For Claire (ClaireBear1982) - I hope you like it, it was a lot of fun to write :)

We're all travelling through time together

Every day of our lives

All we can do is do our best

To relish this remarkable ride

- Ellie Goulding, 'How Long Will I Love You'

She should have seen the warning signs, really. They weren't hard to miss. Except... Well, except that she had missed them. Every. Single. One. Maybe that was a blessing in disguise, though. That way she could delude herself into thinking that there hadn't been any warning signs; that this was completely unexpected; that she hadn't been waiting for this to happen.

She first met him on the train to Hogwarts; he was being obnoxious and rude and she'd hated him almost instantly. He shouldn't have been treating anyone like that, and she'd been doubly angered that it was her very best friend – he only friend, if she was being honest with herself, and wasn't that a little sad? But, no; he was nice, he was there for her, and he was her very best friend. Numbers didn't matter. And who was this kid to think that he could tease her friend just for what House he was going to be put into? It was infuriating.

He teased her mercilessly; he was always there – hiding behind the statue of the One-Eyed Witch so that he could jump out when she walked past and scare her enough to cause her to scream; running through the corridors and purposefully knocking all her books and quills and parchment to the floor and stepping on them as he didn't even slow down; moving her goblet of pumpkin juice barely an inch to the left so that she knocked it over, spilling the orange liquid all over herself and having to walk around looking like she'd wet herself until one of the teachers took pity on her. She hoped she would get her chance to pay him back eventually. But for now, she could wait.

Around third year, things got even worse. Around third year was the time that he discovered girls; more specifically, it was the time that he discovered that she was a girl. After that he started following her around like a lost puppy. Always trying to be a 'gentleman' as he called it – holding doors open for her; helping her with her books; lying on the floor and trying to get a look up her skirt. And his friends encouraged this behaviour – thought it was entertaining or something – but she supposed that was okay. She'd just watched the Pettigrew boy spill a boil inducing potion on the floor he was lying on, so it wasn't all bad really.

Then he really stepped up his game. She'd thought he'd been everywhere before, she had been wrong. So. Very. Wrong. Somehow he always managed to sit next to her during meal times; he was always sitting behind her in class; he was always one step behind her in the corridors; and there was that one memorable occasion when he'd turned up in the girls bathroom wearing nothing up a pair of swimming trunks – though he'd sworn that was for something else entirely, though he couldn't tell her what. She seriously doubted that it could get any worse.

She had been wrong, again. That was when the notes began. And he'd started writing poetry. He'd somehow worked out how to charm the parchment to speak the words allowed, only he hadn't gotten the spell quite right so sometimes it kept playing the entire thing on a loop and she couldn't figure out how to make it stop – though if she thought about it that could have been intentional, only she wasn't thinking about it because it was difficult to think of anything when all she could hear was:

I love you

like a man loves a woman he never touches, only

writes to, keeps little photographs of.

On repeat for five hours straight; it was annoying. And creepy as hell.

And if the notes weren't bad enough, now he'd started serenading her, though she had the feeling that might have been Black's brilliant idea. He'd only done it the once. Stood at the bottom of the Gryffindor tower and amplified his voice so that it would reach her right at the top. She supposed it might have been considered romantic – if he could sing, that is; and if it hadn't been 3 o'clock in the morning. As it was, he took a book to the head for his efforts and had to endure the wrath of an entire House worth of very angry – very sleep deprived – teenage girls. It did not end well.

There was no more singing and things didn't get any worse. That was her only excuse for agreeing to go to Hogsmeade with him even when she'd meant to say no; she'd tried to get out of it, but he had had witnesses. Lots of them. And so she had to endure his smug attitude as they went on a 'date' as he insisted upon calling it and told everyone he knew about it, and everyone he didn't; as he'd told everyone, really. And wasn't that just great when all her friends thought it was the sweetest thing they'd ever heard and that they were meant to be, whatever that meant. All she'd wanted was some Sugar Quills.

And now, here they were. He was still as infuriating as ever, but she'd learnt to take a lot of what he said as the joke it was intended to be. And if it was something that she found particularly offensive? Well, she still had all her old text books from Hogwarts, and that method had proved successful before. And she was happy; and he was happy; and it worked.

As she took her first step down the aisle, she realised that there was nowhere else she would rather be.

A/N: The poem James sent to Lily should actually read "I loved you/ like a man loves a woman he never touches, only/ writes to, keeps little photographs of." An Almost Made-Up Poem, Charles Bukowski.