Chapter Three: Growing Up
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO
"You've changed," she whispers, before leaning over and pressing her lips to yours.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO
It had come as a surprise to all of them when he'd received his school letter for the coming spring and found a Head Boy badge in it. In fact, the first words out of his supposedly best friend's mouth had gone something like,
"Dumbledore made you Head Boy? I was right, he is going barmy!"
Even if Dumbledore was barmy, though, he got the position, and to his utmost delight the Head Girl was none other than Lily Evans. The prior year to that he had begun to mature up a bit, lessening his pranks against the Slytherins and throwing fewer hexes out in the corridors. It must have been that that had caused Dumbledore to come to his conclusion that he could be a possible candidate for Head Boy.
Faced with the prospect of responsibility, he did not, as Lily Evans expected of him, withdraw from his tasks and leave all the work for her to do. Instead he contributed as well as he could, making every meeting, calculating weekly points, and otherwise helping her as best as he could. After a while, it became clear to the aforementioned Head Girl that he was different and that he was no longer the arrogant prat she had set out to refuse a date to hundreds of times in the past several years. As she began to open up to him, he started to get to know her even better than before, making his initial interest in her rise until he felt butterflies dance in his stomach every time her eyes caught his.
But even then he never went so far as to ask her out on a date. He flirted openly, spent time with her outside of class, and waved to her in the hallways, but he never did dare test his chances. He was too afraid for everything he had worked for to go down the drain. Gradually, she began to approach him in a different manner, participating freely in his flirtatious banter and occasionally glancing at him with a wistful grin and a faraway look in her eye. He never noticed, though.
It was during patrols that the missing pieces finally clicked together. They had finished clearing the North Tower out of stragglers and were leaning on the balcony, looking out to the darkened silhouettes in the Forbidden Forest and speaking in hushed voices that echoed across the room.
"Do you ever worry about what'll happen when we leave Hogwarts?" she said. Her question, although spoken casually, seemed to be asking for more than a quick affirmation.
"Sure I do," he said quietly, letting his eyes wander over the lake and the forest before shifting back to her face. "Voldemort's gaining power every day, and I know that my family is directly in his path. I worry about them all the time. And all these Muggles and Muggleborn he's targeting…" He expelled a deep breath, throwing her a surreptitious look. "I just want to get in the fight to try and help people, you know? But sometimes I wonder if that's not enough." He paused for a brief moment, studying the melded shadows their bodies made against the tiled floor. "But I do know one thing," he said, looking up and meeting her gaze again. "I'll do anything and everything I can to help, even if it doesn't make a difference. Because even if the fight seems hopeless sometimes, I know that good will triumph in the end. Even if I don't live to see it."
He felt foolish by the time he finished, wondering if he had sounded terribly cryptic or grim, but when he risked a glance up to her face, he saw that she was looking at him with a mixture of awe and gratitude rather than the disgust he had expected. Before he knew what had happened, her arms were thrown around his neck in an impulsive hug, breathing deeply into his shoulder as if to steady her breaths. It took him a moment to react, hesitantly wrapping his arms around her waste and drawing her closer. He had to close his eyes to regain control of his emotions as her usual flowery scent drifted up to his nostrils. When he opened them, he found that she had drawn back a bit and was now gazing straight at him, her head tilted up so she would be able to see him better.
"That's…really noble, James," she said softly, and he had to avert his eyes as the impulse to kiss her rose again. Her face was mere inches from his now, and he could see every freckle on her nose, every curling eyelash. "You just…you've changed so much, over this last year." His eyes found hers again, capturing the emerald orbs in the moonlight. He swallowed visibly, wishing she wasn't so goddamned beautiful. "You're…not a boy any more." She grazed her hand over his cheek, forcing him to bite back a groan, his eyes darkening and searching hers, wondering desperately if her motive was anything akin to his. "James," she breathed again, her eyes flicking up to his before landing on his lips, and this time, she tentatively leaned forward, brushing her mouth against his softly.
It was as though an electrical switch had just gone off in his body, warmth spreading through his arms and stomach. Taking a moment to react in his surprise, he pushed one of his hands up to cup the side of her face and slid the other one around to the small of her back. Her lips were sweet and soft against his mouth, and he kissed her more tenderly than he had ever kissed a girl before, almost as though she was fragile enough to break. When he finally drew back, his eyes were hooded and glazed and his breathing pattern irregular. A slow grin spread up his face, the corners of his mouth forming dimples in his cheeks. "You're so beautiful," he whispered. And then he leaned down to kiss her again, more forceful this time, drawing her tongue from the confines in her mouth and murmuring husky praises in her ear as he kissed and nipped at her neck.
Much later, when the moon had reached its highest point in the sky and the outlines of the trees were impossible to see, he pulled her to him again, smiling at the fact that her body fit perfectly next to his. "Does this mean you'll go to Hogsmeade with me?" he said, light tone barely making up for the tremor of brief anxiety in his chest.
It was at this moment, for the first time in four years, that he didn't receive a slap on the face or a vicious retort or a cold silence. This time, for the first time, Lily Evans said yes, and in that moment, when he kissed her, he realized what had caused her change of heart, what had finally made her see.
He had changed. And he had changed for her.
OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO