Lily Potter is not Lily Evans. But Lily Potter still sees her out of the corner of her eye, pressed up against shadows and bookshelves, her laughter the dust hanging in the stagnant air, permanent. She sees the flash of her green eyes, a whip of auburn hair.
She tastes the earth, feels a heart sever in two.
Everything is suspended, because that girl's chapter never finished—never should have been—because, after all, Lily Evans was just a girl.
Lily Potter knows things about Lily Evans that no one else ever bothered to figure out. Witty, popular, beautiful, academic—and there was fierce, brave, loving.
They forget that she carried her heavy burdens on her shoulders, that her hands, too, were mottled with the blood of her enemy. She saw the ends of things, but she faced them like it was the beginning. Naïve on purpose, maybe, full of that school-girl hope and romanticism. She never realized the wake that overturned everyone behind her; she never realized she meant something.
She was just a girl, but she was not innocent. Mother, maybe, but she was too young to be Mrs. Potter.
The real Lily Potter, the one with the brown eyes, the one that will grow up one day—that Lily glimpses the life of her predecessor as it was: a girl of the seventies, a girl who one day wanted to be a real woman, a girl who wanted to be a revolutionary, to matter—
A girl who lost her sister to jealousy, a girl who lost her husband to murder.
A girl who lost her baby boy because she left him behind.
And Lily Potter, very much a girl—very much foolish, carefree, and young—
That Lily Potter soars across a lake and a castle, her laughter bubbling up to the clouds as summer swells in. One day she will be a woman, but until then, she is happy to be a girl.
Lily Evans whispers something in her ear, and Lily Potter flies higher, deeper into the blue.
These are the days—