Voyeur

by scriibble

As his seventh year begins and the First Wizarding World grows outside Hogwarts' castle walls, James Potter has one goal in mind: to finally win over Lily Evans. The only problem? Accidentally seeing her with someone else, of course—but it's not like that will stop him. [L/OC to L/J; Marauders seventh year/intro to the First Wizarding War] [Winner of JilyAwards 2020 Fav Smut/NSFW]

9. Chapter 9

A/N: This chapter is stupidly long, but I couldn't find a better way to break it up. It's also my favorite so far, I think. I had the most fun writing it out of anything that preceded it.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed! I know I say this every time, but I really do appreciate each and every one, especially those from people whose usernames I'm starting to recognize.

Chapter Nine

James had no idea how he expected Lily to act the next morning, so much so that, before bed, he had to repeatedly warn Sirius off even speculating. "Whatever you think she'll do," he cautioned, as Sirius continued to grin proudly even hours after witnessing the kiss, "She will do the exact opposite."

"Well, obviously. She's a woman, isn't she? That tracks." Sirius clapped James on the back for what felt like the eleventh time. "Honestly, Prongs, buck up. You did it. You cracked her. Moony, Wormtail, and I talked about starting a bet probably around fifth year, you know, about if it would happen or not. But we couldn't bet against each other, because no one would take the side that you could do it. So what's the matter?"

Honestly, how could James even express what he felt? He didn't know how to describe to his friends how all the blood had rushed to his head even in the seconds she kissed him, with a surge of adrenaline hotter than anything he'd ever experienced in Quidditch or any sort of trouble they'd ever caused. And he didn't know, even more so, how to express the way his stomach had dropped, all the way past his feet, past the floor, down into the depths of the castle, when she'd turned to leave so impersonally. If he thought her capable of running away from something—and he didn't, he couldn't, because he'd never seen her do anything of the sort before—he would have classified her departure just as that: a retreat.

"You weren't supposed to tell him that," Remus said, and he looked rather embarrassed in the apologetic glance he shot to James. "To be fair, Prongs, you probably would have bet against yourself back then, too."

James couldn't deny that.

The next morning, Lily acted like her normal self. She sat by Remus at breakfast, and told him about the Potions essay she needed to research and write over the next few days. He explained his Ancient Runes homework to her in return, in words that she apparently understood, despite never taking the subject. To James, the whole thing sounded like another language, and a rubbish one at that. He tried to content himself with talking to Hestia and Sirius about Quidditch, but couldn't help but wonder what Hestia thought every time she looked at him. Did he imagine that she looked at him with pity now? Was that entirely in his head?

He felt like he was going mad, and more so with every passing day.

They returned to the common room after breakfast. Lily had just finished packing her bag for the library, and James had nearly summoned the courage to ask to join her, when the fireplace crackled to life with such force that Remus nearly dropped the book in his hands. Marlene's pretty face, etched with lines of worry, appeared amongst the flames, and she let out a sharp, nearly frantic, "Oh!" when she saw Hestia seated at the chessboard near the fire. "Where's Lily?" she demanded instantly, even as Hestia dropped to the rug in front of the fireplace.

Lily dropped her bag near the portrait hole and rushed over. "Here, Mar."

Marlene's eyes closed in what looked like silent thanks. When she opened them, she scanned the room, and caught sight of James, Sirius and Remus in the blink of an eye. James thought, as she looked at him, that her mouth twisted slightly in distaste, but he couldn't be sure. "I was so worried," she said, her eyes snapping back to her friends, her words punctuated with an almost furious emotion. "Did you not think to owl me? Really?" And now James realized it actually was fury in her tone, however colored by her clear relief. "My mum just Floo'ed over here to tell me that she saw your names in an Auror report about Hogsmeade, and I told her, that can't be right, because they would have told me they were there."

"I'm sorry," Lily said immediately, with the sort of real, genuine meaning James recalled from her voice during her conversation with Remus nights before. Hestia buried her head in her hands. "So much happened that it didn't even cross my mind that you would hear about it and worry. I didn't think about your mum. Is she okay?"

"She's with me now and she's just as furious as I am. She doesn't understand why you didn't ask for her after it happened, because she was right there in Hogsmeade, and she would have dropped everything, she says—"

"She would have, I know." Hestia's hands fell from her face, and she looked truly miserable. "But Mar, we didn't think. Do you know what it was like, after everything that happened? We were in the Hospital Wing for ages—Lily and Potter stayed overnight, even—and yesterday we were just—we were trying to keep it together. I can't explain to you how that felt, but…everything that happened was the last thing we wanted to think about. It didn't occur to us to tell you. I'm sorry."

Marlene's head bobbed a bit, as if she'd shifted her weight. "Are you okay?" she asked Lily, and some of the intensity faded from her dark eyes.

"We should probably owl Pete," Remus muttered, even as he kept his eyes on his book.

Sirius shrugged. "If you like. He won't yell at us if we don't, though." He didn't bother to keep his voice down.

"Fuck off, Black," Marlene snapped, even as Lily responded.

"I'm fine," Lily told her, and she wore jeans again, James noted, which certainly meant her leg had improved some. "Nothing Madam Pomphrey can't fix. Mar, where are you? You said your mum had to Floo there."

"Oh." The anger and worry retreated from Marlene's face, and she moved her mouth wordlessly for a moment, as if holding off a smile. "I'm at Luke's. I said I might come for a bit, but…I came straight here from the Hogwarts Express and only went home for Christmas yesterday, but I came back." She paused, her dark eyes sparkling, and she looked fit to burst. James watched her look at him, Remus, and Sirius in turn, as if weighing something. "His parents let us share his room," she said in a rush, as if she couldn't help herself, despite their presence, and a smile split her face, "So obviously I'm not going anywhere. It's been great."

Hestia and Lily both began to laugh, and Sirius stopped twirling a pawn in his hands, now clearly interested. "You have to tell us everything," Hestia said, leaning closer towards the fire. "How are his parents okay with that? My dad would never."

"Mine either," Lily agreed. "My mum would have a right fit. When I told her Greg's parents let us stay together that Christmas, oh my god. You would have thought I'd admitted the world's biggest sin. She gave me such a lecture, and then she sat me down and started telling me all about muggle contraceptives. My dad walked in in the middle of it all, heard one piece, and just left immediately. I think he might have actually left the house altogether. When I saw him later, he acted like nothing happened and he never heard a thing."

She spoke so casually that James wondered if she'd forgotten, in her amusement at Marlene's news, that he and his friends were even there. He almost hoped as much, because the alternative—that she knew he was there, and shared the story anyway—seemed to bode even worse for whatever had passed between them the night before. He felt Sirius' eyes on him, but didn't look back.

"What are muggle contraceptives?" Hestia asked, clearly intrigued. "And why don't we learn about those in Muggle Studies? I'd rather hear about that than, say, ironing." Even though her voice lost none of its customary sweetness, James couldn't help but notice that she spoke with a swifter, more assured tone than he had heard from her all break. She always came off as rather shy, even still, after she'd opened up a bit in the days the five of them had spent together. But he wondered now, for the first time, if there was more to her yet that he hadn't seen. He looked to Sirius then, curious if his friend had noticed too, but Sirius just pulled a face in return, his mind clearly still on the mention of Greg Gimble's name.

He was nothing if not loyal, James thought, and not for the first time.

"McKinnon, are you going to ask if we're okay?" Sirius interrupted loudly, his eyes back on the fireplace. "Couldn't help but notice that you haven't said a word about that."

Both Hestia and Lily jumped at his voice. James would have blamed it on the volume of Sirius's question, if Hestia hadn't immediately flushed bright pink and Lily's hand hadn't flown straight to her hair. She began to plait her long locks, and James wondered, some of the tension easing from his stomach, if she showed her nerves that way just as clearly as Hestia's showed in her cheeks.

"You seem fine," Marlene said, rolling her eyes, but good-naturedly. "It would take a lot more to fell you lot, I think. How many idiotic stunts have you already lived through?"

"A few," James said, and Lily seemed to shift at his voice. She pulled her injured leg upwards, cradling her ankle, and rested her chin on her knee.

"You'll tell us everything when you get back," she said to Marlene, and it wasn't a question, but a statement.

"Of course." Marlene laughed. "Honestly, at this point, Luke knows I tell you both everything. And he hasn't complained yet."

"McKinnon, if you're shagging him, he's not going to complain about much," Sirius explained with great mock patience, and Marlene looked as if she wanted to throw something at him, although her disembodied head wouldn't allow it.

"You're a real gent, Black," she said sarcastically, and it may have been the coals, but her face seemed to flush. "I should go, tell Mum and Luke and Alex that you're okay. The boys both absolutely panicked when Mum told me what happened, I think because they worried about having to do Potions without you, Lil. The three of us would not last."

James watched Lily's face, at least as much of as he could see of her profile from his angle on the couch. Her expression didn't change, but Hestia, James noticed, had reached out a hand to touch Lily's hip, just near her back, under the guise of leaning onto one arm. Although Lily didn't know it—she had no idea he had told Sirius and Remus—Hestia was, James thought suddenly, the only one in the room who didn't know about her and Morton—unless, of course, she did. James felt Remus tense from his spot on the couch, but he didn't look up from his book, although his eyes had stopped moving across the page the moment Marlene's head had emerged in the flames.

James hadn't thought about Morton in over twenty-four hours, and then only a passing thought, even though, before break, he couldn't get him off his mind every time he was around Lily—and often when he wasn't. No, he'd hardly thought of Morton at all the entire break, since seeing Peter off for the Hogwarts Express. The reminder of his existence tasted bitter.

"Oh, is he there?" Lily asked, as if she didn't care, not even bothering to specify Morton's name. Maybe she didn't care, he thought. She certainly acted it convincingly, if she did.

"Alex? Most days, yeah. The whole lot of them come over—Weber, Nicols, and O'Ryan, who brings Bennett occasionally, so at least I have a girl to talk to. They're just such…lads sometimes, but in the most Ravenclaw way. I can't explain it, but it's exhausting."

"We know the feeling here," Hestia said, but she smiled as she said it, and ducked her head just slightly.

"Sounds like a real Ravenclaw party," Sirius said, and he looked genuinely disgusted to James' eye. "I'm sure it's thrilling."

Marlene ignored him. "You definitely have it worse," she told Hestia and Lily.

"It really hasn't been bad," Hestia defended almost immediately, and Lily gave a shrug and a nod beside her. Sirius pumped a victorious fist into the air.

"Well I never thought I'd hear that." Marlene looked entirely taken aback, an almost textbook definitely of surprise. Her eyes lingered on Lily. She seemed displeased. "You'll tell me about it when I get back." Like Lily before, she didn't pose it as a question.

"Every little, stupid thing," Lily promised, but she smiled. "Go on, now. Tell your mum we're fine, and we're sorry we didn't we didn't think of her. It was honestly just such chaos, Mar. We really couldn't think about anything."

Marlene's anger had clearly passed long ago. Her eyes went unexpectedly soft, a mirror of the expression James had seen on Lily's face the night before, a look he'd never seen her wear before. Her head nodded on the coals. "It's okay. She'll understand. Love you both." She glanced at the boys, as if she would have waved, or maybe, James thought, would have flipped them off, and then her head disappeared and the fire died down significantly.

Hestia lifted her hands to tuck her hair behind both ears, removing her hand from Lily's hip in the process. "She sounds happy," she said, and she sounded happy at that.

"She better be or Rooney's not doing it right," Sirius said, and Hestia went pinker than usual. "Chess, Jones?" he prompted, and she stood to rejoin him at the table, but then hesitated, her hand resting on the back of her waiting chair.

"Do you want me to go to the library with you?" she asked Lily.

"No, stay," Lily told her, and Hestia smiled as she sunk into her chair. "I write better alone, anyway."

Earlier, that might have disappointed James to hear. But now, he found he didn't really want to ask to go with her.

She turned to leave, and James started, jumping just slightly, when she touched his arm as she passed him. It was the faintest of touches, just long enough for her hand to reach for and squeeze his upper arm lightly, but she had to reach out purposefully to do it. She didn't slow her pace, and by the time James looked up at her, she'd already passed him and, moments later, grabbed her bag and climbed out the portrait hole.

Hestia had seen. She'd twisted her torso in her chair, and she chewed the corner of her mouth as she regarded him with that expression he'd noticed at breakfast, that something close to pity in her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said as Sirius set up their chess pieces.

"For what?" James asked. He wanted to hear her name it, name whatever she meant, whatever had caused that look that he'd started to hate.

"For…" She gestured with a hand towards the empty fireplace, and then to the portrait hole. Words seemed to fail her, as if she couldn't quite place what she thought. James knew that feeling well. "I know you didn't like Greg," she finally settled on, but the way she moved her mouth after she said it—pressing together and releasing her lips—made it clear that wasn't all she meant.

Somehow, something about the way she said it combined with the look on her face made him wonder exactly how she felt about Greg Gimble.

It didn't sound positive.

"He was fine," James said.

"Until he started dating Evans," Sirius corrected, and he gave an unconvincingly innocent smile at the look James shot him, one Hestia could hardly miss. "What?"

James wanted to ask her about Morton—if she knew, what she knew, what Lily had told her—and, even more so, to ask her all the same questions about the kiss he and Lily had shared the night before. From the way she looked at him, he almost thought she would have answered him in that moment.

"Did she really like Gimble?" Remus asked, and now he set his book aside, dropping any pretense of reading. "It never struck me that way."

"Has Evans ever really liked anyone?" Sirius asked, and it sounded rhetorical, a jest, although James saw how it opened the floor past Gimble, into present day, with a sarcastic ease. Sirius had racked their pieces, but he didn't move to start the game, his eyes intent on Hestia.

She pushed her hair behind both ears, or tried to, since no piece had moved from the last time she had done so. "She can be tough," she said with a sort of even fairness that answered neither question, although she made it sound as like it did. She had sidestepped the issue of Greg entirely. "And she has to be. She has more to worry about than the rest of us." She turned in her chair, as if that settled it, and looked at Sirius expectantly. "Your move," she said even as he looked ready to respond, to argue her point back to her somehow. The way she said it—and the look on her face, even from profile, which was all James could see—made it very clear that she wouldn't say any more.

Because the look on her face altered her expression so severely—her usually smiling mouth straight, dark eyebrows drawn together, eyes almost dangerous—that Sirius didn't argue back. He moved his first pawn.

xxx

For the next few days, Lily employed a technique around him that James could only classify as polite ignoring.

She spoke to him seemingly easily at mealtimes and in the evenings, as she might the others, with a sort of teasing tone and open smile that kept her sometimes-sharp banter from stinging. She played chess with Sirius, studied Arithmancy with Remus, curled up companionably on the sofa with Hestia, and engaged in Gobstones or Exploding Snap with all of them, but she didn't linger in the common room as she had before Christmas.

"Library," she would answer airily when Remus would ask how she'd spent her day, or, "Went to brew a bit," or even just, "Walked around." She disappeared for long hours at a time, and Hestia most often went with her, although not always. After a couple of days, Remus ventured, when the girls were absent on one of these same journeys, that he kind of missed having them around, and Sirius agreed. James didn't add anything, because he knew he didn't have to, certain that they already knew how he felt. But he did express what had floated through his mind ever since break had started—that it felt strange, really, to want anyone new around. They'd gotten along perfectly well for years, just the four Marauders, and it never felt like they were missing something before.

"Well, makes sense we'd want them around. They're better looking than Wormtail, you know? It's a nice addition," Sirius said breezily, but James knew that wasn't entirely it, and he knew Sirius knew it too.

They had fun anyway, the three of them. The day after Boxing Day, James all but begged Madam Pomphrey for permission to remove his sling. "I'd rather ask her and have her say yes than have her find out later that I just did it," he explained to his friends, too aware that, in years past, he never would have just flown without her okay. But he didn't feel quite as invincible anymore. To his surprise, he hadn't needed the justification. Even Sirius didn't razz him about his decision to revisit the Hospital Wing. Maybe he, too, no longer felt invincible, or at least acknowledged that James wasn't.

After a lengthy examination of his arm, Madam Pomphrey had grudgingly given him the okay to fly, and they spent most of the next few days in the Quidditch pitch, despite the cold and, on one afternoon, fresh snow. Remus cheerfully played keeper, although he seemed to have the most fun charming a row of would-be bludger snowballs to attack Sirius. When James joined him and caught Sirius square in the face with one, he understood why.

They explored, too, during the day and also often at night, crammed under the invisibility cloak together, trodding on each other's toes, like old times. The portrait of Mirabella Plunkett came through on James' request, and informed them of a secret room in the dungeons they hadn't yet discovered. They found it not far off the Slytherin common room, password protected and hidden behind a patch of blank wall. Inside, they discovered a hidden potions laboratory, clearly unused for ages, the cauldron long-since rusted over and hundreds of bottles of ingredients covered in an inch of dust. "I'm going to guess they weren't just brewing, I don't know, Burnhealing Paste," Remus noted with disgust, holding up a large jar filled with what appeared to be human hearts. They promptly left.

Neither James nor Lily were scheduled to patrol again until the night before New Year's Eve, and when he got up to leave the common room for duty that night, she offered, from her place on the sofa with Hestia, to accompany him. She threw it out so nonchalantly that James wondered for a wild second if she hadn't spent the past few days politely ignoring him after all, that the idea had simply existed in his head, but he couldn't shake what he knew to be true.

"You've been avoiding me, haven't you?" he demanded the moment they exited from behind the Fat Lady, who lifted her eyebrows in immediate interest.

"Not entirely," Lily replied, as one might comment on the weather, and then she did just that. "Merlin, it's cold," she said, stamping her feet. "C'mon, I always start near the Astronomy Tower."

"'Not entirely'? What does that even mean?" he asked as he fell in beside her, and he only lit his wand after she did hers and gave him a pointed look. He could hear the Fat Lady voice her disappointment with a loud sigh as they took their clearly tense conversation away from her frame where she couldn't eavesdrop.

"It means…well, I have been busy. I've been doing all the things I said I've been doing. But I haven't minded being absent the common room, no."

"Why?"

She looked sideways at him, and between the eerie light of her wand and the dim torches along the walls, he thought she looked rather surprised. "I mean, we watched someone get murdered, Potter. Not to mention all of the torture we saw, and you nearly died. That doesn't pass easily. I've needed a bit to myself."

"I didn't nearly die." The distinction felt important, although he didn't exactly know why.

"You didn't see yourself, didn't see your injuries. So you don't really know, do you?" she asked tersely, and she pulled open the door to the Astronomy Tower with some force, more than necessary, he thought.

The chilly corridor felt warm compared to the icy air of the tower, the cold only heightened by the clear sound of the wind outside. "Do you usually go to the top?" he asked as she regarded the winding stone staircase with trepidation.

"Usually, yes. Do you not?" She switched her wand to her left hand, flexing her frozen fingers, and repeated, with more feeling than before, "Merlin, it's cold. There's no way anyone's up there tonight."

James took off his cloak and offered it to her. "I never go up when I patrol."

She didn't take it, although she continued to flex her fingers, seeming to debate the manner. "I didn't say that so you'd give me your cloak. It wasn't a hint."

"I know. Take it."

She did, with obvious reluctance, as if she thought better of her actions even as she went through with them. "I would have grabbed mine, if I'd thought about it. I didn't plan to join you," she groused, almost more to herself, as she fastened his cloak around her neck. It pooled around her ankles, exaggerating their difference in height in a way he found quite fetching, and she seemed to anticipate this line of thought, from the warning look she gave him.

"Why did you? Come with me, I mean."

She didn't answer, already midway through reaching for the door back to the corridor, which she pulled, again, rather harder than necessary. "You know better than to not check the top of the tower," she said once they reentered the relative warmth of the corridor, and she set off at a brisk pace. "I know that's where you took Violet Griffith last year."

Suddenly the corridor didn't just seem warmer than the Astronomy Tower, but actually hot, as James nearly tripped over his own feet. "What? I don't know what you're talking about," he sputtered, but he absolutely did. He'd never quite forgotten—even though he'd tried—how guilty he'd felt after an evening tied up in Violet Griffith's arms, after he'd promptly realized he didn't like her, not really, not like he wanted to. It would have been too easy, he'd thought then bitterly, and thought even still, to like a bird and have her like him back.

Lily's smile looked almost vicious. "I'm sure you don't. What, you really thought she wouldn't tell me? I was tutoring her in Charms. She came right to me the next day."

"I…honestly didn't know that." Even as he walked, he waited for the stone floor to open and swallow him up. He thought he might prefer that, really, to her sideways looks and slanted eyes.

"I was tutoring her, because she quit talking to me once you still asked me to Hogsmeade the weekend after you took her up to the tower. She cursed me out something awful, insulted me with some things I had never even thought of saying to someone—impressive in its way. Marlene ended up hexing her." Her smile turned indulgent. "The skin-stretching hex I got you with. I'd taught it to her. I ended up reversing it, after a bit."

"I'm sorry."

They stopped at the seventh-floor landing, and she looked up at him while they waited for the staircases to shift, to bring the set they needed so they could walk down to the sixth floor. "Why? You think I didn't expect that you were off with girls the whole time you were asking me out?"

"No, I mean—for the stuff she said, whatever it was."

"Oh." She dropped her eyes and shrugged, and then turned to wait. She craned her neck downwards, looking for the stairs, obviously impatient. "It was fine. I've gotten worse."

"You also say 'girls' like it's a lot," he said before he could stop himself, and the staircase appeared suddenly, arriving at a rapid pace from wherever it had hidden below. "It wasn't."

"Three, at least," she said, and she looked amused again, and entirely at his expense. She started down the stairs, her long hair and his cloak streaming behind her. "How many were there?"

His stomach had sunk again. "Three."

She laughed into the deserted sixth floor corridor, and didn't bother to stifle the sound. "Don't look like that," she admonished as he fell in step beside her again, even as his feet wanted to take him back to the common room, or really anywhere away from her. "You had to expect they'd tell me. Wait, you really didn't?" she asked, surprised, when she glanced up at his face again. "Really?"

"No. Why would they?"

"Probably to see if it bothered me."

He licked his lips. "Did it?"

"Not as much as you would hope, I'm sure." She stopped suddenly and swept her wand from left to right as they reached a divide in the corridor. "Which way?"

He went right. "That tells me absolutely nothing, you know," he said, and he reached up to rub the back of his neck, which felt increasingly tense. She would give him a serious headache, he expected, before they completed the rounds. And she'd probably laugh.

"I know."

They walked in silence for a bit, and James waited for the heat to dissipate from his face before he spoke again. She couldn't know, of course, what truly embarrassed him so deeply—not that he'd fooled around with other girls and that she knew it, not exactly. His embarrassment—and guilt—had simply never gone away from what he'd realized after shagging Violet Griffiths: that he didn't like her, in his heart of hearts, not because of anything she'd done or hadn't done, but because she wasn't Lily, which was what he had always really wanted.

"You don't need to get embarrassed," she said finally, and her voice was softer, as if she realized that he didn't banter.

"I'm not," he insisted too quickly, and he felt like knocking a nearby portrait off its hangings when the sleeping wizard inside shushed him.

"Okay," she agreed in a voice that clearly imparted that she didn't believe him a bit. "But I had to take the piss a little, because you always get this look on your face when someone mentions Greg, but that's not exactly fair. You're not devoted to me."

James resisted the strong urge to correct her use of present tense, to point out that Violet Griffiths had been the last girl he'd tried to find interest in, near on a year ago prior. It seemed futile to even bring up, because she had to know that if someone informed her every time he looked at another girl.

Ugh. Women, as Sirius would say. Or at least the women he had seemed to choose, who couldn't keep their mouths shut. Not that he'd ever asked them not to tell Lily.

Not exactly, anyway. He'd just assumed—stupidly, it turned out—that they wouldn't rush right to her.

"What look?" he asked, because it felt safer, but not because he really wanted to know. He could probably guess.

"Like you'd like to make him throw up some more, this time for a good six months or so."

Yes, he'd pretty much expected it was something like that.

"Did you really like him?" he asked, echoing Remus' question from days ago, as they reached one of the sixth floor's dead ends, where the corridor seemingly stopped cold, flanked by two classrooms. He might have told her that the nearby portrait of a wizened woman by a lake opened into a passageway, if he didn't think it would distract her totally and she'd never answer him.

"Greg?" she asked breezily. "Sure, he's a great bloke. But I'm not really sure how that's your business."

James had often thought that she could convince him of anything if she tried hard enough-or if she tried at all, really. But her words didn't convince him then.

She turned, ready to double back, and he seemed to surprise them both when he reached out to grab her wrist, to stop her, and not exactly gently. "What?" she asked sharply, and looked for a moment like she might shake him off, but she didn't.

"Don't do that. That thing you do where you act all casual and like you don't care what we're talking about," he clarified, before she could even ask. He fought a fleeting, but very real, urge to shake her, to wipe the look off her face as she almost smiled, but she must have read something in his expression that changed her mind, because she frowned instead. "And don't do that thing where you act like you don't expect me to ask a question after you led me down the path to get there. I didn't bring him up. You did."

She looked like she wanted to snap back, from the way her mouth twisted, and he braced himself for it, only too aware of the sharpness of her tongue even if she hadn't truly given him hell, except teasingly, for months. But then she gently disengaged her wrist, and settled his cloak around her with great care, as if he'd mussed it. "Fine," she said primly, and he wondered, from her ruffled demeanor, if anyone ever bothered to call her on her shit. He certainly couldn't see Hestia doing so, but Marlene, maybe?

Then again, James had no idea what she even acted like around Marlene. Only during this break had he really ever seen her interact with others for an extended period of time—tenderly affectionate with Hestia, academically engaged with Remus, playfully bantering with Sirius. And infuriatingly infuriating to him, James thought. Always challenging, frustrating, impossible—although it often didn't bother him. He usually liked it.

"I don't know what you want to hear," she said after they'd resumed walking, her voice a bit chilly.

"You could tell me he's a wanker and you dumped him," he offered, and the tension dropped off her face—and at the sight, so did his, just as easily as that.

She laughed and shook her head. "You're incorrigible," she accused, but she didn't seem to mind, just as she didn't seem to mind the times Sirius beat her at chess, even if she'd throw a barb or two his way. "But it's not true. Greg really was lovely while we were together. We just could never really be serious, even if either of us might have wanted that."

"You stayed with his parents, Evans. Don't tell me that's not serious." She waved a hand at him, bringing the light of her wand with it, and the disgruntled portrait they passed earlier coughed pointedly. "But if he was so great—" the word came out harder than he wanted, "Why wouldn't you get serious with him?"

"Because Diagon Alley happened, and that changed a lot."

He stopped her again, this time by holding his arm out, and she halted before she ran into him. "What? How? Were his parents—?"

"What, involved on Voldemort's side? Oh, no, no—his mum's actually a muggle. She's an accountant." He wanted, briefly, to ask her what on earth that was, but she continued, not moving from the spot, something about the set of her jaw suddenly defiant. "Besides, if they were involved on Voldemort's side, do you think they would have let me in their house? A mudblood?"

He flinched. "Don't."

"That's how they see me, Voldemort and his followers. And it's not like I'm not used to hearing it. Or worse." She still looked discomfited as she spoke Voldemort's name, something in the shift of her legs, but she also spoke with a certain sort of pride—at her use of the name or at his own uneasiness at her pointed slur, James didn't know. "And it's something you don't have to worry about—you or Black or Remus or Hestia or Marlene or anyone who isn't muggleborn."

"We still worry about him."

"Sure, some. But who do they target? Who did they go for, exclusively, in Hogsmeade—the only people they killed? Your name will never be on that list, Potter. Even if you fight him, it's like Frank and Alice said—as Aurors, they're targeted, but for me, I'd be targeted further." Her voice hadn't gotten louder, even as her passion and the color in her cheeks rose. She'd gone softer, somehow, more intense in a way that seemed almost more frightening. "God, and you saw what they did to Louisa Mullins's husband, heard what they said to him, what they called him. 'Blood traitor.' You think I haven't thought about that since they did the same thing at Diagon Alley? About what it would mean, for someone to be with me? What kind of danger that would put them in?"

"So, what, you're just done?" he asked. "You're done dating?" He watched as she twisted her hair back with such obvious aggression that she seemed to almost strangle the rope of her ponytail before she dropped it entirely and her hair spread out, again, across her shoulders.

"For now? Absolutely, yes. Why not?"

He stared at her, silent, at the determination in her eyes and the tension that had once again taken over her shoulders and the silent fury of her mouth, and thought, for what felt like the millionth, that she'd never looked more beautiful. He remembered, in that moment, why he'd always enjoyed seeing her turn red with rage. She looked magnificent.

"So Morton?" he asked abruptly, and felt a certain sense of satisfaction that he'd thrown her off at least a little, as she took a slight step back. It seemed like he surprised her so rarely, and she always got the better of him.

"What?" she asked, and then she understood. "Is that why we're not dating?"

"Yes."

"No. I mean, don't get me wrong—I wouldn't date him even if I wanted to, because of all the reasons I just explained. But I don't. Want to date him, that is. We get on well, but it's just…not there, what it takes to really want to be with someone."

Looking at her, he thought of Violet Griffiths, and he knew exactly what she meant.

"Can we walk?" she asked, and didn't wait for him to answer before she took off, although slower than before.

"He's going to ask you out, you know," James said, not sure where the thought came from even as he spoke, but he knew as soon as he said it that he was right. "I guarantee it. When he gets back."

"I don't know why he would," she said as they stepped into the brighter light of the Grand Staircase and waited for the stairs to shift to take them to the fifth floor.

"Really?" he asked, and looking at her, he almost thought she meant it, that she really didn't know. He started to open his mouth, to explain, but then stopped. Why would he plead Morton's case for him, the case that he already saw, the case Sirius had even picked up on just from the brief moments he'd seen them together at Slughorn's party? It was clear that he cared, truly liked her, whether Lily recognized it or not.

Maybe she simply didn't want to recognize it.

"Yes, really," she said, a tad impatiently. "We hadn't really spoken much in the weeks before Slughorn's party, and we didn't leave things on the best of terms afterwards, so I don't know why he'd try anything drastic. He never minded what we were. I don't know what bloke wouldn't be fine with the arrangement we had."

"I wouldn't be fine with it. Not with you. That's the difference. You're the difference." And suddenly he didn't care anymore how foolish or love struck or soppy he sounded. His body felt weary, just as his mind, and he recognized now that he somehow always felt that way around her. Was it because he constantly kept his guard up, worried she'd understand too well exactly how he felt, or because she seemed to purposefully wind him up and it exhausted him? Or some third option, something he hadn't yet figured out? He thought the latter, quite suddenly, when she looked up at him with a certain softness in her eyes and on her mouth. It felt, as his heart rose, like his exhaustion might more recently stem from the almost frantic chase to get her to look at him that way. And he felt even more certain as she wiped the expression from her face entirely, and he felt his hopes plummet as she started swiftly down the stairs.

"I expected you to stop that entirely, once you told me you saw me with Morton," she said when she reached the fifth-floor landing, and there was something of an edge to her voice, a curious sharpness.

"Stop what?" he asked, and in return she simply gestured at him, at all of him, with one wide, expansive moment, and didn't clarify. "Acting like a melt?" he finally suggested when he realized she wouldn't explain further.

"Something like that. I don't get it. You confuse the hell out of me, you know that?" A storm cloud came over her face when he began to laugh, and she made a noise in exasperation, almost a huff, as she whirled away into the shadowy corridor. But he was ready, ready to step faster than her to keep up and cut her off, just inside the fifth-floor corridor. He succeeded in grabbing her hand to stop her from continuing, but she wrenched it away immediately, as if burned. "What?"

"I'm sorry," he said, even as he tried to stop laughing, but his shoulders still shook. He felt as if all of the built-up pressure of her presence had finally erupted. "I'm not taking the mick, I swear. But—I confuse you? Do you know what you do to me? Do you have any idea?"

She stared at him, and some of the anger left her face, just slightly. "I have some idea," she said with blunt honesty. "But I don't understand why, especially now." Her voice dropped, then, almost to a hiss, even though they stood quite alone. "Like you yelled at me in October, you watched me 'shag another bloke.' Your exact words. Some sick part of me can understand why you'd still fancy me after that—that you'd probably want to try what you saw—but you can't still like me."

"Wait, what?" Now he stared. "Evans, you can't think that that's all this is. That I just want to try what I saw."

But he could see from her face that she thought exactly that. He saw, for maybe the first time, something real and honest in the way she looked back at him—angry, defiant, accusatory, but also, somehow, small. He recalled, in his mind's eye, the expression on her face when she'd seen Marlene in the fire days ago, a sort of open vulnerability that seemed to contradict every cool look and casual statement he'd ever seen her give.

"I've liked you for ages," he said the second he realized she wasn't about to respond. "You literally said it yourself once—I never gave you a moment's peace for years. Nothing about the way I feel about you has changed. I really don't think it can change."

She scoffed at that. "Sure, you've liked me for ages. And how did you show it, by shouting invitations to Hogsmeade across the Great Hall, or asking me to go out with you so you'd lay off Snape? It was all just such a performance. That's all it was."

Shame pricked the back of James' neck at the memory of the very scenes she spoke of. In particular, he thought back to fifth year, of Snape's skinny ankles, held up magically by his wand, his dingy gray underwear on display for the grounds to see, and Lily's horrible, all-encompassing scorn as she'd yelled at him that she'd never date him. The incident had only been a single time out of many, so many times that he and his friends had tormented Snape similarly, even if their actions often came out of retaliation, as Snape and the other Slytherin goons gave it back just as hard. But that one time had always lingered in his mind, impossible to escape, because of the way she had reacted. Really, that time, among all times, was the only incident where he even felt remotely bad for what he'd done to Snape, and he hadn't liked that feeling then, and he didn't like it still. He saw some of the same scorn, even still, casting shadows on her pretty features, shading her eyes and mouth and cheeks in a way he hated to see.

"I'm sorry for that. All of it. I really am—"

"Shut up."

"No, let me—"

She covered his mouth with a slender hand, her skin surprisingly warm against his face. She turned him, without an ounce of gentleness, her grip rough on his shoulder, to point down the corridor. A light had appeared, the familiar brilliant gleam of Lumos, but still hidden around a bend in the wall.

"Come on," Lily said, and started towards the source. She wore her best Head Girl face, stern and serious, and James wondered if he imagined that she walked faster than usual, even faster than she might have to catch a rule-breaker, just to get away from him.

They cleared hardly fifteen paces before the light rounded the corner, cast from the end of Slughorn's wand. His moustache jumped with pleasure at the sight of them. At his side, almost as if conjured into existence by the very mention of his name, stood Snape. Their expressions could not have differed more.

"Why, Lily! Potter! Patrolling, are we? Good, very good." Slughorn's bright, beady eyes took in the sight of Lily, rather dwarfed by James' cloak, and his smile only widened, although he didn't comment. He rested a congenial hand on Snape's shoulder. "Just escorting Severus here back to the Slytherin common room from my office. We got to brewing and the time simply flew. I hope you won't take any points from either of us, now!"

Lily smiled, all easy professionalism, the look James had seen her give professors hundreds of times before. Yet she seemed to stare at Slughorn with an abnormal intensity, her eyes determinedly never darting once to Snape. He, on the other hand, looked only at her. His eyes lingered on the hem of her cloak, pooled around her ankles in a way that revealed that it clearly didn't fit, didn't belong to her, and then his dark eyes flickered to James. The look only lasted a fraction of a second before he once again regarded Lily. Yet in that moment, James saw all the blatant hatred and rage that always passed between them, only now magnified somehow, something he would have thought previously impossible, certain that Snape could never loathe him more. And even though he had felt, only moments before, rather bad at the thought of how he and the other Marauders had tormented Snape, now James felt flushed with victory at Snape's sallow, bitter expression as he observed Lily wearing his cloak. Jealousy, James recognized, and easily, because she inspired it so readily in him as well.

He couldn't wait to tell Sirius.

"Please don't let us keep you, Professor," Lily said, and she stepped pointedly aside, clearing the hall for them. "It's late, and I assume you'll rise early to continue work on your Felix Felicis. The color starts to change tomorrow, doesn't it? After the twenty-third stir?"

"Indeed it does. You'll be by to witness it, I expect?" Slughorn asked.

"Of course. I have a book I'd like to show you, too, that I found in the library while working on my essay. It's old—so old Madam Pince almost wouldn't let me take it—and it has some potions I've never heard of before. I'd love to hear your thoughts." James couldn't help but admire the way that she spoke, so clearly calm and academically engaged, even as he recognized by the tense set of her shoulders that she felt anything but at ease. He had to resist the urge to reach out and touch the small of her back, the desire to comfort her suddenly quite overwhelming. Moreover, he found her self-control remarkable, highly impressive to witness, since she wasn't employing it, for once, to argue with or fool him.

"You do know how to pique a man's interest!" Slughorn exclaimed, and he all but rubbed his hands together in excitement. "I look forward to it. And you're of course welcome, Severus, to come observe the Felix yourself tomorrow. And you too, Potter," he added, almost as an afterthought, and his smile made his tiny eyes disappear further into the florid flesh of his face. "Although I imagine it might not interest you as much. Transfiguration is your game, isn't it? But you do try, my boy, you give each potion your best crack."

"Thank you, sir," James said. "I try to." Snape seemed to flinch a bit at the sound of his voice, as if it pained him, angered him, just to hear it. For the second time that night—and only the second time in his entire life—James felt like he understood Snape. Morton's voice made him feel similarly. He'd never given much thought (or truly, a single thought) to anything that Snape felt, but he understood with sudden clarity, just by the way Snape looked at Lily, a great deal more than he did previously.

If he was a better person, James thought, he might feel guilty that he caused someone the same rage, the same discomfort, that Morton inspired in him. But, Merlin, it was Snape, so the feeling brought him nothing but a further sense of satisfaction.

"Goodnight to you both," Slughorn said warmly, and he patted Snape on the back to urge the silent boy to continue their stroll.

Lily and James watched them go, watched as they moseyed down the corridor and Slughorn resumed the conversation they had apparently dropped, something about cauldron temperature.

"I am absolutely leaving if he's there tomorrow," Lily said quietly once the pair disappeared around the corner towards the Grand Staircase. "I have to go see Slughorn now, because I said I would, but if he's there, I'm leaving." She sounded, even quietly, somehow more enraged than before, although the tone hardly matched the way her eyes seemed to turn down in the corners, almost sadly. She turned swiftly, abruptly, and resumed their walk down the corridor.

James didn't know what to do, other than to simply follow her. He wanted to resume the conversation that Slughorn and Snape had interrupted, to tell her that, whatever he had seen between her and Morton, whatever her ridiculous assumptions, he did like her, and she couldn't talk him out of that. But it took a single look at the silent movement of her jaw, the way she seemed to almost grind her teeth, to dissuade him of the idea.

Her friendship with Snape had always plagued James, something that came up constantly in his mind at moments he didn't expect, because he simply didn't understand it. They'd grown up together, he knew that from information he'd gleaned over the years. But somehow that didn't account, in his mind, for the fierce loyalty Lily had shown Snape for their first five years at Hogwarts. No, a simple childhood friendship didn't explain why Lily, all fire, brightness, and kindness, had stuck by dark, sneaky, bitter, downright evil Snape. It had never reconciled in his mind, and still didn't, even though they were no longer friends, and he doubted that they had spoken since the fateful 'mudblood' incident on the grounds in fifth year. The memory returned to him, and he felt bad all over again, though this time not for what he'd done to Snape, and especially not that the entire ordeal had ended his friendship with Lily, which truthfully seemed like a bonus. No, he felt bad that Lily had had to hear Snape call her what he did, because it clearly had bothered her in a way deeper than she had revealed that day in her brilliant anger.

"He wasn't always this way." Her voice startled him, jolted him away from that sunny day and the memory of Snape's scrawny legs and back to the dark corridor. "I know you won't believe me, but he wasn't always—that." She tossed a derisive hand over her shoulder, to where Snape had long disappeared.

Dark? Creepy? Obsessed with her? Somehow James didn't think she'd appreciate any of those helpfully-supplied answers, and she could easily throw the latter accusation right back at him.

"I believe you," he said instead, and immediately insisted, "I do!" when she scoffed in disbelief.

"Don't lie. You've never seen it in him, what he could be, what he used to be."

"Well, no," he admitted. "But I believe it's there, even though I never saw it and know I never will. There would have to be something there, for you to have been his friend for so long. Doesn't make sense that he's always been a total raging arsehole if you wanted to be around him."

Even as James spoke, he remembered the look on Snape's face when he had gone to confront Remus in the Shrieking Shack after Sirius' deadly, humorless joke. Snape had transformed from glowingly triumphant, certain he'd caught them in the act of their biggest mischief after five years of attempts, to grey-faced, horrified, and petrified, even though he'd tried to cover up the latter the moment James had pulled him back into the tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow, back to safety. He'd hated Snape then, as severely as the plague, hated him for discovering Remus' carefully-kept secret, for the certainty that he'd spread the word around Slytherin house before the morning, for his inability to keep his abnormally-large nose out of other people's business. He'd felt a sick, hot flash of desire to shove Snape to Remus-as-Moony, to keep him from spoiling everything he and his friends had accomplished after so much work, to keep him from ruining Remus' life.

But he hadn't. Although not entirely because he wanted to spare Snape, but mostly because he wanted to spare Remus from the carnage he would undoubtedly wreak, which James knew would destroy him. And to spare Sirius from any spark of conscience that James knew—or at least hoped—would have hit him eventually, if Remus-as-Moony had gotten to Snape before James had.

Yet even though Snape had never told a soul about Remus, James knew, even today, that he could, and that deeper, hot hatred he'd felt in the Whomping Willow passageway had never abated. He'd saved Snape's life because it was the right thing to do on many levels, but really, it only made him hate him more.

"We should go back to the common room," he told her suddenly as a prickling, crawling feeling spread up the base of his neck.

"We have five more floors with the dungeons, and I usually do the whole thing twice—"

"Do you want Snape to follow us the whole time? Because he will. Oh, come on, Evans." He felt like he reached out to stop her for the millionth time that night, and he knew she had the same thought at the annoyed set of her lips. "You saw his face. There's no way he's not going to shake Slughorn and follow us—well, follow you. I'm just incidental here." But he wondered—no, he assumed, even as he spoke—if that that wasn't necessarily true. Snape hated him, hated him more than just a random bloke who might have roamed the halls with Lily, and that had to drive him over the edge, desperate to see exactly what she and James did together, what they were together.

James knew this—and he hated the thought, hated even comparing himself to Snape—because he felt very similarly about Morton.

"He wouldn't," Lily said dismissively, but the way she looked up at him, her brow wrinkled, spoke volumes. "You're serious, aren't you?" she asked, tipping her head to the side. "You really think he would?"

"Evans, you're wearing my cloak. We're out past curfew together. What do you think he's going to think?" James didn't bother connecting the dots for her. She had to understand. He'd read it all over Slughorn's face the moment he'd seen them together, in the surprised but pleased, almost congratulatory, oh, well done way he'd looked at James.

Even Slughorn had known, apparently, how he felt. He knew he lacked subtlety, but Slughorn?

"Oh." Her mouth held the shape of the soft, little 'o' even after she spoke. "Well, here—" She reached up and began to fiddle with the clasp of his cloak around her neck.

"Keep it. You'll stay warmer, and it looks better on you anyway. Besides, he's already seen it, and so has Slughorn. They already think we're together."

"But we're not!"

"What, you think I don't know that? I'm aware, and it's the first time in my life that I actually wish Snape was right about something." She succeeded with his cloak even as he spoke, and held it out to him after she'd removed it from her shoulders. "Keep it. Wear it or carry it, it doesn't bother me. I'm not cold."

Well, he was just a little, but he'd rather she wear it than him.

James thought, for a moment, that she might drop the cloak to the ground, just out of simple defiance, because she seemed to barely tolerate that he'd told her what to do. He wondered, again, if anyone ever did this with her, pushed back at her and didn't give her her way. Because who would? Who would even try to fight a test of wills against someone so stubborn, so intent on wresting control over every situation?

But finally she sighed, and draped his cloak over her arm. "Fine. We can go up. But we're not telling anyone we skivved off on duty. We'd lose all authority as Heads."

"I don't think I have much authority anyway," he told her amicably, and he allowed himself, then, to touch her back, just between her shoulder blades. She felt tense, and that feeling didn't lessen, but she did breathe deeply, as if she caught the feeling in her own body under his hand. "You really don't get it, do you?" he asked as they walked back towards the Grand Staircase. "What you do to blokes?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Just because you think I'm—"

"Incredible? I do. But Merlin, Evans—me, Morton, Snape. Who else is out there, hanging on your every word? Even Slughorn—"

"If you're about to suggest," she said sharply, eyebrows high on her forehead in warning, "That Slughorn favors me for anything less than my abilities as a potion-maker, I will hex you for your bullshit, garbage sexism."

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said as they started up the staircase. "You're a cracking good potions-maker, I've seen that for years. But it does help that you're fit. Don't act like it doesn't. You heard him—'You do know how to pique a man's interest.' And even Flitwick—"

"I will absolutely shove you over this railing, and no one would blame me for it." She looked, for a moment, so resolute and dangerous that James believed her entirely capable. But she didn't seem bitter or sad anymore, and remarkably less tense, even as she shoved his hand away from her back and walloped him staunchly on the chest. "If you're angling for me to tell you that you're only pulling O's in Transfiguration because McGonagall is desperate for your cock—"

That kept him laughing all the way to the common room.

He stopped her before she could wake the Fat Lady, reaching out to touch the side of her face, to tuck her hair back behind her ear. He waited for her to push him away, or to make some flippant remark to match the mirth that had come over her face at his prior laughter, but instead the expression slipped away, and she tilted her head, just the briefest inch, to rest her cheek against his palm.

"Evans, I—" He managed to sound entirely tentative, even in just two words, before she cut him off.

"Don't," she cautioned—no, seemed to plead, almost, if he thought her capable of such a thing. "I know what you're going to say. Just…not tonight. Let's just go home. I want to hug Hestia, and kick Black's arse at chess and rub his smug face in it. Please?"

He couldn't remember her ever actually asking him for anything before. Even that aside, he liked the sound of 'home' so much, and how he and his friends seemed to fit into it, that he would have done whatever she wanted, he knew.

"Okay," he agreed, swallowing all the things he wanted to say to her, all the ways he wanted to tell her how he felt, and she favored him with a smile that made the effort worth it. "But I will tell you later, how I feel about you."

"I've come to expect it," she said, and turned to wake the Fat Lady.

xxx

In the end, James waited twenty-four hours.

Lily had seemed—remarkably quickly, to his eye—to actually somehow bounce back to herself the moment they had reentered the common room, better than she'd been in days past. She kept them up late, later than they'd stayed up all break, by challenging Sirius to a chess tournament so vicious that James, Remus, and Hestia had all stayed awake to watch, drawn in more by the verbal volley between the players than the actual game. Lily had taken over the black pieces that Peter usually played, and she'd used them enough in the prior days that they seemed more willing to trust her judgment. She pulled out a spectacular win the first game, Sirius eked out a win on the second, and she proceeded to absolutely slaughter him on the third, final match, the most decisive victory they'd seen all break.

"Did you let me win that second game?" Sirius demanded when his king all but collapsed at the end. He had looked as frazzled as James had ever seen him. "Have you been letting me win every time I've won?"

"Why would you think that?" Lily had said, her eyes wide with uncharacteristic innocence. She had deflected his stinging hex, the one she customarily shot at him when he boasted over a win, with almost mindless ease. "Oh, don't get like that. I told you that I didn't often play wizard's chess. But I did play muggle chess a lot with my granddad for years. He fancied himself something of an expert."

"You bloody liar! That's—that's splitting hairs, trying to make that distinction!" Sirius stared at her, clearly torn somewhere between impressed and annoyed. He sighed. "Whatever. Go ahead, gloat."

"I don't think I will," she said with a simple shrug. "I don't really need to, do I? My win speaks for itself."

This had, of course, only nettled Sirius further—entirely her intention, James was sure.

"I don't know why you bother with her, Prongs," Sirius said that night when they'd finally retired to their dormitory. He pummeled his pillow into shape with more ferocity than usual. "I mean, yeah, she's fit and she's smart and she's funny sometimes, but—you can't win with her. At anything. No one can. She's challenging just to be a challenge."

Remus, settled in bed, didn't bother to open his eyes. "You don't think that's part of why he likes her?" he asked. "C'mon, Padfoot, don't tell me you don't want to immediately go beat her at chess."

"Well—yeah. 'Course I do. But she'd probably beat me, you saw her. So what's the point?"

"Losing has never stopped me from trying, mate," James said, quite certain that he'd never heard their dynamic summed up so simply.

Despite his words, Sirius immediately challenged her to a rematch the next morning after breakfast, but she waved him off, claiming retirement, and set to do her Transfiguration homework with Hestia. After near a half hour of Sirius' dark looks and loud sighs, Lily called him over. "We're trying to crack the whole human-to-animal transfiguration bit, since McGonagall said we'd start practical applications after break," she explained, pushing her textbook at him. "I know you can do it—I remember you transformed Snape into a weasel last spring. Can you walk us through how it works?"

Sirius took a seat reluctantly, although over the next five minutes he made a quick recovery to his usual, animated self, clearly relishing the chance to play professor, especially when he could pepper in insults to Snape at the same time. James watched, waited to see if Lily would take umbrage with any of Sirius' particularly cruel barbs, but her face remained calmly engaged, her questions wholly academic. Once, he caught her eye and could have sworn she tipped him a very small wink, and he had to bury himself in his own schoolwork in order not to laugh. She'd managed to mollify Sirius' pride expertly, he marveled, with his friend none the wiser. Still, he couldn't help but wonder, rather uncomfortably, if she employed similar tactics on him, and if he remained just as oblivious as Sirius.

Lily spent the day in the common room, much as she had before Christmas Day, which meant that Hestia stayed too, and James noted that his friends seemed every bit as happy as him that they stayed. Lily spent the afternoon walking Remus through the basics of healing charms, and Hestia curled up on the couch near Sirius, close but not quite touching, and they spoke on all sorts of things. James only heard fragments of their conversation— their favorites places in Diagon Alley, their mutual utter dislike for their Muggle Studies professor, their continued shared passion for Teen Witch Weekly—but he heard enough to understand the appeal of whatever it was that passed in between them. Hestia played the captive audience just as well as Sirius did—she laughed and gasped at all the right parts of his stories, asked all the necessary probing questions to help push the narrative along, and offered the same undivided attention that made Sirius so charming. And she could tell a story surprisingly well, James realized, as her tone became more open than he'd yet heard it, save for her fireside conversation with Lily and Marlene. She spoke most assuredly when she launched into the tale of the last Quidditch World Cup, Madagascar against Syria in '74, which she, Lily, and Marlene had attended thanks to Marlene's father's connections at the Ministry. Sirius, duly impressed, showered her with dozens of questions.

At some point, James managed to catch Lily's eye and nod towards the pair in an unasked inquiry. She only gave him a small, private smile and a shrug, but Remus picked up on the look and immediately said, quietly so Hestia and Sirius couldn't overhear, "Oh, that's happening. Watch. It will. He always gets the girl." Although he spoke very matter-of-factly, with no note of bitterness in his voice, the statement alone made James wonder, again, if Remus and Hestia weren't more evenly-matched than she might be with Sirius, and if Remus didn't see it too.

But he'd spoken true, James had to concede, when Hestia left the couch after dinner to join Lily at her side. The way Sirius looked after her, deeply thoughtful, spoke volumes. Whatever it was between them, it would definitely happen.

"Should we go?" she asked Lily, reaching out to twine her fingers through her friend's hair with ease. James felt, again, a stab of jealousy at such familiarity, as he had in the easy way Lily had so carelessly taken Remus' hand all afternoon to show him particularly complex healing charms.

"Where to?" Sirius asked conversationally, standing up to stretch, as if he too were invited.

"Prefect's bathroom," Hestia said. "Lily's been taking me all break, and it's incredible. The bathtub is amazing."

"You can sod off," Lily shot to Sirius without even a glance in his direction as she closed her charms book and stood up. "Because of that look on your face," she explained before he could even ask, and then looked to him and rolled her eyes. "Yes, that one, you pervert. Don't get so excited."

"Dunno what you're talking about," he said breezily, although his eyes had begun to glitter. "What do you wear?" he asked, and then jumped when Lily shot a wordless stinging hex at him.

"I must have missed, because I don't think that hurt enough—I aimed for your bollocks." She smiled sweetly in return to the innocence he'd affected after his scowl, even as he continued to rub the sore spot on his backside. "Obviously you've never been to the prefect's bathroom. The bathtub is huge. We swim laps, mostly—Hessie always bests me. It's more than big enough for two people." She gestured carelessly behind herself as she started for the dormitory stairs. "Ask Potter, although I'm sure he's told you. He knows."

"He knows what now?" Sirius demanded, rounding accusatorily on James, but by then she'd already disappeared up the stairs, laughing.

"Prongs, how much aren't you telling us?" Remus asked, every bit as accusatorily as Sirius looked.

"Some," he admitted, although he couldn't hide a grin as he reached up to ruffle his hair. "Just…like Padfoot said, she's throwing that out as a challenge just to be a challenge, you know? But hey, we should go to the Hog's Head. It's New Year's Eve, we have to have something to drink."

"You can't just change the subject like that," Sirius insisted, although evidently he could, because Sirius' expression shifted from accusatory to excited in the blink of an eye. "But we should. I'm in. The Hog's Head has to be there still, even after Christmas Eve, right? I can't imagine Death Eaters targeting Aberforth—it's just the old goat there, innit?"

"It'll be easy," James reassured Remus, even as his friend cast a wary look out the windows at the darkening sky. "The fourth-floor passage comes out right near the Hog's Head. We nip in, get what we want, and leave. Although…" He hesitated. "I would like to see what the rest of Hogsmeade looks like. I didn't see it at all afterwards, after everything happened. C'mon, Moony, we have the cloak. No one will see us. Or you could stay here, if you want, let Padfoot and me go."

"Like I'd let that happen," Remus scoffed, and James knew he had him. "But she will kill you," Remus added, as one last word of warning. He didn't bother specifying who.

"We just won't tell her, will we?" Sirius suggested gleefully, not needing the specificity either, and he rubbed his hands together briskly. "Right, this is perfect. They'll leave, we'll get on our way, and we'll be back before they're back from the bathroom—although I'd rather go with them than you lot, if I'm honest. And on the way—" He pointed at James. "Prongs is going to tell us what the fuck she meant about the prefect's bathtub, don't you think, Moony?"

Sirius' optimistic plan sounded too easy to work, but he ended up outlining exactly what happened, down to James giving a much-abridged description of the time he and Lily had whiled away in the prefect's bathroom after Slughorn's party. He'd managed to pull Sirius aside, when Remus had gone to their dormitory to retrieve the map and the invisibility cloak, to warn him that he'd told Remus what he knew about Lily and Morton, but not what he'd seen. "Smart move," Sirius said simply, clapping him on the back, and James felt an uncomfortable twist of guilt in his gut at that, that Sirius, always the most immoral of their group, agreed with his decision to omit much of the truth.

"Don't mention it to her—and don't say anything to Jones, no matter how cozy you get," James said after concluding his story about the prefect's bathroom. He gave a sharp look to Sirius as they walked unhurriedly through the cavernous passage behind the mirror on the fourth floor, their footsteps echoing. Sirius just grinned.

"I assume she knows you'll tell us something at some point." Remus hadn't looked surprised at all that Sirius had apparently already known about Lily and Morton, and James realized he hadn't told him Sirius also knew about the pair when he'd confided in him earlier in the break. Remus had simply given a sideways glance between them at the casual way James had thrown out that he and Sirius had witnessed the pair fighting at Slughorn's Christmas party, but then shrugged. He seemed to accept immediately that, of course Sirius must know if he knew, in an unspoken way that made James feel a bit guilty, although not out of anything Remus said or did. "After all, she did just throw out that whole bathtub comment. She had to know Padfoot wouldn't let that drop."

"Like a dog with a bone," Sirius said, with quite a bit of pride. "But Jones—do you really think she doesn't know? Evans tells her everything, there's no way she doesn't know it all, down to the shape and size of Morton's cock. I don't want to think about it either!" he protested after a disgusted look from both of them. "Merely a figure of speech."

"How is that a figure of speech?" James understood suddenly why Lily continued to fire hexes at Sirius. Sirius held up his hands, an unconvincing picture of innocence, and James sighed. "I don't know if Jones knows. McKinnon doesn't, but Jones might. But it doesn't matter if she knows, because she can't know that you know. So don't tell her when you sneak her off somewhere tonight."

"McKinnon doesn't know? I didn't see that coming. Oh, that's kind of fun." For the second time in such a short while, Sirius rubbed his hands together gleefully. He'd always loved a good gossip. "But it's the last thing I'd talk about to Jones. Do you think I'm stupid?" Yet he didn't bother to deny that he might pull Hestia off that night, which confirmed everything James had already thought about his friend's feelings. Remus gave him a very pointed look.

The passageway narrowed the further it went, until eventually they had to walk single-file, and then, crouched over so their heads wouldn't brush the ceiling. They eventually met a dead end, and Sirius prodded three stones with his wand in rapid succession. The dead end cracked open silently, as if on invisible hinges, and Sirius took a careful glance outside before he tumbled out, out from a mossy, overgrown hill in the thick patch of forest behind Hogsmeade. Remus and James followed, and the wall vanished back into the hillside the moment James shut the opening.

"Remember when we couldn't find it back, that time third year?" he asked as Remus fumbled with the invisibility cloak, shaking it out to drape over them.

Sirius snorted. "And Wormtail found it—literally tripped into it. Split his head right open. You went so pale, Moony, I thought you'd be down next. Hey, look." He nodded through the trees towards the village. Night had fallen, and Hogsmeade glowed in the darkness, yellow lights sparkling cheerfully. "Good sign. But looks smaller than usual, right?"

He spoke true. James couldn't remember ever seeing so few of the village's lights aglow; it looked, to his eye, that the area seemed to have shrunk in half from the way it had looked during the full moon less than two weeks before.

The passage brought them out close to where the dingy Hog's Head buttressed the residential and commercial districts of Hogsmeade. The houses, James noticed, appeared almost entirely intact, with only one or two still sporting broken out windows and, in one case, a dilapidated porch. (James didn't even want to speculate what it meant for the status of their owners, that their houses still sat unrepaired.) Neither Remus nor Sirius protested when James pulled them past the Hog's Head, which looked as empty and bleak as ever, though none worse for the wear, and took them into the heart of the village.

"I thought it would be worse," Sirius breathed under the cloak, and James felt, rather than saw, Remus nod. He'd had the same thought. He'd never seen Hogsmeade so deserted—and certainly, he assumed, not on New Year's Eve—but, despite the lack of crowds, the village appeared much the same as always. All the shops had been repaired, from Dervish and Banges to Madam Puddifoot's. Honeydukes looked identical to when he had last seen it on Christmas Eve, although Remus pointed out, almost inaudibly, that he knew this to be a huge undertaking, after the way they'd last seen it. Gladrags lacked its customary cheerful, robin's egg blue sign that hung over its door, and the window displays sat empty, but someone had repaired the front. Remus described, hushed, how he, Sirius, and Hestia had seen the roof blown off entirely when they walked out of the wreckage of Hogsmeade on Christmas Eve. James felt a surge of relief, yet again, that they hadn't been inside.

"I can't believe people are actually going in," he whispered when they passed the Three Broomsticks, because, sure enough, a duo of wizards, probably in their mid-thirties, stepped into the pub as the trio doubled-back towards the Hog's Head. Warm lights twinkled in the windows, and James wanted, for a moment, to linger, to look inside and see who all would actually choose to sit inside the scene of a murder so few days after, even if, outwardly, the place looked much the same. Who, he wondered, tended bar—Louisa Mullins's husband? Their daughter, Rosmerta? Even as the questions plagued him, he didn't know if he really wanted to see the inside again so soon. The mere sight of the trio of broomsticks over the door, arranged in their familiar triangle formation, sent the memory of hot, bitter ash and thick blood into his mouth. No, he thought. He'd rather not look.

"Those blokes would be us though, wouldn't they?" Sirius reckoned. "We came back, and we were here when it happened. They probably don't think anything bad can happen to them, you know?"

It was, James thought, probably one of the most insightful things he'd ever heard his friend say, and it did nothing to quell the nausea in his stomach.

They doffed the cloak in the alley by the Hog's Head, and found the pub exactly as James had seen it countless times before: dark, dimly-lit, inexplicably smoky, and empty save for a pair of card-playing wizards in a far-back corner, with Aberforth Dumbledore behind the bar. He took in the sight of the three of them with hardly more than a raise of bushy eyebrows that sat over blue eyes disarmingly like Dumbledore's—or, at least, James had found them disarming once, before he realized Aberforth would sell them liquor without comment. That seemed too far from anything he knew about Dumbledore to see the connection between the brothers any longer.

"Kind of late, isn't it? Figured you'd be in earlier today," he said, tossing a dirty rag down onto the scuffed bar. He spoke with so much conviction that James believed, somehow, that he must have known they were still in residence.

"Got a nose for coin, though, doesn't he?" Sirius supposed as they made their way slowly back towards the passageway, pockets lighter of coin but heavier in drink. They had to move slower than before, now, as full night had fallen and they didn't dare light their wands until they'd reached the cover of the forest. "And drunks, for sure."

"Dumbledore might have told him, after Christmas Eve," Remus suggested. "Maybe he went to see him and mentioned which students were in the village that day."

"Logical, Moony, but can you imagine Dumbledore, what, just strolling up to the Hog's Head? Putting an arm around one of Aberforth's goats and just shooting the shit?" Sirius affected a dry, wizened voice that sounded nothing like Dumbledore. "'Oh, just came by to check on you, brother, make sure you weren't blown to bits—you or Bertha or Barbara or Brenda—'"

"Do you think he names them? The goats, I mean." James pulled off the cloak the moment they stepped behind the first row of thick trees and stuffed it in the inner pocket of his robes.

"Must. It's always the same three. You can't keep pets like that and not name them, right?" Remus lit his wand as they reached the hill that concealed the secret passage entrance, and groped along the mossy slope. "So, what lie do you plan to tell the girls about where we were if they're already back in the common room?"

Fortunately, it didn't come to that, because, no matter how they tried to best spin it on the walk back, neither he nor Sirius could come up with a solution.

By the time the girls returned from the bath, still pink-cheeked and damp-haired, the trio had already returned the cloak and map to their dormitory. (Sirius had, James couldn't help but noticed, oh-so casually taken the map for himself. He seemed intent on keeping it in his possession.) Lily took in the sight of bottles stacked on the table nearest the fire and pointed a finger at James—not Sirius or Remus, he noted grimly, but entirely at him—in judgment.

"You did not just go to Hogsmeade," she stated rather than asked with that searching look, again, that reminded James uncomfortably of Dumbledore.

"Of course not, Evans, keep your hair on." Sirius flicked at Exploding Snap card towards her, which fell short and exploded near her feet. "We had it upstairs, for after we beat Ravenclaw next month. But we'll have to go back now, after we drink it tonight so, yeah, we will head there eventually. Why, are you going to take points when we do?" He lied so easily, so convincingly, that James took a moment to ponder who would win some sort of lying competition—Sirius or Lily. He really didn't know.

Lily seemed to buy his explanation, although she still regarded them a bit suspiciously. "No—as long as you're not so blatant about it that you make me yell at you, which is entirely possible. I would just want to go too."

"Really, Lily?" Remus smiled. His Exploding Snap hand began to go off in his hands, and he tossed the lot onto the floor. His amusement didn't flicker. "Head Girl, sneaking out of the castle?"

She pointed at him and then at James in rapid succession. "Past prefect. Head Boy."

"But they're not you," Sirius insisted, as if that made his line of logic entirely obvious. And really, it did. "Besides, we've never brought girls." And here, he looked at James, clearly identifying him as the weak link in any such future ventures. "And we wouldn't, right?"

"Have you ever brought girls to the kitchens?" Hestia asked mildly, combing fingers through her dark, wet hair. She bit back a smile, literally, at the face Sirius pulled in return.

"Well, no, but this is different."

"Okay. I guess we'll see, right?" Hestia said with an indifferent shrug, and James stared, rather floored. He'd never seen her so confident about anything before, almost cocky. "Come try on that blouse," she said, taking Lily's hand to pull her to the dormitory stairs. "I know it will look lovely on you."

"She's a surprise, that one," Sirius acknowledged after they left. He didn't sound displeased. "I don't know what I expected, but not…whatever she is."

"I get it," Remus said, and, for the second time that night, James felt a flash of guilt, a sort of sad pang for his friend. Did he feel like a third-wheel, or, more accurately, a fifth-wheel? However endlessly understanding and supremely patient, James couldn't imagine how Remus might not feel that way. James knew he certainly would. He vowed, silently, not to let himself get too wrapped up in Lily that night, or over the coming days, to help Remus avoid that feeling, if at all possible.

Lily must have had a similar thought, he reasoned, as she crossed the room to sit at Remus' side when she and Hestia returned downstairs. James felt relieved, more than anything, that she didn't choose to sit by him. He could tell, even a few paces away, that she smelled faintly of the bubble bath of the prefect's bathroom, and she had painted her lips the same cool cherry she'd worn the night of Slughorn's party, the combination of which made his pulse race from the memories it brought up in him. "Here, Black, catch," she said, tossing a heavy glass bottle across the room at him, and laughed when he caught it on instinct, even when he had to drop his Exploding Snap hand.

"What the fuck, Evans!" Sirius exclaimed, but without real malice. He turned the bottle over in his hands, curious, and then began to laugh. "Wait, wait—is this Slughorn's infamous port?"

"The same." She seemed pleased at his reaction, and looked to Remus to explain. "Slughorn had some of this at his Christmas party, a gift from the Minister of Magic, and he just could not have been more thrilled. He shared it with Marlene and me, and Black got so personally offended that he didn't get any." She looked back to Sirius, eyes sparkling. "You'll have to tell Marlene you finally tried it. Happy New Year."

"Three questions," Sirius said. "First, is this the same kind? Second, where did you get it? And third, you keep alcohol in your dorm? Honestly, Evans, you surprise me."

"Doesn't everyone keep alcohol in their dorms?" Hestia asked, and giggled as Sirius looked up at her curiously. She'd gone to sit on the arm of his chair, and James couldn't help but notice that Sirius had propped his elbow up on the same arm. He would bet a good ten Galleons that Sirius had taken to touching her back, and he wondered if he had ever seen his friend employ such an affectionate gesture. "You caught fourth years with wine in their room earlier this year, didn't you, Lil?"

"Third years," Lily corrected, and she made a brief, sour face. "I mean, lord, can you imagine us doing that at that age? But yes, Black, it's the same kind, and I got it from Slughorn. I've been helping him with his Felix Felicis all break, and he gave it to me as a thank you after he asked how I liked it at the party." She turned to glare at James, so quickly that her hair fanned out around her face and he leaned back a bit in his chair, away from her, startled. "Don't you dare make that weird, Potter."

"How could I make that weird?" he asked, and laughed when she chucked a pillow at him. "What's weird about a male teacher trying to get a female student pissed? Perfectly normal stuff. I'm sure he has no ulterior motive."

"Oh, gross, Potter!" Hestia looked like she might throw something at him, too, if she had any ammunition around her.

"All the same, good use of his weird obsession with you, Evans," Sirius said, and he made it sound like the sincerest of compliments. She chucked a pillow at his head as well, which he also managed to duck.

"You would never accuse him of favoring Snape for anything less than the way he performs in class," Lily insisted. "It's insulting to my abilities, and you're both absolute pigs."

"But, Lily, you know that no one would favor Snape for his looks, right? You do understand that?" And the question sounded so earnest coming out of Remus' mouth, and the source so unexpected, that Sirius began to laugh, and the sound was so infectious that they all soon joined in, Hestia however reluctantly, and Lily more reluctantly still.

"You're a bunch of gits," Lily said, but James liked the sound of it, liked it because she sounded more affectionate than disgruntled. Even still, it surprised him to hear her talk about him affectionately, even as a collective with his friends. It felt as if the first six years of Hogwarts had never happened—or at least her intense dislike for him never had, even if the rest had occurred. It still felt better than he had ever hoped.

They sipped the port ("To Slughorn!" James had toasted their first glasses, and Lily had reached over, across Remus, to swat at him), and Lily brought out a muggle deck of cards as Sirius switched on a radio they'd brought down from their dorm. James found that he and Hestia agreed on much of the same types of music, sharing an intense dislike for The Dung Beetles and a passion for Star Grass Five.

"I just don't get what they're even doing," Hestia said of The Dung Beetles, and James found himself nodding. "Like, is it even music? It's just…sounds."

"They honestly sound the same to me, The Dung Beetles and Star Grass Five," Remus said, and James got halfway through a complicated explanation of every problem with his opinion before he realized Remus said it only to wind him up. Yet Hestia carried the torch and argued on much longer than he lasted, apparently unaware, or uncaring, of Remus' poorly-concealed mirth.

Lily taught them how to play poker, a muggle game Remus apparently knew a little, and Hestia seemed to know quite well. They stretched out on the rug in front of the fire, and James couldn't help but notice the way that Lily's sleeveless, cream-colored blouse lifted as she lay on her stomach, revealing several inches of pale skin on the small of her back.

"My mum's side has poker tournaments sometimes," Remus said as he took two hands in a row. "I try to stay out of it, really. My gran in particular can get really nasty."

"This is what we should do in Muggle Studies. All I want from next term is to learn muggle card games and muggle contraceptives." Sirius showed his new cards to Hestia, and her hand rested atop his as she rearranged what he had just picked up. "How'd you get good at this?" he asked her. "Don't tell me you two and McKinnon have a serious betting pool going on in your dorm."

"From muggle parties," Hestia explained. She discarded and drew two new cards. "What?" she asked as Sirius looked at her, eyebrows raised.

"That sounds like much better Muggle Studies. Tell us."

And so Hestia did. She told them about the muggle concerts, muggle discos, and muggle parties, she, Lily, and Marlene had attended the previous summer. To hear her tell it, it sounded like they had spent the summer in one dark, crowded venue after another all over London. When James characterized it as such, Lily shrugged, her chin in her hands. "You're not wrong," she said. "But we also did get all of our work done over the summer. That's important to remember. You make us sound like a bunch of pitiful drunks."

"You can never get mad at us for throwing another party," Sirius said, and she shrugged again.

"It's entirely different here. I'm not Head Girl out there, just my muggle friends' friend who goes to boarding school with a couple of really weird girls." She smiled fondly at Hestia as she spoke, who giggled.

"Marlene just cannot play the muggle," Hestia explained. "She stands out like a sore thumb around them. It would be like you two, Potter and Black, trying to blend in out there, since you've never been around muggles that much before. Well, you might have a better shot, Black, because of Muggle Studies. It's a rubbish class, but at least if ironing comes up at a party, I know what they mean. But Marlene…she's just hopeless."

"And she's just such shit at poker," Lily said, and she sat up, smiling. "Do you remember the time those blokes first tried to teach her? She just couldn't get it."

"Was that the night we held her hair back while she threw up in the bushes outside your friend Elizabeth's house?" Hestia's cheeks flushed a darker shade of red at the slow grin that spread over Sirius' face, one James felt he too could barely repress. "Don't tell her I said that," she said, almost a plea.

"Wouldn't dream of it, of course," Sirius promised. "Would we, lads? I am a bit disappointed, though." He gestured to James and then Remus. "When was the last time one of you held my hair back for me?"

"I'm not starting tonight," Remus said, even as Sirius cracked open a bottle of Firewhiskey.

Lily caught James' gaze, even before he realized he stared at her. She tipped her head towards him, cheek now in her hand. "Don't tell me none of that sounds like me."

"Well, it doesn't." He hated that she'd somehow read his mind, maybe from something she'd read on his face. He tried to imagine her, as she lay before him, all prim, proper Head Girl, despite the red of her lips and the glass of port in her hand, in some dark muggle disco, and just couldn't conjure the image. But another image did come to mind, that of her with sly, dangerous sharpness on her face as she told Morton she had no knickers on, and that Lily, yes, that Lily he could see holding Marlene's hair back in the dark outside a house that thumped with music. Yet where these two Lilys met, he still didn't know. "It sounds entirely more like us," he said, gesturing between himself, Remus, and Sirius. "But, like you always say, I don't know you."

She laughed at that, and he saw something changed in the shape of her mouth and the look in her eye that made her look, suddenly, like that second Lily, the one who demanded control over every situation and loved when she got it. Everything about her expression both frightened and exhilarated him.

"I don't know what idea you had of us—what, that we only care about school, I imagine—but we're just average girls, Potter," she said, although as he looked at her, he thought her anything but average. "I don't know why you're so surprised." She left unspoken, but he thought he knew, somehow, that she wasn't sure, at this point, how she still surprised him. Or maybe, James thought, maybe he projected there, because he really wasn't sure himself.

The closer the clock ticked towards midnight, the more Hestia and Sirius seemed to gravitate towards each other. James found himself once again in a trio with Remus and Lily, watching as the pair chatted quietly to one another, just removed from the warmth of the fire. Even with his tone quiet and low, Sirius still gesticulated emphatically as he spoke, although James couldn't hear the words, and Hestia laughed as she nursed a second or third glass of elderberry wine.

"Midnight, you think?" Remus guessed, nodding towards them. "You think before or after?"

"On, exactly. He'll kiss her at midnight," Lily guessed. "And she'll let him."

But Sirius didn't. When the clock struck midnight and 1977 rolled into 1978, Sirius reached for his friends instead, tossing an arm over Remus and James in tandem. "This will be the year," he said with certainty.

"The year for what?" James asked.

"Everything. I don't know, really, but this is it. This is our year."

Over the next year, and into the following years—1979, 1980, even 1981—James would think back to Sirius' prediction, and remember the heat in the pit of his stomach as Sirius had said it, warm from Firewhiskey and his friends' company and Lily so nearby. He would manage to recall that moment with an almost perfect recollection, and marvel at the way Sirius' words had come true, both for better and for worse.

But he knew none of that in the moment, of course, and the words slipped by, in one ear and out the other.

He tried, as the night went on, to find some subtle way to get Lily by herself. Subtlety mattered, he decided, although wasn't sure why, especially when Sirius employed it not at all. At half past midnight, Lily cleared her throat loudly and pointed towards the far corner, to where Sirius had an arm wrapped around Hestia, his mouth on hers. Even from profile, Hestia's cheek fairly glowed with a blush.

"Past midnight after all," Remus mused. "I think that's probably a bet we all would have lost—I really did think before."

Sometime later, Sirius, who seemed unable to stop grinning, challenged Remus boisterously to chess, and although Remus rarely played, he accepted. Lily excused herself to the loo, and James excused himself to wait for her at the bottom of the dormitory stairs. He made sure to wait off to the side of the round turret, where the wall curved enough that he couldn't see the other three by the fire, so they also couldn't see them.

"Is this an ambush?" she asked when she reached the bottom of the stairs and saw him, and although she sounded casual, he saw the flicker of surprise (alarm?) that crossed her forehead.

"Absolutely." He reached out and grabbed her hand to pull her over to him, and she looked like she might resist—and then, for a moment, did actually resist, not by pulling her hand away, but by leaning back slightly, as if to pull him towards her, back towards the fire and their friends. But then, inexplicably, she relented, and she let him tug her towards him, closer than she'd sat or stood near him all night. She smelled of wine and, still, bubble bath, and James' head, already swimming a bit from Firewhiskey, seemed to leave a bit further from his body still. "I'm going to say it now."

He had expected her to take her hand back, away from his, but she didn't, and left it folded within his. And she didn't ask him what he meant. She just nodded, as if—as she'd said the night before—she had expected this.

"I think everything you said last night was bollocks," he began, and she started laughing immediately, and took her hand back, then, to put it over her mouth.

"I'm sorry," she said, although she clearly didn't mean it, as her laughter continued unabated. "But you're just really selling it again, you know? I don't know what I expected, but it was not that." She had that soft, rather unfocused look to her eyes again that he'd noticed at Slughorn's Christmas party, and her collarbone and chest, exposed by her blouse further than he was used to seeing, already looked a faint pink in the dim light of the stairwell. He wondered, as he watched her giggle, if this was even the time for all of this, when she clearly felt as fuzzy as he did. But he'd already started, so stopping felt a little too much like cowardice, and alcohol, it seemed, had made him brave, braver than usual.

"Just shut up, will you?" He said it without thinking, and he assumed she would bristle the second it left his mouth. His mind had just enough time to work fervently for a few seconds, to try to figure out how to mollify her enough to listen, before he realized she wasn't about to snap back at him. In fact, she did quiet, just a bit, although she seemed to bite the inside of her cheek, by the look of her face, to keep from laughing. "Look, I don't care about anything you said, any of the blood purity stuff—"

"But that's just it, don't you see?" And she didn't laugh now. She sounded earnest, almost desperate for him to understand, he thought, and the tone felt strange against his ears. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard her speak quite like it. "That's privilege, Potter. You get to decide if it matters to you or not. I don't have that luxury. It just—it is what it is, for me."

"I get that. No, really, I do, you don't have to try to convince me." He added the latter swiftly, because her mouth had opened again, as if she meant to plead her case more. "I get it as much as I can, anyway, for someone who will never go through that. And I want to understand it more. Is that enough? Enough for you to not argue with me, at least right now?"

She seemed to literally weigh her options, as she tilted her head back and forth, first one way and then the other, and then she simply conceded, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. Go ahead, say your piece."

Did she really want to hear what he had to say, or just to have him say it so she could get away from him? James really couldn't tell, and hated that he cared, that it mattered, when all that should have mattered was that she would actually hear him out.

"I don't care about the blood purity stuff," he repeated, and she didn't interrupt him again. "I think you know that—or you should—but I wanted to say it anyway. That's never something I've thought about when it came to anyone—but especially you. Of all the things I've ever thought about you—all the things I like and all the things that drive me mad—the fact that you're muggleborn has never crossed my mind as anything other than, like, cool, she taught us a muggle card game. That's great."

Lily smiled a little at that. "You're really bad at it."

"Poker? Yeah, I assume so. But, Evans—will you look at me?" Without thinking, he reached a hand out to bring her chin back to face him, as she'd turned to look at the stairs almost absently, and he immediately wished he hadn't. Her eyes looked so green, and she didn't pull away from his hand, but let it linger against her chin and then, as he moved unconsciously, her cheek, which felt almost impossibly soft. It would have been easy, too easy, to clear the gap to her lips, and she would have let him, he realized with a sudden, sure confidence that seemed to knock some of the air out of his chest. He dropped his hand quickly, and when he swallowed, his throat felt a bit thick. "Evans, don't you get that you're kind of doing what they want? They want muggleborns to stay away from half-bloods and purebloods and whatever the fuck else there is out there, because those distinctions don't actually exist and everyone is actually a mix of all sorts of magical and non-magical origins, no matter what purists claim. And you're just going to do that, to do what they want, when every other part of you wants to fight them? You want to be an Auror and go out there and duel these people and put your life on the line and maybe die, but you're willing to give up any sort of personal life because of what they say?"

"But it wouldn't be me that would suffer," she said, her voice soft but insistent. "I mean, they might kill me, sure. But they'd brand you as a blood traitor, because of me. And I don't want to deal with that."

He wondered wildly what she meant by "you"—him specifically, or a general sort of you, a collective "you" of any potential bloke she might date? He chose, hope against hope, to go with the former. "Isn't that also my choice?"

"Not if I don't give it to you, no." And despite the finality in her words, the determination in the now-familiar set of her jaw, James felt his heart lift, out of his chest and seemingly into his mouth. She hadn't corrected him. "And besides—"

"If this is where you launch into the Morton stuff, I also don't care about that. Whatever I saw—"

"Don't try to frame it like that," she interrupted, and she laughed, rather humorlessly, under her breath. "You can't just gloss over what you saw, because we both know everything that happened, every single detail, and I know it's not something you've forgotten."

He shifted, uncomfortable at the way her eyes seemed to challenge him again—that challenge just to be a challenge, he couldn't help but think. "You're right," he admitted. The stairwell had begun to feel rather warm. "I haven't forgotten, and I don't think I can. But it also doesn't mean that that's why I always want to be around you, because I'm angling to—to shag you on a desk too, or something. I've liked you for ages, Evans, way before all this. You know that."

Frustration leaked through as she sighed. "You couldn't have liked me for ages. Fancied me? Sure. But you didn't know me, we never talked before this year except for me to yell at you, so there's no way—"

"But I did know you," he insisted. "At least enough to like you." And the whole thing came tumbling out of his mouth before he could stop it, everything that had floated beneath the surface of every boneheaded time he had asked her out, the things he probably should have expressed but never did. "Of course I've always fancied you—and at this point, I'd be surprised if you could show me someone who doesn't. But I liked you, too. Even if we never talked, I liked that you were the kind of person who would stick by someone like Snape, even though I never understood why. I knew that you could see things in people that I couldn't, that other people couldn't, and that you were loyal to people you cared about, and I liked that. I knew that you worked ridiculously hard at everything you did, and you made every class I've ever had with you look easy, and I liked that, how hard you worked and how dedicated you were. I knew that you were kind, because you gave Remus a shot at being your friend even though he was friends with us first, and you could have just written him off. And I knew you were kinder still, because you've let Pete off the hook more than once with just a warning when you caught him sneaking out of bed, again, even though he's my friend and you hated me."

"You can stop." She had sucked in her lower lip, and he felt certain, as she looked back towards the stairs, that she was about to brush him off, to leave him there. He reached out and took ahold of her arm to keep her there, just below her shoulder, and her eyes snapped back to him. "I get it."

"Do you? Because I like you better now, now that I know you more, whatever you think about Morton and all of that shit. I know now that you like Quidditch, and the Harpies might not be my team, but I think it's awesome that they're yours. I know that you care about everyone, even about people who shouldn't really matter to you, enough to make sure that Pete had a place to sit on the train home, and to let Sirius explain Transfiguration to you to help him get over his pissy mood, even though you probably already understood it. I know that you're funny, and you make me laugh even when it's at my expense, and I love that you give it back to me when I razz you—and I love that we can do that now, that you'll joke with me when I once figured that that could never happen. I know that you've known about Remus' condition for years, and never said anything to anyone, even him, and you never treated him any different."

Lily looked away again then, but to scan their surroundings, as if to make sure no one else had heard his final comment about Remus. She couldn't see out into the common room, with her back to the wall that obstructed their view, but she didn't try to pull away either, to check. She looked back to James sharply. "He told you?"

"Of course he told me. He's not going to keep something like that from me or Sirius."

She closed her eyes and took a breath that sounded, to James' surprise, almost weary. It seemed to echo the very way she always made him feel, completely and utterly exhausted, and he had no idea why she might feel that way—especially now, when he felt more awake than he'd ever been. His heart seemed to move at double time. "Okay." She opened her eyes and he heard her swallow. "You can stop now."

"No, I can't—"

"No, I mean—you can stop now." And although she'd merely repeated the same four words she'd just said, they came out so differently that it sounded like she'd said something else entirely. He stared down at her, confused, but then saw the softness in her eyes as she lifted a hand to rest against his chest. That was all it took. He bent to kiss her, even as she closed her hand around his t-shirt to pull him down towards her.

Everything about the kiss felt immediately different from the one they'd shared on Christmas day. She'd kissed him gently, then, and for what felt like the briefest fraction of a second. But now she kissed him with a sort of untempered ferocity that, later, he wasn't sure if she'd initiated, or if she simply responded to his own desperation. She stepped back to lean against the wall behind her and pulled him against her, and her body seemed to fit neatly into his, almost perfectly, he thought, in the part of his brain that still functioned as blood pounded in his ears. Her hands had gone to twine around his neck, nails scraping lightly at the back of his scalp in a way that made him shiver, made goosebumps prickle his arms, and he didn't know what he wanted to do with his own hands, where he wanted to touch her. He went with one for her hair, thick and soft between his fingers, and his right hand found the gap where her blouse met the waistband of her jeans, and he slipped a hand inside her shirt. She made a quiet sound against his mouth (In pleasure? In protest? He later wondered, and never knew for sure, although if the latter, she didn't pull away) as he reached around her to touch the small of her back, hand pressed between her bare skin and the chilly stone of the wall behind her, to stroke the length of skin he'd admired so thoroughly by the fire before. And even as desire twisted deep in his stomach, and lower still, he didn't move to touch her anywhere else. Later, he would realize he never even thought about it, too content to simply kiss her.

"Oh!" James recognized Hestia's voice in the single, surprised yelp even before he saw her. She stood in the open archway that connected the stairwell to the common room, both hands pressed over her mouth, eyes wide, a perfect pantomime of surprise. James expected Lily to push him away, then, but she didn't, didn't even drop her arms from around his neck. He could hear the quickened pace of her breath, even as he felt it in the way her chest moved against his, and he didn't dare look at her, worried he'd kiss her again, Hestia there or not. "I'm sorry!" Hestia exclaimed, muffled behind hands that she couldn't seem to drop. What he could see of her face—mainly her forehead and the area around her eyes—had gone scarlet. "I'm so sorry! You were gone so long that I thought you might be sick upstairs, Lil, and I—well—" And then she seemed to give up on words, give up on an explanation, because she turned on her heel and all but fled back to the common room.

Lily began to laugh, and rested her face in the crook of James' neck, where her breath tickled his skin pleasantly. "Good lord, she acts like she's never seen me snog someone before," she said, and even though James recognized, somewhere in his brain, that he didn't like the words, he liked the feeling of her breath and lips, voice muffled slightly against his skin, too much to care. "They're all going to know," she added, but she didn't sound terribly put out, if at all, just still, overall, amused. "C'mon, we should—"

"No, no, no, not yet," he said quickly, even as she moved to disengage from him. He took her chin and pulled her face back to his, and she didn't object. But there seemed to be less heat behind this kiss, less hurried need, her mouth somehow softer, sweeter against his. He found he liked it just as well as the way she had kissed him before.

"And now?" she asked as she broke away for a second time, although he knew immediately that it wasn't a question. Her cheeks had flushed, her collarbone still further, and her eyes seemed almost painfully bright and a bit glossy. She looked shaken, he thought, despite the still-perfect line of her lipstick, held magically intact, and the way she pulled her hands away from him to push her hair back from her face and behind her ears as if to create some sort of order. And if she looked rattled at all, he had no doubt he looked the same, only ten times worse.

He stepped back, away from her, and missed the heat of her body immediately. She took a moment to straighten her blouse and to resettle her jeans around her hips, all practiced business, before she started towards the common room. "You go," he said when she turned to look back at him. "I'm going to need a minute."

She lifted an eyebrow, and dropped a knowing look to his trousers before biting back a smile. "I'm glad women hide it better," she said simply, and let that dangle there, the promise in her voice, which of course did nothing to quell his arousal. As he pressed his forehead against the cold stone wall and stood motionless for several moments, he knew very well that that had probably been her point.

When he rejoined his friends, he could tell immediately that Sirius and Remus knew, simply by the expressions on their faces—Sirius's outright sly with grinning glee, and Remus' a more subdued version of the same look, even as he busied himself with arguing with his chess pieces. Lily had already curled up under a blanket with Hestia on the couch, and she looked as settled as if she'd always sat there, as if he'd just imagined everything between them. Somehow, Hestia's face, still glowing pink, and the way she wouldn't quite meet his eyes, seemed to make what had happened seem the most real.

No one said anything, not in the hours that passed as they wound down in the common room towards sleep. Even later, when they'd finally given into drink and tiredness and said goodnight, neither Sirius nor Remus said much about it in their dorm.

"Congrats, mate," Sirius offered simply, turned towards James' bed with his arms around his pillow and eyes already closed, as the sky began to lighten outside their windows.

"You too, I suppose," James said, and Sirius had looked at him, then, to share a grin, before he'd rolled over to go to sleep.