Lily had not answered any of his owls. He knows, god he knows it had been unforgivable. Mudblood! - he hates himself more than she could ever hate him. He sits in a hunch over his bed's edge, waiting on his owl to return without a response for the thirty third time this summer. There were only two weeks left until they went back for their sixth year and he couldn't imagine going back and not sitting with her on the train. Not watching her pick through her food at the great feast and gorge on pumkin pasties (god he hated pumkin pasties). There is a small glass half emptied of it's firewhiskey on the bedside table and he picks it up and drains it just as his owl glides down to the window and lands on the sill. He drops his glass and snatches the small rolled parchment out of it's grip so quickly that it squawks in alarm and flutters away.
'8PM. Lakeside' is all it says in impassionate scroll.
.
She is already there when he arrives, sitting calmly at the edge of the lake. She hears the crunch of dead leaves under his uncoodinated feet and turns to watch him with an eyebrow raised. He tries his hardest to look well put-together and not drunk (he's only a little drunk, afterall). He thinks hard about whether he should stand or sit but Lily answers for him by standing and facing him, a few feet between them.
"Severus, you have to stop owling me." She says, finally. She shifts her eyes away and Severus knows immediatly that she really doesn't want to be here. But they'd had tons of fights, hadn't they?
"Look - Lily -" he notices his hands have come up expressivly and puts them back down. "Lily, I am so sorry." He cleaves a hand through his hair and pushes it back and takes a step toward her. "You know, I mean you know I don't really think of you like that. You know how I am sometimes.." A long twilight envelopes the tallest treetops as though the world is folding in around them - swallows and martins course, and the lonely call of a curlew sounds overheard.
Lily takes a step back and puts the same amount of distance between them, again. It makes him stop where he is standing, wobbling dumbly, struck by her horror to be closer to him. Fragments from the age of ten in gilded gold frames of the heart shifting and breaking apart expressivly across his face, in his features. The air is heavy with the scent of wisteria growing low on the ground, and the whistle of duck wings against the starlit sky fills the void that begins to spread like blotted black watercolours.
"I told you everything I had to say, Severus, it's not that I am mad at you - I mean this isn't some argument. These are the paths we've chosen to go down and they.. our paths split here."
She is more rigid and resolved than he's ever seen her before and for a moment he can't decide how to say what he wants to say. She is wearing a blue dress. She looks beautiful in blue. It is true that Severus has never had much, but because of what he lacks he values what he has so much more. And she is all of it, all of what there is of goodness and purity and beauty. In his saddest corners he mentally begs Lily not to take this away from him. Lily would point overheard and follow the red-tip robins by fingetip, tracing their forms across the skyline in lazy loops that inevitably led down to Severus's nose and cheeks and, still, her laughter is in his ears from those days she colored the sky across his sweaty skin. The scenes melt and twist into kaleidoscope realities, irish twined vines, pictish coiled snakes: the mist wavers and the sky changes to colorful cottoncandy between long, quiet glances.
He tries to step toward her again and, again, she steps back. He recalls her ice skating on big bear creek in the lemon light of early morning during winter break. Blowing butterbeer malt-bubbles into the air at the Hogshead tavern during trips to Hogsmeade. Long hours across from one another in the library and Lily's fingertips tracing still muggle artwork, 'Botticelli', she would breathe in an intoxicated fashion, causing Severus to look into the faces of dead Saints to see what she saw.
"Lily, I love you.."
"Severus, we aren't friends anymore."
The sentences come together in the air, clogged and messy and equally painful.
Severus continues to wobble where he stands.
"It was an accident.." he whispers.
"No, Severus, it wasn't. And I can't keep trying to change you. I don't want to keep trying to change you."
She looks away, up, to the sagging willows overhead that Severus had once charmed, turning hundreds of leaves into fluttering wings. She smiles for those faint ghosts from what seems like another lifetime.
Severus wilts to the ground, staring impassivly at the lake.
"I'd change for you.." he whispers, softer.
Lily looks down at him, a sad expression on her face. "Change isn't like that, Sev, and you know it. It isn't something you choose ..it just.. exists.."
He doesn't respond. He stares at the lake for long hours, unsure of when exactly she'd left. Unsure of when one day had ended and the next began with the sun spilling over him. He sits that way, in that spot, willing himself to die in the way pained teenage love sacrifices itself at loss freely, until his owl squawks behind him. It steps carefully and drops a letter, then swoops away again. The envelope is thick, rich vellum and the outside reads Severus. A wax seal for the Malfoy manor seals it, red as blood and crisp. Malfoy had been trying to recruit most of the Slytherin lott to his cause - causes Severus wasn't blind to, certainly, but had been putting off because he knew Lily would just hate his being friends with those people. Maybe that was her point. He had never flinched at their allegiances, he had never thought poorly of what they did - if he had ever pulled away it had been because of Lily. His fists ball in his lap. I don't need her he tells himself, finally feeling cathardic anger beginning to blossom.