Agerasia: A lack of the signs of age.
Lily has never changed.
The woman in James's arms is the girl on the Hogwarts Express. She's still the pumpkin juice thrown in his face, still the smell of vanilla shampoo, still the long, freckled limbs and green gaze, though the green is no longer acidic when it pierces James, for it has faded into love over the years, into a soft emerald.
Childbirth has not stretched her body out of shape, merely enlarged her nipples and darkened them, a contrast with her skin that James worships by night, in the lamplight of their cottage bedroom. Her hair swings as vibrantly as it ever has, in the small, pretty kitchen where she listens to the radio and hums as she works, and where Harry bangs a spoon against the table.
None of this is any particular wonder, really, she's only twenty-one.
But James remembers the burnt toast and gone-off milk in the mould-ceilinged flat that they first moved into together, eighteen years old. It was James who burnt the toast, and Lily who forgot the milk on the sideboard in the sun.
Now, James burns the toast, and Lily scrapes the charcoal off into the sink, with her smooth hands by her flat abdomen and her bright curls falling over her face, and James kisses the back of her neck apologetically, and loves her.