Hi, so here is another chapter, I hope you enjoy this one, there will be one more following this one and then we will have a time jump to over Christmas and then we move into the more meaty aspects of this story.

I am thinking as well there might be a follow up story but that's still in the planning stages.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine just these characters that I play around with.

Please Read and Review.

And please remember in this story James and Lily are seventeen. SEVENTEEN. Nobody and I repeat NOBODY makes good decisions at seventeen this author included.

And Enjoy.

The Beginning Of The End

Chapter 6-Bones To Pick.

Lily's point of view of this chapter, Lily goes to Hogsmeade meets up with Snape and ends up kissing James. She has no idea how this has happened or how this is her life. But there it is.

Hogsmeade was really one of the nice perks about Hogwarts Lily had decided. It was one of the nicest, picture postcard villages that she had ever seen. She enjoyed it weather it was winter or spring or summer. Granted the weather was getting colder, the news getting bleaker and the workload at the castle getting to the point where she would happily never look at another Transfiguration book again but Hogsmeade was still the same and she loved that about the small sleepy little village.

She had gone to Honeydukes. Such was the workload that it was either chocolate or despair that got her through it and she chose chocolate. She picked out the biggest choco-balls that she could and then several jelly snakes that really did move (easier to eat than the jelly butterflies that flew and created an almighty mess if you didn't catch them in time—especially on a hot summer's day). She had paid for her purchases and had left Marlene and Mary in a very spirited conversation about weather or not it was worth spending thirty gallons on a model chocolate hippogriff with wings made of chocolate covered marshmallow, to see if she could grab a table at the Three Broomsticks (though this late in the afternoon it would be a miracle in itself) when she was aware that someone was watching her.

A lifetime of feeling those eyes on her told her who it was before she even turned around.

Sev.

Shit.

Like the mature seventeen year old she was she immediately bolted into the post office.

Yeah. Like Lily said.

Mature.

Of course Sev had to follow her in. Or Snape as she supposed she now had to get used to calling him. She was honestly not sure. She had known that she had to cut him out of her life, that the friendship she had depended on for so long both inside and outside of the castle had to end but if truth be told she was not sure what the correct protocol for that was. Or even if there was any at all.

"Lily" he said quietly.

"Sev"

"Lily look…can we talk?"

Shit.

"I don't know what we can talk about Sev" she said cautiously sounding each word in her head before she said it. Merlin this was awkward.

"Anything Lily" carefully he took a step forwards. Very carefully Lily did not take a step backwards. Instead she watched him with careful, cautious eyes.

"Sev…you tell me what we can talk about that doesn't inevitably come back to your friends or the war or—"

"Your one to talk"

And just like that whatever Lily might have entertained in terms of communication with him was shut down almost instantaneously.

"Sev" she said again but time she knew the warning was clear in her voice and it should have been enough but experience with Severus had taught her the long and hard way that there was no stopping him when he locked eyes on his favourite subject in the world.

James. Potter.

To be honest had she not understood the deeply unpleasant feelings (and to be honest a lot of them were well deserved) that Severus held towards James then she would have thought her ex-best friend had, had a crush on him. As it was it was just her that had the complicated, awkward, horrendous feelings for the man she had once believed she would live and die despising.

Somewhere up there in the great beyond she knew her Dad was pissing himself laughing at her.

"No" she said cutting across Sev's tirade about James. "No Sev" she said shaking her head. "Not now, not here, not ever"

And with that she pushed past him into the whirling wind and down the street away from prying eyes.

It was just typical that James would find her. She supposed even it was typical that she would kiss him.

It was a good kiss as well. Granted Lily didn't have much to compare it to but it was a good kiss, not the blow your brains out Hollywood kiss that even she would admit to dreaming about but a good kiss nonetheless. James Potter was good at many a thing, she supposed it was only natural that he would be a good kisser to boot.

After that thought she'd had to shut her brain off. The last thing this wonderful moment needed was her chaotic thoughts over thinking it.

What was not typical was her reaction. She had never considered herself a runner but the second they had kissed she had ran back to the castle like a scared little girl.

"I kissed James Potter"

Marlene McKinnon put down her quill. She did a quick calculation in her head to double check that this was not April Fools and then another one to make sure that the world she had woken up in this morning was still the same world she was in now and then she turned to face Lily who was almost chewing her nails down to the quick in sheer frustration.

"I see" she said though in truth she did not see. She did not see at all because though things had been warming between them and though she might have been secretly wondering weather or not such a thing could happen the idea of Lily and James together after all this time was still difficult for her to get her head around.

"Do you?"

"Not…was it good?"

Lily rolled her eyes.

"Yes"

"Great?"

Another eye roll.

"Not like I have a lot of experience to compare it to Marls but yes"

There were bits and pieces to this story that Marlene was missing she was sure of it.

"But what happened next?"

Lily launched into the whole story. Marlene listening whistled under her breathe.

"And you just left him there?"

"I…Oh God help me I did"

Marlene sighed. Granted her own relationships were virtually non-existent but something clearly had to be done here. James and Lily were a danger to themselves and if left alone to their own devices they'd clearly never get their shit together. After all, Hogwarts had waited nearly six years for this to happen. It wasn't going to fall down on Marlene's watch at the final hurdle.

Where was Sirius Black when you needed him?

Sirius Black was for one of the rare times in his life in the library.

Well it wasn't completely unheard of you know!

But that didn't stop Marlene from double checking because even though she had left Lily contemplating drowning herself in the bath in order to go and find a book (also to try and find Remus who could always be relied upon as a voice of reason if one could not find Sirius) that would help with her potions essay that she was seriously contemplating turning into an aeroplane and sending in the direction of Slughorn's head detention be damned.

"Today is too wired" she said sitting down next to him. "First Lily and James finally seem to be getting their shit together and then I find you in the library"

"Hardy-har-har" Sirius said not looking up from his Charms notes.

"Swap your Charms for my potions" Marlene said after a moment of pity. Dark grey eyes shot up to stare at her and she suddenly had to resist the urge to shiver—bloody castle was getting a draft again no doubt, what with the change in weather.

"Really?"

"Yeah go on, you can actually understand half of what Slughorn says and I got five points of Flitwick last week. Consider it a trade off"

"Marlene you are a stunning woman" Sirius said rubbing his eyes in exhaustion.

Marlene blushed. She could feel herself blushing scarlet. Damn.

"Thanks" she said quietly. "You're not too bad yourself"

Sirius flashed her another grin. "McKinnon are we flirting?"

How the fuck was she supposed to know?

"Are we?"

It came out more of a question that he wanted clearly because the smile slid off his face and dimmed a little and she could have kicked herself for it though she didn't know why when she felt just as confused.

"What are you after McKinnon" he said finally and it wasn't phrased as question. Also the tone had changed, gone was the jokey kind of tone that he used and in it's place was something else…something…different. Whatever it was she didn't like it.

"Did you hear from Potter about—"

"Oh about them kissing, oh yeah, I left Mooney with him and came here instead. Honestly the way the man goes on you'd think that there had never been another kiss in the history of the world"

"Lily's not much better" Marlene said. She didn't think that she was betraying her friends confidence in this. To be honest she thought she was saving her friend from a lot of teenage angst. And her ears from hearing said teenage angst.

"She's convinced she's fucked it all up. Of course…she doesn't know if there is anything to fuck up."

All in all telling Sirius this was for the good of the world.

"Really" Sirius said putting down his quill. "James will be happy to know that. But seriously how does she not know? I would have thought that it was obvious James is still in love with her? He's all but tattooed her name on his chest…and to be honest if he thought that would work he'd do that as well"

Marlene took a second to imagine that.

Actually it wasn't a bad image either.

Sirius perhaps sensing this tapped his nails on the edge of the table in irritation and it brought her back to herself in sharp reality.

"Huh?"

"McKinnon"

"Oh…sorry…look…I don't want to put up with this longer than I have to, you know that James and Lily belong together, so do I. Hell at this point so does Voldemort. The only people who don't know that they belong together are James and Lily themselves. So why don't we just…help them along?"

Sirius eyed her for a long second and then he leaned back on his chair and eyed her with a smouldering kind of look (and there was no other word for it other than a smouldering kind of look—Merlin knew it was the kind of look that girls who read Witch Weekly read about).

"So Marlene" he drawled and she noticed the use of her first name.

"What did you have in mind?"

It had not been hard to rope Mary and Remus into the plan simply because after three hours of hearing James wax poetic about Lily and 'The Kiss' Remus was prepared to do anything to get it to stop and Mary thought the entire thing was too funny to do anything other than help.

Peter had been in detention for consistently not bothering to do his transfiguration homework. If Sirius was being honest it was not like he was missed. That right there and then should have been the start of something but he was seventeen. Looking back was not something that he knew how to do all that well.

As his father had once told him, Blacks never looked backwards.

Bastard.

Marlene's plan was a cliché and Sirius who enjoyed the clichés on more than one occasion thought that there was no way in hell that this plan was going to work.

Of course famous last words and all.

Remus had gone to get James to tell him that there was a fight just outside the Head's office and Mary had done the same with Lily. Clearly Remus had embellished the official story a bit more than Sirius had told him too because James had skidded up to the where Marlene and Sirius were talking and the first thing that came out of his mouth was…

"Where's the Hippogriff?"

Lily came around the corner then and Marlene with a poker face that would have made a politician weep she pointed at the Head's office.

It was almost comical.

Marlene locked the door.

"AND YOU DON'T COME OUT UNTIL YOU'VE TALKED ABOUT IT!" Sirius shouted before he put a silencing charm on the door.

"That shouldn't have worked" Marlene said shaking her head.

"No it shouldn't have" Sirius said a little dazed.

"It was a stupid plan" she said into the silence.

"Wasn't the best" Sirius agreed.

"Don't be nice Sirius"

"Fine…fine I was worried that it wouldn't work. But sometimes the simple things are the best"

Marlene blinked.

"Get that off a greeting card did you?"

Sirius rolled his eyes.

"So what do we do now?" he said.

"You wanna wait?"

"Sure"

Truth be told he was pretty happy doing anything that Marlene McKinnon wanted him to do.

That was kind of the problem.

They should run a class Sirius thought wildly. A class. Teach how girls minds worked, how to talk to them, how to deal with the complicated feelings that you got when you were left alone with them. Be more useful than History of Magic any day of the week.

Sirius slid to the ground and Marlene followed him.

And just like that, the conversation about feelings had begun.

And there you go, hope you enjoyed it and I will see you for the next chapter.

Next Chapter-Lily and James talk about their feelings inside the Head's chamber. Outside Marlene and Sirius do the same. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And Remus just wants to be normal. Mary thinks she might help with that.