Lily Evans married James Potter because he said he could give her anything she wanted.
When he first said it, it was cocky, arrogant, the same as everything James Potter did. Quidditch. Courses (James' arrogance was only founded because he was quite certain that he could get passing grades without doing a lick of work, and indeed, he hardly did any work and got just-passing grades). Even that bloody Animagi transfiguration, which he told her about, bragging, proudly, one night during sixth year when they ran into each other at the Quidditch pitch. His twitching smirk and irrefutable grin put her off, but she allowed him to take her hand and tell her all about it because it really was a fantastic piece of magic.
As they walked back up to the castle, brooms tucked under their arms, James asked her again to go out with him, and this time she hesitated, instead of saying no straight off. He must have taken her silence as a positive, because he said quickly, "Evans, if you go out with me, I'll – I can – I can do whatever you'd like. I can be anyone."
She was tempted to tell him no, he'd always be a cocky little twat who ragged on people smaller and weaker than he is, but he made a hurried sound in his throat. "No, no! I don't mean it like that. I mean I'll do – I'll give you anything. Anything, Evans."
And because his voice sounded, for the first time, like something other than smooth, slick satin, she nodded yes and let him kiss her cheek in the doorway to the Great Hall.
For the next year and a half, most times, he was as good as his word. He never quit mussing up his hair in the back to make it stand up, even when Lily sat right next to him in the Gryffindor common room. And he never tired of the foolish pranks, the midnight trips to the kitchen, the excessive use of magic in the corridors. But he also sat next to her in Charms, and listened attentively (or at least, quietly) when she told him how things were in the Muggle world when she was a child, and fetched her tea and scones when she had a fever, and kept away from the girls' dormitory when it was her time of the month. Once he even Transfigured a clump of limp brown weeds into a bouquet of flowers and handed them to her, with a trace of the old brash grin, as they stood outside beneath a benign willow tree.
He often promised her anything she wanted, although some afternoons, pressed into the bare, muscular curve of his neck in one or the other of their beds, she couldn't think of a single request.
When they'd been together for two years and left Hogwarts, once again James brought up a new subject, marriage. "I could make you happy, Lily," he said, and she wondered at the sudden use of her first name, strangely more solemn than her last. "You tell me what you want."
Because she was sick of letting James bring up all the important topics, she told him that what she wanted more than anything in the world was a big family.
Lily's mother, Helen Rush, was only twenty-two when she married William Evans, and they pooled their dreams of many children and a house in the country. Helen was one of four children, and William one of six, and Mum often said that Petunia and Lily learned to talk and read and spell early because they had so many aunts and uncles to remember and write thank-you notes to: Aunt Diane, Aunt Rose, Uncle Horace on Mum's side, Uncle Richard, Uncle Joseph, Uncle Raymond, Uncle Robert, and Aunt Dolly on Dad's. The girls had two or three dozen first cousins, which meant that no matter what holiday it was, there were at least two first cousins exactly their own age to play with. Mum was the youngest in her family, and Dad was the youngest boy in his, and they assumed that like their sisters and brothers before them, they'd have a big family to take to Christmas dinner and Easter Sunday. Instead, they had just Petunia and Lily.
Lily knew that her parents loved her, Mum and Dad both, but she also knew that running between them was the current of disappointment over their failed family. She never knew what had gone wrong, exactly, only that both Mum and Dad had wanted more children and for some reason they never had, after Lily. Sometimes at night she pressed her ear to her closed bedroom door and listened to the alternating cadence of voices from her parents' room, knowing they were fighting and wondering whether she was the source of all that fighting. After all, they'd had Lily after Petunia, so why couldn't they have another baby after Lily?
And so, on the day that James stretched out in the sun-dusted grass and looked at her with bed-rumpled black hair and serious hazel eyes, she swallowed and rubbed at the corners of her own eyes. "That's what I want," she whispered.
He put his arms around her, smelling like grass and dusty tree bark and vanilla, and rumpled her hair affectionately. "Absolutely, Evans."
She choked back an amused sob. "And I can have as many as I want?"
"Sure. We'll make the money for them somehow. Let's see, we can drive them into slave labour at the age of, oh, three or four …"
"You're a twit!" She swatted him, laughing, and waited for the brush of his warm, wind-roughened lips.
She married James Potter because he said he could give her the one thing, or four or five things, she wanted.
When she was pregnant with Harry, James was remarkably attentive, almost nauseatingly so. He brought her special foods and ice-cold pumpkin juice and fistfuls of flowers with strange names, amaryllis, dahlia, jonquil. For some reason he'd got it in his head that she should have ice chips by their bed at all times until she finally told him to stop, she wasn't in labour yet. At night he placed his hand on her stomach and rubbed soothingly in circles, despite her laughing protests that he was going to make the baby dizzy and in need of glasses before it was even born.
"How are you?" was the first thing he'd ask when he Apparated into the little house in Godric's Hollow. "What can I get you? Anything you want," was a close second.
Sometimes she could think of odd cravings – pickle juice, hamburger-mash pie, grass-flavoured Bertie Bott's beans. But most of the time, she smiled at him and shook her head. "This is what I want," she said once, stroking the swell of her belly, right below the navel, and he crossed the room to kiss her moving hand.
Lily Evans married James Potter because he said he could give her anything she wanted.
When she wrapped her arms around her baby son and knew by the grinding of her stomach against her ribs that her husband was dead, she thought not of the future, a future of fear and murder and the rule of Lord Voldemort, but of the past. She thought of summer days and the wind in her hair and an easy, golden, smirking grin. She thought of their promises and scattered dreams and, always, the question, what can I get you, anything you want.
She held Harry and pressed her hand to her tummy, still a little soft from the pregnancy, at the same time. She knew that she'd never feel that, the strangely firm, hollow hum of her body, again.
Lily kissed her son's smooth forehead and placed him in his bassinet, running a gentle hand down his cheek. "Yes," she said to no one in particular, bringing home in her heart the memory of a skinny teenage boy with untidy dark hair. "That's what I want."
Lily Evans Potter did not cry when she saw the flash of green light rushing down to meet her. She screamed with the effort of moving one dream aside to make room for another.
finis.