A/N: Still just consistently blown away by the reviews, and that so many of you have stuck around for roughly 230 single-spaced Word pages (!) and almost 150k words (!). It's still truly wild and baffling, and writing this and feedback from you all has brought me such joy during such a chaotic time as this global pandemic. I hope all of you are staying safe!
Shout out to Freckles, a fellow PhD student. I hope you're having a better time of it all wherever your university is, because everything around mine is madness.
Chapter Thirteen
Lily remained absent from Hogwarts for eight days.
As James anticipated, Marlene took his non-explanation of Lily's sudden departure the hardest.
"She can't just be gone," she kept insisting after he had returned to the common room and corralled the five of them, her friends and his—their friends—into a corner.
"I watched her walk out the door myself," he replied each time.
Finally she lost it a bit, and her voice escalated. "If you won't tell me, I'll just ask Dumbledore myself!" she threatened, and before James could even react to hush her, Hestia did it for him.
"Keep your voice down!" she hissed, taking Marlene's arm, and the warning sounded somehow fiercer coming from her than it would have from him, James thought. She looked pale, and Marlene did too, but it seemed more apparent on Hestia's ordinarily pink cheeks. She shrugged off Sirius' hand, which had flown to her shoulder, and he looked truly surprised at the action. James hoped he realized it came out of her frustration with the situation rather than with him. "We're going to believe what James says, because we have no reason not to trust him." His first name sounded weird coming from her lips for the first time. He later decided that she'd probably lapsed into the habit after hearing Sirius call him that so many times, and had just never done so publically before.
"And you can't tell anyone," James reminded them again, but time he looked directly at Marlene that time. "Including Rooney. He's anyone. Dumbledore was really clear that he only wants the six of us to know she's even at St. Mungo's."
Marlene huffed at that and left. Even over the usual din of the common room, James could hear her dormitory door slam.
"She's just worried," Hestia said grimly, and her words jogged James' memory, reminded him of Remus' identical explanation of Sirius' anger when Lily had found out about Remus' lycanthropy over Christmas break. He hated the pang of missing he felt, already, that he couldn't make that comparison to her. "I'll make sure she doesn't say anything," Hestia said firmly, and as trailed after Marlene, even her walk seemed resolute.
Sirius pressured him more once they got to their own dorm.
"You were gone way too long to not know anything," he kept insisting even after they had all gotten into their beds and killed the lights. His nagging need to keep at it reminded James, again, of Marlene.
"Padfoot, let it go." James felt a pillow hit his side, and picked it up to throw immediately back at Sirius.
"But—"
"Drop it," Remus instructed sharply, shortly, from his own bed. And Sirius quieted down at that, but as James lay awake himself, he knew from Sirius' lack of snores that he didn't fall asleep for a long time afterwards either.
Sirius appeared to have gotten over it by the next day, at least enough to laugh as he told James about Marlene's foolish actions after Transfiguration. "McGonagall apparently got so mad at McKinnon when she kept asking where Evans went and wouldn't drop it that she went off on her a bit. Took twenty house points from Gryffindor, even. I'm sure McKinnon will need lick her wounds for a while. It had to hurt."
James knew the information should have satisfied him, just as Sirius had clearly intended. But it gave him little joy to see Marlene miserable when he felt so miserable himself.
He took away more house points in the next few days than he had throughout the year. Everywhere he turned, someone seemed to break some rule or make some stupid decision that required a reprimand. He realized, as the week wore on, that even his friends had started to annoy him, just with little things—the way Sirius couldn't handle a real conversation without cracking a joke; how Remus seemed the exact opposite and took life far too seriously; how Peter seemed, still, to feel like he was somehow lesser than and underneath the other three. He hated the sound of Sirius' chewing, how Remus turned the corner down to mark pages in the books that he borrowed, and how Peter snored so loudly that it kept him up at night.
"You've really got it bad for her," Remus said to him one night after James finally stopped ranting about the week's prefect meeting, which he felt had gone abysmally without Lily. Remus sounded almost surprised, as if the thought came as a true revelation to him, and didn't even bother to specify Lily's name. He didn't have to.
"What was your first clue?" James snapped, and then guilt hit him immediately and he slumped in his chair. He took off his glasses to rub his face. His eyes burned from exhaustion. "Sorry. It was just a lot today, trying to handle all the Head stuff she usually does."
James didn't mention, and also hadn't added to the abridged version of the prefect meeting as he'd explained it, that a vast downturn in his mood stemmed from Morton hanging around after the meeting to inquire about Lily's whereabouts. The exchange had lasted not twenty seconds, with Morton's simple question followed by James' non-answer. Morton hadn't spoken to him since Slughorn's Christmas party, as he seemed to avoid addressing James even in classes or in prefect meetings, a habit James also adopted all too happily. It had taken a single look into Morton's eyes for James to comprehend two things for certain.
First, Morton disliked him, as resolutely as James disliked him in return.
And second, Morton understood, just as James did, that they vied for the same girl. He had surveyed James like one might assess another Quidditch player of their same position, and it fit, with both of them occupying roles as chasers on their house teams. James thought, again, of what he had told Frank—this wasn't Quidditch. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like it was sometimes.
At least, James had thought bitterly as Morton thanked him coldly for absolutely no information and left, the exchange had proven to him that Marlene had kept her mouth shut and hadn't told the Ravenclaws anything, as he'd asked.
"It's just really bad," Remus commented, jerking James from his revere. "Worse than I expected. You're…kind of a wreck, mate."
James knew it, but he didn't want to hear it. "Tell me something I don't know."
Peter looked up from where he sat next to Hestia, her correcting hand busily scribbling on his latest Herbology essay. "I don't get it," he said conversationally, evidently pleased with the distraction from his half-hearted efforts at work. "You went six years without talking to her. What's a few days?"
But James knew he didn't get it, couldn't get it, because he hadn't spent Christmas with them, hadn't seen what he and Lily had started to become without anyone around to make her pull back. But Hestia glanced up at him, her blue eyes sympathetic, and Sirius cuffed Peter lightly on the back of his head. They understood, he knew, as did Remus, because they'd been there. And knowing that they, too, had seen what he saw, remembered what he remembered, made James feel a little less crazy, like he hadn't imagined everything that had passed between him and Lily.
But Peter also had a point. Over the previous six years, Lily's absence might have annoyed James a bit. He'd miss teasing her, miss looking at her, miss planning how to attract her attention. But as he'd finally gotten her attention, her absence felt like a heavy weight that seemed to overtake almost everything in his life. He missed everything about her, even somehow the things that had once irritated him, like the way she would flit past his questions without giving answers or say things just to bait him, just to see what he'd do. She never strayed too far from his mind, and even in the moments he managed to forget about her briefly—when focusing particularly hard in class, laughing at times with his friends, or especially when flying—he somehow still felt the loss of her, almost physically, like it lurked over his shoulder even in his subconscious.
But the situation stretched his nerves thin for reasons past Lily as well, in a way he didn't understand at first. It came to him one sleepless night, one of many those days, that he worried not just for her, but for the entire situation. He'd thought the Hogsmeade attack would be the worst thing he would face in his life, and he still thought about it, as the memories lingered no matter how hard he tried to push them away. But, for the most part, life had gone on. He'd become wrapped up again in trying to get close to Lily, in leading Gryffindor's Quidditch team, in spending time with his friends, and the memory—and reality—of the threat of Voldemort's power had faded, just a little, into the back of his mind. And because he'd put it aside so quickly, he felt an unmistakable hot pang of guilt that he'd ignored the long-term impact that Christmas Eve must have had on so many people, not just Lily.
Lily's absence and the reality of her injury reminded him, at the forefront of his mind, that life had started changing rapidly outside of Hogwarts, in a way that he would soon have to face. It kept him awake at night, the immensity of the situation, how impossible it felt to go up against Voldemort and his fanatic followers, and the enormity of what he'd signed up for when Dumbledore had asked him if he wanted to fight back. He didn't regret agreeing to the latter, and never even considered that he could regret it, truly, because he knew it was the path he was always going to take without any other option even coming to mind. What bothered him most was his inability to confide in his friends. He'd never felt like he needed their advice and support more. But he tried to remind himself that he could talk it all over with Lily when she got back. Whenever that happened.
And then, quite suddenly, one evening she just returned.
"Lily's back." Hestia had made a beeline for the Marauders the moment she'd reemerged from her dorm, a good half hour after she'd gone up to merely drop off her bag. Her eyes danced, although quite with what, James didn't understand. "I need to find Mar."
Sirius grabbed her, quite easily with a firm arm around her waist, before she could rush off. He left it there even after she stilled. "What did she say?" he demanded, and he sounded, James thought, almost as desperate for an answer as he felt.
Hestia hesitated. She looked to James, who could feel his heartbeat, it seemed, in every pulse point on his body. "Honestly, nothing," she admitted. "I couldn't get a single thing out of her, just that she went to St. Mungo's and she's fine now. She looked…" She shifted a bit to get out of Sirius's grip, and he let her go. "She looked not like herself. But she says she's fine." She looked up at Sirius and crossed her arms. "I'm going to go find Mar now," she said, more of a warning than a statement, and she did just that.
James saw Lily for the first time the next morning at breakfast. She sat at the Gryffindor table beside Marlene, a sight familiar to his eyes, but she looked different, somehow, as Hestia had said. She'd lost weight, he thought, more than what made sense in such a short amount of time, because the delicate bones of her cheeks and collarbone seemed more prominent than before. And when he came to sit next to her, he saw close up that she looked weary, even as she offered a bright smile and cheerful greeting to the Marauders.
"You alright?" he asked under his breath, bringing his head close to hers.
She didn't lift her eyes from her plate. "I'm good. And you?"
He hated the surface-level quality of her voice, that tone of prim, proper Head Girl that she'd given him so many times before. "I'm a right wreck," he said, and that got at least a bit of a smile out of her. "Will you tell me? Later?"
"When I can," she agreed, but not without obvious trepidation. "I don't know when that will be."
She returned to classes with the same vigor that she'd always employed, and seemed to not miss a beat in any of the subjects James had with her. He almost suspected, by the way she successfully charmed Hestia's face into one quite unlike hers, with a prominent nose and chin, thick eyebrows, and drooping eyes topped with a shock of yellow hair, that she'd somehow managed to get her coursework books to her at St. Mungo's.
She excelled in Potions as usual as they brewed Odiomus, a complex potion most commonly seen as the antithesis of Amortentia that inspired a deep, obsessive hatred in the drinker. They had yet to tackle such a difficult potion, one they could certainly expect on their NEWTs, Slughorn hinted heavily, and Lily's potion came the closest in its first stages to what Slughorn expected from the multi-day brew. She spoke quite cordially to Morton, James couldn't help but notice, just as he certainly noticed when Morton reached over to tuck her hair behind her ears when it fell in her face, her own hands incapacitated by a fine layer of powdered root of Asphodel. James hated to see her smile in thanks, and hated to see the gesture done so easily, but he also hated that he recognized himself in that motion, something he had started to do to her too, although only in private.
Outside of class, James rarely saw her for days. She kept to the library until late, Hestia claimed, and when he went to see for himself (and to return a book, although the secondary quest seemed less important), he did see her there, at a table surrounded by several stacks of books. When he approached her, he felt, again, rather like a predator stalking skittish prey. But she offered him something of a smile when she caught sight of him, and set down her quill from her ink-stained fingers.
She didn't object when he drew up the chair next to her, and they went through their increasingly familiar routine of shallow questions as to how the other did, answered without any actual substance. Afterwards, James found that he hardly knew what to say.
"Stuff you missed?" he asked quietly, nodding to her work, and he felt his ears burn a bit with how lame that sounded. She murmured her confirmation, but he realized, looking at the stack of books nearest her, that she lied. Each title had something to do with Curse-Breaking, something he doubted very much that they had suddenly taken to covering in Arithmancy in the week of her absence. He picked up a worn copy of In Tutankhamun's Tomb: Numerology's Advanced Tenants Practically Applied and leafed through the pages. The author had written the majority in prose, the book so old that the typeset had faded from black to purple, but he came across several complex numerical charts scattered throughout the pages, unreadable to his eye. "Evans, this doesn't look like homework at all."
He expected her to push back a bit, but she didn't. She did, however, take the book from him, albeit gently, and placed it carefully back to the pile where he'd taken it from. "I've…become a bit obsessed," she said haltingly, and she picked up her quill again, not to write, just to fiddle with and to hold. James saw, on the long scroll of parchment held open in front of her, that she'd scribbled all number of the complex mathematical charts he'd spotted in the book, many scratched out with great ferocity.
"I wish you'd tell me," he said simply, because, at the end of the day, he really had nothing else to say. That summed everything up.
"I know," Lily said, and not unkindly. "And I expect I will. Just…" She shifted in her seat and rolled her shoulders, as if to shake something off, although he could tell by her expression that she didn't succeed. "Not yet. I'm still trying to put myself back together." She hesitated for a moment, and her right hand reached towards him before she pulled back, uncertain. But the next moment she took his hand and held it in hers under the table. The ink on her fingers left no trace on his skin, apparently stains that had long-since dried over the day. And as she sat there, her hand in his, she watched his face with such intensity that she seemed to look for something. It didn't seem like she made the gesture out of any sort of desire for comfort or to comfort him. It felt, almost, like a test.
"Are you okay?" he asked uncertainly, but relief flooded her face in the next moment, an emotion she didn't bother to try to hide.
"Yes," she said, and so emphatically that he believed her answer for the first time since she'd gotten back, even though she'd assured him the very same thing too many times for him to count. She squeezed his hand briefly before she took hers away, and explained, her voice thick with reluctance, "I just wanted to check." The way she said it, it sounded like some sort of major reveal, but he understood nothing better than he had before. In fact, he understood even less.
"Check what?"
"I can't explain it—I honestly can't, and I would, truly, if I could. I'm not just saying that." She seemed to add the latter to keep him from pushing her further. But she looked so fragile in that moment, both physically and emotionally as she had ever since she'd returned, that he didn't have it in him to press her for anything. "The past few days it's been fine when someone touches me or I touch them, but at first…it wasn't. Alice tried to hug me at St. Mungo's after it was all over and it just felt like…" She didn't finish, but she didn't have to. Her face had gone rather pale, and she looked faintly sick.
"I wish you'd fucking tell me what happened," he said again, but without anger or frustration. He sounded as he felt, just utterly defeated. "Do you remember what you said after Christmas Eve, how you worried I might die in the Three Broomsticks? That's how I felt every day while you were gone." He didn't add, although he couldn't forget, the guilt he'd felt the entire time, too, and still felt even then, although she'd returned. He should have worried more about her leg when it wouldn't heal, he reckoned. He should have pushed her further to do something about it, like he would have for Sirius or Remus or Peter, because he wouldn't have let up if it had happened to any of them. He knew logically, of course, that his relationship with her differed drastically from the one he had with his friends, and that she simply wouldn't have let him care no matter how hard he tried. But somehow, that didn't ease his guilt.
"I remember, and I'm sure it did feel like that," she said. Her eyes lingered on the spot of his wound from that day, just above his left ear, although any potential scar lay buried beneath his hair. "But I will tell you. Eventually. Like I said, when I can. And in the meantime…" She sucked in a deep breath and smiled, and the look in her eyes nearly matched her lips for the first time he could recall since she'd returned. "I'll be okay. You'll see. I'll rally."
And after that, she really seemed to.
Lily slowly reintegrated into their group in the common room. She showed Remus her complex Arithmancy charts and asked him to check her math, which he attempted valiantly for two days before giving up. He admitted to James privately that he had no idea what equation she hunted for, and she hadn't explained it to him, so he couldn't interpret the charts one way or another.
She patiently helped Peter with his Charms work, easily his weakest subject, and in return asked for his advice for a bit of Transfiguration, clearly his best after everything he'd gone through with the Marauders to become an Animagus. James doubted she needed the help, really, although she did seem to struggle with Transfiguration the most of any subject, he'd noticed, although only a little if at all. It just seemed the form of magic that came the least naturally to her, but she may have played that up a little, he thought, when she'd double-check some part of her work with Peter, who seemed thrilled to offer her help. James wondered more than once, watching Peter talk her through some incantation or wrist movement, if anyone had ever asked Peter for help with coursework before. He knew he and Sirius and Remus never did.
She played chess with Sirius, and James knew she had come back almost fully to herself, truly, the day she wiped the floor with him entirely after several games that had come nearly too close to call. Something about the way she laughed at Sirius' demands as to if she'd let him win all the other times they'd played reassured James of her healing more than anything else.
And with James, she returned almost to normal, back to how she'd acted before she'd left for St. Mungo's. She left a space for him by her on the couch some evenings when Marlene hadn't claimed it for herself, and James thought that maybe she asked Marlene for a bit of space on those days, based on the dirty looks she gave him. Lily seemed quite content to curl up near him, never cuddling, although she did find excuses to touch him otherwise, he noticed. She would rest her hand on his arm when she talked or laughed, reach to adjust his tie, and attempted, more than once, to make his unruly hair lie flat. But she acted much the same with the others, he realized after a while. She'd become more physically affectionate with Marlene and Hestia, and found reasons to touch his friends as well—smacking Sirius after a particularly stupid comment, her hand on Remus' as she continued to teach him healing charms, asking Peter to move her own hand to demonstrate a Transfiguration cast. And when James caught those moments and watched, he could see the expectant tension in her shoulders that released once the contact happened, and she would relax into her typical smiling self, as if she'd just averted a cause of great discomfort.
But even as some things seemed to slowly return to normal, others changed. One morning the Marauders watched as Lily, Hestia, and Marlene entered the Great Hall for breakfast and bypassed the Gryffindor table to sit with the Ravenclaws instead. Marlene had taken to joining Rooney for meals during Lily's sojourn at St. Mungo's, but the other two had never joined her before.
"Hestia says they're trying to be more fair to McKinnon and spend more time where she wants to be," Sirius explained in response to James' choking on his pumpkin juice at the sight. "She said it makes total sense," he added in a voice that suggested the absolute opposite as he poked moodily at his eggs.
"McKinnon probably just doesn't want to be alone over there," Peter reasoned, even as he watched them unashamedly with no effort to conceal his interest. "I wouldn't blame her—not exactly a great laugh, are they, that lot? Still, bit weird to see."
Rather an understatement, in James' opinion. He watched Lily slide in next to Anthony Weber, Ravenclaw's Quidditch captain, who immediately engaged her in conversation. While James felt a bit gratified that she'd opted to sit by Weber rather than Morton, who had room next to him as well, he still didn't like the way she laughed at whatever Weber said, or how she moved her hands animatedly as she responded. Sirius had it easier, he thought a bit bitterly. Hestia seemed to rescind back into the shell she'd come out of around the Marauders, her smile polite but her words minimal. Seated in between Lily and Marlene, both so vivacious, she seemed to fade into the background in the way James had always seen before he'd gotten to know her.
"Feels a bit like psychological warfare, doesn't it?" Sirius asked. "Them taking our birds before the match on Saturday? What, are we supposed to do it back?"
"Pass," Remus said lightly, and he sounded so carefree about the whole situation that James envied him.
"Agreed. It would be a downgrade." Peter served himself another helping of bacon, but didn't take to eating it right away. "You were right, Padfoot, what you said after break—that I'd get it, why you all wanted them around once they started hanging out with us," he said thoughtfully. "I mean, I'm glad it's not all the time, but it is kind of nice. I don't mind it."
"They're three of the best-looking girls in our year," James pointed out dryly. "Why would you mind?"
Peter just grinned and shrugged. "Fair, Prongs. Fair. I just thought maybe it would be weird, change too much about how it's always been. But it's not like that. It's been alright."
To hear him put so simply what Marlene had seemingly expressed through endless huffs, rants, and argument, before she'd finally accepted much the same thing change amongst her own friends made James feel suddenly very appreciative for Peter's level-headedness. He clapped him on the back and said the only thing he could think of. "Good man." But by the way Peter's grin widened, James thought he understood the gratitude behind the two words.
"You're just glad McKinnon's around," Sirius accused, and the fact that he had to launch into a joke said everything to James. Clearly he recognized the significance in Peter's statement too, and wanted to cast humor on the situation quickly.
"Certainly doesn't hurt."
"She'd wreck your life, mate."
Peter laughed good-naturedly. "I'd let her."
James' piqued feelings at the table situation abated later, just a bit, when Lily pulled him aside to explain even before he could ask her. She phrased it much the same as Sirius had relayed Hestia's words—that the girls wanted to make sure that they treated Marlene fairly and gave time to her friends. After all, Lily reasoned winningly, Marlene had given in to spending so much time with the Marauders that they owed her. She sounded neither pleased nor displeased about the situation, just neutral. He tried to feel similarly, and it did help that she had taken him aside to explain as if what she did in her life was indeed his business, a sharp contrast to earlier days.
But he found it harder to stay neutral when Lily returned to the common room one evening after patrol a handful days after the full moon had passed (again, quite easily with her help) and only a few before the Quidditch match against Ravenclaw. James had stayed up after the others had gone to bed ,and Sirius had offered to sit with him so they could work out last-minute Quidditch plays. But James knew, of course, that he waited up for Lily, as he always did, because he could recognize the need to see her in the part of his brain that didn't lie to himself. And he knew Sirius knew it too, although he never mentioned it, and James was grateful for that.
She returned to the common room well past eleven, later than usual, and he might have thought nothing of it if not for the look on her face. Still, he couldn't quite place what seemed off in her expression as she took off her cloak and sat in the chair next to him. She didn't lean back in her seat, but rested just on the edge, and propped her elbows up on the table he and Sirius had covered with diagrams of the Quidditch pitch, all covered in little x's and o's that zoomed magically across the page.
"You look like shit," Sirius told her with an easy grin, obviously just to wind her up. And James felt a measure of relief with his statement, because it meant that Sirius saw it too, whatever played across her face, and that he hadn't imagined it in paranoia. When she didn't immediately fire something back, Sirius' amusement faded rapidly. "Are you….okay?" he asked uncertainly, and with a certain degree of discomfort, as if he wanted to know but also hated to have to ask.
"Yeah. Yeah, honestly," she assured them, as if she could apparently tell from their faces that they didn't believe her. She dragged a hand through her hair and chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. She looked at Sirius, so sharply that he leaned away from her a bit, clearly taken aback, and then she shifted her gaze to James. "Alex caught up with me on patrol," she said bluntly, as if she didn't want to sugar-coat anything, and just wanted to move past the situation as quickly as possible. "He wasn't on schedule and it wasn't planned—I just want to make that clear. Well, at least I didn't plan on it. Clearly he did, since he found me."
"Alex," Sirius repeated under his breath like it was a bad word, but he busied himself pointlessly with the diagrams in front of him at the look she shot him.
But James knew what he meant. Hearing her say Morton's name so familiarly disturbed him almost as much as knowing they'd presumably been together. He stared at her, and she stared back, clearly waiting for him to say something, but he didn't know how to respond. The potential of the conversation felt suddenly very dangerous, because the possibility of pissing her off seemed extraordinarily high. They hadn't disagreed seriously since the end of break, when he'd asked questions about Morton in a way she hadn't like, and the moment felt ominously similar.
"Okay," he said finally, because that seemed safe enough, neutral enough. "What happened?"
"We just patrolled. He asked if he could walk with me, like we used to, back when I was dating Greg and he'd show up just to talk to me during my shifts. Fucking hell, Black, what?" she asked, her tone suddenly exasperated, and James saw why as soon as he looked at Sirius. He'd abandoned any pretense of focusing on the parchment before him and he stared at her, unashamedly surprised. "I know you already know all this, which is why I didn't ask you to leave," she added rather sharply. "So, what?"
"Nothing, just—" Sirius seemed, for a moment, rather lost for what to say, a rare sight to James' eye. "Yeah, I knew you guys used to…whatever, but I didn't know he was trying to work his way in there when you were all cozy with Gimble." He took a single look at James' face and realized aloud, "But you knew. And you didn't tell me. First of all, what the fuck, mate, really? Why wouldn't you tell me that? And second, what the fuck to Morton, because that is a long game. I don't like the bloke, but that's impressive—sly and underhanded, but impressive. You should have been playing a longer game, James."
"Probably," James said shortly, and he watched in disbelief as Lily almost laughed. "What?"
She shook her head, and he thought—or perhaps hoped—that she looked a little moved. "I just assumed you told him."
"I don't tell him everything," James pointed out, and Sirius snorted in clear disagreement despite the evidence of their entire conversation. "So, what, he didn't try to—" He broke off, not sure how he wanted to put it, how he could phrase it delicately so as to sound the least amount of jealous, insecure, or accusatory as possible.
"Put it on you?" Sirius supplied helpfully, and James reasoned that that seemed as good a way to put it as any.
"Not exactly," Lily said carefully, and paused long enough to find the words that Sirius had opened his mouth again to prompt her before James shook his head at him severely. She acted as if she didn't notice the exchange. "I don't think that was his end goal, anyway, although I'm sure he would have if he thought I'd be into it. But I made it pretty clear that I wasn't. He really just acted like he just wanted to talk like we used to—but 'acted' is the wrong word. It seemed genuine." She opened her mouth again, as if to say more, before she closed it, clearly second-guessing her words. Finally, she admitted reluctantly, "He did kiss me though."
Sirius nodded knowingly. "See? Knew he would. Can't blame him for trying."
"Could you not?" she asked acidly, and she gave him a look that James knew would have felled many a man, although it seemed to roll of Sirius' back pretty easily. "Can you go away, or pretend you don't know what's going on, or just shut up?"
"What did you do?" James asked, and he reached out to take her hand, to draw her attention back to him. He realized after he took it that she seemed to have wanted him to do so all along, because her face lost some of the strange tension that she'd come in with, although not all.
She smiled a little. "Same thing as last time. Stopped him. Like I said before, kissing him would have been entirely contrary to the message I wanted to send. And—" She looked past the table then to scan the rest of the common room, which sat empty save for a cluster of third years in the opposite corner, their hunched postures and frantic quills imparting a clear last-minute cramming session. "Black, look away," she instructed, and of course he didn't, but she kissed James anyway.
They hadn't kissed since before she'd left for St. Mungo's, and her mouth on his and her hand on his cheek felt, to James, like a sudden shot of sweet relief. He had waited for her to initiate with him, intent on following her lead, but so much time had passed—at least, to him, it felt like so much time—that he'd really started to worry if she ever would.
"And you," she said when she pulled away, but she seemed content to let James' hand linger in her hair. She smiled at him. "It's not just contrary to my message. There's also you."
Sirius cleared his throat awkwardly, and James realized he'd entirely forgotten he was there. "I should—"
Lily cut him off by standing up and gathering her cloak in her arms, removing herself from James' grasp entirely. "No, stay. I should go, see if Marlene's still up. I need to try to get ahead of this, do some damage control before the morning. Christ, we're meant to sit over there at breakfast. It should be fine because he wasn't even mad, really, he's just so nice, but I—"
"—realize that he's doing the same shit he did before, waiting in the wings and acting the good friend so he can get in there?" Sirius interrupted pointedly, so pointedly it came out almost harshly. He tried to soften the question with the expression he and Marlene so closely shared, and he lifted his hands as if to protest his innocence. No matter how strange it had felt, to have Sirius with them, James found himself suddenly very glad that he was there. He voiced a question James very much wanted to ask but didn't know how without potentially making her mad. At least she could redirect her anger Sirius' way, and James could still get his answers.
But she didn't get mad, maybe, James would ponder later, because Sirius hadn't tossed it out as an accusation at her, but at Morton. "Of course I know that," she said matter-of-factly, tucking her hair behind one ear. "I'm not fifteen anymore. I see a lot more than I used to. Goodnight."
They both watched her go, and after she disappeared up the dormitory stairs, Sirius turned to look at James, astonished. But almost immediately, just looking at him, he began to chuckle. "Moony's right. You've really got it bad, Prongs."
James couldn't summon a shred of embarrassment. It seemed, once again, that he and Sirius has mercifully passed that point. "You get it though, don't you? What it is about her?"
Sirius glanced back towards the stairs. "Yeah, I do," he said thoughtfully. "She's hard work, don't get me wrong, but…she is something." Then he quickly began to laugh again. "But Merlin, Prongs, this is psychological warfare on Morton's part. He wants to fuck with your head before the match. You can't tell me that's not part of it."
"He does hate me," James agreed. "But I don't think that's all of it."
"Nah, I suppose not." Sirius began to gather their Quidditch diagrams together in a pile. "You have to feel sorry for the git, just a little, because he had access to that and lost it." He directed a thumb over his shoulder to where Lily had disappeared as he said it, and then sighed at the look on James' face. "Mate, come on. I could have put that worse in a hundred different ways. Look, from what you told me about when you saw them together—"
"I didn't tell you shit," James reminded him. "Just that it happened. That's it."
"Sure, but I also saw them in the corridor, didn't I? Not hard to infer a lot from that. And based on just that, yeah, no wonder he's not keen to give it up." He shrugged, and again, his hands went up innocently after he stacked all of the parchment in a neat pile. "I don't like the guy. Like I said, real git. But I meant it, you know—can't blame him for trying, and he's going to keep trying, I expect, even if she keeps shutting him down in her weird, polite way. I suppose she has to do it that way, for McKinnon's sake. Keep the peace and all that. But…if Wormtail were here and wanted to make a bet out of it, I'd stake everything I have on the side that she won't go there again even though he'll keep at it."
"Thanks, Padfoot," James said, and he meant it. He knew, of course, that Sirius could offer capable support. He'd shown him that countless times. But it still felt like a rare occurrence, somehow, far from his usual self, so much so that James never actively sought him out for advice. He suddenly felt a bit bad about that.
"Of course. But, mate, I wasn't kidding, Morton played a long game. You should have come up with something like that instead of just annoying her for years. How long did he just hang around her, waiting for her and Gimble to break up so he could get in there? Genius, if you think about it. But, like I said, she's hard work. It would take some sort of long, careful plan." He clapped James on the back and stood up to stretch. "Hestia's simpler. It's much better. I have far fewer headaches than you, I'm sure."
"Padfoot, do you like her?" James asked. Watching Sirius form a careless grin, he added, "No, do you really like her? Honestly."
Sirius still wanted to make a joke, clearly. But he looked away from James, back to the Quidditch diagrams. He began to turn them, pointlessly, so that they all faced the same direction. "Yeah, I do. She's pretty great; I didn't expect it. I never really thought much of her before break, because she's so quiet compared to how obnoxious Evans and McKinnon are—you know it's true. They are. But she's actually dead funny, believe it or not."
"I believe it," James said, even though he'd rarely witnessed her humor for himself. But he'd seen and heard Lily break into laughter innumerable times through the years over something Hestia had whispered to her to know Sirius spoke true. "Bit like Moony in that way."
"What, because he's quiet compared to us, and we're obnoxious?" Sirius asked, and he grinned at that for a moment before he shook his head, his humor dropping. "I don't know. We also ended up talking about a lot of stuff one day over break—my garbage family, and her mum dying, and her shit dad—and she just…gets it. She gets how I feel, what it's been like, all of it. And again, I just didn't expect it."
"Does she know, then?"
"What, that I like her? Yeah. I've not exactly tried to hide it. But there must be something in the water in their dorm, because she's kind of like Evans—she just brushes it off when I say anything, doesn't want to talk about it. She's probably a bit nicer about it than Evans, though." Sirius started towards the stairs, and added even as they began to climb, as if he couldn't help himself, "But something in the water doesn't account for McKinnon. Maybe it affects her in the opposite way, since she's gone and just stuck herself on Rooney."
James laughed, both because Sirius had a point, and to give his friend some relief, because he clearly lobbed the joke out so the serious part conversation of their conversation could end. Still, it felt necessary to tell him, "Sorry, mate." And as he apologized for Sirius' struggles with Hestia, James recognized that he felt sorry for Sirius, certainly—but also for himself, too. "You'll figure it out."
"Probably," Sirius agreed, his tone once again light and breezy. They stopped on the landing outside their dorm and Sirius put his hand on the doorknob but didn't turn it. "At least I'm lucky in that no one else really knows how great she is. We understand it, but she's too quiet to ever show it around anyone else. This is why you don't pick the obnoxious ones, Prongs. They get noticed."
"You really don't think one of the Ravenclaw idiots will take a shine to her, since they're with them all the time now?" James asked, mainly just to wind him up, but because he also recognized that his misery would love company.
But Sirius just grinned. "Doubtful. She thinks they're all a bit thick. You should hear her go off about them. Hey, do you think they'll still sit over there tomorrow, after that nonsense with Morton and Evans tonight?"
James didn't even have to pause to think. "Absolutely. Show of strength and all that. Watch."
And in the morning, when the girls came into the Great Hall and made a beeline for the Ravenclaw table, Sirius lifted his orange juice towards James in a silent salute.
xxx
That Saturday, as soon as Madam Hooch gave the final whistle to signal that the Quidditch game against Ravenclaw had come to an end, James decided even before his broom touched the ground that Lily had won Gryffindor the match.
He would tell her the same repeatedly over the next few years, and she would laugh every time, but never as much as she did that night when he saw her come through the portrait hole into a party already in full swing in the Gryffindor common room. He immediately left where Sirius had taken to recounting the full match for whoever who would listen, which turned out to be nearly a couple dozen people, and grabbed her to swing her around.
"Put me down!" she insisted, but she must have known that her words carried no weight as she laughed loud enough that most everyone around them turned to stare. "I mean it!" She continued to laugh long after he'd released her, even as she took her cloak off and threw it at him in mock outrage. "Yes, congratulations, all that. You flew well."
"You know that's my personal best for goals, right?" he asked, and then rushed on, before she could respond, as her face suggested, with a no, followed by a why would I know that? "It is. Fourteen—two up from when we won against Slytherin in the House Cup last year, and that game went on for ages. Nothing like this, where we caught the snitch in what, fifteen minutes?"
"Twelve and a half, actually," she corrected, and then lifted her chin defiantly at his obvious surprise. "What? I happen to take Quidditch very seriously, Potter. This isn't about you."
"Well, this is about you." He bent and kissed her cheek, which still glowed pink from laughter. "You did this. You're lucky." That only succeeded in making her laugh more, which didn't help the amount of the attention their conversation attracted. "You are," he insisted, and he tugged her away from the portrait hole, towards his friends and away from the most curious of prying eyes. "If you hadn't pulled me before the match—"
"Shut up," she said, and he couldn't tell, from the way she smiled, if she meant his words or his volume or both. "It would have come out the same."
But somehow, he doubted that. She had grabbed him in the Entrance Hall after breakfast as he left the Great Hall for the Quidditch pitch and pulled him inside the passage behind the portrait of George von Rheticus that he had shown her during one of their nighttime strolls. She had kissed him, as enthusiastically and for as long as time seemed to allow, her nails tracing patterns on the back of his neck and her body pressed into his.
"For luck," she'd told him simply once she pulled away, long after he'd already forgotten what he even had to do. And then she'd left him there, feeling rather dumbstruck but stupidly pleased. That she had sought him out before the game meant a lot to him, but the fact that she had done so before he played against Morton meant even more.
Lily passed over the Firewhiskey ("It made me kind of sick after New Years," she admitted), but she did let James pour her a glass of mead, and she leaned up against the wall near the fireplace as she sipped it. She nodded towards Sirius, who stood a short distance away with Hestia under his arm. He continued to recount the match, and by James' estimation he'd only gotten about halfway through. "Did Black mean to hit him in the face?" she asked James, and he didn't need her to specify who she meant.
James tried not to look too pleased when he remembered the way the Ravenclaw fans had groaned near the end of the game. He hadn't faltered, had continued with the quaffle towards Raveclaw's hoops and made it past their keeper, and only on his return back downfield did he spy what had happened. Blood poured from Morton's nose and all down his face even as he caught the quaffle that their keeper threw to him. And James heard Sirius' laugh and caught a glimpse of his friend, not far away, twirling his beater's bat in a familiar, victorious manner that told him everything.
"I asked him after the game," he told Lily, and he ducked his head to try to hide his grin, but he knew it didn't work, knew that she saw. "He said he aimed the bludger for Morton's arse, but that his face looked so similar that he got confused."
He thought he heard Lily laugh into her glass, although he couldn't be sure. "Boys," she said, and everything in her tone reminded James of the exasperated manner that Sirius would often use to comment upon women.
James didn't bother to even fake concern. "Whatever, I'm sure he's fine."
"He is," she said nonchalantly. "Marlene dragged me to the Hospital Wing as soon as the match ended, and we watched Madam Pomphrey mend him in a trice. She said this wasn't near as bad as fifth year, the last time Black got him, so she clearly that time made an impression on her. And then I had to stay there with Mar for a bit, because I didn't know how to extract myself. I don't know how Hestia got out of it—she somehow slipped away from us after the game. She really needs to teach me how she does that."
To his surprise, James found that the fact that she'd already been to see Morton didn't really bother him. "Did you lift his spirits?" he joked, and the sound of his own voice surprised him further. He didn't know he could joke about the situation.
She noticed, clearly, evidenced by a slight quirk in her eyebrow, but didn't comment on it. "Oh, I was horrible company," she said, and she began to laugh again, although the way she reached up to touch her face revealed a little bit of embarrassment. "I feel kind of bad. It was me and Mar and a bunch of Ravenclaws there, and they were so sad, which I completely understand, because I would have been disappointed if we had lost. But I just didn't have it in me to fake that I was anything less than thrilled, so I dipped out as soon as I could. Mar held it together better, but I expect she'll be back soon. She doesn't have the patience to stick it out for too long."
Somehow, James thought as he reached out to tuck her hair behind her ear just for the excuse to touch her, somehow he'd never felt prouder of her.
Lily didn't brush his hand away as he knew she might have once, but he also didn't expect her to for reasons he couldn't quite understand. Perhaps she felt hidden enough, tucked back against a wall in a roaming sea of people, to let him stroke her cheek and touch her hair. Or maybe she, too, felt flushed with victory, too pleased with the match's outcome to really care about anyone around them—that certainly summarized how James felt. She smiled up at him, and as he brushed his thumb over one of her dimples, he fought the intense urge to kiss her. But later, when he ran the night back over in his mind many times over, he suspected, just a bit, that she might have let him if he'd tried.
They both jumped at the loud burst of laughter behind James, and he took his hand from her cheek in order to quickly right the glass he almost dropped. He turned and followed Lily's gaze to where Sirius stood, still recounting the match. Something about the way Sirius' gray eyes scanned the room made James assume that he'd just gotten to the part where he'd hit the bludger towards Morton. And, sure enough, when he found them, he raised his eyebrows and his grin widened. He lifted his bottle in a mock salute, his eyes locked on Lily, and she returned it with a tip of her own glass.
"He's nothing if not loyal," she said, but she didn't sound upset. "He'd kill for you, I expect, if you asked him."
"We're brothers," James told her simply, because he didn't know how else to explain it. They watched Sirius launch into the rest of his story, presumably nearing the climax by the way he kept gesticulating towards Abigail Murk, Gryffindor's seeker, who busied herself in her cup as she listened, her face a bit pink at the attention. Something in the way Sirius paused when Hestia slipped away from him to go refill her glass jogged James' memory. "Oh, by the way," he told Lily, "He snogged Jones in front of everyone."
He took great pleasure in the way she clapped her hand over her mouth in shock and how her eyes widened, growing almost impossibly large. It felt ridiculously good to surprise her, to throw her off kilter, when she did so constantly to him. "You're fucking joking!" she insisted, her words muffled by her hand, and then she began to laugh. "You have to be joking."
"Nope. She was already in here when we got back from the pitch, and as soon as he saw her he grabbed her and laid it on her."
Since Christmas, Lily had always listened to his stories with rapt attention, but he had never seen her quite so engrossed. "Oh my god, she must have hated that," she breathed. James had the sudden thought that the way she looked at him, so entirely wrapped up in his words, may have been one of his favorite expressions on her face, and that if she looked at him like that too often it could very easily go to his head.
"She actually seemed fine with it, at least until she realized that basically everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare. And then she went all red and stepped back and said to him—and you're not going to believe me, but this is a direct quote—she said, 'You should go shower.'"
Lily gripped his arm as she burst into laughter. "She didn't!"
"She did. And you're not going to believe this either, but he said, 'Okay, let's go,' and took her and he pulled her up to our dorm."
"Hedidn't!"
"He did. She came back down about five minutes later, still all red, and people started cheering when they saw her—which, don't tell her, but I really think Pete started. She looked so embarrassed that I thought she might leave, but she kind of just grinned and went upstairs to your dorm for a bit. And she acted perfectly normal when she came back down."
Lily had to take her hand off his arm to dab underneath her eyes, which had filled with tears from her laughter. She managed to keep them from rolling down her cheeks, but she couldn't stop giggling all the same. "He's such a prat," she said, but warmly. "Oh, poor Hessie. That is her nightmare. I can't believe she's just okay with him now—look."
She took James' arm again, to turn him gently back towards Sirius, as Hestia had returned to his side once his story had wrapped. He'd put an arm back around her, and he'd taken to laughing at something she said. But she seemed to feel that they watched her, because her gaze flickered towards them and she met Lily's eyes. James watched their silent exchange over the yards and cluster of milling bodies that spanned between them. Lily lifted her hands in a very clear, what the fuck gesture, one so violent that she nearly spilled her drink. Hestia shrugged a single shoulder in return, and everything about her expression read, what else can I do? But she looked, he thought, not at all upset by it.
"I have to go talk to her," Lily told him, and she sounded a tad apologetic. "I can't wait to ask her later, because this is—this is honestly so wild, I can't even tell you. It's really not how I expected tonight to go. But I'll find you later."
Hestia left Sirius before Lily even reached her, and the two met near the middle of the room as if by unspoken agreement. Hestia took Lily's arm companionably, and James thought that something about the way they spoke to each other, and the way Lily laughed as they migrated across the room further from the Marauders, made them look like co-conspirators.
Sirius joined him by his side almost immediately and passed him a bottle of Simison Steaming Stout, which smoked faintly. "Women, mate," he said, watching the girls huddle together near the portrait hole, their heads touching as they spoke quietly, Lily laughing and Hestia pink-cheeked. But, as he tapped his beer against James' in cheers, he looked particularly pleased.
The Marauders heard rather than saw Marlene join the party a short while later, the sound of her distinctive shriek audible even from across the room. It actually set James' hair on end, too reminiscent of the number of times she'd yelled at him by Lily's side over the years, and he could tell by the way that Sirius started that he felt the same, as another frequent target of her ire. James had to assume, by the way he spied her gesturing over towards his friends, that she'd just heard about Sirius' actions, and Sirius assumed likewise, because he sighed wearily. He clearly anticipated some sort displeasure on Marlene's part, and probably directed at him.
But by the time the girls made their way back towards them, Marlene appeared to have come back to her regular self. In fact, after a few drinks James found that she became considerably nicer. She even told him, albeit grudgingly, that he had done well that day, and laughed when he fell silent in surprise and couldn't respond. They also had their longest conversation to date, undoubtedly longer than all of the other times they'd ever spoken one-on-one added together, when she found out that he, too, loved the wizarding band the Star Grass Five. She talked his ear off at that, telling him about their concert that she, Lily, and Hestia had attended the previous summer in London. He whipped around to look for Lily, and found her chatting amicably with Peter nearby.
"Why didn't you tell me that?" he demanded. "You heard me over Christmas, you know how much I like them."
She just shrugged. "Didn't think about it. Hestia was there too and didn't say anything either, go bite her head off." But he very well couldn't, which she knew. Hestia and Sirius had disappeared off somewhere, out the portrait hole and out of sight.
The party died off slowly. The younger students trickled off first around midnight, with the Quidditch team and the sixth and seventh years pushing far later into the night. James still didn't feel tired as a few of the sixth-year girls, the last of the stragglers, stood from where they'd joined him and his friends in front of the fire, and bid them goodnight.
"I think they waited to see if Black would come back," Lily said in a stage whisper once they heard the girls' dormitory close, her smile wicked. The mere sight of the expression on her face made James' stomach flip, and he felt suddenly glad he sat away from her. He loved that look a little too much. She continued her work on Marlene's hair, who sat in front of her on the floor so Lily could weave a complex plait. "I've told Potter this a million times, but tell them, Mar. Every girl fancies Black."
Marlene reached back to hand Lily one of her tightly-coiled curls that had already escaped the plait, and Lily tried to work it back in. "Fancies?" she repeated, and she shrugged. "Sure. Bit annoying, really. But, likes? That's another story, I don't know if anyone actually likes him. He's lucky he found Hestia to put up with his nonsense. I can't imagine many would. He's too much." Lily shot James a dark look over the top of Marlene's head when he snorted into his drink. "What?" Marlene asked. "You think I'm a lot too?"
He didn't hesitate. "Absolutely."
"In a good way," Peter clarified quickly, clearly hoping to keep the peace, and Remus picked up the same tactic.
"In the same way Sirius is," he said smoothly. "He's a lot, but it's part of why we like him. At least…most of the time." He seemed unable to help adding the last bit, and something about the way he looked into the fire, and the sudden tension in his forearm as he held his drink, had James convinced that he thought of Sirius' werewolf prank on Snape in that moment, even though he probably didn't want to remember.
But Marlene didn't seem offended. "You're not wrong. I am a lot. I'm lucky Luke puts up with all of my shit."
"You put up with his too," Lily reminded her, and so firmly that James had to wonder what Rooney—boring, predictable, hard-working Rooney—had going on that made her sound that way.
"And most blokes would, McKinnon. Put up with you, I mean. You know that, right?" Peter's face had gone rather pink from drink, and he spoke admiringly, although not with any real purpose. He seemed content to fancy Marlene without doing a thing about it—probably, James thought then and many times later, all too aware that she didn't and wouldn't ever reciprocate those feelings.
"He's got a point," Remus agreed. He gave the briefest of sideways glances at Peter. "I'm sure there are a lot of guys who would let you wreck their lives." And James couldn't help but laugh at that, which Peter and Remus joined almost immediately.
Marlene looked pleased, so much so that she nearly blushed, James thought, though it could have been firelight playing a trick upon her face. "Cheers, really. Remind me of this the next time I get mad at you all."
"So, what, in an hour?" James asked, but she didn't hear him. She'd already moved past it.
"What are you going to wreck someone's life?" she asked, tipping her head back to rest on Lily's knees so she could look up at her. "Because there's no shortage of applicants, Lil. You could start tomorrow."
Lily smiled, but pushed her head back up rather sharply. "Probably never. You know how I am. Sit up, I'm not done with your hair."
Marlene complied, but she rolled her eyes, and, seeming to understand afterwards that Lily couldn't see the move, sighed loudly. "I'm just trying to help you get laid," she said, and Remus choked on his drink. "What?" she asked as he took to coughing, and Peter, his face a bit redder, leaned over to pat his back. "Oh, grow up. It's not like you guys don't talk about this. I've heard way too much about it from Luke's friends, and all they usually care about is—is solving the next Arithmancy problem. Which, honestly, Lil, is why he's ideal. That's your shit."
"Is that what you're doing?" Lily asked sarcastically. She ignored the obvious reference to Morton, James noticed. "Trying to get me laid? And here I thought you were trying to sell me on companionship. You should have been more specific."
Marlene waved a careless hand. "Whatever, you can have both." She felt Lily secure the end of her hair, and immediately leaned her head back again. "I just feel like you're a lot nicer when you're with somebody. Maybe because you're getting laid, I don't know. But you're a real bitch otherwise. You have been for ages."
"Then what's your excuse?"
"That's just who I am." Marlene said it so honestly that Lily began to laugh, and she soon joined in.
James saw it, then, in the way they bantered back and forth, a piece of their friendship that he hadn't understood before. Lily had told him once that she had more fun with Marlene than anyone else, and he could see it, since time or alcohol or both had dropped Marlene's front just a little bit. Hestia never would have spoken to her like that, and Lily seemed to like it, the way that she and Marlene wound each other up, built upon each other, tried to win a verbal sparring match. He could just imagine one of them coming up with a truly stupid idea, and the other encouraging the entire thing, just like he and Sirius would. He just hoped that they had a bit more sense than he and his friends had had in the past, but he found himself more and more uncertain that they did.
"You're going to give poor Pettigrew a heart attack," Lily said, resting her hand on Marlene's forehead. She smiled at Peter. "You really are a magnificent shade of pink."
And he was, James saw, although he grinned. "Don't worry about me, Evans. I'm fine. But if there are applications for this sort of thing, I'm pretty sure James will want to be on the top of that list. I'm sure he'd try to, you know, improve your mood."
James didn't know if he wanted to cuff him on the back of his head or laugh, but he did the latter as soon as Lily did. "Thanks for the tip." She looked at James, her eyes sparkling. "But I already knew that. He's not exactly subtle."
James waited for Marlene to interject, to put a stop to the interaction between them, but she didn't. She just pulled a slight face, even as she looked up at Lily, clearly displeased, but stayed silent.
"I'm glad you know, Evans," he told her, and she nodded with exaggerated graciousness.
"Bed, I think," she told Marlene briskly, and got up to pull her friend to her feet. "At least if you throw up tonight, it won't get in your hair." She touched James' shoulder when she passed, and he just heard her say, almost inaudibly, "I'll be back down," before she swept Marlene away and up the stairs.
James watched her go, and when he looked back at his friends he found them both watching him, Peter clearly dumbfounded, Remus just as clearly amused. "You should go to bed," he told them, unable to hide his grin. Remus asked no questions, simply stood and stretched, but Peter remained still and continued to stare at him, his mouth slightly open.
"So this is actually happening?" he asked finally, and when he looked to Remus, if he expected a partner in shock, he was disappointed. "You knew?" he accused. "Moony, like, you knew past Padfoot's mentions of secret corridor snogging?"
Remus simply shrugged. "Christmas had us all talking. We all kind of assumed." He snorted with laughter when he looked back at James. "But, Prongs, I didn't realize…mate, you'd let her wreck your life, wouldn't you? To keep her around?"
"Absolutely." And James hated that he meant it.
But he told her as much when she came back down the stairs after Remus and Peter had gone to bed. She had pulled him over to the far, dark corner of the room furthest from the fireplace, where she and her friends used to sit, out of the line of sight from the stairs. He found himself seated in an armchair, her straddled across his lap, and her mouth on his with the sort of speed that he thought might make her an excellent Quidditch player if she wasn't so afraid of flying.
She pressed her face into his neck as she laughed. "I'm flattered, truly. Because that means I haven't wrecked your life yet, and that's nice to hear. It's felt like it sometimes."
He slid his hand up the back of her scarlet Gryffindor jumper and marveled, for probably the hundredth time, at the softness of her skin. "Nah. Not even close. This is the happiest I've ever been."
She pulled away just a little so she could look at him, and he smoothed back the curtain of hair that spilled down her shoulder to tickle his face. "I should think so," she said lightly. "You had a good game today."
"That's not what I meant."
She nodded, and she cupped his cheek, her thumb against his jawline and her fingers behind his ear, a move James recognized as one he did to her often. And there seemed something tender in that, that she'd replicate his own actions unthinkingly, although he had the presence of mind, alcohol or not, to wonder if he projected his own feelings onto her in that regard. "I know," she said, and he thought he saw a flicker of relief when he used his hand on her back to pull her in to kiss her again, rather than to press the issue further.
He'd never found her quite so wonderfully maddening before, and the fraction of his brain that still worked recognized that her extra eagerness and extra enthusiasm had to come from her utter control of the situation and of him as she had him quite literally pinned in place. He could read that in the way that she moved her hips against his and the way she laughed, soft and low, her mouth hot on his neck, when he swore into her hair. He could tell from the way that she kissed softly all around his ears, which she had discovered that he particularly liked, something he hadn't even known about himself before her. And he could especially tell by the way she smiled at him, coy and dangerous, when he grabbed her hands as she slid them down from where they explored under his shirt, to dangerously close to the waistband of his jeans.
"What?" she asked, rather breathless, her tone all innocence in a way that directly contradicted her expression. He knew very well that she knew.
"You're fucking horrible," he told her, but without malice, only raw desperation. And she liked it, as he knew she would, evident in the way her smile widened. "We're in the common room. You can't." But he knew as soon as she said it that she'd done it precisely because they were in the common room. She'd never reached for his belt before, not in the past few months where he'd basically made it his life's mission to snog her wherever he could around the castle. But she did it then, he read all over her face, to see what he would do, to see if he would stop her, to wind him up totally, some new exquisite form of torture in her eyes. He hated it, but he also loved it, and hated that he loved it. He especially hated that had to also know that, after stopping her, the thought of course occurred to him—what if he hadn't stopped her? How far would she have taken things?
She laughed when he groaned, laughed when he threw his head back, and laughed even as she continued a new assault on his neck. "I'm sorry," she offered without any attempt at conviction in her voice.
"You're not."
"I'm not," she agreed easily, her lips against the underside of his ear. "You did offer, though, to improve my mood," she added, and she spoke so softly that he almost felt rather than heard each word.
He couldn't remember ever feeling so frustrated and turned on—not when he'd had to refuse her offer to join him in the prefect's bath after Slughorn's party, not in any of the countless secret passageways where he'd pushed her up against a wall for as long as she'd let him, not when she'd talked to him so dirty by the Great Lake, not even, he felt suddenly sure, when he'd watched her with Morton way back in October. Because there was promise in her voice, promise in the way she moved against him, and the most promise, he thought, when she pulled back to look at him and he saw, so clearly on her face, that she felt just as frustrated as he did and didn't try to hide it.
James moved to kiss her, but she stopped him, kept her mouth just apart from him so she could watch him, her arms around his neck and her fingers twined deep in his hair. "Ask me if I want you," she prompted softly, and her voice sounded like velvet over the pounding of his heart in his ears. She kissed him, just once, very gently, not at all like he wanted, and that somehow made everything even harder, even worse, yet even better. "Ask me if I'm wet."
"Christ, Evans—" he choked out, and his voice sounded most unlike his own, her muggle swear strange on his lips, and he never did know what he would have said next, because everything went sideways.
"Christ is right! What the fuck, you guys!"
James recognized Sirius' voice even before he saw him, and his brain, previously so far gone, came back a bit to him, at least enough for him to disengage his hand from under Lily's jumper where he caressed her breast. It seemed to take Lily a second longer. She sat up suddenly straight, as if shocked, and twisted around towards the portrait hole, her hands over her mouth. But even before she recognized Sirius and Hestia standing there, twin pictures of disbelief, she still didn't make a move to pull herself off of James' lap. And he felt grateful for that, because he didn't know how he'd hide his erection if she stood up.
The tension left her body as soon as she recognized Sirius and Hestia, and she dropped her hands as she began to laugh, the sound one of utter relief. "It's just you guys," she said, clearly reassured.
But neither of them looked reassured. Sirius still looked electrified, yet somehow as if he didn't know if he should join Lily's laughter or not. And Hestia's hands had flown over her own mouth, an expression so like Lily's from a moment before, and James could see wide the whites of her eyes even though they stood a good distance away. "The common room, Lily?" she asked suddenly, throwing her hands up into the air. "Are you daft?"
Lily's laughter faded as she seemed to think her question over, and not sarcastically, but genuinely. She tipped her head back and forth a couple of times, pensive, before she finally said, "Yeah, I guess so. Or something like it. Just—I'm sorry, both of you. Potter's sorry too, although I think he's gone temporarily mute."
She wasn't far off the truth, James thought. He cleared his throat, still uncomfortably aware of the pressure of her thighs around his legs and the throbbing of his cock. "Sorry," he managed, and Sirius finally sniggered. Everything in his face confirmed to James that he'd be hearing about that moment for the rest of time.
Lily waved a hand, an unmistakable motion of dismissal. "Sorry again. Hessie, I'll see you upstairs in five minutes."
"Five minutes?" Hestia repeated, even as Sirius took her hand and tugged her towards the stairs. "Are you for real?"
"Yes, and I love you," Lily said brightly, offering her most winning smile. The second the two disappeared into the stairwell, she turned to look at James, and a hand went over her mouth again. And then she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder, and her body shook with muffled laughter. "That was so embarrassing," he heard her say, and that broke something in him too, and he laughed with her.
He pushed her hair back from her face when she finally sat up, tears in her eyes and her face entirely pink. He'd never seen her so flustered, and found that he rather liked the look of it. And after simply looking at her for a long time, he told her, honestly, "I don't know what to say."
She shook her head, still smiling, if ruefully. "I mean, what's left? Oh my god, I've never been caught before. He's going to take the mickey out of you forever, isn't he?"
"Yes," James said immediately, but he didn't care about that, not then. "Evans, would you have?"
"What? Oh, shagged you?" She said it so casually as soon as she looked at his face, and he wondered what she could see there that clued her into the meaning behind his question. Even still, despite the carefree nature of her tone, she lifted both hands to run her fingers through her hair, which made him wonder if she felt as unbothered as she looked. "I don't know. And it's not a cop out, I really don't. It would have been really stupid, and we're lucky it was just them that saw us." She hesitated, and even her movements became cautious, as she reached out to touch his chest with just her fingertips. "But…I wanted to, very much. And I still want to, so I'm leaving." She kissed him, so quickly that he couldn't react, couldn't even kiss her back, and then slipped off him and left without a backwards glance.
James didn't move for a long while. He waited for his erection to recede, but he could still smell her perfume clinging to his clothes, which left him unable to get her out of his mind. Finally, he gave up and trudged up the stairs to his dormitory bathroom to take care of it himself.
He lingered in the bathroom for a long while, long after he came, hoping that Sirius would fall asleep if he hadn't already. But he'd only just slipped under the covers of his four-poster bed and stilled when he heard a snigger from the bed next to him, and knew that he shouldn't have even tried to wait Sirius out—he would have stayed up all night, James was sure, just to have a go at him.
"Have a good night, Prongs?" he whispered, and although James couldn't see him clearly, just his outline in the dark, he knew he was grinning.
"Shut up."
"You didn't finish, then. I wasn't sure, when she wanted five more minutes, but if you had, you'd probably be a lot happier." James threw his pillow at him, and it thumped in the darkness. Peter's snores faltered for a moment, but he didn't wake up, just seemed to shift a bit from across the room. James could just make out Sirius' arm reaching to the floor to snatch the pillow up, but he didn't throw it back. Instead, he just put it under his head, and continued conversationally, "I knew you two were snogging, but shagging? I have half a mind—no, scratch that, a whole mind—to be offended that you didn't tell me."
James didn't want to respond, but he could almost hear Sirius waiting for an answer, and it seemed, if not better, at least faster to talk and get it over with. "We're not."
"You're not?" Sirius began to laugh, and he pressed his face into his pillow to muffle the sound. "Yeah, sure," he whispered, and he somehow managed to sound sarcastic even at such a low volume. "We got in right when she started telling you to ask her stuff. But you're not shagging her. That's why she told you to ask her—"
"Don't."
Sirius must have picked up on something in the way he said the single syllable, because he believed him quite suddenly. And when he spoke again, the mirth and sarcasm had left his voice. "So, what, you were going to shag her for the first time in the common room? Hestia's right, are you daft? Mate, how much did you have to drink for that to seem like a good idea?"
James wished he hadn't thrown his pillow so early, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to bury his head under it or throw it at Sirius again. He pushed his face into his mattress instead, and said, "Not enough," which came out so muffled he wasn't sure if Sirius heard him.
"Just take her somewhere next time, Prongs, so you don't take another ten years off Hestia's life. There are lots of places to go. Evans clearly knows that."
He sounded so reasonable, so measured, so adult, that James wondered for one blind second where his stupid, reckless friend had gone, the one who encouraged him to do dumb shit and then laughed whether it went right or terribly awry. That Sirius had sent Snape under the Whomping Willow to face a full-grown werewolf without a second thought. The current Sirius seemed absurdly tame in comparison—but it also made sense a moment later. 'Don't take another ten years off Hestia's life,' he'd said, and James didn't know how to feel, exactly, when he realized that she'd started to tame his untamable best friend, whether Sirius knew it or not.
He turned his face back towards Sirius. "So that's what you did, then?"
"'Course, but you somehow got further staying here than I did by going there, so what the fuck do I know." He didn't sound mad about it, though. "But I guess that's fair to you, since you also have to deal with the headaches that come along with her. Although, I gotta say, when you asked me if I got it—why you like her—I didn't know you two were doing all of that. And now, yeah, I definitely get it. No wonder Morton won't lay off. He'd be crazy to. Fuck, if other blokes knew—"
"Padfoot, you can't say anything," James said quickly, and he saw Sirius wave a hand in the dark even before he finished.
"Well, obviously."
James felt his pillow hit him, and he tucked it under his head. "No, I mean, not to her either. You can't make fun of her. I don't want her to get mad and stop talking to us." And that, really, was what worried him, what made him feel so miserable. Not that they'd been interrupted—because, he told himself firmly, there would be other times—but because he didn't know how she'd act in the morning, since she'd once ignored him for days after just kissing him. Somehow, throwing Sirius and Hestia in the mix seemed to up the odds that she might react similarly—although what scared him most was that he never knew how she'd react to anything.
"Yeah, sure," Sirius agreed easily, and it sounded dismissive, but James knew he meant it. He'd never given him his word lightly, no matter his tone. "But I'm still going to take the piss out of you. I won't in front of the lads, but I'll find the time to do it privately. I'll work it into my schedule."
James felt some of his worry dissipate just enough to realize how tired he felt. "Thanks, mate."
"Sure thing. But I have about eight hundred questions."
"Tomorrow. Or never. Never is good too."
True to his word, Sirius behaved nearly normally at breakfast the next morning, although James didn't see him stop grinning for a moment, even as he ate. ("Still pleased about the match," he told Marlene when she finally asked him about his 'shit-eating grin' rather snappishly, clearly feeling the after-effects of Firewhiskey quite a bit.) Hestia, too, acted normally, the perfect picture of friendliness to both James and Lily, which told him that Lily had talked her way out of Hestia's obvious shock the night before.
And Lily sat down next to him at breakfast as she so often did, and the way she smiled up at him when he reached to give her leg a brief squeeze told him everything he felt that he needed to know.