#sltltua

“Heating’s broken,” she says, the second he picks up the call.

He grins back at her, pixelated and slow, and she tugs on the chain of her necklace. Anxiety tell. “Hello to you, too.”

“This is serious!”

“No,” he says, and he must push his laptop around, because she gets a sweeping look at most of his loft, “this is Sirius.” The man in question freezes with a cup of tea pressed to his lips, and flips her off.

(He might be flipping James off).

She says, “I’m hanging up,” and that’s that.

It takes him 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds to cave and call her back. “Heating still broken?” he asks.

“Yes. London is going to kill me.”

“London can try,” he laughs. “I’ll get someone to come round and have a look at it. Oi Siri,” he calls, looking over the top of the camera, “d’you think I can get your brother to go round ours for free?”

“No,” Sirius shouts back. “He’ll nick whatever booze is in the house.”

James rolls his eyes, and then he’s tapping away at his phone, and without looking up, “There’s a fur coat in the top of the guest bed cupboard, if you’re that cold.”

“I am,” she says, and goes and gets it.

“Regulus says fuck off, which I think means he’s coming over this evening,” he tells her when she plonks back into the desk chair. “I told him you’re going to freeze to death and he just sent back a knife emoji.”

“Aw,” she says, “he does care,” and they both laugh at that. “What have you been up to?”

“You know, this and that – being young and beautiful in a major world city. You know how it is.” He starts listing off on his fingers. “We finally went to that museum and took Gossip Girl pictures on Thursday, which Sirius pretends wasn’t his idea but definitely was. What else? He almost lost it in a Starbucks, again.”

“Still hasn’t found a good order, then?”

“I don’t get it! It’s not like we don’t have Starbucks at home!”

“What’s there to get? It’s an opportunity to be dramatic, Sirius is going to jump right on it.”

“It feels so nice to be known!” shouts Sirius, and Lily wishes desperately she was there with them right then.

“Shut up,” James sings. “Wait – fuck, oh my god, he’s just lit the sink on fire, I’ll call you back – Sirius!”

The screen goes black, and Lily taps her fingernails on the keyboard. He’s not going to call her back, they both know that. A millisecond, and the loneliness settles in.  

Regulus shows up at 11pm which shouldn’t surprise Lily from what she knows about him, but does anyway. He actually has like, a tool belt, slung low, low on his hips, and a leather jacket, just in case she couldn’t figure out he was related to Sirius by his face.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says, “Batman.”

“Ha.”

“Do you know where the heater is?”

“Yep.”

“Alright then.” She steps aside for him to enter, and goes back to the kitchen. “Do you want a tea?” she calls.

“Yep,” he says again, and she puts on the kettle. She pours the water, checks in on Regulus, and then she puts The King and I back on.

“Hey, so that’s totally fucked,” Regulus says, “and I have no idea how to fix it but I can probably get a guy in mayb— areyouwatchingTheKingandI?”

“Seems that way.”

Regulus vaults the couch to land beside her, and puts his feet up on the coffee table. “Love this film.”

It takes eleven minutes and forty-one seconds for realisation to hit her. She points at the screen. “Yul Brynner.” Points at him. “Reg-yul-us.” The screen. “Yul.” Him. “Yul.”

“Hmm,” he says.

When they swap phone numbers so he can consult her about a real handyman, she saves his contact info as Yul with a knife emoji, and he gives her what must just about count as a smile, for Regulus Black.

He says, “I’ll text you,” and, with half a bottle of tequila that Lily was unaware was even in the flat tucked under his arm, he leaves.

December

“Lil,” Dorcas says, poking her head out from the back room, “phone’s for you.” Lily hadn’t heard it ring, but she carefully folds the ribbon she’d been measuring, and puts it in her apron pocket.

She takes the phone, and she says, “U-huh?” as she puts the receiver up to her ear.

“Finally,” says Petunia, and it sets Lily on edge in less than a heartbeat. “Do you even have your phone on? I’ve been trying to reach you for twenty-five minutes.”

“I don’t know how to put this politely, Petunia, but obviously I’m at work.”

“I know, I had to get the number off Mum. This has been hugely inconvenient for me, you know.”

“What do you want?” Lily asks, trying to suppress her exasperation, and judging by what her sister says next, failing.

“Because you’re being so rude I’m not even going to try to break this gently: you can’t come home for Christmas.”

The world slants and the floor is slipping out from underneath Lily as she manages to say, “What?”

“I booked a table for six at the Pennyworth months ago, because Vernon’s sister was going to be abroad, but she’s not now, and it would be rude to tell her she can’t come after all. I phoned the Pennyworth to see if we could get an extra chair but the place is fully booked out for Christmas dinner and they can’t make any exceptions.”

Lily thinks, as she braces herself against the filing cabinet next to the door, that they probably could make an exception, and Petunia just doesn’t want her strange sister to ruin her perfect Christmas dinner with her future in-laws, but she doesn’t say it.

“And besides, we need your bed because Vernon’s parents are staying at our flat, and they’re very old-fashioned, you see, so we can’t let them know we’re sleeping in the same bed before we get married, so Vernon’s taking the sofa at the flat and I’ll be sleeping in my bed at home. Marjorie will have to sleep in your bed, because it’s the only one left. So there won’t be any room for you.”

Lily doesn’t say that she could sleep in their mother’s bed, doesn’t say that she doesn’t want to go to the Pennyworth anyway, doesn’t say that the Potters would most likely take her in for dinner even without James there, and that the food would be a thousand times better, the company a million times better. She says, “What does Mum think of that?” instead of, “What have you told Mum?” and Petunia pauses in her rambling.

“Of course, she thinks that this is all your idea. You’re so busy with work in London, and you know how important it is for us to welcome all of the Dursleys into the family.”

Lily doesn’t say that that’s complete bullshit, doesn’t say that if Petunia hadn’t been slowly poisoning their mother’s mind since Lily moved away, she’d never have believed it.

There seems to be a lot that Lily isn’t saying, and maybe Petunia senses this, because she says, “Don’t forget to phone in the morning, though,” before she hangs up.

Lily listens to the dial tone, an aural marker of time stretching out from this terrible moment, an anchor to keep her from floating away. She barely realises she’s crying until a sob manages to slip free, and then she’s on the floor with her knees pulled up to her chest and a pair of customers staring at her from the wrong side of the counter. Dorcas shuts the door to the back room, has to save face for the business.

It takes the better part of four minutes for Cas to prise the full story out of Lily, after she’s cleared the shop, and put on two teas. Lily’s still shaking, a little, when Cas starts rubbing her back, and she almost sloshes her tea everywhere. If Sirius were here, he might have offered her a cigarette. If Sirius were here, she might have accepted it.

“Your sister’s a right piece of work,” Cas grumbles.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hey,” Dorcas says quietly, looking towards the sound of the bell over the door tinkling, “Take your break early, I’ll be okay alone here for a while.”

When she’s gone, and the door is shut behind her, Lily digs her mobile out of her bag. Her fingers move without needing to be told what to do, and James answers with a groggy, “Hello?”

“Oh my god,” she says. “Oh, no, I didn’t even think about the time difference, I didn’t even – oh, this is so silly. I’m sorry, this was dumb, go back to sleep, I’ll—”

“Evans,” he says, warm and firm. “Calm down, I’m not angry. I’ve been woken up at five in the morning before.” She hears a window open on the other end of the line, and the sound of trainers on metal, then he says, “What’s up?”

He says it so casually, like he wouldn’t mind if she was just calling to tell him she saw a cat he might have liked. Like he wouldn’t mind being woken up before the sun even if it wasn’t urgent. “Petunia just called,” she says quietly.

“Christ,” he says. “Are you alright?”

“I’m officially uninvited from Christmas.”

She can almost hear him grinding his teeth. “Right, I’m getting my laptop, and I’m going to book you flights out here to be with us—”

“No,” she says, though she doesn’t know where the firmness comes from. “No, I’m alright here.” She doesn’t have a passport. She doesn’t have the moral ability to take a handout like that. “I just…” needed to hear your voice. She doesn’t say that, and maybe she doesn’t need to. “What are you doing today?”

“Uhh,” he says. “Hmm, I don’t know. I think Siri’s got an interview for something, but I’ll probably just go in and have a four-hour bath to warm up.”

“Go in?” Lily asks. “James, you’re not outside?”

“Does the fire escape count as outside?”

“Isn’t it supposed to be snowing there?”

“It’s actually not that bad out. I think it’s going to rain, because rain is so weird here, like it gets warmer when it rains. So it’s…” He yawns. “I don’t know, I just know that the stairwell smells like vomit and it’s way too early for Siri to be woken up. Evans, it’s fine. I’d stand out in the Antarctic without a jumper if you needed me to.”

“Under what circumstances would I ever require that?” she asks.

“Oh,” he says breezily, “I wouldn’t know. I’d just be following orders.”

January

She breaches James’ en suite for the first time when she’s gone through all the towels in the linen closet, and the laundrette down the road is closed for repairs. She knows he’s got to have towels in there, and she knows he won’t mind, really, but it still feels like she’s finally taking it too far.

“This is so stupid,” she tells herself. “You sleep in his bed every other night.”

It still smells like him in here, the exact combination of his shampoo and the bar soap his mum’s always gotten from the Indian grocery store down the hill from his house. The rest of the flat has mostly lost that smell. She blinks back tears she knows she doesn’t really have any right to shed.

She takes a towel and presses her face into it, and then she does what any reasonable person would do – she gets distracted by what he has laid out on the counter. Most notably a framed professional portrait of their old head of form.

She gave up several months ago on not talking to herself in this flat, so she breathes, “Why do you have this in your bathroom?” She feels like she’s meant to pray to it, or something, which, well. She can think of worse idols to worship than Minerva McGonagall.

There’s also a family of those tiny ceramic cats that Lily is pretty sure are worth a lot of money, and a folded up serviette with COSTA RICA written in sharpie and underlined eight or nine times. And a tube of toothpaste, which seems normal except—

Its expiry date is like, a questionable amount of time past, so after she googles how long is toothpaste good for and finds out that three years is too long, actually, she has a really supremely stupid thought. That’s how she finds herself with her foot braced up against the shower wall, with funny-smelling white goo lathered on her leg and a Kinks song playing through the entertainment system. She knows it’s toothpaste in theory, but in practice her brain just can’t connect the dots.

She holds one of her shitty disposable razors that she’s definitely been using for longer than she should have, and she gives it a go.

As she holds toilet paper to the parts of her leg that are bleeding, she considers that perhaps this does not rate in her Top Ten Best Ideas Ever.

The weekend before Lily’s birthday sees an eclectic mix of people to the Camden flat – first Regulus, two hours early to help her take down the shitty Christmas decorations she still has up, then Dorcas and Benji, who are put to work on the currently-empty drinks table to make ‘KEEP OUT’ signs for the bedrooms. Well, Cas writes KEEP OUT and Benji draws stick figure bouncers with barrel bodies and bouncer-names like Hugh and Geoff and Mars.

At half past eight, they’re playing Cards Against Humanity when the door – the locked door – swings open. Lily’s heart leaps and she half rises from her spot on the couch, because could they be? But it’s Remus and Peter, carrying a slab each, and Frank Longbottom in front with a set of keys in his hand.

“Compliments of the landlord,” Remus tells her, giving her a quick peck on the cheek before struggling over to the kitchen to free his hands. Peter does the same, and Frank, hands-free already, picks her up and spins her round a couple times in greeting.

“I didn’t know you were coming!” she grins, as Remus and Peter re-join them.

“And miss your birthday?”

Peter scoffs. “Not on Prongs’ watch.”

“I hope you didn’t tell too many people they could stay over,” Remus says, “because I’ve had a standing dibs of Sirius’ bed since he passed out on mine in sixth form and I had to sleep on the floor of my own bedroom.”

“Which time?” Pete asks.

“Exactly.”

Lily laughs, of course of course, and it catches Dorcas’ attention, so she waves her over. “This is Remus, Peter, and Frank, who I went to school with. Lads, this is Dorcas, she’s an angel.”

Later, she overhears Peter telling Dorcas something stupid like, “…loves of each others’ lives but they won’t admit it”, but she’s intercepted from going to refute that claim by Frank with fucking jägerbombs even though he knows she and Sirius got blind on them at their Leavers afterparty and she can’t stand the smell now.

“Frank, darling,” she says, trying not to breathe in, “have you met Alice? She probably won’t throw up on you if you put that thing too close to her.” She grabs Alice’s shoulder and uses her like a human shield, burying her face into shoulder length blonde hair. “Alice, this is Frank. His favourite song is Come On Eileen.”

“Fuck off, Evans,” he says cheerfully, and Alice laughs.

“Give me another explanation for why you play it at every single event, then,” says Lily.

“Because it fucking bangs,” Frank says, handing the cup of Red Bull and the shot of Jäger to Alice. Lily uses the distraction as an opportunity to slip away, and she finds herself on the settee next to Mary, getting her head massaged.

“I have a question,” Mary hiccoughs. “Well, I have a few. First,” and she digs her fingers into Lily’s scalp a bit too hard, “why have I not heard a single song recorded anytime in the last fifty years?”

“I dunno how to change the music,” Lily shrugs.

“Second, how the fuck do you afford to live here alone?” She asks it a little louder than Lily might have liked, and she shrinks away from the fingers in her hair.

“Hmm. That.”

“She’s fucking the landlord!” Frank calls from across the room. Entirely too loud. Lily cringes away from the sudden shift in focus around the room.

“I’m gonna get a drink,” she says, and crosses to the kitchen to what is, statistically, a Kinks song. Remus is there, mixing Cherry Coke and vodka, even though she knows he likes neither. “Does James know other bands exist?” she asks, and he laughs, and it’s almost enough to distract from the music changing.

Her body reacts to it before her mind recognises it, and she makes eye contact with him as the blood drains from his face. “I’m sorry!” she shouts, as they make a sprint for the control panel. “I don’t know how to change the songs on this thing.”

He looks up, frustrated, but he says, “It’s not your fault, the thing broke after he put this on and they never figured out how to fix it.”

“But it works fine,” Lily says, peering at the little screen.

“What happened was James prioritised and uploaded all his awful 60s music, and then while he was choosing the other stuff he wanted on, Sirius snuck in and put on Gasolina and something went wrong and the file copied 27 times and now they can’t put anything new on or take anything off.”

“And here I thought Potter had just given up on modern music completely.”

“Oh,” says Remus, shutting the control flap, resigned, “I wouldn’t take that level of pretentiousness off the table.”

[01:21] lames otter to billy kevins: did u like the presents

billy kevins: i dont even drink somersbys

lames otter: I TOLD PETER NOT TO GET FUCKING SOMERSBYS

lames otter: wht abt the actual present

billy kevins: what actual present?

lames otter: i knew putting peter in charge was a bad idea

billy kevins: smh

Lily looks across the room to Peter, who’s just pulling out his phone and frowning at the screen. He looks up and searches for her, and gives her a sheepish smile. He holds up a finger like wait and goes into the kitchen, and she shares a look with Remus.

Peter emerges with a velvet box and Lily thinks for a hot minute that 1) James is proposing, 2) he’s proposing via Peter, 3) he’s proposing but then she realises that any jewellery might come in a velvet box.

billy kevins to lames otter: tell me you did not buy me jewellery

lames otter: open it u fool

She takes the box from Peter and opens it slowly, because this is sure to be something stupidly expensive, knowing James, but—

“Oh my god,” she laughs. It’s a plastic Spider-Man kids’ watch, like the one she and Tuney used to share back in primary school, before Tuney gave it to the boy she liked and he gave her a broken heart in return. She puts it on her wrist and thinks about how much she resents her sister, and about how that’s outweighing her James Potter resent for now.

billy kevins sent a photo to lames otter.

lames otter: :~)

lames otter: ok im going to dinner w siris art class friends

lames otter: speaking of, he says his gift shld b arriving in the post this week

lames otter: ok byeee call u wednesday xoxo

February

Never having to be the one who does the vacuuming, Lily discovers one afternoon when her white socks come away from the wooden floor covered in hair and dust, is a luxury of living at home. Oh my god, she thinks to herself, you’ve been here almost a year and you never thought to hoover.

So that’s what she does, after searching through every single cupboard in the flat. She finds this really ancient hoover that looks to be older than her—

(Why, she asks herself, indulging her petulance for just a moment, do these stupid boys have to do everything for the aesthetic? Why can’t they have clean, modern appliances that work?)

—and she sets to work.

Well, she blasts James’ awful 60s playlist and sets to work.

She tackles the guest bedroom carpet first, over the course of (shocker) a Kinks song and a half. A year, a year she’s lived in this flat and it’s still the guest bedroom, not her bedroom. Even James still calls it that, when she can get him on the phone, when he isn’t ducking her calls, when she isn’t ducking his.

(“Hey, quick question,” Sirius had said, last time he’d been in the room while James was on Skype with her, “why the fuck do the two of you still not know how to talk to each other?”

James had thrown a cushion at him, and accidentally pressed end call. She chooses to believe it was an accident.)

She does his room over a Beatles track that she doesn’t quite like, but which definitely reminds her of him. “Hey quick question,” she says, out loud to the empty room, “why the fuck am I so pathetic about James Potter?”

It’s because you don’t talk, the Sirius-tinged voice in her head snarks.

“That’s enough,” she tells him – not him.

She does a shit job of vacuuming his room out of spite.

Maybe it’s not just him in her head that’s riling her up. Maybe it’s him on the wall above the fridge, tick, tick, ticking. Maybe she leaves the hoover running even while she’s moving furniture to drown out that fucking clock. Maybe she climbs up onto the bench and tries to accidentally knock it down while reaching for the cobwebs on the ceiling.

“Hm,” she says to herself, from her new home on the floor with a sore tailbone and an even sorer wrist. She has to drag herself, one handed, to the table to retrieve her phone.

Regulus picks up on the eighth ring. Of the third call. “What?”

“I need you to take me to A&E.”

“What? Catch the tube. What did you do?”

“I fell off the bench and I think I broke my arm.”

“Evans. I don’t have a car.”

“So nick one,” she says. “Or were you making it up when you told me last month that you feel a spiritual connection with Baby from Baby Driver?”

“Fucking fine,” he says, except he hangs up halfway through so it’s more like fucking fi—.

“It’s not broken,” the nurse tells them, like six hours later.

(For all his complaining that she was being a real nuisance, Regulus had stuck around in the emergency room for an awfully long time.)

“Okay,” Lily says slowly. “Then why’s it hurt so much?”

Regulus stifles a snicker, but the nurse just gives her a look like grow up. “You’ve sprained it. We’ll get you fitted with a splint and you’ll be free to go home and rest.” She gives them another look, this time like don’t get up to anything too strenuous, which Regulus finds even funnier.

When he takes her home, she decides she can, in fact, keep living like this, and makes him put the hoover away.

“Don’t call me,” he says cheerfully on his way out, and then she’s alone.

She goes to bed, because what else is she going to do? She’s tired. She goes to James’ bed, and god, she misses him.

She stays in bed for a few days, except for when she makes herself toast and tea, and she calls in sick to work. She calls her mum, and then she calls Remus, because those seem like the two most sensible options. The most adult options, even though her mum’s still angry with her for not coming home for Christmas, even though Remus hasn’t texted her back in a week.

“James is going to want to know about this,” he tells her, then, “oh my god shut up, Pete, we’re not going to be late! I’m talking to Lily, can you be quiet?”

Muffled, she hears Peter say, “Tell her hello from me. Am I making this turn?”

“No, the next one.” He sighs. “Sending him a Snapchat doesn’t count as telling him, either. Call him. And you didn’t hear it from me, but Black’s just about reached the end of his tether with America and I’m sure a few well-timed words from you would hold quite a bit of sway.”

“You want me to convince them to come home? Hang on, wasn’t it Black’s idea to move there in the first place?”

“There’s rarely reason or rhyme involved when it comes to Sirius Black. Listen, we’ve just pulled up at this dinner, I’ve got to go. Love you, call James.”

Anxiety heaves in her stomach, and she’s tired again, bone-tired. A nap, two naps later, and then, well.

Call him.

Sun is streaming through the window next to him, and he’s wearing a t-shirt which is like, annoying, because she hasn’t seen the sun in five or six days, and the flat is still bitingly cold.

“Sirius is being annoying,” his voice announces, three seconds before his mouth does.

“Well, you know,” she says, “I can treat you better.”

“Don’t you fuckin—”

“Better than he can.”

“Oh my god, you’re such a fucking meme. I like you why, exactly?”

She grins. “How’s LA?”

He grins back. “All so crazy, everybody seems so famous.”

“Oh, and I’m the meme?”

His grin relaxes. “What’ve you gone and done to your arm?”

She goes bright red. “Hm.”

“Do I have to call Remus to find out? Or do I need to come back to make sure you don’t accidentally fall out a window? Do I need to make sure you, like, mind the gap?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Ask me properly?” He whispers it, and her thundering heart almost drowns it out.

Don’t be silly now, she tells herself. This could be worth the risk. “Come home,” she says, quietly. “Please, come home.”

He stares at her, just stares. Maybe the screen has frozen, and then he lets out a heavy sigh.