Previously in the Darklyverse: Girls' night at Emmeline's flat ended disastrously when tensions rose about Mary leaving the Order. James and Sirius combed through James's parents' house. Lily began training to become a Healer at St. Mungo's so as to improve her skills for the Order, but her real passion was International Magical Cooperation.

xx

December 21st, 1978: Lily Evans

"And then Marlene gave her a hug, and it looked like it was torturing her—you should have seen the look on her face. And then she said goodbye and Disapparated."

"Padfoot is right," says James definitively. "That sounds really, really uncomfortable."

"I just don't know what to say to get through to her," Lily says with a sigh. "I want to make her feel like she's still part of the group. I don't want her to feel like I—stole her place or stole her best friend or anything. But how do I do that without, you know—without backing out and giving her her place back?"

"First of all," says Sirius, "Mary's issues aren't just about her friendship with Marlene: her leaving the Order had a lot to do with it, and there's nothing you can do about that decision. Also, there's room for both you and Marlene with all of us. You don't have to go anywhere for her to be able to stay."

Lily purses her lips. "Are you sure it's okay for me to be talking about Marlene to you? I don't want to—drag anything up."

Sirius laughs hollowly. "I think I can say truthfully that that ship has completely sunk. You say her name, and I just feel—nothing."

They're sitting at Sirius and Lily's kitchen table with James, who popped by after finishing his last commission of the day for Fluke-Nettles. It's the first chance she's really had to talk to either of them since getting home from girls' night last night: Sirius was out with Peter most of the night, and James had been with Remus, and then they all had work today, of course.

"That's not exactly good, either, Padfoot, mate," James says, clapping Sirius on the shoulder. "Are the two of you ever going to forgive each other and find some middle ground?"

"There isn't anything I have to forgive her for," says Sirius, and when James raises his eyebrows, he continues, "Seriously! I'm past it. She was a mess, and she was doing her best. But always getting shoved into the role of villain to satisfy her narrative—I don't want any part in that ever again."

"I wish making up were easier than this," Lily says, looking down. "Remember two Christmases ago, when we all stayed at James's house for the holiday and worked through our differences? Just look at us now."

"And now my parents are dead," says James humorlessly, "and so are yours, and Padfoot's have blasted him off the family tree."

Lily smiles sadly. "That's not exactly where I was going with that, but that's also true, yes. Did you finish going through the manor?"

"Just about," says James. "I can't really put it on the Muggle market—there are too many magical effects still around the house—but I hired a wizard who does real estate to find me a buyer. Hopefully somebody bites soon, because the longer I have it, the longer I have to pay property taxes on it. Not that I'm hard-pressed for cash, but still."

"God, I can't believe we're old enough to be doing taxes," says Sirius. "Where did our youth go?"

"Tell me about it," says Lily, thinking about the rather large number of dying bodies she's had to mend for the Order in the past few months.

Christmas Day is coming up on Monday, and Lily is spending it—in a couple different places, actually. She's staying with Marlene and Doc for a few days, but she's also spending a hefty chunk of it with James and Sirius, following up the tradition they started last year when none of the three of them had any family to go to. If Sirius and Marlene were friends—but they're not, so Lily doesn't allow herself to entertain the thought of what it would be like to bring James and Sirius to Doc's flat.

Work the next day is grueling. She's completed St. Mungo's formal training program, which means she's now shadowing experienced Healers and performing basic spells and check-ups as a trainee. She knows she'll get more Healing experience the longer she continues to shadow, but completing her official training raises the question: does Lily want to stay at the hospital, or leave it and try to get involved again in International Magical Cooperation at the Ministry? She's trying to gravitate toward experience that will prove useful in the Order during her shadowing, focusing on poisonings and spell damage on the third and fourth floors, but it's not like every case (or even many cases) Lily encounters on a daily basis is relevant to anything she needs to know for the Order.

And she misses International Magical Cooperation. She didn't suffer through seven years of Binns's History of Magic for nothing. She misses her internship, even as frustrated as she was with the French government when they visited it, and she misses Brinn and the other familiar faces she came to learn around the department. Lily just—doesn't want to go back to it if there's a chance it would mean she'd miss out on something that could prove life-saving in the future.

"You know what you should do?" Marlene says that evening after Lily Apparates to her and Doc's flat, overnight bag in tow. "Screw Healing, screw International Magical Cooperation, and run for Minister of Magic."

Lily freezes in a moment of does not compute. She can't possibly have heard Marlene right. Could she? "Pardon me?" she says instead of answering.

"I'm serious. Run for Minister. Minchum is retiring in '80, so '79 will be an election year, and I think you could stir everything up by running. I'd vote for you."

"You and nobody else," says Lily weakly. "I have no relevant experience. The closest thing I have to prior experience is my internship in sixth year, and I had to spend half of it repairing my reputation there after my outburst at the French in front of Brinn and everyone. Plus, I gave myself away at graduation—everybody's going to think I'm involved in vigilantism, and they're right, and we all know how illegal what we're doing is."

Marlene shrugs. "I'm just saying. Right now, it looks like it's between that slimy git Lucius Malfoy and Millicent Bagnold, who's—okay, I guess, but we can do better than her."

"What's wrong with Millicent Bagnold?" asks Lily, who admittedly hasn't been following the election.

"Well, she supports Crouch's move to allow the use of Unforgivables on suspects in the field. She's also okay with convicting prisoners and sending them to Azkaban without a trial following their arrest. And she's made a big public show of wanting to crack down on vigilantes trying to interfere with due process."

"…Okay, yes, that sounds bad," admits Lily. "But I can't exactly march up to the podium and announce that the rumors are true and I'm one of those vigilantes she hates so much, can I?"

"Just you watch. I bet there's a bunch of witches and wizards out there who are just begging for a third option. They won't even care that you don't have any qualifications if the message you're putting out resonates enough."

"Gee, thanks," says Lily, but she's grinning.

"Oh, you know what I mean. You aced your N.E.W.T. in History of Magic; that's good enough. Anyway, I don't think people would care. I wouldn't care. You have the people skills, and you're so smart, and you can think your way through anything. Besides, you're a trainee Healer, so you can claim to represent—you know—healthcare employees and other front-line workers."

Lily says, "I'll give you one thing: Lucius Malfoy is a total scumbag. He works at the Ministry in the International Magical Office of Law. I ran into him now and again during my internship, and he's the biggest bigot covered up underneath a mask of political connections."

"See?" says Marlene. "Wouldn't you love to beat his arse to the ground?"

"What I worry about," says Lily, and she can hardly believe she's even considering this, "is—if Malfoy gets all the purist votes, and Bagnold gets everybody else's votes, maybe Bagnold has a chance at defeating him. But if those votes get split between Bagnold and somebody else—"

"You."

"All right, then—if those votes get split between Bagnold and me, doesn't Malfoy come out on top? Isn't that worse for the wizarding world than if I never ran at all?"

"Oh, there aren't that many bigots in Wizarding Britain," says Marlene dismissively. "There are too many half-bloods and Muggle-borns able to vote."

But Lily isn't so sure. She's not even sure that, all her other issues aside, she'd be able to get any votes as a Muggle-born running for public office. Because it's not just pureblood supremacists like the Slytherins Severus used to associate with who support purist politicians—it's also people like Alice, or at least the person Alice used to be, who mean well but are blinded by their upbringings.

There's a crack, and Doc appears right on top of Marlene on the couch. "Sorry, hon," he says, scrambling backward. "Lils, good to see you, as always."

"Hey, Doc," says Lily with a grin.

"Doc, don't you think Lily would make a good Minister of Magic?"

Without missing a beat, Doc says, "Sure, I'd vote for her."

"You two and nobody else," Lily mutters.

But she keeps thinking about it through the rest of the night and Saturday and Sunday, even though Marlene doesn't mention it again. Still, Lily tries to concentrate on enjoying time with Marlene and Doc, whom she sees incidentally through the Order less than she might have expected. Doc insists on cooking elaborate meals for them at every meal, and they Apparate to Muggle forests where they can take winding walks through the snow in the evenings. Finally, on Sunday night—Christmas Eve—Lily kisses Doc on the cheek, waves to Marlene, and Disapparates for her and Sirius's flat.

Sirius and James are both fussing in the kitchen over what smells like a very burnt turkey. "You tried cooking Christmas dinner yourselves?" asks Lily, amused.

"Shut it," says Sirius good-naturedly. "Gifts are in the spare bedroom; can you bring them all out?"

"We have a tree you could have put them under, you know," says Lily as she ducks into the bedroom and retrieves the badly wrapped packages.

She sets them under the tree and then goes into her and Sirius's room to retrieve her own gifts. It takes a while to sort out dinner—they eventually end up trashing the turkey and undercooked vegetables and ordering Muggle Chinese food—but once they're comfortably slurping lo mein out of takeout containers, the fish the gifts back out and make their trades.

"Ooh, thank you," says Lily when she opens James's gift—a paint-by-numbers art kit. "You remembered what I said about wanting to get into painting!"

"You did pretty well yourself," says James, who's got his old wallet in one hand and is carefully sticking all of his gold into the new dragonskin one Lily got for him.

Sirius gets her a record player with a few vinyls to go with it—"The music is Muggle stuff, but it's charmed so that it doesn't use electricity," he tells her. She hurries to set it up and start playing one of the records, then settles back down on the couch, leaning against James and smiling with her eyes closed.

She lets James and Sirius do most of the talking, zoning out in that space where she's still awake but drifting in her thoughts. "You still with us, Lil?" James eventually asks, squeezing her closer to him.

"Yeah. I'm just… thinking."

"About what?"

"Well… Marlene thinks I should run for Minister of Magic."

"Do it," says Sirius immediately. "I'd vote for you."

"And me," says James.

"Oh, don't tempt me," says Lily, smiling.

But the next day, she Apparates to the wizarding library in London where she knows Sirius checked out spell-writing books while working on the Sectumsempra countercurse, and locating the little section on politics, she checks out a book titled So You Want to Run for Office: How to Become Wizarding Britain's Next Great Elected Official and begins to read.

xx

END OF PART FIFTEEN