Disclaimer: Everything is the property of Jo Ro and her many wonderful publishers, etc.

Chapter 2, Thinking Too Much

Lily's summer had gone by in the same way as the weather had. Outside it was hot, oppressively humid, and bitterly windy. It had been that way, with very few breaks, for nearly two months, and it was in no way helping Lily escape the melancholic feeling that had been haunting her ever since she came home from school.

The last two weeks the year had been uneventful. Lily spent time with her friends out on the grounds—but never near the lake, and not talking nearly as much as she usually did. In the days after her... confrontation… with Severus, several people had approached her and asked if she was okay. She said yes, and for the most part she acted okay. The only people who knew that she wasn't were her dorm mates.

After she had left James in the hallway, she spent a long time in the girls room sorting herself out. Mostly, she splashed lots and lots of cold water on her face, rearranged her hair and clothing, and forced her lungs to draw in long, deep breaths that they clearly didn't want to take. She stayed in the loo, staring at herself in the mirror and practicing keeping her expression blank, until all the redness had left her cheeks and her eyes had de-puffed a bit. Then, she walked determinedly the rest of the way to Gryffindor Tower, through the portrait hole, and right up the stairs to her dormitory, where she immediately crawled into bed and forced herself to asleep.

Eventually she let herself be sat down and given a pep talk. She knew it was coming when her three roommates surrounded her en masse and led her upstairs. They sat around Lily on her bed with consoling but somehow stern expressions. It was just before breakfast on the last day of exams when the group sat her down.

"Lily," Marlene started gently. "It's been three days."

"And in that time, you've probably said as many words," added Lori Crossmark.

"We're just… we're really worried about you, Lil," finished Mary. It all sounded very rehearsed.

But Lily could hear the concern in their voices and felt immediately guilty for ignoring their attempts to question her. Lori was right; she had been working hard to avoiding talking to them about what happened after the scene at the lake. Not because she didn't want to talk to them about it, but because she just didn't want to talk about it. At all. To anyone. Thinking about it was bad enough, and that she could hardly stop herself from doing. But still, she thought. Lord knew that Lily would not have waited three days to sit them down if they'd been keeping quiet about something like this.

"I'm sorry, you guys," Lily sighed, looking down morosely at the dirty beige carpet. Her voice was heavy with sadness and guilt. She sounded utterly helpless, and she felt it, too. Her friends moved closer, Marlene putting one hand on her knee as Lori wrapped one arm tightly around Lily's shoulders.

"You don't have to be sorry, love," Lori said softly. "We just want to know that you're okay. You haven't talked to any of us about… what that git said to you… and we know that you're upset."

Marlene sounded indignant on Lily's behalf. "And you've got every right to be."

"What he said to you was absolutely disgusting…" Lori said, half a sneer hidden in her sweet voice.

"And we know how you are with him," Mary added. Lily's heart rate was starting to pick up and she groaned silently at how painful the topic actually was, and hearing her friends talk about it. Mary and Marlene sounded so sorry for her, and their pity made Lily's skin crawl. She didn't want to be pitied, even if she was acting pitiful. And Lori sounded so offended and angry, like she was making up for the emotions that Lily ought to be feeling. Although part of Lily was angry, and more than a little offended, the rest of her simply felt overwhelmingly hurt and betrayed.

"I'm just… We're so sorry to be proven right," Marlene admitted.

Lily dropped her head into her hands. She was so ashamed; ashamed of how she'd been embarrassed in front of her whole year, ashamed of how wrong she had been, ashamed that she was so heartbroken over someone who obviously didn't care for her the way she thought he had, ashamed that she was so weak. Ashamed because of all the reasons she had to be ashamed.

"I'm sorry," Lily repeated through her hands, hoping that none of her roommates picked up on the small quiver in her voice. "But I can't do this. I love you guys, and thank you, and I promise that I will be fine and stop ignoring you. But I really, really can't talk about this. I just can't."

Despite her efforts, by the end of her promises the creaking in Lily's voice was unmistakable. The three girls exchanged sad looks over her head before patting her shoulders or her knees and murmuring quietly that that was fine. Lily dabbed at her damp eyes and smiled at her friends before going into the bathroom to fix her make-up for breakfast.

After that Lily talked more, but never about anything much deeper than lessons and how nice it was now that the sun was out and how glad they were that school was ending. She sat her last exam, feeling shaky at best, because who knew what that last plant she was supposed to have identified for Herbology was, and then it was all over.

The last days were spent lying in the sun with her friends with her robes lying on the ground beneath her, and sometimes a book. She forced herself to laugh and be cheerful, and sometimes it wasn't so hard, if she managed to push all thoughts of the events that were plaguing her out of mind. She attended the End of Term feast, clapping and cheering with enough enthusiasm that no one around her questioned it. The she packed, she tramped down to Hogsmeade, she rode the train, she said her goodbyes, and she rode silently in Petunia's fiancée's car until they were home, where she greeted her father with the first bit of real happiness she had felt in a week, before saying that she'd had a very, very long journey and headed up to her room.

Where she had, for the vast majority of her time, stayed for the last two months.

She knew that moping around in her room probably was not the best thing for her. And she didn't always. (She was very defensive on this point when she considered herself recently.) In fact, she had been to visit Lori three times, and Mary and Marlene each once. Then, just last week she had met up with the three of them in Diagon Alley to get their new school things.

She had also kept in touch with Harlow Bawtry from Ravenclaw and Alice Fortescue, who was a year above her. Mostly their letters contained idle chit chat and tales of her friends' holiday adventures, but Lily decided that they still counted. Her letters were usually much shorter than the ones she received, however, as she had very little to get up to.

This was another reason that Lily had scarcely left home. Unless she made plans ahead of time and travelled to meet her friends, there was nothing for her to do outside of her house. Not that there was much to do inside it, either, but at least being inside meant she didn't have to worry about running into Snape.

It felt weird calling him 'Snape' after all this time, Lil mused. She was still getting used to it. She was lying on her bed, a potions book abandoned and about to fall off the edge beside her, thinking. Both her window and her door were thrown open in an attempt to draw a breeze through to lift the sweltering air away from her. She was wearing just a thin pair of cotton shorts and a t-shirt, but she still found herself so smothered by the heat that it was difficult to move from her bed.

This was probably the reason she'd been so thoughtful all summer, Lily decided. The stagnant heat in the air did not lend itself well to lightheartedness or fun. Instead, it prompted long hours stretched out on a bed, or a couch, or a porch swing, or the grass in the back yard, thinking about anything and everything the Lily felt she really ought not have been thinking about, the main one being Snape.

He'd been writing to her constantly all summer, which she cited as an excuse for being unable to go any length of time without her mind straying to him. She never opened his letters, but instead took them begrudgingly from a dark brown short-eared owl that she recognized as his and rolled them open just so that she could press the lot of them into a single stack on her dresser. Some letters were very, very long and others very short, but although Lily often found herself curious, she was determined not to read them after the first one—the only one at which she had even looked—made her cry for a solid hour the second day of break.

The only good thing that had come from her inability to stop thinking was the fact that she didn't cringe every time she thought about him anymore. She could think his name, she could think about what he'd done. It was harder to think about what she'd lost—the them from when they were little, before Hogwarts, before Slytherin and Gryffindor, before the Dark Arts and everything else had come between them.

And being able to remember what he'd done without flinching made it easy for Lily to be angry. It made it easy for her to not look at his letters. It made it even easier not to return them, and it made it easy for a small part of her to sadistically revel in the fact that he was probably dying for her to do just that. It made it easy to be okay when she talked to her friends, and even when she was at home. She was still hurting, but now it was tempered by anger. Lily was good at anger.

Something Lily was not good at—very not good at, for a matter of fact—was being unsure. Which is precisely how she felt about the other thing that her mind had been circling her many long days at home: James Potter.

She was unsure about everything in connection to James Potter.

She is unsure what exactly had happened between them, and why she reacted the way she did. She hadn't consciously thought about letting him comfort her, but she had let him comfort her, had let him hold her in his arms and stroke her hair and kiss her head. She had been so out of herself that she had just done without thinking. And she kissed him back… Sure, they weren't real kisses and they had been completely platonic (she thought), but the knowledge the James Potter's lips had touched her hair and hers had touched his skin left her reeling, and she did not enjoy the feeling.

She didn't know how to feel about it all, or how she should feel. The more she tried to figure it out, the more her thoughts swirled messily, so for the most part she tried not to go into it. She didn't know how her attitude toward him had changed so much so quickly. It was bewildering, just like every other thought her mind had been stuck on this summer.

She was very, very, very unsure how she felt about him at the moment. Not in the sense that she fancied him, but in the sense that she didn't sputter with irritation when she thought of him anymore, and that was extraordinarily confusing to her. She wasn't convinced that she liked him, either as a friend or as a classmate, but as it turns out it's rather difficult to think about someone that let you cry on their shoulder and comforted you when you could have easily looked up and blamed them for your tears, and hate them. And when it came to James Potter, for whom she had never had any sort of positive or even ambivalent feeling before, she wasn't sure what else she was capable of feeling towards him.

Which is why, she told herself, she had been thinking about their last encounter so often. (She had studiously avoided him for the remainder of school, a feat she was proud of because he was usually bloody everywhere.)

She used the continuation of this train of thought to justify her almost obsessive worry over their next encounter.

She was dreading seeing him again, mainly because she didn't know how he was going to act and the lack of knowledge drove her up a wall. She had decided that there were three possibilities, and she wasn't sure if she liked any of them.

He would either go right back to normal (aka being a prat) and ask her out, possibly using her breakdown as leverage to get her to say yes, and then she will feel like an idiot for thinking that he might not be so bad for having treated her like an actual human being, and moreso for telling him as much. Or, he'd look at her like some fragile little schoolgirl that can't handle her own emotions and he'd think she's weak, which, while she would rather prefer that he didn't think about her at all, she doesn't want to be seen in that light either. Or, because of her careless, overwrought emotional words, he would think that they are someone now friends.

This last possibility is the one that Lily was most anxious over: she didn't want to be friends with James Potter. She hardly wanted to be friends with anyone at the moment. She didn't feel stable enough for it. Trying to write letters to Lori or Alice and sound happy, like she wasn't wasting her summer away, was hard enough. The prospect of having to see Potter on the train on September 1st was unthinkably agitating. Like she said, she wasn't stable enough for friendships right now.

She was too lonely.

Which was backward logic, but there it was. Lily sighed heavily and ran a hand restlessly across her bedspread. Her hair was sticking to her neck. She was lonely. That's what the problem with this summer was. She couldn't remember ever feeling this lonely. Growing up she had always had Petunia. And losing Petunia only came after she found another playmate, another best friend.

Lily tried to ignore the pang in her stomach when she accidentally thought of him as her best friend. He certainly wasn't anymore… This was the longest she'd gone without seeing or talking to Severus since she was nine years old. It was the first holiday since they'd met that she wasn't at the park between their houses close to every day, staying as long as she could there just to not be alone.

Her thoughts always came back full circle to this. It was like her mind didn't know any other shapes. It was beyond frustrating, Lily didn't want to keep doing it, didn't want to keep spinning around the same thoughts and never thinking anything new.

So, instead, she shook herself out and went downstairs to strike up a game of cards with her father, thinking as she went that she really needed to stop thinking about all these things and sort herself out. School started in a week and a half, after all. She was desperate to get back to normal, and to get back to Hogwarts.

A/N: This chapter is very slow and takes place virtually all inside Lily's head, I know. I'm sorry. I hardly have the right to call it a chapter, because nothing happened. I was trying to incorporate more into it but it just didn't happen. I wanted to get out how she was feeling though, and I think that this is a pretty believable picture of what she would be thinking. Lily's POV is out of the way though, and that only leaves room for one thing, yeah? :D

Sorry if it was so dull. I will try to get the next chapter written and up sooner rather than later, and get more action and things that matter into it. Thank you for reading.