Chapter Text
The Hogwarts Express smells exactly the same.
Coal smoke. Pumpkin pasties. Something metallic underneath, like the engine is breathing.
Seven years of this. One left.
Lily sets the thought down before it can sink its teeth in.
She got here early. Easier that way — her mum on the first train, paper cups of tea between them, neither of them talking much. Which is its own kind of language, now. The hug at the barrier lasted longer than it should have. Write, her mum said. I will, Lily promised.
She always promises.
She never writes enough.
Pumpkin yowls softly in his carrier at her feet. She crouches to press two fingers through the wire. He butts his head against them.
Okay, she thinks. Okay.
The platform fills up around her — families, trunks, owls complaining loudly about everything. She watches it all with the particular attention of someone who knows she is running out of times to watch it.
And then she sees him.
James Potter.
He's on the far end of the platform with his parents and — God, he's taller. She knew that, she'd known he was tall, she comes up to his shoulder and always has — but something about the summer has settled into him differently. He's broader. Filled out. And he's standing with his parents in that easy, unthinking way of his, the three of them laughing at something, and his mother reaches up to straighten his collar and he lets her, bowing his head slightly, patient and warm—
He looks up.
Catches her eye across thirty feet of crowded platform.
He raises a hand. Small. Unhurried. Smiling like he's pleased to see her and isn't trying to make anything of it.
She raises her hand back before she can decide not to.
Don't, she tells herself.
She doesn't listen.
"There she is." Mary MacDonald materializes from the crowd with her arms already open. "Head Girl. My best friend, the Head Girl — I want you to know I will be insufferable about this."
Lily laughs — a real one, surprised out of her — and lets herself be pulled in. Mary smells like that shampoo, the good one in the blue bottle. She's wearing new robes. Her parents would have picked them out carefully. Well-made, they'd have said. Practical.
"You were insufferable long before this."
"True." Mary pulls back and holds her at arm's length. Studying. She always studies. "You look well. Tired, but well."
"I'm fine."
"I didn't ask."
A beat. The platform noise fills the gap between them.
"I worked a lot," Lily says. "This summer. I worked a lot."
Mary's face shifts — just slightly — and squeezes her arm once before letting go. "We'll talk on the train."
She means it. She always means it.
That's why Lily loves her.
Marlene McKinnon arrives next — dramatic, because she's always dramatic, she was dramatic at eleven and she'll be dramatic in the grave — from the expensive end of the platform, where the families stand further apart and someone else handles the luggage. New robes. Made for her, because they were made for her. A streak of pale blonde threaded through her dark hair that she is absolutely daring someone to comment on.
"Before you say anything—"
"I wasn't—"
"The colour is exceptional."
"Marlene—"
Lily is still laughing when she spots him again.
James, without his parents now. Moving through the crowd toward the train. Easy to track — he's a head above most of the platform, dark hair its usual catastrophe, glasses slightly askew. Sirius beside him, matching his stride, and there's something in the way they move together that has always made her think of people who have never once in their lives wondered if they belong somewhere.
Remus emerges just behind them — even taller than James, which still startles her, it shouldn't anymore but it does — scanning the platform with that quiet alertness of his, the way he's always slightly braced for the next thing. Their eyes meet. He nods. She nods back.
"Oh," says Marlene, very softly.
"Don't."
"I didn't—"
"You were going to."
Marlene closes her mouth. But she's smiling. And Lily resolves — firmly, sincerely — to find it annoying.
The Heads' compartment is at the front of the train.
Lily tells herself the fact that she's already there, bag arranged, Pumpkin settled, patrol schedule in hand — tells herself it has nothing to do with wanting five minutes before she's in an enclosed space with James Potter.
She reads the parchment again. Three inches long. She's memorised it. She reads it anyway.
He knocks on the open door.
She hadn't expected that. Last year, he wouldn't have knocked.
"Evans." He has to angle himself slightly to get the trunk through — she doesn't notice this, she's looking at the parchment — and swings it up to the rack. Drops into the seat across from her. His glasses are crooked. Up close, the summer is even clearer in him. Rolled sleeves. The lean muscle of his forearms. Something settled in the way he takes up space.
Don't, she tells herself.
She keeps not listening.
"Good summer?" he asks.
"Good enough. You?"
"Yeah." He doesn't fill the silence. She's always hated boys who fill silences with noise.
She hates that she notices.
"Your cat's enormous," James says. "What happened to him?"
"He just grew."
"He looks like he eats other cats."
"He's very gentle."
James leans forward to look at Pumpkin — she does not observe how far he has to bend to do it, she is not observing that — and Pumpkin looks back at him with the slow, contemptuous blink of an animal that has seen many things and judged all of them poorly.
Then he puts his head on Lily's knee and closes his eyes.
James looks at her.
She looks at the parchment.
"He's particular about people," she says.
The conversation moves on. The schedule. The patrol routes. His voice when he's actually listening and not just waiting for her to finish — she knows the difference, now, which is its own kind of problem.
There she is, he says, when she tells him she wants the fourth floor corridor.
Don't push it, Potter.
Never, he says, in that tone.
She looks at the window.
Don't, she thinks.
She already knows she won't listen.
Hogsmeade station arrives as the sun gets low, the mountains going purple-grey, and Lily steps onto the platform and watches the first-years being herded toward the boats and feels the ache of it.
Seven years. She knows every corridor. Every shortcut. Every step that creaks on the moving staircases, every ghost's favourite haunt. She knows which professors want a specific kind of answer and which just want her to be honest and she knows — in the way she knows very few things with complete certainty — that this place made her.
The war is out there.
She knows that too.
It hasn't come inside Hogwarts yet — or it's tried and Dumbledore's kept it out — but it seeps under doors and through the post. She's felt it for two years. That low hum of something coming.
She's muggle-born. So she feels it differently. It isn't abstract.
It has a specific address.
The thestrals are waiting between the carriage traces — bony, black-winged, white eyes catching the lamplight. She's seen them since fourth year. Since the September after her father died. She stepped off the train and there they were, and she understood immediately what it meant that she could see them.
She reaches out as she passes and rests her fingers against a warm, leathery neck.
It turns toward her.
"Ready?"
James. Beside her, suddenly. He has the natural ease of someone who doesn't overthink proximity. She finds it —
She finds it. That's all. She finds it.
He looks at the thestral. She watches him register that she can see it.
He doesn't ask.
That, she thinks, is new.
"Ready," she says.
They walk toward the carriages without talking. It's comfortable. She's still getting used to that.
The castle comes into view through the window as the thestrals pull them forward — towers, lit windows, flags snapping in the September wind — and Lily watches it and thinks:
One more year.
She can do this.
She can absolutely, completely, entirely do this.
She looks at the window.
She doesn't look at James.