Reunion

On the first of September Lily arrived at platform nine and three quarters in time and she hastily said goodbye to her parents to try to find Sev before boarding the train, but she didn't see him either.

She boarded at the last moment and dragged her trunk and Puck's cage around the Express, searching each compartment for him. When she passed by the one occupied by the Gryffindor girls of her year with some badgers, who were glad to see her inviting her to sit with them, she made the excuse that it was crowded and managed to get off of it, but not before being forced to promise to drop by later.

A little further on she bumped into Potter in the hallway, who cut her off. "How was your summer, Evans? You must have missed me." Meanwhile he ruffled his hair making it more frizzy, rehearsing a pose that seemed seductive to him.

'Stupid conceited, if you only knew who I've missed,' she thought. But she only told him, "Let me go by, Potter."

"Stay with us, there is plenty of room, you can sit next to me."

Lily took a quick look at the open cubicle where the rest of the quartet was, all three of them smiling at her. Remus with a friendly but worried look in his eyes, Pettigrew with a goofy grin, and Black, sarcastically, replied to James, "Leave her alone, Prongs. Can't you see that she's looking for Snivellus?"

'So that obvious is it… Well, what do I care? I do not have anything to hide.'

She tried to push past him, but Potter blocked her with his body moving closer to her and looked down at her gravely from his height, saying very seriously, "Evans, you shouldn't hang out with him, you know what snakes are like."

The same ditty as always. He broke her patience and she pushed him away angrily. "Mind your own business! You are nobody to tell me who I should go with!" as she walked down the hall without looking back.

What a year waited for her. As soon as the Express started and before she even found Sev, she had already had a confrontation with the idiot with the glasses.

As she walked through the cars, still not seeing him, the anger she felt turned to concern. 'What if he hasn't taken the train?' It had been four days since Sev's last message and he had told her that he would try to kick his father out of his house before he went back to Hogwarts. He could have had another fight like last Christmas, this time without being able to use magic, and be hurt, or maybe he had used it and been expelled.

She felt coward for having taken his words literally and not having returned to Spinner's End to check if he was fine. At the beginning of the last car she spotted the snakes of his year. He wasn't with them either, and luckily they didn't see her.

She quickened her pace, dragging the increasingly heavy trunk with great difficulty, anxiously scanning each compartment, in that area there were even some empty ones.

A few meters from the end of the train, with almost lost hope, she saw him.

Her heart stopped.

He was sitting by the window, staring out of it pensively, his elbow resting on the ledge, his chin resting between his thumb and forefinger in that characteristic gesture of his. She didn't see his face, hidden by the curtain of silky black hair, somewhat disheveled as always.

Her heart pounded again, now racing from the near-race and from emotion, as she realized he wasn't alone. Two Hufflepuff boys sitting on either side of the door had interrupted their lively chatter when they saw her standing there, still on the other side of the glass, looking into it hesitantly to enter. One of them got up and opened the door, saying kindly, "Come in, come in, there's room…" as he bent down to help her pull the trunk.

"Thank you…" She advanced like an automaton without taking her eyes from Sev, who turned at the sound of her voice, and when he nailed the black wells she could read in them surprise and maybe… emotion too?

But it was only for a second, because he jumped up towards them and practically ripped the trunk out of the hands of Lily and the badger. "Let it. I'll lift it," he said in an authoritative tone while still being friendly.

They had inadvertently brushed their fingers and Lily felt a strong current run up her arm.

In one swift and seemingly effortless movement, he lifted the heavy chest above his head and placed it on the luggage rack. Seeing him, she couldn't help but think, 'How strong he is...' but he, before turning around, was already speaking to her, "Hi, Lily, how was your summer?"

Meanwhile he also took Puck's cage from her hands, which he arranged next to the trunk. She thought, 'Missing you,' and in that moment she remembered Potter's greeting and wished Sev would behave like him, prompting her to confess to him, but she knew he would never say such a thing. So she only managed to answer him, "Fine…"

So many things she wanted to tell him and now she had drawn a blank. It didn't help that the Hufflepuffs had resumed their conversation, nor that when they sat facing each other on either side of the window, Sev immediately turned to look out of it absentmindedly, apparently with no intention of speaking.

Lily finally reacted and remembering the last time they saw each other she decided on the most obvious topic. "And you? How about at home?"

Without changing his posture, Sev narrowed her eyes, turning into two burning slits. He was slow to answer, Lily was scrutinizing him waiting, and then she could see, already almost healed, the wound on his lower lip. She was definitely a loudmouth.

He responded in a tone that tried to be neutral but failed to quite mask his underlying rage. "I managed to get him out of the house last week when he was drunk, and I convinced my mother to cast the anti-muggle spell again… when we managed to find her wand. This not being able to use magic outside of school is killing me."

Lily was still bothered by the cut on his lip and wondered if there weren't more, hidden. "But you're fine?"

He looked away from the window and his tone changed, much more animated, he looked at her with a half smile. "Of course, silly. We're on our way to Hogwarts, right?"

That got them into conversation, though Sev was still looking outside most of the time, avoiding her eyes. They talked about the subjects they would take that year, the one of the OWLs. They were both bright students and expected to get good grades. The time had come to decide their future professions and Sev told her for the umpteenth time his dream of all time. "I would like to be a Defense teacher. The ones we've had so far are a disaster, a different one every year. This way it is impossible to advance, almost everything I know I have learned on my own."

The reason why Sev was so interested in the Dark Arts. "You have to know the enemy," he used to tell her often.

The dialogue flowed, sometimes with long silences that were not uncomfortable, since it had always been that way between them. For a while it seemed like everything was back to the way it had been, except for Sev's averted gaze and the fact that they never touched, despite the fact that Lily's arm rested outstretched on the window ledge, her hand just a couple of inches away from his elbow.

When they were silent for a while, she would stare at that small distance that separated them, dreaming of daring to reach out to caress his arm over the sleeve of his robe, he was already wearing his uniform from home, as he always did when they took the Express, and perhaps change the subject of the talk.

But she couldn't think of how to begin to talk to him about what she now felt, and she was afraid of spoiling this moment of camaraderie. She remembered her second decision, patience, and thinking that with this reunion the waters would return to their channel, she decided to wait for a more propitious occasion to make some progress.

A couple of hours passed like this. In one of the pauses in the conversation, Sev had moved away from the window, and leaning back in the seat, with his arms crossed over his chest, he had closed his eyes, drowsy from the swaying of the train.

She stared at him, how different he looked with his face relaxed, his harsh features softening, he seemed so at peace... It was as if she was seeing him for the first time. The outlined eyebrows, the closed eyelids framed by the black eyelashes, the high cheekbones, the aquiline nose, the lean but smooth cheeks, the sharp chin, the fine line of the lips that she did not kiss...

'God…how attractive is he,' she caught herself thinking. 'How I did not realize before?' And she quickly looked away from him to the swiftly passing landscape, because she had felt the urge to get up and kiss him right there, in full view of the Hufflepuffs, in a reversal of roles from the story of 'Sleeping Beauty'.

'What nonsense, if the Prince is him...' And she tried to get the idea out of her head, wishing she could get some book out of the trunk to distract herself. At last she resigned herself to staring out the window, until she, too, began to doze off.