Of Tea and Secrets
Part I
Sunday Morning
Lily is nibbling on a slice of toast and reading the Sunday edition of The Daily Profit when James arrives at the Gryffindor table that morning. He throws a leg over the bench next to her, straddling it, and leans in to give her a full peck on the cheek before bringing his other leg around to settle into his seat fully. She doesn't look at him, remaining seemingly engrossed in her paper. He, in turn, does not seem to notice her lack of response as he yawns tiredly and reaches for a steaming pot of tea that rests in the center of the table, lifting and pouring it into a teacup that has conveniently appeared on a saucer by his breakfast plate. It is a little known fact that James Potter loves tea, especially tea in the morning, although she knows he is very keen on drinking tea in the afternoons as well. He is nondiscriminatory about it like that. In September he had insisted that they begin keeping their own tea set in the Head Common Room that they shared, only half-joking, as she came to learn, in telling her that all he really needed to get by in life was a bit of oxygen, a dash of water, and some Earl Grey.
"Ugh." James makes a loud, disparaging sound and Lily finally looks over at him—several people around the room do as well as it is still relatively early for breakfast and the Great Hall is quite empty and silent. He is setting the teacup back down on the saucer with a distasteful look on his face. "That's awful," he says flatly.
Now that she is full facing him she sees how tired he looks—blurry eyes framed by dark, purplish circles and a telling slump to his shoulders as if he currently lacks the energy to employ good posture.
Lily watches as he swiftly pours a glass of water from a pitcher in front of them and takes a generous gulp of it, trying to wash the offensive taste from his mouth.
It is an even littler known fact that James Potter is a first-rate tea snob. In fact, she is certain that tea brewed from tealeaves that were grown in The Garden of Eden itself would not pass the rigorous standards of James's snobby taste buds. Only in extremely rare circumstances has she ever witnessed him satisfied with a cup of tea that someone else has made. This she found out the hard way during the previous month when he was sick in bed with the flu. He had refused to drink the first two cups she had brought him past the first sip because she had failed to prepare the tea "in the special way that his House Elf Tinky makes it at home." Snob. If he hadn't been sniveling, coughing, shivering, and looking so incredibly, pathetically ill at the time she probably would have told him to shove off and go date Tinky instead of her.
Usually it is at this point most mornings when Lily would admonish James for being a Tea Elitist and tell him that he needs to stop leaving anonymous instructions—signed "Concerned"—for the House Elves in the kitchen because it is a very rude thing to do, regardless of how poor he believes their tea-making skills to be.
She looks back at her paper without comment.
"What time did you get up this morning?" he asks after a short silence. He is not looking at her, but obliviously concentrating on piling a heaping amount of eggs onto his plate, so he misses the fraction of a second where her jaw tightens.
"Seven," she answers curtly. She is still looking at her paper.
Startled by her short tone, James's head snaps up. He stares at her. Lily can tell from the corner of her eye that he is unsure of what to say next, trying to figure out if the edge in her voice had simply been a figment of his imagination or was something truly wrong? and finally settles with a lame observation of, "That's early."
"Hm."
"Lil?"
"Uh-huh?"
"Is something…" he hesitates. "Is something the matter?"
"No."
"Oh. Okay."
There were several minutes of silence, only broken by the sound of James cautiously chewing his breakfast, then:
"So, what are you reading?"
"Words."
"Is that supposed to be a joke?"
"No."
"Right," he says briskly. He puts down his fork and turns to face her. "I can't read your mind, you know. If something is wrong then you're going to have to tell me out loud."
Lily begins turning through the pages of her paper frantically, rapidly scanning each one as she shuffles them around.
"Dear Merlin, what is it? What in the bloody hell are you looking for, Lily?"
"Didn't you hear? James Potter just admitted that he couldn't do something—I'm sure there must be an article about it in here somewhere. If that's not newsworthy then I don't know what is," she deadpans, shaking her head.
Lily continues to rustle the paper about noisily, drawing attention from all around the still-nearly-empty hall, until James brings his large, Quidditch-calloused hands down over hers, effectively stilling them.
"What's wrong?" he asks her again, very seriously this time. He draws in close and dips his head low, forcing her to look into his eyes. "Did I…is today our anniversary or something?" he asks. He suddenly sounds very nervous, and more than slightly confused. "If…er…four months and twenty-one days is an important milestone to you I swear I had no idea—"
"No," Lily answers honestly, looking down into her lap where his hands are still holding hers. "It isn't."
She suddenly feels very guilty; she wouldn't have had the faintest idea precisely how long they had been together if the situation were in reverse.
"I think I know what this is about."
Lily's eyes snap back up to his. "You do?"
"Yes, and I want you to know that I understand why you feel the way you do."
Her brow furrows as she looks up at up him skeptically. "Really?"
"Is…" James pauses, glances around the table to ascertain that no one close by is listening to them, and bends in even closer. The expression on his face is a very earnest one. "Is it…er…that is to say, your Aunt Flo is visiting this week, right?" His voice is so low and cautious, and his head so close to hers, that it looks like he is conspiring murder with her right there over breakfast instead of just asking about her menstrual cycle. "My mum says that girls tend to get very touchy around these times so I completely understand if you need to let off a little—Hey! Where are you going!"
Instead of slapping him, as she rightly should have, she simply gets up and walks away—no longer feeling the least bit guilty.
Several hours have passed since breakfast and James has not returned to their rooms yet. Lily is certain that she knows exactly why this is: in real life, as in Quidditch (Quidditch is not important enough for her to consider it to be real life), James Potter is a master of the art of strategizing. Never one to walk into a potentially hairy situation without extensive planning, Lily has a strong feeling that he has likely been holed up in his old dorm room in Gryffindor Tower all morning, conversing with his most prized and trusted advisers: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew (she fervently hopes that he knows enough to only listen to Remus). Little does James know, however, that such careful strategizing has since become fruitless. While this morning at breakfast she had been too tired and angry to converse reasonably, she is now ready to do exactly that—or at least to try to.
Over the course of this morning, Lily has discovered, to her utmost displeasure, that she can no longer stand to be mad at James Potter for extensive periods of time. This startling truth has made her extremely wistful for 5th Year when, looking back, she cannot remember a single day in that entire year when she wasn't angry with him, even on the ones when he hadn't really done anything in particular to deserve it (to be fair, there were very few of those). The irony of this does not escape her.
Approximately two hours ago, she had thus grudgingly resolved to enter their common room, curl up on a couch, and attempt to complete her Charms essay while she waited for him to return.
Yawning, Lily now checks her watch again. Two hours and four minutes ago, actually.
She sighs, chewing on the end of her sugar quill. It was turning out to be a very anxious wait.
Click.
The portrait hole at the entrance of the room suddenly swings open and she jumps a little. James does not linger at the threshold of the room when he spots her but strides through—making a beeline for where she is sitting—looking very purposeful with his jaw clenched tight and his eyes narrowed tellingly. Lily knows this look of determination well enough to be confident of the fact that he has definitely been strategizing something fierce. He stops walking when he reaches the couch adjacent to her own, promptly sits down, then props his elbows on his knees so that he can lean forward, closer to her.
He stares at her, very intently, and she stares back. It reminds her a bit like the interrogation scenes on the muggle police dramas her dad watches on the telly, but she is not sure who represents the lawman and who represents the suspect in this situation.
She does not wait for him to speak. "So, what did the lads tell you to do?"
James makes a noise low in his throat—the beginnings of a laugh that he stops before it reaches his mouth. "Well…" he starts off cautiously after a moment, clearly debating if he should be telling her this. He fidgets uncomfortably on the couch. "Sirius and Peter reckoned that I should get you flowers and begin apologizing profusely—in the most nonspecific way possible, of course, so that you wouldn't know that I didn't actually know what I did wrong, but Remus and I both felt that it would be a gross underestimation of your intelligence." He smiles tensely for a moment. "So eventually I decided to take Remus's advice, which was just to come back here and try to talk to you…so...Here I am."
There is a long pause. She gathers that this is her queue.
"James…I…" Lily cannot seem to get the words out properly. She realizes that this is because she is not sure if she really wants to hear his explanation to the question she needs to ask him—the one that kept her up all night—she is scared, no, terrified of his answer being as awful as she has imagined it could be.
"Lily," James says, reaching for her hand. He looks into her eyes and she feels herself melt, just a little. "Please just tell me what the hell is going on. You're driving me absolutely crazy."
He sounds desperate and it's enough to make her realize that she has to ask him before they both go crazy.
Lily takes a deep breath. "Where did you go last night?" she asks.
He freezes, his eyes widening. Then suddenly—too suddenly—his face relaxes. "What are you talking about?" he asks, trying and failing to look genuinely confused.
Her heart drops into the pit of her stomach. She pulls her hand away from his.
"Last night," Lily says, feeling numb. "You said you didn't feel well, that you were going to bed early, and that perhaps we should sleep separately because you didn't want me to catch anything," she recites for him unnecessarily in a flat, emotionless tone. While she could not name the exact date that they began seeing one another, she could say that they'd been sleeping in the same bed—usually trading off between his room and her own—every night since some rather significant physical boundaries had been crossed precisely twelve days ago. "But then you left," she finishes, speaking slowly.
Lily looks at him expectantly. He says nothing, just continues to stare at her—saying nothing, so she clears her throat and carries on.
"I could tell that you were lying—you're an awful liar, you know—but I just thought that you were honestly tired from Quidditch practice and didn't want to admit it because of…er…male pride issues… I hear those things happen sometimes. Anyway—oh please, it's not important—" she cuts James off as he opens his mouth to protest. "Anyway, I was lying on the couch reading around ten last night when all of a sudden I became so tired that I started drifting to sleep." Lily pauses and levels him with a fierce look. "Do you know why this is, James?"
"Er…because you had had a long day?"
"No. I began falling asleep because someone hit me with a botched Sleeping Charm."
"Lily, don't be ridic—wait. What do you mean by botched?"
"I mean that it didn't work," she explains impatiently. "I mean that whoever cast it failed to master a simple spell that most Second Years could do."
"But you fell asleep—you just said that you did," James argues. He is looking at her with a particularly frantic gleam in his eyes now.
"No, I said that I started falling asleep. I never actually did. It must not have been executed properly—the wrist movement, I would think," Lily says, factual now, revealing the Charm's prodigy within her. "If you accidentally swish a little before you flick at the end, it can produce a similar result to the charm, but it's effect will be a lot weaker."
For a fraction of a second it looks like he might disagree with her, but then he quickly collects himself. "So, you're saying that someone broke into the Head Rooms, cast an allegedly botched Sleeping Charm on you—"
"James."
"Well, you can't blame a bloke for trying." James sighs tiredly, reaching a hand up to rub his temple. "So, I take it you saw me then?"
Lily nods. "I was almost asleep…I would have already been, if the charm had worked properly, but then I heard the portrait creak open. When I looked over the arm of the couch, I saw you walk out—well, I saw your head leave, anyway. You must have taken the hood off of the invisibility cloak after you charmed me." She lets out a humorless laugh, shaking her head. "I know it sounds daft but I really didn't realize what had happened at first. I saw you leave and I thought that you must be running to the kitchens or maybe even to the Hospital Wing—maybe I had it wrong and you were truly sick. Then the charm wore off and I started to think how strange it was that I could be so tired one moment and so alert in the next. I didn't start to put it all together until after about an hour and a half of sitting here, waiting for you to come back—that's when it started to seem like you weren't coming back at all." She is as furious about it now as she had been that morning and it shows, her complexion darkening as the blood rushes to her face. "It all fit then—pretending to be sick, me conveniently drifting off as you left—you did it all to sneak out without my knowing. The only reason I didn't figure it out sooner was because it honestly hadn't crossed my mind at first that you would do something so underhanded. It really hadn't. Silly me, right?" she asks angrily, then adds, "Somehow I forgot who I was dealing with."
Over the course of the last few sentences of her recounting, Lily witnesses James's face morph into an expression of acute horror.
It's not that he went out without telling her where he was going, she thinks to herself—it honestly isn't. She isn't his keeper, and has no intention of ever needing to know where he is at all times of the day. It's the way he went about it. It's the lying, the way he had used magic on her, the sneaking, and now the lying again. Why was it necessary? Why was it so crucial that she not see him leave? What was he hiding from her? For the better part of the early hours of that morning, she had kept herself up with these questions. At first, she had made excuses for him. James was not cheating on her. Boys that told their girlfriends that they loved them for the first time very recently did not just go out and cheat on them. At least this was what she had thought at first. Then sometime around dawn, worn down by sleep deprivation, anger, and mindless worrying, she had realized that she really did not have any experience beyond the present with such matters. Maybe boys cheated when they realized that they had made a mistake in telling said-girlfriends that they loved them when they didn't mean it, she had thought, a little hysterically. Maybe James had not meant it when he had said it to her, and had since panicked.
Maybe that is what the panic on his face now meant.
If he had cheated on her with some hippogriff (she would not allow for the hypothetical female in question to be anymore attractive than a half-horse, half-bird creature) then she supposed that she would have to kill him. It was that simple. She would just kill him. He had made her want this relationship when she didn't think she needed it, and then made her need it when she really hadn't wanted to. And they had been happy—madly, wonderfully, unbelievably happy these past four months. When they fought, it was always to make up. When they made up, it always made the fighting seem more than worth it. And now he had thrown it all away to shag some ghastly hippogriff girl. Possibly.
Lily decides that there is only one way to know for sure, and it is not continuing to blither about pointlessly in her own head.
"Where did you go last night?" she asks again. Her voice sounds a bit uneven this time.
He hesitates, then: "Out with the boys."
She gives him a hard look and determines that he is telling the truth (he is an awful liar, after all). The flood of relief is instantaneous; he was not with another girl. And yet, the confusion that she felt before just seems to have multiplied.
"Why didn't you… You know I don't care when you want to spend time with your friends," she says, frowning at him. "Why couldn't you just tell me? Why did you have to sneak out like that?"
"It's…complicated."
Lily notices that he does not deny any of her side of the story. Until this moment, she has still honestly been hoping that she has just been majorly overreacting to some colossal misunderstanding. Being right has never felt worse.
"I don't understand." But she really wishes that she did. Lily knows she should be furious with him for lying to her and for using magic on her to slip out, regardless of the reason behind it all, but desperately, pathetically even, she still hopes he has a good explanation for it. Something she can forgive—eventually. Something that comes with a convenient light at the end of the tunnel. "What were you doing?" she tries.
He doesn't respond right away and she can practically see the wheels inside his head turning rapidly, round and round, as he tries to think of how to answer her.
She shakes her head at him. "Please don't lie again," she says firmly, before he can speak.
James looks at her guiltily, running his hand through his hair in a nervous, fidgety gesture she has not seen him make in quite some time.
"Lily," he says finally. He reaches for her hand again and she reluctantly gives it back to him. "I can't tell you."
What?
"What?"
Lily takes her hand back again. They are officially playing musical hands.
James swallows deeply, his Adam's apple moving up and down like a fishing bobber whose hook is being nibbled on. "It's just…really complicated, Lil," he says eventually, and he looks nauseated.
"Complicated like…a secret?" Lily asks.
"Yes."
"A big secret?"
A beat.
"Yes."
"Oh." She can't think of anything else to say.
"If it were up to me, I would tell you everything," James quickly explains, sounding desperate again. He lets out a noise of frustration and puts his head down in his hands. When he speaks again, his voice is muffled. "I don't want to lie to you…but I can't tell you the truth either. It's not only my secret to tell, and there are other circumstances too. I know how this sounds. I know I sound like a complete and utter wanker, but please trust me when I say that it has nothing to do with you—with us." He looks back up at her and she is startled to see how scared his eyes are. "I am a wanker for lying to you last night…for trying to make you fall asleep so you wouldn't see me leave…I should have just told you that I was going out, but we—I didn't want you to know. I thought you might think… I'm sorry, it was unfair. I'm really sorry about all of it," he says and she can tell that he means it.
But it is not enough—not nearly enough.
"Nothing to do with me or us…" Lily slowly repeats his own words back to him, then questions, "But still something to do with you, yes?"
"Yes," James admits quietly.
"I've told you everything," she says stubbornly, shaking her head.
It is the truth.
Lily had told him about the chalkboard eraser she had stolen from her 2nd grade classroom, which she still feels guilty about (he had asked her what an eraser was and then laughed when she told him), about how when she was ten she had flushed her goldfish, Marvin, down the toilet while he was still alive and gone to confession every single day for two weeks straight, convinced that she was going to go to hell for it, about how much she hates the freckles on her arms (he had immediately set about trying to kiss all of them), and then most recently, she had embarrassingly cried in his arms when she had admitted to him how desperately she misses Petunia sometimes. Strangely, it hadn't felt embarrassing at the time. But it did now.
"I know," he says. His eyes plead with hers. "I know that. Someday I will tell you—show you even, where I went. But I can't right now… not without—" he stops short. "It wouldn't be fair to…certain people."
"To who?"
James doesn't answer for a moment, then confesses, "My mates."
"Oh. I see."
She clearly doesn't though, and they both know it.
"Tell me what I can do to make it up to you," he says suddenly. He looks completely serious. "I'll do anything."
Except, apparently, tell her what is really going on.
Lily realizes that there is a very good chance that she is being shrewish about this—people are entitled to some secrets between friends, after all—but there is something about the way he went about hiding it, about the fact that he does not seem to trust her enough to tell her this secret, this big secret that involves himself, that pains her fiercely. She had, after all, told James that she loved him as well. Didn't that count for anything? It mattered a great deal to her. And then there is something else—something about this whole affair that brings into the light a certain, previously-thought-to-be irrational fear that has always lingered in the back of her mind—the fear that she will never be as important to him as his friends are. That is not to say that she has ever wanted to be more important to him than Remus, Sirius, and Peter—it truly, honestly was not like that. It's just… she had thought that equal footing one day would have been nice.
She gets up suddenly, an idea formulating, and walks over to the tea set that they keep on a small table in the corner of the room.
"Lily?" she hears James question from behind her. He sounds confused.
"Hold on a minute."
He remains quiet.
Lily then proceeds to do something decidedly devious: she makes a cup of tea that she is sure would make the infallible Tinky shudder in despair. She remembers what James likes, so contingent on being added together in very particular amounts, in a very particular order, and does exactly the opposite: too many tealeaves, too much sugar…no milk. In the end, the mixture is very dark from the extra tealeaves. She is confident that he will despise it on site. When she returns to where he is sitting with the precarious cup of tea balancing on a small, white saucer, he still looks confused. She holds the saucer out to him and he takes it, predictably wrinkling his nose as he stares down at the deep brown liquid. Snob.
"Drink it," she says, taking the seat across from him again. "All of it."
"What?" He looks affronted.
"You said you would do anything to make it up to me." Lily clears her throat and nods to the cup in his hands. "So…do this."
"You're not serious?"
She cocks an eyebrow at him.
He lets out a strangled little laugh, but behind this, there is true panic swirling in his hazel eyes. She is unsurprised. She counted on this. James Potter is, after all, a Tea Elitist. Drinking an entire cup of unsatisfactory tea undoubtedly goes against some fundamental rule of Tea Snobbery.
"Lily," James says, very seriously. He looks down into the cup again with a pained look on his face. She almost feels bad but then she remembers that it is really just tea—albeit very bad tea, but still. "I can't drink this."
"You can always tell me what you were doing last night," she counters.
James's brow furrows. He appears to deliberate this point for awhile.
"Okay," he says finally, taking a deep breath. "Alright."
For a moment, she thinks that he is going to concede. Lily feels relieved, believing that there is a chance this might turn out all right—but there is also a feeling of disappointment that intermingles with this relief. Had she done the right thing? Resorting to coercion was low of her, but she was more hoping that it would make James tell her because he would realize how important it was to her, not because he simply wanted to get out of drinking a batch of poorly made tea.
Suddenly, James lifts the tea cup off the saucer. No, she thinks—wants to yell. But with a martyred expression, he brings it to his lips and throws his head back, drinking its contents all in one gulp as if it were actually grain alcohol.
Her heart sinks and she suddenly feels very cold. He might as well have hexed her. She cannot believe he chose to drink it rather than trust her enough to tell her the truth. There is undoubtedly a society of Tea Elitists out there somewhere currently shredding his coveted membership card.
"There," James says, putting the cup back down on the saucer he is holding. He looks like he might be sick, but then, he also seems to be very relieved. "Can we put this behind us now?" he asks, giving her a look that is partially expectant and partially plaintive.
Lily doesn't answer. She stands up and slowly walks in the direction of her room.
"Lily."
Glancing back, she sees that James is very cross now. The expression on his face is that of a three year old who has had his favorite toy ripped out of his hands.
"You said that if I drank it, we would be all right," he reminds her stubbornly. His jaw clenches as he looks at her.
"I guess I lied." Lily shrugs glibly, now twisting the golden handle of her door and pushing it open. She steps inside of her room. Turning to face him one more time, she goes to close the door, but not before adding, "People do that sometimes."
As soon as he is out of sight, she casts a silencing charm in her room so that he will not be able to hear the sound of her crying.