- Chapter 3: O Writer, My Writer -
It was unseasonably warm when my day off arrived. The streets were a soup of slush and melted snow; people brought out their de-icers only to find that the locks on their cars actually weren't frozen. The air temperature remained solidly above freezing and the Order paused momentarily in its obsession with atmosphere and climate control charms. We threw open the windows in the mail room and breathed much-welcomed fresh air; we swapped our heavy cloaks for lighter ones. Hestia even waltzed around the mail room watering our resident plants, which seemed to be having a growth spurt. It was lovely - except for the fog.
My head was intensely foggy with sleep deprivation by the time I was allowed to take my leave. The last thing I needed was to be surrounded with fog, because now I got lost in two ways instead of one: First I would lose my train of thought and stand stupidly in the road, wondering what I was doing there and why my skull felt pumped full of molasses; then I would look around and realize that I hadn't the faintest idea where I was or where I was going. This was hardly unusual for me, though, so I didn't worry much about it when it happened. I simply smiled at the grandness of having gone through several weeks of exhaustion and emotional turmoil, for which the reward was incoherent giddiness and a day off to celebrate 1) the fact that I was not dead, and 2) the fact that missing James for so long had borne its fruit, because now I could see him again.
The problem with seeing James, however, was that I always managed to choke at the sight of him. He was beautiful, with strong shoulders and a lovely tapering waist that put smug thoughts in my head: He is a piece of art, and only I am allowed to see him naked. He was also, I kept discovering, eminently better than I was at sleeping during the ungodly hours of the morning, which made him infuriatingly well-adjusted - at least when compared with me. The fact that he seemed so in-control, so calm, and so well-rested made me feel stupid, angry, and altogether incompetent. And this just made him look all the more beautiful.
Such was the condition of James Potter when we finally got to see one another. He was sitting on my bed with his coat and socks off, black hair falling over his forehead, rifling through the sheets of paper I'd taken off the typewriter while I fidgeted restlessly with a loose thread on my pillow case. I got up several times and puttered about my closet while he continued to read, but found nothing to clean or put away; I went into my cramped and dingy little kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets. I brushed my teeth and rinsed three times. Finally I lay down on the bed and curled up next to James, resting my head in his lap.
At last he was done. "…When I turned to gaze ahead once again, Edwin was running ahead of us, though not without gesturing for us to follow." James put the manuscript down and gave me a hard look. "This is what you're doing at six in the morning?"
Immediately my stomach constricted. "This is what we're going to spend our time off together arguing about?"
A look of pain flickered on James's face. "Well - no." He sighed. "It's just - you need to sleep, Lily. I mean seriously."
"I know, I know. I just can't. I'm an insomniac."
"You need to find a way to make it happen."
"I'm trying!"
"No, you're not. You're drowning yourself in your misery and refusing to sleep so you'll have an excuse to keep drowning yourself. And wax nostalgic about the past again."
"What! No I'm not, what is your problem?"
"I don't have a - listen, Lily, you work at a dangerous job and you keep staying up at night. You're a really good writer, but seriously, you can't do this. Okay?"
"James. Don't be an asshole, I'll do what I have to do in order to sleep! If that means I'm up all night with insomnia, then fine, better I do something useful with the time."
"Lily - "
"What about 'stop' do you not understand!"
Now James got that pained look on his face again and gathered me up in his arms, making hushing sounds. "Shh, Lily, I'm not trying to pick a fight. I'm just telling you the truth. Please." He cupped my face gently in his hands, tilting my chin up; a hot flush spread over my cheeks, and I avoided his eyes. To my consternation and chagrin, tears flooded onto my cheeks and I began sniffling pathetically, wetting James's shirt.
"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I'm being unreasonable. I just never get to see you. And I've been all depressive lately. Having a hard time shaking it."
"Shh, shh, don't cry," James whispered. "I'm here now. And we'll get to see each other again soon." He kissed my cheek and rocked me gently, which only made me bawl harder. "Shh. It's okay."
"If you say so." I sniffled and fought to control myself. "Sorry. I'm being ridiculous."
James kissed me again. His body was tense. "Yeah, you are."
I pulled away and wiped my eyes. "How embarrassing."
"Promise me you'll actually sleep now."
"Sure."
"I mean it. I'm not going to talk to you about your writing or the Order or the weather until morning. And I'm not going fuck you until you've slept for at least eight hours."
That felt like a slap. I laughed a little disbelievingly. "Aren't you supposed to be a hot-blooded caveman or something? I'm an available female." I batted my eyes at him, then sniffled again. And swallowed a nose full of runny mucus.
James's shoulders slumped a bit, and he closed his eyes for a moment. Breathed. Then he looked up and smiled. "Stop messing with me, Lily," he said gently. "Why don't you take off all those clothes and get in bed? I'll join you after I'm showered and don't smell like a goat."
"You don't smell like a goat," I said thickly. He was stripping off his shirt and trousers. The hint of muscles rippling over his lean frame was catching the light of my floor lamp with almost pornographic deliciousness. He looked at me quizzically.
"Sorry," I said, for the third time. "I'm just enjoying the view. Are you going to toss off in the shower?"
He gave me a supercilious look and took off his boxers. Then he threw his dirty clothes into the laundry basket and helped himself to one of my freshly washed towels. "And so what if I do? I'll last longer in the morning."
"Touche." The absurdity of my predicament was rising so insistently in my throat that I almost wanted to kill myself. I laughed. "I'm going to remember this forever: 'The day James Potter cock-blocked himself.'"
"I love you too. Now shut up and go to sleep." And with that he turned and left the room. The door clicked shut behind him with absurd finality. My head was foggy with fatigue and frustration, and suddenly it hurt quite a bit; unable to think of anything else to do, I rolled over and laughed silently into my pillow. And then smelled fresh lavender on my sheets, just as I'd intended. I was so relieved not to be smelling dust and weeks-old sweat that I began to weep again. Blinded by tears and aching with the choke of laughter, I stripped off my clothes, tossed them into the laundry basket, and collapsed onto the bed. One yank of the sheets and I was in the dark, asleep.
I woke briefly to the soft rustle of blankets as James slid into the bed with me, his skin soft and still damp from the shower. I was conscious long enough to feel his hand move over my hips, over my belly and the cusp of my breast. I felt his chest pressed against my back, his lips on my shoulder; and then all was black, all was silent and soft.
* * * * *
Sunlight was streaming through the curtains when I awoke. I was still curled up beneath a pile of blankets, and groggy; now that I'd succumbed to the urge to sleep for more than half an hour at a time, I didn't want to wake up. Ever. "What time is it?"
James stirred behind me, pulling me more tightly against him. "Eleven AM. You outdid yourself. That was twelve hours right there."
I buried my face in the covers to block out the light. "Really? Damn."
"I've been reading your memoir from start to finish for the past hour. You're really obsessed with death, aren't you?"
"What? Not at all. I am Lily. I am loquaciously loftily loony. I love writing shit that sounds deep."
"Ludicrously loopy liar. How bad is your morning breath?"
"Lovingly lethal."
"Mm. I'll bet." James threw a leg over my belly and climbed on top of me, resting his weight against my pelvis. He pushed my hair gently out of my eyes and kissed me. "Glad to have you back."
"Was I gone?"
James kissed me again, this time with lust. He was already hard. "You were acting like a crazy lady who raided pharmacies at night and ate their toothpaste instead of sleeping like normal people. Do you mind if we spend the next six hours fucking?"
His hand squeezing my breast was delicious. I lifted my hips against him and ran my hands down his back, gripping his buttocks. "Let's do the honors. Indulge me."
* * * * *
"Okay, so let me get this straight," James said, his mouth full of roast beef sandwich. He swallowed. "You're writing an obituary for Jonathan Paxton, which you say you don't want to do, and you're doing it because Hestia Jones, who - if I may remind you - was at Hogwarts known as 'The Pastry Girl' and whom you out-classed at her own game, says you should."
"Er. Well. When you put it that way."
"I'm just trying to figure things out here, my ridiculously sexy nymph. Forest nymph, I mean."
"James!"
He cocked an eyebrow at me, looking mischievous. "Sorry," he grinned. "It's just that you were naked all afternoon. And now you're feeding me. I couldn't feel more manly if I tried." He took another huge bite of his sandwich and gulped it down with amazing fortitude. "I'll act civilized now. And I won't say anything about you bending over and letting me eat lemon meringue pie off your bum."
"Right. Not a word."
"Yes ma'am."
We were sitting across from one another at the small wooden dining table in my kitchen, with an impressive amount of food piled up between us. The place looked much cheerier with the lights on - I had to give James credit for pointing that out - and was equipped with surprisingly good cookware. It made the whole business of talking about obituary writing seem much less important, and I had to admit that I felt a bit foolish with him grinning across the table at me the way he was.
"Right, so," I said. "Yes. I'm writing the obituary for Jonathan Paxton because Hestia Jones asked me to. I guess whoever's been writing them is taking a vacation. Or got reamed out by the Death Eaters for saying something they didn't like. Or something."
"And you don't want to do it?"
I stared at the sandwich in my hands for a moment. I still hadn't bitten into it. A piece of tomato was falling out, dripping juice and mayonnaise onto my plate. "It's just difficult. I mean I don't know the guy from a hole in the wall. Which is a silly thing to whine about, I guess, because they just handed over a whole bunch of records and research and said, 'Hey, you could write this thing in half an hour if you're quick about it, no sweat'. And there was a noticeable lack of volunteers for the task. So I feel kind of obligated."
James gave me an odd look. "Why?"
"I don't know. But anyway. I'm writing it." I bit into my sandwich and relished the taste of fresh tomato and beef. I'd been glamorously living on noodles and broccoli for the past three weeks, and I wondered as I chewed whether I was going crazy partly out of diet-induced anemia. "It's a weird task. At least I knew Alice's family when I wrote their eulogy. I feel like this time I'm dissecting a corpse."
"How appetizing."
I opened my mouth to quip about James suddenly becoming squeamish, but the look on his face made me stop. "So how is everything? At Gringotts, I mean."
James grimaced. "Fantastic, of course." He took a swig of water, seeming to wash down a bit of bile. "I still haven't seen any action the way you people in the train stations and alleys do. But I did see a few rotting bodies and a mutilated goblin this week."
I had been about to swallow, but that gave me pause and I spent a moment trying not to choke. "Really. How did that happen?"
"Someone broke into Gringotts about a week ago, tried to steal a piece of cursed jewelry, I think. I guess the Death Eaters managed to head them off in the middle of it, because we'd been searching for the bodies for days. I was the lucky bloke who stepped on someone's collapsing face. And the guy who got to dispose of the whole scene, seeing how I'm, you know, at the bottom of the food chain and all that."
"You're sure the fact that your family is insanely rich couldn't get you a slightly nicer job?" I asked, and immediately felt ashamed at having suggested it. "I mean, this isn't to say you should try to bribe your way up, but you'd have to work pretty hard to come up with a reason why someone like you should be a janitor. They're just wasting you on a job like that."
James laughed harshly. "No, I volunteered for that job. Everyone in the Order would have been wasted on it. I took the position because they needed someone to do it, and I have enough money that I can afford to do it for free - and it's not like I've been doing it that long; it's only been two months. I'm planning on quitting as soon as they finish training this crop of Aurors. I'll be able to get under someone's wing easily. I just have to wait it out until they've got space to take me on as an apprentice."
"…Oh." I found myself staring open-mouthed at him. "Why didn't you tell me you'd volunteered?"
James smiled. "Because you would have freaked out and told me not to do it."
"Well, who's crazy now? Shit, James. I stay up all night writing about my childhood, you stay up all night searching for dead bodies. Voluntarily."
"Yeah, you can bet I'm foaming at the mouth just thinking about a tube of toothpaste when I find a pile of putrefying human lying about in a small, enclosed area. Breathing the smell and getting it in all in your mouth really makes you appreciate toothpaste. And toothbrushes."
The image was nauseating and brazenly, improperly, almost comical. I shuddered, all the while hating myself for thinking I might want to laugh. James regarded me curiously, seeming to await my response. I decided on a half-laugh, half-grimace. "And to think I sometimes forget how much chutzpah you have."
"Hence the reminders, Lily-tron. Now you'll always know who's got the biggest balls of them all. Without ever having to check."
"My knight in shining armor."
"That is my God-given purpose in life," James said, grinning stupidly at me. "I love you, Lily."
I grinned back and passed him another sandwich, which he happily took. "I love you too, James."
But even with the expression of unadulterated contentment on his face, something darker and not so cheery lingered. It was not self-pity - I hadn't seen that on James for several years - but it clearly weighed on him. A look of carefully contained somberness. Of responsibility, perhaps.
* * * * *
James and I had only the following night off before we had to return to our respective shifts, so in the evening we decided to take a short trip out of London, to a remote wooded area neither of us could locate on a map. We didn't know if the place was named; we didn't know if it was even in Britain. But it was beautiful, a snowy landscape of hills, evergreens, and rocky gorges. There was a waterfall, about forty feet high and frozen over now, near a clearing we frequented on our days off. In our jeans and snow boots we walked over the icy rocks at its base, slipping, falling, laughing as we tried to catch one another. James, who had more strength and superior balance, was better at it than I. "I keep having to make a point of not planting my face on these rocks," he laughed, holding me up by my armpits as I slipped and skidded. "You're too impatient to get to where you're going, you have to quit jumping around."
"I'm not jumping around," I giggled, brushing hair and snow out of my eyes. "I am just lacking the proper zen."
"I like how you imply that I'm filled with zen." He nuzzled the back of my neck.
"You know I exist purely to stroke your ego." I kissed him and didn't pull away until I slipped again and nearly sent us crashing onto a large pile of rocks.
And that was how we spent the evening - walking through the snowy woods, tripping in the snowbanks, breaking icicles off the trees and sucking the water off them; when the sun set, James Transfigured a rock into a lantern, which we took turns carrying as we wended our way through a forest of rich, thick evergreen boughs. Eventually we grew cold and stopped in a small clearing, where I brushed a pit into the snow and lit a fire. James and I stood before it, warming our hands and feet as steam rose from our sodden clothes.
"Try that thing you did once, when you got it to change shape."
I concentrated and flicked my wand at the flames. Something resembling a fish flickered into sight. I squinted and flicked my wand again; the fish's tail fin only grew broader. "That was supposed to be a bird, but I guess a fish is good enough."
"I'll take it," James yawned. "It's warm and it dances."
"That'll be fun to write into my memoir, the time we tried to dance in the dormitories that ended with me somersaulting over the back of one of the armchairs."
"That was hot," James said. "Your shirt rode up about a mile. And I hadn't known until then that you were that flexible."
"Can't argue with the truth, I guess."
"You know what I love about this," James mused, "it's the fact that it's been two hours and neither of us has mentioned work."
"Jinx."
"Savoring the sanity, you mean."
I laughed ruefully. "Or the rest of the world is crazy and we're mad. Either way, we'll never know."
"Lily," James said, giving me a wisftul smile, "look up. The stars are out. This is why I like to come out here with you. You can look up at the sky and see the stars through. And if you bother to look long enough, you'll even see them twinkle."
I looked up. It wasn't just the stars that were out - it was the entire Milky Way, visible as a faint, pearly stripe of violet and blue, half-hidden by the trees. I closed my eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply, drinking in the scent of winter and pine. "I have a confession," I said after a time. "I feel incredibly stupid for dramatizing and poeticizing everything in writing when we're out here."
"Why is that?"
"Because it's like the paint job in my brain suddenly changes when you're around and we're away from all the death and fighting, and I don't have to try to find ways of making life look artful."
There was a beat of silence, and James simply continued to look up at the sky. Then he exhaled, his breath a cloud of steam dispersing into the night, and put his arm around me. "Well," he said, pressing his lips against my forehead, "I'm glad to be of service. Because being with you does make me very happy."
* * * * *
Going back to work really was like having a different mental paint job. The mail room was in a drab state as usual when I got there the following morning, with loose parchment and envelopes cluttering up almost all of the visible desk space. A freezing rain had begun to fall an hour earlier, so that now the windows were in the process of glazing over with an inch of solid ice; all of the owl windows had been shut for the morning, with the owls themselves grudgingly perched on a slightly dizzying array of pegs on the wall. Hestia Jones was in her usual spot, looking pale and a bit run-down, and mindlessly waving her wand to and fro over a stack of letters. Each time the tip of her wand moved to her right, a letter slid into an envelope, which then addressed itself. Hestia had the look of someone who had been doing this for several mind-numbing hours already. There were two empty coffee cups on her desk, where she ordinarily kept her writing supplies.
"Anything you want me to take off your hands?" I asked.
My question seemed to have broken her trance, and she started a little before looking up. "Oh, Lily," she said, as if she'd completely forgotten I was supposed to be there. "Hi. Yes, if you could take a stack of these and deal with them, that'd be lovely."
Wordlessly, I did as she requested and sat down at a desk next to hers. "Where are these going?"
"Blue seals mean Department of Mysteries," Hestia said. "Red are for the Wizengamot. Actually, I put a charm on all of these that'll tell you where the letters are going, if you tap the seals and look pretty."
I nodded and sighed inwardly. I thought about experimenting with a few different charms for addressing the letters more efficiently and even considered making a suggestion to Hestia, but thought better of it. Her voice had a slight edge to it, as if she'd stop being polite as soon as I stepped a bit sideways and landed on her toes. "So what happened with the train that went off the rails?" I asked carefully. "I was off-shift when they were investigating, and I haven't heard anything over the past day."
"Ah, so you were sleeping," Hestia said, a bit testily. "I was wondering if you'd ever get to that. Anyway, yes, I was on duty with the group they sent out to survey the accident. A whole bloody night of walking over wrecked cargo. And Muggle-proofing the scene. It took us until six in the morning to wipe their memories and get them out of there."
"Was anyone hurt?"
"There were a few injuries. Nothing serious, as the conductor appeared to have realized there was a problem in time and hit the emergency brakes before they went careening over the wrecked tracks at eighty miles per hour. Horrific amount of monetary losses, though. That train was supplying half the apothecaries in Wizarding Britain. All that cargo - spilled all over the place, soaked into the dirt. Millions of Galleons. Disastrous."
My stomach sank. The Order of the Phoenix consumed a huge amount of potions and potion ingredients provided by the local apothecaries each month - with our rate of injuries due to hexes, curses, and confrontations with the Death Eaters, we were second only to St. Mungo's and the potions classes of Hogwarts. "Do you think we're going to have a supply shortage?"
"You should hope to Merlin not," Hestia said, smiling mirthlessly.
"I do," I said uselessly. "Is there anything else you want me to take care of today? You look like you could use a break."
"Write that obituary." Hestia's smile hadn't changed. "His father sent an owl this morning asking for it."
"…Ah."
"Make it good, too," Hestia added, a note of irony in her voice. "You could make a nice bundle on it if Paxton Senior is pleased."
Something about her voice sounded barbed, and, feeling defensive, I finished addressing her letters with a swift flick of my wand. She started and looked at me. "How did you do that?"
"Modified sorting charm, I think," I said, clearing my throat. "Right. Obituary. I'll get to it right now."
Hestia only regarded me strangely.
* * * * *
I spent the rest of the shift working on the obituary - that is to say, I spent the rest of the shift sifting through the mess of documents Hestia had provided me, struggling to think of a workable angle from which to tell Paxton's story. The clock ticked relentlessly through the morning and early afternoon, seeming to crush itself into the spaces between my ears and brain with each twitch of its hands. After about an hour of this, I began to feel claustrophobic, so I got up and paced along the wall where the owls were perching; but this only heightened my anxiety, so I sat back down and stared at the blank parchment before me. Disparate thoughts skittered across my mind. How could we know the monetary value of a person's soul? Was I supposed to hide Paxton's alcoholism and bring him off as a saint? Surely I should refrain from writing about his support for the Order of the Phoenix and risk getting his father killed - but didn't the fact that the request for an obituary had landed on my desk imply that he wanted someone from the Order, who knew about his son's contributions, to write about him? Which newspaper would publish the obituary? Oh, Paxton had been so young. Too young to die. Too stupid to know not to drink himself to death - or too helpless to overcome his alcoholism. An empty suit. Riding the shirttails of a railroad tycoon. Living the high life, drunkenly threatening to kill a taxi driver, drunkenly destroying millions of Galleons' worth of talking marble sculptures at a five hundred thousand Galleon house party. Drowning in his own vomit. Everything hushed up. Until now?
I didn't understand him. How could I possibly know him from his medical records?
Eventually I got up the nerve to ask Hestia for her opinion.
"You don't have to know him," she answered impatiently. "Nobody reading his obituary is going to know him. Of course his father doesn't want you to make him sound like a drunken fuck head…sorry, excuse me." She paused to sip from her coffee mug, blushing a little. "All I'm saying, Lily, is that the point of an obituary isn't to bare the ugly truth to the public, it's to notify them about the person's death and provide them with a bit of backstory. All you really have to do is write a short biography of him. Who he was, what he did, some vague nonsense about how he died. Make him sound like a good guy. Remember him fondly. You know. That sort of thing."
"It's going to be a security risk to his father if I mention anything Paxton did that was good," I said flatly.
Hestia's eyes flashed. But then she smiled. "So don't be specific about it. Just say he was a philanthropist. Generous bloke."
I considered this; she was right. I shrugged my concession.
"Oh, come on, Lily," Hestia said irritably. "You wrote a eulogy when you were seventeen. You went parading around Hogwarts with half a book's worth of who knows what you were writing practically every day. You were also at the top of your class. Stop acting stupid. Just write the bloody obituary. You know what to do."
I was silent for a moment, stunned. "When did I parade anything?"
Hestia looked at me as if I were crazy; for a moment I thought she was going to yell at me for deliberately being thick. But then her expression softened. She turned away. "I'm sorry. I'm just in a bad mood. And you were always winning writing awards at Hogwarts. I just didn't expect you to have any trouble with this, that's all."
I blinked. "What writing awards? I wrote an advertisement for Honeydukes once. They took it because they liked the jingle I came up with. And the parchment rolls you saw me carrying around were probably all essays for class."
Hestia blushed and refused to meet my gaze. "Lily, kindly shut up, all right? I'm sorry I got snappy with you."
"It's fine," I said quickly. "Thanks for the advice." With that, I went back to staring at my parchment. And failed utterly to come up with a single worthwhile sentence.
* * * * *
Writing the melodrama into death is easy to do. You choose your favorite set of overblown metaphors, be they filled with the love of birds, sunsets, or over-described fallen leaves, and then you think about something depressing, to the point where you are convinced that you yourself want to die, and begin writing about death as if you can count yourself amongst the bereaved - regardless of whether you are bereaved or not. You do not spare a single moving detail, and the details that aren't moving, you either exclude completely, or describe with such maudlinness that the mere presence of the words fools you into thinking you should be moved. And then, if you find that you can't stomach the descriptions you've produced, you trim them down until you can read them without gagging.
I spent several more hours wrestling with myself over how not to do this to Jonathan J. Paxton. I couldn't tell if I loved him or hated him, or even if I was indifferent. The emotion of writing blocked all judgment from my mind, until I was finally so fed up that I scrawled the following in roughly eight minutes:
Jonathan J. Paxton
Born January 18, 1952
Deceased February 19, 1979
It has been said by some that Jonathan J. Paxton was the face of the Gwydion Railroad; indeed, he was often his father's ambassador. An educated, literary man, he charmed many and entertained many more, leading a life surrounded by Britain's rich and famous. And certainly he was one amongst them: an heir to his father's millions, Jonathan Paxton could have chosen to live on the Riviera and never look back.
But he did not. In a time when our country is wracked with conflict and bloodshed, Paxton supported peace. He was an avid philanthropist. His many donations to numerous and admirable causes will always be remembered by all of us who carry the mantle of peace. May he live on in our hearts and memories.
* * * * *
"Thank you," Hestia said, as I handed her the piece of parchment. "Right on time for the next shift, too. Nice work."
"Thanks," I replied. I had a massive headache. "I guess I'm going to get a move on. Can't be late."
"Good luck."
The obituary was published the following day. I read it from my usual spot in the train station, behind the coffee counter, to the sound of the late-night trains roaring in and out of the station.
-->