this is a disclaimer.
the city's aflood (and our love turns to rust)
It happens like this:
There's a crash of shattering glass and a scream. For an instant Lily doesn't even register what's happened - someone screamed, could have been anyone, doing anything, kids with water balloons, a dropped glass at Fortescue's. Then darkness creeping at the edges of her vision, another scream, she'd crossed the street quite ostentatiously to avoid Black and Potter but they're not looking at her they've got their wands out and –
"Mudblood whore!" shrieks a voice, triumphant, cold clammy fingers curling around her throat: Lily draws her wand and flings the other woman away with a jinx she doesn't remember casting, spins on her heel, blocks a Stunner, flings one back, the rubble in the street is Transfiguring into knives and darting at the Death Eaters, Prongs is at her elbow guiding the blades with wand up and left hand moving with it, sweep back and throw as if he's holding a Quaffle. More people are screaming. Distantly she thinks she sees Sirius scuffling with a Death Eater, hand to hand - idiot, is he a wizard or not? - she summons the roof tiles over Madam Malkin's and sends them cascading onto Bella's filthy mad head, but she flicks her wand and sends at least half of them rushing at Lily and Potter, who blasts half a dozen as Lily throws a Shield Charm over them both - scarcely enough, the wind's knocked out of her and she sees one wreck his knee, throw him sideways, watches him hit the ground. He twists, snakelike, quicksilver, fires off a jinx, wrenches an attacker into the air by his heels and Lily follows with a curse that knocks the man, still hanging upside-down in the air, into the walls of Gringotts a hundred yards away.
Bella again, shedding roof tiles and cackling. Sirius throws himself at her but he's sixteen and she's twenty, how many tricks has Voldemort taught her since Dumbledore expelled her from Hogwarts when they were twelve?
Glass shards sharp as James' knives earlier. Lily blocks them, feels them cut into her arms, watches them slide around her and slice into James –
"Let's see you play Quidditch now, blood traitor!"
James roars with the pain of it, all over blood, knee ruined irreparably, flings out his wand hand again and Transfigures the lopsided fountain into a miniature dragon that breathes fire and brimstone into Sev's leering, sneering face - Sev, whom Lily hesitates to attack, even still, even now, until he raises his wand: "Cruci -"
"Petrificus Totalus!" she shouts and watches his body crash into the cobblestones, stiff as a board, may he be trampled underfoot and fall through the street into the deepest darkest cavern of Gringotts.
"Got to stop them - block the street -" James is gasping, clutching at his leg, screams from behind them sobs and cries, people running. Why are three Hogwarts students still a year away from NEWTs the only people in the vicinity prepared to stand up to these bastards?
They won't last much longer. Prongs is right. They need time, they need to regroup, they need reinforcements.
"Fire!" she says and her fingers slide, slick and bloody, on her wand. "The rubble - wood -"
He understands. They do it together: pile the rubble, Transfigure, light the flames: ordinary, magical, it doesn't matter. Sirius has lost Bella, he looks wrecked, covered in bruises as he crawls to them, hands shaking. "There's," he says. "Children. In the sidestreet - she just -"
But there's no time, no time at all. Lily forces the fire on, hotter and hotter, raises smoke that chokes and stings, sends it piling over their makeshift barricade into the Death Eater's faces, may they all choke on it and die of asphixiation, but they're still standing, still coming –
Her smoke pauses, the flames shiver. All Diagon Alley hovers on the edge of a precipice. Then Auror Moody flings the whole construct into the faces of the Death Eaters gathering behind it, and more besides: shattered glass, pebbles, cobblestones and roof tiles, tables and chairs, the cart of books from outside Flourish and Blotts. It's too much, and the Death Eaters aren't coordinated enough to counter it together, aren't strong enough to block it one by one. It sweeps the street clean.
When the dust settles, they're gone. Lily realises she's lying over James' prone, bleeding body and that Sirius in turn is shielding both of them.
Moody stumps over to them, magical eye spinning.
"Evans, Potter and Black," he says, speculatively. "Not bad. Not bad at all." And then, casually, he adds, "Better get to St Mungo's."
Easy for him to say.
"No, no one," says Lily. "It'll be all right. I can get home." She has money, she can call a taxi. It'll be all her pocket money for a year gone, but better than the bus, the train, everyone staring.
The Healer looks at her: doubtful, suspicious. If parents can't pick her up she must be a Mudblood –
"That's quite all right, Adalbert. The young lady will be coming home with me."
Lily turns to this new voice, this competent firmness like her Dad's, like - well, like Professor McGonagall, when you get right down to it. It doesn't belong to a very tall woman; she's thin and grey-haired and has eyes like James'.
Adalbert has melted away, and Mrs Potter takes Lily's hands in her own; they are wrinkled and smooth like old leather, grip still tight and strong.
"Dear girl," she says. "Dear child. You saved him. Thank you."
"I think," says Lily, awkward, "he saved me." In those first few minutes, when she was still stunned and useless and gaping.
"A mutually beneficial arrangement," says Mrs Potter. "You will come home with us, won't you dear? Sirius has told me your parents might not know how to help you if - there are complications. I'm a Healer - let me look after you three."
She has a much nicer smile than her son's, even though it's exactly the same.
"I -" says Lily.
"Excellent," says Mrs Potter, plainly just as inclined to take no for an answer as her son. "We'll take the Floo, I think."
James Potter lives in a mansion. Lily might have known, but she's too tired to be anything other than sleepy. Moderately clean and with her wounds dressed, she falls into the most comfortable spare bed she's ever touched and closes her eyes in relief.
They eat breakfast in the kitchen; Sirius apparently has a spot, and he glares at her when she sits in it. James's father is as lanky as he is, greeting her with careful, slightly old-fashioned charm. His hair is black, but it's not messy.
"Where's Prongs?" she asks when they've all sat down.
"Abed and asleep," says Mrs Potter. "And he won't be leaving it for another fortnight, not with that leg, and then on crutches. That is, if you're referring to James."
Lily flushes. The nickname had slid out before she'd realised it. Sirius taps his spoon against his cereal bowl and watches her with heavy-lidded eyes.
"I cannot imagine how you four came up with those ridiculous nicknames anyway," Mrs Potter adds, casting a glance at Sirius, who shrugs and grins.
"Will you chuck me out if I tell you we were drunk?"
Is he living here?
"Certainly not, I'm well aware of what you two are capable of. The number of owls I get about that boy!"
"Mrs Potter," says Lily, anxious to find some other topic to think about than the ludicrous idea that James Potter's mother thinks he's an adorably mischievous but essentially harmless little bundle of fun, "I'm really very grateful to you for taking me in like this -"
"Nonsense dear, Alastor told us -"
"- but would you mind very much," Lily continues, gentle but firm, "if I used your telephone? I should tell my parents where I am."
She realises they're all staring at her.
"My dear, I'm afraid I don't know what that is," says Mrs Potter gently.
Lily draws a breath and lets it out into her cornflakes. "Oh," she says. "Of course. I -"
"Evans, have you never been in a wizarding house before?" Sirius asks bluntly.
"Most of them are all right with the theory of Mudbloods but not with the practice," says Lily sharply. "And that includes Marli McKinnon's parents, before you open your stupid fat mouth."
Her hands are shaking and she wants to cry. She doesn't even know where she is, for God's sake. This is practically kidnapping.
"So if - it it's not too much trouble - is there a village, I could get a taxi, or the bus -"
"The bus! Nonsense again. Under no circumstances will I allow a guest under my roof to leave here in order to travel miles on a bus, Muggle or otherwise. Sit down, child. You're exhausted, and you've had a nasty shock. Eat your cornflakes, have some bacon, then go back to bed. Ned will fetch your parents, won't you Ned?"
"Of course," says Mr Potter. "Do sit down, Miss Evans. Your cornflakes will go soggy." He smiles at her.
It's exactly the sort of maddeningly, stupidly practical thing Prongs would have said. Lily drops into her seat again and picks up her spoon. She glances up, catches Sirius' eye by accident.
He picks up the milk jug. "For that tea?"
And finally, all of a sudden, like a wall coming down that she'd been holding up so long she'd forgotten it was there, Lily Evans gives up and gives in and lets the Marauders do what they've been nagging her to let them do - consciously at first, and then unconsciously for five years after her 'final no, go away I will not be part of your silly gang' - since before Gideon Prewett had given them the stupid nickname.
She lets them win.
It's so easy, oh so easy, they've been different this year, harder, quieter, grimmer-yet-gladder, they've fought together side by side, she could have stood there and let Sev kill James and they all know it, they've banded together, despite themselves, against their better judgement, this tight fierce knot of students who'll stand up to Mulciber, to Avery, to Sev and his filthy Sectumsempra that's left scars on half a dozen students that she knows of that McGonagall cannot prove (as if every cut and scar is him getting back at her for daring not to want a friend who calls her Mudblood), who'll hex the Slytherin Head Boy and get sent down for it, who'll dig their heels in at every turn and say: no. No. No.
Lily's been telling herself it was just for school, just for now, just for temporary protection and safety in (relative) numbers, but here's the thing: it really isn't.
Maybe she can live with fifteen-year-old Lily's howl of disgust if she tells the silly child it was a draw all along.
Maybe it was a draw all along.
"Sure, Padfoot, ruin my tea," she says. And she kicks his shins under the table, in an Evans-and-Padfoot sort of way, and goes back to her cornflakes.
(Admittedly she doesn't actually snog James until Halloween, when he asks her to meet him in the Forbidden Forest and comes to her as a stag - as Prongs - as himself, for the first time, whole and entire. But it's far too late by then anyway.)