By The Sea
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and accept no credit towards it. I am not the wonderful J. K. Rowling nor am I in any way affiliated with her.
Warnings: not much really. Sort of angsty but more hurt/comfort.
Prompts below!
Word Count (without A/N): 980
For as long as she could remember, Lily had always loved the ocean.
Her parents, her sister, and she always used to go on holidays to Devon and Cornwall and Lily would spend hours trawling the beaches and paddling with her father in the shallow tides that churned in the rock pools.
It was familiar to her and Lily took comfort in the crystal clear waters, while her sister, Petunia, ran shrieking from them, claiming that she was going to drown in the inky abyss.
Lily couldn't exactly blame her. Water was dangerous, as the redhead had found out one April morning of 1967 as she emerged too early from the hotel and ran to the beach without the sharp eye of her father to keep the little girl at bay. She'd decided to see how long she could float for, and it wasn't until, several minutes later, when her mother hoicked her out, dripping wet and shouting reprimands that Lily had seen just how far she'd drifted out.
Nevertheless, the sea had been her safe haven. Back home in Cokeworth, an industrial town miles from any large expanse of water, Lily found solace in the stream which ran in the woods outside her house and the postcards which she collected, with the roaring waves painstakingly etched upon the front.
Many hours Lily remembered lying on her floor, tracing the pattern of the sea with her finger, her tongue poking out in concentration as she examined the picture and tried to imagine herself back to those magical holidays.
Standing, now, on a rocky beach on the Isle of Wight, with the sea foam swirling gently around her ankles, nineteen year old Lily looked at the English Channel stretching out before her and wondered what would happen if she just drifted away now.
The war was clutching them all in it's sinister, maniacal grasp and Lily was sure it was going to strangle them all before the decade was up if nobody managed to defeat You-Know-Who before then.
It seemed almost like the easier route out, to lie back in the waves and let them carry her away to Narnia or Neverland or wherever it is the children of lost childhoods go to find peace but Lily knew that she could never abandon her friends to the cruel hands of the war.
And James. He was a recent addition to her list of people she needed to save, one that wouldn't have been there three years before as they prepared to enter their sixth year. But several years in each other's company had softened Lily's unforgiving disposition to him and, over time, she'd grown to realise that there was much more to James Potter than the boy who'd dropped a bucket of frogspawn on her head in first year.
They'd slowly become inseparable over the years and it'd come as no surprise to anyone when the couple had gotten engaged on New Year's Eve of 1978.
Stepping further in the water, Lily braced herself for the familiar icy plunge to hit her stomach as she submerged herself fully into the waves and started to glide forward.
Coming up for air with a gasp, Lily glanced over to the cottage, partially hidden by a jutting rock, where she and James were staying.
A few days respite from the Order and the fighting, a few days to spend with each other after their wedding a few weeks previous in September, that's what James said, and Lily was grateful that he'd known her preferences so well and picked a place by the sea for them to stay.
He was currently asleep or, at least, had been when Lily had left. It was only seven in the morning and James had never been an early riser at the best of times so Lily, after a night of tossing and turning, had decided to come and calm her nerves in the most comforting way she knew how.
It wasn't just the war and the bloodshed lingering in Lily's mind, although it was pretty prominent at the moment. She hadn't liked to tell James yet, in case it was a false alarm, but her period was overdue by almost two weeks and she'd been feeling nauseous and exhausted - common signs of a pregnancy just beginning to develop.
Truth be told, she wasn't exactly sure how to feel about this. She'd wanted kids since she was little; the idea of raising a family and watching her children grow up had been a favourite dream since childhood, but that was before the war she and James found themselves in, before the war which claimed lives like the sea had on April 15th 1912.
Lily wasn't sure she wanted any child of hers to be born into a world where innocent people were tortured for sport and every night the sky lit up with the deadly hue of green against the stars.
Moving on to her back and letting the tide sway her gently from side to side, Lily placed a hand on her still-flat belly, wondering if right now, a life was evolving inside of her, ready to grow and develop into a child that would need protection from the harsh world.
A baby. If she closed her eyes and pretended hard enough, Lily could almost see them, a child, their child, with James' hair and her eyes and a smile that would keep them going in this time of darkness - their child.
Nothing could describe the feeling of protectiveness that settled over Lily like a blanket to a sleeping babe but there was a certain melancholiness hanging in her heart that had not been there before her morning swim.
It was bittersweet, clouded by love and determination and the fear that kept them all breathing. It was a promise to make her child survive the war.
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Written for Hogwarts Assignment 5, Beauty Therapy, Task 4: write about somebody entering a body of water.
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I apologise for any spelling/grammar mistakes. I wrote this very quickly earlier and have not had much time to edit yet. I'll try to and go back through it ASAP.
For those of you wondering, chapter 6 of Letters from a Stag and a Doe should be posted tomorrow.
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As always, thank you for reading! Xx