Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognize. All credit goes to JKR.

Melisande88 and her Shampoo vibes are responsible for the beta-reading. Thank you, dear! You're brilliant!

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"They use to say time is the fire in which we burn..."

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Two girls sprawled on the grass in a hot summer's day. One of the girls' red locks pours on the grass and the sun waivers upon them, the way it shines along the other's pearly white tresses. Blonde, so bright and fine it is unearthly. Lily, the redhead, reaches her hand; crushes a lock of Narcissa's soft, moonlight coloured hair between her thumb and her index finger. Narcissa cocks an eyebrow. Later, many years later, she is reminded of that moment, and certain kind of sweet nostalgia washes her with liquid intoxication. Strange, because Lily had never been sweet, and had never been fluid. James Potter thought that Lily Evans was beautiful, but Narcissa Black knew better. Lily Evans was ablaze. The beauty was an external, superficial mask, and it was meaningless. A mane the colour of wildfire, and porcelain skin, a contrast that was so becoming of Lily. And it wasn't beauty, oh no. It was intensity. It was fire.

Narcissa remembered long moments of silence under the large English oak. The lake spread few meters away from them, licking the shore tenderly, and Lily would have taken off her shoes, pulled off her socks and stretched long, white legs toward the waterfront. The sun gilded the sparse, soft hairs on Lily's shins. The thin hairs on her forearms, at those occasions when she had rolled up her always-starched school-shirt. The molten sun set her hair afire.

"It's funny, you know," Lily told her, "that we're here. A serpent and a lioness. The impossibility of this..."

"Amuses you?"

"No, not amuses." Lily shook her head. "We Gryffindors don't get amused. It's too sophisticated for us. But it puzzles me... there is wonderment. That we can be friends."

The blonde girl shrugged her shoulders. "Why not?"

"Oh, you're a Slytherin. You can bend reality do your bidding... social mores, I mean, when it suits you. You can ignore it. And I can't. And why not... why not..." Lily turned the question over and over again in her mind. "Because. Because I am self-righteous and you're unabashed. Because you are refined and I am clumsy. You'd always say the right things while I'd spill the first thing that comes to mind and blush and regret it later. That's why it's strange. Because girls like me don't hang around with girls like you."

"Well, now they do."

Lily's head rested in her lap. Thousands of red threads, Lily's hairs, blazed against Narcissa's tweed skirt. She leaned forward, to look at Lily's face. Somewhat crude features. Clearly drawn out. Long, aristocratic nose and a country girl's mouth. A mouth that told secrets of stolen kisses, and snogging in the dark. "You amuse me," Narcissa said.

"So now you are decided?"

"Now that you bring up the subject."

"Tell me, what is it you find amusing about me," Lily asked.

Narcissa leaned against the tree's trunk, running through her head a velvety string of images which were – which became, once woven together –Lily Evans. "You amuse me because you're... a Gryffindor."

"Really. Is that all you can come up with, Black?"

"Oh no, but you're impatient. If you want to hear more, you'll have to wait."

Lily pouted her lips, like a little girl might do. "All right. I'll behave," she promised.

Narcissa rolled her eyes in feigned disbelief. The small, redheaded girl she met on her first day at Hogwarts didn't impress Narcissa Black all that much. Lily Evans was awkward; her limbs were lengthy and cumbersome; her face too angular, and her total disorientation indicated her Muggle origin. Just like Lily herself said, girls like Lily Evans and Narcissa Black weren't meant to befriend one another.

For several years, the two had treated each other with the politest contempt, each observing the other from afar: knowing, though not always knowing why, the other girl was an equal rival. When both of them had been appointed prefects on their fifth year, a certain kind of relationship had been formed between the Slytherin Ice Princess and the righteous, enthusiastic Gryffindor. And in truth, Lily amused Narcissa. They found themselves discussing a book, then exchanging careful opinion about the transfiguration lessons the Slytherins and the Gryffindors were taking together – Narcissa was surprised to learn she was able to hold a fluent conversation with the opinionated Gryffindor.

Quite entertainingly, it had been Bella who stamped their friendship as an official matter. Oh, they never proclaimed themselves to be friends, but the knowledge they might actually like each other was something both Narcissa and Lily needed a nudge in order to understand. Lunch, Narcissa remembered. Just another lunch. The smell of food washed the Great Hall. Narcissa probed her shepherd's-pie with the edge of her fork. The food at Hogwarts was always so heavy. At the periphery of her vision she noticed Bella halting the clumsy Gryffindor and taunting her. Bella always enjoyed bullying people. It was all right, usually. Usually, Bella would pick up someone who could relate to her comments –people who knew she is only amusing herself. But Lily was not the type for verbal fencing. Narcissa suspected that Bella hadn't looked for such.

She heard herself muttering; "Bella, let her be," or something along those lines, and Bella looked at her in amusement and belittlement, rolling her eyes in a gesture of mockery that was so characteristic of the Black family.

"Yes? What will you do to me if I don't?" Bella had a deep voice, a little husky voice; a sexy voice. Narcissa was never sure whether she envied Bella – especially because she didn't Narcissa was never sure whether or not she envied Bella – especially because she didn't want to envy her. She saw Bellatrix elbow Lily, and watched the Gryffindor girl stumbling – how ridiculous! The foolish girl could never put her limbs into some order: legs too long and arms that always flew in every direction- Narcissa could not figure out why she should find it charming. Then Lily fell to the floor, her robe disheveled and her skirt crumpled and wrinkled, and Narcissa nudged Bella aside and offered her hand to Lily.

"Come. My little sister is bored today."

And Lily laughed.

Narcissa found herself wondering, in later years, whether it was she who managed to draw those unexpected reactions out of Lily, or was it Lily, who was simply unexpected. James Potter strummed on Lily with predictability- one could always foresee how she would react to him. One could always anticipate she would arch her lean body and pout her lips when he vexed her. But Lily and herself... They were something else entirely. They were different. And that's what Narcissa told Lily, at last. "You amuse me, because the way we exist against and alongside each other is different. Because you make me different and I make you different, and because of many other things-"

"-Like what?"

"That you are beautiful, but it's not what's relevant about your appearance-" Narcissa attempted to wrap a net of words around the idea. "You see, when I look at you, I see something very specific, and it has nothing to do with any external criteria of beauty."

"Really." Lily rose up a little, supported on her elbows. The same little smile hovered about her pale face. Not exactly a spasm of the lips, an impression of a smile, floating inside green, glittering eyes. "What do you see when you look at me?"

Narcissa's lips arched around the words. Soft, silky pink, around a notion which was violent and burning and incontrollable. "Wildfire," she said. "That is what I see when I look at you."

And then, when she leaned forward, she pressed her lips to Lily's mouth. Strange, they weren't completely synchronized; Lily had a full mouth, dark and lush, while Narcissa's lips were thin and delicate, in the palest pink imaginable. They had dimmed against each other, and perhaps distinguished each other: it wasn't like man and woman, when you integrate against each other like two pieces of a puzzle, but like petals, soft, veiny and easily bruised. White against pink. A mouth tasting of mint and a mouth tasting of bubblegum in a strange mixture, not exactly earthy, because neither one was completely capable of pulling it to the ground and anchoring it to the realms of reality and the harsh, grainy dust. Not even this enthusiastic, good intentioned violence that was Lily. Which changed what should have been soft and gentle, to stormy – impossible to catch. Like the wind or the sea that cannot be trapped in a fist. Lily – how beautiful you were. How coincidental we had been, and how easily we separated.

"It hurts," she said quietly, lifting her gaze to look at Narcissa. "I don't want to leave you."

"Hurts." And she shrugged her shoulders. Always the same gesture of random incidence, as the real emotion was too exalted and raging to be given a physical let-out. "As if someone hollowed your guts," she added. "But you know, Evans, it goes away. I'll marry Lucius, and you have James, and our kids will attend school together and someday we'll look back and think how... meaningless it all had been. A sweet, pastime of teenage girls. Like an extremely wild spring that alights all at once and then extinguishes within a single month."

"How can you be so nonchalant?"

"How can I be anything but nonchalant?"

And in the end, Lily, of course, had been proved right. But on the other hand, they were never granted the chance to look back at this short phase of their life from a position of calculated maturity. Perhaps Narcissa, who had been lucky enough to grow old. Not Lily. Never Lily. And Narcissa too, always when she looked back, would see the visionary picture that haunted her dreams. Lily, open-eyed and dead, sprawled on the parquet floor of the house in Godric's Hollow, in a chilly autumn's night. And it was and remained violent. Like wildfire.

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Fin.