They said you were beautiful.
In the years that followed your untimely departures from this world, the words that most frequently graced the lips of those who knew you well but not intimately, those whom you considered friends but not of the best kind, were that you were beautiful.
It is often the most common lies that paint a picture of truth. You were not beautiful. Really, you were anything but.
You'd met your future wife on a crisp autumnal day, on a morning in which the rest of your life would begin. She had glowing cheeks, and shining eyes, and was a picture of youth, health and happiness. You barely noticed her- eleven year old boys are at an age to young to notice the benefits of the opposite sex. So when you did catch her eye, accidental as it was, you did not feel an instant connection. There was no lightning bolt. There was no intrinsic sense of love from that one fleeting glance. The first look between the two of you was not beautiful, it was casual, as it should have been.
Of course, you had eventually come to terms with the fact that girls, as much as their thoughts alluded you, were people to be wanted. Initially, to be lusted after, then to be coveted, and then one day to be loved. Your taste of romance seemed to arrive in one petite, red headed package. Lily Evans wasn't beautiful. She was too thin to be beautiful, to mismatched to be stunning, to alive to be graceful. She was just Lily, and you loved her the more for it. She hated you.
And so you learned, incredibly early really, that love wasn't the way your parents had described it, nor the way the songs sang about it. Love for you was messy, difficult, tiring. Lily Evans did not love you back.
When you eventually united, one crisp Autumn day much like the one that you had first met her, the two of you were still far from beautiful. There were too many arguments, too much fire, too much passion. Anyone who touched you was burned, not beautified. The love you felt for one another was the kind that set things ablaze in a storm of red flames and black smoke, not the kind that makes everyone around you bask in the reflected golden glow.
Life in the Wizarding World during the seventies and early eighties was not easy or pretty. The two of you soon caught on to the ugliness that was tainting your planet, the malevolence that infected your people like a fungus and made witch turn on witch, wizard on wizard, family on family, friend on friend. Life for the two of you was not beautiful, it was hard, and tragic, and a struggle. You found solace in each other's arms, and comfort in each other's kisses, and love in whatever the other did, but your relationship was now further from beautiful than it had ever been.
Love, for the two of you, wasn't easy. It didn't come naturally, and on some days it felt like the whole world was against you, and most of it was. But the love was all encompassing, unavoidable and unflinching. The two of you weren't beautiful, you were something better- you were real. Gritty fights, hazardous quests, a girl and a boy. It sounds like a fairytale, and it's often told that way. But the reality of things is sometimes better than the fantasy, and the reality was that sometimes Lily drove you so insane that you wanted nothing more than to walk out and never come back. There was sleepless night after sleepless night when Harry was born, and you didn't take his every cry as a blessing. You were young parents, not saints.
The two of you weren't beautiful. You were fire, and love, and anger, and determination, and all the other things that can make something amazing. But you were never beautiful, because beautiful was too intangible, too fantastical. You were something better. You were real.