Once the tent is set up-manually, as wands would attract questions from the werewolf populace, which is thoroughly excruciating-the darkness is absolute and Lily has been grinding her teeth for a solid hour. Remus follows herself and Sirius into the tent.
"If you want supper, you'll have to fend for yourself. I'm in no mood to play hostess," Lily mutters to Remus. To Sirius, she adds, "Tomorrow, don't meet his eyes. You leak like a garden hose."
Without waiting for response, she storms into the bedroom. She wants to slam a door but all there is is canvas partition, barely more than a curtain, and she tugs it violently across the opening instead, not bothering to charm it for privacy. If they want the comfort of a real bed instead of the armchairs out there, they will have to brave her company.
It is supremely childish that the only thing she wants, in her anger, is to talk to Severus. She could rage and storm and then he would come up with something thoroughly nasty and sneaky and perfect and she'd never do it, they'd come down on a much smarter and sneakier and less nasty sort of arrangement. But his imagination would satisfy her rage, the rage that even now has Sirius saying some string of profanity the curtain she closed.
She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and pulls out the tightly wrapped scrap of parchment but can't think of what to write, what is safe to say over this wildly unsecured child's method of communication. What she even can say of it yet; despite the length of the conversation with Nicolas she feels she has learned little yet that she can articulate clearly.
In the kitchen, she can hear Remus say, "She hasn't sweetened with age."
Canvas isn't as soundproof as a door. They must assume she's thrown up a privacy spell, or that this door is just as secure those in houses. Or they don't care if she eavesdrops, which is the rudest of all.
"You've no idea. Never did understand what James saw in her but she's the only reason I'm here, so credit where it's due." A chair scrapes, and creaks under weight; Sirius is sitting down at the table.
The parchment rolls back up and is tucked up her sleeve as she shimmies closer to the slight gap between the canvas curtain and wall of the tent. Fine, if they don't care if she eavesdrops, then she'll eavesdrop.
"How did that happen, then? Snape took her from the home just before James was killed, last I heard."
"He did, the bastard. Obliviated her, though she says she told him to. Pulled James and Harry right out of her head with a memory charm."
"Harry." It sounds as if Remus' heart is breaking, for a moment. "I haven't thought of him in-I never even met him. I went off with to spy before he was born and didn't come back until…" He trails off, and they each give the death breathing room so it can dissipate into the stale air. "They're not pulled out of her head, you know. That's not how the charm works."
"Locked them away, then, does it matter?"
"There's a distinction. Pulled out is pulled out and potentially lost. Locked away can be unlocked."
Lily imagines she can hear the smile on Sirius' face. "I forgot that you're a bloody walking textbook."
"Can't fathom how you've managed without me for three years. How many toes have you lost to doxy bites?"
Sirius lets out a bark of laughter. "None. But I've got a red spot on the back of my neck where I put down a flea treatment, would you like to see?"
"You've been living as Padfoot, then?"
"Not as if I could have said oh, sorry mum, I've reconsidered everything I've ever said to you and would like to come back into the fold. They'd have seen through it."
"Your mother was never terribly forgiving." He pauses, and his voice goes almost tender. "You could have come to find me, you know. Albus would have known how to find me, and could have proven your innocence."
There's a low snort. "Thing was, that would have come with strings, wouldn't it? Strings on Reg. Couldn't do that."
"Your brother, Regulus? Is he-?"
"What's this, then, an interrogation?" Sirius teases, but there is a bite to it, a real question underneath. "Think you can just wander across our path and think nothing's changed?"
"I never said that." Remus' tone is even, studied. "You just seem to have a very different opinion of your brother than the last time you spoke of him." That silence again, leaden, and another chair being dragged out and sat upon. Remus is at the table, then.
Sirius says, voice gruff, "Can I trust you?"
It comes clear, fast. "No."
Sirius curses.
Remus continues in earnest, as if he's heard it all. "I'll tell Nicolas everything you say without meaning to, and I will mean to. We have to trust him, here. I want to know the whole shape of what you're working toward but I can't. I don't know if Nicolas will work against you and I-all of the werewolves and I-are reliant on his help to keep this settlement secret and secure. I have to prioritize them. There's children, infected children, we can't risk- It's safer not to say anything you can't afford an enemy knowing."
"Never took you for one so comfortable following orders."
"I do what I have to."
A breath of pause. "Are you really safe here?" Sirius asks.
"Of course not. Nowhere is. Does Voldemort seem like he can be satiated in conquest, Sirius?" Remus asks wearily.
"The Soviets seem to think so."
"After he took Hogwarts, the papers in Moscow said he would end there, that he must. When Durmstrang fell the next year, the papers in Paris were sure he's never touch Beauxbatons. Now the Salem Times is assuring everyone in the States that Ilvermorny is safe, the Beijing Institute has sent emissaries to London, and India and Italy have both closed their borders. Even that one-room schoolhouse teaching domestic charms in Sicily isn't taking anyone without an Italian passport these days."
"Thought you didn't have news," Sirius replies mutinously.
There's almost anger, somewhere deep inside Remus. "This happens to be the kind of news you tend to seek out when you might have to flee for your life at any moment."
"You could come back with us." There's a hazard greater than the lack of trust there, greater even than suspicion. "It could be like it was."
"You know I can't do that."
The silence stretches and beneath the blanket, Lily tenses, waiting for an intruder, for Sirius to storm into his bunk and leave Remus to sleep in an arm chair. But there's no sound of the chair scraping the floor, no movement. It seems Remus Lupin is a special case, allowed more lassitude with giving Sirius answers he might not like to hear. Lily wonders if James was like that, given more freedom to tell the truth-and if the rat was, too.
"I wish I could have been there for you. After James died," Remus says finally.
Sirius is so quiet that Lily has to strain to hear. "After all that I thought I'd never see you again. Never get a chance to tell you it wasn't me who betrayed them."
"I figured it out when I saw you with Lily. Or I figured Nicolas would. It's not as if I could take you on without a wand and it was worth waiting rather than knocking all your teeth out right away."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know. I'm sorry." A few breaths. "I couldn't believe it was you. Not ever. Not really."
A low, growling laugh-Sirius', in a tone she's never heard it before. It feels intimate, like a secret. "Come on, now, Moony, not even a few spite-filled months? A year of sweet gentle loathing?"
"Oh, perhaps. I did use a picture of you as target practice for a while, when I still had my wand, but the picture was just as good at dodging as you."
The sound that happens next takes a full fifteen seconds for Lily to understand, and when she does she feels her face go hot with embarrassment. Eavesdropping is not without its risks and one of those risks, apparently, is listening to Sirius Black kiss Remus Lupin. On the mouth, by the sound of it, and at length. They are going at it like they've had practice.
The silencing charm goes up quick as you please and Lily rolls over. God, but she had been oblivious. So wrapped up in her world, her war, let alone the colossal distraction of the black shadow of Severus hanging over them both, she missed this entirely. Did she know about this, once, or would this have been new to her back in 1981 as well?
And is that jealousy that's started up a drumbeat in her abdomen? Not for Sirius-he's handsome enough but not her type in the least-but for the act, for unfettered snogging free of manipulation, for-
There were three years of peace with Severus. Three years built on a lie, surely, but there was peace: Christmas dinners and his steady hands when hers shook, and they shook often, as recently as this past holiday. He gave her morning glories twining their way up her bedpost and a distant, careful kindness that took only forgivable liberties; a kiss on the forehead, a hand on her arm, affection from a friend and caretaker. They are forgivable if she forgives them, at least, and if he wanted anything more-if she-
There's nothing good that comes from continuing that thought, and even now she suspects that forgiveness is underserved. Lily stamps it out. The men out there in the sitting room, were they not otherwise engaged, they could smell the smoke of that thought a mile away. To them, she's still a bereaved wife, and it's likely half the reason they've put up with so much from her.
There is a very recent memory in Lily's mind. You are angry because you're scared, she had said to Severus. Water droplets fly off the tines of the fork.
Yes, she is angry. Yes, she is scared. Remus had been a shock, a new and old set of memory to get lost in or deny, neither option useful, both choices damning. And Flamel is another creature entirely: not Dumbledore, not Voldemort. Worse. Different. Older than both.
And she was terribly rude. Petunia would string her up by her thumbs if she knew.
(If she were alive.)
Very well, then. Lily can keep it all and freeze it under and maintain a balance. She can keep to the fight. The parchment unrolls and the ink blooms without even thinking about it.
How did Peter Pettigrew die? Lily writes.
He makes her wait fifteen minutes to read No. The N is overlarge, spiked, the o so narrow it was almost a line with no daylight in the center, and the period is so fierce it almost punctures the parchment.
I deserve to know, she writes back.
His handwriting is so fast it becomes sloppy. He died while being tortured by myself and the Dark Lord.
That isn't enough. I want to know everything. Lily chews the end of her biro, thinking, through long moments of silence. There's something going on here I can't tell you, but for my own peace of mind, I want to know.
Finally she writes, Please.
Severus' handwriting is ugly. A great many things about him are ugly if taken in the wrong light-the kind of light that Severus seemed to shift himself to stand in, if she's being completely honest with herself. But it's what she likes about him; he has no fiction for her, no false smiles, no kindness that a wooing schoolboy would try for. When they spar, he doesn't hold back. When they work together and she's wrong, he tells her so. When he smiles at her-really smiles, really laughs, not those put-on silken falsities and sneers and half-smiles he offers up to others-it's real, and it's hard-won, and it is hers. And that's what she misses now, with Sirius treating her like a childhood friend one moment and a gossamer ghost fit to dissolve into thin air by the next turn. And Remus-well, who could ever read Remus but Sirius and James and Peter, but two of that number are dead and the last isn't particularly adept in translation.
By the end of the description of the long and messy end, some kind of dismay for the man she called friend until he brought death to her doorstep. She tries to summon some kind of horror.
She can't.