Hello all - I've been away for a while, but you know. Life. Though, mostly it's this whole "America is falling down around our ears" thing.

Anyway, enjoy.

Disclaimer: I know, you know, moving on.


He smelled like… she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

Her face was buried in the crook of his neck, his fingers tracing tantalising patterns over her skin, his heartbeat thrumming through him and she could feel it on her lips, pressed, as they were, against his throat. The air around them crackled with electricity, with promise, with potential but all she could think about was how… beautiful he smelled. Beautiful wasn't the right word, wasn't big enough, deep enough, but it was hard to find any word that described the way he was making her feel, so it would have to do.

It was one of the first things she realised she loved about him, craved about him. His smell. It had begun with a gently placed blanket in fifth year, one she hadn't even know was his until years later. She should have guessed, the rich red blanket with golden quaffles stitched around the edges should have given it away, but it was well-worn and soft in all the best places and smelled like love and comfort and home, and she'd still hated him then, so she never would have guessed something so wonderful belonged to him.

She'd ended up sleeping on the common room couch, her dorm mates having kicked her out after she'd had her third O.W.L.S.-related breakdown/all-night revision of the week. She had intended to bring a blanket, but her arms were too full of books to carry anything else and, quite honestly, she'd assumed she wouldn't be sleeping anyway. She'd woken the next morning, the sun pouring through the windows opposite the couch, her hair a complete mess of tangles, with the blanket draped over her. She didn't know where it had come from, who had put it on her, but it had smelled so intensely good that she pulled it over her head to block out the sun and fell back asleep, breathing in the scent.

When she'd finally unearthed herself from underneath it, hours later when the feet thundering down the dormitory stairs became too much, she folded the blanket neatly and wrote a brief note, thanking her mysterious stranger for the best blanket she'd ever used in her life. Thank you, whoever you are, for this amazing blanket. You're quite lucky I didn't steal it ;) Love, Lily

She found the note in a box of James' things when they were moving into the cottage. She couldn't believe he'd kept it. Though knowing James as well as she did now, she wasn't all too surprised.

She hadn't stolen the blanket, but when they had started dating, Lily no longer felt obligated to respect silly things like 'ownership' and 'belonging' - she stole his quidditch jumpers, t shirts, tracksuit bottoms, his button-up shirts and school jumpers. Anything that had, at one point, been on James' body found its way onto hers.

She loved being surrounded by his scent, feeling like he was there, his skin against hers, even when they were sitting in an excruciatingly boring lesson and James was sitting on the other side of the room because after that incident in February he wasn't allowed to sit anywhere near her in any of their classes anymore. It was probably for the best, she did actually want to pass her N.E.W.T.S., but instead of listening to the professor talk about whatever they were talking about, Lily pulled her arm up inside the sleeve of one of the jumpers she'd stolen from James' chest of drawers and pressed the cuff to her nose.

She used to catch his eye from across the room whenever she did this and wink at him before turning her eyes back to her notes and scribbling dutifully for the rest of class. Nothing riled him up more than knowing that she was thinking of him but intentionally ignoring him, and moves like that always ended up with James pulling her into the nearest broom cupboard, secret passage, abandoned classroom, and letting her know just what he thought about her saucy wink back there.

When they began their all-night missions for the Order, those jumpers were her saving grace. He had to be okay, he couldn't not be okay, but she knew that she couldn't do anything about it if he wasn't and this line of thinking usually sent her into some kind of spiral that usually ended with her curled in bed in James' old quidditch jumper with her face pressed into James' pillow, trying desperately to fall asleep, to reassure herself that he was, definitely, without a doubt, okay. His warm, woodsy, vaguely spicy smell brought her down from even the height of her panic, settled her into sleep, and always announced his return in the morning.

James, finding her there, wrapped around his pillow, would fall gently into bed next to her and wrap his arms around her, pressing his nose into her hair and letting hers meet the skin of his neck - he always smelled vaguely of smoke when he came home and she knew it was because he and Sirius were probably smoking those bloody things again, but she couldn't exactly blame them, they needed something to take the edge off and, having smoked them a few times herself, Lily could attest to their healing powers. Or, at least, their suppressing powers - they never actually healed anything.

This change, though, was the only thing that had ever changed about the way that James smelled. It came off easily enough in the shower and she had him back, the warm, comforting smell that filled their house and made Lily feel at home more than anything else. She'd grown more and more attached to it, she realised, since they'd gotten married, since Harry was born, since they'd been locked up in their house for months on end with no plans to leave in sight. So much about James had changed - he was still his mischievous, bold, loving self, but being trapped inside the four walls of their cottage was wearing on him. What was once a light, jaunty step became heavier, grounded, his eyes were constantly shadowed by a lack of sleep, his fidgety, nervous energy characterised everything he did because he no longer had an outlet.

Worst of all, she could never quite forget the sound of James screaming, terrified, in the middle of the night and waking from what was already a fitful sleep, couldn't forget the way his body had quaked in her arms as she held him, the way his tears had soaked her skin. They had you and Harry, Lils. They had you both and I couldn't do anything about it and fuck, Lily, this war is going to kill me.

She loved him, more than she ever had, more than she'd even realised it was physically possible to love someone; it broke her heart watching the war dig its claws into him and tear him apart.

And that morning, as he traced lines across her hips, her ribs, her shoulders, she pressed her nose into his neck and breathed deeply, telling herself, as she used to do when he was gone, that everything would be alright. That they would be alright.


One more left.

Until next time xx