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Lily is a light sleeper.
She always has been.
She doesn’t know why; just some quirk of genetics that curses her to wake easily, disturbed by every little sound, no matter how innocuous. At home, it was Petunia snoring loudly enough to wake the dead in their shared bedroom. Here at school, it is usually Mary talking in her sleep, or restless sleeper Emmeline’s bed creaking as she tosses and turns.
Tonight, though, it’s neither of those things. Tonight, it’s a soft but persistent tap-tap-tap at the window that rouses her.
Bloody owl! she thinks, then throws back the curtains of her four-poster and picks up her wand from her bedside table, her whispered “Lumos” bringing a little light to the darkness.
She scowls at the other beds in the dormitory, illuminated by the soft glow of wandlight, and wonders which of her housemates is getting mail delivered in the middle of night. Not that it matters; clearly the job of letting the cursed creature is going to fall to Lily, despite the fact that the letter won’t be for her. After all, she’s only one of them that never gets mail by owl, lacking either a pureblood family or a Hogwarts-graduate boyfriend to do the honours.
It is, therefore, quite a shock to throw open the window and find, not an owl waiting outside the window, but her own boyfriend, sitting astride his pride and joy, the Nimbus 7 he got for his seventeenth birthday. Except sitting isn’t entirely accurate, is it? He’s somehow managing to lounge on it, as though he isn’t basically sitting on a twig, several hundred feet in the air. Just looking at him is making her feel dizzy (though in fairness, that isn’t actually down to the aforementioned mile-high twig-sitting, as much as it’s just a standard side effect of looking at him these days).
“Alright, Evans?” he enquires, with a grin that speaks to exactly how pleased with himself he’s feeling right now.
“James!” she hisses, in a passable imitation of being cross with him, despite the way her stomach is doing flip-flops. “What the hell are you doing knocking on my dormitory window in the middle of the night?”
He shrugs, making the broom wobble alarmingly, not that he appears to notice. “Well, I couldn’t get up the stairs to knock on the door, could I?”
Lily rolls her eyes. “Not what I meant, Potter.”
“I wanted to see you,” he tells her, and oh! His eyes are so dreamy, aren’t they? Brown and green and melted golden caramel and all hers. She could drown in them, and she’s sure he’d let her.
“You’ll see me at breakfast,” she reasons, not yet ready to capitulate, because where’s the fun in that? “Now bugger off, before you wake everyone else up.”
“Come with me,” he suggests. “It’s a beautiful night for a fly.”
He isn’t wrong. The cloudless sky is scattered with starlight, like a handful of sequins scattered across velvet, and the pearly waning gibbous moon is matched by its twin, reflected in the glassy surface of the Black Lake. It is breathtaking.
“Absolutely not!” she scoffs, but he hears the playfulness in her tone, and instead smirks at her, offering his hand.
“Come on, Evans,” he coaxes her. “Jump on.”
Finally, she surrenders, letting the smile spread across her face. “Okay,” she tells him, and he looks so thrilled that she realises that actually, he wasn’t sure she’d agree after all. It’s all kinds of adorable. He’s all kinds of adorable.
She’s got one foot on the window ledge before she hesitates.
It isn’t because doesn’t want to, or because she’s trying to make a point, it’s because… well, it’s because it’s a very long way down, and she’s never felt all that stable on a broom, and now that she’s so close to the edge, she’s been irrefutably reminded of these two facts.
Somehow, though, he seems to know that.
“I won’t let you fall,” he promises, gently and unprompted. ”Jump, and I’ll catch you.”
And she knows he will, because that’s just one of the fundamental rules of the universe, isn’t it? When Lily Evans jumps, James Potter will catch her.
She looks at him, his patchwork eyes, his reassuring smile, his outstretched hand, and she knows she’s safe. She’ll always be safe with him.
And so—she jumps.