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They’re up in the heavens, gods looking down over the grounds as the dawn breaks—and breaks is right because it feels like the light is shattering, hard and sharp against the rough cast of frost. The Black Lake glitters like shards of glass. It is the silver hour between the darkness and the dawn, the borderline between what can and cannot be said. There’s a heaviness to the air, nascent mist that is yet to settle and obscure the harsh, splintering light that paints them in painful clarity.
James glances over at Lily. She’s leaning against the windowsill of the Astronomy Tower, each gentle breath leaving a cloud of condensation on the windowpane that spreads out and folds in on itself in steady rhythm. There are purple rings beneath her eyes. James knows the kind of bone-tiredness they signify because he’s seen it in Remus’ face too many times, saw it in Sirius’ on the night when he turned up at Peverell Hall, panting and agonised. He’s seen it in his own face when he stands in the Prefects’ bathroom and looks at his reflection, and tries to forget the sound of Mary Macdonald’s screams.
“The world’s decided to lose its mind, hasn’t it?”
Lily breaks the silence. James blinks, focussing on her again, pulling himself back from his thoughts to watch her breath on the window shift and syncopate. Her voice is hollow. That’s the only way James can describe it—smooth-edged and hollow in the middle. When he opens his mouth and replies, his voice sounds like splintering wood in comparison.
“Yeah,” he says, and he knows that’s a weak response, a pathetic answer, “it has.”
They’d been called to a meeting in the early hours of the morning. The professors, dressing gowns pulled tight around them, sat stony-faced in the staff common room as Dumbledore swept into the room. He’d lifted a hand and spoken, told them of the terrible, dreadful news: a wizarding family ten miles from the castle have been murdered, slain in their beds. War, it seems, has come to Hogwarts.
Lily wouldn’t go back to the Gryffindor common room afterwards. She’d looked at him, eyes reflecting the candlelight like flames conjured in green lanterns, and asked him to stay with her while she got some air in the Astronomy Tower. They’re still there, watching the indigo retreat and the day take its place.
“Kiss me,” Lily says, looking at him. Her voice is full now; hollow no more, it is rich and warm and strong. It is the supple sound of a bow string, firing arrows into James’ lovestruck heart. “Kiss me,” she repeats, the words shaking a little now, “because I would have kissed you before now, if I weren’t such a coward.”
The blush of love that creeps up James’ cheeks is raspberry, fading to rose at the line of his jaw. He pulls at his bottom lip with his teeth, and then pushes himself up from where he’s been resting his shoulder against the cold stone wall. There’s hardly any distance to close between them, but it feels like an eternity—James can’t feel his feet from the cold, and his steps are stumbling. But then they’re pressed against each other, and Lily’s hands are in the soft hair at the nape of his neck, and her freezing fingers are dipping beneath his collar and against the skin that is burning for her.
She tastes like the morning. She tastes like the way the light looks, sharp and beautiful. It’s not like everyone said it would be—fireworks, or summer days, or mallowsweet sugarlumps. No, she tastes like January winds and like frost on bright red berries and like the heat of the fire against cold hands, burning. Lily Evans tastes like coming home; she feels like the shuddering breaths of the winter, powerful, holy. She is beauty in the barrenness and she is the sharp shock of snow, and she is wonder, wonder and awe.
They pull apart. There’s something alight in Lily’s eyes, a ghost of a smile playing at her lips. She pulls him close again so their foreheads rest together.
“Happy Birthday,” James whispers, as their noses brush against each other. “Happy Birthday, Ev—Lily.”