InsaneJournal

When Lily woke up, even before she opened her eyes, she knew she was still in the same room she’d gone to sleep in. It was the fifth morning she’d woken up in the bed, and she was slowly beginning to accept she’d be waking up in this bed … well, until she moved out.

Then she’d be waking up in that bed, but it would never be her own bed.

It left her with a lot of questions. What was happening at home? Was she missing or was she somehow being place-held while she was here? Had she been split? Duplicated? She wanted to ask Severus -- since he was the only one here who might know -- but she couldn’t imagine he’d paid too much attention to what she’d gotten up to after school. Or that he’d deign to answer her even if he did know. She scowled slightly at that thought, but it wasn’t as though she was blameless in the entire incident.

She just didn’t like acknowledging her part in it. It wasn’t one of her proudest moments, and it had cost her a friendship. One she likely wouldn’t have been able to keep much longer anyway, given the way he was going, but … still. She’d only argued so much because she wanted him to see what he was doing with his life and how wrong it was. She could have accepted his apology, but she stood by her arguments in regard to that. Maybe it had been a slip, maybe he hadn’t meant it, but he had said it and it had hurt.

Uninterested in dwelling on those thoughts, Lily pushed back the covers and sighed as she gazed toward the ceiling. She had a couple of interviews lined up for today, but not until the afternoon. So that meant the morning was hers to do with as she pleased, and what did she want to do? There were plenty of things to see and do around the city, though she was more interested in things that didn’t cost anything to do. She supposed she could look into Battery Park or one of the other places Don had mentioned, but she didn’t want to roam too far away in case she lost track of time. She didn’t want to be late for her interviews.

Dragging herself out of bed, she stood up and stretched before she looked around the little room. The little room that was hers, for now. The little room that wasn’t in her flat, that wasn’t in England. The little room that didn’t have James. The room that might never have James. She might never see him again.

Lily let that thought roll around in her mind for a few minutes.

It was possible he might show up. Severus was here, so why couldn’t someone else she knew show up? She shouldn’t count on it though, and that was the trap she was falling into. She was counting on him showing up, counting on him being here so they could get married and be a proper couple. But he wasn’t here, and he might not be here, which left her wondering what she should do about it.

She should likely stop telling people she was engaged, for starters, because that would involve lying about James, and she really was a rubbish liar. Saying he was in England, she could get away with. Explaining why she was here alone and settling in was harder, and there wasn’t really any reason she could think of that a young man in 1964 would send his bride-to-be across the ocean to a strange country to house shop -- with no money. Lily abhorred the idea of cutting James out of her life, even if it was just make-believe, but the other options weren’t particularly viable for the situation she’d found herself in.

So that made her what, exactly? A single but unavailable woman? And how long, she wondered, was she going to maintain her unavailable status? Was she going to wait forever for something that might never happen? But when was it appropriate to move on? Was it ever appropriate? Lily wondered where the damn rule book was for situations like this, and she laughed softly in her otherwise silent room at the absurdity of that thought. Life didn’t have rulebooks. She just … had to live it, to make her decisions, to live with the consequences those decisions created.

She guessed that when she finally fully acknowledged that she was stuck here indefinitely, she’d work on the whole moving on thing. Until then, she’d remain secretly engaged to a man who didn’t exist here. Lily bit down on her quivering lower lip before turning away toward the bathroom. She’d go have a shower, and all the water on her face would just be water. No tears. She was stronger than that.