For Screaming Faeries' Vanilla Ship Bingo and alyssialui's The Hogwarts Games on HPFC. And also because of everything in the world right now.
Torn
by padfoot
...
"later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere."
- Warsan Shire
...
The world is being torn apart.
Lily knows it when she watches the news, sitting on the floor in her parents' living room. Petunia is out with that vile Vernon boy, but for once Lily doesn't notice, doesn't care. Instead her eyes are glued to the television, one hand curled in the carpet and one over her mouth as she watches the world unravel around her.
She's sat in this spot a hundred, thousand, million times before. Sat here every night for her whole childhood: with Petunia, before she was a witch and the rift between them was so insurmountable, or leaning against her father's legs, or against her mother's, with soft, gentle fingers combing through her hair.
But now, in the silence, the stillness, the emptiness of the room, it feels worse than anything Lily has experienced before. Worse than homesickness, worse than failure, worse than that special brand of crushing loneliness that can only be felt in the absolute darkness of a Hogwarts night. Because her and now, Lily Evans doesn't feel alone, she feels present – embarrassingly, uselessly, foolishly, hopelessly, awfully present. Sitting there. Living, breathing, watching. And doing nothing at all to stop it.
She watches buildings topple and houses collapse. Watches lives being extinguished with the wave of a wand, families destroyed in a flash of light, people – real, human people – wiped out of existence as if it's just that simple and easy. As if life is as fleeting as an errant thought, and death as quick as forgetting.
The war aches in her body, assaults her mind. She wants to be strong – so, so wants to be what everyone expects her to be – but sometimes she can't, she just can't cope with it all.
Back at Hogwarts, it's almost worse.
People come back from the winter break with grey faces and ashen expressions. The corridors feel narrower, darker and colder. The breezes are harsher, the classes are harder. Nothing feels right anymore.
And then there's the talk.
Oh, the talk.
How this person lost his mother, and this one lost his father. How third-year Betsy watched her grandparents being dragged away by Death Eaters, but that's nothing compared to sixth-year Joseph, whose whole family was blown up at the fight on the bridge. How Professor Dillywally fought off four Death Eaters when they tried to attack a group of students at Hogsmede, but how, really, no one is giving any credit to Professor Luxar, who was awake for thirteen hours straight last week, comforting Peter Hawthorne who had just found out that his little brother was killed.
It exhausts Lily. Every extra piece of knowledge, every extra piece of human suffering, hits her like a Bludger to the stomach. She's so sore with the weight of it, so guilty that she finds it so overwhelming when, in truth she is fine.
She is safe. Her family is safe. James is safe.
So why does being fine hurt so damn much?
In other ways though, Hogwarts is better.
Here, Lily sits on the Common Room floor, staring blankly at an essay. An essay. Everything going on in the world, and she still has deadlines to make, grades to achieve. Patrols to do, meals to eat, hair to brush. She has a life to go on living. And it feels unfair and unjust and selfish and so many more things. But feeling those things won't get her essay written. And then how is she any better from the rest? If all she can do is sit there and think about how bad she has things, adding her own horror stories to the mix, as if it even matters to compare how far someone's heroism extended, or how deep their pain lies.
A hero is a hero, and pain is pain. There is no sense, no decency, in measuring the magnitude.
"Do you need some help?"
James is really just passing through. He's on his way back from patrol, about to head to Quidditch practice, and is half-dressed for each, in the process of pulling off his robes to reveal his winter Quidditch kit underneath. It's cold enough to be layering up anyway, Lily supposes.
"No," Lily answers quickly, not wanting to delay him. "It's just Charms."
"Well, we both know I'm a pro at Charms. I charmed you into going out with me, didn't I?"
"Is that how you did it?" Lily says dryly, "I always knew I couldn't have been acting out of genuine free will."
"You're not going to break up with me now that I've revealed my trick, are you?"
Lily watches as James walks to the bottom of the stairs to the boys' dormitories. He stops to look at her when she still hasn't answers, and catches her chewing on the end of her quill, pretending to think.
"Hmm. Not today, I don't think," she finally responds. "I'm not sure I could deal with another disaster right now."
In an instance, James is at her side, all commitments forgotten. And it's selfish and rude and all that kind of stuff, but Lily is instantly grateful. She lets herself fall into James' arms, leans her whole weight against him and screws her eyes shut as the tears that have lurked there since Christmas finally spill.
"Hey, hey, it's all right," James shushes, and fusses, and strokes her hair and kisses her forehead.
And Lily feels like a little girl again, waking up from nightmares, shaking and terrified of the evils she's dreamed up in the dark. Only these evils aren't dreams – they're real and deadly. They haven't touched her, but they're close, so close, and she's frightened but she wants to be brave. She so, so wants to be brave.
"I'm scared," Lily admits.
Right there, in the quiet isolation of James' hug, engulfed in his warmth and his smell and his solid, undeniable presence. A presence that doesn't feel light and untethered like Lily's. Because that's just it: Lily feels real, but delicate. As if she could be as easily extinguished as those others on TV, those people who she recognises in the students' stories and the teachers' scars. Whereas James' realness is hot and hard and strong, and for a wild moment Lily thinks that if she clutches him close enough, he'll stop her from floating away.
"It- it feels like every time I hear another story about- about You Know Who, about what he's done- it just gets easier to imagine it as me. And then- sometimes, in my head, it is me. It could be me. Or my mother or father, or Tuney, or you. We walk along bridges, too, James! We have parents, and grandparents, and siblings and loved ones and every time I see someone die – or hear about it, even – every time I feel it like it is me."
James has stopped shushing. He is silent but for his steady breaths, his beating heart. Lily feels his pulse against her cheek and draws strength from it, enough to go on.
"I get this sense that everyone is connected. As if invisible strings are going out from every point on my skin, connecting me to everyone else in the world. Connecting me to the world itself as well, to its energy, its life. And every time when something awful happens, a little part of me is torn apart as well.
"I'm so scared, James. What if, after seeing all this, living through this war, I can never be whole again? What if the world can never be whole again?"
"I don't know that the world was ever whole to begin with, Lil," James says. And it isn't comforting, not at all, but it's true. "But that's why the world needs us. To spend our lives trying to make it whole again."
"Fighting a losing battle?"
"In the hopes of winning the war."
From his words, Lily inhales James' courage and his fear. She savours his kisses on her skin, the way his hands shake where they hold her. She memorises his heartbeat: hard and strong, undeniable, unstoppable.
And she lets herself believe him.
For that brief moment of reprieve, Lily forces the ragged edges of the tears in her soul to mend, and feels herself being sown back together, piece by painful piece. Because James is right. Forces will always exist to tear the world apart. What takes courage is mending it again. Lily thinks she has courage enough for that.