She once promised herself that she would never return home once she left. It was a sad night when she made her solemn vow. Her sister, once her best friend and now a distant relative she has no contact with, came home crying one night when Lily was fifteen and Petunia twenty-three. She and her fiancée fought. She never heard the details of the fight and after Petunia met Vernon she seemed to forget the night all together, but she knew that her sister had been struck and left in destitute by the man she was supposed to marry. He left her to live on the mercy of her parents.
She was always so proud when she was young. She always strove to be independent because she loved making her own way in the world. She love knowing that everything she has she accomplished on her own. It's true, she thinks a lot, that she has been very dependent on James in the past few years. After Gabriella died she quit her job at Flourish and Botts, lost contact with all her close friends, and James was her sole life source which consequently added to her resentment of him. But it was different. She wasn't a burden left on his doorstep for him to take care of. She wasn't a child that left for a seemingly opportunistic life suddenly turning up on his doorstep. She was his wife and he promised to care for her. He promised to care for her in sickness and in health. He made a solemn vow to always be there that she has finally taken the pains of releasing him from.
It feels like a long drive for her. She hardly notices the London streets busy with city dwellers. Hardly sees the country hills the buildings of the city faded into. She couldn't stop thinking about him. She couldn't stop thinking about the look in his eyes when she said she was leaving, the devastation she never thought would be there. She couldn't stop touching her arm where he grabbed as a last resort to keep her with him. She couldn't stop wishing for his warmth to be around her and had to remind herself time and time again why she left. Why she had to venture back to a place she wished to never return to.
It was supposed to be simple. He wasn't supposed to care. But when she closed the cab door, when she looked in his eyes and said goodbye, she felt as if she made his whole world come tumbling down.
She shakes her head and looks out the window. She feels she's getting closer. She smells the distinct scent of snobbery crawling up her nose and a frown forms on her face. She breathes deeply at the thought of being there. She wishes she could turn the cab around. She wishes she could just go back to him because the thought that any minute now she would be back there makes her throat constrict and gives her the feeling of being strangled. She loves her parents, loves them very much, but she grew up in an aristocratic life style ruled by strict manners. Grew up with regulations about how she was supposed to act. Her earliest memory was being taught proper dinner manners and she sometimes cries that she was never allowed to play in the mud. She sometimes cries that the first time she wore her hair in a pony tail or yelled in public was her first year of Hogwarts when she was eleven.
Maybe that's why she secretly detested her home. For someone with such a strong spirit, strong will, it's hard to be put in a cage of rules. It's hard to be told that her tears were forbidden. It was hard to be told that her voice couldn't be heard because she was born to scream her opinion from the highest peak into the lowest valley. It wasn't until she became a witch that she was allowed any freedom, that she threw her manners to the wind and became the passionate woman she once was.
When the cab driver pulls into the long driveway she breathes in apprehensively and silently prays for the driver to turn around and forget to drop her off. The car comes to a stop in front of large pink doors and she walks out of the car as the driver goes to the trunk to get her suitcase out of the back. She pays him in muggle money and he leaves without another word.
She stands in front of the door for a few minutes still debating in her mind whether or not this was a good idea. Still wondering whether or not she should have left at all. But her hand slowly rises and with a shaky finger she rings the doorbell. A small woman, shorter than herself, opens the door. Her fiery red hair is in a bun at the top of her head and her dark brown eyes are bright with surprise. She smiles as she looks at her mother. She notices the lines in her face she hasn't seen before and the tiredness she blames on old age more than anything else. They throw themselves into each others arms and, despite her better judgment, Lily begins to cry.
They stand in the doorway for five minutes before she lets go of her mother, smiles sadly, and takes her suitcase up the stairs and into her bedroom. There she is bombarded with memories. Nothing has changed from when she was seventeen and she feels like crying all over again as she stares at the lavender walls and touches the few quidditch posters she put up after sixth year.
She walks to her nightstand and picks up her old jewelry box. The pink still sparkles and the gold paint hasn't chipped at all. She opens it and still hears the sweet music, still sees the small ballerina twirling by a small mirror. She sits in her desk chair and begins to look at the jewelry inside. There's a gold locket she got when she was seven years old, a picture of her and petunia on the inside. It was her favorite necklace until she was nine years old and her neighbor insulted her because of it. Next she picked up a beaded bracelet. There are few of those in there from crafts she once loved to do, beads of all different colors and even some red and gold ones from her earlier years at Hogwarts. Suddenly, a silver chain catches her eyes and she picks it up. On the chain is a beautiful lily, white with subtle pinks shaded in it and a silvery outline. There's a diamond in the middle and as she looks at the necklace she begins to cry. It was the first present James ever gave her.
She puts the necklace into the box not wanting to reminisce any further and climbs on her bed. She's hit with the fatigue of not sleeping for a few nights and as soon as she hits the pillow she falls asleep dreaming of a handsome young boy with tousled black hair and mischievous hazel eyes. Dreams of a pretty young girl with wild red curls and bright emerald eyes. She dreams of a time when she's seventeen because more than anything she wishes she could go back and fall in love with James all over again.
She doesn't wake up until the next morning and her mother and father are waiting patiently in the parlor with some tea their servants brought to the table. She walks down in her pajamas and hugs her father with the same lack of enthusiasm she did with her mother the day before. Both parents can see the change in her. Both of them see how the life has been sucked out of their daughter. They haven't seen her since their granddaughter's funeral and when they look at her now it's as if she's been frozen in time since that day. She's still horribly pale and thin, still horribly depressed, but they smile and her father pets her lovingly calling her Princess, her old nickname.
They have small talk for a few moments. They talk about work. Talk about Petunia and other relatives she has no true care for. They ask about the wizarding world. They ask if it's still dangerous because they remember her letter a year or so ago about attacks. They ask if she's been feeling well, if she eats, if she ever goes out anymore. But they don't being up James or ask her why she came until her mother tactfully blurts it out. Until her mother asks her daughter with her characteristic, blunt coldness why her daughter so suddenly showed up on her doorstep. Tears well-up in her eyes.
"Well, you see," Lily says her voice quivering, "James and I haven't been getting along like we used to and… and I feel like we can't go back to the way it was before. Ever since… we… I… it was time to move on." She finally says.
"Move on, Princess?" her father questions.
"What's the point in holding on, Daddy? Everything we ever were to each other is gone and… and I can't go back to him. There's nothing left there."
She falls silent after that and as her mother moves to say something else, her father shakes his and they let her drink her tea in peace. It's hard for them to imagine. Of all the couples in the world they believed Lily and James were a shoe in to survive. It seems impossible that she could have left him. It seems impossible to them that she could have come here because she has no where else to go.
But they didn't question her again. They saw now first hand that the Lily they brought up, the Lily that fascinated and charmed everyone she met, was gone and replaced with this sorrowful woman. They still loved her. She was still their daughter. But inside of them was a deep remorse that the daughter who now sits with them at dinner and sleeps in her childhood bed is not the daughter that left them so many years ago. It as if their worst fears have come alive. As if there daughter has truly died and been replaced with… with someone they can't even recognize.
They fall into an easy routine and after four days she feels slightly more comfortable being there. On the fifth day she forgets her initial hatred of the beautiful mansion and feels slightly more at home in the place she grew up in. She sits and reads for most of the day. She sits in a cushioned chair out back with a cup of tea that magically refills itself whenever she wants some more, and she smiles serenely at how her mind has been blank since she got there. She smiles at how it feels like a lifetime ago that she got into a cab and tore out a piece of her soul.
It was on the fifth day that the owls began to arrive. She thought it was a sweet gesture at first although it made her cry for hours afterwards because his handwriting was still like it was in Hogwarts and she knew his words were heartfelt. She cried with each word she read although no words of love were present, no begging for her to come home was written. It was merely a lovely note acquiring after her health, begging her to be alright and let him have a word about her well-being. A small, polite note. A note that he took the time to write.
She put it in a tin box where she kept the old Hogwarts' love letters he wrote her. She put it in the box that night after reading it over and over again and put that in her drawer. She promptly fell asleep after unconsciously dreaming about hazel eyes and a time when she remembered how to smile.
It was a few days later that she realized he was going to send a letter everyday. Each letter was written with more feeling. Each letter had more words of affection and more hints to go back to him. She read them all, read each of them over and over again sitting by her window and looking at the moon knowing that he's looking at that same moon. Read each letter until she had every word memorized because she was so in love with the fact that he wrote to her. She was so in love with that fact that he may still care.
Her mother made a point to not talk about the letters James kept sending after Lily made a point to stress that she didn't want to talk about it, that no she wouldn't write him back because she doesn't want to speak with him. But each night her mother listened to her daughter's heart-wrenching tears with anguish in her heart knowing that her daughter is in pain and that the one person who could help her is being shut away. She feels anguish at the fact that James could save her, could cure her daughter's heartache, but is being left behind from that coldness she adopted God knows when.
But, then she thinks about it in depth one night. She thinks about her assumption that James is the only one who can save her and realizes that he had three years to try. He had three years and yet he couldn't bring her old smile to her face, couldn't lift his finger enough to make her want to stay with him. He had three years and yet her daughter is still an empty shell, still wondering if all the goodness has left the world because her eyesight has become so jaded. She began to hate him that night.
By night thirty Lily was getting restless as she sat crying about his latest letter. It was still more detailed than the twenty ninth but then she laughs at his ability to say nothing in so many beautiful words. He goes into details about his work, about Sirius, and oh, did you know Remus dropped by for a few days? Yes, and Peter too. There were words of regret, many different, complex ways of simply telling her he misses her. His words, she still thought, were very sweet.
But she cried because more than anything she wanted him to give her a reason to go back to him, to go home. Missing her isn't enough because god knows he's missed her for years. God knows, she's missed him for just as long. But she wants to go back, so badly wants to see him with his arrogant grin. So badly she wants to listen to his charming words and funny anecdotes she never got tired of through the years. She wants to sit in his arms and watch the stars or stroll on a beach with his hand in her own. She wants to go back but cries each night because he doesn't give her anything to go back to. There is no clue, no hint that anything is different from the depressing day when she left. She's tired of being empty, tired of waking up each morning and asking herself what's the point. Tired of not wanting to live, of feeling defeated because she was once so strong. But there's no point in leaving to go to him if she'll still avoid him at all cost. There's no point in returning to London if he'll still slip out at night to visit the whores. He never, not once, promised her that things will change. He just states, Lils, I miss you. Lily, the house, it's so lonely and big without you. Meaningless stuff she takes to her heart hoping that they hold some truth yet knowing the words aren't strong enough to convince her he's sincere.
She wants to believe it will be different. She wants to believe these letters might be a sign of some change he went through. But she gave up on believing, gave up on hope because she can no longer see any light in her future at all. She uses the excuse too much, my daughter's death destroyed me, but as she saw her child being lowered into the ground it was as if piece of her heart, her very being went with her. So she can no longer take this leap of faith James's letters would make her take. She can no longer blindly venture into the world with him like she used to because, because she's terrified of what pain could be lurking in a corner. So instead she sits and reads his letters each day. Instead, she sits and watches the moon knowing the same one is shining on him, and lets every letter go without a response, without a drop of hope to warm her frozen heart. It just isn't enough, not anymore, not ever.
A/N: Ok so we have like three chapters left. Yes, the story will be a bit longer than I predicted. I know it's a longer wait this time but I have been working on college applications and summer homework for my AP classes. Sorry but school starts in three weeks for me. But this'll be done very soon. Oh and, who read the sixth book? 'eyes wide with amazement at what happened.' I don't want to say anything to ruin it but OH MY GOD and REVIEW!