The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
-Christian, Moulin Rouge
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And there she is: a sparkling vision, smiling despite the fact that her clothes are already soaked through and through. It's easy to spot her, even from afar, in the midst of the usual Diagon Alley crowd. Her wine-colored tresses traced her alabaster skin in ornate curves. He always believed that she was a lady filled with a special kind of light.
Today, as he looks at her, unconsciously absorbing her, he remembers the time as he spoke to her of the stars that lay beneath her emerald eyes, telling her that she could not glow any brighter than she did then. Yet, the way she looked today readily made him eat his words.
She edges nearer to him through the rapidly thinning sea of people, smelling of rain. That intoxicating scent of her seeps through his heightened senses, maddening his own pulse into an erratic running. Suddenly, his whole world comes into a flat line as she embraces him, her laughter trailing in his ears.
And that world disappears as she presses her lips against his cheek, heedless of the two-day stubble he had neglected to shave.
But she only hugs and kisses him as a brother. That much he knew-painfully so-that the sobering thought pulls him back to reality with such a resounding thud he could almost taste the dirt between his teeth.
Then he realizes she was talking to him.
'...so sorry. I knew it was so sudden and unexplained but…' she paused, those fathomless orbs piercing his own. She gently cups the side of his face with a surprisingly warm palm. His hands almost cramped in holding back the abrupt, insane urge in him to hold her hand and tell her-tell her now!-what he had been keeping back all those years.
'I really, REALLY, need to see you, Remus. I wanted to say something to you.'
The palm settles on his shoulder and he notices that unsettling void her hand had made on his cheek, one more permanent imprint of her. His voice was hoarse when he finally opened his mouth, wanting to say 'So do I' but he shifted it into a curve and told her to go on.
'James proposed last night. And-Remus, you're such a dear to listen to my blabbering but I know you understand my need to say SOMETHING to SOMEBODY…oh! What am I saying!-I told him yes. And, it's a surprise for all of us, honestly and I also know there are little things that are bound to get in the way-well, not just little, you know that-and…'
All of the sudden, the girl part-embraces, part-strangles the boy, jumping up and down, up and down, screaming like words of massacre in his ears.
'I'M GETTING MARRIED!!!'
She shouts, laughs, cries, throttling him as if it was the only manner how she could share her happiness with him.
What she didn't know was that in that same moment, the entirety of the universe had fallen down on the boy's shoulders, ripping the wind off his throat and his stomach along with it. He was so sure his heart stopped for one whole minute in her during her ecstatic squealing. He couldn't feel a single thing.
!!!BREATH YOU FOOL!!!
A rational neuron hollers at the remaining conscious part of his brain. And so he does, and his nerves sizzle every single muscle fiber he possessed as lightning courses through his veins with the incoming wind.
He couldn't get enough air in his lungs, considering that an invisible herd of elephants was using his diaphragm as their trampoline for setting a Guinness World Record for Most Elephants Jumping in a minute. Violent blots of pink obscures his eyes and his brain was mashing itself in a psychosomatic blender.
'Remus!' he hears her shout from another reality, as the cobblestones met his face none to gently. She whips something from her coat pocket and shoves it under his nose.
It was a brown paper bag. He despairingly clings to the fragile brown material, his breath almost tearing its paper walls. It is the only thing keeping him alive, refraining his soul from leaving his frozen flesh.
Impossibly, after ten centuries in ten minutes, he does get through, breath still ragged, though. Eventually, his breath slows down. But the two-ton pachyderms refuses to stop, or at least slow down in their murderous bounding. Worse, they had donned killer stilettos on their rear feet too. The absence of blood in his head filled his ears with a thunderous white noise. The presence of too much of it in his chest clogged what path there was for breath and rationale.
'Are you all right?' she asked faintly, nudging him by his shoulder when he grew frighteningly still.
'I'm dead.' He declared. Seeing he stooping over him, he weakly asked 'Am I in heaven?'
'Don't be silly, Moony! 'Course you're not!' she gave an unladylike snort but blushed nevertheless.
'And you're not dead. As a matter of fact, you're so alive, you are going to be the one who will walk by my side on a plush red carpet in-no, not in robes' her eyebrows knit for a moment to erase the unwanted detail in her dream and wove on '-but in a black tux and give me away on my wedding day.' She nods emphatically at his traumatized, wide-eyed stare.
'That is,' she adds, 'if you'll agree.' She gives him a wink and a smile as if everything is so bloody all right.
The abruptness of which he stands up catches the girl unaware. With her jaw open, she watches him furiously striding away from her that she had to run to keep up with him.
'Iccantdothis.Iccantdothis.Iccantdothis.' He mutters at her as she breathlessly held him back.
'But-Remus! Stop walking, would you!!!' A desperate note swims for two seconds after she spoke. And only after those moments does the desperation reach his mentally corked ears.
'I can't do this either. Not without you!'
Two mercurial orbs searches her own. Perhaps seven hundred people have already died as he seeks uncomprehendingly. Finally, the boy relents and he stops his efforts on tugging his hand away from her alarming grip.
'Why me?'
The question was merely a whisper. He did not mean to really direct the inquiry at the girl. Yet she takes one bewildered backward step.
'Why not your father, or …or Dumbledore or someone else, just not me!' His own query found a voice, newborn-frail, trembling and afraid, but it wounds surprisingly deep her unsuspecting dreams.
'Because you know as much as I do that my dad and mum disowned me the moment I left them to live in the wizarding world and become a Healer and be with-' she does not finish the sentence and turns away from him.
'It's because you're the closest thing I had as a brother, if not my da right now.'
Silence invades the spaces of peace before his awkward words stumble out. 'I'm so sorry, Lily. I…I forgot. I was shocked. I still am and I don't think I can do this.' He finishes politely, careful not to spill his guts as he screamed and spliced himself inside.
!!I can't do this because I-
Even his consciousness was too cautious for him to accept his inward cries.
'Never mind. If you don't want to, I'll go to somebody else. Dumbledore might even agree.' She mumbles, but an audible sniffle comes immediately after the statement.
Was she crying? Out of disappointment?
He settles on her shoulders both of his hands and makes her turn around.
'You are.'
'Are what?'
'I mean,' he sheepishly joins his fragmented thoughts, 'you are crying.'
'No, silly. I just got something in my…eye.' The last word is muffled as he reels the miserable, sniffling girl.
His quicksilver eyes were suddenly withdrawn and tired but at least he was smiling down at her.
'I hate it when you pull that act on me.'
Another sniffle replies to his comment.
'Fine. I'll walk you to James. Happy now?'
A relieved laugh bursts from her and she throws her weight at him again, arms flung to his much higher neck.
'I knew it! I knew I could count on you!' she squeals triumphantly. 'You always make me the happiest girl in the world.'
He attempts to swallow the enormous lump in his airway but nearly choked. Biting back the bitter saltiness, he couldn't tell her that someone else already did that before him.
James was her sole reason for true happiness. Not ever, in this life or the next, will he be ever able to change that.
Closing his eyes to Lily's beaming grin, the elephants begins using jack knife pogosticks while double-somersaulting their way up his ventricles.
He doesn't know if he would still be alive tomorrow.