I love you
“And I’ll lie to my lover, I’ll lie to the moon, I’ll lie to my bedsheets,
I’ll lie to you.”
-Beautiful Boy
“I love you.” Severus pleaded, his eyes wide and earnest.
She’d waited so long to hear those words.
They were alone, outside the Gryffindor common room without a person in sight. She was safe, she could tell him anything and nobody would have to know.
Lily looked him in the eye, willing her entire body to stay still. “I don’t.”
His face fell, he went rigid. He broke right in front of her. She watched it happen in real time, the moment she lost him forever.
Lily lied.
The news says that they’re looking at one of the coldest summers in European history, with back-to-back storms and a never ending downpour. Her mum is running around the shops for supplies, convinced they’ll be swept up in a flood.
Three consecutive days of rain since she’s gotten home.
Bad things always come in threes. Isn’t that what they say?
Lily lays in her mothers bed, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets as she stares out the window. She hasn’t been able to sleep anywhere else without breaking down.
Her eyes fall on his house without meaning too, searching the windows with shallow breaths as if he’ll jump out and scare her.
Severus told her he loved her four days ago, on the last day of school. He’d waited outside of the common room, even asked Mary to bring her out.
She knows how hard that was for him, saying those words.
Lily knew what it meant. Even then.
Severus has a visceral reaction to embarrassment, he always has. She knows this because she has it too. It was something they always agreed on: they’d rather be depressed than embarrassed.
Her entire existence has been avoiding humiliation.
Because she remembers what it was like for them as kids. The two of them running from the other kids at the playground, fighting off them and closing their eyes when it got bad. It bonded them, that need to shield one another from what they hated the most. There were no reservations in their friendship, they could say anything.
Except that.
Severus never once said that he loved her.
If they were younger, if they were still those children with matching bobs and gap toothed smiles it would’ve meant something different.
She never said it either, but as they got older the feeling grew, it festered into something larger.
But they can’t be anything more, and they can never be kids again. They can’t take back how things went, or what happened that day Potter and his friends.
She blinks, the tears having made their way out of her eyes and into her ears. Stretching her limbs, she gets up. The shoulder of her dads old shirt slips. Lily lets the VHS in her mums tele play, padding her way into the attached bathroom and turning on the flickering light.
The girl in the mirror blinks back at her, her expression empty.
How is it that she doesn’t even recognize her?
How do you live in the body of a stranger?
She takes one of her mums cigarettes scattered on the bathroom counter and lights it with a stray lighter, opening the window and leaning out of it. The rain had calmed a bit, but she shields the lit cigarette with her hand anyways. Lily lets it sink in her lungs, burning all the way to her heart.
Mum won’t be mad, Lily’s not sure she’ll even notice.
Looking out the window makes her feel off kilter, like a headache. Every single inch of that town is full of reminders of him. The yards they used to steal flowers from, until the neighbors chased them away. The benches they’d sit on.
Lily huffs, a cloud of smoke puffing out her mouth. She holds the cigarette between two fingers and grabs a pair of scissors from the already open medicine cabinet.
Eyeing the mirror out of the corner of her eye, she takes a large chunk of her hair and cuts it to her chin. It falls in fragments, the scissors too dull to get a clean cut. She works at it anyway, deciding it’s too late to back down.
An hour (and four cigarettes) later, she hops up onto the counter and stares.
And for a moment, she feels like she recognizes her reflection.
“What in God's name?”
Lily groans, rolling over and propping herself up on her elbow. She squints at the sunlight.
Her mum stands in the doorway, shaking her head with her arms crossed.
“Where were you?” Lily asks.
“I went to Petunia’s. What on Earth happened to your hair?”
Shit.
“Um.” She looks around. “Got into a fight with some scissors.” Lily smiles a bit, extending her arm so she’s put her weight on her hand instead. “Didn’t win.”
The rain pounds on the thin roof, little tiny drops racing one another on the window until they’re swallowed by the bunch. She can see it weighing on her mum (she never did like the rain) with the way she wraps her cardigan around herself. She walks around the room gathering warmer clothes, her boots, and her purse.
“Well honey,” She says in the midst of ripping the blanket out from under Lily, presumably for the wash. “I’ve got errands to run before the storm gets any worse, your sister called before I got all my shopping done yesterday– something with Vernon and–” Mum waves her hand. “Anyway, you’ll have to come with me.” She eyes Lily. “We’ll stop by the barbers.”
Self consciously, Lily rolls over and looks at herself in the stand-up mirror on her mum's nightstand. She turns her head this way and that. “D’ you think it’s that bad?”
Mum appears behind her, taking a thin chunk of Lily’s choppy hair in her hand and letting it fall. “Well I hope your big dreams weren’t hairdressing.”
She makes her way out of the room to the wash.
Lily fights a smile. “And what if they were?! Dream crusher!” She yells after her mum.
“Get dressed and eat Lily, be ready in a half hour or I’ll drag you out myself.”
Quickly, Lily gets up and scrambles to get ready.
Lily used to love the rain.
Back when they were kids, it was one of the only times they didn’t have to go to great lengths to meet one another. Nobody noticed them leave with fogged over windows and leaks in the ceiling to worry about.
The two of them, Severus and her, used to run hand in hand down to the river when the current raced faster than they could. They’d fold up paper boats and use magic to make them float longer than the others, then eventually one of them would notice the other was cheating, and they’d fight.
They used to fight so much. It was something irrevocably tied in their relationship.
All best friends fight, She’d tell herself.
Sometimes, lately, it feels like they were always doomed.
Lily stopped in her tracks when she saw him. She’s been standing there, completely still for at least two minutes. Rain falls all around her, narrowly missing her with her clear, cheap umbrella.
He doesn’t even have one.
The way their houses stand, his is higher up than hers, on a hill. Which means that she can see him, but he can’t see her. A one-way mirror.
He’s merely a figure from where she stands, small as if she were looking down from an airplane.
She wonders what he’s doing outside, in the pouring rain under a dark blue sky. She wonders if he can tell she’s watching. If he’s going somewhere, if so, where? Is he going to someone? Who?
It’s a tough pill to swallow, one that feels dry like sandpaper down her throat. It’s habitual for her to run between the two houses blocking his view, and up that hill. And she knows that if she did it now, if she knocked on his door or appeared on his front steps, she knows that he’d let her in.
It doesn’t matter. Lily tells herself bitterly, kicking herself for considering it. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
Nothing changed. Is her final thought before she gets into the passenger's seat of her mum’s car.
Slowly, time passes.
The storm rolls out and back in.
Lily only eats kids cereal for a week and spends her days on the couch watching sitcoms. More time passes, rain passes through her open window.
For a while she’s scared she’ll see him everywhere. She’ll see him in every black-haired person in the grocery store, and her heart will drop.
Sometimes she actually does see him. Outside his house, once while walking to her dads grave. Every time she sees him she repeats everything she hates about him: his eyes, his hair, the way he talks and everything he did.
Her hair grows an inch past her chin.
She sleeps in her own bed.
After a while it gets easier to lie to herself.
She sees him at the train platform before he sees her, his hands tucked in the pockets of his pea-coat, his hair curling around his ears.
Her mum had told her she saw Severus there on her way to lunch, and she knew she had to go, instinctively. She knew what it meant.
Severus has an umbrella this time.
Part of her hopes he's not cold.
It’s always awed her, how she could be so mad at him until she saw him again. Every single time they fought she’d swear herself off forgiveness. And then, he’d look at her with those wide black eyes and her knees would fold out from under her, dumping her in the abyss.
“Lily.” He says, as if breathless. Severus stares at her like he hasn’t seen her in years, his eyes darting over her face, her hair, her eyes, her lips.
She stares at him for a long moment, passerbys glaring at them for taking up space. Her fingers are starting to cramp around her umbrella, even through her gloves. “You’re leaving.”
Lily fights the tears but they come anyway, an unwelcome guest in their conversation lingering in her eyes. His face falls as her eyes well up, and he steps forward only to think better of it and step back once more.
“Yes.” He says, his face resolute once more.
“Why?” She demands back.
For a moment she fights with herself. Good riddance.
It’s better if he’s gone.
“You know why Lily.” When she doesn’t respond he gives in, elaborating. “I stayed here for you.”
Someone yells at their kid, two people joke with one another as they get on the train. It’s lighter now, the rain less severe.
He’ll be leaving any moment.
“Where are you going?”
“Charity has an extra room.” And then, like it’s the hardest thing he’s ever said: “Goodbye Lily.”
It becomes real then, him leaving. If she’s honest, part of her did know that Severus was only here because of her. He never had a place in that house, he always hated their town.
I love you. He’d said it, didn’t he? He laid it right out for her, plain and simple.
She almost shouts after him: I lied. I lied that day.
He would know what she meant, he’d come back, and they’d talk. He wouldn’t leave.
But she doesn’t.
Lily knows that she’s in love with Severus.
What could it possibly be, if not love?
Yet, simultaneously, she hopes that one day she’ll find something else. Something that proves to her that it wasn’t love at all, that love is something kinder that never ends.
She loves Severus, of course she does, but she hopes she never has to love this deeply again.
The love she has for him is so strong, so intense that she’s sure it’s killing them both. She can’t be near him, and she can’t be away. It rains when he’s there, and lightning strikes when he’s gone.
And she knows, deep down, Severus knows she loves him.
That’s why she couldn’t say it.
She’s supposed to be the brave one, she has to be. If she didn’t walk away they’d stay like that forever. Severus would never leave her or their town. The resentment would build, and build, and she’d hate him more than she already does.
He might even grow to hate her too.
Lily will never forgive him for what he said to her that day, she knows she won’t. She’s tried. The last weeks of school, since she’s been home. She’s tried her hardest to convince herself that she’s still who she was. But she isn’t.
And she knows, she knows that forgiveness takes time. Years, even.
But another deeper, truer part of herself knows that she can’t. If it were anybody else, Marlene, Mary, Potter. If it were anybody else, then maybe she could get over it.
In another world where true love is a kinder thing, where that once in a lifetime connection appeared everywhere, where she didn’t love him like she did, maybe she could let it go.
But that’s not the world they live in.
So she lets him go instead.
She watches him board the train, watches him glare at the driver, watches him sling his bag over his shoulder.
And when she’s sure that he can’t hear her, she whispers, just loud enough for her to hear it:
“I love you.”