Lily Evans—well, she isn’t Lily Evans anymore, but she hasn’t gotten used to calling herself Lily Potter yet. It’s only been four months since she married James Potter and it’s only been four months since she willingly gave up the last tie to her family she still possessed.
Originally, they planned to hyphenate. “James and Lily Evans-Potter,” he’d whispered to her. “I like that sound of it, don’t you?”
And she had. Eight months ago, when he’d proposed and she’d cried too hard to answer and he’d had that anxious deer-in-headlights look that was too sweet for her to do anything but grab him and kiss him and let him take her hand to slip the ring on, and then stare at it in wonder before kissing him again, and again.
She’d never actually said yes. She didn’t realize until hours later when he’d already stepped away—to brush his teeth, he said, but the last time she checked brushing your teeth didn’t involve a mirror and a lot of screeching in the next room—and by then it had been too late. She’d been tired, it was late, he’d taken quite a while with his high-pitched nighttime routine, and by the time he came back she was already half asleep and didn’t have the energy to do anything but shift obligingly so he could spoon her properly.
And, well, you can’t exactly go and accept your boyfriend’s (fiancé’s?) proposal after he’s already told basically everyone he possibly can.
It’s not like she minds that part, she likes seeing James when he’s happy like this. She likes the way he smiles so hard it looks like it hurts, she likes the way he dotes on her and stares at her like she hung the stars in the sky (a joke she can only make when Sirius isn’t around). She likes how much he touches her, just little things, bumping her gently with his shoulders and kissing her cheeks and forehead, taking her hand whenever she’s close enough, finding ways to lean on her whenever he can. Mary teased her, the first time she found Lily in their dorm room, James curled up next to her, sound asleep, but Lily just looked up and shushed her, then went back to reading next to him.
They started dating when they were seventeen, after he came up to her in their sixth year and apologized for being such a prat. She didn’t accept, but she didn’t send him away either, and she let him try and try and try to prove himself to her.
She let him try until he stopped. She let him keep trying until it stopped being trying and it just started coming naturally to him.
That was when she started letting herself admit how fit he was, which she’d noticed much earlier but refused to act on for multiple reasons. Mostly because she didn’t want to be that girl with a idiot boyfriend she only dated for his looks. She wanted an intellectual boyfriend.
She’d tried to find one, and she’d found an excellent candidate, but as it turned out, Remus was not in the slightest bit interested in an intellectual girlfriend and was extremely interested in an idiot boyfriend who did happen to be wildly attractive. When he admitted this to Lily, she shook her head and silently mourned the loss of her chance, then told him he had terrible taste. Remus had agreed wholeheartedly, not looking in the least bit sorry. Because he’s an arse. (An arse she’s made an agreement to run off with and marry if they ever get too fed up with their idiot boyfriends.)
(Well. His idiot boyfriend. Her idiot husband, now.)
She’d dated a few Ravenclaw boys, one that was dreadfully boring, one that never learned to tell time, and one that had dumped her because his tea leaves told him to and then called her irrational when he tried to get her back the next day after realizing he’d been looking at the wrong section in his Divination textbook and she refused.
There’d also been a Ravenclaw girl, because she was curious once and the girl was very pretty indeed and her voice did all sorts of things to Lily’s insides. It had been absolutely lovely until the girl came and sat her down and told her that she’d had a vision (she was an actual Seer, unlike the last boy) and she’d watched Lily die in her arms at a very young age. They’d both cried quite a bit, but the girl had been very clear that if Lily stayed she would die soon, and Lily hadn’t had much choice in the matter after that. She’d let the girl leave and then she’d left too and she told herself it was nothing but girlhood curiosity.
And a year later, James Potter started becoming actually decent and she decided dating an intellectual was too much work and he was smart enough on paper, even if he was thick as a post. So she’d hung around and eventually forgiven him, and realized very reluctantly that he wasn’t, actually, an idiot. He was a very smart man that didn’t care enough to do any work he didn’t absolutely have to, and it all worked out for him because he was James Potter, and he was made of magic.
(Which meeting his parents only confirmed further. If they were both magic, how could he be anything but?)
(Not magic in the actually-magic sense. Not in the pureblood sense. More like the type of magic Lily used to believe in when she was a little girl and hadn’t yet realized she could fly instead of fall and move things with her mind. The type of magic in old fairy-tales and dreams, the type that surrounds people who are just too captivating to tear your eyes around. Magic in that sense.)
So she’d started flirting with him because he’d stopped flirting with her and for a year he gave her nothing but pure friendship and she’d thought she’d lost her chance until their seventh year when she’d come down to the common room either very early or very late and found him alone in front of the fireplace, crying.
Lily had not asked if he was okay, because she knew he’d lie and anyway it was very obvious he wasn’t. But she did ask what had happened.
“It’s silly,” he’d said.
“Most things are,” she’d said. “Tell me anyway?”
He’d laughed but it was hollow and then he’d looked up at her and said in a voice full of pain, “Do you think I’m unloveable?”
Lily had looked down at him, and said, completely honestly, “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone as lovable as you, James Potter.”
“Says the woman who rejected me for five years,” he pointed out. It had given her a bit of a thrill to hear him call her a woman. She was seventeen and not very used to it, and she isn’t now either, but now she’s accepted she might never be and then it was all still quite new. She wasn’t a girl, she knew that, but a woman seemed like a bit of a stretch.
“Well, yes,” she admitted, trying to pretend he hadn’t thrown her into a tizzy with an offhanded comment. “But you grow on people, I’ve heard.”
“You’ve heard?”
“Yes.”
“That I grow on people?”
“Yes.”
“Which people?”
And she’d huffed, not knowing exactly what to say, not having planned on this at all, and said, “Me. You’re a very hard person to hate.”
“You don’t hate me,” James said slowly.
“I don’t,” she admitted.
“You forgive me?”
“As…as much as I ever will, I think. Yes.”
“So you don’t hate me, you…”
“I love you,” she said very suddenly, almost regretting leaving her dorm. “It’s quite annoying at times.”
She hadn’t been sure what to expect. It was all wrong. It was dark and he had been crying and probably still was, and he was huddled in a ball on the floor, head still between his knees and eyes peaking out, and she was crouched beside him confessing her love.
He’d closed his eyes, then opened them. “I—“ he’d started to say. “I—I can’t, Lils, I’m sorry, not now, I just—I just-“
And then he’d started sobbing, sobbing out loud instead of crying silently like he had been earlier, and she’d reached for him and he collapsed into her arms and she held him as he cried and whispered to her about a boy who didn’t love him and a boy James wasn’t sure he could love anymore, and she’d held him and thought of the Ravenclaw girl and almost said, I know. I understand. It hurts, doesn’t it? It hurts when they’re so brilliant it leaves you aching and when they love you so much they leave you.
It hurts.
He hurt. She hurt.
They didn’t kiss that night, he was too busy crying and still half in love with someone else, but they did three weeks later and then she’d asked him on a date and said he didn’t have to promise anything, but she fancied him and she wanted to know if he still felt anything for her.
She felt like a schoolgirl. Which she was, but, well, she felt much younger than she was.
He thanked her and said he’d see and kissed her and told her a month later he did still fancy her a bit, and he’d like to her her boyfriend if she’d still let him, and she’d pretended to think about it before accepting, and it was perfect, really. If they’d started dating at any time before that she would’ve broken up with him on the principle that you don’t marry your boyfriend from your school years, but she was seventeen and so was he and they were months away from a war, and really, why shouldn’t they?
There was no reason not to. So they did.
They dated and they found a flat and moved in together and she met his parents, lovely people that they were, and he met hers and they liked him very much and he met her sister who hated him. And then her parents went and died a month later in a car crash she didn’t quite know if she believed was really a car crash, but James didn’t let her look into it. He told her it would only drive her mad, and he was right, probably. He almost always was.
That did drive her mad, but in a loving way.
They dated for three years before he proposed, and she wasn’t really surprised because there was—is—a war, and he’s James Potter of the parents with so much love, and then they were dead and she was almost waiting, after they died. She was waiting for him to propose once he realized if they waited the people who would be there to see it would only decrease.
It’s a good thing, anyway. They’ve lost people in the four months since they were married. They lost people during their engagement, so they hurried with the wedding and said they were keeping it small when they really were filling it to the brim, only with ghosts.
It was a nice wedding, anyway. It was a nice wedding and afterwards they bought a house, a proper one, in a village called Godric’s Hollow. They’re still working on setting up the house, but it’s nice, the domesticity of it all. It’s almost like mind Healing, or Muggle therapy. Exactly what both of them need, just a little home to tidy up and make into their own. They’ve had a few arguments, sure, but nothing worse than their disagreement over the paint in their bedroom, and they settled that easily enough. Sirius laughed the first time he saw the half-maroon, half-spring green walls, divided exactly down the middle of their headboard, but Remus just smacked him and told Lily it looked lovely and Mary thought it was the cutest thing when Lily told her the story, and it is, isn’t it? They’re so perfectly in love in the middle of a war. Marlene was murdered and Dorcas was killed avenging her, Mary’s Muggle boyfriend was killed in a raid a few months ago, Remus and Sirius are turning on each other, but look at James and Lily, happy in their sweet little house full of love. Look at them, and their perfect family of two.
Look at them.
Aren’t they so sweet?
Aren’t they cute?
Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you wish you had what they do? Married at nineteen years old, content even with all of the chaos, swearing eternal love to one another every time they part because it just might be the last time.
And now there’s this.
Lily Evans, Lily Potter, Lily Evans-Potter whose father never walked her down the aisle and whose sister won’t speak to her, is sitting on the floor of her perfect, freshly painted bathroom, staring at a positive pregnancy test.
Because apparently studious Head Girl Evans doesn’t know how to properly cast a contraceptive charm.
(She does, actually. She just forgot. And now here she is. Taking the rest of the sixteen pregnancy tests she bought from the Muggle drugstore when she told James she was picking up candy for their movie night.)
(Wait, shit. She forgot the candy. She has to go back.)
(Goddamnit.)
She waits a few minutes, then she paces for a few more minutes because she needs to move, and then she checks them. They’re all positive. All sixteen tests.
(She panicked, okay?)
She’s pregnant with James Potter’s baby.
At nineteen years old. (Her birthday is in a month. But still.)
In the middle of a war.
That’s where James is right now, by the way. Providing security for an exchange of something he isn’t permitted to know about. If he did, Lily would know, even though everything’s on a strict need-to-know basis. Everything James knows, Lily knows, and anything Lily hears, she tells James.
(Remus refuses to do this with Sirius, which is part of the reason they’re falling apart. Remus doesn’t want to admit what he’s been doing to Sirius and Sirius thinks he’s turning traitor, and Lily and James know all of this because Sirius tells James everything and Remus tells Lily everything. James thinks Remus is being overdramatic, since his massive secret is just that he’s been visiting werewolf packs and he genuinely enjoys it, but Lily thinks she understands. She understands that Remus doesn’t want anyone to think of him as anything other than a person, even if he isn’t really, not completely. She understands that he doesn’t want things to change.)
(God, if only things could stop changing.)
But things keep changing and now Lily is married and now she’s pregnant and she doesn’t know what to do.
She doesn’t know what to do.
James wants a baby. She knows it from how he insisted on painting and cleaning up the spare room even though they didn’t have any purpose for it. She knows it from how he acts whenever Arthur or Molly Weasley bring along one of their numerous offspring, how happy he looks cooing at the babies and how content he is talking to the older ones. She sees how eagerly he agrees when Molly offers to hand him Fred or George, how carefully he holds them and the joy written across his face as he looks at them. She’s met his parents, she knows he’d be a good father. He’s had an excellent role model.
She’s not so sure she’d be a good mother, but she wants to try. She wants to see James holding a baby that looks like a little bit of them both, she wants tiny socks and wooden cribs and first steps and first words, she wants all of it.
And here is it.
She’ll have it. She just needs to wait a few months, and then it’ll all be hers. Hers and James’.
This is where she cries for joy and sets up some cute, elaborate way to tell James, isn’t it?
Twenty minutes later, Lily is banging on the door of the flat Remus shares with Sirius.
He opens it fairly quickly, and this time she doesn’t have to remind him about the security questions, which is objectively a good thing, but it means he’s getting used to this. It means it’s been going on for long enough for Remus to get used to it, which just makes her want to spiral further.
“What did I tell you when you told me you fancied James?” Remus asks her, and he’s holding his wand. There are bags under his eyes, he’s leaning against the doorway like he’s too tired to stand up straight, and he’s holding his wand. Tightly.
“That you thought I was more sensible than that, but you supposed I didn’t need glasses after all,” she says, and maybe she would’ve giggled at the reminder a few months ago, but now she just stands there stone-faced, hand on her own wand. “What did I give you in sixth year, after you told me your secret?”
“A heart-shaped box of chocolates that you’d covered in rainbow glitter,” he mutters, rolling his eyes, but he steps back to let her in. “Which I still can’t get off that jumper.”
“You love it,” she sniffs, and then she remembers why she’s here and grabs onto his arm, shutting the door behind her. She hears him whisper something as the lock clicks and then he slips his wand back into his pocket.
“What’s up?” Remus asks.
“I’m pregnant,” Lily says, and then she bursts into tears.
It takes Lily seventeen minutes to stop crying and then it’s only because she’s starting laughing at how uncomfortable Remus looks with all of it. He’s trying to be comforting, of course, he lead her over to the couch and offered her a cup of tea, but she was crying too hard to drink it and that’s really all he’s got. Lily knows this, so she isn’t upset with him, but it’s funny.
“Shut up,” Remus snaps as she dissolves into hysterics, because he knows exactly why she’s laughing because this happens a lot. “Do you—can we talk now? Please?”
“Okay, fine,” she wheezes, trying to catch her breath. “But, uh, that was pretty much all I had.”
“Right,” he says, nodding. “So. Pregnant?”
“Apparently,” she says.
“Did you…see a doctor?” he ventures.
“I took sixteen tests,” she says, giggling a little.
“You realize the entire reason I’m gay is so that I don’t have problems like these, right?” Remus says after a long pause.
“Fuck off, you’re gay because Sirius is a guy. If he wasn’t you’d be straight. Also, you don’t have a uterus!”
Remus shrugs, not looking particularly bothered, which means him and Sirius are in a good spot and Lily is glad for that. She doesn’t feel like dealing with his relationship problems right now.
“That, too,” he concedes. “Do you want advice or did you just want to bitch about James Potter with company? Because if it’s the first I might actually be the worst person you could’ve gone to.”
“He’s such an arse,” Lily mutters instead of answering the question.
“I don’t think it was his arse that caused the problem,” Remus says in a low voice, and Lily smacks his arm.
“Hitting a pregnant woman, Lupin?” she taunts when he attempts to get his revenge. “Low, even for you.”
“Are you going to keep it?” he asks, unhelpful as always. She thought she’d made it pretty clear she didn’t want to talk about it.
“I don’t fucking know,” she groans, and she thinks of the Ravenclaw girl and how maybe Lily would’ve been dead by now but she wouldn’t be pregnant in a war. Maybe Lily would be dead, but she would’ve been happy, and she wouldn’t have outlived Marlene.
“Are you going to tell James?” Remus asks, and Lily swears she can feel her heart stop as she realizes just how much she doesn’t know the answer to that question.
“I,” she says, and then she closes her mouth, and Remus watches her for a few seconds before he gets up.
She doesn’t speak, so she can’t ask where he’s going, but she knows a little while later when she hears the kettle go off.
She almost goes to Severus. She doesn’t. She knows she can’t. But she wants to so, so badly.
She aches for him, half the time. Not in a romantic way. Never in a romantic way. But she wants to hear him breathing, wants to listen to the sound of him muttering instructions under his breath as he works, the sound of his nails anxiously tapping the side of a pewter cauldron.
She just wants him back. Her friend. Her Sev. She just misses him.
If Lily could, she’d go back to her first year of Hogwarts, when she was eleven years old and she was still friends with Severus and James Potter was just a boy in her House and she wasn’t pregnant and there wasn’t a war.
But she can’t. Severus chose the Death Eaters over her, and she chose the boy who drove him to them.
(James thinks Sev should be begging for her forgiveness. That marrying him shouldn’t even compare to everything that Severus has done. Lily doesn’t say anything. She made a choice that night or morning in seventh year, when she told James she loved him, and Sev knows it.)
(Her betrayal is just as personal. Her crime is the same in a different way, her innocence just as stained.)
(There is no way anything will ever possibly bring her and Sev back together, but she’ll love him forever in the way you love your dearest friend and she knows he’ll love her too.)
(Sometimes that’s all that can get her to sleep. The knowledge that wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, Severus Snape loves her and he won’t ever be able to free himself from the guilt of leaving her.)
(She won’t either, so it’s only fair.)
She wants to go to Severus. But she can’t. So she just goes home, and waits for James to get home.
James is ten minutes late, which only scares her a little bit, because even though she knows she was just at Remus’ and Sirius wasn’t there so James and Sirius were probably out together and of course he’s going to be a little delayed, he never misses a chance to spend time with Sirius, this is her husband she’s talking about. She has no interest in becoming a widow.
Or…
Or a single mother, her brain supplies unhelpfully.
Lily, a mother. It doesn’t seem all the bad, just…
Not now. She’s not even twenty yet.
She’s still a fucking teenager. This is a teen pregnancy.
She won’t be a teen mom, she’ll be twenty by the time…
By the time the baby is born. Because there’s a baby. An actual, living baby, inside of her.
Well, just a clump of cells at this point, really. Does that make it better? The logical side of her is saying yes, it’s fine not to want a clump of cells, it would be shameful not to want a baby but this isn’t a baby yet, it’s not, so…
The door to the flat opens. Lily resists the urge to jump to her feet, instead she remains on the couch and she’s still there when James walks in.
“Prongs?” she asks. With James, Sirius, and Peter she doesn’t really bother with security questions. Their Animagus forms are proof enough.
James nods, transforming into the deer as he does so that when his head goes down it’s Prongs’ head and when it comes up it’s his own again. “Now for yours…let’s see…”
“I’m not in the mood, James,” she mutters. Usually he turns this into a sex thing. Almost always he turns this into a sex thing, except when they have company over.
Well…
Company that’s not Sirius. In front of Sirius, her husband’s sense of shame seems to melt away completely. To be fair, Sirius does the same thing, and he does tend to randomly grope Remus, but still. Lily has her boundaries.
And right now, sex got her into all of this, so she isn’t really feeling like reminding herself of that.
“Sorry, flower,” he says. “What did I say to you after we kissed for the first time?”
“That you still weren’t in love with me,” she recites obligingly. “But that you thought you were getting there.”
“And I was right.” He pulls his jacket off, dropping it on the arm of the couch, and plops down next to her. “What’s wrong? Or do you not want to talk about it? Or is it just…well, the war.”
Lily shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said honestly. “But I have to. It’s not right to you if I don’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” James assures her. “And whatever it is, if I can I’ll help. Or support you, or…you know.”
Lily smiles weakly, leaning into his shoulder. His arm immediately curls around her shoulder, and she gives a little sigh of contentment, allowing herself this brief moment of calm before she ruins it.
“You want to have kids,” she says. It isn’t a question. They haven’t talked about it before, but it isn’t a question.
“Well, yes,” he admits. “Not right now, of course, once everything’s settled down and more stable. And if you don’t want to…we can talk about it. Later. As soon as we’ve won the war.”
“You’d best win it quick, then,” she mutters. “I’m pregnant now.”
James freezes. Then, finally, he whispers, “What?”
“I’m pregnant,” she repeats.
He turns, grabbing her shoulders and staring at her as a grin slowly grows on his face. It’s almost manic, both the smile and his expression. He’s almost manic.
“Lils, that’s great!” he says quickly. “Really! You need me to win a war in nine months, I’ll do it, just let me call up Sirius and we’ll have it sorted. It’ll be okay. It’s going to be okay, everything’s going to be okay, we’re going to be—“
(In another universe, she says nothing. She just smiles and nods and lets all her fears be hidden underneath the wave of happiness. She lets his excitement drown her doubt out.)
(In another universe, she says nothing.)
(In another universe, she says nothing, and Harry Potter is born.)
(In this one, she opens her mouth, and as she does the little boy with messy black hair and bright green eyes disappears from her future.)
(She can almost feel it. She can almost feel her baby’s life being snuffed out as she opens her mouth, and it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done but it’s also easy.)
(And Harry Potter is gone, just like that.)
“James,” Lily Evans, Lily Potter, Lily Evans-Potter, just plain old Lily who won’t be having a baby at all, maybe, interrupts, because she can see he’s lying. “I don’t know if I want to keep it.“
James goes silent.
(It doesn’t matter what he says. Lily has opened her mouth, Lily has spoken the words, and whichever way this conversation goes from here it does not matter. Lily’s son is gone.)
“I feel terrible,” he says finally. “Because my parents tried, and tried, and tried. And they lost so many babies. I have so many siblings, if you think about it, siblings I’ve never even met. Siblings who never got to live. A few of them got names, even. The one who made it the farthest was stillborn at seven months. Her name was Alaya. She would’ve been three years older than me if she lived.
“And here we are,” he continued. “We didn’t even fucking try. And it’s a terrible time. In the middle of a fucking war, and neither of us are even twenty yet. We’re fucking teenagers.”
Lily squeezed his hand, pulling it off her shoulder. He let the other one fall too, and the motion felt almost like he was relieved.
“And I feel fucking terrible about it,” he repeated. “But you’re probably right. It’s not a good time. And I’ll probably regret it forever, but not more than I would if you had the baby and it got hurt or killed or…”
“I will too,” she murmurs. “It’s already killing me because I’m not happy about it. Because this is supposed to be happy, and—and—“
“Merlin, Lils,” James breathes, and then she’s crying and he’s holding her and she’s pretty sure he’s crying too because her shoulder feels wet but she doesn’t know because she can’t hear it over the sound of her own sobs.
They cry together, for a very long time.
And then they stop. And a few days later, Lily goes to a Muggle building and uses magic to make the receptionist think she has an appointment.
And then there is no more baby.
And the next time she sees Remus, he gives her a questioning look and she just shakes her head.
In about two years, Frank and Alice Longbottom will be killed personally by Lord Voldemort. He will try to kill their one-year-old son (the one who always reminded Lily of what could’ve been her own baby) and he will fail. The power of a mother’s love, Dumbledore will proclaim, and Lily will laugh long and hard once she’s alone. When she expects to hear herself, it sounds more like Severus. Bitter and harsh, like he always was.
Then, she’ll cry. Alice was her friend, after all, and Frank was James’ first Quidditch Captain.
In two more years, when she’s twenty-three and the war is firmly established as a thing of the past, she’ll get pregnant again. This time, on purpose.
The baby will be a girl, and they’ll name her Euphemia Katherine, after James’ mother and her own. She’ll have Lily’s red hair and James’ dark eyes, and something about her will feel slightly off to Lily until she’s a year old, the day after her second Halloween, and then everything will feel perfectly normal and eventually Lily will forget she ever had a single uneasy feeling about her baby. (Her second, she keeps thinking. Her second child.)
When Little Effie, as they call her, is about a year and a half old, Lily will get pregnant again. Another girl, and they’ll give her a nice name they both like, without any particularly meaning attached to any part of it. Just a nice, pretty name for their pretty little baby.
There’ll be another baby, three years later. Another girl, and that will be the last one, only because Lily does not get pregnant again. Ever.
(She knows, in her heart, that if she does she will keep the baby, no matter what happens and no matter when it does. But she doesn’t. So that’s that.)
Eventually, when Lily finally feels like a proper adult, with her three perfect daughters nearing the time when they will stop being children anymore, she almost forgets about everything. About the war, about the baby she never had, about how wrong something about not-so-little Effie had seemed that first year.
Eventually, until her oldest daughter brings her boyfriend, Neville Longbottom, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, home to meet her.
But that doesn’t happen until Effie is twenty, so she still has plenty of time to be happy before everything becomes confusing and difficult again.