A/N: Double chapter today because I'm too excited to wait!

xx

Previously in the Darklyverse: Sirius admitted to Lily the prank he played on Snape in fifth year.

xx

November 12th, 1982

What Lily doesn't understand is how everyone kept this hidden from her for so many years. James married her, for god's sake, and he didn't even bother to work the information in there somewhere that his best mate tried to have her former best mate murdered by a werewolf once. How could Sirius know what he had done and pursue a friendship with her for so many years without telling her? How could Remus protect Sirius over something that Sirius presumably dragged him into without his knowledge or consent? Hell, even Peter used to be Lily's friend—if he doesn't owe it to her anymore to tell her something this major, he sure as hell used to.

If anything, Severus should have told her about Sirius sending him after Remus as the wolf the second it happened—but he didn't. They never directly talked about what had happened: all Lily remembers is overhearing Marlene gossiping to Mary about James saving Severus from whatever was under the Willow. When Lily brought it up to Severus, he didn't say a damn thing to explain what had happened down there—and she can't wrap her head around why he didn't. He hated Sirius. Why would he not have jumped at the opportunity to tear Sirius down to Lily for doing something so—

It was beyond cruel. It was downright evil. But Sirius—the most loyal person Lily knows, who spent so many years working hard to break the mold the rest of his family tried to cast him in—isn't evil.

None of it makes sense.

And for her to find out now—now, when she and Sirius and Remus and Severus are living in Sirius's childhood home together, trapped with no place to escape each other—

It's been hard enough to steer clear of Severus in this house, and she's been doing it by keeping Sirius and Remus and Harry on her outskirts at all times. Now, two-third of her buffer is gone—and it's happened just minutes after she had a breakdown about James right in front of Severus. She let him hold her, and she hates herself for that, and now she's got to—

When she locks herself inside her bedroom, Harry doesn't wake. She slides down the door with her fist stuffed in her mouth and just—holds in a wail.

xx

"I have to go after her."

"No, you don't."

"But Moony—"

"No. She needs space. You just dropped a bloody bomb on her. Give her room to process it."

"But—she shouldn't be alone right now."

"Pads, if she wants company, that still doesn't mean she wants it to be either of us. She can—wake up Alice or someone if she needs to."

"Alice can't explain this to her. Only one of us can, and if we don't—"

xx

There's a knock on the door. "Lily? Lily, are you in there?"

And Severus Snape is both the first and last person Lily wants to talk to right now, but—she can't do it here, where Harry is sleeping, with the mess she just left behind with Remus and Sirius directly across the hall from her. She wants to scream at him to go away, or maybe to drag him in here and demand answers, but either option would wake Harry, and she can't have that. Lily may be nothing—Lily may know nothing, apparently—but she at least knows how to leave her sleeping child in peace. She's a shit mother and an even worse human being, but she at least can do that much.

She hopes Severus might just go away if she stays on this side of the door and doesn't answer, but he repeats, "Lily?" a little louder after a moment and knocks again. She screws up her face and her courage, stands, shuffles into the hall, and closes the door again as quietly as she can.

"Not here," she tells him. "Harry's sleeping."

"I was worried about you. I know you don't want to see me right—er, ever—but—"

"Harry's sleeping," she says again. "Let's go… uh…"

"My room," Severus suggests.

"But Dung—"

"Dung's out like a light by now. We could be speaking in perfectly conversational tones, and he'd drown us out with his own snoring. He won't hear a thing."

So Lily follows Severus to his and Mundungus's room. Her arms and legs are shaking; she tries to wipe the sweat off her forehead, but her hand is sweating, too. She's making little gasping noises every time she breathes, which she's doing faster than normal.

Mundungus's snores, true to Severus's word, are deafening, and she has to really concentrate to make out Severus's next words. "I'm surprised you didn't turn me away. I thought you—"

"Why didn't you tell me about Black sending you into the Shrieking Shack after Lupin?"

Severus blinks, and Lily remembers: Severus is only aware of Lily's breakdown in the living room; he's got no idea what's just happened between her, Remus, and Sirius. "What?"

"You hate him, don't you? You always have. Why would you protect his reputation like that? If you wanted me to hate him, well—there was your smoking gun."

"And this is coming from—you didn't know? If you hadn't already figured it out from the timing of when Black lost those hundred house points, I thought for sure that Potter would have told you by the time he married you."

"Get to the point," she urges him. Distantly, she observes her own hysterical voice and wonders why she can't get it to sound the way it usually does.

"Lily, are you sure that you're all—"

"No. I'm not all right, and I'm not going to be all right the longer somebody doesn't tell me what the hell happened in—"

"Okay. I—okay. All right? Just—take a breath."

She realizes that she's right up in Severus's personal space, and she takes a step back and raises her hands (which are still sweating) to her forehead (which is still dripping). Her elbows stick out at awkward angles. Lily needs—something. She needs something.

"Mostly, it was because of Dumbledore," says Severus now. His voice is markedly softer than hers; the contrast feels strange. "He swore me to secrecy. He was very firm that word could not get out about Lupin's identity as a werewolf—that I would be suspended from the school if I allowed anyone else to find out what Lupin was. But even if it hadn't been for Dumbledore—what would it have accomplished to tell the school what Black had done? Surely, your friends would have used it as ammunition to frame me as a—as some kind of snitch who would say anything to try to get the rest of the school to stop siding with them. Besides, I never would have lived down a reputation as somebody that needed James Potter to rescue him from the big, bad werewolf."

And Lily's head is just—

"Okay. Okay, say that explains why you didn't tell everyone, but that doesn't explain why you didn't tell me. You must have known I would have been good for it—I wouldn't have let anybody find out that you'd told me."

He smiles hollowly. "Really? You're telling me the first thing you would have done wouldn't have been to march right up to Sirius Black and bite his head off? He'd have told Dumbledore in an instant that you knew, assuming you left a living body behind to do the telling. As much as I wanted you to know, I couldn't risk it. I couldn't get suspended—he'd have sent me home, Lily, and if I'd had to go home to my father…"

"But you did go home to your father. When James got your address to go and get the Horcruxes after you went to Azkaban, it was your parents' address. He'd gotten himself killed going through records at the Ministry to get that address, and all along, I could have—if I had known—"

Severus is staring at her like he's never seen her before. "Lily—"

"You hated your father. What the dickens possessed you to move back there?"

"I did it for my mum, okay? I didn't want her to be alone with him."

"Okay," Lily rants. She only now realizes that she's pacing back and forth along the near wall of Severus and Mundungus's bedroom. "Okay, so let me get this straight. You're telling me you'd move back home after leaving Hogwarts to try and protect your mum, but you couldn't tell your best friend that Black tried to have you murdered because you were afraid of a week-long suspension back home?"

"It's not that simple. I couldn't do magic at home when I was sixteen. There was nothing I could have done to defend her. But when I was of age—"

"You don't even love your mother. You called her frigid and neglectful."

"Maybe I thought so when I was a kid, but… it's just not that simple," he echoes.

And—for a moment, just one, Lily thinks she can recognize her departed best friend somewhere in there.

"I'm going to lose it," she tells him. Her voice has gone low, but it somehow manages to sound as manic as ever. "I'm going to bloody lose it. James is dead, Sirius is an attempted murderer, and you're—you're—"

Severus presses his lips together and says nothing.

"I can't do this. I have to get out of here."

"Please don't," he says immediately. "You've had a time of it tonight. Won't you just—stay until I know you're okay? You can go right back to ignoring me in the morning, if you want, but just… give me half an hour to help you. Give me something."

"I don't want your help," she snaps automatically, but she doesn't know anymore whether she still means it. "If I need help, I'll get it from—"

"Black? Lupin? Given what you've just found out about them both?"

And—he's got a point. Lily's whole argument about the Gryffindors being better than Severus hinges on Severus being the only one of the bunch capable of torture or murder—but apparently, that's not really true, is it? If Sirius would have had Severus killed—by Remus, no less, when Remus was in no position to protect anyone from himself—

"That was a long time ago," she says now, but it's weak, and she knows it.

"And so were my Death Eater days. I've been on your side for years now—"

"Only because you're in love with me. You didn't do it because you agree with my beliefs. You would have let Harry burn if Voldemort hadn't dragged me into it, too."

"And you think Black and Potter leaving me mostly alone in sixth and seventh year had nothing to do with them wanting to get into your good graces?"

He's got a point there, too. An hour ago, Lily never would have admitted it to him, but now…

xx

"They've been gone for too long," says Sirius. He's pacing, too, just like Lily is upstairs, not that Sirius knows this. "I don't like this one bit, Moony."

Remus exhales. "Fine. Just—wait another five minutes. If she's not back in five minutes, you can go up to Snape's room and check on them. All right?"

"But it's already been—"

"I know how long it's been. You've only been checking the time every ten seconds since she left this bedroom."

"But—he's going to poison her. He's going to poison her."

"Padfoot, I love you, but you did that all by yourself when you sent him down that tunnel after me, whether or not she knew about it before now."

And Remus is right: whatever is happening inside Lily's head right now is entirely, unequivocally Sirius's fault. If he tracks her down and manages to get her to hear him out—then what? What could Sirius possibly say to make his intentions make any semblance of sense to her?

After all, James and Peter nearly never forgave Sirius for what he did to Snape that night, and they weren't Snape's best friends—Lily was. For Peter and James to understand how Sirius felt about what he'd done, they'd had to feel for themselves his guilt and his pain and his self-loathing, and to do that, they'd had to meld minds with him—literally. It had happened the first night they transformed into Animagi: one moment, they were humans at war, and the next, they were animals who could (just for a few minutes, just the once) see inside each other's minds—feel what each other was feeling. Lily's not an Animagus: there's absolutely no way that Sirius can justify himself to her in a way that won't feel hollow and distant.

Remus, of course, was not an Animagus, and he managed to forgive Sirius long before James or Peter did. On the other hand, Remus himself admitted that the only reason he didn't abandon Sirius for the prank he played on Snape was because he was too codependent to be able to walk away, even when he was livid and hurt out of his mind.

He was messed up, back in those days, when he did what he did to Snape. He thinks he mostly did it because Snape and Regulus had recently become friends; things between Sirius and his brother, who used to be Sirius's best friend, had been at breaking point for months, and he couldn't stomach seeing the way Regulus kept looking at Snape—like he trusted him as much as he used to trust Sirius—or hearing all Snape's little comments to the effect that he knew what Remus was. He'd been screwed up about it all—and about Andromeda and Emmeline disappearing from his life, and about whatever he was doing with Marlene, and about the way Remus kept looking at him whenever Marlene came up—and he'd just… snapped. He'd snapped.

He wasn't proud of it then, and he's not proud of it now. Dumbledore only didn't expel him in order to protect Remus's privacy, and Sirius still thinks Dumbledore let him off way too easily. The worst part is that he and James didn't stop bullying Snape even after it happened, and every time Sirius remembers this, he sincerely thinks the world would be a better place without him in it.

But—Sirius has been a lot better off for a long time than he was back then, and he's had years to come to grips with the worst thing he ever did and forgive himself. Lily, however, hasn't.

"I'm going after her," he says. "Has it been five minutes?"

"It's only been four—"

"I don't care. I can't stand another second of this, Moony."

They exchange a look, and then Remus relents. "Fine. Just—you need to be careful, okay? I don't know what kind of breakdown she was having downstairs before this happened, but she already wasn't okay before you even told her about the prank under the Willow. We both heard her."

"Yeah, yeah," Sirius mutters as he turns the door handle and ducks out of the room.

But Lily's not in Snape's room when Sirius goes to check. When Sirius knocks on the door to Alice and Reg's room, it takes a moment before anybody answers; when she does, Alice is scratching her head with one hand and rubbing sleep out of her eyes with the other. "Sirius? It's got to be, what, like, one in the morning?"

"Has Lily been in here?"

"No. Why? What's going on? I was really out of it when it happened, but I heard crying downstairs—"

"Shit. Shit."

"Alice," says Reg blearily from inside, "what—?"

"If Lily comes in here, can you send her up to me and Remus's room, please?"

"Okay, but—"

xx

If he wanted to right now, Peter could escape. There's nobody on the other side of the door to spot Lily; she's taken down the barricade with her wand, and moreover, her wand is still in the room with her. It would be easy to grab it and make his move; even if he failed, there would still be a chance—he could at least try.

He does not try. Peter is long past the point of wanting his freedom. Besides, where would he even go? Back to the Death Eaters? Back to another wizarding family as Wormtail? Back to the shed he constructed for himself in Ottery St. Catchpole?

"So you're saying you want me to—walk you through what happened that winter?"

"I need to know why you and James forgave him," says Lily, sounding rather manic. "I need to know why Remus didn't abandon like he should have. I need to know why he did this."

"And you're asking me because—?"

"Because you hate him. I know you'll tell it to me straight."

"Lily, I don't…" Peter is breathing hard. Is that really what they all think of him? "I don't hate Sirius. I don't hate any of you."

"How can you say that after helping get so many of us killed? After getting almost everyone sent to Azkaban?"

"Lily—"

"Just—just tell me what I came here to ask. Please, Peter."

It's the first time in months that any of them besides Reg has called Peter by his given name—but now is not Peter's time to have a breakdown. Apparently, it's Lily's.

"Sirius was in a really bad place back then," he says haltingly. "It was a long time coming; he'd been falling apart since—probably third year? And Snape knew he was a werewolf and kept dropping snide remarks about it, and he'd been getting friendly with Sirius's brother, and Sirius just…"

"No."

"No?"

"That's not good enough. You don't try and have somebody murdered just because they made friends with your estranged brother."

Peter closes his eyes. "Lily, I love you, but—"

"Don't you dare. Don't you throw that word around like you mean it."

"Fine. I… all right. I'm just saying—you weren't one of us back then. You weren't there. When I say Sirius was in a bad place, I don't just mean… Do you remember the way he and his brother used to get in duels in the corridors? I don't know how many times he landed Black in the Hospital Wing. And—he was destroying himself with what he was doing with Marlene. His mum was an abusive turd who used Crucio on him whenever he went back home, and his cousin—Tonks—wouldn't take him in when he asked her. His other cousin, Lestrange, had become a Death Eater. His whole life was falling apart."

"But you didn't forgive him at first. At least in the beginning, you saw through his excuses."

Peter can't believe he's sitting here defending Sirius's actions from seven years ago to Lily. "It's not that I—saw through them and then got confused. It's that I—I was shocked that he'd go so far as to do what he did, and he made it worse when we fought about it, but—I saw inside his mind, Lily. When we turned for the first time, James and Sirius and I saw inside each other's minds, and—it was so dark in his. It's not like I'd thought he was in a good place, but I hadn't realized how much guilt he carried around. He hated himself for what he'd done—for everything he was doing."

"And that absolved him?"

"It didn't absolve him," says Peter slowly, "but it humanized him. I knew he wasn't doing any of it because he didn't give a damn. He was—hurting. He needed us."

"And I suppose you're the authority on how to help hurting people. I suppose Sirius was the one in that situation who deserved sympathy."

This doesn't really make sense as a retort in the context of what they're talking about, but he doesn't point this out. "Lily," he says instead, "are you sure you're all right?"

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

"Because this is the first time you've said even two words to me since you brought me here, and it's about something that Sirius did to Snape seven years ago. Plus, you're crying."

She raises a hand to her face and pulls it away, looking surprised. "I'm fine. Don't talk to me."

"You came up here to talk to me—"

"Well, I shouldn't have done it," she snaps. "I have to go."

"Lily—"

xx

The thing, Remus reflects while he's counting down the minutes since Sirius left the room in a panic, is that he probably never should have forgiven Sirius in the first place. Remus never had the benefit, like James and Peter did, of seeing inside Sirius's mind to know for himself that his intentions weren't evil: he'd taken him on his word, and he'd done it immediately, without taking even a day to process what had happened.

He'd been angry—of course he had—but his need not to lose Sirius had overwhelmed his anger. In retrospect, it should have been telling, when he could stand for James and Peter to shut him out for taking Sirius's side but couldn't stand to lose Sirius, that it meant Sirius meant something more to Remus than James or Peter did. Remus just remembers Sirius crawling into his hospital bed and letting the whole damn story unfurl—holding Remus—acknowledging that it was all his own fault and looking at Remus like he'd already accepted the verbal beatdown and rejection he was sure Remus would deliver to him. Of course, Remus had done nothing of the sort. I don't forgive you, but I can't just leave you like this, he'd said, and he hadn't left, not even when James and Peter came down half an hour later and James said outright that Remus was as bad as Sirius was if he was able to forgive him without question.

James was wrong about one thing: Remus hadn't forgiven Sirius without question. It was just—like he told Lily—complicated.

Why do you think I've been so pissed at you? he'd said. You keep doing things that should make me walk away, but I can't, so just… stop doing shit that makes it more painful for me to stay, and just—hold onto me. Can you do that? Can you just stop it already?

Sirius had agreed, but he hadn't stopped. He'd kept right on sleeping with Marlene under threat of Azkaban, and as soon as he'd reconciled with James and Peter, he'd resumed bullying Snape just as badly as ever. And Remus—

—at one point even said outright that he hated Sirius for what he'd done, but he hadn't hated him, not really, and he told Sirius as much the next time he got him alone. He told Sirius he loved him more than he loved himself, and it had been true: it had been the whole reason he hadn't been able to pull away.

Lily will understand, Remus tells himself firmly. After all, she made excuses for Snape using black magic on James and Sirius and calling Mary and Peter Mudbloods for years: surely she knows what it's like to love somebody too much to let them go.

xx

When Sirius finds her, she's in the basement. She wishes she could go outside, where her cries would disrupt the otherwise quiet street but not the rest of the Order—but thanks to all of them being wanted by the Ministry of Magic, leaving this house isn't an option, at least not unless or until they decide to go through with their assassination scheme and start surprise-bombing Death Eaters. Either way, if she's going to risk discovery and capture, it better be for a damn more important reason than because she's too embarrassed to let anybody she knows hear her crying.

"Lily?"

She stops rocking on her haunches, looks up. "Go away."

"You keep saying that to everyone like you think any of us are going to listen," says Sirius. His lips are smiling, but his eyes and voice aren't.

"How could James not tell me this? How could no one ever tell me this?"

He steps up to her and stretches out a hand. "I'm sorry we didn't. You should have known a long time ago—the instant you started becoming so important to James, at least. For what it's worth, none of the girls ever knew. Alice still doesn't, and Marlene and Mary and Em didn't before they died."

"So what you're saying is that none of us was important enough for any of you to loop us in. You didn't respect Marlene any more than James respected me."

"I'm saying that, by the time you and Prongs were close or the other girls knew Moony was a werewolf, we'd all had a lot of months to deal with it and didn't think it was worth dragging back up."

"So you didn't think any of us deserved to know? That I deserved to know?"

"I didn't say that. I never said it wasn't selfish."

She takes his hand, but she doesn't get up, instead yanking until he stumbles down onto the ground with her. "I'm never going to be able to ask James what was going through his head," she whispers. "Not when he forgave you—not all those times he tormented Severus—not when he saw inside your and Peter's heads. He's just gone, Sirius."

"I know. I miss him, too. When I think about never being able to see him again… hear his laugh…"

"I've been trying not to think about it at all," she breathes, "but he keeps cropping up everywhere—and now this. How am I supposed to handle any of this? How do I…?"

"We just have to do our best. We just have to hold on and focus on saving the world, you know?"

But Lily doesn't know—that's the whole point. She doesn't know what she's doing without James, and now, she doesn't know what she ever was doing with James, either. An hour ago, she was still hanging on—she was shredded, but she was clinging to a vestige of reality, of purpose. Now, however—

—She needs something to drown it in.

She looks at Sirius, his big eyes and murderous hands, and she doesn't know him anymore, but he might be the realest thing left in her life, besides Harry, anyway.

She needs it.

She doesn't really think about what she's doing while she's doing it, and the kiss is over in a second, anyway, when Sirius grips her shoulders so tight they hurt and wrenches her backward. She wipes her wet mouth on the sleeve of her nightgown, and her eyes well up again.

"Hey, no, Lily, please don't cry. I just—you know I can't."

"I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I just—I need something. I'm so alone all the time, and I keep trying to hold it together for Harry, but I can't be what he needs from me, and James is gone, and I need to forget. I just—I want to forget. I want something to hold onto."

"You… you can have me, okay? I'll be here as long as I'm alive. Just—not in that way. Remus and I—"

"Shit. Shit. Remus. Sirius, you can't tell him. I don't—I don't want him to think less of me."

"I have to tell him, Lily. You know what happened between me and him and Marlene—I can't make that same mistake again."

"Right. I—sorry. Of course you have to."

"It's okay. He's not going to judge you, all right? He did the same damn thing when I was dating Marlene. He's got no room to talk." He smiles hesitantly, then pulls her in roughly and just—hugs her. This is still Sirius, she tells herself: he's been the same Sirius the whole time they've been friends, whether or not she knew what he'd done, and he still is now that James is gone. "Just—give me ten minutes with him, okay? Just so I can tell him we kissed. He won't be mad, I swear, and then we can go get that ice cream and have a cuddle pile or something, okay? I'll get Moony to do a dramatic reading of some Muggle romance novel. It'll be hilarious."

Lily doesn't think she can bear to face Remus after what she's just done, but she nods anyway. "Ten minutes?"

"Ten minutes. That's it. I swear."

But when Sirius is gone, she waits the requisite three minutes and then steals as quietly as she can back for her bedroom. She makes a game out of it: she just needs to keep herself from crying long enough that Sirius will think she's gone to bed and go to sleep himself. If she can just hold on another minute or ten or twenty…

xx

"You can't be mad at her," says Sirius urgently. "She didn't mean anything by it, I swear. I mean—it meant something, but it didn't mean she's interested. She's not, and I'm not. She's just lonely, Moony. You can understand that, right?"

Remus is so relieved that he nearly laughs. "Padfoot, it's okay. I'm not mad."

"You're not? But—she's a woman. I thought you'd feel… I don't know, threatened."

"It's okay. Really. You've been making it extremely clear ever since third year that you find her unattractive, even if some of us were too dumb to believe it at first. Anyway, I thought we were past feeling uncertain about your sexuality. If you'd been secretly longing to sleep with women again, you could have done it for the whole time we were broken up, and you didn't."

"So—we're good?"

"Yeah, we're good."

"Good, because I told her we'd be good. If we weren't good, I don't know how I would have broken the news to her. She's… really messed up, Moony."

And in a way, Remus doesn't understand—because Lily (and Sirius, for that matter) has never been to Azkaban. How can she—how can either of them know real pain if they don't know what it's like for the dementors to take your every fear and regret and amplify it until your mind is screaming it for endless consecutive days?

But—then he remembers Emmeline, the way she suffered so badly she tried to kill herself all on her own without any dementors to aid it along, and Remus feels suddenly ashamed of himself. Not everybody needs dementors to be around to torture themselves—and, if anything, Remus should count himself lucky that he was mostly holding on up until Azkaban, even if he wasn't exactly happy during all the years he was broken up with Sirius. Besides, even in Azkaban, Remus got to go four extra months not knowing that James was dead. His grief may be rawer than Lily's, yes, but—Azkaban would have been much, much worse if he'd known in there that one of his best mates in the world was dead the whole time. Anyway, James was never Remus's soulmate like he was Lily's. If it had been Sirius who had died…

God, he couldn't even stand to leave Sirius when Sirius had tried to use Remus as a vehicle for murder. Is he so deluded as not to be able to realize what Lily's going through when he imagines what it would be like if Sirius had died instead of James?

"It has to be okay," Remus mutters. "We can make this okay. We can clean her up and go on like tonight never happened."

"Moony, I don't think it's going to be that—"

"It is that simple. I swear. She's still got us and Alice, and we can make damn sure she knows she isn't alone."

"But…"

"Don't say we can't. Not tonight. Not after…"

They share a look; Sirius is the first one to look away. "Okay. Okay. I left her in the basement; I'll just go and…"

"No, I'll go. She should hear from me that I'm not upset with her, and—you say you didn't really explain yourself to her, about the prank on Snape? If she hears it from me, I might have a better shot at making her understand what it was like to—to forgive you. What that felt like. Why I had to."

"Remus—"

"It's okay. Everything's going to be fine."

But Lily isn't down there when he goes to check on her, and when he knocks on her door, she just responds with a grumbled, "'M sleeping." She doesn't sound out of it enough to be convincing, though, so he opens the door anyway and perches on the edge of her bed, mindful of Harry sleeping peacefully in the second bed they'd conjured for him at the other end of the room.

"Lily, we need to talk about this. All of this."

"No, we don't," she whispers. "I never want… I can't…"

Carefully, he swings his legs onto the bed and curls up on top of the covers. He can feel Lily's breath on his face. "I didn't forgive him because it was forgivable—I forgave him because I loved him too much to stay away from him. Surely, after everything that happened between you and Snape, you can relate to that."

There's a pause, and then she breathes, "Maybe. Just… maybe."

It's good enough, he decides. "Come on. Harry's sleeping, and you're clearly not, and Sirius went to go get the ice cream."

"Do we have to? Can't we just—lie here?"

Remus hesitates. "Sure we can, but only if you come and do it with both of us."

"But—I don't want you to see me around him and think that I—"

"Lily," he mumbles, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, "I know there's nothing going on between you and Sirius. It's okay. I swear."

She gives him a long, searching look, and then she says, "We can talk about it—about Severus and James and all of it—but not tonight."

"Okay."

"Is, um… is the offer of ice cream and a cuddle pile still on the table?"

He drags her into a hug and whispers in her ear, "You bet it is. Come on. We've got Marlene and Mary's whole collections of Muggle romances Vanished and ready for perusal—I'll let you pick your favorite for me to read."

In the morning, like usual, the whole house seems to be aware that something went down between them overnight—but Remus pointedly ignores Alice's questions. He thinks he's had his fill of drama for the day, thanks very much, and anyway, the Death Eaters haven't gone anywhere—they've all still got bigger problems to worry about.

xx

END OF PART TWENTY-FOUR