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All errors are mine.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or any of the characters featured. Anything you recognise belongs to JK Rowling.
They didn't understand.
Her friends understood many things: her need for resistance against the slytherins and the dark force they called Voldemort; her need and desire to study, work hard and do as well as she could in a world that would struggle to accept her; her need for lie ins on Sunday's. But they would not understand this. Hell, she didn't even understand this.
Lily was stuck, her loyalties torn and her friends unable to help. She cried when no one was looking, the occasional moments when she was alone - though those were few and far between - but the tears didn't last long.
The tears went away.
But the pain didn't.
The gnawing, constant pain that clawed its way up her throat and threatened to spill out in a moment of weakness. She was afraid it would all come flowing out of her, that she'd start crying in front of them, screaming about what she felt and never stop.
Sometimes it faded slightly, when she was surrounded by her friends, playing the part impeccably of the untouched, funny, charismatic Lily Evans. She had gotten good at pretending by now, she was sure that no one noticed. The silencing charm around her bed at night helped - they couldn't hear the sobbing that way.
The pain faded sometimes. But it always came back. She often wondered if she was being selfish, being so affected by this matter that was so inconsequential compared to the war raging outside, and inside, the walls of Hogwarts. It was a small, insignificant battle. The outcome wouldn't change the world or change lives, only the lives of the Evans' family.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't even her battle to fight, not like the Battle of Blood. Maybe that was why she threw herself headfirst into the war against prejudice. Because she could. Because it was tangible, shared and real.
Horribly, terrifyingly real.
It wasn't just inside her head, it was here on their doorstep, in their school, invading their safe haven like a disease. This hatred, this fear that permeated everything and touched everyone. No, this she could fight. She and her friends, they could beat this, she was sure of it.
The other war, however, that was unspoken. It wasn't in the things that were said, it was in the things that weren't. It was in the pauses, the avoided eye contact, the silence. The terrible silence. The suffocating tension that hung over the house. It never lifted, no matter how hard Lily tried. She couldn't fix it. She didn't know how.
That was what was tearing her apart. Not her father's infidelity; not her sister's biting words or claims that this was Lily's fault; not the absence of light in her mother's eyes. No, these were most certainly the cracks, but what was truly breaking her, was the fact that she couldn't fix it.
Lily Evans - top of her class, Gryffindor prefect, arguably the brightest witch in her year - couldn't fix what was already shattered. And no amount of magic could help her.
She was powerless and broken. She knew she had a rightful place in the Wizarding World, no matter what the Slytherins and the blood purity extremists said; she knew she was worth more than her mud blood and had proven it time and time again; she knew all this. She knew a lot of things.
But Lily Evans didn't know how to repair her broken family.
And that's what scared her most of all.
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