This is based off of a poem I wrote based off of a comment my mother made, so really, thank my mother for this one. It can be considered AU or exaggeration for the sake of imagery, depending on your point of view.
Lily Evans knows she lives in a fool's paradise, but on days like this, she tries to forget it. On days like this, she can't.
It's like everything is in technicolour, in this sunlight with grass and sky of unnaturally bright colour. It's nice, hot for England with a cool breeze and bare feet in the glassy lake and her hand platonically resting in his. The hand is scarred in places, long-fingered, and brilliant on a piano.
He starts humming a tune she thinks she must know. It's beautiful and sad, and the way he hums it makes her think about him.
He is Remus Lupin, and he ties his well-earned Gryffindor tie in the most complicated knot he can to tease James, who is incapable of remembering the third step to tie a normal knot without Peter's help. Today he is wearing a white-collared shirt over disfigured skin with a red bowtie. His legs aren't halfway in the lake like hers because he thinks the oddly raised skin of scars will repulse people. He doesn't say it, but she knows it's true.
On full moons, his hands start to shake about twelve hours beforehand, and he loses the ability to tie the knots he usually does. She does it for him over breakfast, which neither one of them can eat.
He's smiling in the sunshine, but his smile isn't a happy one and he's still humming that song, reminding Lily of the night, the black-and-white empty classroom she found him having a panic attack in, trying to warm himself with grey flames. It reminds her of the time shortly after his mother passed away, the time he sat down at the piano to play what had been her favourite song and broke down before finishing it. It reminds her if their shared habits of hiding tearstains behind book covers and scars under clothes.
Remus's melody makes her absently trace the scar that winds its way across her torso from her right shoulder to the bottom of the left side of her ribcage like a sash. Only he and those who gave it to her know it's there, and that she nearly died from blood loss. Only he knows that her last thought was that if they put lilies on her coffin, she would curse them all.
He finishes on a dissonant note and she emerges from her thoughts the way her feet emerge from the water a moment later. She dries them in the grass and slip them back into her ridiculously high heels.
A slight comforting squeeze of his hand signals that she's standing up. He does too, trying to soak up all the sunlight he can, knowing even now that his days are numbered. She pushes morbid thoughts out of her head, thinking that even if it's sunset in a few minutes, there's still some daylight left.
They don't know yet that she'll be buried with a single lily in her hand or that he'll outlive all his friends and die before forty.