Chapter Text
NEVER QUITE AWAKE
ONE: can I try again, try again, try again?
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The last thing she sees is the pucker of concentration in his brow, his previous arrogance gone; as if this moment has some particular importance attached, as if it is now-or-never.
And then—
“Obliviate.”
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i glow pink in the night in my room / i've been blossoming alone over you
and i hear my heart breaking tonight / i hear my heart breaking tonight
do you hear it too?
Pink in the Night, Mitski
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Love is in the air.
Or so says Sirius Black, unimpressed, when he catches them holding hands in the corridor between Transfiguration and Ancient Runes.
“He’s jealous,” Lily whispers in James’s ear, pushing herself up onto her toes to graze her lips against the skin under his ear. He doesn’t flinch away. “That I’m taking up all your time.”
He grins down at her, a sparkling flash of white teeth that yawns from one cheek to the other.
“Then he’d better get used to it.”
The perfect weather of mid-May matches the fluttering warmth making its way through her bloodstream right now. Yellow flowers dot bushy heads of green, and the sky stays blue as ever. A picnic in the sun is more than warranted.
They walk down to the grassy expanse, basket of food and butterbeers in hand.
This is a first date. She has wanted this for weeks, since she glanced at James Potter near the beginning of the new term and thought oh, my.
Yesterday, he made the first move — Evans, if I have a chance, if there’s any chance at all, tell me now — and yesterday, she fell, twirling and stumbling, down the rabbit hole of James Potter. There was no chance of return.
“I think I like you back,” she had replied in a half-whisper, hands tucked between her thighs and the crimson-coloured couch. “You’re quite easy to fancy, James.”
He didn’t kiss her yesterday; not on the mouth, at least. His parting gift had been a slow, soft press of his lips (softer than she’d imagined) on her cheek (tingling, pink). It kept her up for hours, staring at closed curtains with a shy beam, hand pressed to face.
Now, he spreads out the picnic blanket and waits for her to smooth her skirt and sit down. The gentle breeze wafts up and down her bare legs, a kiss of relief on an otherwise too-hot day.
Hardly a stone’s throw away from their shady spot under the willow tree sits a group of girls around her age; Slytherins and Ravenclaws, mostly, though there’s probably a Gryffindor in their midst somewhere. They watch, narrow-eyed, as Gryffindor’s Head Students tuck in for what’s undeniably a date.
One of the girls — Ravenclaw Ruby Yaxley — turns around to meet her gaze. She tucks a strand of glossy brown hair behind her ears and mouths a word, slow and slick and pointed.
Lily flinches. Her hands slip from their spot against her thighs, damp with sudden sweat.
“Ready?” James asks, drawing her attention back to him. His hands are folded in barely-repressed eagerness. He spent the whole morning preparing this lunch, or so Remus had confessed to her when she left the Common Room to find him.
Lily takes a deep breath and musters up a bright smile. Sticks and stones, she tells herself.
“Okay, Potter. Show me what you’ve got.”
They don’t kiss until he walks her back to the Common Room. He looked like he was going to try, but she dodged it by hugging him instead. She tells herself there’s no particular reason why. It just wasn’t the right time.
Instead, she kisses him in the golden (private) glow of the Heads’ Office, something steady and sure — something too bright, too ripe. Something with an expiration date.
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He takes to walking her from class to class. When she asks him why, he evades her question, shouldering her bags and falling into step beside her.
“I’ll take any chance I get to be near you,” he says, lips tugging upward. “And before you say anything, I know you hate to accept defeat, Lil, so don't question how much I like you. I promise that’s the one argument you won’t win.”
She ducks her head to hide her blush.
Sometimes he says things like this — look at how much I like you, what I would do for you, you’re everything, Lily — and the butterflies that usually accompany his presence are replaced with something almost apprehensive. She wonders, weighing the thought like a heavy sack of flour, if he proclaims his extravagant feelings for her so as not to proclaim something else.
Yesterday, she heard him say something similar to Sirius. She makes my head spin, you know? I want to be with her all the time. It’s crazy. She makes me think that I might be, that I might—
How can he feel so much, and so quickly? It’s hardly been a week. Lily still forgets, some mornings, to wait for him in the Common Room.
She once read that a habit takes sixty days to form. In sixty days, she might say it back.
“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” she chides, fingers tapping nervously against each other. She’s not used to being empty-handed around the halls of Hogwarts; maybe she’s imagining all the stares they’re garnering. A few fifth-years jerk their heads away when she catches them looking. Not at all suspicious, she thinks with a roll of her eyes.
Ruby Yaxley’s words — word, singular — swims back into her mind. She knows she hadn't been imagining that.
“I do mean it!” James insists, fixing her with an intense look. She coughs, cheeks reddening. “I mean it, Lily, I—”
“Shit,” she curses, her foot catching on someone’s protruding shoe. She’s sent stumbling forward, arms pinwheeling, into a storm of rampaging footsteps and sharp elbows.
James catches her just in time, one arm looping around her waist to pull her into the warmth of his body. Her jaw hangs open ever so slightly, still unmoored from the shock of the impact.
“Someone did that on purpose,” she whispers.
James goes still. She’s still tucked under his arm. “What?”
Lily blinks rapidly. “Someone tried to trip me. Intentionally. I don’t know who.”
James is quiet for long enough that she begins to doubt herself — Is he going to disagree? Does he doubt her? — until he gently turns her around to face him.
Steady fingers wrench through black curls, agonised.
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking like he’s going through the seven stages of grief right here and now. “Fuck, Lily, I’m so sorry—” He halts, torn between fury and comfort.
He chooses the latter — a testament to his character growth; fifth- or sixth-year James would have gone chasing after whoever had dared do her any harm — and pulls her into a fierce hug, tucking her head under his chin.
“You deserve better than this,” he murmurs, and tears prick at her eyes. Lily buries her face in his chest. He’s warm. Comforting. Safe.
Some days, she questions how much she feels for him, doubting if this isn’t simply a teenage fancy that too will pass — but there are the other times, like now, when she’s bowled over with affection for him; when she is certain that, for better or worse, there will never be another James Potter in her life. No one else could fill the spot in her heart that he’s nestled in. No one else could burrow into the cold, untouched recesses of her lungs and simply will them into warmth.
“You deserve everything, Lily,” he says into her shoulder.
For a moment, she lets herself believe him.
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James doesn’t know when he went from just liking Lily Evans — granted, liking her a lot — to loving her wholly and unquestionably.
He fell in love with her laugh first. The crinkles around her eyes, the almost-shy tilt of her head, the tuck of blood-red hair behind her ear. She doesn’t laugh often — not nearly as much as she should, at least — but when she does, he knows she means it. It’s full-bodied; it stretches from the gentle curve of her toes to the jelly-like quiver of her lips when she bites down a smile.
Every time she laughs with him, he’s sent cartwheeling over the moon.
They sit, fingertips touching, on the parapet of the Astronomy Tower. He last made her laugh six minutes ago; he spends the remaining minutes devising a plan to do it again.
A near-full moon hangs in the ink-coloured sky, swollen and luminescent. It casts its shrewd gaze across their barely-brushing hands, illuminating the dips and cracks in Lily’s palm, the rough callouses on the pads of his fingers.
“What do you want to do?” Lily asks. Her voice wades through the thick blanket of quiet that has enveloped them; she pushes it aside and commands his attention. “After Hogwarts? I realise I don’t actually know.”
James hesitates. After Hogwarts is a subject he’s tried to avoid thus far. It brings up too many questions, too many possibilities, too many what ifs. What if their relationship was never meant to last past school? What if she ends things upon graduating?
Fear has never been much of an issue for James Potter, but this is the one thing he isn’t willing to take for granted.
“I was—” he coughs “—originally thinking of joining the Arrows, you know, as a Junior Chaser. The Quidditch team, I mean.”
Lily smiles brightly; it sparkles in her bright eyes like the stars in the night sky. James blinks, dazed.
“I'm not so out of touch that I don’t know the Arrows, Potter,” she teases. “Everyone knows they’re your favourite team.” It takes a moment to sink in that she knows his favourite Quidditch team. Every time he’s sure he’s reached the limit to his affection for her, she says something like this and he discovers that he was, in fact, very wrong. “But really, James — that’s fantastic!”
He manages a smile. “Ah, thanks. That, erm, brings me to my next point. I... will not be joining the Arrows. I decided after we won the Cup last year that it’s just not the path for me.”
Lily’s smile is wiped immediately. Her eyes go comically wide. “Why not?”
A guilty half-shrug. “I don’t think I ought to. Not now, when the world is like this. That time can be put to better use, you know? Fighting, protecting, serving — all of that.”
The smile she offers him then — tender, proud, almost awed — might just beat the House Cup in becoming his favourite prize to win.
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Evangeline Ortega, Lily’s roommate, takes Divination at N.E.W.T.-level.
Divination has always eluded Lily’s understanding. Something about the imprecision and the haziness of the art keeps her at arm’s length — she prefers to look from afar, not touch. She dropped the subject after third year, leaving behind the murky crystal balls and vague prophecies for exact spell-movements and precise inflections. After all, there’s only so many times one can have their violent and bloody future predicted in class. It doesn’t matter that Lily explained to Professor Lamarie a dozen times that, as a muggleborn, none of this is news to her.
But Evangeline is a Divination enthusiast for all the same reasons Lily isn’t.
“It’s about knowing there’s something more out there,” says Evangeline earnestly, unearthing dozens of loose-leaf papers from her rucksack; star charts and undecipherable scribbles and ominous codes. “That your destiny is told in the stars and in your soul, but at the same time, is yours to shape as you wish. It gives you this feeling of being part of something bigger than just yourself… at least, that’s how it feels for me.”
Lily watches with mild interest as Evangeline continues to pull out more Divination-related items; a wide ceramic mug, dried tea leaves, and inked parchment.
“Anyway, I don’t need you to believe in Divination to help me with this assignment,” she continues, “as long as you enter with an open mind.”
Lily quirks a smile. “I can do that. I promised I would. Open mind, here I come.”
“That’s the spirit,” Evangeline says warmly. “I’ve got your birth chart here, accurate to the minute — would you mind if I took a minute or two to organise the leaves?”
Lily waves her off and settles back onto her four-poster, pulling the crimson blanket up and around her shoulders.
The details of Evangeline’s Divination project are still unclear to her. All Lily knows is that her future will be told... or something of that sort. Idly, she wonders if it holds James in it. Their relationship is still green, still young, but James Potter is the sort of bloke one would want to keep around. Good men aren’t easy to come across.
Still; the lingering feeling of unease that has accompanied her time with James thus far hasn’t quite faded yet. The threat of an expiration date haunts their every kiss.
“Right, I'm ready,” Evangeline says, gesturing for Lily to join her on her bed.
Lily offers Evangeline her hand, palm facing upward. It garners a look of confusion that quickly morphs into amusement.
“Merlin, Lily.” She snorts. “This isn’t palmistry! It’s tasseomancy. I can’t read palms for the bloody life of me.”
Lily retracts her palm. “Er. What?”
She’s fixed with another pitying look. “You really know nothing about Divination, do you?”
“Oi, I never claimed I did,” she says hotly. “I took the class for one year and passed with an Acceptable.”
Evangeline shakes her head again. “Oh, Lily.”
“If you’d rather I go, I’ll be happy to—”
“No need,” comes the hasty amendment and a sheepish smile. “I’ll get on with it.” Then, another rearrangement of tea leaves. “I just need you to...”
The next few minutes pass with Lily enacting each of Evangeline’s bizarre instructions. She swirls the mug left, then right, then anticlockwise with growing weariness until she’s finally allowed to stop. Sure, she believes there may be some truth in Divination… but this seems like an awful amount of work for just one reading.
“I’ll start at the top of your mug.” Evangeline peers down into the mug — which now looks to be covered in brown muck — and nods in satisfaction. “The dragon signals that change is imminent. You should expect a lot of internal turmoil and stark differences in your near future. I’d chalk that up to the transition from Hogwarts to the outside world.”
Lily nods.
“There are also, um, a lot of stark forks in the paths the leaves make. They signify big decisions. Important ones.” A quick glance upward at Lily. “The life-changing sort.”
This can be explained easily. She is planning on joining the Resistance. Most people would consider that a life-changing decision.
Evangeline’s expression, previously neutral, has now creased with concern. She’s silent for so long that Lily begins to worry.
“What is it, did you see my early death?” she half-jokes.
She receives no reply. The panic starts to set in. Then—
“No, no, thankfully. But there are...” Evangeline hesitates, “some less-than-optimal readings here. I can skip them, if you’d like.”
Curiosity killed the cat. It might kill Lily, too, because she can never bloody leave well enough alone.
“No, there’s no need,” she rushes to say. “I want to know.”
Evangeline makes a face but continues. “The twisted lines mean your life won’t be easy. Every stretch will be a battle, and there’s no… there isn’t any guarantee you'll win them all.” She rushes to fill the uncomfortable silence that follows with, “Let me look at something about your relationships with others, maybe…?” A quiet curse. “Ah. Shit.”
Evangeline tries again — “Are you absolutely sure you want me to continue?”
“Yes, I am.” No, she’s not.
“This shape, if I am interpreting it correctly, could mean that a conflict that shouldn’t have happened will lead to… an end of some sorts.”
A shared grimace; in Lily’s stomach, the faint ache throbs worse, more painfully.
“An end, you say?” she asks hoarsely.
Of course, the end of a relationship could apply to any number of things. Her family; her schoolmates. Hell, even her professors. But her suspicions — that she and James are doomed to crash and burn — are all but confirmed.
Evangeline spares her an agonised look. “You said it yourself: Divination is notoriously unreliable. I once predicted Professor Lamarie would have a gruesome pus-filled injury that never happened. Nothing is fated, not in the set-in-stone, unchangeable way.”
She manages a weak laugh. “Have you got any more depressing predictions to make for me?”
Evangeline sighs. “I think we can stop here.”
The image of James’s blazing smile appears behind her eyelids, familiar and bright and incorporeal. The longer she thinks about it, the more it fades. They don’t have much time — or so say the tea leaves, at least.
“I have to — to go,” Lily says, standing up abruptly. The blankets bunch around her feet, a crimson pool that follows when she moves. “I have rounds tonight.” With James.
Her friend whispers, “Okay. I’m sorry.”
She hasn’t quite caught her breath enough to reply — so she leaves without another word.
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Sirius Black catches her by the elbow — with a surprisingly gentle grip, despite his usual apathy toward her — to steer her to an armchair.
She’s drunk past her wits end, drowning in firewhisky and butterbeer. The warm glow of the Gryffindor Common Room is too bright, too glaring; the endless shimmying to the slamming beats of the music has been paused in favour of asking everyone around her if they know where the toilet is. She left her scarf in there, she tells them. Never mind that it’s mid-May and she doesn’t even own a bloody scarf.
Lily’s hammered enough that she doesn’t even remember yesterday’s ominous prophecy… though, it’s more of a causation than a correlation.
“Christ, Evans, you’re a fucking idiot, you know that?” Sirius says, all chiselled cheekbones and haughty raise of the brows. He drops her, rather unceremoniously, into the plush crimson chair. “But Prongs would have my hide if I didn’t make sure you don’t die of alcohol poisoning.” He sighs, as if her death would be but a minor inconvenience.
“You’re a—” she hiccups “—a prick, Black. Tell me where your boy is.”
He smirks at her. “Not my boy anymore, is he?”
She scowls at him. For some reason, this touches a nerve; however, in her inebriated state, she isn’t nearly aware enough to identify the reason why.
“Just tell me where he is.”
Sirius sighs. “He’s bringing provisions from Hogsmeade. More firewhisky. Butterbeer. Firecrackers. You know the drill.”
Post-exam parties are notoriously rowdy — and this year’s will undoubtedly go down in Hogwarts legend. The Marauders, hoping to go out with a bang, have several elaborate plans in the works. James refused to tell her most of them, but Lily doesn’t mind. She’ll let them do whatever they want. After all, in a few weeks, it won’t ever again matter how many House points they do or don’t lose.
The thought sends a pang of fear into her chest. Lily takes a shuddering, alcohol-thick breath.
“Evans,” Sirius says. “I have a question for you.”
“Ask away, ask away.” She smiles with her eyes closed, the too-bright lights of the room forming colourful shapes in the lids of her eyes. Orange, purple, green stars dance to the beat of the song playing — You Make Loving Fun from Rumours.
“When did you change your mind about James?”
Lily cracks an eye open. Sirius is studying her with a thoughtful expression.
“When did I begin to tolerate him, you mean?” She chews on her lip. Another hiccup escapes her lips. “Ages ago, really. Sixth year, near the end. And — fancying? Recently, I think. A month ago, maybe?”
Sirius nods slowly. “Interesting.”
Lily huffs, any lingering patience evaporating with his ambiguous response. “Do you have anything else to say, or will you go find your stupid mate and bring him back here?”
Sirius levels her with an even look. “Fine, since you’re being a bloody pain.” But before he turns to go, he pauses, lips parting, and says—
“Whatever you do? Don’t break his heart, Evans.”
And then he’s gone.
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and i could hear the thunder / and see the lightning crack
all around the world was waking / i never could go back
because all the walls of dreaming / they were torn wide open
Blinding, Florence + The Machine
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Lily is in the dungeons — by herself. A few years ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about being alone in the Potions classroom.
It shouldn’t be a problem. Sure, the Slytherins have been getting bolder and bolder over the years, but they wouldn’t be so rash as to attack their Head Girl not even a month before school lets out.
It may be dark, yes, and rather musty-smelling, but Potions has always been her reprieve from the rest of the world. From her first year in the magical world, the dungeons — that housed her best friend and best subject — had been the place she could escape to.
The first time she heard the word mudblood — December of her first year — Severus brought her here and they stood in companionable silence over the cauldron brimming with vibrant green Wiggenweld Potion.
Now, it’s far too easy to lose herself in the lilac sheen of bubbling liquid, in the familiar strain of exertion in her forearms, the slippery crush of swollen Sopophorous beans.
Easy enough that a Slytherin can get the better of her.
“If it isn’t Lily Evans herself.” A smooth voice creeps up her spine as if someone poured cold slime down her shirt. Lily freezes over the cauldron, the sleeves of her robes bunched up around her elbows, the sharp dagger in her hand suddenly too heavy, too unwieldy. “Hogwarts’s favourite mudblood.”
She closes her eyes. Evangeline’s voice rings in her ears, low and apologetic: a conflict that shouldn’t have happened.
“Is that all you’ve got?” she says, hand on hip, turning to meet his icy stare. “Calling me a mudblood?”
Rosier opens his mouth to say something, but she doesn’t wait to hear it.
“I’ve heard that one before, believe it or not.” She rolls her shoulders, betraying none of the anxious energy bottled up in her chest. “Find a new catchphrase and then we’ll talk.” She’s not afraid of Atticus Rosier and his false bravado.
Rosier’s scoff echoes through the empty room, bouncing off dusty stone walls and competing with the faint bubbling of her potion.
“It sickens me,” he says, voice thick with insinuation, “that every day, they let you walk around Hogwarts as if you, a dirty-blooded Muggle, belong here, in the hallowed halls of the most magical place in all of Britain.”
All of a sudden, Lily’s tongue feels too heavy for her mouth. Forming words — shaping them on her lips — is harder than she’d ever have guessed.
“And you and Potter.” His lips curve in all the wrong directions; the resulting picture is both unpleasant and unsettling. “I thought there was hope for him yet, coming from a pure line, but I suppose I thought wrong. Sullying his good family name and sleeping with a mudblood all at once — what a colossal disappointment.”
Her breath catches in her throat; the implication of what she and James are to each other — or, rather, what they aren’t — leaves bitter confusion swirling in her stomach. Two weeks, she wants to yell. It’s been hardly two weeks and you’re already spouting this shit?
She’s suddenly too aware of the knife in her hands and the distance between her and the Slytherin leaning against the doorway; the impression of a wand in his pocket. Where is hers?
“Fuck off,” Lily bites out, finally finding her voice. She tightens her grip on the knife, wishing she could fling it and watch it embed itself between his shoulders.
A low laugh; Lily notes it with a sense of detachment, like she’s hovering above her body, or underwater.
“Right, Atticus,” she says with as uncharitable of a smile as she can muster. It ends up being nothing more than a thin stretch of lips over teeth. “If that’s all, you can show yourself out. I have other business to attend to, you see — such as brewing a Draught of Living Death, something I definitively recall you unable to do. I wonder which of us is the pure one here?”
Evangeline’s words ring through her mind yet again. She doesn’t intend to provoke him, really — it merely slips out of her mouth, as instinctive as a mindless curse. Besides, there’s no curbing her pride. It just may be her downfall.
A sneer mars his features.
Rosier is handsome the way a marble statue is beautiful. Cold, pale, lifeless; eerily symmetrical. Some girls like that about him, Lily knows. Even Evangeline had been one of them. He has an air about him of dangerous approachability, of frosty intelligence. There’s not another Slytherin in this castle that would choose to goad her into fury without firing a single spell. Rosier, it seems, is one-of-a-kind.
Of course, any distant attraction Evangeline might have felt for Rosier disappeared the moment he’d opened his mouth. Being a bigoted arsehole tends to leave a bit of a stain on one’s character.
“Do you really think any of this will last?” He fixes her with a pitying smile, saccharine and fake. “Do you really think you will finish your last year at Hogwarts and still have a place in our world? That your friends, your precious boyfriend, will still be by your side when Dumbledore isn’t there to force their hand?”
Lily isn’t so shocked as to stay mute. “I do, yes. Unlike yours, my friends actually do enjoy my company.”
Rosier smiles. “Every connection you think you have to our world — the magical one — can disappear in the blink of an eye. It will disintegrate, and all that will be left is dust.”
She carefully unpeels her fingers from the hilt of the silver dagger. Sets it down. “Is that a threat?” Her heart is beating too fast for her chest.
For the first time since he walked through the dungeon doors, Lily suspects he might cast a curse on her.
Again, he smirks. “If you want it to be.”
“My connection to the wizarding world — which is just as much mine as it is anyone else’s — is not erasable. You would be a fool to think that seven years of friendship and connection will end once we leave school. Even the purest of purebloods wouldn’t. James would never forget. He couldn’t forget me.” She doesn’t know why she keeps talking, about James nonetheless; only that his words have struck a nerve she didn’t know existed.
A little voice whispers: An end. Of sorts. Lily ignores it, but her pulse picks up speed. Carefully, her fingers search the cold tabletop for the warmth and security of her wand. She brushes the neck of a spoon and the spine of a book, but not the wood of her wand.
She thinks of James, of Mary and Remus and Evangeline and Christine. She thinks. She considers. It hurts more than pulling teeth.
Rosier looks at her, the precise cuts and unsettling angles of his face seeming to line up before pulling apart just enough to look in want of something. A soul, maybe.
Lily’s hands close around the ridges of her wand; she grasps it gratefully, attempting to draw it close without his knowledge.
“I can offer a demonstration, if you still don’t believe me.” A cool smile. He’s going to do what he wants regardless of what she says. “You seem so certain your precious boyfriend will never forget you... I wonder how you would react to being wrong.”
Her blood chills, and she has hardly a half-second to remember a lesson on memory charm from Flitwick — “Notoriously finicky, and highly dangerous!” he had squeaked — before Rosier, in one smooth motion, draws his wand.
Lily fumbles hers in a hasty attempt to lift it. Instead, her hand catches on the silver blade of the dagger she’d used to crush Sopophorous beans; the instant pain leaves a trail of blooming red in its wake. Gryffindor red slices across her palm, leaving two pinkening, aching halves behind.
“Don’t touch him,” she spits, fear crawling its way up her oesophagus. An end, an end, a conflict, an end. “Don’t you even—” Words stick in the blocked passageway, half-formed and sinking back down when it becomes clear that she’s incapable of saying anything else.
Rosier laughs, filling the yawning dungeons with the sound of it. “Oh, I don’t plan on it.”
In the moment before he acts, Lily registers, faintly, while her hand stings as if she’d doused it in alcohol, that something isn’t right. He sounds gleeful; like he knows something she doesn’t. Like whatever he’s planning — to find James and make him forget her — is more than she knows. Worse than she knows.
In a flash, his wand is pointed directly at her. Hers is still nowhere to be found.
The last thing she sees is the pucker of concentration in Rosier’s brow, his previous arrogance gone; as if this moment has some particular importance attached, as if it is now-or-never.
And then—
“Obliviate.”
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Five hours pass in a blur. The memories come back in blurry increments, shrouded in confusion and desperation and, later, wrath.
It starts while he’s at Quidditch practice; the voice muttering in his skull, slithering forward in strips of misty haze. Something’s off, it whispers. James pushes it away and flings the Quaffle harder. It misses the hoop by several feet and lands in the soft grass beneath.
His Beaters wait in position, bats held aloft. Caz Cirillo and Rizwana Azad (his unofficial second-in-command) are the best the team has seen in years. But today the weakness of the team lies not in its six determined players, but in the preoccupation of its captain.
“Christ, Potter,” Azad says, her bat slung over her shoulder, as she flies forward to hover next to him. His specs sit, lopsided, on his nose; she frowns at the sight. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m completely fine.”
He’s telling the truth — he should be telling the truth.
Then why does it feel like a lie?
Azad shoots him an uncertain glance. “If you say so...”
The rest of the team is watching closely, too — James hasn’t had an off-day in years. They must be wondering what could be so jarring as to put him off his game mere days before the final game of his Quidditch career.
James has no idea. He only knows that his body is itching to hop off the broom and rush back into the castle. Something isn't right, and he’s got to get to the bottom of it.
But Quidditch practice lets up for nothing, and especially not ‘a bad feeling’.
“All right, back into places, everyone!” he calls out, swerving to the right and past Azad and Cirillo. “Chasers, we’re going to get the Wollongong pat down. We can’t afford to mess up against Ravenclaw.”
The next twenty minutes pass the same way as the first half of practice. The team: in sync. James: not.
After the third missed Parkin’s Pincer (thanks to his horrid aim), Azad pulls him aside, her lips pursed. Her hair loops around her shoulder, tied up in a thick ribbon. The frayed ends of the silk look obviously chewed. A nervous habit of hers, he knows.
“That’s enough, Potter,” she says firmly, hands tucked into the pockets of her trousers and shoulders pulled back. Though she’s a year younger than James, he has always thought she’d make a brilliant captain once he leaves Hogwarts. She has the confident charisma characteristic of himself — but without the arrogance he possessed when he was younger. “This is getting us nowhere. Take a break. Go figure out whatever you’re preoccupied with. You’re throwing off the rest of the team.”
James exhales through his nose. “There’s nothing to figure out.”
“I don’t buy—“
“No, I mean I don’t know what’s wrong,” he says helplessly, one hand raking through his hair. “I just don’t know.”
Azad softens slightly. “Okay. Take a short trip, then — to Hogsmeade, maybe?” At his instant protest, she cuts him off with, “I’m not an idiot, Captain. I know you boys have your ways to get there. I haven’t ratted you out for the past six years, have I? Why would I start now?”
He smiles sheepishly. “Yeah, all right.”
She steers her broom back to the middle of the pitch, ponytail swishing across her red-and-gold practice jersey.
James spares a moment to be grateful to Rizwana Azad — who is a wonderful teammate and friend despite her intimidating demeanour — before tipping his Nimbus into a dive, the violent winds screaming in his ear, and pulling up just before his feet hit the ground to dismount.
The nagging whisper in his ear has mostly subsided. Maybe all he really needed was to clear his mind of Quidditch and allow himself a moment of quiet.
While James would love to take an impromptu trip to Hogsmeade, several feet of empty parchment sit back in the dorm, waiting to be filled with essays on Golpalott’s Laws and the properties of snake fangs. As he walks his broom back to the shed, James decides that he’ll tackle the Potions assignment first. Best for last, after all.
Just as he locks the broomshed behind him — its guard, the disgruntled portrait of a green-skinned mermaid, grumped at him in Mermish the entire time — an unintelligible noise sounds from somewhere near him.
“Prongs!” James fishes around in his trousers for the mirror in his pocket. “Prongs, it’s Lily—“
He yanks it out of the fabric it was stuck onto, Sirius’s face materialising out of smoky glass. It’s drawn. Pale.
“I — Lily?” James asks hoarsely. “What happened?”
Sirius side-steps his question. Instead, he says gravely, “Come to the Hospital Wing. Quickly.”
He doesn’t bother shoving the mirror back into his pocket before breaking into a sprint. The afternoon air snaps at his face as he runs, doing its best to yank him back into the present, but it does not succeed. He is too far away, lost in thoughts of Lily Lily Lily.
Without knowing how, he makes it to the Hospital Wing.
Cots line up from one end to the other, spanning dozens of feet, but James only has eyes for one. He can pick her out of the lineup easily from the stark contrast of the dark red of her hair fanned out against starched pillows. Madam Pomfrey is by her bedside, wand held in one hand and two stoppered bottles in the other.
Sirius and Mary Macdonald are waiting by the door. They look up when he rushes in, wearing twin expressions of sobriety.
Something in him — the forever optimist who believed it couldn’t be worse than a minor Potions accident — dies a little. His heartbeat drowns out every other noise in the room.
“—saw her on the map and brought her here,” Sirius is saying when James finally regains his bearing. Mary stays stony-faced. She must have been filled in about the map, then. “Lupin is getting the others.”
James strides past them without a word, crouching by her bedside a moment later. The roaring in his head intensifies when he sees her, spread-eagle on the cot, looking oddly young. Her eyelashes barely reach the top of her reddened cheek, sitting still, and her lips are parted slightly. James has the sudden urge to push them closed.
“What happened?” he asks, voice trembling. “What did they do to her?”
Madam Pomfrey glances at him — the sympathetic set of her mouth makes him want to vomit and vomit and never go up for air — and inhales.
“You might want to sit down for this, Mr Potter.”
══════════════════
a falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes
i screamed aloud as it tore through them
and now it's left me blind
Cosmic Love, Florence + The Machine
══════════════════
An hour and a half later, he leaves the Hospital Wing with a splitting headache.
Everything else is numb, even the flush of his forehead from the May heat and the old ache in his bicep from Quidditch practice. He walks through the hallways of Hogwarts, lost, each foot placed in front of the other.
Outside the bubble of shock he’s trapped in, the world is still going, still moving, unrelenting. A gaggle of Hufflepuffs huddle around a Muggle camera, pointing and exclaiming with wows and ohs. Thaddeus, a third-year Gryffindor James tutors, waves and beams at him. James can’t quite muster up a smile in return, but he does his best to wave back at the boy.
All around him, the world moves on without a care in the world. Like he hasn’t just received the worst news of his life.
I’m deeply sorry to inform you that Miss Evans has suffered from a dangerous, difficult-to-remove charm. Unfortunately, undoing an Obliviate isn’t a part of my repertoire, nor that of most others…
His feet carry him past the vanishing staircase that leads to Gryffindor Tower; instead, a minute later, he finds himself blinking at the ajar door that would take him to the Astronomy Tower. A place special to him and Lily. Where they spent several evenings on patrol. Where James told her he intended to join the war effort. Where they kissed and kissed until they couldn’t any longer.
Yes, she’s awake. She woke up fifteen minutes ago. No, you can’t see her right now. She — she needs time. From what I understand, the curse targeted her memories of you. Yes, you, Potter — you were her boyfriend, weren’t you?
He could hear his heart splinter further every second Madam Pomfrey spoke. But all James could do was stand there and listen as his head spun and spun and spun.
Thankfully, Miss Evans seems to know who you are. That’s excellent news. However, it seems there’s a James Potter-shaped hole missing from her past year of schooling. Whoever cast the curse — and I certainly have my suspicions about who it was — intended to completely erase your relationship from her memory. They didn’t succeed, though, and the execution has ‘amateur’ written all over it. Memory charms rarely go as planned, and this instance is no exception.
It’s still before dusk, and the sun glares down on the castle, too yellow and too harsh. It feels wrong to be here during the day, without Lily by his side. Briefly, he wonders if they will ever stand within these stone walls again. Is this the end? Was that the end?
Come back in a few days. Test the waters. See if she remembers who you were to each other. Again with the past-sense. James thought his knees just might buckle and send him collapsing onto her pristine tiled floor. If she doesn’t… well, I’m sure you know not to push her beyond what she can handle. She’s rattled, Potter, and we certainly can’t fault her for that. When you come to see her, just… be prepared to hear things you’d rather not.
It’s just one year, he tells himself firmly. At least it’s not her whole life. Be grateful.
But just one year isn’t exactly the truth. He and Lily have never had an easy, uncomplicated relationship, not in all seven years of knowing each other. If a year’s worth of memories involving him have been erased, then…
Then everything is a farce; nothing was real. Whatever she feels — felt — for him is long gone. He is no longer her doting boyfriend. He’s just… an acquaintance. An enemy-turned-friend.
A stranger.
The wetness dries on his cheeks before it can slide any further; the sun bakes any traces of grief away before it can linger and imprint itself into his skin for the world to see. James knows he isn’t fit to be near anyone else. Not even his mates, who are surely looking for him on the map right now.
Another tear slips out. He is mourning what should not have been. An attack. A loss. An end.
In the grand scheme of things, the two weeks he spent with Lily are fleeting. They mean nothing. Two weeks — even if they were the best two weeks of his life — can be replaced easily. Life is a fastmoving river, and it waits for nobody. James can put down anchor and root himself to an unstable rock… or he can let go and let the water carry him where he’s meant to go.
There is no right answer. Either way, he’s going through a breakup that Lily doesn’t even know about, and either way, she’s reckoning with the loss of a year’s worth of memories involving him.
Either way, it’s over. They are over before they even got a chance to be.
══════════════════
They tell Lily he’s her boyfriend.
Mary and Evangeline sit at her bedside and explain it slowly and carefully — the friendship, the more-than-friendship, and the two weeks of being ‘the happiest they’ve ever seen her be’.
She still can’t believe it.
There are gaps in her recollection where there shouldn’t be; tears and stretches that expose the dark confusion behind ripped-apart memories.
You’re Head Girl, they tell her, and she knows that — she remembers getting her badge in the mail, and holding Prefects’ Meetings in empty classrooms, and walking the halls of Hogwarts on Patrol. But when they say And he’s Head Boy, something Lily knows she should know, should remember… all that resurfaces is a fuzzy sort of emptiness. As if someone dug around in her skull for all her memories of Potter and buried them under three layers.
Coming to terms with the fact that this version of her is in a relationship with Potter — James Potter, who she can hardly even count as a friendly acquaintance — is jarring, to say the least. She only knows him as the boy she hasn’t been able to stand for years; the boy who tugged on her twin braids a few months into first year and cemented her dislike for him; the boy who dangled her ex-best friend by the ankle in front of half the school and rubbed salt in the wound by proceeding to ask her out on a date. The boy who she carefully avoided interacting with throughout their sixth year.
Perhaps worse than knowing she has no recollection of a supposed relationship with James Potter — which itself is something out of one of her worst nightmares — is the dawning realisation that she might never get these memories back. She is but a hollowed mirror of her past self, scooped clean of moments she can’t recall. Vacant eyes and bleeding heart.
That might be the worst part. Looking into Mary and Evangeline’s hopeful, shining faces and knowing none of it is reflected back in hers.
Lily reaches for the wand at her bedside, the cross-hatch leaving shallow cuts in the willow wood. It has always sat in her hands like it belongs. Each crook fit into the lines and curves of her hand.
She imagines this hand — this wand — rendered powerless at wandpoint of another. At the hand of Atticus Rosier, if Pomfrey’s whispered conversations with McGonagall are any indication. She doesn’t know how to feel about it.
On the one hand, she’s furious. Furious and incensed and seething and everything Lily Evans knows herself to be. Ready to take up arms and fight until the last goddamned second of her life.
But on the other, she’s… tired. God, she’s fucking exhausted. For how long must she live in this state of limbo? In this uncertain, indefinite in-between, where she’s no longer the Lily Evans she knows — confident and certain of who she is and who she trusts — nor the Lily Evans she used to be?
Everything takes more effort than it would have before. Opening her eyes against the blinding sunlight that seeps through the curtains takes minutes to accomplish. Sipping the porridge Madam Pomfrey brought her is near-impossible with limbs that somehow feel like they were made with both jelly and lead. When her friends drop off the assignments she’s missing, Lily takes one look at the Ancient Runes work and her head swims.
Her only solace is that the girls come in after classes finish every afternoon. After the customary chats get over and the others leave with empty hands and lighter purses (Lily now has a lifetime’s supply of chocolate), only Mary and Evangeline stay.
“Hi,” Evangeline says brightly, coaxing a returning smile out of Lily. “How are you feeling?”
“Definitely better.” She lies without missing a beat. The girls both smile wider, a hint of relief colouring their faces.
Evangeline smiles encouragingly. “Do you feel ready to go back to normal?”
Normal. Lily’s stomach lurches unpleasantly. It’s unimaginable, really, to see herself leaving this cot and venturing onto the white-tiled floor, let alone wander the halls of Hogwarts and attend classes and pretend she’s the same Lily everyone knows.
“Not quite,” she replies. Her smile is forced. Everything feels forced nowadays. “Maybe soon.” To make up for the slight fall in her friend’s expression, she adds, “Besides, I’ll have to face Potter… and I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“He’s your—” Mary stops herself just in time, but Lily fills in the blank herself. He’s your boyfriend.
Her head hurts, and she’s not ready for this conversation. So Lily deflects.
“Well, some boyfriend he is,” Lily says, trying for a joke. “He hasn’t come to see me once in all the days I’ve been in the Wing.”
Evangeline gives her a strange look. “That’s… not true.”
Lily frowns. A hint of uncertainty creeps in. “Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not,” Evangeline says, shaking her head. “He came the moment he heard and sat by you for as long as he could before Pomfrey kicked him out. I heard he cried, too, but that might be the third-years’ love for exaggeration.”
Her stomach twists unpleasantly. “Oh?” It’s a lot harder to pretend your boyfriend (Merlin, boyfriend) is a class F, good-for-nothing scumbag when he insists on being… the exact opposite of that, really. It’s even harder when your friends insist on sticking up for his charm and integrity.
“Give him a break, Lily,” Mary tells her, almost sadly. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to finally get the love of your life to like you back — and don’t you look at me like that, I’m just saying what I think — and have her lose all her memories of your relationship. It’s a terrible, once-in-a-lifetime sort of break-up, basically, except the break-up just… never happened.”
“When you put it that way…” Lily trails off.
Suddenly, she’s drained — both emotionally and physically. “But I don’t know what to do about it.” Since when has breathing taken this much effort? “I don’t know…”
Her eyes well up with tears. Evangeline conjures a kerchief and pats her hair several times — Mary holds her hand tight and doesn’t let go.
“You don’t need to do anything,” Mary whispers into her ear, breath tickling stray strands of hair. “All you need to do is rest and heal, and everything will be better.”
If only it were that simple. If only she could get a few good nights of sleep and wake up and not feel torn in half, not feel hollowed and empty and incomplete.
But she doesn’t know how to put this feeling into words — or, at least, words that don’t take excruciating effort to spit out — for her friends.
“Nothing is all right,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. It comes out choked and garbled, the tears blurring her vision and closing up her throat. “Everything’s wrong and I’m stuck here and I need out of it, God, I need fucking out.”
It’s okay, it’ll be okay, we’re here, we’re here, Mary and Evangeline murmur over and over. Everything’ll be okay. You’re safe.
Lily digs her fingernails into her palm until it cuts the skin and comes to the realisation that she has no choice, really. She has to leave.
══════════════════
It’s not much longer before the Marauders show up.
She has her suspicions that they tried seeing her earlier, if her friends’ words are any indication, but were sent away by Madam Pomfrey. Something about ‘confusion’ and ‘denial’. Lily’s grateful for the delay, even if only lasted a few days.
Pomfrey places the double-dose of a medicinal potion at her bedside; Lily tries not to grimace as she downs the first and the bitter taste of birkroot slips down her throat.
“We’ll start memory therapy for you soon,” Pomfrey tells her before she leaves. “It’s said to be effective. I have high hopes for you — we might even be able to recover some of the most important moments that you lost.”
It’s not a fix, no, but it’s something. Something to look forward to.
Lily swallows the second potion. At least this one tastes faintly sweet. Orange-flavoured, maybe?
It’s Saturday, and the Marauders’ hushed conversation beyond the doors isn’t nearly as discreet as they think it is. She can’t make out what they're saying, but it’s obvious that four separate voices are conversing in low tones. The implications of who is there are nervewracking. She isn’t ready to face James Potter.
Remus Lupin walks through the door first — alone, thankfully. But the gratitude only lasts until she sees his knit expression, the worry, the hesitation clouding his kind features.
“Lily, you’re okay?” he asks. The relief he exudes when she smiles up at him is almost palpable.
“Hi, Remus. I’m feeling better, yes.”
He pulls out a chair beside her cot and all but collapses into it with a deep sigh. “Sorry I didn’t come earlier.”
He looks haggard — as if he weathered a cruel storm, rode through a blizzard, and toiled under the blazing hot sun all in one day.
Suddenly, Lily remembers that the full moon was two nights ago. She had seen it from her cot — bright and luminous in the night sky — but hadn’t been in any state to remember it the next morning.
“It’s no problem,” she says immediately. “Are you all right? How are you holding up?”
Remus casts her a wary gaze. She fights to keep her gaze open and honest — Remus is a dear friend to her, werewolf or not, and she hopes that he will someday feel comfortable being his true self with her. “I’m perfectly fine. I wasn’t the one who was attacked by Rosier.”
Lily blinks. “It’s confirmed, then? That it was… him?”
“Did they not tell you?” Remus asks. “His hearing is tomorrow. He’ll definitely be expelled.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she says dryly. “His mum and dad are on the Board of Governors, right? Old money can get you out of any skirmish — even wiping the memories of a muggleborn.”
Remus doesn’t voice his agreement, but his face says enough.
“At least we’re graduating next week,” he offers. “Close enough, right?”
As if.
“Close enough,” she echoes, and they both pretend like her voice holds even a bit of emotion.
“So, what have I missed?” she asks lightly. “What have you boys been up to? Not another Great Hall food fight, certainly?”
“Never without you,” Remus promises. “Someone needs to help me keep them in line.”
“As if you aren’t right up there causing chaos with the others.” Lily snorts, remembering the Welcome Feast of ’76 — when the Marauders, Remus included, charmed each candle in the Great Hall to belt the Hogwarts school song in a Cockney accent. After that day, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts had been imprinted in her mind forever.
Remus grins. “Who, me? Never!”
She almost feels normal again. Bantering with a good friend about the one constant in her life (at least, until now, with her whole world tipped off its axis): the Marauders’ pranks and antics.
At least, it feels normal until—
“You know, we actually haven’t pulled a prank in ages,” Remus tells her, sobering up. “We tried, recently, to cheer James up with one. But he’s never been less interested in kiddish spectacles than he is now. You always said you wanted him to grow up and mature… well, Lily, I think he finally has.”
It’s funny. How a few words — I think he finally has — can have such a huge impact on a person. Because Remus says them straight to her face, looking her in the eye the whole time, and for a moment she knows. Somewhere deep down, an innate part of her believes him wholeheartedly that James Potter is better. Hell, he’s good.
“I don’t remember him,” Lily blurts out before she can think better of it.
Remus’s eyes widen in shock, horror flitting over his features before she can correct herself.
“No, that’s not true,” she amends. “I mean, I don’t — my memories of this past year are muddled. Everything involving Potter, I mean. I can’t recall much of… anything, really, with both of us in it. It was news to me that we… that we dated.”
Lily’s not an idiot. She can see, plain as day, the surprise that he’s unable to conceal when she calls him Potter. When she says we dated. But she’s only telling the truth, and it certainly isn’t her fault that Rosier decided to curse away her memories.
Remus opens his mouth to respond — no doubt to tell her she was a very willing participant in their relationship, just like Mary and Emmeline did — but she cuts him off. She isn’t ready to have this conversation, and she doesn’t know if she ever will be.
“Not now,” she says softly, and Remus closes his mouth. “Just — tell me one thing. And be honest, please.”
He nods.
“Was I…” Lily exhales, closing her eyes. “Were we happy? Really, truly happy?” She keeps them closed, afraid of the answer.
Remus is quiet for so long that she begins to fear his answer. She cracks open one eye; he is staring at her with an expression of abject sorrow etched into every stress line of his forehead, every dip in his cheek, every colour of his eyes.
“Stupidly so,” Remus says, his laugh coming out choked. “He adores you. And you…” He smiles a little, brokenhearted. “I’ve never seen you laugh so often.”
She can’t help it. She cries and makes a mess out of it. Why does it feel like her heart is breaking for the third time for a boy she’s never liked? Why is there a chasm of hopelessness slicing her in two, that reaches into the cavern of her heart and finds nothing there?
For the first time, Lily tries her hardest to remember something — anything — about the two of them. About James, her boyfriend, and not Potter, her sworn enemy. She pictures herself kissing him — for the first time ever — and hopes it will conjure up an image of their actual first kiss. But there are no magical Hogsmeade dates, no dashing Prince Charming kisses. Instead, she’s met with the uncomfortable visual of her (Lily Evans) kissing him (James Potter). Now she’s hopeless and confused.
Remus is gracious about it all. He offers her a kerchief, a warm hug, and a quiet “You’re the strongest witch I know, Lily” (which sends her into another bout of tears) before ducking out of the door.
She knows what comes next. She knows what she has to do. It’s not pretty, and she isn’t looking forward to it, but it’s what must be done.
Lily braces herself when the door creaks open again.
“Hi, Lily,” James Potter says, hands folded before him. Her first name in his voice feels both familiar and foreign at the same time.
He looks like he always has. Messy black hair, rectangular specs, and loping gait. But something about him is different — maybe it’s the slump of his shoulders, so uncharacteristic of his usual confidence; or perhaps it’s the grave demeanour that engulfs him head to toe.
“Hello,” she replies stiffly, and it isn’t awkward at all. It definitely isn’t.
He takes the seat Remus just left and leans forward to meet her eyes. “How are you holding up?”
The eye-contact is new. “Oh. Yes, I’m fine.”
Something in him seems to shrivel at that; any hope leftover wilts and dies. A plant unwatered is a plant dying, and her non-answers only seem to hasten the end.
Lily has to give him credit. He bears it well, with a short nod and a straightening of shoulders. But she’s known James Potter for five years. His disappointment is more than evident.
“Did…” he clears his throat. “Did Pomfrey let you know? Or your friends? About…”
About us is unsaid but implied.
“Yes, I was informed.” Her throat burns. “I don’t remember it, but I believe them.”
Defeat doesn’t suit James Potter. His handsome features and boyish mouth were built to house lopsided grins and booming laughter. Not — not this.
He doesn’t seem to know what to say in response to that; Lily can’t blame him.
“Merlin, this is so odd,” she blurts out, a choked laugh slipping out. “To talk to you like we’re strangers. Because we’re not, and we never have been.”
James half-smiles. She’s suddenly itching to make him laugh.
“Strangers,” he murmurs. “You’re right. We’re just not capable of being strangers.” His hazel eyes are heartbreakingly sad.
He’s so… still. This isn’t the James Potter she knows. But — and the thought startles her — this is the James Potter she fell for.
It’s still surreal, make no mistake — but she believes it.
Lily takes a deep breath. There’s no point in putting off the inevitable end.
James takes note of her breath — he’s awfully attentive to her every move, she notices — and steels himself for what’s to follow.
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” she says, the words rushed and tangled and lost. “I’m sorry, I really am—”
“Don’t be,” James says. He leans forward, reaching for her hand, but pulls back before he touches skin. “I understand. I wondered, briefly, if we could make it work, but I just don’t think that’s possible.”
Lily nods, a lump in her throat. Even if she felt something for him — which isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility, with this version of Potter — she isn’t nearly recovered enough to date someone.
She lost a year’s worth of built-up trust with someone who had evidently been very important to her. That isn’t something a relationship can bounce back from easily. The inequality would make her uneasy. The lingering awareness that he cares more, knows more… it would eat away at her.
“Thank you for understanding,” she whispers.
James meets her gaze. “I’m not the one suffering.” He inhales and adds, “I know I no longer am anything to you, and my opinion is of little value—” she wants to disagree, but he’s still speaking “—but, if it helps, I hope you find peace. And if there’s a place for me in your life as your friend, I’ll take it in a heartbeat.”
Her eyes are stinging again. This would be easier if he would just be arrogant and entitled; if he would fight back and yell and cement her belief that it’s better this way, that if one good thing came of this, it’s that they were forced to break up.
Why does he have to be so bloody understanding about it all?
He moves to stand, but Lily stops him. She has one more bomb to drop. He raises an eyebrow; it’s so quintessentially Potter that her breath stutters in her chest. He hasn’t changed completely, then.
“I’m moving to France.”
The words fly out, stumbling through the space between them. James’s eyes widen imperceptibly before they go blank once more. She can see him fighting to keep his expression neutral.
“Oh?”
Lily snorts, as if her hands aren’t slick with sweat. As if she hasn’t just blurted out something she’s never voiced aloud — not even to her closest friends — to a boy she just fucking broke up with. “You can be surprised, you know.”
James finally laughs, surprising both Lily and himself. His eyes shine when he laughs, she realises. Why has she never noticed this before?
“Evans,” he says with a hint of amusement. “I’m screaming on the inside. Really.”
She hides a smile. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”
He blinks at this. “Really? Why?”
“I have no idea,” she says honestly. “It just felt like the right thing to do. I think I owe you an explanation, at least, before I up and disappear.”
“Is that what you’re planning to do? Run away?”
Lily bristles. “I’m not running away—“
“—wait, shit, I didn’t mean it like that,” James hastens to explain. “It’s just — you always told me you had no choice but to stay and fight. You even…” he pauses. “You never said it, but I could tell that you didn’t agree with Mary’s choice to leave after school.”
Lily blinks. “You noticed?”
He smiles twistedly. “Of course I did, Lily. We were good friends before we started dating.”
“Right,” she says hoarsely. “Right, of course.” She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. “Anyway, everything’s different now. I feel…” she huffs a laugh, “Like I’m someone else. I know it was only one year and one person, but I feel empty. And I’m so tired of all of this, you know? My mum was French, and I can speak enough to get by. Maybe what I really need is to get out of Britain and wait for everything to boil over.”
After a long pause, he finally replies. “I don’t think I can ever understand what it feels like, but I respect whatever decision you make.”
Lily smiles. It’s a bit watery. Confiding in James Potter does that to a person. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
James stands up.
“I’ll see you around, then?” He smiles crookedly; Lily can’t quite smile back. “Take care, Lily.”
“Take care, James,” she echoes. Her words sound hollow to her own ears.
Endings are nothing unfamiliar to Lily Evans; she’s seen the ends of sisterhood, of friendship, of innocence, all from miles away. But this is an end unlike any other. An end that was never supposed to happen.
He walks away. She doesn’t stop him.