Work Text:
The funny thing is, the real funny thing is, that Lily had only really met James through Sirius in the first place.
Sirius, eighteen and not even a uni student, holding down court at the centre of a flat party, clapping along as someone chugged their drink. Gold glitter from falling eyeshadow that just won’t stick to her eyelid properly, Lily has to do her best to wipe at her eyes as she surveys the room in front of, unimpressed.
“You’ll feel better after you chug this,” Marlene assures her, pushing a half-finished bottle of cheap wine they had bought at the local Tesco’s before they hopped onto the Tube.
Lily doesn’t really believe her, but she takes the wine and dutifully does as her friend says. “Do you really know all these people?”
Marlene snorts. “Absolutely not. I know maybe five people here.”
If she’s honest, Lily doesn’t really believe her friend. Marlene McKinnon, from the first day Lily had met her in Year 7 at the only secondary school all the small villages around were able to send their children to, had made friends loudly and effortlessly. Lily herself was sociable and charming, but moving to London, this bustling city miles away from home, had knocked at her confidence a bit. But every time Lily called her friend on the phone, Marlene seemed to be having a whirlwind of a time.
Lily’s much too embarrassed to admit that her first year of uni right now is overwhelming and lonely. When Marlene asks if she wants to come along to a party she’s invited to on the other side of London, Lily pretends she’s moved plans to make it.
“McKinnon! A fiver that you won’t try this shitty drink that Peter made!’
Marlene flips her middle figure up at the vague direction of the room, saying to Lily, “Sirius Black – you know, the one that I’ve been hooking up with? French student, complete bastard. You’ll love him.”
“Yeah?”
“You have a track record of loving complete bastards,” Marlene reasons.
“He’s wearing a beret and a gold chain.”
“Don’t judge my type.”
Lily dances and wanders around and finds Sirius’ best friend in the kitchen, rifling through some drawers.
“I feel I should say something to someone if you’re nicking something.”
The man, his head inside a cupboard, jumps at the sound of someone’s voice and hits his head hard against the cupboard door, which is why Lily finds herself going through a stranger’s freezer to find some frozen peas to hold against another stranger’s bruised forehead.
“I was looking for a lighter,” he sulks, pulling out a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket, as if Lily was going to doubt him. “Lost mine, but I reckon Sirius hid it.”
“Oh, easy fix.” Lily’s fingers close around the cigarettes, and she pushes the bag of peas in his hand instead. He watches curiously as she takes one out and heads towards the stove, flicking the electric on and leaning forward to light the cigarette in her mouth. “Ta-da.”
“It’d be more impressive if your hair wasn’t, like, two seconds from being set on fire.”
She switches the stove off and walks back towards him again, blowing smoke in his face. “Says the man with peas pressed to his head.”
“I’m sexier than this normally,” he reassures her. With his free hand, he reaches out. “James Potter.”
Laughing at the formality, she shakes the hand back. “Lily Evans.”
She spends most of the night hanging out with James by the kitchen window, so long that she doesn’t even notice until Marlene comes swinging around to find her and presses a drunk kiss to her cheek.
“There you are! Couldn’t find you and thought you dipped – the last anyone saw of you was some girls in the bathroom. Said you had pretty hair.”
“I do have pretty hair,” Lily frowns.
“The prettiest,” Marlene confirms, and then seems to notice James. “Ooh, hello again. Where’s your better half?”
“I thought he was with you,” James replies, bemused.
As if on cue, there’s a yell from another reason of “Sirius, no!” and then a crash.
“Never mind.” James stands up, clinking his beer bottle against Lily’s as he goes. “Nice to meet you, Evans. See you around soon?”
Marlene, drunk and dangerous without a filter, barely waits for him to leave the room before she lowers her voice in an imitation of a man’s and echoes, “Nice to meet you, Evans. See you around soon?”
With an eye roll, Lily shoves her friend and then has to grab at her before she falls over completely. Affectionately, she tucks Marlene under her arm, something she can only do when Marlene stoops, even in her tallest heels. “C’mon, let’s get you home.”
The next morning, Lily’s sitting on the Tube in her baggiest jumper, thinking about how, in less than forty minutes, she doesn’t really want to sit a lecture hall with a bunch of people who are going to wrinkle their nose at the holes in her sleeve.
She’d shoved a bottle of water under Marlene’s nose before she left. Marlene had groaned when Lily checked on her and dismissed her with a wave of her hand, mumbling, “I’ll be fine – go to your fancy-pants lecture, Miss Doctor.”
Lily doesn’t feel fancy or like a doctor, even if she is studying a Chemistry degree at UCL. Actually, with her second-hand laptop and scuffed trainers, she feels a bit like a fraud sitting amongst students with designer bags and a Macbook.
But she doesn’t say that to Marlene, who’s known her since she was eleven. Lily was supposed to be one of the brightest in their town’s secondary school. She was supposed to be doing bigger and better things, not getting anxious about who to sit next to.
She’s still seven stops away before her Tube goes overground, but her phone automatically connects to the Wifi at the next stop. There’s a text from an unknown number.
[unknown] not being creepy, promise
[unknown] but it’s james from the party, the one with the bruised head, hello
[unknown] i am also told that sirius has been telling everyone he’s a uni student
[lily evans] who bruises their head at a party? embarrassing
[lily evans] marlene says he does french but the girls from the bathroom that night said he does art history
[unknown] god i know, what kind of idiot injures himself in front of the girl he fancies?
[unknown] sirius hasn’t been in education since he was 16 but he is a pathological liar
Lily smiles, forgets about her worries, saves his number.
James, who is apparently a footballer, goes from being a stranger with a bruised head at a party to a constant in Lily’s brand-new life.
He turns up at Lily’s accommodation hall more often than a non-student really should, but he tries to make friends with each and every one of Lily’s anti-social flatmates. When it doesn’t work, he pouts for at least half an hour on her bed, and she laughs at him so hard she snorts.
Marlene and Sirius stop fucking after a few months because Marlene finds herself a girlfriend – Lily meets her after only one week because Marlene is more concerned about Lily’s opinion of her relationship than she is any other person in her life.
“This is the worst dinner party ever,” Sirius Black says conversationally, and Lily digs her elbow into his ribs. “Ow, Evans!”
Marlene had asked Lily If she was free for dinner to meet her girlfriend, and of course with Lily came James, and of course with James came Sirius.
Anyone with even a teaspoon of more shame than Sirius would have read the room and not come at all, but Lily thinks the man must have been dropped on the head as a baby.
Then again, Marlene seems happy enough to have her ex-friends with benefit sitting around her counter, so Lily supposes it’s not really her place to say anything at all.
(When Lily talks to her later about it, Marlene shrugs, easy.
“You’re still dating James. It’s not like Sirius is going to drop out of our lives soon, the leech.”
She says it with a grin and an eyeroll, and Lily feels very, very lucky that Marlene sat next to her at lunch on that first day of Year 7.)
Marlene’s right because Lily doesn’t realise until too late that dating James means also almost like dating Sirius. Which isn’t to say that Sirius is his only friend – more often than not, James is hanging outside her accommodation, waiting for her to get back from labs for that day, with three of his mates in tow. Sirius, of course, but also Remus and Peter.
Her flatmates really don’t come out of their rooms long enough to even notice the additional people in the flat, so Lily kisses James, hugs Remus and Peter, and aims a kick at Sirius’ shins when he ties to tug on her ponytail, before leading them upstairs. They all sprawl on the sofa in the communal area that she’s pretty sure has a sick stain on it, but she’s convinced Sirius that it’s just a bit of paint and has to share a snicker with Remus eery time Sirius’ expensive jeans sit on it.
Remus and Peter have a permanent space in her uni flat, but it’s Sirius who trails after James everywhere, a bit like a stray dog. After complaining about how the floor of her bedroom has the audacity to be so uncomfortable, he buys a beanbag that takes up more room than Lily really has in her room.
Lily has gotten so used to seeing Sirius lying upside down on the beanbag in her room as she’s trying to revise or making snide comments about the lack of shit in her fridge that he thinks it’s okay to start turning up without James.
James plays football, which means he has to be at training all the time or away playing matches – and Lily would love to be the kind of girlfriend who follows him to every match, but she’s also trying to study for a degree and frankly doesn’t give a shit about football.
“So, you’re like a WAG?” Petunia says disdainfully on the phone, and Lily has to get over the shock of hearing her older sister’s voice. Lily tries to call home every week (not Facetime because, bless her mother’s heart, she can’t seem to get her head around new technology) and Petunia, though living at home, makes herself scarce every time. Lily doesn’t think she’s spoken more than five sentences to her since last Christmas.
Petunia’s tone makes Lily feel immediately defensive, but then Sirius, who is eating peanut butter straight out of the jar with a spoon because it’s the only thing in Lily’s kitchen cupboards right now, grabs the phone out of her hand and says, “Excuse you. If anyone is James’ WAG, it’s me.”
Lily can hear Petunia shrieking down the phone, “Pardon me! Who is this!”, but Sirius has already hung up and thrown the phone onto Lily’s bed.
“Peanut butter?” Sirius offers his spoon out, pretending he doesn’t see Lily’s tense shoulders, and she nods, but gets up to grab another spoon because she doesn’t trust where Sirius’ mouth has been.
Lily’s never been in love before James, but she doesn’t think love can always feel like this for everyone – sometimes, James smiles at her and she is so overwhelmed by this silly man that she can’t breathe.
The anxiety of not belonging at uni fades a little as the months pass on, but then there’s an exam next week and she’s freaking out, because she still can’t believe no one’s caught her out, that no one has stopped her and asked what the hell she’s doing at this prestigious uni, that a professor hasn’t pulled her out to say there’s been some kind of mistake and actually student finance is not going to cover her tuition fees after all so maybe it’s best if she just drops out –
“You’re, like, the smartest person I know,” James says nonchalantly, and Lily’s mind screeches to a halt. He’s lying back on her bed as she paces, nervously nibbling at her lip and trying to disguise it as reciting information from her textbook in her head.
“Liar.”
“Nah,” he says easily. She crawls into the bed with him when he lifts his arm, tucking her chin over his bony elbow and leaning her head back against his chest. His next words are muffled by her hair, but he doesn’t make her move. “You can run rings around anyone else I know. Like if Einstein was still alive, he’d probably quit science after meeting you.”
Lily hides a smile into the crook of his elbow. “Albert Einstein was a physicist. I do Chemistry.”
“My point stands. You’re probably smarter than the best person in Chemistry, whoever the fuck that is.” James pauses. “Mm, except for that time you got drunk and thought that rat on the street was a lost cat.”
“It was a huge rat!”
“I literally have video evidence to prove how that is just not true.” James shifts position and then widens his eyes in horror. Before Lily can ask what’s wrong, he’s scrambling up and sticking his hand in his back pocket, pulling out a sad-looking, squished chocolate bar. “Ah, shit. I bought you a KitKat on the way here and forgot about it.”
He looks so crestfallen at himself that Lily laughs for the first time that day, plucks the melted chocolate from his hands and eats it, even though it tastes pretty grim. When he tries to make her halve it, she stuffs the whole thing in her mouth and grins at him, chocolate on her face and all.
He still looks at her like she’s the best thing he’s ever seen.
“James said to check in on you to make sure you’ve eaten dinner,” is the first thing that greets her as she lets herself into her flat.
She startles because no one really talks to each other in her flat, and Sirius seems to anticipate the swat she aims at his head when she realises it’s him.
“How did you get in the building?” she demands, a bit snappy because she’s exhausted from a day at the library.
“The receptionist has a crush on me.”
“The one with the bowl cut?”
“Nah, the one who always smells like salt and vinegar crisps.”
Lily pulls a face. “Ew. He always screws up my packages.”
Sirius shrugs.
“How did you get into my flat?”
A pause. “So, one of your flatmates has a crush on me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lily says, rolling her eyes. She dumps her bag on the counter and tries not to think about the work she still has to do later.
“No need to bring my man Jesus into it; it’s not his fault I’m fit,” Sirius says, and barely has to move when Lily automatically tries to poke him. “Pathetic attempt, Evans.”
“I’m knackered.”
Sirius squints at her for a moment before producing a bottle of vodka from the inside of his leather jacket. “All right, we’re getting drunk tonight.”
“I thought James wanted you to make sure I eat.”
“New rule: James can only mother you when he’s here and not in a different city,” Sirius scoffs. He unscrews the bottle and pours a shot into the cap. “Bottoms up.”
Three hours later, James Facetimes Lily three times and she doesn’t pick up, so he calls Sirius’ phone instead.
“I owe your girlfriend a new phone,” Sirius says immediately, as soon as James’ face appears on the screen. He’s got his back against a door in what James recognises as Lily’s bathroom and James can hear muffled yelling, presumably from the other side of the door. “I may have dropped her phone down the toilet. Accidentally.
“How on Earth can you do that accidentally?”
The truth is, the two of them had polished off the bottle of vodka together and somewhere between Lily almost being convinced to dye her hair blonde and making homemade milkshakes, Lily started getting teary at the idea of James being so far away, even though he was only three hours away in Manchester. She had started mumbling, against her will, about how she was missing him all the time, and Sirius had taken her phone in a moment of glee to send a voice note of this to James, hiding out in the bathroom when Lily switched from sad to indignant lightning-quick, and in the kerfuffle, the phone had dropped down the open lid of the toilet.
But Sirius, despite everything, doesn’t actually want to tell James about the way Lily’s tired eyes had blinked back a couple tears when she said she just really missed her boyfriend’s hugs and how sleeping in her three-quarters bed by herself was a lot lonelier without James’ gangly limbs taking up all the space. If Lily wanted to tell James all this, she would.
“She won’t admit that I look a bit like Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys,” Sirius says, and then calls through the door, “Evans, if you stop yowling like a cat, I’ll let you talk to your boyfriend!”
The funny thing about time is that you never really realise it’s slipping away from you until you wake up one day and think, Huh. How did we get here?
Because just under three years ago, Lily was packing up her life to move to London in a flat with strangers who all don’t seem to want to make friends, and last year she’s living in a two-bed with Marlene like they’d been dreaming since they were fourteen, and now she’s in a weird house share with her boyfriend and his three best friends because Marlene had decided to be a grown-up and move in with Dorcas as girlfriends, so Lily doesn’t really have an excuse anymore about why she just doesn’t move in with James – aside from the fact that she’s terrified sometimes about how much she loves him.
Final year kind of sucks, but she doesn’t really expect anything less. Studying in the bedroom she shares with James is kind of an impossible, so she and Remus, who is in his final year of studying English Literature to become a teacher, have regular study sessions in the library to get out of the chaos of their house – Sirius and James are banned after they started throwing pencils at each other the first time, but Peter sometimes tags along to read quietly when he wants to get out of cleaning the bathroom on his designated cleaning day.
It’s final year when Lily gets really into smoking weed – the stress of exams is getting to her and sometimes it’s just not feasible for her strict schedule of revision to wake up with a hangover every time she wants to not think. At first, she just goes through Sirius’ bedroom and stealing his stash, but she meets Alice Longbottom, who is studying for her PhD and turns out to be a pretty good supplier, due to the fact that her husband apparently has magic green fingers.
It becomes a regular thing, for Lily and Remus and Sirius to all be sitting on the couch, passing a spliff back and forth as they watch Fresh Meat on a TV that James had bought with his first real pay cheque at 16. Peter gets twitchy and paranoid when he smokes so he’s usually drinking a can of beer and James shakes his head every time he’s offered, just catches the beer can Peter throws his way and settles across Lily’s lap.
Lily’s been on the pill since she was 15 because her periods have always been God-awful, so it means nothing when her period doesn’t come. In January, she can’t stop throwing up and blames it on the ever-occurring Fresher’s flu that hits her every year, except she gets so nauseous to the point that she has to stop drinking and smoking and sitting in the kitchen every time Peter cooks anything that involves ginger.
(Sirius laughs at the irony and Lily enlists James’ help in putting purple dye in Sirius’ shampoo as retribution.)
Eventually, because she’s not stupid, she makes James buy three different pregnancy tests from the Boots at the end of the road, waiting for a night when the rest of the boys are all out so James can sit cross-legged on the bathroom floor to watch her pee on some sticks.
“We’re going to be parents,” James says weakly, holding the three positive pregnancy tests, and Lily bursts into tears. “Oh, no, hey, Lils – Lily, we’re going to be okay, I promise, whatever you want to do, we’ll be okay, I’ll always be right here, please, don’t cry, we’ll be okay –”
They don’t tell the others until Lily’s had her doctor’s appointment to confirm it. Together, curled into bed, she and James had already discussed what they were going to do – James tells her that he’s going to take time from the team indefinitely as soon as he can, and then spends an hour trying to persuade Lily to finish of her degree. In the end, Lily convinces James that taking the year out of her degree will be fine and deferring her final year is best.
The day they come back from the first scan, Lily sticks the sonogram onto their fridge, under four separate shopping lists that only have the word ‘milk’ on them in different handwritings and held up by the magnet Sirius stole from someone’s house party because he liked the look of it.
“Why is there a screencap from E.T. on the fridge?” Peter says, seeing it first. He’s eating a yoghurt as he walks into the living room.
“The fuck are you talking about?” Remus says, and then they’re all heading to the kitchen, Lily and James hanging back.
Remus’ jaw drops open.
“You’re joking!” Sirius reacts first, whooping and then jumping on James, using his other hand to muss up Lily’s hair.
“What? What’s going on?” Peter demands.
“You’re having a baby?” Remus yelps, as Lily tries to shove Sirius off her boyfriend.
“Baby?” Peter echoes, spoon and yoghurt pot falling out of his hands in shock.
“Oh, Peter, now we’ve got to go borrow the mop off the neighbours again,” Lily sighs.
“Christ, Evans has already got the mothering thing down.”
Lily actually bends down to take her shoe off and throw it at Sirius’ head. The scream suggests that it hits him.
A bunch of twenty- and twenty-one years olds really shouldn’t know enough about pregnancy at all, but James, true to his character, decides he absolutely has to read every book to prepare.
All of them know that Sirius, on a whim when he was eighteen, signed up for an elaborate cooking course, and can in fact cook brilliantly, but is always too lazy to make anything that involves anything more than boiling water – suddenly, he is cooking dinner every night and leaving it out for Lily, albeit in an offhanded way, as if it doesn’t really matter if she eats it or not. Once, Peter tries to eat the leftovers of lasagne that has been left in the fridge, and Sirius doesn’t talk to him for two days.
Lily wants to tell her mother about the pregnancy in person, so she books a rare train ticket home at the end of February. The day before she’s supposed to go, she gets a phone call from her hometown hospital, telling her that Julie Evans has died of a heart attack earlier that morning.
James is the one to speak to the hospital on the phone after that because Lily is rendered silent in shock. He books his own train ticket immediately that evening to accompany her the next day.
Her mother’s will split everything equally amongst her two daughters so Lily, for the first time in a long time, manages to hold civil conversations with Petunia as they sort out selling their family house and dealing with their mother’s possessions.
“I was going to tell her I was pregnant,” Lily says numbly before she can stop herself.
Petunia’s back is to her, reaching to the top shelves in the kitchen to pack away their mother’s favourite plates. “Yeah, me too.”
Tears prickle in Lily’s eyes again. She wants to reach out to her older sister for some comfort, but Petunia hasn’t acted like an older sister for a very long time. “We’re pregnant at the same time?”
There’s a sniff and Petunia’s shoulders shake. “Yes, I guess so.”
Lily lets a pause drag out, biting at her nails. Finally, she gets up the courage to say, “Tuney, maybe we could see each other more. Try and do this together.”
It’s the wrong thing to say because Petunia’s limbs go rigid, and she draws herself to her full height. When Petunia turns to face her sister, it is the same facial expression Lily has seen for the last decade – the pressed lips, the narrowed eyes. “What? In London?” Petunia says, tone scathing. “Don’t you have enough fancy friends up there?”
Lily feels something in her shatter, like a rib or a piece of her heart snaps off and skewers her from the inside.
“At least I’ve got a husband. I’m going to have a family,” Petunia continues, “I don’t need you, Lily.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Lily’s very grateful for James to walk back into the house, shopping bag in hand.
“Hey, I’ve got the cleaning supplies, is this enough stuff?” he says, before noticing the atmosphere. His gaze flickers from Lily to Petunia, and then back to Lily again, who seems to curl in on herself. “Everything okay?”
Lily nods and Petunia sweeps out of the room, snatching the shopping bag of cleaning supplies out of James’ hand.
“Lils, you’re bleeding,” James says, barely noticing Petunia. His eyes are focused on the running blood down her finger. She’s been biting her nails so hard, she’d bitten down to the skin.
She hadn’t even noticed.
James is painting her toenails, despite the fact that Lily has insisted that she’s not yet big enough to warrant such treatment. Still, he’s got his tongue between his teeth as he’s concentrating very hard on painting.
“Hey, do you want to get married?” Lily says, out of nowhere, and it startles James so much that the orange polish in his hand splashes all the way up her foot. “Oh, you fuck, I’m going to look like an Oompa Loompa.”
She has to lean towards the bedside table to grab a tissue because James is still staring at her, unmoving.
“We don’t have to get married, obviously,” she adds.
“Do you want to get married?”
“Why would I ask if I didn’t?” she throws back, incredulous. “It’s fine if you don’t want to get married–“
“This is a really shit proposal,” James interrupts, and she’s really, really glad he’s grinning now.
“I’m not proposing! I’m opening up the idea of marriage—”
“Why isn’t this a proposal?”
“I—What?”
“I’m open to the idea of marriage.” James shrugs. “In fact, I’m very into the idea of marriage. Well, marrying you specifically. I’d do anything with you.”
I’d do anything with you.
“Okay, then you propose.”
“Why would I do that when you just did?”
“Oh, my God—”
James shuts her up by leaning forward and pressing his lips against hers, laughing brightly against her teeth. The orange paint on her toenails is making ugly stains on his white top and the nail polish in his hand knocks over into the carpet, but she’s much too interesting in kissing him back to even care.
Sirius is apparently already ordained, and nobody wants to sit through his story to ask him why; they mostly just accept it, so Lily and James get married in the garden.
They only have three kitchen chairs, even though five of them live in the house, so they drag them all out. Despite standing at the front with the bride and groom, Sirius demands a chair anyway, so Remus gives up his chair for Marlene, who pulls Dorcas into her lap. Peter offers his chair to Alice Longbottom, who seems to also be pregnant, and sits on the floor with Remus and her husband Frank, grass staining their trousers.
Lily texts Petunia about the wedding, but her message is left on read. One night, when Lily is getting dinner with Marlene and Dorcas, James calls Petunia up, but she tells him in a clipped tone that she is unfortunately busy, despite not being given a date.
Lily wins £50 because James cries first at the wedding and then plies him with champagne because she can’t drink. Alice tries to do the same with Frank, but he curls up and takes a nap on the sofa after four glasses, and Sirius and Peter take turns doodling on his face in Sharpie. Marlene and Dorcas buy everyone Chinese takeaway in lieu of a wedding present, and Sirius spins Lilt around the living room as Sweet Caroline playing the background, and James, drunk and bright-eyed and never letting go of Lily, keeps telling her he loves her, like if she doesn’t hear it every ten minutes, he’s scared that she will forget.
She’s so impossibly happy that she can’t even believe just a month ago, she was standing in her childhood home’s kitchen, arguing with a sister and crying over the fact she has to bury her remaining parent. She had been 15 when she lost her dad to cancer and she’s only three months into 21 now, and she’s an orphan. She’s going to have a baby, and she’s an orphan.
But she’s not thinking about that when she tumbles into bed that night, caught up in James’ sparkling eyes and messy hair and the way his mouth curves around her name. She’s going to have a baby, and she’s an orphan, but she’s got a husband, she’s got James.
James is at the Tesco’s Remus works at on the weekend, looking for a specific brand of profiteroles that Lily keeps complaining about.
“Sirius Black, you useless sack of shit, would you call James?” Lily hisses through a contraction, in too much pain to throw a shoe at him as he stands at the doorway, stock-still, holding a can of Pringles.
It kicks him into gear, and he’s fumbling to ring James whilst simultaneously moving towards Lily and rubbing her back.
“He’s on his way,” Sirius promises.
“God, fuck, this hurts like a bitch, crap, make it stop, make it stop, make it – Oh, nice. It’s done.” Lily wipes at a bit of sweat on her forehead and leans back on the couch again, batting away Sirius’ arm. “Give me the Pringles.”
Normally, Sirius would stuff it all in his mouth – or even put the full can down the bin before giving it to her, like that one time – but he hands it to her wordlessly, looking unnerved.
“Stop staring, I’ll be fine. Are you timing this?” she says, cramming two crisps into her mouth.
“What, how quickly you can eat a can?”
“No, moron. How many minutes in between each contraction.”
Obediently, he gets out his phone again and starts a timer.
Harry James Potter is born on the 31st of July, after twelve hours of labour.
In the fifth month of Lily’s pregnancy, James had already built Harry’s cot in their bedroom, packing away his weights and any other miscellaneous gym equipment to make space for baby things. The day Lily and Harry are released from the hospital, Sirius turns up in a minivan instead of his trusty motorbike, Remus and Peter in tow.
“What the fuck is this?” Lily says, bemused, staring at the black vehicle.
“Language,” James says automatically, holding Harry in his car seat. “Sirius, I said you could borrow my Volkswagen Golf.”
“I’m not driving your Volkswagen Golf.” Sirius pulls a face, making fun of the way James says it. “Besides, we can’t all fit in your car. There’s six of us now, with Harry. Family car, baby.
He honks the horn to make a point and it wakes Harry up from his nap, so they all think it’s pretty justified when Remus kicks the back of his seat.
They’re all straddling the boundary of being a grown-up and being a child, but they all do their best. There’s a strict no smoking rule – weed or cigarettes – within the house and all alcohol, as well as anything sharp, is placed on the top shelves.
Peter sits on his knees and tries to figure out what else needs baby-proofing, even once they’ve put some weird silicone corner guards on the edge of the tables. Sirius can’t figure out how to use the baby gates, so Remus thinks it’s funny locking him in every time he comes down the stairs.
James is apparently serious about the swearing, so he’s forcing everyone to censor their language around the house. Lily has a running list on the fridge, next to Harry’s first baby scan, of the best replacements for swears – point system included. Naturally, she’s winning, but Remus is really close behind.
It turns out pushing a baby out of your vagina really exhausts a person, because Lily feels ready to collapse, even weeks and months after the labour. She’s so tired all the time that everyone always lets her sit on their limited number of chairs when she walks into the room or have the most cushions in the living room. James tries to bully her into sleeping the whole night when Harry wakes up every few hours, but she forces him into sharing a schedule because she loves Harry and, even if she is exhausted all the time, she wants them all to stop treating her like something fragile.
Eventually, Alice Longbottom takes her out for a wine night and it’s the first time Lily feels herself unwind.
Hearing about Alice’s life, how she and Frank and Neville and Frank’s mother, are all functioning is almost funny. It’s such a wild contrast to Peter’s face when he’s changing Harry’s nappy and Remus lying with Harry in the grass of their garden and Sirius coaxing Harry’s first word to be fuck to piss James off and James building more baby toys than Harry’s ever going to really need. Marlene pops at least three times a week to blow raspberries on Harry’s round tummy. Lily’s got a whole army of weirdos raising her son, and hearing about the way Alice keeps arguing with Frank’s grandma about how Neville is being raised makes her think about Petunia. At least I’ve got a husband. I’ve got a family. I don’t need you, Lily.
When she gets home, she finds Harry curled on the bed with James, son mirroring father in the rumpled hair and open mouth. Lily kisses them both and crawls into bed besides them, thinking happily, God, I wouldn’t trade this life for anything. Not for anything in this whole damn universe.
Is this Lily Potter on the phone? I have you down as James Potter’s emergency contact. Are you able to come down to St. Pancras Hospital immediately? I’m afraid there has been an accident…
Remembering is a fickle thing.
For the entire week after Lily goes to the hospital on a Tuesday evening and identifies her husband’s body as a victim of a drunk driver’s car crash, she doesn’t think she could recall a single thing from that week.
Her Facebook wall is full of condolences. Her phone won’t stop ringing with people checking in on her. In the end, she throws her phone at the wall and sits on the sofa in the living room, holding Harry close to her.
Remus keeps giving her food and she keeps eating it, as if on autopilot. Breastfeeds Harry and bathes him, changes his nappies and puts him down to sleep. She doesn’t wash her own hair for 13 days. Lets the laundry pile up, and doesn’t even notice when Peter does it for her enough to say thank you.
She doesn’t remember seeing Sirius at all in those days, and she finds out later that he’s never in the house, only goes out drinking and starting bar fights and trying very, very hard to drown out that the fact that James Potter has died.
In the end, it takes opening the bedside drawer on James’ side of the bed and finding a stash of KitKats that sends her over, that makes her fall apart. After she starts crying, she doesn’t stop. But she starts getting up, starts taking showers and eating dinner at the counter with Remus and Peter. Slowly, Sirius starts joining. Sometimes, he has a black eye. Sometimes, he doesn’t say or eat anything at all, just takes long pulls from a whisky bottle. But steadily, he turns up more often and there are less bruises on his knuckles.
Lily overhears Remus saying to Peter once, quietly when they’re watching TV in the middle of the night as she goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water, that Sirius needed time to get back to them.
Maybe three weeks after, Harry won’t stop crying, and Lily’s trying really hard, but he’s had his milk and his nappy’s clean, and he just won’t get to sleep. She thinks, when she’s clutching him to her chest and he’s bawling still, that he just misses his dad, just misses James – but she can’t do anything about that, and then the thought is making her cry too, until she and Harry are both sobbing at each other and everything hurts.
The bedroom door creeps open and Lily, through her snot and tears, is trying to apologise, because she knows Remus has an early shift at Tesco’s tomorrow morning and Peter has got to catch a train to visit his mum and Sirius hasn’t slept much, if at all, since the car crash. She’s trying to apologise, but Harry gets lifted out of her arms and Lily collapses into a sad puddle on the floor, hair in her eyes and mouth. Through the red streaks in her vision, she can see Sirius holding Harry and trying to sooth him, rocking him in his arms back and forth.
She’s trying to apologise, but she can’t get any words out, can only see baby Harry and keeps thinking, James, I wish you were here, I need you here so badly.
Eventually, Sirius manages to calm Harry down and eases him into sleep, sitting back against the bed gently so that he doesn’t jog the baby in his arms. He’s left enough space for Lily to crawl onto the bed too, but she stays on the floor, pathetic and afraid she might never get back up again.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Lily admits, curling her knees up to her chest. She rests her chin against it and tries not to hide her face in her arms. “I don’t know how to do this alone. Dad’s been gone for years, and Mum’s gone, and Tuney – Petunia can’t stand being in the same room as me. I’ve got no family; I don’t know how to do this without James. James – James and I were meant to do this together. And he’s not here.”
Sirius doesn’t say anything for a long time. Lily wants to lift her gaze up to look at him, but can’t make herself do it – just stares, unfocused, on a spot on the floor. It’s crusted orange nail polish. She feels more tears leaking down her face.
“I have family that sucks,” Sirius say, and he’s so quiet, Lily almost misses it. She’s never known Sirius to be quiet, but he barely moves either, Harry tucked protectively to his chest. “And James gave me a family. He gave me this family – his parents, rest in peace, Remus, Peter. You and Harry. James gave me a family. Lily, he’s given you a family too.”
She can’t look at the spilt orange stain anymore on the carpet, and she can’t handle Sirius’ words, so she buries her face into her arms, screwing her eyes shut. “I don’t know how to do this."
“I know.” There’s movement and then a weight pressed into her side. She knows without lifting her head that he’s moved from the bed to sit beside her on the floor, Harry still in his arms. “I don’t either. Remus and Peter and Marlene – they sure as hell don’t either. But we’re going to work it out, promise. It’s what family does.”
Lily leans her head sideways against his shoulder, trying to find warmth.
Later, she cries some more, and they sit there for a very long time, missing James. But eventually, Sirius stands up and tells her that he’ll take Harry for the night, leading Harry to his own bedroom, as if he knows that Lily has spent every night since the car crash being too afraid to sleep, spending every moment in the night watching Harry, as if he’s also going to be taken away from her the moment she looks away. Sirius promises he’ll watch him all night and Lily finally, finally crawls into the bed that she once shared with James. Curls into a ball in the centre of the bed, instead of the right where she normally sleeps, because it’s a lot emptier and more space without someone else in there, and damnit, she’s going to make herself get used to it.
It hurts, it carves something important and vital in Lily out and she can feel herself bleeding from it, but she does it for Harry. She opens up her laptop and goes through all her favourite photos of James that’s backed up on her iCloud and sends them out to be printed.
There are selfies of the two of them from the beginning of their relationship, all the way up to the day before the car crash, where James had rested his chin on top of Lily’s head with a Snapchat filter. Photos Lily had taken of him fondly, mostly doing stupid things like climbing a lamp-post or building a confusing piece of Ikea furniture. Formal photographs of their wedding day and the day Harry’s born and an assortment of birthdays, Christmases, Easters, holidays that they had spent together. Endless photos of James with Sirius and Remus and Peter, in different orders, pulling faces.
Lily picks her favourites and starts putting them all around the house. She starts off in the bedroom, the one she shares with Harry, the one she used to share with James. Bluetacks them to the wall until it almost looks like the wallpaper, puts her favourite one of them as a family in a frame on her bedside table and another, smaller one of her favourite photo of James – him on their wedding day, caught off-guard just looking at Lily like he’s never going to stop.
And then she starts buying more frames and Bluetack, branches out into the hallways. Uses the living room and shifts things around so that there is a photo on every surface. Soon, the house is covered in photos, all with some variation of James in it.
When Sirius comes home, he takes one look at it all and retreats to his own room. Peter sniffs and Remus trails his fingers along the ones in the corridor, looking at the still photos like he’s going to find something.
“He’s not gone,” Lily says defiantly, and then shakes her head when Peter opens his mouth. “He’s not here anymore, but he’s not going to be gone. Not from our lives, and not from Harry’s. We’re going to move on because we have to, but he’s still going to be here, in this house with us and in the rest of our lives. He’s still going to be here.”
Sirius comes out of his room, leans against the open doorway and doesn’t say anything. Remus moves to put his arm around Lily and she rests her cheek against his shoulder.
“Harry’s not going to remember James’ face,” Lily says, voice wet. “He’s too young. It’s unfair, and so is James dying from a car crash that wasn’t even his fault, and so is me being a widow at twenty-one. It’s not fair. None of it is fair. But it’s what we were given. And I’m not going to let Harry forget what his father’s face looks like – James is going to be watching him from every single one of these photographs and I’m going to answer every question Harry has about him and we’re going to tell stories about James all the time, and James is going to be here.”
Peter moves to Lily’s other side to hug her too.
“James is going to be here,” Lily says again, sobbing, holding on to the sleeves of Remus and Peter’s jumpers. “Because he deserves it. Because James was – is silly and made bad jokes and couldn’t sit still and was good, he was a good man and he deserves to be remembered and loved still and he deserves for Harry to know him. Harry’s going to know him because James is going to be a part of his life, and we’re – we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay, aren’t we?”
Lily looks up, looks at Sirius, who is still standing motionless at his bedroom doorway. After a pause, he moves towards them, throws his arms around their weird-looking group hug. Into the top of her head, because she’s smaller them all, she hears Sirius murmur, “Yeah. Yeah, we’re going to be okay, Lily.”
Lily decides to go back to finish her degree on Harry’s second birthday.
James has left his entire inheritance – which is apparently a lot more than she’d thought – so, for the first time in her life, she’s secure on the financial front. And she loves Harry, loves spending time with him every single day, but she’s twenty-three and wants to go back out into the world.
It takes a few months to negotiate doing her final year part-time. She brings it up tentatively to Sirius, Remus and Peter, as if they might look right through her and call her selfish – irrationally, because they all grin and think it’s the best idea they’ve ever heard. Together, they all work out a schedule, because Harry’s old enough to be put into nursery next year; they can handle a growing baby amongst the four of them.
When Harry gets put into nursery, Lily puts down all their names on the permission form of who is able to pick him up. The receptionist raises her eyebrows, and Lily stares at her, hard, daring her to say something.
The schedule of who drops off Harry in the mornings and who picks him up in the afternoon is much too confusing to anyone who doesn’t live in their chaotic house, some sort of shorthand Lily’s scribbled on the fridge as a reminder, but it’s a consistent and fool-proof plan of making sure there is always someone there for Harry.
Lily has pick-up on Thursdays, after her last lecture. Harry’s teacher calls herself Ms Sprout, a squat and greying woman, and makes Lily feel less stressed about sending her son away for a few hours a day.
“I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mr Black, Mr Lupin and Mr Pettigrew the last few days,” Ms Sprout says conversationally, after telling a teaching assistant to help Harry grab his coat to go home. “Hope you don’t mind me asking, but we’re all curious – which one is his father?”
“All of them,” Lily replies immediately, as if automatic. And then shakes her head. “I mean, none of them.”
“Sorry – I mean your husband then.”
Lily glances down, looking at her left hand where she still wears her wedding ring, over two years later. She won’t take it off. She knows she should, but she still feels married more than widow. “My husband died a few years ago.”
Ms Sprout’s face turns sombre instantly. “Oh, how rude of me, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. No, really,” Lily says hurriedly when Ms Sprout doesn’t look convinced. She smiles and she’s glad that she means it. “I’m going… We’re doing okay.”
“Please do let us know if there is anything we can do to help,” Ms Sprout says, and then Harry is barrelling towards them, hair askew and clothes messy, babbling non-stop.
“Hello, my love,” Lily says, picking her son up. He looks more like James every day. She’s given up fixing his hair. “How was school? Sirius has got a Shephard’s pie in the oven for dinner, I think – something about family dinner. Isn’t that fun, baby? Sirius, Remus, Peter and I altogether? Think we can give Marlene a ring and see if she’ll come too?”
Harry throws her a wide grin, mostly gummy as his teeth are starting to come in. He claps his fists together, chanting, “Fam-lee! Fam-lee!”
“That’s right, family,” Lily laughs and makes him wave goodbye to Ms Sprout. “Let’s go home.”