As if it wasn't enough just to hear you speak
They had to give you lips like that
Like all of your sadness reduced to a color
then painted upon you, how could I forget you.
/
When their parents first told them the story, they stared in quiet disbelief.
How could a father name his children this way? It was unholy. A joke that rang like a funeral dirge.
James - Lily - Severus. The perverse triangle. Now united by flesh and blood and bone, like the three heads of a beastly creature which thirsted for blood.
James thought it was weird and gross that in another life, maybe sixty years ago or more, he had been married to his sister and had given birth to his father, who had then produced him somehow.
But he got over this paradox around the age of eleven, when he was shipped off to Hogwarts.
It was harder for the second half of the triangle.
For Albus Severus and Lily Luna were not shipped anywhere. They stayed together, in adjacent rooms, at home. And they fell in love.
It was a reconciliation of the old triangle, a reconstruction that was meant to give precedence to the angry lost boy, this time around, instead of the handsome popular rascal.
Albus conceded that James was much nicer than their grandfather, but that Lily was still his.
And his alone.
This fact became evident in Lily's thirteenth summer and Albus' fifteenth when they shared their first kiss in front of James. Accidentally, or so it seems.
James was practicing his flying in the field. He was set on his target; three improvised hoops at the end of the pitch. He hadn't inherited his father's talent for seeking, but rather his mother's dexterity with the Quaffle. This year was going to be his last at Hogwarts, and he would make it count, he would win the Quidditch Cup.
He flew low on his broomstick, enjoying the cool morning air on his face, when he saw them behind the garden wall. Albus was holding her face like it was ripe fruit. She had her hands closed shyly around the collar of his shirt. They were both inexperienced at it, their mouths barely touching, but it didn't seem to matter. They made such a silly picture. James felt like laughing, but then he didn't. He wanted to throw up. He turned around and flew beyond the three hoops.
A week later, they were all back at Hogwarts and James noticed how much Lily blushed when her eyes happened upon the Slytherin table. He thought, perhaps that had been a fluke, the kiss. Perhaps his brother and sister were just experimenting on each other. He had been curious too, he'd kissed Teddy once, on a dare. But mostly because he had wanted to.
But this was different.
He'd meant to talk to her, he really had. He would never tell Mum and Dad, he wouldn't betray her like that. But someone had to stop it before it became - well, obvious.
They weren't being very secretive about it. He saw them, in the following weeks, sitting together in the library, holding hands under the table, sending each other little notes during lunch. One Hufflepuff actually pointed at the paper birds which travelled from Gryffindor to Slytherin without any compunction. It was embarrassing.
And then came the first Hogsmeade weekend and they went together. As siblings. But not really.
Lily invited her group of friends as a pretext, but James heard from Talulah, who heard from her younger sister, Bess, that Lily and Albus had ditched them halfway through the outing and gone on a separate walk around the village.
He really needed to talk to her, he really needed to knock some sense into her. He didn't know why he thought he'd have more success with her. She wasn't the sensible one. No one in Gryffindor really was, not since Aunt Hermione.
"James? Could you not look at me like that? I'm not a child. I can make my own decisions."
"It's not about being a child. He's your brother."
"So are you, what difference does it make?"
"Well, you haven't kissed me, that's the difference." He meant it as a wake-up call. See, you wouldn't kiss me, would you? That would be disgusting.
James kissed his sister under the mistletoe, at Christmas, at Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron's.
Rose had charmed a mistletoe to follow unsuspecting victims around the house. They'd both seen it when they came out of the kitchen, but there was no one in the hallway, so James chuckled (he had extracted a promise from her that she and Albus would try to stop) and bent down and kissed her on the cheek, but funny that, Lily said his "stupid stubble" was tickling her, and "why did he have to grow a beard again?", so James kissed her on the lips. For two seconds. It happened.
The triangle is like a waterfall, one thing goes up, another down, and it's a continuous circuit, each feeding off of each other.
James blamed his father. And names. Names foretold destinies. Firenze had taught them something about it during Divination, he hadn't bothered to listen. Because if names were that important, Professor Longbottom wouldn't be half as cool.
("Fuck names") (He felt a thrill the first time he said the f-word)
There were a lot of tempting offers on the job market, all far away from home and Hogwarts, all decidedly free of the sick little tendrils which had enclosed his heart.
But when Madam Hooch retired happily that spring, James applied for the job.
He thought it would be relatively safe, since he would only be teaching First-Years and referee the Quidditch team, and Merlin knows, Lily and Albus had never shown an affinity for flying.
It was all right in the beginning. He got a sense of distance from his siblings. He was his own man now. Except, he lived in the same castle and inevitably heard rumours. Such as the fact that Albus was tutoring his sister in Potions and since Albus was Professor Plinskey's pet student, she allowed him to use one of her storerooms for their little sessions.
Matilda Plinskey told James himself how happy she was that Albus was helping his sister make progress.
It was a twist of fate that Lily Luna was not as gifted as her grandmother. Or perhaps a dirty little lie.
He wanted to check, like a fool.
He stormed the little storeroom one evening, expecting to see them sweaty and dishevelled, trying to hide their sickening urges, but instead, he found them huddled together around a cauldron, holding hands, while Albus instructed her how to apply the salamander blood.
James hated them in that moment. It was the only time he truly hated them as a unit, as a two. Because he had wanted to see his brother and sister in the most hideous way possible, and they had disappointed him. He had been entertaining a vicious fantasy of her, pressed up against the cold dungeon wall, and Albus placing butterfly kisses on the hollow of her neck and - nothing had come of that.
He hated them for making him feel like a fool.
But the fantasy persisted in his mind. She was a Prefect now, and she patrolled the corridors every night, like a ghost. It was the only time she was truly bereft of Albus, since her brother was saving himself for Head Boy.
James sat in his office late at night and poured over Seeker Weekly while also imagining that Albus would break curfew on purpose, just to be caught by Lily.
He went out at night himself, looking for them, thinking they were hiding from him.
He burst into the Room of Requirement one night and it was - it was Lily's bedroom from home. Her toys were lined up on the shelves, her miniature moving globe of the world, a gift from Uncle Bill, sat perched on her bedside table, her clothes were spread haphazardly on the bed and her perfume was clogging the air.
He felt like crying. He wanted to tear up the room in half. He was a grown man. He was James Sirius Potter, he had been a good kid in school, he had had good friends, had enjoyed a brilliant career as a Chaser, had a good life. He didn't deserve this.
He started seeing Matilda Plinskey, who was five years older than him, but otherwise a catch. He thought it would make things better if he focused on someone else for a change and it worked nicely for a month, until she realized he was always walking the corridors late at night and he never told her why.
He did tell her he might quit Hogwarts after this year, but he'd keep in touch with her.
"But you're an excellent Professor! They all love you."
He said he knew that he was well liked, but he wanted to be some place where no one knew him. This had the effect of offending her, naturally.
Albus heard it first from his father that James wanted to travel for a year or two.
He knocked on his door one evening, during Easter break, and asked James if he and Lily could join him when they were done with Hogwarts.
"I mean, if you'd only wait two more months, I'd be able to come with you straight away," Albus explained sheepishly. "And Lily would love to tag along later. We could make a party of it."
James smiled heavily and said "I'd rather be alone, Sev, sorry, I have to figure myself out". And Albus said quietly, "Don't call me Sev. But all right."
The Golden Trio had lived in a tent for several months. James could do it too.
But he was fucking weak, because three months in, he wrote his family a letter, he wrote Albus a letter, and he wrote Lily a letter and sent her a ticket to come join him for a week in Albany. He told her not to tell anyone, that he wanted to whisk her away for her birthday.
She was fifteen going on sixteen. But she told her Mum and Dad and even Albus that she was going to visit Bess from school who lived in Wales. Because, Lily felt that there was something wrong with her big brother, and he needed someone there to steer him right. He probably wanted convincing to come home. He was probably tired of travelling already or desperate for a friend or -
She reasoned with herself that Albus must not know, because James would be upset if she told, and the last thing she wanted was to cause strife between them. The last thing.
She had forgotten the mistletoe kiss of almost two years past. One forgets such dangerous things.
He slept with his sister on the third night of her arrival.
He cried, at first, and told her he couldn't come home ever again, which was a bit dramatic even for him, and Lily gathered him in her arms and told him that whatever was making him sad, she would brave it out with him, she would make it better, she would fight the monsters and send them running and when he lifted his tear-stained face to tell her she was the monster that needed to run, he couldn't find the words to even utter "you", and she wiped away his tears and he closed his eyes and kissed the palm of her hand and it progressed from there and Lily felt she couldn't stop it because James was not miserable for once, and their kissing was nice, more mature than her and Albus', not better, just different.
That was the first night.
The second night they lay innocently in bed together and looked at each other thoughtfully and told stories of when they were little and James was awful because he was the oldest and kept lording it over her and Albus.
"Did I - did I -" he asked and stopped. He wanted to know if he had, by his own designs, brought Albus and Lily together, a united stand against the big brother.
Lily shook her head. "Oh, no, it wasn't that. It's when you left us that we really started to go crazy. You went to Hogwarts and we decided we wanted our own Hogwarts and well...it's not hard to fall for either of you."
Either of you.
He remembered that the third night, when he undressed her.
He had the taste of her in his mouth when Lily, naked and remorseful, told him in a whisper "Albus missed you so much. He still misses you."
But a triangle is not a circle and no three elements can all be happy at once.
Someone always has to miss someone else.
Lily returned home on the fourth day, cutting her birthday week short. The problem was, Mum had called Bess' parents and hadn't found Lily there. She'd nearly gone mad with worry.
"Albus almost ran away to find you."
Oh.
And when she went into his room to tell him she was safe and home, he knew. He knew.
Albus dropped out of Hogwarts during his last year. He took a job in Diagon Alley and moved out of his parents' home. No one could persuade him not to throw his life away, no one - not even sensible, understanding Aunt Hermione - could shame him into returning to his academic pursuits.
He was content to quit while he was ahead. He liked working small. He wanted to figure himself out, just like James had.
James. Sometimes he wished he were dead. But if his brother died, Albus felt he'd die too.
Lily came to see him at his shop and begged him to go have a cup of tea with her but he turned around and acted like she wasn't there, which was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do.
"You can't even look at me! But you're my brother too, just like him!" she shouted, slamming her palm against the counter-top. Several magical trinkets fell and made a terrible noise all around her and no one could hear her crying.
Harry and Ginny realized all too late their children had been defeated by their names. Lily graduated from Hogwarts, but she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. She stayed at home in bed, watched TV, and picked up her old colouring books and started colouring again, which worried Ginny excessively.
Eventually, Lily signed up for a course in magical drawing, which was better than nothing, but Aunt Fleur had to badger her into doing it. She even paid for the instructor. The goblin said she showed some talent buried underneath her general ennui.
Meanwhile, Albus was working in a shop and James was making his way through South America, sending Quidditch postcards along the way that bore little to no information about his true state of mind. It was all a giant mess.
They didn't know where it had all gone so wrong. But if they succumbed to depression too, well, where would the Potters be? No, they belonged to an older generation, who, when faced with existential impasse, turned to myth and legend. They turned to the past.
"We didn't have time to get bored and sad with our lives, we were trying not to get killed by Death Eaters," Harry reminisced fondly.
"Are you saying our children might need some good ol' fashion Death Eater cure?"
They laughed weakly at their own little joke, but privately, they both knew they had saved the world, and not their children.
A triangle and a circle and a dash in the middle - those were the Deathly Hallows.
The wand that could win every duel, why that was Lily, because she advanced through her drawing classes with impressive speed. In two years' time, she opened her own studio.
The stone that could bring back loved ones from the dead, why that was Albus, who took over the shop when the owner died and opened three new branches across England and resurrected himself without anyone's help.
The cloak that could render the wearer invisible, why that was James, because no one heard about him for five years, and then one autumn morning, he showed up at Lily's studio.
He bore gifts from strange magical places across the globe and he lay them at her feet and didn't ask for an apology, just expected to be welcome in some fashion. That was James.
He went to see Albus next. They both pretended Lily's body had never been a material thing and that they knew nothing about it. Albus was not good at hugs, but James tackled him without mercy. It almost looked like a fight, like the two were coming up for air, only to push back their heads underwater - but it was only brotherly love.
The three of them were all in the same room at Halloween, when they came home to visit their parents.
There was such a feeling of joy and immense pleasure, like no time had passed at all, as if lives had been stopped in the middle of living, and the children were still waiting to grow up. Harry and Ginny watched them with the shock of people who had given up hope. The siblings reunited!
Even Albus and Lily, who had never managed to reconcile properly, sat next to each other at dinner and smiled.
Everything works out in the end.
They returned with her to the studio and they had it out. Not a fight, really. They'd brought wine and Fire-Whiskey, so it was more like an incoherent torrent of regrets and accusations.
They all knew the ending, they all knew what would happen before the sun rose, and they let it happen, watched for it amidst their own vitriol.
Lily said they were both idiots who had abandoned her because they were too proud to share, and Albus said that she and James had been selfish because they had started without him, and James said that he had never meant to get involved but those stupid fucking stories about their grandparents had twisted everything out of proportion, until all he wanted was to get involved.
They were so drunk at one point that they fell on the hard tiled floor and rolled together like a fat caterpillar that was never going to metamorphose, that was just going to lie drunk -
But they were very lucid afterwards as they undressed and bit each other and scratched and tore and spat and plunged.
James tasted Albus' mouth and begged forgiveness. Lily kissed the hairs on their stomachs and hoped she would someday be able to draw this moment. Albus licked the back of James' ear and remembered what it was like to be without all the weights around his shoulders. He pulled on Lily's hair and whispered feverishly that he wanted her, he wanted all of them.
In their heart of hearts, there had never been a question of who wanted whom.
It was just that, it takes time for a triangle to acquire a circle and a dash.
Harry and Ginny thought that they had never seen their children happier. All was well.