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Part of what Lily liked about being early was that Severus was usually earlier. And moments like these, born out of those circumstances, when she could just exist in the same space as him without the judging eyes of other people or the crushing weight of their house rivalry and his increasing dark streak creeping in, were like a rare treasure to her. It was an uncomfortable juxtaposition that Lily was forced to live in: she loved her best friend, yet, sometimes, as much as she hated to admit it, she was embarrassed to be seen with him, to be linked to this… oddball, for lack of a better word. But without those outside forces shoving her into that space, in these quiet moments, she could just love Severus with her whole heart and forget the rest of the world, forget his darker side, forget what made her ashamed to still be his friend. And that was what she was doing right now, standing outside the potions classroom, just barely obscured from his view by the edge of the doorway.
There was just about nothing she loved more than seeing Severus happy, and the potions classroom seemed to be one of the few places she could count on seeing that lately. She had come to work with him on an extra-credit project for Professor Slughorn, but she had arrived a few minutes before they had agreed to meet, and was just taking some time to take him in, with no interruptions or interferences. Just him.
Severus was sitting at one of the benches, turning a small seed over in his fingers and peering at it with narrowed eyes. He looked completely lost in thought, like this seed had captured his full attention and nothing else in the world existed to him at this moment. He then directed his eyes towards the ceiling, as if running mental calculations, and bit at his lip, something Lily noticed he tended to do when he was concentrating hard. At this point, she had picked up on quite a bit of Severus’s idiosyncrasies, and she probably could have predicted the sudden snatching of his quill and scribbling away on a sheet of parchment in front of him. Although she knew others found it strange, she found it endearing the way his nose nearly touched the paper as he transcribed his thoughts with a frenzied determination, completely lost in his work. Learning was one thing that seemed to bring him joy, and Lily never tired of seeing these little mannerisms of a budding potioneer.
Lost in thought herself, although not of potions, Lily didn’t notice her school bag slipping off her shoulder until it fell to the ground with a loud thud, bringing an abrupt end to their shared solitude as Severus flinched and his head snapped up. She was relieved to see the instinctual fear melt from his eyes and a crooked grin spread across his face as he realized it was her. She knew she was just about the only person he ever smiled for like that, and its increasing rarity only made her cherish it more. If there was a spell she could use to preserve these moments forever, make it so that she and Severus were suspended in time like flies caught in amber, she would learn it in a heartbeat. But unfortunately, time marched on relentlessly.
“Sorry,” Lily grinned sheepishly back at him as she bent down to pick up her bag. As much as she loved the fact that he was comforted by her presence, she did feel bad for scaring him initially.
“Oh, it’s okay. I think I’ve figured out what we should use!” Clearly, she hadn’t scared him too badly to shake his enthusiasm for potions, and she was certainly grateful for that. She loved these moments of discovery, when everything clicked for him and it seemed like nothing could take him off Cloud Nine.
“Well?” Lily asked expectantly, entering the room and sliding onto the bench next to him. She couldn’t stop herself from staring into his eyes as they seemed to sparkle with sheer joy at his experimental successes.
“These. Fire seeds.” Severus held the seed out to her, then threw it in the air, seemingly so he could catch it afterwards and put on a cool display for her, but coordination was not one of his skills, and it rolled under the table after he tried unsuccessfully to capture it on its way back down. Lily thought she could detect a faint blush on his cheeks as he ducked down to go searching for it, and it had only intensified as he came back up.
She simply smiled and pretended not to notice, asking him instead, “How many?”
“Oh, just a few. They’re real potent, they use them in Pepperup, it’s why you feel hot when you take it. I think they probably also cause the steam, but we can test that. I was thinking we could make a modified Pepperup, without the antiviral ingredients and hopefully without the steam, but he never did say anything about side effects, so that’s not real important. We’ll see what we can do.”
It seemed that Lily would never cease to be impressed with Severus’s potions skills. They had gotten this assignment just yesterday: Professor Slughorn had given the class an optional extra-credit project to come up with a hand-warming potion for the bitter Hogwarts winter they were currently enduring, and it seemed that not only were Lily and Severus the only pair to actually try it, but Severus had come up with a solution almost instantly. She supposed he didn’t really have any other good friends, so perhaps when she wasn’t with him, he spent his time thinking about potions. She certainly preferred that to his other hobbies, anyway.
“Blimey, Sev, it seems like you don’t even need me, then!” Lily laughed to mask a bit of insecurity. She knew she could hold her own in potions and she knew she was Severus’s best friend, but lately she felt that everything she thought she knew was on shaky ground sometimes.
But everything seemed to fall back into place with his crestfallen look upon hearing that. His eyes widened, and they almost seemed to be pleading for her to stay. “Don’t- Don’t say that! I still haven’t figured out how to make it warm just the hands and, er, I’m not even sure if it’s such a good idea anyway, I haven’t-”
“Sev.” Lily gently placed her hand over top of his. She could see it shaking almost imperceptibly as his speech got choppier like he was trying to fish for the right words to smooth over whatever he had done wrong. “It sounds great. Let’s figure out the rest together.”
Severus gave a shaky smile as Lily moved her hand to grab her own potions textbook out of her bag.
“I’ll find the recipe for Pepperup and we can test it out together,” she offered. Only after taking her book out did she realize that Severus’s book was already open on the table beside his quill and parchment, full of little scribbled notes. She would recognize his handwriting anywhere, it almost looked twitchy and uncomfortable and as if it was trying to take up as little space as possible the same way he himself often did, and she could tell he had been diligently working on this modified recipe probably since yesterday. She guessed that he hadn’t said anything because he didn’t want her to feel useless, but she knew his book was probably more than sufficient. Still, she pretended not to notice and opened her own book to the proper page, reading through the ingredients. As she perused the list, a thought occurred to her. Perhaps she could help after all.
She turned towards the back of the room, where Severus was rooting through Professor Slughorn’s ingredient stores. He was attempting to screw the lid off of a jar of a sickly green color, but he had never been the most muscular individual, and it was clearly coming as a struggle to him. It was also clear that he didn’t notice Lily looking at him, as his face was contorted into a grimace and he was biting hard on his lip. She was glad for his obliviousness; as much as her friends would have made fun of her for it, she found his little battle with the lid cute. And she found it just as cute when he popped the lid off, grinned, then carefully sniffed it and immediately recoiled, his nose wrinkling in disgust. It was then that he looked up to see her facing him and immediately reddened.
“It’s really old, I think. I doubt ol’ Slug’s ever cleaned this place out.” He laughed and placed the jar back on the shelf where it came from. “That shit probably hasn’t been opened since Dumbledore was a student!”
“So, the Stone Age?” Lily laughed along with him. Laughing with Severus was always so healing, like they were back home and there were no wizards or wars or anything wrong with the world. But before she could get too lost in the bittersweet nostalgia of it all, she remembered her idea.
“Oh, Sev! The heating of the water is what creates the steam from Pepperup, right?”
Lily knew she said something right by the way Severus’s eyes lit up. Now this was bliss—coming to a eureka moment together. “You’re right! So if we use a liquid that has a higher boiling point than water, no steam… Absolutely brilliant!”
Lily couldn’t keep the triumphant smile from spreading across her face. There was one place she and Severus were true equals, and that was the potions classroom. Everything felt right in this moment, like their balance was no longer delicate, but sturdy and unshakeable.
Severus immediately swiveled around to face the shelves. He clearly knew what he was looking for, and by the way his spidery index finger traced their outlines in the air, Lily knew he must spend enough time here to know these shelves like the back of his hand. She knew better than to ask him if Professor Slughorn knew that too, though.
Severus returned to their table with an armful of the necessary ingredients, including a bottle full of clear liquid. He slid onto the bench next to Lily with his trademark crooked grin plastered across his face. “Vinegar. Might taste right foul, but does the job.”
“Not bad. It might taste like pickles,” Lily quipped.
That was enough to earn a laugh from Severus as he opened the bottle and poured an amount he seemed to know by heart into the cauldron set in the center of the table. “Do you want to do the honors?”
Lily knew exactly what he meant, and pointed her wand under the bottom of the cauldron, whispering a quick “Incendio!” She had made potions with Severus enough times at this point that they had fallen into a familiar routine, and neither of them had to ask what to do next. They sat in comfortable silence as Severus meticulously weighed out just the right amount of fire seeds and Lily chopped away at a few mandrake roots. Something about the rhythmic motion combined in tranquil harmony with the sound of Severus’s breathing made Lily feel that everything was alright with the world.
Lily thought she would never tire of watching Severus make potions. It seemed that he was truly himself in the potions classroom, the boy she had met back in Cokeworth who had raved to her about the wizarding world and not the shell of that boy that seemed to be pushing him out more and more. The way he pushed inky strands of hair out of his eyes as he peered into the cauldron, and the content smile he wore when the potion was softly bubbling with the proper color and consistency, when he knew he had done it right, would never fail to bring Lily the same joy he felt. Especially when she knew her work had brought him just as much joy as his own.
The completion of the potion was marked by the bubbles settling down, leaving a still, thin liquid the color of lava, as well as by Severus triumphantly sitting back down on the bench, wiping away the sweat that had accumulated on his brow as he craned his neck over the cauldron, letting no changes in the potion slip past his notice. He turned to Lily, grinning, and gestured towards the cauldron. Lily returned the grin and completed their experimental brew with a wave of her wand.
“I guess I’d better try it, huh?” Severus remarked almost absentmindedly, beginning to stand back up and head to the ingredient stores for a vial. But before he could get too far, Lily stopped him with a firm grab of his wrist, and he turned around to face her with a puzzled look.
“I want to try it too! We made it together, you know!” Lily protested.
“But what if we fucked it up? I don’t want you getting sick!” Severus replied with worry lacing his voice.
Lily rolled her eyes. She knew she could hold her own just as well as he could. But still, she had to admit she secretly liked his protectiveness over her. “Well I don’t want you getting sick, Sev! And if it’s going to have to be either of us, it might as well be both of us, right?”
It was Severus’s turn to roll his eyes, but he was smiling nonetheless. “Alright, you win. I’ll get two vials.”
He returned quickly with the promised vials, and carefully filled each one with the amber liquid, handing one to Lily. They clinked their vials together as if capping off a toast and each downed their serving in one sip, as they had learned to do rather quickly with often foul-tasting potions. Clearly this one was no exception, as Lily gagged and watched Severus’s eyes shut tight and lips pucker as if he had eaten something sour.
“Well, it doesn’t taste like pickles,” Lily remarked flatly, resulting in another one of Severus’s deep, warm laughs. She thought she would never tire of hearing that sound.
“No, but I do feel pretty warm,” Severus responded, and Lily had to agree, as she felt a comforting warmth like that from a fireplace spread out from her core all the way down to her fingertips. “And look! No steam! We did it!”
“Blimey, you’re right!” Lily felt the healing warmth of Pepperup with none of the pesky steam coming from the ears, and she certainly couldn’t see any coming from Severus’s. They had done it! She couldn’t stop from grinning ear to ear.
“Now, just one more thing.” Severus reached up to scratch the back of his neck, looking a bit sheepish. “We have to make it a hand-warming potion, not a body-warming potion. So we gotta figure out a way to make it just go to the hands.”
This didn’t deter Lily; she knew if anyone could figure it out, they could. Besides, it meant more time with just Severus. “Got any ideas?”
“Er, no. I was hoping you would,” Severus replied with an uneasy smile.
A challenge for them to tackle together: there was nothing that could have made Lily happier. “Well, I haven’t the foggiest idea. Maybe we should meet in the library after dinner, there might be some books that could help.”
Severus gave an enthusiastic nod. “How about 8?”
“Sounds perfect.” Lily smiled back at him.
---
Lily thought she would lose her mind if she had to read another word. She glanced up at the clock on the library wall. 9 PM. On a Saturday night like this, she would normally be up in Gryffindor Tower swapping sweets and gossip with her friends, or out in Hogsmeade sipping a butterbeer and not thinking about her schoolwork. But somehow she didn’t really mind spending her Saturday night in the stuffy school library as long as she was next to Severus.
She decided to take a mental break nonetheless, and glanced over to see what Severus was up to. He seemed to be lost in thought, staring intently at the page open in front of him, a piece of parchment full of scribbled notes lying next to the book he was reading. His quill, however, was in his mouth. She knew he sometimes tended to chew on it when he was focused on something, but she also knew it certainly wasn’t a healthy habit. She reached over and gently took his hand, leading it back down to the surface of the table they were sitting at. Severus looked over at her and flashed her a small smile, and even in the dim candlelight of the Hogwarts library, she could see the red beginning to paint his cheeks. Simply pretending not to notice, she turned back to her reading.
After reading yet another chapter on safety precautions for the brewing of warming potions, Lily’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. She looked at the clock again. Half past 9. There was no way Severus wasn’t getting bored, too.
She looked over to test her hypothesis, and it certainly appeared to be true. His head slowly slipped forward until it snapped back up abruptly and his eyes shot open. He gave his head a quick shake and rubbed at his eyes with a fist, turning the page and going back to dutifully reading.
Lily reached over and lightly tapped his shoulder, receiving an expectant look in return.
“Sev,” she whispered, “Don’t you think we should go to bed? You look awfully knackered.”
“I’m fine,” he whispered back defiantly, sitting up straighter in his chair. “Besides, I can’t go to bed yet, I think I’ll have it soon!”
Lily simply sighed and turned back to her book. She knew getting Severus to take care of himself was an uphill battle, but she figured she would at least try.
Another chapter, and Lily found herself fighting sleep, too. The clock read 10 PM, but after all this dry reading, it felt even later, and she was no closer to a breakthrough than she was when she started. Somehow, she doubted Severus was either.
Her suspicions were confirmed as she looked over at him, only to see his lanky arms hanging limp at his sides and his head pointed slightly downwards, with curtains of black hair obscuring everything but the tip of his nose. Sometime in the last half hour the poor lad had fallen fully asleep.
It was definitely time for bed now, Lily decided. She closed her book and returned it to its place on the shelves where she found it. On her return to their table, she gingerly placed her hand on his shoulder and he snapped awake instantly, turning back around to look at her. Getting a good look at the seemingly perpetual dark circles under his eyes, she only felt more secure in her decision to stop for the night.
“Sev, it’s time for us to get to bed. I’m knackered myself,” she whispered gently, but firmly.
Severus seemed to know there was no arguing with that tone. He sighed. “Alright. I’ll meet you tomorrow morning at 10 in the potions room?”
Lily nodded and smiled. Although those moments when she set off for Gryffindor Tower and he ventured down into the dungeons were always bittersweet, it helped to know that there would always be tomorrow.
---
Even though the dungeon hallways appeared dark and joyless before her, cut off from the morning light streaming in through the windows above ground, there was nowhere Lily would rather have been. She couldn’t get to the potions classroom fast enough. She hadn’t thought about much of anything all morning besides this potion conundrum, and it seemed she had finally come up with a possible solution.
As she had expected, Severus was already sitting inside the classroom when she arrived, evidently absorbed in the book he was holding up to his face as he bit down on his lip in concentration. This time, however, she was too excited to share her findings to wait to go inside.
“Sev! I’ve got an idea!” Lily practically yelled from sheer excitement as she rushed into the classroom and slid onto the bench next to him.
Severus perfectly matched her enthusiasm as he closed the book and laid it down on the table, his eyes lighting up upon hearing that they might have found the missing piece to their puzzle. “Well?”
“I was looking through the index of our textbook and I found a potion that turns your hands into paws. Rather specific, I suppose, but I figured it might have an ingredient that localized its effects to the hands.”
The warmth in Severus’s dark eyes seemed to intensify with genuine elation upon hearing that, and a growing smile accompanied it. “Of course, kneazle claws! Lily, you’re brilliant!”
How he knew the properties of every single ingredient and could pinpoint which component of each potion had which effect, Lily couldn’t even begin to understand, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that they had solved their problem—together. Maybe they didn’t always come to the same conclusions in other areas, but in the potions classroom, they were always perfectly in sync. What she wouldn’t do to preserve this feeling forever, to take him and plant him firmly on the same track as herself and never again feel like he was going where she couldn’t follow. But at least there was always potions, and at least he was still her best friend.
“Thanks, Sev,” Lily replied with a shy giggle, “Shall we get started then?”
Severus nodded, but it was an uncertain one. His smile faltered and Lily could tell something was bothering him.
“What’s wrong?” She asked.
“Well, I’m not exactly sure how many kneazle claws we’ll need. We might need to try making it a few times, and that could take a while. I’m sorry, I know you have other stuff you could be doing today.”
Lily’s joy deflated instantly. She knew spending time with her other friends was less complicated and wrought with bittersweet longing than spending time with Severus, and sometimes she just didn’t feel like dealing with the judgmental stares or the subsequent interrogations from her Gryffindor friends about spending time with slimy, good-for-nothing Snivellus Snape. But Severus was her dearest friend of all, and while spending time with him could be bitter sometimes, it was also far sweeter to her than spending time with anyone else. And she hated that she had given him the impression of anything but.
“Sev. I like spending time with you,” she reassured him, but there was a hint of pleading that she couldn’t keep out of her voice.
His eyes softened and his smile widened.
“I’ll go get the ingredients then,” he responded with much more confidence than before. He seemed to know that it could go unsaid that he liked spending time with her just as much. Lily already knew from the way he smiled and laughed and seemed young and carefree again when they were together.
Severus returned from Professor Slughorn’s stores with the same armful as before, but this time with a jar full of small silver claws, their secret ingredient.
“I think we can try the same amount they put in the paw potion first, since it seems to do a pretty good job of restricting effects to the hands. What do you think?” He asked Lily as he turned towards her expectantly, seemingly eager for her input.
“I think that sounds good,” was all Lily had to offer, but she truly did think it sounded good. It was the same thing she would have tried first. Potions was one thing they rarely disagreed on, and it was sacred to her for that reason.
Lily wasn’t sure if Severus was thinking the same thing, if he ever was, but he certainly seemed to be feeling the same joy as she was at that moment, baring his crooked teeth for her in a wide grin as he unscrewed the lid to the jar of kneazle claws. Lily, in turn, lit the fire under the cauldron, and Severus poured in the same amount of vinegar as the day before without giving the recipe a passing glance. They settled into the comfortable rhythm of potion-making, Severus carefully tipping the jar of claws into the palm of his hand and Lily once again slicing through mandrake roots with graceful precision. The process was perfectly choreographed as if they had rehearsed it a hundred times, as if each knew instinctively what was in the other’s mind and could follow in perfect step.
In between stirs or ingredient portionings, Lily would steal glances at her potioneering partner. Watching him at work, she couldn’t understand for the life of her why others found him ugly. The way he gently tipped his open palm over top of the cauldron and let the ingredients resting on it smoothly tumble in, the way his delicate fingers wrapped around the stirring spoon, all of it had a certain elegance to it, all of it was beautiful, all of it was him. And no matter what else was going on, even if it only spelled trouble for her, Lily couldn’t help but love him.
They were both peering over the cauldron awaiting the potion’s imminent completion as the liquid settled into a deep orange once again, and Severus gestured towards Lily with an enthusiastic nod. With a flourish of her wand, it was done. Severus and Lily turned towards each other, both smiling with equally unbridled joy.
Lily decided that, today, she would let him be protective, but she would also be brave. Gryffindor courage coursing through her veins, Lily reached over and enclosed one of Severus’s bony hands in her own. Just as she had expected, it was ice cold.
“Oh, Sev, your hands are freezing! You’ve gotta try it!”
Severus was simply looking down at his hand nestled in hers, blushing profusely, and was finally snapped out of whatever fog this action had put him in by Lily’s words. “Oh, er, sure. Let me get a vial.”
As she watched him scurry off towards Professor Slughorn’s stores again, Lily thought about what an enigma that boy was. He had always had odd ways of expressing his feelings and every time she thought she knew what he was thinking, she seemed to lose her grasp on him just as quickly. She never could tell if he liked her the same way she did him.
Her thoughts turned back to the potion and its potential effectiveness as Severus returned with a vial and filled it to the brim. He tipped it back and swallowed its contents in one sip. It seemed the kneazle claws didn’t do much to counteract the taste of vinegar as his face instinctually scrunched up from the pungent sourness of it all. Still, after placing the empty vial neatly on the table, he stretched out his hands in front of him, flexing his fingers back and forth with widened eyes.
Lily didn’t need to ask whether it had worked or not, she already knew the answer from the look on his face, but nonetheless she gently brushed the tips of his fingers with her own. Severus had always tended to run cold, especially in the winter, but his fingertips were full of a comfortable warmth like that from being bundled in soft blankets on a chilly night. She gingerly wrapped his fingers with her own, and they were just as warm as the tips. Making her way to his palms, she enclosed her fingers around them and felt radiant warmth as if from deep in his soul.
Lily hoped the blush on Severus’s cheeks wasn’t from being overheated in the rest of his body, but he quickly dispelled that idea. “It worked…” he practically whispered in amazement.
Still, just a moment later, he seemed to deflate a little, his shoulders sagging and his eyes suddenly downcast. “I guess we’re done now,” he mumbled.
Lily was about to ask what was wrong, but just a moment later it occurred to her: a successful first try meant less time spent together. She thought back to her Gryffindor friends and the teasing and nagging she would probably get from them for spending all weekend with Snivellus. But she had already decided that today, she was going to be brave. Today, she was going to listen to her heart.
“Oh come on, Sev, you can’t expect to be a successful potioneer with that attitude!” She scolded, but with a mischievous smile forming nonetheless.
Severus’s brows knitted in confusion, and Lily knew this was her chance.
“We’ve gotta test it outside! Come on!” Lily grabbed Severus’s hand and practically dragged him to the door of the classroom as he tried to get his bearings.
Hand in hand, the two bounded up the dungeon stairs and made their way through the great front doors of Hogwarts on the ground floor. The lingering stares and barely-concealed whispers of passersby didn’t bother Lily today. She was with Severus, and everything was alright.
The snow was powdery and soft underneath their feet, gently falling snowflakes began to dust their hair, and even the bitter winter wind had no power over Lily when she was holding Severus’s hand, filled with the tender warmth, the comfort and security, that could only come from being with him. As she looked his way, she couldn’t contain her sheer happiness when he looked back at her with a serene smile like nothing was wrong in the world. His eyes gave off a warm brown glow in the midday sunlight, and although Lily hadn’t taken any potion to keep out the cold, she knew that Severus’s presence would do that just fine.