a/n: so, looking back, I realise that I only meant this to be 1,500 words long maximum.
Awkward.
For my friend Francesca, who is 18 tomorrow, March 28th, and who has always been there for me and who is equally as obsessed with Harry Potter as me and is also always late for everything. Chess, you're awesome, and I'm sorry this isn't Daniel Radcliffe.
With the song: Does Your Mother Know? by Abba.
Warning: lots of swearing, because the Potter children are incapable of keeping their language clean.
See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way. (- Exodus 23:20)
even the man in the moon
LilyTeddy
to die by your side
is such a heavenly way to die.
- There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, The Smiths
He breaks her heart on July 16th. It shouldn't be something she remembers with such startling clarity, but she does and there you have it.
She's sitting out in the back garden with him, sixteen years old with her whole head spinning and her breath coming faster just for being near him, hopeless and helpless and hating herself for it.
(She's always tried to be the sort of girl that never feels like this.)
Then he says, very quietly, "I'm marrying Vic. I asked her last week."
And, for the first time in her life, Lily Luna Potter is speechless. She's always been that Slytherin with the tongue quicker than a whip and a wit sharper than a knife, with a smart answer to everything and a snarky joke to deflect any suspicions about what she's really feeling.
But this time she has nothing to say. All she can do is stammer hopelessly, "But… but… I – you… we…"
He knows what she wants to say – he's always known her better than anyone, known the whims of her changeable heart and stubborn opinions and been able to read her flawlessly even when she doesn't know herself what she's feeling.
"I'll still be your best friend, Lils, don't worry," he tells her firmly, and then his arm is dropping around her shoulders and she can't breathe, damnit, "I'd never leave you, not for anything."
She wants to scream then, wants to yell until he understands what he's doing by telling her this.
"You're like my sis–"
"Don't say it," she interrupts, in a voice low enough that she hopes it won't break while she's talking, "Don't you dare say that to me."
And then she gets up and walks away, and she doesn't start running until she hits the main road and can't be seen from the house.
;;
She wakes up the next morning with her head against the shoulder of a stranger, a train ticket and a passport clutched tightly in both hands, her wand tucked into the waistband of her jeans and digging into her thigh. She sits up sharply, shaking herself fully awake, and she glances out of the window at the unfamiliar countryside flashing past and then around herself, at the sleeping man next to her and the quiet train carriage.
She takes a moment to remember hailing a taxi to the nearest train station, paying the astonished Muggle with galleons out of the back pocket of her jeans, exchanging more galleons for Muggle money with a spell her Uncle George had taught her years ago in return for her keeping quiet about him playing a certain prank on her Uncle Percy, and then buying a train ticket to Dover. She's always been embarrassingly impulsive for a Slytherin.
She'd train-hopped twice then, keeping moving to stop herself having time to think. She remembers Paris – bright lights, lots of strangers talking in a language she couldn't understand – and then the train that was taking her… somewhere.
She glances down at the ticket in her hands, and raises it to eye level so she can read it in the dim light of the carriage.
Moscow.
Well. She's always wanted to visit Russia.
;;
Russia is colder than she anticipated. She draws more galleons out from a local wizarding bank and then exchanges them for more Muggle money, spending that on several thick jumpers and a hotel room for the night.
It's probably a bit conspicuous that she picks the grandest hotel she can find, but she's Lily Potter and she doesn't care if it makes her spoilt to be used to the best.
She stays in Moscow for three days, chatting up a local wizard to get him to cast concealment charms on her so she can't be tracked, and then she sees a boy with hair dyed bright blue and she leaves that same hour.
She goes to Kiev and then onwards, liking the wildness and savagery in the landscape and the quiet resilience of the people. She finds herself in a snowy town somewhere in Nepal with nothing but her passport and a small bag stuffed full of warm clothes and a purseful of money. She scopes out the area and then ducks into the nearest shop. She finds herself confronted with rows and rows of animal furs, and Al's always been the sensitive one in the family so she buys as many as she can and puts most of them on until she's like a walking furball and her distinctive hair is totally hidden under a wolf-fur hood.
She finds a man with a sled and twelve dogs and she manages to understand that he's heading out into the steppes to go home to his little village, and after half an hour she persuades him to take her too.
It's probably stupid, but then she's always had that Gryffindor streak of recklessness that she pretends doesn't exist because it's humiliating for a Slytherin – but, still, it's there and she's already in Nepal, it's not like she can do anything stupider.
;;
The village the man lives in defines 'the middle of nowhere' and as soon as he helps Lily off the sledge she's besieged by curious people, wanting to know where she comes from and speaking hardly any English at all, children jumping at her and dogs barking and it's like being famous.
(Except she already is famous, no matter how she tries to deny it – only daughter of Harry Potter, hello?)
She deflects questions with smiles and soon she's seated on the floor in someone's house, two amazed little girls wrapping her fiery hair around their fingers and cooing in delight, absorbed in the coppery shine of it.
She's fed and she's given a bed just because she's there and Lily falls in love with the place when she awakes the next morning and goes outside to find the whole world a pristine white, nothing moving but for puffs of smoke curling into the air from chimneys.
It's the nearest thing to peace she's ever felt.
;;
She stays with the people there for a month, but then the itch beneath her skin grows again and she starts to get afraid that if she stays too long then her family will track her down.
She's probably being illogical – after all, it's Teddy that she's running from, not her relatives – but she's always been solitary and somehow she needs this, needs to be away from the crowd and the noise and the constant competing to be centre-stage.
She waves goodbye to the people of the village, her skin chapped and red from the cold and her spirits singing with sorrow to be leaving them all. It's the most accepted she's ever felt – no worries that they're just being nice to her for her name or her family.
She returns to the town and she gets a train to China.
She doesn't stay in Shanghai for long – she feels too obvious, too out-of-place, with her palepale skin and blazing green eyes and flaming hair, so she tries an aeroplane for the first time and hates it all the way to Nice.
She only stays in Nice long enough to see a newspaper headline that, when she casts a subtle translation spell on it, screams 'Harry Potter's Daughter Still Missing, Twelve British Aurors On The Case!" She gets on the next plane and ends up in Canada.
She starts to hop around from place to place, staying in the North and only taking trains, living out of a small suitcase and caring less and less each day that the return to school is approaching. She decided somewhere in Ontario that she had no intention of going back, and she doesn't even feel a little bit guilty at the prospect of avoiding her NEWTs entirely – it's just another way to break the mould, and besides her dad did it, so shouldn't she be allowed to do the same?
She strays down into the USA for a bit, risking a day in New York, and then she tries a little while in Florida but her soul cries out for snow so she spends nearly two weeks on a train that takes her all the way to Alaska.
She's in a bar in Bethel when it turns midnight and something sparks inside her. She doesn't know what it is, but the world has shifted somehow and she just has to sit, completely blanking the man she'd been chatting to, and feel it for a moment.
The next morning she wakes up in a stranger's bed and remembers that it's her birthday.
"I'm seventeen," she whispers to herself, testing the words out, "I can do magic outside of school."
She revels in the lack of Trace, cleaning the man's whole house with magic before he's awake, and then conjuring herself an entirely new outfit up before she leaves, stealing away before her unknown bedfellow ever wakes up.
She spends the whole day moving around the town trying out her magic, changing the colours of things and revelling in the power she feels. She's no longer a helpless child with no protection. Nothing can stop her now.
;;
The real reason she's running starts to make itself obvious around mid-October. She's in the depths of the Katmai Park and Wilderness, sleeping on the floor of a little hut, having been fed by a kind old man and his kinder wife, and she wakes up with a gasp from a dream about a boy with golden eyes and turquoise hair tumbling her into pristine white sheets, his touch setting her on fire.
She staggers to the door and throws up what remains of her dinner the night before. She has to wait until the old couple are up and about and the man is preparing to make a run into the distant town on his surprisingly modern snow jet ski, which takes an agonisingly long time.
She gets back into town and she sits in a bar for four hours, her stomach churning, thinking that of all the clichés her life has turned into, this is the worst yet. Because when it was just her it was all okay, she could just be responsible for herself (or irresponsible) and nothing mattered. But now there's a whole other person to deal with, a tiny little person who belongs half to somebody who's more than willing to deny that he never even slept with her, and she can't just make this about her any more.
Then she gets so drunk that she can't remember her own name, and when she wakes up the next morning with her worst hangover yet, in bed next to yet another naked stranger, she gives up.
She gets dressed quickly and efficiently and she steals out of his house and she finds the first train she can.
As she travels, she watches the snow recede into woodland and she barely sleeps at all, finding herself instead fascinated by a girl who can't be more than half a year older than herself, trying to calm a fretting baby in the sleeper opposite her.
"He's lovely," Lily ventures one evening when she's grown tired of staring up at the ceiling of her little compartment and worrying, sitting cross-legged as she watches the other girl, "What's his name?"
"He's a she," the other girl replies with defensive look, and Lily spares a moment to wonder whether she'll know how to use that look, that anger mixed with pride and a love so fierce it nearly burns, if she keeps her baby, "Her name is Chloe."
Lily closes her eyes and breathes deeply, the memory of her best friend suddenly a fearsome stab, wondering how on Earth she's gone this long without feeling so guilty. Her eyes flash open and she meets the other girl's scowl with an easy smile that she's learnt over these past few months can put people quickly at ease.
"She's gorgeous. My name's Lily. Who're you?"
"I'm Vanessa," the stranger ventures, and her eyes rove to the gentle curve of Lily's stomach, swelling beneath her too-tight jumper, and she's suddenly understanding, "You're pregnant?"
Lily can't bring herself to say the words, so she just nods and she feels sick the minute the truth is out there, confirmed and undeniable. Vanessa tilts her head over at her, gently rocking a still-babbling Chloe, "You gonna keep it?"
"I don't know," Lily replies quietly, fingers knotting in the corner of the ragged bedspread, "It's complicated."
Vanessa shifts sideways and then smiles a smile identical to Lily's one of only a few minutes previously, and then pats the space on her own bed next to her.
"Tell me."
So Lily clambers across and she finds herself explaining about a boy who's engaged to her cousin and who's eleven years too old for her who got stupendously drunk at another cousin's birthday party and told her that he loved her and would pick her if she wasn't so young (-"You're only a child, Lily, goddamnit"-) and then was gone the second he woke up the morning after, not even stopping to pick up his discarded boxers.
With the curtains drawn, Vanessa listens and listens and when Lily's done she wordlessly holds a tissue out to her. Lily accepts it and wipes away her tears and thinks that this is probably the lowest she's sunk so far, and that that's really saying something.
"Your family are looking for you?" Vanessa asks after she's sat in silence, obviously digesting Lily's story, and when Lily nods she continues, "Then you should go back. You're lucky. My family didn't come to look for me."
"Why not?" Lily asks in astonishment, taking in pretty Vanessa and her pretty baby and thinking that her family must be mad, she's a far nicer girl than Lily will ever be able to claim to be, "My family would probably kill to switch me for you."
"They're very religious," the other girl explains with a sigh, rocking little Chloe absently, "I was a massive embarrassment. But it's okay, my boyfriend took me in, so we do okay. But you – you've got your family. You shouldn't drive them away."
"They don't know about me and Teddy, though," Lily points out, reaching out a hand to let Chloe grasp one of her fingers, feeling like crying as the baby clutches tightly, "Or about me being… y'know. They might kick me out too."
"They won't," Vanessa replies confidently, smiling reassuringly over at Lily.
"How do you know?"
"They're still looking for you, aren't they?"
Lily can't argue with that, so she falls quiet to think about that and when the train finally arrives in New York she's made her decision.
;;
The plane journey to London is as hellish as she remembers her last plane journey being, stuck in between some screaming toddler and a man who keeps trying to see down her shirt, so she puts her chair back and tries to fall asleep.
When the plane lands she staggers off with stiff legs and rumpled hair and goes straight to the bathroom to be sick. She manages to freshen herself up with a few quick spells, and then she marches out of the airport with her head held high, catches the tube, and emerges into the hustle and bustle of London with a determined stride.
She goes into the first shop she can find and splashes out what she has left of her English Muggle money on a good outfit – she's a firm disciple of the belief that a good outfit adds tonnes to your confidence – and then, just like that, she finds the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic and walks straight out into the foyer as though she's the Minister for Magic himself.
She heads straight to the Floo office and bangs her hand down on the desk of the official working there.
"I need a floo connection to Hogwarts," she demands, ignoring the shock on the look of the wizard's face, "Now."
"But – but – but you're Lily Potter! The whole –"
"Now," she hisses icily, and he's in such shock that it's all too easy to use a quick Confundus charm on him and get her connection. She steps into the fireplace and shouts, "Slytherin common room!" and suddenly she's whirling and it's all she can do not to throw up yet again as she decides that, from now on, she's sticking to trains.
She collapses out onto the hearthrug in the Slytherin common room, displacing ash and soot and coughing like she'll hack up her lungs. She manages to stagger to her feet and finds herself confronted with a roomful of astonished Slytherins, staring at her like she's Salazar Slytherin himself come back to life.
"At ease, men," she tells them blithely, and then she walks right through the middle of them with her chin up, and finds the familiar steps up to the girl's dorms with sure feet.
She bursts into the seventh year girls' dorm and freezes in the doorway, suddenly impossibly choked up with emotion, as a blonde girl stares back at her with a face so white she might be a ghost.
"Lily?" Chloe whispers in pure disbelief, and without meaning to be Lily's crying as she rockets towards her best friend. The two girls crash together near the foot of Chloe's bed, both of them sobbing their hardest as their hands clutch at each other and take solace and comfort and reassurance.
"Oh, Merlin, Lily," Chloe keeps gasping, and Lily is entirely beyond words, just weeping into her best friend's hair.
When she does find words, they're "I'm sorry, I'm sorry".
;;
She sits on Chloe's bed and she tells her everything, every tiny detail she can remember about Teddy and about running and about hiding and about everything.
"Fucking hell, Lily," Chloe says after she's sat in silence to think about all of this, "You're an idiot."
Lily laughs, then, and hugs Chloe tightly and then she takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes and asks the question she's been dreading asking since she first decided to come back to Hogwarts.
"Will you come with me to get an abortion?"
She cracks one eye open, surprised into nervousness by her best friend's silence, and finds Chloe just looking at her.
"You sure?"
"Absolutely," Lily says firmly, and Chloe looks at her a little more before shrugging and grinning and leaping off the bed with all the fire that has made Lily so happy to be her friend all these years.
"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!"
They head back through the common room arm-in-arm, and the door to the common room bursts open to admit Lily's father just as the emerald flames are whisking the pair back to the Ministry, too quickly for Lily to even hear him shout her name.
They stagger out into the Ministry foyer, and get out of there as quickly as they can, in no doubt that there'll be some sort of manhunt going on for them now that Lily's father knows she's back in the country.
They take a taxi to the nearest Muggle hospital, not wanting to draw attention to themselves by using magic, and they just stand and stare at the big building, hand-in-hand.
"I'm scared," Lily admits quietly, her eyes wandering over the pristine hospital front, taking in the big windows and too-green plants. It's this or risk the story being all over wizarding newspapers by tomorrow by going to a potion shop to find an abortion potion, which she's heard are messy and really not as practical as doing things the Muggle way anyway.
"You don't have to," Chloe reminds her gently, squeezing her fingers, "We could go back to Hogwarts."
"No, no, I do have to," Lily insists, biting the nails on her free hand, "It's go in now or be walking out in four months with a baby. I know which one I want."
So they step through the main doors and they walk quickly through to the reception, hustling their way into the next appointment with a couple of sneaky Confundus charms – Muggles are hopelessly easy to manipulate – and not twenty minutes later Lily is lying on a starched white bed with a woman hovering over her and the room full of strange metal things that she'll be seeing behind her eyes for the rest of her life.
"Are you sure about this?" the woman asks, and Lily pretends that she's not crying as she nods and Chloe squeezes her hand and the woman looms closer.
;;
She finds herself in the front garden of her home roughly an hour later, and as she just stands and stares up at the achingly familiar house she wonders for a moment how she got there – the last thing she remembers is Chloe apparating her out of that horrible white room after the procedure was finished. She assumes that Chloe must have left her and gone back to school.
She doesn't know whether she'll go in.
It's a bit of a dilemma, actually. She could not go in, and instead run again. But to be honest her family's probably got lookouts at every aeroplane and train station in the country, and besides her dad will be able to track her too easily now he's seen her. She's become good at concealment charms, but not good enough to fend off the head of the Auror department.
And then she could go in. See who's home, see how much trouble she's in, see whether the house will feel the same as it did all those months ago when she fled from Teddy and her suffocating feelings for him.
Her decision is made for her when the front door opens slowly and a boy (man) with purple hair and very yellow eyes appears from the shadows of the hallway to stand on the doorstep, his eyes trained on her, his body movements cautious as though she'll be spooked like a flighty horse.
She doesn't say anything for a while, just stands there and looks at him, studies the tense lines of his shoulders and the weariness in his face and the fact that a weight seems to have been suddenly lifted from him by the sight of her.
She opens her mouth to speak after a lifetime, and she means to say something cutting and snide like, "You've got fat" or "Oops, sorry, I was looking for someone who cared," but instead she merely says, "I hate you."
At least it's simple and to the point, she supposes, as he sighs and runs a hand through his now-black hair and takes a cautious step closer.
"I suppose I deserve that."
"I hate you," she repeats with slightly less conviction this time, moving backwards a pace or two, "You broke my heart."
"I know," he murmurs, and she's kind of satisfied in a really sick way to see how hurt he looks about this, "I'm sorry. If that makes it better."
"Not really," she replies with a shrug, holding her ground now, "You did sleep with me and then propose to my cousin. Usually it takes a bit more than a 'sorry' to fix something like that."
He drops to sit on the front doorstep, eyes now a vacant grey that don't meet her own green ones as he withdraws a lighter from a back pocket. He digs around to find a cigarette and then lights it with hands that, to his credit, only shake a little. He dares to glance up at her then, taking a drag, and for some reason it's that that finally sets her off.
"Don't you dare!" she screams, and she doesn't care that she's doing this in her front garden where the world can see and hear, doesn't care that she never meant to react to him at all, "Don't you dare sit there and smoke! You quit, remember? You quit because I hated it so much and I begged you stop and you did, finally, you did and you said it was because you loved me."
"Lily –" he tries to interrupt, but then suddenly she's sitting down on the ground and staring at him with slightly wild eyes, fists clenched against the grass, legs spontaneously not working.
"Is loving me really something so easily thrown away?"
"Fucking hell, Lily!" he exclaims, and all of a sudden he's flicking the damned cigarette into the flowerbed and rushing to kneel down next to her, all lanky limbs and broad shoulders and black hair, "I love you. Of course I love you – it's you. How could I not? But… but you're seventeen and you ran away and you're a child and – and – and do your parents even know you're here?"
"'Course not," she replies, wanting to shake off the hand that he's placed on her shoulder, but not quite being able to bring herself to do so, "You think we'd be able to be arguing like this if they did?"
He shuts his eyes and then all of a sudden his arms are going around her and he's holding her against him in that way he's always held her, and it's an embrace that makes her think of warm sunny days and teenage sadness and don'tthinkitdon'tthinkit (love).
She tries to fight it because she's Lily Luna Potter, okay, and she has her pride. But there's thing he does with his hand on the nape of her neck, and it makes her go nearly cross-eyed with pleasure.
"That's cheating," she tells him firmly, because if he's taken control of the rest of her body she'll have control of her voice, thank you, "And you stink of smoke."
"You know," he says, and his hold on her tightens, as if he just needs to keep reminding himself that she's really here, "You're kind of impossible. By all rights you should be really quiet, you know? Because all the Gryffindors in your family are the loud ones, and everyone else is quiet. But you… you can't be quiet for more than a minute. You're louder than even Dominique."
"You'd better be going somewhere with this," Lily warns darkly, because after all she's not here for a dissection of her character, she's here to… well, to not get a character dissection, that's for sure.
"And you're impossible because you make me love you," he murmurs, and when she twists her head to look up at him he won't meet her eyes, his own trained on some distant point, a distractingly bright pink, "Which I shouldn't. I mean, come on, you're a child. I've known you as long as you've lived. And it was always supposed to be Vic, with me, you know? It's what everyone thought. And then you came along… rules and destiny and things like that don't matter when you're in the room, did you know that? You make everything else stop mattering. Everything. You have that smile and you just want everything so badly. It's heartbreaking and awe-inspiring all at the same time."
She's speechless now, but for once she doesn't even bother fishing for the words. She just leans her head back to rest on his shoulder and breathes in his scent, ignoring the undertone of stale smoke.
"I nearly had a baby," she tells him, more to make him look at her than anything else, "But then I decided not to."
She gets her wish – his hands are suddenly on her shoulders and he's twisting her to look at him, almost shaking her in his shock, "You what?"
"Yeah," she replies coolly, in that Slytherin way she knows has always infuriated him, "You knocked me up, did you know that? It was pretty nasty, actually," she continues, more to fill the gaping silence that his disbelief has left, "I was sick and everything. But the Muggles were really good at abortions – d'you reckon that's a symptom of society or something? That's what Rose would say – and so now I'm not any more. Pregnant, that is. If you wanted to know."
"You – Lily, why didn't you tell me?" he demands, and his hair is a wild red and his eyes are wide and – is he scared? "You should have told me!"
"And you'd have done what?" she taunts, batting his hands away impatiently, scrambling backwards, "You wouldn't even admit that you slept with me. It was everything to me and then you acted like it never even happened. You proposed to Vic the next week, Teddy."
"I didn't know, Lils," he replies, one hand reaching out towards her, and she notices suddenly that he's wearing a jumper that she knitted him when she was nine and went through a phase of wanting to be like her grandmother, and she doesn't know why but it's this that sparks the tears at the back of her eyes.
"Fuck off, Teddy," she tells him firmly, and she hurries to her feet and races to the house, "Just fuck off and leave me alone. I don't ever want to see you again."
;;
Half an hour later it occurs to Harry and Ginny to check their house, nobody having seen hide nor hair of Lily since she disappeared from the Ministry, and they apparate home to find Teddy sitting on the front doorstep looking utterly disconsolate, dragging moodily at a cigarette, hair a dull brown colour.
"She's inside," he says without preamble, not looking up at them, "She locked me out."
Ginny lets out a frustrated sigh and strides up to pluck the cigarette out of his mouth, vanishing it and giving him an enormous scowl.
"I find you smoking on my doorstep one more time, Theodore Lupin," she threatens darkly, "And you are banned from family dinners forever."
Harry ignores them, striding past the pair to try the door. As Teddy stated, it is locked, and doesn't yield to any of the spells he tries – nor any of Ginny's when she joins them.
"She's got your skill," Ginny informs him, tilting her head back to look up at the windows to see if she can catch a glimpse of her daughter, and Harry is about to ask why she's not more worried and desperate about the fact that Lily is in there, Lily is just inside and she's been missing for four months – and then Ginny goes mad.
She throws herself at the door, beating at it with ineffectual fists, screaming, "Lily Luna Potter, you open up this door right this second or I am going to blast this house apart piece by piece until you're the only thing left standing and I can –"
"Hi, Mum," a voice says with just the faintest undertone of amusement, and Ginny freezes as the door creaks open and Lily's slim form appears, face pale and devoid of make-up and eyes red-rimmed and puffy from crying. She wraps her oversized cardigan more tightly around herself and stands in the semi-darkness of the hallway and just looks at her parents, waiting for a reaction.
It doesn't take long.
Ginny flings herself at her daughter at the same moment Harry does, and they crush her in a three-way hug as Ginny starts to rant about how scared they were and how she's never ever to do something like that again, and oh yeah she's grounded until she's sixty and she's banned from ever going out.
Lily stops listening pretty quickly, and with one arm around her mother's neck and one around her father's she just stands there, and it's funny because her mother might be the one talking a mile a minute but it's her father's reaction she's worried about. He's just standing there with his arms tightly around her and his face in her hair and his mouth shut, breathing slowly and steadily and somehow she feels far more picked apart by his silent reproach than by her mother's rant.
"I'm sorry," she ventures eventually, cutting her mother off mid-spiel, "Really. I am."
Ginny shuts up this time and her parents just stand and look at her – because Lily doesn't do apologising, not to anyone, no matter what she's done.
"Missed you, froglet," Harry tells her finally, and she beams and she doesn't mean to be but she's crying again as she leaps at him and wraps her arms almost chokingly around his neck and feels the smallest she's ever felt.
"Missed you too, Dad."
;;
She stays at home for three weeks, refusing to go out or to see anyone. This worries Ginny more than anything, because the old Lily would have been chafing at her restrictions and trying to sneak out every five minutes (and probably succeeding) and getting moody and lashing out.
Instead she spends hours sitting at the window on the landing and watching the street in total silence.
Harry goes off to work every morning and drops a kiss onto her forehead, telling her to have a good day, kissing Ginny goodbye at the front door and not saying anything because he knows how worried she is, and she knows how worried he is, and it's funny because Lily's home but it's like she never came back at all.
She won't talk about where she went or why she ran away – but Ginny is beginning to put two-and-two together from the amount of times that Teddy's turned up at the front door and been met with a stony silence as Lily refuses to acknowledge his presence.
"Hey, honey," she says gently as she seats herself opposite her daughter by the window one sunny morning, reaching out to put a hand on Lily's knee, "Do you want anything for lunch?"
"No thanks," Lily replies without looking away from the street, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and face bare of make-up, still in her pyjamas, looking impossibly thirteen and setting Ginny wondering all over again.
"You need to eat," she insists, patting Lily's knee, "I'll make you brownies, if you like?"
Lily turns to look at her suddenly, the sunlight catching the green of her eyes like the blaze of the Northern Lights, "Why aren't you angry with me, Mum?"
"What do you mean? Have you done something I should be angry about?"
"No, it's just," Lily begins, and her fingers are twisting in the hem of her t-shirt and she looks like there's something she's dying to say but can't quite bring herself to, "I thought you'd try to murder me for disappearing. I don't understand why you're being so nice."
"Believe or not," Ginny says, reaching out and tucking a stray strand of hair behind her daughter's ear, "I did want to murder you for a bit. But, the thing is, I've realised how close I came to losing you… I'm just glad that you're back, that's all. Although I would appreciate an explanation. Why you did it and everything. Your father would, too. He's worried about you, you know. Really worried."
"Dad's always worried," Lily replies with an eye roll and just the barest hint of her usual sarcasm, "He wouldn't be Dad if he wasn't."
"Don't deflect," Ginny orders firmly, and Lily sighs and won't meet her mother's eyes and shrugs.
"I had to get away. I didn't mean to stay away for so long, but I loved it out there. The further away I got the less everything started to matter. It was great."
"Why did you have to get away?" Ginny presses, not about to let this opportunity go to waste, "I deserve an explanation, Lily. You didn't even send us a letter to tell you that you were okay. We thought you might be dead, for Merlin's sake!"
"Please, Mum," Lily says, drawing her knees up against her face, "Please don't. It's not – it's just that… I can't tell you."
"Why can't you tell me?" Ginny demands, throwing her hands up in the air, "For crying out loud, Lily! You vanished for four months! The whole family was in uproar! James spent six weeks scouring every inch of this country for you, did you know that? Albus went to Charlie in Romania and then worked his way across the whole of Europe! Dominique threatened to drop out of school to find you, Teddy broke up with Victoire because –"
"Don't talk to me about Teddy!" Lily shrieks, and suddenly she's on her feet with her hands balled into fists at her sides and her whole face an ugly red, "It's always Teddy, always! You all love him so much and he's just… he's so… I hate him. I hate him I hate him I hate him!"
She finishes with an almost triumphant air, staring her mother down as though daring her to contradict her. But Ginny is just sitting there with her arms folded and one eyebrow raised in genuine astonishment.
"It was Teddy, wasn't it?" she asks softly, staring up at her daughter, "That's why you ran away. Because of Teddy and Victoire."
"No," Lily corrects stiffly, "It's so much more than him and Victoire. That's only part of it. You just… never mind. It doesn't even matter. They're getting married and everyone's thrilled and it's all going to be just –"
"Lily, love, he's eleven years older than you," Ginny reminds her gently, reaching up to take her hand, "He can't help not loving you – I know that you were always his favourite out of all you kids, but he's grown up now, and you're almost there yourself. He's not going to start loving you just because you've got a crush on him."
"Oh, God," Lily says, yanking her hand out her mother's grasp, "You really don't have a clue, do you?"
"Don't you talk to me like that, young lady," Ginny admonishes in outrage, but then Lily's shouting again and Ginny almost can't believe the words coming out of her mouth.
"He said he loved me!" Lily announces fiercely, hair swishing as she gesticulates wildly, "He said he loved me and he promised he'd pick me and then – and then…"
Out of nowhere she's crying and Ginny's head is spinning at the rapidity with which Lily's emotions switch, but she gets to her feet anyway and encloses her daughter in an embrace, stroking her hair and whispering soothingly against her skull.
"And then what, darling?"
Lily mumbles something unintelligible and shakes her head, clutching onto her mother like she's afraid she's going to drift away, tears soaking the shoulder of Ginny's top.
"It doesn't matter," she manages to convey between sobs; "I hate him. That's what matters. I hate him more than anything."
"More than splinters?" Ginny inquires, trying to lighten the mood, naming the one thing that Lily's always hated most in the world.
"More than splinters," Lily confirms without the barest hint of humour, and that's when Ginny realises that maybe she doesn't have a clue what's going on here after all.
;;
James and Albus arrive home from their respective homes one snowy weekend just before Christmas, meeting each other quite by chance at the garden gate.
"You seen Lily yet?" James inquires as they march side-by-side up the garden path, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
"Nope," Albus replies as he wraps his Gryffindor-red scarf tighter around his neck, "You?"
"Not yet," James says tightly, and the two brothers pause on the doorstep and glance at each other for a second, not really needing to say anything to know how the other is feeling. James may tease Al rotten and talk down to him but he knows without a second thought how his younger brother is feeling – the same as himself, he imagines. Worried and relieved that Lily's home, but mostly angry that she could do something like this to them.
"I feel bad being so angry when Mum and Dad keep telling us to be nice," Al confesses, neither of them quite ready to reach for the doorbell yet, "Do they keep owling you to tell you to go easy? Apparently she's in shock or something. I dunno why, I think we should be the ones in shock."
James sighs and lets his head fall back and he's about to reply when he notices a flash of red at the upstairs window. With a start, he realises that Lily is up there, watching them, her pale face thoughtful and very young. They gaze at each other for a long while, wordlessly, until Albus notices James's distraction and also glances up.
The three siblings stare at each other for a long moment, not able to put into the words the feelings running between them, and then Lily disappears suddenly. Al and James exchange another look, and then they hear a pitter-pattering of feet behind the door and Lily is pulling it open, feet bare and freezing under her pyjama bottoms.
"Hey," she says, somewhat nervously, fingers tugging at a loose thread on the bottom of her jumper, "I missed you guys."
"Mum and Dad warned us to be nice," James says stiffly, "But it's probably best if you just avoid me for now."
With that, he brushes past her and strides into the kitchen, tugging off his coat and yelling for his parents, announcing that he's hungry. Al hesitates when Lily turns back to him, and to his horror he notices that she's near to tears.
"I knew he'd hate me," she gulps, standing back to let Albus in the house, "I didn't mean to make him hate me."
"He doesn't hate you, Lils," Al promises as he unwinds his scarf, slipping back into the role of peacemaker between his considerably louder siblings as easily as breathing, "You scared him, that's all. And you know James and his stupid pride."
She drags a hand roughly over her eyes, as irritated as James gets by tears, and Al has to repress a smile. Although she's Slytherin and James is Gryffindor, they've always been far more similar than either of them will admit.
"I missed you, Al," she tells him as though it pains her slightly to admit it, "Even if you are shagging my best friend and always tell me off for stupid things and wear stupid jumpers."
"Missed you too, Lils," he replies with a smile, and then she's hugging him suddenly, so hard his breath is almost knocked out of him, her skinny arms woven tightly around his neck and her face in his shoulder. He folds his arms around her in return and cannot believe what a relief it is to know that she's back and the worry and sleeplessness is all over.
;;
It takes Lily four days but eventually she wears James down enough that he'll talk to her in more than grunts, and Al comes down to the kitchen one night at about three o' clock in the morning to find his siblings already there, the lights on. Lily is leaning against the side of the oven and laughing as James flicks obsessively through a recipe book making stupid faces.
"What are you guys doing?" he inquires in a hiss, running a hand through already-rumpled hair and shutting the door carefully behind him, "It's the middle of the night!"
"Don't fret, Al," James says patronisingly, and so loudly that Al winces, "We've got a silencing charm on the room."
"We're making brownies," Lily chips in, waving her oven-glove-covered hands to prove her point, inclining her head to indicate the red timer beeping on the oven door, "We were watching the telly and we got hungry."
"At three in the morning?" Al asks incredulously, flopping down into a chair at the head of the table.
"We haven't been to bed yet," James informs him, waving a wooden spoon importantly, "We got distracted watching Mum's Sex and the City DVDs back-to-back."
"James didn't believe me when I told him that women talk about sex," Lily explains with a grin, and Al can only sit there, astounded by their sudden descent back into their old intimacy.
"Al, do you –" James begins, but then the oven pings and Lily leaps into action with a cry of delight, hopping off the counter she'd been sitting on and yanking the oven door open, grimacing as the heat hits her but sticking it out and grabbing the brownies, pulling them out and dumping them on the side in one swift movement with a clatter that makes Al hope that James is as good at silencing charms as he thinks he is.
One quick cooling charm later and the three siblings are falling on the brownies, sitting around the kitchen table and bickering just like they used to, and when their parents come down the next morning they find Lily fast asleep against James' shoulder and Al face-down on the kitchen table, all three of them covered in chocolate and an empty plate in between them.
"Do we even want to know?" Harry inquires, and James just opens one eye a crack and gives a bleary shake of the head before going right back to sleep.
;;
That afternoon Lily and Al have retreated back to bed, but James has always had a lot of energy so when Harry and Ginny disappear out to do some last-minute shopping for Christmas, he is the only one left awake in the Potter household.
He sits down to write a letter to his fiancée Jenny, who is on holiday with her family in the Caribbean, and he's just about to go and steal Al's owl out of his room when there's a tentative knock at the front door. James bounds up to open it and discovers Teddy standing slightly uncomfortably on the doorway.
"Hey, mate," James says in delight, beckoning Teddy in, "Long time no see!"
"I've been avoiding Lily," Teddy confesses as he enters the hallway, tossing his jacket with an ease that belies long practice onto a hook and heading straight to the kitchen, "But I haven't seen you since you got back, so I wanted to drop by. Is she in?"
"Yeah, but she's asleep," James reassures him, following him back into the kitchen and switching the kettle on, "Why are you avoiding her?"
"I wrote her a letter," Teddy informs him, tugging a writing-covered piece of parchment out of a pocket as he collapses into a chair, "And this is what she sent back."
He holds the parchment up to James to show off the words, "FUCK OFF AND DIE" written in bright red ink in Lily's unmistakeable scrawl, right across the neatly-written letter.
"Bloody hell," James says in astonishment, eyebrows nearly shooting up to his hairline, "What did you do?"
"You don't want to know," Teddy replies, tucking the letter away again and then running a hand through his messy hair, the colour of it gradually waning to purple without his noticing.
James shrugs and jabs his wand at the kettle to speed it up, then pours a mug of tea for both himself and Teddy before sitting down and striking up a conversation about the relative merits of the new Firebolt 3.0 as opposed to the Thundercloud 1.2.
About an hour or so later the pair are in a ferocious argument over whether the Chudley Cannons will ever win a match when suddenly the kitchen door flies open and Lily staggers in, hair everywhere and wearing a sweater that James is sure he recognises.
"Isn't that the jumper Jenny gave me last Christmas?" he demands, interrupting Teddy's rant mid-flow and glaring at his sister.
"It's soft," is Lily's only reply, and then she seems to become aware of who is sitting at the table with James. She folds her arms and leans against the doorway, her face instantly unreadable and emotionless.
"Teddy's here," James announces somewhat redundantly, feeling the awkwardness suddenly pervade the room.
"You didn't get my note, then," Lily says lightly, and as Teddy turns around slowly he notes the tight line of her jaw and thinks it sad that she's always been the one person he could read so easily.
"No, no, he got it," James butts in cheerfully, "He showed it to me."
"Did he show you what he wrote in the letter?" Lily inquires in a low, spiteful tone, and Teddy is shaking his head and uttering a pleading, "No, Lily," when her tone turns needling and bitter, and she grins ferally as she adds, "About how he fucked me and knocked me up at Roxanne's birthday party the week before he proposed to Vic?"
James drops his mug of tea.
"I'll take that as a no, then," Lily says with a scornful smirk, and with that she disappears out of the room, legs very long and bare under the sweatshirt.
"Please, James," Teddy says desperately, already backing away, "You can beat the hell out of me later – but, please, let me talk to her. I need to talk to her."
James puts his fingers on the bridge of his nose and takes several very deep breaths.
"You have ten minutes, and then I'm beating the shit out of you."
"That should be enough," Teddy vows hopefully, and then he's vanishing out of the kitchen in pursuit of Lily, leaving James covered in tea and so angry he doesn't quite know what to do with himself.
;;
"You shouldn't have told James," Teddy announces from the doorway to Lily's room, gazing down at her form on the bed, face-down in her pillows, "It'll kill him."
"It's killing me," she mutters, and her voice is muffled but he can hear every syllable anyway.
"I really am sorry, you know," he tells her gently, taking another step into the room and shutting the door carefully behind himself.
"Sorry for what, exactly?" Lily demands, turning her face up to glare at him, fists clenched in her sheets, "Sorry for sleeping with me? Sorry for running away in the morning? Sorry for saying that you loved me, sorry for marrying Vic, sorry for –"
"I didn't marry Vic," Teddy interrupts hastily, moving closer daringly, "She dumped me. I kind of told her… about us. And she could see how worried I was about you being gone. The longer you were away the more it got to me."
"Nice of you to fucking come and look for me then, huh?" Lily retorts angrily, turning her face away from him again, her tone considerably softer as she adds, "I wanted you to look for me, you know. I wanted you to find me. Every day."
"I looked, Lily, alright?" Teddy replies shortly, "I looked fucking everywhere. I didn't come home for six weeks because I was looking for you. But you were nowhere. It was like you'd vanished."
"That was the point," she sighs, and she still won't look at him so he crosses the room and walks around her bed and crouches down so their faces are nearly on the same level, her green eyes wide and untrusting as she meets his gaze steadily and accusingly.
"You know," Teddy says, reaching out and nervously plaiting and unplaiting one of the tassels on her fluffy white blanket, "I thought… when you got back, on the lawn… I kind of thought – hoped, really – that maybe… maybe you still loved me? Even just a little bit?"
"Maybe," Lily repeats blankly, "And maybe not. It doesn't matter anyhow. I'm still – what was it? Oh yeah, a child. Even though I took care of myself for four months and kept ahead of the whole fucking British auror department. I'm definitely still a child. Teddy the wise. You should have been a fucking Ravenclaw."
"Stop it," he commands, raising a hand and clamping it across her lips, "Your mouth is too pretty to keep saying ugly words like that."
He sees the flash in her eyes that is her wanting to bite his palm, but then she appears to calm it and she very coolly reaches up and wrenches his fingers away.
"You never cared that I swore before," she replies defiantly, still looking at him sideways, expression tight and challenging, "You think that sleeping with me suddenly gives you the right?"
"For fuck's sake, Lily!" he exclaims in exasperation, because Merlin she's just so non-stop and does she have an answer to everything or what?
"What's the matter?" she taunts, and suddenly she's sitting up to look condescendingly down at him, a smirk that is pure Slytherin written across her face, "Can't take it? Figures, I suppose. Teddy Lupin, the Gryffindor with the courage of a fucking bumblebee. Why don't you just fuck off and –"
He cuts her off, then, the most effectively he's ever cut her off in her whole life, closing the gap between them suddenly and desperately, reaching out and pulling her towards him with something that's half-gasp, half-prayer, his hands fumbling for her and his mouth ascending to hers roughly and hungrily until all he can feel, hear, sense is Lily and her tangled hair around his fingers and her slim waist within the protective curve of his arm and her arms around his neck as she kisses him back just as desperately, her lips moulding to his.
Their breathing speeds up and grows ragged, until their heaving chests are almost touching and Lily has to break away to drag in a hearty lungful of oxygen, her eyes wide and somewhat glazed when they meet his.
"Cheater," she says a little unsteadily, the fingers of one hand flying up to trace her lips, as if to check that this has really happened, "Aren't Gryffindors supposed to be honourable?"
"Not in love," Teddy replies, and before she can roll her eyes or wince at the cheesiness he kisses her again, more sweetly this time, feeling every inch of her against him and wishing, praying, that loving her didn't have to be so hard.
;;
James, as promised, comes up shortly afterwards, drags Teddy out to the back garden, and beats the shit out of him.
Lily lets him because, well, Slytherins have always had revenge issues and besides she can fix him up quickly afterwards, and it does James a world of good.
From her bedroom window, Lily waves goodbye to a blood-covered Teddy, who smiles in a slightly unfocused manner and then disapparates. Lily spares a brief moment to think that maybe he shouldn't be doing that in his condition, but then she decides that he's a big boy and can make his own decisions.
She starts as James appears in her bedroom doorway, his expression menacing and arms folded, Quidditch muscles bulging admittedly impressively beneath his t-shirt.
"Explain," he commands shortly, his brown eyes dark and discomforted, "Explain what the fuck is going on here."
Lily sits and just looks at him for a while, because he might be twenty-one years old and far too cocky for anyone's good, but he's her big brother who always protects her and teases her and who she's irritated and undermined for as long as she's been alive – and she can see under his seething façade that he's hurt and confused and more than a little scared.
"He fucked up," Lily says quietly, "But I did too. We both did. But… I think it's okay now. I think it's all okay."
"He got you pregnant, Lily," James reminds her, entering the room and unfolding his arms, taking a seat on the edge of her bed and gazing at her as though willing her to deny it, "He's like part of our family and he got you pregnant."
Lily sighs and takes in the disappointed slump of his shoulders – because this is Teddy and this is James and it's not exactly a secret that Teddy is everything James has ever wanted to be – and she knows in that heartbeat that just one more lie won't hurt anybody.
"No, he didn't," she says firmly, getting up and sinking down onto the bed next to her brother, "That was a lie. I'm sorry. I wanted to make you hate him. That was wrong."
"Oh, thank Merlin," James exclaims, and then his arms are wrapping around her and his breath is in her hair and she can feel his grin against her scalp, "You scare me like that again, Lily Luna, and I'll tell Mum you had sex with him."
"Then I'll tell her it was you that sold her Witch Weekly's Quidditch Player of the Year award to Mundungus Fletcher," she says into his shoulder.
"You wouldn't," James hisses in outrage, taking her by the upper arms and yanking her backwards so that he can glare at her, "Even you're not that evil."
"You honestly believe that?" Lily inquires with an eyebrow raised, and James rolls his eyes and then pulls her back into a hug. Lily puts her arms around him this time, and when Al finally wakes up and pauses at the door to Lily's room to find his siblings sitting on Lily's bed laughing their heads off, he enters the room with a yawn and throws himself down next to them.
"What did I miss?" he asks sleepily, and James and Lily exchange a glance and then turn identical innocent grins on him.
"Nothing!" they chorus, and Al believes that about as much as he believes that Uncle Ron once beat Aunt Hermione in a Charms test, but with the weak winter sunshine streaming in through the window the day is too pretty to waste with disbelief so he just shakes his head and grins and joins in their conversation quickly and easily.
;;
Lily dreams of Teddy that night, and he of her, and the next morning he pitches up at the Potter household to find a very silent kitchenful of Potters waiting for him.
"James told them about us," Lily informs him cheerily from where she's sitting by a thunderous-looking Harry, "Because I told Mum about the Witch Weekly award."
"She had it coming," James chips in blithely, and Teddy doesn't really know what to think as Al snorts into his tea and Harry's expression grows even angrier.
"If Lily didn't assure us that you make her happy," Ginny begins, and Teddy's waiting expectantly for the rest of her speech when Harry interrupts, more explosively angry than Teddy's ever seen him.
"What in Merlin's name are you thinking, Teddy?" he demands, "She's seventeen! That's eleven years younger than you!"
"Dad, I'm right here," Lily reminds him calmly, levitating a spoon from the side next to James so she can take a mouthful of her cereal, "And I'd super appreciate it if you could refrain from the whole –"
"Lily, not now," Ginny warns as Al and James recognise the signs of a brewing storm with their unerring Weasley antenna for trouble, and creep skilfully from the room.
"I love you like a son, Teddy, you know that," Harry continues, knuckles white around the handle of his wand, "But this is my daughter we're talking about. She ran away from home because of you! She doesn't know enough and –"
"Still here, Dad," Lily announces in a chipper manner, prompting a hissed, "Go to your room!" from Ginny. Lily sighs, grabs her bowl of cereal and spoon, and flounces from the room, pausing at the doorway to look back at her parents.
"I really do love him," she informs them firmly, "So don't go all vanquishers-of-Voldemort on him, please?"
And with that, she disappears from the room, leaving Teddy alone to face the wrath of her thoroughly deflated parents.
"There were thirteen years between my parents," he reminds them somewhat tentatively, "And nobody denied that they were in love."
"But… but that was different," Harry replies, appearing to gain mastery of himself again.
"How?" Teddy demands, folding his arms and feeling his own temper starting to rise just a little bit, "Tell me how."
"Because Tonks wasn't my daughter!" Harry explodes, face red. Teddy is tense, ready to go for his wand for self-defence if he should need it. But then Ginny is suddenly laying a hand on her husband's arm and whispering something in his ear, and Teddy feels his hope spike as Ginny turns towards him with an incredibly serious expression on her face.
"You swear you love her?" she inquires in a tone without a hint of joking. Teddy meets her gaze and, without falter or doubt, replies, "Yes."
Harry rolls his eyes and gets up from the table, muttering something about being outvoted as he heads out of the room and upstairs.
"Let him talk to her," Ginny tells Teddy, getting up from the table with a weary expression, "Everything will be fine."
"You're okay with it?" Teddy inquires disbelievingly, and Ginny gives a shrug and heads over to the counter to start preparing lunch.
"Not exactly," she replies, and Teddy supposes that he has to appreciate her honesty at least, "But I trust you and I trust her and if you think you're right together then I'm not going to argue. Besides, you know you're already like our son anyway, this will just make it official."
"Thank you, Ginny," Teddy says sincerely, and she throws a grin that has all of its old radiance over her shoulder at him before starting to levitate ingredients out of various cupboards.
;;
About forty minutes later Teddy is helping Ginny cook when Harry appears back downstairs and, without preamble, informs Teddy that Lily wants him upstairs.
Teddy takes the stairs two at a time and discovers Lily sitting at the windowseat on the landing, gazing out onto the street below.
"It's going to be okay," she whispers, her forehead against the window, "It's really going to be okay."
"To be honest, I don't think okay even begins to cover it," Teddy tells her with a small grin, taking a seat beside her and taking her hand in his, his thumb tracing circles against her pale skin, "Not even close."
"Not even close," Lily repeats, and then she smiles at him so comfortably that he can't believe they haven't been like this forever.
Then they sit together and watch the world go by for hours.
a/n: if you liked this enough to favourite/alert, I'm begging you not to do so without reviewing!