Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
For Bri, because she's amazing and I miss her and she hates grape-flavored everything.
SHINE
take me out tonight,
take me anywhere, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care
– the smiths, there is a light that never goes out
He is stumbling around the darkened kitchen in the back of a Finnegan house party when he sees a pair of legs. They are not a bad pair of legs, Lysander supposes, but the fact is that they are hanging out of a tree next to the kitchen window, so his first thought is that James or Aiden or Lucy or one of the other idiots must have slipped some firewhiskey into his butterbeer despite his protests.
The floor isn't shaking, though, and the colors aren't blurring, so maybe he's just going bonkers like his grandad. With some degree of anxiety, he sticks his head out the window and looks up.
"Lily?" he says, incredulously (though not without some relief). "What are you doing here?"
James and Albus Potter's kid sister stares down at him, pushing her silver-rimmed glasses back up on her nose and closing the thick book she's been reading. "What, Lysander? I was invited to this party too."
He stutters for a minute with that one; there are so many things wrong with this situation, he's not sure where to start.
She watches him for a minute, and then seems to take pity on him, because she says, "Lucy invited me and James said I was too young and Albus said I'd like it better if I stayed home, so of course I wanted to come. And James and Al got tired of arguing with Lucy."
"Yeah, I can imagine," he says, rubbing his head. "But still, what the hell – I mean, heck – are you doing up a tree? With a book?"
Lily scowls. "The party was boring. What the hell –" she makes a great deal of show at emphasizing the word – "is wrong with that?"
He has to laugh just a little at that. "Nothing. Why don't I take you home? Side-Along Apparition? James was probably right – you're not really old enough to be here. How old are you now, anyway? Fifteen?"
"Almost eighteen, thank you," she snaps. "I'm at the legal age to Apparate!"
"Yet you're still climbing trees," he points out.
"I happen to like climbing trees," she retorts with a dignified air.
"If you don't want to be here, and you can Apparate, why don't you go home then?"
"I said the party was boring. I never said I wanted to leave," Lily says stubbornly. "And I would Apparate, if..."
He just looks at her.
"... if I hadn't failed my test three times..." she mutters. "But why would you think I was fifteen? I graduated Hogwarts last month! The last Potter – there was an article about it in the Prophet." She says this last bit with a grumble. "I'm surprised you didn't see it. Your mum was there."
"Yeah, well," Lysander tells her. "I've been deep in the forests of Greece, off finding absolutely nothing, quite a lot lately." Besides, he's never really paid a lot of attention to her as anything more than James and Al's little sister. "Come on, Lily... it's stupid for you to sit out here. I'll go get James."
"No."
"Al, then."
"No."
"Lucy?"
"Nope."
"Lily!"
"I don't want to go home," she says, fiddling with her silver-rimmed glasses and crossing her arms.
"Lily, honestly, I'm going to go get James..." She's starting to really aggravate him.
"You're not in charge of me Lysander," she says furiously. "But I suppose, if I have to, I'll go home with you. If –" she goes on before he even has time to draw a breath of relief – "you drive me. In your car."
He almost protests, and then resigns himself. "Fine. I'll go tell them all we're leaving."
As she jumps down and lands perfectly on the ground, he is reminded what a little thing she is.
:
"Are you a safe driver?" she says, as she situates herself in the passenger seat of his old blue Muggle car, his pride and joy, not that anyone else has ever appreciated her.
"There's two rules you have to follow if you're going to ride in here," he cautions her. "Number one, you accept the fact that I am an absolutely top-notch driver. Number two, you concede the fact that Betty is the most beautiful car you've ever seen."
"Betty?" she sniggers as they pull out of the driveway. "That's the best you could think of?"
"Shush," Lysander says, patting the dashboard. "You'll hurt her feelings."
"You're crazy," Lily says. She doesn't sound like she particularly minds it.
"Say it."
"Betty is the most beautiful vehicle I've ever seen," she intones. "I'll decide whether you're a good driver or not if we get where we're going in one piece."
"We're going to your home," he says. It's only a ten-minute drive from here. "And are you scared we won't? I promise –"
"No," Lily interrupts, a hardness in her voice. "That I'm not scared of."
He doesn't have anything to say to that. As they start out into the darkness, he flicks his headlights on, though he hardly needs them, the moon is so bright.
:
"Why do you have a car anyway?" she asks him, a few minutes later.
"Lots of reasons," he answers. "I like driving a lot. I like being different from all the other stupid wizards in the world who are constantly snapping their fingers and disappearing or else hopping on a broomstick – no offense to your brother, of course – and Mr. Weasley offered it to me after he fixed it up since your grandma flipped a – a shit," he says, reluctantly, slipping her a grin that she returned, "when she found it holed up in the shed. I guess none of the rest of you Weasleys wanted it."
"Can't imagine why," she snorts.
"Rule number two," Lysander reminds her. "Now it's my turn to ask a question. Why the big book?"
"The big book," she says him, with a sniff of condescension "is called Modern Physics."
"Never heard of it."
"It's a Muggle science book."
He swerves the car just a little bit. "Why in the name of Merlin's pet Snorkack are you reading that?"
She just snorts, giggling.
"Honestly!" he says, straightening his wheels and making a left-hand turn. "You're a regular Hermione."
"Not," she says, still laughing at him. "I got terrible marks in school."
"Oh, yeah, I bet," he says sarcastically. "What'd you get on your NEWTS?"
"Haven't gotten 'em back yet."
"OWLS, then."
"E in Astronomy, A in Care of Magical Creatures, A in Charms..."
"Those aren't bad at all!" he protests. "I should show you my old report card..."
"P in Herbology and History of Magic and Transfiguration and T in Potions..."
"Ouch," is all he says. "They honestly give Ts?"
"Yeah," she says, looking out the window. "But I didn't... never mind. O in Muggle Studies, though. Dunno why. That was the only thing I could bear... I mean, I like reading about science and things. Cold, hard facts, you know. And part of me just thought it'd be bloody hilarious because I suppose Voldemort would be rolling around in his grave just a bit if he knew that the daughter of the man who defeated him was best at Muggle Studies. I figured I had to get the best of him somehow..."
She trails off, and Lysander laughs a little at that, but there is something in her tone that bothers him, and he wonders, suddenly, if this is somehow about her father, but he's not sure how the hell he's supposed to ask about that.
"Lily," he says, seriously. "Why don't you want to go home?"
They are just coming to the end of the road; it forks, in front of them, splits off to run in different directions. He can see the Potters' white house, lit up on the hillside, to his right.
"Turn left here," she says, instead of answering, fiddling with her glasses again, opening her book and illuminating the page with her wand.
Lysander turns left.
:
They don't talk for the next ten minutes, as she reads her book and he stares out into the hazy summer night, out at the narrow, rocky, countryside road ahead of them.
Lily breaks the silence. "It's 12:01. New day."
"Merlin," he says, lightheartedly, trying to keep the conversation going. "Time goes fast in the summer, doesn't it? I don't even know what day it is..."
"I do," Lily says; she sounds choked, like she might cry. "It's the fifth. July fifth."
This time, he really does swerve, almost completely losing control of the car, so that he has to slam, hard, on his brakes. When he turns to her, she has her hands over her eyes, tears running down her cheeks, tears that he can tell she's trying desperately to stop.
"Shit," he swears shakily. "Shit, Lily, I'm sorry. I forgot."
Slowly, her tears stop and she uncovers her face. Her eyes are blue and blank and devoid of any kind of feeling or hope or strength. "It's fine, Lysander," she says, flatly. "It's fine. Everyone always forgets."
:
He was sixteen when the wizarding world changed for the first time in his lifetime; when the man who had built it all up after the fall of Voldemort was felled himself at the age of forty-one, by a mad man, for no reason at all. That's the way they wrote it about it in the newspapers, anyway, with glaring headlines and long sentences and terribly beautiful, haunting words, on the fifth of July, four years ago today.
He and Lorcan had already returned to Greece from the summer holidays, so their mum had taken them back to England, whispering memories of her friend, Harry Potter, the stories they'd heard a hundred times, but took special comfort in, now. Lysander remembers standing in the funeral crowd – he'd never seen so many people in all his life – and catching of glimpse of the Potter kids. James was almost unrecognizable, his face was so sad, so grief-stricken; Al's green eyes were dull and lost. If Lysander is honest, he doesn't really remember much about Lily except her little red head and silver-rimmed glasses and the book she'd held in her hand even then.
:
"Keep driving, Lysander," Lily says, pleading. "Please."
So he does.
:
"Everybody always forgets," Lily says, again, and all he can hear is his own breathing and her trembling bravery.
(She is a tiny thing, so young and innocent-seeming, but he sees for the first time that she is scarred, so scarred, like her father was, the father who is gone.)
"James and Albus are at that stupid party, and my mum went out to eat with her old Harpy friends and she told me I could come but – but –" she chokes on her own words, stifles them, and continues, "They bloody forget. Every year, they bloody forget, when all I want to do is remember, and I c-can't, not always. Sometimes, I forget what he smelled like, when he came home from work, or what his owl's name was when it was little or the games he's used to play with me and Al and James when we were just babies. I was only thirteen when he died – and they just – they just freaking forget."
But he shakes his head, remembering how much James had drank that night, so much more than usual, remembering how talkative Albus had been, as though he couldn't bear to hear the silence. "I don't think they forget, Lily," he tells her. "They're just trying to cope."
He can't even imagine it, losing your father at thirteen, not really. He is twenty-two, and it still makes his stomach ache, his knees shake.
"The paparazzi will be all over us tomorrow," Lily says, miserably. "Asking all sorts of dumb-ass questions like, 'How does your father's death make you feel?' and 'Do you think he's still watching over you now?' It's all I can do not to scream, HOW WOULD YOU FEEL, and NO, NO, YOU BASTARDS, NO, right in their faces. And all day, I'll wish – I wish –"
"Maybe he is watching over you from somewhere, Lily," he says, softly, soothingly, reaching out for her hand...
She looks at him, shaking, her face white; her next words are low and soft, but he hears every word. "Don't you dare condescend to me. Don't you dare lie. Your mum spouts the same shit and I can just take it from her because she's my godmother and she really believes it, but – James tells me you're nothing like Luna. James tell me that you scoff at anything that's not hard and concrete and certain. James said you've never believed in the Crumpled-Horned Snorkack. You said yourself you've never found anything in that damn Greek forest."
"Look," he says, trying to keep his hands steady on the wheel, his tone comforting, when all he wants to do is sob for her. His foot pushes the gas pedal harder, harder, faster, faster. "Just because we haven't found anything recently doesn't mean we never have, and just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not –"
"Shut up!" she screams at him. "Do you think I haven't thought about? About what happened, about where my father went, where he was? Teddy showed me the official report, and I saw them lower the casket in the ground and still I – I looked for him, lots. I read all these Muggle books on science and philosophy and I failed all my OWLS just because of that, except for Muggle Studies, to stick it to Voldemort, which so stupid, because he'd dead too and he'll never know, will he? And some of those books made me hope and some of them made me cry and some of them I didn't understand – and then I realized that half of them were lies, because there was no bloody life after death and I'd –" her voice drops to a whisper " – I'd never see my father again unless I dug up his bloody skeleton."
Slowly, he turns off the headlights and pulls the car over on the shoulder of the road, without saying anything. He unbuckles his seat belt and unbuckles hers, and beckons her out the door, into the night air, no longer so warm and hazy, no longer like a summer night, but chilly, windy, like the autumn.
"Come on," he says, and somewhat to his surprise, she complies.
:
"I lie, Lily," he admits, once they are laying on the cold, cold grass, under the stars. The sky is clear tonight; the moon is full. Her book is still clutched tightly in her hand. "I don't mean to, I guess, but it just comes out that way because the truth sounds stupid in the daytime. Because I'm stupid and immature and always the kidder, so that people don't ever take me seriously, because - because it's safer that way."
She just looks at him; the fight, the madness, seems to be waiting for what he has to say. The moonlight glints off her silver-rimmed glasses; he can see some faint hope in her eyes.
"I've never really lost anyone, like you have." His own voice is thick now. "But my mum's mum died when she was nine, right in front of her eyes. She used to take me and Lorcan in turns into the backyard on night like this and lay us on our backs and have us look up at the stars and tell us stories. Sometimes, they were real, and sometimes, they were about things like Crumpled-Horned Snorkacks, and sometimes, they were about heaven.
"She'd point up to the stars like this," he grabs her left arm and holds it up, aiming it at the brightest point of light, "and say that those little dots of light were the sparkles of angel's wings, so tiny we could hardly see them from this distance. She'd say we'd all be up there someday, together, that we'd all be happy. Lorcan never really believed her, to be honest, even though he's the painter, the sentimental one, the light-catcher, but I did. I know it's probably easier for me to believe it all than you, but I do believe. I do. I swear, Lily."
"I've read about stars, Lysander," she says, quietly, but she lets him keep her arm pointed up, up. "They're just balls of gas that will all burn out in the end, and if you tried to stand on one you'd fall right through or burn up or both. And that star there, that you're having me point at, is just Polaris, just the North Star, just a ball of destruction like all the others."
"Yeah, I reckon you're right," Lysander says. "But who ever said that it's impossible to be more than one thing at once?"
He lets her arm down and rolls over on his side and takes her silver-rimmed glasses off her face and unclenches the finger of her right hand from her book. He kisses her eyelids and her freckles and nose, kisses the salty tears and invisible scars and all that star shine dancing across her face.
(But she's the one who pulls his lips down to hers first, and he figures that's a very good thing, because he's really not sure how he ever would have explained his snogging the Potters' baby sister to James otherwise.)
A/N: I'd really appreciate any feedback you can give me. This story is set in the same universe as aligned with a tilted axis, but they are both very much stand-alone pieces.