What's in a Name?

Early July, 1980

Lily's POV

Lily – Lily Irene Evans (Potter) – always thought of herself as Lily Evans, even after she was married – she hadn't yet been married for a year, after all. Only her husband and their solicitor and the goblins at the bank ever called her (Lady) Lily Potter.

She didn't particularly like her name. She didn't particularly dislike it, either.

In the muggle world, her first name, just Lily, was relatively unique, if a bit 'hippy' to suit her. (Not that she had anything against the hippies, but she was a fighter, not a lover, when push came to shove, as she had glibly told her girlfriends, on more than one occasion. They never believed her, not for the longest time.)

In the wizarding world, it was rather common – short for Lilith, which was popular with the darker Old Families, and Lilian, which was equally popular with the moderately progressive set. There were even a fair number of families who, like her father's family, never let go of the Victorian fashion for flower names. In a way, she was lucky, that her name did not automatically single her out as clearly muggleborn (or at least, not the Lily part). There was a pureblood Violette Rosier in her class, and Narcissa Black in the year above.

But her first thought whenever she heard it, ever since she was small, and their mother showed her and Petunia the flowers that were their namesake, was of the little, bell-like Lilies of the Valley, that grew down by the river, or the classic funereal Calla Lilies, and to be frank, they just weren't her style.

It wasn't until she was planning her wedding that she realized lilies came in any color but white. (In her defense, they never used the things in Herbology or Potions, so why would she?) Lilies that looked like they were on fire? Those she could get behind.

The Irene part was a little better. She liked the way the syllables rolled off the tongue, especially when it was pronounced the Irish way, ĭ-RĒ-nē, instead of ī- RĒN. But it was, she knew, derived from the name of a Greek goddess of peace, and she wasn't terribly certain how well that suited, either.

It might have done, in school, when she took pains to hide behind a slew of masks, always showing the right face to the right people and keeping everyone improbably pleased with the Lily Evans they thought they knew. Now, though, after almost two years on the front lines of the War, widely acknowledged as the most ruthless fighter among the light?

Sev always thought it fit, though, because ĭ-RĒ-nē sounds an awful lot like irony, and that suited her to a tee. Still does. After all, she's a Healer by trade, and she's killed more men than half the Death Eaters. (She's not proud of that, or ashamed, it's just a fact. The person who knows best how to take a person apart is the Healer who knows exactly how they're put together.)

The only part of her name that she loved, the part that always suited her, was Evans.

She loved it even though it was common as mud, and marked her out as such in the wizarding world. She thought it was a dependable sort of name. You could count on an Evans, whether to back you in a fight or follow through on their promises.

She knew she could be manipulative and cruel and at times a bit… off, but she always came through in the end. If she said she would do something, she did (even if she had to use Black Arts to do it– all was fair in love and war, and she was most assuredly at war).

Her friends had grown up with her and fought alongside her calling her Evans. Lord MouldyShorts and his lieutenants knew her as Evans, like Bella Black was still a Black, even though she'd been married to Lestrange much longer than Lily was married to James. Even her husband, proud as he was to label her 'Potter' after eight years' pursuit, still used her maiden name more often than not, the habit of their Hogwarts years not easily broken.

She'd always thought that if she someday had a son, she'd like to call him Evan. Jamie could choose the middle name, but she wanted Evan.

That was why the Lord and Lady Potter, locked up in hiding, for the safety of their unborn child (one of two the Old Goat thought might be able to fulfill a certain prophecy and end the terrorist campaign of He Who Needs to Brush Up On His French), were refusing to speak to one another, despite the lack of alternative conversationalists.

Firstly, it had to be noted that Lily refused to allow James to determine the sex of the child via magic. James thought this was a stupid, mugglish decision, but he was willing to give his very pregnant wife nearly anything she wanted.

Nearly, because while they had found it easy enough to settle on a girl's name (Mary Elizabeth, which followed the Potters' naming traditions, while honoring Lily's mother as well. Mary Victoria had been a close second, but they had decided that was too much like laying claim to the prophecy), the stubborn man was utterly unwilling to compromise on a boy's name.

The Potters named their children after royals – James, Charles, Henry, George, Edward – and always passed down the father's name to the first-born son. Jamie was particularly enamored of Harry (not a proper, royalist Henry, or Harold or Harrison, just Harry, which Lily, her own given name a common diminutive, hated). He wanted his son to be named Harry James Potter.

He refused Evan Henry and Evan James and Fredrick (after her father) and Charles (after James') and any variation thereof. Lily, though she was pregnant and thought James Charles Potter owed whatever she damn well asked for, because she was giving him a child in the first place, in the middle of a freaking war, and they had to be insane – but she digressed… she, despite her reputation as one of the most stubborn girls Hogwarts had ever seen and her current indelicate condition, had offered a compromise, after the first month of debate: She would accept Evan as the middle name. She would simply ignore whatever stupid name James chose for the first bit, even Harry.

James would have none of it. It was Harry James, he said, or nothing.

Lily had leapt upon that linguistic slip-up immediately, declaring that Anomos Evan Potter sounded like a perfectly reasonable wizarding name to her. (Evan Anomos sounded even better.) Or Outis, the classic Greek pun. Odysseus was a king in Ithaca, after all.

James was not amused.

Pity, she actually quite liked Niemand. Evan Niemand Potter? It could work.

James' counter-proposal was that he should name a boy, while Lily could choose any name she wanted for a girl. Because of some terribly sexist reason Lily hadn't bothered to listen to all the way through. She had rejected that compromise because she had already grown quite fond of Mary Elizabeth, and James had had significant input into that choice, so it wouldn't be fair, because she didn't want to change it.

Besides, there was every chance that if she did take the offer, and went with something like Marigold to suit her own family's traditions, it would violate James' naming sensibilities anyway. He could be betting that she liked Mary Elizabeth too much to change it, but she thought it was far more likely he had done the charm to check the baby's sex while she was sleeping, and knew that it was a boy. (No matter what Minnie said, pregnancy had not made her more paranoid – just less willing to put in the effort to hide it.)

So they were at an impasse, and she suspected that her husband of eleven months had done the one thing she expressly forbid him to do, and was trying to use it to leverage her into a bad deal, which was why they were currently not speaking.

But it had been three days, and they were in hiding with no one else to talk to, and they were, admittedly, running out of time to pick something. She found her resolve weakening under the pressure of her husband's stubbornness and her own hormones. It could be so much worse, after all. He could be fighting for something incredibly dumb, like James Remus Potter, or Serious Peter Potter (she wouldn't put it past the Marauders to name at least one of their children with a reverse-Sirius pun).

In the grand scheme of things, Harry James was not so bad.

But she would be damned if she was going to break the silence first, just to tell him that.