It wasn't peculiar that either of them should find the other at their window on a summer night.

Lily, when she would steal away to Spinner's End, would tap the glass of Severus's bedroom window impatiently, looking over her shoulder with worry wrinkling her features at the sound of stray dogs barking and visages of shadows stretching and yawning in her direction. Inside there was yelling, always some horrible yelling. Sometimes she would see Tobias Snape sauntering through Severus's room, engaged in whatever mental or physical torture struck him the most amusing on that particular night - Lily holds her hand over her mouth on these occasions, her back pressed round the wall of the window, having to hear Severus hit the floor or his belonging go shattering or furniture scraping hard from force. Then she would tap. Quick, urgent, wanting him to see her before she lost her will and fled from the futility of horrors she couldn't change. He would look up from his apathetic flounce across the bed, he would look up while picking up a torn book, he would look up with his bloodied nose and his lanky limbs spread dazed across the floor, and there was always such thankfulness that she had come.

.

When Severus went to Lily's home he would stare into the window until she noticed him; he would press his hands against the white clapboards of her windowsill and get lost in the hazy warm yellow light from inside, the faint smell of something nice cooking in the family's kitchen. Lily was usually splayed across the floor reading a book, and he could watch her for an hour before she would even noticed him. Sometimes she was at her vanity table, combing out her long red hair or considering her wand or writing madly in her journal with softly changing facial expressions that Severus would watch adamantly. When she would finally notice him (usually by chance glance or because Severus had crunched a stick in shifting around) she would jump, she always jumped, and then she would give him an admonishing look and open up the window and drag him inside by his arms.