An: I'm going to have to do some dedicating here. So pardon me while I gets to it. BECKS, who read this and read this and read this and freaking read it again like the trooper that she is.KRISTA who is the sole reason I have yet to run screaming into the night poking my eyes out because I need this posted asap and I cant do it myself. So she posted this for me. Cause she's awesome. I really don't think she can help it…and if she can…don't. don't help it. And more mad love for DP who fixed my paragraphing for me in I MISS YOU (otherwise known as ch 1) look at me all carrying on like I'm important and someone is going to read this…my conceit is amazing.
I can't tear my eyes away from the small box resting in the middle of my perfectly made (for once) bed. I hate that box. I want to pick it up and throw it as far from me as I can possibly get it. I just might. How can something so light cause so much trouble? I can't stop touching it, but I don't want to touch it at all. Every time I pick it up I toss it from hand-to-hand as if the box were on fire. It might as well be. I drop the box on my bed, and falling to my knees I let all the pain, hurt, and anger inside of me out in a long yell. The boys are concerned, I know, but I can't help it. I can barely help myself.
My hands are in my hair, yanking for all that they are worth. Its almost like, if I can just pull my hair hard enough, then eventually it will come out and my brain will be clinging to the roots. Then I won't know anything about anything. When I open my eyes, the ring isn't going to be there. It isn't, it can't be. Its going to be on Lily's finger where it should be and its going to turn out that these past few weeks have been nothing but a hellish dream. I open my eyes. The box is sitting to the left of the center of the bed where it landed staring at me innocently. I had it all planned out. For two damn months I had it all planned out. I worked so hard to make things perfect. To make the night a night she would never forget. Too much time was spent for things to end up the way that they had and I have no idea what to do. None. And neither do the other Marauders. For once not even the four us can come up with a solution. All I can do is cling to my sanity as best I can and try to get through each seventy-two hour day and all they can do is watch me fall apart.
Remus, Sirius, and Peter shifted uncomfortably on their beds. None of them really wanted to be there any longer, but they didn't want to leave James alone either. James had been upset over Lily before, there had hardly been a day in all of their years in Hogwarts that James hadn't been upset over Lily. But nothing like this. And to make matters worse the girl had disappeared. She had dumped James two weeks before and had promptly fallen off the face of the planet.
"How could we have been in such different places?" If I can hear the tears in my voice, I know my friends can too. I'm too tired to be embarrassed. "Here I was, first class chump, thinking marriage and she was thinking 'should I serve James his heart? On a platter with cabbage and peas or should I filet it nice and thin and serve it in a mixed greens salad?'
My instincts have never been so wrong!" I repeatedly slam my head against the castles stone floor. If I couldn't physically yank my brain out, then smashing it was the next best thing. My instincts. My instincts. I can't help but roll my eyes at the thought of them. I had always been able to trust them before. They are what makes me Quidditch gold. They are what always keeps me at least two steps ahead of Severus Snape, they were what told me that Lily would go just a bit further before she would smack me. Before and after we started dating.
"I need to talk to her. This has to be some sort of mistake. She loves me. She loves me as much as I love her, remember? She said it, right?" I can barely get the words out my throat feels so thick. I can hear my voice shaking with my effort to restrain myself. I really am trying not chuck it all and sob uncontrollably on my bed. My friends would understand.
Ever since that day in the hall I have been trying to make a decision about the ring. Throw it at her head and tell her to stinkin' deal with it, or send it back for a refund. I had been carrying it around in my pocket, and had been ever since I had bought it the month before. Today was the last day that the ring could be returned.
The ring was a white opal stone. I had considered diamonds or crystallized unicorn tears on a solidified rainbow ban but those seemed too common place for her. Lily was special.
I had had the entire evening planned out. I was going to have Sirius, Remus, and Peter walk her into Hogsmead on the next weekend. I would tell her that I would meet her there, I had some thing's that I needed to finish up. That would be true. They just wouldn't be school related things. I would fly into the town on my broom and after some hemming and some hawing she would agree to fly off with me.
It had taken Sirius and I a month or more to find the perfect spot. There was a small island that wasn't too terribly far from Hogwarts. About an hours fly away if you're making good time. After we found the location it took another couple of weeks to decide on how to set the scene. It was all we could talk about for months. And when the ring was finally in my possession it was a full-out Marauders adventure trying to decide on the exact moment that the ring would look its best against the chosen setting.
And, after all of that we had to find a way to find out Lily's dress size since the most romantic night of her (our) life could not take place in the white jeans she wore all the time. And then we had to find the right color dress. Something that would make the ring really pop. Something to make it impossible for her to say no. And the last piece of the puzzle was finding the perfect set of sheets, and transfiguring them so that they wouldn't be obvious, because naturally after agreeing to marry me Lily would want to shag my brains out. And here's something that they don't tell you in transfiguration class: no matter how much of a master you are, no matter how hard you try ,you cannot transfigure good sheets. They always take on the texture of the thing that you transfigured them from, so the thing to do was buy the best sheets in the world and transfigure them into rocks or something.
Perfect, right? And even more if perchance she said no then I could send her off on my broom by herself and by the time my friends found me again my suicide attempt would have proved successful. But the day, the stinkin' day before P-Day, the day before Hogsmead she led me into the hall and handed me my heart on flambé.
I sat in Herbology, my eyes twitching this way and that. The ring was in my pocket, where it had been since I had bought the thing. I was looking for Lily. I still wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to chuck the ring at her head or throw myself at her feet and plead with her to take me back. Or maybe a combination of the two. Throw myself at her head and tell her to stinkin' deal with me. And let the ring smack her in the eye. I hadn't seen her since we broke up which really didn't make any sense. We had a lot of the same classes, so where was she? I looked at her typical spot towards the middle of the room. Herbology was one of the few classes that she didn't sit in the front row for. Her seat was empty, as it had been all week and the week before. Sirius inclined his head to a seat in the back and if I didn't know Lily down to her freakishly long blonde eyelashes then I wouldn't have recognized her. She was sitting in the very back of the room, her knees pulled up to her chest and a sweatshirt with the hood up over her head. The only visible aspect of her were her pale, pale ankles and the freakishly long eyelashes.
Without thinking of the consequences. I stood and stormed over to the girl. I pulled the hood from her head and forcibly lifted her face up to look at me, right at me. If she was going to do this to me the least she could do is look me in the damn eye. She looks worse than I do. And I've been drunk for the best part of the past two weeks. Something to file away and think about later.
My hands are clenching and unclenching and to someone not in my head it probably looks like I'm working not to work my hand into a fist and belt her one. Truth? I have no idea what to say to her. My heart hurts and I haven't slept for weeks and I want to know why she did this to me but I can't think of a single, solitary way to say that that won't cause even first years to start offering me tampons and cramp medicine because everything in my head sounds so damn girly and over dramatic.
"What do you want from me, huh?" She surged to her feet. Our heads smashed into one another's, but neither of us relinquished an inch. Her eyelashes tickle the tops of my cheeks and I just want to close the distance between our mouths and kiss her. We were happy, damn it! Except that part had come out loud, and I yelled it right in her face and saliva had flown from my mouth and had landed on her lips and even my spit has missed her.
"Were, Potter. Past tense. Maybe you should move on." Or maybe she should, tears are in her eyes and I can feel the moisture on her freakishly long eyelashes as she tries to blink them away.
"Potter, Evans, OUT!" Professor Hedgerow kicked the two out, she had been content to let them fight out their issues, they needed to talk, but when the third student was sent to the nurses' office because they had been bitten, she had had no choice but to kick them out. They were dealing with Biting Bizmonkey, a rare plant, and those had poison running through them.
Lily and I were standing by the lake glaring at each other. To be more exact, Lily was glaring at the hand that had an iron grip on her elbow that had forced her to the lake. In this somewhat relative expanse of privacy the question that had been tormenting me for the past two weeks finally fell from my lips. "Why?" I stared hard into her eyes. "I love you Lily. We love each other." My voice cracked and tears that had been held so long in check finally spilt free.
"No you don't!" She broke free from me and ran as if Slughorn himself were chasing after her. She needn't have run so hard or so far, I was in no position to chase her. That tiny bit of hope that she had just given me had so thoroughly sapped me of strength it was a wonder that I was still standing. She had said 'no you don't' not 'no I don't.' And as long as the only thing standing between me and Lily and shagging on a deserted island while I call out "Mrs. Potter! Mrs. Potter!" was her belief of my indifference to her, then there really isn't anything standing between us at all.