One month
Work was boring him.
James had not been an Auror that long, and as such got stuck with paperwork a lot of the time.
Today was one of those times.
He'd been doing nothing but paperwork for—he checked his watch—five hours and was pretty sure he'd go insane if he had to see Alec Denneham's handwriting one more time.
James pushed some of his straggly hair out of his eyes and forced himself to keep reading. This could be very important, he told himself. The world might need to know about Denneham's suspicions that the Death Eaters were working out of a Muggle toy shop.
It was rubbish, of course.
But then everyone in the Department thought Denneham was a little touched in the head, so it wasn't really his fault.
James signed his name at the bottom of the page and shuffled the pages on his desk. He was about to pick up another paper when he heard Lily's voice, greeting his coworkers and politely answering questions. So unlike her, he thought, smiling idly and leaning out of his cubicle. She spotted him watching her and dashed toward him, positively beaming and carrying something.
"Aren't you just a bright little ray of sunshine?" he said as she reached him. She was wringing her hands and biting her lip and pretty much shaking with excitement. "What's wrong with you?"
"Come on," Lily said, reaching out and grabbing his hand. "We're going to lunch."
"What?"
"We're going to lunch," she repeated, pulling on his hand in an attempt to get him to stand up. "Come on, you and I have to talk."
"What--?"
"I'll tell you when we get there," Lily said, and James could tell she was getting a little exasperated. "Let's go."
James glanced at his desk, at the stack of horrendously boring paperwork that awaited him…and then he looked up at Lily, who looked like she could explode from enthusiasm. He compared the two in his head. Lily….paperwork. Girlfriend…papercuts. Snogging…reading. Food…writing.
"All right," he said, rising. "Let's go."
Hestia, Remus was noticing, had a fixation with his hair.
She was always touching it in some way; brushing it out of his eyes, twirling it around her fingers, running her hands through it. It didn't bother him or anything; it was just something he noticed. She said that he had the best hair she'd ever seen. She loved the color, she said, and the way it felt and the way it smelled and the way it curled a little at the ends because it was getting too long. He mentioned offhandedly one day when he was lying on his back on her couch with his head on her lap and she was absentmindedly combing it with her fingers that he was thinking of getting a haircut and she gasped and said that if he cut his hair she wouldn't speak to him for a very long time. Remus asked, "Well, how long exactly?"
Hestia responded, "It depends on how nice the new haircut is."
"So you're agreeing there will be a new haircut."
"There will be no haircut," she corrected herself. "I love your hair. Cutting it off would be like cutting my heart out."
"That's why you're with me, isn't it?" Remus teased, angling his head so he could meet her eyes. "Just so you can play with my hair?"
She grinned. "It helps," she allowed.
It worried Remus that he was getting so used to this.
It didn't really bother him anymore that he was keeping a secret from all of his friends, that there was this insanely huge part of his life that he didn't really care to share with them. His friends couldn't keep secrets to save their lives, he knew that. Sirius simply liked to talk, and if that meant telling you his entire life story, so be it. James just got excited really easily, and when he did, he'd prattle on for hours. Peter was always anxious to have something to offer in a conversation so he would feel important because Peter had a small inferiority complex.
But Remus was content to sit back and listen and only spoke up if he really felt the need to.
Privacy was kinda nice. He liked not being interrogated about his girlfriend the way Sirius questioned James. Even after four years, Lily was one of Sirius's favorite topics, mostly because she was an easy target for the jokes and sexual comments that Sirius was famous for. James could take it all in stride. He could smile and laugh it off, but Remus didn't know if he could. He was already getting protective of Hestia, and he didn't think he'd appreciate Sirius making fun of her very much.
But then Remus remembered that making fun of their relationship would be the very last thing on Sirius's mind if he found out about it.
He winced.
"Are you hungry?" Hestia was asking. "I can make sandwiches or something. If you're hungry, that is."
Remus shook his head. "No, I'm not hungry." He yawned and sat up, unconsciously smoothing his hair. "Actually, I should be getting back."
"Back?" Hestia echoed. "Back where?"
"Well, back home," he told her. "I've been here for four hours."
She looked down at her lap and said softly, "And if Sirius can't get a hold of you at any given time, he'll get suspicious." She glanced back up at him expectantly.
He sighed and let his head drop. "That's not fair," he said evenly.
"Maybe not," Hestia replied. "But it's true, isn't it?"
"Not entirely."
"So you're tired of being around me."
He looked at her incredulously. "Tired of being around you?" he repeated. "How could I get tired of being around you?"
She tossed her hair once. "I've been told that I have an extremely trying personality, so I could see it."
Remus put his hand on the back of her neck and gently pulled her face to his, kissing her for a few moments before pulling away. He rested his forehead against hers and murmured, "I do not get tired of being around you."
She nodded once and ducked out of his grip. "Listen," Hestia said, playing with the fabric of his jeans, "I have something to tell you."
He said, "Okay."
"Remember," Hestia began, still looking down at his leg, "the day when I…when I told you how I felt about you?"
He did. A lot. "Yeah."
"Remember how I said I had a meeting…with Dumbledore?"
Remus vaguely recalled this. "Yes, I remember."
Hestia mumbled something unintelligible.
He asked her to repeat it.
She mumbled again, but it was still incomprehensible.
He asked again.
"He asked me…to join the Order," she said softly.
Remus paused. "Oh," he said awkwardly.
She nodded, abandoning his pants and starting in on the hem of his shirt. "He said that I showed dedication to the cause." She chuckled darkly. "I didn't know it was a cause. Like it's a charity or something. Anyway, he gave me time to think it over…and I did, for about a month and a half. Last week, I sent him an owl saying 'yes'." She finally looked up at him and tried to laugh. " And now that I've done it I'm kinda scared."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Remus bit his lip. "There's no reason to be scared."
Hestia stared at him disbelievingly. "Remus, are you aware at all about what's been going on lately?"
"Well, okay, there's a lot to be scared of," he corrected. "But…there are great people in the Order, all right? There's, er, there's Aurors. We've got the greatest Aurors in the country. We've got librarians. We've got people like Lily, who are too smart for their own good. We've got people like Sirius who can think fast and talk faster. We've got…we've got strong people, we've got people who have been studying magic and its origins longer than I've been alive, we've got construction people building safe houses all over the continent, we've got fashion designers, Hestia, who are working on camouflaging robes! And we've got Dumbledore," he added, almost as an afterthought. "And that says enough, you know?"
She nodded a little.
"And all of those people," Remus continued, "all of those people will put their lives on the line for you now."
"They don't know me," Hestia said.
"They don't care," Remus told her. "You're one of them now, and that's all they care about."
She smiled, pressing her lips together. "Do they give you that speech on your first day or something?"
He smiled, too. "Oh, but it's such a lovely speech."
Once James and Lily were seated at one of the Muggle restaurants located around the Ministry (many Ministry workers ate there simply for the convenience and the waiters didn't even notice the strange clothing anymore) and had plates of sandwiches in front of them, James asked, "Okay, what's going on."
Lily grinned. "I finished it," she whispered conspiratorially.
James was confused. "Finished what?"
"That horrendous seating chart that woman is making us do," Lily reported proudly, pulling a manila folder out of her bag. Ever since Gideon's funeral, she had been referring to Adeline simply as 'that woman', usually scowling as she did. She pushed the folder across the table to him and he took out a diagram of little round tables with names and numbers next to them. "See, I've color-coded it," she said excitedly, taking the diagram from him and pointing. "The blue is your family. The purple is mine."
"What about these little stars?" James asked, motioning.
"Those," she said, "represent magical…ness. See, I tried to put wizards with wizards and Muggles with Muggles, but I'm wondering if that counts as discrimination?"
James glanced at her, trying not to laugh. "No, Lily," he said flatly. "That does not count as discrimination."
She looked down at her sandwich and poked it absently. "It's getting so close," she said softly.
"Discrimination?"
Lily looked up at him again. "The wedding," she told him, returning her attention to her sandwich. "It's in a month. The seating chart was the last thing I had to do. We're done planning. We just have to wait now."
It's that close? "Yeah," he mumbled.
"It's scary," Lily continued. "This time next month, we'll be married."
"Yeah," he said again, for a lack of anything better.
Lily swirled her water around with her straw. "I can't believe it's already here," she sighed.
"I know."
"I still cannot believe you're getting married," Sirius said, elbowing James. "Who would've thought? You. Getting married."
James rubbed his temples. "I know," he replied, for what seemed like the seven thousandth time that day.
"I mean," Sirius continued, "it's insane."
"Yeah."
"It defies all logic."
"Right."
"I mean, if anyone told me when we were eighteen and you'd just gotten together with Lily that you'd be marrying her—"
"You'd've said that they were crazy?" James supplied dully. He hated that saying: 'If someone told me this and that, I'd've said they were crazy'. It was dumb and overused, and it just irked him.
"No," Sirius said. "I'd've killed them." He smiled at his friend, who flashed a half-hearted smile back. "Can't have madmen like that walking the streets."
Sirius had come by for dinner. The meal was over now, and he and James had gone outside for a glass of wine and some conversation while Lily had a bath. It was dark and pleasantly cool outside, and from the steps of the porch where the two of them were sitting they could see the family across the street eating dinner in the window.
"Yeah," James mumbled, looking down at his shoes. "I still can't believe it. I'm going to be someone's husband, you know?"
"It is a difficult concept to grasp."
"Right."
They were both quiet for about a minute or two, the only sound coming from one of them taking a sip of wine and replacing the glass on the step. Sirius broke the silence, staring at the family across the street as he said, "It's not really that different, though."
James turned his head to look at him, but Sirius still stared straight ahead.
"I mean, you and Lily have been together for a really long time," he said. "There's people who didn't even know you when you weren't with her, and the same goes for her. I mean, yeah, you guys break up every once in a while because you're both stubborn and temperamental, but you've never been apart for more than, what, a month?"
"Try four," James corrected quietly.
A short, harsh sort of smile crossed Sirius's face. "Yeah. Four. My point is, though, that you two always come back to each other. You remember those four months?"
James scratched absently at a stain on his knee. "'Course I remember."
"You were miserable."
"Well, I'd been stupid," James replied. "I'd been stupid and I kinda hated myself for it."
Sirius nodded, but still didn't look at his friend. "Yeah, you'd been stupid. And remember, Lily stayed at Remus's because she was afraid of what her parents would say and Remus said she cried herself to sleep every night? And you cried for the first time since you were nine?"
"I remember, Padfoot," James said, gently telling him to back off the subject.
But Sirius wouldn't let it go. "You'd made a stupid mistake, Prongs," he continued, "and she took you back."
"Yeah, she did."
Sirius paused, watching as the family across the street cleared the table and closed the curtains. "There aren't too many girls who would do that, Prongs."
"I know."
"I didn't even like you very much during those four months," Sirius said. "And Lily took you back."
No one had talked about what James had done in about two and a half years, and even someone alluding to it always made him feel sick to his stomach. "Yeah," James said. "She did."
"You know why?"
James felt very young all of a sudden, like he was in trouble and Sirius was his mother asking him to go sit in the corner and think about what he'd done. He didn't respond, because he sorta felt like Sirius didn't really want him too.
"Because she loves you," Sirius said, proving him right. "You know? You did the stupidest thing in the world, and she still loved you for it."
"I really don't think she loved me for it," James answered flatly.
"Well, she loves you in spite of it, then," Sirius said, annoyed that James had contradicted him. "You're my best friend, Prongs, and you have been for about fifteen years now, but God, I hated you a little bit for doing that to a girl."
"Why are we talking about this right now?" James asked. He was starting to feel like he might throw up, and it was not a nice feeling. "I thought we exhausted this topic when it happened."
Sirius finally looked at him. "Because," he said, "I want you to understand how insanely lucky you are. I want you to get that a million other people would kill to be you right now."
James forced himself to stare Sirius right in the eyes. "I do," he told his best friend. "I do get all that."
"Do you really?" Sirius said, his tone misleadingly light.
"Yeah, I do."
"Then why did you do it?"
James had to look away. "I was nineteen, okay?" he said quietly.
"So was Lily. And you didn't see her—"
"I was scared," James interrupted. "I knew all this stuff that you're telling me. I realized that I was probably going to marry this girl, and I didn't—I didn't know if I was ready for all of that. I'd said I loved her, and I did, and she'd lost her virginity to me, you know, and she was living with me and I'd met her parents and my family loved her, and…I didn't know if I was really ready to be an adult yet." He ruffled his hair absently. "It was different than what I had imagined it to be when I was fifteen and just staring at her in class."
Sirius didn't know what to say to all of that, so he just stared as James rambled on.
"I got a crush on her when I was fifteen, and it was easy then. I imagined kissing her, I imagined sleeping with her, I imagined her telling me that she loved me and me being able to say it back without…without even thinking about it. And then all of a sudden I had her. She was real. I could touch her whenever I wanted and she wouldn't yell at me. I could kiss her and she would kiss back and she would take my glasses off for me because I'd forget and they'd get in the way and she would put her hands in my hair. And it was great, you know, I'm not saying that it wasn't." He paused and stared across the street, where all the lights had been turned off and all the curtains drawn. "But it was definitely different. It wasn't just kissing and sex and 'I love you's. There was fighting and she yelled at me and I yelled back and I punched holes in walls to keep myself from hitting her because she made me so angry and she threw things at me and…" James sighed and took his glasses off, rubbing his eyes before replacing them.
"I've broken my hand four times," he said. "There were times when I couldn't even remember what my own bedroom looked like because I hadn't slept there for so long. The point is, Padfoot; that it was all well and good when I was just imagining what being with her might be like. I didn't take into account the fact that I can be stupid sometimes and so can she. I didn't think that she could make mistakes, because in my mind, she was perfect. But she did make mistakes. And I did, too."
"Yours were just a little bigger than hers," Sirius finally said.
James glanced up at him. "Not all of them," he replied lightly. "Lily's screwed up pretty badly, don't let her fool you. But the mistake you're talking about…yeah, that one probably tops the list. But she's made mistakes of her own, I've made mistakes of my own, and we've made some big ones together. There's stuff that you and Moony and Wormtail don't know about. There's stuff her friends don't know about. And all of those mistakes and arguments just got to be too much for me. We'd been together for going on two years, Padfoot, pretty much without a break. You're asking me if I loved her, yeah, I did. You're asking me if I was in love with her, yeah, I was. My mother was asking me when I was planning on marrying her, and Lily's mum was dropping hints whenever I saw her. I just…developed a little case of commitment phobia. Sort of."
"Prongs, you've been pro-commitment since the age of eight."
"I know," James said impatiently. "You're not listening to me. I'd never been in a serious relationship like this before. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be like that. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to hate my girlfriend one minute and then be ripping her skirt off the next. I'd never even heard about relationships like that before. All my friends who were in relationships had nice girlfriends who didn't raise their voices ever. They all had girlfriends who cooked and always remembered to pay bills and were always on time for everything. So I thought, yeah, what if I marry Lily and I realize that it's not supposed to be like that? What if I've just been wasting these past two years when I could be going out and finding someone better?"
Sirius picked up his empty wine glass and turned it over in his hands. "Why didn't you tell her?"
James emitted a bitter laugh. "And break her heart?"
"Yeah, well, what you did instead didn't help with that," Sirius returned harshly. "You could've told me. You could've told Remus or Peter or anyone aside from a girl you met in a bar."
"I know that!" James exclaimed, the sudden raise of his voice making Sirius jump. "I know that now, okay? I don't even know why you had to bring this up the month before my wedding. I know that I was wrong. That's why I'm never going to do it again! You're acting like this is something Lily and I have never discussed, something she doesn't even know about."
"I'm sorry," Sirius said quickly. "I am. I just…" He trailed off, James staring at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. "I don't even know."
They sat in silence for a few minutes before Sirius asked softly, "Was it really hard?"
James glanced at him. "What?"
"The four months. I…I hardly saw you, so I don't really know."
James stared into space, nodding slowly. "I was so mad at myself. I didn't know what the hell I was doing; it's a miracle I didn't fail out of Auror training. I was in a daze until the night she came home."
Sirius nodded a little and let a few more moments of silence pass. "Do you talk about it much?"
"What?"
"The…messing around. Do you talk about it much with Lily?"
James shook his head. "She only brings it up when she gets really, really mad and wants something to throw in my face. Which means we've only talked about it twice in two years. With the Gideon Prewett thing…when I was jealous…it was because I knew it could happen. And she knew that, but she never brought it up."
"It could've happened even if you hadn't—"
"Yeah, but it's like when a murderer has a kid, isn't it?"
Sirius paused. James did this a lot; he made analogies that made absolutely no sense. But the good thing about it was that James knew this about himself and usually explained.
And he did now. "When a murderer has a kid, that kid is a lot more likely to commit a murder." James raked a hand through his hair again. "I made the relationship that much weaker, I made her less likely to trust me. It took her a year before she trusted me again, I mean, really trusted me." He shook his head. "It should've taken longer. So Padfoot, to answer your much, much earlier question…do I realize how lucky I am?" He stared his best friend in the eye. "You have no idea how many times I just sit there and watch her sleep or read or talk and think that I don't deserve her. And I don't. We joke about it, but I honestly have no idea what she's doing still hanging around. Which is why I'm positively terrified that I'm going to be standing up there at that aisle for hours and she'll have disappeared."
Sirius touched James's shoulder. "It won't happen like that," he said quietly.
"It's entirely possible."
"It's possible," Sirius acknowledged. "But it won't happen."
James sighed. "Whatever you say, Sirius."
A/N: Angsty!James. Wasn't that fun?
Kinda draining for me to write, kinda melodramatic and soap-operaish but I actually enjoyed writing it a lot, but I'm extreme nervous as to what you all will think about it. I always sort of had the idea in the back of my head that there had to be something huge that happened to make them almost break up for real…several ideas came up, but this one, while arguably the most unoriginal, seemed to fit to me.
As for why Lily took him back when he committed the ultimate evil, she had her reasons. ;) None of which I'm going to go into right now, because I'm considering writing a ficlet based on the James/Sirius conversation and that would just ruin it.
I don't know. I really like that scene, though I apologize for the excessive dialogue. Lots of fun.
However…
The next chapter will be more fun. :)
I won't give away much, but…I'll just give you the title of the chapter and see what you can make of it.
Chapter eighteen is called "The Bachelor Party".
See you soon!