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Ron tosses and turns on the cot but never quite wakes. His skin is slick with sweat, his shirt long soaked and discarded, yet every time Harry tries to pull away the sheets, Ron shivers hard enough to shake the bed.
“Get some rest,” Pomfrey told him the last time she’d come to renew the healing spell. “It’ll be awhile before he wakes up.”
Harry had nodded, though they both knew he wouldn’t relax until Ron was back on his feet, and she left with a slight shake of the head. Hermione came too once she heard what had happened, her anger forgotten easily in favor of worry for her friend. She stayed a long time, holding Ron’s hand and stroking his hair while Harry pretended not to hear her short, hitching breaths. Eventually, she too left, but she didn’t bother to ask Harry to do the same.
Now, the infirmary silent and dark aside from the lamp on Ron’s bedside table, Harry sits and thinks about how often he finds himself here: When they were eleven and Ron suffered a concussion after taking a blow meant for Harry, or when he broke his leg trying to defend him from Sirius Black. Ron murmurs something incomprehensible, brow furrowed, and turns onto his side, exposing the long lines of scars stretching from his arms to his back, not even a year old yet. Harry brings a hand to them, barely touching the puckered skin with his fingertips, but it is enough; Ron relaxes ever so slightly, drawing on his parabatai’s strength.
Removing the stele from his belt, Harry draws a quick ostium rune onto Ron’s shoulder, just below his parabatai rune. He’d tried one earlier, when he first realized Ron had been poisoned, and he’d barely finished it before it disappeared into his friend’s skin. Now that the healing spell has taken effect, the rune sticks, and Harry sighs in relief.
Ron is getting better.
Lily throws open the infirmary doors, hands shaking in a mix of anger and worry. Lying on the first bed is Severus, head wrapped in bandages and leg suspended in a sling. He does not rouse when Lily approaches him, enchanted into a healing sleep.
She stares down at him a long moment before deciding to sit. Her parabatai rune twinges as she does, an insignificant flicker shooting across their bond for the first time in months. She cringes; their bond has become so weakened with disuse that she hadn’t noticed he’d been injured. Had the Dean not woken her, she never would have known.
Sighing, she settles into the chair, preparing for an uncomfortable night. Severus doesn’t deserve her presence or her concern, but she can’t bring herself to leave while he’s like this. When he begins to wake, she’ll go. No need to listen to his grovelling any more than she already has to.
A few cots down, a curtain draws back and Dumbledore exits, nodding at Lily as he portals away. Beyond him, Lily is surprised to see Sirius leaning over another patient. He doesn’t seem to notice her, totally engrossed in whoever lies before him. Though she has a good idea who it is, she stands and makes her way over to them, curiosity propelling her forward. Unsurprisingly, she finds James face-down on the cot, but that’s not what gives her pause. Instead it is the scratches spanning the length of his back, deep and slow-healing. Every few seconds he tenses up in pain, and despite being unconscious, his eyes shift wildly beneath their lids. Like he’s having a nightmare.
“What happened?” she asks Sirius, who still hasn’t acknowledged her presence. He doesn’t respond. “ Black. ”
He starts, finally looking up. “Evans. What are you...oh. Right.”
Something, be it her tiredness or the tension in his shoulders threatening to break him in half, makes her take pity on him. She seems to be doing that a lot tonight.
“Same as you, probably.” She swings a chair around, planting herself firmly in front of him. “Now tell me what happened.”
Sirius braces his elbows on the bed, holding his head in his hands. His left leg bounces uncontrollably, like he’s seconds away from jumping up and bolting. She understands the feeling--knowing there’s nothing you can do but wait, the uselessness that it breeds. A year ago, she would’ve been the exact same.
A lot can change in a year.
“It’s my fault,” he mumbles. “It’s all my fault.”
He tells her about Severus and his incessant snooping, how much it had irritated Sirius, how much he wanted it to stop. He tells her about the place in Brocelind Forest he, James and Peter often visited, about Remus and the other werewolves they’d befriended against the Academy’s rules. He explains his thought process, how his irritation turned into something dangerous and he figured out a way to keep Severus off their trail for good.
Sirius gave Severus directions to their “secret base”--in actuality Remus’s hiding place--hoping it would be enough to scare Severus away. Remus, still a relatively young werewolf, had trouble resisting his transformations at night, so Sirius hoped that Severus would stumble upon a turned-Remus, still in control of his actions. He hadn’t considered the other werewolves so close by, or that it was a full moon.
But James had.
James, who Sirius told his plan only in passing, rushed out after Severus, unarmed and unprepared in the hope of stopping him before it was too late.
“He was furious,” Sirius says, shame evident in his voice. “He ran out of our room, cursing the whole way, and I was so shocked I didn’t even try to follow him.” He closes his eyes, cringing. “By the time I realized it was a full moon…”
“By the Angel,” Lily whispered, looking down at James with wide eyes. She almost can’t believe it; the James she knows would never risk his life for someone, especially not Severus. But he did, and he’s likely the only reason her parabatai is still alive. “Were either of them bitten?”
“No,” Sirius rushes to assure her. “No, they checked them both when we got back, and I looked James over everywhere. It’s only scratches.” She doesn’t need to tell him that, though scratches had a much lower risk of infection, they could still lead to Lycanthropy. With how tense he is, she can tell he already knows. The next month will be hell for all of them.
Lily knows she should yell at him, for the sake of her parabatai and her own satisfaction, but it’s nearly one in the morning and all she really wants to do is go back to bed. Besides, with the way Sirius is looking at James, she has a good feeling he won’t be pulling a stunt like this ever again.
She stands, contemplates returning to her dorm and crashing, and decides against it. She thinks of Severus and his pride in being a shadowhunter, of how devastated he’d be if that were taken from him, and returns to the chair by his bed. Parabatai draw strength from each other in times of turmoil, and if her presence can help him fight off a potential infection, she’ll stay, at least until morning.
The hours crawl by. When she’s not busy staring at the wall, she sleeps in restless spurts, never quite comfortable enough to drift away fully. The last time she wakes, as the beginnings of sunrise peek through the windows, Sirius is gone, and she takes a turn around the room to stretch her legs.
At least, that’s what she tells herself, but she ends up standing over James’s bed, staring worriedly at his wounded back. She can’t grapple with her emotions, can’t come to terms with the fact that the boy she’s hated for years risked his life for someone who was once so important to her. The two versions of James Potter can’t possibly coexist, and yet here he is.
“Here to mend my wounds, Evans?”
She almost gasps, finding James grinning up at her, and has to fight down a flush of embarrassment. His voice is hoarse from disuse and likely exhaustion, and he can’t even lift his head to look at her properly. Her heart gives a little throb of sympathy.
Just this once, she thinks, and takes Sirius’s seat.
“Black did a fine job of it, I think.”
“That bastard,” James says, but there’s no heat behind it. “Where is he?” He winces. “If he’s the one healing me, I’ve got a few choice words.”
Despite herself, she smiles. “Go easy on him. He hasn’t left your side all night.”
James closes his eyes. “I know. I could feel that he was here.” He opens them again, locking onto her with no small amount of amusement. “Give it to me straight, Evans. How bad?”
She glances at his back, as though she hadn’t all but memorized it by now. Her mouth twists as she tries to decide whether to sugar coat it or not. “You’re going to have a couple scars.”
“That’s fine with me. Ladies love scars.”
Lily laughs, actually laughs, and at the expression of pure amazement on James’s face her heart gives another pitiful thump. Before she can figure out what exactly that means, though, James goes stone-cold serious.
“Is Snape alright? I tried to get to him in time, but he’d already gone so far…”
“Yes,” she says, “yes, he’s fine. His leg is broken, and I think he hit his head, but he’ll be okay.” James relaxes, relief rolling off him in waves, and Lily is struck with the realization that the boy before her is not remotely the same as the one who’d bullied Severus all those years. She doesn’t know when it happened, or why, but somewhere along the way James Potter made a man of himself and she’d missed it completely.
“Thank you, James,” she says, voice sticking in her throat. “You saved his life. I don’t know how to repay you.”
“Well,” he drawls, and she prepares for him to ask her on a date for the thousandth time. Prepares to finally say yes. “You can find me some water and we’ll call it even.”
She blinks, surprised, and moves to fill the cup on his nightstand. He struggles to sit up, so she brings the cup to his mouth and waits while he drains it. “Thank you,” he whispers just as Sirius returns, arms full of ointments and salves from Raziel-knows-where. He races to James’s side, apologies already falling from his lips. Lily takes that as her cue to leave and slips back over to Severus’s bed. He’s beginning to stir, so she figures now is as good a time as any to return to her room. She wants to be gone before he wakes up.
But she hesitates, hovering over him, and at the last second pulls her stele out of her belt, draws a quick iratze on his arm--her own version of an olive branch--and backs away.
Sirius is still talking when she leaves, but she can feel James’s eyes on her back, following her even when she’s long out of sight.
Lily places her hands on her son’s shoulders, feeling him finally drift to sleep. Even though he can’t see her, on some level he’s still aware of her presence, still comforted by the touch of his mother. Ron rests more soundly too, now that Harry has calmed somewhat.
She feels the energy flowing between the three of them and wonders what it would have been like to know the boys in life, wonders what it would have felt like to call Ron a son.
The sun comes up and her ghost disappears, leaving nothing behind, and Harry wakes from a dream of red hair and green eyes.