They say the last sense you lose before death is hearing. James doesn’t know what that means until he is on the floor and hears the scream prising itself from his wife’s throat. That heavy feeling of living in a dream, somewhat prophetically but being unable to pull himself forward, even as Lily is dying at the top of the stairs, her face in his imagination luminous somehow and ghostly pale – he thinks that is the most intimate form of helplessness. A ringing corrupts the clarity, a faraway soprano spiraling on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and he can’t remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it is tonight. The slowing of reality, the open texture of everything… The truth of it doesn’t scare him anymore, but God help him, he hears everything.

…Shouting, “Dada, Dada–”, kissing the tight knot at his shoulder, kicking those blue legs up in delight, pyjamas flapping wildly, until the covers are all over the carpet. He loves the mad proportions of Harry’s grin. Each syllable that bubbles out of his mouth is a small, star-hot joy. 

“Tell him to quiet down, will you!” floats Lily’s voice from the kitchen. 

James turns, scrambling for his glasses with one hand and holding his son with the other, gripping Harry’s pudgy waist as he squeals – the force of those baby lungs and how they are capable of making such noise, James will never begin to understand.

“I will if you explain how!” James shouts back, “Because I swear he came out of your womb yelling, Lily!”

There is a faint smell of toast, and the peppered smell of those eggs with frilly edges Lily had promised Harry on Halloween morning. He finally manages to wrestle the glasses onto his face, but Harry keeps trying to paw them off until they wobble on the bridge of his nose.

“Oi, trouble,” scolds James fondly, blowing a curl of dark hair from his son’s forehead, “You’ll have plenty of time to break stuff once you get to Hogwarts.” 

Harry slaps a small palm onto James’ cheek in glee.

“Merlin’s balls,” he cries out theatrically, clutching the side of his face though it doesn’t sting at all, “Lily, can you please come control your son and stop him from terrorising me again!”

“Just come to the kitchen,” comes Lily’s voice, “Breakfast’s nearly done.”

Grinning, James swings his feet over the bed and bounces Harry on his toes in an effort to get him to walk. “C’mon, you heard your mother. March.”

Downstairs, the downpour of morning light spills over everything, like a sunroom. Lily’s hair is glowing amber. Flour dusts the sleeve of her sweater and the insides of her palms. There’s that freckle just under her chin that she hates and he loves. James looks out at the sweet, endless blue of the sky, then the woman in front of him to whom he’s married. The house smells like wood.

“What?” says Lily, smiling in that bright, cheeky way she does when she catches him staring.

“Nothing,” James replies, “Just admiring the view.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “Sit down, you sap. You’re hopeless.”

“Hopelessly handsome,” he corrects, stretching out his long limbs and tugging a callous hand through the mop of hair on his head. “Hopelessly charming. Hopelessly –”

“– Hopelessly insufferable, you mean.” 

“Ouch.” James huffs, slumping down at the table, “You do know how to break an old man’s heart, Lils.”

She leans forward and kisses him on the head. “Eat before it gets cold.”

Cold. The morning is cold on Christmas Eve a year ago. In the dim light of Dumbledore’s office he sits shaking, sleet falling in low-strung lines outside the windows. Sometimes, when reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a glide and the small things fill an eternity. The indigo of a vein. Lily’s head thrown back in shock like a dead girl’s.

“What do you mean?” he says, comes to realise the meaning of each word only after seconds have passed.

“But you have nothing to worry about,” answers Dumbledore, though he hears only a disjointed sentence. “The Fidelius Charm will do the trick. You will be under the protection of the Order of the Phoenix.”

“But why?” murmurs Lily, her hands coming up to clutch at her mouth, “Why Harry?”

“There are some things no one can explain, Lily,” Dumbledore replies, “We only know that the prophecy has been leaked and you are likely his new target.”

“But he’s… He’s just a baby,” she croaks, “How can he be the one who saves the world? How is that fair? How is that fair at all?”

She talks of fairness with a defiant voice that sounds like a child’s. Because she is only twenty, so too is he, and she thinks of the world still in bright colours and the invariable rules of right and wrong. James can’t look at her. His eyes are fixed on the bead of wax that crawls down the side of the candle on Dumbledore’s desk like slow-dragged blood. 

Dumbledore folds his hands in his lap gently like he is trying not to startle a wounded deer. “I truly am sorry. But I can promise you that you will both be well protected. That is all that we can hope for, isn’t it?”

“But what does that mean?” Lily asks. “What does any of it mean for him? For us?”

“What it means is that you must go into hiding.”

The horror of the sentence is a gut punch to James. Things are becoming white on the edges, and it suddenly seems that he has no past, no future, no memories, that he has been on this hissing, gravel road toward death for centuries and centuries on end.

Instead, he curls his fingers over Lily’s and says, “We’ll figure it out. Lils, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll make it work.”

“I just want him safe,” she says fiercely, “That’s all, that’s all, and –”

“– And a very happy eighteenth birthday to our beloved Prongs!” Sirius tosses his hands into the air, firewhiskey exploding out of the bottle and splashing callously down his wrists. The night is still young; woodsmoke swirls into laughter as his friends sway around the clearing with mouths bruised by burgundy wine. James feels warm, his insides are fizzing if that has ever been possible, but the one face he is looking for is that of Lily Evans’. He is a man on a mission. He cranes his neck and scans the crowd for red hair, a shade of sunset he’s memorised by accident over so many years, green eyes like jades or sparkling lime drinks, so bright that they spark into his darkest nights. 

And then there she is. She is so beautiful he feels he might faint (he is a man prone to exaggeration but this one is not so). Looking back at this, he sometimes thinks that he has not known beauty until he met her, because look at how the firelight halos her hair, look at how the glitter streaks across her cheekbones, look at the easy, careless way she tosses her head back at something someone has said. This is how beauty can be a living, breathing thing.

He must have looked terrible, like a puppy starved for colour, because Sirius elbows him impatiently in the ribs. “Go get her, birthday boy.”

James rolls his eyes but takes a step anyway, and when Lily meets his gaze everything suddenly feels concentrated and electric, doomed elation.

“Happy birthday, Potter,” she says when he reaches her, thrusting a paper cup of firewhiskey into his hand. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Because you’re here,” he murmurs.

She bumps her shoulder into his with a scoff, but she’s biting back her grin. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Completely,” he says. “And yours.”

Her breath catches. Teeth come biting down shyly on plum-coloured lips. “James…”

Someone lights a charm above them and sparks rain down in shimmering red and gold. Lily’s face glows. James wishes he could freeze her just like this: pink cheeks, eyes wonder-wide. He thinks that he wants a thousand more nights like this. A thousand more years. A whole lifetime.

Lifetimes are terribly, awfully short. He realises this when his father dies, and then his mother in sixth year. She’d been sick for a while, but the news hits him anyway. You can anticipate the grief for years and years, prepare for it, steel your heart all you want, but it will never compare to the grief of the loss when it eventually comes crashing. Perhaps beneath all of that young bravado he still held a candle-wick of hope that maybe if he could love her enough, if he could send her the high voltage of his life-force through boxes of chocolates and tender letters that she might just make it through, that she might beat all odds and prove everyone wrong. Her death comes at the end of August, a late Summer death that breaks something very young within him.

He sits for hours on the Astronomy tower, dangling his bare feet over the ledge and smoking. There is an emptiness, he feels, that can only be assuaged by drawing that sticky rot into his lungs. Blackened soot. Blackened sky. The orange glow of that paper delight against starless twilight. He watches the ember burn down to his fingertips. Grief changes its shape every hour. At this hour it is a stillness so total that he feels the world has stopped spinning.

“Oh my god,” comes a startled voice from behind him, but he doesn’t care enough to turn back around. “Please come down from there. You’ll fall.”

“Sure,” James responds emptily, unmoving and unblinking.

“Potter?” A glimpse of red hair tells him that it’s Lily Evans. Last year he might have been humiliated to allow his crush to see him like this, but this year he finds that he doesn’t have enough in him to care. Everything kind has been crushed in his life, and new loves seem vacant. He thinks she doesn’t care much for him anyway. She’s made that plenty clear throughout the years.

“Potter,” she says firmly, “Please come down.”

“Why?” His voice doesn’t even sound like his. “What difference does it make if I sit three feet back or three feet forward? My mum’s dead. Nothing changes. She’s still dead.”

“No,” she agrees, “But it changes whether you’ll be here tomorrow to miss her.”

He huffs, a half-laugh that stutters into a wheeze. “I don’t know if that matters.”

“It matters to me,” she replies immediately, and then her breath catches like maybe she hadn’t meant to reveal that much, but she takes nothing back nevertheless. He looks at her green eyes, and then back at the drop of darkness beneath his feet. It looks like a long way down.

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” pushes Lily, “God, yes, really. What do you take me for?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, “I just never thought you really cared for me, that’s all.”

When he looks back at her, her expression is fierce. “James,” she says, “Just because I don’t let you breeze through life like everything’s a joke, doesn’t mean I don’t care about you.”

He swallows. The ember between his fingers gutters low, then dies. Smoke curls up like a ghost. He climbs back over the ledge and watches the girl in front of him exhale in relief.

“I’m not trying to make anything a joke,” he says, “I’ve never done that to you.”

Lily blinks in the dark. “Oh.” She says nothing for a long time.

“I’m so sorry you’re hurting,” she whispers at last, “Can I walk you back to the Gryffindor tower?”

James looks at her, swallows, nods. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she smiles, “Really.”

The haze of summer passing by. The haze of years. On the Quidditch quad in fifth year he dangles Severus Snape upside down and laughs. At fifteen he thinks cruelty is just another shade of charm. He thinks life is perfect. It’s an intoxicating feeling to be young and adored. 

“Let him down!” Hair like a war banner. Voice shrill with youthful displeasure.

James whips around and grins at the girl approaching. He thinks she’s beautiful, and it helps that she’s a Gryffindor – proud and brave and righteous like him. He thinks he’ll marry her someday.

“Only if you go out with me, Evans,” he runs a hand through his hair and fixes his crooked glasses.

Lily’s jaw sets. Her eyes are furious, green like fresh leaves bruised underfoot. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Yes,” James agrees cockily, “I am. Can you believe that?”

She is unimpressed. “What is wrong with you?” she says, like she is trying to understand him, and the insult hits its mark painfully despite the brave front he puts up, “Is this who you want to be?”

He doesn’t know what to say. A tide of feeling he can’t name comes rising up over young pride and arrogance.

“Grow up,” she narrows her eyes, jabs a finger at his chest, and he recoils, “You’re better than this.”

And then, the tick of a wand, something grotesque slithers out of Severus Snape’s mouth.

Mudblood.

He reads about the rising Dark Lord at the Gryffindor table at thirteen. Thirteen is the age of wonder, it is the age of discoveries, it is the age when everything feels possible but nothing feels very final. James thinks Dark Lords belong in the margins of newspapers. They don’t touch the bones of boys who think they can outrun the world because they can do anything.

At thirteen, Sirius pops fresh grass flavoured jelly beans into his mouth and says, “Well, he’s not getting into Hogwarts. Dumbledore wouldn’t let him.”

And at thirteen, James grins and says, “C’mon mate, they’ll never get us.”

In seven years he will love so much that he won’t hesitate to die. He will lie on the floor of his house and hearing will be the only thing left of him. In seven years he will listen to Lily Evans Potter scream and drop like a marionette and he will be able to do nothing. In twenty-four years his son will look his mirage dead in the eyes and he will say, “We are… so proud of you.” He will say, “Until the very end.”

But that is lifetimes away. The war can’t touch him at thirteen.

When he is eleven he kisses his mother goodbye at the train station. The sky is brilliantly blue, everywhere, spreading all fire across the horizon. He finds a little red-headed girl and he stares at her for hours. He thinks she’s beautiful. He thinks he’ll marry her someday. When the train grinds to a start and rushes past rolling hills, open skies, James Potter thinks with a grin that he has all the days in the world waiting for him, and they are all brighter than this one.