Meditations on a Theme -- Lily Evans Potter -- PG
Title : Meditations on a Theme
Author: aberforths_rug
Rating: PG
Fandom: Harry Potter
Character: Lily Evans Potter
Warnings: None really. Some difficult scenes from the books are explored, but there is nothing graphic in this piece.
Word Count: ~1700
Prompt: 84) The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone's concern and like vampires they suck out life's blood.--Bette Davis.
Summary: If Lily Evans thought to split the world cleanly and simply into those who are weak and those who are strong she would count herself among the strong.
Author's Note: Many thanks to antoshevu for the beta and the encouragement. Thanks to ladytory for the conversation about the thing about Lily and Petunia! Thanks to gehayi for running this wonderful femgenficathon with grace and patience!
Meditations on a Theme
If Lily Evans thought to split the world cleanly and simply into those who are weak and those who are strong she would count herself among the strong. She would imagine this strength as something that comes from outside herself, not from choices she has made or could ever make. While she has never spent the energy to make such a split-consciously anyway-this was the sensibility from which she operated.
This was a sensibility she had developed long before she ever knew that there was any such thing as a Wizarding World.
***
She has always just known that she was the stronger of the Evans sisters as surely as she knew she was the older, if only by twenty minutes.
If Lily thought to analyze this, she could have endless arguments with herself about cause and effect. Had Lily, in her fetal state, made a choice to move herself forward toward life and light and air and the unknown? Had Petunia, in that same pre-birth state of being, chosen to stay inside as long as she could, feeding off of the life blood of their mother, comfortably inside the only home she had ever known? Had those choices made them stronger and weaker? Could we make choices before we were even born?
Or.
Had Lily, made strong by forces of nature or magical forces-or chance-been pushed out first? Had there been no thoughts or actions she could claim as her own? If this were true did it mean that fate had chosen her to be stronger… or did the strength she carried mean nothing more than the flip of a coin?
But Lily did not analyze this. She just lived life aware of her role as the oldest, the strongest and the healthiest of the Evans twins. Pressed to choose, she would point to those forces outside of her control as the source of her strength.
This strength did not give her any conscious feelings of superiority; she was not more deserving of any of this than Petunia was. What she did feel was an obligation to use this strength to help whoever or whatever was not so blessed. Clearly their circumstances were equally outside of their control. Strength or weakness was not any sort of a reflection of worth.
She was the one who brought home the birds with the broken wings and the lost puppies. When a neighbor boy, six years old when Lily and Petunia were four and a half, was standing in front of his locked house, temporarily forgotten by his loving but busy parents, it was Lily who put her arm around him and brought him to her mum, who fixed everything.
Petunia had laughed to see the older boy in such a state. Lily understood that there was something funny about the look of the boy who sometimes teased them: snot smeared across his face and tears the size of peas running down his cheeks. She also understood intuitively that it was wrong to laugh, wrong to mock someone when they were already feeling so low.
Petunia had the last laugh though. The next day the boy had asserted his own brand of strength and tripped Lily while they played tag. She fell into a mud puddle. Lily laughed too, once she got over the surprise of the fall, but she waited a bit longer before she came to the boy's aid the next time he was locked out of his home.
***
It came to pass, of course, that Lily and her family discovered that some of her strength came from magic-that she was a witch. This fit well with the ideas she had formed about strength and weakness and her own place in the world. Having this secret mysterious strength was good, but it came with even more responsibility.
Petunia looked at her with revulsion and called her a freak whenever their parent's backs were turned. Lily chalked it up to jealousy. Poor Petunia, stuck in the world Lily had just learned to think of as belonging to the Muggles just had she had been stuck inside their mother. They were twins yes, but by age eleven they were on such different paths that no one would even guess them to be sisters.
*****
Lily had a whole new world to explore. Part of that exploration required that Lily find her role again. Did her late entry into this world put her in the camp of the weak? No. Lily excelled in all her subjects. She continued to see herself as strong and to live with the obligations of that strength
The weak and the strong-Lily among the strong -- never a conscious thought but always her point of view. She carried this sensibility with her into the Wizarding World.
Time passed. Lily matured. As she observed the world and her place in it she came to understand that weak and strong are not always what they seem to be. People, herself included , did not always fit so neatly into these categories. She began to feel the tickle of nuance challenge this unconscious way she had always seen the world.
*****
By the time she was at the end of her fifth year at Hogwarts it seemed more important to split the world into good and evil rather than weak and strong. It was easy to confuse these two dichotomies. Sometimes they seemed to become entwined and sometimes neither was very clear.
Fifteen-year-old James Potter appeared strong, but his neediness revealed a deeper weakness. She had not noticed this at first. When they were first years he and his friends seemed to be the strongest of the strong. But the closer she looked…
He was athletic and walked with an air of confidence. He ran his fingers through his hair with practiced ease. Now, after knowing him for five years, that air, that ease seemed to her to be a mask. His strength wasn't his own. He sucked it from the praise and adoration of those around him. He was a vampire feeding on attention. Like all vampires he oozed a charm that she could not help but find appealing.
She held her will as tightly as the garlic cloves old peasants used to fend off their vampires. She would not be seduced by this false strength.
Peter Petegrew, on the other hand, appeared weak. She thought that this was a sort of mask as well. He had to work harder than the others to achieve less grand results. They saw the weakness in that. She saw the strength that this effort required. They underestimated him
He was not a vampire, but something else that she did not have a name for. He freely gave the praise and adoration that fed James and the others. Some of the strength they were sucking out of him was reflected back, so he gained from this arrangement as well. Clever really... if a bit scary.
And then there was Severus.
Mudblood. That word cut her as surely as his curse cut James.
Weren't she and Severus supposed to be friends? They got on well as potions partners.
They had surprised old Slughorn; he tried to hide it, but it had been obvious that he had not expected her, Muggle-born, to excel as she did. And Severus-well, that was a common error, underestimating him.
Damn him and his pride, his need never to let anyone help him or get close to him.
Was Severus weak or strong, friend or foe? Did he stand against the rising evil… or did he plan to join it?
She was not sure.
She was sure, or at least she had a strong inkling, as she watched these stupid boys all behaving badly, that everything would be different the following year-and maybe forever after.
*****
It turned out that she was right. The next years brought change, some of it terrible, some of it wonderful, all of it beyond anything she could have foreseen.
While she was pregnant, she could not help but think of the time she had spent with Petunia inside their mother's womb. Surely both of them had been weak, needing to feed on the very life blood of their mother. Surely in the end both of them had been strong enough to survive the trauma of birth. Here they were now, both pregnant, both living through this same amazing and terrifying experience but too far down their separate paths to truly share it.
Some days the small weak being inside of her sucked every bit of her strength away. Other days the wee thing seemed to be screaming his strength as he kicked and punched the walls of his warm dark home. In the end would he be one of the weak or one of the strong? In the end was anyone really one or the other?
***
In the end it turned out that it was not about who was strong and who was weak. It came so clear to her in that moment just before she died.
Love. Strength, hers anyway, was really love… compassion… and Love.
It was love that pulsed through her veins as she stood between Evil and her baby. In the split second it took her to die she knew that her son held this same strength-that Love moved through his being. The killing curse sucked her life away, but the Love somehow remained.
She seemed to move forward in time. She saw the next curse repelled by her sweet baby. She saw him bring down the Dark Lord. In that very same moment she saw the force that moved through Voldemort as well. Fear. He was there in that room that terrible night because of fear and for all the evil he was able to spew out on the world he was weak because fear coursed through his veins.
Fear. Weakness in all its energy-sucking incarnations was really fear.
She was sure that she was already dead yet she heard her own laughter fill the room. She knew all would be well.
And then she was gone.
Author: aberforths_rug
Rating: PG
Fandom: Harry Potter
Character: Lily Evans Potter
Warnings: None really. Some difficult scenes from the books are explored, but there is nothing graphic in this piece.
Word Count: ~1700
Prompt: 84) The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone's concern and like vampires they suck out life's blood.--Bette Davis.
Summary: If Lily Evans thought to split the world cleanly and simply into those who are weak and those who are strong she would count herself among the strong.
Author's Note: Many thanks to antoshevu for the beta and the encouragement. Thanks to ladytory for the conversation about the thing about Lily and Petunia! Thanks to gehayi for running this wonderful femgenficathon with grace and patience!
Meditations on a Theme
If Lily Evans thought to split the world cleanly and simply into those who are weak and those who are strong she would count herself among the strong. She would imagine this strength as something that comes from outside herself, not from choices she has made or could ever make. While she has never spent the energy to make such a split-consciously anyway-this was the sensibility from which she operated.
This was a sensibility she had developed long before she ever knew that there was any such thing as a Wizarding World.
***
She has always just known that she was the stronger of the Evans sisters as surely as she knew she was the older, if only by twenty minutes.
If Lily thought to analyze this, she could have endless arguments with herself about cause and effect. Had Lily, in her fetal state, made a choice to move herself forward toward life and light and air and the unknown? Had Petunia, in that same pre-birth state of being, chosen to stay inside as long as she could, feeding off of the life blood of their mother, comfortably inside the only home she had ever known? Had those choices made them stronger and weaker? Could we make choices before we were even born?
Or.
Had Lily, made strong by forces of nature or magical forces-or chance-been pushed out first? Had there been no thoughts or actions she could claim as her own? If this were true did it mean that fate had chosen her to be stronger… or did the strength she carried mean nothing more than the flip of a coin?
But Lily did not analyze this. She just lived life aware of her role as the oldest, the strongest and the healthiest of the Evans twins. Pressed to choose, she would point to those forces outside of her control as the source of her strength.
This strength did not give her any conscious feelings of superiority; she was not more deserving of any of this than Petunia was. What she did feel was an obligation to use this strength to help whoever or whatever was not so blessed. Clearly their circumstances were equally outside of their control. Strength or weakness was not any sort of a reflection of worth.
She was the one who brought home the birds with the broken wings and the lost puppies. When a neighbor boy, six years old when Lily and Petunia were four and a half, was standing in front of his locked house, temporarily forgotten by his loving but busy parents, it was Lily who put her arm around him and brought him to her mum, who fixed everything.
Petunia had laughed to see the older boy in such a state. Lily understood that there was something funny about the look of the boy who sometimes teased them: snot smeared across his face and tears the size of peas running down his cheeks. She also understood intuitively that it was wrong to laugh, wrong to mock someone when they were already feeling so low.
Petunia had the last laugh though. The next day the boy had asserted his own brand of strength and tripped Lily while they played tag. She fell into a mud puddle. Lily laughed too, once she got over the surprise of the fall, but she waited a bit longer before she came to the boy's aid the next time he was locked out of his home.
***
It came to pass, of course, that Lily and her family discovered that some of her strength came from magic-that she was a witch. This fit well with the ideas she had formed about strength and weakness and her own place in the world. Having this secret mysterious strength was good, but it came with even more responsibility.
Petunia looked at her with revulsion and called her a freak whenever their parent's backs were turned. Lily chalked it up to jealousy. Poor Petunia, stuck in the world Lily had just learned to think of as belonging to the Muggles just had she had been stuck inside their mother. They were twins yes, but by age eleven they were on such different paths that no one would even guess them to be sisters.
*****
Lily had a whole new world to explore. Part of that exploration required that Lily find her role again. Did her late entry into this world put her in the camp of the weak? No. Lily excelled in all her subjects. She continued to see herself as strong and to live with the obligations of that strength
The weak and the strong-Lily among the strong -- never a conscious thought but always her point of view. She carried this sensibility with her into the Wizarding World.
Time passed. Lily matured. As she observed the world and her place in it she came to understand that weak and strong are not always what they seem to be. People, herself included , did not always fit so neatly into these categories. She began to feel the tickle of nuance challenge this unconscious way she had always seen the world.
*****
By the time she was at the end of her fifth year at Hogwarts it seemed more important to split the world into good and evil rather than weak and strong. It was easy to confuse these two dichotomies. Sometimes they seemed to become entwined and sometimes neither was very clear.
Fifteen-year-old James Potter appeared strong, but his neediness revealed a deeper weakness. She had not noticed this at first. When they were first years he and his friends seemed to be the strongest of the strong. But the closer she looked…
He was athletic and walked with an air of confidence. He ran his fingers through his hair with practiced ease. Now, after knowing him for five years, that air, that ease seemed to her to be a mask. His strength wasn't his own. He sucked it from the praise and adoration of those around him. He was a vampire feeding on attention. Like all vampires he oozed a charm that she could not help but find appealing.
She held her will as tightly as the garlic cloves old peasants used to fend off their vampires. She would not be seduced by this false strength.
Peter Petegrew, on the other hand, appeared weak. She thought that this was a sort of mask as well. He had to work harder than the others to achieve less grand results. They saw the weakness in that. She saw the strength that this effort required. They underestimated him
He was not a vampire, but something else that she did not have a name for. He freely gave the praise and adoration that fed James and the others. Some of the strength they were sucking out of him was reflected back, so he gained from this arrangement as well. Clever really... if a bit scary.
And then there was Severus.
Mudblood. That word cut her as surely as his curse cut James.
Weren't she and Severus supposed to be friends? They got on well as potions partners.
They had surprised old Slughorn; he tried to hide it, but it had been obvious that he had not expected her, Muggle-born, to excel as she did. And Severus-well, that was a common error, underestimating him.
Damn him and his pride, his need never to let anyone help him or get close to him.
Was Severus weak or strong, friend or foe? Did he stand against the rising evil… or did he plan to join it?
She was not sure.
She was sure, or at least she had a strong inkling, as she watched these stupid boys all behaving badly, that everything would be different the following year-and maybe forever after.
*****
It turned out that she was right. The next years brought change, some of it terrible, some of it wonderful, all of it beyond anything she could have foreseen.
While she was pregnant, she could not help but think of the time she had spent with Petunia inside their mother's womb. Surely both of them had been weak, needing to feed on the very life blood of their mother. Surely in the end both of them had been strong enough to survive the trauma of birth. Here they were now, both pregnant, both living through this same amazing and terrifying experience but too far down their separate paths to truly share it.
Some days the small weak being inside of her sucked every bit of her strength away. Other days the wee thing seemed to be screaming his strength as he kicked and punched the walls of his warm dark home. In the end would he be one of the weak or one of the strong? In the end was anyone really one or the other?
***
In the end it turned out that it was not about who was strong and who was weak. It came so clear to her in that moment just before she died.
Love. Strength, hers anyway, was really love… compassion… and Love.
It was love that pulsed through her veins as she stood between Evil and her baby. In the split second it took her to die she knew that her son held this same strength-that Love moved through his being. The killing curse sucked her life away, but the Love somehow remained.
She seemed to move forward in time. She saw the next curse repelled by her sweet baby. She saw him bring down the Dark Lord. In that very same moment she saw the force that moved through Voldemort as well. Fear. He was there in that room that terrible night because of fear and for all the evil he was able to spew out on the world he was weak because fear coursed through his veins.
Fear. Weakness in all its energy-sucking incarnations was really fear.
She was sure that she was already dead yet she heard her own laughter fill the room. She knew all would be well.
And then she was gone.