James would find Lily or Lily would find James and they'd fall asleep on the tearstained shoulders of each other.
Lily would walk away later, with orphan carved over her forehead with killing curse, seemingly etched in stone.
James would wake up with his arms holding nothing but damp spots on his jumper and the smell of vanilla in the air.
And then, like wind up dolls, they would go about their lives like they were still at odds with each other, until their movements became slow and jerky and forced and they needed to be rewound by each other, and with their last bit of strength they would meet up and turn the key.
But letting on that they needed this, that they needed help, and from each other no less, was impossible. Impossible because she was Lily and he was James and they were everything together and nothing apart, but that was the way that they preferred it, going through the motions.
Two sixteen year old idiots with one mother to share and no fathers to speak of, and a plethora of friends, but none that understood the acute way in which they were spiraling away from light, full breaths and into sharp, heavy intakes.
They were drowning in the world and nobody knew the kiss of life, and they thought that maybe, just maybe, if they stayed underwater long enough the orphan carved over Lily's forehead would be eroded and never seen again and the empty air that James would wake up holding would be evaporated and then they could resurface just as they did before, appreciating life because they'd almost lost it.
But they weren't kicking towards the surface, they were sinking, and it's not that they weren't trying, it's that the water rushing into their lungs was like heroin and they couldn't come off of the feeling of being numb and above the world in the way that nothing mattered and yet everything mattered too much.
But James was Lily's lifeguard, and she was his rehab. As the amount of time she spent curled up and tucked under his arm increased, so did her breaths, and the more time he sat with her, the less he needed to be rewound.
And in that way the orphan etched into stone was smashed away and the hole in James' arms was always filled with a redhead with a penchant for bad puns and an unhealthy taste for blueberry pie.
And when they were done crying they walked back into the world together, like soldiers after a battle, because that's what they were, the two of them, still fighting in a war.
And when their friends greeted them like they didn't know who they were anymore, after a long absence of themselves, it didn't bother them, because they knew each other and they knew that they weren't going to drown anymore, and they were going to go back to eating blueberry pie and making bad puns and throwing around a large red ball and putting up trip wires in the corridors even without parents to send the letter home to when they got Head Boy and Girl, just a very sad Mum and a very large house, and a very horsey sister who never got over the fact that her parents hadn't been saved by a girl with a wand.
And Lily stopped seeing the pieces of them strewn across her room at night and James stopped feeling the weight of the curses hit him in the chest when he woke up every morning, and they were okay.
But just a little bit okay, and that was better than drowning, and everyone knew it.