Author's Note: I do not and never will own Harry Potter.
Written for the Occasion-a-Day Competition/Challenge. September 13 Prompt: Write about the Weasley family.
Content warning for smoking and alcohol use.
You can always come home, but Lily knows it's a lie. There is no space carved out for her at the family table, there is no warmth clinging to her old childhood sheets.
She smokes too much and she drinks firewhiskey like it can slosh over and fill the hole in the heart of her. She's a Gryffindor just like her parents, but she can't stand the House of the Lion anymore than her mother could ever stand the House of the Snakes. She dyes her hair because she can't stand to be red anymore, and pretends not to notice the disappointment in Ginny's eyes, or the betrayal in Harry's.
I'm my own person, she longs to shout at him some days, when she's sitting in the crook of a tree outside the Burrow, cigarette caught between two fingers and alcohol burning in her stomach. She isn't her grandmother and she doesn't want to be. Lily Potter is a goddess propped on a pedestal, and Lily Luna wants nothing to do with her.
She ponders running away sometimes, between school breaks, but gives it up. Where would she go? Everyone's related, connected to each other in one giant morass of a family tree, and she has nothing but Weasley stamped on her forehead, though her last name screams Potter. Everyone knows the Boy Who Lived is an honorary Weasley anyway.
One night in July, she sits in the familiar old tree, legs dangling against the trunk as she lights another cigarette, hands shaking. There's been another row and she shouldn't have come here, of all places, but it's the first place she thought of, now that she's learnt to Apparate, and it's not the same as being inside, is it? She's always on the outside, and she's so tired of it.
Her grandmother comes out, sweeping the back steps, and she freezes, waiting for Molly to turn her away, or worse, ignore her.
"You can come inside," Molly says carefully, setting the broom against the door frame. "I've made soup. You'll catch your death of cold out here."
"It's not cold out here," Lily remarks scornfully, but she stubs her cigarette out against her shoe and comes down anyway. It's not home as she always wanted it to be, but home has more than one meaning.