crossroads ✿ jily

Chapter Six - Losing Control

When Lily awoke the next morning, her head was pounding. She brought a hand up to her face and blinked at the sunlight streaming through the window...something wasn't right. Glancing at the bed to her left, she realized that Arabella wasn't there, and neither was Helen. Sitting up and upsetting her headache even further, she blinked at the clock on her bedside table – it was nearly ten o'clock. She was missing her first two lessons. Just as she was about to throw the covers off and wonder aloud why she hadn't woken up at seven as usual, she was hit with the realization that she had a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach about leaving her dorm...and then she remembered why.

A wave of shame hit her so hard that she unconsciously leaned back again on her pillows as her mouth dropped open in horror. She suddenly recalled the night before with vivid clarity as the fog of sleepiness lifted from her brain, and she had the insane urge to crawl under her covers and refuse to come out. Covering her face with her hands, she wished that they could protect her from the images assaulting her mind.

She had lost control after that stupid dream, and James Potter had seen it. Not only had he seen it...he'd participated in it. For the first time in her life, Lily actually felt sorry for James...he must have been at a complete loss as to what to do with her. He had tried to help, and she showed her thanks by literally hanging on him. She brought her hands down from her face and swallowed at the lump in her throat. Why couldn't he have just left her alone? Why couldn't he have just minded his own business?

Not only had he seen it, but the rest of his friends had seen it as well. She rubbed her eyes, thinking that the whole school probably knew about it by now. How was she to face a classroom full of people, all who were quite aware of her breakdown? What were they saying? Were they laughing at her, or worse...did they pity her? Sitting up at the nausea that threatened to overcome her at the thought, she silently cursed Potter and his friends. Where had they been, anyway, that they were coming through the portrait hole at all hours of the night? She wasn't even sure what time it had been, or how long she had sat down there weeping on James Potter's shoulder. The sick feeling worsened, as did her headache, and so she ran her fingers roughly through her tangled mess of hair as she got slowly out of bed.

Staring around the empty room, feeling distinctly out of place as she was supposed to have been in Herbology, she tried to come up with a reasonable solution...and panicked at the realization that there was none. There was no way around this...she was simply going to have to face it. Face him. The best she could do was postpone the inevitable, and she wasn't about to waltz into class so that she'd not only disrupt a lesson, but also have every single pair of eyes in the room boring into the back of her head. Wincing at the thought, she decided to give herself a bit of time to prepare for it...she'd just take a walk to the hospital wing for a pepper-up and tell them she was sick. It was actually the truth...she felt terrible.

She took a quick shower and got dressed, slightly relieved that she now had the whole day to decide how she wanted to approach Potter about this. At the moment, she was thinking the best way would be to simply pretend nothing had happened. When she saw him later that day, he was bound to be on edge about it as much as she was, and he'd probably be relieved when she showed him that she never wanted it mentioned again. If she pretended it hadn't happened, then people would just slowly forget about it. Even as she said this to herself, though, she knew it wouldn't be that simple. People wouldn't forget...if she thought they had been on eggshells with her before, she didn't want to imagine what they would act like now in her company. She felt the familiar burning in her eyes again as she felt her insides cringe in utter humiliation, and she gently set down the brush she had been running through her hair.

Control, she told herself as she regarded herself with puffy eyes in the mirror. You lost it last night, but it's not going to happen again. Nodding slowly at herself in resolve, she walked down the stairs leading to the common room...and stopped dead when she got to the bottom.