One]

Seven years old and she's afraid of magic. She doesn't understand it. And, okay, she's been around it since forever, but she likes logic and jigsaws and sense and magic is just too unpredictable for her.

Of course, she gets over it eventually. But she still jumps at unexpected flashes of light.

Two]

"You grew up as a Muggle, Daddy?," she asks, and her voice is like sunlight and smiles. She's bouncing on her tiptoes with excitement, and she bombards her father with question after question.

She's fascinated. Enthralled. Jealous.

And she never tells them how she sometimes wants to snap her wand in two and jump in a "tacsy" and go god-knows-where.

Three]

Then there's Teddy. He's thirty and blue haired and hazel eyed and nice and funny and handsome and married. He's been there forever and he's like her eldest brother but he's not, is he?

He's held her hand for years and stopped her falling off the edge of the world and she thinks she may have fallen in love with him.

She's twenty and the fire in her hair matches the fire of her voice.

And she kisses him one day. And he kisses her. They fall into an unmade bed and forget everything but skin and kisses and maybe even love.

He asks her to tell no one.

She obeys.

And maybe she never really loved him anyway.

Four]

She's always been the best at Transfiguration. Best in her family, best in her class.

And she loves it. It's hers, this one thing that she knows better than anyone, this talent of hers. It's easy to be drowning in this sea of perfection that is comprised of Weasley red, and this is the one thing that allows her to float. It's her buoy.

So she does her best to decimate every challenge set to her.

She is seventeen when she finds herself in the body of a barn owl.

The first time last no more than thirty seven seconds, because she shocks herself so much when she stretches her wings that she frightens herself back into her human body. So she tries again, and again, and again, until she is brown and wise and regal and her wings take her over rooftops and traffic jams and her owl-eyes begin to feel so comfortable, so right.

She never tells anyone that she's happier as an owl, chasing scurrying mice and soaring high, than as a girl, chasing broken dreams and falling flat.

Five]

She loves him. And she's said that before when it wasn't necessarily love but she's grown, she's matured, she's twenty six and, this time, she's sure.

"Lily," he whispers to her, surrounded by fairy lights and tinsel.

"Mistletoe."

And they kiss and she knows she was right because her heart comes alive and bleeds with the flawlessness of it all.

So, "Lysander," she mutters, "I think I might love you," and it's sudden and to the point and she worries he might run.

But that wouldn't be very Lysandery, would it?

"I know that I love you, Lils. It's not a secret."

And it's that precise moment when she opens her mouth and her soul together and she tells him what she's never told anyone else.

"Magic scares me and I'm an owl and I loved Teddy but he's married and I wish I was a Muggle and I'm sorry th-"

His kiss is comforting and tastes of lilac and afternoon naps.

"You don't have to tell me. It's okay to have secrets."

And so she never tells him that he's the one thing that keeps her in the Wizarding World. She never tells him that she planned to move to Muggle Edinburgh that New Years and start again.

She never tells him any of it, and yet somehow he knows.

And he loves her anyway.