House: Gryffindor
Position: Potions
Drabble
Prompt: [emotion] loneliness
WC: 597
Beta: Ash Juillet and beawrites
Honestly, Lily would do anything to go back to a time when this was easy. When she didn't feel untethered by the forces of life itself or angered at how little she could do. If possible, she would wish it all away. She would wish away how painfully isolated magic made her feel.
She didn't try to explain it as Petunia skipped ahead. Her sister prattled a mile-a-minute about the changes that had happened over the last year. Lily hadn't come home during her fifth year. She had missed both Christmas and Easter, choosing instead to spend the time studying for her O.W.L.'s. Not that it mattered much. Apart from Charms and Potions, the rest of her report card held Acceptables across the board.
That had hurt, seeing those scores had hurt really badly. Maybe she shouldn't have felt so insecure. She ran to catch up with her sister and absent-mindedly hummed a tune as Petunia's rants started giving away to silence.
Lily tried to envision whether telling her sister how she felt was a good idea. Petunia was one of the few people in her life who lived in the muggle world, but Lily shut that idea down quickly. Petunia wouldn't understand why Lily felt the way she did.
There was a time where she once thought Severus had understood. She felt for certain that while he had a witch for a mother, there was something that they shared. Lily had thought that they shared this idea of not fitting in into either part of their identity. She had been painfully wrong.
The word "Mudblood" had hurt more than she let on. It was a slur and it bothered her. And while she did have muggleborn acquaintances, they were not her friends. They could never fill the void that Severus had left.
Petunia yelled something to Lily and ran towards her friends on the netball court. Lily had to stop herself from following. Those were Petunia's friends, and they didn't have space for Lily in their lives.
"I'm going back home!" Lily yelled, waving goodbye to her sister. It wasn't like they had planned to do anything apart from netball, but Lily wasn't going to make a fool of herself in front of Petunia's friends.
Lily took the long way back home. She hummed a song under her breath; she knew she was out of tune and was trying to ignore how lonely she felt. If it was any other summer, she would have been with Severus, at the park. She missed her former best friend, but that was not all she missed.
Lily missed being sure about herself and her purpose in life. Magic was a very real part of her, but so was all the muggle stuff. She would never understand the politics or classism of the Wizarding World, but she did know it felt very different to how she experienced those things in Cokeworth.
Was she blowing this all out of proportion?
Lily found herself spiralling badly down a set of questions she knew to which there were no answers.
Was loneliness all that a Mudblood witch was entitled to? There had to be something better out there, otherwise, all the promises made to Lily when she was younger would have been for no reason!
But maybe, promises like that were meant to be broken.
Years later, Lily would marvel at how her feelings of loneliness overpowered everything. She had the life she always dreamed of, but it was still lonely. Her younger self had been wise to be wary.