He's in Ravenclaw and about as big of a swot as she is, maybe even a bit more. He's nice enough and mostly attractive, so when he asks her to have dinner with him in Hogsmeade one day, she accepts. He takes her to a small café, one she's never really noticed before, tucked solemn and unnoticed behind the much more popular (and gaudy) Madame Puddifoot's. She holds her breath as they walk towards the restaurant known for its Valentine's day specials and mostly-milk cups of tea and she breathes a sigh of relief when they pass it, but he is far too sensible to take anyone to eat overpriced sandwiches cut into the shape of hearts anyway.
His name is Landon Wilkes and he's just lovely and dinner at the café is lovely and he's politer than she could've imagined. He pulls out her seat and opens doors and doesn't ask anything rude or too invasive. They talk about their classes and how bizarre it is that this is their last year at Hogwarts and dutifully pretend that they aren't finishing school in wartime. He is nice and he is polite and he is lovely, so when he walks her to the Head Dorms and says goodnight she smiles kindly and gives him a kiss on the cheek.
He is nice and polite and all of those things, but she does not go to bed thinking about their date and she does not fancy that she should have pecked him on the lips instead. Still, when he asks her out again, she accepts. They have most of their dates in the library, fingers carefully intertwined with books spread out in front of them and haphazardly stacked scrolls of parchment covering the tabletops. Marley remarks one day that it's a good thing Landon is left-handed or they'd be in quite the spot writing essays. Lily rolls her eyes at the comment, and feels the slightest bit embarrassed, but holding hands with Landon is nice and he is nice, so she resolves to not further explore that particular response.
One day during patrols James calls him pathetic on the Quidditch pitch and completely wet and she laughs. She denies it, of course, but it occurs to her only after she's laughed that she shouldn't have laughed at all. She feels guilty nearly immediately and even more so when she can't muster up the indignation to properly tell James off. It occurs to her that she cares what he thinks of Landon as her boyfriend and then it occurs to her that she's surprised by this fact. She reminds herself that she and James are mates, now, or at least mate-ish, or at the very least they are Heads together and have patrol a couple of nights a week, and so of course she cares what he thinks. She does not give it any more weight than that.
Landon is sweet and it is easy being with him. He doesn't mind when she excuses herself to have dinner with Marlene and he understands when she runs off to patrol with James. He's polite to everyone at the prefect meetings and, though he mentions casually once or twice that it's a shame he never gets to patrol with her, he never asks her to change the schedules. He carries her books to the classes they share and he inquires after her mum's health every now and then. He is nice and polite and all of those things, but James is right. He is completely wet. She tells herself she doesn't really mind.
There's an attack on Hogsmeade and several stores are damaged. The café that she ate at with Landon on their first date is destroyed. The family that runs the café has been killed. She's with Landon when she hears and it's all too much for them to pretend like there isn't a war going on. She's horrified, but he's completely frozen at the news, catatonic, and she gathers him up in her arms and hugs him to her tightly when he finally mutters something about having eaten at the café for years, about knowing the names of the servers and the busboys and the manager. The Prophet publishes an article about the attack a few days later and she reads it while picking apart a piece of buttered toast, focusing grimly on the names of those lost. She is sickened to learn that the owners of the café were not the intended victims, and when she reads that most of those killed were half-bloods and purebloods, quiet people who have never publicly voiced political opinions, she has to run to the loo to try and heave up a breakfast she didn't quite get around to eating.
She has always lived in a world governed by rules and laws and reason. In war time, these things do not exist. The killings have become senseless, the attacks random, and she stumbles numbly up to her bedroom instead of attending her first period class. She stays there for an hour, for two, for three. She stays there until the whole day has past and James comes to knock on her door and bully her for skivving off. She doesn't hear the knocking or him calling her name, and when he finally just barges in he looks surprised to find that she's actually in there. For a moment, neither of them moves, they just look at each other, and then James lurches forward and drops his armful of her homework onto her floor and himself onto her bed beside her. He rubs her back as well as he can manage, but his hands are stiff and clumsy as she gasps into the front of his shirt.
After the attack, she has nightmares. She has trouble falling asleep and even more trouble staying asleep, and when she does manage to catch some shut eye it isn't particularly restful. She knows he's awake because he doesn't sleep much either and, anyway, she just heard the bird he was with leave. He's still in bed when she knocks on his door, but his sheets look freshly changed once he opens it. He frowns and tells her that cripes, Evans, she looks awful, but when she follows him back to his bed and mumbles instructions to budge over, he does. Even as he tells her that Merlin, he's not her mum, she can't run in here every time she's had a bad dream (and she wonders now if he's heard her the last couple of nights, waking with a strangled cry), he reaches to pull on a shirt and forfeits one of his pillows.
It becomes a habit. She sleeps better next to someone, knowing that someone's near, and maybe another warm body in his bed is just what he's needed, too. He stops inviting birds over at night and he takes down his pin-up posters that flirt with him even as they jeer at her. She knows it's wrong to date one boy and sleep next to another, but she can't go back to sleeping without James and she doesn't want to and, anyway, James is only her mate.
Classes continue and essays need to be written, so she forces herself to move forward as if things haven't changed and this new world isn't beyond recognition. Things are weird and wrong and she doesn't like pretending, but after a week things start to feel at least a little normal and after two more it's even easier. She pretends like this is a world that still makes sense, that she still wants to live in, and eventually that's how it becomes. Landon carries her books and James calls extra practices and the only thing that changes is where she sleeps.
She's decked out in red and gold on the afternoon of the Quidditch match, wearing an entirely too large red jumper that she's borrowed from Mary (and, consequently, one of Mary's ex-boyfriends) and a necklace of gold baubles that she's conjured herself. She carries a "Go Gryffindor" banner that Marley has painted and that she has charmed and proudly lacks even a single speck of blue or bronze on her person. Still, she bids Landon luck before he enters the Ravenclaw team change rooms to put on his Keeper uniform and gives him a chaste kiss for good measure. She will not be cheering for him or his team once the game starts, but she is happy enough to wish him well before hand.
When James makes his second particularly impressive goal, his fifth score of the match, she goes wild with the rest of the crowd. She is not deterred by the fact that another goal made by James is another save missed by Landon, even if Gryffindor is up by sixty points and there is no end in sight. She cheers on her House as vehemently as her father used to cheer at football matches on the telly, and she imagines her own voice as booming as his always seemed when she was young. When Ana Blythe goes into a dive, the particularly small third year that James has appointed the position of seeker seeming to spot the snitch, she lurches forward against the railing with everyone else, nearly winding herself in her excitement. She has just enough breath left to scream as Gryffindor wins the match.
There's a party in the Common Room that night to celebrate their second victory of the year and when James hands her a drink, she takes it. She is seventeen and it is legal for her to drink and she's still too excited from the match to police anyone else. The Firewhiskey burns her throat and the wireless Sirius has charmed drowns out all noise other than James shouting something in her ear about dancing. The furniture in the Common Room has been pushed to the edges of the room and she follows him to the middle of it, bodies pressing in on all sides but her hand still clutched in his.
After a sixth year in a short skirt cuts in with James and she's had more than a few cups of what she's starting to suspect isn't just punch, she fancies herself in the mood for a snog. The hallways are quiet and empty as she navigates them and it is only with slight difficulty that she manages to find her way to the Ravenclaw Tower, or at least the general area. It occurs to her only once she gets there that she's not sure how she expected to find him. She hadn't thought far enough ahead when she left and she still hasn't as she sits down to rest her warm cheeks against the cool stone walls and wait for him. She gets lucky and it's only a few minutes later that he turns into the corridor, apparently just back from a long soak in the prefects' bathroom, and though his hair is still wet suddenly he doesn't seem so.
She leaves the party for a snog and when she returns to the Head Dorms she's single and confused and putting herself to bed in her own room for the first time in weeks. The walls spin when she closes her eyes and her sheets seem cold and unfamiliar. Her bed is suddenly too big, too empty, and she can't fathom lying in it alone, but she's starting to think that Landon might be right and if he is than she's got to start locking her door.
It takes three days for James to hear about the break-up and the first thing he says while they're patrolling is congratulations for ditching the wanker. His tone is harsh and maybe even a little bitter, but they both fall silent after she mentions, quietly and uncomfortably, that, actually, Landon was the one who broke up with her. Neither of them acknowledges that she's hardly spoken to James since the victory party. Neither of them acknowledges that, when he came to her door after he'd come back from the party, not sure where she'd gotten off to or if she'd gotten back okay, she'd ignored his knocking. Neither of them acknowledges that even when he'd attempted to barge in, as had become customary when she didn't explicitly tell him to bugger off or give her a minute, he'd found the door charmed shut.
James isn't the sort of boy to say something when he's hurt and she's doing her best not to notice that he is, but his tone before and his silence now are too potent to ignore. She struggles to find the right words to fix this, but all she comes up with is "who told you" and she's met with a stony and somewhat accusatory "Remus" in response. She doesn't know what more to do than apologize, so she does, but when he mocks her "I'm sorry for not telling you" with "I'm sorry for that poor bloke" she can't help but be stung. "You must've been even madder than I thought for him to want to lose a fit bird like you," he goes on to explain, and she's not sure if she's supposed to accept the compliment or be offended by the insult or both.
His curiosity gets the best of him three days later and, when they're settled around the table in their dorm doing work, he stops to look up at her and ask why Landon really dropped her. She shrugs again, repeats that she doesn't particularly want to talk about it and it's all still too fresh, but when he pushes the issue and protests that oh, come on, a "nice" boy like Wilkes wouldn't send her off without a reason, she snaps and tells him that she thought he didn't give a flying fuck about a wet Ravenclaw like Wilkes. He's not fazed and he's not insulted, but he snorts and rolls his eyes and then leans forward to rest his elbows on the table and properly look at her so that he can tell her to stuff the sass, Evans, because she's been acting like a shut-in for a week. She ignores him as best she can, leaning away and using only the very edge of the table to work on her essay, but it only seems to encourage him and his smile grows gleeful as he raises her eyebrows and exclaims that she did something, didn't she and – Merlin, Evans, did she cheat on Wilkes? She pauses and then chooses not to remind him of the two weeks when she used his shoulder for a pillow. Instead, she simply gives in and tells him the truth – that Landon broke up with her because she fancied someone else.
He's in Gryffindor and about as big of a hothead as she is, maybe even a bit more. He's smart enough and certainly attractive, so when he tells her that he's taking her to grab drinks in Hogsmeade one day, she doesn't argue. He takes her to The Three Broomsticks to sit in his favorite booth that he usually shares with the Marauders, the booth she usually does her best to ignore, tucked in the corner furthest from where she usually sits. She holds his hand as they walk towards the pub known for its Butterbeer and busty barwoman and she laughs out loud when he brings back two bottles of Firewhiskey instead, because he is far too cheeky to not try and get her drunk on their first proper date.