What did Remus tell me? That was the one question that repeated itself over and over as James stood in silence, listening to Lily's footsteps fade away. The mud that had been caked on his boots gave the changing room an earthy, sodden smell, despite the fact that he had washed and scraped the mud off of him. Standing here, alone and confused and with a strange aching in his head and chest, James thought, in the brief second before reason could censor him, that the only place he wanted to be was with the girl who had just left. Seeing her laughing in the mud, not trying to stumble to her feet, not avoiding his gaze as she seemed to do so often these days, had been as close to perfectly happy as he had felt in some time.
It wasn't that he wanted to be with her, he assured himself as he took a seat on the bench where he had sat so many times, listening to team talks from the Captain he would soon replace. Lily was just special, he cared about her and just wanted to spend his entire life making her laugh and smile… but that didn't mean he wanted to be with her. She could be so frustrating, half the time it was as if he had accidently insulted her, the way she seemed to freeze up around him and turn everything to ice. Still, there were those moments, those dazzling moments, where Lily was like spring itself, she could seep into his every pore and make flowers sprout, her smile could make all the snow and ice of his attempts at distance melt away like they had never existed. Lily could force you to build a wall higher than you could see, and then have you forget why you needed it in the first place.
Against the charms of Lily Evans, James had no defence.
The worst thing, he thought, was that she didn't even know she was charming. She didn't even know that he had spent the three days she had been ignoring him telling himself not to let her back in. She didn't know that while she was pretending not to see him in the hall, he was telling himself to do the same. Yet, at any moment, no matter how resolute he told himself to be, all she needed to do was look him in the eye and he forgot everything he had ever known about her except that she was lovely, beautiful and so kind it made you want to cry.
Lily Evans was kind, despite all the ice she left in her wake. If James had ever told her how cold the air was, she would have set herself on fire to heat him up, begging for his forgiveness as her eyes smouldered and her hair flamed.
What could you do when someone cared that much, but was so oblivious to their effect on you? James had recently decided that the only thing to do was to endure it, like humans did with seasons. There was no way to fight winter, you simply had to stay indoors, and find things like hot tea and board games to distract you from the chill. And when Spring came, you simply had to revel in it and try to make the most of the sun.
James had spent this year feeling that the spring and summer was getting longer and that perhaps one day there would be no winter at all, but that wasn't true and that couldn't ever really happen, he knew that.
Lily had seemed to be experiencing a winter of her own, and James had done that. He hated himself for it, but he had been angry and annoyed and he had let his frustration out, something that he had never really done so honestly. He had spent his entire time at Hogwarts sniping at Lily and Severus Snape, calling them names, pulling her hair and trading insults with her, because she seemed not to care even a little bit what he thought of her. Generally, people wanted James to like them. Peter did, Remus did, everyone outside his closest circle of friends did. Sirius hadn't seemed to, not at first, but he had always been a special case.
Lily was a special case too, but in quite a different way. Sirius liked James, and hadn't really cared if it was mutual. They were friends because they were both as convinced of their own greatness as they were of one anothers.
Lily had seemed certain, from their first meeting, that he was anything but great, and that irked him, and drove him to pay her more attention than a boy with as many friends as he had ought to have paid. Even now, when she couldn't deny that she liked him, she seemed always to be qualifying her affection.
'I like you, but you're a prat!', 'We could be friends if you weren't so immature', and so on until James had started to doubt whether he was all that great. Truthfully, he had needed a little doubt, and he was glad of Lily's presence in his life, if only for that reason. A little doubt had made him kinder, he had stopped hexing people in hallways, paid a little more attention when a girl pretended to drop her books in front of him, and had even started answering questions in class in an attempt to actually earn House Points, rather than simply relying on his Quidditch Cup gains to even out his wrongdoings.
All this growth seemed to have led to very little though, since he had still managed to wound Lily in a way he didn't even really understand. Which led him straight back to the question, What had Remus told him?
Remus had told James a lot of things. Remus had told James that Sirius was the one who kept replacing his Chocolate Frogs with bezoars, an inexplicable joke of his that James didn't really understand, but which had started in their first year, when James had woken up every morning to find a small, cool stone somewhere different, in his shoe, in the pocket of his robe, even once on the centre of his forehead.
Remus had told James that Lily had been the one to throw that Stinging Hex in first year, which might have been the first time that Lily had come to James attention for positive reasons. He had been aware of her before then as the angry Ginger girl who was pals with the Slytherin and seemed to hate James, but at that point she became the angry Ginger girl who can cast one of the best and most painful Stinging Hexes that James had ever seen, or more accurately, felt, since she had directed it at him after he had dropped Bubotuber pus in her cauldron during Potions one day and caused a minor explosion. True, he had spent two days in the Hospital Wing, but wasn't Evans amazing?
Remus had told James about his 'flurry little problem', though James had already figured it out, given the clockwork like precision with which Remus' visits to a sick, and vaguely described, relative coincided with the full moon. James had let Remus come to him and tell him about the illness, rather than forcing Remus to confide in him. It was only when Remus agreed that they had confided in Sirius, who had nodded and described it as 'awesome' and Peter who had very solemnly told Remus that it didn't matter to him what Remus was, as long as his mum kept sending them that amazing toffee.
They had planned their transformation into Animagi two years later over a parcel of that same amazing toffee before breaking it to Remus that his friends were going to undertake a dangerous and difficult magical transformation with or without his agreement and also that the toffee was gone and they had eaten his share.
Remus had told James that Lily had been made a Prefect in their fifth year, and promised not to date her, though James had never asked and Remus had never suggested he might It had been Sirius who had presided over this embarrassing agreement, when Remus had told them that he would be walking around dark corridors at night in the company of Lily Evans. It had been two months before James had worked up the nerve to suggest to his friends that he might possibly find Lily Evans quite attractive.
Remus had told James that they already knew.
Remus had told James nothing about Lily that would have upset her, and James was at a loss to think about what Remus knew that he wasn't telling James. He traced back through the conversation, the incredibly angry, frustrated conversation that had involved very little attention to the actual words and a lot of venting of pent-up unspoken feelings.
Remus had told James a lot of things, but he had not told him that he was dating Lily. James had seen them together. Though his memory of that night was fuzzy and mostly consisted of the inside of a green, glass bottle and the taste of alcohol on Iris' lips, there was a very clear image, fixed in his head, which he could not, not matter how he tried, get rid of.
Lily and Remus, sitting on the stairs, Lily's head on Remus' shoulder, a loving, supportive gesture that seemed romantic at the time. How could Remus not be feeling attracted to Lily in that moment, having spent an entire night with her, when it took James a split second of seeing her dark red hair, glowing in the blue light, her pale skin like pearl and her eyes glistening, to fall utterly in love with her.
He wasn't in love with her, he corrected, but he had felt something, something that he couldn't understand Remus hadn't felt. James had always assumed that the rush of his heart when he saw Lily was a natural reaction to seeing someone who looked as utterly perfect as Lily did. How then could Remus sit beside her and feel anything other than love?
He was beginning to wonder if his feelings towards Lily were a little more unusual than he had previously thought. If everyone didn't love her on sight, did that mean that what he felt was…
One thing was abundantly, painfully and worryingly clear. He had to speak to Remus.