TW: Suicide, Depression, Death, Funeral.
"will you still love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul?" – young and beautiful, lana del rey
"But will you still love me, Teddy?" Lily asks, serious as she ever can be. For once, Teddy's not sure whether she's pulling his leg or whether she's being really serious. She had been a phenomenal actress, ever since she was a little girl.
"Of course I will," Teddy replies before leaning in and kissing her on the top of the head. She doesn't quite seem to believe him, but she curls up and into his side. Their relationship was supposed to be strictly forbidden under a hundred rules at Hogwarts, but nobody found it odd that Lily spent so much time in Professor Lupin's rooms, they were like siblings. So everyone thought.
"Even when I get old and ugly?"
"I'll love you until the day I die, Lily," Teddy replies, cupping her face in his hands.
She smiles slightly, but seems to continue on with her tangent, "I'd hate to get old. I don't want to be here when I get old and useless and unable to do everything properly. Maybe I should just off myself so that I don't have to deal with any of that."
"Lils, I love you and I always will. If you go to sleep, we can talk about this in the morning."
She snuggles into Teddy's side and it takes a while, but Teddy notices her breathing has regulated and he knows that she's safe from herself for a little while.
Teddy is woken again at around three, by Lily as she gets up.
"Lils, where are you going?"
"I can't do this, Teddy. I'm so sorry. Go back to Victoire, she deserves you at the very least."
He catches her wrist as she goes to leave, her ginger hair almost seems to flare in the darkness, "Peeves'll catch you; you'll get in trouble. Go back to bed and I'll bring you some milk."
She barely moves to go back to bed and Teddy takes the choice of lifting her up and returning her to bed himself. She smiles gently at him as he tucks her in and he kisses her on the forehead again before going to the kitchen.
When the morning comes at last, Lily is up and out of bed like a bullet from a gun. She whirls around Teddy's room and scoops up all of her belongings before kissing him goodbye and returning to her dormitory so that none of the girls will notice that she was ever gone.
Half an hour later, Teddy got up to make coffee and find his folder that kept his lesson plans in order. He found it lurking underneath the sofa, where it had probably been kicked one night when he was trying to prove to Lily that he loved her.
Underneath the dark cover of his sofa, he found a small notebook, bound in black. His curiosity piqued, he opened it and began to flick through it. He was only three pages in when the sad little diary entries, each addressed to a 'Friend' and signed 'Lily', transformed into collages. First, they were mellow. Flowers, along with a picture of a knife or something similar. The further he flicked through, the worse things got. To his horror, each one was dated, with one being created at least every other day. He reached the final page in the book and scanned the black and white images to find one reoccurring theme: death.
In the end, he was six hours too late. As a teacher, he knew he could get down into the Slytherin dormitories. When he arrived, he didn't know quite what to expect. He approaches Lily's bed like he is taming a tiger and he pulls back the heavy Slytherin green curtains, his heart lurches, sending ripples throughout his body. He drops to his knees for a brief moment and clutches her tiny cold hand. He can't stop the tears that are coming hard and fast and his nose dribbles as he cries, hot tears rolling over his burning cheeks. He cries for what seems like forever because he thinks he could have stopped this. Or at least prevented it for a little while longer. He sits there for an eon as he knows her dorm mates won't be coming back until after dinner, which typically took two hours.
He wipes away the tears and casts a spell to make himself appear a lot better when he walks into the Great Hall to inform Slughorn that the only Potter girl has killed herself. She looks so lovely as she lies there. Teddy decides that if he didn't know her, it would be almost picturesque. She lies like Snow White, but with no hope of waking any more.
He smiles weakly as he leaves and casts a spell on the door to allow nobody but him to enter. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket and scrawls down a 'No entry – strictly forbidden' sign that he glues on to the door.
He can barely sit through the wake. He can't even build up the confidence to say goodbye to her for a final time – he can't possibly admit all the things he wants to in front of her family and her friends. He wonders if this was what she wanted: mourners. Her cousins cry, her grandparents wipe away tears with their handkerchiefs and her family try in vain to remain composed throughout the entire ordeal.
It's long after hours before Teddy finally turns to look at her in that glass coffin. He helped Ginny and Harry arrange the whole ordeal, so he knows exactly what's happening on what day and who's going to be where. He helped them keep the whole thing private, as the Wizarding press swarmed like wasps over the Potter family. Teddy had called James called home from his training camp with the Falmouth Falcons and pulled Albus back to Godric's Hollow with him.
It's late and Teddy has secretly been slipping himself a little dash of Firewhiskey here and there, until he finally faces Lily's dead body.
"How could you?" He asks her, even though he knows she won't be able to answer. "How could you leave me, Lily?" He approaches the coffin and fixates a vehement stare on the lilac stems clutched together in her hands. "Why would you leave me? Leave us?" He knows he's drunk by this point, but he doesn't care. His throat burns as he sips on his drink again and he waves his arms wildly, forcing his drink to slop everywhere, "I'd never do this to you. I fucking love you, Lily. How could you not see that I'd never fucking leave you in a million years?"
It's then that Teddy falls to his knees again, into a trap of his own self-loathing and sadness and begins to weep over Lily's encased corpse.
"Sh, Teddy. Let's get you to bed."
Harry insists on babying Teddy still, only forcing Teddy into exploding again.
"How could she just do that, Harry? I fucking loved her so much, and – "
"It's alright, Teddy. We all loved her." Harry's calm and poised exterior alienated Teddy.
"No, you don't understand! I really fucking loved her, Harry," His voice cracks and he slides down onto the sofa. He curls up and cries into the arm of the sofa, wishing for the world to disappear underneath his feet.
"There's a letter for you, we found it in her room."
Harry leaves Teddy alone that night and he finds his own way to bed. He chooses to go back to his grandmother's house, although she had been dead a long time, she left it to him. He opens up the letter and he spends hours crying, until he finally falls asleep on the sofa out of sheer exhaustion. James wakes him the next morning and tells him to get dressed as he's been asked to make sure that Teddy actually gets ready.
Teddy hadn't expected to pull on his funeral suit for a good few years. Grandma Molly always thought that she was going to be the next to go, but Lily had evidently decided to take matters into her own hands.
However, Teddy follows the instructions on the letter to the best of his ability. He probably wouldn't re-read the cursed eight pages of tiny handwriting again, but he does what Lily would have wanted and fixes his dark green tie around his throat.
James raises an eyebrow at Teddy's chosen tie but doesn't question it.
"I hope you don't mind, but we've got to go one town over and get somebody," James says as he drags Teddy out to his car.
"Who?"
"My girlfriend. She plays Quidditch too."
"Oh." Teddy doesn't think that this is the best time to introduce Harry and Ginny to his new girlfriend, but he repeats the favour and doesn't question it.
"She was close with Lily at Hogwarts. They were both in Slytherin."
"Okay."
When it came to burying Lily, Harry refused the offer of simply using magic to compact the soil. Teddy picked up a shovel after tossing in his tiny bundle of hibiscus, forget-me-nots and daisies. He has another small bundle to put on her completed grave, but since it has not been completed, he strips off his jacket and pulls his sleeves up to begin pouring dirt over the eternally beautiful and very, very much dead Lily.
A/N: I kind of needed to write something completely and utterly morbid to get out of my writer's block. So this happened.
Disclaimer: As usual, I don't own the characters or the Harry Potter world.