The five times Lily Evans sees James Potter cry and the one time he can’t
The first time Lily Evans sees James Potter cry is in their first year, she is just ducking down to the common room late one night to find her sweater when she hears sniffling from near the fire. When she sees who it is, little James Potter (she’s a whole 4 inches taller than him), pillow clutched to his chest and a scrunched letter on the floor next to him she scurries back up to her dorm. Tuney always said boys don’t cry (she hears from Remus later that week that his mum has the dragon pox and she thinks that it’s a pretty good reason for anyone to cry, even a boy).
Lily doesn’t see James cry again till third year. This time she’s walking down to dinner when she sees not-so-little James storming back towards the common room, a red swollen bruise forming under his eye and tears streaming down his face. This time he sees her and there’s a moment of hesitation before he says “please don’t say anything”. Maybe it’s the desperation in his voice, or maybe it because she has learnt that boys can cry but she simply nods her head and continues on to breakfast. She hears him boasting about a Quidditch accident later in the day, something involving a 100 foot drop, she doesn’t believe him - not if the similar shaped bruise on Mulciber’s face is anything to go by (she asks Remus about this later but he goes red and mutter’s something about a “bloody loyal bastard”).
By sixth year Lily is sure she’ll never see James Potter cry again, he seems too arrogant, too confident and too self absorbed to actually have feelings. But one morning, following a particularly cold night (it was a full moon, too) she sees James Potter cry for the third time, and she’s not the only one. She’s just about to leave for Transfiguration when James comes storming down the stairs, he looks livid and hot, angry tears are threatening to spill. Before anyone can stop him he flees the common room and she doesn’t see him for two days (in fact, Peter is the only Marauder she sees, and he refuses to answer anyone’s questions). It becomes a bit of a legend, everyone wants to know what caused James Potter to cry and what could possibly causes James and Sirius to ignore each other for nearly a month (she doesn’t dare ask Remus).
The fourth time is a little more trivial. It’s just after curfew one Friday night and she’s doing a final patrol of the corridors with James. They’d talked more in the last few week than ever in the past six-and-a-bit years and if Lily was honest with herself (she often wasn’t) it was nice. She doesn’t think her joke about the werewolf disguised as a school student was that funny but soon James is roaring with laughter (it’s the kind of laughter that makes you want to laugh) and they’re both sitting on the floor clutching their stomachs, tears of mirth streaming down both their faces (she does admit that these tears are definitely better).
It’s now 1980 and Lily has seen James cry multiple times (when friends died in battle, when his parents died, when they got married, when they found out she was pregnant) but as they sit in Dumbledore's office, Harry snoring softly in her arms James, doesn’t cry.
