Jily oneshots

Force of Habit

done by elanev91 on fanfiction.net

It's really easy to develop patterns.

Without even realising it, you end up eating the same thing for breakfast every morning, wearing the same five outfits, more or less, on rotation. You develop habits — like going to the library every Saturday afternoon to choose the next week's read and stopping by the shop every Thursday evening on your way home from work (why Thursday? No reason) to get groceries for the week ahead — and no matter how much those self care, lifestyle experts tell you that you need to be intentional about these sorts of things, it's always easier to let them just happen to you. To fall into them without bothering yourself about them.

Because there's something comforting about patterns. When you don't have a life, when you don't have anything else going on, you always have your routines. You have reasons that you would have to turn down a drinks invitation, assuming you'd ever get one, because, oh, well, actually, you like to take your mum's dog out for really long walks on Friday nights because mum can't take her out like that anymore and, you know, Radar gets restless if she doesn't get her walks. And you can't let Radar down.

Marlene insists — because Marlene always bloody insists — that these little routines of Lily's are really just a way to avoid doing anything different, but if Lily ignores her whenever she says this, or effectively deflects the criticism, then it doesn't count. And, no matter what Marlene says, Lily's right, she thinks, in arguing that there is some use in letting herself live inside the groove of her routines.

Grooves which are definitely not, as Marlene insists, ruts.

She's just….

She's just still getting used to everything.

Because Lily had moved, quite suddenly, back home to Ardsley twenty seven months ago. She'd been in her last year of university, her last term, actually, and then her dad….

Her dad.

Her dad had worked in the mines, coming up right around the time that everything was starting to go to utter shit — cheers, Maggie — and he'd had to jump around colliery to colliery through the Dearne Valley as mine after mine found itself shut down. Lily couldn't remember most of it — she was born in '89, and her dad had finally gotten stable employment at Grimethorpe then — but she remembered him moving down to Goldthorpe the year the Grimethorpe mine closed, remembered how he rode the bus every day for a year, leaving well early and coming back, his neck smudged with the coal dust he hadn't caught, so late at night that Lily barely got more than two seconds to say goodnight.

And even though she knew that mining was bad — her father, even in those early days, had a hacking cough that Lily could hear through the walls of their house, and she learnt later that coal, burning coal, was trapping the heat close to the planet and was, one day, going to drown them all if they didn't do something about it, but even though she knew it was bad, mining was also the only thing that her father knew how to do, the only thing that so many men in her village knew how to do. She wanted a different future for him, one that cleared his lungs of the soot she saw on his handkerchiefs, one that didn't melt the ice at the ends of the world, but Lily knew, even then, even when she was young, that they were living in a country that didn't care about people like her father. That would sooner see them out of work to punish the unions than help retrain them to do something better. Something that wouldn't fill their lungs with poison.

When Lily went to university, she learnt that it wasn't just people like her father that this country didn't care about.

But she'd left uni, left London — it was too big for her anyway, too much — and she came back to Ardsley and, now, she's just never left. Her sister lives in Surrey, the fucking prat, is always calling home and talking to mum, and Lily can hear her wiping the North out of her accent with each passing phone call, can hear her starting to adjust herself to fit into this new, posher place than the place that she came from, and it pisses Lily off to no end, this erasure.