The Netted Sunbeam

by Beeezie

'Courtship' does not go quite as James's parents might have expected.

I originally started writing about James's parents before information about them was released on Pottermore. By the time it was, I was too attached to their names to change them. However, this story does center around a vaguely canonical version of them. :)

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"I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows."
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Brook"

My first hint that my mother was deeply displeased with me was a slight sharpness in the way she said my name as she poured me a cup of tea. "Isolda, is there anything you would like to tell me?"

I schooled my face to bland disinterest, though with difficulty. "Not that I can think of. Why do you ask?"

Her eyes flashed, and she put the teapot down on the table harder than was strictly necessary. "I heard that you were seen with Tristan Potter the other day."

"Mm." I took a sip of tea.

"Is it true?"

I forced the blandest smile I could manage onto my face. "Yes. He wanted to ask me about buying a potion."

My mother eyed me carefully. I hoped that I'd gotten better at hiding my emotions since I'd moved to my small cottage on the edge of the village than I had been as a girl under her roof, because I did not want to broach this subject with my mother just yet.

Or anyone, really. Except possibly Tristan Potter himself.

"He seems very nice," she told me. "I'm glad you finally met him, but I wish you'd speak to him about something other than potions. Don't you think he's nice?"

Here, at least, I was on firmer ground. "Not particularly."

She took a deep breath, clearly intent on convincing me of the error of my judgment. She had prepared a very good lecture for this response; my mother had been trying to convince me to talk to Tristan Potter since he'd moved to Godric's Hollow three months before, and she'd found me remarkably resistant to the idea.

It was true, though: nice was not a word that I would use to describe Tristan Potter. That didn't mean I didn't like him, though - quite the contrary. It was only that "nice" was really a very bland word when it came down to it, and Tristan Potter was not a bland man. He was charming, and he made me laugh; I might even go so far as to call him kind, at least where I was concerned - I hadn't observed him with anyone else enough to say one way or the other.

My mother didn't know any of that at all, of course. I'd taken care that she wouldn't.

By the time I left, the sun was setting. My mother had, quite thankfully, stopped lecturing me about Tristan Potter's relative virtues quickly enough for us to have a very pleasant end to our visit. I wasn't quite sure what she'd have said if she knew how often I was meeting him and how little my time with him had to do with selling potions. I still wasn't quite sure what I thought about it in the first place; he was undeniably arrogant, vain, and a little too enamored with himself. I'd seen that from the start.

But he also made me laugh, and he didn't mind being the butt of a joke, which I found refreshing in a man. And, enamored with himself though he was, he was clearly also quite enamored with me. I'd found I rather liked that, too.

The cool evening air was refreshing, and traveling along the forest rather than straight through the village ensured a peaceful, if roundabout, walk home. When I reached my cottage and reached for the doorknob, I suddenly sensed that I was not alone.

I turned around to scan the treeline. After a moment, he stepped out from the shadows and approached me.

I smiled at him. "I wasn't expecting you tonight," I said. "Have you been waiting long?"

He leaned against the thick wooden walls of my little cottage as I unlocked the door. "Not very." He kept his voice low. "Is this a bad time? I'm sorry. I was at a dinner party, but I got bored."

"Thank you." I opened the door and stepped back to let him follow me in.

Belatedly, he realized that he'd stuck his foot in his mouth. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I just didn't like anyone there, so I left to find someone I do like." I glanced at him, and he smiled his most disarming smile. "I came here first, you know."

I bit back my own smile and took down the tea cups.

You wouldn't have guessed from his delivery that the company he was so easily dismissing were people most of my acquaintances would have given their eye teeth to dine with. They were, though. He led a bit of a charmed life, Tristan Potter did; he'd identified himself as being rich and handsome in so many words at our very first meeting, and he'd been right on both counts. I'd been well on my way to dismissing him for being an arrogant and entitled prat.

But when I'd laughed at him, he'd laughed, too, so I'd let him walk me home. By the time we'd gotten to my door, I'd realized that while Tristan Potter was a bit of an arrogant and entitled prat, I also rather liked him, so I'd invited him in for tea. We'd talked until the tea we'd promptly forgotten had grown ice cold in our cups, and we'd lingered by the door for another twenty minutes before he finally took his leave.

I hadn't slept well that night, and I'd been more pleased than I was entirely comfortable with when I'd bumped into him two days later on my way home one evening. There had been more cold tea and more talking, and when I'd glanced at the clock when he left, I'd been shocked to discover that it was nearing midnight.

And so it went from there.

Once we'd boiled the water for tea, he followed me into my sitting room. I set my cup of tea very carefully on a side table and settled into my most comfortable chair. Tristan, on the other hand, left his on the mantle above my fireplace and dropped carelessly down to the floor.

I eyed him from my perch on my chair. "Why do I even bother to make you tea anymore?"

"Only you can answer that, Iz. And I do drink it sometimes." He looked perfectly at ease from his place on my floor, his back against the wall next to my fireplace. His head was cocked slightly to the side as he watched me.

My stomach gave a lurch. He really was very handsome, his unruly dark hair falling along his head in waves. I even liked the shadow of a beard on his face, and I never liked that on men.

"You don't know me well enough to call me that," I told him.

He smiled, and my stomach gave another lurch. His smile lit up his face; even in the dim light, I could see his hazel eyes shining with barely repressed mirth. "When will I know you well enough?"

"I'm not sure."

His smile grew a little wider. "If I kiss you, will I know you well enough then?"

I felt my face get a little hot, though I wasn't sure why. It wasn't as though I didn't know he was thinking about it. Merlin, I was thinking about it. And anyway, a little impropriety was probably to be expected here and there; after all, there was something inherently improper about socializing with a strange man in my sitting room until well after midnight several nights a week for nearly a month, even if we weren't doing anything particularly untoward during that time.

He hadn't looked away from me. "Come on," he said, jerking his head toward the floor next to him. "Sit with me."

Tristan had taken to sitting on the floor this week; he claimed it was more comfortable. He hadn't asked me to join him until now, though. Before I was quite aware of what I was doing, I got to my feet. "I must like you," I told him. "I usually don't sit on the floor. That's why people have chairs, you know."

He threw back his head and laughed. "Your carpet is comfortable," he told me. "It won't hurt you, I promise."

I sat down next to him, and he smiled at me. He smiled a lot. Of course, when you were rich and handsome and got almost everything you wanted in fairly short order, it was probably easy to smile. Still, I had a feeling he'd be easygoing in far more adversity than he faced in his present situation.

"You needn't look so perplexed. Have I ever led you astray?"

"Frequently."

He snorted. "And yet you're quite happy to welcome me back."

"Mm."

He reached out to cover my hand with his. When I didn't pull it back, he intertwined his fingers in mine. After a minute of hard deliberation and a hammering heart, I let my head rest against his shoulder. His grip on my hand tightened a little, and when I turned my head to look up at him, his smile had gotten wider.

In retrospect, I have no idea how I thought we'd keep getting away with it, especially as three nights a week became five and six, and the few hours surrounding midnight stretched to include the better part of the evening. I don't think Tristan would have minded anyone knowing where he was for his own sake, but he was cognizant that it would have destroyed my reputation for people to find out that he'd spent many dozens of hours alone with me in my home at all hours of the night - particularly since I very much doubted that he'd be able to claim entirely innocent intent and maintain a straight face.

Tristan Potter was not a particularly good liar.

And, by that point, he'd long since kissed me.

By the time we were found out, I'd begun to hear speculation in the village about Tristan Potter's wildly unsocial behavior which had surfaced so suddenly was due either to a family illness or a dalliance with a mystery woman. It hadn't gone unnoticed on my end, either; both Cicily and Beatrice had begun to feel slighted by what they described as "anti-social behavior, even for you, Iz."

But despite the rumors, no one seemed to be entertaining the idea that our respective absences from most evening social events were at all connected, and so we had become a little careless. On that particular evening, he'd arrived before the sunset had faded from the sky, and we'd already been sprawled on the thick carpet covering my sitting room floor for well over an hour when we heard a knock on my door.

I glanced instinctively at the grandfather clock standing next to my window, which I'd mercifully remembered to cover with a curtain. It was nearly nine - not so late that it would be unforgivably rude for a good friend or my mother to stop by for a few minutes, but far too late to write Tristan's presence off to potions, as I'd done once or twice in the past when we'd encountered this problem.

I jumped up. "You should leave. Apparate."

He looked up at me, looking far more deeply perplexed than he had any right to. "Apparating is loud, Iz. Whoever it is will know someone was here. And you don't exactly have a back door."

"Hide, then."

He cast an eye around my small cottage. "Unless you'd like me to hide in your bedroom, I don't really see a good hiding place. Do you have any suggestions?"

I rubbed my face. He was being blasé on purpose, but unfortunately, he was also right. I was deciding whether having him in my bedroom was worth someone not seeing him when I heard my mother's voice through the door. "Isolda, are you home?"

I sighed. "Stay in here," I told him. "I mean it. Right where you are." If it was just my mother, I was fairly confident that I could handle whatever she wanted in my potions workshop.

"I like it when you order me around." There was a small smirk playing at the corners of his mouth, and I made a mental note to make him pay for it later as I strode into my workshop and yanked open my front door just as my mother was raising her fist to knock again.

"Mum!" I ushered her in and gave her a quick hug. "How are you? Is something wrong?"

She shook her head. "I was just worried - you haven't seemed yourself lately. Here." She handed me a sweater and a jar of tea, and brushed by me toward the sitting room before I could reply.

I had never seen my mother genuinely shocked before that evening, and I don't think I ever saw her shocked afterward. Surprised or startled, yes, but never shocked. When she walked into my sitting room and found Tristan Potter sitting on my floor looking very much at ease, however, there is no way to describe the look on her face but pure, genuine shock. She opened her mouth, but wasn't even able to get words out.

Tristan bounced to his feet and gave a small bow. "Good evening, Mrs. Winters. It's good to see you."

My mother blinked at him several times before taking a deep breath. "Good evening," she said faintly.

He glanced at me. I was trying to keep my expression cool and collected, but in truth, it was all I could do not to fall down. He could tell. I hoped that my mother couldn't.

"Please, sit." He gestured to the chair I'd eschewed that evening. He'd been right about the floor - with carpeting, it was more comfortable than I'd realized. "I'm imposing; don't stand on my account."

I sank into it, laying my hands in my lap in what I hoped looked like relative calm. I was actually digging my nails into my palm in an attempt to distract myself from a pit of anxiety that had suddenly invaded my stomach.

My mother remained standing.

Tristan looked at me. "Should I leave, Ms. Winters?" he asked politely. "I don't want to interrupt your visit with your mother."

Courtesy came naturally to him. An outside observer would have never guessed that ten minutes before, he'd been running his fingers along the back of my hand and calling me by my nickname as he teased me.

My mother relaxed a little, though she didn't sit. "I'll be gone shortly; I only came by to bring my daughter a sweater and some tea. She looked pale when I saw her last, and I know how cold that workroom of hers can get."

I doubted I'd looked anything of the sort; I had a feeling that my mother had just found me to be very distracted and wanted to find out why at a time when we were unlikely to be interrupted. Unfortunately, it had collided with exactly what had been distracting me, and I'd been hoping to keep that from her for a little longer.

"It's a bit late for a social call, isn't it?" my mother asked, giving me a pointed look. Even if she accepted the semblance of formality that Tristan was admittedly making an excellent show of, there was no denying the fact that a man I'd consistently insisted I barely knew was in my sitting room at 9:00 in the evening, and that it was distinctly odd.

"Oh, it's not a social call. Should I leave, Ms. Winters?" he asked again. "We can conclude this tomorrow; I don't want to interrupt your time with your mother.

Before I could say anything, my mother smiled disarmingly. "If it's not a social call, why are you here?"

He hesitated for a second. "A potion," he said after a moment. "It's for my mother - it's difficult to brew and a delicate subject besides, and your daughter is very discrete."

He was lying, of course, and I could tell my mother knew it. He was a master of courtesy, and he'd been able to slip past her last question because this was rather more complicated than a simple social call - but this was a blatant lie, and you could tell. He was making a concentrated effort at it, which I appreciated, but Tristan Potter really was not a good liar at all.

"My daughter is far more discrete than I ever gave her credit for," my mother agreed pleasantly. "Just two days ago she was insisting that she barely knew you."

"We rarely talk about anything but potions." He held my mother's gaze only briefly before glancing down at the floor, and he shifted from one foot to the other.

She knew he was lying about that, too. "Well, Isolda," she said, turning to me, "I'm not sure why you're so adament that he isn't nice, if this constitutes the extent of your interactions."

I was able to hold back my wince at her words, but not at Tristan's very injured voice as he said, "I am nice." If his regard for me hadn't been clear before, it was definitely clear now.

"Indeed." My mother reached out to grab my shoulder rather harder than she really needed to. "Why don't you stop by tomorrow? If you're not ill."

"Mm." I avoided her gaze. "I'll see you to the door."

"No," she said before I could get up. "No, you should continue to discuss these potions so Mr. Potter can return home. It's getting rather late for potion making, you know. I'll see myself out."

I waited for the front door to close behind her before I buried my head in my hands and groaned.

Tristan knelt beside me. "Sorry," he said. "She knew I was lying. I tried, though."

"I know you did." I lifted my head from my hands. "I have no idea what I'm going to tell her tomorrow."

"Well, that's tomorrow." He fell backward and pulled gently on my hands. I let him pull me off the chair and into his lap. We were rarely quite so physically intimate with each other, but I was still so shaken by my mother's abrupt appearance and departure that I was more than happy to feel his arms encircle me as he rested his head on top of mine. "It's going to be fine," he murmured. "Do you want me to go with you?"

"I don't think that would help."

"Probably not, but if you want me to, I will anyway."

I shook my head. "Anyway, if you go with me to my mother's house in the middle of the day, people are going to see and talk."

I felt his shoulders rise and fall. "Iz, it's not as though we're carrying on some illicit affair. The only reason there's all this secrecy is that you want it - I'd be perfectly happy for all of Godric's Hollow to know that I'm courting you."

I dodged around that word. It was very intimidating. "They're not idiots. We've both been mysteriously unavailable for two months. They'll put it together."

He shrugged. "Let them. It's just gossip. And anyway, there's no reason for them to think that it hasn't all been very proper."

I glanced up at him. "It's been fairly improper, you know. We've spent far too much time unsupervised"

"I know. I was there." He brushed his lips against my cheek. "And we haven't done anything improper with all that unsupervised time." At my pointed look - I was, after all, sitting in his lap - he let out a chuckle. "All right, fine - we haven't done much improper."

My smile vanished when my eyes fell on the door. "What am I going to tell my mother?"

He sighed and nudged me. "Get up? This isn't the most comfortable position in the world."

I got to my feet. Before I could start to feel unhappy - propriety aside, I liked feeling his arms around me - he pushed himself up, grabbed my hand, and led me over to the carpeted floor. He flopped down onto it and held open his arms.

I regarded him carefully, and he laughed. "Come on, I see it in your face. I'm pretty good at reading you." I joined him on the floor and let him fold me into his arms. "Are you sure you want to talk about this now?" he murmured in my ear. "We could be talking about much more exciting things. We could be kissing."

"Tristan."

He sighed. "Oh, all right." He kissed the top of my head. "I don't know what you're going to tell your mother. I think you should tell her that I want to actually court you, not just have clandestine meetings where we spend hours talking and sometimes kissing, but that you're not having any of it."

"Oh, so you don't like talking to me?"

He usually played along with me when I teased him. Tonight, though, his voice became uncharacteristically serious. "Don't do that."

"Don't do what?"

He sighed and slumped back against the wall, though he didn't let go of me. "That. I do like talking to you. That's why I spend so much time here. But damn it, Iz, this is stupid. There's absolutely no reason we shouldn't be seen together."

"Yes, there is. Do you know what people would say if -"

He cut me off. "No, I don't mean in this house - I agree with you there. But why shouldn't they see us together out there?" He gestured vaguely toward the closed and curtained window. "Unless you have a secret betrothal you haven't told me about, I'm at a loss."

I didn't want to have this conversation right now, not in the wake of my mother's discovery of him, but I could see why he was pushing it. It was relevant.

And it wasn't as though I didn't know he felt this way.

I wasn't quite sure why I was so reticent to do so. Early on, it had seemed silly to - everyone else in the village had been so enamored with Tristan from the very beginning, and a few good conversations with him when he'd finally tracked me down a full two months after moving to Godric's Hollow hadn't been enough justification to throw myself into that mess. I liked spending time with him. I did not particularly like talking about him, and no one seemed able to stop themselves even when they thought I disliked him.

"I don't know," I said finally.

"I think that you just don't like that you fell for the most eligible bachelor in Godric's Hollow after avoiding me for two months and trying your very best not to." His grin was back, though his words did have a biting edge of truth to them.

"Maybe."

"So what are you afraid of?" He swept my hair in front of my shoulder and leaned down to kiss my neck. "That they'll think you're shallow, or that you have emotions and hidden depths? If you'd like, I can wander around looking dazed so they think you've given me a love potion."

That made me giggle, though I wished he'd stop kissing my neck. It made it very difficult to think. "That's not necessary."

He trailed his fingers up my arm and switched to the other side of my neck. "It could be fun, though. I'm starting to like that idea."

"Tristan!" He finally stopped, and I let my head fall back against his chest as I tried to steady my breathing. When I looked up at him, he looked quite pleased with himself.

"You're terrible," I told him.

"I'm just trying to help you relax." His attempt to convey complete innocence was somewhat hampered by the slight upward curve of his mouth and the decidedly impish look in his eyes.

The expression would have irritated me to no end if I'd seen it on anyone else. On him, however, it was rather endearing and made me want to kiss him. I supposed that that was probably my answer.

I'd been afraid that my mother would jump to all the wrong conclusions, and my fears were borne out almost immediately upon my arrival. After the most cursory greeting imaginable, my mother leaned forward, gripped my shoulders, and said, "Isolda, what were you thinking?"

"I wasn't. I bumped into him when I was buying potions supplies, and then… things just… happened."

"These things do not just happen," she snapped. Her dark hair, which was usually loosely braided, was pulled severely back from her face in a bun. It made her look a little more intimidating than I'd like. "How long ago did this start?"

I swallowed hard. Admitting to this was admitting to lying to her for months, pure and simple, and I was close enough to my mother that I hated to do so. "Two and a half months. It really wasn't intentional. I just - I invited him in for tea."

"Did he take advantage of you?"

"What? Mum, no!" I studied her face, and the ire I found there gave me the sudden feeling that I was missing some very important subtext. "Mum, what exactly do you think is going on?"

She sighed, most of the fight going out of her. "When is the child due?"

"What?" Now my mother looked more confused than I'd ever seen her before. My very first romantic entanglement was creating all sorts of firsts with my mother, probably because there were many ways in which I'd been handling it spectacularly poorly. "Mum, there's no child! We haven't - we haven't done anything like that!"

My mother blinked several times as she processed that. "You haven't?"

Once she'd ascertained that our admittedly slightly foolish behavior had at no point become overly sexual, which took a solid ten minutes and was punctuated by multiple pointed comments about it being difficult to believe a daughter who'd been lying to her face for months, my mother fixed me with a look. "If he likes you so much, why isn't he courting you openly?"

The question was laced with suspicion; all of her positive feelings about Tristan seemed to have dissipated quickly, despite my hasty clarification that Tristan hadn't done anything untoward.

"I didn't want him to."

"You didn't want him to." My mother rubbed her temples. "For the love of - why?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter, anyway. I'm going to tell him that he can next time I see him."

"When will that be?"

I didn't even try to hold her gaze. "Tonight."

She sighed and got up to put on the kettle, looking very, very tired. "You do that."

When I told Tristan, he didn't seem particularly surprised by my change of heart, though if I'd doubted his desire to follow through on it, it would have vanished once I saw the smile on his face. He didn't tell me his plans, and I didn't ask, but I wasn't particularly surprised about how he publicized it. It was in true, presumptuous, Tristan Potter fashion, which I'd come to expect of him.

It was as I was leaving Simon McKinnon's shop with Beatrice the following morning that I heard his voice. "Iz!"

Beatrice shot me a quizzical look; very few people called me that, and while I'd finally stopped insisting that I barely knew Tristan Potter several weeks before, I barely spoke whenever he came up in conversation and let people draw their own conclusions from that.

I turned to find him striding down the street after us. "Good morning," I managed to get out before he reached us. I couldn't say anything after that because he'd put his hands on my elbows and drawn me close, heedless of the backet full of potions supplies dangling from my arm. I caught sight of a small smirk on his face before he leaned down and kissed me.

It was a fairly chaste sort of kiss, as these things go, but its intent was unmistakable, and more than one person stopped to gawk. Beatrice's expression mirrored theirs in a large part, though she was at least able to keep her mouth shut. When we parted, he rested his forehead on mine.

His smirk had gotten bigger.

"If you're not careful, your face will stick that way." My voice was too soft for any of the onlookers to overhear it.

"Oh, it already has," he said cheerfully. He kissed my forehead and drew away from me. "Darling," he said, raising his voice and instantly leaving me fighting the intense desire to step on his foot, "let me carry that for you."

I relinquished the basket. He nodded to Beatrice. "Good morning, Ms. Vales. I'm sorry for my rudeness. You know how hot-blooded young men in love can be."

Her thin blond eyebrows were raised so high that they seemed to me to be in danger of disappearing into her hairline. "Good morning," she said faintly. She kept shooting me quizzical looks on our way back, though Tristan's presence was enough to dissuade her from saying anything of substance. When we arrived at my cottage, he dropped the basket inside. "Have a good day, Ms. Vales," he said, nodding at Beatrice on his way back out.

She smiled tightly. "Good afternoon, Mr. Potter."

It was not quite afternoon yet, but neither of us corrected her. Once she'd vanished inside, however, Tristan's grin grew broader.

"Yes, you're very pleased with yourself, aren't you?" I crossed my arms. "Darling? Really, Tristan?"

"Well, I just wanted to make sure the nature of my affection wasn't misunderstood."

"I don't think there was any danger of that. And 'hot-blooded young men in love'? Where did that come from?"

He rested his hands on my waist and kissed my forehead. "But Iz, I am a hot-blooded young man in love."

"But you don't say it. And certainly not like that."

He lifted one hand to caress my cheek. "I do." He leaned down a little further to kiss me in a manner that was significantly less chaste than the kiss of the street had been. Irritation at his purposeful obtuseness aside, there was a vague sense of relief that most of the secrecy was over, and I was quite happy to kiss him back.

When we broke apart, he glanced up at the sky. "When do you think you'll be done?" he asked. "With the potions, I mean?"

"Mid-afternoon. Why?"

"Would you like to join me for dinner?"

I studied him carefully. "You're enjoying parading me around, aren't you?"

"Exceedingly."

I considered his question. "Come by later - I'm not sure right now."

From the twinkle in his eye, I somehow doubted we'd actually end up going anywhere for dinner. "I'll see you then." He kissed me again and turned to walk away, and had just started to whistle when I ducked inside my cottage.

Beatrice was already at work chopping up roots for one of her potions, but as soon as I closed the door behind me, she pushed them aside. "Tristan Potter."

"Mm." I set to putting the potions supplies away.

"I thought you barely knew Tristan Potter."

I couldn't think of a response to that in which I didn't admit to being a liar. "Mm."

"You clearly do know Tristan Potter. You'd have hexed him if you didn't. You certainly wouldn't have handed over your potion supplies and kissed him back."

"Mm." She fixed me with a glare, and I sighed. "We talk sometimes. There's not that much to tell." She opened her mouth to argue, and something in me snapped. "Bea, I have never had any interest in talking about Tristan Potter. That hasn't changed. Yes, if he's in love with me, clearly there was something going on that you didn't know about. I still don't want to talk about it."

"Fine." After a moment, though, she said, "The truth, though, Iz, and then I'll shut up."

"What?"

"Are you in love with him, too?"

The room suddenly felt uncomfortably hot and stuffy. I would have liked to deflect the question, but my mind was curiously blank. "Yes," I muttered. "Now can we please change the subject?"