I Loved You More

Chapter Thirty-Five

Little Fantasies

Lily had to force herself not to slam the door behind her as she left Dumbledore's office. She couldn't believe it--she would not be seeing James that weekend. If not this weekend, then it would be at least another week, and the thought of that was too....

Long.

She stepped off the staircase and turned down the corridor.

James would not want you to forget your life for him.

This was her life now. She could not forget it. And she could not forget him.

But Dumbledore wanted her to go about acting as if everything was dandy. As if the only thing she had to worry about was her exams. If only...

Lily's heels pounded the stone floor. As her blood pumped faster, her feet moved quicker, in rhythm with her anger.

"I think I know a little more about what James wants than he does!" she blurted, her voice rising so suddenly, it cracked.

Sirius's eyebrows lifted as he looked at her from the corner of his eye. "We could sneak out."

Lily peered at him. "Do you think we could?"

"Of course."

She put her hand to her forehead, feeling dizzy under the amount of relief that fell over her.

"But, Evans," said Sirius, very slowly. "Really, what's it gonna do if we go?"

Lily stopped in front of him. "What do you mean?"

Sirius leveled her with his eyes. "You know what I mean. He's not there. He won't know if we are."

"That doesn't mean we can just give up on him." She grabbed his shoulders, wanting to shake him. "Sirius, come on. Don't do this to me. Not you."

Lily thought she saw a spark of anger flashed through his eyes. "I'm not giving up on him. Of course not. He's Prongs." Then his face softened. He reached up and gently cupped his hands around her arms. "I just can't keep seeing him like that. I can't stand it. You know?"

Lily let her chin fall against her chest. She knew. She knew sneaking out of the school to visit him wasn't going to bring James's sanity back. She knew, and she hated it.

Grasping her forearm, Sirius twisted her around, tucking her into his side. They continued on their way back to the Tower, the same image of James's empty face haunting their minds, crushing everything else out.

When they crawled through the portrait hole, their silence was interrupted by the familiar sound of laughter coming from the common room fireplace. They looked around and saw Remus and Tara sitting with Summer and Peter by the fireplace. The normalcy of the little scene struck Lily. It could have been from any point of their lives at Hogwarts. It was hard to wrap her mind around the fact that they would go on doing the same things they used to when everything was so different. So torn apart.

It seemed fake.

Lily and Sirius approached the little group quietly. "Hey, you're back! How are you feeling?" asked Lily. She gave Tara a hug while Sirius delivered a friendly punch to Remus's arm.

"Amazing!" cried Tara, a dazzling smile on her face. "All the pain is gone. I'm thrilled to be out of that damn hospital wing!"

"The nurse had to stop her from bolting about six times," said Remus. "She was jumping out of her skin. Drove me mad."

Lily shoved a smile on her face. It felt awkward, as though her mouth had forgotten which direction to move. She wanted to sleep. "I'm glad you're back."

For their sake, Lily stuck it out for another hour. They played a game of Exploding Snap then turned in to their dormitories to study. Lily should have opened her books but instead she curled up in her bed with a quill and some parchment and shut the curtains. She penned out a quick letter to Mrs. Potter to ask how James and Mr. Potter were doing, then a longer one to James.

"Please read this aloud to him," she wrote to his mother.

From the moment Dumbledore refused to let her go back to St. Mungo's, a horrible fear had rooted itself into her stomach. What if James got better but did not know who she was because she hadn't gone to see him? Or worse, what if he did not get better at all because he wasn't hearing enough familiar voices? Maybe Mrs. Potter's voice reading her words would be close enough to her being there to speak to him herself. So she wrote to him by the stripe of candlelight poking through the crack in her bed curtains, keeping it light and chatty.

Dear James,

It's Lily. How are you doing? I miss you. I don't know if you can understand this but I hope you're getting better. Please get better.

It is so strange being at school without you. You've always been there. Classes are so quiet. Everything is quiet. Sirius doesn't know what to do with himself. The Marauders have been dormant without you, of course, and I bet that even the teachers are bored. Everybody misses you.

You'll probably laugh at this but, I'm a complete mess. You don't even want to hear about it, James. So please, just get better.

Exams are next week so everyone is busy studying. I'm trying to concentrate but it's hard, you know. I finally see what you have always told me about studying. It's overrated.

It's been very hot these last two days. Some of the younger kids have gone swimming in the lake. It reminds me of the time we both fell off our brooms into the water. I'm sure it's not that cold anymore. When you get back, we'll go swimming together.

Sirius says hi.

Please, please get better. I love you, James.

Lily

Lily signed it. She was smiling, thinking about the evenings she used to spend flying in the pitch with James and the night he led her out into the grounds when they pushed each other into the freezing water. Tears streamed down her cheeks, falling into her smile. The memories choked her, rid her of air.

Once again, sleep kept away from her tired mind. To calm her thoughts, she tried to picture Mrs. Potter reading her letter to James and James waking up from his trance and saying, "Is that from Lily?" and smiling when he thought of the memory, too. But the fear that nothing like this would ever really happen was too powerful for her weak little fantasies. She flipped around in the darkness, grasping for hope.

Finally, she sat up and peeked through the curtains. Tara was snoring heavily and Summer's steady breathing could be heard from her corner of the dormitory. Lily slid out of bed and crept out the door and down the stairs. The common room was dark and deserted. Lily tiptoed to the other side and climbed the stairs of the boys' dormitory. She opened the door. The room was silent. Oddly silent. Lily held her breath and darted for James's bed. Her refuge. Just as she was curling up under the covers and breathing in his smell, a voice made her freeze.

"Lily?"

Sirius's head poked out at her from behind his bed curtains, his face a pale blur in the thick darkness.

Lily's neck stiffened. She stared at him in silence, unable to find words. Sirius waited. "I...I..." she fumbled. "I can't sleep."

Sirius nodded and disappeared behind his curtains. "Okay," he whispered. "Goodnight, Evans."

In James's bed, Lily was finally able to believe her own hopes. She fell into a deep sleep, full of memories that made her smile.

* * *

It happened nearly the same way the next night. And the next. After that, Sirius gave Lily James's Invisibility Cloak and she stopped bothering with her own dormitory.

With sleep, Lily made it through her exams. She and Sirius sat up late in the dormitory studying every night. Summer, Tara, and Remus liked to take their books outside with the other students or join the study groups in the library. Lily and Sirius went with them a few times, but they preferred the quiet. Like Lily, it was harder for Sirius to push away thoughts of James, who was always the life of the party, when they were among a big group of friends.

Sirius didn't so much as study with Lily as lie on his bed and stare out the window. Sometimes he recited questions for Lily but other than that, they didn't speak much. When they did talk, they had a rule that had just sort of silently established itself between them. James wasn't gone. He was taking a little break but would be back soon, and talking about him any other way was against the rule. That was it. They never broke the rule.

Each night, before Remus and Peter came upstairs for bed, Lily wrote out another letter to James, always adding an additional note from Sirius at the bottom. She read Mrs. Potter's responses aloud, though they never changed. "James is the same. I think he liked your last letter, though. His eyes moved around a little while I was reading. Maybe they're working. Take care of yourself, dear."

Lily sat on James's bed with her spellbooks and worked. She hated leaving his bed. Soon his smell faded from the sheets so Lily started to sleep in James's clothes. She was aware of herself falling into a new level of pathetic, especially when Remus and Peter entered the dormitory. Peter pretended she wasn't there but Remus just shot her sad, pitying looks from the corner of his eye. She couldn't care about that when she opened James's trunk to pull out an old tee-shirt, fresh with James's sweet scent.

By the time exams started, millions of versions of the story had traveled throughout the school. Lily, Sirius, Di, and James's absence had not gone unnoticed by the other Gryffindors and neither had James and Di's failure to return after Lily and Sirius got back from St. Mungo's. News moved around about Snape, Remus, and Tara entering the hospital wing the same night they all disappeared--the same night of the Hogsmeade attack.

Slytherins, too, were well of aware of Clive Pritchard, Bellatrix, Wilkes, and Nott's sudden decision to quit school a week before their N.E.W.T.s. Eventually, word was exchanged between the rivaling two houses. Parallels were drawn, pieces were put together and people realized that all of it was connected somehow. Even the teachers joined the speculation. The fact that both Gryffindors and Slytherins were involved perplexed everyone and because nobody was confirming anything, the school was left in one giant state of scandal.

Most students caught on that something awful had happened to James and Di and were decent enough to keep their gossiping voices down when Lily and Sirius walked by, but then there was always a few less subtle people who could not contain their curiosity. The most they dared to do, however, was pose questions loudly to their friends, as though hoping Lily and Sirius would overhear and off the information. The two of them paid no attention--detaching themselves completely from their classmates. Without realizing it, they created an aura of mystery and danger around them that seemed to intimidate other students. Nobody could gather the courage to ask them anything outright.

Summer was pestered with questions but it died down when it became clear that she had no part of the whole ordeal. Snape didn't speak to anyone. Rumor had it that he had been found unconscious in a broom closet. Tara and Remus were bombarded after their recovery but then McGonagall stepped in and told some students that even if it were any of their business, none of them could speak of it because it was "a legal matter with the Ministry." This just stirred up a fresh new batch of theories.

Then the Daily Prophet reported Clive Pritchard dead, as one of the known enemy casualties of the Hogsmeade attack. There were so many other casualties that they did give any other information about the death.

After this report had been passed from hand to hand, the school flew into an even bigger uproar.

Was Pritchard really dead?

Had he really been a Death Eater?

Is that why the other Slytherins had fled the school?

Where was James Potter and Diana Kendel and what did they have to do with it?

Why were they in Hogsmeade?

It all came down to that one puzzling question. What really happened that night?

* * *

Lily and Sirius were, once again, holed up in the boys' dormitory. Lily, wearing one of James's sweatshirts, was studying for her Transfiguration N.E.W.T. in the dying sunlight. Sirius was studying the ceiling as he lay sprawled out on his bed.

With a small yawn, Lily pushed aside her Guide to Advanced Transfiguration. "I'm so tired."

She stretched out on James's bed and turned her head to look up at the photograph James had framed and put on his bedstand. Sirius had snapped it once before they had started dating while James and Lily were walking back up to the school after hours of flying. Neither of them looked at the camera. James was turned toward Lily, grinning, as he said something to her that made her throw her head back in laughter. Their hair was windswept and their cheeks were flushed from flying.

Lily tried not to stare at herself and James interacting in the photo for too long, but sometimes, she couldn't stop herself from fantasizing that she was back in that moment. If she had known she would have so little time with him, she knew she would have kissed him then and there. Why had it taken her so long to realize how wonderful he was? She would have had so much more time....

"You're doing it again, Ev," said Sirius, still staring at the ceiling.

Lily scowled at him. "I know."

"Back to studying," he said. He stretched his hand across the space between their beds. "Let me see."

Lily picked up her notes and handed them Sirius. He lifted them in front of his face. "What spell do you use to conjure inanimate objects?"

Lily rolled over with a groan. "Er...Inanimatus Conjurus?"

Suddenly, the door banged open and Remus dashed in. "Guess who's back!"

Sirius lifted his head, frowning. "Who?"

But Lily sat straight up. "Di's back? She got off?!"

Remus nodded and turned back down the stairs. Lily hopped off the bed, grabbed Sirius by the wrist, and followed.

Down in the common room, they looked around and saw Summer and Tara jumping up and down next to Diana Kendel. Di was beaming at them, which pleased Lily the most. She and Sirius hurried toward her and wrapped her in a hug.

"I'm so glad you're back! How are you?" cried Lily, though there was still something dark weighing in her heart, for the person who could not come back.

"I'm good, actually," said Di, nodding. She looked good, especially compared with the weak, withered thing Lily left on the floor of the shop in Hogsmeade.

"You got off, then?

"Yeah, thanks to you and Sirius. The woman in the shop gave a testimony and it matched yours," explained Di. "They ruled that Pritchard murdered her husband and would have gone on to kill more if I hadn't...um, stopped him."

Lily looked at her solemnly. "Are you sure you're alright, Di?'

"She really is!" piped up Tara. "She got a job!"

"A job?" asked Lily, her eyebrows pinching together.

A small smile appeared on Di's face. "Yeah, at the Ministry."

"Wait, I'm confused. I thought you went there as a murder suspect," said Lily, suddenly growing uneasy about the fact that Di seemed so okay with this.

Di turned her palms to the ceiling. "I know. I was shocked. But after I finished telling the Head of Magical Law Enforcement office what happened, he pulled me to the side and offered me a job in the department for after I graduate."

"Crouch offered you a job? Just like that?" Lily demanded. She didn't mean to sound so skeptical.

Di nodded. "Well, he asked me about my marks and stuff. He said he liked the way I thought."

"What did you say to him that made him say that?" Lily persisted.

Sirius wrapped an arm around Lily's shoulders and gave her a firm squeeze. "I think what Lily means to say is, congratulations," he said, smiling.

Summer hugged her. "Yeah, that's brilliant, Di." Tara hurled herself onto them both, her arms wide. At another time, Lily would have jumped into the group hug but she honestly did not seem what everyone was so happy about.

Sirius looked down at Lily, who glared at him and shrugged off his arm. "What was that?" she hissed.

"Let it go," he mouthed back.

Lily shook her head.

"Evans," he said quietly, in that weird, big brother way he sometimes had.

Lily rolled her eyes and looked back at her friends. Summer and Tara were hanging on Di, giggling in excitement. Even Remus was busy talking about the new job. Lily couldn't believe that this was what she was looking at a week after the night Di killed Clive Pritchard and Mr. Potter tortured James. How could they carry on like this? How could they be so happy?

Lily looked at the floor, trying to stem the surging anger that slowly coming to a boil under her skin. Deep breaths. It's not their fault that everyone's home but James.

But it was too much. She could not forgive them.

"You know what, I have to go to bed," Lily suddenly snapped. "See you lot later." Then she turned on her heel and fled up the stairs of the boys' dormitory, forgetting that she wasn't really where she was supposed to sleep.

She slammed the door and flew into James's bed. She curled up around James's pillow, squeezing it with her fists. She tucked her face into it, wanting to scream.

A few minutes later, someone entered the room. Knowing that it was Sirius, she didn't look up. "Don't say a word."

He didn't. He just slumped into his bed.

Lily turned her face so she could see the photograph. She looked at James, his smile, and imagined him next to her. She could almost here his voice.

"Real mature, Lily."

Lily buried her face back into his pillow. I know.