The Scottish Autumn was gradually winning the war on Summer, but today was a lingering reminder of holiday warmth. Tucked away in his quiet dell with a book, an apple and a cushion (conjured from a length of string from his pocket), Remus was content. Somewhere else in the grounds, Peter and Sirius were serving detention and James Potter had mischief in his eye but Remus was lost in the Archipelago with Sparrowhawk and the ever-present danger of dragons and Kargish pirates.

Someone was crying, and Remus gradually became aware that the sound was real, and not the echo of happenings in his book. Chivalry suggested that he should ask if help was needed. Laziness retorted that the crying girl was clearly in this deserted area of the Hogwarts grounds for privacy and Caution added that he had no idea what he might be getting into, but when the sound of crying gave way to a string of solid Muggle cursewords, punctuated by savage attacks on the undergrowth, Chivalry won. He knew that voice.

"Lily?"

The cursing stopped abruptly and he called again. "Lily? It's Remus. You OK?"

When Lily forced her way through some bushes on the high side of the clearing she looked less like a damsel in distress than a really pissed-off dragon. She threw herself onto the ground beside him with a muttered string of cursewords"

"Anything I can help with?"

"Are all boys liars and cheating bastards, Remus?" Lily's voice managed to be both savage and vulnerable simultaneously. Remus briefly closed his eyes, grasping the situation without need for further clarification.

"Clarissa."

She swung around viciously, fist clenched as if to punch him. "You KNEW?"

He had the impulse to deny it, but that was ridiculous. "I ... sort of. James said that she had been swinging her hips at him, but I didn't know that he'd ... well, done anything about it." Well, not for sure, although the innuendo had been pretty clear. But he really hadn't thought that Prongs would actually risk Lily for a roll in the hay with a girl he didn't give a damn for.

Lily pulled herself up so that she was sitting hugging her knees and staring at her feet. "Why would he do, that, Remus? He said..."

He'd told her that he loved her - he'd told everyone in Hogwarts that he loved her. Remus told the truth, "I don't know, Lil. I just... don't know."

They sat there for a moment in silence before he asked tentatively, "Are you sure? I mean, really sure?"

She nodded. Remus didn't know what to say. "Oh Lil! He is such an idiot. Even more so because I know he really does love you."

She hunched into herself a little more deeply. "They were in Greenhouse Four. I got a note telling me to meet him there. I thought it was from him, but I guess it wasn't. He was already there, with her. They were..."

Remus waited for the trainwreck. Lily's voice got quieter.

"...naked. I could see him lying on top of her, with his bare arse in the air and her knees around him and he was grunting..."

Remus closed his eyes as if that would stave off further revelations.

"... and she was going 'Oh! Oh! Oh James!' and I just stood here like an idiot and I didn't even say anything. I just left. I don't think he even knew I was there." As if that had been the final insult, she started sobbing, punching the ground savagely with her fists.

"ALL MEN ARE BASTARDS!" she shouted suddenly. Remus flinched.

"He said he had never... but that was probably a lie too. We were going to lose it together. He was going to wait until I was ready. Oh the bastard. I will never forgive him."

Lily plucked the grass with mighty jerks, rending each clump of grass in a way that made Remus think that James should be afraid. "Are you a virgin, Remus?" she asked, her eyes rising briefly from her destructive fingers to look at him.

"Er... sort of."

She was clearly waiting for clarification. "I've never had real sex, " he added, "but I've done a bit of frotting."

Lily's nose wrinked in puzzlement. "Frotting?"

"Er, rubbing against each other." Remus didn't think it was necessary to mention with whom the rubbing had been taking place. He hoped Lily wouldn't ask.

"No blowjobs?"

"Not yet."

Lily shrugged unhappily. "Oh. Well. Do you think James really was a virgin?"

Remus considered the matter. There had been plenty of innuendo when Sirius and James got going, but James had never actually straight-out said that he had had sex, which made it pretty sure that he hadn't. He said as much to Lily, who nodded quietly.

"I don't see why he couldn't wait."

Thinking about it from that point of view, Remus wondered if... "Maybe he was worried that he'd be terrible. Maybe he wanted to practice with someone he didn't care about."

"Don't start making excuses for him."

"No, I'm not. He did the wrong thing. I'm just trying to figure out why he would do such a dumb thing. He must have had some kind of reason, even if it was a stupid one."

"The reason is that he just doesn't love me." Lily was ripping up the grass again.

"No, he does. He really does. That's why it doesn't make sense."

"He was thinking with his dick."

Remus sighed. "Yeah, I guess so."

Lily's lips tightened. For a minute she looked frighteningly like her sister, who Remus had seen once or twice in the holidays. "He was going to let me think that we were losing our virginity together," she said slowly. "We were going to go to a hotel together next holidays and he would have pretended that it was his first time."

She put her hands over her face, making an obvious effort to control her breathing. "I'm sorry. I just. I have to go now."

Before Remus could say a word she had pushed her way out of the clearing and was gone.

Remus lay back with his head on the cushion until it turned back into a piece of string, leaving him with a bit of a headache from the thump. He wished he had never called out to Lily. He wished James weren't such a dickwad. He wished he could return to Earthsea, but the pleasure had gone out of the day.

* * *

James was as white as a sheet when he came to bed that night. Remus didn't ask, but Pete told him all about it anyway while James was in the bathroom.

Lily had gone to Chess Club after dinner as usual, then when James had shown up to meet her afterwards she had looked right through him and gone to walk past. He had grabbed her arm, forcing her to stop, and after a quick furious exchange of hissed words (Pete didn't know exactly what had been said) Lily had asked James in a very loud voice if he was a virgin! According to Pete's informant (Matthew Bright from Hufflepuff) James had gone white and dropped Lily's arm like a hot coal, freeing her to walk regally up the stairs and away from him. Lily hadn't been seen since, and James refused to explain, but Pete (and Matthew) had lots of varied and lurid ideas as to what Lily had meant by that remark.

When James came back from the bathroom he went straight to his own bed without a word and closed the curtains. Remus studied his Potions text for a while, hoping to distract his mind, but when he finally put out the light, long after Pete was asleep and Sirius, who had bounced in late after a date, was snoring softly, he knew that James was still lying silent and unsleeping behind his closed curtains.

* * *

James Potter didn't have secrets from his friends. He bounced back from setbacks at the speed of light and never had an introspective thought in his life.

James Potter was unaccountably missing today, and someone strangely quiet was inhabiting his body, someone who answered Sirius at random and stared vacantly at his hands. Remus was achingly sorry for him at the same time as he wanted to smack his vacant face and tell him it was all his own fault. It was clear, however, from the stricken look in his eyes that James had already worked this out.

"She'll get over it," Sirius assured James in blissful ignorance of the cause of the rift. "Give it a couple of days and she'll be begging you to come back."

James just shook his head and Remus looked around for a way to divert Sirius onto another subject. "Kitchen Raid?" As a distraction, it didn't deserve to work, but they all pretended that it had, which was good enough.

* * *

It was really too cold to be tucked away in his quiet dell with Earthsea, but Remus couldn't stand to be in the Castle any more. As Ged chased the shadow over half of Earthsea, Remus huddled into his warmth-charmed blanket in the lee of a huge boulder which he had also heated. The winds whipped over and around the boulder, leaving a small warm pocket of privacy just for Remus. Nevertheless he was not actually surprised when Lily stepped out of the woods, making her way with the delicate caution of a wary wild deer across the clearing to stand in front of him. He huddled to one side of the boulder, gesturing to her to take the other, and then wrapped the blanket over her when she settled in next to him.

She let her head fall onto his shoulder. "Don't mind me," she said wearily.

For a minute he wasn't sure what he should say or do, but when she didn't stir or speak again he picked up the book and kept reading. A little while later she shifted and curled further into him, and he noticed that she had fallen asleep.

* * *

As the months passed it grew too cold for Remus to retreat to his dell. He had another space that he liked to use in winter, tucked in a tiny nook up a set of hidden stairs from the library. He had delicately deceived the marauders' map into believing that the nook was was part of the stacks in the library.

This private space too, he opened to Lily. Her public persona, bright and bubbly as ever, showed no signs of remembering the breakup with James in the Autumn, and Remus wondered if the nook was the only place she allowed herself to be quiet, reflective and sad. There was a tiny lancet window peeping out towards the hills and she had placed an old leather armchair, leaking stuffing from a long-neglected crack in one corner, where she could sit and look out at the sky and the purple heather-clad hills. Remus had its mate, which was somewhat less comfortable due to a missing leg, wedged in the opposite corner. It was propped up with a chunk of broken marble he'd found lurking in a disused corner and roughly shaped to fit.

Today Remus had cast aside novels and was deep in research for his History assignment. "Did you know that Annis Wychwood was a half-blood?" he asked Lily. She appeared to consider the question but in fact her next question was entirely unrelated. "Why don't you have a girlfriend, Remus?"

"None of your business, nosy," he countered with a smile. "Have you already finished your History essay?"

"Yes, but I know at least eight girls who would love to go out with you. Why won't you give any of them a chance? Melissa Johnston said that you wouldn't even walk to Hogwarts with her."

"Lily. Drop it."

"Are you homosexual? Because it doesn't matter to me, you know."

"Not especially."

"Is it because you're a werewolf? Because I don't care about that either."

Remus froze. "Did James tell you?" he said eventually. If James had, he was venison.

"I do astronomy, and I spend time with you," Lily said, the simplicity of her explanation entirely convincing.

Remus sighed. It seemed that anyone who paid attention could find out his secret.

"Then, yes. It's because I'm a werewolf."

"It's not transmissable unless you're transformed..." Lily began, but Remus interrupted.

"I'm not touching a girl who doesn't know what I am! Do you think I want to trick someone like that? Do you think I want her finding out one day and throwing up into the toilet at the thought that she touched me?"

Lily's face showed incomprehension and annoyance in equal amounts. 'Muggleborn,' Remus thought grimly. Even the rest of the Marauders understood his feelings on this subject. You just couldn't do that to a girl, and no wizard-born girl would willingly touch a werewolf.

He tried to explain it, but there were some things that Lily Evans just wasn't prepared to hear and apparently the basic facts regarding werewolf social interactions were among these things.

"You're clever and sweet and very goodlooking," she told him seriously. "And you're only dangerous one night a month. Look at Andrew Grapple: honestly, he's a bad bet any night of the month."

Grapple was the Ravenclaw keeper, and his girlfriends did seem to end up with suspicious bruises, but that never seemed to stop the stream of girls through his bed.

"Grapple might bruise you, but he wouldn't rip you limb from limb Lily! You just don't get it!"

Lily shook her head at him, her vivid hair bouncing to frame her face. "No, Remus, you don't get it. Are you seriously not gay? Because you're pants at taking a hint."

She leaned over into his space and licked his lower lip as he stared at her in utter shock.

"If I'm not your type, Remus, it would be polite to tell me now," she prompted him. Despite her bold words and actions she was taut as a bowstring. She really meant it!

"You're Prongs' girl," he said weakly and saw the shaft strike home.

Her tone was bleak. "Not any more."

"Lily - you're not really over him. Do you think I don't know that? In the end, you'll forgive him because he loves you, and he'll never, never, never be so stupid again."

Lily lifted her chin. "I don't know that I will forgive him. And I am not giving him my virginity. He's lost that privilege."

"So it would be revenge on him?"

Lily flinched. "No! It's not like that. God, Remus, why do you have to be so loyal to that prat? I'm not going to forgive him - or at least I'm not going to trust him enough to go out with him again."

Remus thought she believed it. He almost believed it himself, but somewhere deep in his bones he knew otherwise. She still loved James.

"You're the one who has been there for me this year, Remus. You've kept all my secrets and I want you. Is that so hard to believe?"

Slowly, as if she was afraid of startling him, she settled into his lap. Her fingers combed through his hair, lingering at the nape of his neck, and his eyelids dropped low at the pleasure of her touch.

"Now, James doesn't exist. It's about what you want, Remus. Do you want to go out with me?"

It was stupid, so very stupid, but he answered with the truth, "Yes! Of course!"

God, someone to touch him. Someone to kiss him. And of all the someones, for it to be Lily, so bright and brave and beautiful. She knew him - knew all his secrets - and she wanted him. What hope had he of saying No?

* * *

James winced and withdrew, but Sirius wouldn't leave it alone. He bombarded Remus with a million variations on 'How could you do this to Prongs?' day and night.

Remus tried being rational.

"She's a person, not a possession and she made her own choice."

He tried being irrational.

"Just shut the fuck up or I'll strangle you in your sleep!"

He even tried appealing to James.

"James, please tell him to back off. It's not like I didn't try to talk her out of it."

James said all the right things, but his face was so taut with pain that even Remus could see why Sirius didn't believe him.

Remus cared - he did! - but the sheer bliss of being touched as affectionately and as frequently as Lily touched him made him unable to give her up. Besides, reason was on his side. James had had his chance and blown it. As Lily held his hand in the corridor or snuggled into him in the Common Room Remus felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with body heat.

Pete didn't say much, just watched. One day when they happened to be alone in the dorm for once he broke his silence to ask a question.

"Is she really worth it, Remus? We've been there for you since we were eleven, and you're just throwing that away for a girl?"

Remus looked up at him from his Runes homework. Peter looked uncomfortable, but determined.

"Would you have turned her down, Pete?"

Peter flushed, but held his ground. "There's lots of girls who like you, why did it have to be Lily?"

"She knows what I am, and she doesn't care, Pete!" The awe in his voice must have communicated clearly to Peter, because something shifted behind his face.

"We don't care either," he said, but the condemnation in his voice had given way to frustrated understanding. "There'll be other girls who don't care, don't you see? But you're killing Prongs."

"Do you know why they broke up?"

Peter sat down heavily on the side of his bed facing Remus. "Yeah," he admitted reluctantly. "He told me and Sirius a couple of weeks ago when Sirius was carrying on a bit."

"Well, if it wasn't me it would be someone else. He hurt her, Pete, and she needed me."

Peter dropped his eyes. He sighed. "You can say what you like, Remus. Maybe you're even right, but I dunno... Choosing a girl over the Marauders... How can you justify that?"

Peter didn't mention it again, but he didn't need to: it flared out of his eyes every time he saw Remus with Lily. He must have discussed it with James, though, because one day not long afterwards James grabbed him in a quiet stretch of corridor and choked out, "I'm glad you were there for her, Moony. I know she needed a friend. I'm so sorry..."

Remus stared at him helplessly, and then James unlocked his hands from Remus' sleeve and was gone.

* * *

Despite her bold words and her affectionate touches, Remus didn't think Lily wanted to go too far with him. For the first few weeks, they just cuddled and kissed. Lily transformed the chairs in their private nook into a small couch, which barely fit across the tiny space and it was there that she first took off her jumper and unbuttoned her shirt for him.

He was transfixed at the sight of her bare breasts.

"God, Lily!" She grinned at his shock, sitting in his lap and placing his hands where they had never dared to go. He lifted them, feeling their soft weight in his hands and leaned forward to kiss them, finding how much she loved to have him circle his tongue around her nipple. She smelled so wonderful - clean and sweet, and she tasted of salt and soap. Her breast against his lips and cheek was softer than any skin he had ever touched.

"You're so beautiful, Lil," he said wonderingly. For just an instant her face froze, and he knew who had said that to her last.

Sometimes, he knew, the Marauders even sounded alike. When you share a dorm with someone for that long you develop a common pattern of speech, common ways of thought. James had probably even said it in the same intonation.

Remus winced, suddenly unsure how clearly the boundaries between him and James were drawn inside Lily's head.

She drew him to her fiercely, and he forgot all about it, lost in the wonder of her touch.

* * *

One day Remus looked at Lily and Lily was looking at James. Not for long, but it was the harbinger of things to come. Remus kissed her hard, but he wasn't a fighter really, not when something was as inevitable as this.

That night in their quiet nook above the library, after she had kissed him and stroked him to a desperately conflicted orgasm; after he had used his fingers as she had taught him and supplemented them - as he had wanted to for weeks, but hadn't been brave enough to - with his tongue until she cried out into her fist and shuddered around him, he broke up with her.

She protested a bit, but the shame in her eyes made him wonder if she had been thinking of James as she came for him. It was for the best really.

The others forgave him and Lily made up with James. Remus knew that it was for the best.

He'd only borrowed her for a little while, after all.

He didn't regret a minute of it.