A/N: Engagement for the last chapter was insane, with more review than I received in the first handful of chapters of this fic combined. It also included some of my first negative feedback, which I honestly really appreciated. I don't expect every chapter or every plot point to please everyone, and I always want to hear about what you all think doesn't work, just like I want to hear what you all think works. I also realized that it's absolutely wild that I somehow made it sixteen chapters without any significant negative feedback, and that in itself is incredible. On top of that, watching you all respond to each other in the comments was such a treat. Basically, thank you for the feedback, long or short, positive or negative or somewhere in between, and for the discussions you all have with each other.

Update information: I try to update weekly, typically on Fridays, but I wanted to offer a word of warning. I'm going to struggle personally over the next couple months, because I suffered a really terrible, sudden loss around this time last year. Like Lily said about Hestia's loss, there really is no manual for how to deal with this, so I'm not sure what an anniversary of this sort feels like. It might throw my update schedule off, or it might make me write more. There's a reason I've written as much as quickly as I have, and that's down to trying to find some way to cope with and escape from grief. (This is not an exaggeration: I've written 600,000 words in this universe between May 30th and today.) But basically, if my update schedule goes wonky, or if I just don't update some week or two in the near future, there's a reason, and I will be back. With as much as I have planned or done, I won't abandon this anytime soon, even if I'm MIA at all.

Chapter Eighteen

Frank proved as good as, if not better than, his word.

Later, James would come to appreciate that no one, not even the other Marauders, could have handled him better. He took James to The Hopping Pot in Diagon Alley, a smaller pub than the Leaky Cauldron and far less popular, which was blessedly, entirely empty when they arrived. They took seats as far away from the aging bartender as possible for the sake of privacy, and Frank let James sit at their table and brood in silence for the first couple of drinks before he even tried to broach the subject. And then he just nodded, when James finally vocalized what bothered him most of all, and burst out, "I was almost there. I almost had her."

Frank went to the bar and came back with a full bottle of Firewhiskey and two glasses. He poured a good measure into both before he prompted, quite gently, "Tell me about it."

And so James did.

Not all of it, of course. He left out the salacious bits he couldn't hide from Sirius, working his way around the entirety of how he'd seen Lily with Morton by simply saying that Lily had been seeing someone else casually, and let Frank infer from that what he would. But he told him all the rest. He told him about the way they'd started to get on as Head Boy and Girl, and how Lily had begun to take him more seriously when she saw that he took the role more seriously than she had expected. He described what it had felt like, to know she was with someone else, but how things had continued to blossom regardless. He even told Frank about the parts he'd been present for, like Slughorn's Christmas party, although of course he didn't know that Lily had ended up with James in the prefect's bathroom afterwards. And then James had to dive into the whole, chaotic mess of Christmas—about the Hogsmeade attack, the book he'd given her that had first made her kiss him, the way he'd told her how he'd felt on New Year's Eve that had solidified things more, and how happy he'd been in the week that followed. He described how things crumbled slightly when school had restarted, but they'd since seemed swiftly on the rise with only a few hiccups. And he even explained, in a few terse sentences, that he had felt he'd liked her too much to shag her without being with her, but had since realized that it didn't even matter, because he was too far gone regardless.

"It sounds like you're in love with her," Frank said neutrally when James had finally almost talked himself hoarse, the bottle of Firewhiskey halfway gone. "Are you?"

"Yes. I think so. I don't know." James' head had begun to hurt.

"Bound to happen, Hogsmeade considered." Frank looked thoughtful, and then almost nostalgic. "Stuff like that—war, you know—it changes things, mate, ramps things up. I remember the first time Alice and I got caught in something like that—not even a few months out of Hogwarts, barely started training, and we were part of a random skirmish on what seemed like a routine visit to a muggle village, just a follow up to a place Death Eaters had hit not too long before. Moody was with us, so we had it sorted pretty quickly, but…I just worried about her the whole time, even more than myself. I already liked her plenty, but after that…it was game over. Bought the ring the next week, even though I didn't give it to her for a bit because I didn't want to scare her off. So I get it. I do."

"I won't be thinking about rings until the next lifetime or two. She won't even date me."

Frank smiled. "Yeah, I know. She and Alice have written a fair bit since Christmas, which has been nice for Alice. She always felt bad that she and Lily kind of fell out after Lily and Greg ended—Greg got custody of us in the divorce, as Lily put it." He looked as if he found humor in that, although he realized quickly that James did not. "Alice doesn't tell me all of it—she's too smart for that, knows I can't handle my drink sometimes—but they've written about you."

"And?"

"And it's been more serious, and harder for her, than I think you realize—probably more than I realize, honestly. I really do think she worries about everything she's said—what it means to be muggleborn right now, how that puts a target on her immediately, what that means for anyone who's close to her, not just a romantic partner. I think she meant it when she said it to Greg, too, so it's clearly bothered her for years, but from the way Alice talked…I thought you might get her past it."

James watched him splash more Firewhiskey into both of their glasses, Frank's words incredibly bittersweet. "But if that's why they broke up—because she's worried about blood status—why wouldn't it work between them now? If she could maybe get past that with me—"

"Yeah, but it's different," Frank insisted, and with such feeling James nearly believed him, although maybe just because he wanted to so badly. "Look, you don't want to hear what they were like—"

"Yes I do."

"Mate." Frank sighed, and it sounded long-suffering. "You don't. I would never want to hear a single thing about Alice with another bloke, good or bad—"

He looked confused by James' humorless laughter, but James knew he couldn't even begin to explain why he was so far past just hearing about things by that point, since he felt certain he'd heard—and certainly seen—much worse. "Tell me."

Frank regarded him for several long moments, and then pushed James' glass closer to him. "She was different then, real timid—do you want me to tell you this or not?" he asked, finally sounding a bit impatient, because James had snorted with laughter into his Firewhiskey.

"I do, honestly. But, c'mon, I knew her then too. I think our fifth year she probably hexed me the most, more than any other."

"Yeah, but—" Frank drew a hand down his face, and when he spoke again, his words came with maximum reluctance. "You never saw how she acted around a bloke that she liked. Alice started chatting with her more after she became a prefect, began bringing her around, and we could all tell she fancied Greg, but also that she just…didn't know what to do about it. Greg was totally oblivious about it all—Hector, Rupert, and I used to take the piss out of him constantly about her—until Alice literally walked him through it, that Lily was interested. And it still took him a little while, even then, because he didn't quite know if he liked her, since she acted so differently around him than the rest of us—shy, although you won't believe it."

James thought about the bashful way Lily smiled at him sometimes. Despite his initial disbelief, he suddenly could believe it.

"But he came around to her—"

James snorted again. "I'm sure that was real difficult work for him."

"But he came around to her," Frank repeated, firmer than before, clearly unwilling to let the interruption leave things there, "And it was quick for him, liking her and liking her a lot, when he did. You can't blame him. Alice is right—she's pretty and personable. You would have felt the same."

"Seems like too many guys would. And do." Because James knew, then, that even as all of that had happened fifth year—all of which he remained oblivious of the entire time—Morton had taken to patrolling with her, just waiting in the wings. What had changed in a year and a half that she had gone from apparently too timid to even approach Greg, to shagging Morton on a desk?

"Yeah, she has that way about her. But that doesn't matter with Greg, because she went off him. We all watched it happen too, how things slowly reversed between them, how suddenly he was the one who cared more and had become more keen, and she didn't know anymore, didn't know how much she was into him. Greg's just…" Frank appeared to struggle to find the words. "He's my best mate. I love him. But he's real laid-back, maybe too much, and once he came around to her, he seemed pretty happy to just let her run things between them. We gave him shit for that too, of course, but that's his way. Alice started pointing it out to me around Valentine's Day that something just clearly didn't work there, at least for Lily. She said Lily seemed almost relieved when she talked to her first thing after she broke things off with Greg. Lily said they had fallen out pretty hard when she'd ended things, and…I can't recall, exactly, but something about how it wasn't there, whatever it was it took to really want to date someone enough for her to fight for it after Diagon Alley."

James could almost hear her saying it in her voice, because she'd repeated the exact same words about Morton.

"But it's not like that with you. You make her really mad, and honestly much of the time, although definitely less now than you used to fifth year, at least the way I remember it. Because when I think about she was with you then, and compare it to how she is with you now…" Frank rubbed his face tiredly. "It's night and day. I think she likes the way you wind her up now that you've toned it down about two thousand notches, since it's so much of her personality to do the same. And Greg never did that. He wasn't willing to challenge her about much of anything, and it's not like he's changed at all in the last two years, at least enough for it to suddenly work."

"Is this your interpretation or Alice's?"

"What, you don't trust my thoughts?" Frank chuckled at the look James gave him. "Right, fair. It's mostly Alice's, just from things we've noticed, things Lily has written, the way Alice has read things. She's smarter than me. Always has been." His tone had become suddenly warm, proud, and it resonated with James, but in a way that didn't sit quite comfortably in his chest. He thought he probably sounded much the same when he got after Lily for not emphasizing the amount of work she put into potion-making.

James sat silently with his Firewhiskey for a time, and Frank let him. "Did you know this would happen the whole time, when you were saying shit about Greg after you and Alice came to get Lily to take her to St. Mungo's?" The question had occurred to him midway through their meeting with Moody, and had plagued him ever since.

Frank had the decency to look a little ashamed at that. "A bit, yeah," he admitted. Seeing the way James opened his mouth furiously, he added quickly, "But not entirely, I swear! It was enough of a possibility that that's why Dumbledore wanted to bring her on, just in case, although he'd taken to talking about recruiting both of you since after Hogsmeade. But Greg hadn't been promoted yet, just got put up, so we weren't sure it would even happen or that we'd need her for that. And I really did think that it might help and push you to get after her, the thought of him. From what Alice has said…I knew you'd have trouble—Lily is hard work—but I thought you both might just need another push or two. I get now that that's just bungled it all worse. I'm sorry. Really. For all of it."

James reached up to cradle the bridge of his nose. Frank looked so incredibly earnest that he believed him deep down, but the day's events still hadn't quite sunk in. He could barely take in his words.

Yet Frank had more words to offer. "Beyond that, we really did try to find another way. I know it might not matter right now, but Alice an I fought this hard, Alice especially. I'm sure she's crying about it right now, because she's been proper torn up about it all. I have no doubt that she's going to go in on Moody tomorrow for even suggesting that Lily might shag Greg. We never discussed anything like that, nothing past her getting friendly enough with Greg to have an excuse to hang around their department. It's like I said—I've seen her flirt with blokes and get and keep them interested without doing anything else. That's all we're asking, and I know even that is a lot. You were right. I'd hate it if it were Alice. I would have hated it even back when we were just dating. I know it's a lot, but Lily doesn't have to further than that. You were the one that kind of jumped it to the worst place it could go, mate. I get why you did, but that's not what's being asked of her, even though I know what's being asked is bad enough. I can't imagine how blindsided you feel. Her too. Especially her."

His insecurity had pushed him to jump to the worst place, James knew. The whole mess with Morton had done his head in completely. It seemed almost cyclical, to see Lily with another bloke, nearly have her, and then have to repeat the process and see her with another bloke again. "Do you trust him?" he asked, pushing those thoughts aside. He knew he'd have no choice but to face them later anyway.

"Greg?" Frank paused, and his face grew slowly pained, enough so that James managed to feel bad for him even on top of his own misery. "I don't really know if I trust anyone at this point, except for Alice and members of the Order, who I only trust because Dumbledore does. He's never led us wrong. So I trust you, because he does too, but…I don't know about the rest of the world, even my mates, even Hector, and he works with us, so I should, shouldn't I? But I've just seen too much at this point, I guess, and…it's all just coincidental, you know? Greg had multiple really big projects and cases that he excelled at, so it makes sense he'd do well in Transportation. The bloke he worked under quit, which put him up for promotion with other people who had worked there longer. Still, he got the gig, though, and Lily's right—that is absurdly fast, even if he's done a lot of high-profile work. But…he's favored." He looked unwilling to even speak Mulciber's name, no matter how empty the pub or how quietly he spoke. "He has been since he started, got taken under his wing immediately. And Greg likes him. By the time we figured out who at Transportation might be involved, he and Greg had gotten so chummy that we weren't sure if we should chance asking him for help. I wanted to, but the others…they're less sure. I get it. We don't even know how many people are involved in it all, but—there are Death Eaters in positions in every department, and those are just the ones we know about, let alone others or sympathizers or unknowing participants or people indifferent to the war. It's hard to know where anyone stands. If it were up to me, I'd trust him, but I understand the need for caution."

Although he spoke with total conviction, James had to wonder if he only did so because he'd convinced himself that he believed it.

"Would he know enough to alter the wards around Hogsmeade?" he asked finally. "Or to mess with those around Hogwarts?"

"He would," Frank admitted. It looked like a bitter pill to swallow. "I've never asked—like I said, we don't really talk about work—but from my understanding, he would, and there aren't many who do." He rubbed his face roughly. "Again, I'm sorry. You have every right to kick off. Lily does too. I know we sprung it on you both without any warning and didn't give her any time to think it over. Moody just…sees all this in black and white, as I'm sure you've picked up. He has to, I suppose, after all he's seen and done. He's brilliant, and I've learned a lot from him, but…his bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired, to put it lightly."

James found that the fight had left him. Perhaps thirty minutes earlier—maybe even fifteen—he might have kicked off as Frank clearly expected, but drink and exhaustion had led to at least a modicum of acceptance. He stared into his Firewhiskey and wondered how Lily felt at that moment. He would have bet that she still had some fight in her, no matter how slumped and defeated she'd looked in the conference room, seated on the other side of Moody's dark stare. She always had fight to spare, and such a look of defeat had sat strangely on her face. But, truly, what else could she have done but accepted and agreed to what Moody asked?

"Ask me what to do now," Frank prompted, jerking James from his thoughts.

"What do I do?" he asked dutifully, tonelessly, with a resigned sigh.

"You're going to sit here and finish this bottle with me, go home and sleep it off, and figure out tomorrow if you think she's worth all this to you. Because nothing is going to get easier, mate, even when this gets resolved with Greg. You're in this fight with us now and so is she, and it's just going to make everything way more complicated."

With no other path to follow, James went with his plan.

Or went with most of it. Long after the sun set, as evening turned to night and night turned later still, the thought of going home and seeing his parents' excited faces and battling Sirius' endless questions seemed like more work than he could handle. Without many other options—and, truly, without even thinking about it twice—he Apparated to Remus' parents' house.

"Moony, mate, can I stay here tonight?" he asked the second Remus opened the door.

The surprise on Remus' face at the sight of him turned into more surprise when he heard the slur in his words, and then, immediately, into unquestioning acceptance. "Yeah, of course."

Later, when Remus never so much as poked fun at him for his state, and really hardly even brought it up again after the next morning, James would feel grateful all over again that he'd made the choice to go to him—and that he had him in his life to make that choice a possibility.

And even in the moment, quite a bit drunker than he'd been in ages—or maybe ever—James felt grateful too.

He tried to express it, tried his best to clumsily thank Remus as he ushered him inside and upstairs, down the hall past his parents' dark bedroom and into his own. Remus had a single lamp lit on his desk, and James spied a quill and parchment spread out next to it as Remus sat him down firmly on his bed. He took a seat at his desk chair and pushed away what looked, based on the books nearby, like the same Transfiguration essay James had toiled over that very morning, which seemed suddenly like very long ago.

"Do you want to tell me what's going on?" Remus asked mildly, and James didn't bother to answer, just laid down heavily onto Remus' bed unbidden. Remus gave a brief sigh of disapproval, followed by a quick, "Prongs, don't put your trainers on my bed." With his face in Remus' pillow, James heard and felt rather than saw Remus stand and move to pull his shoes off for him.

"Thanks, Moony."

"Sure thing." James heard something set down near his head, and looked up to see Remus place a glass of water on the bedside table. "Just don't piss or puke in my bed either. Those are my only rules. That's my line."

"Got it."

James wanted to fall asleep. It would have been so easy and welcome to drop into sleep and deal with all of it—Moody, the Order, the Auror Department, Mulciber, Greg, Lily, especially Lily, just everything—the next day, a problem for Future James, because Present James felt about at the end of his rope. He waited for the room to stop spinning, which he could feel even with his eyes closed, and waited for sleep to come and overtake him. But it didn't. He knew Remus had picked his quill back up, because after a few minutes he heard its familiar scratch against parchment.

Finally, sighing, he lifted himself onto his elbows so he could reach for the water next to him. His mouth felt thick. And he'd left his glasses on the whole time, he realized as he drank as much water as his sloshing stomach could handle, and hiding his face in Remus' pillow had left the bridge of his nose irritated from the pressure. "I met Alastor Moody today," he told Remus abruptly, because that seemed as good a place to start as any.

James saw Remus pause his writing, quill hovering above parchment long enough for several drops of ink to fall onto his essay. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"How was that?"

"He's scary, past what I expected."

James put the water back on the nightstand, and Remus set his quill down, ostensibly so he could flick his wand that way and refill James' glass. But he left the quill down, and James warily met the curious intensity of his brown eyes. "Why did you meet him?" Remus asked, and even in his state, James recognized the careful nature of his words, the cautious way he posed the question.

"Lily and I went to Auror Headquarters. Frank and Alice took us. Moody wants to recruit us." That, James reasoned as his head pouded, was safe enough to say. He could tell Remus that. That wasn't classified, even if all the rest was.

"She's Lily now, not Evans," Remus mused, almost more to himself. "That's new." He turned in his chair to face his bed and face James, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "Alright, where's she?"

"With Alice, I expect. Or maybe back at my house. I don't know. I was with Frank."

"So Frank got you sloshed?"

"Yes."

"And he let you Apparate? Bloody hell, Prongs, you're lucky you didn't splinch yourself on the way over here." James had closed his eyes—although he didn't quite remember doing so—but opened them at how cross and suddenly furious Remus sounded, as he usually only spoke after the other three Marauders had done something especially stupid. "You could have really hurt yourself."

While his nose still hurt from where his glasses had dug in, James pulled them off more so he wouldn't have to look at the unhappy set of Remus' face instead of out of a physical need. He aimed them for the nightstand next to him but heard them fall to the floor, and then heard Remus sigh. "Sorry," he offered without specifying what for, and he could see Remus' form, though slightly fuzzy, stand to pick up his glasses.

"So did it go poorly? With Moody?" Remus asked once he'd sat back down. "Because this isn't how you act when you're drunk after a victory. This seems pretty miserable, although you're a lot less destructive like this than what I'm used to. I don't mind that."

"No, it went well. We'll both start training in June, sounds like." Something flashed in his brain, a quick, sudden thought. "Hey, you should Floo Padfoot, tell him I'm staying here. I don't want my folks to worry."

"Yeah, I will in a second. Prongs, why are you like this if everything went well? You're never stroppy when you drink. I can't imagine Frank and Alice—"

"No, just Frank. Lily was with Alice."

"Oh." Even drunk, James could hear what he often thought about Remus—that he could sum up so much in a single syllable. "So you rowed." It wasn't a question.

"No."

"No?" Remus repeated, and the surprise and sharpness in this question made up for the lack of inquiry in his previous words. "Then what—"

"I can't tell you," James snapped, and his anger startled even himself. But he felt it come over him in the next second, all the rage and frustration that had apparently started building that he hadn't even noticed. He wanted to tell Remus everything, all of it—everything he'd left out about seeing Lily with Morton; all of the hidden moments he'd had with her at Hogwarts that had made his feelings for her grow to where they stood; the way he'd realized, perhaps belatedly, that he was all in with her—but he knew he couldn't. He couldn't tell him about seeing Lily with Morton without the very real fear that Remus might despise him for all of it, because he undeniably had more morals than Sirius. He didn't have the words just then to explain how he felt about Lily, and didn't trust himself to try. And he'd sworn secrecy to the rest, to everything about the Order, and meant it staunchly enough that even alcohol couldn't make him come out with the day's events. Despite that, he later thought with a clearer head that if he hadn't already hashed nearly everything out with Frank, he might have broken with Remus then. "I can't tell you," he repeated, and he tried to soften his voice, even though his anger remained. "I swore."

"To her?"

"No."

"Then what—" Remus had begun to sound exasperated. "I don't understand what's going on. At all."

"I almost had her!" James hadn't planned to say it, just as he hadn't planned on telling Frank those exact words, but it came tumbling out. He wanted to reach out and take the words back, but he couldn't, and he didn't have the strength to halt what followed after either. "We went on a date, and everything was great. I told her I was all in, because you were right, Moony, I'm too far in this to get out even if I wanted to. She was nearly there too, she said as much, and then today—" He bit his tongue to stop himself, and the physical pain worked and made him end everything else he desperately wanted to say.

"Then today," Remus prompted, and James could see, with blurry eyes, that he'd leaned forward again expectantly.

"It's just—fucked. The world is fucked. All of this is fucked, and we're fucked too, and it's like—the world just won't let it happen, between me and her, even if she came around. And, fucking hell, she would have. By the end of next week, she would have been my girlfriend. I know it. It would have happened."

"But what—"

"No, mate, I'm done. I'm sorry, Moony, but—I can't. I can't say anything else." If he did, James knew he'd end up saying something he couldn't take back, things that needed to stay secret and not just the stuff he didn't want to say to protect his own pride. Although, he thought dully, he'd pretty much already lost his pride anyway. He pressed his face into Remus' mattress and put his pillow over his head. "Floo Padfoot, will you?"

For a long time the room was silent, and then he heard the creak of Remus' chair, the sound of his footsteps across the room, and the squeal of door hinges as he left.

Sleep would have come even more welcomely than before. Yet James knew, as he hadn't earlier, that he wouldn't sleep anytime soon, his body too keyed up to give into what his mind so desperately wanted and pass out. His heart pounded too hard in his chest, adrenaline rushed too hotly through his veins, and his shoulders remained too tense for him to relax enough to sleep. He seemed unable to do much else but turn the day over and over in his mind—how pretty Lily had looked, the fear he'd felt coming face-to-face with Moody, how Marlene's mother had made a point to say that Marlene hated him, his sickened irritation upon spotting Greg for the first time, the way that irritation had only festered, the pity on Frank's face that never abated no matter how far down they drank the bottle of Firewhiskey.

The door squeaked back open, but Remus didn't say anything for several seconds. When he did, his words came out hushed, and clearly not directed towards James. "Just like I said, but passed out, I hope." He raised his volume just a bit. "Prongs?"

Nothing could have incentivized James to lift his head or respond.

He felt even less like answering when he heard a sigh and knew that it came from Sirius even before he spoke. "Well and good for you, Moony, but I have about ten thousand questions I want to throw at him, and I'd make sure to get a lot further with them than it sounds like you did."

And that, James thought with a certain amount of grim satisfaction, was why he had refused to go home.

"I'm not about to make him tell me something he doesn't want to, and he was pretty clear he didn't want to tell me."

And that was why he'd gone to Remus.

"Yeah, well, you didn't listen to Hess worry half the evening until Alice wrote her and said Lily had decided to stay at theirs because she'd had too much to drink to go home." James had never heard Sirius call Lily by her first name before, and it sounded weird coming from him.

"It would have been nice if Prongs had thought of that, the idiot. He could have splinched himself getting over here. It made me furious when I realized how drunk he was."

And then, James realized with dawning horror, if he had splinched himself, Greg's department would have had to deal with setting him right.

Knowing he had at least avoided one horrific catastrophe that day made him feel just a hair better.

"Yeah, well, Lily's smarter than all of us, isn't she? Except maybe you."

"Or Alice is smarter than Frank."

"Or both."

"What did Alice write, exactly?" James heard the creak of Remus' desk chair, as if he sat back down as he spoke. "Did she say anything to explain…all this?"

"No. That'd be too easy, wouldn't it? Women." It sounded like Sirius had perhaps conjured a chair of his own and sat down. "Just something like, everything was alright, Lily didn't want Hess to worry, she'd had too much to drink and would be home in the morning. Alice's writing looked dead sloppy too—no way she was sober. She added something, though, about how Lily didn't want Prongs to worry either, that things were fine, which made Hess think they probably hadn't rowed, although who knows with them. Foreplay for them at this point, innit?"

"Wait, did they finally?" Remus sounded momentarily distracted.

"Shag? He says no, and I believe him. Lily's been in with Hess most nights, and, besides, you don't think he'll wake up all of Britain when it happens? There will be a category ten earthquake when he finally gets his end away. He will come that hard. That's how worked up she's got him."

Remus' laughter sounded reluctant but genuine. "Padfoot."

"Just telling it like it is." In his mind's eye, James could perfectly imagine Sirius' mock innocent expression down to the way he probably held his hands up in defense. "I thought he was bad before this year, and then I thought he was bad at Christmas, but now…you should see it. He's gone."

"That's pretty much what he said, that he was too far in to get out even if he wanted to. He also said they went on a date yesterday."

"Called it a date, did he?" Sirius sounded delighted. "They kept saying it wasn't, that it was just dinner, even got Hess to call it that too. But yeah, they went out, and had drinks with Frank and Alice after. Prongs said they hadn't gone off each other—"

"Yeah, he told me it went well."

"Yeah? That's more than I got out of him when I asked this afternoon. But something happened, because everything about the way they acted today was real weird. She seemed all nerves, and didn't even banter back with me at all. And he was…furious. I don't know. Something like that. Hess said it didn't seem like they were mad at each other, and I believe her—she knows a right bit more than me about people and feelings and all that—but I don't know what else it could have been."

"He said—and these are direct quotes, Padfoot—that 'the world is fucked' and 'won't let it happen' with them, even though he was pretty sure before today that he could have brought her around before break ended. He said she would have been his girlfriend."

"Wait, girlfriend? Really?" Sirius seemed to chew on that. "I mean, doubtful, but maybe. She has come off a little more keen, even though she's still giving him the run around. She's worked hard at his folks. She's got Flea snowed—"

"No surprise there."

"None. He's a bloke, isn't he? And you should see her brew in his lab. I think we've all been replaced. But she's gone after trying to win Effie over too, although that's been harder. Effie thinks she's kind of messing Prongs about, said as much to me—"

"She said that?"

"Not exactly, but basically. I mean, she has to see what we all see, doesn't she? That he's obsessed with her, and she…what, ranges from maybe secretly into him to mad at him depending on the day? And I called her on it—Lily, that is—"

Remus began to laugh, entirely genuinely and without holding back, although he clearly thought better of it and tried to stifle the sound after a few seconds. "And you're still breathing?"

"Mate, I ended up apologizing to her," Sirius said with some bitterness. Even after a few days, it clearly still rankled. "She accused me of judging her, said she's never done that with me and Hess—which, fair play, she hasn't, good on her—and told me I didn't know what she thought or how she felt, pretty much. But does he know how she feels, even? Has he told you something he hasn't told me?"

"Does he ever?" Remus asked. Despite his anger at the world and his drunkenness, James felt bad at that, even though Remus didn't sound even slightly put out, as if he'd accepted long ago that he'd always come second to Sirius in James' affections. "No, he's not told me much, beyond a little about her and Morton, but…you do see it, don't you? Between the two of them? I mean, I didn't before Christmas, you had to tell me—"

"Feel lucky you're not in the Slug Club."

"Yeah, well, I didn't see all that, but over Christmas break…you know, she and I were pretty good friends when she dated Gimble. And I saw her around Morton all last year, when they were apparently—" Remus stopped.

"Fucking. You can say it, Moony. You're of age. It's allowed."

"Fucking, then, are you happy?" Remus asked, and Sirius clearly was by the way he began to laugh. Yet he stopped abruptly when Remus added, "Merlin, Prongs would hate to hear it put like that."

And, of course, James did.

"Go on, then," Sirius prompted, and, to his credit, he sounded much less gleeful.

"I saw her with both of them, and she wasn't like that with either of them, what she's like with Prongs. She doesn't moon over him like Hestia does with you—"

"You think Hess moons over me?" Although Sirius sounded just as happy as he had a moment before, something about the quality of his voice changed, became more real than it had at James' expense. "Tell her that. I want to see her face."

"I would never, and don't tell her I said it either. But, yeah, she moons. Has she told you she likes you yet?"

"Exactly once without my prompting, which I'm taking for an absolute win." Sirius sounded proud of himself too. "Lily's trying to set it up so we'll shag, bless her. I mean, it'll take a fair bit more than she can manage, I think, but if anyone can make it happen, it's got to be her. Knows her way around all that real well, doesn't she? Wish Wormtail was here to try to start a bet over it. Which side would you take?"

Remus sat silently for several long moments, and James wondered what he thought. Had he ever fancied Hestia? Had James imagined that entirely? "You by yourself?" he asked. "I'd bet against that. With Lily's help? I'd bet for it."

"Do you have that much faith in her, or that little faith in me?"

"Little from column A, little from column B," Remus said, and Sirius let out a bark of laughter. "Think about it—Lily's not going to try to get you to go for it if it's not what Hestia wants. And she'd know."

"Cheers, Moony. I'll owl you, let you know the minute it happens, if it does."

Remus snorted, and they sat quietly for a moment.

"You should have seen her tonight, though," Sirius continued, his voice warm and fond. He sounded, James thought, almost like Frank when he spoke about Alice. "She was so bloody mad that Lily had stayed with Alice and hadn't thought to tell her. She talked about Floo'ing over there herself to see what was going on, but I talked her out of it. Figured Frank and Alice wouldn't take kindly to a near-stranger falling out of their fireplace, you know? And I think she was a bit jealous, too. It's been just the three of them for so long, her and Lily and McKinnon, and then Alice suddenly comes along? I get it. Like, Prongs decided to get pissed with Frank? Frank? Not me, not you, not even Wormtail, but Frank?"

"You wouldn't have wanted to be there with him, I don't think. I doubt he was much fun. I wish you could have seen him, Padfoot—it made me actually miss how stupid and shouty and destructive you both usually get when you drink. He had me worried. I'm still worried."

"What do you reckon, then? If Wormtail were here, if we had to all place bets, what would you say made him like that?"

"I think…" Remus hesitated for a long while. "Probably something that we couldn't even come up with. Something we wouldn't ever guess, because we have no idea."

"My money's still on Lily."

"I'm sure she's tied up in there somewhere, because that's just how things are for them now, I think. But no matter what Prongs said…I'd be surprised to see her go anywhere."

"We'll see, won't we? I'm still with Effie and think Lily's mostly just fucking with Prongs' head. She's more trouble than she's worth, and she's got him so wrapped around her finger that he'd do anything to get her to stick around. No way she doesn't know that, and likes it, I reckon. Could be payback for all the years we tormented her, but no matter the reason, she's such hard work. I told him he is too, because he's a right git sometimes, but I don't understand why he won't just let it go with her."

"You got Hestia out of it."

"That is true. I'll give Lily that. Speaking of Hess…she may quite literally murder me if I'm not back within the next five minutes. And if you try to take the piss out of me for saying that, I would encourage you to try to argue with her the next time you see her."

"I'll pass. Wormtail had a point—the quiet scary is worse than the loud. C'mon, I'll walk you down." James heard Remus' desk chair shift. "And then I'll conjure a bed and try to make sure he doesn't hurt himself somehow."

"Better conjure a bucket too. Remember last year after we beat Slytherin in Quidditch? Bloody hell, we were all so sick, but I thought Prongs and Wormtail might literally die—" Sirius' voice broke off as the door hinges squeaked, and James heard them move down the hall. The silence that followed was blessedly peaceful.

xxx

Sirius and Remus' conversation came back to James in bits and pieces the next day, particularly in the time he spent bonding with the bucket Remus had conjured. He had plenty of time to think and curse Frank, curse Firewhiskey, curse Moody, curse it all.

Remus sat at his desk the entire time, apparently unbothered by the sights and sounds of James' sick. Later, James would realize that he'd seen Remus throw up before or after his monthly transformation more times than he could count, and that Remus had probably become desensitized to the whole thing after going through it so much himself. And maybe he got some sort of satisfaction out of it, James thought, for getting put through such confusion and worry the night before. That seemed especially possible when Remus waited until James had thrown up the entire contents of his stomach, and somehow even more, before he tossed a potion vial onto the bed next to him.

"What's that?" James asked, and his voice sounded strange, harsh and guttural, throat raw from alcohol that had both gone down and come up.

"Hangover potion," Remus said, and James didn't question it, just picked it up and drank it. It could have been poison at that point for all he cared. Remus watched him for several long moments, waiting to see if it worked and settled him, and James found that it did. His stomach calmed, his head no longer felt split open, every muscle in his body ceased its ache, and he felt rather alright, all things considered, although still exhausted. "It came to my window this morning around seven—scared me senseless." Remus passed over a slip of parchment. "This came with it."

James pulled on his glasses, and hardly had to glance at the greeting by Remus' name to recognize Lily's hand, even before he glanced down to see her name at the close next to a scrawled heart.

Hi Remus,

I woke Hestia as soon as I got in this morning and she told me Sirius said James was with you. (If he was anywhere near as drunk as Frank last night, I'm very sorry, although I was nowhere near much better, and Alice only a bit better than that. We had a very pitiful morning at their place far too early.) This is a hangover potion, in case he needs it. I assume he very much will.

Missing you and hoping you're well. I assume you'll be over for James' birthday. Remind me to show you the Arithmancy book Effie recommended to me from their library. It's changed the way I plan to study for NEWTs.

Tell James to come home. Hestia and I are to my parents' house for lunch, and then Marlene's for the night, so I may not be here if he's late, but tell him I'll be back tomorrow if he's not home before I leave.

Lily

James looked to his watch automatically and saw it neared ten o'clock.

"You couldn't have woken me?" he asked Remus, who shrugged.

"Prongs, you were in enough of a state last night that I wouldn't have woken you up if you'd slept for three days. I would have just checked to make sure you kept breathing." He paused delicately. "You want to talk about it? Yesterday?"

"Very much," James said honestly. "But I can't. I just…" He pushed his glasses up to rub at his face roughly. "I remember what I said to you, I think—"

"So you know you were talking out your arse?"

"Yes. Although, in my defense, I very much blame Frank."

Remus chuckled. "Sounds like you and Lily are okay, at least." He nodded towards the letter James passed back over. "Padfoot and I figured she had to be involved somehow, but she's clearly not mad, and you didn't seem mad at her last night, so…" He waited for James to say something that would clarify things, and sighed when he didn't. "C'mon, Prongs. Give me something."

"It's just shit timing," James said after another long silence had elapsed, one long enough that Remus had already opened his mouth, clearly about to prompt him in some other way. "There's a lot to…to this Auror business that I didn't consider going into it yesterday. It's going to change things with us one way or another, and not for the better either way. I thought it was hard enough just to try to win her around, but it turns out there's more to it than that, stuff neither of us can control. And Frank basically said last night to figure out if it's worth the hassle—if she's worth the hassle—because it wasn't going to get easier."

James expected a dozen different questions from Remus, all ones that he knew he couldn't answer while still holding true to his word to not speak at all about the Order. But Remus surprised him, and asked instead, "Is she worth it?"

James didn't even have to think about it. "Yeah."

Remus nodded. "Good man. I'd agree."

"You don't even know what we're going against or what the hassle is."

"I don't need to. She is." Remus stood and stretched. "If you don't think so, I'm sure one of the three of us would take her off your hands."

It might have rubbed James the wrong way coming from anyone else but Remus, but something about the way he grinned as he said it, all in clear jest, made James laugh instead. "Right." He stood too. "Well, she has to actually be in my hands before I can pass her off, so I'm going to get going." Yet instead of heading for the door, he shifted, hestitating. "Sorry for barging in here last night, Moony, but thanks for letting me stay. I just…I couldn't go home and deal with Padfoot, you know? He wouldn't have let me be."

"Not a problem," Remus said. "And say no more. Some days I can't deal with Padfoot either, although there's never a reason for it outside of him acting annoying in some bloody way." He smiled. "Have fun with my dad, though. He's got a few questions to take the piss out of you, because Mum heard Padfoot in the hall last night, came to investigate, and he told her you were drunk off your arse. Dad's been thinking up all the things he wants to say to you since breakfast."

xxx

Euphemia looked immediately unimpressed the moment James walked through the door.

"—and absolutely drunk, Sirius said, which doesn't bother me, James Henry—because I know what you're up to at school, don't think I don't, don't think your father and I weren't the same way—but what does bother me is that you didn't let any of us know where you were," she said sharply, finishing up a lecture that James thought lasted a lifetime, but probably only spanned a few minutes. "At least Lily had the sense to write to Hestia, although when she didn't mention you—well, what were we to think?"

"Alice had the sense," Sirius reminded her, draped across a loveseat in the den. He looked unaffected by James' bawling out, or that he'd apparently made the entire situation worse the night before. "But Frank's an idiot, so he wouldn't think about that. And Remus said James at least thought to have him Floo me as soon as he got there."

"And why Remus' house?" Euphemia demanded. "Why wouldn't you just come home?"

"So you could see me drunk, Mum?" James asked pointedly. "Gee, I wonder why I'd want to avoid that?"

"Then maybe you shouldn't get so drunk that you can't come home!"

"Darling, let him be," Fleamont said good-naturedly, and Sirius grinned and winked at James behind Euphemia's back. "Like you said, it's nothing we didn't do—"

"At school is different, because I can't worry when I don't know any better about what he's up to! I know better when he's home, and I can worry then!"

"Of course, but he'll be out of the house come summer, and then what? Will you worry every day and every night? He's just acting his age, darling. Let him be."

"Speaking of, where did you figure you'd live after we graduate?" James asked Sirius a good fifteen minutes later, once he'd fielded off his mum's rapidly-dwindling anger and sidestepped most of her and his dad's questions about the Ministry with meaningless platitudes.

"Hadn't thought much of it," Sirius said absently as they climbed the stairs, and James felt a sense of relief that he hadn't been the only one. "My uncle left me a fair bit of gold last year; I'll probably rent a place. Hess said she and Lily are getting a place together. You want to do the same? We could check with Moony and Wormtail too."

"Yeah. Yeah, let's." James made for his room, and Sirius followed him inside. "Since when is she Lily to you?"

"Last night, when Hess got shirty with me for calling her Evans still." Sirius tossed himself onto James' bed while James went into his bathroom. "Doesn't really bother her, I don't think, but she got pretty concerned when you both didn't come home, and I was an easy target for her frustration." He sounded remarkably unconcerned by it all. "And Lily called me Sirius at breakfast this morning, so I guess we're there. She's in her room, I think, since you'll probably ask me that next."

Indeed, Sirius knew him well, because that would have been James' third and final question.

He took the time to wash his face and brush his teeth before he knocked on her door, and found her in front of her dresser, rifling through clothes. She did a double-take when she saw him. "I thought you were Hestia," she said, as if that explained the slight step she took backwards, and maybe it did. She looked pale but otherwise no worse for the wear, her hair piled on top of her head and wearing the Star Grass Five t-shirt he'd admired on her days before. "We're taking off for my parents' soon enough that I figured I'd just see you tomorrow."

"I like your shirt," he told her, and she looked at him oddly, glanced down at her shirt, and then smiled. "I had the same thought the other day, just didn't tell you."

"Thank you," she said, still smiling. "I got it at the concert we went to, me, Mar, and Hestia. I think Hestia got about four different ones." Her smile faded slightly. "Are we alright, then?" she asked uncertainly. "Actually, do you want to come in? I feel like Sirius is probably in the hall listening. He's so starved for gossip."

She made a fair point, but once James stepped inside the room and closed the door, he didn't quite know what to do with himself. "Why wouldn't we be alright?" he asked, and she shot him a look before she turned to rummage in her dresser again.

"I can't imagine," she said sarcastically, and she tossed a few articles of clothing—a jumper, a shirt, a dress, he thought—towards her bed. "Do you want to pick a reason? I can think of a few. I mean, you didn't come home last night."

"Neither did you!"

"Yeah, but I at least wrote. Well, Alice wrote. I dictated. She chose to interpret my words creatively, which was kind of her." She added a skirt to the growing pile on her bed, and then a hairbrush as well. "Although I don't think Frank had that capacity to write for you, honestly. He slept on the floor in their bathroom last night, because I slept in their bathtub."

James stared at her, and then started to laugh. She joined him with a smile, however reluctantly. "You didn't."

"I did. It's entirely logical if you think about it—doesn't matter if you're sick. Easy cleanup. And it's not the first time I've done it—Marlene will tell you if you ask, I'm sure—but it was definitely the most embarrassing. I think I apologized to them about fifty times this morning. Well, to Alice. Frank didn't feel like talking, and I don't blame him. The floor is worse than the tub, so he had a poor night. But he insisted that someone to keep me company, and he was drunk enough to do it, where Alice was not. But she's an angel, really, for dealing with me as long as she did before he got home. She took the worse shift; he got me when I was much calmer and had shouted through enough."

"Did you and Frank talk much?" he asked, and he went to sit on her bed, mainly because he hoped moving would make him sound more casual than he at all felt. He realized, belatedly, that Frank knew way too much for someone who said he couldn't handle his drink.

"Oh yeah, loads," she said, and James felt his stomach sink. But she added, in the next breath, "Although, how much of it do I remember? Not a ton. How much of what I do remember is coherent? Again, not a ton. It was like we were on two different radio frequencies and talked around each other, really. But he's so lovely, and he tried so hard."

"Any highlights?" he asked, and she grabbed her school bag on her way over to join him at her bed. She hardly gave him a second glance before she began opening the pockets, unpacking notes and bits of parchment and quills and ink.

"Well, we have very different ideas about Quidditch, for one. His whole thing about Zimbabwe—"

"Are you acting jokes again?"

"I suppose, since I really doubt that you care what Frank thinks about Quidditch, although you'd probably be more interested than I was." She brushed her hair out of her eyes from where it had escaped atop her head, and, unable to help it, he reached over to tuck it behind her ear for her. For a moment, she put her hand atop his and held it to her cheek where he'd lingered, and the smile she gave him looked so sweet and almost shy that he knew without a doubt that he would kiss her if she continued to look at him that way. But then she let go of his hand and slipped away, heading back to her dresser. "He told me he got you well drunk, and that you two talked about your feelings. And that's exactly how he put it—he said, 'We talked about our feelings.'" She laughed under her breath when she crossed back to him, holding somehow still more clothes and shaking her head. "I think he thought he was on a roll and wanted to go two-for-two, because he tried to get me to talk about mine too."

"And?"

"And you've met me. What do you think?"

"I think you probably made jokes and infuriated the living hell out of him. Am I right?"

"More or less. He didn't get that frustrated, though, and just ended up talking at me in the end, telling me everything he thought about it all. Which was about the same as listening to what Alice thought, only less intelligible."

"Anything good?"

Lily started folding her clothes methodically. "Not much other than that he thinks that I'm proper hard work—no doubts now where Moody got that—and that he just wants me to be happy. He's lucky he came in when he did though, because if he'd said it all even an hour earlier when I still had some rage in me, I would have reacted a lot differently. But he can't complain. His flat is intact and Alice is unharmed, like he asked, and they both got a hangover potion in the mail as well this morning, so they're both even less harmed now."

"What kind of overnight trip needs four separate sets of clothes?" he asked, momentarily distracted by the sheer bulk she piled into her bag.

"The kind of overnight trip where Marlene has been alone for the better part of a week—or, maybe worse, off with Rooney and his friends—so I know I'll end up spending the evening and night catering to her every whim, because she'll need a bit of joy. There are many sides to her, and I need to be prepared for them all."

"I'm just used to whichever side of her shouts, I guess."

"Oh, they all do that. But they don't all shout the same amount—some more, some less." She smiled when he chuckled. "And you and Frank?" she prompted. "Did you have a nice talk about your feelings?"

"Yes." He didn't really know what else to say, and hated the thought of disrupting the ease with which they spoke, but he tried. "I'm still…not happy with all of it, to say the least. Or with how Frank and Alice handled it. They could have given us some warning."

"But they couldn't," she said as he watched her pace the rest of her room and grab the last odds and ends to shove into her bag—toiletries, cosmetics, a second set of shoes, a handful of potions vials. "They had to listen Moody's orders even though we're friends. I understand that. And if Frank can lie to Greg—well, he has more important people in his life he's lying to than us, you know? I really feel badly for him."

James thought it just like her, to care about someone else's feelings above her own. Still, in the light of a new day, when he remembered what Frank had said the day before and how he'd compared it to lying to Sirius, he had far more sympathy than the little that he'd managed previously.

"Listen, while I'm gone—" As she paused midway through closing her bag, James thought he saw her reach towards him, her face serious and all banter gone, but couldn't be sure. The move felt like a gamble, but when he pulled her toward him and she went willingly, he knew it was what she had sought and simply hadn't wanted to make the move herself. Something about the way she allowed him take her in his arms, the way she pushed her face into his neck and let him sit there and hold her, made her feel more fragile to him than ever before. While he'd comforted her in the past without her prompting, he wasn't sure if she'd ever gone to him for comfort besides a couple nights previous on the loveseat in the den. "While I'm gone, will you…will you think about what you want?" she asked. "With us?"

"You know what I want," he said against the top of her head. "That hasn't changed."

"But it has. You know that." She pulled back just enough to look at him, and fiddled lightly with the front of his shirt much as she had done a couple nights before. "I want you to actually think about it, logically, if this is something you can see making sense for you. I don't want this to be some knee-jerk reaction where you're just thinking with your cock—"

"That's not what this is," he said sharply, but she continued as if he hadn't spoken.

"—or your emotions, or those two things together, because you can't tell me they're not intertwined here." She paused as if to let him say something, to break in like he had clearly wanted to before, and waited pointedly before she went on. "Have you thought about what a relationship with me would be like with all of this? Because it would end up looking a lot like how it is now, I think, except even worse, because no one could know by order, not by choice. And on top of that, you would know that I'm around Greg as much as possible. Could you deal with that? Could you deal with me having coffee with him next week, when that's going to be something you and I wouldn't be able do?"

He'd never wanted to kiss her quite so badly, because he'd never felt—in all their time together, no matter how hard things had gotten—quite so lost for words. It became suddenly quite clear why she often kissed him when she just didn't want to have to say anything else and when she wanted him to stop pushing something. He'd never considered what she must have felt to make that move so many times, and wondered, guiltily, if she experienced any amount of the discomfort or pain he felt then.

"Is that what's happening?" he asked quietly, and she looked away. "You're seeing him?"

"Yes. You must have heard him say he planned to owl me. What else could he have meant?"

"I don't know, I—" He swallowed, and watched her wait for him to complete his sentence. "I didn't want to think about it."

"Yeah." She touched his cheek with a sad smile. "I know. And you'd have to. There's no way around it. So it's okay, really, if you can't. I would understand. I don't know if I could do it if it were the other way around, and I don't even know what that's like, really. I'm lucky that I've never had to deal with you with someone else since you started mattering to me. And I know that that's how you spent all of last term, just driven basically mad with hating Morton. I don't want to put you through that again, now that I know—well, now that I know that you actually do care about me, and don't just see me as some difficult challenge to conquer like I thought."

"Don't look like that." James didn't know what else to do besides to draw her back into him and cradle her head against his chest, because he couldn't stand the sadness in her smile, or the way it touched her eyes. "You look like you're sorry, and there's nothing to be sorry for."

He felt and heard her sigh. "That's kind of you to say."

"I mean it. There's not." He reached for her hair, but remembered she'd had it tied up. Yet she understood the motion and took it down, and it comforted him to push his hand into it as he often did when they kissed, since he couldn't kiss her then as he still very much wanted to. "And I don't care about all that. I know how I feel. I don't have to think about it. I told you, I'm in. And if you're in too—"

"Have you thought about what we'd tell your parents? We'd have to say something. Or our friends? How would you explain this to Sirius, since he can't know anything about what I'm meant to do? He already thinks I'm just playing games with you." She waited a heartbeat to let him consider that before she went on. "I just want you to think about these things, because there's so much shit like that that I don't think you've thought about, things I spent hours shouting about last night. We wouldn't be able to dinner again, but you might have to think about me going to dinner with Greg if this goes on long enough. I think Frank's right and I can play this friendly and only flirtatious when necessary for a long while. I don't think Greg would even question if I were to act hesitant for anything else, really, since even though things were always pretty good between us, it went ugly really fast when I ended it. It's not something he'd expect me to get over quickly, but—how long are we talking here? Months on end? Do you know how long this could last?"

At some point she'd started crying, and he hadn't realized it, hadn't even heard it in her voice until she inhaled a little, shaky breath that sounded strange and utterly unlike her. He drew back enough to see her wipe her eye covertly and then, once she realized he'd noticed, fiercer, as if angry that she'd gotten caught. The sight of her tears derailed all his thoughts and all the information she had just served up to him with surprisingly little prompting of his own. "Don't," he told her firmly when she went to pull away from him, but he'd anticipated it, held her tight, and tried to bring her even closer still. "Stop it. Let me hold you."

"I don't want—"

"I don't care what you want. Not right now; not about this. I want to hold you, and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't argue with me. I'm tired."

Although he waited for her to argue (and almost exclusively because he asked her not to), she didn't. She gave the smallest of huffs, he thought almost more out of habit than any real outrage, and then gave in and rested her head back against his chest.

"I feel like such a prat," she said after several minutes that felt somehow both long and short. Her voice had lost much of the trembling quality from before. "I don't cry. Well, I do, just—not in front of you."

"I don't mind," he told her, and he realized as he said it just how true that was. He watched her lift a hand to dab again at her face and offered, "Here, use my shirt." It made her smile, and then laugh a bit under her breath, when he lifted the hem of his shirt to dry her cheeks.

"Thank you," she said quietly, a hint of a smile still on her lips. "Although you smell like you've bathed in Firewhiskey."

"I think I'm probably still about eighty percent Firewhiskey. It may have replaced by blood, I'm not sure." The way she softly laughed again raised his hopes. "Can we please be okay? Please?" He knew how hopeful he sounded, but he didn't care. As he'd understood under the haze of alcohol the night before, his pride had all but fled months ago. "I don't want to fall out, I don't want you to cry, you have to know—"

A knock came at her door, and then Hestia stepped inside without invitation, and with the ease of someone who had done the same many times before. But she became flustered immediately at the sight of Lily in James' arms. "I'm sorry, I didn't—" she began, but her eyes sharpened, and the rest of her face became somehow sharper too, like the blade of a knife, when she saw Lily reach up to give her eyes one final wipe. It took her all of two seconds to take in the dampness of Lily's cheeks, spy the wet spot of tears against James' chest, and put together that she'd been crying. "What—" Hestia stopped herself, but even in that single word, the sheer acid of her voice paired with the abrupt, overwhelming fury in her face, had James appreciating what he often didn't see, even if his friends did: she was terrifying.

"I'm fine," Lily told her quickly with one of her practiced smiles. She pulled back from James enough to stand just away from him, and that time, he let her go. "Honest, Hessie. I'm just—yesterday was so much, and then I had too much to drink and not enough sleep. I'm prangy, that's all. James didn't do anything. He was actually trying to make me feel better, so you can pack that face away."

James could see Sirius in the hall behind Hestia, hovering just over her shoulder. Looking in, he didn't bothered to hide any of the surprise on his face.

"We were meant to leave ten minutes ago," Hestia said carefully. She kept her eyes trained on Lily, never glancing anywhere near James. "I just wanted to check if you were ready."

"All set, yeah." Lily pulled a hand through her hair. "Can you…give me just a second?"

"Sure." Hestia turned on her heel and tugged Sirius down the hall with her. She didn't close the door behind her, James couldn't help but notice, as if she expected that she might have to come back in at any moment.

"Such a mother hen," Lily muttered, but fondly. None of that fondness left her face when she looked at him again, but got sadder some indistinguishable way. "Please think about it all, and I mean really think about it. We can talk tomorrow when I'm back. I'm not sure when Mar will let us leave, but your mum said Millie's making a big to do over Easter dinner, so we'll definitely be back by then."

"Okay." He watched her stand there, unmoving. "Can I kiss you goodbye?"

James didn't know what she smiled at, the question or the hope in his voice, but it relaxed him just a little to see her smile again, and to see her smile genuinely, not like she had at Hestia. He could tell her smiles apart, he realized for the first time with a little start. The difference lay somewhere in the tightness of the corners of her mouth, which looked softer than before, but if he had to quantify the amount of what changed in her expression, he would have labeled it less than a fraction of an inch. "Yeah, alright," she agreed with the certain amount of nonchalance he'd started to see as signature. But she gave a brief, almost breathless laugh when he pulled her back towards him sharply the moment he heard her consent, and he saw that her smile had grown, bright and brilliant and dimpled, in the second he could see her face before he kissed her.

She seemed intent to kiss him chastely at first, just a few gentle times with her hands around his neck, buried in the back of his hair. But he heard the nearly inaudible noise she made as he slipped his hands under the back of her shirt, driven there by both habit and desire, and her fingers became less caressing and more insistent as she opened her mouth to his. When he slid closer to the edge of the bed so he could pull her to fit more tightly between his legs, she moved there without prompting and folded her body into his. Running his hands up her back, he frantically tried to think how he could convince her to stay, and he turned the situation backwards and forwards in his mind, but he still hadn't thought of anything when she pulled back.

"Can you not do this to me, please?" she asked accusingly.

"Do what?" he asked, and she shot him a dark look.

"Like you don't know." She removed her arms from around his neck, and reached around to still his hands, which lingered under her shirt. "Can you please not kiss me like that and look at me like you are right now, like you want to ask me to stay?" With another look, more pointed than the last, she moved his hands away from her, placed them on the bed, and stepped back.

"Well, I do want you to stay, so I don't know how else to look at you. But I'm not going to ask."

"Thank you," she said rather primly, and she shook her hair back and tucked it behind her ears before she picked up her bag. "Will you think about what I said?"

"Yes." At that moment, James couldn't think of a single thing she could ask him, really, that he wouldn't have done. "And, hey—" He reached out to catch her hand as she went for the door.

"I am leaving."

"I know. I was just going to say, you can invite McKinnon over Monday, if you want. We'll have Remus and Pete over for my birthday. It would get her out of the house if she's going stir crazy, and away from the Ravenclaws. It'd make Pete happy too. You can tell her that. I doubt she'd want to come, but you can offer."

For a second she just looked at him, and he thought, yet again, that he might have made her sad, because her expression went soft. But he understood after a moment that she looked at him not sadly, but in the tender manner he had already come to love, and also as if she didn't know quite what to make of him.

"It's really nice of you to think of her," she said after a deep breath. He caught that the smile she flashed him looked a little less than genuine, her eyes still a bit sad, no matter how pretty and bright she looked. "I'll tell her, and I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

Sirius poked his head in the door a few minutes after she left, and looked surprised—but also somehow not surprised at all—to see James still sitting on her bed. "I'm about to get real concerned, because you look like you're planning on staying right there until she comes back," he said, and although he kept his tone light, James caught the way his forehead puckered as they looked at each other across the room. "That's the line, Prongs. That's when we have the intervention. Is today that day?"

"No." But he still didn't move, just pushed up his glasses so he could rub the heels of his hands against his eyes, which burned with exhaustion. "I'm too fucking tired to move. I either slept like shit or not enough or both."

He heard Sirius cross the room, and felt him sit down next to him. "Right," he said briskly. "You want to tell me now how you ended up kicking Moony out of his bed? Because you're going to have to sometime, mate. You really should just tell me, because I don't want to harass you until you come out with it, but I will."

James knew, without question, that he absolutely meant it.

But he let James sit quietly for a while, didn't push or prod or poke in a most uncharacteristic way. And then James tried to explain and gave it his best shot, even though his head throbbed.

"I'm going to be an Auror," he began, and even after that, a single, factual sentence, he faltered.

"Yeah, I know. You've been saying that for years. Sound like you've managed it. That's great." Weirder still than the silence Sirius had allowed to elapse, he sounded sincere as he spoke, with no attempt at his characteristic levity or wit.

"Yeah, but…" James had rubbed his eyes so long that stars had begun to form behind his eyelids. He dropped his hands, settled his glasses, and looked at Sirius, who did, indeed, look almost grave. "It'll change everything. There will be things I can't tell you or Moony or Wormtail, because of the nature of the job. And that's already started, and I fucking hate it."

Sirius nodded slowly, and then leaned back across the floral quilt atop Lily's bed. He folded his hands behind his head, and although he looked the picture of casual, his voice sounded anything but. "So that's what you're on about? You had to know that would happen, right?"

"It's different stuff than I expected. Just—it's more personal. And I can't get more detailed than that, I really can't, so don't ask. But that it's personal makes it harder for me not to talk to you about it."

"So she's tied up in it then?" Sirius didn't bother to even say Lily's name, James noticed, but he didn't have to. "C'mon, mate," he said impatiently when James didn't answer. "You can at least admit that. It's obvious, anyway. Nothing else gets you this aggy besides her. This is just what she does to you at this point, isn't it? Gets your hopes up and dashes them? I've seen that over and over by now. Add that to what Moony told me you said to him last night, and her crying in here, and it's obvious she's involved in this, or maybe caused it. Probably caused it. I'm not stupid." He paused, and some of the frustration on his brow lifted. "I'm not stupid, but I am surprised. I'm surprised that she came anywhere near you when you smell like a pub floor, let alone that she'd let you touch her. You really do smell, mate."

James opened his mouth to throw something back at Sirius' dig words about Lily, which had started to feel routine by that point, but found he didn't have the energy. He forced himself to focus on the end of Sirius' comments instead, that bit of banter that he clearly had tried to resist but couldn't out of a desperation to cut the tension. "It's in my skin at this point. I told her I think I'm about eighty percent Firewhiskey, and I meant it."

"Courtesy of your new best friend, Frank? You can talk to him about all this, I imagine."

"Padfoot—" James began, distracted past his irritation, but Sirius waved him off, although James couldn't tell what, exactly, the gesture meant. "I mean, yeah, I can. And Lily can talk to Alice."

Sirius snorted. "Hess is going to have a field day with that."

"Then I guess you're well suited."

"True."

"Padfoot—" James tried again, but Sirius cut him off.

"I know things are going to change, and I hate it," he said bluntly. "It would be a lot better if they didn't, because things are pretty great right now. But…they don't have to change so much where me or Moony or Wormtail aren't the people you go to when you're down. And if you can't tell us why, you just can't tell us why. That's alright."

"Sure. I can't think of a single time in seven years that you've let something go, or haven't tried to pry something out of me."

"Well, yeah, because how serious were those things? Bit different if it's your job."

James searched Sirius' face for any trace of amusement or any hint of a lie. When he saw none, he waited for Sirius to break the silence first, to cut the tension with another joke.

He didn't."

"Okay," he agreed simply, and Sirius' smile came of as particularly satisfied. "I'm going to hang out with Frank, you know, and Lily's going to see Alice, but you and Hestia don't need to poison them or anything." It felt weird to call her Hestia after knowing her as Jones for so many years.

Sirius nodded. "I like Frank, and I'm sure she likes Alice. They're fine, so long as they're not our replacements. I will only accept so much change. And, you know, with Hess' Herbology knowledge and all, she really could probably poison them. Something to think about."

James realized belatedly, with a blow that felt almost physical, that Lily's room smelled like her, as his brain processed something past the tension he'd felt and things seemed, if not good, or even okay, at least marginally less terrible. It smelled like her perfume, soft and sweet and lightly floral, the scent he'd first detected when he stood next to her at Slughorn's Christmas party, the closest he'd ever been to her at that point, the night he saw her dimples for the first time. Thinking about all that, the air suddenly felt a little too close.

"Let's get out of here," he told Sirius quickly, and Sirius didn't question it, just sat up and bounded off the bed immediately.

"The room or the house?"

"The house. I'm going to go shower—"

"Thank you, really."

"—and then we should get Moony and Wormtail and…I don't know, go to Hogsmeade." Leaving Lily's room behind and shutting the door left James' head clearer. The hallway felt much safer. "Or Diagon Alley. Something. I think it would be nice to just…feel normal for a bit."

James didn't know how else to describe it, really, how he craved the kind of simple fun with his mates that had seemed to fall away after the attack on Hogsmeade had suddenly made the world feel more real, too real. Other things felt too real as well, of course—everything with Lily, all the danger looming on the horizon, that graduation lay only less than three months away. But Sirius seemed to somehow understand, as he often did, without James needing to say a word.

"Same, mate," he agreed, clapping James on the back, and he spoke so wholeheartedly that, for some reasons he didn't understand just then, it almost made James a little sad.