Chapter Text
SNAPSHOT 1 (LILY). you hate her, you hate her so much, except that you don’t. you know you’ll love her until the oceans dry out and the sun goes dark; until all the languages are forgotten and all the worlds are destroyed; until love itself stops having a meaning—and even then you’ll look for it for as long as it takes, until you find it in the softness of her touch, in the gradient sea-blue of her eyes, in the poetry of her voice. you love her, you love her, you love her, and you wish you didn’t. it would’ve been so much simpler if you hadn’t loved her at all.
Narcissa is exceptionally stubborn in a way she never is, not with you. She always fights tooth and nail for things she believes in while remaining icy-cold-controlled, yet this time, her fight is desperate—a hurried action of a hunted animal.
You don’t want to doubt Narcissa, don’t want to question everything in the world the two of you had built in the cracks and crevices of each other’s hearts. Yet, tendrils of doubt seep into your lungs akin to cigarette smoke, suffocating you from within. At the periphery of your mind, a thought pops up, unbidden: this is the kind of argument the two of them won’t be able to come back from, like a cancer diagnosis after years of second-hand smoking.
“You can try to pretend all you want, but in the end, you’re just like the rest of them,” the words are poison on the tip of your tongue, knives aimed at the weakest places within Narcissa’s heart that you know all too well. You aim for what will hurt the most and don’t miss; Narcissa is the one who gave you the weapon and forfeited the armor.
The words slip easily off your tongue, like glaciers falling apart and into the waiting ocean. The words are a death sentence carried out by a lover’s hand, although the two of them were never lovers at all—not in the way other people are lovers. Yet the argument feels like a dissolution of a relationship instead of a simple friendship.
(Even though you know your friendship was never simple.)
In another life, the two of you could’ve been lovers, you’re sure of that. You would’ve lived in a cozy cottage in a far-away land where the sun and the moon hung side by side, and exchanged kisses that tasted of bittersweet honey and freshly picked raspberries. You would’ve had an idyll dealt by gods not angry at the world.
In this life, you’re not lovers at all—you’re best-friends, but star-crossed nonetheless. Despite how much you long to believe the best in her, Narcissa is and always will be on the wrong side of the war that will rage in your heart for the rest of eternity, even when the actual war comes to an end—a comet crashing, leaving a hole in the middle, forever unfilled.
Narcissa’s words will forever taste of burning and charred wood and meteor showers, no matter how hard you try to wash them down with a sting of firewhiskey and your mum’s gently neutral words. Yet, in the farthest corner of your torn-apart heart, an emerald-green flame glows in the darkness despite the cruelty of Narcissa’s unmade choices. You stubbornly refuse to let it die, even when the rest of your world stands behind your shoulder with buckets of ice-cold water, waiting for you to burn out, to fall.
You do, eventually. Your love is the kind made of aching and falling and breaking; but after those three comes the inevitable sweetness of salvation.
The stars might have crossed the two of you, but Narcissa reached through the galaxy for you and stubbornly held on.
You did, too.