Peony only sat staring at the floor for a long while. Finally, Lily broke the silence to explain the situation to her sister. 'Peony, it's okay, see? We're getting married, see? Frodo and I, we're in love, and he asked me. Last night he asked me, and we're getting married. And don't worry about the money. He knows. I told him, and he doesn't care. He loves me, see, and I love him. And there isn't anything left to stand in our way. He's well-bred. He has money. He's a friend of the family. Don't you see, Peony? It's perfect. We're in love, and it's perfect!'
Peony still just sat there, she now seemed sad and far away. She sighed and looked up at her giddy young sister, thinking she had no idea just how naïve she sounded, pitying her for the pain she was about to experience, preparing to break her heart. 'Lily,' she said sadly, 'you can't marry Mr. Baggins.' Lily only looked at her with a question in her eye, but did not contest Peony's statement, waiting for justification of this theory. 'It will never work. Lily, Mother hates him. She'll protest. Grandfather will forbid it. There are traditions, Lily. And they shouldn't matter, but they do. If you marry him, Lily,' Peony warned sympathetically, 'they'll disown you.'
'What are you talking about, Peony?' Lily asked with a chuckle in her voice as though she thought it all a grand joke.
'Lily, you have to believe me,' Peony insisted. 'I wouldn't joke about this. It's serious.' Peony stood from her where she'd knelt on the floor beside the bath, paced the room in four great steps, and came back to sit on her stool beside the bath, taking the shift warily from where it lay on it, and once again fingering the hem. She looked up from the stain to her sister's eyes. 'Lily, there are traditions--'
'You said that already,' Lily interjected.
'Well there are, and they can't be tampered with. Lily, they can't be overcome. Mother will disown you. Do you understand what that means? That means she won't see you, and that she'd deserve, but that also means she'll keep the others from you. I'm grown Lily and have my own family now, my own life. But you'd never see Poppy or Bella or Mari or Tom or Hal or Tim. Lily you'd never see any of them again. And mother would make you move out straight away and leave you with nothing, not even a goodbye.'
Lily did not respond, only looked her sister straight in the eye and stared. She did not cry. She didn't shed a tear. She wasn't even really sad. She didn't feel anything. In her mind she wondered about this, thinking she should feel something, anything at all. She tried to squeeze out a tear, just one. She tried to sink sadly into the bath, wallow in her would-be sea of tears, to feel that aching emptiness she thought she might've felt at some point before in a life she could only dimly remember. She didn't feel. She couldn't feel. And then she found suddenly that she did feel something after all. It was not emptiness; it was not sorrow. It was. . . liberation.
A/N: Yeah. That. That reviewing thing. You should do it. D