It's a slow disintegration. He tries to brush it all aside, the extra vigour with which they target him, the almost tangible hatred that is flung his way along with charming epithets like "mudblood-fucker" and the more usual "blood traitor". He says it doesn't matter, that it wasn't like he was hoping to be mates with these people anyway, but she feels the fear ratchet up inside her, the slow crank of a wheel, a pressure that has settled permanently behind her eyes, around her temples, that she feels may never go away.

When she first says it—and not even the whole sentence, just a "maybe we should" before he cuts her off, frustrated by even the idea of saying it, let alone doing it—her heart isn't in it. Maybe it's never in it; she can admit that much. But he reads that reticence in the tug of her brow, in the way she can't quite let go of him as she says it. "What, and let them win?" he asks, and leans down to press an unassuming kiss to her forehead. "Not in a month of Sundays, Evans."

No one will tell her what has happened, how it is they find themselves struggling to stem the thick flow of blood from the angry gash down James' side. "What can I say, he's a shit wizard," Sirius says, an attempt at levity that would make his best friend and brother laugh if he wasn't barely conscious.

It's not until later, when headquarters has quieted and most are sleeping, that she finds out. Not that anyone has dared to tell her; she has to read it all from the mission report, Remus' normally steady cursive suddenly spiky, like the hand that wrote it couldn't keep itself still.

She reads them once, then again, and again, because something in her brain is trying to stop her from understanding it all.

The usual start to a firefight, the passing of curses like ping pong, then a dawn of recognition for one Death Eater, and suddenly the focus switches entirely to James. Although the report tries to be dispassionate, detached, the fury and the fear ripples from the tale in waves.

They want to kill him, she thinks. Because of her.

She can't sleep, thoughts of his blood staining her hands never leaving her mind for long enough for her brain to switch off; she gets out of bed early, her limbs heavy, and makes her way back to the headquarters, but even seeing James there—sleeping, for now, under the weight of just about every pain potion they had in stock in their dwindling supply cupboard—doesn't calm her heartbeat, doesn't settle her stomach. That's the first time, she thinks distantly, that he hasn't been able to settle her soul.

It's a disquieting thought.

When will this end, she wonders, not noticing the tears that blur her vision into a fine mist. How will this end?

Next, it's barely two months later; the wound on James' side still makes him cringe if he moves in the wrong way, and sometimes he wakes, choking and pale, in the middle of the night, gasping for a breath that initially won't come. She lays there at his side, coaxes the air back into his lungs, smooths her hand down his arm, down his back, as if touch alone could calm the raging fear that wrenches him from sleep.

These aren't the only reminders of what he has been through—what they have been through. The scar feels rough beneath her fingertips, a constant reminder, even as he touches her and fills her and snatches her breath from her lungs, that he is hurt, he is hurting, because of her.

They are out, together, wands clutched in sweaty hands, trying to get to some artefact that Dumbledore says could hold great significance and which Sirius says isn't worth the manpower to try to find: gone, anyway, nowhere to be seen, and soon enough they are under attack, flashes of green and red flying through the air, sizzling, around them. She ducks something which she is certain—even under the heavy fire and crashing sound, somehow amplified, of screaming—is an avada, and James flings himself in front of her, and that's when the laughter catches them both, like a blow, winding them.

What's so fucking funny? she wants to scream. But she doesn't, because—

"That's it, Potter," the voice calls, cracked and cruel. "Watch your mudblood die, and then maybe we'll let you die too."

A curse, sent back to them, issues from James before he can even catch his breath, and she has to grasp at his shirt collar to haul him down to the ground, out of the way of the retaliatory fire, and she can hardly think, hardly notice their surroundings anymore until they've apparated through the mandatory three points, her blood stinging in her eyes alongside her tears, and she hates to cry in front of him when he's already so worried, but she can't stop it from happening, couldn't even if she tried, a force immovable like the tides.

She can't stop any of it, can she?

That night, she can't sleep; her brain simply won't allow it, won't let her shut out the constant hum of panic for long enough to relax. James has no such problems, passed out on their bed, a new bandage on his side where the twists and pulls of fighting have tugged him back open; red seeps sluggishly, now, a gentle reminder of every way in which she is hurting him.

She had tried, earlier, to express herself: I'm sorry, she had said, and, I love you, and, we can't keep doing this. But he can't seem to acknowledge it, in spite of all his bravery, his courage; he can't look at their problems head on, can't even admit that they have any. His replies of "it's fine" and "we'll be fine" feel empty in a way they never have before.

For that, she feels just a little bit resentful, but she tucks the feeling away, somewhere deep down where she might not be able to find it again.

This is all she has left, now. To save him, even if it means letting herself crumble to pieces, because he won't save himself. He won't stop, as long as she's there, as long as he thinks she needs his protection. As long as he thinks she's worth fighting for.

She packs her bags. The note she leaves says, simply: I'm sorry.

It's not James, but Sirius, who reaches out. A week passes quietly before his owl finds her, as much as she tried to lose herself in the busy streets of Bristol; she tosses and turns in the spare bedroom of Mary's cosy flat, only a few minutes from the Avon Gorge and the kind of open space she craves, all the time, and wonders if she'll ever feel alive again. If she hasn't just left the beating heart of herself, sleeping in their bed back in Godric's Hollow.

'What the fuck,' it says, characteristically blunt and without any opening pleasantries—it wouldn't feel like Sirius if it had; 'do you think either of you will get out of this?'

I don't know, she wants to reply. I don't know and maybe that's part of the problem, nothing feels knowable anymore, not even us, and that can't be right, can it? But isn't it enough to want to keep that person alive, to know that even if he can't be with her, he's still there, surviving and without the burden of her impure blood hanging like a target around his neck?

But she doesn't say that. She doesn't say anything. Because he won't understand, she knows he won't. None of them will, and why would they, when she hardly does, herself.

The owl flies back, without a reply, a few days later, and doesn't return.

Each day, she has to settle, like a reopening wound, with the idea that she won't see him when she opens her eyes. The truth of it doesn't seem willing to sink in, unable to seem real for longer than a few hours before she forgets, and thinks of his hands—how they would sift through her hair, or brush at her hips—or thinks of his smile, the gentle lift at the corner of his mouth when he looks at her.

She always knows, even before she opens her eyes, that it will be a hard day.

Outside, the sun is shining; the sky is blue. It's a textbook autumnal day: cold, crisp. Bright. The air is like ice as she moves to the bathroom, and she thinks distantly that they should ask someone to fix the heating. She shouldn't be able to see her own breath.

She's had this thought before—she had it yesterday—but she never seems to get around to doing anything about it. That would require an energy she isn't sure she has.

Mary has more energy, of course, and maybe she's already spoken to their kindly landlady—a muggle woman, broad Bristolian accent and a penchant for baking them lemon drizzle cakes—and maybe she's already told Lily this. They have conversations, as flatmates do, and Lily is a participant in them, but later, she can't recall what was said, her mind won't settle to any particular detail, and it's this way that she sinks slowly further into herself as the days slip by.

Two years pass, and no closer to peace. Lily scrapes a living in shifts at the hotel down the road, cleaning bedrooms and serving dinners. Mary stays in touch with their friends, getting updates on the war which sometimes she shares, and sometimes she doesn't. Everywhere Lily turns, something reminds her of James: little things, so innocuous that no one would think twice about them, but which seem to knock her sideways every time. One day, she gets home to find that Mary has bought a bouquet of pink roses, spilling out from a vase on the kitchen table, and she is thrown into a memory of a random day four years ago, of his face as he presented her with the deepest pink roses she'd ever seen, plucked, he'd said, from his mother's garden. "Don't tell her," he'd whispered with a grin, as if they didn't both know that Euphemia was in on the whole thing.

(How could she explain to Mary that a vase of flowers made her sob into her pillow?)

But then McGonagall visits, and Lily feels some part of herself reawakened. The magic in her that she has tried to push aside, to suppress, all this time, is needed. She is needed.

Healing potions are in short supply, their old teacher explains. They need someone with skill and patience who doesn't need their hand held. "Potter suggested we track you down," Minerva says, her face giving nothing away.

Lily and Mary share a look, both already knowing that they will do this. That going into hiding, something which once seemed the only option, had done nothing but turn them into a bag of nerves every time the post arrived, or the phone rang, every time the news trickled through the flat from the wireless.

And James had carried on fighting, regardless. She should too.

She is applying a poultice to the oozing wound of a woman she doesn't know—blonde, pretty, gritting her teeth against the obvious pain—when she first sees James again. He staggers through the doorway of the safehouse, his gaze flicking from Lily, to the blonde, as he catches his breath.

"James," the woman breathes, and Lily, all of a sudden, forgets to breathe herself.

Because she knows that tone; she knows that look. She recognises the fear mixed with relief that is painted across those beguiling blue eyes—she herself has worn it before. And so it isn't a surprise, somehow, as he moves forward, takes the woman's hand, brushes her hair from her face.

It hurts. How could it not? But it isn't a surprise.

"Cora," he murmurs, frowning down at her. His gaze moves briefly to Lily, and she quickly resumes what she was doing a moment ago, before the room crashed down around her. "What happened?"

Cora, it turns out, is a fearsome fighter, a half-blood who has personally killed several of Voldemort's inner circle. It makes sense that he would be drawn to someone like that, she thinks clinically; someone with strength, someone who doesn't give up, who doesn't hide away.

The patient eventually drifts into an uneasy sleep, and James glances up from where he sits at her side. He still holds her hand. Lily has been trying not to look at it for the past hour. "You're back," he says, quietly.

"Yes," she agrees pointlessly, and busies herself with her mortar and pestle. "McGonagall said—"

"Sirius suggested they find you," he interrupts, and she lets him, because even if it's true, she doesn't want to acknowledge the hope she'd felt when she'd thought that he wanted her back. "I'm—glad you're okay."

She nods her agreement to the fine powder turning to dust in her hands. That seems easier than meeting his gaze again. "You, too."

When Cora wakes, they leave together, and Lily is too tired to cry.

It becomes the new normal: they are everywhere, and she is back, and they cannot avoid each other, not that she wants to, and she doesn't think he wants to, either.

At meetings, they are the couple that others turn to—for reassurance, for battle plans, for levity when things feel too dark. Lily looks on, and wonders at how she brought herself to this point; watching on as the man she loves drapes his arm around another woman.

Lily starts going on missions, again. She is needed as a potioneer, it is true, but their numbers are dwindling, and needs must. Dumbledore insists, at first, that she only goes on low stakes jaunts—surveillance, mostly, easily called back if she is needed.

At first she thought it would only fill her with terror, even just crouching in some bushes and watching as nothing much happened. But, as brewing had done too, it gives her a sense of purpose, something she hadn't realised was missing all this time. She starts to feel like she is making a difference. Like all is not lost.

Cora and James stop sitting next to each other at meetings. She doesn't want to notice it, but she does. Of course, she is no longer the person he can talk to; she is no longer a person with the right to ask him if he's okay. They've been cordial—they've chatted idly around the kettle, or swapped information in the safehouse, but he hasn't been her James. Hasn't been her James for a long time, now, and she knows all too well whose fault that is.

Remus, embattled and weary, admits that things between the couple are strained. When she asks why, he levels her with a look, one that seems to say, you know why.

She doesn't ask again.

They start being paired up again. She asks Dumbledore if that's such a good idea, if her being there isn't just opening up target practice on James once more. "My dear," he replies, looking as mild and serene as ever, "what makes you think that ever stopped?"

She feels sick at that thought, but she's used to that feeling by now.

They slip into old patterns, ways of communicating without words; trading spells, protecting, deflecting, movement like a choreographed ballet, as if they alone know the steps to get from A to B in one piece. More than once, she finds his gaze across the battlefield of that day, sees the fire in his eyes, and feels that surge of familiar feeling inside her.

It's a while before she realises it's not just her who feels it.

It's as if the sounds and colours of the fight around them have suddenly faded into nothingness: how can there be anything else, she wonders, when there is the thread of gold in his hazel eyes, and the way his chest hitches with a breath caught between them—the sensation of defined muscles under his shirt, the heat of him, not just from the exertion of battle but from him, and the way his hand curls at her hip as if it's acting on memory, on instinct, and then—

He twists; together, they fall; land, in dark, in quiet, any danger long gone but still pressed together; still her hand clutches at the open collar of his shirt, still she looks up at him and sees the world. They stare at each other, like that, for far longer than is polite: her other hand slides up, of its own volition, to his hair, and for a moment, he lets something slip past the barriers he has constructed. A soft sigh, a breath away from a moan, and his lashes flutter shut for a matter of seconds before he is suddenly back, James, the man she's missed like a lost limb these months past. His fingers rake through her hair; he crowds against her, his longing, his desire impossible to hide; hers, too, as she shifts against him, a gasp at the friction that—

—that breaks the moment, cleaves it clean in two, and he swallows down his feelings as if they were never there. An act she envies.

He steps back. Drops his hands to his sides. "I can't," he murmurs, and she hates that she so loves this about him: he wouldn't be so utterly James if he weren't so moral, so strong, so true. "I'm sorry. I—"

"No," she agrees, because she can't bear to hear him say any more. "It's okay."

It's not. It's not, but it's all her fault.

He can barely meet her gaze. "Everything reminds me of you," he says, and it shouldn't sound like an accusation, but somehow, to her ears, it does. That's the trouble with guilt, of course; it discolours everything in its path. "And that's not—"

"It's okay," she says again, and wants desperately for it to be true.

"No," he says. "I don't think it is." His face is shadowed, but she can see the pain in his eyes. Knows, full well, that she put it there. "Good night."

He's gone before she can reply, and somehow she knows, with certainty that she has not felt in a long time, that this was the last time.