A/N: Written for Sapphic Season using the prompt Marauders Era.

Word count: 728

Lily picked her discarded tie up from the floor, only for a small black creature with eight legs to scurry out from under it and across the wooden floor of the first year girls' dormitory.

She screamed, tossing her tie across the room and jumping onto her bed that sat—most thankfully— on the opposite end of the dormitory from the one the spider had scurried towards. The spider had instead begun scaling the wall between Mary's and Marlene's bed with determination.

"Get it!" Lily shouted, pointing a finger at what was now little more than a moving back dot to her eyes. "It's right there! Someone get it!"

She had no intention of getting near it herself, but Marlene was braver. Hovering carefully on the edge of her mattress as if the creature might suddenly descend back to the floor, she pointed her wand at the spider.

"Wait!' Mary called, reaching out to wrap a hand around Marlene's wrist. "It can't hurt you!"

She was standing right next to the spider on the wall as if it weren't a terrifying monster. Lily swallowed as she found yet another reason to be thoroughly taken with her new roommate. She'd already discovered plenty of them since September 1st.

"We can just let it outside," Mary said firmly. "What good does killing it do?"

To demonstrate, she opened the window. Lily shivered as crisp December air fluttered into the dormitory.

Using both hands, Mary guided the spider out the window, not scared of the animal or the cold. Lily bit her lip, resisting the urge to run to her and bat her hands away to protect her from the spider.

Mary closed the window, latching it shut tight, and turned to smile at the other two girls.

"See?" she asked. "We didn't need to kill it."

Lily shivered, and she no longer had the excuse of the December wind.

"Won't it just come back inside?" she asked, her voice a little dazed as she stared at Mary.

She'd almost forgotten that Marlene was there.

"Probably," Marlene said with a roll of her eyes. "And if it does, I'm getting it next time."

Lily gasped a little as she remembered their friend. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog, and snapped her mouth shut, realizing that she'd been gaping at Mary the whole time.

Mary who looked even more impressive now that she had fixed Marlene with an intense, disapproving gaze.

"You know that no spiders in the UK are capable of killing people, right? And that one couldn't have even bitten you. It would actually only help us. It eats all the annoying bugs, like flies. Why hurt it?"

Lily didn't have an answer except that the spider made her deeply uncomfortable in a way flies didn't. Sure, she didn't want a fly buzzing around her while she was sleeping, but she'd still have taken that over a spider any day. There was something about the way all eight of their legs moved that got to her.

She felt guilty for feeling that way, though, now that she'd seen how passionate Mary felt about the animal.

That was becoming a theme of their friendship. Lily had never wanted to impress anyone as much as she did Mary, and she didn't quite understand it. At first, she thought it was insecurity about being a Muggleborn, but that didn't make sense. Mary was a Muggleborn too, and Lily didn't feel the same need to please Marlene.

"I just hate the idea of hurting something so helpless," Mary said, sitting down on her bed with force. "If it can't hurt us, it seems incredibly cruel to hurt it first."

Marlene loudly scoffed, but Lily wanted to move to Mary's bed and wrap an arm around her shoulders. She'd never thought of the situation in those terms, and she felt too inadequate to comfort Mary after calling for the spider's death minutes before. To her, insects and spiders were just, well, insects and spiders. She'd never given any thought to killing them.

"That's very admirable, Mary," she finally said, her voice cracking.

Mary beamed at her, and Lily's heart skipped a beat. She smiled back, feeling inexplicably bashful over the attention.

The Gryffindor first years still had a lot to learn about each other it seemed. And learn about each other they would.