Disclaimer: I'm not JKR, or Severus wouldn't have died. Oh well. That's why we're here! (At least, that's why I'm here.)

A/N: Should I note that everything from Eileen's backstory that is not corroborated by the oracle of the Internet was totes made up by me? So noted!

Boxing Day, December 26, 1976

Lily jabbed her elbow into someone's back, her knee between two people's hips, and shoved through the gap that opened up. Her prize was almost torn out of her grip when it caught on some woman's handbag, but she twisted free without tearing it, darted around an overflowing shopping cart, and slipped ahead of a pair of quarreling girls into the checkout queue.

"Just what you need to take your mind off the most depressing Christmas in the history of time," she said under her breath, clutching the jumper to her chest.

Boxing Day sales. She'd been so wound up last Christmas, what with trying to keep Sirius from burning her house down as he tried to distract James from mournful thoughts, and trying to distract James alongside him, and being a brand new mum with a brand new baby, and bearing out the war as it grew darker, that she hadn't gone to a single sale. When really, she should have gone to all of them, because there was something therapeutic about kicking and elbowing perfect strangers, and snarling at them, and being expected to shove everything. She hadn't even needed stinging hexes to get people's paws off her things. That would've been the easy way out, anyway. She wanted this to be tough. Snarling over marked-down cashmere meant not having to think. It was rather fun, in a nasty sort of way.

She hauled cash out of her billfold, wondering whether Sev would let loose at one of these things or go so stiff she'd have to prop him on a dolly to get him out the door. She thought Sev would appreciate the chance to unleash on someone . . . but really, he would probably just get a Leglimency migraine from all the emotions running manic through the air and collapse. Lily didn't want another trip to the hospital.

Besides, if she'd brought him, he'd have pitched a fit at her buying him a jumper. And a coat. Somehow she didn't think grown-up Sev was going to be any less difficult about "hand-outs."

Well, grown-up Lily knew how to be difficult, too. Severus was going to get some clothes that fit. He could wear them or toss them in the river, but he was going to get them. And if he knew what was good for him, he'd take the wear-them option.

She sent a death glare at an old lady trying to shove her shopping cart into Lily's ribs in order to winch her out of the line, and squeezed forward through the gap. She'd forgotten the lovely thinness of being sixteen.

Five minutes later, Lily stumbled out of the crowd, down the aisle toward the exit, her treasure bag in hand. It seemed safer to clutch it across her chest, so she did, going out the sliding doors into the car park and the cold. The sun had timidly decided to come out that morning, although it was spending long periods of time hiding behind the clouds. It was acting like Sev had the one time Lily had dragged him to a Slug Club party. But the clouds were thin and blowing away in streaks, leaving the sky patched with wintry blue. Lily had bought a cashmere cardigan for herself in that shade.

The inside of the store had been so hot, she was glad she had worn layers that could be stripped away. Her coat and cardigan hung open, and a brisk chill was now threading past the weave of her thin blouse. It felt lovely. She bet her cheeks were bright red.

She stood for a moment on the edge of the car park, closed her eyes and just breathed. The air smelled only faintly of exhaust, not of mist tinted by fear; dementor mist. She could walk anywhere she wished, go anywhere she wanted, because she didn't have to worry about the Dark Lord finding her, or any Death Eaters in their stupid, frightening masks. All that was in the past; the future.

She took the route home past the bakery, stopping to get herself an iced bun to eat. How long had it been since she could just do that? She couldn't even remember. Iced buns had been a thing of the past, until the past became the present, the present the future.

She got Severus a petit-four, hoping he still liked them, and checked her watch. Just enough time to get to the park.

She had all but ordered Severus to meet her there at noon. He had given her a look she couldn't read—some strange combination of bone-deep weariness, irony, and dim amusement—and said, "As you wish."

Lily had a Plan. She wasn't going to set foot in that house again with his horrible mother; she had a very strong idea that her husband's death wouldn't make Mrs. Snape forget she had forbidden Lily to darken her doorstep if they each lived to be two hundred. She and Sev weren't about to continue meeting all holiday in the frozen play park. The only other option was to gain Severus' entrance to her house, and she was fairly confident she could do this. It would require a certain sickening playing off his father's death, but she could stomach that if the alternative was Sev alone with that woman in that dark, cheerless, drafty house.

I can't believe Sev grew up with that woman, she thought, sucking a bit of icing off her finger. She's the vilest person I've ever met. Voldemort could've recruited her to keep the Death Eaters in line. I bet he was a lark to Sev, after growing up with her for a mum.

She hadn't missed Severus' tension, or the way he'd pushed her behind him. His breathing had hitched when his mother started tapping her wand against her hip.

Severus had never once told her his mother was like that. Oh, Lily had met her at the train station every year and been absolutely ignored, but she'd thought that was just the way Mrs. Snape was to strangers in public. But in private she was worse. She was literally as bad as Death Eaters, and all she had to do was stand there and tap her wand. Forget masks; if she'd shown up on the battlefield in that lilac robe, wand out, the Order would have fled from her like a pack of frightened squirrels, Lily in the lead.

All Severus had ever told her was his mother came from a pure-blood family, the Princes. Lily had looked them up once out of curiosity, in a book the Hogwarts library kept called Annals of Magickal Families. The Princes had an entry lengthier than she would have expected—it was just odd somehow, to think of awkward, moody Sev as part of a distinguished pure-blood family going back to the Reformation—but most of it meant nothing to Lily; she figured you had to be a pure-blood to understand it. The only reference she recognized was the Prince family's long-standing allegiance to Slytherin and blood-purity. But the last line had stood out to her: The most recent descendants of this line are daughter Eileen, by Prospero's first marriage to Emily Marlowe, and sons Duncan and Eleazar, by his second wife, Flavia Black. Prospero recognizes no grandchildren to this date.

All very stuffy and proper. And then Eileen Prince had married a Muggle and wound down her days on a poverty-stricken street in a North England mill town. How on earth had that happened? That terrifying woman, in the robe with the embroidery that made Lily's fingers ache, it was so intricate, her eyes cold and cruel as she looked at her son . . .

Lily could never imagine looking at her baby like that. She just couldn't.

She climbed the stairs to the play park. A couple of children were there this time, bundled so thickly in coats they looked like puffer fish. Their mothers stood chatting with their arms tucked tight across their chests, stamping their feet to keep warm. "Five more minutes!" one of them shouted at the babies, and her friend said, "Oh, make it two, I'm freezing to death out here."

Great, Lily thought, watching one of the children try to haul itself onto a swing. Just what I need a reminder of. Don't cry out here, your tears will turn to icicles.

But the feelings of longing, of grief, beat at the inside of her heart like a thousand birds straining to get free. In those unoccupied moments in her mum's house, she'd found herself hating Petunia for keeping everything so clean—how she would have loved to be able to take a scrub brush and a bucket and savage all the kitchen tiles free of grout—something, anything, to take her mind off a house barren of her baby's laughter—

"If I'd thought anyone would be daft enough to take their spawn out in this weather, I'd have suggested another meeting place."

Lily felt her frozen cheeks ache as she smiled in spite of everything. She turned to Sev. As usual, he was hunching, although this time he could blame it on the cold. His coat was a disgrace to coats everywhere. She knew he'd had to get it from the second-hand shop and done the best he could, but it couldn't keep him warm.

His eyes were on the children, but everything about him said "wary lest they come this way."

"You weren't waiting for me, were you?" she asked, glancing at her watch to be sure. Her voice shook. Shit.

"It's of no consequence," he said quietly, his dark eyes skating over her face and then away, squinting in the sunlight. "I was early."

He followed her away from the park, down the concrete steps to her street. She had no idea if she should ask—if he would want her to—but she said, "How's . . . how's your mum?"

"Making arrangements. She's even put on black. For a moment, I thought she must have run out of clothes to wear and stolen one of my school robes while the laundry washed."

"Well, he was her husband," Lily said, but timidly, because she couldn't believe that woman could love anyone. And then it occurred to her that she was a widow, too—but no—she wasn't—she wasn't, because James was here, somewhere, still alive somewhere, and Tobias Snape was really, completely gone.

James was—

"...more to do with tradition," Sev was saying as she wrenched her attention back to him. "She was raised to act a certain way at certain times. Her husband has died; she must observe the tradition of mourning." Severus wasn't looking at Lily, but off to the side, as if this conversation was hardly interesting. But his voice was empty. She remembered when he'd taught her about Occlumency theories, so excited he'd been to learn it, because it would mean he could stop dropping into people's heads, could distance himself from unhappiness.

Lily wondered if you really could do that. It seemed more like unhappiness would just wait until you could notice it again.

A sudden unnerving thought assailed her. "You're not going to move, are you?"

"My mother will move in with a cousin of hers who's mentally unwell."

"Are you—are you going with her?"

"No. She'll leave the house with me." He stopped walking, so she stopped with him.

"What?" she asked, looking at his face, then up and down the empty street.

"I doubt your mother wants to see you walking with me. If you're going home—"

"Eventually." She set the shopping bag down on the ground and pulled the jumper out of it. "This is for you," she said, shoving it at his chest in the hopes that he'd take it out of reflex. He just looked down at it, infuriating boy—man.

"I'm quite sure I'm not going to take that," he said.

"Come on, Sev! That one I bought you last year doesn't fit anymore. This is a replacement." When he just narrowed his eyes at her, she said, "I'm not taking it back, whatever you do. But I guess if you won't take it, I can wear it around the house, sighing that it's yours and it's all I have left of you—did you know Mum still thinks you got me sprogged up and I lost the baby?"

An interesting range of emotion's flitted across Severus' face, some so subtle Lily didn't know what they were. The most prominent was horror. "If you weren't such a wretched liar," he said vehemently, but he let her push the jumper into his arms.

Lily smiled sweetly at him, but he might have missed it, because he was giving the jumper a vicious scowl. "It's black, I thought you'd like it."

"I hate colors," he muttered, which confirmed that he did like it.

"Good," she said, trying for cheerful. "And I got it on sale, so don't go fretting that it cost my life's savings or anything. Hurry up, put it on, you look like an ice lolly."

"If I remove my coat to put this on, I will be colder," he pointed out; just to be difficult, she was certain.

"For two seconds, you big baby. Go on!"

He did, but in a very put-upon manner. She couldn't believe he was wearing nothing but a thermal shirt under his too-thin coat, but she managed not to say anything about it, mostly because she needed the time to figure out a way to broach the coat . . .

And Sev's thermal was too short, too, because it rode up as he raised his arms to slip on the jumper. She found her gaze lingering on the trail of hair on his stomach, and then wrenched her eyes away, feeling like a bit of a great pervert, because Severus looked sixteen. Well, seventeen almost, but that was splitting hairs—oh no, she shouldn't think of hairs. She was twenty-one inside, even if she looked sixteen and Sev was really thirty-eight.

She frowned slightly. She must seem really immature to him . . . if he'd lived seventeen more years than she had, he must have had a ton of experiences that she hadn't . . .

She made herself focus. "Good," she said, looking him over as he tugged the sleeves down past his wrists, "it fits. I had to eyeball it—glad to know I've got one skill to market in my bright new future."

Severus was giving her a closed-off, unreadable look that Lily couldn't connect to anything she'd just said. Did he think she was being flippant? Flippant had always been a difficult thing to practice around Sev, and a grown-up Sev . . .

Oh, Lord, if she started second-guessing every one of his reactions, she would drive herself to drink. Severus had been hard to figure out when she'd been close to him, and he'd had twenty-two years apart from her to turn into a whole other person.

"Thank you," he said, with as much gravity as if she'd just given him her firstborn child. Although his expression at being handed a baby—especially her actual firstborn, Harry—would probably have been a lot more horrified. She wondered what he'd been like around Harry. Last night, everything he had told her about Harry had been wiped free of emotion.

"You're welcome," she said, smiling. Was there anyone else in the world who gave him things? You are one of only two people who has honestly liked me . . . most people loathe me . . .

"Lily," he said, in a voice remarkably like patience. "Whatever you want to ask me, you may ask me."

"What?" she said, blinking.

"If I were to say 'your face is an open book,' it would be an understatement. A closer comparison would be sky-writing. What is it?"

"I don't want to ask anything—" His look was openly sardonic. "Okay, I do, so stop looking so sarcastic—it's not that I—oh, sod it, I bought you a coat! Don't freak."

Severus blinked and then peered down into the bag where she was pointing. "Very considerate. I hope you shoplifted it, because there is no way I am taking a coat you paid for."

"No shoplifting, but I did cosh an old lady and steal it out of her cart in the car park."

"If that were true, I'd take it. Even if you'd stolen it off the back of a Death Eater. But there's no reason for you to—"

"There is, Sev, because you don't take care of yourself and you never have."

His face had gone cold and remote. "I've taken care of myself for a great many years," he said. His tone made her feel small and wretched.

"I know," she said quietly. "Which is why you should let me help."

He folded his arms tight across his chest, as if trapping his ratty old coat against himself in preparation for her diving at him and stripping it off. A militant sort of stubbornness had stolen onto his face. Inwardly, Lily sighed, but she was glad to see it all the same: pig-headed, abrasive Severus was better than empty Severus, or cold and biting Severus. Even though they were all a part of Severus . . .

"From a logical standpoint," he said in a voice that sounded distinctly snitty, "it's irrational for me to accept a coat that I will hardly wear. This is the first time since I was ten that I've been at home when it was cold, and at Hogwarts I have always worn robes."

"Right, and until then you're here, and you're going to bloody freeze before December 31st rolls around and you do whatever it is you can't remember you came back to do. I'm not returning it, Severus. We can fight about it until you wear it, or you can wear it and save us the fight."

"Wear it yourself," he said, sounding, for a moment, very much sixteen years old.

"I can't, you great git, it won't fit me."

He nicked it from the bag, holding it up to her. "It will."

"It's obviously a man's coat, Sev."

"Women are permitted to wear men's clothing. It's only the reverse that's a problem." She took note of the way he carefully folded it up before tucking it back into the bag. "I prefer the fight to the coat, thank you."

Lily growled. He did not look perturbed. Damn him! James had always balked when she growled.

"Fine! You'll get a fight," she warned, picking up the bag. Severus only looked politely interested. Git! She would not laugh. "Come on, it's lunch time." She grabbed him and tried to pull him toward her house, but he must have had steel beams installed in his legs because he didn't move a centimetre.

"Are you seriously suggesting I go eat at your house? That old woman must have coshed you." But he didn't pull his arm away. She could feel his tension through the layers of his clothes, could see him making a fist in his coat pocket. She wouldn't have thought the prospect of eating with her family would unnerve him so much. He had seemed to take everything in stride on Christmas Eve . . .

Seemed to, Lily. You're talking about a man who can shut off his emotions at will. You idiot. No one says "Everyone loathes me" and doesn't care.

"I have a cunning plan," she assured him. His expression was hilariously skeptical. She figured she should be offended, but she couldn't be.

"I hope it's more cunning than your plan to floss with stringweed," he said.

"Trust you to remember that," she muttered. "Roadkill is more cunning than that plan. This plan is cunning like a fox, a very energetic and crafty one. It's very . . . Slytherin-y."

"Our house symbol is the snake, not the fox."

"Well, maybe you should consider changing it, then. Snakes have a bad rep, poor little things."

"Foxes don't have one much better," he said dryly. "What is this plan you—misguidedly, I am sure—believe is cunning?"

"Don't get angry with me, okay?" she said, as a sudden worry struck her that she was being very naïve about everything to do with Sev. He couldn't be as . . . blasé about his father's death as he'd led her to believe, could he? "I just thought . . . since, you know, so much bad stuff is going on . . . " She took a deep breath, willing herself not to be a coward and squeeze her eyes shut for this part. "If we told my mum your dad's died, I'm sure she'll let you come over."

There was a silence. A long, very silent one. Lily realized she was squinting her eyes and forced them all the way open. Then she forced them to look up at him. But he didn't look disgusted or furious; on the contrary, his expression was rather . . . measuring. A long, measuring look.

"That is fairly Slytherin," he said, his voice neutral again. Lily saw that at some point she had slid her hand down to grab his.

"You can tell me it's dumb as roadkill," she sighed. "It's not actually any good, is it? I just thought—"

"From an objective standpoint, it has a plausible chance of working. You would know your mother better than I to judge its effect subjectively."

Severus had really learned how to talk like a Victorian Potions textbook.

"I think it'll work. I haven't told her yet why I was out so late—she was pretty mad at me about that, but I think—if she knows—it will . . . make things better."

"You mean she won't scream and attack me if I come in the front door," he said with a dark shrewdness, and more accuracy than Lily liked. She felt herself blushing. He flicked his head to the side, as though shaking it 'no.' "For many years I have been a Death Eater. I have spent a great deal of effort learning how to . . . unsettle."

And Lily would just bet he didn't have to look much further than his own sitting-room for inspiration. "Will you come, then?"

He answered, but at the same moment she sneezed and didn't hear, because the power of her sneeze had just blown her ears off the sides of her head.

A snowy white handkerchief fluttered in front of her. She groped it into her hand and blew her nose.

"Was that a flock of geese flying overhead?" Severus asked.

"Oh, shut it," she sniffled, wiping at her eyes, which had teared up. "I didn't know you carried handkerchiefs."

"I don't."

"You conjured it?" She was impressed; if she hadn't know better, she'd have thought it came from Harrod's. The fine white lawn looked like it belonged in the suit pocket of a bank manager. She stuffed it into her pocket, thinking that conjured or not, it was worth keeping.

"What was it you said when I was sneezing, blasting off my own ears and not hearing you?"

"I said if your mother calls the Muggle police, I can at least dive out the window and Apparate."

Her cunning plan to finagle Severus into her mother's good graces hit its first snag when they walked in the front door and Petunia screamed, "Why have you brought that dreadful boy back here!" and Lily yelled back, "His father's just died, you heartless cow, why don't you think of someone except yourself for once!"

Of course, Russians probably heard them in Moscow, so naturally Mum did, too. Especially since she had been coming down the stairs when the front door opened. She delivered a brief soliloquy on the importance of manners in front of guests, and then looked at Severus, who was standing againgst the door with the air of a man expecting to be thrown out on his ear. Another long, very silent silence ensued.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Severus," Mum said at last in a very quiet voice.

"He's in a better place," Severus said. Lily wondered if she was the only one who heard the touch of bitterness in his voice.

Petunia was as happy as a wet cat with brambles in its tail at the prospect of Severus' staying for lunch, and shut herself up in the kitchen. While the scent of onion soup threaded its way through the house, Mum, Lily and Sev sat in the sitting-room making excruciating conversation. Severus was perfectly polite and monosyllabic, Mum grave and distant in her compassion, and Lily full of the jitters. She couldn't stop jiggling her leg. Also, that sneeze had really knocked her up; she kept pulling Severus' handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her nose.

When they sat down to table for soup and bread, Petunia parked herself at the furthest end and opposite side from Severus, and Mum sat with her eldest daughter. Lily hoped it was just from solidarity.

There wasn't a lot of talking, just the chink of their silverware on ceramic. Lily was just glad there wasn't any more screaming. Yet.

The violent urge to sneeze gave her a split second's warning, just enough time to grab her napkin and thrust her face into it. That time, when she came up for air, she felt dizzy. "Eurgh," she said.

"Goodness," Mum said. "Are you all right, dear?"

"I think so," Lily said thickly, although she wasn't so sure. She blew her nose into her napkin, but her sinuses seemed to have suddenly developed an unlimited supply of mucus. "Oh, damn."

"You've caught a cold," Severus told her in no uncertain terms, "from running around in the sleet without an umbrella or even a hat—who is it who can't take care of themselves?"

"Oh, shut it, I bet you'll be coming up with a flu next— your coat wouldn't keep a church mouse warm." She sneezed again, into her soup. Great. At least they were her own germs.

"I bet running around in a sea of manic shoppers first thing in the morning didn't help matters any," Severus persisted, the ruthless bastard. "Your eyes are turning red. Stop sneezing in your soup and go to bed."

She wondered if he used that tone to tell students to cut up their shivelfigs.

She squinted up the table at Mum and Petunia and found them giving her and Severus very . . . strange looks. Lily couldn't interpret them with a head stuffed full of mucus.

"Severus is right, sweetheart," Mum said gently, pushing herself up from the table. "Come on—let's put you into your pajamas and we'll see how you feel after a rest."

Lily went. Petunia and Sev watched her go.

"I shouldn't have let you out last night." Mum clattered around the bedroom, rustling up Lily's nightgown and a clean pair of socks. "But then I suppose you wouldn't have been there for Severus, and maybe it's good you were."

"Oh, you have no idea, his mum is the most wretched horror," Lily muttered, and then darted a terrified look at the door. It would be just her luck if Sev were standing there—

But he wasn't, and he wouldn't be; sixteen-year-old Severus might have been clueless enough to show up when she was in the midst of changing, but grown-up Severus would know to stay put. Even if it was with Petunia.

Mum paused in turning down Lily's bed, but after a moment she resumed. "There you are, sweetie," she said, folding Lily, now in her pajamas, into bed. "Rest is the best medicine."

"Thought that was laughter," Lily murmured.

In which case, it was unsurprising she was sick . . . there had been precious little of that for a very long time.

"Oh—Mum?" Her mother looked a question as she placed the box of tissues on Lily's bedside table. "Can you make sure that stubborn old sod doesn't leave without his coat?" She pointed in the general direction of the bag she'd dumped upstairs when she was certain her mum wouldn't eject Severus from the house when her daughter's back was turned. "I got it for him because his is about to fall apart in a good breeze, but he's too much of a git to take it without a fight, and now my head's too swollen to bully him properly."

She closed her eyes, because they felt itchy. Mum was silent for so long she almost opened them to see if her mother had left the room, but then Mum only said, in a soft, gentle voice, "Of course, sweetheart." Lily felt her mother's lips on her forehead, was folded for a moment into the embrace of her perfume; and then there was only the rustle of her leaving, taking a paper shopping bag with her.

When Lily opened her eyes, it was to a mostly dark room. Some time after she'd fallen asleep, the daylight had faded, and a frog had crawled into her open mouth, slid down her throat and got lodged there. Someone had also packed tissues into her ears.

She gave an experimental groan. When was the last time she'd been sick . . . ? She'd forgot how lousy it made you feel. Still, this wasn't quite as bad as the time the Sirius' Indian take-away had given her food poisoning and Harry had screamed all night because none of the boys knew how to quieten him down. The memory made her want to cry and laugh at the same time.

Someone rapped smartly on the door and pushed inside without waiting for an answer. Lily squinted through the semi-darkness, the fading sun that scrawled across the wall in tones of gold. "Petunia?" she croaked.

"Mummy thought you should have a tray," Petunia's brisk voice said, speaking from a blurry dark shape. She set something on Lily's desk with a clink and clicked on the lamp there, blotting the room with matte, yellow light.

"What time is it?" Lily asked, pushing herself up to sit. Her voice was weary and croaky. She wasn't hungry, but she was old enough to know she needed to eat whatever Petunia had brought anyway. A bowl with lifting curls of steam suggested soup.

"A little past three in the afternoon. You've been asleep for about two and a half hours, but that's long enough if you want to get a good sleep tonight."

Petunia arranged the tray on Lily's knees with efficient, almost fussy movements. Lily blinked down at a queenly spread: Petunia had laid out the meal on a place-mat and the spoon on a snowy napkin. The tea was exactly the right shade of light, milky brown, because Lily always took more milk than tea.

"This is amazing," she told Petunia. She chose the glass of orange juice first, drinking half of it down her aching throat.

"It's simplistic," Petunia said, dismissive, but Lily recognized signs of satisfaction in her sister's face.

"I couldn't make a tray like this," Lily said.

"I don't imagine this is what they teach at . . . that place." Petunia's nostrils flared and her mouth thinned.

At the reminder of Hogwarts, Lily expected her to turn on her heel and stalk out, but to her utter shock Petunia swiveled out her desk chair and sat in it.

Deciding the best course of action was to eat her soup in silence, Lily did just that. Petunia had made her chicken broth. She wondered if it was specially for her. As unlikely as it was that Petunia would practice consideration on her freaky sister, she wouldn't serve broth for dinner. Perhaps she'd cooked a chicken and this was the run-off.

"Where's Mum?" Lily asked, and then winced, hoping Petunia wouldn't take that as an insult.

"I told Mummy to stay downstairs. You might not know," said Petunia in the voice of one expecting Lily to be far too self-absorbed to notice, "but Mummy has been feeling quite tired lately. I don't want her catching whatever you picked up."

"No" was all Lily said.

For that matter, she felt too tired to continue dipping her spoon over and over, so she set it down, picked up the bowl and drank directly from it. Petunia looked faintly scandalized.

Hell with it, Lily thought. She was too tired to tread lightly on civility; she would ask what she really wanted to know. "Did Mum get Severus to take the coat?"

"She did," Petunia said coldly. Lily was glad she could hide her eye-roll behind the soup bowl.

When the mention of Severus still didn't drive Petunia to get up and leave, Lily wondered why on earth not. She wasn't trying to aggravate Petunia, but since she was nine it seemed to be a talent she'd developed overnight, as if it had blossomed along with her magic. Nothing she did or said was ever right, and Petunia knew that, so why did she remain in Lily's desk chair, her legs primly crossed, her long, thin arms folded across her lap?

"Lily." Petunia's tone of voice actually made Lily look up, it was so . . . unusual. Not angry, or smug, or snide, just quiet and serious. Then she said, "How long have you been . . . dating that boy?"

Lily blinked once, then three more times. "Dating . . . who, Sev?"

"Yes, him," Petunia snapped, her seriousness evaporating. "I didn't know you made it a habit of running around dating multiple men. Is that standard practice at that freaky place?"

"No, it's not, and no, I don't," Lily said, pushing James out of her mind. Not now, I can't deal with that right now. "But Tuney"—the name just slipped out, as 'Sev' had on Christmas Eve—"I'm not dating Severus. Why would you think—"

"Fine." Petunia practically bit the word in half. "If you want to pretend everyone but you is a complete idiot, I'm sure that's fine with me." She snatched the tray off Lily's lap, but paused to slam the juice glass and teacup onto Lily's bedside table.

"Drink your fluids," she snarled. When the bedroom door slammed shut behind her, Lily flinched.

"What the hell," she muttered, putting a hand to her head. It throbbed a little, as if trying to get her attention.

She slumped against her pillows and rolled that bizarre episode around in her mind as she finished off her juice. Honestly, just because you hung around with a boy, people assumed you fancied each other. All right, so she and Sev had hung around together all the time (before last summer), but still . . .

No one had ever believed her when she said he wasn't her boyfriend. Lily had always suspected their skepticism came from sincerely thinking boys and girls couldn't ever be just friends. But she and Sev had honestly been friends, for ages. They liked the same sorts of things (before all that with the Death Eaters and Dark magic), like Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek and the Lone Ranger. She'd gone to see Indiana Jones with Remus, but the guilty thought had flitted across her mind that she wished she could've seen it with Sev; she knew he'd have secretly liked it while pretending it was stupid and worthy only of mockery. She liked Remus very much, but she couldn't be fully herself around him because Remus was so polite that if you blew up at him or bit his head off, he would simply wait it out. Lily couldn't be comfortable really getting angry at someone like that; it always made her feel like a bully. Severus would scream right back at you. Once she'd thrown an ink bottle past him, and he'd hurled a book about a foot wide of her head. Even in that year in hiding, when they'd been so tense and sometimes so unhappy - both separately and together - James would never have thrown anything at her. In fact, he'd have probably tried to hex Severus black and blue if he'd ever seen it.

But in the days before she and Sev had fought all the time about his friends and the Marauders and the Dark Arts, Sev had been the one person she could be around when she was exhausted, and frustrated, and short-tempered. She didn't have to be perfect around Sev; she could act like a horrible human being but still go off at the end feeling like she wasn't, really. She'd never felt like that with James, even when she hadn't been able to be perfect, shining, wonderful Lily Evans Potter. She and Sev had been able to spend whole days together, nattering about virtually anything; and she had never remembered what any of it was, which always seemed to be a vital part of friendship to her, that the time just blurred into one long moment of being with them. She'd told Sev things she would never be able to bring her kaleidoscope of friends to understand; and there were so many things like that, with her girlfriends. They were baffled that she would hang around with Sev, who stuck out like a sore thumb no matter what he did and was known throughout the halls of Hogwarts for a dreadful, even terrifying temper, and his Nose, and never seeming to wash his hair. She had never been able to tell them that Severus was the one person who was outwardly as out-of-place as Lily felt inside.

Even when she'd gone to Hogwarts, where everyone else did magic, not just her and Sev, and when she'd been fairly popular, and the most popular boy in school had done backflips in an effort to impress her, and all her friends had sighed over how lucky she was . . . secretly, in a tiny place, like a box she'd carefully stocked and hidden away, Lily had always expected to wake up one day and find that none of it had ever happened. That everyone would discover that really, she was no one special, just a Mudblood, a little freak. Sev had been able to understand that . . . and it had hurt so much when he'd said . . .

But none of that had ever made Severus her boyfriend. There were very distinct things one got up to with boyfriends, things one did not get up to with one's best friend. She would have noticed, thanks very much, if any of that had gone on with Sev. Oh, she'd thought about it, of course - in private - but it had always made her come over with high-pitched, embarrassed giggles, turning as red as her hair. That wasn't what she did with Sev. The thought had just seemed . . . silly. She'd never even been able to imagine Sev being with anyone like that, in that way, at all—she couldn't even think the words.

Sev's image coalesced in her mind, as he'd been today, his shoulders slightly hunched, squinting in the light . . . and then on the first night in her mother's parlor, rising from his chair like a shadow standing up from the floor . . . and some odd feeling fluttered inside her—

Horrified, she choked it off. What was she thinking? Was she—what? She was married right now, for Christ's sake! Even if her husband was currently a sixteen-year-old boy in mind and body—

The empty juice glass slipped from Lily's slack fingers, thumping to the carpet as she froze in the middle of setting it on her night table. What if . . . what if James had come back, too? After all, if she and Severus had, why not James? They'd all died, all three of them . . .

That would be too much of a coincidence, said the Voice of Reason. And surely James would have been to find her already if he was the man who remembered being married to her . . .

Or he might not—I haven't been to find him yet, after all. No, she'd been clinging to Sev, because Sev needed her and she needed him. As much as Lily wanted to throw herself into James' arms—the real James, her James, the man she'd married, Harry's father, despite all their spats of the past year, shut up together in hiding, their tenseness, their silences—there was a different dimension to her need for Severus, who was so much older now and far more capable than she was, who knew so many things she needed to know. It was different with James—she had lost Sev in heart, and it had always hurt . . . after the way she'd left things with the boy Severus, the young man . . . she'd had to go up to him in that diner, the night before Christmas Eve. God, if she hadn't . . . She'd have fallen to pieces by now, have gone utterly mad, without this grown-up Severus to help her, to tell her about Harry, to piece her heart back together.

If her James were really here, she would find him soon, she would soon be with him; and if he weren't, well . . . she could see this James, at least. She could talk to him.

Of course, it looked to be a few days, until she got well enough to get out of bed and catch a train to the Potters'.

She drank a bit of the tea, its warmth soothing on her throat. Petunia had added honey.

Lily lay back against her pillows, on her side, and studied the tea cup with its pattern of roses. Petunia was so strange. In many ways, she'd become as impenetrable, as indecipherable as Sev . . . both the teenage-Severus Lily had broken with, and the man he'd become.

Who had Sev become? He'd taught Potions at Hogwarts . . . he'd been Harry's teacher . . . but what else? What kind of teacher? Had he been married? Was he a father? He'd implied he didn't have any friends . . .

The thought of Sev going through life with hardly anyone to turn to was . . . painful. Severus was so full of things he wanted to share. But he'd never shared them lightly, and most people had just turned away from him . . .

Like you did, whispered a part of her that she hated. Not because of what it always told her, but because she always heard it at times like these. She thought of it as her personal dementor. It was the part of her that rose from the depths of her heart to torment her with what she'd never forgiven herself for doing; for not doing; for suffering.

There had been times, after falling out with Sev, when she had felt as sick with remorse as she'd ever felt keenly justified. When she'd see him with those vile boys she'd hated, the ones who had put him into those stupid masks and robes, she'd felt both at once: she'd been right, but she'd also been right.

The only worse thing she had ever been right about was the fear that Voldemort would find them, find her and James and Harry, and tear their family apart.

And now here was Sev, who'd outlived her by seventeen years; who was, at times, even more frightening than she'd thought he would be. She remembered his half-crazed fright when she had slipped on the stairs, the glittering look in his face when he'd struck the Muggle on the street, the way in which he'd stood and left her mother's comfy sitting-room; the tone of his voice as he'd said I was a Death Eater no longer. If doubts that Severus was telling the truth had whispered in her mind since he'd climbed in her bedroom window on Christmas Eve, she had never even heard them, so certain she was that this was a Severus who had grown into a different person entirely.

And yet at the core he was still Sev; she knew she wasn't looking at a clever impostor in Severus' body, but at Severus, all grown up, and probably lonely, and grieved, and maybe even a little bit mad.

Severus, she thought, closing her eyes on the roses painted in a ring on her teacup. What did you live through, when I was dead?

To be continued. . .