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Lily goes through two breakups on a Tuesday morning when she’s eighteen.
One is arguably not a true breakup—relationships have to be real, after all, to break—but that does nothing to offer bleak comfort to her in the fourth floor classroom where she seeks shelter the second lessons let out.
The other isn’t a breakup either, she supposes, since it wasn’t romantic. And it was a letter. Letters can be burned and ripped, even if the words remain like wet ink smeared over unwary fingers.
She’s still got it in her hands.
Lily exhales and her eyes travel over the classroom. It was probably used for Transfiguration, many years ago, because she can still see some faded marks on the chalk board that look like familiar spells. She traces it, mentally murmurs the incantation.
Nothing happens.
She’s not holding her wand, so it’s not a surprise even though she’s an ace at nonverbal magic, but—
Lily wants to laugh, hoarse and choked. She doesn’t feel like magic right now, even if that’s what she’s supposed to be.
In her hands, the paper crinkles. Something sears through her and she crumples it between her fists, then tosses it onto the desk where she’s perched.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Lily starts when she hears the voice cutting through the quiet, then her eyes shut. “Go away.” Her voice is more broken than she wishes. She squeezes her eyes tighter. Fuck.
“Lily—“
“Go away, James.”
“Are you okay?”
Lily wrenches her eyes open and light floods her vision. She’s dizzy. “Fine,” she says. “I’m just fine.”
He’s standing by the door. “You don’t look fine. And—well, people who are fine don’t usually hide in abandoned classrooms.”
“Normal people don’t track down their friends with magic maps either,” Lily counters, prickly and sharp.
James doesn’t repent for his tactics. “Are you okay?” he says again and steps towards her. The step does it, because it shows he must know somewhere, that he’s heard or— “I—“
“What the fuck do you know about this?” she says, stinging. It’s instinct from a time when they were something else, and it almost gives her a burst of pleasure to see him freeze.
He’s quiet and something discomfited crosses his face. “I don’t…”
“You don’t,” Lily says and suddenly she wants to cry. Her throat is thick, hurting, cheeks too bright. She can’t bear to look at him at the same time that she can’t possibly look away. The curse of someone she’s known for so long, who’s watched her grow. It’s far too difficult to lie to him.
James exhales and his shoulders drop. “No,” he says. “But I’d like to listen, if you want.”
She watches him carefully, eyes still blurry, with no intention to actually tell him anything. His head is tilted, hair too long at the nape of his neck and curling near the front. His specs are on straight for once. Red and gold tie tucked into one trouser pocket, the ends perilously close to trailing on the floor. He looks like such a boy, like one she’s called a foe and then a good friend and—
“I don’t think I know how to love,” she says. Her voice is oddly even. “Not right, at least.”
James almost flinches, then he stares at her. “That’s—“
“You don’t get to tell me I’m wrong,” she says. “If you want to listen, you…you have to just listen.”
He wrestles with his thoughts for a second, then his chin dips. “Okay,” he says and lets out a breath. There’s a crease in his brow, and he hefts the rucksack on his elbow higher. “Is this about McLaggen?”
She wants to snort. “Not really.” She tugs the hem of her skirt straight. “You can say I told you so.”
James opens his mouth, then stops. “I don’t—“
“You want to.”
“Oh, fine, I do,” he says and for a second he almost looks like he’s going to grin, but it fades into something serious. He drops his rucksack on the floor and settles onto the top of another desk, sighing. He rubs at the back of his neck. “I didn’t think—he wasn’t right for you.”
“He definitely wasn’t,” Lily says. “He was just a few-dates-boy.”
James snorts, then looks as if he didn’t mean to let the noise out. “What’s that?”
“Doe coined it,” she says and almost smiles too. The sunlight slants through the dusty windows, shining into the quiet classroom. It’s January, but the light is still bright, even though she can feel the cold pressing on the windowpanes. “For Tommy Randall. I don’t want few-dates-boys or—“ She clamps her mouth shut, fear burning through her instinctively—
The letter crumpled beside her thigh. I heard from Marcia what you did this summer.
James doesn’t look away from her there. “Or?” he says.
Lily swallows. Her throat is tight. “Nothing.”
James’s brow creases again, but then his eyes fall to the letter next to her. “Someone write you?”
Here she can offer a bit of honesty. "My sister.”
“Oh,” James exhales and it’s knowing and she hates it.
When did James Potter become someone who knows her, someone who finds her in classrooms, someone she might tell—
Lily wants to scream. Cry. Fall into his arms. “I’m not that upset about Ian,” she says. It’s done with purpose, because she can handle her shitty ex-boyfriend far easier than—
But that’s folly, and a lie, because her eyes settle back on James and she remembers. Her teeth hit her lip and she bites down until the pain breaks through. Pain is nothing but temporary, after all.
“I’m glad,” James says and his lips curve slightly, though his eyes remain cautious. “I don’t want you to be sad.”
She’s not upset about Ian because she loves James, of course.
I love you, she thinks and it’s the first time. It’s the first time, hours on the heels of a breakup. She looks at him in a sunlit classroom and something breaks inside her.
It’s panic and it’s sharp glass that cuts through arteries and bone because she can’t love him. Can she?
You’re going to hell, Lily.
She’d laugh, because surely James is hell too. He’s hell and he’s—
Oh, what would her sister prefer—the girl in Diagon Alley with the braids and the smile, or the wizard boy with magical firecrackers in his pockets and a death grip around her heart?
Lily releases her lip. It’s tender and raw.
You’re going to hell, Lily.
Her first kiss is given freely, softly, under a rusty swing set at age seven to Jenny Greene. Her second kiss is in a booth at the Three Broomsticks on arguably the most awkward date of her thirteen year old life, sitting across from Benjy Fenwick.
At fourteen, when Dorcas comes back to the dorm crying, mascara streaked across her cheeks, chest shaking and rattling because he didn’t want me—
Lily decides to stop kissing people.
She breaks it for Malcolm Davies in fifth year. Regrets chokes her until she cries too.
The curse of teenage girls, to give love until they bleed.
Lily likes lines. Right or wrong. Left or right. Be one thing. Be a Muggle or a witch. Be a friend or a sister. Be everything you want, Lily, her mother whispered into her hair years ago (she’s forgotten when, though the memory clings to her skin like dryer lint), perfume-soft roses around them. She squeezed little Lily’s hand three times, a silent love. A wish, a hope, for a life not yet unfurled.
Be everything you should, she heard.
She kisses Jenny before she’s yet learned right and wrong. Before her sister has sneered at a couple holding hands on the street. Unnatural, she hisses to Lily, grabbing her hand and tugging her to cross to the other side of the road. Against God’s plan.
But what is God’s plan? she wonders over the years. If his plan is love as her mother always says, then how can this feeling, this line that’s not a line at all, that’s a road, a bridge, a house she keeps wondering through riffling through cabinets and searching for doorways, this waterfall of JennyBenjyMalcolmClotildeJames, be anything but divine?
The summer before seventh year, Lily wants to live.
She’s seventeen and her hair is long, she’s been told she’s pretty, and she’s magic. She’s magic, and the world is finite, and she wants to live.
A flower shop at Diagon Alley presents something for that.
The girl’s name is Clotilde and she shapes her words like they’re dramatic, perfect secrets. A purse, a puff of air, shaping around the letter, a throaty whisper. It’s the first thing she notices about her, the first thing that sticks in her head like glue and refuses to unstick. Later, Clotilde will tell her she hates the way she talks. I sound like Maman, she confides. Her voice turns sad, her eyes far away. I used to…it was like she was here, but…people don’t like people who don’t talk like them.
In her eyes is the feeling of longing for a home. Lily gets it strangely, a longing for a place that you’ve never lived in. A person you’ve never been.
That first day, wearing a tank top and jean shorts, Lily sees the girl with blonde braids and a smile so wide it almost touches each side of her face and she falls into something.
It’s not love, she’ll realize later, but it’s something.
It’s something she pretends isn’t anything as she Apparates from Cokeworth to London almost every day, as she spends her meager pocket money on bouquets of yellow daisies so she can talk to Clotilde behind the counter, as she smiles and laughs and becomes someone under the summer sun.
She doesn’t think about it as an it until she’s back at home one Sunday and she wanders into church with her parents. It’s wandering, because she’s a witch, and Muggle faith and ritual feel like something slightly removed from her experience, but all of that doesn’t change what she is.
She’s Lily Evans, and for the years before she was a witch, she was a girl raised by two working parents and a prideful sister. Whispers have floated into her mind, and even once she thought they’d gone, they must’ve left some mark.
“Love is between a man and a woman,” the preacher intones at the front of the small church. He’s a kindly man that she’s known since she was old enough to walk. “Anything else…is an abomination.”
Beside her, Petunia sniffs. “Of course,” she mutters beneath her breath. Vernon is on her other side, the shiny new boyfriend, and he makes a face.
Lily can’t breathe, hemmed in on either side by family and by strangers.
She chokes on air, on communion wine, on holy whispers.
She chokes and no one notices.
She goes home. At the end of the street is a grey stone house identical to hers. Jenny Greene lives inside, with her brother and her grandparents.
Like slow, syrupy fate colliding, she runs into her at the supermarket the next morning.
Jenny isn’t seven anymore, and neither is Lily, and they both freeze at opposite ends of the aisle. Jenny’s dark blonde hair is curled from the July heat, and her eyes are lined with mascara.
“Hi,” Lily says. She’s gripping the handle of her shopping basket. Caution and hope rise inside her. Here’s someone that’s not part of the dangerous, crumbling world she was shoved into. Here’s someone who knew her before she knew what she wanted, what she wasn’t supposed to want, what she could want—
Jenny’s face shutters and she shoves past Lily. “Fucking lesbian,” she mutters. “Don’t talk to me.”
The cold air of the supermarket washes over her skin, raising goosebumps. Lily doesn’t move.
She was sent to buy tomatoes and flour.
Twenty seconds pass, then Lily drops the basket to the floor with a clatter and turns on her heel.
(But she’s also someone who looks like Lily Evans, someone who’s magic, and she won’t let the world stop her from feeling.)
She goes back to Diagon Alley and kisses Clotilde.
Their lips collide over the counter, above freshly cut flowers and amidst perfumed summer air. It’s warm. She’s burning up.
She hasn’t kissed a girl since Jenny, since before she knew what kissing was. Fucking lesbian.
Clotilde’s eyes are closed when Lily pulls away, but then that same wide smile spreads across her face. She opens her eyes. “Well,” she says and laughs. “Tres bonne.”
Lily feels half like she’s going to be ill, half like she can fly. Like she’s done something that’s existed in her mind, in corners and fantasies, something that was never real. But it’s real now. Her lips have touched another's, and they were just lips, but behind it was a girl and— She laughs too, helpless.
“Yeah,” Lily says and her voice is breathless. The summer sun gives her a headache. She’s never felt more human. Not a witch, not a Muggle.
“Why can’t we read it?” Mary grumbles. She’s got her legs kicked up on the armrest of the couch while Love of My Life plays tinnily over the wireless. Freddie Mercury's voice is a distant hum. “It’s a book.”
“There are books in the Restricted Section that bite,” Remus points out. It’s a whole group of them in the Common Room, the spring of fifth year. She avoids looking at Potter, because they’re revising for exams and she doesn’t want to yell tonight. He confuses her just as much as he aggravates her these days, and she’s just…not in the mood for him. Not in the mood for thinking.
“This isn’t even in the Restricted Section,” Doe counters.
“Exactly!” Mary crows, like it’s evidence.
“What are we talking about?” Peter asks, blinking at them all.
“Some stuffy book Macdonald’s obsessed with,” Sirius says and rolls his eyes. “She said the word theory and I lost interest.”
Mary scowls. “McGonagall still has a copy, but she won’t let me look at it,” she complains and flops back into the cushions. “Binns assigned me a whole essay on early magical history, and this is that, isn’t it?”
“Enchantements Obscure isn’t exactly history,” Potter says and Lily starts.
She forgets her intention to ignore him and narrows her eyes. “How do you know about this?” she says. It’s sharp.
Potter gives her one of those looks that make her skin shiver, makes her want to leave the room because she can’t stand it, and says, “I’ve read it. Mum and Dad had a copy at home. Beaumont is pretty well-known magical reading.”
Mary sits upright with eagerness. “Can I—“
“Had,” Potter corrects and a bitter, disgusted expression crosses his face. “Ministry rounded up most copies a few years ago. Don’t like anyone insinuating that precious magical life isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.”
This is a side of James Potter she doesn’t know how to deal with. One that takes the earlier look and shoves it towards a feeling of wonder, of interest, of—
Mary slumps and groans. “Oh, come on,” she says. “It’s just a bloody book.”
Bloody book or not, her friend doesn’t forget about it as the weeks pass—it used to be in the Restricted Section, but was removed in 1957 for ‘inciting theories’, according to a flat-mouthed Pince when Mary goes enquiring shortly before the O.W.Ls debacle.
Things stop after. They stop, because Mary’s in the hospital and Mulciber is still sneering and smirking in the hallways, and her friend is so still and Severus won’t stop trying to talk to her until she wants to claw her own skin to blood and bone—
Lily hates magic, hates purebloods, hates the world.
She doesn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Mary at the end of the year, though letters slowly come in throughout June and July as she recovers. In mid-July, a letter in different handwriting arrives.
Lily thinks about tearing it up.
She knows who it is, because how can she not recognize his handwriting after existing together for five years?
She thinks about burning it.
He’ll say he’s sorry and she—
Severus lurks around Cokeworth that summer and she slams every door in his face. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—
Potter’s probably writing the exact same words. And how can she accept them from him, and not from Sev? How can she equate their sins, how can she admit that James’s sin is always, always tangled with her reaction to him—
She opens the letter. It’s not an apology.
Dad copied down a few pages he found particularly interesting before the Ministry took the book. I don’t have Mary’s address, but would you see about getting this to her? I know it’s too late for the assignment, but…well, it’s interesting.
I hope she’s okay.
-J
She stares at the J, then immediately copies the sheafs of parchment Potter attached and forwards the originals to Mary.
I hope she’s okay. Good God, isn’t that James Potter’s motif? He wants everyone to be okay, even if he has to make them that way. He wants her to like him and the world to be right and—she doesn’t know if he’ll get either of those things.
Then she reads.
The lines from Enchantements Obscure that Fleamont Potter found interesting enough to copy are quick and to the point: Magic is temporary, Edward Beaumont wrote over three centuries ago. Our world is temporary. Magic will burn us all out like a dying star.
Lily thinks about that more than she should as summer crawls past, as she contemplates hatred and bitterness and scars that don’t heal. Mudblood. I’m sorry. Magic in her veins, dying stars, whether mouths and hearts are the same no matter who they belong to.
Whether they’re all burning out anyway.
She tries to tell Mary in the fall of sixth year. It won’t come out.
It builds behind her lips until it hurts, as if the secret has claws that are digging into the tender flesh with every passing hour.
“What did you want to tell me?” Mary asks, giving Lily a small smile as they sit on opposite beds in the dormitory. Her friend is smiling more these days, and it cracks something open in Lily. Like a silent guard, she and Doe have kept Mulciber from being anywhere near Mary so far. If she has to keep her eyes open for the rest of her life, she’ll do it to keep that tiny bit of happiness on Mary Macdonald’s face.
What is her secret, compared to that? It’s not even anything that big.
I kissed a girl, Lily imagines saying and Mary replies: I almost died.
“Nothing,” she says and forces her own smile. “Hand me that Witch Weekly, will you?”
The lightness on her friend’s shoulders is worth it. The weight of her own secrets, heavy and cloying until they choke, even in their diminutiveness, is worth it for that alone.
“What are you upset about, then?” James asks. He’s swinging his legs from where he’s sitting on the desk. The tie gives up its hold on his pocket and falls to the floor, a puddle of gleaming red and gold.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lily mutters. Her cheeks feel hot. “None of it matters.”
“Of course it matters,” he says and his voice is sharp for the first time. “Don’t say that, Evans. We have to make it matter, or—“ he falters for a second, brow creasing painfully. “It has to matter.”
Lily watches him for a second. “How do you do that?” she says eventually. It’s softly wondering.
James makes a confused face. “What?”
She clears her throat. It’s parched. “Just—care.”
James almost looks offended. “Of course I care,” he says. “Doesn’t everyone?”
She wants to laugh. “Not like you.”
“You care,” James says.
She makes a face.
“No, you do,” he insists and shifts, as if he’s going to get up. He’s always moving, erratic energy contained by too tall limbs, wild hair, and a face…well, she’s always liked his face. “You care, Evans.”
Evans.
She doesn’t know how to tell him that her name on his lips makes her cheeks flush, her heart beat too fast. He can probably tell. She wants to tell him that it makes her feel safe, as if the syllables of her being are kept preciously in his mouth.
“I do,” she allows after a second. A sigh. “Maybe too much.”
“No such thing,” James says immediately. “You don’t care too much, it—other people are pricks, and they don’t care enough. If anything, it just shows that you’re better than them.”
“Sounds like typical Potter self-confidence,” she murmurs. He laughs.
Potter.
That’s who they are. Evans. Potter.
She knows who she is when she’s with him, because she’s Evans. She’s prideful and clever and she’s never able to sink into the sandstorm of her thoughts because they’re always talking too quick, too angry, too sharp for there to be time.
It’s quiet in the classroom, winter sunlight pouring in, heartbreak on her mind, and there’s time now.
She wonders, with a pulse of fear and anticipation, what will happen. When there’s time, when they can look long enough for emotion to fill the cracks in the silence.
“What did your sister say?” James asks after a moment has passed.
Lily wants to sigh. She presses her fingertips to her brow, a divot formed by muscle memory. Her voice comes out honest, bleak. “She says I’m going to hell.” Almost amused.
She doesn’t have to look at James to know he’s frowning. “What’s that?”
Oh, he’s so magical, this boy. She wants to laugh or hug him—tell him how unbearably fond of him she is, that the world falls into such simple shades through his spectacled eyes.
“A Muggle thing best not talked about,” Lily says. She looks down at the floor. “I…Petunia’s friend saw me kissing a girl this past summer, and she thinks its a sin. Unforgivable.”
The words are quiet and quick, because there’s still fear, even if its him and he’s so good he couldn’t possibly— Lily chances a glance up, sees his eyes settled on here. The furrow in his brow, the clench in his jaw.
“The only unforgivable thing,” he says, nettled and stingingly furious beneath the steadiness of his gaze, “is that she could think something so stupid.”
Her eyes burn. Her hands shake a little, threaded together in her lap. Of course. Of course James Potter wouldn’t vilify her for something so integral to her existence, of course he’d understand. Of course he’d still think she’s the same, think she’s…normal.
But she needs to ask. She needs his voice. “Do you think that?” Lily asks. “That it’s…normal? To kiss girls?”
He gives it to her. “Kissing is the most normal thing in the world,” James says bluntly. “We couldn’t go on without it. Who gives a shit whether the person you’re kissing has different bits than you, if you want to be kissing them?”
Lily doesn’t know what possesses her to say the next thing. “I want you to kiss me.”
Of all the things she’s said, none have managed to shock him. Revealing her darkest secret hasn’t managed to shock him, but this does. He freezes and his eyes go wide and he stares. “You—“ His voice is strange. His hand jumps to his hair and grips.
Lily’s cheeks flame. “Sorry,” she says. “I just…I do.”
James’s legs shift, jittery. His eyes dart over her, something strangely deep growing in his face. “You do?” It’s as breathless as she’s ever heard him. Behind it…hope.
Something fragile stings in her chest.
“You liked me,” Lily says. She wonders if she should’ve done present tense, but—
James’s shoulders don’t tighten. They slump, almost as if with relief. “Yeah,” he says and it’s just as soft. “I do.”
Do you love me better, she thinks, if I am myself or if I am the person you wanted all those years?
She’ll never tell him this—not when they grow old and white-haired, when wrinkles form in the crease of her mouth from smiling, when his eyesight has grown poorer—never, never. Eventually, she’ll realize that he knows.
Now, in the classroom where they sit, Lily looks at the wall and thinks of lost loves. If she falls in love with the idea of a person—the idea of Clotilde, the girl with whom she could be someone reckless and capable of love at all—just as much as James Potter fell in love with the idea of Lily Evans.
It’s a kinship they share, for a moment. She’s in love with the idea of being in love, of loving girls or boys or anyone, but not trusting the love in return.
“You’re thinking too hard,” James says. “Tell me.”
“What if you don’t like the thoughts?”
“Then I’ll say it,” he says simply, looks over at her. Her confession hangs in the air, and she looks at his mouth for the millionth time. They both love to love other people. “But I don’t think I will. I love your thoughts, even the complicated ones.”
Love me, she wants to say. Love me back, just like I loved all those strangers and daydreams, just like you loved the Lily Evans in your head. Love me, love me, love me, please.
The end of the summer before seventh year drowns in decaying roses and days getting ever shorter.
Clotilde doesn’t say goodbye.
Lily wallows in her room for days after. She vows never to go back to Diagon Alley, even though she’ll have to get her books before the end of August. She cries a little. She wonders if she loved the girl, or just the feeling.
She feels sick, and hot and—
Clotilde was a commitment. A rebellion. A decision. She knew she was someone with her. Maybe that someone wasn’t Lily Evans, but she was someone.
I hate myself, she thinks in the early morning. The sun is staining the world outside her window blush and pale purple, and she’s staring at herself in the mirror. Flushed cheeks, bloodshot eyes. A mascara pen dangling from her shaking fingers. She inhales, and lifts her hand to slowly wipe at the black stain near her eyes.
Her fingers come away black.
The streak goes from her eye to her cheek, dark as pitch.
Another tear slips down her cheek, and it burns. It isn’t for the girl.
I hate this. It’s scathing, furious. I hate this, I want it over, I want someone to just love me without all this other shit—
A knock on the door. “Lily? Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she says and her hand knocks against the mascara tube. It rolls across her desk and she presses her fingers to her cheek until the pain stings. She’s panting, inhaling so her voice doesn’t crack, though it sounds raspy even to her ears. “I am.”
Her mother is quiet, then there’s footsteps fading. “There’s breakfast downstairs, love. If you want.”
Lily stares at the mirror. The black line. The red in her welling eyes.
Do I hate myself, or do I just fear that others do?
Her hands shake as she wipes at the makeup with a cloth, but that doesn’t work and she makes a sobbing noise, throwing it down. A dash of her wand vanishes the mascara, and she tips her head back. Inhales deeply as she stares at the faded yellow ceiling.
Her mum is making coffee in the blue tiled kitchen, dressing gown tied around her waist. She smiles over at her, but doesn’t comment, so Lily assumes it doesn’t look like she was crying. “You’re up early,” her mum notes.
Lily shrugs, sitting down at the table. Her head aches and she wants to drop it into her hands. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Something flashes across her mum’s face and she pulls out the seat across from her. Her hands wrap around her steaming coffee mug. “You’re upset about that girl, aren’t you?” she says gently.
Lily’s entire body stills. Her heart lurches and she tastes something like hope. She can weep now, she can fall forward into her mum’s terrycloth arms and let her tears soak through until she could drown her sorrow—
“Your friend? The one you’ve been spending time with?”
Lily’s fingers knock together, fall flat on the table. “Yeah,” she says after a second. It’s hollow. “She…left to go back to school.”
Her mum’s face is sympathetic. “That’s the way of it, isn’t it?” she sighs. “You’ve got friends at your school, though, don’t you? You’ll be fine.”
Lily’s smile is odd and unwieldy. Stitched together for another mouth, another person. “Yes, I will be,” she says. She stands, and the chair makes a screeching noise on the linoleum floors. “Do you want eggs?”
“Yes, please,” her mum says.
Lily’s fingers feel numb around the handle of the frying pan as she moves it to the stovetop, as she cracks the eggs and hears them sizzle. She—
She turns. Her mum is still sitting at the kitchen table.
Suddenly, she sees the wrinkles forming at her mum’s hairline. The grey and white creeping at her temples. Hands that aren’t as soft as she remembers squeezing hers three times when she was a small child. Three times for a wish.
“What do you think of love?” Lily asks into the kitchen.
Her mum looks up and her brow raises. “What kind of question is that, Lily?” she asks softly.
Lily shrugs, chest hurting. “I was…thinking.”
“Father Andrews gave a lovely sermon on love a while ago,” her mum says. A pause. “While you were away at school.”
“I didn’t ask what Father Andrews thinks about it,” Lily says. “I asked what you think.”
Her mum looks at her for a second, then her lips tuck to the side. It’s reminiscent of the purse that Petunia does when she’s upset, and Lily wonders if she does it too. If someone who adores her will ever watch—ever adore—her so much that they’ll take notice.
Her mum sighs, then stands as well. She crosses over to Lily and stops near the stove. The eggs are sizzling. “I think love is important,” she says. “What do you think of love, Lily?”
Lily’s quiet. “I don’t know,” she says. Turns back to the stove and pokes blindly at the raw yolk. It breaks, sunshine yellow spilling and flooding the black pan. “I’m too young to know.”
“I don’t believe that,” her mum says and sets her coffee down on the counter with a soft clink. “What is it you want to ask me?”
Lily’s quiet, then she swallows. “Is the world so full of love,” she says after a second, breath trembling a bit, “that we cannot ever just love one thing?” She wants to hear no. She wants to be allowed to love one person with her entire heart, but what if she does and one side of her heart feels just a little bit emptier? Isn’t it better to be in stasis, to be always wondering. Does loving Clotilde or—or the boy I can’t stop thinking about mean that I’m a lie?
Her mum’s eyes go soft. The terrycloth fabric of her dressing gown looks soft, like she could be five again, head buried in her shoulder, when she was certain that she was loved. “Loving one person doesn’t mean that there is less love in the world,” she says and her fingers brush against Lily’s cheek. They’re rough on the tips. “God loves us all, yet so many pour their entire hearts into just one person.”
Her throat is painful. “God doesn’t love me.”
“God is a belief, Lily,” her mum says simply. “Love is real. If I love you, then you are loved.”
The egg is burning.
Tell me.
“I think…” Lily has to stand suddenly, and she exhales when her feet hit the ground. She leans back on the desk, then straightens. “I don’t know. I’m confused.”
Something shifts in James’s face and his voice is different with his next question. Softer. “About the kissing girls thing?”
She wants to laugh. “James, I don’t think you can help there.”
“How do you know?” he says and stands too. He takes a step forward, then another. They’re standing close together now. She could reach out and touch him. “I kiss girls.”
“That’s different,” Lily mutters. Her head aches. “You’re—“ She stops herself, because she doesn’t believe that.
Silence descends on the classroom. Outside, the world of Hogwarts is going on. People are gossiping about her and Ian’s breakup, probably. She’s surprised to find she doesn’t care.
James is clearly thinking something over in his head as the seconds tick past. She can see it wrestling in his face, and his hand goes back to his hair.
She doesn’t prompt him, waiting for him to finish whatever he’s mulling over.
It bursts out suddenly. “Lily, just—“ James sighs, tense. There’s something slightly pained in his brow. “Tell me something, okay?”
“What?” Lily asks. Her teeth tug at her lip again.
“I—quit that,” James says, briefly distracted. He’s staring at her mouth. “You’re going to give yourself a scar.”
Lily stops. She doesn’t know if telling him I already have so many would scare him off. She doesn’t think so. “What were you going to say?”
“You said you wanted me to kiss you,” James says after a second. His voice is uneven, and for the first time she sees the actual threads of unraveling within him. “Did you mean it?”
“Yes,” Lily says immediately. Something stabs and she inhales. “But I—“
“What?”
“I don’t know.” She wants to cry. “It’s like I said, I’m confused. I—my sister says I’m going to hell, and my parents would probably think that too if they knew, and this world is built to hate me and I don’t even know myself, okay? So what’s the point, then? What’s the point in everyone hating me if I don’t even know who I am?”
“I don’t hate you,” James says sharply. “And—fuck that. A few shitty people don’t mean—“
“It’s not a few, James!” Lily cries, glaring. She’s not sure how the mood turned, but it has, and it stings sharply against her skin. “You don’t understand. The world is easy for you—“
“I know it is,” James insists. He steps forward. “I know and I’m sorry—“
“Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“What would you rather I say?”
Lily goes silent. Wrestles with her thoughts. “I—don’t know.”
James stares at her, then something breaks in his face. “Love me and let me go then,” he says. It’s sharp, but not mean. He looks cracked open, honest. She hadn’t even realized he was putting up walls until the second that he took them down. “If that’s what you want. If…if you just need to see where it goes, to figure things out. But—I’ll love you for the rest of my life. I know that, because—fuck, I don’t know what a God or hell is, Evans. I don’t know. I don’t know if smoking means I’m dying or if magic will burn us all out—I don’t even know if who someone wants to fuck means anything.” His voice is getting louder and louder and his eyes are red. His hands clenched into fists and she wants to reach across the space to hold them. Hold them and have her heart break apart that James Potter exists. “But I know…” he’s swallowing and he’s looking at her and his eyes have only ever been the same color in her memory. Color theory. Browns dipping to greens. Warmth. Safe.
“You know what?” Her voice is like a bird, paper thin.
“I know I love you,” he says simply and he sounds exhausted. “And I know I can’t do any of this for you.”
“Oh,” Lily manages to say. The brief anger of earlier has faded. I love you. Her eyes are blurring and she gives in and reaches out to take his hand. The weight is warm and comforting. “No, I don’t suppose you can.”
It’s selfishly unfair that she wishes he could. She wishes she could give him some of the confusion inside of her, because surely he’d know what to do with it. James knows everything, it seems to her. The world spins because of him, and she wonders far too much about why the world goes on at all.
It seems like that to her, but he says he doesn’t know either, and if he doesn’t know…
Lily sniffs and looks up at him. “I hate always looking for something,” she whispers. “Even when I find it…I’m still looking.”
“Isn’t that being a kid?”
Her laugh is a little painful. “I don’t know that we qualify as kids anymore, Potter.”
“I love you,” he says again after a second. “I just. I love you. That’s all I’m capable of.”
If you’re only capable of loving me, and I’m only capable of loving you, she thinks, then what does the world fucking matter?
Her brain rejects that the moment it crosses her mind, though. It matters. The world matters, everything matters. The school, the classes, the people, the wind.
God, her mother whispered to her, holding her tight in her arms that summer, simply means that every blade of grass, every second, matters. Living matters, Lily. But none of it is worth a thing if you don’t love.
“No,” Lily says and the sunlight through the window streams down in a dusty, slanted spiral of light. She’s certain, ferocious almost, staring him down. “James Potter, you’re capable of so much more.” She exhales, uneven, the surge of fierceness gone. “And so am I.”
He’s still watching her, almost thoughtful. “Alright,” he says. “Then where does loving each other fall?”
“Right where it should,” she says and she reaches out, tangles their fingers together. Tugs gently, and he follows willingly until he presses against her, until his face is close enough to make out the flecks of gold in his eyes. She doesn’t let go of his hand, but brings both of theirs up to his chest. Intertwined fingers flat against fabric. “Here.”
James’s eyes soften and he shifts in even closer. “Okay,” he says. A breath. “What now?”
Lily swallows. Something riots in her chest, months of want colliding with doing it. “Now…I kiss you. If you’ll—if you’ll have me.”
James’s eyes trace over her, then his face bursts into a smile, the clouds parting for the sun. “Always,” he says. Gentle, as soft as the fingers he’s brushing across the back of her hand, still clutched at his chest. “I’ve been waiting.”
I know, she thinks, empty and aching.
Patient boy he is, he waits even longer still for her to kiss him.
He waits until she’s closer than close, until they’re in the held-breath space between, sunlight shining down on them. Until her lips almost brush his, then James finally shifts and his hands cup her cheeks, guide her to him.
Lily’s hands come up to cover his, and she doesn’t smile or laugh or cry. His mouth is warm and new, the object of fantasies and adoration.
The feeling in her chest isn’t fireworks or stars. It’s a bird, fluttering its wings, caught on a breeze as it soars into the sky.
When the world began, there was starfire.
When it ends, it will be in the collapse of a star. The negative space, the implosion.
Magic burns through veins like a wick dipped in oil; a finite science for the foolishly hopeful.
“Do you think we’re young, sometimes?” The words are hoarse, spoken through a broken throat. Her hands haven’t stopped shaking since they got back to the flat, and she blinks and the world is smeared red.
It’s red, and then the darkness of the small kitchen in Camden comes back into focus, the gold, dim light shining in from the street outside. It’s at least two in the morning, and things feel quiet.
James was drinking water—his hands aren’t shaking anymore, but they were. She saw it—but he pauses. “We are,” he says. Sets the cup down on the counter.
The clock ticks. It’s summer, but it feels cold outside.
“I know,” Lily says and wants to sob. She sits down in the wooden chair that always creaks instead.
James is quiet, then there’s a long exhale and footsteps. They stop in front of her. Fingers tuck beneath her chin, pulling her gaze up to his, then slip until he’s cradling her cheeks. The cold metal of his wedding ring is a blessed balm on her burning cheeks and Lily breathes unsteadily. Turns into the touch.
They’re always turning into each other these days—when they could be running, shattering apart, they’re turning into palms and arms. That’s why she married him, why she’s terrified, why she’s brave.
“We’re going to be okay,” James says and his thumb strokes. His eyes are shadows behind his specs, and he looks older than nineteen. His hair is still too long, just like it always was in the last months of the school year, but his jaw is dark with stubble and his eyes are dark with memory. He shifts forward a little bit, and the light from the streetlamp hits his face. His eyes aren’t shadows, they’re bright.
“Sit down,” Lily says softly. “Next to me.”
He does and they sit in silence on the two creaky chairs, watching the walls and the time tick on.
I hate war.
Her throat hurts and her eyes burn. The shop in Diagon Alley—the flower shop, with the yellow painted shutters…
The fire. The screams.
The memories of a long ago summer, collapsed to dust.
She worries about the first girl she ever truly kissed. As soon as dawn breaks, she’ll go to Moody and McGonagall, then finally to Dumbledore. She’ll ask, desperate, and James won’t have to ask where she went when she comes home. When she sinks to the floor and cries, and he follows her, arms around her shoulders.
Clotilde hasn’t worked at the tiny flower shop in years, but the tacit confirmation of her survival won’t be enough to stem the breaking in her chest. Maybe it’ll cause it, because the world is ash and smoke, it’s cloying for breath, and she wants to worry. She wants to worry about girls and boys, to worry and wonder. She wants to be young and lost.
It’s okay, James will say into her hair, voice breaking. It’s his mantra, said every day. Willed into being. It’s okay, love.
In the kitchen, before any of that has come to pass, its quiet between them. James has begun to swing his feet slowly, shoes scuffing against the floor.
Maybe they’ve said all the words there are in the world for them to say. Maybe, Lily thinks, this is the end of the script that someone wrote for them. From a sunlit classroom, their hands lying side by side, to the same position in a dingy flat in London while the world breaks around them.
She says his name, just to test it out. “James.”
His feet stop swinging. “Yeah?”
Words not written on a page.
She exhales slowly, watching the lamplight stream into the dark kitchen. “I love you.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I know,” he says and their fingers brush together. Maybe he’s thinking of the past too, and he thinks: I thought that wasn’t what you were looking for.
She was looking for kisses, for girls with sunshine smiles who lived to see wrinkles and white hair, for boys to grow old with.
James shifts, and his hand slips into hers. He squeezes three times.
The streetlamp outside the window shines, sparkles. The light hisses, splinters into fractals across the tiny kitchen. A burning glow, a slow collapse.
A dying star.