The morning of Lily's birthday, James was awoken by a heavy weight on his chest and a warm breath on his ear.
"James," Lily's voice hissed into his ear. "James, it's my birthday."
"Erg," James replied, not opening his eyes.
"Is that all you're gonna say? Not 'happy birthday, love of my life' or 'oh my goodness, do you feel any different'?"
James made a noise that was a cross between a gargle and a groan.
"I've never said 'oh my goodness' in my life, and I don't plan on starting now," he groaned. Lily gave him a kiss on the forehead.
"That was surprisingly articulate," she said wryly. "Get up!"
"What time is it?" James moaned, attempting to cover his face with a pillow. Lily promptly removed it.
"Much too late," she said. "You're going to be late to class if you aren't already, for instance."
"What?!" James cried, bolting up and causing Lily to fall backward. "What the hell? Why didn't someone wake me up?"
Lily smiled innocently.
"Oh well. Rather unfortunate, but I suppose you'll live."
"What--I--" His eyes narrowed. Lily wasn't innocent. She never was.
"What'd you do?"
She held up her palms in a motion of peace.
"Don't blame me. Isn't my fault."
"Right. As if I'm supposed to believe that."
"You are!" she cried earnestly. "Sirius came up to me fifteen minutes ago and told me that he'd put a silencing charm on your bed so you wouldn't wake up. He's the one that said to me that I should take advantage of your tradition of skiving on birthdays. He told me to tell you to take me out to Hogsmeade for ice cream. He also told me to tell you to shag me already, but quite frankly I find that bit to be rather unnecessary."
James raised an eyebrow at her.
"And you actually took his advice?"
She shrugged.
"He was being rather nice about it, so I didn't want to be rude if he'd taken the time to put the silencing spell and whatnot. Besides, I rather liked his idea. It sounded fun." She crawled to the edge of the bed and opened the curtains a crack.
"If you don't want to, that's fine. I suppose you could still make it to class, after all."
He laughed.
"Maybe I was right when I used to think you were off your rocker. Why the hell would I spend a day in class when I could spend it on a date with you?"
Lily looked up at him and smiled.
"Good!" she said. "Then I can change out of this uniform!" Barely pausing long enough to give him a quick peck on the mouth, she slid out of the bed and ran out of the room.
***
James couldn't remember the last time there was an awkward silence between himself and Lily, but there it was, hot and suffocating on an otherwise cold February day. They were actually shivering, because for some reason Lily had insisted on ice cream instead of hot chocolate--'the texture of ice cream is much more birthday-esque than hot chocolate, that's more like Christmas', she'd said at the time--and yet the silence between the two of them made him want to roll up his sleeves, and wipe beads of sweat off his forehead. It was times like this that reminded him that they'd only known each other a short amount of time and had been together for even less time.
It wasn't that there was nothing to say. They'd had silences like that before, where the natural flow of conversation had ended and another had not yet begun. They were capable of silence, comfortable and lovely and utterly unlike the silence right now. This silence was pregnant with unspoken words and unexpressed thoughts. James was frightened to know what she could possibly have to say, and from the way she was sneaking nervous glances at his face, he guessed that Lily was too. He glared down at his plain vanilla ice cream as though it was its fault. Lily took the opposite approach, devouring her mint chocolate ice cream with more vigor than normal.
Finally he could stand it no longer.
"Lily, I wanna talk to you about something."
Lily paused in the middle of licking her spoon and placed it back into her glass bowl.
"Oh God," she said weakly. "Please don't say that. Start it off some other way."
"Huh?"
"Nothing good ever started with 'I need to talk to you'. It's a horrible start, really. I imagine that countries and lives were ended with a conversation that started that way." Lily bit her lip, realizing that she'd spoken more than she'd wanted to, and began toying with her spoon.
"It's not--it's not bad, at least I don't think so." He had the curious sensation of his heart in his throat again, and he ran a hand through his hair.
"Look," he said, "I've never dated someone as long as I've dated you. Sirius is always talking about how the only other girl I dated was for a week. So I don't suppose I really have much to go on as far as relationships go. I don't know how much you know, or have done, which I guess I probably should've asked you before now. Not that I really want to know, but I guess it's something I should've asked anyway, because it's you and it's important because…well, you did it," he finished weakly. "But anyway, we haven't been together very long, and we still don't know each other very well, because no matter how much we talk we just met this summer. It's not really something we can help, it's just…that's how it is. But I--" He looked up, and he saw that Lily looked a sickly green color. He reached for her hand impulsively.
"Lily, are you alright?"
She nodded emphatically.
"Finish what you were saying," she said, swatting his hand away. She continued to toy with the spoon.
"You sure?"
"Mmhm."
"Alright," he said doubtfully. "Well, I was just saying that--in spite of all of that--you're still the one that I want to be with, forever. I guess that's a long time, and it sounds like I've gone mad, but I'm serious. I was thinking about…well, it sounds really stupid, but…"
"James, it's me. Even if you sounded stupid, which I doubt, it wouldn't really matter to me."
"Right. Well I thought about…about asking you to ma--to marry me. Yeah. I mean, I'm not," James said quickly, not looking at her face because he was scared of what he might find there, "but I don't suppose it's something that would bother me very much. I reckon I'd like to be married to you, someday. And I just thought I should tell you, because I don't know when we could, but I think someday I'd want to, and I know we're really young and I really shouldn't be talking about this at all because it's not really something that we have to talk about, especially on your birthday, and I--"
Lily, who had been listening very patiently the whole time, silenced him by gently putting her hand over his mouth.
"Shh," she said, "now you're just letting your nervousness talk." Seeing that she'd gotten him to stop, she sat back in her chair, looking at him as though she'd never seen anybody like him before. Then she began to laugh--loudly, joyfully, a laugh that James had not heard from her since before her mother had died. It would have made him smile, perhaps even laugh, if he was not so petrified that she was laughing because she was about to crush the fragile thoughts that he'd laid before her. It wasn't characteristic of her, but it would've been very easy to do. One word was all it would have taken to smash everything into tiny pieces.
"Now," she said, "I--" She couldn't finish. She started to giggle again.
"Well I'm glad it's funny," James said helplessly. Lily stopped her laughter, but a persistent smile remained on her face.
"Don't be bitter, Darling," she said. "After all, here I was thinking you were going to tell me that you wanted some time apart or something of that sort, when all you really wanted to tell me was that you wanted--that we--" She started to laugh again, this time standing up and twirling around childishly. He watched her, wondering how someone who managed to act in such an embarrassingly childlike way could also be so feminine and beautiful in the same instant.
"You thought I wanted to break up with you?" he asked. "Haven't I already made it clear to you that I love you? And why the hell would I do it on your birthday?"
"You wouldn't--you wouldn't, would you?" Lily crowed. "And it's because you're wonderful, absolutely wonderful." She gave him a quick peck on the lips, then she looked up at the sky.
"It's so beautiful today," she said. "The sky is so blue and everything is just--things are just wonderful. I haven't felt like this in a long time, it's amazing." She stretched out her arms as though stretching, though James had a sneaking suspicion that it had more to do with her desire to reach out and touch and hold everything surrounding her. He ran his hand through his hair again.
"So," he prodded, "I'm guessing that means that you're alright with the idea."
Lily kissed him on the mouth again, then on the head.
"Yes," she said, then kissed him again for good measure. "I've never heard an idea I liked more. It couldn't happen right away of course--it's much too soon, and like you said, we don't know each other well enough yet--but at the same time I feel like I know you better than anyone. We're--we're like kindred spirits, almost, except not in the way that they're the same. It's like we're utterly different, but it's in ways that the other needs. And I've never really needed anyone, not like I need you, so I don't suppose that I'd ever be able to let go of someone I needed so much. And I--I'm just so happy that you think so too, or something like it, anyway." She laughed again.
Later that afternoon, he gave her big box of records and a small, gold ring that, as he explained, wasn't an engagement ring, but rather a reservation for an engagement ring at a later date. These gifts surprised and amazed her, and he knew from the way that she looked at him, lingeringly and thoughtfully, that it meant more to her than he could know. But in spite of that, he supposed that he'd always be the most proud of the first birthday gift he'd given her--that startling, uninhibited laughter that had managed to elude her for so long.
***
The rest of the year passed quickly, faster than anyone would have liked. There were joys, as Gryffindor won both the Quidditch and house cups, and sorrows, such as when James received letter after letter informing him of his father's decline into infirmity. Though his father had always seemed young to James, he slowly began to realize that he was indeed aging and that the Potter estate might have been bequeathed to him sooner than he would have expected or liked.
NEWTs were possibly the most torturous thing that any of them had ever experienced, and it was almost with relief that they came to the realization that their time at Hogwarts was over. Yes, it was true that there were tears--and not just from Lily--and reservations about the world outside of Hogwarts' walls. But somehow there was also a deeper held knowledge that they'd already been prepared as much as it was possible for them to be. As their last night in the home they knew for seven years drew to a close, James and the other three boys made a solemn promise to not let their physical distance separate them.
Of course, even the most well-intentioned promises cannot always be kept. Remus, who they'd already begun to lose contact with in school, was quickly lost to them almost entirely as he began traveling far and wide looking for work. Sirius would always give a skeptical snort when this reason was given for their estrangement. Meanwhile, Peter also grew apart from them, though not to the same extent as Remus. He had never been quite the same after Marlene broke up with him. Once the McKinnon family was murdered, two years after she'd broken up with him, it was as though a bit of him had become lifeless, a childlike shine that nobody had realized was there, gone.
It was not until years later that anybody who wasn't a Death Eater would figure out that he'd actually played a large role in the family's murders, and it was also for this reason that Hestia Jones was convinced to leave her job in the Ministry of Magic and join the Order of the Phoenix. Though she'd long since gotten over her love for Charlie McKinnon, she'd never gotten over the fact that he'd been murdered in perhaps the most gruesome manner of anyone in the family.
It was the original Order of the Phoenix that kept the Marauders together. Lily and James had stuck together, as had James and Sirius, but it was very rare that they saw Peter outside of these meetings, and any contact with Remus outside of them was virtually nonexistent.
James and Lily were married on Lily's birthday a year after James originally proposed the idea of proposal. It was a tiny ceremony, because even then a huge ceremony was a target for attack, especially since James had decided to become an auror. Lily chose a different route entirely, instead opting to work in the Ministry of Magic in Muggle-Wizarding relations.
The end of the story is well known, so it bears no repeating. However, it is interesting to note that, years after the house in Godric's Hollow was burnt down, a casual passerby happened to notice a redheaded girl on a yellow bike zooming by. It was someone he'd never seen before, that he knew; but before he could get a closer look, the girl disappeared, almost as though she'd never been there at all.
THE END