The Headmaster's Office is a place Lily prefers to avoid, if at all possible. She has no negative associations with it from her school days, but most of her communication with the Headmaster nowadays is done via letter or Patronus.

When an in-person visit is required, it's rarely for a good reason.

With a simple throw of Floo powder, a flash of green flame, and an annoying tug of her stomach, she finds herself exactly there.

She didn't bother warning him of her arrival, yet he doesn't seem to be fazed by her sudden appearance in his fireplace in the slightest. He doesn't even bother getting up from his desk.

"Miss Evans, a pleasure," Dumbledore says placidly. "Can I offer you some tea?"

Lily's not here for pleasantries, and she cuts right to the chase. "What do you know about Snape?"

A flash of recognition crosses his face. "Sit," he directs her.

She finds herself obeying his command instinctively. With anyone else, she'd almost certainly snap back at them for their avoidance of her question, but she respects the Headmaster more than most people.

Dumbledore also hardly reveals information except on his own terms, so she'll have to play his game to get what she wants from him.

She's not going to leave without a clear answer, but she'll sit down in one of the velvet chairs in front of his desk if it'll get her to that answer somehow.

"I must ask, why the sudden curiosity about Mister Snape?" He folds his hands on his desk. "From my understanding, you severed all ties with him during your Hogwarts years."

"I severed ties," she replies. "I'm not entirely sure if he severed them on his end in quite the same way."

That's probably an understatement. All throughout sixth and seventh years, after she'd made it quite clear that she wouldn't associate with him unless he swore off his Dark Arts obsession and found some friends less intent on exterminating people like her, she'd notice him watching her from afar.

He never stopped trying to talk to her either, despite being unable to do the one thing she'd asked of him. The one unforgivable thing.

"And you're curious about him because…?"

"He was at the Black's dinner party last night," she tells him.

That manages to catch him off-guard, and Lily catches the brief flash of shock on his features before they settle back into his usual expressionless state. She'd almost be pleased with that, the prospect of having thrown him off his rhythm, thrown something at the Headmaster that he hadn't predicted five moves ago, were it not for the fact that this unknown information could potentially get her caught.

It's not as satisfying when her life hangs in the balance.

"That is… unexpected," the Headmaster eventually replies.

"That's an understatement," she snaps. Her respect for Dumbledore will only go so far before her temper wins out. "He could blow my entire cover."

"What do you mean?"

Lily could throw something. She could pick up the shimmering glass orb on his desk that does Merlin-knows-what and fling it at the wall until it shattered to dust. It's only her most valiant efforts at self-control that stop her, that force her to keep this conversation civil even when she knows that Dumbledore is smart enough to recognize at least some of the reasons why Snape in particular poses a specific threat to her.

"For as much as you may have picked up between me and Snape, I'm not sure you understand the exact nature of our relationship, sir." The last word comes out with more force than necessary, lending an entirely sarcastic tone to her words. "Snape was… infatuated with me. More infatuated with the dark arts when given a choice, but infatuated nonetheless. I'm not completely unlike myself when I'm undercover - and if there was anyone who's studied me enough to recognize me through all of it, it's him."

Dumbledore appears to ponder that for a moment, and the long stretch of silence does little to settle the fiery impatience in Lily's veins.

"That does present a problem," he eventually relents, and Lily almost wants to slap the esteemed wizard upside the head, because no fucking shit.

"If I go back to another event without knowing what I'm getting myself into, I'm at risk of compromising this entire operation… not to mention essentially walking into a death trap," she replies. She can't tell from Dumbledore's words if he grasps the gravity of the situation - if he does, he's certainly not showing it. And while the Headmaster has never been one for showing his hand, at least some minor indicator that he recognizes the significance of this would be nice.

"You wouldn't compromise the entire operation - there's a reason I have safeguards in place, after all," he says simply, and while Lily is well aware of said safeguards, she doesn't exactly appreciate being spoken to as if she's fucking expendable. Dumbledore may be able to find a new spy, but she'd quite like to stay alive, thank you very fucking much. "But I'll have some intelligence collected on Mister Snape's activities and the extent of his involvement and share the results of those investigations with you as soon as is reasonable."

"I won't be going to any events until I get that information." She's steadfast on that point - both for the very real protection of her cover and in the hopes that it will ensure Dumbledore prioritises getting her the answers she needs.

"That's understandable," the Headmaster concedes, still looking delightfully unaffected by this whole exchange. "As I said, I will share what I learn with you as soon as is reasonable."

It's not fucking worth it to push the point with him any further. This is all she's going to get out of him, and it's going to have to be enough.

Then again, her standards are low. As long as she doesn't end up dead in the basement of Malfoy Manor, it'll be enough.

They've hardly got two weeks until the first match of the season, and Lily's quite sure she hasn't seen the Puddlemere team look any worse than they do today.

Ozzie's doing a piss poor job of actually keeping any shots out of the rings, which is made even more pathetic by the fact that none of the Chasers' shots are all that good to begin with. The three of them are off their rhythm in a way that they've never been before - not even when James first joined the team two months ago.

Usually, the team's close bond is an advantage - they operate as a unit across all their separate roles, and when one member of the team is at their peak, they're all at their peak. But the opposite also holds true - and despite not crossing paths at all, somehow the Chasers' and Keeper's poor performance are rubbing off on both the Prewett twins and Mari.

But the worst of all is James. Normally the one keeping the Chaser team glued together as one unit, today he seems determined to fuck up that cohesion in any way possible. He's almost exclusively passing to Charlie on his left, and he fumbles two easy passes from Corinne. Lily, frankly, has absolutely no idea what the fuck has gotten into him.

Usually, when practices are going this poorly, it's not really her problem. She's an assistant, merely there to help Harrison out, and ultimately he's the one responsible for whipping the miserable state of the team into shape or choosing when to call it a fucking day and try again tomorrow.

But now this is her team. She's the one in charge now.

James makes another pass to Charlie despite the play clearly requiring a right side pass. "Potter!" Lily yells. "Are you just trying to do the exact opposite of what the play calls for? Run it again, and run it right this time."

He does, at the very least, appear to recognize that he's playing like shit, and has the good sense to look a little bit ashamed about it.

The awareness doesn't stop him from throwing an absolutely terrible right side pass the next time around, a jerky sort of throw that's nothing like his usual easy flowing but lightning fast movements, practically sending Corinne spinning out in an attempt to catch it.

What the hell is going on with him? Lily hasn't seen him play this sloppily since their Ravenclaw match in seventh year, and that was only because he'd had two ribs broken three hours into the game and stubbornly refused to sit out the rest of it.

Gideon is distracted by the dreadfulness of the Chasers' play, and nearly takes Lily out with a Bludger.

Fucking hell.

She does everything she can think of to get them back on track for the day, to get at least something good out of what is clearly a trainwreck of a practice, but even with some marginal improvements, she eventually accepts that it's just a lost cause and that drawing out the miserable experience any longer isn't going to amount to any great breakthroughs.

There's a decent chance one of the other assistants will make a point of complaining to Harrison about it, whether out of an opportunistic attempt to make Lily look bad in front of him or out of nothing more than an innocent grumbling, she doesn't know, but she does know she's going to make a point of updating Harrison on today's practice before anyone else can.

"I want every single one of you to go home and figure out how to reset," she tells the team as soon as they get into the mid-air huddle. "I don't care how and I don't care what it takes, but tomorrow's session will be better."

She'll come up with some particularly brutal ground conditioning for them if it's not.

The team lands and trudges off to the showers, the other assistants get to work in putting things away, and Lily takes a couple laps around the pitch to clear her head before she proceeds any further.

It's always been inevitable that she'd have a practice like this - one where everything goes to shit while she's at the helm - but she wasn't expecting it to happen quite so early on. It's nothing she can't recover from, nothing the team can't recover from, but her good name with Harrison - or god forbid, Worthington - might not bounce back as quickly if she doesn't do the proper amount of damage control and sucking up.

She lands and does her part of the post-practice clean-up quickly, before stalking off in the general direction of the locker rooms. She'll keep any sort of dead giveaway expression off her face the moment she walks in, because the team doesn't need to see her in any sort of state, but there's no denying the emotional build-up underneath the surface.

The simple matter is that she's incredibly frustrated, and she desperately needs something to take that energy out on.

Or, perhaps, someone.

It's really a testament to her ability to keep her professional and personal feelings in completely separate bubbles that she's even entertaining this thought, because professionally, she's pretty sure James is the primary reason today's practice was a disaster, and she's more than a little annoyed at his sudden terrible performance, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that ripping his clothes off seems like a very good way of channeling her frustration.

He's nowhere in the main area of the locker room when she gets there, and that's probably for the best anyways - it's not like she can exactly drag him off into a closet or something when there are this many other Puddlemere players and staff around.

No, she's just going to have to trust that he's going to be the last one out of the locker room, like always. Though she's not feeling particularly patient right now.

She grabs her clothes from her bag and makes her way to the showers. She's quick about the whole process, only staying under the hot water as long as she needs to, thinking about something else entirely.

Due to her late start at showering, however, there's only one other shower left running when she turns her own off.

Finally, something goes right today.

She dresses slowly, waiting until she hears the lone running shower turn off. It's a game of timing after that - right as James pulls the shower stall door open, she's in front of him.

He doesn't even get to step out; she steps to him first, his warm body fully flush against her own. Even through his shirt and joggers, he's a furnace, and she doesn't know if that's from the shower or just his natural state of being.

"I want you to - "

She doesn't get to finish the sentence. He cuts her off abruptly, but she can't even be annoyed about it, because he cuts her off with the very thing she'd been on the verge of asking of him.

His mouth meets hers, and just like the last time, there's no slow, gentle build to this kiss. It's hot and heavy and all-consuming from the very start. It burns every last rational thought from her brain, which is exactly what she was looking for.

He tugs her into the shower stall, letting the door shut behind them, and lets himself be backed into the wall.

His hands slide down her body, seemingly touching as much of her as he can, before they find steady purchase on her ass, and Lily vaguely recognizes that he's tucked his hands into the back pockets of her pants.

She tightens her grip around his neck as his tongue runs across her teeth, and she lets herself burn, burn, burn, happy to spend forever in this moment but also desperate for something more.

It would be utterly foolish to fuck in the locker room - perhaps less so since they're tucked into a shower stall this time instead of right in the middle of the main area of it, but still stupid. Still reckless.

But right now, recklessness tastes like the sweetest release and James' body against hers feels like a sacred oasis.

So fuck doing the smart thing.

Her fingers claw at the soft cotton of his T-shirt. She starts tugging it off of him recklessly, not overly concerned with gentleness, and suddenly he's breaking the kiss, eyes closed and head leaned back against the tile as he hisses in pain.

Lily slows her movements, gingerly pulling up the fabric and finding exactly what's got him reacting like that - red, angry claw marks spreading across his entire left side. They look fresh.

Slowly, through her kiss-fogged haze, a few things start to make sense.

"Did you go to the team Healers about this?" Lily asks, fingers hovering over the wounds. She wonders where they came from - Quidditch may be a contact sport, but this clearly wasn't caused by a collision with a bludger.

He scoffs at that. "Yeah, because that would go over well. How exactly do you propose I explain why I've been fucking mauled?"

He's got a fair point.

"How did you?"

"Evans, you're a smart witch, don't tell me you've forgotten the secret I told you in seventh year," he replies, almost flippant.

He told her a lot of secrets in seventh year, so it takes her a moment to piece together which one he's referring to, which one would end with him injured like this.

And then it hits her. He's… he's still doing that?

"You still do that?" She looks up from his injuries and into his eyes.

He gives her a look like the answer should've been obvious. "Yes, of course I still do that. The transformations didn't suddenly just stop as soon as we graduated."

"Oh," she replies softly, her hands dropping away from his side. "I just figured - "

He scoffs when she trails off, obviously having filled in the blanks on his own. "For fuck's sake, why are you so set on this idea that I'm totally different from who I was in school? That all my good qualities just immediately evaporated as soon as we left that castle?"

Because you left me, she thinks to herself, but she doesn't say it aloud.

"I never - "

"It was very heavily implied," he interrupts, glaring at her. "God, it's the constant undertone every single fucking time you talk to me. I've told you the truth, I've told you just how much the stories going around about me got it twisted, and yet you still seem to believe them."

She opens her mouth to argue, but he cuts her off again. "Honestly, Evans? I think you're projecting. I may have changed since we graduated, sure, but you're a totally different person. The Lily I knew wasn't so cold and distrusting of literally everyone. She saw the best in people, even if they didn't always deserve it, and she believed people could always be better. She made them want to be. And now? Now, it's like you're made of ice."

He has a point there. Back then, she'd been happy, golden; and now, she's deep blue, frozen. But what he seems to miss is the fact that he played such a pivotal role in that transformation.

"I'm protecting myself," she replies sharply. "Because as it turns out, when you see the best in people when they don't deserve it, all you're doing is giving them one more chance to hurt you."

His brow furrows.

She decides to spell it out for him. On one hand, she hates drawing attention to the fact that she gave him so much power to hurt him, but on the other hand, he's clearly never going to figure it out on his own. The spoiled boy wouldn't know what that betrayal's like.

"I saw the best in you for years," she tells him. "And… god, I fell for you so hard. And then, stupidly, I let myself think you felt the same way. But it turns out all you wanted me for was a fun little snog in the kitchens and then you dropped me as soon as we left that castle. So excuse me for questioning your character after that."

His mouth falls open as she speaks, and it takes him a few tries to form a response. "I - you - that's not what happened."

She laughs involuntarily, the sound high and mirthless. "Of course that's what happened, I was there."

He can't argue facts with her. He can't tell her that things that happened right in front of her eyes didn't happen. He can't.

"I - I wasn't supposed to kiss you that night," he replies, as if that's somehow supposed to make things better.

She'd already gathered that he sees that night as a mistake somehow, she really doesn't need him slamming that fact in her face.

"Well you did, so you have to live with the fucking consequences. You can't just pretend it didn't happen just because you didn't want it to."

Now it's James' turn to laugh bitterly, and it catches her off guard. "Not wanting it couldn't be farther from the truth. You can't seriously think I didn't want to kiss you that night."

"I can't?" she asks disbelievingly, the slightest note of a challenge in her voice. "I certainly don't know how else I'm meant to interpret it."

He rakes his hand through his still-wet hair. "That kiss was… I'd thought about kissing you like that for the better part of seven years."

Of all the things she expected him to say in this moment, that was none of them. There's a soft earnestness to it that knocks the wind out of her for a moment, her breath stuttering to an abrupt halt in her chest.

She's torn between two versions of herself - the first, that wants to believe him, that wants to trust his earnestness and believe in him and in his words, and the second, that's screaming at her to run away, to put her walls back up before it's too late and before he gets the chance to break her again, to break her like they always do.

"You thought about it for seven years, and it happened, and then you ran away," she replies, her tone flat and betraying nothing of the war waging in her mind.

"I… I panicked. I just… I felt so much and I figured there was no way you would ever feel that too, so I just… I don't know. I thought it was better if I just let things end there, before I got in too deep and you realized what you'd gotten yourself into. Before it had the chance to destroy us both."

There's a long silence between the two of them, and the depths in James's eyes suggest there's just as much turmoil going on in his head as there is in hers.

But there's something wrong with what he's saying. Because there's no way he wouldn't have known what that kiss meant to her at the time. She'd told him exactly what it meant, written it out in so many different ways, sent every single one of them to him.

He would've known. Unless -

"Did you even read them?" She hates how her voice sounds, raw and vulnerable.

"What?"

"The letters I sent that summer. Did you read a single one of them?"

He just stares at her in stony silence, the barest hint of guilt on his face, and it's as clear as if he'd shouted the answer at her.

The war in her mind declares a victor, and the churn of emotions is consumed by a cold, dull rage as her walls go up again. He can't, he can't claim to have thought his feelings for her outweighed hers for him when he didn't even read any of the letters that would've disproven that theory, that would've shown that she'd bared her heart to him.

He doesn't have that right - not now, not three years too late.

"That's what I thought," she replies, any vulnerability once present in her voice replaced by pure ice.

She wants to walk away then, to let her anger at him take over, but one last curiosity keeps her where she is.

"Why is this any different?" she asks, gesturing between the two of them. Despite their arguing, they're still practically pressed up against each other.

"What do you mean?"

"You ran away back then. You've now kissed me twice in the past week, and you're not running away now."

He has an answer far faster than she expected him to. "You don't feel anything for me now."

Sometimes she really wonders if he thinks at all about how his words sound before they leave his mouth. The fact that it's somehow better to him that she feels nothing for him than it was when she felt everything for him makes it seem exactly as she'd suspected - that he was just using her then and he's just using her now. At least now it's mutual, but…

"You… you do realize that makes you worse, right?"

He sighs, apparently unbothered by her sardonic tone. "You were always going to destroy me, Evans. This was always going to drown me. At least this way, when the water comes rushing in, I'll be the only casualty."

She can't wrap her head around it when he speaks like that. She finds it so hard to reconcile all the evidence about him, everything he's done, with words like those. She's gotten so accustomed to the narrative in her mind that James never really cared for her like she did for him, and it seems that every time he opens his mouth, he sends that crystal clear conclusion deeper and deeper into the mud.

She decides not to address it now, and instead looks back down at his wounds. "At least let me - I've got a salve in my bag that should help with the worst of that."

She leaves the shower stall first, but his footsteps just behind her confirm that he's following.

He sits on the bench behind her as she rifles through her bag for the blue ceramic jar of healing salve - a concoction of her own invention that does the job far better than any of the pre-mixed ones they sell at apothecaries.

When she turns around to face him, he's got his shirt pulled up to expose the wounded area again, and Lily tries not to think about how, just a few minutes ago, she was kissing him and trying to pull that shirt off herself.

She kneels down in front of him, opening the jar and dipping her fingers in to grab some of the thick, pale blue paste.

"It might sting a little," she warns him just before beginning to dab it along the deepest part of the cut, and his sudden sharp intake of breath confirms that it does.

She works wordlessly, his skin burning hot under her fingertips in comparison with the cool salve. The locker room is silent but for the sound of their breathing, and Lily throws herself completely into methodically covering every inch of damaged skin. The salve won't heal his injuries entirely - that would require a healing spell far beyond Lily's amateur capabilities - but the skin does start to stitch itself back together, the healing process accelerated by a number of days and the redness fading into scars. By the time she's done, most of the jar has been depleted, but his injuries look markedly less severe.

His eyes are fixed on her - they have been the entire time she's been working, she's pretty sure - but it still knocks the air out of her lungs when she looks up at him and their eyes lock. It burns something inside of her, something reckless and heavy and utterly starving.

She, stupidly, thinks about kissing him again, about resuming what they were doing just a few minutes ago, despite everything that has been said between now and then. She shouldn't even want to be in the same room as him, and yet she, stupidly, still wants him pressed up against her.

Gravity keeps her there, kneeling in front of him, drowning under his gaze.

"I'm not usually this careless," he says quietly, breaking the heavy silence in the air.

A disbelieving sort of scoff escapes Lily's throat unbidden at that, quiet but still very audible in the silent room. Because he is careless, has always been, and while she'd once let herself believe it was an endearing trait, it has more often than not made her want to strangle him, especially as of late.

"Not with this, at least," he clarifies, heading off Lily's reply before she even gets the chance to speak it. "I've - we've been doing this for so long that I know how to… I let myself get distracted, and I don't normally do that."

"If it happens again, find me," she tells him, mentally shoving all of her stupidity back into the corner of her brain where it belongs, all business and all Quidditch once again. "Don't make me witness another practice like that."

"It won't happen again."

That's not good enough for her. She gives him a look that tells him as much.

He sighs. "If it does, I'll find you."

She just gives him a nod at that, then backs away, screwing the lid back onto her nearly-empty jar and placing it back in her bag. The distance does her good, clears her brain even more. But even then, even away from the magnetic pull that seemingly affects him just as much as it does her, she knows that there's nothing in the world that can stop this. Nothing in the world that can cut off what they've started.

She knows where this goes, and she has a bad feeling.