Proud as Lily was of her truly admirable skills at girl detectiving, she was slightly annoyed that in the course of her duties she had been forced to ally herself with an annoying git like James Potter.

To tell the truth, in the library when he'd been abashed and arguing fervently in defense of his best friends she'd found him slightly endearing. Sweet, even. Now that he'd regained his composure and was strutting around with his chest puffed out, giving her a countdown of the ten greatest Quidditch plays ever made by him, she was beginning to regret ever including him in her investigation.

He was just finishing #3 in the countdown, in which he scooped up and saved a falling baby with the Quaffle in one hand and scored the winning goal seconds later, when they turned the corner and ran into a very dismal-looking Sirius.

"Oi, Padfoot," James said, raising his hand up in the air.

Sirius raised his own and slapped James's palm half-heartedly. He had a faraway glaze in his eyes, staring directly between James and Lily's shoulders, and she didn't even think he'd noticed she was there yet.

"How are things, mate?" James asked, sticking his hands deep in his pockets and furrowing his brow.

"Huh, oh... Nothing. Hello, Lily." Sirius perked up slightly and looked at Lily with a twisted-lipped expression that could in no way be considered a smile.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw James shoot her a confused look.

Clearly he couldn't help himself for long, though. "Lily and I were just strolling through the castle, arm in arm, taking in the scenery, and-" Lily jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

Sirius couldn't seem to manage any other reaction than to raise one eyebrow half-an-inch.

"Look, Black, Potter's delusions aside, we - well, I-" She revised her words in response to a panicked little throat clearing by James. "Need to talk to you."

"About..."

"I think you know what about."

Sirius snorted and looked at James skeptically. James cleared his throat again and shrugged. "It's uh... It's nothing, just trying to put Lily's mind at ease." He made a circle motion with his finger by his ear that she was sure he didn't think she would see. But she could let that one go for the greater good.

"This is ridiculous," Sirius muttered. Then he fixated his gaze on Lily. "If you're going to accuse me of trying to kill Snape..." He trailed off looking up to the ceiling and sighing, his mouth hanging open and his jaw working up and down.

"I just want to get some things straight, but I think it would be more, comfortable for everyone if we didn't do this in the middle of the hallway," Lily hissed.

"This is absurd. Prongs, I know you're bursting to fuck this bint, but I didn't think you'd sell out your own best friend to do so."

"Pads, I wasn't-" He grabbed Sirius's arm and pulled him closer. "Look, I know you didn't do this, so just tell her that. Just tell her what you were doing last night."

Sirius shook his arm free. "I don't have to justify myself to her - or to you, for that matter. It won't do any good to try and convince her anyway. She's already got her mind made up, I think."

"My mind's not made up on anything, Black-"

"There it is again. Black, Black, Black! That's all anyone can ever say to me. I thought you of all people would understand that's not right, Lily."

"You cannot honestly pretend the only reason I would suspect you in this is because you're a Black," Lily scoffed.

"But it helps, doesn't it? I don't see you pointing the finger at James over here."

Lily had to physically force herself not stomp her foot impetuously. "Look, someone tried to kill my friend, and I want to know who and why. Can't you just help me out?"

"I don't know anything about it," he said. "And unless you've got a good reason why you think I would..." He trailed off leadingly.

"You hate him!" Lily almost screamed.

"That's not proof, Lily, everyone hates him," James said under his breath.

"Okay, Evans, I've got some advice for you: next time you want to accuse someone of attempted murder, you might want to get some evidence first," Sirius said, pushing James in the chest so he stumbled back a step and shoving past Lily with his shoulder.

Lily felt her face growing red as she listened to his footsteps disappearing down the corridor. When she felt James put his hand on her elbow, she jerked away and whirled on him.

"Fat lot of help you were, you great prat. Calling me crazy made him want to cooperate, I'm sure."

"Oh, come on, Lily, you can't blame me. Sirius is just angry - and rightfully so - because you're accusing him of something he didn't do."

"Oh, yeah right! He did it all right; now he's just trying to scare me off with this 'prejudice' shit. Well, he's right about something. I'm going to go get that evidence and then we'll see who's 'prejudiced'."

"How can you be so sure he did it? I'll say it again: a lot of people hate Snape."

"You two most of all! You hate all Slytherins. You're the prejudiced ones."

James paused to take a deep breath and put his hand to his forehead. "I don't know what to say, Lily. I want to help you, I really do, but I can see you're deadset on blaming my best friend for something he didn't do."

Lily clenched her jaw. "I'll do it by myself, then. If I'm the only one who doesn't hate Severus Snape - If everyone else wants to protect Sirius Black then fine. I'll do it by myself."

James just shook his head, and Lily shot one last blistering look at him before turning on her heel and disappearing down the hallway.

Collecting evidence turned out to be a tiring and thankless task. She visited the Quidditch pitch and carefully examined the spot in the stands where the railing had broken when someone pushed Severus off. There wasn't much to see. Splintered wood. The railing hanging above the pitch waved back and forth in the wind (which was considerable at such a high altitude), creaking.

She inquired with Madam Hooch about the Quidditch practice schedule. The night of the "accident", as Hooch referred to it, was Slytherin's practice day. That didn't help much. Though Lily had never known Severus to be a big Quidditch fan, hanging out at the pitch to watch your House's team practice was a popular activity across the board. Even Severus Snape had some friends.

She sighed. Not that she would really know what was going on with him recently. They were friends - that was true. In the past tense. They'd had some differences, and she was beginning to think he'd been in the right in all – well, many of - those arguments after all.

She nudged the broken railing with her toe and heard the wood still connecting it to the stands splintering even more.

She was no closer to getting any information about Sirius than she had been at that horrific failure of a confrontation with that blundering idiot Potter, and if anyone else knew where he'd been that night, they certainly weren't telling. So far she knew where he wasn't: the library, Gryffindor Tower, the Slytherin dungeons, the hospital wing, and Madam Hooch had just finished telling her she hadn't seen him on the pitch that evening, but that she had left around 6:00, before Slytherin was even done with their practice.

She reckoned her next move ought to be interviewing some Slytherin Quidditch players, but didn't that sound absolutely awful? She frowned. What she'd really like to do was take the weekend off and take advantage of the upcoming Hogsmeade trip to relax and have a good time. But that wasn't really fair, was it? With Severus lying unconscious in the hospital wing?

Some people - she wouldn't name names, but there were some girls up in Gryffindor Tower who wouldn't be winning any awards for investigative fortitude any time soon - suggested she should just give it up and wait until Severus came to. He'd surely be able to tell everyone what happened, and that seemed to be the course of action the administration had adopted.

They didn't understand.

For Lily, it wasn't about just solving a crime. When Severus woke up, she wanted him to know someone had been trying. She thought he'd appreciate it. Even if they couldn't be friends like they used to be – and Lily knew, still, they would never been like that again – she still cared. She wanted him to know that.

Well, but what better place to get the Slytherin Quidditch players alone without arousing suspicion that the Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade?

That weekend, she managed to lose her girlfriends among the sales rack at a popular new boutique on the High Street. She had seen a cluster of upperclassmen Slytherins trundling into the Three Broomsticks minutes earlier, and now she hurried over, shopping bags in hand, hoping she hadn't missed them.

She still wasn't quite sure what she was going to do, or how to get in the middle of them, but she trusted her detective's instincts.

Unfortunately, when she walked in, accompanied by a swirl of leaves, her detective's instincts were unable to help her locate a half-dozen Slytherins who were decidedly absent from the room. She scowled and dropped her shopping bags by a barstool. "A butterbeer, please, Rosmerta," she said dejectedly.

"What's the matter, Miss Lily?" Rosmerta asked, plunking the foaming butterbeer down in front of her. "Can't be romance woes, that James Potter was in here not ten minutes ago, still talking up a storm about you."

"Was Sirius Black with him?"

"Well, naturally. Although, Sirius seemed a little down, today, too. Didn't even try to get me to bend over the bar once," she said, smirking and putting her hand on her hitched hip.

"That's strange," Lily muttered, mostly to herself, but she didn't have the energy to push the questions anymore.

"I should say so. Eventually James got a little nonplussed, too. They went to a private room to talk - I told them they could, those things are always open."

"Oh, which one?" Lily asked, not even thinking about propriety before leaning forward excitedly on her stool.

Rosmerta drew back a little bit, her brow furrowed.

"It's okay – I - I think I know what they're talking about. I've been meaning to talk to them, actually."

"Well, they're in the back room by the exit," Rosmerta said, pointing tentatively, with her elbow bent, as though she was unsure she was doing the right thing.

"Thanks!" Lily jumped up, grabbing her bags but leaving her full butterbeer on the bar with foam still running down the sides.

She was just about to crouch down in front of the keyhole when the door swung open and Sirius and James stepped out, both looking particularly grim.

"Hi!" Lily said nervously, straightening up. "How about a butterbeer?"

Sirius's lip curled and he sidestepped Lily without a word and walked back into the main room.

James smiled sheepishly. "We were just talking about Quidditch, Lily, I - I mean, Quidditch strategy, you know, very private, but I - I would take that butterbeer if you're still offering."

Lily rolled her eyes and hit him in the leg with one of her shopping bags. "Moron!" She pushed past him and threw open the back exit, then slammed it behind her, the leaves stirring around her ankles.

"Evans." She heard a voice off to the side and spun towards it.

"Rosier," she said, narrowing her eyes.

Evan Rosier was leaning against a small birch tree, an outlier from the woods surrounding Hogsmeade. Smoke was curling out of the corners of his mouth.

"How's the investigation going?" he asked, smiling in a completely unfriendly way. "And don't look so surprised - everyone knows what you're doing."

"And why are you skulking around the back of the Three Broomsticks," she said hotly.

He shrugged, shaking the ash off the end of his cigarette.

"Well, as much as I would love to continue this little chat, I try to spend as little time in dark alleys with creeps as possible." She threw her bags over her shoulder and began to walk off.

"Wait, Evans," Rosier said, though he didn't move an inch to hold her back. She didn't know why she stopped - morbid curiosity, maybe, or the sense of intrigue. Rosier looked and acted like he belonged in a detective novel, anyway. His dark clothes and narrow, glittering eyes, his smoking cigarette - all he really needed was a trench coat and the cover of darkness. In fact, if Lily were a betting woman, she would have staked money on Rosier having planned this little scene out.

She stopped and turned around. "What?"

"I just want to help you, Evans. I know you're following Sirius Black around like a shadow-"

"Well, I really don't think that's-"

"And you're not finding anything on him, because you're not going to find anything."

"Oh yeah? How do you know?"

"Because you've got the wrong Black."

She stared at him intently for a moment. "You mean Regulus."

"Well, naturally."

"Why in the world are you telling me? Aren't you friends, or something?"

"Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. But aren't I allowed to have a conscience?"

"No, I know you don't have a conscience," Lily said. The last she'd heard of Rosier's hi-jinks, he'd been organizing duels between second years and charging admittance fees.

Rosier shrugged again and tossed his cigarette butt in the air, vanishing it before it hit the ground. "Maybe I'm turning over a new leaf," he said, sliding his wand back into the pocket of his trousers.

"Forgive me if I find that hard to believe."

"Well." Rosier crossed his arms over his chest. "Regardless of personal motivations on my part, I have evidence."

"Yeah, and what do you want from me for it?" She mirrored his pose, but it may have been difficult to appear like she meant business holding a couple of big flowery shopping bags.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." He smiled in a way that made it look like he was showing off his fangs.

"Oh yeah?"

"Well, are you interested or not?"

"Why don't you go to Dumbledore?"

"Evans, if you're going to continue to ask these trivial and unnecessary questions, we're really not going to get anywhere here."

"Fine. What is it?"

"Well. As I'm sure you know, Reg is the Seeker for the Slytherin Quidditch team."

"Yeah." Actually, the thought had somehow slipped her mind - that she hadn't connected the idea that Sirius's brother was on the Slytherin team… it was almost like some kind of subconscious willful blindness.

"So that puts him on the Quidditch pitch right before the incident, anyway."

"Right, along with probably twenty other Slytherins."

"Okay, well, there's more. Now, I'm his best mate, as you so astutely observe. The two of us had detention scrubbing the third floor prefects' bathroom with toothbrushes right after Quidditch practice. I was there from 7:00 to fucking midnight. I would've been done a lot earlier, but thing is, Reg never showed. You can ask McGonagall about it. I thought maybe he skived off because he was tired after practice, but when I got back to the room, no Regulus. I don't know exactly when he came in because I was exhausted from cleaning and passed out as soon as I got my shoes off. But here's where it gets interesting: next day, he's got long scratches down his forearms, like from fingernails. Like someone was trying to hold onto his forearms and tore the skin sliding off. They were pretty deep, and I told him to go to the hospital wing, but he wouldn't do it. Tried to heal them himself, but he wasn't very successful. They're still there."

"Where is he?" she asked evenly, holding her fingers to her lips and staring at the ground between them.

"Well, since he skived off the detention, McGonagall wouldn't let him come to Hogsmeade. I think he's spreading manure in the herbology gardens right about now."

"Why would he do it?"

Rosier shrugged, still grinning. "He's angry at Sirius. He's always saying how it sure was easy for Sirius to forget who his real brother was. How he found a new one just like that." Rosier snapped his fingers. "I think he wanted to frame him. You know, to get back at him for walking out. Plus he hates Snape as much as anyone else. Two birds with one stone, you know."

Lily turned around wordlessly and began the long walk back to the castle.

"Good luck, Evans!" Rosier called after her.

A/n: Okay first off so annoying writing Lily Evans and Evan Rosier in the same scene. Sorry if it is at all confusing I tried to stick to Evan's last name because of it.

Aaaaand posting this for you guys b/c Reprehensible has kind of stalled out (whoops) and I prob won't be ready with the next part of TLYL for a couple of days.

Who was I kidding with that first part, anyway? Obvi Regulus was going to show up at some point I am so predictable.