There are no excuses. I've been really busy. Anyway, here's the chapter. Please read and review!

Lily was worried.

They had only been back from break for a couple of days and already she wanted to smash Hermione and Remus' heads together.

Remus had told them that they had broken up before they got back to school, but he had been very vague about the details. He hadn't even said who had broken up with who. She had owled Hermione, but never received a reply. And then, once Lily was able to talk to Hermione, she too was vague about the details.

Neither one would look at each other, or acknowledge the others existence. The mood of the room was tense with everything that was going unsaid and it was driving everyone mad. Only Hermione and Remus seemed not to notice that everyone else in the room wanted to murder them.

She'd talked to James that morning and asked if Remus had said anything to them during the night, but not even his best friends could get anything him.

All Lily wanted to do was fix everything and make it the way it was before, but she wasn't sure if she could. Though, she was damned sure going to try.

…...

That night, Hermione decided to skip dinner and stay in her room and study instead. She was too far behind on her plan to get home, and now that everything with Remus was finished, she found she had renewed interest in a task. She'd always heard stories of women who did crazy and stupid things after a break up, but she figured that she would be the first to time travel twenty years in the future to get away from an ex.

Dumbledore had found a journal that seemed to contain exactly the spell that she needed to get home. It was an obscure text that had apparently been buried within the ministry's vaults for years. When Dumbledore gave it to her, she hadn't asked how he had acquired it and she was quite sure that he wouldn't have told her the truth if she had.

But, of course, the journal had been written in some sort of random code. It was something that she had been expecting, in fact, most wizards developed their own form of code in case their thoughts and ideas ended up in the wrong hands. But she had been hoping that perhaps fate would be kind to her this time.

And although Dumbledore was able to come up with the journal, he was unable to find any sort of clue as to how to decode the thing. That task was going to be left to her, and Hermione was very much discouraged. While it could take as little as a couple of weeks, sometimes decoding these things could take years, and that was no longer a future she wanted to consider.

As Lily walked in the room a couple hours after dinner, Hermione did feel a little bit grateful that Lily wouldn't be able to understand the journal and snoop. She didn't look up from her desk when Lily walked in the room, but she could feel her restlessness.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Lily pacing in front of her bed, slowly. She wanted to talk. She wanted to talk badly. However talking was one thing that Hermione did not want to do. So she kept her head down and prayed that Lily would take the hint and do something else.

Five minutes passed, then ten, and then fifteen with Lily still pacing by the foot of her bed. It was obnoxious but Hermione knew that she could outlast Lily. At least, she hoped she could.

Five minutes later, and Hermione couldn't take it anymore.

"Will you please stop pacing!" She shouted from her desk.

"Well look who's finally speaking to me," Lily smirked as she finally sat down on her bed.

"I spoke to you this morning," Hermione commented as she continued to stare down at her desk.

"Hardly," Lilly murmured, before continuing in a louder voice, "So are you ever going to tell me what happened?"

"What happened with what?" Hermione asked, pretending not to know what Lily was talking about.

She had been avoiding this conversation since New Years, though she knew that it was going to happen sometime. Lily would make sure of that. But that didn't mean that she had to help it along.

Lily knew what she was trying to do, but she was in no mood to play that sort of a game.

"What happened between you and Remus? We can all tell that it must have been something bad and neither one of you are talking."

"Perhaps we just don't want to talk about it," Hermione snapped at Lily, "it's not as though its any of your business."

"It becomes my business when it affects my friends," Lily replied curtly, "whatever is going on with the two of you is affecting everyone else. It's so tense and uncomfortable! So perhaps if you just talked to me about it and told me what happened, I could help."

"There's nothing you can do," Hermione answered quietly, "so it would be nice if you could just let it be."

Silence crept over the room and Hermione let herself believe that perhaps Lily would, in fact, drop the subject with the girl in question broke the silence.

"Did you break up with him because you're going back soon?"

If Hermione just said yes, she knew that Lily would take that as a final answer and ask her no more about what was going on. But although Hermione wasn't overly fond of talking about the truth, she didn't want to lie to Lily either.

"No, it's not because of that," Hermione answered after a long pause.

"Then what was it?"

Lily's insistence on knowing everything would eventually wear Hermione down anyway, she realized, so she thought that perhaps it would be better to just get it over with already.

"So you know about the fight that Remus got into with Severus, right?" Hermione began.

"Yes," Lily answered wairly, "but Remus never told us why it happened, and I just assumed that it was just him being stupid."

"Well it was," Hermione replied, "you see, Severus has been unknowingly helping me find a way back to my own time. We've been studying together twice a week, every week for a while now. I didn't want anyone to find out about it, because I know the history between you all. And I need Severus, he's the only one that can help. But I guess Peter saw us a couple of times and told Remus. Then when he asked me where I had been, I lied. So he assumed that I was cheating on him with Snape,"

"Well are you?" Lily interrupted.

"No!" Hermione answered sharply, "I never cheated on Remus. But I guess he didn't believe me and attacked Severus anyway. And we never really recovered. He must not have believed me entirely and then on New Years, just before midnight, he sent me this," Hermione finished, handing the letter over to Lily.

Lily took the letter and Hermione could see that she was reading quickly.

"That miserable bastard," Lily whispered just enough for Hermione to hear before her eyes began to scan the page again.

"He really needs to learn better timing," Lily said after she'd gone over the letter three more times, "I'm so sorry about this. We were trying to talk sense into him the entire holiday, but I guess nothing got through. I'm sorry that he ruined your new year."

And at that, Hermione wasn't sure that she wanted to continue. She thought that Lily should know everything that happened, and Hermione was eager to talk about it with someone who could actually talk back to her. But she was worried about how Lily would respond. Then again, there was no way of knowing how Lily would react until Hermione told her.

So she ripped off the metaphorical band-aid and blurted out very quickly, "I kissed Severus on new years."

She watched Lily and waited for her reaction, but none came. Lily just stared at her, a blank expression on her face. Time passed, but Hermione wasn't sure how much, as she continued to stare at Lily. And still, there was no reaction. And so, in a mild panic, Hermione began to explain.

"That night, Severus and I had been talking and we were getting along pretty alright and then the letter from Remus came so I went back to my rooms. And then after I read the letter, I was so upset and I had an idea that the whole reason why Remus had broken up with me was because he thought I was cheating with Severus, which I never was. So I found Severus and kissed him at midnight."

"So you willing kissed Snape," Lily said after a few moments of silence.

"Yes," Hermione answered pathetically.

"Because you were mad that Remus broke up with you because he thought you had been kissing Snape," Lily continued.

"Yes," Hermione answered again.

"You know that doesn't make very much sense, right?"

"I know," Hermione half shouted, "believe me, I know. I don't know what I was thinking and believe me, it has not been making studying with Severus very easy."

"So you're still seeing him?"

"Well I have to, I need him to help me get home. We haven't talked about it sense but honestly I haven't been trying too hard. It's just this giant elephant in the room and it has made things even more awkward than they were."

Lily nodded her head as though she agreed and they fell silent again. Hermione didn't know what to say. There wasn't much left to say at this point. So she stared at Lily wand waited, hoping that she would say something that would make all of this better.

A few minutes later, Lily looked back at Hermione, a strange twinkle in her eye as she asked, "So, did you like it?"