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“What if this is a mistake?” He says.
They’re sitting in the common room, the two of them, long after everyone else is gone. The fire around them glows, its brightness dwindling slowly over the last few hours because neither of them cared enough to keep it alight. The castle is usually listening, but maybe this is its way of telling them that it’s time to go to bed. Lily wishes James would, but he wouldn’t until she would, and she wouldn’t until he would. It’s a circular kind of selfishness she finds herself getting increasingly attached to. Round and round they go, him and her and him and her.
There’s a silence around them that feels more comforting than strange though nothing about this is novel—they’ve always been capable of this kind of silence. However, being capable and being aware were two separate landmarks altogether. You and I have crossed seas, she thinks.
Lily stares at him from the sofa across from him. He’s the kind of vision that makes her wonder if this is the humanity that sculptors try to carve into stone. As if his split-second motions need to be immortalized for everyone to see.
He’s not looking at her, and she wonders if he even meant to speak out loud. There is a tense posture in his back, one that has been there for the last two days. It’s like something has been eating away at him, something he’s been hesitant to acknowledge. Something that she wants to smooth out with her hands.
She wonders if he knows she notices him.
She hopes he does. She likes that she does, too.
Lily chews on her lip for a moment before she walks over to sit beside him. She takes his hand in hers, palm down. They’re in an odd position now; him sitting upright on the obnoxiously red sofa facing the fireplace and her cross-legged, face towards him. “What if what is a mistake?” There are three hands on her lap now. Asymmetry.
Still not looking at her, still staring up at the ceiling, letting his hand be held by hers, James says, “What if you change your mind?”
Maybe this should’ve offended her, and she thinks it would have a few weeks ago. And, it definitely would have a few months ago, but she knows him now. As much as a person could know someone else, she supposes, but she knows him.
“Is that the kind of person you think I am, then?” She places one of her palms on the back of his hand—as if she is comparing sizes—and continues when he doesn’t speak, “Someone who changes her mind?”
No, James in her mind replies.
“Of course not,” James beside her says, “that’s not what I meant.” She almost smiles, I know you. There’s a certain pleasure in this knowing—this understanding—of a person who exists outside of her.
“Potter.”
“Evans,” He groans, finally looking at her, and she smiles. She’s still staring at the back of his palm, her mind distracted. They’re wonderful hands, as hands go, and she should know because she’s held her fair share of them. Hands are good storytellers, always different, always personal, like the essence of a person could be discovered if she just looks close enough. It’s hard to pick favourites but even harder to deny that his are hers.
They’re ever-warm, larger than hers, and the tendons and muscles seem to be in constant motion under the expanse of his brown skin. It’s like they always have a mind of their own, like their movements are not attached to the rest of him. Always gesturing, always beckoning, always fidgeting. She wishes she could study them, sometimes, just his hands. She wonders what she would learn.
“James.”
“Okay, maybe that didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, but you just—” he pauses, looking around again as if the words he wants are floating around somewhere waiting for him to catch them out of thin air— “you hated me for a long time...”
Stop, she wants to say as he keeps talking, I never hated you.
She hates a lot of things, but hating someone in particular is hard. Hating James is especially difficult. Round and round they go. She flips his hand over, palms up, calluses showing. Are they what they are as a result of Quidditch, or quills, or pranks, or his wand? Her finger trails up and down his fingers (long and crooked in places, from what? She wants to know.), as she marvels. The lines etched in his skin feel no less important than the constellations in the sky. She could be a cartographer, she thinks, or a scientist if it’s him.
Intellectually, she knows she’s obsessed beyond normalcy, but she can’t seem to figure out if they’re fascinating because they’re his or because she loves him. Did one come after the other; hands first then the love, or did the love come first, and then the fascination? Or if, by some wondrous miracle, they are the same thing?
This is the first time the thought has come to her, coherent and explicit, and not at all scary. Because of course, she is, of course she is in love with him. It makes a pleasant sort of giddy, like champagne delirious, like hearing her friends laughing at four in the morning, like successfully brewing a hard potion, like she knows that this is a moment she will remember the next time she conjures a Patronus.
She wonders when she realized she was in love with him, and when it stopped being shocking, and when he would figure it out. If he would figure it out without her having to say it.
She wants to say it. It is nearly midnight. There are stars bright enough to see, the lack of clouds being obvious in a way she hasn’t seen in weeks. They are twinkling in a way that feels surreal even in the castle she knows is already surreal despite existing firmly within it for the last seven years. The fire is even lower than it was moments ago, and the smell of burnt wood and cinnamon and peppermint exists pleasantly around her like a cloud. The seat under her is warm in a way that makes her think of the word home. She is sitting beside James Potter, her James, and she thinks—just for a moment—she is the luckiest person in the world. It feels like magic. The real, primal, fundamental magic that runs through the world; wandless and wordless.
Her mother believed in that magic, long before she knew her daughter was the kind of magical that had a name. Frankly, she believed in a lot of things: magic and fate and reincarnation. Reincarnations were tricky, she used to say, just because you existed before somewhere, doesn’t mean you exist in the same place now, to the same people. Lily isn’t sure what she believes in, but here, now, holding his hands, it feels like this magic was invented for them. Round and round, James and Lily. She wonders how many lifetimes they must have spent leaving and coming back and reaching and never touching to be allowed the mercy of today.
She really wants to say it.
It is both a profound realization and one that doesn’t feel like a realization at all. She thinks of all the firsts—the big ones—that were gone long before James and they feel almost inconsequential in the face of the small ones that he is. She’s said, “I love you,” before but never with a feeling of peace quite like this. She’s held hands before, but never with the thought that they are reverent like this. She has been in love with someone before, but never felt home in them before.
“...just don’t want you to wake up one day and regret this,” he finishes, his hands moving as they do, jolting out of her lap and startling her away from her thoughts. He gestures between the two of them and she resists the urge to laugh because he knows her, but he can’t read her mind. Oh, but imagine if you could.
How wonderful, she thinks, to place a glass heart in another’s hands and know with certainty it will not shatter? How wonderful that James holds her beating heart outside of her chest and not a cell in her body craves it back?
It rises inside her like a vine, the curiosity to place when she became so well versed in the intricacies of James Potter that his words began to translate automatically in her mind. When did his “I hope you don’t regret this” turn into “I need you a little more right now”?
She sighs and says, “D’you want to know what I think?”
“Do I?” He replies, wryly.
“I think you believe you just happen to people, that we’re all just mindless pawns caught up in your forcefield”—she wonders if reaching for his hand again would be too much, too obvious— “You don’t just happen to people, James.” And it is true because maybe fate and reincarnations are real, maybe they aren’t. Maybe James and Lily have spent lifetimes meeting and knowing, or maybe this lifetime is their first, or their only, or their last, but this James and this Lily have never been here before. And this James is hers to love. And he needs to know.
She reaches for it anyway, like a magnet to iron. He says, “I—”
But Lily doesn’t let him finish because something about touching a part of him feels like she can barrel straight into what she wants to say. The words are easy, “We don’t just happen to all be here because we’re all too afraid to change our minds. We—I— want to be here. You make people stay.” She wonders if it even makes sense, wonders if the sprinkles of I love you are woven into them enough. “I know who you are,” she says with finality, like this is all that matters. Perhaps it is. She knows him, and she loves him.
His hand wraps around hers, and she grins down at them. It’s nearly impossible to render him speechless, but she revels in the way that she can do it to him like this. Like he is basking in her presence just as much as she is in his.
He turns his body over to face her and lowers his forehead to hers.
“Thanks,” he whispers.
“Anytime.” A promise, a hope. Anytime, anytime, anytime. She wants to be in this lifetime for as long as she can be, selfishly, and foolishly, and undeniably.