Smoke Signals
"You, you must've been looking for me."
Across the bridge, over the lake, are the words “Marry me” written in the sky. The plane looks so little from where she stands, like a toy for a doll. Lily can see the couple, across the water. A brunette girl gasps up at the clouds, Lily can almost hear the little “For me?” The girl exclaims.
She thinks about how rare it is.
Most planes fly an average of 30,000 feet, which is so high that the couple could’ve been anywhere. But they’re right in front of her.
The girl nods a shaky yes and throws her arms around her new fiancé. Lily hopes they’re happy. That they live a great life together with a white picket fence and two gap-toothed kids. She hopes they get everything they want, and that she never has to see another happy couple again.
Lily goes back to her coursework, she’ll be done with uni in two years, and hopefully she’ll start teaching after that. If everything goes to plan, that is, which it rarely does.
Her legs dangle, loafers grazing the water below her. James says she shouldn’t sit on the ledge of bridges, no matter how close to the water it is. He says she’ll fall. They aren’t together now, as of last week. She wishes she felt hurt– or anything, really. James cried when they broke it off. He always does. They’ve been down this road before.
Learning the right melodies to different songs, never quite working out. Lily’s too focused on her career, she can never let things go. And James is… James. He’s perfect to her, really. But it always ends the same way.
They’ll be going out again by next week, and off again next month.
They used to stay together longer, but Lily grew up, sometimes she thinks she might’ve grown out as well.
She’s halfway through an essay on sirens for her mythology course when she hears it. Footsteps, nothing, really. But somehow she knows. Before she even sees him she knows. They stop in their tracks before she can even look up.
“Lily?”
He sounds the same. Is the first thing she thinks. He sounds exactly like he used to.
“Severus… hello.” She says, unsure of what to say.
He looks older, different in ways she hadn’t prepared for. She hadn’t prepared at all, actually.
Lily never thought she’d see him again.
His hair is a little shorter, like he just got it cut, curling behind his ears. Severus’s nose is flushed from the cold, and he sniffles every couple of seconds. But he’s taller, and for some reason that almost makes her cry. He’s taller than her now.
It’s been five years.
Looking at him is like a window, into everything she wanted to forget so badly. Everything she tried so desperately to let go of.
She can almost see it like she's there. Like she’s fifteen years old in the dead of night, laughing as she runs to the car Severus hardly knew how to drive. They spent that entire night swearing they were going to drive away, somewhere where their families couldn’t get to them.
Lily can almost feel the wind in her hair.
Severus appears stunned, hands in his coat pockets, staring at her doe-eyed. He looks at her as if she’s just come back from the dead, like she’s not even real.
She’s just as stunned, if she’s honest. Part of her, a childish insane part, feels giddy with it. Lily Evans plans for everything, she’s rarely caught off guard. But she was never prepared for him. Not when she was nine years old, and not now when she’s twenty one. Her mind spins, runs itself in circles and she has no idea what to do, or how to react.
“Here,” She pats the ledge next to her. “Sit.”
It’s half a test, and she feels that same anger flare up in her stomach. It’s not the same, it’s duller now, and part of her is too tired to feel it. But she wants to see– she needs to know if he’ll run.
He doesn’t.
Severus walks over, wordlessly with shaky knees and hauls himself onto the ledge. He has to hold his legs in the air a bit so they don’t fall into the water. It almost makes her laugh, because really he looks quite silly.
For a moment they just stare, Lily intent on the sky and Severus on the water. Finally, when he looks up at the sky and scoffs.
Lily laughs under her breath. “I think it’s sweet. You should’ve seen the girl, she was so happy.”
He gives her a sidelong look. “It’s…” He gives her that look again, and stops his sentence as if he’s distracted. “Grand.”
Severus says it like it’s a bad thing, and she knows that to the two of them it is. She hopes the couple are happy, but she would’ve hated that gesture. Words in the sky, in public, it’s too much. Lily always thought grand gestures were incredibly presumptuous.
He knew that.
He knows her.
“I haven’t heard from you in a while.” Which is the understatement of the century, obviously. But Lily was always good at feigning indifference. Internally, her heart pounds to a beat that sounds like shared laughs and the engine of that old car.
It hurt her a little, after they fell out he never tried to reach out, he never tried to fix things. She really expected him to, for whatever reason.
“I assumed you didn’t want me writing anymore.” His hands are intertwined in his lap, his dark eyebrows furrowed.
She turns to him fully this time, her knees grazing his. “What?”
He says it slowly, like it’s obvious: “I wrote to you, after we graduated– You never—”
You never answered.
But she would’ve. She knows she would’ve. If she’d known.
Lily gives him a sad look. “I never got any letters, Severus.”
It hits her then– in a rush. She was so distraught after they fell out, she barely got out of bed for weeks. She’d sit in front of her mum's old TV with antennas and watch VHS tapes while eating kids cereal all day, tears rolling down her face without her realizing it.
Petunia hated Severus, and it only grew after that.
She lets out a shaky breath. “You addressed them to my parents' house, didn’t you?”
Severus opens his mouth and closes it again, his eyes fluttering closed. “Shit.”
Lily laughs. It feels so surreal, and saddening. But strangely she doesn’t feel empty anymore. If she saw him two years ago she might’ve cried, or screamed. It’s not then, though. Somehow, the years passed, and the scars healed over.
It still scrapes her, and her heart whines painfully as she looks at him, but she’s okay.
The scary thing happened.
She’s seeing him again.
And she’s okay.
Lily gets up, deciding she can finish her essay later.
“Come on.” She puts her hands on her hips and says it like a demand. “Let’s go for a drive.”
When they were kids, they spent all their time together. They used to sneak out at night with tattered raincoats and sacks of clothing, giggling about running away just so they could be together all the time.
It wasn’t necessarily healthy, she has enough sense to see that. They never hung out with other kids, they refused. No other kid could have possibly been as smart as them, or as funny. They never got sick of each other, even if it was just sitting in silence.
You can't get sick of something you're addicted to.
It resulted in them turning into the same person.
Lily loved Severus like she loved herself. It was full of resentment, and a little hatred, but pure in a way that came natural to her. She looked out for herself: and she loved Severus like breathing. She needed him, needed that love like oxygen.
Even now, watching him walk through the isles of a corner store, she sees herself in him. Little things. The way he taps the pads of his middle finger against his thumb, or the way he shakes his head when he gets lost in it.
She watches as he looks at the ice cream, and she knows instinctively what he’ll pick. Because it’s what she’s going to pick.
Lily used to think their meeting was fate. Part of her still thinks it was, that little glowing fraction of her heart that still believes in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
Another part of her thinks it’s something darker, a curse, maybe.
But most of her, now, thinks that it was just happenstance. She thinks they were two fucked up kids who ended up connecting.
And that’s okay. Because most people don’t get that kind of connection in their entire lifetime. Most people don’t know instinctively that someone would try and come back to them.
Most people don’t know,
She thinks as she watches Severus pick up a pint of mint chocolate chip,
everything.
Wordlessly, Lily picks up mint chocolate chip for herself, and shakes her head to clear it.
The two houses watch them from beyond Lily’s windshield. One is painted a light pink, with floral stained glass windows and a garden out in the front. The other is a dull beige with a brown door and a dead tree.
It’s funny how both of them were suffocating.
She hadn’t planned to drive to their childhood homes, but it felt fitting.
They’ve hardly spoken since they saw each other. They never really needed words in the first place, though.
Her phone bings on her lap, James.
Can we talk?
Severus must've seen it, because his nostrils flare and he looks out the window.
“Potter? You’re still with him?”
She scoffs. “And if I was?
“He’s not-“
“What? Good? None of us are.”
Lily used to believe in the good in the world, wholeheartedly she believed that everybody was good. She thinks, now, that there’s no such thing as a good person. You are the things that you do.
“I’m not with James at the moment. But it’s not your business if I am.”
You don’t know me anymore, She wants to add. But she can’t. Because that would be a lie.
He does know her. As easily as she knows him.
She can feel it, as he eats his ice cream with one of the plastic spoons she keeps in the back, she can feel the words on the tip of his tongue.
Do you love him?
He won’t ask, and she won’t have to answer. But if he did, she would’ve told him the truth.
No, She would’ve said. I should. And I want to. But I don’t.
I wish I did.
I wish for a lot of things.
Severus doesn’t ask, because deep down, he already knows.
“Okay.” Severus says in response, his voice quiet. They take a bite at the same time.
She wants to ask him if he’s happy, if he has friends, where he lives, what he does. Is he working? Does he still talk to his mum? Does he still talk to Mulciber? Charity?
So, she does.
It’s easy, and not at all what they should be talking about, but there’s no rulebook for these kinds of things.
It’s odd how you can know someone so intricately and not even know where they live.
As it turns out, Severus still talks to his friends, but mostly Charity and Aurora. His mum died last year. (Lily frowns, she always liked Eileen.) He lives in a flat in London.
“Are you happy?” She asks after thirty minutes straight of asking questions, barely letting him get a word in that isn’t an answer.
“I’m not sure.” He answers honestly, looking down.
And she wants him to be happy, she does. Despite everything, she wants him to be happy.
She remembers when the police found them after they ran away. Two fifteen year olds who made it three nights in France before they were brought back home. They weren’t even disappointed, by then they’d gotten their fix of spending all their money on cheap hotels and were ready to go back home.
Her mum had asked her why she did it, and she said she didn’t know.
Yes you do. She’d replied.
Lily used to forget, then, that her mum had been in love once too.
Severus asks her some questions too, lighter, surface level ones. And she answers. She lives in London too, she’s in university studying to be a professor.
After they’ve both run out of questions and answers they already knew, she gives him a long look.
“I don’t forgive you.” She says, because he won’t ask.
He looks down at his empty bowl. “I know.”
“But,” She smiles a bit “I don’t want you to be a stranger, okay?”
And with a small smile on his face, she knows.
She may never forgive him, and she may never get to read those letters. But they'll be okay.
They’ll be okay.