Disclaimer: Nothing related to Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling belongs to me.
A/N: I read over the (previous) second chapter and deleted because I realized it was truly awful. So here's something a bit sad, I don't know. I haven't written for awhile, and I feel rather disconnected from this site. I miss it. So…here's it, I guess? As always, telling me what you think about my writing is key to my improvement. Okay, I'm stalling, here it is.
(FifthYear)
Burn Marks
She doesn't remember every single day of it. Every unrecorded colorless day, every gray meaningless cloud she floated in. But she remembers some. That was when she walked through the world as if she wasa ghost, transparent, floating through agonies and loves and hearts of everyone around her.
Those days, she sat down at desks, and sharpened quills and neglected everything but her papers and notes and exams, her handwriting smaller and neater, her essays on parchment longer and excruciatinglydetailed and her tests prepared for deep into the night. Constant occupation and brainpower drained her, but nobody knew how hard she really worked herself, she made sure of that. Her clothes were still ironed meticulously (she forgot to fix her small burn marks on her hands) and her hair was pulled back neatly as ever, but if you looked closely there was a mask over her eyes. Something uncertain and undirected that suggested she didn't know yet where she was going from here.
Gaggles of concerned people surrounded her, clucking and comforting her nonsensically. Pseudo-sympathetic, yet cheerful. Probably they didn't care at all, and sometimes it occurred to her that they showed more emotion than she. She knew she was supposed to feel terrible grief, but she couldn't bring herself to feel anything but blunt numbness. Maybe that was a problem.
She was acting oddly. She switched her brain off every day carefully and she wanted to remove the screens of sympathy sheathing her classmates, she wanted to be ridiculed, stabbed with insults, marked with pain and not carefulness. There was no more pain that existed anyway; this numbness was the harshest pain imaginable.
Her father died, you know, they whispered and they thought she couldn't hear, but she did.
He was no different from the rest, not that she should have expected him to be. He could not turn on the lights again, they were extinguished, and she felt like hitting him over the head, for the way he cautiously, carefully, looked at her now, so uncertain, and she just hated it. The way he tiptoed around her and let her be without him. The way he left her so completely. The way he looked confused now; he always did in her presence now.
You should know what to do, you idiotic, joking , jerk, and you can't take anything seriously, and look, Mr. Potter, look what you do with all this invested time in me, throwing it all away? You idiot; you complete idiot, you've lost it all, what are you doing, what are you doing with yourself, with me, with us, you're breaking something I didn't know existed. Take charge, take control; don't you see that's what I need, don't you see that whenever I slapped you, I meant it that it was a test and that I needed somebody to get angry, I needed somebody to take charge of me, I needed somebody to tell me I couldn't fall apart like this, but maybe that's the problem, you don't see me falling apart, you see me as more put-together than any of them, you don't see anything, you're blind. Every time I ignored you it was a plea, but you didn't get it, you're daft, you are, you can't leave me like this.
She walked out of Potions yesterday, into the cold reality of life, lifting the spell briefly, with all these bodies, all these hearts that are living and beating, all these beings knowing where they are going. They are like a different race because they don't turn to vapor under the shining revealing light; they remain, they are real.
You were once like them; you aren't any longer, you brush their shells; but you're a different person now.
The most complete sense of loneliness ever sustainable has befallen her now, now as she marches off through the weaving bodies and laughter, ringing and hurting her skull, drills little precise holes in her brain. The idea that something so soft and innocent could wedge their way into her very core, seems crude.
She turns a corner and sees the same crowds and the same everything; the noise is unbearable, the emotions that teemed in the corridor, and she wondered at them, and she envied these naive people with their hearts on their sleeves, with all their souls ringing out into the crevices of the floors and ceilings, with all their expressions readable.
They are behind her, the four of them, they are laughing like everyone else, barely distinguishable yet in her mind it was all the difference in the world. They're always together.
And suddenly she stops; there is a Slytherin boy in her path, a smirk coldly vicitimizing his features. And he doesn't realize how impassive she is, how his words don't matter, her skin is thick enough now. She waits for him to speak; he sneers, tall, intimidating to others maybe, cruel colorless slits of eyes peering at her, targeting her. Among the mass and shuffle she sighs as he fixes on her, thinking he is so stealthy and so cruel, when really it's an act.
He steps in her path and she is almost relieved.
"Hey, Evans," he sneers, as the four behind her quiet suddenly. She wished they wouldn't do that. She wished not that the four would leave her alone to deal with things herself, like the bully. She didn't need them tailing her; she was strong enough without them.
His nextwords trailed to her mind on a sharp straight sword-blade, only somehow missing her.
"Heard about those death eaters killing your dad, it's for the good of humanity really, the mudblood's dad d—"
A swish of air close to her, a loud, sickening crack of a breaking nose; blood streamedinswift,indecent rivers down the Slytherin's pale chin suddenly, an odd backdrop of students bustling to class with their books tucked under their arms.
Sirius stood next to Lily, glaring, apparently disgusted, at the boy before him and the blood pooling at his feet.
"And I won't hesitate to do it again, Smith," he said, his eyes radiating blazing anger.
And she felt something deeply irrevocably wrong as the people blurred dizzylingly around her, as they rushed here and there so pointlessly, they were so futile. The tall handsome boy with the gray, angry eyes stood beside her, defending her. There was something wrong, something sickening, about the one boy with his two friends, standing cautiously, carefully behind her; and she hated him more than ever. She felt irreparably alone and separated from him. She really hated him like this, standing there useless, thinking he had no right to intervene or do anything; he had all the rights in the world.
You know, Potter, once I thought you were brave, and once I thought you liked me. Now I know better.
Smith let out a wail, but James didn't hear it, he didn't hear it at all, he didn't see the blood pooling or register Smith's acute howls, he didn't see the rushing masses, the anonymous personalities filling in the edges of the corridor. Because after weeks of emptiness and lifelessness and cautiousness, his friend stood before him; Sirius, the brave one, defending, hazardous, heroic, getting the girl's attention, his girl's attention. But she isn't anymore, he guesses.
A few inches to Sirius's right, the redhead turned her head slowly towards James to meet his eyes. He feels under a trance in her gaze, with all the world rushing past them. As if in a dream, she lets her green eyes linger on him for a moment in silence.
She waits—he could have said something if he had wanted—and with a trapped numbness burning acidly through his chest, she turns and walks away, leaving him standing stock-still.
Run after me, she thought desperately, please, James, but he never knew that.