heart scope
He thinks a lot about all the things he will forget, the sound of Remus’s croaky morning voice at breakfast, his mums favourite skirt, how he sits three rows back from the front in Transfiguration because then McGonagall can’t reach out and smack him with her wand from the front.
It’s a horrible feeling, this forgetting. Once he overhears Evangeline Watts talking about her Grandfather and this muggle illness he has which makes him slowly forget everything in his life, whether it matters or not. He’s awake for the entire night later imagining what it would feel like to lose things like that, as if memories were water in cupped hands.
He falls asleep the next day in class and Evans tips half her water bottle down the back of his jumper to wake him up. He yells and gets a detention from Slughorn for swearing while Snape smirks underneath his curtain of grease. He calls him a waste of space later while everyone laughs and Snape burns, cheeks hot and hollow. He doesn’t even know why he hates him so much, probably the muggle hating and pure blood mania. Yup, definitely the muggle hating and pure blood mania.
The thing is, Evans is apparently oblivious to the muggle hating and pure blood mania, so she hates his guts for calling her best friend worthless even though he is. It shouldn’t matter that she doesn’t like him, a lot of people don’t like him, it’s just that he likes her. And it’s not love, because he’s fifteen and an asshole still but he likes her a lot more than he’s willing to admit to Sirius even while drunk on the firewhiskey they stole from the teacher’s lounge.
She’s smart, except for the whole ‘friends with Snivellus’ thing; she’s really sarcastic and wears huge black combat boots underneath her robes with tiny red flowers doodles on the foot. Her friends are loud and they love her in that weird way that girls do, absolutely and while laughing. She writes everything down in this purple notebook with grass stains on the cover. Her hair is to her shoulders and it twists when she laughs, she’s the only person in the entire school who has ever called Sirius an: ‘expired sack of dragon shit’ and walked away without looking back to gage reaction.
He provokes her in class just so she’ll twist in her seat and ruin him with her mouth, showing all her teeth when she calls him a dick for the thirteenth time that day and it’s not even noon. Sirius thinks he’s mad but he doesn’t care, Evans is so goddamn interesting and he wants to talk to her until he can figure out why.
Over Christmas break he goes home and misses school like a toothache, he wants to walk into class and slide across desks until McGonagall walks in and gives him detention. School is where he can hang out with his mates every day and learn stuff and run around during full moons. They go back and he and Peter paint a banner that says ‘WELCOME TO OUR HUMBLE SCHOOL, PLEASE PAY A THREE GALLEON ENTRY FEE AT DOOR.’ They make 87 galleons and a toothpick before a teacher catches on. He gets detention for two weeks and hexes Snape’s legs together when he catches him laughing.
He’s not a violent person, but Snape deserves all the shit he gets and Evans throws her wand at him later in the common room but he’d do it again. He’s not a bad person, he isn’t, but Snape makes him want to punch a wall on account of him being a bigoted arsehole. Whatever, this whole thing should be over soon anyway.
He turns is his muggle studies homework late because Sirius stole it to try and prove to Moony that he could: ‘make Prongs slowly lose his mind while he looks for it’. As payback he tells him he pissed in his morning cornflakes and Sirius spits them up all over a stack of toast looking horrified. Peter and Remus laugh so hard they get cramps. He loves his mates, they’re shitty and irritating and funny and losers and if he didn’t have them he’d probably have ceased to exist a long time ago.
Over Christmas she gets a huge white cat which is utterly feral, Sirius starts calling it a polar bear behind her back until everyone is calling it that. Its real name is Ophelia because it’s her mum’s favourite character in some muggle play and it’s the fattest animal that has ever existed, once Marlene and Mary have to lather a door in butter just to pry it through. Lily loves it still and wraps it in scarfs when it’s cold. She’s barking mad and he tells her so but she says she just ‘doesn’t give a shit’ which makes him laugh.
In Charms they have to say the best thing they got for Christmas because Flitwick had only planned for half the lesson, Sirius says a headache and Remus says some new boots. Pete got some orange leg warmers which are awful, Marlene McKinnon refused to say anything because she ‘hates Christmas and all the joy it stands for’, Avery had ‘to many to pick from’, Jane Ruvesh announces she got dumped and then runs out crying while Lyle Parrish looks uncomfortable.
Mary was given a new set of hair curling potions and Evans says her stupid cat, which makes everyone groan and then makes everyone flinch back when she glares at them for groaning. Snape says under his breath that he got a bath towel and James leaves class avoiding his eyes. It’s one thing to give shit to a guy who’s a shit, but it’s another to give shit to a guy after you’ve just found out the best thing he got for Christmas was a bath towel.
There are other Slytherins to fight with anyway, Mulciber who grinds his teeth when Mary walks past and runs his fingers along her arm, Remus throws him against the wall and then Sirius is lazily cursing someone who tries to intervene and then it’s all gone to hell anyway. He punches anyone in sight and curses anyone dumb enough to not move out of his way and then it’s to Dumbledore’s to get a detention again. Fighting does nothing, he knows that, but he’s got to feel like he’s doing something.
He’s partnered with Evans in detention to scrub the fourth floor corridor. He asks her what she did and she says “I punched Markham Finch in the dick for saying that Ophelia isn’t so much an animal as she is a block of fat with legs”. His hand slips into his soapy bucket he’s laughing so hard, leaning against the wall and watching her grin at the soaking floor. She scrubs the left side and he does the right, they don’t speak much because even though he laughed and she didn’t hit him for it, it didn’t mean she still didn’t hate him quite a bit.
His mother writes, Lily buys a new pen for the purple notebook and he plays Quidditch, they win and Pete smuggles in firewhiskey for the party. It’s loud and Sophie Mallory’s homework gets ripped but the music is thumping so no one can hear her yelling. Lily does half a strip tease on the table before passing out into Remus’s arms and being dragged to bed by Marlene. James makes out with Rosaline Patel under the boys staircase and Sirius gives a speech about the muggle feminist movement on the table while pissed because he actually read Sophie Mallory’s homework and was the one who accidentally ripped it while waving it under Remus’s nose.
Once her Transfiguration book goes missing (cue the joke about the cat eating it for a light snack) and she’s pacing up and down the common room while Mary is all ‘you can borrow mine’ and Marlene is saying ‘just drop out’ and then Evangeline hits her for being negative. He charms the name off the front of his and slips it to her at breakfast when she’s talking to Dominic, she looks around and asks whose it is but he faces front and eats his toast without saying anything. “Well, um, thank you! Mysterious book giver!” she calls when leaving the hall and he’d probably give her both kidneys if she asked.
During muggle studies they learn about muggle physics and some guy’s law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Basically everything you do will affect something else, whether it is a person or a place and he doesn’t know why this so hitting him so hard now. Everything he’s ever done has affected some other person with a brain and a favourite colour and a next door neighbour they’ve probably said hello to in the rain. Why, he thinks, is this the first time he’s ever noticed that.
Lily gets sick and isn’t in lessons for a week, which makes him notice that he notices an awful lot when she isn’t there and he finally resolves to just try and bloody get over it. He doesn’t know how, but he’s going to because this crush has gone on long enough and ignoring it has done nothing but give him a semi in the middle of Charms. She walks into Herbology on her first day back, sneezes, and passes out against the glass. His heart stops to scrape along the barrel of ribs and he ditches his next three classes in the bathroom, smoking to cover the fact that his hands are shaking until he hears from Jimmy Ivis that she’s okay. This entire thing has gotten out of hand.
She’s in class again three days later and he sees her, sitting there next to Marlene and writing in that purple notebook, and he lets out a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding. He doodle’s her name on the back of his textbook the whole way though the lesson and she hugs Snape in the corridor and his gut is twisting and he hates this, he doesn’t want to be this guy. He hates these guys and without realising he has become one entirely on fucking accident.
This is how it happens: there is exams, and he is cocky, and Snape is Snape and she is far too loyal. Maybe if it wasn’t sunny they wouldn’t have gone outside, maybe if he’d done badly on the exam he wouldn’t have left, maybe if he wasn’t an asshole it wouldn’t have happened.
But it did. And when he thinks about it, her face and the way he saw the exact moment that all of the blood poured out of her heart, he buries his head in his pillow and all at once wishes that he could forget the entirety of his life if only to never have to live through that moment again.
A week later, Sophie Mallory, the one who did her muggle studies assignment on the feminist movement and who smiled with chip on her bottom tooth because she flew into a wall during second year Quidditch, is found in the attic of the potions room after some student complained that blood was leaking into his potion from the ceiling. She’d been lying there half naked for the entire night, passed out with ‘DIRTY’ carved into every inch of her skin with a cursed knife so you could almost see the bone. When he hears, he goes to the bathroom and throws up, chest heaving and heart rearranging itself inside his ribs.
After that everything is completely different, because this couldn’t be fixed by punching Avery in the jaw. No more fighting, no more using this… thing that’s happening as an excuse to get into it with the Slytherins. No more hiding behind being noble so he can get in fights with people he just doesn’t like. What was something that seemed to happen to other people is suddenly happening to girls he’s known since he was eleven, who did their muggle studies projects on the feminist movement and chipped their tooth during second year Quidditch.
The holidays happen in a blur, and then it’s back to school, sitting in the back and biting his tongue when Snape answers questions in class. He avoids Lily, sneaks around her and misses her like she was his arm. But this is what he’s doing right now, because Snape is all over her and all she wants is for the both of them to leave her alone. All James wants is for her to be happy and all Snape wants is for her to be his.
It starts slowly; she borrows a quill from him to finish her History of Magic Essay. He silently gives her his telescope when she forgets hers for Astronomy. She gently points out that he’s spelt Jupiter’s third moon wrong on his Divination Star Chart. They don’t talk still, but she snickers into her hand when he makes a deer pun in class and he can’t stop smiling for the rest of the lesson.
They’re partnered up for Herbology, and it’s the most uncomfortable ten minutes of his life as they both silently try to clip the Vicious-Visper-Vine, which steams when handled. The silence is digging into his teeth as he scrambles around for something, anything to say, that doesn’t sound terrible.
“You’re not going to faint again are you?” he asks and fuck, he was aiming for something not terrible.
She looks at him, surprised. “You- um, you remember that?”
He looks back at her, the plant beginning to snake around his hand. “’Course I remember that, you got a bruise the size of my ego, which, as we’ve established, could crush several people under its weight.”
She laughs at this, and then the god damn vine has found a hole in his glove and his left hand is burning so much it might as well be on fire. She takes him up the hospital wing and eats the food Madam Pomfrey brings him at lunch while trying to say ‘Vicious-Visper-Vine’ five times fast. He laughs so hard that Pomfrey sends her away and she grins at him from the window for seven minutes trying to get him to laugh so he can get kicked out as well. It works to.
He yells “VICIOUS-VESPER-VINE-VICIOUS-VESPER-VINE-VICIOUS-VESPER-VINE-VICIOUS-VESPER-VINE- VICIOUS-VESPER-VINE HA SUCK IT EVANS” down the hall the next time he sees her, and she grins and raises her middle finger in the air so high that Minnie sees it and gives her a detention. Then she turns to him and snaps “ONE MORE WORD OUT OF YOU POTTER AND I’LL GIVE YOU A DENTENTION AS WELL” so he shouts “ONE MORE WORD” and gets his twenty-first detention in a month while Evans giggles herself to death against the wall.
In detention they have to catalogue all the library books and she finds all the ones with swearwords and reads them aloud while sitting in the table. In Defence they’re put together and she blocks his jelly legs like it’s nothing, then turns his hair into a hoard of ants. She sits across from his at breakfast and makes fun of how much milk he puts on his cornflakes so he takes all the honey off the table and hides it so she can’t put any on her toast. The next week he finds his bed dripping in honey with her sitting on Sirius’s bed, wearing a shit-eating grin the size of Brighton. They’ve become friends while he wasn’t looking and he doesn’t really know what to do with that.
Her cat gets something in its paw and while he’s holding it down she tries to get it out. It scratches her neck and she uses a cushion to stem the blood while still fighting with the cat. She’s honestly insane. She tells him that Ophelia is named for a character in the play Hamlet, so he orders a copy and finishes it in three weeks while not understanding a single thing. What he does grasp however, after asking Remus to read it to, is that Ophelia dies by drowning, which is completely ironic.
“How do you figure?” she asks, throwing a balled up piece of paper while lying flat on his bed
“Because you named your cat after someone that drowned. Your cat. When cats hate water.”
She turns to him, stares, and then starts laughing so hard she rolls off his bed and onto the floor. And then he’s laughing because she is, and he really just can’t help himself. She asks him why he does Divination at all and he says because he and Sirius put on a huge act of predicting Sirius’s imminent death at the end of every class, complete with Sirius fainting into his arms with horror and paying Moony three galleons to make the lights flicker. The next Tuesday just before Sirius is due to faint he sees her sitting on the roof outside the window, and he’s so surprised he forgets to catch Sirius, who falls into a bunch of candles almost fulfils the prediction.
He notices that purple notebook of hers, how she pulls it out during classes and while sitting on the floor with her friends. He wonders what she writes in there, if she draws pictures of if it’s a diary. The grass stains, he realises, come from her going to lie down in the grass outside while using a muggle pen to write with. He’s never seen one before in his life, and she shows him how it writes without any ink as he imagines all of the fantastic pranks he could pull on Sirius. He tells her this, and they scheme together, leaning against a tree and eventually falling asleep, with her legs over his and head against his shoulder. That is, until Minnie is hovering over them in her tartan dressing gown and kicking him in the leg, yelling about it being two in the morning, but whatever. Worth it.
She and her friends throw bread rolls they stole from lunch at him while he’s doing Quidditch practise. Soon, this becomes a thing and Sirius, Remus and Peter have all joined in, saying it’s ‘bludger practise’ and ‘for the good of the game’. He catches five in his mouth in a row once and she charms his robes to flash ‘BIG MOUTH’ on the butt. He can’t stop thinking about that detention an age ago, when they scrubbed the fourth floor corridor in silence and how she had hated him.
He can’t even imagine doing that now, being in a room with Lily and not talking would be walking past a black hole and not getting sucked in. There is just so much he wants to tell her, about pranks and how he is allergic to strawberries and that one time he fell off the roof and broke his jaw when he was eight. He wants to learn everything about her, if she likes chocolate or vanilla, what her favourite song when she was five, how did the first pet she had die, would she go to space if she could, how she knew she was a wizard.
(vanilla, ‘if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’, it was a frog and she sprayed it with the families hose so hard it fell off a ledge, hell yes, because flowers didn’t die once she picked them)
In the month till the Quidditch final he loses his mind, practising every day and slipping out of conversations to go over strategy in his head. He can’t lose this, expectations piled so high that he wonders if his broom will be able to take the weight. “Relax James,” she says at breakfast, while they’re walking the halls, in the common room, “Everything will be fine.” Her voice sort of, quiets that part of his brain a little. It often plays on loops as he tries to fall asleep.
Then all at once, it is too much again. He’s pacing the common room at three .a.m., scared out of his mind that he’s going to let everybody down. It’s too hard and he’s going to fail and oh no oh no oh no but then she’s there, holding his face and saying shhh James, it’s okay. James, look at me, alright? Just look at me. And he is. Oh god he is.
They play the game, and they win, and there is a party, and everyone is drunk, and it is madness. They spill out into the castle with Sirius roaring ‘WE MURDERED THEM’ while running up and down the halls topless, making three girls faint and Remus roll his eyes before (after three more drinks) joining in. He’s happy, because he did it and because everyone else is. That’s the best thing about Quidditch, besides flying, it makes everyone delirious. He stops Marlene from going upstairs with Lyle Parrish because she’ll regret it in the morning and Mary is found trying to convince a suit of armour to go stargazing with her at around three.
He notices she isn’t there because he always notices. He finds her on the pitch, after wandering around empty classrooms for an hour. She’s looking up at the sky, with her purple notebook in one hand and the other tracing shapes on her knee. It’s cold, and he runs out to her, standing the middle of the field like a post. “Congratulations” she says and he can’t stop looking at her. He can see her through the dark, glowing right through her t-shirt.
“Yeah.” He swallows because he’s had a few and so has she and it’s foggy and she’s still looking at the sky and he wants to do something but he doesn’t know what. He’s thinking of pulling out a cigarette just so his hands stop shaking and all at once he’s fifteen again, pacing the bathroom and thinking of her until his brain wants to bleed out. She’s looking at him now, really looking, and then she’s on the ground scribbling in the goddamn purple notebook with the grass stains
“Why are you always writing in that thing?” he says because he can see her combat boots with the flowers on the toe sticking out from under her palepale legs like a dream.
She shuts it and stands upright again, head tilted to him and voice unwavering. “Because I never want to forget.” She says and he can see her breath in front of him. Her combat boots look just the same as they did two years ago when he was fifteen and she tipped water down the back of his jumper and it wasn’t love then but it is now. It is now.
