And wasn't it you who said I was not free?
And wasn't it you who said I needed peace?
And now it's you who's floored by the fear of it all −
and it's alright. Take it out on me.
It's alright. Take it out on me.
Slowly, with care, he learned her. All of her.
He'd known her a while. She was there constantly. He couldn't avoid her. Her presence was plastered across the walls of every classroom, every empty sky. Her voice was fire, her eyes were fire, her hair was fire. She was more flame than girl and he was warmed by it. Her haughty disregard of him, her impossibly defiant stance on nearly every subject, her incorrigible ability to infuriate and entice in the same frustrating moment − it intoxicated him. He was 11, 13, 15, 16 and he was sunk, he was just finished. It was simply as if Destiny had sat him down and said, aggressively, "listen, kid, you've just honestly got no choice."
In the beginning, he'd been young, and messy. He'd been loud and unthinking and obnoxious − ungenerous. Thinking only of the 'me with her' and nothing of the 'us'. But she was smart, much smarter than him, much smarter than anyone, and she called him what he was. A bastard. Arrogant. Stupid, bumbling, juvenile. Prick. Tosser. "Potter you wanker, I will hex you clean to Madagascar I swear I will I don't care the repercussions I will accept detention!"
He wanted more. There wasn't anything he did that convinced her they were right. So he decided: Fuck It. Not to the cause of Her and Him, but to the cause of him being an absolute sod. A staggering, stumbling, thick-headed jerk. Unaware, unchanging. He wasn't the boy she wanted, he knew. He wasn't quite the man she needed.
He sought an inbetween.
So the summer before seventh year he stood in front of a mirror and looked himself square in the eye. "Listen here, Potter." With careful detail he shed himself of Arrogance, and Deceit, and Tomfoolery, and watched as they slithered and sank beneath the ground. He picked up Levelheadedness, and Patience, and Grace, and tried them on. He felt uneasy beneath the new apparel. But he also felt lighter than before. "You'll not fail her − not anymore."
When the end of summer exploded in heat as the train whistle blew through King's Cross, his new eyes found the Head Girl pin on her uniform − a Head Boy pin to match on his chest − and it was no surprise, but what was surprising was the way he greeted her that final year, the authenticity in his tone, the buoyancy in his shoulders, the calm and cool maturity of the interaction. He saw her shock and could only smile because that encounter in the mirror had done its job. Things would be different. Of that he was confident.
His promise came through each day. He cavorted with the Marauders as he always had but stepped back from mischief unlike ever before. He embraced responsibility and always had an ink well to refill one gone empty. He studied and he struggled but he learned, and he questioned things, everything, because he didn't want to take things at face value anymore, not when everything suddenly seemed to have so much more value. He didn't know it, but he was finally learning to fight. The fight had begun years before − the fight for her.
The change didn't go unseen. Remus was bursting with pride over this polished James, this sensible James, and he'd beam and laugh open-mouthed, rattling on about his excellent exam performance in Defense Against the Arts, "James, an admirable job, my God."
Sirius shoved him playfully and teased but his eyes glowed with the prospect of this James that Lily might date, his smirk and his bravado vibrating with constancy that could only come from years and years of friendship.
Peter was quieter about it but perhaps the most grateful for it − "Prongs, I appreciate it, you know, not just you helping me on this essay, just you, being there, thanks" and James would smile and glow and ruffle his friends' hair, "C'mon, Pete, let's sneak into the kitchens to steal food, I'm sodding starved".
And some nights found the four of them huddled in the library, thinking not only about the homework in front of them or the joke Sirius just rattled off or the sound of the loud Hufflepuffs two tables down but of the way Lily Evans had touched James' arm, genuinely, softly, lingeringly, earlier that day, in the Great Hall, thanking him quietly for all the things he was doing to help ease her stressful Heads duties. The way she was doing that much more of late, noticing things James did just for the sake of doing them.
Lily had begun to look at him as if she had no reason to look away. She was challenging his intellect because she was beginning to understand his deep, unyielding desire to understand how things worked, and why things were they way they were. She remembered his flaws, he knew, but she saw only the edges of them, the ragged, clouded peripheries that made him human. And emerging from him she seemed to feel what he felt: a newness of spirit, a true and trying effort to be better. It sparkled in the air between them, like sparks off a firework, and slowly, slowly, the wall she'd built to keep him out began to come down. Brick by brick.
James relished in the deconstruction. In all of an instant, she wasn't Lily, she was − more. She was fire. She was light. She saw and felt and thought things no one else did, things he couldn't fathom, and she experienced the world so singularly, so splendidly, so fully − that is spent him completely to be immersed in her, to watch her face tell the story that toppled from her lips, to learn her particular infatuation with not just knowledge but greed, and prejudice, and hatred, and everything lopsided that needed uprighting. He handed himself to her in pieces, and said: "I am lopsided. Please upright me."
The year went on and everything altered. Outside the castle walls, the world was breaking. There was hatred stirring like blackening storm clouds and suddenly everything was more urgent. The way he looked at her in the hallways, the way he talked to Sirius, Remus, Peter, about the future, about fighting for the future − their future. He was scared, for the first time. Really, purely scared. Not as much about war, or death, or fighting. About never having felt her hands in his, or having never heard her laugh in the early morning, or never having watched her lose inhibition and abandon reason in favor of feeling. He craved it. It pressed down on him.
And at a time when neither one of them expected it − especially not him − there was a shift so palpable that it stung.
They'd been out for a walk, a solitary pair caught in a tangle of language and laughter and heat against a cold November wind. He'd looked at her, the girl who meant everything, and decided he could tell her that right then, in a way different than he'd ever done so before.
"I love you, and I'm sorry," he spoke it quietly, as not to scare her. "I'm sorry, but I can't help it."
And the wind had picked up her hair and spread it out wildly, crimson blanketing grey horizon. Her eyes blazed into his and he felt for a moment that the world wanted this, wanted them.
"I know," was her response, quiet enough to have been mistaken for breeze. "And I just need time to get used to it, is all."
If miracles hadn't been real until then, James noticed the instant her hand reached out for his, and this was nothing short of miraculous, the coming together of skin and skin, the piercing way her face was inches from his, the jarring, exhilarating music of muscle against blood against bone that pounded in his ears.
And then - quite suddenly - she was kissing him, feverously, chaotically, in a way he suspected only Lily could, and he was grateful that gravity was there to affix him to the ground. Seconds later she was detached from him and beaming like she'd always meant to do that, like she hadn't got around to it yet, and he just laughed, by Merlin what else was there to do?
