July, 1981

The evening was still in the garden behind the cottage, the air warm on her bare arms. The moonless sky was darkly sprinkled with stars. She stood in the soft night-time greenness, listening. Her ears were trained for any sound or bump from within the house, muscles tense beneath her simple summer dress. She had no jacket or cloak, and wore no shoes. Vaguely, she enjoyed the feel of the grass beneath her bare feet. She walked through the garden and far out into the field that stretched behind their plot.

From where she stood she could look up through the distant trees of her garden and just see the unlit window of the room where her husband and son slept. She did not think of them but briefly as she cast a furtive glance around her before apparating away with a small 'pop!'

She reappeared in a small stark yard in the shadow of a neglected house, the red brick wall of the yard crumbling and the tendrils of tenacious weeds poking their sunstarved heads up through the cracks. She rapped at the door urgently and it opened just wide enough to admit her. A hand slipped out, blue-white in the gloom, and pulled her inside.

The kitchen was stuffy and dusty and the overhead lamp glowed dim above them, casting the room in a pathetic yellow light.

"I told you not to come," her lover scolded gently, drawing her gratefully into his arms.

"I had to," she breathed against his neck, into his long hair. It was a rather cruel irony that only years later, after she had broken their friendship and made him a bitter man, had she come to want him the way he had always wanted her. Her hunger for him frightened her, because the very nature of her desire was treacherous. "And you were expecting me anyway, weren't you?" She asked with a smile, pulling out of their embrace to look at him. His eyes were dark and liquid like spilled ink and expressive in the dim light, and she touched his cheek fondly with her fingertips.

"I was," he admitted. "And I'm glad to see you, but we can't risk this again. Not now."

She went to the shabby little kitchen table and sat herself down in one of the creaky old chairs there. He sat opposite of her across the table, his eyes taking her in hungrily.

"I wondered if you had any news." She said, and suddenly her even, pretty features were tense and drawn.

"None. I'm still waiting."

"I almost didn't come, but James and the baby fell asleep and I.." She stopped, having seen Severus recoil involuntarily at her husband's name, as though she had struck him. "Sev," she said, reaching for him across the table. She took his hand in hers. He met her eyes for a minute, but his gaze was sharp.

"Don't say his name to me," he breathed, but did not release her hand. It was a huge point of conflict between them, and Lily spent her times with Severus as though she had never married James or had his child. She had tried to talk to Severus about it, but they had fought terribly, and the vitriol and bitter rage that he had expressed towards James had shocked her, though in retrospect she saw why it shouldn't have.

It was no secret that Severus and James had been hateful rivals at school, and Lily knew that her place between the two of them had only worsened what had already been an ugly dislike of one another. She recalled the way James had strutted and shown off, the way he had jealously bullied and abused Severus to punish him for Lily's interest in him, the delight James took in his acts of cruelty. It had only made Severus darker, angrier and more willing to cross the line in order to exact some kind of retribution.

In the wee hours of the morning, when she lay at home awake beside a softly snoring James, guilty with the longing to go to Severus' bed, she would hear Sev's furious voice in her head, her mind replaying what he had said when they had fought so awfully. He had been agonized and angry, and had told her that James had stolen his chance at happiness, that she should be his wife, that it should have been his child that she had carried and nursed, that he would never be a whole person because of what James had taken from him. The naked expression of his misery haunted her, almost as much as the guilt she felt at her betrayal of James.

Lily sat for a long moment, looking at Severus. She loved him, it was true, but he made her uneasy, as well. He walked in dark places, had done bad magic, and now all the pretense he had upheld about not wanting to join up with Voldemort had fallen away for good and yet she wanted him, undeniably. The first time they made love, she had looked at the dark mark on his thin pale arm for a long time, torn between desire, pity, guilt and sadness. She screwed him desperately the first time, with a pain in her heart blooming like a flowery bloodstain. Afterward she knew that her rejection of Sev's friendship those years ago had pushed him on in to darker places just as much as James' torture and humiliation of Severus had. Perhaps she should have been stronger, should have been there for Severus, should have fought the darkness in Sev's heart with the light of her love, but she herself had been a different girl then, and not so uncanny as she was now.

The truth of it was, she needed his touch, she needed the devoted way he kissed her mouth and breasts, needed the tangle of his long fingers in her hair and the twisting of his tongue between her legs. She needed the information he made her privy to, that she could pass it on to the Order. There were parts of herself that she was not proud of, but that Severus knew well and accepted, parts of her that she was and always had been incapable of sharing with good-natured, easy-going James. James was not a fool, though she sometimes found his emotional responses to be somewhat simple and unsophisticated. Severus was both complex and complicated, and by loving him as she did, her guilt and covetousness were making her more complicated, as well.

"Take me to bed," she told him, and he smiled a little, a pointed, pleased-with-himself smile that she liked making appear on his features. She was hungry for his touch, for his body next to hers in bed, for the feel of his narrow hips pressing against her, his dark head laid upon her breast in exhausted aftermath. She stood up and went to stand before him. He put his hands on her hips and slid them up her back, unzipping her dress.