Despite their 'disagreement' at the end of their fifth year, Lily and Remus had settled back into their regular friendship shortly after the beginning of term. As soon as they found each other on the Hogwarts Express, each expressed their sorrow at how they had each behaved that day by the lake, and formed the agreement to be a little kinder, listen a little better, and be a little more honest. For two of the most generous-hearted people any of their friends had ever known, they had been more than a little surprised to hear of the blow up, but were relieved to hear the two had made up and were as friendly and warm as ever.

Lily and Remus' friendship had been formed around the beginning of their third year, when they accidentally sat next to each other in their Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson. Lily had only seen Remus a few times around the school, and knew him to be a quiet and reserved sort of person, often associated with Potter and Black (much to her disgust). Their friendship grew, and Lily found him to be so wholly unlike his friends that she wondered why and how they found common ground with each other, which she mentioned to Remus on more than one occasion, to which he simply replied, "You don't know them."

As the years passed, their friendship grew, and if you'd have asked Lily at the end of her fifth year, she would have told you that she counted Remus among her best friends. Remus would have said the same. Their similar work ethic, passion for Care of Magical Creatures, and overall compatible temperaments made their friendship an easy and natural one. They rarely fought, kept conversations emotionally light and breezy, and simply enjoyed each other's undemanding company.

Remus, however, always felt guilty there was a part of himself he kept from Lily. Although they seldom delved into the emotional baggage behind her experience realising she was a witch, her family or Snape, Remus felt that Lily at least let him in to every facet of her life and wished he was able to do the same. Not that he ever would, for her sake, and for the sake of their friendship.

Lily's aversion to Remus' chosen circle was mostly an unspoken obstacle in their friendship, and they kept their external friendships separate enough that the issue had not properly arisen since that god-forsaken last day of fifth year.

Lily was headed to the library, keen to make a start on the mountain of homework she had yet to complete. She strode with purpose through the halls, the dinner she had inhaled sitting uncomfortably in her stomach, as she clutched her books to it. The week had been unbelievably hectic, and Lily felt she had had barely three seconds to relax since she had woken up on Monday morning. The Herbology project with James had made little headway, especially since Lily suspected James had been equally as busy.

She was making a little to-do list in her head as she walked through the entrance to the library, unconsciously scanning the desks for a solitary seat so she could get her work done in as productive a manner as possible, so she could go to bed at a relatively reasonable hour.

She was halfway through her latest Potions essay; Slughorn was a kind professor, and infinitely biased towards her, but his essays were often easy concepts which really did not require an entire roll of parchment to explain them, when she noticed a shadow hovering over her book. She looked up to demand with ire "Do you mind?", only to find the pleased grin of James Potter looking back at her.

"Alright Evans?" he greeted her jovially, inviting himself to sit at the seat opposite her. Lily couldn't help but smile back at him, his energy was clearly infectious.

"What are you doing here?" she said, with significantly less venom than she had expected to come out of her own mouth, especially when Potter was interrupting what was supposed to be, and previously was, a very productive evening.

"I just finished up with Sarah Vincentia, she's a third year." He said casually, spreading his own pile of books across the space between them.

"What are you talking about? Why are you hanging out with third years in the library?" she asked with genuine confusion, her second question inciting a beautiful, melodic laugh from James that rather stole her breath away for a second or two, long enough for her to remember what Alice had told her a few weeks ago; that James had been tutoring third years in Transfiguration. As the realisation dawned, James was still laughing at her earlier question, so Lily cut in-

"You're tutoring her?"

"Yeah, I am." James replied, a little sheepishly Lily thought, as she watched him compose himself.

Unable to help herself from prying, and wondering who this altruistic boy was in front of her, she asked "Why? Don't you have enough to worry about as Quidditch Captain?".

"McGonagall asked me." James replied simply. "Now, how about we have a chat about the dreaded Herbology project? This is what I've got so far"

James placed a rather hefty stack of parchment sheets in front of Lily, each scribbled with notes and information about the elusive Fire Seed Bush. Lily had scanned a few books over the past couple of weeks for information surrounding the Fire Seed Bush, but each restated the same information; that it was a bush which smouldered and burned indefinitely, used in various potions and sometimes to hatch dragon eggs. She thought it was going to be much harder to find this volume of extra information.

She flicked through the notes, perusing the information scrawled in his distinct hand. He had covered practically all of the information about the life cycle. An immense wave of gratitude and awe washed over her. Where did he even find the time to write all of this? The boy must never sleep, because she knew the Gryffindor Quidditch team had been training every other day at half five in the morning! He surely must have had someone else do it for him, or maybe he copied them off a previous student, or someone gave him access to special books, maybe his parents? Lily knew they had an incredible library at Potter Manor. That must be it!

"Where did you find all of this? Admittedly, I haven't been looking very hard, but I had trouble finding more than just the basics. How on earth did you, first of all, find the time to take all these notes, and second of all, locate all of this information?" she asked.

Lily looked adorable when she was flabbergasted, James thought. He smiled a secret smile to himself and looked back at her, his invisibility cloak, (or key to accessing the Restricted Section), sitting firmly in his pocket.

"I have my ways" he said with a sly grin, opening his Herbology textbook almost too quickly to quell any of Lily's suspicions, but he was clearly unwilling to elaborate further.

Lily still was suspicious of the boy sitting across from her, who indeed appeared to be doing his work quite diligently, but returned to her work without pushing the issue.

They worked silently across from each other for a further hour, not noticing the setting of the sun and the emergence of the stars outside the window opposite them.

Growing restless as his hand began to cramp from all of the writing, James turned to Lily. "Did you hear what happened to Sirius this morning?" he asked Lily.

"Hmm?" Lily said, absent-mindedly looking up from her own notes, strands of hair floating out of her ponytail.

"You sure are deaf when you're concentrating on something, Evans." Lily rolled her eyes, her attention now sorely concentrated on James. "I said, did you hear what happened to Sirius this morning?"

"No, what happened to Sirius this morning?" Lily replied, adopting a tone one would use to respond to a toddler telling a knock-knock joke.

"Well, he's been teaching one of the second years, Gregory Smithe, how to set a booby trap with magical tar, which he enchanted to be semi-permanent," Lily threw him a disapproving look, "but what he didn't tell the kid was how not to get stuck in it himself. So, Sirius is just sitting down to breakfast, when this panicked little first year comes up to him and squeaks in this tiny voice 'Excuse me, Mister Black, Gregory Smithe said if you could please come quickly'. Of course, Sirius refused- "Lily threw him a reproachful look again "-Hey! I would have gone to help the little tyke, but I was still packing up from practice! I think Sirius should have gone the first time. Anyway, Sirius said that Gregory should have come and got him himself, but the kid said that Gregory wasn't able to, sir, and so Sirius reluctantly leaves his breakfast and follows this kid to the fifth floor Charms corridor, where Gregory is standing in this puddle of tar, unable to get himself unstuck. Lucky for Gregory the Charms Corridor isn't very busy at that time of day. Anyway, Sirius starts to pull his wand out, but the first year, nervous little thing; terrified of getting in trouble, accidentally bumps Sirius, and his wand rolls into the tar puddle!"

Lily, already enjoying James' animated storytelling, laughed aloud at this. James continued-

"And then Sirius, who is never EVER clumsy, might I add, stumbles forward trying to prise it off the floor and gets stuck himself! The first year was so terrified, he raced all the way down to the Quidditch Pitch to get me, despite Sirius' protests- he knew I would take the mickey out of him for eternity when I got there. And he wasn't wrong! When I got up there, I nearly laughed myself right back down the stairs!"

They were both nearly howling with laughter at this point, grateful that the library was practically empty at this time of night, and James felt a little jolt of pleasure through his heart when he realised he had been the one to make her laugh this time, and they were laughing together.

A warm blossom of happiness bloomed in Lily's chest as her and James rocked back and forth with laughter, each setting the other one off when they caught their eye. It felt surprisingly… natural, to be enjoying herself in James' company, and Lily realised with a start that they were friends. She was even more surprised to find herself pleased at this fact, and wiped the tears from her eyes with a broad smile. The Herbology project might actually prove to be fun, with James…

Meanwhile, Marlene and Sirius were 'rendevous-ing' in a second floor broom closet. Each as enthusiastic as the other, they prided themselves on not making things messy due to "feelings" or things as inconvenient as emotions. "Purely carnal" they told their friends, earning a disgusted look or an exaggerated gag from across the table.

Marlene liked to keep things "light and breezy", as they called it, because that's all she ever did. She'd had a constant stream of 'companions', both male and female, since she'd had her sexual awakening at the beginning of the previous year, and none ever lasted more than a week or two. A 'safety precaution' she called it, not wanting either party to risk growing attached to the other. This 'thing' with Sirius was proving to be the exception that made the rule, they had been going strong for nearly two months now, and who knew when they were going to stop. She trusted Sirius not to do anything stupid like fall for her.

Sirius liked to keep things "light and breezy" for his own reasons. He told himself it was because he just wasn't cut out for relationships, that he witnessed enough lovey-dovey shit from James which was enough to make him sick for a lifetime, but deep down he knew this wasn't the case. Sirius' deep fear of being unworthy of love, just as his mother and father had told him all his life, only increasing in frequency as they discovered he was sorted into Gryffindor and his muggle-sympathising tendencies, had inhibited his ability to form lasting romantic relationships. This issue had presented itself before, when James and Remus and Peter had first tried to befriend him all the way back in first year. He was constantly trying to pull away whilst maintaining his façade of confidence and swagger, until James had pulled it out of him that his mother had told him to only make friends with children of his parents associates, and that there was no such thing as friendship, only alliance in order to mutually benefit both parties. Trust was not in the Black family vocabulary. And thus, his relationship with Marlene, he thought, was doomed to be eternally "light and breezy".