Lord Asriel (lordasriel) wrote in nocturnes, @ 2014-09-09 14:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | lily potter, sirius black, spring: 1990 |
Who: Lily and Sirius
Where: Lily's horrible place of employment!
When: After Sirius has his reunion with his heterosexual life partner.
What: Sirius has grand ambitions to Fix Things. Unfortunately, he rather spectacularly fails.
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Lily, how could you. Lily, you shouldn’t have. Lily, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Lily, I may be sorry, depending on how much you actually believe it. Lily, I did it for all of us.
These were some of the sentences he was considering for opening his conversation with Lily Potter, his friend, and judging by what he had come to know in the past few hours, his not very good friend. There was a dual stream of emotions at work here, inside of him. As he tore through the Dursley residence in search of her and proceeded to tie both Petunia and Vernon Dursley to their living room sofa to extract information about her whereabouts (they weren’t very welcoming or obliging for some odd reason), he was going from longing to loathing, love to indifference, anger to anguish and from acute impatience to deep mistrust. Damn that girl and her sway, he thought. And damn the fact that unlike every other woman in his life, save Marlene, of course, his heart and mind had always been in a constant struggle against each other when it came to one Lily Evans, turned Lily Potter, turned – no, he didn’t want to consider what came After James. After James, there was supposed to be nothing. The end.
The facts were these: Sirius Black had, once upon a time in his childhood, considered sharing of expensive sweets with Lily Evans and telling her in grave detail how he was Important and The Best. The objective was, of course, to have the eleven year old red-head immediately fall in love with his eleven year old Important and Best self. But then it turned out that his mother abolished any such aspirations with one fell swoop of a threat against Lily’s dear little mudblood head, and he learned a valuable lesson: never share details about the women he liked with his mother. This was to help aid him later when he fell into the traps set by one Marlene McKinnon (real traps. The wolf hunting kind.), also a mudblood but doubly ready to prove through scientific fact how all this mudblood malarkey was a steaming pile of shite and nothing but. But as far as Lily Evans was concerned, all hope of a grand love were diminished within the span of five days. Then all of a sudden his best friend zeroed in on her and it was an entirely different game. Out of loyalty to him, and some respect for her, he took a step back and gladly so. It wasn’t just meant to be, and he never stopped telling either of them that. At least until '78, and then she and James got married. She taught him Scrabble, and really, she shouldn’t have, because she never won again (it is not cheating if the word is in Goobledegook.). She was the mother of his godson. The same child he helped her and James bury.
That was then. Now, he was in a different mental and physical condition. Wasted and wry, unforgiving and focused, unconvinced of the state of things. He would never know what James and Lily went through when they lost Harry, but he imagined what he himself felt was a fraction of that soul-crushing blow. And it had been crippling, and numbing. Going after Peter, the very fact of tracking and destroying, had been fueled with an all-consuming rage, and it hadn’t died out. It had only been three days since he came out of Azkaban, but every time since he had looked at his best friend, alone and haggard, and every time he imagined Lily in a different world altogether, that flame took strength. That desire to destroy grew. What else could I do? What else can I do? It was a race to the next option available, as ever, to make up for the fact that he wasn’t there when it mattered. This fact, however, went largely unrecognized.
But this zeal to put things right wasn’t helping anyone, not right now. As he navigated his way through the muggle-filled streets of London to the office address he had extracted from the horse-faced Petunia, he was motivated to get some answers. Throughout the elevator ride and then the small trek into the dingy, illkept offices that were offering ‘Customer Services’ of some kind, he was both motivated and shocked at his decision to confront Lily. And was himself confronted by rows upon rows of cramped cubicles where people set staring at little flickering screens, talking into strange contraptions strapped to their heads, speaking rapidly and in deceivingly calm tones to Merlin knew who.
So he basically came to the conclusion that all of them were under the Imperius Curse.
And then: “LILY POTTER? LILY?”
The glaring looks and all the faces that suddenly snapped to look at him was an overwhelming spectacle and would've surely reduced lesser men into meek embarrassment, but this was Sirius Black.
"All of you are named Lily Potter?"
Said woman in mention just so happened to have just been returning from her fifteen minute break and had arrived on the floor just in time to catch the tail end of Sirius's bellows. Upon hearing the familiar and wholly unexpected voice shouting at her co-workers like a mad, homeless person (and looking little better than one too), Lily froze, first paling in dread and then flushing with deep embarrassment as her arrival had not gone unnoticed by her nosy peers, all of whom now directed their pointed sea of disapproving glares her way. It was her fault for this latest disruption, was it? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her frowning superior begin to wind his way through the labyrinth of cubicles towards her and knew she had to remedy this situation quickly lest things get worse and Sirius--not one known for thinking first, if at all--did something he'd regret or worse: got her sacked.
"Sirius!" she hissed, latching onto his arm with a talon-like grip that was not at all gentle and, with few options at her disposal, shoving him into the break room which was mercifully empty.
After making sure the door was firmly closed, she leaned against it briefly as if trying to absorb some of its support before turning to her estranged husband's best friend, back from prison, apparently, and back from the past she was striving so desperately to forget.
Azkaban was not kind to anyone and its effects had certainly carved their years on the man before her now. There was a certain hollowed-out quality to his face now, too pale from so many years without sunlight. His eyes held that gleam only borne from years of isolation. She recalled her last thoughts of Sirius were not fond and if she were honest with herself, it was hard to remember when and how she had ever called him a friend, looking at him now.
"What the hell are you doing here? How did you find me? Did James send you?" As if this thought were the most horrible of all, and so angry was she with the whole situation, she pulled out the wand she still kept in the back waistband of her skirt--force of habit, as she didn't think she'd ever feel safe again, not anymore--and held it up threateningly. "Did he?"
"What the bugfucking hell are you doing here?" was his immediate response after allowing her to escort him out. Her vice-like grip was soon shrugged off, but not before he had thrown her - and the rest of her bumbling, inferi-like colleagues - a look of pure, unveiled disapproval.. It was perhaps a blessing that he didn't dwell too much on her reaction, the sudden shift in her expression from casual impassivity to focused and paranoid rage: he was concerned more about her being present in this hovel of a place with its musty smells and claustrophobic setting. He was shocked - not at the unwelcome in her eyes - but at how much she seemed a part of all of this. Like she had never been anywhere or anyone else.
He sized her up for good measure with a calculated, clinical look before swatting away at her wand, even though it gave him at least an iota of respite from thinking she was entirely lost.
"James - no, I am not James fucking Potter's errand boy." And this shared with a lot of fondness for the man in question, but with certain indignation as well. James was his best friend and not his keeper; he could've send him here, and in all honesty Sirius believed he would've come running (and earlier) if it was so, but this was his own choice. And now he was wondering if it was the right one.
"And I went and said hullo to your sister and brother-in-law. Sorry to say Lils, but they are still a pair of flypicking, horse-faced and pork-bellied idiots - so that brings us back to...what the hell are you doing here?"
"You went and saw my sister?" Lily practically sputtered as one incredulous thing after another seemed to pour from this aggravating man's mouth. Her wand, which had been an empty threat at best before, was now held up again with more purpose. And anger, jabbing into Sirius's chest pointedly. "No. I'm the one who gets to ask the questions around here when you barge into my muggle sister's home and my work and my life, unasked for, by the way. If you're not doing this for James, then what the bloody hell is the matter with you, Sirius Black? I work here. I live in this world. I get by. What do you think I'm doing?"
As slow as he was perceived, it wasn't hard for him to do away with his own expectation in situations like these. Her words hit hard and home; he blinked, both angered and genuinely baffled. "If I'm not doing this for James?" he hissed, "Why do you think I am here, Lily? Is that so hard to fucking imagine?" The wand, the demeanor - it was quickly dispelling any tenderness he may have had towards her, and those long hours he spent in Azkaban imagining the joyful reunion he would have with both her and James was exactly the kind of thing he needed to do away with now, right now. His eyes, hollow as they were, went from emotive to cold, a shift that didn't need much to happen these days.
"I came here to see you, to see if you were alright. Clearly I was wrong to have even considered the possibility that you would be happy to see me! Get this stick out of my face or I will break it!"
I'd like to see you try, she thought derisively, an angry thought out before all the energy that had fueled such anger deflated as easily as it had come. Energy came and went as quickly as the tides for her these days. Anger and weariness and a to hell with it all forfeit. She dropped her wand and turned away from him to collapse into a cheap plastic chair, and her whole body conformed to its sub-par existence with ease. She rested her chin in a hand and stared at him with all of her years of exhaustive regard. "Why would I be happy to see you? You're a reminder of everything I've been trying to forget. I guess now you can see for yourself how I fare." And if she detected any vindictive pleasure from his newly learned observations, she had yet to find any. It mollified her some.
He was left standing all of a sudden, looking down at her with a mix of rage and shame. It could be contested that Sirius Black, with all his bravado and barefaced pride, had absolutely no shame at all – but he wasn’t entirely incapable of feeling something akin to it now and again, when it mattered. Lily mattered, her words mattered. There had been times when he had deduced that the red-head was more of a second-hand responsibility than a direct burden on his conscience, but at the end of it, he knew full well that all of that was the product of his anger directed towards the most likely subjects: people who were capable of taking it for his sake. So yes, by all means she mattered and here she sat before him, out of place in dirt and grime, cheap plastic furniture and stained carpeting, surrounded by the kind of mindless droning that spelled only broken dreams, shattered expectations and no hope. He wasn’t the most cheerful person to be around these days, but all of this made him look like the Spirit of Christmas drunk silly on eggnog.
What could he possibly say to her.
“Do you want me to apologise?” he asked flatly, his face angled down to look at her. And he wasn't seeing her as she was now, but as she had been then. The lack of a smile and her vacant eyes were more hurtful than anything she could ever say to him. “Do you want me to disappear? Would that help you forget? Ten fucking years, Lily, and I haven’t forgotten…do you think you ever could? Would that help?”
"Of course not," she replied in a nearly bored tone, and the only thing of interest she could possibly note was the contrast between her demeanour and Sirius's impassioned one. "If I can stop thinking about it for five minutes, I consider it a smashing success. It doesn't go away, but I've at least discovered that it can be lived with, and this...this is the only way I know how to live with it."
“Fuck this!” he exclaimed and crouched down before her. “You don’t belong here and you know it. You don’t belong in this place or under your sister’s roof…who, by the way, was discussing your lack of monetary contribution to the household with her fatslab of a sister-in-law when I walked in on them. It...doesn’t go away but you don’t have to run from it…not like this. I thought…I thought you were stronger than this.”
"I'm muggleborn, Sirius, in case you've forgotten," she said drolly, not quite able to give into the desire to address him like the child he sometimes--most times--always was to her, so it became a share intimation instead, two-faced and knowing. "I've lived like this before magic, during magic, and even in all this misery and tedium and Petunia's disapproval, it's infinitely preferable to the fresh and unbearable pain I was exposed to every day I lived in that house after Harry died."
“Muggleborn but not a muggle,” he corrected factually. This was not exactly the time or place to revert to some of what his Mother had always said about muggleborn witches and wizards, that magic was wasted on them, but he couldn’t help but recall that. And he looked at Lily, his face still burning but slightly more solemn, to once again erase that harsh, bitter voice in his head that had haunted every single of his childhood interactions with her and others like her. “I don’t know what happened between James and you after I was gone, and I am not relying on his word alone. So tell me how it came to be like this. You two could’ve survived this together.”
"And to what purpose would that serve now?" She could almost see it, those gears rolling inside his head. Her wand lay limply on the table, odd in its ordinary surroundings. "I'm not going to accuse James of anything, no matter what he probably very rightfully has said about me. We were both grieving. We both did and said things I'm sure we regretted. It became difficult to even look at him and not see Harry..." And then, all of it, all that pain and hate and sadness balled into a collection which could not be parsed and individually recognised anymore, which she held close to her chest and left alone.
"The fact is that we didn't survive and all the wishing and earnestness in the world," she said, unable to help but at least afford him some fondness for this, "won't change what's happened."
“Harry had your eyes,” he said, and his voice was bitter. “I suppose, just like you, James looked at you and saw only him till both of you forgot to see each other.” He too followed her line of vision and regarded the wand, which was more a prop now than anything useful. She was right, nothing will ever change what had happened, and it wasn’t too difficult to persuade him about any effort he made to reconcile his friends as a lost cause. As he stood up and straightened, he felt purpose drain out of him like an expelled breath. None of that zeal, that burning excitement he had when he started out to see her was there anymore. He felt older, unable to stomach the loss gracefully, to admit that what she was saying was right.
“We were all only children ourselves.”
"Now look at us," she agreed. "Older. Perhaps not as wise as we wish we could be." Falling silent a moment, she studied him, this time without the haze of anger and shock to colour her view. She saw his defeat--of this, she had a well-trained eye. "Take good care of him," she whispered.
He stood still and silent, contemplating the weight of her request and coming to the conclusion that no, she wasn’t coming back, and no, he couldn’t carry her back either. This was it, but he was damned if he was going to take this, the finality in her tone and the distance she had put between herself and his world, as a severance.
Without words, without much of anything except a sudden realisation and a quiet promise, he leaned down and pressed his lips against her forehead, lingered for a moment or two, before breaking off as a man poked his head out the side of the door and called for Lily.
To this world, to this stasis, he left her. And he knew if she was a part of this, he was as well, and that he will return.