That Night
"Stay there with Harry!"
“James!”
A look, and he's gone.
A noise. A thud on the floor, the vibrations climbing up the stares and into Lily's feet and into the ground, shaking her world in every which way. It rocks Harry's crib, a little, and she finds herself wondering for a brief moment if it makes him feel comfortable, like the way James would oh-so-gently rock him in the biggest chair in the sitting room.
James Potter stumbled into Lily's life like a tree that falls into the road. disruptive and disastrous, decidedly unwelcome. Slowly, though, he had picked himself up and started to grow out in different directions. Branches of kindness stretch out from his trusty core, leaving cool shade over Lily's doubts. Bright leaves and pretty flowers of attentiveness and gentleness start to cover up his ugly parts, spot by spot.
There are winters, Lily learns as time goes by, where his branches are bare. when he snaps too hard at a teammate for forgetting their strategy, or when he's stretched himself so thin over everyone else's issues he starts breaking apart, leaving tiny holes all over himself, his guts spilling out of his stomach and into Lily's grasp. She gets glances of the acidic mess inside, the fear he holds, the loneliness. Before she can do or say anything about it, James sews himself shut, and it is spring again.
She learns he has calm springs, where he'll bloom and kindly greet any passer by. She learns he has furiously hot summers where his colors turn blinding and the sun leaves marks on his tree trunk, leaving lines and scars of age and worry. Far too much worry for someone of James’s age.
They’re sixteen, when James tells Lily she is the strongest person he has ever met. It’s in the hall and with a blood purist on his knees, at her mercy. He says things- Lily doesn’t exactly recall what- and she lashes out on instinct. James is by her side in an instant, having only gone to grab his wand that he’d forgotten in the classroom (James was playing guard duty with her since the bullying got bad. She was still pretending he wasn’t her friend), and is holding said wand to the seventh year’s chin, his face red and fuming.
“What do we do with him?” He bites out. He wants to hurt him. She hates that part of him. She hates it in herself as well. “Nothing”, she says, and James let’s go of the student and takes lily’s arm in his and he whispers- you are the strongest person I have ever seen. Lily thinks it’s so strange that for all his narcissism, James Potter has apparently never looked in a mirror.
They are seventeen when she finds him in the prefect bathroom, sobbing into the toilet (At that point, she had stopped pretending to not be James’s friend, but she was still pretending he was nothing more). Seventeen when he spills his guts all over the floor of that bathroom, all but melting into Lily’s grasp. He’s sobbing these horrendous, loud sobs, and she can almost, almost make out a name between his cries. Oh, James. Always crying for someone else. Never sparing a tear for yourself.
They’re eighteen when she finally gathers the courage to kiss him, drunk on firewhiskey in the back corner of the common room. Their childhood playroom, their teenage paradise, now also their first kiss. It’s so silly how in this life the smallest things seem to line up, Lily thinks. This room, it’s like the fate line traveling on her palm, it’s like the glance she shared with Remus on the first day of school, it’s like the plates that make up the world had aligned perfectly that day on the train, just for her. Pushing her towards the boy she will live and die with.
—
There is a noise coming up the steps, there is a shadow in the doorway. There is Harry, who has James’s shitty eyesight and cheerful demeanor, and her eyes. Hers hers hers.
She screams the scream of a mother and a father all at once, nothing less and nothing more. She knows it will be enough.