Mr. and Mrs. Potter are not meant to be. There won't be a simple wedding, with a glowing bride, and a disheveled groom to tuck a streak of red behind her ear and say, "I do." There won't be two (eight) little children running around the house, grabby hands and sticky faces and smiling mouths and green, green eyes. There won't be any more quarreling, either, which he supposes is a relief. Their last row was ages ago, and she really gave it to him, throwing and shouting and crying, but that was then, and now their end is resigned, tired. No shouting, no accusing, just two people, peeling off into different, separate lives.
He leaves her on a Sunday morning, while she's reading The Daily Prophet, innocently tucking into an early breakfast.
"What are you doing?" she asks, not looking away from the paper, a crease between her eyes as she concentrates on the front page story.
"We need to talk" He feels numb when she raises her gaze to meet his, green eyes wide and sad and betrayed.
She shakes her head. An hour later, her things are packed down to two suitcases, and she looks terribly displaced, but if Lily Evans is anything, it's efficient and prideful. "If you're – if you're certain. I don't want to... hold you back. It was good, James. It was."
She nods, steadying herself. She's about to leave, for good, she thinks, when the cat round the corner and rubs against her leg. She crouches down, scratches between his ears, and James stares at the crown of her forehead, where a snowy pale scalp makes a beautiful line with her ginger hair, and his body jolts to life. What have I done?
"Well," she says, and then she doesn't say anything, just opens the door and walks through it, closing it silently behind her.
If James hates anything, it's losing. And everything about this reeks of defeat – the empty space beside him in bed, her practical mint toothpaste, absent beside his bubblegum tube, the vacancies where she had so plainly existed... The house is so empty without her it feels crowded with absence, and sadness, and he feels sick walking into his own bedroom, where things used to be so beautifully theirs.
He tries to move on, because this is all his doing, really, and he shouldn't be the one irreparably damaged. Peter suggests that he goes through the motions, but it doesn't work fast enough for him. James Potter is an impatient creature – it's why he could never play seeker. He doesn't possess the patience to sit high above the action, eyes scanning the pitch for a single, elusive flash of gold. It's why he's on the front lines of the war (even though there are no front lines – the war is everywhere and nowhere, surrounding them and inside of them). He can't plan, sit back and watch things fall into place – it just isn't in his nature. It's why he goes out and gets hammered with Marlene McKinnon, stumbles back to her flat with the intention of taking her to bed, and ends his night crying on her couch, head in her lap, a soothing hand stroking messy black hair. "Its not fair," he chokes, and she rolls her eyes, pats his head, because he's being a bit pathetic, really when he's the one who broke it off officially.
It's a month later when he sees her again, just a flash of red hair in Diagon Alley, popping into Flourish and Blotts, probably for a new book. He sees her for an instant, then she's gone, and it was just enough time to rip him in two.
It's a month after that when he sees her plastered on the cover of Quidditch World, her face shielded by a comically large sunhat, hand in hand with Alder Bretsky, his face shielded by a mammoth hand.
His halves ripped into halves.