Disclaimer: All characters belong to JKR, and unfortunately, I am not her. As does the song Hoodie belong to Hey Violet.
It was a rainy Saturday evening in Central London, and it was Lily's first night back in the city living with Marlene after moving back from Moscow. It was funny, she had been gone four years, and London had only ever been her home for a few months after graduation, and yet, somehow, it felt like home in an instant. It was as if this was where she was meant to be all of the years she had been away. Of course, the only reason she had gone to Moscow in the first place had been to chase a story, as if writing could only be done from Moscow. If she were being honest with herself, she might admit the real reason she went to Moscow in the first place, the person she was trying to escape. But he had nothing to do with her decision to leave only months after moving in with him in the first place, right?
Water was pouring down over the busy streets of London below, and Lily had opened every window in the flat, much to Marlene's annoyance. She had always loved rain. There was just something about it that had always made her feel so calm, like rainy nights in the Head's dormitory with a certain someone. But she didn't think about him anymore, she couldn't.
The sounds of cars splashing through the roads below calmed Lily as she unpacked her clothes into her wardrobe, and slowly worked away at putting her things away. She hadn't packed her own things, so unpacking hadn't been the easiest task. Her mother had taken it upon herself to put all of her things in boxes for her when she had visited her during her last week in Moscow. It was a nice gesture, really. But Lily prided herself on organization, and her mother did not.
She was nearly halfway though her boxes of things when Lily opened an unmarked box, and felt all of the air leave her lungs at once. Slowly, she begun removing the items in the box one by one, and she felt her shoulders beginning to shake slightly.
It started with a piece of parchment, covered in doodles, and notes, in her own handwriting, and his. She remembered writing them in sixth year, halfway though the term, when she had decided that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't so awful after all. Goddamn, it had been a long time since she had seen his handwriting.
Next, she picked up an old battered copy of Pride and Prejudice, and opened the front cover to the birthday inscription that he had written for her seventeenth birthday, and in the back cover, were pressed daisy petals, from the flowers that had come with the book.
The third thing she removed from the box was a small wooden container, with her initials inscribed on the lid. Her mother had given it to her when she was eight years old. But it wasn't the box itself that had caused Lily's stomach to tie up in knots, rather it was the contents itself. Movie ticket stubs, receipts, bits of parchment with notes on it. The box contained nearly every memento she had kept during the year and a half they had been together, and she had forgotten she even still had the box.
Placing all of the items on the floor around her, she reached back into the box one more time to pick the last item up out of the box, and immediately, she felt herself sink slightly into the ground, and clutch the piece of maroon fabric to her chest. Battered and torn, the Gryffindor Quidditch jumper hung loosely in her arms, still covered in cigarette burns, with a broken zipper that didn't do up. Holding it up in front of her, her eyes ran across the gold lettering across the back that read Potter, and she smiled.
She remembered the very first time she wore that hoodie like it had only happened months prior, not years. It had been a Tuesday night, and she was late for rounds to meet him. She had just ran halfway across the grounds in the pouring rain, and began barreling through the common room and to her trunk to find something dry to wear before she was even more late. Pulling on the first thing she could find, she dashed out of their shared common room, and met him by the portrait of the Fat Lady outside the Gryffindor common room. It wasn't until he looked down at her, and began to laugh, that she realized that she was in fact wearing his Gryffindor Captain's jumper and not her own, and that the house elves had mixed up their clothes. She apologized, and offered to go back to the common room to change, only to have him laugh, and tell her it was fine, and that it looked better on her anyways. That was the first time he had ever made her blush.
The second time she ended up wearing his jumper had been a complete mistake. It was several months later, and it was the morning after the first time they spent the night together. He had come back from Quidditch practice the night before, wearing his Quidditch jumper, sans a shirt underneath, and it was like years of tension between them finally just boiled over, and she woke up the next morning in his bed. The thing that woke them, however, was loud banging at the outside of their portrait hole, and she had thrown on the first article of clothing that she could find, his jumper. Which again, wouldn't have been such a big deal, if the source of the banging hadn't been Sirius trying to get into their common room, and Lily hadn't answered the door in nothing but his jumper, and a pair of knickers.
The third time she had worn his jumper had not been an accident. It was a month into their relationship, and it was the morning after their first major fight. Thinking back on it now, she couldn't even remember what they had been fighting about. All she remembered, was that she wanted to drive him absolutely mental. And so, she had pulled his jumper on over her bra, and made her way down to breakfast where the rest of the Gryffindor seventh years were already gathered and eating. She didn't remember much of the morning, but she distinctly remembered his eyes widening at the sight of her in his clothes so early in the morning. In addition to his hand creeping it's way up her thigh when she had told him that she would have given it back to him, but she hadn't anything on underneath it. Several minutes later, found the two of them back in the Head's dormitory, with both his jumper, and the rest of her clothes discarded on the floor.
Following that particular incident, the jumper had remained in Lily's possession. In fact, she was fairly certain that he never wore that jumper again after that instance, and that it's home had become Lily's trunk at school. When they left school, it had gone home with her, until it found it's new place in the shared wardrobe of the flat they shared in London, only a few weeks after they had graduated.
How Lily had ended up with it after all of those years, she did not know. In fact, she distinctly remembered leaving it in a box at his doorstep several weeks after they had broken up. She hadn't even been aware that it had been in Moscow with her, nor did she know how it had wound up in a box with all of her things from their relationship.
Smiling down at the jumper, Lily stood up, and slipped it on over her shoulders, enveloping herself in the scent of his cologne, still clinging to the fabric after all of those years. It was much too long on her, like it always had been, stopping at her knees due to the fact that he was nearly a foot taller than her, and the sleeves hung well past her fingertips. Slipping her hands into the pockets, she felt the hole in the right corner of the left pocket, where he had burnt with a smoke one evening on the Gryffindor Tower balcony smoking with Sirius. Then, pulling on the drawstrings, she smiled fondly at the frayed ends that were a direct result of her chewing on them whenever she was alone at night, when her and he had been fighting.
Catching her reflection in the mirror on the opposite side of her room, she shook her head at the sight of her. It had been four years since she had so much as seen him, and there she was, standing in her bedroom in his jumper, reminiscing on their relationship. He'd probably think she was psychotic if he knew she still had it, not to mention was wearing it. It was odd, though. As she looked at herself, at the woman she had become since she had last seen him, since she had last worn that jumper, she couldn't help but wonder if she was still the same person deep down. If maybe, just maybe, there was still a shadow of the girl she once was somewhere inside of her. She supposed there was. But it had been four years, and she had chosen herself over him all those years earlier. But, she supposed, there would always be a small part of her that was in love with James Potter.