The words were more than a mantra. They were a prayer she kept locked in her mouth, clamped between her teeth, each night and when she woke each morning she could still taste the bitterness on her tongue. She wasn't even sure if she believed in a god. "Please. Let me wake up and not love him, not anymore."
If there was a god, he never listened.
And so, she pulled herself from bed, each morning like the last, the ache in her chest growing and swallowing and consuming. Had anyone ever wished so desperately to be numb? The bed had felt so empty without him that first night. For days, weeks, months, she'd slept on the sofa. Until one day, she bought the smallest bed she could. She still woke with her arm draped over the edge where he once would have laid.
Everything, every goddamn little thing, he was trapped in her head. She couldn't brush her hair, not without remembering the way his fingers had tangled and stroked and smoothed. She couldn't brush her teeth without flashes of him, toothbrush dangling from the corner of his mouth, toothpaste on his chin, while he danced in his boxers in their tiny bathroom. She couldn't even eat breakfast the same way- two eggs, sunny side up, a few microwave sausage links, toast so black it was nearly burnt, without him, always there in the corner of her mind, snagging her sausage when she turned her back.
She had taken to eating cereal.
Lily Evans didn't understand a broken heart. Hearts were meant to heal, weren't they? They were supposed to long and ache and then they would stitch together again, refill with air, as if by magic. Magic. But she was left sitting with bloodied hands, trying so desperately to force the jagged pieces back into place. They never seemed to fit.
Moving on, fucking moving on, she had tried. But her feet were nailed to the floorboards of thei- her home and she was stuck standing in the hallway with blood filling her shoes and her nails leaving gouges in the wallpaper. Some girls weren't the types to move on.
She'd been on dates, set up by Mary or Alice or her fucking mother.
(She watched as he swallowed swords. Every word clenched behind his lips looked to cut his mouth like broken glass and she could almost see the blood. Almost. But he bared his lips in a tight lined smile, one that fumbled, faltered, and fell short of his eyes. She could hear the metal as it clanked bottom in his belly, the blade two sizes too big for his throat.
And so, Lily watched, counting out in silence the number of seconds between the beats of her still there heart, her barely there heart, staring out with glass hazed eyes at the man across the table who simply wasn't.
He was a circus, skin pulled taut over sweeping beams of bone. She could hear the elephants in his stomach, see the fire breather billowing from his lungs, watch as the acrobat danced the tightrope in his words, feel the way the clowns drove through his legs, restlessly moving. And each act, all somehow sadder than the last, led to the grand finale, ring master baton raised, center stage, when he left for the restroom and never came back.
And, as she had each time before, and would for each time after, Lily stood, slowly. She pushed in her chair and slid her coat back on. She left the exact number of bills and the exact number of coins to cover the meal. She kept her eyes on the ground. She left.
She had never cared for the circus.)
Lily wasn't the type of girl to move on.
In the Before, she had been real, the type of real that is almost hard to look at, hard to swallow, hard to touch, blinding in the right light. But in the After, when she looked in the mirror, she had to look away. Her eyes were green, once, but they felt grey, sucked of color, or joy, of everything he had made her. Peacock feathers clung, stapled in place, under her eyes, angry bruises, fields of lilacs growing. However pretty she wanted to make it, sleep had abandoned her.
They had been children, punch drunk and choking on the violence surrounding them. And they had dare to find happiness. With blunt instruments, they'd managed to carve out a place in the world to wedge themselves inside. There had been no time to waste, no room for hesitation.
They were not meant to be heroes. No one had told her that she had to be a hero, that she had to raise herself, her son, as lambs to the slaughter. For so long they had been weaned on the taste of blood and the promise of a better world. Those raised on blood start to find the taste too much like home, but James had been her home and the house had gone cold, like stone, like steel, like the hallway floor.
She was untethered, floating throughout the world that praised her name, but she hadn't thought, hadn't planned. She had heard the sound, the shout, the drop onto the floor. And she had done what she had to do for her son. For herself. For him. Some nights, she woke to flashes of green and Harry's cries and the resounding thud of a body hitting the ground. Some nights she didn't wake, didn't dream. She thanked whoever was listening for those nights.
Because in her dreams, he was drenched in light, almost too bright. Yellow and soft and welcoming. The peppery smell of his cologne, the cheap drugstore floral of their shampoo, the broom oil permanently sunken into his hands, the strong tea he drank- stained on his sleeve. She never let herself walk into his outstretched arms, press a kiss to the corner of his mouth as he grinned, run her hands through his hair, set his glasses properly on his nose. If she touched him, he might disappear into that blinding light and let her go. And so she woke herself each time, just as their hands were about to meet, every time.
But what hurt more than anything, the way Harry looked at her, blinking up at her with the green eyes she once had. He never meant to make her face fall, crashing like a satellite back to earth. But he would ruffle his hair with his chubby fists, he would shake with excitement, he would shove sweets into his mouth with ardent zeal. And she could see him.
She could see him, lifting him up onto his shoulders and zipping through their home. She could see him, steady hands as he held their son onto a broom for the first time. She could see him, pressing a kiss to his forehead each night, long after he had fallen asleep. She could see him in the way Harry smiled. She could see him and it hurt worse than any pain she could have imagined or endured.
Everyone said, they all said the war was over. It had ended all those years ago in her flash of green in the nursery. The war was over. The war was over. The war was over. But each moment that flashed by, she was still in a war zone. It hadn't been a flash, but an atom bomb. They had never left Chernobyl and the radiation was left to fester and eat at her. She could hear his voice like gunshots, just behind her, calling her "Evans," telling jokes, asking "alright, Evans?" Whispering to run.
Harry was five and she took him to his first day of school alone. He kept his hand held tight in hers, tugging her down so he could wrap his arms around her neck before he ran into the classroom. She pretended no one was watching her as tears spilt down her cheeks. He would have been bursting and crying himself, though from joy, from exuberance. Because that had been her James.
When she stumbled in the front door, slamming the door shut and slumping to the floor, she wept. Four years had dragged and spun out of her hands. And there were days when things felt better, when the lead in her bones drained away. But those days weren't constants. She tried, oh god how she tried. But the world felt too heavy, Atlas bowing under the strain of it all, she felt her bones breaking, the metal sinking her into the mud snapping.
She was someone without him, she was Lily without James, she always had been. But without him, she didn't know if she wanted to be. They should have had decades, centuries, an eternity that unfolded itself at their feet. But he was dead and he was gone and she was left a queen without a king, holding a broken crown over an empty domain.
But she wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her sweater and she stood and she cleaned and she ate and she picked Harry up from school and she watched cartoons with his head in her lap and she didn't let herself open those boxes that sat in the back of her closet. She didn't press her nose into his old shirts, sealed away in as airtight of bags she could find. One day, when he was old enough to ask questions, Harry deserved those bits of his father, preserved as if he'd just run out for her favorite biscuits.
But each night still, those words were on her tongue and in her mind. "Let me wake up and my heart have healed, or disappeared." "Tomorrow, I want to never have loved him." "When I open my eyes, I'll have dreamt of it all." "If there's a god, please, bring James back to me."
And each morning, she woke in her too small bed, alone, with the pain crawling from the cavity in her chest.
The loss was sore as an open wound on some days, a dull throbbing on others. She could feel the snapped thread, dragging and tangled behind her. He would have tried, Merlin, he would have tried so desperately to get her to move on, to smile, to let her heart heal. But how could she love someone else.
He had been the sun and the moon and the wind and the stars and the feeling of tea after a winter day, of a fire on cold hands, of flying in a stadium with hair fluttering, of swing dancing in their socks in the dead of night. How could she love someone else when he was all she knew of love?
Four years turned to five to six to seven. Each night, he was there, still in her dreams. Seven turned to eight to nine to ten. Harry received his first letter to Hogwarts and she sat him down, his hand clasped in hers, and she told him of his father, of how he had saved them, how he had given up the world for Harry, for her. He had nodded, big eyes behind round glasses watching her as she struggled against the ocean raging inside of her.
That night, she dreamt of him once more. The dreams, they had been less often and she was afraid that she was losing him. That one day she would wake up and forget the way his lips felt on hers, the way his thumb brushed across her knuckles, the way his voice sounded in the mornings or the way he took his tea. But that night, she saw him, standing there in that blinding light with his arms outstretched to her. That night he smiled at her in her dreams and he laughed and she laughed with him.
That night she stepped toward him into the light and took his hand.