#lighthouse fic

so. it's a very classic set-up for them. james is very rich and very handsome and very charming, the son of an earl or a baron, a blue-blooded aristocrat. lily is the daughter of a miner, no standing to speak of, brash and rosy-cheeked and definitely not a suitable match for the heir to the potter family. they meet, somehow, the details are unimportant, and james falls head over heels and decides that she will be his wife. at first, lily's like well. no. bc she doesn't know him and she doesn't want to be a lady and have to deal with all the snobbery and judgement. but james is charming, and persistent, and everyone tells her how great it would be for her family and for her if she married him so eventually she decides that yes, maybe she will.

this is obvs a big shift for lily bc now suddenly she's no longer just the miner's daughter, she's the lord's daughter-in-law, she's nobility, she's pulled into a completely different social sphere with different expectations and a shit ton of social niceties and pernickety rules that she has to adhere to. but she decided to marry him and she likewise decides that, now she has, she's going to be best wife the local gossip circles have ever seen - partly out of spite bc they bitched about her 'shameful, lowly background' or whatever but also partly bc this is her life now, the role that she has chosen to play.

so she throws herself into it. she learns all the stupid rules. she embroiders instead of sewing, and she gives the servants instructions instead of just lighting the fire or doing whatever it is herself, and she follows the latest fashions coming in from france, and she settles in. and she loses a big part of herself. a few years pass, and the only ones who still gossip about her are the old ladies that everyone calls crazy, and she's got most of the local aristocracy wrapped around her little finger, and she's convinced herself that this is where she belongs. and she's a dutiful wife with a doting husband who she loves deeply and they have a beautiful baby boy and everything is exactly as it should be....

and then lily goes off to oversee the setting up of the new potter family summer house on the island. james and harry are due to follow her there in two months time but for now it's just her and some of the servants. and she's away from that idyll of family life, and away from her circle of aristocrat's wives that she spends her time with. she's away from all the rules and expectations that she had painstakingly learnt, and following them even when there's no one there to see her starts to grate, it's like a blindfold being removed or something bc she suddenly feels like such a stranger in her own life, picking out colours for the wallpaper like who am i? (zoolander looking at his reflection style x)

and this is where the whole sybillily plot begins so i won't go too deep into this bc i've already been talking for far too long oh my god and they haven't even died yet, but anyway she basically shrugs off the role of the aristocrat's wife and finds that brash, rosy-cheeked girl again as she falls in love with sybill. most of the time during those two months, james and harry are farrr from her mind, but occasionally a servant will come across her staring into a newly-built, unlit fireplace, james' last letter in her hand, cheeks stained with tears, and assume she's just missing them, rather than that she's being overcome by a bone-deep sense of impending doom mixed with some guilt about the fact that she doesn't even feel properly guilty bc she's just so disconnected from that whole life now. it doesn't feel quite real.

and it still doesn't feel real when she gets the news that they've died, that james and harry have drowned, just off the coast of the island, on a boat coming to meet her. what feels real is the way that sybill has shut herself away from her. i think there's again guilt about not feeling more guilty. guilt, like i said another time, about the fact that, before the shipwreck, she had wished they didn't exist and now they're not in her life anymore but they're more present than ever bc they're coming between her and sybill in a way that they probably wouldn't have done even if they had made it to the island and she can't help thinking that they died wrong.

there's a kind of irrational anger about the way that she would never have met sybill if it weren't for james, if it weren't for the potter summer house on the island, and the kind of horrible cyclicality in how her and sybill's relationship started and ended because of james. and more irrational anger at j&h for making sybill feel guilty for not being in the lighthouse. and the things she feels are all about what's happened to her and sybill rather than like, her husband and son dying. the tears she sheds are all for her and sybill, grieving that relationship rather than her marriage or motherhood. maybe she's a bit like 'i could've told them not to come, i should've told them not to come' but it would all be bc of what that would mean for her and sybill if they hadn't. if that makes any sense. what i think i'm trying to say is that the whole jily part of lily's life in this fic is kinda eclipsed by the major impact that sybill has on her, like she kinda shakes it off like a bad dream and ignores the fact that the island and sybill, despite how real it feels, isn't her real life at all. i imagine her entirely dry-eyed when she's like identifying their dead bodies or whatever, but like full-on sobbing, weeping, falling to pieces as sybill continues to refuse to let her in to the lighthouse.