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December 1981
The road is quiet, as it should be, when Lily arrives. A lone street lamp flickers some thirty meters away, far enough that it doesn’t help her. Her eyes begin to adjust, neat hedges and posh-looking terraced houses crystallizing in her periphery, as she rummages through her bag for the slip of paper.
Her hand knocks into something sharp, and she jerks her hand out of the bag, hissing. She eyes the prick of blood on the side of her pointer finger, and then the darkness around her, considering. She scowls, palms her wand where it sits tucked inside her coat, and mutters the necessary Accio. Lily bites her lip as the paper flies into her free hand with enough of a sting that she’s surely got a papercut now, too. No matter.
Lily glances down at the address, ripped hastily from the rest of the letter, which she’d immediately burned.
38 Grisholm Lane, London SC4Y HE. She recognizes the swoop of the capital L s. It matches the Lily she’d see on Head Girl documents in her final year.
She takes a deep breath and tries, fails, to quell her anticipation. She wants this to be what she thinks it is. She needs this to be what she thinks it is. These past months there’s been something twisting, breathing, multiplying in her gut, so quickly it’s almost outside herself, that needs this.
She eyes numbers 36 and 40 ahead of her. They sit regal and still in the quiet night. Her eyes have adjusted enough that she can see their marble facades reflecting the light of the quarter-moon. One of them boasts a hedge carved to look like a lion, she thinks.
She doesn’t see a 38. She looks down the way, and sees a 34, 32, 30… then a 42, 44, 46 on the other side…
She squints at the placard bearing 36, at the one bearing 40. Turns around to the other side of the street, but they’re all odd-numbered. She turns back again. The posh marble facades seem to mock her.
And then they begin to move.
Lily takes a jerky step back and then whips around wildly. She instinctively incinerates the last shred of the letter and clutches the lapel of her coat in one hand, her wand underneath still clutched in the other.
No pops surround her. No Death Eaters. No boogeymen.
Her teeth release her chapped lip. Her tongue runs over it, soothing, only to find it sharp and tangy.
She backs up against a tree, trying to quiet her panicked breath, hopefully hidden in its shadow, until she can figure out what’s going on.
The terraced houses continue to glide and jerk, alternating. It’s so eerily silent, despite the entire foundation of the road seeming to bend and buck. A new house has warped into existence between the two, stone by stone. 38, says a dull golden placard that’s just sprung into existence.
Lily gapes. She instinctively glances down to check the address again and instead sees some of the ashes on the toe of her boot.
The house looks much like those that surround it. But for all that it didn’t exist until a moment before, it seems to have been weathered down.
She stares at the 38. She’ll never know this whole Wizarding world, Lily thinks. Never tire of the wonder of something new. Even if the something new might be trying to kill you, it’s still something magic.
A door slides into the world next to the 38 as Lily watches. It’s painted black and looks remarkably well cared-for compared to the rest of the house. As if it’s been repainted recently.
From her shadows, she again scans the road around her, which she can see in full now. A quick Homenum Revelio turns up nothing.
The letter had told her 8, and it’s nearing 8:30; she’d dithered on if she was coming to her death. On why she’d come at all.
It’s partly desperation, she knows. The kind of desperation that makes you want to do something about it. The attacks that had been sporadic, the rumors that had been whispers, the fear and rage that she’d been able to quell in her final years at Hogwarts are loud now. Unignorable. More of her friends are moving abroad, going into hiding, or doing things they won’t tell her about. Things like whatever’s behind 38, she hopes. She knows that’s why she came.
She’d thought she’d be in the thick of it from right after graduation. By default, through the nature of things. But not much of her life after graduation looks like how she’d planned it.
Lily brings her wand out into the open, quietens the tread of her boots, and approaches the door of 38 wand-first.
She climbs the few stairs quickly and silently. The black of the door is blurring out everything else around it.
She takes a deep breath.
Her weight hasn’t even borne down on the doorstep, her foot having just grazed it, when she hears a thump from behind the door.
Before she can react, it swings open, and Lily’s gaze jerkily traces the line of her outstretched wand right to the nose of Albus Dumbledore.
She’s changed and shrunk her overnight bag down into her clutch with five minutes to spare. Lily dithers in the ladies’ room in front of a mirror, fine-tuning her makeup manually in a way she usually doesn't have the patience for.
It’s been the most adrenaline-packed 24 hours of her life in years.
Dumbledore had spent the better part of the previous night initiating her into the Order of the Phoenix. She’d signed whistleblower revealing contracts and been added to various secret-keeping and communication charms, had toured the house that he told her was usually used as their Headquarters and meeting spot, had learned the full extent of the violent outbreaks the Ministry was covering up.
He’d gone heavy on explaining to her the mission of this all, which she hadn’t needed convincing of, and had been frustratingly sparse on the details. She’d gotten no names, no confirmed ops that had been theirs, no plans in the works. Just a twinkle in his eye and a promise that this was the right thing to do. And, of course, firm assertion that she was needed.
As painful as it was to sign her life over for essentially no information in return, that was a nice feeling. She’s not known it for a while.
He’d been upfront with her about why he was reaching out now, at least. That he anticipated more violence in the coming years than they’d seen before, and they’d need her potions skillset.
That the Order needed to cast a tracking charm, in person, on a potioneer they suspected of working for Death Eaters. A potioneer they specifically suspected of trying to develop a vile potion with the opposite effect of Felix Felicis — a curse of bad luck, sort of like in the superstitious muggle way. It sounded a bit silly at first, and even this morning as she readied herself, but she understands it now: a potion that Order members could undetectably be poisoned with during battle or otherwise, stymying countless missions in mundane or ridiculous ways without the other side having to strategize consciously at all, ever.
Someone in the Order had learned that the potioneer in question, Dungle Birkby, was attending the annual Potions Original Testing Soiree conference near Leeds, and they needed someone with a real reason to be there to get ahold of him.
And Lily Evans, senior ingredients assistant to the senior assistant potioneer, Dogson Iodson, at Belby Potions Inc, was someone with a real reason to be there. Perhaps.
He’d apologized for the last-minute rush of it all, but they’d needed her tomorrow — today, now — and it couldn't wait. And he couldn’t tell her more. But the world would be grateful for her contribution, even if they’d never know about it.
Lily had tried not to show her panic, but she certainly hadn’t expected to be chucked on a mission the day after she was given the bloody Oath of Admission.
He’d clocked it, because of course he had, and reassured her that she would be attending only the final cocktail party of the conference, at which plus ones were allowed, and as such she’d be attending with another Order member, who could show her the finer ropes of a reconnaissance mission such as this.
They’d already forged the paperwork to get her into the conference, which had passed muster with flying colors an hour ago when she’d checked in.
Which brings her to now, in the ladies’ loo in the lobby of the posh Muggle hotel next to the conference venue, which is someone’s castle, she thinks. After all, why not at someone’s castle, if they’ve got a spare?
She presses her hands, hard, into the marble bathroom counter in front of her and tries very hard to stop her train of thought from veering into territory she’d thought she’d fenced off. Dumbledore hadn’t told her the name of the Order member who’d be working with her here, and she hadn’t asked.
She wants it to be him in the way she wanted to be the Queen’s granddaughter when she was younger, or a movie star, or a prodigious singing talent. She wants it only because it won’t happen. It feels nice to imagine him next to her once more, for the first time in years. Warm and recognizable, in the way too few things are anymore. Comforting.
But she’s lying. That’s the way she wants to run into Peter Pettigrew in Flourish & Blotts on her monthly trip in. (She never does.)
She wants it to be him the way she wants to go back in time and redo the last four years of her life. She wants to have known things she couldn’t have known before she knew them. She wants to have been the person she is now, back then, which is when it would’ve counted. She wants to have said the things she needed to say when it counted. The things she’d wanted to say. She could do it all better now. She’d do it all right now.
She knows that’s impossible. She’s slow on every uptake, but there’s no such thing. She couldn’t have done anything before she did— because she didn’t. She knows.
But she does want that laugh back. She wants his slapstick sense of humour, and his dead seriousness when it mattered, and the way he was kind of a know-it-all despite his years of calling her one, and how he could be the busiest student in the castle and still drop everything the moment anyone needed him. She wants to never have known the look in his eye the last time she saw him, because she doesn’t want to die a Lily Evans who saw James Potter for the very last time ever at 18 on a train station platform.
She wants it to be him. She doesn’t — she doesn’t. She doesn’t. She wants to be something, and do something. And she wants it to be him. She has to accept that it’s not going to be him, because she can’t spend the entirety of her mission disappointed about the impossible. She can’t spend years more of her life always hoping she’ll see him around the corner, never to see him again.
Her fingers relax on the countertop. She leans away from the mirror slowly, noting that she’s minutes late now, and exits the loo.
She’s looking for a red umbrella. They’ll be holding a red umbrella, even though it’s not raining. It’s a beautiful day, even, for late December. Maybe she can contribute to the Order both her potions talent and advice on how to blend in less horribly in the muggle world.
She feels like her brain is thinking slower than usual, and she’s scanning people slower than usual, and people around her are moving slower than usual, and in retrospect she’ll wonder if it’s because she wasn’t daydreaming. The something in her that never knew things before she knew them finally, finally, finally did.
She spots him before she spots the umbrella he’s holding, even though it’s a bright red, because of course she does.
It takes him only a split second, from where he’s standing clear across the lobby looking horribly good in a set of pitch black dress robes that he’s clutching a Muggle coat over, for him to spot her back. She can see his eyes flare even from here.
He stares at her.
Her eyes greedily trace the face of a boy — a man, now — she hasn’t seen in three years, as she approaches him without really realizing. His nose, straight and long, is the same. His jaw is sharper, his cheeks less full. His hair is shorter, neater, but still not neat. His specs are the same. His eyes, a deep hazel that she’s so used to and has never once seen in another person, flicker up to meet hers a beat later. What’s someone to you, when you were in love with them but haven’t seen them in three years except in your dreams and nightmares? Does anything still count?
“James,” she breathes, stopping feet away. It’s not a question or a hello.
“I… Lily,” he says. His free hand, which for a wild moment she thinks might reach out to her, moves to clasp the red umbrella as well. “You…”
He blinks twice, thrice, and seems to shake himself back to attention, finally breaking eye contact to scan around them.
“We should talk somewhere quiet,” he says quickly, taking a step back and to the side. His jaw tightens, then softens. He turns around abruptly and seems to search for somewhere to go.
She feels something in her stomach swoop; she doesn’t get much of that feeling nowadays.
She can’t believe it. She can. She should’ve known. But she couldn’t have expected it.
He settles on the ajar door ahead of them and a little to the right and heads toward it without looking back for her. She can tell through the robes and through the coat and from the back and after three full years that he’s tense.
James opens the door and then stops beside it. It takes her just a beat too long to realize he’s waiting for her to pass through. He arches an eyebrow but is otherwise inscrutable.
She steps through the doorway and into the hallway. As she passes him, she sucks her stomach in, lest she touch him, and lets her gaze flit past his shoulder.
When she turns around, he’s closed the door not quite all the way and is standing facing her, still holding that umbrella.
“It’s not raining,” she says, pointing to it, even though she knows.
James shifts his weight and looks down at it. “Yeah, I was… overly cautious.”
“A first,” she says, again before thinking, and immediately regrets it. She’d hoped that would sound teasing but it didn’t.
He opens his mouth sharply, then seems to change his mind. He shakes his head again.
“You’re here,” Lily says.
“I am,” he nods. “His jaw clenches again. “You’re — you’re also here.”
“It’s been a while. It’s nice to see you,” she tries. Nice to see him. What a liar. She wants to tuck her head under his chin.
His gaze softens for the first time, so slightly she wonders if she’s just wishing for it. “You, too, Evans.”
She can’t imagine he means that, can he? She thinks she might throw up, a bit. How embarrassing, to have been turned around so far from reality.
“Well, look, I don’t really know everything to say because I wasn’t—I wasn’t…” James says, twisting around to glance through the crack in the door before turning back to her. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but you shouldn’t be here. And — I know, before you tell me off, who I am to tell you what to do, this is a regular hotel in the middle of nowhere — I know. I know. But trust me. You should get out of here, Evans. It’s not—I mean, nothing’s happening. Everything’s fine. But— but you should go.”
His hand jumps into his hair for the first time in the conversation. She follows the line of his forearm, his palm, his fingers, as they cord between the already disorderly strands. She sees him do it a million times over in her head. She’s touched those fingers with her own.
Lily blinks, then, and has to backtrack to his words.
“James,” she says, with intention. He stares back at her, still pleading.
“I’m—” she tilts her head. “I know. I’m here for you.”
His hands finally still. She can see him tense. “What?”
Lily blushes but soldiers on. She shakes her head. “I meant, did Dumbledore not tell you? He didn’t tell me it’d be you, but I assumed… maybe I shouldn’t have said that. What are you here for?”
He stares at her. Relaxes a bit. A slow blink. “POTS.”
“And I’m your way in,” Lily says. She takes a quick look around and quietly summons her nametag out of her bag. Her tiny image sticks her tongue out at James as she shows it to him.
“Oh,” he says, still looking down at it, understanding clearing his expression. “No, he didn’t tell me it was you. Just that it was someone new. And that she’d have a…”
Lily pulls a rusted spoon out from the inner pocket of her coat.
James nods and hands the badge back to her after she pockets the spoon again. “Right. I didn’t know you’d joined.” His voice is a little tight, and he seems to search her face as he says it, gaze dark and still as unreadable as it never used to be.
“Only yesterday,” Lily admits, trying to take a deep breath without him noticing to quell her blush.
“Yesterday?” James demands, quite loudly. His face finally breaks out into horrified expressiveness. He realizes, and runs his hand through his hair again. “Yesterday? And he’s sending you out already? You haven’t even been to a bloody meeting!”
Lily pauses in surprise, then bristles. “I’m perfectly qualified to be here, meeting or not. We’re not tasked with anything complicated, and there was no one else who’d have any reason to be here if I wasn’t, is what he—”
“I wasn’t questioning you,” James interrupts hastily. “Of course you can do this. Of course. I just — Merlin, sometimes he… never mind. Never mind that. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“So we’re doing this,” Lily says, after a pause where James seems to zone out somewhere over her shoulder, which kills her. It comes out sounding more like a question. His gaze snaps back to hers. “If you’re not…” Lily juts her jaw out until she feels it click a little. “If you’re not comfortable doing so, of course, I’m more than happy to go on my own. It seems straightforward. I’m sure I can handle it.”
“No,” James says sharply. “That’s not what I was… sorry. I’m sorry. I just wasn’t expecting to see you, and definitely not as part of… this. I’m not usually like this, especially on a mission.”
Lily twists her mouth and nods slightly. He’s startled to see a girl he forgot about three years ago, and she’s so bloody in love with him her toes are curled in her heels from three feet away from him.
He smiles ruefully at her. “Not to kick a dead thestral, but can we start this over again?”
Lily holds his gaze, and she does see warmth, at least. He tilts his head slightly to the side, and she knows he means it.
Her smile grows, genuine now. “It’s nice to see you, James. It’s been a while.”
His smile blossoms into a grin. “And as much of a pleasure as ever to see you, Lily. You look lovely.”
Her robes are a deep green, and she hates them a little, which she says out loud.
James laughs, which she’d hoped for.
“Shall we save the rest of our catching up for inside the party? With all my… we’re running a tad late, I think.”
(She lets her arm graze his as they reenter the lobby.)
“Now I’m glad I wore these,” Lily says on an exhale. “Isn’t this for a conference?”
James smooths out the collar of his robes. He’d handed his coat over to an attendant as they’d entered.
They’re staring out at a flower-bedecked dance floor, replete with couples gliding around in movements she doesn’t recognize. A magnificent, wood, carved ceiling curves above them, depicting the Greek gods, she thinks.
“Must be old-money funded,” James says. “They’ll make anything they can a black tie ball.”
Lily cuts her gaze over to him. “They?”
James rolls his eyes and turns to survey the rest of the room but not before she sees his smile.
“Do you see him?” he asks pleasantly, as he flashes a grin at someone she doesn’t recognize who cuts between them.
Lily squints at the far end of the room. “I think that’s him in the red. Talking to the short bloke and the tall bloke.”
James hums and moves to stand slightly behind her. She can feel the ghost of his hand on the small of her back. Or she’s imagining it. It feels like this could be any other day of her life.
“Your eyesight has dipped in the past few years, has it?” James says quietly, and she can hear the laugh in his voice even before she whips around to glare at him. She ignores the reminder of the time that’s passed.
“Shut up,” she mutters, surveying the people over his shoulder. “Hey, someone’s—”
James turns around just as the smiling blond man she’d spotted reaches them, a thick stack of parchment in his hand.
“James, m’boy, I’d thought that was you!” the man exclaims, swiftly drawing a once again startled-looking James into a tight hug.
“Mr. Fellsworth, what a lovely surprise,” James says, seemingly automatically, once he’s been released. His smile is genuine, if slightly strained. He shifts slightly closer to Lily. “You’re… you’re on the POTS board, aren’t you? I’d forgotten that.”
“Forty years and running, son!” Mr. Fellsworth bellows, clapping James hard enough on the shoulder he moves a little with it. Lily brings her hand up to the back of James’s elbow and tries not to shiver. “Your father was on it with me, once upon a time. Before you were born, I’d say that was. Oh, time!”
“You know, I’d actually forgotten that too…”
“And who’s this?” the man says cheerily, turning to Lily now. “Your girlfriend? Your father didn’t tell me the last time I saw him!”
James is as red as his skin can get. “Er, well—”
Lily doesn’t know what possesses her, except that she doesn’t want to regret this moment four years from now, and more importantly, she just wants to, even if that makes her crazy: “Yes, sir, Lily Evans. Lovely to meet you.”
As they shake hands — with noticeable gusto, not instigated by her — she can feel the burn of James’s gaze on her. She warms with it.
“Ah, Lily Evans! I’ve heard Belby mention you more than once, you know. If you’re ever interested in speaking at one of these little things, do send me an owl, you know…”
Lily grins. “I will gladly take you up on that.”
“Good!” he smiles back. “Good, good, good. Well, I’ll leave you young people alone, but James, do pass along my hello to your mum and dad. Maybe you can convince your father to join us all here next year!”
James laughs. “I’ll try, but he’s taken well to retirement. To everyone’s surprise, truthfully.”
Fellsworth waves him off. “Nonsense. If anyone can convince him, it’s his boy. Alright, I’m off to business. I think those two by the entrance are interlopers; they’ve got that look about them, you know…”
He hustles off to the double doors they’d entered through, where two guests who look like teenagers are quite obviously giddily scoping out the room.
James turns back to Lily with half a smile and the remnants of a blush on his cheeks.
As he opens his mouth, Lily cuts in preemptively: “It seemed easier. To explain. I didn’t want to derail the mission.”
James holds her gaze for a moment longer than she’d expect him to, long enough that she finally lets herself wonder.
“Good thinking,” he says softly, before glancing back at where Birkby is still chatting with the two men from earlier in the more crowded part of the room.
“The fewer people around us when we cast the better,” Lily whispers. “Should we wait him out?”
As turns to him, she realizes she’s not used to looking to him for answers.
James hums. “Let’s. For a little while at least. I’d rather get him alone naturally if we can.”
Lily eyes the couples on the dance floor and scans the clumps of people around the circumference and is going to regret this tomorrow.
She opens her mouth—
“Want to dance?” James asks, and when she looks at him he’s smiling just a little. But there’s some uncertainty. Under an hour back and already she knows what things look like in this new, slightly older James. She’s sure of it.
She smiles warmly. “I’d love to.”
His right hand clasps around her left, his other on her upper back, and she doesn’t know what to say. It’s so intimate, and so familiar, and so alien. He’s warm. That’s something she remembers about him. He’s warm against her. She wants to press closer until she can’t anymore. She wants to lean the side of her face against his chest, and then tilt into him.
Lily has been following James around for under a minute, her steps half-hearted imitations of his, when he clears his throat.
“What have you been up to?” he asks quietly, his gaze squarely on her. “The last few years, that is. Fellsworth mentioned something about Belby?”
She can’t tell if that was pointed, in the end. She clears her throat back. “Damocles Belby. I work at his potion developing company.”
“That’s great,” James says earnestly. “I know that’s what you wanted to do. Right?”
“Well, I’m not…”
He tilts his head as she trails off. “You’re not… the one developing the potions. Is that it?”
Lily huffs a laugh and squints up at him. “You’ve always been good at that. But yes. I’m not. Ingredients sourcing. Which is a twig in the broomstick, I know. And I have to do it. And I am learning. But I hate how people always tell you that you have to do things you hate to earn the chance to do what matters.”
James’s mouth twists. He doesn’t break eye contact with her. “I know what you mean,” he mutters.
She cocks an eyebrow, grateful for a way out. “Have to do missions like this to get the better ones? Or — I didn’t even ask. If this is most of what you’re doing, or if there’s something else.”
James smiles ruefully. “Missions like this are the better ones, trust me. For more reasons than one,” he adds.
Lily smiles at his shoulder. She wants to believe that these are niceties to an old classmate, but she’s starting to not.
“But no,” he continues. “Just this. Though I don’t know if I can say ‘just.’ Quidditch seemed like it could wait. And you know, I don’t…”
“Need to work for money?” Lily supplies.
James’s mouth twists into a wry smile. “Yes, that.”
James’s hand suddenly drops several inches on Lily’s back as he nudges her closer to his body, glance flitting to something over her head. She feels heat very suddenly curl in the pit of her stomach.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Fellsmouth is talking to Birkby and they both looked over at us.”
He glances back down at her when she doesn’t say anything. She holds his eye contact, and musters up some of the Gryffindor she hasn’t had to use these past years. As the seconds tick by, she slides the pointer finger of the hand that’s curled onto his shoulder up to his collar, until it just barely grazes his neck.
He shivers. Her head tilts to the side. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, except that she does.
His gaze is hot on her face and for a second she swears it flicks further down before meeting hers again.
“Lily,” he says lowly. “It is really nice to see you again.”
For more than a second, she’s sure he’s moving closer. She’s sure she’s going to kiss him.
“And a round of applause for the band!” echoes a voice from the opposite side of the room. Lily startles into James, who steadies her easily. “The Weeping Wombats—they’re up and coming, and we love them, don’t we?”
The audience cheers back at the man she doesn't recognize who’s holding the microphone. “They’re going to take a little break and then we’ll be back for more dancing. Don’t forget your drinks, everyone!”
Lily exhales. Yes. She needs a drink.
“I can get you one,” James says. He’s taken a step back from her now and has pushed his hair back from his forehead. It makes him look older.
“Is that advisable on a…” Lily trails off pointedly.
“A You-Know-What?” James prompts with a smirk, one that seems a half-beat delayed. “If you’ve eaten, one helps. Best not to get smashed. We did that once. Poor form on the stakeout after. I don’t recommend it.”
Lily chokes on air. “You got smashed before a stakeout?” she questions.
James waves her off and starts to back up towards the drink table. “Accident. Story for later.”
He winks and finally turns, and later means there’s going to be a later, right?
“Keeper, that one.”
Lily jumps once again — she’ll need to work on that, she thinks absently — to face the elderly woman who’s sidled up next to her. The woman watches James’s retreat before smiling up at Lily. “You’re very lovely together.”
Lily swallows, then smiles. “That’s kind of you.”
April 1978
James is uncharacteristically nervous.
She can tell by the way he’s sorting through the prefect feedback forms. He’s reading them slowly, so slowly she suspects he might not be reading them at all.
His feet are still on the floor, which means he’s thinking about something deeply, because if he wasn’t, they’d be tapping.
“Alright, Potter?” she tries lightly.
His head snaps up, which is the third tell. He’s not usually so easily pulled out of focus.
“Are you all right, Evans?” he counters. And that’s the final one.=
“What’s on,” she says, clasping her hands together on top of her set of forms.
He purses his lips. Lily waits.
She tries to push down the slight thrill that envelops her that she read him so quickly. They’ve come a long way.
“You know Asha Jenkins, right?” he asks. He looks her in the eye quite steadily as he says it, nerves apparently pushed to the side.
Lily blinks, caught off guard. “Er, we’ve shared classes together for seven years. It’s a small school.”
“Right,” he nods, but he doesn’t look embarrassed. “She asked me out to next month’s Hogsmeade weekend. The final one.”
Lily’s palms flatten onto the table. “Oh.”
He continues as if he hadn’t paused: “And I was thinking about it. I was thinking about what I should say, rather. I didn’t say anything to her yet.”
“Oh… kay?” It feels a little harder to breathe, and she doesn’t know why.
“I wasn’t sure if there’s a reason for me to say no,” he says, and he’s staring at her so steadily she starts to blush. “No. That’s a lie. I rather think there might be a reason for me to say no, actually.”
Lily swallows. She knows he can see she’s red. She doesn’t—she doesn’t...
“What are you…” it comes out raspy; she clears her throat. “What are you talking about?”
He doesn’t look exasperated, or really like anything else. Just so serious. “Lily. We’ve… you know. You have to know, unless I’m crazy. Unless I’m crazy, you’ve been half of this. And lately… lately I’ve been thinking I’m not crazy.”
She stares at him. She feels the panic rise in her chest. She knows. She does know. She hasn’t even thought the words, but she does know. She knows he’s not crazy.
“I…”
“I know this is a lot to… to finally say out loud,” he says, and he looks down at the table for a second before his gaze cuts right back into her. “After a long time of us dancing around it. I appreciate that. So you don’t have to… right now, or anything. But I wanted to. To say it, and to know. I mean, I’ll say no to her anyway, sorry if I made it seem… but it was a good kick in the broomstick to… to do this. I thought we needed to do this.”
The panic is at her throat now; it sits on her tongue now; it’s escaping into the air now.
“James, I—” think you’ve become my best friend, and I want you to always be my best friend, and I don’t know what that means. “I don’t…” know what I’m doing? Or what this is. I didn’t realize earlier. I wasn’t thinking. Don’t we have time? I don’t know anymore if we have time. “I don’t want to…” lose you. Would this mean that one day I lose you? I didn’t think about this; why didn’t I think about this.
She shakes her head. “I don’t… I don’t think I can—James…”
She looks up at him, because she realizes she hadn’t been. His expression has dropped. A sad smile, now.
“Okay,” he says, raspily. “Okay. I guess, I thought… but maybe. Yeah. Okay. Got it.”
“No,” she says. “I don’t mean no. I mean I don’t know. I didn’t know.”
He goes for a small smile. “That’s okay. It’s okay to not know. Merlin knows I don’t… I don’t know what I’m doing. We can just… we can forget this. Or not. You can see, later, if you know. Or if that’s code, we can forget it.”
He stands up abruptly.
“James…”
“Lily, it’s really alright. I’m alright. I just got a little in my head.” He laughs shortly. “I’m sorry I’m being so… I’m just going to hop on a quick fly, alright? And we can maybe meet up in a couple days to finish these? I promise to be my right normal self.”
She stares at him where he’s already at the doorway. “Sure. Okay. We can do that.”
(They couldn’t.)
December 1981
James engages Birkby’s final conversation partner of the night in a rousing debate over the merits of Wizarding versus muggle chess, and Lily inserts herself right by Birkby’s side.
All it takes is one detailed question to the man about whether an antidote to Alihotsy’s Draught can ever be created that doesn’t incur the typical side-effect of a week of uncontrollable gas, and he’s off. Midway through his explanation of the medicinal properties of Mistletoe berries, Lily makes like she’s adjusting her robes and palms her wand in her pocket for the split second it takes her to cast a wordless Homenum Avensegium. When Birkby doubles over in laughter after she — knowingly incorrectly — proposes adding bat spleen (“what?” he chortles, “to swell them up like a muggle hot air balloon?”), she slips half the vial in her pocket into his drink. He takes a swig almost immediately. And then another. And it’s done. Ten minutes after hours with James.
Birkby claps her on the shoulder and thanks her for a good laugh, and then stumbles back to the bloke chatting with James, who grins at her.
They meet up back at the hotel lobby next door, and when she finds him in the same hallway they were in before, James already has a key in his hand.
“The portkey is only for tomorrow, but I got us a room. There was only one left. Hope that’s okay,” he says. He’s not flushed but he does look giddy, likely high from their small victory. He’s got his muggle coat hanging over his arm, and his hair is somehow more disheveled than when she saw him minutes ago. His dress robes fit him… nicely. Black has always looked good on him. His eyes gleam in the dull late-night lobby night. It’s likely now early in the morning on the 31st.
Lily meets his eyes. “Fine with me, yeah.”
He grins and gestures her down the hallway.
The room is nice enough, she notes as she enters. Lily only ever cares that it’s clean and locked. It’s got a rickety desk, a squashy chair, and…
James is already staring at it. His gaze cuts back up to her as he clears his throat. “They didn’t mention that. You’re welcome to it. I can transfigure the chair, easy.”
“No,” Lily says, her voice dry. “No. We can share. I don’t mind.”
She doesn’t want to complain anymore. She wants to make things happen.
James nods and turns away quickly to dig through the bag he’s pulled from his coat, and for a flash of a moment she’s nervous she’s made him uncomfortable, but he’s not. She knows he’s not. She saw the look in his eyes in that ballroom. He’s not.
She slips into the loo to change and then slips past him to let him in exchange. Her touch doesn’t graze this time; it lingers. He notices.
She’s in the bed and on her back, tucked neatly in on one side of it, when he returns. He’s in a soft-looking shirt and soft-looking cotton pants. They’re plaid — blue and green. She smiles. That’s new.
He Nox es out the light, pads over to the bed, folds back the covers on his side. She could diary out the way every muscle in his exposed arm moves three months from now, no wand to her head needed.
They don’t talk. There’s a lot to say. Years to cover, a moment to unravel. Something to stitch back together with the thread, she hopes.
Too much to cover tonight.
He’s warm, even from the other side of the bed. Warm through the space between them. What does centimeters on a bed have on three years of silence? Maybe she’ll wake up soon, and this is yet another thing she’ll pluck back out for ingredient-chopping daydream fodder.
But she doesn’t feel giddy. She feels settled. Toes uncurled, palms loose.
She wants to roll over onto him so badly. She wants to stay right here.
There’s no other way it could’ve happened.
She turns her head to trace the familiar line of his nose. His eyes are closed, but he’s not asleep.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, closing her eyes too. “For that day in seventh year. I know I played it off, but I knew. I was so scared. I used to think it was nothing, but it was real. I’m sorry it couldn’t happen.”
Thirty deep seconds of silence. His breathing is as even as ever.
She squints her eyes shut.
A rustle.
A pinky on hers, then fingers, then a palm. She clasps his hand back, and lets out a breath.
“I know,” he whispers back, minutes later, as the tendrils of sleep begin to snake over her. She’s not even sure he’s talking. Maybe she’s wishing. “I’m sorry too. For how I handled it. That it couldn’t happen then.”
Sleep claims her.
Lily awakens with her head pillowed on the fleshy part of James’s chest, the area between the collarbone and shoulder proper. She can tell he’s already awake; he’s trying not to move.
She presses her head into his shoulder to let him know.
“Hey,” he says after a beat, his voice a croak. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she murmurs back.
She slides her hand across his chest, over the shirt. She tilts her face up to watch his.
“There you are,” he whispers. His eyes are crusted in sleep and half-closed, but he’s already started to smile.
“I’m here,” she affirms. “So are you.”
He huffs a laugh. “This again. I thought we’d agreed to a do-over?”
“A do-over?”
“Downstairs, yesterday, when we first met. I asked if—”
She leans up to close the gap. His lips are sweet and soft as she presses him back into his pillow. Something sparks down her spine.
He makes a noise that she’s not dreaming up and kisses her back slowly, hands securing themselves at her back and in her hair.
She swings her leg over his body and settles herself on top of him, deepening the kiss into something messier, faster, desperate. She feels him against her lower stomach and bites back a moan, rocking into him. Her fingers dance through his hair.
His teeth scrape her lip and she moans openly, pressing herself flat against him. He’s so bloody warm against her.
She breaks away on another moan to look down at him. The both of them are panting, lips chapped. His eyes are wide as he stares back up at him.
He clears his throat, hands squeezing her hips. “That was…”
“Our do-over,” she says, breathless, grinning. Still so very much in love with him. “And I’ve been waiting far longer than since yesterday.”