TITLE: Summer
PAIRING: Lily/Severus
SUMMARY: Summer is different at sixteen.
WARNING: Spoilers for DH, I suppose.
Author's Notes: So I felt like writing another short piece. Now, I know Lily starts dating James at around seventh year, but let's just say he visited her once during the summer before sixth year started because James started--or attempted, at least--to "clean up his act". Ehhhhh, whatever. Hahaha. I just felt like writing a fic before I got crazy with schoolwork. :D

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Summer is different at sixteen.

Days are no longer endless, and it is cold. Swings are abandoned by evening, and the little spot by the river is empty of its visitors. There is no boy with his peculiar frock, no green-eyed girl lying beneath the shade of trees. There is the laughter of children, but it is not theirs—not anymore, because things have changed. Fifteen has gone; fourteen through nine, too, and what's past can't be returned.

Summer at sixteen has the girl all grown up, who's brought home a friend—another boy. Bespectacled and handsome, he smiles more often than the other one. A new friend, her sister says, and she admits he's much better than him, because this one is charming and is everything the wretched boy isn't.

Summer at sixteen has the pale boy alone and miserable, and he hates it, because it isn't supposed to be like this. Summer at sixteen has him back as he was when he had first met her: hiding behind things, because he can't touch her, not anymore; reduced to only watching her from a safe distance and greedy when it comes to everything that's her.

Summer at sixteen has him replaced—by the boy he resents, because he has stolen her away, and has begun to rob him of the one thing he alone has shared with her: summer, in its essence, because it was she who had made everything about it brilliant.

At sixteen, it's the boy with the glasses who's holding her hand as they cross the street. Buying her ice cream. Lounging by the river. Lying down on the grass. Making her laugh. Bringing her home. Loving her like hell in the hours that should have been his.

Sixteen is a difficult age, and summer is no longer the same. Memories of summer consist of sundresses, a lovely girl with eyes the colour of grass, of a boy who forgets everything else when she exists. Here, ambitions are unimportant, because he only dreams of her and of perpetual summers with her.

Theirs were summers of childhood, and they are no longer children.

Summer is different this year, and they've all grown up.