Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling has a lot of intellectual property, including the characters and setting of this story.

"Done!" Lily set down her quill and grinned at James and Remus, who were hovering impatiently across the table from her. She took out a ruler and held it next to her essay just to be sure. "Yep—that's ten inches of parchment exactly! And it's only eight o'clock!"

"'Only'?" James demanded playfully. "The past hour has taken forever."

"Well, if you'd done your own homework or something else productive instead of watching me write for an hour, you might not have gotten so bored." But Lily was still smiling. She couldn't help it. On good days, when James was happy—well, she'd never felt anything quite like this.

"Anyway," said Remus, blushing a bit at the couple's banter, "your birthday presents."

"Guys, you didn't have—"

"It's not about 'have to,'" Remus said at the same time as James was saying, "You seriously think I'd skip getting you a birthday present?"

"I didn't get you anything for your birthday," Lily said to James before nodding to Remus and continuing, "but yeah, I guess I understand that."

The boys exchanged a glance, and then Remus proffered a package. It was wrapped in plain green wrapping paper and shaped approximately like a thick book. Lily took the package and admired it for a minute until Remus said, "Well, open it!" whereupon Lily tore off the wrapping paper. This took longer than necessary, because Lily had a slight obsession with not ripping wrapping paper while she removed it, but eventually the paper was off and Lily was holding not one thick book but two thinner ones. One had a cover featuring a moving picture of a young witch and a young wizard who were circling each other, wands drawn, in a moonlit field. By contrast, the other book's cover included a stationary picture of a well-lit pile of truffles. The titles were Star-Crossed and 100 British Confectionaries to Taste before You Die, respectively.

"The chocolate one's a Muggle book, so Honeyduke's isn't in there, but then—there's Muggle and magic in you, you know? I don't mean by blood, or anything about purity or whatever. I just mean . . . you're a part of both worlds. Like how you think of eighteen as adulthood, like you said this morning. You know?"

Lily smiled, softly this time, not a playful grin but an expression of understanding. "Yeah, I know."

"I'll go with you to some of those confectionaries, by the way," Remus added. "I paged through the book before I bought it and everything looks delicious."

"Chocolate is the best," Lily agreed.

"A-hem!" said James, half-disguised in a deliberately bad fake cough.

"The best food," Lily corrected herself. "Obviously, you're the best." She could feel her eyes crinkling as the playful grin returned.

"Right," said James, and then held out a package. The wrapping paper was Gryffindor-themed, and Lily wondered if James had transfigured some other type of wrapping paper to look like this. She was pretty sure you couldn't buy Gryffindor-themed wrapping paper just anywhere.

When Lily got over marveling at the paper, she carefully pulled off the Spellotape holding it in place, eventually revealing a box, approximately the right size for a piece of jewelry. Given that the words Hogsmeade Jewelers were embossed on the top of the box in gold, jewelry seemed like a likely candidate for James's gift.

Just as Lily was opening the box, a loud tapping sound at the nearest window made all three of the teenagers jump. Remus, who was nearest the window, was the first to see what was outside. "It's an owl. What's an owl doing here? We get mail in the mornings."

"Maybe it's something important," replied Lily, setting her box on top of her essay and making her way to the window. "Owls can be pretty smart. Maybe this one knows its message can't wait." She turned the latch on the window and pushed out on the glass, which swung open obediently. The owl instantly proffered its leg to Lily, thrusting an envelope at her. The appearance of the envelope struck her immediately: it was made of bleached white Muggle paper, not the sepia parchment ubiquitous in the wizarding world.

It was also stained with blood.

Lily took the letter from the owl's talons, whereupon the owl flew back into the night. Sinking onto the windowsill without even bothering to close the window, Lily flipped the envelope over and read the address: "Lily Evans, Hogwarts, somewhere way the hell north of here." The handwriting was unmistakably Petunia's.

Panic coalesced and rose in Lily's chest like bubbles in the proverbial unwatched pot. She tore open the envelope, taking considerably less care than she had taken with either of the pieces of wrapping paper she had so recently encountered. With fingers that were just beginning to shake, Lily pulled a note from the envelope. It was also written in Petunia's characteristic cramped handwriting, but the letters were slightly bigger than usual and there was a definite wobble in the lines that should have been straight.

The missive said, "If you're going to be a freak, you at least ought to be a useful one. Mum has cancer. Come home and fix it if you're not too freakish to care about the death of the woman who gave you life." In a different pen, with blue ink instead of black, was a postscript: "P.S. Owls are bloody horrible animals." That explained the blood on the envelope.

Lily looked up and held out the note, directing it vaguely toward James, who was still across the table from the window and therefore from Lily. She did not feel capable of doing much else. In a strange way, she did not feel much at all.

James hurried to the window and took the note from Lily's outstretched hand. It took him mere seconds to hit the key word, the cause of Lily's speechlessness, and then he sat down beside her on the sill. He took her hand and the two sat in silence for a moment.

Remus walked over to the window, almost tiptoeing. He took the paper from James's hand, read it, and then set it on the windowsill. Then he squeezed Lily's shoulder in a wordless expression of sympathy and left. Despite the noise of the common room roiling all around them, Lily got the impression that she and James were completely alone.

"Well," James said at last, "what do you want?"

"For this to not be happening?" was Lily's only response.

"Fair enough. But it is. So now what?"

"I don't know!"

"No one ever knows, Lily. The point is to do something anyway." James ran his thumb down the back of Lily's hand. "You're going home, obviously. Tonight. If Dumbledore has an issue with that, he can find you. Merlin knows that man has the resources."

"But—but Petunia's wrong. I can't fix anything."

"You've made one hell of a go at fixing me," James retorted before sighing and returning to seriousness. "You have a point. Petunia will be disappointed. That won't be anything new, if what I saw last month is any indication, but it'll probably be hard in new and horrible ways. Disappointing family gets . . . harder, amid tragedy."

Lily looked at him then and said, "James . . ."

James smiled sadly. "I know. I know. You'll go home. What will happen to your mum will happen to your mum, and Petunia will react the way Petunia will react. Those are things you can't affect, and they'll hurt you and they'll be horrible and I'm sorry about that. I'm so, so sorry. But there's no way to plan for those things or change them by being extra-prepared. Not even you could do that, and you're the most prepared person I've ever met. No, what you can affect—and not completely, and not always in the way that you want, but somewhat—is how you react. That, and whether I come with you."

Lily forced herself to make eye contact once again. "What?"

"I'll come with you, if you want. I would never intentionally desert you, especially not at a time like this. But I'm not so arrogant as to think that my presence always makes everything better, and if this needs to be just you and your family, or you don't want to worry about me on top of worrying about your mum, or whatever, you're certainly under no obligation to take me with you."

Silence fell for several minutes, and then Lily stood and said, "Let's go."

"Both of us?"

"Yes. I don't want to face . . . well, anything. Without you."

"I won't worry you too much?"

"The way you're being now, James . . ."

"Moony has always said that the best way to deal with being upset is to find someone more upset than you."

Lily thought back to the first time she and James had had a real conversation. Under her veneer of having everything under control, she'd still been upset about losing Severus, too upset to properly articulate it. And then James had been more upset, and, yes, that had helped her deal with her own internal conflicts. It had cost her a lot—plenty of sleep, at the very least—but in other ways it had been a way to handle an unending upset-ness. And now it seemed James was going to be put in that position where she'd found herself all those months ago. "Sometimes I think Remus is a genius."

"Oh, there's no 'think' about it," said James. "Speaking of Moony, I should tell him where we're going. He can deal with Dumbledore and then we can get you to your family without making you explain anything to anyone."

"Won't we be stopped on our way out of the castle? We can't just Apparate—"

"You're dating a Marauder, Lily. Remember that."

Lily nodded, the thought of cancercancercancer invading to prevent her from reflecting further or coming up with a witty response.

James sprinted up to the boys' dormitory and came down a minute later, took Lily's hand, and pulled her out of the common room. Once the portrait hole had closed and they'd gotten a good distance from the Fat Lady, James pulled something from beneath his robes and held it up. It appeared to be a piece of semi-transparent fabric, but it was too thick to be naturally transparent, so it had to be . . . "An invisibility cloak," James explained, wrapping it around himself and Lily. "One of the biggest enablers we Marauders have. We've gotten away with so much because of it. By the way, congratulations on finding out about it. You're the only one besides the Marauders who knows. Well, my dad knew, but I'm not sure if he counts anymore."

Lily took James's hand. The silence was sad, but also comfortable. After a few moments, James led the way down the corridor. After several twists, turns, and staircases, the two found themselves at a statue Lily had never paid much attention to before, a statue of a one-eyed witch. James tapped the witch's back with his wand and muttered something, and then a hatch opened and James climbed inside. Once in, he stuck his arm back out and motioned for Lily to follow him. Lily climbed inside the statue, and the two walked together into the darkness.

A/N: I'm going to call this the end. Obviously, the story could go on to explain Lily and James's life after Hogwarts, Harry's birth, and Lily and James's eventual death at the hands of Voldemort. But it won't. I've been working on this story for close to four years; it is not a coincidence that those four years coincide exactly with the four years of my high school career. This story has been intensely autobiographical in the worst way, and it has been the closest thing I've had to a diary throughout high school. It has been a place where I can process what's happening in my life by creating a fictitious abstraction that illuminates more than it obscures.

The relationship inspiring the one between Lily and James has ended, as has my time as a high schooler. I am less Lily than I have been for most of the past four years, and as such I feel I have nothing to add to this story. I hope to go into the future as a different person than the one who has been using "Heads over Heels" as a substitute for a diary, and I don't want to write this story anymore.

I think it's important to say that I don't endorse everything that happens in this story. The codependence, gender roles, and secrecy featured in "Heads over Heels" are all features of my reality whose problematic nature I am still in the process of realizing. "Heads over Heels" is not and never was an attempt to tell a story as it should be, but rather to tell a story as it very well could be. I believe that we are all, to some extent, muddling through issues we don't really know how to handle, and I think that one way to handle them is the way depicted in this narrative. Whether that way is good or healthy is a different question entirely, and I think that this particular narrative shows coping mechanisms and solutions that are problematic and damaging at times. This is not a how-to manual; it's a journey through a messy set of circumstances with few obvious answers.

The lovely thing about writing a prequel is that there are so few loose ends; that fact lessens my guilt about ending the story so abruptly. Obviously, James and Lily get married, have a son named Harry, and are murdered by Voldemort. By this point, James and Lily are both without surviving parents; Harry's only living relatives are the Dursleys. Lily fails to save her mother and Petunia never forgives her for it. Ultimately, I have little to add to Rowling's canon; I have simply manipulated it a bit in order to process my own thoughts. Thank you for your patience and interest.