Chapter Text
“I've got a love, I've got a love for you
I've got a place in this old heart for you
I want to tell you that I want you
Any way I can”
– The Paper Kites, By My Side
Petunia loses her virginity in the summer after fifth year.
It’s a sticky kind of weather, heat sinking into the brick, smog weighed heavy in the air, smelting into thick plumes even where Lily and her family live on the outskirts of Cokeworth.
Lily lays face down on her bed, nose in a Charms textbook and music from the record player drifting around the room. Her skin is sheened with sweat, nape of her neck wet. The hem of her denim shorts presses into the tops of her thighs and she wiggles to unstick them. When a rare breeze winds through the window, a kind of magic that doesn’t come from a wand, she sighs. It’s a little like relief.
“I had sex with Johnny last night,” Petunia says in the quiet.
She sits cross-legged on her own bed, painting her pointed nails. Her pink and white dress is hiked above her knees, pale skin rouged red. Her long, slender neck has a mark right near her protruding collarbone.
Lily pauses, unnerved. “Okay,” she says.
She smoothes her auburn hair over one shoulder, her fringe damp against her forehead as she subtly turns to look at Tuney.
“Was it... What was it like?”
Tuney’s eyebrows are arched, her lips pursed as she runs the polish down a nail and inspects her handiwork. Lily doesn’t know if it’s the right response. They haven’t been familiar in so long.
“Nice,” Petunia says. “Johnny was very respectful.”
“That’s, uh, that’s great Tuney.”
She thinks that if this was Marlene, or Dorcas or Mary, Lily would say, tell me the details. Where did he touch you? Did it hurt? How big was it? And they would descend into giggles and it would feel something like sisterhood.
But with Tuney it’s silence, magic wedged in the emptiness between them. She doesn’t know who Johnny is, only that he smokes and hangs around the factory after work with the other men. Her father doesn’t like him.
“He says he wants me to be his girl, isn’t that nice?”
There’s a tone Lily doesn’t quite understand. Nothing about Tuney is recognisable anymore. She wants to say, is it Tuney? Do you want to be someone’s, or do you want to be someone? But then Tuney would turn and spit at her and the accusations would lodge in the place Lily quietly keeps all her hurts.
So she nods. “Yeah Tuney, I’m happy for you.”
Tuney’s eyes are sharp as she looks at Lily with glinting victory. There are circles under her eyes, like she’s had a late night. She is missing an earring.
“It will happen for you one day Lily,” Tuney reassures, twisting her lips. Lily has taken a wrong step somewhere. “But that will take a very special man. One to look past your...”
She waves a hand up and down Lily’s body, the denim shorts that dig in, the loose embroidered top that doesn’t quite cover her large bust, stomach she can’t suck in, the sweat, the unkempt hair, dirt on her nose, Charms textbook turning pages by itself.
“Freakishness.”
*
Lily can’t stop thinking about it.
She walks around Cokeworth, toes muddying in the country paths, jumping fences and dipping her feet into the clean ponds, the ones without beer bottles and cigarette butts.
In the field where her and Severus first discovered each other, she sits and plucks flowers and misses him. The bright pink blooms are the colour of Petunia’s dress. Had she been wearing it when she had sex with Johnny?
Severus had kissed Lily last term, and the sick shame of that sticks at the back of her throat. Petunia has had a man touch her, has opened herself up to him and not been ashamed. And yet somehow Lily allows herself to feel exposed without taking a shred of clothing off.
I’m sorry, Severus writes. I was scared, they were watching and I reacted badly. I didn’t mean to hurt you.
She has replied in so many ways and burnt them all up. She has paced and worried. When Lily bumped into Severus in town last week, the broken street lamps and dark grey of dilapidated buildings had overshadowed him, nearly obscuring the fresh bruise on his cheek and his father’s hand tight around his upper arm.
It’s dumb to be angry about a kiss, when she has done...
Lily lets herself be stupid, just this once.
*
She visits Remus in Wales.
Without her apparition licence, she has to take the long way. A floo trip from the Witches Brew pub in Manchester to Birmingham, then Birmingham to Swansea, through the fireplace in an old wizarding B&B to finally land in the Black Lion pub in Cardigan, Wales.
When she dusts herself off and steps out onto the street, Hope and Remus are leaning against their cheery yellow car. Remus looks tired, a new scar on the side of his mouth and his arms crossed. Hope spots Lily and lights up.
“Let me help you with the suitcase, dear,” she says, popping it in the trunk.
Remus wraps an arm around Lily as she presses her face into his shoulder. The musty smell of his knit jumper and dark chocolate envelopes her.
“I missed you,” Lily says.
“Me too,” Remus’s voice is deeper than it was in July. There is something wrecked about it, as if he has been screaming.
They drive along the river, past Cardigan Castle and then to the coast, where Remus and Hope live in a cottage that sags warmly and lets in the salt breeze. The sea air is good for your health, Hope insists.
With his head out the window, Welsh air whipping through his soft brown curls and honey eyes closed, Lily wonders how anyone could ever think Remus Lupin is dangerous.
*
“Have you had sex?” She asks Remus late that night.
She’s tucked into his bed. The room smells like boy and old books. There are clothes strewn in the corner, records stacked high and ratty cushions piled up. Remus sleeps on the floor next to her. Hope says nothing except, I know Lily is a sensible girl.
In her pyjamas, an old t-shirt from a charity shop and shorts that she knows are sized bigger than anything Remus wears, she doesn’t feel sensible. She feels a little lost and sad and uneasy in her own body.
Remus is silent. “Yeah,” he murmurs eventually.
He turns away from her. She can see the sharp outline of his spine beneath his long sleeved shirt. He keeps his body covered like she does, like they both have something to hide.
“Oh,” Lily says. “Who with?”
Remus sighs, his shoulders slouch. “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry.”
This time Lily rolls away. “That’s okay.”
*
They go for walks along the coastal cliffs, when the summer morning is dewy fresh and the sky a swash of light pink. They pick themselves over fences, sheep bleating at them, and watch waves crash into rocks.
When they get hungry, Remus brings out a picnic lunch that Hope prepared. They sit balanced on a fence railing. The wood pinches the soft underside of Lily’s thighs, but she can see the ocean from its height and can’t bear to give that up yet, not when she has to go home to Cokeworth in a few days.
“Last year was...” Remus says. He doesn’t finish his thought.
“Yeah,” Lily bites into her sandwich. “Have you heard from them?”
Remus’s voice is tight. “No.”
When she turns to look at him, there are tears in his eyes that can’t be blamed on the balmy morning air. In the aftermath of the Prank, Remus has become small and quiet, like he is eleven and afraid of his own voice again.
“He’s a fucking monster,” Severus had raged at her from his hospital bed. “You don’t know what I know, Lily. I can’t tell you because Dumbledore made me promise.”
As if she was naive. As if she didn’t find how Severus’ mouth twisted in hatred just like Petunia’s ugly. She had wanted to ask why he would want to give away a secret like that anyway. When did you become cruel?
“Have you heard from him?” Remus asks quietly.
“Yeah,” Lily says.
Remus nods as if he expected the answer, both of them lonely and silent as they contemplate the dissolution of their childhood and how they were totally inept at stopping it. Puberty is a bitch, Marlene says. She gets the best of us.
Lily jumps off the fence, brushing her palms together.
“C’mon,” she says. “The air is good for our health.”
*
Remus teaches her how to drive. It’s bright for him, he laughs as she lets out a frustrated yell and releases the clutch too quickly, the yellow car spitting and sputtering to a halt.
“No, no, c’mon. Ease into it, hey,” he coaxes, a smile in his voice.
By the time they make their way into town, she mostly has it, Remus only occasionally leaning over to help her with the gear shift.
“This is worse than fucking flying,” Lily grumbles.
“No it’s not,” Remus laughs.
Lily looks sideways at him. The broom had dipped and nearly fallen when she tried to mount it that first lesson, and Sirius Black had said, careful Evans, you don’t want to break it. Severus had punched him in the nose.
“You’re right,” she says slyly.
Remus winds down the window and puts the radio on. They sing Don’t Go Breaking My Heart at full volume, Remus belting Elton’s parts and Lily Kiki’s. The corners of his eyes crinkle as he looks at her, his canine teeth crooked in his grin. I couldn’t if I tried.
She finds a park in the middle of town, near a row of brightly coloured shops that remind her of a more jolly Diagon Alley. The spot needs a reverse park, and she forces Remus to swap seats with her so he can do it, because there’s no bloody way.
When they wander into the record store, Lily takes his hand. Music blares. Friends in their early twenties laugh and smoke. Piercings stack upon each other to decorate ears and faces. Neon hair entwines as a couple snogs in the corner. Lily feels unbearably uncool in her dungarees.
She buys Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Wings and Bob Dylan. Remus picks up an Eagles record, Queen, and Bowie. When they pay at the counter, the Muggle employee has curled black hair and ears lined in silver.
“Nice date?” He asks them casually.
And Remus pulls his hand out of hers, splutters awkwardly – “We’re not, it’s not...”
“No.” The young man says, tilting his head, charcoal eyes on Remus. “I think not.”
*
When Lily arrives back at Cokeworth, Petunia and her parents are arguing.
She slips in the front door, quietly puts her bags on the floor and makes her way to the kitchen. Tuney’s face is splotched red and pinched. Mum’s grey hair shines in the harsh overhead light, hands clenched together and elbows on the table. Dad leans against the sink.
“Now you can go to London.” He’s trying not to be too pleased. “And do the typing course that Barbara recommended. It’s a good career, honey.”
“I don’t want a career. I want Johnny, I want kids, why isn’t that good enough for you?”
Their mother is tense. “He doesn’t want you, Tuney. He’s the type of boy that jumps into bed and leaves a girl after. I raised you to know better.”
“Mum,” Tuney sounds heartbroken.
“Running off with him where everyone could see, making a fool of yourself. Now he’s with Jenny’s daughter. Who’s next, hmm?”
Petunia lets out a sob and storms out, her shoulder slamming into Lily as she passes. Mum sags and Dad lets out a sigh. When he looks up and notices her in the doorway, he pushes himself towards her, smiling –
“Oh Lilypad, welcome home. Sorry about that.”
“Everyone okay?” Lily asks.
Mum sighs. “Just boy trouble. You’ll never bother us with that, will you Lils? Much too smart.”
*
In the dark, Lily asks, “It was just sex, wasn’t it Tuney?”
She can feel immediately that it was the wrong thing to do.
“I hate you,” Tuney says.
*
Severus turns up at her door. His black hair is stringy and the bruise on his face has settled into a motley green-purple. She lets him in and he sits on her sofa with his sock-covered feet curled up beneath him.
“I’m sorry,” he says reluctantly, not looking at her.
“I know you are.” She touches his wrist and wishes that she can rub bruise balm where he hurts, but Tobias would know and some pains cannot be cured even with the wonder of magic. Severus is abandoned and she wants him loved, but she cannot give it to him, even if she wishes she could.
It’s not a surprise when he tries to kiss her again, as if her kindness is permission.
“Sev.” She is firm.
“Why Lily? Everyone knows it’s us, everyone –”
“Who is everyone? Your friends?” Lily demands. “Avery? Mulciber? I’m not something to be decided on by committee, I’m not –”
“They don’t think you’re good enough for me anyway.”
There is a flush of shame down him now, and she wants it gone. But she wants so many things for him. She wants him to be found where he has been lost. He pushes down second years now. He hexes children. He spits on Gryffindors. He creates spells that slice through skin. He is destruction, and he is taking everything apart with him.
“They think I can do better than a fat mudblo-”
“Get out,” Lily says.
*
She takes the train to Kings Cross with Petunia.
In the empty carriage, Lily puts her feet up and gets out her snacks. Her Converse are muddy, the hem of her dress ragged from late afternoon walks through open fields.
Petunia purses her lips in disapproval. Her typing course starts in a week, and she is tidy, starched, collar smooth. Sometimes their mother says, it’s hard to believe the two of you are sisters.
As the train honks its final warning and pulls away from the station, Lily can see how hopelessly disappointed Tuney is. Her face falls as she looks out the window to watch the deserted Cokeworth platform disappear into the distance.
There is nobody running after the train. There is nobody frantic to want her.
*
In the prefect’s compartment of the Hogwarts Express, Remus falls asleep. With his head on her lap, Lily looks at his freckles where he is bleached a sickly moon pale – none of the Welsh breeze dashed across his complexion. He breathes raggedly, last night’s full weighing down his fragile limbs.
The compartment door abruptly slides open. Lily waves her wand to cast an immediate silencio and James Potter glares at her from the entryway. As he takes in the scene in front of him, he sighs and nods at her in acknowledgement, raising his eyebrows, palms open. She undoes the charm.
“You’re not meant to be here Potter,” Lily whispers. “Prefects only.”
James ignores her. He sits opposite them, spine curved and biting his lip as he catalogues every inch of Remus, eyes soft and wary. In the Scottish countryside, the afternoon light peeks and beams through oak branches to shine in the carriage window. James’s glasses reflect the forest green, his dark skin luminous. Somehow he has tamed his hair over the break, so that now the length falls artfully across his cheekbones. He is rottenly handsome.
“How is he?” James asks. He doesn’t look at her, even as she does him.
“Not good,” Lily says. Remus shifts uncomfortably in his sleep and she looks down at him. He is unbearably young with his face slack. His nose scrunches as he murmurs to himself and sighs. Lily brushes a curl away from his forehead. She knows there are new scars behind his ears.
When she looks up again, James is watching her, eyes heavy.
She swallows.
“I’m glad he has you.” His voice is rough.
*
They don’t speak as they leave Remus in the compartment alone, head pillowed by James’s robes and cocooned with Lily’s coat. And they don’t speak as they spell the door to the prefect’s bathroom closed.
Instead James’s mouth is hot on hers as she gasps into the kiss. His large Quidditch hands grip her waist, fingers splayed and pressing firm into the soft sides of her belly. There is a wave low in Lily’s body, a tide, and she can feel the swell of it in her, strange and awkward and hot.
James moans and crowds her against the wall. Her back nearly hits a decorative lamp and she laughs, scooching across to lean against bare panelling. James follows, touching her face reverently, smoothing a calloused thumb across her lips, which part for him. When he leans in again, their noses bump and the metallic edges of his glasses press into her round cheek.
“James,” Lily breathes. With two months between them, she has forgotten what he looks like with his pupils blown this close to her face. The taste of him in her mouth, ridiculous candy. Or maybe not forgotten, maybe stored neatly in the trunk she puts things that she doesn’t understand.
“Lily,” James mocks.
He kisses the base of neck, near a gold necklace that Sev bought her when they were thirteen. He touches the top button of her blouse and she nods, the hot press of his mouth reverberating to her toes. She can feel how wet she is getting, how much she has missed them just like this, how her memory of it is never quite so good as having it.
Respectful, is what Petunia said.
But Lily and James are decidedly disrespectful, and she likes that. She likes that she has to cast a silencing charm, otherwise other students will hear how they pant and groan and moan for each other.
She likes how she trembles under his touch, liquid in her veins, bones on fire. How he can indent her, hands on the soft tops of her thighs where they touch, gripping her stomach rolls as he presses his erection against her, belly overhang, deep noises in the back of his throat, her upper arms wobbling, fingers stroking down hard athlete muscles, nails sharp as she clutches his firm biceps.
She likes that when his grin turns lazy and his eyes dark, he will get down on his knees and sit back on his heels to slide a hand up her skirt as he watches her. That his fingers will pull aside her cotton pants and press into her. That his mouth on her will be sweet, tongue inside her, on her clit. That he will make sure she comes first, and most often again.
His black hair is a mess from where she’s tugged it when he stands up and kisses her, his lips filthy wet with her desire. Lily puts a hand between them and down his open trousers where he is hard and aching. He moans into her neck as she strokes him, mouth open and panting. He rests his body against hers like he knows that it’s safe. She makes James spill into her hand.
It’s just sex, she asked Petunia. Isn’t it?
*
They don’t talk as they smooth down their clothes and splash water on their face. She helps James straighten his tie, and he applies a cleaning charm on them both. When his fingers rest on a spot he’s left on the side of her neck, she pulls away and taps it with her wand so that it disappears.
Lily knows that they don’t make sense. She is a smart girl. But it feels, fuck it feels, and she likes to be stupid with him, she has learnt that about herself. She likes to turn herself off as he turns her on.
In her mind, there is Lily who has had sex, and there is Lily who hasn’t. She doesn’t need to reconcile the two because they exist in different orbits. Faced with the harshness of public, they hide as two strangers who happen to go to the same school. In the quiet, she dares to want him and he deigns to let her.
“Like this?” He had asked her the very first time they fucked.
It had been quiet in the Room of Requirement. Quiet everywhere really, the Prank silencing them all except Sev, who spat with fury and grabbed her arm and tugged her away from Gryffindors even as she wished she had the courage to be one.
The candles had burnt low in the room and there had been no mirrors, nothing for Lily to look at except James as she floated outside and inside herself all at once. Except his voice, and the way he touched her slow and patient.
“How does that feel? Do you like that?”
She had watched the sweat trickle on his forehead, his eyes vulnerable without glasses to act as a barrier between them and the world. James was sharp and firm while she was soft and round and she didn’t quite know if the puzzle pieces of them would fit yet.
“Have you done this before?” Lily had asked. She couldn’t look at him to see how he looked at her, eyes skittering away. Did he hate her fat, curved stomach compared to his muscled one? The way her thighs wobbled. How her tits bounced, and so much of her with them.
But he had waited until she caught his gaze again.
“Yeah,” he had said openly. He kissed her cheek. “Is that okay?”
And then later, him sliding into her, every moment along the way. “You can say no, you know, we can stop. Does that feel good? How about here? I like that, do you like that?”
Pressing into her, pausing, waiting, patient, so patient, so kind.
*
When she lets herself back into the prefect’s compartment, Sirius Black is there.
Remus has his knees pulled up to his chest, her coat around him like a shield. If anything, he looks even more tired than he did at the station, eyes simmering and expression pressed closed. There is a red scar wrapped around his throat.
“...I’ll go,” Sirius is saying. “I just wanted to let you know.”
“Okay,” Remus says blankly. “Now I know.”
When he turns around, Sirius honestly seems startled by her, like he doesn’t realise that she or anyone else can exist in the vicinity of Remus. With his straight Roman nose, olive skin and silver piercings glinting in the sun, Sirius could be a model out of Witch Weekly. But now something in him is peaky, skinny. Under his eyes looks bruised, his wrists too thin. In six months he has become utterly shatterable.
“Evans,” he says politely as he steps around her.
She nods at him as he throws one last fleeting look at Remus and disappears.
“What did he want?” Lily can’t help but ask as the door closes and she settles in opposite Remus. She pulls out a chocolate frog and hands it to him. He takes it shakily, lets out a breath.
“Nothing.”
They don’t keep secrets from each other, her and Remus. They just don’t tell the whole truth.
“Ah,” Lily says.
*
Thestrals pull up with carriages to take students to the castle. Lily can see them thanks to her dead grandmother, but they still unnerve her as she and Remus help organise second and third years into each ride.
“I can’t find my bloody robes.” She can hear James complaining over the din of students catching up on their summer. “Oi, dickheads, have you taken my robes?” His shoulders are broad as he reaches arm deep into a bag.
“They have to be here somewhere,” Peter Pettigrew squeaks nervously. He sidles his way around precariously stacked trunks and picks up his feet as if the lost item will suddenly appear beneath them.
Sirius leans with fraught casualness against a carriage. “Minnie is going to kill you mate.”
But already Remus is trudging towards his friends, black fabric scrunched in one hand. When he reaches James, he presses the crumpled robes into his chest and James stumbles back a step. Remus has his mouth in a grim line, face empty.
“Here you go.” They are the same robes James had placed under Remus to keep him comfortable while he and Lily snuck away to have sex. It sends a frisson of tension down her, the lurid public evidence that they have misplaced. But James doesn’t look at her, doesn’t seem shocked or nervous.
His hazel eyes are pleading. James says, “Remus –”
Remus walks away.