The same warning is on the prologue--I have read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This story will be compatible with it. However, there will be no spoilers for the book, so if you haven't finished it yet, you can read this story without worrying.

My internet... well, let's just say that it hasn't liked me much lately. That's why I'm so behind on author responses. Expect the long overdue e-mails from me over the next few days. I'm sorry about the delay!

Chapter Nine

It was much easier for Lily Evans to find James Potter on his own than it had been for Remus Lupin to find her, even when you factored in Sirius Black, who could usually be counted on throwing your plans off kilter, no matter what said plans might be. (Indeed, this was such a common occurrence that both students and faculty had begun to refer to it as Law of Black Luck. In a Muggle school scientific studies would have been run on the probability of the phenomenon; in Hogwarts, the students wrote it off as a side-effect of being in a magical environment—putting up with Sirius was necessary much in the same way as putting up with staircases that led to a different part of the castle on alternative Fridays, dealing with the eerie Mrs. Norris, or Peeves' very existence.) Sirius himself was quite modest about his talent. After all, it was a gift.

James was sitting by himself in a corner of the Common Room, acting like a normal student for once and actually doing his school work. None of his friends were around, for which Lily was grateful. She had already talked to Remus, Pettigrew had been giving her weird looks ever since that thing with James (whatever it was) had started earlier that week and Sirius had been giving her hateful looks ever since that thing with James (which was unfortunately all too clear) had started in fifth year.

Lily plonked herself down beside him. "I think I owe you an apology," she said as way of a greeting.

James glanced up from Metamorphamagi: The Myths, the Mystery and the Magic that he was reading for extra credit in Transfiguration. "You think you owe me an apology?" he asked.

"I was talking to Remus, and he was saying how I've upset you. I don't want hard feelings between us, especially now that we have to work together so much, so I thought I'd clear the air."

"So you don't know what you're apologizing for," James concluded. "That rather makes the apology useless, don't you think?"

Lily surprised them both by bursting out laughing. At James' questioning, and almost hurt look, she elaborated. "You sound like my sister. She does that sometimes with her boyfriend, when they fight. 'If you don't know what you've done wrong, I'm not about to tell you!' I guess it just always seems to be that she doesn't remember why she's mad in the first place and is pretending it's Vernon's fault."

"She does have a point," James said, obviously not wanting to make things easier for Lily by using her prompts to explain what was the matter.

Lily only laughed again. "I'm sorry. I guess if you knew her, you'd know why I found this funny. It's just the thought of the two of you agreeing on anything…" She trailed off, shaking her head and trying to hold back the tears of mirth.

"So she's like you, then?" James asked.

"No. Quite the opposite, in fact," Lily said.

"But you said that she wouldn't agree with me," James said.

"No, she wouldn't, but for other reasons than we don't agree."

"Why don't we agree?" James asked before he could stop himself.

Lily chose not to answer that question, instead continuing her previous line of thought. "You and Petunia—she's, well, a Muggle. I mean, I know she's a Muggle by definition, but when you get down to it, you could open a dictionary and look up the word, and her picture would be there to illustrate the meaning. I'm fairly certain she'd rather eat rat poison with an extra helping of cyanide than agree with a wizard on anything."

She had answered the question as it might have been, not as it was posed, but James didn't feel inclined to argue with her and instead acted as if he had really been asking the difference between himself and her sister. "She doesn't like that you're at Hogwarts?" he guessed, reading between the lines. Not that it was hard. There were pictures drawn between these lines. Captioned pictures. With blinking arrows and flashing lights.

"She doesn't think it's 'normal'," Lily told him.

"How? What?"

But Lily was shaking her head. "Don't ask. It's better not to know. Needless to say, we don't get along well. We don't get along horribly, either. I mean, we're not like Black and his family."

"I don't think anyone is like Sirius and his family," James said noncommittally. He tried to keep his tone light, not wanting to get delve into Sirius' family life for his best friend's sake, and changed the subject as quickly as he could without tipping Lily off to his intention. "Has Dumbledore talked to you about this Slytherin thing?"

Lily sat up straight, suddenly alert. "I thought we had a meeting with him in the morning." It came out more as a question, much in lines of the way Peter would sometimes say "I thought the test was next Monday" before proceeding to develop a full-blown case of panic-induced hysteria.

"We do," James answered in the same voice Remus would always use to assure Wormtail the test was next Monday and won't you please ignore James and Sirius because all they were doing was trying to rile you up and it's best not to give them anymore reason to cackle like a bunch of hyenas.

He also decided that the third tone typical in these conversations, that of Sirius' "Honestly, Wormtail, must we go through this every bloody month?" was completely unnecessary in this particular situation, no matter how funny it was in the original conversation.

So instead, James continued, "I was simply curious if Dumbledore had already talked to you, or if you had any idea what the meeting was about."

Seeming much more relaxed now, Lily slumped back down into her seat. "No, no clue. Well, unless it's about article in the Prophet, like we were talking about last night."

Suddenly, James remembered their conversation from the other night—if owling each other for five hours straight could be called a conversation. He remembered his resolve to go read the Prophet in order to discover what, in fact, Lily was referring to so that he wouldn't look like a complete berk when it became apparent he had been talking about things he didn't have a clue about.

He also remembered his trek to find the Prophet. There was usually a copy of it lying around somewhere in his dorm—James subscribed to it (rather, his parents subscribed him to it) and Remus read it.

Of course, on his trek to read the Prophet, following the Law of Black Luck, he'd been sidetracked by Sirius, who had the perfect idea on how to spend an evening. James wasn't quite sure how things had escalated, but the end result was a solemn vow between the friends never to discuss the goings on again. The evidence (a book that would have been placed in the Restricted Section had it belonged to the library, a love letter written by and for students who must have graduated almost a century beforehand and an suspiciously empty bottle of firewhiskey—suspicious only because neither James nor Sirius touched a drop of alcohol the entire night) was disposed of accordingly

So James simply smiled, albeit a tad too brightly, and said, "Right. I guess we'll just have to wait until tomorrow to see what Dumbledore has to say."

"We're fine then?" Lily asked.

James blinked, forgetting for an instance that she'd struck the conversation simply to apologize to him.

"We're fine," he lied.