Chapter 45: Of Turmoils and Tumults
Lily felt discombobulated in the morning, lethargic and wound up tight at the same time, her mind cottony and distracted. She'd thought the dream would fade, like the few previous sex dreams she'd had, but maybe it made sense that this one didn't, because it had been so wholly different from anything before. Those previous dreams had been nameless bodies and touches, pleasant while they lasted and sometimes leaving her mildly aroused when she awoke, but never enough to do something about it, never enough to make her do more than smile, turn on her other side and go back to sleep. Certainly, she'd never been so close to the edge, so desperate to finish herself off as last night.
She firmly kept her mind away from the boy she'd dreamed, from the revelations that had pelted her like torrential rain in the last three weeks, in the last two days, forcing herself to pretend she hadn't recognised him, hadn't wanted him so badly that she'd cried tears of frustration from it. She just needed a decent cup of coffee – and when had she started actually wanting to drink something she'd barely stomached just last spring? – and as soon as classes started, she'd have something to occupy her mind with properly.
She was sure the dream would let her go by then, because she didn't feel capable of evaluating all the revelations of the previous two days while under its influence.
"Lily, are you all right?" Mary asked as they headed down for breakfast. "You look... off."
"Weird dreams," Lily murmured back, shaking her head. "I need coffee and an interesting lecture."
"You'd be lucky to get that with Sluggy," Mary replied with a roll of her eyes, stopping Lily in her tracks.
"Potions?!" Potions meant Severus and his vitriol, and her stomach turned at the thought. "It's Tuesday."
Looking partly worried, partly amused, Mary shook her head. "Are you sure you're all right? Maybe you're coming down with something."
Rubbing her eyes, Lily nodded, even though she felt the farthest thing from all right. Her stomach felt unsettled, her skin clammy, her heart racing.
"Just slept badly."
"Come on; some food will do you good."
As soon as they'd reached the Great Hall and the Gryffindor table, Lily caught sight of James – it was hard not to, when he was on his feet, waving at them and grinning.
"Lily, Mary! Over here!"
Lily felt her mouth stretch into a smile, her heart calming for the first time that morning. The messy-haired boy felt like a momentary balm to her perturbed soul. The two girls walked over to the boys all sitting in the very middle of the table and Lily slid in next to James, Mary next to her.
"You ok?" James asked, looking at her somewhat critically. "You look a bit pale."
"Not very nice to point out to a girl she doesn't look her best," Mary noted mildly, making James flush in embarrassment in spite of his undiminished smile.
"Does that mean I have to be concerned in manly, suffering silence, then?"
Lily smiled, feeling herself blush as he bumped her shoulder with his.
"If you ask nicely, you're allowed to express your concern. Course, knowing your level of suave, you should definitely take Mary's words to heart."
James gasped dramatically, putting his hand to his chest. "You wound me!"
Lily giggled, feeling more like herself with every passing moment. If she convinced James to skive off Potions and spend the morning with her to do something silly and childish instead, she thought she might manage to give her soul respite from the turmoil only Severus could ever put it in. Then she could figure out what to do with this mess that constricted her heart every time she thought of her complex, tangled emotions for him, now with the newly added weight of love whose expanse she'd not even known until yesterday.
She turned backwards on the bench to dig through her bag for the two Knuts her morning newspapers cost, to have them ready when the owl post arrived (lest the impatient buggers that delivered them ate all her bacon), and when she closed the flap of her bag and looked up, she saw Severus. He was striding into the Great Hall in the direction of the Slytherin table, back straight, hair throwing shadows of the morning sun over his face, making his facial features sharp, his scowl more pronounced, his determination on firm display, the whole package something severe and forbidding and dark.
A bolt of lightning short through her, rending her in half; her mouth went dry and her skin felt so, so tight all of a sudden. Something terrifyingly familiar twisted and pooled low in her stomach, spreading warmth outwards through her, and she was suddenly having trouble breathing. Her lips tingled and her palms itched and her crotch throbbed and for a second, there was nothing in her mind but the need, the horrible need the likes of which she'd never felt, the want, sudden, desperate, to run into his arms, to feel him fold her into his embrace, to know what his kisses were like, to devour him.
She'd thought there was nothing that could physically attract her to him. She'd been so very wrong about that, for so long. Confidence had always suited him so well. She'd seen it when they were kids and forgotten about it; she'd seen it last summer and purposefully ignored it. She saw it now and ached.
Flushed, head spinning, Lily closed her eyes and reached blindly for the table to pull herself fully up, her balance off enough that her other hand slipped, so that she almost fell on her nose if not for a strong arm breaking her fall as it wrapped around her shoulders from behind.
"Whoa, there," James said, helping her sit up. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I..." Her voice sounded shot to hell. She cleared it, pulling away from him. "Dizzy spell."
"You're flushed through," Mary said worriedly, placing the back of her hand onto Lily's forehead. "And you're warm. I think you're coming down with something; no wonder, with what you've been doing to yourself since we came back. Over something silly like a study aid, too; you and your charms projects."
"I just need a sec."
She closed her eyes, rested her elbow on the table, forehead into her palm, and just breathed through it, or tried, seeking any scraps of balance and self-control, pushing with all her might against the urge to march to the Slytherin table, grab Severus' hand and–
No. No. She was going to stay put and she was going to figure out what the fuck was the matter with her, why she was so viscerally pulled to him all of a sudden, when she'd felt none of this just yesterday when they'd last shared a class together and she'd seen him face to face.
The dream came back in breath-taking detail and she swallowed past her dry throat, trying to think of something, anything else, because this was not helping–
The warmth of James' hand as he began rubbing her back made her skin crawl. Oversensitised as she felt, it was all wrong, wrong, wrong, and she jerked away from it instinctively as she lifted her head up. The hurt on James' face was there for a fleeting second, but it made her feel worse, made her feel–
She wanted to go back to three minutes ago, when she'd been laughing and joking with him, when she'd been flirting, fantasizing silly childish scenarios that had made her feel more settled, more normal, made her feel like the dream was just her stupid subconscious picking at her emotional wounds, and then she'd seen Severus, and–
"Do you have any idea how much it hurts to see you flirting with my biggest enemy, when you know how I feel about you and refuse to come within ten feet of having a discussion with me about it?!"
"Sorry. Just need space."
Turning to her breakfast, she tried to take a bite and found that her stomach was so twisted the sight of food made her nauseated. Instead, she moved her breakfast porridge around mindlessly with her spoon, trying to untangle herself and failing, trying to understand what had just happened to her, trying to...
God, what was wrong with her, what was... she'd at least been able to trust her own body until yesterday, been able to trust in her involuntary reflexes, and then the dream, and now–
And James made her laugh and she felt light and easy with him, felt like she wasn't drowning under the weight of it all, didn't have to hide, didn't have to pretend–
But Severus–
God, just a glimpse of him reignited her, made her cheeks blaze, made her bite her lip hard at the yearning flooding her body, made her–
She had to get out of here, she had to get away from them both, had to– she couldn't, couldn't do this, not here, not where everyone could see, not–
Out of her mind, feeling like she was being chased by hellhounds, Lily got to her feet, grabbed her bag and ran out of the Great Hall, heedless of anyone she'd left behind, heedless of what people might think, caring for nothing except getting away from it all.
She had to get away, and it didn't matter that she couldn't, because it was all herself; in that moment, she felt like she would run to the other side of the globe, if only to get away from her confused mind, body and heart.
It took Lily about three days to begin completely rattling apart at the seams; Remus, in turn, had grown proportionally more worried for her throughout this time, until Tuesday morning's episode at breakfast ended with him catching, as she ran away from everyone, the briefest of desperate, wild looks in her eyes that seemed to plead for some kind of absolution. Having stewed in the quiet agony of watching her lip bleed from her worrying at it and the bags under her eyes only growing darker from lack of good sleep, he wasted no time in abandoning his own breakfast half-finished, only grabbing his bag and rushing after her, giving no significance at all to James' and Mary's alarmed calls behind him.
She stopped running after the first flight of stairs, falling into a fast trot instead, and Remus easily kept up with her a step behind, letting her lead them in whichever direction she wanted. They ended up in their secret room, of course, and by then Lily was breathing heavily, chest rising and falling in great gulps, sweaty fingers tangled in her oily hair.
"Lily, what's wrong?" he asked, hurrying to pull her fingers into his own and ground her in some way. She looked wilder than he thought he'd ever seen her in his life.
"Everything," she replied miserably. "Everything."
"Okay; okay, Lily, it's going to be all right, whatever it is. It'll be fine, Lilian."
She dropped her head onto his chest, allowing him to hug her and help her simply breathe through whatever it was that was causing her to panic like this. Her breath was hot and moist through his shabby, threadbare robes, and he tried to calm his breathing as much as he could, to give her an example to follow.
"I'm so messed up," she whispered, tangling her fingers in Remus' robes on either side of his chest. "And I don't even get why."
"Is it about the row you had with Snape before the hols?"
Her forehead rubbed against his chest as she nodded.
"What happened during that row?"
Her fingers spasmed in her robes, and he felt more than heard her gasp once.
"He... he accused me of... of breaking his heart."
That, it appeared, was what it took to finally, properly release the floodgates. She sagged against him with deep, gut-wrenching sobs, and Remus lowered them both gently onto their sitting pillows, keeping his arms wrapped around her and letting her cry herself out. His feeling of anger remained relatively undirected, unsure of whether to fall on Lily, on Snape, on himself or on James, but it was there, bubbling under the surface, waiting for an explanation.
She managed to gather herself after a few minutes, pulling away with an exhale and a lot of sniffing. Remus waited while she wiped her eyes and cheeks and blew her nose out, and then waited some more until she found the strength to actually speak.
"He didn't say it that way, but I know that's what he meant," she whispered, twisting the sodden handkerchief in her hands. "He accused me of ignoring his feelings for me and... and... he thinks I want James."
Remus winced, not in the least surprised it had finally come to this. Given Snape's possessiveness over their friendship and his insecurity in it over the summer, and in light of everything James had put the Slytherin boy through in the last five years, Lily's sudden infatuation with the bespectacled boy must have pressed all of his buttons.
The werewolf boy wanted more than anything to be on Lily's side in all of this; siding with Snape just felt really weird even without accounting for who Lily was to both of them. But if any one of them had been capable of seeing Lily's flaws, than it was Remus himself, and here they stood now in sharp relief; if she was unobservant – or wilfully blind – about something, it was how other people felt about her, including how her own actions impacted them. It had worked in his favour, preventing her from cottoning on to his own unruly feelings for her, but he could well imagine how hurtful it was to Snape.
"Did you know you were doing it?" he asked, a bit too harshly, because there was really no need to ask if Snape had been right in the first place.
Lily licked her lips, fingers tightening around the piece of cotton in her hands. She didn't lift her head to look him in the eyes as she said: "The first one, not... not the second one."
"But you do fancy James, don't you?"
Her expression twisted in sorrow and guilt, and she nodded.
"I don't know what to do."
The anger he was feeling found a momentary target, and he felt it sting, because why did she need to put him in this position, of having to help her untangle it all for her? Then it shifted back towards himself, for being angry with her over it, when he'd already decided he didn't want to pursue those romantic feelings for her that he felt.
The clarity of his reality was a blow to the self-esteem he'd worked so hard at building in the last half-year – he'd been wrong this whole time, in thinking his infatuation would pass if only he ignored it. No, all he'd managed by it is to leave it resting, unchanged, in the back of his mind, lurking and waiting for any chance to rear its head up again, even though its existence was utterly pointless, because Lily was always going to see him as the brother she never had, and he was never going to risk their relationship to see if he could change her mind on it.
Really, watching her break apart now because she was her own brand of coward like all the rest of them, or maybe simply because she didn't know any better than any other inexperienced teenager, he found himself utterly relieved not to be any further involved in this mess than as Lily's confidante. Providing her with an attentive ear and a shoulder to cry on was something he was not going to mind doing, not if the alternative was to be yet another insider making the situation even more complicated than it was.
He gave himself a mental shake; there'd be time in the future to put a stop to any romantic notions still lingering in his mind, if getting face to face with the ugliest part of Lily didn't do the trick. Now it was her turn, to find her own truth, and he was going to help her with it, because those two boys deserved it as much as she did, and perhaps, if he helped her find her way to one of them, then that'd help him fully let go of any remaining fanciful notions about the girl before him, too.
"Tell me," he encouraged her as gently as he could. Taking a deep breath, she began, explaining in brief sketches how her relationship with Snape had gone through its deep low at the beginning of last year, to her last big breakdown in June, when she'd admitted to him that she'd known of his feelings for her.
"I hadn't felt the same then, and I didn't... I didn't want to make things even harder than they were, trying to put things back together," she explained, shame radiating from her every word.
And then the divorce of her parents had come, and of course she'd had her head full of that instead of thinking of Snape's feelings for her – feelings, Remus wanted to point out, which the boy hadn't acted upon in all the time he'd had them, which must have been years. She admitted that there had been a moment when she could have let the conversation go in that direction, right before school had started up again, but that she'd chosen not to because they'd had a huge fight right before and she'd not felt emotionally capable of handling it.
"And this semester's just been so hard, Remus, with the lying and the pretending and all of the hurtful things we've had to say to one another to keep anyone from getting suspicious," she concluded with a sniff. "I knew it'd be, in my head, but I hadn't expected it to be this hard."
"But then why do it? I know you two don't want to tell me what it's about, but I've got a relatively good idea by now, and frankly, I don't think it's worth it, if this is the result."
"No, what Severus is doing is important, and he'd be doing it whether or not I'm in it with him. The war is coming, Remus, and pretending it isn't won't benefit anyone in the long run. I wouldn't abandon Severus to it even if I wanted to, and I don't."
"But you also didn't really want to put more effort into it, or?" Remus asked, frowning. "Because I didn't really take you for a procrastinator, but I have a feeling like that's what you've been doing with this."
She didn't speak for long moments. "Maybe you're right," she whispered brokenly in the end. "Maybe part of me would've preferred if things had gone back to the way they'd been before, and us losing our connection in trying to pretend well enough to fool everyone is my fault, too. But I couldn't think of any way to make things better, and in the end all I did instead was miss him and miss him and miss him, and I felt so useless when he was doing all the dangerous, hard work, I was so worried carrying all of that on his shoulders would eventually break him. So when you asked me to help you with James, I thought it was my chance to help him, to make things easier for him, too. And until December, that was all it was, I swear it was. But we rowed in November, and I was hurt by how things were between us even though that's largely my fault too, and James just... made things easier. He made me laugh, helped me get out of my head, and he's changed from that arrogant toerag he was at the end of last year, I know you've seen it too."
"James is very easy to get along with when you're on his good side," Remus agreed with a nod.
"I got... carried away some, without realising it. But Severus realised it, and it hurt him and I suppose he couldn't keep quiet anymore. The fight right before the hols, he... he didn't tell me how he felt about me, not exactly, but..." she finally looked up at Remus, for the first time since pulling away from him, and her green eyes begged him for something he could no longer identify. "Remus, you can't tell anyone this, not anyone. You'll find out eventually yourself for sure, but even so, he wouldn't want me telling it. But I... I can't explain it if I don't tell you."
"He will never find out from me, Lily. I promise."
"His Patronus... His Patronus is my doe. Not like mine, Remus, it is mine."
Remus frowned, digging for a moment in his memory for the significance. And then it dawned on him, and he felt his jaw drop.
"He hadn't wanted to show it to me, I pushed him into it, I took it from him too, Remus, like I've taken everything he'd had to give me, and I hate myself for it now, because I hadn't understood what it meant to him. I only realised day before yesterday, when I managed to conjure my own and saw it was the same. I thought it was about him not trusting me, and that had hurt so much, but it was about so much more than that. He couldn't feel that vulnerable around me, not when I'd kept quiet for so long, when he'd started believing it meant I could never feel anything similar for him. And I knew he fancied me, or was in love with me some, but this is... it's so enormous, and I..." Tears leaked out of her eyes, and she wiped them angrily. "I hadn't deserved his vulnerability. I still don't."
"Because you don't feel the same way?"
"That's the problem, Remus," she whispered, looking spooked and trapped as she did. "I think I've started to, to feel this, this... thing for him, and I think it started in the summer, maybe, and that was why I was missing him so much it sometimes felt like I couldn't breathe. But I didn't want to, because everything was just so hard already, and this would only make things worse, and so I, I managed to suppress it or, or ignore it, or, or something. And so long as he kept quiet, I could pretend to myself things could stay the way they'd been before. But he couldn't stay quiet any longer, and I've tried to parse it all out since, to figure out how I feel."
"And?"
"He was right, about my fancying James – I do. And I love Severus even though I have no clue what that love even really is anymore, but it's more than just friendship, I know that much. Yesterday, I realised what the thing he's doing actually means, what he'll have to do, and I lost it a bit. I can't bear the thought of him taking the Dark Mark, becoming a Death Eater in truth, becoming a slave to that monster. I realised I'd do anything to prevent that, Remus, and when I say it like that..."
She truly meant it, he could see it on her face, hear it in her voice. It terrified her to her core, and Remus thought, if he were to feel anything of the kind, he'd be just as terrified as her, because it was something enormous and nigh-on incomprehensible, and no doubt made all the worse by the suddenness of its coming upon her, too.
"I don't understand what I'm feeling at all, Remus," she whispered, voice shaking. "It's easy with James, this stupid crush I have on him – it's physical, I'm attracted to him, I like his smile and his upper arms and how he looks after Quidditch practice, muddy and sweaty and exhilarated. I mean, it's not just that, I like his sense of humour and I like how unselfconscious he is. I like that he's stopped being overbearing and pushy and self-absorbed. That's what a proper crush is like, I've had those before, I know it's romantic in nature. But with Severus, I'd never been attracted to him, not... not cleanly like with James, not physically and not on any superficial level. He was so important to me when we were kids, and then it got all muddled in the last couple of years, and three days ago, all I was thinking was that I couldn't lose him, I didn't stop to think why I was feeling that way, I just was and so I focused on that. And then I figured out about his Patronus two days ago, and I figured out what his mission meant yesterday, and then last night–"
She broke off her rushed, run-on sentence, taking big gulps of air and clenching her eyes tightly shut, her pale cheeks flooding with a rosy tint.
"I had a dream last night," she said, so quietly he'd have missed it if not for his Lycanthropy-enhanced hearing. "I dreamt of him and me, and we were– And it was more vivid than anything like that I'd ever dreamed before. I thought it'd pass, but then he walked into the Great Hall–" She lifted her eyes up to his, and the naked longing in them made Remus' mouth go dry. "I wanted him, Remus, I–" She looked away, her cheeks in full red bloom, and Remus felt his own heating up in response. She ploughed on regardless of just how awkward and embarrassing it was to talk about wet dreams with a boy, a boy she didn't even know might have had one or two of his own of her. "It's like all this stuff came on all at once, everything I was feeling and wasn't acknowledging, and what I wasn't feeling too, the, the attraction, they came all at once, and I... it's too much, Remus, it's all too much and I can't reign any of it in at all."
She buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders began shaking as another wave of quiet sobs overtook her. Sighing softly to himself, Remus placed his hand on her shoulder, letting her get whatever relief she needed from another crying spell while he turned all the information over.
The conclusion he came to was one he thought was going to be painful for her to face. But then, Lily had always somehow been coddled through all of the hardships she'd had since their friendship had truly grown, whether it was her sister, her parents, or Remus and Snape themselves, as a matter of fact. Perhaps it was time she was encouraged to grow up a bit, too, like the rest of them had.
"What I think, Lily," he laid it out when she'd calmed down again, "is that you're labouring under some misconceptions, and that they're blinding you to what your actual problem is, which has very little to do with either of those boys, and much more to do with the fact that you haven't a clue what you actually want in the future, and until you sit down and figure that out, you'll never get out of all this turmoil."
"What misconceptions?" she sniffed congestedly, conjuring herself another handkerchief to wipe her cheeks and blow her nose into – her first one was sodding wet.
"Well, you're thinking about it in terms of romantic interest, but that's a false equivalency. If you get together with Snape, James will eventually get over it and be your friend, even though he's gone completely arse over tits for you in the last couple of months. If you get together with James, you're losing Snape, full stop. It's not about deciding whom to be involved with, it's about whether you advance things with James at the cost of your connection with Snape."
Lily instantly lost all colour. "Oh God, I... I didn't–"
It was more than a little disillusioning, to get confirmation that she hadn't really seen this utterly obvious fact. But that in itself, Remus suspected, was coming from yet another misconception, and at least for this one, he couldn't really blame her, not when everyone involved had no doubt tried their hardest to pull the wool over her eyes, so as to make themselves look better, less of a bully or less of a victim, himself included. (At least, he chose to think that it was a case of misconception and lack of forethought, rather than that she'd actually thought she could have Snape as a friend while getting together with James; that version of Lily wasn't someone Remus thought he'd want as a friend, especially not given her newly acquired knowledge about the depth of Snape's feelings for her, but it also didn't fit to the Lily he knew from experience, either, so it wasn't hard to dismiss the possibility as very unlikely.)
"Lily, you can't equate me and James in this," he told her gently. "Snape may have found it within himself to call an amicable ceasefire with me, because of you, because he couldn't deny you our friendship no matter how much he wanted to, but your platonic friendship with me is a far cry from your potential romantic relationship with James. Not just because the whole root of their animosity is that they've both fancied you for years, but because James instigated most of our aggression towards him, and I mostly just stood by. I'm not saying I'm blameless, and Merlin knows Snape's not blameless either, but realistically, most if it is James' fault. I don't know how much he's really told you about it, or how you see our mutual antagonism, but I bet whatever you know isn't the true extent of it, and it's clouding your judgment, making you unconsciously think that if Snape's found a way to make peace with me, that he's got the capacity to do it with James, too. So you see, the question isn't 'which one do I like more?', the question is 'do I like James enough to give Snape up, even if I don't like him and I'd rather only have him as a friend?'"
"No," Lily blurted out, almost before Remus had finished his sentence, grabbing onto Remus' sleeve with a desperation he'd not quite expected. "No, no, I'm not giving Severus up, not for anything, and certainly not for James."
"So then, your dilemma should be resolved, you won't get together with James and you clearly feel more for Snape than just friendship, and this was even without taking into account just how disproportionate your feelings for those two actually are – with James, it's a crush, and with Snape, it's love, by your own words. It should be easy enough to sort out, and yet you're still conflicted."
Her eyes filled with tears almost instantly yet again, and Remus felt himself shifting from disappointment and pity into sympathy once again. In a way, perhaps it wasn't so surprising she'd gotten everything confused; hell, thinking about how much pressure she'd been under in the last four months made Remus' shoulders hurt with sympathetic weight of it all, and that was without adding her home situation or her social circle into the mix. And what did she even know about relationships? What did any of them know about them? They were sixteen years old, for Merlin's bloody sake, and middle-aged people found relationships difficult to navigate, never mind teenagers with so much else on their plates.
"What you're tearing yourself up about, it's not about your feelings for them, it's about what the choice you make means going forward. It's about everything else that comes with that choice."
She shook her head despairingly. "I don't think I understand, Remus. I don't... I don't think I understand anything anymore."
Well, that was rather counter-productive to what he'd intended; taking a moment to rethink his approach, Remus leaned his elbows on his folded legs.
"Ok, listen," he told her. "How about I break down how I see your choice between Snape and James, as an outsider, and you think about what that comparison represents to you in general terms?"
"All right," Lily said gratefully, wiping her tears with the palms of her hands.
"Right. Well, a relationship with James would be easy, simple, straightforward. He's a gentleman and he likes the idea of chivalry; he'll do all those things expected of a young man of noble birth, the flower and the presents and maybe even poetry, Merlin save us all. He'll adore you and shower you with that adoration. He'll likely woo you for the rest of your lives, and in spite of his relative promiscuity, he isn't one to cheat." Remus took a deep breath, then ploughed on with the flip side, voice growing almost harsh in judgment of his friend. "He'll also throw money at problems if he's even aware of them, he'll likely forget important dates because something more exciting will sweep him away in the last moment, and he certainly won't know how to handle conflicting emotions, nor will he ever develop the instinct to put you first, because he simply doesn't have the capacity for that sort of empathy in himself.
"A relationship with Snape, on the other hand, would be hard, complicated, likely always a struggle. He's hard all around, is my impression, full of negativity and insecurities and anger. He nurses his grudges and I think he doesn't forgive easily at all. And that's not even taking your circumstances into account – you'd have to hide, you'd have to learn to control your reactions really well, because you were very obvious today, and if what you said about him becoming a Death Eater is true, I don't know how you'd resolve that issue. I think he'd demand things from you that you'd struggle with, if we go by your current predicament, that he'd likely be jealous and possessive, and I can't see him doing any grand gestures or displays of affection either. But, I also think that he's very much guided by thoughts of you in everything he does, and I think that in spite of whatever stunted his emotional growth, he is extremely attuned to your emotions and well-being. I think he'd never lose that, either, that his instinct is to put you first, always, no matter how difficult it is or how much he'd rather not."
Lily didn't say anything for a few minutes after he finished, and Remus let her process it in silence. It was almost interesting, to watch her train of thought flit over her face as she worked through his comparison, the frowns and grimaces and squints and smiles, tiny, fleeting expressions that told him she was taking his words seriously.
Her face settled into confusion in the end, when she finally switched from staring into the distance to blinking her swollen, glassy green eyes at him. "What did you mean?" she asked, "that I was the root of their animosity?"
"The reason James targeted Snape more than any other Slytherin is because he wanted your attention, and you were giving it to Snape."
"What?" she said, aghast. "No, I... it can't be. Maybe for Severus, but not for James."
Merlin, could she be blind to emotional undercurrents around herself. He knew it, and yet it brought him up short every time she demonstrated it yet again.
"Half the reason why Sirius has always disliked you is because James has been fixated on you since we were kids."
"But... but he's had girlfriends and girlfriends! He flirts with all the other girls just as much as me!"
"James is a flirt, it's what he does. But he's never had interest for any of his girlfriends for longer than a few months."
"Oh," she breathed out, eyes widening. "Oh, God," she repeated, swallowing so heavily that he could actually hear it. "It's my fault, that's what you're saying? It's my fault that he singled Severus out from all other Slytherins."
"No, it's not," Remus retorted sharply. "Until this year, you've never encouraged him in it, Lily, and James' actions are on him, not on you, no matter how you might be involved with them. Snape's, too, for that matter. But maybe you can appreciate Snape's upset with you fancying James a bit better now."
"On top of me fancying his biggest bully, you mean?" Lily said miserably. "God, I'm such a horrible person, aren't I? How could I ever let myself start fancying someone who's been tormenting my supposed best friend for years, and then not feel disgusted enough about it to just stop when I realised it?"
Remus shrugged wearily. "It'd be nice if emotions worked that way, wouldn't it?" he replied, rubbing a hand over his face. "But putting aside how you've perceived James' aggression against Snape versus the actual truth of it, that was the point I was trying to make, Lily – I don't think you find it hard to stop fancying James, I think you find it hard to let go of what he represents. You know, having it easy and uncomplicated. But you can't have Snape without also having it hard and complicated, so you have to know what you want more in order to sort yourself out."
"I think I get it now, what you mean," she answered softly. "Thank you. I don't... I don't think I'd have realised what you said, on my own. And I'm sorry for putting you in this position, I had never meant to."
"But I'm the only one you can talk to about it. If it's helped you, then it's fine," Remus reassured her. He exhaled the emotional weight of the conversation in one forcible whoosh of air out of his lungs, letting his shoulders slump, letting himself feel for the moment the crushing weight of disappointment and envy and longing the conversation had stirred in him.
He thought of Lily's feelings for Snape, so much larger than she was ready to admit. He thought of James' young love for her, in its infancy still but with the potential of growing into something great. He thought of Snape's old love for her, already so life-changing and unshakeable.
He wondered how Lily could even think to resist the siren call of being loved that intensely, being wanted that strongly, as Snape wanted and loved her.
And he realised, dimly, that maybe his feeling of disappointment over her not seeing him as a romantic prospect weren't so much about her, as they were about him wanting to be loved in that way, and Lily coming the closest in the last year.
When she squeezed his fingers in gratitude, Remus smiled at her determined, centred face. There was nothing else for him to do.
The school owl carrying a Quidditch Weekly promotional letter flew in on Wednesday of the second week of January, dropping the letter directly onto Sirius' bread and nipping itself a piece of bacon before flying back out. Sticking the letter into his pocket, Sirius didn't think about it further until he could steal away to one of the toilets and read Regulus' note.
Tomorrow seven-thirty, during Gryffindor Quidditch practice
Regulus was already waiting for him at their usual meeting place when Sirius got there. He looked rather worried, which immediately put Sirius on guard, because there weren't very many things that would worry his brother into speaking with him about them. They'd not been bosom buddies even as kids, let alone now, after the mess the last summer had turned into.
"Sirius," his younger brother greeted him, straightening out from his slouch against the desk. "I though you should know – Father has had another setback."
Sirius' stomach clenched, though whether in nerves or worry, he couldn't quite tell. Clenching his jaw for a moment, he crossed his arms over his chest and looked Regulus straight in the eyes.
"You thought I should know."
"He had severe arrhythmia after Christmas; the healers were hopeful he would improve with proper bedrest. Mother wrote to me two days ago to tell me that it had happened again; they had to perform surgery on him to force his heart into proper rhythm. They've connected his heart to a charmed implant that should prevent further reoccurrences, and he should improve, but it's left him severely weakened. The healers said it's likely a congenital issue with his heart that they can't fix, just monitor and try to stop from deteriorating as long as possible."
"Why are you telling me this, Reggie?" Sirius asked, clearing his throat when the words came out far hoarser than he'd expected.
"I know you care about him more than Mother," the Black heir answered quietly. "I... you're seventeen now, he can't do anything to you anymore. If you think you'll regret one day not making peace with him before–" Regulus pinched his lips tightly shut and blinked a few times, visibly gathering himself against the words that had almost escaped him. "Well, before you haven't a chance any longer, I thought you should know that he probably hasn't got decades left."
"I owe him nothing," Sirius hissed viciously. "He disowned me."
But Regulus shook his head, very clearly keeping his cool. "I won't go into that topic with you anymore, Siri; I made a judgment call to disrespect your wishes regarding what we talk about during our meetings, and I apologise for that, but I felt it to be necessary that you had this information. What you do with it is your business."
"How very nice of you to just drop this in my lap and walk away."
That managed to poke through his brother's faux-mature façade. "Be happy you just had it dropped in your lap and can toss it in the bin as soon as I'm out of here; last I checked, it wasn't my fault that I not only had it dumped into mine, but I actually can't toss it away and have to deal with it on more levels than you can possibly imagine."
Yes, because it was Sirius' fault for getting disowned and giving Regulus exactly what he'd wanted, was it, Sirius translated Regulus' words for himself.
"Poor Reggie, having to deal with actual responsibility for once."
"Merlin, you're a prick sometimes, Sirius. Is it that easy for you to cross us all off in your head now you've gotten your freedom, that you don't even give two Knuts about Father maybe dying on us tomorrow?" Regulus' voice vibrated with childish hurt that only provoked Sirius even further.
"When they didn't give two Knuts whether I lived or died, Regulus, then yes it is."
And Sirius knew that Regulus had thought Orion might end up killing him on that horrible night, he'd actually outright said it. Why was he always so insistent on bringing Sirius back to all of this, on keeping him up to date with people who were supposed to love Sirius as he was, and not only didn't, but went out of their way to hurt him for it? Why should he care about any of them?
Regulus sniffed, but composed himself so deliberately and thoroughly that Sirius found himself losing his footing a bit, because his brother had never before been truly able to do it when he was emotional in this way, not in front of Sirius. He walked out, or he fought back, and always it was fuelled by emotion, always it was so very obvious to the boy who'd been Regulus' first playmate, who'd spent more time with Regulus than almost anyone else in the world, when it was all tallied up.
It was as if a wall of decorum had slammed between them suddenly, and Sirius felt disturbingly bereft because of it.
"Whether you like it or not, Sirius, they are your parents, and I am your brother. It is my brotherly duty to make sure you know what is going on with the people whose blood not only runs in your veins, but who actually came together to create you. What you do with that information is on you, and frankly, I think I would rather not know what that is in any case. But I will continue to do my duty by you, and you may consider that to be selfishness on my part if that helps you deal with it, I have no issue with that. I will leave you to it; it is clear I've overstayed my welcome for this meeting. Goodbye, Sirius."
He walked out of the room with his head held high, in measured steps that held no anger or hurt, just resoluteness.
And Sirius hated him, viciously, in that moment, because he got the last word, because he got to ruin Sirius' day and walk away from it without his day ruined in turn, because he knew Sirius as well as Sirius knew him, because damn him, Sirius did care about the fact that his father might be at death's door and he wouldn't be allowed at the funeral, because he couldn't stop himself from caring no matter how hard he'd tried to do it over the last five months since being kicked out, because Regulus was a tether to the worst parts of Sirius' life that the Gryffindor boy nonetheless couldn't cut off, no matter how much Regulus hurt him.
Feeling like his chest was suddenly on fire, Sirius bent over with his palms on his knees and fought to catch his breath, his heartbeat racing in his ears. Shutting his eyes tightly against the sudden sense that the room was closing in on him, Sirius dug his nails into the skin of his knees, feeling himself shaking apart at the seams and terrified of what was happening to him.
Some well-trained instinct forced the world into blues and yellows and greys as Padfoot's simpler drives asserted themselves over Sirius' fright, and he was suddenly running to cower in a well-concealed corner, letting out squeals and whines even as he curled up as tightly as he could and buried his head into his abdomen, and it wasn't helping, that was what terrified Sirius the most, it wasn't helping like it normally did, Padfoot wasn't taking it all away, he was only making things worse, making feelings clearer and sharper in his mind, making him more aware of the adrenaline that had him shaking with the chills and his heart galloping a thousand beats per minute and his breaths still being so short and shallow he felt like he'd suffocate.
Switching back, Sirius curled himself up tight and just begged whatever it was to go away, begged like he'd begged for the pain of the Cruciatus to go away, like he'd begged for his mother not to hurt him, like he'd begged his father–
pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease
One certainty, above all other, flooded his whole body and mind and soul, until there was no room for anything else–
He was going to die tonight.
pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease
At some point, breathing became a bit easier, and his chest didn't hurt so very much. Sirius stayed curled up, tears streaked down his cheeks, hair a sopping, sweaty mess, feeling like he was going to freeze so much his teeth were chattering. His neck felt numb, his arms and legs were tingling, nausea was trying to make him burp, and when he opened his eyes, the world felt somehow unreal, distorted.
But at least he wasn't hearing the banging and clattering, the pops of Apparition that had been so very loud in his ears what seemed like just moments before.
At least he knew that Orion wasn't there, pale as a sheet and murderously angry, standing above him with death in his eyes, death for his firstborn son.
It took another however-long to stop the shaking and finally manage to catch his breath properly, to feel like his heart wasn't going to race out of his chest and that he could stand up without his body feeling too limp to bear his weight.
When he did, he crawled out from under the desk, having to lean heavily against it to keep his balance, his limbs as weak as they'd been when he'd gotten that bout of wizarding flu in his second year and had had to spend almost a whole week in the hospital wing. Panting, he dropped himself into the nearest chair and buried his head in his hands in despair.
Sirius had no idea what was happening to him, but he knew one thing – whatever it was, he had no clue how to stop this from happening again, and that terrified him to death.
Lily felt like she was sleepwalking through the rest of the week. After the bombs that had fallen on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the relative lull in Wednesday, Thursday and Friday felt wrong, somehow, like the silence after an explosion felt deafening.
She kept her distance from both James and Severus, knowing now that she'd not be able to figure herself out if she was under their influence. She kept to Remus, Mary, Clotilde and Bettina instead, letting them avert her mind from romance and future when she got too overwhelmed by her own thoughts, allowing them to think she'd picked up a bug somewhere during her manic work on the journal and her withdrawn quietness was because of this.
And yet, at every spare moment not spent studying or passing time with her friends, Lily returned to her dilemma, picking at it, digging deeper, trying to come to a conclusion and a decision, not about the two boys over which she was seemingly agonising, but about her own wishes and wants.
She returned, so very often, to her parents. With seven years age difference between them, getting together when her mother had been barely nineteen and her father twenty-six, with twenty-five years of relationship and two children aged nineteen and seventeen, all that had in the end been between them had been resentment, disappointment, pain and indecision. She recoiled in her mind from such a conclusion to her own marriage, determined never to allow herself to reach that point. And yet, would all the strength in the world a single person could possess be enough to preserve something that was beyond saving?
The thought of it terrified her, of one day finding herself in her parents' shoes, and when she acknowledged it, when she forced herself to confront it, break it down, analyse it, she finally managed to comprehend just how much she'd been unconsciously driven by it. In her unwillingness to commit fully to the endeavour with Severus, in the way she'd recast Severus' justifiable mistrust of her from her own failing into something beyond her own control, she had been trying to extricate herself from a situation that could have been a failure even if she had fully committed, had tried to cling desperately to 'how it was before', even as she'd pretended that she wasn't and that this wasn't what had been pulling her in the exact opposite direction from the one she'd promised to tread.
It was time to face that aching truth – you could never go home again, no matter how much you tried. She could no more go back to how she and Severus had been before this winter, before last summer, before the last three or five years, than her father and mother could go back to the love they'd shared and life they'd built when Lily was small. All she could do was move forward, build something stronger, strive for something better, face up to something worse. The past had to serve only as a teacher, a cautionary tale, a hope. It couldn't serve as a template for the future.
And in accepting that, Lily also found her terror of her parents' situation ameliorated, too, because reflecting on them now, she could see that the end of their relationship, devastating though it had been, had also brought something else with it: a beginning – for healing, for new love, for moving on. Failure wasn't the end, and admitting defeat wasn't a flaw. It was only a flaw if she didn't give all she had to it, if she did it in half-measure. So long as she never fell into apathy and complacency, so long as she worked and worked and worked on her relationship, she'd know that if the end truly did come, it was because there really had been no way of preventing it.
From there, she turned her thoughts to her first concrete failing this semester; she sifted through her training with Dumbledore, combed over the insults and jeers she and Severus had traded, thought about her studies, her duties as a Prefect, her role in the social hierarchy of the school and how she was using it for the benefit of the Dracones Dormientes Society; she thought about friendship old and new, thought about being pulled in opposite directions by people equally dear to her; and most of all, she thought about just how exhausted she was, emotionally and physically, and how long ago that had started.
She'd not been prepared nearly enough for what this school year had brought, that was a painful fact that she had to face. Whether by circumstances outside her control or not, it didn't matter; what did matter was that she'd only committed to it in half-measure, had been caught unawares and had buckled instead of rising to the challenge.
And it wasn't that she was incapable of rising to the challenge, was the thing. Going home had shown her that, as well – she'd left home in September still in emotional turmoil, at war with Petunia, struggling to accept that her parents were as flawed as everyone else in the world. Distance and time had helped her process it, had helped her find the patience she needed with her sister, the understanding that her love for her parents wasn't diminished by the harms they'd done to her whole family, the capacity for forgiveness that she'd needed to be happy for them both in their new relationships and their new futures. But it was going home for the Christmas hols that had tested her, that had forced her to acknowledge all of these things, to become consciously aware of them.
And it was going home for the two weeks that had given her that same distance and time she needed so that she could think of this blasted mess at Hogwarts with a clearer head, with a finally properly determined mind. The memory of that devastation on Severus' face from their last meeting and the panic that had driven her to stand up to Dumbledore had blown away the blocks and barriers she'd used in the last six months to hide from the full truth of Severus' feelings for her and what they entailed on her side. With the fear of failure ameliorated, too, she felt reinvigorated, felt committed to Severus' mission and her role in it in a way that she'd not been at the beginning of the year, felt newly refocused on the war effort above her own struggles with the demands of it.
Because there was no other option for her, not if she wanted to have a future of her choice in Wizarding Britain once she was out of the safety of Hogwarts. And oh, how she wanted that bright future; the thought of being constricted – professionally, creatively, intellectually, socially, magically – was unbearable, and the happenstance of her birth to two non-magical people meant that to prevent that sort of constriction, she'd either have to fight or to leave. And she couldn't leave, certainly because she loved her homeland, but even more because her whole family, everyone she loved, was here, and would still be indirectly in danger if Voldemort were to win. To save Severus' soul, she knew she'd do it in a heartbeat, but not for her own safety, not for cowardice.
It was almost a relief, after so much rumination on negativity and failure and hardship, to think instead of an ideal future and what it might contain. Speaking with Petunia had made it perfectly clear to Lily that she wanted higher education and a career for herself, and watching her mother, she'd also come to the conclusion that she wanted financial independence, the ability to stand on her own two feet in the world. Too, she wanted some time to nurture her hobbies, reading and socialising, magical experimentation and fighting for political causes maybe. But she also wanted a family of her own, two or three kids, warm winter evenings by the fire with presents under the Christmas tree, hot summer days playing catch on the beach. And of course, she wanted a partner with whom to build that imaginary family, wanted a romantic relationship based on love and understanding and acceptance.
Thinking of her parents made Lily wonder if it was possible to have all of those things at once, or if her expectations were far too high. Thinking of them made her wonder, too, if she would be willing to put a romantic relationship before her career and interests and ambitions, if it would be possible to build a family when interests and ambitions were vying for her time and attention, if family would or could come together with a romantic relationship or if it could get in the way of it, make the relationship feel settled while actually becoming staid. Was there such a thing as a trinity of a fulfilled life, or did one or two things suffer for the sake of a third?
Certainly her parents had failed fantastically at at least one of those three, and that didn't give Lily much confidence in the endeavour. Still, even if it was a selfish or foolish thought, she still didn't want to sacrifice any of those things for any other. She never wanted to find herself simply existing with the other person as if years and years of togetherness had come to nothing, as her father had done, but equally so, she never wanted to find herself hollow and empty, having lost her interests and her ambitions for the sake of another person, like her mother had in the end. She wanted a relationship and a career, wanted a family and hobbies of her own. She wanted a relationship in which she was supported, was given space to bring all of the other passions to an even plane, to equal footing, even if this demanded tremendous effort of her in return, if it required compromises and struggle and exhaustion, if the condition was doing the exact same for her partner that she wanted him to do for her.
On Sunday, one week since the last exchange of words with Severus, Lily bundled herself into her warmest cloak and went wading into the Forbidden Forest, not straying too far from the castle, but far enough in to truly feel the woods around her. She pulled out her wand, fingers kept warm in fur-lined gloves, and cast her Patronus, so that she could bask in her doe's rightness in these surroundings, in the snow-filled forest, in the interplay of tall, dark trees, the soft, white snow all around, and the bluish, silvery glow of her Patronus, in the winter that was Lily's favourite time of the year. Lily was a winter child, and the winter soothed her burning soul. Like a wildfire, she felt herself burning so very brightly in her own body and mind, felt her soul yearning to be free, like her doe Patronus. Free, and yet not unfettered, but connected, always connected, like a doe was to her herd, to her fawn, to her forest and her stag. Free, and yet alert, watchful, always on guard, aware.
Finally, after four days of thinking on who she was as a person and what she wanted of the future, Lily turned her thoughts to the kind of relationship she wished for herself, and the two boys who were in a lot of ways the representation of the two poles of the same spectrum. She turned Remus' words over in her mind, the descriptions he'd given her of the two potential paths she was faced with. She took her time to imagine the best case scenario, and imagine the worst, too.
With someone like James, they might get along easily, joke and laugh around, have fun. In the beginning, while they were young, she thought it'd be fulfilling. But what about later, when she'd want to pursue her career, as a Charms Master or as an Auror? When she'd want to have children? When the weight of adult obligations blanketed the relationship, would it be able to survive? Would someone like James be mature enough not to resent her for it, or be forever more concerned with his own enjoyment than other people's pain? She could see the worst-case scenario so clearly, could imagine herself growing exasperated and resentful over such behaviours. Was that something she could change, simply by her own code of always working on it, never giving up?
James had changed in the end, yes, but he'd not changed on his own initiative. He'd not even changed on theirs, either, not until Remus had 'put his foot down', until, Lily assumed, the threat of truly losing what he wanted became properly real, until he'd tried to win it back and came so close and lost it again, for his own faults. And Remus had said that James wasn't capable of that sort of empathy, no matter how much stronger his awareness of others was now than it had been last year. Maybe this wasn't a trait another boy like him would share, but it was worth remembering anyway.
What about Severus? He'd changed for her, not for himself, didn't he? And yet he'd done it before it had even come to a pressing need for it, before he'd been given any ultimatum of the kind, before anyone but him had even realised he needed changing. She thought that with him, she'd have someone who'd fight as hard as she did, to build together, to mend before it was fully broken, to change.
And yet, would it even be worth it in the first place, when a future with him promised nothing but hardship? Remus had been right – Severus was jealous and selfish and possessive, was brooding and hoarded his resentments and lived with an ever-present anger. Would that mean he'd try to stifle her, try to stop her from doing the things he didn't agree with, try to control her?
Half a year ago, she'd have thought so; certainly, if she asked Petunia or Mary, they'd think so. But Remus didn't think so, and Lily didn't think it anymore either, not when Severus had overcome years of Remus standing on the sidelines, watching him get bullied and doing nothing about it, to find some way of coexisting with the boy who terrified him so very easily, on whom one of Severus' biggest traumas hinged. She'd been selfish and wanted Remus as her friend, and he'd not agreed with it, yet he'd chosen to adjust instead of object, to try and make things bearable from his side instead of trying to stop her from achieving it in the first place.
In a way, the choice boiled down to one essential difference – did she want easy laughter, warm indulgence? Or tense silence, fearful uncertainty? Did she want an easy relationship that would leave space for other things to take precedence, with the risk of that space turning into resentment and hurt, or did she want a hard one, that might consume her at the expense of all the other things she also wanted in her life, but might give back enough she wouldn't mind?
She turned around these words – easy and hard – in her mind, tried to look at them from every angle, tried to find the positives and the negatives in them. She thought about whether her soul would stagnate if her life were 'easy', whether her mind and her interests would turn stale. She thought about whether her soul would dim if her life were 'hard', whether her mind and her interests would exhaust themselves. She thought about whether her soul might find opportunity and choice if her life were 'easy', whether it'd find growth and strength if her life were 'hard'.
What she decided in the end was as much a product of the last nine months, as it was something she might have eventually come upon herself, in her mid-twenties or thirties. An easy relationship would be a shallow relationship, only ever surface deep, not challenging her in the least, letting her gently drift away into other things until she become just like her parents had. Choosing a relationship because it might be easy would already be giving up on her ambitious desire of having it all. A hard relationship, on the other hand, would be a deep relationship, one that filled all the nooks and crannies and hidden places of her heart, one that always challenged her, that took from her but that also kept her focused on what was important, on what needed to be done to maintain it. But would it be worth it, choosing a relationship knowing that it'd be hard and that it might in the end costing her one or more of the other things she wanted in life? Ultimately, if the worst should happen, which one would she regret more?
This time last year, if she'd asked herself which one she'd choose, she'd have gone with 'easy' and not given it a second thought, at least not until much, much later. Now, though – now, she felt differently.
Thinking back over the last nine months, over the upheavals and changes in her relationship with Severus, in her understanding of him, led Lily to conclude that, while the risk was inevitable, she didn't feel it to be insurmountable. Severus would understand – he'd shown his understanding and appreciation for hard work and effort needed for enormous endeavours, his willingness to bend in spite of his own rigidity. Even more, Lily knew that he could appreciate her internal life because his own was so very rich, away from prying eyes, in his love for reading and spell invention and potioneering.
As for what sort of relationship she wanted this to be, independently of anything else...
The doe trotted beside her as she slowly made her way back out of the woods and towards the castle, one set of footprints though two beings moved. Her Patronus made her feel warm, safe, protected by dark, dark eyes and potion-stained hands, and she felt so unutterably grateful for it.
She remembered, when she'd been thirteen years old, stealing into Petunia's room and unearthing a romance novel from the bottom-most drawer of her sister's desk, one of those silly, melodramatic romantic kinds, with a medieval theme, a lord's daughter locked up in a tower and a stable-boy who loved her beyond reason. She'd read through it in one breath, it had seemed to her then, and dreamed of having love of that kind, of a man whose focus would only ever be on her, whose intensity would ignite her from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair, whose deeds for her would be epic and whose dangerousness would change the world around her.
She still wanted that, at age seventeen, wanted it with a new maturity born of knowledge and experience that told her this was within her grasp, this was possible, this was real. She wanted epic in her life, shaken earth and stolen breath, wanted something worth shedding blood and ruining lives for. She wanted a relationship in which she was equal, was one half of a whole, no more and no less.
Only by choosing one path could she attain that, so in a way, it was a good thing that on that path was a boy who had the capacity to push beyond his limits, to break his own mould, to sacrifice all of himself for her, to give her what she wanted in life, a boy who would think to demand the same from her, who could force her to give the same, a boy who had the focus and determination and intensity to commit endlessly, to persevere in spite of the worst thrown at them, to sustain her and be sustained by her in return. And she knew that Severus would be guaranteed to be blind to all others but her, and even more thrillingly, that he could make her blind to all others in turn.
Choosing to embrace her feelings for Severus meant choosing the hard path, and Lily was not afraid of it anymore, not now when she knew that only on this path she'd have a chance to have all the other things she wanted out of life, too. It was not guaranteed, oh no, but it was a chance, and that was all she needed. She didn't know what her feelings for Severus entailed, exactly, beyond that willingness to sacrifice for him far more than she would for even her family. She certainly didn't love him the way he loved her, but she thought she could, if she let herself. And having recognised that first thing that had sparked a physical attraction to him – a thing she'd noticed even at the very beginning of their friendship, before physical attraction had meant anything at all – it was now so simple to find him physically attractive on the whole, too. Strange, and not altogether completely comfortable yet, but simple nonetheless.
All that rumination in the end illuminated something else, too – it illuminated to her just how abominably hurtful and trust-destroying her actions of the last half-year were towards Severus. And with that came the full force of self-disgust and guilt: self-disgust, over the cowardice that had driven her to cause Severus so much hurt without realising what she'd been doing, over forgetting all the history between Severus and James, over wavering between them instead of standing firmly by her best friend the way a good person would've, no matter what Remus had said to give justification to it; and guilt, over her incomprehension of the depth of his feelings for her in spite of the clues she'd been given months ago, over the deliberate self-blinding to the hardships of his mission just because she had had it hard too, over the selfishness of stalling for six months on tackling her dilemma and taking these three weeks to put things to right in her own mind before taking any decisive steps, no matter how much she knew it had been the right thing to do.
She needed to make things right with him beyond simply choosing to return his romantic feelings and turn their relationship from friendship into romance – she needed to ameliorate the hurts she'd caused, reassure and repair the broken trust he had in her, the way he'd done this summer with her broken one in him, commit fully to the war effort and her place by his side in it, take her time to finally properly learn and understand him, without preconceptions of past experience, without her own judgmental attitudes and without biased influences of others, be it in their disapproval of Severus himself, in their presentation of conflicts with him, or in their convictions of politics and chosen sides. Severus had changed, and the greatest injustice she'd caused him in the last nine months was not acknowledging it, accepting it, treating him accordingly, this new person he was choosing to be, for her and for Dumbledore and, Lily hoped, most of all for himself. Before all else, she needed to change this.
And she was going to start that by never again forgetting to think of his feelings alongside her own, never again putting him second-plan to her own problems and difficulties. When James had asked her advice on changing, she'd told him that the way to do it was to police himself constantly, to never stop thinking of what he was doing in any given moment, and to make amends when he did fail. She was going to take a page out of his book, then, and walk the talk she'd given him, because when James Potter of all people had managed to change himself to any extent, then Lily was damned if she'd allow herself to lag behind and stagnate in trying to be a better person, a person worthy of the love Severus held for her.
She slithered into bed that night, long after Mary and Bettina had fallen asleep, closed her drapes and cast privacy spells, and allowed herself just one indulgence, before the morning would bring with it hard work of penance and recompense for the hurts she'd caused. She imagined what it'd be like if she and Severus were lovers, imagined what it would feel like to have all that dark intensity and singular focus turned on her, imagined Severus pulling her apart into a million pieces and putting her back together into something wholly new, imagined something like her dream of Monday night, something so, so much better than the few fumbles she'd had last year with the outgoing boys, encounters that had left her partially disappointed, her soul wanting for more than lukewarm heat and muted excitement.
Later, after she'd satisfied herself for the second time in her life to the thoughts of her best friend, the experience only stronger this time around with her awake and aware of what existed between them, Lily slept, and dreamed of woods with two paths, of their doe outshining the ugly green Dark Mark in the sky and the magnificent red Phoenix, too, dreamed of Severus reaching for her hand so very desperately and herself finally reaching back, so that when they laced their fingers together, nothing could ever tear them apart again.
In her dream, she was happy.
A/N: Phew, that's done! I hope it's gone at least a ways towards redeeming Lily in the eyes of everyone who've judged her over the past chapters and found her wanting. The hard work is still ahead, of course, because I don't believe in the 'Moonlighting curse', but I do believe that this modern perception of 'hooking up is the hardest part of romance' has a very strong potential to ruin a story if taken as truth. Nonetheless, there's one last chapter to Part III, which will be followed by an Interlude (as usual), and then the story will be going on hiatus yet again while I wrangle another 150k or so words into a coherent Part IV narrative. I'm hopeful that I won't take as much time as I have previously, but I can't promise anything specifically; I can only promise to try and get it written as soon as possible.
For a little furry addendum to the chapter, head over to the story on AO3 and check the author's note at the end of this chapter :D