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After All This Time


The sun went down as James led Lily across the grounds from the pitch, down the sloping hill toward the edge of the Forbidden Forest. He purposely brought her down past Hagrid’s hut, between the paddocks and the green houses ‘round back of the castle. It was the way that she usually took when she went down to the forest to visit the stag. They slid down the last few steps and reached the edge of the bracken. The moonlight shone overhead and James paused there, staring off across the grounds to the silhouette of the Whomping Willow, far off from where they were going into the trees. He thought of Remus changing - of Sirius and Peter, probably wondering where he was, and he hoped Sirius wasn’t be too pissed off at him for not coming back like he’d promised. He wasn’t too worried - deep down, he knew Sirius would understand once he heard what happened...

He led her through the trees in silence, taking hold of her hand to guide her ‘round some low roots… reaching out an arm to hold aside branches for her, and holding her steady over a low slope, coming out to the clearing in the Forest trees…

Lily knew this clearing all too well.

She looked at James with wide green eyes. “Potter,” she whispered, “Did Remus Lupin… did he tell you about this place?” A chill of betrayal was running up her spine at the thought of it.

“No,” James answered levelly. “Remus did not tell me about this place.”

Lily took a couple steps past him, toward the log where she usually sat to wait for the stag, and she stood there for a few moments in the moonlight, staring off into the dark of the trees. “So it’s just a coincidence that you took me to this particular clearing?” she asked.

James didn’t answer.

She turned around.

There, behind her... where James Potter had been just a moment before… stood the stag.

Lily stood, absolutely breathless, staring at him, at his thick antlers and leathery nose. He huffed and his breath came out in thick white clouds before his muzzle in the chill air, honking in his throat… She found herself compelled to take a step backward and she opened her mouth in disbelief, a small squeak of surprise pinching itself from her lungs. Lily’s eyes were as wide as they could be.

The stag took a step toward her and she took another step back. Her mind couldn’t wrap around what was happening, couldn’t digest the meaning of it. James was there… and now… her stag… but James had been there…. But the stag was… and James… it wasn’t possible… not her stag… not … not James Potter, anyone but James Potter… not her sag.

Lily felt like she’d been gutted.

Lily was taking great gasps of breath, too much oxygen to her brain, she was dizzy, the forest was spinning, and everything sort of darkened around the edges…

She fell to her knees in the bracken and the stag hurriedly stepped forward and then, before her very eyes, even as she stared in disbelief, choking over the realization that was drowning her mind, she watched as the stag - her bloody, precious, wonderful, beautiful stag - melted away, stepping toward her, falling from his four legs onto two, until it was James Potter, rushing forward as the world spun… and she lost her balance and he fell… losing her consciousness...

James caught her, the weight of her falling directly into his arms. “Evans,” he breathed, pulling her into him so that he was holding her gently in his arms, her head cupped by his biceps as he supported her, her dark ginger hair framing her face, her eyelids fluttering as she came to. He stared down at her, his heart racing in worry so hard that she could actually hear it. “Hey… hey shhh… shhh. Are you alright?”

Lily stared up at him, trembling.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he whispered.

“H-how?” she breathed.

“Animangus,” he said the word very, very quietly. The weight of it settled into the air, as heavy as a sentence.

Lily closed her eyes a moment, and she struggled to her feet, her stomach turning. He stood with her, and she lost her balance again, still dizzy from the shock and he caught her, holding her by her elbows to keep her upright as her palms pressed to his chest, catching her balance against him. She knotted her fists around the fabric of the maroon and gold striped quidditch jumper.

“Careful,” he murmured, “Here, sit…” James gently lowered her onto the log, kneeling before her, one hand still on her shoulder as he stared up at her.

Lily stared into his eyes.

And suddenly Lily knew.

She knew beyond a doubt.

Of course. Of course he was her stag. How could she have been so stupid all this time not to see it? Not to know? How had she looked into these eyes so many times and not seen? Not recognized? But she had, hadn’t she? Back in May, in that bloody room with all the clocks, when Mopsus had appeared to them, when he’d delivered that prophecy. She’d stared into James Potters’ eyes then and she’d felt… she’d felt the quiver in her stomach then, hadn’t she? She’d seen it then for a split second… She closed her eyes and tears slid down her cheeks from her eyes as she sat, shaking, the longer she thought on it, the more tremulous she got, until James could hear her teeth chattering from it and she opened her eyes and stared at him again and her breath caught in her throat and she shook her head.

She knew, but she couldn’t accept.

“Do it again.”

“What?”

“Do it again! Change back! Show me!”

James stood up, backing away from her a couple steps and he took a deep breath and with a soft pop! he dropped forward, his spine reshaping itself, his feet and arms twisting into legs, fingers cleaving together into hooves… his mouth and nose stretched out from his face, the nose becoming leathery as his eyes spread apart… antlers sprouting out, shooting up into the sky, his tail emerging from behind, swishing in nervous circles and the fur rippling it’s way across his back, up his neck, over his face, his eyelashes lengthening and then -- there he was. Her stag again.

Lily stood up and she took two very weak-kneed steps forward, holding out her palm… and the stag pressed his nose into her palm like he always did in greeting and Lily Evans covered her mouth with her other hand. She thought of James’s face in Divination two years ago when she’d told him about the stag in her dreams… how surprised he had looked… how interested he’d been, how he didn’t laugh at her… Her palm moved to the necklace that hung at her collarbone. The one she hadn’t taken off since the day he’d given it to her, her fingers running over the gold antler’s curve… the prongs poking her skin. Suddenly, Sirius’s voice echoed in her mind. Prongs! Sirius called him that… Remus called him that, too, she realized, so did Peter… Nobody else seemed to know why… She remembered Severus, accusing her of meeting James Potter in the woods, claiming that James Potter was there, under the invisibility cloak… fighting with her about whether or not she could trust James Potter… all this time, all those arguments she’d had with Snape… insisting she hadn’t been meeting James… bloody hell. She had been meeting James Potter. She had.

She lowered herself to the bracken, this time on purpose and she laid herself into the neck of the stag, her face pressing into his fur, her tears hot and huge as they fell across her face. Her dress pooled about her as she clung to him…

He honked lowly in his throat.

How many times had she knelt like this… in these very leaves… and he’d done that very thing and she’d felt like he was talking to her, comforting her, communicating with her… How many times had she cried on his shoulder only to have him nuzzle her back to a smile or to carefully wrap his neck about her so that it was as though he were hugging her… pulling her closer…

He had been.

And how many times had she knelt like this… wishing… dreaming that he was a person, a human person that it made sense to fall in love with… because it was impossible to be in love with a stag… but she’d been falling for him all along anyway… and now...

Now he was a person.

Lily felt so many things at once that it was as though her chest cavity might break open at any moment.

Then an overwhelming wave of horror struck her.

All the things she’d said to him. All the secrets, all the confessions, all the fears and hopes and dreams and troubles and stresses and worries and tears… All the memories and prayers and heartbreaks and desires… She’d poured her soul into her stag, she’d held nothing back… She’d told that stag things he would never, ever, ever have told any human person…

But she had told a human person.

And not just any human person.

James Potter.

“I trusted you,” she choked the words. “I trusted you with all of it, and… all this time… you… you weren’t even… you weren’t even a stag?” She pulled away from him, her heart cracking… she could feel the chisms as the shards began to form in it, crackling, forming chasms. “After all this time?”

He began to shrink in her arms… she clutched on even as he melted away… as the shoulders changed and the legs became arms and the form got smaller… and she was soon leaning over a boy… a boy kneeling on the floor of the forest before her, her arms around him, around his neck… her face buried into his shoulder… warm and boy-smelling, musk and forest… and she whimpered as he turned toward her and tentatively… slowly… put his arms around her…

It was exactly what she’d dreamed of for months… and yet… she felt so betrayed… she didn’t know what to do.

“Evans,” he breathed, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, I wanted to, I was so scared to, though. But Lily, I’m here for you. I’m here. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you or your family and if Tuney says those awful things to you ever again I’ll bloody hex her and stop her from ever hurting your feelings like that ever. I will! And I’ll keep you safe. The Dark Lord won’t ever lay a hand on you. I’d die before I’d let him lay a hand on you, Evans! I’ll take care of you, if you just - just give me a chance, just let me be there for you as me and -- and I’ll --”

“Stop.”

Her voice was hard, rock solid, and cold. She stared at him. “How does you being my stag help Remus?” she asked, her voice trembling.

“We’re all animaguses.”

“Sirius and Peter are stags, too?”

“No. Sirius is a dog and Peter’s a rat.”

Lily stared at him.

“It was Sirius’s idea… A couple years ago, we figured out Remus was a werewolf… well, really Sirius did… and Sirius sort of started taking care of him. Rey gets really ill late in the cycle of the moon, you know, and at the turn of the new moon, too, sometimes. Do you remember when he was in the wheelchair?”

“Yes, of course,” she stammered.

“He did that to himself. He tore apart his own skin, ripped it to bits, broke his own legs, shattered his knees… he nearly bloody killed himself.” James shook his head, “If we hadn’t’ve told McGonagall when we did, if she hadn’t gone to save him, he probably wouldn’t be here.”

Lily shivered at the thought. A world without Remus Lupin, she thought, would be a very sad world indeed.

“Well, after that, Sirius decided that we needed to do something about it. Remus shouldn’t be alone out there. Just sending him out to the Shrieking Shack only protects him from others, or rather others from him, it doesn’t protect him from himself, though. He needed somebody to be there with him. So we… started researching… looking for some way that we could be around Rey on the full moon to make sure he wasn’t hurting himself at all. Well, after a while… we found a way… becoming animaguses… and it took a long time to learn to do it… Well, me and Peter took longer than Sirius. Sirius was a bloody natural. Or else he just was the one with the most determination to save Remus. They say love is the most powerful magic in the world, so… maybe perhaps his love sort of… sped up the process in a manner… I dunno. Maybe he’s just that much of a dog naturally that it wasn’t as much of a transformation for him as it is for the rest of us… I dunno. But we finally did it. And we go with Rey on the full moons now and we all make sure he stays safe. We take care of him.”

Lily felt tears pouring down her face. So he wasn’t even her stag at all. He was Remus’s stag. And Remus had known. She could still see him, Remus, in her mind’s eye, standing right there in the clearing, telling her they should go inside, that the stag wasn’t coming… of course he’d known the stag wasn’t coming… of course because he’d known where the stag was - asleep in the dormitory! Remus had lied to her, too, then.

Lily closed her eyes. A voice deep within her was screaming with pain and rage. Her heart finally, completely breaking...

“Evans…” James begged, “Please… say something. Anything.”

“I hate you.” Her voice shook with the words.

He blinked at her and her arms fell away from his neck as she struggled away from him, standing up, backing away from him. “Evans,” he said gently, “Nothing’s… nothing’s really changed, I’m still the stag… still the same stag… I - I’ll still listen… I just, I can protect you and hold you and make it better and --” He held out his arms, as though to pull her back in and she slapped his hands away.

“No! Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!” she said and she got to her feet. “How can you say this is the same? It’s not the same! It’ll never be the same. You’re a liar and you’re a horrible person for - for tricking me, for stealing my heart like that, for invading my privacy and - and for making me feel like I feel right this second and I hate you for it!”

“But Evans --” He stood up, too and took a step toward her.

“NO!” Lily yelled the word firmly and she pulled her wand out, “STOP!!!! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

James held his hands up in surrender, staring at her with tears burning his eyes now, too. “Evans,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Lily shook her head. “No, Potter. It’s too late for sorry. I don’t care.” Her voice shattered around the words… and she hurriedly turned and ran away through the trees.