summary: Two women with the same name and vastly different views on life. A character study through the influence of flowers. "Maybe you could use some daisies."
title: "You can grow flowers from where dirt used to be." ~Merry Happy, by Kate Nash
note: So. I know this is random. I mean, I haven't posted for like a year and now here I am in a totally different fandom. I'm deeply sorry if you were expecting TVD and got this instead (although I don't know anyone who's not a Harry Potter fan, even if just a casual one, haha). I've been reading more HP stuff and I just fell back in love.
Warnings, though: I haven't written this stuff in ages; truly, ages. I'm very rusty. Don't hate me for not being great at this – I just wanted to try my hand at something new! Also, I rarely write in the past tense, but for some reason I decided to for this. I probably slipped up somewhere – no amount of editing will actually catch it, I'm sure. Just let me know and I'll fix it. Oh – and I dearly hope it's not too choppy. If you've read my other stuff, you know that this is a fairly big departure from my usual style. Again, branching out, right?
This is basically just an exploration of the two Lilies. And yes, my name is Lily. That's probably why I'm writing this at all. :) Apparently the name breeds a lot of mixed feelings/deep seated issues?
Review if you are able, I would love to hear thoughts on me in this somewhat new territory!
Lily Evans fell in love with the world.
She picked flowers from the time she was old enough to understand her name. It was probably trite, probably cliché, but she did it despite it all. She made her mother bouquets of weeds picked from the park near their house and cried if they weren't put in a nice vase just as though she'd spent real money at a real florist's. She stuck dandelions behind her ears until they turned into puff balls and then made wishes, ignoring the grumbles of an old neighbor who claimed she was simply spreading weeds around the neighborhood. She gave her sister petunias just about every chance she got, despite the long-suffering sigh that inevitably came from Petunia's mouth. And most of all, she found lilies.
"I don't buy the whole sweet girl thing," Marlene McKinnon said blatantly on the ninth day of her first year at Hogwarts. Lily was weaving a daisy chain under the shade of a big tree, while Alice Carter looked on with a devoted admiration.
Lily looked up, surprised. Marlene was standing, silhouetted against the sun, so it was impossible to see her face. There was a long pause, and then Lily said, "I'm not quite sure what you mean."
"Okay, you're this Muggleborn who just found out she's a witch and just got sent into this new life that you don't know anything about. But instead of freaking out like any normal person would, you sit here day after day and play with flowers. You carry lilies around. Like, we get the symbolism. It's pretty obvious – lilies for Lily." Marlene waited, saw if Lily had anything to say to this admittedly undeserved attack. When she stayed silent, Marlene continued roughly. "I don't buy it. You're putting up this front, so normal with your cute little flowers, when really you're scared out of your mind and you don't think you'll measure up in the Wizarding world."
There was a long, long silence. Lily continued with her daisy chain, weaving it effortlessly but staring hard at it all the same. After the quiet became excruciating, Marlene gave a frustrated sigh and turned to go. But Lily's soft voice called her back.
"You're mostly wrong," she said, not looking up from the chain. "I'm more excited than scared. And I really, really like flowers. My mother says it's bad for me, how much I adore them. I make myself into a caricature, she says. You're right about that – the sweet girl with her cute little flowers. The predictable lilies. But that's not a front. It's real. It's me. I like flowers."
Marlene came closer, looking at Lily curiously. Lily slowly looked up, meeting Marlene's eyes, and said casually, "I am scared, though. That's true. I do worry about inadequacy. But mostly I just like flowers."
Then she tied the ends of her daisies together, neatly, and held out the bracelet to Marlene. "It was going to be for Alice," she said. "But maybe you could use some daisies. I can always make another one."
Lily Evans was in love with the world, and the people inside it.
Lily Potter was the quintessential pessimist.
Her father called her "my glass half-empty girl" and her mother told her to lighten up. But mostly her negativity got her what she wanted. She was left alone, to her own devices, from the time she was a little girl.
Not that she wasn't always surrounded. She had cousins everywhere she looked, aunts and uncles bustling in and out at every moment. And both of her parents were famous, so no one ever seemed to pass up the chance to talk to them. But she was a whiny little girl, separated from her brothers by virtue of the fact that she was a girl and closed off from her cousins primarily by choice.
Her favorite thing to do was sit alone, sometimes talking to herself if she wanted company. She liked to read long, complicated books that she didn't totally understand and zoom so fast on her toy broom that she couldn't stand steady when she landed. She hated her father's cheesiness and her mother's rules and the ruckus her brothers caused. Most of all, she liked being alone.
"I don't think you're happy," her cousin Hugo said to her on the day after her tenth birthday, when she was sitting on the front steps of her house, reading Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. He stood behind her, looking out through the screened door, a daisy clutched in his hand.
She glared up at him. "I don't remember asking your opinion."
Hugo came out and sat down beside her, appraising her curiously, playing with the stem of the flower. "I don't remember asking you to join me, either," she snapped, and he smiled.
"You're just contrary. That's what my mum says. She says you just like to annoy people, so you're mean to them on purpose. But I think you're lonely."
"Your mum said that?" Lily looked down, turned a page in her book forcefully, the tips of her ears turning pink. Aunt Hermione was one of the few people she'd decided not to hate, simply because she was too clever and not sentimental. "Well, whatever. I don't care what any of you think."
"You don't talk to anyone because you think you're superior to us. But somewhere deep down I think it's more that you're afraid that we'll reject you. My mum says it's because you're the youngest and each of you show the troublemaking gene in a different way. James is obvious, but Al is clever and funny – and you're just mean. You don't like that your family is famous and you don't want to have a public image and you think it's easier if everyone just leaves you alone."
She bit her lip, pretending to be thoroughly engrossed in her book. He didn't go on, so finally she looked up to find him staring at her. "You're wrong," she said, hoping to wound him with the severity of her words.
She didn't. He just kept looking at her. Then he stood up, extending the hand with the daisy in it until she tentatively took the flower. "Happy birthday, anyway, Lily."
"Is it so much to ask to be given one single lily by a boy sometime? Is that so ridiculous? I know it's cliché, and it's probably stupid, but I think it would be just about the sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me."
Lily Evans was upset. Sitting on her bed in the Girls' Dormitory, she stared in dismay at the note that read, pathetically, happy Valentine's day and absolutely nothing else. "I mean, what kind of boyfriend does this? This is all I get for the most romantic holiday that exists? He couldn't get me the most obvious gift in the world?"
Alice and Marlene came to sit next to her. "Look, Lil, he was probably just nervous. He didn't know what to do," Alice said tentatively. "I mean, you're his first girlfriend."
Marlene snorted. "Even I know that Valentine's Day is supposed to be a big deal, and I don't know anything."
"Oh, God. This probably means he's going to dump me, right? Definitely. He'll definitely dump me. Oh, God." Lily fell backwards on her bed, her arm over her eyes. "This is horrible. He's just waiting to do it so he's not the jackass who dumps a girl on Valentine's Day."
"Don't panic," Alice instructed.
"He's not worth it," Marlene said derisively. "I'll break up with him for you."
"No!" Lily cried, sitting up quickly. "No. I'll wait it out. If he dumps me, he dumps me. I can't do anything to stop it, right?"
"Right," Alice said, while Marlene looked on with a raised eyebrow. Lily's look warned her not to say anything, though.
"I just wish he'd gotten me a bloody lily," she muttered under her breath, worn out by the ridiculousness of it all.
When Lily Potter was fourteen years old, Darnell Longbottom asked her to go to Hogsmeade with him and handed her a tiger lily. "You have such a fiery personality, you know? I thought this fit you really well," he said, shy and awkward and clearly nervous.
She looked at him in disbelief. "You actually gave me a lily? My name is Lily, dimwit!"
"I know, that's the whole point," he muttered, scuffing his shoe on the ground. "My dad got it from the Herbology green house, and - "
"Darnell, look, I think you're very nice to be giving this to me. Very sweet. I can't thank you enough." Her dry tone contradicted her, but Darnell looked cheered nonetheless. "I'm sorry, though, I can't accept. Just because my name is Lily doesn't mean that my personality is like a flower. Really, I'm a bit surprised that you thought I would like something so – cheesy and uninspired. No offense. Ask some nice girl who you wouldn't describe as 'fiery', she'll definitely say yes."
With that, she handed the lily back to him and walked quickly away, muttering under her breath at the ridiculousness of it all.
Lily Evans fell in love with one person, and one person fell back in love.
James Christopher Potter had been after her since the end of their second year at Hogwarts. He watched her relationships with other boys with disdain, jealousy, and the occasional fistfight. He asked her out at every opportunity, and she took every opportunity to humiliate him, absolutely hating his gigantic ego and his loud mouth.
And then she fell in love with him.
It didn't happen all at once. It was mostly slow burning. Mostly she knew that he made her furious. She was a serene, happy girl the great majority of the time, but James Potter got her blood boiling beyond belief. Marlene teased her that there was a thin line between love and hate, and Lily always said that she was so far on the hate side that she couldn't even see the line. But then came the day when Remus Lupin admitted to her, shamefaced, that he was a werewolf, in the middle of their sixth year, because she'd begged to help him with whatever he was hiding.
And Remus told her all that James, Sirius, and Peter had done for him. He told her how it was James's idea to become Animagi, to help Remus with the full moons, to support him in such a clear, dangerous, tangible – albeit illegal – way.
That was certainly the beginning. From then on she saw James less as an arrogant toerag and more as a devoted friend, loyal through and through. And after that she didn't know what happened. She was in the middle before she even knew she'd begun.
By that time, his desperate attempts to get her to want him had petered out. While he was still fun-loving, wild James, he had become more serious as the real world began to encroach, especially with the growing evil no one really spoke about.
And so finally, she found him in the Common Room at the end of their sixth year. He smiled at her but didn't say anything, training his eyes back on the fire. She took a deep breath. It was all going to have to be her.
"Hey, James?" she murmured, coming to sit next to him on the couch. He looked at her in surprise.
"Yeah, Lily, what's up?" Although they'd certainly been kinder to each other of late, they weren't exactly friends. Especially not friends who had conversations late at night when no one else was around.
"Would you – er – ask me out again? For old time's sake?"
He recovered quickly from the shock of her request, although from then on the wonder never really left his eyes, not till the day he died. "Will you say yes?"
"Let's see."
He smiled, stared hard at her as though she was joking. And then, slowly, he said, "Lily, will you go on a date with me?"
She beamed. It was answer enough.
(James was the boy who fulfilled her secret wish. He got her a lily on their six month anniversary, and he was embarrassed, acknowledging the predictability. She was so moved she couldn't speak, and even though he didn't quite understand it, he accepted her ecstatic hug.)
Lily Potter was sick of boys practically from the first second one showed interest in her.
In the end, it wasn't a boy who won her heart. It was a man.
Viktor Krum had gotten married a year after graduating from Durmstrang and had a child as soon as possible afterwards. Tsvetan Krum was almost a decade and a half older than Lily Potter, and that was probably the reason for his appeal.
They first met at Bill and Fleur's thirtieth anniversary party. Lily was nineteen and adrift in the world, working at a small bookstore in Diagon Alley and wondering what to do with the rest of her life. Tsvetan was thirty-two and owned his own company in his native Bulgaria, rich and secure with no one to share his success with. They primarily hit it off because Lily was already pretty much wasted by the time he and his parents arrived at the party.
Four months into their tumultuous, whirlwind affair, Tsvetan knocked desperately on the door of Lily's flat, having Apparated from Bulgaria in considerable haste.
She opened the door and laughed out loud when she saw him. "Tsvet, you know I don't want you leaving your job in the middle of the work week to see me," she told him.
"I could not go vithout seeing you," he said, his accent heavier thanks to his lack of breath. "Leelee – Leelee, I must tell you that I am in love vith you and I vould like to marry you."
She gaped at him in surprise, still standing in the doorway of his house while he waited on the front stoop. "Oh, my God, Tsvetan. This is a big deal. We've only been together for four months, and I don't even know if I'm ready to be married, and - "
"It does not matter to me. I love you. My feelings vill not change. I must be vith you forever."
She took a long breath. Then she said, "Well, don't you at least have a ring?"
He slapped his forehead in distress. "I have not been romantic like a beautiful girl deserves! I have been horrible. I should have bought you flowers, gotten you diamonds. Vot have I done?"
"No," she said, reaching her hand out and taking his, pulling him into the flat. "No, I hate flowers. I hate diamonds. This is perfect." She kissed him, hard, and when she broke away she was happier than he'd ever seen her. "Yes, I will marry you."
(He never once bought her flowers in the sixty-six years they were married.)
The world finally betrayed Lily Evans, and she finally accepted it.
She had her husband, a baby, the life she should have adored. She had everything she needed. Until one day she didn't.
Word of Marlene's murder came to her two weeks before Harry's first birthday. It was a Sunday morning, and James had Harry on his lap, playing peek-a-boo. She was busy in her garden, digging out a pesky weed that kept threatening to choke her lilies. An owl hooted overhead, getting Harry's attention, his wide eyes following it as it swooped down and laid a letter on the table next to James.
The next thing Lily heard was a horrible gasp coming from her husband's mouth. She was up immediately, at his side. "What is it?"
"Oh, God, Lil," he choked out, handing her the letter with no other words.
She scanned Gideon Prewett's sprawling handwriting quickly. Lily and James, Horrible news. Death Eaters caught up with the McKinnons. Norman, Genevieve, Marlene, Caleb and Daphne were all murdered. Quiet funeral tomorrow – completely understand if you can't make it. Dangerous times. Wishing you all the safety in the world. Gid.
She didn't hear the sob come from her mouth, but she knew it had to have been her who made that inhuman sound. She was on her knees before she knew it, in the dirt with the letter crumpled in her fist. James rubbed her back in slow circles, but she could hear him breathing heavily, fighting back tears. Harry was screaming, feeling the anguish surrounding him and feeding off of it.
She lived for three and a half more months, but she never touched a flower again.
The world finally pleased Lily Potter, and she finally accepted it.
She never thought she would be the maternal type, but one day she realized she was late, ridiculously late, and a suspicion took root inside her. She went to a Healer and her belief was confirmed – she was pregnant.
To her surprise, Tsvetan was over the moon. And she found that she was excited too, nervous and excited. She spent most of the coming nine months reading parenting books that scared her more than reassured her and getting suffocating advice from her mother and aunts and cousins.
On her due date, Hugo unexpectedly came to visit. He had a bouquet of daisies. "I know you hate flowers," he said, arranging them in a vase, "but I couldn't help it."
"You brought me a daisy on my tenth birthday," she remembered.
"The day after, actually," he corrected, bringing her a glass of water as he sat down next to her. "The day of your family party."
"God, I hated you that day."
He laughed. "I know you did. In some ways I wanted you to. You were so..."
"Closed off?"
"Yeah. Closed off. You wouldn't let anyone in. And I wanted to be let in."
"It was such a wake-up call. Do you know that? Especially when you told me your mum thought I was contrary. Ooh, that hurt. You told me I was lonely and I realized that I was."
"You were still a raging bitch, though, even after that," he said, partly teasing, but there was a seriousness underneath his lighthearted words. He really had worried about her, all those years ago. And still did, it seemed.
She smiled. "Oh, yes. Definitely. That's just my personality. I've heard it being termed stubborn, feisty, pessimistic...Darnell Longbottom told me I was fiery." They both laughed. "But you're right. It is just raging bitch, that's the best descriptor. Anyway, I like to think I'm mellower now."
"Tsvet makes you that way," Hugo said.
"Yeah, he does," Lily said, faintly smiling and tracing her swollen belly. "And with him, the world finally stopped disappointing me."
At those words, she felt something wet go down her legs. She looked at Hugo with a mixture of alarm and elation, and then said coolly, "I believe my water just broke."
Several hours later, her healthy baby girl was born, red-faced and squealing. Tsvetan took the baby in his arms, staring transfixed at her tiny face. Lily smiled up at him, exhausted and radiant. "Daisy," she said simply.
Tsvetan looked over to his wife, nodding. "Perfect. It's perfect."
Daisy Krum fell in love with the world.