Lily knows something is up as soon as she goes up to the dormitory for the night to find it empty except for Pettigrew. Lupin being missing isn't a surprise—he's been looking particularly peaky the last few days, and Lily expects he's back in the Hospital Wing tonight—but Black and Potter ought to be up here, too, trading whatever secrets Lily obviously knows they keep from her when she's not around. Instead, Pettigrew is alone and looks anxious out of his mind as he fumbles to hide the glass phials he's holding. "Hey, Evans."

"Hey. Where are your—uh—your friends?" She resists the urge to call them Pettigrew's "ringleaders."

"They're, um…" Lily realizes in a rush that maybe the answer isn't innocuous—Pettigrew is sure as hell acting like he's got something to hide. "They're in the Hospital Wing. James and Sirius are down there visiting Remus—he needed to stay the night."

"Right. And you didn't join them?"

Pettigrew shrugs helplessly. Right. Whatever. It's fine—it's not like it's any of Lily's business, anyway.

But she can't help but be curious when the door bangs open twenty minutes later. She's still awake, but Pettigrew clearly can't tell when he immediately asks in a hush, "How are they?"

"He's okay," comes Potter's voice. He sounds winded, like he ran all the way up here. "He's not pressing charges, but Sirius is still in hot water. Dumbledore sent me back here before they doled out his punishment, but…"

"Is it really that bad? I mean, it was just a laugh, right?"

But Pettigrew's tone of voice sure doesn't sound like whatever happened was "just a laugh." There's a long pause, during which Lily tries to make any sense at all out of what Potter's just said. "Not pressing charges"—what could Black possibly have done that could have gotten him in trouble with the Ministry? Who exactly was the victim, and what happened?

But she already knows the answer, and Potter confirms it. "I don't care how much any of us hates Snape. He could have died, Peter, and nobody deserves to die when they're—what—fifteen, sixteen?—not at all, and especially not at the hands of a fully transformed werewolf who's out of his mind with violence."

Oh. He—oh.

So Severus was right: Lupin is a werewolf. Lupin is a werewolf, and Black—

Lily thinks she's going to be sick.

"It was really big of you to go after Snape like you did. You didn't owe it to him."

That gives her pause. Pettigrew almost makes it sound like Potter—

"Yes, I did." Potter sounds—almost stung by this, as if that makes any sense. "After what I've…? I owed him."

"But—you're not suddenly going to be his friend after this, are you?" Pettigrew sounds unduly worried about this possibility.

"Of course not," Potter scoffs. "I'm sure things will go back to normal in a few months. It's just… I don't want him dead, Peter. And anyway, I probably shouldn't be…"

It's the second time this year that something Potter says leaves Lily's head spinning. Her best friend apparently almost died tonight, and Potter was the one to rescue him—and yet he's planning on going right back to bullying him as soon as things blow over? Nothing makes sense. More than that, Lily isn't sure she wants it to make sense—not if that means understanding what's happening in James Potter's head every time he pulls his wand on Severus.

xx

Severus isn't at breakfast the next morning, and he's not in Potions, either. By the time he's missing at lunch, Lily is starting to get seriously worried—so worried that she almost, almost doesn't notice the way Potter, Lupin, and Pettigrew keep giving Black the cold shoulder. It's not until dinnertime that she catches a glimpse of Severus at the Slytherin table, but when she finishes shoveling her dinner into her mouth and tries to fight her way over to him, she's intercepted.

The slur falls out of Mulciber's mouth before she realizes what's happening. The students in their immediate vicinity stop chattering and crane their necks to look between him and Lily, who feels her face turning red. She glances to Severus, who's sitting a meter away and watching the exchange with a tortured look on his face—but he doesn't speak up.

Not like Lily always speaks up when it's his arse being tormented.

"Get out of my way before I hex you, Mulciber," she snaps.

He laughs high and clear at this. "Evans? Hex a Slytherin? When everybody knows we're the only house with anybody in it who can tolerate you?"

She whips her wand out at this, but Severus finally, finally stands and mumbles, "It's okay, Lily. Come on, I'm done here anyway."

Her eyes flicker from Mulciber to Severus and back again. Mulciber raises his eyebrows but, a moment later, lowers his own wand.

"I don't understand why you even talk to them," Lily hisses five minutes later after they've made a quick exit and made their way out to the castle courtyard. "They're scary, Sev, especially Mulciber—do you even know what he tried to do to Mary Macdonald two days ago? Do you?"

"That was nothing. It was just a joke, that's—"

"And you heard what he called me back there," she says over him. "Don't try to pretend like you weren't listening because I know you were. You know as well as I do that if the roles were reversed—because the roles are reversed every time Potter or Black or Pettigrew lays into you, and every time, I defend you, but when I'm the one being bullied—"

"That's different," Severus says quickly.

"How? Because Potter's gang aren't my friends, but Mulciber's are yours? If anything, that should mean they'll listen to you. He put down his wand when you interrupted tonight, didn't you?"

"That's exactly—I interrupted. I don't understand what more you want from me."

"I want you to defend me when people call me slurs! I want you to quit calling people like Mary 'Mudbloods' behind my back, and I want you to—to stop using the Dark Arts like you don't see anything wrong with them."

Severus flares up immediately at this. "All I've ever done is defend myself from Potter and Black and Pettigrew."

"Yeah, but they don't use Dark Magic on you, and you use it on them. You're not being very gracious, you know that? I overheard Potter and Pettigrew talking about what happened last night. You went creeping to try and find out what's wrong with Lupin, and Potter saved you from whatever you stumbled in on—"

"'Saved? Saved?'" he echoes, spluttering. "He's not the big-shot hero everyone seems to think he is. All he was doing was saving his neck and his friends' too. Black would have had me killed down there, and Lupin—there's something off about him. You know there is—you've lived with him all these years. If you knew what a monster he really was—"

But Lily doesn't think this is entirely fair: Lupin didn't ask to be a werewolf, and just because he becomes something that's out of his control every month doesn't make him a monster. "He's not well," she says staunchly. "They say he's not well—"

"Every month at the full moon?"

"I know your theory," she says coldly. "He deserves his privacy, you know."

"What he is stopped being private the second Sirius Black tried to get me murdered by him. I mean, don't you even care that I almost died last night? You didn't even ask if I'm okay before you launched into telling me I ought to be thanking Potter."

Lily blushes. "I'm sorry. I just—I was worried about you all day, and then the moment I see you and try to check on you, Mulciber called me what he did, and—you just sat there, Sev."

"Because that's what's important here," Severus mutters.

This rankles her for reasons she doesn't fully understand, but she sets this aside for now. "Are you okay? I missed you this morning. I was worried."

"I'm fine. Thanks." His voice is sullen and flat.

xx

When she goes up to the dormitory at the usual time—never earlier than midnight, not if it means having to spend time in her roommates' company—Black and Pettigrew are missing, leaving Potter and Lupin up there alone with her. At least, she assumes Lupin's here: the curtains on his four-poster are drawn, anyway. Potter's sitting on his bed with a quill stuck in his hair and his tongue poking out between his lips as he scrutinizes what looks like an Ancient Runes textbook.

"Is it true?" Lily blurts before she can help herself. She knows the answer, of course—she heard it straight from Potter telling Pettigrew, who clearly had already known what was going on—but she can't help the incredulity that leaks into her voice. "Did you really save him?"

"I… you're not supposed to know about that." And Potter—wait for it—actually blushes.

She shrugs helplessly. "I heard Pettigrew telling it to Mary during Care of Magical Creatures. It's going to be all over the school by tomorrow morning." This is true—she did hear Pettigrew telling Mary that Potter saved Severus from something—but she fails to mention that Lily already knew straight after it happened last night.

"God damn it. I'll have to talk to him."

"Why? Don't you want people to know you've got a soul in there?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I just—it's okay to be kind to him. You don't have to keep up the… all the time."

Potter's mouth is hanging open. He wipes it with one hand and blinks. "It's not that I don't want to get caught doing something for him. It's that—I don't want the credit, not after everything else I've…"

It's Lily's turn to be speechless. "Potter…"

"It's fine," he mumbles. "I should go to bed. I have to be up by sunrise."

"Why? What's at sunrise?"

"'Night, Evans."

"Potter—"

xx

They have kind of an—understanding—after that. She wouldn't call Potter her friend, but when he acknowledges her in the dormitory and during lessons, the corners of her lips turn up. She even manages to go a whole fortnight without yelling him, at least until she catches him using a Bat-Bogey Hex on Severus when she goes to find Sev out on the grounds one Saturday afternoon.

She's got her wand out and has bellowed, "Expelliarmus!" before Potter can even look round to see her coming. As his wand flies into her hand, she barks, "You ought to be positively ashamed of yourself, James Potter. Whenever I think you could change—every bloody time I give you the benefit of the doubt—and you just turn around and prove that you're the same arrogant arse you always have been. You're disgusting."

"Hey, I didn't start it this time," he says, putting up his hands. It sounds like he's trying awfully hard to sound nonchalant. "He did when he called Pete a Mudblood."

Lily's eyes flick to Severus. She performs a quick counterhex and demands, "Well? Did you?"

Severus picks himself up off the ground and scowls at her. "Of course not. You're a Muggle-born—my best friend—I wouldn't—"

But Lily knows for a fact that he's used the slur before when she wasn't around. She wrinkles her nose. "If I catch you in a lie, Severus Snape, I swear to Merlin…"

"It's true," says Lupin in a low voice. "You know I wouldn't lie to you, Lily."

She looks from Severus to Lupin to Potter and back again. "Lily—" says Severus.

"Don't. Just—don't."

She whirls around and marches away; Potter tears after her. "Evans, hold up. Evans!"

"You didn't have to hex him," she informs him, finally stopping when he catches up to her and gets a hand on her elbow. "You could have dealt with it without resorting to violence."

"You're still defending him? Even after he—"

"This isn't about him."

Potter retorts, "Oh, it's not, isn't it? You're telling me you'd be equally pissed at me if I'd gone after Mulciber or—"

"Maybe not Mulciber, but if it'd been some innocent first year—"

"Evans, Snape's not innocent. He's no better than Mulciber. I have to believe you know that deep down."

But even with her insecurities about Severus crashing down around her, she can't admit that she doubts him, not to anyone and certainly not to Potter. "You're just looking for excuses to go after him—trying to make it okay so that you don't have to face what a bully you've been. Well, I've had enough of it. We're not friends, you and me, and we never will be."

"Evans, I saved his life. I haven't even spoken to Sirius in weeks."

"Yeah, and you're acting like, even after you saved him, Severus is just scum on the bottom of your shoe." By this time, she and Potter are both panting, even though they're standing still. "Prove his life is worth something to you. Prove you can stop this."

His face hardens. "And what? I'll have your approval? Haven't you just said that's never going to happen?"

He's backed her into a corner, and she knows it. "Whatever, Potter. Forget it. I don't know what I'm even doing talking to you right now."

"Yeah," says Potter heavily, "neither do I."

At this point, Lily doesn't even know why she's so angry—what on earth she wants from this boy. Maybe she's so disappointed in him because she allowed herself to believe he felt a shred of guilt for his behavior toward her best friend. Maybe it's because she's lonelier than she realized with only Severus for company—kind, thoughtful, Dark Magic-loving Severus who doesn't stand up for her, not even when his friends call her transphobic slurs. Maybe Lily just wants a friend—a partner—who understands what it's like for her.

But it doesn't matter what she wants because, whatever it is, Potter's not going to be anybody she gets it from, and she'll be better off the sooner she stops looking to him for it.