he takes her to a bar, somewhere in London, and the air smells of vodka and sex and cigarette smoke. She loves it.
"Did you know that I used to dance in a bar just like this?" she asks him, and when he raises an eyebrow in response, she laughs. She won't tell him of those lonely nights she plowed through during that time. when the only thing that kept her going were the music, bellowing from the speakers. She won't tell him of all the screams and laughter that followed her home and left her sleepless
They walk up to the bar, and she orders vodka, plain. when she does, he looks at her with something that maybe could have been love. In return, she gives him one of her crooked smiles, then she takes his hand, escorting him to a booth in the far back of the bar. The place where all the lonely men and wizards scared of being found out hides. Since it's christmas it's quite empty, two out of three booth's are empty, Lily chooses the one farthest away from the only other person whose lonely enough to spend his night here.
Just like in the kitchen at the burrow, they sit in silence. Lily downs her drink during the first minute, turns her head upward and stares at the ceiling. She doesn't register what Lorcan's doing, truthfully she doesn't really care. She just lets the clinking of glasses and one of those old Rihanna songs lull her into something that could be sleep if she just closed her eyes.
Lorcan's the one to cut the silence, in a hushed tone he asks "Hey, Lil," when she hmm's back he continues, "why do you keep running from us? From Hugo?"
When she doesn't answer him he takes a jug out of his beer, puts down the glass with a cold clirr. Lily just keeps staring upward, counts the ceiling cracks, blinks away the wetness in her eyes.
Ten seconds pass, eleven, twelve—
Lily straightens in her seat, doesn't look at Lorcan when she opens her mouth, looks at something beside him instead; "Lorcan, so much happened to me in the muggle world during that first year, you know"
Lorcan nords but he doesn't know, he won't ever know. Lily will never tell anyone about those things, about her first shabby apartment in Madrid, or the boy with sparkling green eyes, or the trip to the ER with severe burns on her arms, or the STD, or the rush of adrenaline she felt during that first performance with the studio. Those are the things she keeps locked up inside her heart, those things will go with her to the grave.
For just and instance, their eyes meet, and hers are big and wet and emerald shards, after just a short moment she looks away. It's heartbreaking to listen as her voice almost breaks when she spits out her next sentence; "Lorcan, none of you understood what I was talking about, I could have been an alien for all you gave!"
The silence stretches out over them again, with him staring vacantly into the air and Lily fiddling with her empty glass. Two lonely souls together in a dark corner of a even lonelier bar, not quite finding the support from each other as they may have hoped. Lily even starts to wonder how it's going for Miranda, maybe she's angry at Lily for leaving her alone. She hopes not, maybe Miranda got along fine with Lucy and the others.
When she starts to think about it, they're actually quite alike, Miranda and Lucy. Both are fun and hate cleaning.
Thinking of Lucy brings her back to the reality, to the broken and probably alcoholic man in front of her. She notices that his eyes are blue, not like the sea, more like the sky on a hot autumn day.
"Lorcan, why do you write about her?" Lily asks, and she knows that her words are wrong and absolutely not her business the moment they're out of her mouth. Before her, Lorcan crumbles, his eyes focusing for a few seconds before they fill with something that looks like tears, Lily ignores it. Instead she turns her head and just waits.
"Did you know that I almost married someone to get into a tomato-selling company?" It's Miranda who shouts it, loud enough for herself to hear her own voice over the music. When she looks around the group of poeple sitting on the sofa's, she sees that they're looking at her in disbelief. Miranda almost laughs when she sees the redheaded youngsters hungering after her story's continue. She doesn't laugh and instead settles for a wicked grin, tries to say something but it drowns in all the other sounds, in front of her Roxanne notices her problem and screams to her brother;
"jesus, Fred, turn off the music!"
The music quickly gets shut off, Miranda finds herself wondering how he turned it off so fast. Fred didn't even get up from the sofa, but before she gets around to ask him, Lucy nudges her in the side.
"okay, okay!" she laughs, takes a small sip from the whiskey bottle that James found somewhere and started passing around, "I walked past the tomato stall at the market in Milano, and I—"
"Wait!" James butts in, drunk as fuck and the smell of garbage surrounding him, "are you really saying that it wasn't even a tomato shop, just a market stall that you found on the local town-fair?"
Miranda leans back against the sofa, takes another sip of whiskey before giving it away to Lucy, her whole body's buzzing and she knows that it could be midnight or 6AM right now and she would have no idea. The only thing she's absolutely sure of is that Lily's disappeared with a rockstar, that Miranda's loved for like six years and should rightfully have been introduced to. She also knows that Lucy's sitting so close to her and that Lucy's knee is touching hers and that Lucy's skin is softa and warm and smells like—
"Miranda, no cliffhangers or only God knows what'll happen!" Hugo exclaims and well, with that threat over her head she sure gotta deliver.
"yeah, sure, and no, Freddie, it wasn't just a tomato stall, that tomato stall had the best tomatoes south of"—drunk Miranda sucks at parables—"eh, south of something, and they didn't just sell tomatoes, the also had dried tomatoes, tomato paste, roasted tomatoes, canned—
"STOP IT!" all the Weasleys scream in union, at least fifteen pair of fingers jabs Miranda in the side and she collapses of laughter onto the sofa. After a few minutes of a full-on tickling fight, the calm spreading over the room again, Miranda wipes her eyes from tears, making herself comfortable on the sofa again.
"okay, I promise to be serious now" she says as her grin widens against the cousins, "Anyway, I was broke at the moment, and the owner was cute, so I asked for a date and three months later I was ready to propose."
Aa a dreamy sigh passes through the redheaded crowd, Miranda feels that her grin is starting to become wicked, back at the studio when she told her friends, Lily and Nick had howled over those stories.
"Why didn't you marry him?" Lysander asks from somewhere in the back of room, Miranda realizes that the whole Weasley family's been listening to her memoirs, a bit awkward, to say the least.
"Well, she was nice, but after a while I got sick and puked up at least five yards worth of tomato sauce, after that it became kinda hard to own a tomato business."
When she looks around at her audience, she realizes that they've started staring at her with something weird in their eyes. Miranda feels her heart going down with a pang.
"The tomato owner was a she?" Fred asks, and his voice suddenly sounds different, Miranda gulps.
fuck.
"have you seen her eyes, Lily, they're brown like dirt, but not in a bad way, you know, dirt in a homely way, you know?"
Lily sighs, last time she checked the time on her phone it was sometime between 2AM and 5AM, but Lorcan's been talking for a while now and there's a permanent crick in her head, and she's so fucking tired.
"And her lips aren't that big, you know, not like Roxy's, more like yours, but when she wakes up they're like really sexy because sometimes she drools while sleeping—
Lily finds her phone lying on the snowy ground, which is weird because she's been searching in her purse for at least fifteen minutes and how the fuck did it end up there. When she turns it on the giant numbers 04.35 shines at her.
She looks around in the empty park, doesn't move any part of her body because her blood's turned to ice quite a while ago and she's in extreme pain right now.
"hey, Lorc, get up!" she quite forcefully stands up from the bench and walks over to him, she thinks off snapping her fingers in front of his face but it turns out to be unnecessary when he blinks and looks up at her.
"why do you ask me a question and then not listen to my answer?" his voice is suddenly filled with irritation, and Lily shudders when his breath hits her in the face, how much vodka did they even drink before getting thrown out of the bar?
Lily takes Lorcan around the shoulder, sends a quick prayer to God for this to go well, "come on Lorc, we need to get home now" She's not that surprised when their apparition turns into a total disaster.