Title: Just Another Light Missing
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Sirius Black and Lily Evans
Author's Note: I can't help it! I LOVE this pairing! I love Lily and James but unrequited love stories with Lily and either Sirius, Remus or Snape are just so sob I was listening again to Tori Amos' song, "Taxi Ride", and I realized that the first line had Lily's name in it, and it inspired this story (Thank you, Tori!).
Disclaimer: insert usual "I don't own Harry Potter" crap here. I also don't own the excerpts from the lyrics of Tori's song (guess which they are).
She danced on the table, gyrating in her drunken glory like a goddess with flaming hair. She knew she was being absurd but she didn't care. She was aware of the stares and whispers that circulated around her, but somehow none of it mattered at that time. She was too lost in her otherworld.
He wasn't really sure about Lily Evans. She was considered pretty, she was smart, and she had all the moral fibre to get her way. He knew she wasn't exactly Miss Perfect. She did things that she wouldn't dare admit to others who didn't know her as well as he and their friends did. There was a certain spirit in her – "hippieness", she called it. He always thought it was rather off, but unsurprisingly, James – of course, James adored her for it anyway. James adored everything about her. That's why Sirius knew that their being together was written in the stars.
But Merlin, he was sure about one thing about her: she was beautiful.
For him, beautiful did not mean exceptionally pretty. Beautiful was a completely different animal. Beautiful meant the way her Farrah Fawcett-styled red hair flew in the wind even though it already looked windblown indoors. Beautiful meant the way her green eyes sparkled and smiled all the time, whether she was drunk or sober. Beautiful meant being young and girlish and carefree, caring if one side of her shirt wasn't tucked in but not if she was publicly licking her fingers right after eating.
He liked that about her. She was always such a paradox.
She never understood him. She was disgusted by his antics and fickleness with women, but she thought he was alright when she was drunk. There were times when she saw him as charming and witty, times when she was wasted to the point of not knowing what was happening around her.
He laughed as she danced, wondering whether the mahogany legs of the table would give way beneath her weight. "Fag," she'd say to him when he'd tease her about her weight. "You're a right bastard to say that you're any thinner than I am." But he would grin and poke another cigarette into his mouth to prove his point, and she would try to pull it out while berating him for endangering his health. She wasn't one for danger. Well, not physically traumatizing danger, in any case. Somehow, the prefect in her still couldn't overcome her more daring side, the side that she showed to him just to confirm that she was definitely not a bore.
He knew he wasn't the only one in love with her. James wasn't counted in her long line of admirers that she called "the other ones". Remus and Snape were guilty of being part of it. They were both understandable, but him? Sometimes he thought that there wasn't any point in it, that he only felt it because he forced himself to.
Besides, he said to himself as she twirled around. Miss High-and-Mighty Evans doesn't even bother to look at Mr. Idiot-Bastard-Black when Mr. Potter-the-Great is around.
Only sixteen and absolutely glamorous was how James would describe her. Glamorous everything. He hated having to listen to his best mate go on about her every single day. It only reminded him that his fantasies were wrong and that they couldn't come true. He'd call her a glamorous bitch sometimes, just to make James shut up with the praises and start cursing and swearing at him for calling her that. He was selfish and twisted and he didn't know what to do.
There wasn't anything he could do, really.
He could only watch her lose herself in her intoxication. It was painful, knowing that beauty and everything good were within his reach but his damned conscience wouldn't let him take it.
He once overheard her and Remus talking. "Love is so exaggerated," she said. "You tell someone you love or like him or her, then what happens next? What if he or she doesn't like you or doesn't care? It's all pretty useless." She twirled a lock of her hair around her finger and grinned. He knew exactly what Remus was thinking. He was thinking the same thing.
She could be so tactless sometimes, so straightforward that it hurt.
He finally looked away as her dance became wilder. She threw back her head and exposed her white neck, the same one that James kissed and that he wished he could kiss and strangle. But he didn't want her when she was there for him to take so easily. He didn't want her, period.
He wasn't sure what he wanted anymore.
She couldn't care less about him, anyway, not even if he was gone. She had James, and James would have her all to himself. She only 'cared' when she was drunk and wasn't thinking straight. Most of the time, he was just another.
Just another dead fag, just another light missing.
They went outside and lay on the grass. She was wasted and he was not. He pointed to one noticeable black spot in the sky, right above the patch of land they were lying on.
"Wasn't there a star there before?" he said, frowning. She closed her eyes and answered in an indifferent drawl.
"Who cares? There're millions of others, anyway."
FIN