Chapter Text

Lily feels like a half-finished puzzle.

Some days she tries to put the parts she’s got together. Some days, she almost feels like she’s got it, she’s found all the missing pieces, and she’s ready to find the places they go in, but they never quite fit. It’s never long before she loses them again, before something breaks her concentration and it’s all lost, all so many little meaningless words that don’t fit or connect anywhere.

She clings to what she has anyway. The last time she thought she remembered something important, it was just a name, but it seemed the most important name she had ever heard, it seemed so important, like someone had screamed it three streets away and the wind had carried it here. She stole a scrap of parchment and a quill and wrote it down. She hadn’t held a quill in so long that it shook, and her handwriting was large and messy, like a child’s. It was just five letters:

Harry.

And then, later, when she remembered something else, another five letters, strung together, it seems, almost by chance:

James.

Most of the time they don’t mean anything. But sometimes, when she is alone in her room--no matter how full of flowers it is, no matter how beautiful and constantly in bloom they are--she pulls the bit of parchment out from the slit in the seam of her dress and reads the names. Mouths them. Memorizes them. And something tugs deep down inside her, and she finds her face wet, and she knows that she has done something wrong, something very bad and wrong, but she can’t remember what. She rolls up the parchment tight and hides it in the lining of her shoes, to be discovered again and again and memorized again and again, and--

There are footsteps. He’s coming. She scrubs her face and sleeve on her robes and tries to look bright and cheerful--he hates to see her sad--and she finishes the bouquet she is arranging on the dining room table.

The front door opens. It is storming outside, and the wind is ghastly. “Lily?”

“In here,” she says. The cold air is already creeping around her bare feet, but she hears the door shut and lock, and footsteps. He fills the doorway like a spider fills a corner, suddenly, almost all web and no weight to him, shaking snow from his cloak. He pushes his hood back and shrugs the thing off. She takes it from him. Snowflakes melt into her palms like the tiniest, newest ocean.

His hand on her shoulder is cold from outside, and it’s shocking that anyone can feel so cold and still be alive. It makes her start. But he’s her best friend, she chides herself, and he’s so gentle with her, and he takes care of her ever since--

His lips are so cold on her forehead that she might be being kissed by a corpse. But it feels good to have him home.

Home. Harry. James. Like thinking in another language, one she learned as a child and hadn’t spoken in years.

She shakes her head again, and smiles up brightly. “How was your day, Sev?”