They didn’t want to admit it, even to themself, but they felt relieved. Every moment since asking the question they’d been expecting Lily to get offended and start yelling at them, but the outrage never came. Instead Alecto watched Lily as she answered their question as well as she could. She was as articulate, as thoughtful as Alecto expected, if not more. But the thing that most startled them was how much effort Lily put into giving them an explanation. After all, she didn’t owe them anything; she could ignore them, refuse to talk to them or straight up tell them to go to hell and leave her alone. If Alecto was being honest with themself, they still waited for this kind of reaction.
Alecto took a moment to consider Lily’s words. “Fine, what you said implies that muggles wouldn’t care about us either, but you can’t really tell me that once the muggles learned about the wixen, they wouldn’t take a stand against us just because our culture beyond their comprehension. There is a reason why we hide from them, after all,” they pointed out. “Though, I suppose you are right about the universal themes,” they said, thinking about all the muggle novels they’d read in secret. Sure, there had been elements of the story they hadn’t understood or been able to relate to, but the overall message had rarely been lost on them. “And it works both ways, I imagine, so a muggle could relate to a story where people apparate even if the concept is completely foreign to them.”
“Well, maybe Lemonade wasn’t the best example,” they shrugged. It was never supposed to be the main topic of the conversation, anyway, and Alecto was glad to go on to talk about other aspects. “I just don’t understand one thing. Why should we share anything with the muggles? It’s not like they would understand whatever we could offer them. And besides, wouldn’t that be more of a one-way exchange? The solutions that we could show to the muggles is incomporable to whatever muggles could ever put forward,” Alecto said, but their heart was not in it. They didn’t quite agree with such a statement, but they had yet to figure out how to argue it, especially since they’d heard it so many times in one form or another from their parents.
“I can’t tell you what the muggles would do. Just because I’m muggleborn doesn’t mean I speak for them. I mean, they wouldn’t all think the same thing. There are thousands of different cultures in the Muggle world. My dad’s American, and even things over there aren’t like in London. And even in different parts of London, there are different rules and social norms. It’s just like here. There are the elite and the lower classes. Sometimes that divide is economic, sometimes it’s racial. But it’s there. That’s universal. But they’re all human. They’re all still people.”
She looked carefully at Alecto, taking her words apart one by one, trying to figure out why they were coming up to her, looking for a debate it seemed. She didn’t mind, not in the slightest, she just couldn’t quite understand it. Lily wanted to though. Whatever it was she did work about about Alecto’s motives, she wouldn’t share it. She wasn’t the type to. “You’re right. They could, if they tried.” She wished her family would. Try that is. Of course she didn’t dwell on that thought, she rarely did anymore.
She felt a smile raise her lips. “Well, maybe they wouldn’t have something like that to offer us right off, but you’ve got to give them a moment. They’ve figured out how to do all the things we do with magic without it, so just think what they could manage if they had us working with them. The kind of things they could built, create. There are things even magic can’t manage, but magic and science all at once? Well then, that’d be something. Some of the things I’ve seen in the muggle world are more amazing than any spell.”
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