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i. the first time: the explosion
“Hey,” James said, acutely aware that she hadn’t heard him. She had a propensity to be absorbed in her thoughts.
“Christ,” Lily murmured, expectedly, “We need to put a bell on you.”
James just grinned at her, as she rolled her eyes. She had a propensity to do that as well.
There was a sharpness in the air today, the weather getting chillier around them. It was not nearly the type of weather that required many-a layers, but chilly enough that he could wear his sweater without needing to justify it to anyone.
James came down to sit beside her, and for a few moments, neither said a word. It was a strange routine, but it was their routine, one he found that he enjoyed entirely too much. She kicked up her legs, without even sparing him a glance, and he followed suit. It was a strange competition, no one really a winner (though, that is not to say they hadn’t tried), but both too stubborn to stop.
Every Thursday, they would meet up in the park that was nearly always empty, they would sit down, and they would swing on the swing set, and sometimes they would talk, sometimes they would sit in utter silence. It had started as an escape for her, and a fascination for him. The fascination wasn’t the swing set, mind you, the fascination was her.
Words like fascination and intensity didn’t exist in his mind when he met her—the grand age of eight—but it was without a doubt the way he understood them now. They didn’t have their own meanings anymore; they were both just Lily Evans.
It was easy then, to fall in love with her. She always existed as a seamless composition of wild hair, and hands clasped together perfectly, and for all the gold in the world, he couldn’t imagine existing in any other state. In any way but in love with her. It should’ve scared him, really, the way he felt, but he had years now to get used to her inside of him, and the idea of not being in love with her was more unsettling. It was effortless and slow, and undiluted with anything else. It was a landmine, really, and the steady, unchanging weight of his feelings had kept him from exploding for this long.
“Why were you late?” There was no real judgement in her voice, just simple curiosity. This was how she always was; he had come to realize.
“Got caught up with Remus, actually,” he replied. They were going higher and higher, and it was a little more difficult to talk, but when Lily asked him a question, he was almost always inclined to answer. It was obsessive, this crush of his, but she never seemed to notice it.
In his periphery, he saw the smile on her face grow at the mention of Remus. There was that too. How was he supposed to not be in love with Lily Evans when she had a smile like that ? He was jealous once upon a time, back when he had first figured out they were friends, but the green had disappeared just as quickly as it had come up. She deserved good people in her life, and there was possibly no one more intrinsically good than Remus. Plus, Remus (or anyone else for that matter) wasn’t here with her every week, James was, and that was a victory he celebrated as often as possible.
“How’s he doing?” She questioned, as always.
“He’s fine,” James swung his legs harder, they were nearly in matching rhythm now, “Tired, y’know?”
Lily frowned, “I’m going to bring him soup tomorrow.”
James smiled, almost involuntarily. She hated when he brought up things she did as if it was the basic measure of kindness to care with the capacity she does. It wasn’t that she cared about his friends or the fact that she expressed her care through the solutions she had, but it was the constancy of it all. There was never any faltering from her, never the not today for showing up, she simply did, and then did again, and again, and again.
The pressure inside of him seemed ever-growing, and nearly every day he got closer to telling her what had been expanding like a balloon since the first day. Since before he even had the words to articulate what it was. Now that he had found the words, it was only a matter of time before they came out of him. Tick, tick, tick, it seemed to say, time’s running out.
A change in topic, then. If he kept thinking about her like that, she may pull it out of him without even trying. “Does Slughorn still love you?”
Lily snorted, and then gave him a mock gasp, “Wow? You don’t come to school for approximately three days, and you’re suddenly questioning the foundation of my relationship?” An ongoing joke between them. It had started as a way for him to tease her, and over time she had started going along with it with an unexpectedly high amount of gusto.
“I just wanted to ask because I need that extension in chemistry, and if you tell him, he’ll give it to me,” he said.
“Aw, Potter, did that charm of yours run out?”
She was out of breath, he could tell, but she didn’t stop, going higher and higher nearly every time she swung her legs. He glanced over at her, and she was blurring together as if her whole being was just flushed skin and red hair.
He slowed down instead. He wanted to see her today, for whatever reason.
(It should’ve been a premonition, but he was never one to listen to those.)
This time, Lily followed suit. Eventually, they both came to a stop, relishing in the cold air around them. She took her hands off the chains of the swings and came to rub them in front of her, and James felt like he was under a spell. The words came up his throat as if they were living breathing entities. He swallowed them down.
“You don’t want me to use my charm, Evans, what if I steal him away from you?”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she replied, feigning outrage.
He grinned at her, “Is that a challenge?”
“You couldn’t even if you tried!” Her hands were moving dramatically as if to convey her disbelief, and he let out a laugh. They both knew whatever attempts he made towards Slughorn were futile; James was charming, but even he had his limits, and Slughorn was—rather annoyingly—completely besotted with Lily Evans. It was probably the first and last thing they had in common.
“Alright, Evans, you can keep him…” He said, finally, “For now.”
“Fine,” she shook her head, “I’ll ask him for you.”
“I knew you loved me,” he replied.
“Yeah, okay, fine. But I want something in return.”
Anything, his brain supplied immediately, unhelpfully. “Anything,” he said aloud, anyway. He was a desperate, desperate fool.
“Tell me what you know about Caradoc?” It was phrased as a question, and she had asked him a great number of questions before, but there was a strange lilt to her voice he had never heard before.
Tick .
“What?” He managed to get out, feeling a great wave of something rising within him. The world felt muddied and shifted, in just one single moment.
“Dearborn?”
“Yeah, I know who he is.”
She was frowning, he could tell, at his snappy reply. “Well, okay then.”
“Sorry, I’m just confused.” He paused for a moment, hoping, praying that this wasn’t going in the direction that he thought it was. “Why do you care about him?”
She bit her lip as if contemplating something, “He asked me out today.”
Tick.
It wasn’t that Lily didn’t have anybody asking her out, or that she had never been on dates before, but this was different, he could feel it in his bones. She had never asked him about someone before, and never had she had the same strange expression on her face before. He had given himself the solace that it was because she had never really liked them and that despite all of them, he was still in her life. It wasn’t some sort of game that he was playing just eventually waiting to wear her down through his sheer will. He cared about her more than that.
Well, maybe it was that, but only a tiny, nearly microscopic amount. Rather, the majority of it was a strange sort of hope he kept, nestled between his lungs, right in the hollow spaces of his heart. That she had never been like this was the only buffer he had, and suddenly it seemed like it had been stolen from under his legs.
“Are you going to say yes?”
She gave him another strange look, and suddenly he realized that she had asked him only as a formality. “I just—”
It dawned on him, just a second later, “You already said it.”
Tick.
“Yeah,” she chewed her lip again. “He was really sweet, and I—”
It flew out of him before he had the chance to stop it, “He’s going to break your heart.”
Tick.
She nodded, just once, “Right.” Lily looked hurt in a foreign way, in a way that didn’t feel like it should exist in their world, here in the park, on the swings. Especially not because of him. She clenched her jaw, and his heart collapsed in on itself.
He felt like screaming to himself, wishing he could go back to last Thursday when this didn’t exist. Even mere minutes ago would be better than existing right now. He had never wanted to take back words as badly as he did at that moment. “I just mean—”
“No, I know exactly what you mean, thanks.” She replied, her tone indicating that she was done talking about this.
James, however, was not. He had to fix this somehow. “No, you—” she motioned as if she was about to get up, and he cried out, “God, Evans–fuck, Lily can you just hear me out? Please?” The end was nearly a whisper, but she had heard him, and that was enough.
He took too long to gather his thoughts, it would seem, because she made an impatient gesture with her hands, “Go on then, I’m waiting.”
“He’s just–he’s on the team, I know what he’s like, and I know his type.” Aw, fuck. The moment he said it aloud, he realized how utterly shitty that sounded, but it was out there, in-between them, and the damage was done.
Her eyes flashed, anger—real, bubbling anger—seemed to be overriding everything else. “And what? His type isn’t me?”
James nearly groaned, “That’s not what I meant, Lily.”
“Yeah, well, it’s what you said.” Her hands were clenched in her lap.
“Lily, you literally asked me to tell you about him.”
“Great, and now I wish I hadn’t.”
“Do you want me to lie to you?”
“I want you not to be a dick,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. She had never hesitated with him, and she wouldn’t start now, he knew that.
The worst part was he knew he was being a massive piece of shit, but it was like he had lost all control of his mouth. Caradoc Dearborn wasn’t even a completely bad guy, and Lily was exactly his type, but God, the thought of her with anyone else hurt more than he could fathom, even to himself.
He took a deep breath, “Look, I’m sorry.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, “That’s it?” When he said nothing else and stood up. “I asked you what you knew about him, and the only thing you implied was that I was either too naïve for him or that I wasn’t his type, ” she put an emphasis on the words, “And now you don’t even want to tell me why.”
He took in a deep breath wondering, vaguely, how they ended up in this conversation. His mind, unchanging, kept supplying him with a never-ending stream of ways to say that he was in love with her, and he had to keep them down with every single inhale. “I never said you were naïve,” was what his genius brain could come up with, “and you’re infinitely too pretty for him, you know that Evans.” Maybe if he joked a little, she wouldn’t look like such a painful combination of wounded and furious.
She had always had her guard up, ever since he met her, the result of the kind of family she had grown up with and the distrust she had for almost everyone. Even at eight years old, it had taken him nearly four years to chip away at her bit by bit just to see her laugh and consider him a friend. Over time, he had been allowed inside of her mind, her jokes, her worries, and it had all felt like a distinct privilege that out of all the people in the world Lily Evans had chosen him. She never fell into things, she always made choices. Lily was different from James in that way; everything he had was due to chance, to some higher being placing him on the right path, at the right time.
But Lily. Lily was purposeful in every single way that mattered. She had chosen him, he was not a happenstance, a result of the circumstances thrown in her way.
“I thought you would’ve been happy for me,” she muttered, where she was standing. There was a shakiness in her voice, and from the previous experience when she had let him see her at her most vulnerable, he knew it was the sound of her close to tears.
He had never made her cry.
“I…” James trailed off, knowing he had no answer. You could tell her. There’s a chance she feels the same way, it was both a distant and constant dream, but he let himself wonder. Could she feel for him the way he felt for her? He would’ve seen it, wouldn’t he have? He could read her mind, but always only almost. The gamble was wondering if he had simply gotten better at reading her, or if she had gotten better at showing him things.
“I was happy for you when you dated Odessa, wasn’t I?” Lily questioned, suddenly.
James glanced up and blinked at her, “That was different.”
She was standing right in front of the sun, and the unfortunate outcome was that she looked like some sort of celestial being, who had come down to Earth only for him. “How was that different?”
“It just was.” It was different because she never meant as much to me as this. As a fight between us. Not even when she thought she could stand a chance.
She crossed her arms against her chest, “Oh, brilliant, thanks.” He clenched his jaw. He felt as if he was teetering on the edge of a great cliff, as if he spoke one single word, everything would crumble around him. “Fantastic, great, right, so when you figure that out, let me know.”
“Lily, I don’t want to fight.”
“But I do.”
“What are we even fighting about anymore? Caradoc?”
She gave an exasperated groan, “We aren’t fighting about bloody Caradoc!”
Finally, “Great, so we can move on? Can you come sit down, please?”
“No, I’m not going to come sit down.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me why, exactly, you think Caradoc is going to break my heart?”
Because he isn’t me, his brain supplied unhelpfully, again, possibly for the hundredth time, like this was some soap opera his mum was a fan of.
What a colossal mistake, not getting his own brain under control, because he could see the very second, that his words had not been in his own head.
Lily stood there, back against the sun, hair haloed like an angel descendant, her mouth wide open, gaping at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Tick.
He wondered if he had been a liar up until now, or if he would turn into one now if he came up with some nonsensical reason as to why he said what he said. In the end, it didn’t matter, because if he could read her, she could read him too. It was willful ignorance on her part, sheer want that he was, perhaps, a decent guy, that had allowed him to get away with not revealing how desperately he was in love with her.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, completely resigned.
“No, I really don’t,” she replied, promptly.
“You’re going to make me say it, then.”
“Say what ?”
“God, Lily, I’m in love with you.”
It shouldn’t have hurt, he should’ve known, the second she brought up someone else, he should’ve known, and yet the silence pierced through him like a bullet. He felt like his chest had been splayed open and left to cook under the sun. She didn’t feel the same way about him, not at all, not even worth the kernel of hope he had fostered inside of him.
Boom.
“Is–are you joking?” Lily, if possible, sounded angrier than she was before.
“Why would I be fucking joking?”
“Then why would you–”
“Because it’s fucking true,” James’ need to curse was directly proportional to the level of distress that he was facing, and that, in this precise moment, had reached an unprecedented rate.
They were both quiet for what felt like forever. There was only the sound of the wind rushing by, and the creaks of the swing that James was still sitting on. It was a strange feeling, he acknowledged, the way this confession felt like both defeat and relief. On the one hand, he knew it wasn’t like he would’ve been able to keep it inside him forever, but on the other hand, she looked so betrayed he wished he had buried it inside of himself where no one could ever find it.
“Can you say something?” He said, finally. He found he couldn’t look her in the eyes.
“I wish you didn’t,” she said, finally turning away. Though their reasons were different it was apparent, she couldn’t look at him either.
“Believe me, I wish I didn’t either.”
The rest of it was a blur, memories of it too painful to think about in the coming years.
The grander motions of that pain were this: She had walked away, and he had let her. And the next day, she was going out with Caradoc Dearborn, and James was still pathetically in love with her. And then, he had stopped coming because being near her was unbearable, and she did too eventually because there was nothing left to go for.