Unidentifiable Legumes

Lily didn't know whether she could trust her own judgment. It wasn't that she was doing things she knew weren't right, it was that she kept feeling extreme conviction for things that actually turned out to be wrong. She knew this, but, all the same, a new treatment for the issue at hand was forming in her mind. It was simple. It was ethical. Most importantly, James himself had prescribed it.

An end to the grand gestures.

The strange thing was, the reactions sparked by hanging up the hat were even greater than those she had gotten from the actual pranks. It wasn't as though she wrote the new development in the sky or anything, but the next morning she made the mistake of announcing the end of the saga to the few Gryffindors who were lolling around in their varying states of alertness at the breakfast table.

'Oh, no!' Gen Clearwater exclaimed through her scrambled eggs, looking bereft. 'I just cancelled my Daily Prophet subscription! I haven't read it at all the last two weeks; it's not nearly as interesting as your breakfast-time entertainment.'

And then all of sudden everyone knew.

'Damn it!' Emmeline's beau the great idiot Adam Prescott swore loudly in the line for the Herbology exam. 'I hope you know that you've robbed me of a lot of money, Evans! I'll have to inform the lads the bet's off.' Lily could feel him glowering at her all throughout the paper, which was very distracting. On the way out, he brushed past her and said 'just so you know, I was backing you,' in a very injured tone.

'What? You're giving up?' shrieked Bianca Friars, accosting Lily on the way to lunch. Bianca was an overly romantic third year that, with her small posse of romantics, had become obsessed with 'the deep, tortured tension' between Lily and James. She was also one of the few who couldn't be convinced that Lily was only pitching for friendship. This wasn't because the third year was clear seeing and insightful, Marlene assured Lily candidly; rather that she was deluded and very hormonal.

'I'm getting a beating, that's for sure,' Lily told Emmeline during a sleepy, unmotivated lull between the Herbology and Arithmancy exams. 'But it's a relief, and that's even surer.'

Emmeline was making a huge ceremony of crossing the exams she had completed out of her diary and wasn't listening. 'Runes, killed! Defence, scraped through, I hope! Muggle Studies, defeated! Divination, failed! Herbology, blitzed! So, that leaves only Arithmancy and Potions...'

'I mean,' Lily continued, absently examining her nail beds atop a huge stack of Arithmancy notes, 'Fun as it was, I don't think I'm…' She frowned, searching for the right word, '…uninhibited enough for the Way of the Prank. It was actually quite stressful. Not to mention,' she heaved, rolling her eyes skyward, 'trying to come up with new ones! Once I had a thriving imagination,' she said, now narrowing her eyes at Emmeline who obviously didn't care in the slightest, 'now the riverbed is dry.'

Bianca wasn't the only heartbroken one: Mary was despairing. That evening in the common room, without any precursor, she stormed up to Lily and waved a few sheets of wax paper in front of the redhead's face.

'It's a niffler launcher!' Mary moaned at her. 'You have no idea how much I have invested into this prank, Lily! You can't give up on me now.'

For a fraction of a second Lily felt sorry for Mary: the witch had thrown herself into the pranking saga with surprising determination and enthusiasm. She had been behind the scenes, plotting and planning; the director, producer and prop-supplier in this shambles that was the romantic comedy/horror film of Lily Evans's life. At the time Lily hadn't thought too deeply on it; had gratefully taken the help without question, but now she noted the manic look in Mary's eyes with some nervousness.

The nervousness blossomed into a fully-fledged horror when she realised what Mary had said.

'A niffler launcher?'

The brunette could be quite volatile, and usually her friends tried for diplomacy when dealing with her, but the idea was so terribly bad that Lily didn't even try to mask her distress. 'Mary.' She took a deep, wobbly breath to calm herself. 'The lead vest thing doesn't work at all.' Another breath. 'It actually works zero percent.'

But Mary shushed her with a few energetic waves of the hand, her eyes widening in a wildly hopeful look. 'Just listen. I've got it all planned out. It's Thursday, right, and the end of exam festivities are next Saturday night. Next Friday I'll sneak out and pinch a half dozen nifflers or so from Hagrid's pen.' She had pulled out a checklist and was pointing at the different stages of the plan.

'I've just got another five lead vests and a very small chainmail poncho with lead coating in the mail, so that's done —' she ticked it off her list ' —and on Saturday evening we dress 'em all up, and when the party's in full swing —' here she pulled out a floor diagram of the Gryffindor common room, covered in arrows and dots labelled with their various names, ' —I clear the dance floor with a stink bomb, you push James into this circle, and then I launch the nifflers.' Mary's eyes were bright with prank fever. 'It'll be like an adorable giant, furry cuddle of friendship!'

There was a long pause. Lily breathed deeply. At that most fortuitous moment, Marlene slumped next to her on the couch. The brunette had just arrived back from the evening installation of the Astronomy exam and was scowling fiercely.

'Wow, Mary,' Lily said, suddenly brightening at the look of pure murder on Marlene's face. 'Why don't you tell Marlene your idea? She's a great one for constructive criticism.'

On Friday morning, Lily came across Mary crying in the toilet.

Naturally, Lily's first thought was that it was all her fault for letting Marlene shred the niffler launcher blueprints, but it quickly became clear that the issue ran a little deeper than a prank. The girl's shoulders were heaving with sobs. She looked utterly broken. A piece of parchment —a letter? —was crumpled in her fist.

'Mary!' Lily said, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice. 'What's wrong?'

At her exclamation the other three, in the middle of dressing for the day, came to the door. Alice slipped into the bathroom and wrapped her arms around the distraught witch, making hushing noises and Lily felt herself relax a little bit: Alice knew what to do in these situations.

'Tell us what's wrong,' Alice murmured against her friend's hair. 'We love you; we want to help.'

'We want to kill whoever hurt you,' Marlene added, obviously trying in her awkward, good-intentioned way to lighten the mood. But Mary's breath hitched at that and her breathing became harsh and soon she was literally choking for air. Quickly, Emmeline conjured a paper bag from the end of her wand and Lily held it to Mary's mouth. Marlene looked stricken.

'M–my cousin…' A fresh round of tears swallowed her next words, and it took a few minutes before her breathing was regular enough to continue. In those few minutes Lily despaired. Mary was a Muggleborn, and from what Lily remembered, her Muggle uncle had married a German halfblood and so Astrid, Mary's cousin, was a witch as well. Although Astrid went to a magic school in Austria, the two were incredibly close as a result of being two of the only oddities in a very Muggle family. And something, written on a scrap of parchment in Mary's hand, had happened to her.

Finally Mary breathed out shakily. She raised her red eyes to the light fixture and said, 'she's d —dead.'

This was met with utter silence. Then Mary's head fell back and she gave an agonised, keening wail. It was so utterly hopeless a sound that Lily's eyes stung, and soon she was crying too. In her periphery she saw Marlene slip out of the room, overcome.

'Oh-'

Suddenly Mary's head flew up and her eyes flashed with anger. Her teeth clenched and her hands clenched and Lily imagined that her whole body was knotted up with the force of her fury. 'And my p-parents are getting a divorce,' she spat with vitriol. The momentum of her anger sent a hacking cough through her and the paper bag was pressed quickly to her lips again.

Alice stayed with her all that day. They both missed the Potions exam, but no one cared. No one cared because in a Death Eater attack on Pferdefliege, the Austrian magic school, thirteen students had been killed. The magical community was small; everyone mourned.

Later on when Emmeline and Lily, who had gone to Potions, returned from the exam, they found all the other occupants of the dormitory clustered around Mary's bed, silent. Every girl looked bone-weary; sapped; hollowed-out.

Conjuring herself a wobbly three-legged stool —she had never been able to master the plushy armchairs that James had produced in Transfiguration —Lily settled by the bedside, joining the mourning vigil. Still in the circle of Alice's unwaveringly dependable arms, Mary appeared to be cried out, but there was numbness in her eyes as she stared blankly at the canopy of her four-poster.

After what seemed to be several hours, Mary murmured, 'Part of me appreciates the irony of the fact that I —I got the worst two letters of my life in the —in the space of five minutes.'

The other girls crooned in response, and Marlene said something that she probably thought was comforting about two birds and one stone, but Lily wasn't listening.

It seemed as though the scope of her vision had suddenly expanded. As if on microscope, her vision had zoomed outwards, leaving the Charms exam, prefect patrol rosters and James Potter as little brushstrokes in the big picture that Lily Evans, Queen of Repression, was finally seeing.

For the first time in a long while, sitting on that wobbly stool next to Mary's bed, she saw clearly. No, not quite: she made herself see. And everything that had been firmly locked away in the Not To Worry About box came flooding into her mind again and Lily literally rocked on the crooked legs of the stool, overcome.

Lily thought about Petunia. She thought about her parents' own divorce. She thought hard about her chances of surviving the war that was beginning to truly boil in the wider world. She thought about how a foot outside the castle at the wrong time would see her dead.

And other things surfaced, too, for she was making herself see clearly. She was hurting Daisy Abbott, who was too kind to say so. She was making James feel guilty for something he wasn't even doing. He wanted to be faithful to Daisy. She even let herself think of Severus for the first time in a year, always hovering at the corner of her vision like a wounded dog.

Lily Evans wasn't really one for shocking revelations, but this one nearly bowled her over.

Everything she had focused all her energy upon these past months seemed trite and impossibly insignificant now. She felt unbelievably childish, stocking up on confetti missiles and studying the rules of Quidditch to impress James, when most of her life was actually a bit of a mess that she was continuously sweeping under a rug.

And for a moment she felt shockingly alone and cold; colder than she had ever been.

But then she looked up and Emmeline was wiping her eyes. Dorcas looked haggard and Alice was humming tiredly under her breath. Mary had her eyes closed, two hectic spots of colour on her cheekbones. And Marlene —she seemed to feel how cold Lily was, and she reached for her friend's hand and squeezed.

'Well, this is just jolly, isn't it?'

Saturday night dinner in the Great Hall was subdued. Marlene had both her elbows on the table and was staring into the depths of her pea and ham soup. The tables were half-filled, but it was quiet aside from a low murmur here and there and the scrape of cutlery on plates. Across from her, Dorcas and Lily were cautiously reading the same Daily Prophet, both wincing infinitesimally in anticipation each time the page was flipped.

At Marlene's comment Dorcas looked up, scandalised. 'Is mass-murder supposed to be fun?' she asked severely with her eyebrows raised high.

Rolling her eyes, Marlene said dryly, 'I would have thought so, wouldn't you? No, Hattie Hyperbole, I was actually talking about the year in general.' She picked up her soupspoon and swirled it in a figure of eight around her bowl. '"Sixth year is the best year," they all say. "No O.W.L.s, no N.E.W.T.s, no seventh year responsibility," they all say. What we actually get is a general crunk.'

There was a beat of silence in which Lily and Dorcas tried to decide whether they were supposed to know what that meant.

'A general crunk?' Lily said after a moment. 'Is that a —what is that?'

Marlene frowned. 'A crunk. You know, a crunk,' she said, surprised. 'All the kids are saying it these days.'

'Is it unhealthily meaningful that I'm feeling behind the times at seventeen?' Dorcas muttered, reaching for a bread roll and ladling more soup into Lily's extended bowl. Marlene made a noncommittal noise, mumbling something like, 'you're only just realising it?' that Dorcas luckily didn't hear, and finally began on her soup after playing with it for the last ten minutes.

'Well,' Lily said pointedly when it didn't seem like Marlene was going to elaborate, her own spoon hovering above her bowl, 'What's a crunk, then, if we're so behind?'

'It's a crazy funk,' the other witch said between slurps. 'It's when you're in a mood and it causes you to behave irrationally. Wait.' She stopped short. 'You —' she gestured to Lily with her spoon, her eyes widening ' —you are the very definition of a crunk. The very personification!'

'What, acting irrationally when in a mood?' Lily repeated in offended astonishment, dropping her spoon into her soup.

'Yes,' Marlene replied mildly, watching as Lily angrily wiped chunks of unidentifiable legume off her jumper. 'You're the Queen of the Crunk. The Empress. The Dalai Crunka–'

'Your meaning is understood,' Dorcas said hastily, eyes on Lily's steadily darkening visage. Marlene kept going, though, obviously vastly enjoying herself. 'President Crunkerson, Alexander the Crunk, Napoleon Bonacrunk —'

Sloop.

Really, Lily thought later on, as she was leaving the hospital wing, Marlene had brought it upon herself. Of course Lily hadn't remembered that the girl was allergic to artichokes. Who would? At the time it hadn't seemed too severe of a punishment to empty a plate of salad down her shirt. At least it wasn't soup, Lily thought, waving a dismissive hand in the now bed-ridden witch's direction as she informed Lily that she was written out of Marlene's will. That would have been messier. Although I suppose her face wouldn't have blown up if it were soup. What a stupid allergy.

The second last week of term dragged its feet. Lily's last exam was Charms on the Monday and when it was over she found herself at a miserable loose end. And it wasn't just her penchant for melodrama that found her in that semi-depression; the whole castle had fallen under a smothering blanket of nervous grey fog.

The corridors were subdued as students moved through the castle. Professor Gänsefeder, the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, had once taught at Pferdefliege and sat at the front of the Defence exams with a handkerchief attached to her nose. Even Dumbledore, sitting in his throne-like chair at dinnertime, looked tired and beleaguered.

There was mourning, but there was also fear. The whispers ran rampant through the halls: Hogwarts was the safest place for the students, yes, but surely the pupils of Pferdefliege had thought the same about their own school? They didn't have Dumbledore, but they had a dozen ex-Aurors in their Defence department... And so people moved quickly through the corridors. Pupils were removed from exams in hysterics. Younger Muggleborn students were panicking.

A few of the older students were taking advantage of the emotional upheaval: the usual black market trade of intelligence-boosting and wisdom-augmenting spells that cropped up around exam time were replaced almost overnight by suspicious-looking Death Eater wards and sketchy camouflage charms.

It was here that Lily found employment for her trailing loose ends. In recent months she had been shirking her prefect responsibilities —quite honestly, pranking was far more enjoyable —but now she threw herself back into the role, specifically into stopping the trade of illicit and frankly rubbish spells. The task lifted her mind out of the rapidly spreading pool of gloom and fear that was flooding the castle.

It took her mind off something else as well, because it wasn't just the fear that was getting to Lily. Since deciding to leave well enough alone with James, she couldn't get him out of her head. It was even worse than before. She had finally gotten the blinders off, and was now aware of all the things that were bigger than her trifling little issues, and still the boy plagued her mind. Literally: he had taken to popping up in her head when she was alone, giving her bits of advice on how to approach real-James.

That was how Remus found her, sitting victorious and red-faced on a bench in front of the boys' lavatories on the second floor after a particularly successful bust on the last Wednesday of May. She was saying Bugger off very firmly to mind-James, now dubbed the Parasitic Mind Worm, who had approached her (inside her head), inexplicably dressed in a Hawaiian patterned kimono, offering her "hearty congratulations" with a roguish wink. This is not the time for such outlandish prints, she told him. You're making me seem shallow and unfeeling in my own head.

She was recovering after having just seen one Samuel Froggarty promptly dispatched to Flitwick's office. The fifth year Ravenclaw had been apprehended in the toilets in the act of selling an Unforgivable Umbrella —a useless device which, when used like a shield, purportedly protects the user from any Unforgivable Curse —to Ferdy Mannox, a second year Hufflepuff. She had the device in her hands and was rapping the luridly magenta and completely unmagical "shield" against her knees. Once the high of the chase had begun to wear off, Lily's mind had sidled —as it far too often did —to the presently kimono-clad Marauder. Thus, when Remus sat next to her wearing robes distinctly unlike a kimono, she was glad for the distraction.

'Success is delish,' she said to him in greeting, beaming. 'I can see why people want to become Aurors! It's the thrill of the chase.'

A small smile touched Remus's mouth. 'I think there's a possibility that Aurors deal with a bit more than school kid quasi-delinquents, but I'm sure that you're right.'

Lily smacked his knees with the Unforgivable Umbrella. 'Don't belittle my victory, Remus! And that was no picnic: Samuel Froggarty has a very intimidating stare. I think it's his overhanging forehead.'

Remus laughed. 'He has one of those, doesn't he?'

She nodded. 'I secretly suspect,' she said in a conspiratorial voice, 'that he is a Cro-Magnon changeling baby.'

'Brilliant.' A fully-fledged grin appeared on the sandy-haired boy's face. 'The result of a Time Turner adventure gone terribly wrong. His parents meant to pick up baby Jesus but overshot the mark by a few million years.'

The prefects hooted with laughter until they both exhaled on a satisfied 'Ahh.' They sat quietly for a while, but when the laughter had worn off, Lily began to feel anxious again, as she did whenever her mind wasn't occupied. During the altercation with Froggarty she had seen red, but now the red was receding, and James the Parasitic Mind Worm had taken off the kimono, and the grey was creeping back in.

Shortly Remus asked, 'How's Marlene? Still all rashy?'

Lily sighed loudly. Although she probably should have, she didn't feel at all guilty for the salad incident. Marlene was loving being an invalid and had thus far managed to get out of two exams. But not having the witch around to pep her up with a sarcastic comment was reminding Lily how much she actually relied on her friend for the odd support she provided.

'Fine. Milking it for all it's worth.'

Remus smiled. He paused, then —'How's Mary?'

The redhead shrugged, gripping her knees tightly. 'A bit like a zombie. Gets up, eats, stares blankly at her textbooks… She was able to write her name on the Charms exam before they had to take her out…' Pulling a squashed egg sandwich from her back pocket, she examined it for lint. 'Is there a real life equivalent of a zombie?'

'Reanimated dead...' Remus squinted in thought. 'Inferi?'

She nodded in agreement. Then she offered him some sandwich and he took it, eyeing his half dubiously. As she ate, Lily's eyes were drawn to the portrait of Salisia the Serendipitous on the other wall. Not so serendipitous now, eh, Salisia? The hook-nosed witch, thirteenth British Minister of Magic, was moping about in her frame. Even the pictures had been miserable the past week.

'It was a double whammy for Mary,' Lily said presently. 'A really bad one. My parents divorced, you know.' She stared at the remains of her sandwich. 'I haven't thought about it properly in… about two years. But anyway, that alone was hard enough without my favourite cousin being murdered by Death Eaters as well.'

After a short moment of consideration she told Remus about her repression issue.

'And I think I'm doing it again now,' she said, fiddling with the bent spokes of the Unforgivable Umbrella. 'Covering up what I should be thinking about with something else.' She rapped it against her shins. 'For example: since Charms on Monday I have bust up seven heists.'

'Seven?'

'Yep.' She grinned at the admiring surprise in his voice. 'You can call me Jess — no, Jen — no, Jer–Jernumbra Justice, please and thank you truly.'

'I will not do that,' Remus said firmly. 'Jernumbra is not a name.'

'It's original.'

When Remus finished his sandwich he began folding his paper napkin into a chatterbox. Lily watched the movement of his fingers as they made the strategic creases.

'Anyway,' she said. 'I saw Severus for the first time in a long time on Saturday. When I went to the hospital wing I actually asked Marlene where he had been for the last few months and she just gave me this strange look. I —' she paused thoughtfully, swinging her legs, 'I don't think I've let myself think about him. Any thoughts about him make me feel sad and uncomfortable, so I —I've repressed the whole darn thing. Not to mention Petunia.' Lily exhaled loudly and looked down at her interlinked hands. 'I haven't thought about her since I last saw her.'

Struggling with the fiddly chatterbox, Remus accidentally tore the delicate fabric of the napkin and began again with his usual limitless patience. 'And now you think this subliminal monarch —the Queen of Repression, you said? —this queen you keep inside your head is striking in the form of busting the Hogwarts black market? That's Jekyll and Hyde type stuff.'

'Kind of,' Lily said weightily, smiling wryly. 'But… I dunno… It's also something I can control, you know? It's giving me something to do instead of sitting around all hopeless waiting to be murdered in cold blood.'

They thought about that for a while.

Then Remus said, 'I think we're all confronting stuff at the moment.' Lily noticed that he looked even more haggard than usual. 'This has well and truly burst the bubble. The world isn't as safe as it was last week.' He frowned. 'Well, it was just as unsafe back then, but we weren't quite so aware of it.' Then, trying again to lift the mood, he asked, smirking now in a very un-Remus-like way, 'what about James, then? You not thinking about him as well?'

'Oh no,' Lily said, viciously tearing her own napkin down the middle. James the Parasitic Mind Worm popped up again, grinning and wiggling his fingers in a most obnoxious way. 'That's a different matter entirely. He's the one thing I've never been able to repress. How is it that he manages to annoy me in my own subconscious?'

'Because you're mad on a subconscious level.'

No response was given to that frankly rude comment, because at the mention of James Lily had fallen once again into a crunk. It was terrible, she thought: half of the time she was riddled with a peculiar mix of glum and anxious, brought on by the news of the thirteen dead at Pferdefliege. It had suddenly broken open the cosy Hogwarts incubator, and Lily —and every other student —had been plunged into the sudden cold of the world outside. But the other half of the time she was despairing over James Potter and what seemed to be the impossibility of having any sort of real relationship with him, friendship or otherwise. And it didn't help that James the Parasitic Mind Worm was extremely friendly and suggestive —talk about mixed signals! Not that that's real James's fault, but —

A voice cut through her mental ramblings.

'Moony!'

Lily's head shot up. There was no doubt about it: God was laughing right now. Because who else would it be but the impossible James Potter, barrelling around the corner, clutching a piece of folded parchment. Remus was sitting closest to the corner and Lily was sitting in his shadow, so James didn't notice her at first.

'Moony, Padfoot's gone and —' He had moved close enough to catch sight of her. He pulled up short, stopping in his tracks. '…Evans.' James stood there, eyes wide and fastened on her. A nervous hand came up to pull at the hair that fell on his forehead. Lily's heart —along with every other vital organ —swelled at the endearing fidget.

'James,' she managed to say quite normally, with a graceful incline of the head. She kept her ankles together and chin raised, despite the blood that boiled under the skin of her cheeks. 'Don't mind me. What's Padlock gone and done?'

Oh yeah. Playing it cool.

A smile seemed to tip Real James's lips up despite him, and he said, 'Padfoot…' The smile was short-lived though, and the hand holding the parchment clenched tightly. 'Well —' He hesitated, eyes flicking from Lily to Remus and back to Lily. Then he hastily unfolded the parchment and held it out. He probably meant only for Remus to see, but Lily took the liberty of peering at it as well. As she watched, fascinated, what seemed to be a map webbed its inky way outwards, spreading the spidery tendrils of corridors and passages and classrooms across worn material.

If it didn't seem like greater things were afoot Lily would have gone mad with excitement and requested – no, demanded – to be allowed to examine the gadget. But as it was, neither Marauder looked impressed; Remus was staring grimly at a cluster of dots James was pointing his wand at. They were labelled, Lily saw, Sirius Black, Rudolphus Lestrange, Augustus Rookwood, Wilhelmina Nott and, God help us all, Peeves. The last four dots were skittering around the page, inside a boundary that seemed to be…

'Is that the girls' bathroom?'

James nodded, meeting her eyes for a moment and looking quickly back down at the map, throat working. 'First floor. Remus, will you —?'

With a sigh, Remus unfolded himself off the bench and held a hand out to Lily, who was looking at James. The sooty-haired boy's eyes met Lily's again and held for a fraction of a second longer.

Remus coughed. 'Lily's probably the greatest asset we could have on our team. Lookit at this here; she just busted this Unforgivable Umbrella–'

'Is that Fathomless-Forehead-Froggarty's?' James interjected curiously, staring at the device, a smile touching his mouth. 'I heard word that that he was going to pitch that to the susceptible youth of the castle.'

'Fathomless-Forehead…' Lily repeated, stunned. Then she let loose a peal of laughter. 'He looks Cro-Magnon, doesn't he?' she exclaimed delightedly, wide-eyed. A laugh burst from James's mouth and his eyes crinkled at the corners and he was about to reply —but Remus was looking at the map and frowning.

'We'd better get a move on… And we might be needing that umbrella, Lily —hold onto it.'

Feeling a strange mix of elation and trepidation —James had laughed! That smile had heated her very bones, and his eyes had been so very warm and golden and looking right at her… —Lily hastily followed the wizards down the corridor.

'Why?' she asked, cautiously, jogging to keep up with their long strides —bloody hell, must get fit, she thought, trying not to pant —'Does it look violent?' Her voice went high at the end in a way that made both boys try to hide a grin.

'I dunno, but they're certainly not playing spin the bottle,' James said, looking down with a mix of fondness and long-suffering at the map as Remus passed it to him, taking three stairs at a time as they raced down to the first floor.

Lily jumped the last few stairs and skidded to a stop behind the boys as they paused awkwardly in front of the girls' bathroom. Crashes and yells resounded in the room beyond. Outside in the corridor the boys had frozen.

'I know we do stuff like this all the time,' James muttered, scrunching his eyes shut as a pig-like squeal —Wilhelmina, Lily assumed —issued from the bathroom, 'but it just feels wrong going into the girls' toilets.'

Louder roars of outrage —no, that was more like Wilhelmina, actually —came through the door. Peeves's laughter skipped over the top of the din, accompanied by an awful, high wailing.

'Good heavens,' exclaimed Lily in dismay, watching the veteran pranksters loiter uncomfortably in the doorway. 'What is wrong with you two? Gird your loins, lads.' Narrowing her eyes, she twisted the doorknob and leapt into the room —

- to find a scene that she could never in her wildest dreams have imagined.

Sirius was sitting on the water cistern high above the sinks, knees clutched to his chest, shaking with uncontrollable, silent laughter as down below Nott, Rookwood and Lestrange blundered around on the tiles.

Peeves and Moaning Myrtle were zipping around above them, cackling and wailing respectively. In his hands Peeves was clutching something that looked like a purple and green foghorn, and was intermittently spraying whatever was in the container in the Slytherins' eyes and open mouths.

'Padfoot!' James yelled incredulously over the ruckus, ducking through the door behind Lily. 'What the hell is going on?'

'Prongs!' Sirius gasped at the sight of his best mate. He was clutching at his chest, trying to catch his breath from laughing. 'I assure you… I am only… in part to blame.' He probably would have attempted to explain how it was possible he could be innocent, but his and everyone else's attention was spectacularly diverted as Rookwood lumbered heavily backwards through a stall door and fell clear through the toilet seat.

About half an hour later Nott, Lestrange and Rookwood had been sent off to the hospital wing under several heavy-handed Confundus charms.

According to Sirius, the situation hadn't really been his fault. He had been peacefully walking back from the kitchens —Lily had been interested to know what business he'd had there, but all three wizards said that it wasn't important —when he'd come across Peeves in the first floor bathroom, picking on Myrtle. All he'd done was gift the poltergeist with a can of Net'll Sting and lure in a few 'worthy targets'. What Peeves then did with the nettle spray and the three Slytherins was completely his own responsibility, said Sirius.

Now Remus was supervising as the criminal Marauder cleaned up the bathroom with many a curse. Lily had settled on the plinth of a suit of armour and was trying not to watch James, sprawled against the wall a few yards away from her. When she glanced over next it was to find that he was staring at her. Their eyes caught and hers promptly skittered away. It's strange, she thought, suddenly miserable, that the reason I can't look at him is because I want to so very badly.

'Why,' she began, just for something to say, 'why didn't Myrtle show up on that map?'

James sucked in a frustrated breath through his teeth. 'Haven't been able to manage it yet. It's maddening —I've got no idea what to do.' He drummed annoyed fingers against the parchment, now spread across his lap.

Tentatively, her fascination getting the better of her, Lily reached out and took the map from him. She squatted next to him, a yard or so away. 'What is it? Some sort of revealing charm? Homenum revelio?'

Head lifting off the wall slowly, James nodded, eyes suddenly attentive. 'Uhuh. I've put —'

'Are you lot coming?'

James and Lily raised their bowed heads from over the parchment. Sirius was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, eyes narrowed with some keen emotion. Anger? Amusement? Lily couldn't tell, but she leapt up as if the floor was burning.

James followed moments later, hands shoved deep into his pockets. By now Lily could recognise this as a sign of discomfort and wished she could know what he was thinking about. Instead of asking, she turned away from him and moved to catch up with Remus and Sirius.

'Evans,' James called, quietly. He had come up behind her. The way he said her name told her he was going to say something important, and her heart started pounding double time. But all he said was, 'before I found you lot I was —I went to see Marlene in the hospital wing.'

'Oh.' Lily blinked. 'Right. That's nice of you,' she said, wondering why he looked so sheepish. He was determinedly not looking at her, and so she stared probingly at him, trying to work out what could possibly have happened.

'Well, you came up in conversation —'

Oh, no. Lily felt her face suffuse with blood at the same time that her stomach turned to ice. Marlene wouldn't have —she wouldn't do that —

'No, no!' James looked half alarmed, half amused. 'Don't worry! It was nothing bad, seriously. She —she actually told me about your sister.'

That was possibly the last thing she had been expecting. And while it wasn't quite good news, it was most certainly the lesser of two evils. She breathed out a full chest of air. 'Okay.' What do I say to that?

Now James was watching her. There was something gentle in the angle of his eyebrows and in the curve of his mouth that made Lily's insides simmer. 'I know it isn't any of my business, but…'

'But?' she repeated, wondering absently what it could possibly mean that he cared enough to ask about her sister.

'I was thinking that you should maybe write to her.'

Silence met his advice. In truth, Lily was only trying to think of how to respond, but James seemed to take the silence as an admonishment and he hastily backtracked. 'I know it's none of my business, but I —I thought —'

His apologies faded into the background as she stared at his open, imploring face. His earnest eyes were now riveted on her and his hand gestures were manic. And in all of it, Lily could only think one thing.

He's stuttering.

He was falling all over himself because of her; unsure, uncomfortable and apologetic, and she loved it. She loved it.

'James.'

He stopped short. 'Yes?' He shifted from one foot to another. 'I knew it was —'

'Thank you.' She paused. 'I will. Write to her.'

It seemed to take him a moment to process what she had said, but then a slow smile spread across his face. Lily cut him off before he could speak. 'Stop right there. Yes, Lily Evans took James Potter's advice. There is no need to write a song about it.'

'Forget a song, Evans.' His grin could have lit up London in a blackout. 'I'm going to write a whole musical.'

'You do know that his eyes are brown, not gold, Lily,' a completely rash-free Marlene said dryly from her hospital bed that afternoon. 'Good afternoon to you, too.'

Lily had seated herself on the narrow pallet facing the window and had mentioned —in an embarrassingly soppy instant that she wasn't even really embarrassed about —that the glint of the sun on the darker patches of the lake reminded her of the colour of James's eyes.

'What's that they say about colour being ninety-five percent perception?'

'I don't know, because they don't actually say that.'

There was a beat of silence.

'Did you tell him about Petunia?'

For once Marlene looked stumped. A hand came up to tug at her lower lip. 'I —well —'

'It's okay.' Lily crinkled her nose and looked down at her lap. 'He —he told me I should write to her.'

'Good.' Marlene looked relieved. 'Is that good?'

'Yes. I think so.'

'Well, you should know that I also called her boyfriend a whale. In front of James.'

Lily laughed once, picturing the boy, beefy Vernon Dursley, whom Petunia had begun seeing at the beginning of last year.

'James wondered,' Marlene went on, 'if you could turn this boyfriend into lipstick. Isn't that what the Muggles do with whales?'

'He would ask that,' Lily murmured, smiling. She hummed placidly, looking out at the students studying on the grass. It was a beautiful day outside. Summer was coming. 'Sixth year is over in four days, Mar.'

'Yes. It is,' Marlene said, her voice softening somewhat. In fact, she sounded so unnaturally sentimental that it snapped Lily out of her stupor.

'Hey ho!' she called, smiling at the soft look on Marlene's face. 'What's bitten you?'

'Nothing, you great prat,' the other witch said, grinning and throwing a box of tissues at Lily. 'I was just thinking about how it's almost over. All of it. I feel like the summer hols are going to be different this year.'

And although she didn't say anything —just 'hmm,' —Lily couldn't have agreed more.

Dear Petunia,

How are you? It seems a stupid thing to ask —you're probably just wondering why I'm writing to you.

Remember Mum and I talking about that wizard war criminal character? Last week a dozen Muggleborns (I think I've explained the term to you) were killed by his followers. A cousin of one of my closest friends was one of them.

I know it's a morbid, but I've realised how terrified I am and how much I want to tell you these things. I'd love to talk to you, properly. I want you to tell me what you've been doing.

I honestly miss you, Petty.

Love,

Lily

Yorick, Dorcas's owl, fluttered in his ungainly, lopsided manner to land on Lily's pancakes on Thursday morning. He had a scroll of peachy coloured card attached to his leg, which he thrust into her face. With some trepidation, she unrolled the card, took a deep breath and read.

You, _____________ , are invited to celebrate the engagement of Vernon Dursley and Petunia Evans on the 22nd of June, 1976.

The space where the guest's name is typically written was empty, but this in itself made Lily's heart leap. She could just see Petunia sitting on her bed, staring at Lily's letter… and then, on a whim, before she could tell herself that it was a bad idea, snatching up an invitation and sending it. To Lily it was a peach-coloured olive branch.

Her fingers ran over a line of bumpy writing on the backside of the card and she flipped it over.

You owe me twenty quid. This bloody bird did a shit all over my new cardigan.

From his perch on Lily's pancakes, Yorick hooted in a friendly way, and for the first time in a long, long time when thinking about her sister, Lily laughed aloud.