Monday January 6th, 1975

Lily took her customary seat next to Severus in Potions class that morning, stuffing her bag under her stool and pulling her seat closer to the table. "I looked for you yesterday after lunch," He whispered.

"I was reading mostly," she whispered back. "Plus, I had to help a friend with her charms homework."

Lily had stayed in bed until noon reading 'Amorestmorta' before going down to lunch. When she returned to the Gryffindor common room, she had helped Mary with her homework (Lily was a dab hand at charms), before snuggling into an armchair to read another few chapters in her book. After dinner, she went to her dormitory and thought about what to give to Severus' for his birthday present.

Severus nodded and leaned forward in his seat, ignoring Slughorn as he droned on about the trio of healing draughts that were commonly administered as treatment during medical procedures and after surgeries (Draught of Vitality, Draught of Wellness, and the Draught of Healing).

Severus was making annotations in his copy of 'Adavanced Potion Making'- The instructions for Draught of Vitality printed in the book were appalling in their deviations from the accepted standard method for brewing it.

He crossed out the 'four' in 'four (4) sprigs mint', quill scratching, and added a '6' above it. He and Lily had brewed this particular potion last year over Christmas break when they had both gone home for the holiday, been bored and missing being able to do magic every day, and Lily got an awful cold.

They had long ago discovered that if they cast no spells over their potions, the act of brewing a potion itself did not violate the restrictions placed on under-aged magic, and since they had been in school they had cooked up all kinds of things over the years: cooling potions for hot summer days, warming potions for cold ones, dreamless sleep potions to get rid of nightmares, potions that caused uncontrollable laughter, potions for memory, potions that let you see in the dark, and potions that changed the color of your hair. Lily had been delighted when Severus' hair had turned blue in their third year. Severus, however, had not been delighted at all, but horrified, and promptly spent the rest of the afternoon brewing a counter-potion. By the time he was finished, his hair had already turned dark again on its own."That was the worst potion we've ever brewed," he had told her seriously. Lily had just laughed and laughed.

"You may begin," Slughorn was concluding. Severus set aside his copy of 'Advanced Potion Making' before lighting the fire beneath his cauldron. Next to him, Lily was fishing her bottles, vials, and jars of ingredients out of her bag. The potions lab was full of the sound of stools scraping the stone, quiet talk, and people rummaging around for their things.

"You were right about that book, by the way," Lily told him as she lit her fire and arranged all her ingredients on the table in the order she would need them in.

"In what way?" He asked, pulling his own ingredients out of his bag.

"It is a bit girly, at some parts." Lily said.

"That's not very feminist of you, Lily," He said, firing her own words from the other day back at her. A bright peal of her laughter rang out through the classroom.

At the sound of this, James, who had been occupied talking to Sirius about the map up to that point, looked over sharply at them.

"I don't get what she sees in him," James later complained, crunching up his dried beetle eyes irritably in a mortar and pestle and dumping them haphazardly into his cauldron.

"Maybe you should just ask her out," Sirius said. He usually took a less complicated approach to dating.

Across the room, Lily and Severus were brewing from the same book, their heads bent close together as Lily's finger traced the instructions on the page. Severus said something quietly, close to her ear, and she laughed again, this time covering her mouth with her hand in an attempt to stifle herself.

"Yeah," James said, suddenly puffing up with confidence. "Yeah, I will."

He watched Severus and Lily together for a few minutes more, dumping his four sprigs of mint into his cauldron in a hurried fashion and giving it a careless stir, before standing up and heading towards the table that Lily and Severus were working at across the room.

Severus was sitting on his stool, making notes in 'Advanced Potion Making' and talking to Lily about the second phase of brewing Amorestmorta. "The potion will be done on the 25th, but it will have to age another two days before we can add the soil and the heart.."

Lily kicked Severus hard in the ankle under the table to shut him up, and Severus looked up from his book to see James Potter standing there, looking at Severus intently. So they were brewing a potion together, after all, James thought, a potion that included dirt and the heart of.. something.

"Potter." Lily said, somewhat coldly. Severus stared at him, dark eyes shooting daggers.

"Listen, Evans, I was thinking maybe sometime I could get you a Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks. What do you say?"

Lily looked at him like he was crazy, and was so surprised that she simply didn't say anything for a minute. Severus returned her kick under the table.

"I don't think so," She said airily, coming back to herself. "I don't date bullies. Now, If you'll excuse us, we're trying to brew our potions."

"Maybe we could talk somewhere in private," James suggested pointedly, and looked at Severus as though he were a bit of muck that might be on the bottom of his shoe.

"I don't want to talk to you, Potter, now go away." Lily said firmly. She turned and looked at Severus, pulling his copy of 'Advanced Potion Making' towards her across the table and appearing to take great interest in it. James stared in loathing at Severus for a moment, who was smirking and looking just as pleased as he possibly could.

"You heard her, Potter. Leave us alone." Severus said, shooing him away with a small gesture of his hand. Severus took immense satisfaction in being able to tell Potter to piss off. James was immediately angry that Severus was the one sitting beside her, sharing his book with her, making her laugh. James turned on his heel and headed back to the table he was sharing with Sirius, Lily watching him go.

"That was brutal," Sirius said sympathetically.

"Shut up," James muttered miserably. His cauldron was softly smoking- he had burned his potion.

Later, in History of Magic, Lily and Severus sat at the back of the classroom where they could talk, Severus having covertly cast a charm he had invented over the two of them, something he had come up with only recently, a spell called Muffliato.

"Can you believe Potter?" Severus asked in a mocking tone.

"Ugh, I wanted to throttle him," Lily said. "It's just my luck that he would be interested in me like that. He thinks he's entitled to everything. I wouldn't go with him if he were the last wizard on earth."

Severus wanted to ask if she would go with him, instead, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He found he had been pushing himself closer and closer to the brink of broaching this subject with her, inching ever nearer to an inevitability he both wanted and feared. He had already missed lots of good opportunities to tell her how he felt, and on some days he was certain she must feel the same, other days he could only go as far as to assure himself that if Lily didn't like him at least a little bit, she wouldn't hang around with him all the time. He had to do it soon, he knew that much. Not today, of course, but maybe tomorrow.

"What do you think, Sev?" Lily was saying.

Tomorrow would be the day, he decided. Tomorrow for sure.

Lily tugged his sleeve gently and he turned to look at her. "What do I think about what?" He said.

"About your birthday!" Lily said. "You weren't even listening!" She laughed. "I was saying we should actually do something on Thursday. I know you "don't care about birthdays because they're just an arbitrary holiday," but you only turn fifteen once and we should live a little."

"Alright," He agreed. A pleased, surprised smile caught up the corners of his mouth that stayed with him the rest of the day.

That night after dinner, Lily went to her dorm room and set to work on Sev's present.

Originally she had wanted to brew him something, but this idea fell by the wayside as she waffled back and forth between ideas on what to brew and the actual date of his birthday drew nearer. She had felt at a loss and had briefly considered giving him her vial of Draught of Living Death (Sev was fascinated by poisons), but it didn't seem appropriate for a birthday gift, as it was something he was perfectly capable of brewing himself.

Finally, around eleven the previous night, she had had a stroke of genius. She had been looking through a book she had on the charming and enchantment of objects when she came across a small charm for making pairs of communicator objects that could be enchanted to deliver a message that another person had sent. This, Lily had thought, was a great idea, but not very practical, as it wouldn't work very well to have to carry around a charmed object that you had to speak in to, or one that was constantly announcing your private conversations.

It would be better, she reasoned, if they had a pair of two-way books that she could charm to send written messages back and forth to one another. Lily had suddenly been inspired, and had gone to her trunk and began to dig through it purposefully. Each year her Father had given her a weekly calendar on September 1st before she got on the Hogwarts Express, but she had only ever used one of them, and she knew she had kept at least two extra when she had cleaned out her trunk at the end of last year.

She had dug to the very bottom of the trunk and seized on a pair of little books. She pulled them up from the mire of chocolate frog cards, empty potions bottles, dried lavender that had somehow gotten out of the sachet, and various wadded-up papers and dusted them off.

One book was pink with bright daisies marching across its front, another was blue but had hearts.

"Well, that won't do," She had said to herself thoughtfully. She reached for her wand and had executed a wide flourishing swish and flick. The blue book was then black, its smattering of baby blue hearts gone. The the pink book had changed to a deep blue. Nice and innocuous.

Lily went to her bedside stand and took the two books out. She looked at them as she thought about how she might go about enchanting them to send messages between them. She was sure the spellwork was within her capability, but she wasn't sure where to begin.

She picked up the black book and flipped open the cover. Weekly Planner for the 1971 Calendar Year, it said. On one side, there was a place to write your name, address, and phone number, and on the other was a chart illustrating the week, where you could write your schedule into the time slots. She turned the page. The next two pages were a calendar of the week of January first through the seventh, laid out in neat little squares.

Setting the black book back down beside the blue, she lifted her wand and began to cast a complex charm over them both, ensuring whatever might be written in the books would not appear in the book that it had been written in, but rather in its companion volume. This many long minutes of unbroken concentration, and when she was finished, she cast another charm that guaranteed that any words written would vanish only after they had been seen by the owner of the book, a tricky feat considering she then had to enchant the books to recognize when they had been picked up by someone other than their owner. As a precautionary measure, she then cast a separate charm on each book book so they would appear as blank, ordinary weekly planners to anyone whose name wasn't Lily Evans or Severus Snape, a clever magical technicality she had learned from Professor Flitwick, the charms instructor, last year.

Around midnight, after several hours of casting 'just in case' jinxes, she got out her ink and quill and prepared to test them. Opening both books to the second page, she dipped her quill and made a wet, blotty mark of ink on the page of the blue book. Lily watched it bleed into the parchment, fade, and then disappear all together. A moment later the same blob of wet ink faded into being and appeared on the second page of the black book. She stared at it for a moment before it, too, disappeared. Elated, she took the black book and repeated this process, sending sloppily written test words back and forth to make sure the books were working as they should. Around one in the morning, she put the books back in her bedside stand, and went to bed.