She wishes it were easier. Isn't it supposed to be? When you're young and naive and hopelessly optimistic isn't everything supposed to be easy? Life is meant to sweep you off your feet and let you drift somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. But reality isn't like that. It's hard and uncomfortable and doesn't cushion the blow from child to adult.
She sometimes wishes she were braver. She wishes she could hate him and move on. She wishes that she didn't want him so bad that she can taste it in the back of her throat. She wishes relationships were fun and simple and full of bright starlight. She is a teenager and isn't she supposed to make mistakes? Isn't she supposed to get her heart broken and let some beautiful boy piece it back together?
It doesn't happen like that.
Perhaps it never does.
She watches him and waits. She waits for the man she knows he is to emerge. She laughs because when he finally arrives she almost misses it. He has changed in the most subtle of ways and at first she dismisses it with a raised eyebrow and a barely audible tut. This is not the first time he has 'changed his ways'. Then there are whisperings about him; whisperings that she cannot ignore or deny, whisperings that he has changed.
They say he is a boy dressing like a man. But she knows he is a clown dressing like a king.
His wild hair and twinkling eyes and mischievous grin are his armour. The palace is not his and he does not lead the people there, he amuses them. She does not see him as the crown-prince of Gryffindor and she never has. She can see him slowly drowning and she sometimes wonders if she is the only one who can see that he is breaking. His hair is knotted and intense, like brambles at midnight, and his eyes are not windows they are mirrors which are cracked beyond repair. He is not the clown she paints him to be but she thinks maybe she is not the queen he is searching for. She has not asked for the limelight and she does not desire it.
All she knows is that she has been thrust onto this empty stage without a script and without a clue. She stumbles blindly from one scene to the next and she can soon surmise that her story will play out like a Greek tragedy. There is only one way the final scene will end; the curtain will fall heavy and leaden on their twisted figures.
The perverse thrill to keep chasing after that impossible, fairytale, alternative ending never leaves her and she hopes it never will. She needs to believe that they can both change together. That they can stand still long enough to fall in love. She wants, so desperately, to fall into his welcoming embrace and live the rest of her life in dizzying happiness but she knows that they are far too explosive for something as calm as that. She knows that when it happens there will be fireworks and screaming and heat and, like all good things, it will come to an end. They will fizzle out into old age together or they will burst into an unrivalled legend.
She wishes she could quietly simmer in the background but they were meant for greater things. She knows that together, Lily and James, James and Lily, Evans and Potter, will reach boiling point and there will be no way down.
So, when she is mocking the court jester, they will be busy imagining a crown on James Potter's head and picturing her in this lead lined throne of her own design.
And she knows that when they explode together it will be glorious.