Title: Bubblegum
Summary: "He predicts something about a train-crash girl and a trail of broken hearts, but then flits to Nargles and magic and daydreaming and Lily is glad he never speaks the truth." / Lily Potter has had them all, and she made their hearts go pop! one-shot. lilylunaeveryone.
Prompts: Lily Luna Potter; death.
Notes: This was written for Tech Discovery over at Camp Potter, and I suddenly had the urge to write Lily Luna and... everyone. Mainly because I belatedly realised that I honestly ship her with everyone. Shoot me. The parts in parentheses are inspired by lines of the song, 'Bubblegum Bitch.' Cousincest and incest ahead. Ye be warned.
"I chew you up and spit you out 'cause that's what your love is all about. So pull me closer and kiss me hard; I'm gonna pop your bubblegum heart." - Marina and the Diamonds, 'Bubblegum Bitch.'
(Lily Potter has had them all, and she made their hearts go pop!)
i.
The first is because she is bored.
It's summer and she's bored and pretty and fifteen, and oh, if that isn't a dangerous combination. He is too much older and too much wiser, and she's always been one for a challenge. A shame, because he isn't so hard to break, in the end.
Bored - she's unravelling her heart and all that's left is puppet strings and marionettes.
Pretty- oh so pretty, oh so daring and oh so brave. Red lips and bubblegum smiles and playing her boy like a toy. Teddy didn't stand a chance. "Are - are you sure?" She pops his heart like bubblegum and enjoys it far too much.
Fifteen - far too young for this world; for choosing between living forever and dying young.
But Lily twirls her way across his heart and bats her eyelashes like curtain calls and drags him away from vicious Victoire with a painted pinky finger. It's all too easy.
(Lily Potter steals them with a kiss and they let her.)
ii.
The next is a little harder. Lorcan is so in love with Molly and daydreams and staring at the sky. He loves stars and melodies and little girls who don't burn too brightly, but shine all the same. Lily Luna is a supernova and she isn't one to burn forever.
He babbles about constellations and dot-to-dot and she plays along, drawing patterns on his arms and gravitating towards him like he's the sun and she's a lowly planet looking for life.
She flashes him a smile and steals him with a kiss and talks about written in the stars. She makes him fall a little in love with her. It's easy.
"I think I could maybe love you," he murmurs, lips soft against her collarbone, words empty and feeble in the wake of Molly Weasley and maybe.
By the end of their black hole romance, he ignores the sky and stares at her instead.
(Lily Potter is sugar pink and they've always had a sweet tooth.)
iii.
This time, Lily decides she's being too pure - after all, nothing good comes easy. So, she thinks, third time lucky. The wheel turns and fortune is in her favour and Lysander whispers in her ear about futures and popping and tarot cards.
He predicts something about a train-crash girl and a trail of broken hearts, but then flits to Nargles and magic and daydreaming and Lily is glad he never speaks the truth. "Why do you look like you're dying?" he asks her one day.
She doesn't reply.
Lorcan glares from the sidelines and she shimmers from the skyline and this, this is what love is meant to be. Lysander's crystal ball never saw her coming.
Lily giggles and presses pink to his lips until he can't think of a future without her.
(Lily Potter fizzes like soda pop and they all want more.)
iv.
Still, all these boys and toys don't do much to keep her entertained. Summer is over and autumn slinks like shadows until it rests over her. Back at school, there are so many options, so many mistakes, but she wants so much more than that.
Lily wants nightfall and vibrancy and contrast and that balance between living and dying and Schrödinger's cat. She wants someone to open the box.
He is recovering from one of those breakups, when she finds him; he has been swallowed by darkness and he still has shadows under his eyes. She promises him more than feeble candlelight. Lily Luna promises fireworks.
So when she traps her cousin Louis in a broom cupboard and makes his eyes light up, suddenly she isn't so bored. "More, more," he purrs against her neck, and she shines.
Like fireworks, it doesn't last.
(Lily Potter is number one and they're putting her on her pedestal.)
v.
But then that just isn't enough. She's kissing cousins and breaking hearts, but darling, it will never be enough. So she steps it up a level.
Lucy Weasley is a hurricane, wild and uncontrollable and losing steam. Lily just can't resist. So when she is daring and gorgeous and sixteen, she blows Lucy away from school and carnage and wraps her wings around her shoulders in some mockery of comfort.
"Aren't you cold?" Lucy asks sparingly, because what she really means is, hasn't your heart frozen yet? Lily shakes her head, but she doesn't really mean it.
They fuck on the top of the Astronomy tower and pretend they can fly. It's a whirlwind romance and like a storm, it's gone as soon as it came. Lucy curls her toes around the stone and talks about falling.
Lily pushes her off the edge.
(Lily Potter just wants to be adored and they want to love her.)
vi.
The problem with romance is that it's all so pre-written; it's all chocolate box cottages and chocolate box hearts and Lily really, really hates chocolate. Why does everything have to follow a pattern? First dates and candles and valentines and all she can think is, fuck it.
This one is different.
She thinks it's a perk of "dating" a writer - they're liars from the start and so fanatical and obsessive and wonderful, and they never appreciate it. Lily does.
"You laugh like someone who's dying." Rose kisses her ear in apology and Lily laughs.
Rosie sweetheart talks about the secrets in her eyes and the curve of her lips and Lily falls a little, like she always does. Her pen scratches just below the surface of her skin until they are filled with ink poisoning and delusions and love.
But Lily, as she always does, gets bored of fairytales, and simply tears out the page.
(Lily Potter smacks her lips and they are hers.)
vii.
It's not long before Lily falls back into her old ways - stealing and cheating and lying and keeping. It's the most fun a girl can have, after all. And he was Rose's once upon a time, but now it doesn't matter, because Rosie went Potter and she's not exactly going back.
So Lily smirks at the Slytherin and plays with her hair and sings, ring a ring a roses, a pocket full of posies...
Scorpius' love is a nursery rhyme ringing through her head and she never wants to stop laughing. "I thought you were in love with my brother," she jokes against his thigh, and he never does answer.
Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down.
Like so many other childhood toys, Lily Luna casts him aside, broken and charming and misunderstood and still so fucking pretty. Someone will pick him up along the way, she's sure. Boys like him and girls like her just aren't made to fall.
(Lily Potter is liquor lips and they all want a taste.)
viii.
This is her big rebellion.
She's drunk and not-quite alone, and she's still so gorgeous, all firetruck hair and cruel eyes and biting lips. The world is a haze of vibrantvivid and colourcolour and kaleidoscopes, and she spins, laughing, falling into the lap of yet another conquest.
His eyes are emeraldgreen, but through the fog, they are smiling and gleaming. Lily is mesmerized.
"You drunk the last of the Firewhiskey," he offers as an explanation, as his tongue slides between her teeth and Firewhiskey lips.
Albus is just as drunk and just as promiscuous, so he has no qualms about sliding redhot hands under midnightblack skirts and over milkpale thighs. She runs her bubblegumpink nails through his ravencharcoal hair and the world doesn't stop shining.
It's only a night, a drunken perfectrainbow night, if only because none of the Potter children dream in colour.
(Lily Potter is spiked lemonade on street corners and they are gasping.)
ix.
She is the only one to kiss her first, out of all of them - it makes Lily blink in shock, eyelashes against blushing cheeks, thinking of righting wrongs and wronging rights. This girl is dangerous and destructive and oh, if she isn't a girl after Lily's own heart.
They smoke behind the greenhouses and disappear into back alleys that should've killed them, should've stopped them. They didn't.
"It's girls like us who want to die and do absolutely nothing about it," she tells Lily, her back against a tree trunk and her tie hanging loose from her neck. Lily hopes they never change.
Roxanne, darling, is a dead-beat, a dead-end; but she's fading fast, gripping tight to her defiance and decadence, hoping that someone will notice the way she is drowning. They don't, of course - no matter how loud Roxy screams.
She is murder and malice and the ten o'clock news and Lily gets out fast, before she breaks her too.
(Lily Potter is a bitch and they pretend they don't know.)
x.
The next one is angry and impulsive and nails biting into palms. Lily didn't know what she expected but it wasn't this - it wasn't scarlet lips and scratch marks, knotted ropes and romance and one week of nothing but wishful thinking.
She loves every second of it because she is Lily Potter, and she knows there will always be a beauty in pain. Victoire is the one who blames her, of course - blames her for the miscarriage and the miscarriage of justice and her eventual decline into misery. Lily isn't surprised that it had to turn out this way. Victoire has never been worth her victory.
"Just because Teddy didn't want you!" Lily growls as Victoire pushes her against the wall and makes her head spin in more ways than one.
The look they give each other is soft; so Lily closes her eyes.
But then again, she is Victoire's salvation; she is painful and perfect and seventeen. She is alive, a beating heat and flowing blood and she thinks that Victoire needs her, just for a while.
She needs to be reminded that she isn't dead yet.
(Lily Potter is a doll and they don't want her to break.)
xi.
The next one is special if only because this little boy is grieving; his lost love hung herself, did you know? And Lily Luna promises comfort and a twist of hips and a rope of love bites around his neck. She is his toy, this time. They prefer it this way.
He treats her like a doll, taking her out to dinner and buying her shoes and curling her hair around his fingers. She wants to laugh at him, wants to rip his porcelain skin to pieces.
She doesn't.
Because this isn't about her, not this time - this is about healing and forgiving and Lily wants to tell him, "What? Did you think you were special?" She doesn't, of course. Hugo mends and Lily stitches in his button eyes with a care she isn't used to. It's better for the both of them, and this time, his fabric heart won't snap.
(Lily Potter is a flatline heart and they are her electricity.)
xii.
The following is a car crash.
After Hugo, Lily needs to claw back that fire (wants to set the world alight) and who better than a dead boy to make her feel alive? He is all sunken eyes and track marks and tragedy, and oh, if he isn't just a little bit like her.
Their red hair mingled together looks like blood on the pavement and their hearts echo the sound of gunshots in darkened alleys. They are a crisis.
"Do you think the war ended?" Fred asks her, when the sky is pink with loathing and the new is telling them about another dead daughter or sister or mother or nobody at all. When she says yes, he laughs.
(They were never born to live long. It comes with the name.)
And that is how Lily will find him; blood seeping into carpet rather than concrete. Some part of her will remember how to feel. The rest of her will hold his hand as though they are in a chemo ward and a machine is flat lining her heart.
(Lily Potter is a diary and they are pouring out their hearts.)
xiii.
Her family is a fucking mess; none of them cry at the funeral, but none of them have to. Molly (the second, always the second) picks up the pieces of the second generation as Molly senior mourns for the loss of yet another Fred.
Even when the room is silent and everyone is staring at their hands, she whispers, "More tea?" And they all nod, of course, how could they not?
One day Lily follows her to the kitchen and pushes her up against the counter and presses their lips together in a mockery of a kiss and reminds her to breathe. She is nothing more than crossed out sentences and cups of tea, and to Lily, that's alright.
This is a different kind of story, one sitting on the edge of a teacup, boiling and soothing and just this side of daring.
Until Molly starts pouring her Irish coffee without the coffee and Lily doesn't want to hold up this family any more. The cup shatters, and so does their illusion of comfort.
(Lily Potter is a pin-up and she pops their hearts with a pin.)
xiv.
Lily doesn't mind being a replacement. She's spent her whole life as Lily Luna, as just her hair or just her smile or just a body for someone to hold. She uses them just as much as they use her.
But, to be honest, she's never been a replacement for her brother before.
Dominique is all masks and confusion and twenty-fucking-one and this close to running off to Paris and Dublin and the middle of the goddamned Atlantic. Lily is... simply there to help. "I didn't want to be left out," Dominique tells her with a cocky smirk and a lifted eyebrow, and Lily thinks, of course, because if there's one thing Dominique knows, it is secrets.
But she's not fooling anyone in the end.
This is more acceptable because as forbidden as it is, Dominique has no urge to hold Lily's hand and in return, Lily doesn't want to walk her down the aisle. She's not that type of girl. (Dominique is; she just won't admit it.)
Lily's oh so good at keeping secret, but she decides that this one isn't worth taking to her grave.
(Lily Potter is the girl they die for.)
xv.
In the end, it almost makes her laugh.
Lily is popping bubblegum in the middle of nowhere - she has graduated Hogwarts, barely, and now she has no fucking clue what to do with her life. She's confined to coffee shops and artwork and her delusions of happiness and to be honest, not much else.
(She dreams of marionettes and stars and futures and shadows and hurricanes and stories and nursery rhymes and rainbows and disasters and anger and dolls and car crashes and tea and secrets and -
- and family - )
He finds her, of course, when she is tucked into a corner of Dublin, smoking a cigarette and choking down stale coffee like it's hard liquor on a Friday night. He knows her. Always has done.
(And if that isn't the fault of Harry fucking Potter then -)
"Come home, Lily," James whispers, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. The kiss her brother presses to her cheek is soft and fleeting, and their eyes meet for a second. Then it is over. Just like that.
James and Lily die again.
"No," he tells her firmly, and she understands, of course she understands. She has popped every single bubblegum heart of their godforsaken family, and what did she get for it? Chipped pink nail polish and a brother who won't kiss her. Surprise, surprise.
In the end, though, she isn't as upset as she thought. Lily Potter is hopeful and broken and eighteen, and this time, focussed on living forever rather than dying young.
(Pop!)