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]

21. Chapter 21

A/N: As always, the feedback I received for the last chapter was fantastic. The gratitude you guys show blows my mind with each update, and I wish I had the words to express that gratitude back, but I don't. Turns out I can write over 350k words of fanfiction (which is what I'm up to now in draft form, including notes and outtakes), but don't have the words to thank you all. Someone wrote that this fic was the best thing to happen in 2020, which made me laugh, but jokes aside, that's how this all feels for me. In a shit year, writing this and reading everyone's thoughts has kept me sane, reignited a passion for writing that I thought academia had beaten out of me, and made me a better and more confident writer in all forms. To see you all engage with each other in the reviews and talk about how you read them to see other people's thoughts—truly, that makes me happy beyond words. So thank you.

Another reviewer said they weren't sure what to say when reviewing, and that's okay! I totally get that feeling. I love long reviews, short reviews, reviews on general things, reviews on specific things, all reviews! I'll never turn down feedback on someone's favorite/least favorite scene/moment/quote/character, anything you wished had happened in the chapter (or will happen in the future), anything that might have confused you, any theories that you had—any of those things, or anything else, thrills me.

That said, the end is near! Or the end is clear if not near, as I have a better picture of how long it will take to get there. I'm currently anticipating 26/27 chapters in total, although that could change—and knowing me, if it does change, I'll only add chapters because ~I have no self-control~. But as it currently stands, I think that's about how long it'll take for me to wrap this up. And then…well, sequel?

Chapter Twenty-One

"Are you going to smile like that all day?"

James looked up from digging through the contents of Lily's makeup bag and watched her lean towards the mirror to apply her blush. He bent to kiss her shoulder from where he perched on the countertop next to the sink in his bathroom. "At least for a good few hours, yeah. And you're not making it go away any faster by walking around naked."

"Is that a complaint?"

"No. It's the sincerest of compliments."

She looked as if she might want to swat at him despite her smile, although she let him draw her face towards his to kiss her instead. But she did slap away the hand that went to run down the smooth skin of her back, and then reached into the makeup bag on his lap and pulled out an eyeliner pencil. "Honestly, you look like no one's ever done that for you before."

She summarized the 'that' too neatly, he thought, and completely undersold how she'd just gotten on her knees in the shower and taken him in her mouth. And just thinking about it—the way she'd looked up at him, and how she brought him just to the edge of climax twice before he finally came so hard his knees almost gave out—made him feel exceptionally warm towards her all over again. "Not until I finished," he said, and it felt a little awkward admitting that to her, although she just shrugged a little and leaned back towards the mirror.

"I suppose that's different then. It is for girls too, so I get it."

He watched her balance on the toes of one foot and lift the other up slightly so she could lean closer to the mirror than before, and she began to carefully line her eyelid. "Would you like it if I—" He broke off, unsure of quite how to put it. It felt strange, asking her such things in the bright light of the bathroom, rather than spoken in some heated moment—and even then, she usually spoke more than he did.

Yet she still managed to sound supremely casual. "Well, sure," she said, moving onto her other eye. "But only if you actually wanted to. Reluctant or half-arsed is worse than not doing it at all."

"I don't think I could do anything half-arsed with you," he told her, and she flashed him a smile. "Although I've never done it before, so I don't know if—"

"Wait, hold on, shut up." Her voice came out with none of her previous casual coolness. "Hold onto that. Let me finish this."

He waited, more than a little perplexed, and watched her finish lining her eyes. It looked like she snapped the lid on the eyeliner with a little more force than necessary. "How many girls have you slept with?"

Wait, what?

His previous awkwardness returned, doubled. "Is that a conversation we need to have?"

"I mean, not if you're going to be weird about it, although I really don't care." He felt a little prickle of irritation that she looked as if she honestly meant it too. She exchanged the eyeliner in her hand for a tube of mascara from her bag, and pointed it at him almost threateningly. "My point is, I know of three, and you just said that at least one of them has gone down on you. But you never returned the favor? I'm not saying it always has to be reciprocal, but never once? You're a selfish git."

The bathroom suddenly felt a bit too cramped.

He shifted under her gaze. "To clarify, you're giving me that look for shagging other girls incorrectly?" he asked, and she laughed a little as her gaze broke. "Because I would have absolutely no problem hearing that you weren't great with other blokes."

"I see your point," she said after she thought on it a moment, and she took that beat to apply her mascara. "But you're the perfect example of the sort of lad I would normally absolutely hate. I wouldn't go near you if I met you on a night out, because you're clearly that type. You know, good-looking enough that you can pull a girl so easily that you don't really care if she has a good time—"

She was neither entirely right nor entirely wrong. He'd cared with other girls, of course, just…less than he did with her. Much less.

"I don't think you've ever called me good-looking before."

"That's your takeaway?"

He shrugged, unable to hide his grin. His ego demanded it. "Bit, yeah, because I tell you that all the time. And if we're talking about reciprocation—"

"You can fuck right off," she said, but she laughed while she said it, and she kissed him, lifting herself onto her toes to do so, as he very much liked. "Obviously I think you're good-looking. I wouldn't shag you if I didn't, because I'm horrifically shallow. Sometimes I think I fancy you more than I like you, like when you're acting like an absolute prat."

He ran his fingers through the loose curls she'd charmed in her hair. "So, typically."

"I'd say as much." He felt her smile as he kissed her again, but she pulled back far too soon, removed her hands from around his neck, and tugged at his shirt. "I'm done. Come."

"Normally that's all you have to say and I absolutely will come—" He told her, sliding off the counter, and he had to join her in laughter.

"It's jokes all day with you," she said, but fondly, and he watched her gather the odds and ends of her toiletries back into her makeup bag, which she zipped and left by the sink. The sight of it there made his chest buzz with more happiness than he thought it probably should have. She'd brought some of her things into his room, and she never bothered taking them back out. To see her act as if she belonged there alongside him still felt unreal. "I need to get dressed. I've been putting it off—no, stop that!"

He let her go nearly as soon as he'd grabbed her, and followed her back into his bedroom. "Or you could not," he suggested, and he sat in his desk chair to wait for her. She shot him a look, something dark but possibly a little longing too, although she reached for the clean clothes she'd spread across his bed before they'd showered, and he knew she truly meant to prepare for the day. "What kind of knickers are those?" he asked, watching her pull on a pair that seemed truly most unlike her, a plain black cotton with none of the lacy embellishments he'd come to expect.

"Practical. Boring. I'm not about to waste a good pair on today."

Oh.

Right.

It took him a minute for his mind—which still floated somewhere in the vicinity of the shower—to catch up with her words, and another for them to sink in. He'd managed to forget, between the afternoon before and that exact second, that she had plans to get coffee with Greg that afternoon. The memory of that certainly dimmed the smile on his face that she'd called out such a short time before. He didn't know what to say, or how to react, but she didn't watch him to see—in fact, it seemed like she might have looked away from him purposefully.

But he watched her.

He watched her pull on the dress she'd picked out, black with thin straps and a soft, swinging skirt. He watched her settle the neckline just so, and check to make sure neither strap twisted. He watched her go to his dresser, where she'd placed a few more of her things, including her hairbrush, her perfume, a few pieces of jewelry. He watched her spritz herself lightly with the scent that seemed entirely her, and slide a pair of gold hoops into her ears.

"Will you come here?" he asked once she finished, both because he wanted her to, and also because she looked like she didn't know quite what to do with herself once she'd completed her tasks. She acquiesced, and let him pull her down into his lap. He'd jealously watched Sirius perform the same move on Hestia countless times, annoyed that he couldn't grab Lily in the same manner, uncertain only a few days before if she would have allowed it even in private. But she acted like it happened all the time, like they always sat such, and rested an arm back across his shoulders with ease and let him wrap his own arms around her. She felt small, circled like that. "You look really pretty," he told her, and she favored him with a smile. "Ridiculously pretty, honestly. I wouldn't mind you looking a bit worse."

She wrinkled her nose a little. "I suppose I need to look nice, don't I? Although, like I said when we went to the Ministry, I really just want to throw on my Harpies jersey—"

"I'd rather you wear the dress than the jersey." It came out sharper than he intended, and he touched her cheek apologetically. "Sorry. It's—"

"No, I know. That's reserved for you now, as far as I see it." Her smile seemed gentler than usual, a sort of look he couldn't remember seeing before. It wasn't dissimilar to the warm, tender way she had taken to looking at him, just maybe mixed with an apology of her own, and sympathy as well. The latter sat uncomfortably on his shoulders. She shifted and moved to draw her legs up under her, as she so often sat, and he forgot the look when he watched the hemline of her skirt shift higher. She didn't brush him off when he moved one of his hands to rest upon the exposed skin.

"It was four," he said, and when she looked at him quizzically, added, "Other girls. You asked."

"Oh. Good on you, for finding someone who didn't immediately run to tell me. The other three really loved doing that." She began to run her fingers through the back of his hair, and even though he liked it well, it didn't ease the awkwardness he felt as she looked at him. "But you didn't have to tell me if it makes you uncomfortable. Really. I'd never want you to tell me something you didn't want to, unless it was something I absolutely needed to know."

He knew she meant it, not just from the sincerity in her voice, but also because she had acted in that same manner about Remus' lycanthropy for years, and still acted that way about how the other three Marauders managed to accompany him every month.

Still, he wouldn't have minded her acting just a little bothered about his past. Not to the extent that hers bothered, him—he doubted that was possible—but a little would have been nice.

It also could hardly escape his attention that she didn't offer up a number of her own.

"Yeah, well, it's fine." But it didn't feel totally fine, and from the way she continued to play with his hair, her fingers soft of the back of his neck, he thought she might have known. "But none of it was…"

He didn't know quite how to explain how it all felt with other girls. He knew it differed with her because he had wanted her badly for years, had finally gotten ahold of her just enough over Christmas break to know that she somehow surpassed everything he'd thought and known about her, and spent enough time laughing and talking and worrying and planning and flirting with her before they'd gotten into bed, that he'd already fallen for her by then. He'd already admitted that he loved her—to himself, to his parents, to Sirius—before they'd ever shagged, so of course that changed things, he knew.

It also helped, all feelings aside, that he really, really liked shagging her, even beyond what he'd hoped and dreamed about.

Nothing compared to how she made him feel, but he also really didn't have a lot to compare her to. He'd tried things with other girls at Hogwarts, and went so far as to shag three of them with varying results, one only once, another a handful of times scattered through a couple months, and the third multiple times weekly for a few weeks. But none of it had really mattered. He'd fancied all of them, sure, and liked them varying amounts, but it felt rather like going through the motions each time, the same ritual of talking to flirting to a Hogsmeade date to shagging—although he'd found the date optional, to his surprise.

None of them had held his interest for long.

In hindsight, he wondered how much of that stemmed from their nerves, which had certainly tampered their personalities at least a little. After all, those girls had liked him, so they undoubtedly worried about saying or doing the wrong thing.

Lily, on the other hand, had gone out of her way to constantly say and do the wrong things to him, and he'd liked that—all chaos and fire and laughter and danger. Winding her up had given him the same sort of adrenaline rush he got from taking off on his broom.

Shagging her felt better than any Quidditch win he'd ever had, which felt blasphemous to even consider. He'd never admit those words out loud.

If he had to pick, he would have said the fourth girl—the one Lily didn't know of, the first one, in truth—came second to her. Annette, too, was confident, headstrong, and driven, although in a more understated way. The daughter of a family friend, she and her mother had stayed with his family over the Christmas break of his fifth year, and he and Sirius had had a good-natured race to try to see who could bag her first. James had succeeded, although he still hadn't quite figured out how. They'd finally ended up in her bed for what hadn't seemed like her first time, although it had been his. In the days that had passed before she and her mum had continued their holiday, he got her back there or to his room a handful of times.

Or maybe she had gotten him there.

He still wasn't sure.

It undoubtedly helped that he hadn't seen Lily during the whirlwind of those days—he knew by then that she'd spent at least some of it at Greg's, doing exactly what he and Annette had gotten up to. It wasn't a case of 'out of sight, out of mind,' but her absence from his general vicinity had made things with Annette easier, without a doubt.

He'd still thought of her, of course.

He'd dreamt about her too.

And the moment he saw her on the train back to Hogwarts, he'd of course fallen right back into the sound of her laughter and the brilliance of her smile, even if she rarely directed either his way. He had quickly forgotten all about Annette or the potential of any other girl. Tunnel vision, Sirius had grimly called it more than once, and he wasn't wrong. James had never been able to see past her for long.

In another lifetime, he knew for certain that he could have liked Annette quite a lot. The others too, maybe. Who knew.

But in his lifetime then, the tunnel had focused back on Lily. The girls that had come after—the three she knew of—never had a true shot. He'd known it back then and knew it still. Sharing a common room with Lily and attending nearly all the same classes created too much constant exposure for him to not compare every other girl to her.

Really, he couldn't even think of girls coming before her, because there was nevera time before her. She'd always lurked in the back of his mind, even when neither of them had wanted her there.

How could he even begin to explain that to her?

"None of it was like this," he told her finally, because he didn't know what else to say. The words fell utterly, entirely short.

She got it, though. "Yeah," she said, and she managed to make it somehow sound deeper and more meaningful than a single word. "I understand that. I—" She faltered, and her hand went to her hair.

Had they ever actually spoken about their feelings in the light of day? Really, truly, as they did at night?

He understood why they hadn't. Everything felt safer cloaked under darkness.

"I've not had anything like this either," she said after a long pause. He almost thought she refused to look at him, her eyes trained on his dresser instead. "So I understand what you're saying." She looked at him then, and he almost wished she hadn't, because he hadn't expected it and she looked ridiculously pretty, 'stupidly good-looking,' as Sirius had put it, so much so that it made his head swim a little. "Would you like me to reassure you about today? Is that what you need?"

Despite the lead that had developed in the pit of his stomach the second he remembered her coffee plans, he chuckled.

"It's very like you to ask," he told her when she rolled her eyes, although she didn't look insulted. "Very academic and technical."

She smiled unwillingly. "Yes, well, if the shoe fits."

Would her strange muggle sayings ever actually make sense?

"Would you like me to reassure you?" she repeated. "You know I'm rubbish at this. You're going to have to tell me what you need from me."

That opened a lot of promising doors.

Yet rubbish or not, she'd nailed what he needed, even if she'd done so in her own way.

"Of course I want that," he told her. "I'm going to always want that, even if there's nothing to reassure me about. I want you to fawn over me."

"You chose the wrong girl if that's what you're after. I don't fawn, Potter." Still, even as she said it with her laughter soft under her breath, she pushed her face into his neck. It felt the same as she had taken to doing in bed, the tip of her nose somehow nearly always cold but her mouth always warm, and the thought of curling up in bed with her soothed him more than anything else. "I'm going to end up thinking about you all day, even if I don't want to, because I'm still a little sore from last night. I honestly don't mind it—I like it a little, really—and it's going to keep reminding me about the way you looked when you dragged me to the edge of the bed. I'm going to think about that all day. Is that reassuring?"

Fucking hell, of course it was.

"Not enough," he told her, his mouth rather dry. "You can keep trying."

She laughed against his neck. "Yeah, alright." Her hand went to toy with the front of his shirt, fingers light against his chest, and her voice shifted to something a little more hesitant. "I know I'll end up thinking about how you smiled at me afterwards too, like you'd never been happier in your whole life. I was really pleased to have made you look like that."

How did that somehow make him want her more?

He kissed her, but he caught a glimpse of her face right before he did, and she wore that strange, bashful expression that looked so entirely unlike her, but also somehow just like her. He loved how it looked on her face, so long as only he put it there.

"I don't like how much I like you," she told him, an admission murmured just away from his mouth and then immediately silenced with another kiss, one a little more insistent, as if she thought he might try to follow up with her.

But that alone was enough for just then. The words felt like he had once thought of her smiles and laughs—as the rarest of treasures, each one pulled out of her clearly against her will.

He'd just had her on her knees within the hour, but fuck if he didn't want her then.

She almost seemed to sense it, because she got up with a flicker of a knowing look that very much said no. "Stay here," she told him, and she slipped off his lap and out the door almost before he'd registered her words.

She left the room for not more than a minute, and returned with a carefully wrapped package, which she proffered with a smile that looked, again, bashful.

"I meant to give it to you yesterday," she explained, and she sat back on his lap with little coaxing. "But I didn't want to do it while everyone was here, and I didn't really think much after everyone left, so it'll have to be now. Three guesses what it is."

He didn't need three. He knew the moment he had it in his hands. "Just like you, to give a book as a gift," he told her, and she smiled.

"Must be unlike you, then, although you did the same at Christmas." She hooked her hair behind her ear. "Before you open it, just know—I did go looking for it, but it cost me almost, just besides time and effort." He recognized that she played on the very words he'd said to her at Christmas, of course, but he thought they sounded far more winning coming from her.

It also left him feeling a little dazed that she'd committed his words to memory, even as far back as then.

And he had an even deeper feeling of déjà vu when he pulled off the paper to reveal a copy of Grindelwald's Greater Good, the same book he'd gotten her months before, only the copy she gave him had a fine leather cover, not worn like her paperback. He looked at her, nonplussed.

"It's a first edition," she explained. "They're incredibly hard to find. I should know, after trying to find one for months. But also—" She flipped open the front cover, and he saw the author's name there, Robert Gruen, signed in a tight, cramped hand in thick black ink faded gray. "You told me over Christmas that your dad collected books and that you planned to keep it up, so I thought—"

"How?" he demanded, and he knew the shock in his voice read all over his face. "Even Dad—he would absolutely kill—"

"I wrote a fair amount of letters," she said, and she made it sound simple, as she did with nearly everything she accomplished. Color had risen high in her cheeks and somehow made the shy smile she gave him look even prettier. "It came down to obnoxious persistence and a ton of luck. You'd be surprised what elderly folks have lying around. I was. It took a while to track it down, but like I said—it cost me nothing but time and effort."

"You're—" He didn't have the words, just then, to tell her exactly what he thought of her. Nothing he could conjure seemed nearly close enough. "I can never top this. You know that, right? You've just won every holiday you keep me around for."

His clear, stunned pleasure had changed her smile from shy to genuinely pleased. Watching the transformation, he realized something utterly insane.

She had worried if he'd like it.

He kissed her before she could respond, and much as he loved and appreciated and valued her gift, he loved and appreciated and valued how much she clearly cared even more.

"Are you pleased?" she asked when she broke away, her hand still buried in his hair. "You haven't thanked me, although I'm not sure why I'm surprised, your manners are—"

"Thank you. Aside from my broom, it's the best gift I've ever gotten. Honestly, it might be on par. And that's huge. It's a great broom."

"Oh, I know. You're not exactly subtle about your feelings for it. It's worse than how you act about me. I have to try my hardest not to get jealous." She kissed him one last time, something soft and sweet, and the novelty of such a kiss all hadn't started to wear off even a bit, but he wanted to snog her senseless instead, overwhelmed by her unspoken thoughtfulness and care. He didn't doubt she saw that all over his face, because she looked as if she tried very hard not to smile as she stood up, and he missed her warmth and weight and the smell of her skin immediately. "You're welcome. Come on, breakfast."

James showed his dad first thing, before he so much as greeted all the others who already sat at the table, and Fleamont set down his copy of the Daily Prophet immediately. If he'd had a drink in his mouth, James thought, he would have spit it everywhere. "How?" he asked immediately, and James heard his own voice reflected in the question.

"Do you like it?" Hestia asked. She smiled as if as pleased as she expected him to feel. Sirius had his hand on the back of her neck, and James forgot the book for all of a few seconds when he remembered that they'd headed to bed together the night before. He couldn't quite read Sirius' grin to discern what had happened between them, but it looked promising. "I'm sure she'll tell you it was nothing, but it took months, and more correspondence than I've seen her receive in all of the rest of our time at Hogwarts put together."

"Hessie, stop." Lily's color had never entirely gone away, but it renewed as she reached for a plate of bacon. "It honestly wasn't that long—"

"Near on three months? That's one-fourth of a year, Lil."

"I've spent more time on lesser things." Lily looked distinctly uncomfortable under the praise, as she so often did. The way she tried to deflect Hestia's words reminded James almost exactly of how she'd undersold the intense labor she'd put into her scar-removal potion when they spoke to Frank and Alice. "And I didn't mind it. It was kind of fun, like an exercise in detective work."

Fleamont stared at her. "You managed this?" he asked.

James knew from those three simple words that there was almost nothing Lily could do for the rest of time that would make his dad dislike her.

"How?" Fleamont asked again.

"Even I know that this is impressive," Euphemia said after she'd gestured James to her side to look at the book for herself. "And I truly don't understand you or your father's obsession with this book, Jamie. I still remember the nightmares it gave you."

After carefully setting his book on the server behind the table, James took his seat next to Lily, and reached over to tuck the wisps of hair behind her ears that always escaped to frame her face. Her cheek felt warm against his hand. "Tell me how you did it," he said, and she abandoned any pretense of eating to do so. Her face stayed the same shade of soft pink for the entire explanation.

The trail had started with a letter to Marlene's uncle, Ackerly McKinnon, who had once worked as the co-editor of the Daily Prophet, to see if he had any connections to anyone who had published Grindelwald's Greater Good. He didn't, but he had given her the names of two people who might, and told her to use his name freely when she wrote to ask. From there it sounded like the whole thing spiraled into some complex web of letters sent and received, each person with a new name to follow up with, who sent in another name, and another, and another.

"She made a chart of it all," Hestia explained, and she seemed to like the look Lily sent her, something torn between embarrassed and annoyed, because she went on unabated. "She sat down and she wrote down the connections between everyone she wrote to, and she looked like a madwoman when she explained it to me." She smiled across the table at Lily, her pretty face soft and fond. "Even after seven years, you still scare me sometimes."

Of course Hestia managed to look and sound sweet even when she took the piss out of someone, because James recognized her words as just that.

"I'm a very organized person," Lily told her primly, and she passed a hand over her hair before she went on.

She had expected a difficult task, but it turned out harder than she'd even imagined. Bad news hit her left and right.

The publishing house had gone under in the mid-fifties. She couldn't find a single person who had worked there as anything other than a typist.

Gruen's agent had died over a decade before.

So had his editor.

Finally, in the strangest stroke of luck, the sister of Gruen's late editor found a box with six first-edition, signed copies. They had sat tucked away in the boxes upon boxes of books she hadn't touched since he'd died, and she sent Lily one without asking for a single thing in return.

"I wanted the first edition," she explained. "I knew they existed and I thought it an old and obscure enough book that it might not cost me much if I played it right, but I didn't expect it to be so hard to find. When I did, I didn't expect it to be signed, and I didn't expect to get it for free, but we had corresponded for a while by the time she found it and she sent it to me for nothing. It was all luck in the end, and just fell in my lap. I got so lucky."

He wasn't surprised.

He'd known she was lucky.

"Is it luck if you work at something for three months and make it happen?" The way Hestia said it, James thought she had probably repeated much the same at least once before. Her voice returned to the lightest of teases, as if she revealed something embarrassing. "You should have seen her face when she opened the parcel with the book in it. She spilled juice all over the Ravenclaw table and into Weber's lap. She didn't bother to apologize or clean it up. I ended up vanishing it for her."

Lily smiled back sheepishly. "Thanks for that. I did lose it a little, and I couldn't hide it. I didn't even try. What reason did I give them for my reaction?"

"Something about a rare book on potions, I think. It sounded pretty convincing."

"You spent three months on this." Although Sirius stared at Lily inquisitively, his words came out as a statement rather than a question. "That's what Hess said. Three months."

"Yes." Lily shifted slightly, and reached to refill her coffee cup. "It became a challenge pretty quickly, and I went at it like I would a class, really. I wanted to see if I could manage it after I kept hitting dead ends. There's really very little that you can't crack if you try hard enough, although, again—such luck."

She looked as if she challenged Hestia to disagree with her again on the issue of luck. Hestia just smiled into her teacup.

"Three months," Sirius repeated emphatically. "So, what, right after New Years?" he demanded, and Lily nodded and shrugged as she added creamer and sugar to her coffee. James found Sirius' gray eyes on him suddenly. He looked frankly astonished. "Mate, are you hearing this? You two weren't even—she wouldn't even kiss you until Christmas Day!"

Lily shot him a look. She'd gone pinker. "Kind of you to remember," she said dryly. "But he was there."

"Yeah, but—" The words seemed to elude Sirius for a moment. James couldn't remember the last time he'd seen him so obviously flabbergasted. "Lily, love, that's so much effort for a git who would probably muck things up in a week. Didn't he muck it up in a week? Didn't that actually happen? Am I going crazy? That happened, didn't it?"

James had thought the exact same thing, of course. It was impossible not to think back to where they'd been just after Christmas—right after the Hogsmeade attack, after she'd pulled back from him slightly, and then had finally started to warm to him after New Year's. Then he had indeed mucked it up briefly by pushing her about Morton improperly and at the wrong time. Those thoughts had flickered through his mind almost so quickly that he hadn't really realized over them until he heard them summarized from Sirius' mouth.

It was without a doubt the most effort that anyone had every put into any gift he'd ever received, and she'd done it during the infancy of their relationship, back when he still didn't know if she even really liked him.

Happiness roared in his chest, perhaps the loudest it ever had in his life.

If he hadn't already loved her, that moment would have cinched it, he knew.

She physically ducked a little from the way he looked at her, and he knew it had to be that expression that she always asked him to change. He would wonder later if the look might too closely echo praise, which clearly made her physically uncomfortable.

"If he mucked it up, I knew the book would make excellent kindling," she said, and she laughed. It was a charming, engaging laugh, one that even Sirius couldn't help but smile at, although he continue to stare at her in disbelief. "And, like I said, I wasn't even sure if I could manage it. When I thought I might not be able to, it became a matter of pride pretty quickly. You know how stubborn I am. That really drove me."

She spoke entirely convincingly, but James didn't believe her for a minute.

"Well, I guess the next time Flea needs someone to track down a particularly rare book—" Euphemia gestured towards Lily. She looked as if she'd never liked Lily better, and James knew that the gift—and the story of the effort behind it—had impressed her past any carefully-concealed lingering doubt she may have had.

"Really though." Fleamont pushed his cold, forgotten breakfast away. "I would pay you, of course. That's—you're remarkable."

"It's over," Sirius said later, when they'd settled into the library at Lily's insistence to begin work again. "It's done. Flea no longer cares about us, James. He's replaced us fully. It's the Lily show now. He'll forget our names before this time tomorrow, kick us out of our rooms, and write us out of the will. You watch."

"It started sliding that way days ago," James reminded him. "We all saw it. It was only a matter of time."

"Fuck off," Lily said, but she smiled. Her color had finally returned to normal. "It wasn't that big of a deal. I'm just fairly good at extended, tedious work. That's all it was."

"Don't downplay how hard you worked."

"It's not one of her better qualities," Hestia agreed. She'd opened her Transfiguration book, but hadn't even glanced at it. She stared across the table at Lily. "You look awfully nice today."

"Thank you," Lily said. "I'm meeting Alice. She wanted to get together one last time, since I was a fright the last time she saw me."

It was the truth, just not all of it.

"Kind of you to dress up for her."

Lily shrugged and looked down to her finished Transfiguration essay, apparently intent on editing it. She looked perfectly blasé in response to Hestia's obvious suspicion. "You know I never miss out on a chance to wear a dress. It's easier than trousers or a skirt—you don't have to match anything together. But speaking of—" She reached for James' wrist to check his watch. His stomach lurched uncomfortably as he remembered that she'd pulled the same move on Greg just days before. She glanced up at him, apparently unaware of the discomfort that move had brought. "I need to leave at noon. Don't let me forget."

He had never felt so conflicted about a request before, torn between what he wanted and what he knew needed to happen.

"Sure," he agreed, and he heard the shortness in his own voice. The grin that had felt like a permanent fixture on his face began to fade.

She hadn't let go of his hand, and when she still hadn't after a moment, he looked at her. She smiled a little. "I don't know when I'll be back," she told him, and he thought he heard a certain carefulness in her voice. "After coffee, Alice might take me to Auror Headquarters, so it might be a little while."

He didn't doubt that she'd debrief Moody then—or, more likely, Moody would check to see if she'd somehow messed everything up immediately. James remembered his characterization of her as a "fresh, untrained, emotional eighteen-year-old." Clearly, no matter what Dumbledore had said, Moody didn't have much faith in her.

But did Moody have much faith in anyone?

"It's alright," he said, and he hoped the smile he attempted, and the way he squeezed her hand, softened his earlier shortness. "You know where I'll be."

Still, he couldn't shake the way his mood had plummeted, and watching her get up a half-past eleven to fix her hair again, Hestia trailing behind, left him feeling more than a little unreasonable about it all.

"Didn't quite manage it," Sirius said after he seemed certain they were gone. James didn't have to ask him to clarify, but he did anyway. "Last night. With Hess." He still looked supremely pleased, and as if he tried not to feel too pleased at the same time. The expression sat strangely on his face, since he so rarely tried to mask how he felt in the slightest, even when he should. "But Lily was right, bless her. Hess is keen, just wasn't about to tell me or do anything about it first. And I didn't want to push her, so we were at a standstill."

"I don't think you've ever been worried about going after a shag before," James pointed out, and Sirius just shrugged. "Bit different with her?"

"Bit. But if you're trying to get me to recognize that that's the same thing you say about Lily, I'm not going to. Totally different. You can't convince me otherwise. I'm set on this."

"Seems like your typical logic," James said, and Sirius grinned, although his mirth faded after James went to return to his book.

"You're acting in a mood for someone who got a killer gift and also came to breakfast with Lily sporting red knees. Looked like she'd been on them for a while." James didn't know what Sirius saw on his face when he looked up at him, but whatever it was sent Sirius into laughter. He laughed so fully that James couldn't help but smile, even as he thought of Lily just the floor above them, fixing her hair to see Greg. "Glad something can still make you smile, Prongs. Although if that didn't, I don't know what would. How was it?"

"Padfoot—"

"Right, you're not going to say. The way you looked after I asked said enough—just smug as hell. You need to control your face better, mate."

James doubted Sirius had ever said truer words.

But Sirius didn't seem willing to let the entire thing drop, even if he did stop pressing for certain details. "Prongs, what's your deal? Why the mood? Nothing about this tracks."

It took only a few seconds of meeting Sirius' eyes for James to crack enough to admit what it seemed like he could, even though he knew that he shouldn't.

"She has to go do something before she meets with Alice, and it's nothing big, really, but I don't like it."

The way Sirius looked at him went from casual to intense so quickly that he almost looked like two different people. "About—?"

"I can't."

"Right. Okay."

Silence overtook the room.

"What do you want to do after she leaves?" Sirius asked. He pushed his work away, somehow all business but also all energy and excitement at the same time. "Go harass Moony and Wormtail? Go run? Go to Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade? Something else?"

James raised his eyebrows. "And leave Hestia?"

"She'll understand." Sirius sounded confident. "She wants her time with Lily, so she'll understand it. We'll give her that later. She'll be fine."

Although very tempted to ask exactly what Sirius planned to do if Hestia wasn't okay with that, James held his tongue.

He kissed Lily goodbye at the front door, and after his mouth met hers, he almost resented Hestia and Sirius for standing nearby, because he had the sudden urge to push her up against the door and keep her there. But he let her go, and he watched her go too, her long, brilliant hair tumbling down her back as she crossed the front lawn to get outside the wards and Disapparate.

After the telltale crack, James stared at the empty spot where she'd once stood. He only looked for long enough to draw a deep breath, and after he exhaled, he turned to Hestia, who regarded him with great, undeniable interest. He really only had one question.

"How do you feel about cats?"

xxx

"Fuck off. You didn't."

Despite the words, Lily's smile stretched so wide that it took over her entire face.

"The shopkeep said his name is Oliver, but but he doesn't answer to it at all, so you could probably change it," Sirius said. "He's kind of dim, but I guess that's what you like in a bloke, innit? I mean, you took up with James."

The gray and white quarter-Kneazle Lily had held in the Magical Menagerie, truly more fluff than cat, wound itself around her ankles. She crouched immediately to stroke his head, and his purrs filled James' bedroom.

"I figured we'd keep him in here until he's adjusted," James explained, but Lily just nodded, her listening clearly absent at best. "But he seems pretty settled already. He made right for Hestia's lap the second we let him loose."

"James asked me if I was okay with it, since we'll live together come June," Hestia told her, and Lily looked up from where her hand stroked Oliver's belly to smile at her. Hestia readily returned the look. "Of course I'm okay with it. He's very sweet."

"But dim," Sirius repeated. He'd lounged back on his elbow on James' floor, his face all careless ease, but he started to grin as he watched Lily with Oliver, and James understood why immediately. She'd taken to speaking softly to him, words murmured in a gentler tone than any he'd ever heard her take with a person—himself included—and she did so with none of the reservations she typically had about expressing affection. "Lily, love, you look dead cute right now," he said, and she looked up at that with a warning flash of her eyes. "You're lucky I never saw you like this back when we used to torment you. You would have scared me a lot less."

"And, what, you would have been worse? Is that possible?" She didn't wait for him to respond. She'd forgotten him the second she looked to James, and he watched her grapple with something deep and complex that warred across her face—gratitude, exasperation, pleasure, annoyance. "You shouldn't have. Honestly, I—"

"Are you happy?" he asked, although he already knew the answer. Her hand hadn't left Oliver's considerable fluff since he'd gone to her.

"Yes. Obviously. But you don't just buy a girl a cat because you're trying to compete with her birthday present, Potter. That's just like you, though, so endlessly competitive—" Yet she laughed as she spoke, and everything about the way she looked at him radiated joy.

He would have bought her a hundred cats to get her to look at him like that, although he didn't know where she'd put them.

After all, it already looked like they'd gained one companion in his bed, and that was enough. Oliver walked to jump up onto the mattress when Lily stood up, and James could just imagine waking up at two in the morning with Oliver's furry side stretched across his face, suffocating him.

"Look at Oliver for a second," she said to Sirius and Hestia, and then she crossed the room, light on her bare feet, and kissed James.

She kissed him, standing up on her toes with her arm around his neck to bring him to her, the sort of kiss that she had given him that first night that she'd gone into his bed, something far too heated and longing than acceptable in front of others.

Sirius obviously hadn't followed her direction. "I think that's our cue, Hess—" he said, and James could hear him get to his feet, but he didn't care. He absolutely agreed. That was their cue.

"No, stay, I'm done." Lily sounded a little breathless when she broke from his mouth, and the tone alone made James swallow hard. "Thank you," she told him as she dropped down from her toes. "I love him."

He really couldn't wait until the day he heard a 'you' there instead.

It would happen. He would make it happen.

"Yeah, no, based on the way James looks, we're definitely leaving," Sirius said decisively. "You think I'm about to get in the way of this, love? Do you know how quickly he'd kill me?"

Sirius knew him well.

"Just don't get too far into dueling without a silencing spell," Sirius added before he and Hestia slipped away, and Lily returned his cheeky smile with a roll of her eyes.

They looked as if they'd always been friends, and good ones at that.

James knew he'd have to ask her about the day eventually, but he couldn't just then. Her eyes had gone back to Oliver, who had taken to padding James' pillow, and her expression went tender. It wasn't an identical look to the one she gave James, but something adjacent, a little more affectionate than longing.

As he watched Oliver, he knew that he would wake up with the cat on his face at some point. It didn't bother him as much as he might have thought.

Later in bed, he would finally ask her about her day, and she would tell him all of it. She would describe the perfectly fine coffee she'd had with Greg that had ended with him kissing her cheek and asking if he could see her in June, and would launch into the almost tense discussion she'd had with Moody right after. Apparently, she had put to him immediately the question of what to tell their friends, but he'd clearly expected it. Alice had tipped him off, although James wouldn't think of it that way. Alice had apparently gone in on him over it before Lily had arrived, just enough to get her point across without showing disrespect. Or much disrespect, at least.

"At one point, I guess Alice said to him, 'This is Order business, not work business, so you're not my boss right now, which means I can tell you what I think,'" Lily would tell him, looking more than a little impressed. "She said they came to terms shortly after that."

When James would try to imagine kind, round-faced Alice Prewett saying those words to the terrifying legend that was Alastor Moody, the imagine simply wouldn't form in his brain. It truly never would.

Dumbledore had okayed it in the end, and Moody could hardly sidestep that. He'd given express permission for Lily and James to tell their friends to tell their friends they liked each other ("or however you want to put it," Moody had amended, clearly uninterested in a clarification), but had decided to keep it quiet—silent—until further notice, in order to make their transition to the Auror Department easier. "Tell them it's been suggested, if you have to," he had added. "Just make sure they keep it to themselves."

He couldn't have made it more clear that he disagreed with Dumbledore's decision entirely, Lily would tell him.

Yet hearing the last bit, James would remember Dumbledore's similar instructions over Lily's trip to St. Mungo's. He would wonder if he meant to test their friends even then and see if one of them broke their confidence.

They had apparently passed at least a little.

For days afterwards, he and Lily would strategize about the best way to explain it all. They would speak in circles for hours late into the night, pausing only when one of them reached for the other, which admittedly happened a lot. They never would come up with a satisfying explanation. Eventually, Lily would voice the obvious, unspoken issue.

No answer they gave would satisfy their friends, because they could hardly tell them even a fraction of the truth.

But he put that issue off for Future James, who would have to confront it all on the train back to Hogwarts.

As Oliver's purrs filled the room, Present James pulled Lily back to kiss her, which made any and all thinking stop.

xxx

Looking back on the break later in life, James would appreciate just how much that Easter changed.

The two weeks split into two separate categories: Before Lily and After Lily. He would come to see life much the same.

He'd never felt he lacked anything in the years Before Lily, even though he wanted her badly. It was very much still just a want then, something optional that might improve life, but it wasn't a necessity.

In the times After Lily, she became the fourth necessity in his life aside from food, water, and oxygen—even before sleep, he would come to find. He came to truly need her, and he could point back to the moment she'd knocked on his bedroom door that Easter break and say with supreme confidence, "That's where life changed."

He'd never felt lacking before, but once he had her, he realized just how much he had lacked. The feeling would ebb and flow, always present but sometimes stronger than others. He felt it especially when he didn't have her, and he would feel it most strongly of all in the not-so-distant future, when he would spend months not having her.

But that was Future James' problem, and one Present James didn't even know existed.

In the meantime, he spent every possible waking moment following through with her earlier accusation, and tried to get into every set of clothes she wore.

He knew he probably annoyed his parents, Sirius, and Hestia with it all—his constant attempts to get her to flirt and laugh and banter; the way he could hardly keep his hands off her, even just to touch her hair or put an arm around her shoulders; his continuous efforts to get her alone as often and for as long as he could. He knew exactly how he looked: infatuated, besotted, a man obsessed, a total melt. Sirius called him all those things as break progressed, and more still. But he didn't care. He wanted to steal every last moment with her, because he knew how much it would change the second they got to King's Cross.

To her credit—and to nearly everyone's surprise, possibly even her own—Lily continued to reciprocate in kind, although not in intensity. Sirius' eyebrows became permanently fixed high in his forehead as he watched them together more and more, which gave James a certain extra sense of satisfaction. She didn't say much to show how she felt, but she showed it in her own way. She bantered with him endlessly, their words bouncing off each other, and sometimes she reached for him, or moved to kiss him, or played with hair, just little things that Hestia and Sirius had taken to doing all along. Yet it looked significant when Lily did it in a way James couldn't place, and stood out enough that Sirius clearly noticed too.

Eventually, James would realize that it all looked and felt absolutely mad because he had only ever chased her. Suddenly, things had become much more even, one no longer predator and one prey. Although he knew her feelings to be less intense than his own, after years of chasing her, her reciprocity of affection—let alone her initiation of affection—felt utterly unbelievable to James, and apparently to Sirius, whose amusement grew as he watched.

Hestia watched too, her expression much more inscrutable than Sirius'. She looked pleased by it all most of the time, her smile softer and smaller than Sirius' grin, but at others James caught her watching him almost too closely, as if she waited for something he couldn't place.

It clearly drove her insane that Lily refused to clarify things between them. He had the distinct feeling that something like that had never happened before in the history of their friendship.

But then things got considerably easier after Hestia and Sirius finally shagged.

"This is why I pushed at them," Lily whispered to James one evening. "Look how happy she is." Sirius had Hestia tucked under his arm, and she had him laughing about something, her head against his chest and her chin tipped up to look at him. They both looked quietly contented, as Lily sometimes looked at him. He had to assume he looked at her that way too—or worse. Most likely worse.

He had never seen such an expression on Sirius' face, but he had to wonder if Sirius thought the same when he looked at him.

"Unsurprised you two are worse about it," Sirius told him that Saturday when Hestia and Lily stepped out for a late lunch with her parents and they had a rare minute alone. "Like I said, I expected you to just hole up your room all break and only come out for food and water. It wasn't a joke, and I was seriously right. It's ridiculous."

Somehow, Sirius managed to make that sound like both a good and bad thing.

"I'm sure," James said, because he was. He felt the way things crackled between him and Lily, a hot, underlying current underscoring all their words and actions, and he knew other people must see it too. He had expected to want her if he ever got her, but he hadn't expected the constant all-consuming intensity of it all. "How much of a fool am I making of myself?"

"If acting like a lovesick melt were part of our NEWTs, you'd get an 'O,' no question." Sirius grinned. "Watching you two is insane, mate. You're obsessed. Your dad and I had a laughed over it the other night, the way you look at her when she smiles at you and how pleased you are when she laughs and how you're clearly always trying to take monopolize her attention. It's hilarious. What's more, you were so focused on her that you didn't even realize that we were taking the piss out of you. We weren't trying to hide it either. And she…" Sirius paused, pensive. "I didn't know she had all that in her," he said finally. "The shagging stuff, sure, because once you get past the perfect Head Girl act, she's clearly wild. But the rest? The hand holding and the cuddling and the messing with your hair? I didn't know she was capable of that. Don't know how you got that out of her, but good on you. You two make me and Hestia look like we're just mates in comparison."

In a way, they kind of did.

"You're not much better." It hardly bothered James to know that Sirius thought him obsessed. He wasn't exactly wrong. "I don't think I've ever seen you like a girl, Padfoot. It looks weird."

"Same to you."

"Yeah, well." James could hardly argue with that. "Do you want me to go in on you with questions about how the shagging is?"

Sirius returned his grin, all good humor. "That's not your style, Prongs, but go ahead. Try it out."

"What did you ask me? Something about if it was worth the headaches or wait? Was it?"

"Yeah. But she's not given me too many headaches, so that's an easy answer."

Shit. What else had Sirius asked him?

"Told you, it's not your style," Sirius said when he faltered. "Lily's way better at taking the piss this way. Your heart's never in this kind of thing."

He had a point.

"Hess isn't exactly coming to breakfast with red knees like Lily, but there aren't many like that, I reckon. Best hold onto her if you're smart." Sirius paused there, as if to underscore his point. "But it's good with Hess, the shagging and all the rest. I like her. She'll say it back now, that she likes me too, which is an improvement. I've just got to shove her that last bit over the line and get her to call herself my girlfriend. She won't do it just yet."

Sirius sounded casual, almost matter-of-fact, like he recited some sort of information from a textbook.

James knew he did so on purpose, and didn't buy it at all.

"Girlfriend?" he repeated, and Sirius shrugged.

"Yeah. Inevitable at this point, innit?"

"When have you ever actively sought a girlfriend?"

Sirius looked as though he gave the question real consideration. "Actively? Probably never. Seems like it just kind of happened before, because the girl pushed it there. I wish Hess had just a little more of that in her, although I don't mind her not rushing it."

"You don't mind it?"

It took a single glance at James' face for Sirius to comprehend the question. "Lily told you, then? What I said about getting frustrated there?"

Shit.

"It's fine, Prongs. Kind of figured she would, because I'm sure you two talk occasionally. Have to pass the time somehow until you can get it up again, don't you? Besides, if she chatted shit about you to me, I'd absolutely tell Hess, so it's fair." Although Sirius continued to grin, the way he ran his hand through his hair confirmed to James that he didn't feel quite as casual as he looked. "Yeah, it frustrates me. I get it. She's had a shit year after losing her mum, and it's made her question a lot. Makes sense. But it does get to me, yeah."

James hardly knew what to say.

"Lily's a bit better at this whole talking thing than you are," Sirius added after a beat. "Expect she's probably better than you at most things though, so I'm not exactly surprised."

"Sorry, mate. Sorry. Just…you never let on."

"Yeah, didn't really have a lot to say. Hadn't thought much on it, really. Lily kind of dragged it out of me. She's mad good at that. Terrifying, but good. You know that you'll never get one over on her, right? She doesn't miss a thing."

In the times Before Lily, to hear Sirius say such things about her in such a fond tone would have shocked James senseless. He'd acted friendly enough towards her at Hogwarts, but he'd never spoken of her as affectionately of her as he did then, and seemingly without pause. He made it look and sound as if he'd always thought such positive things of her, and he pulled it off with uncanny ease.

"A small price to pay," James told him, and Sirius snorted. "What's your plan? With Hestia?"

Sirius stretched. "Don't really have a plan. Keep at it, I suppose, because it's not like I'm about to like someone better, and things are fine the way they are. I'll probably harass Lily into giving me insider information, or at least try to. Need to exploit having her for a mate somehow, don't I? She has to be good for something."

But just from having watched them over the previous few days, James knew that Sirius already saw Lily's value. With the true establishment of their friendship, their personalities worked, suddenly and intensely. They had always bantered and joked, which hardly surprised James. They both struggled to hold down a serious conversation, after all, more eager to laugh than anything else, especially in tough situations. Yet at Hogwarts they had never really sought each other out, at least not outside of an occasional chess match, which meant that it looked utterly bizarre that they had started to actively want to hang around each other. For the first day or so, Sirius had done it out of obligation, James thought, because he had continued to watch Lily's newfound intimacy with James with an expression that sometimes bordered on the same guilt he had expressed the night he'd helped get them together. He clearly set out to make it up to them—to make it up to James, really—and he had done so by putting in more effort with Lily than James realized he ever had with Hestia.

But then they just clicked, and Sirius clearly no longer acted out of obligation. He genuinely enjoyed her company.

"Do you feel a little like third and fourth wheels?" Hestia had asked him the evening before, watching Sirius and Lily play chess, but she had smiled when she said it. And James understood what she meant without question, because she had put words to a little of the way he had felt, watching Sirius and Lily laugh and joke and take the piss out of each other with the sort of ease that he had only achieved with her in recent days, and only after months of effort.

With Lily and Sirius, it just seemed to come naturally.

"Well, of course," Lily had told him that night when he'd gotten her to bed rather later than he would have liked. She'd run her fingers across his chest mindlessly, smiling. "There's no chance of us ever shagging, which makes things immediately so much easier. There's no awkward limbo stage of trying to figure out if that's something you want or the other person wants or you both want. It's clearly established that we're mates and that's all we'll ever be, so there's no tension of any sort, outside of the tension where I sometimes still want to strangle him."

As James recounted that conversation to Sirius, Sirius threw his head back and laughed. "Bless her. At least she's to the point sometimes, isn't she? Although I wouldn't write it off just yet, Prongs. When she wises up and sacks you off, I might still try to—"

He ducked the quaffle James chucked at his head, but only just.

"Are you going to tell Hestia that?" he asked as Sirius continued to laugh.

"No, but you're welcome to. Go for it when she gets home."

Really, James had half a mind to take him up on it.

But when the girls did return, the potential for revenge left James' mind entirely. From his broom high up in the Quidditch field, he could see where they materialized as they Apparated in, and gestured to Sirius for him to look too. He expected to watch them walk immediately towards the house, but instead they stood where they'd landed. Even from across the yard and in the air, James could see the furious movements in Lily's arms as she presumably spoke, although he couldn't even make out a bit of her facial expression. He knew those gestures a little too well, and even though she hadn't looked that way towards him in months, it still gave him a shot of anxiety.

"She's not going in on Hess, because Hess would be giving it back," Sirius said when James flew to his side. "And you'd know if Hess was. It's a lot less motion and a lot more pointing, but it's still pretty obvious."

It said a lot that Sirius had only truly spoken to Hestia for three months, and had never set out to annoy or harass her, but already knew her shouting style.

But he was right, because just as they landed and approached, Hestia pulled Lily in to hug her. Best friends or not, James doubted Hestia was stupid enough to try something like that if Lily had yelled at her rather than…around her, presumably.

"Her sister is a real bitch, and that's all there is to say about it," Hestia said when she saw them. Her face looked stormier than James had ever seen it, eyebrows a sharp line across her face and mouth severely thin, and she passed a single hand over Lily's hair repeatedly, like they had all taken to stroking Oliver. She waved the other hand sharply, beckoning them away, and James found himself wanting to listen to her without even understanding why. "Go. Go on. Let me—"

"It's fine, Hessie." Lily pulled her face from Hestia's shoulder and her body from her arms, although not without considerable effort. Hestia clearly meant to keep her there. Despite her words, she looked less fine than James could remember seeing in recent days—not after Moody's ambushing at the Ministry, not after returning from coffee with Greg, not after a "slightly awkward but overall fine" lunch with Emmaline Vance two days before. (The latter had bothered her the most vocally, because she felt like Emmaline was passing judgment upon her, and she had no idea how she'd done, a horrible feeling for such a perfectionist and dedicated student.) Her face had completely drained of color, not red at all as James had come to expect to see under anger or sadness or stress. He couldn't remember ever seeing her look quite like it. "I'm more mad at Mum for setting it up so we'd both be there when neither of us knew, but—that's her way," she added, speaking solely to Hestia. The way that she flexed and then curled her fingers into brief fists said everything there was to say about her thoughts on her mum's way. "I know she just wants us to get along, and Petunia never really means it, I don't—"

"Stop justifying it." Hestia's voice made James flinch, and he saw Sirius do the same, although Lily didn't even look surprised. It looked as if Hestia had said it to her many, many times before.

"I'm done." Lily ran both her hands through her hair. She hadn't looked anywhere near him, James noticed, or Sirius either, but had kept her eyes trained on the house. "I'm going to go have a bath and a cry, and then—"

"Come play chess with me."

Even Sirius looked surprised after the words had left his mouth.

Lily looked at him then, and offered a strange half-smile. "I don't need your pity."

Pride. The strange half-smile meant to cover up the very real way that he had piqued her pride at the suggestion.

"Actually, kind of hoping you'll pity me," Sirius replied easily. "James is hardly a worthy opponent—you know that, you've seen him play—and I like Hess too much to want to beat her too badly. But you? You're decent at chess, and I like you okay but not a ton, so you put up a pretty good fight but I never feel bad for beating you. C'mon. You owe it to me after last night, because I know you let me win."

James recognized the stubborn set to Lily's jaw before Sirius had even finished speaking.

"No, Sirius, I really just want a bath. I can't—"

Sirius didn't hesitate. He pushed his broom towards James and went to tug Lily away from Hestia, who looked surprised enough to let her go. "Chess first, then go jerk yourself off in the bath to make yourself feel better or whatever it is you plan to do," he said, looping an arm around her shoulders. She smiled genuinely, if with exasperation, and he grinned as if he'd managed to drag the world's biggest belly laugh from her. "Is that not what you plan to do? Well, whatever. You don't have to tell me about your sister, but I'll tell you all about Regulus, if you'd like," he continued as he led her away, and absurdly, she went with him. "You're doing me a favor, really, because the lads are sick of hearing about what a gigantic fucking waste of space he is, and I still have several lifetime's worth of complaining I need to…" His voice drifted away as they walked out of earshot.

Well, damn.

What had even happened?

"She would have never let me do that," James said, rounding on Hestia almost as if it were her fault.

Hestia stared after Lily and Sirius' retreating forms, her lips slightly parted, and watched the way Sirius opened the front door and then pushed Lily through, eliciting a laugh they could only just hear. "Marlene could do that," she said after a moment. "Easily. She's very good. Lily does it for her too. I'm the serious one who gets the serious talks, not the joker who gets to do he pick-me-ups." She managed to sound only mildly put out over it.

"One of the first things Sirius ever told me he liked about you was that you make him laugh." James didn't know where the words had come from before he'd said them, and didn't even know after, really. Yet he'd apparently said the right thing entirely, because Hestia's eyebrows unknitted. She looked much more herself when she glanced up at him.

Well, at least he could talk one woman down.

There really was something to Lily's whole we're-never-going-to-shag explanation. It certainly did make things easier.

"Thank you," she said simply, and although she didn't specify what for, she didn't have to.

"Quidditch?"

She took Sirius' discarded broom from his hand, but set out walking back to the pitch rather than flying. "Did you ever wish you had a sibling?" she asked, and James fell into step beside her.

"I used to want a brother sometimes, yeah. I thought it would have been nice to have someone to hang out with before Hogwarts."

"I wanted a sister. Then I met Lily's sister. Now I'm glad it's just me."

"What happened today?"

Hestia sighed. It looked like she exhaled a significant amount of stress, and as that dropped away, she just looked tired. "Their mum invited them both over today—and me too—but didn't tell Lily that Petunia would be there, or vice versa. I think Lily's right and her mum does mean well, but…intentions mean nothing. Actions mean everything. And that was a really stupid action, well-intended or not. She and Petunia fought. They always do. There's a reason Lily wouldn't go home for Christmas, because she and Petunia have done their best to just avoid each other since Petunia moved out, but their mum…wants them to get along." Everything about the way she said the last five words made it clear how absolutely stupid she thought that sentiment. "I hope she learned from today, but I'm sure she'll have forgotten come summer, and we'll get to go through this again."

It was the most Hestia had ever told him about Lily—her life, her thoughts, her feelings, any of it.

That ended quickly, of course.

"What did they fight about?" he asked, and her expression closed suddenly, like the slamming of a door.

"You'll have to ask her."

An uneasy silence fell.

"Does Marlene fight with her brother?" he asked after a long pause, because he could hardly think of anything else to say in that moment.

Somehow, the question landed softly, and when Hestia smiled, it looked like she had gotten past a moment she clearly saw as too invasive.

"Yes, but it's different. Or at least it was. He's not been back in England for ages. But they used to drive each other mad mutually, and it was never meant to actually hurt the other…well, except for when Marlene actually tried to physically hurt him. He always laughed that off." She paused, and her voice took on something slightly wistful, and altogether sad. "I wouldn't have minded a brother like Charlie. But a brother like Regulus, or a sister like Petunia? I'll take the only child role over that, even if it's lonely sometimes. I never thought much on it until Mum died, because I always had her and that was enough, but after…it's very lonely."

For a moment, she looked entirely like Lily when Lily thought she'd said too much or spoken too openly, as if she'd put a piece of herself on display that she hadn't set out to reveal. Something in Hestia's expression froze entirely, and then she gave herself a little shake, mounted her broom, and took off wordlessly.

James watched her fly away with a very real sense of relief, followed by guilt. He hadn't known what he would have said in return if she had stayed.

Sirius had taken on Lily's problem seemingly without a second thought. Why couldn't he do the same for Hestia?

But Sirius understood Lily's problem, and apparently understood her, and James understood neither of those things about Hestia.

Still, he needed to do better. Or at least needed to try to do better.

Over the course of an hour, he came to understand that he probably couldn't have conjured anything to say that would have served Hestia better than flying in that moment.

So at least he understood one thing.

Her expression opened back up the more they tried to score on each other. When she made it past him into the hoop for the first time, he could hear her laughter even after he dove after the descending quaffle, and, to his surprise, he found that hearing it made him laugh as well. She sounded so entirely joyful that he felt himself react in kind, and she looked entirely joyful too, he saw when he flew back up. She looked herself again, sweet and pretty and smiling, and it relieved him more than he thought it would have.

They might not have Sirius and Lily's ease, but he did care about Hestia, without question.

"I know you said it's early days, but…I'd like you to be his girlfriend," he told her after they'd called it a day and landed. Her cheeks were even pinker than usual from wind. "I can't imagine he could date a lot of girls who would play Quidditch with me, and also be halfway decent at it."

She smiled. "'Halfway decent.' Thank you. That's kind." Somehow, she managed to make her words sound entirely genuine, even though he knew they weren't. "Lots of girls will play Quidditch, you know. Just because you've never really considered a girl outside Lily and she won't play doesn't mean that every girl is the same."

She managed to make that sound entirely genuine as well, even though he caught the way her eyes flashed when she smiled at him, all gentle teasing.

He returned her smile. "But someone who also keeps him in line, overlooks it when he's an idiot, and puts up with me and Remus and Pete? That's rare."

"Lots of girls would put up with Remus and Peter. You're the hard sell there."

He laughed at that longer than he should have, probably, but he'd always found it funnier when Remus or Peter took the piss out of him than when Sirius did. The uncharacteristic nature of it all made things entirely more humorous. It felt almost like that just then.

Then again, how much did he really know about Hestia's character? She might not put on a front like Lily so often did, but she hid herself all the same, buried under several layers of quiet shyness. That Sirius had gotten underneath those layers at all was truly an impressive feat.

He'd take Lily's fire and chaos and danger, even when navigating a minefield of her careful veneers and well-acted moods, over that sort of shyness any day.

Those thoughts only increased as they approached the library and he heard her laughter well before he saw her, mingled with Sirius'.

They'd halted halfway through a chess match, and Sirius spoke emphatically with his hands, clearly in the middle of a story, even as his wild gestures threatened to spill the contents of the glass he held. Lily held an identical glass in her own hand, and the other rested against the broad side of Oliver's furry body, as he'd stretched out across her lap. Even though given the run of the entire house, he still seemed most content curled up in someone's lap, preferably hers.

"I can't believe you abandoned Peter," she said. Much like Hestia, she had returned to her usual self, her face joyful, and genuinely so. Her smile reached her eyes.

"We didn't abandon him," Sirius insisted. "There was just no way all four of us were getting out of there without getting caught. Someone had to fall on their wand for the cause. James and I were already overwhelmed with detention, and prefect Remus? We couldn't exactly get him in trouble more than we already did, although he did take the fall sometimes. Good man."

"I'm sure Filch knew you were involved."

"Oh, he did, to hear Pete tell it. He worked real hard to try to get Pete to admit we were there, but he didn't sell us out." Sirius had never sounded prouder. "Loved greeting Filch the next morning. He was furious. But it's not like I expect you to understand. You're such a fucking swot, you could never—"

"Could I? Yes. Would I? No. We're not at Hogwarts to raise hell, you know."

"What, that's what summers are for?"

"Now you're getting it."

Hestia had paused in the doorway alongside James. Watching the scene and the way Sirius and Lily bounced off each other, her expression softened, not unlike the way Lily's did when looked at Oliver. "Yeah, like Mar," she said quietly under her breath. "Well, at least she's better."

And Lily was better. For the rest of the evening, she acted entirely herself.

"I didn't really do much," Sirius admitted when James pulled him aside after dinner to demand a thorough walkthrough of how on earth he'd managed to get her back to herself. He very much intended to take notes. "Played chess—she beat me, no surprise, which makes me think that she has been letting me win—and then I talked her into having a drink while we played the next game. I had her laughing good by then, and she got more herself pretty quick." He paused. "I only said a little about Reg, not much at all, and we didn't even talk about her sister. Seemed like she just wanted to forget about it."

Yes, that absolutely sounded like Lily. He gotten the measure of her entirely, at least as James knew her.

She even looked reluctant to get into it later that night, after they'd settled into bed to rest in the contented post-shag moments he so loved. It didn't surprise him that she didn't want to talk about it, really, although he couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.

Even with the strides they had made, she still held so much back.

"It's complicated," she said when he'd asked the first gentle, prompting question. "It really is, so I'm not just saying that. It's not easy to explain."

He ran his hand along her back and waited for her to go on, but she didn't, of course.

"We have time," he pointed out. "I'm sure you can tell it all before I can get hard again, but we can try to make it a competition, if you want."

She smiled, as he'd intended. "Stop," she said, although without real force, which she backed up by the gentleness of her fingers in his hair. "I could tell you before then," she agreed, and her smile faded. "But I'd rather not. It's just…it's too hard. I don't have it in me to rip that scab off again. Petunia already opened that wound today. I need to let it heal a little."

"You're avoiding thinking about it." After the words left his mouth, he wondered how smart they were to say.

But she didn't look upset by such an accusation. She shrugged a single shoulder, and he moved his hand there to trace the freckles that showed just barely in the lamp light. "Of course I am. It's easier than the alternative."

"What's the alternative?"

"Realizing I've lost her for good."

Without a clue as to how to respond, he fell silent, and she let him.

After a long while, she opened her eyes. Something in them looked wary, perhaps aided by the slight worried slant of her eyebrows. "I told you Greg and I broke up poorly," she said, and if she meant to knock him off kilter, she did entirely.

What?

"What?" he asked, echoing the only word in his head. "What does that have to do with your sister?"

"Nothing. It's entirely separate. But…" As she hesitated, she rolled onto her side with her back towards him and closed the gap between their bodies. He slid an arm around her without really thinking about it, and his mouth had already gone to press a kiss at the junction of her neck and shoulder when he realized how weird her move was.

Had she ever initiated him holding her? Usually after sex she moved decidedly to her side of the bed. If he wanted to touch her or hold her—and he always did—he had to bridge the gap and join her where she lay.

"Before you ever ask, I don't want to talk about that either." She stroked his forearm with fingers so light that it almost tickled. "I doubt that that's fair. I'm pretty sure that it's not. But…there are some things I just can't get into, not in detail. Not yet. Maybe ever. I don't know. It's like that, with Petunia and Greg both, and I don't talk about those difficult things with Hestia and Marlene either, if that makes it any better. I have to sometimes, when they're there for those times like Hestia was today, but otherwise…I just don't."

"Why?" It seemed as safe a question as any reaction.

"There are just parts of me that are only mine."

She made it sound entirely reasonable and understandable, and maybe it was.

Then again, he knew she probably could have convinced him of just about anything if she'd tried hard enough.

"Are they only the parts that hurt?"

He could hear her smile. "Yes. It really was easier when you understood me less."

Maybe for her, but he found her nearly as infuriating, because still he clearly didn't understand her at all.

Nearly as infuriating. He found it much harder to get mad at her when breathing in the warm skin of her neck, which may very well have been her reason for having him hold her.

"What about not in detail?" he asked. "What about just generally?"

She thought it over, and so deeply that he almost thought he could hear the wheels of her constantly-moving brain kick into overdrive. "Yeah, alright," she agreed eventually. Her hand stilled on his arm. "Petunia has resented me for my magic since I found out that that's what made me…the way I am. It's only gotten worse over time. I still love her very much. I hope she loves me too, but it doesn't seem like it if she does." Her words had come out clipped and devoid of emotion, each one purposeful and carefully selected. "And while Greg was lovely to me while we were together, he said some very hurtful things when we broke up. A lot of them. Very hurtful. He felt bad almost immediately, but you can't take back words. I'm not mad at him or upset anymore. I honestly just feel neutral about it all and him, and when I'm around him, I don't even really think about what he said. I don't see him as that person, because it's easier not to, so I've put it behind me and have only focused on the good there, because there was a lot. It fucked me up for a while, but I got over it. All the same, I'd rather never have to think about it again, because I don't want to get back to that fucked up place, and talking about it means thinking about it. Can we leave it at that?"

She sounded so desperate by the end of it that he could hardly tell her no.

"Yeah. That's fine." Even as he said it, he didn't know if he meant it. She relaxed against him, even though he hadn't noticed that she'd tensed. "Frank didn't mention anything about that when he told me about you and Gimble."

"He doesn't know. Neither does Alice. I wasn't about to potentially wreck Greg's friendships on top of dumping him. I have some heart."

What the fuck had Greg said that could have wrecked his friendships?

"Only Hestia and Marlene know that it went as badly as it did, and they had to know," she went on. "We shared a dorm. I couldn't exactly hide how it made me feel in private, although I acted my way through it otherwise." She paused, and emotion crept back into her voice. "Please, please don't say anything to Frank. If it all came out at this point, I know he and Alice would just feel terrible for having any part in me seeing Greg again, even worse than they already do, and I don't want that. It's too late now to ever say anything, and I'm fine with that. I'd make the same choice again."

James had a lot of adjectives he could use to describe Lily Evans—passionate, stubborn, caring, controlling, empathetic—but over the years, forgiving would come to top that list.

Sometimes too forgiving, perhaps.

"Did you talk about it when you saw him Tuesday?"

She hesitated again, and rolled away from him as abruptly as she had rolled into him in the first place. She didn't move far, just to her other side so she could face him, and she gave him a swift, searching look that sent him abruptly back in time to a week ago exactly, when she'd shown up at his door late at night. He hadn't seen that look since, and he hadn't missed it.

He couldn't help but think that it hardly boded well that she looked at him that way again only when discussing Greg.

"Kind of," she said shortly. He thought he might have to push her to continue, but she sighed heavily and went on without prompting. That seemed like a good sign, at least, no matter how guarded her tone. "He apologized again. He did the same when we ran into each other last summer. I heard him out then and told him that I'd gotten past it, because I had. It meant I could at least stop him from going on about it again this week, because I'd already listened once. He didn't push it."

Did he imagine the subtext in her voice, which seemed to say, so you shouldn't push it either?

"What else did you talk about?" he asked instead of continuing at the line of questioning he really wanted, which boiled down to what the fuck had he said when they broke up?

Still, he wanted the answer to the question he'd asked as well. After returning home Tuesday, she hadn't told him much, after all. She had focused more on her conversation with Moody and her talk with Alice afterwards than she had her coffee with Greg, and he didn't doubt she did so by design. She didn't go into detail about her time with Greg, but when he asked specifics, she would answer.

No, Greg hadn't said anything too soppy.

No, he hadn't tried to put it on her.

Yes, he'd acted nothing less than absolutely respectful.

The latter had surprised him the least, although given the new information he'd just acquired, maybe it should have surprised him the most.

"Nothing, really. What?" For the first time, she looked a little annoyed. "I didn't take notes. We just chatted. I wanted to play it super low key, so I didn't ask him much about work at all, just general things. I did ask how he liked working there what he thought of Mulciber, because I doubted he'd question it since we met, but nothing huge. I told you that."

She had. Greg apparently liked working in Transportation and liked Mulciber about the same amount, meaning quite a lot. He'd added that after he'd returned to the department from bringing Lily down to the canteen the day they'd gone to the Ministry, Mulciber had commented that Greg had been an idiot to let her get away, because he'd found her charming. Lily had sworn that was the most forward thing Greg had said to her throughout their coffee, aside from asking to see her in June.

Somehow, just knowing Mucliber's slimy, dirtbag son, James doubted he'd put it in quite those words.

"What else?" he pressed, even though he didn't want to. He could see the line between her eyebrows growing and knew he pushed his luck, but he couldn't help it. The need to know burned hot and sick in his stomach, just as it always had with Morton—worse, maybe. "I know you didn't take notes, although I doubt he would have batted an eye. Eager student, aren't you?" She nearly smiled. "Just tell me what you do remember. I want to know the general things too, not just the Order stuff. It's hard, Lily," he added when she didn't reply, and he felt his own frustration growing. "I don't even know what you were like with him. I spent so much of fifth year pretending you weren't dating him that I tried not to notice anything between you. I know you said you haven't had anything like what we have, but I have no idea how you were with him, and that changes what it's like when you're around him now, doesn't it?"

He told the truth. Well, most of the truth.

Even though he'd done his best not to notice fifth year, he had noticed, of course. After the first time he'd spied them in the Three Broomsticks together, Lily and Greg seemed almost always in his eyeline—in the corridors, in the common room, in the Great Hall, on the grounds.

That came from the fact that he'd always looked for her, of course.

But still.

He'd noticed the way that Greg acted particularly fond of her hair, because he'd seemed to always have a hand in it—brushing it away to whisper something in her ear or pushing it back from her face or even just running his fingers through it absently. James had noticed, of course, because he'd wanted to do all those things to her countless times, but knew he'd lose a hand to a severing charm if he tried—maybe both, really. Even if he had touched her with only hand, he had to assume she would have taken the other too, so he couldn't ever try it again.

He'd noticed the ease with which Greg tucked her under his arm in the common room, and how Lily's face had flushed the first two dozen or so times he'd seen it happen. She apparently had gotten used to it fairly quickly, because she'd stopped going quite so pink. On the other hand, he'd never gotten used to the sight of them sitting like that.

He'd noticed the way Lily got Greg to laugh, and how it had looked as if she'd loved doing so. She'd looked all brilliance and charm and beauty even from across the common room, her hands constantly gesturing as she spoke, and Greg had typically watched her with a fondness James thought stupid, although entirely understandable.

And he'd of course noticed when they had started leaving the common room together in the evenings, or returning together, and the way Greg had looked at her in the way that Sirius had taken to looking at Hestia, or James knew that he looked at Lily—quietly, wholly contented. He'd tried not to dwell on it, but he absolutely had, and often obsessively if he saw the scene play out too many days in a row.

He'd suspected then what he'd discovered firsthand by Easter: that the moments in the aftermath of shagging her felt more peaceful than anything else he'd ever experienced.

That peace had showed all over Greg's stupid face.

During fifth year he'd probably fantasized about her more than any other, because he'd shagged Annette that Christmas and he had to assume she'd probably done the same with Greg at some point. That meant he could imagine more fully what it might feel like to experience that with her, and to know that the likelihood of it happening had increased just a little, perhaps 1%, because he knew her at least amenable to the idea of shagging someone. even though he'd visibly repelled her at the time. Any increase in likelihood had felt like a win.

"We weren't like this," she told him firmly. He didn't even know what she meant by this, although he also knew that he'd done that to himself. After all, he hadn't exactly told her what he'd meant by it when he'd told her he hadn't ever had anything like what they had together, and she based her statement off that. "We were fine. It was easy. I was happy, but it wasn't there between us, not like I wanted it to be, although I had hoped at times that it would get there. It never did, at least not for me. Marlene called him a 'training broom boyfriend' after we broke up, and it sounds horrible, but she was honestly right. It would have ended after he'd graduated if I hadn't broken things off first, because—well, the fit was never right for me. I didn't know enough about lads to see that until we'd been together a while. I learned lads after him, and it's helped me understand what it is that I want out of someone. It was never going to be him."

It should have mollified him completely, but it didn't.

"So what did you talk about?"

He wasn't even sure why it mattered so much, other than what he'd always thought of her and Morton: if he knew for certain what had gone on, at least he'd know his imagination hadn't blown things out of proportion.

She sighed again and rolled onto her back, as if restless. She very rarely laid that way, and he tried to ignore the rare view it supplied him of the soft slope of her breasts and the flat length of her stomach, which disappeared just below her navel into the sheet he very much wanted to pull away from her in that moment.

It felt a little like fifth year all over again, because he half expected that she might reach for her wand and threaten him if he did.

To no surprise at all, he found he didn't entirely mind the thought.

"I honestly don't even know. I wasn't paying that much attention, because—well, I know how a conversation with him works, so I could manage it easily without thinking. I also couldn't even really think that much, because I felt so nervous and guilty and downright rotten about it all." She threw an arm up above her head, and he tried to ignore the way it altered the shape of her breast. "I know we talked about his family. His mum is a muggle, so we got on well when I spent part of Christmas at theirs, and his brother and I had a laugh then too, so I asked after him. We talked about his friends and mine and what they've been up to. I told him about wanting to be an Auror, and he told me what I've already told you about his job. Other than that, I don't really remember. Would you like me to pay super close attention next time so I can give you a play-by-play of each sentence?"

She sounded as if she only half-joked, and really, that made the tightness in James' chest loosen just slightly. That imparted that she meant it at least half, and took his concerns seriously, if with frustration.

"Honestly? Kind of."

"Then I will."

As easy as that, it seemed.

It made his head spin.

He stared at her. "Seriously?"

"Yes, if that's what you want. I don't think it'll do you—or us—any good, but if it's what you want, I'll pay close attention and tell you everything we talk about."

Something about that broke him a little. Any potential at true anger, or even irritation, melted away.

He gave in and reached out to touch her, running a hand down her side, and she turned her head to look at him. Her eyes had gone soft again, and something about the twist of her mouth looked almost apologetic.

"I'm not mad at you for asking," she told him. "I'm mad at the situation, and telling you every last detail doesn't seem healthy to me. I'd rather we come to some sort of middle ground where you get the big picture but I don't have to tell you every word he said about his mum or brother or mates, but if you want me to tell you every last detail come June, I will—at least as long as you act reasonably about it."

Yeah, she'd made his head spin.

Would she ever stop surprising him?

He inched closer to her to kiss the light freckles on her shoulders, and she fidgeted just a little when his fingers brushed the spot on her side that always made her jump. It felt like he pushed his luck even further then, and even more when he shifted the sheet off of her so he could continue his hand's path down her side and over the slope of her hip.

"I don't have anything to say," he told her, because he really didn't. She'd floored him nearly fully, and the softness of her skin had only silenced him further.

"A rare blessing." Her smile was small, but she smiled nonetheless. "Can I roll over?"

"No."

Absurdly, she listened.

"We'll figure it out." As he spoke, he traced the line of her hip bone and couldn't help but grin when she twisted in the way he very much liked, and then smacked sharply at his hand. "In June. We'll figure out what works."

He heard the confidence in his voice, and very much wanted to believe himself.

Did she believe him?

He couldn't tell. She nodded a little, but didn't look at him. Her eyes had gone back to the ceiling.

"And I really think you'll be great at it."

He'd thought it several times over the past week, but never knew if he should say it. He'd certainly never wanted to bring it up if he didn't have to, because ignoring the entire situation was undeniably easier than trying to make sense of it all. After all, how often could they talk about it when nothing would happen until June? What was the point to obsessing over it, at least verbally? He obsessed in his mind, of course, but he wasn't about to waste his break with her by treading over the same miserable ground instead of flirting with her or holding her or snogging her or trying to get into every set of clothes she wore.

The whole situation might have ruined his immediate future with her, but he wasn't about to let it ruin everything.

She laughed a little bit under her breath, and he couldn't tell if she did so with humor or humorlessly. It sounded torn somewhere in between. "I mean, we'll see, won't we?" she asked rhetorically. "Greg's one thing. I understand how he works. But since it's not really about him, that makes it more difficult."

The rest of her thoughts spilled from her lips so suddenly that James knew she hadn't planned them. At any other time, seeing her speak without thinking would have shocked him back into silence. But she spoke more freely at night, as he knew he did too, and he could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she spoke, her eyes still on the ceiling and somehow far away.

"Moody has a whole list of things he wants to know—how they regulate Apparation and if they can track it and how they communicate and how they keep tabs on the Floo network and on and on."

She'd already told him as much after she'd gotten home Tuesday, but he didn't mind hearing it again. That she wanted to share things with him—and so much that she told him twice—was a luxury he'd once only dreamed of.

"Greg knows the answers to some of that, but not all. Moody's hoping if I'm in their department enough, I'll manage to swing it without acting like I'm hunting for information. He's right, I suppose, because it did work last week, and right away too. Mulciber brought me to the Floo network map without a second thought." She pushed a hand through her hair. "I keep thinking back on it, and I don't think he's a hard man to read, Mulciber, at least on surface level. Who knows what's deeper in there. I'd rather not find out. But the minute I started asking questions and acting like he knew so much more than me, he loved it. It goes to superiority, I suppose—he thinks he's superior because I'm muggleborn and further superior because he knew so much more, and he loves that. I'd imagine most Death Eaters do, because isn't that what blood status hierarchy is all about? Superiority?"

Put quite simply, yes. He nodded, but she didn't see him as she kept talking.

"He'll want me to act deferential and interested in everything he has to say, because it just confirms all that nonsense in his mind, but he also doesn't want too much deference. He loved watching me tease Greg. Those things together were what had him take me around—the interest and the attention, and the jokes and banter. If I'm up there enough, Moody hopes I'll learn how the department works, but also see who Mulciber talks to the most and who comes and goes, or get Greg to tell me those things by asking the right questions, because he's convinced there are Death Eaters in other departments who are working in tandem with Mulciber. And… I can probably do that, get the information from him and Greg and hang around and make it look casual and all that. I won't like it, but I can do it. Men are just grown lads, after all, and I understand lads. There's a method to the way they work."

Everything about her tone reminded James of the way she spoke to Remus when explaining healing spells, or to Peter when she walked him through the difficult parts of Charms. It sounded like a subject she knew and knew well, as if she'd studied the method for ages and could ace a NEWT on it without pause.

She'd told him almost all of that before, little snatches dropped here and there in conversations on Tuesday and since, but he'd never heard her put it all together—what she meant to do, what she thought of Mulciber, how she planned to make it work, and how it in fact was work, because she knew how to play it.

He'd already known that she got him to do just about anything she wanted in bed, and had the feeling she did outside of bed too, although if so, she usually worked in ways too subtle for him to consciously recognize. Yet to hear her break down precisely what she had gotten out of a brief meeting with someone she didn't even know very well, but clearly had somehow figured out nonetheless—

Fuck, how much did she understand about him?

Suddenly, he almost feared her.

At the same time, he kind of liked it.

Merlin, he was fucked.

"What?" she asked, and he realized she'd turned to look at his face, something he'd missed entirely, his eyes trained on the repeated path of his hand down her side and over her hip. "What's that look?"

He kissed her, both because he wanted to (unsurprisingly—he very much always wanted to kiss her), and because it meant he didn't have to answer right away.

"You're scary good at everything you do," he told her eventually, after his hand had gone to tangle in her hair. She moved as if to turn her body towards him, but he pushed her rising shoulder back down, and she let him. "Stay. I'm admiring you."

More than that, he was loving her—terrifying brilliance and careful calculations and all. She had stunned him yet again, and left him feeling tender towards her all over again, because if she understood men as much as she seemed to, and she'd still chosen him—

Well, he couldn't imagine anything touching his ego, or his heart, more than that.

"I can see that," she said, and she didn't sound exactly pleased. Her face had taken on that strange, bashful look that made him somehow want her more. "How long do you expect to continue?"

He knew she meant in the moment, but he answered as honestly as he could.

"Literally for as long as you keep me around."

Her smile looked somehow gentle. "I'm going to end up hexing you."

"I honestly can't wait."

He meant it too.