Voyeur

by scriibble

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

14. Chapter 14

A/N: Constantly gratified by the amount of reviews. Quality and quantity both are just incredible, and it's kept me going at this, as always. Thank you. I didn't expect this to get what traction it has, and I'm continually astounded.

I've been writing at this so much that Spotify has made me a custom playlist of bands that only sing songs about Harry Potter. The inspiration from that alone has been crazy wonderful. I have so many suggestions if anyone wants them.

A couple questions I have answers to:

Guest asked how long this fic will be. I'm anticipating more than 30 chapters, but don't have anything clearer nailed down quite yet.

Reese T asked about the possibility post-Hogwarts content. I'm actually planning a potential sequel at the moment, but no promises on that just yet. But it is on my mind!

Chapter Fourteen

Truly fine weather broke out in earnest during the first week of March, and James could swear he'd never seen the Scottish Highlands look so green.

"Prongs is in love," Peter whispered loudly when James commented one too many times about the niceness of the weather or the increased success of Quidditch practice or the great interest he suddenly had in most of their classes. And James cuffed him on the back of the head for it, although he didn't take the time to argue back. Love or not, the sheer blueness of the sky did have something to do with Lily, he knew, and to try to claim it didn't seemed futile. His friends knew him too well to believe him if he would have tried to lie.

Each day he wore her down a little more. It sounded strange to him, to think of it in those terms—wearing her down—but nothing else really seemed to encapsulate how she slowly warmed to him—almost, he often thought, as if she didn't want to. She caught herself sometimes, acting with him publically the way she had only previously in private. She'd stop then, stop him from stroking her hair as they sat on the couch in the common room or stop herself from resting her hand on his arm as they conversed during meals in the Great Hall. But she didn't admonish him, even playfully, when she'd disengage his hand from her hair or the back of her neck or across her legs in the common room, as he knew she might have once. If anything, she seemed to almost admonish herself more when she thought that she touched him too long or smiled up at him too much or flirted too openly. And she'd pull back in those moments, just a fraction, just a hair, although she'd often return to that familiar behavior within the hour if she didn't leave his side.

It didn't go unnoticed, of course. James got asked about it occasionally from blokes, usually with the eager question of, "How'd you finally do it?" which reminded him, yet again, just how blatantly obvious he'd been in his intentions over the years. She got it worse from girls, he knew, although she didn't often tell him when someone would ask if they were dating. But he overheard her complaining to Hestia more than once, the words on her lips always "nosy" and "not their business." He didn't know what she said in return to those questions, but when asked he tried to stick to the party line he knew she wanted: they were just friends. And, truly, he couldn't claim anything else just then, couldn't claim that he'd cracked her entirely, because for all her more recent closeness, she still remained, in some ways, entirely closed off.

She still wouldn't tell him what had happened at St. Mungo's, and he stopped asking, because it seemed to upset her more than anything, and he knew she wouldn't say a word until she was ready. He wondered often if Hestia knew, because it became apparent the more he spent time with them that, for all outward appearances of Marlene and Lily's friendship—their constant banter, their identical sense of humor, their recollections of shared events that confirmed to him that they sometimes had almost as little sense as he and his friends—Hestia was Lily's real confidant. Despite that, Marlene clearly meant the world to her, and things started to become easier the more Marlene took to the Marauders. Her jokes remained biting, especially towards James, but with significantly less acid. As the days passed, she became more willing to at least engage in conversation with him with minimal insults, although she warmed considerably more to Peter, Remus, and even Sirius. When he complained to Lily one night that it seemed unfair that, in Marlene's eyes, Sirius somehow managed to be good enough for Hestia, when she saw him as nowhere good enough for Lily, she just shrugged.

"It doesn't help your case that she wants me with Morton so badly. But also…" She hesitated, biting her lip, before divulging, "Mar doesn't see Black and Hestia as some serious thing. But don't tell him that. Don't you fucking dare."

James hated knowing that he wouldn't have told Sirius even if she hadn't asked him to keep quiet. He would have just kept the secret instinctively, something unfathomable a year or even six months before, when he told Sirius absolutely everything. "I won't," he promised, and he expected her to push him more, to reassure her further, but she didn't. She seemed to accept his word. "But that makes no sense. They're outwardly something; everyone can see that. We're not. Unless you've said something to her." He didn't like how hopeful he sounded.

She shook her head. "Not…exactly," she hedged, and she let that hang for so long that he figured that was the only answer she'd give. "But I think she knows."

"About us?"

"Maybe not exactly, but…that it would be something, and maybe something serious, if I'd let it." Her forehead puckered into the pained expression he had begun to know increasingly well, the look she always gave when she said something she didn't want to, or something she thought she shouldn't. But she smiled the next moment, and changed the subject so easily that he almost wondered if he'd imagined it.

Morton still hung around her, and although it didn't bother James as much as it once did, he still didn't like that she wouldn't dissuade him off her totally. She still sat with him, Rooney, and Marlene during Potions, still joined Marlene and Hestia at the Ravenclaw table for meals sometimes, and even allowed Marlene, after significant cajoling, to drag her to the library for a regular, informal NEWT study group with the Ravenclaws. ("They honestly do know what they're doing, and it's been helpful," she admitted when he asked why she went, but she sounded a bit annoyed, although with his question or with the Ravenclaws, he couldn't exactly tell.) Morton also asked a couple times if he could join her for patrol, and she told him no, although James heard about that second-hand through Marlene's scolding rather than from Lily herself.

"You're just fucking impossible," she burst out one night, throwing Hestia's latest issue of Teen Witch Weekly at Lily from across the table where she, Lily, and Hestia had spread out their Transfiguration homework. The magazine hit home, smacking Lily in the face, but without real force. All four of the Marauders turned from watching Sirius and Peter play chess to catch Marlene looking around the table, seemingly for more ammunition to throw. "Just let him walk with you, that's nothing! I don't know why you won't just give him a chance!"

Lily looked entirely unruffled, and Hestia appeared outwardly more bothered as she snatched up her magazine with a sharp look at Marlene. "You knew I was impossible first year and you've known it ever since," Lily told her, and her calm expression shifted to a frown when as she saw that she'd blotted ink on her essay. "It's never stopped you from being my friend."

"Because you've never been so stupid before!"

Lily looked up at her and smiled. "Marlene. Come on. I've been plenty stupid, and you've always been right there with me, most of the time egging me on."

"That's different," Marlene insisted, but Hestia managed to silence her, somehow, by placing a single hand gently on the table.

"You have an audience," she said quietly, and James wondered how she did it, how she captured the attention of her two loud, fiery friends with just a few soft, simple words. Watching Lily and Marlene heed her, he could see a bit more why Sirius would listen to her completely, although he still didn't understand it, couldn't figure out her power.

Marlene glanced at the nearest table, several yards away and filled with fourth-year girls who stared unabashedly. "Do you mind?" she snapped, and they returned to their work quickly, although James didn't doubt that they still tried to listen. She looked to the Marauders next, her eyes like slits. "And can you guys just fuck off?" she asked, but Hestia sighed before any of them could respond.

"Mar, they're literally right there. They're going to hear what you say, and it's not like they don't know what you're talking about. So just be a little quieter, will you?"

Lily flipped a page in her Transfiguration book, and James had to wonder, watching her, if she actually continued to work, or if she just wanted to appear like she did. She painted a convincing picture either way. "Or you could just not say it at all," she suggested evenly, tracing her finger down the page. "Because we've had this talk before, and nothing has changed. Honestly, I don't understand why you're pushing it like this. You've never been this way before." She snapped her book closed, and although her tone remained calm, James didn't know how Marlene didn't flinch under the look that she gave her. Across from him, Peter seemed to see it too. He squirmed uneasily even though she hadn't directed her gaze anywhere near him.

Yet something about her anger seemed to soften Marlene rather than rile her up further. She got out of her chair and moved to the empty one at Lily's side, which she pulled up closer to her. "Lil, you're my best friend, and he's Luke's best friend, and he is so into you—you really can't see why I'm pushing it? Really?"

Lily set her quill down, and she accepted Marlene's hand when she reached for her. It was, James thought, perhaps the most tender move he'd ever seen Marlene make. "That doesn't mean it would work," she said with a sigh. She looked past Marlene to see the Marauders all staring at them, and asked, her voice sharper, "Can you lot at least pretend to play chess? Can you just fake it a little?"

Peter busied himself with his pieces immediately, but Sirius just grinned. "We want to see a fight if there's going to be one," he said.

"There's not going to be one," she told him firmly, and then regarded him for a second longer. "Black, when Hestia talks, do you care? Like, do you listen? Are you engaged with what she says? Do you want her to keep going?"

She rattled off the questions so quickly that Sirius actually recoiled slightly. He picked up a pawn, even though it was Peter's move, and James could almost read his mind: he definitely should have just stuck to playing chess. "Well—yeah," he answered with none of his customary ease. "Why? Is this a trap? This feels like a trap."

She ignored him and turned to Hestia instead. "Hessie, against all odds, for some reason do you actually listen to Black when he talks to you? Do you care about what he says?"

Hestia seemed much more composed than Sirius, although James couldn't tell if that came from the extra time to prepare an answer or if she was simply used to getting involved in Lily and Marlene's disagreements. "Of course," she said, and something about the way she said it made James certain it was the latter.

"And Mar, I don't even have to ask you about Luke," Lily continued, "Because you hang on his every word, and that's fine, that's great, because he's the same with you. But I don't have that with Alex. And it's not because I've never tried, because he and I have talked a lot ever since fifth year. He's nice, and he's attractive, and we get on, but…I don't really care when he talks to me."

Sirius began to laugh. "Evans, he bores you?" He looked at James, gleeful, and James couldn't help but return his grin. "Mate, did you hear that? He fucking bores her. That's amazing. I've been calling him dull for years."

Marlene shot a caustic glance at him over her shoulder, harsh enough that Sirius lowered his laughter to a much quieter snigger. "That could come," she persisted, but Lily shook her head.

"But it won't, because it's just not there. And—look, I've thought about it, even before you got on this, even before you and Luke got together, because Alex and I do know each other well. I know it makes sense on paper, because he honestly is so great, which only makes me feel worse that I'm not interested. But…" She took her hands away from Marlene's and raked her nails through her hair, cradling her head for a moment. "He just doesn't make me laugh, okay?" And she looked truly miserable to admit it, so miserable that James instantly felt terrible when he started laughing. Sirius, who had never truly stopped sniggering, joined him immediately.

"I'm sorry," James apologized the moment Lily looked at him, but he couldn't wipe the grin from his face, and she gave him an exasperated sort of half-smile in return. "I'm sorry, Evans. But…it is funny." Funnier than anyone else knew, for sure, because he couldn't help but remember how Morton had lobbed that very same accusation at her at Slughorn's Christmas party, that he didn't make her laugh like James did. The comment had sent her fuming.

He knew she recalled the exact same moment just from the look she gave him, somehow pointed but also personal, threatening yet also calm. "Stuff it," she warned, and he put his hand over his face to try to stop laughing, but Sirius' continued chuckling next to him didn't help matters.

When he looked up again, he could still only see the back of Marlene's head, but he didn't need to see her face to hear the incredulity in her voice. "He doesn't make you laugh? Do you understand how absurd that sounds, that that's your deal breaker?" She didn't wait for Lily to respond. "Okay, what else? That can't be it."

"Marlene—" For the first time, Lily sounded a bit upset, and she shifted in her seat, drawing a leg up to tuck underneath her. "Don't make me do this. Especially in front of them." She threw a frustrated hand at the Marauders. "Do you really want to give them more ammunition to throw at Alex? Look at Potter and Black. They're already giddy. It's enough."

"They're not going to repeat a fucking word," Marlene said, and she turned to look at the Marauders as she said it. "Right?" James and Sirius immediately stopped laughing. She looked, in that moment, more truly terrifying than James could ever remember seeing her, even when he'd been on the receiving end of her wand.

Lily threw her hands in the air without waiting for their answer. "You know what? Fine. Okay. He doesn't make me laugh. Hestia, what else have I said?"

"Take notes, mate," Remus muttered to James, and when they looked at each other, James felt like he might start laughing all over again.

Hestia had taken to thumbing through Teen Witch Weekly and didn't bother to pause when she answered carelessly, "He's too nice."

"He's too nice?" Marlene repeated, and the disbelief in her voice ratcheted her volume up a notch before she caught the look Hestia suddenly shot her, her gaze no longer so carefree. "He's too nice?" she repeated, quieter, but with no less incredulity.

"Could you have put that in a way that made me sound a little better, maybe?" Lily asked Hestia. Her face had gone slightly pink.

"You have said that," Hestia said. She sounded entirely reasonable, but James thought he caught something in the way she looked at Lily that seemed almost like amusement. She discarded her magazine on top of her forgotten Transfiguration essay and left her seat, walked to Sirius' side, and let him pull her onto his lap. "I wish Mar would come out with it," James heard her mutter against Sirius' ear, so quietly he thought, for a second, that maybe he'd imagined it. But Sirius nodded in response, shortly, just once, and James wondered, suddenly, if he should feel bad about keeping things from Sirius, when he might be holding his own secrets in return.

"I like that he's nice," Lily explained quickly. "That's part of why he's so lovely, really, so it's not even that. I just don't like…" She reached up to her hair again, obviously reluctant. "Marlene, he's such a pushover," she finally said, almost all one word. "And don't be mad, but Luke is too, which is totally fine, because you like that. You like that he listens to you, that he'll do anything you say. But I don't. I honestly think I could tell Alex anything, no matter how stupid or absurd, and he'd roll with it." She leaned forward suddenly, towards Marlene, and took her hands again, her eyes bright. "And Mar, I have done that. I have said things to him that I know he doesn't agree with and that I don't even believe, just to see what he would do, and nine times out of ten he hasn't disagreed with me."

"Wait, what have you said?" Peter asked, clearly interested, and then turned red when she looked at him. "Right. We're not listening. Sorry."

"I also want to know," Sirius added, and Hestia physically put her hand over his mouth.

"Stop interrupting and let it play out," she whispered, and she met James' eyes when he turned to look at her. "Watch," she added, and James didn't know if she spoke to him or Sirius or both.

"So you want him to be an arse," Marlene said. "Got it."

"Don't be difficult, you know that's not what I meant. Just, ideally, I would want someone with at least a little backbone. I don't want someone to just agree with me if I'm acting stupid or doing something wrong." Lily smiled at her winningly. "Why do you think I'm friends with you? I mean, for a hundred different reasons, but I appreciate that you'll call me on my shit if I need you to—although I don't exactly like it when you can't drop an issue. Like now."

"I can't help it. You're acting stupid."

"Maybe. Probably, actually. But that's my choice, and it's not going to change."

Marlene leaned back in her chair. She looked, even from behind, a little bit deflated, a little bit defeated. "So you want someone who you find funny and who's a real piece of shit." She didn't bother to turn around, just waved a careless hand over her shoulder. "Just go shag Potter then."

"Wait, what?" James blurted out at the sound of his name even before he really considered what she said.

Marlene looked over her shoulder at him and offered, "I mean, no offence. I call it like I see it. You're kind of shitty."

"How is that not offensive?" he asked. Next to him, he could see Sirius tapping Hestia's hip repeatedly, discreetly, even though his face remained just the right amount of inquisitive, and he didn't laugh when Remus and Peter began to. When James caught his eye, he made a brief sort of gesture with his free hand, one James couldn't quite interpret, but seemed to indicate something along the lines of, there. He didn't look surprised at all, as if he'd already heard that line of reasoning previously, as if the conversation had happened many times before.

Lily's next words confirmed his suspicions. "The more you suggest that, Mar, the more I think you actually mean me to do it." She looked to James, and he didn't know what she read on his face, but whatever she saw there made her laugh under her breath. "What do you say? Me and you?"

He didn't have to think, didn't care that she said it just to wind Marlene up. "Absolutely."

"Great. We can compare schedules later this week, come up with a time." She picked her quill back up and reopened her Transfiguration book. "I'll make sure to tell you all about it, Mar, since you're so invested. Can I work now?"

"Lily, knock it off—" Marlene began, clearly frustrated, but Sirius cut her off.

"Right, sounds like a plan," he said, rubbing his hands together briskly. "Let's get this rolling."

"Evans," James asked, "What are your evenings like?"

Lily smiled down at her essay, even as she pressed her lips together to try to hide it. "Hmm. Well, Tuesdays are no good for me, Remus and I usually do our Arithmancy together then—"

"That's fine, we have Quidditch practice Tuesdays."

"—And I have some Potions stuff going on Wednesday and Thursday—I'm trying out something new, it's really been so time-consuming—"

"We have practice Thursday too, so that wouldn't work anyway."

"Mondays, though, I'm usually free. What are your Mondays like?"

"I get it, Lily," Marlene said sourly.

James wanted to laugh, though he wasn't sure what he found funnier—Peter's face or Marlene's tone. "Mondays work for me."

"Great. We'll say, I don't know, eight o'clock? And we'll find a place." She flicked a careless hand. "Whatever. We'll play that by ear."

"You made your point," Marlene said louder. She softened her tone just a hair when Lily looked at her. "Understood. I'm done."

"Forever? Because there are a lot of Mondays left this year."

"This conversation is insane," Peter said, and it sounded like he couldn't help himself. "This wouldn't have happened last year. Evans, you would have lost it at anyone who joked about this."

"Last year was a better time," Marlene said darkly. "I miss it daily. Lily, I'll be done for…as long as I can be."

"That's a start," Lily agreed, and she let herself smile. "I love you. And I'm relieved you'll lay off, because I've been sitting here trying to figure out how to break you and Luke up so you'd stop this. You wouldn't push Alex then, would you?"

"You couldn't do it." Marlene sounded certain. "You don't have that power."

"You don't think so? You really don't think that I could pull it off if I thought about it long enough? Do you want to chance that?"

With that, they resumed bantering as they usually did, but about Rooney, which certainly seemed like safer terrain.

"Marlene's been throwing that out for months," Hestia told James once she seemed certain that her friends were occupied, and she kept her voice low enough to not travel, almost not even a whisper. "To wind her up, mostly, and to get her to see Morton as the better option comparatively. But…also because she knows, I think. And she said it here to test it, see what you both would do. Because she has to see it, even if she doesn't want to because she really doesn't like you."

When James thought of all the times he'd made Lily mad in the past—really mad, screaming mad, hexing mad—and therefore, by extension, made Marlene mad as well, he really couldn't blame her for disliking him so much. "See what?" he asked. He tried to keep his voice as low as Hestia's, but Lily must have heard him, at least the fact that he'd spoken even if she couldn't decipher the words, because she glanced away from Marlene, towards him, and smiled.

"Don't be thick," Hestia said. She kissed Sirius' cheek after she said it, as if she spoke to him, and then went back to join her friends at the table.

"She's good, isn't she?" Sirius muttered admiringly after she left. After Peter made his move, Sirius leaned forward to push his bishop onward, but carelessly, his mind clearly no longer in the game. "Sorry, mate," he added, still under his breath, and when he turned toward James, he really did look it. "She tells me stuff sometimes, and I want to tell you, but…you know."

He didn't have to finish, or even look so awkward. James understood perfectly. "Yeah, I get it. But Padfoot…do you know other things? Has she told you other stuff? About Evans?"

"Well, yeah. But nothing life-changing. She knows, I think, not to tell me too much." He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and raised his voice to normal level. "Pete, I've got you in eight moves."

"You don't," Peter disagreed, and when Sirius continued to make his certain victory known, Peter seemed especially pleased to win.

James held Lily back that night before she could follow Marlene and Hestia towards their dormitory stairs. "But, honestly, what are you doing Monday?" he asked quietly, and he loved the sound of her laughter, even as Marlene sighed audibly from across the common room.

xxx

James' plan for the month of March, he decided, was to somehow get Marlene to stop hating him. He didn't know how he'd manage it, didn't even have an inkling of a plan, but he felt that it had to be easier than winning Lily over, and he'd somehow managed that. Still, it seemed like a hard enough challenge to face.

But then everything got harder.

"Today's classes have been cancelled," McGonagall announced the Wednesday morning after Remus' birthday, her voice magically amplified throughout the castle. Sirius jumped as if shocked, and James understood why—for a second, her loud voice had reminded him too of the many times she had yelled at them. "Students inside the castle are to return to their common rooms immediately. Students outside should gather by the front doors. I will collect you there."

"Bit odd," Remus said uneasily as abandoned their breakfasts and joined the mass exodus from the Great Hall. "They've never just outright cancelled classes before, have they?"

They didn't have time to talk more until they'd reached the common room, which had immediately transformed into a den of heightened anxieties and wild theories. James couldn't remember the same level of noise outside of a Quidditch victory party, and the din and the packed bodies felt very strange to experience during daylight hours.

"Another Hogsmeade attack, you reckon?" Sirius asked as they drew their chairs to their usual corner by the fireplace. "It would make sense."

Based on the voices around them, he wasn't the only one with that thought. Scores of students pressed their faces against the common room's windows, whispering much the same, but James wasn't sure why they bothered. The windows faced entirely away from Hogsmeade.

"Should you do something?" Peter asked James. "As Head Boy?"

The idea hadn't even occurred to him. "Maybe, yeah. Evans will know. I'll ask her when she gets here."

"You can't though, mate." Sirius' face had gone suddenly, undeniably grim. "Hestia said they planned to go to the greenhouses before Transfiguration, the three of them. So they're outside."

He stood almost at the same time as James, and they pushed their way through the throngs around the windows. Hogwarts' grounds spread out as far as James could see, the grass like a wide swath of green velvet. Smoke rose gently from the chimney of Hagrid's hut, and Hagrid paced along beside it, holding what looked, at least from seven stories up, suspiciously like a crossbow. A couple people prowled near the lake and he thought he saw another, very small and far away, by the greenhouses that winked in the sun. But they were professors by the look of them, or so he assumed from the sight of McGonagall's trademark emerald green robes and hat.

"Well, fuck," Sirius said dully, and James didn't know how to respond, didn't know how to sum up his own feelings better than those two single words.

After they'd returned to their seats, the four Marauders simply stared at each other a bit.

"You're Head Boy," Peter said again, nodding at James. "You could go, see if you can figure it out. They can't get after you for leaving the common room, can they?"

"They actually probably can and will," Remus said. He pulled at his scarlet and gold tie, undoing the knot and tossing it aside. "But that won't stop you from going, will it?"

James didn't answer. He'd already gotten back to his feet.

"You want company?" Sirius asked, and James knew, just from looking at him, that nothing would stop him either.

But when they reached the portrait hole, they found the exit sealed. Nothing they did—knocking on the back of the Fat Lady's frame, shouting the password into the portrait hole (James doubted anyone had ever yelled, "Shamrock!" with as much ferocity as Sirius in that moment), casting unlocking spells everywhere they could think—heeded any results. They remained trapped. And while James hadn't felt entirely panicky before, something about his forced stay in the common room made his head swim, and sent bitter fear into his mouth.

"We can check the map," Sirius said after they'd given up. He limped a bit as they made their way back to Remus and Peter, having given the back of the Fat Lady's portrait a few pointed kicks. "At least we'd know where they are then."

"Wouldn't it be worse, though, to see them somewhere and not be able to get there?" James reached out and stopped him before they closed the last few feet. "Or what if they just don't show up on the map, Padfoot? What do we do then?"

"They have to," Sirius said firmly, as if he could will it into existence. "The map doesn't lie." And James wanted to ask him to help him recall how they'd charmed the map, if it showed dead people—not just Peeves and Nearly Headless Nick and the other ghosts, but regular people recently deceased. But he didn't want to speak the words, didn't want to put that idea out into the universe, because it seemed too ludicrous—but also too real, too possible—to even consider. "We won't check the map," Sirius said after several long, delicate moments, and James had to wonder, from the sudden tension in his shoulders, if he'd had similar thoughts. "But what the fuck are we supposed to do now?"

Strangely enough, they did homework.

James wrote the entirety of his Potions essay on the Odiomus potion, which they continued to brew even then. Slughorn would later give the essay an E, and even that, James would think, seemed too generous.

One hour passed, and then two, and then three and four. Other students tried to figure to the absences in the room, and it spread that all four of the second-year girls were missing too.

"Seems they already went outside for Herbology," Remus reported worriedly when he came back from the bathroom just before noon. "And the second-year boys just hadn't left the Great Hall yet, so they're all here."

James thought, at first, that the tension in the room should have eased as the day went on and everyone settled in. But he came to realize that everyone else shared his general feeling of unabating unease. He'd almost cracked from it all—the theories, the rumors, the almost audible sound of people's minds spinning anxiously around him—and had just considered telling Sirius they needed to look at the map after all when McGonagall came through the portrait hole.

He expected things to get louder, for students to start throwing the questions at her that they'd been asking each other for hours, but instead everyone fell suddenly, uncomfortably silent.

"There has been an incident on the grounds," she said calmly, but her hat, James noticed, sat rather uncharacteristically askew. "I cannot say much more right now, but I assure you all that we're working diligently to solve it. In the meantime, I will send up food from the kitchens for lunch, and I ask that you stay inside Gryffindor tower and stay calm."

"Can't exactly leave, can we?" Sirius muttered.

A bit of a ruckus began, more of the shifting of bodies than the raising of voices, until someone near McGonagall (James couldn't see who) asked, "Is anyone hurt?"

"Everyone at Hogwarts is safe," she answered briskly, and that, James thought, answered the question not at all. "I need to return to the headmaster. Potter, as Head Boy, I'd like you to accompany me."

James hardly noticed that all eyes turned to look at him, something that a year or two before would have thrilled him greatly, back when he'd cared about little else besides attention and a rapt audience. He got up immediately and didn't bother putting his schoolwork away. It took him no time at all to reach McGonagall's side, and when he did, she added quietly, privately, "I would like Black to come too."

It only took James a glance at Sirius and a quick nod of his head for his friend to join him across the room, and they both followed the deputy headmistress out the portrait hole and into the corridor.

"Professor—" James began immediately, but she stopped him with a sharp, cutting wave of her wand hand.

"I know you have questions, but I'm afraid I have few answers." She set off down the corridor at a steady pace, her walk as swift as her voice. "Two Death Eaters attacked near the greenhouses this morning, right before Professor Sprout meant to start her second-year class. Jones, McKinnon, and Evans went to the greenhouses this morning—to collect herbs, I understand?" She turned her shrewd eyes on them.

James felt dread in the pit of his stomach so thick and heavy that he couldn't respond. Sirius answered for both of them. "Yeah, Hestia does that a couple times a week. Says mornings are the best time to harvest Starthistle. Evans and McKinnon go with her sometimes." It all seemed, from the way he phrased it, very important to him. "Professor, are they—" He didn't finish. James didn't think he could.

"They're fine, Black," McGonagall said crisply. Somehow, all of the staircases seemed to heed her path and shifted into place perhaps quicker than usual. She didn't have to slow her step once. "I left all three in the Hospital Wing not an hour ago. We're headed there now. Jones insisted I get you both." She said it almost as if she disapproved, her thin mouth forming an even thinner, pale line. But as James nearly jogged to keep up with her, he could see, even in her profile, that that disapproval manifested from a certain amount of fear, and wasn't about Hestia's demand at all. Knowing that McGonagall worried in that moment, maybe even feared, scared him almost more than when she'd mentioned Death Eaters.

"Were they—" he started, but McGonagall cut him off as if she read his mind.

"Were they involved in the attack? Yes. I'll leave that for them to explain." They neared the Hospital Wing in what James knew had to be record time. McGonagall placed her hand on the door but didn't go in. "And I trust," she said slowly, carefully, looking first at Sirius and then at James, "That you will keep this information—what I just said, and whatever your friends might tell you—quietly to yourself. The headmaster has spent most of this morning strengthening the castle's wards. We will figure out what to tell the students when he finishes." She didn't wait for them to give their word, but pushed through the door.

James had seen the Hospital Wing busy before. After many Quidditch matches, Madam Pomphrey often had nearly every bed occupied with players sporting black eyes or broken bones or mild concussions. Those days were chaotic, noisy, and somehow pleasant, almost like some sort of extension of the match, despite the injuries.

The Hospital Wing sat at the same capacity, but had none of the cheer of a post-Quidditch match day. A cluster of second-year students huddled in chairs in the far corner of the room, including the four missing Gryffindor girls and a smattering of students from other houses, each face pale. Someone had gotten them blankets and mugs of something steaming, and they looked like children to James' eye, children recovering from a particularly nasty flu.

"I'm fine," he heard Hestia say even before he saw her, and when he did, she certainly didn't look it. She sat propped up in the bed nearest the door, the one James had occupied only a few short months before, after the Hogsmeade attack. She looked much the same as he had seen her then, again covered with thick white bandages, only currently fully around both arms and her neck almost like braces. She smiled, or tried to, and the attempt looked strange on her pale face. "Honestly, I am. Mar is too."

He noticed Marlene then, who lay in the bed next to Hestia, the one Lily had taken up on Christmas Eve. In contrast to Hestia, she appeared to have no outward injuries at all, but she lay perfectly still, her eyes closed. As someone always laughing, always moving, always teasing, always loud, her immobility looked almost like death.

"You should probably get Lucas Rooney from Ravenclaw," James told McGonagall, turning slightly to give Sirius some privacy as he drew a chair from the wall to sit near Hestia. "Let him know. But—" He cast another look around the room, and his heart skipped a beat. "Where's Evans?"

McGonagall frowned severely as her eyes swept the room as well, but Madam Pomphrey answered before she could say a word.

"Well, she left, didn't she?" she asked rhetorically, testily, bustling past James to Hestia's side. She vanished the bandage on Hestia's left arm and uncorked a tall green bottle, and even from several feet away, James caught the familiar scent of Dittany. "Your wrist, Jones."

Hestia turned her arm over reluctantly, bearing the underside to the matron, and Sirius swore loudly, so loud that most of the second years jumped. James bit back a similar sound of his own. Red, angry cuts, too numerous to count, laced up her skin from wrist to elbow. "It looks worse than it is," Hestia assured Sirius quickly, and she reached out to touch his jaw even as Madam Pomphrey poured Dittany on the other arm. Her wounds began to smoke. "Madam Pomphrey says I probably won't even scar."

"Same as the burns, right?" Sirius asked sarcastically, but James heard the worry in his voice too.

"And they didn't."

"Yeah, but how many times are you going to have to say that to me?"

Hestia didn't answer, just dropped her hand from his face. But Sirius took it in his own and held it for a moment, until Madam Pomphrey gave him a sharp look and he backed off so she could attend to Hestia's other arm.

"Okay, but where is Evans?" James persisted. He hoped he didn't come off as uncaring towards Hestia's injuries, truly, but the way she smiled at him, quite gently, told him she didn't take it that way.

"Like I said, she left," Madam Pomphrey repeated, even more coldly than before.

"Poppy," McGonagall began, clearly disapproving, "You just let her leave?"

Madam Pomphrey threw up her hands so violently that she almost tossed the Dittany bottle. "What was I to do, Minerva? Stun the girl? I considered it, but Jones dissuaded me." The look she gave Hestia as she vanished the bandages around her neck said that she clearly disagreed with her. James tried not to look at the long, scarlet cut across Hestia's throat. He looked at Sirius instead, but regretted that immediately too, because his friend had gone entirely white.

"Can you wait to do the rest?" Hestia pleaded after the smoke cleared, and James saw that her skin had mended and looked, at least from a distance, just as it had the night before.

"Where the fuck else are you injured?" Sirius demanded, and McGonagall cast him a reproachful look, her nostrils flared, but she didn't reprimand him.

"You don't have permission to stun students," she said to Madam Pomphrey, but she sounded a bit displeased at the rule. "But I hardly think Evans was in any shape to leave."

"She was honestly fine," Hestia said eagerly. Sirius scooted his chair back towards her and took her hand again, his expression dark. "You saw her earlier, Professor. She got it the least of us, and she patched herself outside just like she did me."

"Be that as it may—"

"I think it would have been worse for her to stay." McGonagall looked surprised at Hestia's interruption, or perhaps at the firmness in her tone, or maybe both. "She hates it here, from Christmas and all the months after, when she couldn't heal. Madam Pomphrey, tell her."

"She was agitated," Madam Pomphrey admitted grudgingly.

"And she said she'd be back to check on us, so she will be. She just needed a bit."

"And McKinnon?" Sirius asked tentatively. "She's…"

"Asleep, currently, but she will be fine," McGonagall said crispy, and James felt as relieved at that as Sirius looked. He wondered if Marlene would have felt similarly if their roles were reversed. "I've already sent Professor Flitwick after Rooney, Potter, at Jones' request."

"And I expect once he gets here he'll refuse to leave, just like these two will now," Madam Pomphrey said peevishly, turning towards Marlene's bed. She reached down and felt for her pulse. "Can't keep Evans in, but won't be able to keep these ones out."

"Actually, Professor, can I can look for her? Evans, I mean." James looked into McGonagall's stern, lined face and met her dark eyes. He saw her total absence of surprise at his request.

"I expect you'd do it whether I gave permission or not," she said, and she sounded a fair bit exasperated. "Yes, just go." He was already two steps out the door by the time she'd finished, but he heard her call after him, "And bring her back here!"

It took him all of five minutes to decide where to check first, but in those five minutes, he'd never wanted the Marauders Map quite so badly. He knew Sirius kept it somewhere in their dorm, but he still wouldn't tell James where, more to annoy him than anything else at that point, it seemed. But even though he knew he could probably find it if he enlisted Remus and Peter's help to tear their room apart, he didn't know if he'd be able to get back out the portrait hole again, or if it remained sealed from the outside. So he rolled the dice and checked the first place he could think of: the prefect's bathroom.

He saw Lily the second he entered, barefoot with damp hair and sliding her skirt up around her waist. If she was surprised to see him, she didn't show it aside from a single raised eyebrow as she tugged at the zipper of her skirt and then felt around her midsection, checking the tuck of her shirt.

"Hey," he offered, because he didn't know what else to say, and the single syllable echoed slightly in the spacious room, almost mocking him.

She smiled a bit, but almost on reflex, he thought. "Hey." She bent to retrieve her wand from where it sat with her shoes and carefully-folded robes and stockings, and by the time she stood, she'd already magically dried her hair back into its customary waves.

"You alright?" he asked as she sat on the bench beside her and reached for her stockings. She didn't have time to respond before he added, quickly, "Evans, can I see your leg? Before you finish getting dressed?" It seemed like maybe the worst time to ask her, but he hadn't seen her without her stockings or jeans on since she'd returned from St. Mungo's, and her right leg, which had looked so grievously injured the last time he saw it, appeared entirely normal, at least from a distance.

Or maybe it was the best time to ask her, he realized when she shrugged in response, because she seemed too exhausted to argue in return. "Yeah, alright," she agreed, and he crossed the room to sit next to her. She placed her leg in his lap carelessly, with none of her customary teasing or smiles when the action lifted her skirt several inches.

Up close she looked as pale as Hestia, and she didn't meet his eyes when he studied her face, so he looked down at her leg instead. He traced the fine, white etchings that crisscrossed her calf like almost some kind of wire mesh, too faint for him to notice if he hadn't known to specifically look. He said as much to her.

"They were black at first, when I got back from St. Mungo's," she explained quietly. "That's what I've worked on brewing lately—something to try to get them to fade. This only took about a week ago, so who knows if it will stay. It's hard to say; it could come back that way. Scars are strange and I've never really worked with them before." She lifted a hand to the side of her neck, and James saw a gash there not unlike the one that ran across Hestia's throat. "I got out of the way in time," she said when she saw that he'd noticed, and tilted her head so he could see it better before he even had to ask.

He brushed his thumb across it, the welt dark and red. "Madam Pomphrey fixed Jones' right up. Dittany, dead useful, you know."

Lily smiled a little at that, and dropped her leg from his lap, but she didn't move otherwise, made no attempt to stand or pull on her stockings or shoes or do anything. "So I've heard. I'll go back to the Hospital Wing eventually. I just…I don't like being there, but especially with Mar out of it."

"Evans, what happened?"

She pressed a hand to her face and kept it there, her eyes trained on the tiled floor as she spoke. "We go out to the greenhouses some mornings, so Hestia can collect herbs. Mar and I don't always go with, but we do when she goes into the greenhouses with more dangerous plants, just to watch her back—a Venomous Tentacula almost got ahold of her a couple years ago when she was by herself and scared her half to death. Well, we went out this morning, business as usual, and we were outside Greenhouse Seven, just standing around talking while Hessie tried to figure out if she had everything she needed, and…the world just exploded."

"What do you mean?" he prompted quietly, because she'd taken to just shaking her head.

"I mean, literally around us the earth just shot up. And then of course it had to come back down, just this huge chunk of soil and grass where we stood, and we all ended up on the ground just covered in it. I couldn't see for a while, because it was in my eyes and nose and mouth, but I looked up when the dust settled, and I could see a couple of Death Eaters in the trees, maybe fifty yards away where the grounds meet the Forbidden Forest. I recognized their masks, and I thought about Hogsmeade, and then I thought about my leg and St. Mungo's and everything, and I just…froze."

James reached out and touched her back. She didn't respond, didn't look at him or shake him off, and so he chanced it and put his arm around her, collected her close and pulled her into his chest. For a moment she tensed, but then she seemed to accept it, and pulled her legs up underneath her, her knees resting against his legs like she often sat on the couch in the common room. But he'd never attempted to hold her when she sat like that, had never even attempted to hold her at all, at least outside of moments of passion tucked away somewhere private. She felt rather small in the way she fitted underneath his arm, and her hair tickled his neck when she pressed her cheek against his chest. "That's normal," he said, enjoying the feel of her warmth and the softness of her hair when he reached up to smooth it down. "That happens all the time. You know that."

"Yeah, but I didn't freeze in Hogsmeade. I mean, I didn't do anything, but I wanted to. And today, I didn't want to do a thing. I just wanted out of there, because I could not stop thinking about the curse on my leg and how fucking terrible that was." The tone of her voice didn't change, but she lingered over the last few words, as if each one somehow reignited her pain.

"Will you tell me about it? Your leg?" he asked, and she shook her head. "Please?"

For some reason, even though he'd asked her the same question dozens of times in dozens of different ways, she acquiesced at that, his sudden addition of please, when she had just declined only a second before. "I don't remember much," she said quietly. Her hand went to his shirt, and she fiddled there with one of the buttons absently, slipping it in and out of the buttonhole repeatedly with a practiced twist of her fingers. "I remember when we got there, I remember them taking me to a room, and then they gave me a potion and I slept. Alice stayed with me until I fell asleep, I know. I came in and out a bit after that, enough times that I know a day or two passed. I came to at least a couple times, because I heard screaming, but that stopped pretty quick. They must not have soundproofed the rooms until after the first screams, because it sounded like someone definitely getting the curse removed. I know, because I sounded exactly the same later."

"Tell me," he prompted, even though he wasn't sure anymore if he wanted to know. He felt sick.

"They kept me out as much as they could until my turn—four days, Alice told me later. I knew it would probably be a while, because it takes time to unravel a curse, and more time still when you don't understand what that curse even is, so I knew the Curse-Breaker had his work cut out for him. But Alice said they'd try to get to me as soon as possible, and I expect that they did. I wasn't first though."

James hesitated, waiting for her to continue, but she didn't. "Why?" he asked finally.

"Because if you don't know what you're doing, removing a curse can kill the person you're removing it from," she said matter-of-factly. "And, obviously, the Curse-Breaker had no idea what he was doing, because no one had ever seen this curse. You can do the math, you can work out a counter-curse all on parchment, but you don't know, really, what will happen until you actually get started. I've read about all the things that can go wrong in dozens of books." She laughed quietly, but without humor, as if at her past self who had found interest in those things. "And when I asked Alice later, she told me she'd placed me down the line third or fourth on purpose, because the Curse-Breaker had explained all that to her, and she didn't want him to treat me until he knew it worked for sure."

"Evans, look at me." When she didn't, James took his free hand, the one not engaged in her hair, and tipped her chin up. He held her face there, aware she'd probably drop back down the second he let go. "You get that that's a good thing, right? Fuck, you absolutely don't."

She smiled a little at that, but the truth to his assumption read all over her face, as if she didn't have the care or the energy to mask her emotions like she normally could. "I know why you see it that way, and I know why she did it, but…that doesn't seem fair at all to anyone else there."

"This shit isn't fair," he said, and she took his hand gently from her face so she could settle her cheek back against his chest. Still, she kept hold of his hand, and took to again tracing the calluses on his palm just as she had by the lake, but without seeming to notice her motions at all. "None of it is. We just need to look out for each other where we can. Alice did that for you. You would do it for her."

"Yeah, I would," she admitted with great reluctance. "Although I don't know how I'd live with myself after, knowing I prioritized someone's life over someone else's. But she hardly seemed bothered when I asked her how she did it. She said it was just what she had to do, and she clearly meant it. And she promised me that no one before me died, that it had all worked, although I don't know if she'd tell me the truth."

"I don't know if Alice has it in her to lie."

"She would for the right reasons, or at least what she thought were the right reasons. She's tough. I've always known that, but I didn't realize how tough. She has to be, I guess." Lily pulled back from him abruptly, and James missed the weight of her body against his immediately. But he understood why she had done so when she began to plait her hair, her fingers moving more by muscle memory than thought, it seemed, and he found that just watching the manifestation of her anxiety triggered his own significantly. "The Curse-Breaker did his job," she continued brusquely, and he knew from her tone that she just wanted to get that part over with. "First he had to remove all of the charms Madam Pomphrey and I had done over the weeks since Christmas, and…I really felt it then."

"The curse?"

She nodded slowly. "Yeah. I can't explain it to you. There aren't words to make sense of it, and if there are, I don't know them. It felt like…like I literally burned from the inside out, every part of me, but somehow especially in my mind and in my thoughts. I've never felt anything like it. I didn't know a person could feel that, that kind of pain. And I thought about Louisa Mullins' husband at the Three Broomsticks and the Cruciatus Curse, because I wondered if that's how it would feel, that same way. I kept trying to remember his name. I've seen him every time I've gone in there, ever since third year, and her too, of course. But I don't think I ever learned her name until Christmas Eve, and I still don't know his. Do you?"

She looked at him as she fastened the end of her hair, and the question seemed so desperately important to her that James wished he could answer it more than any question that a professor had thrown at him in a classroom. "No. I don't. We can find out."

"I'm sure we could." She smiled with her mouth, although not at all with her eyes. "You know, when muggle Healers—they're called doctors, remember, like my dad— when they do intense work on patients, they make sure they're asleep. But Curse-Breaking doesn't work that way on a person, because you have to make sure that they're still alert and functioning so you know if you make a misstep. So I had to just lay there, totally awake, while the Curse-Breaker started. They restrained me, of course. They definitely had to; I don't know what I would have done if I'd been able to move. It already hurt before he started, but I tried to keep it together, tried not to make any noise. I even tried to talk to him a bit, just to take my mind off of it, until the Curse-Breaker—he told me his name but I can't remember, words didn't really make a lot of sense—just told me to scream, so I did. I wouldn't have had a choice anyway, because I went totally out of my head really quickly. I didn't think it could hurt worse, after he took the charms off, but it did when he started working. And I don't really remember a lot of that afterwards except for the pain. I don't know how long it took, but it felt like ages, so long I thought I might go mad, and one thing I do remember thinking is that I didn't care if I died, because at least it would stop."

She'd crossed her arms over her chest, almost as if to wrap her arms around herself, and James wanted to reach for her again, to hold her himself, but he didn't think that he should. He could feel her trembling, just slightly, beside him.

"And then it was just suddenly over," she said dully. "I must have immediately passed out. I'd worked so hard to stay awake the whole time, because I knew I needed to, that I was just exhausted. Alice and Frank were there when I came to, and Alice hugged me, and it was like I felt the pain all over again. I screamed and scared her to holy hell. And, of course that necessitated a few more days there, to make sure that wasn't anything serious. Fucking hell, by the time they finally let me out I honestly think I would have left with anyone who could have broken me out. But I'm fine now. It hardly happens at all anymore."

"But it does sometimes?" James asked, and she nodded with a twist of her mouth, as if she didn't want to admit it to him. "Why? Even if you don't know, you have to have theories."

Her smile did reach her eyes at that, just a little. "You do know me," she said, and despite it all, despite how his insides felt so numb and cold that he didn't know how he'd ever get warm again, the words touched him. "That's what I've been trying to work out with my Arithmancy charts, but it's all so bloody complicated. And some curses just don't go away, not unless you know the counter-curse exactly, down to the most minute detail. I'm sure the Curse-Breaker worked it out the best he could, but he had to face such a time crunch and I'm sure Moody was breathing down his neck the whole time, so he came up with an imperfect solution, which is better than nothing. And he couldn't know it was imperfect until he tried it on someone. Miserable work, that. I'm so glad I went off it before this point, because I can't imagine working that job."

"So it'll always just…be there? The curse? You could just get hit with that sort of pain at any time?"

"Maybe. Probably. No one can really say, because what the fuck was that curse? But dark magic like that, it rarely just goes away. And…" For the first time since he'd seen her that day, when she laughed it actually sounded real. "God, Potter, this is so stupid. But I was so glad when Morton kissed me after I got back, when he ambushed me on patrol that time, because I knew then that I could kiss you and it would be fine. I didn't want to test that on you and, if it didn't work, if it hurt, I didn't want to associate that feeling with you. And then…I kind of tried to forget everything that had happened at St. Mungo's, just push it aside, and snogging you helped." She glanced at him and sighed, although her smile remained. "That's gone entirely to your head."

James didn't bother to hide his grin. "Of course it has. Evans—" He didn't know what he planned to say, because she looked up at him like she wanted him to kiss her, and so he did. She leaned into him willingly, let him pull her back into his side, and she stayed there even after she broke away from his mouth. She rested her head again against his chest. "I'm sorry," he told her. "For all of it. Again, none of this is fair."

He could feel her nod. "I just don't want to think about it anymore," she said.

"Tell me about today, and I won't ask you about it or St. Mungo's ever again."

She tensed a little, whereas moments before she'd felt entirely soft and supple in his arms. "Fine. I will hold you to that." She tugged at her plait and began to unwind it, and he wondered if she even caught herself going through the motion. "Like I said, I froze. All I could think about was how I didn't want to go through that again, what had happened at St. Mungo's, and how scared that made me. And everything just happened so fast, I swear, we were out there not three minutes from start to finish of the whole thing. I couldn't even follow it at first, but Mar, bless her, she didn't hesitate. She threw up a shield charm, and she really had to focus on it, because she had to cover me and Hestia too. I was just useless, and Hestia didn't have her wand out when it happened because she'd been fiddling with her basket of herbs. And I think that's what threw Mar off, having to really focus on that, because by the time I got it together and got up and Hestia had her wand out, the shield shattered and she never really got back on her game."

He had seen Marlene duel in Defense Against the Dark Arts for years, and had come under her wrath out of the classroom on several occasions. He could hardly imagine her dropping an inch of focus. But, then again, he'd never been in that kind of high pressure situation.

"Mar and I both went on the offensive after that, which was stupid, we should have gone defensive, because I think that's what Hestia did, just kept trying to rebound everything back at them. I could hear people screaming behind us, which must have been the second-year Herbology class. And we were doing okay at first, actually had the Death Eaters at a bit of a disadvantage, it seemed like, but Mar didn't dodge something quick enough, and she just went down and started convulsing. That distracted me and Hestia totally, and she went down next, right by me, and started bleeding from…everywhere. I saw the same thing come at me, and I didn't even have time to think, just kind of threw myself away from it, but I heard it go by, close enough that it nicked me, obviously."

He found the scar on her neck with his hand again. How close was it to some sort of major bloodline? She would know, he felt sure. But he didn't want to ask her. He really didn't even want to know.

"Sprout came out then, but I didn't see her. I landed pretty hard on the ground and immediately cast a shield charm around the three of us, because I didn't know what else to do. But then mine was replaced by something stronger, and I saw Sprout when I turned my head. She kept the shield up even while she fired other spells at them. I've never seen anything like it. I don't think I've ever actually seen her do magic, aside from Herbology spells."

"Me either," James muttered into her hair.

"She's insanely powerful. I didn't expect it. She cast this spell—I don't know what it was—and all of the glass on every greenhouse shattered, and she hurled it at them. It was terrifying and they fled back into the forest. Then she went over and she cast something on Marlene that stilled her, and she tried to heal Hestia, but her wounds just wouldn't close. So…I did it."

Somehow, of all the things she had told him so far, that surprised James the most. He wondered later if it should have, after he'd watch her teach countless healing spells to Remus, watched so closely that he thought that he could probably cast them himself if he tried. But there was something about the way that she said it, as if she almost didn't believe it herself, still incredulous, that gave him pause.

He brought her face back up towards his again, but she didn't seem quite willing to meet his eyes as she had before. "How?"

"I just did," she said simply, shortly.

"But how? If Sprout couldn't—"

Lily shifted, moved under his arm as if she tried to get more comfortable, which certainly indicated that something had made her uncomfortable. "I recognized something about it, the way the spell looked and sounded, and also…how it felt, when it hit me. Not the sensation, the pain, but…I could recognize how the magic felt."

He stared at her. "How the magic felt? What are you talking about?"

"I don't want to get into that right now," she said, and she cut him off before he could protest. "You promised. You promised if I told you what happened you'd drop it."

"Yeah, but you haven't told me everything entirely. There's obviously more there. What is it?"

"Just not today." It sounded almost like a plea, and when she met his eyes, he realized that it was, even though he wouldn't have thought her capable of such a thing. "Please. I'm asking you, please, not right now. I want to be sure, and…I don't want to think about it anymore. Hestia's healed, and she wouldn't be if I hadn't figured it out. Madam Pomphrey said as much. And all that matters right now is that we're all fine."

James knew she had a point, but he had to wonder, if she believed that to be true, why she didn't look relieved, but just overwhelmingly sad.

"Okay. I'll trust that you'll tell me eventually. But…it also doesn't sound like you froze."

"We can disagree on that," she said evenly. "I was so, so scared. I didn't know what to do, and I just felt so—so panicked. You weren't there; you didn't see."

"We will just disagree then," he told her, and she rolled her eyes, but not unkindly. "What were Death Eaters doing at Hogwarts?"

"Probing the wards, Dumbledore thinks, trying to suss out weak spots. The Auror that came by agreed with him. She took me and Hestia's statements right away, although Marlene wasn't awake. I didn't recognize her, but she looked right scared when we told her Marlene's last name. I assume the Ministry just sent someone, not knowing who got attacked, and now she'll have to take that news back to Marlene's mum, and that…I don't envy her that task. And now please, Potter, please can we be done?"

"Yes." She exhaled so deeply that he wondered if she'd actually breathed at all during their entire conversation. "I'm just…I'm glad you're okay."

The words sounded stupid to his own ears, could hardly sum up everything he actually thought and felt and meant in that moment, holding her there, looking at her face. But Lily seemed to understand, if not everything, at least enough of what he meant, based on the way her face softened just a bit. "Yeah. Me too. I don't want to think anymore. Will you kiss me again?"

James knew he would never tire of hearing her ask that.

He kissed her, perhaps a bit more gently than usual, because she still felt somehow fragile against him. He felt her shift again beside him, turning, angling her body towards him, and then a slight pressure on the back of his neck as she used him for leverage to slide smoothly into his lap. It was a practiced move, something she could have pulled off easily in her sleep. She'd only done it to him one time before, but he found himself, again, marveling at how quickly she relocated, beside him one moment and straddled across him the next. He leaned back and pulled her with her, her body flush and warm against his front, the stone wall cool against his back. And he found himself surprised, surprised at the intent behind her kiss and the way she pressed herself against him, although he very well knew by that point that nothing she did should have surprised him.

He'd never had her bare legs within such close range before, not during a private moment where he could actually reach for her, although he'd had the thought more than once when he sat next to her on the common room couch. He ran his hand up and down the length of her calf, her right one, he realized a moment later, her cursed one, but the skin felt no different than the smooth expanse of her back or sides or breasts, still marvelously soft. But he still wanted to compare, and she broke from his mouth with a breathless laugh to help him untuck her shirt so he could reach his hand inside. He caught something on her face as she did, something he didn't quite recognize then, but he would think about later on that day and night, and for many days afterwards. It came to him eventually, what the look reminded him of—not something he'd ever seen on her face before, but something she'd said.

"I blame them less after exams," she'd said about rendezvousing couples before Christmas break. "It's like a near-death experience for some people, which of course means so many people just need to feel alive again afterwards."

There was something in her face, something almost wild about her eyes and even in her laugh, a note which seemed almost needy. And he recalled later—and almost a bit then, in the part of his brain that still worked, as most seemed to shut down entirely whenever she got too near him—what she had simply told him moments before: "I don't want to think anymore." She seemed quite determined to forget.

She'd worn jeans the only other time she'd sat on his lap that way, after their Quidditch win against Ravenclaw, and he'd felt the pressure of her thighs then, but in a skirt he could also feel the heat of her bare skin pooling across his thighs and the crotch of his trousers. It became all he could focus on, all he could think about, a dull, thudding obsession in the back of his brain, just under where she'd buried her hands in the back of his hair. He broke from her mouth and turned his attention to her neck to try to find the sensitive spot below her ear. He realized only later, playing the entire episode back, that he'd moved over her fresh scar without a second thought, and wondered if it hurt. He didn't think so, because he didn't notice anything in the moment, at least no sound of pain. But he certainly noticed when his lips brushed the correct swatch of skin, noticed from the rather breathless way she gasped and the way every muscle in her body briefly contracted. His cock seemed to jump almost in tandem with her movement, and he felt almost painfully hard, desperately aroused, at the way he thought—or imagined?—that the heat between her legs increased as he allowed his mouth to linger there on her neck.

Yet even as he turned that thought hungrily over in his mind, she seemed intent to show him if he imagined it or not. She reached for his hand from where it caressed just above her knee, and slid it up her leg, up past the raised hemline of her skirt to rest against the highest point of her inner thigh. And she left it there, and left him frozen against her neck, his fingertips brushing the soft lace edge of her knickers, as she returned her hands to his hair and pressed a very soft kiss to his ear. "Please?" she asked, more of a breath than a question, and whatever had stilled in him broke, because to ask for anything in such a moment, rather than taking control herself, was utterly contrary to everything he'd known about her for the past year.

James had imagined what it would be like to touch her before, of course, especially in the months after he saw her with Morton. Those thoughts had only increased after New Years, when it started to seem like it might actually happen, when she'd taken to all but tormenting him with the idea, drawing him close before pulling away. But the reality reminded him entirely of the thoughts he'd had after he'd first seen her naked—that no matter how he'd imagined it, the actuality was, somehow, entirely better. As he pushed her knickers to the side and ran a finger over her experimentally, he could hear every faint, tiny change in her breath against his ear. And when he slid a finger inside her—first one and then, after the way she shifted against his hand, another—he understood that if he got inside her (no, when he got inside her, he decided, as the quiet sound she made against his neck seemed to point to that as almost a certainty) he wouldn't manage to last long.

He sought her clitoris with his thumb, and she pulled a hand out of his hair to place over his, to guide him there. He didn't mind the help, and minded it even less at the way she gripped his shirt in her fist and her muscles contracted around his fingers when he began to stroke her there. She moved in real earnest, then, rocking against him, and her mouth never left his ear, so he heard every whimper, every whisper, every moan no matter how quiet she tried to be, although she seemed increasingly less concerned with that the wetter she got. And when she began to tense—not as she had before, under his arm as she spoke, but in a different way, with an increased tautness to her legs and also around his fingers—she dropped her hands. Too wrapped up in the feel of her, her sounds, and her movements, he hadn't noticed that she'd moved underneath his shirt at some point, But he did recognize immediately when her hands moved to his belt, and with much more purpose than she had when she'd reached teasingly for the waistline of his jeans after the Ravenclaw Quidditch match. She actually meant to go through with it this time, he could tell as she slid his belt open easily, the motions no longer just something she did to wind him up.

He'd pulled both hands away from her and reached to still her wrists before he even really thought about why he did so.

She pulled back to look at him, her brow furrowed. With her hair mussed from his hands and her eyes bright yet somehow dazed, she looked the perfect picture of arousal, the way he always rather hoped he'd make her look. Yet even though his brain felt jammed, his thoughts scattered as his heart continued to pound and his cock continued to throb, he understood why he'd stopped her after looking at her for only a few seconds.

"Evans?" he asked after clearing his throat extensively, and he sounded a bit hoarse, he thought, but relatively composed, all things considered. "Can you stand up? And will you—?" He didn't trust himself to finish, just gestured to where her shirt hung open down the front, and he couldn't remember which one of them had undone the buttons, but he would have placed money on himself. Even though he hated the sheer confusion on her face, he kept his eyes trained there to avoid the perfect view he had of the satin of her bra over the swell of her breasts, a view which he'd never seen up close before and hadn't even realized he'd had access to before that moment, which made the whole thing feel entirely even more unfair.

He stood as soon as she did, so abruptly that she almost lost her footing, but he reached out to right her, and then immediately let her go as soon as she seemed steady. "I'm sorry," he told her, and he meant it, regretted it even as he started pacing across the floor simply to occupy his mind and body so he wouldn't look at or reach back for her. "But I can't."

"I think it's pretty clear that you can," she answered dryly. He might have felt embarrassed if he had any energy to spare, embarrassed that she could clearly recognize his continued arousal in everything from the straining of his trousers to the way that he prowled, but it took every ounce of energy he had just to keep away from her. "But if you don't want to—"

"Isn't it also pretty clear that I want to?" he snapped back, and then stopped moving long enough to glance at her apologetically. It had come out harsher than he'd intended. "Will you just give me three minutes?" he asked, because she'd sat back down, properly buttoned back up again and with her hair smoothed behind her ears, and had reached for her stockings. "Three minutes, and then I want to talk."

"Three minutes," she agreed after she regarded him for a beat. But she began to pull on her stockings anyway, and then her shoes, as if she fully intended to prepare for a quick getaway just in case.

And so, for three minutes, he paced and she sat.

He didn't trust himself to sit too closely to her again, and he waited until he felt like he could at least form semi-coherent sentences, even if none of his desire for her had abated. He sat down nearly two feet away, which still felt too close somehow, even though the way she tilted her head at him, as if she didn't know quite what to make of the action, made him think that she saw the distance as a dramatic move. "I can't," he told her again, "And it's not because I don't want to, because I obviously really fucking do. I've fantasized about this for literal years, especially this year. Sometimes it feels like you're all I think about. But, I just…I like you too much."

She stared at him, impassive and unmoving with her lips slightly parted, for so long that she seemed frozen. It appeared, for the first time, like he'd finally broken her brain, as she so often did to him. "I am very confused," she finally said, but she didn't sound it. She didn't sound frustrated or puzzled or angry or anything of the sort, just blank, and his own voice, he thought, sounded rather tenser than hers. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

"I like you too much," he repeated, and it sounded even stupider, somehow, the second time. "I've always liked you, for ages, but…more now, more than I ever have before. You can tell that, right?"

"Yes. You've made that pretty clear. Haven't I made it clear back?"

The worst part, he thought, was that she had, in her way. She'd made it clear that she liked him even as she simultaneously revealed that she absolutely didn't want to like him. Even her verbal confirmations came much more frequently and freely than he would have expected six months earlier, and she seemed to struggle there the most, offering physical affection much more freely, if privately. "Yes. But it's not the same. The way we feel isn't equal, not even close."

For a second he thought she might argue with that just from the way she opened her mouth quickly, and her own words, so habitually spoken, echoed back in his mind: "You don't know me." But she didn't, and when she did speak, her voice came out much the same, as even and collected as it had before. "Maybe so. But I really don't see what that has to do with anything."

"It has everything to do with it." He pushed up his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose, because she looked so reasonable that he found it rather difficult to look at her. "Because, look, I already like you way more than I should, way more than I think you'd want me to, even, if you knew. And if we do this, I know I'll only like you more, and I don't think I should do that, when this…isn't anything."

She continued to stare at him, and a flicker of emotion, of frustration, perhaps, crossed her face. "But you said this was enough, what we are now. You said you were fine with that."

"I thought I was. Or at least I thought I could be."

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

When he looked at her again, he saw that she'd folded her arms back over her chest and she'd tipped her head back to stare up at the ceiling. "I guess we've reached an impasse then," she said with finality, and his heart sank.

He should have seen it coming, and would have, he thought, if he'd operated at his usually thinking capacity, not considerably slowed down from such intimate exposure to her. And, later, he would admit to himself that he also hadn't seen it coming because she hadn't attempted such a thing, to pull back from him at all, since right after the term had first started. Enough time had passed that he'd begun to feel, if not entirely secure in what they had, at least a little more so. "This isn't an impasse," he told her quickly, but she just shook her head.

"It is, though. You must see that. I'm not about to walk back the way I've felt about dating anyone for years now, way before you came along as anything except a nuisance. And this changes things—not because of the sex, that's whatever, because I'm an adult and I can take care of that myself, I've gotten quite good at it since December—"

James had never wanted to interrupt her and ask her to show him something quite so badly before.

"—but because you can't change how you feel. And if I'm going to make you miserable—"

"You don't make me miserable," he interrupted her tersely. "You don't. I didn't say that."

"But I must, if you think that this will end up being worse for you in the long run than better, and that you'll just end up regretting it if we sleep together. You get that, right?"

No, he thought, not in the way that she seemed to think so, so assuredly, absolutely no doubt in her voice. "That's not how I meant it. Any of this."

"I know." She turned her head to face him, and she looked, again, sad, sadder than he ever wanted her to look, especially when he knew that he'd caused it. "But that doesn't make it untrue. And that's okay. You needed to say it." He did reach for her, then, when she unfolded her arms and got up, because there seemed something so final in the motion, in the way she made towards her folded robes and wand to clearly leave. He caught her hand, and she let him hold it for a moment before she gently disengaged. "We can still be friends," she assured him, and she pocketed her wand and folded her robes over her arm. "Not friends…like this. But friends."

"That's not what I want."

"But I can't give you what you want."

He rubbed his face and tried to bite back a growing sense of panic. "If you can't, I don't want to stop this, whatever it is."

"But you also clearly do."

"I don't—"

"Well, then which one is it?" she asked, and frustration truly crept out of just her face and into her voice for the first time to stay. "Either you're fine with what we've been, or it's not enough for you, and it can't be both."

"It's not both for you? Not even just a little?" He knew he shouldn't goad her, not with the day that she had, not with everything she'd just confided in him about St. Mungo's and the Death Eater attack and everything, but he couldn't help it. He'd rather she get mad, he thought, than sad or uncaring, both of which she vacillated between at an almost alarming rate. "I don't believe that it's not both for you too."

Her eyes narrowed, and he thought, for a brief moment, that she might hex him, because she looked so dangerously close to the end of her rope, her nerves all but shot. But in the next second, she just shook her head. "Look, I'm only going to say this once. I could shag you right now, Potter—like I clearly just very much intended to—and it wouldn't change the way I feel about you at all. Whether you want to take that as me admitting that I like you a lot or that I like you very little, well, that's up to you."

"Don't leave," he implored immediately when she turned away. "Evans, don't—"

"Don't what?" Lily stopped as he broke off and turned to look back, to see what he could possibly add. He didn't like the look she gave him when she studied his face—he felt caught out somehow, although he didn't know how.

"Will you just think about it?"

"I don't know what there is to think about."

"But will you?"

She opened the statue of Boris the Bewildered and hesitated just the briefest moment before she ducked out. "Sure. Whatever. Now, if you'll excuse me, I am done with this fucking day."

Long after she left, after James had remained on the bench with his head in his hands until his neck had gone altogether stiff, so stiff that he doubted it would ever feel normal again, he realized the day that she had just quit had not even passed two in the afternoon. He was exhausted. And he wondered if she had recognized it, something in his voice or face, that told her that when he had stopped just before asking her not to do something, it had been to ask her to not go find Morton to help her feel alive, as he hadn't.