blue_moony (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} blue_moony) wrote,@ 2004-07-24 15:28:00 |
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FIC! Written for imochan, whose writing never ceases to amaze and enchant me. If you've never read her writing, I urge you to visit her journal now! Short, succinct, and devastating.
Title: Lullaby
Pairing: James/Lily
Warnings: Angst?
Word Count: 4245
It’s morning, and the toilet won’t flush. Outside November lingers a dirty, forgotten child, late and dribbling cold - wet where there should be snow, and white. The patches of mud play false, shifting time capsules to life, and even the trees seem to twist from the air. There’s a sickness on it, a sickness near it, and Lily is sick, so sick, and the toilet won’t flush so she can smell it, the acrid taint, a confession not to be denied and - oh James, James, I hate you, she thinks, desperately, and not today, please, not like this she thinks, too. Outside their footprints haven’t quite faded – supper last night, you know, and dear, dear Lily, we’re going to see your sister next week, won’t you join us? Waving from the driveway in that automobile James so admires, and Lily on the porch with her hand to the banister, just smiling as she sees them off. Crescents of fingernail in the white paint this morning, after the owl flew in with unwanted word.
James will be home soon from the Ministry, where he’s taking care of arrangements already, and he’ll see Lily here, kneeling between tub and radiator, or he’ll smell this, the sickness, and he’ll think he knows why she aches and aches, and she’ll only be able to heave wet breaths against him, shaking in his arms as he says I know, Lily, I know and tries to sooth the hurt with hand and heart. But he won’t know - not today, please, not like this - and so she sets the lid down, folding her arms overtop, burying head against cool porcelain. Her knees are going numb against the ceramic floor tiles, and she starts to cry.
They make love only once in the month to follow, in the aftermath, as if some small part of her is afraid James’s movements will make everything doubly true, a reality felt inside and out, and the effort of concealment wears her ragged. It’s cold and the blankets are out, and Lily’s wrapped up in one of her mother’s quilts – now Lily’s to keep and cherish in the settling of the estate, the meting out of a life in just so many faded pink squares and recipes for cobbler, in the curtains and the linen, the bookshelves and shoeboxes full of romance and dust. It feels deathly cold, and Lily’s certain it’s not the weather, not with the spells, and the fireplace, and, after, James’s chin tucked to her shoulder, but she shivers nonetheless, and her lips are just tinged with blue when she finally falls asleep.
In the morning, Lily’s in the loo again, and James can hear the shower running, and The Door Is Closed, so James thinks he’s hurt her all the more for the night before, and he says nothing, asks for nothing more, and Lily feels terrible for letting him believe he’s to blame but, oh, how a piece of her knows he is. So in the nights to follow she’s curled up tight - fetal - and James doesn’t try to force her from it; he understands this need to find space in limitation, and kisses her shoulder instead, and draws up the sheets about them. He lies beside her, and whispers to the words she can’t quite say yet, a soothing lullaby-hush she puts to the drifting of dark-pink snow outside their window, like music, like maybes, and falls asleep.
And James understands the whole mess as much as a man with two living parents can, as much as a man who in actuality knows nothing of the situation might, and he makes no complaint even in daytime, even in the moments when she won’t or can’t respond. But of course he would never make a complaint, not then, not ever, because he knows his own voice grants him no more than Oh Lily, oh love when she breaks down over the countertop, and gets tears in his tuna salad. He eats the sandwiches anyway, and holds her face in his hands and kisses her forehead because he doesn’t know what else to do.
And at the meetings, in the battles, in the niches they all fall to when counting wounded, organizing dead, readying for more battles to come – ad infinitum, it seems, these days – everyone tells Lily she’s so brave, and tells James she’s so strong. But although he’d never tell, not ever, he looks to Lily as she rests against the crumbling stone wall of a village, of a castle, and tucks wisps of red, red hair behind her ears, and shows those eyes so green, so tired, and James knows, he knows just how much it hurts for her to be so unyielding. He knows how her hands shake in the evenings now, as they sit on the porch and watch the sky prick itself with stars. He knows there’s a trembling in her fingers that he can’t catch in his larger, sturdier hands, can’t exorcise. Sometimes at night he wakes to the quiet and watches her, and takes her hands in his – calmer then, more at peace – just to prove she’s still there.
Three weeks later she thinks of telling him. It’s fireplace-warm, and Kingsley’s over, and they’re all still smudged with dirt and sweat. It’s been a long day, thick with death, but they won back a district, a whole district, and James is laughing and his glasses catch the glint of flame, of smiles. It’s relief, a substance more easily abused than the drinks they rally around. Lily pours them all a shot and they make a toast. Clinkclink, to old friends and good times. Clinkclink, to vengeances wrought for the dead. Clinkclink, to my wife, who saved my life by a hair, again. “What a team,” Kingsley crows. “What a team!”
And James wraps an arm tight about her waist and draws her in for a kiss with the happy ease he’d seldom used in the days prior – an ease he’d hardly had reason for, in the midst of their snowstorm defeats, and the cold, and the numbness spread like a fever about camp. But not spread tonight, no. No, tonight there is only laughter, and hope, and they would lie together as man and wife tonight, she knows, if they weren’t so goddamn tired. So instead she smiles, laying her hand on his jumper, his neck, before snuggling close.
She’ll tell him later.
Later is Yuletide. Later is Christmas Eve and the first feast, and the gang’s all there. The tree’s a little crooked, but that’s only on account of James and Sirius trying to outdo each other with the ornaments. Remus has already scolded them about leaving the poor pine alone, but Peter’s laughing so hard and you know how it is, of course, with an audience so appreciative. The Christmas tree still shakes every now and then, though they’ve since retired to speculating on the brightly wrapped gifts beneath. Needles fall like snow, a heavy sprinkling over each.
Lily’s been cooking the meal, a task she doesn’t mind, a task she finds comfort in – the familiarity, the routine – though when she finds her mother’s apron hanging behind the pantry door she takes a moment to run her hand over the flower-print pattern, until the laughter draws her back to the living, back to friends. She makes her mother’s stuffing, adds the spices her mother favoured, and cooks the pudding just as her mother would have wanted. The table choruses in approval, in grandiose shows of rubbing their stomachs, and a sudden lump rises in her throat, and – “If I might?” she says, and James and Remus elbow Sirius into silence. They sit with forearms bent over the table, eyes turned in admiration and earnest, and she wonders how she’s still breathing as she tells them.
There’s a silence as their faces take time to change, James’s most of all. Then a “Well bloody hell!” seizes the room and they’re all excited smiles as they stand, Sirius thumping James’s back good and proper with a “’bout time, old man!” and Remus laying a hand over hers and smiling as he squeezes encouragement from scarred fingers to smaller ones, and Peter already asking “What month? What month?” and Lily, still not sure about breathing, looking to James, who looks to her in turn and glows. “Lily,” he says, softly, and Sirius lets him out of the headlock long enough for him to find her face, her belly in his hands and kiss her like it’s already Christmas morning and it’s everything he ever asked for. And Lily’s heart flutters as he seizes her other hand in his and turns back to the group and crows triumph: “I’m gonna be a dad!”
And, oh, she thinks, as Remus insists he and Sirius and Peter can handle dishes, and as James draws her into the sitting room, babbling excitedly about how it all makes sense now, as James turns abruptly and draws her up against him, protectively close under the sighing mistletoe and asks why didn’t she tell him sooner, before kissing her soundly, sweetly – oh, she thinks, her eyes shuttering closed, maybe I should have after all.
Then it’s evening, and hot toddies all around. Lily says she needs to strip the turkey and Sirius asks if that’s a euphemism for something James should be worried about. Lily just smiles and turns to leave and Remus follows. “I’ll help,” he says, and Lily realizes if it were anyone else she might not be able to handle it, another presence in her meditative space, but it’s Remus, good, steady Remus, and so she nods and starts for the left-over husk of turkey. Her hands still feel like they should be shaking, and there’s something still not quite right about the way her insides are fluttering, the way the lump in her throat hasn’t quite been dispelled. “All right there?” Remus asks, like breathing, and Lily laughs, a stilted thing, and shakes her head.
“Scared?” Remus asks then, glancing at her with such kindly eyes as he wrests flesh from gutted fowl. “It’s okay to be.”
And Lily can’t look at him directly, so she watches his hands, so efficient about the bird, so hard here when she knows they can be mild, too, almost painfully mild despite the scars, or perhaps because of them. She thinks of the way he must break out of himself, of the tearing and the wounds when he turns each month, though she’s never seen it herself. Unknowingly she touches a hand to her stomach and wonders how she’s ever going to manage this, and then she moves to help him, because words have failed, thoughts have failed, and yes, of course she’s scared, so they strip the remains of bird-flesh in silence.
Sirius leaps up from the sofa the moment they return, their hands lemon-scrubbed-pure from the brutality of their task, the slippery feel of desecration. “Guess what?” he says, thumping his chest so excitedly that James laughs. “James says I can be godfather!”
And Lily looks to James, and James shrugs, though his eyes are still in askance, and Lily’s a bit at a loss, to be taken so quickly by all these decisions, decisions, but she smiles, and nods. “Sounds wonderful,” she says, and tries not to wish it were Remus instead.
“Any idea about names?” Peter pipes up, and Lily only feels all the dizzier, and a little angry, that they should think it easy to quantify this thing, this thing inside her as a series of tasks, of procedures – name this, entitle that. It’s nothing like that, nothing at all; it’s a rhythm, a flow she’s still trying to immerse herself in, a language she hasn’t yet learned, and damn the names, and damn the words, and oh, damn it, damn it all.
“Harry,” James says, so quietly as he watches her, watches the flush on her face, the exhaustion in her eyes, and Lily blinks, as if expecting her father to be there all of a sudden, right behind her. “If it’s a boy. Martha if it’s a girl. For your parents?”
And Lily looks to him, the lump rising again in her throat, and she wants to say no, because that would make them really dead, now wouldn’t it? And she’s not quite ready for that, for letting go and letting life beat out its cycles anew, but she doesn’t say that, because James is watching her so tenderly, so lovingly, and to him it’s the best he can do, the best he can offer, so she manages a smile and sits beside him, and he kisses her cheek as she says “Yes, that’ll do. That’ll do nicely.” And Sirius makes yet another toast, and Peter passes out early, a snuffling lump in the armchair, and when Lily falls asleep against James Remus suggests that maybe it’s time for bed.
Christmas morning is the anticlimax, and gifts are all unwrapped with knowing smiles, the realization that no book or scarf or travel-kit can compare to the notion of a new life, a new hope. James and Lily sprawl on the sofa, one’s stronger arms wrapped loose comfort about the other, and Peter fetches their presents from under the tree, which tenses on every approach, still scared witless by last night’s assaults. Peter looks a bit the messenger rat, dogging back and forth, but no one says this, of course, until the presents are all finished with, and then it’s all right if he flushes, just a little, with embarrassment.
Meanwhile Lily’s still a little pale from her morning toilet, the most recent upheaval of her stomach, her fears, and even Sirius runs favours for her – gingerbread and eggnog and preheating the oven – and Remus leaves chocolate always within reach – “like the Easter bunny out of season,” James jokes – and maybe, she thinks, her head against James’s chest, his hands in her hair as she falls drowsy, maybe I can get used to this. Sirius stands by the window late in the afternoon, with his eyes to the snow and his hands to his hips, and sings under his breath, in Gaelic, thinking no one will hear, but she does.
Then supper comes about, and the sun goes down and suddenly when she looks out the windows, into the dark, she’s seized with fear again, with the knowledge that their holiday is an illusion, a denial, and that they were lucky even to have this, these scant two days without fighting and bloodshed. She washes the dishes by hand, alone, because she needs the solitude now more than ever, and even Remus doesn’t press. In the sitting room, the boys are still talking in low, warm tones, but even their light-hearted banter must now fall steadily to serious matters, as the frost beckons, and night thickens, and a tawny grey owl arrives with orders from the front.
Lily remembers to breathe before returning to the sitting room, where the tree sits a cowering presence in the corner, and the floor is still littered with wrapping paper, and the fire seems to be going out. There’s a fearful heaviness in her chest, in her gut, as she approaches, and they look up before looking away, all of them, uneasily. They have the maps and orders splayed out across a coffee table and are bent to task dividing the workload between them.
“Sirius, we need a scout targeting the south wall.”
“On it.”
“Remus, will you—“
“Of course. Just like in September.”
“Right. And, Peter, how’s about you doing the house search? They’ll never suspect a rat. And the Ministry need never know, eh?”
Lily approaches the table, noting the flash of fear in Peter’s eyes even as he nods, and the way Remus turns to Sirius, promising that they’ll still be able to meet in Sussex, after, and she crouches before the maps, scanning the orders because she can’t bring herself to look at James. Her hands are shaking as she lays them on the edge of the table. “And…. where’re we?”
Silence. A stomach-tremor of felled hope. The papers under her fingers crease and then wrinkle under the pressure, the clenching. The pine tree shakes, casting still more needles to the floor. Pins dropping, pins dropping…
And then it’s “Lily…” against the guilty quiet, and James is entreating, pleading. She looks to him and her eyes flash with rage.
“No,” she says, and everyone else looks fixedly away. “No, James, don’t you dare.”
“It’s safer this way,” Sirius tries to explain, in James’s helpless rooting of words, before Remus can elbow them both, before Remus can intervene and make all these words right, all these actions easy, and Lily’s hard glare arcs across all of them as she rises, and turns, and leaves.
Minutes later and there’s thumping on the stairs from James chasing after, but Lily’s got a head-start and she reaches the bedroom first, finds the knob, and slams the door so hard in James’s face that it ricochets slightly out of its frame, partly ajar, but James still stops abruptly on the other side, hands raised, because The Door Is Closed, even if it’s not, and Lily’s just on the other side, inches from the wood when he hears her start to shudder, and heave, and cry. She leans back against the door, slumped in on herself in her tears, and the latch slips in with a soft click, and then James, his eyes shut, his heart aching to hear her crying, so close, so out of reach, lays his hand on his side of the wood, and rests his forehead to it, too. “Oh, Lily,” he whispers. “Lily, please understand.”
“No no no,” she chokes out. “I can’t. James, don’t you dare. It’s not fair, James. It’s not fair. I can still fight. I have to fight. I have to make them pay.”
James sighs, so heavily, and he curls his hand into a fist against the wood. “I’ll avenge them for you, Lily. You know I will.”
But the crying doesn’t lessen, and James presses his ear to the door to listen closer, and on the other side Lily’s cheek is pressed to wood in turn. “I can’t let you fight alone,” she says. “You know I can’t.”
“How can I fight at all knowing I could lose both of you any second?”
“But why…” Her voice is raw, aching; James can hear it. He knows her too well not to hear how hard it is for her to continue now, to speak the words that have no doubt been caught in her throat for a month now, a full month, in the weight of her secret. “…why,” she manages, hoarse though her speech is, “…why does this have to happen now?”
James opens his eyes against the dreaded words, and on the other side Lily slides down the doorframe, and he follows to his knees, palm flat against the wood. “You’d want to… to abor—“
“No! No…” Lily makes that shuddering sound again, the one James can feel like a tight knot deep in his stomach again, and he rests his head to the wood once more, and bites his lip. “But, oh James,” she whispers. “James, this is no world to give to a child.”
“Can I come in now?” he asks, so gently, so quietly. And she doesn’t reply, of course; not with words, but he can hear her skin slide along the heavy wood flooring, the shuffling sounds as she draws herself somehow to her feet. He can feel the pressure off the other side of the door and he glances up, and stands too, and enters. Lily is sitting on the bed with her arms drawn up across her chest, hands to her face, and she’s shaking, she’s still shaking.
“Lily,” he tries. “Lily, love…” But he needs more than that here; he knows that now. “Lily,” he says, “This is when we need children the most. I know it hurts, I know you’re scared, but we can give him love, Lily. Love, and a future. We can give the promise that we’ll do everything to give him the world. We’ll have something to fight for, you see? Something besides our own futures, since we already promised we’d give those away in a heartbeat if we had to. But for something more, Lily. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Building a better world for the next? For him?”
He closes the door slowly behind him and waits. Lily lets her hands fall from her face after a moment, and folds fingers in her lap, and watches the window, the curtains, the faintly billowing flush of winter Yuletide night beyond.
“Or her,” she says at last, her voice barely audible as she turns the pale smooth slope of her face to him, managing a faltering smile.
“Or her,” James agrees, and then it’s quiet again, and he can’t even hear Lily breathing, and downstairs Sirius and Remus and Peter are heading home, with cards and chocolate laid out like offerings on the coffee table, and the mess of wrappings cleaned up and the poor pine tree finally put out of its misery, and a hundred and one other things done that James doesn’t know about, can’t know about, doesn’t want to know about, because right now all he cares about is her, and the future, and them.
He draws her out under the blankets, her mother’s quilts, inch by inch. She shuts her eyes and tucks her face to the spread of his shoulder as he lays lullabies and kisses along her skin, baring her with such gentleness, such protectiveness that her hands are left soft and trembling on the hard Quidditch contours of his chest, his back. “What’s going to protect you,” she whispers, “if we can’t protect each other anymore?”
And he stretches himself flush against her, and tangles ankle to ankle, and braces himself on his elbows so he can smile down upon her, his fingers sifting through her rich red hair. “Your love, Lily. Your love will always, always bring me home, safe and sound.”
She cries then, and he can feel the ache in her breast against his ribs, in the trembling of her vocal cords in the space between them – can taste the fear in the tears he draws ready as kisses from her wet, dark lashes.
“Don’t you dare leave us,” she pleads, and they lay so tight, each so warm and natural in the hollows of the other, that when they finally fall joined there is a long moment of wonder, of questioning -- this heat this heat where is this heat coming from -- before they realize, and sigh their relief heavy and desperate between mouths and hands and bodies. He barely moves and she cannot stir save to shudder, to ache, and so they just hold each other steady against the night, against these changes, these oh-so-human fears. “I can’t live without you.”
“I would rather,” he whispers in turn, breathing at her ear, his hand at her neck, her breast, her belly in soothing strokes, in worship. “That my family survived me than I should live to see you all gone.”
And she cries further then, into crisis, into shuddering half-ragged sobbing, which he continues to catch in his mouth, his hands, his humming, hushing incoherencies. “You coward,” she cries, faintly now. “You coward.”
She’s right, he realizes, as she falls to fitful slumber for an hour or maybe two, as he waits and watches, only to wake in the fever-heat of pre-dawn coitus with her eyes so full of love and fear he can only hold her all the tighter, consoling himself that this, his cowardice, to tell her to live without him when he cannot, cannot do without her, is a common theme, a universal weakness in his breed, his gender. Oh noble Gryffindor he thinks, and lays his head to the soft curve of her stomach in the rays of purple-pink dawn. His strong arms wrap about her waist, his legs about her own, secure in the tangle now of blanket and quilt and sweat, the glisten of skin wed to skin, and he asks for her forgiveness in this, a soft and final request before he must withdraw, must dress and go and make sure he does not fail her, not ever again.
And since she’s out of tears now, at last, her fears flooded free in the night’s catharsis, in the warmth and love and loyalty of her James, sweet James, oh noble Gryffindor she raises a hand to his face, to the morning stubble and all the signs that they are really here, are grown and committed and ready, so ready, for these tasks to come for both, and she forgives him in a smile, and in the softness of her green eyes he smiles back, and they make love, long love, until there can be no denying the day.
“Time for me to leave,” he whispers at the last, and she says nothing, her eyes almost glassy, holding him all the tighter to her.
“See you at supper,” he adds, with a smile, and a kiss, and only then does she find strength enough to let him go.
imochan, whose writing never ceases to amaze and enchant me. If you've never read her writing, I urge you to visit her journal now! Short, succinct, and devastating.Title: Lullaby
Pairing: James/Lily
Warnings: Angst?
Word Count: 4245
It’s morning, and the toilet won’t flush. Outside November lingers a dirty, forgotten child, late and dribbling cold - wet where there should be snow, and white. The patches of mud play false, shifting time capsules to life, and even the trees seem to twist from the air. There’s a sickness on it, a sickness near it, and Lily is sick, so sick, and the toilet won’t flush so she can smell it, the acrid taint, a confession not to be denied and - oh James, James, I hate you, she thinks, desperately, and not today, please, not like this she thinks, too. Outside their footprints haven’t quite faded – supper last night, you know, and dear, dear Lily, we’re going to see your sister next week, won’t you join us? Waving from the driveway in that automobile James so admires, and Lily on the porch with her hand to the banister, just smiling as she sees them off. Crescents of fingernail in the white paint this morning, after the owl flew in with unwanted word.
James will be home soon from the Ministry, where he’s taking care of arrangements already, and he’ll see Lily here, kneeling between tub and radiator, or he’ll smell this, the sickness, and he’ll think he knows why she aches and aches, and she’ll only be able to heave wet breaths against him, shaking in his arms as he says I know, Lily, I know and tries to sooth the hurt with hand and heart. But he won’t know - not today, please, not like this - and so she sets the lid down, folding her arms overtop, burying head against cool porcelain. Her knees are going numb against the ceramic floor tiles, and she starts to cry.
They make love only once in the month to follow, in the aftermath, as if some small part of her is afraid James’s movements will make everything doubly true, a reality felt inside and out, and the effort of concealment wears her ragged. It’s cold and the blankets are out, and Lily’s wrapped up in one of her mother’s quilts – now Lily’s to keep and cherish in the settling of the estate, the meting out of a life in just so many faded pink squares and recipes for cobbler, in the curtains and the linen, the bookshelves and shoeboxes full of romance and dust. It feels deathly cold, and Lily’s certain it’s not the weather, not with the spells, and the fireplace, and, after, James’s chin tucked to her shoulder, but she shivers nonetheless, and her lips are just tinged with blue when she finally falls asleep.
In the morning, Lily’s in the loo again, and James can hear the shower running, and The Door Is Closed, so James thinks he’s hurt her all the more for the night before, and he says nothing, asks for nothing more, and Lily feels terrible for letting him believe he’s to blame but, oh, how a piece of her knows he is. So in the nights to follow she’s curled up tight - fetal - and James doesn’t try to force her from it; he understands this need to find space in limitation, and kisses her shoulder instead, and draws up the sheets about them. He lies beside her, and whispers to the words she can’t quite say yet, a soothing lullaby-hush she puts to the drifting of dark-pink snow outside their window, like music, like maybes, and falls asleep.
And James understands the whole mess as much as a man with two living parents can, as much as a man who in actuality knows nothing of the situation might, and he makes no complaint even in daytime, even in the moments when she won’t or can’t respond. But of course he would never make a complaint, not then, not ever, because he knows his own voice grants him no more than Oh Lily, oh love when she breaks down over the countertop, and gets tears in his tuna salad. He eats the sandwiches anyway, and holds her face in his hands and kisses her forehead because he doesn’t know what else to do.
And at the meetings, in the battles, in the niches they all fall to when counting wounded, organizing dead, readying for more battles to come – ad infinitum, it seems, these days – everyone tells Lily she’s so brave, and tells James she’s so strong. But although he’d never tell, not ever, he looks to Lily as she rests against the crumbling stone wall of a village, of a castle, and tucks wisps of red, red hair behind her ears, and shows those eyes so green, so tired, and James knows, he knows just how much it hurts for her to be so unyielding. He knows how her hands shake in the evenings now, as they sit on the porch and watch the sky prick itself with stars. He knows there’s a trembling in her fingers that he can’t catch in his larger, sturdier hands, can’t exorcise. Sometimes at night he wakes to the quiet and watches her, and takes her hands in his – calmer then, more at peace – just to prove she’s still there.
Three weeks later she thinks of telling him. It’s fireplace-warm, and Kingsley’s over, and they’re all still smudged with dirt and sweat. It’s been a long day, thick with death, but they won back a district, a whole district, and James is laughing and his glasses catch the glint of flame, of smiles. It’s relief, a substance more easily abused than the drinks they rally around. Lily pours them all a shot and they make a toast. Clinkclink, to old friends and good times. Clinkclink, to vengeances wrought for the dead. Clinkclink, to my wife, who saved my life by a hair, again. “What a team,” Kingsley crows. “What a team!”
And James wraps an arm tight about her waist and draws her in for a kiss with the happy ease he’d seldom used in the days prior – an ease he’d hardly had reason for, in the midst of their snowstorm defeats, and the cold, and the numbness spread like a fever about camp. But not spread tonight, no. No, tonight there is only laughter, and hope, and they would lie together as man and wife tonight, she knows, if they weren’t so goddamn tired. So instead she smiles, laying her hand on his jumper, his neck, before snuggling close.
She’ll tell him later.
Later is Yuletide. Later is Christmas Eve and the first feast, and the gang’s all there. The tree’s a little crooked, but that’s only on account of James and Sirius trying to outdo each other with the ornaments. Remus has already scolded them about leaving the poor pine alone, but Peter’s laughing so hard and you know how it is, of course, with an audience so appreciative. The Christmas tree still shakes every now and then, though they’ve since retired to speculating on the brightly wrapped gifts beneath. Needles fall like snow, a heavy sprinkling over each.
Lily’s been cooking the meal, a task she doesn’t mind, a task she finds comfort in – the familiarity, the routine – though when she finds her mother’s apron hanging behind the pantry door she takes a moment to run her hand over the flower-print pattern, until the laughter draws her back to the living, back to friends. She makes her mother’s stuffing, adds the spices her mother favoured, and cooks the pudding just as her mother would have wanted. The table choruses in approval, in grandiose shows of rubbing their stomachs, and a sudden lump rises in her throat, and – “If I might?” she says, and James and Remus elbow Sirius into silence. They sit with forearms bent over the table, eyes turned in admiration and earnest, and she wonders how she’s still breathing as she tells them.
There’s a silence as their faces take time to change, James’s most of all. Then a “Well bloody hell!” seizes the room and they’re all excited smiles as they stand, Sirius thumping James’s back good and proper with a “’bout time, old man!” and Remus laying a hand over hers and smiling as he squeezes encouragement from scarred fingers to smaller ones, and Peter already asking “What month? What month?” and Lily, still not sure about breathing, looking to James, who looks to her in turn and glows. “Lily,” he says, softly, and Sirius lets him out of the headlock long enough for him to find her face, her belly in his hands and kiss her like it’s already Christmas morning and it’s everything he ever asked for. And Lily’s heart flutters as he seizes her other hand in his and turns back to the group and crows triumph: “I’m gonna be a dad!”
And, oh, she thinks, as Remus insists he and Sirius and Peter can handle dishes, and as James draws her into the sitting room, babbling excitedly about how it all makes sense now, as James turns abruptly and draws her up against him, protectively close under the sighing mistletoe and asks why didn’t she tell him sooner, before kissing her soundly, sweetly – oh, she thinks, her eyes shuttering closed, maybe I should have after all.
Then it’s evening, and hot toddies all around. Lily says she needs to strip the turkey and Sirius asks if that’s a euphemism for something James should be worried about. Lily just smiles and turns to leave and Remus follows. “I’ll help,” he says, and Lily realizes if it were anyone else she might not be able to handle it, another presence in her meditative space, but it’s Remus, good, steady Remus, and so she nods and starts for the left-over husk of turkey. Her hands still feel like they should be shaking, and there’s something still not quite right about the way her insides are fluttering, the way the lump in her throat hasn’t quite been dispelled. “All right there?” Remus asks, like breathing, and Lily laughs, a stilted thing, and shakes her head.
“Scared?” Remus asks then, glancing at her with such kindly eyes as he wrests flesh from gutted fowl. “It’s okay to be.”
And Lily can’t look at him directly, so she watches his hands, so efficient about the bird, so hard here when she knows they can be mild, too, almost painfully mild despite the scars, or perhaps because of them. She thinks of the way he must break out of himself, of the tearing and the wounds when he turns each month, though she’s never seen it herself. Unknowingly she touches a hand to her stomach and wonders how she’s ever going to manage this, and then she moves to help him, because words have failed, thoughts have failed, and yes, of course she’s scared, so they strip the remains of bird-flesh in silence.
Sirius leaps up from the sofa the moment they return, their hands lemon-scrubbed-pure from the brutality of their task, the slippery feel of desecration. “Guess what?” he says, thumping his chest so excitedly that James laughs. “James says I can be godfather!”
And Lily looks to James, and James shrugs, though his eyes are still in askance, and Lily’s a bit at a loss, to be taken so quickly by all these decisions, decisions, but she smiles, and nods. “Sounds wonderful,” she says, and tries not to wish it were Remus instead.
“Any idea about names?” Peter pipes up, and Lily only feels all the dizzier, and a little angry, that they should think it easy to quantify this thing, this thing inside her as a series of tasks, of procedures – name this, entitle that. It’s nothing like that, nothing at all; it’s a rhythm, a flow she’s still trying to immerse herself in, a language she hasn’t yet learned, and damn the names, and damn the words, and oh, damn it, damn it all.
“Harry,” James says, so quietly as he watches her, watches the flush on her face, the exhaustion in her eyes, and Lily blinks, as if expecting her father to be there all of a sudden, right behind her. “If it’s a boy. Martha if it’s a girl. For your parents?”
And Lily looks to him, the lump rising again in her throat, and she wants to say no, because that would make them really dead, now wouldn’t it? And she’s not quite ready for that, for letting go and letting life beat out its cycles anew, but she doesn’t say that, because James is watching her so tenderly, so lovingly, and to him it’s the best he can do, the best he can offer, so she manages a smile and sits beside him, and he kisses her cheek as she says “Yes, that’ll do. That’ll do nicely.” And Sirius makes yet another toast, and Peter passes out early, a snuffling lump in the armchair, and when Lily falls asleep against James Remus suggests that maybe it’s time for bed.
Christmas morning is the anticlimax, and gifts are all unwrapped with knowing smiles, the realization that no book or scarf or travel-kit can compare to the notion of a new life, a new hope. James and Lily sprawl on the sofa, one’s stronger arms wrapped loose comfort about the other, and Peter fetches their presents from under the tree, which tenses on every approach, still scared witless by last night’s assaults. Peter looks a bit the messenger rat, dogging back and forth, but no one says this, of course, until the presents are all finished with, and then it’s all right if he flushes, just a little, with embarrassment.
Meanwhile Lily’s still a little pale from her morning toilet, the most recent upheaval of her stomach, her fears, and even Sirius runs favours for her – gingerbread and eggnog and preheating the oven – and Remus leaves chocolate always within reach – “like the Easter bunny out of season,” James jokes – and maybe, she thinks, her head against James’s chest, his hands in her hair as she falls drowsy, maybe I can get used to this. Sirius stands by the window late in the afternoon, with his eyes to the snow and his hands to his hips, and sings under his breath, in Gaelic, thinking no one will hear, but she does.
Then supper comes about, and the sun goes down and suddenly when she looks out the windows, into the dark, she’s seized with fear again, with the knowledge that their holiday is an illusion, a denial, and that they were lucky even to have this, these scant two days without fighting and bloodshed. She washes the dishes by hand, alone, because she needs the solitude now more than ever, and even Remus doesn’t press. In the sitting room, the boys are still talking in low, warm tones, but even their light-hearted banter must now fall steadily to serious matters, as the frost beckons, and night thickens, and a tawny grey owl arrives with orders from the front.
Lily remembers to breathe before returning to the sitting room, where the tree sits a cowering presence in the corner, and the floor is still littered with wrapping paper, and the fire seems to be going out. There’s a fearful heaviness in her chest, in her gut, as she approaches, and they look up before looking away, all of them, uneasily. They have the maps and orders splayed out across a coffee table and are bent to task dividing the workload between them.
“Sirius, we need a scout targeting the south wall.”
“On it.”
“Remus, will you—“
“Of course. Just like in September.”
“Right. And, Peter, how’s about you doing the house search? They’ll never suspect a rat. And the Ministry need never know, eh?”
Lily approaches the table, noting the flash of fear in Peter’s eyes even as he nods, and the way Remus turns to Sirius, promising that they’ll still be able to meet in Sussex, after, and she crouches before the maps, scanning the orders because she can’t bring herself to look at James. Her hands are shaking as she lays them on the edge of the table. “And…. where’re we?”
Silence. A stomach-tremor of felled hope. The papers under her fingers crease and then wrinkle under the pressure, the clenching. The pine tree shakes, casting still more needles to the floor. Pins dropping, pins dropping…
And then it’s “Lily…” against the guilty quiet, and James is entreating, pleading. She looks to him and her eyes flash with rage.
“No,” she says, and everyone else looks fixedly away. “No, James, don’t you dare.”
“It’s safer this way,” Sirius tries to explain, in James’s helpless rooting of words, before Remus can elbow them both, before Remus can intervene and make all these words right, all these actions easy, and Lily’s hard glare arcs across all of them as she rises, and turns, and leaves.
Minutes later and there’s thumping on the stairs from James chasing after, but Lily’s got a head-start and she reaches the bedroom first, finds the knob, and slams the door so hard in James’s face that it ricochets slightly out of its frame, partly ajar, but James still stops abruptly on the other side, hands raised, because The Door Is Closed, even if it’s not, and Lily’s just on the other side, inches from the wood when he hears her start to shudder, and heave, and cry. She leans back against the door, slumped in on herself in her tears, and the latch slips in with a soft click, and then James, his eyes shut, his heart aching to hear her crying, so close, so out of reach, lays his hand on his side of the wood, and rests his forehead to it, too. “Oh, Lily,” he whispers. “Lily, please understand.”
“No no no,” she chokes out. “I can’t. James, don’t you dare. It’s not fair, James. It’s not fair. I can still fight. I have to fight. I have to make them pay.”
James sighs, so heavily, and he curls his hand into a fist against the wood. “I’ll avenge them for you, Lily. You know I will.”
But the crying doesn’t lessen, and James presses his ear to the door to listen closer, and on the other side Lily’s cheek is pressed to wood in turn. “I can’t let you fight alone,” she says. “You know I can’t.”
“How can I fight at all knowing I could lose both of you any second?”
“But why…” Her voice is raw, aching; James can hear it. He knows her too well not to hear how hard it is for her to continue now, to speak the words that have no doubt been caught in her throat for a month now, a full month, in the weight of her secret. “…why,” she manages, hoarse though her speech is, “…why does this have to happen now?”
James opens his eyes against the dreaded words, and on the other side Lily slides down the doorframe, and he follows to his knees, palm flat against the wood. “You’d want to… to abor—“
“No! No…” Lily makes that shuddering sound again, the one James can feel like a tight knot deep in his stomach again, and he rests his head to the wood once more, and bites his lip. “But, oh James,” she whispers. “James, this is no world to give to a child.”
“Can I come in now?” he asks, so gently, so quietly. And she doesn’t reply, of course; not with words, but he can hear her skin slide along the heavy wood flooring, the shuffling sounds as she draws herself somehow to her feet. He can feel the pressure off the other side of the door and he glances up, and stands too, and enters. Lily is sitting on the bed with her arms drawn up across her chest, hands to her face, and she’s shaking, she’s still shaking.
“Lily,” he tries. “Lily, love…” But he needs more than that here; he knows that now. “Lily,” he says, “This is when we need children the most. I know it hurts, I know you’re scared, but we can give him love, Lily. Love, and a future. We can give the promise that we’ll do everything to give him the world. We’ll have something to fight for, you see? Something besides our own futures, since we already promised we’d give those away in a heartbeat if we had to. But for something more, Lily. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Building a better world for the next? For him?”
He closes the door slowly behind him and waits. Lily lets her hands fall from her face after a moment, and folds fingers in her lap, and watches the window, the curtains, the faintly billowing flush of winter Yuletide night beyond.
“Or her,” she says at last, her voice barely audible as she turns the pale smooth slope of her face to him, managing a faltering smile.
“Or her,” James agrees, and then it’s quiet again, and he can’t even hear Lily breathing, and downstairs Sirius and Remus and Peter are heading home, with cards and chocolate laid out like offerings on the coffee table, and the mess of wrappings cleaned up and the poor pine tree finally put out of its misery, and a hundred and one other things done that James doesn’t know about, can’t know about, doesn’t want to know about, because right now all he cares about is her, and the future, and them.
He draws her out under the blankets, her mother’s quilts, inch by inch. She shuts her eyes and tucks her face to the spread of his shoulder as he lays lullabies and kisses along her skin, baring her with such gentleness, such protectiveness that her hands are left soft and trembling on the hard Quidditch contours of his chest, his back. “What’s going to protect you,” she whispers, “if we can’t protect each other anymore?”
And he stretches himself flush against her, and tangles ankle to ankle, and braces himself on his elbows so he can smile down upon her, his fingers sifting through her rich red hair. “Your love, Lily. Your love will always, always bring me home, safe and sound.”
She cries then, and he can feel the ache in her breast against his ribs, in the trembling of her vocal cords in the space between them – can taste the fear in the tears he draws ready as kisses from her wet, dark lashes.
“Don’t you dare leave us,” she pleads, and they lay so tight, each so warm and natural in the hollows of the other, that when they finally fall joined there is a long moment of wonder, of questioning -- this heat this heat where is this heat coming from -- before they realize, and sigh their relief heavy and desperate between mouths and hands and bodies. He barely moves and she cannot stir save to shudder, to ache, and so they just hold each other steady against the night, against these changes, these oh-so-human fears. “I can’t live without you.”
“I would rather,” he whispers in turn, breathing at her ear, his hand at her neck, her breast, her belly in soothing strokes, in worship. “That my family survived me than I should live to see you all gone.”
And she cries further then, into crisis, into shuddering half-ragged sobbing, which he continues to catch in his mouth, his hands, his humming, hushing incoherencies. “You coward,” she cries, faintly now. “You coward.”
She’s right, he realizes, as she falls to fitful slumber for an hour or maybe two, as he waits and watches, only to wake in the fever-heat of pre-dawn coitus with her eyes so full of love and fear he can only hold her all the tighter, consoling himself that this, his cowardice, to tell her to live without him when he cannot, cannot do without her, is a common theme, a universal weakness in his breed, his gender. Oh noble Gryffindor he thinks, and lays his head to the soft curve of her stomach in the rays of purple-pink dawn. His strong arms wrap about her waist, his legs about her own, secure in the tangle now of blanket and quilt and sweat, the glisten of skin wed to skin, and he asks for her forgiveness in this, a soft and final request before he must withdraw, must dress and go and make sure he does not fail her, not ever again.
And since she’s out of tears now, at last, her fears flooded free in the night’s catharsis, in the warmth and love and loyalty of her James, sweet James, oh noble Gryffindor she raises a hand to his face, to the morning stubble and all the signs that they are really here, are grown and committed and ready, so ready, for these tasks to come for both, and she forgives him in a smile, and in the softness of her green eyes he smiles back, and they make love, long love, until there can be no denying the day.
“Time for me to leave,” he whispers at the last, and she says nothing, her eyes almost glassy, holding him all the tighter to her.
“See you at supper,” he adds, with a smile, and a kiss, and only then does she find strength enough to let him go.
