Archive of Our Own

In the summer of 1976, Lily Evans is a prefect, a tragic poet in the making, and immensely, terribly bored.

She hasn’t been friends with Severus properly since she was fourteen, really, but his absence is like a gaping hole, never mind that she was the instigator of this absence in the first place, that he would come running back if she asked. It is frightening to find that she has this power over him, yet in the end, he is the one to wound her. Perhaps it is because she knows she will not use this unspoken power, yet Sev craves power like it is a well and he is a dying man in the desert.

On nights when she can't sleep, she thinks of that afternoon after OWLs and wonders what she could have done differently, if, if, though she knows that her Sev has been gone for months, maybe years. Maybe he was never there in the first place, although that hurts to think about for too long.

The first saving grace of her summer is that Petunia has found a boyfriend. Privately, Lily thinks of him as terribly dull; he seems to have no passions except money, drills, and deriding particularly bad football players as “pansies.” He sneers at her with a combination of derision and fear the first time they meet, and she wonders what, if anything, Petunia has told him about her. Petunia spends every waking hour with him, though Lily can’t imagine what they have to talk about. She has fun, sometimes, picturing their conversations: Petunia talking about how their neighbor, Mrs. Michaelson, has simply no taste in clothes at all, Vernon darling, she paired a floral skirt with a plaid shirt, Vernon grunting at intervals, occasionally speaking to ask, how about those drills, Petunia honey? She hopes, truly, that they will break up soon, but for now, it is immensely entertaining, and Petunia is almost always out of the house. 

The second saving grace is Rachel Monroe, recent implant from the United States, who moves in down the street that June with her recently divorced father and an arsenal of knowledge about poetry and art that fascinates Lily immensely.

Rachel has short coffee-brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and owns what seems to be an infinite collection of bell-bottom jeans. She is the most beautiful person Lily has ever met, Narcissa Black (formerly known as the prettiest girl in all of Hogwarts) included. 

Rachel openly hates Cokeworth in the way only recent residents can. On the afternoon they move in, all noisy moving trucks and cars with bags tied to the top, Lily’s mother invites Rachel and her father over for tea. It is horribly awkward, not least because of Rachel’s stiff demeanor. 

“Your father tells me you’ve just moved here from Manhattan,” Lily’s mother says to Rachel, attempting to make conversation after the cheese plate has been devoured and the tea has been drunk. 

“Mhm,” Rachel replies, avoiding Lily’s mother’s gaze. She picks up her clearly empty teacup and brings it to her mouth, airsipping loudly. It is obvious that she would rather be anywhere else in the universe, including Hell itself. 

“Rachel misses it,” Rachel’s father says—an understatement, surely. With his greying hair and long goatee, he resembles an old llama. “It was a bit of a sudden move—my wife slept with my boss, told me she would be leaving me for him, sued for our home, I needed to get a new job, the only one I could find was in a foreign country, you know how these things go.” He chuckles in an attempt to bring levity to the conversation. It fails miserably. 

“What do you like to do, Rachel?” Lily’s mother asks. Rachel picks up a biscuit and examines it as though it is the most interesting thing in the world. 

“I write,” Rachel says shortly.

“Oh! My Lily likes to write too!”

“Mum,” Lily hisses, because she’s begun to write poetry, yes, but it is absolutely terrible, and she doesn’t need some cosmopolitan American girl to confirm that it is terrible. Rachel, however, perks up and finally seems interested.

“What do you write?” Rachel looks at her for the first time—really looks at her, straight in her eyes, and Lily feels as though she’s been electrocuted.

“Just some poetry,” she says. “About nature, mostly.”

Rachel nods, as though she understands. “I’d love to see some of your work. I write poetry too, when I can.” 

From anyone else, it would seem to be merely a passing comment. Lily assumes that it is one, something polite Rachel said to end their torturous tea, but the next morning, Rachel shows up on her doorstep, looking bored and beautiful. “Well? I thought we could write together today.” And Lily follows, because she is bored and Rachel is beautiful and she really does need to write better poetry. 

Lily knows her poetry is juvenile. She describes, mostly: the look of the sunset on a cool night, the flowers blooming between the cracks of the sidewalk, the color of the sky after the rain. Rachel’s poetry is different—it is angry, it is political, and it is vivid without having to describe anything at all. But Rachel never tells Lily that her poetry is lesser or less real, even though Lily knows that it is—she only suggests ways to make a metaphor flow better or a different way to split up a stanza.

“My poetry is terrible,” Lily sighs one day when she’s feeling particularly uninspired. They’re in the public park today, writing on the edge of metal slides that burn to sit on at first, because Rachel insists that changing environments is good for stimulating the mind. Lily doesn’t protest, partly because the last time they were here, Sev had walked by, and when he caught a glimpse of her whispering with Rachel, he had reared back like he had been hit with a Stunning Spell. Maybe it’s childish, her way of screaming I don’t need you, I have other friends at home too, but it feels good. Rachel had seen Sev’s face, and rolled her eyes, saying, “It’s like he’s never seen a woman outside of the kitchen before,” and Lily had burst into laughter, because it was both completely accurate and completely false at the same time. 

“It’s not,” Rachel says, scribbling out a word furiously with her green-inked pen. 

“My poetry—it doesn’t say anything,” Lily says, wondering how she can best explain it. “It’s—your poetry has meaning, you know? You talk about war and suffering and creating change, and all I write about is fucking flowers. Why couldn’t I have been born when people were still writing about fucking flowers?”

“Well, for one thing, I don’t think many people have written about fucking flowers,” Rachel says with a lewd grin, and in that moment she uncannily resembles Sirius Black. “It would be very subversive if you did. For another, I don’t think there’s a correct way of writing poetry. I can write about ending wars because I care about ending wars. You can write about flowers because you care about flowers.”

“But I don’t care about flowers,” Lily says, because she really, truly doesn’t. There are things she cares about: ending prejudice, friendship, her education, her family. There are things she fears: the coming war with Voldemort that seems to be almost inevitable, the deaths of her friends and her family, the failure to do, in life, what she loves. Flowers don’t fall into either of these categories.

“There’s your problem then,” Rachel says simply. “You need to write about something you care about.”

“How?”

For a moment, Rachel is lost in thought, gazing into the distance. “You have to read more poetry,” she concludes. “We’re putting you on a diet of only poetry, all the time, Miss Lily Evans. Plath, Lorde, Hughes, Dickinson, Shelley, Byron, Cummings, Eliot, Joyce. You’ll know what to write about afterwards.”

Lily goes home that night laden down with books and an unquenchable thirst to read. For the next week, every night, she puzzles, delighted, over wordplay and rhythms, mouthing out round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. She realizes that she’s forgotten over the past few years how much she used to love to read. Reading at Hogwarts is the reading of textbooks, how-to manuals on casting spells and brewing potions. Most wizarding fiction is almost juvenile, the plots outlandish at best. Few of her fellow students really, truly love to write. It seems to have been stampeded out of them with every essay. No wonder The Daily Prophet’s journalism is so shoddy. 

Last year, when Professor McGonagall had called her into her office to discuss future career paths, Lily came prepared. She wanted to be a Healer, she told McGonagall.

“I have the skills for it,” Lily had explained in her most level voice. “I’m going to take Charms, Potions, Transfiguration, Herbology, and Defence for my NEWTs.”

“That much is clear, Miss Evans,” McGonagall had replied. “However—and I do ask this to every one of my students—why do you want to be a Healer?”

She had sat, stunned, in her seat. The first explanation that came to her mind had been laughably naive. She had wanted to be a doctor as a child, because her childhood doctor was one of the kindest people she had ever met. When she told the boys at primary school this, though, they had laughed at her. You can be a nurse, but not a doctor, they said. When she’d gone to Hogwarts and learned that there was no distinction—that you were simply a Healer, and no one treated you as less of a Healer if you happened to be a girl—she’d become quickly attached to the idea. She is under no delusions that the Wizarding World is free of sexism, but here, she can be a Healer, and no one would laugh at her for wanting to be one. 

Haltingly, she had tried to explain this to McGonagall, who looked at her with sad eyes. “Miss Evans, if you wish to be a Healer, of course you can be one. You are one of the few students I’ve spoken to today who seems to have given actual thought into their career path instead of simply wishing to become a Quidditch player.” At this, Lily had stifled a laugh, thinking of Potter. “However, I must urge you, again, to keep your mind open. I have no doubt that you would be an excellent Healer, but I have no doubt that you would also be an excellent professor, Auror, journalist, cursebreaker, or any number of other professions.”

She wonders, now, if she could become a writer—not a journalist, but a writer of poetry, of short stories, of fiction. No matter how terrible her poetry is, she can’t deny that she’s gotten more enjoyment out of it than she ever has shadowing Madam Pomfrey in the Hogwarts infirmary. She almost dismisses it—she isn’t good enough to be one, after all—but a voice that sounds suspiciously like Rachel pops up in her mind. No writer is born good, the voice says. You have to work at it. 

Would it be throwing away everything she’s been given, throwing away everything she’s learned at Hogwarts, she wonders, if she wanted to become a writer? Can she even apply to universities for English? She’s not going to take her A-Levels, after all. Maybe she could apply to a wizarding branch of a university—Oxford, in her dreams—and sneak into lectures on her free time. She resolves to find out, later, if Oxford allows joint degrees in Wizarding and Muggle subjects. McGonagall would know, surely.

For now, though, there is summer, and there is Rachel. Lily stops writing about flowers and begins to write about the things she cares about. She writes about missing Sev, her first real friend. She writes about the dread she feels with every letter from Marlene, whose mother is an Auror and has been seeing more cases of disappeared Muggleborns every month. She writes about wanting to wipe Potter’s smug smirk off his face. She writes about the old news articles Rachel shows her when they go to the library—articles about anti-war demonstrations in the United States, the Miss World Protest, gay liberation, and every day, she wonders more about what her life would be like if she had never been magic. She wonders what she would be taking for her A-levels—English, Chemistry, and History, probably—what she would be reading, what she would be fighting for. 

Rachel’s father lost almost all his money in the divorce, but he is determined to give his daughter a good education nevertheless, so by mid-August, Rachel is spending most of her days preparing for her next two years at Wycombe Abbey. She complains about it daily. 

“I’ll hate it,” Rachel announces one evening for what must be the thousandth time, sighing. Tonight, they’re lying on their backs in Rachel’s small backyard, watching the dark clouds pass in the sky. “They’ll bully me for being American. I just know it.”

“You know, I don’t think that’s a thing that happens,” Lily laughs. “Anyway, they’ll love you. You’re going to introduce them all to Magritte, and they’ll find you immensely interesting.”

“No, that’s just you,” Rachel says, not unkindly. “They’re going to be so fucking posh, I just know it. I bet their parents all know the Queen. God, they’ll be insufferable. All those boarding school girls are.”

“I’m a boarding school girl, you know,” Lily says. 

“God, don’t remind me,” Rachel says, playing with a blade of grass. “And just when I thought we’d be friends forever.”

“Least I’m not posh,” Lily grins. Everything is wonderful, in this moment, the cool summer breeze, Rachel at her side. 

“No, you aren’t,” Rachel agrees. Above them, the clouds pass in one fluid motion, sectioning off the night sky. There are rare stars tonight, and they twinkle welcomingly. 

“That’s Ursa Major,” Lily points. “Well, part of it, anyway.”

“I didn’t know you liked astronomy.”

“I used to,” Lily shrugs, only half a lie. She’d dropped it for her NEWTs, but she’d enjoyed the subject. There wasn’t much magical about it, but that was part of why she’d loved it: it grounded her a bit, watching these age-old constellations in the sky, the same constellations conquerors and poets alike had looked upon once. 

“I’m going to miss you terribly,” Rachel says suddenly. She looks at Lily contemplatively, searching her face. This is the first time she’s ever seemed vulnerable, Lily realizes. 

“I’ll miss you terribly too,” Lily says, perhaps too candidly, but it seems to be the right thing to say, because Rachel finds her hand and squeezes it tightly. For a moment, there is just their shared breaths, and then, somehow, their lips find their way to each other.

This is Lily Evans’s first kiss: under the night sky in her hometown, with a beautiful, sophisticated, unbearably kind American girl. It is a gentle kiss, one she will only ever remember fondly. When she thinks back to it, decades later, she will remember the taste of Rachel’s lip gloss: strawberry, soft and sticky sweet. This is the summer that changes Lily’s life, only it doesn’t, really, because her life has been changed tens of hundreds of times before this, but nevertheless: this is the summer that changes Lily’s life, because every summer changes Lily’s life a bit. 

When Lily returns to Hogwarts that fall, she finds herself, for what must be the first time, aching for Cokeworth. Rachel won’t be there, she knows—she’ll be off in the south of England, rolling her eyes as her classmates ride horses competitively—but she misses it nevertheless, especially when the only tangible memory of Rachel she possesses is Rachel’s copy of The Bell Jar, which Lily still hasn’t quite gotten around to reading. This ache only grows stronger as the early fall begins to turn into winter and she realizes that her roommates have all gone mad. 

It seems as though every one of them is boy-crazy, determined to couple up with one boy or another. The first is Alice, who begins dating Frank Longbottom, a Ravenclaw, in October. They are sickeningly sweet, and Lily can’t even find it in her to complain, because the most they ever do is cuddle adorably in the Common Room. Frank is kind, smart, and witty, and Lily finds herself approving of him almost instinctively. 

The second to go is Mary, who snogs Peter Pettigrew after one Hogsmeade weekend in November and becomes absolutely lovesick. Pettigrew is nice, Lily must admit, and he’s cute in a plain sort of way, but she can’t understand why Mary begins writing actual sonnets to him. They aren’t very good sonnets, since Mary mucks up the rhyme scheme half the time, but Lily won’t tell that to her, because Pettigrew seems to love them. She approves of this less than she did Frank and Alice, because Pettigrew and Mary not only cuddle, but they also snog each other’s brains out every time they see each other. This, of course, means that Pettigrew’s other friends—namely, Potter and Black, since Lupin never seems to join in as fervently—wolf-whistle loudly every time Mary and Pettigrew snog, which is too often. Lily finds herself studying in the library most days and not the Common Room. She thinks, savagely, that some people might need a reminder that the Common Room is a common space, and begins plotting when and how to do this in the most effective manner. 

She writes about this in her letters to Rachel, which she sends at every Hogsmeade weekend through the regular post. Rachel writes back with crude jokes and suggestions to make her roommates shut up in various ridiculous ways, and she finds herself wishing that Rachel could go to Hogwarts as well. 

In a certain light, the sudden obsession of her roommates over boys makes complete sense. For one, it is wintertime, and every winter, more couples seem to appear—perhaps due to the cold, perhaps due to the insatiable urge to share a hot butterbeer with another person. For another, the impending war is never far from the back of everyone’s minds, and more signs of it appear every day. At the tail end of November, Athena Wu’s brother, an Auror, is murdered brutally by Death Eaters, who hang him from a town square after slicing him open from the inside out. The day after, she begins dating Billy Dawlish, and they are rarely found apart afterwards. Her classmates throw themselves into love headfirst, in the fear that if they do not, they may never have the chance to love again. 

However, this does nothing to diminish Potter’s infuriating pursuit of her. It also encourages her roommates to continuously ask her if she fancies any boy. For these reasons, while she can understand the sudden obsession of her roommates over boys, she can’t sympathize with them.

It’s the third time in December that Dorcas Meadowes asks her if she fancies any Gryffindor boy, wink wink nudge nudge one James Potter, mayhaps, that she snaps. “Look, if Potter’s so wonderful, why don’t you date him?”

“He’s totally gone for you, Lily,” Dorcas laughs. “The poor boy would give anything for you to fancy him back.”

“Well, I don’t,” Lily says, snapping her Transfiguration textbook shut. “I’m going to go study in the library.”

“He’s very fit, you know!” Dorcas calls as Lily quickly walks out of the dorm room. Potter is fit, yes, with his warm brown skin and his Quidditch muscles and his wide smile, but he is also horribly arrogant and infuriating, and Lily isn’t in the habit of fancying people just because they’re fit. Otherwise, she would have fallen in love with Sirius Black years ago, and God knows that will never happen. 

When she gets to the library, she finds that her Transfiguration textbook is, unfortunately, immensely boring. She’s known this for a while, but it’s still a bit annoying to have this confirmed, since before, she could blame her boredom on being in her dorm room, which is constantly filled with distractions. The library is filled with almost no distractions at all, especially this close to the end of term. She drops a pen, and one manic-looking Hufflepuff shushes her. He looks about twelve. 

She gives up on her Transfiguration homework after a few more minutes of rereading the same paragraph, and decides to finally open up The Bell Jar. She’d liked Plath’s poetry when she’d read it—particularly “The Applicant” and “Mirror”—but she doesn’t quite know what to expect from the book.

Surprisingly, she becomes engrossed quickly. The prose is easy to follow, and she finds herself sympathizing with Esther’s detachment. She has never been to New York, but she can imagine it vividly. Mentally, she begins to make a list of everything she likes about the book so she can write to Rachel about it later. 

“I love that book,” a voice above her comments, and she whirls around to find Remus Lupin.

If Lily had to—had to—pick a favorite Gryffindor boy, it would be Remus Lupin. Remus is unfailingly nice to everyone, even those who are cruel to him, and he always has a hand to lend with a particularly difficult assignment. Remus, unlike Potter and Black, has never attempted to attract Lily’s attention with an ostentatious prank. Remus is a very good listener, according to Dorcas, who once cried all over him after being broken up with by Nicholas Patel. Remus takes their prefect patrols seriously and, unlike a certain Slytherin prefect, does not use them as an excuse to steal food from the kitchens. 

“A friend gave it to me,” Lily smiles. “It’s good so far.”

“My mum had me read Plath, actually,” Remus says, sliding into the seat next to her. “She was a very big fan of ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’ which made me wonder for a bit what her early relationship with my father was like.”

“Do you read a lot of poetry?”

“Not that much,” Remus admits, playing with the left sleeve of his jumper. “Not as much as I’d like to. I’m a big fan of Eliot, though. I’ve heard that Pound is worth a try, but I’m not especially keen on reading poetry by a fascist, especially now.” 

“Oh God, we definitely don’t need to give more attention to fascists,” Lily sighs. She thinks of Athena Wu’s crumpled face when she got the news of her brother’s death, and her stomach twists horribly. 

“That we don’t,” Remus says, echoing her sigh. “I need to go help Sirius with something right now, but I’d love to talk about poetry more with you some other time.” He smiles warmly at her, and Lily realizes that yes, she would like to talk about poetry more with Remus Lupin.

She watches as he exits the library, stumbling over a piece of fallen parchment and apologizing to Madam Pince, who actually produces a smile for the first time in the six years Lily’s known her. She thinks of his warm eyes and his kind smile, and slowly, a plan begins to form in her head.

“Who do you fancy?” Dorcas asks, her eyes dancing. Lily sighs. Two days before Christmas Break, and her roommates seem to have gone even madder. Fewer students are heading home for the holidays, now, especially Muggleborn students, with the danger the Death Eaters pose. Hogwarts is the safest place on Earth and all that tosh. Really, Lily would be willing to brave Death Eaters if it meant she could go home and see Rachel in person again. She’s never thought letters could fail to be enough—they’ve always worked with her parents, after all. 

All her friends are also hopelessly drunk, even though it’s not even midnight. Marlene had asked the House Elves for eggnog and proceeded to spike it with Firewhiskey, even after learning that the Hogwarts eggnog was already alcoholic. 

“No one,” Lily repeats for what must be the fourth time. 

“You fancy someone,” Marlene slurs. “You do. I just know it! You—you’ve been sneaking around, and you’re never in the dorm, and you look so happy.”

“I can’t be in the dorm with you lot hanging around,” Lily grumbles, but she sighs. She does love her friends, even if they’ve insisted on being annoying as all hell for the past few months. “Fine, do you want to know who I fancy?”

“Yes!” Mary practically screams, spilling her eggnog everywhere. Marlene sighs, vanishing it quickly. For someone so drunk, she’s surprisingly quick with her cleaning spells. 

“I fancy,” Lily whispers, leaning in for dramatic effect. “Remus Lupin.”

“Lupin?” Marlene sits back, seemingly stunned. “Why Lupin?”

“What do you mean?” Lily feels offended on Remus’s behalf. “Remus is very nice and smart.”

“Yes, but,” Mary says, scrunching up her nose. “It’s just—Potter fancies you.”

“And?”

“It’s Potter!” Mary exclaims. “He’s Quidditch captain, and he’s smart too, and he’s kind, and he—he’s fit.” 

Alice nods in agreement. “I love Frank, but Merlin, is Potter fit. Those arms.” To Lily’s horror, her drunk roommates collectively have a moment of silence in honor of Potter’s biceps. 

“Well, Remus is very nice,” Lily says. “We have good talks together. And I think he’s plenty fanciable.” 

Alice looks contemplative for a moment, and then gasps. “So that’s why you liked patrolling with him so much! No one actually enjoys being a prefect!”

I enjoy being a prefect, Lily doesn’t say. It would make her seem even less fun than she already does. 

“He is very, very tall,” Marlene muses. “You could always wear heels with him around.”

“I don’t care that he’s tall,” Lily says, even though Remus is objectively very, very tall. Marlene ignores her.

“He also has wicked scars,” Marlene continues. “It’s very roguish. Makes him look like a dragon tamer or something.”

“He’s not a dragon tamer.”

“No, I know that,” Marlene says, throwing herself onto Lily’s bed. “But he looks like one.”

“I can see it,” Dorcas announces, pouring herself another glass of eggnog. “It makes sense, I suppose. Two prefects, two bookworms, two swots—”

“I’m not a swot!”

“Yes, you are,” Dorcas says, rolling her eyes. “You’re our swot, though.” 

“I hate you all,” Lily says, pushing Marlene off her bed gently, who puts on her best face of mock offense. “And I am going to bed.”

“It’s not even eleven, Lily,” Mary laughs. Lily closes the curtains around her bed loudly and dramatically and casts a silencing charm around her bedpost. She sighs and thanks God that Remus is actually going home for the holidays to spend time with his mother and father. With her luck, by the end of the holidays, her roommates will have forgotten about this conversation entirely. After all, they are very drunk.

Her roommates do not forget about the conversation entirely. On the contrary, they seem to remember every part of it. For the rest of Christmas holidays, she finds herself pestered daily by Dorcas, who wants to know the intimate details of her prefect patrols with Remus.

There are no details. In their patrols, they walk the halls largely in silence, mindful that the majority of students are sleeping. Sometimes, they chat a bit about their shared classes, a bit about poetry they’ve read, and Lily offers to help Remus with Potions, which he hasn’t dropped despite professing a hatred of the subject. Occasionally, Remus leaves the patrols early to check on something or other, and afterwards, Lily spends her time wondering how she can improve her short story about a boy dealing with his father’s untimely death. More sadness, she thinks. 

Despite this, Dorcas seems to have the impression that their patrols are filled with flirting, and occasionally, illicit kisses in classrooms.

“Remus and I aren’t dating,” Lily says, too forcefully, to Dorcas on the fifth day of Christmas holidays. She’s been trying to write a letter to Rachel for days, but Dorcas won’t leave her alone. She sighs, picking up her pen again. I haven’t been able to get a copy of The Iron Man yet, but I’ll read it soon, I promise, she writes, and then, in a fit of inspiration, also, my friends are all horribly annoying. Please let me know how I can transfer to Wycombe Abbey, effective immediately. 

“No, but you fancy him, and I know for a fact he could fancy you back,” Dorcas says with a smile, plopping down next to Lily on her bed. 

“How do you know that?” Lily tries haplessly to school her features into one of boredom, but inwardly, she’s panicking. Remus can’t fancy her. Dear God, that would ruin everything. He doesn’t fancy her, right? Outside of patrols and their library chats, they hardly even speak to each other. 

“I don’t, but it would make sense,” Dorcas says. “I mean, he’s never dated anyone, and when he goes to Hogsmeade, it’s just with Black. It’s probably out of respect to Potter—he fancies you, but he knows that Potter does too, and Potter got dibs.”

“I’m not dibs!” Lily says, jumping off her bed. She wonders if there’s an empty classroom somewhere. Maybe she could finally finish the letter in peace. 

“You’re writing to Remus, aren’t you,” Dorcas says with a knowing look. “Oh my God, you are! That’s so romantic.”

“Shut up, Dorcas,” Lily says, a bit too rudely.

“I’m sorry,” Dorcas says. She looks genuinely apologetic. “I’ll drop it if you want me to. I know that new crushes can be hard—”

Lily scribbles out the end of her letter quickly and resolves to write a better one next time. Next time, she’s also going to write in the Potions classroom, somewhere no one will ever bother her. “I’m going down to Hogsmeade.”

“If you need any advice on how to get him to fancy you back, feel free to come to me!” 

“Dorcas, please, please stop talking,” Lily says with a sigh. 

Luckily, for the rest of Christmas break, Dorcas stops asking her, instead winking every time she sees Lily writing a letter. Lily also manages to obtain a copy of The Iron Man. For a children’s story, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. Hughes uses language well, and when she finishes it, at night, she pictures herself as an Iron Man—Iron Woman, perhaps—iron bolts and parts, piecing herself together slowly. Emerging from the ground like a mechanical Venus, I am Lazarus, come from the dead. A defender of the meek, a protector against the cruel. An Iron Woman could defeat Voldemort easily, fling him out into the expanses of the universe. She imagines Voldemort floating out in space, screaming wildly into the endless darkness, waving his wand uselessly. It is a very funny image. 

When Christmas holidays end, though, the trouble starts again. Remus Lupin comes back from Wales with new robes and a shorter haircut, and her friends go mad. 

“I can understand why you fancy him now,” Marlene says with a sigh the first day term starts up again. They’re in Charms, and Remus is demonstrating a nonverbal Summoning Charm. “His hair’s finally caught up to his face.”

“I fancy him, so shouldn’t I be talking about this?” Lily asks, amused. The haircut does look quite nice, but if she did fancy Remus, it wouldn’t be for his hair or lack of it. 

Remus, at least, is perfectly pleasant. Their first patrol of the new year, he meets her with a smile. “I got the chance to go to the bookstore over holidays, and I thought of you when I saw this.” He hands her a book with a whimsical cover, a girl looking out into the countryside. I Capture the Castle, she reads. “It’s very funny, and the main character loves poetry just like you.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Lily says. And it is—when she reads it that night, under the covers, she finds herself falling in love with the Mortmains, sympathizing with Cassandra’s inability to write a good poem. She wishes, ludicrously, to live in a crumbling castle in the 1930s as well, even though Hogwarts is already a castle, though one less crumbling than stately, and if she really wants to revel in the pre-war era, all she needs to do is read The Daily Prophet. Still, she can imagine.

She writes this in her next letter to Rachel—tactfully leaving out the part about Voldemort and the Death Eaters, of course. It’s a very great comfort to know that in every century, in every place, English teenage girls have been unable to produce good poetry. Rachel’s reply is a combination of gushing over Dodie Smith’s prose and yes, that is the eternal struggle: there is so much I want to write, and I am horribly unequipped with the tools to do it. 

She talks about the part with Voldemort to Remus instead, the next time they come across each other in the library. For a moment, she feels bad that she’s effectively using him as a stand-in for Rachel, especially when Remus and Rachel have nothing in common, bar their shared hair color, but she reasons that she’s not really using him as a stand-in. She can have multiple literary friends, can’t she?

“I understand what you mean,” Remus says thoughtfully, after Lily’s explained her idiotic fantasy of living in the fucking Great Depression. “It’s not a logical fantasy, but I don’t think any fantasies are. I mean, I wanted to live in the Roaring Twenties after reading Wodehouse, but realistically, I wouldn’t be a young aristocrat. I’d probably be some sad war veteran who lost a leg to German fire.”

“But it makes no sense,” Lily sighs, flipping to the next page of her Potions textbook. “We’re in a pre-war era, and—this sounds stupid—it doesn’t feel very romantic at all.”

“I don’t think it ever does,” Remus says. “Did you know Smith wrote I Capture the Castle during the Second World War? She wrote it because she wanted to think of happier times, only I doubt people were that happy during the 30s anyway, what with the starving and poverty and all. Everything is happier when you’re looking back on it. We take out the bad and only remember the good, because there’s no use remembering the bad when everything is bad already.”

“That makes sense,” Lily says slowly. “You know—”

“Moony!” an exuberant voice shouts, and Lily looks up to find the flailing form of Sirius Black. Madam Pince glares at him with flaming daggers, but Black takes no notice, instead dropping swiftly into Remus’s lap and wrapping his arms around his neck. He resembles a particularly tactile sloth. To Remus’s credit, he barely even flinches. 

“Hi, Sirius,” Remus says, his eyes too kind for the absolute tornado of chaos that is Sirius Black. “Lily and I were just talking about a book.”

“You could talk about books with me, you know,” Black says with a roll of his eyes. “Anyway, we’re late for you-know-what.”

“Are we?”

“You’ve been in the library for ages, Remus,” Black says. “You could have died in here.”

“I doubt that,” Remus says. He does, however, stand up, stretching. “Sorry, Lily. We’ll talk soon?” 

Lily nods, and then Remus and Black are off, Black’s arm still draped around Remus. She can’t quite hear their conversation, but she does detect a whine in Black’s voice, and she has to stifle a giggle at that. 

In her next letter to Rachel, she writes about Remus for the first time. He’s very smart; I think you would like him a lot. He seems like the kind of person who knows about the surrealists. 

Ask him what he thinks of “Lady Lazarus," Rachel writes back. I know you said he likes The Bell Jar, but make sure he’s a poet too. If he is, definitely introduce us. 

And she does, a few weeks later. “You’ve read Ariel, haven’t you,” Lily says, more of a statement than a question. They’re in the library again. Lately, they’ve stopped using the pretense of doing homework to meet up, accepting these conversations as what they are: opportunities to gush about literature. 

“Of course,” Remus says. “I think I told you about ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’—I had Plath spoon-fed to me by my mum before I could even properly read.”

Lily laughs at that, imagining a tiny Remus on his mother’s lap, hearing of blood and suffocating tulips instead of knights battling dragons. “What do you think of ‘Lady Lazarus’?”

“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air,” Remus recites, looking straight at Lily, who rolls her eyes. “Honestly? I’m unsure about it. I get the intention of it, but—the use of the Holocaust as imagery is, to say the least, quite troubling.”

“It really is,” Lily agrees, the poem’s stanzas floating in her mind. 

“When I read Plath on my own again, a few years back, I talked to my mum about it—she was raised Orthodox, actually.”

“Oh,” Lily says. “I didn’t know you were Jewish.” 

“We’re not really practicing anymore, but we celebrate some of the holidays—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Purim, and Passover, mostly,” Remus says, twirling his pen. “Anyway, I asked her how she felt about it, and she said that the biggest problem with it was that Plath seemed to tokenize suffering. The Holocaust wasn’t a metaphor. It was something that actually happened, that killed millions. And Plath suffered too, but no matter what she wrote, she wasn’t Jewish or a victim of the Holocaust.” 

“She wasn’t,” Lily echoes. She sighs, leaning back in her chair. “But your mother still likes Plath?”

“She does,” Remus says. “Well, not Plath, but her poetry.”

“So separating the author from their work.”

“Not exactly. I don’t think you can ever do that, really, especially with writers like Plath. Their work is influenced so deeply by their lives, by their beliefs. You just have to live with that, I think—know that there are parts of their work that are racist, that are anti-Semitic, that are horribly wrong, and remember that as you read,” Remus says. In this moment, he looks wise and old beyond his years. Then, as if remembering something, his smile returns. “By the way, I made Sirius read The Bell Jar yesterday.”

“You did?” Lily says, laughing. She imagines Black in the Common Room, legs thrown haphazardly over an armchair, forcing himself to read. “Does he even know where New York is?”

“He’s not stupid, Lily,” Remus says, but he’s smiling too. “He did, however, have to ask me if electroconvulsive therapy is a type of healing potion.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

She talks with Remus late into the night about Plath, about Hughes, about nothing at all. She finds herself wishing that she’d brought a tape recorder along so she could send the entirety of the conversation to Rachel. Even a transcription wouldn’t do it justice. After what seems like an eternity but must be only hours, Remus glances up at the clock.

“We should probably be getting back,” he says. “Otherwise, Sirius will be launching a school-wide search party or something ridiculous like that.”

“Black seems very—protective of you,” Lily notes. Remus shrugs.

“He’s a good friend,” he says, smiling. “He cares a lot.” 

Lily tries to envision Black—loud, perpetually in motion, his barking laugh, his ridiculous schemes, his callousness and casual cruelty—as someone caring. It’s hard to do. “If you say so,” she says simply.

The warmth of their conversation lasts with Remus until she enters her dorm room, where Mary sits on her bed, her eyes glinting deviously. “It’s very late, Miss Lily Evans.”

“I was—caught up with homework,” Lily says, sliding off her shoes. 

“No, you weren’t,” Mary replies, shifting on the bed. “You left all your textbooks here.”

That she did. Inwardly, Lily groans. She should have taken along parchment, at least, so she could make an excuse, but her hands are empty.

“Who were you with, Lily?” Mary asks.

“No one. Like I said, I was studying.”

“Oh, come off it. You were with Remus, weren’t you?”

Lily is very, very tired. In Potions, the cauldron next to her had blown up, and she’d gotten Hiccoughing Solution all over her robes. In Charms, she’d been partnered with Pettigrew, who had managed to turn their vinegar into poisonous gas. The warming charms on the greenhouses had failed while they were repotting Venomous Tentaculas, leaving her shivering for hours after. The lone highlight of her day was Remus, and at this point, the only thing Lily wants to do is curl up in her bed and go to sleep.

“Yes, I was,” she says, giving in. Maybe it’ll get Mary to shut up. And, for good measure, “We’re dating now.” 

“You’re dating?” Mary falls off Lily’s bed in shock, just as Lily expected. “Oh my God, I’m so happy for you, Lily, I can’t—”

Quickly, Lily closes the curtains around her bed and spells them shut. She laughs as Mary shouts. She can picture Mary’s face perfectly, offended and itching to hear more. Mary will spend the night stewing, Lily’s sure, over the injustice of it all, how could Lily keep such a secret from her best friends, and she’ll probably wake up with a million questions—when did this happen? Are you in love? Have you kissed yet?—to ask Lily, all of which Lily will gladly ignore. It will all be wonderfully amusing.

Just as Lily predicted, Mary spends the next morning badgering Lily with questions. This has the unintended side effect of every one of Lily’s other friends also badgering her with questions, unfortunately, but nevertheless, it is all very funny. The best part of it is that Remus will never find out. Every time they come across him, in the halls or in a classroom, her friends go absolutely silent and nudge Lily furiously, as if they’re terrified to speak to him. She’s sure that the whole of sixth year thinks that the Gryffindor girls have gone absolutely mad, but that’s not her problem to deal with. It would probably make the lower years respect her more, honestly. 

Tonight, Remus is doing rounds with Frank Longbottom, so Lily takes the chance to write Rachel with the full chronicle of her deception instead. Most likely, Rachel will find it endlessly amusing. She’ll write it like a parody of an Austen novel, she decides, and starts: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sixteen-year-old girl must be in want of a boyfriend. It does not matter if this girl actually wishes for a boyfriend; nevertheless, she must obtain one, if only for propriety’s sake. 

“Oi, Evans.” Lily looks up to find Sirius Black looking at her, an unreadable expression on his face.

“Black.” 

“Let’s go for a walk, shall we.” It has the tone of a demand, not a request.

“I’m writing, Black,” Lily says, holding up her parchment and ballpoint pen. 

“Can’t that wait?” Black shifts from foot to foot, looking uneasy. It’s the first time Lily has seen him appear to be anything besides totally collected. 

“As you can see, it can’t.”

“It’ll be brief, I swear,” Black says. He holds up his hand. “A Marauder’s word.”

Lily snorts. “Your word isn’t worth anything.” She picks up her pen again, cursing Black internally for making her lose her train of thought. 

“Look, Evans—Lily—it won’t take more than an hour,” Black says, looking impatient. “It’s important. You can bring your wand, your books, your pen, whatever. I just—I need to talk with you. Please.”

“Fine,” Lily says. She isn’t getting anywhere with the letter anyway, and she has a feeling Black will hover over her head like a vulture unless she gives in. “Where are we going?”

“Astronomy Tower,” Black says shortly. “I checked the timetable, and there’s no lessons up there tonight.”

Lily sighs. “Let me get my cloak.”

The walk to the Astronomy Tower is silent but for the clacks of their shoes on the stone floor. In lieu of speaking, Lily studies Black’s face. He looks determined and terrified at once, only she can’t comprehend what he could be scared of. His strides are long, and Lily has to walk quickly to keep up.

Finally, they reach the top of the tower, and Black sits down on the cold floor, leaning back against the wall. Lily casts a quick Hot-Air Charm, and Black gives her a small, grateful smile, which disappears just as quickly as it comes. She slides down next to him, and for a moment, they simply sit, gazing out at the night sky. 

“Peter says you told Mary you’re dating Remus,” Black says, breaking the silence.

“She told Peter already?” Lily asks, exasperated. She supposes she couldn’t expect Mary to keep a secret—well, what Mary thinks is a secret—from her boyfriend, but it hasn’t even been a day.

“Well, he’s her boyfriend, after all. Anyway. You’re not dating Remus.” Black’s mouth is pressed into a thin line. He looks out into the distance, plainly avoiding Lily’s eyes. And then, Lily understands—Black’s insistence that they have a discussion, his brisk pace, his uneasiness. 

“Is that what this is about?” she says, too loudly. “God, everything goes back to Potter, Potter, Potter, doesn’t it. Look, I don’t fancy Potter, and I don’t know when you lot will finally understand that. So what if I’m dating Remus? I swear, if you take this out on him when he’s done nothing wrong, you’re even worse than I thought you were. I am not some object for Potter to acquire, you know. I’m my own fucking person, and none of you—your merry band of Marauders or robbers or whatever—can force me to date him.”

She doesn’t know what she expects from Black. Maybe for him to shout back, or to deny everything vigorously, or to hex her. Instead, he bursts into incredulous, bone-shaking laughter. This was not a possibility she considered. “Merlin, Evans.”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Black says, wiping tears from his eyes. “I just—I wasn’t expecting that.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to laugh at me either.”

“Point. Anyway, it’s not about James, I promise. And I’ll tell him to lay off. I think—I think I worded it badly. You’re not dating Remus because I know you lied to Mary,” Black says. He sounds sincere.

“How do you know? Mary can’t have figured it out already.”

“Well, for one, you just confirmed it,” and Lily is an absolute idiot. “For another—”

Black breaks off with a sigh. He turns to the window, looking out at something imperceptible. Then, shaking his head, he turns back to Lily. “I can’t believe you’re the third person I’m telling this to. I always thought it’d be Reg or someone.”

“Telling what?”

“I know you’re not dating Remus,” Black starts slowly. “I know you’re not dating him because—because I am.”

Lily looks for any hint of a joke in his eyes, but there is none. “Oh,” she says simply. Many things make more sense now, to be honest—Black’s tactile behavior and general exuberance around Remus, Remus and Black going to Hogsmeade together, Remus insisting that Black is caring. 

“And I know Remus wouldn’t—he wouldn’t cheat on me. He wouldn’t do that.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Lily agrees.

“So when Mary told Peter that you said you two were dating, and Peter told me—”

“You knew,” Lily says, sighing. “Fuck. Did he tell Remus too?”

“No, Remus doesn’t know,” Black says. “You should probably let your friends know what you did, though, before it gets out to him.”

“God.” Lily buries her face in her hands. “I just—I wanted my friends to get off my back. They kept asking me who I fancied and why I didn’t fancy Potter, and it was infuriating. It just seemed easier to tell them I fancied Remus, so maybe they’d finally leave me alone. And one thing led to another, and, well.”

“I know,” Black says, and Lily looks at him curiously. “Third year. Everyone kept asking me which girl I’d bring to Hogsmeade, and I didn’t have the heart or courage to tell James that if I had a choice, I’d ask Kingsley Shacklebolt any day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You get used to it,” Black shrugs. “Anyway, James and Peter both know now, so it’s better. And Remus, knows, of course.”

“When did it happen?” Black looks confused for a moment, so Lily clarifies. “You and Remus, I mean.”

“Over the summer,” Black says, and a small, contented smile spreads over his face. “Honestly, I’ve fancied him for ages. I never thought he could feel the same way. He’s just—he’s so amazing, you know? He’s kind, and he’s funny, and he’s handsome, and he’s incredibly smart. Sorry.” Black breaks off, blushing. He looks almost flustered.

“He is,” Lily agrees. “He’s a wonderful friend.” She looks at Black, wondering. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would judge her or spit on her, at least not with this. “I kissed a girl last summer.”

Black hums, and Lily lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “And?”

“Her name is Rachel,” she says. She sees Black looking contemplative, so she adds, “She doesn’t go to Hogwarts. Wycombe Abbey, actually. She’s American.”

“How was it?”

“It was—” Lily struggles to find the right words. “Good. Really good. She’s wonderful. Very smart. Beautiful. I’ve been writing to her this whole year, actually. I think that’s partly why my friends all got it into their heads that I was dating Remus. I wrote to her a lot over Christmas hols, and I told them I was writing Remus instead.”

“Do you think you—” Black makes a crude gesture with his hands, and Lily rolls her eyes.

“I like her—I like girls—a lot. But I think I like boys too, or at least I find some of them fit.”

Black sniffs. “Only an idiot wouldn’t find Remus fit,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “He’s a fucking marvel. When he got that haircut—” He looks as though he’s going to wax poetic about Remus’s hair, and Lily’s had enough of that for a thousand years, so she cuts him off.

“By the way, Remus told me you read The Bell Jar,” she says. Black smiles. 

“I read everything he recommends,” he says, shrugging.

“That’s—very nice, actually,” Lily says.

Black shrugs again. “His taste in everything besides clothes is wonderful, so I figure that he probably knows more about what books are good than I do. And I like to hear him talk about them.”

“You should join us in the library sometime,” Lily offers, surprising even herself. “We talk about poetry there. I could give you some recommendations.”

“Maybe I will,” Black says, smiling. Lily has never been fond of Divination, but she has a feeling that the next time she sees Remus, there will be a third chair pulled up beside them. She wonders what Black would think of The Iron Man and resolves to find out. 

Outside, the sky blinks with stars, each one the hero of a story. Lily places her hands on the ground and watches her breath coalesce, listening to the quiet rumble of the castle below, steadfast in the stillness of the night.