And James did forget. More or less. Lily started spending weekends at the flat. She was glowing with her new life—radiant, fierce, always scribbling patient notes on napkins and recounting long training shifts at St Mungo’s with a Healer’s precision and a Gryffindor’s heart. Her eyes sparkled when she talked about her cases, even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones. She was alive in a way that made the flat feel brighter, more real.
In August, James introduced her to his parents.
Monty took to her instantly —beaming across the table, delighted, hanging on every word like she was the most fascinating person he’d ever met. He laughed too loudly at her jokes, offered her seconds before she asked.
Effy was more reserved.
She appraised Lily with sharp-eyed precision—cool, measured, politely interested. Lily had worried, afterwards, that she hadn’t made a good impression.
James had reassured her. That’s just how mum is.
And it was true. Euphemia Potter could be sharp when she wanted to be. She liked things done properly. She had no patience for fools, and even less for people who wasted her time. But that wasn’t the whole of her. She was also fiercely intelligent, quietly loyal, and exacting in her affections—not out of cruelty, but out of care. When she decided someone was worth her time, that was it. Done. Unquestioned. But getting there—that took something. Not a particular quality, as far as James could tell. Not charm, or wit, or bloodlines. She was maddeningly unpredictable about who she took to.
Sirius, for instance, had taken months. He was practically family now, but Effy’s fondness hadn’t come easy. She had watched him. Weighed him. And then, one day, it had simply been . As if it had never been in question.
Peter was different. She’d known him since he was small—by rights, he ought to have been her favourite of James’s friends. But no. That title belonged, firmly and without contest, to Remus. James had never understood why. He’d long since given up trying to find a pattern.
By November, Effy had started asking Lily pointed questions about her rotation schedule. By early December, she was clipping articles from The Lancet Magicalum and sliding them across the breakfast table, her expression faintly sly as she suggested—almost offhand—that Lily might consider applying to the Curse Damage Unit. She even offered to write a reference. And that, James knew–was her stamp of approval.
Christmas came and James’s father sat him down and told him about the Order of The Phoenix.
James joined immediately.
So did Sirius.
Effy didn’t speak to Monty for a week—not even when he offered to reorganise the St Mungos potions archive in penance. She sent messages through the owl. Refused to sit at the same table as him. And hexed all the tomato plants he’d been carefully cultivating in the green house.
She tried—unsuccessfully—to intimidate Alastor Moody into keeping James and Sirius out of the Order.
It didn’t work.
They were both eighteen. They could sign their names to the cause. As Moody pointed out to her gruffly, even if he did then avoid Euphemia Potter for several weeks afterwards.
“I’ve seen her wand work,” James heard him muttere to Monty at one point. “She’s at least as frightening as half the bastards I’ve thrown in Azkaban.”
Effy didn’t asked her son not to fight.
But she did tell him, once, on a rainy afternoon as he packed for his first mission, “don’t you dare die before me.”
James promised he wouldn’t
There were meetings in back rooms, names read aloud in careful voices, maps inked with red dots and strings of urgency. Plans whispered over pints and parchment. Everything felt sharpened. Alive.
Winter dragged its feet through late-night patrols and cold hands clutching coded messages, through meetings lit by guttering candlelight. Most nights, James felt like he was holding his breath.
March came and with it James’s birthday. He turned nineteen. Marlene, Dorcas and Mary came first, armed with wine and chocolate cake. Pete and Remus turned up later with a bottle of firewhisky. Lily was last to arrive. Fresh from her shift at St Mungo’s, cheeks wind-pinked, still in her Healer’s robes with the sleeves pushed up.
They talked about school. Old professors.
Who had kissed who behind which tapestry.
And, of course, Quidditch.
“My sister made the team,” Mary said proudly over cake, pushing her fork through the thick icing. “Seeker. Just like me.”
“Poor Slytherin,” muttered Sirius, mouth full of sugar.
Mary shrugged. “Not according to her. Apparently they’ve won every match.”
There was a chorus of groans.
“I’m sorry, what ?” said Sirius.
“She said they’re totally dominating,” Mary said grimly.
James, curious, leaned forward over his glass. “Who’d Vance pick for captain?”
“Rosier,” answered Mary.
James nodded, it was a good choice. Rosier had been sharp, controlled, relentless on a broom—someone who understood the tempo of a match inside and out. He was who James would’ve picked too, if he’d been in Vance’s shoes. James thought that he would’ve liked the chance to face off properly—him as Gryffindor captain, Rosier leading Slytherin. That would’ve been something. James didn’t say that bit out loud though, just smiled faintly at the thought.
Marlene, already half a bottle of wine deep and glowing from it, grinned and poked Dorcas in the ribs. “Remember that time on the pitch with him and James? What was that about, eh?”
Dorcas snorted. “I forgot about that,” she shook her head. “Rosier showed up—and me and Marls were expecting a fight,” she said to the table at large. “But then suddenly the two of them are all pally. Laughing. Joking. James tells us to sit down so he and Rosier can show us how it’s done.”
“I did not tell you to sit down,” James objected.
“You may as well,” said Dorcas with a roll of her eyes.
Mary giggled. “It’s true.”
“What?” Sirius cut in, frowning at James.
James shrugged. “I was showing Marls and Dory some offensive formations. He happened to know the set. Offered to fly it with me as a demonstration. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Sirius snapped. His eyes narrowed. “You cheated on me with an enemy Beater.”
James raised both hands in mock surrender. “Hey, you’re the one who got yourself thrown off the team. Not my fault I had to outsource.”
“That’s not the point,” Sirius muttered.
James rolled his eyes. “Come off it, mate. Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean he wasn’t a solid on a broom.” He hesitated, wine warming his blood. And then added—without thinking. “It was decent of him, actually.” He knew the second he’d said it, that it was a mistake.
Sirius glowered at him. “He's not decent. He’s a snake. And a prick. And you know it.”
James looked down at his hands. He didn't argue, but some part of him wanted to. The moment passed. They drank. Sirius got rowdy. Peter wheezed with laughter, nearly choking on cake. Marlene grew emotional and started declaring her undying love for everyone in the room, one by one, tears in her eyes and wineglass clutched like a holy relic.
Lily was radiant. Relaxed. Her head tipped back in laughter, her fingers twined loosely with James’s under the table, her thumb brushing gently over his knuckles. She looked at home. Happy.
Later, the flat quieted.
Peter, Marlene, and Mary drifted home. Dorcas fell asleep on the couch. Lily went to bed, fast asleep within minutes, snoring softly into James’s pillow. Remus made a show of taking the other couch in the living room, but James knew that the second he went up the stairs, he’d follow Sirius into his room. James didn’t begrudge them for keeping it a secret. Not really. He just thought it was sad, sometimes, how they still didn’t talk about it. Not openly. Not even now, when he was pretty sure everyone knew, or at least suspected.
James padded into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. The overhead light buzzed softly. The pipes clanked. Somewhere down the street, a fox screamed. He leaned against the counter, drinking slowly, and his eyes fell on Sirius’s abandoned pack of cigarettes. He snagged the packet, wrestled the window open, and—clumsily, not gracefully—climbed out onto the flat roof of the shop below.
The air was cool. The city was quiet.
The stars were out.
James lit a cigarette. Inhaled. Let the smoke curl from his lips into the dark.
He leaned back against the brick. Behind him, the kitchen window cast a warm square of light across the rooftop, soft and gold and steady. Below, the streetlamp flickered like it couldn’t decide whether to stay.
He stared up at the sky and found himself thinking about Evan Rosier.
He smiled faintly, lips tugging around the cigarette.
He was glad Evan made captain. He’d be good at it.
James exhaled smoke, watching it rise.
He thought hazily that it was a shame they hadn’t been in the same House. Maybe then they could’ve been friends.
Real ones.
Not just the strange, sideways almost-friendship that passed between them in nods across corridors and jokes about buckets.
He would’ve liked being Evan Rosier’s friend.
It was a quiet, absurd little truth, but it was true.
And it was the last thought he remembered before climbing back inside and collapsing into bed, clothes half-off. He woke the next morning with a skull-cracking headache, a parched throat, and absolutely no memory of anything past stepping down from the roof.
He didn’t remember having another firewhisky and thinking drunkenly that it really was a shame he and Rosier hadn’t been friends. Didn’t remember deciding that they should be. And he definitely didn’t remember scribbling a note—addressed, with drunken certainty, to:
Evan Rosier
Slytherin Quidditch Captain
Hogwarts.
Congratulations on making captain.
Don’t set fire to my pitch— J.P
That was the last good night James had.
The last night where the laughter felt easy.
Where the war felt like a call to action, and not a nightmare of death and loss that curled around him like iron talons, forcing the life out of him breath by breath.
Maya Gilbert was the first person he saw die. Two years above James. Ravenclaw. Muggle-born. Clever as anything. Always carried three books at once and had a laugh like sunlight through glass.
Gone in a flash of green light.
James didn’t sleep that night.
Then.
Julian Fawley.
Fellow Order member. Soft-spoken. Steady. Good with wards, even better with complicated spellwork. He had two young children, his wife pregnant with a third. They found his body in a ditch, limbs twisted and broken like some grotesque rag doll.
After that, it wasn’t schoolboys playing war.
It wasn’t honour.
Or ideology.
It was real. James learned what the Cruciatus Curse sounded like. Learned to spot the vacant dazed expression that the Imperious curse caused. Learnt why they called them Unforgivable.
That summer, he asked Lily to marry him.
It wasn’t planned.
It wasn’t romantic.
It was the day after a raid. One that went horribly wrong. There’d been a little girl—seven, maybe eight—caught in the crossfire. Screaming as hexes cracked overhead. Someone had shoved her behind a broken fountain. She hadn’t stopped crying, and then there'd been a flash of green and suddenly her cries had stopped. It had been horrible. He heard her panicked sobs in his dreams for weeks afterwards.
“Let’s get married,” he’d said, suddenly: almost desperately. Biting off the last part of the sentence, the part that echoed in his mind. While we still can, before it's too late.
She was making toast. She stopped, turned to him. Studied him for a long, unreadable moment. And then said, softly, “alright.”
They moved out of the London flat, found a small house in Godric’s Hollow. Quiet. Green. The kind of place that felt safe.
Two weeks later, Marlene was gone.
Taken.
It was another week before they found her body. And what they found wasn’t a body so much as a warning. James felt hollow. She loved to gossip, had always known things she shouldn't, used to cheat at Gobstones in second year. Teased him about his hair. Called him princess all of third year after finding out just how much Sleekeazy’s he went through a month. He didn’t speak for two full days after. He couldn’t.
Autumn came like a shroud.
And then winter.
A quiet Christmas. Him. Lily. Sirius. James’s parents.
They sat around a table too large for five. The fire crackled. The mulled wine went cold in half-drunk glasses. No one laughed. No one even really smiled.
Then: Gideon and Fabian Prewett.
James was there when they found them, it was new year’s day. You couldn’t tell who was who, their bodies broken beyond recognition, a mess of pale limbs and bright red hair, James vomited into a gutter: heaving as bitter bile stung his throat and tears burnt his eyes.
After that, he started saying the name.
Voldemort.
Openly. Deliberately.
He spat it like a curse. Refused to flinch. Refused to give silence more power than it already had.
He hated him.
Hated all of them.
Hated what they’d done to the world—to his friends.
The wedding date remained unset.
He couldn’t think about vows and flowers and cake when everything else was fire and blood.
Then Mary. Her family. All of them. Her parents. Her brother—ten years old. Her sister, sixteen and still at Hogwarts, home for the Christmas holidays.
Their house: reduced to ash. A Dark Mark above the ruins.
When Sirius found out, he screamed.
Not words. Not even rage. Just a sound—raw and broken and animal. He collapsed to the floor like something had torn straight through him.
Mary. Gone.
Mary, with her dark eyes and infectious giggle.
Mary, who James had known since he was six.
Mary, who was kind, and clever, and funny—
Gone.
James turned nineteen.
He didn’t celebrate.
Didn’t mention it.
He felt hollow.
Like something inside him had been scraped out, and there was no room left for grief. No space for more names. No space for more pain.
He was wrong.
“Regulus Black. Confirmed Death Eater. Missing.”
Just like that.
No hesitation. No weight.
Announced casually at the end of a meeting.
James couldn’t move.
Couldn’t speak.
The fear and dread that had plagued James through seventh year confirmed. That the boy with storm-grey eyes. The boy who kissed like he was afraid to be caught, who laughed like he wasn’t sure he deserved to, who had looked at James like he meant something—was one of them.
Regulus.
A Death Eater.
Regulus.
Missing.
James wasn't sure which was worse. Which hurt more. And Sirius—Sirius didn’t even blink.
Didn’t flinch. Didn’t care.
Just stared straight ahead, jaw tight, as if he’d never even had a brother.
James wanted to hit him.
Wanted to shout, don’t you feel anything? Don’t you care if he’s alive or dead?
But he didn’t.
Because to say that—to feel that—would mean telling the truth.
All of it.
And he couldn’t.
Something inside James broke that night. A part of his heart he didn’t even know was left to break. Broke for the sixteen-year-old who kissed him in the library stacks. Who traced the line of his jaw like he was afraid it might vanish. The boy who loved poetry and flew like he'd been born for the sky. The boy James had loved. Deeply. Foolishly. First.
James lay awake at night wondering if he could’ve done something. Stopped it. Said the right thing. Reached out. Held on tighter.
The question kept him up at night.
More than the missions.
More than the war.
Because the missions had plans. The war had rules.
But this —this silence, this loss without closure, this sick, spiralling not-knowing —this was a weight James carried alone.
And Lily...
It wasn’t Lily that was the problem.
She was still brilliant. Still kind. Still the fiercest, strongest person he knew.
He loved her.
He really did.
It was him.
He knew it.
Felt it in the space between them.
Saw it in her eyes sometimes—when she thought he wasn’t looking.
That quiet question, suspended like breath.
Like she was still waiting.
Still hoping the old James would come back.
The one who made her snort-laugh over toast.
The one who stopped mid-cooking just to kiss her, to spin her around the kitchen until they were both breathless.
The one who spoke in futures—
When this is over.
When we win.
When it’s done.
He wanted to be that person again. For her.
But he couldn’t.
He didn’t know how to explain it.
Didn’t know where to begin.
That it wasn’t her.
That it was him.
He felt hollow.
So he ran.
From it. From her. From himself .
He thought—maybe—if he just kept moving,
Kept doing,
Kept fighting,
He might start feeling again.
So he threw himself into the Order like it might save him.
Every mission. Every stakeout. Every raid.
First to volunteer. Last to leave.
Bruised knuckles. Blood under his fingernails.