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// You're so scared, you're aging faster
So you drink Earl Grey tea 'cause you heard that's the answer
And you're so scared of dying slowly
But why aren't you more scared of dying lonely? //
It was October.
The rain pattered for weeks and anxious first years were overheard excitedly wondering if it would abate in time for the first Quidditch match of the year.
Lily nearly laughed when she heard this and told them not to worry; the Gryffindor captain was too determined and insane to let something like weather spoil a match. Which might have been quite inconsequential, if their Head of House didn’t share the same values and could be heard loudly lecturing on the importance of a stiff upper lip in the face of ‘a bit of rain’.
Lighting and thunder boomed outside, rattling the windows of the Great Hall.
Lily’s eyes went to James.
He was sitting on the far side of the hall, tucked amidst his laughing friends and teammates. Lily was on the steps by the doors; out of sight, out of mind. The Slytherins were getting bolder each day, more and more Muggleborns ending up in the Hospital Wing, and the shadows offered her a bit of peace.
James spotted her looking and an instant smile broke across his face. He didn’t wave, but he cocked his head at the table, a silent invitation.
Lily shook her head, raising her napkin filled with toast as justification.
James grinned. Mouthed: Hey.
Lily bit the inside of her cheek so she didn’t smile, then glanced around to make sure no one saw them. He wasn’t being as careful as they usually were today, but his mates were all distracted with their own things, so there was no harm done. They were still a well-kept, lovely secret.
Good luck, she mouthed back. See you after?
He grinned and made another vague gesture—one that left nothing to her imagination as to what he wanted to do to her after.
Lily’s cheeks heated and she tried to scowl at him, but James just winked and turned back to his breakfast. The bustle of the Great Hall continued on around them, the pouring rain a soundtrack outside.
She and James Potter were friends, once.
Well, not friends, in the beginning of the story.
It started like all small, heartbreaking, life-changing romances do: prideful insults from children hellbent on winning an argument to stinging shouts from teenagers with no concept of what love was.
But then the fall of 1976 came and James was taller, kinder. He apologized to her: a short, simple thing unlike all of his grandiose declarations, and that more than anything else dug its claws behind her ribs, in the space between her bitter thoughts.
It hid a tiny seed in her mind, a seed that she tried to strangle, only to fall to the side as the sunlight of his smile blurred the rain. And so it grew, this feeling for him.
It was shaky and full of false starts, the road to friendship. Rows that couldn’t be tamed by either of their tempers, half-hearted apologies and fighting again, but their story started anew that spring in a quiet truce, like the blossoming flowers falling gently from the trees outside the tower window cushioned their collapse. It didn’t feel like falling, it felt like that. Collapse. Her barriers and judgments and pride all built up and torn down by his quick smile.
She shouldn’t be friends with him—it went against every carefully curated plan she’d put into place when she entered the wizarding world: from James Potter specifically, to their wider classmates. She wasn’t supposed to get attached, not when the amount of time she’d be allowed to live in this magical world would eventually run out.
James either didn’t know this, or simply chose to ignore her self-imposed exile and stubbornly wormed his way into her life during sixth year: sitting next to her in class, walking with her in the corridors, passing her notes with scribbles and jokes that made her unwillingly smile.
That fragile something between them taunted her. She liked him, suddenly and with such force of feeling it nearly bowled her over, just watching him sit at his desk, dust sunlight falling over his face.
It made her stupid, made her do something like look up at his face on the train platform as they headed home for summer. Made her say, “You should come visit me sometime.”
And James, surprised for just one second, beamed back at her and said he would.
June, warm and sweet-scented with blooming flowers, came to her parents little house in Surrey and brought him with it, standing in her square garden watching her work.
Her knees were covered in earth, face flushed as she dug around the roots of her mother’s prized rosebushes. James was going on about some hilarious incident Sirius had with his new motorbike and the Anti-Apparation wards at his house last weekend and it felt utterly bizarre, having him here.
His lanky limbs and tousled hair and blinding smile were all wizard in this utterly Muggle residence, with its twenty square meters of garden and rusty swing set.
“What are you doing?” James asked, coming over and crouching next to her. He watched with fascination as she pulled out a handful of weeds and dropped them onto a growing pile.
“Gardening,” Lily laughed, giving him a sideways glance. “Honestly, Potter, haven’t you ever seen—“
She never got to find out if he had or hadn’t seen someone do something as mundane as gardening because James, eyes blazing, suddenly leaned forward and caught her words with his mouth.
Their lips pressed together, soft and gone, and she stared at him, breathless and frozen.
He didn’t blink. His cheeks were red. “I just…wanted to try that,” he said after a second, voice rough.
Lily set her trowel on the earthy ground with trembling fingers, then used her dirt-covered hands to grab his face and pull it down to hers. She kissed him again. And again, the June sun beating down on them in the small garden.
And James kept coming back. He kept kissing her.
Two weeks of this, of a strange bubble of being James and Lily within the confines of her Muggle world, passed and somehow—she wasn’t quite sure how it happened—kissing turned to breathy sighs of appreciation, to his fingers in the loops of her jeans, to lying on her bed with him between her legs. To his head between her thighs, her fingers tangled in his hair, moaning nonsensically to the ceiling, skin flushed and head spinning with desire. For it being both of theirs first time having sex, it passed remarkably smoothly and the initial discomfort quickly faded into something that made her kiss him harder, dig her nails into his back, cry out his name in a way she never had before. Potter couldn’t have been further from her thoughts or her lips.
She should’ve wondered how they got here, tangled together and kissing lazily in her childhood bedroom, but that was James. Inevitable, stubborn, never-giving-up.
He wrote the week after saying that his parents were dragging him off to Italy for the summer—he actually phrased it like that, the spoiled idiot—and apology was implicit in his scrawling handwriting. I’ll see you on September 1st, Evans.
It made Lily think, the way she should’ve before this thing with him started. Enmity to friendship to this.
The first day of seventh year she met him on the train, his smile bright and just for her. “This can’t happen,” Lily said before he could speak. Her voice was as cool as she could make it, like she could hide the brittle feeling behind her ribs, where that garden he unknowingly planted had been blooming all this time. She watched that smile flatten a bit. “It—it just can’t, James. What happened this summer—it has to be just one time.”
James looked at her for a second and that was when she saw the Head Boy badge pinned to his robes, bright and gleaming like the twin of the one on her own chest. It hit her like another punch. “Congratulations,” she added softly after a beat of silence. “You deserve it.”
“No, I don’t,” James said simply, then continued looking at her. “Okay,” he said. “It’s fine. I understand.”
He didn’t, she could see that in the furrow in his brow, and he’d agreed quickly—too quickly, there must have been something else beneath it. But Lily finally exhaled, trying to smile.
“Friends?” she said, holding out her head. “Co…Heads?”
James’s lips quirked. “Sure,” he said and took her hand, so much larger than hers.
She remembered it on on her hip, tracing small circles against her skin. His mouth pressed against the back of her neck, tangled in the clouds of her hair. The hot bloom of summer around them.
Like all the twists of their story, that conversation ended with them crammed in a bathroom stall on the rattling train, clothes hastily tugged to the side and moans muffled by the others mouth.
Lily felt the guilt, the sting of what she’d fallen back into. The thousands of reasons it was a bad idea ran through her mind, but when he touched her still-flushed face gently as they left the scene of their tryst…she felt that more. The urge to lean into his hand was so strong she nearly did, but then he was withdrawing his hand and moving forward.
And it continued on like that, a secret.
The world around them grew more grey with every day, darker and hate-filled. She took to avoiding the corridors on her way to class, keeping her head down when whispers followed her from the Slytherins.
At night she slipped away from the girls dorm. She didn’t know any of them very well, first out of shyness in her early years, then simple self-preservation after her brief friendship with Ravenclaw Mary Macdonald in fifth year ended in shouts and tears and screams at the end of Mulciber’s wand. Another Muggleborn tragedy, was the dismissed whisper through the halls, but Lily couldn’t look Mary in the eyes after that. Not when they’d laughed and sat together and Lily was the one who cursed Mulciber after a particularly foul comment. She was to blame for Mary’s weeks-long absence, the fragile look in her eyes after.
Marlene McKinnon watched her go each night with a raised brow, but when Lily didn’t volunteer any information about her destination she just shrugged and turned back to giggling with Dorcas Meadowes.
It would hurt, all of these things, if Lily didn’t slip out of the dormitory and into the arms of James Potter.
They patrolled together every Wednesday, and it was down to an art, the dance they’d perfected since the beginning of term. They’d walk the four upper levels in quiet silence or quiet conversation, watching out for the habitual curfew-breakers or midnight hookups in broom closets. Those four upper levels were the most frequented at night, James had claimed once. If we do those we don’t really need to bother with the bottom. She’d wondered how he knew, then decided she really didn’t want to know. The clock would strike ten and as if there was some silent signal they’d turn the corner at the top of the stairs and head back to the seventh floor.
Sometimes it was a classroom or a hidden passage he knew of. Sometimes a broom closet, if they were particularly desperate. But those sleepless nights that fall, the kisses and gasps and breathless laughter, were the best of Lily’s life.
He learned her body just as quickly as she learned his, all the ways she could drive him wild or he could make her head spin with a perfectly placed kiss or touch. Maybe it was the newness of it all that made it so wonderful, but when she was clutching his neck and panting into his shoulder, held steadily between him and the wall on one of those aforementioned desperate nights, she thought it was probably just him. Them.
The way they fought and bickered and laughed and everything in between had led to a knowing, formed through the six years of hardship they’d gone through to get here. He knew what would drive her crazy through words or touch, how to channel that tension that always crackled between them into more passionate pursuits, the kind that left her whimpering into his palm, white-knuckled fingers clutching the top shelf of a broom cupboard during Charms as she tried not to cry out too loudly with every thrust of his body into hers.
And the fear that still lingered, the Mary Fear, as she’d begun to call it ironically in her mind, would have been so much easier to listen to if they didn’t work so brilliantly together.
October brought fall storms and grumbles from students at the onslaught of homework, but it also brought the beginning of the Quidditch season and that, for the first time in her life, she enjoyed.
Lily eagerly watched him play against Ravenclaw, breath held when he’d pull off something especially daring. He was in his element in the sky, flying and falling and wildly reckless and she felt like a part of something in the screaming crowd, cheering him on behind numb lips from the cold rain.
Her enthusiasm had a selfish tint too, of course, because after any kind of training, no matter how exhausted he was, James always sought her out. She couldn’t imagine a real game, this one with its landslide victory and thrilling plays, would be any different and was proven right within an hour.
She was sitting in the corner of the common room, head bent over a book while the victory party already began to rage, music blaring and teenagers drunkenly shouting. James found her like that, a quick hand brushing against her knee as he leaned in, balancing against the edge of her seat.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he said with a grin and she knew.
She played the game though, because that was half the fun. “Everyone is here,” she said, shutting her book and pulse already thrumming. His hair was wet from his shower, a visual she’d been imagining on and off for the last hour, and she could feel the effect it had already had on her in her hot cheeks and tense muscles.
James smiled, slow and dangerous and suddenly the will to draw this out, to banter and flirt just for the sake of it, disappeared.
It was the first time they’d shagged in an actual bed since that very first time at her house, and for some reason this struck her as very funny, enough so that she started laughing as she lay naked on her stomach, James pressed completely into her, their intertwined hands clenched in the sheets by the headboard. Her laughter was interspersed with moans and James paused mid-move, legs tangled together. “What?” he said, voice rough.
Her stomach tightened and she gasped, reaching back to clutch his shoulder. “No, no, fuck don’t stop—“
He thrust into her, long and slow, and her words cut off, jaw clenching as pleasure flooded her. “Oh—“
“Why did you laugh?” James asked her and she started to giggle again, clutching his pillow harder. “I—oh fuck, James—“
He groaned into her hair and his hips snapped against hers harder.
“I was thinking we haven’t—oh—done this in a bed since this summer and—”
He froze against her for a moment and she whined at the lack of movement, but then he chuckled and dropped a kiss against her sweaty neck. “That’s true,” he said.
Lily gasped, eyes drifting shut. “Right, yeah, it was just funny, but—oh fuck, please I swear to God, Potter, if you don’t finish me off right now—“
That just made him laugh more of course, but he obeyed her command easily and within two minutes she was muffling her cries into his pillow and hoping the party in the common room was loud enough they couldn’t hear her.
James asked her about Mary in November, sitting in a corner of the library during the endless fall rainstorms.
Lily kept her eyes on the lines of her textbook, trying to keep her shoulders relaxed. His innocent question echoed in her ears. What happened with you and Mary Macdonald?
“We were friends,” she said simply, about to leave it at that, but something about James’s curious gaze on her sent her mind skipping back, to the curve of Mary’s smile, lunch hours spent sitting in hidden corners giggling about life. The shine of her hair, head tucked into Lily’s shoulder when she cried after everything went to shit. “We…being a Muggleborn, it’s hard to find friends willing to be with you through all of…everything. Mary has Muggle parents, so she understood that.”
James’s brow was creased. “Are you still friends?”
Lily inhaled, hard. The rain drummed against the windows. “No,” she said. “The Mulciber thing…that was my fault. I taunted him, and he took it out on her because he knew that would hurt more.”
“That wasn’t—“
Lily shook her head. “Don’t, James,” she said. “You don’t get it, and that’s okay, but it’s the truth. Mary knew she was better off with her own friends, and I agreed. So, we just went our separate ways.”
It was a drastic oversimplification of the weeks-long end to that friendship, the arguments they had had and the way it all slowly broke down, but she didn’t like to remember that even in her own mind.
James was still looking at her though, something painful in his face.
“I’m okay,” she said, because she could tell he was thinking it.
James’s brow furrowed. His voice was careful, pitched towards caution. “Are you sure?”
Lily exhaled, eyes fluttering closed for a brief second. She opened them, blurry eyes refocusing on the library. “Positive,” she said, and gave him a smile that pinched the corners of her mouth.
But James, either too perceptive or too stubborn, didn’t let it go that easily. “So, what, you’re never going to make friends again?” he said.
“Probably,” Lily said.
He huffed. “That’s ridiculous,” he said sharply. “I mean, your parents—“
“My parents don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t want them to—or maybe sometimes I do—but they don’t. They can’t.” She studied the tracks of rain on the window, dripping down the pane. Her voice got quieter. “And the years I’ve had here have only ever been borrowed time.”
“That’s not true,” James said, leaning closer. It was his way, always trying to make things better, like he could force the world to be good. Watching his faith in that get stripped away in the following months and years would hurt.
Lily shook her head. “It is,” she insisted. “The world keeps crumbling and anyone I touch will just get caught up in that.” The thought implicit behind it was something she didn’t like to linger on, practical mind skipping ahead. She’d practically been a ghost in these halls, her only mark scribbled grades by weary Professors. Watching James play Quidditch with his laughing team in the stands, the rain whipping across her vision, blurring everything to grey. “It’s a miracle I made it this far, honestly,” she snorted, leaning back in her chair. “We’ll see if they’ll even let a Muggleborn into Healer training, I’ve all but accepted I’ll die in this war one way or another—“
A crash, the sound of his tilting chair landing on the floor. “Don’t.” His brow was tight, his eyes pained. His voice was equally strained. “Don’t say that.”
Lily stared. “Why not?” she asked. That damn practicality, everything slipped neatly into boxes of black and white. “It’s true.”
“I haven’t accepted that,” James said harshly. “I won’t accept that.”
She looked at him again, stubborn and proud, but with something else twisting inside her. It was painful and burning and a little too much like love. Lily exhaled softly. “Then don’t,” she said. “You—you see the good in everything, James. I like that.”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t want you to like it,” he said. “Because that means you don’t see it.”
Lily didn’t know what to say to that. That she’s practical, maybe. He’d call her cynical.
James took in her silence, then let out a harsh breath. His chair scraped back again, but gentler, and he strode over to her, cupping her face in his hands. He kissed her hard, clutching her close to him and Lily rose unsteadily onto her feet, wrapping her arms around him in return.
“I’ll show it to you,” he said, breaking away. His breath was uneven, cheeks flushed and she wanted to keep kissing him, lose herself entirely in the feel of his body where everything made sense and felt safe. “One day. I’ll show you that this fucked up world can be good.”
Lily swallowed. “How?” she asked, and it came out weaker than she wanted.
James shook his head briefly, closing his eyes. They blazed with determination when he opened them and she loved him. “We’re good,” he said and that also came out soft. He brushed his thumb gently down her cheek, pausing at the corner of her mouth. His words were tight. “We’re good and we’re here and we’re going to fight. And—“
He didn’t say whatever else was lingering behind his eyes, in the shadows of his thoughts.
Lily could finish his sentence for him if she were braver, if she thought more on the good of the world, the good he brought into it. That might’ve been all the answer she needed.
But the rain poured down the windows of the library and she just tucked her head under his chin, breathing in the smell of him. He held her close, mouth pressed into her hair.
The pitter-patter of the raindrops filled her ears, a world of grey outside. If she stepped out of his arms she’d drown for sure.
Being with him, she felt a bit like the wrong end of a scornful love affair, except she was entirely to blame for it. She could’ve lingered on the bitter parts, the secrecy and guaranteed hurt ahead, but thinking about James always led her down a path of musing and soft emotions she didn’t usually let herself dwell on. How she adored his freely given smile and his messy laugh and broadly drawn shoulders. How he was kind and he made her body sing and how it always hit her hardest when she was alone in her bed at night, dreaming of being wrapped up in his arms.
In another world where he was different and so was she, where there wasn’t something missing inside her, where this wasn’t all she could give him, she could have married him.
Married to James Potter. What a ridiculous, perfect thought.
Lily pressed her face closer into his neck and let him hold her.
Her sweet, Muggle parents knew James as a friend—the boy who had hung around their house for three weeks that summer and made their daughter unusually nervous.
They were the nervous ones that December, when she once again impulsively asked James to come visit. Petunia had left to spend the holiday with her new boyfriend, but Lily preferred the house like this. Quiet, just the three of them.
Plus James, sitting cross-legged in their sitting room in front of the Christmas tree, frowning at the telly and trying to work out how electricity managed all of these things.
Her dad tried explaining it and James listened eagerly, but his questions eventually hit dead ends as the gap of knowledge between the two of their realities was too large to be bridged in one conversation.
“I like him,” her mum whispered to her as they set out the plates for dinner. “He’s kind.”
He was that, certainly.
“I like him, too,” Lily said, hiding how the thought put a sudden lump in her throat. The Christmas lights sparkled and glinted and James laughed, right in the middle of it all like he was always meant be a part of her family.
Her parents left them alone in the sitting room for a bit after dinner and Lily wasn’t even slightly surprised when James leaned over and immediately started snogging her. She broke away, laughing. “We’re supposed to be exchanging presents,” she reminded him, then let him kiss her one more time. Her toes curled and the soft warmth of his mouth made her thoughts hard to keep track of. “James—“
James muttered something along the lines of ‘Fuck that’ into her mouth and dragged her into his lap, swallowing her surprised laugh with his lips. They never did get around to opening those presents, though they got a heart-stopping start when her parents wandered into the sitting room ten minutes later to find them like that.
Lily wasn’t sure her cheeks would ever be un-flushed again.
The present thing didn’t really matter, though because she sent James off with his—“Best opened out of sight of others.”—and barely three hours later she got a completely wrecked, euphoric, confused owl from him, his handwriting even messier than usual.
Are you fucking kidding me, Evans? he wrote. Are you trying to kill me??? You’re really going to send me home with a pair of your knickers?
She responded: If you won’t use them I’ll take them back, please.
Oh, no, I’m definitely going to use them. Right now, actually.
Her toes curled, cheeks flushing pleasantly and she glanced around her small room, the house quiet and still around her. She could imagine his touch, his wandering mouth, glinting eyes.
She wrote, Me too, and held her breath until his owl departed from her window with it.
Lily kept her casual promise to James that night and so did he, based on the letter he sent her the next morning whose contents made her blush bright red and laugh in equal measure.
She was definitely in love with him, she reflected, rereading his filthy words for the sixth time with as much fondness as she would an innocent love letter. This hastily scribbled note was better than any letter, somehow. That—being in love with him—should be a problem. It was a problem.
But when you’re in love, the future seemed distant and impossible and the world felt bright for a moment. Just as good as James was always saying it was.
Her eighteenth birthday fell on a Hogsmeade weekend and somehow—she suspected it had a lot to do with the fact that his cock was inside her when he asked—she’d agreed to go with James.
Like a date. In public.
“I don’t know why you’re making a big deal out of this,” James said, obviously amused as they walked. “We wake up together nearly every day.”
“And I like that,” Lily insisted, giving him a Look when he tried to capture her hand in his for the third time. She kept a careful foot of distance between them. “It’s nice that your voice was the first thing I heard today.”
James raised a brow. “But?”
She huffed. “But—you know.”
James looked like he was going to roll his eyes. “I do know and I think it’s shit stupid,” he dismissed, but didn’t push the subject of her self-imposed exile like he normally would. There was something about him today, a brightness to his eyes, like he couldn’t quite believe the day was happening.
Lily couldn’t really believe it either. Them. On a date. In public.
Or it would’ve been a date in public, if ten minutes into their stroll down High Street the world hadn’t imploded.
Her brain skipped over the scene, like the screaming and flashes of light as buildings exploded into fire and rubble just couldn’t be comprehended. Her ears rang and the only thing she remembered was clutching James’s hand, his knuckles white, his frantic voice in her ear—
The younger years wept the entire blurred journey back to castle, once the Aurors came and fought their way through the wreckage, chaos that dissipated suddenly and completely, cracks of Disapparation the second they arrived.
There were bodies in the street, Lily remembered that. Some wearing black cloaks that sent a sickening pulse through her, some in normal robes or even jeans. She couldn’t bear to see if any were wearing a Hogwarts crest.
James clutched her hand the whole time as they directed the students back to the castle, so hard she wondered if he’d leave a mark. She didn’t tell him to let go.
All the students who’d been out in Hogsmeade were gathered in the Entrance Hall for no discernible reason anyone could explain. The usual noise level was a low, upset hum and Lily sat next to James on the steps of the stairs in the middle of it all.
The only ones unbothered were a group of Slytherins in the corner, laughing and talking like everything was normal. Nott glanced over at her, then hissed something to his mates that made them laugh. Lily looked down.
“Hey, Mudblood.”
Her jaw clenched. The stone floor blurred in her vision.
“I said, hey Mudblood.”
“Shut the fuck up,” James snarled, shoving to his feet. Lily’s heart jumped.
Nott ignored him and smiled slowly at Lily when she finally looked at him. His words echoed through the silent Entrance Hall, mindless of any Prefects or teachers. “You’ll be next, Mudblood,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
James’s hand went to his wand and she shook her head frantically, Mary spinning through her thoughts. Sit down, sit down, she pleaded in her mind.
He didn’t. Every muscle in his body was drawn tight as he pointed his wand straight at Nott. “You don’t talk about her,” he snarled. “Or about anyone.”
The crowd whispered, tension floating through the room.
Lily felt like she was drowning, watching the scene from under water, watching Nott’s pale face go hard with rage. “Well,” he drawled lowly, looking at James. His eyes were narrowed. “I guess the golden boy’s chosen his side.”
James didn’t flinch, wand held steady. The gathered crowd, separated by ties of green and red and blue and yellow, separated by the side they took, watched on. “I guess I have,” he said.
Fear squeezed her ribs tighter and tighter, painfully drawing—
It snapped, when James lowered his wand as he never would’ve done in fifth year, face cold with resolve, and walked away. He held out his hand as he passed Lily and she stared at it for a moment, fear prickling again. But he was so close and fuck it all, if she didn’t want to believe him when he said he could fix all of this. She slipped her hand into his and let him pull her to her feet, out of the Entrance Hall and down the corridor.
The echoes of their words went round and round in her head—
James stopped and pushed her gently against the wall. He kissed her, hands cradling her face, thumb stroking down her cheek.
Lily closed her eyes and threw herself into his embrace, hand shifting to clutch at the back of his sweater. He’d drawn a line in the sand today, with the date and Nott and…it shook her soul, as much as she loved him.
But the thing she remembered the most was glancing past Nott and his cronies and seeing Mary Macdonald’s face in the crowd, terrified and pale. She hadn’t looked at Lily for long before her eyes flicked away.
Things between her and James shifted somehow as January passed into February. His hands were gentler, his looks longer. He was letting himself slip and so was she, and she could feel it happening, the lines between them blurring.
Lily started to eat dinner with him and his friends, and slowly they became her friends too.
The winter snow lingered well into early March, but when she shivered on her way to Greenhouse 5 for Herbology, Petter jogged up to her. “Here,” he offered and handed her his cloak.
Lily blinked. “Thank you,” she said after a moment. She kept looking over at him, casually taking notes, all throughout the lesson. The greenhouse was humid and warm but she kept the cloak on. It was things like that that made her self-imposed exile so hard to maintain. Things like small human acts of kindness, friendly smiles or mentioning her name in conversation.
It made her want to be a part of it all.
James’s bed was always warmer than hers, which he thought she was making up to be dramatic, but she knew was actually true.
It wasn’t just the soft sheets or being curled up with him: everything felt warmer with James, when their limbs were tangled together, mouths lazily seeking each other out as they hid from the March chill in his dorm.
He slid a hand down her body, settled between her legs and Lily arched her back, a soft sound escaping her mouth. Her back was pressed against his, her cheek against his pillow. The warmth of his skin and the slow touches he gave her kept her mind from ever settling on a thought, lost in a soft daze of pleasure.
“I love you,” he murmured into her shoulder. His thumb pressed into her clit at the same time he slid a finger inside of her and she moaned, fingers clenching in the sheets.
I love you.
Lily panted, eyes flickering open. She twisted her head to look at James. He was looking at her too, cheeks just slightly flushed, his usual arrogance laid to the side. Lying would be easy. He pumped his fingers in and out of her, hitting a spot that made her whimper and maybe that was what prompted her response, but she didn’t think it was. Yes, the sex was incredible and he could do things to her body she didn’t fully understand until she was a panting, swearing mess, but that was part of everything. The sex was a part of the love, of the care, of being with him. “I love you, too,” Lily whispered and kissed him.
She felt his smile against her mouth, his giddy laugh when she broke away. “Now make me come,” she added, then as an afterthought, “Please.”
James laughed again, stroking quicker. “Always,” he said, eyes crinkling at the corner. “I love you.”
Lily’s breathless response was lost in a moan, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Lily wasn’t sure whether or not to be surprised when she got a letter in April saying she’d been accepted to the Year 1 Healing program at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.
Not surprised, she decided on eventually, once she’d shared the news with James and the others. He’d also recently gotten his own acceptance to the Auror Academy, though that one was a given. She’d had all of the NEWT scores necessary to get into the program, and apparently anti-Muggleborn sentiment hadn’t spread deep enough to affect her admission.
Privately, after James had beamed and congratulated her and Sirius had set off fireworks as an insane show of support, Lily wondered how long it would last.
Their last months at Hogwarts were passing in a daze, but every time she laughed with the Marauders and kissed James something clenched within her. This, all of this, was coming to an end. She didn't know how it would end, just that it would, and in early June she got her answer.
The last week of term, Lily impulsively decided today was the day to skip class. The sun was shining and flowers bloomed everywhere and she couldn’t think of anything less appealing than sitting indoors and being tested on content for exams she’d already taken.
James was delighted, and (correctly) assumed this was the product of his influence on her. He badgered on about it their whole way out for the castle, until she rolled her eyes and threatened to hex him if he didn’t shut up.
They sat on an old bench not far from the castle and Lily breathed in the fresh air, looking out at the sea of green around her, interspersed with pink and yellow petals clinging to tree branches. When she glanced to her right she saw James looking at her, wearing much the same expression she was sure she had on her own face.
She flushed and smiled at him. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
James blinked slowly, a strange expression crossing his face. He straightened, and a pulse of anxiety went through her at the motion, but then he was straightening and looking directly at her. “I’m thinking I want to marry you,” he said simply.
Lily froze. Her heart pounded. “You—what?”
James didn’t retract his statement, still looking at her with the same steady eyes. “I want to marry you,” he repeated. He ducked his head, then glanced back up. “That’s a question, actually. I know it didn’t sound like one, but I—“ he cleared his throat. “Will you marry me?”
The wind blew through the spring leaves, rustling softly.
For one glorious moment, she saw it all spread out before her. Marrying James, getting a place together and waking up every morning to his smile against her skin. Them against the world, fighting it all together.
Him dragging himself down with her.
A futile war that stripped away at both of them, only it wasn’t a war he had to fight. He’d only be fighting it for her, because he loved her.
“I—I can’t.”
James’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” He looked confused.
Lily’s breath choked. She sucked it in. “I just—I can’t.” Her words began to trip over themselves.. “We—fucking hell, James this is why we shouldn’t have done this from the beginning—I—because—it’s.” The words didn’t come and what did was explained badly, cut up. “It’s not like here in the real world,” she said. “It’s dangerous and we’ve lived in a bubble and I always knew that this could only be temporary—“
“We are the opposite of temporary!” James said loudly. His face was starting to look angry. “We love—I love you.”
The urge to say it back was so strong she nearly flinched shoving it down. “You can’t,” she said, voice thick. That voice inside her, the one she called the Mary Fear, was screaming. “You can’t, James, because it’s so much worse out there and I’ll die and I won’t let you—“
“That’s shit stupid, Lily!” he said harshly, glaring at her. “Fuck that! Fuck all of that, because none of it is true and I love you—I—I—“ His words cut off and his jaw worked, clenched tight. He started again, voice hard, “I won’t let you—“
“Then I will,” Lily said, and she was really crying now. This sunny day, with the laughing promise of skipping class, with him teasing her…how had it all turned so fast? Why hadn’t she thought more on this, that graduation meant moving forward, meant ending? She felt stupidly blindsided, like she could shout at the world for being unfair. “I’ll protect you if you won’t.”
James stared at her and that was the moment she knew he saw she meant it. His expression started to crack. “Lily, please don’t—“
Her voice trembled. “We’re done,” she said. It didn’t penetrate her brain, the world. Maybe they were still seventeen, crouching in her mother’s rose garden, not yet having kissed. Maybe she’d never made the mistake that stealing away a few months with him would make the separation hurt less. What a stupid thought.
James went silent. His jaw clenched, his forehead furrowed and she’d never seen him look angry with her before. “You’ll regret this forever,” he said lowly.
Her eyes blurred. “I’m sorry—“
The look in his eyes: shattered, surprise, confusion, killed her.
It killed her more when he walked away.
Lily cried, pressed her palm to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. The sun shone down on her, soft and gentle and she was wracked with sobs, leaning forward as everything in her collapsed and hurt. James Potter was a collapse, and this was the aftermath.
A bird chirped nearby and she tried to straighten, panting for air. She tried to blink away her tears to watch the spring continue on around her. Blossoming petals falling, the wind through the leaves.
The end of something. So many things.
Graduation passed in a blur, sitting in a crowd of cheering black-robed peers. She sat off to the side by herself, trying to keep her eyes from blurring with tears when she glanced to her right and saw James sitting with his frail-looking parents amidst his friends. They were angry and so was he, though hurt was the largest emotion in his eyes by half and she felt those looks splinter away at her slowly. The only interaction she’d had with them was one harsh, shouted comment from Sirius the day after James’ failed proposal.
She was miserable and alone, and that was the way she’d always thought her years at Hogwarts would end.
Remus came over to talk to her after the ceremony on the lawn, his face guarded. “Congratulations,” he said.
Lily smiled weakly. “We made it, right?”
He didn’t laugh, but his eyes lingered on her. “Good luck,” he said simply, and turned to walk away.
“Remus!”
He stopped, glancing over his shoulder.
She swallowed, cheeks flushing, eyes prickling. “Is he—does—“ Her words trailed off.
Remus was quiet for a moment. “He’s hurt,” he said after a second. “He will be for a while, I think.”
“Does he understand?”
Remus sighed, the sound a lifetime of weariness and the lines in his forehead crease deeper. He hadn’t walked away yet, maybe because he got it in a way the other three never could: that feeling of being on the outside. “He will one day,” he said, voice soft. “Bye, Lily.”
Lily watched him go, the wind blowing through the leaves of the beech tree over the lake.
Her journey back home on the Hogwarts Express felt stilted and lonesome, curled up in her solitary compartment near the back of the train, but an hour into the voyage someone rattled on the door, then it slid open.
Lily paused, looking at James in the doorway.
His brow furrowed, pain or anger or something in his expression, something that dug into her heart like a blade. But then he exhaled and stepped in, sitting down silently across from her.
The train rattled and bumped, scenery racing past.
The minutes passed, the silence grew. Lily’s eyes stung and she studied the ceiling, the metal racks meant to carry the luggage of generations of students like her, or unlike her.
This was the last time she’d ever sit on this train, take this journey. She glanced over at James again, his gaze fixed steadily out the window. He was never good at masking his emotions, though, and she could see the tension in his shoulders, the way he kept flexing and unflexing his fingers like he was resisting the urge to do something.
The whole way home they sat together, silent in the compartment, perfectly across from each other. Legs parellel, crossed and leaning. Heads tilted to the side, looking out opposite windows, one to the countryside, one to the corridor of the train. Perfectly silent, perfectly heartbroken.
She wanted to reach for him, but she didn’t dare. The world outside the little train compartment whooshed past, greens and grays and blues. It was so dangerous and so fragile, everything between them. But so much more vicious hurt waited for them in the real world, and so she looked out the window and said nothing to this boy that had stolen her heart completely.
As soon as they got off the train they’d be heading to different homes, different parts of the country. They’d ended the school year on bad terms before, but there’d always been another September around the corner to mend things. This time, she might never see him again.
The Hogwarts Express slowed, creaking and whistling. Kings Cross came into view, blurry, then in sharper focus, outside of their window.
James stood, pulling on his jacket. He didn’t look at her at all.
Lily swallowed, slowly pushing to her feet.
There was just a few feet of space between them. She could try—
She remembered Mary’s glassy eyes. Flinching away from her touch.
Her fist clenched and she closed her eyes.
She heard him move around, gather his things and walk over to the compartment door. It slid open and she thought he’d left, but then his voice came, quiet and so unlike his usual tone that her eyes flew open.
“Bye, Lily,” he said softly.
Footsteps. The sliding closed of the compartment door.
Her eyes shut again.
“I’m getting married,” Petunia said into the quiet hallway of their house. Their parents were out so the yellow painted sitting room was still and quiet, bathed in sunlight from the windows on the front of the room.
Lily paused, staring at her. They were walking past each other, her on her way to her room, Petunia out to meet her boyfriend. Fiancé.
“Congratulations, Tuney,” she said eventually. “I hope you’re ha—“
“Yes, well.” Petunia sniffed, shutting her purse with a snap. Her painted face was stiff, awkward. “I am.”
The house was quiet when the door shut behind her.
Lily felt empty living back at home, even with her parents smiling and making noise and existing. Every time she slept in her old, narrow twin bed she was reminded of lying there with James almost exactly a year ago, laughing to hide nerves, slightly clumsy kisses, his hand sliding across her skin.
Eventually it became too much. Too many memories, too much.
She moved out of her parents house one month into summer and rented a tiny, sardine-can of a flat in London that was barely more than four walls and a creaky kitchenette, but she could breathe better there. Her excuse was the beginning of Healer training and the commute, which her Muggle parents nodded sympathetically over.
With Apparation, she could’ve lived in Dublin if she wanted to, but London was loud and big enough that she didn’t feel like she was drowning in perfumed, still air.
It was in a loud, crowded pub in September that she re-met Marlene McKinnon.
The bright, happy girl—one of the only ones in her dorm who’d acknowledged her—bumped into the bar, sat next to her, wobbling and drunk on a tall barstool, loudly ordered a round of shots and somehow, just like that, they were friends.
“I liked you,” Marlene told her that first night, even more miraculously. Her eyes were crossed from drink, cheeks flushed bright red.
“No, you didn’t,” Lily snorted, giving her a side look.
Marlene ignored that, wildly swinging her head from side to side. “I did,” she insisted. “But you were always gone and I never got the feeling you wanted to talk to anyone.”
Lily paused, the din of the pub crashing in her ears around them. “I suppose I didn’t,” she said eventually, though that wasn’t quite true. She wanted to talk to James, and later Sirius and Remus and Peter, when they’d slotted themselves neatly into her life like James loving her meant they loved her too.
That hurt, like all the thoughts of those four did, and she shoved it to the side, giving Marlene as wide a grin as she could. “Let’s drink, shall we?” she said loudly.
They drank—Merlin, did they drink—and then they stumbled home to Lily’s tiny flat and collapsed onto her couch. The next morning, light blinding their aching heads, they set about to breakfast and it was like suddenly Marlene was there all the time.
They went out for dinner, talked, and went out to drink and she found out that Marlene—a chatty, flamboyant drunk she barely knew how to handle—was working at the Leaky Cauldron in London to spite her aristocratic aunt and her grand plans.
“You’d get along with Sirius Black,” Lily muttered in a rare moment of humor, when the thought of that sardonic pain-in-her-arse bastard didn’t bring sadness to her thoughts.
Marlene snorted. “I hit a Bludger at him last year,” she said lazily. “Doubt he’d be chuffed to see me.”
Lily snorted, because she could just imagine Sirius holding a grudge over that. She didn’t remember that particular match, though that didn’t surprise her. She was always too busy ogling James to pay any attention to anyone else on the pitch.
The weeks passed and Marlene’s lease on her own, much larger place finished. Despite Lily’s protests that “Surely you could find something better—“ Marlene moved into her cramped flat on the fourth of November, 1978. She brought with her her special brand of loud laughter and chaos, and Lily found that she craved it.
In a way, Marlene reminded her of James, and that hurt, of course, but it was a sting she was coming to welcome. It meant it was real, that all those months laughing with him weren’t just in her head. She’d loved, and been loved in return.
Dying in a futile war didn’t seem so bad, if she had that.
Eventually, Lily told Marlene about him. They spent an evening curled up on their couch, a bottle of Muggle vodka passed between them. Her words became more slurred and tearful the longer she talked, but Marlene listened the entire time.
“Do you still love him?” she asked, swigging from the bottle.
Lily paused, then nodded. “Of course I do,” she said. “But…I couldn’t do that to him.”
“Let him die for you?”
Marlene’s blunt words hit it right on the head, that idea she and James had never been brave enough to speak of.
Lily nodded, squeezing her blurry eyes shut. She took another drink of vodka from Marlene, coughing at the burn. “At least he’s still alive, this way,” she said glumly. “Even if I’m miserable and may never shag anyone again.”
Marlene cackled. “If it comes to that I’ll shag you,” she told Lily. “But maybe give it a few more months.”
Lily kicked her lazily, already smiling. “Sure,” she agreed. “That’s definitely a good plan.”
Marlene just laughed more, drunk and sprawled, and plopped back onto the couch cushions. “Well, at least you had an epic romance,” she said. “Gotta count for something.”
Lily and Marlene made a habit of frequenting clubs and she found it fun in a way she’d never imagined she would. When there was someone to hold her arm or giggle in her ear, the flashing lights and loud music became something exhilarating and drinking too much wasn’t scary, because there was always someone to stumble home with her.
It was fun until it wasn’t, and the bright lights turned to screams and shouts, the flash of hexes.
The Moonlit Cove was a wizarding club, with self-refilling drinks and a Weird Sisters cover band playing in the corner, a group of goblins muttering around a table in the corner while young witches and wizards danced and drank the night away.
It was Muggleborn owned, though, and utterly destroyed by Death Eaters in the space of ten minutes.
The walls exploded inward, rubble flying through the room and something caught fire over by the bar, sending people screaming.
Lily’s chair tilted back beneath her and she fell, temple striking the ground, ears ringing—
Marlene cried out. Blood poured from her arm, a sizzling purple glow around the wound and Lily gasped, shoving to her feet—
She ducked just in time to miss a flash of green light.
Figures shoved through the wreckage of the club, a cacophony of screams and shouts as duels broke out. She couldn’t make out who was on what side, if there were Aurors on the scene yet or, or, or
Lily’s frozen brain kicked back into gear and she slashed her wand through air quickly, a wayward curse bouncing off her shield. It landed on a table and it promptly exploded into fire.
“Marlene—“ Lily’s shout was cut off as her Shield charm shattered and a cloaked figure spat something at her, wand darting through the air. The hex barely glanced off her arm, but the burn ripped through her skin.
Her brain shut off around then. Chaos, shouts. More explosions. Her arm hurt, from the hex and from casting spell after spell like she hadn’t since dueling practicals in school.
Her ears rang.
The Death Eater who cursed her lay on the ground at the far end of the club, dark robes obscuring his face. One pale arm lay on the ground, the curling Dark Mark branded into his forearm.
She was going to be sick.
“Lily!”
Sound filtered back in. Marlene’s panicked face before her. Her arm was bloody, but she clung to Lily tightly. The sounds of fighting were gone, replaced by loud voices and lingering shouts. Lily’s head spun, her eyes stung. Fuck. She clutched Marlene back, sinking down to the ground. She sat directly on top of a pile of rubble, dust floating around them in a cloud. She coughed, choked back a sob.
“Lily,” Marlene repeated, voice cracking.
Lily closed her eyes and dug her fingers into her friend’s shoulder, heart pounding through her chest.
The people in the club weren’t Aurors. They weren’t wearing the signature robes or bearing Ministry-stamped paraphernalia. They moved quickly though, despite their rag-tag appearance and Lily’s bleary eyes took in how they rounded up the bodies of the dead, organized search parties for the missing.
A witch with brown hair that looked vaguely familiar—perhaps like she was a few years ahead of Lily at Hogwarts?—healed Marlene’s bleeding arm, and the burn on Lily’s shoulder, then moved on quickly.
“Lily Evans,” someone said and she automatically turned, head spinning at the motion. The dust hadn’t cleared and her lungs hurt.
A grizzled looking man wearing a leather coat scowled at her. His wand was clenched in his hand and for a second she thought he was going to curse her. But he just glared at her. “Are you Lily Evans?” he demanded.
Lily’s throat unstuck. “Yes,” she rasped.
He stared at her, eyes flicking back and forth like he was sizing her up. “You’ve got talent, girl,” he said gruffly after a moment. “I’ll give you that. I saw you fighting off some of those bastards. And Minerva’s always gone on about you. I suppose she might’ve been right. We could use you.”
McGonagall?
“For what?” Lily said, thrown.
The gruff man didn’t say anything for a second. Then his words hit like a punch to the stomach. “The fight.”
One week later, Albus Dumbledore showed up at her front door at 8 o’clock in the morning.
“The Order of the Phoenix is an organization meant to combat the evils we see growing strong in our world,” he began, holding one of her mother’s teacups in his hand as he sat on her and Marlene’s saggy couch and the rest of his words faded into a haze in her memory.
She didn’t remember the specifics, how he outlined what the group did or how they were formed. She didn’t even remember him asking her and Marlene to join, saying he’d taken note of their skills when they were still his students.
His words at the end stuck with her though, mundane as they were.
“I know your speciality is Healing,” Dumbledore said to her delicately, “but we could use your fighting skills at the moment.” Something darkened in his eyes, a somber look coming over him. “We have so few true fighters these days, anyone we can get is an enormous asset.” He looked out at the two of them, perched on the couch across from him. “I understand this is a great thing to ask of you, to request you risk your lives for the sake of so many others.” His question was implicit. It was a great thing, but he was asking it of them anyway.
And there it was again, that fear.
Stay low, don’t look them in the eye or Mary will get hurt. Fear.
Lily glanced over at Marlene. Her blonde hair, still disheveled from sleep, was frizzing around her pink cheeks. Her mouth was set, eyes hard and she’d never seen her friend so present and alert. Determined to fight.
We’re good and we’re here and we’re going to fight.
James’ voice echoed softly in her head and for the first time in months it didn’t hurt.
Something good.
She’d have to quit Healer training and would have no career for the rest of her life, but who knew how long the rest of her life would be anyway if she didn’t try—
“I’m in,” Lily said.
And she wasn’t stupid, of course.
Of course she wondered about him. If he was in Auror training or if he’d quit or met someone new or—
She ought to have expected it really, but it still hit her like a freight train the day she left an impromptu Order meeting in the back room of the Hog’s Head after a dizzying week of missions and brewing dozens of potions for emergency healing, and she overhead Caradoc Dearborn casually mention, “—Potter and Black are meeting us in Cornwall on Friday. Place is crawling with Death Eaters but they’ve managed to gather some good intel, Merlin knows how, those boys are either insane or brilliant—“
Her mind had stopped recording the conversation at that point, a buzzing static filling her head.
James was here. He was in the same world as her, he was in the same group as her.
Once she thought about it, curled up in her bed in her and Marlene’s tiny flat, it made perfect sense. Of course he was in this, the stupid noble bastard. Of course he wouldn’t have stopped trying to be a hero after she left him.
It should be the last thing on her mind, but hope took root behind her heart that day. Hope, mixed with fear and eagerness and apprehension. That she could see him again. That they still existed in the same plane of existence and hadn’t each floated off to their own solar systems.
The next day she walked into the warehouse where headquarters was housed and volunteered to join the Cornwall contingent. “They’ll need someone who can heal,” she said, though that might have been stretching her skills a bit. She’d only had the most basic of training in her brief months at St. Mungo’s before she quit.
But McGonagall wore a pleased smile and even gruff Moody seemed to like the idea. “Excellent,” her former Professor said. “You can join Caradoc on Monday. There is a safehouse in the city of Truro where we’ve set up camp.”
Lily nodded, barely hearing the words.
Marlene took the news about as expected—a dramatic fit, then flamboyant support. “Don’t die,” was how she said goodbye, wearing her hair in curlers and bunny slippers on the wrong feet. Her mascara from yesterday was smeared under one eye, but she squeezed Lily with all the alertness of someone who’d gotten a full night of sleep.
Lily laughed, choked. “I’ll try,” she promised and went off to meet Caradoc Dearborn.
He greeted her with a grim smile in the early grey dawn and she took a shuddering breath. She was doing something, going somewhere, and she might see James again.
Her heart pounded as she slipped her hand into Caradoc’s and then the world went crack.
They Apparated from the dreary Order headquarters in London right into a battle.
The bright lights of curses whooshed past her face on the grassy plain outside of Truro where they’d landed and her brain immediately switched into battle mode, as if the last few months had rewired the way she thought and acted. She’d hexed a Death Eater and cast a curse at another before ten seconds had passed, harshly pulling Caradoc with her as she ducked a vicious streak of light that exploded a nearby copse of trees.
It wasn’t an ambush, she realized after a second. There were already other people here fighting—Order members, presumably—but they were vastly outnumbered, maybe five of them to the twenty Death Eaters surrounding them.
Fire lit the night sky, screams ripping through the air.
Her breath cut her lungs, harsh and panting as she fought and ducked and—
The crack of Apparation echoed in her ears, then a sudden wordless shout of victory. Dread curled in her stomach and she barely glanced up—
A bright flash of light cut through the clearing and one of the Death Eater’s screamed, falling to their knees as a sizzling red curse sliced through their abdomen.
“Order reinforcements, fall back!”
The crack-crack-crack—
It sounded like bones snapping in her head and Lily panted, flinched, standing so still she couldn’t move even as her hands shook.
“They’re gone!” Caradoc said hoarsely from her left, straightening. His grip on his wand was tight, knuckles white, his face just as pale. The fire still burning in the trees reflected in his eyes. “They’re…”
His words fell away and Lily didn’t blame him.
Her eyes paused on blood streaked across the grass, retinas still blurring from the bright spells and curses.
She looked up, finally taking a stumbling step forward to help, then came to a halt.
On the other side of the clearing, only just lowering his wand, was Sirius Black. His hair was longer, face sharper. He was wearing the same leather jacket she’d seen him sport occasionally at school and she saw the second his eyes paused on her too.
Something built in her chest. A sob, maybe.
It didn’t even matter she hadn’t seen him in months, or that he hated her the last time she did. Lily ran forward, world blurring and collapsed into his arms. Sirius made a sound, then gripped her tightly. His chin pressed into the top of her head, the stinging smell of smoke clinging to both of them. Her eyes swam with tears. “Fucking hell, Evans,” he said and his voice was the same, rough and tight.
The crackle of the flames continued, the sounds of wounded Order members dragging themselves to their feet. She should go heal them.
Lily was numb as she arrived at the safehouse, a large cottage perched by the edge of the sea. Sirius became more and more closed off with every second that passed between them and their impromptu hug, and he didn’t say a word when they entered into the narrow hallway. He silently directed her to a small bathroom, then went ahead into a door that led to some other room. She could hear the sound of voices starting up.
Lily cleaned herself up, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Her face was white, eyes red. Hair streaked with blood and ash.
She closed her eyes, breathed tightly and left the bathroom.
The room Sirius had gone into was a kitchen and it was filled with people when she arrived—Caradoc Dearborn among them, and at least six she didn’t know, and a few others she did. Sirius was leaning against the sink, arms crossed and face brooding, and standing right there next to him was James.
Lily’s breath froze. Her heart stopped, or did something that hurt.
He looked the same.
That was the first thing that went through her mind. His hair looked the same, just as wild and messy, and he was wearing a Magpies sweatshirt that she recognized. He looked the same.
James looked up and saw her. His face stilled, but there was no surprise in his expression. Sirius must have told him he’d seen her, then.
He didn’t make a move to come say hello.
The meeting passed in a daze, words and arguments she didn’t hear. Her eyes stayed on him the entire time and as soon as people were leaving the kitchen she made to stand, but that turned out to be useless.
James came to her, his hands in his pockets.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was breathless, almost a whisper.
James’s face didn’t move. “Hi,” he said quietly. He glanced around. “You’re staying here?”
Lily nodded.
“Okay,” he said simply and that was all it was.
Lily nearly collapsed the second she found her room at the top of the creaking cottage, hands covering her trembling mouth. Don’t cry, she told herself. He’ll hear.
She didn’t blame him for still being angry, but…what if he heard her crying and came to comfort her, or worse, didn’t care at all?
Lily settled into life in Cornwall that winter and spring and she and James avoided each other for most of it. He was stationed there as well, along with Caradoc Dearborn and Hestia Jones and she knew that must have meant he’d quit Auror training to join up, much as she’d quit Healing. That brief, shallow sting of dreams crushed by the war shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.
Other Order members cycled through the cottage, bringing wounded members who needed her attention—at some point it must have gotten out that she had a few months of Healer training, which apparently made her the de facto person to come to when you were injured—or just to hand off information, including three familiar faces.
Remus, Peter and Sirius popped in and out through January and February, and the former two smiled when they saw her for the first time, though the expression was quickly flattened with a cautious glance at James.
Lily couldn’t tell if he was mad or just genuinely didn’t care anymore, if that was why he left every room she stepped into and only talked to her when necessary.
She turned nineteen and life went on.
Death Eater attacks were often, meaning most nights were spent patrolling through the wilds of Cornwall in groups. In April, she wearily left the house in one such group, the grey evening so peaceful and quiet it was impossible to imagine danger lurking around the corner.
Lily slowed her steps until she was next to James. “Alright?” she asked.
He glanced down at her and there was a flash of something in his gaze he couldn’t hide from her. Longing and pain and love and—
It hit her in the chest. He still cared.
“Fine,” he said shortly, glancing back ahead.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said and he stiffened. She kept going, eyes focused on the grass beneath their feet. “Really, I am. I—I should’ve explained better, why I couldn’t—“
“It’s fine,” James said, but it was clear nothing had ever been less fine to him.
Lily’s shoulders slumped.
But their overwrought emotions took a back burner, because suddenly there was a shout from Caradoc and a flash of light, a crash—
The scent of smoke still lingered in the air, her lungs choked with it, with the screams she could still hear.
James was standing in the door of the kitchen of the cottage, shoulders slumped, brow furrowed, eyes squeezed shut. The others had either gone to their rooms or left. Lily’s hands felt raw from casting spells and tying bandages.
James opened his eyes when he heard her faltering footsteps and then he was looking at her.
Lily swallowed, heart pounding.
Neither of them moved for a moment, the space between them a cold void, and then suddenly he was striding forward, that horrible look on his face replaced by determination. Her breath choked—
James reached her and grabbed her around the waist, dragging her into him.
She just about said his name, a breathless plea, then his lips were swallowing the sound.
He tasted like the same smoke still in her lungs and metallic blood from the battle. He kissed like he did at seventeen, in her mother’s rose garden.
“James—“ It escaped, a year’s worth of longing in one syllable and he groaned, gripping her hips hard enough to bruise. They stumbled backwards, legs banging into the kitchen table, hands roaming eagerly to touch skin that was once known so well.
“Fuck, wait—“ James stopped kissing her long enough to grip the backs of her thighs and lift. Her feet left the ground and she automatically grabbed his shoulders, then he was depositing her on the tabletop and immediately kissing her again, hands tangled in her hair, mouth sucking and kissing her neck, her shoulder.
She whined when his mouth paused and nearly panted when his head came up, wild eyes looking into hers.
“Lily…” His voice was all breath.
Lily shook, her skin burning, the smoke clinging to the room, the town, the world. She let her legs slide apart, hook around his waist and she kissed him gently, mouths brushing together, tongues tracing. “Fuck me,” she breathed. A shuddering breath, need rising from deep within her. “I—James, please, please fuck me—”
A sound ripped from his throat and his hands were suddenly on her, pushing her shoulders back until she lied flat on the table, legs dangling off. Lily stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling with pants, then she felt his mouth on her stomach where her shirt had ridden up. She squeezed her eyes shut, a whimper making it out of her mouth.
James pushed the shirt up and she helped him, quickly tossing it over her head towards the sink. She wasn’t wearing a bra and she relished the sound he made when he saw her lying there topless, spread out before him on the table.
Lily flushed with want, lifting her head up to look at him.
His hair was a mess, eyes wild and fixed on her. She watched him swallow, then step forward, closer, closer, and yank down her jeans. A harsh sound escaped her throat as cool air brushed her thighs, then she was lying there in only her knickers, aching to be touched—
He hadn’t touched her yet and that was unacceptable and why hadn’t he and why was he still wearing so many clothes—
Those thoughts more or less made it out of her, an incoherent stream of complaints and demands mixed with desperate pleading and—
James liked it just as much as she remembered he did, a string of hissed swears making it past his lips as he harshly tugged his shirt over his head and leaned over her, one hand pressing flat to her stomach.
“Fucking hell,” he said, and kissed her. Lily’s fingers wound into his hair, gripping tightly and she moaned into his mouth when he finally, finally stroked over the fabric between her legs.
“Fuck, fuck—“ her head flung back, hitting the table with a thud but she didn’t care. He was touching her again and kissing her again and the past blurred around her, like they were seventeen, eighteen, stealing away minutes between class in a broom cupboard. “Oh—James, I swear to fucking God—“
James pushed aside her knickers and slid a finger inside her.
Lily’s back arched and she made a yearning, pleading high pitched noise she couldn’t name at the feeling, the familiar stroke of his fingers and that one callous by his knuckle from Quidditch that drove her mental—
He was saying her name, some broken litany of repetition, scattering frantic kisses on her mouth and chin, glasses bumping into her with each one but she truly couldn’t have cared less.
She didn’t know how he knew, how he still remembered, but she made a noise, some breathless, pleading thing that demanded without words and he instantly removed his fingers from inside her—she cried out—then he was yanking at his belt.
Lily barely had a chance to take a breath before he was gripping her hips and then he thrust inside her.
In the end, it was his name that she said. His name, over and over, as he fucked her on the kitchen table, as she dug her nails into his shoulders when he leaned over to kiss her. His name, when he groaned and thrust into her even harder, like the ten months of separation had pent up into such desperate need he couldn’t bear to make it slow. His name, when she was gasping and squeezing her eyes shut, coming undone around him—
“James,” she gasped, trembling hand at the base of his neck. His face was buried in his shoulder as he bent over the table, his cock still inside her. She was still clenching around him from her climax, her head fuzzy.
James breathed heavily and kissed her shoulder. “I missed you,” he said, voice muffled. “Fuck, I missed you, Lily.”
James didn’t look at her the next day.
Peter and Remus dropped by, which meant he and Peter played a game in the garden to pass the time. (“Modified Quidditch, since the wards don’t extend to the sky,” Remus said idly. “So, football?” Lily wondered. Remus snorted.)
Lily spent the afternoon watching him from the front steps of the cottage. It was an unusually slow day, the kind where nothing in particular was happening. No missions to undertake, no one to heal. She had cauldrons of potions bubbling in the kitchen, but the thought of being trapped in a hot, smokey room alone sounded like torture to her.
James played just as surely as he had in school, and she was struck for a second how close that time was. It felt like ages, yet it hadn’t even been a year. This time last year she was studying for NEWTs in the library, worrying about the Slytherins and completely lovestruck with James.
That part hadn’t changed, at least.
When they finished outside, James headed in to shower. After a moment, glancing at her peaceful companion in Remus, who just raised his brows at her, Lily stood to follow him.
The soft noise of the shower and the steam hit her when she slipped into the upstairs bathroom. She could see the shadow of his body behind the glass and thrill clenched tight between her legs.
Lily’s clothes dropped to the ground in a pile next to his and she took a shuddering breath, closing her eyes briefly. Despite the steam, the cold chill from outside penetrated the bathroom and her nipples pebbled quickly.
She heard the moment he realized she was there, as she stepped into the spray of hot water and touched his lower back.
James tensed, sucking a breath, then released it slowly. “Hi,” he said lowly.
Lily kissed his shoulder. Their bodies pressed together, warm and steady. “Are you okay?” she asked.
James laughed, the sound completely without humor, but leaned back into her. “None of us are,” he said.
Lily pressed her palm flat against his wet back. It was right over a scar she’d never seen before, a slow curve with a jagged end. “What’s this from?” she asked softly.
James didn’t glance back, but she felt his shoulders tense. “Auror training,” he said.
Her fingers trailed upwards, pausing on another by his side. “This one?”
“Moony, on a particularly bad full moon.”
“After?”
He nodded. “Last September.”
When she was drinking and laughing with Marlene McKinnon, brain completely barred from thinking his name.
James sucked in a breath and turned to face her. He kissed her quickly, gripping her hips and pushing their bodies closer together. She could feel his cock starting to press into her thigh and she made a high-pitched sound of want, nearly a whimper, kissing his neck. “I need you,” she whispered. Her hands travelled up and down his chest, tracing the familiar shape and grooves.
Her eyes paused, taking in what she hadn’t noted during their table-shag the day before. His chest looked the same as it had when they were together, except maybe a bit more defined. And there were more scars now, some small, some long and sharp, pale marks against his tan skin.
James noticed her look and she felt him tense under her hands. “Hazard of the job,” he joked, but she could hear the rasp in his voice. He shifted, hand on her hip falling to his side.
The need for him was still there, but her plan for it changed.
Lily glanced up at him, then lowered herself to her knees. The tile was cold, the water still pouring down on them hot and James made a low, groaning noise above her. His hands dropped on her head, tangling in the strands of her hair.
She kissed a small scar on the crease of his hip and her breath brushed over his cock. He twitched, making another sharp sound.
Lily pressed her forehead to his abdomen, kissed his skin again, a scar beneath her mouth. I love you, she thought.
Suddenly things were moving.
In early May there was a big raid scheduled on a nearby Death Eater hiding spot and ten members were chosen to lead the strike. James was one of them.
The tension caught in her lungs as he made to leave the buzzing kitchen that night, face set with determination and nerves. Caradoc joked with him. “Best make it count if we don’t make it back, aye?” he said.
James laughed too, but his eyes were tight.
She stopped him in the corridor on his way out the door. The words burst out of her. “Don’t go.”
James froze, glancing at her. “Lily…”
Her eyes were stinging, her heart rioting in her chest. “James, please—“
He kissed her, hard and dizzying. Kissed her, left her panting, left. “I have to,” he said simply.
After the crack of his Disapparation sounded, she went into the garden and screamed. Her throat hurt, her eyes burned and welled with tears.
Sirius, the lone person to stay behind, did her the courtesy of pretending she hadn’t and he offered her tea with a heavy splash of Firewhiskey when she re-entered the kitchen. He didn’t glare at her as often these days, though his gaze wasn’t always all friendly. Tonight, though, it was quiet.
“Do you think we’ll get through this?” Lily asked, throat raw. She stared down at her amber tea, smooth as glass. Her finger tapped against the rim of the cup and ripples spread through the steaming liquid.
Sirius’s brow furrowed and he tilted his head back. “Sure we will, Evans,” he said. “Sure we will.” She couldn’t tell if he believed it or not.
When James returned that night, smelling of smoke and blood and horrors, Lily didn’t even wait for him to take off his shoes before she dragged him upstairs, pushed him against the door and kissed him until her mouth was sore, her breath panting.
Lily would feel more self-conscious and exposed about how obviously crazy James being gone made her, if he didn’t worry about her, too.
Each time she came back from a patrol or a raid or something in this endless fight that blurred in her head, he caught her hand in the hallway as she came through the door and kissed her. It didn’t matter who was watching and the first time he did it in front of Peter she felt a flush of anxiety, but it was gone the second his hand touched her bare back and want sparked within her.
Because out there…out there everything was grey and rain soaked and painful, but when she stepped back into the cottage and saw him waiting for her it hit her that she was alive. She’d made it past graduation, past her self-imposed exile. Back to him, even, despite all the odds.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Evans,” Hestia said as Lily walked past her in the early hours of the morning after a stakeout. “We’re back to London tomorrow.”
Lily nodded, releasing a breath. “Got it,” she said.
She made it up the stairs, bones aching with weariness, her only thought lying down in her bed, but that thought stumbled, crashed to the ground when she heard the sound of swift footsteps behind her that she recognized immediately.
Lily turned, breath already snatched away, even more so when she saw the look on James’ face as he strode towards her. Her mouth opened—
He grabbed her by the arms and pushed her through the open door to his room. She stumbled back against his dresser, mouth taken swiftly by his. He kissed her hard. “You were late,“ he said roughly, pulling away. His hand cupped her arse, squeezed.
She sucked in a breath, eyes squeezing shut. “I know, I know, we—“
He rolled his hips into hers and she cut off with a high-pitched noise. Fuck. “We got delayed and—“
James kissed her again, hand burying in her hair while the other pulled at the buttons of her shirt. It fell to the floor, followed quickly by her bra and he cupped her breast, thumb circling her nipple. “Don’t ever do that again,” he said harshly. He was panting, mouth hot and wet as he pressed kisses to her neck. “Do you hear me?”
Lily let out a breathy moan, clutching his back. “Yes, yes,” she said, half-delirious. “God, I know, I’m sorry—“ She was sorry because she knew the feeling, the dread when he was just one second late and she couldn’t even speak for the thought of him out there injured or worse—
Her jeans and knickers dropped to the floor, followed by his, and his hands didn’t stop moving for a second during that: gripping her hips, massaging her breasts, tracing her thighs, her stomach. She had a bruise blossoming on one hip from a hex and he stopped to touch that gently. The look in his eyes when he looked back up at her nearly bowled her over, the abject rage and fear and care—
Lily kissed him, tugging him back towards his bed and they fell onto it in a tangle of limbs and panting breaths. She felt him hard against her and gasped softly, trying to draw him closer into her. “Please,” she moaned, tilting her head as he kissed her neck, cock slipping between her thighs. She was almost dizzy from arousal and latent panic and the only thing that kept her grounded was gripping his shoulders, nails digging into his skin.
“Merlin, I want to fuck you,” he muttered, biting her neck. He settled between her legs and slowly rocked against her and she clenched with a whimper.
“I want that,” she gasped. “I want you to fuck me so hard I feel it tomorrow—“
Something blazed in his eyes and he groaned, gripped her hips and slammed into her.
Lily cried out so loudly she slapped a hand over her mouth, biting her own palm to contain the noise.
James groaned again, leaning forward and used his hand to pull hers away. “Don’t,” he panted. His face tensed. “Fuck, don’t, I want to hear you—“
Like every time they fucked after a mission, it was a hard mess of lips and teeth and moans, nothing finessed or slow about it. She clung to the edge of the bed, held onto him where their hips pressed against each other. She memorized each stroke of his cock inside her, the way it all felt—hard, hot, so much from every direction she almost couldn’t take it—so that she could remember this, remember what it felt like to be with him, to have him—
The tension in her core built, built, combusted. She collapsed, a mess of panting cries and repetitions of his name, pleasure flooding every inch of her aching body. Lily’s shoulders fell back against the bed and she trailed her hands up his stomach, gasping. “Fuck, James,” she whimpered keeping her eyes open to look at him, watching his face, his body—
He came a second later with a groan, hips stuttering against her and his head tilted back. His neck was a portrait, gasping and red flushed as he gripped her hips even harder, fingers digging as they finally slowed.
Lily’s head fell back on the bed, unable to support herself any longer. She gasped for air, ceiling blurry above her and lay there in the feeling, heart pounding, cunt still pulsing around him. After a second or a minute she felt a soft hand brushing the side of her face. “Okay?” His voice was rough.
Lily hummed, reaching blindly for him. She clutched his wrist, pulled it up to her and pressed a kiss to his thrumming pulse. “Okay,” she breathed.
James shifted, pulling out of her—she sucked in a breath, eyes fluttering closed at the feeling—and collapsed onto the bed next to her, arm thrown heavily around her waist. Lily leaned into him, tangling their hands together. She stared at the ceiling then twisted her head so it was lying flat against the bed. She could see James just a few inches away from her. As she watched he shifted and his face pressed into her shoulder. His glasses were still on, she realized dimly.
Lily’s toes curled as they lay there in silence, sheets cool beneath her legs, his fingers tracing patterns on her arm.
“Are you going to join the mission to London?” James asked her, voice muffled by her shoulder.
Lily exhaled, closing her eyes briefly. “Yeah, I am,” she said.
She could feel the tension of his body against hers. “Be careful,” was all he said, though his voice sounded off. His hand had stopped stroking her arm too.
Lily twisted her head to try to look at him, then rolled out from under him completely. He let her go, but she caught the furrow in his brow before he could hide it as she resettled on her stomach next to him.
“Why are you worried about me?” she asked. “You do this shit too.”
“It’s not the same,” James muttered, looking around the room before resettling on her.
“How?” Lily demanded, ire starting to poke at her. “James—this whole ‘be careful’ thing isn’t exactly what we have.”
“It isn’t?” His voice is flat.
She huffed. “No,” she said. “I go out on missions and—and then I come back and you grab me and fuck me to get out whatever tension you have about this whole mess—“
He interrupted her. “That’s not why I do it.”
Lily stared at him. “Then why do you?”
He was quiet.
Lily closed her eyes tight. “James—“
He cut her off. “Whenever I go on a mission, all I want to do is come home and fuck you until you can’t walk. Until I can prove to myself that you’re alright,” he said plainly. His voice became lower, jaw tight. “That you’re here and alive and breathing and if you’re under me or moaning my name or sucking my cock then you’re okay. I —fuck, for months after we broke up—“
It was the first time they’d referenced it as such and Lily flinched.
“—I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a dead panic, sure that something had happened to you,” James continued. He shook his head, letting out a choked laugh that didn’t have an ounce of humor in it. “I’d pace and go absolutely mental and Sirius would have to stop me from trying to track you down or—something. And the worst part was I had no way of knowing. I had no idea if you were alive, or okay or if I’d ever see you again. I’d reach for you in bed at night and it would just hit me all over again.”
Lily couldn’t breathe, her cheek pressed against the sheet.
James looked at her directly, eyes pained. “So yes, I worry about you. I worry about you every time you walk out that door, and every time you come back I nearly break, because I’m so damn sure that one of these days you won’t.”
The silence between grew, two sets of breaths, two pairs of hands lying on the sheets. Lily reached out and gently slipped hers into his. She squeezed. “I will come back,” she said. His damn, stupid, all-consuming faith. Her, Icarus, falling for the sun. “I promise.”
The war crept in strange ways.
Some weeks were quiet and lingering, filled with personal troubles or highs. The week Lily departed for London to help Hestia Jones find out some intel from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, despite James’s anxiety, passed smoothly. She saw Marlene again, still in their tiny flat, still working for the Leaky Cauldron out of spite and because “Dumbledore reckoned it might be useful” and they hugged and cried for what felt like hours. She told her about James and Marlene’s brows had gone straight to her hairline.
“That sounds like a disaster,” she told her. “Like, a serious disaster. Guaranteed to end badly.”
Lily shook her head though, thinking of James and feeling her heart settle behind her ribs. “I don’t think it will,” she said softly.
She promised to visit Marlene again soon, then with a crack she was back in Cornwall. The lull continued, the silent dance as she and James rediscovered each other, until suddenly it didn’t.
A routine mission gone badly led to Dorcas Meadowes’s torn shoulder, stumbling back into the cottage while blood poured down her side. And worse, or better, but infinitely more painful, was James.
One minute she was dueling in the alleys of a tiny town, ducking spells and high on adrenaline, then there was the flash of a curse she wasn’t quick enough to dodge—
James knocked her out of the way, sending her stumbling directly into a stone wall, but her pain paled to the sound he made when the curse meant for her connected with his skin.
The kitchen of the cottage was quiet because it was just the three of them, but as Lily tried to keep her hands steady enough to cast the mending spells on Dorcas, she couldn’t stop seeing it in her mind: the flash of light hitting his side, his roar of pain.
Dorcas’ injury was more urgent, her face screwed up with pain as Lily painstakingly tried to remember her brief classes in Healer training to figure out how fix this. She managed it in the end, but the entire time she had to force herself to focus when all she wanted to do was run to James.
“Thank you,” Dorcas said, shuddering as the last bandage was secured around her shoulder. She gave Lily a tight smile and slid off the table. “Fucking hell, I need to lie down.”
Lily laughed hoarsely, starting to feel lightheaded, and went to wash her hands. The water scrubbed away blood, the rhythmic noise of the tap drowning out the screams in her ears. She shut it off and dried her hands, turned back around to face James.
He was sitting in a chair at the table, hand pressed to his side where dried blood clung to the fabric of his shirt. His eyes were on her, an expression she couldn’t name on his face.
Lily tried to keep her hands from shaking as she approached and gently pulled on the fabric.
He hissed, squeezing his eyes shut. “Fuck,” he said tightly.
Lily let go of his shirt and kissed him quickly. “Fuck,” she agreed, laughing without any humor. “Hold still.”
To his credit, he did, only wincing when she pulled the fabric of his shirt away from the wound and set about to cleaning it and spreading a paste of Dittany. She watched the wound begin to close, then stop somewhere around a tender scar. “Don’t move for a few days,” she said. “Let it heal on its own.”
James nodded, then completely ignored her instructions by reaching to kiss her.
Lily dodged his seeking lips, holding up a bloodstained hand. “No, no. Absolutely not. Rest. Five days.”
He made a grumbling, angry noise. “That’s stupid,” he scoffed. “I feel fine—“ He stood and nearly fell over, stumbling into the kitchen table.
Lily raised a brow. “My point stands,” she said dryly. “Five days, no exercise, no running,” this one was going to hurt, “no sex—“ Now he made an even louder sound of protest, which she raised her voice to talk over, “—and get plenty of sleep.”
“I would sleep better if you wore me out first,” James said and—he was actually sulking. His arms were crossed, a scowl on his face that looked awfully similar to a pout.
Lily took a deep breath, clinging to her thread of self-control. “Try counting sheep,” she told him sternly, then softened and stepped close, giving him one soft kiss on the mouth. He tried to hold her there, but she slipped away. “I’ll even sleep with you to make sure you’re doing it right.”
“How very generous of you,” James muttered dryly, but he didn’t say no to the offer.
They ended up sleeping together every night that week even though they weren’t having sex, and she found that she loved it. Waking up with him felt warm and safe, the way she did at eighteen. But when his arms were laying over her bare waist, his breath at the back of her neck she was reminded of the flash of light, his sound of pain. How if he wasn’t injured she would’ve dragged him to the shower and asked him to fuck her against the wall until she couldn’t think, until all she could feel was him.
Her hand sufficed for four days, but the tension between them still crackled, all the more for the fact of the distance, and sometimes his eyes looked far away and he felt far away and she couldn’t stand that.
On the fourth day of his mandatory rest—which he hadn’t ceased to complain about or bemoan for that entire period of time—Lily knew she was going to give in. There was only so much longing she could take, after everything they’d been through.
The morning was unusually sunny and she debated going out for a walk along the ocean as she slipped a dress on. The sound of James waking up came from behind her, a shuffle of sheets and soft sighs, then there was a low groan and the pad of his feet. She felt him come to a stop behind her and his hands pressed gently against her hips.
Her breathing stuttered and she held it in, cheeks already flushing.
“Morning,” she said.
His voice was rough with sleep. “Morning,” he murmured and kissed her neck, pushing her hair to the side so he could access the soft spot beneath her ear. Lily’s back arched into him, a sigh escaping her.
“James…” She wasn’t sure if her voice was warning or approval, but he didn’t seem to care as he kissed another spot on her neck, lower this time, and sucked a mark there too.
Oh fuck.
Lily’s eyes closed, head tilting back into him. “You’re the worst patient I’ve ever had,” she told him.
James chuckled, pulling her harder against him and she could feel him hard, pressing into her arse. “You attended two months of Healer training,” he drawled, “you’ve barely had any patients.”
“Yes, well, you’ve risen to the top very quick.”
His arm slid around her, coming up to cup her chin. He gently tilted her head back onto his shoulder and kissed her, mouth moving lazily against hers. She was breathless when he drew away, stomach tightening.
He said her name then, softly and like it was something precious and that was what broke her. She twisted around in his arms and kissed him immediately, hands going to his hair while she pressed their bodies together.
James groaned and the reverberation went down through her toes, sending a dizzying tingle through her body. “Lily, fuck, please—“
Lily hummed and kissed him again, his tongue hot and clever in her mouth. “Carefully,” she said with a panted exhale. “Please, for the love of God don’t make me heal you again—“
He laughed as he pulled her dress over her head, stumbling back until he was at the edge of her bed. She did likewise with his shirt, taking care to be gentle, then she was falling forward into his lap, knees pressed into the mattress.
She laughed. “You’ve been planning this,” she accused, kissing him quickly and desperately. “Planning to seduce me out of my own rules,” she muttered into his mouth.
He grinned. “Definitely,” he said, hands curving over her bare arse and squeezing gently. She sucked in a breath, leaning further into him. Her eyes paused on his scars as her hands pressed against his bare chest.
Some of them were ugly and harsh, including the newer one she’d just healed. But to Lily they looked like him. They meant he’d fought and he’d cared and he did it for his friends; or they were the remnants of boyhood foolishness that he’d long since grown out of, and every time she looked at them it hit her all over again that any one of these could have killed him. Any shot could have taken him down, but instead he was here, holding her, touching her.
Suddenly she wanted to cry.
James saw her looking, her fingers still on his chest and he gently brushed his thumb against her chin, kissed her. “They’re all for you,” he said roughly. At his waist, her fingers contracted. His eyes were steady. “Everything—every battle I’ve fought, every curse I’ve taken is so I can come home to you and do this.”
Lily’s eyes stung. She kissed him so he wouldn’t see, then stroked her hand along his waist, the curve of his hip. He groaned and one of his hands slid up to bury itself in her hair at the nape of her neck.
Undoing the zip of his trousers and lining herself up was the work of a few moments, then Lily was slowly lowering herself down onto him. She whimpered at the familiar feeling of him stretching her and James swore hotly, eyes clenching shut. “Fucking hell, Lily,” he said roughly.
Lily gripped his shoulders, using her knees to push herself into a slow rock up and down. He groaned.
Her breath caught, a whimper escaping as his cock slid in and out of her. She clutched his hair, “James, oh,” she gasped. “Oh, yes, yes, James—“
Despite her earlier warning James shifted, gripping her hip with his free hand and pulling her tighter against him. She let out a choked cry at the sudden shift in angle, head falling back. She was panting, head already spinning as her hips worked over him.
The sunlight shone into her small bedroom, shimmering through the curtains blowing softly in the wind and they shagged like that for what felt like forever, mouths meeting and moving together with every whimper and gasp and cry of the other’s name. Her hand kept returning to his hair, so often criticized and fantasized about by her in their earlier years. It was as soft as it had always looked, slightly curled on the ends and her nails scratched against his scalp, prompting a low groan into her mouth that James didn’t seem to be able to suppress.
“Come for me,” he murmured when her moans reached a frequency he knew well, her hips stuttering over his with every stroke. She clutched his hair tight, stomach clenching as everything held tight within her broke.
It felt like catharsis. Like her body was made to be held by his, her lips pressed to his skin, her name in his mouth, heatedly whispered as he found his own end.
Her brain slowly cleared as the seconds ticked on, the fog of her orgasm dissipating. She panted, kissing his forehead, his cheek as he lay his head against her shoulder. He was still inside her, but neither of them made a move to change that.
The sun had changed angles slightly, and now it fell over their intertwined bodies, casting half of James’s face into shadow. She could feel the warmth on her back where his hands were still resting, lazily tracing patterns against her skin.
Her hand pressed against his stomach, over the top of one of those scars. She couldn’t remember which battle is was from, which hurt he’d suffered. James saw where she was looking and raised his head from her shoulder. He kissed her once. “They’re all for you,” he repeated, “because I’m going to fight. I’ve been fighting and I won’t stop.”
Lily swallowed. Her eyes burned again, but this time she didn’t try to hide it from him.
His eyes were steady on hers. “It’s not even about you, though if you think that no matter how many years go by or how much you hurt me I’d ever sit by and let someone hurt you you’re wrong. It’s because they’re wrong and I’m going to fight, Lily.” His voice was shaking. “We’re all fighting.”
Fucking hell, he was so—
“For the good things?” Lily managed to say through the blurring of tears in her eyes.
He smiled at her, because he always could look at it like that. “The good things,” he repeated softly.
Sirius was sitting alone out on the front steps on the safehouse that evening when she finally detangled herself from James and made her way downstairs. Lily paused in the doorway, wondering if she should go back inside.
“Sit,” he said, voice rough.
Lily sat.
The wind whistled, setting golden sunlight staining the grassy dunes in front of them. The cold air burned her lungs when she inhaled, exhaled hard. It didn’t smell like spring yet, even though it was nearly summer.
Sirius offered her the bottle he was drinking from and Lily accepted it without a word, silently bringing it to her lips. She coughed at the burn, then took another sip.
“He was terrible,” Sirius said, “without you. Drove us absolutely mental.”
Lily exhaled. “I know. Me too.”
Sirius grunted, though it didn’t sound upset, and held out his hand for the bottle. She handed it over.
The two of them didn’t talk much as they sit there, watching the sunlight steadily decline and eventually the sounds of another Order group returning clattered through the house.
Remus and Peter, both sweaty and blood-stained, poked their heads out the front door and saw them sitting there. Remus smiled wearily, then the two of them stepped further out onto the steps.
“Alright?” Lily asked them. Her voice was slightly hoarse from disuse.
Peter shrugged. “As good as can be expected,” he said, but grinned while he said it and lowered himself onto the step beside her.
The sounds of the other people in the house were a dull clatter in the background, rumbling voices and occasional laughter. It hadn’t been that sort of mission, then, the kind that ended in screaming and tears and frantic calls for her to heal someone from collapsing entirely.
Sirius started to smoke.
Lily watched the trails twine up into the grey sky, blown away on the wind.
Eventually Dorcas poked her head out the door. “Dinner, fuckers,” she said congenially.
Peter groaned at having to move, but the four of them slowly pushed themselves to their feet and filtered into the house.
“You look like you’re about to freeze,” Dorcas laughed when Lily passed her and her smile was brighter than she’d ever seen directed towards her. Maybe healing someone from the loss of a limb would do that. Or maybe, like Marlene, you never truly gave any of them a chance, the voice in her head whispered.
The old urge to just duck out of the conversation poked at her, but Lily took a deep breath and returned her smile. “Should’ve brought a sweater,” she said. “How’s the arm?”
“Healing,” Dorcas said, smiling.
The second she entered the loud kitchen her eyes were scanning, looking for James. He was there, leaning against the counter and listening to Caradoc talking about the mission they’d just completed. His eyes flicked up when she entered, though and her steps slowed, drawn by the look in his eyes.
It was soft, and his lips quirked.
Dorcas clapped her hands for them to sit, loudly directing people to seats.
Hey, James mouthed to her.
Lily just smiled back at him, shaking her head. The smile lingered all through dinner, especially bright when James walked around the table to sit next to her. He touched her leg gently while they ate and she leaned towards him without even thinking about it, like he was gravity and she was caught in his pull.
The house was strangely empty the next morning. She’d woken up in bed alone, though she had the vague recollection of someone kissing her forehead and re-tucking the blanket around her sometime in the early morning.
Lily lay there for a while, breathing in the smell of James on his sheets. It had become familiar again, sleeping in his bed, the way it had once been during seventh year.
Her fingers curled in the warm covers and she wished James was still here so they could’ve taken advantage of the quiet house. Slow morning sex hadn’t been a part of their routine until the last few months of their relationship, when the line between casual hook ups and love had blurred and she’d found herself spending more and more nights in his dorm.
She’d like to make it a part of their new routine.
Eventually she forced herself out of the warm cocoon and got dressed, then wandered down the hall, the stairs. No one appeared to be home, though she doubted they were out for a walk based on her glance out the window. The wind was blowing again, spring chill flooding even into the house.
She found James in the kitchen. He was making tea the Muggle way, just how she’d shown him all those months ago when he came to her house for Christmas. Her heart suddenly hurt, and she thought of her parents, blissfully unaware of their daughter’s life.
He glanced up and smiled over his shoulder at her. It was the smile she’d never seen him direct at anyone but her, a slow curve up on one side while his eyes became soft. “Good morning,” he said.
Lily perched on the edge of the kitchen table. “Morning,” she said quietly.
James continued clinking with the dishes, then handed her a steaming cup of tea. “I’ve got to go sit on a stakeout with Hestia,” he said, silently apologetic. That explained his early rise and why he was wearing a coat. He brushed her cheek with a soft hand and she leaned into the touch, eyes fluttering closer. She kissed his palm when he withdrew and when she opened her eyes he was smiling. That smile, just for her. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
“See you later,” she echoed and the phrase felt like it carried a weight. Later. They were always mentioning some ‘later’, but never with the intention to actually get there. Right then, in the grey morning kitchen, she felt like they could do it this time. Later.
James walked towards the door as she watched, blowing on her steaming tea, then he paused under the frame and looked over his shoulder. His eyes pierced her, hidden behind the frames of his glasses. “You know…” he started, stopped. His voice tightened. “This…fear is always going to be there, Lily. But not having you—that just might actually kill me one day.”
Lily didn’t move, staring back at him. She felt like her breath was frozen in her lungs, nothing about this moment moving. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the wind stopped blowing outside the window above the sink.
“I loved you so much,” James said, old memories clouding his voice, and then paused, softer. “I still love you.”
Lily closed her eyes, a shuddering breath falling out of her. She could feel the tears, suddenly clinging to her eyelashes. Her words were a whisper, trailing off. “Even after…?”
Even after she cut the strings of their relationship, slashed the canvas that made up them? Lost him for months at a time and only just got him back?
She had to open her eyes then, look at his familiar face, clutch it to her like a safety blanket.
His eyes were steady. “Yes.”
The tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away with a shaking hand. He didn’t move, but it didn’t feel like a dismissal. The space between was an invitation. A step she hadn’t taken all this time.
Lily closed her eyes for one second, then looked at him again. She set down her teacup and pushed off the edge of the table. Her steps echoed as she crossed the room.
James waited for her, but something like relief collapsed his shoulders when she stopped in front of him. His hand trembled a bit when he raised it to brush against her cheek.
She caught it in hers, laced their fingers together.
Their hands touched, finally, and it felt like that held-breath moment on the train home last summer had lasted this whole time, and they’d finally reached the end.
His thumb curved over her palm and he brought their entwined hands to his mouth, pressed a soft kiss there. She was trembling, tears building in her eyes, heart seconds away from collapsing to nothing.
They stood there like that, hands pressed against his mouth, the grey light from outside shining into the quiet kitchen.
And it was terrifying, but then love always was.
// And when I was shipwrecked
I thought of you
In the cracks of light
I dreamed of you
It was real enough
To get me through
But I swear
you were there. //
She married James Potter in a sunny garden just outside a Muggle church on the third of July, 1979. They didn’t choose the date for any particularly special reason, other than it was the one day they and all of their loved ones managed to get overlapping time off from rushed Order missions.
The war was getting steadily worse out there, but the thought didn’t penetrate her mind as she held her breath and faced him, sunlight shining around them.
There were only a few guests—their parents, a beaming Marlene, and of course the stalwart Marauders, who couldn’t have been shaken from James’s side by a hurricane—and the perfumed scent of roses filled the bright air.
Lily had chosen the venue because of the rose garden and the way it reminded her of their first kiss in her childhood home two summers ago. James hadn’t said it aloud, but she knew he agreed with the sentimentality.
And when she slid on that ring and held his hand in hers, her heart finally settled. The fear—the Mary Fear, her own fear—loosened its grip and she cried, of course. And she knew James understood why by the way he kissed her as their friends cheered. He held her tight, longer than was exactly appropriate for a wedding, and her heart felt like it could beat out of her chest.
It was the best day of her life, up until that point, at least. In almost exactly one year (a year and twenty-eight days, precisely) she’d have another best moment, the kind that couldn’t be described or broken down to anything but love.
But no fear was without cause, just as no love was without hope. She learned this when James’s parents died of Dragon Pox a few weeks after their wedding, and when her parents followed within the month, when Petunia uninvited her to her wedding with shouted words so hard they tore something between them. It’s your fault.
Again when two pink stripes appeared on a test that Christmas.
Again, when her funny, bright friend Marlene McKinnon was immortalized as a black and white photograph in the paper, eternally smiling and eternally gone. And again, hiding in a cottage with the two people she loved more than anything in the world, more than she ever thought she was capable of. She was hidden behind four walls, for real this time, but that year something shook loose within her, a trapped bird of a heart finally free.
In the end, it was a tiny hand clutched in hers and her husband’s eyes on her, and that voice in her head finally whispered. This is what makes the fight worth it.
James, holding her in a library during a rainstorm four years ago. She left his arms and she drowned, then she breathed air once more and all of that—him and Harry and Marlene and Sirius—were what made their rain-soaked, trembling world good.
// And I was catching my breath
Floors of a cabin creaking under my step
And I couldn't be sure
I had a feeling so peculiar
This pain wouldn't be for
evermore. //