DISCLAIMER: None of this belongs to me. All hail J.K Rowling
A/N: I went a slightly different route with the intricacies of magic, inspired by murkybluematter's Rigel Black series. Also, Lily has a hard life with one parent deceased. Bear with me.
Chapter 1:
Lily, drained from her fight with Severus, and having to put up a cold façade to cover up her roiling and reeling insides, turned back to the Gryffindor common room.
A hard mask had set over her soft features, her normally expressive eyes resembled green chips of ice. All combined with her deep rose red hair, Lily looked the part of an extremely angered forest dryad.
She felt eyes on her as she strode past, shoulder-length hair rippling around her and slowed to a stop, and turned to face them.
James Potter was lounging on a chair and gazing at her with an unreadable expression.
She suspected he knew who she'd gone out to meet.
A wave of pain rose up again at the thought, and her mask broke. Her eyes filled suddenly and she whirled around and ran up the stairs to the girls dorms before, god forbid, she could show any weaknesses to Potter.
James sat up and made to call after her, before a firm hand on his arm stopped him.
"Give her some time to cool down, James. Even though you loathe Snape, accept that Lily just lost a friend today.", Remus said, an imploring expression on his face.
"I just don't understand what she sees in him."
His head turned towards the fire and he leaned back, sighing deeply.
After a few minutes of mental stewing, he huffed and put his head in his hands, muttering under his breath," Alright that's enough, think about Gamp's law of elemental transfiguration." He spent a few minutes going every detail of the answer he had written on that day's transfiguration exam. When that avenue was exhausted, his mind inevitably circled back to Lily Evans and her frustrating propensity to dislike him.
She was such a contradiction. She was a prodigy in charms and potions, most likely because those required thinking in patterns and layers, with a dash of intuition, but struggled desperately with the rigorous rules and intense visualization required for subjects like transfiguration and arithmancy. It was complete irony, for someone who was so outwardly stringent about school rules.
In that vein, he supposed he was a contradiction too. A rulebreaker who only followed the rules of magic and nothing else.
Lily was her teachers' ( especially slughorn's) darling, and had the regard of nearly everyone, upperclassmen she patrolled with, and lowerclassmen she tutored, but not many knew any personal details about her, because she seldom talked about herself. She was, first and foremost, a listener.
What surprised James was how cutting her words could be when she was riled up, how she took and returned witty barbs with the ease of a wizengamot barrister….He wished she would open up more, so he could at least glean secondhand accounts of her life from someone else, namely Remus.
She was strangely close to Remus, even though he sometimes helped subtly with their mischief, and never seemed to blame him for preventing any of their misdemeanors. Instead, every time, she took that mantle on herself. He couldn't understand why.
Well, they did have things in common, with their muggle heritage and he'd sometimes hear them talking about Sylvia Plath and Ayn Rand, whoever they were. Remus was also the only reason he knew that Lily had a muggle sister, the only piece of information he had about her family, and he clung to it.
Her appearance, though, he must admit, was one of the fist things that drew him to her. Her hair was a deep dark red that fell down her back in waves when it was longer, and her pale skin stood out in stark contrast to the deep hue. She had very light freckles spread across her nose and upper cheekbones.
By far, her most startling feature, were her vivid green eyes. They were so bright, they seemed to almost glow at times, though perhaps it was his lovesick brain that embellished them that way.
She never had met someone he knew of that hadn't remarked on their uniqueness.
But, he reflected with another long sigh, they would probably never be his to look at, since she had conveyed exactly how little she thought of him. His stomach gave a sick swoop as he recalled what she said about his arrogance, and he felt even sicker as he realised that she had been right on. ( Why did she insist on picking out his every flaw? All he wanted was for her to go out with him.)
With that wired into his brain, he trudged up to bed and collapsed in it, trying now to escape the guilt, even as resentment churned in his stomach for having been compared to Snivellus of all people.
….
Lily had managed to make it to her bed before the first tear fell down with a plop. She quickly drew her curtains, silenced them and frantically searched around for a distraction. She found one as her hand slapped against paper stowed under her pillow and she withdrew it . The letter was written in her mother's flowery script and she unfolded it, intent on rereading it.
Dear Lily,
Grandma Alys will be staying with us for the summer and perhaps longer. Apparently, her other sons want no part in taking care of her, so she came to us. I couldn't very well refuse her, seeing as how financially indebted to her we are, especially for your father's hospital stay.
I hate to ask you this, Lily, as you are a magical young woman with many plans, but you mustn't agree to visit any of your friends over the holidays right away, as I do require a second set of hands , what with my working two jobs and Pet trying her hand at 'seduction'. She doesn't seem to realise that to buy pretty new clothes you must own the capital in the first place, and her frivolous spending has driven me up the wall more times than I care to count.
To answer your question in your previous letter, no, my dear, I have not been drinking too much. Your father's absence has been hard on us all, and, yes, I occasionally succumb to a drink or two but not more. I would like you to stop thinking so grimly and am rather glad you are coming home soon so I can put this sudden pessimism of yours to rights.
I'll be waiting at the usual spot at King's Cross , my flower
Mother
P.S Do you suppose you could use one of those nifty magic spells of yours to make your trunk lighter?
It would make the bus ride back much easier.
….
"James, hold up a minute!"
Peter came huffing and puffing behind him, lugging his sizable trunk along.
"For Merlin's sake, Wormtail, levitate it, why don't you?"called Sirius from upfront.
James pulled his wand out of his robes and tapped the trunk.
"Here. Go on now…" Wormtail looked at him in awe and said "How'd you manage that wordlessly?"
He smirked, "My dad taught me how to cast this particular nonverbal spell beginning of fourth yea-"
"Remus!"
Lily Evans' voice cut through the crowd as she appeared, pushing what looked like two weightless trunks in front of her. Beside her stood Mary Macdonald, another muggleborn, who quickly asked Lily to release her trunk from the spell when she spotted her parents.
Lily, now saddled with just the one trunk walked to Remus, who had dawdled at the side of the platform.
The other three marauders drew closer to hear her saying-
"will be absolutely bored out of my mind, so I was hoping we could meet up at the movies sometime.
The Godfather, part two is playing again, mother said-"
Her spiel abruptly cut off as she realised they were not alone.
She turned, narrowed her eyes at James and backed away, saying, "Send me an owl when you make a decision, Remus. Have a good holiday!"
"Evans, wait!"
She didn't slow down or turn around.
James turned to Remus, raising a brow.
Remus, whose eyes had brightened at the prospect of movies, dimmed again as he forestalled in a weary voice " Before you ask, James, she gave me her address under the condition that, under no circumstances, would I pass it on to you. I intend to keep my word."
" I would just use it to write a letter of apology, not show up at her front door!"
"No can do, James"
James exhaled, "What's this about a mover, then?"
"A movie, Prongs. We're just planning a joint venture to truly appreciate the wonders of dramatic crime cinema."
"I'd barge in, if my parents let me out of the stuffy dress robes for longer than two minutes this summer." , Sirius drawled.
"Do remember to send me the muggle motorcycle magazines, though"
"Oh, I'll have to ask Lily for those."
"Evans has a motorcycle!?"
" No, Padfoot, her father rides one."
"That means she has one, Moony."
Remus hesitated, "I don't know if they've sold it or not."
"Oh. Get me the magazines anyway. I plan to permanently stick them to the bedroom walls. See how my dear mother takes that! …and there she is with Reggie. Well, I'm off, fellow marauders, I shall see your illustrious selves two months hence."
Sirius turned with a dramatic flourish and strode off
To a chorus of goodbyes and rolled eyes.
Remus exhaled a sigh of relief. Lily was an intensely private individual, for all that she appeared to be easygoing and social, and she would not have thought favorably of him for spilling her secrets to his rambunctious friends.
In an atmosphere as antagonistic towards muggleborns as it was, information about her father's untimely death would have been used to torment her, especially because it was a curable disease for wizards.
Although, the spark in James' eyes as he faced him said he would be pestered about Lily Evans for a while yet.
….
"Mum!"
"Lily, dear!", Rosalie Evans gave her daughter a once over and shook her head wistfully, blonde and grey wisps of hair furling off her twisted updo.
"You look lovelier and lovelier everytime I see you ."
Lily gave her mum a strained smile and craned her head to look back. She seemed strangely jittery and fiddled with her trunk, dragging it along seemingly effortlessly
"Thanks, mum…..we should get going though. The lightweight enchantment should hold for at most three hours so we should be able to make it back home before it becomes five times my weight.", she rambled as she took hold of her mum's hand and towed her to the red public bus.
"Is something wrong, dear?"
Lily studiously avoided eye contact as she explained, "Severus and I had a falling out,mum. We're not friends anymore. I just wanted to leave before he could somehow corner me."
"Ah…so he still wants to be your friend?"
Lily, who had settled into her seat, snorted bitterly.
" Even if he did, it would never happen. There's too much bad blood between us now."
"Well, I never understood why you were his friend anyway. You could do so much better, Lily. Was it his feelings that caused the split?"
Lily's heart gave a pang at that. Everyone around kept telling her that it was a good thing to be rid of him, but it just augmented the prejudices that separated them. Let her mum think it was unrequited feelings that caused the divide. It was better than the truth. To Lily's family, Severus had been the dirty boy she had chosen to befriend from the poorest part of the already poverty-ridden town.
In an industrial town like Cokeworth, the divides between richest and poorest were not all that great, monetarily, but could have been the difference between a king and ragpicker, for all the arrogance and prestige it seemingly afforded. The more fortunate workers held it over the less, like a princess flaunting her jewels at a pauper, except in this case, it was probably a rusty secondhand motorcar or Merlin forbid, a lawnmower.
Lawns were practically impossible to maintain in Cokeworth because of the coal dust everywhere, so it made the undertaking equally foolish and laudable. Petunia's greatest ambition was to be the mistress of a pretty white suburban house with a polished, picture-perfect lawn. Lily internally gagged. Merlin help anyone or anything that got in her way.
Petunia's opinion of Severus too was of a gutter rat, even before she knew about magic. Then she viewed him as a dirty freak.
Lily wondered if Petunia would be kinder to her now that she and Severus weren't friends.
Her dorm mates, Mary MacDonald, Hestia Jones, Evangeline Lefay all thought her mad to want to spend time with a Slytherin, not that Lefay had much of an opinion. She wondered why their opinions mattered to her, when she thought of them by their full names even in her head.
Marlene, the seventh year, former Head Girl, and a good friend, had met Severus once and tried to have a conversation, only to be rudely rebuffed.
She had been pointedly neutral about him ever since. Alice, another seventh year, had been too intimidated by Marlene's account and always politely refrained from tagging along when Lily went to meet Severus in the library.
She had convinced herself it was fine, that their friendship was unique to the two of them, and anyone else joining in would just be awkward.
But, now that she had lost him, and with Marlene and Alice leaving after NEWTs, and with how she had never really connected with her dorm mates on more than a casual friendship basis, she found herself all alone.
She felt adrift, without a partner in crime. In her early years, it had been Petunia, before the wonder that was magic had torn them apart. Something she had no control over. You either had magic or you didn't.
Later and at Hogwarts, it had been Sev (No,.. Severus, she firmly corrected), before blood prejudice had torn them apart. Something she had no control over. You couldn't choose to be a pureblood, or half or a mudblood. You either were or weren't .
What tore her apart inside was that she knew that the segregation was partly justified. She could feel how wild her magic was, how untuned. Pureblood hated muggleborns because they were uncarved magic users. They themselves had magical gifts and affinities passed down through the generations, shaped into something rigid over the years. But a muggleborn's magic was new, unshaped, and consequently as wild as nature itself. She had made flowers bloom, plants turn leafy and green, and floated down from swings when she was younger. It was only when Severus found her that she realised that uncontrolled magic, rather, magic without will of a person giving it purpose, at such a level was very uncommon in a wizarding household.
But being different and new, didn't have to mean being subjected to hatred and fear. She had learned to control her magic, like everyone else. But it was no accident that she performed well at charms and potions, subjects that weren't so rigidly rule-bound and had room for experimentation and absolutely sucked at transfigurarion and arithmancy, which couldn't be performed without fine-tuning every detail.
The theory about inherently shaped and unshaped magic in the different bloods wasn't widely known.
Many wizards went their entire lives without ever questioning what the basis of blood prejudice was.
They just accepted it as the norm and chose to either be tolerant or intolerant of muggleborns.
She only knew because she had demanded that Severus show her evidence of her magic's so called wildness, and three days later, he had showed up with a dusty tome, that he had borrowed from the Black library, through Regulus Black. It was her introduction to the Slytherin way of exchanging favours for information. Some of the things she had seen in that book had left her scarred but morbidly curious for more. And Sev had provided.
Another sudden pang struck her, she would never be able to converse about the intricacies of magic, share spells and tactics and tricks with Severus again. She had ensured it with how unforgiving she had been.
Enough, she thought resolutely, Severus had been a valuable source of intellect, the best even, but she would have to make do without his Slytherin resources.
She would just have to be more proactive. In fact, the first thing to do once she got home was write a letter to Marlene about the advanced defensive charms book she had spied her reading once or twice.
The bus sputtered to a stop and Lily glanced outside at the brick houses and grey streets, and inhaled the heavy air with unmistakable tang of coal. Her mother had drifted asleep and Lily shook her awake.
"Mum, we're home."
They trudged out and went to collect her trunk which…..
Had lost its enchantment.
Lily sighed and resigned herself to aching arms. She would have to see how she could extend its action period. More magic or more effective weight was the question.
"Wore off, did it?"
"Yes.", Lily grumped.
Her mum held the other side, and with an overly cheery expression, said,
"A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do."
With that, the two females, one a woman and the other a soon-to-be-woman, lugged the trunk to their front door, the silence of the late night punctuated by a curious intermixing of laughs and groans.
….