Disclaimer: We're 10 chapters into this mess of a story, kids. If you are still under the delusion that this silly college student is JK Rowling, or better yet, PJ Harvey, and for the sake of this chapter and its contents we'll throw Joni Mitchell into the fray, I'm not. Mkay?
Rated: R (adult themes, sexuality, and language)
Summary: 12 steps. 12 steps, and you can cure alcoholism, sex addiction, a love of coke, an uncontrollable rage or that hatred within yourself. 12 steps and you can dance in reverse, fall apart and watch the carefully constructed fabric of your life unravel. And in 12 steps, two people can foolishly fall in love.
Author's Note: Chapter 10! I really can't believe how close to the end this story has come. Makes me a little sad. This chapter…writing it has been like pulling teeth. Hard to explain, and even more difficult to write. I guess this is all the falling action, if we're going to speak in the whole five-stages-of-a-plot idea. But I'm strangely anxious to complete this story and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess there really isn't much needed in way of an explanation regarding this particular chapter. So, on that note, please, do, read on and thank you for sticking with me and this story.
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10. The Axis Turns
I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering
When you taste so good
Ican't believe that the axis turns on suffering
While my head burns…
Come on out, come on over, help me forget
Keep the walls from falling as they're tumbling in
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling…
- "This is Love" PJ Harvey
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Lily is having a total Joni Mitchell moment. But, then, when she takes a second to think about it, she has been having a total Joni Mitchell kind of summer: shades of blue drifting across the suburbs of London and the magical boroughs near Diagon Alley and Godric's Hollow. It's been the kind of summer where poetic language and nearly clichéd thought merge together with the heavy, heady surroundings creating a lyrical melody all its own. And as a sort of domino effect of trouble cascades its way down on her, Lily knows, now more than ever, the closing of July and the entr'acte of August, she really needs that river to skate away on.
Oh, yeah, Joni. Sooner rather than later Lily's own off-key voice will join in with yours, warbling a tearful "I made my baby cry," and throwing in a broken "I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfish and I'm sad, now I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had" for good measure at the end. Joni, you're not alone. Or maybe you are. It seems that heartbreak and pain and misery always carry the placard denoting party of one, and the old saying, about misery and company, is really just a collection of empty sounds lacking true significance or meaning.
Lily wonders if James is the best she ever had. Or something akin to the worst. Or maybe that's how it works. The best is the worst, and the worst, the best, triggering the extreme ends of the spectrum, love and hate and hate and love, and she has a feeling she quit making sense a long way back, sometime in May when she dropped her sanity with her schoolbooks and her panties soon there after.
She wants to know why when she closes her eyes she pictures Remus rather than James. She wants to know why she craves the company of the former rather than the latter, why it's always the ones you can't have that get you hotter than safety can ever seem to spark. It must be the whole dancing too close to the flame idea, dallying with the devil and praying to a god you rejected that you don't get burned.
"I love him," she whispers. And she hopes and prays that it's not the truth.
She takes the screaming kettle off the stove as her mother walks into the kitchen, unannounced, quietly appraising her youngest daughter.
"Lily, I've been meaning to talk to you," she begins.
"We talk everyday, Mother," Lily swiftly interrupts.She doesn't completely understand why she resents this woman, her own mother, so much. But she does. And something tells her, in the narrowed eyes and the absence of mother-daughter bonding in her past, that the feeling is somewhat mutual.
A hand on her hip, near the high waistband of her voluminous skirt, and Lily wonders if this woman ever craved this kind of existence, if the banality and boredom of it all is ever enough to make her snap, pack her bags, and run, leaving Mr. Evans in a house alone with his full-grown daughter and the ghosts of domestic disturbance disguised as tranquility.
"That's not what I meant, Lily. We need to talk about your future, what you plan on doing after this summer," and it's the voice, that voice she has heard for the last eighteen years: Lily, this is not what I meant by clean your room. And what will the neighbors think, Lily? I am your mother and I know what's best. I am your mother and I am your future, Lily.
"Later." And Lily closes the argument as she takes her mug of tea out on the front porch, the muggy evening heat her only company.
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Lily sits in her sunny kitchen and stirs her cereal with a spoon, turning the corn flakes and milk into an unappetizing paste she has no intention of consuming. She takes a sip of coffee, cringing as it scalds her tongue.
The kitchen seems too bright, the morning too sunny. Near blinding, Lily thinks.
She hears a sharp flick, and looks up to see her mother sitting across from her, clad in a bright floral blouse, puffed sleeves, smoking a cigarette.
"All right, out with it. You've been sulky for weeks now, Lils, and I've about had enough. You're a woman now. Grow up." Mrs. Evans has never been a confrontational woman, and to say that Lily is shocked would be an underestimation at best.
A strange smile quirks Lily's face, her eyebrows drawn together, confused, yet strangely amused. "You don't smoke, Mum."
"And you don't get to change the subject." A strong exhale, smoke exiting through her nostrils, and all Lily can think of is dragons and fire as her mother leans forward across the table, the rich scent of cloves and tobacco is on the air, nauseating her.
The impossibility of the situation, the utter out of character behavior her mother has adopted, are beginning to irritate her. She doesn't like this. No, she doesn't like this at all.
"Maybe you should just save it and lecture Petunia," she states acidly. "You two always seemed to get on a bit better with the whole mother-daughter thing."
She shakes her head, dropping ash on the tabletop, ignoring it. It doesn't make any sense. "Apples and trees, love. I look at you and I see me. But you learn in the end. You learn. And it's really not so bad."
The kitchen lights are too fluorescent, yellow light,and Lily feels strangely cold.
"I don't understand."
"No. Not now. But you can't have the best of both worlds. That's the point here. You can't be Muggle and magic. You can't be child and mother. And you can't have one and love the other."
She stares blankly, and she can swear her mother looks twenty years younger.
"There are more important things to consider, Lily."
"Like what?"
Her mother stubs the cigarette out on the tabletop, burning the tablecloth and leaving a deep burn mark on the wooden table below, a nearly manic grin on her face.
"Saving the world, of course."
A flash of green and her kitchen is little more than a leveled battlefield, stretches of dead earth with screaming and falling and more green, green, green. A flash and a cemetery, a flash and two graves, a full moon, a jail sentence, the dementors of Azkaban, blood and gore, and a quiet nursery. A flash and her own green eyes, wide and empty. Dead.
She wakes up with a gasp, and instead of seeing bursting stars before her eyes, she sees nothing more than the faint outline of lightning bolts dancing before her in the dark.
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She didn't sleep much the rest of the night. Tossed and turned,alternating between beingtoo hot and then too cold.
She finally gave up at seven in the morning and tramped downstairs in her pajamas, and half an hour later, she finds herself sitting alone in the family room, watching cartoons and eating a bowl of cereal.
She hears the stairs creaking under descending footsteps. When she looks up, ignoring the supposedly comic hijinks on the screen, she sees her mother in the wide doorway.
"You'd think you were eight rather than eighteen," her mother states as a greeting.
"Good morning to you, too." Looking at her mother, tired, hair rumpled, she can't get the dream from last night out of her head.
Rather than acknowledging her statement, her mother simply says, "You're up early."
"Yes. I am."
"Sleep well?"
"Not particularly."
Her mother has a sad smile on her face and Lily doesn't like it. Slowly, she walks towards her, Lily sitting cross-legged on the couch, and runs a hand through her red hair.
"You've grown up so fast."
With a kiss on her forehead, her mother leaves, and Lily can hear her, bustling around, preparing breakfast for her father and she wonders if what her mother said is true.
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By early afternoon, restlessness is just a euphemism for her frame of mind. It's been such a Joni Mitchell kind of summer and she has never felt as selfish or sad as she does sitting in her room.
Without thinking, she grabs her wand and apparates.
When she opens her eyes, she finds herself in Remus Lupin's front lawn and she's really not surprised.
He rises from his vantage point upon the porch, their eyes lock, and she knows. She knows it must be love. Only love could create such a beautiful disaster, such an awful tension, the branding and the burning.
He descends the step, skipping over the broken one, second from the bottom. He doesn't say hello and she doesn't either, and she guesses at some point they rounded a corner where these greetings are irrelevant and useless.
She can't handle this too much longer.
"I love you." She doesn't know why she said it. She does know that the words are barely there, lingering, just touching, dancing on the electricity she imagines to crackle there, there in the space between them.
She says it and draws a semi-circle in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. The top of her white flip-flop turns a shade of brown and she stares at the arc her foot created.
She looks up, and there he is. Studying her; his expression the same as it had always been behind the walls of the Hogwarts library, never changing, never varying, whether he was reading of the history of werewolf prejudices or the numerous species of hinkypuffs, it was always the same. Conflicting wonder and desire to slam the book closed.
There really wasn't anything different here. She's not really sure what she expected.
She wants to ask if he has heard her, but knows he already has. That steady, sickening sinking anchoring her in place.
"But you don't…" She wishes he would stop looking at her like that. Unwavering. Eyes never leaving her face, attempting, she would almost call it desperately, to lock with her own. "You don't love me?" And she hates that her voice sounds so pathetically meek, and Jesus, what is she even doing here?
She traces the semi-circle in the dirt once again.
"James. You love James, Lily. You love him."
Hearing it makes it so much worse. James. James. She loves James. She is supposed to love James. She is supposed to love him.
But what if she doesn't?
She finally looks at him, angry. "Then what are you? What would that make this – everything between you and me?"
"Lily…" Patience and Remus Lupin have always melded neatly and nicely; patience and Lily Evans have always gotten on like oil and water.
"No. Who are you to tell me who I love and who I don't? I love you, Remus. I love you. And don't even try to give me that bloody werewolf shit. I know you are poor. And I know about your…your disease. And I don't care. That's not a fucking excuse…to just get rid of me with." She finishes lamely, the wind taken out of her proverbial sails. She knows that's not what this is about, but it comforts her to argue it anyway.
"I wasn't going to say that." She hates his patience, his tolerance. She wants to shatter it as he has wrecked her self-control, the way he has sent her moral compass skittering into the dark corners of her universe.
"Then…"
She notices them, his hands, curled in tight aching fists at his sides. She notices the rigid line of his jaw, the clenched teeth that must be grinding underneath. And she knows. Knows he's fighting something. She's just not sure what.
"Remus?"
"He's my bloody best friend!" She can't help but look taken aback, and he clearly takes this in. "James, Lily. James is my best friend. And here I am, shagging his girl. And now she is telling me that she loves me, and it's wrong. And you…you know it is. That's the only reason why you came here in the first place."
Oh, God. This is all so wrong, and she knows it, and he knew it, all along, but no, that can't be what this has been about. No, she tells herself. She has made a decision. And Remus is it.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Nothing…I'm not…nothing."
It's hitting her, swift, hard and fast. It had never been about love.
She looks away, swallowing quickly. No, that's a lie. It had been about love the second after the first in the string of accidents and collisions between the two of them, for that's what they really were. They were never two lovers meeting for clandestine rendezvous or passionate breaks between the sheets.
They were merely the meeting of two people, two people lost and alone; one feeling abandoned by the man she loved and the other, abandoned by the world.
It had been about love. A love for passion, a love for life. A love for adventure, a love for something, anything, out of the ordinary.
It had been about love the second their eyes had met. Love for an invisible target.
But she wants, she wants so bad for it to be a love for him and a love for her in return.
He continues to stare at her.
"I'm out, Lily," he whispers. "I can't…do this with you anymore."
She has imagined this scenario countless times. The ending of it all and their own sad attempts to return to life as it was before it all fell apart. Each time it was she who finally stepped up, cut him off, ended the affair. She doesn't like this version. At all.
She is angry. And has been, but now she's finally letting it show.
"Can't do what, Remus? What is it exactly that you can't do?"
He chuckles. "You…"
"You're disgusting."
"Yes, yes, I am, Lily. I am disgusting. I have spent the entire summer fucking my best friend's girlfriend. Yes, I would say I am pretty bloody disgusting. And then, and then to add insult to injury, I let her believe we're in love. Yes, Lily, I am sick. And disgusting. And I think it'd be best if you left right now."
The way he says it makes her believe he doesn't mean the half of it. But it strikes her all the same. A resounding punch to the gut with her, open-mouthed and slightly teary-eyed.
And finally the meaning of the words sink in.
"You don't…you don't love me?" She is convincing herself in those scant seconds between her question and his answer that the truth is all she needs, that it's better to know than let her imagination work its dirty tricks.
He looks away. And then back again. "How can I love you when you have James in your arms and a man who will never exist on a pedestal? I don't fit into that picture." He is angry. She can tell. His eyes have narrowed and his whole body is tense, taut, waiting to spring and attack.
"What picture?" She doesn't know why she is asking. She doesn't know how the words crawled out of her swollen throat.
"The one of you and James living happily ever after. I'm not that man. And you knew that, Lily. You knew that. I thought that's what brought you to me in the first place. I guess…I guess I was wrong."
She doesn't know why she feels so desperate. But she does.
"But I love you…" She wonders when it came to this. Lily Evans pleading for the love of another, outside his house, mid-afternoon with tall green trees and an overcast sky.
He steps forward. Kisses her on the forehead, softly, silently. He holds her shoulders in his hands and squeezes. Rests his forehead against hers, his eyes squinted shut.
"I know," he whispers. "I know." His tone says that he doesn't, that he doesn't know, and neither does she, and maybe it's fitting.
This feels like good-bye.
She has James in her arms.
She has perfection on a pedestal.
But that still leaves him.
"Where will you be?" It's a question without a prelude, a question minus an explanation. But he gets it, he understands.
But hasn't he always."Where I've always been…" He kisses her softly, gently, and she realizes they have never kissed like this before. "Running free."
He kisses her once more, then turns and walks away.
She knows a farewell, a send-off, a parting line when she hears one, reads one, sees one. Feels one.
Standing alone in the woods surrounding the Lupin house, she understands. With a slight shudder and a quick swallow, the beginning of the tears to come, she understands.
This, this is pain. This is heartbreak.
This is what she asked for.
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