Chapter 2 - Summer Nights

On a small, deserted playground on the outskirts of London, Lily Evans was doing her very best to avoid her family. As the evening stretched on, the light grew too dim for reading, leaving her to sit on one of the rusty old swings, rocking back and forth without much enthusiasm.

Ditching her copy of 'Confronting the Faceless' on the gravel underneath her feet and wishing she was allowed to cast a simple lumos spell without being expelled, she twisted the metal chains around each other carelessly, watching them clink together and fall back to their usual place. It was still warm and early enough for Lily to be comfortable in her white sundress and thin cardigan, but the idea of going back to the house and having to sit with the repulsive boy her sister had brought home was distinctly unpleasant. Really, he was the furthest thing from the rest of the family that Lily could imagine, and she was certain, despite not being close to her sister these days, that he was no good for Petunia. He was loud, brash and over confident about subjects he knew very little about. Lily didn't like the way he looked down his nose at her as if he knew something she didn't: as if Petunia had told him everything.

At the sound of a metal gate squeaking open, she looked up hurriedly, ready to hide the magic book from any curious muggles, but her anxiety was needless; the boy shuffling towards her was definitely not a muggle, nor had he ever quite mastered the skill of dressing like one. Lily watched him approach, feeling the beginning of a headache already nagging at her temples. He sat down on the swing beside her, gazing at the floor and kicking up gravel.

"I went around to yours," Snape said, not looking at Lily. "That great muggle was there again – he looks just like you said, like a bulldog snarling at you."

Lily turned to look at Snape – he seemed ghostly pale, even in the low light, as if he hadn't left the house all summer. Lily supposed he might not have, considering how little time the two of them had been spending together. Of all the witches and wizards she knew, he was the only one who looked so utterly out of place in the muggle world, like it made him ill.

"Severus…"

"I know you don't want to talk to me," he interrupted, finally dragging his eyes off the ground, "I just… I keep telling you, I didn't mean what I said."

Lily shook her head. "If you didn't mean it then why-"

"It was Potter! You saw what he did, and I panicked. I didn't mean to call you that."

"Why not?" Lily demanded, anger flaring up. "Don't you think I've heard what you and your little friends go around calling muggleborns? If them, why not me?"

"You're different," Snape said defiantly. He was staring at her fully now, eyes wide and pleading as he watched Lily shake her head.

"No." She stood up, backing away from him, "I grew up right here, Severus – in the muggle world. My family are muggles – I love muggles. I don't want your special treatment just because we used to be friends."

"Used to be?" Snape repeated flatly.

"Yes. You made your choice, Sev; I may be muggleborn but I still read the papers and you're the one who's going to be on the wrong side of all this."

"But Lily," he said, standing up and darting forward to grab her arm, his long oversized coat dragging across the ground, "I don't care about your blood status – I told you that the first time we met, it doesn't matter!"

Lily ripped her arm away from him. "Tell that to the Hufflepuff who was in the hospital wing for a week after your little gang hexed him."

"I had nothing to do with that."

"You were there. He was a second year and you don't even think they were wrong to do it, do you? Some friends you've got there. "

"I-"

"James Potter may be an arrogant arse at times but he's nothing compared to what you've been like this past year. I can't ignore that anymore."

She turned around, striding towards the gate and forcing herself not to look back to see if her words had had any effect.

"He's like a bullying child!" Snape shouted after her, "he's probably doing something stupid as we speak!"

"Unlike you? Chasing after someone who wants nothing to do with you?" She slammed the gate behind her, cutting off Snape's words with the sound of clanging metal.

James had got out of going to dinner with some overly-friendly relatives who would insist on telling him how much he'd grown since he'd seen them last summer (three inches, to be precise – he'd had a growth spurt) by saying how boring it would have been for Sirius. His mum had looked sceptical and suggested that being around more people might bring him out of the somewhat quiet, distant mood he'd been in since he'd arrived, but James had insisted that family gatherings were currently Sirius' least favourite thing and were to be avoided at all costs. And now, an hour after his parents had stepped into the green flames of the fireplace, they were celebrating an evening free from parental supervision by getting completely hammered.

They had gone out into the garden, since James was all too familiar with Sirius' tendency to break things when drunk, usually by curiously picking up something he liked the look of and then promptly forgetting it was in his hand and dropping it. When they had first sat down on the grass and cracked open their drinks, the sky had cast a warm, pinkish glow over them, but since then the sun had ducked beneath the horizon, leaving them in darkness.

One of the great things about James' house was that it was isolated enough for them to be able to do as they please without fear of annoying the neighbours, but not too desolate that they were miles away from the city. It was so unlike Grimmauld Place, where the towering houses and constantly smoking chimneys had only served to make Sirius feel more and more trapped.

"This was definitely one of your better ideas, Prongs," Sirius grinned from a low hung branch of the old oak by the Potter's flower garden. He generally didn't considered himself a country person, but by the time he'd had half a bottle of fire whiskey, he'd realised that tree climbing was his true calling in life and he would never again live in a place without trees. "Where'd you get the whiskey from, anyway?"

"Left over from last year." James replied from where he was lying on the grass with one hand behind his head and the other still clutching the whiskey bottle. "Nicked them from that Ravenclaw who fell asleep in our dorm. And I'll have you know that all of my ideas are fantastic."

"Of course," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. "I particularly liked the one that landed us all in detention. Which one was that again?" He grabbed a fistful of leaves from the tree and flung them down in James' direction. "Oh wait, that's all of your ideas."

"Well yeah, all the best ideas involve bending a rule or two." James said, rolling to the side to avoid the worst of the leaves. He sat up and lifted his bottle as an example. "We wouldn't end up in detention if we didn't take credit for our genius, but where's the fun in that?"

"Probably in the not getting grilled by McGonagall," Sirius laughed.

He slid down from the branch as quickly as his trousers would allow, grabbing his own bottle of whiskey from where he'd left it beside James' head and holding it up in a mock salute before taking a swig.

"Merlin, Pads, you're standing in mum's flowers." James grabbed Sirius' trouser leg to drag him away from the flower garden. Grinning, he added, "If you trample her lilies you'll be kicked out of the house by morning."

"Oh, not the lilies!" Sirius replied in mock horror, flopping down onto the grass beside James. "Did you plant those yourself Jamesy? Do they remind you of your One True Love?" he threw one hand across his forehead dramatically, sloshing whiskey down his shirt with the sudden movement.

James elbowed him in the ribs. "I didn't make a flower shrine for her in my back garden, right, I'm not that much of a prick."

"Hmm," Sirius half agreed, shoving away James' arm. He'd never been particularly fond of lilies, they smelt like cat piss and made his nose tickle. If James' mum liked them though...

He pushed his hair back out of his eyes and stared up at the darkening sky. He could actually see the stars here, unlike in the smog of the city, where even when he escaped to the roof, the sky was more often than not shielded behind cloud, even in the summer.

When Sirius didn't say anything else, James turned his head towards him, but in the dark he couldn't see his expression. "Hey," he said, his voice low even though there was no one else there to hear them. "You've gone quiet. Either you're so drunk you think that stargazing is fun, or you're thinking about...you know, family stuff."

"Can't stargaze without thinking about my lot, can I?" Sirius said, turning his head towards James. He was smiling, but it didn't meet his eyes. "I'm fine mate, really."

James chewed his lip, choosing his words carefully before he spoke. "It's good if you're fine, but...you don't have to be, you know? You can be upset or angry - or whatever. That's okay."

"I just wish things were different," Sirius said, glancing at James before taking a swig from his bottle. "Not just for me but for Reg and Andromeda and my uncle Alphard. Not that I don't like it here," he added quickly, patting James knee with a little more force than necessary. "But you can be a bit of a pain, Potter. Even if you do supply decent booze."

James smirked. "I always knew you were using me to get to my alcohol. But for real," he said, "things are different now. You – you got away. So did Andromeda and I guess your uncle too. Regulus might too, one day, but that's up to him."

Lily was furious. Each footstep sounded like a drum beat in her head as she hurried towards home, hoping that Snape had sense enough not to follow her. The darkness had come on suddenly, and the other peaceful houses on the street, with their safely drawn curtains and their perfectly cut shrubbery pissed Lily off. It was unfair, she thought bitterly, for Snape to act like the victim when he was clearly the one in the wrong. Lily disliked James Potter 80% of the time, but she knew his attacks on her former friend weren't completely random. Severus had always hated James and Sirius just as venomously as they had hated him, and he hadn't minded sending plenty of hexes their way to show it.

She made it to the corner of her street, pulling her cardigan tighter against the sudden chill in the air, when she heard Snape call out her name.

"Lily! Lily, wait," he gasped when he caught up with her, a hand on the stitch in his side as he walked quickly to keep up. "Look, I know you never liked the other Slytherins, but you were always friends with me regardless. I don't understand why that's changed."

Grateful to reach her front yard, Lily paused and turned around. Snape looked downright pathetic with his oversized muggle attire and mournful expression.

"If you can't even see the problem then it's not worth the effort to try to explain it to you," she said, anger abating into something quieter, something more like dread. "I don't want you coming here anymore."

"But we've been friends for five years," he said indignantly. In the darkening evening, his eyes looked blacker than ever, but below them his mouth was pinched together, like he was trying to hide his emotions. "You can't just end it all of a sudden."

Lily shook her head, struggling to hold back a laugh at how ridiculous she felt having to justify herself. Behind her she could hear muffled speech through the front door – probably Petunia saying goodbye to Vernon. His car was still in the drive, right beside where Snape was standing. She briefly wondered how long it would take the two of them to murder each other if she were to leave them alone for any period of time. Her sister's boyfriend was everything Snape hated about muggles, and although Petunia was forbidden from telling anyone about her magic, Lily got the distinct impression that Vernon would be less than approving.

"We've both changed since we were eleven," she said finally. The shadow of her words, unspoken but still heard, that he had changed – and not for the better. "If you change your mind about the kind of people you want to spend your time with, then maybe we can talk."

She turned to head inside, not wanting to give Snape a chance to respond, just as Vernon Dursley opened the front door, almost colliding with her.

Lily slid around him into the house, stopping only to look at her sister, whose face was scrunched up into a most unflattering expression, as if the very sight of Snape left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

"What's he doing here?" she asked loudly, probably wanting to make it clear to Vernon that she disapproved of someone as poorly-dressed as Snape. "He hangs around too often."

"For once," Lily sighed, "I have to agree with you."

She didn't wait to see if Snape left. The sound of Petunia's gushed goodbyes to Vernon followed her up the stairs to her bedroom, where she promptly collapsed onto the bed.

The front door eventually closed and Lily listened to her sister's footsteps on the stairs, then the landing, stopping momentarily outside her bedroom door as if she were about to knock. Lily stared at the door, not sure whether she wanted to talk or not, especially when things between her and Petunia had been so strained. Then the footsteps moved away, and her sister's bedroom door clicked shut, leaving Lily alone.

James held the empty fire whiskey bottle up in front of his face and stared at it. It looked a little blurry, so he reached a hand up to touch the bridge of his nose; his glasses were definitely still there. "We're out of alcohol," he declared loudly.

Sirius looked up from where he was lying on his stomach, plucking bits of grass from the lawn and twirling them between his fingers. He wasn't sure what time it had gotten to, just that the distant glow of light from James' neighbours' windows had disappeared, and the moon was high in the sky above them. It was still fairly warm, whether from the lingering sunshine or the buzz of alcohol, he wasn't sure. With sudden inspiration, he jumped to his feet, declared that he had an idea, and staggered towards the house.

"Pads?" James called after him as Sirius disappeared through the back door, where light still shone from inside, a rectangle of brightness against the dark. He considered following him, but the grass he was sitting on was very comfortable and he didn't really feel like getting up. Luckily, he was saved the effort of moving by Sirius' reappearance in the doorway a minute later. In his arms was something about the size of a shoebox, with a thin metal stick pointing out of the top, and as Sirius got closer James noticed that it was covered in buttons and dials.

Sirius set it down in front of him, grinning, as James raised his eyebrows. "I'm probably going to regret asking," he said, his voice a little slurred, "But what exactly is this?"

"It's brilliant," was Sirius' reply.

He tumbled to the ground beside James, crossing his legs and leaning forward just enough so as to not over-balance while he fiddled with the contraption.

"It's a radio, but different to Wizarding ones – got it off a muggle in London last summer, didn't I? It runs off these things called batteries – I think we did about them in muggle studies but I don't remember exactly how they works."

He pulled the stick on the top of the box, making it longer and longer, much to James' amusement.

At first, all the boys could here was a buzzing, static sound, but as Sirius moved the dials around, words and melodies started to come through, filling the night with the music of muggle artists.

"I listened to it every day before I came here, used to piss my mum right off."

After deeming the radio signal adequate, Sirius sat back on the grass, looking regretfully at his empty bottle of whiskey. He felt James shift beside him, obviously curious of the radio as the song started up. It was a bit fuzzy to start with, but once the chorus started, they could make out most of the lyrics. From what James could gather, the song was about someone shaking their 'booty.'

"Wooow," he said to Sirius, drawing the word out elaborately. "This is the kind of music muggles listen to?"

He looked away from the radio and the corners of his lips twitched as he noticed that Sirius, though still sitting down, was shaking his hips from side to side and murmuring the lyrics to himself. "Sirius Black," James said, smirking, "Do you actually like this song?"

"No!" Sirius replied defensively, though he didn't stop nodding his head in time to the beat of the music. "It's just, this bit is really catchy, listen." He sang along under his breath for a moment, before he grabbed a surprised James by his forearms and dragged him to his feet.

"Told you, it's the best!" he beamed, not giving James a chance to respond before he started to bop from side to side in front of his friend, encouraging James to do the same.

James reluctantly started dancing, laughing as Sirius spun around and nearly fell over. "We look like idiots!"

"We always do!" Sirius agreed jovially. He swept past James with a rather ungraceful leap and bent down to turn the radio up, music pouring out across the garden.