closed RP in the potions lab for bicycles

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Grind. Stir. Blend, methodical and precise. Potion-making could be messy, but a controlled mess. If done properly, the result would be a clean one.

Stephen addressed himself to the task with a sort of forced focus. He preferred to contemplate these controlled and harmonious mixtures, their outcomes entirely predictable. He scarcely noticed when Lily entered the laboratory, and why should he? She worked here not infrequently; the wards were set to admit her. Blank-faced, economical in his movements, he worked on.

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[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Lily's account surprised Stephen, primarily because he had expected no information, and here he was being presented with answers to questions he had not even known enough to formulate. He had known only the little that Susan had told him (http://community.livejournal.com/hogwarts_hocus/1379188.html?thread=70105204#t70105204), which had given him no cause to worry, and then the less clear but alarmingly detailed stuff he'd seen on the secrets board, which he had been trying and failing not to think about ever since. What Lily told him at once reassured and dismayed him: reassured, in that Susan seemed in less danger after all than he had feared; dismayed, in that he fully concurred with Lily's analysis, and would almost have welcomed the contrary if only because it would shore up his eroding respect for Susan.

"You may be right," he allowed tersely -- reluctantly, even. "You are almost certainly right. I am not one to judge such matters. I have declined to do so; as I have declined to inquire. I decline even to contemplate her motives." Though Lily's suggestion -- maybe she just feels her life is lacking excitement -- added yet another aspect to his malaise: perhaps what Stephen had undertaken as a serious if informal attachment, Susan would have pursued only for entertainment, relief from boredom, in the same way she now pursued her schoolyard squabbles.

He drank his cooling tea and cast about for words. "None of this is my province. There are battles worth fighting in this time as in my own: evil clowns, furries, such monstrosities as would make even vile Napoleon blanch. Susan's ill-chosen battles are not mine to fight. We have a tacit understanding, she and I, that what is not a mutual concern need not become a mutual concern. Lily, I speak most candidly and without an ounce of reservation when I say I have no desire to check the course she has elected to run. What saddens me is only that seeing that course, I find it exceedingly difficult to respect her as I once did. I am no idealist; I believe trust is no prerequisite to love. Respect, though -- there can be no love without respect, without a genuine esteem."

For he had loved her, in his way, never breathing a word of it -- or, rather, he had loved what he believed her to be.

This had happened once before, with Diana*, and it had left him just as bereft, just as baffled and empty. He had thought he would always love Diana, and when he saw what she had allowed herself to become, he found his own self-assessment lacking. It was that, more than anything, that had disturbed him then, and that was what disturbed him now. The true object of his discontent was not his erstwhile beloved but himself.


* (( This emo moment is to be found in book 6, The Fortune of War: "His indifferent eye fell on the note, addressed in that familiar hand, and he drew a sheet of paper towards him. 'If I no longer love Diana,' he wrote, 'what shall I do?' What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever - to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply the possibility of doubt. Yet now it seemed that perpetuity meant eight years, nine months and some odd days, while the last syllable of recorded time was Wednesday, the seventeenth of May. 'Can such things be?' he asked. He knew from examples that this had often happened to other men; and that other men also lost their minds or contracted cancer. Could it be that he was not, as he had implicitly supposed, exceptionally immune?" ))

[lilypotter60.livejournal.com]

Stephen, Lily knew, was not one to speak unnecessarily. He did not waste words, nor time, on subjects that he felt didn't matter. And so, as he went on, though her eyes were fixed on his desk and only occasionally raising to his face and her wand twirling through her fingers, Lily gave weight to every word, every sentence. When he'd finished she thought for a moment before offering Stephen a half-smile.

She did not agree with his statement about trust and love. In Lily's mind, there could be no love without a fundamental trust behind it. She had trusted James, in the midst of so much uncertainty, with every part of her; without that, their marriage would not have stood nearly so strong. Their love would not have run as deep.

Of course, she trusted Sirius just as much. With all of her. ...At least, with most of her. Shifting uneasily, Lily considered the difference. Since she and Sirius' long and colourful string of fights, she'd been working on being more open. On not shutting him out. But that was the problem, wasn't it? It was work. Hard work, at that. And it was nowhere near perfect - there was still plenty she kept from him, still so much that she simply bypassed when she was with him. There was her life, and then her life with Sirius, and the two were not the same. And, thinking back, it hadn't been like that with James. Not that she expected the two men to be interchangeable, not at all, and yes, she'd changed in the year since her death. But not this much. Not to the point of becoming cold, distrusting. Not to the place where she was becoming Stephen, so hardened that he simply assumed that even love wasn't a reason to let down his guard.

This was not how she should be. The realization hit her like the proverbial ton of bricks. She was turning into someone she didn't like, not in the least, and what was more, she was hurting Sirius with it. And he didn't even know; because this Lily - the closed off, angry, defensive one - had been around since the start of the relationship.

However she had gotten here, to this place she despised and was just now seeing clearly, Lily knew she had to stop. She needed to get back to how she had been, before all of shite had somehow soured her. This was not what Lily wanted her life to become, and she was determined to figure out how to fix it.

...Later. Right then she was still talking with Stephen. Clearing her throat, Lily leaned back in her chair, curling her legs up and resting her chin on her knees.

"There are two things I've learned," she said slowly. "The first is that you can't change people. You can want more for them, you can expect things from them, but, in the end, they'll be who they are and nothing else. Not love, not respect, not friendship, not hope, not trust - nothing can change that. Susan is who she is, and she makes the choices she deems best for her. I don't doubt you want her to live her own life, much as you want to live yours. And if, in the end, the decisions she makes are not ones you can live with, there's little to be done." There was something melancholy in Lily's eyes as she watched Stephen; some distant sorrow that had healed but not been forgotten. To have a friend, to have someone you trusted, make decisions you could not abide, that you had to walk away from... She knew this all too well. Severus had done that, years ago. And then Peter in a far more cataclysmic event. But to lose a lover to their ill decisions... That had to be worse.

"And the second," she said after a moment, shaking off the memories, "is that life is too sodding short to waste being with someone who doesn't make you want to get up in the morning. Someone who doesn't ignite your soul and make you hum in the shower." Lily grinned wryly at him. "Mate, if Susan doesn't do that, if being with her is a chore with no reward, if you can't respect her, then what's the point? What are you hoping will change?" She paused for a moment, then ventured, delicately, "And, perhaps, Stephen, part of the problem is the age difference? It's not really my place, but do you think that being with someone who is closer to you in maturity and life experience might...help?"

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen found Lily's proclamations on love to be both touching in their earnestness and incredibly amusing in their naivete. He would not contest them; she meant well. Besides, the topic was moot. If he had ever truly loved Susan -- rather than some person he thought he understood Susan to be, some person who valued discretion and restraint as highly as Stephen himself did -- he loved her no longer.

"There is nothing I hope to change," he said simply and quietly. "Certainly I agree that once a connexion is seen to be false or undertaken in error, it should come to an end."

[lilypotter60.livejournal.com]

Ah. Lily sat back again. "So, you're well off of her, then?" It wasn't really a question. Not after everything Stephen had told her. There was nothing but sympathy for the loss of whatever Stephen had had in her voice.

Then a half-smile lifted the corner of her mouth. "Good for you. Susan is a nice girl, but...well, she's just that. A girl." And this from someone a few years younger - but Lily was completely unaware of the irony. "You need someone of your own maturity level, really."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen snorted a rueful half-laugh. "My dear Evans, do you really suppose that makes any difference? My luck appears to run such that a woman either must already be insane to develop an attachment to me, or she becomes somehow deranged shortly thereafter. Age does not come into it, at all." He picked up his teacup and regarded it thoughtfully. "Still, there may be something in what you say." Who fit that criterion? Professor McGonagall, perhaps. If he dated her and she did not go stark raving mad, then perhaps the jinx would be broken!