James crumpled to the floor. A neat Stunning, Severus observed. He usually disliked attacking people from behind, but with Potter, the usual rules of honor didn't apply. Whenever they had faced each other over the years, both men had trampled them into the ground and then dug them up to desecrate them again.

"You all right?" Severus asked Lily. Her eyes were still wide with surprise as she looked down at the unconscious form of her husband.

"Yeah. What an ass. Him, not you," she added.

There was a twitch of his mouth that might have been a smile. He stepped over the form lying on the floor, and the smile disappeared as he looked down at it. "Did you say you were leaving?" he asked her, as much to take his mind off the curses he would like to test out on Potter as to know the answer.

"Well…yeah. We've been having problems lately, to put it lightly." She sighed. "Honestly, I wish I'd never married him." I managed to say it. I actually managed to say it.

"I'd love to hex him into oblivion," he said softly. "In fact I still might."

"Please don't. Then I might lose my respect for you." What are we doing?

"You respect me? Well, that makes one person." Underneath his light tone there was not a little bitterness.

"Severus."

He looked up at her. His eyes were dark pools, pulling her in, making her heart jog in her chest.

"Can I…" The words pressed themselves out of her mouth before they had even fully crossed her mind. "Can I stay with you?"

A few seconds of silence passed before he said, disparagingly, "You know where I live, Lily." As if he couldn't quite believe that he was saying it, that she had just asked this of him. And something in his face seemed to have closed down.

I'm not trying to take advantage of how you feel about me. I know I would probably have done that before, back when I was the same teenager who admired James Potter on the Quidditch pitch, and I'm so sorry. This was what Lily thought but couldn't bring herself to say. She could only manage: "I—I'm not throwing myself on your mercy. I wouldn't be homeless. I could kick James out of the house. But honestly…I don't feel comfortable there anymore. There are too many ghosts." She remembered James carrying her across the threshold when they first moved in, and suppressed a shudder. At the time she had been overwhelmed with the sight of the inside of their new home, not even glancing back at James. But if she had thought to look at his face, what would she have seen there? Joy and love, or the delight of a dragon who had just stumbled on a new cache of gold?

She didn't see anything like that in Severus's expression now. Just incredulous disbelief. And that same guarded aspect.

"Are you sure there wouldn't be too many ghosts with me, Lily?"

"Is this really—" The words caught in her throat. "I can't believe I'm having this conversation right now."

"Well, we'd better hurry up with it," he said, glancing back behind him—showing that scar, the line that glared redly in the harsh light—"because you were correct. Classes'll be out soon."

This isn't right, she realized, her heart sinking at the way his tone was now cold, removed. I should never have asked to stay with him. Not after I just told James I was leaving. What an idiot I am. Severus probably thinks he's just a place for me to crash while my marriage scabs over. She glaced back down at James, frowning with concern, but not at her husband. Her thoughts were still with Severus.

"We can't just leave him here," Severus said grudgingly. Although he would dearly have liked to see how many similarities there were between Hogwarts students leaving classes and a stampeding herd of hippogriffs.

Looking at Lily now, as she gazed down at her husband, he seemed to have stepped back in time. For the first time in years they were both back in the light of the school corridor, amongst the portraits that were frozen in time. This was very different from seeing her in the park or even back at the Ministry. Now it was easy to picture her as the sixth-year who had resolutely avoided his gaze for months on end. And then the seventh-year he had eventually seen on the arm of James Potter, gazing adoringly up at him like the rest of the students. Somehow, he had never thought she would be one of them. But she had hung onto his every word just like them, once even reaching up to mess up his adorably untidy hair.

His blood heated up in his veins now, just as it had then, as he looked between the two of them. The man on the floor and the woman staring down at him, worry etched on her face. She still cares for him, an inner voice whispered, and something cold took shape in his stomach. Once again, they were together, and Severus was the stranger, looking in.

And then he froze. The green eyes were locked onto his, and something was pushing at his mind. In an instant he had recovered himself and blocked her. But he had almost stepped backwards in shock.

"Where did you learn to do that?" he hissed. Even the Dark Lord, the most accomplished Legilimens of the age, had never been able to penetrate Severus's defenses. Then again, Severus had never been particularly…emotionally vulnerable in front of him. Which was not the case now. Lily was no great Legilimens; even now she was putting a hand to her forehead, blinking from the strain. But she had caught him in the midst of a roiling cloud of emotion. Damnation. What had she seen?

"Just paying you back for what you did to me," she said faintly. "Impulse decision." She took her hand away slowly, frowning, as if disturbed by what she had seen.

Now she's seen that I haven't changed, he thought bitterly. I'm still the same pathetic… There his train of thought ended. He would not let it continue.

"I suggest you revive your husband and get home," he said. "As I said before, you wouldn't be comfortable at my house. Too many lunatics lurking about at the end of the alleyways and such. Probably not what you're used to." A slight sneer. "But I'm sure the Leaky Cauldron has no shortage of available rooms."

"Sev!" she cried, and her use of his old nickname stung him like nothing else she had said so far.

"Goodbye, Lily." He bit back everything he was dying to say—don't be weak, he thought; don't be pathetic, don't let history repeat itself—and walked away, as Lily looked helplessly from him to James and back again.

She couldn't just leave her husband lying on the floor to chase after Severus Snape. But he was wrong. As usual. He underestimated how much he really meant to her. But could she really blame him, after how she had treated him through the years? It wasn't a great surprise that he thought…whatever he thought.

The hem of his cloak whipped around the corner. She bit back a cry for him to wait, instead raising her wand and casting the spell that would enable Madam Pomfrey to find James. She didn't want to be here when he woke up, but she didn't particularly want him to be trampled by a crowd of third-years emerging from class. A glowing beacon of red light formed from the tip and traveled through the air, disappearing through a wall on its way to the hospital wing.

Then she gathered her cloak around her and hurried away.

She could still picture it in her mind: the winding streets, the dark brick walls, the boarded-over windows. She had gotten the image clear in her thoughts before she had even exited the grounds of Hogwarts. The moment she stepped beyond the boundaries of the school, she turned into space, into the crushing whirling blur of color and light and sound.

And landed on her knees in Spinner's End. She leapt to her feet, her ears ringing in the sudden silence. There was no one within sight. The day was drawing to a close faster than she had thought—the students at Hogwarts had probably been dismissed not to another class but to dinner. Already the sun had dropped low in the sky, casting a glow over the surrounding houses and turning the glass in the windows opaque and clouded, like blind eyes.

He had brought her here once before, when she was twelve, after she had insisted on seeing his home. For weeks afterward she had been able to tell that he regretted it. Spinner's End was as far from her cozy, white-picket-fence home she had shared with her sister and parents as anything she could imagine. It had been embarrassing for the both of them. Since that day she had never considered going back there, never dreamed that one day she would be chasing Severus down one of its twisting alleyways.

"Severus!" The name had just left her lips when she realized it might not be a good idea to start calling for him in this place. She inhaled sharply, as though she were trying to suck the sound back into her lungs.

There was a scuffling from behind her and she whirled, heart pounding, and it didn't slow down once she saw that it was only Severus and not some knife-wielding maniac. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "It's dangerous."

"You're here. I just followed you."

"Why, Lily." He was shaking his head, his cloak rippling in the slight wind as he walked towards her. The atmosphere and emptiness of the place made him look like a priest out of Plague England, walking the streets past houses full of the dead.

"Because I wanted to say something."

"What." Flat dull dead lifeless tone. Him barely looking at her.

'You're never going to change' he must be thinking but I can change I have changed let me tell you and don't listen to what I say listen to the voice in which I say it

"Look at me."

His eyes were pulled to hers smoothly and immediately, as if he did not want to meet her gaze but found himself helpless at her direction.

"I made a mistake in marrying James. I had no idea who I was then. Or who he was even. I thought he had changed. I thought he had become more mature, more thoughtful, more like someone I wish I were married to. More like…you." Once she had started talking she couldn't stop. "I've been running around trying to figure things out and every time I start talking like this I realize I'm just waiting for you to shut me up by kissing me like you did that one time because that's what makes me stop, isn't it, that's what makes me stop and think and makes all the confusion and rushing noise in my head just…go away. So it's just you and me again."

"Are you hinting at something?" Severus said, and she wasn't mistaken, that was a slight smile on his face.

"I don't even think I need that now, though, to figure out something I should have realized a long time ago. That mistake I made right after graduation."

"We all made mistakes after grad—" Severus began, his arm stinging.

She stopped him, knowing what he was about to say, remembering Dumbledore's ringing words in the courtoom. No one would vouch for her, though, and the mistakes she had made. "I haven't done anything to repair it, though. I've just been fighting with James and sneaking around. I…I don't want to sneak around anymore." And then, before he could assume she meant she wanted to fix her marriage and leave him behind, she rushed on: "You're the only one I love. Not James."

"So this means…what?" He looked around him, at the crumbling bricks and dark stains on wood and the quickly darkening sky. "You can't mean you'd prefer to stay here."

"Would you want to stay here, though? I mean, I'm sure the Leaky Cauldron has no shortage of available rooms."

His eyebrows shot up. "You're not saying you'd want to stay in the Leaky Cauldron with me."

"Although, I'd be staying at Hogwarts next semester," he mused, almost to himself. "Albus was kind enough to offer me a job there."

"What position?" He had not shared this news during the Order meeting, Lily realized. As far as she knew, she was the first person to ask about it.

"Potions." The word brought back memories upon memories of hazy, perfumed classrooms, whispering with Severus underneath Professor Slughorn's droning voice. "He wisely chose not to offer me the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts…needs to keep up appearances, you see." There was a slight tinge of bitterness in his tone.

"Well, that's good," Lily said, hearing and hating the false cheer in her voice. "You were always brilliant at Potions. Better than any of the rest of us clowns."

"You weren't that bad."

"Because you were whispering instructions in my ear," she returned with a smile. "What, you don't remember?"

"I remember," Severus said after a second. "Did James ever find out, by the way?"

Lily's body tensed at the sound of her husband's name. "About you helping me with Potions?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Ah."

"What does it matter?"

"Nothing. Just something I was wondering." But he was smiling now. "And now I know that I'm still the only one who knows how bad you really are at Potions."

"Merlin's beard, Severus. If you're going to gloat…" But the slow, disturbing realization that something was wrong crept into Lily's mind, even as she was smiling and allowing that teasing lilt to enter her voice. Something connected to James, who was probably prone on a bed in the hospital wing right now while Madam Pomfrey tried to figure out what the hell had happened.

Severus noticed the change cross her face. He frowned and glanced down the alleyway as if he had heard someone there—but there was no one—and Lily realized that her hand had gone to the wand stashed in her pocket.

"He's not here," she said, not sure whether it was to Severus or herself.

"No," Severus replied, still looking at the entrance to the alley. "But he's not going to want to let you go."

A/N: Sorry this was sort of a short chapter, but I've been really overwhelmed with life and personal issues lately. But I promise I won't wait too long to update.