The Rise And Fall Of The Stag And The Doe

With me

As a seventeen year old, Lily really should have been home alone at some point in her life before, but she never really was. Petunia or her dad was always there with her. A month ago Petunia announced she was engaged and Lily hadn't seen much of her since. Not that she particularly minded, the less she heard about the horrible wedding the better things would be. The only thing she did mind was sleeping alone in a dark house. She liked to talk tough, but she was paranoid. Every time she heard a creak in the house she would panic and assume a serial killer was in the house.

Of course it never was anything. Lily knew she was crazy, that still didn't stop her from walking around her house with her dad's old cricket bat. She couldn't wait till he got back from Wales. He was only supposed to be gone for a night or two, but he called and said he'd be staying a day longer.

Yes she was seventeen, a legal adult in the magical world and yes she had gone through some trying experiences, but she was really an adult yet. There was still apart of her that was a little girl, terrified of the dark and wanting her mum and dad to hold her hand and tell her there were no monsters in her closet. But her mother was long gone and her father was out of town, so Sergeant Mittens, her loyal and just teddy bear would have to do.

Lily was excellent at potions but somehow not a very good cook, so she had gone out to get dinner and spent the rest of the night longing around different parts of the house with her record player and books in tow. So far she'd gotten through a lot of books on her summer reading list, but it was sort of relaxing to not rush through them and actually process them. Right now she was on a Jane Austen kick. She'd read Pride and Prejudice and was on Sense and Sensibility. Dorcas had mocked her mercilessly for reading a book with no sex, barely kissing and the slowest plot ever, but Lily didn't care. In her opinion slow love plots were the best. It gave her time to love the characters and gave the characters time to really fit together.

By nightfall, she was lying back on her bed, her pale scrawny legs hanging off the bed. Her fan was turned to its highest point in an attempt to suppress the overwhelming summer heat. By wearing a tank top and shorts, she had tried her best to adapt to the temperature, but she still was warmer than she would have liked to be.

After reading a line, her brows furrowed and though she was alone she read aloud, ""When so many hours have been spent convincing myself I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?"

Biting the side of her lips she let the book fall onto her chest, and looked up at her blank ceiling. She'd read a million of things she understood and only a thousand that she could connect to, but this quote especially seemed to catch her. Overall Lily was quite proud of herself. Yes she hadn't cured any diseases or changed anyone else's life, but she had worked on her own and she liked to think she had become a better person over the past year; less judgy and more relaxed towards other people with... some understandable exceptions. Still there was one thing she really couldn't fix about herself no matter what she did.

She needed to be right and Jane Austen understood why completely. It wasn't that she just craved the control over being the most moral and just, but it was also the fact that if she wasn't right then she wasted so much energy and time convincing herself she was. There was several areas she could think about with this, but only one person's face came into her mind. The one person she had tried to not think about all summer but failed miserably.

Lily had originally hated him and that had worked until she realized that there was a lot of good in him. Then she tried to ignore him, didn't last long at all. Finally she gave up and decided to just be friends with him. At this point it was impossible for her to imagine not being friends with James. He was in her life and she couldn't even think of what her life would be like if she tried to cut him out of it. It just wouldn't work. So now she just had to make sure she kept him as a friend and didn't let them become anything else. She was already putting him in danger by being his friend and she knew how selfish that was, but it beyond the point where she could stop it.