A/N: Continually so gratified with all the feedback I've gotten! I clearly need to get better at pacing my chapters, because the last one was too long and this one is too short. The next two chapters, as they stand, are both around 13k words, so a little more reasonable. Sorry to shortchange you all, and…for any saltiness the end of this chapter causes. It'll get there!

Chapter Ten

James would later look back on the next few days, as Christmas break faded into the promise of a new term, as some of the best of his life.

He would, of course, have happy times later, and have moments undoubtedly happier than anything he experienced during the first few days of 1978. But those times came tempered with darker moments, too, things worse still what he had already experienced on Christmas Eve, which, at seventeen, seemed the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to him. Anything and everything good that happened as the years went by would seem clouded, somehow, shadowed—sometimes just slightly, sometimes majorly—by the events of the wizarding world to come. In hindsight, Christmas break would feel like the last time he truly felt carefree, and the last time he saw that feeling echoed on his friends' faces. He could feel, still, like a kid, with all of the promise that came with it—promise of invincibility, of future, of greatness yet to come. Because, as the days passed, the Hogsmeade attack seemed further and further from his mind, although he did sometimes wake up at night, cold and sweating, afraid for reasons he didn't immediately understand. No, it became easy, rapidly easy, to get caught up in all of the fun and joy and excitement of spending time with his friends—and, of course, with Lily too, which had more of an impact on what made the days special than he wanted to admit.

Because things had changed between them, he found when he woke up New Year's Day, even as he expected that they probably wouldn't, and that she'd resume the polite ignoring she'd employed the last time they had kissed. But she surprised him, as she somehow always did. He had convinced her, it seemed, that what he wanted from her went past a desire to simply "try her out." In the days that followed, she seemed a bit keener to be near him, and didn't metaphorically dance away when he came close to her. She never acted overtly, not in the way that Hestia would sometimes rest a hand on Sirius' leg, or reach to absently touch his hair when they sat in conversation with the others, but James didn't expect Lily to. He knew, by then, that that wasn't her way.

No, instead she sat closer to him than before, curled up near him under a blanket on the couch when she read, never quite cuddling, but close enough that she could rest her folded knees against his leg, her body turned towards his. And she'd smile a little, almost subconsciously, when he'd rest his arm atop the blankets, propped up on her legs. The changed seemed outwardly minor, James knew, compared to the kiss they'd shared, but he didn't mind. He found he liked just being near her almost as well as kissing her, although he didn't exactly what her to know that.

She seemed a bit more willing to compromise, too, in her own way. She let him show her how to ride a broom one sunny day when he, Remus, and Sirius managed to cajole her and Hestia to join them in the Quidditch pitch. They quickly found that Hestia had no difficulties on a broom, and actually flew rather well. But then again, as Lily pointed out darkly, Hestia had grown up riding brooms—she had only ever known them for sweeping until she reached eleven.

"I like to watch Quidditch, I don't like to play," she insisted for the hundredth time when he showed her, his hands over hers, how to hold onto the broom properly without falling off. "I haven't ridden a broom since Hooch showed us first year, and I've never wanted to since." But she still kicked off anyway, although not without the most piercing scream James had ever heard. She seemed to gather herself almost immediately—controlling to the end, he thought—but she didn't go further than two laps around the field behind Hestia before she landed again. "Are you happy?" she demanded, a bit pale, as she thrust his broom back at him.

He still hadn't stopped laughing. "I'm sorry, really, but I've never seen you scared before, or actually bad at anything." She looked like she might argue with him, but he stopped her with a kiss, his mouth firm and his arm around her back. She looked much less angry when she pulled away, he thought, even as she bent to scoop up snow to throw at him, a whole loose handful in his face, not even bothering to waste the time to form it into a snowball.

"You're a prat," she said, and she'd smiled then, and stood on the tips of her toes to kiss him, very sweet, her skin warm against the cold snow in his face. She didn't seem to mind, in the moment, that their friends watched.

Still, James tried not to show affection towards her around them too much, because she didn't towards him, and he wanted to follow her lead. But Lily seemed gentler, softer somehow, in the look on her face and the way that she spoke to him, both in public and also in private, he found, when she asked him to patrol with her the night before break ended, the first patrol either of them had had since before New Year's. She spoke a little more freely, he thought, and touched him a little more than she had before—her hand on his arm as she laughed, or her shoulder gently nudging as she teased. And she didn't seem to mind when, somewhere around the second floor, he took her hand in his. He hardly dared to breathe those first few moments, worried it would be the thing to scare her off, to make her pull back, but she didn't. She gave his hand the barest of squeezes, he thought, even as she continued their quiet discussion of Sirius and Hestia, who they had both watched with increasing interest ever since New Year's Eve.

"She actually likes him, I think, which is truly strange to me," she said, and he couldn't help but notice that her patrolling skills had gotten rather lazy the more interested she seemed in talking to him. She hardly moved her wand at all, or looked into the shadows for truant students, lacking the sort of determination that had made her such a fierce opponent in all of his years of sneaking out. "I mean, every girl fancies Black—"

"Don't say every girl, Evans."

"Well, he is very handsome," she said, her voice all silk and sweetness, even as her eyes flashed teasingly. "I just never expected her to like hanging around him," she continued, undeterred. "I know he's your best friend, but you have to admit that he's exhausting sometimes. He's very fun, and he makes me laugh to no end, but he is just…a lot."

James felt a bit indignant at her words, out of loyalty rather than from any argument he could make to the contrary. Sirius was a lot—it was part of his charm, James thought, rather than a negative. He said as much.

"No, I agree, he's very charming. But he is so everything she's not—boisterous and hyper and—you have to admit it—cocky. That's more like Marlene than Hestia, you know? It's just surprising."

"Jones probably likes that," he told her, because in everything he'd seen between the two of them over break, it seemed very true. "It probably keeps her entertained. It does me."

"Mmm." Lily seemed to chew on that a while, pensive, and he let her mull it over. "It'll be interesting to see what happens after break," she finally said, ending the silence James now found companionable rather than uncomfortable, when before break he couldn't decide how to characterize any pause between them. "I honestly don't think she expects—or even wants—it to go further than this. I think she was just happy to have something to occupy her this Christmas. Considering this is the first Christmas without her mum, and after everything that happened at Hogsmeade, it could have been shit for her otherwise."

He wanted to ask her, badly, what would happen between them after break, and if she felt as Hestia apparently did—just happy for a distraction. Yet at the same time, he wanted just as badly as to never ask her anything of the sort, too afraid of how she might answer, or, maybe worse, pull away. In the moment, as far as questions went, the coward won out.

But he could still take action, he found. She hadn't said anything the first time they'd passed the alcove where he had spied her and Morton together after Slughorn's dinner party, although he'd glanced at her as long as he dared without worrying he might alert her, wondering if she remembered. She must, he thought. She had to. But on their way back towards the seventh floor, after they walked by the space again, he pulled her into the passage behind Mungo Bonham, and she followed him into the seemingly solid stone wall without hesitation.

"Where does it go?" she demanded, her eyes bright, even as he pushed her up against the wall where he had sat nearly two months ago, spilling his guts to Sirius about everything, everything that had happened after he'd initially seen her with Morton and the conversations with her that followed. James dropped his lit wand carelessly to circle her hips, and she let her fall too, to reach up to touch his face, even as she insisted, "Show me."

"In a bit," he promised, and he felt her laugh against his mouth even as he kissed her.

"Your wand's rolling away," she warned playfully, and she brushed at the side of his head, fingers through his hair, in a way he'd seen her do with Morton in the alcove just outside the passage. He shoved the thought frantically away even before it could fully materialize, and found it easy to do with her pressed against him, filling his eyes and hands and all of his senses.

"I don't care," he told her, and he didn't, he'd never cared about anything less, even when the light of his wand slowly disappeared as it rolled down the gradual slope towards the fourth floor. He could see her only by the light of her wand, from somewhere down by their feet, which played strange shadows across her face. "I'll get it in a minute and I will show you where this goes," he said to mollify her, but she kissed him almost before he could get the words out. She didn't seem to care about anything anymore either.

He hadn't kissed her that way since New Year's Eve, just a brief kiss here or there like they had shared that day on the Quidditch pitch or they might exchange when their friends weren't looking, not the way he wanted to toss her up against a wall and snog her senseless. He didn't know when he'd get the chance again, either, with break so close to over. So he kissed her with everything he had, every way he'd wanted to over all the years he'd liked her. She never pulled back, except to gasp breathlessly, "Christ, your hands are cold!" when he'd pushed his way into her jumper, although her skin warmed them quickly.

He found her ticklish, just barely, by the way she shivered and gently bit his lip, as if to suppress a new laugh against his mouth, when he traced his hands up her bare sides. And he felt content to linger there, exploring the smooth skin of her sides and up her back, without going any further. He thought he felt her tense, maybe just the slightest bit, when his hand passed over the clasp of her bra, but he didn't try to fumble with it, and she went, again, quite soft in his arms, so relaxed that he thought he'd imagined it. He did think about it, though, about touching her elsewhere, especially when she made the quietest of noises when he dipped to kiss her neck and found and zeroed in on an especially tender place just below her ear. She slid her own hands up the back of his shirt, and he felt her nails against his shoulders, hands somehow warm when his had been cold, as she pressed just barely and released. She made the sound again, somehow softer, when his teeth grazed the spot below her ear, and he realized quite suddenly that his leg had found its way between hers, and he could feel her thighs contract to squeeze his leg in tandem with the renewed pressure of her nails.

It suddenly felt like all too much.

He wanted to pull back from her instantly, to drop her as if burned, before she could feel his growing erection pressed against her, but his body didn't want to listen to the far recesses of his mind. Still, he managed to disengage from her eventually, to pull his hands away and steady them on the wall on either side of her, desperate for any kind of strength. He could see the surprise on her face even as she removed her own hands, but they stayed on him, stroking softly down his back outside of his shirt, and the touch seemed less heated, safer, almost comforting, even as staying so near to her felt intoxicatingly risky.

"We need to get going," he said, and he tried to keep his voice as steady and neutral as possible, although he failed even before he got through the first syllable.

Her surprise faded, but into something much worse, as she seemed to do her best to swallow a smile, even as her eyes took on the sort of amused, dangerous look that twisted his stomach into knots. He pulled back from her totally and bent to retrieve her wand, desperate for something to do with his hands and somewhere to look that wasn't her. He worried she might still look like that when he handed her back her wand, and he worried she might say something, something sly and teasing and tormenting, that might make him totally lose his head and push him over the edge and back into her. But she'd composed herself by then, in those few seconds, and she looked, again, like the proper Head Girl he knew, despite the slight swell to her lips.

"Do you need a minute?" she asked, moving away from him towards the downward slope of the passage, and the sound of her voice relaxed him, just a bit. She sounded soft and warm, as she had before he'd pulled her into the passage.

Still, he didn't want her any less.

"No. I just need us both to get out of here before—" He broke off, not trusting himself to finish, or for her to not see it as bait to torment him if he did.

But she'd already moved on, and James followed her down the passage to recover his wand, which looked rather pathetic on the fourth-floor landing, still lit and lying alone. The brisk air of the corridor did him more good than anything, and he cleared his throat to explain to Lily how the passage worked, even though it seemed rather self-explanatory. And she listened, polite and clearly interested, as if the everything that had passed between them had never happened.

In return, when they got back up to the fifth floor, Lily showed him how to reset the password for Boris the Bewildered, which worked much the same as the other castle passwords they needed to reset monthly. He did his best to pay attention as she described the concept—the statue had a base password that one had to use to reset the temporary, monthly password, it seemed, and it was important to check inside for no occupants before resetting the password, because the base password would open the statue even if someone were already inside—but he succeeded far less in that regard than she had moments before when he'd spoke. And he couldn't conjure much else to say, as they walked the three floors back up to the Gryffindor common room, by unspoken agreement taking the stairs and not patrolling the remaining corridors. He reached out to touch her as they waited for the staircases to shift from the sixth to seventh floor, and she smiled up at him when his hand found the back of her neck, right where the collar of her jumper began, to caress the skin there.

"I like being Head Boy," he told her simply, and he admired her dimples as her smile widened into a laugh.

"Some things just happen on patrol, you know?" After she said it, so flippantly, that easy callback to their conversation in the prefect's bathroom after Slughorn's party, he had to wonder if she had the same thought as he did—that he was not the first bloke to have things "just happen" with her on patrol. Something flickered across her face, just a flash, to make him think that maybe she'd regretted her words.

But he didn't have the brainpower to dwell on that, not just then. He watched as she sighed softly and tipped her head away slightly, almost unconsciously, when he passed his thumb over the sensitive spot on her neck, as if to give him better access, and the look on her face derailed his thoughts all over again. "You're a bit red," he said apologetically, dropping his hand quickly and starting up the stairs the minute the staircase settled.

"It'll pass," she said without real concern.

"Look, I'm going to go upstairs as soon we get inside," he told her as they neared the Fat Lady. "And you know why, so don't ask and don't look at me like that," he added quickly at the sideways glance he could see her give from the corner of his eye.

"Or what?" she asked, soft, wicked, and she reached out a hand to stop his determined stride. It took only the second that he hesitated for her to stretch up into him, her fingers gripping his shirt for leverage. She kissed him, just barely, just once, and then slipped out of his grasp with all of the agility she lacked on a broom, even as he automatically reached for her. "Just wanted to make sure you're more bothered than I am," she told him as she retreated, that look again on her face, and he loved the sound of her words, even as he hated them. He hadn't known what he would have done, if he had caught her, the impulse to both grab her close and also throw her somehow clashing and then melding together in his head. He'd never wanted or disliked her more, somehow simultaneously.

He followed behind her into the common room moments later, and, true to his word, took off for the stairs even as she went to join Hestia, Sirius, and Remus by chess board in front of the fire.

"Is everything okay? Did you row?" he heard Hestia ask quietly when he passed without greeting them.

Lily didn't bother to keep her voice down. "Oh no, we're fine. Just the loo, I expect. We were gone for a while."

He did go to the bathroom, and stayed there long after he came, came to the memory of the warmth and smell of her skin and the way her thighs had tightened around his leg and the quiet sounds she made in the back of her throat. Clear-headed, he found he liked her, of course, and an amount that felt increasingly uncontrollable, the power of which made him dislike everything about the situation, but not her. Never her. He wasn't sure how he could have ever thought differently.

xxx

When he went downstairs again, finally, he found her curled up under a blanket on the couch where they usually sat, book in hands. She looked up at him a bit warily when he approached, he thought, even though she tried her best to mask it with a smile, this one small and wholly different from the look she'd given him in the corridor. But her expression cleared when he sat next to her and reached out to touch her back, the same casual gesture he'd seen Sirius do to Marlene countless times, although a bit more overt than the way they normally acted in the common room. If it surprised her, she didn't show it, but seemed to settle more comfortably and returned her eyes to her book. "Now he's affectionate," she muttered archly as she turned the page, and allowed herself to smile, genuinely, when he laughed.

He wondered if he should have felt embarrassed, but he found, now, that he didn't really care that she knew what she did to him, and what he'd done to himself. It felt worlds better for her to know that he'd jerked off after snogging her than it did when he'd had to vocalize that he'd done the same thing while seeing her with Morton. A very strange benefit, he thought, and one he hadn't expected.

"How was patrol?" Remus asked from near the fire. He held a copy of Teen Witch Weekly in his hands, and he looked between James and Lily with frank curiosity, his eyes ever observant.

"Good," James answered breezily. "Saw McGonagall, but that was it. Oh, and we caught Peeves opening all the taps in the first-floor girl's bathroom. You know him—it was hard to talk him out of it."

"So Potter suggested he go torment Filch instead," Lily said, eyes still on her book. James realized, just from the briefest hint of crimson color on the cover, that she held the paperback he'd gotten her for Christmas, and he felt his chest swell. She looked over three-quarters of the way done. "He made it sound fun enough that Peeves went off, and we heard him shouting swear words from inside the armor outside Filch's office when we came back around."

"Any good ones?" Sirius asked from the chess board as he took one of Hestia's knights with his rook.

"The usual, but some new. I think wiener jacket was my favorite," she said matter-of-factly, and Sirius began to roar appreciatively.

"Bless him. I'm calling Snape that first thing tomorrow."

James felt quite contented to simply sit next to Lily as she read, to let his mind wander and to again stroke the back of her neck, which she seemed to not mind, but actually enjoy. Yet by the time Hestia beat Sirius at chess and Sirius repaired their pieces to rerack the game, his brain seemed to come back to the same issue over and over, unrelenting.

"Evans?"

"Hmmm?" She didn't look up.

"Everyone's back tomorrow."

"Yeah, I know."

"What are you going to do about Morton?" James tried to ask as quietly as possible, but he thought he saw Sirius fidget out of the corner of his eye, as if he'd heard. A quick glance at Hestia and Remus, who sat further away and remained tied up in the Teen Witch Weekly quiz Remus read to her, confirmed that they, at least, seemed oblivious.

Lily looked up then, but didn't close her book, a tactic James had seen Remus employ countless times—the book gave her something to go back to, an excuse to leave the conversation, just in case. "I haven't thought about it," she said softly, with a total honesty he rarely saw. "I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but I really haven't. He's not been on my mind since you mentioned him New Year's Eve."

He could find some solace in that, James supposed. "He's going to immediately try to talk to you. You get that, right? There's no way he won't after the way you left things at Slughorn's party."

"No, that whole thing is sorted. Well, better, at least, than before. We talked it through before he left."

"Wait, what?" He stared at her, and looking at his face made her close her book, even without marking her place. Something about her seemed to shift in that moment, something he couldn't quite place, about her posture or her face or the way she felt under his hand, and not for the better. "You didn't tell me that."

"I didn't know I had to."

"But you should have told me by now, don't you think?"

She didn't answer. "Do you have to do this now?" She gave a pointed nod towards their friends at the fire. James wasn't sure if she noticed, but Sirius busied himself with the chess pieces rather suddenly. "You could have brought all of this up when we patrolled."

"I was a little preoccupied. So were you."

"Not the whole time!" She seemed to work to keep her voice calm and low and her face placid. "How many floors did we have before that? And you never mentioned a thing."

"Will you just tell me what happened? Was it that bad? Did you shag?" The words flew from his mouth before he could stop himself, his stomach sinking into his feet.

"What? No! Christ, Potter." The muggle swear sounded entirely different than it had not even an hour earlier, when she'd whispered it in the secret passage. "He and I haven't done that since—I don't know, the end of November? But, what, you think I shagged him after the way that he and I fought, after you and I were in the prefect's bathroom and I told you later that I wanted you to kiss me? And that after I shagged him, then I just want right into—all of this? With me and you?" She seemed loathe to name whatever it was between them. "That's what you think, don't you?"

Yes, he kind of did. "I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. It was all over your face, all over your voice." She shifted, then, seemed to pull herself up from the more comfortable position she'd previously curled into. "And you're not denying it now either. You see, this is what I meant. You're never going to get over what you saw. You said that you didn't care, but now you're jumping to conclusions that I'm this slag who just can't control herself."

"Look, I never said—"

She shot up suddenly, throwing the blanket at him in the process, and, for good measure it seemed, her book too. He didn't understand why, not until she clapped a hand over the side of her neck, and he realized, with sick, dawning horror, that, as he continued to stroke her neck unconsciously, his fingers had strayed to the still-red spot just below her ear. "Don't you fucking dare." There was something so ice cold about her words that he thought it might have been better if she yelled.

Heat flooded his face. "I didn't mean to, I swear. Not—there." By the fire, Sirius, Remus, and Hestia had gone entirely silent and still, and he could feel the weight of their eyes.

Lily had turned even as he'd spoken, and she left without another word. The sound of her slamming dorm door seemed to hit him almost physically.

In the painful silence that followed, Hestia spoke first.

"What the fuck, Potter." The curse made her voice sound utterly unlike hers, but she didn't appear mad, just exasperated, almost tired. "What did you do?" She didn't wait for an answer, but left the brand new game of chess without so much as a backwards glance, and followed Lily to their dorm

Sirius sighed as he watched her go. "Brilliant, Prongs. Really."

James fought the urge to simply follow suit, to go up to his own room and just write off the day entirely. He stayed, but only just barely. "Did you hear it all?" he asked Sirius.

"Yes."

"Then what happened?" Remus asked, clearly bewildered, but James ignored him.

"Was she right? To get that mad?"

Sirius sighed again, and reached up to rub his face with both hands. "I don't know," he said after a long pause, and with great reluctance. "Listen, you did ask if she shagged him before he left, after you two have been pretty loved up lately. You did. That's not great."

Remus understood quickly. "Wait, is this about Morton?"

Sirius ignored him too. "But she went off her head there at the end. That went from moderately pissed off to full-blown real quick."

"That part was definitely my fault, although I didn't mean to." James wasn't even sure how to explain why, and didn't even try. "Yes, Moony, this is about Morton," he added quickly, worried suddenly from the look on Remus' face that he might become the third person to storm out of the room that evening. "I asked her what she planned to do when he got back, and she said she didn't know, but that they had talked before he left. I asked her what about, and then she said it sounded like I was calling her a slag—"

"But you kind of sounded like you did. It was in your voice, mate," Sirius interrupted, and then held his hands up, all innocence. "And, I mean, you did immediately jump there, although I get why, after what you've seen—"

"Hold on." Remus' voice cracked like a whip, uncharacteristically sharp, and Sirius froze, immediately aware of his mistake. "You never said you saw anything, Prongs."

"Just some snogging in the corridors after the stupid Slug Club dinner. I was there too. Nothing really, but enough, you know?" Sirius lied flippantly, seemingly as easily as he breathed. He looked back to James, his expression little softer, apologetic at the slip up. "Fact is, you could have just lied to her. You could have just told her that you absolutely didn't think that she shagged him again, even if you did. Just—'No, Evans, I never thought that, I just really like you and I don't want him to screw anything up when he comes back.' Fuck, that's not even a lie, Prongs."

It sounded so easy, put that way.

"Did you snog her, just now? On patrol?" Remus asked, and when James nodded mutely, he threw the issue of Teen Witch Weekly at him. The magazine fluttered and fell short of hitting James, landing a good foot away from his feet. The cover model, a young witch holding up a purple, heart-shaped potion bottle, winked up at him. "That was also dumb."

"Agreed," Sirius said shortly. "Not that you snogged her—because, whatever, good job—but that you immediately wanted to talk about Morton after, because you ruined whatever progress you made. You could have left it until morning—or just waited until he got back and watched to see what she'd do. It's not like you wouldn't have found out. You're kind of obsessed; you'd find a way."

James didn't answer. He could feel a headache coming on.

"Whatever." Sirius pushed the chess pieces back into place, and he sounded brisk. "You're going to fix it. Tomorrow. Because McKinnon comes back, and if you don't fix it, she and Evans and Jones go on their happy way, reunited and back to normal, and they won't hang out with us anymore. And that's not going to happen." His final sentence sounded almost like a warning.

"And you're going to stop being such an obsessive prat about Morton, because you're letting him win right now. You get that, right?" Remus asked. "Because if you keep obsessing over him, she's going to keep getting mad, and you'll get nowhere. Just…calm down a little, Prongs, at least about him. I'd tell you to calm down about her, but I don't know if you can do that at this point. So at least let go of all that with him, unless she gives you a reason not to. You can't get mad at her for shagging him before you two ever started talking."

Remus sounded so moderate, so reasonable. But James didn't know how to explain to him that everything that had happened between him and Lily had only occurred, truly, after he'd first caught her with Morton back in October. Everything seemed to stem back to that moment. Maybe, he'd thought more than once, maybe even if he hadn't followed Morton into that classroom, maybe he and Lily still would have started talking. And some days he entirely believed that, because of the congenial way she had treated him before he'd confessed the entire episode to her in the hidden passageway. It seemed, maybe, like they would have become friends regardless, and if so, without all of the shit that followed—all of his guilt and jealousy and her anger and outrage that still continued, even then.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe she would have stayed surface-level friendly to him the whole year without something so drastic and dramatic to drive them together, to make them clash and come together and clash again.

He hated that he'd never know, and hated Morton for serving as the lynchpin that brought them together.

James tried to stay awake a bit longer, tried to let Sirius and Remus cheer him up, and they did try. But he packed it in shortly, unable to rally. He set Lily's copy of Grindelwald's Greater Good on the stairs to her dormitory as he went up to bed.

xxx

The book still sat there in the morning, untouched, a silent reminder of the night before. But Lily was nowhere to be found.

"I'm not going to say anything," Hestia said when James asked after Lily at breakfast. She only sounded impatient, not angry, but as she served herself potatoes, she banged the serving spoon against her plate so forcefully that the sound made him jump, and the Hufflepuff prefects who had stayed behind over break both turned to look in their direction. "And if you push it, I will leave."

He could tell by her face that she absolutely meant it.

He held his tongue all day, mostly to avoid the inevitable confrontation that would follow with Sirius if she got mad enough to leave. And Hestia stayed with them all day, and treated James with a sort of indifferent politeness that made him wonder what all she knew, what all she thought.

"Evans is still pretty mad, sounds like," Sirius told him when they went out to fly that afternoon and Hestia had taken off on her broom. "Jones said she got a little shirty with her, even, although she wouldn't say why. She's got a mind like a vault, that one. I could not get it out of her." He sounded so impressed that James knew, without a doubt, that he'd tried hard to pry the information out of Hestia, and had failed soundly. "It's weird, though. I think she knows about Morton, and I think she knows that I know too, but neither of us will admit it first. At least that's the vibe I get, from the way she talked around things." He clapped James on the back. "But if you tell her any of this, she will have my balls, and then I will have yours."

"Fair." James squinted across the pitch towards Hestia and Remus, twenty feet in the air, tossing the quaffle back and forth. Hestia missed a catch, and dove to grab it at the last second. "Did she say where Evans went?"

"Brewing in the dungeons, she assumes. She figured Evans went there because she knows Jones hates potions, and she didn't want her to follow her. She said Evans would probably stay there all day, unless Snape shows up, because that always runs her out real quick."

Apparently Snape stayed away, because James saw neither hide nor hair of Lily, even as afternoon crept into evening.

Yet by the time dinner rolled around, James had new distractions to occupy his mind, and the whole matter of his row with Lily seemed to matter just a little less, as students began to arrive back from the Hogwarts Express. They met Peter in the Great Hall, he and Remus and Sirius together, and they clustered together at the Gryffindor table, just the four of them, like old times. Peter told them about Christmas day with his mum at the house of his three aging great-aunts, none of whom had ever married and seemed to survive fully off of the desire to outlive each another. The whole situation sounded so earnestly miserable that he sent the four of them into hysterics by the end, himself included, as he described the climactic ending to their Christmas dinner, which involved an exploding Jell-O mold and several very angry Pekingese dogs.

"I hear we sit with you now." James looked up from blotting his eyes behind his glasses to find Marlene sliding in next to Hestia, who had taken a seat next to Sirius. Marlene's face seemed somehow torn between amusement and distaste. "I miss one Christmas and suddenly everything goes to hell."

"This is also the first I've heard about this," Peter pointed out, but James almost didn't hear him.

"Evans." He leaned back, looking behind Remus, where Lily had sat down. Remus heaved a rather long-suffering sigh and leaned forward to allow James to see her better. "Can I talk to you after dinner?"

She didn't look at him, but kept her eyes trained on Marlene, and her expression, at least from profile, neutral. "No."

"Will you talk to me sometime?" He knew how desperate he sounded, and he hated it.

She thought about it, so long that he began to think she'd started pointedly ignoring him and would never respond. "Yes," she finally said, but her jaw remained resolutely set. "But not tonight."

"At least that's stayed the same," Marlene joked, either unaware of the tension or simply uncaring. James thought, somehow, it was the latter. "Although I guess we've also changed, haven't we, Pettigrew? We sit together now too."

Peter looked pleased, and with good reason, James thought. Marlene was easily one of the best-looking girls in their year, and she'd never spoken to him before, even passingly. "We do, I suppose, although I'm not going to miss the Ravenclaws."

Marlene rolled her eyes skyward. "Me either. Seeing them every day was way too much. I'm going on a nice, Ravenclaw-lite diet from now on—just Luke, maybe one or two more, tops. Merlin, I can't handle any more talk about—oh, I don't know—about Transfiguration theory, or the science behind Ancient Runes, or Quidditch."

"We talked Quidditch all the way back," Peter explained to the other Marauders. "And on the way to London before Christmas, actually. They're petrified for the game next month, although they wouldn't admit it. Their captain, Weber, kept trying to pull out of me—" And then he was off, talking about Quidditch as if he played on the team, although, James thought, he very nearly did, considering all the time he spent watching their practices, discussing their strategies, and attending their games.

The girls hardly spoke to them through dinner, a fact James mostly succeeded in ignoring. It felt good to have Peter back, good for their group to be whole again, good enough that James felt like himself for the first time in a long time. But he still had to wonder which version of himself felt happier—this version, the version that felt as he had for over six years at Hogwarts, or what he had felt like over Christmas break.

He didn't know if he wanted to know the answer.

Lily, Hestia, and Marlene broke away before they even left the Great Hall. When James and his friends reached the common room, they found the girls already tucked away in their usual corner, the one they had occupied for years, which laid as far away from the Marauders sat as possible. Lily had probably chosen that corner years ago, he thought, even though it sat far from the fire, simply to avoid him.

Sirius watched them moodily across the sea of returned Gryffindors, even as Peter cheerfully set up a chess match. "Fix it this week," he told James shortly. "Or that's going back to normal. Is that what you want?"

Marlene had taken to touching Hestia's hair, her face rather somber. James had gotten used to the length over break, enough so that he'd almost forgotten that she'd lost several inches after the fire at Honeydukes. From the look of increasing horror on Marlene's face, he assumed that Lily was explaining the Hogsmeade attack. Lily had her back to the Marauders (purposefully? James couldn't help but wonder), so he couldn't see her face. But he noted the careless flutter of her hands as she brushed Marlene away when she bent to pull at Lily's stockings to examine her leg. He would have bet that Lily downplayed her injuries entirely.

"We should probably tell Wormtail everything, right?" James said abruptly. He waited for Sirius to call him on dodging his question, but, thankfully, he didn't.

Peter forgot the chessboard completely when James launched into a detailed explanation of the attack on Hogsmeade on Christmas Eve. His jaw slackened a bit as he listened, but he stayed rather pale and entirely silent—no gasps, no questions, none of the attentive listening cues that Sirius so often employed. Sirius and Remus jumped in at points, to what had happened in Honeydukes, or to offer more insight into what they had seen as they left Hogsmeade, escorted back to Hogwarts and the Hospital Wing. James recalled Dumbledore's warning—to keep the information they held closely to their chest—but highly doubted that that meant excluding Peter, just as he assumed Lily and Hestia wouldn't exclude Marlene. Sirius evidently felt the same, because he didn't hesitate to expound on his theory that he had seen Bellatrix Black, recently turned Bellatrix Lestrange, amongst the Death Eaters.

After the story wound down, before Peter could even summon the words to react, Remus added, almost offhandedly, "Oh, and Lily knows about me."

Peter's wide blue eyes cast immediately towards the corner where Lily and her friends sat, and the rest of them followed suit. The girls had taken to laughing, the serious moment amongst them apparently passed. "Knows what about you, Moony?" Peter asked warily, as if he already knew.

"That I'm Moony. She figured it out and cornered me about it."

Peter had questions at that, dozens of them, with the sort of vigor that he hadn't managed to conjure in the shock of their gruesome Hogsmeade tale. How? When? What did she say? What did he say back? And mostly, why, why hadn't he lied, denied the whole thing?

Sirius nodded, grimly satisfied. "My thoughts exactly, Wormtail."

"How do you know she's not going to tell everyone?" Peter demanded.

"She won't," Remus said, even before James could jump in to offer the same defense. "I trust her word. And from the sound of it, she's known for years, just never asked, and never said anything to anyone, not even Jones or McKinnon. And that says the most, really—I don't think we'd manage to keep something like that from each other if it were us."

James thought about his own inability to keep even Lily's most personal secrets from Sirius, and, to a lesser extent, from Remus, and agreed with the statement entirely.

"Anyway, Prongs is going to win her back over, and then she definitely won't say anything." Sirius reached out to give James' shoulder a brief shake. "Right?"

"That always sounds like a threat."

"It is, mate."

"Back over?" Peter repeated, and he began to grin, and then laugh. "No way. Prongs, did you do it? Did we all lose the bet we couldn't even make because none of us thought you'd ever crack her?"

"Again," Remus interjected, "We're not supposed to tell him about that."

James pulled a face, even as he hesitated. He could tell Peter all about Hogsmeade more or less easily, he found. He could even talk about some of the things he'd witnessed in the Three Broomsticks—not everything, all the sights and smells and sounds of the torture that he'd never forget, but more than he thought he'd manage going into it. He'd explained what it had looked like to see the Cruciatus Curse performed, and how Louisa Mullins had died before she'd even hit the floor, memories he hadn't vocalized since recounting the entire thing to Frank and Alice in the dark hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But he didn't want to tell Peter about Lily, he realized. Not just the whole saga with Morton, which he didn't have it in him to recount anyway, but everything that had happened during break. It felt like entirely too much to deal with, and he doubted he had the words, anyway, to explain any of it.

"It's better than it was," he said finally.

"They snog now," Sirius put in helpfully, and Peter clapped James on the back like a proud father.

"Not like you and Jones," James countered.

Peter looked between the two of them, and then to Remus. "How did I miss this much?" he demanded, and Remus just shrugged. "Padfoot and Jones? Really? I mean, Prongs and Evans might be more surprising, because it seemed like it was just never going to happen. But Jones, Padfoot? That's so out of left field. I wouldn't have even bet against that—or for it—because it never even occurred to me as a possibility. So you're—"

"Shagging like rabbits?" Sirius interjected with a grin. "Absolutely." He let that hang for a moment, enjoying Peter's astonishment, before he laughed. "Nah, not really. She's just kind of cool. We play chess. She likes Quidditch. It's nothing, really."

He sounded so casual that James nearly believed him. But Remus caught his eye and shook his head just slightly, his face skeptical, and James knew he didn't completely buy it either.

"But you'll see," Sirius continued briskly. "Because Prongs is going tell Evans he's sorry for acting like a prat last night, and then they'll hang out with us again, and you'll get it. It's too complicated, don't even ask," he added, before Peter could broach the topic of what James had done the night before, and for that, at least, James felt grateful.

Peter seemed to mull all that over. "I wouldn't mind it, I guess, if they came around. McKinnon's pretty great. She waited for me on the platform this morning, seemed like, to make sure I sat with them. I'm glad Evans suggested it to her."

James felt a familiar rush of gratitude towards Lily at the relieved look on Peter's face.

"Good." Sirius turned to the long-forgotten chess board. "So, Prongs, fix it."