Author: Lily EvansPotterBlack

Title: She knew

Rating: PG-13

Archived: Unspeakable

Pairing: James Potter/Harry Potter

Warnings: Slash, incest, mentions of teen!preganacy and hints of squib!Harry.

Summary: AU. Little Lily Potter was always good at keeping secrets. JP/HP. Incest, slash.

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Little Lily Potter was always good at keeping secrets.

Not that the older Lily Potter, her mother, was not, just that Little Lily Potter only told secrets to her diary, and sometimes to her beloved brother, Harry; the only brother in a sea of redheaded sisters.

Her redheaded sisters who came to her - though she was near half a decade younger than the youngest of her older sisters, her only sisters - with talk and rants, confiding without fear of the words creeping back to them through other's mouths. That was why Little Lily knew her sisters so well, how she just knew that Maddie was pregnant and Zariel thought she might be bisexual.

Adults can't keep secrets. Whether because it's 'for your own good' or because the secret is too juicy a piece of gossip to keep to themselves. Grownups can't, or, (Little Lily always thought this more plausible) they just wouldn't keep secrets.

Little Lily had no respect for adults who were like this, the only possible exception being her Dad, because he wasn't always a grownup. Sometimes (and this was just some of the time) when he was with Harry, he wasn't even Dad anymore. On those glorious days when it was only the three of them, and they were out on the fields by the lake or having ice cream in muggle Rome, or on the subway in New York he become 'James' once more. The grinning boy that was alive on paper with youth and fire and freedom and determination and love became flesh, and blood, and bone that made up James, or maybe Prongs, instead of Dad or Mr. Potter. Little Lily knew it was her beloved brother that made it so.

Often, Little Lily would sit on the staircase in their large muggle home, pressing her fingers against the bouncy cream carpeting and reading from the jagged script that was much like her brother's (and indeed, that was who it was modelled after) and that was her diary, crunching through a green apple and re-reading the wonderful secrets she herself had wrote so long ago.

Through her childhood Little Lily watched her beloved brother and James (he would always be James in her thoughts and her writings, she had seen him with Harry too often for him not to be) blossom together. Slow kisses from whence the laughter never seemed to fade, hands clasped close together sticky with kisses instead of ice cream, close against the chest with Harry instead of swung like Maddie or Paige or like Little Lily herself used to, who held on more softly to both Harry and James because she was not the kind of child her sisters once were. Not still and loose like with Lily, stretched about or with a child in between so they weren't mashed together with intimacy, like the photos of James and Sirius and Remus and Peter. The Marauders who made James James again, but not in the same way that Harry did.

Little Lily knew that nobody was to know of what went on between her father and her brother, that the passages in her diary, in her brother's handwriting that was truly her's were to stay within those pages. Secrets, if you will.

She knew that the love James felt for Harry was not the same as the love James felt for her, that the touches between them never would even dream to be taken the same as the fatherly piggy back rides James gave her or the teasing and ribbing Harry gave her. She knew that her Mother who was now standing in front of the open door in the large entrance hall of their muggle home calling to her missing husband and children, would never now that her husband was delayed because he was buttoning his shirt and exchanging swift open-mouthed kisses with his only son several last times. She knew that her redheaded sisters, who were ducking back and forth from the car and the hall, dragging trunks and arguing with their mother over subtracted house points and undeserved detentions would never know that as they called greetings to Harry as he walked confidently along the landing and down the sweeping staircase, (ruffling his youngest sister's hair with a grin as he passed her) that their only and oldest brother had first been kissed by their Dad as a lover three days after he had failed to get his letter to the school they had just returned from or that it was him inside their parent's bedroom, in their Dad's bed, breathless, on the night Mira and Gabby had flooed in because Paige had been petrified, and not 'another women' as they had concluded with their friends and sisters. Little Lily knew because Harry had told his youngest sister. And Little Lily would never tell them.

Little Lily knew that, although her hair was the same dark red of her mother's, that the almond shape of her eyes and the small nose with the delicate tilt were all akin to her Mother, that although the name she used was Lily's she would be, and would always be first and foremost, her father's daughter.

Little Lily, she knew that out of all his daughters, she was the only one who James saw himself in, littlest Lily was the only child of his to inherit his mischievous, knowing eyes and the only Potter child - even Harry - to carry the spirit of Prongs inside of her.

"Mum!" Little Lily left her diary atop the stairs and ran down to her Mother, and was swung up into a hug. "Heyah, sweetie. How's my little Lily?" Little Lily smiled, her teeth small and white, one of them loose and another was gone. "I've lost a petal." she said, referring to her teeth. And in the arms of her laughing Mother, Lily Potter the second looked over her namesake's shoulder with mischievous hazel eyes that twinkled. Identical eyes met, the elder leaning on the white rail of the balcony, and father and daughter shared a conspirative smile.

Maybe that was why Little Lily Potter was so good at keeping secrets.

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This is fini, just like to make that clear. Doesn't mean I won't write more fics in this universe again but this one has ended. Really. Tell me what you think and it'll go towards buying Harry a magic wand. You wouldn't deprive those pretty emerald eyes of some magic would you? : )

xxLilyxx