Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead?
Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed?
Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy?
In fifty years, will all this be declassified?
And you'll confess why you did it
And I'll say, "Good riddance"
'Cause it wasn't sexy once it wasn't forbidden
I would've died for your sins
Instead, I just died inside
And you deserve prison, but you won't get time
You'll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars
You crashed my party and your rental car
You said normal girls were boring
But you were gone by the morning
You kicked out the stage lights
But you're still performing
And in plain sight you hid
But you are what you did
And I'll forget you, but I'll never forgive
The smallest man who ever lived
(The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived by Taylor Swift)
“When you’re born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it’s not.”
— Richard Kadrey
Summer, 1978
It was a hot dusty day in early August when James Potter came to take Lily Evans away.
James was used to the fresh salt breeze that rolled through his parents’ estate back in Dorset. The Potters’ manor was atop chalky white cliffs, accessible only by a small cliffside path marked by gorse and bramble bushes. With its climbing wisteria and ancient oak door, the pale stone manor sat atop a slight rise that overlooked the English Channel. This time of year, deep into the summer, the sea was a deep cerulean, the golden glow of the sun glancing off the water. The meadows that lassoed the house were full of rippling purple heather and wildflowers that waved softly in the sea breeze.
Everything about the place James had lived and grown up in was quaint and idyllic, like something from a storybook for children. Motley had a maypole festival, a jam and canning society, a village hall with weekly arts and crafts nights, and a dated maritime museum that smelled like herring and was run by a pot-bellied man who looked like Father Christmas and ran tours of the smugglers’ coves.
A naive part of James had always expected something similar from Lily’s hometown. But no matter how often she had tried to warn him that it was a soot-blackened wreck the loss of industry in the area, he had always believed it must be like his home in Motley Bay. It must be because surely the wasteland she described could not have possibly produced a girl like Lily Evans. She was too soft, too kind, and too much of everything good in this world to come from a place like she described.
When James parked the old scrappy car Sirius had let him borrow into the alleyway Lily had described, he understood how stupid he’d been.
He walked through the high street where the shops were shuttered and only a few people trudged miserably down the road. A couple of shops were graffitied. One had a broken first-floor window with some cardboard taped over the jagged glass.
In the residential areas, there was no improvement. Rows upon rows of grimy terraces were wedged closely together like sardines in a can. There were upturned shopping trolleys, broken television sets, and even a rusted fridge in the front gardens. No trees lined the streets, and the August heat reduced every front lawn to a brittle brown. Everything in Cokeworth was grey or black or some other dull industrial shade.
Two women sat on the steps of their houses and were talking loudly as he passed, bringing lit fags to their wrinkled lips, their arms sun-browned and liver-spotted. They looked much older than James suspected they really were.
The misery of a place like this discomforted more than anything he had experienced at the hands of the fledgling Death Eaters the past year had managed to.
As he turned down Fry Road, he tried to imagine Lily returning from Hogwarts to this backwater mining town. To go from sweeping forests, snow-capped mountains, and the vast glassy expanse of the Great Lake to somewhere like this…?
His heart broke for her a little then.
Guilt instantly replaced the feeling. Lily did not need and would not want his pity. A sort of pride settled in his chest for her instead. She was born into a town of soot, smog, empty high streets, and a canal that smelled of sewage, and she had bloomed into the sweetest flower in the garden.
Lily’s house was in the middle of the street. It was neater than most others with a white pebbledash exterior and a small patch of grass that was dead but cut back, several potted succulents sitting beneath the windowsill.
James stood outside the front door for a minute, hesitating before knocking. He had always known that meeting Lily’s father would be an exercise in restraint. He still remembered that day just after the Easter holidays when he decided that he truly hated Bill Evans. Lily had returned from the holidays quieter and a little thinner, with dark circles about her eyes, and a hollowness to her speech. She made excuses to go to bed early, left abruptly during meals, and clocked out of conversations so deeply that it would take saying her name several times to pull her from abstraction. It had all come to a head when they were bickering over something inane and he had thrown his arms up in frustration. Acting on instinct, Lily had raised her own as if to shield herself, shrinking back from him, eyes wide in reflexive fear.
James had thought it was his fault at first. He thought she was scared of him, that she genuinely believed he might hit her one day. That thought had almost broken him. Seeing him so distraught made Lily confess the truth of what had happened with Bill; how he lashed out when she poured his last few cans of Scrumpy down the drain; how he backhanded her hard enough to knock her down to the ground.
James hadn’t known what to feel first; anger at Bill, fresh protectiveness over Lily, or frustration at himself for not pushing harder for her to stay with him in Motley over Easter. James had never quite recovered from the fact that he had not been there to help her, to kill Bill Evans the second he laid a hand on his daughter. But was that for himself or her?
He knocked three times and straightened up, his hands balling and then relaxing.
There was a moment’s pause before he heard a sudden cacophony of footsteps pounding down the stairs. He glimpsed familiar wine-red hair through the rippled glass in the door before it was flung open and Lily stood there on the threshold, breathless but her face alight.
Before he could say anything, she’d launched herself at him and he swept her into his arms, lifting her off her feet as he stepped blindly inside. One arm curled tightly about her waist, the other at the back of her head, as he breathed in her familiar scent of lily-of-the-valley perfume and verbena shampoo. Her soft, warm weight in his arms, so whole and real, soothed some of the tension that had been cinching his chest since he arrived in Cokeworth.
“Finally,” she said against his ear, and he could hear her smile in her giddy voice.
His arms tightened around her. The response was biological, chemical, an unalterable physical law that when Lily Evans was in his arms, skin-to-skin would never be quite enough. He would always need to be closer to her than was scientifically or magically possible.
“Oi, you’re crushing me!” Lily laughed, swatting at his arms.
“Sorry, Lils, but it had to happen I’m afraid.”
“You monster,” she declared, though her arms did not relax from around his neck.
“That’s actually one of the nicer things you’ve called me,” he said, grinning against her.
“Oh, I have plenty more locked and loaded. Don’t push your luck.”
James loosened his embrace to look down at her upturned face. Despite her smile, shadows circled her eyes like smudged ink, and her hair had dulled slightly, missing its rich ruby sheen. Tiredness traced the lines of her face, down-turning her eyes and lips. The month spent in Cokeworth was impressed on the topography of her skin.
Her smile faded a little. “It’s been miserable without you.”
“I’m sorry.” A lump rose in James’s throat. Lily had insisted on returning home for a month to get everything in order, but the overwhelming sense that he had abandoned her weighed him down like lead. He frowned a little then, realising that something was missing from her person. “Your ring,” he said, catching her left hand at the conspicuous absence on her fourth finger. “Why aren’t you wearing it?”
Lily flushed. “It’s not that… I just… If Dad sees it…” She ducked her head in embarrassment. “It’s in my room. Money’s been tight and if he knew I had an emerald engagement ring sitting about…”
It was James’s turn to flush. Stupid of him to make assumptions. Realising his own naivety threw a fresh wave of helplessness over him. But there was no point in telling Lily he could give her money, no point in telling her that he’d give her the skin off his own back. She knew. Pride is a funny thing.
The pride she took in paying her own way all these years through school was the same pride that had her hiding her engagement room in her childhood bedroom so it didn’t end up at the local pawn shop.
“Sorry, I didn’t think, I didn’t—”
“No it’s okay. Seriously. I know what this looks like.” She looked up at him and he could see she was biting back a smile, “I really don’t want anything more than to marry you.”
“World peace? End world hunger?”
“Oh, they’re up there. Definitely top forty in my current priorities.”
“If ever there would be a person to end world hunger and bring eternal peace single-handedly it would be you, wouldn’t it? Bloody overachiever.”
She laughed and mimed a curtsey. “That’s me.” Then she hugged him tight once more, squeezing him as though to check that her was really there. “God, I missed you.”
“I’m here now, okay?”
“I wish you weren’t. I mean—” she continued hurriedly, “of course, I want you here with me, but I don’t want you here .” Her eyes slid from his face, glancing around the slumped greying street and embarrassment mottled her neck and chest. “I didn’t want you to have to see this place.” A slight shudder twitched her shoulders. “No one from school has ever been here, except, well…”
“Has he been bothering you?” James asked, his voice low and serious as he frowned, studying her face for any sign that the jerky little freak had been causing trouble for her.
Lily hesitated, then nodded. “He comes into Woolworth’s all the time.”
James frowned. “The shop you work at?”
“Yeah. He only comes in on the days he knows I work— I checked with some of the other girls who work there— but he never comes to the till. Never. Just walks through the aisles and looks at me and once he realises I’ve noticed, he leaves immediately.”
James still remembered how Snape used to stare at Lily ever since the incident by the Lake in Fifth Year. Snape didn’t talk to her again, not once, but the staring was obsessive. Across the Great Hall, in the corridors, between rows of seats in a classroom. He watched Lily behind that greasy hair or over the tops of particularly foul books on dark magic.
Those serpentine eyes of Snape’s seemed all black, like whatever foul, rotted spore that festered at the Slytherin’s core had infected the whites of his eyes. And they never blackened quite as swiftly as whenever Snape caught sight of James’s hand in Lily’s, or his hand on her waist,
“Fucking weirdo,” he said bitterly.
No one seemed to notice Snape’s compulsive staring but James. Not even Lily.
The difference between them was that she never thought of Snape, but for James, there were some nights when the image of those beady black eyes boring holes into Lily made sleep impossible, and he would lie there with curled fists.
But these days, Lily never thought of the Death Eater who had once been her closest friend.
Besides, there were enough people who stared at Lily, enough people who James wanted to curse into oblivion for the whispered slurs and pointed disgust that they aimed at her. There were too many people like that that Lily had to deal with, and bringing up the boy who betrayed her in the worst possible way would do no one any good.
But knowing that Snape was stalking her?
“He’ll have no way of knowing where we’re going,” James said. “And if I see him I’ll—”
“No.” The syllable fell hard off Lily’s tongue like the drop of an axe. “You are not putting yourself or me in danger because of Snape. He’s not worth it. And with the Ministry slipping away from the Order, Magical Law Enforcement is looking for any excuse to bring either of us in. You know we can’t risk that.” She cupped his face, eyes very serious.
James swallowed and nodded. “I know. Sorry. I just don’t want you to feel… I don’t know, threatened, I suppose, when it comes to that little—” But there wasn’t a word strong enough to convey the breadth of James’s loathing.
Lily lets out a snort of laughter. “You think I feel threatened by him?”
He smiled wryly. “Bad choice of words.”
“You should make it up to me,” she said, reaching up on her tiptoes to kiss him more deeply.
That familiar hot flash of heat seared over him and he exhaled hard. “Not here,” he said quietly. “Is your dad in?”
She shook her head. “No, he’s out at work. He’ll be gone for a few hours.” They both knew Bill didn’t have a job. James remembered what he had read in a book once about muggle vice. Bookies are what they’re called; those establishments that place bets and measure odds, where they tell a man they can give him a fortune by taking his money away from him and the man believes it. James supposed it wasn’t that different to the Hippogriff racing that his great-uncle gambled away all his assets on.
He knows that’s what Lily is too embarrassed to admit. So he just nods.
“Then maybe you should show me your bedroom?” he said, unable to hide his smile.
“And then what?”
“Well,” James considered. “I have a number of requests. Some involve your mouth, some involve mine, and almost all involve hands. Actually, I have one very specific one involving hands.”
“Oh?”
“I want you to wear your ring while I fuck you.”
***
James lay in Lily’s little single bed with the redhead on his chest, her cheek pressed over his heart, their bodies a tangle of sweaty limbs.
Her bedroom was exactly how he imagined it. The room was perfectly organised but mismatched furniture that all seemed chipped and preloved underpinned the neat facade. She had vases of all different shapes and colours lined across her window sill, and little muggle trinkets of painted wooden ornaments and small china jewellery boxes sat upon her spindly vanity. A bell jar with a bunch of dried cow parsley was placed carefully on her bedside table, along with a book that declared itself To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Next to the window stood a slightly crooked bookcase lined with dog-eared children’s books with cracked spines in faded primary colours, and secondhand paperback classic novels with Puffin Classics printed on the sides. He recognised some of the authors that Lily was forever quoting. James Joyce. Kate Chopin. John Fowles. James Baldwin. Fran Ross. Muriel Spark. Thomas Hardy. James wanted to reach each of them, paying particular attention to the lines she underlined with a perfectly sharpened pencil. He liked watching her lips part slightly when she read a particularly arresting line, and he loved that she brought out a ruler to ensure her annotations were precise and neat.
But there would be time to read every book Lily had ever loved. There would be time for everything.
“Tell me about the house again,” Lily said softly. Her eyes were closed, those strawberry blonde eyelashes fanning over her cheeks.
“It’s small but just enough space for the two of us. It’s an old stone cottage that used to belong to my Great Uncle,” James said, reciting the same words he had spoken to her a dozen times since he had told her about the cottage in the Cotswolds. “It’s tucked away in the middle of the countryside and surrounded by woodland and farmland, so we’ll be safe there. But it has a garden, a vegetable patch, a duck pond, and a greenhouse to keep us busy when we’re not—” James cut himself off and cleared his throat. The presence of the Order of the Phoenix and the arduous crusade that lay before them loomed like a phantom in the corner of the room. “There’s green everywhere, Lils, as far as you can see. There’s a river nearby and it’s so far from any city that you can see the stars at night. Like properly. You can see stardust in the sky.”
“I hate it here,” Lily’s voice was small and James didn’t miss the hitch. “I really fucking hate this town, James. Mum’s gone, Petunia too. Now it’s just me and Dad here in this filthy fucking town and I just can’t stand another second here.” Her voice rose with each word, trembling and eventually breaking along with a piece of his heart. “God, I’m crying over fucking Cokeworth.” She made an effort to try and laugh but she couldn’t tamp down the tears.
James knew she needed the silence that settled over them. In those green eyes of hers, he saw the need to grieve; not just for what she was leaving, but for everything she had never had. The helplessness that clawed inside James was the worst feeling. All he could do was hold her tight to him.
“You know you never have to come back here, right?” he murmured after a moment.
She nodded. “I know.” Her smile was more affirmative this time.
“We have our own house, and we’ll start a family, a real one.”
For a moment, they were lost in their own abstraction, their own private moment when the future lay out ahead like a spool of tangled string. It was bright and colourful and theirs to untangle, theirs to weave a tapestry together over many long years. In that moment, they had forever.
But then the door to Lily’s bedroom flew open with a deafening crash.
***
At the sound of the crash, Lily hardly had time to lift her eyes before James was pointing his wand at the threshold. Those Quidditch reflexes had been honed to a sharp point in the last few years, ever since those sullen-faced troop of Death Eaters at Hogwarts had started to aim curses and hexes at Lily and the other muggleborns, James had become hyper-sensitive to the slightest twitch or flick of the wrist, pre-empting attack in every slight movement.
Of course, there was nothing subtle about the way the door almost flew off its hinges as it was thrown open.
For a moment, James just stared at the man in the doorway. He was in late middle age with a thick thatch of dry, straw-coloured hair and leathery workman’s skin creased deeply by a long-standing smoking habit. His eyes were almost the same green as Lily’s, but murkier, like bitter pondwater. There was a meanness in those eyes, one that could not be found in hers. Although he wasn’t tall, he was thickset, rotund but strong; a man who was used to hard physical work.
This, James realised, must be Bill Evans.
He clutched the doorway, staggering slightly as he pointed at James. James became suddenly and painfully aware that he was stripped down to his boxers, and Lily’s naked body was covered only by the patchwork blanket that she’d yanked up to her neck.
“What the fuck are you doing with my daughter?” he half roared, half slurred.
“Dad, stop!” Lily cried, scrambling to her knees with the blanket draped around her like a cape. “He’s… I’m… We’re leaving. James and I. We’re leaving Cokeworth.” There was fear in her voice, not much. Lily knew she could defend herself from him and strike him down without even saying a word. But when a man who you once trusted to brush your hair, who used to read you Enid Blyton novels hits you, it puts a fear inside of you.
No amount of logic and no amount of magic can ever really assuage the panic of a girl who is afraid her father might hit her again.
“Leaving?” Bill said the word as though it was entirely foreign to him.
“She’s coming with me,” James said.
“Whothefuckareyou,” Bill demanded, his vowels and consonants tripping over each other and blurring together almost incoherently.
“I’m her—” But James isn’t sure what to say. Fiance? Boyfriend?
“I’m marrying him, Dad.”
Bill laughed then, but it sounded cracked and jagged about the edges like a dirty bottle dropped over an underpass and breaking on the concrete.
“You weren’t gon to say g’bye, were you?”
Lily said nothing, but she didn’t look away. Tears welled in her eyes but did not fall.
Bill’s nose twitched. “She talked about you, you know. Called yer names.”
“Dad—” Lily began.
“C’mon, don’ be liar,” he slurred with a hacking chuckle. “Arr’gant prick, she called yer.”
James’s fist was tight at his side, knuckles blanched bleach white. Lily was on her knees, one hand on James’s back, her hand shaking with anger, fear, and humiliation in equal measure.
“I knew boys like you,” he said, and his voice was a little clearer, his smirk dropped. “Was in Norf Africa with boys like you in the war. Rich pricks. Used us like fodder.”
“Just go, Dad,” Lily begged.
“There’s a war now, ain’t there?” Bill’s wheezing sounded painful as he tried to catch his breath, ignoring Lily entirely. “She finks I’m stupid but I know there’s sumfing goin’ on," he garbled. He tilted his head, pushing his unwashed hair back from his face, pointing a finger accusingly at James. “You'll use my daughter like fodder too.”
“I love Lily, Mr Evans,” James said, trying hard not to let his voice him. “I just want to keep her safe.”
“I can’t stay here any longer, Dad," Lily said. "Petunia’s gone. Mum’s gone. I can’t do this anymore.”
For a split second, Bill’s face sagged and he blinked hard, like a small child who had just been slapped.
Then his lip curled and that drunken bitterness returned.
“You’re just like yer mother,” he said, staggering a little closer, grabbing onto her chest of drawers for support. “She left without saying goodbye.” Bill paused for a minute, breathing hard with the whistling drag of tobacco-stained lungs. His eyes raked sluggishly down Lily, taking in her nudity, mussed hair, and the ring on her finger. “And she was a slut too.” He lurched forward wildly, veering towards Lily, drawing back for momentum with a large flat palm raised.
Fury heated down James’s spine like sparked lighter fluid his vision flared white at his peripheries. But before he could so much as raise his wand, Bill Evans landed facedown with a thump on the floorboards, felled like a tree.
Lily sat on the bed, eyes glassy, face a little stunned, wand raised.
“D-did I do that?” she said numbly, eyes fixed on her father’s crumpled form.
“If you didn’t do that, I might have killed him.”
It scared James that it wasn’t an exaggeration.
It’s one thing to be willing to die for someone, but be willing to kill for them? He knew now that he would. It also occurred to him that in that moment, he didn’t care if it was the right thing to do or the brave thing to do. But he would’ve killed Bill Evans for the terror he instilled in Lily, for the way he spoke to her like she was scum on his shoe. Forget a wand or magic, James would’ve done it with his bare hands. Maybe he would’ve preferred it that way regardless.
“I should’ve told him before.” She spoke in a frantic, breathless rush. “I-I should’ve told him so he wouldn’t have gone crazy like that. I thought he’d be out all day, I didn’t think… I didn’t want you to ever have to meet him. He’s—”
James folded her in his arms.
“He wasn’t always like this,” Lily said with a small sob against his shoulder. “You know, I see you and your parents and, Christ, I just wish you knew him before all of this other shit. He… Just don’t judge him too harshly. He’s the only family I have.”
James didn’t know how to tell her that family isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. Family is a title that you earn on the hard days. Family isn’t easy, family takes hard and constant work. And when one of you does not put in that work, the other buckles under the weight.
“Lils,” James said quietly. “Maybe your dad was once but you don’t have to defend him because he’s the only family you have. I’m your family now. Fucking hell, I’ve been your family since you first agreed to go out with me. And that’s all to say that you don’t need a man like your father. You don’t have to take the whole world on by yourself.”
The tears in her eyes welled up, and then she exhaled hard, and they receded.
“I’m ready to go.”
Lily did not look back as the door to 28 Fry Road, Cokeworth clicked shut behind her.
In years to come, Bill Evans would sit on the sagging brown sofa in front of the TV, his eyes inevitably sliding to the framed photograph on the dusty cabinet. It was a grainy, coloured photograph of a family of four by the beach. There was a small red-headed toddler in a woman’s arms, a serious-faced girl with dark hair flashing a rare smile at the camera, and there was Bill, his arms around his family, a smile on his face that he would not have seen in the mirror in years.
Bill would remember what he learned at school when he was a boy, that stepping on a butterfly hundreds of million years ago could lead to the death of the sun. And he will look at that photograph and wonder what was his butterfly.
Was it his wife’s first affair? Was it the day his youngest daughter left for a world Bill did not understand? Was it the day he decided to go to cover a coworker’s shift at the worksite and some poorly constructed scaffolding left him with a partially broken back and nights where he couldn’t sleep for the pain? Was it the first time he decided to down a bottle of cheap gin when his elder daughter proclaimed him a leech for being unable to work because of the injury to his back? What was the butterfly Bill Evans had stepped on that had led him to lurch with a raised hand towards his youngest daughter?
She was the same daughter who he had once nicknamed “Carrots” for her red hair and love of Anne Shirley after all. But was he the same man?
Bill Evans died alone on that brown sofa in 1981, only a month before his daughter, though he would never know that. But maybe in that space after death, he would be able to find her and tell her that when those men in masks with skulls inked onto their forearms tried to torture the whereabouts of his daughter out of him, Bill said nothing. When the flash of green light struck him in the chest, he only hoped that maybe Lily would find out that the last thing he had done was try to protect her, even when for so many years, there had been no one to protect her from Bill himself.
He had no visitors and certainly no friends in those last few years of his life. His body was found on Christmas Eve when a neighbour complained about the smell. No one noticed that Bill’s glassy, dead eyes rested on the photograph atop the cabinet. No one had known that the last thing he had done before he died was search for the family he once had and then lost.
***
James’s old Beetle was parked a few streets away and it took them several trips between the house and the car to load all the boxes into the boot of the old tin box.
Lily waited outside under the pretence of double-checking the contents of each box whilst he went back into the house. At some point between trips, Bill had dragged himself down to the living room and was slumped on the sofa with a can of cider and a cheap cigarette between his lips. He was staring at the TV but it wasn’t even turned on. Bill said nothing as James moved the boxes.
She had teased him mercilessly when she saw it, erupting into peals of uncontrollable laughter at the rusted bodywork and ratty old plastic eyelashes that someone had glued over the headlights.
“Sirius got it for me,” James said defensively. “He says it’s a nice car.” Of course, he knew it was the ugliest mechanical abomination in recent history, but he could take the teasing and the mocking to hear her laugh. He knew she needed it, could see in the way the worry lines smoothed slightly.
It wasn’t long before the car was loaded. The sun was sinking low on the horizon, heavy and red, drenching the town in a scalding scarlet swell.
“Do you, um, want to say any goodbyes or…” James trailed off. What was the right thing to say?
“I’ve said everything I need to.” She patted the roof of the car and smiled. “Come on, let’s—” But her smile died as suddenly as the words in her throat.
James followed her blank-eyed stare and immediately, bile and anger surged up in him in equal measure. Standing just a few metres from the old beetle was a greasy-haired, sallow-skinned boy with a skulking, twitchy expression.
“What the fuck do you want?”
It took James a second to realise it was Lily who spoke, her voice as cold and hard as iron left out on a freezing December night.
Snape took a jolting step forward, brushing stray strands of his oily hair back from his face. He had grown a little during their final year at Hogwarts, but without the other Death Eaters by his side, he looked rather small and weedy, like that slimy little git he’d been in Fifth Year.
“You’re leaving.” Snape’s voice sounded pained, like each word was a struggle.
“She is,” said James, every instinct to curse Snape flaring up like a rash. Old habits die screaming, it seemed. “You’re back to stalking her, is that it?”
“I see you, you know. In Woolworth’s,” Lily added. “Watching me.”
An ugly flush mottled Snape’s neck a dull red. “That’s not why I’m here.”
James’s voice was low and threatening in reply. “We’re not in school anymore, Snape. Lily’s leaving this place and if you try and pull any of your fucked up shit on her, I’ll curse you so hard you won’t know your arse from your elbow.”
“I’ll do it myself,” Lily confirmed.
But Snape’s beady eyes had already dropped to her left hand and the small emerald engagement ring that matched her eyes perfectly.
“You’re marrying him?” Snape demanded incredulously. It had been so long since he had ever betrayed his surprise in front of Lily, let alone James. In fact, it had been years since Lily was greeted with anything other than stone-faced inscrutability.
“What business of yours is that?” Lily shot back.
“He’s going to get you killed.”
“And if I defect to your little gang of supremacists I’ll be much safer, is that it?” She laughed coldly and Snape scowled.
“You should leave the country.”
“I’m not a coward. I never fancied taking the easy way out of this.”
“Unlike you,” James said.
“You think I took the easy way?” Snape said, his voice raising and his hand reaching instinctively towards his wand. James was in front of Lily in a flash, lowering his centre of gravity, ready for a fight. But Snape just stood there, wand in hand, his thin chest rising and falling heavily.
“You Know Who is the biggest bully in the playground, Snape,” Lily said, ignoring his flinch as she used his last name like an insult. “And you’ve always just latched onto the biggest bully. It’s easier to ride their coattails than do what’s right and what’s hard.”
“He wants you dead. The Dark Lord. He knows your names.”
James and Lily exchanged a look, a brief understanding that the war was darkening and deepening, and soon both of their heads would be underwater.
“I don’t know any specifics,” Snape said jerkily. “But he’s coming for you. Your best chance is to leave the country. Go to North. He doesn’t have much influence in Scandinavia.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Lily asked, and there was a hint of genuine sadness and pity. “There are things worth dying for, and there are people worth dying for too. If I die, I know it will be for a reason. Can you really say the same?”
“I have a purpose, a mission ,” Snape said with a defensive snarl.
“Your mission is to eradicate people like me,” Lily said. “If you don’t believe that, then you’re even more stupid than I thought.”
James took a perverse pleasure in seeing how Snape nettled at being thought of as unintelligent.
“So you think Potter is worth dying for?” Snape demanded. It was an obvious attempt to deflect, but Lily’s face remained impassive.
“Yes,” she replied honestly. “I would die for him, and he’d die for me. And I pity you. Seriously. How fucking tragic is it that there isn’t a person who would die for you? And there isn’t anyone you would’ve died for?”
“I would’ve died for you !” Snape bellowed, and fiery black sparks shot from the end of his wand, as though all these emotions pent up inside him had nowhere else to go.
“Then why are you with them and not with us?” Lily asked simply.
For a moment, Snape simply opened and closed his mouth like a broken puppet.
He swallowed and stepped back, his cheeks burning red again. “There’s a mud— muggle-born problem. It’s not all of them. It’s not you, but… but it’s a problem.”
Lily pressed her lips flat and nodded. “Right.”
“You know I never thought you were a— a—”
“A what, exactly?” Her voice rose with her temper.
“You have to know I never thought of you as just a you-know-what.”
“Oh, come on, Snape. You’ve said it before and you never stopped any of your mates calling me it, so one last time won’t hurt, right?”
“Lily, I—”
“No, I’ve had enough. You can’t pick and choose the parts of me to care about, that’s your problem. You can’t care about me despite me being muggle-born. I don’t want to be cherry-picked, and that’s all you’ve ever done with me.”
A vein pulsed in Snape’s forehead as she shouted. The heat was getting to him beneath his black shirt and trousers and black, greasy hair; beads of sweat trickled down his waxen skin.
“You should leave this place,” he muttered darkly. “But you shouldn’t leave with him. He will get you killed, Lily.”
“Then I’ll die happily knowing it was for a good man, which is more than can ever be said for you.” She paused and the most bizarre urge to laugh bubbled up in her. The laughter that forced its way out was strangled and unnatural. "You know, maybe in fifty years this will all be declassified and you'll confess why you did it. But all I'll have to say then is good riddance. You have to realise that there's nothing left in me to give to you." The tears that prick her eyes constrict her throat and Lily hates that she still cares enough about the friendship they once had for its loss to make her cry. "Fuck you!"
“You can’t just leave!” Snape shouted desperately. “I’ll never see you again, Lily. If you walk away right now, I’ll never see you again. You’re my—my—”
“I’m not your anything anymore.” Her voice was calmer now, the venom ebbing slightly and tears subsiding as she cast him a pitying stare. “You made your choice, Sev.”
Snape’s arms hung limply by his side, and in his lumpy oversized clothes, he looked like a child again.
“Lils,” James said, pulling back to look at her face. “Give me a minute with him.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked cautiously.
“Just talk,” he assured her. “Can you wait in the car?”
With Lily in the passenger seat, James walked to Snape until the two were only a meter apart.
“I’m going to say this to you once,” James said, and there was a rough bite to his voice. “Lily chose me. Do you understand that? She chose me . And it’s not because I’m better looking, or funnier, or better at sports or magic— even though all of the above is true. It’s actually because when it comes down to it, you won’t put her before yourself. You can say that you’d die for her, but at the end of the day, when you have to care about her beyond the vision you cooked up in your head, you won’t do it.” Something savage had taken up residence in his chest. Years worth of resentment that he had tried to hold back as much as possible for Lily’s sake was spilling out in one. All the times the two had hexed each other, called each other foul names, and butted heads like rutting stags, none of that mattered. It would always come back to that day at the Lake in Fifth Year; for James, it would always come back to Lily Evans. “What I’m saying,” James said, enunciating every syllable purposefully, “is that you’re just a fucking coward.”
James realised a second too late what was about to happen. He heard Snape bellow the odd serpentine word.
Sectumsempra .
James knew that curse and remembered the last time he heard Snape use the hex. It was too late to block, too late to do anything other than close his eyes. At the sound of a roaring explosion and a small blast that sent him staggering back, he braced for impact.
A second passed.
Then another.
And another.
James opened one eye then the next. In between himself and Snape was an enormous, towering shield charm. Even in the glare of the low-burning sunset, its bluish-silver glow was unmistakable. It was thick like reinforced glass and larger than any he had ever seen. When James turned instinctively to the car, frantically searching for Lily, he saw the blasted-out windshield, the glass that littered the bonnet. And there was Lily, wand raised, eyes narrowed, her wand pointed between James and Snape, her protego charm glinting in the light of the setting sun.
Neither James nor Snape spoke as she climbed from the car, wand still raised.
Snape’s own wand was limp in his hand, face deathly white, eyes darting between Lily and James.
“I… I didn’t…” Snape stammered, taking a halting step back. “He provoked me. I didn’t mean…”
“Go.” Her command was simple.
She looked at the black-haired man who stood before her and even through the haze of her fury, she could see the boy he had once been. She remembered the friendship they had once had, how this time many years ago they had stretched out in the field behind the old industrial estate and watched the wood pigeons and listened to the slow croak of the bullfrogs in the pond. They’d lain down in the grass between patches of nettles and thistle, dodging their stinging barbs, and she showed him how to weave a daisy chain, placing one in his palm to keep. They’d made plans together, dreams of a life away from this place. The promise of forever had seemed a certainty at the time.
How foolish and tragically common it is for an eleven-year-old to see forever in the turn of a daisy chain.
But now they stood divided by the strongest shield charm either had ever seen. Now, Lily had a ring on her finger and a man who was not Snape by her side. And, oh, how Snape hated how she leaned into Potter and held his hand. All those practised rituals of familiarity were sickening. For a moment, he was bolstered by the thought that if the tide of the war continued in the direction it was heading, James and Lily would not have long to learn any new intimacies.
It was the shame of that thought— the way he had revelled momentarily in the idea of Lily’s death— that made his shoulders sag.
Lily raised her wand and the shield charm dropped.
“You know,” she said quietly. “You really are the smallest man who ever lived.”
***
Lily was quiet as James drove them out of the town. But as they reached the town limits and the sign that read “Now Leaving Cokeworth” slipped past them, Lily closed her eyes and let the last rays of the hot summer sun wash over her. The place was filled with bad memories and bad men. But there had been good memories too, and the bad men had not always been so.
As she watched the familiar chimney stacks and corner shops and rows of terraces and bungalows slip away, there was sadness, but there was something much stronger.
Lily looked over at James. He was staring out at the road that stretched out ahead through the rolling pasture, his hair lightly lifted by the summer breeze blowing in through the rolled-down window. He looked over at her and a smile took over his face. It was that confident crooked smile that still made her stomach twist in delight.
There are small men in this world who cower and stay low to the ground, never standing straight for fear of being cut down. But some men will stand tall, and will rather die on their feet than live on their knees.
As Lily leaves behind the dirty Midlands town full of small men with smaller hearts, she looks over at the man she will call her husband. She doesn't know yet that one day he will die for her and make true an unspoken vow he made to himself many years ago. But she doesn't need to know all of that to realise she has made the right choice.