Faces of the Moon
Borrowed
Four years ago, Lily had borrowed her oldest brother's razor.
He never knew where it went.
Four years later, Lily twirled the thing in her hand, its blade long having departed with the handle, and she studied it intensely.
She would be seventeen years old tomorrow, and nothing divided her from coming of age than a few hours of night. Yet she couldn't seem to sleep.
When she was thirteen years old, she had lost hope. She had lost hope and lost her strongest, purest belief. She no longer believed in love.
When she was thirteen years old, she had grown obsessed with a boy. He had been older, and even though she had known from the start that there wasn't a chance in hell he could look at her twice, she just couldn't help but nurture her feelings for him, defend him before her friends, lead herself to believe that she loved him, and that he was the one.
Foolish, but still not sinfully naive, Lily imagined she would have to wait a few years in order for a chance, and she still sometimes had trouble believing what went on.
Even today, after so many years, the memories were still blurry, in whole, but unbelievably clear at moments.
Though most times Lily kept to herself, she was famous, almost automatically.
So naturally, this boy had known exactly who she was, and one day, he had talked to her.
He had been in his last year at Hogwarts, not yet of age, but almost so. She hated to think back on it.
She closed her eyes shut tightly, her front teeth digging dangerously into her bottom lip as she let her hand slide down to her leg.
The blade wasn't far as sharp as it had been when first she used it, but it was still slated enough to break her skin without much hesitance.
She had never cut herself at her wrists, never understanding why. It just felt wrong.
So she told herself that a little cut on her thigh was so out of sight that it would never bother anyone, and the stark white scar that had formed over the years barely hurt at first when she broke its surface one more time.
It was a strange, strange ritual for her. When she felt worst, when the scars on her soul would open once more, she would open up that old scar as to feel whole. It was a way of joining her soul with her body, and the depressing, painful experience was beautiful to her, always leaving her sickly content.
She used to feel guilty whenever she would touch her skin with the metal, but after four years, there was barely place for guilt in her heart.
It strung, and a tear rolled down her cheek as she forced the blade further, knowing by now that she could do it if she willed herself enough.
Any touch to her thigh other than the cool, lifeless one made her want to retch. Two years ago, her boyfriend had tried, and she had recoiled so sharply that by the next day, she didn't have a boyfriend any more.
Everyone knew what happened to Lily Potter when she was thirteen, yet somehow, nobody knew.
Everyone knew that something had happened. Her brothers, all three of them, once even the oldest had heard, had questioned her on what it was that had truly happened.
No one had known the details but her and that one person, but everyone knew the words that had been sworn to be true by people who had known nothing of anything. The words that seemed to be true.
Those words were enough.
Everyone knew that Lily Potter was a slut.
No one knew that she had been stripped of all her trust back then, that she had been hurt so deeply that night and that each time she heard that word uttered in her face, by her side, or behind her back, his voice rang loud and clear, though it was only a whisper, in her ear.
They didn't know that they were speaking his words, that he had called her the same and worse, after giving her endless speeches of praise and loving words, after her had spilled so many empty promises, and in turn let her spill all her dirty little secrets.
When she had been very, very small, Lily had always had a reoccurring nightmare – the belief that she would die young.
Little had she known that she would.
Little, innocent Lily had died at the age of thirteen, and what was left behind was only half of her soul, as half had already been taken. And so the live half kicked desperately around herself in search for her missing part, sobbing with lack of breath as she tried relentlessly to break her shell, her body.
A drop of blood touched the sheets of her bed as the red liquid tricked down the side of her leg, away from the wound she had just sliced open.
Just one little scar, so inconspicuous.
The one little scar that would always be there, that would never fade, just as she was inside.
In the last three years, she had had a number of boyfriends, but each had disappeared from her life the best she could manage if they ever took things a step closer than kissing.
And she had never been able to feel much, but she had tried.
Some time after the incident, she had tried to push forward, no matter how much she hated the idea, and even when she had finally started to truly try, she had never been able to feel anything like she had for him towards anyone. It was just impossible.
She had prayed to a nameless source to never meet him again, even if her heart said otherwise, and she had thought she might be able to get through with it.
Her nameless source, her faceless deity, her identity-less energy didn't salvage little girls who made mistakes. And even though it made her feel even worse about the whole of everything, she understood that.
After some time of careful, yet insistent prying, she had told her brother.
It hadn't been Al, who understood that she wanted to be left alone, yet didn't see her need for him to ask more, try harder to get her to talk, nor had it been Teddy, who had asked so, so many times, but had been away the one night Lily finally felt like she could talk about it without throwing up and drowning inside her own body.
No, it had been James.
It had been James who she had told. It had been James whose chest she had sobbed heart-wrenchingly into as she told him in gory, intricate details exactly what had happened.
Despite her knowing full well that James must have hated hearing it, must have felt both physically and emotionally sick at her confession, at having to picture it all in his mind, he had sat there, listening, his hand clenching into a fist over her bed covers, his teeth grinding together, his eyes hard and then soft again, flickering between disgust, hatred, anger, and sadness as she told him everything.
He had let her sit on his lap with her eyes clenched and her face pressed deep into his black T-shirt with a flannel shirt on top, snoot smudging all over the light brown print on his top as she sniffled and cried and sobbed away.
So when she had seen him again, James had known.
Lily knew, and even back then had known, that her other two brothers knew something of their own. She understood that James had told them, because they were all her brothers, and though she trusted that neither Teddy, nor Albus knew the horrible details that James did, she knew that they knew who, what, and to an extent even how.
So when she had seen him again, Teddy and Albus had also known.
And when she had seen him again, there had been four of them. There had been her, Teddy, James, and Albus, eating ice-cream and a part of her had actually been smiling weakly then as she licked at her pistachio scoop and her brother cracked some weird joke and they all bantered.
It had been that balding man's fault that he wasn't dead when he had walked through. They had recognised him, and as Teddy had stood up and called his name, and he had turned around and stared, wide-eyed in recognition, and then had smirked and his lips had started to curl over the word that she detested with her entire being, ready to snarl it demeaningly at her, her remaining two brothers were suddenly on their feet too and only moments passed before they were all on the floor.
Lily hated that a part of her thanked the balding man before she fell asleep.
She hated that even though she had a razor half a centimetre deep into her leg, and her bed was red and her heart numb, that even though the trauma didn't allow her to be touched in some places of her body, and hadn't allowed her to be touched at all for months, even though she still cried herself to sleep at night sometimes, even though she had lost hope in happy love, even though she had been broken and used and betrayed, she still couldn't hate him.
And if she had believed in such a thing, she would have said she still loved him.
Hey there, I'm Charlie.
So yeah, what I want to say is thanks for reading this, and that although this story will have many chapters, they are completely unrelated to each other. This story, or database of stories, will be entirely dedicated to Lily Luna Potter, but in each story, unless I make an exception, she will be a different Lily. Hence the title.
It's about the many faces of Lily Luna, and the many ways I see her. Since she is not a very definite character and really is at the mercy of our imagination, I just see her in so many different ways, none of which are absolute for me.
Also, sometimes it will be depressing, sometimes it will be funny, sometimes it will be angsty, sometimes romantic, sometimes it'll even be sexual, sometimes there will be homosexual romance, which is a thing I'm trying out writing, and since I believe love is everywhere and is beautiful whether in the form of two people of the same or opposite sex doesn't matter at all. So though I'm not big on writing that kind of stuff and usually stick to het, I'm finding that if I feel like writing about two girls or two boys and can feel the emotion, I'm going to very well damn write about it.
So, you have been warned, it's not going to be in most stories, but if it appears, it just appears.
But mostly I suspect it will be about emotions and feelings rather than heavy action, as that is what I love writing more, what makes me feel as incredible as writing does.
And as a fun fact, this wasn't actually supposed to be the first story in this... story, but I haven't finished the first or the second one yet and just wrote this one, so this goes first.
And though the title of 'Borrowed' may not seem fitting to any more than the first line, it was the word that started this off and I really couldn't find a different one to fit, so I've decided it stays.
And here's a disclaimer that goes for the entire story: I don't own the world of Harry Potter, nor do I want to. I love being just a reader, or I would never have had the childhood I had. What belongs to Rowling belongs to Rowling, yet my writing in itself belongs to me and no one else.
So, if you feel like it would be worth your time, please drop a review so I know if there's anything I can make better. I'm trying to always move forward, so if you're not being incredibly rude or something, I'd really like and appreciate hearing your opinion.
Cheers,
Charlie L.E.
