A/N: AU where James and Lily are just a normal teenage couple. Trigger Warning: Familial Abuse, Self Harm. One Shot.
"Please," he heard her whisper through the phone, "Please come fetch me." She didn't need to ask twice; before he could even think, James had grabbed his car keys, walked straight past his adopted brother Sirius, slammed the front door and gotten into his car. His heart was beating hard and fast, he could feel the anger pulsing all over. In his finger tips, his head, his heart. He couldn't think of anything but how badly he wanted to mess them up, how much he wanted to see them suffer, as they had made Lily suffer. Her whole life had just been one big suffering fest.
Her parents, though they were both generally sweet were also ridiculously weak-willed against Lily's sister, Petunia, who acted as a tyrant, keeping their parents under her control and manipulating and torturing her sister. When James first found out, he struggled to believe that Petunia, small, tight-lipped Petunia could be the reason for the scarlet scars embedded in Lily's arms. But then he had also found it unbelievable that Lily; fiery, outspoken and beautiful could be so sad.
He had always only barely noticed the looks Lily got when she thought no one else was looking. He'd thought nothing of it; who looked happy all the time? But then he probably should have realised, he'd had fair warning about Lily even before they had gotten into a relationship. "Just...be there," Remus had told him, "Be there for her, okay?" Remembering his words, James pushed slightly harder on the accelerator and saw the mixture of emerald and fern green of the trees on either side of him become more blurred.
The fact that Remus had known before him hadn't been what had made him angrier, it was that there was a cause for worry. Lily; sweet, small Lily, who he had loved since before he could remember, came with a warning label. Not that it had changed the way he felt about her, in fact, it had just made him want to hold her, protect her, take her away from the family that didn't deserve her.
He pulled up in front her house where she was standing, her arms wrapped around herself, her crimson hair tangling and swirling in the wind. James made to get out of the car but had only just gotten his hand on the door handle when she ran to his car and pulled open the door and sat down.
"Lily..." he said, watching her carefully. Her eyes were red, there were dried tear stains on her cream-coloured cheeks.
"Go," she whispered, pulling her sleeves down as new tears made their way down her face from under her closed eyes. James observed her for a while before starting the car and driving off, away from the house of Lily's own personal horrors.
The lilac sky was studded with weakly shining, silver stars and puffy, taffy coloured clouds. James kept his eyes on the darkening road, keeping his hand on Lily's cold one, feeling his heart in his throat as her quiet sobs filled the silence. All he could think about was her, her cedar-and-gingerbread scent filling his nose, the curtain of her dark red hair separating her sadness from him, yet he could feel it emanating from her, as though it was a part of her which, as he had only recently learned, it was.
After another ten minutes of silence he finally spoke, breaking the silence. "What happened?" he asked, interrupting his eye contact with the road to look at Lily, whose face was now visible as she had tucked her hair behind her ear.
"Nothing," she replied picking at the daisy white wool of her cardigan.
"I know it's not nothing," he told her, squeezing her icy hand in his.
"It's a lot of nothing," she said looking out the window at the rolling hills of the scenery, juniper in the growing darkness. "It's Petunia and Mum and Dad, just like always."
"Did something happen?" James tried to ask again, gently.
"She's getting married," Lily laughed humourlessly, "Remember Vernon?"
"That idiot she was with?"
"Is with," Lily corrected him, "Yeah, somehow he hates me more than even she does. They're getting married."
"That's a good thing though, isn't it? That means she'll move out? With the idiot?" James wondered aloud. Lily laughed again.
"If only. No, Vernon's still only just starting out at his new job so they don't have enough money to get their own place. Petunia practically bullied Mum and Dad into letting them stay at the house."
"No..." James breathed.
"They gave in, of course. But that's not the worst part," Lily bit her lip as fresh tears formed in her green eyes, "She wanted me to move out." James felt his anger spiking again, worse than before, he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing.
"Petunia wants you, her eighteen-year-old sister, to move out?" he said, making a concious effort not to yell, "How? Why-Where does she get off making requests like that? She's twenty-two and she's still living there-I-" his anger was beginning to bubble over as his sentences starting molding together and he was at a loss for words, he pulled a hand angrily through his hair.
"That's Petunia for you," Lily sighed shakily, looking out the window again.
"Well...I mean your parents won't agree, they can't," James tried to reason with his own furious thoughts, hand in hair again.
"For once they stood up for me, but that just made her angry. She stormed out and told us she never wanted to see us again," she wiped a tear stubbornly from her cheek, "Urgh," she said, "I hate crying. I'm sick of it, it's stupid and pointless."
"Cry if you want to, cry until you can't cry any more. And don't listen to her, Lil," James told her, "Don't care about what she says. You're more important than her."
"I'd like to believe that..." Lily said, trailing off. The sky was a dark indigo blue now and there were no headlamps lighting their way; James had just driven in any direction, unaware of where he was going and was surprised to discover that he had managed to get them lost.
"Uh, I don't mean to alarm you, love," James said worriedly, looking around, "But I have no idea where we are."
"I like it," Lily smiled at last, "Oh! Go there!" she pointed at a turn off that James took which led onto a clearing on a cliff. He turned off the car and slumped back. He and Lily sat together, in the darkness, silence filling the air; this time it seemed more in admiration of the last golden rays of light that streaked the clouds.
"Let's get out," Lily said suddenly, kicking the door open and hopping out of the car, her hair shimmering and dancing behind her.
"Woah there, sweetheart," James, getting out as Lily rushed to the very edge of the cliff. He went and stood beside her, watching her cautiously as rocks crumbled at her feet and tumbled off the edge, but she seemed calm, at ease as she watched the final swirls of light falter and the stars twinkled more brightly in the onyx sky. She smiled up; her eyes reflecting the expanses of the glittering night. He felt himself relax as he watched her, filled with nothing but love for her in his heart.
"I want to live in the sky," she whispered, taking his hand in her own one which had warmed significantly, "With the stars and the clouds and the moon."
"I want that for you," he laughed softly, and putting his hands around her waist he lifted her slightly up to the heavens as her peals of laughter filled the canyon below them, echoing over the steady silence.
"Sod-off!" she shrieked as he tickled her, trying to grab his hands. He caught hers and spun her around so that she faced him.
"I love you," he told her, for the first time, "I know it's probably too early to say, but it's true; I always have and I plan to carry on."
"James..." she said putting her hands on his shoulders.
"It's okay if you don't," he said quickly.
"No, no, I mean-I do, it's just," she paused and closed her eyes momentarily, before opening them and he thought he could feel them looking right into his heart, "When I say it, I want it to be perfect. Because I do, but...people I've loved haven't always turned out to be the best for me."
"I understand."
"I know you do, that's why it has to be perfect. It has to be completely and totally real, because that's what you deserve," her hands were holding his head now, one in his short hair and one on his cheek. She stood on tip toe and kissed him lightly on the lips and then, grinning at him, she slid his glasses off his nose and place them lightly on her's. James thought, as he grinned back at her, that if it had been anyone else he would probably have felt upset that she hadn't said it back but it was Lily and if she needed time he was willing to wait because she was worth waiting for.