Chapter Text
James is gone for a week, burying and mourning his father. Working in the library, studying for their upcoming exams, Lily didn’t hear about what happened until after he’d already left Hogwarts. He comes back thinner and hollow-cheeked, tawny skin pale, with dark shadows beneath his large, hazel eyes. When she tries to hug him, he pushes past her like she isn’t even there.
Lily gives him space, room to grieve without her intruding, and waits for him to approach her. Exams come and go, and it’s the night before they leave for the summer holiday when James finally catches her in the hall. He leads her to the music room, and without a word, he starts undressing.
“How are you?” Lily asks.
“Fine,” he says, but he doesn’t look well at all. Handsome as ever, but there’s a brightness to his eyes that’s missing, and he’s downright skinny. Once he’s naked she can see that he’s dropped a good stone that he didn’t need to lose.
But it doesn’t curb her desire for him. She’s starting to think there’s nothing in this world that could make her want him less.
It’s quick and rough this time. He fucks her like he’s trying to lose himself inside her body, and he comes before she can finish. Afterward, James keeps himself supported over her, trembling. Tears slide down his face and fall onto her, wet and cool against her skin. She hugs him as fiercely as she can, and he weeps in her arms.
“It’s okay,” Lily soothes, running her fingers up and down his back. “You’re going to be okay, James.”
Summer stretches on in an endless series of perfect, sunny days. He Seeks against Sirius (and wins most of their matches), meets his other friends in Diagon Alley, and spends time with Mum whenever he can. She hasn’t been quite right since Dad passed, and if he’s honest with himself, James knows he hasn’t either.
He breaks down in the middle of August and sends Lily a letter, inviting her to have lunch with him at the Leaky Cauldron. Not as a date, he writes, just so she doesn’t feel threatened by the invitation.
She meets him two days later wearing a butter yellow sundress and sandals. Summer sun has brought a smattering of freckles to her nose and cheeks, and her dark red hair is pulled up in a ponytail. She smiles when she sees him, and James can’t help but think that Lily has never looked more beautiful.
“How’s your summer going?” he asks.
“Good,” she says. “Yours?”
James shrugs. “Well enough.”
He orders shepherd’s pie while she gets fish and chips. Then James pulls from his pocket the badge he received in the mail the morning before. “I don’t know what Dumbledore’s been drinking,” he says, “but it must be strong stuff.”
Lily looks at the badge, then at him, green eyes wide. “You’re Head Boy?” she asks, clearly incredulous.
“It seems so.” James shrugs. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“Why?” Lily asks. “I mean, your friends are going to take the mickey out of you, but your mum will be so happy for you.”
“I dunno, I just wanted to share it with you first. Maybe because I thought you might be… impressed, or something stupid like that.”
“It’s not stupid,” Lily says, “and for the record, I am impressed.” She reaches across the table, like she means to touch him, but pulls away at the last moment. “You should be proud of yourself.”
“Thanks. Did you get Head Girl?”
She grins brightly. “I did. So I guess we’ll be working together come September.”
Petunia comes home with an obnoxiously big—yet utterly ordinary—diamond ring on her left hand. She fawns over it anyway, and her sister smiles at her for the first time in ages. Lily doesn’t like Vernon Dursley, but it isn’t her place to tell Petunia who to marry, and the last thing she wants is another row.
When she isn’t visiting friends, Lily stays inside. She’s nervous to walk around the neighborhood, afraid that she might run into Severus. Somehow it’s easier to avoid him at Hogwarts, the place where she lost him. But Cokeworth is the site of their first meeting, of innocent childhood days full of exploration and magic and love. Here, it’s almost easy to forget the things he’s said and done. So she keeps to her house, writing letters and reading spellbooks, as the last days of summer slip by.
She meets James at the Leaky Cauldron three days before term starts to plan their first meeting with the prefects, which will take place on the train. Lily has to lead this discussion, as James was never a prefect and he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what goes on in such a meeting.
Once business is taken care of, he reaches across the table and takes her hand. His touch is warm and welcome, and Lily wishes she could feel his hands everywhere. Something of this must show on her face, because James whispers, “Wanna get a room?”
Of course she wants to. All summer, she’s only been able to come by thinking of him, touching herself in the private darkness of her bedroom, James’s name on her lips. But lust is the least of it now. She’s missed so much more than his body.
“I can’t,” she lies. “I really need to be getting back home. But I’ll see you on the train, yeah?”
James nods, his handsome features even and unreadable, and says, “See you later, Evans.”
James decides not to pursue Lily any further. If she wants to fuck, she can damn well come to him. And if she doesn’t—well, he needs to move on anyway.
She’s kind but professional whenever they meet to discuss Head duties, and although she talks to him outside of these responsibilities and class now, she remains as much of an enigma as ever. But lately James is tired of trying to puzzle out the riddle that is Lily Evans. He doesn’t want secrets and guessing games and a relationship without a definition anymore. He wants something real, or nothing at all.
This is what he tells her on a pleasant Saturday in September. It’s one of the last warm days they’re like to get, and they’re sitting by the lake when he says this.
Lily looks at him with widened eyes and asks, “So you’re giving me an ultimatum? Date you, or we stop… whatever it is we’re doing.”
James smiles, even though he doesn’t find anything about this funny. “Let me guess which one you’re choosing.”
She blushes, then says, “I don’t want to lose you.”
This surprises him, but James keeps his voice cool when he says, “Careful there, Lily. You almost sound like you give a damn about me.”
“I do care about you, James. I just—” She cuts herself off, but he isn’t going to let her talk her way around him, not this time.
“You just what?” he asks.
“I loved Severus,” she says, and he’s as shocked by her honesty as he is angry that she wasted her affection on a bastard like Snape. “Not like he loved me, but when I cut him out of my life—it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It broke my heart.”
Lily takes a deep, shuddering breath, and it sounds like she’s trying to keep from crying. Like there are tears just waiting to fall the moment she loses her composure.
“So you’ve been afraid I’d hurt you the way he hurt you?” James asks.
“Something like that,” she says.
“Lily, I would never do that to you. Do you understand me? Never.” He takes her hands in his and says, “Because I love you.”
It’s nothing she doesn’t already know, he’s sure, so it isn’t much of a confession. Still, it makes his heart race, to say it out loud for the first time.
“I don’t know if I can say that yet,” Lily tells him, “but I do want to be with you, James.”
It’s more than he expected, and he can’t stop himself from kissing her. She kisses him back, in the light of day, where anyone could see them.
Word that she and James are dating gets around the castle fast. Her friends demand details, which she doesn’t divulge, and even Nearly Headless Nick wishes them well.
Severus must hear too. He won’t look at her at all throughout their classes, and whenever their eyes accidentally meet, he seems so wounded that it’s hard for her to stand.
It doesn’t matter, Lily tells herself. He made his choices.
Dating James is quite different from having an affair with him. He’s very publicly affectionate, always holding her hand or wrapping a possessive arm around her shoulders, and he gives her little gifts all the time. A silver bracelet, Honeydukes sweets, books, and potions supplies, all in the month of October alone.
On their first Hogsmeade weekend, James takes her to an ice cream shop, where they try a half-dozen different flavors. Lily orders a hot fudge sundae, while James settles on a mint flavor (predictable) and gets three scoops of it on a spindly-looking cone. While they eat, they talk about their families. Lily tells James about Petunia’s no-necked fiance, and he tells her that he’s worried about his mum, who’s been quiet and withdrawn every since his father died.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when it happened,” Lily says.
James shrugs. “It’s all right. You’re here now.”
On the walk back to Hogwarts, she realizes that she’s happy. Truly, honestly happy for the first time in a long time. So when Lily finally reaches the castle, she goes to an unused classroom and practices her Patronus. On her third attempt, while thinking of her date with James, she makes a corporeal Patronus for the first time.
It’s a doe, silver and beautiful. A mate for a stag.
Lily is half-determined to live in the library, preparing for their N.E.W.T.s, but James manages to drag her outside to enjoy the snow. They skate on the frozen lake and kiss and have a snowball fight (he clobbers her; Lily’s aim is nothing short of awful).
Afterward, they go to the kitchens and ask the elves to make them hot cocoa, which they drink from steaming mugs by the hearth.
“I told my parents and my sister that we’re dating,” she says. “Mum and Dad really want to meet you, and I said that, if you were all right with it, maybe you could come by for dinner over the Christmas holiday?”
“Sure,” James says. “I’d love to meet your family. Although your sister sounds like she could benefit from a good prank or two,” he teases.
“Oh God, please don’t,” Lily says, laughing. “Petunia would hate you forever.”
And so this is how James ends up in a Muggle milltown on the night before Christmas. Mr. and Mrs. Evans turn out to be lovely people—interested in magic, if ignorant of its mechanics—but he can’t say the same for Petunia. She spends the meal with her lips pursed, shooting sharp looks in Lily’s direction every time she opens her mouth. Petunia is so obviously jealous of her little sister, and James can’t help but dislike her for it.
“It’s too bad Vernon couldn’t make it,” Mrs. Evans says. “It would have been nice for you to meet each other.”
“Maybe we can go on a double date?” Lily asks, and it takes all of James’s self-control not to groan out loud.
Petunia sniffs. “Perhaps,” she says. “Vernon is very busy you know. He’s such a hard worker.”
Lily has told him just enough about Dursley that James sincerely hopes the man is too preoccupied to make a double date.
The evening is disastrous. When Vernon brags about his fancy new car for five full minutes, James interrupts him to describe his racing broom. Lily is certain that he only did this to irritate Petunia’s fiance, who hates anything magical.
“You don’t have a car?” Vernon asks. “What are you living off of? Unemployment benefits?”
James laughs. “No, actually, my family’s filthy rich. I’ve got a fortune in gold Galleons buried underneath London.”
Vernon’s little eyes narrow and his mustache bristles. “And what sort of bank would allow that?”
Lily kicks James lightly underneath the table, but he ignores her. “One run by goblins,” he says cheerfully.
Vernon, clearly trying to determine whether or not he’s being had, turns a hideous shade of purple. He hisses, “Just because you’re proud of your—your unnaturalness—doesn’t mean the rest of us care to hear all about it. This dinner is over. Come on, Petunia.”
Her sister hurries from the restaurant with her fiance, leaving Lily and James behind, still seated at the table. When their server returns with four drinks, asking whether or not they’d like to wait for their companions to come back before they order, Lily starts crying.
James asks for the check, and the waiter leaves.
Lily sniffs, wipes her face with her unused napkin, and asks, “Why did you have to egg him on? I told you he doesn’t like magic.”
“He was just so bloody obnoxious,” James says. “I have a hard time being respectful to people who don’t respect me, and that windbag was too rude to ignore.”
“That windbag is going to be my sister’s husband in a few days,” she says. “You should have made some effort to be nice to him instead of irritating him on purpose.”
James has the grace to look sheepish, at least. “I’m sorry, Lily.”
She sighs, then says, “I was hoping you’d come to the wedding with me, but if you hate Vernon that much, maybe it’s not a good idea.”
“No,” James says quickly, taking her hand. “I want to go with you. I promise I’ll be on better behavior, all right?”
Lily nods, and a small smile tugs at her lips. “Okay.”
Lily wears what must be the drabbest dress in her closet: a conservative navy blue number guaranteed not to outshine the bride’s simple white gown. And that’s exactly the point, James imagines. Still, she looks beautiful, if nervous. She stays close to him, her small hand clasping his own, looking almost as out of place as he feels. Lily may have Muggles for parents, but she’s spent most of the last seven years among witches and wizards, and she must be as uncomfortable surrounded by the mundane with wands hidden away as he does.
At the reception, James hears Vernon call him “some magician,” but he manages not to do anything foolish. The last thing he wants is to cause a scene and hurt Lily, who’s already upset. Petty and envious, Petunia didn’t invite her little sister to be a bridesmaid, and although she hasn’t said as much, James knows Lily well enough to tell that her feelings are bruised.
But once he gets her on the dance floor, she starts smiling again. It reminds him of their first dance, over a year ago at Slughorn’s Christmas party, and he says as much.
“That was a fun night,” Lily says, a pretty pink blush coloring her cheeks.
“Only fun?” James asks. “Not spectacular? Or earth-shattering?”
“You’re good, but you’re not that good, Potter,” Lily says, grinning.
“Right,” James says. “Spend the night with me and we’ll see if I can adjust that opinion.”
“Why wait till then?” Lily whispers. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”
They’re in the middle of a song, but James doesn’t care. He leads her away from the dance floor, out of the hall, to the front desk. Lily pays for a room, as he doesn’t understand the paper Muggle money, and then they go to the lift. Once the metal doors close them in, James pushes her against the wall and kisses her, tastes the champagne Lily had been drinking at the reception. She makes a needy sound in the back of her throat, and he slips a hand beneath her dress, cups the curve of her bottom and pulls her against him. When the lift doors open again, they hurry to room 607, lock themselves in, and undress each other with greedy, impatient hands.
James presses her to the queen sized bed, kissing her throat, the valley between her breasts, her stomach, the dark curls shielding her sex. Lily opens her legs to his searching mouth, grips his hair, and when he teases her with his tongue, she cries out. Once he makes her climax, she pushes him onto his back and sucks his cock so passionately that he can barely remember his own name. When he’s on edge, too close to stand it, Lily pulls away, straddles his hips, and rides him until he comes inside of her. Afterward, they lie in a tangled mess of sweaty limbs.
I love you, James thinks, but doesn’t say.
The night before the new term starts, Lily sneaks out of her room and makes the long walk from Weaver’s Lane to the woods. The frost-bitten air stings her lungs every time she breathes, but she doesn’t stop until she’s found the place—a grove she and Severus once haunted, half a lifetime ago. Old snow crunches beneath her boots, but the sky is clear tonight, cloudless and bright with a full moon and an array of constellations. Stars wink at her from the heavens, white and vivid, as beautiful as they are distant.
Lily sits beneath a familiar tree and traces Sev’s initials in the snow, before wiping them away with her gloved hand. This is a goodbye of sorts. She’s decided not to hang on to old hurts any longer, to stop torturing herself with what-could-have-beens. It doesn’t matter, the things she might have had; what matters is what’s right in front of her, a future she’s been hesitant to embrace because she’s been clinging to the past. A future with James.
She spends hours outside, letting go of fear and anger, bitterness and resentment. And love too, because there’s no use in leaving pieces of her heart in the hands of someone it doesn’t belong to.
When the sun finally starts to rise, and the woods fade into day through twilight, Lily stands, brushes snow and dirt off of her clothes, and goes back home. She feels lighter than when she snuck out, freer. As if she left something behind in the grove, a burden that had been weighing her down.
She says it for the first time on a cold January day, cuddled up with him in his bed. They’re naked, sated, but still kissing, and Lily whispers three small words against his lips, monumental for all their brevity: “I love you.”
James smiles, maybe wider than he’s ever smiled in his life, and says, “About time.”
Things are different after that. Simpler, easier. They still argue, because James remains arrogant and spoiled, and Lily is as judgmental as ever, but now there’s an understanding between them. That no matter how angry they make one another, they’ll forgive and move on, because this is it. They’re in it for the long haul.
Despite her disinterest in Quidditch, Lily comes to his match against Ravenclaw and cheers with the best of them. He fumbles the Quaffle once because he’s paying more attention to her than his opponents, but Gryffindor still wins, and after it’s over, Lily hugs him and kisses him in front of everyone.
Later, at the party, James says, “You don’t have to come to my games. I’d get it. Quidditch isn’t really your thing.”
Lily sits beside him in front of the hearth, drinking butterbeer. She sets her bottle down, leans her head on his shoulder. “I may not care for sports, but watching you in your element is a beautiful thing,” she says, “and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
James wraps his arm around her, hand settling on the round of her hip, and says, “You’re really incredible, you know that?”
Lily grins. “Oh I know. But you can say it again.”
Mulciber calls James a blood-traitor and asks what it’s like to fuck a Mudblood, right in front of Lily; the Slytherin boy ends up in the hospital wing, and James goes to their Head of House’s office. McGonagall gives him a week’s worth of detention, which he skives off until Dumbledore threatens him with suspension.
“You’re Head Boy,” Lily says. “Hexing Slytherins into the hospital wing does not set a good example for the younger students to follow.”
“You heard what Mulciber called you,” James says.
Lily smiles sadly. She brushes his messy hair out of his face and says, “A lot of people call me that.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” James grumbles, “or mean that they should get away with it.”
“Maybe not, but it is what it is.”
Mulciber might be the most vocal about his disapproval, but he’s far from the only one who thinks James is slumming it. Plenty of the pure-bloods (not all of them Slytherin) whisper that he should know better than to date a Muggle-born during such a turbulent political time, and Meredith Valmont tells anyone who’ll listen that Lily is a slut who doesn’t deserve James. Some people say it’s unfair to their hypothetical children, who wouldn’t fully belong to either the Muggle or wizarding worlds. Others speculate that she’s using James for his money, and there are a few who simply say “it just isn’t right.”
There are days when this bothers Lily. She knows there’s nothing wrong with her love for James, nothing dirty or unnatural about it. But sometimes she worries that their relationship brings him more grief than joy. She finally admits this on the first warm day of spring, while they’re picnicking by the lake.
“Are you crazy?” James asks. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Lily feels surprised and a little unworthy. Mostly because it’s hard to believe something like this about herself when she’s constantly been told she’s not good enough.
“I mean it,” James says, fiercely, like he can see the doubt on her face. “You are.”
“I believe you,” she says, because even if his words are hard to accept, Lily knows James would never lie to her.
There’s a jewelry shop in Hogsmeade. Nothing as fancy as the sort you’d find in London, but it sells all sorts of fine necklaces and bracelets and brooches. Rings, too, and on the second-to-last Hogsmeade weekend of the year, James finds himself looking through diamonds and gemstones, trying to find the one Lily would like most. There are rings aplenty in his family, beautiful antiques that are nearly priceless, but he knows that Lily would rather have something all her own. So he asks the shopkeeper half a hundred questions before settling on an oval green amethyst set in platinum. It isn’t a traditional sort of engagement ring, but then, Lily is not a traditional sort of girl, and he’s certain she’ll love it.
What he’s less sure of is whether or not she’ll think he’s crazy for asking her to be his wife. They’re just eighteen, she only admitted to loving him two months ago, their world is in the middle of a war, and getting married would paint a target on their backs. James doesn’t care about any of these things. He knows Lily is the girl for him, has known this for a long time, but there’s no guarantee that she wants the same things he does.
The only way he’ll ever find out is to ask, but he doesn’t quite have the courage to voice the question just yet. So the platinum ring stays in its box, which goes into his bedside table, and that’s where it stays for weeks.
Lily finds it while looking for a quill. James is sleeping, and the other three boys are gone (Remus is in the hospital wing, Peter left to study for exams, and Sirius never came back to the dormitory last night). She opens the box without even thinking about it, and when she sees what’s inside—a beautiful ring, some sort of pale green gemstone haloed by tiny diamonds—Lily asks, “What’s this?”
James stirs, blinks at her blearily, puts on his glasses, then stares at her and the open box with wide eyes. He runs a jittery hand through his untidy hair. “It’s um—a present. For you, for our anniversary.”
This is an obvious lie. Their anniversary is months away, and besides, there’s only one reason a man ever buys a woman a ring that expensive. “James, were you—were you going to ask me to marry you?”
He says nothing for a long moment, then, “Yeah. I was. Or I guess, I am, now. Shit, this isn’t how this was supposed to go.”
Lily can’t help but laugh. “Beautiful proposal, Potter. How could a girl refuse?”
“Are you turning me down?” James asks, sounding nervous.
“No!” Although she’s sure it makes her a lovesick idiot, ignoring all the good, sound reasons that they shouldn’t get married—they’re too young and too different, for starters—Lily says, “I love you, and I want to say yes. I want to be your wife.”
James stands, picks her up, and swings her around, laughing. She’s never seen him look so ecstatically happy, and despite the reservations she thinks she should have, Lily has rarely felt so sure of herself.
They graduate on a beautiful summer day, and their class leaves Hogwarts the same way they arrived, by boat. James holds Lily’s hand through the whole trip across the lake, and he can feel the cool metal of her engagement ring against his skin. A symbol of their promise to spend the rest of their days together. He hopes they’ll have years and years. That he’ll be able to watch her belly grow big with their children, that he’ll have the privilege of seeing her beautiful red hair turn white. But if he doesn’t—if their story is a short-lived thing, a fragile casualty that doesn’t survive the war—James is still thankful. Because even if their love is only here for a moment, it’s worth it. It’s worth everything.