i love you much (most beautiful darling)

oyprongs:

There is something to be learned, Lily thinks, from first impressions.

She meets Marlene McKinnon and immediately knows from the curve of her smile and her welcoming words that there is a strength and kindness there. Mary Macdonald offers her a sugar quill and asks her almost a million excited questions, and Lily can tell it is indicative of her devoted and passionate heart. She knows Remus Lupin is kind-hearted and gentle when they first shake hands and he shares his notes with her, despite his questionable taste in mates. First impressions do mean something, Lily believes, and she is nothing if not stubborn in her beliefs.

And yet sometimes, on particularly strange days or after particularly noteworthy events, she can be seen questioning some of those strongly held convictions. For instance, that of first impressions. Because, Lily remembers, she was quite repulsed by Severus Snape and his behavior the first day she met him, and yet they grew to be best friends. However, if she had kept her first impression of him in mind, she might have foreseen his descent into the Dark Arts. But the Severus Snape of now is not the Severus Snape of then, and sometimes people are multitudinous. And James Potter, who from the age of eleven Lily would swear was a plague to the entire Earth, and yet loved to surprise her in the smallest ways. So Lily tweaks her hypothesis the slightest, and she thinks instead that perhaps people – or the ideas one has of people, rather – are made up of infinite impressions over many years, and maybe first impressions aren’t the most important. Maybe it is the second impression, or the eighteenth, or the fiftieth, or maybe even the last. Maybe Lily is not quite as astute as she believes herself to be, and maybe the most surprising of people are the most significant.

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