DAYS OF THE MARAUDERS [eng]

Chapter 14. Rain in a drought

The tall, dry grass parted in front of Lily with a soft rustle, lightly scratching her bare feet.

The hot ground burned through the soles of her sandals, and despite the early morning, the sun burned mercilessly from a bright blue sky. A sweltering silence fell around them, broken only by the sound of grasshoppers and the soft murmur of the river Lily was heading towards.

This year's summer had gone completely mad and decided to drive the entire population of England mad at the same time. August swept through the country with a series of fires, a suffocating drought, and terrible thunderstorms that flooded several counties. 

Every night the news reported on people killed by lightning, a hurricane that ripped roofs off buildings, and a series of riots in the heart of the city that left a huge number of victims.

All of these events reeked so strongly of Death Eaters and black magic that Lily could only shake her head when the news anchors wrote them off as some ridiculous flare-up in the sun.
The Daily Prophet said the Death Eaters were catching Muggle-born wizards at the border, "like gold diggers looking for stones," as the strange journalist wrote. The Dark Forces had the country in a lockdown, and yet, despite the fear and the great risk of being caught, wizards were fleeing the country in panic, and that month Lily received a stack of farewell letters from her old, good school friends, letters that were difficult to read because of the wet ink.

The truck with the furniture had left early to get to the airport. We had to take only our personal belongings... and leave on our own.

It was hard to stay in the empty rooms. I wanted to sit on the sofa that had been taken away, to turn on the TV that had been turned off, or to heat the packed kettle in the missing kitchen. From the bare corners, the life I had lived in this house stared back at me with reproach. Unable to bear the sound of the sad echoes in her own rooms, Lily went outside in the morning and helped her father load things into the car. It was too dangerous to use magic now, so the process took a long time, and Lily was glad when her father let her go for a walk to her favorite river before they left.

Lily walked down the hill, overwhelmed by the clean smell of the river and the spicy, pungent scent of wormwood.

The water purred, rolling small round pebbles along the bank. The river grass and water lilies, slightly rotten in the sun, smelled good.

Lily began to undo the buttons on her dress.

Stripping down to her underwear, she stepped into the water, the cold burning her feet, but Lily moved forward with determination, reaching her waist and diving into the icy, sunlit water. As a child, she often came here to swim. At first, alone, Petunia would grimace at the sight of the wild water. And then — with Severus. And more recently, with Alice, when she came to say goodbye...

Lily was about to stroke her arms when she froze, petrified, as if a large paw had squeezed her heart so hard that her whole body went numb.

The events of July in the forest were still fresh in her mind, and at night she would wake up screaming as a panicked crowd invaded her dreams.

But while the nightmares were something she could cope with, the other dreams, full of crumbling stars and the cottony scent of cotton boy shirts, caused her much more pain, and after them Lily would throw herself around the room until morning, shrinking, crumbling and falling to pieces.

Before, she would have been quite surprised if someone had told her that one day James Potter would occupy all her thoughts. But that 'before' was in another life. In this life, she would wake up on a pillow wet with tears, press a toy deer to her torn heart like a healing potion, and bite her lips, which had felt warm, dry, and slightly cracked for the past month...

Lily ran her finger over her lips, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

He had sent her only one letter all summer, and it consisted of three words in a crooked, boyish handwriting: "I love you." It was a goodbye - she felt it as if he had said it to her himself. Soaking the parchment with tears, Lily wrote a reply, sent it off, and fell into a daze, then woke up, but couldn't remember what she'd been doing the last few days.

It is unlikely that they will ever see each other again. It takes owls a long time to fly across the Pacific.

Maybe, even probably, she would fall in love again someday, maybe even marry some faceless stranger who could heal her emotional wounds. But right now Lily felt, realized with a kind of startling clarity, that James Potter was the one, her one and only. She would never meet another like him, she felt it, understood it on an animal level.

And if that's the case, how can it be that they have to break up? It's ridiculous. Stupid. It shouldn't be like this.

Lily went ashore and pulled on her dress. She shook her heavy, dark hair, squeezing and twisting it carefully.

As she fastened the top buttons, Lily heard a dry branch snap sharply behind her.

Lately, Lily had been so afraid and scared that her nerves had turned into taut strings. And now she didn't even flinch - the wand seemed to fly into her hand. The girl spun around so fast that her wet hair whipped her face.

"Who's there?" she shouted.

Severus Snape emerged from the sun-burned shrubbery that hid the rotten, horrible bridge from view, crimson with shame, looking at Lily in embarrassment with dark eyes from under the hair that fell across his face. His lips were puckered, white.

"Hello," he whispered softly.
Lily lowered her wand, clutching her open, damp dress to her chest.

"Were you following me?" she asked, a little out of breath. Her heart was pounding like a bird and it was hard to breathe.

"No... yes," he said, furrowing his brow painfully as he looked down at her bare, wet feet and clutched the lilac branch that had cracked so treacherously in his white hands, which had not tanned at all over the summer.

Squinting slightly, Lily looked at him, trying to find the features she had known in this strange, repulsive man since childhood. Severus' voice dropped strangely, becoming unnaturally quiet and low. He himself was stretching out and losing weight - his cheeks were completely collapsed, his cheekbones sharpened, his nose thinned, his eyes, lined with shadows, burned with a kind of feverish glitter. His hair had grown even longer, reaching his shoulders and looking even dirtier than before. It looked as if he had suffered a long and serious illness.

"Well, did you like it?" Lily asked, her voice shaking. Everything inside her was burning with anger and she didn't want to keep it inside.

"I'm sorry, I... I had to see you... all these..." he swallowed, "things have been going on and I haven't seen you for a while... I didn't want to, I mean, follow you, I didn't... I just saw you and you were so...

Lily raised her eyebrows and Severus blushed painfully.

"You... you... look beautiful. I do," he finally blurted out.

"You don't," she said coolly, crossing her arms over her chest, and couldn't help but ask, "Are you okay?

Lily would have liked to just rudely dismiss him and walk away, but despite everything... after all, their childhood and friendship together hadn't been so bad that she could just put it out of her mind. She really cared about his life. Whatever it was.

"I'm fine, thank you," he said. His right cheek creased, though the smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. "I saw Mrs. Evans put up a sign for the house," he said, and judging by the way his thin lips were pressed together, that was what had interested him the most, and the reason he had crossed the bridge.

"None of your business," Lily replied coldly. At another time, Severus would have been the first person she would have run to with the news. But not anymore.

"So it's true..." he whispered. The branch snapped in his restless fingers.