Chapter Text
Lily spends the week before Christmas unpacking. There are some perks to being a former Order member beyond scars both mental and physical. She gets in touch with Emmeline Vance, whose brother is a realtor, and with a combination of both luck, a significant portion of the Potter fortune, and celebrity leverage, manages to sign on a rundown Georgian farmhouse in Leicester, with a small gardener’s cottage at the back of the field behind it.
Petunia is aghast when Lily tells her she intends to take the much shabbier cottage for herself and Harry and let Petunia and Dudley take the main house. “I barely paid for any of it,” Petunia sputters, even though Lily can see the spark of desire in her eyes as they take in the house. “You can’t possibly-,”
“Tuney, I love you,” Lily says dryly, “but we’re both grown women now and we are never going to be able to live in the same house again without wanting to murder each other. Besides, you love to decorate- think of it as a project. Something to take your mind off the…,” she trails off, because papers being drawn up by Vernon’s slimy new lawyer or not, ‘divorce’ is still very much a dirty word for her sister.
“And I hope you don’t intend to ban Harry and I from the premises,” she adds with a slight teasing lilt. “Seeing as my unearned galleons paid for it.” At the very least, they won’t have to shell out nearly as much money for any renovations; magic certainly makes painting, wallpapering, and the lifting of heavy furniture less of a burden.
She genuinely prefers the little cottage anyways; it’s close enough to the house that if Petunia steps out on the overgrown patio and yells, Lily might hear her, and close enough that she can see the lights flick off every night. But there are no sounds of traffic or lawnmowers or television, and the rambling, disastrous plant and vegetable garden, now a mass of dead leaves and thorny, barren branches, is beckoning to her. The two bedrooms will be more than enough; Harry and the new baby can share, and eventually both children will be off to Hogwarts for most of the year anyways.
But for the time being, she puts Harry’s new crib in the corner of her own room, cramped as it might be. She can’t bear the thought of not being able to reach him in a moment’s notice. And the nightmares are easier to bear when she can wake up to the sound of his breathing or soft whimpers in his sleep. She fills the cottage with poinsettias and holly, and hacks down a small Christmas tree herself with an old hatchet she found in the cellar. There’s something decidedly freeing about throwing all of her weight into each brutal swing.
Of course, Petunia comes running out across the hard, slick ground to scream at her to put the axe down, she’s pregnant, it’s freezing cold, but Lily just squares her shoulders and takes another swing. Last Christmas their tree brushed the ceiling of the sitting room. This feeble specimen is barely past her waist, but she tries to think of it as being the perfect size for Harry o help her decorate instead. She makes paper chains with him slathering glue everywhere on the wooden kitchen table, and holds him up to place to the shiny gold star on the top.
She can’t bring herself to use most of the ornaments she and James excitedly bought for their first Christmas as a married couple, but she does hang a tiny broom with a Gryffindor player astride it near the top. Maybe she should buy Harry another toy broom, although she really won’t be able to run after him much in another few months. Maybe she should talk about James with him more, but the words always lodge in her throat.
Instead she puts up just one photo of them on the mantle; she can’t look at any of their wedding photos or the ones from when she was pregnant with Harry without breaking down, so this photo is of them shortly before their graduation. They are in Hogsmeade, arms wrapped around one another, laughing uproariously at some joke or another, as other students pass through the frame, oblivious.
She misses the girl in the photo almost more than the boy; that Lily was entirely unafraid. She was the opposite; she was eager to go out into the wide world, eager to fight, eager to start her life, eager to see what happened next. Now, three and a half years later, she is mostly consumed by dread. She doesn’t want to know the future. She doesn’t want to keep going. She wants to huddle down right where she is now and never leave.
Mary and Dorian invite her for Christmas Eve dinner; Petunia refuses to attend, of course, but Lily can’t stand the thought of spending another night in a too quiet house, and goes, taking Harry with her. The Puceys have a small dinner, and she’s relieved; she’s not sure she could face a party full of old classmates at this point. They let Adrian open a few of his gifts early, and to Lily’s surprise, present Harry with a little red tricycle. “Not as exciting as a broom,” Mary admits, “but it should be easier on you, right?”
Lily opens her mouth to thank them but a strange choked up rasp comes out instead; she flushes in embarrassment, but neither seem to mind.
She doesn’t stay too late; Harry has passed out on the sofa beside Adrian by ten, and Lily bundles him up in his coat and little scarf and says her goodbyes, wishing more than anything that she still had what Mary and Dorian have. A couple smiling and talking quietly while they put their son to bed. She might have a new home, but it’s not the same. It can never be the same.
On Christmas morning she wakes up alone, in a cold bed. She wraps a wool blanket around her shoulders and stokes up the fire in the hearth, puts on the kettle. She waits to hear Harry rattling the bars of his crib, then puts on his boots and plods across the frosty ground to the house, where his and Dudley’s presents are congregated under Petunia’s trusty artificial tree. It’s quite a meager offering compared to last year; Lily was in no state to go Christmas shopping, and the hordes of well-wishers have died off some, since it has been two months now.
She sips her rapidly cooling mug of tea while Petunia rattles around in the kitchen, before finally presenting the boys with a somewhat battered tray of cinnamon rolls. Dudley tears through his presents in record time, and fights with Harry over a truck. Lily hands her present to Petunia, who blanches, but has something for Lily too. They open them in silence, and then look at each other in surprise.
“Remember the music box we used to have in our room when we were little? With the ballerina?” Lily asks by way of explanation for hers. “I saw that in a catalogue, and I thought… it looks just like it, doesn’t it? The one I broke when I was seven?”
“I didn’t speak to you for a week,” Petunia recalls, a strange look in her pale blue eyes.
“It was an accident,” Lily reminds her, but she has uncovered her own gift; an infant outfit set, all lacy white and clearly high quality.
“Dudley had one just like it when he was born,” Petunia says. “He looked like an angel. Yours will too.” It is perhaps the kindest thing she has ever said in reference to Lily’s children, both born and unborn. Lily almost upends the tray of cinnamon rolls in her sudden embrace of her, and Petunia’s arms are a bit less stiff than usual around her.
She has both Sirius and Remus over the day after Christmas. Sirius is clearly hungover, skin clammy and eyes bloodshot. Remus looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks; the shadows under his eyes and lines in his face are more pronounced than ever. Lily feels almost as if she has been coping well in comparison, and she is the one who lost a husband. But James was like a brother to them long before he was married to her, she reminds herself sharply.
They’re not openly hostile with one another, but it’s obvious they haven’t spent any time together since the funeral. “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Lily begins once they’re all seated in the gardener’s cottage, so instead of wasting time trying to explain or justify it, she plainly states, “I’m pregnant. I was pregnant when… when it happened, and I didn’t know, but now I do. James never knew. The baby’s due in the beginning of July.”
There is a long, hollow silence that follows, and then Remus straightens a little, plasters on a smile, and says, “Congratulations, Lil. That’s… that’s amazing.”
Sirius has no such compunctions, nor has he ever. He stares at her as if she just sent an Unforgivable his way, stands up, and barges out the door. He is Padfoot before he’s gone more than two paces, and a black blur streaks towards the woods behind the field. Remus sighs. “He’s not been well, I don’t think.”
“Can you blame him? Because I don’t.” Lily sinks her head into her hands all the same. This not at all how she envisioned it going, but she supposes it could have been worse. They both could have walked out on her. They could have refused to come at all. These things happen with grief, like all the parents who separate after losing a child. In a way, James was almost like their child, like they felt some guardianship over him, over each other.
He was always looking to the future, James, for all that he lived in the present. Lily remembers. He wanted a whole household of children, after growing up a spoiled but lonely only son. “At least four,” he’d insist, “so no one’s stuck in the middle,” and Lily would just throw back her head and laugh and say, “I hope you plan on adopting, then, Jimmy.”
He hated when she called him Jimmy. Or Jim. Or Jamie. Her silly vain lover boy James- just James, no nicknames. Like James Bond. It would send Sirius and Remus into heaps of hysterical laughter, though. Her arrogant, lovely, generous James, who wanted four children, unlike her, and a big garden out back, like her, and who would have given anything to be here right now.
“He needs time,” Remus says. “We all do. But for him- I’ve still got my dad, at least. Sirius doesn’t… well, it’s just us and Harry, for him. Especially with his brother and Marlene-,” he just jerks his head a little, not completing the sentence.
Lily lifts her head, and picks up her coat. “I’m going to talk to him. Watch Harry, will you?” Harry has been engrossed with his new blocks for hours now in a corner, building up towers just to topple them, cackling all the while. Remus inclines his head and goes over to him as she ducks outside. The wind rises bitterly to meet her, but Lily stalks into it instead, and is grateful for the fresh inch of slush on the ground; she can read the tracks very clearly.
Padfoot is lapping up frigid water from a mostly frozen stream, only patches of dark water visible, mars in the pristine ice. His thick coat shudders in the cold. Lily first met Padfoot when she was fifteen, only she didn’t realize it was also Sirius, then. He was just a nice dog following her and Marlene through Hogsmeade. Marlene threw him a sandwich, and he took off with it, barking. She sinks her numb fingers into his fur, knowing he heard her coming up on him.
“Good doggy,” she says only a little sarcastically under her breath, crouching down on a withered log. He rests his furry head on her legs, eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. I know you- well, you were the first we told about Harry.”
He just snuffles in the cold. “And I’m sorry about Marlene,” she whispers this, because the words are too fragile. “I know you- you put on a brave face about it, Sirius, but I know that was… awful for you.”
Padfoot pads away from her, and turns back into a long-haired young man in a leather jacket. He sits on the edge of her log, and Lily rests her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know,” Sirius says, “it’s not like- I wasn’t her boyfriend or anything. We weren’t together. Didn’t feel like I could say anything, at the funeral. But we-,” he shakes his head. “We were stupid kids. We could have- it could have been for us like it was for you and James, but we were both too scared to admit it. Me more so than her, I think.”
“Marlene wasn’t any more ready to settle down and spread her roots than you,” Lily says softly. “She was just as wild, Sir. But she did- maybe it wasn’t you know, true love, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out in the long run, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, that it didn’t matter. You felt for each other. You were good together.”
“We were awful together, which is why we were never ‘together’,” Sirius grins balefully at that, and ruffles her still-short hair. “Not like you and James. Merlin, we couldn’t go more than a couple days without getting into a screaming row and throwing shit.”
“It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows with us either,” Lily mutters, but she knows what he means. They weren’t stable, weren’t an established couple, they had a fling, ran hot and heavy, never admitted what they might have meant to each other, never had the chance to mature into something serious. But it still counted, didn’t it? Still mattered.
“You’re still allowed to miss her,” she adds. “Just like I miss James, every day. Last night, I-,” her breath catches in her throat, “I dreamed about him. Not just of him. Dreamed he was here with me.”
Sirius just looks at her and smiles sadly, and says, “When I dream about her, it’s not- it’s never a good dream.” Lily can taste the smoke from the wreckage of the McKinnon’s home on her tongue then, can feel the heat searing her face, and in her mind’s eye, she can imagine Sirius, standing in the darkness, looking up at the skull and serpent in the sky and knowing she’s gone. There are worse ways to die than a Killing Curse, and Lily counts her blessings once more that it didn’t end so bloodily for her and James.
She wraps her arms around him and holds onto him tightly, so he cannot slip away again, and when they walk back together, Padfoot paces at her side, and Harry shrieks with joy, watching with Remus from the foggy window, to see that side of his godfather once more.