#seventh year

For a moment, Harry considers leaving. That would be the easy thing. The expected thing.

Instead, he walks closer.

“You couldn’t sleep either?”

Draco glances at him, expression flickering. “Groundbreaking deduction.”

Harry snorts, then hesitates before lowering himself to sit beside him—close, but not too close. There’s still space between them. Enough to retreat if needed.

They sit in silence for a while.

It’s not uncomfortable.

That’s new.

“I thought it would feel different,” Harry admits eventually. “Being back.”

Draco lets out a slow breath, his shoulders loosening just slightly. “It does feel different.”

“Not like I expected,” Harry says.

“No,” Draco agrees. “Not like that.”

Another pause. The wind brushes past them, cool and gentle.

Harry glances sideways. Draco looks… tired. Not in the sharp, brittle way Harry remembers from sixth year, but something quieter. Like he’s been holding himself together for so long he’s forgotten how to stop.

“You stayed,” Harry says, softer now. “I didn’t know if you would.”

Draco’s mouth quirks, but it’s not quite a smile. “Neither did I.”

Something about that lands heavy and light at the same time.

Harry shifts, just slightly, until their shoulders almost touch.

Draco notices. Of course he does. He goes still for half a second—

—and then doesn’t move away.

“I keep thinking,” Harry says, voice barely above the wind, “that we’re supposed to go back to how things were.”

Draco lets out a quiet, humorless laugh. “That sounds dreadful.”

Harry smiles, just a little. “Yeah. It does.”

Another stretch of silence. Easier this time.

“Potter,” Draco says after a while, like he’s testing the word instead of using it as a weapon.

“Yeah?”

Draco doesn’t look at him when he speaks. “What happens now?”

Harry watches the horizon, where the sky is just starting to think about morning.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. Then, after a beat: “But I think… we get to decide.”

Draco exhales slowly, like that answer matters more than he wants to admit.

Their shoulders touch properly this time. Neither of them pulls away.

Somewhere below them, Hogwarts creaks and settles, as if it’s finally allowing itself to rest.

For the first time since Harry arrived back, he feels like he might be able to do the same.

“Alright,” Draco murmurs.

Harry glances at him. “Alright?”

Draco’s eyes flick toward him, softer than Harry has ever seen them. “We’ll decide, then.”

Harry nods.

They sit there until the sun starts to rise, quiet and close and something new—not fixed, not defined, but not broken either.

A single letter arrives the third day into summer: a drawing of a headstone in a billowing thunderstorm. There is no caption, but there is an epigraph: 

Here lies James Fleamont Potter: willing killed by Lily Marie Evans

She sends his owl back empty handed. 

The summer passes in a single grey blur: she goes to work at the corner pub, comes home, stares at the ceiling. It’s a monotonous hellscape of a life, but it’s still better than being back at school—facing him.  

She doesn’t escape though, not totally. In her dreams he returns again and again. Many of them are just memories, though warped and made bizarre by the saturation of the light or blurry fuzz of the images. Others he shifts through the many versions of himself throughout the years as though searching for a frequency—his height, hair length, slope of his neck changing in milliseconds as he walks alongside her on some unknown path in the forest. She knows when the dream is about to end when the antlers begin to grow—slow and cumbersome from the top of his head. 

“I’m still waiting.”

When not busy with work, her days are spent mostly convincing herself it was all just a fault in judgement. She didn’t ever actually fancy him, not truly. He had simply tricked her again, lulled her in with his beaming smile and warm, enveloping presence until a third year version of herself took hold. She does her best to wrap everything about him—his laugh, his smile, his smell— all into a little box to be shelved in the back of her brain and for a while, it works.

Never, never does she allow herself to think of the night before holiday, because she knows how easy it would be to relapse if she does— the rejected blankets on the cold stone floor, the soft buzz of weed in her veins, the warmth of his hands as they slide under her skirt, whimpers so soft they could have been the wind…

She keeps it all mostly at bay, until another letter arrives.

Due to your outstanding achievements in academic and social standings, your professors and I are pleased to offer you the prestigious position of Head Girl for the 1977-78 school year. Please find your badge attached and a list of duties required upon arriving in September.

It’s laughable how much she can read between the lines: It’s charity. 

She isn’t a fool—Dumbledore might keep them sequestered within the walls of his fortress, but there was a war going on outside and it was finding its way through the cracks. She had to hand it to him—it was smart on his part. Dumbledore might continue to refuse a position in the ministry, but he was no stranger to politics. The end of the letter made that more than apparent:

Fellow Gryffindor, James Potter, will serve as Head Boy alongside you to share in the duties and expectations that come with the position. I highly recommend reaching out over the holidays to prepare for your upcoming posts. I look forward to working with you both in the next coming months.

Best Regards,

Albus Dumbledore

It produces an actual laugh, deep and hateful and cold. Of course he chose a pureblood, a boy with a quidditch pitch, a boy who fits in, a boy who will become something in this world because he is destined for it—and you, the token muggleborn. There was no better optics.

“What’s that?” Petunia scrunches her nose at the badge weighing heavy in her hand. She tosses it across the table, letting it skitter to a halt for her sister to see. 

“It’s your dream come true—I’ve been promoted to head freak.”

Turns out one of the many duties of being ‘head freak’ was receiving an onslaught of correspondence that she is neither prepared nor willing to answer. 

“ I just heard the news—James Potter??? Head Boy??? (Congrats by the way!)”

“It’s karma babe—Dumbledore is fucking with you, that or the universe is trying to tell you something….”

“EVANS. Everyone has gone nutter. Prongs is MIA—first mentally and now (as of an hour ago) physically. Seeing as you are his keeper now (see: Head Girl) I am not-so-kindly requesting you to FIX IT.”

“Fix it.” If only it were that easy. 

“There’s a deer in the garden,” her dad says from the window. Lily looks up, leaving Sirius’ letter to lay open like a cadaver in her lap. Her dad pulls back the curtain further and a rush of sunlight pours in. 

“Mighty rack on it too. Can’t say I’ve seen that kind of wildlife around here since the factory went in? Have you?”

It takes a second to register his words.

Rack meaning antlers. Growing, twisting, closing in—no, creating a cage. Protecting. Golden eyes piercing back. 

“No, I haven’t.”

She doesn’t respond to anyone—folding up each parchment into one big lump of words. When she attempts to shove them in her pocket, she finds the space already occupied. A note from a lifetime ago. 

“ I’ll always pick you!” 

She stares into the eyes of flobberworm James on the page, half hoping it will animate and explain itself. 

“No, you won’t.”

She goes to work, comes home, stares at the ceiling—but a letter from James never comes.The quaffle was in her court so it shouldn’t feel so much like a rejection, but it does. It twists deep in her stomach. 

Nobody could ever love a freak like you. 

She turns her eyes away from the ceiling and scans her bedroom. Letters litter the floor, some from the avalanche this morning, others from a past James she isn’t quite sure ever existed. 

You’re being stupid. This isn’t about fancying him anymore. Grow up. 

With much effort, she drags herself across the room to the table and pulls out a fresh piece of parchment. 

Dear James Potter, 

She stares at the page and a full minute passes. 

How are you?

Congratulations on getting Head Boy.

I don’t know whether I want to strangle you or snog your face off or strangle MYSELF for wanting the latter so badly it hurts.

With a wave of frustration, she throws her pen down and pushes the parchment off the table to mingle with all the rest on the floor. Scrubbing her face, she reaches for a fresh parchment before freezing, her gaze shooting outside the window.

Devil’s Snare winds up her stomach and into her throat to cut off all air supply. She must be dreaming—going fucking nutter—there was no other bloody explanation for it. 

James Potter is in the garden. 

He doesn’t notice her and she doesn’t wait for him to look up, rushing out her bedroom and down the stairs. When she wrenches open the door the sound startles him, his eyes jumping up wide and bright. His hand instinctively runs through his hair and it hits her how long it’s been since she’s seen the tick. “I got over it,” he had shrugged one of their many days studying last year—back in the short period they called each other friends. “ You said you hated it, so I stopped.”

“Alright Evans?”

His eyes flit over her from head to toe, a small blush forming on his temples. It makes her very aware of the short, muggle dress she had thrown on that morning. A small half-smile threatens on his lips.

“Ah, muggle style wins again.”

The way he says it—low and tight, barely above a whisper—makes every stitch of common sense in her want to unwind.

The backdrop of Cokeworth and the smell of toiled earth does not mesh well with the world she has built around him for seven years. At school, it was easy to be guarded, stone walls giving way to stony dispositions, but here, among the dregs of her mum’s garden?

Her floodgates are open and the water is rising fast. 

“How did you get here?”

She can hear how shaky her voice is, cold and hard in the summer warmth. If he notices, he ignores it—stuffing his hands into his pockets and turning his attention elsewhere.

“Lavender by the gate—it’s good luck, you know.” He nods his head over to the creaking metal fence in front of their house. Her mum had said the same thing back when her condition was just a big word on a piece of paper. How dare he know. 

“We have a garden too but it’s only for potions ingredients—Dad insists on growing his own, the uptight sod,” James continues, averting his gaze. If she didn’t already know this dance of his, she would find it laughable. Here we go: his specialty. Deflect, joke, talk in circles. How predictable, how infuriatingly—”

“So, I’m sure you saw I was made Head Boy.”

—straight forward?

“I did,” she stutters, taken aback, “but I don’t see how that warrants a house call.”

“Well, you haven’t exactly been answering my letters.”

It hits hard and fast, stinging on impact. She had expected a lot of things from him when they would finally have to meet again, but pain and resentment on his part was not one of them. 

“I’d hardly call some silly drawing a letter.”

“You used to.” His eyes narrow, steely and cold.

“Well, this time there was nothing to say, so drop it.”

She wants to sound sure of herself, but it comes out warped and cracked, like the records they used to listen to on the dorm room floor—like the one that played when…when…

No No No No. Don’t go there, never there…

“I think you should leave.”

It’s not the tears blurring her vision that make the words stick in her throat, but the look on his face as she says them. Pale and helpless and deliberately not James. The James she knows is a ball of light, an endless force of energy ringing laughter through the halls—not, some beaten boy standing in the polluted haze of the moon.

He scrubs his face, knocking his glasses askew. 

“Please. I just need—”

“No.”

“ Merlin, I’m being serious I—”

“I said no. Goodbye Potter.” She twists on her feet and her heels dig into the soil, breath coming painful and shallow from her windpipe.

“I am going to decline the Head Position—I wanted you to hear it from me.”

It pierces sharp and hot into her heart. She spins back towards him to find him still frozen in place. Suddenly, the urge to run, wrap her arms around him and tell him to stay passes over her like a chill.

“Why.”

“Because I don’t deserve it.”

“Yeah, sure. A pureblood not deserving it .” 

She can see the anger rise in his shoulders, his brow knitting into a tight line. Good, show me something Potter.

“What are you talking about? You of all people should know that—”

He stops abruptly, letting out an exasperated sigh. His steeled reserve drops. 

“Look—Dumbledore is nutter for giving me this badge and we both know it. I’ve been a bloody nightmare to them for years—they could have picked anyone else, honestly anyone , and they would have made more sense.”

She snorts. “Never took you to be the self deprecating type.”

It awards her a joyless laugh. 

“Sure you have—I’m the biggest wanker of them all. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

Anger twists in her veins, propelling her back towards him as though ready to strike. She waits for him to recoil, perhaps search for his wand, but he just watches her return, the ends of his untidy hair catching glints of moonlight and quickening her heart.

It’s not until she’s standing back in front of him that she notices something warm and damp pattering onto the skin of her folded arms. His face immediately softens and she can tell he wants to rush forward and wipe the tears from her cheeks, but he won’t and she won’t let him. 

“ Lils,” he pleads, eyes dragging across her tear stained face, “I’m doing this for you.”  

“Do not call me that,” she hisses, wiping her cheek impatiently, “You have no right. And don’t give me that, you have no idea what I want. I don’t care if you are bloody Head Boy or dead at the bottom of the lake at this point I—”

He lets out a strangled cry, turning away from her to clench at his hair. When he turns back, he wipes his eyes, a glassy sheen now coating his irises. 

“You’re right, Evans,” he says, making no effort to smile. “I don’t know—so enlighten me. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” 

A jolt of electricity runs up her spine, threatening her nervous system to short circuit. How many times over the years had he said those words and when did he actually start meaning them?

All of them—every single bloody time.

It unlatches the box that kept the memories of him at bay and suddenly the images seep through like ink on a canvas. James past and present float through her vision like beautiful, wonderful, infuriating ghosts. 

“Be Head Boy or don’t, I don’t care,” her voice breaks, a choking noise bubbling up. “—but stop playing all these games with me because…because I won’t be able to survive it—really Potter. I mean it. I know you are an arrogant prick and probably get your rocks off watching me wallow and make a fool of myself after you like I’m still bloody thirteen, but I’m not some plaything you can just toss around and take the piss whenever you—”

He closes the distance between them so fast, she hardly registers it, both hands cupping her face and demanding her attention. 

“So it wasn’t the drugs. You meant to kiss me.” 

The heat rises so fast it scorches her cheeks. 

“I wish I had never done it.”

“But at the time—you wanted to.”

She wiggles under his hands but he doesn’t let her go, eyes wild and determined. 

Vulnerable. She’s far too vulnerable. 

“What does it matter?” She gasps, tears falling between his fingers, “Like I said, it's all one big game for you. The lads probably got into your head that it was a good idea to—what did they call it?—’pop your muggleborn cherry’ so you decided to entertain my pathetic little relapse and snog me just to say that—”

“Is that really what you think of me?” He cuts her off, nostrils flaring, “Lily, I don’t know what reality you are in but you’ve got this all wrong. I don’t know how I could have made myself any more clear…”

The memories boil over again—every moment he has ever shown her kindness or, god forbid, attraction being shrouded by some other, sinister inner voice. 

“Well, you aren’t being clear!” She screams, finally wrenching his hands off her face. “One day you are giving me foot touches under the table, writing me little letters… and the next you recoil from me in your bloody bed !”

There’s a beat of silence, then James lets out a laugh so unhinged and feral she takes a step back.

“Fucking Hell, you are delusional.”

An insult sits at the top of her tongue but he keeps laughing, all of the tension in his shoulders melting away. He looks completely mad, keeled over with his hair tousled and glasses barely hanging on to his ears. 

“Evans,” he pants, trying to catch his breath, “Me recoiling from you? That was out of self preservation.” 

His words sink to the bottom of her stomach, setting off the flutter of a thousand little snitches. 

“If you had even gotten close—pressed up against me even slightly— I would have made a fool of myself, you’d have felt me make a fool of myself. Merlin, I’m embarrassed just saying it.”

Oh. Oh.  A flush streaks across her face and neck, trying her best to not linger on what it implies—

“Do you get it?” He gasps, finally righting himself and raking a hand through his hair, “Please don’t make me elaborate on the fickle anatomy of a teenage boy, Evans. I’m standing on your bloody doorstep…”

It’s not possible. He’s taking the piss…

Like aligning tiny intricate puzzle pieces, one clicks together with another. 

“But Elodie…Slughorn's party—” she stammers, her whole inside churning, “I know she asked you—Christ, she asked me if she could…”

He looks as though he has been slapped, eyes wide and body leaning back. When he recovers, he speaks slowly.

“Lily…I went to Slughorn’s party looking for you.”

“Rubbish.”

“Fucking honest,” he stammers, eyes getting more bright by the syllable.

“Elodie did ask me, but I turned her down. I went because you had been so weird about wanting me to go in the library—” He cuts himself off, closing his eyes and taking a deep, shoulder clenching breath. 

“—And yes, maybe I was hopeful that you had been trying to ask me…you know, just in a real bloody confusing kind of way.”

Another click of a piece, but instead of making it easier to decipher, it makes everything turn belly up. Years worth of interactions with him racing past her eyes, now at an angle she hadn’t considered before.

But you’re a muggleborn. A freak. No one could love you. Just a plaything to take the piss out of. The sirens begin in her head and they are deafening, making it hard to even think.

“James,” she murmurs, eyes stinging again, “It's too much. I think you should leave.”

Something flashes across his face and his eyes darken, jaw tightening in indignance. 

“Sorry, but no. Not until you get it.”

He walks towards her, slow and somewhat unsure of himself. It’s a jarring visual—James being hesitant. Ever since she has met him, he has thrown himself into everything with such gusto and trust. Now, he steps deliberately, like dodging a thousand trip wires waiting to unlock a trap door. 

She should run—rush back inside the house and slam the door, leaving the beautiful curve of his jaw, and the square of his shoulders and the moonlight in his hair out in the street. But by the time she is ready to dart, his hand reaches back up to her cheek, rooting her to the spot. 

“I want to propose something to you but I need you to give me the floor again.” His words echo from fifth year, ringing as steady and warm as they did back in the forest. 

“I want you to stop over thinking things—get out of that brilliant, freaky, fucking fantastic brain of yours and listen to me— and really listen because I don’t think I will be able to say it again—so will you humor me? Please?”

Another stab from the past. Just like in his dorm, he’s not asking, he’s begging. She doesn’t know what to say, feeling the heat of his hand and sharp stare of his eyes lulling her away like in a trance. Eventually, she feels herself nod. 

He closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath. Maybe it was unintentional, but his thumb gives a slow caress to her cheek. 

“I know I’m an idiot—I don’t deserve anything more than what you have already given me for the past six years— hell, I definitely don’t deserve the second chance back in fifth—but I want you to know, need you to really understand that I have been so foolishly in love with you since the moment I met you.”

There is no air. No sound. They are hovering untethered in a void. 

“I didn’t really understand what the feeling was until probably fifth year—and even then I did an utter shite job showing you—but, again, I need you to know that there isn’t a day that passes where you aren’t on my mind, where just the thought of your hair or the color of your eyes or the way you hold a bloody quill doesn’t make me want to implode with a happiness that I certainly, certainly have no right to feel.”

It’s a sadness she has never seen on him before. One that cuts to the bone.

“If you still hate me and want nothing to do with me after this, I swear I will never bother you again, but I just really needed you to know—and it’s not a joke, not me trying to take the piss or play games with you like you constantly seem to think. I am obsessed with you and honestly at this point I wish you would just be cruel about it and go on and tell me to fuck off—”

She lurches forward on her toes, slotting his mouth against hers before he can continue to spiral any further. His lips move soft and warm just as she remembers and a small gasp of Lils drifts into the air. Unlike the time in the dorm, his hands move slow like drifting through water, down her neck and back, savoring each centimeter they drop until they wind around her waist to pull her in deeper. Only after the fact, maybe days or months later will she realize that all the noise and voices that usually plagued her brain have vanished. The silence is so delectable.

When they finally come up for air, it makes her laugh—a real, raw one that tilts her head back and cuts through the night. Eventually she realizes he had started to laugh too, pressing his forehead against hers and kissing the lingering vibration away.

“Merlin, your laugh,” he groans into the crook of her neck, pressing an impossibly large smile into her skin. “I’m addicted to it—how did it take you this long to understand I’m hopeless for you. Seriously, just take me out of my misery…”

It makes her laugh again, but this time he catches it, his lips sweeter than anything she could ever imagine. 

“Don’t worry, I will.”

* * * * *

Of all her seven years of Hogwarts, she has never noticed how intimidating the double doors to the Great Hall are. Have they always been this big? This…terrifying?

“Evans— you’re doing it again. Let me in.” 

She feels the press of warm and familiar lips into her cheek, lingering by her ear just to make her skin prickle like he knows it will. Arse.

“It’s going to be fine—dare I say, even brilliant.”

She snorts and he rewards her with another kiss to the neck—something she’s grown very fond of in their final stolen weeks of summer. 

“Says the boy who is so chuffed about showing off he could die.”

James flashes her a smile, beaming from ear to ear. Wrapping his arms around her waist, he cradles her to his chest, leaning his chin in the crook of her neck. 

“Give jabs all you want, Evans. I am chuffed—but hopefully I don’t die anytime soon because I have big plans for us…namely some that involve that comfy looking couch back in the Heads’ office…”

Heat rises to her cheeks and his smile grows wider than humanly possible.

“ Stop,” she groans, reaching up to tug at his hair, “We are seconds away from shepherding loads of first years to their common rooms…becoming role models… .You can’t be bringing up things like…like…”

“Hm, like what?” He wiggles his fingers against her stomach, making her squirm against him. 

“Nevermind—you’re impossible,” she sighs, resigning herself. He continues to feather kisses up her neck, finding her pressure point and nuzzling his nose. She can’t even pretend she doesn’t like it.

“James?”

“Hm?”

“Tell me again how this year is going to go.”

He hums against her skin, then pulls up—eyes wide and shining and full of an adoration no one has ever shown her in her life.

“Well–” he tsks, holding her with both arms around the stomach and swaying her playfully. 

“Upon walking through these doors I will swoop you into a romantic kiss and the whole school will cheer.”

“Alright, territorial. ”

“Then,” He continues ignoring her, “We will become the best Head Boy and Girl this school has ever seen: catch wannabe death eater pricks...dole out detentions...make use of our ability to stay out after curfew to snog….”

“Funny, that last one wasn’t on the duties sheet.”

He gives a small growl and she reaches up to give his chin a shake, kissing the bicep that wraps around her. 

“Oh, it was definitely on there—and anyways, don’t hate me for trying to make up for lost time.”

She spins around, burrowing her hands into his hair and his response to it is blinding—her bright star that will never go out. 

“Let's get through the welcome feast first,” she says, peppering his cheek with kisses. His arms tighten around her, a hum of satisfaction escaping his lips. 

“Whatever you want, Evans.”

When they turn to enter, James’ face is still beaming and she wonders if he has broken the record for happiness. He reaches out and takes her hand, and she knows her eyes must be bright and brimming with a word that has hung on her lips all summer-love.

As the door opens she waits for an outpouring of thoughts, the chanting of mudblood…the gasp of her kind ever being associated with his…the sound of her sister’s voice or Severus’ or even just her own telling her that she will never never be good enough.