BOTH ALIKE IN DIGNITY
By: geekinthepink
Rating: T
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing; everything you recognize belongs to either JK Rowling or William Shakespeare.

With all of the current angst I tried to add in a little humor, however, my friends to tell me that things that I find funny really aren't so… Sorry?

Thanks again to the reviewers and of course to my lovely beta Diana. Unfortunately Diana didn't get a chance to read this chapter before it was posted because of an error with my e-mail server so if there are issues with the grammar etc then that's my fault, sorry.

Chapter Eight: Act Three – Scene Two through Four (and three quarters)

Also Known As: Lovingly Tainted

Having finally pried her eyes away from countless texts and drawings of plants, Lily found herself to be back in the near comforts of the Capulet home. As much as it scared her, she was beginning to grow fond of this place. Even in Shakespeare's time, Italy was a beautiful place and Lily was almost sad that she wouldn't have the chance to take advantage of that.

It wasn't just the weather or the countryside, either, that had Lily growing fond of this place. Even under the pain of death she would never admit it, but were it not for James Potter she probably would be in tears right now. She was an immeasurable distance away from home, she was facing her potential death and the only thing that she could think of was the fact that she had actually kissed James Potter.

She couldn't blame the whole thing on him either, she had been the one to find herself wondering across her books what it would be like to just suck it up and close the gap between them. She had been the one hoping from the edge of the table that he would just listen to his hormones and abandon any fear of ruining their newfound friendship.

And now – now she wished desperately that he was here so that her lips would stop tingling from his touch.

It was murder.

A very painful murder.

Suddenly her mind tore itself away from hormone ridden re-enactments of her earlier kiss and reminded her of what play she was in, of what act and scene it was corresponding to. Mercutio and Tybalt must have fallen by now, she realized. Meaning that James would be banished from the city.

That is, if he had killed Tybalt.

She shook her head to rid of the thoughts. He couldn't do that. James would never kill someone, especially over a person he didn't even know. Would he? Sure she teased him about his bravery, his chivalry and sometimes this dire attention seeking beast he turned into, but was it the sort of thing that would cause him to plunge a sword deep into the heart of a man he didn't know?

Lily didn't know. She tucked her hair behind her ear with a shaky hand and nearly jumped a mile at the sound of the door opening behind her to admit the nurse. A frown coated the older woman's face and Lily knew that it had happened; James had killed him.

"Oh what a sad, sad day. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead! We're ruined, miss, we're ruined."

When Lily didn't respond to her melodramatic outburst, Nurse continued on.

"Who would have ever thought that it would be Romeo?" She cried out with a sob.

Lily fought the urge to roll her eyes, fully aware of the name dropping that Nurse was trying to use to draw in her questioning. Playing along with the baiting, though her heart was not in the teasing, Lily searched her memory for the lines.

"Why do you torture me so? Has Romeo killed himself? If you say yes then I shall become more poisonous than a snake. Your answer determines my pain or my happiness." Lily told her monotonously, the words sounding painfully rehearsed. For some reason, the fact that James had been forced to kill Tybalt sent a rippling feeling of sadness through her body. It was like ice numbing her body slowly.

"I saw the wound. Right on his chest. Pale skin and blood everywhere. I fainted when I saw it." Much to her characterization, Nurse was dragging this whole thing out and Lily fought desperately against the urge to slap her in her current bout of teenage angst.

"Oh, my heart is breaking." Lily said emotionlessly. "I shall never move again, I shall have to die as well and my body shall lie beside Romeo's for all eternity."

"Oh Tybalt! Tybalt! He was the best friend I had. Courteous gentleman, I wish I had not lived long enough to see you slain!" Obviously, Nurses cries were not for Lily's benefit as she wanted nothing more than to find James and leave this place. This had become too much, the play was moving too fast. She wanted to go back to the ballroom scene, back to the point where blood had not been spilled.

"Tybalt is dead and Romeo is banished." Nurse tried once more at the name dropping to capture Lily's attention. "Romeo has slain Tybalt and his punishment is banishment from the city."

Nothing could drag Lily away from her thoughts, however, as the desire to leave this wretched place was building up inside of her. A moment's worth of thoughts was enough to drive Nurse up from her spot in the chair next to Lily's and she stormed off towards the door. Stopping when her hand reached the doorknob she turned back to the redheaded young woman, "Will you come mourn the loss of your cousin?"

Lily didn't answer. She was thinking of a way to escape from her room tonight and make it to Friar Lawrence's apothecary without James being seen. It would have to be under the cover of night, that much was obvious. What they needed was… a Disillusionment Charm! She just wondered if James knew how to do it, it was too tricky for her to try with just her knowledge of the theory of it out of a book.

Hearing the click of the door she knew that the nurse had gotten fed up with the silence and Lily took this as a chance to catch up on some much needed sleep that she had missed in a night's worth of potions work.

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"Romeo!" A deep voice hissed, calling James out from his current hiding spot. It wasn't really much, to be quite honest. Seeking salvation in a clutter of ruins not too far away from the apothecary, James had spent most of the afternoon in thought. Now, as Friar Lawrence called him out he welcomed the interruption.

After all, there were only so many times you could play the same kiss over in your mind. Oh, who was he kidding? He detested the Shakespearian creation from pulling him away from the replay of the single most memorable moment in his life. Learning to fly was nothing when compared to a kiss with the woman you were going to marry. At least, that's what James was thinking before he reminded himself not to count his chickens before they quacked, or some Muggle cliché like that.

"So what's happened? What's my punishment?" At the idea of being punished and the realization that detention would probably be preferred, his heart sank a little. The fact that he knew that it would be banishment didn't help either, for it still kept him away from Lily.

Friar Lawrence shook his head, motioning for James to come into the apothecary where the chances of being overheard were reduced. Moving required more mental effort than physical from James as it was much easier to think when not surrounded by countless herbs and plants.

"He made a gentle decision, it's banishment for you." The way the friar delivered the words was like a death sentence. Gloom swept over James despite his knowledge of these affairs. The reality of the situation that he and Lily had gotten caught in was astounding, it was all happening. He had been the one to murder Tybalt. He had been the one to sink his sword deep within the other man. It had been him – James Potter – who had killed another person. How was a seventeen year old supposed to deal with that?

"You might as well say that he ordered me to be killed. Being exiled is much worse than death." James sighed and sunk onto a chair. With his head in his hands he found it much easier to close his eyes and block out the reality of his recent actions.

"You cannot come back here, back to Verona that is." Friar Lawrence knew how much of a punishment this truly was for the potion was near completion. They had gotten it to a state where all they needed to do was test it, but with the rate of fatality being high for such a fragile potion, they needed to run a couple more tests.

He looked at the young man with sorrow etched into his sun-worn features. He pitied the boy, but at the same time he thought him to be ungrateful. Banishment was nothing compared to the death sentence that rightfully belonged to him. "Our Prince took sympathy on you," he told him. "He ignored the laws and substituted banishment in the place of death. This is mercy, and you don't realize it."

For all his alliance with this young man, the fact remained clear to Friar Lawrence that Romeo was in fact a murderer now. He was tainted.

James remained silent for all the man's lecturing. He didn't care at the moment about mercy or how sympathetic the prince was, the fact remained in emboldened black and white that he had killed another person. He had known that it was coming but it couldn't shake the shock of reality. Was this what Lord Voldemort and Grindelwald felt?

"Listen to me!" Friar Lawrence finally snapped.

"Why? So that you can go on about my bloody banishment?" James questioned coldly, lifting his head out of his hands to look at the older man. "No, sorry."

"Do you want the antidote for trouble?" The friar asked, continuing on without waiting for a retort from his younger companion. "Philosophy."

"Forget philosophy! Will your philosophy create a way for Lily and me to get out of here? Will it undo things that have already occurred? It doesn't do anything! Just… Don't talk to me." James let out an exasperated sigh.

"Oh, so now you're also deaf?" Friar Lawrence questioned him. He shook his head at the younger boy, realizing that he had gotten himself in deeper than he had expected.

"You don't understand. You're not trapped in some sort of twisted dimension where you re-enact books! You didn't just kill a man that technically doesn't exist. I did!" Whatever emotions James was keeping welled up inside exploded at the friar in one simple moment. There was too much on his plate and it was far too over his head.

A sudden knocking at the door sounded, which surprised both of the men.

"Hide yourself!" Friar Lawrence hissed to James in a whisper. The younger man hesitated for a moment, before getting up from the chair swiftly. "Go, hide yourself in my study." Nodding at Friar Lawrence's direction, James did as he was told.

The knocking continued while Friar Lawrence made his way to the door. "What do you want?" he questioned, his hand hovering over the knob.

"Let me come in. I come from Lady Juliet." Nurse demanded through the heavy door. The friar admitted her in quickly and ushered her inside of the apothecary. In a characteristic fit of over dramatics she turned on the friar in a blink of the eye. "Oh good friar! Where is he? Where is my lady's love? Where is Romeo?"

From the study, James allowed his head to hit the door he was pressed against (in order to eavesdrop) with a soft thud. Honestly, did these two not have anything better to do than play matchmaker? Of course, he had kissed Lily so perhaps he owed them something.

"He's in my study. Getting drunk off of his sorrow." The cynical nature of the man's words must have escaped the Nurse's attention for she responded with a resounding sigh.

"The same as Juliet then. She is so depressed words escape her." Nurse informed him, regardless of the truth or not. Growing tired with the lack of Romeo's presence, she called out to him, "Stop being such a coward of a man and come out here, for her sake."

Doing as he was ordered, James opened the door to the study and readmitted himself into the friar and Nurse's presence. He found the large woman to be obnoxious in his current state of depress and wished for nothing more than a nice Bat Bogey Hex to place upon her. Of course, that was hardly appropriate as she was the only real link he had to Lily at the moment.

"How is she?" James asked, worried that the weight of this all was effecting Lily as well

"She hardly speaks, sir." Nurse admitted.

"Then I must go to her." James decided. It was now or never, they made their escape tonight; before anything got worse.

"I will tell my lady you will come." Nurse told him with a small nod. She nodded to Friar Lawrence as well before turning around and making her way back out the door. James watched her leave, lost once more in his thoughts. When he returned to reality he found the friar collecting a vial of the potion.

"If this works then I bid you both the fondest farewells, however, if it does not then stay in Mantua for a while before you can figure out another plan. Good luck, young Romeo. You have certainly faced a lot since you first approached me and I hope that you and your lady are able to leave without more trouble."

For all of the arguing between the two men moments before, James found he truly appreciated the man's sincere goodbye.

"Thank you, I wish we could repay you somehow. You have been infinitely helpful." Taking the vile from Friar Lawrence's outstretched hand James realized that for once he didn't know what lay on the other side of this page. He could either return back to Hogwarts leaving Verona behind as nothing more than a dream, or he could face something much, much worse.

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How James managed to find himself in Lily – Juliet's room that night was quite the embarrassment. First he found himself sprinting across the grounds of the Caplet's home as to avoid the guards, followed by a rousing climb up an ivy trellis in which he almost fell – twice, and then to top of the whole shebang with a cherry, the doors were locked.

Yes, the large glass French doors to the room were locked. Lily didn't even realize it until he started pounding furiously to get her attention. She raised her head from the pillow, hair a mess, and looked at him like he was some sort of peeping tom.

And then, and then! She took her own sweet time to get up and let him in.

"Finally." James muttered, walking into the bedroom.

"Finally?" she questioned, finding him entirely too ungrateful for his own good. "Do you have any idea what it was like to be in my shoes today, James? While you were off gallivanting around and proving that no matter what we do this bloody play is going to happen I sat back and had to play the role of the good little daughter of these people. You know, I actually thought that you might change the play and not kill Tybalt, but I was wrong about that too." She didn't know if she was actually upset that he had slain the fictional character or if it was just all of her emotions spilling out at once.

"I didn't want to kill him, Lily." James tried to justify. He sighed and sat down on her bed. "I hardly was conscious that I was still in this play, I just started thinking that if that Mercutio bloke was anything to Romeo like Sirius is to me, then Tybalt had it coming. But now – Now I don't know. I killed him." He announced the last part like it was just occurring to him.

Lily met his sigh with one of her own. "I'm sorry," she apologized to him. "Are you going to be okay?" She couldn't imagine what it must be like for him to run the incident through his head so many times.

"Yeah, that's the weird thing. I know I'll be fine, I know he got what he deserved but it's just shell-shocking." He had come to terms with the death of the antagonist of this story and even with the fact that he had killed him, it was just the realization of that action that was difficult.

Remembering the reason why he was actually in her bedroom at the moment he withdrew the vial from his tunic. "Friar Lawrence gave this to me. We haven't tested it yet so the results still aren't certain, but at the moment it's really the only choice we have."

Lily looked at the small glass vial containing their potion. It had cooled to a transparent state, much like she assumed that it would but the sunlight streaming in from the window tinted it a vibrant orange. Biting her lip gently she took the vial from James's hand and looked at it lying in her palm. "We have three options with this potion. We drink and it works, we go back to Hogwarts and put this all in the past. We drink it and it doesn't work and we work on a plan B. Or, we drink and it proves to be fatal."

James nodded, they had been through these scenarios before. "Let's hope for the first option then."

"It shouldn't take a lot of the potion to work." She informed him. "The smallest sip should produce results." Her gaze had wandered away from James and back down to the vial in her hands. The small amount of the potion was so daunting, so terrifying. If they had done anything wrong, picked the wrong herbs, boiled the leaves too long, then the chances of something bad happening were high. "I'll just go first then." She offered.

James opened his mouth to protest but she had already pulled the stopper out of the vial. He watched as she eyed it hesitantly and sighed. She brought the glass up to her lips but refrained from tipping in even one drop of it. She was scared, though James had learned through years of experience that she would never admit it.

"Lily, stop." He told her before she could tip the vial even the centimeter it would take to get a drop onto her tongue. She lowered the vial and waited for an explanation. "We don't have to leave now. We know for certain that the next scene doesn't occur until morning. Let's just use this time to breathe." He was wondering if it was possible for him to be more afraid of her drinking the potion than she was.

"If we can leave now, why wait?" Lily asked.

In obvious avoidance of the question, she found that James's lips had met hers, stifling all thoughts that could have possibly wanted to flow from her lips. After all, her lips were a little busy right now. Almost as a reflex she returned the kiss, forgetting once more that a week ago she would have hexed someone for even suggesting that she kiss James.

Of course, he was rather addicting. Besides, kissing was better than worrying about potions and Shakespeare and … Wow, he was good at that.

In the course of the past couple of seconds James's hands had found their way to Lily's waist, pulling her closer to him. She thought that it would be impossible to move any closer to him but obviously he wanted to see if they could break more laws of physics. That or he was just really possessive. Either excuse was really plausible but if he kept up this kissing thing she really didn't mind.

It wasn't that she had ever thought about what it would be like to kiss James Potter, but when you reached a certain point in your life and find that at seventeen you've never had a "real kiss" you just start to wonder. It wasn't even until she had kissed him over the pages of some ragged books that she even could process the idea of kissing him. But ever since then it was like he had plagued her mind.

Running their last kiss through her mind had done nothing to match up the feel of his lips against her. While in theory the smashing of one's lips against another person's should have no butterflies in the stomach effect, it did. It was actually quite disgusting the more she thought about it. How could the one boy who had caused her to shout off tangents about the stupidest things cause her feel like some lovesick teenager?

Oh, right. She was a lovesick teenager, sans the love. It was just lust. Lust over his amazing lips. She had to repeat that a couple of times in her head before she was completely certain of it.

His lips moved over hers easily, sending the butterflies in her stomach into complicated flying patterns and painful dives. Lily had forgotten what they had even been talking about until the vial in her hand fell to the ground with the distinct sound of shattering glass. She and James broke apart and looked down at the mess of liquid and glass littering the floor. A look of horror crossed her face and she looked over to see that James was smirking a little.

"Oh, shut up," she swatted at him. "You weren't that good; I just didn't feel like holding the vial anymore." She knew that he wouldn't believe her excuse for her breath had caught as their only chance to escape absorbed into the hardwood floor.

Lily brought her hand to her mouth and bit at the nail of her thumb for a few seconds, trying to put together some sort of way to fix this problem James had caused. It really was his fault, she decided, because if he hadn't been running his tongue across her bottom lip in such a tantalizing way she wouldn't have lost her ability to hold on to things.

"We can just get more from Friar Lawrence, I'm sure he kept enough for us to use." James tried to reason, his own gaze fixed upon the shards of glass. He was sure that it wasn't that big of a deal but the mixture of amusement and fear from Lily's inability to hold on to the vial was causing him to lose himself in thought.

She shook her head, "No, we can't. You can't be seen in Verona. I can send Nurse to see if she can get some but I won't be able to go myself, James. Tomorrow is when they announce my impending marriage to Paris; the Capulets will be watching me like a hawk." She said. "What's the likelihood of Friar Lawrence even keeping the remaining potion? It's witchcraft and he could be hung for that here. Besides, that vial was supposed to contain enough to keep us from needing him again."

"There's go to be another way." James told her, looking at her as opposed to the shards of glass and remnants of potion.

With thoughts of more vials filled with sleeping draughts, poisons and deadly daggers, Lily nodded her head. "Yes, there has to be."

The silence that filled the room was stifling and Lily had to take a deep breath to calm herself. It shouldn't be that big of a deal, but this was their lives they were talking about, this was the line between reality and this Shakespearian suicide. Neither of she nor James were stupid enough to kill themselves but hadn't the play somehow worked around their reluctance to do things before?

"I need to lie down." She announced, settling herself down onto the canopy bed decorating Juliet's room. She looked up at the gauze coating the wooden frame before closing her eyes and trying to think of some way to find a loophole. Anything was welcome, a way to get more potion, a way to avoid killing herself, anything.

She was running a thousand scenarios through her head when she felt the bed shift under her body. Opening her eyes she found that James had situated himself on the bed beside her.

"What are you doing?" She asked him, lacking the venom that usually accompanied her questions of him.

"It's getting late," he explained, "and I sincerely doubt that I'll be able to find some place to sleep tonight without being discovered in Verona still." As he said the words the realization that the play was rewriting itself, that he had become the main character, hit once more. He was getting sick of the same epiphany over and over.

Lily nodded at his reasoning, "Okay." It wasn't like she could kick him out and force him to sleep on some rock in some unknown place and as there wasn't anything in the room that would provide a decent nights sleep, she couldn't see an alternative.

She looked up to the ceiling again to try and sort through her thoughts before she felt James's eyes still upon her. "Stop it." She ordered of him. He only shook his head in response.

"You have to stop worrying yourself to death. We're going to find some way out of this, just try and get some sleep, Lily." He requested.

James was met with a small sigh from her before she rolled over on to her side to make it more comfortable to sleep. He continued to watch her, unable to believe that this was really happening, that he was sharing a bed with Lily Evans. He was mesmerized by the steady rising and falling of her chest with every breath she took and the way that her hair and skirts fanned out around her body, encasing her in impending sleep. He watched her until his eyes grew heavy and sleep encompassed him as well, momentarily forgetting that tomorrow would be the beginning of the end.