Voyeur

by scriibble

As his seventh year begins and the First Wizarding World grows outside Hogwarts' castle walls, James Potter has one goal in mind: to finally win over Lily Evans. The only problem? Accidentally seeing her with someone else, of course—but it's not like that will stop him. [L/OC to L/J; Marauders seventh year/intro to the First Wizarding War] [Winner of JilyAwards 2020 Fav Smut/NSFW]

16. Chapter 16

A/N: I read every review at least two or three times over, and I'm grateful for each and every one. I've probably said this, but I'm part of a couple different fanfiction communities where I like to read forums, and every once in a while people will talk about their favorite reviewer who leaves them a full paragraph or two each chapter. They'll say, that reviewer is who motivates me, and I realized that I couldn't pick that one reviewer who motivates me. That's fucking incredible.

I was asked after a potential Tumblr again. I don't have one, and I probably shouldn't make one (unless this dissertation wants to write itself…which would be awesome), but I love the idea of people having theories they want to share with me. That they even exist is wild to me, since this was just a weird idea in my head for literal years before I finally put it all down. I'm always down to hear any theories, feedback, or anything else via PM here!

Enough gushing. Thank you, all, for the love and support. Someone wrote in a review that my fic was a bright spot during a chaotic time for them, and that really spoke to me. I think our lives are all probably chaotic right now, so thank you for escaping into this with me.

Chapter Sixteen

When James came downstairs the next morning, he found everyone else already at the table—his mum bent over the post, his dad and Lily sharing an issue of the Prophet, and Hestia giggling at something Sirius had just said.

The scene made him extraordinarily, almost absurdly happy.

"Good morning, dear," Euphemia said, smiling. She, too, looked pleased as her eyes swept the table. "Always the last one up, although your dad would beat you, I think, if I'd let him."

"Good morning, James," Lily offered, and she seemed to linger over his name. He thought she smiled, too, although she allowed only her eyes to peak over the top of her newspaper. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, Lily, thank you." And really, after he had gone to the bathroom with her knickers, he had. He'd kept them afterwards, uncertain about what else to do with them—what was the etiquette for what to do with knickers gifted in that way?—and also because he'd absolutely wanted to keep them. Still, he wondered a bit uncomfortably if Peter's shrine jokes were about to get a little too real for his taste. "And you?"

"Are they flirting or fighting?" Sirius asked Hestia as James took the empty seat next to Lily and busied himself with a stack of toast.

"Flirting," Hestia answered immediately. "You really can't tell?"

"It all looks about the same to me."

Lily ignored them pointedly. "I slept well, thanks." She turned a page in her section of the newspaper, and then slid James a piece of curved parchment from by her side. "This came in the post from Alice."

James read the letter quickly twice over:

Dear Lily,

Imagine my surprise when I wrote to Professor Dumbledore to ask if Frank and I could see you over Easter break, only to find out that you're spending it with the Potters! You should have heard Frank laugh. Please expect him to tease you mercilessly the next time you see him, although he's promised to give it to James worse. That was my one stipulation.

But, if you're not too annoyed at the mere idea of his future attitude, can we chat sometime this week? Frank and I would love to meet you for drinks one evening. We can make tomorrow or Thursday work. You pick. And bring James. We have something we need to put to the two of you.

After reading over your last letter again, I think you're absolutely wrong, especially now. There's no—

James flipped the parchment over, confused, but it seemed to end there, midsentence, just above a carefully-torn line. "Where's the rest?" he asked.

"In my pocket," Lily told him. "Fleamont, are you done with the Divination section? It can't be full of any more bunk than this opinion piece on the Minister's new policy towards the importation of magical creatures, but you're welcome to it."

Fleamont swapped her several sections of newspaper for what she held in her hand. "Speaking of bunk, there's a wonderfully infuriating little bit on page four about an unattributed attack on a muggle village near Dover, caused by 'witches or wizards unknown.'" His tone sounded mild, but James recognized the frustration that lay beneath his words.

"I wonder who that could be," Lily muttered sarcastically, and James saw her flip towards page four immediately.

"Why is the rest of the letter in your pocket?" James pressed, toast forgotten.

"Because it's nothing important. What, do you want to read my girly chats with Alice?"

"Evans, I want to read your girly chats with Alice," Sirius interjected, obviously intrigued. "Does she gossip? There's no way. She's too nice for that, isn't she?"

"Sometimes," Lily said airily, although it wasn't clear from her answer if Alice sometimes gossiped or was sometimes too nice to do so. "Fleamont, what do you think they mean by this: 'Charges will be filed pursuant to information held by the Ministry'? Do you think they have charges, or that they'll file them when the information becomes available—so, basically never?"

"The latter, no doubt." When Fleamont lowered his paper briefly, James saw that his face had gone undeniably grim. "After all, when was the last time the Ministry filed any charges after muggle attacks?"

"Or any attacks, really." As Lily spoke, James saw her glance up at Hestia, who had taken to looking out the window, although her gaze looked very far away, further than past the Potters' perfectly-manicured lawn. At the sight of her, Lily seemed reluctant to go on.

"There's nothing in the rest of the letter I need to see?" James asked. By the way the corner of Lily's mouth twitched in response, he had to wonder if she'd purposefully tried to wind him up with her blasé responses and question-dodging.

"Just girly chat. Honestly. I'd tell you otherwise." And she looked as if she meant it, at least enough that he believed her.

"What kind of girly chat?" Sirius asked, undeterred.

"The standard stuff." Lily waved a hand evasively, and James knew, picking his toast back up, that Sirius wouldn't get more from her than that. "Hessie, what do we talk about when we have girly chats?"

Hestia seemed to come back to herself, and she managed to smile a little as she picked up her teacup. "Let's see." She took a thoughtful sip. "Boys. Clothes. The utter chaos and destruction in the world. Teen Witch Weekly."

One of those things, so casually spoken, seemed very much not like the others.

"I wrote a bit for Teen Witch Weekly after Hogwarts," Euphemia spoke up off-handedly. She looked truly startled when she saw the astounded expressions on Sirius and Hestia's faces. "What?"

"You never told me that!" Sirius exclaimed, which only added to her confusion.

"Now, why would I, dear? Why would I think you'd have any interest in that? And why would you have any interest in that?"

"We love Teen Witch Weekly," Sirius said sincerely, and James heard Lily stifle a laugh behind her newspaper.

We, she mouthed at him when she lowered her paper just enough to catch his eye, and James couldn't resist a grin. The plural did sound undeniably coupley, and entirely unlike Sirius.

"It was just a few opinion pieces, and some bits here or there about beauty spells," Euphemia said dismissively.

"Beauty spells you created," Fleamont clarified, not lifting his eyes from the paper. James hadn't known he'd listened. "It was very impressive, darling."

"So you took Arithmancy, Mrs. Po—Effie?" Lily corrected herself midway through the question. She folded the paper and set it on the table. She no longer looked amused, to James' eye, but very intrigued.

"My favorite subject," Euphemia replied. She'd cast Fleamont a warm look at his compliment, one that reminded James uncomfortably too much like the way Alice looked at Frank. "The only NEWT I didn't have to study for to get an O—although of course neither James or Sirius gave it any interest, just like they wouldn't humor Flea at Potions, although at least they both stuck with that. Stubborn to the last, the both of you." She cast them both exasperated but loving looks before she returned her attention to Lily. "Do you take it?"

Lily nodded and opened her mouth to say more, but Sirius interrupted her.

"Do you have the issues you wrote in?" he asked eagerly, leaning forward on his elbows. "Because Hess and I would be all over that."

"Somewhere, I'm sure. I'll set Millie to looking today. But why the sudden interest?"

James tuned out Sirius' hurried explanation of Hestia's passion for Teen Witch Weekly, which he had clearly adopted whole-heartedly, and handed the beginning of Alice's letter back to Lily. She folded it carefully and tucked it into the front pocket of her jeans, which already bulged slightly, he noticed, apparently from the other fragment of letter. "Tomorrow, then?" he asked. "You should owl her back right away."

"I will after breakfast, but we'll do Thursday." She sounded definitive.

"Tomorrow is fine, Lil, really," Hestia said quietly from across the table. James hadn't felt her eyes on them. "You should go."

"Thursday is fine too," Lily insisted, and Hestia, perhaps sensing she would fight a losing battle if she continued, simply nodded. "I'll be here tomorrow. It's where I want to be."

Hestia's face transformed into something James didn't recognize, and as he looked at her, he suddenly thought of the way Marlene had looked when she cried on the couch in the common room in recent days—just utterly broken. But she smiled in the next moment, however tremulously, and he knew without a stitch of confirmation that the next day must be the anniversary of her mother's death that she had alluded to when she worked to convince Lily to go to his house over break.

"Thanks," Hestia said softly, and James' thoughts shifted to Remus, and his ability to capture so much in just a single spoken syllable. She had that power too.

She seemed to perk up mightily after breakfast, perhaps due to Sirius' many attempts to make her laugh, to break her out of the mood he'd only realized, belated, had come over her. He coaxed her out to the Quidditch pitch, and flying seemed to cheer her up in the same way it always did him and James. Although James had tried to coax her onto a broom (and got rejected even more sorely than he had the night before in her bedroom, he thought), Lily seemed quite content to lay on her stomach in the grass nearby, a book in hand, and soak up the watery sunshine of the late March day.

"Is this a bit to impress my mum?" James asked when he took a break from flying to spread out next to her. He recognized her book as an Arithmancy tome.

"Not entirely, but I do intend to talk to her about it later. I caught her in the kitchen after I wrote back to Alice, and she suggested it to me."

"I thought you found Arithmancy dull. Isn't that what put you off Curse-Breaking?"

Lily marked her place in her book with her wand and closed the cover. She rested her cheek against her hands, which she had folded up by her head, and smiled when James rolled onto his side so he could caress the bare skin of her back where her jumper had ridden up. He couldn't help but grin back. "It is dull, but it's dead useful," she said, and she closed her eyes.

He wanted to ask her what it was she worked on, what those complex numerical charts meant that she had shown Remus, the ones that had stumped him even though he'd sat next to her in Arithmancy for almost four years. According to Remus' intel, she had started something new, not the previous work to try to figure out the curse on her leg as she'd confided in James weeks before. But she looked so peaceful, so content, that it seemed better to use her good mood to fry bigger fish.

"If I tell you something, do you promise not to get mad?" he asked.

She opened her eyes at that, clearly wary. "Absolutely not. I reserve the right to get mad if you tell me something ridiculous or crazy. Is this ridiculous or crazy?"

"Kind of, I guess. I don't know. You might think it is." James could hear Hestia's laughter, bright and excited, as she scored a goal against Sirius up high above their heads. "I want you to be my girlfriend," he told Lily bluntly, and he took the fact that she didn't throw his hand off from where it still lingered on her back as a good sign. "I think you probably have to know that already, but I don't think I've ever actually said it before, so I wanted to make sure that I told you."

He waited for her to launch into some impassioned speech about her reasons against dating, her fear for any potential partner linked to her, all of the thoughts she'd relayed to him that he'd spun over and over in his head ever since Christmas break, trying to work a way out of her reasoning. But instead she simply lifted her head back up and nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving his. "Okay. Thank you for telling me," she said, and James doubted that he'd ever heard a more neutral tone or statement in his life.

"But I'd also rather have something with you than nothing," he continued, and he felt slightly flustered, his words so open and honest and passionate when she sounded so detached, but he barreled on. "I didn't want to give you an ultimatum or something with what I said in the prefect's bathroom. I'm sorry if it came out that way. I was so focused on trying not to touch you that I doubt I made much sense at all. But you don't make me miserable. You never have. But if I'm not able to kiss you or touch you or spend time with you anymore, that will make me miserable. So just…stop trying to respect my feelings or whatever you said last night. Knock it off."

"You're asking me to stop respecting you?" she asked, gently teasing, as if she couldn't help but break the tension, unable to stand the seriousness behind his words. "I can do that, and easily. I did it for years, so I've gotten quite good at it. One of the best, I'd say."

At her comfortable tone, James let out a breath he didn't know he held, and leaned to kiss her. He half-expected her to stop him, still uncertain about what her light words really meant, but she didn't. She leaned in closer to him, a hand on his chest, and when he reached up to stroke her hair, he felt tiny blades of grass twined in the strands.

"I'm still not shagging you," she said after a long, increasingly heated moment, which of course killed any kind of potential mood. James could tell she knew it too by the fraction of a smile on her face he spied when he opened his eyes.

"I really wish you would," he told her, and she laughed again. He tugged her towards him to close the gap between them, and found that she came quite easily to lean up against his side. She rested her head on his arm, the same one he had propped up to hold his own head as he remained turned towards her, and he returned his hand immediately under the back of her jumper. The only other time he'd held her intimately—intimacy without anything sexual—had been in the prefect's bathroom when she'd confided to him so much—the truth about her cursed wound, the trip to St. Mungo's, the Hogwarts Death Eater attack. He'd found she fit neatly against him then, but thought so even more in his parents' yard, as the sun shone and the air smelled fresh and she looked up at him with teasing eyes somehow even greener than the grass. She looked, and felt, like she absolutely belonged there with him, he thought. "Evans—I mean, Lily, since we do that now—" She laughed as he fumbled, but the humor faded quickly off her face as he continued. "I've given up trying to pull back, to like you less, to try to keep myself safe in case you…just leave, just get done with this, because I know that could happen. That's all I meant in the bathroom, because I worried that I might—no, that I absolutely would—like you even more if we had sex. But I don't care about that anymore. It's like—what did you say? 'I could shag you right now, and it wouldn't change the way I feel about you at all'? That's how I feel. Because I'm just…I'm in. I give in."

What he gave into, he didn't want to say. Into their relationship, whatever that was? Into finally take that next physical step, the final act they'd danced around for months? Or into love? Because he'd started wondering the latter more and more as the days passed and his desire to be around her seemed less like a simple want, as it once had been, and more like a physical need, something akin hunger or thirst, something he couldn't live without.

Her face went soft, that sort of expression that that seemed to come over her anytime he tried to have a serious talk with her—a sort of sadness, almost, and she always acted like she didn't want him to see that look. She kissed him, as she usually did when that sort of mood overtook her, and he wondered not for the first time if she did so mainly to hide her face. Even her kiss seemed a little sad, very gentle and singular, and then she buried her face in the crook of his neck. "I'm not going anywhere," she told him quietly, her lips soft against his skin, and her voice held promise, such promise that James allowed his hopes to rise. She really sounded like she meant it.

"Mate, get a room or get back up here!" Sirius hollered down from above their heads. Even as James looked up at him so many feet up in the air, a tiny figure against the soft blue sky, he could tell his best friend grinned.

"You pick," he said against Lily's ear, and he heard, and felt, her laugh.

"Go play," she ordered, and when she pulled back, he saw that her face had returned to normal, its usual picture of pretty good cheer. "I'm going to go see if your dad wants to brew."

James couldn't help but feel cock blocked by his own dad. When Lily heard him mutter something to that effect, her laughter renewed.

"Oh no, your dad isn't in the way of anything. Again, I'm not shagging you. Not unless I'm sure."

"I wish you'd tell me what that means, so I could make you sure."

He could feel her smile against his mouth as she kissed him a final time, and then swept to her feet and gathered her book and wand in her arms. "I'll tell your dad you said hi," she said tauntingly, and he watched her walk back towards the house, her long hair swinging behind her.

xxx

James found her still in his dad's brewing lab a good four or five hours later, her hair piled on her head and her jumper tossed carelessly over one of his dad's armchairs, clad instead in a thin t-shirt embossed with the logo of the Star Grass Five, his favorite wizarding band. Even from behind, as James watched her from the open doorway, she exuded a certain sort of energy as she bent over the steaming cauldron in front of her, almost an electricity, that made him suddenly appreciate potion-making much more.

From what he could see of his dad's face from his profile, Fleamont looked every bit as keen as her, although he reclined in a nearby chair. "But your parents are muggles, are they not?" he asked, clearly in the middle of a conversation James suddenly wondered very much about. He saw James in the doorway and favored him with a smile and a wink, but his attention remained focused on Lily. "Forgive me for assuming, but Britain's wizarding world is a small one, and I don't recall any Evanses."

"Yes, they're muggles," she confirmed, and then picked up a loose handful of something brilliant and white. "Snake fangs," she told Fleamont, and counted out four, which she dropped into the cauldron one at a time, stirring carefully after each addition.

"To counteract toxicity, I assume?" Fleamont asked, and James realized they carried on two conversations at once, which they both seemed to follow easily.

"Yes, but the dosage is incredibly touchy. Too little and it does nothing, and the toxicity remains. Too much and you'll end up—well, burning your skin off, as you saw in one of my photographs. It took a bit of trial and error to figure it out." Lily picked up her wand and prodded the fire under the cauldron, which immediately died down from bright orange to small, blue flames. "I started brewing with a wizarding boy who lived a couple neighborhoods away," she explained, picking up the thread of their other conversation. Her voice had a strange quality to it, one James had never heard before. "We must have been…oh, nine? He saw me doing accidental magic and revealed the whole thing to me—magic, Hogwarts, the wizarding world, all of it. Wr spent a lot of time at his house after that, trying to harness our magic to brew with his mum's equipment, because it was the only kind of magic we could potentially manage without wands. I've just loved brewing ever since."

"The first magic is often the most important to us," Fleamont said thoughtfully. James couldn't see Lily's face, but he wondered what she looked like, given the way his dad looked at her, so pensive and careful. "May I come look?"

"Please."

Fleamont rose and joined her at her side, and James hesitated in the doorway. He'd never felt like an intruder before in his own home, but he felt distinctly like one just then, as if he'd fallen into some private moment where he didn't belong. He couldn't imagine Lily ever telling him a story about Snape, who he knew she spoke of even though she hadn't used his name. When it came to Snape, she still kept her cards impossibly close to her chest, even after years of no communication between them past the fight they'd apparently had recently, which she still hadn't said a word about. Unwilling to rock the boat, James had never brought it up either. He didn't understand their relationship, but he wanted to, desperately—and it seemed, annoyingly, like his dad managed to get at it and maybe understand it more than he did.

Despite his hesitation, James stepped into the lab, and cleared his throat as he approached. Lily turned and smiled when saw him, the color high in her cheeks as she always flushed when she worked in Potions. He touched the small of her back when he reached her, and she shifted her weight very slightly to lean against him in a way that almost seemed subconscious rather than purposeful.

"It'll simmer now," she told Fleamont as she carefully extracted her stirring spoon from the pearlescent potion. "And I will just leave it entirely alone. If it's bothered with too much, it has the potential to explode at this stage—I ruined a really nice blouse that way."

"Where do you do this at school?" James asked. "In the dungeons? I've never heard of explosions down there that the lads and I haven't caused."

She cast him a look far less disapproving than he would have thought. "I have a little part of our dorm rigged up, but I mainly use the dungeons or, if I need his help, Slughorn's office." She lifted a shoulder in a mindless shrug, and set to clearing her station in well-practiced motions, vanishing the remnants of ingredients and cleaning different measuring and stirring vessels, some of which James had never seen before in all seven years of Potions. "He doesn't mind if I use it, so long as I don't destroy anything, I suppose, although he's never caught me when I have. He was out when I really had to work to get one of his armchairs back together once after an incident with an overheated cauldron, but I did manage."

"So, this will simmer then," James said. "How long will it take to reach a stage where it's not some sort of bomb?"

Lily took his wrist in her hand to check his timepiece with ease. "Until after dinner, at least. Seven, maybe? It'll get into the babying stage around then, so I'll need to keep an eye on it."

"And until then?"

Lily twirled her wand, and a shimmering shield grew to encase the cauldron, flames and all. "Until then, like I said, it's best left alone. This will keep it encased, so if something should happen, it won't ruin your lab, Fleamont."

Fleamont waved a hand. "Nothing that can't be righted if something did happen," he said easily. "I guess this means you're taking her away, Jamie?" he asked, and his hazel eyes twinkled. He seemed to try hard to fight off a smile, although that somehow just drew more attention to his amused grin when it did break over his face. "Go on, then. I'll have her back after dinner, please."

"I'm meant to have tea with your mum this afternoon," Lily said before James could even respond, before he could suggest that he pull her somewhere. "Do you know where she is?"

"She went to show Hestia the greenhouses," he said, taking her hand. She glanced down for a long moment, at their hands clasped together, and James thought that she might pull away, but she didn't. "They'll be out there for ages. And, really, I don't remember signing up to share you with my folks all break," he told her, and that got a laugh out of her and his dad, when, really, he half meant it.

Still, he managed to get her away, out of his dad's lab and out on the estate's grounds for a walk, just the two of them. After so many months surrounded by people at Hogwarts, it felt like the ultimate luxury. When he told her that, she agreed without pause, and he wondered what felt like the luxury to her—the time spent alone with just him, or the time spent away from all the chaos and noise of hundreds of students. He didn't have the nerve to ask.

But she let him continue to hold her hand, and when she stopped to slip her jumper back on, she even reengaged his before he could reach to take hers.

"Dad's completely taken with you," he told her as they stepped into the formal gardens of the front lawn, each flower bed row laid out carefully in straight geometric lines, although many of the flowers had yet to even peak up through the dirt. "You and potioneers. You always manage to win them over, don't you?"

She smiled, and she looked a bit bashful when she ducked her head for just a moment, the antithesis of her normal self. There was something softer or sweeter than usual about her expression, and he found he loved the look entirely. "I usually don't try. You know, to win people over. I do when it's necessary, but it's too much work, too much effort and energy the rest of the time."

James stared at her, nonplussed, recalling each kind, selfless thing she'd done for his friends. Did she really not know that she'd won them over completely, and had she not even tried? Did she truly just manage to win people over without realizing she did, or meaning to do so?

"But I'm trying now, because I'd like your parents to like me," she continued, and the certain shyness came over her again, as if she had just revealed something embarrassing. "I know your dad does already, but your mum is harder to read. I'll have to work more at her than him, I think."

He couldn't help but recall Peter's recent characterization of her—unstoppable and relentless. The way she said it, her desire to win over his mum, sounded as determined as any mission she'd ever had, like any school project she'd ever had to tackle, and he believed she would do whatever she needed to get an O.

"Why do you care if they like you?" he asked, and he grinned at the exasperated glance she threw him. "C'mon, let me have this."

"Would you want my parents to like you?" she shot back.

The mere thought of meeting her parents seemed suddenly more daunting than the NEWTs that they faced in only a few short months. He felt a newfound flash of gratitude that she had come home with him for break, to spend a solid two weeks with his parents when he wasn't sure how he'd manage even a handshake and introduction with hers. He hadn't considered how nerve-wracking time spent at his house might be for her, and his hope blossomed further, because she had agreed to go despite the potential stressors.

"Yes," he answered, and he wondered what she thought when he saw the second glance she shot him, more curious than before. "But you can still tell me why you want them to like you, if you want. I'd like you to."

She kissed him instead, lifting herself onto her toes to reach for him, and when he reached to wrap an arm around her automatically, he wondered for the second time that day how often she did that—kissed him into silence when she didn't want to talk—because he knew it absolutely would work every time, as it did then. Yet when she pulled away, more flushed even than she had looked while brewing, she did let him have it, as he'd requested, even though she could have easily bypassed the question entirely.

"I want them to like me because I like you," she said, remaining needlessly on her tiptoes, hands still buried in the back of his hair. "And…I don't plan to go anywhere, so it's important to me that we get on, since…I usually want to be where you are these days."

Halting stops, hesitation, and all, it was the clearest declaration of feelings she had ever given him. She looked, for a brief second, like he so often felt around her—like she'd just put something out into the universe she shouldn't have said, and like she wanted to reach out and snatch it back. The anxiety in her expression endeared her to him even more, just a blip that crossed her face before she carefully masked her feelings behind her usual impassive smile, because it showed what it had cost her emotionally to tell him so plainly how she felt, yet she had done it anyway. Unsure of what to say, and unsure of what else to do besides grin so widely that his face hurt, he bent to kiss her with the plan to keep her there, to hold her and kiss her for as long as she'd let him.

Later, in his own declaration of feelings, he would tell her that he knew exactly in that moment that he'd fallen in love with her.

xxx

To his annoyance, James found he had to share Lily quite a bit—with his mum, with his dad, and with Hestia. She slipped away from him quite quickly after their walk to have tea with his mum. Hestia joined them, but she ducked out early and found James and Sirius back outside with their brooms.

"Lily brought out an Arithmancy chart from her trunk, and it was all over for me after that," she explained, rolling her eyes. Still, something in the tightness of her mouth, even as she gave Sirius a warm look when he handed her a broom, made James wonder if she knew more about the Arithmancy subject that she let on, or perhaps more than she wanted to know.

"She's really going for it, huh?" Sirius asked, chuckling. "She's going to force your parents to like her, mate."

"I don't think she has to force much," Hestia said loyally, an eyebrow lifting in clear reproach.

"Well, you're lucky you don't have to go through this with me," he told her, and he slung an arm around her shoulders before he did something James had never seen him do before, and kissed the top of her head. The motion seemed so natural, even as it looked so absurd to James, that Sirius didn't even seem to catch the fact that he'd done it. "I wouldn't foist my family on anyone, and the Potters like you, so you're golden."

He seemed to miss a brief look that flashed across Hestia's face, and James had to wonder if his words, so carelessly and lightly spoken and clearly well-intentioned, had made her think about her own broken family. Catching James' eye, she carefully rearranged her face in a manner far less convincing than Lily usually managed, yet when she smiled up at Sirius a second later it did seem genuine, all things considered. She seemed willing to forgive him thoughtless transgressions, and really, Sirius needed that, he knew.

Dinner passed peacefully enough, although James thought he detected something colder in the air than had existed at breakfast, a slight break in the way that they had somehow managed to come together with such ease the night before and that morning. He couldn't place it through the starter and most of the main, although he thought he identified it just before Millie sent out their dessert. Lily spoke easily with his dad, their conversation shifted again towards his library, and James jumped in when and where he could, not a simple task when they both clearly had the same passion for books that made his own look weak. Euphemia kept Hestia engaged, back into discussions of Herbology and Teen Witch Weekly, and Sirius added his thoughts in his usual boisterous manner, his hand often drifting to rest on the back of Hestia's neck. But for two people who had passed the afternoon together at tea, he couldn't help but notice that his mum and Lily rarely so much as made eye contact. He caught his mum observing her more than once, especially when she laughed at something James said and reached to touch his arm or shove his shoulder, both of which happened with an increasing frequency that made him proud. In return, Lily glanced down the table towards his mum at a couple of the things she and Hestia discussed. She looked as if she'd like to add something and only just resisted, as if concerned her commentary might disrupt things. It left him frankly bewildered, especially compared to the way his mum treated Hestia like some sort of valuable, delicate treasure. He couldn't make heads or tails of it at all until after dinner.

Lily and Fleamont disappeared to his lab, and Euphemia managed to pull James aside after successfully distracting Sirius and Hestia with a whole stack of old Teen Witch Weekly issues. Surveying James over the top of her teacup, she blew away a mouthful of steam and leaned up against a counter in the kitchen. "So, Lily," she began, and he resisted the urge to immediately start rubbing his head just from the way she looked at him, so watchful and alert, as if she waited to sniff out the slightest clue from his reaction.

He waited for her to go on, but when she didn't, he finally caved. "Yeah, Mum? What about her?"

"Your father seems quite taken with her," she said matter-of-factly, and James had to marvel at the fact that he'd made the same comment to Lily only hours before. "And you seem…" She looked as if she thought about it in-depth, really weighed the possibility of assigning a number of different words to what, exactly, he seemed. "You seem smitten," she finally decided. "Are you smitten?"

James pushed up his glasses to cradle the bridge of his nose. Just a few days away from eighteen, he thought, and he encountered his first awkward talk about girls with his mum. He'd almost managed to avoid it entirely until he got out of the house, but she'd gotten him only months before. Would it have felt less awkward, he wondered, if he'd had more opportunities for her to force him to have such talks? She'd rarely ever seen him around girls before, he realized, and none that he liked as much and as he blatantly liked Lily. "Yes." He dropped his glasses back down. "Mum, this is embarrassing."

Euphemia smiled at that. "I have no idea why, dear. I haven't even asked you yet if you need your father to talk about contraceptives with you, although I'm sure Lily could brew up what she'd need if she's half the potioneer your father thinks she is."

James stared at her and felt his entire body seemingly flush red all in a flood. His back began to sweat. "Mum, that's—we're not. Okay? We're not. So, no, Dad doesn't need to tell me a thing, and we never have to talk about this again. Actually, let's start over entirely. Hi, I'm James, your son. We don't need to talk about these things."

"Don't be so dramatic," she said, waving a hand, and it didn't escape him that Lily had accused him of the same thing earlier. "And Sirius and Hestia?"

"Also not—I think—no, he'd tell me. He would. But tell Dad to go ahead with him, give him the whole spiel. He'll love it."

"Okay then," she agreed, almost too easily. "Well, that's that." She paused thoughtfully, before offering, "Hestia's very sweet. I like her very much."

James wiped his off on his jeans, still very much overheated even though he thought from her tone that the worst of it must have passed. "Yeah. She's good for him. Makes him a little less…stupid." He watched her nod as if she understood completely, and then waited to see if she had anything to add. When she didn't, the absence became glaring. "And Lily?"

"She's very pretty and vivacious," Euphemia said, and she spoke in the same manner that she turned her teacup in her hand: very carefully. "And clearly very smart. The Arithmancy charts she showed me today were quite advanced, and nothing assigned for coursework, just additional work she wanted to do. That—"

"Did you know what it was?" he asked, and she looked startled at the sharpness in his tone. "What she meant to work out?"

"No. I'd need longer with the charts, and she just asked for help with a single section, something she'd gotten stuck on. Why?"

He hoped his shrug came off as nonchalant. "No reason. What were you saying?"

"Nothing, really. I can see why you like her, and I like her bit too, honestly. I just hope you're not getting too serious too fast."

Laughing more at himself than anything, James shook his head. "Trust me, Mum. She's not about to let that happen."

"I didn't mean both of you, Jamie. Just you. I hope you're not getting too serious too fast, because…I'm don't think she is."

James tried to look for whatever it was that his mum saw in Lily that gave her pause when he went to join her and Fleamont in his brewing lab. Perhaps he just couldn't see her with objective eyes, he worried, but he felt his anxieties abate almost immediately when he found her laughing into one of his dad's crystal scotch glasses, her legs curled up beside her in an armchair, her face twisted in disgust. "James, it's horrible, I hate it, here," she said the moment she saw him, proffering the glass, and his chest hummed with happiness at the mere way that she said his name. Everything about the way she smiled up at him when he crossed the room to take the glass from her soothed his worries like a healing balm. At some point in the past few months, he realized, he had gotten just a little better at reading her. Everything in her expression—the brightness in her eyes, the soft color in her cheeks, the way she reached up to brush back her hair, almost as if he made her nervous, but not in a way that she minded—confirmed to him everything his mum apparently couldn't see.

He wanted to kiss her for the fresh sense of respect he had for her, that she had apparently listened to Marlene drag him for months, and had never outwardly wavered or doubted in the way he felt about her. He suddenly saw all too clearly how easily that could happen.

"Okay, so no scotch," Fleamont said, chuckling, as he sipped from his own glass. "I thought you might like it, since you said you like whiskey. But no matter. Wine, perhaps? White or red?"

"Red, right?" James asked, and she looked surprised as she rose and slipped by him towards her cauldron.

"You're observant," she said with one of those secret glances, and he knew she remembered, as he did, that that was the very first compliment she'd ever paid him. "Oh, Fleamont, please don't bother," she added quickly, but he'd already spoken Millie's name, and the house-elf appeared with a sharp crack. "I'll need a clear head to brew."

"One glass won't hurt," Fleamont insisted, and Millie came back in a flash with a bottle of red. He thanked her, and the house-elf curtsied and left in the same amount of time it took him to open the bottle and pour Lily a glass. "I haven't brewed in ages, not since I sold Potter's Potions—and long before that, really, since I stopped working at the hands-on portion years before. This is quite exciting; it calls for a drink." He sounded so genuine, so truly excited, that James felt suddenly a little bad that he'd never so much as tried to care about his dad's interest in potions. It had simply never appealed to him as anything more than a necessary class to get take to become an Auror. He'd never thought that, maybe, his dad would have liked him to express more interest.

Sirius voiced the same thing some time later. He, Hestia, and Euphemia had migrated down to the lab when it became clear that Fleamont, Lily, and James intended to stay there, and Fleamont looked entirely thrilled at the company. He had to conjure more chairs, and he passed around drinks eagerly, repeating more than once that he'd never had so many people in there at once before.

"Feel like a shit son at all?" Sirius asked James when Fleamont left to use the bathroom. He nodded towards Lily, who stood at her cauldron, feeding tiny bits of a finely-chopped green plant—Fluxweed, James thought, although he wasn't sure—into her potion. "We could probably get better at faking that we care about all this stuff to make Flea happy."

"We'll pretend to care about something for you too, Mum, don't feel left out," James assured Euphemia quickly with a grin before she could even protest. "Herbology, I suppose. I guess we'll be spending a lot more time in greenhouses, Sirius."

"Without throwing quaffles through them, I hope," Euphemia said darkly, but she smiled. "Besides, I don't need your help—and I doubt it would be very good help at all, knowing the two of you, especially the two of you together. I have Hestia now." James recognized the look that his mum gave Hestia, all soft worry and care, as the same way she regarded Sirius—like sort of a lost puppy, a stray that needed a home that she wanted to adopt.

Hestia looked quite pleased at that, her smile almost achingly sweet. "I'd love to see the Moly in your greenhouse bloom in the morning; I've heard they all open at once. At dawn, isn't it? I'm never able to at Hogwarts—I don't know how I'd explain being out of bed at that time to go watch flowers bloom."

"We could find a way," Sirius told her immediately, and a specific sort of glee entered his voice, one that only came out at the promise of rule-breaking.

"We can go out to the greenhouses any morning you'd like, just pick," Euphemia told Hestia warmly. "And, boys…I'm sure you don't have to fake anything with your father, either." She'd slipped—or did she do it purposefully?—and referenced to Fleamont as if he had fathered them both. James wondered if Sirius noticed. She nodded towards where Fleamont had rejoined Lily at her side, peering through the faint, light pink mist that emanated from her potion, his face riveted. "He has Lily now. Or at least I hope he does." Although she spoke lightly, James didn't miss the uncertain way she'd phrased it, her doubt in Lily just as clear as her certainty in Hestia. James felt it return, that little wiggle of insecurity in the back of his brain, but he tried to push it away. He hurriedly engaged Hestia in a discussion about their flying that day, because she looked at Euphemia in a way that wholeheartedly suggested that she picked up on her meaning as well, and she didn't care for the obvious slight to Lily. He didn't relish the idea of Hestia trying to argue with his mum, and she looked suddenly capable of it in a way he hadn't yet seen.

Any lingering doubt in Lily had nearly passed again by the time he saw her walk by his open bedroom door that night, wrapped in her bathrobe with her hair still damp around her shoulders, on the way to her room from the hall bathroom. It passed in the way that she laughed when he immediately dipped into the hallway to join her before she could open her door, and how she let him grab her and pull her into his arms, as if held against him was wholly where she wanted to be.

"You waited for me!" she accused, but she kissed him just the same. "Were you just in there, sitting and watching for me to come down the hall?"

"Absolutely," he said shamelessly. He didn't care if she knew. "I laid on my bed and waited. And about my bed… come back to it with me."

He fully expected her to say no even before he asked. But he also fully expected to love the look that came over her face, that dangerous, teasing expression he knew well by then, and he found himself correct on both assumptions. "No," she answered simply as she smiled, and he reached to brush one of her dimples with his thumb. He knew she loved the way she could torment him like she did, and he loved it too, even as it drove him a bit mad. Still, he didn't mind—no, he enjoyed, and greatly—giving that to her. "Kiss me goodnight and let me go."

She didn't have to ask him twice, and he found himself quite suddenly pressing her up against the wall next to a long, floral tapestry, much in the same way he so often did when they patrolled together. Somehow, even as he held her ostensibly trapped, it still felt like she very much controlled things, very much had the upper hand in a way he couldn't explain but deeply believed. It still felt like she led him to do everything—to kiss her longer and more heatedly; to push a knee between her legs, pinning her against him further; to venture a hand up her leg and into her robe, where he found—with what felt like a physical shock, so much so that his body actually jolted—that he could run his hand freely up her thigh and across her hip, unhindered by the line of any clothes.

"Wait, are you naked under here?" he asked, breaking from her mouth, although he already knew the answer from drawing his hand up the flat expanse of her stomach to catch on the knot that secured the robe around her waist. She didn't answer, just nodded, and then laughed, soft and low, as she watched his face. He knew he had to look exactly as he felt—delighted, frustrated, and determined, more determined than before, when he'd felt content to let her tease him a little since she liked it so much. "Come to bed with me," he said—or, hearing himself, pleaded.

"No," she repeated, just as simply as before. She let his hand travel back down to slide in between her legs for just a few seconds before she kissed him very lightly and reached down to tug him gently away. "I would really like to—"

"So do."

"—but not tonight."

"Tomorrow? Thursday? Friday? My schedule is open."

She laughed, and before he even realized what he was doing, she'd managed to get him to step back, away from her, with just a gentle press on his chest. "Goodnight," she said, and she opened the door to her bedroom and disappeared inside.

Sometime later—long enough that James had killed the lights in his bedroom and crawled into bed, still haunted by the softness of her skin—he heard voices in the hallway, and recognized Sirius' chuckle immediately. He got up automatically, but then hesitated by his closed door, his hand on the knob, worried he might step into a moment between his friend and Hestia not unlike the one he'd just shared with Lily. But then, almost as if he'd conjured her, he heard Lily's voice.

"It's a laugh a minute with you," she said dryly, and James pressed his ear against the door so he could hear her better.

"I'm just saying, if you're going to show up to a bloke's room late at night, it should probably be James'." Sirius continued to chuckle. "But I'm flattered, Evans, really. You know I think you have great legs, and—hey!"

James would have bet a great deal of money that she'd smacked him.

"Look, I have two things to say, and then I'm going to bed," she said.

"Well, if you reconsider—bloody hell, woman, I was going to say, if you reconsider, James' door is right there! Keep your hair on."

"Do you antagonize her like this?" Lily asked, and she didn't have to mention Hestia's name for James to know that she meant her. Sirius apparently didn't need a further clue either.

"I mean, a bit. But I try not to. She's even scarier than you, believe it or not."

"I believe it," Lily said, and she sounded as if she really did. Despite seeing her looking a little fiercely towards his mum, James still wondered what on earth they both saw in Hestia that he apparently did not, the frightening side that seemed to keep Sirius and Lily and even Marlene—all such big, loud personalities—in line. "Shut up for a second and listen. First, I want you to leave her alone tomorrow. Like, just leave us be. I need you to respect that we'll need space."

"Why?" Sirius sounded slightly miffed. "Shouldn't I be there? Isn't that, I don't know, kind of shit if I just ignore her on the day?"

"No, because I'll tell her I made you leave us alone. She just…" James heard Lily sigh, and he could almost picture her dragging a hand through her hair and chewing the inside of her cheek with worry. "I don't know how it's going to go. I think—and again, I don't know, there's no manual for this—that she'll probably need to just…feel what she feels. And while I love you for it, you make her too distracted and happy for her to do that. If you're around, I'm afraid she won't get to really grieve. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, I suppose," Sirius agreed reluctantly after a long pause. "And I love you too, Evans."

"Now I'm flattered." The grim note in Lily's voice had lifted slightly, but James wasn't surprised. Between the two of them, he wondered how they'd managed to deal with the obvious tension in the conversation at all. "I'll come get you if she wants me to," she added, quite serious again. "But if she doesn't, don't get offended or anything, okay?"

"I wouldn't. I'd just like to be there if she needs me. That's all." James couldn't remember when he'd heard Sirius sound quite so personal, quite so sincere. But then the next moment, he laughed a little, maybe at himself, and asked, briskly, "What's the other thing to tell me, number two?"

"Oh. You know, on the topic of showing up at rooms late at night—you should invite her to yours sometime."

"Wait, what now?" Sirius voice cracked like a whip, and then he lowered his tone, as if he quite suddenly worried about the closeness of Hestia's door, even though she'd disappeared to bed over an hour earlier. "Has she said that?"

"Not in those words, but yeah, basically. She's just not going to make the first move—she's a lady, after all."

"Not like you."

"Not like me."

"So…what do I do?" Sirius asked, and he sounded clueless, entirely and utterly, so much so that Lily laughed.

"You want me to give you moves?"

"I hear that you have them."

"Thank you," she said simply. "I'd like to think so. Still, it's been a while since I've seduced Hestia—I'm joking! Jesus Christ, your face. Look, it's not difficult. Pull her during the day, snog her, and ask her to come to your room that night. You have to do it during the day to give her the warning so she can make sure she has cute knickers on. I assume once you have her there you'll figure out what to do, but I know several books that can walk you through the steps if you don't know how it all works."

"You're…a surprise, Evans."

"Thank you again. I do try. And don't pressure her, obviously, whatever you do, just…show her you want to, and you'll get there before break is over. But also don't you fucking dare tell her I told you to do it. I wouldn't have had to if she would just be a little more forward and you would…what's your deal? Why haven't you put it on her yet?"

Sirius' next words came out so quietly that James almost didn't hear them. "I didn't want to presume. We haven't really talked about…you know, who we've dated or whatever, so I didn't know what she's comfortable with."

"Oh." Lily fell silent. "So, ask her, maybe?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Or listen to me. Wait until…I don't know, Monday or Tuesday, and go for it. But I'll tell you if you should the day of. Trust me. I know what I'm doing."

"I know that you do." Once again, Sirius sounded amused.

"Sod off. You're lucky I'm around to make this happen. Alright, goodnight."

"Wait, Evans—" Sirius' voice got a touch louder, as if Lily had already slipped back across the hall. "Monday is James' birthday."

"I know." Lily sounded closer than before, almost right outside James' door. He took an unconscious step back. "And?"

"Do you need a pep talk too?"

She laughed. "No. I think I'm doing okay. Am I wrong?"

"You're driving him mental. No, seriously." Lily stopped laughing abruptly at the sudden sharpness in his voice. "Do you understand? How far in he is?"

James could hear her door crack open, and then nothing else for a long time. He wondered what they looked like, regarding each other in the dimly-lit hallway, his best friend and the girl he wanted so desperately that it hurt.

"I think so, yeah," Lily finally said, her tone light. "About as far in as I am, I'd expect."

Sirius snorted. "Right. You don't get it, if you think that. See, it's shit like this that makes me think this is all a game to you. Do you even care how he feels? Or was agreeing to come here for Easter your newest way of getting his hopes up and playing hot so you can shift to cold again and mess with his head even more? Because that's entirely how it looks to an outsider, like you're just constantly back and forth for kicks."

"That's a pretty unfair judgment." She no longer sounded even the slightest bit playful. "You don't know me, Black. You don't get to assume how I feel, especially because I've never done that about the way you feel towards Hestia. Even just now, I asked you why you haven't tried it with her, and I believed you when you answered me. It's bullshit that you can't extend the same generosity towards me. You've never asked me a goddamn thing, just automatically assumed, and assumed the worst."

"I'm…well, I'm sorry," Sirius offered after a touchy pause. "So tell me, then. Tell me how far in you are. I'm asking."

"I'm here, aren't I?" she asked crossly. When she spoke again, James recognized the tone of her voice well, but not from any pleasant memory. He had sudden flashbacks to anger he'd seen at least daily until the end of sixth year, a voice present in the times he got her wound up enough to go off on him at length. He suddenly almost feared for Sirius, even though he'd grown to nearly like the voice from years of constant exposure. "And it's not just for kicks. I'm here trying to get his parents to love me, even though Effie clearly thinks I'm hard work that's not worth it—I'm sure you agree with her there. I'm constantly defending him to Marlene, even though it's made my life a periodic living hell since Christmas—and, by the way, I end up defending you by association, I'll have you know. You're welcome. I have upended so much of my life to be around him this year that I don't even recognize it myself sometimes, how different virtually every aspect of my life has become compared to this time last year. And the worst part is, I'm okay with that. And I'm okay with the fact that we'll be going into the same profession next year if all goes as it should—no, I'm relieved by that, because it feels like the only place I want to be lately is wherever he is. So go fuck yourself, seriously, because—"

"I'm sorry," Sirius interrupted earnestly. If he hadn't stopped her, James thought she might have carried on all night. "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know. He doesn't know."

"He has some idea. I just hope he's a little more kind with the way he thinks about me than you are."

"Evans, stop it."

"There's nothing to stop. I'm going to bed. But for the record, I think you're great for Hestia. I've said that from the beginning, even though you've given me plenty of reasons over the years to hate you and think the exact opposite, and even though you're still a thoughtless wanker sometimes in a way that makes me want to strangle you. But what matters to me overall is that you make her more happy than you do sad. Is that true with James? Do I make him more happy than I do sad?"

"Yes, obviously, but—"

"Great. That's all I need to know. Goodnight."

James didn't hear Sirius' door close for a long while after Lily's did.

xxx

"Mate, but she is hard work," Sirius insisted the next morning after breakfast. He shouldered his broomstick, his face unusually gloomy. "I get why you'd want to put the work in, sure, but it's not exactly been smooth sailing with her, has it? And, bloody hell, I don't know how you go toe-to-toe like that with her all the time. How does she do it? How does she flip it around every time? Shegot me to apologize. She's so fucking good."

James had divulged that he'd heard the entire conversation the moment Sirius had begun to recount it to him. There seemed no reason to pretend her hadn't overheard. "She had a point though," he said, because it felt necessary to say.

"Of course you're going to defend her. Of course. How many times have you two fought this year?"

"How many times have you insisted that it's been my fault?"

"Well, you're hard work too!" Sirius exclaimed, and James thought he might have a point there. "But she's just…I don't have the words for it. Can't blame me, mate, for not knowing what she's thinking. 'Course I'm worried she's going to fuck you over, because you're so far gone, and she's either totally off you or snogging you, nothing in between. You worry about it too, don't you? About her just dropping you and taking off to someone else?"

It took James a long while to figure out how to answer. "Less than I used to," he said finally, and the fact that he meant it surprised even him. Sirius' eyebrows shot up as well. "I think she's coming around. She's said some things…I don't know. I'm getting there, I think."

"Where is 'there'?" Sirius asked immediately. "Is 'there' her snatch? Or is 'there' getting with her outside of your secret passage snogging?"

"Yes," James said, because both perfectly encapsulated—in a very Sirius way—the direction he saw things heading with increasing confidence.

Sirius snorted before kicking off from the ground on his broomstick. "Best of luck. You know she'll do something crazy to throw you off before you get either from her. Challenge just to be a challenge and all that. Wait."

Lily caught up with them in the library that afternoon, after a thunderstorm had chased them indoors to Fleamont's marble chess set. She looked slightly pale, James thought, but overall as composed as she normally did, although he had to wonder how much effort it took for her to arrange her face so placidly. She lifted an eyebrow with a flicker of amused disbelief when he held his arm out, wordlessly coaxing her to him, but she joined him at his side. She perched on his chair's armrest and let him curl an arm around her waist to rest his hand where her soft green skirt met her thigh.

"Hessie and I are going out to play as muggles," she said without a greeting. "Effie already explained where the wards lift outside, so we'll Apparate to Diagon Alley and go out in London for a while. Mar's going to meet us."

"And we're not invited," Sirius finished for her, and sourly.

"Correct." Lily reached into the brown leather handbag she'd slung over her shoulder and pulled out a compact and tube of lipstick. James watched her paint her mouth the same cool red he remembered from Slughorn's Christmas party, and remembered further from New Year's Eve. Did she know that it absolutely reminded him of kissing her, he wondered, or the desperate desire to kiss her? For once, it looked like tormenting him wasn't something that she even considered. She didn't glance at him as she snapped her compact shut. "I thought we should go do some of the things we used to do with her mum," she explained, and she sounded suddenly much less brisk, much less business-like. "You know, go to the tea shop she used to take us to when we'd go back-to-school shopping, go to this boutique she loved in Covent Garden, have dinner at her favorite place, all that. It seemed a nice way to remember some of the good times with her, because there were a ton that even I just have, let alone all Hessie's memories. Her mum was just… such a great woman."

Something about the way she said it made James realize for the first time that Lily must grieve for Hestia's mum as well.

Sirius seemed to have similar thoughts. The sourness faded off his face, and he regarded her carefully. "How's Hess?" he asked.

"A bit of a rough morning," Lily said, and she shook her head slightly, as if to clear her thoughts. "But she'll be okay. I mean, she has to be. What other choice does she have?"

James had never thought about it quite like that.

Lily smiled down at him, and then she bent and kissed him, her hand against his cheek. He heard Sirius make a sharp, short noise of surprise, and he understood in the next moment that Sirius had never seen her kiss him before, had hardly seen them kiss at all, really, which had to make a kiss she'd initiated even weirder. "I'm glad we're here," she said with a simple sincerity that tugged unexpectedly at his chest. "It's made things much better than I think they'd otherwise be. She really needed to get away, and I didn't see it until we got here. Thank you."

"Of course. I'm glad it's helped." James didn't know what else to say or what else to do except to resist the urge to pull her into his lap, because she looked so quietly sad and he hardly knew how else to comfort her.

She kissed him again and then stood up to adjusted her purse. "I'll bring her back to you soon," she told Sirius, who still looked shocked, but also wary.

"Evans, we're fine, right?" he asked bluntly.

She swooped down and kissed his cheek. "I don't know why we wouldn't be," she said, and then she cuffed him sharply upside the head.

"You're the worst!" Sirius called after her as she walked away, laughing a little.

"You love it," she shot back, and she waved before she vanished out the door.

"Well, color me shocked," Sirius said, and he still did look it. "Wonder if she kissed you because of what I said last night. Guess you're not just a total secret shame anymore. What's one step about that? Slight secret shame? That's where you're at."

"Cheers, Padfoot." James found Sirius' words nettled in a way that surprised him, as his jokes almost never bothered him, but they still couldn't stop his grin. He prodded a knight forward, and went on to steal a rare victory from Sirius.

He'd known she was lucky.

xxx

The day passed rather quickly, all things considered. James did his best to distract Sirius in the same way that Sirius always did for him—lots of enthusiasm, lots of energy, lots of ideas. They got Fleamont to practice dueling with them under the guise of Defense Against the Dark Arts practice, although James knew they didn't even need the flimsy excuse to get his dad to pick up his wand. They also persuaded him out to fly once the rain abated, and he played keeper for them with the vigor of a man half his age—although he'd certainly be sore tomorrow, Euphemia said laughingly when they traipsed in, covered in mud. And they dined together, the four of them—Sirius, James, Euphemia, and Fleamont—at the six-top table set only for four, as they had over so many school breaks and holidays for so many years before, although it felt different somehow, quieter and more subdued.

"I hope the girls are okay," Euphemia said as they finished their shepherd's pie, and James knew from the way she said it that she worried about Hestia.

As evening fell and Sirius prowled more restlessly, James suggested the one thing he knew would cheer him up entirely: that they transform and go for a run. Neither of his parents batted an eye when they told them that they planned to go traipse around the grounds near dark, far too used to such outings even though they remained clueless about their Animagi status.

"Be careful!" Euphemia called after their retreating backs as she worked at her correspondence in the den.

"They always are, darling," James heard Fleamont assure her, and he wondered guiltily how he'd lucked out with such trusting parents.

And so Sirius and James ran once they'd transfigured out of sight from the brightly-lit manor, ran through the thick copse of trees that surrounded the Potter estate, out past the Apparation wards, and into the countryside. They ran past the estates that bordered his parents', owned by muggles that knew the Potters as polite but distant neighbors who had invested family money smartly—all true, really, besides the glaring absence of any knowledge of the magical world. They passed a muggle village five or six miles out, one that boasted a fairly nice tavern that Sirius and James had visited before with muggle money exchanged at Gringotts. They were both fairly awful at "playing as muggles," as Lily had put it, and they'd gotten more than a few strange looks.

Finding their way back was as simple as following the trail of their own scent, which James could pick up with his stag senses, but Sirius really excelled at, nose snuffling at the ground. He often took them the wrong way on purpose, or some roundabout route, just to see if James could catch him at it and correct him.

"You're such a git," James told him, laughing and drenched to his knees and all up his left side, when they finally transformed back in the privacy behind Euphemia's greenhouses. He pulled his glasses off, fairly splattered with mud, but even without them he could see Sirius' grin.

"Should have seen that stream, mate. Not my fault that you didn't. Here—" James felt a hot blast of air, and, moments later, his clothes dried completely. "Effie'll kill us if we go in looking like this."

Euphemia seemed to have the same thought, because she called out from the den the moment she heard them open the front door. "You better not track anything inside, or you'll be cleaning it, not Millie!" But they had both used Scourgify to get the mud off themselves completely, which left them at least visibly clean, although James still felt in need of a shower.

"Millie baked?" he asked the second he entered the den, snagging a gingersnap biscuit off the tray on the table between Fleamont and Euphemia before they could offer. The whole house smelled of warm spices.

"No, the girls did," Euphemia said, and she smacked at his hand, and at Sirius' too when he followed suit and snatched a biscuit of his own. "Manners, you two! I think they're still in the kitchen," she called, because Sirius had already made his way halfway out the door.

They found Lily and Hestia seated in the kitchen's breakfast nook, dressed in pajamas with a plate of biscuits between them. Hestia looked quite herself, perhaps a little shy in the way she smiled at Sirius from across the kitchen, her hands wrapped around a teacup. She'd piled her hair on top of her head, and she had a faint smudge of flour near her left ear, which Sirius brushed away when he bent to kiss her.

"You need a shower," she told him, her nose lightly wrinkled, but she laughed, and Sirius looked relieved, even soothed, by the sound. To his surprise, James found that he felt the same. The nerves in his stomach—concern, he recognized later—calmed slightly.

"You look fetching," he told Lily as he sat down beside her and took a second biscuit. And she did, in a set of pale blue silk pajamas that Hestia seemed to favor, her hair unbound and her face free of makeup. He could almost count each of the freckles on her nose, faint and no more than a dozen, which he had always found very cute. "But I think I like the Quidditch jersey better."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said with a wry smile. "The Jonses are firm believers in pretty nighttime things—and, honestly, pretty things in general—so Hessie made me and Mar follow suit today when we were out."

"Mum and I used to sit around our kitchen like this," Hestia explained. Her smile looked genuine, if sad. She pushed past it. "What were you up to outside?" she asked Sirius, who had taken her hand.

"Running," he answered easily, which was true enough. "Bit dull around here without you. Did you have a good day? I mean…you know. As much…as you could." His ease had faded rapidly the longer he spoke until he looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable.

But Hestia seemed to understand. Her smile went kind. "Yeah. We had a lovely time. We went 'round to this tea shop my mum loved, where this muggle lad works that Marlene has always fancied. She got so flustered when he started chatting her up that she dropped her teacup."

"It was really quite a sight," Lily said, smiling. "Tea went everywhere, and we could just tell that she wanted to get her wand out so badly and repair it, clean it up, all that, but she had to play the muggle. She looked so helpless."

James tried to picture feisty, difficult, assertive Marlene looking even a tiny bit vulnerable. Even though he'd seen her cry, and more than once, he still couldn't imagine it. "What does that even look like?"

"It was hysterical." Hestia bit her lip, as if she felt bad for her own clear amusement. "But I think he rather liked it, her helplessness. He gave her his telephone number before we left. It's a way muggles communicate," she explained, clearly for James' benefit, because a glance at Sirius' face confirmed to him that he understood. "He asked if they could go out sometime."

Sirius cracked up. "Poor Rooney. I hope she does it."

"She was very tickled," Lily said, smiling into her teacup. "She needed it, I think."

"She did," Hestia agreed. Looking between them, James tried to imagine why confident Marlene would need any form of reassurance. Had he read her wrong from a distance for years, and closer up for the past few months? "Then we shopped a bit—"

"Or a lot," Lily corrected.

"—or a lot, true. And we had dinner at my mum's favorite Italian place, and then…went to go see her." The humor had vanished from Hestia's face in the blink of an eye, although she tried to maintain her smile as she twisted her teacup in her hands. "We all had a good cry."

James didn't know what to say. From the look of it, no one else did either.

"I'm glad…you had good moments where could," Sirius tried eventually. James identified (and identified with) the note of desperation in his voice, like he wanted more than anything to wipe the sadness off of Hestia's face that had clouded her usually sunny features. He did what he could—scooted his chair closer to hers so he could slip an arm around her shoulders; gently rubbed at the bare skin of her upper arm; even pressed a kiss against her forehead in a manner so clearly caring that James looked away, almost embarrassed to witness it, and found Lily seemed to feel similarly when he caught her eye. "Evans insisted I leave you alone," Sirius said after Hestia had rested her head against his shoulder. He couldn't seem to resist the chance to potentially cheer her up or make her smile. "Apparently, I'm a 'distraction.'"

"You are. The best kind." Everything in the way Hestia looked up at Sirius confirmed, absolutely, that James shouldn't be there.

Lily apparently agreed. "I'm going to go check my potion," she said briskly, rising. In a flick of her wand, she had her teacup emptied, cleaned, and put back into the cupboard. "I'll see you upstairs, Hessie."

"I'll go with you," James offered quickly. Lily didn't argue. To his great surprise, she even took his hand as they left the kitchen.

She seemed entirely at home in Fleamont's brewing lab by then, and she dropped James' hand with an excited look once she'd vanished the protective shield around the cauldron. "Your dad said he'd keep an eye on it for me today and stir it twelve times every hour like I asked," she explained. "It looks perfect, just as it should. Remind me to thank him."

James watched as she disappeared into his dad's storeroom and came back a moment later carrying ginger root. He watched her peel and dice it finely, her knife work quick and confident, and then carefully measure out half a gram.

"It doesn't actually do much," she said conversationally as she unceremoniously tipped the lot into the cauldron and stirred a careful twelve times. "Of course, ginger does have healing properties—even muggles have used it in folk medicine for centuries—but it's pretty weak compared to other plants that can be used similarly. Here I've found it mainly works to make the whole thing smell a lot better. No one wants to put something on their skin that smells like Chizpurle carapaces, and this covers that at least enough." She smiled at him over her shoulder. "Here, come look."

He joined her, mainly so he could slip a hand under the back of her pajama top to touch the small of her back. She smelled like the ginger she had just diced. "Again, if you taught Potions I would have a far greater interest," he told her, and she rolled her eyes even as she smiled. "What am I looking at?"

"This is basically what it looks like at completion. It's gray now, but it'll lighten over the next couple of days." She extinguished the fire under the cauldron, and, with another wave of her wand, encased it all back with a protective shield. "It'll go all silvery when it's done, and I can bottle it then. If you're lucky, maybe I'll let you help me—and watch your hands, I'm working!" she added, exasperated but still smiling, as she pulled his hand out from where he'd slid it up her back.

"What time are we meeting Frank and Alice tomorrow?" he asked as she cleaned her station and went to wash her hands at the porcelain basin in the corner of the room.

"Eight, and I'm working until then. You really should too, unless you want to explain to McGonagall that you didn't write the essay she assigned because you spent all of break trying to get into literally every set of clothes I've worn."

"She might appreciate it if it's a success story," he told her, and she laughed. She looked sorely like she wanted to chuck the towel in her hands at him, but the potioneer in her clearly thought better, protective shield or not, when she glanced at her cauldron and its precious contents. "Hey, come here," he requested, and to his surprise she actually did, and let him pull her into his chest and kiss her. "Go to dinner with me tomorrow before we meet them."

It was her turn to look surprised. He watched that emotion fade away into a sort of wary suspicion. "What? That sounds an awful lot—"

"—like a date?" he finished, and he didn't wait for her to confirm it. "So we won't call it that. We'll just call it dinner."

The way she shifted in his arms made James certain that she considered pulling away, but she didn't. "You do realize that other people will call it a date, right?"

"It's one dinner," he insisted, waving a hand, and he hoped he sounded as casual as he absolutely didn't feel. It seemed suddenly very risky, having her pulled up against him, because she could potentially feel the way his heart thudded with anticipation. "C'mon, have a heart. It's my birthday Monday. You can consider this my gift."

"I already got you a gift."

That threw him off momentarily. "Wait, really?"

"Yes. How horrible do you think I am? You got me something for mine, but didn't expect me to reciprocate? Christ."

"I didn't want to assume—oh. You're having me on."

She swung her hair around as she laughed, and he found that it did indeed remind him of the last time she'd made that move so close to him, straddled against him on the bed in her bedroom, just as he'd assumed it would at the time. "Yes, but I did get you something," she said, and he wondered if she saw it on his face, his thoughts about her, because she studied him with a newfound intensity. "I'll go to dinner with you," she agreed, but with the air of negotiation. "But because it's not a date, I'm paying for myself."

Those truly seemed like the best terms he could get.

"That will work," he said, and he kissed her again, both because he wanted to, and also because he didn't want her to see how excited he was, worried she might back out if she knew.

"Did you hear my conversation with Black last night, or did he tell you about it afterwards?" she asked off-handedly as they left the lab, but she broke her composure with a slight laugh when he tripped on a rug in the hallway. "What? You idiots don't have secrets—that's become abundantly clear to me over the past few months, if nothing else has. And besides, you didn't look confused at all when he asked if he and I were alright this afternoon. If you didn't know, you would have gotten a lot more concerned."

"I overheard," he admitted reluctantly. "And…then he told me."

"Figures." She shrugged, as if completely unbothered. "I thought it back and really doubted that you went right to bed after snogging me like that. I didn't care if you heard when I only planned to talk to him about Hestia. I only cared that she didn't overhear, but I knew she'd be out because she took a sleeping potion. I didn't know he'd say anything about you, or try to have a go at me."

"He had a point, though," James said, just as he had to Sirius, because it felt necessary to say. "And before you get mad, I said the same thing about you to him."

She shrugged again. "I suppose. It just seems unfair that he passes that kind of judgment on me when I've been his biggest defender to Mar—bigger than Hestia at times, because she just doesn't want to deal with it. I do it because of the way Hestia talks about him, even though I don't see it half the time, the way they are together like what we saw tonight. I just trust her word and the way she characterizes him. So I did wonder if his thoughts came from things you've said."

James reached out to stop her abruptly on the second-floor landing. "No."

She gave him one of those searching looks, one where he wished he knew what she looked for in his face. "Okay."

"You believe me, don't you?"

"I believe…" With a sigh, she reached up to rub the back of her neck, and he wondered what that meant, the new manifestation of some emotion he couldn't quite place because it didn't read on her face. Each word she spoke came out almost staccato, clearly carefully chosen. "I believe that there's a lot about the way me and you started that could have been better, and a lot that I could have handled better as things went on. I am sorry for that, you know. I really am. But I'm sure there's times I've made you really mad or frustrated, and I understand that you probably talked to him about it, and maybe in ways that were…less than kind."

"I do worry about us—but you know that. He sees that, I suppose. But I'm never having a go at you or anything, I swear."

She took his hand with a small smile and tugged him towards the stairs. "It's fine if you did, or if you do still. Again, I'd understand."

Frustration crept up James' back and into his shoulders. "But I haven't and I'm not," he insisted, and he pulled her back towards him. The fact that she went to him willingly and leaned up against him mollified him a bit. "I mean, I've definitely told him that he shouldn't ever try to predict how you're going to react to something, because you'll do the exact opposite, but that's literally just a fact. And he knows I hate it when we row, because I'm always afraid that'll be it for you, one time too many—"

"I'm not going anywhere," she said even more firmly than she had the day before. "Except to bed now, and, before you ask, not with you, no."

"You can act jokes in a second. I need to know you believe me."

The smile dropped off her face. "Okay. I believe you. It just…it would make sense, is all. I mean, I would definitely chat shit about me if I were you, although I suppose that's obvious, because I'm literally about to chat shit about myself for you right now."

"So don't." She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. "Really, don't. Don't feel bad about anything either, okay? I was a complete prat to you for six years. Technically, you owe me six years back. Or we could just call it even, and you could come to bed with me."

"Now who's jokes?" she asked archly, and he felt her physical relief that he'd let the tense moment go in the way that she relaxed against him.

"Who's joking? I'm completely serious."

"You know, I believe you. I think that you are." When she took his hand again to pull him towards the stairs again, he let her. "But the answer is still no."

"Tomorrow then?" he suggested, and she laughed.

She kissed him outside his bedroom door very gently, with none of the heat he had come to expect. "I'm staying in Hestia's room tonight," she told him quietly with a sideways glance behind her. Clearly it hadn't yet left her, how easily her words might be overheard. "Although Black might be in there, who knows. The way they carried on in the kitchen…yuck. I suppose I shouldn't complain, though. She's given me very little shit about walking in on us after the Ravenclaw Quidditch match when she could have taken the piss out of me for ages. Mar would have. But tonight, she and Black were just so…loving." Somehow, she managed to make it sound like a dirty word.

"You could do a bit more of that, you know," he said, only half-joking.

She seemed to take it precisely in the manner he meant it, as nearly a joke though not quite, and she smiled, if ruefully. "I know. I'm not good at it."

When she reached up to smooth his hair, a gesture she often made with mindless affection, he thought he saw something further in her face, more words under the surface she wanted to say. She looked quite suddenly very young, younger than he often thought, because she always came off as entirely controlled and together. The sudden softness in her face reminded him of the way she'd looked at him many times before. He thought back to her expression on Christmas Day, when he'd gifted her the book he'd purchased for her; days later, when he'd told her he didn't think any bloke could just shag her and want nothing more; on New Year's Eve, when he'd told her, finally, the depth and the reasons why he liked her; in the Great Hall, after he'd spoken to Marlene when she and Lily had finally made up; and finally, to just the previous day when he'd told her, laying in the grass outside his parents' house, that he was all in with her. He suddenly saw what he'd caught in all of those moments in her face—something almost melancholy that lurked around the corners of her mouth and the slight furrow of her brow—but something past that too, something new and tender that he hadn't ever seen before, or perhaps had just then noticed.

It hit James like a punch to the gut, followed swiftly by a huge shot of adrenaline: she looked at him the same way that Alice looked at Frank, or the way his mum looked at his dad.

"Lily—" he began, but that broke the look from her face as if he'd uttered the counter-spell. She shook her head, the movement so minute he nearly missed it, and then kissed him again. He knew that she had done so to distract and deter him from whatever he planned to add after her name, words he still hadn't figured out later, even when he laid awake long into the night and wracked his brain to figure it out.

"Goodnight," she said quietly, her fingers still in his hair, and she then crossed to Hestia's room, knocked, and entered at her muffled response.

James thought later, for reasons he didn't fully understand, that even though it had taken her only mere seconds to leave, he might have been able to stop her if he'd tried, and that she probably would have let him if he did. But he let her go.