by lilevans on archiveofourown.org
your heart weighs down on my shoulders
and your wide eyes lose me at sea
your words make a fire and smoulder
you are the moon pulling tides over me.
- deep the water by lewis watson.
Sometimes, he thinks that loving Lily is like repeatedly letting the ocean fill his lungs. Like she’s this impossible puzzle and he thinks he’s never going to get it right. Like now, for instance.
She’s glaring him through her eyeliner and her bright eyes, terrifying, beautiful, and incredibly stubborn. She won’t budge from this. He knows that, and he’s fucked.
“Lil, come on.”
She narrows her eyes at him further, arms crossed, combat boots planted firmly on the dirt ground beneath her. “No.”
Something beneath her skin softens for a split second as she shifts her weight. Because sometimes, she thinks that loving James is like going against the tide and the currents and every piece of rhyme or reason. And right now, she’s going against rhyme and reason and logic and every molecule of her body telling her to run back to him.
“I can’t keep doing this, Jim.”
She nearly breaks when she says his nickname. Her lip trembles. But her glare and her firm stance on the ground stay put.
James shifts again in disbelief, taking a step closer to her again. She doesn’t move.
“What?” he says, his words quiet, scared, reckless.
As he moves forward again, she steps back.
“We’re going in circles. How many more times are we going to have this argument? We’ll argue about what we want and how we want completely different things when we finish school! You want to play soccer and I want to solve crimes and we’ll end up arguing about it and kick and scream…”
“But we’re always fine, Lil! We always fix it.”
She scoffs. “And then we break it! We’re fine, we’ll lay in bed in the sun for days, we’ll joke around with the boys like nothing happened and I love nothing more than those moments with you. Then it happens again. We fight again, we end up here, and we go around and around and around. When will it end?”
“When you decide that you don’t love me anymore, Lil! Cuz we both know you’ll stop loving me before I stop loving you.”
Something within her snaps. Instead of stepping back, she steps forward in anger. “Fucking what?”
He gulps, gasping for air. The ocean is filling up his lungs again. He is running out of time.
“Lil. We’ve always known that I’ve loved you more than you love me.”
“That’s such fucking bullshit!” She screams. Right now, it felt like she was ready to give up on going against rhyme and reason. For real.
“Really? Is it?” he spits. He’s just as angry as she is now, his automatic defence against heartbreak.
“Of bloody course it is! Do you think I didn’t love you even when you blew up my toaster? When you took me out for that expensive dinner and Sirius had taken all your cash so I had to pay for the whole thing? Do you think I minded? No, because I love you! Do you think I care that you’re late for everything and wear mismatched socks and taste like cigarettes? I love all of that about you, and I would give up breathing tomorrow if you asked me too.”
He can’t do anything but look at her. She breathes in.
“Don’t you dare tell me I love you less because I have always loved you this much. And that’s why I’m standing here, telling you I can’t do it anymore. Because I love you so much that I’ve been self-destructive. Going against reason to be with you and keep myself sane.”
She’s turning around to walk away, but he can’t let her. He grabs her wrist, softly, and she whips around in a whirl of red hair and smudged eyeliner and the brightest eyes he’s ever seen.
She wrenches her arm out of his grip again. She doesn’t walk away, but distances herself once more.
“Okay, nobody loves anymore more or less. But if you think that I’m going to let you walk away just like that, you’ve got another thing coming, Lil. You still loved me when I blew up the toaster and your eyes are fucking beautiful and you accidentally killed your fish and cried about it for a whole day and I love you even though sometimes I swear I forget to breathe around you.”
Lily, too, stops remembering how to breathe for a moment. A tear slides down her cheek.
“We can’t keep doing this.” She insists quietly.
“Why not?” James pushes back, determined. He’s never let anything go easily, and he’s not about to start with lily. She’s the last thing he’d let go at the end of the whole fucking world.
“Because we’re going to different places when we finish school and not seeing you every day is going to rip a hole in my stomach if I don’t rip the band aid off now.”
James finally realises what this is really about. Why she picked a fight in the first place.
“You got into Cambridge, didn’t you?”
She gives him the wateriest of smiles.
“Yes.”
They both seem to soften, the distance between them seeming to close even though neither of them have moved from their spots in the dirt. They almost melt into each other, then and there.
James takes a step. Lily shifts, caught out, but doesn’t move yet.
“Lil, that’s amazing!” He can’t contain a smile. She never shuts up about that school.
“Is it? Cambridge is on the other side of the country, and I… I don’t want to leave you behind. Or Sirius or Remus or Peter or Marlene… I can’t-”
James steps towards her in long-limbed and lanky awkwardness, cautiously closing the gap between them. Her eyeliner runs down her freckled cheeks in watery lines.
“We’ll figure something out,” He murmurs. “It’s all you’ve ever wanted.” His hands cup her cheeks to wipe away those smudgy tears. She flinches, but lets him.
“But it’s so far away,” she replies despairingly. “From everything. From you.”
“It’s not like we’ll fade into nothing, Lil.”
“Jim.” She says it so tenderly his knees tremble beneath him. She says it the same way someone you love says, “It’s time to give up.”
“We’ll work something out, Lil. We always do.” He chokes out. He doesn’t want to hear her say his name like that. He knows what it means. His throat is closing up. The world is ending. He can feel the sky falling onto his lungs as he lets out a trembling, soft sob.
“Potter…” She trails off, eyes wide and sad, mouth agape.
“Evans,” he looks right at her, hazel eyes into green. “We can do this.”
“James… I’m not saying all this because I don’t love you enough, but because I do. I can’t drag you along and expect you to wait or follow or withstand the distance between us when I go. What are you gonna do when I leave?”
James scoffs. “For someone so so smart, you’re so thick sometimes. You know I’d follow you anywhere.”
She sniffles. “What about the boys?”
“You know they’d follow you anywhere you asked them to in a heartbeat without thinking too.”
“But I can’t ask you all to do that.”
He shrugs, hopeful and determined. “Then don’t. Just let us.”
“Come with me to London? What would you do? Where would you go?”
“We’d find something to do. It’s us. And it’s you. We’d wing it, and it’d be awesome.”
He’s got this look on his face, that mischievous smirk, the one she thought was annoying when she was 11, the one she thought was hot when she was 16, the one she’s in love with right now. The smile that would convince her to jump into oblivion. The one that could make her weak at the knees and convince her to do anything at all.
“James…”
“Lily,”
She bits her lip.
“But we still fight like mad. We still have dumb arguments and we still hate each other and hurt each other and we’re always going to be convinced that something will go wrong, and I-”
“Everything goes wrong, Lil, that’s just what life is. If everything went right, I would have been your boyfriend by age 11, your husband by age 16 and a football superstar by age 17. But life doesn’t work that way.”
She laughs, giddy and messy.
“We fight. We love. We laugh. You’ll have dumb arguments with Sirius about Downton Abbey and tell Remus that Gatsby and Nick were gay; we’ll have screaming matches and be fine by the morning. We’ll uproot our lives, move to London, and pretend to know what we’re doing when we don’t. But we’ll be together and you’ll be right where you’ve always wanted to be.”
She smirks. She’s been won over, and she knows it now.
“In London?”
He wraps his arms around her as she leans into him, head on his chest. He places a soft kiss atop her head. “Yes, but you know where I’ll be?”
“Causing trouble?” She raises a brow.
He pokes her ribs playfully.
“Yes. But mostly, I’ll just be right where you need me to be.”
She looks at him and crinkles her nose. “So, on the corner of the universe furthest away from me, then.”
“Ha-ha.” Sarcasm fills his tone. “No, Lil. Right next to you. Against Rhyme or reason.” He’d drown in the ocean any day of the week if he could be right next to her.
“Against rhyme and reason. I quite like the sound of that. Even if you’re infuriating and broke my toaster.”