Lily?
Clear blue water,
high tide came and brought you in.
- This Love, Taylor Swift
The rise of the tide brings the fall of the shore.
On a Sunday night in mid April, a girl is washed up on the sand.
She has hair like the everlasting glow of the sun, a rare flame in an expanse of water. They'll say she came out of nowhere, from nowhere, with no one. She appears devoid of the freckles the used to wear, with translucent skin showing through a white dress that sticks and melds with her flesh. They'll call her revival a beautiful miracle, drifting up from the depths below, beckoned from the heavens above.
Below, in a kingdom forgotten by those who banished it's inhabitants, a girl with hair like snow watches her go. A tear falls, and nobody is there to see it.
༄༄༄༄
Tell me once again,
I could have been anyone, anyone else.
- The Moon Will Sing, The Crane Wives
The world appears to her flush with the air of rain. She blinks away the sting in her eyes from too much sleep.
I think she's waking up, She hears somebody say, Lily?
She feels lifeless, drained of everything but her body. Her muscles ache, her skin stretching too tight over her weakened bones. Mentally, she is nowhere, and she is everywhere.
Lily can you hear me?
Colors dance around her vision. The vague figures she sees slowly come into fruition. A tall man with scars.
"Remus?" Her voice is scratchy, unlike her own.
"Hey red," He offers her water and she takes it gratefully, downing it instantly. "How do you feel?"
Lily rubs her eyes and takes in the room she's in. It's small, fairly modest, with very little in it. It reminds her of the rooms her dad used to have, the ones in their home back East. The walls are a dull beige but they're lit up by the window taking up the back wall. The curtains have little sunflowers stitched into the blue fishnet fabric. In the corner is a small wooden boat, one built for rowing in shallow water. Beside that there isn't much, a small yellow chair in the corner, maroon sheets tucked under her chin.
"Cold." She replies, attempting to sink further into the bed.
"Well, you did drown. So, you know." Says a new voice, one she hadn't noticed before.
"Marlene." Remus replies warningly.
"Well She did!" Lily hears, distantly. Her mind fades, and she begins to struggle to stay present.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry love. Soft as a whisper, gentle as a caress.
She jolts up violently and they rush to accommodate her. Lily hears Remus curse, and her head pounds with sharp bouts of pain. The room feels like snow, biting in it's lack of warmth. "I drowned?" She asked incredulously, "When?"
Remus pulls back like he's been hit, staring at her like she's having a breakdown. "Lily," He grimaces. "You've been gone for nineteen hours."
༄༄༄༄
Everything happens all at once.
She's taken to the dining room of Hope Lupins house, she fights Remus and Marlene for information the entire way there. Lily is a whirlwind, a hurricane, and she cannot stop.
She's thrown into several hugs when she arrives, all by her friends, people shivering with anxiety and overflowing with relief. James, Dorcas, Peter, Mary. Albus sits at the head of the table with a straight back and an amused expression. She's sat down, force fed food that tastes of acid, and then she sits and listens to everybody debate what happened to her as if she isn't even there.
"T' was the bloody sirens." Peter explains, mouth full.
James comments next, "I didn't even know there were sirens in Wales."
"-None of us did. Anyway, if she's here there's literally no way it was a siren." Mary cuts in sharply.
As they continue, she finds herself drifting. It's like she's on a single lifeboat caught in the deep end. Her toes can't touch the ground, and her arms are too tired to swim. So instead she falls under the water, and back into her mind.
Lily is at her dads house. Her parents are alive, and sat on their swinging bench on the porch.
What other creature lures people out to sea?
She wanders through the field of morning glories in their yard, acres and acres of land they own. The sun is slow, rising in the East. Even still, it washes over her in a wave of gold. Her mum laughs at something her dad has said. Lily runs faster.
A vile one. Whatever it was, something kept her under. Alive.
The scenes gone all wrong. The flowers grow taller the faster she runs, she door shifts and the windows change shape of their own accord. No matter how hard she pumps her legs she can never quite reach them. It's wrong. All of it. None of it is how she remembers her childhood home and yet it transforms continuously anyway.
Lily, you have to tell us what happened.
She feels a tear slip through her eyelids and for a second she doesn't even know if it's really anymore.
Lily, can you hear me?
Her vision fades.
Lily?
༄༄༄༄
Outside the window a small child with big hazel eyes chases another with a baseball cap and blue swimming trunks. They stumble over themselves, giggling without a care in the world. One trips over the other and they both go tumbling to the ground, sand sticking to their clothes and weaving itself into their hair. It's still raining, and Lily can't help but wonder if their mothers know that they're outside in the rain. The tides are ruthless in the wind. It'll eat you, she thinks absently.
Apparently, the rehabilitation after 'coming back to life' is really fucking boring, and if she's honest she's gone a little insane with it.
It's been a month and she was only allowed her books to research what actually happened to her two weeks ago. Before that everybody was afraid she'd fling herself off the dock or faint the second she saw the word 'siren', which was annoying.
Lily understands their concern, which is why she feels slightly bad that she made everybody's life hell those first two weeks. If there's one thing Lily hates, it's not being in control. Since then she's been pouring over every book she can, everything on sirens she already knew. Everything tells her the same thing, once a sirens called you never go back. The ocean never gives you back.
Sometimes, she finds herself getting conspiratorial. Sometimes she finds herself thinking the ocean always had her. She remembers when her parents took her camping as a child they said that she always tried to run off to the water, even before she could swim. The ocean has always been a constant in her life, something that was always there in the background. The soft sounds of the waves from the beach she lived by, the way it just washed everything else away when in her line of sight. Her mum used to say that the ocean belonged to her; but in truth she was always in it's possession. Unable to look away, helplessly drawn to it.
Petunia thought it was stupid, she'd spend hours whining about how much their father had them go out on the boat. Lily thinks that's why she did it, why she does it even now. Why she married Vernon Dursley, the man who hunts sea creatures for a living. Because she gets to be his perfect wife, knowing that she gets to ruin the things Lily loves without lifting a finger. She's hurt Petunia before, she's sure of it, but she never would've done that to her.
The stark-white door opens with a creak. Mary winces in the doorway and pears at Lily, sat on her bed around piles of books.
"You coming to dinner Lils? We've been calling you."
She smiles apologetically, because she knows she must look frazzled. Several of the books are marked up with sticky notes jam-packed, spilling out of every crevice between the pages. There's a small cup of tea on one of the closed ones, precariously balanced and still half-full. Her hair is in a hap-hazard braid off to the side and she's still in her pajama pants.
Lily takes in Mary's put together appearance, wearing a short dusty-pink sundress and her ringlet curls in a bun atop her head.
"Yeah, sorry, I was just-"
Her friend waves her off with a small laugh and comes to sit down next to her, careful to lift the cup of tea before putting it down as not to spill it. "Find anything?"
If she had to choose a best-friend between all her friends (even though she believes that they can all be her best friends and choosing is not only rude but unnecessary) she'd pick the enigma that is Mary Macdonald. Along with her other friends, they met in Hogwarts, a small boarding school on Scotland. She likes to think that they got each other through it. People always tended to underestimate Mary, seeing her for her self-preservation and flirtatious personality and writing her off as a 'bimbo'. Mary's had a hard life, though. She has a way of seeing through people, and becoming whatever she needs to survive. She isn't dumb, she never was, she's just an adapter.
That's why Lily was the only one who understood why Mary didn't go on voyages with them. Unlike her friends, she didn't possess the need to see more, to become more. That in itself is the bravest thing she knows.
She sighs and rubs her eyelids, "No. Nothing I haven't already heard."
"I don't think anybody knows the ocean like we think we do love. It's fruitless." She carefully takes out Lily's braid and fans her hair over her shoulders, "Why don't you change and come with us to dinner this time? You look like you could use some time away."
Lily deflates and nods, Mary beams back at her.
༄༄༄༄
Later that night James finds her on the porch. It's close to the shore, so she can see the stars reflecting on the water like a black hole of a million tiny lights.
Lily and James have always shared a insomnia as a common enemy. Most of it is self-developed, Lily staying up all night powering through her coursework so she could get ahead, and James sneaking out to the football field to get some extra practice in.
It's the first thing that they really, truly bonded over. She's always thought fondly of the late nights at school, silently leaving each other cups of coffee, chatting quietly in the common room whilst nobody else was awake.
So she's not surprised James is up, or that he found her, because he always tends to have his ways. He clears his throat and leans against the wooden railing, staring out into the expanse of darkness that Lily can't quite look away from. She wants to ask him if he sees it too. If he feels it, the pull in his heart. She wants to ask him if he's only sailing because his dad loves it, or if it's because the sea herself has captivated him too.
"It's really dark tonight," He comments in a hushed voice, running his hand through his black curls.
Lily finally drags her eyes away to take him in. The porch light glows golden, giving him a halo around his head. She always thought that he looked a little like a deer. Big black eyes with eyelashes she'd kill for, light brown skin and golden freckles like little kisses all over his face. He seems anxious under her gaze so she draws it away once more.
It always awed her, the fickleness of emotions. She'd hated him once, what seems like ages ago, for somebody who she loved more than he ever deserved. And then she loved him tenfold. Lily was always so wrapped up in it, love. She never quite grasped how to do it normally, or in moderation. Lily Evans doesn't just love with her heart; it's her entire being. She'll never be entirely sure if she was in love with him, but whatever love she felt for him was enough for a while there. In the end it was James who ended it, there's too much love between them, and not enough words to contain it. It was never the right place, or the right amount, and it just didn't quite work out. Both of their parents died as they tried to adjust to being adults, and love is hard when you can't even breathe.
"But the nights' alive, don't you think?" Lily replies, taking in the low buzz of the night. The rustle of the trees, the waves, the laughter of a couple down the road.
He laughs and shakes his head, "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Make everything sound beautiful."
Lily shakes her head, joining in while he laughs. She looks over when it dies down, and he's studying her.
"What happened in the sea Lily?" He asks quietly, "You were dead. We saw you die."
His voice cracks, and for the first time it fully sinks in how it must've felt for everybody else. Lily went under, but they all saw it happen. She wishes she had a better answer for him other than what she gives, "I don't know James," She moves to a whisper, "I don't know."
She's surprised at how easily he takes this answer. Lily's said it about a million times since she came back and he never seemed to believe it, but now his jaw hardens in resolve and he nods. For a while they're silent, just staring ahead of them until James decides to speak again.
"You know, I always sort of felt that the ocean was your 'true love,'" She stares at him incredulously, "Like there were three people in our relationship. Me, you, and her." He nods to the water.
There's not a day that goes by that Lily hasn't wished she could've loved James better. That she could've taken away all of the ugly bits and given him good instead. But in the end he's right; she'll always long for more. She'll always itch beneath her skin, she'll swear that she's fine with a mundane life, but she'll always throw herself on a sinking ship just to feel splinters in her skin.
She doesn't respond. She doesn't know how.
"If you say the sirens took you I believe you." James says instead.
Lily nods, and he follows. For a while they just stare at each other, and something passes between them. She thinks that James understands her then, and in turn she understands him. That he tries, so, so hard to be a good person. His entire life revolves around doing everything he can to be good. Following in his fathers footsteps, taking up cooking for his mother and fishing for Peter. James Potter is a beautiful, strange, ridged man who hasn't let himself be selfish a day in his life.
And her? Irrevocably, and fundamentally broken.
༄༄༄༄
After a restless sleep, Lily wakes up in a room washed with blue. It's dark, early morning. Her tounge swells, the taste of salt stuck on her lips. The window frames the moon outside, blinding in it's persistent light. There's whispering somewhere, if she really listens. A voice that drifts through the house, seemingly coming from all directions.
Go back to sleep.
Over, and over, and over again. Every time it's in a smooth voice of silk, like a melody.
Lily isn't stupid. She's crazy, perhaps, but she isn't stupid. She knows it's a siren. She knows. She's completely, fully, and entirely well aware that she gets up because she cannot help it. With every step she takes she's sure that she will die. That this is the end. The end, that feels like cool water in the summer and the soft petals of full-grown flowers.
She's been trained for this. 'If you're ever tempted, plug your ears with wax and stay put'. It was her father that taught her, that told her over and over again how dangerous sirens were. Albus chose her for this voyage because he knew that she was capable of resisting. He let her off the last time because they hadn't had wax at the camp, and she'd been caught off-guard, too close to the shore.
But it's happening again.
And she bypasses the wax on her dresser without a second thought.
The only thought in her mind, repeating like a broken record, is that she has to know. She'll go mental before they can even capture her if she doesn't know what happened to her. Even if everybody has told her otherwise, she knows with her entire body, and her entire soul that she was pushed out of the tides by a siren.
One with silky white hair and scales covering her skin. The face she saw, in a flash, before she woke up. At first she tried to convince herself it had been the blinding lights from the rescue helicopter, or the moon winking down at her with a threat. So she can't help but feel a little bit of delirious pride when she finds her on a rock outside.
Found you, she thinks.
She notices the siren before she notices the world around her. Her presence has a way of warping her surroundings, turning them into simple obsolete objects in the background. The water is calm, yielding to the sky in an endless sheet, only slightly darker than the pale blue sky. She absently imagines reaching out, and running her hand over it. Because everything looks smaller from a distance, in her mind her hand is big enough to sweep over all of it. Lily has never seen a body of water so still, or anything for that matter. It's as if the Earth has paused to take a breath, and she's been caught between the inhale and the gust of wind following that.
The siren is how she remembers her, only more real. She's more human than the myths say, with long legs stretching into the water, only barely grazing the surface below. Her eyes are a bright blue, Lily imagines that they open and close the same hers do. Her lips are a full pale pink, and the skin is covered in patches of scales. In the light, they're more blue than white but only just. She feels as though she can't comprehend her, like what she's seeing is inadequate in a way she can't wrap her head around.
When she walks over and sits down on the patch of sand next to the sirens rock she is not afraid; she feels a strange serenity.
"Hello Lily Evans," Her voice is quiet, but Lily feels it in her entire body. "It's quite late, you should go back to bed."
"So you've told me." She counters, pleasantly surprised with how level her voice sounds. "How do you know my name?"
The siren gazes at her, amusement dancing behind her eyes. She ignores her question, "Do you think the moon gets sad? I imagine it's lonely up there without the sun, no?"
Lily looks up to the moon, how it washes over the water and causes it to glisten. "The moon being lonely implies that the sun and the moon know one another."
"They could've, don't you think?" The siren replies. If she's surprised that Lily is humoring her she doesn't show it. "Either way, the absent presence of what could've been is just as lonely if you ask me. The moon is always too late by a little, and no matter how hard it tries the sun will always be just out of reach."
The siren raises her arm while she talks, as if to pluck the moon out of the sky all on her own. She looks pensive as if this metaphor decides her fate.
"You're a brave soul Lily Evans, but you have a beautiful mind," The siren looks back at her, "I tried to stop you, you know. But you'd already made up your mind."
"Why did you? Sirens aren't known for kindness. I have to know. Who took me, all of it."
A beat. And then, "It wasn't me."
"But you're the one who let me go. Why?" It's a statement that doesn't leave any room for argument.
The siren looks taken aback. Suddenly, she stands, the water runs past her ankles as if she isn't even there. "It's been nice, Lily Evans."
She goes to walk further into the ocean. Lily will never understand why she did it, what could've possessed her. Her skin is soft, as if it's not flesh at all. It's cold to the touch in a way that almost causes her to draw her hand away.
"What's you're name?"
She takes a moment to respond, opening her mouth and closing it several times before whispering, "Pandora."
"Stay, Pandora. Stay."
She thinks, in that moment, that she needs her to stay. She needs her to look at her with her oceanic eyes. She needs to know why she did it. Why she's still alive. What happened in those nineteen hours she was gone. Where she was, who she was with. Was she breathing, underwater? Was she still herself if she doesn't even remember it? Why did she save her? What does she see in her that she can't see in herself?
But more than that, Lily wants her to stay. She's so, so selfish because she wants the sun to stay hidden. She wants the moon to consume the sky. She wants cold weather, and riddled conversation. And she wants, so desperately, everything that sirens are supposed to promise. Enlightenment. A better life. She'd sit on this sand forever if it meant that she didn't have to go back to the life she lives. One where her parents are dead, and it's her fault. One where her sister won't speak to her, and James can hardly look at her.
When she was little she was told about sirens. Their lies, the deceit. How they lure sailors to their death with kind words and promises of a better place. They're supposed to show you everything you're missing.
She wants pandora to stay because she looks like the ocean, and Lily would swim forever if she could.
Pandora's eyes grow wider, glossing over. She moves her arm so fast Lily's fingernails dig into her flesh.
When she's freed, there are four scratch marks engraved into her skin. From it, a drop of blood.
It digs itself into Lily's heart. Never being able to let go without leaving claw marks. Always wanting more. Never satisfied with enough.
Lily doesn't have time to react, because Pandora is gone before she can take a breath.