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The library in the late evening is one of Lily’s favorite places, and her friends are used to losing her for hours at a time while she curls up on a bench by the window, book in hand as the dying light of the day streams through the glass.
Today, however, she doesn’t have a book with her. No, today, she’s staring out at the grounds, lost in thought.
James is being weird. James has been weird all week, ever since his birthday on Sunday, and Lily just can’t figure it out. He’s seventeen now, and he should be excited, shouldn’t he? He’s an adult who can now legally practice magic at home, which means he can get up to all sorts of magical trouble at home as well as at school now.
But instead of walking around with big smiles and even bigger laughs, James has been almost skittish everytime Lily sees him, refusing to make eye contact and having a hard time even putting a sentence together. It’s a big change from how they were before, inside jokes and catching each other’s eye from across the room, working through their past issues to become friends. For a little while, Lily had thought they might be becoming more than friends.
Not anymore, clearly.
She lets out a sigh big enough to stir the strands of hair that have fallen into her face, and she wonders if she hasn’t somehow messed something up. She should really just talk to him, she knows that, but the thought of getting up from her seat and confronting him makes her stomach churn.
The sound of a heavy footstep behind her causes her head to whip around.
It’s James.
Of course it is.
It’s James, and he’s still looking a little skittish and off, hands tapping the edges of a box he’s holding nervously. Lily’s eyes drop to the box, then return to his face.
“Hey,” she says, confused.
“Hey,” he says back with an awkward clearing of his throat. “Can I?” He nods to the space on the bench next to her, and Lily shifts over to make more room.
“Yeah, of course.”
James sits down on the edge of the bench, tapping his foot on the ground over and over, and sets the box down in his lap. Lily follows it with her eyes, not even bothering with pretending like curiosity isn’t eating her alive. This, she knows, is probably an explanation of why James has been so weird, and it’s several days overdue.
“So, uh,” he begins, which is a promising start. “You know the thing?”
“The thing,” Lily repeats, deadpan, and watches as James nods seriously.
“Yes, the thing that happens on birthdays.”
Lily does know “the thing.” James is referring to the game the universe likes to play on all of them, delivering little hints as to who their soulmate is every time they complete a lap around the sun. It’s supposed to get less and less obscure as the years go by, but for her birthday this year, she’d only gotten a small figurine of a deer. She’d had no idea what that could mean, so it’d just gone straight into her suitcase.
Lily looks at the box again.
“Is that…?”
James follows her gaze.
“Yeah, it is. And, well, honestly, I didn’t really want to show you, but Sirius said that I have to, and Remus agreed, and Remus has more common sense than all of us, so—”
“James,” she says, interrupting his nervous rambling. “What’s in the box?”
He takes a sharp breath.
“Um, well—it’s easier if I just show you.”
He reaches for the lid slowly. There’s a slight hesitation before he flips open the lid, trepidation marking his every move, almost like the thing will bite him if he doesn’t move slowly.
Lily tries not to feel disappointed when the angle she’s looking at makes it impossible for her to see inside. Then again, she’s not certain she really wants to see inside, if James is about to show her soulmate clues that probably don’t add up to her and therefore firmly erase the chance for them to ever be more than friends.
It’s fine.
“I don’t have all of them,” James starts to explain as he sorts through the box, clearly looking for something. “I always leave the ones I got before school at home, you know? On a shelf in my bedroom. They aren’t very specific, anyways, so they aren’t really necessary to bring with me—oh, here it is.”
He emerges with a small, gold button. He passes it on to Lily, who takes it and turns it over in her hand. It’s not extremely revealing of anything. Most girls have clothes with similar buttons, and it’s not hard to lose them, either. She raises an eyebrow in James’s direction.
“Buttons aren’t common in standard wizarding clothing,” he explains. “I figured it meant that my soulmate was almost definitely not a pureblood. I was so relieved at that, you have no idea.”
He says it with a grin, and Lily gives him a small smile back. This whole situation is still confusing, but if James wants to talk about his soulmate with her, she can’t blame him. She wouldn’t want to have to talk to any of the other boys about it, with maybe the exception of Remus, and no matter how she might feel on the inside, it’s her duty as a friend to listen to James when he wants to talk.
She hands the button back.
“You don’t strike me as the type to marry your cousin, anyway,” she says.
James’s hand brushes hers as he takes it, laughing.
“Thanks, Lils, it means a lot.”
The button drops back into the box with a hollow kind of noise, and James picks up the next object—a teabag.
James smiles at it as it dangles on the string.
“This one confused me at first, but then Sirius pointed out that it probably means they’re British.”
Lily laughs. “I like that one.”
“Me too,” James replies, and places it back down, beginning to pull things out in earnest now.
He grabs something else, holds it up so that Lily can see it’s a Knut.
“A magical coin for a magical soulmate.”
Logical, Lily thinks.
A letter seal, which, as James puts it, “Has a Hogwarts seal to tell me that they go here.”
Next, a red and gold hat with a lion on it, “To show that they’re in Gryffindor, like me.”
And finally, James goes to reach into the box one last time. But before he actually grabs whatever it is, he hesitates again, and Lily has to push down the urge to peer over to see inside for herself. She’s getting this nervous kind of hope building up in her stomach, and she feels a bit sick with it.
James grabs the object delicately, like he’s afraid of breaking it. A strange sort of silence falls over the two of them as they sit there, James quiet and serious, Lily waiting to see what’s making him act that way, almost holding her breath with the hope that something good happens.
“Close your eyes,” James tells her.
Lily listens.
“Hold out your hand.”
She does.
It’s soft, the way James places the thing in her palm, this underlying sort of reverence in his motions. Lily can feel it even with her eyes closed.
“Open.” He whispers the word hoarsely.
Lily does just that, eyes opening and going straight to her hand, where there’s…
There’s a flower.
There is a flower sitting in her palm.
And it’s not just any flower, it’s—
“A lily,” James says, voice quiet, “to tell me it’s you.”
She looks at him, mouth agape, the back down at the flower. Back to him. His eyes are steady in a way they haven’t been ever since his birthday, and Lily knows he isn’t lying.
“Me?” she asks, dazed.
James nods.
“It only makes sense, really, given that I’ve been in love with you ever since I was eleven.”
Lily laughs, and if it’s a bit wet, who cares. She’s just found her soulmate.
“Come here, you idiot,” she says, leaning forward.
James meets her halfway.
The kiss is soft and sweet and has that same sort of reverence with which James put the lily in her hand, and when she pulls back, it’s with a smile.
“I had no idea you were mine,” she says.
“Really? None at all?” James sounds surprised, but she’s not too worried.
She shakes her head. “It’s pretty hard to guess when the universe decides that your big clue is a deer figurine.”
It’s a little… unexpected, the reaction James has to the word “deer.” He blanches, then coughs awkwardly. Then fidgets on the bench.
“Yes, um, I guess so.” His reply is weird and stilted, and it makes Lily narrow her eyes. She knows him too well by now to not know when something’s up, and she’s not about to let it go that easily. Not when he’s her soulmate.
Merlin, he’s my soulmate.
She pushes it down.
“James,” she says, voice low and serious, “why did I get a deer figurine?”
James clears his throat again.
“Well, you see,” he says, “that’s definitely a story for another time.”
And Lily would press more, she really would, but James is pulling her back in for another kiss and she’s completely helpless not to give in.
That is her soulmate, after all.