The Truth Is, It Wasn't Like That

(Set in the canon timeline in Year 5, with Mary Potter AU marauder history context)

It's a Black thing, to love the people who are worst for us, who will never – can never, maybe – love us back. The ones who are the least appropriate, the ones who will destroy us. We're passionate people, drawn to fire, but we never stop before we get burned. I don't think we know how, and even if we did, we wouldn't want to.

Look at Bella, in love with that psychopath, or Andromeda, throwing herself out of society, ruining herself for 'that mudblood.' (Dark Powers, no, God, it's like I can still hear my mother's voice in the back of my mind. Ugh. Even for the sake of sarcasm, that was a mistake.) Look at Cygnus, head over heels for that harpy Druella, whom we all know seduced him for his money. Look at my parents, yet another in a long line of incestuous Black unions. Dorea and Charlus' marriage was one of perfect friendship, but there was a reason they only had one child, in thirty-five-odd years of wedded 'bliss.'

I'm no exception.

How ironic is it, that Charlus was gay, and James wasn't, when Dorea and I would have given anything for it to have been the other way around?

I think it's a curse. It's the only explanation.

The only successful Blacks are those who forsake love entirely, like Narcissa and Regulus. Well, Narcissa, at least. They were the good kids, the ones who did as they were told. We all know they used to steal longing glances at each other when they thought we weren't looking, but they knew it couldn't happen, wouldn't happen. They never acted on it. And then Narcissa took on a loveless marriage for the good of the House, to strengthen alliances, because her mother demanded it of her, and Reggie died for The Cause.

Even in the second generation, the curse persists.

Look at Tonks, panting after a werewolf who's determined to think the worst of himself (Moony, if you're reading this, get your damn head out of your damn arse and make my baby cousin happy already! And stop reading my journal, what are you, twelve?) Look at Jamie, as gone for Lily as Bella ever was for His Moldiness, from the very beginning.

Harry asked us, me and Moony, tonight, how his parents ever ended up together. Thank the Powers Moony was there. I don't know if I'd've been able to say anything, if it was just me, because the truth is, well…

Moony, and McG, and probably, well, just about anyone who was alive back then (except maybe Snivellus) – they'd tell you that Lily was a genuinely good person, full of light and spirit, the sort of person who fights for their beliefs, and that Jamie was a prat, full of natural talent, with an ego to match, the sort of person who was supremely sure of his own place in the world. They'd tell you that Jamie's parents dying changed him, that he was forced to grow up suddenly, and too soon, a child becoming a man in the face of War. They'd tell you that he backed off, dropped his childish flirtations, and she realized then how much he meant to her, that she saw he had the potential to be a good man – a great one, even, and that they bravely came together despite social pressures and made their own way in the world, fighting for their love or some such rubbish.

A love story: history, re-written through the golden glow of self-sacrifice and the soft lens of nostalgia.

The truth is, it wasn't like that.

I'll admit it now – never to Harry, because he doesn't need to know – God knows he doesn't need to know, with Molly spouting off all the time about how I get him confused with James – I haven't, I never could – I was (am, will always be) in love with James. Since the day in third year when we figured out that Remus was a werewolf, and James, without hesitation, grinned and said, Alright. What can we do to help him? So I might be biased, maybe more than a little bit, but no more than the people who would tell you that Lily was a perfect angelic paragon of the Light.

The truth is, James was a good person.

The truth is, Lily wasn't perfect.

The truth is, they were both real people – flawed and human. And young. Gods and Powers, we were all so young.

I'll admit it, too, that I never liked Lily. At first she was just an irritating, jumped-up, too-eager mudblood. (That's what I thought in first year, before I got out of the habit of using the m-word.) I hated her for being just as good at magic as James and I, despite the fact that she shouldn't, by rights, have had any experience of it at all. But she was a natural, especially at Charms, and it got under my skin. I'd never tell Harry, but at first, we picked on her just as much as Snivels.

And then she got someone (bat-boy) to teach her how to hex, and started getting her own back, and Jamie was smitten. The day he said he was going to marry her someday for the first time? It was the first time she ever hit him with a stinging hex. To stand up to a boy who has never in his life been denied anything is the surest way to pique his interest.

(To hurt a Black might be the surest way to make him love you.)

After that, we targeted Snivelly more thoroughly, at Jamie's direction, while he continued to metaphorically pull at her pigtails, trying to keep her attention firmly on him. I, in my juvenile way, did not see that following James blindly and throwing myself and all my frustration at the greasy git on his behalf would never win me his heart. In truth, I didn't realize my infatuation with him as such for years after it began.

I suppose I have to thank Lily for that – whatever else she may have been – and she did grow up to be a manipulative, cut-throat bitch – she always was perceptive.

The September after the now-infamous Mudblood Incident by the lake, she seduced me. It wasn't hard. Back in those days, I preferred, to be crude, thinking with my wand, rather than my head. Constant distractions stopped me from wondering too much about exactly why the sex was unfulfilling, and whether there might have been something I wanted more out of life. It was the first week back, and there was firewhisky and tits and a let's fuck the world smile, and even though I knew James would hate me for it, I did it anyway.

What I didn't expect, didn't see about myself, and she did, was how much it would hurt me when James pushed me away. That was when I realized I loved him as more than a brother (though I'll never, ever tell Harry). See, when Reggie chose the Family and the Cause over me, it felt like my heart was breaking, but when James stopped speaking to me, it felt like a dementor's kiss. My soul was crushed.

I made the stupidest decision of my life – well, maybe the second… no, third-stupidest, lashing out at his absence. I think, in my madness, that I thought if I could solve James' biggest problem – the continued existence of one Severus Snape – he would welcome me back with open arms – that things could be like they were before. I'm not really sure, though. Things done in the grip of the Madness (and that truly is a Black curse, but one of genetics and inbreeding, not magic) don't really make sense outside of it. I clearly wasn't thinking of Moony and what would happen to him.

It was a minor miracle that they ever forgave me, James and Remus. Remus used to joke that he wished all his problems could be solved by three months of Saturdays at St. Mungo's with a Mind Healer, but I guess the fact that he thought I truly betrayed James to old Snakeface shows he didn't fully trust me, even then. James, I'm pretty sure, thought the breakdown led to me sleeping with Lily, not the other way around. I never corrected that misconception.

But I've got off track. That happens more now, after Azkaban.

The truth is, James was always a good person. He was the kind of person who learned that one of his friends was a werewolf, and found a way to help make his life bearable – the kind of person who liked to make people laugh. I know the memory Harry was talking about. I know that, out of context, it would seem indefensible. But the whole thing with Snivelly, well, it started small. It took five years to escalate to that point.

It started with a color-changing charm, on both Snivellus and Lily, actually. We turned her hair Slytherin-green for a day, and his Gryffindor-red. A laugh, right? But he just took it so seriously, jinxing us between classes – and we couldn't just let that sort of public embarrassment stand, so we slipped a dungbomb in his bag, and then he hexed us again. Never knew when to give up, that kid.

By fifth-year, he was laying traps keyed to our magical signatures and polyjuicing himself to look like a first-year to attack us and then crying to McGonagall or the prefects – still disguised – making us out to have been the worst sort of bullies. Did a real number on our reputations that year. It was one of the reasons we were so eager to take him out after our OWLs, down by the lake. I mean, everyone expected that sort of thing from us by then, thanks to him. We might as well have taken advantage of it. And I still think he had it coming, even if James would never admit it to Lily that we'd been dragged through the mud by a single slimy snake all year.

We were, like I told Harry, arrogant, attention-seeking little berks – but I don't know anyone who wasn't, at fifteen. Even Harry and his friends – they're going to look back in ten years and just cringe at how angsty and self-centered they are now. We did, on occasion, hex people just for the fun of it, but more often than not, we were laughing with them, not at them.

Most people would tell you that James' parents' deaths changed him. It really didn't, though. He was always the steady foundation of the Marauders – our leader. I was the one who took things too far, who came up with the daring, audacious plans. Moony was the one who had a healthy respect for authority, and stopped us, more often than not, from doing anything outright illegal, half exhilarated by breaking the rules, half terrified that he would be caught and chucked out as a werewolf. The traitor was an idea-man, never one to do any work or follow through, but he was the one who suggested the Map, and that animagi were safe around werewolves. James was the one who kept us balanced, who made me funny instead of cruel, the one who kept Remus' anxiety in check, and who gave the traitor a sense of belonging and purpose. He was the one we gravitated to, the one we needed.

His parents' deaths changed him only insofar as he let the rest of the world see that he no longer had time for Dumbledore's carefully-crafted illusion of carefree youth. The war, outside of Hogwarts, did, after all, still exist. The James he showed the world, then, was the one we, the Marauders, had always seen glimpses of, the young man his parents raised to become a leader in the Wizengamot and make just choices. (He always was a better pureblood prince than me.)

He let the jokes fall by the wayside. The feud with Snivellus bled into a small-scale war with the young Death Eaters, as the greasy git fell from Lily's side into their waiting arms. Quidditch took a back seat to NEWTs and pre-Auror training. Even his pursuit of Lily, by that point more of a joke than anything else, came to an end. From the January of our sixth year all the way through Christmas of our seventh year, he hardly spoke to her outside of their duties as Head Boy and Girl, let alone asked her out.

I couldn't have been more pleased. I thought he was finally over her, that I might finally have a chance with him. But then he started dating Marlene and Mary and Amy and even Violette Rosier, and one drunken night after a particularly brutal Quidditch practice, he caught me snogging Tory Loupeau and asked me how I could stand to be with boys as well as girls, and it became painfully obvious that he was never, ever going to see me like that.

Then halfway through seventh-year, Lily and her healer friends started joining me and James and Alice and everyone for pre-Auror training, and we all started talking. James and Lily actually became friends, and I let my guard down a bit and finally got on speaking terms with her myself.

There was a certain amount of resentment, even so, when it came time for the last Hogsmeade weekend of seventh year, and James shouted across the common room, "Oi! Evans! Hogsmeade on Saturday, for old times' sake?" and she gave him that long, evaluating look that no one else ever seemed to see as Slytherin, and said, "Yeah, alright. Meet you at breakfast?" as though it was no big deal. The look of shock on his face… he was absolutely flabbergasted, and then elated, whooping about how he'd finally done it, after seven years, getting a date with the Lily Evans.

And let me tell you, the Lily Evans was a piece of work.

How could she not be? She was best friends with Snivellus, from well before they came to school all the way through fifth year. Her friends, her Gryffindor friends, couldn't ever see why she was still friends with him, but it was so obvious to me. Maybe I really should have been in Slytherin, or maybe it was just growing up around my family, but I recognized a mask when I saw it. She might have been an innocent, truly, at the beginning, when she was first Sorted, but she grew up to be just as deceptive as any Snake.

As early as fourth, fifth year, people were talking – mostly Slytherins and Ravenclaws – about how she danced at Samhain, or played Host for Walpurgis. Gryffindors weren't invited, of course, as a rule, but when you've grown up surrounded by Old Magic, when it's in your blood and bones, it's hard to resist. I was drawn out, more years than not, and saw her at the revels myself.

Did she think no one could feel her aura growing darker over the years? It was never very strong, and granted, I'm better than most at reading them, but over the years it sharpened, from a finger's caress to a claw dragged across the skin. That doesn't just happen learning the kind of spells they teach you in school. She had to be practicing dark magic, for her own to become so attuned to it.

And all the while, she kept up this perfect front – Lily Evans, golden girl, never broke the rules unless it was with a wink and a grin, always did her work and went above and beyond, chatting with professors and helping new students even before she was a prefect and never retaliated when she was called an overachieving, overreaching mudblood in the halls and always acted the lady that they all knew she wasn't. The professors liked to hold her up and say, look, muggleborns can be every bit as good and cultured and well-mannered as purebloods.

They conveniently ignored that she had a nasty temper and never noticed when she took revenge on the sly, or that she was developing curses with her Slytherin boyfriend in the library or how she slept around as it suited whatever arcane purposes she might have. It was all, Lily wants to be a healer and Lily wants to help the war effort, and Lily is campaigning for centaur rights – isn't that just the sweetest? Never Lily hexed Mulciber into the Hospital Wing… again or Lily is practicing ritual magic in secret (I saw the diagrams in her notebook.) or Lily convinced Selwyn's boyfriend to cheat on her with Charity Burbage or Lily is submitting political commentary to the Prophet anonymously, and she's not arguing for the Light.

Even when I pointed it out, it was as though her reputation was invulnerable. There was always some excuse, even if it was just a wink and a nod in acknowledgement that yeah, perhaps that was a bit too far, but… And then James'd tell me off for slandering her good name.

Even Lily, though, couldn't just brush off the fact that, once we all joined the Order (and were thrown straight into the field with seven years of shitty DADA instruction and two years of pre-Auror training evenings and weekends), she quickly gained an awfully high body-count for a Healer. She was on the front lines, of course, and she was helping the cause, and she did her job – saved my life more than once – but it didn't change the fact that it slowly became clear, even to James, that she was far more ruthless than anyone else ever thought.

It was, I think, one of the few things Lily and I ever agreed on, that Dumbledore's efforts to fight a bloodless war were going to get us all killed. When he wasn't there – and he wasn't always – we both fought for all we were worth, not sparing a thought for the enemy. They were going to kill us if we didn't kill them first. I could respect her for that, and for doing whatever it took after a skirmish to make sure her patients got back up.

Still, she was a healer, not a warrior, or at least, she said she was. She never stayed behind the lines like she was supposed to, never settled for just patching us up. God, the first time we fought, for real, I thought we were going to die, when she used James' cloak to sneak up on the thrice-cursed Dark Bastard himself with her little bell and her knife and whatever forbidden ritual magic she called on to turn the day around. It was all James and I could do to guard her back against the Corpse Munchers until the anti-apparition wards came down.

It was… the war was a crazy time. We were young, all of us, and we were invincible – until we started to die. Even then, I thought – we all thought – it couldn't happen to me.

When James and Lily got together, finally, it was in the midst of that war – stolen kisses before battle and sex in the wake of near-death experiences. They never said 'I love you.' Not where anyone else could hear, at least. I need you or I missed you or I'm glad you're not dead, but never I love you.

Because everyone will tell you it was a love story, but really, it wasn't like that.

There was no time for romance. Days were spent in training, and nights on patrol or fighting. He proposed in the wake of one of the large battles – Glastonbury, the one with the golems and the giants and the bloody earthquake – in a healer's tent, surrounded by the dead and dying.

I was one of the lucky ones – a golem damn-near ripped my arm off before Dumbledore showed up, but it was nothing that couldn't be fixed (with a lot of pain and some probably not very light magic and more revolting potions than I care to remember). James was worse off – delirious with some sort of curse that had to be treated by muggle means. He was lying in bed with a fever of a hundred and three and Lily was nursing him because she'd been working for days and was completely drained and couldn't do anything else.

James had been babbling mostly incoherently, and we didn't know if it was the fever or the curse, but then he said, cool as anything out of the blue, "Hey, Evans, marry me? For old times' sake?" and she gave the saddest little laugh and said, "Yeah, alright. Survive the night, James Potter, and I'll marry you." And that was when I got scared, because Lily Evans never said 'yes' to Jamie's marriage proposals, but against all the odds, he did survive, and remembered that moment, and held her to it.

They were married – bonded, in the traditional Potter ritual – on midsummer of that year. Crashed by Death Eaters, of course, and then there was the reception, after, with Lily's muggle family – they were both far too stubborn to call it off just because of a little battle a few hours prior.

Life went on, pretty much as it had before, except at the end of the day, James went home with Lily instead of with me and Moony. Then they got pregnant, and Lily was reassigned from being a front-line healer to waiting back at the Safehouses while we went out to fight. James wasn't happy, but she refused point blank to sit and do nothing for the first six months of her pregnancy. And then in June, Dumbledore heard the Prophecy, and they went into hiding, and she became obsessed with protecting the baby at any cost, and James, well, he always wanted a wife and child. He spent as much time with them as he could.

But we were still fighting, and we were losing. Half the Order died in 1980, and at least a third of the Auror Corp. The Prewett twins, our most effective fighters, were killed in March, before Harry was born, and Lily was out of the field, and James' heart wasn't in the war anymore. In… August, just after Harry's first birthday, I nearly fell to Yaxley's wand, and we – James and I – decided that it wasn't safe, for me to fight and hold the Fidelius Secret. I tried going into hiding myself, but I couldn't stand to sit by and watch my friends fight and die while I did nothing. (It was uncannily like the position I'm in now, and that makes hiding out here even worse, never mind that this is my mother's house, and I swore I'd never step foot in it again when I left the summer after fifth year.) I lasted less than a month before I was begging James to consider switching Secret Keepers.

We chose Peter, the traitor. That was the stupidest decision of my life.

And then, well, the rest is history. We switched the Fidelius in September. Snakeface killed them in October. And I went to Azkaban to pay penance for my sins. I think it would have been better if I died.

History will tell you that James and Lily were a love story, but the truth is, it wasn't like that.

It was a tragedy.

For James and Lily, dying, knowing that they couldn't save each other or their child.

For Harry, living, orphaned and alone.

For me, losing everyone.

Their story was always about desperation and need and obsession and horror.

Love never really entered into it.