The morning after the Cannons match, Lily wakes up to two letters. The first is from Dumbledore, and the heavy encryption indicates that it's probably follow-up from her last meeting with him, when she'd demanded he find out the extent of Snape's involvement with pureblood social circles before she'd go back in as Calypso.
It'll require both a number of spells and a decoder to work out exactly what it says, so she sets it aside for now, opting to open the second letter first.
The handwriting on the envelope is intimately familiar in a way that settles a lump of dread in Lily's gut. Opening it and reading the contents only makes that dread worse.
The opening paragraphs are entirely updates on Petunia, courtesy of her mother's doting attention on her oldest daughter. She gets a list of updates on baby Dudley's milestones, his first words and first toddling steps, and an extensive rambling about Vernon's latest promotion.
At one point, she did give a fuck about her sister's life, but now that she's so clearly been relegated to the outskirts of it, barely even worth the recognition of being invited to a baby shower or a christening, these updates do nothing but fill her with a sense of annoyance.
Petunia doesn't care enough to tell Lily about them herself, and her mother only brings them up as a point of comparison between her daughters - one of whom she sees as the success story, and the other, the disappointment.
Her father had always been the one most thrilled by Lily's magical talents, the only one who would sit with her at the kitchen table for hours after her returns from break just listening to her stories. Lily's magic had fractured them, split the family down a seemingly unmendable seam - and though they all had tried to pretend that wasn't the case while her father was still alive, the façade had crumbled to pieces with his death.
Now, she's little more than an outsider, only worthy of the occasional letter update and an invitation to lunch.
Convinced it can't get much worse than that, she lets that letter fall to the table and picks up Dumbledore's.
And because the universe is seemingly out to get her, perhaps to balance out yesterday's overwhelming successes, it does get worse.
Little Whinging is, as towns go, profoundly dull. The rows of houses all look just alike, manicured lawns trimmed just so, not a blade out of place. Even the shopping district mimics that style, devoid of any sort of personality or color - just uniformity and perfectly matched aesthetics as far down the main street as the eye can see.
The little café that Lily is meeting Petunia and her mother at is no different - crisp and white-trimmed and standing out along the street only by the collection of tables out front.
Standing outside the front door, she takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders, as if readying for combat. She doesn't want that to be the route that this afternoon's meeting goes down - the invitation, after all, had been perfectly cordial - but history would suggest that it's a fair expectation.
The bell above the door rings a little too loudly when she walks into the café, as if even the building wants to point out how little she belongs in this town.
"Can I help you?" the hostess asks.
"Evans, party of three," Lily recites. She doesn't see either her mother or Petunia in the dining area, so she must be the first one of them here.
The hostess gathers menus and leads Lily to a small table close to the back. It's positioned well enough to give her a clear line of sight of the front entrance, so she'll be the very first to notice when the rest of her party arrives.
Instead of doing just that, however, she chooses to occupy her time intently studying the menu, despite it being just about the most boring and straightforward café menu known to mankind.
"Lily!"
Lily looks up to the sight of her mother and Petunia both coming in at once, Petunia pushing a stroller in front of her. Her mother is smiling at her, and Petunia, as usual, looks more like she's just sucked on a lemon.
"I'm so glad you were able to join us, what with your silly sports schedule being what it is," her mother continues, reaching over and giving Lily a one-armed hug, pretending like her comment wasn't simultaneously a barb.
"Yes, me too," Lily replies, choosing to brush off the comment for now.
"Mum and I were just talking about how difficult it is scheduling social outings as a new mother," Petunia adds, her nose upturned just so. She's adjusted Dudley's stroller to sit next to her at the table, and is currently attempting to unstrap the pudgy baby from his seat.
"I can imagine," Lily responds.
She vaguely entertains pointing out that Dudley is almost a full year old, and therefore it's a bit of a stretch to still call herself a 'new' mother, but that's hardly a fight worth bringing up either.
"I hope we didn't keep you waiting too long," her mother says. "Petunia and I took Dudley to the park this morning, and he got his little overalls dirty, so we had to stop by her house to get him a change of clothes."
She looks around. "But isn't this place just lovely? I swear I tell Petunia every time that I'm here, this is just the most perfect town."
"Vernon does want the best for me and Dudley-kins," Petunia adds, her voice pitching upwards at the nickname for her child, who is currently blowing spit bubbles in her lap.
It is, more or less, exactly how every interaction with her mother and sister goes these days. Her mother and Petunia attached at the hip, Lily the strange outsider who pops in for an hour or two at a time.
They order drinks and meals, and the conversation progresses over food in much the same way. Lily doesn't mind it honestly, the sole focus on Petunia and her life, because at least it's better than the alternative, which comes around the time that they order dessert.
"How are things going with the sports team you help out with?"
Lily bristles. "The professional team I coach is doing well this season," she replies, specifically emphasizing her corrections to her mother's phrasing. "We just won our season opener match by a wide margin."
"Oh, that's lovely," her mother says. And then the kicker: "Have you given any thought to what you might do after yet?"
"I don't have any plans for an after," Lily answers simply.
It's the truth - while she's not sure she'll stay at Puddlemere forever, she certainly has no intentions of planning a departure any time soon. She loves what she does too much for that.
Her mother gives her a pitying look, one that sends Lily's blood into a boil. "Lily, dear, you know I love you, and it's because I love you that I say this."
"That you say what?" she challenges.
"I just - you have so much potential, dear. You were such a bright child, and you did so well in school before… you know. I'm sure there are so many different opportunities for you to pursue, but you'll have all this catching up to do, and I just want to make sure you're thinking about that."
"I don't have any catching up to do," Lily replies, doing her best to keep her voice level despite her steadily rising temper. "I'm exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do."
"I just think you would be so much happier if you - "
"Don't tell me about my own happiness, Mum."
This is always where it returns to: this idea that Lily's magic is somehow some temporary whim, that it's eventually something that will expire or that she'll grow out of, and then she'll come back to the world she was born into, the world her mother and Petunia still firmly occupy.
"I'm just looking out for you," she insists. "Petunia's just doing so well and is so happy, and I want that for both of my daughters."
Lily would, quite frankly, rather keel over and die than switch places with Petunia. Dudley is cute enough, if not a little fussy from being constantly doted upon, but Vernon is a nightmare and the concept of spending her days as his doting housewife sounds far more like torture than domestic bliss.
But the idea that Lily could ever be content with her current existence, firmly rooted in the magical world, devoting most of her time and energy to a job in a field that neither of them even remotely understand, is an utterly foreign concept, one that Lily's long since realized is a lost cause attempting to explain.
She sighs, knowing that any attempt to make her mother see her perspective is a lost cause. "I'll keep that in mind."
Her mother reaches out for her hand, and Lily resists the urge to pull it away. "That's all I ask."
There are a hundred, if not more, thrown-out speeches in her head that she's never said to them in moments like these. In moments where it's clear that there is some unfathomable chasm stretching between her and the two of them now, one that she no longer knows how to bridge. They almost always close with some sort of ultimatum - accept her as she is, acknowledging that magic is an inextricable part of that identity, or lose her completely. The delivery would be satisfying, surely, but she doesn't want to know how that ultimatum would be answered.
She can't picture them leaving, but she can't imagine that they'd ever stay.
By the time they finish dessert and say their goodbyes, Lily is suffocating.
Something about spending time with them, with these two people who should by all measures be the people who know her the best and yet cannot fathom even the most core parts of her identity, drains something out of her.
She hates it.
Normally, she just lets herself stew on those feelings for a while, before stamping them out. It's not like she can do much with them anyways.
But today, oddly, she wants to let them out. She wants to be able to vent to someone who understands what it's like to have your own blood be so fundamentally opposed to everything you stand for and love.
And so before she can think too much about it, she Apparates to the apartment building of the very best person she can think of to understand what that feels like.
She knocks on the door, and after a few long moments, it swings open.
"Evans?" Sirius looks at her in mild disbelief. Part of it may be her attire - she's in muted, pastel tones instead of her usual darker colour palette, possibly out of some subconscious attempt to match her mother and sister, to be more like them in outward appearance if nothing else - but she imagines that most of it is because she has appeared at his doorstep entirely out of the blue.
"Is now a bad time?"
He shakes his head, shaking the shock off with it. "No, not at all. Come in."
Sirius steps back from the doorway, letting her walk in. She's been here a few times since that first dinner, an attempt to keep Sirius and Remus in her life again, and she recognizes the warm, woodsy candle they've got burning in the space at all times.
"Tea?" Sirius offers. And then, perhaps sensing something in her, "Or something stronger than tea, perhaps?"
Lily can't help it - she laughs at that. "It's two in the afternoon."
He shrugs. "When you need a drink, you need a drink. Two in the afternoon is hardly the most offensive time I've cracked open a bottle of whiskey."
"Tea is good," she replies. The offer of something stronger is tempting, but she knows it's probably not the best choice.
"Can do," he says, grabbing the kettle. "You can sit at the bar while I make it."
She takes a seat in one of his chairs, watching as he fills the kettle and puts it on the stove. He doesn't speak again until he's done with that task, turning to face her.
"So, for what purposes am I owed the pleasure of an entirely out-of-the-blue Lily Evans visit?" he asks, leaning against the counter.
She could approach the subject delicately, or she could just cut straight to the point of it. Ultimately, it's Sirius she's talking to, so she opts for the latter.
"How did you know it was time to just fully cut your family out of your life?"
The lighthearted expression on his face morphs into something more serious. "Oh." And then, "Well, that explains why you looked like you'd just seen a Grim when you showed up here."
Sirius knows, to an extent, the difficulties she had with her family in the immediate aftermath of her father's death. They were still close when it happened, and Sirius was possibly one of the only ones out of any of her friends who could best understand fraught family dynamics, what it was like to feel out of place and unwanted in their own home.
"I just came from lunch with them," she replies.
He sighs, pondering his answer for a moment. "I think, to an extent, some part of me knew from the very beginning. That moment I was Sorted into Gryffindor and unintentionally defied all of their expectations for me, I think some part of me knew then that it was the beginning of the end. There was something about that I was never going to come back from."
He turns to pull two mugs out of the cupboard. "The original plan was to wait until I was fully self-sufficient, when I could cut those ties and not find myself shit out of luck without their financial support," he explains. "Of course, you know how that worked out."
She does. The exact details of the situation aren't fully apparent to her, but she knows that Sirius got into a significant fight with his family sometime over winter break of their fifth year, prompting Sirius to move in with James, becoming an unofficial second Potter child.
"It was… it wasn't a choice I made lightly. I mean, I know you know exactly how horrible they are, but for a while some part of me really believed I could convince them to see things the way I did." He scoffs. "Probably one of my most egotistical moments, that one - believing somehow I'd be able to undo hundreds of years of deeply set convictions just because maybe they'd love me enough not to lose me."
The water comes to a boil, and Sirius plucks the kettle from the stove, filling the two mugs. "But they were just - our differences were irreconcilable, and they hated the people I loved merely because of the blood they were born with or other circumstances wildly out of their control." His eyes briefly flash to the closed office door across the room, where she imagines Remus is working right now. "They might have been the family I was born with, but in the end it was all-too-apparent that they weren't the family I was going to choose for myself."
Lily nods, unable to say anything else.
"So, what was it about this lunch you just came from that has you seeking my take on cutting your family out of your life?"
She opens her mouth to answer, but before she gets the chance to speak, she's interrupted by the sound of the door opening.
"Padfoot, did you - " James' voice comes booming into the flat, and then cuts off abruptly when he walks into the room and immediately notices Lily sitting at the counter. "Evans. Wasn't expecting to see you here."
He looks uncharacteristically awkward in that moment - something about finding her at his best friends' flat, and also probably in light of what happened the last time they were together, seems to have thrown off his usual smooth persona - and he just stands there, frozen in place, like he's unsure what he's supposed to do next.
"Moony's in the office reading, go bother him," Sirius says flippantly, waving James off with a flick of his hand. "Evans and I are in the middle of an important conversation."
James just gapes at him for a second, looking like he's about to say something then thinking better of it. He turns to Lily, looking at her for one last moment, before following Sirius' instructions and going back into the office.
The heat of his gaze leaves a mark on her, setting the room on fire, filling her lungs with invisible smoke. It lingers even after he's fully disappeared, and she has to snap herself out of it when she turns back to Sirius.
"I can leave if you have plans with James, I didn't mean to - "
"I have no plans with James, he just showed up at my front door unannounced," Sirius replies, placing her tea in front of her. "Seems the two of you have that in common today."
Sirius walks around to join her on the other side of the counter, taking a seat on the barstool next to hers. "Oh, and don't think I didn't notice that look between the two of you. I don't know what's happening there and I know better than to try to ask, but that was definitely a look."
… Fuck. Is it really so easy to see right through her?
"My family still can't fully come to terms with the fact that I'm a witch," Lily says, choosing to abruptly pivot back to their original topic of conversation. As fraught a topic as it is, it still somehow feels like a steadier ground right now. At least she knows how to talk about this one.
"It's been over ten years, and somehow they still expect me to give up on it eventually. As if I'm off on some little adventure rather than, you know, my entire life existing here. And Petunia's as much of a bitch about it as ever, just turning her nose up at me whenever I dare to acknowledge that magic is something that exists in the first place, but my mother's always going about it in a 'I say this because I love you' sort of way that just…"
She feels emotion build in her throat, the type that she wouldn't dare let out, so she takes a sip of too-hot tea to push it back down where it belongs. The burning liquid makes her eyes water, but at least it's better than any other reason her eyes could start watering.
"But she doesn't. That's not… that's not what love looks like, is it? Barely talking to me and then when she does, trying to goad me into abandoning everything I've built my life on?"
"No, it isn't." Sirius shakes his head. "And admittedly, no one in my family tried that method - it was much more point-blank 'you're a disgrace to the family' from them, but…"
"I know the situations aren't identical," Lily tacks on. "What I'm dealing with is child's play in comparison to what you had to - "
He puts a hand up to stop her. "This isn't the Triwizard Tournament of trauma, we don't have to declare a winner based on who had it worse. What you're dealing with is extremely shitty, regardless of whatever I had to deal with."
Sometimes, Lily's in awe of the way Sirius has so dramatically grown up over these past few years. Of all of them, he'd always been the most immature, the least prone to deep introspection. But somehow, whether by nature of getting himself settled into adult life in a way that neither she nor James has managed yet or by some other force entirely, he's matured a lot. She can't imagine seventeen-year-old Sirius having that level of insight.
"Remus told me that, once," he acknowledges. "It stuck with me."
Of course. That advice does sound like Remus.
"That's fair. I just… I don't know, am I at the point where I jump off the train? Every time I get close to issuing an ultimatum, I wonder if maybe I should just give it a little longer. But I don't… I don't know if there's a point anymore."
"Making that decision is fucking hard," Sirius replies. "And you have to do it for yourself, not as some sort of punishment for anyone else. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, you know? But if maintaining those ties is more painful than cutting them, which is what it kind of sounds like you're suggesting, then… yeah, maybe it's time."
It's something Lily's known at the very least for hours now, the feeling that settled in her gut in the middle of lunch and realizing the all-too-repetitive nature of these meetings, but it's wholly something else to hear the same thoughts come from someone else's mouth. It feels final in a way she wasn't expecting.
Her tea has cooled down enough that when she sips it this time, it doesn't scald her. "I think you're right," she admits.
"Ten points to the dysfunctional parents club for coming to logical conclusions," he jokes in return, the playful jab loosening the tightness in Lily's chest somewhat.
"When did you get so insightful?" she finds herself asking.
Sirius laughs at that - she gets the feeling that even he knows that, a few years ago, it would've been far more reasonable to predict that Lily would be the one in the sage advice-giving role between the two of them. "It turns out that dating someone who is very in touch with their emotions and has actively worked out how to process them in a healthy way tends to rub off on you, who would've guessed."
"Remus truly is the saint among us," Lily agrees. "I should let you figure out what James came here for, but… thanks for listening, I guess."
He smiles at her, and it's almost a sad thing. "No one should have to work through shit like this alone," he says. "I'm happy to be of support."
She leaves after that, and while the whole conversation hasn't fully resolved everything, she feels slightly more put back together than she did when she arrived. And that's something.
She gets her next event invitation addressed to Calypso Selwyn the next day. An art exhibition and dinner party hosted by the Rosiers.
She has no justifiable reason to say no.