Come in your sadness, come as you are;
I'll love you in pieces, the sky to her stars.
- Coals and Cigars, Lang Leav
November, 1979
Blood in her mouth and fire in her throat. They lurch, crunch, batter into asphalt - James' elbow smashing into her nose, skinning her palms and knees on the tarmac, Peter's body curled under her blocking her fall. Sirius hauls her to her feet and when she looks up into his face, she thinks that she has never seen him look more alive.
"All right, Evans?" He chokes out the question along with a cackle of laughter and a moment later he is doubled over in deep, silent belly-laughter. She collapses on the curb, her hand pressed over her wet nose. Tears, she thinks, before realizing its blood. It barely registers as pain. Remus is the first of the Order members to emerge from the safe-house they've Apparated outside, he fixes her nose with a flick of his wand and pulls Sirius and Peter, both giggling helplessly, inside. Alice is right behind him, round-faced and comforting and motherly in her fluffy pink cardigan.
"Oh Lily," the older woman moans, putting her arm around her shoulders and ushering her in. "Sweetheart you're a mess." She trots her straight to the kitchen and pours a mug of tea for her. For good measure she adds a dollop from the bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey on the table. "Drink this up. Now."
"I don't have a face," Lily mumbles and tries awkwardly to explain. "They wiped off my face, they cursed it off..." Surely Alice understands, she can't drink a cup of tea without a mouth, without a face...
Frank, newly-married to Alice, appears in the kitchen and Transfigures a plate into a mirror. She has a face after all, a bleary, bloody one but a face all the same. They couldn't take my face, they couldn't take my name. "You're in trauma," he says kindly. "Seen it happen often enough." He looks at James, leaning against the counter, sipping Gillywater straight from the bottle. Out of them all he is the only one in his senses. "Was it that bad?"
James shrugs, unusually taciturn. "Locke's dead. Lily hit him straight in the eye."
"I killed him," she mumbles, picking at the hole in her jeans. "I didn't think it would kill him."
James gives her a cool, hard look. "You or him."
"He was a Death Eater, Lily," Alice says comfortingly, draping a blanket over her shoulders. Its fleecy and striped in red and green and she buries her face in it. "He deserved it. You shouldn't even be thinking about it twice."
I shouldn't have killed him, she thinks, nobody should kill. "Dumbledore'll be here soon," Frank says bracingly. "You must be exhausted but I doubt Peter and Sirius will be in any state to-"
James nods. "I'll handle it," he says. "Lil, you should get some sleep as well."
There is a bottle of Firewhiskey on the table. She pours herself a measure from a battered tin cup and throws it back down, feeling like a fifteen-year-old drinking contraband liquor in her dorm once again. "I'll handle it too," she says, daring any of them to contradict her. The doorbell rings again and Alice starts up.
"That'll be the Prewetts," she says. "Lily, James - if you need anything. There's some shepherd's pie left out from dinner..." Frank trails after her, after a nod to Lily.
James sighs and jumps up on to the counter, swinging his long legs, his heels knocking against the drawers. "Stop that," she snaps. "You know I can't stand the sound." When he does the silence in the kitchen, the first real silence she has heard since sunset, is deafening. The clock says two in the morning. James reaches out for the Firewhiskey on her table.
"You're not going to drink that straight from the bottle are you?" she demands querulously. Irrationally, irresistibly she wants to fight with him, for being so cool and controlled when she is shaking inside the blanket, for being so indifferent when she has just killed a man, when she is...
"I am, yes." His look dares her to stop him. "You'd better wash your face." He glances down at her scratched hands and the rip in her jeans that exposes her skinned knees. "And your hands."
"My face is fine." She twists a clump of her hair nervously around her finger, expecting him to bully her into cleaning herself up or going up to bed but for once he is just too exhausted. His face looks too thin and young and brittle in the garish yellow light of the lamps, there's a long red scratch on his cheek and it looks like badly-applied make-up. "I'm pregnant."
"What?"
"I'm pregnant," she whispers again, though she's sure he must have heard her the first time.
"I heard you." He rests his head against the wall, his knuckles white against the neck of the bottle. "Fucking sweet Merlin, Lily." He closes his eyes as though he cannot bear to look at her any longer. "Since when have you known?"
She can feel the tears oozing out, slow and hot, burning like acid rather than salt water. "Yesterday. The day before. I don't know. I- we don't have to do this-"
He slides off the counter and kneels in front of her. "Oh Lily, love, don't cry. Its alright- shush now-" He puts his arms around her, as gently as though she is a glass doll, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, kissing her tears away. "I'm so happy, sweetheart."
"We don't have to-" she mumbles.
"We'll get married," he whispers, kissing her fingers one by one and then her scraped knuckles even though there is blood and dirt in the cracks. "We'll get married and live at Godric's Hollow and have the most beautiful baby. I'll take care of everything, I swear I will, Lily."
"I don't need anyone to take care of me," she mumbles but she rests her head on his shoulder, tears and streaks of her blood soaking into his shirt.
They are nineteen years old, not even six months out from school.
February, 1980
"Let's not get married at all," she offers to James. "Let's stay in bed all day."
He laughs and sets the breakfast tray over her knees. The tea is weak and under-sweetened, the marmalade spread too thickly on soggy toast... but he's trying so hard that she forces a smile.
"Happy Valentine's day, Lil."
She spreads her arms out and he slips in, and when they break out of the hug the smell almost makes her gag. The bedroom in Godric's Hollow is knee-deep in roses. The chintz wallpaper replaced by thickly-growing pink and yellow buds, the floor carpeted in red roses, even the furniture white-petaled in roses.
He looks terribly smug, smirking like a fifteen-year-old version of himself. "So what do you think?" She doesn't answer, she flies to the bathroom, her hand stuffed over her mouth. She vomits in the sink, all the queasiness of her first two months back again. When she returns, he is vanishing the flowers, looking crestfallen.
"That was so sweet of you," she says, trying to make it up. She puts her arms around his waist from behind him. "You meant so well, I didn't mean to spoil it." And so you, she thinks - thoughtlessly thoughtful, over-the-top with the best of intentions.
He smiles wanly. "Guilty as charged," he agrees, as though he can read her mind. "Get dressed love, my mother'll be here soon." Her own gift is far more pragmatic - a perfume of her own brewing. Enthusiastically he sprays too much of it in one go and she feels her stomach heaving again.
Dorea Linnea Potter nee Black arrives within the hour, Scrappy, her wizened little house-elf, in tow. She is a wisp of a woman in tailored robes and high-heeled satin slippers. She takes charge at once, Scrappy flying all over the cottage trying to keep up with her barked orders. When Lily asks if she can be of help, her mother-in-law-to-be says absently, "Oh of course not, dear. You just sit still and keep calm for the baby."
"She makes me feel like a Muggle," she mutters to James. Her wedding dress is upstairs and the guests aren't arriving for hours. "What am I supposed to do now?"
James looks politely baffled by her resentment. "Best let her take care of everything," he tells her encouragingly, drifting outside for a smoke. "She knows more about this stuff anyway and besides, she likes to arrange things."
Its my house, she wants to say, its my wedding. "I never wanted a wedding," she starts to say but stops at "I". "I love you," she changes it to, standing up on tip-toe to kiss James' cheek.
And she never did, not like James, so maddeningly eager to be married. She is only nineteen, not even a year out from school. There are so many things I'd rather do than have a baby, she thinks, drifting back upstairs. Of course this is the way of the wizarding world - witches have children during the brief span of their fertile years, raise them, send them to school and then resume their own careers. For the greater good, of course. In lives that can easily span a hundred-and-fifty years, a ten or twenty-year withdrawal period barely raises a blip. How else would the tiny wizarding population survive? But this wasn't the way she was raised, this wasn't what she thought she'd make of her life when she was fifteen and striving.
She drifts up to her bedroom and after a while Dorea joins her. Something borrowed, something blue. Something old, something new. Her wedding dress is new, a white lace tea-gown from a Muggle boutique, her dead mother's pearls are old. Petunia, in an unusual fit of generosity, sent them over to her - with a note reminding her to send them back after the wedding. Her satin slippers, too small and tight for her swollen feet, are blue and Dorea's veil will be something borrowed. She is just brushing out her shoulder-length hair when Dorea comes up.
"So your sister won't be coming then?"
"No. She sent me flowers and a box though."
Dorea nods sagely. "Hard on the family, these marriages," and Lily wonders if she means her own family. Lily has no family left except for Petunia and her newborn baby, Dudley. When she asks, Dorea looks her straight in the eye and says, "I won't lie to you, Missy, mixed marriages have never been my thing. But you're a good girl, smart and pretty, and James loves you so I suppose that's all that there should be to it." She makes a little grimace.
"But you do mind."
Dorea shrugs. "We Blacks have been pure for six hundred years, the Potters even longer. They come of the Peverell and Gaunt lines... but what does that matter to children these days? I'm an old woman and its hard for me to change my mind. But I do like you... even if I don't necessarily approve of the wedding." And she is, she is in her seventies. "I had a child when I was already in my fifties. Charlus and I never thought I'd have a baby, James was our miracle. You be good to him now, girl."
"I love him," she says earnestly.
"So you do," Dorea agrees. "But you're only nineteen, Lily, and trust me, sometimes love isn't enough." She drapes the antique lace veil over her head, telling her that it has been in the Potter family for a hundred years. And never once rested on a baseblood bride's head, she thinks sardonically, wondering if the veil is magicked to protest at any infringement of its dignity. It isn't though, it doesn't try to strangle her as she half-expected it to. And then it is time to walk down the stairs and into the frosted garden, with Remus' flowers in her hands.
After the ceremony they all come to congratulate her and James, so many of them that their faces and names begin to blur in her mind and afterwards she can never remember how many guests they had. Sirius with a stylish woman in her forties draped over his arm, Remus looked patched and Peter looking peaky, warbling little Mrs Pettigrew and formidable Mrs Longbottom (at cut-throats with Minerva McGonagall), Frank and Alice just married at Christmas, the beaming Prewett twins in magenta robes clashing violently with their red hair, their sister Molly and her five little boys, Professor Dumbledore gallantly kissing her hand, Hagrid scooping them both up together in an enthusiastic bear-hug, Amelia Bones who is an old friend of Dorea's, the Tonks' and their little girl Nymphadora-called-Dora, the McMillian clan out in full force...
"You look beautiful, Lily."
He had been invited of course, but she had never really expected Severus to show up, not at her wedding. She hasn't seen him since June, since their graduation. "Thank you, Severus." She smiles cautiously up at him. He looks pale and strained and far too thin. "You must have some of that cake," she says, taking his arm, concerned in spite of herself. "You look peaky."
He looks as if he's about to smile but then shakes his head. "Thank you, no, but I must be off. I just came to..." he struggles with the words before saying, "...to see you." He looks uncertainly down at her stomach. "How long before...?"
"Early August we think," she says and he visibly relaxes but then tenses again when she adds, "or late July."
"Take care of yourself, Lily," he says and before she can say another thing, strides away.
"Snivellus," Sirius snickers behind her shoulder.
"Don't you even dare," she mutters to him. "He's still my friend. In a way."
"Oh you sweet innocent, how I weep for you. He might still be your friend - but are you his?"
Sev wouldn't hurt me, she thinks, her hand going unconsciously to her stomach. Would he?
August, 1980
They call her Linnea, after the flower, after her grandmother murdered in May.
She wakes up in the middle of the night, her breasts sore and leaking milk, and trips over the blankets in a rush to reach the nursery. James is standing by the window, holding the sleeping baby.
"Was she crying?" Lily asks blearily. She feels guilt that she hadn't woken up in time and then a stab of resentment at having to wake up every night, every few hours for a crying baby. She is only twenty years old, she still feels too young, too selfish to be a mother.
But James shakes his head, no. "I couldn't sleep," he admits. "It was at night, you know." They'd left a Death Mark swimming foul and green in the clear sky and three bodies in the beautiful old house. A man, a woman, a house-elf. James is planning to sell the house, though it has been in his family for nearly two hundred years now.
"It was all my fault," she whispers. "I'm so sorry, James." Charlus and Dorea were Purebloods from old families, they were named blood-traitors because they had allowed their son to marry a Muggle-born, they were murdered in cold blood because of her and her daughter.
"You know it isn't, Lil. Here - I think she's waking up." She takes the baby in her arms, settling down in the rocking chair and unbuttoning his old dress-shirt that she wears to bed sometimes. He leans against the window-sill, looking out over the quiet, dark garden, warding charms flickering like fireflies all over. "I'll kill them," he says and he is so quiet and calm as he says it that she believes him. "I'll kill them all."
She bites her lip, hating it when he is in this mood, however understandable. "I'm going with you on our next patrol."
"Don't be an ass. You were still pregnant two weeks ago."
"Alice was back in the field ten days after she gave birth to Neville. And she's an Auror. Just because I'm a mother now doesn't mean I've ceased to be a person."
"Fine. Get yourself killed. See if I care."
Linnea begins to suck and Lily sighs and leans back against her chair. "Oh Jamesina. Such a drama queen." She puts her hand out in the darkness and finally he reaches out and holds it.
"Lilifer," he drawls, laughter in his voice, and kisses her hand.
February, 1981
He is standing in the frosted garden, smoking. "Happy Valentine's Day, James!" she yells out from the upstairs window and he waves up to her. "Happy anniversary." But he doesn't come up to the cozy bedroom, he doesn't tell her to close her eyes for a surprise, and eventually she ambles over to the kitchen herself to make breakfast. She is playing in the kitchen with Linnea, shooting out stars from the tip of her wand to make the baby giggle, when James eventually slouches in. His lips are chapped, his face pale and cold.
"I made us some hot chocolate."
"No thanks."
She sighs and follows him to the drawing room, Linnea on her hip. "Stop avoiding me."
"I'm not." He fumbles with the knobs of the radio. She plops Linnea down on the sofa with her teddy bear and begins to stack the disordered newspapers together neatly. Typical James.
"You could at least fold them after you're done-"
"Bloody Hell, Lily, can you stop it already? I'm exhausted."
"Doing what?" she snaps. They haven't been out of the house since Christmas, not after the Fidelius charm was placed over it. "You're not the only one frustrated, you know."
"We were supposed to be happy." He sounds baffled as he says it. His fingers stop fiddling nervously with the buttons and knobs on the radio and he looks up into her face with bewildered, appealing eyes. People in love are always happy and happy couples don't snipe and snap at each other. They don't. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."
"We are happy, James. I am." She puts her arm on his shoulder but he shakes it off moodily. She sighs, wishing they could meet the boys. James would be so much better for a night out with them. For herself she can control her frustration and passive aggression, rein it in as she has so many emotions in her life, stew over it perhaps. But James isn't used to this - he simply explodes.
"Lil, we're fucking going to be killed."
"Maybe, maybe not." She tries to sound cool and sure of herself, she wishes she could toss off the words with Sirius' arrogance or even James' measured certainty. But even to herself she sounds like a frightened schoolgirl, parroting the words with a dash of panicked defiance. "But we won't go down without a fight." She picks nervously at her chunky cream-colored sweater.
"I wish I could say that. But my parents thought that too, didn't they?"
"Fine," she snaps, frustrated at him. Suddenly she feels so stifled that she finds it hard to believe she's still breathing - she's sick of this house, she's sick of James, she's sick of her marriage and most of all, her daughter who is the reason she's stuck in this house, this marriage at twenty. She feels her hands balling into fists, she feels like swinging them into his face just to get a reaction. "Suit your fucking self."
She marches into the kitchen and drinks the two mugs of hot chocolate she'd made for both of them while reading a journal of research papers from a Potions conference held in Prague. An hour later she drifts into the drawing room to feed Linnea, only to see James playing peekaboo with her. They are so happy together, so absorbed in their own silly little world that she feels bile rushing into her mouth.
Linnea is her baby, carried in her body for nine months, born washed in her mother's blood and pain. James can play stupid little games with her all he wants, can try to win her adoration, it will never change the fact that this is her baby, that it is only her blood and sacrifice that can keep her safe. "You're a great father," she says coldly. "Too bad you're such a terrible husband."
With nothing really to do all day but read, her resentment simmers all day long. By night he is almost back to normal, perhaps because they haven't been speaking all day. He makes dinner for the two of them but she ignores it and munches a stale piece of toast, washing it down with tea. Not that he's ever been a good cook, he's always been too coddled by his mother and her house-elf.
"I'm sorry, Lily," he says softly when she's washing the dishes, after putting Linnea to bed - its her turn tonight. He puts his arms around her waist and she stands stiff and rigid, ignoring him. He begins to kiss her earlobes, as though he expects her to melt into his arms like the seventeen-year-old girl she once was. She remembers their lovemaking then, hot and hurried and sticky inside abandoned classrooms and corridors, pressed together in a broom-closet once with Mrs Norris sniffing outside the door. They had both been virgins. They had both been idiots. "Lets have another baby."
"No," she says, appalled by his stupidity, pushing him off when he begins to kiss her neck. She sleeps alone that night for the first time in her marriage, the first of many nights.
May 1981
She is crying when he shakes her awake. She is crying as though she can never stop, as though she could cry for the rest of the world. She cries into the Butterbeer he brings up to bed, salt and sugar on the tip of her tongue at the same time.
"Linn's fine, sweetheart," he says. "I'm fine, you're fine."
It is a balmy sweet night, they've left their windows open and the lace curtains dance lazily in the breeze. For a moment all she sees in them are the ghosts of the people she has loved. "It was only a bad dream. What did you dream about?"
Sev, she thinks but says nothing. "Do I need anything bad to dream about anymore?"
He pulls her into his arms, rubbing her back and kissing the corners of her eyelids. "Sometimes I think I'm ruined forever because of all this," she whispers, "don't you feel that way too? As though I'm ruined for loving other people, I can't look at you or Linnea without reminding myself that I might lose you any day. Its like I've lost a part of my soul." And perhaps I have, she thinks, killing does that to a soul. James has never killed before, strange to think. She has.
"You won't lose us," James lies, so sweetly that she wants to believe him. But she's not a girl anymore, she doesn't need anyone to protect her.
"I might lose you," she whispers, burying her head in his chest. "I might not be able to do anything about it. But I will never lose my daughter. Never."
"Of course not, love, you won't even lose me-"
"No, you don't understand." She pushes her hair, almost to her waist now since she hasn't cut it in months, off her forehead. "There's a spell, James, a very old one. Blood magic, a sacrifice only a mother can perform, not a lover. And if I have to do it, I will."
November, 1981
They are all there on the first night of November, the old crowd back in her cottage. The garden is filled with plumes of smoke, people high on whatever Sirius has brought in a battered biscuit tin to the party, people vomiting in the bushes and the box-hedges of petunias on her window-ledges. The house is filled with people sloshing champagne on the carpets as they toast each other yet again, people swigging straight from the kegs of Firewhiskey, laughing and crying, singing off-key and clapping each other on the back, dancing to the radio turned on at full volume. Its three in the morning and all the lights in the house are on.
Remus is out cold on the sofa, James is dancing drunkenly with Hestia Jones and Sirius is, most likely, making love to some nymphet on their bed. The Prewett twins should have been here, she thinks sadly, but they've been dead more than a year now. They used to love dancing and both of them were half-in-love with Hestia. So many missing faces that she feels her heart breaking, they shouldn't be celebrating at all, they should be mourning.
Only the nursery is an oasis of quiet and surprisingly, she finds Peter there. He is sitting on the window-sill, watching Linnea sleeping with an eerie intensity that makes her nervous. He nods when he sees her and his voice is higher than usual as he warbles, "All right, Evans?"
She hasn't seen him in almost a year, not since they made him their Secret Keeper at Christmas. "I'm good." She knots her waist-length hair into a loose bun and sits down cross-legged on the floor. He slides off the window-sill to sit down next to her. In the moonlight his round face seems washed out, he looks as peaky as Remus.
"Not celebrating?" he asks.
"Getting high and drinking myself silly isn't my idea of celebrating, no." It never has been, she remembers how she used to flee to the dorms during Quidditch after-parties at Hogwarts. Later when she was dating James she'd simply drag him off to an empty classroom whenever the party got too rowdy or lasted too long for her comfort.
He smiles at her. "You and Prongs have different ideas of fun."
"Shouldn't you be celebrating, Peter?"
He rubs at his eyes. "I'm tired." He sounds so like a little boy that she laughs and tousles his sandy hair. She remembers the sweet little roly-poly boy he used to be in first year, so twitchy and anxious, even more than her. Now the only thing roly-poly about him is his face, the rest of him is so thin that she's sure that he's barely been eating or sleeping.
"Go home then. Your poor mother will be happy to see you - you haven't been home for two months, have you?"
"You know I couldn't, not with them after me. But I can't go home, if I go home I'll go to sleep and I don't want to go to sleep."
"Bad dreams?"
"The worst."
She nods sympathetically. "We all have them these days." Gingerly she pats his shoulder. "Do you want to tell me?"
"You'd hate me. You'd never be able to forgive me."
"No I wouldn't, I really wouldn't. I have the worst thoughts about-" she's about to say James and Linnea but she stops "-well about the people I love sometimes."
He looks at her sadly, his doleful round face reminding her irresistibly of Alice. She feels the tears starting in her eyes. In the cottage at Godric's Hollow they are celebrating but in the old Longbottom mansion it must be cold and dark. Poor, poor Augusta. And Neville, only fifteen months old. The Boy who Lived. She can't help wondering if they were spared because they had a daughter.
"You're too good for this world, Lily, you're too good for even old Prongs," he says seriously, "you're the kindest woman I've ever met. And I- I- nothing." He stands up clumsily, his hands shaking. "I have to go now, Lily. But I'm glad you're alive, I'm glad you have a little girl and I hope you'll all be as happy as you deserve."
A/N: To be continued! So its been a while since I've written Harry Potter fanfiction! I've always been fascinated by genderswitch fics and decided to go in a different direction with this one, working mostly with how Lily's life would have changed, trying to flesh her out as a real young woman instead of the glorified Madonna presented in the series. I find it so sad that she died when she was so young, she really does seem like a fascinating character in her own right. I chose the name 'Linnea' over the default 'Rose' (which even I used when I was writing my last genderswitch Harry Potter fanfic, which has since been deleted), for Girl!Harry, because I really liked the sound of it as a name - it definitely sounds like a Pureblood-old family name plus it ties in with the flower theme going on in Lily's family.