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The night before she starts secondary school, Lily wakes up seven minutes before midnight to a sharp ache in her arm and the eerie glow of the clock on her bedside table. It’s clean and abrupt, like she’s been yanked out of sleep by her right ulna bone, pulled like a fish flailing on a hook through the veil between waking and not.
It’s definitely her ulna bone that was yanked. That, or her radius. It’s definitely one of the two. She’s about to start big school, and the different bones in your forearm are the sort of things that big kids know. The sort of things she knows.
Lily doesn’t quite know everything, but it feels pretty close.
The main thing she still doesn’t get is soulmates. Love doesn’t seem like something that should be painful. Or rather, love seems like it’s painful enough on its own without any help.
What’s the point in soulmates when doors still slam and plates still break and cars still crash? What’s the point in more pain, when the small shards of glass that skittered across the kitchen floor and pressed into the soft fleshy soles of her feet were nothing but a dull ache compared to her heart slowly ripping in two inside of her, was nothing compared to watching her mum seize up as she dropped the vase and fell to the floor screaming, was nothing compared to the scrape of those screams against her eardrums, was nothing compared to knowing one parent was dying while the other acted it out in front of you, a macabre puppet show? What good is a soulmate when Lily hasn’t been able to watch the Punch and Judy shows on the common for the past four summers without feeling like she’s watching her mum’s body contort and imagining her dad’s doing the same?
Love hurts enough without extra pain.
She wonders how much her soulmate felt when it happened, whether their eardrums rang for days from her mum’s screams, whether their heart sat between their lungs like a crushed-up coke can.
Or whether all they felt were the small pieces of shattered vase poking into their heels and arches and toes. Maybe they had no idea about the rest of it at all.
The ache in Lily’s arms becomes pointy and jagged and she breathes in sharply, pain radiating through her arm again. It’s almost certainly broken. Or at least, her soulmate’s arm is almost certainly broken. She closes her eyes, desperately clawing for sleep, wanting to pull the hook out of her mouth and drown in the inky depths from which she had been raised. Sleep is elusive, a soft and tacky thing that disintegrates in her palms.
Maybe the space between sleeping and awake isn’t a veil at all. Maybe it’s a fragile and film-like. Like the skin that forms on a hot chocolate and clumps around the spoon when you stir. Flimsy and breakable but continually reforming. Her skin feels tacky and it’s difficult to tell whether she was sweating in her sleep or if it’s the dream milk skin, manifested physically and coating her limbs. Under the soft glow of her mickey mouse alarm clock, the second feels oddly possible. Her nose is still blocked from the cold she caught last week, but in her tired state she almost feels that if her nose was clear she would be able to smell the faint scent of warm milk.
For now, though, she stares at the ceiling, noting the blinking of her alarm clock in the periphery of her vision, and resigns herself to a sleepless few hours until her soulmate manages to find their way to an x-ray machine and a plaster cast. She gives her left arm a hard pinch in retaliation, right over the site where she got her flu jab last week, so she knows it will hurt extra hard, and can almost picture the whistling of air being pulled sharply through the teeth of a faceless soulmate whilst she smiles smugly at the watermarks from bygone leaks on the ceiling above her.
She lies there for hours, stock still, aside from the occasional arm pinch, until eventually the milky film of sleep forms undisturbed over her.
The next day, the first day, she spills tea on her new jumper and almost falls asleep on the bus and can’t make any notes on her timetable, because although it may not be her arm that’s actually broken, it sure as heck still feels like it is, and she can barely hold a pen between her fingers.
Lily’s not a gambler, and at any rate, she’s only eleven, so she doesn’t have anything worth gambling with other than the nice purple headband Petunia gave her for her birthday, but if she were, she would bet that her soulmate’s left handed and currently has no problem with writing. It just seems like the kind of thing that would be, the kind of thing that is.
Over lunch, Sev lets her photocopy his notes from the induction on the clunky library copier, while telling her that her soulmate must be a huge idiot. She bites back the disagreement that rises on her tongue. She’s not sure why, exactly. He’s right. They are. Only idiots break their arm at 11:53pm on a Tuesday night. But that’s for her to think, not him.
Weirdly, Sev calling her soulmate a huge idiot is more frustrating than having an arm that’s broken-but-not-really and an inability to write. It’s not the most frustrating thing though. The most frustrating bit is that she doesn’t even get a cast, on account of all the bones in her arm being technically completely fine.
Petunia had a bright pink one three months ago, and she carried it around proudly, letting Lily draw small flowers on the rough surface occasionally. For four weeks, every time they went to the shops she made Lily carry the bags, and loudly sighed about the pain her poor soulmate must be in. Aside from the constant moaning, it looked like fun.
Lily would quite like to see what it’s like, having a cast. She wants to be able to play noughts and crosses on it, and to ask Petunia to carry all the shopping for a month.
A new boy turns up on the second day of school with a blue one, and he’s the one who gets to spend maths playing noughts and crosses on his arm. She almost wants to ask to have a go, but Sev spends the day muttering under his breath about selfish attention seekers, and she decides against it. James is a stupid name anyways. He probably isn’t even any good at noughts and crosses.
———
Two weeks before the Easter holidays in year eight, there’s a huge game of Octopus that everyone in their year joins in on. Lily gets caught out in the second round, on account of her and the Prewett twins being the only people with red hair, and therefore the only people who can cross that round. Gideon plays football, and Fabian does cross country, so naturally the octopus targets Lily, and naturally she gets caught.
She’s standing in the middle of the playground, wiggling her arms like a dutiful piece of seaweed, when she feels a scrape on her elbow, despite it being nowhere near anything hard. She pulls her arms in, curiously inspecting her left elbow to see if a mark transferred with the pain, while over half her year run to the other side as a result of Benjy Fenwick bellowing that ‘anyone who’s born between October and April can cross!’
She feels a flash of indignation at her soulmate’s poor timing. Sirius Black’s birthday is in November, and he’d been running right in her direction before her attention had been diverted. She had really wanted to get him out, because last week Sirius had swapped out Sev’s biros with pens that had big pink glittery plumes on top. Privately, Lily had thought it was a little bit funny, given that the ink was still dark blue and therefore useable, but Sev had been really upset, so she had swallowed down the laughter and switched pens with him. He’d been in a mood ever since, glowering at the back of Sirius’s head in almost every lesson. She had wanted to do something to bring normal Sev back, and catching Sirius Black out in a game of Octopus had seemed as good an idea as any.
If it hadn’t been for her soulmate, she might’ve been able to catch him. Her frustration builds slightly within her, simmering like salted water just before her mum pours the pasta in, until she catches sight James Potter sprawled on the floor, ruefully smiling as he picks himself up and rubs his elbows.
That’s alright, then. Lily might not have caught Sirius Black, but someone catching James Potter out will definitely have boosted Sev’s mood, and even if she isn’t the direct cause she can still look forward to the walk home from school being free from snippy remarks. She can see him, Sev, that is, smirking triumphantly down at James from the far side, slightly winded, and her irritation at her soulmate dissipates, like the candy floss from the school fair when it had started raining.
———
Logically, Lily knows there are seven billion people on the planet, and probably at least fifty million in England alone.
Logically, Lily knows the chance of her soulmate being in the same town, let alone going to the same secondary school, is virtually zero.
And yet.
Sometimes, she allows herself to imagine they are, that they do. The hope is iridescent and silky, a silver fish that weaves between her ribs and swims through her veins, pushing up against her wrists in the form of a skittering pulse. She wonders if that’s something her soulmate can feel.
Hestia Jones is two inches taller than Lily, and three weeks older. Her hair is dirty blonde, and her eyebrows are a little too dark, evidence of the dyeing kit she was buying when Lily bumped into her in Boots a week ago. Hestia Jones plays netball, and when she smiles the silken fish that swims through Lily’s arteries hardens and hammers against her skin.
In October, there’s a charity event put on by the girls in the year above. Frankly, Lily isn’t quite sure what the money is meant to be for, and she has a sneaking suspicion that half of the fundraising team themselves aren’t sure either. But the girls in the year ten are cool, practically all of year nine is going, and Mary promised to buy her something from the pick and mix. And on top of all that, everyone attending gets special dispensation to wear mufti clothes for the day.
She’s glad she goes. Mary buys her a bag of jazzies and flying saucers, two people tell her that they like her new jumper, and the piñata that she heard Peter Pettigrew talking about after Chemistry is actually there.
That’s the highlight of the afternoon, to be honest, and not just for the free sweets.
She’s third in line for the piñata, and she takes a huge swing at it, prompting a ‘Cor, Evans’ from Sirius when it swings up in the air and refuses to stabilise for a good thirty seconds, swaying like a misshapen multicoloured pendulum. Ten people later, the piñata finally bursts open like an overfilled balloon, and everyone desperately dives forward, scrabbling on the ground.
She sees Hestia’s head bobbing up and down amidst the fray, sees her so focused on the floor that she doesn’t realise how close she is to the mop of black hair beside her, and sees their heads bump together.
What Lily doesn’t see is the hand that jumps into the messy hair, or the face attached to the hair raise up in a quick glance of apology that Hestia meets and returns, because she’s too busy rubbing her own head to distract from the dull burst of pain.
The fish in her veins grows three sizes and heads for her heart.
———
Four days later, Lily drops a glass in the dining room and it smashes into three clean pieces. She asks Mary to hand her a napkin, and wraps the three chunks thoroughly while thanking her lucky stars that it didn’t splinter across the floor.
As she thinks that, she sees shattered glass in her mind’s eye, pictures it on her kitchen floor and pressing into the soles of her feet.
She’s too caught up in the remembrance to pay proper attention to the glass, and her hand slips, leaving a clean slice in her thumb. She breathes in sharply and involuntarily, and looks down to see small beads of blood forming. She watches the bright red well up for a moment, before quickly raising her head to look for Hestia.
She’s in the queue, laughing.
She doesn’t look like she’s felt the pad of her thumb slice open.
The fish suddenly feels a lot more like tin than silver, and more like a rough doormat than silk.
———
The seventh anniversary of her father’s death is a Tuesday. She’s fourteen, and he’s now been gone for as long as he was here. The time without him will stretch endlessly into the distance, whilst the time with him shortens as her memory fades.
Lily had a dream the night before, with a beaten-up jeep on a pin-straight dusty road somewhere in the middle of America, tumbleweeds cartoonishly rolling across the heated tarmac. She was sat in the driver’s seat, on the right side, even though this was America. Dream-America follows the British highway code. She was sat in the driver’s seat, but she was facing backwards, her head in a clamp that fixed her view on the ever-expanding road behind the car, in front of her. In the distance, someone wearing her dad’s favourite red t-shirt was waving. They were too far away to make out any features, face replaced with a soft blur that became harder to see as the car moved away from him. The car kept moving away from him. It never crashed. No one ever died.
She thinks that maybe loss is like driving a car, only sitting backwards and not being the one doing the driving.
That is to say, loss is nothing like driving a car at all.
Loss is the fact her mother will never sit behind the wheel of a car on the third of February, and the way her eyes glisten whenever she sees a man with ginger hair walking towards a grey golf.
Loss is the aching feeling pooling in her stomach, filling the rest of her limbs with leaden weight as the empty space grows, forcing her organs out of her torso and into the rest of her body, compacting them together and weighing her down.
Loss is a lot of things, and maybe driving a car could be one of them.
Right now, loss is lying in the nurse’s office during the afternoon sports lesson, feigning a stomach ache to explain the aching heaviness in her abdomen that dogs her every move, reminding her that there will never again be a point in her life when she knew her dad for longer than she didn’t.
Madame Pomfrey allows her to lie on one of the beds in her small office, and turns on the tap in the corner of the room to fill the kettle. She almost feels bad, for lying, but it isn’t really a lie. The space where her stomach should be, is normally, does ache. She’s not sure how to explain that her stomach is currently in her foot, pushed there by the ache itself, that grows and swells and gnaws at her inside.
Stomach ache is easier.
As soon as she puts the kettle on, there’s a knock at the door, and Madame Pomfrey moves to open the door, admitting none other than James Potter.
Normally, Lily doesn’t mind his company, and finds it almost entertaining at times. Today, now, his raucous laugh is one of the last sounds she wants to hear, and even the phantom of it in her imagination grates on her ears. She closes her eyes and rolls onto her side, hoping to do a decent impression of someone half asleep.
She hears the soft pull of the chair along carpet as Madame Pomfrey sits him down, and the hushed tones as they discuss his ailment.
‘Sorry to bother you Poppy– er– Madame Pomfrey.’ Although Lily isn’t facing them, she can imagine the stern glare that prompted Potter’s quick backtracking, and on any other day she would be fighting off a smile. She’s sure Potter would normally be too, but today his voice sounds a bit more reserved, an almost melancholy tinge to it.
She’s probably projecting, viewing the world through grief-tinted glasses. She idly wonders, not for the first time, if this is something her soulmate can feel.
‘I’d just like an ibuprofen, if that’s alright. I’ve got an awful stomach ache at the moment –’
‘Are you sure it isn’t just indigestion? Would you like to just sit here for a moment and see if your food settles down, James?’
‘No, no, I’m pretty sure it isn’t that. I just get these awful stomach aches sometimes, have done for almost as long as I can remember. Weirdly, they’re uh–’ he breaks off for a minute, and she can almost imagine him raking his fingers through his hair, possibly knocking his glasses askew in the process.
‘Weirdly, they’re often worse at this time of year – I know that sounds silly, and stomach aches aren’t seasonal! My mum says it might be a stress thing, but February’s no more stressful for me than any other time of year. Today’s been one of the worst I’ve ever had, but I just need an ibuprofen, please, and hopefully it’ll start to clear up.’
Lily hears a soft hum from Madame Pomfrey, and then hears her footsteps approach Lily’s side of the room. She half opens her eyes to see her opening the cupboard above the sink, and take out what she assumes must be ibuprofen.
She turns around, and Lily quickly squeezes her eyes shut as she hears her walk back over to James and pass him two small pills, while telling him to come back if it gets more painful.
There’s a ‘Will do!’ that is muffled by the closing door and the soft click from the kettle, and the room returns to silence.
Lily opens her eyes slightly again to see Madame Pomfrey carefully fill the stained water bottle over the sink, and watches the slight hunch to her shoulders as the sound of sloshing water fills the air. She closes her eyes as she hears the gentle squeak of the lid being screwed on, and moments later feels the warmth placed against her side.
Madame Pomfrey returns to her desk, and Lily spends the rest of the school day staring steadfastly at the skirting board opposite her bed that’s coming away from the wall, feeling the ache permeate into her bones.
———
Lily is lying in bed, on her period, feeling like shit. Can her soulmate feel this? Surely not.
If only there were a guidebook for this sort of thing. It’s all well and good to know that you’ll feel the pain your soulmate is in, and vice versa. It’s less well and good that there doesn’t seem to be a fixed parameter for what exactly ‘pain’ entails.
It seems that most people share at least the pain from physical injuries, and Lily’s had enough mysterious aches to know that she definitely does. Some people are less fortunate though, and share only emotional pain, which seems pretty bloody ridiculous. How are you meant to know if you’re feeling heartbreak or heartburn?
Beyond that, it must make it harder to find your soulmate, an already mammoth task, when there isn’t a visible and immediate response to a pain that one of you experiences.
Maybe some people prefer it that way though, she muses. It’s more difficult to engineer or manipulate. Marlene spent a month in year eight pricking her finger on her hockey captain badge whenever she met someone cute, on the off-chance they’d wince and she’d be able to leap into their arms and pronounce them soulmates. There’s not really an emotional equivalent for that sort of thing.
Some people feel both, and Lily has no idea how she’s meant to know whether she’s one of those people.
More confusing still is her original train of thought. Where do things like cramps come under this? It’s not a sharp external pain, nor is it an emotional ache. She supposes, like everything else, that it varies. Fat lot of help that is.
In a moment of bitterness, she hopes her soulmate can feel her cramps. It would seem like just retribution for the endless scrapes and grazes she’s felt over the years.
Also, Sev has started insisting they walk to a different bus stop, and despite what he says, she thinks it’s because he doesn’t want Avery and Mulciber to see them together. And it’s fine, except it’s not really, and it’s possibly contributing to her less than generous mood. Her soulmate probably doesn’t deserve her cramps, but Lily doesn’t think that she deserves a dead dad or a best friend who’s embarrassed to be seen with her, so it doesn’t really matter what her soulmate deserves. Life’s not fair.
———
The notable things about the January of year eleven are as follows: there are two snow days, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin are fighting, Marlene gets a fringe, and Lily turns sixteen with perpetual heartburn.
The snow starts on a Monday afternoon, falling softly and turning to slush under the wheels of the bus. Lily is sitting next to Sev, who is glaring at the window’s rubber edging with a sullen expression. His moods have been more temperamental lately, and somehow it’s all tied up in whatever’s going on with Sirius and Remus and James and Peter.
Being friends with Sev has become tiring in a way it never used to be. It’s a leaden weight on her diaphragm, pushing down and sinking further into her, alleviated only when she waves a half-hearted goodbye to him and turns away. Sometimes, she thinks if she spends just a bit more time with him, keeps him away from Mulciber’s lot for a while longer, then the weight will disappear and everything will be easy and good. That, or it will continue to sink down until it rips its way out of her and drops onto the floor. Either way.
Lately, the second option feels increasingly likely. Things haven’t been easy and good with him in a long time. A small part of her thinks they might never be again.
Monday night brings thick sheets of snow that settle everywhere, whiting out the grass in the garden and her frustrations with Sev. It’s impossible to get to school on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she spends the days building a snowman with Sev that reaches her waist, and drinking hot chocolate while her socks dry. Her nose goes bright red and she’s half convinced her fingers might fall off, but things feel a bit easier and a bit better, and the weight on her diaphragm presses a bit less heavily.
Marlene uses the two days off from school to hack at her hair with scissors, and she proudly debuts it on their first day back, blonde hair cutting a striking line across her forehead. It’s choppy and slightly lopsided, something Marlene is quick to blame on her soulmate bruising their knuckles just as she was snipping. The choppiness works, though. It’s carefree and light and brilliant, all things that Marlene herself is.
Lily turns sixteen at a party thrown for her at Mary’s house, pressing a cool cider to her chest, foolishly hoping it will help alleviate the heartburn that’s been plaguing her for the past few weeks. She’s sitting on a countertop in the kitchen, carefully perched between a pool of spilt beer and a bowl of crisps as the clock hits midnight and James Potter stumbles in with the thirtieth of January. Her lips quirk upwards slightly as he stumbles towards the fridge, opening it to let the cold light cut across his face, turning him into harsh lines. The alcohol coursing through her veins tells her he looks a bit like a Greek statue.
He mumbles to himself as he pulls open the freezer drawer to retrieve a single ice cube, and the illusion shatters, Greek god melting into drunken boy. He pops it into his mouth, and turns absentmindedly towards the drinks on the counter, before meeting her eyes.
‘Evans!’ he exclaims, a grin breaking across his face, glasses crooked and hair in disarray, ‘Happy birthday.’ His words are slightly muffled by the ice still in his mouth, and he bites it down with a soft crunch, swallowing it down as his expression becomes contemplative, confusion marring his face. ‘You’re–’ a brief pause as his looks at her solemnly, examining her features, the moment wrapped in cotton wool as her breath catches and she waits for him to finish.
‘–glowing. You’re glowing,’ he adds softly. There’s another pause, and she’s still looking, the fridge light behind him turning him into a silhouette, a harsh outline of a softening boy. ‘A bit like a ghost, or a dream.’
He reaches out, fingers cold from the ice, and lightly touches her wrist, expression gentle. ‘Oh. Real.’
They stay like that for a moment, or two or three or half of one, until the kitchen light flickers on and Marlene bounds in and wraps her arm around her, squealing out a happy birthday as she kisses her cheek sloppily. He startles, and moves to grab another piece of ice from the still open fridge.
He closes it on his way out, and the glow disappears.
Lily turns sixteen, and she presses the cider against her wrist instead, which is suddenly impossibly warm, despite the iciness of his fingertips.
The Sirius and Remus argument, or rather, the Sirius and the others argument, isn’t a singular moment in the same way as the other events of January. In fact, she isn’t even sure that it’s contained solely by January, but that’s when the wounds are most visible, and also when they start to scab over. Being precise, they start to heal on the last day of January, when Remus drops into the seat next to Sirius in Maths, despite not making eye contact. They’re all sitting together by lunch, despite a palpable discomfort hanging in the air, and she sees James smile more easily than he has since it all began.
The end of January is also around the time her heartburn stops. Bloody inconvenient, that, waiting until after her birthday to go away.
———
Exams arrive in a rush of late-night revision sessions and dried out highlighters, dominating Lily’s days and thoughts.
Her last exam is on a Wednesday afternoon, and a weight lifts off her as she leaves the exam hall, thinking of an endless summer and the fact she’ll never have to learn French again. A grin overtakes her face, and she doesn’t bother to fight it off as she skips down to the lake to meet everyone else, excited to be able to join in on the gratuitous lazing around in the sun.
Everything feels clear and bright and possible, and there’s a lightness in her step that’s been absent for too long. She sees a shiny puddle of spilt petrol in the teachers’ car park on her way to the lake, and the soft iridescence reminds her of bubbles. That’s how she feels right now, she thinks decisively. Like a bubble. Clear and bright and possible and light and free.
She lies down on the grass, swatting Marlene’s back with her pencil case, until there’s raised voices and anger and the bubble bursts. James and Sev, fighting, and she has to intervene, she has to make it stop because it’s what she does. She fixes things and she stops the cars crashing and the vases smashing.
Except this time James Potter is humiliating her and Sev is spewing venom and the only person who needs fixing is her, because the weight pressing on her diaphragm has gotten twice as heavy and she can feel it ripping through her, can almost hear a soft clunk as it lands on the floor. If she could see it, she’s sure it would be red with blood. What she can see is Sev’s eyes filling with wild desperation, the too-late realisation that there’s a line that’s been crossed, that this is the end of it all. The desperation in his eyes flickers into rage, and he picks up a handful of gravel to lob at Potter. Lily watches it unseeingly, not truly tethered to her body, not truly believing what’s just happened, and she doesn’t notice the small stones graze Potter’s cheek until the sharp sting on her own face jolts her back into reality. She reaches up to touch her right cheek, despite knowing in the depth of her stomach that there will be no tenderness to her skin or rough graze to meet her fingers. She looks at the scene in front of her again, sees Potter pressing his fingers into his right cheekbone, sees them come away sticky with blood. Distantly, she notices a small fracture in the corner of his glasses.
Something drops out of her again, with less ripping, because the hole is already there, all raw edges and gaping wound. But the weight from before is already gone and so it can’t be that, and with a detached oh Lily realises it feels an awful lot like it might have been her heart. That would definitely be red, and her mind fills with visions of it pumping futilely on the ground, matting the grass with blood.
She hopes her stomach is next to go, because otherwise she’s going to be sick.
———
Two weeks go by, and in that time Sev tries to apologise no less than ten times.
He’s waiting for her as she leaves the corner shop with a carton of orange juice, words rising on his tongue as he pushes off from the wall he was leaning against. She’s tired of his apologies and his pitiful stares, but mostly, she’s tired of trying to fix things that are beyond repair, so she fixes her stare ahead and keeps walking.
She hears a sharp ‘Lily!’ rip from his throat, and she stops, against her free will, against her better judgment, turning to meet his face, blinking back tears of frustration and humiliation. Instead of the contrite expression of a few moments ago, she’s greeted by a maniacal glee on his face, joy warping his features uncomfortably as his right arm twists his left, white marks appearing as his fingers push into his skin.
‘What’s your problem, Severus?’ her words tumble over one another and she almost stutters over his name, forcing herself to add the two extra syllables and erase the familiarity. ‘You seemed all too happy to disassociate from me a couple weeks ago. Why bother changing your mind?’
His cheery expression falters, and he studies her face for a moment, before realising whatever he’s searching for isn’t there, and slowly releasing his wrist. ‘Because it wasn’t my fault. It’s was all Potter – he antagonised me!’ there’s a slight pause as his brows knit together and he hunts for the words, and she’s about to walk off before he continues, ‘and I won’t lose you. You’re my soulmate!’
Bile and bitter laughter rise together in her throat, and it results in a slight hacking sound that escapes her mouth as his frown deepens. He grabs his left arm again with desperation, twists it whilst looking into her face as his eyes widen, searching. ‘Can’t you feel it? Isn’t that why you turned around?’
Her expression remains blank, and his words spill out faster. ‘I don’t know why you’re pretending you can’t feel it, you’re my soulmate! I know when we were kids we weren’t but these things can change, I’m sure of it, and last month when you stepped on that twig in bare feet my foot hurt too and, and…’ he trails off in desperation, before renewing his tirade, ‘you’re mine! You’re mine! I won’t let you leave!’
His words permeate through the fog of shock and she begins to understand, rage building as she steps towards him.
‘Let me? What the fuck is your problem? After all the other shit,’ she gesticulates wildly with the orange juice, ‘that you’ve put me through, all the snide comments and continual putdowns – and lets not forget you denouncing me in front of our whole bloody year – you think we’re– we’re fucking soulmates?!’
She laughs wildly, unsure of how else to react, and her mouth is speaking again before she can process it, ‘For your information–’ her words falter, and she’s swept with an ill-timed wave of gratitude that her mouth dried before she could vindictively tell Severus that she’s pretty sure her soulmate is James fucking Potter, of all people. The gratitude isn’t for him though, because he’s long lost the right to kindnesses from her. It’s for herself, because she still hasn’t fully addressed that thought, and if thinks about it for too long, she feels ill and jumbled up, like her organs have been taken out and shoved back in the wrong places. She doesn’t want to find out what saying it out loud would do.
He’s still staring, jaw open, and she remembers to collect herself and continue, drawing in a steadying breath. ‘For your information, love has already caused me more than enough pain for a lifetime – something you should’ve already known, even as my friend – and no soulmate of mine would ever want to inflict pain on me to grasp my attention, no matter how desperate and pathetic they were feeling.’
She glares at the right hand still firmly clenched around his forearm, and he releases it slowly, embarrassment and rage colouring his cheeks. She breathes in once more, and speaks again, tonelessly and without audible anger, ‘I’m done with this. Please,’ there’s a slight crack, and the monotone breaks, ‘leave me the fuck alone, Snape.’ She hopes that addressing him by Snape conveys the finality of her sentiment, impresses upon him the true end of their friendship.
He’s still staring, and she’s suddenly seized by the urge to do something stupid and mean, something pointless and un-Lily-Evans, and before she can check the impulse she’s unscrewing the lid of the orange juice, and moving to splash it in his face. But her arm falters, and she’s left holding a carton of fruit juice in mid-air. She lowers her arm and turns to go, bringing the juice to her mouth instead, letting the tart sweetness slip down and soothe the aching in her throat. Her feet thud on the pavement in time with the pounding in her chest, and she wipes her hand across her mouth as she stifles a laugh at the unbidden thought of getting home and Petunia glaring at her while telling her off for being unhygienic and embarrassing and wasteful.
The thought of the conversation awaiting her makes her shoulders slump, and she turns towards the playground instead as she takes another sip of the juice. The carton nicks the corner of her mouth, and she can feel the sting as the sharp citrus spills into the cut. Good, she thinks vindictively, as she purposefully angles more juice over the cut, despite the stickiness it leaves over her chin, revelling in the way the sting deepens and grows. She hopes James Potter can feel this.
———
The night before sixth form begins brings unwelcome memories to the forefront of Lily’s mind, and she feels a phantom twinge in her arm as she remembers the night before starting secondary school, the relentless ache that refused to subsist. Knowing James Potter was the cause makes a strange sort of sense – he is exactly the sort of person to break their arm at 11:57pm before the first day of school. He’s also left handed, and it’s weirdly vindicating to know that she was right about that.
The vindication fades quickly, however, as she thinks about seeing him again. Her insides twist and ache, and then she wonders if he can feel it too, and they twist and ache some more. She’s pretty sure that if she was cut open right now her small intestine would be indistinguishable from a knot of fleshy string.
Her mickey mouse clock broke years ago and is long gone, but the watermarks on her ceiling are still present as she stares up at them and wills her mind to clear. The milk-skin of sleep has grown more fragile with age, and is quick to disintegrate when she allows her mind to race. Her palms are tacky by her side, but she knows that this time it’s due to a thin sheen of sweat, rather than sleep.
———
She sees him slide into the chair in front of her in English Lit, and forgets how to breath for a moment. There’s an aching cavern in her chest where her lungs used to be, and her tongue is like sandpaper.
She spends the whole hour staring at the back of his head, drowning out Flitwick’s voice. Halfway through, they’re told to get out their poetry anthologies, and he bends down to pull it out of his rucksack. When he sits back up, his top has shifted, and she can see a purpling bruise over his elbow, the colour of mashed blueberries.
She winces, remembers feeling the pain blossom as she had sat in her garden a few days ago, helping her mum plant amaryllis along the edge of their house. Her elbow had been covered in dirt, so she hadn’t been able to check for a mark to tell if she’d accidentally hit something without realising, but she had known that wasn’t the case. Clearly, she was right.
Her fingers absentmindedly ghost over the same patch of skin, before she notices what she’s doing and quickly pulls them away, feeling as if she’s been burned.
Flitwick dismisses the class without Lily realising, and so she’s one of the last to leave. So is he, and they bump into each other on the way out.
She bites out a quick sorry and he does the same, with a slightly reserved and apologetic smile on his face. She wonders what that means, in relation to the whole possibly-probably-being-soulmates-gig, before she remembers the events of summer term, and realises that the smile is an expression of the guilt he probably feels. The guilt he should feel, she thinks bitingly.
He turns to walk away, and her stomach drops twice as she processes the interaction, like a slinky falling down a pair of steps. The first step is the memory of the day by the lake, washing over her in an acrid wave. The second is the realisation that he might not realise they’re possibly-probably-soulmates. After all, she isn’t the one who had her cheek sliced open in front of half the school, and between her and her soulmate she’s always been the one with fewer injuries. She feels her whole being lurch, as if she’s being pulled down the stairs by the still attached stomach-slinky, realising that as bad as being James Potter’s soulmate might be, him not knowing feels infinitely more so. It makes her feel dirty and clandestine, like she’s unknowingly manipulating him in some way.
But if he doesn’t yet know, she sure as shit isn’t going to be the one to tell him. She straightens her back, and firmly tells herself to get used to feeling like dirt.
———
The rug under her bum is slightly rough, and she can feel it scratching through her trousers. It’s beautiful though, a muted pattern that sprawls across the floor, seems to spread from her toes to the rest of the room. The ornate leg of the armchair she’s leaning against digs into her back slightly, pressing between the knobs of her spine. So far, Sirius Black’s seventeenth birthday is proving to be a thoroughly uncomfortable experience, in more ways than one.
That’s unfair. It’s a perfectly nice room, and a perfectly nice birthday – the event itself isn’t to blame for the fact Lily has chosen to situate herself in the most awkward position possible, or that she’s been mentally torturing herself over James Potter’s presence.
She had briefly considered fabricating an excuse to extricate herself from the evening, before coming to the conclusion that she’d probably be sad to miss out if she didn’t go. And to be honest, it’s not like things were at the start of sixth form, a mere two months ago. She and James are friends again, a tentative return to whatever it was they were before the summer. There’s a new hesitancy to their relationship though, a layer of cling film that prevents her finding the same ease with him that she does with Remus, or even Sirius and Peter. She can’t tell whether the cling film is unresolved guilt on his behalf or hers, but it adds a complexity to their interactions that makes her head hurt.
Regardless, she’s here, and she’s going to get a grip on herself.
They’re at the Potters’ house, passing around a litre plastic bottle of too-strong vodka lemonade and taking turns to wince appropriately as they sip. It’s the third such bottle to be passed around this evening, and the effects are becoming evident. Mary has taken to clapping enthusiastically each time the bottle returns to her, and almost takes out Remus’s eye each time she does so. Peter and Marlene are slumped against each other, the weights of their heads seemingly too heavy to support themselves, and James and Sirius are pacing frantically, with no apparent aim.
Lily herself remains pressed against the uncomfortable chair leg, sifting through her thoughts and adding the odd comment to the ongoing conversation. She uses her stationary position to consider the scene around her – the gathering itself is a peculiar sight, with a small collection of teens drunkenly adorning the already well-decorated living room. Last year, she would’ve considered the party uncharacteristically intimate for Sirius Black’s birthday, but now it strikes her as apt and fitting.
There’s a scraping sound, and she jerks her head up to see James and Sirius standing by a desk that one of them has bumped into and inadvertently nudged across the floor. A dull ache emerges in her big toe, drawing her eyes down to her feet momentarily. After the moment her drunken brain requires to process the pain, she looks up again, certain that she’ll see James by the desk, nursing a stubbed toe. James, however, is on the other side of the room, leaning against the mantlepiece. Unless he used the few seconds she took to examine her toe to leg it across the room for some unknown reason, she must have imagined his proximity to the desk, alcohol distorting her recollection. Even without the pain, it had looked as if James had been the one to bump into it, but there’s no real reason why he would have moved away so quickly, so she must be mistaken.
Lily’s vision blurs slightly as she scans the area around his feet, now much further away from her, looking to see if there’s any object near his foot that might’ve resulted in the pain she felt. The ground surrounding him appears obstacle-free, and the certainty she had been beginning to comes to terms with wavers slightly.
———
She gets clumsier. It happens almost accidentally, and she could almost convince herself it isn’t purposeful, if it weren’t for the shameful flush she feels each time she misses a step or bumps into a chair.
It mainly happens around James.
It’s a challenge, both to herself and to him. She wants to know if she’s right, feels a desperate, clawing ache to know once and for all whether or not he’s her soulmate.
Her stinging cheek by the lake had been too concrete to ignore, but the moments since have seemed less sure. She sometimes feels aches when he looks unbothered, and he didn’t wince when she walked into a bookshelf in the library for the third time in as many weeks.
Sometimes, Sev’s words rush into her head. She thinks of how he said soulmates could change. She thinks of how, when she first suspected, almost a year ago, that would have been a saving grace. She thinks about how now, the idea seems oddly uncomfortable, and how the fish which had long lain dormant has started swimming through her veins again, pulsing when he’s close.
He’s close an awful lot these days.
———
The September of year thirteen is a series of stress-filled and golden tinted days, endless work and stolen moments of laughter. She’s lying on the ground on a Saturday afternoon, feeling the grass brush her legs and tickle her arms when Mary challenges them to a cartwheeling competition.
Marlene does five one-handedly without breaking a sweat, and Mary follows with a respectable three, albeit using both hands. Lily manages two pitiful ones with all the grace of a new-born giraffe, before landing funnily on her left wrist and feeling a shooting pain.
She shakes it off with a laugh as she uses her right hand to grasp Mary’s proffered wrist and haul herself upright, before brushing off the loose pieces of grass covering her jeans.
Later, they’re at the Potters’ house again. It’s become a sort of default, nowadays. Somewhere disconnected from everything else but connected to all of them.
She’s sitting on the dark blue sofa in front of the TV, laughing while Marlene clambers over the other sofa to try and take the remote control off of Sirius and Mary raises her voice over their bickering to tell Sirius that he’s evidence money can’t buy taste because four in a bed is utter crap and if he’s going to subject them to a reality TV competition he should at least have the self-respect to put on come dine with me.
Lily tunes them out as she reaches across to the popcorn bowl nestled between Remus and Peter’s laps. She finds her hand falls short, so she plants her left hand down to give herself the leverage to lean across further. Pushing her hand into the sofa cushions renews the shooting pain from earlier and she sucks in air involuntarily, a hiss escaping her lips as she leans back to her original position, popcorn-less.
Remus catches her wince and looks over to James, leaning against the doorframe, and asks him if there’s an icepack Lily can have.
He nods and walks out of the room before Lily can open her mouth to protest against it, and returns shortly with a bowl of ice cubes, pushing it into her lap and telling her he’ll be back in a moment with a tea towel to wrap them in.
Lily grabs his wrist as he turns to leave again. ‘Thanks, James, but it’s fine, honestly. You can sit down and watch whatever rubbish Marlene and Sirius finally settle on – my wrist will be fine.’
He rolls his eyes at that – ‘Evans, don’t be stupid, it’ll only take a minute for me to go fetch one – besides,’ he adds, a hint of a laugh behind his words, ‘Sirius has already made me watch this episode three times – I won’t be too devastated by missing five minutes of the fourth go-around.’
True to his word, he returns moments later with a tea towel in his right hand, a slightly strained expression on his face that she attributes to the cold as he reaches into the ice bowl with his left to create a small bundle.
‘You don’t have to–’ she starts as he digs his hand into the ice, and receives another eyeroll in return, leading her to add ‘Ah, cheers then James,’ with a resigned finality.
‘No worries,’ he says as he knots up the tea towel and hands it to her, ‘just be grateful it wasn’t your right hand, eh?’
Remus, who has been watching the whole thing with eyebrows raised, looks pointedly at James after that comment, causing him to flush in response and quickly add ‘Not that I– uh– know that it’s your left– just that I guessed because your right wrist doesn’t look swollen and I know you’re right handed so I assumed you’d be more bothered if it was your right–’ he cuts himself off, still flushed and sounding strangled.
Lily flushes too, a rush of embarrassment washing over her as she considers the fact she didn’t even question how he knew which wrist it was – clearly some part of her still thinks of him as her soulmate, even if the past few months of clumsiness on her behalf seem to prove otherwise. The silver fish gets caught up in the tide of shame, and it feels immobile as it’s pushed further away from her heart.
‘Anyways,’ he adds, after composing himself and settling in next to her on the sofa, leaning over to nick the popcorn from Remus and Peter and situate it between the two of them instead, ‘hope the ice helps.’
———
They’re walking along the side of the lake in their free, and James is walking backwards, doing his best McGonagall impression. Her eyes are trained on him. They often are, these days, but it’s nice to have a reason for it right now. It’s easier to pretend she’s invested in his impression rather than in him. Easier than explaining that she thinks they used to be soulmates but somehow she thinks she might have fucked it and it’s changed and she has no idea how but she really wishes it hadn’t because she’s almost positive she’s in love with him.
He’s playing up the Scottish accent, and she’s fixating on the way he walks, the way he holds himself, and both of them are too busy to notice the stone underfoot that he trips over.
The fall is short, and she starts to laugh, mouth opens to tease him for being the world’s least coordinated football player, when her palms sting.
She looks down to see him sprawled at her feet, sees him wince and rub his hands, before realising she’s watching him and trying to push them into his pockets and school his expression into one of feigned nonchalance as he stands up.
She reaches for him desperately, yanks his arms out of his pockets, puts his palms in hers and looks at them for a moment, before letting them drop as she sees grazes that mirror the ones she just felt.
‘You– I– Your hands– I thought it had changed– I thought–’ she muddles through her sentence, willing him to meet her eyes, answer her questions.
‘James,’ she says finally.
He stares fixedly at the ground, hand moving to ruffle his hair anxiously. He’s looking, she notes with a twinge of irony, at almost the exact spot where near two years ago she had first thought he might be her soulmate, felt her heart bottom out.
‘James,’ with more strength this time, wanting him to look at her. ‘Why– What– Have you been hiding it?’ She knows as soon as she says it that the answer is yes, so she doesn’t allow herself to breathe before rushing out a desperate ‘Whyhave you been hiding it?’
A dreadful thought flashes across her mind, and she wonders if maybe he’s been hiding it because he’s trying to ignore it, because he doesn’t want her, doesn’t love her. All the oxygen leaves the air. She feels awfully light headed.
Her brain tells her it’s not true, that it’s James, that the universe wouldn’t be so cruel to lead her to the love of her life and not let them have each other. She breathes in, and now it’s her who can’t meet his eyes as she forces out the next words, quiet and small, ‘Do you– is it because– do you wish it wasn’t me?’
‘God, no! Lils–’ the words leap out of him, the force of them making her raise her head and he’s meeting her eyes properly, fixing her with an intense stare, and she can hear derisive laughter bubbling in his throat.
‘God, no,’ he repeats. ‘As if–’ he trails off again, and something settles in her chest. ‘As if,’ he says firmly.
The oxygen outside has rushed back, and something has rushed inside her too. It might be helium – she thinks she would float away on a well-timed gust of wind.
She wants to wrap her arms around him, never let go, but instead she tries to calm her pulse, and responds with a relieved laugh and a wry, ‘Very eloquent, James. Glad the six hours of Shakespeare a week are doing some good.’
‘You’re– you’re everything,’ he says, ignoring her poor attempt at humour, as if it resolves it all. It does, in a way. ‘That’s all there is to say.’
Her chest floods with light, and all she can think about is how lucky she is, how grateful to know this boy and to love him and to be loved by him. She thinks back to the long nights spent agonising over love and pain, and as she looks back at James she knows that she had no need to worry. He would never hurt her. She would never hurt him.
She thinks how right the universe was to put them together. She thinks how it doesn’t matter, because she would have found him anyways.
He swallows, and she realises he’s still got more to say, ‘I didn’t— I didn’t want to pressure you. To make you feel forced into something you hated. To make you feel forced into something with someone you hated.’
She laughs again, and it’s light and full of space, the tension and anxiety of moments ago feeling like an unimaginable thing of the past as she repeats his words back to him firmly, reaching her hand up to touch his face, ‘God, no, James. As if.’
Her fingertips are pressing into the underside of his jaw as his face splits into a hesitant grin, like he doesn’t quite believe it, and she can feel the muscles move under her touch. She wonders if he can feel the pulse in her fingers, the silver fish that hammers against her skin, desperate to escape her bloodstream and enter his.
Lily leans in towards him as she pulls his face slightly down, breath catching.
Their teeth knock as she kisses him, and she can feel it twice.