Each passing summer has added cracks and character to the Evans home. It feels familiar, standing in the waning yellow light of her bedroom window. It makes him feel young. All of the old posters have come down and there are stacks of brown boxes piled ceiling-high filled with her belongings - ragged editions of Keat's poetry and innumerable blue dresses and boxes of faded, laughing photos from her happy life. Lily is taping another box and a record plays some soft song that mingles with the sound of twilite in Severus's ears. Her hair is tied back in a sagging ponytale and she wears a loose sweater and shorts and she looks the sight of an adult. Severus wonders if he has changed so much - he still feels bony and pale and his hair is still the same length it's always been. He feels as though he doesn't change the way other people do. Once he might have counted his constance a proud point but as he ages he feels unsure a person was meant for just one kind of life.
Hogwarts is behind them, now, and he knows that they will live vastly different lives. He doesn't suppose he will ever see her again after tonight. He hopes he doesn't. With an old familiarity Lily glances out of her window and sees him. Her face doesn't change - she doesn't even move, at first. And then, slowly, with hesitation, she slides the window open and sits down on the floor to look at him. Her hands hang loose on the carpet, treaded with it's own memories of stains from muddy, dirty shoes clamoring inside - one particular rainstorm and Severus blinded with water, but that was a lifetime ago.
He isn't sure if he should wave or say hello or .. he doesn't know why he is there.
Her eyes drift over him, standing in the dark, and she smiles softly imagining that small boy in his ragged coats and bright eyes and all of the summer nights she had dragged him inside to listen to music and read books beyond their years. She wonders if it was her fault. She had hoped ending their friendship would bring Severus back to her fully, in the way he had once been. That he would understand where she was coming from, finally. But he had stayed his course as unswaying as he had ever been. Maybe she couldn't fault him for being himself, maybe she had been the naive one.
Her eyes drift down to his right arm, covered by a long black coat sleeve, and they stay there steadily. Tears exist, but they do not come this time - they've come too many times before. She wonders if Severus can imagine how many nights James has had to hold her and tell her to be strong.
Severus shifts his weight at her knowing look, tugs the sleeve down further, consciously. Her eyes come back up to his face.
"I'm moving into The Orders house tomorrow, Sev." She says. The familiarity of the shortened name strikes her, seems odd finally. That was a name for another time. "Severus," she corrects.
He knows. The Order was a high watch factor among the Death Eaters. He had seen her name as a current applicant the week before.
"Tomorrow we are enemies, you and I." Her voice is far away, thinking of the things she knows about the pale boy standing in front of her. Of the hidden Dark Mark and what a wizard had to do to get the Mark from him. She might have felt pity but .. seeing Severus's name on the Orders list... something final had died, whatever she had spared to feel for him in the future. But that is what Severus had wanted, wasn't it? What could he have hated more than her tides of pity after their friendship had ended? He had wanted her to hate him if she wouldn't love him. He was always curious with his absolutes. But she had loved him. She had. In her own way.
The inside wall by the window has a large gouge in the sheetrock that Lily fingers reflectively. Pentunia had thrown one of Lily's porecelain figuerines at the two of them as they sat huddled under a blanket with cookies and a flashlight and told one another ghoststorries with the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling shining through. She had been so jealous of what Lily and Severus had had.
"I'll never be your enemy, Lily," he whispers.
She smiles. The war is coming. She wonders if she could revisit the past if she would hear it beating with Severus's heart.
When they had gotten to those lanky, awkward ages they couldn't be close enough. The hot stick of summer nights wrapped in close to one another, Severus's hands always touching her, his fingertips hesitant and respectful. She knows now he'd have never drugged her - had known it the second it had slipped out of her mouth that night. She regrets how naive her maturity had been in coming, how her pride had kept her from admitting it, and how stubborn Severus had been to forget it. She knows that some things were as much her fault as his. She knows she had ruined some trusts.
She knows, too, that it's time to say goodbye.
"Goodluck, out there, Sev." She uses the shorthand version for swollen bruises and dirty knees, for his fingers wound into hers during so many years of their lives. For all of the detentions he had served to sneak out of the dungeons and meet her when she needed him. For their secret languages (entire notebooks filled with words only the two of them would understand). For sweaty skin and book clubs and the Yuletide Ball that Lily had forced him to attend with her (and, really, he was a terrible dancer). Because they had loved one another the same, in the end, but it wasn't enough.
Severus stares at her without wavering.
The Dark Mark burns in his skin and he knows he is being summoned.
"If I could do it all again, differently.."
She knows.
"I know."
"Lily, honey, an owl just came from James!" her mother calls from somewhere deep in the house. Lily glances backwards.
Severus touches his wand against the mark and is gone when she turns back around.
Lily rests her head on the windowsill, picking at the peeling paint. The last colors of the sky travel: amber, rose, gold. The memory of them stretches out, somehow, until it is the country all around, vast and empty, echoes in courtyards and shadows on walls. Through the years it drifts, fading, fighting extinction, the two of them laughing together in the tangles of time. Important things reduced down to a few inky drops in a pensieve for others to figure out, and learn from, and reconcile.