It was then that you realized you loved him. Not before, not when his hazel eyes burned your skin, blistering the porcelain, freckled exterior that was so fragile. It wasn't when his arm brushed against yours and sent fireworks exploding through you despite the fact that it was midday. It was when he looked at you, broken, pathetic, that you realized that you loved him.
You loved the way he touched you, lightly trailing his fingers across your skin and leaving trails of heat and fire, the way his laugh could get you drunk, the way his smile and his scent made you stiffen so you wouldn't lose control. Because that's what it was about, before. Control. He wanted it, and you had it, and you were loathe to share it, to let it go. But you realized it. You loved him, and you could share, you could let him take it and know that the only way he'd hurt you were through the love earned bruises left on your hips, your neck, and just below your collarbone.
But you knew you could hurt him, and not in just the sense of what your lips could do to his skin. You could hurt him not because of what you could do, because you would never harm a hair on his body. You loved him, you loved him so completely that it hurt you to even just think about it so it was better just to feel. But you couldn't stop thinking. You thought about the violence of the outside world, of what word that sallow pale skinned, dark haired boy once used to describe you. You thought about how you could hurt him, how you could hurt everyone he cared about just by having your blood pulse through your veins, and have your last name be what it was. You knew you could hurt him, could cause his death and there wasn't a damn thing you could do to control it.
So you left him. You left him, hoping to save him. But you were the water to a man left starving and thirsty in the desert. You were the whiskey to an alcoholic stuck in the prohibition. You were the salve to the burns you left on his mangled heart. You didn't save him. You made him a shell, an exterior. You became so much a part of him that leaving him killed him, tortured him more than any of those people that would torture him for loving you ever could. You put him in a living hell, he raced right past purgatory so that the flames could lick his skin violently. You ruined a good man. You left him, and you hurt him, and you knew it.
So you came crawling back, your tail between your legs, your eyes wide and shining with a burning liquid most have come to call tears. You came to him on your knees, seeing him with another, someone who wanted to heal him the way you did. He was trying and failing to get over you. You tore her away and she let him go. She wasn't right for him. No one would ever be right for him but you. You attached yourself and fell in love all over again, letting him decide, letting him pick you. And he did, he always would.
James would always pick Lily. He didn't care that the blood that ran threw your veins came from a teacher and coal miner. He didn't care that the only bit of magic in your family for generations was yours. And James Potter didn't care in the least that loving you was a death sentence. He would die for you, he would jump between you and a loaded gun and a pointed wand without a second thought. One day he did.
