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Not beta-read; don't jinx, although corrective spells are more than welcome to be cast in my direction.

A/N: This one-shot is set sometime previous to HP & The Deathly Hallows. I have to say that I know this wafts in and out of canon... into the sublimely crazy... and back again. But I don't much mind. I wrote this before the Christmas break and didn't have time to put it up then and I can't do much about the weirdness of it without a complete muse-massacre, so it stays as it is. I'm just letting you know so you don't have to tell me all the things that aren't canon: sweetie, my own critic got there before you. I guess the ideas are just fun to play with, though, more than anything else! Anyway, if you read it, I hope you enjoy it! Hugs, Jen.

Everyone Loves Lily

"Our envy of others devours us most of all." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Don't tell me it isn't possible to fall in love with someone for her mind. You can take that look right off your face or just move where I can't see it because I know your type – you never had an original thought in your life and you wouldn't know inspiration if it crawled up your nose and lit a fire. So you have no idea what I'm talking about, not even the slightest idea. Besides, it wasn't just her mind. The whole package was perfect and I loved every inch of her.

I loved the way she sat with her head bent over a book, just so, at the breakfast table, her porridge growing cold while her imagination was lost in Shakespeare or Achievements in Charming. I loved the way her lips parted just that little bit and the tip of pink tongue slipped out when she was concentrating on learning a new spell. Merlin, but she was good at Charms. Good at everything, really, but there was probably never a witch quite like Lily Evans when it came to charmwork. And she was beautiful of course, that goes without saying. But it was her mind that I loved the most.

I don't doubt James would have died laughing if I'd ever told him that. I'm not exactly renowned as the academic type myself, but that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate it in others. And I'm not stupid, just because I wasn't mad about books like Moony was. But I appreciate efficiency in things and watching Lily's smooth mind think was like listening to the purr of a well-functioning motorbike: music to my ears.

Oh, I we all loved her a little. Wormtail would practically wet himself with joy if she so much as spoke to him - sometimes I wondered if he was a bigger fan of her or of James. I guess he must have been delighted in Seventh Year when they'd become an item and he could focus his idolatry on them as a couple. Little scum. As for James... James always fancied her, I think, but at the same time he reckoned, in the beginning, that she was a bit haughty for him and mostly he was too busy chasing skirts that didn't roll their eyes at him and call him an arrogant toe-rag. And Remus? Remus had loved her from the first day we'd arrived at Hogwarts and she'd spoken a few kind words to him. Plus, she accepted him. Bright as a candle, that girl was, and she'd figured out his "furry little problem" before even we Marauders had, and it hadn't fazed her at all; she just pretended she didn't know. It was through Remus really, that I noticed her in the first place and the rest, as they say, is history.

By Forth Year James had started to make eyes at her and she knew it, but she was mostly buried in her studies. And because Remus and even I – grudgingly at first, I'll admit, but he was my best friend – were more inclined to end up in the library with her than James or Peter, the three of us spent a lot of time together that year. It was flattering that she put up with me, since I was incapable of passing endless hours lost in books like Moony could, and invariably ended up sitting there tearing strips off my parchment and throwing it at people but… but I worked harder that year that I ever had before, or afterwards either, come to think of it, to show her that I could be clever too. A hopeless thing to try and achieve, really, but I knew deep down that brains appealed to her. How else could you explain the act that she'd stop in the hall and chatter to that little grease-ball of a Snivellus? Brains had to be the only thing he had going for him. Either way, I figured that intellect appealed to her – like I said, I'm not stupid – and so I worked hard. And I learnt. I learnt about Transfiguration, and Charms and even damned Arithmacy - and I wasn't even taking Arithmancy, she was - and I learnt some of the most boring history known to wizardkind. But most of all, I learnt about Lily.

I learnt that she rocked slightly, without realising it, when she got lost in her study. I learnt that she had the bad habit of chewing the end of her quills which, considering she liked them feathery and fluffy, must have tasted rather like Moony's dinner when he went feral. I learnt that she rested her face against her thumb on her forehead, rather than her whole hand like most people do. I learnt that she had the surprising knack of humming the latest wizard rock from the wireless when she did calculations, and I learnt that she could break off in the middle of reading a complicated text about troll revolts and burst into a peal of laughter about something she'd heard hours earlier. I learnt that she always sighed a tiny little sigh every evening almost exactly ten minutes before she called an end to her study. Yes. I learnt a lot.

I also learnt that she didn't only meet Snivellus in the corridors.

That was something I would probably never have learnt if I hadn't come down from a horrible cold (which was what you got for snogging Hufflepuff girls behind the greenhouses, I suppose) and had been forbidden from watching James's Quidditch practise like I usually did. Confined indoors and with all the other Marauders out of reach, I'd gravitated towards the library in the vague hope that she might be there. And she was.

But not only. I couldn't believe it when I saw her there, so close to him at the table, their heads bent over a manuscript, wonderful red hair mingling with greasy manky black, and his fingers playing almost absently with her free hand as they worked.

It wasn't possible.

It wasn't bloody possible.

How could she be there, in the library, where I'd thought she only studied with Moony and me, or Margaret perhaps, there, in the library, with Snape? And like that? She'd never studied like that with us, darting him little smiles as she worked and him, who I hadn't thought even knew what a smile was, sending fleeting little grins right back?

I suppose I should ask for forgiveness for what I did then. I suppose I should have confronted them and – well – actually, I suppose I should have minded my own business, really. I bet that's what Remus would have done: just smiled and wandered away, his tatty robes swaying mournfully around him as he turned. But not me. I was never as wise as Moony. I was just full of anger, resentment that she could be sharing her mind, which I had come to imagine as our private property somehow, with him of all people and – and I was furious at her, but I worshipped her, and so my fury deflected onto him.

Perhaps I wasn't always a very nice person when I was young. But then, who was?

It was me who told James. That was why he strung Snivellus upside down that June, and Merlin's beard did that scene make me happy. It's strange though. You never imagine something as silly as that could have such repercussions but then, when Harry told me... It's sobering to realise that you are to blame for the death of the woman you loved. Snape, I imagine, blames himself for it, now that I know the rest of the story. Lily's much more open here than she was there; of course she doesn't really blame any of us. But then she always was a bit too saint-like for her own good. And so it was, as far as I can see, me who made him what he was in the end and thus….

Not that I can bring myself to like the man, not even now, on this side of the veil, where none of it matters that much anymore. But it makes you think, it really does.

It's my biggest complaint about here, really.

Too much time for thinking…