novelraw Chapter 159: Interludes – Lily Evans and Rose Evans
Chapter 159: Interludes – Lily Evans and Rose Evans
Interlude I – Lily Evans
The war had learned to breathe.
It exhaled through alleyways and shattered shopfronts, through burned cottages and silent roads where Aurors arrived too late and left with nothing. The Dark Lord's name was no longer whispered—it was spoken in clipped reports and broken sobs, in casualty lists that grew longer each week.
And beneath it all, the Muggle world bled without ever knowing why.
Lily Evans knew.
Every Muggleborn did.
She stood at the narrow kitchen window of James's flat, watching rain streak down the glass like thin scars. The drops gathered and fell in patterns that reminded her of tears—endless, inevitable. Somewhere beyond the city, another "gas explosion" would be reported. Another police investigation would end with no suspects, no answers, just baffled officers staring at destruction that defied every natural law they'd been trained to understand. The papers would print euphemisms, careful words that meant nothing and everything. The families would bury their dead, never knowing that magic had killed them.
Her parents' street had been spared so far. That knowledge sat like a stone in her chest, heavy and cold.
She no longer lived there.
The fight with Petunia replayed itself whenever Lily let her guard down—every word sharpened by fear, every accusation soaked in years of resentment that had festered since childhood. Since the first time Lily had made a flower bloom in her palm and Petunia's eyes had filled with something darker than wonder. Petunia had begged her to leave the magical world behind. To finish her GCSEs like a normal girl. To choose safety over sorcery. To choose family over magic.
To choose her.
"You're going to die," Petunia had said, voice cracking with the weight of certainty. "And I'll lose my only sister."
Lily had heard something else entirely.
You're special and I'm not.
You belong somewhere I never will.
Give it up. Be ordinary. Be like me.
The words that followed had been ugly. Cruel. Things neither of them could take back, no matter how many years might pass. Petunia had called her selfish, reckless, drunk on power. Lily had called Petunia bitter, jealous, small.
When Rose Evans had stepped in—pleading for reconciliation, asking Lily to understand Petunia's fear, to see the love buried beneath the anger—Lily's own anger had boiled over. She'd packed a bag and left the house the same night, convinced that staying would mean shrinking herself to fit someone else's terror. That returning would mean apologizing for existing as she was.
Now she lived with James.
Not married yet—though that, too, was coming faster than she'd planned. The war had stolen the luxury of waiting, of slow courtships and careful decisions. Everything moved quickly now. People married between battles, had children before the ink dried on their wedding certificates, built lives in the narrow spaces between one attack and the next. James had finished his Auror training with grim determination, the easy confidence he'd worn at Hogwarts tempered into something harder, sharper. And the day he proposed, his hands had shaken just slightly, betraying the fear he tried so hard to hide.
They were planning the wedding now, between patrol schedules and Order meetings, in stolen hours that felt both precious and absurd. The Potter Manor was still half-ruined from Voldemort's attack that had killed Charles and Dorea Potter—James's parents, gone in minutes, their ancestral home left gutted and scarred. Renovations would take time. Money wasn't the issue; magic could rebuild walls. But some wounds ran deeper than stone. Until then, James suggested a small cottage in Godric's Hollow, a place with history but no ghosts, at least none that belonged to him.
Lily had smiled at that. A cottage felt right. Simple. Grounded. A place that didn't echo with the weight of generations, where they could start fresh.
She sat at the table now, parchment spread before her, writing invitations in careful script. Her handwriting had always been neat, precise, a Muggle habit she'd never quite shed despite years of magical education. Names came easily at first—Remus, Sirius, Order members she trusted with her life, old school friends from Gryffindor who'd survived this long. Then her quill paused, the nib hovering above the parchment.
Severus.
Her oldest friend in the magical world. The first person who'd ever explained magic to her, who'd made her feel less alone when the strangeness of her abilities had frightened her parents and alienated her sister.
They hadn't spoken since fifth year. Since humiliation, anger, and words that had cut too deep to heal easily. Since he'd called her Mudblood in front of half the school, his face twisted with rage and shame, and she'd severed their friendship with surgical precision. He had never reached out. Not once. Not to apologize, not to explain, not even to try. And that hurt more than she liked to admit, a wound that hadn't scabbed over properly despite the years.
He should have tried, she thought bitterly. At least once. If their friendship had meant anything at all.
And yet…
She folded the invitation carefully, creasing the edges with precision. Even unopened, the parchment felt heavy with history, weighted with everything unsaid between them.
He deserved an invite.
At the very least.
Not because they were friends—they weren't, not anymore. But because once, they had been. Because he'd been the first. Because some part of her still remembered the boy who'd sat with her by the river and promised her she wasn't strange, just magical.
Her eyes drifted to the newspaper James had left on the counter, folded open to a headline she'd already read three times.
CRIMSON SOLACE APPROVED BY ICW
YOUNGEST POTIONS MASTER IN THREE CENTURIES
Lily stared.
She read every word. Twice. Then a third time, absorbing details she'd missed before—the international praise, the projected lives saved, the grudging acknowledgment even from wizards who despised Severus personally.
She knew what Severus had done—even if James scoffed and called it self-serving, even if Sirius called it "pure coincidence" with a sneer that suggested he believed anything but. She knew Severus hadn't separated vampires from the Dark Lord for fame or gold. He'd done it because it mattered. Because it weakened the war in ways that flashy duels never could. Because people would live who otherwise would have died.
Pride swelled in her chest—warm and sharp and painful all at once.
And resentment followed close behind, bitter and familiar.
You changed the world, she thought, staring at his name in print. But you never once tried to fix us.
She folded the invitation anyway, tucking it into an envelope and sealing it with wax before she could second-guess herself.
Some doors, even closed ones, deserved to be knocked on.
Just once.
Interlude II – Rose Evans
Rose Evans read the paper slowly.
She always did, even now—careful not to miss what lay between the lines. Years of unexplained deaths had taught her that the truth rarely shouted. It whispered in the margins, in the carefully worded obituaries that never quite explained how a healthy young person had simply collapsed, in the patterns she'd learned to recognize despite the Ministry's best efforts to obscure them.
Her hands trembled when she reached the name.
Severus Shafiq — Officially Recognized as Potions Master by the ICW
She closed her eyes, the newsprint blurring before her.
For a moment, she wasn't a worried mother or a woman living under a war she couldn't see—a war that took lives in the night and left only sanitized reports in the morning edition. She was standing in her kitchen again, watching a thin, dark-haired boy sit too straight at the table, spine rigid with the kind of pride that came from having too little. He'd refused a second helping because he didn't want to be a burden, even though she could see the hunger in the way his eyes had lingered on the roast.
She'd called him stubborn. Brilliant. Like a son, once—without thinking, the words slipping out naturally one summer evening.
Pride filled her chest, fierce and aching.
"That's my boy," she whispered to the empty room, her voice catching slightly.
And with it came longing—sharp and immediate.
She hadn't heard from Lily in weeks. The house was too quiet without her—without the arguments that had at least meant they were talking, the slammed doors, even Petunia's sharp remarks that had once seemed so cutting but now would be welcome just for the presence they implied. Rose had tried to mediate, to protect both daughters from each other and from a world that seemed determined to drive wedges between people who loved each other. And instead she had lost one.
Perhaps she'd chosen wrong.
She folded the paper carefully and placed it beside the kettle, eyes lingering on the name again, tracing the letters with her gaze.
Severus had survived. Thrived. Changed the world, if the article was to be believed.
Maybe Lily will too, she thought, heart heavy with hope and fear in equal measure. If I haven't already pushed her too far away.
Outside, sirens wailed faintly—Muggle ones. Police chasing shadows, investigating crimes they'd never solve because the perpetrators didn't follow laws the police understood.
Rose Evans poured herself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table, holding warmth between her palms, praying for children who were no longer children at all.
And for a war that seemed determined to take everything special before it was done.
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