It had been a long, cold October. There were no bright fall colors and cool crisp days punctuated by pumpkin pie and the clichéd sounds of laughter and crunching leaves. Instead, the short days were dark, with low hanging fog and freezing rain. They were punctuated by professors with tense, expressionless faces pulling students out of class. There was no safe hour of the day or night, no moment when you were free from the nearly paralyzing fear that someone you loved was dead.
The Gryffindor seventh years, or at least the ones who had made it into NEWT level Transfiguration, had seen this earlier when Professor Crane, the Defense teacher, had politely knocked on the door.
"I'm sorry, Professor McGonagall, may I interrupt for a moment?"
McGonagall nodded, her lips pressed tightly together.
Every student in the class stilled, keeping their eyes forward. The Marauders had stopped their whispered jokes. Marlene had reached out to take Alice's hand under their desk.
"Miss McDonald, could you please come with me?"
Nearly all the students relaxed for a moment before tensing again with guilt. Next to Lily, Mary became white as a sheet, the color draining from her face so quickly that Lily had to resist the urge to look for a pool of blood on the floor.
"I'm sorry, Professor Crane," Mary said quietly, her eyes forced forward, unblinking and unmoving. "I really need to…" She took a deep, shuddering breath. Lily tried to take her hand but Mary clasped them tightly together under her desk. "I need to stay here. This class is really important."
"Miss McDonald, please get your things." McGonagall's voice, however, lacked its usual harsh authority. The gentleness undermined the command. Mary didn't move.
"Mary…"
"No." Mary's voice had become shrill. One could hear the sobs fighting to get of her throat, clawing and roughening her voice. No, no, no, no, no. The tears spilled out of her eyes and she was gripping the desk so hard that her knuckles were white.
There was flurry of movement and suddenly Sirius was beside her, uncurling her fingers from her desk and whispering soothingly to her, his voice cracking in syncopation with her rising sobs.
"No, Sirius, stop, no. I'm not going. No!" Mary was flailing now, flinging her arms wildly in a desperate attempt to resist Sirius pulling her from her desk and to her feet.
Lily could hear Sirius's whispers, the intimacy of them making her uncomfortable and desperate.
"Shh, baby, come on. Please, come on, please baby." Please, please, please. His face broke Lily's heart. She could almost see the inherited guilt etched across his skin, the incontrovertible desire to take Mary's loss for himself.
Mary's flailing arms slowed, the violence of her fear turned to the weakness of grief as she folded herself into Sirius as though he could hold off the dark. He could add failure to the litany of emotions etched into the harsh planes of his posture. He nearly carried her out of the room, under the quiet, all too understanding eyes of the professors. Everyone could see the tense lines of his shoulders and his neck, the suppressed battle against himself written in his skin.
James unsubtly moved into the vacant seat next to Lily and McGonagall resumed her lecture with renewed authority to compensate for the tremor in her hands.
That night, James took Lily to the kitchens for the first time, getting her hot chocolate and easing first a smile and then a laugh back on to her face. He regaled her with stories of prank planning and dorm room tales, but she didn't laugh out loud until he asked her a question.
"Hypothetically, if you wanted to turn the floors of Hogwarts to water and force all students to get around in canoes, what charm would be most effective to protect against everything being righted immediately?"
The next day, Sirius was late to Charms. Actually, he never quite made it, but he was merely late when the blatant sounds of fists crashing into skin, of bodies hitting walls and Sirius's cruel taunts echoed into the classroom from the hallway.
Professor Flitwick was frozen, unsure how to act in light of such violence. James made to get up but Remus put a hand on his shoulder, nodding at Peter whose eyes were wide open and glued to some spot just to the left of Flitwick's head. Instead, Remus left himself.
"Miss Evans, would you go make sure everything is alright?" Flitwick asked a few minutes later, when Remus's calm voice had broken through the brutal noises and silence had ensued.
It didn't take Lily long to find them. Sirius was sitting against the wall, a little ways down the hallway. Remus was kneeling in front of him. With one hand he was running his wand over Sirius's brow, healing the skin which had split with the imprint of knuckles and a ring with an old family crest. With his other hand, Remus was gripping Sirius's tightly, his thumb moving unconsciously over Sirius's own red hand. Sirius's eyes were closed and Lily could see the cracks in his bravado, the fear that was layered underneath, almost as though Sirius was a painting whose first layer of color had cracked in dry heat.
"You're an idiot, you know that, right?" Remus asked softly. Sirius let out a dark, unnatural chuckle. "Rosier is twice your size."
Lily backed away quietly, but Sirius had noticed her, opening his eyes as Remus had finished healing his face.
"Alright, Evans?" he asked cautiously.
"Flitwick just sent me to check on you guys," she said, moving toward them. Remus stood up and pulled Sirius to his feet. "If you want, I can just tell him you went to the hospital wing."
"Yeah, thanks Lily," Remus said looking at Sirius who wasn't really looking at anything. He grabbed Sirius's wrist. "Come on, Padfoot," he said, pulling Sirius along. They had almost reached the end of the hallway when Lily called out to them.
"Sirius," she called. He turned to look at her. Lily swallowed pas the lump in her throat. "Thanks for taking care of Mary yesterday. I know you guys don't exactly have a stable…" she trailed off, looking for the word. Sirius raised an eyebrow at her. "Relationship. But she needed you and well…we all need you guys," she finished lamely.
Sirius eyed her strangely. "We'll be here, Evans," he said finally. Their eyes met for a moment before Lily turned and nearly ran back to class.
James missed their head's meeting at the end of that week. He had forgotten to tell Lily he wouldn't be there in the chaos of the week and the excitement of the full moon. She fell asleep on the couch waiting for him, still in her school uniform with the collar of her shirt digging into her neck.
She woke when he opened the door, the pale gray light of dawn throwing his shadow into conflict with those created by the dying firelight.
"Where were you, James?" she asked before he even noticed that she was there.
He jumped about three feet in the air, his wand trained on her before his brain had even processed the glint of firelight on her hair.
"Ah, shit, Lily," he said when his heart had started beating again. "I completely forgot…"
"I waited for you," she said evenly, standing up and straightening her skirt. There was something beginning to boil in her stomach.
"I can see that." A battle was brewing and though James tried to make his voice placate her, it came out as defensive.
"Don't mock, James. These meetings are important. I don't know what you've-"
"It was important, Lily. I wouldn't just skip out on you for something stupid."
"But you forgot, so it really could have been anything that kept you out all night."
"Well you're just going to have to trust me…" James wanted so badly for this to be the end, for her to nod, frustrated but trusting and go back to sleep for a few hours. But the tension had been building and Lily has never been one to let things go, even when she might want to.
"How can I, when you don't show up when you say you will?" She started unsure but built to stabilize her fury. "I need you to be where you say you will be. You won't even tell me where you were. Nothing has changed."
Despite the familiar rant, this fight was different than any fight before it. However they meant or didn't mean what they were saying, there was a cool gloss of truth, a quiet sheen that covered their angry retorts.
"Well if you truly believe that, Lily," James said coldly. "Then I just won't bother showing up for anything. This isn't exactly high on my priority list." And he turned and went up stairs. Only then did Lily notice his limp.
The weekend saw neither of them in the Head's dorm except to sleep. They could no longer divide the group with their fights so they stayed on opposite sides of the crowd, creating lines of tension between them that, when crossed or touched became violent lightning shows, disrupting everything around them. And it was worse because Mary was still not back and they hated the other's silence and more than that they hate how much they needed the other.
Tuesday, a week after she had left, Mary returned, pale and quiet, with awful dark circles under her eyes. Sirius seemed to vibrate with tension the second they heard she was coming back until the moment she walked into the Great Hall, sat down next to Lily without even glancing at him. He slammed his way out of breakfast and didn't show up again until lunch, when he immediately began taunting Snape, drenching him in water and soap until he was bright red and yelling curses that had Sirius upside down with his head in a bowl of mashed potatoes.
Where this might have normally prompted a food fight, the rest of the student body looked on, laughing nervously as James righted his best friend and practically wrestled him from the Great hall. Mary had not once looked away from her plate. Marlene and Alice walked in, passing Sirius and James as they were leaving. They took in the table with the piles of food everywhere and the fuming Snape, before they grabbed Mary's hand and dragged her off toward the kitchens. The professors let them go, and Lily stayed glued in her chair, exchanging nervous looks with Peter and Remus.
That night, Lily and James still weren't talking. They went to bed silently, alone. The heads dorm was humming with the effort it took them not to break. At the same time, Mary was sneaking into Sirius's bed, refusing to let him speak until she had exhausted herself with the exertion of their sex and release and the reminder that yes, she was still alive. Only then did she let him hold her while she cried, her sobs breaking like waves against him, a shifting beach unstable and fluid but able to take the violence of her grief.
Remus and Peter woke to heavy breathing giving way to sobs. Rather than casting a silencing spell, muting the effects of disaster and war and trying to go back to sleep with their heads buried in the sand, they gathered their blankets and left quietly. They built up the fire in the common room and played chess so that they wouldn't fall asleep, their hands brushing as they moved pieces, reminding themselves that there was someone else in the heavy silence of the castle that was awake and aware and afraid.
The next day, in any other year, at any other time, would have been normal. They went to classes and no one got pulled out. They ate meals where no one was tortured and no food became a weapon. The only thing out of the ordinary was that Lily stayed behind to ask her Ancient Runes professor about something she didn't understand.
"Mary, I'll be along in a minute," Lily said gently as everyone made to leave class.
"I'm fine," Mary answered shortly, not looking up. "Stop coddling me and mind your own business."
Lily stepped back, pulling her hand back into her own personal space. "I just want to…"
Mary cut her off. "Lily." Her voice was shaking and she looked up, finally. "If you keep this up I won't be able to hold it together, so please just leave me alone." Lily nodded, but Mary didn't see this as she left without a backward glance.
When Lily finally left her class, she was late for dinner and the hallways were empty. She was walking slowly, looking at her feet, when she realized that she wasn't alone. James was approaching her. In a great show of normalcy, he had been detained by his Muggle Studies professor and lectured about his disruptive behavior. Lily stopped walking, hoping that he would turn the corner without noticing her. He didn't, but he kept walking right up until he was practically on top of her, only ten feet away. He stopped walking too as he stared at her. His eyes were wary and defensive until Lily cracked.
She could feel the jagged line running through her core, splitting her into two distinctly painful pieces. A dry gasping breath built up in her chest, expelling itself in a sob as she dropped her bag in the middle of the hallway and rushed straight into James, burying her face in his shoulder.
He, whose bodily tension was always consumed with resisting Lily, wasted no time in wrapping his arms around her tightly, pressing his nose into her hair, trying to make out what she was saying through her rapid, shallow breathing.
"I'm sorry," she said finally one she had managed to catch her breath. "I trust you. You didn't even really need to change." I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
"Shh, Lily," he breathed into her hair. "I'm sorry too." She pressed herself against him further. He stroked her hair and her back and tried to still her shaking. She pulled away first, hands going up immediately to smooth her hair back into place.
"Want to go down to dinner?" James asked, trying and failing to sound unaffected. His throat was hoarse and he had to clear his throat a few times. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.
"I have to go up to the room for a second," Lily answered, not looking at him. As though she knew anyway that he had opened his mouth to offer to accompany her, she continued. "You go on ahead."
"Oh." He said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "See you in a bit, then."
Lily turned to head back toward the Heads dorm and James was about to turn the corner to go down to the Great Hall when Lily called out.
"James," she said. He turned. "Save me a seat?" She offered him a small, tight, but authentic smile.
"Okay."