It's definitely not the question he'd been expecting. James isn't sure what exactly he was expecting, but it's not this. No one has ever asked him for relationship advice before and for a moment James isn't sure how to answer. In school he'd been mooning over Evans since first year, practically; any other passing fancy was exactly that. After school everyone had been too preoccupied with the war to ask him too many questions about the whys and hows of his relationship with Lily.

"Twenty-two today," he tells Kell, and the novelty of that still hasn't quite worn off. He's not supposed to make it to twenty-two, but here he is, dark wizards be damned. "I didn't know," he admits, shrugging a little. "But there was a war on and I knew I loved her and I'd regret it if we didn't try and give it a shot while we still could. We got married at eighteen."

He knows there are people who had thought them foolish, marrying in the middle of a war, but that's precisely why he proposed in the first place. If he only had a handful of days left to spend on Earth he intended to spend them with Lily Evans. "She could very well have told me to sod off," he says, smile creeping back, "but it was better to ask and have her say no than not ask at all."

It's clearly not an objective question at all, but James isn't going to push for detail if Kell doesn't want to elaborate.