#estrangedlestrange

               She realised he was holding her hand when he squeezed the fingers comfortingly. She tried to turn her head to the side, slowly, to see who it was, but even the smallest movements seemed out of the question for now. Plus, her sight was invaded with flashes of bright light, so who knew if she could have been able to recognise him anyway.

               “Sev?” she tried to guess.

               The man grunted.

               “Oh, come on. No insults, please.”

               His voice was nothing like Sev’s anyway. And why would he be there? She tried to put some order in her thoughts.

               “Gus,” she guessed again.

               The man wiggled in his seat. “We, um, didn’t call him. Order’s business, and all that… But we could make up a lie if –“

               “Black!” she said victoriously. It had been hard to place his voice, especially since it was so low – he must have caught a cold, or something. Not unpleasant at all – may he stay sick for a while.

               “Bingo! Took you a while,” the young man joked. It sounded almost genuine, but there was something like a question mark hanging in the air.

               She pushed his hand away. “What are you doing?”

               “Not trying to steal you away from James, don’t worry.”

               She blinked a few times and there it was, his long dark mane falling on his shoulders. Nothing was much in focus, but she could see he looked tired. Or worried. Or – something. Something was off.

               “I’m not your mate’s property,” she retorted with a slight delay.

               “But you are his wife,” he observed.

               (Pause. Rewind.

               She was in a hospital. Not the Nursery.

With James Potter.

A boy.

In the same room.

(What?)

Sev wasn’t there (of course he wasn’t there).

Gus wasn’t there.

Or Beth.

Or Emma.

Instead, there was Black, and he wasn’t holding his best-mate-for-life’s hand, he was holding hers.

               (What?)

               And he’d just called her James’s wife. Potter’s. Whatever.

               (What?))

Lily blinked.

“Either you’re delusional,” she said calmly, “or this is some kind of elaborate prank.”

“Are you okay?” Black asked, furrowing his brow, and there it was, this time, she caught it – concern. Real concern. It sounded weird, coming from him.

“I’m leaning more towards ‘elaborate prank’ – Transfiguration and a few Charms for the room, couldn’t be too hard to make for your little band of psychopaths… though I can’t imagine even you would injure me just for the purpose of making me think I was in a hospital…”

“Lily!” Black said, sounding shocked.

He’d perfected that tone over the years. Did he really think it would fool her? But she changed the subject – it was true, they wouldn’t do that. Not to her, anyway.

“If this is real,” she added, “why aren’t you over there holding your best mate’s hand?”

“I switch every thirty minutes,” he said, sounding serious. (Ha.)

“Why?”

“Well, Pete’s shift started three hours ago, and Remus – you know. He couldn’t be reached. Apparently. I’ve been told Fenwick would come by today, but only after I–“

“Who?”

“Lil…”

He took her hand again and she didn’t stop him. It felt less like an elaborate prank now that her vision was returning to normal and she could see he looked… older. Although a few drops of Aging Potion…

It had really better be Aging Potion, and Transfiguration, and Charms and – and whatever else.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Lily-flower,” he said, low, almost tender. (Ew.)

“Why do you call me that?” she asked faintly.

“I call you that when I want to make it clear that I’m not joking,” he said. “And you call me…”

He waited for her to answer, but she had never had such a long conversation with Black, not any that sounded like that anyway – and she’d never called him anything but his family name.

“Paddy,” her mouth said anyway.

The man’s shoulders sagged in relief.

“You had me worried for a second here,” he exclaimed, pushing her shoulder gently.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry.”

“Paddy,” she said again, trying the word and finding that, oddly though it felt, it fit.

“What is it, Lily-flower?”

“Why are you so worried about me?”

“Come on. You’re basically my sister-in-law, now, right?” he smiled. “I love you almost as much as your husband does. Platonically, of course. Unless you want some non-platonic love, in which case I can’t imagine James would mind sharing –“

Ew!

“Black! Paddy, I mean.”

“Yes, Lily-flower.”

“I’m not your sister-in-law.”

“Well, not by blood, but –“

“I’m not Potter’s wife.”

Tears threatened to overwhelm her when she saw Black’s shoulders tense again even though his face stayed calm, just like he always did when he was trying not to show his anxiety – because when had she picked up on that? When had she spent enough time looking at this arrogant prick to pick up on that? (How much time looking at him and talking to him that she didn’t remember?)

“Something’s wrong, Paddy,” she whispered, trying not to let her voice crack. “Why am I here? Why do you look so old? What – what happened to Potter? Why isn’t he waking up?”

His shoulders sagged again – not with relief, this time, but with defeat.

“The Mediwizard said you might be amnesiac for a bit,” he said, rubbing his face. “It will come back of course, but I didn’t think it would be so…”

“So what?”

“Well… how old do you think you are, exactly?”

“Sixteen,” she said, faintly. “How old am I?”

Another sigh.

“Nineteen,” he said. “You and James are nineteen, Lily-flower. You got married in June.”

*

They got to the apartment not by Apparating but through the Floo network. Sirius – Black – Sirius – whatever – could say what he wanted about how her body would ‘remember how to cast the spell’, there was no way she was going to risk Splitting – especially while trying to hold James Potter’s groggy, long figure upright. She had to tighten all her muscles to prevent them from falling down when the chimney spat them out, and helped her useless package to the sofa before crumbling down next to him. Her injuries were mostly healed, but the exercise still made her head ache enough for bright spots to appear before her eyes. She closed them for a minute, delaying the moment where she would have to look at the place where, apparently, she had moved into with her – with Potter – two years prior.

“You okay?” he mumbled, and a warm hand landed on her neck, massaging it softly. Her headache eased at once, but she withdrew anyway, uncomfortable.

“Sorry,” they said in chorus.

She opened her eyes and huffed, repressing a smile. She had to admit, three years had done wonders for the boy – his lanky figure had filled up, and that jaw…

She looked away suddenly. “It’s okay,” she said quickly. “I just – I’ll take care of dinner, okay?”

“No!”

James tried to sit up, comical in his weakness and fake panic (it had better be fake).

“Please,” he added. “Peter will be here before 8. He can cook.”

“I’m not that bad!” she pretended to snap.

“Lil,” he pleaded – and that almost sounded too genuine. “I can wait.”

“What if I can’t wait?”

She crossed her arms.

“And who said I was making you dinner, anyway? I’m not your Elf.”

A real, toothy grin brightened James’s face and she breathed a relieved sigh. He was pretending.

“You still bicker,” he said.

“We always bicker,” she retorted. “When we even speak. You’ve got a way of getting on my nerves…”

He shrugged. “It’s part of my charm.”

Obnoxious prick.

“The bird-nest you call hair as well, I suppose?”

“Nah. You made me use Sleek-Easy on our wedding day – said it was the most handsome I’d ever looked.”

He smiled nostalgically, but his face turned pale and his head fell back, eyes closed, as a grimace contracted his traits for second. She sat back next to him immediately, hesitating for a second but choosing not to take his hand. Not yet.

“Are you in pain?” she whispered.

He kept his eyes closed and waved the question away.

“Don’t try to be macho, you idiot. I’m asking because they gave me a Potion in case you needed one, so just ask.”

“Well,” he conceded, “breathing might hurt a little.”

She sighed and gave him one of the flasks that piled up in her pocket ever since she’d stolen them from the supply closet on their floor. They were for her initially, but she couldn’t very well let him suffer, could she?

“Black wouldn’t tell me what happened to you,” she said. “Or me, for that matter.”

“Top secret,” James mumbled, before taking a big gulp. “Bloody – is that troll’s puke?”

Another – smaller – gulp.

“I don’t understand,” Lily said, brow furrowed.

“If you can’t remember how to protect the information,” the young man explained, “it’s best not to remember the information at all.”

She pried the potion off his hands before he could finish it.

“Evans!” he protested.

“I want to know what happened.”

“So you’re going to torture me?”

“Don’t tempt me.”

His lips twitched, but his voice was grave when he spoke again.

“It would be dangerous, Lil. Not only for you or me. A lot of people are involved…”

“Who? Is Fenwick one of them?”

He pushed on his arms to sit upright and held her gaze, graver than before.

“Do you remember Benjy,” he asked slowly, “or did you just hear his name and decided to throw it around to see how I’d react?”

She blinked. Found out. “Second option.”

“Well, don’t,” he said harshly. “It’s immature, and selfish. If people find out he’s involved, there might never even be a body to be buried, do you understand? Do you want that on your conscience?”

She stood up abruptly, ignoring the sudden pain in her skull – her ego was hurt much more than her head – as she threw daggers at him.

“You’re sleeping on the couch tonight!” she spat over her shoulder, striding towards what she hoped was the bedroom.

“I wasn’t going to sleep in the same bed as the amnesiac woman who thinks she’s still thirteen!” he retorted furiously.

“Sixteen!” she yelled back, and shut the door violently.

               “That’s the bathroom!” she heard, muffled through the wood.

               Damnit.

               She only got out of there in the morning, dark circles under her eyes, but finally ready to make peace. James – Potter – oh, fuck it – James was already up, and making breakfast. No surprise there – if he could get up at dawn after allegedly breaking three bones simultaneously on the Quidditch field at fourteen, he certainly wasn’t going to sleep in after spending a few days in the hospital – whatever had sent him there in the first place. Curiously enough, she didn’t think it was Quidditch anymore.

               “Sleep well?” she mumbled as a white flag.

               He didn’t look up, focused on what looked like it might be scrambled eggs but could also be eggplant. Either way, she wasn’t eating it.

“You?”

“Nah.”

Her pain Potions had come in handy this morning, after a night spent on the hard floor. James’s lips twitched.

“I can’t believe how stubborn you are sometimes.”

She took a seat and glanced at what was in the pan – yeah, eggplant, definitely. For breakfast. What the hell.

“I’m not eating that,” she warned.

“Who said I was making it for you?” he mocked. “I’m not your Elf.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Part of my charm.”

They exchanged a smile, and Lily sighed.

“I remember our first date,” she said. “It just came to me this morning.”

James’ face brightened up. “That’s great!”

“It was awful. I can’t believe I gave you a second chance.”

He passed her a glass of orange juice and retorted: “Hey, I was a pure gentleman! Followed Remus’ directions and everything. I don’t know why you got so angry at me – I’d really tried for everything to go smoothly.”

“That it did!” she exclaimed. “It was bland, is what it was. You took me to the most vomit-inducing place in Hogsmeade for the most vomit-inducing holiday in the year, were all lovey-dovey and kept telling me ‘let’s talk about you instead’ every time I tried to ask something about you.”

“I thought you hated it when I was being self-centred! And I was trying to be romantic…”

“Please,” she scoffed. “It was like going on a blind date. You were anything but yourself, and completely ignored everything you knew about me.”

“But Remus said…”

“Well, I didn’t agree to go on a date with Remus, did I?”

She swallowed the rest of her juice and got up.

“Fair enough,” James said suddenly. “You’re right. It was a disaster.”

She eyed him suspiciously before sitting back down, pacified.

“How well did you do on our second date, then?” she asked.

“Much better,” he grinned. “Probably because you organised it. As a surprise. So Remus couldn’t tell me what to do.”

“Ha! I would.”

He served her a plate of eggplant and whatever else he’d been adding to the mix – lots of spices, apparently – and her stomach groaned. It smelt quite delicious, even if it seemed more appropriate for dinner than for breakfast, but she really was hungry, so she relented.

She surveyed the flat while eating. It was small, but cosy. Exuberant Gryffindor colours brightened up the quiet, sandy walls here and there, a statue of Ganesh kept watch by the door, a broom was waiting in the corner for someone to fly it and a few Quidditch magazines claiming what must be the latest news were scattered on the living-room table; but she could also see traces of herself in the pressed, dry plants on the walls, the smell of burnt sage in the kitchen, the collection of muggle records by the couch… hey, there must be some of them that she didn’t know yet! She pushed away the urge to check right now and kept looking around. Some things she couldn’t tell whether they were hers or his: the books lining on the shelves of seemingly every subject available, the Charmed origamis flying in a circle around the living-room, the artistic, yet still pictures of Diagon-Alley that were hanging on the door…

“What do you think?” James asked, watching her like she had been watching the room.

“It’s very us,” she answered honestly. “I never thought we would combine like that. It’s almost harmonious.”

“Almost,” he joked.

“Well, it wouldn’t be us without a little chaos,” she said with a side-smile.

He nodded solemnly.

“May I hug you?” he asked.

She hesitated, then nodded herself.

“May I hug you on the couch?” he added. “I’m feeling a little dizzy still.”

“Oh!”

She grabbed a new flask and gave it to him before helping him to the sofa.

“I like being sick,” he said appreciatively. Then after swallowing the potion: “I just changed my mind.”

“When don’t you,” she said, nonplussed, before taking the flask from his hand and putting it down near the latest edition from Snitched!

James made himself comfortable and opened his arms; she snuggled to his side and breathed out in his warmth. A few tears started prickling her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked gently, patting her head like he did his cat in the common room all the time.

“My dad is dead, isn’t he?”

The young man stayed silent, but pulled her closer until she was resting her cheek on his chest.

“I don’t remember it,” she whispered. “Not yet. I just – I remember Professor McGonagall asking me to come out of Charms class and I had – this terrible feeling…”

“You went to see him,” James said quietly. “He had been in the clinic for two months at that point. You told me later it was stage four of cancer, so you knew…”

His voice cracked. That was a first: James Potter crying with her. But she didn’t say a word, because the memories were unfolding in her head, as vivid as if they’d happened yesterday.

“You said your sister and you didn’t even fight. You took one hand each and told him you loved him, then left him with your mom so she could say goodbye. Petunia – she even took you in her arms and said it would be alright…”

“I thought it would be the end of our feud,” Lily whispered. “We even met with her boyfriend and her that summer, didn’t we?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he and the arsehole her sister was da

“You said something like that, once. About – about how me and the lads behaved ting had blown up their tentative reconciliation.

“It wasn’t just your fault,” she said. “But I don’t think I can ever really forgive you for that.”

But she still buried her face in his shirt and watered it like a plant. towards Snape.”

“I did?”

“You said I was a different man. A good man. Someone who would not do it again, if given the chance – you said ‘that, and the way you atone for what you did, that makes me able to forgive you as a person. But I can never forgive your actions, James Potter, as long as I live, and what they led to.’”

He was looking away from her as he spoke.

“And you manage to live with that?” Lily asked, carefully.

“We all have to live with some pretty dark shit,” he said. “I manage.”

*

Boring days went by. James’s friends came to visit – not hers, ever. She figured they weren’t “involved” in whatever her husband and she were. Some kind of resistance against the Death-Eaters, without a doubt. She could believe that of Gus – his lack of involvement in politics was exactly why she’d broken up with him, and while they’d cautiously made up after a year, she knew he would never take as big a part in the war as she was always going to. The twins though – no, she didn’t dare ask about them. Shy Emma and wild Beth… what had happened to them?

It was only a matter of time until she got the answers, anyway. Her memories were coming back in a thin yet steady flow, week after week of her last year at Hogwarts and the summer that followed.

Her eyes drifted down to James’s head on her lap. He looked almost exactly like her latest memory now, features relaxed in his sleep, young and unscarred by the war she now knew for sure was raging out of the quiet bubble they’d been locked into for almost a week.

A few strands of her hair tickled his cheek and James’s eyes flickered open, his dilated pupils quickly adjusting to the brightness before dilating again, drinking her in like they seemingly always did. In the light of the fire, his hazel eyes almost looked golden, with chocolate dots spattered across the iris, and Lily found herself breathless for a second.

“Hey,” he said sleepily.

“Hey…”

She hesitated another fraction of second, and…

“You wanna kiss me, don’t you,” James said matter-of-factly.

And the moment passed.

“You’re insufferable!” she exclaimed.

She pushed him off but he clang to her arm.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just – we shouldn’t. Not until you’ve fully recovered. I’d feel like I was taking advantage.”

“I’m of age mentally and otherwise, not under any sort of influence, and remember what your junk looks like, James Potter. So how about letting me be the judge of that?”

She defied his gaze until he dropped his gaze (and her arm).

“Are you sure?” he whispered.