Author's Note: I don't own the song referenced within, of course. And it was actually released in 1978, so, strictly speaking, it shouldn't exist in this fic. But you'll see why I had to keep it. It was too good to miss.

Long-distance virtual hug to swiftlystarlit for being 110 percent there with me on this one.

Shazam!

CHAPTER FIVE

Tempting

The Three Broomsticks was pretty much empty at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning, since the Hogwarts crowd generally didn't flock to Hogsmeade until lunchtime. In addition, Rosmerta usually had errands to run to prepare for the noon rush, which made the little pub a perfect temporary Marauder headquarters.

Usually there was a lot of laughter and a little too much butterbeer. Today the lack of levity pressed hard against Remus's ears. He worried away at a bit of something stuck to the counter and applied his cleaning rag liberally to every surface that looked like it remotely needed wiping. He was on his shift, after all. And it was a good excuse not to look at the three boys sitting silently at a table nearby.

It was James who mustered up the will to break the silence. "I just didn't want anyone to get hurt," he said.

"And you were right not to," Sirius responded equably, promptly, as if he had been waiting for an opportunity to speak the words. He plucked a wrapper off of the table and crinkled it between his thumb and his forefinger. Lupin couldn't help but feel disappointed in whoever had closed up last night--he wouldn't have let that slip. "If dear Snivellus had been injured and lived to tell the tale, we'd have been in deep shit. And if he hadn't lived, we'd have been in even deeper."

"I understand the temptation to try," James conceded quietly.

"Perhaps temptation exists," Sirius remarked, watching the light spark off of the plastic in his hand, "solely for us to find the strength to resist it."

"You sound like a fortune cookie," Peter decided. When Sirius and James gave him nothing more than a matching pair of blank expressions, he sighed. "It's a Muggle thing. Chinese food. Y'know."

Remus smiled behind his hand.

Right on cue, just as the minute hand of the clock on the wall racheted up to mark high noon, a large group of students funneled in through the door. Rosmerta hadn't yet returned, and Remus was beset on all sides by orders and demands, calls for some item or another that emanated first from one side of the room and then from the other. At least, he reflected, it was good exercise.

By twelve-fifteen, the chaos had abated enough for Remus to lean against the counter and survey his handiwork. It was then that he noticed that Lily Evans and Noelle Cook, a pretty Ravenclaw girl with ringlets the color of melted chocolate, had joined his friends. Noelle, of course, was flirting with Sirius, who flirted right back, and Lily had mustered up another list of tasks for James to review. James was in the process of reviewing her eyebrows, by the look of things. Remus found it rather amusing that James hadn't figured out that Lily came up with lists specifically so that he would have to put his face next to hers and look at them. James was probably the only person who hadn't figured it out.

The bell on the door jingled before his half-idea about very pointedly setting a single drink with two straws in front of them could fully form, and he looked up. Had he been facing the mirror, he would have seen a bit of color leach from his face.

As the knot of Slytherins oozed in, the other patrons paused, looked, and then recommenced their conversations at a lower volume, moving a little bit closer together. Remus saw Severus in the middle of the group, sliding through them like vinegar over oil. And Remus knew that, whatever else there was to say about him, Severus Snape did not belong there, lumped in with the thugs and the murderers. He was better than that.

Or so Remus hoped. Naïveté was one of his failings.

Severus's midnight black eyes panned over the scene calmly until they lighted on the glint of coppery hair that betrayed Lily Evans's presence. Then they narrowed precipitously until they were little more than dark slits. Severus glanced at James. He glanced at Remus. He glanced at his friends--or, rather, his cohorts. Then he glanced at Sirius, pursed his lips, and began to whistle loudly.

If you'd selected a dozen Sixth Year Hogwarts students at random and asked them which of their peers could whistle fit to knock them off their feet, none of them would have guessed Severus Snape. But, as the congregation within the Three Broomsticks was fast discovering, it was him.

It was an astonishing sound, high and clear, and at first Remus only listened with a muddled emotion that his mind puzzled out to be something in the area of grudging admiration.

Then he focused more closely on the tune, and he realized that it was a song that Peter had played for them just weeks ago, laughing all the while at the glorious irony: "Werewolves of London," by Warren Zevon.

Sirius was already leaping to his feet, a frown cutting into his face, splashed across his aristocrat's features like a stain, and Peter and James grabbed an arm each and jerked him back down into his chair. Remus felt himself coloring, felt his cheeks going hot, and he wished they wouldn't, because Noelle Cook was setting bright blue eyes on him right at that moment; he could just see them at the edge of his vision, and he wished she wouldn't pick now; he just wanted a hole in the ground to open up beneath him, and he could be buried alive there, which was slightly preferable to drowning, and Sirius and James would throw flowers at each other at his funeral--

Riding a wave of pure willpower, he forced himself to smile politely at the newcomers and ask them if he could get them anything.

"Doubtful," Severus commented, his lip curling. "It would probably be contaminated."

Remus chose not to hear the words; chose not to feel the barbs pierce his skin; chose not to let the venom slither through his veins. Maintaining his cordial smile, he drew the wet rag over the counter in a wide, sweeping circle.

"Well," he said, "thank you for stopping by."

Severus looked like he wanted to spit on the floor and was refraining from doing so only because it was beneath his dignity. He contented himself with following the others out.

Darkly, Sirius strung together a series of expletives to describe the interruption. James looked pained, Lily looked frustrated, Noelle looked at Sirius, and Peter--well, Peter was looking at Remus and shrugging helplessly.

In lieu of any better response, Remus shrugged back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Remus fought to stay awake. He had started out sitting on the couch in the common room with some homework spread on his lap. Gradually he had slipped and sunk and shifted until he was really just lying down, the book sprawled over his chest like a favorite pet, his quill dangling precariously from the unsteady grip of a few listless fingers. Gravity was making a pretty solid case for the surrender of his eyelids.

Or it was until Sirius's rook hit him squarely in the side of the head.

"Getting a wee bit sleepy, Remus, my boy?" Sirius inquired cheerfully, his cheeky grin a mile wide.

"Not anymore," he groaned, trying to move. The quill bounced to the carpet, spattering ink everywhere.

"Look what you've made him do!" James protested indignantly. He was grinning, too. "Da poor baby's dwopped his wittle quilly, and it's all your fault!"

Peter moved a bishop, breathless with laughter. Promptly Sirius took it, his eyes lit from within.

"The perfect distraction," he drawled contentedly.

Alternately rubbing his head and trying to dab the ink out of the rug with his tattered handkerchief, Remus grinned at him ruefully. "Might I request a pawn next time?"

"Permission to request prospective weaponry denied," Sirius responded.

James rolled his eyes. "That's not very nice of you, Sergeant Black."

Sirius threw Peter's bishop at him. James shouted and tried to twist out of the way, but he wasn't fast enough, and the tiny, soaring figure rebounded neatly off of his chest.

"Scoundrel!" James cried indignantly. "Cad! Rapscallion!"

Gazing into space in mock pensiveness, Sirius weighed another captured piece meaningfully, turning it over in his fingers. "What do you think, Corporal Pettigrew?" he asked. "Shall I smash those pretentious little spectacles of his next?"

Though he drew himself up loftily, James looked a little too harried for his next proclamation to be convincing. "I," he declared imperiously, "am above this frivolous flippancy." He stalked up to the dorm and stalked back down again momentarily with a canvas bag thrown over his shoulder. When he paused to cast a haughty glance at them over his shoulder, Sirius raised an eyebrow--and a hand laden with a new projectile. Making a face, James darted out the portrait hole and slammed it safely shut behind him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James loved the prefect bathroom. Really, though. How could you not?

He found the faucet with the lavender bubbles and turned it on full-blast.

"Back so soon?" the mermaid in the painting crooned, watching him through her eyelashes.

"You know me," James replied, grinning, as he shrugged off his shirt and dropped it onto the pile of his clothing. He folded his glasses and tossed them on top. "I'm a dirty boy."

It was on the way back, with his hair dripping and everything smelling of lavender, that he heard the soft, muffled sobbing. Pausing, he turned, looking around, droplets spraying wildly in all directions, until he narrowed the source of the sound to the place just behind the statue at his right, a statue of a stern, scholarly-looking man that someone had crowned with a daisy chain. In its shadow a figure huddled, the figure of a girl with her knees pulled up against her chest, her head bowed low, her visage hidden in her hands. When he knelt carefully and put a hand gently on the trembling shoulder, the face it belonged to lifted.

It was Lily Evans.

Tears streaked her cheeks like rain down a windowpane.

"Wh--" he began.

With one arm, she rubbed at her face with her sleeve, and her free hand thrust at him a piece of paper folded in half.

Disoriented, he opened it, and the newspaper clipping inside fluttered as he caught a breath. Three Muggles Dead; One Missing, this one proclaimed. Beneath it, in a cruel travesty of a finger-painting, someone had written messily in what looked like sludge, You're next, Mudblood.

A tidal wave of rage rose in James's chest, burning, roaring, seeking release, and his eyes searched the words again, willing them to disappear, trying to incinerate them and erase them from existence.

Then Lily heaved a racking sob, and the fight went out of him. Desolately he sat down on the floor at her side, pushing the loathsome parchment away, and put both arms around her.

"It'll be okay," he whispered, barbed wire coiling around his heart. "Somehow..."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Dark Lord had seen his potential - had seen how intelligent he was, how committed and how diligent. And why shouldn't Severus Snape put all of himself into everything he attempted? He had nothing to lose. And so the Dark Lord had offered him a place, as no one else had ever seen fit to do, and had expressed his approval and his high hopes, which was an even rarer event. Severus had vacillated and asked for some time to evaluate the idea properly, and the Dark Lord had granted him that mercy. A man whose face he hadn't seen had murmured in his ear a caveat - a warning that the Dark Lord did not smile upon ambivalence.

Well, it didn't take a genius to figure that one out. Who did?

Still, days later, the chill of the encounter fading quickly, Severus wavered. It was tempting. The Dark Lord had given him a promise - a promise that he would never be stepped on again. He knew that it was the only thing Severus wanted, the only thing he craved at his core. That was where the Dark Lord's true power was--in his promises.

The man--if you could call something so cold, so pale, and so soulless a man--had asked for him, had sought him out. Surely this was it, this was the moment at which the world had decided at last to treat him kindly. Surely this was the beginning of a new trend, of a new life, of a new generousness from fate's and from chance's machinations, from their cruel dual contrivances, from their pitiless whims. Surely this was the doorway to happiness... That was another of their sneering jokes, wasn't it? As if Severus Snape knew what the word "happiness" meant.

He knew that that was a lie. He knew.

And he knew, Severus Snape knew as well as anyone, as well as any chin-raising, self-aggrandizing Gryffindor, the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes it wasn't clear-cut, wasn't black and white, wasn't easy to see. This time it was. Nevertheless the darkness was tempting. He couldn't give in to that temptation. That was what everyone expected of him, wasn't it? How could he give them that satisfaction, that chance to gloat, seeing him fall into their lazily assured predictions? How could he turn his back on what he knew was the good? What would she--

And Severus smiled, a small, thin, brittle, endlessly horrible smile. It didn't matter. It would never matter again, because she wouldn't care. Didn't care. Would never care.

He was resolved.