coming of age, 1977
a very very happy 17th birthday to @alrightpotter
ellie, my dear, my darling, my dearest, i am so glad to have met you, and to have you in my life. you deserve the world x
Sunday, 30th January, 1977
She wakes up in the common room. She wakes up warm from the fire, burning low. She wakes up to James Potter shaking her gently.
She wakes up seventeen. Well,
“Hey,” James says, and she sits up slowly.
“Hey,” she says. The common room is deserted, the night pressing darkly in through the window. She shrinks away from it. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he says happily, and shoves a box wrapped in brown paper into her hands. “Why don’t you ask your new best friend?”
She half-laughs. “What?”
“Open it.”
She gives him a look, and then she sets about opening the box, and – oh Merlin – she’s one of those people who won’t rip the wrappings off, no matter how long it takes. Of course she is. “James…” she says, and it sends a shiver down his spine the way she says James, not Potter.
She holds up the watch, and he can’t stop looking at the way the band spills over her fingers like molten silver. This is when he knows he got it right, perfectly right. They’re made of the same stuff, that watch and Lily, all delicate and deceptively sturdy.
“I wasn’t sure if you’re meant to get a witch a watch for her seventeenth,” he says, “so I wrote to mum to ask.”
She’s still studying the timepiece when she asks, “What’d she say?”
“She said it’s the 70s and that it doesn’t matter. Which is, privately, what I was thinking, but I still had to get the money off her.”
She looks at him, a blazing, beautiful thing, and she decides that she doesn’t ever want to not be his friend. He looks at her, all hard edges and soft middles, and he decides that he will never not love her. “It’s so lovely,” she says, “but it’s too much, James. It’s too much money.”
He laughs, and he hopes it doesn’t come off as dismissive. “There are so many dumb, stupid traditions that exist in the wizarding world, and I thought it might be nice if you could be a part of this one. If you like, I’ll never get you anything ever again for the rest of our lives, but this is yours.” He reaches out, his Gryffindor daring guiding his hands, and he takes the watch from her fingers. She lets him clip it on her left wrist, then she lets him undo it and put it on the right way round.
When he’s done, she takes his hand, and gives it a squeeze, and says, “Thank you.”
He mumbles something that might be, “Don’t worry about it,” and then he retracts his hand, his Gryffindor daring spent. “What time is it?” he asks.
She looks down at the tiny face, and her face lights in a grin. “It’s three fourteen.”
He grins too. “In that case, happy birthday.”
Sunday, 27th March, 1977
“Jinx!” she says, over the music that Remus has somehow managed to rig into blasting all through Gryffindor Tower. She thinks she remembers the song from last summer, possibly a Paul McCartney number. Maybe. If she closes her eyes she can hear it coming out of the clunky radio in Petunia’s car.
James spins around, and grins at her, and the soft clink of their watches tapping together as they knock wrists is lost in the din. “Hey,” he says, and Sirius has clearly found whoever put Wings on and relieved them of DJ duty, because the music shifts very suddenly to Anarchy in the UK.
“Happy birthday,” she says, and he wants very much to kiss her, but he doesn’t, because that would be a horrendously stupid thing for him to do. Falling in love with her was a horrendously stupid thing for him to do.
“What’d you get me?” he says instead, and immediately realises he sounds like a total prat.
She doesn’t seem to mind, though, because she hands him a card that she’s made from an old scrap of parchment, and it makes his heart flutter. The inside of it is packed to bursting with her words, the handwriting cramped and pushed into every corner. “Read it later,” she says, and he nods. “There’s also this.”
She holds out a black rectangle, and it takes him a second to figure out what it is. It’s an upside-down polaroid, but he knows what it’s of before he even takes it. When he flips it over – yep – it’s the picture of them Mary took at Sirius’ birthday. He knows she keeps it above her bedside table, even though he’s never managed to make it up to the girls’ dorm.
She takes a sip of her drink, and he wants to ask what she’s drinking, but she obviously wants to know what he thinks of her gift.
“Evans…” he says, and then, because that feels wrong, “Lily, I… Are you sure?”
“Sure as shooting,” she says. “Besides, I still get to see it, I just have to come to your room.” She holds up her cup. “To many more.”
He looks at her, and he’s never seen anyone so extraordinary. Maybe he hasn’t.
Maybe he’ll have a few more drinks tonight, and maybe he’ll have a few more, and maybe he’ll end up crying over how much she means to him in the loo with Remus rubbing his back. Maybe he’ll pass out thinking about her, and maybe he’ll wake up too late for breakfast. Maybe he’ll remember about her card when he’s halfway through tying his tie, and maybe he’ll fish it out of last night’s trouser pockets, and maybe he’ll miss the first half of charms because he’s reading it. Maybe he’ll give her a sheepish smile as he sneaks in while Flitwick has his back turned. Maybe he’ll carry Love, Lily, written larger than everything else, in his heart and in his soul until the day he dies.
Or maybe he’ll just enjoy this moment, a moment between friends, with her arm around his waist, with her trying to flag down Mary McDonald and Mary McDonald’s camera on the other side of the room.
Maybe that’s all they need, right now.
