Previously in the Darklyverse: James hatched a plan to take action against Voldemort in the war (CH25), the truth about Emmeline and Sirius's fourth-year falling-out unfolded (CH25), Lily and Severus maintained a months-long silence following an explosive confrontation (CH13), and Lily and James shared a long-overdue kiss (CH24).

xx

February 13th, 1977: Lily Evans

Valentine's Day is fewer than twelve hours away, and Lily can't seem to escape James. As the Gryffindor sixth years are finishing lunch and leaving the Great Hall, he holds her back, asking with a tone of urgency, "Hey, Lily, can I run something by you? We can maybe take a walk around the grounds or something…?"

"James, it's February; it's freezing out," she reminds him, swinging her legs over the bench at the Gryffindor table.

He glances around and grins sheepishly, acknowledging the wind rattling the windows and the snow that seems to drift lazily through the enchanted ceiling towards them. "Just—come with me? It's about—well, it's important."

"All right," she says with a hint of suspicion, praying to god that it really is something important. She's managed to dodge all of his numerous attempts to corner her about Christmas so far in the last two months, but her luck is running thin enough that Lily doesn't trust it to protect her much longer. With James, she lags behind the larger group headed for Gryffindor Tower, following him as he takes a left turn past the staircase. "This wouldn't happen to have anything to do with Emmeline, would it? Marlene said she had some sort of a fight with Sirius, and none of us have seen her since—"

"Emmeline?" James echoes with a frown. "No, I haven't talked to her in a while, actually—although I can ask Padfoot about it, if you—"

"Oh, no, that's all right, I'll just look around for her once you've told me—whatever you wanted to tell me about," says Lily hastily.

He raises an eyebrow but doesn't push the issue. "It's—well, it's about the war," he says, lowering his voice. Knowing this, she lets out a breath and relaxes a bit as he goes on, "I was talking to Sirius about it after the game yesterday—the usual row; you know how aggravating it gets, especially for him."

Telling the others about the France fiasco brought the threat of Voldemort to the forefront of everyone's mind, and like Sirius, Lily has become well acquainted with the feeling of pervading hopelessness that it causes. Nodding, she sympathizes, "I know, but what else is there to be done? We've all agreed, there's not a lot we can contribute on our own. We're not even supposed to know about Dumbledore's group, and there's no way he would let us join him while we're still in school."

"But maybe we don't have to join up with Dumbledore to help. Maybe we don't have to fight directly in order to do something about it," says James excitedly.

"I—I'm sorry; I don't follow you."

"Think about it. Remember what we were talking about last fall, about how Voldemort's only support is coming from stuffy old pureblood families and the only shot in hell we have at winning the war is if we get young blood involved?" he says, struggling to keep his voice down and picking up the pace of their walk; she practically has to jog to keep up. Lily nods again. "We can't exactly go to battle with the Death Eaters without some kind of higher organization sending us on missions or giving us direction, but the one thing we can do while we're in school that no one else can, not even Dumbledore, is get in touch with other students, find out who's likely to fight for and against You-Know-Who—and try to convert whoever is neutral, or even some of his supporters, to our side.

"Think about it!" he says again. "Professors can probably peg some of the Slytherins as future Death Eaters and some of the more outspoken ones, like us, as allies, but eighty-five percent of the time, the students do a pretty good job of acting pretty neutral or hiding their allegiances from the staff—and I'll bet you right now that most of the people in this school who don't want You-Know-Who to gain power probably aren't planning on doing anything to stop him, no matter what the teachers tell them they can or should be doing after graduation. People are shaped by their peers, Lily—being surrounded by other teenage witches and wizards gives us a double advantage; we can try and change some of the younger kids' mindsets about blood purity and recruit the older ones to get off their arses and do something about it once they're out of school."

Starting to smile, Lily agrees, "It makes sense—but how do you think we should go about getting in touch with people about it? We don't really have a convenient platform for—"

"We'll figure it out, I'm sure of it. I figured we could hash out the details with everyone tonight, but I just wanted to run it by you first, see what you think."

"Well, if we can get it to work, I think it's brilliant," she says sincerely. "We'll definitely brainstorm more with everyone there tonight, all right? If that's everything, then, I really was hoping to find Emmeline and—"

"Lily, wait—"

"What?" she says, more snappishly than intended.

The look he gives her in response almost makes her regret avoiding him—almost. "I just—if you're looking for Emmeline, you might want to check for her in the Owlery."

"In the—what would she be doing in the Owlery? How would you even know—?" But James just gives her an embarrassed little wave and walks off, rumpling his hair as he goes. Momentarily, Lily considers running after him to pester him further about how, exactly, he was familiar with Emmeline's whereabouts, but preferring to avoid the risk of an unwanted confrontation, she decides against it, merely shaking her head and setting off in the direction of the Owlery.

In a way, her concern for Emmeline surprises even Lily herself. Emmeline has hardly been friendly with the other Gryffindors for a couple of years now, and Lily has grown accustomed to her borderline antisocial demeanor and sudden disappearances—if it weren't for the fact that she's been rowing with Sirius, Lily would probably think nothing of it. But Emmeline has been rowing with Sirius, and according to Marlene she left the boys' dormitory in tears yesterday afternoon, and the Emmeline that Lily has come to know would never lose her composure like that, never. It worries Lily that Emmeline hasn't been seen since—and her concern worsens twofold when she enters the Owlery to find her fellow Gryffindor not mailing a letter at all but, rather, sitting in a defeated heap amidst the straw and owl droppings on the floor.

Nervously, she clears her throat to make her presence known, averting her eyes when Emmeline glances up miserably at her. "James, er, told me that you might be up here," Lily says. "Do you mind if I—I mean, I don't want to bother you, but—is everything all right? It's just…"

Emmeline looks away without answering—hardly an encouraging sign, but at least she's not sending Lily away. Slowly, she crosses the room to join Emmeline on the ground, turning up her nose a little as she clears away the droppings. They just sit for a minute, Lily's heart beating out of her chest as she surveys Emmeline through the corner of her eye. Physically, the blonde looks awful, down to the ghastly pale shade of her skin and her bloodshot eyes, but even beyond that, her usual bitterness and rigidity have given way to an aura of exhaustion and defeat. "Em, I know we haven't always—er, we're not… but whatever it is, if you want to talk about it…"

"I don't want to talk about it," says Emmeline hoarsely. Then, a moment later: "I screwed up."

"Okay," she says, mind spinning. "Okay, well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's nothing you can't—"

"I'm not a very good person, Lily." That silences her instantly. "I'm a snobby, alienating bitch, but Sirius was always just as bad, and now…"

Tentatively, Lily places a hand on Emmeline's shoulder, bolstered when she doesn't flinch away. "You are not a bad person, all right? You're just—"

"Yes, I am. And it used to be fine because all of us were awful when we first got to Hogwarts—you would know; we were all awful to you especially. But we used to stick to our kind, we at least had each other… but now… I screwed up. You know it's bad when even Sirius is too good for you."

"Listen, Em, I don't know what happened or what you did, but it can't be as bad as you think it is, can it?" insists Lily. "I didn't used to know either of you well, but it was obvious how much you two used to care about each other—that doesn't just go away, no matter how long it's been."

"Really. So you'd be willing to forgive Snape for what he did to you?" Lily doesn't answer. "Nobody wants anything to do with me anymore, and it's my own damn fault, so just… where am I supposed to go from here?"

Emmeline's tearing up again, so Lily gives her a minute to steady herself before she replies. "Just come to the sleepover tonight, all right? James wants to brainstorm about resistance for the war; Sirius can't hold it against you for wanting to help out, and whatever is going on, I don't think it's a very good idea for you to be alone right now."

"Right," Emmeline mutters, swiping at her eyes with chagrin.

"You know, for what it's worth, Em, I always appreciated that you were kind to me after you fell out with everyone else. When I was the outcast, I always knew you'd be there for me if I needed to lean on you—I knew how you felt about Severus, but you stopped holding it against me, and that meant a lot," says Lily.

Frowning, Emmeline asks dully, "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you deserve to know that I don't think you're a bad person," says Lily, "even if Sirius does. I'll see you tonight, okay?"

"Thanks, Lily," she says. By the time Lily steps out of the Owlery, Emmeline's hardly budged from where she was when Lily came in.

xx

She runs into Regulus Black in the library later that day. She's taken aback but determined to keep a level head when he hesitantly takes a seat next to her, laying his elbows on the table and making no move to pull out a textbook and work.

"Black," Lily greets awkwardly a few moments later, her concentration on her History of Magic essay hopelessly broken.

"Mudblood," Regulus responds.

Her stomach churns for just an instant, and then she feels nothing. She flashes him a brief, hard look and then slides her parchment between the pages of Wizarding History and Current Events of the 20th Century, 1976 Edition, snaps the book shut, and begins to pack her things into her bag. "No, wait, Evans, I didn't mean that," he says hastily. "I didn't mean it, it's just force of habit and all—"

"Force of habit," Lily repeats, slinging her bag over her shoulder and standing. The words feel hollow as she says them. "Thought I'd be comfortable with you having that habit as long as you didn't apply your bigotry to me, did you? Didn't you see how that ended between me and Severus last year?"

"He misses you," says Regulus. Her eyes soften, but not by much. "He still—he talks about you, you know, sometimes. What you said last fall about how quickly he gave up on trying to get you back really got to him. It wasn't that you meant too little to him to fight for you, he just—he couldn't understand how his beliefs were never a problem to you for so long until he slipped up and made one accidental personal attack, and it was like one mistake just erased all of the loyalty he had to you. You don't know how much that hurt him, Evans."

She's swelling with injustice and deflating with old wounds reopened. Lily doesn't think about Severus often these days, but when she does, it's still with more pain and indignation than she can handle. "It wasn't just the one mistake, Black, it was the last straw in a long line of hypocrisy that I excused for too long, and by the way, how is this any of your business?"

"It's not," he says feebly.

"What do you even want with me, anyway? What are you doing here?"

"It's not like I went looking for you," says Regulus, "but then I found you and he mentioned you against last night and I can understand that, all right? My brother's a righteous bastard and there's no doubt I'll never speak to the bloke civilly again, but it doesn't mean I don't still miss him. Maybe you've got dirty blood, but for whatever reason, you still mean a hell of a lot to Snape, and he seemed to mean a hell of a lot to you, too, once, and it wouldn't be right to let you go on thinking he doesn't care about you when he does."

She stares unblinkingly at him for a moment, then says, "You're the one who stopped talking to Sirius when your family disowned him, not the other way around, and if you valued him more than you valued clinging to your prejudices, you wouldn't be in this situation, would you?"

"It's not just about outdated prejudices, Evans, it's about preserving an entire way of life—"

"Mudbloods are people, too, Regulus," Lily tells him, silencing him immediately. "You sound like a slave owner. Someday, the history books are going to look back on your lot, and you're going to be on the wrong side of them. You know that, right?"

He doesn't answer. "Say hello to my brother for me, will you?" he asks after a pause, quieter now.

"Say hello to him yourself," she calls back to him as she turns her back and stalks out.

xx

Emmeline comes. She sits huddled against the headboard of Peter's bed, shoulders hunched and knees drawn to her chest and fingers tracing patterns like protective wards onto the comforter, and she doesn't dare make eye contact with either Sirius or Marlene, but she comes and she listens and she nods along as James lays out the plan. "We've got to get the student body to mobilize," he says swiftly, as though they have no other choice, and they don't have another choice, do they? "If Dumbledore and his inner circle are our only link to the war effort and they're not talking, the only thing we can do right now to fight is to make some noise using the platform we've got in this school. It'll be like recruitment—the more students who want to get involved, the more likely Dumbledore will listen and take advantage of us, and I'd be willing to bet we can make a hell of a difference just by getting students interested in taking direct action, maybe even getting some of them to change their minds about what they believe about blood purity and You-Know-Who's followers."

"So where do we start? We can't exactly just walk up to people and demand to know their loyalties and start giving speeches—nobody trusts anybody when it comes to things like this," Mary says, frowning. She chopped off most of her hair last month, and now oily black clumps of it are sticking up every which way.

"No, it'll have to be more subtle than that," muses Remus. "I imagine we could start up some kind of prank campaign—only instead of Transfiguring all the professors into nifflers at the Sorting and setting off fireworks displays in the Great Hall, we'll keep the tone more serious and give people an indication that we're not just messing around this time. We can leave messages of some sort in places—like propaganda, almost—and see how much of a response we get. Keep it light for the appeal and to garner some interest, but not so light that we're not taken seriously."

"Feel out the reaction from different people and use that as a basis to identify who we can talk to directly and whether we're making much of a difference changing the younger kids' mindsets about everything," says Alice. "I like that."

With the slightest touch of doubt, Marlene says, "You realize that by identifying ourselves as the culprits, we'll be putting ourselves in the line of fire of anybody who has it in for You-Know-Who's opponents." Her eyes flicker momentarily to Sirius, and they all know what she's thinking: even Regulus may very well leak the boys' names to the Death Eaters as potential threats.

There's an instant of dead silence, then Sirius says, "So we don't name ourselves. We can go by the Order of the Phoenix moniker and keep ourselves anonymous."

"We can work out the details of the pranks, if we're calling them that, later," decides Peter, his shoulders brushing with Emmeline's. "We should come up with a name—something to call whatever group we're able to assemble."

"The Order of the Kneazle," jokes James as Moonshine leaps into his lap—Lily and Emmeline brought their pets over from the girls' dormitory last night as part of an early spring-cleaning effort.

"No," says Mary slowly, "the Order of the Phoenix. We could incorporate phoenix imagery into the pranks, hype it up for the attention—but 'Order' still sounds pretty heavy, and phoenixes symbolize rebirth and eternity. We could use some of that in our message, reassurance that anybody who's lost a loved one thanks to this war hasn't had to see them die for nothing—that no matter how many times we're told we're too young, we'll jump back in with another way to contribute. Besides, Dumbledore's got Fawkes—maybe he'll take it as a message to him that we want in."

Lily and Alice both are beaming by the time Mary is through with brainstorming. Marlene gives her an approving squeeze of the shoulders, and with both genuine confusion and fondness, Sirius asks, "When did you get so clever, Mare?"

Bashfully, she gives a faint smile and continues to scratch behind Aquarius's ears.

"All right, so we'll get started on the prank design over the next few days and try to get this up and running within a couple of weeks," James declares. "And in the meantime, we can keep an ear open to comments about the war from the people we see, try to scope out exactly what we're dealing with. Everyone good with that?"

They all chime in with their assent, and Lily and the girls slowly start to gather themselves and their pets together and filter back out of the room. "Go on without me," says Marlene, grinning—she must be sleeping over with Sirius to celebrate the holiday. Out the corner of her eye, Lily notices Emmeline stiffen but say nothing.

"You were awfully quiet in there, Lily," Alice observes once they're back in their own dormitory. "Haven't you and James been planning all this out together? I would have expected you to have more to say about how we go about all this."

"He seemed to have a handle on it, and anyway, everyone's suggestions were great as they were," says Lily vaguely.

Alice looks unconvinced, and she's not the only one. "What's been up between the two of you lately, anyway? You were getting so close-knit by Christmas, and it's like that's just been falling apart the last couple of months," says Mary.

"Nothing's up! We got close, and then we started drifting again. We were only even mates for a couple of months before this; it's nothing to be alarmed about," she says, maybe a bit too defensively.

"Uh-huh," says Mary, but neither she nor Alice pushes the issue further, and for that, Lily is grateful.

It's not until Mary, Alice, and Emmeline have all long fallen asleep that Lily finally allows herself to dwell on it. She and James were getting close, and then he kissed her and she liked it and something got lost in translation and she bolted—hasn't had a proper conversation with him since. Something about not just befriending but kissing the boy who tormented her best friend for five years and used to be her number-one toerag, kissing him and liking it, was enough to kick Lily's fight-or-flight impulse into overdrive, and she fled the scene, taking the severed and fraying ties of their friendship in tow and leaving a two-month silence in her wake. She's not saying she did the rational thing, nor that one mere instant of panic was enough to make her shut James out again and forget all the reasons why she'd let him in, but—it was disconcerting, to say the least. It was disconcerting, and she liked it, and it was startling how quickly spending a few hours apart from him to get her bearings turned into a few days, a few weeks, a few months.

Talking to Regulus today, hearing for the first time since O.W.L.s that Severus was hurting, too—that, somehow, has shaken her even more than kissing James did. She wonders, not seriously but enough to give pause to the idea, if there's even the slightest chance that they could ever revive their friendship. She wonders if she should be worried that she's wondering.