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]

20. Chapter 20

A/N: I just have to note again absolutely wild it is to see the sheer number of reviews come in, and the sheer number of reads. The last chapter has nearly hit 600 in just a week, which I'm pretty sure is a personal record for me. I know most readers of fanfic simply read without reviewing, and I get that. I've been that reader in the past. So thank you to those of you who take the time to review, to plug this fic outside , to PM me, all of it. It all makes writing this more and more worth it.

Chapter Twenty

At breakfast that morning, James thought Sirius looked nearly as satisfied and pleased as the expression that he'd glimpsed on his own face in the mirror as he watched Lily towel off after their shower. In nearly seven years of friendship, James' appreciation and affection for his friend had never even come close to how he felt then. He knew Sirius saw some of that, at least a fraction of what he felt, from the way that he grinned when James patted his back on the way to his seat.

"'Morning, mate," Sirius offered easily. He didn't follow this up with a cracking question about how he'd slept, as James knew he wanted, and the hard work it took to stifle that desire read behind his obvious pleasure.

"'Morning," James answered. He saw Euphemia look between them, at the exchanged brilliance in their grins, and she shook her head, although she smiled. James knew she was relieved that they must have made up.

"I was just telling Hestia how surprised I was to see her this morning," Euphemia said, her eyes on Lily. "I thought you would probably stay out most of the day." The question behind her casual statements rang clearly.

Lily shuffled through the three folded letters waiting for her at her usual spot at the table. At her side, even from profile, James saw her expression shift, although he couldn't quite tell what it meant. "I'm sorry, what?" she asked a moment later, looking up, and then Euphemia's words registered. "Oh. Really, I'm just as surprised as you. I feel bad for Hessie, because I dragged her back here so late. I just…" She hesitated. "I really felt that I couldn't wait until morning to talk to James. Howe we left things really got to me, even though we didn't row or anything. I needed to make sure we were okay."

The honesty in her voice, and the fact that she expressed her feelings at all, made James set down the serving fork where he'd already speared several sausages, food forgotten.

And the way she turned to look at him—with all of the warmth and tenderness and care he'd seen briefly on her face in the hallway outside her room, had glimpsed again on their date, and had seen flickers of for weeks, if not months—nearly bowled him over. She made no attempt to hide it and keep herself guarded at all, and the significance of the moment made his throat feel tight and his breath come a bit shorter.

It didn't seem to matter that he'd just had her up against the wall in his shower. He suddenly wanted her again very desperately.

"And we're good," he said after a long moment and the time spent to take a quick drink of water to try to settle himself. He reached over to tuck her hair behind her ear, and she flashed him another flicker of that look as she poured herself a cup of coffee. He grinned in return, and let his hand linger on her cheek. "We're great."

"I'm glad," Euphemia said, and she sounded it, although James didn't trust himself to look at her. He didn't want to possibly glimpse what she knew or assumed. Fleamont caught his eye, however, and winked over the top of his issue of the Daily Prophet. Somehow, even though James could only see a small portion of his face, he knew his dad looked pleased. "Lily," Euphemia continued, and James did look at her then. He saw the smile, perhaps slightly nervous, that she offered Lily down the table. "I've been thinking about your Arithmancy problem. I have a few new ideas. Would you want to talk about them over tea this afternoon?"

Lily looked up from where she shuffled her letters in her hand. She looked as if she debated which one she should open first. "I would really like that," she answered with a smile that seemed to come easier than Euphemia's.

Then again, he knew her to be a much better actress than his mum.

"You're popular," Hestia commented as Lily broke open her first letter. She sounded almost suspicious.

When Lily glanced to her, James saw that her eyes slid almost unwillingly to Sirius, who had continued to grin unabated. The smile she gave him back looked reluctant but conspiratorial, a strange sight indeed. "A bit, I suppose," she said to Hestia simply. "No letters all break, three letters today—funny how that works."

"Who's coming over tomorrow for your birthday, Jamie?" Euphemia asked. "Remus and Peter, I'm sure."

James found himself well and truly shocked when Hestia piped up that Marlene had agreed to come over as well. "She's accepting the inevitable, I think," was all Hestia would say with a shrug and a small smile, and he knew she meant the turning tide of him and Lily.

"Really now?" James asked skeptically. "Because I met her mum two days ago and one of the only thing she said to me was, 'Marlene cannot stand you.'"

Hestia and Sirius laughed, although when James glanced at Lily, he saw that she didn't, her eyes trained on the letter.

"She sounds like Marlene," Sirius said, shaking his head. "Still kind of weird, to not call her McKinnon. How do you think she'll react to that, Hess?"

"Poorly, of course." Hestia paused. "No, I think she'll be fine with it. She'll come around the moment she's sure Lily has."

"Hmm?" Lily glanced up and across the table and rearranged her face into something less worried and more pleasant. "Oh, Mar? Yeah, she'll be better soon, I expect. In her defense, though, of course she can't stand any of you. You lot did do your best to infuriate her nearly as badly as me."

"Because her reactions were nearly as good," Sirius explained, although James thought he detected just the tiniest bit of remorse in his voice. The hit to his conscience the night before had apparently stuck around.

How long would that last?

Lily didn't seem to hear him. She held the letter in her hand out to James, and he took it with surprise. Before he began to read, she watched her flip the order of the other two letters in her hand and open the next one. He looked down at the free-flowing script of the one that he held.

Dear Lily,

I hope you're well and less sick than when we last saw you. Thank you, a million times over, for the hangover potion for us both. Frank sends his thanks as well (he needed it more than I did), and also his love, because he says you bonded in the bathroom together. I could hear him a bit, talking your ear off, so I'm sorry if he somehow made things worse. He swears he didn't, but after everything, who knows. It was quite a day.

Two things. First, Greg was over today. As we knew, he's very keen. He said he planned to write you when he got home and put it in the morning post, which I'll do with this as well. Write me and let me know when you plan to see him. Ask him to bring you up to Auror Headquarters after, and I'll take my lunch then and we can have a girly chat.

Second, I've asked Emmaline Vance to write you. Frank and I would very much like you to work under her come June, because we think it would be a fine match, but we'll see if they take our idea. Regardless, she would be good to talk to about entering the department. She's a great confidant.

Talk soon.

Warmly,

Alice

James read the letter twice over, appreciating the vagueness in her words that somehow still got her point across. Lily handed him the next letter before she cracked open the third. Emmaline's words read just as coded as Alice's.

Lily,

I was so sorry we didn't get a chance to speak more on Friday. Alice told me we have some things in common, and that she thought we should talk. I couldn't agree more. Let me know when you're free next week. I can meet you any day over lunch.

Emmaline Vance

James couldn't help but notice that Lily took the longest with the third letter, and of course he knew why. From Alice's letter, he knew who had to have written it.

"Do you want to see it?" she asked him uncertainly. "I mean—" She broke off, and James didn't know if she hesitated to speak because they sat with others, or because she didn't know how to complete the sentence even as she started it.

It felt much the same as everything had with her, as he'd felt every time he knew that Morton lurked somewhere in the background of her mind, and he wanted to pull forward and expose whatever it was she thought. He'd always reasoned that the facts, no matter how bad, couldn't be worse than whatever he created in his mind. He'd thought so even way back in the beginning, when he'd seen her and Morton together, which had somehow bothered him less than when he imagined them afterwards. He knew almost for certain that this situation was the same.

At least he had experience with it all.

"Yeah, I would," James said finally. He could hear his mum chatting with Hestia about the greenhouses in the background, but felt Sirius' eyes on him. "D'you think it'll put me off my food?" he asked carefully, watching her face for any sort of clue.

She shrugged listlessly and put the letter face-down in between them. "Hard to say. I'm off mine, but I was never really on it to begin with. You can wait, if you'd like. It's nothing pressing."

But of course he couldn't once he'd seen the letter lying there, mocking him.

Watching Lily toy with a piece of toast, he picked it up. Whereas Alice's hand looked open and free, and Emmaline's quite tight and neat, he noticed that Greg's had a rounded characteristic to each letter.

Lily,

I was glad to see you Friday, as I'm sure you gathered. Frank and Alice have sworn up and down that they didn't think much of bringing you up to Transportation, that it wasn't their plan all along to see me, but Frank does seem pleased with himself. And Alice, well, she raves about you, and always has. We had a good chat about you at theirs tonight, which I'm sure won't surprise you at all. Alice said she planned to write you too, and I expect she'll put something in there about our talk, because I know how you two are. I can't even number the amount of times she had to pull me aside seventh year for acting an idiot towards you in some way or another—including that first time, when I had no idea you fancied me. Frank still brings that up and laughs about it. He had Hector and Rupert at it tonight too. Hector said he saw you Friday as well, and had half a mind to write you himself. So, should he, feel free to throw that letter away.

I know you said no to dinner, but what are your thoughts on lunch? I can duck out over the noon hour whatever day works for you. I may even let you pay, like you always wanted. But if you'd rather go for coffee, I'm happy with that. There's a muggle café near the Ministry that has a pretty decent cappuccino, if that's still your drink. I'll have to show it to you in June, if not next week.

Yours,

Greg

How on earth was he supposed to feel in response to that?

For some reason (probably a night follow by a morning of constant shagging with the woman of his dream), it didn't bother him as much as he had expected.

It clearly bothered Lily, though, who kept her face pretty and impassive, but sat strangely still. He read quiet misery all over her, even as she set out—and nearly succeeded—at hiding it.

"Bit full-on, isn't it?" he asked, handing the stack of letters back to her. She didn't look at him, but he appreciated the way she twisted her mouth in response. She had shredded the other half of her toast, much as she had dissected the Danish in the kitchens at Hogwarts after McGonagall had caught them arguing what felt like a lifetime ago. He reached over to squeeze her leg, and it gave him a thrill to be able to do so and watch her smile at him in return, however reluctantly. "You prefer subtlety, I thought," he added, and grinned when she swatted at his hand, and then slid it between both of her own and held it there.

"Like you, I suppose," she replied, and she held his hand briefly before releasing it. "Eat. I'll write back after breakfast, although I might nap first."

The letter hadn't put James off his food after all. If anything, it seemed to bother her more.

Then again, he knew very few things could truly bother him just then. Despite all the chaos of the outside world, his life at that moment felt very, very good, and he held onto that feeling firmly.

"Alice?" Hestia asked a moment later, nodding to the stack of letters. "I recognized her handwriting on the outside from when she wrote me Friday." She sounded truly neutral about that, but James thought he sensed displeasure in something about her words or face, or maybe in the way Sirius regarded her, as if she were a little dangerous.

"Yeah." Lily made a careless gesture. "Two from her, because she forgot something in the first one, and one from Emmaline Vance."

"Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while," Sirius said, and he looked reminiscent, almost nostalgic. He nodded to James. "I take back what I said last night. Emmaline was the first girl I ever fancied." He stared at Lily, strangely impressed. "Why's she writing you?"

"Alice asked her to." Lily dropped the last remnants of her toast, clearly done. "She's an Auror now. We spoke to her just to say hi on Friday, but I guess she and Alice have become quite friendly, and she thought we might get on. She wants to get lunch sometime next week."

It all sounded simple and plausible.

And it was the truth, really. Just not all of it.

"Is she still—" Sirius began eagerly, but stopped short and glanced to Hestia. "Sorry, Hess," he offered a bit awkwardly, but she shrugged.

"I know you've fancied other girls. I don't mind. Is she still stunning, Lil? That's how I remember her."

"Absolutely, unfairly so," Lily said without a trace of rancor. "Like…a Renaissance painting or something. It's ridiculous."

"Alice said you're just as pretty, but more charming," James remembered, and Lily laughed.

"Alice is biased, and after hearing that, I think she might be a bit blind as well," she said lightly. But looking at her and recalling Emmaline's shy disposition to mind, James thought Alice made a fair point.

Then again, he doubted anyone had ever had a more favorable bias towards her than he did that morning.

Euphemia and Fleamont slipped away after they finished eating, with Euphemia confirming tea with Lily that afternoon. Lily seemed slightly reluctant to leave the table, and James felt similarly, and not just because he knew from the way Sirius looked at him that he'd receive several dozen questions the moment the girls were out of earshot.

"Didn't Emmaline date Charlie McKinnon?" Hestia asked Lily as she sipped her second cup of tea. There was something peculiar about her face and about the way she looked at Lily, like something passed between them, one of those moments James thought they wordlessly communicated something he couldn't catch.

"For a bit the spring right after he graduated, yeah." Lily laughed, and James felt a stab of relief as her usual cheer came over her face, which had dampened with the letters, no matter how she'd try to play it off. "I remember Mar being so stunned when he wrote her, because she didn't get it, what Emmaline saw in him. But…come on."

"Marlene's brother?" Sirius asked, immediately interested. "How'd he manage that?"

James knew without an answer. He could remember Charlie McKinnon well, a Hufflepuff beater three years their senior with all of Marlene's charisma and beauty fashioned in a male way. He'd had a new girlfriend what seemed like every week, as most girls had openly admitted to fancying him, rather like girls did with Sirius. But Charlie had taken advantage of it, while Sirius mostly did not.

Mostly.

"Come on," Lily repeated as Sirius shrugged, as if to indicate sort of. "He could pull any girl he wanted. Charlie's just…"

"Beautiful," Hestia finished for her, smiling. "First boy I ever fancied."

Sirius watched her. "I get it," he said shortly. "No more about Emmaline."

"Oh, I don't mind!" Hestia assured him, and she sounded so genuine that James nearly believed her. "Really. Like I said, I know you fancied girls before me. That's fine. It's not a big deal to me. Is it to you?"

It took every ounce of willpower for James not to laugh.

After breakfast, Lily stuck to her plan and ducked upstairs to sleep. ("And to actually sleep, so no, you're not invited," she had added when James merely looked at her.) Shortly thereafter, James found that Sirius and Hestia had somehow managed to give him the slip as well. After checking all the usual places, he wondered if maybe somehow Sirius had sequestered her off somewhere, and his hopes rose for his friend. But he found Hestia seated in the den the second time he glanced in there to check, her knitting needles moving quickly between her fingers.

Had he ever spoken to her on his own before?

"You seen Sirius?" he asked.

"He followed Lily up, said he wanted to talk to her more," she answered with a little smile. "He told me they're best friends now. I don't know if he meant to wind me up so I'd be jealous of his affection for her or her affection for him."

"Which way would it go?"

"Oh, I'd be way more upset if she replaced me than if he did. You go into it with a lad expecting that that could happen, you know? But you never got into a friendship like that. You would never expect that from your friends."

There was something simple and honest and profound about that.

"Seems you managed it, though," she went on with a sideways glance that seemed positively mischievous, and he didn't have to ask what she meant. "Good job. She seems well pleased. And she sounded well pleased. You both did."

Suddenly, talking to her didn't feel quite so strange.

"I don't think you've ever taken the piss out of me before," he said, marveling aloud, and she laughed. He went over to sit in his dad's chair and leaned forward, grinning. "Go on, then. I know you must be able to, given who all you keep in line. I wouldn't be able to juggle Sirius, Lily, and Marlene."

Her smile looked as sweet as ever as she paused in her knitting to hook her dark hair behind one ear. "I don't keep them in line. Or if I do, I'm really bad at it. Have you seen them recently? Messes."

"But you could," he pressed, and she shrugged. She didn't scare him, but he did see something in her that he often did in Remus, a sort of quiet power. "Remus and Pete are scared of you, you know, more than Lily or Marlene. They say it's because you're quiet, so they never know what you're capable of. Sirius hasn't exactly talked them out of it."

She looked really, truly pleased, her cheeks pinker than usual. "Wait, really?" she asked. "I don't think anyone has ever thought that before. Mar and Lily, they're the scary ones. They'll come at you. That's very rare for me. It takes a lot."

"Yeah, so if you were to go off, no one really knows what you'd do. A real wild card. I don't really see it, no matter what Sirius says."

"Well, he should see it." She lost a little of her sweetness, and her voice when a little brittle. "He's can be a real bellend." The insult sounded weird coming from her. Although he had no concrete evidence, James would have bet quite a lot that Sirius' comment about Lily shagging Moody still sat fresh in her mind.

"He feels bad about that, if you're talking about Lily," James offered, and the uncertain awkwardness he'd felt when encountering her alone returned. "And he really helped me out last night."

She twitched her elbow in a way that made him think she would have waved a hand dismissively if she'd had one free. "Don't give him too much credit. She would have been there with you in another…two or three days, tops. He just sped it along. You did the heavy lifting."

Two or three days under the circumstances would have felt like a lifetime.

"I might have lost my mind," he told her honestly, and she laughed, although he meant it.

"You looked like you might at times. I'm not surprised. I've seen her with lads. I know what she's like." The way she glanced at him, for all of one second before she dropped her eyes back to her knitting, had him utterly convinced that she knew absolutely everything, every last detail, of what had passed between him and Lily. "You did well," she added, and the way she said those three words told him instantly that she approved.

To his surprise, that knowledge meant more to him than he'd expected.

She laughed before she went on. "And I'm so relieved, truly. The energy in our dorm was getting real chaotic. Mar is so much at the best of times, and Lily keeps her occupied for the most part, keeps her happy and laughing and entertained. They do that for each other, really. So if Lily's off her game, like she has been lately, Mar gets off hers, and what am I to do? How am I to handle that?"

"How have you handled it?"

"Oh, I just leave. I get out as fast as I can and leave them be. But if Lily's happy, I expect things will get back to normal soon, and I can't wait." She sounded so confident that James would have believed that she could will it into existence, and it sounded strange, because he wasn't sure when he'd last heard her talk with such assurance. "I know she'll tell me later, but what are you? The two of you?"

Just by the way she phrased the question, it sounded as if she already knew. "We're figuring that out," he said cautiously, unsure of what else he could say.

Her eyebrows shot up. "Huh." She sat silently for a bit, and then set down her knitting abruptly. "She doesn't usually surprise me. She does sometimes, but…it's rarer as time goes on. And I'm surprised. She's sworn up and down that she wouldn't shag you unless she was all the way in. Does that mean you're what's holding it back?"

James snorted, both because he didn't think he'd ever heard her say the word 'shag' before, and at the absurdity of her question. "What do you think?"

"No, it's not you," she answered instantly. "Although, you know, if she's surprised me just now, maybe you could too." She surveyed him with a certain carefulness, and then shook her head. "No, no, I expect you're a lot more…I don't want to say dependable or reliable, because she is those things. Consistent, maybe? I could see that."

It sounded very nearly like a compliment, although just not quite. "Thank you?"

"You're welcome, I suppose. So it's her that's holding it back? Because I'd find that hard to believe. That way she looked at breakfast…"

He waited for her to continue, but knew just by looking at her face that she wouldn't.

Mind like a vault, Sirius had said.

"We're figuring it out," he repeated, and she rolled her eyes. It was one of the rudest expressions he'd ever seen her make. Then again, he'd never talked to her quite so long before. "I know we both want it to be something. There's just more at play than either of us thought."

She chewed on that for a moment, drawing her legs up under her, and he recognized her pose as the way as Lily often sat too. "Okay," she agreed finally, and she picked her knitting back up. "She'll tell me. If not now, soon." Again, he'd never heard her sound quite so confident.

He wished he had that kind of confidence in predicting Lily's actions.

He watched her silently for a few seconds, and then leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Silence fell over the room, one he couldn't label as either companionable or uncomfortable, as he'd often struggled to determine with Lily early on. But the fact that he couldn't immediately call it uncomfortable was a good thing, for sure.

He wanted to ask her about Sirius, especially recalling Sirius' boast to Remus two nights before that Hestia had told him that he liked him exactly once without promptin. But he didn't want to ambush her, Sirius' near argument with Lily in the hallway still fresh in his mind. He remembered his dad's irritation with his mum, and thought about his words: we agreed we wouldn't meddle.

"You can ask, if you like," Hestia offered, and James opened his eyes to look at her. She smiled a little, the usual gentle smile he knew well by that time. "I can tell you want to. Go on."

"How?" he demanded. "How can you tell? Am I that easy to read? You're just bloody like her. She does this too."

"A compliment of the highest form," she said warmly, and he could tell she meant it. "And you're like him, you know." He realized that neither of them spoke Lily or Sirius' names, but they didn't have to. "I mean that as a compliment as well, because I do like him. I've fancied him for years, even when I disliked you both. But…it's early days."

"He said there's something in the water in your dorm that makes you and Lily both like this, so reluctant to go for a bloke."

"Explain Marlene," she challenged immediately, and he laughed.

"That's what he added after, since she's so about Rooney. Although, is she still?"

"Not like before." Just as his voice minutes before, she suddenly sounded careful, almost cautious. "But they'll be fine." Still, she didn't sound as confident as when she predicted Lily's actions, which he thought definitely the bigger risk and the more unknown. "It does drive her mental that they support different Quidditch teams," she added.

"Wait, which ones do they support?" he asked, and she smiled as she began to explain.

James spoke to Hestia for the better part of an hour. He realized later that she never did clarify how she felt about Sirius, not really. He felt more empathy for Sirius then, for how annoying Lily's dodged questions and cool attitude must have rankled him on James' behalf.

But did he see the same in his own relationship, whatever it was?

Fed up when Sirius didn't reappear, James went looking for him. He first heard rather than saw him, his laughter drifting out from behind the heavy oak of Lily's bedroom door.

Based on how well he could hear that, James knew Sirius and Hestia must have heard everything the night before.

"See, waiting for no one my arse," Sirius said the second James knocked and came in at Lily's call. He had pulled the heavy leather chair from in front of the empty hearth over near Lily bed, and lounged there as comfortably and carefree as he may have in his own or James' room, his feet propped up on the foot of the bed. "Knew you waited on him."

"I was honestly waiting for no one and nothing except sleep," Lily insisted. She looked much as she had that morning in James' bed, stretched on her stomach under the covers, her face turned towards Sirius and her long hair streaming out behind her across her pillow.

Looking at her, James decided immediately that he'd end up in bed with her no matter how he had to work at it.

He crossed the room to her bed and nudged Sirius' feet off to sit there. "Nice chat?" he asked, because he didn't know what else to say. Their sudden ease floored him, as if the entire first week of break had never happened, and they'd been friends for years.

"Yes, we're besties now," Lily told him, smiling. "It's part of my plan to get Hestia to kill him in the night when she thinks I've replaced her. Speaking of night—" She looked back to Sirius. "I'm going to see where she's at today regarding you. I'm thinking tomorrow evening, we'll get her a couple glasses of wine and I'll tell you if you should try or not. I really would like to get her a shag. It would improve the energy of our dorm if we were all little more relaxed."

"She just told me it's been real chaotic," James told her, and she smiled.

"An understatement. Hessie acts like she's above it, but she's not."

"So wait." Sirius leaned forward, intrigued. "Does that mean Marlene and Rooney aren't—"

"They've had a disagreement or two," she said, and she had that tone, the same one that Hestia had taken with James so shortly before, that indicated that she wouldn't say more. "Now, will you two let me sleep? I swear to god, if I die of exhaustion, I will come back to haunt you both."

"You seemed alright with it from what I heard last night," Sirius said. James shot him an irritated look, but Lily laughed, apparently entirely unbothered and not embarrassed in the least. "You both know there are silencing spells for rooms, right?"

"What did you say about dueling once?" Lily shot back, but she smiled. "Something about how you don't think about some things when you're in the midst of it? Well, there you go."

"Is this how you're going to banter now?" James asked as Sirius let out a bark of laughter, surprise all over his face.

"Yeah, mate, I guess," he said, clearly delighted. "Alright, you two have your fun. I get to go explain to Hess how I managed this last night." He stood up, stretched, and levitated his chair back over towards the fireplace. "Which, you know, you can both keep thanking me for. Forever. I expect to be best man in the wedding, godfather to your kids, all that." He ducked out of the room with a grin.

"I don't mind if he teases me about us," Lily told James the moment the door closed. "That's not about to bother me. He's so ridiculously proud of himself that he needs to gloat."

"Can I nap with you?" James asked instead of replying, and he didn't believe the way she shook her head in the least.

"I meant it. I intend to sleep, and I very much doubt that you'd let me."

"I would!" he insisted, and he sounded more earnest than he intended, so much so that she laughed.

"Sure. Right." She looked at him for several long moments. "Do you swear you'll let me sleep?"

"Solemnly," he promised, and she waved her hand in a gesture that seemed to say, go on then.

"But I'm not naked, so I expect you to follow suit," she told him sharply when he began to divest himself of his clothes, and he complied and left his pants on. "He and I did have a nice talk," she told him as he slid in next to her, and she sounded softer, more herself and less performative. The shift in tone was so subtle that he could hardly believe he'd noticed it. Had he ever before? "He had told me last night that he wanted to apologize a bit more later, but he was so keen to get me to come around on you that he didn't say much then. I didn't expect him to actually follow up, but he did. We had a good talk, and that joke he threw out before he left was the only crack he made. I didn't know he could actually take anything about life seriously."

Really, James hadn't either.

Later, he would try to think up what Lily and Sirius could have spoken about for an hour. Neither of them ever would tell him outright, but just as things had shifted irreversibly between him and Lily that Easter, they had with her and Sirius as well. Eventually, their joke of best friendship would become much less of a joke.

"Will you roll so I can hold you?" he asked. She smiled as she did, and turned her back to face him. He moved to curl himself around her and secured an arm over her waist. Kissing the spot where her neck met her shoulder, he realized that she smelled like the soap of his shower. It somehow smelled infinitely better on her. "I'm glad you two are mates," he told her, and he meant it. "Just tell me if he gloats too much. I'll get after him."

"I can handle it." She rubbed his forearm, and even that gesture looked sleepy. "But I do think he'll be better. He seemed very sincere, more than I've ever seen. His bullshit charm and lies don't work on me, so I think I'd know if he didn't mean something he said. Honestly, I really think he feels badly and means to change. And he said…" She hesitated. "He said a lot of the things that irritated him about me and how standoffish I've been with you came from frustration from dealing with something similar with Hestia."

Sirius confided in her?

He confided in her things he hadn't even told James?

Yeah, things had irreversibly changed.

"He said that?" James asked. "I mean, I'd just had the same thought, but…I'm shocked he'd admit it."

"Once we started talking, it just sort of happened. I think he felt a bit bad now that he knows so much about me and my life and I knew nothing about his. Kind of like he wanted to fix my embarrassment, if I had any, by embarrassing himself." There was a smile in her voice. "I told you it works."

"I'm so fucking glad it did," he told her sincerely. The way that she laughed—soft, under her breath, and sleepily—told him that she understood that he had meant that it had worked with them, as she had insisted all those months before after he told her he had seen her and Morton.

How had he managed to get them from that horrible confrontation in a secret passage to curled up in bed together?

"Sleep," he instructed, even though the patterns of her breathing told him she was nearly there anyway.

"You too," she said, but he wasn't sure if he could comply. He was exhausted too, worn down from three nights with nearly no sleep, but the closeness of her had him instantly bothered. She drifted off with much more ease than he'd seen the previous night, and the first time she'd done so in his arms instead of just away from him lying on her stomach. For a while he just held her, quite contented save for arousal, but he dropped off suddenly, without realizing he'd even gotten drowsy.

Hours later, he woke up to her mouth hot and his neck and her hand around his cock. He wanted to tell her to wake him like that always, for the rest of time, but the words eluded him. He set out to show her instead.

xxx

"We're not telling the others about us today, just so everyone is clear," James said without preamble the next morning. Millie had gone all out for his birthday breakfast, and he felt bad that he could hardly appreciate it, because his head still floated somewhere along the third floor, where he'd woken next to Lily for the second morning in a row. He knew that he'd have a hard time adjusting when they went back to school, because he found he already expected to wake next to her and to take her to the shower with him, which had formed the most pleasant routine he could think of.

"Could you put it a little better than that?" she asked by his side. Her eyes had gone immediately to Hestia, who had stopped eating and set her silverware down, pancake forgotten atop her plate. James realized belatedly that she was the only one who didn't know, if not everything, at least enough to understand, and he regretted his blunt words immediately. "We're still figuring some things out," she told Hestia, who rolled her eyes just as she had at James the day before.

"At least you've got your stories consistent," she said neutrally. "That's what James told me yesterday." Although she expressed no outward signs of anger or frustration, the way Sirius reached out to rest his hand on the back of her neck had James convinced that he also detected some sort of negativity from her. "And you think you'll be able to hide it? The both of you?"

Twenty-four hours before, James would have laughed at the question, because getting Lily to show affection, not hide it, had always been the real struggle.

The day before had shocked him senseless in that regard.

It seemed that once Lily was sure, she was completely sure, and he had finally cracked her. She'd gone, as Sirius described to him privately, "completely soft—like you've been this whole year, but it looks weird on her."

And it did.

James could hardly believe the way she'd dropped so much of her careful guard and veneer. There were things about her actions that he could pinpoint as different exactly—the way she didn't hesitate to reach out and touch his hair or his cheek or his arm, as she had done in private for so long; how she flirted with him more openly, laughing when he teased her and giving it back without pause; how she'd settled under his arm the in the den after the night before without prompting, whereas before she'd sat near him at best.

And there were other, more subtle things that he almost appreciated more, because he wasn't sure if others noticed. Even if they did, he doubted he understood what it all meant as he did. She spoke to him more warmly, with a certain softness to her cadence that had come over her only occasionally when speaking to him before, an entirely different tone than she used when talking to his parents or Sirius or even Hestia. And she looked at him quite often as if she really, truly adored him, that tender look he'd once obsessively searched for suddenly given out freely.

Almost every time he caught it, he'd think about how she'd asked him not to look at her the way he did. He always wondered what that expression looked like on his face, and wondered if he saw it reflected in hers.

But, unlike her requests, he didn't want her to stop looking at him that way.

Ever.

"I'll manage fine," Lily assured Hestia. "I did before, didn't I?"

"And you?" Hestia asked, her eyes on James.

"I'm just going to avoid you," he told Lily, and she smiled. "Seems safest."

Hestia took a full look around the table to take in each person's reaction. Euphemia hadn't looked up from the post except to nod to James' initial statement, and Fleamont had acted much the same with the newspaper. She looked to Sirius last, her eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he grinned in return.

"How long 'til he caves, you think?" he asked her, his hand still on her neck.

"About five minutes," she predicted shortly, clearly unwilling to take his bait to banter.

Sirius nodded thoughtfully. "I'd imagine about that, yeah." He looked to James. "Fancy a game of chess after breakfast? I might let you win, since it's your birthday."

It was a thinly-veiled excuse to get him alone, which Sirius confirmed even as he set up the pieces.

"Had to let Hess have Lily for a bit or she'd start picking us off one by one," he explained, chuckling and shaking his head. "She was bent out of sorts that she never really got Lily to herself yesterday, since the two of you were basically joined at the hip. You've earned it, I think, and it's how I expected you to be this whole time anyway, so it doesn't bother me. Although I didn't know Lily could be so…affectionate."

Really, she hadn't done much, but the contrast was so different that she may as well have started openly snogging him.

"She's said the same thing about you with Hestia," James told him, grinning. His face had almost begun to hurt from happiness.

"Yeah, a couple of surprises, me and her. Speaking of surprises…how'd she do it? Saturday night? How did it go down when she went to your door?"

"Padfoot—" James began, but Sirius waved the protest off impatiently, like one would shoo away a fly.

"Yeah, yeah, you won't say anything, because it's different, because it's her, all that. But c'mon, mate. Give me something." He watched James hesitate and he sighed. "You don't think she's telling Hess everything right now? Like, everything? Because they absolutely tell each other this shit. I've already accepted that Lily will get a play-by-play within twelve hours if anything happens between me and Hess. You know what Hess said the day after we walked in on you two after the Ravenclaw Quidditch match?"

James waited for him to go on. Finally, when he saw that Sirius waited too, he prompted, "What?"

"I was laughing about it—because I laughed about it for ages, you saw that, I still laugh about it sometimes—and she said, 'Well that's just a regular Saturday night for them, isn't it?' You should have seen her face, Prongs, when I asked her what she was going on about. She got so smug that she knew things I didn't, and she wouldn't tell me anything." He smiled with begrudging respect. "Loyal, that one. So, go on, give me something."

"She wore her Quidditch jersey," James admitted, and he tried to rub the grin off his face that had redoubled with Sirius' laughter.

"Good on her, she knows her audience," Sirius said conversationally, like one might discuss a humorous piece of information about the weather. "You know, the weirdest part of it all to me wasn't that I could hear all the ups and downs the other night, so to speak, although that was plenty weird. No, it was weirdest to hear how much you two laughed. If it had just been her laughing, I would have just figured you were shit at it –"

"Thanks, Padfoot."

"Anytime. But no, it was both of you. Just didn't expect it, is all."

Their laughter hadn't surprised James, not really, because they laughed together so often outside of bed. Yet he'd noticed the same, just how much they could laugh and banter and shag almost simultaneously. He couldn't imagine having that with any other woman.

Then again, he couldn't imagine having anything with any other woman. She had him focused only and entirely on her, a tenfold increase of the way he'd already felt before break.

"We're both very funny people," James told him. "She liked your earthquake crack, by the way."

"Did she now?" Sirius asked, pleased. "Was I wrong?"

"No."

"Well, there you are. Thought as much, from how it sounded. I'm going to have to tell Moony that I told him so the second I can."

"But you can't until I say," James reminded him sharply. "And before you go off about how, oh, of course you won't, will you remember for a second that you promised me you wouldn't say anything about what I told you Saturday, and then went right to Lily?" He hadn't quite mustered the ability to feel angry about it, still too grateful that Sirius' meddling had worked, but it hadn't escaped his attention.

"I didn't do anything wrong there." Sirius leaned forward eagerly. "See, I worked it all out, knew I'd have to explain it to you when you finally came up out of her for air. I didn't actually reveal anything, because she already knew everything I said to her. I didn't tell her you're in love with her or any of that, just repeated stuff I knew she already knew. No confidence broken."

Sirius had thrown out the word 'love,' casually, the first and only reference he would ever make to overhearing James' admission to his parents.

James wanted nothing more than to move past it quickly.

He stared at the self-satisfied look on his Sirius' face. Sirius moved a pawn forward on the chess board pointedly. "That's a loophole and you know it."

"It's a loophole that worked and had no negative consequences, so you can't really be mad, can you? Although I doubt you'd have the energy. I imagine she's wearing you out, although I didn't hear anything last night. Glad you remembered the silencing spell. I slept a lot better."

"She remembered," James admitted, and Sirius snorted, unsurprised. James moved a pawn in return. "And why is she wearing me out? Why not the other way around?"

Just like he had a hard time conjuring anger, he also didn't quite have it in him for his pride to fully feel piqued when Sirius laughed.

Yeah, she was kind of wearing him out.

He'd never minded anything less.

"Don't try to act the big man with me, mate. I've seen her with Morton and I've seen her with you. It's clear who's always in control. Whatever, enjoy it. But tell me. Was it worth it? Worth fancying her forever and getting nowhere, and worth all the headaches this year?" He moved a second pawn and glanced at James' face. Whatever he saw there answered the question for him. "What does she do?" he asked, and it sounded almost rhetorical and wondering. "What can be that good that it makes you look like such a smug bastard? You've looked that way constantly since you first got in her. I'd say it's just you, and you feel like that because you've been obsessed with her forever, but she's got Morton running after her too, so there must be something—sorry."

James nodded shortly as Sirius caught himself at the second mention of Morton's name. He managed to forget about Morton for whole stretches of time, forget he even existed and that he'd once given him anxiety at all. But when he did come to mind, he had begun to push forward a worse thought.

What a small-time rival and small-time villain he had been, compared to what James and Lily faced now.

He would have taken Morton as his only adversary again in a minute over everything to come with Greg, Mulciber, and the wizarding war generally.

"Sorry, Prongs," Sirius said again, but James waved him off and moved another pawn as well. James almost felt bad for him, because he clearly thought the change that had come over him was borne out of the mention of Morton's name, not all the other things that Sirius knew next to nothing about that he couldn't explain.

"It's alright. No, really it is," he insisted when Sirius sighed. "I appreciate you catching yourself, though. Nice change of pace."

"Like I said, I'm trying to start thinking. Just hard when you're not used to it." Sirius paused, and then launched back into his previous line of questioning undeterred. "So? What is it? You've shagged other birds, and you've never been like this. What does she do?"

James tried to think about how to put into words exactly what it was about Lily that had him so (in Sirius' eyes, based on his expression) annoyingly pleased.

He thought about the little things, like the slow, cat-like way she stretched when especially satisfied; or how she'd lay on her stomach and swing her legs while laughing with him; or the way she smiled when she knew that she had him excited, all slow and dangerous, that way he'd loved for months, a smile that suddenly held infinite promises she meant to fulfill.

He remembered other things too, of course—of the dirty way she'd spoken to him by the lake at Hogwarts, or how she'd drawn him close so many times before infuriatingly pulling away until he felt like he could die from the physical need for her.

And he thought about all the ways she had managed to make all that build-up and promise somehow even better than he expected or imagined—of her hand between her legs and her eyes on his face that first night while she explained to him how she liked to touch herself; or the look she'd given him over her shoulder that morning in the shower when she asked him to take her from behind; or the maddening way the night before that she had brought him just to the edge of climax when on top, and then slowed the movement of her hips to a crawl, only to smile at his frustration and repeat the process until she was ready to come and bring him with her, and how he came so hard in the end that he swore he saw stars.

"I'm going to have to go find her if I try too hard to explain it," he said finally, his stomach twisting with desire. He rubbed his face, all too aware of how Sirius had said just a couple nights before that his expression got 'stupid' when he thought about her like that. "Look, I'll tell you a little, but—not more." He paused and waited for Sirius to nod, and although he did, James doubted he would hold to the agreement. When he continued, he wasn't even sure what he planned to say. The words tumbled out. "You remember what you heard after the Ravenclaw Quidditch match, right?"

"I'll never forget, even if I want to."

"It's that kind of energy all the time, except she's constantly competing with herself to be better than the time before. And she figures out how to one-up herself, thinks of things I wouldn't think of, but they're somehow exactly what I want." He kept his hands over his face. "Bloody hell, Padfoot, she just—she knows her way around it all, and what she likes. And she wants to know what I like, because she acts like that's a competition too, who likes it better every time, and she's always trying to get me more bothered than I do her. I swear, it's like shagging is a NEWT and she means to get an O every time. You've seen her study. It's kind of dedication, and she's just as good at it."

He'd planned to say none of it, but after hearing himself speak, he thought he couldn't have described it all better if he'd sat and thought through it for hours.

Sirius didn't respond for a long time, and James knew he had to look at him again eventually. When he did, he found Sirius' eyebrows still high on his forehead. "You're not talking me out of wanting explicit details, Prongs. "

"Not chancing it."

"And getting it cut off, yeah, I get that."

"And because she's a bit more to me than just that."

"Well, sure," Sirius said, and James couldn't tell if his blasé tone came from Sirius taking that as a given, or not really caring. He hoped for the prior. "Whatever, I'll ask her. Tell her you wouldn't tell me shit, but that she must have a magic snatch, because you're addicted to her. That's how you sound."

"You're not far off."

Sirius gestured to the chess board. "Your move." He looked thoughtful. "You should tell her all that, though. She's mad chatty, isn't she? During? She sounded it. She'd like it if you said all that, I bet."

James had never taken romantic advice from Sirius before, but he made a very good point for an outsider to it all.

Then again, since he'd admittedly orchestrated it, he was hardly an outsider. He had become a part of it too.

She did like it, James found when she pulled him into her room later. He pressed her up against her door to repeat everything that he'd told Sirius against her ear and neck. "Fucking hell, you couldn't tell me all of this tonight?" she asked, and although she sounded cross, he saw desire all over her expression when she brought his face from her favorite spot below her ear to look at her. "Look, I didn't bring you here to shag you—"

"Plans can change."

"These plans won't change, because you're not about to feel like it." She shifted against the leg he'd pushed between her thighs, and he could almost see the debate that wracked her brain. Finally, she sighed. "Let me go, please," she said, and he read her reluctance even as she used her best Head Girl voice.

"Are you okay?" he asked uncertainly as he stepped back and watched her push both hands through her hair.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I got a late letter." She gestured to her desk, which she'd scattered with books and lengthy rolls of essays and ink and a recently unfurled bit of parchment. A new twist in his gut—irritation and anxiety, not arousal—assured him of what it said before she even explained. "I wrote back yesterday, and we're getting coffee tomorrow. I'm sorry to tell you this on your birthday, because I know you don't want to hear it, but…I just wanted to get it over with. I'm so worried about it, and I don't want to do it, and I feel so guilty on so many levels. I just wanted to put it behind me—and behind us—and enjoy the rest of break. I told him tomorrow or Wednesday—"

"And he jumped at tomorrow. Full-on, like I said." He appreciated that she never used Greg's name more than he expected. Then again, she didn't need to. "It's fine," he assured her, even though absolutely nothing about the situation was fine, not at all. But she looked so upset, such the opposite of her normal, smiling self, or the calm and collected veneer she otherwise wore, that he wanted to comfort her quite badly. "It's fine, you have to do it, I understand that. And you're right—it's better to get it over with so I can get back to trying to get into every set of clothes you wear, as you put it last week."

She smiled a little, not quite as much as he'd hoped, but some. "You shouldn't be comforting me. I should be comforting you."

"What?" he asked, confused, and he saw that she believed it in the way she wouldn't quite meet his eyes. "You're being jokes, right? Because that's bollocks. I don't like it—I honestly fucking hate it, you know that—but you're the one doing it all. You're going out there, playing the part, trying to get in where Moody asked. And what am I doing? Sitting on my arse. Don't make this about me. You have enough going on."

"It is about you, because it's about us."

Us.

"I get that, but…" Without any idea what else to do or what else to say, he reached for her and kissed her, an arm around her waist and his other hand against her cheek. She let him, and brought herself up on her tiptoes as she sometimes did, something he found incredibly cute every time, although he never would tell her, afraid she'd catch herself and stop. Her kiss somehow felt a little sad. "We'll figure it out," he told her when she finally pulled back and dropped herself onto the flats of her feet, but she didn't remove herself from his arms. "We'll figure it out together, as it comes."

She nodded, her brow still a little furrowed, but then she smiled at him, and he saw the tightness in the corners of her mouth that clued him into the falsehood of her expression, no matter how pretty she looked. "I know. I know we will. Come on, let's go downstairs. I told Mar to arrive around two—"

"Don't fake it," he told her sharply, sharper than he intended, and didn't let her go when she went to step away from him.

Her smile softened into something a little more genuine, and a little teasing. "I don't. It's like I told you, it doesn't happen for every woman every time—"

"Now you're being jokes."

"Yes." She lifted herself back onto her toes to kiss him again one more time, and she came away looking much more herself. "It was easier when you understood me less," she added, and she seemed to talk almost as much to herself as she did him. She caught herself after the words left her mouth, and flushed a little, as if caught out.

"Were you happier?" he asked as she led him out of her room. Based on the way she looked at him, he expected he knew.

"You know I wasn't."

The words warmed his chest, beautiful and golden.

"Yeah, I thought not. But it's still nice to hear."

xxx

At the Three Broomsticks a couple nights before, Peter had pegged Marlene exactly right.

Just like Lily, once Marlene came around on a person, she truly came around.

Watching her do so blew James the fuck away.

"Happy birthday," she told him when she stepped out of the fireplace in the den that afternoon. The smile she gave him looked entirely genuine, and she even patted his arm a bit. "So, did you manage it? Saturday night, after Lily and Hestia left my place to rush back here?"

"Mar, stop," Lily instructed, and she laughed as she hugged her, her face disappearing into the mass of Marlene's dark curls.

"I feel like it's a fair question, since I'm involved in this now too. I need to know how everything resolved itself after Black's letter. It's the most interesting thing that's happened to me all break. Then again, fuck, it's been dull."

"His what now?" Remus asked mildly, although his eyes looked sharp and keen, the exact opposite of his tone. At his side, Peter's face—clearly pleased and appreciative at the sight of Marlene—took on a very similar expression.

"Are you unaware of the drama?" Marlene asked excitedly, and as she laughed, James saw the infectious joy Lily always described, something he'd never before seen in full force. It made him want to laugh with her almost on reflex. "It's such a tale. Gather around and I'll tell it. The setting looks like any other girls' night in—"

"Shut up and stop," Lily instructed, although she spoke fondly. "Christ, you sound like Sirius when he sets to recapping a Quidditch match. Come on, Mar. Hessie and I will show you around." She took Marlene's hand and tugged at it, and Marlene went willingly enough, although she cast a look over her shoulder, and her dark eyes locked on James.

"We'll chat later, yeah?" she asked, and he knew she didn't expect an answer. She already took his consent for granted, but he gave her an answer anyway.

"Sure," he managed, still dumbfounded by the change in her behavior, and he watched them go.

"That means she thinks Lily has come around fully, so she's following suit," Hestia explained as she ducked out from under Sirius' arm and made to follow them. "Which, honestly, is such a relief. It will make all of our lives so much easier." She offered a sweet smile before she disappeared entirely. "Quidditch in a bit, maybe? Mar will play; we can do three-on-three."

James resisted the urge to call her back and make her stay with him, because she spoke about Marlene's thoughts and actions with the same confidence she did Lily's, and damn it, he needed her by his side as a guide to it all.

But with her gone, he turned to Quidditch instead.

"Should we head out now?" he asked before Remus or Peter could throw out a single question, because their inquisitiveness read over both of their faces.

But Sirius clearly expected to stay in the den for the long haul. He plopped down on the loveseat and stretched his arms across the back, grinning. "Lily and I are best friends now," he explained, clearly basking in the drama and his own knowledge of it all. "Go on, ask her later. She'll say it."

"What did you do?" Remus asked, and he sounded more than a little accusing.

"Oh, you know." Sirius waved a hand. "Sent an owl, derailed their girls' night, told her I was sorry for acting like such a arse lately, and got her and Prongs to start talking again. That's at least a start, innit?"

He lied as easily as he breathed, James thought then and often.

But, then again, he didn't exactly lie—just hadn't told the whole truth.

"Is the world less fucked?" Remus asked, and he directed the question to James, even though the whole thing seemed to be Sirius' show. "You know, like you said Friday."

"No, it's about the same amount," James told him, and he felt bad at how perplexed Remus looked, because he'd dragged him into all of it and couldn't offer him the truth that he very much wanted to give. He found he wanted to tell him everything nearly as bad as he'd wanted to tell Sirius. "We're just…like we were, I suppose. It'll figure itself out."

But James knew that Remus didn't buy that for a second, and he confirmed it on their way to the Quidditch pitch. He held James back slightly from Sirius and Peter, a hand on his shoulder, his expression curious. "I'm not an idiot, Prongs," he said quietly with a strange sort of half-smile. "We've been friends for how long now? I can see it."

"See what?" James asked cautiously. It would be only too easy to fall into telling Remus too much. It seemed best to keep his responses to the fewest words possible.

Remus seemed to think about it. "If I were Sirius," he said carefully, "I might say that you're walking about ten pounds lighter. And I don't think that's something you could have accomplished by wanking, or you would have by now, so—"

James laughed so hard that Sirius and Peter turned around to look at him, confused. "Moony made a crack I didn't expect," he explained when he was able, and Remus looked quite pleased with himself for the reaction. "From one of you two, sure, but Moony—"

"I merely expressed my thoughts that this new, Zen Prongs seems a bit suspect, considering Lily's in the room next to his," Remus explained with a shrug. "And that I don't think this 'it'll work itself out' attitude could come from anything except a shag, because if he could have wanked it out, he would have by now. Prongs, we know what you do every time you get back to the dorm after going off with her somewhere. We know."

From anyone else, it would have still made James laugh. But from Remus—well, he laughed until he nearly cried.

Sirius and Peter started laughing too, although James felt Peter regard him with a certain new suspicion. "You do seem happier, Prongs. You look…"

"Less haunted?" Remus suggested, which sounded about right. "Because you looked wound about as tight as I expect a person could get when we saw you Saturday. Padfoot, don't look like that. I know you see it."

Sirius just shrugged, grinning. "I'd agree with you if I didn't know for sure that Hess would find out within five minutes, and that she wouldn't be able to keep from telling me. We've been watching them all break, remember, so she'd have to tell me so we could dissect it. And, you know, it's like I said, Moony—level ten earthquake when he gets his end away. The house is still standing, so it hasn't happened. It has to tonight though, right? It's your birthday. She's not heartless."

Fuck, Sirius was good.

"I'm sure that's what she's waiting on," James told him dryly, and he hoped he looked and sounded as cool and collected as Sirius. "No, you know her, Moony—a challenge just to be a challenge. But we're good. It's going well, and…we'll see. We'll see."

He wondered how he'd explain it to them later, when he and Lily finally found out what they were meant to say to their friends about what they were. He could tell from the way Remus looked at him that he still didn't believe his lies, and James knew they'd have to tell him something before she went too far with Greg. He could already tell that Remus would consider Lily seeing Greg as an absolute act of betrayal on her part, and James hated the thought of it.

But that was a problem for Future James.

The weather was too fine to care about much, crisp and cool with just a hint of a breeze, perfect flying conditions. Marlene and Hestia joined them before too long, and Sirius seemed quite pleased when Hestia turned out to be the better Quidditch player thanks to her superior hand-eye coordination, although James though Marlene might have more flying skill generally. With the teams nearly evenly matched, each side took a game to one hundred with no snitch in play, although James, Remus, and Marlene eked out a win in the third and final game. Marlene looked so thrilled by the win, nearly as smug as Sirius got after trouncing anyone at a game of chess, that James thought that if that didn't win her to his side, nothing would.

Inside, he found Lily and Euphemia in the den together, a conjured table covering the rug between Euphemia's chair and the loveseat where Lily had settled herself. The surface of the table was littered with Arithmancy charts, most so complex that James wouldn't have identified the carefully-drawn figures as numbers or numerical symbols if he didn't recognize them from leaning over Lily's shoulder for weeks. The parchment seemed largely forgotten by then, and Euphemia and Lily wrapped up in conversation, enough so that Lily jumped slightly when she heard his voice.

"Didn't you do all this yesterday?" he asked, because they had sequestered themselves off the afternoon before as well to work at Arithmancy over tea. He walked to the table for a closer look, but Lily waved her wand and the parchment sprang back into a neat, shuffled pile and then rolled itself up.

"I'd have to hex you if you got anything out of order," she explained, smiling, and when she rose to pick up her bundle of papers, she touched his arm briefly. "How was Quidditch?"

"Good. Marlene and I were on a team, and I'm glad, because she has a real foul mouth. I couldn't believe some of the things she said to Sirius and Peter, although Sirius gave it right back. She didn't say a word to Hestia though. Never to Hestia." She laughed, and he saw that even his mum smiled a little, although she hid it in her teacup. "You doing okay?" he asked uncertainly, noting her high color, and she leaned her head briefly into the hand that he rested against one flushed cheek.

"Yes. We had a nice chat, and your dad and I bottled my potion before that."

"He was so excited," Euphemia added, and she smiled fully then. "I'm sure he'll have you back in there brewing something else before too long, although I doubt Jamie's willing to share you."

She sounded utterly fine with that fact—pleased even—as she absolutely wouldn't have forty-eight hours earlier.

"I haven't liked sharing her all break, but somehow I always end up doing it," James told her. "Mum, when's dinner?"

He watched Lily duck away after offering some bit of gratitude to his mum, and he saw the smile they exchanged. He didn't manage to catch her before dinner, and she settled herself near Fleamont as usual, with Marlene on her other side. She seemed in high spirits, and easily facilitated conversation between Fleamont and Marlene for most of the meal. James watched his dad react to Marlene much as he did to Sirius—like she was most amusing, high-energy entertainment one could find.

Really, when she didn't hate you, he could see that she was.

James heard her say his name at one point, and found her smiling down the table at him, an actual real, infectious smile, not one that indicated that she was having a laugh at his expense or mocked him, as he'd gotten used to seeing. He couldn't help but smile back.

She was good.

"I was just telling your dad that my mum said she met you," she explained. "She came home and told me all about this handsome lad at the Ministry with Lily, and I was so excited for her. Imagine my disappointment when Mum finally came out with your name. She said you seemed so polite and well-behaved and good-looking. I now question her judgment on all men." Somehow, she spoke so engagingly that even Euphemia seemed to find her bit of nettling funny.

"She said I look just like my dad," James said, and Fleamont smiled, clearly pleased.

"She has good taste, then," Euphemia said warmly, and James heard Sirius snort into his glass when Fleamont winked at her across the table. "I know your mother a bit, Marlene. She helped a couple years ago with the St. Mungo's charity ball the board organizes every summer. I didn't get to know her well, but certainly well enough to like her."

"She mentioned that," Marlene said conversationally, cutting into her roast. "Before I left today, she shared this story with me about how she watched you curse a blue streak at the event manager that evening, because they'd done everything wrong but still expected the board to pay full price. She said you got him down to half, and that she'd never respected you more, because she knew then that you could get things done."

Euphemia covered her mouth with a heavily-ringed hand, and then shot Sirius a half-hearted look when he began to laugh unabashedly. James tried his best to keep his own laughter to a minimum. "In my defense, it was a very long night," was all she'd say, and James couldn't tell if she looked more embarrassed or proud or both.

"Can't get after me for language then, Mum," he told her, but everything about her expression told him that she absolutely still could and would.

Euphemia and Fleamont retired to the library rather than the den after dinner. "Stay as long as you want, have fun, the wine cellar is open, and find what else you'd like to drink," Fleamont said with a grin. He looked truly delighted at the prospect of their company, whether around them or not. He'd always loved a full house.

"Just don't drink too much and Apparate, please," Euphemia added, and James felt her eyes on him, sharp and still a little angry, even as his dad hugged him. "I'd rather you all stay. There's nearly nothing worse than spliching." She sounded as if she knew.

"Happy birthday," Fleamont said quietly as they lingered near the door, and he patted James on the back a second time for good measure. "We're proud of you."

And James knew that, knew it intuitively into the very center of his soul, but it still felt indescribably good to hear.

"Thanks, Dad," he said while Euphemia kissed his cheek. "It was a good day. Really great."

"Should be, since that's sorted." Fleamont gestured to where Lily lay stretched out on her stomach in front of the empty fireplace, laughing at something Peter had said. "We like her, don't we, Effie? She's a sound girl." He managed to make it sound not entirely like a pointed prompt.

"Very much." James wondered if the emphasis in his mum's voice tried to compensate for how she'd reacted to Lily initially. "And…she truly does seem to care for you, at least from what she told me today. We had a good talk. I'm sorry I didn't see it before, but she said she very much didn't want me to."

That sounded entirely like Lily.

And what on earth had she told his mum that made her look so quietly soft and accepting, even more than she had at breakfast?

After they left, Marlene engaged James in conversation nearly as soon as he sat down in his dad's chair. She'd taken his mum's, and she leaned across the arm towards him, her eyes keen. "So tell me, then," she began bluntly, "How did it go Saturday night, after Lily rushed out from mine?"

"She's relentless, mate," Sirius said, shaking his head, but James thought he looked at least a little impressed. "Wanted to compare notes right away between what I knew and what she knew, like she thought we'd catch you two at something from it. And you all think I'm bad."

Yes, he definitely sounded impressed.

"It would help if you'd be a little more forthcoming," Marlene shot back at him. "I know you must know things I don't know—I'm starting to think Hestia must too, since you're all trapped in this house—"

"You've met Lily," Hestia said pointedly. She sat quite cozily tucked into Sirius' side. "Do you think she's about to tell any of us something she doesn't want us to know?"

"Is this about me?" Lily asked. James looked to her, and automatically wished he hadn't, because she swung her legs in the same manner she often did in his bed, and he couldn't help but immediately picture her there. The discussion between her, Peter, and Remus had apparently lulled enough for her to overhear a part of their conversation, and she watched them all carefully. "Marlene, are you acting the nosy bitch again? I can't tell if you don't believe me or if you're just disappointed by my answers."

"Can't it be both?" Marlene asked, and she laughed at the look Lily gave her, a single eyebrow lifted in surprise. "What? I don't have to like Potter—James, I guess—and I still don't. I'm on the fence about him, really—"

"I'm literally right here," James reminded her. It felt like something he had to say to her more often than he'd like.

"—but of course I'm going to be disappointed if you left my house to have a chat with—and I guess you're Sirius now, too. This'll take some getting used to. But, like, what kind of reasoning is that for leaving? To talk to Sirius? At least if you were getting laid you'd have a reasonable excuse for leaving, and presumably be happier. Unless James is shit at it, I suppose."

"You know, I said something very similar today," Sirius offered conversationally. He kissed Hestia's temple (the motion still looked strange, James thought, and he knew from Marlene's disgusted tsk that she thought similarly), stood, and stretched. "Flea said something about wine, didn't he? I'll go grab a couple bottles."

"I'll help," Lily said, and she was on her feet and out the den door before anyone could object.

"Told you, we're best friends now," Sirius said, glancing at Remus and Peter with a grin. He followed after her, and James could hear the light notes of Lily's voice followed almost immediately by their shared laughter.

"The world's gone mad," Marlene marveled, watching after them, and she sounded as if she meant it. She rounded on Hestia. "All this, after how we all felt Saturday night?"

Hestia shrugged. "Things change quickly here," she said, and she smiled when Marlene scoffed. "See for yourself. I'm sure no one would mind if you stopped by more this week."

"Sirius said the same thing when Remus talked about how dull his break was," Peter said. "It does seem a fair bit more interesting here. But speaking of boring—" He grinned at Marlene. "Tell us about the Ravenclaws. How are they?"

He meant to wind her up, James knew, to give her the space to vent, and he thought she looked briefly appreciative before she rolled her eyes dramatically and launched into her airing of grievances. It sounded, to hear her retell it, that hanging around Rooney and Morton and their fellow Ravenclaws only got worse as time went on, not better. Seventh year had turned them, in her words, into "anxious balls of stress" stuck in "an anxiety-induced feedback loop where they all feel like someone else is working harder than them, so they should work harder, and then they work harder so the next person works harder, and on and on and on." They "truly only cared about grades," when they "should care more about learning how to carry on a conversation," as "most of them managed that not well at all."

"They think we're sort of vain and vapid, don't they?" Hestia asked thoughtfully. "I mean, you, me, and Lil. I've always thought so, based on the way they look whenever one of us tries to be a bit fun. At least, when you or Lily try. I've given up on them, but then again, I was never really invested."

Marlene didn't look offended by Hestia's lack of investment. Her face twisted, but more at the thought than Hestia's words. "I think they must, but they've never so much as suggested it, since they know I would kick off. But they think this lot are the absolute worst—"

Hestia cut in as Marlene gestured towards the remaining three Marauders broadly. "Which is an indictment against us for hanging around them."

"Why are you trying to set Lily up for a life like that again?" Remus asked Marlene. James appreciated that he didn't mention Morton's name, because he still didn't like hearing it, even if he did seem like hardly even a blip of an issue in his life anymore compared to everything else.

Then again, Remus didn't need to say his name. Marlene understood immediately. "Well, he and Luke are better than the others. Hestia, back me up."

"They're fine," Hestia offered, and somehow, her customary sweetness made the short words sound a little less cutting than they otherwise would.

Marlene rolled her eyes nevertheless, and she managed to make the expression look ten times as rude as the same Hestia had given James and Lily across the table at breakfast. "Thanks, Hessie. Real strong support there. You're a real pal." She looked at Remus. "I've given up on that. I still had hope before break, but now…" The way she motioned towards James seemed caught somewhere between dismissive and exasperated.

"Now?" Peter prompted, and Remus leaned forward, elbows on his knees, similarly curious.

They looked like they expected a clear answer, but James didn't.

Like Marlene would ever give him a clear answer that might help him out.

Sure enough, she didn't.

"Well, now she's planning to be quite an idiot, I'm afraid," she said, but although her tone came off a little abrupt, she didn't sound mad. She leaned back in her chair and crossed one long leg over the other carelessly. "Hessie, did you hear back on that posting at the greenhouses near Manchester?"

Her change in subject was so forceful, and her intention to speak no more so clear, that she reminded James so much of Lily to where he couldn't help but laugh. The way Marlene smiled, and the look in her eyes as they darted towards him briefly, made him think that she may have understood.

Sirius and Lily laughed too when they stepped back into the den. James wondered if they had ever stopped after they'd left. She levitated a tray of wine glasses behind them, and Sirius clutched a couple of bottles. He measured out a good portion of the red and gave it to her, and she favored him with a smile that looked more than little conspiratorial before she went back to her vacated spot.

The sight of such easy, clear friendship still made James' head spin.

She took Peter up nearly immediately with talk of her visit with James to the Magical Menagerie, and he sounded quite happy to discuss Kneazles with her.

Sirius switched on the radio at some point, and tuned in a recap of the match between Zimbabwe and Hamburg that had taken Zimbabwe one step closer to the World Cup. Although he didn't know if it was wise, James asked Marlene about the Quidditch differences between her and Rooney that Hestia had told him about. But she seemed to take the question in the way that he asked it, as a way to give her the chance to sound off against the Ravenclaws more. Watching her, James thought that she had none of Hestia's skill at reactive listening, or Lily's ability to draw a person out and make them feel important. Instead, she excelled at entertainment, at bringing attention to herself and maintaining it there, which made her a real joy to observe and listen to, even if it might be hard—or even impossible—to get a word in edgewise.

He understood her charm a little better then, as he would much more as the years passed.

James wandered to Lily's side a couple hours later and took a seat next to her on the rug, where she sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, her ankles crossed delicately.

He almost trusted himself to sit next to her. Almost.

"Good birthday?" she asked quietly, and the smile she gave him as she briefly pressed her chin against her shoulder to look up at him made his pulse race a bit.

"Very." He watched their friends converse for a moment, watched Sirius try to wrestle some of the attention away from Marlene, whereas he'd previously seemed quite happy to chat with Hestia, his hand in her hair. Hestia's cheeks appeared a little more flushed than usual. "Seems everyone gets on better now, yeah?"

They had made that happen.

No, he had made that happen, at least the first part, by pursuing Lily so doggedly. Watching them laugh—their friends, theirs together—it all felt a little surreal.

"I'd say so." She nodded her head towards the snappish way Marlene responded to one of Sirius' cracks, although her words didn't sound mad, just like banter between two people of equally matched wits. "Those two would get on like a house on fire if the picture looked different."

The suggestion surprised him, although, at the same time, it also absolutely didn't surprise him at all. "You think they wouldn't just kill each other?"

"No. They have similar craic, so I'm sure they'd have fun. But I'm glad it's worked out how it has with him and her." She nodded towards Hestia, curled up at Sirius' side with her hand on his leg, and sounded keen to avoid using specific names to keep anyone from noticing their sidelined conversation. "He'll get a bit of somewhere tonight, I'm sure. She wants to. She's said as much to me, but you can tell, can't you?"

James saw what she meant in the way Hestia looked up at Sirius when he laughed particularly hard at a crass comment Marlene had thrown his way. He recognized her expression well as the same way Lily often looked at him in bed, a sort of flushed desire. Yet Sirius seemed not to notice, and James thought he wouldn't have seen it either if Lily hadn't pointed it out.

He reached over to stroke her back just between her shoulder blades, and she didn't shrug him off as he thought she might. How much affection could he show in front of their friends? They all knew that something went on between the two of them, even Marlene finally after three months. But he didn't know how open Moody wanted them to be, even in front of the people who mattered most.

"I'm wearing the knickers I gave you," she said softly, lips near the rim of her wine glass, and her voice—and then, as they registered, her words—jolted him sharply from his reverie.

"What?" he managed, although he very well knew what. He knew entirely what she meant and also entirely what those knickers looked like. And although he hadn't seen them on her, he had pictured the imagine so often that he thought he could almost see it entirely too.

"I summoned them in your room earlier today," she explained, and she tossed her hair over to one side of her head, which sent the warm scent of her perfume into the air. "It's part of a matching set, which I figured you might like to see. I thought I'd show you after everyone leaves."

Well, fuck.

"So you're telling me this now?" he asked. Yet he knew she told him precisely because she sat next to him so close that their arms touched, so close that he could have bridged the gap between their faces to kiss her almost without leaning forward, and yet he couldn't reach for her at all. "Listen," he began, his voice low, "I can make them leave."

She laughed, the soft, dangerous laugh he'd loved for months, but one that drove him even a little more mad than before, as he had come to know firsthand some of the things it promised. "No, you can wait. I'll still be wearing them just the same if everyone leaves now or in an hour—or two or three."

"Yeah, but—"

He wasn't sure where he even intended to take his argument, just that he meant to make it as convincingly as possible, but she saved him from figuring it out with a slight shift as she twisted a little to look at him better. "Did you use them like I suggested?" she asked, and the question filled his stomach with heat. "Did you touch yourself? Did you think about me?"

Again. Fuck.

If the conversation between their friends lagged just a little, they would have heard everything. But she clearly counted on Sirius and Marlene's jesting to mask her voice, and she was right. The risk and danger in her move—and her confidence that she could pull it off—made the whole situation somehow even more intense, and even more arousing.

"You know I did," he told her, and she smiled into her wine. "Come get more wine with me," he pressed on. He slid his hand up her back and onto the nape of her neck to try to find the spot just below her ear that always made her breath catch, much as it did when he trailed his fingertips along her hipbones. "They won't think anything. Well, they will, but I don't care."

"I care," she said simply, brushing at his hand almost carelessly. "You can wait."

"You're enjoying this," he accused, and he felt like a hypocrite even as he said it, because he absolutely enjoyed it too, even as it drove him mad. He just wanted to hear her admit it too.

From the way she smiled, as if exceptionally pleased, she seemed to see his torn pleasure all over his face, or at least spot the frank desire there. "Of course I am. Watching you react like this always turns me on. That's why I do it." He watched her turn away from him and lean back on one hand, the pose supremely casual. The next moment she interjected into Marlene's story, as if she'd listened all along, tossing in some quick, snappy remark that threw Marlene slightly off her monologue. Watching the way they bantered back and forth, Sirius' input apparently forgotten, James thought she must have listened somehow even as she'd spoken to him.

He loved his friends, truly, but he'd never wanted to see them less than he did in that moment.

But he didn't say anything. He waited, and did his best to do so patiently, which meant staying away from her entirely.

Marlene cornered him later in the kitchen later, after they'd had a bit more to drink. He wondered if she'd hit that sweet spot Lily talked about—three glasses, three and a half tops—because she looked a little less fearsome than usual in a way he couldn't quite place. Still, she should have scared him more than ever, because he'd never been alone with her before, not since he'd pulled her by the dormitory stairs for the briefest of chats, but even then a whole host of other people lurked nearby in the common room. Standing across from her alone in the kitchen felt not unlike staring into the face of some untamed beast.

His thoughts must have registered across his face (and, really, he knew he should start to expect that they apparently always did), because she laughed at him openly, although not in any real negative way, a true change of pace. "I'm not about to hex you or even yell at you," she promised, pushing a heavy handful of curls behind one ear. "So you can stop looking at me as if I'm some sort of ticking time bomb."

"I don't know how else to look at you," he told her truthfully, which didn't stop her laughter at all. "That's all I've ever known you as."

"That's all you've ever known Lily as too, but you've always looked at her differently, especially now," she pointed out, and she watched him to see how he'd react. From the way she sighed, clearly exasperated, he thought he actually succeeded in not showing any sort of reaction at all, although he had to focus intensely hard to manage it. How the hell did Lily do it almost continuously throughout the day? "Enough of that, the closing off. I get it from her, so I don't need it from you. You do understand, don't you? How fucking lucky you are?"

"Yes."

"You didn't let me specify what for."

"I don't need you to," he said. "Anything you could say, I know I'm lucky to have it. That she's given me the time of day at all after everything I've put her through? I'm lucky for that. Your approval, at least to the point that you'll talk to me? I'm lucky for that. That Sirius somehow hasn't managed to blow it with Hestia yet and cause a big rift with all of us? I'm lucky for that."

She smiled at the last of his reasons, and James truly understood for the first time why Peter fancied her so much. She'd hated him for years and treated him like shit for months, but despite that (or probably because of it, he reasoned later), she still managed to make a smile look like a precious gift.

She was unfairly pretty, he thought, and unfairly aware of it.

"Sirius has plenty of time to still screw up," she said, and despite her smile, she didn't sound as if she joked. "Peter and I have a bet going over it." It still sounded weird, hearing his friends' first names out of her mouth.

"I'm unsurprised. Pete loves a good bet."

"But if you screw up—" Marlene stopped herself, and the way she tapped her chin should have looked like a pantomime of deep thought, but she appeared to genuinely delve in and really consider what she should say next. "Listen, I'm not saying I love Lily more than Hestia—"

"But you do." James had suspected as much, and thought more than once that Lily somehow bound the trio together, much like he often thought he acted as a sort of glue in his own group. She shared such common characteristics with both Hestia and Marlene, a sort of middle ground between the two, but the more he thought about it, the more he recognized the sheer difference in Hestia and Marlene's personalities that made him wonder exactly how they got on.

"I do not," she insisted sharply, and he wondered if she protested so strongly because she felt bad, like he felt whenever he admitted to himself that Remus and Peter always came second to Sirius, and always would. "I just—I understand Lily better—what?"

He waved an apologetic hand, and then tried to rub the smirk off his face. "Sorry. That's just a bold claim for anyone to make, that they understand her. I could spend the rest of my life at it and I don't think I'd ever get there."

He also laughed at what an especially bold—and foolish—claim it was for Marlene to make, when Lily purposefully kept her in the dark about so many avenues of her life.

Later, as time went on, James would still see the gaps in Marlene's knowledge and understanding of Lily, certainly, but would come to appreciate that she understood and knew the parts of her that she did very well.

"Is that your intention, then?" she asked, her voice even sharper, and she suddenly looked as fierce as usual. "The rest of your life? Or at least a long while? You're not just fucking around here? And don't you fucking look at me like that. Someone has to ask you this shit, and it won't be Lily's parents. They're both far too nice, and you'll have them immediately tricked into liking you. I'd offer to lend her my mum for the job, since she can get at it really well—ask Luke sometime—but you've apparently already got her snowed too."

"I hardly even remember meeting your mum," he told her honestly. "I didn't even try to make her like me."

"Maybe you're less of an arse when you don't try," she said, and he thought she might be onto something there. "But, so? What's your plan, if you do somehow, against all odds, manage to bag her? You act a good genuine game, but—" She waved a dismissive hand.

"But what?"

"But lads lie all the time, don't they? And if you tell me they don't, that's just a case in point and another lie, because I know that they do."

James shifted a little from where he leaned against the counter and wondered how she had come to think this to the point that she spoke with such conviction. "Yeah, I suppose they do. We do, I guess, since you're lumping me in there. But you can't act like you've never lied to or messed with a bloke. I don't know fully what the three of you got up to last summer and the summer before, but I know enough to know that none of you are exactly innocent."

He thought it might nettle her and make her puff up further, and regretted saying a word even as he started. But the accusation seemed to have the opposite effect. She shrank back down into the less terrifying person she'd been before she'd gone in on her interrogation, and sported a small smile as she drew her arms across her chest. "Not even Hessie, no, no matter how she likes to pretend," she said simply, and James wondered if he'd just performed some show of strength that Lily swore always made Marlene come around. "Basically, all I'm saying is that you'd be even worse than I ever could have imagined if you go fuck it up after you put in all the work to get her to like you. I can't think that even you're horrible enough to do that on purpose—"

"Thanks, I suppose."

"—but I can absolutely see you fucking up on accident. So don't." She let the threat hang in the air, not just the single word, but everything that lingered in the force with which she spoke, and she surveyed him carefully. "Are you as crazy about her as you seem?"

He didn't need to ask any clarifying questions to answer. "Worse."

She watched him for a while, apparently thinking that over. "She's good at it, getting lads to like her," she said finally. Her tone had shifted in a way he couldn't place, but she sounded unlike herself. "I watched her learn it and get better and better. She can work a lad like nothing I've ever seen, but she never did that with you. She was always so busy trying to get you not to like her that it seems like she never started acting any certain way with you like I've seen her do to snare a lad. By the time she liked you, she was already used to being herself and not trying to work it. Every time I've seen you around her, she's just…her, and that's really rare. Really fucking rare. You better appreciate it."

She spoke with all her artifice stripped away, he realized belatedly. It left her looking and sounding less fearsome than he'd ever seen.

"On that, though," she went on, and she her certain brand of pretty hardness came back to her face. "Just know that if you fuck up—accidentally or on purpose, I don't care either way—I will have a ready-made list of blokes waiting. And I'm serious about that—an actual list. I started thinking of names the second she told me she liked you, so I could figure out who would be my number one choice for her to go to for a rebound shag. It's like I've said before—there would be no shortage of applicants. I could find someone else eager to put their cock in her in under fifteen minutes."

Everything about the way she said it made him choke on the scotch he'd just sipped, which he'd switched over to drinking within the hour. He wished that he hadn't switched the second the scotch went up his nose, because it burned something fierce. He could hear her laughing when he went to cough over the sink, and even as he tried to get his breathing under control, he couldn't help but think that Sirius would have been proud of her, both for the comment and for the way it caught him so entirely off guard.

"Fucking hell—"

"You even sound like her. Cute."

"You're—" James didn't know how to finish his sentence, because he didn't know quite what he wanted to say about her, not just then. "I think it would take under five minutes, for the record," he said instead, lifting up the hem of his shirt to wipe his streaming eyes.

He looked up in time to see her nod, smirking still. "A realist. I can at least like that about you, if nothing else."

She still looked rather pleased with herself even an hour later, settled onto the loveseat next to Lily, who had stretched her legs across Marlene's lap. Watching the way Marlene fiddled with Lily's hair absently, just as she might her own, James thought that they did understand each other well in a manner that perhaps Lily and Hestia didn't. They bounced off each other in a way that fairly crackled with electricity, as if competing to outdo each other with wit, with the same competitive edge that reminded him of how Lily always set to outperform him in bed. Each laugh by the other seemed like a point, and Marlene clearly won when she sent Lily into tears after her dramatic recounting of Easter dinner with Rooney's extended family, all of whom she characterized, scathingly, as "dry toast."

"You can survive off dry toast, you know?" she asked when Peter pushed her to explain. "It's fine. You can eat it and you'll survive. But you won't like it. You never enjoy it. You just accept it as the only food you've got."

"And this is the life you've chosen?" Peter asked, his face a bit red from drink, clear jest in his voice.

But Marlene looked like she actually thought about it, although only for maybe all of two seconds. "Yeah, I suppose," she said shortly, and then she launched back into her derisive description of Rooney sister (who clearly hated her, from her point of view) so quickly that James wondered if anyone else had noticed.

It was his best birthday, James decided, but he'd concluded as much the moment he had pushed Lily up against the wall of his shower that morning. Still, he felt no small measure of relief—and then, with a single glance at Lily, a great shot of anticipation—when Hestia yawned against Sirius' neck one too many times well past midnight, and they left for bed. That they left together without discussion was obviously significant, as was the way Lily immediately gripped Marlene's arm before she could so much as open her mouth. Marlene's dark eyes glittered with unspoken jokes and comments. "Don't you fucking dare make this weird for them," James just barely heard Lily hiss while Sirius and Hestia slipped out the door. "I've worked too hard—"

"Yeah, I'm sure it was real difficult work, getting them to shag," Marlene shot back under her breath, but then she seemed to consider her words. "Although if he wasn't trying, she wouldn't either…"

"I know. You can fully take the piss out of them later. I intend to. Just don't ruin it!"

Surprisingly, Marlene heeded that advice even past Hestia when she, Remus, and Peter rose to leave, and she looked between James and Lily pointedly. James could tell she wanted to say something badly. He could see that it rested just on the tip of her tongue, but she gave them a smile that looked almost painful instead, clearly struggling to hold it all back. "Have a nice night," she offered formally, and Lily laughed as she hugged her.

"Thanks, Mar. You're a real doll."

"That's what they all say about me," Marlene said sarcastically. To James' intense surprise—and also, it seemed, a little to her own surprise as well—she hugged him next, although she did so with little enthusiasm. "Don't fuck it up," she said, her voice sharper than before, but then she smiled, again a picture of bright beauty. "And happy birthday."

"I think that might just be how she says goodbye to you for a while," Lily explained lightly after Marlene had hugged Remus and Peter goodbye as well ("I suppose I have to now!" she'd said, laughing) and disappeared into a flurry of green flames.

Peter left next, looking extremely gratified at Marlene's hug, and a bit more pleased still when Lily kissed his cheek as she did Remus'. The look Remus gave them before he grabbed a handful of Floo powder seemed more than a little knowing, but he didn't offer any verbal accusation either.

Finally.

Relief shot through James' bloodstream in a hot burst, followed by heated determination, which felt even hotter.

Lily laughed the moment the flames died down and he reached for her. "He clearly knows," she told him, burying her fingers in his hair with what seemed more muscle memory than conscious thought.

"I've never cared about anything less," he assured her honestly, and she still laughed just a little when he kissed her as he'd wanted to for hours. Everything about the way she pressed herself against him reaffirmed to him what her casual attitude the entire night had made him question: she was every bit as eager as he was. "What are your thoughts—"

"I'm absolutely not shagging you on the loveseat or anywhere in the den," she said immediately, and he didn't have to guess that she'd read his face, because he knew his intentions were clear enough when he'd gone for the snap of her jeans. She had laughter in her voice again, but the soft laughter he had begun entirely associated with taking her to bed. "And I shouldn't think you'd want to, since you're normally so keen to see me. I figured you'd want a long look tonight and would want to take your time—although if you can't take your time, that's fine with me. I'm already wet enough that you won't have to do much, and I'm honestly much more about making you come tonight. It's your birthday, after all."

"Fuck."

He grabbed her impatiently, strangely almost out of breath from wanting her, and she let him kiss her, let him unbutton and unzip her jeans, and let him push his hand inside her knickers, almost as if to prove to him that she spoke the truth. But she pulled away in the next second, hardly before he had more than a few moments to touch her (and to discover that she told the truth and he knew, maddeningly, that he could slide inside her easily). She made no effort to do up her jeans, and he knew why with a single glance at the way she watched him. Her face glowed with the knowledge of how horribly it tormented him to see the thin black lace of her knickers just barely peak past the denim. He wanted to grab her again and to pull her to him and wipe the smile off her face (yet he also somehow wanted to make it bigger too). Instead, he focused on swallowing several times to try to regain control over his voice.

"Shut up and come upstairs with me," he told her shortly, past the point of trying to sound anything but as frustrated as he felt. He took her hand and went to pull her with him, but she resisted just the tiniest bit. He felt like swearing at her, and his desire only increased when he looked back at her to see the dangerous way she regarded him. She looked curious.

"Or what?" she asked archly, her eyes narrowed in challenge.

He would ask her later what she would have done if he'd called her bluff. What if he'd gone back to her and pushed her up against a wall or shoved her down on the loveseat, both thoughts he considered in the blink of an eye? She would wave away answering him with the flitter of an airy hand. Still, looking at her in the darkened den, he thought that she might have let him take her if he'd gone for her then. She looked nearly as ready as he felt, almost at her breaking point too.

But she led him out of the room in the next moment, the movement gentler than he had been, which made him second-guess quite how she felt all over again. It hardly escaped his attention that she didn't pause to refasten her jeans, and he waited to run into someone on the stairs or in the halls—one of his parents, up for a late nightcap; Sirius or Hestia, coming or going from the loo; or even Millie, who wouldn't have said much—but luck was remarkably on his side. He had her pressed up against the back of his door the second she closed it behind them, and he went for her shirt first, because it seemed the easier target, simpler than fussing with her jeans.

"Silencing spell," she reminded him as he dropped her shirt to the floor, even as she tipped her head to the side and pulled her hair with her to allow him better access to her neck. "We really need to find one that's more permanent. And the lamp—"

"You fucking do it," he said impatiently, and he recognized even as he said it that she never would have laughed as she did if he'd said answered that way anytime outside of a heated moment. It made him wonder just how much he could get away with saying, but he also wasn't enthusiastic to push it too far just then and potentially put her off when he'd waited hours. "Here," he said, reaching into the back of her jeans and grabbing her wand to push into her hand. "Do it."

He fully intended to continue his work on her neck while she cast the spells, but she nudged him away with a gentle hand on his chest, and he marveled as he let her go at how she somehow managed to ward him off whenever she wanted with hardly any effort at all. "Let me concentrate, please," she said, and she would have sounded polite, as if speaking to an acquaintance, if not for the breathless quality of her voice. "You can get the lamp. And then I'm yours."

He held her to it.

After his bedside lamp sputtered on weakly and the door glowed a brief, piercing blue to indicate she'd cast her spell correctly, she dropped her wand as he reached for her, and he did the same. He all but threw her to his bed, and she helped him tug her jeans down over her hips before he yanked them off completely.

"Was it worth the wait?" she asked, settling back on the mattress, but she smiled as she spoke, undoubtedly because she knew his answer without questioning a thing.

"Do you know how you look right now?" he asked hoarsely in return. His throat felt tight. He let her tug his shirt up and off before he stilled her and prevented her from moving towards his belt.

"No."

"You look—" He stopped short, because it felt like his words fell short, entirely short, of what he thought of her in that moment.

He'd seen her in a Quidditch jersey twice, and he'd loved it.

He'd seen her naked for hours, had touched and kissed and admired her from nearly every angle, and he still wanted nothing more than to continue that work.

Yet lying in front of him, wearing the tiniest strip of knickers he'd ever seen, matched with a bra so sheer that he could see her nipples, she looked every inch as dangerous as he often thought of her. Clad all in black lace, she seemed to personify all of the dirty things she'd ever said to him, all of the dirty things he'd ever wanted to do to her, all of the dirty things they had recently done. "Fuck, you look incredible."

Her face went almost shy in that moment, as if uncomfortable under his praise, but she wiped that expression clean quickly. "Now this is a look I really like," she told him softly, and she lifted a hand to touch his cheek. "You've looked it off and on all night."

"What look?" The words came out stiff, stilted.

"You look almost mad, honestly, and like…you'd like to take it out on me."

James had moved past the stage of just looking and had finally taken to touching her. He'd bent to kiss her collarbone and moved a hand to stroke her breast, but he stopped to stare into her face. "And you'd like that?"

"Not always," she told him, and when she went for his belt again, he let her unbuckle it with smooth, expert fingers and push his jeans down and off. Her face looked wonderfully flushed. "But sometimes? Yes. I frustrate you for a reason, you know. It's because I want to see what you'll do."

He thought hardly anything except the word fuck in that moment, as he always did around her, a continual, longing mantra. But he really thought it then, so much so that he thought he might have said it aloud, but he didn't know for sure.

So much of his skin suddenly found its way to hers—her legs tangled in his; his stomach against hers as kissed down her chest to close his mouth around her nipple through the tissue-thin fabric of her bra; her arms around him, one tangled in the hair near his neck, and the other wrapped around his back. She overwhelmed him—the sight of her, the way she felt, how her skin smelled—and for a moment he didn't know what he wanted to do with her, where and how he wanted to take her. As if she realized the way his brain had jammed, she led him where she wanted him to take things—or, ultimately, where he wanted to take things, but didn't realize that he did until she said it.

Then again, he could think of very little he didn't want to do to her in that moment, besides put her clothes back on her.

"I'd like you to tell me sometime what you thought about when you jerked off to these knickers," she said, moving his hand from her breast to between her legs, and the soft lace felt entirely familiar under his fingers. "And I'd like you to show me sometime, just like you had me show you. But for now…" She used the hand over his to push her knickers aside to give him access to touch her, and she didn't have to guide him there a second time. She made a noise, very faint in the back of her throat. "You can leave the knickers on, if you want," she said, and a little of the composure left her voice when he slid a finger inside her, and then another. Her forehead broke with what he recognized as pleasure even if it looked like pain, and she began to move against his hand, her mouth suddenly hot and insistent against his neck. "Get me close," she said, and he couldn't place quite how she said it—not a command or a plea, but something torn just in between. "Get me close and then take me to the side of the bed and fuck me there. That way you'll be able to look at me and watch everything. That's what you want, isn't it?"

It absolutely was, of course.

As Quidditch captain and unofficial leader of his friends, James usually came up with the plans in his life. That meant he knew a good plan or a bad plan when he heard it.

Lily consistently had some of the best he'd ever heard.

He set to work at it immediately, his hand between her legs and his mouth everywhere he could think to place it. He kissed her mouth, which tasted like the glasses of red wine he'd watched her nurse all night; her neck, where she smelled soft and sweet and floral and entirely like her; her chest, which felt warm, almost hot beneath him. Her breath came in short and shallow, occasionally interspersed with the softest of gasps, and her hands had gone to bury into his hair. She'd done so by design, he learned quickly, because it left her able to hold him to the places she wanted him most—the sides of her breasts, where the tender skin met her ribcage; the sensitive spot under her neck that he bruised without fail every time he got her into bed; her mouth, and she kissed him in a way that made their secret passages snogs—the best of his life before break—feel almost inconsequential.

She lowered her hand to meet his, and she shifted the way he touched her, rotating his wrist and adjusting the way he held his thumb. "Slow like I showed you, remember?" she breathed, and he pulled back from her neck to watch her face as he complied.

Of course he remembered.

He knew for a fact that he would remember the sight of Lily Evans touching herself for the rest of his life.

He didn't know how she had understood precisely how to turn his wrist on the first go to get exactly what she wanted, but he saw—and felt and heard—that she'd clearly gotten it right immediately. She clenched around his fingers in a promising way that made his cock throb even harder, and she arched her back just slightly. The noise she made was one entirely unique to her, not a moan or whimper or sigh, but somehow all three combined, and the second he'd first heard it their first time he'd made it a personal mission to coax it out of her as often as possible.

They'd only had days together, but he knew without question that if she ever so much as made that noise in public, he'd get hard instantly. He loved it an inordinate amount, and it sounded like sex to him, of all the intense, incredible, unbelievable things they did together. He knew hearing it regardless of context would send him there immediately.

She spoke, words heated and at first incomprehensible to his ears. He couldn't focus enough to take them in, too wrapped up in all the ways she'd taken to responding to his touch. The general message got through eventually, if not all the words themselves. She had wanted him when they sat by each other on the floor that night, she told him, and badly.

The admission frustrated him more than anything.

"I told you to go somewhere with me," he reminded her, his voice rough and foreign to his own ears. "Do you know how I felt? I swear, you're trying to kill me—"

"I am. That's entirely my goal." She twisted against his hand, frustration tugging at her mouth. "I want you," she told him, three simple words that he'd of course already known, but fuck if that hadn't been the constant refrain in all his fantasies of her for years, and he wanted to hear her say it over and over. "Not yet, not yet," she added quickly and breathlessly as he began to pull away from her, intent on giving her what she wanted. "Just keep—" He'd apparently fulfilled her request even before she'd finished it, his hand resuming the thrust of his fingers and the sweep of his thumb, and he looked away from the pleasure on her face to watch himself touch her.

How did it all still feel surreal, even when he had his fingers inside her?

How on earth had he managed it?

"How bothered were you tonight?" she asked him, her breath hitching, and she smiled at him, small and smug. She clearly knew.

"Very." He saw no reason to lie.

"Did you like it?"

"Yes." He could hardly lie there either.

"Were you mad?"

"Yes." He knew by then that she'd already known all of the answers he'd given, but she seemed to delight in them anyway. She still looked a little smug at his expense, but her words made up for it.

"Show me," she prompted, her voice soft and low. Her hands had gone back to his hair, and she once again moved him as she wanted. She made him look at her, and he saw the sort of blazing desire he'd first witnessed in the prefects' bathroom after Slughorn's Christmas party when she'd wanted him to kiss her. He'd wanted to too, of course, and desperately, but he couldn't trust or believe his eyes, certain he'd misread her. Her expression sent him back to the opportunity he'd sorely missed. "You looked like you wanted to get rough with me tonight. I kept expecting you to come out of nowhere and push me up against a wall every time I turned a corner. Sometimes you look like you're just barely controlling yourself, and I love that." She paused, her eyes sly and taunting and her voice throatier than before. "Go on, Potter. Lose control. Get mad. Make me come."

Her words snapped something inside of him he hadn't known had gone taut, and he gave into wanting her fully.

She would heal marks on them both the next morning before they showered, vanishing the lines that her nails had drawn on his shoulders, and healing the bruises he'd left from gripping her hips too tightly, holding her wrists down a little too long, spending far too much aggressive time on her neck. He'd feel a little bad for it all, even as she'd assure him she had liked it and remind him that she had asked for it too. Still, in the light of day, his actions would surprise himself as they hadn't in the darkness of night.

After all, he'd spent four years all but worshipping her, and three months with her holding tightly onto control, always the one in charge without question. To have both those things flip—suddenly almost resentful from wanting her so much, and placed firmly in control of the situation by her express permission—threw him off entirely.

The prior he had assumed before. He'd had flashes of anger at her ever since she'd started her game of taunts and teasing, allowing him just enough—a snog, a hand in her shirt, his fingers between her thighs, a litany of filthy words—before pulling away and leaving him undeniably frustrated. A little bit of anger had always lingered below the surface even before that—anger towards her, for encompassing everything he wanted but couldn't have, and anger at himself, for wanting her like he did. So while the way he expressed that anger surprised him, its origins did not.

Her relinquishing control surprised him much, much more.

The unreality of it hit him even in the moment, when his brain had all but shut down from an overload of longing and determination and love and resentment. He recognized the uncharacteristic manner in which she let him take her hands and pin them above her head to hold them there, a move she had done to him before, but he'd never so much as tried to reciprocate.

The moment she allowed that and he heard her breath hitch in anticipation, whatever restraint he had left vanished in an instant.

He still listened to her, of course, even if he didn't follow her exact instructions—or follow her instructions at all. He did at times, altering the placement his hand between her legs when she asked, but he disregarded any and all requests for an adjustment to the speed or pressure of his fingers. He slowed when she asked him to speed up, and lightened his touch to a gentle caress when she told him to go harder. She pulled the same with him constantly, although he'd never done it back. He didn't quite have her patience (or skill, he thought privately, although he'd never admit it), and also didn't trust himself to try to bring her truly close to climax without giving in and pushing her over, although he assumed both patience and skill would come with time. Yet once he'd started taking control, uncertain at first or not, he realized why she so often pulled the same moves on him.

It was fucking intoxicating.

It was intoxicatingly powerful to cause the tight passion in her voice, and to see her transformed from one of the most formidable witches he knew—and certainly the most formidable woman—into an unsatisfied mess of nerves and desire. He watched it unfold underneath him, the anticipation in her breath and on her face turning to frustration the longer he held her there, refusing to listen. He got it then, why she had done and would continue to do all the wonderfully, horribly taunting and teasing things he hated and loved. He understood completely.

Later, he would wonder if that might have been an unspoken point in letting him take the reins.

Because he knew she let him do it, just as he typically let her, but it still felt unbalanced somehow. Even as he held her down, even when she started adding a tight, reluctant please to her requests, which sounded a little more pleading each time, it still felt like she ran things in a way he couldn't explain. It didn't matter that she swore, the same heated fuck he usually thought or gave at her actions, or that she called him Potter and asked him anywhere from sweetly to angrily to move his hand faster or harder or in some way other than the slow or gentle or teasing way he used his fingers. He loved all of it, of course, and the way she looked at him, and the way she twisted underneath him, and the way her chest had flushed a more brilliant pink than he'd ever seen it. But he didn't feel like he had her, not in the all-encompassing, total way that she absolutely ran him when they got into (and truly often even when they were out of) bed.

Eventually, frustrated himself, he told her that. He doubted it sounded anywhere near coherent, the thoughts themselves a tangled snarl of lust and aggression and love in his brain. Yet she caught it somehow, and the way it made her smile, slow and dangerous and undeniably pleased, sent his pulse somehow skyrocketing even further. That look confirmed everything he'd thought.

"That's because I made you this way," she told him. Breathless or not, her neck red from the attentions of his mouth and the scrape of his stubble, there was power in her words, and she looked powerful then, even with her hands held above her head. "I drove you to this. I've been driving you to this for months, Potter—years, even, if we count before I started trying. I made you want me badly enough to make you lose it. That's control. Everything you're—"

He gave in.

He knew from her look and her voice that she wanted him to give in and take her, and that she knew her words probably came in part from that desire, because she had to know what they'd make him do. Yet he didn't really care about that, because she was right, and he loved it and he hated it all at once. In the back of his brain, he knew come morning—hell, probably come shortly after he came—that he'd linger over her words with pleasure. She might aim to rile him up badly, but that meant that she wanted him badly too, and had for months. She wanted him badly enough to plot and scheme and see how far she could push him, and he knew he would love thinking about that. He knew he'd love it if she kept it up, too—and he would very much encourage that in the days and weeks and months and years to come. But she looked so almost evil with her wicked smile and in all the black lace that reminded him of all those dirty things he'd wanted to do to her, and when he thought of all the years of wanting her with no reprieve…he lost it a little more, and gave into what she wanted.

Victory glowed on her face as he heard himself swear spectacularly. It sounded very much like fuck you, Evans, seriously, but he hadn't intended to say it, so he didn't know for sure. He let her wrists go and dragged her to the side of the bed, and he hated doing so because she had suggested it, but fuck if that wasn't all he wanted as soon as she'd said it. And fuck if he didn't also want to leave her knickers and bra on the second she'd suggested it, and he resented that too. But she looked so ridiculously good on her back underneath him as he stood at the side of the bed—and she felt so ridiculously good even just with his hands on her hips before he'd even gotten inside her—that those petty annoyances didn't matter.

Watching himself thrust into her, reminding himself that it was Lily Evans who clenched her legs on either side of his hips, the unreality of it all struck him all over again.

She inhaled sharply, and the sound brought him back down a little, suddenly aware just how tightly he held her, how roughly he'd thrust into her, and how very much he planned to continue both those things.

Hearing that from any woman would have given him pause, he knew, but again—it was Lily Evans who had made it, and concern won out over desire in a way he didn't think possible.

"What—" She had closed her eyes, and only opened them when he stilled. The concern apparently read all over his face (he knew it must, because he didn't have the energy or effort to try to conceal anything just then). For a second, she almost laughed, although in a way that sounded somehow caring when combined with the way she smiled at him, soft and almost gentle. She didn't look evil then, but sweet, like she always looked once it was all over and they'd both settled in so he could stroke her back and try to get her to laugh. Yet her expression sharpened in the next moment, and he felt her contract herself purposefully around his cock in what he could only think of as a taunt.

Paired with her next word, what else could it be?

"Harder," she told him, drawing the corner of her lip into her mouth, and with that he was gone.

It really only came back to him after, the separate pieces of everything that had happened, because in the moment it all mixed together in one heated, intense, pleasurable blur where he thought of nothing and everything all at the same time.

He would remember watching himself fuck her, and it felt like fucking, more than anything they'd yet—or he'd ever—done.

He would remember looking to her face to see her watching him, eyes locked on his expression, clearly even more aroused by his arousal than anything else, which only sent him into wanting her further.

He would remember watching her hand let go of where she gripped the quilt and reach between her legs to touch her clit, and how he'd pushed it away to replace with his own, deeply intent on getting her off solely entirely by himself.

He would remember how she lost a bit of herself after that, although she'd clearly tried to hold back. She kept her sounds stifled in her throat, and he'd lost it at her in return, suddenly fed up with her need for control. He said something, calling her Evans and telling her to just fucking stop it and say and do and feel what she wanted, and she refused at first, but she'd broken in the end.

He would remember the look on her face when she came with a sort of strangled cry, her head tipped back and her eyes closed, and how he'd thought somewhere in his mind that he should maybe slow and see if he could get her again. But watching and feeling her come, he suddenly he didn't care, the desire to join her in how she felt too overwhelming to resist.

He would remember leaning down over her for better leverage, her legs tight around his waist and her nails sharp on his back, so he could finish as quickly as possible. When he did, his face pressed where her neck met her shoulder, the world went as it always did after he came inside her—perfectly, completely, blessedly still, like nothing else on earth.

She took in a breath that sounded almost painfully deep, and he let out one he hadn't known he'd held. Her hands had drifted towards his hair, fingers soft and caressing, especially when compared to just before, and it took him every ounce of strength he had left not to collapse and crush her. He felt relaxed in a way he hadn't since he'd last pulled out of her that morning.

He spoke first, of course.

"Fuck," he said into the warm skin of her neck, because that summed it up about as well as he could just then. "Fuck, Lily. Just—fuck."

She laughed, soft and breathless, and dropped her legs from around his waist. "When do you plan to let me up?"

"Never. This is where I want to be. I would fucking buy up real estate and live inside you if I could."

He'd thought it offhandedly before, and more than once, but he'd never planned to actually say it. Yet the second it sent her laughing, he was glad he had.

"Poetry," she said. Her hands stayed in his hair as he summoned the energy to lift his head so he could admire the laughter all over her face. He could feel himself smiling, and way she looked up at him, as if exceptionally fond, made all the already considerable warmth he felt towards increase her tenfold. "Truly. You have a gift."

"What can I say? You inspire me." He could feel her laughter in her throat when he lifted a hand to touch the red, almost raw skin of her neck. "You're going to bruise," he told her, and she looked the textbook definition of unconcerned. "You're alright?"

Should he have felt bad that he hadn't thought about that at all since right after he'd gotten inside her?

He assumed yes, but he didn't have it in him to feel much of anything just then except tired and affectionate and stupidly pleased.

"Of course. Could you not tell? You certainly acted like you could." Her face had gone soft and sweet, that look she'd given him when he'd stopped himself abruptly to check on her. "I'm not some delicate flower—and I will get my wand and hex you if you turn that into some crack about my name. It would take a lot more to truly hurt me. I'm made of stronger stuff than that. Now will you let me up? If you do, I'll let you decide if I take leave this on or take it off."

That derailed things slightly.

He knew good terms when he heard them.

"I want the nickers on for sure," he told her immediately. He didn't even have to think about it. "I haven't seen you from behind. I want a good look."

That was all he did once she came back from the loo and stretched out on her stomach beside him. He traced his hand down the path he loved—down her back, over her bum, and as far down her leg as he could reach—before running it back up, eyes trained on the thin black lace that contrasted so dramatically with her skin. She seemed content to let him, lying still as if quietly pleased, and she confirmed as much when he told her how she looked.

"It was a good reaction," she said, not bothering to open her eyes. "You just looked stunned when you saw me. I loved it. Like I told you, I love watching you want me."

"I'm constantly stunned by how fit you are," he told her. "It's been this way for years, just worse now, because now I actually know what I'm waiting for and I'm not just imagining it. You're always going to get that kind of reaction out of me."

She kicked a foot up into the air and began to swing her legs back and forth lazily as he already loved. "We'll see."

They would see.