Marauder Rare Pairs ♦ Fic: Going, Going ... (Gone)
Title: Going, Going … (Gone)
Author: aphodiopsis
Pairing: Lily/Alice. (Lily/James.)
Rating: T (PG-13)
Word Count: 4,371
Prompt: 90
Warnings: Sexual language, swearing, femmeslash, mild violence, character death
Summary: “It was like a leaf loving a hurricane. It couldn’t last.”
Author’s Notes: Ahhhh. A full week of spastic begging after I finished this, I finally got someone to beta it for me. All hail T. for that. Also, thanks to the mods for giving me an inspirational boost after I spent like four days writing one sentence; I finished the rest of the fic that night. Then I got early access to Pottermore. Fate!
Credit for the quote at the beginning of the story is already listed, and I obviously am not J. K. Rowling, so. Other things you might not have realized do not belong to me: The drinking song was adapted from lyrics included in Lord Gyric of Otershaghe’s Bawdy Song Book on the document “Songs that Ought NOT to be Sung.” Also, the Silver Snitches record was partially inspired by Elton John’s album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”
***
“I’ll ply the fire with kindling now; I’ll pull the blankets up to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I’d like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she’s got the urge for going and I guess she’ll have to go.”
- Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
***
Snidget Snogging is a complex drinking game that Lily Evans is pretty sure James Potter and Sirius Black made up as they went along. They bickered ferociously about the rules, which changed every round. (“Every time you take a drink from the orange goblet, you have to sing the school song in Mermish or you have to take a drink from the brown goblet.” “What if we don't know how to speak Mermish?” “No one knows how to speak Mermish, Evans. That's the point.”).
The more they drank, the more exceptions to these rules they seemed to recall. (“That's not Mermish, that's French. Drink!” “No. The Monitor sings everything in French.” “I thought Sirius was the Monitor?” “The Monitor can transfer his duties to any player at any point as long as both players happen to be wearing red, which we are. Honestly, Evans, keep up.”)
In the resulting game, Peter Pettigrew drank fourteen goblets in as many minutes, Mary Macdonald spent three rounds standing on her head, Remus Lupin suffered four separate nosebleeds, James’s eyebrows turned a brilliant shade of pink, and Lily had to snog James for a full eighteen seconds. After that, Sirius took turns snogging just about everyone, though he never lost a round.
Not until three a.m. do things finally begin to settle down. One by one, the teenagers quit their game and returned unsteadily to their respective dormitories. Now only Lily, James, and four empty bottles of Ogden’s finest are left in the wreckage of the Gryffindor common room.
Lily sprawls out on the floor before the fire. James stays in his armchair, glassy-eyed but otherwise seemingly unaffected by the liquor in his system. “You’re much more fun than you let on, Evans,” he says, “and not a bad kisser, besides.”
Lily looks at him and laughs. She’s only eighteen, but she doesn’t laugh as much as she used to, James thinks.
He feigns offense. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Thank you. Would you like to give it another go?’”
“Sorry, it’s just-your eyebrows.”
James touches his long, tapered fingers to his eyebrows, remembering. “I thought they were rather dashing, myself.”
“Quite.”
He watches her eyelids grow heavy and her breathing begin to slow, and he knows he ought to tell her to go to bed. Instead, he says, “Really, though. I thought you were opposed to breaking the rules, Miss Head Girl.”
“Less so than you would think: I skived off my parents’ funeral (“Well, that’s understandable,” he begins to say) for a shag.”
There is a minute of stunned silence during which Lily wonders why she felt the need to share this bit of information. Perhaps, she decides, it is to prove to him that one drunken snog does not mean she belongs to him. She has done worse things with worse people (and she does not belong to them, either).
James’s laugh sounds as though he is choking. “Really?”
“Cross my heart,” Lily says. She does so.
“Really?” He leans forward in his chair, looking at her with newfound respect. “With who?”
“Whom,” she corrects him automatically. “Alice Longbottom.”
“Wait, who?”
“Alice Longbottom-well, I mean, she wasn’t a Longbottom then; this was before she was married. You know her, right? Her gran’s friends with your mum.”
“Er-yeah. I know her,” he says. “You two … How did … So you’re … ?”
“No.” Her brow crinkles slightly. “Maybe. I don’t know. We were in love.”
“Oh.”
“I think.” Her frown deepens. “I loved her, anyway, and she-yes. We were in love.”
“Oh,” he says again.
Lily gets up and puts the new Silver Snitches album, “Road to Romania,” on the phonograph Mary left out when she went to bed. Even at a low volume, Morgana Maher’s voice is clear and rich over the deceptively cheerful guitar music, singing, “I will, I will love you forever, until the last of summer fades. I will, I will love you forever, until the end of this amortentia daze.” It fills the room with the sweet scents of coneflowers and fresh-cut hay.
She comes back and sits hugging her knees to her chest, her back to the fire. “You remember in fifth year, when we had those meetings with Professor McGonagall to talk about what we wanted to be?”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t know. I mean, I knew of dozens of things that I could do, but none of them seemed like something I would want to do forever. Professor Slughorn wanted me to do something with potions, you know, but that just seemed so … trivial, given everything. So she-McGonagall, that is, she said I ought to think about being an Auror, and I shouldn’t have any trouble as long as my Transfiguration grade didn’t slip any further.” Here she pauses to send James an accusatory glare. It irks her greatly that the only subject in which she struggles is the one in which he most excels.
“So I said I’d think about it,” she continues, “and she said she knew someone I could shadow if I was interested. She was really excited about it, too, so I said alright, and she said they’d be in touch.”
“Alice?” James asks.
Lily says, “Yes,” and without deciding to do it, she begins to tell him the rest of the story. “That was a really unpleasant summer for me. I spent the first part just walking around because my parents were at work and my sister always had her boyfriend over-which was actually pretty normal, but before then, I had always had Sev for company. On good days, my da would take me into the garage-that’s, um, where muggles work on cars, which are kind of like-”
“I know what cars are,” he assured her.
“Right,” she said. “So then one evening, da got home early and he asked Tuney-that’s my sister-to help him change the oil on the car, but she said she didn’t know how, and I didn’t know how, either, but I said I’d help anyway. And we were joking around, pretending we were working on a space ship-which is kind of like, I don’t know, a car that muggles take to the moon, or ... Well, never mind. The important thing was that I had oil in my hair and on my face and I was a total mess, and then suddenly this witch showed up, and she was …”
“Beautiful?” James suggests. It seems fitting.
“No,” Lily shakes her head. “No, Alice isn’t beautiful, but she’s … She’s elegant. She was very-well dressed, clean cut, not one strand of hair out of place. That sort of thing. She shook hands with my da and then with me, and we invited her in, and the whole time she had this look in her eye, like … like she was laughing at us or something. I hated her. I thought she was a snob.
“She stayed for dinner, and my parents were just completely in love with her. She was so polite. She laughed at my da’s jokes, she asked my mum about work, and then she helped Tuney with the dishes, which only made me hate her more. I knew she saw the way Tuney glared at her during dinner and thought she was being false or something, like she had some sort of hidden agenda that involved getting in good with some muggleborn nobody’s family or … I don’t know.
“Turns out that’s just how Alice is. She honestly doesn’t believe that anyone doesn’t like her, and she can’t sit still. So, anyhow, I walked her to the door, and she told me that I could come to Ministry with her in the morning if I wanted, and I fully intended to tell her not to bother, but then she hugged me, and I … I just …”
“Fell in love?” James has moved from his armchair to the floor, where he sits across from her, listening intently.
“No. Not yet. I just thought, ‘Wow. I am so disgusting and she’s all clean and fresh and smells like flowers, and she doesn’t mind at all.’ And it wasn’t one of those awkward hugs where the person holds you at arms’ length and sort of pats your back. It was a real hug, like she liked me or something, though I’m sure I was rude to her the whole night. So I said okay.
“And she gave me this smile. You would have thought I had just agreed to give her the world or something, she was so happy-and I would have, probably, if she’d been smiling like that. I got all warm and jittery, and then she hugged me again, and it felt like … amazing. Just amazing. I didn’t sleep at all that night.”
Lily realizes that she is smiling at the memory and looks to James to see if he is upset. On the contrary, he smiles back. Encouraged, she continues, “Alice graduated the year before we started Hogwarts, which means she’d been an Auror for … about a year, I guess. She was fairly new, anyway, so she didn’t have any really big assignments-or if she did, I didn’t know about them.”
She tells him about going to various remote locations and building complex protection spells around camps where Aurors rested during particularly long, dangerous assignments. Lily was not allowed to speak to Alice while they were working, but she was allowed to help. She cast the spells she knew, and learned some she didn’t, and tried not to become distracted by the way Alice’s whole body became taught and focused when she cast a spell.
“She was so incredibly clever, and she worked so hard. I’ve never respected anyone more in my life,” Lily says.
“But you didn’t love her then.”
“Not yet.”
***
Afterward, Lily would test Alice’s charms and Alice would test Lily’s, almost like real partners. Then they sat in the shade and waited for nightfall when the other Aurors would arrive. The afternoons were theirs.
Once, Alice found a trick wand in her pocket. She had meant to conjure a blanket for them to sit on, but the wand turned into a rubber chicken in her hand. Lily was startled. Alice only laughed. “My dad,” she explained. “Mentally, he’s about seven. He’s from an old pureblooded family-both of my parents are-so he’s never had to work a day in his life. Plus he married my mother, who was born seventy, and he thinks he needs to balance her out.”
Lily laughed. “My da’s a mad scientist,” she said. “That’s sort of-like Merlin, I guess.” Alice nodded. “He wants to go to the moon.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
“Oh, er.” Lily glanced at Alice to see if she was taking the mickey, but her face was serious. “It’s not that easy for muggles. Only a few of us can go at a time, and you have to go through a lot of training and become an astronaut.”
“Then he should become an astronaut,” Alice said, as though this decided the matter.
“He’d like that,” she agreed. If Alice had been Mr. Evans’s daughter, Lily knew, she would have found a way to make it happen. Alice did not overcome obstacles; she barreled through them. “Do wizards go to the moon?”
“Of course.” Alice seemed bewildered that she had even asked. “Don’t they teach you anything at Hogwarts? Where do you think ‘Loony Luna, Loony Light’ comes from?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Of course not, it’s only the second most famous drinking song in the world.” Alice rolled her eyes. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know ‘The Ball of Ballynoor.’”
“Er …”
“Merlin’s balls, Evans,” Alice sighed in frustration. Then she launched into a drinking song so loud, long, and bawdy it made Lily’s head spin and her ears turn bright red.
When at she finished, she turned to her young companion and asked, “Got it?” Lily nodded, glad it was done. “Good. Then join in. ‘Balls to yer partner, arse against the wall!’ C’mon, Evans. Don’t be a prude.”
“‘If ye cannot get head at the good ol’ Hog’s Head, ye cannot get laid at all.’” Lily sang timidly at first, but then Alice joined in with her strong, proud alto, and by the time the first Auror showed up, disheveled but uninjured, they were practically shouting, “‘It started out so simple-like: each lad and lassie mated, but pretty soon the doin’s got so bloody complicated! Oh the ball of Ballynoor! Yer wife and my wife were fucking on the floor!’”
“No trouble then, I take it?” the Auror, a man named Williamson, asked, chuckling.
“Miss Evans wouldn’t allow it,” Alice teased. “Everyone else alright?”
“Yeah-false alarm. Kingsley got in a scrape with one of the local dogs, though. Castro’s just patching him up and they’ll be along.”
“He’s alright, though?” Lily asked. She liked Kingsley, who was never too busy to share stories from his years in training, though she wasn’t sure she could believe half of what he said.
“Fine, fine,” Williamson assured her.
***
“So, wait, Aurors just sit around singing drinking songs?” James is delighted.
“Hush, Potter.”
***
They were only ever in real danger twice. The first time was the evening Lily showed Alice she could make a whistle by cupping a blade of grass between her hands and blowing through them.
“How do you do that?” Alice asked. Lily showed her, but when Alice tried it, positioning her hands and the grass as she had seen Lily do, no sound came out.
“Try again,” Lily said.
Alice did, with the same result. “Rubbish,” she announced, tossing away the grass. “Teach me something else.”
“No, here.” Lily moved closer. She plucked a fresh blade of grass and held it out for Alice to take. Then she wrapped her fingers around the other woman’s, positioning them just so, and moved them to her mouth. “Blow,” she instructed.
Alice blew. A low, breathy note issued forth from the place where their hands joined. She met Lily’s gaze above their hands and grinned. “Brilliant.” Then she leaned forward and brushed their lips together so lightly it hardly counted as a kiss.
For Lily, it was the first kiss that had ever counted. Her heart pounded so wildly in her ears that she hardly heard the muffled thump behind her, but Alice did. She was on her feet in an instant.
“Castro,” Lily heard her say as though from a great distance. “Why didn’t you take him to St. Mungo’s?” The redhead got unsteadily to her feet and turned to see what the fuss was about.
Kingsley and Williamson had returned with their robes torn and bloody. A body lay on the ground between them-Castro.
“Couldn’t make it that far,” Kingsley panted, drawing his wand. Alice was faster. She knelt beside Castro and began to peel back his clothing to reveal the latticework of cursed wounds beneath.
“Evans, go for help,” she said.
“No,” Kingsley said. “No time.”
“Now!” Alice snapped.
Castro groaned and exerted his remaining strength to recoil in pain from Alice’s probing fingers. “Give him your hand, Evans,” Kingsley said. “Keep him still.”
Lily did-not because, as they would later tell her, she was a brave girl, but because it was the only thing there was to do. She stroked Castro’s bloodied brown hair back from his high brow and murmured to him. Afterward, she could never remember what she had said. She hoped it was something comforting. She knew only that she had kept on crooning, barely pausing to take a breath, until long after they knew he was dead.
“Lily.” Alice’s cool hand rested lightly on her shoulder. Her voice was calm. “Lily, that’s enough. It’s time to go home.”
“I can’t.” She was not ready to let go of him. She was not ready for him to be gone. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
In the end, Lily went home with Alice so she would not have to explain to her parents what had happened. Alice drew her a bath in a large claw-footed tub and stayed to be sure she would not drown herself. Lily might have asked for privacy, but she knew Alice would only laugh and call her a prude. When she was clean, Alice dried her off with a large lavender towel, dressed her in borrowed pajamas, and combed out her hair as though she were very young. Then, though there were dozens of guest rooms available, she took Lily to bed with her.
Both the woman and the girl were glad not to be alone.
Lily lay shivering beneath the heavy comforter until Alice reached out and drew her into her arms. “Are you cold?” she asked, pressing a light kiss to her temple. With a single finger, she turned Lily’s face to her, and then tilted her chin up for a kiss.
Lily felt it all through her, a cord of heat and electricity from her lips to her very toes. She gasped as though drowning. “Alice, I don’t-“
“Hush,” she said, and silenced her with her lips.
***
“And then you fell in love?”
“Oh, no, I’d been a goner for a long time before that.”
“So how did it happen?”
“I’m not sure-quietly.”
“Poetic,” James says. “Tell me about the second time you were in danger.”
“Oh.” Lily shrugs. “It was really quick. It was the week before my parents’ funeral. A couple of dark wizards found out about our hideout and managed to Apparate in.”
“You took on a couple of Death Eaters?” he asks, impressed.
“Suspected Death Eaters,” she corrects him. “They weren’t expecting us to be there. They were trying to set up an ambush. We stunned them and then a Ministry witch showed up and took over. The worst bit was trying to set up a new site before the others finished their mission.”
“But if you had all those protection spells, how did they even get in?”
“James Potter, do you honestly think I would share confidential Ministry information with you?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
She laughs. “Not a clue.”
“Incredible,” he says. “You sing pub songs with Aurors, fight off Death Eaters, shag a bird, and play a drinking game with the Marauders and you’re still the most bloody boring person on earth.”
“It wasn’t really like that,” she says. “It wasn’t some torrid affair or anything. I just … I loved her, and after my parents died, I couldn’t live in the house with my sister anymore. So Alice let me move in, and I kept having these terrible nightmares, and she … She comforted me-or distracted me. The night before my parents’ funeral was particularly bad, which meant she had to be particularly distracting, and I guess we just got carried away.”
“They don’t mind, you know-your parents.”
“How could you possibly-“
“I missed my dad’s funeral, couldn’t take it.”
“Oh. I’m …”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
They sit in silence, while in the background Morgana purrs, “Baby girls’ an easy score, been around these hoops before. Boys who look out for the gold are missing out and growing old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a Snitch is a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but only a Quaffle goes through the rings.”
“So what happened?” James asks after a long time.
“What do you mean?”
“You two aren’t together anymore, right? So something must have happened.”
“Yeah,” Lily agrees with a humorless laugh. “Nothing big. My Hogwarts letter came the day after my parents’ funeral-“
“-Which you skived off for a shag.”
“Yes, and Alice said, ‘Lily, I want you to know, just so you won’t be surprised, because I don’t have any secrets from you.’
“And I said, ‘Okay.’
“And she said, ‘I have a boyfriend. Well, not right now, but when you leave for school, I’m going to take him back. We’re going to get married.’ She said it was nothing personal, just that she wanted a family and children, and she couldn’t have those things with me. She said it had nothing to do with him being pureblood, and I was crazy about her, but even I didn’t believe that.”
“He took her back?” James asks.
“Several times,” Lily says. “Apparently, her whole restless bit applies to relationships, too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m …”
“Yeah, me too.”
Without realizing it, they have come to kneel with their knees touching, heads together, so that their faces are suddenly very close. Lily shivers unconsciously. James’s hands are shaking. “So,” he says, “last year, when I asked you out, and you said you couldn’t … ?” She nods. “And now …?”
“I miss her,” she says. “I miss her desperately, but it was like a leaf loving a hurricane. I couldn’t … It’s better this way.”
He says, “You’re no leaf, Lily.”
“Not with you,” she agrees, “but you’re not exactly a hurricane, you know?”
He isn’t sure what this means, nor if he wants to find out. Instead he asks, “So-Auror, huh?”
“Yes,” she says. “No. Maybe.” He laughs. She swats his arm, and it actually hurts, which only causes him to laugh harder. “Oh, shut up. I was going to be an Auror, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What happened?” he asks diligently, though his eyes are still laughing.
“Crouch authorized them to use Unforgiveable on suspects. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the intent, of course. Things are getting really bad, and we ought to do everything we can, but that doesn’t mean-” Lily’s ranting has begun to build momentum, but James barely lets her get started before he cuts her off with a kiss.
She doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t resist. She closes her eyes memorizes this moment so that, years later, she will be able to recall it with perfect clarity when Alice shows up on her doorstep smelling like summer's last blossom and announces, “I'm leaving, going into hiding--in Australia. Come with me.”
(His mouth pressing so hard against hers it almost hurts.)
It's tempting. Working for the Order is hardest on Lily. She lives in fear of the future--of what she might have to do. James has already claimed his first victim. He was lucky. The wizard he killed wasn't acting under the Imperius Curse, was a real honest-to-Merlin Death Eater.
(His parted lips, his too-eager tongue.)
But he was still alive. He could have made a different choice.
And now he isn't. He can't.
(His fingers ensnared in the tangles of her hair.)
Lily knows her time will come. She tries to delay it by spending free afternoons in St. Mungo's, brewing potions that will heal Death Eaters and Order Members and civilians alike. She knows that, had she been born into a Wizarding family, this is the path she would have chosen. She hates her dead parents for this, a little bit--for the knowledge that she will have to kill someone she might have saved, that she will never forgive herself for it.
(His surprising artlessness, when she'd expected him to know everything, everything about making love.)
She says, “I want to. I want to more than anything-but I can’t.”
“I'm pregnant.”
“Oh.” Lily is nearly certain congratulations are not in order. A biting wind invites itself in through the open doorway. It is the last day of August, but autumn is already upon them. “Me, too. Come inside.”
“I want my son to be safe.”
“Me, too.”
“so I'm going.”
“Me--No, I can't. Come inside. It's cold out.”
(His glasses bumping against the bridge of her nose.)
Alice still isn't beautiful, but she is still used to getting her way. She still has no respect for other people's boundaries, physical or otherwise. She cups Lily's freckled cheek, says, “You look exhausted.”
“I've been told I'm glowing.”
“Not really.”
Lily is not vain. Alice's honesty is a comfort. She smiles. The lines around her eyes deepen. She looks much older than she is, but somehow this makes her even lovelier than she was at sixteen--breathtaking, really.
(His eyes. Oh Merlin, it’s trite, but they never looked that way before--humble, submissive.)
She says, “I'm not leaving James. He's only in this for me.”
Alice's tone is unwontedly harsh when she says, “You don't owe him anything.”
(His unnecessary gentleness in removing his fingers from her hair.)
“Yes, I do.” Lily is certain of this. He is fighting a war for her sake. He is the father of her child. He loves her. She's a wreck more days than she isn't; she shouts and laughs and cries for no reason at all. She doesn't deserve him, but he loves her. “And I love him.”
“You loved me once.” Alice is quieter now, unsure
“Yes,” Lily agrees. They are quiet for a while. Lily wonders if she can convince Alice to go home to Frank. Alice wonders if Frank will take her back. At last, Lily says, “James and I are going into hiding--here, in England. You and Frank could ...”
(“You’re a flower, I think. What am I?”)
“Yes.” Alice's distant gaze hardens and becomes cold. “Yes.” She straightens her shoulders and turns around, then hesitates and cannot keep herself from saying, “If you really loved me--”
Lily refuses to be baited. “You left,” she says. “I was just another landmark in your wanderlust, and then you went back to Frank. You always do.”
“I did love you,” Alice says.
Lily says, “I know.” She closes the door. She goes into the kitchen. She sets a kettle on the stove. She moves to the living room. She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and curls herself into the corner of the couch. James will be finishing up his meeting with Dumbledore anytime now. She waits for her husband to come home and drive out the cold that has settled in her bones.
(“A flower? How original. Alright, then, you must be the sun.”)
Author: aphodiopsis
Pairing: Lily/Alice. (Lily/James.)
Rating: T (PG-13)
Word Count: 4,371
Prompt: 90
Warnings: Sexual language, swearing, femmeslash, mild violence, character death
Summary: “It was like a leaf loving a hurricane. It couldn’t last.”
Author’s Notes: Ahhhh. A full week of spastic begging after I finished this, I finally got someone to beta it for me. All hail T. for that. Also, thanks to the mods for giving me an inspirational boost after I spent like four days writing one sentence; I finished the rest of the fic that night. Then I got early access to Pottermore. Fate!
Credit for the quote at the beginning of the story is already listed, and I obviously am not J. K. Rowling, so. Other things you might not have realized do not belong to me: The drinking song was adapted from lyrics included in Lord Gyric of Otershaghe’s Bawdy Song Book on the document “Songs that Ought NOT to be Sung.” Also, the Silver Snitches record was partially inspired by Elton John’s album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”
***
“I’ll ply the fire with kindling now; I’ll pull the blankets up to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I’d like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she’s got the urge for going and I guess she’ll have to go.”
- Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
***
Snidget Snogging is a complex drinking game that Lily Evans is pretty sure James Potter and Sirius Black made up as they went along. They bickered ferociously about the rules, which changed every round. (“Every time you take a drink from the orange goblet, you have to sing the school song in Mermish or you have to take a drink from the brown goblet.” “What if we don't know how to speak Mermish?” “No one knows how to speak Mermish, Evans. That's the point.”).
The more they drank, the more exceptions to these rules they seemed to recall. (“That's not Mermish, that's French. Drink!” “No. The Monitor sings everything in French.” “I thought Sirius was the Monitor?” “The Monitor can transfer his duties to any player at any point as long as both players happen to be wearing red, which we are. Honestly, Evans, keep up.”)
In the resulting game, Peter Pettigrew drank fourteen goblets in as many minutes, Mary Macdonald spent three rounds standing on her head, Remus Lupin suffered four separate nosebleeds, James’s eyebrows turned a brilliant shade of pink, and Lily had to snog James for a full eighteen seconds. After that, Sirius took turns snogging just about everyone, though he never lost a round.
Not until three a.m. do things finally begin to settle down. One by one, the teenagers quit their game and returned unsteadily to their respective dormitories. Now only Lily, James, and four empty bottles of Ogden’s finest are left in the wreckage of the Gryffindor common room.
Lily sprawls out on the floor before the fire. James stays in his armchair, glassy-eyed but otherwise seemingly unaffected by the liquor in his system. “You’re much more fun than you let on, Evans,” he says, “and not a bad kisser, besides.”
Lily looks at him and laughs. She’s only eighteen, but she doesn’t laugh as much as she used to, James thinks.
He feigns offense. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Thank you. Would you like to give it another go?’”
“Sorry, it’s just-your eyebrows.”
James touches his long, tapered fingers to his eyebrows, remembering. “I thought they were rather dashing, myself.”
“Quite.”
He watches her eyelids grow heavy and her breathing begin to slow, and he knows he ought to tell her to go to bed. Instead, he says, “Really, though. I thought you were opposed to breaking the rules, Miss Head Girl.”
“Less so than you would think: I skived off my parents’ funeral (“Well, that’s understandable,” he begins to say) for a shag.”
There is a minute of stunned silence during which Lily wonders why she felt the need to share this bit of information. Perhaps, she decides, it is to prove to him that one drunken snog does not mean she belongs to him. She has done worse things with worse people (and she does not belong to them, either).
James’s laugh sounds as though he is choking. “Really?”
“Cross my heart,” Lily says. She does so.
“Really?” He leans forward in his chair, looking at her with newfound respect. “With who?”
“Whom,” she corrects him automatically. “Alice Longbottom.”
“Wait, who?”
“Alice Longbottom-well, I mean, she wasn’t a Longbottom then; this was before she was married. You know her, right? Her gran’s friends with your mum.”
“Er-yeah. I know her,” he says. “You two … How did … So you’re … ?”
“No.” Her brow crinkles slightly. “Maybe. I don’t know. We were in love.”
“Oh.”
“I think.” Her frown deepens. “I loved her, anyway, and she-yes. We were in love.”
“Oh,” he says again.
Lily gets up and puts the new Silver Snitches album, “Road to Romania,” on the phonograph Mary left out when she went to bed. Even at a low volume, Morgana Maher’s voice is clear and rich over the deceptively cheerful guitar music, singing, “I will, I will love you forever, until the last of summer fades. I will, I will love you forever, until the end of this amortentia daze.” It fills the room with the sweet scents of coneflowers and fresh-cut hay.
She comes back and sits hugging her knees to her chest, her back to the fire. “You remember in fifth year, when we had those meetings with Professor McGonagall to talk about what we wanted to be?”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t know. I mean, I knew of dozens of things that I could do, but none of them seemed like something I would want to do forever. Professor Slughorn wanted me to do something with potions, you know, but that just seemed so … trivial, given everything. So she-McGonagall, that is, she said I ought to think about being an Auror, and I shouldn’t have any trouble as long as my Transfiguration grade didn’t slip any further.” Here she pauses to send James an accusatory glare. It irks her greatly that the only subject in which she struggles is the one in which he most excels.
“So I said I’d think about it,” she continues, “and she said she knew someone I could shadow if I was interested. She was really excited about it, too, so I said alright, and she said they’d be in touch.”
“Alice?” James asks.
Lily says, “Yes,” and without deciding to do it, she begins to tell him the rest of the story. “That was a really unpleasant summer for me. I spent the first part just walking around because my parents were at work and my sister always had her boyfriend over-which was actually pretty normal, but before then, I had always had Sev for company. On good days, my da would take me into the garage-that’s, um, where muggles work on cars, which are kind of like-”
“I know what cars are,” he assured her.
“Right,” she said. “So then one evening, da got home early and he asked Tuney-that’s my sister-to help him change the oil on the car, but she said she didn’t know how, and I didn’t know how, either, but I said I’d help anyway. And we were joking around, pretending we were working on a space ship-which is kind of like, I don’t know, a car that muggles take to the moon, or ... Well, never mind. The important thing was that I had oil in my hair and on my face and I was a total mess, and then suddenly this witch showed up, and she was …”
“Beautiful?” James suggests. It seems fitting.
“No,” Lily shakes her head. “No, Alice isn’t beautiful, but she’s … She’s elegant. She was very-well dressed, clean cut, not one strand of hair out of place. That sort of thing. She shook hands with my da and then with me, and we invited her in, and the whole time she had this look in her eye, like … like she was laughing at us or something. I hated her. I thought she was a snob.
“She stayed for dinner, and my parents were just completely in love with her. She was so polite. She laughed at my da’s jokes, she asked my mum about work, and then she helped Tuney with the dishes, which only made me hate her more. I knew she saw the way Tuney glared at her during dinner and thought she was being false or something, like she had some sort of hidden agenda that involved getting in good with some muggleborn nobody’s family or … I don’t know.
“Turns out that’s just how Alice is. She honestly doesn’t believe that anyone doesn’t like her, and she can’t sit still. So, anyhow, I walked her to the door, and she told me that I could come to Ministry with her in the morning if I wanted, and I fully intended to tell her not to bother, but then she hugged me, and I … I just …”
“Fell in love?” James has moved from his armchair to the floor, where he sits across from her, listening intently.
“No. Not yet. I just thought, ‘Wow. I am so disgusting and she’s all clean and fresh and smells like flowers, and she doesn’t mind at all.’ And it wasn’t one of those awkward hugs where the person holds you at arms’ length and sort of pats your back. It was a real hug, like she liked me or something, though I’m sure I was rude to her the whole night. So I said okay.
“And she gave me this smile. You would have thought I had just agreed to give her the world or something, she was so happy-and I would have, probably, if she’d been smiling like that. I got all warm and jittery, and then she hugged me again, and it felt like … amazing. Just amazing. I didn’t sleep at all that night.”
Lily realizes that she is smiling at the memory and looks to James to see if he is upset. On the contrary, he smiles back. Encouraged, she continues, “Alice graduated the year before we started Hogwarts, which means she’d been an Auror for … about a year, I guess. She was fairly new, anyway, so she didn’t have any really big assignments-or if she did, I didn’t know about them.”
She tells him about going to various remote locations and building complex protection spells around camps where Aurors rested during particularly long, dangerous assignments. Lily was not allowed to speak to Alice while they were working, but she was allowed to help. She cast the spells she knew, and learned some she didn’t, and tried not to become distracted by the way Alice’s whole body became taught and focused when she cast a spell.
“She was so incredibly clever, and she worked so hard. I’ve never respected anyone more in my life,” Lily says.
“But you didn’t love her then.”
“Not yet.”
***
Afterward, Lily would test Alice’s charms and Alice would test Lily’s, almost like real partners. Then they sat in the shade and waited for nightfall when the other Aurors would arrive. The afternoons were theirs.
Once, Alice found a trick wand in her pocket. She had meant to conjure a blanket for them to sit on, but the wand turned into a rubber chicken in her hand. Lily was startled. Alice only laughed. “My dad,” she explained. “Mentally, he’s about seven. He’s from an old pureblooded family-both of my parents are-so he’s never had to work a day in his life. Plus he married my mother, who was born seventy, and he thinks he needs to balance her out.”
Lily laughed. “My da’s a mad scientist,” she said. “That’s sort of-like Merlin, I guess.” Alice nodded. “He wants to go to the moon.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
“Oh, er.” Lily glanced at Alice to see if she was taking the mickey, but her face was serious. “It’s not that easy for muggles. Only a few of us can go at a time, and you have to go through a lot of training and become an astronaut.”
“Then he should become an astronaut,” Alice said, as though this decided the matter.
“He’d like that,” she agreed. If Alice had been Mr. Evans’s daughter, Lily knew, she would have found a way to make it happen. Alice did not overcome obstacles; she barreled through them. “Do wizards go to the moon?”
“Of course.” Alice seemed bewildered that she had even asked. “Don’t they teach you anything at Hogwarts? Where do you think ‘Loony Luna, Loony Light’ comes from?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Of course not, it’s only the second most famous drinking song in the world.” Alice rolled her eyes. “Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know ‘The Ball of Ballynoor.’”
“Er …”
“Merlin’s balls, Evans,” Alice sighed in frustration. Then she launched into a drinking song so loud, long, and bawdy it made Lily’s head spin and her ears turn bright red.
When at she finished, she turned to her young companion and asked, “Got it?” Lily nodded, glad it was done. “Good. Then join in. ‘Balls to yer partner, arse against the wall!’ C’mon, Evans. Don’t be a prude.”
“‘If ye cannot get head at the good ol’ Hog’s Head, ye cannot get laid at all.’” Lily sang timidly at first, but then Alice joined in with her strong, proud alto, and by the time the first Auror showed up, disheveled but uninjured, they were practically shouting, “‘It started out so simple-like: each lad and lassie mated, but pretty soon the doin’s got so bloody complicated! Oh the ball of Ballynoor! Yer wife and my wife were fucking on the floor!’”
“No trouble then, I take it?” the Auror, a man named Williamson, asked, chuckling.
“Miss Evans wouldn’t allow it,” Alice teased. “Everyone else alright?”
“Yeah-false alarm. Kingsley got in a scrape with one of the local dogs, though. Castro’s just patching him up and they’ll be along.”
“He’s alright, though?” Lily asked. She liked Kingsley, who was never too busy to share stories from his years in training, though she wasn’t sure she could believe half of what he said.
“Fine, fine,” Williamson assured her.
***
“So, wait, Aurors just sit around singing drinking songs?” James is delighted.
“Hush, Potter.”
***
They were only ever in real danger twice. The first time was the evening Lily showed Alice she could make a whistle by cupping a blade of grass between her hands and blowing through them.
“How do you do that?” Alice asked. Lily showed her, but when Alice tried it, positioning her hands and the grass as she had seen Lily do, no sound came out.
“Try again,” Lily said.
Alice did, with the same result. “Rubbish,” she announced, tossing away the grass. “Teach me something else.”
“No, here.” Lily moved closer. She plucked a fresh blade of grass and held it out for Alice to take. Then she wrapped her fingers around the other woman’s, positioning them just so, and moved them to her mouth. “Blow,” she instructed.
Alice blew. A low, breathy note issued forth from the place where their hands joined. She met Lily’s gaze above their hands and grinned. “Brilliant.” Then she leaned forward and brushed their lips together so lightly it hardly counted as a kiss.
For Lily, it was the first kiss that had ever counted. Her heart pounded so wildly in her ears that she hardly heard the muffled thump behind her, but Alice did. She was on her feet in an instant.
“Castro,” Lily heard her say as though from a great distance. “Why didn’t you take him to St. Mungo’s?” The redhead got unsteadily to her feet and turned to see what the fuss was about.
Kingsley and Williamson had returned with their robes torn and bloody. A body lay on the ground between them-Castro.
“Couldn’t make it that far,” Kingsley panted, drawing his wand. Alice was faster. She knelt beside Castro and began to peel back his clothing to reveal the latticework of cursed wounds beneath.
“Evans, go for help,” she said.
“No,” Kingsley said. “No time.”
“Now!” Alice snapped.
Castro groaned and exerted his remaining strength to recoil in pain from Alice’s probing fingers. “Give him your hand, Evans,” Kingsley said. “Keep him still.”
Lily did-not because, as they would later tell her, she was a brave girl, but because it was the only thing there was to do. She stroked Castro’s bloodied brown hair back from his high brow and murmured to him. Afterward, she could never remember what she had said. She hoped it was something comforting. She knew only that she had kept on crooning, barely pausing to take a breath, until long after they knew he was dead.
“Lily.” Alice’s cool hand rested lightly on her shoulder. Her voice was calm. “Lily, that’s enough. It’s time to go home.”
“I can’t.” She was not ready to let go of him. She was not ready for him to be gone. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
In the end, Lily went home with Alice so she would not have to explain to her parents what had happened. Alice drew her a bath in a large claw-footed tub and stayed to be sure she would not drown herself. Lily might have asked for privacy, but she knew Alice would only laugh and call her a prude. When she was clean, Alice dried her off with a large lavender towel, dressed her in borrowed pajamas, and combed out her hair as though she were very young. Then, though there were dozens of guest rooms available, she took Lily to bed with her.
Both the woman and the girl were glad not to be alone.
Lily lay shivering beneath the heavy comforter until Alice reached out and drew her into her arms. “Are you cold?” she asked, pressing a light kiss to her temple. With a single finger, she turned Lily’s face to her, and then tilted her chin up for a kiss.
Lily felt it all through her, a cord of heat and electricity from her lips to her very toes. She gasped as though drowning. “Alice, I don’t-“
“Hush,” she said, and silenced her with her lips.
***
“And then you fell in love?”
“Oh, no, I’d been a goner for a long time before that.”
“So how did it happen?”
“I’m not sure-quietly.”
“Poetic,” James says. “Tell me about the second time you were in danger.”
“Oh.” Lily shrugs. “It was really quick. It was the week before my parents’ funeral. A couple of dark wizards found out about our hideout and managed to Apparate in.”
“You took on a couple of Death Eaters?” he asks, impressed.
“Suspected Death Eaters,” she corrects him. “They weren’t expecting us to be there. They were trying to set up an ambush. We stunned them and then a Ministry witch showed up and took over. The worst bit was trying to set up a new site before the others finished their mission.”
“But if you had all those protection spells, how did they even get in?”
“James Potter, do you honestly think I would share confidential Ministry information with you?”
“You don’t know, do you?”
She laughs. “Not a clue.”
“Incredible,” he says. “You sing pub songs with Aurors, fight off Death Eaters, shag a bird, and play a drinking game with the Marauders and you’re still the most bloody boring person on earth.”
“It wasn’t really like that,” she says. “It wasn’t some torrid affair or anything. I just … I loved her, and after my parents died, I couldn’t live in the house with my sister anymore. So Alice let me move in, and I kept having these terrible nightmares, and she … She comforted me-or distracted me. The night before my parents’ funeral was particularly bad, which meant she had to be particularly distracting, and I guess we just got carried away.”
“They don’t mind, you know-your parents.”
“How could you possibly-“
“I missed my dad’s funeral, couldn’t take it.”
“Oh. I’m …”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
They sit in silence, while in the background Morgana purrs, “Baby girls’ an easy score, been around these hoops before. Boys who look out for the gold are missing out and growing old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a Snitch is a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but only a Quaffle goes through the rings.”
“So what happened?” James asks after a long time.
“What do you mean?”
“You two aren’t together anymore, right? So something must have happened.”
“Yeah,” Lily agrees with a humorless laugh. “Nothing big. My Hogwarts letter came the day after my parents’ funeral-“
“-Which you skived off for a shag.”
“Yes, and Alice said, ‘Lily, I want you to know, just so you won’t be surprised, because I don’t have any secrets from you.’
“And I said, ‘Okay.’
“And she said, ‘I have a boyfriend. Well, not right now, but when you leave for school, I’m going to take him back. We’re going to get married.’ She said it was nothing personal, just that she wanted a family and children, and she couldn’t have those things with me. She said it had nothing to do with him being pureblood, and I was crazy about her, but even I didn’t believe that.”
“He took her back?” James asks.
“Several times,” Lily says. “Apparently, her whole restless bit applies to relationships, too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m …”
“Yeah, me too.”
Without realizing it, they have come to kneel with their knees touching, heads together, so that their faces are suddenly very close. Lily shivers unconsciously. James’s hands are shaking. “So,” he says, “last year, when I asked you out, and you said you couldn’t … ?” She nods. “And now …?”
“I miss her,” she says. “I miss her desperately, but it was like a leaf loving a hurricane. I couldn’t … It’s better this way.”
He says, “You’re no leaf, Lily.”
“Not with you,” she agrees, “but you’re not exactly a hurricane, you know?”
He isn’t sure what this means, nor if he wants to find out. Instead he asks, “So-Auror, huh?”
“Yes,” she says. “No. Maybe.” He laughs. She swats his arm, and it actually hurts, which only causes him to laugh harder. “Oh, shut up. I was going to be an Auror, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What happened?” he asks diligently, though his eyes are still laughing.
“Crouch authorized them to use Unforgiveable on suspects. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the intent, of course. Things are getting really bad, and we ought to do everything we can, but that doesn’t mean-” Lily’s ranting has begun to build momentum, but James barely lets her get started before he cuts her off with a kiss.
She doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t resist. She closes her eyes memorizes this moment so that, years later, she will be able to recall it with perfect clarity when Alice shows up on her doorstep smelling like summer's last blossom and announces, “I'm leaving, going into hiding--in Australia. Come with me.”
(His mouth pressing so hard against hers it almost hurts.)
It's tempting. Working for the Order is hardest on Lily. She lives in fear of the future--of what she might have to do. James has already claimed his first victim. He was lucky. The wizard he killed wasn't acting under the Imperius Curse, was a real honest-to-Merlin Death Eater.
(His parted lips, his too-eager tongue.)
But he was still alive. He could have made a different choice.
And now he isn't. He can't.
(His fingers ensnared in the tangles of her hair.)
Lily knows her time will come. She tries to delay it by spending free afternoons in St. Mungo's, brewing potions that will heal Death Eaters and Order Members and civilians alike. She knows that, had she been born into a Wizarding family, this is the path she would have chosen. She hates her dead parents for this, a little bit--for the knowledge that she will have to kill someone she might have saved, that she will never forgive herself for it.
(His surprising artlessness, when she'd expected him to know everything, everything about making love.)
She says, “I want to. I want to more than anything-but I can’t.”
“I'm pregnant.”
“Oh.” Lily is nearly certain congratulations are not in order. A biting wind invites itself in through the open doorway. It is the last day of August, but autumn is already upon them. “Me, too. Come inside.”
“I want my son to be safe.”
“Me, too.”
“so I'm going.”
“Me--No, I can't. Come inside. It's cold out.”
(His glasses bumping against the bridge of her nose.)
Alice still isn't beautiful, but she is still used to getting her way. She still has no respect for other people's boundaries, physical or otherwise. She cups Lily's freckled cheek, says, “You look exhausted.”
“I've been told I'm glowing.”
“Not really.”
Lily is not vain. Alice's honesty is a comfort. She smiles. The lines around her eyes deepen. She looks much older than she is, but somehow this makes her even lovelier than she was at sixteen--breathtaking, really.
(His eyes. Oh Merlin, it’s trite, but they never looked that way before--humble, submissive.)
She says, “I'm not leaving James. He's only in this for me.”
Alice's tone is unwontedly harsh when she says, “You don't owe him anything.”
(His unnecessary gentleness in removing his fingers from her hair.)
“Yes, I do.” Lily is certain of this. He is fighting a war for her sake. He is the father of her child. He loves her. She's a wreck more days than she isn't; she shouts and laughs and cries for no reason at all. She doesn't deserve him, but he loves her. “And I love him.”
“You loved me once.” Alice is quieter now, unsure
“Yes,” Lily agrees. They are quiet for a while. Lily wonders if she can convince Alice to go home to Frank. Alice wonders if Frank will take her back. At last, Lily says, “James and I are going into hiding--here, in England. You and Frank could ...”
(“You’re a flower, I think. What am I?”)
“Yes.” Alice's distant gaze hardens and becomes cold. “Yes.” She straightens her shoulders and turns around, then hesitates and cannot keep herself from saying, “If you really loved me--”
Lily refuses to be baited. “You left,” she says. “I was just another landmark in your wanderlust, and then you went back to Frank. You always do.”
“I did love you,” Alice says.
Lily says, “I know.” She closes the door. She goes into the kitchen. She sets a kettle on the stove. She moves to the living room. She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and curls herself into the corner of the couch. James will be finishing up his meeting with Dumbledore anytime now. She waits for her husband to come home and drive out the cold that has settled in her bones.
(“A flower? How original. Alright, then, you must be the sun.”)