Friendship Has Its Limits
Disclaimer: I don't own it. Period.
Over the next few days, it seemed like a permanent storm cloud sat over the greater part of the country, causing a light drizzle to fall almost continuously. On the third day since the cloud had appeared, the day of the funeral, the sky opened up and it poured. Lily stood just inside of the back door of the Peters' home, staring out across the lawn at the rain. She hadn't spoken much since the hospital, and said even less nowadays. Though she hadn't really cried, either.
Alexa came into the kitchen, trying to change her earrings while she walked (which is rather difficult), saw Lily standing in the doorway, and said softly, "Hey there. You almost ready to go?"
The redhead turned slowly and stared for a moment, as if she hadn't quite caught the question, and finally nodded her head. She didn't want to go, but she had to, and she wasn't exactly emotionally ready to put yet another family member in the ground, but physically, she looked ready. Clad in a black long sleeved shirt, a black skirt that went down to her ankles, and a pair of her mum's black stilettos (which she had been given not too long ago because she now had the same shoe size as her mother did), she was truly dressed for mourning. Her hair was pinned back away from her face with a few bobby pins. Alexa thought Lily looked rather sophisticated in her outfit, but also incredibly pale; black did not suit a (formerly) happy girl like her, and especially with her fair skin tone. It made her look a little washed out, and that's probably how she felt, too.
Alexa nodded, too, and then stood there a bit awkwardly, not really sure if she should leave Lily to her thoughts or go over to her in the hopes of cheering her up a bit. Finally she decided to leave her be, but when she turned to leave, Lily's small, tentative voice called her back.
"Do you think we could stop by the store before we go?" she asked, still looking at the lawn and the deck as they both got splattered with rain. "There's something I need to pick up."
"Sure, of course," Alexa replied, nodding. "We'll leave in a few minutes then. I'll go tell Ruby."
Out in the living room, Ruby was sitting on the couch, smoothing her black velvet skirt over her knees, all ready to go. "I wonder what she wants at the store," she said when Alexa told her what Lily said.
Shrugging, Alexa finally managed to get the clasp of her silver hoop earring closed. "I'm not sure, but it seems important to her. God, this is terrible. I can't stand just having to stand by and see my best friend in the whole world so…sad!"
Sighing, Ruby left the couch to hug her cousin reassuringly. "You're doing all that you can by just being here for her. At least she's not totally alone in this, you know?"
"I know, but it doesn't feel like I'm doing anything for her. I feel so helpless!" she cried, burying her face in her hands.
Lily came out of the kitchen, and Alexa instantly stood up. Wordlessly, the three girls headed for the front door.
They drove to the local grocery store in silence, and the only time they really spoke to each other was when Lily politely declined Ruby and Alexa's offer to go into the store with her.
When Lily came out of the store, she had two bouquets of flowers, one of red roses and the other of daisies. Once in the car, she took half of the daisies out of the second bouquet and put them in with the roses, and then she took out some roses and put them in with the rest of the daisies. Ruby and Alexa exchanged looks but didn't say anything to the other girl. They stopped again to pick up the boys (as they had no proper Muggle way of getting to the church). They all crammed into the backseat of Mrs. Peters' Dodge Neon, and Lily had to move up to the front of the car to sit between Ruby and Alexa, because with the three boys in the back, there was no room for her.
"Hey Lils, you could always sit on James's lap you know," said Sirius, grinning wickedly, but his grin quickly disappeared as everyone (apart from Lily, who had apparently missed the comment) turned to glare at him; now was not exactly the best time to be joking around and/or messing with Lily.
The six of them had to huddle beneath two umbrellas, because only Alexa and Remus had brought one, the girls under Alexa's, and the boys under Remus's.
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After the church service, the six of them, along with most of the other people attending the funeral, went to the cemetery. There, more people said nice things about Mr. Evans and about how much he was going to be missed. Surprisingly, Lily didn't cry during the whole thing. She just stood stiffly and silently away from everyone else, staring at her father's coffin with lifeless eyes. After the graveside services, bunches of people surrounded Lily, making impossible for her friends to check on her. She nodded her head politely, thanking people for their condolences, but right as a plump little woman from her father's work stepped up, she walked away toward a blonde woman similarly dressed as she was.
"Veronica," she said gently, as not to startle the woman. "I tried calling you from the hospital but I couldn't get anyone to answer your mobile phone and I---"
Crack! Lily stumbled backwards from the shock of the blow to the side of her face. She looked back at Veronica, holding the side of her face, looking confused and hurt. Veronica had gasped, and she now had a hand over her mouth, looking horrified with herself for doing such a thing.
"Oh, God, Lily, I'm so…" Veronica shook off her horror and shame and started to glare at the redheaded girl in front of her. "This is your fault! You, with your---" her voice lowered to a conspiratorial hiss---- "magic and what not, you should have been able to save him! You could have done something more for him, but you didn't! You failed him as a daughter!"
Remus had to hold back both James and Sirius from doing something stupid, since they were both now raging mad at the sight of Veronica slapping Lily. "Leave them be," he said. "This is a family thing, and I think it's best that all of us just stay out of it."
The girls nodded, trying to convince themselves that this confrontation between the blonde and redhead was none of their business. It wasn't working so well. James and Sirius calmed down a bit, though, which was good.
There was a long, shocked silence between Lily and her stepmother, until finally Lily looked up at her; her eyes were shining with unshed tears. "You're right," she managed to choke out, still holding her face. "You're absolutely right. I should have been able to stop this from ever happening, but I failed him, just like I failed my mum before him. I should have been able to stop them both from dying, but I couldn't. I'm a horrible daughter, and…I just wanted to say that I'm sorry, for being so unsupportive of your pregnancy. I hope you have a healthy baby, and all I ask is that you let your child know of his or her father." She swallowed and turned to leave, but then as an after thought, she added, "Veronica, if you have a boy, I think you should name him Harry; my dad would've liked that."
Veronica nodded slowly, weakly. Finally Lily turned to leave, but found yet another obstacle in her way, only this time it was Petunia and her brute of a fiancé. Petunia glared into Lily's face.
"She's right you know," the older Evans girl snapped, nose in the air with disdain. "With all of your freaky powers and what have you, you should have been able to do something for our father, but then again it's just like you to think only of yourself when in a crisis, isn't it? It's the influence of that wretched school, I just know it. I told Mum and Dad that they shouldn't have let you gone, but they refused to listen, and look where it's gotten them: dead and buried!"
Lily turned her head away, sniffing. And then suddenly her temper began to flare into life. "This has absolutely nothing to do with Hogwarts and you know it, Petunia. You're just looking for someone to blame for things you don't understand."
"I don't need to look for anyone to blame when you're at fault, missy, now do I?" Petunia snapped back. She looked down her nose at her sister, shuddering with dislike. What a freak Lily had become! "You were at the house when this---"
"Yeah, well where the bloody hell were you when this happened?" Lily shrieked, causing her sister to back up a step and falter in her evil eye. "Where were you, Petty, huh? Are you too busy with your new life to even remember our parents? You can't pin this on me just because I was there! I'm always the one at the house, watching you and Dad get new lives and forget everything that happened! I'm always there, sitting in an empty house in the middle of the bloody night, wondering if you and Dad are ever going to come home! And whenever you are at home, I'm still alone, it's still empty, because neither of you were ever there to begin with! Manage your own bloody life, marry that…. thing for all I care! Just leave me out of it!"
"See what I mean? All you can think about is you, you, you," Petunia said, daring to take another step closer to her sister, "even at our father's funeral. You acted like this when Mum passed away too. You don't even care that both our parents are gone, do you?"
Lily whipped out her wand, her hand trembling with rage, and Petunia backed up several feet. "Don't talk to me about feelings," she said, and even her voice was shaking with her anger. "You have no idea what hell I went through when Mum died, what I'm going through now."
Someone touched her shoulder gently, and she whirled around with her wand still out. It was Alexa, and she looked a little scared. "Lily, calm down for second and look at what you're doing," she said pleadingly, eyeing the wand in Lily's right hand anxiously.
Lily looked at her wand, too, and suddenly she burst into tears. "What's wrong with me?" she whispered, forcing her hand to put her wand away. She withdrew a hand that shook harder than ever. Alexa reached for her, but she jumped out of her friend's reach. "Don't—Don't touch me. I need to just----" She shook her head fiercely and ran away, away from everything, the funeral, her friends, what was left of her pathetic family, everything. She couldn't handle this right now, just couldn't deal.
Alexa turned back to the others, looking like she was about to cry, too. Sirius held out his arms, and she went to him, burying her face in his chest. After she'd calmed down a bit a few moments later, she asked, "Now what do we do? We don't even know where she's gone to."
James reached down and grabbed the abandoned flower bouquets, smelling one of the roses in the first bouquet. "I have a guess as to where she's going," he told the others.
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A/N: Wow…. long and very intense, yeah? Even I almost started crying when I wrote this. Poor Lily.