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You’re nineteen, and you’re very much an adult. You’re a year and a half out of school, and you act your part well. You’ve made choices, shouldered burdens, never shied from a fight. Never mind that your chosen career is a soldier, and not a bureaucrat or a healer or hell, even a dragon trainer, like everyone else your age. Sometimes you wonder what will happen when—if—you do get out of this. What then? You were whisked into this war on the threshold of your life, and sometimes you wonder if it’s ruined you for good.
You’re nineteen, and you’re very much a child. You’re in love, and sometimes that gets in the way of things. Sometimes you make stupid decisions, and people get hurt, and fuck you’re nineteen, you shouldn’t have this riding on you. Sometimes you get petulant, sometimes you are lazy, and sometimes you cry in the middle of the night for parents who aren’t there. You look at the kids your age back in your other world, the world where people don’t come of age until eighteen, and even then it’s just for show. You catch yourself daydreaming about University sometimes, but it leaves you quickly; you’ve been ruined for that world for a while now.
It’s terrifying, but you get high off the fight. The thrill that sparks a lightning bolt through your spine when you’re surrounded, but you and your comrades-in-arms somehow break through, perhaps that is worth it. You catch eyes with your lover, your partner, your rebel with a most wondrous cause, and you grin, because what else can you do. You’re nineteen, and so are your fellow soldiers, so more often than not you go to a bar after the fight and exchange war stories like they’re fun and show wounds like they mean nothing.
Sometimes the fight goes badly, really badly, and you’re amazed you can still be shocked by all this, but you are. “They were just a few years older than us,” you whisper as they bring the bodies back. You’re young, and you are prone to forgetting your own mortality, but you are old, and it is in front of you all the time.
You’ve always liked Halloween, even when you were little and didn’t understand why exactly. You love the costumes, the sweets, the embrace of all that is mystical and supernatural and just a little bit spooky. You loved the show the ghosts put on at Hogwarts, the melodrama carried over from ages past, though you didn’t understand why anyone would want to celebrate their death day. When you asked Sir Nicholas, he pulled his head off by the ear thoughtfully. “Perhaps because I missed celebrating it while I was alive. Got to make up for lost time, you know!” You had a shiver run down your spine wondering what day you missed celebrating every year, and went back to your candy.
You wish Halloween were still like that, but you’re an adult now and Halloween is for children and for people long dead. You spend your nineteenth Halloween in the heat of battle, crouched behind the swings in some suburban playground while people who hate your kind try to kill you. There is chaos, and people you have known for years fall dead beside you, a weird blue light fills the sky, and you don’t think you could give an accurate retelling when it is all over. And you’re glad. You just want to forget. You lose yourself in your lover, he loses himself in you. And when you are alone together you again become frightened children who cry softly between moans. When you are stripped of your fatigues, you realize just how thin are your wrists, how translucent is your skin. You swallow each other’s tears, try to make each other feel something other than pain. Ecstasy is ephemeral, but it is something.
It is quiet, for a time, and you mourn the dead and try to convince yourself that it is still worth fighting, that there is still a chance for your side. Sometimes you wish you could back out, but this is not some old man’s war. You may be just a foot soldier, but you are the cause, and you can’t ask someone else to fight for you if you don’t. Sometimes you wonder why people who don’t have a stake are still here, when everyone and everything they know is in danger because of it. Once you ask him, your—you don’t really know what to call him anymore, he is everything—and he looks at you blankly and replies because it’s right. Sometimes you wonder at your own morality, at choices that could have been made but weren’t. Sometimes you think you shouldn’t doubt yourself so much.
It’s the oddest thing, seeing old school mates under masks, aiming wands directly at your heart. It’s not as if they’d ever been friendly—really, the lines drawn on the school yard might well have morphed into the current battle lines—but they’re nineteen too, and it’s hard to forget that just a few years ago you were sorted together and sat exams together and watched the same Quidditch games and occasionally exchanged potions ingredients in moments of accidental civility.
It’s cold tonight, and you’re just a bit off; your spells go wide, you stumble over roots protruding from the frozen ground. James notices, and he and Sirius fall back to shield you. You yell at them between curses—you don’t need protection, they’re leaving a hole in the line, go do something useful—but a sudden dizziness overtakes you, and you find yourself leaning against a tree while your boys stand protectively in front, their wands keeping hexes at bay. “Was she hit?” Sirius asks, and you try to reply no but there’s a ringing in your ears and suddenly you’re not sure. What is this?
There’s a popping in the near distance, and you hear James swear, “Fuck, they’ve brought reinforcements.” They glance nervously at you. “Should we move her? Lily, can you move? Can you hear me?” You try to reply but you’re hearing them as if through a badly tuned radio. You hate that you’re weak. You should be a soldier, but you’ve been cowed on the battle field without even the graze of a curse.
There’s a yell in the direction of the popping and you realize the others must’ve seen you, honed in on the downed Mudblood. You shift, and horror constricts your breathing. You have to get out of here. James, Sirius, you all have to leave. They help you to your feet, the same conclusion apparent on their faces, and you gaze over their shoulders to see one whose mask has come off, his black eyes familiar even in the dim light. He raises his wand and your heart clenches at the betrayal. You see the shot go wide as you are pulled into nothingness, another figure in a black cloak felled by a spell never meant for you.
There is lots of pacing at the safe house, while they wait for you to be checked by the Healer, and you yell at them to cut it out, it makes you nervous, but part of you absurdly wants to be pacing with them. The Healer comes and speaks in low, reassuring tones, and there’s a buzzing in your ears and you can’t possibly have heard that right. She leaves you, and at some point Sirius sidles out of the room too, and you are left alone with another nineteen-year-old who looks as scared as you do. “What are we going to do?” you whisper, and he shushes you and holds you close.
You are nineteen, and you are pregnant. You want to laugh, you want to cry. This is absurd. This is not what you had planned for your life.
You and James tell everyone at the next Order meeting. He does the talking, but you can feel the gazes on your abdomen, and you fill in their silent condemnation in your head—stupid Muggleborn girl, gotten herself knocked up, removed a fighter from the group and made another one next to useless at that. You’re indignant at their imagined criticisms; you’re nineteen, but you’re not stupid. Something went wrong. Something out of your control. When Alice Longbottom turns up pregnant too, you are almost relieved. “Must’ve been some sort of spell that interfered with potion effects,” someone hypothesizes, and you vaguely remember a blue light that tingled when it passed over you, the passion that followed mere hours later.
Christmas is a subdued affair—a few crackers, a small tree. There’s eggnog which Sirius bustles about to make in the small kitchen, Peter trying to help while really just getting in the way. Remus sits and talks quietly with you while James taps his foot nervously. You’re two months along, you say. The baby should be here by the end of the summer. Remus smiles wanly, and there is an apology in it, but also real joy. “That’s wonderful,” he says, and you think about that word. Full of wonder. It is wonderful. For the first time, you feel a shiver of excitement rush up your spine, and a grin blossoms on your lips.
Sirius hands out mugs of eggnog and James cries, much too loudly, “Presents! Mine first!” There’s a finely wrapped little box that is pressed into your hand which turns out to contain a key. “It’s to my parent’s old cottage in the West Country,” he explains. “Godric’s Hollow. Oh, and also…” He kneels in front of you. “Lily Evans, will you marry me?” The ring is beautiful—a gold band with a ruby surrounded by diamonds. You can only nod through your tears, reach out to clasp him tightly around the neck then pull back to have your face peppered with kisses.
There’s cheering from the others, and Peter squeaks out “So when’s the wedding?” James grins at you, and you laugh at him. “Soon,” you say, and James counters “New Years?” It’s in less than a week, but that’s more than enough time. You’ll invite the Order, a few other friends. You’ll have to find a dress, you suppose, but there no need for a big ceremony, no parents left to get in the way. You smile and nod again, and Sirius interjects: “No worries mate, already planned your stag party.” You join with the others in laughing, and your hand drifts to rest on your belly.
There’s romance to an elopement, a dark glamour to a wedding set on the backdrop of war. In your borrowed dress, with your bulge just beginning to show, you feel like a heroine from a novel. You almost tell James while you’re waiting in the tiny Muggle chapel but you decide against it; characters in novels can meet terrible ends. You’re sure your wedding party is the strangest group of people the vicar has ever seen—many of the guests showed up in dress robes, and Hagrid always defies explanation—but it’s fitting somehow, that your oddity should be noticed on your wedding day. It’s much better to be wondered at than hated. You allow yourself a moment of self-pity for the ignored invitation to Petunia, but really that was to be expected; you’re not really sure you want to imagine how your sister handled the news of an elopement and an unplanned pregnancy, never mind that wizards were involved.
Dedalus Diggle takes the pictures and he bounces around so much that his top hat continuously falls off his head. Your guests eat off of napkins that say Happy New Years 1980! because they’re all you could find last minute, and you borrow Sirius’s motorbike to ride off into the sunset, a plethora of old No. 2 pewter cauldrons tied to the back. You spend your wedding night at a small inn in Godric’s Hollow, and the next day you roll up your sleeves and tear down musty curtains in the dusty house which you are to make your home. You take turns trimming the dead hedges with your wands, while the other looks furtively up and down the street for stray Muggles.
It’s nice, having a home again, even though all you’ve really sorted out at this point is the master bedroom (the nursery sits in disarray down the hall, painted a noncommittal shade of yellow.) James shoots a sideways grin at you and asks innocently if you want to break in the bed. Laughing, you race him up the stairs.
You kind of like being around Muggles again. Mrs. Next-Door brings coffee cake over the second day you’re there, and though you have to act quick stop the self-scrubbing pots, you enjoy an afternoon tea full of meaningless small talk and no mention of the war. She practically coos over your growing belly and clucks when you mention you’re too young. “Already ‘ad one when I was your age, and another bun in the oven!” James moves furtively from room to room as if he’s afraid he’ll be spotted, and you laugh at him once she leaves. “Calm down, she’s just a Muggle!” You meet Bathilda Bagshot a few days later, and it’s James’s turn to laugh at you when you trip over yourself trying to impress the aged historian. She sends you home with homemade butterbeer and makes you promise to visit her again.
You hate being left home from the fight. It’s a different sort of fear, watching people you love go off to battle and not being able to do anything yourself. You watch them disapparate, close the curtains, pace back and forth in front the back door. You rub your bump—it’s become a habit now—and all of a sudden you’re talking up a storm. “I don’t know what to do, baby. I’m a fighter and this is frustrating. I’m not supposed to be sitting here… it isn’t fair! I should be able to do anything they can do. Isn’t that the great equalizer of magic? Women can be just as good as men?” You soften a little, rub a thumb under the waistband of your pants, just recently stretched by magic. “Of course I don’t blame you, baby. I’m glad you’re coming, even if you were a little unexpected…” Your stomach moves of its own accord under your fingertips and you gasp, ready to shout for James, but he isn’t there. “Are you a fighter too, baby? Is that what you’re telling me?” There’s another small kick and you smile sadly. “I really hope you don’t have to be.”
You turn twenty on a Wednesday. You’re sick in the morning, and a hard frost keeps you in the rest of the day, so all in all it ends up being rather anticlimactic. It seems it should be a bigger deal somehow. Twenty is old. At twenty you could be a real person. But twenty feels like nineteen, and you wonder when you will truly cross that threshold you seem to be perpetually straddling. You don’t belong anywhere, it seems, except maybe this little cottage. James sidles up to you as you watch snow fall outside the kitchen window, wraps his arms around you from behind. Except maybe with him.
You’re twenty, and soon you’ll have a baby in the middle of a war. Soon you’ll count his age instead of your own, the passage of time marked more preciously—months instead of years, each hour of the day delineated to helping him grow.
You’re twenty and you’re grown. You’re twenty and you’re scared out of your mind. You’re twenty, and you’re a fighter, and becoming a mother won’t change that. You will soldier on.