In which Lily and Wizard Lenin share an almost heartfelt moment, Default loses its first quidditch game, and the saga of Hermione Granger continues.
As with most things when everything went to hell it all went to hell at the same time. Lily figured it was just one of those fundamental flaws in the foundation of the fake reality they lived in that nobody seemed to concern themselves over.
It was what happened in Shakespeare plays. Hamlet swears revenge on the man who killed his father and somehow ends up killing Polonious through a curtain and causing Ophelia's madness and suicide.
You didn't intend for these things to happen, didn't even think that they could possibly happen, and because you were unprepared for the possibility as you headed towards your goal you found them happening anyway.
(Lily had never intended the events of last Christmas even as she'd worked to recreate Wizard Lenin's body.)
It was the third weekend in September and in spite of careful planning, training, and then even more careful planning the quidditch field looked like the Western Front, the walls were literally painted in blood, the hallway was littered with dead headless chickens, and Rabbit was missing somewhere amidst the chaos and general mass hysteria of the student population.
"Ellie, what's the Chamber of Secrets?" Hermione asked, staring straight ahead at the words with less of a panicked expression and more one of an irritated one, slipping back into the Hermione she'd been for the past half a year as if that Hermione had never slipped away at all.
They were standing in the back of the mob of gathering students, staring at the flickering torch light that illuminated bloody words written on the wall. So far they had been more or less unnoticed, safely under Lily's 'these aren't the droids you're looking for' wards, and it gave them a moment to stare at the scene quietly while professors and prefects urged students to return to their dormitories.
Lily, for her own part, couldn't help but wonder what it all was supposed to mean and cast her mind back to a great and terrible danger and then further back to Quirrell. He hadn't written on the walls in rooster's blood, but then, he'd had no reason to.
But if he had, what would he have written?
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Yes, those were the words that Quirrell would have left for her, T.S. Eliot's words. And she could see those words echoed in the shadows and the crimson splatters of these crudely painted letters.
Because between the two of them, for a night, they had once turned Hogwarts into The Wasteland.
"Ellie?" Hermione asked, impatiently, ripping Lily from thoughts.
"Hm?"
"The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir beware. What's the Chamber of Secrets?" Hermione repeated.
Lily blinked, inspected the red words, tilted her head to the side a bit as if that might give her a clearer idea, "I assume a chamber filled with secrets… And maybe dead chickens."
Considering the hallway was filled with dead chickens Lily felt like it was a safe enough assumption. Granted, if she had a giant chamber where she kept all of her secrets chickens would probably not be in it.
It was probably something far more ominous.
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock.)
"Why am I not satisfied with that answer?" Hermione said in that tone of voice that Wizard Lenin reserved for rhetorical questions, "Hogwarts a History mentioned it, you know. Salazar Slytherin supposedly built a secret chamber beneath the school and some say that he kept a monster inside of it."
"Oh, then why are you asking me?" Lily asked, since Hermione already apparently knew the answer, even if Lily couldn't help but feel that answer was at once both too vague and too precise to be satisfying.
"Because, Ellie, I know you're behind it and I really doubt that your Chamber of Secrets is the same as Salazar Slytherin's."
"This isn't mine, Hermione." Lily responded quietly, the gravity of the situation and the words behind the words falling onto her, and the feeling that once again she was descending down a spiraling path whose destination remained murky.
"Ellie, there are dead headless chickens on the floor, a petrified cat, and words painted in blood on the walls. Who am I supposed to blame?" She asked that as if it was rhetorical, and she probably wanted to believe Lily was behind this, desperately.
Because if Lily wasn't behind this then things had just become much more serious.
The terrible danger had begun to show its head, and without Wizard Lenin beside her, with Death a dimension away, she had the feeling that she was woefully unprepared just as she had been one year before.
As with most things it had all started that morning.
Well, no, that wasn't quite accurate. Really, it had started about a week before when Lily had gotten around to telling Hermione that Operation Total Recall was a go.
"What the hell is Operation Total Recall? Neville, please don't… don't touch anything." Hermione said distractedly as she focused on the potion du jour, Neville, for his own part wasn't touching anything at all but was instead sitting at the table with a vaguely pathetic look that he usually had during Potions.
Snape had finally decided to mitigate the damage and had decided to pair Neville with someone who could make sure his potions didn't explode or release poisonous gas and kill everyone in the room. It was an admirable decision, probably one he could have made a year before, but one that Snape was too stubborn and petty to think of doing before he had no other choice.
The honorable position of saving everyone in the Potions classroom from certain death tended to be split between Lily and Hermione and this week it was Hermione's turn. She normally was better about it, considering that she considered Neville to be one of her only friends, but this week she wasn't feeling the spirit of it which only added to Neville's general twitchiness and nervous attitude.
"No, I'm not… I'm not touching anything." Neville said before adding a little hesitantly, "But um, what is Operation Total Recall? Now that you don't sit at the Gryffindor table I feel like I never know what's going on."
"Operation Total Recall is a top secret mission assigned to my elite team of guerilla warfare specialists of which I am the glorious captain." Lily summarized but apparently it wasn't a very apt summary because the only response she got from Neville was blinking.
"Right… Well… I'm taking remedial Potions with Snape and um… sometimes Headmaster Dumbledore." Neville said before his eyes darted to Snape and then darted away, "Did you know he's even more frightening when there's no one else around to distract him, Snape, I mean?"
"Remedial Potions? I thought Hermione's tutoring made you competent." Lily said, because while Neville was still the worst in the class he no longer was tying with Rabbit for rock bottom. Rabbit, according to Luna, still vacillated between wandless genius in Transfiguration and just sitting around and impersonating vegetables.
Luna claimed that his eggplant routine was coming along quite nicely.
"Well… um… It did but… I guess I just needed more help than that." Neville said, his eyes darting away from hers, almost as if he didn't want to look at her directly when he said this. Which, was a weird thing to do, if anything he should be looking away from Hermione. Lily, after all, had no stakes in whether Neville managed to learn how to make potions without killing himself.
"Ellie, I have to study, I don't have time for your shenanigans." Hermione said, stirring her wand into her Potion without breaking eye contact from the bubbling liquid.
Lily for her own part had realized that without Wizard Lenin she actually had no idea whatsoever how to brew a Potion. She'd never actually paid attention to the process, he'd known all of it, she'd just chopped things when needed and stirred when necessary and that was all there was to it.
She'd decided to just use glitches to turn water into whatever it was that was needed and so far it seemed to be working more or less but it required much less concentration than Potions used to. Which just made her wonder why she'd wasted time doing it Wizard Lenin's way in the first place.
"Oh, but agent Hermione, you'll make time for these particular shenanigans. Total Recall, Hermione."
Hermione looked at her blankly and Lily then realized what Wizard Lenin probably would have shouted at her from the beginning. Hermione hadn't seen Total Recall, from the look on her face she hadn't even heard of it.
"Most sheltered thirteen-year-old girls do not go out of their way to see explicitly violent action movies. Particularly ones which feature exploding heads." Imaginary Wizard Lenin said then, with disdain, because he had never really gotten the point of Total Recall and had always gotten caught up on the very necessary and glorious violence in it.
Lily would go on to explain why Total Recall was a great movie and why Wizard Lenin just had no taste but given that this was all a hypothetical imaginary conversation (that she didn't need to have because she was totally independent) with Wizard Lenin she decided it was best to clarify for Hermione.
"We're going to get your parents' memories back." Lily clarified.
She didn't know what she expected in that moment, another brittle dismissal, a snapped comment, but she did not expect Hermione to stop, to turn from her Potion and just look at Lily silently, a desperate fragile hope burning inside of her.
It stung, watching that.
"You're… You can do that, Ellie?" Neville asked and Lily just nodded.
"We're going to need to sneak out of Hogwarts, which is surprisingly difficult and annoying, but that should be the most tedious part of all of this."
Neville was still just staring though, along with Hermione, like neither of them had any idea what to say.
Finally, Neville said quietly, "I'm glad, you know… Nobody else could, but if you can do it… Well, I just… It's good." He paused then added in a rushed almost desperate sort of tone, "You know, you guys can still sit at Gryffindor if you want to."
"Come to Default, it's cooler." Lily added, because really, Neville was one of the few people she'd even bother to visit at the other table anyway. He had more reason to come to them than they had to go to him.
She had the feeling then that she was missing something, something important, but that it kept getting swept under the rug by more glaringly obvious and immediate issues. Even reflecting back on it Neville positively paled next to the bitter, fragile, Hermione Granger.
Always teetering over the edge, halfway to becoming something else, only Lily had no idea what it might be.
"Oh, I can… Thanks, Ellie, um, Hermione. I guess I should have done that to start with… Fred and George will probably want to come too, just to warn you."
Lily wasn't paying attention to that, instead she was watching Hermione's bubbling potion which was beginning to rotate rapidly through colors, "Hermione, you should probably pay attention to your potion before it explodes."
And that had more or less ended that conversation.
Lily had hoped that they could leave that night and just get it out of the way before she lost her nerve or motivation but unfortunately Lily was finally starting to realize what Wizard Lenin had meant when he said why she was quidditch captain. Dumbledore was methodically eating through her free time with a diligence that was almost uncanny.
Lily had had detentions almost every night of the week the year before and that tradition had more or less continued, the only difference was she was now stuck with Lockhart instead of Squirrel.
And when she didn't have detention she had quidditch practice which Dumbledore had taken sometimes to overseeing himself as their head of house and quidditch coach. Thankfully he didn't interfere with Lily's meat shield strategy of quidditch but the fact was that she couldn't predict when he would watch and when he wouldn't.
Plus, there was also the fact that all of the time travel was just starting to wear on her. It turned out living forty-eight hours in what should have been a twenty-four-hour period was just plain exhausting. She'd started napping through History of Magic, rather than doing anything productive, and if she trusted Lockhart only a little more she'd probably sleep through his class too. As it was she just sort of would dully watch him flit about, talking about this adventure or that, and just wish she was sleeping or anywhere else doing anything else and wondering how his hair could possibly glisten.
Normal hair did not glisten outside of sunlight and normal human teeth did not sparkle.
Perhaps though, what really bothered her, as she went through her week was not that Dumbledore had outmaneuvered her without her even realizing it or Gilderoy Lockhart but the fact that Wizard Lenin didn't approve.
And there was once a time, not so long ago, when that alone might have been enough to stop her.
"The last thing you need is more attention from Dumbledore." He'd been getting better, he could stand for long periods of time, even walk up the stairs without too much trouble. He was still winded and exhausted but with each passing day he began to resemble more and more a real person instead of someone on the verge of death.
In that moment he was standing, leaning against a desk that Lily had conjured sometime during the week, staring down at her as she sat cross legged looking up at him. Looking up at him she could remember how tall he was, how his charisma almost made him glow even in a half lit room, and how he was so alive and real that she couldn't tear her eyes away.
It terrified her.
(She hadn't asked where he would go or even when he would go, only made sure that at every moment of the day there was a Lily with him, watching and waiting and marking each second that passed by. Waiting for the day when he finally walked up those stairs and out of the castle altogether.)
"Dumbledore already pays attention to me, it never bothered me before." Lily pointed out and received a sharp and pointed look from Wizard Lenin in response.
It was odd, seeing that look in person, before Wizard Lenin's emotions had always been impressions. Flashes of memory, thought, and sometimes image. In person, seeing those eyes on a real face, it somehow felt more solid (weightier and more intimidating) than it ever had before.
"Don't be naïve, Lily, it no longer suits you." He said, in that tone that allowed the words to sting just a little more, "This is different, you know it, it is one thing to be talented with wandless magic but this shows him power far beyond that. If you're successful then you'll have solved something that he himself couldn't do and believe me when I say that he'll remember that."
Lily was fairly certain that Dumbledore already knew she was extremely powerful, more powerful than him, but she knew better than to point it out. It wasn't worth the shouting match that would needlessly ensue.
"Then I won't get caught."
He laughed, a sharp biting noise, because Wizard Lenin never really laughed, "That's one solution. The easier one is to not do it at all."
And, although she had considered not doing it, leaving Hermione as she was for some reason it was surprising that Wizard Lenin would suggest that. As if Hermione Granger meant ultimately nothing to him, like she was inconsequential, as if the things that were important to Lily were not necessarily important to him.
This was what it meant to be two separate beings.
And then something in him fractured, she would have said softened but Wizard Lenin never could manage soft. His posture slumped a bit and he sat back down on the mattress, sighing, and looking over at Lily with a worn expression, "You don't owe her anything, Lily, you saved her life that night. Humans don't get to hold gods in their debt."
"It's not about debts." Or gods, she wanted to add, but she couldn't find the words to say what she meant and could only look back and see the complete lack of understanding on his face.
He watched her for a few moments, dissecting her cog by cog and trying to build some great sensible machine from her parts, and then quietly said, "You know I won't be coming with you."
It was the first time either of them had said it so bluntly, about anything, and she didn't have any words for that either.
"If you run into trouble, if you're reckless as usual, I won't be there to help you." One of his hands twitched, as if to reach out for hers, but remained at his side.
"I know, I'll be fine."
He didn't seem convinced, just stared, and didn't say anything else. Maybe he couldn't find the words either.
But as the week marched by and she kept not leaving she didn't have to read minds to know that he was a little relieved that she couldn't find the time to escape the castle. His movements became smoother, he started demanding the Prophet so he could catch himself up on the news, asked her to tell her if there was anything new regarding Draco Malfoy, Theodore Nott, Pansy Parkinson, Severus Snape, Dumbledore, anyone and anything who had a remote connection to his revolution.
And his relief only added to her own irritation and need to get it done and get it over with before anyone else could say anything against it.
So by the time Saturday, their first quidditch match, rolled around Lily was more than ready to leave. She didn't quite know what she was ready to do, but she was ready, perhaps she had even been born ready.
Crammed together in makeshift quidditch uniforms, featuring the standard Default colors of whatever color you happened to want to wear, they stood in the huddle of pure sportsmanship that never failed to inspire the underdog to victory against the overpowered enemy du jour.
Outside Lily could hear the roar of the crowd, dulled by the walls of the locker room, but still filled with all that need for violence and competition that always haunted these sports. Uncle Vernon had always been overly fond of football, and over the screams of Hogwarts students she could easily superimpose the image of uncle Vernon, purple with excitement, screaming at the television to beat the bloody hell out of those Spanish bastards.
Unfortunately, while Lily may have once gotten into this sort of thing, she no longer felt the divine inspiration to have victory at all costs.
After deciding to create an A-team out of her quidditch team what little interest Lily had in the actual sport of quidditch almost disappeared entirely. As it was she still didn't know the rules, even Wizard Lenin didn't seem to know the actual rules, and at the moment she was too focused on the fact that she still hadn't found a decent time to duck out of Hogwarts and as a result Hermione was still glaring daggers at her every few seconds for not delivering.
It would probably be mildly alarming if Lily herself didn't collect debts as London's unofficial queen of the magical gutter.
"Alright, team, this is it. Our first game…"
"Match." Blaise Zabini interjected, "It's a quidditch match."
"Right, who cares, anyway it's our first match against Slytherin… And that is something we should all care about, a lot. We may never be able to care as much about anything else as we do the outcome of this single match. I know I care, a lot, and am not trying to think of ways to get out of it so I can drag Hermione out of Hogwarts when no one's looking… Do we all remember our positions?" Lily cast her eyes over the group noting the way they all blankly stared back, none of them having any idea what their respective positions.
"Well, I guess we'll go over them again. Rabbit, being an eldritch horror from beyond the outer abyss, is hereby benched. Hermione, being ridiculously angry and afraid of heights, is also benched. Everyone else is a meat shield and I guess I'll be the sneaker." Lily said, which earned her a blank look from Rabbit and nothing from Hermione, not even a flicker of appreciation, her eyes still burning with that unfulfilled promise Lily had made to her.
"Seeker, not sneaker, and why do you get to be the seeker rather than a meat shield like the rest of us? And you know that we can't afford to bench people, we don't have enough players as it is." Blaise once again very helpfully pointed out, in the mindset that quidditch was something she cared about and cared about playing correctly. Daphne never pointed these things out, Default's resident ice queen only said what needed to be said and Lily very much appreciated that.
"Well, all you need to win is to catch the shiny gold thing, right? I can do that pretty easily and then we can all go home. The number of meat shields doesn't actually matter." Not as far as Lily knew from hearing Ron's explanations.
"Then why don't Blaise, Luna, and I sit this out and just leave you on the field." Daphne suggested, and immediately Lily could feel everyone holding their breath and waiting for Lily either to crush them all in quidditch themed anger again or else to let it slide.
No one, it seemed, wanted to play quidditch.
They would leave Lily out there all by herself, on a broom, and let whatever happened happen. And even though she didn't really care about the quidditch aspect of all of this she couldn't help but feel their team spirit and comradery slipping away. A captain without a team is hardly a captain at all, instead a hollow wasted thing.
Lily bit down on her bitterness and pushed through, "Fine, don't play, I'll be the sneaker…"
"Seeker."
"Seeker," Lily corrected herself with tried patience, "All by myself and you all can be benched. Everyone can be benched!"
"Oh, good, good luck Ellie." And then they were all filing past her onto the field and taking their seats on the bench, none of them even touching their brooms and instead looking at her expectantly to get up into the sky and face the eleven green uniforms opposing them.
Somewhere inside the Room of Requirement, Wizard Lenin was laughing, Lily was sure of it.
But there was nothing for it, with great reluctance Lily mounted her broom, feeling more than a little ridiculous (because really, why broomsticks, couldn't it be anything else but a broom stick) and floated her way up to where the other players were waiting.
Most were some of the unfamiliar older ones Lily had never associated with, but Malfoy was there too, looking slightly less pimp-like than usual in his quidditch robes but equally as ridiculous.
Humiliated, that was the word, she'd never really felt it before only hints of it. One must have shame to feel humiliation, and she'd always assumed that Wizard Lenin was the one who felt more of it than her, but hovering there in the sky in striped rainbow quidditch robes alone facing Slytherin her face was burning and her stomach rolling over itself in shame.
Lily decided that she didn't like humiliation in the slightest.
"Uh, Potter, I think you forgot something." One of the older Slytherins, the one in the front of the triangle, said nodding down at the benched players.
"Oh, yes, they have been benched." Lily said, her eyes flickering down towards them, grimacing at Luna's enthusiastic waving.
"Benched." He repeated dully.
"Yes, benched." Lily repeated before asking, "Is it a problem?"
"For Merlin's sake, Potter, you can't play quidditch against just one person!" Malfoy said from the back of the formation, "It's embarrassing even for you."
Lily had gone from being a terrifying overlord in Slytherin to embarrassing even for her, she hadn't realized how badly her reputation would suffer from quidditch. There was once a time when even Draco Malfoy had rightfully cowered in her presence, and he still quaked a little on that broom when she looked at him, but it wasn't anywhere close to what it could have been.
Lily's hands tightened on the broom.
Suddenly Lily cared very much about quidditch and winning quidditch and showing everyone in that stadium that Lily, even on a quidditch field, was not to be trifled with.
"Unless I win." Lily said, her eyes narrowing and voice hardening, instinctively shifting into the Lily Riddle persona.
The other team laughed, not small chuckles either, no they were in hysterics. Over the laughter Lily dimly recognized that someone was commentating on the lack of Default participation and on how short a match it would be when Slytherin slaughtered them.
To be honest, the rest of the match was something of a blur to Lily, she hadn't really been paying attention. Or rather, she didn't like to get into the details, because even for her it had been rather fast and more about the emotional need to win and maintain her reputation than it had actually been about quidditch.
She just knew that with only a wave of her hand every broom of the opposing team was snapped and they were all hurtling to the ground (Draco Malfoy for the second time in his Hogwarts career), and then the balls that had been enchanted to hit Lily instead crashed into the earth like great meteors, taking out chunks of the field with each impact and then taking out more as they careened towards the stands, digging out trenches.
And with the other hand she'd just reached out and summoned the flying golden ball without having moved an inch from where she started.
A ten second quidditch game, possibly the fast that had ever been played.
For a moment there was only stunned silence from the crowd, her Default comrades, and her opponents alike, and then there was screaming and a loud cry from the announcer's box, "Disqualified! Default loses by disqualification!"
Lily floated back down to the ground, dropping the broomstick as she went, but still holding the flying ball in one hand, too stunned to really process the words, "What?"
"Ellie, you have to score a certain number of points before you can catch the snitch… And you can't use wandless magic to destroy the opposing teams brooms, or tamper with the bludgers, or create giant trenches in the field." Blaise half-whisper-shouted from the sidelines as Lily just stood there, looking at the flying instructor staring at her, but not really listening, and hearing the crowd booing in the background.
"Oh." And she just stood there, dumbly, wondering how she was supposed to feel about winning but not really winning or her teammates who had put absolutely no effort in and continued to put no effort in.
The important thing hadn't necessarily been the winning but more maintaining her reputation, and as far as she could tell by the groaning Slytherins trying to crawl off the field, they remembered why you took Lily seriously.
Lily was trying to figure out if she should take this as a victory.
And then she was being handed some sort of a red card and being told she had yet another detention for vandalism and severe disregard for the rules of quidditch and the dazed stupor drifted away and Lily's severely frayed patience returned.
And perhaps it was because of losing quidditch and being reminded of how annoying she found Hogwarts that she remembered an essential fact about her life. No one could force Lily to do anything she didn't want to do and similarly no one could force Lily to not do something she wanted to do.
"That is it, I am done! I am done with this place and with quidditch and with detentions and I am going back to doing whatever I like!"
Lily wasn't too busy to leave, she could leave any time she wanted, just as she had with the Dursleys so many years ago. Hadn't she already concluded that Hogwarts was just a larger more decorative cupboard beneath the stairs?
She released the golden flying ball, then with a sense of assurance she stepped outside of time, freezing those who booed and gawked and twitched in their place and walked towards the bench, leaving only behind the sense that Lily was right where they expected her to be and doing exactly what they expected her to do.
And she pulled Hermione out of time with her, "Change of plans, time to go fix your parents."
"Now, but, I… It's this again, you did this with…" Hermione trailed off, not mentioning his name, Quirrell or Hindenburg and leaving Lily to grab her hands and ask where her parents lived releasing her hold on Hogwarts' space time continuum as they teleported through the wards and out into the greater world.
(Lily didn't expect, or prepare for, the consequences of her leaving the castle and the blood soaked walls they would find when they returned.)
It was very suburb like, the kind of place that made Lily itch, too reminiscent of the Dursleys for comfort. Staring at the row of white picket fenced houses Lily couldn't help but feel that she might as well be standing in Little Whinging on the doorstep of Number 4 itself.
Hermione stumbled forward, all expression dripping from her, it only now sinking in that yes Lily was living up to her word and doing what she had said she would. And Hermione looked almost as empty and broken as she had a year before in the pub Lily had abandoned her in.
"Ellie, I… Why are you helping me?" Hermione finally asked, her eyes roving over each of the houses, the lawn in disbelief as if she hadn't believed she'd ever see a place like this again.
And again Lily was struck with that feeling she'd had with Wizard Lenin, that she couldn't really explain why, because the reason wasn't really concrete. It wasn't even about Hermione at the end of things, it was about… About being independent, about letting go, about moving on and moving past all those things that were simultaneously moving on and away from her.
It was about Wizard Lenin.
But Hermione wouldn't understand that, couldn't understand that, "Does it really matter?"
"No, but I… Thank you, Ellie." Hermione finished somberly, in her seriousness attempting to make the words mean more than they already did.
And perhaps they did, perhaps Hermione really did mean it, but all Lily could think as she stood there was that it must be very convenient for Hermione to know someone like Lily. To have a friend with god like powers to be used at a moment's need.
But if Hermione wasn't going to talk about that then neither was Lily.
"Alright, Hermione, we'd best be getting on with this."
Inside was a house without a cupboard beneath the stairs but one that looked as if it should have had one. Inside the empty picture frames, ones which had probably featured Hermione at some point, Lily saw the reflection of Dudders proudly displayed on the Dursley's walls (while Lily herself had always been absent from the photographs).
Hermione had to be towed through, silent, unseeing and weightless as if she wasn't really there but still at Hogwarts and this body was simply a shell of her.
In the kitchen she could replace the bushy haired woman with the thin and grim aunt Petunia, chopping vegetables and pinning Lily with a glare to hurry it up girl before something starts burning, and at the table the man with an oversized uncle Vernon reading through the newspaper and blathering on about those damned union workers.
They didn't even have time to turn around, to notice the blank eyed girl staring at them, before Lily reached into their heads and turned the small almost unnoticeable knob called memory. And just like that the woman's knife dropped, the man's paper tore in half, and they were descending on Hermione and hugging her and they were all crying.
And Lily was thinking about Death, Wizard Lenin, and a conversation she'd once had with Dumbledore about the Dursleys and love.
Lily would never belong in a place like this, the very structure of it, the very sight of it, drove her out and pushed her away into the corner where she could sit silently and unseen. Because that's what she was doing, with all this hugging and crying and remembering, this was Hermione's moment and not Lily's.
And maybe this was the reasons he'd hesitated so long, not Wizard Lenin's fears, not her own fears, but her dread of standing in this house and watching everything she'd never had and never even really wanted for herself.
Quietly, manipulating the strings of the universe so she was just a little outside of it, a little forgotten and unnoticed, she took a post-it-note from the desk and wrote a short message to Hermione (for whenever she wanted to go back) and then made her way outside into the sunlight.
And she waited.
And waited.
And waited.
"It was easier to kill time when Lenin was around." She said to herself at one point, when the sun had dipped lower in the sky, almost at a sunset, "There was always something to talk about and if there wasn't something then we could always talk about nothing. I wonder if he gets like that too, well, maybe not because I always travel back to stay in the room with him."
No one answered and she sighed, feeling boredom creep through her, and glanced back at the damn house.
"Independence isn't nearly as much fun as I remember it being." Lily commented to the grass but as grass usually did it didn't bother to answer, "Really, it was too long ago, it's hard to grasp its benefits after all these years. I don't think I like being independent all that much, I'm not any good at it now."
She wondered then if Hermione was coming back at all. She didn't have to, she could just stay inside that suburban nightmare forever, and eventually Lily would be forced to leave without her. Of course, it would ruin Hermione's plans of being a strong enough pseudo glitch manipulator to stand up to the likes of Hindenburg, but all the same she could picture it so easily.
Because that sort of a life must be so tempting.
It rang false with Lily though, even if she was offered something like that, she would never take it. That wasn't her world and never would be.
"Ellie,"
She looked different, smaller, her eyes red rimmed, almost broken, where before she had been bitter some sweetness had drifted in. She wasn't what she was originally but she wasn't what she had been that morning either.
Lily stood, brushed off her quidditch uniform, and gave Hermione an assessing look, "All good?"
"I… Yes… They remember everything… They, I… Thank you."
Lily didn't respond to that, just held out her hand, an offering, "You going back to Hogwarts?"
And for a moment Hermione hesitated, looked back towards the house, before nodding and taking Lily's hand.
And that of course was when they returned and found dead chickens, the bloody graffiti, and the ominous words that meant far more than they actually said.
Author's Note: A lot of stuff fit into this chapter, because otherwise it was going to take two, and it was not going to take two. Next chapter detective Lily is on the case, with her trusty Default guerilla warfare side kicks in training, as well as the very frustrated and increasingly panicked consultant Wizard Lenin. Who are the suspects? We'll have to wait and find out.
Also, if you're interested, new in the world of Lily is the oneshot "River Eyes" which features Wizard Lenin pre 1981 in a fist fight with Fenrir Greyback and "Bright Eyes" which features the answer to 'what if traveled back to the marauder era and adopted Lily' plot line. So check those out if you're interested or don't if you're not.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, if I did, apparently Tom Riddle would have written T.S. Eliot poetry on the walls of Hogwarts instead.