A/N - Lily again! There is a method to the order of these chapters, by the way! Hopefully it will become apparent in the end :) Thanks so much for all the reviews, I am incredibly grateful!
The Time That Lily Looks For Something Real
She's in her element, laughing, smiling, fizzing with her own marvellous electricity as if the world is perfect and she is too – at least on the surface. But her eyes are searching and a strange sort of worry lurks beneath them, even if no-one knows it.
Because she knows that something is off, something is a little wrong, just like a jug with no handle or a face with no eyebrows. She's always been so good at reading people, instinctively knowing how to make them laugh and feel at ease and like her, just like Louis knows how to make a potion work perfectly.
But tonight…tonight she's not quite right, and she can tell from the slightly confused looks at remarks that normally would provoke uncontrollable laughter, from the people who make excuses and escape her company with relieved glances at their friends who remain, and those ones look strained and uncomfortable.
So she ends her little spiel early, feigning tiredness, and she herself whisks out of the Hall like some fiery Valkyrie who is followed by the souls of heroes, but nothing follows Lily this time.
She flees, you see, and tries to find something that ties her down to the ground and gives her something that is incontrovertibly true and real and good, because that's hard to come by in her world of casual, uncaring conversations.
And what does she come to but the library? The dim, highvaulted room with little domes of warm yellow light where people are reading still. And she swishes through the columns of books, robe stiffing the dust and letting her smell that musty, homely scent that hides betwixt the pages of old books.
She comes to the little, hidden away corner where there is a wide window seat with a worn blue cushion on it, and a little girl with long dark hair shielding her face is hunched over a huge leathery book on the seat, engrossed in the story, but squinting and yawning with fatigue.
So Lily sits on the other side, pulls Molly into the crook of her arm and takes the tome into her own hands, settling down and breathing in the mixed aromas of the book and her twelve year old cousin's hair, which immediately brings back the bittersweet memories of younger Christmases, when everything was simpler.
And then she reads, in her real voice, not the sharp, high, glassy one she uses at the moment. Her sweet, rich voice that hides inside her for fear of corruption, but that comes out when it is really Lily here. And she gets lost in the fairytale, at once swept up into the world of perfect princesses and chivalrous knights and brave kings, where black is black and white is white and there are no shades of grey. She is magnificent while reading it, though she can't see it, sitting in the light of a dying day with the sun crowning her head and turning her sweet, serious face into the beauty that she could be if she would just let herself.
And she never finishes the story, but stops just before the end, when the princess and knight have been reunited and are just beginning, not ending. And she too nods off, leaning her head against the windowpane and dreaming of tomorrow with a little bit of hope, a little bit of love, and a little bit of a princess filed away the corner of her heart.
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