Rising from Embers

RISING FROM EMBERS
by shiiki

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CHAPTER NINE

The Awakening

December, 1976 – January, 1977

Despite her vow never to see Lily again, Petunia had no choice but to do so in the following fortnight. Lily didn’t know where her sister went from the hospital; she stayed there overnight, tossing and turning until dawn as images of a car hurtling down an icy cliff plagued her tired mind. The next morning, she was discharged, and she wandered London for two hours before deciding she ought to return home. She spent ten Sickles on the Knight Bus to get home, but once there, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

Petunia came home three days later. A big, beefy man with a moustache escorted her to the door and patted her on the back before driving off in a mustard-coloured car. Petunia said nothing to Lily, accusing or otherwise, but went straight to the room that they shared and barricaded herself inside.

Christmas came and went. Lily wouldn’t have noticed, except she received owls from her friends, carrying Christmas greetings and gifts. She threw them aside without looking at them.

Petunia finally started talking to Lily again – to discuss the funeral. Lily didn’t even want to think about it. She let her sister make all the plans, and simply agreed to everything.

Even at the funeral – a sombre, silent affair – Lily didn’t shed a tear as she and Petunia buried their parents. Petunia wept throughout the ceremony: incessant tears poured silently down her cheeks, which she didn’t bother to wipe away. Few people turned up; they had no close living relatives, and Lily hadn’t owled back any of her friends. Those who arrived to offer their condolences were friends of Petunia’s (the beefy man appeared again) or neighbours. Lily simply stood quietly in a corner.

‘I have to go back to school,’ Lily told Petunia after the funeral. Term started again after the New Year. Lily could hardly summon enough energy to return to Hogwarts, but she couldn’t stay in the house, where memories of her parents haunted her every turn.

Petunia looked at her with cold, apathetic eyes. ‘Go, then. I don’t want to see you anyway.’

And that was that. Lily thought maybe she’d become encased in ice since the accident. Her sister’s hurtful words couldn’t seem to penetrate and reach her.

She returned to Hogwarts still feeling cold and hollow inside. On the Hogwarts Express, people who passed her stared. Lily found herself an empty compartment and sat staring out of the window until the train pulled into Hogsmeade station.

~ * ~

It was a week before the ice broke. A long week in which tired took on a new meaning. Point-blank exhaustion would be more precise, thought Lily, as she struggled to prop open her drooping eyelids and concentrate on what Professor McGonagall was saying.

It wasn’t any use; her brain was fatigued beyond absorbing. In the two weeks following her parents’ deaths, she had slept barely two or three hours a day. Or none at all. Part of her couldn’t even be bothered and wanted to hide away and mourn. But there was another part of her that had suddenly awakened, and was urging her to snap out of it.

She wondered what had suddenly changed. And then she looked around her and she knew. A peek at the radii of desks around her revealed her friends, in very much the same situation as her.

They were all exhausted. Worn out from countless nights staying up until the crack of dawn to sit with her in silence. Coaxing her to eat the food James and Sirius snuck out of the kitchens. Extending hands of comfort when nightmares shook her back to consciousness during the brief periods when weariness claimed her mind and body. Surrounding her with warmth and friendship … and love.

Alice was so pale, she could have joined Nearly-Headless-Nick as resident ghost of Gryffindor. James’s eyes were open with enormous effort, and even his thick black-framed glasses couldn’t mask the heavy bags hanging beneath them. Remus was nodding off; his head snapped back to attention, only to repeat this cycle every few seconds. Sirius had given in and was sound asleep on his desk. Dorcas’s back was ramrod-straight, but her eyes were glassy and unfocused. And Peter was in a complete daze.

Unconsciously, the icy wall that had gone up around her melted down. Her parents were gone, her sister wouldn’t speak to her, her best friend was long gone, but she wasn’t alone.

Lily found she appreciated it. She didn’t deserve their concern; and yet they were there for her now, when she sorely needed them. She would never have dared asked their help. But they had put themselves there, rallied themselves by her, and she was too grateful to push them away anymore.

Alice and Dorcas stayed with her that night, in the common room. Wedged between her two friends on the couch, Lily let the crackling fire lull her to sleep.

She dreamt, then, of her parents. Not the recurring nightmare of the car crash that had invaded her mind for the past weeks; just her mother and her father, standing before her, smiling and nodding.

Tiger, said her father. We love you. Let go.

Then they faded away, still beaming at her.

When Lily awoke, there was a strange wetness on her cheeks. She raised her hand slowly.

Tears.

Somewhere inside of her, a dam had broken. For the first time since the accident, she was crying. It felt strangely therapeutic – like a release of grief and guilt. And Lily realised something else too. With her tears, she was letting go.

She was saying goodbye.

~ * ~

The full moon came a week after the start of term. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs had been together in the Shrieking Shack as always, but James’s thoughts kept drifting to Lily.

It’d been a distressful week. Lily had been out of sorts since the Christmas break. She talked to no-one, not even the teachers. The first prefect meeting of the term had been a disaster, with the Head Girl looking like a wreck. Drucilla Malfoy had been quick to pounce on this. Lily had walked right out of the meeting, to the glee of the Slytherins. James’s first instinct was to run after her and make her tell him what was wrong, but he stayed, and tried to do his duty as Head Boy.

James found out the terrible news from Professor McGonagall; Lily had lost both her parents over Christmas.

He couldn’t help but ache for her then. Lily never shed a tear, but she walked around like a zombie, missed classes, and paced the common room nightly. He didn’t know if she was eating; from the pinched look of her face, he’d guessed she wasn’t.

The night he’d found out, he and Sirius had snuck down to Hogsmeade to bring back Butterbeer and Honeydukes’s best chocolate, hoping to tempt her appetite. She’d stared at them with hollow eyes and turned away.

James was still fretting over it when the Marauders returned to the common room at dawn. There, he got a shock.

Lily, Alice and Dorcas were squeezed together on the couch before the fire. Alice was dozing beside Lily, and Dorcas had her head buried in her arms on the other side of the couch. Lily, however, was still awake, her face glowing dimly in the firelight. She turned and his gaze locked on luminous green eyes. Wet luminous green eyes. James realized that there were tears on her cheeks.

‘Lily?’ he said softly. To his surprise, she shifted closer to Alice slightly, to make room for him. Awkwardly, he sat down next to her. Sirius grinned at him knowingly, and dragged Peter away.

She looked at him and smiled – the first smile that he had seen on her face since before the Christmas break.

‘I’m all right,’ she told him softly, reassuringly. James almost laughed in disbelief. ‘You should go up to bed,’ Lily continued. ‘You must be tired.’

She was tired, too. More so than him. Close to her, James could see that her eyes were bloodshot.

‘So should you.’

Lily closed her eyes and – the most amazing thing – she leant her head against his shoulder. James held his breath, scarcely believing it.

‘I know you’ve been worried,’ she murmured. ‘You’re a good friend, James.’

He let out his breath in a small whoosh of disappointment. Of course, she wouldn’t think of him as anything more than her friend. But then again, it was better than nothing. And she was all right. She was going to be fine. That was everything.

Lily’s eyes opened, but she didn’t move her head. James couldn’t see her expression; her gaze was cast towards the fire. He wished he dared put his arm around her, but he sensed that she wouldn’t be ready. Maybe – he hoped so, at least – that time would come someday later. But not now. Now he settled for the intense pleasure of having Lily rest her head against him, of being a friend she could depend on tonight.

His shoulder got numb, but he didn’t move a muscle, and neither did she, until the sun was blaring against the thick drapes. Lily was still awake, staring blankly into space in front of her.

The pressure on his shoulder disappeared as Lily raised her head and gently tried to stand without disturbing Alice. James jumped to his feet immediately, to allow her room to manoeuvre herself off the couch.

‘You’re still awake,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Thank you. I’m – I’m really OK now. I think I’ve – made my peace with it.’

James wondered what had happened before he’d arrived, what deep thoughts had stirred Lily’s mind and brought her out of the depression she’d been in the past week, and decided that whatever had transpired in her head, he didn’t need to pry; he was simply relieved.

Dorcas stretched and yawned. She looked around curiously.

‘What time is it? When did you come down, James? Lily, are you all right?’

Lily placed a reassuring hand on Dorcas’s arm.

‘I thought it through last night, Dorcas. I’m OK now. Thank you.’

‘Really?’

Lily nodded. ‘We ought to get some sleep today.’ She glanced at Alice. ‘I don’t have the heart to wake her, though.’

‘I could help you carry her up …’ James offered. Lily shook her head.

‘Don’t forget, you can’t get past our stairs,’ she reminded him. He’d forgotten that the stairwell to the girls’ dormitories was magically activated against male entry.

Dorcas shook Alice lightly. She came to slowly, blinking against the sunlight streaming into the room. Dorcas whispered something in her ear and she nodded.

James watched the girls climb the stairs to their dormitory, Lily with slow but steady steps. He was relieved to see that something in her posture had indeed changed; the ‘real’ Lily had returned, to replace the brittle mask of her true self that had been present just before.

And it struck him that now, she was slowly piecing what was left of her world back together, the same way that she tried to hold the school in one piece, with a strength that only Lily could possess.

It only made him love her more.

~ * ~

It wasn’t easy for Lily to return her focus to school.

Her homework was piled sky-high on the table in front of her.

Her other troubles weren’t quite so overtly laid out, but they were no lower than the work.

Lily wished she could just fall asleep and wake up to find everything solved: the work miraculously completed, her worries incredibly vanished.

At this point, though, any kind of sleep would be a relief.

Sleep, however, was a luxury that she couldn’t afford now. A quick glance at her watch told her she had only fifteen minutes before the Prefect meeting. If she hurried, she could complete her Potions essay. Lily pulled her Potions text across the table, flipped it open, and tried to bully her brains into writing a five-foot-long essay.

~ * ~

The fire in the hearth was crackling. Lily slid sleepily into consciousness, wondering how a fire had got into the dormitory.

Wait. This wasn’t her dormitory. Lily sat bolt upright on the sofa. Her blanket fell to the floor in a heap.

James was sitting on the rug before the fire, tending to it with a poker. The rest of the common room was empty.

‘There’s a prefect meeting,’ Lily said aloud.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said James. ‘I’ve got the notes for you.’

‘I missed the meeting?’ Lily felt scandalised. She must have fallen asleep over her work … ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘Relax, Lily. I told them you weren’t well. Don’t argue – you needed the sleep and you know it!’ He gave her a mock-stern glare, and she gave in.

‘All right, all right. I – well, thanks.’ He was right. The few hours – she was shocked to find it was one in the morning – had done a world of good.

‘James,’ she said suddenly.

‘Yeah?’

‘I fell asleep at the table, didn’t I?’

‘Er – I suppose so.’

‘How did I get here, then? And –’ she held up the blanket suspiciously ‘– where did this come from?’

James didn’t answer, but the way he was avoiding her eyes and turning red was indication enough.

He’d carried her to the softer couch. He’d brought the blanket. He’d kept the fire going. James had watched over her.

And he would keep on doing so, Lily realised.

Deep down inside her, Lily knew James Potter loved her. It wasn’t something she cared to admit, though. She was happy with him as her friend, and he was perceptive enough to know she didn’t want anything more from him. So she had blithely ignored the fact, and so far it hadn’t really troubled either of them for a long time.

She still wasn’t sure if she was willing to give him a chance at a relationship. But he was always there, and she had come to trust him again.

‘Thanks, James,’ she told him, with a smile to tell him plainly that she understood what he was doing, and appreciated it. He looked up then and grinned sheepishly.

Lily calculated that she could finish at least half her stack of work by breakfast. But James caught her wrist before she could sit back at her table.

‘I’ve got work to do,’ she protested firmly.

‘You’re going to sleep,’ he told her, equally firm. Lily opened her mouth to object, but something in his eyes made her shut it and give in. It wasn’t like she didn’t need the sleep anyway; quite the contrary, in fact: she was rather desperate for it. She nodded, and James released her quickly, looking both relieved and slightly embarrassed at his success.

‘Good night, James,’ she said softly, and on impulse, leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

She didn’t stay to watch his reaction – part of her was amazed at her daring. But somewhere in her mind, Lily knew it was appropriate.

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A/N: Once again, I find myself apologising for the long wait in between chapters. I keep wanting to get them up earlier, I really do, but then other things get in the way. *glares at RL* Thank you all for bearing with me. I hope this chapter made up for some of the wait!

I don’t know when the next chapter will be up – probably not very soon, as I’ve got camp and a holiday trip back to back next week. And I think I’ll make sure the chapter after the next is coming along as well, because I don’t want to torture you with a wait between the next two chapters. *wink*
-shiiki