Friendship Has Its Limits
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters (except for Alexa and her family, which includes Ruby), but the ideas are mine.
Neither of them knew how long they say in the house, but eventually Lily's crying slowed, and then completely stopped after a while. Her breathing slowed, too, until at one point James thought she was sleeping, but she wasn't. Finally, after what seemed like an eon of silence, Lily said, "You must think that I'm a horrible, selfish person for hating my parents just because they died."
James shook his head and said strongly, "Of course I don't think that about you, Lily. I already told you that you had the right to hate your parents for leaving you all alone."
Sighing, she pushed herself off the floor and brushed the stray bits of glass and wood splinters from her skirt. A larger piece of glass had embedded itself into her leg; blood seeped through the wound, pooling around the glass. At first all she did was look at the gash, unaware of the pain in her leg. Then she came to her senses and removed the bloody shard of glass from the wound with a soft hiss of air being pushed through her front teeth, the sensation of pain finally making itself known.
"I suppose we should get back to….to the others," she said at last, looking down at him from his place on the floor. He hadn't gotten up yet.
"You don't have to go back there, you know," he replied, standing up and brushing himself off, too. "I think the others would understand if you didn't go back."
"No, I want to go back. There's something I need to do," she said, talking to herself as much as him. Suddenly something occurred to her. "Oh no! My flowers! I must have left them---" She turned to look at him, panic in her eyes.
Wordlessly, James pointed to the counter behind her; two bouquets of roses and daisies lay there where he'd set them when he'd entered the house. She looked so relieved when she saw them, he thought that she might start crying again, but she didn't. Instead, she went over to the counter and picked up the flowers with hands that shook.
They walked back to the cemetery in silence. When they got there, Alexa and Ruby flocked over to them and began hovering worriedly over Lily.
"Oh, Lily, I was so worried about you!" Alexa exclaimed, obviously upset that the redhead had run off like she had.
"We had no idea where you'd run off too, either," Ruby added. "We weren't sure if James would find you, and if he did we thought that he might make it worse, since he does kind of have the tendency to do that kind of thing, you know. We thought he'd screw things up with you for sure---"
The redhead looked around the clucking girls and met James's eyes, looking for someone to help her get away from the madness. He remembered her saying something about having something to do, and it had seemed important to her. He cleared his throat, but the girls ignored him entirely and continued to fuss about the redhead.
"Alexa, Ruby," he said finally, his voice rough. The cousins turned to him, and all he did was shake his head and the girls backed away from Lily. James watched as she walked over to her father's grave, the two bouquets of flowers still in her arms. The rest of the teens followed her at a distance, and then stopped under a tree as she knelt in the wet grass between two tombstones. She set a bouquet against each slab of granite, and curiosity got the better of James; he walked over to where she sat and looked down at the tombstones.
As he'd been expecting, one of them was for her father, but the other one had been divided in half by a line carved in the stone. The top half was inscribed for an Adrienne Rose Evans, "Best friend, great mother, and loving wife," and the second half was for one Harry Matthew Evans, who had "the ability to come into the world with a family who already loved him."
Suddenly rain began to fall from the skies. "I always used to think that the rain meant that my mum was crying," she whispered a bit sheepishly, looking up at him. When she noticed that he as looking at the second tombstone, she said, a bit louder, "They cremated the baby's body and buried his remains with my mum. My dad thought Mum would have wanted it that way."
James swallowed past the lump in his throat. "I know that saying sorry won't change the past, and also that you're probably really tired of hearing it, but I am truly sorry for your losses. I might not have really known either of your parents, but I'm sure they're both really proud of everything you've become, of everything you will become."
"Thanks for saying that, and for everything else you've done for me these past few months. It means a lot."
He smiled shyly. "Now what was that you were saying about the rain?"
"I used to think that when it rained, my mum was crying for something," she replied, raising her face to the sky. Her face was splashed with the icy drops falling from the sky. "I think now my dad's crying, too. They're mourning their loss."
"The loss of what?" he asked quietly, and what she answered with made him realize for the first time just how much Lily had been forced to grow up in the past few months.
She met his eyes for a brief moment before standing up. "Their daughter." Turning around without another word, she began walking back to where the car was parked.
The others joined her, James hesitant to follow. He glanced one more time at the gravestones that marked the loss of the redhead's family (apart from Petunia, who didn't really count as her family, in his opinion). Slowly he followed the others back to the car.
Grinning, he caught up to Lily after a moment. "Go out with me, Evans?" he asked merrily, and Alexa turned to him, a horrified look on her face.
Smiling back at him, Lily punched his arm playfully and said, "Not in a million years, Potter."
u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n u n
Later that night, Lily snuck out of the Peters' house, and once she was safely out of hearing range of the house, she Apparated with a loud crack like a gunshot. Wrapped in a black cloak, it was relatively easy to walk along the streets of Knockturn Alley unnoticed. She received a few looks from a group of shady-looking witches huddled together against the wall of an equally shady-looking shop, seeking shelter from the rain. Ignoring the witches, she stepped inside the shop without glancing at the name.
Without removing the hood of her cloak even though she was away from the pelting raindrops, she strode over to the counter, where a shaggy old wizard stood dozing. She rang the bell on the counter, and the wizard jumped, pulling out his wand defensively. Inside her cloak, Lily's hand wrapped tighter around her own wand.
"What can I do for you, little missy?" the wizard asked once he realized that she posed no threat at the moment.
"I want a Time turner, and I heard that you carry them."