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Chapter Text

It's 1976 and Hogwarts' N.E.W.T. Divination class can only see the homework in their future. The Divination workload's ludicrous, and a week in they've all forgotten why they took it, but Professor Auriga's an easy marker and gives out molasses cookies to munch while the class studies the lumps in their tea or the inversion of their cards. Besides, the grading standards for Divination have gone so downhill in the past quarter century that anyone can pull an Acceptable, if she's a good enough liar.

Lily Evans heard as much from Sev, with his usual scorn, when it was still 1975 and they were still speaking. She doesn't need an easy mark, and really she's more interested in unicorns and old magic, but Potter's carrying on with Care of Magical Creatures and Sev Snape with Ancient Runes and by the end of fifth year, all she wanted was one class free of them both. And she might not be any good at seeing her future, but she's quite the liar. She's been perfecting it since she was eleven and started at a school she couldn't tell any relations or neighbors about.

She thinks she might be the only one in the small class actually enjoying herself. September is cool, so the Tower classroom isn't too muggy, and for once, there aren't eyes on the back of her head. Lily can breathe in Divination. Despite the incense.

They all sit at a round table of shiny brown wood in the center of the room, which swivels out into four small tables when Professor Auriga raps it with her wand. There's only seven of them in the class, so they can't pair off quite right- each time one group becomes a crowded three, which makes practicing tarot reading practically impossible.

October brings unseasonable warmth and Sirius Black, who strolls into the classroom as if he'd been their eighth all along.

To Lily's dismay, he takes the seat right beside her, and while she doesn't often feel his eyes on her face, she certainly feels the bits of parchment he keeps flicking at it.

"How're you here?" she finally hisses to him one day, while Professor Auriga has the lights out to showcase a projection of the night sky on the ceiling.

He stops tearing pieces of his parchment and looks up lazily, blinking behind the dark fringe of his hair. "I walked up the stairs—"

"Oh don't be smart—how'd you get into the class a month after it's been going on? I thought you were in Arithmancy—did Potter put you up to this?" Lily's fingernails are digging into the wood of her table in annoyance.

Sirius looks away, which she takes as confirmation. "I switched. Could hardly turn me away—I got an O on my Divination O.W.L."

"Don't be ridiculous," Lily says.

Marlene McKinnon, across the way, gives her a warning kick as Professor Auriga moves nearer.

Lily lowers her voice. "No one gets an O on Divination. Seers or something, maybe. Not you, Sirius," she says, his first name sounding funny on her lips. She'd meant to call him Black, but what with Auriga discussing his namesake star in the background, it sort of slipped out.

He grins, mysteriously, and she wants to strangle him, even more so when he simply lifts a finger to his lips. "Shhh," he says, " some of us want to learn something today."

Lily finds herself shredding her own parchment for the rest of class.

She has Herbology after Divination, and, unfortunately, so does Sirius, so they have to walk in the same direction. Lily walks very, very fast.

Sirius, it turns out, can walk faster.

"What's effin' wrong with the two of you?" Marlene McKinnon pants. She also needs Herbology, as one of the courses to get her into the Healer training program—and Divination as the easiest mark she can get, since her O.W.L.s weren't quite up to Healer requirements. For Lily, it's one too many courses with Marlene this year—the girl in her dorm she finds most insufferably boy-crazy and foul-mouthed. "Something happening at the greenhouse I don't know about?"

"I doubt that," Lily says, a little too wryly. For the past two years Marlene's name has been one of those most frequently linked with couples caught out behind the greenhouse well after class.

The tiny dig doesn't go unnoticed. Marlene shrugs her shoulders stiffly and falls back to walk with Hufflepuff Davy Gudgeon, and Sirius, one annoying stride ahead of her, shoots a scrutinizing look over his shoulder at Lily.

She's been refusing to speak to him on the walks over for the past few days, but, unable to tell if his look is appreciative or a reprimand, she can't quite help herself. "What?" she says snappishly.

"Judgmental today, are we, Evans?" Sirius says, not sounding even the slightest bit out of breath, and slowing his stride just enough that suddenly he's walking perfectly in sync with her.

She gives him her severest frown. "Don't you assume I'm always judgmental?"

"Always judgmental ? No, no. Always mental? Absolutely."

"…Did you really get an O in Divination?"

He smiles sweetly, and it's not hard to see why every girl in their year—and the year above, and probably three below—are completely in love with the boy. "Would I lie to you, Lily?"

"Please, Black," she says, as they reach greenhouse number three, "we're not on a first-name basis."

He holds the glass door open for her and grins maddeningly, again, leaning enough that he's practically whispering in her ear when he says, "We are now."

James Potter is giving Sirius a very strange look as they walk in. Lily, walking to the seat a friend of hers from Hufflepuff, Greta Catchlove, is holding for her, hears an oddly familiar strangled sound from her right. She looks and immediately looks away; Severus Snape is slowly turning purple.

She tries not to feel happy about that, but while part of her feels guilty, most of her is gleefully vengeful. Her walking in with Black is probably even worse for Sev than her walking in with, say, Potter would be. It's a toss-up, but she thinks right now he hates Sirius even more.

"Why's McKinnon shooting you death glares?" Greta wants to know, but Lily only shrugs. A moment later, with a surreptitious adjustment of her robes over her curvy figure, Greta says quietly, "Don't look now, but I think Sirius Black is waving at me."

Lily turns. Sirius, sitting alone in the back of the greenhouse, is casually waving at her with the hand not busy stabbing his spade into the dirt. She suspects this is only because she is not within parchment-piece throwing distance.

She can't fathom why he's sitting alone. A casual glance in Potter's direction - which he immediately notices, causing him to adjust his glasses and stare intently directly back - shows he's partnered with Pettigrew, and while Lupin isn't in this class, there's certainly plenty of room for three at Potter's space. Surely… Potter couldn't have exiled his best friend to the back of the class just because he'd walked to class with her… right?

Lily, perturbed, gives Sirius a little wave back. She isn't quite sure why, but she almost feels sorry for him, even more so when it seems to perk him right up. Potter, still staring back at her, knocks over his pot after witnessing this little exchange. The small shrubbery makes whimpering noises from the greenhouse floor and Potter apologizes dramatically as he cleans it up.

She can feel Potter's eyes on the back of her head, and Snape's too. She sneaks a glance back at Sirius to see if he's staring at her too, but he's finished tucking in his shrubbery and is staring blankly at the ceiling. He doesn't even seem to notice she's looking. It's a bit disconcerting; Lily's grown very used to having the bloke she's looking at staring right back (and she has to wonder how Sev and Potter get any work done at all, given that any time she so much as spots them in her peripheral vision both boys' attention is very decidedly locked on her instead of the lesson plan.)

It's another two days before she has Divination again, but Lily, instead of pretending Sirius didn't exist unless she was forced to accept it by him being right in her line of sight, finds herself looking out for him. Something's wrong, it seems—he's not at dinner, and during lunch period he never seems to sit down—he's swaggering around a bunch of Hufflepuff fourth years, all girls and mostly blondes; taunting the Slytherin fifth years, otherwise known as his brother Regulus and company; and lurking around the edges of the table where James Potter is sitting with Remus and Peter in a manner Lily would have thought awkward had it been anyone but Sirius Black.

Despite herself, Lily finds herself watching the other Marauders, too. Peter's eyes skitter to locate Sirius every few moments or so and he looks terribly anxious, Remus studies while he eats and keeps his eyes locked firmly on his textbook, and while she most absolutely does not spend a lot of time watching James Potter eat his lunch, she's never seen him so engrossed in a ham sandwich before.

"Why are we looking at James?" Mary Macdonald asks, pausing mid-bite. Mary, though a year younger than Lily, is her closest girl friend – her best friend overall, with Snape out of the picture now. Their friendship was sealed Mary's second week at school, when Lily slammed Mulciber with a bad case of buttock-boils after finding him keeping the first year under the Jelly Legs hex and shoving the stumbling Mary around for his friends' amusement.

Lily, very quickly, looks down at her own lunch. "Maybe you were looking at Potter, I was looking at- Lupin- doesn't he look a bit, a bit peaky to you?"

Mary pretends to play with one side of her nut-brown hair and steals a glance. "No peakier than usual. James looks sad, what'd you do to him now?"

Lily, choking on the water in her drinking goblet, sputters, "Me? I didn't do anything. I think he's rowing with Siri- …Black."

It's Mary's turn to choke. "You can't be seri- you're kidding. They never row. Ever. Not to say I haven't seen James yell at Sirius – just last week he was telling him and Peter off for harassing a couple second years – but Sirius never, never goes against James. None of them do, they all follow him around like a bunch of, I don't know, puppies or something."

Lily rolls her eyes. "That makes them sound considerably more adorable than they are, Mary."

Mary fiddles with her piece of bread, looking shyly over to where Sirius is standing now, seemingly having a fascinating conversation with Nearly Headless Nick right in James' line of vision. "I know you'd rather not hear it, Lily, but it's hard to deny that the lot of them are quite adorable. Even Peter, in a- y'know, in a bit of a pathetic way." Mary pauses. "You have to at least admit Sirius is handsome, even if James or Remus isn't quite your type-"

Lily scoffs slightly and eyes Sirius over her water glass. "Too pretty."

Mary gasps and signals desperately to someone behind Lily's head. Marlene McKinnon plops her lunch down next to them, to Lily's dismay, and waits expectantly for Mary to speak. Normally Marlene would sit with Gladys Gudgeon and Felicia Fortescue, other Gryffindor girls in their year who Lily gets on with well enough, but has never become close with outside of school.

"Marlene, could you please back me up- Sirius Black's not too pretty, is he?" Mary inclines her head towards him for good measure.

"Don't be ridiculous," Marlene says. "There's no such thing as too pretty. Why, you fancy Black now, Lily? Is that Potter's problem with him?"

"Wouldn't know, couldn't care. How's Gideon, Marlene?" Lily says, referring to one of the recently-graduated Prewett brothers, who Marlene had been seeing on and off for the past two years.

Marlene's eyes narrow cattily at the change in topic. "He's swell. Not quite as pretty as Black, of course, but I reckon he's coming along alright. Says he'll be up to meet me in Hogsmeade our first weekend out, I'll tell him you were asking about his general well-being and all. Any Hogsmeade plans yourself, Lils?"

Lily absolutely hates when people shorten her name. It's only two syllables, is there really a need to cut it down even more?

"Unless I decide to ask Black," Lily says, stressing the withering sarcasm, "I'll be spending that Saturday picking out exciting new colors of ink."

"Ooh, I'll come with," Mary says, "Felicia has that raspberry-colored ink from Flourish & Blotts and I want to see if Scrivenshaft's has it in."

"Scintillating," Marlene says, pursing her lips but failing to keep them from turning up at the corners. She waves over Gladys Gudgeon and Lily realizes that somehow, she's about to have lunch with more girls in her own year than she has since her second year. Lunch used to be the one time in her day practically reserved for Severus.

She has Divination again the next day, after N.E.W.T. Potions. Severus has been shooting her looks all class and trying to catch her attention as they file out, so she hustles out and up the dungeon stairs. She turns the corner to the main corridor so quickly she bumps smack into James Potter's chest.

"Well hello," he says, sounding a bit befuddled, possibly because his glasses have just landed in her hair.

She pulls them out, quickly, and frantically brushes off a dark red strand that caught around the wire frames. She's not really sure what Potter would do with a strand of her hair but figures she's better off hanging onto it. "Sorry," she says, shoving them into his hand and side-stepping as quickly as possible.

Sirius, who must have been on Potter's heels, is suddenly on hers. "Don't you think it's a little scary how that creep's got his eyes on you all hours of the day—and I suspect you'd rather not wonder what he thinks about at ni—"

"Oh, that's nice to say about your best friend, Black," Lily says, rather shocked.

"What? Not James! Snivellus! Obviously!"

"Is he still following?" Lily says, sighing and fighting the impulse to look, since that would probably encourage Sev, "and he has Ancient Runes next, that's in the opposite direction—" Poor thing , she thinks, but won't add that in front of Sirius.

"Want me to hex him for you?" Sirius says, almost hopefully.

"No," Lily says adamantly, raising her book so it's poised to knock his wand hand down should he take the initiative anyway.

They reach the stairs of the North Tower and Sirius bounds up them three at a time. "I'll save you a seat," he calls. She sighs again, more heavily this time, with a vague, and strangely guilty, recollection of Sirius budging over to make room for her at their very first welcoming feast—a seat she turned her nose up at. Well, he had been an awful little prat to Sev on the train—and before that Sirius and Potter both had sat there and both looked away while she cried in the corner over going away to school and Tuney being so mean.

"I don't believe you," a strangled voice says from behind her. Lily whirls on her heel, book still in menacing position. Severus eyes it skeptically. " Black , Lily? Potter's bad enough, but consorting with his homicidal mad dog lackey—"

"I am not consorting," Lily says hotly, and then, after a moment's thought, "and whatever else Sirius may be, I hardly think homicidal's fair—"

Severus smiles bitterly. "Shows how well you know him," he says coolly. "Even his mates have seen him for what he is—ask Lupin what he thinks of his good friend Sirius after his latest bout with that oh-so-regular illness of his. Go on, then—or are you afraid to hear what's behind Black's appealing façade?"

"See, even Snape thinks Black's pretty," Marlene McKinnon says, all out-of-breath. Severus nearly jumps up the first stair at the sudden interruption, but manages to give Marlene a look that could curl her hair anyways. "Sorry to interrupt your heart-to-heart and all, but if you could, y'know, budge, I'm late. Oh, and so are you, Lily," she adds, as she shoves past them without further apology.

Lily, startled into action but mulling over Severus' cryptic challenge, puts one foot on the stair.

"I don't care what you think," she says to him. "Not anymore. And, you know what, I can consort with whomever I damn well please." She turns, hair flying behind her, and races up the stairs so she doesn't have to hear his snarky reply. Knowing him, it would be spot-on and trouble her all day.

Sirius has his legs propped up on the chair across from him at the table when Lily darts into the classroom at the top of the winding flight of stairs, panting more heavily than Marlene had been at the bottom. He swings them to the floor and gestures to the seat as if to say, there you go . She hesitates a moment as she takes in the rest of the class. Everyone is sitting in pairs, Marlene with Felicia Fortescue, the only other Gryffindor in the class; Davy Gudgeon with Grace Hornby, both Hufflepuffs; Ravenclaw's Charity Burbage warily eyeing her sullen opposite, Evan Rosier of Slytherin. She briefly allowed herself the fantasy of asking Felicia or Marlene to switch with her—even Marlene, who was taken, would hardly object to pairing up with Sirius Black—but feeling that would be a very first-year-ish move, moved towards Sirius resignedly.

His mouth is full with one of Auriga's molasses cookies, but he points to the small basin of water in front of them. It seems they're into hydromancy today. Lily tips her face down to study it more carefully and immediately is struck by several droplets of water as Sirius flicks some up onto her face.

She tries to keep a straight face, but mad or not, it's hard to keep from catching Sirius Black's boyish glee. She also fervently hopes that if they touch on pyromancy this year, she won't be partnered with Sirius when he's given permission to play with fire.

"You can go first," he says, after swallowing. He gestures to the small pile of pebbles and simple silver ring on a string in front of them, which Professor Auriga is trying to explain how to utilize, despite the fact that as usual, no one is paying attention. He idly flips open the text book beside him and finds the correct page with such ease Lily would've thought he'd prepared, if she didn't know better. She gets the number off him and turns to page 127, but a quick look tells her the book won't help as much as she'd like—in N.E.W.T. Divination, everything's open to interpretation.

She tosses a pebble into the basin with more force than she meant to and watches as the ripples expand all the way to the edges. "Tell me my future, then," she says to Sirius Black, and it surprises Lily how much her words sound like a dare.

He quirks one eyebrow up—a trick she can't get the hang of at all, though Potter and all his cronies and Severus and all of Slytherin house seem to have it down pat—then rests his fingers on the basin while he gazes into it. In a moment he starts to drum them against it.

"And don't say you see James Potter in it," she adds warningly, unwittingly drumming her wand against the hardwood to the same beat. "He's been reading that in my tea since third year and it hardly got him into N.E.W.T. Divination."

"It's not like I saw being in this class coming, so don't expect any marvelous insights from me," he drawls.

"Nothing outstanding ?" For once he didn't rise to the bait, but stared distractedly at something over her shoulder. "At least come up with something that's in front of me."

"Trouble," he said, eyes scanning everywhere but her face.

"Describing yourself doesn't count-"

"I don't mean me sitting in front of you," Sirius says, quietly, intently and very suddenly looking right at her. "Evans isn't a wizarding name and sorry, but that's not going to make your post-graduate life a picnic, not when it's names and blood and grudges our world's about to combust over. Not to mention this year and the next'll be going rougher for you than they have before— now that you and Snivellus are quits, you're fair game so far as Mulciber and Avery and our man Rosier over there see it."

Her throat tightens instinctively. "I haven't had any more trouble than usual," Lily says stiffly.

The flash of Sirius' teeth is lightning-white in the dim classroom. "That's because James hexes them blind behind your back every time they so much as finger their wands around you."

Somehow, Lily feels as if she already knew this, but she's outraged anyways, and at Potter, at that, rather than the Slytherins. She'd like to shake that boy silly and let him know she can carry her own weight just fine, thank you very much, and—and … she lets that half-formed thought tumble out her ears like an unheard phrase.

She's distracted back to the moment as Sirius casually says, "And I help, some."

Oh, she bets he does. She makes an effort not to roll her eyes – her mother tells her it's an extraordinarily unattractive look on her, and Lily finds herself doing it far too often – and looks down instead. The ripples have long faded from the water, making the exercise practically pointless, and she trails her fingers over the surface, not letting them breach the film of the surface.

"Your turn."

"I haven't even properly predicted anything about you, though," Sirius says.

"Trouble, remember?" Lily says dryly.

"That's what I said, not what the ripples said."

"Sirius, if the lines in a glass of water actually speak to you, maybe you deserved your O."

He looks at her like she's speaking Gobbledegook. "It's a basin," he says, tapping it

"Toss your pebble, Black," she says, grouchily.

"The slightest provocation and we're not so friendly anymore, hmm, Evans?"

It's her turn to stare, right as Professor Auriga calls they're all through and warns them the tables are about to swivel back to center, so she figures she'll just have to make something up for Black's future. A career in magical demolitions, perhaps, signified by an exorbitantly large splash? She mentally winces but can't think of anything better to go on.

"I wouldn't call it friendly," she says, hedging.

Sirius tosses in a pebble, casually, then holds his hands up in surrender. "I fully understand. What happens in Divination, stays in Divination."

"Oh shut up," Lily says, stumped for any clever retort.

"Excuse me?" Professor Auriga says sharply.

Sirius quickly covers and explains that Lily was actually talking to the basin of water, which, apparently, was telling her quite depressing things about his future—which seems to placate the professor surprisingly well.

Lily finds herself with a headache for the remainder of class and darts for the nearest girls' bathroom the moment it lets out, to avoid altogether the issue of walking with Sirius again. She feels rather sorry, though, and strangely responsible, when he never shows up in Herbology that day at all.

Severus, again, tries to catch her attention at the end of class, moving to grab her arm, but Potter barrels right past him. He's flanked by Pettigrew, with Lupin dawdling behind.

"Evans," James says, rather urgently and a little too near to her ear, while Severus slinks away towards Avery, who's waiting for him.

"I'm not going to Hogsmeade with you next weekend, Potter," Lily says reflexively, flicking the air between them with her arm as if she could swat him away.

"Yeah, I wasn't asking— did you see where Sirius got too?"

"No," she says, and keeps along the path back to the castle. He keeps following. "And really Potter, you could use a jacket."

He gives the sunshine a skeptical look. "Concerned about my well-being now, are we?"

"I thought you might use it to defrost that cold shoulder you're giving your friend," Lily says coolly.

"Oh aren't we clever today," James says, his eyebrows disappearing into his muss of hair.

"Quite generous of you to include yourself in my cleverness-"

"Look," he cuts her off, which takes Lily aback. James Potter rarely bails on an opportunity to banter with her, "if you see him, tell him—that—"

"You were asking?"

"That'll do," James says, rubbing at his eyes. "Wormtail, Moony, onward and upward," and he picks up the pace- again with the annoyingly long legs, thinks Lily- and passes her without a backward glance. She gets one from Peter, an anxious, searching look, as if she has Sirius tucked up her robes sleeve.

Remus gives her a vague smile as he falls into line with her.

"You feeling alright?" she asks lowly, and watches as an almost convulsive twitch passes over his face. He can't disguise the slight wince to his mouth and Lily regrets asking at once. She can't guess how many times he's been asked that over the years, as he does seem to eternally look rundown, but accustomed as she is to him, Remus looks even more run ragged than usual. "I know you'll say you're fine," Lily adds, as his lips just begin to form the words, "and I suppose I'm not the person you'd tell if you're not- fine, that is- but I'm trying to-"

"Be kind?" Remus says, wryly, and there's a bristle behind his words posed to ward off pity.

Lily flushed. "Be a friend."

"You seem to be making a few of those lately," Remus says lightly, and Lily can't help but roll her eyes.

"It isn't as if I'm hanging about with Black around the common room or I dunno, going with him to Hogsmeade—one class with him without you lot and… it is a bit strange, though, him switching into a class without even one of you…"

"You'll have to excuse me, Lily," Remus says politely, "I'm afraid I'm running behind for my next class."

It's rather astounding how quickly someone so ill-looking can breeze right past her. Lily stops in her tracks, crinkling her forehead in thought and annoyance, silently weighing James and Peter's anxiousness against Remus' feigning of cool disinterest. She's struck by a thought.

Right as several Hufflepuffs coming up behind her try to pass her, she readjusts the strap of her book satchel on her shoulder and chases after them towards the castle entrance. Remus seemed to have rejoined his friends without much difficulty, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with James, with Peter bringing up the rear on his shorter legs. Lily can sympathize—but when it comes to catching up with Peter , she's the one with the advantage.

He's about to turn into the stairwell behind James and Remus when Lily yanks his arm and pulls him back towards the grass and around the corner. Peter's eyes go immediately wide and wary.

"Is, ah, something the matter, Eva… Lily?" he says, voice squeaking slightly. He clears his throat and looks back around the bend, clearly expecting his friends to be waiting for him as he and James had slowed down for Remus, but James and Remus have continued trotting on, oblivious to the loss of their shadow. Peter's face falls.

"I need your help for a minute, Peter," Lily says, thinking fast as she spots the glaze of suspicion settling over his eyes, "and I'm hoping you'll keep this between us, but… I'm considering switching out of Divination," she says in a rush, as if it was a confession. "I was wondering what you thought of Arithmancy, 'cause that's at the same time, right…?"

"Well, sure, I'm not in Arithmancy," Peter says, bewildered.

"Oh," Lily says, trying to match the confusion in his tone. "I could've sworn… is it just James, then?"

"No, not James, Remus and Siri-" Peter clams up, quickly, and the suspicion in his eyes, which had been slowly thawing, has slid back in at full force.

"Oh, silly me, I suppose I should have asked Remus then," Lily says, forcing a giggle and trying to sound flighty and foolish, like so many girls she knows. Unfortunately she's never been remotely convincing at playing dumb, and Peter looks like he wants to hit himself- or her- in the head.

"Sorry I can't help, and I've got to go, I'm going to be late for class," Peter says, echoing Remus' excuse—as if James Potter's gang ever bothered with arriving on time for class. He darts around her and Lily watches yet another boy hurry away from her. It's getting to be a habit lately.

Next time she finds Sirius Black, she decides, she won't be letting him get away as easily as that—at least not before why she figures out why he would want so badly to steer clear of Remus Lupin that he'd go to the trouble of switching out of the class they'd had together.

Chapter Text

Lily keeps an eye out while passing corners or corridors but doesn't see so much as a shadow of Sirius on her way back to her dormitory. She's surprised to find all her dormmates in residence, in a small cluster around one of the middle beds, even Annabeth Inglebee, who spends most of her time with her friends and boyfriend in Ravenclaw. Lily can practically feel the swell of drama in the room and considers doubling back. She has no sympathy for the usual silliness and isn't of a mind to pretend—and she's always out of the loop on the castle gossip, anyway.

Felicia Fortescue is all a-flush and flutter, hugging herself and turning slightly in place, like a music box figure. Felicia has wispy golden hair, a wispy smile and is wisp-thin besides, sugar-sweet as the ice cream at her grandfather's parlor on Diagon Alley, where she is very generous in getting her friends free helpings. Lily tries very hard to like her, but Felicia is so darn accommodating and agreeable it drives Lily out of her mind; she expects her fellow Gryffindors to show some spine.

"Why you, though?" Gladys Gudgeon is saying, with a pout in Felicia's general direction, followed by a significant look directed towards Annabeth.

Felicia's face falls, wounded, and Marlene, draped across her bed, looks up sharply. She draws in her sprawling limbs and sits up, still sucking on the end of a Sugar Quill she seems to have been writing a letter with. "Why not Fee?"

"Why not Fee what?" Lily says warily, stopped by the side of the room since she doesn't want to try squeezing by Gladys and Fee, not with the charged current running through and around them.

Fee blushes and lifts her hands to run through her fine hair, which is tangled and a bit damp-looking. She mumbles something.

"Sorry?" Lily says.

"Sirius Black," translates Ann, who seems to be having trouble maintaining her usual look of ennui. "She skipped Herbology to, erm, be with Sirius Black."

"Be with?" Lily says, her mind going places she'd really it rather not.

"Ahh, don't look all judgy, Lils," Marlene says snappily. "Not everyone's me . Fee got herself a good snog, s'all. Ought to try it sometime yourself, you've got enough boyos game."

Lily truly hates her in that a moment. "Them being game doesn't make me," she says, voice low. It takes effort to keep it from growing too tight. "As you said, Marley , not everyone's you."

The only sounds in the room are Gladys' strongly indrawn breath and the rustle of Marlene's paper as her hand clenches reflexively on it. "Yeah, and a fecking tragedy it is," Marlene says at last, lightly, but her lilting accent flies up and down in pitch like she's practicing scales. "There'd be a lot more in the way of spectacular rollick and ruckus, and a good sight less holier-than-thou glowers."

"Don't underestimate a good glower," says Lily coolly. "You never regret one in the morning."

She can see Marlene's eyes dart to her wand on the bedside table. Marlene's not nearly as good a student as she is, but Lily's seen Marlene work hours to master charms and Potions theorems that didn't come easily. Aside from having Quidditch reflexes, even if Marlene is spends half the time only on reserve, they've also all heard her brag how she gets away with as much magic practice as she'd like in the summers under her family roof. They've never been paired against each other in Dueling Club, as pairs are usually matched one House against another, but still, last year, Lily had been beyond certain she could take her down in any war of wits or wands. This year it's already been clear from the first few Transfiguration and DADA classes that Marlene'd used her unfair advantage of summering in an apparently lawless wizarding home to get better, while Lily spent it with her fingers itching for her wand, with the harmless Zonko's products she brought home the nearest she could get to magic. The itch for her wand is back in her fingers now, and here, she's free to draw.

"Can we get back to how Felicia bagged Black?" Gladys says, her annoyance barely covering the anxiousness pervading the dorm.

"Bagged?" Lily says, pulled away from her thoughts by the word and all its assumptions, and would have forgotten Marlene entirely, except that the other girl had spoken simultaneously, her own gaze drawn away from Lily over to Felicia with crinkled concern.

"Well yeah," Gladys says, snorting faintly. "It's not as if he goes pulling girls into closets every day."

"Yes, it is usually the other way around," Ann says in a murmur. She flushes when the attention suddenly swerves her way. "Er, Ravenclaw gossip tends to be rather on the mark."

"And again, why Fee ?" Gladys says, though her sigh says ' why not me ?'.

Felicia's happy glow has dimmed to a timid, wary look, and Lily finds it rather like watching a plucked flower dry and fade, without ever being placed in a saving vase. She'd like to say something to make her feel better, but her thoughts on Sirius' motives right now are hardly kind, and the softest of them, that unquestioning Fee is precisely the sort of girl a bloke might choose as balm for loneliness, is not going to make anything better.

"I wouldn't know," Fee says, a bit dizzily. "He said—he was standing in the hall, and he saw me and asked which way I was walking, and he walked a while with me and was saying such— terribly wild things that I said he shouldn't, about the Ministry, and Professor Dumbledore, and all that Death Eating business in the papers. He didn't—say much of anything about me, really, but he was looking at me like I was, well, pretty-"

"Because you are pretty, you nit," says Marlene, grumpily, trying to smooth out the crinkles in her letter, presumably another one to Gideon Prewett.

Fee's cheeks tinges an even hotter shade of pink and she twirls her wispy hair around her hand till it looks like cotton candy on a stick. "Thanks. And then he asked if I liked him, and he seemed so terribly ser- well, earnest—and I said, well, yes—and that's when it happened. When he—kissed me. You heard that part. Well, he walked me to that empty third floor corridor first. Then," she says and purses her lips in a little confused frown.

Lily, to her dismay, can't help but picture it, a little too vividly for comfort. She feels a headache coming.

"And what did he say after?" Ann says, in her usual, matter-of-fact way.

Marlene throws down her quill and shoots Ann a look that could kill. Lily glances Marlene's way, sharply, and accidentally meets her eyes, and despite the fact she was ready to curse her a scarce minute before and is more than willing now, the understanding's almost instant. They both know full well this isn't going anywhere but heartache for Fee and there's nothing, really, they can do about it. Marlene looks away first, her scowl darkening, but Lily files away the impression of Marlene trying to protect her friend, to add to the short list of reasons she should try to like her.

"Right, thanks," Fee says, nodding.

Ann frowns. "What, for asking you about it?"

"No, that's what he said," Fee says. "'Right, thanks.' Then he walked off."

Lily sits down on the nearest bed, rolling her wand between her hands.

"What'd you say?" Gladys says, still enviously.

Fee looks at the ceiling thoughtfully, eyes faraway. "Not much of anything, I don't think. I was trying to breathe again. Do you—what do you think he meant by it?"

No one will look at her, except Lily, and it's all she can do not to look sorry for her, shrugging and looking puzzled with every inch of the liar in her.

"Does it have to mean something?" Marlene says, clearly trying for conciliatory and sounding panicked. "A snog's a snog."

Fee smiles, and it's as wispy as the rest of her, or wistful, maybe. "It's nothing, then, you think," she says, and Gladys gasps dramatically. "Oh, I was so afraid you'd say that…"

"She didn't say that, though," Ann says, calmly, "and I wouldn't weigh too much on it, as Marlene thinks of all of that sort of thing is nothing, doesn't she? Only a good time?" Ann ignores Marlene's sudden oath to nod at Lily. "Isn't that what Lily was just saying?"

"Not precisely," Lily says, lowly but with enough strength to make sure they all hear her. Marlene is on her feet, gathering up her papers with stiff back and ignoring Felicia's quiet attempts to get her attention and presumably soothe her pride. "I wouldn't suppose Marlene thinks of Gideon as nothing."

Marlene looks at her sharply, and Lily doesn't know what to make of her expression, or even want to try.

"You better bleedin' bet she doesn't," she says, chin high, and throws a rude gesture at Ann. She stalks out, throwing open the dormitory dorm so that it bangs against the wall.

Ann rests her chin in her hand, scrutinizing Marlene's exit. "I truly didn't say anything you hadn't at least implied, Lily," Ann says, perturbed.

"Yes," Lily says, reluctantly. "I think it was more the… timing." She wishes Mary were in her year or that Greta had been sorted into Gryffindor, so that she had some real ally here in the dorm. She seems always to find herself in crowds or alone, and uncomfortable with both, though it seems to have given her a reputation for being simultaneously popular and independent. Everyone becomes more horrid in packs, while she likes them much more one-on-one, from Sev and his awful Slytherin friends who had ruined everything, all of her dormmates, Sirius and Remus and Peter and… well, Potter, she didn't get along with either way, so she supposed he was the rule-proving exception. Something about one-on-one put her at ease, let her be secure instead of all the work she found herself doing among a group, such a lot of fibbing and politeness that left her unsure if she really got along with any one of them at all.

"Right, fine," Gladys says, waving her hand dismissively. "Could we get back to hearing how he used his tongue? You did say there was tongue?"

Felicia's nose wobbles like a rabbit's, and Lily feels a wave of claustrophobia upon realizing she's about to burst into tears. With a soft sound of distress, Fee begins to cry, perfect teardrops leaking out and trailing down her coloring cheeks.

"Oh no," Ann says but doesn't do anything except look at her curiously, and Gladys, anxiously, and with a hint of disbelief, is questioning whether Sirius wasn't very good after all, then, and Marlene's off in her huff. So Lily slides over to Felicia and lightly pats her upper back, ignoring the wicked side of her that's jealous of how picture-perfectly Felicia cries, when Lily's own face turns blotchy and the same shade as her hair, and stays that way for far too long.

"I'm going to get you a warm washcloth," Lily says, getting up slowly, and resolving to rush to the fifth year girls' dorm to see if she can grab Mary as well, because Mary can coo and cluck with the best of them, while she'd rather go shout at someone on her friend's behalf. She feels odd playing this role, when she's not close to Felicia, not really, not like she's close to Mary, or… or… She shakes off the discomfort she suddenly feels. "I'll be right back," she says.

It's hours later, and Felicia's still vacillating between hope and despair on whether Sirius likes her at all, and what kind of a girl does that make her if she kisses a boy who doesn't even care about her (Marlene, by then returned from the Owlery and wherever else she'd been stomping around, and having passed out a secret stash of chocolates from under her bed as if in restitution, tightened her jaw at that but refrained from comment), when Lily manages to slip out for a moment alone.

The common room is dead and cold, all the lamplight gone for the night, leaving only the flickering fire to cast strange shapes on the wall. She heads to the sofa to sit for a minute, catch a moment of real rest on a night when the lights seem likely to stay on all night in her room (Ann opted to try to sleep, and is making harassed noises and pointedly tossing from underneath the covers she'd pulled over her head). Lily's going to have to fake her way through a few of her classes tomorrow, not having gotten to the readings as she'd planned, and is steeling herself for a long day.

She stops before trying to sit down, because the couch is taken, the shape of a figure revealed by the weak firelight in dramatic chiaroscuro. Lily, instinctively, grabs the nearest object, a book someone has left lying on a nearby table, and pelts it at Sirius Black.

He awakens frighteningly fast, sitting bolt upright like a Muggle movie monster come to life and springing to his feet. "I'm not hurting anything, staying here," he snarls, if a bit blearily, "so you can f— oh, it's you. What do you want?"

There aren't any more convenient books to throw at him. "What is wrong with you, Black?"

His scowl is rather ominous, with the left side of his face cast in the red glow of the fire and the right side bleeding into the darkness. "It's a very comfortable sofa."

"No, I don't care why you're sleeping in the common room, it's that you're an inconsiderate ogre of a— actually, I do care, why are you sleeping in the common room?" She crosses her arms in annoyance at his sudden stubborn silence. "You're really that afraid of your friends?

Sirius shoulders the question aside, half-turning away and glowering darkly. "I'm not afraid of anything," he says, with a scoff that sounds like a blunt bark.

It's such a stupid boyish piece of rubbish bravado that part of Lily just wants to hug him, because to her it's somehow clear as morning water that he's bally well terrified. Maybe because in spite of what everyone in school might think, she knows a thing or two about being lonely, even when she's in a gaggle of girls. Strange how she feels more connected here, in Sirius' sullen company, than upstairs in her dorm, and she has to desperately cast aside thoughts to avoid drawing parallels to her time around Sev.

"Don't bluster with me," Lily says. "I know full well you ducked out of Arithmancy because you didn't want to be alone with Remus and if you were so fearless you'd be up in your own bed— and it must have been something quite awful you did to him, if you don't even have to nerve to simply hide behind your canopy drapes."

Sirius is taken aback, to the point of literally stepping away from her. "Why do you assume it's something I did to him ?" he says, voice rising heatedly.

It was an assumption, at that— a feeling, mostly, that Lily suddenly knows was dead-on. "Potter wouldn't have taken his side, otherwise."

Sirius goes very, very still, staring at his hands, and then he sits and covers his face with them. She waits for him to say something, or even to shake with emotion, tears, laughter even, but he simply sits breathing into his big palms, dark hair flopping over his fingertips. Gingerly, she sits down next to him, though keeping a good few inches away and, with some consideration, deciding not to lift a hand to pat his back. He looks too violently tense, as if he might strike out at any contact.

"I don't approve of moping," Lily says at last, with enough petulance to pull him out of his reverie and look over at her. "It's self-indulgent and doesn't make anything better. It's slightly above truly taking your feelings out on others, but wallowing manages to inflict misery on those unfortunate enough to be nearby almost as effectively. And I'm sure you've been rotten, Sirius— you certainly were to Felicia— and I'm not about to feel sorry for you, honestly, so please— stop that and sit up straight."

He sits up like a bolt. "I wasn't rotten to Felicia," he says, "it's not like she was complaining— "

"Do you like her?"

Sirius looks at her with some trepidation. "Do you care ?"

"Yes. For her," says Lily, and finds she does, even if she still can't bring herself to truly like Felicia. "She's a friend, of sorts, and you've turned her all… out of sorts. Why'd you pull her into your— your whole — " She flops her hand in his direction. "You?"

"Er," Sirius says, with an expression Lily doesn't like. "She was there?"

She moves to punch him in the shoulder, not affectionately, but draws it back at the last second and claps her fist against her forehead instead. The wild look in his eyes when he caught sight of her clenched fist made her think he might raise a hand against her should she even casually strike him. He stays tensed in preemptive recoil for a moment before slumping with a low chuckle.

"Knew it wasn't nice," he says. "Still felt good to do it. And I'm not sorry in the slightest."

Lily isn't quite sure which thing he's talking about anymore. "Sounds like a very good way to go about hurting people."

His eyes look wounded into anger. "Some people deserve it."

" Felicia deserves to be hurt?"

"No, not— aghh, I was forgetting about that," Sirius says, and Lily can't help but think that's exactly the point, that's why Felicia's upstairs crying, since she won't forget it and Sirius already might as well have. "I don't see that she'll care much for very long about it— it was only a snog."

Well, that sounded familiar. "And that's all well and good if it's Marlene you're snogging, but— "

" McKinnon ? What?"

"Kisses aren't silly throwaway things for everyone, Sirius. That's all. People aren't playthings in some great prank."

"…Think our pranks are great, do you?"

He sounded like Potter, trying to turn her words around and rearrange them into compliments. "It's like everyone said last year after Davy Gudgeon took that idiot dare by that god-awful tree— good fun right up until someone loses an eye."

"He only nearly lost his eye," Sirius says. She wonders if he was the darer. The whole school had thought it was one of Potter's bunch, though no one could prove it and Davy stubbornly refused to implicate anyone in his Whomping Willow Incident.

"But he very well might have."

"Oh, might have ," Sirius says, scornfully. "The key is didn't. Nobody died. 'Might' have! Stupidest words in the language. If I ever become the sort of coot who goes about whinging over 'might haves' and waxing on about yesterdays, please, Lily, put me out of my misery."

She's a bit preoccupied by Sirius' words 'nobody died,' because the passion and frustration tumbling out of him seems too much for a hyperbole about Davy Gudgeon. It seems to suggest instead that someone actually might have died, and recently.

"If I happen to still know you then," she says, absently, "I wouldn't let you get that far along. I've told you my thoughts on wallowing. In any case I'm sure you'd be able to find some woman willing to wipe you out of the world."

He does grin at that, though it doesn't sweep the storm clouds from his eyes. "There's at least four in my family."

"Your house must be very interesting, then," Lily says, thinking rather wryly of Petunia and wondering if Sirius has sisters. She's never bothered to find out— she never knew he had a brother until it was announced Regulus Black was Sorted into Slytherin.

"Believe me, it mustn't. Particularly as I don't live there anymore."

Lily sits up straighter at this sudden information. She's dying to pry, to ask since when and why and who does he live with, anyhow, and is a little frightened by how truly isolate this makes Sirius Black, sans family, divided from his friends. She thinks he's tempting her to ask, but whether because he genuinely wants to share or if he's looking for an excuse to grow angry with her, she decides not to, mostly to spite him, partly in an effort to keep the conversation from delving into the dark spots of Black's life.

"I suppose any place would be less interesting without you," Lily says lightly.

Sirius shifts, his head back on the plush couch but turned towards her, and he doesn't look pleased, like she expected. Just thoughtful, which from Sirius, is a bit unnerving. "Some people think less interesting's a good thing."

"Yes, but I don't think James Potter's one of them," Lily says, exasperated. "Or Remus, despite whatever's happened that had you reckoning him as a person who deserves to be hurt—"

Sirius laughs, but it's that strangled sound he sometimes makes, the one that reminds her of a dying animal. It's somehow a sadder sound than any of the various sobs she's heard in six years of living in a girls' dorm. "I wasn't trying to hurt him ."

"Then aren't you sorry that you did?" she says quietly.

Sirius lets out a last hum of a laugh, shaking his head. "Remus's overreacting," he says. "No, I'm not sorry . I am sorry it went off like it did, but he had it coming."

"Was it worth it, though?" Lily say, leaning to try to force him to look her in the eye. She grabs his arm lightly, trying to make the gesture seem determined rather than uncertain. He stares at her fingers before finally squarely meeting her gaze, challenge on his face. She's come up with exactly what to say to his lack of apology, almost tuning Sirius' last words out in the thinking of it. "Look at you— all by yourself, when you're so absolutely awful at being alone— so much so you're clutching at Fee, and, I suppose, me , in a way. Whatever 'great prank' this event of yours was, you're the only one laughing. Can you say it was worth it?"

Sirius' lips part to answer, and he hesitates, frozen between yes and no, looking where he was sleeping. It's just enough time for Lily's mind to catch up, and her loose grip on Sirius' arm slackens to a mere touch at a sudden thought. "Wait," she says, her stomach roiling. Her thoughts are curdling, thinking of the only nemesis Sirius might consider worth a prank, thinking of how Sirius had said 'nobody died,' of Sirius being called 'homicidal'—and who by. "Wait, who had it coming?

"Let it alone, Evans," a voice says from behind them. Lily's head whips around so quickly that she feels an ache in her neck.

Of course it's Potter standing there, in his stupid flannel pajamas. Somehow he always shows up at the moments she most wishes he wouldn't, and always, he manages to make himself the center of what's going on. She notices, suddenly, her hand is still resting on Sirius' forearm, and though Potter almost seems to be staring through them rather than any point in particular, she slides her hand off, quickly and with an annoying sense of being caught out.

"Prongs," Sirius says, and despite the darkness of the room his whole face seems to light with hope, even tempered by alarm.

"Sirius," James says tiredly. Lily doesn't quite get why, but she can judge from Sirius' reaction that using his name is somehow a slap, a distancing, like when she slips back into calling him 'Black'. James hasn't looked at her, which is so odd it gives Lily chills. It's usually the first thing he seems to do upon entering a room with her in it, acknowledging her with a wink or nod and smirking at her cool glare in response.

Lily, slowly, rises to her feet, looking between them. "James," she says sharply, figuring she might as well get in on the name game. His gaze whips over to hers and she wonders how many handful of times she's called him by his given name to his face in the past six years, because sleepy as his eyes are, he's suddenly intent on and wary of her. "I wasn't aware Sirius was an 'it'—"

His eyes flare awake. "You know that's not what I—"

"I don't know anything— about you," she adds hastily, realizing her words were about to give him a too-easy mark, "though I can only assume your mother never taught you it's rude to interrupt a personal conversation—"

"Oh-ho, starting in on my mother? That's weak, for you, Evans, I've come to expect better—"

"Yeah, Mrs. Potter is a right lady, 'preciate it if you would leave her out of it, Lily," Sirius says off-handedly, lounging back on the couch with a newly regained casualness and watching them with far too much amusement.

Lily gives Sirius a disbelieving look as James' mouth shuts with a snap. He reaches for his glasses, perched very haphazardly at the brim of his nose, and pulls them off, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand.

"You know what," James says, through a yawn, "the two of you go back to that personal conversation. Sounded like it was about to go right well for you, Sirius…"

The ease straightaway slips out of Sirius' expression. He rubs at his jaw like it's sore, looking away, and Lily, for some reason, though her suspicions should have her in a white hot rage, loses all desire to press him for answers. She turns her gaze to Potter, who is posed as if he's going to leave any instant, though he isn't actually budging an inch. He looks as deflated as she suddenly feels.

She blows a sigh out through pursed lips, the loosed breath barely stirring her heavy hanging hair. "You came down here to say anything special, Potter?"

"Well I didn't know I was going to be having the pleasure of your company, and it's a bit late, or, er, early, for my usual dazzling spur-of-the-moment banter, but gimme a minute here—"

"I'm tired," Lily says. "Be less thick-skulled and say your piece to your best-bloody-friend , or I promise you, Potter, I will finally, finally throttle you."

"Think about that a lot, do you?" Sirius says, straightening off the couch in a rangy movement.

"Yes. And you'd be next," she says, reaching out with her wand to just tap Sirius' chest before he even noticed she'd drawn it. Looking amused, he takes one pointed step back, as far as his long legs will get him.

"Alright," James says to her, lifting his hands in front of his chest in surrender. He reaches one still higher, mauling his eye with it before turning vaguely in Sirius' direction. "Look, you prat. Come to bed already, will you?"

Sirius' eyebrows shoot up in amusement and Lily's come together in a crease. It takes James a minute before he starts vaguely waving his hands back and forth in swift dismissal.

"That may have come out somewhat more interestingly than it was meant to. But you bloody well know what I mean. If you're going to be a ruddy coward about it, at least be intelligent about it and wait to turn in till we're all asleep instead of plunking your arse in the bleeding common room where anyone and McGonagall could come across you in your skivvies." James seems to realize at this point that Sirius is not, in fact, in his skivvies, but throws down his hands expansively as if indicating again they know what he means. He talks quite a lot with his hands, thinks Lily, and clamps down on the thought before it meanders into cordoned-off territory.

Sirius tilts his head, sending his hair flopping. His eyes crinkle so deeply in thought it mars his good looks. "I don't stay where I'm not welcome." He's clearly waiting for James to throw him a bone, admit forgiveness is only a matter of time.

James opens his mouth, but he sighs instead of offering some assuring of welcome and rubs fiercely at his bedhead hair, so mussed that his ministrations actually flatten it out some. Both boys looked tired and sad and far, far older than sixteen, thinks Lily, with a terribly familiar sense of awfulness and endings. Friendships could end, be crushed by a foul word or false-hearted deed, and no magic from the wand in her pocket could help. Even a best friendship— she'd learned that from Sev.

She crosses her arms and puts on her very best glower, or worst, for the receiving end. "Sirius Black," she says, unintentionally stamping her foot. "Or Badfoot or whatever idiot pet name it is you like your lot to call you— "

James somehow manages to choke on the air; she pauses to fix her eyes on him with malice before wheeling back to Sirius. "You listen to Potter and go to your room."

There's that dangerous glint in the grey-blue eyes, the early glimmers of argument.

"Please ."

Sirius looks bewildered. "Are you actually telling me what to do? And…expecting me to listen?"

Lily frowns, wondering why she did assume he'd do as she bids when his current expression suggests that's increasingly unlikely. "Yes," she says slowly. "James is absolutely right, and you usually follow his lead anyhow, so you might as well when, this once, he's actually got a point. There's trying to be a rebel, and there's being contrary. One's stupider than the other."

"Who's trying ?" Sirius says, scandalized, as James, with a smirk that's more shocked than self-satisfied, echoes loudly, "I'm absolutely right?"

There's a battering bang from behind one of the walls, where everyone knows the secret entryway from the Head of House's room is, at least since McGonagall came flying out of there like a banshee one night when an argument over a late-night chess match had turned into a full-fledged duel.

"Oh, brilliant," Lily says, staring at the wall with horrified anticipation.

She is shushed by both boys. Sirius' hand is suddenly at her back, propelling her with ferocious speed towards James, himself halfway towards the entryway to the dorm.

Regaining her senses, she runs past the reach of his hand, brushing past James to the girls' stairs in her hurry not to be responsible for losing any House points. She registers, at the thought, that no points ever disappeared from the Gryffindor hourglass for whatever stunt has recently occurred, and wonders how they ever managed that. She glances back to see them rounding the boys' staircase two at a time, almost in sync, and thinks things may right themselves on their own, but James, with a bound, passes by Sirius. She stops, and her last glimpse of them is of Sirius' steps faltering behind, still following, but without the exuberance of a moment before.

A light hits her face. "Miss Evans?" comes McGonagall's voice, though Lily can't see past the blinding light hitting her face.

"Sorry, Professor," she says automatically, hand up to shield her eyes. She realizes, turned as she is to watch Sirius and James go, she could pass as coming down the stairs. She keeps her face placid and sweet. "I've been up studying, and thought I heard a noise…?"

The light dims as McGonagall tilts her wand, setting her own sharp features aglow. Her hair is in curlers, her expression bleary, but her eyes are sharp as candle flames in the dark. "And you were of course overeager to investigate for yourself."

Lily takes a breath, steels her nerves, and tries to be clever. "Well, satisfaction's supposed to bring the cat back, should curiosity kill it." Perhaps trying a little too hard, she reprimands herself.

McGonagall hums slightly in response, eyes on the boys' staircase as if Potter and Black were still clambering up it, and snapping back to Lily's face with a quiet curiosity of her own. "You may return to bed, Miss Evans."

Relief always makes her think of a chill drink crossing dry lips. She swallows. "Thank you, Professor."

"Oh Miss Evans?" McGonagall says, mildly, only once she's turned, and Lily tries to steady the rhythm of her breath as she pivots with a purposefully sleepy smile. "What subject has you up to all hours tonight? I should hope it isn't my class— I find that contrary to the persistent beliefs of many students, stronger work is achieved in daylight hours, when the mind is meant to be awake."

"I've been studying for Divination," Lily says. It isn't quite a lie. "I find it— challenging."

"Hmm. I would think a student of your caliber, Lily, would find Auriga's class little more than an amusing diversion."

"No," she says, without understanding why. It had been less of a joke, somehow, since Sirius switched into class. "That is— sometimes. It's a guessing game, in a way, looking for likely futures, but it's magic, too." She pauses under McGonagall's sharp look, inquisitive but not unkind, and, for some reason, feels compelled to keep talking. "It scares me a little. It makes me question if I'm in charge of my own life or not, when I like to think that I am."

McGonagall's eyes go soft, though it might be because of the increased shadows around them as she lowers her lit wand. "I quite understand, Lily," she says, and points up to the stairs. "Good night, now."

"You too, Professor," Lily says, giddy with the sense of escape as she heads up the stairs.

"And nicely done," says McGonagall quietly, so much so that Lily's not quite sure she's hearing right. She keeps climbing, afraid to look back and be snared again. "I have rather disliked seeing Sirius Black sleep on the sofa."

Chapter Text

When Severus glances over at her at the end of Potions, hurt lurking behind his sneer, Lily doesn't look away. Not today. She stands with her books held to her chest like a lifejacket and stands waiting, meeting his eyes for once.

The flare of hope in them scorches her to the bone. She's not being kind, in speaking to him—not kind to him, not kind to herself. It's hard. She's thought time and again of a cutting comment that he would appreciate, a joke that might actually make him laugh or at least truly smile, an accomplishment or a story she wants to relay to him. No one's ever listened like he did, with an intensity that at times unnerved her even as it boosted her pride, like he was savoring her every word.

She'd thought all summer how easy it would be to go ring his bell, to open his letters of apology instead of returning them untouched. She could go back to borrowing the rare books in his attic and talking them over with him after—he'd long ago memorized them all—and fiddling with his mother's Potions equipment in the basement. She'd wanted to just go on a walk with him and laugh, a little guiltily, at his snarky and incisive comments about their classmates and neighbors or just people they'd pass in the park. This summer had been lonely, since she hadn't kept up with her primary school friends. Her one attempt to reconnect had been painful—she was a stranger to them, and strange, behind on music, television programmes, Muggle fashion and makeup, local happenings and local boys.

She waits until the dungeon classroom's entirely empty, with even Professor Slughorn off to his office. "I'm listening," she says, and shifts her weight to her right leg. Her foot starts tapping.

"Yes, I noticed," Severus says, eyes on her even as he makes one last notation in his Potions book. He manages to close it and place it very precisely in his satchel without diverting his gaze at all. "I knew that eventually it would get the better of you." His tone's snide, but his expression, for Sev, is almost cheerful.

"What, my curiosity?" Lily says, not about to play his game. "Oh, right, I've been maddened by your oblique and ever-so-sinister hints, which have succeeded in making me so suspicious I've come to fear for my own well-being around that hoodlum Black. How likely. Remember, I'm not the one of the two of us who's utterly incapable of leaving well enough alone."

The black of Severus' eyes seems to expand, swallowing his irises. He finally looks away from her for a moment to shoulder his satchel. "Very well, then," he says silkily, "since it seems the truth does not appeal to you and I am, at any rate, committed to silence on the whole… incident—"

"Oh don't go all silly and dramatic on me," Lily says irritably. "You're bad enough with all that swooping you've started."

"Swooping?" he repeats, truly taken aback, which is always something of a victory when it comes to Severus.

She didn't mean to mention it, but of course she's noticed he's not simply trying to stay out of everyone's way anymore. He still goes around on cat feet, but angrily now, with extra swish to his robe when he stalks the hallway. "The way you've been walking this year—I can tell you've been practicing it."

It helps, too, that he's mostly grown into the robes his mother bought overlarge several years ago intending for them to last. He was bogged down in the black cloth before; he's in control of it now, even if the robes are still a little long. She'd approve of the new show of confidence if she thought it simply came with being an upper year, but it has the same undercurrent of nastiness, of threat, of the wrong sort of power that she spots in Mulciber, Rosier, half the Slytherin lot. There's a hint of gloating in it—more so since the end of September.

The blush that begins to stain his cheeks livens up his sallow features so much he looks like a completely different boy. "I'd almost think you've been keeping a close eye on me," Severus says, trying to sound lazy but too enthusiastic to quite manage it.

"I'm observant," Lily says. "Don't let it go to your head."

"And why is it you think that would go to my head?" he says instantly. "Already that accustomed to the preening of your latest… friends, are you?"

James, admittedly, does preen, but it's not like she's been hanging around with him. Sirius, who she supposes might be a little justified in preening, is many things, but shockingly enough, vanity doesn't seem to be one of his sins. Or to interest him at all, actually.

She folds her arms across her chest rather than arguing the point of whether or not she's friends with Sirius Black.

"I suppose I've been giving you too much credit," Severus says after an awkward silence. "I assumed you could see the likes of Black for what they truly are—"

Even with her mouth closed, Lily can't hold back her low laugh. She knows what Mulciber and Avery, Severus' closest companions now, have been up to already this year, with mainly the first and second-year Muggle-borns and half-bloods as their targets. If she'd been made a prefect, she'd have shut them down. "Let's not do the whole pot/kettle thing, because your friends are heading much darker than my Black."

"You're up the wrong tree," Severus says, with a queer twist to his lips on 'tree'. Lily doesn't know what he might be hinting at, but it strikes her this is yet one more thing she's missed: for all that he's a Slytherin, Severus was raised in the Muggle world, with Muggle idioms, and their conversations never have the disconnect she runs into now and again with other Hogwarts classmates. " Your Black proved himself worse than any company I keep not even a month ago. And for all your denials of curiosity, you wouldn't be speaking to me if you weren't wild to know what he's done."

"Nearly got you killed, I imagine," Lily says coolly.

Severus takes a step back in shock, and she's pleased by how she's surprised him, that she's puzzled it out. She's also horrified by the confirmation on his face.

"Black told you?" he says, aghast, and pain flares suddenly in his eyes. She almost forgets everything in the impulse to give her old friend a hug, but the expressionless shutter slides back into place just as quickly. He takes another step back, deliberately this time, and looks down his hooked nose at her. "Black fed you his sorry account of only meaning good fun and you let him off the hook as easily as that old fool Dumbledore. You ." His hands twitch like he wants to grab her and shake her.

"No, you've told me more than Sirius has," Lily says. "I didn't know Dumbledore had been involved. But really, calling him 'homicidal' was the key—I've heard you call Sirius Black quite a few things over the years, but that was a new one on me. I don't suppose it was anything so simple as a duel, and I still can't work out how poor Remus Lupin got in the middle of it—"

Severus seems to forget about looking angry for the moment to look exasperated.

"—though it's quite obvious Potter had to end it."

"Of course," Severus says, between his teeth. "You're always hoping he'll turn out the hero, aren't you?"

She can't fathom how she's given him that idea. "It wouldn't be the first time he's dragged you back to the castle from following them, even though it meant detentions for himself—oh."

"Oh?" Severus demands. "What 'oh''?"

Lily doesn't know why she didn't see it before. She'd dismissed the idea of a duel, but she'd imagined Sirius staged some elaborate prank for Snape, or maybe even jumped him, when really it was just the same as always . The self-styled Marauders went off mysteriously to make trouble, and Severus snuck around trying to catch them and usually got himself in trouble in the process. And she pretended none of it went on or sometimes scolded, ineffectively, and sounding like a harpy, which she absolutely hated. "You caught them out at last at whatever-it-is. But only because Sirius let you."

"Oh yes," Severus says. " Sirius certainly did."

"For heaven's—" Lily catches herself starting to tut and stops. She's sixteen. It's not her job to mother these idiots. "Never mind," she says, gathering up her book bag and moving to go.

"That's it?" Severus says. " Sirius Black tried to kill me ."

"Sirius Black's sense of humor scares me as much as the next sane person, but it sounds like he gave you exactly what you were asking for," Lily shoots back, shaking her head. She steps around him.

His hands hang slack at his side. "You don't even care."

She reaches the door before looking back. "I'm glad you're not hurt," she says. "But you're not. I'd have notice right away if you were even in the hospital wing. Actually—" She thinks about Sirius Black on the common room couch, about the seat left empty beside James Potter in their shared classes, "—Sirius seems to have come off the worst in this whole," she waves her hand, unable to think of an adequate word for the stupidity, "frippery between the lot of you."

Severus gapes. His mouth is still open when she walks off the door.

"You're easily fooled," he calls to her back.

She lets him have the last word. He can have his opinion. She makes up her own mind.

Also, she's quite late for Divination by now.

Sirius Black is sitting on the stairs of the North Tower when she gets there, instead of up in class already where he belongs. He lifts his head when he sees her and stands up languorously. "Interesting chat with Snivellus?" he asks.

She's unimpressed. Either he walked by the classroom or someone from Potions told him she'd hung behind. "Scintillating," she says tiredly, brushing by him and heading up the stairs.

She's relieved when he doesn't reply, even though he dogs her heels all the way up the stairs.

She prepares to mouth an apology to Professor Auriga, but when she opens the door, she finds only the class, murmuring quietly. Feeling thankful the teacher's late, she moves to the nearest empty table—but there isn't one. Only two empty chairs left at two of the small tables—one seat open across from Marlene McKinnon and one across from Felicia Fortescue. Marlene looks bored, shuffling the deck of tarot cards on her table, but Felicia is biting her lip hopefully and casting sheepish looks up through the fine fringe of hair falling over her eyes.

Drat. Lily'd forgotten all about the Felicia fiasco. Sirius Black seems to be more drama than usual when not under Potter's watch. She's thrown by the thought that Potter, who she's always taken to be the impulsive instigator, has actually been keeping Sirius in check all these years.

She looks over at Sirius, who's reached her side, half-expecting him to be frozen in indecision. But without a hitch in his step, he keeps striding—'right on past hopeful Felicia to sit across from Marlene, whose brief glance at Sirius is more cynically unsurprised than scornful.

Felicia looks like she's about to crumble all over again right in the middle of the classroom, faced with proof positive that Sirius doesn't genuinely want anything to do with her. Lily hesitates on her way to join her.

"Not seated yet, Miss Evans?" a voice says from behind her. Professor Auriga, who has just reentered the classroom, looks rather frazzled today, more bag lady than the molasses-cookie-making type of grandmother. She smells strongly of burnt herbs and gasoline.

"I was torn between my many options," Lily says, fake-smiling, before heading to the only empty chair.

"Hi, Fee," she says as she sits down. Felicia doesn't answer, blinking wetly.

"I apologize for my delay," Auriga says, adjusting her askew pointy hat. "I was—indisposed. Everyone keeping up with the homework should be more than adequately prepared to give a reading without use of books today. Please record your results and interpretations regarding the coming year on quill and parchment, as is tradition." No one in class moves, since Auriga usually spent the first half-hour in preparatory lecture, but she merely frowns. "Go on then," she says, taking a seat on the corner windowsill. "Begin!"

"Do you want to do my reading first or should I do yours?" Lily asks Felicia brightly. She's not sure about this whole no-book thing—is this a test? She's not exactly as prepared as she ought to be.

"I know you think I'm silly," Felicia says quietly. "It's only, he was my first real, real kiss, you know. Or maybe you don't. But he was. And I like him—oh, so, so very much. While he doesn't even want to sit with me. You, though… he waits outside of class for you. Everyone likes you."

Lily doesn't quite know what to say. "I suppose I'll do yours then," she says cautiously, shuffling the deck.

"I don't think you're that much prettier than me," Felicia says dolefully. Felicia is certainly wispily pretty, the way Lily envisions the doomed heroines of Victorian novels. "And you're always yelling at the boys. Is that what they like? I wouldn't suppose they would…"

Felicia is putting Lily in mind of her mom, who endlessly tells Lily to be less strident. She's tried for years to use her energy in more subtle ways, but sometimes she stalks around and finds herself shrieking like Petunia, mostly at Potter—and yet, he keeps asking her out anyways. Lily sets the shuffled deck down. "I think you cut the deck for the first time now."

"You haven't picked a signifier," Felicia points out, sighing. Lily can tell this is going to be a very long class already.

"Don't get funny with me." Marlene's voice carries over from the other table, raised and very unfunny. Lily's surprised—Marlene's tolerance of Sirius is usually pretty high and probably directly correlated with her thinking he's pretty. Looking at Felicia, who's now blatantly watching Marlene and Sirius over Lily's shoulder, Lily figures Marlene must be angrier on her friend's behalf than Lily assumed.

"I'm not trying to be funny," Sirius says lowly, as if trying to get Marlene to lower her own voice by example.

Her reply is, in fact lower, so much so Lily can only make out the tight tone. Lily starts shuffling through the cards and grasps at the Queen of Cups, whose blonde hair puts her in mind of Felicia. Probably not the appropriate method of choosing, but she simply wants this over with.

She slides the deck back over to Felicia, who silently cuts them, and passes them back to be shuffled again. They go back and forth a few times and then Lily begins laying out the cards—the cloaked Death card turns up almost immediately in the position she thinks is associated with events to come, but of course, Death in Tarot does not actually mean death . She still doesn't like the card. Felicia, luckily, doesn't even seem to notice.

The sudden crash shakes the floor so violently that Lily's chair vibrates. Her fingers fumble and she drops the cards, turning to look over her shoulder. Of course it's Sirius Black and his chair sprawled on the floor—he always tips his seat back too far—but that isn't what's sent him tumbling this time around. The table is upturned too. Marlene McKinnon is on her feet and breathing harshly, wand in hand, and Sirius looks truly alarmed.

"I swear," he says from the floor, more fervent than Lily's seen him in days, "Mack, I didn't, I wouldn't-"

"Do we have a problem here?" Auriga asks, rising to move across the room.

"Nah," Marlene says, lowering her wand only to reach for her books. "I'm dreadfully clumsy, is all." Her face, gone slack and emotionless, chills Lily. She's never seen expressive Marlene look so deadened or sound so phony. "And oh my flaming stars, I'm so embarrassed I'm going to have to run off and weep my precious eyes out." Her eyes don't look remotely teary or red, merely flat.

"Look, I wouldn't ," Sirius is insisting, propping himself up on his elbows and not even trying yet to disentangle his legs from the table atop them.

"Wouldn't what, Mr. Black?" Auriga says sharply, then, "Miss McKinnon!"

But Marlene already has a foot out the door. "Ta," she says breezily, waggling her fingers.

Evan Rosier chortles from the corner and is hushed by Charity Burbage.

Auriga seems frozen, a long-suffering expression on her face. Then she turns on her heel to stare down at Sirius. "Mr. Black," she intones. "Kindly explain which of your various charms have sent a heretofore well-behaved young lady—" –not quite how Lily would describe Marlene, but admittedly, she's never seen the other girl act disrespectfully in class—"—fleeing my classroom."

"Professor," Sirius says. Lily wishes he would stand up already. He's looking only at Auriga and doesn't seem conscious to the eyes of the entire class upon him. But she's begun suspecting lately he's not so much oblivious, as she's always thought, as he is brilliant at making everyone think he could care less.

"Now, please," Auriga says, her gentle voice as sharp as Lily's ever heard it.

Sirius slowly knees aside the table and chair. Getting up, he sets them upright before very deliberately picks up the cards, one by one, before rising to his feet. He hands them to Auriga, wordlessly.

She grabs them impatiently, scrutinizing his face. "I'm waiting."

"Look at the cards, Professor," Sirius says quietly.

Auriga flicks her eyes downward quickly and her posture goes instantly limp. She shuffles through the pile, with increasing speed, then sets the cards down as if eager to rid her hands of them. When she looks up again, her scolding expression has turned granite-hard. "In the hall, Mr. Black," she says, stalking out.

Sirius looks up at the ceiling as he walks toward her, but right before he exits, he glances back, his eyes dark and hooded, with just the faintest shake of his head.

"Mmm," Felicia says by way of comment, a small, sad sound Lily can't make any sense of. But she doesn't turn to face her or ask what she means by it. Lily's staring at the facedown cards on the table. So is everyone else in the room.

"Who's going to have a look then?" Davy Gudgeon says, without even a beat passing. He's already half out of his seat. "Oh come along, you know you're all dying to!"

"I'm all a quiver," Evan Rosier drawls from opposite Davy. Severus has always thought quite a lot of Rosier. Lily doesn't know him well, except that he disapproved of Sev's friendship with her and she's never stumbled across him bullying a younger or Muggle-born student. She's not naïve enough anymore to think that means Rosier doesn't partake in such meanness—he might, like certain people she knows, just be sneakier about it.

"As if you're not curious," Charity Burbage says, getting up herself.

"Why would I care what Black and his girlfriend are roaring about?" Evan says, putting his arms on the table and laying his head down, apparently planning to nap.

"Go on, Davy," Grace Hornby says, "you'll end up doing it anyway, might as well get it over soon like so they don't catch you in the act!"

"She's not his girlfriend," Felicia says, belatedly.

Davy inches forward, now completely off his chair. "Should I?" he asks, waiting for urging. Grace Hornby shoos him with her hands and he scampers toward the upside-down table, at once. Everyone except Evan Rosier stands at the seat to better see the table.

Lily walks over toward it herself, in time to see Davy flip the card at the top of the deck.

A cross-eyed man hangs upside down, one knee bent over the other to form a four with his legs. He might be alive, since his eyes are open but blank; he might not be, since he's hanging from a gallows branch. Davy draws in a breath, stepping back. Lily isn't sure why—the Hanged Man card might not look pleasant, but she remembers it's not necessarily bad. It might signal suspension and selflessness, though it is associated with sacrifice, sometimes martyrdom. When Davy shows no signs of turning over the next card, she reaches out and flips it for him. The same card turns up. She picks up the deck and shuffles through it quickly before putting it back together, Davy moving to glance over her shoulder. All the Hanged Man. She doesn't get it. Probably an easy enough transfiguration spell, though these decks have supposedly been in use for several centuries and might be resistant to change, magic as they already are.

"That's low," Davy says, whistling. "Even for a Black—that's low."

Evan has been trying desperately not to pay attention, staring at the window as if contemplating throwing himself out it. But even he stands up at last, looking annoyed with himself as he gets up to see what the fuss is about.

Charity is whispering urgently at Grace, something about "rotten," and Felicia says, "Oh, no," in a swooning sort of voice.

Lily looks around. "Clearly, I'm missing something," she says. She'd skimmed the reading a bit quickly, granted, but she hadn't gotten the sense the Hanged Man was some great boogeyman like the Grim to set everyone skittering.

Davy starts and Grace stares. "Surely, you must," Grace says, before trailing off, confused. "Everyone in the wizarding world must—"

"You forget," Evan says, so dryly he actually sounds raspy, "Evans isn't properly of the wizarding world, is she now?"

"Don't you start that," Charity says in a surprisingly sharp voice. "But—Lily—you do live with her…?"

It hits Lily like a slamming door. It isn't about the card meaning at all or about being on the outside of the magical world; it's about Marlene, who she's lived with for six years and whose private world she still knows precious little about.

"She doesn't even talk about it with me," Felicia tells Lily, in a voice that is apparently meant to be reassuring.

"He didn't hang himself, of course, so Black's handiwork is a bit…imaginative," Evan says. "It certainly got his jab across, though. You really didn't know?"

"Hey, Slytherin," Davy says. "Shut it."

"Marlene's… father?" Lily had gathered some years ago Marlene's dad wasn't in the picture. Her mom, her brothers and sisters, various aunts and uncles and cousins, including one set they seemed to live with, all came up in conversation, and while a gentleman about the right age usually picked Marlene up at Platform 9 ¾, Lily had eventually understood him to be an uncle. She'd never dreamed of asking about Marlene's home situation, and the other girl had never offered.

"Took his own life," Charity says gently. "More or less."

"The coward," Evan says, with surprising passion. When he realizes they're all staring, he actually flushes red and mutters, "It's no decent way to go."

"Low," Davy repeats, "of Black. I hope Auriga sends him to the headmaster. No, I hope she sends him to McGonagall — much more frightening."

Sirius Black chooses that moment to walk back into the room. He takes in their expressions very quickly, never even looking at Lily this time. "Auriga's gone off somewhere," he says idly. "Says we're dismissed."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Grace Hornby starts, raising her voice, but Sirius just grins rather madly and saunters out the door.

Davy Gudgeon calls a few choice words after them.

Lily finds she's still holding the changed tarot cards. She slips them into her bag, thinking, most especially of Sirius' glance at her before Auriga pulled him into the hall.

Lily would never call Sirius innocent. But he's not cruel. She doesn't think he did this.

She likes him too much to believe it.

Chapter Text

The tarot cards Lily took are burning a hole in her school bag.

In fact, her bag's starting to smoke, drawing more stares than she's comfortable with. She picks up her clipped walk to Gryffindor Tower to a jog as she reaches the stairs.

She doesn't pay any attention to who she's passing on her way up, but someone taps her shoulder, so lightly and briefly she almost thinks she imagined it. She keeps moving.

"Lily," Remus Lupin calls after her, slowly, "you might already be aware of this, but—"

She glances back, finding Remus just behind her, stopped against the bannister. "Yes, Remus, my bag's smoking," she says, still hustling up the stairs. "Thanks ever so."

"Well, that," he says. "But also, it's on fire."

With visions of her robes and hair going up in flames, Lily drops her bag instinctively. It hits the stair, flames licking through a new hole in its leather. She goes for her wand, but Remus already has his in hand.

" Synguere ," he says sharply, and the fire shrivels to tendrils of smoke.

Lily's plan had been to soak her bag with water. "Quite nice, that," she says, feeling guilty for being snappish with Remus. "What was it?"

"Snuffing Spell," he says, frowning. "Who was trying to set you on fire?"

"No one," she says. She reaches for her bag strap.

"You've got no reason to protect him," Remus says in a very taut voice. Lily's never heard him speak in quite that tone before.

"Sirius?" she asks.

Remus' shoulders straighten very suddenly, and Lily is suddenly aware how tall Remus is. She tends to think of him as smaller than Sirius and James, but it's just that he always folds in on himself, even near his friends. "I meant Snape," he says. "If you're saying that Sirius did that—"

"Sirius wouldn't," Lily says, mentally adding, to me . She finds herself suddenly contemplating whose bags Sirius would think it very funny to set on fire. It's discomforting how long a list she can come up with immediately.

"You'd be surprised by what Sirius is capable of," Remus says darkly, and Lily's struck by the thought. Remus would have a much better sense than her of what sort of pranks Sirius would or wouldn't pull.

Her bag chooses that moment to ignite again.

A Ravenclaw boy Lily doesn't know leans over as he passes. "What've you got in there?" he asks, curiously. She ignores him, going for her wand.

Remus' raised eyebrow seems to be asking the same question. He flicks his wand again, but the fire fails to snuff this time.

" Aguamenti ," Lily hisses, and the blast of water shrivels the flame but creates a puffing cloud of black smoke. Half the students on the stairwell glance over at her, but most remain unconcerned; magical mishaps happen every day at Hogwarts.

Lily readjusts her bag so the smoking side faces away from her. She takes a hold of Remus' arm. "Come with me," she says.

"Ah, Lily, I was heading to class—"

"I'm borrowing you," she says, but then she realizes she's already half-dragging him. Too strident again. She quickly lets go of his now-even-more-rumpled robe sleeve. She looks pointedly at her bag, fire again outlining where the tarot cards rest against the leather, then back at Remus. "If you don't mind, that is."

He gives her this look. It's a very familiar Remus expression, bemused exasperation and something else, but she's not sure she's ever been on the receiving end of it before and can't place exactly when she's seen it. "I can loan you an hour or two," he says.

He falls in stride with her as they dash up the stairs, and it makes Lily feel strange, realizing she was walking this way with Sirius Black only a few hours before. Both James Potter's friends, both boys she's spent very little one-on-one time with in all their years of school together, and what's making her feel funny isn't how unfamiliar it feels but quite the opposite. As if it had always been this way.

Déjà vu, she thinks, and shivers, despite the heat rising from her bag.

In Gryffindor Tower the common room is full of first years struggling with their first major essay and a whole crowd clustered around an intensive game of Gobstones.

"I suppose we should try my room," Lily says. She keeps a steady stream of water on her bag, hardly smoking now but rather obviously dripping.

"You're forgetting," Remus says, "the girls' dormitories are spelled to keep boys out."

"Oh," says Lily, who did not ever know that to forget it. She flushes, very glad at that moment she's speaking to Remus and not someone more teasing.

"You can get into ours, though," Remus says. "And the others will be in Care of Magical Creatures—where I ought to be."

"Except for Sirius." Lily's fairly sure Sirius was banned by Professor Kettleburn from Care of Magical Creatures for a fire crab incident back in fourth year.

"He hasn't been spending his free time around the dorm lately."

"I'd noticed," Lily says. Dodging the Gobstones crowd, she follows Remus up the boy's staircase. Entering, she realizes that, like the girls' dorm, it's all beds and trunks, no chairs. Ignoring the impulse to look around and identify whose bed was whose (the unmade one must be Potter's), Lily upends her bag onto the carpet, then shakes her hands out from the heat. Her books and piles of scrolls come tumbling, some blackened by smoke but none actually burned—whatever spell it is must not work that way, and luckily enough, or it would have been the end of her Potions notes and half-finished Charms essay. Last the tarot deck spreads out across the floor, and the individual cards start smoldering into the carpet. Lily sits down cross-legged beside them and reaches experimentally to touch one. At a few inches away the heat makes her jerk her hand back.

"You stole those," Remus says intently. He crouches down for a closer look.

He's right, but Lily feels absurdly miffed. "It could very well be my own deck."

"It could," Remus says agreeably. "Though that would mean you've somehow triggered your own anti-theft hex. You could've simply told me."

"In the middle of the stairwell?"

But Remus isn't listening; he's muttering something and waving his wand, and suddenly the cards are no longer destroying the carpet. He grins very boyishly, actually looking sixteen for once. "There's much stronger hexes on some of the library books," he says to Lily's open mouth, and before she can ask, hurriedly adds, "James went through a phase where he nicked things."

"Not so surprising."

"Not so unpredictable as you nicking something, anyway." Remus, still smiling, taps one of the tarot cards, testing, before sweeping them into a pile. He moves into a cross-legged position himself, directly across from Lily, and shuffles the cards, deftly. "You couldn't wait till this weekend to buy a set of your own in Hogsmeade?"

"There's something wrong with them. See for yourself."

Remus, idly, flips one over, and then flips it back so quickly Lily doesn't even have time to see its face. He peeks under the next one in the stack, without turning it over, repeating the motion for the next few.

"Is there something especially disturbing about the Hanged Man I don't understand?" Lily asks, watching Remus' face change. "Besides the connection to Marlene's father?"

"Sorry?" No trace of his smile remains.

Lily feels a gust of relief. "I'm not the only one who didn't know, then?" She lowers her voice even though there's no one there, growing more urgent at Remus' studiously blank expression. "That he—that it seems he killed himself?"

"Lily," says Remus. "I think you'd better explain what happened. But Marlene's father isn't actually dead."

"But I only just—everyone in Divination told me—"

"You're very good at Potions," Remus says. "You've heard of the Draught of Living Death."

The sleeping potion. She's even brewed it. Lily nods briskly.

"Some drafts are stronger than others," Remus says. "The Ministry uses it, ah, humanely , in cases where… people… are a danger to others, or themselves, but haven't warranted the punishment of prison or death. They give them dreamless sleep."

Lily wonders if Marlene's father might have been dangerous, and how that could tie with suicide. "But there's an antidote for the Draught. More than one, even."

"A potion's as good as its maker," Remus says. "As strange and as specific as its ingredients, too. The Ministry possesses the only variance of Wiggenweld Potion strong enough to wake the people they put to sleep. And even that failed to wake up Mr. McKinnon. It's… mildly infamous." He coughed, more a polite punctuation than a racking one. "I suppose you wouldn't have heard of McKinnon Manufacturers? Dublin-based, but they used to supply shops on Diagon. I remember the bottles, when I was little—my mother used to buy this sort of, ah, cough syrup. I believe they went rather badly out of business and then…" He glances down at the deck. "Well, I can see how the reoccurrence of the Hanged Man could set off Marlene."

Lily's mind whirrs. A Draught of Living Death that truly lived up to its name, something that made life stop without inducing actual death. She remembers Evan Rosier's outburst labeling Marlene's father a coward. "Does everyone know this much about it?" she asks slowly.

Remus shifts. "I suppose. I can't say I know much about Marlene's present family situation, but there's a certain amount of—accumulated knowledge, yes."

"I meant this much about the Draught," Lily says, thoughts clicking together. "Like you said, I know my Potions," or really, Severus had, but Lily doesn't have time for that thought, "and I'd never heard of any of that. About how the Ministry uses it."

"My father worked for the Ministry, once," Remus says, too lightly. He sets the deck down, carefully, busying himself in making it a loose pile. "Accumulated knowledge, as we were saying."

Lily splays her hands on the rug, staring at them. She feels an impulse to take his hand, but despite all these years of school, she doesn't know him well enough for that to seem comfortable, or right. "Remus, when you said 'people,' did you…I couldn't help but picture—"

"I meant people." His expression twists.

"Okay," Lily says, trying to show she'll let it drop. She reaches for one of the tarot cards, but Remus' hands are suddenly, busily, in the way, restacking the cards.

"You did ask me to take a look," he says, pulling his wand to point at the cards. "Let me try a few things."

And Lily thinks she ought to let her sudden thought go, she ought to draw her hand back and embrace a change in topic, ought to stay away from anything that makes Remus' nice face twist to such a harsh expression, but she can't help from barging on. She darts her hand forward and flips up a card.

It's the Moon.

Remus drops his wand and pulls back his hand. Lily turns the loose pile over and more Moon cards slide free. They're all the Moon.

She looks to Remus, wonderingly, and he scrambles to his feet, managing to be amazingly stiff despite the hurry of his motion.

Now would be the moment to reassuringly take his hand, Lily figures, but he's hustled out of her reach. She knows she ought to say something, but all she can think, on repeat, is the less-than-brilliant Oh, Remus , which she's afraid could come off very pitying and apologetic or even afraid, everything she does not want to sound at this moment. "Did Sirius do this?" she asks.

"What?" Remus says, at a short clip. Then aghast, "Are you suggesting—he isn't—how much do you—"

"The cards, Remus. The ones that don't work quite right and maybe have a bit of a mean streak in what they show." If she could raise one eyebrow, Lily would do it now. She settles for lifting both at him.

Remus sits back down, though it's more of a collapse to the floor.

"I don't think he did," Lily says. "But Professor Auriga was very upset. And she dealt with Sirius putting Pepper-Up Potion in her molasses cookies in third year—I'm still not sure how he did that—and all of the idiot predictions James would spout in class, with hardly a blink. Today she pulled Sirius into the hall and ended class." Lily narrows her eyes at Remus, who's looking green. "Are you going to be sick?"

"Are we going to simply ignore the elephant in the room?" he counters.

"Why, Remus," Lily says, finally letting some of her shock into her voice, "I really didn't have the faintest idea you turned into an elephant."

He stares at her.

"I realize that's not the cleverest line in the world, but it's all I've got at the moment," Lily apologizes.

The room is very silent for a very long minute, and Remus looks away. "You've known for a while, then," he says at last. " Severus told you?"

"No!" Lily says, but then she thinks about it. "Though I can't say he didn't try. He—he's had an inkling for a long, long time, since we… oh, since we first studied werewolves, I suppose. But I never listened."

Remus studies his palms intently, flexing his hands with a tautness that looks painful. "I understand," he says. "You didn't want to believe it."

"Well, of course not." Lily's study of the werewolf unit is coming back to her, with facts she finds it almost unbearable to match to the soft-eyed boy she knows. Torturous transformations. Shortened lives. Limited futures. She feels suddenly guilty for all the times she's complained about homework in front of Remus. "I don't like to think how much harder it must make things for you." That's a hideous understatement, she's sure.

Remus lets his hands fall slack. "Most people would worry about a wolf so close to their door."

Lily would like to argue that, but compared to Remus', whatever grounds she might have for an upbeat idea of 'most people' seem weak. "Well—never the right people."

Remus meets her gaze again. His eyes are so sad it takes Lily a moment to realize he's smiling at her. "You sound like James," he says.

Lily busies herself with picking up the cards. "Now, these stayed the same when we looked at them earlier… but you were shuffling the deck, and Marlene likely was, too… Only one way to test that." Lily pauses with the cards in her hands, considering what may come if she shuffles.

Remus shakes his head, his hair flopping. He keeps looking at his open hands, flat on the floor. "What are you looking to find out?" he says at last, on a sigh. "What you said about Sirius—is that why you wanted my help, to see if he could have done this? Classroom cards are usually dosed with old magic, so, magically, no doubt they're difficult to mess with."

"He could do it, though," Lily says. She meant it to sound more like a question.

"If he put his mind to it? Probably," Remus says. "But I guarantee he didn't."

"You don't think he would?"

"I've learned not to put anything past him," Remus says, reverting to his most unreadable tone. "But this is subtle, and Sirius is not."

"No, he's much more of an elephant than you are," Lily says. She's appalled when she realizes she actually just said that; it was a stupid thought and a ridiculous comment. She's starting to apologize when Remus throws back his head and laughs.

For some reason Lily has always thought of Remus' laugh as silent—certainly it's the only way she's seen him laugh before, soundless and shoulders shaking at his friends' antics, or covered up with a cough in front of professor—but it's a richly warm, room-filling sound. She's not sure what it is: some combination of his laugh's contagion and this whole ridiculous situation, that possibly the nicest boy she knows actually is in danger of eating people once a month, that this, as with Marlene, is a story going on that she's missed completely over six years in the same Tower, that she's still trying to process how "You sound like James" could possibly feel like one of the highest praises she's ever been given. But something sets her off, too.

And so, Lily's laughing hysterically on the floor of the boys' dorm with Remus Lupin when James Potter walks in, bleeding profusely from his forehead.

"What's all this?" he demands. Peter is on his heels, dancing anxiously around him with a bloody towel, but he, too, stops in his tracks at finding Remus and Lily. Remus clambers to his feet.

"What's all that?" Lily replies, getting control of herself. She finds she actually needs to wipe her eyes.

"The natural hazards of Magical Creatures class," James says, blinking dazedly. He seems to be having some difficulty processing Lily and the cards on the floor, possibly because of the blood on his glasses.

Remus looks to Peter.

"Horn graze," Peter says. He winces as he gestures to the side of his own head.

"Not another incident with the unicorns, James," Remus says. His lips are sneaking back upward.

"He's really bleeding," Lily says. She stands up to get a better look. "You dolt, why didn't you go right to the hospital wing?"

"Quidditch, Evans," James says, still frowning at her. "Peter, towel."

"No, there's no Quidditch," Lily says, frowning back as Peter rushes to hand James the towel to press against his head.

"A Congealing Charm to the head, Pomfrey will at least insist on an overnight stay, possibly ban James from the first match this weekend," Remus explains.

"Why hasn't anyone done one already?" Lily asks, exasperated.

"Kettleburn sent him to Pomfrey and James can't really do one on himself," Peter says, then he looks down and lowers his voice. "And, er, we thought it best I didn't try, especially with Remus right here, and with you—"

"You had no way of knowing Remus and I were here," Lily says. "Meanwhile, blood loss!"

Peter's eyes widen. "Right, of course we didn't know you and Remus were here, lucky—"

"Blood loss is still happening, remember," Remus says, nodding toward James, who, as if on cue, sits down on the floor very suddenly. "Should I patch him up, Lily, or will you take the dubious honors? You'll manage it better."

"Fine," she snaps, because James Potter bleeding all over the carpet and the cards is more distressing then she would have expected. "All right, ah—James, if you'd hold still a minute—"

"Your voice just went all wobbly," he says, looking up from The Moon cards he's poking at. Astonishingly enough, he sounds appalled. "And you're calling me James."

Lily draws her wand. "Well, you're bleeding," she says. And possibly his head's even more damaged than it appears, since he'd usually be eating that sort of thing up, from her.

James, with some of the wobbling of which he spoke, stands back up. "If you don't like me, bleeding shouldn't change that ."

"Unless she does like you," Peter puts in helpfully.

"Not helping, Wormtail," James snarls, in chorus with Lily's "It's not about liking you, it's about being nice!"

"Nice, nice, nice," James says. "I've heard you throw around that word a lot, Evans, to all sorts—be nice to the Slytherins practicing Dark Arts, Sev's nice if you know him, Mary Macdonald's nice —and half the time, it's really about pity and feeling better about yourself. Half the time, I think some of your trouble with Snape is that he stopped being this shabby little urchin you reckoned you took care of and started being the scary swooping git I always knew—"

"I think I've changed my mind about fixing you up," Lily says, as flatly as she can. (James, apparently, has also noted Sev's swooping.)

"It's a surface wound," James says, stepping closer, "we can handle it fine, I'm fine—"

He pauses for breath, and Peter adds, "They were only little unicorns."

James gives Peter a look of despair. "Never mind the bleeding, I don't need taking care of, or mothering , and you know what I think about that?"

Lily bends and swoops up the cards. "No, and I'll see myself out rather than hear—"

"I've got a mess of your cards here," James says, holding out his fist, and sure enough, he does, "I think you like running the show—"

"Pot! Kettle! Black!" Lily says, rapid-fire, straightening again and rising to her toes.

"You need to be superior-"

"Says the most arrogant—!"

"You don't have a single friend you stand on equal footing with!" James bellows, and Lily falls silent.

But only for a moment. "And your friendships with Remus and Sirius and Peter—that's equal footing? I've heard you tell them what to do—"

"Er, to be fair," Remus interjects, from behind, while James and Lily seethe at each other, "that's more James' manner than anything, it's more equal than it might—"

"So equal that Sirius Black follows you around like he's your dog?"

Peter and Remus seem to come down with a simultaneous fit of coughing, but James simply folds his arms. The bloody towel he's been holding against his head falls to the ground. "Sirius is his own man, and even if I had any real control over what he does, more equal him choosing to follow than you taking in strays—"

"And instead you want me to what, put up with you following me like you're in heat?" Lily wishes, immediately after speaking, she had not stuck with the dog comparison.

James doesn't blink. "Girls, then. You're only close with the ones who need looking out for—Mary Macdonald, Greta Catchlove—"

"I don't have any true friends, not like yours , that's what you're saying? Exactly what every girl wants to hear, I'm swooning, I'll go with you to Hogsmeade this weekend after all—"

"I haven't asked you to Hogsmeade," James says impatiently, rocking back again, adding, "this weekend," and he swoops his hand dismissively, "my point, my point, is I don't want you doing your—your nice , to my friends , because while it would be all right if you were actually our mate, the feeling sorry for them, playing at Sirius being your new Snivellus—"

"That is absolutely not at all—"

"Because we're all in it together, you know," James says, "the four of us, so if you've a problem with me, it comes back to all of us, except, 'cept, you've never been so hard on the others, because Peter's—" James casts a glance at Peter and hesitates, "well, Peter, and Remus is… rumpled, and only now that you're seeing Sirius as lonely and mistreated —"

Lily's hands are shaking. "If this is jealousy , James Potter, you have no right—"

"Loneliness is not a reason to like someone, anymore than—" James stumbles, so suddenly Lily leaps back in alarm.

Remus and Peter are by his side bolstering him immediately, James already waving them off in annoyance, but Lily has realized, belatedly, James hasn't been rocking on his heels so much as swaying . She has her wand out and does the Congealing Charm immediately, sealing the wound to an ugly, crusty blot along his hairline.

He raises his hand to it and turns back to her when his hand comes away clean. "Weakness," he says, in a tone suggesting the stumble had been an illustration of his point and not the near-collapse it was, "and suddenly you need to help after all."

"Because one of us should have done it ten minutes ago," she says. "It's called humanity, Potter, try it." She holds out her hand. "Give me the rest of those cards back." James moves to hand them over, and she grabs the opposite end. He doesn't let go right away. "For the record," Lily says, becoming increasingly piqued, "your friends are actually enjoyable company, when not in yours. At your best , you're exasperating."

"You don't know anything about my best," James says, letting go of his end of the cards. "Or Sirius' worst—"

Lily is so tired of cryptic hinting—and lectures from boys on how they think she should behave and who she should be spending time with. Lily shakes out her hair and lowers her voice. "Remus is a werewolf, Snape's been following you for years nearly making trouble, and Sirius did something stupid—no, something bad, that very nearly put the two together. Yes, surprise," she says, when James and Peter reel, "I oh-so-cleverly put together the anvil-sized clues you've all been dropping…"

"Well?" says Remus, quietly, when she doesn't continue.

"Well what?" Lily asks.

"You've picked up the gist of it, what now? You wanted to prove Sirius innocent of a cruel trick with cards for whatever reason, all right—"

"What's that about the cards?" James asks sharply. His gaze zeroes onto them.

"This was intentional," Remus says. "Severus could have died. At my hands."

Lily feels the weight of that and doesn't know how to answer, until she sees James' pained expression. "Does anyone in this room think Sirius actually meant him to die?" she asks, just as quietly as Remus. "Or… get bitten?"

"I somehow don't think he wanted Snape around on full moons," James mutters, in Remus' direction. Rubbing at his head, he heads over to the unmade bed, giving Lily wide berth, and pulls a small case out from underneath. Lily recognizes the distinct smell of Pepper-Up as he pops it open, and the unmistakable magenta color of Blood Replenishing Potion from the bottle he pulls out. That suggests a disturbing level of preparation to take care of injuries.

"I told you what happens," Remus says, his voice dropping even lower, smooth in a way that is very false coming from him and very dangerous, "to… people the Ministry finds too dangerous. I told you today what might have happened to me."

Lily blanches. She's never considered the Draught of Living Death a significant potion, till now.

"And so do you think I should still be nice to Sirius Black, Lily? Do you think you should?" Remus pauses, before adding the final touch. "If I remember correctly, you ended a friendship over a single word. And this is somewhat more than a word."

James shuts the potions case with a bang, mouth tight. He sits down against the bed and starts cleaning the drips of blood off his glasses with his sleeve.

Remus clear his throat in the resounding silence. "I expect Snape said he hadn't meant it, too."

"It wasn't the word," Lily says, after another moment. "It was the thought." Of course Snape hadn't meant to say it; but to say 'Mudblood' meant he thought it, used it with his friends, about others if not about her, a truth revealed by anger and embarrassment. A truth she'd been ignoring to try to keep a friend. "Hang what I think, but what Sirius was thinking—or wasn't thinking—that would matter to me. That does matter to me, though forgiving him isn't my battle—and, as much as I like you, Remus, I'm not going to pretend he doesn't exist on your behalf, either. For one, Sirius makes that very difficult."

"I like how she says 'hang what I think' and then tells you exactly what she thinks," says James, without looking up from his glasses. "Rather like how she says she's leaving and then—"

Lily readjusts her grip on the deck, grabs up her slightly-charred bag, and walks out. "I reserve the right to be a contradiction," she tosses over her shoulder at him, ignoring the rest of whatever he's saying.

"Lily," a voice comes immediately after her.

It's Remus, so for the second time today she finds herself turning to him on a staircase. He's grabbed up some of the books and scrolls she'd dumped earlier and holds them out to her.

"James talks a lot of rubbish sometimes," he says. "Don't let it get to you."

"Of course not," Lily lies.

Remus hesitates, as she takes the books back. "I'm not entirely sure how you got involved in all this," he says warily. "What you hoped to find out or what you'll do now you… know."

"I don't really know myself," Lily says, a little staggered by that knowledge. "Originally I wanted to be left alone in Divination."

"'Originally' means that's not true anymore."

"Oh, Remus," Lily says, not able to help herself this time. "I know, I'm a silly girl trying to fix things that are none of my business, and I'm terrible at forgiving people myself, and I don't like James Potter, at all, but it's going to be a disaster at Christmas if you make James choose between staying on your side, even though you are in the right, or taking Sirius, who moved in with him , home for Christmas."

"Learned about that, too, did you?" Remus says. Even more so than usual, he looks like the oldest sixteen-year-old Lily's ever seen when he looks down and says, "James is my best friend."

He leaves the rest unspoken, but Lily can hear it anyway: but Remus isn't James' .

And then, suddenly, Remus laughs, not an ironic laugh but one of genuine, pleasant surprise. It's so unexpected Lily turns around half-anticipating Sirius Black to be behind her speak-of-the-devil style, but he isn't.

"Those have changed some since you were grappling over them with James," Remus says, pointing at the cards in her hands.

"Hardly grappling," Lily says, and looks. She does not laugh. "The card represents a choice between two paths, Remus Lupin, it is not what it looks like, I'm in N.E.W.T Divination, I know these things, and don't even—"

But he's already reopened the door to the sixth year boys' dormitory and heading back in again, still looking amused.

Lily stays on the stairs only long enough to reassemble her bag. She rushes back down into the common room, briefly attracting the idle interest of students studying and what remains of the crowd from the Gobstones match.

When she glances again at the cards—two figures standing in front of two winding paths—her pique and discomfort wins over better judgment and even curiosity. She tosses the entire deck into the common room fire, staying just long enough to see over seventy copies of The Lovers card start to burn.

Chapter Text

Saturday marks the first Hogsmeade trip and the first Quidditch match of the year. They've never fallen on the same date in all of Lily's years at school. Students have speculated about the possibility before, swapped stories of it happening in a parent or sibling's year—but no one ever thought it really would.

Lily can't get to sleep the night before. Not because she cares about the trip or the match. Not because Remus is a werewolf and Marlene's father ended his own life, and she's seen them day in and out for years oblivious to the hard truths they lived with. Not because the whole reason Sirius Black switched into Divination and became her class partner is that he nearly got her oldest-but-also-former friend killed at Remus' unwilling hands…

Or should that be unwilling paws… jaws?

…Maybe that is a little bit why she can't sleep.

It's certainly not because an entire deck of unnervingly-revealing Tarot cards turned into The Lovers card after she essentially tug-of-warred over them with Potter. She might be taking Divination, but that doesn't mean she believes in it.

The main reason she can't sleep is the other girls in her dorms won't shut up.

"It has to be because of the riots after last year's match," says Gladys Gudgeon, sitting up in bed and patting her curlers. There's charms for perfect hair, but all the girls have seen them go wrong often enough that when it comes to beauty products and cosmetics, the preferred means are very Muggle. Lily has always taken a certain satisfaction from that.

"A few duels and detentions do not riots make," Annabeth Inglebee corrects impatiently from under her covers. "And while I'd suppose House tensions are even higher this year, seeing as we don't have a set of Prewett brothers to start trouble after losing their last Slytherin match—"

"Slytherin asked for it." Marlene, who's been sulking and silent since the Divination class incident, rises like a sheet-strewn banshee from her bed. "Been spending a lot of time over at the eagles' nest, Ann. Starting to forget which House you call home?"

"Whoever said I call this home?" Ann says.

"Please don't fight," says Felicia, from her perch on the end of Gladys' bed. Gladys is doing up Felicia's fine hair in a complicated crown braid, the kind Lily wouldn't know how to begin. "Not when tomorrow's such a happy day."

"Jumping things a bit, to already call it happy," Ann says. "I don't see why everyone's acting like this is such a great thing, cramming two perfectly good Saturdays together. It'll cut down on post-match celebrations, and it'll cut down on time in Hogsmeade—one or the other, if not both, must be the intention. I don't like it."

"But you never like much of anything," Marlene says, so sweetly that Lily props herself up on her elbows and moves her canopy drape. She wants an unobstructed view should mayhem ensue. "And you wouldn't know a good time if it smacked you on your stopped-up bung-hole—"

"Oh for Merlin's sake," Ann interrupts, unfazed, "at least when I'm over at Ravenclaw the insults follow a logical pattern. Therein is their sting—"

Marlene hops off her bed. "You want logic, Inglebee? I got myself three O.W.L.s more than you, how 'bout that, you sour feck, so even if you'd begged the Sorting Hat—"

Lily would usually interfere at a point like this. But Marlene's clearly spoiling for a fight, and of everyone in the room, Lily's the most likely to really give her one. She's too tired to set herself up as target. Ann has the prefect's badge; she ought to be able to use it.

" Gladys. How does she know how many O.W.L.s I got?" Ann asks, uncharacteristically shaken.

"Happy day," Felicia repeats, fluttering her hands at Marlene.

Gladys tugs on Fee's half-done braid to keep her still so she can finish. "Are you meeting up with Sirius at all tomorrow, Fee?" Gladys asks, in a clear ploy to change the topic.

"You actually starting in with that again?" Marlene says, turning her roar on Gladys. "Black can go to Hades, and don't you put on your schoolmarm face and say otherwise, Lils ."

"I'm half-asleep over here," Lily protests. Schoolmarm face ? she thinks.

"That your way of telling me to shove it?" Marlene says.

"What's that?" Lily rubs her eyes and yawns as convincingly as she can.

"Marlene, you're really waking her up," Felicia says concernedly, "and Ann's in bed too, and what about your match tomorrow?"

Marlene scoffs, narrowed eyes still on Lily. "Potter's got me back on reserve what with Slytherin playing Regulus Black at Seeker. Those Blacks," she says ominously, "I swear ."

Felicia gasps. "I can't believe James would do that to you! After last year!"

"What was last year?" Gladys presses. Lily assumes it's some Quidditch politics.

"Twenty Galleons," Marlene says, warming to her topic, "no, fifty , that Potter doesn't even trust little Kiely against Black at Seeker and takes the spot himself. Then I'll have a right laugh when he tries to call me back to fill Chaser. I've got Gideon Prewett coming up from London to meet me in Hogsmeade, so hang Potter and his match."

"Yes," Felicia says, with a bounce on the bed that upsets her hair, "and hang Black right along with Potter. Stupid boys who'd snog a girl and then forget about it."

Lily immediately props herself up in bed again, her stomach suddenly jerking, as Gladys goes, "Wait, Fee, what was that? You've been snogging James too? No fair!"

"Oh no," Fees says, blushing, "no, no, I meant—" She's trying not to look at Marlene.

" That was last year. Potter and I snogged once or twice after wins," Marlene says briskly. "It never left the locker room. Only till Gideon wised up to how he felt about me, of course."

"Oh, of course ," Ann says from under her covers.

"No one told me!" Gladys shrills. "Once, or twice? We won three times last year!"

Marlene shrugs and side-eyes Lily. "That we did."

Lily distinctly remembers running into James on his way from the pitch to the castle after last year's Ravenclaw match. His hair had been completely flat for once, plastered down with sweat. She'd grudgingly given him a "Nice flying, Potter" and gotten back the half-expected reply, "Nice enough to go out with me, Evans?" And his smile had been cheeky enough that even as she'd rolled her eyes, she'd… thought about it, for half-a-minute or so, after she kept walking on by.

Surely he couldn't have been coming from kissing Marlene, of all girls, just then. Surely any girl snogging James Potter would muss up his hair.

"I didn't mean to—to…" Felicia blusters.

Lily, suddenly, realizes that it's her Felicia's doing a poor job of trying not to look at. The other girls are blatantly watching for her reaction. She quickly loosens her hand, which has somehow clenched her quilt.

"Oh come along," she crabs at them all. "As if I'd care!" When their wary expressions don't change, she adds, "What do you imagine Potter is to me?! A pest, that's all."

"For the record," Marlene says. All her angry sullenness has relaxed into satisfaction. "The pest knows how to use his tongue."

Lily, pointedly, lies back down and shoves a pillow over her ears. Just in time, too, to muffle the sounds of Gladys asking further questions.

She doesn't manage much sleep that night.

Sometime after dawn, Lily gives up and gets up. She got bits and pieces of sleep, enough to tease her with half-awake snatches of dark dreams. Not enough to feel at all rested.

She puts on her crispest black robe, to feel a little more together, brushes her hair, and quietly makes for the library. Madam Pince has the library doors open with the sun, though it's catacombs empty and silent so early on a Saturday. Lily actually gets an approving nod from Pince for her seeming studiousness, as she makes for the Divination section.

The library's dark, too, if not tomb-dark. The light from the windows is dim, promising a clouded-over day, and only a few of the lights are on yet. The Tarot section's at the deep, far end of the Divination shelves. Lily feels increasingly like she's walking into a tunnel.

" Lumos ," she whispers to her wand, and it illuminates a body on the floor, mere feet from her shoes, its back propped against the shelves.

She should shout. She should scream. But her throat closes off and she finds her mouth moving like a fish's as she instead rushes headlong at the body, hurrying to see its face, if it's alive.

Sirius Black's head jerks upright at the squeak of her shoes, and he reflexively throws a book from his lap at her.

It thuds and bounces off Lily's shoulder, clattering to the floor. She stops in front of him.

"I thought you were a murder victim," she says, annoyed.

"At Hogwarts?" Sirius says, blinking blearily. "In the library?"

"With a candlestick," Lily adds automatically.

Sirius repositions himself so he's properly sitting up against the shelf again. "How do you murder someone with a candlestick?" he asks.

"Er," Lily says. "Conk them over the head with it. Further bludgeoning."

"Interesting," Sirius says. "It'd take some good candle-sticking to actually murder a wizard, then. My mother once dropped an entire cast-iron stove on my uncle Alphard's head, and he just came to asking if that meant dinner was ready."

"Thick heads must run in your family."

Sirius looks down and pages through one of the books on his lap. "There's a lot that runs in my family," he says, too lightly.

Lily picks up the book he'd thrown at her, this time— Cutting Cards: Cursed Decks, Truth, & Other Things That Can Kill You —and sits down against the bookshelf opposite him. "There's a lot that runs in every family. More importantly, that was me calling you thick."

"I did realize that," Sirius says. "I'm not that thick."

"Sending someone to get eaten by a werewolf is as thick as it gets."

Sirius doesn't so much as look up from his book at Lily's reveal of what she's puzzled out (she's not a little disappointed). "No, nearly getting eaten by a werewolf is as thick as it gets. He guessed what was there. What did he think was going to happen in that tunnel?"

"What did you think would happen? That he would get eaten?"

"Suppose so, yeah. Only a little eaten," Sirius adds hastily. "He's been following us for years. It was going to happen eventually. Figured, give him what he wanted on our terms, scare him off." He stops paging and looks up, not at her but the ceiling. "James called it a 'misuse of trust'. Yelled other things I shouldn't repeat to you, but somehow that was the sticking one. He didn't specify if he meant his trust, or Remus', and both—"

"He meant Remus'," Lily says automatically.

"Yeah he did," Sirius agrees, finally looking at her, with something like appraisal.

"Good luck getting that trust back," Lily says. She opens the Cutting Cards book. "Figured out your trick deck, then?" They had obviously come to the Tarot shelves with the same purpose.

"You do know it's not my —"

"You've never been one not to take credit for a prank," Lily interrupted. Except for maybe that Davy Gudgeon dare with the Whomping Willow last year, but it was only speculation that was Sirius. "I know. What've you got?"

He flipped his book over on his lap and held a picture in her direction. "I'd say it's a Trionfi deck," he says. "Fifteenth-century Italy. Supposed to only be pulled out on occasions like marriages, battles, peace treaties, because of the heavy Cheiro enchantment."

"Cheiro as in chiromancy?" Lily asks sharply, connecting the name for palmistry to how the cards had changed under Remus' touch, under her and James' small tug-of-war for them.

"Better believe it," Sirius says. "I heard you have the thing. Hand it over, will you?"

"Er, it's not with me now," Lily says. The bits of the remaining cards are somewhere up the flue of the Gryffindor chimney.

Sirius lazily raises his eyebrow. "Somewhere safe, is it? Because as a rare heirloom deck, it's worth a small fortune."

"How small a fortune?"

"Couple hundred Galleons. Thousand and some to the right buyer."

"…Is that all," Lily says weakly.

Sirius' eyebrow arches a little higher. "Wrecked it, did you?"

She thinks of the deck, molten and peeling apart in the fire. "…I might have a little."

"How wonderfully impetuous of you," Sirius says, in so laidback a tone she can't tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

"I thought it was some throwaway prank deck!" Lily pauses at thought at her own protest. "Not just anyone would use a fancy deck to mess with Marlene McKinnon. A deck rare enough we don't study it—probably handed down through a family?—and someone careless enough to use it—throw it in with class decks, throw it away into Auriga's hands really—"

"If you hadn't taken it first," Sirius interjects, but Lily waves that aside.

"—all for the sake of being, well—mean, or maybe, trying to be funny…" She looks down hard at the book in her hand, making a conscious effort from keeping her eyes from flicking to Sirius. In the end she fails.

"I know," Sirius says grimly. Even his eyebrow looks subdued. "All points to me, doesn't it?"

Lily studies him. "Or it points to a frame-up," she says. She feels very Miss Marple saying that.

"Snape," Sirius says automatically, then shakes the thought away before Lily can. "Nah, even I know he doesn't have that kind of money to throw away on hating me. And for what? If I sicced a werewolf on Snivellus and am still here, I'm not about to get expelled over Divination class. Auriga didn't even give me much of a telling off, listened to my protests and said something about innocent until proven guilty, then went to try to catch McKinnon."

"Curious Auriga didn't go back for the deck, presuming she recognized what it was."

"I don't suppose she expected you to take it," Sirius says, grinning. "Lily Evans, not-so-petty thief. Somehow I can't see past that. Wait till I tell—"

"Tell Potter, yes, very predictable, Black, I'm sure you two will have a good chuckle over me, assuming you ever get back on speaking terms," Lily says. Then she sighs. "Sorry. It's early. Was that school-marmish? Do I have a schoolmarm face?"

"What? Your face stays nice enough, even when you get— erm, tetchy. …Why are we talking about your face?"

"It was brought to my attention," Lily says. "I don't try to be a stick-in-the-mud, you know."

Sirius stares at her, looking genuinely taken aback, always rare for him. "Lily," he says slowly, "over the years you've locked broom closets James and I were hiding in a good seven times and knocked our heads together a good few more, dueled with a Ravenclaw prefect who wouldn't take points off Slytherins bullying Mary Macdonald, dealt with said bullies yourself more times than I'm comfortable thinking about, made more people like you than you seem to even realize, and yesterday stole and destroyed a six-century-old magical artifact. You may get away scot-free when it comes to detentions, but that doesn't make you a stick in anything."

"Well," Lily says. She's trying not to blush and failing. "Well, Sirius, I…"

"That's observation, not compliment, so don't go fancying me or anything," he says, rolling his eyes. "Honestly, I can't say anything halfway nice to a girl without her hovering around and hinting about taking her to Hogsmeade—"

"Felicia," Lily says, a thought clicking.

"Exactly, like Felicia—"

"She normally works with Marlene," Lily interrupts. "They split up to see if you'd choose to sit with her, remember? Wait, what exactly does a heavy Cheiro enchanment do ?"

"Lays out your soul or fate, or something," Sirius says. "Special occasions only, like I said. The enchantment gets, well, blunter with overuse, much less age, hence all the cards showing up the same—that's why it took me most of the night to figure out what it was, it wasn't working like a Trionfi deck is really supposed to, but I know my way around a prank set, and that was no prank set. For one, they usually turn up dirtier pictures—"

"It is the sort of deck a girl might use to see what's on a boy's mind, then," Lily says. "And Fortescue's an old wizarding family, aren't they?"

"Not by my family's 'sacred' standards, but they're hardly upstarts," Sirius agrees. "There have been Fortescues at Hogwarts since the seventeenth-century easy, and it wouldn't be a shock if some branch reached further back." He runs his hand through his hair in thought, almost Potter-like, except that Sirius' hair falls perfectly back in place. "They don't care a fig for old ideas, the Fortescues," he says carefully. "Fee's mom's a Muggle, lives right in Diagon and helps right at her in-law's shop. For years now, and it's still something of a to-do. My mother writes regular letters to the Prophet editor on it."

"I think I knew that," Lily says carefully. She doesn't bring up how every time Sirius' mother has a new letter published in the paper, often mentioning 'the corruption of youth' or otherwise obliquely referencing Sirius, some Slytherins plaster the whole school with copies. She's pretty sure last year she saw Regulus Black tacking one up himself. She definitely saw Potter dragging Pettigrew with him to pull leaflets down.

Sirius seems to be wrestling with his wording. "It's a fair guess, if it's hers, Felicia might not know what the deck's worth or care much besides what it could show her…"

"A fair guess, her family being what it is," Lily says, gathering as much, and when Sirius opens his mouth to protest, hurries to add, "I'm not saying you're stereotyping, it is fair. There's things about your world I don't know, or care, about, being Muggle-born."

" Our world," Sirius corrects, grinning a little. "True enough. You did destroy a Trionfi deck before bothering to find out—"

"It bothered me," Lily says, exasperated. "And I did come here to find out what it was—"

"Past tense being very apt—"

Lily decides drowning him out is the best option. "So Felicia has motive, potential means, and, since she was in class before us, opportunity—"

"McKinnon didn't know, though," Sirius counters, back to business. He closes the book on his lap. "She never saw the card change coming, that was clear, so Fee would have had to get the deck past her. Don't you girls always tell each other all your plans and secrets?"

"Now you're stereotyping." Against her will, Lily thinks, sourly, of Marlene and Potter and locker rooms, and it's on the tip of her tongue to ask Sirius about it, but she clamps down on the words, because there's nothing she wants to know and asking him will only end with her curiosity eventually reaching Potter's ears. "Any other theories?"

"Rosier, for chaos' sake," Sirius says. "That, and he's my cousins' cousin and generally dislikes me. Or we're barking up the wrong tree—" He smiles suddenly, as if something's funny. "—and someone thought you'd sit with McKinnon, meaning the deck was intended for you, to scare you or show your secrets. Which, again, makes me think Snape, despite us ruling that out."

"He knows all my secrets," Lily says, grumpily.

"Really," Sirius says. "You're brewing Amortentia in NEWT Potions, what's that smell like to you?"

"Tarot cards hardly show smells, Sirius Black, and I could ask you the same—"

"Petrol," he answers promptly. "There's obviously no petrol at Hogwarts; that's how I knew you're brewing Amortentia. And I've also seen you watching everything you drink damn close, because while you'd never admit it and probably hate thinking it, the idea of Sn—someone slipping you some has crossed your mind." He shrugs, his shoulders bumping shelved books. "I watch it myself. Mary-Susan Perks keeps trying to hand me glasses of pumpkin juice. She's not too subtle, and like I was telling you, I'm not that thick."

Lily, reeling, shakes her head. "This is observation, not a compliment," she warns. "But, Sirius, you actually are a bit brilliant."

"A bit," he scoffs. "Watch me do the crossword sometime." He thumbs through the pages of the book one last time and jumps to his feet. "Nothing more to find here, anyhow. It's down to asking Felicia, I suppose."

"And then what?" Lily gets up too. "If it is her, have her tell McKinnon and Auriga it was her? Why? You're not even in trouble—"

"I don't mind when I've given people a reason to be mad at me, which I do, plenty," Sirius say, re-shelving his pile of books, one shove at a time . "I don't like people taking against me when I've done nothing." He looks over at her. "You'd know something about that, I guess, people disliking you for no reason."

"They've got a reason," Lily reminds him. "They're pretty fixated on that reason."

"Pfft," Sirius says at once. "Blood. Idiot reason."

It occurs to Lily that with one onomatopoeia the boy in front of her has dismissed centuries of prejudice, ingrained in him since birth, as easily and thoughtlessly as he might blow away the wisps on a dandelion. Obviously, Sirius, who in the past month nearly ruined two lives, is deeply, deeply flawed. But in that one breath, more than anything he's said before or would maybe say in time to come, he's made himself impossible for Lily to dislike, ever again.

"Later, then, I suppose," Sirius says, lifting a hand. "I'll let you know what Felicia says. This whole thing might be ridiculous, and small, but the cards were still a cruel trick, in their small way. And I like to know who's turning tricks in this castle."

Lily's busy thinking, but she looks up at that, startled.

Already a few steps down the bookshelf tunnel, Sirius looks like he's startled himself. His still-lifted hand moves in the air, as if trying to strike out the words or physically reshape them, before he drops it to his side. "You know what I meant," he says, taking for granted she understands him in a way he never, ever would have before the past few weeks, and gets going again without further ado.

"Sirius," calls Lily. She can't really believe the words are coming out of her mouth, but she can't seem to stop them either, and her feet are rushing to catch up to him. "Don't take this the wrong way—"

"I always take everything the wrong way," says Sirius, reassuringly. "I have a talent for it."

She rolls her eyes—damn it, she thinks, she's really trying to break that habit—and picks up her pace to pass him. "It's fine, forget it, it's a lousy idea, anyway."

"Oh, go on then," he encourages. "I love lousy ideas." He's on her right side and looking over at her expectantly. It's a familiar pose from him, though she feels like she usually sees it at a distance.

"You're not going to Hogsmeade with Potter this weekend, are you." It's not a question.

He falls a step behind her. "Hasn't come up."

"You could—oh, hell," Lily says irritably, to the library at large, and with Sirius at her back, she says, "You could go along with me. If you liked."

There's a resounding silence behind her, not even footsteps. She glances over her shoulder, almost timidly.

Sirius is looking at her like she's smacked him over the head with a trophy shield (having in fact conked him a shield, way back in third year when interrupting a 'formal duel' between Severus and James to which Sirius stood a determined-to-prevent-interruption second, she's familiar with that particular expression: slightly pained, mostly dumbstruck).

"Well?" she says. "I told you not to take it the wrong way. As—company, Black. Not a date."

"To be perfectly clear," Sirius says, "while I might have mentioned you have a nice face, I meant, generally nice, like a painting, not like I fancy you. Which I don't—"

"I should hope n—"

"—Obviously you're, well, something, for Hogwarts, but—"

"You can stop talki—"

"—you don't really have, er, sex appeal—"

Lily can't keep trying to desperately interrupt him. Her mouth's too busy hanging open.

"For me, that is," Sirius adds, suddenly a little desperate. "James seems to think you've got plenty, or at least that you're pretty enough to make up for the lack of it—"

"Where did you pick up that phrase? That's a very Muggle phrase ." Wizards seemed to refer to the equivalent as 'oomph'.

"I read Muggle magazines and—"

"What sort of Muggle maga— no-never-mind, I don't want to know , and as long as we're being clear , I don't fancy you either ."

And it's true, but still, hearing she lacks 'sex appeal' from an undeniably handsome— if somewhat off-puttingly so, not to mention slightly-off-kilter— boy her age, is still not exactly making Lily's morning.

"Well, then," Sirius says, sounding pleased.

(James Potter thinks she has sex appeal, a voice in the back of Lily's head says, but she shushes that. She basically knew that already).

"We can get a good view of the pitch from this one patch off by the woods, if you want to get a head start on the crowd for Hogsmeade," Sirius adds. "Or I can meet you in town, if you're skipping the match—" He breaks off. "Or have you changed your mind?"

"Nah," Lily says, imitating his easy dismissal. "We're going."

James Potter's first-ever match as Quidditch Captain goes like this:

The weather's awful, the cold and wind of November coming in weeks early with the rain. Potter does not put himself back in at Seeker, the position of his early years. He stays in at Chaser and sets up two assists by McKenzie on Mulciber at Keeper within the first three minutes of play. Potter then spends the better part of the next half-hour dodging a full-fledged assault by Beaters Burke and Slytherin Captain Rabastan Lestrange. Sykes, refereeing, calls foul but then can't manage to cite from memory the name of the foul against Bludger-targeting against one player. She lets it drop. McKenzie, meanwhile, a fourth-year, gets called for blagging, blatching, blurting, and then haver-sacking. Potter tries arguing with Sykes on the last one—it wasn't McKenzie's fault a Bludger knocked him, while holding the Quaffle, through the goal hoop. Twice. But still, neither score counts.

Something like an incredible quack rises from the Gryffindor sidelines a while later. Although McKinnon's not playing, some fan puts together that between McKenzie, McLaggen, and MacDougal, about half the Gryffindor side is "Mack"s and starts a chant of sorts. It's certainly easier than yelling a three-syllable House name, some of the Gryffindor crowd starts pointing at McGonagall as they cheer, and it absolutely drowns out Slytherin's attempt to shout "SHA-FIQ," their star Chaser.

Regulus Black, a spindly dark-haired blur in green, takes up the time-tested Seeker position of flying high above the field and circling like a particularly graceful buzzard. Gryffindor's Seeker Kiely, sparrow-quick and light, darts all around, completely exhausting himself in his excitement.

Another hour into the match, the score ekes upwards to 120-20, in favor of Gryffindor, largely because the third-year James had put in as Keeper, Barry Ryan, is actually a genius on the broom.

"Late addition," Sirius tells Lily as they watch from afar while Ryan drops and swings like a monkey from his broom to kick a Quaffle away. "Tibby McLaggen's played Keeper, but James moved him since he was, ah, short a Beater."

"He had you in as Beater," Lily says, because she vaguely remembers hearing grumblings back around September tryouts. "Potter kicked you off the Quidditch team?!"

"James should have never put me on the Quidditch team," Sirius mutters. "He only did it because he could now, but he didn't kick me off. Dumbledore said something like—" He shuffles his feet on the grass. "Detention was too small, for what I'd done, and no doubt I didn't want to draw any more attention to the incident than it already… Then he made this gentle comment about me playing games and how I need to learn better, and I sort of agreed, and next thing I knew he was telling McGonagall I had resigned from the Quidditch team and she was looking very, very relieved." Sirius pauses. "James was pretty busy being upset with me about all the other stuff, but he's relieved too."

"That's one way for Dumbledore to secretly favor Gryffindor, I suppose," Lily says at last, after a long moment of debating how to answer this confidence. "You must be awful ."

Sirius throws back his head and laughs, much, much harder than her comment warrants. "I am," he almost gasps, and his laughter's so contagious she starts laughing too. And then high up near the Gryffindor goal post, Scabior and Shafiq collide hard with Potter and Knight, and out of the blur of bodies against the blue, Potter comes up with the Snitch.

Sirius and Lily could hear Sykes' whistle blowing, calling Snitchnip, and the entire game halts so the Snitch could be re-released. The game had been grueling along, full of fouls and little exciting, breakaway play, for two hours, and Hogsmeade's beckoning; a stream of students start leaving the match, heading with permission slips in hand for where Flitwick guards the Hogsmeade path.

Sirius and Lily finally stop laughing about the time game play returns.

"Radio in Hogsmeade does pick up the game broadcast," Lily mentions.

Sirius stands with his hands in robes pockets, watching James bend his broomstick around quick corners and roll away from Burke, passing the Quaffle off to McKenzie. Lily watches, too, not quite remembering James ever playing so much as part of a team before. The role of Captain sits surprisingly well on him.

"Yeah, why not," Sirius says. "I can see James fly any old time." And they leave their standing spot, on the grass, with a good view of the pitch, behind.

(If Sirius Black was really any good at Divination, he'd see that in seventeen years, he'd be back in the same spot, watching another dark-haired boy fly the same pitch with the same skill, feeling with every shred left in his heart the déjà vu of this day among so many others. But despite that Outstanding O.W.L., he's really not. It's only a Saturday in 1976, and even if it's raining and miserable, today is a happy day.)

Lily and Sirius walk away to Hogsmeade, while the game bruises and shudders its way along for another three hours, with no sign of the Snitch reappearing. The stands thin and quiet, still a good showing, but no chance of riot. Everyone, even some of the players, are more concerned with how soon they can get to the butterbeer, rather than who wins at this point. And the contest for the Snitch might not matter at all. Gryffindor's ahead by 140 points, mostly thanks to James Potter's maneuvering, even though his crowd's still shouting "Mack-Mack-Mack," and occasionally, when McLaggen does something really profound with a Bludger, "Mack Attack!" It's a sharp change from the adulation thrown Potter's way since late third year, and even in the air he feels it, but he's more concerned with the actual game.

One more goal, and even if Slytherin catches the Snitch, but Gryffindor wins the cup. One more goal.

Regulus Black sees a glimmer behind Kiely's head; he dives like a falcon and everyone in the crowd sees exactly what he's after, except poor exhausted Kiely, who turns and pivots but manages to keep missing the Snitch dancing behind him. James cannot will the Snitch into Kiely's hand, so he ignores the crowd and barrels towards the Slytherin goal with his fellow Chasers. The younger Black brother, within arms' length of the Snitch, takes a few embarrassing circles around the golden ball—

But he comes up with it in the end, finishing the game even as the Gryffindor Chasers set up one last play.

Gryffindor loses the match by ten points.

The radio, turned up loud, announces as much to the patrons of the Three Broomsticks. Rosmerta, walking up to Sirius and Lily's table to drop off more butterbeers, swears sharply under her breath.

"We in the Lion House appreciate the sentiment," Sirius says, grinning at Rosmerta despite the sudden gloom descending over the Gryffindor contingent.

"A consolatory one on the house for your better half when he gets off the pitch," Rosmerta mock-whispers, with a nod over to the radio.

"It'll need to be some strong consolation," Sirius says. Grinning like an absolute idiot, Lily thinks, amused.

Rosmerta snort-laughs and somehow manages to make even that sound sexy. "Sure thing, as soon as you're out of school."

"I'm seventeen next month," Sirius says cheekily.

"Doesn't do you any good, boy-o," Rosmerta says. "Nothing stronger than butterbeer for students here." Then she lowers her voice. "'Leastways, not on proper school Saturdays."

"Not even under the table?" Sirius says, dropping a wink.

"Ooh, this one's trouble," Rosmerta says to Lily, even more sotto voce. "It's the Hog's Head for the likes of him."

Rosmerta must be thirty or near it, but the way she winks back and sashays as she turns away makes Sirius' head whip around like Lily has never seen. Lily takes mental notes from Rosmerta, though she's not sure when she'll use them. Most of the really fanciable boys are gone from school, from the Prewett brothers to idiotic- but -gorgeous Quidditch star Ludovic Bagman to brilliant- and -gorgeous- and -nice Damocles Belby from Slug Club who was apparently too distracted with real life to reply to her letter. Some of them, Bagman for one over by the bar, are around Hogsmeade today, grouping together as close to school as allowed to cheer on their old glories.

"Secretly, her heart yearns for me," Sirius says to Lily, inclining his head towards Rosmerta and downing his butterbeer.

"So much she's trying to send you elsewhere," Lily says, watching Rosmerta lean laughingly over a table of older warlocks.

"That wasn't dismissal, that was a tip," Sirius says. "Rosmerta doesn't know you're about as likely to drink in the Hog's Head as—"

"I'd drink in the Hog's Head," Lily says.

Sirius studies her eyes for a moment and shakes his head. "Nah, you wouldn't."

Lily tips back her butterbeer, staring him down, and finishes it. She sets it down like a challenge.

"Hog's Head it is," Sirius says.

She's never been in the Hog's Head. She suggested it to Snape, more than once, but he said it was a bad idea, for her; she shocked the heck out of Damocles Belby when she suggested it on their one-and-only Hogsmeade date before he graduated. Somehow, Sirius seems just the person to go with; he's half-laughing in surprise and making faces at Rosmerta as he grabs the door of the pub for her.

"You don't seem too devastated by our loss," she says as they walk up Shop Street. Lily wonders if Sirius is secretly proud of Regulus.

"It's points that matter, when it comes to the Quidditch Cup," he says. "We'll beat Hufflepuff, and so will Slytherin, but Ravenclaw's going to massacre both Slytherin and Hufflepuff. It's all down to whether we beat Ravenclaw, or more how much we lose to them by. What with Blythe."

Blythe Parkin, the seventh-year Ravenclaw Seeker, is from what Lily understood practically Quidditch royalty, with a spot on the Wigtown Wanderers already waiting for her. She'd cinched the Cup for Ravenclaw every year since she was fifteen and won nearly every match before that.

Lily's opening her mouth to ask further questions. The thing is, she secretly loves Quidditch, though it was almost more fun, this once, to watch from a distance and listen to the play-by-play from radio. Severus used to answer her Quidditch questions, but never at a match, since they sat on opposite sides, and the answer usually only mattered in the moment. Only once or twice did Sirius not know and say, "You'd have to ask James," so distractedly it was as if he really forgot that she and James didn't get along.

She forgets what she's about to say when Marlene McKinnon comes slamming out Madam Puddifoot's and stamping out into the street some distance ahead of them.

"Marlene?" calls Lily, but not loudly enough.

Sirius glances down at Lily, then cups his hand around his mouth. "Oi, Mack!"

A few Gryffindors late from the match take it up as they stroll by: "Mack-Mack-Mack!", the original intention lost.

Still, McKinnon whirls, face glowing in the early twilight, all ease and eagerness. Her hair shine and her makeup's perfect, if a little over-applied. Regardless of what she thinks of her, it makes Lily sad to watch Marlene's face fall as her eyes find their faces. Gideon Prewett calls Marlene that sometimes, too, she knows, and Lily looks for his bright hair inside the dim lighting of Madam Puddifoot's. Nary a ginger Hit Patrolman in sight.

"Ah, Black," Marlene says. "It's only you."

Sirius looks a bit unnerved by her bitter tone. Last time they spoke was over cards, Lily supposes, and Marlene knocking over him and his chair. "And Lily," he says, gesturing.

Lily bumps him with her elbow. "Not what she meant," she mutters, then to Marlene, "Where you heading?"

"To get sloshed," says Marlene curtly. "I'd ask you along, but— "

"We're off to the Hog's Head, actually," Lily replies. "You too?"

Marlene's eyes crinkle. "You're not going to drink there, Lils," she says. "You're going there to look around and feel a tiny bit dangerous so, later—"

"No, I think drinking was specifically invoked in the plan," Lily says flatly.

"That is true," Sirius says, looking between them a little uneasily.

"Have a start on me, then," Marlene says, coming closer and reaching into her robe pocket. Lily briefly sees a fiercely-crumpled envelope and then suddenly a flask is being thrust at her.

"Oh, come on, McKinnon," Sirius starts, but Lily meets Marlene's dark eyes evenly, takes the flask with a small smile, and takes a sip.

She took too much of a sip, she realizes immediately; the liquid's sweet, with a hint of cinnamon, but burning and it's all she can do not to choke. She hands it back, unable to speak, but forcing the small smile back on her face.

Marlene then hands it to Sirius, who, despite his wide eyes, shrugs and takes more of a gulp than Lily deems wise.

"Ogden's," he says. "Nice."

They've somehow formed a little circle, hiding the flask with their backs. The sun hasn't even set yet, Lily thinks wildly, though it's on its way there. They're supposed to be back within the castle gates by 8:30 or… she isn't really sure what comes after 'or,' since she's always been back well in advance. She's known Hogwarts students who've lost privileges coming back drunk, and others who've giggled about faking sobriety on their way past the teachers, but she's never spent much time with that bunch. Marlene takes a dangerously long swing and passes it back to Lily.

"Were you putting this in your tea in Puddifoot's?" Lily asks.

"Let's leave it at, it's been a long day," Marlene says, watching as Lily takes another sip. There isn't much left, and it doesn't burn quite as much the second time. She tried drinking exactly one time this past summer, in trying to reconnect with some of the Muggle girls in her neighborhood, but regular liquor didn't make her feel as flushed as this. If butterbeer's immediately warming, firewhiskey's like standing too close to a furnace with no way to back away.

"Did you finish that?" Sirius says, pointing at Lily. Marlene bats his hand down, and he rears away at the action, annoyed.

"Subtlety, Black," Marlene says. "Or is that not in your spellbook?"

"I didn't think it was in yours," he says.

"Don't arch your eyebrow at me," Marlene snaps, because that's exactly what he's doing.

"Because you can't make only one eyebrow do it, and that makes it hideously annoying?" Lily says, and when Marlene turns back towards her with a squint, she adds, "Me too!"

"Well," Marlene says, a little of the hardness in her expression falling away. She tucks the empty flask away and marches forward. "Hog's Head then. What's with the face, Black? Only now realizing you're living one of James Potter's fantasies, and that may not go over so well with him, seeing how it doesn't really seem to be his day?"

"Oh don't say that," Lily says, feeling the flush even more. She's uneasy with the words 'James Potter' and 'fantasy' in the same sentence, and, too, James seems to be the one spot it seems unfair to tease Sirius about.

Sirius scowls. "I got the sudden feeling this is going to end with me in Azkaban."

"Not a bad idea," Marlene says, "Gideon arrests people. Maybe then he'd actually show up." Marlene's doing an imitation of Rosmerta's sashay, Lily notices. It's decidedly an imitation, but not a terrible one. She looks at Sirius, who also seems to be noticing, in his more typical, casually bored way.

The Hog's Head is dingier up close than Lily remembers it looking from a distance. Sirius is looking up and down the street at passing students, obviously keeping an eye out for his semi-estranged friends, while Marlene, a few sashays ahead, has grabbed the door.

Lily's starting to feel the firewhiskey. "Full responsibility is mine," she says, linking arms with Sirius. His expression suggests she grew a second set of arms rather than simply grabbed his. "You won't get arrested on my watch."

"I'll hold you to that," he warns, and suddenly they're within, and it's getting dark without.

Sirius and Marlene elect to keep sending Lily up for drinks, because, Marlene admits, "No one is going to say no to you." This seems to be true, and also, Lily's not entirely sure who's paying for their drinks anymore, just that they keep coming, though she makes sure they're all in bottles and that she watches them as they're opened. Too many people are in hoods here, and she was friends with Snape long enough to know exactly how many emotions and dangers can be slipped into a drink. Marlene says it's a big crowd for here, even though the place is half-empty. There's a lot of weird-looking older folks, but a decent number of students, especially seventh-year boys. The Quidditch teams must have showed up in town, since a girl in Slytherin team robes is making out with a boy in Gryffindor's red. Lily thinks they're younger than she is. There's also a whole group of thick-accented boys about her age near the bar.

"If we miss the return curfew, I've got six and a half ways to get us back into the castle," Sirius says, head lolling a little, as Lily returns with their three bottles of dwarf-brewed beer.

"And say we were back all along?" Marlene mocks, then blinks and says, "Oh, actually, that could work. Felicia said you were talking to her about secret passages."

"Was I?" Sirius says, looking to Lily as if she has the answer. It's like he's forgotten that whole thing.

Marlene's crumpled letter from Gideon is spread out on the table, and she's already complained about how he apparently forgot about meeting her. It only came after she'd been waiting for hours; it's only a line or two about being busy and the whips—the Wizarding Hit Patrol both Prewett brothers are part of—preparing for some rumored trouble tonight. And, Marlene says, it's clearly in Fabian's handwriting, meaning Gideon himself couldn't be bothered or hadn't remembered and Fab was covering for him.

Lily wonders vaguely if all boys forget and dismiss kisses as airy nothings, a little fun, while girls count them up and remember and make them mean things they didn't. No, now that 's stereotyping— she's sitting right next to Marlene, after all. Marlene seems willing to forget the whole card thing, and maybe Gideon too, since she's definitely giving Sirius the eye right over her letter. But who knows what Marlene really thinks? It's hard, right here, not to think about what she heard last night about last year and Marlene and James Potter and the locker room. And who Potter might be kissing in locker rooms this year. And why she even cares.

Lily's feeling suddenly a little ill. She keeps sipping her beer.

"Where is Felicia?" she asks Marlene.

"I don't know, Honeyduke's?" Marlene says. Wispy as she is, Felicia loves her sweets. "Gladys came in earlier to brag they were walking around with boys with accents."

"There's boys with accents at the bar," Lily says, remembering.

"Fee's from London, you're from Cokeworth, and this is Scotland," Marlene says. "To you the local boys have accents."

"No," Lily says, shaking her head, trying to place the accent. She's visited her Hufflepuff friend, Greta, whose mother is German, from another wizarding school. Durmstrang. The accents might not be quite German, but they did sound decidedly Germanic.

"James," Sirius says, sitting bolt upright, and Lily looks up. Sure enough Potter has just walked in, and without meaning to, she's met his eyes and it's a little bit electric. Unless he's making eye contact with Sirius right next to her, and she simply also happens to be looking at him. She's not entirely sure.

"Am I a bit drunk?" Lily asks Marlene nervously.

Marlene is the only one of them not staring at James, since she's busy lighting her letter on fire. "A bit?" she repeats, like it's hilarious.

And that's when the street very literally explodes.

Chapter Text

Lily falls off her chair. She struggles to get up, but she can't see; a thick sooty cloud, like they're on the roof of some factory, has billowed at once into the bar and surrounds her. It's black and it's choking and it's awful, but not as awful as the sound of Sirius Black's voice, close by and tearing and terrible: "JAMES! JAMES!" again and again. And all Lily can think is that James was right by the door and the window—and she'd heard the glass shatter when the bang came from outside.

Her nose is running; she wipes at it with one hand and reaches for her wand with the other.

And then there's more yelling. Whoops, from outside, and inside too. A jubilant sound, and a strangely ancient one, a very male sound, to Lily's annoyance and slight fear. It sounds like the madness at professional Quidditch matches—she went to one in Wigtown at thirteen, when Greta Catchlove brought Lily and a bunch of other girls. The Wanderers had been winning by a lot, and one of the girls had been so frightened by the men hollering and waving meat cleavers in the air Greta's parents whisked them off before the second half.

There's a chant beginning, too, eerily cheery. It does not drown out Sirius, still yelling, farther away now, still not being answered. Lily's stomach roils; she's not sure if it's the smoke or the drink or the sudden desperate fear James Potter is never going to mess up his hair again, but she thinks she might be sick. She swallows hard and whispers instead:

" Lumos ."

The minute her wand ignites, a hand grips her arm and yanks her upright, hard.

"Put your wand out, we don't want attention," Marlene McKinnon hisses, right in her ear, with something like fear herself, and then pulls Lily so their backs are both up against the bar wall.

Something quite like a human roar comes from the behind the bar, and there's a thud of a body hitting the floor.

Red light briefly flashes and silhouettes the tables and chairs and figures with hoods up; it's gone but leaves a faint after image of the shapes, and a shout and flash of purple answers the red back.

"But—" Lily says, trying to gesture to indicate the smog, and—even in the small circle of wand light she can see Marlene cast her gaze to the ceiling in utter exasperation—her wand is suddenly out of her hand and in Marlene's, as the other girl says, " Nox. Nox-nox-nox —" until Lily's wand cooperates and goes out. The wand is suddenly stuck back in Lily's hand, which was still out to grip it.

There's a lot more flashes of light outside than in the bar.

"Spell yourself for night vision, you goose," Marlene says.

"I don't know that spell," Lily says. That was not in her Charms textbook. "You do it—"

"Haven't you ever snuck out at night?! Buggered if I know how to do it on someone else—it's somnocustenus . Somnocustenus !" Marlene says, so quickly Lily has to pick apart the words in her head.

" Somnocustenus ," she repeats at last, waving her wand in the general direction of her face, but nothing happens, possibly because she's slurring every s despite focusing very carefully on her annunciation.

"Never mind, never mind," Marlene mutters, as if the words were another spell. She pulls Lily down to the floor as a jet of yellow light soars over their heads.

Pulling on Lily's arm, so hard it aches, Marlene drags her along the floor, their crouched walk so low they're almost crawling. Lily bangs hard against a few table or chair legs, but it's only a moment before Marlene yanks her back upright and Lily hears fumbling for a door knob.

Lily finds herself wrenched into another room and is rather abruptly let go of. The sound of clicking metal tells her Marlene's locking them in somewhere.

She reaches gropingly for a wall. "There's a secret passage in the Hog's Head?" she says, dazed but still managing to be annoyed Marlene would know of such a thing. In six years at Hogwarts Lily hasn't managed many such mystery-novel finds.

"No," Marlene says scathingly. "Well—maybe. But this is the ladies'."

Lily struggles to comprehend that for a second. "The ladies' toilet ? What good are we in here?"

"What good are you out there, that's the better question," Marlene says. "You, Lily Evans, are royally pissed."

"Psssssssssh, I'm hardly royally pissed," Lily says, "and I thank, I think, an intoxicated me is still worth ten of that lot out there." She is trying really hard to stand perfectly still, but some swaying is apparently unavoidable. "Perhaps five of them," she concedes, taking her steadying hand off the bathroom wall just long enough so she can turn her back and fully lean against it. "But I am—I'm very useful. In a fight. But possibly—a sober-up spell?"

"Sober-up's potion only," Marlene says. Lily can only vaguely see Marlene's shape in the dark room, but she senses some movement. Marlene seems to be making dramatic hand gestures. "But sure, I'll whip some right up. In this sink. Because I just happen to carry seaweed extract and doxy—"

"You were drinking more than I was," Lily interrupts, with a distinct sense that this is not fair.

"I've been drinking more than you for some years, I think," Marlene says. "You know whose fault this all is?"

Lily thinks of the boys at the bar with Germanic accents. "You know ?"

"Gideon's," Marlene says. "This is all Gideon's fault. I'd be with him, not here, and if he could be bothered to show up, he could be Hit Patrolling just fine right here, and if he was here—"

Marlene may be more sober than Lily, and Lily might not be able to see her, but it's suddenly clear she's not as sober as Lily would like.

"—James Potter wouldn't be dead or something—"

"Don't," Lily says, pressing her back harder against the wall, "don't say that, don't—"

There's suddenly a crash as tables and chairs right near the bathroom door bang together and crash down to the floor. It takes Lily a second to recognize the sort of magic she used to make happen before her wand and Hogwarts, before control. That crash came from her.

Stupid Potter still isn't answering , even though Sirius is still shouting; it sounds like he's around the other end of the bar now. Inside, louder even than Sirius, there's still that roaring voice from the bar, howling spells and less-magical curses, and seeming to shut the chanting up some. Outside, the general whooping, that chanting in another language, is growing louder.

"Have some water," Marlene mutters, and the faucet turns on. Lily can hear her drinking in the dark, which is vaguely weird; she inches off the wall and over in the direction. She bumps her shoulder against Marlene's, almost staggers back in surprise, and then takes a place next to her, cupping water in her own hands. She splashes some on her face, too.

"What is that?" Lily says, inclining her head in the chant's general direction before remembering Marlene can't really see her.

"Idiots," Marlene says, unhelpfully. Lily knows that . But then Marlene adds, "That's a Walpurgis Night song, and it's not bloody Walpurgis."

Lily's heard of Walpurgis Night. "Bela Lugosi," she muttered to herself.

When she was home, she watched TV with her parents, and on Friday nights ITV played the old Universal horror films her mom loved. Dracula from 1931, starring Bela Lugosi, began with a strongly-accented man in a carriage warning about Walpurgis Night. "The night of evil," when "doors are barred," when it was best to stay inside and pray.

Her father had snorted. "Walpurgis Night's only a festival," he'd told her. A holiday, rather like Guy Fawkes Day, but around May Day.

But that was the Muggle world.

" Belalugosi ?" Marlene repeats. "Whatever that spell's meant to do, it's obviously not working."

"What day is it?" Lily asks. The thread of Guy Fawkes has gotten hooked in her thoughts.

"Cripes, Lils, it's a Saturday . Oh!—it's October 23rd—"

"Was that one of the moon dates?"

"…I don't pay any attention in Astronomy. It's not the full moon, if that's what—"

"No, the full moon was two weeks ago," Lily says. Her hands are wet. She reaches automatically for a towel, registers she has no idea where one is, and opts to drink more water. "The new moon?"

There's a sudden crackle from outside the door and Marlene grabs Lily's forearm with her own damp palm. "Play detective later," she says. "That was—"

"I know ." Lily has conjured fire enough times to know exactly what that sound was. She fumbles for her wand—she doesn't really remember putting it in her pocket, but that's where it is.

"When I open the door," says Marlene, propeling Lily by her arm towards, presumably, said door, "we're going to go straight along the wall to the window—"

"We can't head out without Sirius," Lily says firmly. On that at least she's clear.

Marlene blows out a breath. "You don't hear him shouting for us, do you?" she says, and before if Lily can figure out if that's agreement they'll get him or not, she throws open the door.

There is fire. Not an overwhelming amount, not a world of it, but it's there, dancing orange and blue all over the bar. Overturned chairs are on fire, and there's fire on the floor, and a wall of fire right across the bartop. There's fire out the broken window, too.

From behind the wall of fire on the bar, a hand whirls a wand in a circle and a white head peeks over. For a moment Lily thinks it's Dumbledore, but then the white-haired man behind the bar shouts spells, curses in between them.

"It's the bartender," says Lily, dazedly. He's the roaring voice she's been hearing.

"Great," says Marlene, as she flattens them both closer to the wall and hurries Lily along it. The bartender does not seem particularly discriminate in who his spells are knocking over. Lily catches sight of Sirius as he goes down in the same blast as two hooded figures. There's not many people in the bar still in their feet. A couple who'd been making out before is huddled in the corner and Lily, recognizing the girl from Herbology, starts to wave at her before Marlene knocks her hand down.

By now Marlene's gotten them by the window, where the smog's dissipated some. Glass crunches underneath their school boots. Lily can see here, some. The door is off its hinges and down on the floor. Nothing, no one can be under it, but that's where she's somehow imagined James to be, stuck, possibly unconscious, but also rather sheltered, under the door. He's not. There are a few figures standing in the threshold, but they're in cloaks and the spells they're sending at the bar sound like they're derived from Norse, not Latin. Not James.

Where is he, where is he?

"He's right there, I'll get him," says Marlene grimly, which makes Lily realize she said her question aloud. Marlene's pointing at Sirius, who's staggering upright near the opposite window. So is one of the two hooded boys who went down next to him—definitely boys, not men, Lily judges, from their size and shape.

"Would you climb out the window already?" says Marlene, giving Lily a little push as she finally releases her arm.

"But the glass—" Lily tears her gaze away from the door to eye the jagged, blown-in window.

"Blast the glass!" says Marlene, then, with almost a shudder, darts across the bar. Her drawn wand shakes in her hand, but she launches herself towards the staggering Sirius fiercely enough.

By that time Lily's figured out Marlene means blast the glass, literally. She draws her wand, her own hand unsteady, and says, " Confrigo ." The remainder of the glass blasts immediately outward, with a small explosion of light and heat to boot. Some version of the same Blasting Curse is decidedly what blew the windows in to begin with.

"Ouch!" someone says outside, and Lily hopes frantically it's James even though that didn't really sound like him. She leans out the window to look but it's only some guy in a Honeydukes uniform, glass now embedded in his cheek.

"Sorry," she calls after the Honeydukes guy, as he keeps hustling down the burning street, giving her a dirty look.

With a glance behind to ensure that Sirius and Marlene are coming—they are, though Sirius still seems to be looking all around the bar—she scrambles all the way onto the window ledge and drops the few feet to the ground. She lands on her feet, but her knees take the force of the impact. Her stomach roils with nausea.

Sirius Black comes flying out the window head first, and Marlene pokes her head out after. "Give me a hand down," she says to Lily, who offers her hand up in automatic response.

"Did you push him?" Lily asks, as she helps yank Marlene down.

Sirius, swearing, pushes himself upright to his hands and knees.

"At the last second he decided he should check to see if Potter was under the door again," says Marlene. Lily takes that as a yes.

"Could've broken my wand," Sirius says accusingly, as he collects it from the ground.

"Could've broken his head ," Lily says.

Marlene shakes her head dismissively. "Merlin, Lily, we don't break that easy, you forget we're not Mugg—"

"Watch what you say," Sirius says sharply, looking at the backs of the figures in the Hog's Head threshold. Then he shakes his head fiercely, like a wet animal, and raises his wand at their backs. They go down, Stunned.

Lily is annoyed the thought to do that didn't occur to her. She looks at the sky—and then yelps, casting a blue Shield Spell just in time to protect the three of him from an equally blue blast from the sky.

There are also figures on broomsticks, laughing and swooping as they rain fire and other magics down on Hogsmeade from above.

This is a planned attack.

"I think that's last year's Slytherin Keeper," Sirius says, blinking at the sky behind Lily's hazy, but holding, Shield. "Spent enough time spying on them with James—" He blinks harder, then looking around again, and raising his voice, says, "Ja—"

"Oh don't start that again," says Marlene. "He's not around, so unless he was blown completely to pieces—"

Sirius lets out a low moan. No, he doesn't, Lily realizes. That sound was from her. Sirius is still staring blackly at the sky, lips compressed.

"He's fine, and ran off somewhere," Marlene finishes.

"He wouldn't have run off somewhere," Sirius snaps back at her. "James Potter? Run away? How drunk are you?"

They've drawn attention from the flier Sirius labeled as last year's Keeper. Lily's Shield falters under the spell he's sending down—lunatic, he's shooting arrows— and Sirius casts another underneath it. His isn't any more properly cast than his, a weirdly watery opaque instead of the usual transparent blue.

Marlene scoffs. "You've got the spins, you lightweight, so don't you even—"

James Potter doesn't run, Lily thinks, agreeing, readjusting her grip on her wand. The whole damn school knows that. James is smart, and reckless, and strong-opinioned, and he'd never run. He's also a jerk and sometimes even a bully, and Lily doesn't approve of him… the whole damn school knows that, too… James, who has no excuses for his occasional bad behavior, even if there's been less of it last year… Lily can't approve of him…

"I don't have the spins," Sirius says, appalled, "if I'm still unsteady, maybe it's because you pushed me out a window—"

But if James had ever asked her out quietly, privately, in a way that wasn't a joke, if he'd ever said so much as "Evans, I like you, would you like to spend some time with me?", if he'd ever made he think he didn't simply want to snog her and brag about it around school … oh sure, he'd made clear he found her attractive, she's known that for years now, but Lily's not stupid, she knows a lot of boys find her attractive, her mother had 'the talk' with her at twelve… if James Potter ever really asked her out, it would be really, really hard to say no. Even though she doesn't approve of him.

Lily does not have a lot of terrible secrets, compared to the girls in novels she likes to read. But she has one, one she tries not to admit even to herself, and this is it:

She has a crush on James Potter. It's not a proper crush. She doesn't want anything to come of it. She would certainly never be so goofy as to doodle his name in her notes or tell anyone, though she almost told Petunia once in a moment of weakness before deciding she better not. She has never let herself sit around and think about him, not for a single minute. Well, not for a full minute.

In the boys' dorm, that night she'd spoken to Remus over the wonky tarot cards, James said, " You've never been so hard on the others ," meaning his friends. And he was right. He just hadn't hit on why.

The problem with James Potter was that he was almost wonderful. But frustratingly, he missed it by a wide enough margin of doing things like swelling fellow student's heads to twice their size that Lily couldn't, just couldn't, fancy him.

So it's not a proper crush. But it's there. Been there for a long time. Lily's not even sure how long. Sev had accused her of 'liking James Potter' when they were only about thirteen and she'd laughed, very hard, at one of James' actually funny, no-harm-done pranks.

And maybe it had been true even then.

"They're circling over High Street," she says, over Marlene's protest she'd pushed Sirius out the window for his own good and because Lily had made her go get him in the first place, "most of—" Lily waves her hand over her head, "them. That's where the main action is now."

Sirius opens his mouth, and Marlene, sighing, says, "Don't bother, we all know you're going to say that's where Potter would go if he's not blown up—"

"Would you stop saying that," Sirius growls, "Haven't you got a best friend?"

"Good point," Marlene says, as they start walking, then hustling down the mostly-deserted road. Sirius is staggering the most, but then he's maintaining a Shield Spell over them like an umbrella. "Keep an eye out in likely hiding places for Felicia, she'll be hunkered down somewhere. You do remember her name, Black? You know you were her first kiss, right?"

"Would Felicia want you announcing that?" Lily hisses to her, then jumps as they pass a side alley with people in it. But it's just a few students Lily recognizes as seventh-year Ravenclaws, who seem to have pinned one of the hooded figures. If not for the black cloak, the blood running down his lips, and the fact that he's swearing in what Lily's knowledge of movie-accents suggests is Russian, the captive the Ravenclaws are standing around could be just another student. He couldn't be more than eighteen.

Lily has to pick up her pace to stay under Sirius' Shield Spell, since Sirius is practically jogging towards High Street, but she distinctly hears one of the Ravenclaws say, "But Walpurgis is April thirtieth, this is illogical!"

"Sirius," Lily says. Running might make her throw up, but she swallows her nausea. "Your family—they're into Dark magic, righ—"

"Bellatrix flies just like Regulus, doesn't she," he says grimly, startling her. Lily's heard Sev mention the name Bellatrix Black, frequently and in a rather impressed tone, but she's never met her, she graduated before Lily started. "Yeah, I've got a relative in the sky…"

"Fine, but Marlene says they're singing Walpurgis songs and it's a new moon, does that mean anything to you that it doesn't to us?"

"They are singing Walpurgis songs," Marlene contributes, a little out of breath, as Sirius goes, confused, "Walpurgis is a spring holiday—"

They're still a block from High Street when the figures on broomsticks suddenly take off, leaving—but one of them, the one, now that Lily is looking for it, moves her broomstick in the same hawkishly graceful glide she'd watched Regulus Black fly at the match that same afternoon. She circles, buzzard-like, and sends out a blast of green before she, too, darts off into the distance. The green blast hits the cloudy sky like a scattering of stars, which start forming a shape. It's a skull—Lily barely has time to make it out before a rapid-moving broomstick flies right through it and in pursuit of those fleeing the scene. A moment later a blast of white light comes from the street below to clear the rest of the green from above.

Marlene says, with certainty, and relief, "That'll be the teachers."

They're standing back in front of Madam Puddifoot's, where the three of them were sipping Marlene's flask not long ago, when a large boy or man barrels away from High Street towards them, wearing not just a hood but a mask. The kind of mask Lily's only seen in blurry Daily Prophet photos. There's an inexplicable galloping noise approaching with him, too, a clop-clop on the cobblestones.

The masked man seems barely aware of them in his path, but Marlene pushes up her sleeves and Lily's searching her head for spells, but Sirius, suddenly, starts laughing.

A deer, an actual deer, bursts around the corner behind the man. It's like the running of the bulls. The man turns to shoot behind him, but his wand arm flies into the air as the deer stampedes the guy into the ground. The deer trots to a stop, lowering his antlers to them like he's bowing. Sirius, laughing so hard he'd doubled over and Lily would not be surprised if he falls, somehow has the presence of mind to pull out his wand and Stun the guy on the ground. Lily could be wrong, but the deer also seems to kick the man in the head with one hoof.

The running and the nerves and all the drinks swishing in her stomach seem to catch up with Lily all at once. She staggers over to the side of the street and spits up against the building. It turns into a full-on heave a moment later. Marlene's pulled back all Lily's hair with a spell before Lily can even think to push her own hair out of the way.

The deer clop-clops away and Sirius must jog over, since suddenly he's nearby, talking. Lily has one hand braced against the brick building, unsure if she's going to throw up again or not and almost wishing she would, to get all the nausea out of her system.

"I was going to say," Sirius says chattily, his mood much improved, which figures: he would appreciate the sheer absurdity of the deer, "Walpurgis is a cross-quarter day. So's November first. This is the closest Hogsmeade weekend to November—"

"Is now really the time, Black?" Marlene says. "We get it, you pay attention in Astronomy, etcetera. Give Lils a minute."

Lily waves her middling okayness at them with the back of her free hand. She wants just to go back to the castle and pass out have this stupid night be over. So much it being a 'happy day', as Felicia kept saying that morning. Stupid prefect Annabeth Inglebee had been right, that it was jumping things a bit to call the day happy until it was over.

"I'm saying," Sirius says impatiently, "it's an induction. A rite, a hazing, a test. Timed to the closest new moon to a cross-quarter day. Bloody old tradition. Etcetera ."

"What you reckon's with the deer, then, some animal sacrifice that got away?" says Marlene.

"Do I look like I speak deer?"

"You looked like you spoke deer a moment ago when you were whispering in its ear, yeah—"

Lily feels like she should be connecting certain dots about now, but she's a little too drunk, or post-drunk—she doesn't feel hazy and floating anymore, but she's tired and her head's starting to ache and she wonders how long it takes to go from drunk to hungover.

"Oh, I summoned the deer," says Remus casually.

Lily has to un-brace herself from the wall and turn around at this, because she is very sure Remus was not there a second ago. He is decidedly there now—or almost there, walking up behind Sirius and Marlene, looking out of breath and more battered than usual but otherwise fine.

"Why?!" says Marlene. "Who thinks, oh, I'll summon out the fecking forest creatures to fight—"

"It worked," says Remus, shrugging.

"You couldn't have summoned a unicorn?!—"

Sirius and Remus are not paying attention to Marlene at this point. Lily forces down the lingering heartburn-feeling that threatens to push up again—after everything in the past half-month, she's not about to miss this.

"You were with James, I guess?" Sirius says at last. "Didn't see you with him."

"You wouldn't," Remus says mildly, but Lily thinks he sounds vaguely amused. The weird relief kicking in—every window in Hogsmeade seems to have blown clean open, but she has yet to see a serious injury. "But I wasn't right behind him, Peter was. I was still on the street and saw them coming in from above and called out, Peter pulled him down and clear of the door—I didn't even know Peter could get a Shield Spell up that fast."

An induction, Sirius said—a Voldemort thing, no doubt, but involving teenagers—wannabes. Nothing that bad, in the end. Only scary as it pertained to the future, and the showing of numbers of recent graduates, Hogwarts and maybe foreign too, taking the wrong side. That alone was nausea-inducing.

Sirius nods, then he lets out a long, long breath, lips puckered like he's whistling. "Should have known you'd be there."

"We'd have waited for you," Remus says, apologetically, "but there was a bunch of third-year boys who must have been coming for a look at the Hog's Head to get out of the way, and then with all the screams from High Street—"

"I missed some heroics, I reckon," Sirius says.

"Are you drunk, by the way?" Remus adds, eyeing him.

"Aren't you going to hug or say you're glad you're both okay or anything?" Lily interrupts, a little dismayed. She's fully upright again, but still a little unsteady. One of her hands lands on Marlene's shoulder. "A little demonstration of relief, gentlemen?"

Sirius looks uncomfortable. Remus frowns at her and says, "Well, he thought I was safe at the castle, and I knew he was out of the way in a bar that was fine except for the windows and door—"

"There were attackers in the Hog's Head and there was a brawl and fire, just saying, mate," Sirius interjects. "I got pushed out a window."

"You are all ridiculous people," announces Marlene. "I would rather be with Gideon."

"Prewett?" says Remus.

Marlene whips towards him. "Why, is he here? Did the Hit Patrol show up? They should've—"

Remus takes a step back from her, startled. "Er, I was—clarifying?"

Marlene, visibly deflated, puts her hands on her hips. "Well, where's James?"

"That was a quick switch," says Sirius, and Marlene gives him a sour look.

"You were the one shouting yourself bloody for him not twenty minutes ago," she says, "and yet you have yet to run into his arms—"

"Was that only twenty minutes ago?" Lily wonders, not even meaning to say it aloud. It feels like an eternity ago, and yet when she thinks about it she supposes it all did happen very fast. Imminent danger turns out to be very sobering.

Sirius looks at Remus. "Shall we go run into James' arms?" he asks.

"Don't we usually," Remus says back, in an equally wry tone.

Lily feels a great gust of… pleased-ness, and perhaps even jealousy, watching Remus and Sirius slide back into camaraderie, seemingly easily. She would probably have recommended a thorough talking-out of the incident instead, of Sirius' wrongness, of the possible consequences for Remus, and maybe that will happen, away from her. But somehow she thinks not.

"Let's, then," Sirius says, making to stroll off, then looks at the girls. "Ladies?"

"Can you walk?" Marlene says, looking to Lily. She must undo the hair-holding spell, since Lily's hair drops in its natural fall.

Lily, insulted, especially given they'd been jogging and holding up Shields not long before, says, "I can walk," and proceeds to do so. She walks entirely straight, too, though she hasn't kicked the queasy feeling, not at all. She makes a mental note not to throw up on James Potter's shoes, when she sees him. Right now it seems like the sort of thing she would find herself doing and deeply regret unto her old age.

She takes a moment, as they walk down the calm side street, leaving the blown-in front of Puddifoot's behind, Marlene kicking at the cobblestones, Sirius and Remus chatting slightly. She takes a moment to let herself be glad James Potter is alive, and from Remus' demeanor, absolutely, entirely fine. She wonders if his glasses broke.

They hit High Street and the crowd. Lily sees Madam Pomfrey first, darting from one side of the street to the other, organizing a light triage on the steps of the Post Office. There are a lot of cuts from flying glass—one Hufflepuff girl is holding her cut mouth and crying—and there's a big crowd out in front of the Three Broomsticks. McGonagall's voice, magnified magically, wavers as she shouts instructions, to students from townspeople and start getting students lined up to march back to the castle.

Wasn't much of a fight, Lily thinks, right before Sirius says, aloud, "Wasn't much of a fight, really."

"Sirius," James Potter calls, and Lily takes a deep breath as James—his glasses are broken—comes walking up.

"James," Sirius says, loping towards him joyfully. He holds out his hand to clasp as he didn't think to with Remus. "Sorry about the match, mate."

James adjusts his broken glasses and ignores Sirius' hand to give him a hug, pounding his back. Pulling back, he shrugs and says, "I gave it the old go. Probably should've put myself in at Seeker, but that's probably not the best foot to start my Captaincy on—"

"Should have played me," Marlene calls, and James winces, giving Sirius a wordless look that makes him laugh.

Lily glances at Remus. His lips twitch, and then he mouths something at her. It takes her a blinking minute to make out the word—he's mouthing "Christmas". Lily remembers, then, what she said to Remus about how Sirius, who'd left his parents' house behind, would be going home with James at semester's end. And she understands—Sirius is not quite, not really forgiven by Remus. He's let it go so that James can forgive Sirius.

James is my best friend , she hears Remus say again, the second half of that sentence not needing to be spoken.

James' eyes focus in on Lily. "You all right, Evans?"

"Fine," she lies, when really she'd like one of those back-clapping hugs to establish James is really, truly standing there, fine himself.

James gives her a quick lopsided smile and turns back to Sirius, saying, "Tell you what, I feel like I won a match against Durmstrang tonight, in dueling—it's like my father was saying, the foreign recruits are a worry—so Remus, Peter, and I, we hunker down behind Zonko's so Remus can repair our ear drums, when we come up against three of them—"

"Where is Peter?" Sirius interrupts, not even giving James time to answer before bellowing, "Peter!"

"He went to check out the crowd," says James, frowning a little, "there's—"

"There's something wrong with that crowd," says Marlene. Lily looks up—Marlene seems to have been studying the crowd in front of the Three Broomsticks, while she was studying James.

"He's coming," Remus says, spotting Peter long before anyone else. Looking very little among the adults walking up and down the street, Peter, looking pale, probably from the strain of the night, saw their hands raised to catch his attention and made his way towards them.

Peter Pettigrew, who'd pulled James back and down from the explosion and shielded him. Lily could just smack herself for every patronizing thought she's ever had about Peter.

Watching the crowd over his shoulder, as Peter comes closer—his shoulders trembling—it strikes Lily what's wrong with the crowd.

The teachers aren't just assembling students. They're trying to keep them back.

"Someone's dead," says Lily.

Everyone around her goes rigid, staring at her. Sirius tries to laugh. Then he looks at Peter, at the look on his face and comes closer, and moves to meet him before anyone else can.

"Peter," Sirius says, planting both his hands on Peter's arms, "who's hurt? Is it anyone we know?"

"It's Felicia Fortescue," Peter says, looking like he might cry.

Marlene is moving the moment Peter gets out the first syllable of her name. Lily moves to go after her and has to stop. She ducks a few steps away, to her right, and retches again. Someone runs behind her and catches up her hair, with hands, not a spell. Remus, she thinks, maybe Sirius.

But when she's finished, and turns her head to see, it's James, his face stark white under the dark sky, without a moon to lighten it. He's still holding her hair.

"Let go," she says, and he immediately looses her hair, hands up as if surrendering. She sounded rude, Lily realizes, but it's only because she's afraid. And because: "I have to go after her," she says, and does just that, righting herself, because she's sick but not that out of it, to chase Marlene.

Maybe Sirius has already done that, she hopes—but no, he stands in between Peter and Remus, his expression locked and unreadable.

Lily takes off, her feet counting the cobblestones. Felicia's hurt, she tries telling herself, but then she passes Madam Pomfrey, patching cuts at the Post Office, not tending anyone critical.

Marlene, hysterically, is battering her way through the crowd—she's cleared a path that no one is eager to fill in, and so Lily makes her way in her wake. And James, because he's following her, not too close, but when she glances behind, more than half expecting him, there he is, making sure she's okay and looking as afraid as she feels.

It's mostly Hogsmeade townspeople—Lily sees Madam Rosmerta crying—and older students left. They've gotten the younger ones away, and Sprout seems to be herding a collection of fifth years back to the castle now.

"Miss McKinnon," McGonagall says, her voice no longer magically modified. It's soft, in fact, too soft, as she intercepts Marlene with one sidestep, before she can reach the center of the crowd's circle.

Why haven't the teachers gotten Felicia away? Lily wonders, then thinks, absurdly, of her detective novels. It's a crime scene. It's a murder.

Felicia had borrowed Lily's Muggle novels over the years. "I borrow my mom's too," she'd said.

Marlene is crying too hard for McGonagall to notice Lily. She slips through the bodies, close enough to see a form, lying still. Someone, maybe one of the teachers, has covered her with a sheet that reveals only the shape of a wisp-thin girl's body, face-up on the street.

The sheet does not cover the crown of Felicia's hair, the careful crown braid woven into it in their dorm that morning, wispy blonde hairs escaping playfully every which way.

From age eleven to sixteen, from September to June, Lily has slept in the same room as Felicia, night after night. They have always been friendly. They have never been close. But she knows the sound of Felicia's breathing when she sleeps—she knows almost all of her dreams, since Felicia always recounted them breathily in the morning—and somehow, surreally, Felicia… Fee, who once after their first year together had run across Diagon Alley after spotting Lily, only to bring her a free ice cream cone from her grandfather's parlor… will never breathe or dream again.

Lily is crying, too, before she can even think about it. She turns, looking for James—he's two steps behind her, but he's taller. He's seen Felicia, too, and his chin is high, but he's crying. They were laughing a few minutes ago, and Felicia was already dead—

She wants to hide her face in James Potter's robe sleeve. Instead she bites her lips and looks away from him and raises her voice to say, "Marlene," and James steps up to push people, almost violently, until she's only one step away and Marlene McKinnon is in her arms instead of McGonagall's, crying and apologizing to a girl who can't hear and hitting Lily's back with her fists.

Lily pats Marlene's back, hard, burying her tears and all her own guilty thoughts on the shoulder of another girl who has never, really, been her friend, another roommate who's half a stranger and half a sister.

It's 1976, and nothing will ever be the same.

Chapter Text

Lily has never had cause to be in the headmaster's office before now. It's hard to notice anything else about the room for the bird perched on Dumbledore's desk. Its wings are feathered in a riot of scarlet and gold, Gryffindor colors. Its beak flashes equally gold in the torchlight as the bird turns its head to meet Lily's gaze with its onyx-black eyes.

She fidgets in her seat and looks away. There are four chairs at Dumbledore's desk, conveniently, perhaps magically, just right for all four students present: herself, Marlene McKinnon, Sirius Black, and Mary Macdonald.

("What can I do?" James Potter had asked, from close behind Lily, in the crowd, and, her breath hitching in time with Marlene's strangled sobs, Lily said, "Get Mary."

She hasn't seen James since, but it seemed barely a blink later that Mary Macdonald was there, her face bloodless. Her hands trembled when she grasped Lily's, but Mary squeezed hard, and she knew just how to pet Marlene's hair and what to murmur to finally start soothing her, until Marlene wound up half-folded on to Mary instead.

And Lily was free to catch her own breath.)

Marlene's head still rests on Mary's very narrow shoulder, their chairs pressed close together. Lily's is a little more apart, Sirius on her other side.

There's a crackle. The phoenix on the desk sharply turns its head towards Sirius, who is methodically opening up a chocolate bar.

Back in Hogsmeade, a round-faced man wearing a Honeydukes apron had brought out a basket of chocolate bars to hand out to the still-lingering students. No one else was badly injured, but there were a few bleeds and breaks, so the injured and the friends who wouldn't leave them waited in the post office for Madam Pomfrey to take them to the infirmary by a specially-arranged Floo connection.

When the Honeydukes man reached their small group, Lily turned down the offered chocolate bar. But her throat still felt raw and tasted of vomit, so she asked the Honeydukes man if he had a mint. He'd produced a wrapped mint from his apron pocket and pressed it into Lily's palm. He'd said, "Stout heart, now."

It might all have been a very terrible dream, here in Dumbledore's office, except for the lingering coolness and peppermint taste in Lily's mouth from that magical mint and the snap of Sirius' chocolate as he breaks it into pieces.

The snapping chocolate is about the only sound in the room. Some silver instruments hum constantly, and a few of the books have shifted themselves once or twice, but otherwise, the room has been utterly silent. Even the portraits have been mouse-quiet, although watchful.

Sirius clears his throat, and one portrait, of a clever-looking wizard, leans forward, as if he might stick his head right out of the frame to better hear what Sirius is about to say.

"That bird didn't look half so plummy last time I saw it," Sirius says.

He nods at the phoenix, then, when he realizes none of the girls are about to answer, leans forward to address it directly.

"Guess you've had a Burning Day since then, hmm?" he says. He lifts his hand as if to touch the phoenix, then seems to think better of it and resumes eating his chocolate.

They've had their own sort of Burning Day, Lily thinks wearily. She remembers the chanting in Hogsmeade, Marlene saying "That's a Walpurgis Night song," Sirius talking about cross-quarter days and inductions, hazing…

Mary's very quiet voice interrupts Lily's thoughts. "I didn't think anyone died at Hogwarts," she says. "I didn't think it was possible."

Lily had thought the same.

"A boy died in my brother Michael's third year," Marlene says, without lifting her head or opening her eyes. Her voice is an oddly floating thing, a little sing-song and off, somehow. It reminds Lily of the record of an interview with one of Celestina Warbeck's backing banshees that they'd listened to in Defense Against the Dark Arts. It reminds her of Felicia's voice, as wispy as the rest of her… Lily shudders.

"How?" Sirius asks.

"Oh, Transfigured a set of Exploding Snap over the school holidays, ended up blowing up his whole house, the usual sort of thing," Marlene says, in the same voice.

Mary takes a sharp, nervous breath. "That isn't at Hogwarts."

"Neither was Felicia's death, really," Sirius says, and Marlene sits up at that.

"Why are you even here?" she says, pointing her finger at him. Lily is in the chair between them, so Marlene is suddenly leaning over her.

"I brought Mary," Sirius says, and Marlene glances to Mary in near confusion, as if she's not sure why Mary is here either, even though the younger girl's been making soothing sounds and petting Marlene's hair for a quarter of an hour now.

Lily had not been paying much attention at the time but vaguely recalls Sirius throwing elbows around and getting Mary to them through the crowd.

"Why aren't you James Potter?" she asks him.

"I ask myself that all the time," Sirius remarks, "but, what? Are you still drunk?"

"I asked Potter to get Mary," Lily says. "Why'd he send you back?"

"Is that why they grabbed me?" Mary asks. "You asked for me, Lily?" Behind the tremor in her voice, she sounds a little flattered.

"I'm taller?" Sirius suggests, while Marlene suddenly seizes Mary's forearms.

"Where were you, when it was all happening?" Marlene asks. "Were you with Fee?"

"I was in Scrivenshaft's," Mary says, looking down at her feet. "I bought new ink, but I dropped all my bottles when it started..." Her voice drops, even softer. "I saw Gladys, though. After. Madam Pomfrey was with her, her head was bleeding… Gladys was shrieking that they'd just, just shoved her aside… and all turned and fired at once."

"The boys they were walking with?" Lily asks. Her voice comes out hoarse. She pauses to clear her throat. "Boys with accents?"

The phoenix adjusts its wings, a flutter that catches all of their full attention.

A clear, gentle voice behind them says. "Yes, Miss Evans, you are correct. There was foreign involvement in the attack tonight."

They all whirl around in their seats, Marlene half-hissing, "In the murder tonight, you mean," and, then, blinking, adding, "Professor Dumbledore."

"Murder, indeed, Miss McKinnon," Dumbledore says, inclining his head almost deferentially. His eyes look very blue behind his half-moon glasses. "Felicia Fortescue was targeted and killed quite deliberately. She was not, either, the only casualty of the night-"

A sound escapes Lily's mouth even as Mary exclaims in horror.

"No other students have been lost," Dumbledore says, still so calmly Lily almost misses how he speeds up his words, the sooner to assure them. There is an aura of humming about him tonight, not absent-minded sort of humming but a low vibration, like he is one of his silver instruments. His eyes dance over them, reading their faces, lingering, Lily notes, on Sirius'. "There were simultaneous attacks throughout the British Isles, with several deaths. Hogsmeade, though the most personally felt here at Hogwarts, was the largest but also the most amateurish of the night's assaults."

"Where else did they hit?" Sirius asks. His cheek is taut, and he keeps looking from his broken chocolate pieces back to Dumbledore, a little ferociously, as if he's daring himself to look the headmaster in the eye and caving, several times over. Lily recollects that the last time Sirius was in this office, it would have been in regards to the prank he pulled on Snape, the near-deadly joke that has caused all the trouble with his friends.

"Diagon Alley in London," Dumbledore says. "Hysil Bar in Dublin. Several smaller assaults at wizarding communities, including those at Aball Island, Tinworth, and Godric's Hollow."

" Godric's Hollow?" Lily repeats, startled by the name. She's never heard of the place.

"Yes, Miss Evans," Dumbledore says. "It is where Godric Gryffindor was born and, incidentally, where much of my own youth was spent."

Lily tries to picture Dumbledore as a child and finds herself envisioning a white-bearded baby with glasses; she presses her lips tight to prevent inappropriate laughter.

"Did they go after Felicia's family at Diagon Alley?" Marlene asks, her voice shed of all its flimsiness.

"The Fortescues were uninjured," Dumbledore says. "Aurors and Hit Patrol were expecting an assault on Diagon Alley- the Ministry was well-prepared at that front, and the defense in London succeeded. But a clear message was directed at Florean Fortescue's establishment, yes, and efforts made against the life of Felicia's mother, who I believe you all know to be a Muggle."

Mary is trembling, and now it's Marlene bolstering her up.

"I don't mean to frighten you," Dumbledore says. He motions with his hand, and Lily sees his wand in it, held close against the robes that match his eyes. His chair comes from around his desk, floating a centimeter above the carpet, and he sits as it settles behind them. He leans in, looking at them each in turn.

"That is what they mean to do," Dumbledore says, more grimly. "One decided purpose of tonight's attacks- tonight's murders- was to send a message."

"What, that they can do whatever they want?" Sirius asks, leaning in.

"Fee was a message ?" Marlene says at the same time. "She wasn't even-" She looks at Mary and Lily and cuts herself off.

Lily knows how the sentence was going to end, before Dumbledore says, oh-so-very-quietly, "Muggle-born?"

Marlene flushes. "I didn't mean it to sound- but she wasn't," she adds, a little hotly. "She was a half-blood-" She cuts off again.

"That's the message, isn't it?" Lily says. The four of them sitting there are two Muggle-borns, two purebloods- from two very different pureblood families, but nonetheless, she's heard Slytherins call Marlene and Sirius the exact same name. The same phrase she's heard James Potter called, too. "Half-bloods and blood traitors, too. That's the damned message."

"Yes, Miss Evans," Dumbledore says, heavily. "That is, as you say, the damned message."

Mary reaches over and seizes Lily's forearm, so hard Lily thinks it might bruise.

"Why do they hate us?" Mary says, looking at Lily, then to Dumbledore, Marlene, Sirius. "I don't understand, I'm sorry, I'll never understand. Aren't we magic enough, won't our children be magic enough? What do they even want? I just - I don't understand."

There is a long moment of quiet. Sirius, besides Lily, shifts uncomfortably.

"You ask a very old question, Miss Macdonald," Dumbledore says at last. "A question asked by more than Muggle-borns in this world of ours, a question I have seen haunt my own lifetime and, I fear, lifetimes to come. The answer is, at best, a puzzle, of secret fears and cruelty in the human heart, of misplaced faith and mistaught children, of… hunger. For power, for one of power's promises. I could lay out many of the pieces for you, of how the minds you encountered tonight work, but still, Miss Macdonald, I do not believe their logic would ever make sense to you, and that is not something to be sorry for. Never apologize for not being able to understand hatred. That is a gift. Too few," he says, eyes far away behind his glasses, "have it."

The silvery humming reigns in the room's brief silence.

"I must admit I did not know Felicia Fortescue very well," Dumbledore adds gravely. "Gently-behaved students do not often find their way to my office, and I understand gentleness was Felicia's crowning trait. Very little fuss is made over gentleness, especially in Gryffindor House, which I find to be a great shame; it is a quiet virtue when present but missed perhaps most of all when gone."

Marlene bursts very suddenly back into tears, startling even Dumbledore. She doesn't try to explain herself or hide them, just cups her face and wipes her running nose.

Dumbledore conjures a handkerchief, so smoothly it might have seemed to come out of his pocket but that Lily is positioned to see his wand move.

"I do know Felicia's grandfather Florean very well," Dumbledore says, handing over the handkerchief. "He was a pupil of mine years ago, and he is a definitively gentle man. He is also here, at the school, tonight. The news was taken to Felicia's family as quickly as possible, and Florean is here for her. He would very much like to talk to her friends."

Marlene blows her nose loudly, sobbing harder.

"This may," Dumbledore begins, and pauses to draw another two large handkerchiefs out of his wand, handing one to Mary as well as another to Marlene; Mary is crying so silently Lily had not even noticed, and Lily flinches, thinking of Felicia crying in the dorm and wanting so badly to be away from the other girl's tears.

"-be the most opportune time to mention," Dumbledore has gone on, "that the two Hit Patrolmen who have escorted Florean here from Diagon are both named Prewett, and that one of them, Miss McKinnon, has been asking for you with increasing anxiety."

Marlene is so distracted she stops crying. "Gideon and Fabian were at one of the other attacks?"

Lily supposes that would be an acceptable excuse for missing a date, though Marlene's expression remains tense. Still, Marlene does scramble up from her chair, going, "Where is Mr. Fortescue, then?" So Lily stands up too. It's a bit of a wave, since Mary follows Lily, and Sirius, after a moment of looking and realizing he's the only one still seated, gets up.

"Mr. Black," Dumbledore says, rising, too, "you have spent more than your share of time in Professor McGonagall's office- if you could lead Miss McKinnon and Miss Macdonald there?"

Lily is immediately aware she has been singled out, even before Dumbledore says, "Miss Evans, if you could remain for a moment more, I have a question for you."

"We can wait for her," Marlene says through the handkerchief held to her nose, her snapping dark eyes looking suspicious over the white cloth.

Marlene's said it before Mary or Sirius ever thought to, Lily thinks, though all three are looking at her rather than turning to go.

"You go ahead," she says, burning with curiosity as to what Dumbledore wants to ask her alone, anyway. "I've been to McGonagall's office enough times myself."

It isn't that Lily hasn't gotten in trouble, after all; just never quite reached the level of trouble the headmaster needs to deal with.

"Yes, sir?" she says, as Sirius closes the door behind her exiting friends.

"Lily," Dumbledore says, again in that heavy tone, "you were good friends with Severus Snape."

She wants to deny it.

"Yes," she says.

"Did he ever mention the name Igor Karkaroff to you?"

Igor. She thinks again of old Universal horror movies on Friday nights on ITV.

"No, sir," she says.

"Are you sure?" Dumbledore asks, his eyes very clear, very intent.

"I'd remember that name; I'm sure."

"Then that's all, Miss Evans," Dumbledore said.

She doesn't move. "Who is he, this Igor Karkaroff? Who is he to Snape?"

When Dumbledore doesn't answer, Lily says, "You had to know I'd ask. Sir."

"Karkaroff was the top graduate from Durmstrang Institute this past spring," Dumbledore says, "and I understand he entered wizarding Britain sometime this past summer, along with a number of young students, primarily young men, about his age. I believe they were recruited by a man named Antonin Dolohov, who retains strong family ties in northern and eastern Europe, as well as Ministry connections here, into the service of a figure whose name is on the rise in our newspapers. The name responsible for the attacks tonight."

"Lord Voldemort," Lily says, breath catching. "You think Sev- Snape is working for Lord Voldemort?"

Dumbledore looks around his office and briefly touches a silver instrument. It dings, and then he refocuses his gaze on the fire, which is slowly dying.

He waves his wand, but instead of simply blazing the fire back up, he turns one stack of paper into firewood and lifts it himself.

"A student nearly died on Hogwarts grounds a month ago, due to choices made by another student. A student did die in the shadow of the school tonight," the headmaster says. "Due to choices made by more than one former student of this school."

Dumbledore carries the wood over to his fireplace and begins to stack it in. He bends easily, for all he looks so old.

"I cannot control the choices of my students, past, present, or future. I have, at times, tried," he says, ruefully. "But I cannot. Neither can I tamper with official post, and so the contents of Severus Snape's correspondence are a mystery to me and may well be wholly innocent."

"Sir?" Lily prompts, when he pauses.

Dumbledore sighs, still bent by the fire. "Severus has been writing weekly to Bellatrix Black, both brothers Lestrange, and one Igor Karkaroff from the moment he stepped foot in Hogwarts this fall. Inquiring minds do wonder how he spent his summer."

Lily should feel shocked, breathless, but instead there is only a dull, sinking feeling in her stomach, and a voice in her head, a depressed oracle that tells her, I knew it would come to this. I've known for years .

"I should have paid more attention," she says. "I don't know how he spent his summer, I should have- I could spy for you, Professor. Or fight, if it comes to it. I should, I could do something- what can I do?"

Dumbledore stands back up, so tall and straight he puts Lily in mind of a tree. An old white tree, like in a book her father read her years ago. It is impossible to believe he'd been crouched a moment before.

"Lily, dear girl," he says, "you have lost a friend, but you are still a sixth-year student at Hogwarts. What can you do? Study. Be sixteen, and study. This is the time in your life to learn."

"What am I learning for?" Lily says. Divination class comes to mind- neither she or Sirius had to really read the future to know trouble was ahead for any Muggle-born; the tomorrow and tomorrow awaiting after school no longer seems so promising. "What was the point of all of Felicia's years of school and homework and- I'd like to be doing something now, Professor."

He says nothing, and in frustration Lily adds, "Muggle schools may not use Latin the same way we do, but they did teach me carpe diem ."

" Quam minimum credula postero ," Dumbledore says quietly, and it takes Lily a moment to realize he is finishing the quote, not casting a spell, and a moment longer to roughly translate it. For all the spells she uses and despite reckoning she has a fairly strong vocabulary, it has been a long time since she took a Latin class, and that was primary-school level.

"'With minimal belief in tomorrow'?"

"But never without hope of it," Dumbledore says. "It is unwise to live for tomorrow, Lily, but neither can we live as if there will not be one. We live as if tomorrow will come, and perhaps it is only that which makes the sun rise."

It would not rise for Felicia, though.

Dumbledore seems to see this in Lily's face, for, very mildly, he changes the subject.

"Tomorrow's newspaper is being written right at this moment, with, I imagine, a debate raging in the headquarters of the Daily Prophet as to what the front page will say," he says. "There is no proof of Voldemort's involvement, and the last journalist to call him murderer by name disappeared earlier this week. No, they will not mention his name. Instead, the focus will be on an influx of young foreigners causing mayhem. It will serve as obfuscation, as threat to those of us who do remember Grindelwald's time, as a stirring of old phobias and of dissension between our Ministry and European governments at a time when we direly need allies. And for those able to read between the lines, it will be evident Voldemort's ranks of followers have significantly swelled, with young, bitter followers, the remnants of a cause that ended before they were born. "

Dumbledore turns his head slightly, and his face is firelit, stark in its chiaroscuro. "It has been thirty years, and Grindelwald's war was only dormant, not dead after all. Voldemort has fed it kindling, and up it goes."

Lily half-holds her breath- she wants to ask questions but also doesn't want Dumbledore to stop; it's the longest they've spoken in the six years since she met the headmaster and asked him, as soon as she had a chance, about the letter he had written her sister.

"Here is what you can do, Miss Evans," Dumbledore says, and Lily can tell he's ending their conversation, anyway, the moment he steps back from calling her Lily. "Pay attention to what is happening in the world, as well as to your classes. Keep your ears and eyes open, and don't be afraid to speak out- fear lives in whispers, my dear, and the whispers are building. And the most important thing, right here and now, is to go and join your friends."

She waits, but Professor Dumbledore turns to the desk and strokes his phoenix. The bird has been so quiet, Lily had forgotten it was there.

"Good night then, Professor," she says. "And good night to- what is your phoenix's name?"

"Fawkes," Dumbledore says, and Lily smiles, briefly. It is her first smile since seeing Felicia's body and that realization makes her stop, quickly.

"How revolutionary of you," she says, still feeling the ghost of that smile. Guy Fawkes Day is almost upon them, though she's been at Hogwarts, where fireworks fly often enough but not for that Muggle memorial, for so many November 5ths, now,

"Ah, yes," Dumbledore says, with his own smile, as the phoenix lets out a croon Lily hears as goodbye, "even I was once a young revolutionary."

As the door shuts behind her, Lily could swear she hears Dumbledore murmur, "How lucky we are some revolutions fail."

Sirius Black has never been gladder to see Lily in his life than when she joins him beside Florean Fortescue- his relief is so clear, he almost sags, and some color reappears in his face. Marlene is arguing with a dusty-looking Gideon Prewett in the corner, with Fabian, in his matching Hit Patrol robes, leaning nearby to watch; Mary is standing shyly beside Sirius but contributing absolutely nothing.

Sirius' effortless charm has faltered completely as Mr. Fortescue, who looks young for a grandfather though grief adds years to his eyes, seems to be recounting how Felicia told stories at home about Sirius and his friends, including "old Monty's boy", which Lily, after a moment, takes to be James.

Felicia thought all four of the boys were very funny, Mr. Fortescue says.

Lily introduces herself hurriedly, taking over, and finds herself painstakingly retelling stories about Felicia, class stories, dorm stories- she really doesn't have any others. Mr. Fortescue does not seem to want to go, and there are no professors to be found. Lily prays McGonagall will return to her own office soon.

"We were in Divination together, this year," Lily says, "I was partnered with Felicia just this week-" And Death had come up in Fee's cards, she remembers, with a start. Just one card, not like the deck that had so upset Marlene and interrupted the meeting. The enchanted Trionfi deck Lily had burned.

The antique deck that might have been Felicia's. It should seem silly and far away after everything that has happened, it does, but…

"Felicia liked Divination," Lily says. "It's a small class, and the room smells like ginger spice- she said the first day we walked in, as third years, that it reminded her of your Christmas ice cream…"

"Felicia always helped with the Christmas batch," Mr. Fortescue says wistfully.

"She liked the subject, too," Lily says. "I think... she even had a lucky tarot deck. A family heirloom?"

She's pushing her luck. Mary gives her an aghast look, wondering what she's on about, but Sirius, who's been subtly inching back, takes a step closer, newly alert.

Mr. Fortescue is too distracted to notice anything amiss. "Oh, we have our share of heirlooms, but tarot cards, no," he says. "Many Seers come out of Ravenclaw, actually, but not in our line."

"Ravenclaw?" Lily says, since that mention seems apropos of nothing.

Mr. Fortescue pauses, seems to catch himself and blink into further awareness. "Most of the family winds up in Ravenclaw, you see, and while Felicia…"

He hesitates. Lily feels unkind. She'd thought of Felicia, so many times over the years, as vaguely vacant; even now, there's a piece of her arguing that despite being gentle, and a person worth many things on many levels, and dead, Felicia had been a little light in intelligence. She was not that quick on the uptake nor did she even seem very curious.

"While Felicia would always listen patiently, if I talked about the past," Mr. Fortescue went on, with a catch, "she never took an interest in my dusty old antiques. Not for herself. She was simply… being kind."

Overhearing, Marlene nearly physically shoves Gideon away to leap back into the conversation with stories about Felicia's kindness. Lily glances to the side and Sirius catches her eye. Before she looks away, she feels as if they have had an entire conversation.

It is a while before they can actually exchange words in private. Breakfast is being served in the Great Hall, earlier than usual, or maybe later, but the Prewett brothers head there since they haven't eaten. Lily isn't sure if Marlene follows them or has stormed off somewhere- she loses track of Marlene as she's lost track of the night. The dark of it is suddenly gone, replaced by rosy light through the castle windows. The weather has held and is no less beautiful than the day before. She, Sirius, and Mary walk back to the common room, in silence, along the dawn-dappled flagstones of the halls. When they reach the Fat Lady, Mary gives the password, quietly, and climbs through, expecting them to follow.

But Sirius lingers out in the empty hall, and Lily, giving Mary an apologetic shrug, closes the portrait door in her friend's exhausted, confused face.

"So," Sirius says. He crosses his arms and leans against the common room entrance. "It wasn't Felicia's deck." He ignores the protesting squawks of the Fat Lady behind him, closing his eyes in thought. "Rosier, do you reckon? He's the only Slytherin in the class. Only one with opportunity to swap the deck. And that lot ," the bitterness in his voice rings close to home for Lily tonight, "are the only ones left with reasonable motive: chaos, making a jab at one of us..."

Lily closes her eyes too, rocking between her toes and heels as she pictures the classroom layout. She tries, anyway - it's an effort to picture anything other than Felicia's still face.

"Would he have had opportunity, though?" she says, more to herself. "He'd have had to switch out a deck Auriga laid out… she usually only returns to the classroom right before we actually start, so no professors watching, but Evan Rosier was on the other side of the room. He'd have had to be in the classroom earlier than everyone else to swap the deck, then, and why, then, throw away an heirloom on… it wasn't even a good joke…"

"Well, as pranks go-" Sirius starts to say and stops at Lily's expression.

"Let's not defend the 'humor' of the Trionfi deck putting Marlene in mind of her father taking a Living Death potion," she says, fiercely. "As pranks go, it was a cruel one."

"If it did what it was meant to do," Sirius says, lolling his head toward the ceiling. "Pranks go sideways all the time. People you didn't mean to hurt get hurt."

"Oh," Lily says, a new thought striking her as footsteps strike the stairs. She opens her eyes.

"Password is 'fribble'," James Potter's voice calls from some way behind, "if the two of you are stuck."

The Fat Lady's portrait immediately begins swinging open, and the Fat Lady herself clearly seems to take pleasure in throwing Sirius off balance and more importantly, his shoulders off her frame.

"James!" Lily says, swiveling toward him.

James, making his way up the nearest stairs with a muzzy look, slows his approach and rubs at his eye behind his glasses.

"I feel like I should be alarmed by your enthusiasm," he says, "but I'd be hard-pressed to deny being James. Yes?"

"Oh," Lily says again, thrown, and at once feeling every moment of her lack of sleep. She finds herself silent for a second - she can still see tear tracks from hours earlier on James Potter's one cheek. "Nothing. No, not nothing- only that I'm glad it's you."

James, quite near them now, stops in his tracks."As opposed to…?"

"Anyone else," Lily says. She turns at a noise behind her- the Fat Lady has started to swing shut on them, and Sirius, who has been very silent during their pauses, moves to bodily hold it open.

"Are we heading in then?" Sirius asks.

Lily takes in a breath, one sharp and long enough to feel as if the air is measuring her every tooth. Will Felicia's bed still be there, as tidily made as when she left it? Or will the house elves already have cleared the girl's effects away, rearranged the beds so no space is even left? She is not sure which she is more afraid of and wonders what the boys would say if she said she was going to sleep on the sofa. Something gallant, she suspects. Crisis seems to bring out gallancy in Gryffindors.

The other girls in her dorm will be up the stairs, asleep or awake together.

"We better, yes," Lily says and moves to clamber through the entrance. She doesn't need a hand - but she takes Sirius' when offered, and the swinging momentum it gives her helps her all the way through the common room, past the watching eyes of the few students sitting up, and up the stairs to the dorm, to find whatever awaits her there.

Lily wakes up on the floor of her dormitory, on the mountain of pillows and blankets the sixth year Gryffindor girls have made. For a second they seem to be all one breathing creature before she registers them as separate pieces - Annabeth Inglebee's knee, poking out under the school robes she fell asleep in; Gladys Gudgeon's nose, a little too close to Lily's own; Marlene McKinnon's dyed-dark hair.

It feels as if it has been a full day, as if she's slept for two, but the clock on the wall shows it is only Sunday evening.

She manages to get up without waking the other girls - Ann briefly lifts her head but puts it back down - and takes an overdue shower, for a very, very long time. At home, her mother would be telling her she's running up the water bill by now; at home, she would have run out of hot water by now. Concerns like that- concerns like death - have never touched Lily's magic castle before now.

Marlene McKinnon is staring at herself in the mirror when Lily comes out of the shower, dressed but with her hair still soaked and dripping on her robes.

"I was a terrible friend to her," Marlene says, and before Lily can fully get out "No, you weren't," Marlene, without looking away from her reflection, snaps, "Yes, I was, you wouldn't know."

Lily is not sure whether or not that's a knock on her, on how shallow and teetering her own friendships with her dormmates have been, but keeps her mouth shut, as it is hardly the time for an argument.

"Almost never saw her in the summers," Marlene says. "Never got mail off. I'd be with my cousins and - fecking excuses, I'd always have 'em, but it comes down to, I didn't make time."

Lily hesitates. "Felicia never seemed to-"

"Hold it against me?" Marlene says bitterly. She slaps her open palm hard against the mirror.

It happens to be the talking mirror of the girls' bathroom, since her reflection says, quietly, "Careful, dearie, watch your luck."

"Never that I could see," Marlene says. "Never that she'd say. Doesn't mean she didn't in her head. No one's that good, are they? Or is it just me, thinking terrible things all the time?"

Lily thinks of Felicia sitting across from her over cards, saying to her You, though...he waits outside of class for you. Everyone likes you . Not so much resentfully as resigned, and a little genuinely confused... I don't think you're that much prettier than me …

She thinks of every dismissive thought she's ever had of Felicia, lurking tauntingly now the other girl is gone.

"It's not just you," Lily says. "And it's not just you, failing to keep up with school friends during holidays, either. Though I do get mail off."

She is not sure why she adds the last part- one of those impulses she'd have been better off resisting - but Marlene lets out a titter of a laugh and then claps her hand to her mouth, white-faced.

"She wouldn't be laughing if it was me dead," Marlene says, through her hand, still to her mouth.

This is likely true. Lily does not believe Felicia would have made it out of her bed, or stopped crying, for some time, if any of the girls in their dorm, let alone Marlene, had died instead.

"You're going to do something about it, though," Lily says, fishing for the right words. She has the wrong words, in her head, the terrible kind of thought Marlene was talking about - that Felicia, while she'd have done a lot of crying, would have been unlikely to do anything about one of them dying. Or maybe Lily's wrong- she'll never know, Felicia will never have the chance, but-

"You - we- will do something about it," she says, firmer this time.

Marlene pulls the hand over her mouth into a fist but doesn't take it away.

"We were going to do something anyway, though, weren't we?" she says, a little dazedly. "I know I was - I know you would, Lily Evans. It's not - her death isn't for anything, it doesn't do anything, or mean anything… and we were jumping out of windows and Remus Lupin was summoning a deer for some reason, while she was most like already lying dead in the street and- it's all less of an adventure now," Marlene almost wails, and then claps her free hand over the fist at her mouth, shaking a little, as if pressing the words in. From the expression on her face, Marlene knows exactly how selfish that sounded.

It is impossible to explain, how at once Lily feels she has never felt older, never felt younger. She feels heavy and childishly selfish at the same time - because a girl, a friend, is dead and what hurts the most is that her own safe bubble has burst.

"I thought that, too," Lily says, and for a simple few words, it is a hard admission. It cuts, deeply; it takes something with it. Her confidence that she is a good person - a better person than most, maybe.

She turns to the mirror. Emerald eyes, everyone always says. Everyone, including Lily, forgets emerald is a stone. She sees the stone this time.

"Will you help me dry my hair?" Lily says. "You always do the charm much faster than me."

Marlene takes her hands off her mouth. "That's because my hair's so much thinner than yours," she says, and though her tone is scathing, her motions jerky, she pulls out her wand.

Lily's hair is dry in half the time. All the girls left in Lily's dorm go down to the Great Hall together, where Dumbledore speaks, about what comes next.

School will go on. No one will be marked off for absences throughout the week to come; no homework will be assigned until after next week, after Halloween weekend.

But classes will continue. They will not stop for death.

Letters have been sent out to parents - Lily wonders what her poor parents might make of whatever they've received and resolves to get permission to fire call them from McGonagall's office.

Hogsmeade permission slips have been updated and, while visits will be restricted to only upper level students, future weekends will not be halted entirely. In fact, sixth and seventh years who volunteer are to be allowed down to Hogsmeade every day this week in groups led by Flitwick and Sprout, to repair windows, streetlamps, cobblestones, and landscaping- the only other real casualties of the attack, once Pomfrey took care of students' scrapes and breaks and bruises.

"Couldn't the professors do that themselves?" Gladys whispers to the other girls.

Of course they could. Ann answers before Lily has to, that they're making a learning experience.

A reclaiming one, really, Lily supposes.

Sirius, she notes, is sitting with his friends again.

Lily goes to every class that week, except Divination, which Auriga cancels. Marlene goes to none. But they both head to Hogsmeade every day. A few of the Gryffindor fifth years put up a petition to join the cleanup, too, which Mary Macdonald signs, but they are declined - though each receive two points to Gryffindor, for making the request.

Almost all the Gryffindors are there every day - Gladys Gudgeon only lasts one, as she takes one look at the spot where Felicia was lying and swoons- but she did come in the first place, despite having seen Felicia die there. Lily supposes that, after all, is why she's in Gryffindor.

Flitwick makes the streetlamp repair into a downright master class for his N.E.W.T. Charms students. It's not as simple as a Reparo - James Potter, with his newly mended glasses, looks alert at this - the way Flitwick does it, it's an art. It's the magical equivalent of glass-blowing - and these will, in the end, again be magical lamps, holding flame within but no gas, restoring the warm glow Lily has always associated with Hogsmeade

"These lamps were put up a century ago," Flitwick says. "I'd like the ones we put back up to last a hundred more. There is such a thing, my young friends, as slow magic - just ask Professor Slughorn!"

Slughorn seems to be assisting exclusively with the repair and restocking of Honeydukes and the wine cellar of the Three Broomsticks, but he is still there. Most Slytherins do not seem to choose to volunteer. Severus Snape does not.

Evan Rosier does volunteer each day, which Lily finds interesting.

Flitwick puts the two of them together to reconstruct one street lamp, along with Lily's friend Greta from Hufflepuff and another Hufflepuff Lily knows mostly from Divination, Charity Burbage.

Charity asks Lily questions about how Muggle streetlamps work as they hold their wands and their concentration, the shards of glass still littering the cobblestones liquefying and rising up as small bubbles around them. Lily, embarrassingly, cannot answer many of Charity's specifics about electricity- she hasn't studied her original world in years.

"You're probably not really a Muggle-born," Evan says drily to Lily, startling her. She has to fight to keep her glass bubbles bobbling up to where they are beginning to glom into one whole, atop the still-standing nineteenth-century pole.

"Sincerely," he says, eyes narrowed. "I'd bet my hat at least one of your sixteen great-great grandparents was a wizard - if not a closer connection, Evans. You ought to do some research. Ought to work up a family tree."

"Is this your idea of fair warning, Evan?" she says to Rosier.

His first name is one letter different from her last, and yet he is a favorite son of a pureblood family and no doubt some of his family would sooner see her dead than welcomed into their world. That's 'what's in a name' for you.

"It's a comment," he says back.

"Felicia Fortescue had a family tree, and it didn't save her," she says. "And no one gave her fair warning- or did they?" she says aloud, as she wonders, briefly, if there was any way it could have been Evan Rosier behind the cards after all, with actual well-meaning intent.

"No, she didn't get a warning," Rosier says, without so much as a blink of reaction.

"On three," Flitwick shouts, and then counts.

The four of them turn their wands in tight circles and flick, near simultaneously. Above them, the glass bubble seals into full, repaired glass, and Flitwick shouts over an exuberant compliment.

"Her family was warned, frequently, and ignored it," Rosier adds. His voice is very raspy, for sixteen; he must be trying to talk that way on purpose. "That's what I heard. And haven't you noticed, Evans? In this world, we each stand proxy for all our blood relations - fair or not."

Rosier twirls his wand, finishing the spell, and slivers of metal from the pole wind snakily up, until they solidified as in as the metal strands to capping and holding the glass.

"It's always about blood," he says. "Blood, and the power it holds. That's all there is."

In the distance over Rosier's shoulder, Peter Pettigrew is mending a bent pole, while Remus, Marlene, and two Ravenclaw seventh years rebuild the glass of its street lamp. James and Sirius seem to have their heads bent together, considering some recently Transfigured shrubbery nearby.

"Not all," Lily Evans says back to Evan Rosier, "and not always."

"You go on thinking that," he says. He says it with all the lazy amusement Severus has never quite been able to imitate, that all the purebloods of aristocratic pretension seem to have - Rosier has never seemed more like Sirius' cousin's cousin, or whatever exactly he is. "And I'll see to my side. We'll see how well it works out for both of us." He bends slightly with his wand- the merest shadow of a duelist's bow, which gives his statement the merest shadow of an apology- before he turns, heading over to assist with some other task.

Lily's arms goosebump and she thinks, for the first time: this is what seeing the future feels like.

She has known she and Snape would stand on opposite sides for months now- she's never really believed she would fight him. She doesn't think Snape would let that happen, not really- after all, she won't be wearing a mask.

But Evan Rosier, who she just rebuilt a lamp with, who she has passed the Professor's cookies over to in Divination -

Lily has a downright premonition that he will be trying to kill her in the not-too-distant future.

What chills her the most is she doesn't think it'll even be personal.

It'll just be his idea of how their world should work.

Charity makes some comment about hating working with Rosier in Divination, and Lily quickly asks her if Rosier had ever done something suspicious - but the answer, as she expects, is no. Rosier is early to class, but never earlier than punctual Charity; he never moves from his seat and never so much as draws his wand in class unless the professor asks.

"Why do you want to know?" Charity asks.

"As the quote goes, 'Know your enemy'," Lily says distractedly, and then finds herself asked to explain to both Charity and Greta exactly what she's quoting. Her dad says it about cricket. She doesn't remember till later that it's from the Muggle classic, Sun Tzu's The Art of War - her dad has a copy.

Lily reckons she should probably read that. Soon.

Dumbledore did say to study.

Halloween decorations don't go up till the day itself, a Sunday. Felicia has been gone for over a week, and the floating jack-o-lanterns in the Great Hall are as much a sign as anything that Hogwarts is back to normal or settling into a "new normal" at any rate.

"Happy Halloween, Lily," James says, on his way out of breakfast as she's heading in.

"Happy Halloween, James," she says, with a brief smile. He's in his Quidditch robes - back to practice schedule, she presumes, before looking past him to Sirius, right on his heels, still finishing a piece of buttered toast. She nods her head at him. "Sirius, could you-"

"Hold up a minute?" he suggests, slowing. He looks at James. "It's just-"

"A Divination thing," Lily interrupts.

"Sure," James says, looking between them. "That's fine with me. Really, mate, it is. Ah - good luck with the future, and see you both there, I suppose?" He lifts his hand at them, and backs away, turning when he's a few steps off.

Sirius chews thoughtfully on his piece of toast as James strides away, before saying, equally thoughtfully, "Well, that isn't good."

Lily's face can feel her face flushing and goes, sharply, "He doesn't ever think we're-?"

"Dating?" Sirius says, pulling a face. "No."

Greta and Charity had both wanted to know if Lily going to Hogsmeade with Sirius had meant anything. 'Adamantly not,' she'd told them.

"No, he doesn't think that?" Lily repeats, as she heads into the Hall, Sirius now following her this time. "Just there it certainly seemed like he might-"

"He's my best friend, he knows me well enough to know I'd never be dating you," Sirius says, downright put out. At her expression, he backpedals hastily to explaining, "He likes you - my best friend likes you. And don't make that face at me like I'm telling you some Ministry secret. The whole school knows he likes you, after the way he asked you out at the lake last-"

"Let's not rehash that one," Lily says. She's swooped up a plate and holds it up as if a shield against that thought.

Sirius, although he has clearly already eaten breakfast, grabs up another plate and starts stacking it with more toast from one table.

"So he knows I'm not dating you," Sirius says, biting the crust of a toast. "Yet."

"Pardon?" Lily repeats, choking. Sirius passes her a glass of pumpkin juice off the table and she takes it.

"I did say 'not good'." Sirius shrugs. "He's thinking you want to date me. You'll have to set him straight before he starts locking me in broom closets with you so you can-"

"He would not-"

"He would- James has a dangerously inflated notion of Gryffindor chivalry -"

"James has a dangerously inflated notion of a lot of things," Lily snaps. " You talk-"

"Please, Lily," Sirius says, setting the toast down and putting his elbows on the table, the better to lean in. "The thing of it is, I already tried talking to him."

"He thought you were lying to him?"

"Of course not, but he clearly thinks I have it wrong. Which makes you the only thing in this castle James wouldn't trust my judgment on." Lily is staggered by that until Sirius pauses, tilts his head, and admits, "Maybe a few more things lately."

"Fine," Lily says, still red-faced, "can we get back to Divination now?"

She tells Sirius her theory.

He laughs, loudly enough to draw the attention of the still-subdued Hall.

Then he thinks about it.

"I suppose there's your opportunity," he says slowly. "But motive? It doesn't make any sense. It's absurd-"

"Unless it was meant to do something else," Lily says, "and went sideways. As you said."

"I did say that," Sirius admits, and then thinks more on it, finally letting out a low whistle. "She did react fairly strangely to the whole thing - but to let me take the blame?"

"It's not as if you got punished," Lily pointed out, and he conceded that.

"The real question now is, what are we going to do about it?"

"Not you," Lily says. "Me."

Chapter Text

Sirius goes with her as far as the staircase of the North Tower and sits down to wait. "I still think I should be part of the confrontation," he says.

"That's exactly why you're not coming," Lily says. "To keep it from being a confrontation."

"By definition, it already is one," Sirius says, as he stretches out his legs on the stairs.

"And when, exactly, did you read the dictionary?" Lily says in exasperation, before adding, because she's a little afraid of his answer, "Never mind, it's to keep the 'hostile' out of it then."

"So you're telling me to 'sit and stay'?" Sirius says.

Lily looks at him sidelong. "I certainly wouldn't phrase it that way," she says, suspecting this is an odd friend-of-a-werewolf joke, since he seems to find himself very amusing. "Just - wait for me, would you?"

"Don't I usually?" Sirius says, and he flashes her his most charming smile before lounging back on the stairs. "Hurry up so you can come back and fill me in. My other friends'll be wondering where I've gotten to, y'know."

Lily shakes her head at him but smiles, more wanly, back before heading up the stairs - up to the small, narrower staircase off the Divination classroom.

She knocks on the door to Auriga's office three times before the door opens.

The office looks deserted, but a purple curtain wafts in one corner, revealing a threshold.

"Back here," Auriga's voice calls - and Lily feels a tremor of nervousness, absurdly. She pushes through the darkened office and past the curtain-

"Hello, Miss Evans," Auriga says, her wrinkled, friendly face dwarfed by a terrycloth turban. She's wearing a green housecoat with little broomsticks on it, sitting in a matching pastel green chair with her feet up. She looks like the least terrifying person on the planet. "What brings you to my residence this evening?"

"The Trionfi deck," Lily says, jutting out her chin.

Auriga's face falls. "Ah," she says. "Well." She pulls out her wand, and though Lily knows, deep down, she is safe, she still steps back- and Auriga's face falls further.

Auriga flicks and swishes, and a tea kettle in the corner starts to whistle and puff steam.

"Only putting the kettle on," Professor Auriga says, apologetically. "Will you have a cuppa?"

"Yes, please," Lily says, and she pulls up a chair.

Auriga fetches a tray of biscuits and a container too of the squishy molasses cookies she makes herself. Lily takes one of those.

"Molasses isn't always the easiest thing to get ahold of," Lily says, after she swallows her one bite. "My mother ordered away for it once, for a recipe she was curious about, but mostly she just uses treacle."

"Benefits to being a witch," Auriga says, with a sigh. "There truly are a few." She looks at a little decorative box on the tea table she's set up and adds, sadly, "Usually I think of the cards as one of those benefits."

"The Trionfi cards?" Lily say, but Auriga waves that off.

"Tarot of all sorts, Cheiro-enchanted deck or not," she says. "Even the Muggles use it - it's different in our hands though, dear. And some Muggles- with a touch of magic in their blood - it's different in theirs, too. A true premonitory tool, and not just… " Auriga thinks for a moment, "...I suppose you could call it a psychological exercise."

She smiles at Lily's expression and sips her tea with her pinky out. "I got an O on my Muggle Studies N.E.W.T.," she says. "A very long time ago, now, but I have stayed up on the subject. And I travel, when I'm not teaching. It is a fair good life,"she says, "and I believe I have been a fair good teacher- whatever some may think of my skills."

"Professor?" Lily prompts, both because Auriga has fallen silent and she really is a little lost..

"There are some who have a true gift, to see," says Aurgia, almost crankily. She rubs at her suddenly too-bright eyes. "I have method and precision and interpretation, and magic, yes. That. It may not be Sight," she says, and Lily can practically hear the imperious capital 'S,' "but it is a way of seeing. That is how I grade your homework, Miss Evans."

Sirius would have been pressing for an answer and getting tetchy by now. Lily is both glad and a little sorry she didn't bring him as she says, "I'm sorry, I don't-"

"I read my students' fortunes, by every measurement I know," Auriga says, her tea cup shaking in her hand a little. She sets it down. "I check your work against it, to gauge, as well as I can, who is in fact trying and who is simply making things up. You're quite a good liar, Miss Evans- " Lily's alarm must have registered on her face, since Auriga held up her hand and added, "but I cannot fault your grasp of method, or of the readings - which I do believe you are skimming, but you still seem to come away with the finer points. I suspect you've been doing some additional reading on Trionfi decks?"

It was really Sirius who had done the reading, but Lily has no trouble remembering that conversation.

"Fifteenth-century heirloom decks," she says, "used for special occasions…?"

"I received that deck the day I became a Professor at this school," Auriga says, and Lily feels a guilty twinge, remembering the seventy-some copies of the Lovers card going up in flames.

"And you put it out because you were worried about Felicia," Lily says. "You wanted to see what it would show her."

"Yes and no, Miss Evans," Auriga says. She laughs, a little bitterly. "I was worried about Felicia. I did not leave the deck out on purpose."

"Not - on purpose?" Lily repeats, thinking of other magical objects that have been known to move on their own.

"I had been using it prior to class, to attempt a few - clarifications," Auriga says, "and when setting out the classroom prior to the lesson, I am afraid I made a very old woman's mistake."

"Oh, you're not that old, Professor," Lily protests, out of well-ingrained politeness.

Auriga smiles. "I started teaching at this school the same year Albus Dumbledore was Head Boy."

"You're a bit older than I thought, Professor," Lily admits, just as automatically and a little thunderstruck. Still, she had thought Auriga at least a healthy seventy- in the wizarding world, she ought to remember to round that up.

"He was a terribly embarrassing pupil," Auriga says. "Embarrassing for me, that is, not himself. I was nineteen, and he caught my every error- I had not made any pretensions to the Sight, when I was hired, but I thought, perhaps, I was better than Albus Dumbledore quickly proved me to be."

Auriga clears her throat. "I still do not like to make myself the fool in front of him," she says, more into her cup of tea than to Lily. "I wished for my colleagues in Astronomy and Arithmancy to confirm what I was seeing, before I raised any alarm."

"You were seeing Felicia's future?"

"Miss Evans," Auriga says, "I could not tell whose future, among your classmates, I was seeing. I brought out my Trionfi deck for just that purpose, but the enchantment has long worn thin- for myself, all I turned up was copy upon copy of The Hermit."

Auriga drains the last of her tea and turns the cup, eyeing her own leaves as she murmurs, "I truly thought I had put the deck in my mending pile."

Lily had been a little proud of herself, for solving the mystery. It is immensely unsatisfying to hear it was a mistake - or an unconscious act, on the teacher's part, perhaps. Or a lie.

"But why," she says, in deep frustration, "would you let us think it was Sirius?"

Auriga winces. Setting down her cup, she says, "I have been debating whether to let that misperception stand, whether it is better for your class to think it a prank deck gone awry than a very serious omen. In the moment? I was thrown, and in a haste to go after Miss McKinnon, after I learned from Mr. Black it was the girl who had shuffled the cards and turned up the Hanged Man."

"What does that mean?" Lily says, sharply. They'd all assumed it had to do with Marlene's father, but that would have nothing to do with the future; Auriga spoke as if it was an omen of Marlene's future .

"You are in my class, Miss Evans," Auriga says, looking very serious despite her broomstick housecoat and the turban on her head. "You tell me."

"Suspension, or selflessness," Lily says slowly, even though she doesn't think either one sound very much like Marlene. "...The path of sacrifice." Auriga seems to be waiting, still, and Lily finally wets her lips and says the first word that really came to her mind. "Martyrdom."

"I have been concerned," Auriga says softly, "about several futures, this year. And I say that as a professor who taught through the Grindelwald war."

Lily sets down her cup of tea. Her heart pounds, and she racks her mind for all potential, non-literal meanings for The Lovers card - a moral crossroads, a blessing in disguise - and thinks, too, compared to Hanged Man, The Lovers card doesn't sound so bad.

Auriga reaches for Lily's tea cup- probably to put it aside, not to read her leaves- and Lily violently snatches it back first. The gesture's rude, she knows it, an apology is on her lips - but she has never been afraid of anyone as, for a second, she is of this woman in her towel turban, with her molasses cookies.

"You're not wrong to fear the future," Auriga says quietly.

"I know," Lily says, more tartly than she means to, holding her cup close. "I've read Oedipus ."

"So have I," Auriga says. "What, then, is a Divination Professor to do? I once warned Albus Dumbledore that an early death loomed before him in the last class before his graduation - Albus asked me the exact parameters for an early death. Was not fifty early? What of forty, thirty? Or was tragedy strictly confined to those of teenage years? I could not answer him."

Lily huffs a deep breath of relief. She knows what McGonagall thinks of Divination; she feels silly, having let herself get so worked up. A fifteenth-century deck with a falling-apart enchantment should not be anything to panic over.

"I was very young then," Auriga says, after a moment. "His mother died shortly thereafter, in an accident - she was only forty-eight. Very young," she repeats.

Lily swallows and turns her cup round and round in her hands.

"I have always read my own future and faced what I saw, as best I could," Auriga says. She casts one hand about her apartment, empty but for her. Lily hopes she has a cat somewhere. "I believe there is value, in my subject. I let my students find their futures and let my grading guide them. But..."

"Our class is scaring you," Lily says, looking down at her tea leaves. They just look like leaves to her - or wings, maybe, and a beak, but then she has been thinking of Dumbledore's phoenix all week.

"Perhaps I am merely getting too old to do my job," Auriga says. "But every tool I try seems to point to fate hanging very heavy over the graduating class of 1978."

She levitates a fresh cup over, to pour more tea and says, "When I said as much to Minerva McGonagall, she said, I believe, the exact same words she had as my pupil. 'I see the same thing well enough plain in front of my nose.'"

Trouble , Lily can hear Sirius Black predicting in her future, back on the very first day they were paired up. We're going to do something , she'd told Marlene last week. What can I do? she'd asked Dumbledore. She wonders what Felicia would have done, if told she might die soon, rather than walk happily around Hogsmeade with the boys who'd turned to kill her-

Lily holds her right palm flat in front of her and stretches it out to Auriga, wordlessly.

Auriga gives Lily a small smile, a bit trembly, but pleased, very pleased. Then she takes her palm, hands all soft folds as they close under Lily's wrist.

Auriga peers down, a few frizzy gray strands escaping her towel-turban.

"You have a touch more of destiny in your lines than most, Miss Evans," she says.

"And what does that mean?"

"Any one of a thousand great or terrible things. Tremendous love, tremendous loss- "

"Or maybe that I'm simply tremendous?" says Lily weakly.

Auriga smiles again. It's her eyes that tremble this time. "That as well."

"There are a few things I can tell you," Auriga says, after squinting at Lily's palm a moment, and tracing a few lines, "that I hope may be useful. You will have to choose - again, and again, and again - what side you stand on. You will have great friends - but I would caution, there is a break that suggests a friend's betrayal."

Snape , Lily thinks, but does not say.

"And your line of vitalis is very deep-"

"But short," Lily says, looking at the same line as Auriga.

The textbook had said that didn't necessarily mean anything about actual longevity, and Auriga makes the same remark. There are a lot of interpretations, she mentions. She's been doing this for over eight decades - she's studied all of them, she says. Methods that would have you map the time of death off someone's palm but that have proved wrong more often than right and tend to cause so much alarm no scrupulous palmist would repeat what she sees. Methods that would have you read the best possible interpretation and put a positive cast on it. Methods that recommend reading the knots and lines of a wizard or witch's wand, instead of a palm.

"Ask me what you want to know, Miss Evans, and I will answer based on what I see," Auriga says at last, "remember, though, that I do not have the Sight, and am looking to my studies, and the readings I have done for your class already, to inform my answer."

Lily closes her eyes, but it's the Hanged Man card she sees behind them.

"Should I tell Marlene about the Trionfi deck?" she asks.

Auriga is silent. "Not a question for yourself." She lets Lily's hand slip out of her own.

"I think you've as good as told me to seize the day, just in case," Lily says, eyes still closed. "It's harder to decide whether to tell Marlene." She doesn't truly know Marlene well enough to know if the other girl would want to be warned Auriga thinks she's going to get herself killed for some cause; she's also a little concerned as to what Marlene seizing the day harder than she does already might look like.

"Perhaps," Auriga suggests, "you should have spoken to your friend about your question about the deck... earlier."

Lily shoots her eyes back open, alarmed, but Auriga's smile is wry, not at all worried.

"I informed Miss McKinnon both that your Mr. Black was not responsible, and of my own concern for her, as soon as I caught up with her that afternoon."

Lily can barely contain her groan.

"You wouldn't happen to know where the deck wound up, do you?" Professor Auriga asks, cautiously, a little embarrassed.

Lily, politely, and guiltily- if not as guilty as she might have felt, if Auriga had seemed sorrier for leaving the class under the impression a student was responsible for what seemed a cruel prank- lies through her teeth.

When Lily makes her way back down the staircase, a little shaken up and also more than a little annoyed, Sirius appears to be asleep on the stairs.

Without opening his eyes, though, he says, "You're stomping. Not good?"

"Well, I was right," Lily says, trying to stomp less. She sits down one stair above him. "Also, we're all going to die, but that's not news to anyone, is it?"

"Not this week, especially," Sirius says, a thread of very dark humor in his voice. But he cracks his eyes open and lets Lily fill him in properly, only saying "Rubbish" a few times and swearing a few more.

"What a sorry little mystery," he says. He stands up, brushing himself off. "An accidental frame job? The next time someone frames me, they better do it on bloody purpose."

"Ah, yes, the next time," Lily repeats drolly. "When it'll actually be the butler, in the study, with the spanner."

Sirius is quiet for a moment, piecing each word apart before he asks, "Is a spanner a sort of candlestick?"

Lily laughs, the first nice, real laugh she remembers having since before everything went to hell in Hogsmeade, and explains to him as they head down the hall.

It is not hard to get James Potter alone for a minute, the day after Halloween. She finds him walking with all his friends and announces she has to borrow James, and that's that.

"This is about Sirius," James says warily.

"No," Lily says quickly. "That is, yes, he did ask me to talk to you-"

"Oh, did he?"

"Oh- don't do that."

"Do what?" James puts his hands in the air, surrender pose. "I tried to make clear to him I don't- and I sent him back to you last week- it's not as if I've got some kind of— of claim on you, Evans-"

"I should think not!"

"That's my point- I asked you out… a few times... you said no… a few times… and- I haven't even asked you out this year!" James squints, furrowing his eyes so they almost fall under his glasses rim. "This fall, that is. This academic year."

"No, I suppose you haven't," Lily says, thinking back, almost in disbelief. He hasn't.

"And I can see the cards on the table," James says in a rush. "And… it won't hurt our friendship. His and mine, I mean, since, you and me, we're not exactly friends. But we could… work on that, if you were to date Sirius—"

"I am not going to date Sirius," Lily says, enunciating each word very carefully.

"It's all right, though-" James says earnestly, adjusting his glasses.

"I don't WANT to date Sirius-"

James manages, somehow, to knock his glasses off his face. He fumbles blindly to catch them, snagging them gracefully at about his mid-calf, seconds before they'd have hit the ground.

"What, exactly, is wrong with Sirius?" James wants to know. He sounds a little put out.

Lily puts her hand over her face. "Aside from the fact he nearly killed someone less than a month ago-"

"But he and Remus are alright with each other again," James says, getting his glasses very firmly back on. "...Mostly. And you seemed alright with it when you were taking his side-"

"That is not what - " Lily decides not to reopen that argument, counts to three in her head, and tries again. "That nonetheless does not exactly inspire me to snog him," she says icily.

"No, I'd presume that would be his hair," James says, as if that's obvious.

"His hair?" Lily repeats. "Not his face or his height or his eyes?"

"Aha, see," James says, pointing at her triumphantly. "You do think he's attractive."

"Sirius is handsome enough, it's a fact, but—" Lily could not see try to explain to James of all people that Sirius wasn't her sort of handsome nor was his hair even the hair she found stupidly attractive. "—Well, you might not be able to comprehend this, but for some people liking someone isn't so much about looks as it is about personality."

He looks slightly hurt, but it's hard to tell behind the snarky way his lip curls and his eyes narrow. "Your philosophy on that explains a lot-"

"Do not bring up my friendship with Snape, Potter," Lily warns, her voice tight.

"Maybe I wasn't going to," James says. Then, "All right, I was, and it would have been below the belt, but it's not as if I was asking you out only because of your looks or because everyone likes you-"

"Everyone likes me?" Lily repeats, scornfully, and James throws up his hands in disbelief.

"Plenty of people dislike me," she argues.

"Plenty of people in Slytherin House, you mean."

A little over a week ago, Lily would have named Marlene as someone who dislikes her, but that seems scoffable now. She shrugs, more unsure than she'd like.

James shrugs, though his eyes stay intent. "It makes a sort of sense, you and Sirius," and raises his voice to talk over her when Lily moves to object, "because he's the same way as you. Everyone loves him, or they hate him, because they're jealous, mainly. And the whole school's got an eye on him, maybe waiting for him to explode, because everyone can see he's—"

"Mad?" she says.

"Well - yeah, but-"

"Is this a roundabout way of calling me mad? Or is it that you like me because I remind you of Sirius?"

James sighs. "Do you actually hear me, when I say words, or is it all scrambled sounds you put together into what you expect me to say?"

Lily closes her mouth very deliberately and nods at him to go on.

"Right, then," James says, with a nod back, and continues matter-of-factly,"You're the brightest light in any room, and I'm not talking about your hair. You're gifted in every way that really matters, quickness and boldness and kindness and that something extra - the French probably have the word for it. It spills out of you, that's the main thing, so in twenty years, when people are thinking about who they went to school with, when teachers are trying to drudge up our faces from among the horde, they'll remember you. And they'll remember Sirius- for some different reasons- but he's got it too, the quickness and boldness and- ...well, the something extra, for sure - that's what you've got in common with him. That's what I meant to say." James rubs at his hair as if pushing thoughts away. "Alright?"

"And where are you in this scene of yours?" It's easier to reply than really think about what he's saying, because it's too much to take in, especially with how matter-of-factly James is stating it - and especially since his thesis argument seems to be that she should date Sirius.

"When people are drudging up faces from the horde?" she prompts, since he doesn't seem to follow.

"Oh, me," he says, still ruffling his hair. "I'll just be one more bloke who won some Quidditch games and got some detentions. There's one in every year. Two, in last year's class, with the Prewetts."

"Bull," Lily says, forcing her voice flat. She can still picture James' lips tracing 'brightest light in any room'. "You're fishing for return compliments, and I am not going to bite."

James is unfazed. "I'm Quidditch Captain, my marks are good, and I think I'm downright amusing a solid six days out of the week, but I'm not quite so fatheaded with arrogance that I can't see my feet on the ground." He cocks his head to the side. "Come on, you know it as well as me. If I'm remembered by this school, it'll be for my friends."

Lily frowns, not following.

"'That fellow who was always with his three mates', you know," James prompts, putting on a voice that sounds like a bad hybrid of Hagrid and McGonagall, "'Quite a little gang they had.'" He drops the voice and says, "I'd like that, actually."

He pauses to thumb his glasses an inch back up his nose, until they sit properly, and adds, more absently, "I'd like that fine."

"But they're your gang, James," Lily says, not entirely sure if he's serious or being mock-humble. She'd never define James by any one of his friends, but that's her first descriptor for Sirius, Remus, and Peter, each, without having to think about it: 'James Potter's friend.'

"There's obviously more to you, or you wouldn't have such good friends, with you at the center. You're horribly memorable, actually, because… ." She means to say nice things back, despite her compliments comment. But words like brave-clever-loyal-funny-charming refuse to come out- especially because she knows how many detentions he's had already this year, for actions which do not align with most of those adjectives. "Things. Things like you said."

"Oh," says James. He puts his hand back up to his hair. Puts it down again. "So. ...Are you really not going to date Sirius?"

"I suppose I really do like Sirius," Lily says, "for various reasons, but none of them - none - are the dating sort of reasons. Is that clear enough, now?"

"Yeah," James says, thoughtfully. "...What about Remus, then?"

Lily rubs her fingertips against her temple to slough off the oncoming headache.

"I'm not going to date one of your friends, James," she says, firmly, before he can propose Peter. Or, worse, get offended on Remus' behalf. If James dares suggest she wouldn't go out with Remus because she knows he's a werewolf now- she'll probably have to go snog Remus, just to spite him.

James puts his hands in his pockets and looks at her a moment, before grinning.

"I think we both know I'd prefer you didn't, anyway," he says ruefully. His hair seems to be at utmost ruffled capacity.

Seize the day , Lily thinks wistfully, but Dumbledore's voice is in her head too. Live as if tomorrow will come - and if she kisses James Potter today, that will infinitely complicate her tomorrow.

James Potter, like Sirius Black, would be a terrible idea as an actual boyfriend. But…

"That would make it easier for us to be friends, actually, wouldn't it?" Lily says, and smiles back at him. She checks her watch - they are definitely both late for class.

"I suppose that I'd prefer you didn't date my friends, as well," she adds over her shoulder, and then takes the opportunity to walk quickly away.

"How exactly are we defining 'friends'? That could rule out an awfully significant chunk of this school!" James calls, amused.

"To clarify, Marlene counts as my friend," Lily calls back.

"I wasn't asking about McKinn- wait. Wait, Lily, are you saying you'd mind ?" James raises his voice, the better to be heard down the hallway.

She would absolutely mind. That is also absolutely the closest she will ever come to admitting it.

(Next year, as Hogwarts shifts from Halloween to Christmas season, that prediction will prove completely untrue, but that is 1977, and 1977 in the wizarding world is a year for seizing the day... and for seizing James, in the hallway, by the hair, for a kiss he does not see coming.

Their second kiss goes better.)

Trying to be actual friends with James Potter throughout the rest of the fall is, as it turns out, not so different from supposedly-not-being-friends with James Potter. He and his gang still sit together at all meals, most classes, and travel the school in their pack.

The main difference is now he says, "All right, Lily?" whenever she passes him, and she says - with both eyebrows arched, since she still can't master the one, "All right, James?" back. And that now he tends to borrow one of her spare spades in Herbology, which, on the occasion when Sirius also borrowed her 'spare spade', left Lily borrowing one off Greta.

Lily and Marlene argue about as often as they get along- they have a particularly bad row in the dorms one night when Lily, after Marlene has read about seven letters aloud, takes Gideon's side in an argument-by-owl. Lily rescinds, when she realizes Marlene just wanted her to rail against him with her, not determine which one of them was actually making sense.

Marlene drops Divination - Lily's helping her with Potions, now, so Marlene's not as worried about having a soft elective to help get her into Healing. Which she is really, really determined to do- Lily can't think of a single thing she cares even a tenth as much about potentially doing after graduation. A hundredth, even. She probably should tell Marlene how much that impresses her but manages only to mention how impressed she is someone as prickly as Marlene has a knack for Healing, anyway.

They only talk about The Hanged Man card once, when it's just the two of them alone in their dorm.

Marlene shrugs it off and says, "I can't see that it's a fecking bad thing, as all it's saying is that I might die for something instead of for nothing ." She twirls a piece of her hair about her wand- it never holds curl, but Marlene still tries - and says, "On a completely different note - maybe - you ever heard of Alastor Moody?"

Lily's read about him in the Prophet - he's a famous Auror.

"My uncle Sean's been helping him out with this Phoenix thing since the summer," Marlene says, very casually - and then she spills to Lily the little she knows.

Sirius and Lily have been spending much of their Divination team-ups discussing Voldemort and the latest updates in the paper, which is likely why he's the first person she thinks of telling. She doesn't tell him - she doesn't repeat secrets.

She does mention her older sister to him, and when he jokes about his preference for older women, she hastily says, "No - trust me, no -" and as it turns out, Sirius, with Regulus, gets the difficulties of her relationship with Petunia better than anyone else ever has.

At one point in November, when walking down a hall on the way to Divination, a staircase moves, cutting off their path. Sirius unrolls a map in front of her without thinking about it, to check their best way around, and only later double-takes and goes, "Right, you probably weren't supposed to see that…"

They don't really talk as much as they did when Sirius was on the outs with his friends, but they do write their Divination essays together- and she does join Remus and Peter in their regular afternoon study session for Charms, which she'd refused, before, since Sirius and James spend the whole time interrupting with Muggle Studies questions.

It's nice, actually, how interested in the Muggle world they are, and Lily knows more answers offhand than Remus does.

She sends a school owl home with a request to borrow her dad's copy of The Art of War and reads it in between her recent string of novels.

It hits Lily with a pang, sometimes, especially when reading at night, that Felicia's bed is absent from the dorm. That Felicia is absent from their classes, and studying, and finals.

The worst part is when Lily completely forgets, preoccupied by something else, and then the awareness triggers with a guilty roar.

She supposes that's life. When she gets caught up in Potions class, she still turns automatically to her left to whisper something to Sev. Once, when she does it, she sees him watching her from across the dungeon- but she turns away. Calling her names has receded into the background of him being pen pals with the young followers of Voldemort who'd come to Hogsmeade.

She avoids him to the point of barely seeing him, let alone not speaking to him, and the months go by. November blusters into December and a frantic finals week, where Lily spends so much time in Gryffindor Tower writing essays without looking up she's frequently not even sure who's sitting next to her.

Before she knows it, she's packing her bag to head home for the Christmas holidays. A before-almost-everyone-leaves Christmas party takes place in the common room - Marlene gets elvish wine into the girl's dorms, and they split it with the fifth years before going down to pull Christmas crackers. Mary Macdonald gets a little tipsy and Lily ends up hiding her from McGonagall for most of the party- and keeping both herself and Mary safely away from mistletoe. It's fun, nonetheless.

Something nags at her all party, something that she still needs to figure out. It feels like it has something to do with final exams, actually, but Lily cannot place what.

It's only the next morning, when she's headed with her packed bag down to the station early and sees Sirius heading out the portrait hole, alone, that she remembers.

She calls his name, and he cocks his head, as if not sure he's heard properly, before he turns around and pushes the portrait all the way back open, to the Fat Lady's grumblings. Lily lifts her hand in a faint wave and he takes the few steps back towards her at a lope. He's still wearing the Santa hat from last night's party.

"You're still going home with James, aren't you?" she says, looking around and seeing no one and nothing accompanying him.

"Of course," Sirius says, surprised to be asked. "James is with the Quidditch team for a minute- as Captain, he apparently got everyone presents - "

"Where's your bag?" Lily asks.

Sirius reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wand and toothbrush, and holds both up, grinning.

Lily stifles a laugh and tells him, "It occurred to me I need to know one more thing- "

"I'm sure you don't," he says, grinning as he repockets his 'travel kit'. "Need to know, that is. You just want to. And I'm sure you're better off not knowing."

"I'm sure that, as usual, you're wrong," she says. "I have to know. How did you pull an O on your Divination O.W.L.?"

"Right, that," Sirius mutters, grin fading. He pauses dramatically, as if waiting for a drumroll only he can hear.

Then he says, flippantly, "Told 'em my life would amount to bugger all and that I wouldn't live to comb gray hair."

"Very funny," Lily says, rolling her eyes. "I'm assuming you cheated, but probably in some interesting-"

"Lily," says Sirius. "I'm being serious."

It takes her a moment to follow that. "You told them…"

"A lot of claptrap," he says, "knowing that Divination types tend to love the gloom and doom and that my family's not a favorite of the Ministry lately- I quoted my mother, early and often - I'll come to a bad end, I'll be the end of House Black, or maybe it was an unhappy end- there was definitely somesuch about unhappiness and ends- and I thought it a great laugh. Until they, legitimately, gave me an O."

An Outstanding, in Divination, for saying he'd come to an unhappy end- Lily swallows.

"Your family must be awfully unpopular, then," she says.

Sirius laughs, but the shield over his gray eyes slips, just a little.

"You can't tell me you, of all people, actually believe any of that-"

"Can you picture me old?" Sirius teases, but seeing the actual concern on Lily's face, he says, "I grew up reading my family tree off the wall and memorizing life spans - I'm going to get a little worried about myself when I'm fifty or so, but don't go digging me a grave yet, Evans." The laughter on his face fades.

"Still," he says. "Still. You ever hear of someone getting an O in Divination before?"

The answer is no, which is more than a little scary.

"Fuck that," Lily says. "Fuck their O."

"Lily!" Sirius says, face breaking into unguarded delight. He doffs his Santa hat and presses it to his heart. "What a lovely new addition to your always-extensive vocabulary."

"It's hardly new," she says. Just rarely used, though any of the girls in her dormitory could testify to it being in Lily's vocabulary- but still, usually one she bites her tongue on, in public. Words have more power, the longer you hold onto them- their own kind of spells. "You'll see, now that we're proper friends."

"I don't know about proper," Sirius says, very seriously. "I am, of course, a corruptive influence. Downright corrosive. By the time we're done being friends—"

"Don't be ridiculous," Lily interrupts. "There's no being done when it comes to friends."

There's a funny look on Sirius' face - perhaps he's thinking of how very close he came to combusting his friendships lately, or perhaps, like her, he's thinking of Snape.

"Not true friends," she says.

There's been times this fall, since he stepped into Divination, that it's been her favorite subject- and that's entirely the fault of Sirius Black.

She clears her throat before he can answer and says, "Do you remember at the Sorting Feast - our Sorting Feast, I mean - you made room for me on the bench?"

"Did I?" Sirius says, a little puzzled. He's not sure where she's going, she can tell, and she's losing his attention a little; at the mention of a hat, he's toying with the Santa hat in his hands."You didn't sit with us, then, though. That, I remember."

"It was just you, then, actually, the others hadn't been Sorted yet-"

"Suppose so." He puts the hat back on his dark head of hair. There's a sprig of mistletoe still on his hat - Gladys Gudgeon was positively chasing Sirius with the stuff last night.

"I'm sorry I didn't sit with you."

"Nothing to be sorry-"

"Sorry for myself," Lily says briskly. "Of course, you could have been planning to put a frog on my plate and I might have shoved your face into a pudding, but I think we probably would have gotten along, a lot sooner. No changing the past- but to be clear, I'll be in the queue of official friends looking out for your future, Sirius Black. You probably won't be able to see me behind James Potter's huge head," she adds, fighting not to smile as she thinks of James telling her she stands out in a crowd, "but remember I'll be there. Okay?"

Mock-solemn, Sirius puts out his hand to shake. "Since it's proper, and official, and you're standing in queue and everything -"

Lily takes his hand but instead of shaking it, leans in to peck him on the cheek.

"That's a different queue," Sirius says of the cheek kiss, but he kisses her cheek right back and claps her on the shoulder, too.

"Going to sit with us on the ride home for the holidays, then?"

She's already promised to sit with a full compartment of girls in her year, and says as much… and also that she's heard from Remus that James and Sirius have very maturely decided to get rid of their entire Stink Bomb collection, by very maturely releasing them all at once, so she would be as far away from them as possible either way, thanks.

"See you in '77, then," Sirius says, grinning ruefully. He checks that his toothbrush is secure in his pocket and starts walking away. The sprig of mistletoe falls off his hat, but he doesn't notice. "I'll send you post. All my official friends get post."

"Sure you will," Lily says, laughing, and bids him Happy Christmas while he's still in earshot.

Before she walks away, she grinds the mistletoe into the floor with her boot toe. She's had quite enough of the stuff of superstitions and old traditions. It's about to be a new year, after all.

On the last day of 1976, Lily wakes up to Petunia screaming. It's not a regular shriek, from coming across something from school Lily left strewn on the sofa. It's bloodcurdling.

Lily thinks her sister's dying. She thinks they're under attack, like the assaults she's read of in the Prophet. Like Hogsmeade - but here - and for a second in her mind she can see a body clear in front of her, just as she really saw it, but it's Petunia's blonde hair peeking out this time.

Lily grabs her wand from her night table and prepares to duel for her life. She's surprisingly unafraid. Her mind goes cool and empty as her feet positively fly her down the stairs to her sister.

She stops at the kitchen door. There's an owl there. This isn't that tremendously strange, since Lily does occasionally get post, but its flapping wings must span about six feet, and it looks like it could swoop up a deer—or a fawn, at least. She's never seen a bigger owl in her life, and the orange eyes do make it look a little demonic.

Petunia is cowering behind a kitchen chair, her hair coming out of her curlers. She's wielding a skillet like a shield.

"Post for you," she hisses, when she sees Lily, and is not amused when Lily starts laughing.

She knows exactly who it's from.

Dear Lily , the letter begins. Your friend, Sirius , it's signed.

The in-between is a few brief lines about what Christmas is like in the Potter household, a question on how a Muggle record player works, as he's apparently been given one for Christmas - as has James (reading between the lines Lily suspects they're not clear record players do require records, purchased separately, to play). It includes an arch comment on James' own correspondence skills and friendly inquiry as to whether her sister still thinks all owls are "flying rats" after meeting this majestic creature.

Lily has been doing some thinking in the quiet of break, over what she might be still missing. There was a local Muggle sighting of one of the ghostly black dogs wizards call Grims and people in Cokeworth call "Hairy Jack". It led her to reread Hound of the Baskervilles and think hard about the odd jokes Sirius and his friends have made over the last few years.

About a deer in Hogsmeade and nicknames like Prongs and why, exactly, they would be sneaking down a tunnel with a werewolf, because Snape wasn't trying only to catch out Remus but to see where they go…

Dear Padfoot , how is dear James? she begins, wickedly. Did you enjoy any Christmas venison this year?

Lily sends her first reply to Sirius Black on the first day of 1977.

She doesn't see the future. She doesn't even fully suspect it. But she sends the letter off to Sirius, vaguely aware of something she hopes for, with this friendship, that turns out true in the end:

They stay loyal correspondents - and better friends - for the rest of their lives.