Chapter 2:
A week of summer had passed. Not much happened, except for the differences in the people who lived in it.
Petunia seemed to be out all the time, taking hours to beautify herself and running off to the merchant's district to some prissy girl's gathering at her old school. Lily couldn't decide if she was thankful or resentful, that her sister wasn't home. Resentful because it left all the responsibility of taking care of an old and infirm woman to her. But Grandma Alys didn't really deserve her bitterness, it wasn't her fault.
Lily was no stranger to a hard life, but taking on another person's care completely was a bit much for a girl of sixteen. It didn't help that she had no one to talk to about magic either. Snape had evidently recieved her message of condemnation loud and clear and did not attempt to visit. She didn't venture out to any of their old haunts either.
Petunia had loved dangling that over her head, her apparent friendlessness. Marlene and Alice were both training for demanding professions and she didn't want to badger them. Her dorm mates were all off somewhere on holiday trips. She didn't feel comfortable asking anyone else from other houses to visit her, and she couldn't go anywhere far. There was no need to even think about Severus.
So far the only two magical bright spots were Remus' acceptance of her movie request, and Marlene's defensive charms book.
It felt heinous, to be studying so soon after OWLs had ended, but the things she was reading were too interesting to stop. She couldn't wait to try out a Fortis shield, third strongest in the shield series and quite magically draining. The school didn't offer dueling or combat avenues. It would be a good idea, to have dueling experience in times like these.
On second thought, it was a terrible idea when people like Potter and Black existed.
It had turned one at night when Lily clambered softly down the stairs for a glass of water. Oh, what she would give to be able to conjure some water with an Aguamenti. Her magic was straining, begging to be used, like a tightly clenched muscle.
She stopped dead at the sight at the bottom of the stairs.
"Mum, what are you doing?"
Her mum, who had been staring out the grimy window at the foggy moon, a bottle of brandy clutched in one hand, startled and hurriedly turned around, stashing the bottle in a cabinet.
Lily observed the scene with weary eyes. There was another empty bottle on the counter.
"You told me you would stop."
Her mother shivered and pulled her dressing gown tighter around herself.
" It was just a pick me up, Lily, dear." Her words came slow and slurred.
"Don't 'dear' me, mother. Two bottles isn't 'just a pick me up'.Her voice rose steadily.
( Lily loved quoting words back at the people she was angry with. It made their deflections seem utterly stupid...A good tactic)
"Lily, shhhh!"
Her mum's hushing was pointless, as Petunia came thumping down the narrow stairs.
"Could you keep your voices down? I need my beauty sleep!", Petunia hissed.
"Oh, shut up, Tuney. Did you know this whole time mum's been drinking enough for a sailor once we all go up to bed? Or did you just turn your head and run off to gossip with your insipid friends?"
"Lily-"
"How dare you! You weren't here, you ungrateful freak, this has been happening for months! And what did you want me to do, chain her to the bedpost? She finds new hiding places for her liquor everytime. Of course you wouldn't know, since you're, oh so special and just had to go to a school for freakshows in bloody Scotland, leaving me to do all the heavy lifting."
Petunia was breathing heavily.
Lily took a deep breath and said in a cold voice,
"You're eighteen and finished with school, Petunia. I don't have that option. It wasn't much of an expenditure for you to take a break and stay home to help. You're not planning on being a working woman anyway. Admit it, even now you're desperately trying to get hitched, to leave her when she needs you!"
"Just who are you accusing of being selfish?", Her voice dropped to a whisper. "You could have used your magic potions to save father, I know it! What are you learning all that for then? I know that, and I blame you for the fact that he isn't still alive."
She seemed to realise she'd crossed a line when she as saw the stricken faces that looked back at her, but gathered herself, saying in a prim voice, "And I'm not just trying, I've succeeded. My boyfriend's name is Vernon. I was waiting to tell you on my birthday, mum. It's quite a serious courtship."
"T-that's welcome news, Petunia", her mother stuttered.
Petunia shot Lily one last dirty look and flounced back up the stairs.
Lily seemed like she had frozen. She turned to her mother, who had sobered up suddenly and said in a horribly expressionless voice,
"Do you think that way too?"
"No, I don't. You're still a student and if you'd used magic on a muggle, you would have been expelled."Her mum's voice was expressionless too.
"Yes! And even if I'd known what potion to use, forget expulsion, it could have had unintended consequences on a non-magical person. Then I really would have been the cause of his suffering. W-why does she think it's a rational decision to blame me?"
She asked, now somewhat hysterical.
Something changed in her mum's face at that.
Lily realised some deep part of her mum had thought the same as Petunia. A little hint of betrayal that she'd overlooked as grief.
"I can't believe this."
" Lily, all of us are dealing with grief in different ways. I'm not saying she's justified in any way, but just know that her accusations come from a place of grief, and...well, jealousy."
"I still can't forgive her for saying that, or even thinking that. And if you harm yourself with all this drinking, I'm sure she'll find a way to put that on me too.", she said piercingly. Her mum's face turned apologetic.
She turned to leave.
Her mother made no move to stop her.
Lily would never be able to look at her sister the same way again.
...
The next few weeks were tense. Lily avoided the women in the house and only conversed in stilted tones. The only one she didn't even try to maintain a semblance of neutrality with was Petunia.
She woke early the next Saturday for her much awaited outing with Remus. She'd used nearly all of her pocket money for the tickets to the cinema and bus fare.
When she stepped off the bus and bent down to straighten her skirt, a voice above her said,
"Well, don't you look like this is your first breath of fresh air in days."
Her mouth curled into a smile as she glanced up,
"Well, it literally is. Ah, how rejuvenating air without coal dust is for the lungs!"
She spared a moment to observe Remus. The scars on his face were as stark as ever, but there was a liveliness to him that told her he was in the prime of his monthly cycle. Remus didn't know she knew he was a werewolf and she didn't see the need to tell him. Besides, she didn't ever want him to be uncomfortable around her. So she kept quiet and made up excuses for him when he didn't show up to prefect meetings or rounds on full moon days. He'd only feel unnecessarily guilty that she'd had to come up with excuses and take extra rounds in the first place. He was insufferable like that.
Lily wondered if he'd been told that becoming a werewolf was in any way his fault.
She hoisted her little satchel off her shoulder.
"Anyway, two muggle motorcycle magazines for you, Mr Lupin. My sister saw me rifling through them and took it as further evidence that I'm a freak. Really, she could do so much better with the insults. It's just tiring now."
Remus shot her a commiserating look and dug a fat bundle of tied-up newspapers from his bag. He glanced up shiftily and quickly stuffed the newspapers with moving pictures into her satchel.
"And here are the last two weeks' Daily Prophets for you, milady"
"All in all, a good barter, I would say"
"Sirius will be overjoyed! I'll have to charm the magazines to look like regular notes. Any tips?"
"Well, the road many take would be layering a metamorphosis charm with a duplication charm. But it's very fleeting, needs to be recast afer the magic powering it runs out and very easy to detect.
So the road I would take is actually not charms, for once. Maybe inscribe a continuous transferral rune sequence with a visual condition marker on both your notes and the magazine, and make the magazine the acceptor. The illusion should hold as long as your notes and magazine remain in good condition. What do you say?"
Remus was grinning, "Professor Babbling would be proud of you."
"Well, I've actually used this combination a lot. Handy for sneaking muggle novels into the library and reading in plain sight."
"So that's what you were reading everytime I saw you reading your History of Magic notes for what seemed like the hundredth time. You don't even like what Binns teaches us."
"Well, of course I don't! He completely glossed over Grindelwald's terror period with nary a mention of how it intertwined with our World War, not to forget-"
" -how he portrays muggles as animals not much better than cattle. Lily! Lily, I've heard this rant before", he chuckled.
"Right, sorry! This topic always gets me fired up."
"Don't I know it. You're such an opinionated swot sometimes, Lil.", He chuckled affectionately.
Lily loved that he could trade playful barbs with her. He was usually so meek with other people that when she'd first heard a wry reply from him, she'd been taken aback for a minute.
"And you have a disgustingly noble moral compass. I think you'd go so far as to deny yourself happiness if some unknown entity might suffer harm because of it."
His expression turned serious.
"That isn't really true, Lily. I've been meaning to apologise. I was too weak to do anything but sit there and watch while my friends taunted Snape."
Lily's bright green eyes darkened at that.
"Remus, I don't think anyone could have stopped Potter from starting it, except perhaps Black, and he loathes Severus just as much. And Sev, I mean, Severus, well, the fallout was bound to happen at some point. We'd been fighting for weeks before that. I was willfully ignoring his changing beliefs in the hope that it was the result of some skewed Slytherin peer pressure. But it seemes like he's always had those beliefs, only he made a debatable 'exception' for me, probably because I was the only magical child in his vicinity before Hogwarts... So, don't take any of the blame on yourself."
"What about James, then?"
Lily's eyes grew bright with unrestrained anger.
" Potter is an entirely different story. I'd started to think better of him when I heard he'd saved Snape, but then he had to go and pick a fight with him, someone I cared about- not that Snape was entirely blameless- and had the gall to try and blackmail me me into going out with him, no less! To be honest, I try not to think about Potter. I equate him to shrivelfig in my head. Not poisonous, but so disruptive to a potion that every aspect HAS to be tailored to fit it. I can only think about him in small doses, or my cauldron of a brain might very well explode!"
Remus' eyes had widened with every word, he was now struggling to keep a straight face. Lily noticed, narrowed her eyes, and swatted him lightly, not enough to hurt, but enough to incur a look of amused repentance, at which Lily nodded, satisfied. This just set Remus off further into full-blown snort-laughs as they made their way into the theatre.
...
A month later found Lily in the depths of isolation once again. Things had improved somewhat on the homefront, with her mother reducing her drinking and she seemed to be actively trying to draw her into conversations. Her charms and runes knowledge, at least the theory, had increased in leaps and bounds with every book Marlene or Alice sent her.
The river by the factory was where she chose to take her books to read, a mix of muggle and magical authors. She would curl up against the grey brick, with her legs splayed across the coarse yellowed grass and drift into different worlds. Once or twice, she had seen Severus, but she had always gotten up to go, before he could come any closer.
Sometimes, she would just take her wand out and hold it, reveling in the warmth of it, the eagerness it exuded.
But today, she was here because she needed a place to be completely alone in order to plan. Grandma Alys' weakening bones were getting worse and she was determined to do something about it. ( Not like father)
Every potions book she'd consulted had suggested that the only reason potions had unpredictable effects on non-magicals was because the magical ingredients couldn't sustain their healing properties in a magicless body. A witch or wizard's magic was forced to move in patterns that encouraged healing in affected parts while the potion provided the raw material and acted rather like a ignition key.
So she would have to provide the magic.
Ever since she'd found that magic could be stored for later use, she had used the emerald necklace her
Grandma had given her to siphon off her magic and put it in the teardrop-sized jewel that she'd inscribed with runes, with a potions method called Conscious Imbuing, in which they poured magic into the potions to activate them through their wands. Most people had to wave their wands over the cauldron to achieve it, but Lily had perfected the art of Imbuing no matter where her wand was. She just imagined the magic flowing through the air from her wand instead of directly into the cauldron.
It had been her 5th year Runes project.
She would slip into her Grandma's room at night, after the 70-year-old had taken her sleeping pill, and feed her a Bone-mending draught.
Notwithstanding that, it was also the perfect way to get back at Petunia.
She had arranged things in such a way that when she released the magic from the little jewel, at the same time she would charm all of Petunia's makeup products to stay a bright blue for a week once they touched her face, her shampoo especially. This was done on purpose. The ministry could only detect large raises in ambient magic or magic shaped into a spell, so if she timed it right, the Improper Use of Magic office would only detect her wide area charm, not the slowly depleting jewel on Grandma Alys' right leg.
...
The next day at breakfast, Grandma Alys remarked,
"My, I feel better than I have in years! I feel no pain in my leg at all. Rosalie dear, what were those pills you gave me again?"
Lily and her mum shared a conspiratory grin.
Before they could say anything, they heard an unholy shriek from above and Petunia came thundering down the stairs, screaming about how she would get back at Lily. Her mother rose swiftly and deftly steered her elder daughter out of the room, promising to do everything she could to fix her daughter's outrageously blue hair, not that it would work, while she shot Lily a subtle wink.
Potter and his motivations had always been unfathomable to her, but she supposed she got the appeal of pranking. Being the calm coordinator while the rest of the room erupted in chaos around you was, she had to say, quite satisfying.
Lily smiled quietly and fingered the letter she'd gotten from the Ministry beside her. She'd been informed that they had observed a Targeted Colour-change charm being performed and it included an official warning that she should not perform any more magic. ( Her ploy had worked.)
"What was that, Lily, dear?"
"Petunia's just miffed that things haven't gone her way for once, Grandma. Pass the toast, please?"
"Here you go, flower."
"My, whatever happened to your hair, Petunia?"
"Lily did it to me!"
"Prove it, sister."
Petunia held her tongue, knowing she could not talk about magic in front of Grandma, a fact Lily took great pleasure in, though she tried to make up for it by giving Lily the most withering stare she'd ever seen.
"Oh, and Grandma, tell Petunia about your miraculously healed leg."
Petunia's face grew even more pinched as she turned to Grandma Alys, who looked delighted at the prospect of telling her everything about her affliction.
...
Petunia didn't go out for an entire week. Being seen as as a blue powderpuff girl would completely destroy her reputation. Lily, meanwhile, spent a very happy week, with frequent trips to Diagon Alley to look at potions ingredients, and of course, the bookstore.