They Played in the Sky
"I just can't believe that they're dead."
He's wanted to say it for weeks, but knew his mates wouldn't see past the drama and into his heartache. 26 tiny letters have been festering inside of him, slowly eating him alive, more than the grief or the pain. Words are terribly mighty things.
He finally cracks as Lily comes to sit down next to him on the top of the astronomy tower, holding a blanket and some food from the kitchens, chocolate chip biscotti and her signature hot chocolate. She sits down beside him and covers them with the quilt, then pours James a large helping of cocoa. "You knew I'd need comfort food, didn't you?"
She smiles bashfully, barely acknowledging the question. "I'm so sorry, James. I don't know what else to do. What do you need to hear?"
"I- I'm not really sure," he admits. "I just know how I feel now… broken. Like all these vital pieces of myself were taken away, and I have to rearrange what I have left into something resembling what I once had. But broken pieces stay broken forever, don't they? There's no spell out there for a broken heart."
They're quiet for a little as she thinks about what James is saying. After a few minutes he picks up a piece of biscotti and proceeds to play with it, breaking it into crumbs with his deft fingers, and Lily refills her mug, then tilts her head back, her deeply red hair falling in wild curls around her head. "Look at the stars," she finally whispers reverently. James looks confused, wondering where this is going. "Look how they shine for you."
"I've always loved stars," James confides, leaning further back into the blanket and glancing upwards. "The idea of them, I mean. There's something so infinite about them, I just can't explain it."
"What do you see?" Lily asks gently.
He looks up again, squinting through his glasses, trying to understand what Lily means. "Just stars," he answers, feeling like he failed some sort of test. "I was always rubbish at astronomy. And besides, I can't really concentrate on them now when I just want to stare at you."
She smiles a little at that, the way she always does nowadays when he says these fluffy sorts of sentiments. "No, look, they're pictures, see? My sister was obsessed with all this stuff, astronomy and astrology and horoscopes. Muggles learn it, too. I never really thought of it as something concrete and scientific, not like how I love potions, but Tuney learned it from a library book and she taught it all to me, like a bedtime story. " She takes his hand and starts to trace the stars. "These few make the Big Dipper. And there's Sirius, your best friend, you can see the tail at the bottom. Cassiopeia, the queen. Orion, and Andromeda, and look, the North Star, that'll always guide you home."
Lily drops James' hand and looks at him earnestly.
"A constellation is made up of all these broken pieces, yeah? You have to make the connections yourself to find the pictures. But the broken pieces are just as beautiful; they shine. They're stars. Fragmented things are still valuable. All God's children can dance."
It's quiet again for what feels like an eternity, as James finally manages a bite of the food. "My sister…" Lily says wistfully, breaking the silence. "I miss her so much. I don't have the right to- she's still here, not like…" she trails off, not wanting to mention James' parents, but he nods that he's okay. He just needed to get the words off his chest. As wonderful as Lily is, there's really nothing she can do. "And it's just a constant reminder," she continues, sadly. "I can't go more than a few minutes without encountering something that just screams Petunia. Even spending time with Em can be hard, because personality-wise, she is just so similar to my sister. But she's one of my best friends. And even now, when I should be asleep, I'm haunted by all the times she didn't come home, even when I waited up for her. And I'm looking at her stars, and thinking of her words, and she still won't come home. I don't think she'll ever come home."
"But, isn't she already home? I mean," James adds when he sees Lily's confused face. "She's always with you. You remember her words and her stars and all the things that make her Tuney, isn't that all you can do? You took all the good parts of her and made them parts of yourself and I think that's the bravest way to hold a person. You're a Gryffindor for a reason, Lil. Don't ever forget it."
She mulls that over for a few moments before replying. "You do it too, James, you know? You hold your parents right here." She places her hand over his heart, feeling the beats as they come, steady and unchanging and infinite as the stars.
She suddenly begins to speak as though she was in a trance. "'I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart).'"
"Tuney's words?" he asks softly.
"Yeah. I mean, e e cummings' originally. He was a brilliant, contemporary Muggle poet. But Tuney had thousands, all these beautiful phrases that she twisted into crowns that she wore. She was a princess of words- Muggle words, obviously. She almost worshipped the stars. I said that already. But she did. They were so poetic to her, she had a whole two pages of her notebook devoted to quotes about stars."
"Tell me. They must have been stunning."
"Okay, let me think… Well there were the more generic ones, like from Peter Pan, another popular Muggle book, about flying 'second star to the right and straight on 'til morning'. But there were so many more. 'I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.' Van Gogh, an artist. 'You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' Nietzsche. That was from a philosophy class she once took. 'Hitch your wagon to a star', Ralph Waldo Emerson, another poet. Kerouac, her favorite, even if he was American. 'There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep rolling under the stars.' And this one, 'If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn't need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again.'"
They're quiet again, absorbing, filling themselves with the nourishment of these weighty, yet intangible, things.
"Do you think she'll ever find her way home again?" Lily finally says in a tiny voice. She sounds terrified, but James doesn't answer, because he can't. He just doesn't know.
Lily smiles sadly at him. "I'm sorry," they whisper to each other simultaneously, and it's black and white and nothing and everything all at once.
written for jily trope fest over on tumblr a while ago, i'm just lazy and didn't post until now. thanks to the reviewer who noticed the formatting was funky on the original! i forgot your url, sorry.
reviews decrease my perpetual anxiety x