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Septennium (Completed) Read here Pairing: Snily (Lily Evans/Severus Snape) Words: 125,606 Summary: June 1969 was when the word found her - witch - delivered by a strange, disheveled and sharp-elbowed boy called Severus. In the soot-stained heart of Cokeworth, far from enchanted castles and moving staircases, Lily Evans and Severus Snape stole seven summers from time's stubborn march. Between broken bones and mended grudges, between flowers blooming out of season and roots that refused to take, Lily learns that magic has its limits, but still her hands keep reaching, reaching, reaching. Spotify playlist
Novennial (Completed) Read here Pairing: Snily (Lily Evans/Severus Snape) Rating: E Words: 24,928 Summary: The day of the Defense OWLs is uneventful. No public humiliation, no slurs shouted for everyone to hear, no friendship-ending disasters. Just two people who've been slowly losing each other for years, continuing to drift apart. Until suddenly, they don't. / Note: follows Septennium, but can be read as a standalone. Spotify playlist
Perennitas (WIP) Read here Pairing: Snily (Lily Evans/Severus Snape) Words: 13,325 words and more coming) Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other. Note: These serve as epilogues to Septennium and Novennial, but can work as standalone pieces. Spotify playlist
Fortune Favors the Brave (WIP, 4 of ca. 18 chapters posted) Read here Pairing: Panville (Pansy Parkinson/Neville Longbottom), Gen focused Words: 82,377 and more coming Summary: Canon divergent AU: Harry Potter died, while Neville Longbottom became the Boy Who Lived and little that followed stayed the same. / Pansy thought being sorted into Gryffindor was rock bottom, until a troll incident had her inexplicably befriending Neville Longbottom and Ron Weasley of all people. Now she's handling toads, stalking suspicious professors through corridors, and discovering that spite makes for terrible life decisions but surprisingly solid friendships. / From Year 1 to Year 7 - a canon rewrite. Spotify playlist
Ignis Alienus (Completed) Read here Words: 18,391 words Summary: December 1969. Severus finally walks into Lily's house. He thought the cold was the worst thing he would have to survive. Spotify playlist
Pairing: Lily Evans/Severus Snape
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 6: August 1979: Lily and Severus try fleeing the Wizarding War on forged passports for France with Majorca as a stopover, and accompanied by the Dursley's, they discover that the hardest border to cross is the one between leaving and staying.
Word count of chapter 6: 34,446 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Gatwick smelled of aviation fuel and floor polish and the collective anxiety of several thousand people trying to leave the country at once. Severus paid the driver with a crumpled tenner he'd been folding and unfolding the entire journey. He'd barely spoken since they left Cokeworth.
Inside the departures board clattered above them, its split-flap letters rattling through destinations like a shuffled deck: Alicante, Corfu, Faro, Malaga, Palma, Rhodes, Tenerife. The names of places where ordinary people went to lie in the sun and eat chips and come home sun kissed and smug with a duty-free bottle of Fundador brandy. Ordinary. That was the word Severus kept using. It has to look ordinary. A young couple on a cheap package tour. Nobody looks twice.
They waited outside until they were late enough that they would have to be rushed through all the checks, giving them a bit more leeway than they would have if they had been perfectly on time and the checks had been more through. Late enough that the check-in staff would be harried. Late enough that no one would look too closely. Early enough that they wouldn't actually miss the flight.
Their luggage was wrong, and Lily had known it would be wrong from the moment they'd packed. Their old school trunks, scuffed at the corners, the initials on the brass plates worn down to ghost letters. Real holidaymakers had hardshell suitcases in brown or navy some even with little wheels and a paper Thomson sticker still on the side. They had trunks. They looked, Lily thought, exactly like what they were: two people who had never been on a plane in their lives, pretending.
The check-in queue was a horror. Lily got them into it and Severus stood at her shoulder with the trunks like a sullen valet, and she watched the clerk at the desk, a young woman with frosted lipstick and a name badge that said JULIE, process a family of five with the slow, blinking patience of someone two hours from the end of a night shift. When their turn came, Lily slid the copied tickets across the counter and the British visitor’s passports on top of them, and she did not breathe.
The British visitor's passport, available over the counter at any post office for a birth certificate, about five pounds and a photograph, was a single sheet of folded card without magical protections of any kind. The Ministry and the Home Office had, in 1962, agreed on a joint system for the regular passports, which marked their bearers as magical persons and could not, by any spell yet attempted, be altered. The visitor passports had been left out of the agreement, presumably because no one had thought of them. Severus had thought of them.
The names had been Severus's work. He had spent the night before with the kitchen lamp low and his wand in his hand, sweat at his temples, doing the kind of careful illegal alteration that meant Azkaban if they were caught. The photographs were theirs. The names underneath, in cramped post office worker hand writing, read VERNON ARTHUR DURSLEY and PETUNIA HORTENSE DURSLEY.
Julie had one eye on the clock above the Kodak advert and the other on her colleague Denise, who was already standing by the staff door with two cigarettes and a lighter, making the universal face of a woman whose lunch break was being held hostage by stragglers. Julie glanced at the ticket. Looked at the passport. Looked at the clock again and didn't bother with manifest that was sitting closed in it's folder on the desk behind her. "You're cutting it fine, Mrs Dursley."
"I know," Lily said, and it came out breathless and a little tearful, which she had not planned but which turned out to be useful. "I'm so sorry. The taxi- we thought we'd allowed enough time-"
"Hop it onto the belt, love."
The trunks went on. Julie raised her eyebrows at the empty cat carrier on the belt. Lily did not explain that they had spent the previous evening attempting to insert their cat into it and had been repaid with lacerations comparable to the incident, one year ago, when she had attempted to determine the cat's sex, because it had been bothering her for years that they did not know, and had needed dittany.
She did not explain that the cat had disappeared sometime before dawn because it understood exactly what a carrier meant and had no intention of cooperating. She did not explain that she had sobbed in the kitchen while Severus told her, in the flat, reasonable voice he used when he knew she wasn't going to be reasonable, that her mother had been feeding it in addition to the food they were giving it and that it would be just fine.
She couldn't bring herself to leave the empty cat carrier behind, since it seemed like giving up on it.
She had left her wand under the floorboards at Spinner's End and had borne it; she could not bear the empty carrier.
At the end of the transaction, Julie just said, "Have a nice flight," and tore the boarding card stubs off and pushed them across, and they were through.
Severus didn't speak until they were ten yards down the concourse. Then, very quietly: "It really worked."
"It worked because she didn't care." Lily said. She had spent the morning ready to start a scene, if it came to it, and to use whatever magic was needed to walk a confused Julie away from her manifest. None of it had been required.
The passport check was worse, because there was a man in a peaked cap and his entire job was to look at faces, and Lily watched him work his way down the queue with the slowness of someone who had not been hurried in eleven years.
"Cutting it very fine," the officer said, exactly as Julie had said it.
"I know, I'm so sorry-"
"Where you off to?"
"Palma."
"First time?"
"Yes. First time abroad, actually. First time flying. First time doing any of it. We're very excited. Well, I'm very excited. He's-" She gestured at Severus, who was standing beside her with the rigid stillness of a man trying to become invisible through sheer force of will. "He's more of a quiet excited. Internal. He keeps it all in here." She tapped her own chest and winked at Severus whose mouth did nothing but whose eyes, for the briefest moment, moved to hers and away again with something in them that a stranger would have read as resignation but that Lily, who had been reading those eyes since she was nine years old, recognised as the thing he did instead of smiling.
"Still waters, you know. Very deep. Probably too deep, actually. I keep telling him he should express himself more, but he says that's what I'm for, which is, anyway. We're going to Palma. Did I say that?"
The officer opened the first passport. Looked at the photograph. Looked at Severus. Looked at the photograph again. His thumb moved to the details page.
"Have you been before? To Majorca? Because I've heard the beaches are lovely. Someone at work, I work at a department store, perfume counter, fragrances, you know, someone said the water's so clear you can see the bottom, which sounds made up to me, but she'd been three times so she'd know. Is it true? Can you actually see the bottom?"
"I wouldn't know, love. I work at Gatwick."
"Right, of course, sorry. It's just that we're so looking forward to it. Me and my fiancé." She reached for Severus's arm and gripped it with the bright, performative affection of a woman establishing a narrative. Severus's arm went rigid beneath her hand.
The officer's eyes dropped to the passport. His finger stopped on a line of text. He looked up.
"It says Mr. and Mrs. Dursley."
Lily felt Severus stop breathing.
"Yes," she said. Her smile held. Her mind, behind the smile, was running at a speed that should have produced sparks. "Dursley. That's us."
"You said fiancé. Not husband."
"Did I?"
"You did."
"I- well- it's- we're not married yet, but the passports were booked under… it's complicated. Family thing. His mother booked them as a wedding gift and she put Mrs. because she was being optimistic. Jumping the gun. You know how mothers are." She laughed. The laugh sounded strangled, even to her.
The officer looked at the passport. Looked at Lily. Looked at Severus, who was staring at a fixed point approximately three feet above the officer's head with the expression of a man who had decided that if he couldn't see the conversation, the conversation couldn't see him.
"And you're both Dursley."
"Yes."
"Same surname."
"Yes?"
The pause that followed was long enough for Lily to hear her own heartbeat and to formulate, reject, and reformulate three separate explanations, none of which were good, before her mouth, her treacherous mouth, selected a fourth.
"He's also my cousin."
The words left her and entered the air and she heard them and the officer heard them and Severus heard them and for one terrible second, all three of them existed in a shared space of absolute horror.
The officer stared at her. His face went through confusion, through dawning comprehension, through a revulsion so profound it seemed to age him, arriving finally at wanting very badly to be transferred to a different department.
Severus turned his head and looked at her. His expression defied language. It contained multitudes, every multitude trending toward a single, unified conclusion, which was that he had never met this woman, did not know this woman, had not arrived at this airport with this woman, and would be filing paperwork at the earliest opportunity to ensure that no record existed of his ever having been in the same postcode as this woman.
"The stamp," Lily said faintly. "Could we just… the flight's about to-"
The stamp came down. They were through.
They ran. Lily, who could not run as fast and was already out of breath, fell behind. He went back for her.
"This is what happens," he said, taking her wrist, "when you start smoking at twelve." He pulled her with him the rest of the way.
Lily's legs carried her through the barrier and into the departure lounge on what felt like pure adrenaline. She didn't look back. Severus walked beside her with measured strides that were fractionally too fast.
Neither of them spoke until they were past the duty-free, past the newsagent, past the café where a man in a business suit was drinking lager at seven in the morning, and the gate numbers were climbing, 10, 11, 12, 13, and then Gate 14 was in front of them and the Thomson rep was already pulling the door shut and Lily called out "Wait — wait, please, we're on this flight" and thrust the boarding cards forward and the rep looked at them and looked at her clipboard and said "I thought we were complete," and Lily said "Traffic, the M23, I'm so sorry" and the rep sighed and opened the door and waved them through.
After the air-conditioned terminal, the August morning was thick and warm and smelled of jet fuel and hot concrete and something green and alive that might have been the grass beyond the perimeter fence. The aircraft sat on the apron fifty yards away, white and blue, its door open, its metal stairs glinting in the early sun. It was enormous. Lily had seen pictures, of course, had watched them take off from a distance, but the sheer physical mass of the thing, the height of the tail, the breadth of the wings, the fat cylindrical engines hanging beneath them, made her stop walking for one full second and simply stare.
Severus did not stare. Severus walked directly toward the aircraft with his rigid, purposeful stride. He climbed the metal stairs without looking down, his knuckles white on the railing, and disappeared through the cabin door.
Lily followed. The stairs were steeper than she'd expected, the metal warm through the thin soles of her shoes. At the top she paused and looked back across the tarmac toward the terminal building, toward England, toward everything behind them. She turned and stepped inside.
They were the very last two onto the plane.
The cabin was a wall of patterned fabric and the smell of warm bodies and the sound of two hundred people who had already settled in. A stewardess in a navy uniform and a silk scarf was trying to persuade a large man in a Hawaiian shirt that his bag would not fit where he was putting it. They moved down the aisle looking for empty seats that they could take, and then she saw, in twenty-six A and B, the broad pink back of a man in a short-sleeved shirt and the pale tight bun of a woman beside him.
She stopped so abruptly Severus walked into her.
Twenty-six C and D were empty.
Lily took a breath that did not go all the way down, and walked forward, and slid past Severus into D, because if she had to sit beside her sister and her sister's husband she could not also be touching them. Severus took C with the smallest amount of motion necessary. Vernon, who had been attempting, without visible success, to fasten his seatbelt across his stomach, blinked. His eyes moved past Severus to Lily, and stopped.
"Lily?"
Petunia, who had been digging in her handbag, looked up.
Petunia's face went through surprise and incomprehension and didn't progress from there, and Vernon's went through the slow registration of a man whose very normal Saturday afternoon had just acquired a feature he had not budgeted for.
"Vernon!" Lily deployed the smile. "I can't believe it. Of all the places in the world. Fancy that," Lily said. Her voice came out almost level.
"Fancy that," Vernon repeated.
She squeezed past his knees into the middle seat, her hip brushing the armrest, her bag wedging itself between her feet. "Sev, look who it is."
Severus, who had not looked up from the seat back since sitting down, turned his head approximately fifteen degrees in Vernon's direction and produced a nod so small it might have been a muscular spasm. Then he returned his gaze to the seat back.
"How on earth," Vernon began, as the cabin's safety announcement began in front him, "did you two afford this?"
"Competition," Lily said. The lie arrived on her tongue fully formed, which she was grateful for, because she had not in fact rehearsed it. "At work. Whoever sold the most fragrance in May won a holiday. Four days, Palma, half-board. Two tickets. I sold the most." She made herself smile. "Apparently I'm very good with people."
The whole Dursley universe ran on the moral logic that things like this did not happen for free, and a woman like Lily, Petunia's sister, the one who lived with the peculiar one in a council house in Cokeworth, should not be appearing on aeroplanes by virtue of having sold scent to housewives.
"That's- well." He cleared his throat. "That's something. That's quite something. What's the brand, then?"
"Lancôme."
"Sounds French."
"Because it is."
"And they just give holidays away, do they?" he said in mild disbelief.
"It's a promotional thing. Builds loyalty among the sales staff."
Vernon nodded slowly. He took a breath, preparing, she thought, to ask another question, and that was when Petunia spoke.
"Don't bother, Vernon."
Lily could have strangled her. Vernon had been halfway to believing it.
"She's lying. Always," Petunia said. Lily felt the heat rise from her collar to her cheekbones. Not because the accusation was wrong, it was, of course, entirely correct.
"Tuney-"
"Don't call me that." Still without turning. "She didn't win any competition, Vernon. She doesn't win competitions. She cheats. That's what she does. That's what they all do. You know her kind."
Lily said nothing. There was nothing to say. The booking confirmation in her handbag had been copied from the Thomson brochure and booking confirmation on her mother's coffee table while Petunia was in the kitchen showing off the itinerary, and Lily had been alone with it for perhaps ninety seconds, and ninety seconds had been enough for her to see the opportunity that was presenting itself and go through with it. Petunia was right. She was a cheat.
“Well,” Vernon said after a moment. “Prize or not, you’re here now.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “We are.”
The cabin, around them, had begun the slow business of preparing for takeoff. A stewardess was demonstrating the brace position halfway up the aisle. Vernon looked from his wife to his sister-in-law and back, evidently concluded that whatever was happening between them was above his operational clearance, and returned to the seatbelt.
He wrestled it across his lap with a series of grunts, failed to make the clasp meet, and eventually folded the loose ends under his legs and placed his hands over them with an expression that dared anyone to comment. Petunia was already facing the front.
The plane began to taxi. It moved slowly, ponderously, bumping over the concrete seams with a gentle rocking motion that was nothing like flying. It felt like being in a bus. A very large, very noisy bus that was taking the scenic route through an industrial estate. They turned once, twice, joined a queue behind another aircraft, waited. Lily watched through the gap between Severus's shoulder and the window frame as the terminal building receded, as other aircraft grew smaller, as the runway appeared, a vast grey stripe stretching into the distance, longer than anything she'd expected.
The aircraft stopped. Turned. Aligned itself with the runway's centre line. And then the engines changed. The whine became a roar, a physical thing that pressed her back into her seat, and the aircraft began to accelerate with a force and purpose that was nothing like a bus, nothing like a broomstick, nothing like any experience of motion she had ever had. The runway blurred past the window. The cabin shook. Something in the overhead bin shifted with a thud.
And then the ground fell away.
It didn't tip or tilt or lurch the way she'd expected. It simply dropped, as though the earth had lost interest in them and had let go. One moment the runway was beneath them and the next it wasn't, and through the window the airport was shrinking, the cars on the perimeter road becoming toys, the fields beyond the airport spreading out in a patchwork of brown and green that was suddenly, unmistakably, a landscape seen from above. From the air.
Severus made a small sound beside her. She looked.
His knuckles on the armrest between them were white. He had put the magazine down and his eyes were fixed on the seatback in front of him, seemingly trying not to be where he was. His face was the colour of parchment. His jaw was clenched so tight that the tendons in his neck stood out like cables. Of course he wouldn't like it.
She put her hand over his. He did not move it. He did not, in any visible way, acknowledge her at all, except that under her palm his fingers, slowly uncurled enough to take hers.
"It's all right," she said.
A sound from across the aisle made Lily turn. Petunia was breathing in short, shallow gasps, her fingers digging into the armrests of her own seat, her face drained of every trace of colour beneath her foundation. Vernon was leaning toward her with the helpless, lumbering concern of a man who desperately wanted to fix something and had no tools.
"Petunia? Pet, are you all right?"
Petunia was not all right. Her breathing was accelerating, each inhale higher and shorter than the last, her chest rising and falling in rapid, panicked jerks. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, staring at the window where the ground was now very far away and getting farther, and her hands were shaking in a way that she couldn't hide and wasn't trying to.
A stewardess appeared with the practised speed of someone who had seen this before, a young woman with auburn hair pinned beneath a navy cap, her smile warm and professional in equal measure. She crouched in the aisle beside Petunia and placed one hand over hers.
"First time flying, love?"
"No," Vernon said, at the same time as Petunia said nothing because Petunia couldn't speak.
"Take a nice deep breath for me. That's it. And another. You're perfectly safe. The captain's been doing this for twenty years."
The stewardess produced a paper bag from her apron pocket with the speed of a magician performing a card trick and held it to Petunia's mouth. "Breathe into this. Slowly. That's lovely."
She glanced up at Vernon. "Would she like a drink? Sometimes a small brandy takes the edge off."
Vernon nodded, his hand heavy and uncertain on Petunia's shoulder. The stewardess returned with a miniature bottle of Courvoisier and a plastic cup, and Petunia drank it in two swallows, the colour seeping back into her face by degrees as the alcohol did its graceless, effective work.
Lily watched. She was going to sit here, in seat twenty-six D, and let the stewardess do it, because Petunia had told Vernon thirty seconds ago that her sister was a liar, and there was a very small, very mean part of Lily that was, just now, not prepared to be of use.
Severus, beside her, whispered: "If we fall out of the sky, we will all die. I'm not certain magic could save us. I want it noted that I consider this the single greatest act of Muggle hubris since the Titanic, and I include the atomic bomb."
Lily knew Severus did not trust things to simply work, that magic, for him, was the only reliable mechanism. When they had been nine, he had told her with great seriousness that the moon landings had been a wizarding operation and that Muggles could not, by any technological means, have reached the moon. He had been, at the time, entirely sincere.
She turned to look at him. He was reading the safety card.
"That's a very comforting thing to say."
"I'm telling you because you should know."
"Thanks, Sev. I really needed that."
"The brace position assumes a survivable impact."
"Would it help," she suggested, "if I asked the stewardess how planes actually stay up?"
He did not answer, but his hand, in hers, tightened.
She caught the stewardess's eye on her way back up the aisle.
"Excuse me, sorry, could you tell us how the plane stays up? My fiance, he's a bit nervous, and he likes to understand things."
The stewardess, whose name was Ramona, was delighted to. Ramona had a niece who was studying engineering and was full of facts. Ramona explained, leaning across the seat of the elderly man in front of them, who had gone to the lavatory, about lift and about the shape of the wing and about how the air moved faster over the top than the bottom, and Severus listened with a stillness that, to anyone who didn't know him, would have looked like indifference. By the time Ramona moved on, his knuckles had returned to the colour of skin.
"One in a hundred thousand flights," she said, repeating what the stewardess had said, and tried smiling a smile of reassurance. "You're safer up here than you are crossing the road."
"The road doesn't have a thirty-thousand-foot drop beneath it," Severus said, but his grip on the armrest had loosened by a fraction. Lily could have kissed the stewardess.
"Muggles built this," he said, almost like a question.
"Muggles built this," Lily confirmed.
He said nothing else. But she saw him lean closer to the window, watching the wing cut through the cloud, and his expression was one she'd only ever seen him wear over a cauldron, the expression of a man in the presence of something that worked beautifully and that he wanted to understand but didn't yet trust entirely.
The meal eventually came on a plastic tray: a ham roll, a square of fruitcake, a pat of butter, a sachet of mustard, and a cup of sparkling water. Vernon ate everything on his tray and half of Petunia's fruitcake, which she surrendered without comment, the brandy having dulled the edges of both her panic and her appetite. Lily ate the roll and gave Severus the cake, which he ate without acknowledging the transfer.
A while later, after watching the clouds race by them, the plane began its descent, and through her window Lily saw, for the first time in her life, the Mediterranean, a blue so saturated it did not look like a real colour, a colour that belonged to brochures and to other people's lives, and then the gold-and-white coast of an island she had only ever known as a word on a piece of paper she had stolen and copied from her sister's coffee table.
The landing was not gentle. The runway came up fast, and the aircraft hit it with a thud that jolted through the cabin, bouncing once before settling, the thrust reversers engaging with a roar that was louder than takeoff. Lily's stomach lurched.
The passengers burst into applause.
Lily looked at Severus. Severus looked at Lily. His expression suggested that the applause had confirmed every suspicion he had ever held about Muggles.
The doors opened. The heat came up the aisle to meet them, not English warmth, not anything she had a category for, a real physical heat that pushed against her face like a hand, and they stepped out of the aircraft door and into the white noon light of somewhere that was not England.
Behind her, somewhere in the slow shuffle of disembarking passengers, she could hear Vernon Dursley telling his wife that he had, frankly, never seen her quite so green, and that he hoped she'd manage the coach.
The terminal was too full. The arrivals hall echoed with Spanish announcements she couldn't understand, and the baggage carousel moved with the ponderous indifference of a creature that could not be hurried. Vernon stationed himself at the carousel's edge with his arms folded and his jaw set, guarding a stretch of rubber belt as though defending a territorial claim. Petunia stood behind him, her floral dress already wilting in the heat, her pearl clip catching the light as she scanned the arriving luggage with the sharp eyes of a woman who would hold the airline personally responsible if her suitcase had been mishandled.
They hung back by the far wall, half-hidden behind a pillar advertising car hire. They had never collected luggage from a carousel. They had never been in an airport. The whole procedure was as foreign to them as a Quidditch match would have been to Vernon. So they watched, and they learned, and when their trunks finally emerged from the rubber flaps looking battered and conspicuously wrong among the Samsonites and Revelations, Severus stepped forward and seized them with the speed of a man who had been rehearsing the movement in his head for ten minutes.
Outside the Thomson coaches were lined up outside the terminal in a row of white and blue, their engines idling, their doors open, the drivers leaning against the bodywork smoking in the shade. A girl in a navy skirt and a nylon scarf stood at the front with a clipboard and read hotel names into a microphone that worked only when it felt like it. “Vista Palma,” she said. “Vista Palma? Don’t forget your hand luggage. The welcome meeting is tomorrow morning at ten. There’ll be information about excursions, money changing, and the Caves of Drach.”
She spotted Vernon's broad back ascending the steps of the second coach, Petunia behind him, the brown Revelation suitcase being loaded into the hold by the driver.
Then she took Severus by the sleeve and walked to the next coach in line, smiled at the Thomson girl with the clipboard, gave a name that wasn't hers, and climbed aboard as though she'd been doing this her entire life.
Through the window, Majorca went by in pieces Lily could not arrange into a country. White walls. Dusty pines. A petrol station with two SEAT cars parked in the shade. A field the colour of old bread. Then, without warning, another hotel block, six storeys high and raw at the edges, with washing already hanging from half the balconies. Behind one nearly finished building stood a crane, perfectly still against the blue sky, as if someone had begun making a second island out of concrete and then gone for lunch.
The hotel was a six-storey concrete block painted a cream that had begun, at the corners, to streak. The Thomson coach had dropped them at the kerb along with seven other couples and a family from Wolverhampton, and Lily had stood on the pavement with her old school trunk at her feet and felt, for the first time since King's Cross, feeling that she had arrived somewhere she had not earned.
The lobby was cooler than the street but not actually cool. Beside reception stood a rack of postcards, blue coves, donkeys in straw hats, bullfighters, the cathedral at Palma in a sunset that looked painted on, and below it a glass case selling stamps, cigarettes, tiny bottles of brandy, sewing kits, and sun cream. A board behind the desk gave the exchange rate in chalk. Another board advertised PALMA BY NIGHT, FLAMENCO EVENING, CAVES OF DRACH, ISLAND TOUR, all in English, German, and Spanish, with the German written most neatly.
A woman behind the reception desk, late thirties, dark hair pulled back, a name badge that said Marisol, was processing a queue of Britons with the slow, exhausted patience of a woman in the third week of August. By the time Lily and Severus reached the front of the line, she had stopped smiling on principle.
Lily stepped up to the desk. Marisol's eyes went to her first, they always went to Lily first, because Lily was the one who smiled, and Severus was the one who stood two paces behind holding luggage with an expression that discouraged conversation the way garlic allegedly discouraged vampires.
"Reservation, please."
Lily slid the booking confirmation across the counter. The same one she had copied from the front of the Thomson brochure on her sister's coffee table, six weeks ago, with two fingers and the kind of duplication spell that left a small headache behind her eyes.
She rested her fingertips on the counter as Marisol picked up the confirmation. The Confundus left her hand like warmth leaving skin, just the gentle, directed pressure of a mind on a mind, the lightest possible touch, the magical equivalent of placing your thumb on a scale. Everything is in order. You've seen this booking before about twenty minutes ago, but there is nothing here that requires your attention.
"Dursley," Marisol read. "Mr. and Mrs."
"That's us."
"I have already checked in a Dursley. A Mr. and Mrs. Dursley. Just now. Perhaps twenty minutes ago." She paused. Her pen hovered over the registration card. Something was snagging.
"That's my brother-in-law," Lily said, without hesitation. "Vernon. Big chap, you'd remember him. His mother booked both holidays as a surprise, one for them, one for us. Same surname, same hotel, same dates."
Marisol looked at Severus. Looked, presumably, for some trace of Vernon in the sharp, sallow, dark-haired man standing before her. Found none. The crease deepened.
Behind Lily, Severus was projecting a silence so intense it had its own gravitational field.
"Different mothers," Lily tried.
The Confundus nudged. The crease smoothed. Families were indeed strange.
After another look at her list Marisol's mouth opened again in confusion.
"But-"
"It's been such a long day," she said. "We're so sorry to be the last in. The flight was delayed, and then the coach, well, you know what the coach is like."
Lily held her smile. Behind it, she pushed, a second pulse, stronger, less polite, the magical equivalent of a hand placed firmly on a door that someone was trying to open. You are tired. You want to go home. This is the last thing standing between you and the end of your shift.
"Yes," Marisol said, after a small pause, and her eyes went a little soft in the corners and she stamped the registration card and pushed two keys across the counter. "Room four-oh-two. The lift is on the left. Breakfast from seven to ten in the dining room. Buenas noches."
"Gracias," Lily said, giving the R a roll that came out closer to a gargle, and gathered the keys, attached to a plastic fob the size and shape of a pear, and steered Severus toward the lift before he could open his mouth.
The lift was built for six. There were eleven of them in it. A woman with a straw beach bag pressed Lily into the back wall, and a man who smelled of Ambre Solaire and lager had his elbow in the space where Severus's ribs were trying to be. Severus stood with his trunks held against his chest like a shield, his jaw locked, his eyes fixed on the floor numbers with the ferocious concentration of a man counting down the seconds until he could stop touching strangers.
Their door was at the far end of the corridor. Lily fitted the key and pushed the door open, and the room exhaled at them: a flat hot air with the faint sweetness of laundered sheets and bleach and closed air.
She walked three paces into the room, dropped her handbag on the floor, and threw herself face-down onto the bed before Severus had cleared the threshold.
The bed was, in fact, two single beds pushed together, with a gap up the middle she only discovered when her hip hit it. She did not care. The mattress was too firm and the pillow was too flat and there was no duvet, only a white sheet pulled tight beneath a thin yellow bedspread, and she lay on her stomach with her arms flung out and she made a small muffled sound into the pillow.
Severus closed the door behind him.
She rolled onto her back. He was standing in the middle of the room with both trunks at his feet, standing the way he stood in unfamiliar rooms. He was looking at the wardrobe with the sliding doors, and the small writing desk with the mirror, and the louvred shutters on the balcony door, and the framed print of a harbour bolted to the wall, and the bedside lamp with the amber shade, and the thin towels folded on the foot of the bed, and the door to the bathroom standing half open. He looked like he didn't quite know what to do with himself.
"Come and lie down."
"In a moment."
He hefted her trunk onto the luggage rack with a small grunt and opened it, and began, actually began, to hang her things. Her sundresses, two of them, both bought with her staff discount in the final week before she'd left the counter for good. Her one good blouse. The green dress. A cardigan she'd packed because her mother had told her evenings could be cool. She watched him from the bed with her cheek on the flat pillow, too tired to help, too grateful to say so, watching his hands move her clothes from the trunk to the wardrobe.
"You are going to end up in Azkaban," he said, aligning her shoes beneath the wardrobe with his foot.
"You think so?" She was picking at a hangnail on her left thumb, giving it more attention than it deserved and the conversation less.
"What you do to Muggles is… I'm not going to say wrong, because I don't care about most Muggles, but it is illegal, comprehensively illegal, illegal in ways that have subsections, and you do it the way other people breathe. Today alone-"
"And the passports? Those just forged themselves, did they?" She flung her arms out, nearly hitting the bedside lamp. "Welcome to the fruits of our combined criminal enterprise. Twin beds. Harbour print. Balcony overlooking the sea. I hope Azkaban is as nice."
"I was assisting." He closed the wardrobe door. It stuck on its runner. He closed it again, harder. It stuck again. He left it. "If they catch us, when they catch us, I shall plead diminished responsibility. I was led astray by a wicked woman."
She rolled onto her side. He was at the window, opening the shutters a crack to check the view. "If they put me in Azkaban, you know what."
"What?"
"I shall have the very best roommate."
He snorted. And she knew he had remembered, because Severus remembered everything.
"That offer was made under duress, at the age of thirteen, in a graveyard. I consider it void."
"Too late. I'm holding you to it. Matching cells. Adjacent if possible. I'll write to the Wizengamot."
He made the small sound that on him was laughter.
She unpacked the last of it, toiletries lined up on the bathroom shelf, their toothbrush sharing a glass, the bar of hotel soap still in its paper wrapper because they'd brought their own. The room, which had been no one's when they'd entered it, was now, through the ordinary alchemy of hung dresses and placed toothbrushes, marginally theirs. She crossed to the balcony doors and pushed them open.
Every balcony had something drying on it. Towels over railings. A child’s red swimming trunks. A woman’s brassiere, enormous and pale, pegged without shame to a length of string. Two floors down, a man in a vest smoked with one foot on the balcony rail while his wife shook sand from a beach mat into the dark.
Beyond the balconies, the pool glowed turquoise with its underwater lights, and beyond the pool the strip glittered in the dark, and beyond the strip, was a slip of black sea, and over the sea a sky already pricking with stars.
She turned.
"Sev. Come and look at this."
"I'll see it tomorrow."
"But then you wouldn't have seen it tonight?"
"I don't need to see it tonight."
She stayed in the doorway. Behind her the cicadas were doing whatever cicadas did, a sound she had read about in books and never heard, a dry electrical buzzing that filled the dark.
"This is a stopover," he said from inside. "Lily. You know it is. We're not- this isn't a holiday. We're not here to enjoy ourselves. We have a few days and then we have to-"
They both knew the rest. Monday the ferry. At the border they would separate, Lily across as a Muggle-born, with papers, with rights under the French statute that granted asylum to magical persons fleeing persecution. Severus across as a Muggle, without papers, without rights, because the death eaters hadn't been hunting half-bloods, and they would find each other on the other side, if it all worked out the way they were supposed to.
They couldn't go directly. France had warded the Channel last year, a response to the small flood of British wizards with unclear alliances arriving in France and a subsequent rise in crimes against muggles and muggleborns. The wards didn't stop Muggles, only magical persons, which meant the ferries still ran and the hovercraft still hummed and ordinary people still crossed without knowing that the air above the water was laced with detection charms that would register a wand at six hundred yards. To get to France as a witch, you had to arrive from somewhere that wasn't Britain. Spain didn't check. Spain, in the chaotic first years after Franco, had other things on its mind.
"I know what we have to do."
"Then you know we shouldn't-"
"Shouldn't what?"
She could see his outline on the bed, a dark shape against the darker room, and she could see his hands, folded across his stomach the way he folded them when he was holding something down.
"Shouldn't pretend," he said.
She came back into the room. She stood in front of him, and she put her hands on his shoulders, and she said, "Severus Snape. Have you ever, in your entire life, been on a holiday."
He looked at her as though she had asked him to name his favourite sunset.
"Right. So. Neither of us has ever had a holiday, and here we are in a place that has a sea and stars and cicadas, which I have only ever seen on TV and I would like to hear them with you. That's all I'm asking. Not to forget what Monday is. Not to pretend this is something it isn't. Just come and stand on the balcony with me. Ten minutes. Because I don't know-" She stopped. She made herself finish. "I don't know when we'll get to hear them again. And I would like to have heard them with you at least once."
He stood, and walked past her, and stepped through the balcony door.
She followed him.
He stood at the railing with his hands flat on the warm metal, and he looked out at the pool and the strip and the sliver of sea, and he did not speak for a long time. Lily came and stood beside him and did not speak either.
"I can hear them," he said, eventually. "They sound like the wireless. Our wireless. The one you broke the dial off and glued back on and thought I wouldn't notice."
"Sev."
"I'm being serious. If you could tune them properly you'd get the World Service."
She started laughing. She could not help it. She laughed with her hands on the warm metal of the railing and her face turned up to a sky she did not recognise, full of stars that were not her stars, over a sea that was not her sea.
"Ten minutes," he said.
"Ten minutes."
They stayed an hour.
The dining room was vast, a bright, tiled cavern with floor-to-ceiling windows along the front wall that let in a merciless cascade of morning light.
The ceiling was high, industrial almost, with exposed ducting for the air conditioning that laboured against the combined heat of three hundred bodies and the August sun and the kitchen, whose swing doors released periodic blasts of steam and the clatter of crockery being assembled at speed. The noise was extraordinary. Two hundred people eating and talking simultaneously on tiled floors under a high ceiling produced a roar that swallowed individual voices whole.
She took a tray from the stack by the entrance and joined the queue. This free, included, already-paid-for meal was going to be the load-bearing pillar of their entire day. They would not be eating lunch. They would probably not be eating dinner. Every bread roll she could carry, every pat of butter she could pocket, every piece of fruit she could tuck into her bag without drawing the attention of the waiters was a peseta saved, a meal stretched against their forty pounds of travellers' cheques and the reality of being alive and hungry in a foreign country.
Scrambled eggs, not good eggs, not Hogwarts eggs, but hot and plentiful and free, so onto the plate they went, a mound of them, golden-yellow and slightly rubbery. Bacon that wasn't bacon, not really, two sausages, pale and not quite the right shape, smelling faintly of something herbal she couldn't identify, but she was willing to try. Three bread rolls, one croissant, a square of butter in its foil wrapper. Sliced ham from the cold table. A hard-boiled egg. A piece of melon, a handful of grapes, an orange that she slipped into her bag with a glance over her shoulder. A glass of juice from the jug, watery, more sugar than orange, but cold. A cup of tea from the waiter who circulated with a pot, pouring without asking. The tea was wrong of course.
She carried her loaded tray back to the table she'd chosen, far corner, near the kitchen doors, partially shielded by a plastic palm in a ceramic planter. Where one could sit with her back to the wall and see who was coming.
Severus stood at the buffet with his empty plate held in front of him and did not move for fifteen seconds. Then he loaded it, fast, indiscriminate, head down, and carried it back to the corner with focused urgency.
She knew what this was. She remembered catching his eye across the great hall in first year and seeing him hunched over his plate with his hair curtaining his face, shovelling food in with the desperate speed of someone who wanted to be finished before anyone noticed he existed.
This was the same. Two hundred strangers and the noise and the lack of privacy. The discomfort of eating with your guard down when every instinct screamed to eat fast and leave.
He ate quickly. He always ate quickly. His shoulders were hunched, his head bent, his left arm curled around his plate in the unconscious protective gesture of someone who had learned early that food could be taken away. She ate slowly, making herself chew, making herself taste, stretching the meal out because every minute at this table was a minute of not being hungry.
She was reaching for her third bread roll when she saw them.
Vernon was unmistakable even from across a crowded room. His bulk preceded him through the buffet queue like a ship parting water, his pale blue polo shirt already straining at the buttons, his plate loaded with an ambition that suggested he viewed breakfast as both a meal and a competitive sport. Petunia followed three paces behind, carrying a single piece of toast and a cup of tea.
They were making for the window. Vernon led, Petunia followed, and her head was turning, scanning the room.
"Down," Lily hissed.
Severus looked up from his plate. "What?"
"My sister. Three o'clock. Don't look."
He had looked. Immediately, obviously, with the full turn of his head, the way people always look when told not to.
"They haven't seen us," she said. "Keep your head down. Eat."
He returned to his plate. She hunched lower in her chair and angled her body so that the plastic palm partially obscured her face. Across the room, Vernon was settling into his window table with the satisfied weight of a man taking possession of something rightfully his. Petunia sat opposite, her toast in its triangles.
She couldn't deal with the Dursleys. Not now. Not before she'd finished her tea. Petunia required preparation.
She pressed herself deeper behind the plastic palm and told herself to stop looking. She looked. Through the fronds, dusty, synthetic, fooling no one, she watched Petunia arrange her toast triangles and sip her tea and conduct her surveillance of the dining room.
Petunia's sweep reached the plastic palm. Their eyes met.
It lasted less than a second and then Petunia looked away. She leaned toward Vernon and said something behind her teacup. Vernon's head began to turn toward the corner. Petunia's hand shot out and caught his arm. His head turned back.
Neither party approached the other.
By the time she set down her fork she was fuller than she'd been in weeks, possibly months, the kind of full that came from eating not for pleasure but for purpose, stockpiling calories against a day that would offer not much else. Severus had cleaned his plate with the thoroughness of a man who had been raised to waste nothing and who treated a hotel buffet the way a squirrel treated October.
Lily stuffed two extra rolls into her bag, wrapped a piece of ham in a paper napkin and slipped it into her pocket, and palmed three miniature pots of jam that she'd add to their supplies upstairs.
They made it out of the dining room without being spotted. The doors closed and the noise of the dining room cut off, replaced by the mechanical groan of the lift and the silence between them, and Lily watched the tension drain from his body like water from a wrung cloth.
In the room, she changed into her bikini and a loose cotton dress over it, respectable enough for a hotel pool, and stuffed a towel and the stolen orange. She stood by the bed where Severus had already settled himself, propped against the headboard with his legs stretched out on the brown-orange-cream thin blanket, the Britannia Airways in-flight magazine open on his lap at a page about duty-free watches, clearly intending to be found too busy to be disturbed.
She didn't ask. She had known since the moment they arrived, had known, really, since she'd first suggested this plan back in May, that Severus would in all likelihood not be coming to the beach, or the pool, or anywhere that involved removing clothing, exposing skin, and sitting among strangers in the sun.
She could have pushed. She could have cajoled, pleaded, deployed the specific combination of stubbornness and charm that she'd used since they were children to drag him into situations he'd rather avoid. But she decided not to for once.
"I'll be out," she said.
He turned a page. "Don't drown."
"I'll do my best. Don't die of boredom."
"I'll try but I can't make any promises."
She walked.
She didn't know where she was going, which was, she suspected, the point. The hotel was behind her and the beach was somewhere in front of her and between the two was a resort strip she had never navigated, and she walked along it in the late morning heat with her bag over her shoulder and no map and no plan.
The strip was busier than she'd expected. Tourist shops with open fronts and racks of postcards spilling onto the pavement. A bar with a chalkboard advertising FISH + CHIPS + PINT £1.50 and below that she guessed the same in German in handwriting that suggested the author had been drinking from the stock. A leather-goods shop, its doorway hung with bags and belts that smelled of animal and chemicals in the heat. A pharmacy with a green cross that she noted for future reference. A minimarket selling bottled water and crisps and inflatable floats and the particular, cheerful tourist tat.
She turned a corner and found the tabacos.
It was small and dim, a kiosk wedged between a souvenir shop and a café, its counter stacked with boxes of cigarettes behind glass, the brands unfamiliar but a few she recognised: Benson & Hedges, Marlboro, a tower of red-and-white Rothmans. The smell reached her through the open hatch. Tobacco. Paper. The faint, sweet, acrid undertone that she had spent two years trying to forget and that her lungs remembered.
The Rothmans were right there. Red and white. Less than a pound, probably, in pesetas. She could taste the first drag before she'd opened the packet, the scratch in the throat, the heat in the lungs, the brief, stupid, perfect calm that lasted exactly as long as the exhale and then left you needing another.
She did not ask for cigarettes. She had promised Severus. She had promised her mother. She had promised herself, which was the weakest of the three promises but the only one anyone was here to enforce.
She bought a postcard instead.
It was from a spinning rack beside the cigarettes, the standard tourist selection: the cathedral at Palma in sunset light, a cove so blue it looked chemically altered, a donkey in a straw hat, a beach that might have been theirs or might have been anywhere. She chose the cathedral. Her mother would like the cathedral, it looked nice.
She stood outside the estanco with the postcard in her hand and a biro she'd borrowed from the man behind the counter and she tried to think of what to write.
She couldn't tell her mother. That was the thing. She couldn't write Dear Mum, I'm leaving the country, I don't know when I'm coming back, please feed the cat. The plan, Severus's plan, was to call from France. Once they were safe, or whatever passed for safe. She would call, and her mother would answer, and Lily would tell her, and her mother would cry, and the phone would cost too much, and none of it would be enough.
She should write I'm sorry. That was the truth. She was sorry. Sorry for leaving, sorry for lying, sorry for the years of half-explanations and fabricated cover stories, sorry for every visit where she'd said everything's fine, Mum when everything was war.
She didn't write it and in the end she capped the biro and went back inside and handed the postcard to the man behind the counter.
"Lo siento," she said, which was one of the four Spanish phrases she'd acquired, and which was now useful for the postcard and also for everything else. "Could I- could I swap this? For something else?"
The man shrugged. He did not care what she bought as long as she bought something and stopped blocking the cigarette display.
She chose a fridge magnet. It was small and rectangular, ceramic, painted with a crude but cheerful depiction of the Palma waterfront, with PALMA DE MALLORCA in raised gold letters along the bottom. It cost forty pesetas. It was, objectively, what Severus would call garish.
She turned it over in her hand. It would look nice on a fridge. Not on a fridge she currently owned, because the fridge at Spinner's End was Muggle and old and didn't have the kind of door that magnets stuck on very well, but on a fridge somewhere else. A future fridge. A fridge in a flat in Paris, perhaps, or wherever they ended up, a fridge in a kitchen she hadn't seen yet, in a life she hadn't started yet, and the magnet would sit on it and say: we were here.
She put it in her bag.
Outside, the sun was climbing and the strip was getting busier, and she was still, she realised, no closer to the beach than she'd been twenty minutes ago. She found a tourist map on a board outside a travel agency, YOU ARE HERE, the red dot, the streets radiating outward in a tangle of Spanish names, and she studied it, her finger tracing the route from the red dot to the blue shape that was the sea, memorising the turns, the landmarks, the name of the road she needed.
The beach was not what she had imagined.
She had imagined, vaguely, something like the postcards, a long crescent of sand, a turquoise sea, herself on a towel in the sun. What there was, in fact, was a long crescent of sand and a turquoise sea and approximately four thousand other people, and Lily, who had never been to a beach in her life, stood on the concrete promenade with her bag over her shoulder and looked down at the wall of bodies and discovered that she did not know what to do.
This had not occurred to her as a possibility. She had imagined that a beach would, by virtue of being a beach, instruct her in how to use it. It did not. It sat in front of her, large and bright and full of strangers, and it offered her no instructions at all.
A group of girls her age were sitting together on towels near the steps, four or five of them, tanned, passing a bottle of sun oil between them, laughing at something. They had the easy, unselfconscious physical closeness of people who knew each other well, shoulders touching, legs overlapping, one girl braiding another's hair while a third told a story with her hands. Lily watched them and wondered whether they'd come together or found each other here, and whether it mattered, and whether one could walk up to a group of girls on a beach and simply sit down, and what they would say if she did.
She walked down the steps. She walked along the sand for perhaps three minutes. She found a thin gap between a German family and a British couple who were having an argument about sun cream, and she put her towel down, and she sat on it, and she sat there, and the beach did not do anything, and neither did she.
Other people lay down. Other people closed their eyes. Other people did nothing, in a sustained and deliberate way, for hours. Lily had not, in her recollection, done nothing for longer than perhaps ninety seconds since she was nine years old. Her body did not know how. Her body wanted to brew something or sell something or argue with someone or fix something that wasn't broken or check on Severus. She lay on her back on the towel and stared up at a sky so blue it looked painted, and within four minutes she was thinking about a batch of Dittany she had left on the laboratory shelf at Spinner's End and whether her mother had remembered to feed the cat.
She lasted forty minutes. Then she gathered her things and walked back to the hotel.
The German family had taken the loungers under the umbrella, which she had expected, and the best two loungers along the deep end were already covered with towels, which she had also expected, and at the end of the row of loungers facing the sun were Vernon and Petunia Dursley.
Vernon was already pink across the shoulders. He was supine, eyes closed, a very recently started book open on his chest, a bottle of San Miguel sweating on the concrete beside him. Petunia, beside him, was sitting up under a wide-brimmed straw hat, applying Piz Buin to her arms generously.
Lily considered, for one full second, turning round.
Petunia looked up. Their eyes met for the second time that morning, and this time there was no plastic palm to hide behind, no dining room to cross, no distance left to maintain. Petunia's expression did something complicated under the brim of her hat, and then she said, "You might as well sit down. There's a spare chair."
It was not a warm invitation. It was the kind of invitation that is technically an invitation in the same way that a ceasefire is technically a form of peace. But Lily took the plastic chair and pulled it into the thin strip of shade cast by Petunia's hat, and sat.
"Where's your boyfriend?" Petunia asked. "Not enjoying the holiday?"
Lily watched her sister cap the bottle of Piz Buin and set it down on the concrete, and she felt the anger move up under her ribs in a hot slow wave, and she did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that would not require her to explain how she had come to be on a holiday at all.
"He's tired from the flight," she said, eventually. "And he doesn't really like the sun."
"No," Petunia said, "I shouldn't think he does."
"You grew up ten feet from him. You know exactly what he's like."
"And I've spent every year since trying to forget it." The sunglasses came down. Behind them, Petunia's expression became her own business.
She lay back. She closed her eyes.
After a while, Vernon snored. After another while, Petunia got up and went to the pool bar for a lemonade and brought back two, and put one on the concrete beside Lily without a word, and sat down again. Lily said thank you. Petunia said don't mention it. They drank their lemonades in the kind of silence that, if you did not know them, you might have mistaken for companionship.
Vernon, over dinner, was magnanimous.
He had insisted, when she rose to leave the pool at six, that she join them. He had insisted with the particular volume of a man who liked to be heard insisting. Half-board, he'd said, means we've already paid, and there's no sense in you eating alone, and besides we've barely had a chance to, well, catch up. He'd said catch up as though he were Petunia's friendly neighbour and not his sister in law by, well, law.
She had said yes because the alternative was paying for her own dinner, and because she did not, in fact, want to eat alone.
The hotel dining room at half past seven was a roar. They were seated at a table for four near the kitchen door, Vernon had not got the table he wanted, and was inclined to be aggrieved about it, and a waiter brought a carafe of red wine and bread rolls and small dishes of something that might have been tapenade, and Vernon poured wine for all three of them and proposed a toast to the holiday, and they drank.
The starter was prawn cocktail. Vernon ate his rapidly. Petunia ate hers in small displeased bites, watching the room. Petunia didn't eat seafood. Hadn't since she was small. Lily ate hers and thought about Severus upstairs eating, possibly, nothing, and she set down her fork halfway through.
Vernon cleared his throat.
"So," he said. "Lily."
"Vernon."
"Your young man."
"Yes."
"He's- what's he doing with himself, these days?"
Lily reached for her wine.
"He's looking for work."
"Ah." Vernon nodded. He had, she realised, been waiting for this question. He had, perhaps, been preparing for it since the airport. "Ah. Well. These are difficult times, of course. Difficult times for young men. Especially young men without qualifications."
"He has his A-levels." He did not in fact have his A levels.
"Of course. Of course. But, you know… practical experience. That's what employers are looking for. Practical."
"I see."
"Now." Vernon put down his fork. He folded his hands. He had, Lily understood, arrived at his point. "Now. I happen to know that Grunnings, the drill manufacturer-" How could she ever forget that fact?
"Is taking on warehouse staff at the Birmingham depot. Steady work. Decent wage. Not what your young man might have imagined for himself, perhaps, but a foot on the ladder. And I could put in a word."
He said the last sentence with the air of a man producing a velvet box.
"That's very kind of you, Vernon."
"It's nothing, it's nothing. Family is family."
Petunia, who had been silent throughout, set down her knife and fork with a clink.
"Don't."
Vernon blinked.
"Don't what, dear?"
"Don't offer that boy a job. He won't take it," Petunia said. "And even if he took it he wouldn't keep it. You don't know him, Vernon. I do. I knew his mother and I knew his father, well, I knew of them, everyone in Cokeworth did, and I'm telling you. He's not the working kind. His mother wasn't, his father wasn't, his father was in prison, Vernon, did Lily mention that? Drank himself half to death and beat his wife and went to prison for murder and his mother was no better, she was-"
"Petunia."
"-she was a drunk, Vernon, the whole street knew it, and she ended up, well, nobody knows where she ended up, she just walked off one day and took the boy's, well. Anyway," Petunia continued. "I'm telling you. You'd be doing the firm no favours. Some people are not the working kind."
Lily set down her glass. She did it carefully, because she did not trust her hand. She set it down on the white tablecloth and she breathed out through her nose.
The worst part was that she couldn't argue. Not because Petunia was right, Petunia was wrong in every way that mattered and right in every way that showed, but because because the defence was true and unsayable. Severus worked. He brewed blood-replenishing potions and healing draughts and concentrated dittany in a basement laboratory by lamplight, for people who would die without them, for a war Petunia didn't know was happening. He worked more than Vernon. He just couldn't put it on a form.
And even if none of that were true, even if he really did sit in a house all day and did nothing, it was his house, and her business, and the Dursleys could take their concern and their warehouse job and choke on it.
"Pet," Vernon said, uncertainly.
"What."
"Bit much, perhaps."
"I'm only saying, Vernon. I'm only being honest. It's a kindness to be honest. Lily knows what I think. She's known since we were children."
The main course came. Lily ate it. By the time the flan came, Lily had said, perhaps, fifteen words for the entire meal, and she rose at the end of it and thanked Vernon for dinner and told Petunia she hoped she slept well and walked out of the dining room with her back very straight.
The corridor on the fourth floor was dim and quiet, the sounds of the dining room and the pool bar fading behind her as she walked, her sandals clacking on the terracotta tile.
She reached room 412. Put the key in the lock. Jiggled. Shoved. The door opened onto darkness.
The shutters were closed, the bedside lamp was off, and the bed, even in the half-light from the corridor, was visibly empty.
"Sev?"
Nothing.
She pushed the door open further. She came in. She turned on the lamp.
The bed was made. Not made by housekeeping, made by Severus, in his particular way.
"Severus?"
She crossed to the bathroom. The bathroom was empty.
She checked the wardrobe, an absurd impulse, born of seven years of finding him in unlikely places, cupboards and alcoves and the narrow space between bookshelves in the Hogwarts library where he'd wedge himself when the Slytherin common room got too unpleasant. The wardrobe held his shirts, hung in an evenly spaced row and his trousers folded over the crossbar. No Severus.
A small, cold knot formed in the space below her ribs. He didn't do this. He didn't leave without telling her.
But his shoes were not in the room.
She crossed to the balcony and unlatched the doors and stepped out into the warm dark.
The sun was setting. She'd missed it happening, and now it was nearly done, the last of it pooling along the horizon in bands of amber and copper. The promenade was lit. The strip glittered. Beyond the strip the sea was almost black, only a thin band of last light along the horizon where the sun had been an hour ago. The palm trees stood in silhouette against the sky, their fronds motionless in the still, warm air.
And below the hotel, beyond the pool and the car park and the low wall of oleander bushes, the beach stretched out in the fading light, the sand turned from gold to a pale, luminous grey by the angle of the sun. The sea had gone dark, the turquoise of the afternoon replaced by something deeper and more serious, and the waves, small, gentle things, caught the sunset light on their crests and held it for a moment before letting it go.
There was a figure at the waterline.
Lily gripped the balcony railing. The metal was warm from the day's sun, almost hot, and she leaned forward and her eyes adjusted to the distance.
Severus stood at the edge of the sea.
He was still in his dark shirt and trousers, of course he was, he hadn't brought anything else, but he'd taken off his shoes and held them at his side in one hand.
His feet were in the water. Just his feet, ankles deep, the small waves washing over them and retreating, washing over them and retreating. His trousers were rolled to mid-calf, exposing pale shins that had probably never been exposed to sunlight in their entire existence. His sleeves were rolled too, his forearms bare, and his hands hung at his sides, empty, open, fingers slightly curled.
He was watching the sunset.
She watched him for a long time.
When he finally turned and began to walk back up the beach, she went inside, and closed the balcony doors, and turned off the lamp, and lay down on top of the made bed in the dark to wait for him.
She woke before he did.
The shutters were half-open and the light was the colour of sand, and the cicadas had begun, and somewhere out over the sea a gull was making a thin small sound that did not, in any way, sound like an English gull. Severus was on his side facing her, one arm under the pillow, his hair flat across his forehead and she watched him for perhaps a minute before she registered that on the other side of the wall, in the room next door, two voices were already awake.
The balcony doors of both rooms were open.
"-don't understand why it isn't working. We've done everything right. Everything. The doctor said to relax, so we're relaxing. We're on holiday. We're relaxed." Petunia said, clearly not relaxed. "I'm so relaxed I could scream."
"Pet, love-"
"Jean from accounts was pregnant within three. Three. And she wasn't even trying. She told everyone it was an accident, as if that's something to brag about."
Vernon said something Lily couldn't catch.
"What if something's wrong with me?"
"Nothing's wrong with you." Vernon's voice was firm now, the voice of a man planting his feet. "The doctor said-"
"The doctor said to wait. The doctor said to be patient. The doctor said some couples take longer." Petunia continued. "But he also said, he asked about my cycle, and I told him about the flushes, the hot flushes, Vernon, and he looked at me, and I could see him thinking it, even if he didn't say it-"
"He didn't say it because it isn't true. You're twenty-two."
A silence. Lily, on her side in the bed, did not move.
"It happens. And the flushes keep getting worse. Every day, sometimes twice a day, this heat that comes from nowhere, like someone's lit a fire inside my chest, and my face goes red and I can't-"
"Pet, it's August. We're in Spain. Everyone's hot."
A long pause. Lily heard the springs shift. She heard Vernon, in his unfamiliar role of comforter, clear his throat.
"I just want a baby, Vernon."
"I know, dear. We'll keep trying. We've got time."
The springs shifted again. There was a small sound that might have been Vernon kissing his wife's forehead, or might have been him reaching past her for the water glass on the bedside table. The conversation, after that, dropped to a register Lily could not make out, and after a moment she heard Petunia get up and go into their bathroom, and the door shut, and after that, nothing more than muffled voices.
She realised she had been holding her breath.
"Lily."
Severus's voice came from beside her, from the other half of the pushed-together beds, from the narrow gap between the mattresses where they met in the middle. She turned her head. He was lying on his back, the sheet pulled to his waist, one arm behind his head, his face turned toward her. He'd been awake the whole time.
"Did you-"
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"Most of it."
He closed his eyes again. He kept them closed for some time. Then, in a voice of deep and considered horror:
"You have a choice. You can Obliviate the last five minutes, or you smother me with a pillow. I'll accept either. I have no preference."
"They're married. It's to be expected…"
"Not them. Not those two. The laws of nature should have intervened. The universe should have drawn a line. There are things that should not exist, and the image currently occupying my mind is one of them."
She started laughing. She tried not to.
"Don't. Don't laugh. This is a serious medical event. I am going to require years of professional assistance."
She was laughing properly now, her face buried in the sheet so the wall would not carry it. Severus opened one eye to look at her with the dignified suffering of a man whose tragedy had not been adequately honoured, and then, after a moment, the corner of his mouth moved, and he closed the eye again.
An almost comfortable silence settled over the bed. Lily let it last approximately twelve seconds.
Then: "Do you think that they heard us last night?"
His eyes snapped open.
"No."
"The window was open. We had the doors open. It was hot-"
"I am going back to sleep. I am going back to sleep and I am going to forget this entire conversation. You will not speak. You will not breathe loudly. You will lie there in silence and in shame, and when I wake up, in perhaps a week, we will not refer to this morning ever again."
"So that's a yes, you think they heard us."
He stood up, walked to the balcony, and shut the doors. Then he shut the shutters. Then he came back and lay face down on the bed and did not move. She took this as confirmation.
By the time they got down to breakfast, Vernon and Petunia had already eaten and gone, Lily checked the dining room with the small careful glance of a woman counting exits, and they ate quickly at a table near the kitchen door and went back to the room and got changed.
The bikini had cost her four pounds at Rackhams, on the staff discount, and she had tried it on three times in the changing room with the curtain firmly closed and had still not been certain. It was navy blue with small white spots. The bottoms were modest by Mediterranean standards and immodest by every other standard she had ever held. She put it on in the bathroom with the door locked, and she put a sundress over the top, and she stood in front of the mirror over the sink for a full minute and looked at herself, and then she went out.
Severus was sitting on the edge of the bed.
He had not dressed for the beach, because Severus did not dress for beaches, in the same way that cats did not dress for water. He was wearing his black trousers and his boots and the white vest, over which he had, at her insistence, pulled his white shirt with the sleeves pushed up past the elbows, the maximum amount of skin he was prepared to expose to sunlight, strangers, and the general indignity of being outdoors. The rolled sleeves had taken ten minutes of negotiation. The boots were non-negotiable.
She'd tried. God knows she'd tried. In the weeks before they left, she'd taken him to the Rackhams menswear department and shown him swimming trunks, cotton shorts, linen shirts in pale colours that normal men wore to normal beaches. He'd looked at the swimming trunks and informed her that he would rather be kissed by a dementor than wear them.
"No."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were going to ask whether I would consider something and the answer is no."
"All right."
"I have made significant concessions already."
"You have."
He held out his arms, sleeves rolled, pale forearms exposed to the morning light coming through the shutters. He looked at them as though they belonged to someone else. Then he put them down.
She kissed him, briefly, on the temple, and picked up the beach bag, and they went.
After breakfast they left the hotel through the side entrance, avoiding the lobby where the Thomson rep was setting up for the morning's excursion bookings, and walked down towards beach.
The book kiosk was at the far end of the promenade, a rotating wire rack outside a shop that also sold newspapers, cigarettes, and whatever a tourist desired.
The rack held perhaps forty paperbacks, most of them in German, a handful in English, their covers already beginning to fade in the sun. Lily turned it slowly, scanning the spines, while Severus stood two paces behind her with his arms folded.
"I'm not reading Muggle books."
"You've been staring at the ceiling fan for two hours. I fear for your sanity. You need a book, Sev."
"It's more likely I will go mad reading Muggle fiction."
She pulled a paperback from the rack and held it up. "Agatha Christie. Murder on the Orient Express. Very popular. Very clever. A detective solves a murder on a train using logic and deduction, which sounds very you"
He looked at the cover, a circle of shadowed faces around the white blade of a knife, and turned it over. He read the back cover and she saw the moment the premise caught him, because his eyes went back to the top and read it again.
"I'll know the answer before he does," he said. "This Poirot. He won't see what I see."
"I'm sure he won't."
"People always miss the obvious."
"Buy the book, Sev."
He tucked it under his arm. Then he reached over her shoulder and pulled a second Christie from the rack. And a third. He examined them without comment, read both back covers, and added them to the first.
Lily, while he was occupied, found the Forsyth. The Day of the Jackal, a silhouetted figure in a hat seen through crosshairs. She held it up.
"Frederick Forsyth. Spy thriller. Very popular right now. Everyone on the beach is reading one."
Severus glanced at the cover. "Spying."
"Yes."
"A man who lies to everyone around him, lives with many secrets, serves more than one master, trusts no one, and operates in constant fear of being discovered and killed."
"Sounds about right."
"And people read this for pleasure."
"Apparently."
He looked at her. She looked at him.
"I'll get it for myself," she said.
"You'll get bored of it in thirty pages and try to make me read it."
"Probably."
She bought all four, the three Christies and the Forsyth. One hundred and twenty pesetas. Just over a pound. They would read them carefully, not crack the spines too far, and return them to the rack before they left.
By the time they were out of the store, Severus was already opening the first Christie as they walked.
The beach at half past ten was already filling up. She rented a parasol from the leathery attendant who patrolled the loungers with a pouch of pesetas and a territorial bearing. She claimed a spot nearest the back of the beach, where the sand was deeper and the crowd was thinner and Severus could sit with his back to the majority of the human race.
The noise was considerable. Hundreds of people doing nothing generated a surprising amount of sound, splashing, shouting, the tinny pulse of competing radios, complaining about sand in places sand should not be, the steady slap of a paddleball game three towels away. The whole beach smelled of coconut oil and salt and warm skin.
She spread their towel, a hotel towel, thin and white, stamped with the hotel crest, and watched Severus lower himself onto it with the cautious, angular movements. He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, boots planted in the sand, and extracted the three Christies from the bag, laid them on the towel in a row, and considered them. The Orient Express went first. Lily took off the sundress. She was aware of her own skin in a way she had not been since she was twelve and her body had begun doing things she hadn't asked it to do. The bikini covered what it covered and left the rest to the sun and the air and the several hundred strangers who were not, in fact, looking at her, because they were on holiday and had their own skin to worry about, but who felt, just at that moment, like an audience.
Severus was looking at her. She caught it, the quick, involuntary glance from behind the Agatha Christie, the eyes that moved from her face downward and then snapped back to the page with a speed that suggested the page had suddenly become the most riveting thing ever printed. His ears went pink.
She fished the Ambre Solaire out of the bag and shook it. The bottle was brown with a gold label and smelled, when she opened it strongly of coconut. She poured a pool of it into her palm and began spreading it across her arms, her shoulders, her stomach, working it in, hoping for the most even result.
Severus, without looking up, reached over and took the bottle from beside her foot. He turned it over. He read the back. He read it again.
"This has a protection factor of two."
"Yes."
"You might as well rub chip fat on yourself. The effect would be comparable."
"It'll be fine. I've never had a bad sunburn."
"You've never been to the Mediterranean."
"The sun shines in Cokeworth."
"The sun in Cokeworth is a rumour. This-" He gestured at the sky, at the white disc of heat that was already, at half past ten, strong enough to make the sand shimmer. "This is not the same sun."
"It is literally the same sun."
"You know what I mean."
She took the bottle back. She applied more. He watched her do it with distaste at her choices. She'd been making decisions Severus disapproved of since she was nine years old. Her survival rate so far was excellent. She saw no reason to change the method.
"I'm going in the water," she said.
He raised the book a fraction higher, which was both an acknowledgment and a fortification.
"Are you going to come?" Not because she expected him to say yes. Just because he needed some teasing.
"Of course not. I am going to read about how" He checked the back cover, holding it at arm's length, squinting slightly. "Hercule Poirot solves a murder on a train. I will applaud you from here."
The walk from the towel to the sea was perhaps forty feet. She covered it at speed, arms slightly away from her body, chin up, trying to seem absolutely fine and not at all thinking about the fact that several hundred strangers could see her like this. The sand was hot under her feet and then cooler at the waterline and then the water was suddenly around her ankles and warm, actually warm, warmer than any English water she had ever stepped into, and she stopped to appreciate it.
She turned. Severus was, in fact, watching her. He looked back down at his book very quickly.
She waded in.
The Mediterranean held her with a lightness she had not known water could have. She had grown up swimming in the municipal baths on Cradley Road, where her father had taken her and Petunia on Saturday mornings and held them under their stomachs while they kicked, his big hands steady beneath them, chlorine in their eyes, and she had never been in salt water in her life. The salt held her up. It held her up the way magic sometimes did, with an unearned generosity. She put her face under and came up and pushed her hair back, and the water ran down her face and into her mouth and tasted of salt, and she turned and waved at the small dark figure under the parasol on the sand.
He raised the book in acknowledgement.
She did this every few minutes. She would swim out a little way and turn and look for him, and find him, and wave, and go back to swimming. He never came in. He never put the book down for long. But every time she turned, he was there, and every time she waved, he raised the book. After a while she stopped worrying about whether he was watching and simply trusted that he was.
She went further out, past the wading families and the children on their inflatables, to where the water deepened and darkened and the waves were bigger, proper waves that lifted her gently and set her down.
Every few minutes, she turned and swam back toward the shore until she could stand, and she waved at him again. Each time, the same small tracking movement of his head.
She came out of the water eventually, dripping, her hair plastered to her neck and her skin goose-pimpled despite the heat, the transition from warm water to warm air producing a brief, delicious shiver.
She crossed the sand, it was scorching now, the evening sun having turned it into a griddle, and she ran the last stretch on her toes like a woman crossing hot coals, which was essentially what it was, arriving at the parasol's shadow with breathless relief.
"You're getting me wet," he said, before she had even reached him.
"Says the man who's been marinating in his own sweat because he'd rather dissolve than wear shorts and take his boots off. Move over."
He moved over. She sat down on the towel beside him and leaned into him deliberately, pressing her damp shoulder against his arm, her wet hair dripping onto his vest.
"I can solve this problem," she said. "If you came in, the wetness would no longer bother you, because you would also be wet."
"Your logic is, as always, impeccable."
"The water's beautiful, Sev. It's warm. You can see the bottom. There are little fish."
"I have no interest in little fish."
"You might, if you saw them. They are near the rocks over there. They're silver. They move together, like, like a spell, actually. Like when you cast that charm in fourth year, the one that made the snowflakes swirl in formation. They move like that."
She didn't push. She leaned her wet head against his dry shoulder and felt the sun begin to dry the salt water on her skin, tightening it, leaving a faint white residue that tasted of the sea when she licked her forearm.
The bakery was on the way back from the beach on the slow walk back, on a side street off the strip, and they had only meant to look in. Their shadows were almost directly beneath them, the strip shuttered and drowsy in the midday heat, the restaurants not yet open for lunch, the pavement radiating warmth through the soles of her shoes.
The bag of bread they came out with was warm against her hip. They added, at a stall on the corner, a paper bag of peaches, six of them, the woman behind the counter holding up six fingers and saying seis, Lily counting out the pesetas, Severus standing behind her with his hands in his pockets looking at the fruit closely without touching anything. The peaches were huge, fuzzed, dense in the bag. The woman put a seventh one in without comment, looked at Lily's face, made a small sympathetic sound and patted her own cheek and shook her head.
Lily, who had begun to suspect that she burned a bit, smiled and thanked her and got out of the shop quickly.
Severus, in the lift, looked at her.
"You're a bit red."
"I'm tanning."
In the room she got under a cool shower and stood there for a long time. The water hit the tops of her shoulders and she made a small involuntary sound. She turned the temperature down further. She washed off the salt and the sand and the cheap ice cream stickiness and also washed her bikini in the shower. She wrung it out over the drain and hung it from the shower bracket, where it would dry in an hour in this heat.
When she came out of the shower in a towel, the room was different.
The shutters had been pulled. The curtains had been drawn. The fan had been turned to its highest setting. The bread was on the desk, torn into pieces on a napkin from the dining room. The peaches sat beside it, washed, lined up. A glass of water on each bedside table. Severus was sitting in front of the fan with his shirt off and his eyes shut, which meant the heat had finally defeated him.
The after-sun was in her toiletry bag. She fetched it and sat on the edge of the bed and threw the towel across the back of the chair and started, working the lotion across the tops of her shoulders and down the backs of her arms. It was cool. It was, almost immediately, less cool.
Behind her, she heard a page turn. Then not turn. Then not turn for some time.
Then she rubbed the last of the lotion into her hands and considered them.
There was rather a lot of it left.
"Come here."
"I am here."
"Closer."
"I am quite close enough."
"Sev. Come here."
He turned a page. Lily reached across the bed and, with both hands, smeared after-sun lotion liberally across his cheek.
The sound he made was not, in any technical sense, a word.
"What in the-"
"I'm protecting you from sun damage."
"You absolute-"
She got him on the other cheek before he caught her wrist. The lotion was now in his hair, on his collar and across the bridge of his nose. He grabbed for her other wrist. She rolled away. He rolled after her. She got him in the throat. He got the lotion bottle off the bed and held it above her head as a hostage.
"Apologise."
"No."
She lunged. He dodged. She caught the hem of his shirt and pulled and the lotion bottle arced through the air between them and landed on the bedspread, and they both grabbed for it at the same time, and the result was a tangle of limbs and lotion and the brown-orange-cream bedspread bunching beneath them, and she was laughing and his hand was in her hair and hers was on his jaw and the lotion was a white smear across both of them.
The door opened.
The receptionist was standing in the doorway with a passkey in her hand. Behind her stood a couple, British, sunburned, holding matching Thomson welcome packs, the woman already mid-sentence about wanting a sea view, and porter with two more bags on a trolley. Marisol was looking at the room number on the door, and at the passkey in her hand, and at the registration card she was holding in her other hand, and at the entirely occupied bed in the middle of the entirely occupied room, with the slow blinking confusion of a woman whose paperwork did not, today, agree with reality.
Lily made a noise.
She grabbed for the bedspread. Severus, with a reflex she would also later admire, dropped the lotion bottle and snatched up the magazine and held it across his chest uselessly. The horrified woman put a hand over her mouth. The appalled man looked very firmly at the carpet. The porter began a slow, professional retreat down the corridor with the trolley.
"Lo siento," Marisol said. "I am so sorry-"
"It's all right-" Lily heard herself saying, in a voice three octaves above her natural range.
"So sorry. My mistake. I will sort this. Please, enjoy your-" The door closed. Footsteps retreated. Voices in the corridor, diminishing.
Silence.
The ceiling fan clicked. The after sun dried slowly on Severus's undershirt.
"The Confundus," Lily said.
"The Confundus. Evidently not your finest work." Severus confirmed.
There was a long silence.
Severus, after a moment, lowered the magazine.
"That woman," he said, very quietly, "is going to tell every person in this hotel what she just-"
He stopped. She was, despite herself, beginning to laugh.
She was laughing properly now, and after a moment Severus, still propped against the headboard with lotion in his hair and gave up entirely, and they laughed together in the dim hot room with the fan turning overhead, and it took them, in the end, some minutes to stop.
When they had stopped, she lay down beside him on the bed, and put her head on his chest, and listened to the slowing of his heart, and neither of them said anything for a long time, because there was nothing to say that the laughing hadn't already said.
They went and got banana splits at the ice parlour on the promenade in the evening. The glass-fronted display case showing photographs of the available options, each one so extravagantly, impossibly perfect that they bore the same relationship to actual ice cream that a portrait in the National Gallery bore to the person who'd sat for it. Banana splits, sundaes, coupes, parfaits, each one a towering architectural feat of fruit and cream and chocolate and wafer, photographed against a blue sky that was bluer than any sky had ever been.
The boy behind the counter spoke a kind of approximate English and a kind of approximate Spanish, and Severus stood in front of the menu for too long, so Lily, watching him, ordered for both of them.
"Banana split," she said, holding up one finger. "Uno. Two spoons." She mimed spooning. "Dos."
She pointed at herself and at Severus. The boy nodded.
The boy did things behind the counter with bananas and ice cream and chocolate sauce and a tin of squirted cream, and the dish that appeared on the counter was glass, long, heavy with fruit and cream and three colours of ice cream, with two plastic spoons laid across the top, and Lily paid for it with pesetas she had counted twice.
They sat on the sea wall with their feet dangling over the sand, close enough to the shop that the boy could see they hadn't stolen the dish, the banana split balanced between them on the warm stone, one spoon each, taking turns. The cream melted faster than they could eat it and ran down the sides of the boat and Severus made small offended sounds about it, and they ate it anyway, and the chocolate sauce was the cheap thin commercial kind that bore no relation to chocolate as such and was, she thought, perfect.
The last of it she left for him, nudging the dish across the stone with her fingertip. He scraped the sides of the glass wasting nothing. She set her spoon down and wiped her hands on her dress and watched the sun sit on the water.
"Maybe not Paris."
He was working the plastic spoon around the inside of the boat, hunting for the last bit of chocolate sauce.
"Maybe Nice."
The spoon paused. Just for a second. Then it kept moving.
"The beach," she said. "The beach is… look at it. We could live near a beach. We could live near something like this." She gestured out at the sea, at the evening light turning the water to copper and gold, at the strip and the sky and the gulls and the boats and the small tanned children running in and out of the waves with buckets. "There must be work. There's always work at the coast — shops, bars, the tourist trade. And there'll be a wizarding quarter somewhere. There always is, in the old cities. Tucked away."
She stopped. He had set the empty boat down. He was looking at the sea. The light caught his face at an angle that turned his skin almost warm, and his eyes were half-closed against the glare, and he was very still.
"I know it's not Paris," she said. "I know you wanted Paris. I know there's the library. The Bibliothèque Obscura. I know there's the Académie. I know Paris has everything. But Sev. We don't have to go where it's just grand. We could go where it's warm, and where there's water, and where we could…"
She trailed off. She had said enough, or too much, and the rest depended entirely on him.
He didn't look at her. He was still looking at the sea.
"I don't mind the beach," he said.
From Severus, this was rhapsody.
They sat on the wall in the last bit of sun, shoulder to shoulder, watching the sea and the boats and the many people on the beach below, and the world was warm and bright and full of salt and sugar and the distant sound of a Spanish radio, and for a little while, for an hour, for an evening, nothing was wrong at all.
The sun moved. The shadows lengthened. The promenade behind them filled with the evening crowd, couples walking arm in arm, children with ice cream running down their wrists, the first restaurant touts emerging from doorways with laminated menus. Neither of them moved to leave. At some point her head found his shoulder. At some point after that, his hand found her knee. At some point after that, she turned her face up and he turned his face down and the distance between them, which had been narrowing all evening, closed.
She woke because her skin woke her.
It was a particular kind of pain she had never had before: not a wound, not a cramp, but a heat that came up off her skin in waves, a tightness across her shoulders to her back and the tops of her arms and especially across the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones. She moved and the sheet dragged across her shoulder and she made a small involuntary noise.
Beside her, Severus slept on.
She lifted her head, very carefully. The light was already coming in around the edges of the shutters. She turned to look at him, and what she saw was almost insulting. He was lying on his back, one arm flung across the pillow, his face, in the dim bar of light across the bed, a healthy, faintly burnished colour. He had, she realised, tanned. He had spent the day under a Mediterranean sun in a vest and trousers and his black hair flopped over his face and he had, in defiance of every expectation, tanned a bit. This was not, by any reasonable standard, fair.
She got out of bed very slowly and went into the bathroom.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
The face that looked back at her was, broadly, the face of a tomato. Her nose was peeling already at the tip. There were clear strap-mark white lines across her shoulders where the bikini had been. Her cheeks were a fierce, uneven red. Her chest, where the V of the bikini had ended, had a sharp triangular tan-line that would, she suspected, last until October.
He was going to tell her he had told her so.
"Oh no," she said, to the mirror.
She got dressed in the loosest cotton she had, which was the sundress, and she went down to breakfast.
The dining room at half past seven was filling up. Lily kept her head down and made for the buffet and looked for yoghurt. Her mother had told her, once, that yoghurt drew the heat out of a sunburn, a thing her mother had picked up from somewhere and came in handy one memorable summer in 1972 when their father had fallen asleep in the garden in his vest. There was, in the long row of small glass dishes at the cold end of the buffet, exactly one kind of yoghurt available. It was strawberry.
Lily took four pots of it.
The waiter behind the buffet looked at her. She nodded at him, with the air of a woman who had a very ordinary plan for four pots of strawberry yoghurt at seven in the morning. The waiter, who had seen many things, said nothing.
Back in the room she went straight to the bathroom and shut the door. She took off the sundress and she sat on the edge of the bathtub, and she opened the first pot of yoghurt and, with two fingers, began to apply it to the tops of her shoulders.
It was cold. That, at least, was correct. It ran down her back. It ran down her chest. It dripped onto the tiles between her feet. It smelled, intensely, of strawberry.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub with cold strawberry yoghurt running down her spine and thought: What I have done with my life?
There was a knock on the door.
"Lily."
"Give me a minute."
"I'm- I-"
"Just go away. Leave me alone."
"Lily." A pause. His voice came through the door at a different angle, lower, the voice she had heard him use only for the things he found genuinely difficult to discuss. "Did you not bring… anything?"
She closed her eyes.
"Because I can go down to the chemist. Or whatever it is here. The pharmacy."
"It's not that, Sev." It was the sunburn. It was just the sunburn, and if she told him it was the sunburn he would say I told you so and he would be right, and she would rather sit in a dark bathroom covered in strawberry yoghurt for the rest of her natural life than give him that.
"Are you sure? You have, in the past, been less than forthcoming about this." She closed her eyes. They had been together for nearly two years and she had successfully maintained, through a combination of vagueness, deflection, and the strategic slamming of the bathroom door, a near-total embargo on this particular topic.
"I would tell you. Sev. I'm not… it's stomach. It's nothing."
Severus did not, immediately, believe her. She could hear it.
"All right. How long are you going to be?"
"I don't know… give me a few minutes-"
He went away. She heard him cross the room and sit down, presumably on the bed.
She looked down at herself.
The yoghurt had done absolutely nothing for her sunburn. The skin on her shoulders was as hot as it had been ten minutes ago.
She got into the shower and washed it off.
When she came out wrapped in a towel. Severus was where she had left him, on the bed, with the Agatha Christie face down on his stomach. He raised his eyes from the book to her face, and then lowered them to her shoulders, and then raised them back to her face.
"I had," Severus said, "told you so. I would like that registered."
"I'm done with the bathroom," she said.
He eventually returned from the bathroom. He climbed in under the sheet on his side and lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling for some time in silence.
"You smell," he said, eventually, "like strawberry."
"You're quite the detective. Must be the books."
"It is not unpleasant."
"Good to know."
"It is, however, somewhat-"
"Severus."
"-concerning."
"Go back to sleep."
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. His face, sun-warmed, faintly tanned across the cheekbones, was very close. She closed her eyes.
"You are not allowed in the sun today. I am declaring it medically necessary that we remain here. You are, in fact, not allowed out of this room today."
She picked up her pillow. Severus, who had seen what was coming, did not move. The pillow hit him in the chest. Ow, he said, mildly.
"All right, Sev."
They both went back to sleep.
They closed the shutters at half past nine in the morning and did not open them again.
The room, with its wooden louvres pulled to, became something else entirely. The bright Mediterranean glare reduced itself to thin gold bars across the terracotta tiles and the foot of the bed and Severus's bare shoulder where he lay on his side reading. The rest of the room sat in a deep brown-green half-dark, the kind of light Lily had never known before. The fan on the dressing table turned slowly with small complaints. It moved warm air from one side of the room to the other and did nothing about the heat, which had settled into the room as a substance, a thing you waded through to get to the bathroom.
They did not, today, open the balcony door.
Vernon and Petunia's balcony was three feet from theirs, separated by a single thin partition of painted concrete, and the previous morning's overheard conversation had been an education Lily did not propose to repeat from the other side. The shutters, today, would stay closed. The balcony door, today, would stay closed. They would, today, breathe each other's air and the lukewarm exhaust of the fan and the dust of the wooden shutters.
The room grew warmer with the door shut, the air thickening, the heat building in the sealed space until it sat on her skin like a second sunburn, but neither of them moved to open it. The warmth became the room's texture, part of its substance, the medium they existed in.
Lily lay on her stomach, naked, on top of the sheet. There was no position she had not tested. There was no fabric, including the sheet, that did not feel like a small punishment. And Severus lay beside her in his undershirt and pyjama trousers and read. He was about to finish the Agatha Christie. He made a small disgruntled sound.
"What."
"It is implausible."
"What's implausible."
"Everything."
"He beat you to it."
"Maybe."
He turned the page.
She closed her eyes.
The day moved. It moved without moving. There was, somewhere in the early afternoon, a long stretch in which she just lay with her face in the pillow listening to Severus turn pages and to the slow regular sigh of the fan and to the children at the pool five floors down, and she could not have said, when she surfaced, whether ten minutes had passed or two hours. The light through the shutters did not, on the timescale she could perceive, change. The bars of gold on the floor moved by perhaps the width of a tile and stopped, and moved again. The fan turned. Severus turned a page with a snap.
They ate the rest of the bread. There were, at some point in the middle of the afternoon, two peaches left, and Lily handed him one and ate the other and the juice ran down her wrist, and she lay on her back and let it.
At some point his breathing changed, and then hers did, and the space between them, the careful inch she'd been maintaining, the gap that protected her sunburn from his skin, was gone.
Some time later again, neither of them was asleep and neither of them was awake, and Lily lay on her side with Severus's arm under her neck and her sunburnt back held an inch off his chest where it would not touch him.
She must have slept. When she opened her eyes the bars on the floor had shifted across two more tiles and the light coming through them was a more dull colour. Severus was awake, watching her. He did not say anything. She did not say anything. Outside, very far away, somebody was playing a radio.
Then the knock came.
Lily froze. Severus, beside her, stopped breathing. They lay there in the brown half-dark and waited.
The knock came again. Then nothing. Then, after perhaps thirty seconds, a small retreating shuffle in the corridor.
"Gone," Severus murmured.
"Reception, do you think."
"Probably."
He stopped.
They lay there. The fan turned. Severus's hand moved very slightly to the small of her back, into the only patch of her that did not hurt, and stayed there. Lily breathed out. She thought, all right then. She let her eyes close again.
The second knock came four minutes later.
Three raps, harder, the irritated knock of a person who had not given up after the first attempt. Lily's eyes opened. Severus's eyes opened. They looked at each other in the half-dark.
"That's not the receptionist," he said.
"No."
"That is-"
"Yes."
"Lily, no."
"Yes."
"No, Lily-"
"Sev. Open the windows. The shutters. The balcony. Open them. Now."
"What."
"Sev, because it reeks of you know what in here, just go-"
He was up off the bed in one motion, and across the room in two, and she heard the click of the latch and the wooden creak of the shutters going wide and the sudden immense rush of warm air and the noise at the pool flooding into the room like something poured. She was already dragging her sundress on over her head. Her hair was a disaster. Her shoulders were on fire. Her face, in the small mirror over the dressing table as she lurched past it, was too red, too creased, and very obviously not, ten seconds ago, expecting visitors.
He went.
She crossed the room. She ran a hand through her hair and produced no improvement. She put her hand on the door handle and she breathed out and she opened the door perhaps eight inches, and she put her head into the gap, and she said, "Petunia."
Petunia was in a yellow sundress with white piping. Her hair was up. She looked, Lily registered, composed. She fanned herself with a paper fan she'd bought from one of the souvenir shops, the kind with a flamenco dancer on it, the kind Petunia would ordinarily have considered vulgar. She did it absently, flicking it back and forth at her throat, and Lily saw, a flush of pink rising from her chest. Her other hand went to the pendant, not holding it, touching it, the way you touch a spot that's warm, the gesture automatic, half-conscious.
Lily looked at the flush and the fanning and the fingers on the pendant and felt something cold move through her stomach.
"Hello, Petunia," she said, and the words were automatic because her brain was somewhere else entirely. It was at the wedding. It was in the back of the car, Petunia shivering in her white dress, and Lily's fingers on the clasp, and the warming charm she'd cast without thinking, the throwaway spell, the minor kindness, it was still active, wasn't it?
"I knocked before."
"I- yes. I was asleep."
"Asleep."
"I haven't been very well. The sunburn- "
Petunia's eyes moved past Lily's face into the eight-inch gap of room behind her. They moved across what they could see, which was not much, a slice of bed, a fan, a strip of late-afternoon balcony, and Petunia's nostrils flared very slightly.
"I see," Petunia said.
Lily, with her head sticking out into the corridor and her shoulder pressed against the inside of the door and watched her sister adjust the strap of her handbag, and waited.
"Vernon and I," Petunia said, "are going to the beach tomorrow."
"Oh."
"In the morning. At about ten."
Petunia was not going to say, would you like to come, because to say it would have been, in Petunia's vocabulary, a request.
"Right," Lily said again.
"I just," Petunia said, "I just thought you might want to know. Where we'd be."
"Okay."
"Right."
Another pause. Petunia was now looking down the corridor, in the direction of the lift, as though she had places to be.
"I'll- let me think about it. I'll see how I feel in the morning. The sunburn-"
"You look quite poorly."
"Have a nice evening, Petunia."
"You too, Lily."
Petunia's eyes flickered, one last time, into the slice of room visible behind Lily's head.
Lily closed the door.
She stood with her forehead against the wood for a full five seconds before she could move. Behind her, in the bathroom, the shower was running. She crossed the room and turned it off, and Severus, who had been sitting on the closed lid of the toilet looked up at her.
"What did she want."
Lily sat down on the edge of the bath. She put her face in her hands. Her shoulders, even with that small movement hurt.
"I don't know," she said, into her own palms, "what she wants from me."
"Lily."
"I don't, Sev. One day she says she has no sister, and the next day she comes to my door and stands in a corridor for ten minutes trying to get me to come to the beach. I can't read her. I can't. I never could. She's been doing this since we were children. She hates me and she can't leave me alone. She wants me near her and she cannot bear having me near her. And I don't know what I want or what I want her to want."
Severus reached over and put his hand on her knee. He did not, by speaking, attempt to solve it.
She batted his hand away gently and got up off the edge of the bath. She walked back into the bedroom. She opened the balcony door, properly this time, fully, the louvres folded back against the outer wall, and stood in the doorway and let the evening air come in. The sky over the strip was beginning to turn. The first lights were coming on along the promenade. Somewhere out beyond the rooftops, the Mediterranean was the colour of wet slate.
She stood there for a long time.
Severus came and stood behind her, careful, not touching her shoulders. He stood with his chest perhaps an inch from her back, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him without his actually being against the burn.
"Are we going," he asked.
"I don't know," she said, eventually. "Ask me in the morning."
Lily had decided in her sleep.
She was not sure when, exactly. Some time in the small hours, between one shallow surfacing and the next, her body had sorted the question into a different drawer than her mind had filed it in, and when her eyes opened at half past seven the question was answered. She would go to the beach with her sister. She would have breakfast with Vernon and Petunia. She did not fully know why. It had something to do with her father, and who had once said, at Sunday dinner, Petunia is your only sister, flower, and you will never have another one.
She told Severus while he was still pulling his shirt on. He looked at her for a long moment and before he could say anything-
"You don't have to."
"I am coming."
"Sev-"
"I am coming, Lily. Stop trying to spare me."
So they went down to breakfast.
Vernon had developed, overnight, the kind of sunburn that should involve a doctor, and Petunia was in the yellow dress with white piping again, and they all sat at a four-top by the window and said good morning. Petunia had eaten three pieces of melon and Lily was sure that was done for the meal after the piece of toast she was very slowly eating. Vernon had, by the time Lily and Severus arrived, accumulated a small ramparts of bacon.
Vernon noticed her. "Look at you. You'll want some after-sun on that." He said this from a face that was itself in urgent need of after-sun, and would not, Lily suspected, be receiving any.
Lily rolled her eyes. "You're looking very well done yourself."
"Tanning," said Vernon, pleased. "Coming along."
She watched him reach for another rasher of bacon with the slow proud confidence of a man whose plan was working.
He greeted Severus with a clap on the shoulder that made Severus visibly recalculate his entire morning.
"Snape, my lad," he said.
"Vernon."
"Going to get you in the sea today, are we?"
"I-"
"Bit of colour on you. Bit of Majorca. I'm working on a tan myself."
"Vernon," said Petunia.
"Just saying. The lad needs sun."
"I am, in fact," said Severus, "currently avoiding the sun."
"Eh?"
"Out of preference."
"Out of-" Vernon blinked, considered this as a position, and elected to set it aside. "Right. Right. Well. Each to his own, eh?"
A silence followed in which Vernon drank his beer and Severus stared at the pool and Lily watched both of them and marvelled, not for the first time, at the vast and apparently uncrossable distance between two men who were, at this moment, sitting eighteen inches apart.
Vernon talked. Vernon, she suspected, always talked at breakfast, about the weather, which was going to be hot; about the pool, which had been crowded yesterday; about the German family, who had once again beaten him to the prime loungers through what he clearly considered a campaign of systematic aggression, about the Caves of Drach excursion they'd taken yesterday, about an underground lake he would admit was quite something. Lily chewed her roll and made the sounds of agreement that the conversation required. Severus ate with his head down, his hair curtaining his face. Petunia ate her toast in small, measured bites and watched.
Read the rest on Ao3 here:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
(It's about 34k words, so it's too long for Tumblr)
Made some covers for the parts already posted of my fic Perennitas (1-5) and also some unposted one that I'm working on right now as a little preview 😅 Chapter 6 will be out soonish hopefully!
Summary for Perennitas: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 1: July 1978. Lily drags Severus to Petunia's wedding. It goes about as well as expected.
Chapter 2: June 1978. Lily gets a Muggle job while Severus does nothing at all, and somehow the war they're both hiding from finds her anyway.
Chapter 3: Early 1980. Lily and Severus hide from the war, then from each other, and finally from despair.
Chapter 4: October 1975. Lily spends five days convincing Severus to visit Hogsmeade, and one afternoon learning she shouldn't have asked and that firewhisky solves nothing.
Chapter 5: 1991 school year. Professor Snape (née Evans) is faced with James Potter's and Marlene McKinnon's child, her own avoidance, and the difference between caring and actually doing something.
Pairing: Lily Evans/Severus Snape
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 5: 1991 school year. Professor Snape (née Evans) is faced with James Potter's and Marlene McKinnon's child, her own avoidance, and the difference between caring and actually doing something.
Word count of chapter 5: 27,702 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
The restaurant was called Le Sortilège, and it had been torturing Lily for the better part of three years.
It sat on the crooked stretch of Hogsmeade's high street between Scrivenshaft's and the old apothecary, occupying what had once been a tearoom and before that, according to Severus, a dingy solicitor's office that handled magical property disputes.
The new owners had gutted the place down to the original stone and rebuilt it into something that belonged on a Parisian side street rather than a Scottish village: tall windows with iron mullions, candlelight that moved like living things behind frosted glass, a door of dark oak with a brass handle shaped like a coiled vine.
The whole building was wrapped in a Notice-Me-Not charm keyed specifically to anyone under seventeen, which meant that seventh-years who came of age during term experienced the disconcerting phenomenon of an entire restaurant materializing between Scrivenshaft's and the apothecary where they could have sworn there had only been a narrow alley.
Severus had looked at the menu and then looked at her and then looked at the menu again, calculating in the way of a man who had grown up without enough and never entirely stopped counting.
The last night before term. They'd been marking it this way for years now, a meal out, something indulgent, a small act of defiance against the coming months of responsibility.
They'd eaten well. Better than well. She'd had the lamb and he'd had something with venison and a sauce that involved redcurrant and thyme, and even Severus had admitted that it was worth at least half of what they'd paid.
Now they stood on the cracked tarmac of the playground at the end of Spinner's End, the Apparition still ringing in her ears, the August evening settling around them like something warm and worn. The roundabout had finally given up the ghost sometime in the mid-eighties, collapsing into a heap of metal that the council had never bothered to remove. The swings were new. The old ones had finally rusted through and been replaced sometime in the eighties by the council, who had given up on most of Cokeworth but kept sending people out to replace the swings. Lily found this strangely moving.
"We could Apparate closer," Severus said, though he was already walking toward the gate.
"It's a nice evening."
She wanted to walk. She always wanted to walk when the weather was like this, when it offered up an evening so warm and golden it felt like an apology for everything that had ever gone wrong.
They walked through the streets of their childhood, past the boarded-up shops and the empty houses and the FOR SALE signs that had been there so long they'd faded to illegibility. The steelworks had closed in ’79, taking half the town's employment with it, and the slow bleeding that followed had never quite stopped.
"McGonagall's still doing it," Lily said, because she'd been waiting to bring it up all evening, had in fact been composing and discarding opening lines since the main course. "The visits. All of them. Every single Muggle-born family, she does them all herself. Won't let me near it."
"I know."
"I've asked four times now. Four. You'd think after four times she might at least-“
Severus said nothing.
"What?"
"I didn't say anything." He shrugged.
"The point is, she won't let me help. I was Muggle-born. I know what those families are going through. I know what it's like to have some stranger show up in your sitting room and tell you your daughter is a witch and by the way, magic is real, here's a rat that used to be a teacup. I lived that. I could help."
"You could."
"And I'm good with people. I’m-“ She stopped herself. She didn't need to make the case to him. He knew. "So why won't she let me?"
"Because she doesn't trust you to do it properly."
Lily pinched the soft skin on the inside of his arm, hard enough to make him flinch. "Tell me the truth."
"That was the truth."
"Tell me the truth I want to hear."
Severus was quiet for three paces. The light was thickening now, the sun balanced on the roofline of the terrace ahead like a coin on its edge.
"Break into Dumbledore's office," he said. "The Hogwarts Book of Admittance is inside. Copy the Muggle-born entries for the upcoming year, track down the families yourself, and tell them everything before McGonagall even has the chance to lace up her boots."
Lily stared at him.
“How very Slytherin of you.”
She pinched him again, lighter this time, and he caught her fingers and held them against his arm. They turned the corner onto Spinner's End.
Every year there were fewer lights in windows, fewer cars in driveways, fewer people on the streets. But Lily had grown up here. Had walked these streets with Petunia, had run through these alleys with Severus, had known every shortcut and every hiding place. So she couldn’t imagine leaving.
They turned onto Spinner's End.
The street had changed less than the rest of Cokeworth, mostly because it had always been the worst street in town and therefore had less distance to fall. And the fact that the terraces had been condemned for demolition when they were fourteen and they had only managed to keep them standing through renewing a notice me not and muggle repellant spells every few years.
Their house was, objectively, the nicest house on Spinner's End. This was not a high bar to clear, but Lily cleared it with enthusiasm.
Window boxes spilled over with geraniums, and the cat sat in the front window like a small malevolent gargoyle, watching their approach with an expression that suggested they were already late with dinner.
The front door had been repainted three years ago, a colour the tin had called Country Green and which had turned out rather more vivid than the sample had suggested. Lily loved it. She fished for the key in her bag, which was always at the bottom of the bag no matter how many times she vowed to put it in a proper pocket, and let them in.
The door stuck slightly in its frame, it always did in humid weather, and she shouldered it open with the automatic adjustment of long habit.
Inside, the house made fewer efforts to impress.
“Fucking shoes," she muttered, stepping over the pile that had accumulated by the front door like sediment. There were trainers and wellies and sandals and one inexplicable winter boot, scattered in defiance of the shoe rack that stood empty beside them.
Severus kicked the shoes out of his way and was already moving toward the kitchen.
From down the sitting room, the television emitted the ambient chatter of a set left running to keep an empty room company. Lily eased the sitting room door open and peered in.
The room was dark except for the grey-blue wash of the screen, which was showing something involving cars. A constellation of empty glasses had accumulated on the coffee table, because no one in this house had ever learned that the journey from sitting room to sink was not, in fact, a heroic undertaking.
"Telly's on again," she called toward the kitchen, where she could hear Severus moving about.
She searched for the remote, checking the usual places: between the cushions, under the coffee table, behind the stack of magazines and newspapers that no one ever read or paid attention to. It was nowhere to be found. The remote existed in a quantum state in this house, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, observable only by whoever had used it last and therefore utterly invisible to anyone who actually wanted it.
She gave up and pointed her wand at the screen. It went dark with a soft click.
From the kitchen came the sound of cupboards opening and closing, of water running, of Severus muttering something uncomplimentary about the state of the sink. The cat was weaving between his ankles, butting her head against his shins, ignoring her. It was ancient now, her black fur shot through with grey, her movements slower than they'd once been, but her capacity for melodrama remained undiminished.
Severus opened a tin of cat food and scraped it into the dish with more force than the task required. The cat descended on it like a creature that had been starved for weeks rather than an animal that had, Lily knew, been fed this lunch.
"How many?" Lily asked, nodding toward the sink.
"Every bowl in the house, as far as I can tell.”
Lily leaned against the doorframe. He'd rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and she watched the tendons in his forearms shift as he set the empty tin aside.
She let her eyes linger. The restaurant had been lovely, but this, Severus in shirtsleeves, the kitchen they'd built together, this was better.
"I'm still hungry," she announced.
Severus turned from the sink, one eyebrow ascending. "We have just spent thirty-four galleons on a meal. Thirty-four. That is more than I spent on food in my entire childhood. Combined."
"I'm a different type of hungry." She batted her eyelashes. It was not subtle. It was not meant to be.
"If you're about to make a dessert metaphor," he said, "I want a divorce."
"I wasn't going to."
She absolutely was going to make a dessert metaphor and she'd been about four seconds from delivering it with the kind of theatrical eyebrow raise that she knew he secretly found funny even when he pretended otherwise.
"Good." He turned back to the sink. "Because I've heard every possible variation and none of them have improved with age."
A beat. Then another.
"Come here," Severus murmured.
She crossed the kitchen and wrapped her arms around him, pressing her face in his still scrawny chest. He was warm through the shirt. He always ran warm, one of the many small contradictions of him, cold hands, cold manner, but warm like a furnace underneath, like all that heat had to go somewhere and had chosen the parts of him that only she ever got close enough to find.
Lily pushed through the door of the staff room at seventeen minutes past seven, slightly winded from the walk up from Hogsmeade, her hair escaping from its twist and her breakfast in a napkin, because apparently "leaving early" and "eating breakfast at the table" were mutually exclusive goals.
The walk from the village to the castle was twenty minutes if you hurried, which she had. Her calves were protesting. Her lungs were protesting. Her dignity, such as it remained after far too many years of teaching, was protesting loudest of all. She was thirty one years old. This was undignified.
Yesterday had been worse. She'd missed the Welcoming Feast entirely, had looked at the clock to find it half past seven, the Sorting having started thirty minutes ago, and herself still in Cokeworth in bed.
Today, at least, she was early. Earlyish. Early enough that she had time to eat her toast before her first class, which was all that really mattered.
The staff room was on the first floor, behind a door that bore no markings and opened only for those employed by the school, a charm so old that nobody alive remembered who'd cast it. Filius had claimed his usual spot on the specially heightened chair by the window, a stack of marking already accumulating beside him despite the term being approximately twelve hours old.
Minerva sat in the high-backed chair nearest the fire, which did not contain a fire because it was September and still technically summer, but which she occupied anyway out of what Lily suspected was pure territorial instinct. Aurora Sinistra was curled in the corner of the settee with a cup of something that steamed, her dark hair piled on top of her head in a style that made Lily's own escaping twist feel even more inadequate.
They looked up when she entered, offering the comfortable acknowledgments of long acquaintance.
She made for her armchair. She'd claimed it in her second year of teaching, and it had been hers by unspoken consensus ever since: the wing-back by the window, slightly removed from the main cluster of seats, angled so that she could see the door and the room and the grounds beyond the glass all at once. Its cushion permanently dented in the shape of her, and heaven help anyone who sat in it during her absence.
She dropped into it, kicked off her shoes, the left one landing neatly beside the chair, the right skittering under the side table, and tucked her feet beneath her. From her bag she extracted the toast, two slices of brown bread with butter and marmalade pressed together, slightly squashed from the indignities of transit.
"Good morning, Lily," Filius said. "We missed you at the feast."
"The Knight Bus," she said, by way of explanation, and bit into her toast.
"Ah. Trouble?"
"Something about a traffic jam in Inverness." Even she could hear how thin it sounded. "Three hours late. I sent a Patronus."
"It arrived," Minerva said crisply, "approximately forty minutes after the Sorting concluded."
"Well." Lily swallowed. "The important thing is that I'm here now."
The silence that followed suggested not everyone agreed.
Aurora stretched, catlike, and reached for her cup. "You missed quite a Sorting. A modest haul for Slytherin this year, but I'm quite pleased about that, quality over quantity, you know-“
"Quality," Minerva repeated dryly.
"A strong showing for Ravenclaw," Filius added. "I expect great things."
"Gryffindor took the lion's share, as usual," Aurora continued, "including, of course, the main event of the evening."
"The Potter boy." Aurora's voice had taken on the particular cadence of someone sharing gossip they'd been saving. "The Boy Who Lived himself, in the flesh, sorted into Gryffindor to the surprise of absolutely no one."
She'd known, of course. But she had forgotten it as well.
“I didn't realize-”
"Didn't realize what?"
"That it had been-“ She stopped. "That it had been ten years since the war already. Time flies."
"He seems a pleasant enough boy," Minerva offered, which was high praise from her and clearly an attempt at reassurance. "Small for his age. Quiet."
"I'm surprised you're pleased," Filius said to Minerva. "James Potter was the most troublesome student I've ever taught, and I've been teaching for fifty-three years. The detentions alone-“
"Both his parents were Gryffindors," Minerva said firmly. "From long lines of Gryffindors. It is only fitting that their son should continue the tradition."
"Fitting, perhaps. Restful, certainly not." Filius said. "I seem to recall a certain Deputy Headmistress threatening to resign if she had to supervise one more Marauder-related incident. What was it that finally pushed you over the edge? The singing toilets?”
“The haggis incident,” Minerva said grimly. "I had to replace my entire wardrobe."
"And now you have his son. For seven years."
"His son," Minerva said, with the air of someone who had given this considerable thought, "is not his father. The child was raised by Muggles. He arrived at the platform yesterday not knowing which end of a wand to hold.”
"Give him time," Aurora murmured. "The blood will tell."
The door opened, admitting Pomona Sprout in. Her robes were already stained with what looked like potting soil, suggesting she'd been in the greenhouses since dawn.
"Good morning, all! Glorious day, isn't it? The queen of the night is finally flowered, been waiting the whole year-“ She stopped, her gaze landing on Lily's armchair. "Lily! There you are. We missed you yesterday."
"The Knight Bus-“
"Yes, yes, I heard. Dreadful." Pomona bustled toward the tea service, which had appeared on the sideboard at some point during the morning and was steaming gently. "I was just saying to Filius this morning, wasn't I, Filius-“
"You were," Filius confirmed.
“-that it's quite remarkable, James Potter’s son starting at Hogwarts, and Lily being here to see it. After all, you were at school with his parents, weren't you? Same year, same House, the whole thing."
"I was," she managed.
"Same dormitory as his mother, even." Pomona was warming to her subject, clearly delighted to have found a conversational thread to pull. "I remember Marlene, you know. Interesting girl.”
"And James Potter." Pomona turned back to Lily with a smile that was clearly meant to be conspiratorial. "Head Boy, wasn't he? To your Head Girl? I remember the staff meetings that year, everyone speculating about whether you two would make a match of it. He was so obviously smitten, used to follow you around lovesick kneazle-“
"Pomona," Minerva said, in a warning tone.
"What? It's not a secret. Whole school knew. He asked her out at the semi-final Quidditch final in front of the entire school, didn't he? Made quite a spectacle of himself in the Great Hall that one time with the singing-“
"The singing," Filius said, wincing at the memory. "I'd forgotten the singing."
"Transfigured a pumpkin into a bard to kneel at her feet and sing a love song. The look on her face-“
"That was a long time ago," Lily said, and her voice came out sharper than she'd intended.
"A very long time ago," she repeated, more gently. "And thankfully, James grew out of it. Eventually."
"He was rather forced to, wasn't he?" Aurora murmured. "What with her and Severus Snape…”
Heat crept up Lily's neck, which was absurd. She was thirty-one years old. She had been married for nearly a decade. She should not be blushing like a fourth-year caught passing notes.
"We mustn't tease her so," Filius said finally, his voice determinedly light. "We've all been young once. And some of us remember what it was like rather less distantly than others."
"Some of us remember what it was like quite recently," Aurora murmured, and her dark eyes slid toward Pomona with the deliberate casualness of someone preparing to change the subject. "As I recall, Pomona, it wasn't so very long ago, I suppose two years ago, that a certain Herbology professor was seen exchanging very prolonged farewells with a certain Defence Against the Dark Arts professor at the end of her tenure. In the Entrance Hall. In full view of the portraits."
Pomona's cheeks went pink. "I was being collegial. She expressed an interest in Herbology. It would have been rude not to-“
"You showed her the private greenhouse. The one with the sensitive specimens."
"The woman is a scholar! She was curious about the application of magical plants in defensive-“
"You gave her a cutting as a goodbye.”
The conversation had successfully pivoted away from Lily's romantic history, for which she was profoundly grateful. She retrieved her toast from the arm of the chair, wiping the butter stain with her sleeve, and took a bite, watching the others bicker.
The door opened again.
Professor Quirrell entered. He was a slight man, Professor Quirinus Quirrell, with a nervous disposition that manifested in a persistent stammer and a tendency to flinch at sudden movements. He'd appeared at the pre-term staff meeting that doubled as a dinner, the newest addition to the faculty with excellent references and a large purple turban that he claimed was a gift from a wizard he'd met abroad, the details of which changed slightly each time he told the story, and which he never removed, even indoors, even when Minerva had pointedly asked whether he might be more comfortable without it.
Today he looked worse than usual. His face had a greyish pallor, and sweat beaded at his temples despite the morning being quite cool. His hands trembled as he reached for the doorframe, steadying himself, and his eyes, when they met Lily’s, held a feverish quality that made her instinctively sit up straighter.
“Quirinus," Pomona said, recovering first. "Good morning. You look…"
She trailed off, apparently unable to find a polite way to finish the sentence.
"N-nervous," Quirrell supplied, with a smile that was clearly meant to be self-deprecating and came out looking rather ghastly. "First d-day of t-teaching. You know how it is."
Lily did know how it was. She remembered her own first day, the terror of standing in front of a room full of students and realising she had no idea what she was doing, the conviction that she was going to say something wrong or do something wrong or simply combust from anxiety before the first lesson was finished. She remembered how Severus had told her, flatly, that the students would be too stupid to notice if she made mistakes.
"It gets easier," she offered. "The first class is always the worst. After a few weeks, you're too tired to be nervous.”
"Y-yes. I'm sure you're r-right."
"I have calming draughts, if you'd like one. Brewed them myself, occupational hazard of being the Potions professor, I always have stocks on hand. It won't impair your faculties, just takes the edge off."
"N-no," he said. "No, th-thank you. I prefer to f-face these things with a clear head."
"Of course. The offer stands, though. If you change your mind."
"V-very kind."
He moved past her to the tea service, his movements jerky and uncertain, as though his body was not entirely under his control. The purple turban bobbed as he walked, and Lily found herself staring at it, wondering whatever whoever had been thinking when he'd given such an ugly piece of headwear as a gift.
The others had resumed their conversation, though at a lower volume, shooting occasional glances at the new arrival.
Poor man. A year of teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts and then whatever calamity the position had in store for him. They never lasted, the Defence professors. Last year's had left for pregnancy; the one before that, a nervous collapse. Lily had stopped learning their names until Christmas, just in case.
She finished her toast and brushed the crumbs from her robes, already thinking about the day ahead.
"Well," she said to the room at large, "I should go prepare. First class starts in an hour."
Nods and murmured acknowledgments followed her as she retrieved her errant shoe from under the side table and slipped out into the corridor.
The seventh-year NEWT class was already assembled when Lily arrived.
"Apologies," she said, sweeping through the door with her robes billowing in a way she'd spent years perfecting. First impressions mattered, even with students who'd known her for six years. "Unavoidable delay. Books out, please. We're starting with theory today."
A collective groan rose from the assembled students, the universal response to the word "theory" from young people. Lily ignored it. She'd been ignoring that particular groan for seven years; she could ignore it for many more.
The NEWT class was small this year, only nine students had achieved the required Outstanding at OWL level. NEWT Potions was not for the faint of heart. The Ministry's requirements were exacting, the practical examinations were brutal, and the margin for error was approximately zero. Lily had learned, over the years, to temper her natural inclination toward encouragement.
It was not her favorite version of herself, the NEWT professor. But she needed them to pass. Her pass rates had been slipping, and while Dumbledore hadn't said anything directly, Lily knew that it must be coming.
"Today we'll be revisiting the theoretical foundations of antidote construction," she announced, tapping her wand against the blackboard. Words began to appear in her handwriting. "Specifically, Golpalott's Third Law and its practical applications. Who can tell me-“
"Professor?"
The voice came from the back of the room, accompanied by a flash of color.
Tonks was not the worst thing that had ever happened to Lily's N.E.W.T. class but also not the best.
It wasn't that Tonks lacked understanding. She grasped theory perfectly well, could recite ingredients and procedures and the underlying principles that governed magical chemistry with reasonable accuracy. The problem was the execution. The problem was that Nymphadora Tonks had been born with an inverse relationship between her magical talent and her physical coordination, and potions-making required both.
She should not have been in a potions laboratory. She should not have been within fifty feet of a potions laboratory. And yet here she was.
Lily had looked at the girl's OWL results, looked at the wreckage of her practical exam, looked at the fierce, stubborn want burning behind the apology in her eyes, and signed off on the O. She'd assigned three supplementary essays and a summer of supervised brewing to justify it. The essays had been competent. The brewing had cost two cauldrons and most of Lily's eyebrows. But the want had never wavered, not once, and Lily had learned long ago that you didn't stand between a person and the thing that made them who they were.
Tonks repaid this generosity by showing up to the lesson wearing a familiar shade of hair.
The match was uncanny. The same deep red, the same slight wave, even the same way it caught the light from the dungeon windows. Tonks grinned, clearly pleased with herself.
"Miss Tonks."
"Yes, Professor?"
"Your hair."
Tonks's grin widened. "Do you like it? I thought we could be twins."
"Change it back."
"But Professor-“
"Now, please."
The red faded reluctantly into a sulky purple.
The lesson proceeded with the particular tension that always accompanied Tonks's presence. Every time she moved, Lily's attention snapped to her, tracking her hands, her elbows, the dangerous proximity of her chair to the shelf of volatile ingredients against the back wall. The other students had learned to give her a wide berth; two of them had quietly relocated to workstations on the far side of the room within the first five minutes.
It happened during the slicing phase. The sopophorous bean, notoriously resistant to cutting, needed to be crushed rather than sliced to release its juice properly and the force required to crush the bean sent it skidding off the cutting board, into the flame beneath her cauldron, back out of the flame on a trajectory that defied several laws of physics, and directly into the simmering potion of the student beside her, where it reacted with the unfinished base to produce a geyser of pale purple liquid that hit the ceiling and rained down across a six-foot radius.
Tonks stood in the epicentre of the mess, her hair now lilac from the spray, her robes dripping, her expression cycling between horror and the particular species of resignation that came from having been in this exact situation many, many times before.
"I am so sorry, Professor Snape. I'll clean it, I can-“
"You've got Transfiguration." Lily checked the clock above the door.
"Go," Lily said. "I've got this."
"But-“
“Ms. Tonks. Go. I mean it."
Tonks went, trailing purple footprints and apologies in equal measure. Lily watched her crash into the doorframe on the way out, both sides of it, somehow, in sequence, and added a silent prayer to whatever deity oversaw the Auror training programme that they had excellent insurance.
The day continued.
She taught a double period of third-years after the NEWT class, then a single period of fourth-years, then another double with the second-years who were still excited enough about magic to find everything fascinating and hadn't yet developed the sullen indifference of adolescence. The dungeon classroom filled and emptied, filled and emptied, the faces blurring together until she had to check her register to remember which year she was meant to be addressing.
By the time the afternoon session arrived, she was running on determination and tea, having skipped lunch in favor of collapsing into her office chair and putting her feet up for twenty precious minutes. The chair was old and uncomfortable, salvaged from a Ministry clear-out years ago, but it reclined if you kicked it in exactly the right spot, and right now that was all she required of furniture.
She had not expected teaching to be this exhausting. When she'd accepted the position, she'd thought it would be manageable, stand at the front of a classroom, share her knowledge, go home at a reasonable hour. She hadn't accounted for the marking, the lesson planning, the endless administrative tasks that accumulated like sediment.
She hadn't accounted for the emotional labor of dealing with homesick first-years and stressed fifth-years and seventh-years who burst into tears over their career prospects. She hadn't accounted for the way her voice would go hoarse by the end of term, or the way she would dream about cauldrons and examinations and students whose faces she couldn't quite place.
The last class of the day was third-year Gryffindors and Slytherins, a combination that had been causing problems since before Lily was born and would probably still be causing problems long after she was retired.
Fred and George Weasley were thirteen years old, identical in appearance, and possessed of the most dangerously creative minds Lily had encountered since she'd attended school alongside their spiritual predecessors.
Unlike the Marauders, however, the Weasley twins had taken a liking to her.
"Professor Snapey!" Fred, or possibly George, she'd stopped trying to tell them apart in their second year, and counted herself lucky she'd never had to with her own, announced cheerfully as they claimed their usual seats in the front row. "We've been looking forward to this all day."
"Have you indeed, Mr. Weasley."
"Absolutely. Summer was dreadfully boring without your dulcet tones to guide us."
"We nearly expired from the lack of educational enrichment," the other twin added solemnly. "Had to make our own entertainment. Mum wasn't pleased."
"I trust you've completed the summer reading," she said, as the rest of the class filed in.
"Every word," Fred said.
"Twice," George added.
“We particularly enjoyed the chapter on controlled volatility.”
"Very informative. Really opened our eyes to the possibilities."
Lily made a mental note to inspect the hospital wing's burn salve reserves at the earliest opportunity.
The lesson proceeded with the controlled chaos that characterized any class containing the Weasley twins. They asked questions that were either brilliantly insightful or deliberately designed to derail the lesson; they completed their practical work with surprising competence, their potions were always exactly right, which suggested they were paying far more attention than they pretended to, and they only set one small fire, which was practically a record.
By the time the final bell rang, her head was splitting, her voice was hoarse, and her reserves of patience had been entirely depleted.
She dismissed them with a wave of her hand and sank into her chair, letting her head fall back against the worn leather.
The lesson plans took a lot longer than she'd hoped.
Slughorn's curriculum hadn't been meaningfully updated since the thirties. Lily knew this because she'd been the one tasked with updating it, and she hadn't, she just added to it instead of completley reworking. Every September she told herself this would be the year she rewrote the syllabus from scratch. Every October she found herself teaching from Slughorn's old plans again, her own revisions scrawled in the gaps.
The examination board's expectations had shifted considerably since then. What had once been considered advanced was now merely competent; what had once been optional was now required. Her students were being asked to demonstrate mastery of techniques that she hadn't learned until her apprenticeship, and they were expected to do it in half the time with none of the practical experience.
She'd meant to address all of this over the summer. She'd brought the folder home in July, had set it on the kitchen table with every intention of spending August restructuring the entire two-year programme. Instead, July and August had happened the way those months always just happened to her and and suddenly it was September and the folder was exactly as she'd left it, unopened, its contents reproaching her from across the kitchen whenever she caught its eye.
She pulled parchment toward her and began.
An hour passed. Two. The Great Hall would be serving dinner now. She didn't go. She ate at home, always had.
She summoned a school owl and scribbled a note.
Late tonight. Curriculum. Don't wait up. L.
She tied it to the owl's leg and watched it flap away into the darkening sky beyond her window. The reply came forty minutes later, delivered by the same owl, now looking slightly windswept.
Fine. S.
Spinner's End offered nothing but dark windows when she turned the corner. Inside, she stood at the foot of the stairs and listened, for the creak of floorboards overhead, the murmur of a wireless left on, for the particular quality of silence that meant the house was truly asleep.
She grabbed a spoon from the kitchen without breaking stride, went down to the cellar laboratory, and retrieved the tub of vanilla ice cream she'd hidden in the ingredients freezer behind a bag of pickled flobberworms. The flobberworms were the lock; the disgust they inspired was the key. She ate her way upstairs one spoonful at a time.
The ice cream was cold and sweet and exactly what she needed.
The light was on in their office. She followed it down the hall, spoon in one hand, ice cream in the other, and found Severus in the room they'd magically squeezed into the second floor some years ago. It was barely large enough for the desk, a chair, and the bookshelves that lined three walls from floor to the high ceiling, crammed with volumes in various states of repair and a rug the cat had ruined.
She pushed the door open with her shoulder, ice cream in one hand, spoon in the other, and there he was.
Severus sat with his back to the door, bent over a spread of parchment, his quill moving in the steady rhythm of someone deep inside a thought. The cat had draped herself across the remaining desk space, all four legs extended, occupying as much surface area as feline geometry would allow.
He was working on the Dark Arts book, the project that had consumed his evenings for the past two years. A comprehensive text on defensive theory and dark curse countermeasures, requiring enough rather interesting research material that an entire shelf now sagged under the weight of volumes he'd justified to her as "purely academic."
The working title changed monthly, it had been "Practical Dark Arts Defence” in the spring, “The Dark Arts: A Comprehensive Guide to Counter-Measures” over the summer, and was currently, as far as Lily knew, simply “The Book”, spoken in tones that suggested capitalisation.
He'd offered her co-authorship, as he did with all their projects, but she'd declined. Publishing one book had nearly killed her; she wasn't ready to survive another.
He didn't talk about it much, but the evidence of its progress was everywhere: stacked drafts on the kitchen table, reference volumes left open on the sofa, marginalia appearing on napkins and the backs of receipts when inspiration struck at inconvenient moments.
"I'm home," she said.
"You better not put that container back in the freezer."
"I was planning to finish it."
"And you're aware it's nearly midnight."
"I am."
"And that you said, and I quote, 'curriculum, don't wait up,' which I interpreted, perhaps naively, to mean you would be home at a reasonable hour rather than wandering in at a time normally reserved for burglars and cats in heat."
"The curriculum took longer than expected."
He turned in his chair. The quill was still in his hand, and he wielded it like a pointer. "First week of term and you're already keeping these hours. It doesn't bode well."
"It was a difficult day."
"They're all difficult days. That's teaching."
Lily had barely set foot in the teachers' lounge since Monday. Her lesson plans had consumed her evenings, the NEWT revisions spilling into her first-year preparations, her marking piling up in drifts across her desk like snow that refused to melt. She'd taken to eating lunch in her office, door closed, a sandwich in one hand and a quill in the other.
On Wednesday, she'd visited Pomona in the greenhouses to collect the fresh nettles and dried billywig stings she needed for next week's practical sessions. She'd intended to ask then, about the boy who lived, since Pomona taught first-year Herbology on Tuesdays, she would have seen him, but the moment she'd walked through the glass doors, Pomona had immediately launched into a ten-minute monologue about her new Hufflepuffs, bless them, bless all their little anxious hearts, one of them reminded her so much of a boy she'd had in seventy-four, did Lily remember a boy called Collins, of course she didn't, she'd have been thirteen at the time.
Lily had nodded and made appropriate sounds and collected her ingredients and left without asking a single question about Gryffindor's most famous new student. By the time she realized her omission, she was halfway back to the dungeons and it was easier to let it go.
Now it was Friday. First-year Potions, double period, Gryffindors and Slytherins. The class she'd been simultaneously anticipating and dreading since the term began.
She arrived early, as she always did for first lessons with new students. She wanted the classroom ready, the ingredients laid out, the atmosphere set before they filed in with their nervous energy and their brand-new cauldrons still shiny from the shop.
The students began arriving at five minutes to the hour, drifting in through the heavy door in ones and twos, their eyes wide as they took in the shelves of jars and bottles, the cauldrons arranged on the workbenches, the peculiar specimens floating in preservative along the back wall. Some of them, the Muggle-borns, mostly, looked frankly terrified. Others, the children of magical families who'd grown up around potions, looked bored.
Her eyes swept the room.
There.
The back row, far left corner, as far from her desk as the room's geometry allowed. A small figure with dark hair, hunched over his desk, shoulders up around his ears. She couldn't see his face clearly from this distance, just the general impression of someone who didn't want to be noticed.
She made herself look away. Made herself survey the rest of the class with equal attention as she should, noting the bushy-haired girl in the front row who had already opened her textbook and was reading ahead, noting the round-faced boy who had somehow managed to sit on his own quill, noting the pale blonde boy in Slytherin green who had already acquired two large boys as bookends.
Draco Malfoy. She'd known he was coming, of course, had seen his name on the register and felt her stomach tighten with preemptive dread. She remembered Lucius Malfoy from school, remembered Narcissa Black, remembered the particular flavor of contempt they'd reserved for people like her. The son would be no different.
Seven years. She was going to have to teach this child for seven years, assuming he didn't drop Potions after OWLs, and she was going to have to do it fairly, somehow.
Some days, she really did wonder why she'd chosen this profession, given that impartiality had never been her strength.
The bell rang. The last stragglers slid into their seats. Lily rose from her desk and moved to the front of the classroom.
"Good morning," she said, and her voice filled the dungeon with the ease of long practice. "Welcome to Potions. I am Professor Snape, and I will be your instructor for the next seven years, assuming you don't blow yourselves up before then, which is a distinct possibility if you don't pay attention."
A nervous laugh rippled through the class.
"Before we begin, I'd like you to open your textbooks to the foreword. We're going to read it aloud, one sentence each, going around the room." She paused, letting this sink in. "This will serve two purposes. First, it will ensure that everyone has actually brought their textbook, which some students in previous years have failed to do. Second, it will introduce you to the philosophy that will guide our work together."
"Miss-“ She consulted her register. “Ms. Granger. Would you begin, please?"
The bushy-haired girl straightened in her seat, her textbook already open to the correct page, her finger marking the first sentence with the precision of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion making.” Her voice was clear and confident, carrying easily through the dungeon.
"Thank you. Mr. Thomas?"
The sentences passed around the room like a baton. The words wound through the classroom, Severus's cadences spoken in the high, uncertain voices of eleven-year-olds.
The reading was approaching the back corner now. Her eyes found the boy’s desk, found the small figure hunched over his book.
Silence.
Twenty-three students turned to look at the Boy Who Lived, who was staring at his textbook with an expression of frozen terror.
The silence stretched. One second. Two. Three.
His face had gone pale beneath his tan, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. He looked, she thought, like a rabbit caught in the open by a hawk.
The other students were beginning to shift in their seats, discomfort spreading through the room like ripples in water. The Slytherins were exchanging glances; Draco Malfoy's lip had curled into something that might become a smirk if given encouragement.
She made a decision.
“I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory and even stopper death.” she read smoothly, as though this had always been the plan, “even if you happen to be a bunch of dunderheads.” She looked up from the page and met the eyes of the class. "Bit dramatic, isn't it? My co-author has a flair for the theatrical. Right. That's the philosophy. Now let's talk about what you actually want to do with it."
The next exercise was one Severus called a waste of time and she called essential.
"I'd like you to pair up now," she announced. "With your partner, you're going to write down on a piece of parchment what sort of potions you'd like to learn to brew. Anything at all, silly or serious, simple or complex. Don't worry about whether it's possible or appropriate for first-years. Put your papers in the cauldron at the front when you're done."
The room erupted into the controlled chaos of students finding partners, chairs scraping across stone, voices rising as friendships and alliances asserted themselves.
And the boy, still alone at his desk in the back corner, watching the others pair up without moving.
She gave it another thirty seconds, waiting to see if anyone would claim him. No one did.
The other students were settling into their partnerships now, bending over their parchment, the scratching of quills and chatter filling the dungeon.
Lily made another decision.
She collected a stool from beside her desk and carried it to the back of the room, setting it down across from him with a scrape that made him startle. His head came up, and for the first time, she got a proper look at his face.
He looked like James Potter. The resemblance was immediate, the dark hair, the shape of the jaw, the messy hair. But the eyes were different. Blue, not hazel. Wary where James's had been confident. She couldn't quite place them.
"It seems fate has chosen me as your partner for this assignment," she said, settling onto the stool. "I hope you don't mind."
He stared at her. “I- what?"
His voice was hoarse, as though he wasn't used to speaking, and something about the way he held himself, shoulders curled inward, making himself smaller.
"The exercise." She gestured at the parchment on his desk, still blank. "You need a partner. I need a partner. It seems like an obvious solution."
"You're the professor."
“What an astute observation, Mr. Potter. However, I am also a human being with opinions about potions, which makes me qualified to participate in this exercise." She pulled a quill from her pocket and held it out to him. "Now. What sort of potions would you like to learn to brew?"
He took the quill automatically, then looked at it as though he wasn't sure what to do with it. "I don't… I don't know."
"You don't know? Nothing at all?" She let her eyebrows rise in theatrical surprise, though this response was entirely predictable, in six years of teaching, she'd encountered a handful of students who handed in blank papers, who shrugged when asked about their interests, who had arrived at Hogwarts without the faintest idea of why they should care about magic.
"I've never really thought about it," he admitted. "I didn't know about potions until last month."
"Last month?"
"When I got my letter. Before that, I didn't know about any of this." He shrugged, a small, defensive movement. "I thought magic wasn't real."
That explained some things. Not everything, but some.
"Potions are useful things," she said, keeping her voice light. "That's where I'd start, if I were trying to convince someone they mattered. They're practical magic. A potion to cure a headache, a potion to help you sleep, a potion to mend a broken bone. Anyone can use them, once they're brewed. You don't need special talent or years of training. You just need to drink it."
That hadn't landed. She could see it in his face. She tried again.
"Think of it this way. A witch who's terrible at Charms and can't manage a single spell, she can still walk into an apothecary and buy a potion that will do what she needs. The magic is in the bottle. She just has to open it." She leaned forward slightly. "And the person who brewed that potion? They've essentially bottled magic. Made it portable. Made it possible to sell. That's rather remarkable, don't you think?"
He considered this. Then he shrugged, the motion somehow conveying complete indifference.
"I suppose," he said. "I just… I don't know what I'd want."
She looked at this child and remembered James Potter, James who had been all confidence and bravado and absolute certainty that the world had been arranged for his benefit, and saw none of that. This boy was quiet where James had been loud, withdrawn where James had been expansive, apologetic for his own presence in ways that James would never have understood.
"Have a think," she said, standing. "No pressure. The cauldron's up front when you're ready."
She left him to it and returned to the front of the room. The cauldron at the front of the classroom filled steadily with parchments.
He didn't hand anything in, not even blank parchment. She didn't press. There would be time. There would be years.
She moved away to collect the other papers, leaving him alone with his blank parchment and his blue eyes and whatever thoughts were churning behind them.
The suggestions ranged from the predictable to the absurd. Love potions featured heavily, as they did every year. Several students had requested potions to make them taller, or stronger, or better at Quidditch. One Slytherin had asked for "a potion to turn my little sister into a toad,” which Lily was fairly certain had been intended as a joke but with Slytherins you could never be entirely sure.
"These are excellent suggestions," she announced to the class, shuffling the papers into a stack. "I particularly enjoyed the request for 'a potion to make homework do itself’, I’m afraid that one doesn't exist, Mr. Weasley, though I appreciate the optimism. Over the course of this year, we'll be working toward some of these goals. Not all of them-“ she fixed a stern eye on the Slytherin section “but those that are appropriate for your skill level. The more advanced potions will have to wait until later years."
She set the stack on her desk and turned to face them.
"Now. For our first practical exercise, we're going to brew a simple Cure for Boils. You'll need to pair up again, proper pairs this time, two students per cauldron."
The room shuffled into new configurations. Draco Malfoy immediately turned to his two companions, clearly intending to form the same trio as before.
"Pairs, Mr. Malfoy," Lily said firmly. "That means two. Surely you can count that high."
A snicker ran through the Gryffindor section. Malfoy's pale face flushed, his eyes narrowing with an expression she'd seen on his father's face many times before.
"Perhaps you'd like to work with Mr. Potter," she continued, before he could respond. "Since neither of you currently has a partner. Off you go."
"Fine," Malfoy said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but. He gathered his things with exaggerated reluctance and made his way to the back of the room, settling onto the stool Lily had vacated.
Lily returned to the front of the classroom and began the demonstration.
The Cure for Boils was, as she'd said, straightforward. Six dried nettles, four snake fangs, two porcupine quills, and three measures of crushed whelk shells, combined in a specific order with precise timing. She'd brewed it hundreds of times, as a teacher showing new classes the basics. Her hands moved automatically through the familiar motions, her voice providing a running commentary on technique and timing.
She was halfway through explaining the importance of removing the cauldron from the heat before adding the porcupine quills, a step that many students forgot, with unfortunate consequences, when she noticed that something was wrong with Neville Longbottom's and Ron Weasley’s cauldron.
The potion inside had turned a virulent orange color that bore no resemblance to the gentle blue it was supposed to be at this stage. As she watched, it began to bubble ominously, great glooping bursts that sent droplets spattering onto the workbench.
"Mr. Longbottom-“ she began, starting toward him.
She never finished the sentence.
From the back of the room came a sharp crack, followed immediately by a sound that took her a moment to identify: the meaty thud of fist meeting flesh.
She spun around.
The boy had knocked Malfoy off his stool and onto the stone floor, and he was hitting him with a concentrated fury that seemed entirely disconnected from the quiet, withdrawn child she'd been trying to reach ten minutes ago. His small fists rose and fell in a rhythm that spoke of practice, of experience, of someone who knew how to hurt and was doing it deliberately.
Malfoy was screaming. Blood was streaming from his nose, his hands raised to protect his face, his carefully cultivated composure shattered into raw panic.
"Potter!" Lily's voice cracked across the dungeon like a whip. She was already moving, pushing between frozen students, her wand in her hand though she wasn't sure what spell she intended to cast. "Potter, stop! Stop it right now!"
He didn't stop.
She seized him by the back of his robes and hauled him bodily off the other boy, his arms still swinging, his face contorted into an expression she barely recognized. For a moment he struggled against her grip, his elbow catching her in the ribs hard enough to make her grunt, and then suddenly the fight went out of him all at once.
He went limp in her grasp, his breathing ragged, his small body trembling with rage.
Malfoy was sobbing on the floor, one eye already swelling shut. Around them, the other students stood various states of shock, their cauldrons forgotten, their potions beginning to bubble unattended.
"Everyone remain where you are," Lily said. "Do not touch your cauldrons. Do not move. I will be back in ten minutes."
She hauled Potter to his feet with one hand and helped Malfoy up with the other. The Slytherin boy flinched away from her touch, crying openly now, with the particular devastation of someone whose dignity had been violently stripped away.
"Hospital wing," she said. "Both of you. Now."
The walk through the castle was interminable.
“-completely unprovoked, he just attacked me, my father will hear about this, I want him expelled, Professor, expelled and his wand snapped, this is assault, my father knows people on the Board of Governors, I'll have bruises, I might have a concussion and a broken nose, I need to go to St. Mungo's, the healers here aren’t-“
Potter said nothing.
He walked beside her in silence, his head down, his hands, knuckles split and already bruising, hanging at his sides.
"Be quiet, Mr. Malfoy," Lily finally said, when she could bear it no longer. She felt guilty immediately, the boy had just been beaten bloody, he had every right to complain, but his voice was like a needle in her skull and she couldn't think through it.
Malfoy subsided into offended sniffles.
The hospital wing was bright and airy after the dungeon's gloom, the tall windows letting in the September sunshine, the white beds arranged in neat rows along both walls. Madam Pomfrey emerged from her office at the sound of their approach, took one look at Malfoy's face, and sighed.
“Really?” she asked, though this was only the first week of term and therefore there had been no previous incidents to compare to. "On the bed. Let me see."
"It's broken," Malfoy moaned, settling onto the nearest bed with theatrical agony. "My nose is broken. I need St. Mungo's. I need a proper healer, not a school nurse-“
"Your nose is not broken." Pomfrey was already running her wand over his face, her expression professionally neutral. "Hold still."
Lily guided him to a bed on the opposite side of the room and pushed him gently onto it. "Sit there," she said. "Don't move."
He sat. He didn't move.
She returned to Malfoy's bedside, positioning herself where he could see the healing process. Let him watch. Let him see the consequences of what he'd done, the damage rendered visible and then corrected by magic that existed only because violence had made it necessary.
"What happened?" Pomfrey asked, not looking up from her work. Her wand traced careful patterns over Malfoy's swelling eye, the flesh responding, the angry purple already fading.
"I don't know." Lily's voice was tight.
"He attacked me!" Malfoy's voice rose to something approaching a shriek. "Unprovoked! I didn't do anything! I was just sitting there and he-“
"Did you say something to him, Mr. Malfoy?"
The pause was infinitesimal, but Lily caught it. "Nothing. Nothing that would justify-“
"What did you say?"
Malfoy's chin lifted, defiant despite the blood still crusted around his nostrils. "I don't remember."
"Boys," Pomfrey said, with the weary wisdom of someone who had been healing them for decades. "They need to scrap it out sometimes. Get it out of their systems. James Potter was in here every other week, wasn't he? Hexing someone or other, always gave as good as he got-“
Movement from across the room. Potter's head had come up, his blue eyes suddenly alert, focused on Pomfrey with an intensity that hadn't been there before.
"James Potter?" he said, and his voice cracked on the name.
Pomfrey glanced at him, then at Lily, something complicated passing across her face. "Your father, dear.”
He was staring at her with naked hunger, a desperation for information that he couldn't quite hide. "You knew him? My father?"
"Everyone knew James Potter. He was rather hard to miss." Pomfrey's voice had softened, the professional briskness giving way to something more maternal. "Talented wizard, your father. Quidditch captain. Head Boy."
"What was he-“ The boy started, then stopped, as though afraid to complete the question.
"I need to get back to my classroom," she said abruptly. “Poppy, can you-“
"Yes, yes, I'll handle it from here." Pomfrey waved a hand dismissively. "Go. I'll send them back when they're sorted."
Lily nodded, already moving toward the door.
In the corridor outside the hospital wing, she nearly collided with Albus Dumbledore.
“Lily.” He beamed at her as though they had encountered each other on a pleasant stroll rather than in the aftermath of a crisis. "How fortuitous. I was just on my way to have a chat with the boys."
"They're with Poppy. Malfoy's injuries are being treated."
"Yes, I had heard." Of course he had. "A rather dramatic first potions lesson, from what I understand."
"How did you-“ She stopped. Of course he knew. Dumbledore always knew. The castle itself seemed to whisper to him, keeping him informed of every incident, every altercation, every small drama that unfolded within its walls.
"I thought it might be helpful to speak with both boys," he continued. "Separately, of course. To understand what occurred."
"Malfoy says Potter attacked him unprovoked."
"And Mr. Potter? What does he say?"
"Nothing. He has hardly said a word since it happened."
Dumbledore stroked his beard slowly. "Ah. Well. Perhaps he'll be more forthcoming with me."
He patted her arm in a gesture that was probably meant to be reassuring and swept past her toward the hospital wing, the conversation clearly concluded as far as he was concerned.
Lily watched him go, then turned and hurried back toward the dungeons.
She heard the chaos before she saw it.
The smell hit her next, a noxious combination of burnt hair and rotten eggs, billowing out through the dungeon door in a cloud of greenish-yellow smoke. Coughing, eyes watering, she pushed through into the classroom and found exactly what she'd feared.
The students were standing on the tables.
All of them, without exception, had abandoned their workstations and climbed onto the sturdy oak surfaces, their robes hiked up around their knees, their faces expressions of horror and disgust. The floor had disappeared beneath a layer of viscous orange sludge that hissed and bubbled where it touched the stone.
The cauldron lay on its side in the middle of the room, the source of the disaster, still oozing remnants of what had been a Cure for Boils.
Ron Weasley stood on the table nearest the overturned cauldron, his face pale, his robes splattered with orange. "It wasn't my fault!" he said immediately upon seeing her. ”It just went mental! We didn't touch it, we were just sitting here and it sort of… blorped-”
"Blorped," Lily repeated.
"That's the only word for it, Professor. It blorped."
Lily raised her wand and vanished the potion with a sweeping motion. The sludge disappeared, revealing a floor that was going to need serious work before the next class.
"Everyone down from the tables. Carefully." She waited while they clambered back to ground level. "Is anyone hurt? Anyone splashed by the potion?"
A few students raised tentative hands. Minor splashes, nothing serious, the potion hadn't had time to fully corrupt before she'd vanished it. She directed them to wash immediately and return to their seats.
"I apologize," she said, and meant it. "This is not how I intended your first Potions class to go. Class dismissed. Go to lunch."
They filed out in subdued silence, casting nervous glances back at her as they went. Longbottom lingered at the door, his round face etched with misery.
"Professor, I'm really sorry-“
"It's all right, Mr. Longbottom. Accidents happen. We'll work on your technique next week."
He nodded, still looking wretched, and shuffled away.
Lily stood alone in her ruined classroom, surrounded by the acrid smell of failed potion-making and the lingering echoes of violence and disaster, and wanted a cigarette more than she'd wanted anything in years.
The heat was absurd for September.
It had arrived without warning on Friday afternoon, a last gasp of summer that the forecasters hadn't predicted and the country wasn't prepared for. By Saturday the newspapers were calling it a "heatwave" and by Sunday the entire nation had collectively decided that complaining about it was a constitutional right. Windows stood open in every house on the street, fans whirred in bedrooms, and the ice cream van, which normally retired after the August bank holiday weekend, had made a triumphant return.
Lily's mother's house was not equipped for heat. It had been built in an era when the primary concern was keeping warmth in, not letting it out, and its small windows and thick walls conspired to trap the September sun like a greenhouse. The front door stood open to the street, as did every window on the ground floor, but the breeze that occasionally wandered through was tepid and unhelpful.
A cooling charm would have helped. The Dursleys' presence made that impossible.
"It's like being slowly poached," Lily announced to no one in particular, sprawled on the sitting room floor with her back against the sofa and her bare feet stretched out on the carpet. Her notebook lay open in her lap, the ink smudging where her sweaty palm had rested. "I'm going to emerge from this weekend fully cooked."
From the sofa behind her, Severus made a noise that might have been agreement
Through the open front door came the sounds of the street. A football hitting tarmac. The rhythmic smack of a skipping rope. Someone's radio leaking pop music from a window two doors down. A shriek that could have been delight or injury floated through the window, followed by laughter, and Lily's head lifted for a fraction of a second, before the laughter resolved it and she returned to her notepad.
From the kitchen came the sounds of Sunday: pots clattering, her mother's radio murmuring, and Petunia's voice insisting that the vegetables needed more butter while their mother insisted they absolutely did not. Lily had offered to help when she'd arrived and had been waved away with the firm instruction to “sit down and stay out of it”, which was her mother's way of saying that Lily's contributions to cooking were best confined to eating the results. The smell of cooking beef had been filling the house for an hour now, mixing with the heat in a way that was simultaneously appetizing and oppressive.
The television sat silent in the corner. Lily had spent twenty minutes that morning on her hands and knees behind it, following Dudley's increasingly frustrated instructions as she tried to connect the Sega Mega Drive to the aging set. The console was a massive black thing, all sharp angles and mysterious ports and the instruction manual had been written been left behind in Surrey.
She'd managed it eventually, through a combination of trial and error and what she suspected was unconscious magic, the cables had seemed to find their own way to the correct ports after her third attempt. Dudley had been briefly impressed, then immediately disappointed when he'd realized they'd left the one game he actually wanted to play back in Surrey.
Petunia had sent Vernon back to Surrey to retrieve it, and he'd gone without argument, which again told Lily everything about who made decisions in that household.
"This one's from a fourth-year," Severus said, from the sofa. A plate of cake sat beside him, produced by her mother before the meal had even finished cooking. Apparently the rules about dessert didn't apply to him. He was holding a piece of parchment at arm's length, as though it might bite him. "He's written you a poem. The rhyme is clumsy at best but other than that it is fucking terrible.”
"Is there anything I need to know about?"
"Only that the quality of education in this country has declined catastrophically since our day."
The love letters had started arriving in her second year of teaching, and they had not stopped since. Every term brought a fresh crop of infatuated students convinced that their feelings were unique and profound and definitely not the result of hormones and proximity to a reasonably young authority figure. Lily couldn't bring herself to throw them away unread. Someone had to make sure they were just embarrassing and not alarming.
So she made Severus read them.
“Anything else?"
"The usual. Three declarations of eternal devotion, two requests for private tutoring that I suspect are not actually about potions, and one rather sweet letter from a second-year who just wants you to know that you're her favorite professor." He set the stack aside. "I don't know why you can't just burn them unread like a normal person."
"Because one in twenty contains something important." She tilted her head back against the sofa cushion, looking up at him upside-down. "Besides, you could learn something from them."
"Learn something?"
“Being romantic. When's the last time you wrote me a love letter?"
His expression suggested she'd asked when he'd last performed ritual sacrifice. "I have never written you a love letter."
"Exactly. Over twenty years of friendship, almost ten years of marriage, and not a single love letter. These fifteen-year-olds are putting you to shame."
"These fifteen-year-olds are putting themselves to shame."
"You could try." She reached up and poked his knee with an outstretched finger. "Something simple. 'Dearest Lily, you are as beautiful today as the day I met you.' That sort of thing."
The sound he made was indescribable, something between a choke and a scandalized laugh. “You were nine! I am not going to write you a love letter referring to your nine-year-old self as beautiful, fuck's sake, think, what is the matter with you-“
"Fine. 'As beautiful as the day I first noticed you were beautiful.' When was that?"
"I refuse to answer on the grounds that you'll be insufferable about it."
"Fair point. You should probably think of something else to write then."
"I'm not writing you a love letter."
"You wrote 'I'm sorry' on my hand once, while I was unconscious. That's basically the same thing."
"It is categorically not the same thing."
She grinned up at him, enjoying the faint flush that had crept across his cheeks. He was still so easy to fluster, after all these years.
While she had him distracted, she shifted the quill in her hand and pressed the inky tip against his sock, between his toes. A small dark spot began to bloom on the grey wool.
"What are you working on?" he asked, nodding toward her notebook.
“My student club." She returned her attention to the page, adding another name to the list.
"Merlin help us. Thought you'd tired of playing Slughorn. ”
She hummed noncommittally and pressed the quill against his sock again, widening the ink spot slightly. He still hadn't noticed. "I've been going through the roster all week, trying to identify candidates. It's harder than I expected. First-years especially, I’ve only had them for one lesson, I don't know their capabilities yet."
"Then wait until you do."
"I can't wait too long. The whole point is to catch them early, before they form habits or fall through cracks." She tapped the quill against her chin, thinking.
"You're going to fill this club with strays."
"I'm going to fill this club with students who need it.” She hesitated, then wrote another name. "Which includes this one."
She held the notebook up for him to see.
Severus leaned forward, squinting at her handwriting. His eyes moved down the list, she watched him register the familiar names, the unfamiliar ones, the strategic distribution of houses and blood statuses, and then stopped.
"Potter?" His lip curled. "You want Potter in your club?"
"He needs something. I don't know what, exactly, but something." She pulled the notebook back into her lap, staring at the name she'd written. "He's completely isolated. Won't speak in class, won't engage with other students, sits in the back corner like he's trying to disappear. And then on Friday he beat another boy bloody, completely out of nowhere."
"Define 'out of nowhere.'"
"I had my back turned. I don't know what triggered it."
“Sounds like a Potter.”
"He's not like James Potter,” she said quietly. "He's…" She searched for the right word and gave up.
"I want him in the club," she said finally.
Severus was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're not responsible for him, Lily."
"I know that."
"He's one student among hundreds. You can't fix everyone."
"I know that too."
"And if you get too attached-“ He stopped, visibly choosing his next words with care. "You need to be careful."
"Careful of what? He's eleven years old."
"Careful of seeing what you want to see instead of what's actually there." There was more beneath the words. There usually was, with him. "You have a tendency to collect broken things. Just… be careful." He wasn't quite looking at her.
"Says the man I collected when we were nine."
The ink spot on his sock was quite visible now, a dark smudge against the grey wool. She waited, quill poised for another strike.
"You might want to watch that tendency," he said, his voice dropping into something that was almost teasing.
She opened her mouth to respond, but the sound of a car pulling up outside cut her off. Doors slammed, voices rose, and the particular heavy tread of Vernon Dursley could be heard approaching the front door.
"Finally," came Dudley's voice through the windows. "Dad, did you get it? Did you get Sonic?"
Then Dudley burst through the door with all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros, a plastic game case clutched in his meaty fist. He was sweating profusely, the combination of heat and excitement had left him pink-faced and breathing hard, and he threw himself onto the floor in front of the television without acknowledging either of the adults in the room.
She drew her feet in to give him more space. Dudley was already fiddling with the console, his thick fingers working the cartridge into the slot.
The television flickered to life, the SEGA logo appearing with a chiming sound that seemed designed to announce itself to the entire street. Dudley hunched forward, controller in hand, his attention already entirely absorbed by the blue hedgehog that had begun running across the screen.
"Finally," he muttered. Then, apparently remembering something, he heaved himself to his feet and waddled to the front door. He leaned out into the street and bellowed at a volume that made Lily wince: "MATE! IT'S HERE NOW! COME IN!"
A voice drifted back from somewhere outside: "COMING!"
Dudley returned to his position before the television, settling into the carpet with the satisfied air of a boy whose universe had been restored to its proper order. The game music began to play, cheerful and repetitive, and within seconds he was lost to the world.
Severus looked at the television, then at Dudley, then at Lily. His expression suggested he was reassessing his life choices.
From the kitchen, her mother's voice rose above the clatter: "Roast's nearly ready! Lily, help your sister with the vegetables. Severus, you can carve."
As she was about to rise, she noticed Severus looking down at his foot with a dawning realization.
"Lily."
"Yes?"
"There's ink on my sock."
"Is there? What a mystery."
She laughed and scrambled to her feet and they made their way to the kitchen together, where her mother was laying out the roast and Petunia was regarding the Brussels sprouts with deep personal scepticism.
The table had been laid with the pink-rimmed plates she and Severus had bought her mother for Christmas three years back. Vernon had come in from outside and was lowering himself into what had clearly become his designated chair, the one at the head of the table that had once been her father's. The children had been banished to the sitting room with their plates and the Sega, a solution that suited everyone.
Lily carried the bowl of carrots to the table and took her own seat, across from Severus, where she could watch him carve the roast with the same precision he brought to everything. Her mother settled at the other head, looking tired but satisfied, the matriarch presiding over her family.
They were all here. All of them, together, in the house where Lily had grown up.
Severus caught her eye across the table and raised an eyebrow, a silent question.
She smiled back at him.
The roast was good. Her mother's roasts always were.
In the weeks after she'd tried everything she could think of. Assigned Potter to different partners, hoping someone might draw him out. Paired him with Brown, who was eager enough to carry any conversation, but he'd sat in silence while she explained the entire brewing process without his input. Paired him with Nott, thinking two quiet boys might find common ground, but they'd worked in a silence so complete it had become oppressive. Nothing worked.
He didn't participate. Didn't ask questions. Didn't answer when called upon, just stared at her with those blue eyes until she moved on to someone else, the awkwardness rippling through the classroom like a stone dropped in still water.
And then there were the absences.
The first time he'd failed to appear, she'd assumed illness. Students got sick, that was just a fact of life in a drafty old castle. But there'd been no note from Madam Pomfrey, no explanation from McGonagall, nothing. He'd simply not been there, and then the next lesson he'd appeared in his usual seat in the back corner, offering no explanation, asking for none.
It happened again. And again. Sometimes he was late, slipping through the door ten minutes into the practical. Sometimes he didn't come at all, his workstation empty, his partner forced to brew alone.
She'd asked the other teachers, trying to understand what she was dealing with.
Minerva had been brisk and uninformative. "Mr. Potter is adjusting to Hogwarts life. First-years often struggle with the transition."
Filius had been slightly more forthcoming, admitting that the boy was quiet in Charms as well, but he'd changed the subject quickly, steering them toward a discussion of his new approach to teaching Levitation.
Pomona had sighed and shaken her head and said something about giving him time, about some students needing longer to find their feet. She'd looked sad when she said it, which told Lily nothing except that whatever was happening with Potter, she wasn't the only one who'd noticed.
The most informative response had come from Quirrell, who had flinched when she'd mentioned the boy's name and then stammered something about Potter being "d-different, very different, not what one might expect," before excusing himself with a haste that seemed excessive even for someone as nervous as he perpetually appeared.
She ended up sending out the invitations in early October, hand-written on parchment she'd selected carefully, the kind that felt substantial without being ostentatious. The wording had taken her three drafts to get right, formal enough to convey importance but warm enough to not intimidate:
Dear Student,
You are cordially invited to the inaugural meeting of Professor Snape’s Potions Society, to be held on the evening of 30 October in the Forbidden Forest (safe area, approved by the Headmaster). Please gather at the edge of the forest at seven o'clock. Light refreshments will be served.
Dress code: Come as you are. This is meant to be enjoyable.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Professor L. J. Snape
Several students had approached her afterwards, anxiety barely concealed beneath polite inquiry. "Professor, what should we wear exactly?" Granger had asked, her brow furrowed with the particular worry of someone who had never encountered a social situation she couldn't prepare for through extensive research. "Is there a specific protocol? Should we bring anything? I read that some academic societies have traditions around-“
"Miss Granger." Lily had held up a hand. "Wear whatever makes you comfortable. Bring nothing except yourself. There will be a bonfire and some interesting people and, I hope, some good conversation. That's all."
Granger had not looked reassured, but she'd nodded and retreated.
Hagrid had been delighted to help with the preparations. He'd cleared a space at the forest's edge, well away from anything dangerous but close enough to feel adventurous, and built a bonfire pit with stones he'd hauled from somewhere deeper in the woods. The night before the gathering, Lily had walked out to inspect his work and found him adding final touches, arranging logs for seating and hanging lanterns from the lower branches of the surrounding trees.
The evening of the thirtieth arrived clear and cold and the bonfire crackled and sparked against the dark sky, sending small constellations of embers floating upward to join the real stars.
Lily had arrived early to greet her other guests, the adults who would give the gathering its sense of occasion. Slughorn had claimed the best seat nearest the fire, holding court with a goblet of mulled wine as though he were hosting rather than attending. Her publisher, Allen Jalkins, stood near the fire warming his hands and looking slightly bemused by the setting, his city robes out of place against the forest backdrop.
Two of his other authors had come as well, Damocles Belby and Frederic Olivier, both of whom she hoped might inspire a few students toward careers in research. She’d also managed to convince Libatius Borage to come. He had taken the replacement of his textbook with surprising equanimity, even sending her a note of congratulations when the adoption was announced: “Fifty years was long enough for any book to hold a monopoly on young minds.”
The students had begun arriving at seven, filtering out of the castle in small groups, their faces illuminated by the lantern light as they crossed the grounds.
Malfoy arrived with a sneer already in place, though it faltered slightly when he noticed the adult guests, recalibrating quickly into something more appropriate for networking. He introduced himself to Jalkins with a smoothness that spoke of extensive coaching at home, dropping his family name with practiced casualness.
Other students drifted in, some she'd invited, a few who'd apparently heard about the gathering and come anyway. She didn't turn anyone away. The more the merrier.
She kept watching the path from the castle.
Potter didn't come.
Seven-thirty passed, then eight. The bonfire burned high and warm, the conversation flowed, Slughorn held court near the refreshment table with a group of students who were hanging on his every word about the time he'd introduced Celestina Warbeck to the Minister for Magic. Still no Potter.
She tried not to feel the disappointed. He was one student. One eleven-year-old who didn't want her help, didn't want anyone's help apparently, and she had a whole gathering of other students who did want to be here, who were laughing and talking and making exactly the kind of connections she'd hoped to facilitate.
But still.
She had hoped.
Slughorn found her standing at the edge of the firelight. He'd inserted himself into the evening with characteristic confidence, greeting the students as though he'd personally selected them, reminiscing about former members of his own club who had gone on to great things.
She didn't mind. He'd been her mentor in teaching, had answered every desperate Floo call she'd sent him in those first terrifying years, no matter the hour or the triviality of the crisis, and his enthusiasm for student cultivation was genuine even if his methods had always been more mercenary than her own.
"Wonderful party, my dear." He clapped her on the shoulder with the particular heartiness of someone who'd been sampling the elderflower wine. "Truly wonderful. You've got a real eye for talent."
“Potter was supposed to come."
"Ah. Yes. The Potter boy. That would have been quite the centrepiece, wouldn't it? The Boy Who Lived, attending your first gathering."
"That's not why I invited him."
"No?"
"I thought if I could get him here, around other students, in a more relaxed setting…" She trailed off, aware of how naive it sounded. As if a bonfire and some interesting adults could fix whatever was wrong with that boy.
Slughorn nodded slowly, his expression shifting into something more serious, more genuine than his usual performance of charm. "You want to help him find his place. Find some friends. Somewhere to belong."
"Yes."
"Admirable." He swirled the wine in his goblet, watching the firelight play through the liquid. "But ultimately, my dear, that's something the student has to achieve for himself. You can create opportunities. You can open doors. But you can't force a child to walk through them. If young Potter doesn't want to be helped-“
"Then what?" The words came out sharper than she'd intended. "We just leave him to it? Watch him struggle and tell ourselves it's his own responsibility?"
Something in her chest had gone tight, the old anger rising, the memory of another boy who had needed help and hadn't received it. Slughorn had been there then too, presiding over his little club, collecting students with potential and connections, and Severus had never been really invited other than her tag along because what connections did a half-blood from Spinner's End have to offer? What potential did a boy in shabby robes with a drunk mother and a violent father represent?
Slughorn had watched Severus struggle and done nothing. Had seen the darkness gathering around him, the dangerous friends, the path he was walking, and had deemed it not his problem because the boy wasn't useful enough to bother with.
She batted his hand away from her shoulder.
"I need to get home."
"Lily-“
"Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. I do." She needed to leave before she said something worse, or started crying, or both.
"I think you're doing a wonderful job," Slughorn said quietly. "With the club. With the teaching. With all of it."
Her eyes stung. She blinked rapidly, looking away toward the fire where the students were laughing at something one of the twins had said.
"Thank you," she managed.
"I'll finish up here. See everyone back to the castle safely. Go home to yours. Give Severus my greetings, will you?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice, and turned toward the castle. The night air would clear her head, and by the time she reached Spinner's End, she'd have herself under control.
Halloween fell on a Thursday, which meant the feast landed in the middle of the working week, which meant Lily spent the morning teaching back-to-back double periods while the castle vibrated with the manic, sugar-adjacent energy of a thousand children who knew that tonight there would be carved pumpkins the size of armchairs and enough sweets to induce a collective dental emergency. The dungeons offered some insulation from the hysteria, stone walls and subterranean gloom had a dampening effect on festive spirits, but even her N.E.W.T. students, who were supposed to be above such things, kept glancing at the clock.
Lily let the last class go ten minutes early because she was counting down too.
She loved the Halloween feast. She'd loved it as a student, the Great Hall transformed, the floating candles replaced by jack-o'-lanterns that grinned and leered from every surface, the bats that swooped theatrically between the house, the food appearing in quantities that seemed designed to test the limits of human appetite.
Then Quirrell had burst through the doors.
"Troll!" His voice had cracked across the hall, silencing the chatter, freezing the laughter mid-breath. "In the dungeons! Thought you ought to know-“
He'd crumpled to the floor in a dead faint, his purple turban askew, and for one crystalline moment the Great Hall had been perfectly, absolutely still.
Then the screaming started.
Dumbledore had restored order with a cannon blast from his wand and a voice that carried to every corner of the room. Prefects were to lead their houses back to the dormitories. Teachers were to secure the castle. The students were not, under any circumstances, to go anywhere alone.
Lily had been moving before he finished speaking.
The dungeons were her territory, her classroom, her office, her stores of ingredients that had taken years and a considerable portion of the department budget to accumulate. She'd taken the stairs at a run, her wand already drawn, her mind cycling through the spells she might need. Stunning wouldn't work on a troll; their hides were too thick, their magical resistance too strong. Fire might drive it back. Conjured ropes might slow it down. If she could get behind it, a well-placed Severing Charm to the back of the knees or neck-
The corridor was empty when she reached it. No troll, no destruction, no sign that anything larger than a first-year had passed through. She checked her classroom, her office and the storage rooms.
The troll wasn't in the dungeons.
She reversed course, taking the stairs two at a time, her breath coming faster now. If not the dungeons, then where? The students were supposed to be returning to their dormitories, but students didn't always do what they were supposed to do, and a troll loose in the corridors-
She heard it before she saw it.
A crash, thunderous and echoing, followed by a sound that might have been stone crumbling or might have been bone breaking. It came from above, from the first floor, from the direction of-
Lily ran.
The corridor outside the abandoned classroom was already occupied when she arrived, though not by anyone she'd expected. Minerva McGonagall stood at the threshold, her wand raised, her robe billowing around her.
"Minerva?" Lily slowed as she approached, her own wand still ready, her eyes scanning for the threat. "What-“
Minerva stepped aside, and Lily saw.
The classroom had been destroyed. Desks reduced to kindling, scattered across the floor like bones. Chairs embedded in the walls where they'd been thrown with terrible force. The blackboard had cracked clean in half, and plaster dust hung in the air like fog, coating everything in pale grey. A mountain troll lay in the centre of the devastation, twelve feet of grey-green flesh and matted hair, its club still clutched in one massive hand.
It wasn't moving.
Standing over it, wand still raised, breathing hard, was the Boy Who Lived.
And he was alone.
His robes were torn at the shoulder and dusted white with plaster. A cut on his forehead, not the famous one, a new one, fresh, welling blood that dripped into his left eyebrow, caught the light from the shattered ceiling. His glasses were cracked. His wand hand was steady.
"Mr. Potter." Minerva's voice cut through the sound of rushing water. "Explain yourself."
He lowered his wand.
"There was a troll, Professor."
"I can see there was a troll. What I wish to know is why you are here, in this unused classroom, with said troll, when you were explicitly instructed to return to your dormitory with the other students."
"I heard it. In the corridor. I thought-“ He stopped.
"And so you decided to confront a fully grown mountain troll. Alone. Without alerting any member of staff."
"There wasn't time."
"There is always time to seek assistance, Mr. Potter. Always. The arrogance of assuming you could handle this situation by yourself-“
The boy didn't flinch. Didn't argue. Didn't do any of the things children usually did when being told off. He just stood there, waiting, as though this were simply weather to be endured.
Minerva's lips pressed into a thin line. "Five points from Gryffindor. For reckless endangerment and flagrant disregard for-“
"Five points to Gryffindor."
The words left Lily's mouth before she'd consciously decided to speak them. Both Minerva and the boy turned to look at her.
"For exceptional bravery," Lily continued, holding Minerva's gaze, "and practical application of defensive magic under extreme circumstances."
The boy’s eyes moved between them, clearly aware that something was happening but not understanding what.
"Professor Snape.” Minerva's voice had dropped to a register that Lily recognized from her own student days, the tone that had preceded some of the most memorable detentions of her youth. "A word. Outside."
She swept from the classroom without waiting for a response.
In the corridor she could distantly see the other teachers were arriving now, drawn by the commotion: Rolanda, her wand at the ready; Aurora, her hair escaping from its usual bun; Quirrell, recovered from his faint but looking no less pale for it, his eyes darting nervously toward the classroom door.
"See to the troll," Minerva said to them, her voice clipped. "Mr. Potter will need escorting back to Gryffindor Tower. Lily and I have something to discuss."
Her hand closed around Lily's elbow and she steered her down the corridor to an alcove where a suit of armor stood sentinel over a window that looked out onto the darkened grounds.
"What," Minerva said, releasing her arm, "do you think you're doing?"
"Rewarding a student who demonstrated courage and skill in a dangerous situation."
"Countermanding my discipline in front of the student in question."
"I was just… supplementing."
"Don't." The word came out sharp enough to cut. "Don't pretend this is something other than what it is. You saw me deducting points and you couldn't bear to let it stand, so you inserted yourself into a situation that was none of your concern."
"He defeated a mountain troll, Minerva. By himself. He's eleven years old."
"That was a child who has been taught, somewhere along the way, that he must handle everything alone. That he cannot ask for help, cannot rely on adults, cannot trust that someone will come if he calls." Minerva's voice had shifted, the anger giving way to something more complicated. "I know what I saw, Lily. I've been teaching for forty years. I know what it looks like when a child has learned to survive by themselves, and it is not something to celebrate."
She wasn't wrong. That was the problem. Minerva wasn't wrong about any of it, and Lily still didn't know how to stop.
"I wasn't celebrating," she said, but her voice had lost its certainty. "I was trying to… he looked so-“
She couldn't finish. Minerva waited, and when it became clear Lily had no ending for that sentence, she spoke again. ”Did you think I was going to leave him with nothing but a point deduction? Did you think I wasn't going to acknowledge what he did?"
“I-“
"I was going to give him five points myself. After I'd made it clear that his behavior was dangerous and could not be repeated."
Lily felt heat rise to her cheeks. "I didn't know."
"No. You didn't. Because you didn't wait to find out. You saw something that looked like unkindness and you rushed to correct it, because you've decided that you're the only person in this school who cares about these children."
"That's not-“
"It is. It's exactly what you do, Lily."
She held up a hand before Lily could speak. "Let me finish."
"You assume the worst of your colleagues. You assume that if you don't intervene, no one will. You position yourself as the sole source of compassion in a building full of people who have dedicated their lives to the care of young witches and wizards."
"I don't think that."
"Then why did you override me?"
Lily opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't know," she admitted finally. "I saw his face, and I just- I couldn’t-“
Minerva stepped closer, her voice dropping. “Lily, your compassion is not more important than my judgment. Your instincts are not more reliable than my experience."
Lily thought about the Muggle-born visits. About the four years she'd been asking to help, and the four years Minerva had been saying no.
"Is that why you won't let me do the Muggle-born visits?" she asked. "Because you don't trust my judgment?"
Minerva's expression flickered but she recovered quickly. "That's a conversation for another time."
"Is it? Because I've been asking for four years, and you've never given me a real answer. Just that you prefer to handle it yourself."
"I do prefer to handle it myself."
"You let Horace help. He did mine.”
"That was different.”
"Minerva. I've been asking for four years. I deserve an actual answer."
The words hung between them. Minerva closed her eyes briefly.
"Because I've watched you, Lily. You form attachments quickly and deeply, and you struggle to maintain professional distance when those attachments are threatened."
"That's not-“
"The Muggle-born visits require delicacy. They require presenting the magical world in a way that doesn't overwhelm or frighten. They require maintaining appropriate boundaries with families who are confused and often hostile."
"I was a Muggle-born myself. I know what it's like."
Minerva sighed, apparently finished when she had so much to still say. About how she is not a student anymore, that she is thirty one years old and her equal and many more things that she had wanted to tell her over the years that they had been colleagues.
"Go home, Lily. It's late. The troll is handled. We'll discuss this more another time."
She turned and walked back toward the classroom, her robes swirling around her ankles, her spine straight and her shoulders squared.
Lily watched her go.
All the way there and when she was trying to fall asleep, she couldn't stop thinking about Minerva's words. Her face still burned from the criticism.
The troll incident became legend among the students, whispered about in corridors and embellished with each retelling until the version circulating bore little resemblance to what had actually occurred. In some tellings, The Boy Who Lived had slain the beast with a single spell. In others, he'd wrestled it into submission with his bare hands.
She watched him, in the weeks that followed. Watched for signs that the experience had changed something, cracked open whatever shell he'd built around himself. Surely surviving a troll attack would give a child confidence. Surely the attention, the whispered admiration of his peers, would draw him out of his isolation.
It didn't.
He remained as withdrawn as ever, sitting in the back of her classroom, not completing his work and volunteering nothing. He'd made no visible friends that Lily could detect, formed no alliances, joined no study groups. He ate meals at the end of the Gryffindor table, usually alone, and vanished into the castle's corners between classes as though the shadows were safer than the light.
She didn't push. But she kept the invitation open, mentioned the upcoming meetings in class with careful casualness, made sure he knew the door remained available whenever he chose to walk through it.
The Christmas party was different.
It was the crown jewel of her social calendar, the event she'd always been building toward since her first year of teaching. It was exhausting to plan. It was expensive to execute. And every year, without fail, Severus complained about it as though she were asking him to walk barefoot across hot coals.
"I don't understand why my presence is required." He was adjusting his collar in the mirror of their bedroom. "I'm not a teacher. I'm not a student. I have no official connection to Hogwarts whatsoever."
"You're a successful author. The students should see examples of what they might achieve after graduation."
"I've written a few books. I am not a celebrity."
"You're more of a celebrity than most of the other guests. And perhaps I simply enjoy showing off my husband." Lily finished pinning up her hair and turned to face him. "Is that so terrible?"
"Yes. Quite.”
He was coming anyway. He always did.
The journey to Hogwarts was accomplished in the particular silence of a man conserving his energy for an ordeal ahead. Snow had fallen earlier in the week and still clung to the grounds in patches, glittering where the moonlight caught it. Their breath rose in white clouds. The path crunched softly beneath their feet.
"I should have refused," Severus said, as the castle came into view. "The first year you asked me, I should have refused, and then we wouldn't have established a precedent."
"If you were going to refuse, you'd have done it by now. We both know you like complaining more than you'd like staying home." She'd watched him dine out on party gossip for months afterwards. He complained about attending, but he never complained about the material it provided.
They passed through the entrance hall, past the hourglasses that tracked house points, past the doors to the Great Hall where the sounds of dinner were still audible. The party was in Lily's office, which she'd spent the afternoon expanding and decorating with the help of two house-elves.
"I'll find a corner," Severus said, as they approached the door. "A dark corner, preferably. And I'll stay there until you tell me we can leave."
"You could try mingling."
"I could also try setting myself on fire. The experience would be comparable."
The office had been transformed. Fairy lights floated near the ceiling, casting a warm glow over the assembled guests. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, decorated with charmed ornaments that moved and sparkled. Tables had been arranged around the perimeter, laden with food and drink from the kitchen, and the center of the room had been left clear for circulation.
The Ministry witch was telling a group of wide-eyed third-years about the time a twelve-year-old in Cornwall had accidentally turned his school into a greenhouse, and the third-years were rapt with the particular attention of children hearing about someone their own age doing something spectacularly illegal and getting away with it. The Slug Club alumni were charming a table of Slytherin sixth-years with stories about career paths that had nothing to do with the Ministry, stories that Lily knew from experience were exactly what ambitious seventeen-year-olds needed to hear: that the world was bigger than the three or four options they'd been told about, that success could look like things their parents hadn't imagined.
And there, standing alone near the door, was the boy.
He looked profoundly uncomfortable, shoulders hunched, hands shoved deep in his pockets. His eyes, those blue eyes, were scanning the room.
She wanted to rush over to him. Wanted to take his arm and guide him into the room and introduce him to everyone and make sure he felt welcome and included and safe.
She did none of these things.
Instead, she greeted the next guest who approached her, a witch from the Department of Magical Transportation who had been in Slughorn's club a decade before Lily and who had been consistently failing to remember her name for six years.
Severus had found his corner, as promised. He'd claimed a small table near the back wall, as far from the main flow of traffic as the room's geometry allowed, and had installed himself there with a plate of food and an expression that discouraged approach. The students gave him a wide berth, word of his temperament at previous parties had clearly spread through the years, and he seemed content to observe rather than participate.
Perfect.
Lily excused herself from the Transportation department witch and made her way toward the boy.
"Mr. Potter," she said, keeping her voice light. "I'm so glad you could make it."
He blinked at her, apparently surprised to be addressed directly. “I- thank you." His hands fidgeted with the cuff of his robes. "I don't really know anyone here."
"Of course. That's what the club is for, bringing people together." She gestured at the room around them. "Have you had a chance to look around? There's food, if you're hungry. And several of former students are here; they might have interesting perspectives on life after Hogwarts."
He nodded, but didn't move.
"Actually," she said, making a decision, "let me introduce you to someone. Come with me."
She led him across the room, weaving between clusters of conversation, nodding at guests who tried to catch her attention, steering him inexorably toward the corner where Severus sat in isolated splendor.
He'd been eating a mince pie. He choked on it.
He looked at Lily. Looked at the boy. His face arranged itself into an expression of profound and specific dread.
"Severus," Lily said, ignoring the coughing, "this is Mr. Potter. Mr. Potter, this is my husband, Severus Snape. He's an author.”
He clearly had not heard of them, which was evident from his blank expression. “Oh. Hello."
Severus had recovered enough to respond, though his voice came out strained. "Mr. Potter."
“Mr. Potter is one of my most promising first-year students," Lily continued, pulling out a chair and gesturing for him to sit. "I thought you two might have some interesting things to discuss. Mr. Potter, why don't you sit here? I'll bring you both some punch."
She was already moving away before either of them could object, though she felt Severus's gaze boring into her back. When she glanced back from the punch bowl, she saw exactly what she'd expected: two dark-haired figures sitting in awkward silence, neither apparently willing to initiate conversation, both looking as though they'd rather be anywhere else.
Good.
Severus could survive one conversation with an eleven-year-old he wasn't related to. It might even be good for him. And perhaps the boy needed to see that difficult, solitary people could grow up to be something other than alone.
Whether either of them would thank her for this arrangement was another matter entirely.
She was intercepted on her way back to the punch bowl by a sixth-year Ravenclaw who wanted to discuss career options in potions research, and by the time she'd extricated herself, the room's dynamics had shifted. New guests had arrived, conversations had rearranged themselves, and-
Dumbledore was at Severus's table.
The Headmaster had materialized with his usual talent for appearing exactly where he was least expected, his silver beard gleaming in the fairy light, his half-moon spectacles reflecting the glow of the Christmas tree. He'd pulled up a chair beside the boy and was beaming at the boy with the particular warmth he reserved for students.
Severus caught her eye across the room. His expression was one of barely contained desperation, a silent plea for rescue that she chose not to acknowledge. He'd survive. If he could survive the war, he could survive an hour of conversation with Albus Dumbledore and James Potter's spawn.
The party continued around them, guests circulating, conversations rising and falling, the particular rhythm of a social event finding its groove. Lily moved through the room, playing hostess, making introductions, ensuring that no one was left stranded on the margins. She checked on the students, were they comfortable? Did they have enough to eat? Had they met anyone interesting?
The party wound down gradually, guests departing in ones and twos, the energy in the room shifting from festive to tired. Lily stood at the door, thanking each person as they left, accepting compliments on the evening, making promises to stay in touch that might or might not be kept.
Severus escaped the moment social propriety allowed, murmuring something about fresh air and vanishing in the direction of the entrance hall. Dumbledore departed with a twinkle and a cryptic comment about the importance of connections. The students were ushered out by Filius, who had volunteered for corridor duty, their voices echoing down the hallway as they made their way back to their dormitories.
Finally, the room was empty except for Lily and the wreckage of a successful party.
Plates stacked with a wave of her wand, glasses collected and returned to the house-elves, leftover food vanished or shrunk into containers for tomorrow, no sense wasting good canapés when they'd make a perfectly serviceable breakfast. The fairy lights dimmed themselves as she worked, responding to the late hour, the room gradually returning to its normal dimensions as the expansion charms released their hold.
She was reaching for a napkin that had escaped under one of the tables when she heard the footsteps.
Light footsteps. Hesitant. Approaching the door with the particular caution of someone who wasn't sure they should be there.
She straightened and turned, and there was Potter standing in the doorway, his borrowed robes slightly askew.
"Mr. Potter." She set down the glass she'd been holding. “I thought you'd gone back to the tower with the others."
"I did. But then I came back." He stepped into the room, his hands clasped in front of him, his posture rigid. "I wanted to ask you something."
"Of course. What is it?"
He was silent for a moment, his gaze dropping to the floor, then rising again to meet hers. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than she'd ever heard it.
"Did you know my parents?"
The question hit her like a physical blow.
She'd known it was coming. Had known, from the moment she'd learned that James Potter’s and Marlene’s child would be attending Hogwarts, that this conversation was inevitable. But knowing something was coming and being prepared for it were not the same thing, and she found herself suddenly, completely unprepared.
“I-“ The word came out wrong, strangled. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Yes. I knew them."
His expression didn't change, but something shifted in his eyes, a hunger, a desperation, the same look she'd seen in the hospital wing when Madam Pomfrey had mentioned James Potter's name.
"What were they like?"
What were they like.
Such a simple question. Such an impossible question.
What could she say about James Potter? That he'd pursued her relentlessly for years, refusing to accept her rejection, making a spectacle of himself in corridors and classrooms? That he'd tormented Severus with the casual cruelty of someone who'd never questioned his own right to exist? That he'd been arrogant and thoughtless and so absolutely certain of his own importance that he'd never noticed the damage he left in his wake?
That he'd grown up, eventually. That he'd become Head Boy and surprised everyone, including himself. That he'd married someone good and died protecting his son.
And what could she say about the woman who'd become his wife? Her dormmate, her almost maybe friend, the quiet presence who'd listened to Lily's complaints about James for years before somehow ending up with him herself. Marlene, who deserved better than to be summarised by someone who hadn't spoken to her in years before she died. Marlene, who had become a resistance fighter and a wife and mother and then a corpse, and Lily had missed most of it.
"They were-“ She stopped. The words wouldn't come. "I'm sorry, Mr. Potter. I'm not sure how to answer that."
His face showed what might have been disappointment. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
"It's not that I don't want to. It's that-“ She pressed her hand to her forehead, trying to gather her thoughts. "I knew them when we were young. We were in the same year, the same house, for seven years. But people are complicated, especially when you're young, and I'm not sure I can tell you about them in a way that would be… fair."
"I don't need fair." The words came out fierce, almost angry, the first real emotion she'd heard from him since September. "I just need something. Anything. Everyone knows my name but no one will tell me anything much about them."
His voice cracked on the last word, and for a moment the mask slipped entirely, showing her the child underneath, the child who had grown up without parents, without stories, without any sense of who he'd come from or what he'd lost.
"I'll think about it," she said, and the words felt inadequate, felt like a betrayal, but they were all she had.
He nodded.
"Thank you, Professor."
He turned and left, his footsteps echoing down the corridor until they faded into silence.
The Christmas holiday passed in a blur of domestic routine and guilty avoidance.
They survived Boxing Day at Petunia's, where she refereed disputes about whose turn it was to choose what to watch, about who had eaten the last mince pie, about the fundamental injustice of having siblings at all. Back at home she read by the fire while snow fell outside the windows of Spinner's End. She lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, composing and discarding speeches in her head.
“Your father was…”
“Your mother was…”
They hadn't been friends. That was the thing Lily kept circling back to, the knot she couldn't untangle. They'd been dormmates, classmates, members of the same resistance movement during a war that had consumed everyone it touched, one way or another. They'd known each other for years without ever really knowing each other. Lily couldn't remember a single conversation they'd had that wasn't about assignments or small talk about home or boys or the logistics of staying alive.
And then she had learned that Marlene had married James Potter, and Lily had been surprised but not surprised. There had been signs, she supposed, if she'd been paying attention. She hadn't been. She'd shared a dormitory with Marlene for seven years and somehow missed it entirely, too absorbed in her own tangled feelings for Severus to notice anyone else's.
What right did she have to tell him anything about his mother?
How could she say that to an eleven-year-old boy who was desperate for any scrap of connection to the parents he'd never known?
She thought about reaching out to someone who had known Marlene better. But who? The McKinnon family had been wiped out in the war, targeted specifically because of Marlene's work with the Order. The other girls from their dormitory had scattered after school, and Lily had lost touch with them right after. She wouldn't even know how to find them now, and even if she did, what would she say? “Hello, I know we haven't spoken in over a decade, but I need you to help me explain your dead friend to her orphaned son.”
The thought of reaching out to James's friends was even worse.
Peter Pettigrew was dead, killed by Sirius Black on a London street along with twelve Muggles, blown apart so completely that only a finger had been recovered. Sirius himself was in Azkaban, convicted of the murders and of betraying the Potters to Voldemort. Even if Lily had wanted to seek out James's old friends, there were none left to find.
That left Remus Lupin.
She'd never been close to Remus. He'd been the quiet one, the reasonable one, the Marauder who occasionally looked embarrassed by his friends' behavior but never quite managed to stop them.
So she did nothing.
January arrived with the students, flooding back into the castle with their post-holiday energy and their new Christmas jumpers and the particular chaos that accompanied any transition. Lily threw herself into teaching with an intensity that was probably obvious to anyone watching, filling her hours with lesson plans and marking and the endless small tasks that accumulated like snow drifts in the corners of a professor's life.
She didn't seek the boy out. When he appeared in her classroom, she treated him exactly as she treated every other student, no more warmth, no less. She didn't ask about his holiday. She didn't mention the conversation they'd had after the Christmas party. She pretended, with the skill of long practice, that nothing had changed.
He noticed.
Of course he noticed and the fragile opening that the Christmas party had created began to close.
By February, they were back to where they'd started: a withdrawn child in the back row and a teacher who couldn't reach him.
“Tell him something,” she thought. “Tell him anything.”
But she couldn't make herself do it. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, she saw his face, hungry and hopeful, and she imagined the disappointment that would follow when he realized she had nothing real to give him. Nothing true. Nothing that would fill the void he was carrying around inside him.
She was a coward. She knew it.
March came, and then April. The Easter holidays approached with the inexorable momentum of the academic calendar, and Lily found herself looking forward to them with something approaching relief.
She wasn't looking for anything in particular. Just scanning the departure roster in the staffroom, the kind of half-attentive reading that filled the gaps between classes. And then she saw the name.
He was going home.
The words sat strangely in her mind. She realized, with a jolt of something like shame, that she didn't know where home was for him. She knew he'd been raised by Muggles, knew he'd arrived at Hogwarts without any understanding of the magical world, but she'd never thought to ask who those Muggles were or where they lived.
But now, watching his name on the departure list, she found herself suddenly, intensely curious.
The invitation to tea with Dumbledore arrived on the Thursday before the Easter break, written in his distinctive purple ink on. A chance to discuss her lesson plans, he wrote. To catch up. To share a cup of tea and a conversation before the students departed for their holidays.
She accepted, as she always did. One did not refuse tea with the Headmaster, not when one was a professor trying to maintain good standing, not when one had questions that only he might be able to answer.
His office was as cluttered as ever, every surface covered with silver instruments and curious artifacts, the walls lined with portraits of former headmasters who dozed or pretended to doze or watched with undisguised interest depending on their temperament. Fawkes sat on his perch by the window, looking magnificently indifferent to her arrival. She gave Fawkes a respectful nod, which he ignored. This was their established dynamic. She had accepted years ago that birds, as a species, found her unimpressive.
Dumbledore himself was behind his desk and rose to greet her.
"Lily," he said, gesturing to the chair across from him. "Thank you for coming. I know how busy this time of year must be."
It was. She'd thought sitting her own NEWTs had been stressful; watching her students approach theirs was somehow worse.
"Not so busy that I can't spare an hour for tea, Headmaster."
"Albus, please. After six years, I think we've earned first names."
They settled into the ritual of tea and small talk and dumbledore listened and nodded and offered observations that were either brilliantly insightful or deliberately opaque, depending on how one chose to interpret them.
Lily's eyes kept drifting to the corner of the office, to the lectern where the Book of Admittance sat.
She'd seen it before, years ago, when she'd come to Dumbledore with a question about her nephew. She'd asked Dumbledore if she could check the book, and he'd allowed it, and she'd found… nothing. Dudley's name wasn't there. She didn’t even know why she had bothered hoping.
"I was wondering," she said, interrupting whatever Dumbledore had been saying about the importance of foundational skills, "if you might have a particular book I've been trying to find. Something on the history of potion-making in the medieval period, specifically the transition from alchemical traditions to modern brewing techniques."
Dumbledore's eyebrows rose with interest. "That's a rather specialized topic. I'm not certain I have anything in my personal collection, but let me check. I believe there might be something on the upper level."
He rose from his chair and moved toward the spiral staircase that led to the second floor of his office, his robes trailing behind him. "It may take a moment. I'm afraid my organizational system has become rather… organic over the years."
“I know how it is. Take your time," Lily said. "I'm in no hurry."
She waited until his footsteps had faded, until she heard him moving among the shelves above, muttering to himself about the inadequacy of human memory.
Then she moved.
The Book of Admittance was exactly where she remembered it, standing open on its lectern, the Quill of Acceptance resting beside it. She crossed the room in quick, silent steps, her heart hammering against her ribs.
The Quill stirred as she approached, rising from its resting place as though preparing to defend its territory. She batted it away with more force than necessary, sending it skittering across the lectern, and seized the book with both hands.
The pages were thin and closely written, each one containing dozens of names in the same elegant script. She flipped backward, counting years, trying to estimate where 1980 would be.
Too far. She flipped forward. 1982. Back again. 1981. 1980.
Her finger traced down the page, scanning the names that had appeared that year. The organization was chronological, each name noted on the day of the child's birth with the date and time recorded in the margin. She found July, found the thirty-first,
Below the name, in a different hand, was a notation that must have been added when his Hogwarts letter was sent:
“Letter delivered 24 July, 1991. Accepted.”
And beneath that, the address.
She read it three times, committing it to memory with the desperate focus of someone who knew she had only seconds. The street name, the house number, the town. A place she'd never heard of, somewhere in Bristol, a Muggle address that told her nothing.
"I'm afraid I may have been mistaken about that book."
Dumbledore's voice came from directly behind her.
She turned, the Book of Admittance still open before her, her face a study in guilt that she couldn't quite manage to suppress.
He was standing at the base of the spiral staircase empty-handed.
"I'm sorry it took so long," he continued, moving toward his desk as though nothing unusual had occurred. "My collection is rather less comprehensive than I remembered. I believe the library might have better resources for your research."
Lily's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"I was just-“ The excuse came out before she'd fully formulated it. "I thought I saw a magical child in Cokeworth. Over the Christmas holiday. I wanted to check if they were in the book, if I'd seen correctly."
Dumbledore settled back into his chair, his expression mild. "And had you?"
“I- no. I must have been mistaken."
"We are all mistaken, from time to time." He reached for the teapot and refreshed both their cups with the unhurried movements of a man who had all the time in the world. "Well. I shan't keep you any longer. I know how precious time is at this stage of term."
She couldn't tell if he believed her. His expression gave nothing away, and she'd never been able to read him, not in all the years she'd known him.
"You're right," she said. "Of course you're right." She picked up her teacup. "I should probably be going. The students will be leaving soon, and I wanted to see them off."
"Of course." He rose to show her out, his courtesy as impeccable as ever. "Do let me know if there's anything else I can help you with, Lily. My door is always open."
She thanked him and fled, the address burning freshly in her mind.
She made it to the corridor, turned two corners, checked that she was alone, and pulled the quill from her pocket and scribbled the address onto the back of her hand in letters so cramped they were barely legible.
She stood in the corridor outside the Headmaster's office and told herself that she was a professor. That house visits were sometimes necessary. That checking on the welfare of students was part of her responsibility, part of the duty she'd accepted when she'd taken this position.
That she had every right to know where that boy lived.
That this wasn't about pity, or avoidance, it was about being a good teacher.
She woke before dawn, slipping out of bed with the practiced silence of someone who had learned long ago how to move without disturbing a sleeping partner. Severus didn't stir. He slept deeply these days, the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent the previous evening wrestling with a chapter that refused to cooperate, and she was grateful for it. She didn't want to explain where she was going. She wasn't entirely sure she could explain it to herself.
The house was dark and still, the particular quality of quiet that existed only in the hours before anyone else was awake. She dressed in the bathroom with the door closed, choosing her most proper Muggle clothes, a wool skirt, a light pink blouse, a cardigan, a pair of pearl earrings, things her mother had bought her that she rarely had occasion to wear.
The photographs were in the pocket of her cardigan, folded carefully into a square of tissue paper to protect them from damage.
She'd spent hours the previous night going through the stack of old Daily Prophet issues that had accumulated in the corner of the sitting room. Severus couldn't throw them away, some quirk of his nature that insisted on keeping records, maintaining archives, preserving information that might someday prove useful.
The coverage of the Potters' deaths had been extensive. Front-page articles for weeks, photographs accompanying every story, the same images reprinted over and over until they'd become iconic: James with his arm around Marlene, both of them smiling at some event she couldn't identify; Marlene holding the baby, her face soft with a tenderness Lily had never seen in their dormitory days; the family portrait that must have been taken shortly before the end, all three of them together, happy, unaware of what was coming.
She'd cut them out carefully the night before, sitting at the kitchen table after everyone had gone to bed, scissors moving through newsprint while the clock ticked toward midnight.
The kitchen was cold, the Aga not yet stoked for the day. She moved quietly, filling the kettle and boiling eggs on the hob. She couldn't remember eating them much as a child. Perhaps it was a taste she'd acquired later, absorbed from somewhere, adopted without conscious decision.
A sound behind her made her freeze.
The cat. She hissed from the doorway, a low sound of accusation that somehow managed to convey both "you woke me" and "I know you're up to something."
"I'm going out," Lily whispered. "I'll be back before evening. Watch the house."
The cat hissed again, softer this time, which was not agreement but wasn't quite refusal either.
Lily gathered her things and slipped out the back door, into the grey light of early morning.
She took the train because Apparition would have deposited her at her destination in seconds, and she wasn't ready for seconds. She needed hours, hours of watching the country scroll past, hours of rehearsing what she might say, hours of being neither here nor there.
The first train was nearly empty, the early hour deterring all but the most determined travelers. She found a seat by the window and watched the landscape slide past, the industrial sprawl of the Midlands giving way to greener country, fields and hedgerows and the occasional glimpse of villages that looked like they'd been there since the Conquest. England in spring, waking up after winter, everything softened by the pale morning light.
She ate her boiled eggs somewhere around Birmingham, peeling them over a napkin and trying not to scatter shell fragments across the seat. The woman across the aisle gave her a disapproving look, but Lily was too preoccupied to care. Her mind kept circling back to the same questions, the same anxieties, the same fundamental uncertainty about what she was doing and why.
The train changed at Reading, and again at some junction she didn't catch the name of. By the time she reached Bristol, the morning had advanced into something approaching midday, the sun breaking through the clouds in patches that moved across the landscape.
The town was exactly what she'd expected and nothing like it at the same time.
The town itself was ordinary. A high street with a Boots and a WH Smith and a charity shop. A church with a clock that was seven minutes slow. Lily walked from the station with the address written on a piece of paper and a feeling in her stomach that was if she was honest, dread.
She checked the address again, though she'd memorized it weeks ago.
She found it on a residential street five minutes from the high street. The building was larger than the houses around it, a converted Victorian property, probably, extended and adapted over the years into something institutional without being imposing. It had a neat front garden, recently mown. A low brick wall with iron railings. A sign beside the gate, painted in friendly colours, that said the name of the place, and beneath it, in smaller letters: “Children's Home”.
Lily stopped on the pavement.
She stood there for a long time. Long enough that a woman walking a dog on the opposite side of the street glanced at her twice. Long enough for the clouds to shift and the sun to break through, briefly, before being swallowed again.
A children's home.
Lily stood on the pavement and felt something crack open in her chest.
He'd grown up here. In this clean, bland, institutional building, surrounded by other children who had also been left behind, cared for by staff instead of family. Her father had grown up somewhere like this. He'd never spoken of it. She had always understood why.
She thought about eleven years in a place like this, and she wanted to sit down on the pavement and weep.
The woman who answered the door was somewhere in her sixties, grey hair escaping from a bun, a cardigan that had seen better decades and showed no signs of being replaced. A cat wound between her ankles as she stood in the doorway, a large tabby with a squashed face and an expression of profound suspicion.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm here to see Mr. Potter," Lily said. "I'm one of his teachers."
The woman's expression shifted. "His teacher?"
"From his school. I wanted to check in on him during the holidays."
"From the boarding school?"
"Yes. I teach chemistry." The lie was reflexive, the standard Muggle translation she'd used for years. "I'm his chemistry teacher."
"Chemistry," the woman repeated, in a tone that conveyed precisely how much she believed this.
Lily said nothing. Sometimes silence was better than a bad lie made worse.
The woman seemed to reach the same conclusion. She let it go.
"Is he in trouble?"
The question came too quickly, with too much resignation behind it. As if trouble was what she expected, what she was braced for, what always followed when adults came asking about that particular child.
"No," Lily said firmly. "Not at all. He's a delightful child. No trouble whatsoever."
The woman's eyebrows rose, skepticism written clearly across her features. "Really? Delightful?"
"Is that surprising?"
"He's been here since he was about sixteen months old. I've known him his whole life, near enough." The woman stepped back, gesturing for Lily to enter. "I'm Mrs. Figg. Come in, mind the cats."
The warning proved necessary. The entrance hall contained at least four cats that Lily could count, with more suggested by sounds of movement in adjacent rooms, the soft thump of paws on carpet, a distant yowl of feline complaint. A large ginger tom sat on the bottom step of the stairs, washing his paw with pointed disinterest. A tortoiseshell watched from the top of a bookcase. Something grey and fluffy had claimed the radiator and showed no intention of moving.
Lily edged past them with the particular wariness of a woman whose own cat would absolutely know if she came home smelling of rivals.
"Sorry about them," Mrs. Figg said, not sounding particularly sorry. "The children like them, mostly."
"It's fine," Lily said, pressing herself against the wall as a fifth cat, black and white, missing half an ear, emerged from a doorway and wound between her ankles before disappearing again. Her own cat was going to be unbearable when she got home.
"He was a difficult baby," Mrs. Figg continued, leading her toward the stairs. "Cried constantly, wouldn't be comforted, fought every bit of care we tried to give him. We tried fostering him out three times in the early years, good families, patient people. It never took. He'd scream until they brought him back." She shook her head. "Attachment disorder, the specialists said. Wouldn't connect with anyone. Wouldn't let anyone in. Delightful is not a word I'd have chosen."
The inside of the home was exactly what the outside had promised: clean, functional, well-maintained. The walls were painted in the kind of neutral colours that were warm enough to avoid feeling clinical, bland enough to offend no one. Notice boards lined the corridor, pinned with timetables, emergency procedures, and artwork that had clearly been produced by younger residents: splashy watercolours, potato prints, a lopsided cat that someone had labelled "Mr. Tibbles" in wonky crayon. The carpet was hard-wearing and spotless. The whole place smelled of cleaning products and toast and, faintly, of cat.
It was not a bad place. The fire extinguisher on each landing, properly serviced; the window locks, intact; the stairwell lighting, adequate. No peeling paint or damp patches. This was a good home, run by a woman who clearly cared, and he lived here because nobody else had given him somewhere to live, and the goodness of the place didn't make it any better.
Something was building behind her eyes, pressure and heat and the warning signs of tears she absolutely could not shed in front of this stranger. She blinked hard, trying to force them back, but her vision blurred anyway, her breath catching in a way that was impossible to hide.
"Are you all right?" Mrs. Figg had stopped walking, was looking at her with concern that seemed genuine.
"Fine," Lily managed. "Just… hay fever. The pollen this time of year."
Mrs. Figg didn't look convinced, but she didn't press. Another cat, a Siamese, this one, with crossed eyes and a proprietary air, sat outside one of the doors, and Mrs. Figg scooped it up with practiced ease as they passed.
"This one's always trying to get into the room. Thinks she owns the place." She deposited the cat over her shoulder, where it draped itself like a furry stole and glared at Lily with undisguised hostility.
They stopped outside a door that was identical to every other door in the corridor, plain wood, brass number, nothing to distinguish it from its neighbours. Mrs. Figg knocked twice, then opened it without waiting for a response.
"You've got a visitor."
The room was small. A single bed against one wall, neatly made with a plain blue coverlet. A desk and chair beneath the window. A wardrobe that probably held everything he owned. No posters on the walls, no photographs on the desk, no evidence of personality or preference or the accumulated treasures of childhood.
The boy was sitting up in bed, clearly just woken, his dark hair even more disheveled than usual, his blue eyes blinking in confusion at the two women in his doorway. He was wearing pajamas that looked too large for him, hand-me-downs, probably, from the home's supply of donated clothing.
"Professor Snape?” His voice was rough with sleep, bewildered. "What are you doing here?"
Mrs. Figg was looking between them, clearly curious but trying not to show it. "I'll leave you to it, then. Come find me at the office when you're done." She retreated, pulling the door mostly closed behind her but leaving it ajar.
Lily stood frozen just inside the threshold, all of her prepared speeches evaporating like morning mist, leaving absolute certainty that she had made a terrible mistake.
"I came to-“ Her hand went to her pocket automatically, searching for something, anything, that might justify her presence. Her fingers closed around an object she'd forgotten was there, dry and fibrous and utterly out of place. "I came to bring you your homework."
She pulled it out and stared at it. A valerian root. She'd harvested it weeks ago for a potion that had never materialized, shoved it into her pocket, and promptly forgotten it existed. This cardigan had a habit of accumulating things.
He was looking at her as though she'd lost her mind. Which, to be fair, she possibly had.
"Homework?" He'd swung his legs out of bed now, sitting on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet pale against the worn carpet. "It's the Easter holidays."
"Yes, well." She thrust the valerian root toward him with the desperate energy of someone committing to a bad decision. "I forgot to give it out before the break. Anyway, I’ve been visiting all my students. To distribute the assignments. And to spread Easter cheer."
The words sounded insane even as they left her mouth.
He took the root from her hand. "What am I supposed to do with it?"
"Look at it." She was improvising wildly. "Describe it. Write down your observations. Feel the magic in it."
You couldn't feel the magic in objects. If it were possible, she and Severus would have discovered it years ago, after they'd spent half a summer with their hands pressed against canal weeds and scavenged roots, trying to sense something, anything. All they'd managed was matching headaches and an argument about who wasn’t trying hard enough.
"Feel the magic," he repeated slowly.
"Yes. It's an exercise in… in magical sensitivity. Very important."
He looked up at her.
"Is that all?" he asked.
"That's all. Yes. I should- I should go. I have other students to visit. Other homework to distribute."
She was backing toward the door as she spoke, the coward's retreat, the same avoidance she'd been practicing for months.
"Right." He set the valerian root on his empty desk.
She was in the corridor. She was walking toward the stairs. She was going to leave this place and go back to her life and pretend that none of this had happened, that she hadn't come all this way just to hand a child a dried root and flee from his questions.
The photographs were still in her pocket.
She stopped.
Stood in the institutional hallway, beneath the cheerful yellow paint and the obligatory artwork, and felt the full weight of her own cowardice pressing down on her shoulders.
She'd promised him. Months ago, in her office, she'd looked into his hungry eyes and promised that she would think about it, that she would tell him about his parents, that she would give him something, anything, to fill the void he was carrying around inside him.
Was she really going to walk out of this building with the photographs still in her pocket, with the answers he'd asked for still locked inside her head, with nothing accomplished except the confirmation of every worst belief he held about adults and their reliability?
She thought about Minerva's words, months ago in the corridor outside the abandoned classroom. “You assume the worst of your colleagues. You assume that if you don't intervene, no one will.”
Maybe that was true. Maybe she did assume too much, intervene too often, trust too little in other people.
But right now, in this moment, there was no one else. There was only her, and the photographs in her pocket, and a boy in a small room who had been waiting his whole life for someone to tell him who he came from.
She turned around and walked back.
The door was still ajar. She pushed it open without knocking, and he looked up from where he was examining the valerian root.
"Professor?"
She didn't wait to be invited. She pulled out his desk chair, positioned it across from him, and sat.
"I forgot," Lily said. "I forgot the most important part."
He was watching her with those blue eyes, wary and waiting, the expression of someone who had learned not to hope for too much.
"These are your parents."
She held out the first photograph. It was a newspaper clipping, carefully cut from the society pages: James and Marlene at their wedding, forever young, forever happy, confetti falling around them in a moment that would never end.
"This is your mother," Lily said, pointing to Marlene. "Marlene McKinnon. We were in the same dormitory at Hogwarts, all seven years. She was-“ She paused, searching for words that were true, that meant something, that weren't just the platitudes everyone else had offered. "She was someone who did things. When the rest of us were still deciding whether to act, she was already moving. That's how she was in school, and that's how she was in the war."
She kept talking, reaching for whatever she could find, small things, trivial things, anything that might make Marlene more than a name and a photograph. The memories came unevenly, some clear and some half-dissolved by time, and she offered them as they surfaced, not stopping to judge whether they were important enough to share.
He took the photographs gently, though his breath had gone ragged.
"And your father." Lily pointed to James, feeling the strange grief of losing someone you'd never quite liked but had known for so long and too well. "James Potter. He was… persistent. When he wanted something, he didn't give up. He pursued it until he got it, and he didn't always think about whether the thing he wanted actually wanted him back."
She glanced at him, checking his reaction. He was still staring at the photograph, his expression impossible to read.
"He grew up, though. People do that, sometimes. The boy I knew at school, arrogant, thoughtless, certain that he deserved everything he wanted, he became something different, later. I didn't see the transformation myself, but I heard about it. He became someone who protected people. Someone who fought for what was right." She paused. "Someone who died protecting you.”
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Said nothing.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner," Lily said. "I'm sorry I avoided you. I was-“ She stopped, tried again. "I didn't know how to tell you the truth without it being complicated. Your father and I didn't get along when we were young. Your mother and I were never as close as we should have been."
"But you knew them." His voice was barely above a whisper. "You actually knew them."
"I did." She handed him the other photographs, the family portrait, Marlene with the baby, one more of James alone that she'd found in a Quidditch coverage piece. "These are yours now. To keep."
He gathered them carefully, holding them against his chest as though they were precious beyond measure. Which, she supposed, they were.
"Thank you," he said, and his voice cracked on the words. And Lily saw tears gathering in the corners of his blue eyes, his mother's eyes, she realized now, the same shade, the same shape, and she had to look away before her own tears could fall.
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Lily asked the question she'd been avoiding.
"Why did you come back here? For the holidays. You could have stayed at school."
He looked down at the photographs in his hands. "I know."
"Hogwarts has a lot to offer over Easter. The grounds, the library-“
"I like it here." He said it quietly, without emphasis, as though it were simply a fact. "Here, no one cares who I am. Mrs. Figg just wants me to make my bed and show up for meals. That's it. That's all she wants. I know what's expected. No one stares at me."
She didn't know what to say to that. What could she say? That it would get better? She wasn't sure it would.
"I should go," she said, standing. "But Mr. Potter-“ She waited until he looked up at her. "If you want to know more, if you have questions, if you want to talk about them, come find me. At school. Any time. I'll tell you what I can."
He nodded, unable to speak.
She left him there and walked down the institutional corridor and past the cheerful yellow paint and through the front door into the April afternoon, and she didn't cry until she'd reached the bus stop, and then she cried until her eyes were raw and her nose was running and an elderly woman on the bench next to her offered her a tissue.
The train pulled into Bristol Temple Meads and she stood on the platform with the departures board clicking overhead, the connection home listed in amber letters, platform 4, forty-seven minutes, and she didn't walk toward it. She stood among the commuters and the tourists and the pigeons that owned the station with the proprietary confidence of creatures that had never been asked to leave, and she felt the anger arrive.
It came slowly at first, the way weather systems built, a pressure change, a darkening at the edges, the atmospheric shift that preceded something violent. She'd been sad on the train. But somewhere between the platform and the departures board, the sadness caught fire.
She walked to platform 7. The train to Edinburgh stopped at every town between here and the border, but it passed through the Highlands, and from the Highlands she could reach Hogsmeade, and from Hogsmeade she could reach the castle, and from the castle she could reach Dumbledore's office, and from Dumbledore's office she could say every word that was demanding to be spoken.
The train was slow, and anger, unlike sadness, did not sit still.
It paced and circled and somewhere north of Gloucester, between the window's reflection of her own furious face and the darkening countryside beyond, it found the crack it had been looking for and began to collapse inward.
She hadn't asked.
That was the thing. She hadn't asked what happened to the child after his parents died. She hadn't asked Dumbledore. She hadn't asked McGonagall. She hadn't asked the Ministry, the Prophet, the Order contacts she could still have reached if she'd tried. She hadn't asked anyone, because she hadn't thought to ask, because she'd been busy, because the war had ended and there were other things-
She pressed her forehead against the cold glass and closed her eyes.
When they died, when Marlene died, her name had appearing somewhere in the Prophet article beneath the words "Dark Lord Defeated". Lily had read the headline three times before her eyes had drifted down to the names. She still wasn't sure which news had made her cry. Whether it was the relief or the grief.
That was the thing, wasn't it? The war had ended, and she had been so relieved, so grateful, so busy being alive when she might not have been, that she hadn't stopped to think about what that ending had cost anyone else. The celebrations, the toasts, the tears of joy, and somewhere in the margins, a baby in the rubble of a cottage in Godric's Hollow.
Because the truth was that after the grief had faded, her life had unfolded exactly as she'd hoped. She had been given everything she had wanted, everything she had fought for, delivered into her hands as though the universe had finally decided she deserved it all.
She had been given everything, and she had never stopped to ask what he'd been given.
She'd assumed. That was the word she kept coming back to, the word that indicted her more thoroughly than any accusation Dumbledore could have levelled. She'd assumed. She'd assumed that the Boy Who Lived, the most famous baby in Britain, the child whose face was on the front page of every wizarding newspaper, whose name was already being sewn into the fabric of history, would be taken care of. That Dumbledore would see to it. That the Ministry would see to it. That someone, somewhere in the vast machinery of wizarding society, would ensure that this child, this specific, particular, irreplaceable child, would be raised by people who loved him, in a home where his parents' photographs hung on the walls and their stories were told at bedtime and his name meant something other than a headline.
She'd assumed, because assuming was easier than asking, and asking would have meant involving herself, and involving herself would have meant- what? Opening her home? Her life? Taking in the son of the woman she'd shared a dormitory with, the man who'd once asked her out seventeen times in a term?
Would she have really done that? She didn't know.
But nobody had asked. And she hadn't offered. And the years had passed, one, then five, then ten, and the boy who lived had become an abstraction, a name in newspapers, a chapter in history books, a legend so large that the actual child at its centre had disappeared behind it like a boy behind a curtain, and Lily had let it happen because she'd been busy and because she'd assumed and because caring, real caring, the kind that cost something, required you to ask questions whose answers might demand more of you than you were prepared to give.
She hadn't cared enough to ask. That was the truth. She'd cared the way most people cared about tragedies that happened to other people's children: sincerely, briefly, and from a comfortable distance.
The train pulled into the Highlands as the sky turned fully dark, and Lily sat with her reflection in the glass and her guilt in her chest and watched the mountains pass like sleeping giants.
She walked through the castle gates and walked the grounds in darkness, her wand lighting the path, the April evening cold enough to see her breath but not cold enough to feel.
She found Dumbledore by the Black Lake.
He was not alone. Argus Filch stood beside him on the shore, his gaunt frame silhouetted against the water's silver surface, his perpetual scowl visible even in profile. Mrs. Norris wound between his ankles, her lamp-like eyes tracking something in the reeds.
Filch was complaining. This was not, in itself, remarkable, but the specific nature of tonight's grievance appeared to involve students and littering and the particular indignity of finding sweet wrappers in the trophy room, a space Filch regarded as sacred ground and which students regarded as a convenient shortcut between the third-floor corridor and the Great Hall.
"-wrappers, Headmaster, Bertie Bott's wrappers, stuffed behind the Quidditch trophies, and if you think I'm going to spend my evenings on my hands and knees fishing confectionery refuse out from behind-"
He stopped mid-sentence as Lily approached. His eyes, which operated permanently at the squinting end of the spectrum, narrowed to something approaching closed. The look he gave her was the same look he'd been giving her for fifteen years, the look that said he had not forgiven her and would not forgive her and fully intended to carry his grievance into the afterlife and beyond.
"Professor Snape," Filch said, investing her title with the precise quantity of contempt that he distributed equally among all professors but which, in her case, carried an additional surcharge of personal resentment. He excused himself with a final, pointed remark about the trophy room and stalked away.
Dumbledore turned to her. In the moonlight, his face was silver and shadow, his half-moon spectacles catching the lake's reflected light. He looked, as he always looked, exactly like what he was: a very old, very powerful wizard who had seen too much and understood too much and who carried the weight of that understanding with a lightness that was either wisdom or performance, and Lily had never been able to tell which.
"Lily," he said. "What a pleasant surprise. I thought you'd gone home for the holidays."
She'd planned to confront him. To demand answers, to make accusations, to say every furious word she'd been carrying.
"I quit."
The words that came out were not the words she'd prepared.
"I'm resigning my position as Potions professor. Effective immediately."
The lake lapped gently at the shore. Dumbledore's face revealed nothing, not surprise, not disappointment, not relief. Just the same mild, infuriating composure he wore for everything.
"I see," he said.
Two words. He could have said why or what's happened or let's discuss this or any of the things a headmaster was supposed to say when a professor announced their resignation during the Easter holidays on the shore of a lake. Instead, he folded his hands before him and regarded her with the patient attention of a man who was willing to wait for as long as the conversation required.
"I am sorry to hear that," Dumbledore said. "You are an excellent teacher, Lily. The students are fortunate to have had you."
He accepted it.
He simply, quietly, without protest or persuasion, accepted her resignation.
The thoughts roared in her ears like wind, like the sea, like the sound of a door closing on six years of lesson plans and staffroom armchairs and dungeon classrooms and Tonks's hair and the Weasley twins calling her Professor Snapey and Neville Longbottom's face when a potion went right for the first time and the sound of thirty cauldrons bubbling in the particular harmony that meant everyone was doing it correctly, that she'd taught them this, that the magic had passed from her hands to theirs and would go on passing, outward and onward, long after the lesson ended.
She'd quit. She'd actually quit.
"Right," she said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. "Right. Good. Thank you."
She turned and walked away from the lake, and Dumbledore let her go.
The telephone box in Hogsmead was a relic of some well-meaning Ministry initiative from the eighties, an attempt to provide magical communities with access to Muggle communication networks that had been installed with great fanfare and then promptly forgotten. It stood at the edge of the village, near the path that led up to the castle, its red paint faded to a tired pink, its windows clouded with decades of grime. The receiver, when Lily lifted it, smelled of the particular mustiness of things that had been left alone too long.
She fed Muggle coins into the slot, and dialed the number for Spinner's End with fingers that had gone slightly numb.
The phone rang four times. Five. Six.
She was beginning to think he wasn't home, that he'd gone out looking for her, that she'd have to Apparate back to Cokeworth and face whatever came next without the buffer of conversation to prepare her, when the line clicked and his voice came through sharply.
“What?”
"It's me."
A breath. Then another. She could hear him collecting himself.
"Where are you?" It was anger, barely contained, the particular fury he reserved for situations that had frightened him.
She didn't know what to say.
"It's nearly four o'clock. You left before dawn without a word to anyone, you've been gone for-“ A pause, as though he were checking a clock. “-six hours, and the only reason I haven't contacted the Aurors is that I assumed you hadn't been abducted, merely inconsiderate."
"I'm in the Hogsmeade.”
"Hogsmeade."
"Yes."
"Hogsmeade, Scotland. Several hundred miles from where you were supposed to be, which was, if memory serves, in bed next to me when I woke up this morning."
"I had to do something. I should have left a note. I'm sorry."
"You should have left more than a note. You should have left an explanation, a detailed itinerary, and possibly a map with your intended route marked in red ink so that when you failed to return at a reasonable hour, I would have some indication of where to begin searching for your body.”
She leaned her forehead against the grimy glass of the telephone box, letting the cool surface press against her skin. He had every right to be angry.
"I know," she said. "I know. I'm sorry. Can you come get me?"
Another silence, shorter this time. "You can't Apparate?"
"I can. I just-“ She closed her eyes. "I don't want to arrive home alone. I want you to come get me. Please."
The please seemed to shift something.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Stay where you are. Don't wander off. Don't do anything else inexplicable without informing me first."
"I'll try."
"You'll succeed. I'm not making a request."
The line went dead.
She hung up the receiver and stepped out of the telephone box into the April evening. She found a bench near the Three Broomsticks and sat down to wait.
The twenty minutes passed slowly and she thought about what she was going to say to him, how she was going to explain what she'd done and why she'd done it and what it meant for everything that came next.
The crack of Apparition announced his arrival before she saw him. He materialized at the end of the street, his dark robes billowing slightly from the displacement of air.
He walked toward her with quick, purposeful strides, and she rose from the bench to meet him, and for a moment they simply stood there.
"You scared me,” he said.
"I know. I'm sorry."
His jaw tightened. She could see him wrestling with the demand for immediate answers.
She sank onto the bench. He stood for a moment longer, then sat beside her, keeping a distance.
"Severus."
He turned to her.
"Would you be angry with me if I quit my job?"
Silence.
"Quit your job," he repeated.
"Teaching. At Hogwarts. If I resigned. Effective immediately. Would you be angry?"
A pause. Then another.
"You want to quit."
"I'm asking if you would be angry."
"That's not an answer to my question."
"It's not meant to be. I'm asking you first."
He studied her for a long moment, his dark eyes moving across her face, reading whatever was written there. She didn't know what he saw.
"The students," he said finally, "never deserved you."
She blinked. "What?"
"The vast majority of students at Hogwarts never deserved to be taught Potions at all." His voice had taken on the particular cadence he used when delivering opinions he'd held for years and had been waiting for an opportunity to express.
"They are, as a collective body, neither intelligent nor talented enough for the instruction of Potions to serve any practical purpose. The entire pedagogical enterprise of attempting to teach complex brewing to children who cannot reliably identify the correct end of a stirring rod is, and has always been, an exercise in futility so profound that it borders on the existential.”
"Severus-“
“Most would be better served," he continued, "by being locked in cages until they reach the age of eighteen and develop some semblance of rational thought. And then, and only then, they might begin their education with the caution and scepticism that the endeavour warrants. The fact that you have been wasting your considerable talents on these creatures for six years is a tragedy of resource allocation that future historians will weep over."
She stared at him. "You can't be serious."
"I am entirely serious. The magical education system in Britain is a catastrophe of design and execution, and your participation in it has been a disservice to your own sanity. If you wish to resign, I will support that decision without reservation. The students don't deserve you. They never have."
"You're saying this to make me feel better." A laugh escaped her, half-sob and half-genuine amusement.
The laughter kept coming, and then it wasn't laughter anymore.
"I did quit," she said into his shirt. "Already. This afternoon. I told Dumbledore I was done."
A beat of silence. Then: "You already quit."
"Yes."
He just looked at her for another moment, then turned and held out his arm. "Good. Let's just go home."
The Easter holiday passed. The days were on the surface normal, but the underneath turbulent, the two layers sliding against each other like tectonic plates building toward a shift that everyone could feel and no one mentioned.
Severus didn't ask again why she'd quit. She knew that he understood, after all these years, that Lily's initial decisions were drafts rather than final copies. His role was to wait while she revised.
She spent the days with Severus in the laboratory, brewing things that didn't actually matter, the familiar rhythm of preparation and combination occupying her hands while her mind turned over everything she'd done and everything she hadn't and the vast grey space between.
She didn't contact Dumbledore. Dumbledore didn't contact her. Minerva, however, did write. A brief, businesslike letter: she would be unavailable for several weeks during the summer. Would Lily consider conducting a Muggle-born visit or two in her stead?
She visited her mother on Sunday, alone. Mentioned the resignation in the space between courses and moved on before too many questions could follow. Ate reheated roast beef and all the trimmings while her mother complained about the neighbours and reported that Petunia was still fighting Dudley's eleven-plus results, despite already having started at Smeltings. Dudley had failed spectacularly, but Petunia remained convinced the exam had been marked incorrectly. The ordinariness of it, the vast, boring, beloved ordinariness, sat in her chest beside the other things and made them bearable without making them better.
The last day of the Easter holiday was a Sunday. Monday would bring the students back to the castle, the timetable back into force, the machinery of the school year cranking to life for its final, frantic push toward examinations and end-of-year feasts, more lessons in a Potions classroom that would need a professor in it, except the professor had quit. Well, except the professor was currently standing in her bedroom in Cokeworth at seven in the morning putting on her robes.
She didn't think about it much. Thinking would have required acknowledging the contradiction, and acknowledging the contradiction would have required resolving it, and resolving it would have required deciding, actually, finally, irreversibly deciding, whether she was a professor or she wasn't, whether she belonged in a classroom or she didn't, whether she was going back or she was done.
She didn't decide. She just got dressed.
Severus was in the kitchen when she came downstairs. He looked at her, at the robes, the shoes, the bag, and said nothing. He handed her the toast she'd forgotten to make. He performed these actions with the absolute neutrality of a man who was witnessing nothing unusual.
"I might be late tonight," she said.
"All right."
"First day back. Lots to do."
"Yes."
She kissed him and left.
She Apparated to Hogsmeade. She walked the path to the castle. She entered through the main doors and descended to the dungeons and unlocked her classroom and put her bag on her desk and her shoes under her chair and began setting up for the first lesson of the day, which was second-year Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw Potions, and which she knew from memory required cauldrons at stations two through fourteen and ingredients from the restricted cupboard and a spare set of scales because someone had melted theirs in the last lesson before the holiday.
The second-years arrived. They sat down. They opened their textbooks. Lily taught.
Nobody said anything. Nobody mentioned her resignation or asked if she was supposed to be there. The lesson proceeded with the unremarkable normality of a lesson that had never been in question, and the students, who had no idea their professor had quit and un-quit in the space of a fortnight, brewed their Swelling Solutions and asked their questions and produced the usual range of results from competent to catastrophic.
In the staffroom at break, McGonagall nodded to her the way McGonagall always nodded. Lily nodded back, then mentioned, that she was free for the summer, barring a week in Mallorca in August, if Minerva still needed help with the visits. Minerva said she did. And that was that. Filius asked if she'd had a good holiday. Pomona offered her a biscuit. Aurora mentioned the Quidditch schedule. Nobody said “we thought you'd left”. Nobody said “welcome back”.
She saw Dumbledore once, passing in the corridor between lunch and her afternoon class. He was walking with Filch, listening to what appeared to be a continuation of the littering complaint, and when his eyes met hers over Filch's head, his expression held nothing, no reproach, no satisfaction, no acknowledgement that anything had passed between them on the shore of the Black Lake during the easter holidays. Just the mild, benign smile of a headmaster greeting a colleague. He inclined his head. She inclined hers. They continued in opposite directions.
First-year Gryffindor-Slytherin Potions were her last class of the week. She taught the lesson. She circulated. She helped students and she did all the things she always did, and she did not look at the back row more than was necessary.
The bell rang. The students rose. The particular impatience of a Friday afternoon class ending filled the dungeon with noise and movement.
"Professor Snape?”
She looked up from the essay she was already marking.
He stood in front of her desk.
She hadn't seen him approach. He must have waited for the other students to leave, timing his arrival for the moment when the room was empty enough. He stood with his hands at his sides, his bag over one shoulder, not quite meeting her eyes.
He held something out to her.
A piece of parchment. She took it. Unfolded it.
The assignment she'd improvised in a children's home near Bristol on a Tuesday morning, the absurd, impossible, entirely fabricated homework about a lint-covered valerian root: “Look at it. Describe it. Feel the magic.”
He'd done it.
The description was short, a paragraph, no more, written in the careful, slightly cramped hand of a boy who hadn't had much practice writing. He'd described the root's appearance: brown, wrinkled, about the size of his little finger, smelling of earth and vaguely spicy. He'd described its texture: rough on the outside, slightly soft when he pressed. He'd described holding it up to the light and noticing that the skin was translucent in places, thin enough to see through.
And at the bottom, in a line that was slightly separate from the rest, as though he'd added it later and wasn't sure it belonged:
“I don't know if I felt the magic. But I think I felt something.”
Lily read it twice.
She looked up. He was watching her, his fingers twisting in the hem of his sleeve, and she saw in it the question he wasn't asking: “Is this right? Is this what you wanted? Did I do it correctly?”
"Thank you, Mr. Potter,” she said. She was proud of this. "This is good work."
Pairing: Lily Evans/Severus Snape
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 4: October 1975. Lily spends five days convincing Severus to visit Hogsmeade, and one afternoon learning she shouldn't have asked and that firewhisky solves nothing.
Word count of chapter 3: 9,642 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
The S came first. It always did one way or another.
Her Potions textbook lay open before her, but the margins had become more interesting than the instructions. Her quill moved in its own accord, tracing letters in the narrow space between paragraphs.
Severus.
She wrote it once, then again beneath, experimenting with different flourishes. The S could swoop dramatically or sit prim and contained. The V could dip sharp as a blade or curve gentle as a valley. She tried them all.
She glanced up, confirmed no one was watching, and bent back to her work.
Lily.
Her own name appeared beneath his, the letters smaller, more tentative. This was stupid. She'd erase it immediately. She just wanted to see. Just once. Just to know how it looked.
Lily-
A bag slammed onto the table.
The quill skittered across the page, leaving a wild streak of ink. Lily's whole body jerked so violently that her Potions book went flying, pages fluttering before it crashed to the floor somewhere beneath the table.
Severus stood there, already pulling out the chair beside her. "You're jumpy today."
"You-" Her voice came out strangled. "You can't just sneak up on people like that."
"I walked across an open room." He settled into the chair.
The book. The book was under the table.
"I'll get it." She dove before he could move, but he was already reaching down, his long arm extending beneath the table.
He had to spread his legs to reach it properly, shifting in his chair, and suddenly his knee pressed against hers beneath the table.
He straightened, book in hand.
Time stopped. Her face was burning, she could feel it.
Then he simply held it out to her
"Your book."
She snatched it back, stuffing it beneath her stack of other textbooks with more force than necessary.
Her cheeks were still burning.
She turned to her calendar, desperate for some occupation. The parchment was covered in her own cramped notations: essay deadlines, Quidditch matches she'd promised Marlene she'd attend, the phases of the moon for Astronomy.
Her quill circled a date in late September, weeks ago now.
She frowned at it. Something about that date tugged at her. Someone's birthday. It had to be. But whose? Not her mother's, not Petunia's, not her father's. She ran through the list of dormitory acquaintances, Slug Club members, casual friends whose celebrations she might have noted and then forgotten.
The date stared back at her, unhelpful.
She'd figure it out later.
"Are you doing anything for Hogsmeade?" she said, eyes still on the calendar. "This weekend, I mean."
Papers rustled as Severus turned a page. "Existing. Probably in my dormitory. Perhaps venturing as far as the common room if I'm feeling adventurous."
"Sounds thrilling."
"I live for excitement."
She traced the edge of the calendar with one finger, working up the courage. "I was thinking of going. To Hogsmeade."
He didn't look up. "And?"
"And I thought… I don't know." She shrugged. "Just to look around. See what's new at Honeydukes. Maybe get a butterbeer."
She turned to face him properly. "Come with me."
Now he did look up. "Why?"
Because I want you to.
"Because it might be nice," she said instead. "Because you could use some fresh air. Because-"
"Fresh air." His lip curled.
"I just thought-"
"I know what you thought." He turned back to his book, the dismissal clear. "And I'm not going. Go with your dormitory friends. Go with Potter, he'd certainly be willing. Go with anyone who actually wants to-"
He stopped.
"I'm not going," he repeated, quieter now. "You'd have a terrible time."
"Okay," she said.
She turned back to her calendar, her stack of books, the margins of her Potions text where his name waited in seventeen different variations.
The campaign took five days.
Monday, she caught him between Charms and Transfiguration, matching his stride through the crowded corridor. "Mary and Dorcas won't go. Marlene has a detention she won't explain. I asked around-"
He kept walking, gaze fixed ahead. "Tragic."
"I'm going to be wandering Hogsmeade completely alone. A sad, lonely ghost who just wants to have a butterbeer."
"Ghosts don't drink butterbeer."
"This one does. This one weeps into her butterbeer because her best friend abandoned her."
He shrugged his shoulders.
Tuesday, she ambushed him in the library, sliding into the chair beside him before he could escape. "I've been thinking about what you said. About going with Potter."
That got his attention. His quill stopped mid-word.
"You're right," she continued, examining her fingernails. "He has been asking. Getting quite persistent about it. Maybe I should just say yes."
"Do what you like." His quill hadn't moved. The ink was pooling, bleeding into the parchment.
"I mean, if you're not going to come with me, and everyone else is busy…" She let the implication hang.
He returned to his essay with pointed focus, the scratch of his quill the only response.
Wednesday, she changed tactics. Found him alone in the courtyard during a free period, hunched on a bench with his Potions text.
She sat beside him without asking permission. "I won't make you talk to anyone. We can avoid the Three Broomsticks entirely if you want- I know you hate crowds. We'll just walk around. Look at things. You don't even have to buy anything."
"I wasn't planning to buy anything regardless."
"See? Perfect. We're already aligned."
He turned a page with more force than necessary.
"I'll buy you a chocolate frog," she offered. "To make up for dragging you out."
"I don't want a chocolate frog."
"Pepper Imps, then."
"I want to be left alone." But he didn't move away, and they both knew what that meant.
Thursday, she didn't mention Hogsmeade at all. She sat with him at meals, passed him notes during History of Magic, met him after dinner to work on their Potions essays together.
Friday evening, as they parted ways in the Entrance Hall, her toward Gryffindor Tower, him toward the dungeons, she paused on the first step.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Meet me at the gates. Ten o'clock."
He stopped but didn't turn. His shoulders rose and fell with what might have been a sigh.
"Lily-"
"Ten o'clock," she repeated. "Don't make me come find you."
She climbed the stairs without looking back, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. Behind her, she heard nothing.
Which could mean anything.
Saturday dawned to the smell of rain, the rattle of wind against glass, and the weight of a skinny cat pinning her feet to the mattress. She extracted herself carefully, it had only just started trusting her over the summer, and dressed with more care than she wanted to admit.
The Great Hall buzzed with weekend energy, students lingering over breakfast and planning their Hogsmeade expeditions. Lily took her usual seat at the Gryffindor table and tried not to stare at the Slytherin table across the room.
She failed immediately.
Severus sat alone at the far end, as always, a buffer of empty seats separating him from his housemates. He was pushing eggs around his plate without eating them, his face pale beneath the greenish torchlight.
She caught his eye.
The contact lasted only a second, but she poured everything she could into it. You promised. Well, you didn't promise, but you didn't say no.
He looked at her again
He nodded. Once. Almost imperceptible.
She hid her smile behind her teacup.
"What are you grinning about?" Mary dropped into the seat beside her, already dressed for her own Hogsmeade excursion in a fetching blue cloak. "You look like the cat that got the cream."
Lily arrived at five minutes to ten, her boots already squelching in the mud that had accumulated along the path. The rain had stopped, but the world remained grey and dripping.
She waited.
Students streamed past in chattering groups, barely glancing at her. A cluster of fourth-years splashed through a puddle with deliberate glee. Somewhere behind her, she could hear a carrying laugh, and she hunched deeper into her cloak. The last thing she needed was Potter spotting her alone and taking it as an invitation.
The castle clock began to chime. Ten o'clock.
No Severus.
The first stroke passed. The second. He wasn't coming. Of course he wasn't coming. She'd pushed too hard, assumed too much, and now she was going to stand here like an idiot while the whole school watched her wait for someone who'd never intended to show up.
The ninth stroke. The tenth.
She was about to turn away, retreat to the library and pretend she'd never wanted this at all, when a figure emerged from the shadow of the gatehouse.
Severus walked toward her with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his cloak pulled tight against the chill.
"You're late," she said, the words coming out breathless with relief.
"You're early," he said. "I saw you from the courtyard."
"I was just-" She had no good answer for this. "It doesn't matter. You're here."
"I'm here." He said it like he wasn't entirely sure how it had happened. "We should go."
They fell into step together, passing through the gates and onto the path to Hogsmeade. The mud sucked at Lily's boots with each step, threatening to claim them entirely. She picked her way around the worst of the puddles.
"You didn't have to come," she said quietly. "If you don't want to-"
"It's fine."
She nodded, chastened. They walked in silence for a while, before Hogsmeade appeared before them in all its quaint, rain-washed charm. The cobblestones gleamed wet beneath their feet, shop windows glowing amber against the grey morning. Students milled about in clusters, their laughter carrying on the damp air, and Lily felt Severus draw closer to her as a group of Hufflepuffs jostled past.
"So." He stopped at the junction where the high street branched toward Honeydukes on one side and the Three Broomsticks on the other. "What did you want to look at?"
The question caught her entirely off-guard.
She'd spent five days convincing him to come, what she hadn't done, apparently, was think about what they'd actually do once they got here.
"I…" She turned in a slow circle, scanning the familiar shopfronts with mounting panic. Honeydukes would be packed, a crush of bodies and noise that would send Severus fleeing within minutes. Zonko's was out of the question. The Three Broomsticks meant crowds, meant running into classmates, meant James Potter and Sirius Black holding court at his usual corner table with his usual gaggle of admirers.
Her gaze snagged on a building she'd never actually entered, a small tearoom with steamed windows and a hand-painted sign proudly proclaimining it's name. Pink curtains framed the glass. Through the condensation, she could make out lace tablecloths and the soft glow of floating candles.
Madam Puddifoot's.
She pointed before her brain could catch up with her hand. "There."
Severus followed her gesture.
"You're joking."
"I'm not."
"Madam Puddifoot's." He said the name like it tasted bad.
The shop was right there, and she'd already pointed, and admitting she'd chosen it without thinking would require explaining why she hadn't been thinking, which would require acknowledging that her only actual plan had been be there with him.
But he followed, stiff-legged and scowling. The bell above the door chimed a delicate melody as they entered, and Lily felt Severus go rigid beside her.
The interior of Madam Puddifoot's looked like someone had taken the concept of "romantic" and beaten it to death with a lace-covered hammer. Every surface dripped with frills, the tablecloths, the curtains, the little skirts around the chair legs. Cherubs did indeed float near the ceiling, trailing ribbons and scattering rose petals on patrons. Heart-shaped sugar bowls sat on every table. The air smelled of perfume and vanilla and something cloying that Lily couldn't identify but immediately disliked.
Severus looked like he was considering making a break for it.
"Table for two?" A plump witch in a frilly apron materialised before them, her smile so wide it threatened to split her face. Her eyes darted between them with barely concealed delight. "Oh, how lovely! Right this way, dears."
She led them to a corner table, mercifully somewhat removed from the worst of the romantic chaos. The tablecloth featured embroidered roses. The napkins had been folded into swans. A tiny vase held a single pink striped carnation.
"Isn't this cozy?" The witch beamed down at them, her quill poised over a heart-shaped notepad. "First date?"
"No!" Lily's voice came out several octaves too high and her face was on fire. "No, we're not- we're just- he's my- we're friends. Just friends. From school. Not a date. Definitely not."
"Friends! How lovely. All love is beautiful." The witch's smile didn't waver. "What can I get for you friends today?"
Lily stared at the menu without seeing it. The words swam before her, meaningless squiggles in pink ink. Her heart was hammering so hard she was certain Severus could hear it.
Severus studied the menu, then reached into his pocket. She watched him count the coins in his palm with quick, practiced movements. When the witch returned, he ordered tea and a plain scone.
"Make it two," Lily said.
When she'd bustled away, Lily fidgeted with her napkin swan, accidentally decapitating it.
Then the bell above the door chimed.
Lily glanced up and her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Sirius Black stood in the entrance, shaking rain from his dark hair with the casual grace of someone who knew exactly how good he looked doing it. A girl hung off his arm, pretty, blonde, wearing the slightly dazed expression of someone who couldn't quite believe her luck. Sirius surveyed the tearoom with obvious distaste, his lip curling at the cherubs, but allowed himself to be led toward a table near the window.
He hadn't seen them. The corner position, the high-backed chairs, the strategic angle, for once, luck was on their side.
But beside her, Severus had gone still.
"Sev." She kept her voice low, urgent. "Don't."
His hand was already moving toward his pocket.
"Sev."
"He hasn't seen us." The words came out flat, almost meditative. "The angle is perfect. I could-"
"You could get us both thrown out. You could start something we can't finish. You could-"
"I could make his hair fall out." His fingers twitched toward his pocket. "Or his teeth. Teeth would be very satisfying."
Across the room, Sirius was pulling out a chair for his date with exaggerated chivalry, saying something that made her giggle. The sound carried and Lily saw Severus's jaw tighten.
"Please," she whispered. "Just this once. Let it go."
But his wand was already in his hand beneath the table, and she watched helplessly as his lips moved in a silent incantation.
The hex hit Sirius mid-laugh. His face contorted, hands flying to his scalp as his famously perfect hair began to writhe and twist, individual strands knotting themselves into elaborate tangles that spread with visible speed. His date shrieked. Sirius leapt to his feet, knocking his chair backward with a crash that drew every eye in the establishment.
"What the-" He was already reaching for his own wand, spinning to scan the room, eyes wild with fury. "Who-"
Severus grabbed Lily's arm and yanked her sideways.
They hit the floor together, cramming themselves beneath the tiny table in a tangle of limbs and robes. The tablecloth fell around them like a curtain, plunging them into pink-tinged low light.
Above them, chaos reigned. She could hear Sirius's voice, raised in accusation, and the tearoom witch's fluttering attempts at calm. Footsteps moved past their table, close enough that she pressed herself further into the shadows.
They were folded together uncomfortably in the cramped space. Their faces were inches apart, close enough that she could count each individual eyelash.
Her heart stopped beating. Or started beating so fast it felt like stillness.
Her eyes fluttered closed. She felt herself swaying forward, drawn by something stronger than sense-
"What are you doing?"
Her eyes flew open.
Severus was staring at her with an expression of utter bewilderment, his brow furrowed, his head pulled back as far as the cramped space would allow.
The mortification hit her.
"Nothing," she managed, her voice strangled. "I wasn't- there was something in my eye-"
"What?"
"Dust. Probably. It's dusty under here."
"You closed your eyes."
"Because of the dust."
He continued to stare at her.
Above them, the commotion was dying down. She could hear Sirius's date making soothing noises, the scrape of chairs being righted, the gradual return of normal tearoom murmur.
"Here we are!" The server's voice rang out, cheerful and oblivious. "Earl Grey and scones, and a pot of-"
The voice stopped. Lily could picture her standing at the empty table with trays balanced on her arms.
"Well, I never." The words dripped with indignation. "Hogwarts students. Think they can just waltz in here, waste our time, treat this establishment like some sort of joke-"
The footsteps retreated, muttering.
"We should-" Severus shifted beside her. "We should wait. Until Black leaves."
"Obviously." She couldn't look at him.
They waited in silence, pressed together.
An eternity later, five minutes, maybe ten, something crashed against the tearoom's front window.
Lily flinched. Through the gap in the tablecloth, she watched chaos erupt: Sirius had leapt to his feet, his wand already drawn, shouting at someone outside. His hair, still a tangled disaster, whipped around as he spun toward the door. Another hex shot through the opening, missing him narrowly, shattering a vase of yellow roses, and then he was gone, storming out with his date forgotten at the table.
From somewhere outside came a shriek of laughter, high-pitched and wheezing.
Pettigrew.
Which meant Potter. Which meant the whole wretched pack of them, turning Hogsmeade into their personal playground, and for once, just this once, their chaos was useful.
"Now," Severus murmured.
They extracted themselves, bumping heads and elbows, emerging into the tearoom like particularly awkward butterflies from a cocoon. The server was busy consoling Sirius's abandoned date while fixing the window.
The other couples had pressed themselves against the walls, still watching the street where hexes flickered like fireworks. No one spared a glance for two disheveled teenagers crawling out from under furniture.
The Three Broomsticks welcomed them with a wall of warmth and noise, the familiar din of Saturday crowds washing over them as they pushed through the door. Lily scanned the room for an empty table, already calculating the least conspicuous route-
And froze.
Mary MacDonald sat at a table near the window, Marlene McKinnon beside her, their heads bent together over butterbeers. Mary was gesturing animatedly, probably recounting some piece of gossip, her eyes bright with the pleasure of a good story.
Then, as if sensing observation, she looked up.
Their eyes met across the crowded room. Mary's eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. Her mouth formed the beginning of a question.
"Actually," Lily said, too loud, already turning, "I've changed my mind."
"What?" Severus had been unwinding his scarf. "You just said-"
"I know what I said. I'm unsaying it." She grabbed his elbow and steered him back toward the door, not quite running but definitely not walking. "New plan."
"Lily-"
They burst onto the street, the cold air slapping her flushed cheeks. She didn't stop until they'd rounded the corner, putting a solid wall between them and the Three Broomsticks' windows.
"Care to explain," Severus said flatly, "why we're now standing in an alley instead of sitting in a warm pub?"
"No."
Lily cast about desperately for a distraction. Her gaze landed on the hill rising beyond the village, where a structure sagged against the grey sky. Dark windows placed strangely high on the building, sagging roof, the general air of quiet neglect.
The Shrieking Shack.
"Let's go there," she said, pointing.
Severus followed her gesture.
"The Shrieking Shack."
"Yes."
"The most haunted building in Britain."
Lily was already walking, leaving him to follow or not as he chose. "Hogwarts is haunted too."
"Those are… house ghosts. They're practically domesticated." His footsteps fell into rhythm beside hers.
"And you think the Shrieking Shack houses, what, feral ghosts?"
"I think whatever's in there has been making noises violent enough to terrify an entire magical village. I think there's a reason no one goes near it."
"Maybe I want to do something stupid with my best friend on a Saturday afternoon."
A pause. A sigh. Capitulation.
But he was walking again, matching her pace as the path curved upward toward the shack. The village fell away behind them, replaced by overgrown grass and twisted shrubs that seemed to lean away from their destination, as if even the vegetation wanted nothing to do with the place.
The wood had gone grey with age and neglect, every board warped, every shingle askew. The whole structure seemed to tilt slightly to the left.
The strangest thing, the thing that made Lily pause, head tilted, was the absence of doors.
She circled the building slowly, Severus trailing behind. The ground floor offered nothing but solid walls punctuated by windows. No front entrance, no back door, no cellar access that she could see. It was as if someone had built a house and then forgotten the most basic element of architectural function.
"There's no way in," she said, frowning.
"There's no way in that we can see." His eyes moved across the structure. "A building without doors doesn't make sense. Someone built this. Someone intended to use it."
"Maybe it's magic? Some kind of concealment?"
"Perhaps." He crouched, examining the foundation where it met the earth. "But concealment charms leave traces." He straightened, brushing dirt from his knees. "If I had to guess, I'd say there's a tunnel. Underground access from somewhere in the village, maybe."
Lily stared at the shack with renewed interest.
"We should find it," she said immediately.
"Absolutely not."
"Why not? Think about it, a secret entrance, an abandoned building, decades of mystery. There could be anything in there."
"Yes. That's precisely what concerns me." Severus's voice had gone dry. "Anything could include malevolent spirits, cursed objects, structural collapse-"
"Or treasure."
He blinked. "Treasure."
"Hidden treasure. Left behind by whoever built this place." She warmed to the theme, inventing freely. "Think about it, why else would you build a house with no doors? To keep people out. To protect something valuable. The whole decrepit appearance could be a cover, a way to discourage investigation."
"That is the most optimistic interpretation of things," Severus said flatly.
"I'm an optimistic person."
He snorted. "Even if we wanted to get in, which we don't, we can't. The windows are too high."
Lily eyed the nearest window. It was high, perhaps eight feet off the ground, but not impossibly so.
"Not too high," she said slowly. "Just… inconveniently placed."
"Lily."
"If one of us boosted the other-"
"Lily."
"It would work. Easily. One person on the other's shoulders, quick bit of magic on whatever magic they've got on the window, and we're in."
"You want me to lift you."
"Or I could lift you. Though I think we both know how that would end."
"This is a terrible idea," he said finally.
"Yes."
"We could get caught. We could get hurt. We could-"
"Yes to all of it. Are you coming?"
Another beat of hesitation. Then he sighed and moved toward the wall.
"If I die," he said, positioning himself beneath the window, "I'm haunting you specifically."
"I'd expect nothing less."
He braced himself against the weathered boards, knees slightly bent, hands cupped together to form a step. The position looked awkward, uncomfortable, Severus was built for lurking in shadows and hunching over cauldrons, not serving as human scaffolding.
Lily approached with more confidence than she felt.
"Ready?"
"No."
She stepped into his cupped hands.
The world lurched as he lifted, his arms trembling with the effort. She grabbed his shoulders for balance, felt the sharp bones beneath his rob and then pushed upward, one foot finding precarious purchase on his shoulder.
"Other foot," he grunted. "Quickly."
She obeyed, and suddenly she was standing on his shoulders, her hands pressed flat against the shack's weathered siding.
"The window," he said through what sounded like clenched teeth. "Any time now."
"Working on it."
The window was sealed tight, encrusted in grime.
"There are wards," she called down. "Give me a minute."
"Take your time. It's not as though I'm bearing your entire weight."
She turned her attention back to the window, letting her magic probe the edges of the wards. They were old, yes, but brittle, whoever had set them hadn't maintained the enchantments in years.
The wards resisted. She pressed harder.
Something gave, like a lock clicking open in slow motion. The window frame shuddered, and then the glass swung inward, revealing a rectangle of darkness beyond.
"Got it."
"Wonderful."
Lily gripped the windowsill and hauled herself upward, scrabbling for purchase on the worn wood. Her feet left his shoulders, she heard his sharp exhale of relief, and then she was pulling herself through the opening, tumbling gracelessly into the unknown.
She landed on a floor, which was reassuring. The air was thick with musk, wet dog undercut by a smell she knew perfectly well from six years of proximity to the Gryffindor boys' corridor: the unmistakable evidence of adolescent males existing in an enclosed space without ventilation or shame.
"Lily?" Severus's voice came from below, muffled by distance. "Are you dead?"
"Not yet." She scrambled to her feet and leaned out the window. "Your turn."
He stood below, looking up at her with an expression of deep misgiving.
"Sev." She extended both hands through the window, reaching toward him. "Trust me."
He took a breath. Then he jumped.
His hands caught hers and she'd braced herself. He was heavier than he looked and her shoulders screamed in protest as she hauled backward.
His feet scrabbled against the exterior wall, seeking purchase. She pulled harder, feeling something in her back twinge. His face appeared in the window frame, flushed, furious, hair wild, and she grabbed the front of his robes and yanked.
They crashed backward together in a tangle of limbs, landing hard on floorboards that groaned but held. For a moment neither of them moved, just lay there breathing, and then Severus shoved himself upright and she followed, and the Shrieking Shack spread before them.
"Lumos."
Lily's wand tip flared to life, casting a pale sphere of light that should have illuminated the room. Instead, it seemed to struggle, the glow reaching perhaps three feet before the darkness swallowed it whole. She frowned, raising the wand higher, but the effect remained the same, as if the shack itself was drinking the light.
"That's not normal," Severus muttered beside her. His own Lumos fared no better, the two wands together barely sufficient to see each other's faces.
"Maybe the wards?" Lily turned toward the window they'd entered through, expecting at least a grey rectangle of October sky. But the opening seemed dimmer than it should be, the daylight filtering through as weak as candleflame, as if the shack existed in its own pocket of perpetual twilight.
What the thin light did reveal was carnage. Not the quiet decay of abandonment she had expected. The wallpaper had been torn away in long ragged strips, the plaster beneath gouged with deep parallel marks that ran in frenzied patterns across every surface she could see. Chunks of the wall were simply missing, exposing the timber frame beneath, the wood itself scored and splintered as though something had thrown itself against it repeatedly with tremendous force. A chair lay in the corner, not merely broken but destroyed, reduced to a scatter of kindling that looked like it had been put through a threshing machine.
"Something's been in here. Something that was very, very angry." Lily said quietly. She ran her fingers along the nearest set of gouges in the wall. They were deep, five of them running parallel, each one wide enough to fit her fingertip inside. The plaster at their edges was still sharp, not yet crumbled smooth by time. These were recent.
"Or in considerable pain." Severus was examining a section of skirting board that had been ripped clean away from the wall. He held his wand closer. "These marks are repeated. The same area, attacked again and again. It's-"
"Distress," Lily finished.
They climbed the stairs carefully, though not because of rot, the steps were sturdy enough, just badly scarred, the banister snapped clean off at the midpoint as though something had collided with it at speed. The upper floor was worse. The bedroom door hung from a single hinge, the wood around the lock not picked or forced but clawed through entirely. Inside, the bed frame had been dragged from its position against the wall and overturned, the mattress beneath it disembowelled, stuffing strewn across the floor in dirty clumps. The headboard bore teeth marks so deep they'd gone clear through the wood in places.
A blanket had been folded and placed on the windowsill, neatly, deliberately, by human hands. Beside it sat a water flask and what looked like a bar of chocolate, half-eaten, still in its wrapper.
Severus noticed it too. His eyes narrowed but he said nothing.
It was in the larger bedroom that Lily's foot struck something that scattered across the floor with a rattling clatter.
She crouched, holding her wand close to the ground. "Sev. Look at this."
He knelt beside her, and together they examined her discovery: an antler. And beside it, caught in the gaps between the scored floorboards, tufts of coarse black fur.
"How does a deer get into a building with no doors?"
"Maybe it had wings. You know, Pegasus."
The sound Severus made was almost a laugh. "Pegasus was a horse."
"A flying deer, then. A… Pegadeer."
She grinned at him through the darkness. "The majestic Pegadeer, soaring over Hogsmeade, crashing through windows to shed its antlers in strange shacks."
"You're ridiculous."
By unspoken agreement, they made their way back downstairs. They tried the cellar door and found it sealed tight, protected by wards far more serious than anything else in the building. Someone wanted that door to stay closed.
The sitting room held a sofa, its upholstery not merely faded but shredded, long parallel gouges raked across the cushions as though something had clawed at it in a frenzy. But here too, a patchwork quilt had been thrown over the worst of the damage, and the cushions had been rearranged to cover the exposed springs.
She dropped onto the sofa, the springs groaning in protest. Their wands lay between them on the cushions, still glowing weakly, creating a small island of light in the pressing dark.
"Footprints." He rose from the sofa and crossed to kneel by the wall, his wand held low. "On the floor. Here, and here."
Lily joined him, squinting. He was right, the scarred floorboards bore scuff marks and muddy prints, some human-sized, some not. The larger ones were smudged and clawed, the shape of them wrong for any animal she could name, too long in the toe, too wide in the pad.
Lily turned away from the prints. Her gaze fell on a crate half-hidden behind the sofa.
She crouched beside it and opened it. Inside, nestled in straw, sat a dozen bottles of amber liquid.
"Well," she said. "That's unexpected."
Severus appeared at her shoulder. "Firewhisky." He picked up a bottle, examining the label. "Someone's been using this place as storage."
"Or someone hid it here and forgot about it." Lily took the bottle from his hands, feeling its weight. "Either way, finders keepers."
"Lily-"
She twisted the cap before he could finish the objection. The seal broke with a soft pop, and immediately the smell hit her, sharp, smoky, with an undertone of something that made her eyes water. She'd never had alcohol before, not really, but she raised the bottle to her lips and drank.
The firewhisky hit her throat like liquid flame. Her whole body convulsed as she choked, the burn spreading from her tongue to her chest, her eyes streaming. She doubled over, coughing so hard she thought she might be sick, the bottle nearly slipping from her fingers.
"What are you doing?"
"Drinking," she gasped between coughs.
"You don't drink."
"I do now." She straightened, wiping her streaming eyes with the back of her hand. Her throat felt scorched, her stomach uncertain, but beneath the discomfort, something warm was beginning to spread. "I was thirsty."
"That's not going to help." His voice had gone flat.
She lifted the bottle again, defiant. His hand twitched toward it, and she met his eyes with a challenge. Try to stop me. I dare you.
He didn't move.
She took another swallow, longer this time, more prepared for the burn. It still hurt, still made her want to cough, but she forced it down with what she hoped looked like confidence.
"Lily." His voice came from somewhere distant. "This isn't- you shouldn't-"
"Shouldn't what?" The words came out sharper than she intended.
She took another drink to avoid having to look at him.
"Your turn," she said, thrusting the bottle toward him. Amber liquid sloshed against the glass.
He stared at her. At the bottle. Back at her.
"I don't drink," he said.
"Neither did I, until five minutes ago. Things change." She waggled the bottle. "Come on, Sev."
"I can think of several compelling arguments against-"
"Drink with me." The words came out softer than she'd meant them to, almost pleading. "Just this once. Just… be stupid with me. Please."
The please did it. She watched his resolve crumble, watched him reach for the bottle with the air of a man accepting his own execution.
He drank. Didn't cough, didn't choke, just swallowed with a grimace and handed the bottle back.
"There," he said. "Satisfied?"
Not even close, she thought.
She took another swig, and another. Severus had refused every attempt she'd made to pass the bottle back, sitting with his arms folded and observing her.
Which was fine. The firewhisky stopped burning after the fourth or fifth mouthful and started tasting almost pleasant, warm and smoky and oddly sweet. She lost track of how many times she raised the bottle.
At some point she'd stopped sitting upright and started listing sideways, her shoulder finding the ruined arm of the sofa, and the world had taken on a soft, blurred quality, like looking through glass that hadn't been cleaned.
It was doing something peculiar to her sense of balance.
She discovered this when she tried to stand and the floor tilted sideways, or perhaps she tilted, it was difficult to tell which.
"The room is moving," she announced.
"The room is stationary." Severus's voice came from her left, dry as dust. "You're the one moving."
"Am I?" She looked down at her feet, which did seem to be doing something independent of her intentions. "Oh. That's funny."
"Hilarious."
She giggled again, at nothing in particular.
"We should play a game," she said, the words tumbling out before she'd fully formed the thought. "Truth or dare. Do you know truth or dare?"
The look Severus gave her spoke volumes, none of them flattering. "I'm familiar with the concept."
"Brilliant. Let's play." She grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the sofa, her coordination approximate at best.
"I'm not playing truth or dare."
"Yes, you are." Lily's hand found the antler she'd carried down from upstairs, she couldn't remember picking it up, but here it was, cool and smooth in her grip. She turned it over, tracing the branching tines with her fingertips, giving her hands something to do besides reach for him. "I'll go mad if we just sit here in the dark doing nothing."
"Your brain needs a sobering potion."
"Come on, Sev. Be fun. Be spontaneous. Be-" She poked his shoulder with the antler's tip.
"If I play one round, will you stop drinking?"
She grinned at him, aware that her smile probably looked ridiculous. "Probably. Play and find out."
He exhaled through his nose, the sound carrying approximately fifteen years of accumulated exhaustion. "Fine. One round."
"You start."
"Why do I have to start?"
"Because I said so. Because-"
"Truth or dare," he said flatly.
"Dare." The choice was instant, automatic. She wanted to know what he would ask her to do, what action he would demand, what glimpse into his thoughts a dare might reveal. "Definitely dare."
Severus was quiet for a long moment.
"Scour my cauldron," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"Next Potions class. When we're done brewing. You scour my cauldron and yours."
Of all the things he could have asked, secrets shared, boundaries crossed, moments of vulnerability exchanged in the dark, and he wanted her to clean his equipment?
"That's your dare?" Her voice came out too high, edged with something she hoped he'd mistake for indignation. "That's the most boring dare in the history of dares. That's not even a dare, that's a chore. You can't just, you can't bank dares like that, Sev. That's not how the game works."
"You didn't specify anything."
"It is implied! It's right there in the name!"
"You accepted the dare. You have to do it."
"I'm not accepting anything." She took another pull from the firewhisky bottle, which had somehow found its way back into her hand.
She set down the antler and turned to face him properly, pulling her legs up onto the sofa cushions. "My turn now. Truth or dare?"
He didn't hesitate. "Truth."
Of course. She'd known he would say it. Had been counting on it, even, in some half-formed corner of her mind.
The question she wanted to ask was pressing.
But the firewhisky hadn't made her brave enough for that. Not quite.
"Do you have a crush on anyone?" The words came out smaller than she'd intended, almost lost in the darkness. "At school, I mean. Or… anywhere."
She held her breath and found herself gripping the sofa cushion hard enough to feel the springs beneath the worn fabric.
"No," Severus said.
One word. Simple and final.
"Oh." The syllable escaped her like air from a punctured balloon. "Oh. Right. Of course."
She reached for the bottle again, needing something to do, something to fill the hollow that had opened in her chest. The firewhisky sloshed as she raised it, amber liquid catching the faint wandlight, and she drank deeper than she'd meant to.
"Your turn," she said trying to keep it bright. "To ask me. Truth or dare."
She wanted him to ask. Wanted him to turn the question back on her.
But he hadn't moved since his reply. He sat rigid beside her, that careful distance maintained, staring at the opposite wall with an intensity that suggested he was trying to bore holes through it with his eyes alone. The antler lay forgotten between them, pale bone against dark fabric.
"We should go," he said finally.
Lily didn't argue. The shack had lost whatever mysterious appeal it once held, now it was just a dark, cold room full of disappointment. She tried to stand and found the floor disagreeing with her intentions again, pitching sideways against her will.
"Steady." Severus's hand caught her elbow. "How much did you drink?"
"Not that much." She glanced at the bottle. The bottle disagreed with her assessment. "Maybe a bit much."
Getting out proved significantly harder than getting in. The window that had seemed manageable before now loomed impossibly high, and Lily's limbs had apparently decided to operate on a time delay, responding to her brain's commands several seconds after she issued them. Severus went first, dropping to the ground below with more grace than she would have expected, then stood with arms raised to catch her.
She didn't so much climb out as fall, trusting him to break the impact. He did, staggering under her weight but keeping them both upright through sheer determination.
The path to Hogsmeade stretched before them, all mud and stones and treacherous dips that Lily's feet seemed determined to find. She made it perhaps twenty yards before her ankle turned on a root and she went down hard, palms skidding through wet leaves.
"Lily-"
"I'm fine." Her hands stung, her pride ached, but the ground was very comfortable actually, maybe she'd just lie here for a while-
"You can barely walk."
"I can walk. I'm walking right now. See? Walking."
She demonstrated by taking three steps and nearly face-planting into a bush.
The sound Severus made was somewhere between a sigh and a growl. He turned his back to her, crouching slightly, arms extended behind him.
"Get on."
"What?"
"Get. On." Each word bitten off with precision. "Before you break your neck and I have to explain to Professor McGonagall why I'm carrying your corpse back to the castle."
A piggyback ride. He was offering her a piggyback ride.
Under different circumstances, she might have made a joke about it. Might have teased him about his lack of upper body strength or demanded he make horse noises. Instead, she just wrapped her arms around his neck and let him lift her, her legs hooking around his waist as he straightened.
Some distant part of her brain suggested that getting drunk more often might be worth it, if this was the result. She told that part to shut up.
He started walking, his footsteps steady on the muddy path, her body swaying gently with each stride. Just this, she thought. Just let me have this.
No.
The word echoed through her again, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the sting of tears.
This was hopeless. She was hopeless.
I'm going to die alone, she thought miserably. She was going to give up on love entirely and become one of those witches who lived alone and died alone and was only found weeks later by a concerned neighbour. She was going to be a virgin forever. She'll never know what it's like to be wanted, to have someone look at her and think 'yes, her, only her, always her.'
The self-pity was excessive, she knew.
Maybe she should just tell him. Just say it outright.
But she didn't. Just pressed her face harder into his shoulder and let the tears leak silently into the fabric of his robes, trusting him to attribute any dampness to the October mist.
They didn't speak for the rest of the walk. Severus navigated the path with grimly, his breathing growing labored on the uphill stretches but never faltering. Lily kept her eyes closed, letting herself be carried.
The entrance hall swam into focus around her, torchlight too bright, stone walls lurching sideways. She was vaguely aware of Severus adjusting his grip, of voices somewhere distant, of the world refusing to hold still.
"Miss Evans. Mister Snape."
Lily's head lolled sideways, and through half-closed eyes she saw Filch materialising from the shadows like something out of a nightmare. Mrs. Norris wound between his ankles, big eyes fixed on them with unmistakable malice. A scratch across her ear was still healing, Lily liked to imagine her own cat had inflicted it.
"Mr. Filch." Severus's voice vibrated through his back into her chest. "We were just-"
"I can see what you were just." Filch's face twisted with suspicious delight, his gaze moving from Severus to the girl draped across him like a particularly undignified scarf. His nostrils flared. "That's Ogden's. I'd know that smell anywhere, confiscated enough of it from those four Gryffindor delinquents."
Lily tried to say something, but her stomach had begun to register a complaint, a churning wrongness that climbed steadily upward.
"Little Miss Prefect," Filch was saying, his smile revealing teeth that had clearly never met a cleaning charm, "drunk as a house-elf on Christmas. Wait until the Headmaster-"
What followed existed only in fragments: Filch's shriek of outrage, Severus staggering sideways under her weight. Voices multiplied, Filch's howling and Severus's sharp commands. She felt herself being transferred, different hands now, Filch's grip bruising her arm while Severus argued in a voice gone cold and angry.
Then climbing. Endless climbing, stairs that bred more stairs. A password spoken by a voice she didn't recognise as her own. Red and gold bleeding into her vision, warmth after cold, the sudden softness of a sofa beneath her.
She was alone. When had she become alone?
The Gryffindor common room was empty, mercifully, the other students still at Hogsmeade or, for the younger years, at lunch in the Great Hall. Lily found herself deposited on a sofa near the fire, the flames dancing orange and warm.
How long she sat there, she couldn't say.
The portrait hole burst open.
Professor McGonagall swept into the common room, robes billowing behind her.
"Miss Evans." McGonagall crossed the room in four swift strides, dropping to her knees beside the sofa with a speed that seemed impossible for a woman her age. Her hands found Lily's face, tilting it toward the firelight, searching her eyes with an intensity that felt almost clinical. "Lily. Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"
"Professor-" Lily's voice came out slurred, wrong. "I'm fine, I just-"
"You are not fine." McGonagall's fingers moved to her wrist, checking her pulse, then pressed briefly against her forehead. "Mr. Filch tells me you arrived at the castle unable to walk. That Mr. Snape was carrying you. That you were-" She stopped, composed herself with visible effort. "That you were barely conscious."
The concern in her voice was almost harder to bear than anger would have been. Lily felt tears prick at her eyes.
"What happened?" McGonagall's hands gripped her shoulders now, firm but gentle. "Miss Evans. I need you to tell me what happened. Were you given something? Did Mr. Snape-" The name carried a weight of suspicion. "Did he give you something to drink?"
"No!" The word tore out of her, too loud, too desperate. "No, Severus didn't- he would never-"
"A boy brings a girl back to the castle in this state, a girl who cannot walk, cannot speak clearly-" McGonagall's voice had begun to harden now, the fear curdling into something sharper. "You must understand how this appears. You must understand what I am required to consider."
"No!" The word tore out of her, loud and desperate. "He didn't- Severus would never- it wasn't like that-"
"Then what was it that caused this?" McGonagall's hands had come to rest on her hips, her glasses glinting in the firelight.
Something cracked inside Lily. The thin wall she'd built between herself and the tears, already weakened by firewhisky and heartbreak, finally gave way entirely.
She burst into sobs.
Great, heaving, ugly sobs that shook her whole body, that made her nose run and her eyes blur and her chest feel like it was being crushed by some invisible weight. She sank back onto the sofa, face in her hands, and cried like she hadn't cried since-
McGonagall stood frozen, clearly unprepared for this development. "Miss Evans-"
"Nothing happened," Lily managed between gasps. "That's why I'm crying. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. I tried, I've been trying for months, and he doesn't- he said he doesn't-"
"Doesn't what?"
"Doesn't have a crush on anyone!" The words came out as a wail, mortifying and uncontrollable. "I asked him, because I'm an idiot, and he said no, just like that, like it was nothing, like I was nothing-"
McGonagall's mouth opened, closed, opened again. "You're crying because of that?"
"I'm crying because-" Lily hiccupped, trying to catch her breath. "Because I'm going to die alone and-"
"Miss Evans-"
"And I'm drunk, which I've never been before, and I think I'm going to be sick-"
"Miss Evans, please-" McGonagall's voice had lost its sharp edge, replaced by something worn and weary. "The staff has been aware of your struggles this term and the last one because of your father. We have made… allowances. Extensions on assignments. Overlooked absences. Chosen not to press when your attention wandered in class."
Lily sniffled, not trusting herself to respond.
"We did this because you have always been, despite your… occasionally reckless tendencies, a student of exceptional promise." McGonagall paused, removing her glasses to polish them on her sleeve. "But there are limits to the grace we can extend. Drinking heavily. Trespassing on dangerous property. Returning to the castle in a state unfit for a student of this institution, let alone a prefect."
She'd forgotten. Somehow, impossibly, she'd forgotten she was a prefect.
"I know. I'm sorry. I don't know what I was-"
"I have decided, against my better judgment, that you may keep you badge. For now." McGonagall's mouth pressed thin. "But understand me clearly: you are one transgression away from losing it. One more incident, one more lapse in judgment of this magnitude, and I will not hesitate."
The glasses returned to McGonagall's nose, and with them, some measure of her usual severity. "I will see you in detention next Saturday evening. My office, seven o'clock. You will write a twelve-inch essay on the responsibilities of student leadership and why you have failed to uphold them."
"Yes, Professor."
"And Miss Evans?" McGonagall rose, looking down at her with an expression that was hard to read. "This is the last time. The last allowance, the last overlooked transgression. From this point forward, you will be held to the same standards as every other student in this house. Is that understood?"
Lily nodded.
McGonagall turned toward the portrait hole, then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, almost gentle.
"For what it's worth… boys at fifteen are remarkably stupid creatures. They often don't recognise what's in front of them until it's gone." She glanced back over her shoulder. "That is not official guidance from your head of house. Merely an observation from someone who was young once, believe it or not."
Easy for McGonagall to say. She curled into the corner of the sofa, pulled a cushion against her chest, and cried until she had nothing left.
Lily's eyes opened to a ceiling that seemed too bright, spinning slightly in a way that ceilings absolutely should not spin. Her mouth tasted like she'd been chewing parchment all night. Her head throbbed with a rhythm that bore no relationship to her heartbeat, a separate rhythm dedicated entirely to punishment.
This, she thought grimly, is why some people don't drink.
She tried to sit up and then she froze, breathing through her nose, waiting for the nausea to calm. The dormitory curtains were drawn around her bed, she didn't remember closing them, but then, she didn't remember much of anything.
What time was it? What day was it?
Lily closed her eyes, trying to reconstruct the previous evening from the scattered fragments her memory had retained. The Shrieking Shack. The firewhisky, oh God, the firewhisky. Severus carrying her back. Filch's face. McGonagall's tartan robes and disappointed eyes.
But between those fixed points, nothing. Vast stretches of black where memory should be. Where anything could have happened, where she could have said-
Her stomach lurched again, and this time it had nothing to do with the hangover.
What did she say?
She remembered crying and the firewhisky loosening her tongue. Remembered the warm fog settling over her thoughts, making everything seem simple, making confession seem not just possible but inevitable-
Had she told him?
She couldn't remember. That was the horror of it, she simply just couldn't remember. The walk back to Hogwarts existed in her mind as impressions rather than events: his shoulder beneath her cheek, the rhythm of his footsteps, the ragged edge of his breathing on the uphill stretches. Had she spoken during that walk?
She could hear herself saying stuff she guarded. Could picture his face in shock and disgust. Could imagine what came after.
But she couldn't remember if it had actually happened.
Lily forced herself upright, ignoring the way the room tilted in protest. Her watch had twisted around in the night, the clasp digging into her pulse point. She turned it right and squinted at the face. Half ten. She'd slept through breakfast, which was probably a mercy given the state of her stomach.
The dormitory was empty. Mary and the others would be in the common room, or the library, or enjoying their Sunday in ways that didn't involve existential dread.
She had to find Severus. Had to know what she'd said, what damage she'd done, whether their friendship had survived her drunken ramblings. The not-knowing was worse than any possible truth, her imagination was providing scenarios far more catastrophic than reality could likely deliver.
Unless reality was really that bad. Unless you told him everything and he's currently in the dungeons, planning how to avoid you until graduation.
She dressed with clumsy fingers, fumbling buttons and tangling herself in her robes. She attempted to tame her hair, failed spectacularly, and settled for pulling it back into a pony tail that at least kept it out of her face, which seemed suddenly important.
The journey to the dungeons had never felt so long.
Every step jolted through her skull. The castle seemed louder than usual, portraits chattering, suits of armour clanking, a group of third-years shrieking with laughter in a way that made Lily seriously consider hexing them. By the time she reached the entrance to the Slytherin dorms, her nausea had returned, joined by cold sweat.
She waited in the corridor, lurking in an alcove like some sort of anxious gargoyle, watching students come and go through the concealed entrance. A first-year gave her a strange look and a seventh-year openly sneered. She ignored them both.
When Severus finally appeared, she wished he hadn't.
He looked angry. It wasn't his usual general disdain for the world not the simmering irritation he carried like a second skin.
He hadn't seen her yet. She could still try to hide.
"Severus."
His name escaped before she could stop herself. He froze and then turned slowly, and the look he gave her made her want to sink through the floor and keep sinking until she reached the earth's core.
"Lily." Her name came out flat and clipped.
"I-" Her voice cracked. She swallowed, tried again. "Can we talk?"
"Can we?" He crossed his arms. "I wasn't sure you'd be capable of speech today. Coherent speech, at least."
The words stung.
"I wanted to- I need to ask you something."
"Ask, then."
Just ask. Rip off the plaster. Whatever she said, she needed to know.
"Did I-" The words stuck in her throat. "Did I say something? Last night? Something to make you… angry with me?"
He looked at her for a long moment and she braced herself.
"No," he said. "You didn't say much of anything. Mostly you just… cried. And mumbled things that didn't make sense."
The relief hit her hard.
But wait, he was still angry. If she hadn't said anything…
"Did I…" She cringed preemptively, bracing for impact. "Did I do something?"
"Yes."
One word, heavy with accusation. Lily felt the blood drain from her face.
"What?" Her voice came out as a whisper. "What did I do?"
"You vomited."
She blinked. "I… what?"
"Vomited. Threw up. Expelled the contents of your stomach in a forceful manner." Severus's lip curled with remembered disgust. "On Filch."
"On Filch?"
"Directly onto Filch." He paused. "Some of the… splatter… also landed on my robes. Which did not improve them."
Lily stared at him. Her mind was having difficulty processing this information, trying to reconcile the catastrophic scenarios she'd been imagining with the reality of… vomiting on the caretaker.
"I threw up on Filch," she repeated slowly.
"Quite thoroughly."
She covered her face with her hands.
This was, without question, the lowest moment of her entire life.
And yet-
"It's just-" She lowered her hands, meeting Severus's eyes. He still looked angry, but less so. "That's genuinely terrible. That's the most disgusting thing I've ever done. Filch is never going to forgive me. He's going to find ways to give me detention until I'm thirty."
"Forty, probably."
"But-" She bit her lip. "But I didn't say anything? Nothing… embarrassing?"
Severus's gaze sharpened. "Should you have?"
"No! No, I just-" She scrambled for an explanation. "I couldn't remember, and I was worried I'd said something stupid, and you seemed so angry-"
"I'm angry because I had to watch that," he said flatly. "And because those robes were the only decent pair I owned. And because you scared me, you absolute-"
He stopped. Looked away. "Don't do that again."
She looked at him. He'd been worried about her.
"I won't," she said. "I promise. That was- I don't even know why I did that. I'm not usually-"
"You were upset." He still wasn't looking at her.
Of course he'd noticed.
You, she thought. The reason is you. It's always you.
"I'm okay now," she said instead.
He nodded, still not meeting her eyes.
"I should-" Lily gestured vaguely toward the stairs. "Water. Possibly more sleep. Definitely avoiding Filch for the foreseeable future. Probably the rest of my life."
She turned to go, then stopped. "Sev?"
He looked at her finally.
"Thank you," she said. "For getting me back."
He nodded once, a small motion that might have meant anything or nothing.
They stood there for a moment longer. Then Lily forced herself to move, climbing the stairs away from him, carrying the weight of her hangover and her small, fragile hope.
Pairing: Lily Evans/Severus Snape
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 3: Early 1980. Lily and Severus hide from the war, then from each other, and finally from despair.
Word count of chapter 3: 6,599 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
The postcard still said HIDE.
Lily checked it every morning now, the first thing she did after waking, before tea or breakfast or any of the small rituals that gave shape to days that had lost all other structure. The postcard lived on the refrigerator door, held in place by a magnet, its cheap tourist image of the Bullring shopping centre faded and familiar after months of anxious scrutiny.
HIDE. The letters pressed themselves into the glossy surface with the same urgent intensity they'd had on Christmas night, when she and Severus had stood in this kitchen and watched the word appear and understood that everything was about to change.
That had been over a month ago. The word hadn't changed since.
She touched the edge of the card, feeling the faint thrum of the Protean Charm beneath her fingertips, and told herself they were doing their best to do just what the card, the Order, said.
The bacon spat.
Fat arced from the pan and caught her across the back of her hand, a sharp bright pain that made her jerk away.
"Fuck," she said to the empty kitchen, and then, with more feeling: "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
The burn was small, already reddening. Three seconds with a wand and it would be gone. Her fingers twitched toward the drawer where she kept her wand now, wrapped in cloth at the back, behind the tea towels and the spare batteries.
She didn't open the drawer.
Severus had explained it to her three times before she'd finally stopped arguing. The Ministry tracked magical activity, that was how they enforced the Trace on underage wizards and the Death Eaters had people inside the Ministry now, so it was only logical that they could be tracked.
She'd called him paranoid, back when he'd started stockpiling magically perserved food in the basement. She'd laughed when he'd dragged her to the passport office in Birmingham, insisting they needed Muggle documents for travel.
She hadn't laughed about it in months.
She ran cold water over her hand and watched the skin flush pink and thought about all the small indignities of living without magic.
The bacon was burning. She rescued what she could, sliding the least blackened rashers onto a plate, and set aside two pieces for the cat.
The cat appeared at the sound of bacon meeting plate, materializing from wherever she'd been lurking.
It had been in a foul mood for weeks now, the cat. They all had, really, but the cat's displeasure was particularly pointed. It had been an outdoor creature before. Now it was confined to the house and the yard behind it, forbidden from venturing beyond the Fidelius boundary in case she led Death Eaters back to them.
"I know," Lily said, watching her eat. "I know. It's not fair on any of us."
The cat did not acknowledge this solidarity.
Lily ate her own breakfast standing at the counter, her eyes drifting toward the hallway.
The telephone sat in a cardboard box by the front door, its cord coiled beside it. Severus had ripped it from the wall three weeks ago, convinced that someone might be able to trace the connection, that the magical modifications he'd made to it might serve as a beacon for those who knew how to look. He'd wanted to destroy the television too, and the wireless, but Lily had fought him on that.
"How will we know when it's over?" she'd demanded. "How will we know when it's safe to come out if we can't hear anything from the outside world?"
He'd relented on the wireless. The television had survived more by accident than design, forgotten in the heat of the argument.
She finished her breakfast and washed her plate and wondered what day of the week it was.
The sitting room door was closed. It was always closed now, had been closed for the past five days. She knocked twice, the agreed-upon signal, letting Severus know she was leaving the kitchen so he could use it if he needed to.
No response came, but she hadn't expected one. That was the point of it. Three days apart, they'd agreed, though the three days had stretched to four and then five without either of them calling it off.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. They'd been snapping at each other constantly, fighting about nothing and what had already happened and could not be changed, the pressure of confinement turning every small irritation into a battleground. The separation was supposed to help. Was supposed to make them miss each other, make the reunion sweet when it finally came.
Lily wasn't sure it was working.
She climbed the stairs to the bedroom, the cat following at her heels. The room had been transformed over the past days, books covering every surface, the nightstands, the dresser, the floor around the bed, until the space looked less like a bedroom and more like a library that had suffered some kind of organizational collapse.
She'd claimed the books when they divided the house. He'd got the sitting room with the television and the sofa that was long enough to sleep on; she'd got the bedroom with its mattress and its privacy and, she'd thought, enough reading material to carry her through however long this lasted.
She'd been wrong about that.
The books sat untouched, most of them, despite the endless empty hours she had to fill. She couldn't focus. Couldn't sink into a story the way she used to, couldn't lose herself in words when her mind kept circling around something else.
The cat jumped onto the bed and kneaded the pillow with her paws, settling into a tight circle of black fur.
"You could be with him, you know," Lily said, settling beside her. "We didn't decide on custody for you. You could go downstairs and keep him company."
The cat responded by pressing her face into Lily's chest, the small body vibrating with a purr that seemed disproportionate to her size.
Before the cat had been Severus's creature, tolerating Lily but reserving her affection for the person who had rescued her from behind a Hogsmeade dustbin years ago. But lately the cat had started seeking Lily out, curling against her in the night, following her from room to room with a devotion that felt almost anxious.
"I wish you could speak. I have an inkling you would be a great conversationalist," Lily informed the cat.
The cat purred louder and did not dignify this with a response.
Below her, through the floor, she heard him moving.
The sounds were faint but unmistakable: footsteps crossing the sitting room, the creak of the sofa, the low murmur of the television changing channels. She'd learned to track him by sound over the past days, mapping his movements through the house the way a prisoner might learn the guards' routines. He got up at odd hours. He didn't sleep well. He paced sometimes, late at night, a restless back-and-forth that she could hear through the floorboards like a heartbeat.
He was just as lonely as she was. She knew that.
She thought about going downstairs. About knocking on the sitting room door and telling him she was done, she couldn't do this anymore, she needed to see his face. The rules they'd made weren't real rules, not really. They could change them whenever they wanted. They could end this whenever they chose.
But she didn't move.
Something stubborn in her insisted on seeing it through. They'd said three days, and three days had become five, and now it felt like whoever broke first would be admitting something about their own weakness, their own need. It had become a contest neither of them wanted to win or lose.
She pressed her hand against the floor, feeling the vibrations of his movement through the boards.
She wondered if he ever did the same.
She woke with perfume in her nose. She'd never known you could dream in scents until Rackhams, and apparently being fired over a year ago hadn't cured her of the habit. God had it been a year already?
She navigated the dark room by memory, her bare feet finding the narrow paths between stacks of books. She'd made this journey a dozen times over the past days without incident, but this time her toe caught on something that shouldn't have been there, a book that had migrated from its stack, and she stumbled.
The book went flying. She heard it hit the floor with a heavy thump, heard pages rustling as it fell open.
"Damn," she whispered to the darkness, and fumbled for the lamp.
Light flooded the room, too bright after the dark, making her squint. The book lay face-down on the floor near the bed, its spine cracked, its pages splayed. Her old copy of Advanced Potion-Making, not Severus's version but her own.
She bent to pick it up and noticed that it had fallen open to a particular spot, the pages marked by something tucked between them.
The handwriting on the page itself was her own, silly and young, covering the margins of the page in looping repetitions of the same two words. Severus Snape. Severus Snape. Severus Snape. Over and over, in increasingly elaborate scripts, surrounded by tiny stars and other decorations that made her face burn with embarrassed recognition.
"Oh, God," she said to the empty room.
She'd been, what? Fourteen? She'd started writing Lily Snape at the bottom of the page, she saw now, but had stopped after the first name, some last shred of self-preservation preventing her from committing the full fantasy to paper.
There was a piece of parchment tucked between the pages. It hadn't been there when she'd put the books on the shelf in the sitting after she had brought them over, she would have noticed, would have remembered. Which meant he'd put it there recently. Which meant-
She unfolded the parchment.
Four words at the top, in his cramped handwriting: In case I'm deceased.
She didn't read the rest.
The rage came first, hot and sudden. She was tearing the parchment before she'd consciously decided to do it, her hands working independently of her brain, ripping the letter into pieces, smaller and smaller, until the pieces were too small to tear anymore.
How dare he.
How dare he write that, hide it, leave it for her to find as though his death was already decided, as though she would simply carry on afterward, reading his final words over her morning tea like a widow in some tragic novel.
How dare he give up like that.
She threw the pieces across the room and watched them scatter, tiny white fragments drifting to the floor like the world's saddest confetti.
She was crying. Of course she was. She pressed her hand over her mouth, trying to contain the sound, though there was no one to hear it except the cat, who had woken and was watching her with wide, worried eyes. She had been so careful not to cry in front of him. Crying was admitting that they might not make it through this, and she couldn't do that to him, couldn't let him see her break when she needed him to believe she was snot giving up.
"It's fine," she told the cat, her voice thick. "It's fine. Go back to sleep."
She crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head and did not go back to sleep herself.
At some point, hours later, she got up.
She didn't turn on the light. She moved through the dark room on hands and knees, collecting the pieces of parchment by touch, gathering them into a pile in her palm. The floor was cold against her bare skin. Her eyes had adjusted enough to make out shapes, the darker shadows of books against the slightly lighter shadow of the carpet.
She found the last piece wedged under the dresser and added it to the pile.
Then she sat on the floor with her back against the bed, the torn letter cupped in her hands. Carefully, she tore a blank page from the back of the book. She folded the page in half, then in half again, creating an envelope of sorts, and slipped the fragments inside. The folded page went back between the covers, tucked beside the Severus Snapes and the incomplete Lily, and she closed the book.
She did not think about what was in the letter as she went back to bed.
This time, eventually, she slept.
The next day she went looking for his textbook.
It wasn't a conscious decision. She woke with the memory of the night before sitting heavy in her chest, the torn letter and the dark floor. She needed something to do with her hands and her mind.
His copy of Advanced Potion-Making was at the bottom of a stack near the window. She'd brought it upstairs with the rest of the books without thinking, without planning to read it, just sweeping everything into her territory when they'd divided the house.
She opened it and began to read.
Part of her was looking for what she'd found in her own book, for evidence of lovesick scribbling, for her name written over and over in his angular hand, for proof that he'd been just as foolish and obvious as she had. It would make her feel better, she thought, to know she wasn't alone in that particular humiliation.
She didn't find it.
Every page was covered in his handwriting, but none of it was about her. The margins were dense with corrections and annotations and alternative methods, entire paragraphs squeezed into spaces that shouldn't have been able to hold them. He'd rewritten half the recipes in the book, crossing out the printed instructions and replacing them with his own variations.
There was enough material here for a book of its own. Several books, possibly.
She pressed her hand against the ink of his handwriting, feeling the slight impression the quill had left in the paper.
Somewhere below her, she heard him moving.
It ended on the evening of her twentieth birthday.
A knock at the door.
"It's over," he said through the wood. "Come downstairs."
She found him in the sitting room, standing by the window where the last of the January light was streaming through. He looked thinner than she remembered, which was absurd, it had only been five days, but something about the angle of his cheekbones, the shadows under his eyes, suggested he'd been sleeping as poorly as she had.
"Take this," he said, and held out a piece of parchment.
She crossed the room and took it, expecting, she wasn't sure what. A card, perhaps. Some small gesture appropriate to their circumstances, their limited resources, their strange suspended life.
In the center, written in his best handwriting, the formal script he reserved for important documents, were two lines:
POTIONS FOR DUNDERHEADS
by Lily Evans and Severus Snape
She stared at it for a long moment, her brain struggling to catch up with her eyes.
"Alphabetical order," he said, as though this required explanation. "Your name first."
"Is this what I think it is?"
"That depends on what you think it is."
She looked up at him.
"The title might need some work."
"It's a working title."
"Is it working?"
"I thought it was rather direct."
"It's certainly that." She traced the word dunderheads with her fingertip. "Though I'm not sure publishers will share your assessment of your target audience."
"If they've read the current state of potions education in this country, they should." His voice had taken on the particular edge it got when discussing inadequate teaching materials, which was to say approximately sixty percent of all teaching materials.
"So we write a better one."
"That's the idea."
"Perhaps the working title should be Potions for-" She paused, pretending to think. "Potions for Promising Young Scholars. Or Potions for the Academically Inclined."
"If you want something that bland, you'll have to write your own book."
"I thought that was the point."
"We're writing it together," he said, "but I retain naming rights."
"No publisher will touch a book called Potions for Dunderheads."
"Then the publishers must be dunderheads as well." He said this with absolute conviction. "Given the quality of the books they've chosen to inflict on unsuspecting students, I can only assume their editorial standards are nonexistent."
She couldn't actually argue with that.
The light through the window had shifted while they talked, the golden rectangles on the floor stretching and thinning as the sun moved toward the horizon.
She closed the distance, stepping into him, pressing her face against his chest. His arms came around her immediately, pulling her close with a fierceness that told her everything about how the past five days had been for him.
"I missed you," she said into his shirt.
"You were upstairs the entire time."
"I still missed you."
His hand found the back of her head, fingers threading through her hair.
The candlelight from downstairs had burned out while they weren't paying attention, and the only illumination now came from the small lamp on the bedside table.
It felt strange to have him back in the room. Very much not unwelcome, the opposite of unwelcome, but strange nonetheless, the way the first day of summer felt strange after months of school. She kept glancing at him as though confirming he was really there.
The books still covered every surface. Lily had meant to tidy them, but the days had slipped away from her, and now the room looked like a library had exploded in it. She picked her way through the debris, shoving a stack of paperbacks aside to clear a path to the bed.
"You've been busy," he observed, surveying the chaos.
"I was bored. You got the television."
"The television shows the same six programs on rotation. You negotiated exceptionally poorly on my behalf."
"I missed reading," he said, as though following her thoughts. He gestured vaguely at the television they couldn't see through the floor. "I've been so desperate that I would read anything at this point. Even one of those dreadful romance novels you hide under the mattress."
Lily felt heat rise to her cheeks. "I don't hide-"
"You hide them badly."
"They're not mine. They are Tuney's."
"You bought the one with the shipwrecked duke at King's Cross in sixth year. I was three people behind you in the queue."
She threw a pillow at him. Sixth year. They hadn't even been speaking properly in sixth year. The fact that he'd apparently been close enough to watch her buy trashy romance novels, and had remembered it, raised questions about that year's supposed estrangement that she wasn't entirely sure she wanted answered.
"Read one to me," she said, the idea arriving fully formed. "For my birthday."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You said you were desperate. You said you'd read anything." She was already climbing off the bed, picking her way through the book-strewn floor toward the headboard. "So read one. Out loud. To me."
"I said I would read anything. I was clearly exaggerating for effect."
"I'm completely serious." She extracted a paperback from the hidden stack, and examined the cover. A woman in a flowing dress swooned against the chest of a man whose shirt appeared to have suffered a tragic accident. The Highland Laird's Secret Bride. Perfect. "Consider it a birthday gift."
"I've already given you a birthday gift."
"Consider it a second gift, then." She thrust the book toward him. "I'll be the woman. You can be the man. And the narration."
"Lily-"
"Please?" She crawled back onto the bed and settled against the pillows, arranging herself into a pose of expectant attention across from him. "I've been reading for three days straight. My eyes hurt, I want to be read to. And I want it to be something ridiculous, because everything else is so-" She gestured at the house around them.
He looked at her and then sighed.
"Which page?"
"Dealer's choice."
He flipped through the book as though each page caused him physical pain, which perhaps it did. She watched his eyebrows climb progressively higher as he scanned the pages, his lips pressing together.
"Chapter twelve," he announced finally.
He cleared his throat with theatrical gravity and began to read.
"Lady Arabella clutched the bedpost, her bosom heaving with emotions she dared not name." He paused, looking up. "Is your bosom heaving?"
"It's trying its very best." Lily placed a hand dramatically over her heart making a show of breathing hard that she could only sustain for maybe a minute.
"'You cannot mean what you say,'" she breathed in a falsetto, "'I am promised to the Earl of Northumberland. Our families have arranged-'"
"Are you quite okay?"
"That's not your line."
"Genuine question."
"You're ruining the immersion, Sev."
He shot her a look of long-suffering patience and returned to the text.
"'I care nothing for arrangements,'" Severus continued in deliberate monotone, clearly refusing to give the Laird any actual passion."'I care nothing for earls.'"
"The Highland Laird crossed the chamber in three powerful strides, his kilt swirling about his muscular thighs. 'Lass,' he growled, his brogue thick with passion-"
"Do the accent."
"Absolutely not."
"You have to do the accent. He's Scottish."
"My dignity has limits, Lily."
"Accent, come on."
Another sigh, deeper this time. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted into something that was not quite Scottish but was at least making an effort. "'Lass, ye cannae marry that Sassenach lord. Yer heart belongs tae the Highlands-'"
"'My heart belongs nowhere,'" Lily interrupted, clutching an imaginary bedpost with both hands. "'I am a woman without a home, without hope-'"
They were both grinning now, the absurdity of it breaking through the careful dignity he was trying to maintain. He looked down at the book, found his place, and continued.
"'Yer heart belongs tae me,' the Laird declared, seizing her by the waist and pulling her against his chest."
"'Arabella', he murmured, his voice thick with desire-"
"She trembled as his hand found the curve of her heaving bosom." He turned the page with unnecessary force. "No man had ever touched her there before, for Arabella was-"
He stopped.
"Was what?" Lily prompted, pressing closer, her chin on his shoulder.
"For Arabella was pure and untouched, a-" His throat worked. "'A virgin, innocent of the ways of-"
Lily's foot connected with his shin under the covers, a sharp, accurate kick that made him jolt and nearly drop the book. She was giggling before the kick had fully landed, the sound escaping from behind the hand she'd pressed over her mouth, shaking the bed, shaking both of them.
"What-"
"Pure and untouched!" she wheezed, barely able to get the words out. "Innocent of the ways of- what was next? What was she innocent of?"
"I'm not finishing that sentence."
"You have to, it's my birthday present."
He looked at her. She looked at him. Her face was flushed with laughter and cold and the remnants of the evening, and her hair was a mess, spread in red tangles across the white pillow, tickling at her temples and the corners of her eyes.
His mouth twitched.
"'Innocent of the ways of-'" He cleared his throat. "'Of carnal passion.'"
She shrieked and kicked him again, both feet this time.
The laughter subsided in stages, fading to breathless giggles, then to the occasional tremor, then finally to something like calm. Her stomach ached pleasantly.
The book had slipped between them during the chaos. He retrieved it, cleared his throat, and they began again.
"'You think you speak of things you understand,'" Lily said, pressing a hand to her chest as though composing herself. "'You speak of love of the carnal, but what is actual love to a man such as yourself?'"
He looked at the book for a long moment. Then he set it down on his chest and spoke without reading.
"Love is what brought me here to you," he cut in, his voice dropping low, and something in his delivery had shifted. "Everything else can be lost. Everything else is already gone. But this-" He paused. "This belongs to no one but us. Always."
"That's not in the book," Something warm had slipped down her cheek without her permission.
"No." He set the paperback aside, his dark eyes finding hers. "It's not."
"Happy birthday," he said quietly and shut the book.
They set up their workspace in the kitchen, which had the best light and the largest table and, most importantly, the biscuit tin.
The first order of business was outlining. They'd need a structure, a progression from basic principles to advanced techniques, a logical flow that would take a student from their first cauldron to their NEWT examinations. Severus produced a sheet of newsprint, its blank reverse side serving as parchment these days.
"We start with fundamentals," he said, his quill moving in quick, decisive strokes. "Proper preparation of ingredients. Stirring methodology. Heat regulation. All the things that get glossed over in existing texts because the authors assume competence that doesn't exist."
"Students know how to stir, Sev."
"Do they?" He looked up, one eyebrow raised. "Do they really? The textbooks say 'stir clockwise' and students interpret that as 'wave a rod around vaguely in the general direction of clockwise' and then wonder why their Shrinking Solution has turned into a minor explosive."
"That's very specific."
"It happened in my third year. Pettigrew nearly took out half the dungeon."
"I remember that." Lily frowned, pulling the memory from the depths of her school years. "The explosion during Slughorn's class. But that was, that was you, wasn't it? Everyone said you'd sabotaged his cauldron."
"I did no such thing. I merely failed to correct his technique when I observed him stirring in entirely the wrong manner." A pause. "Deliberately."
"Severus."
"He had been making my life extremely unpleasant. I felt a lesson was in order."
"You could have killed him."
"At worst he'd have lost his eyebrows." His attention returned to the parchment, clearly considering the matter closed. "The point stands. Fundamental technique is undervalued in modern potions education. We'll devote the entire first section to it."
They argued about chapter structure for three hours.
Lily wanted to begin with theory, with the underlying magical principles that made potions work. Students should understand why certain ingredients reacted with each other, why temperature and timing mattered, why the phase of the moon could affect a brew's potency. Understanding the theory would give them a framework for everything that followed.
Severus disagreed entirely. Better to start with practice and and introduce the theory gradually as students developed the skills to appreciate it.
"You're trying to create scholars," he said, not quite dismissively. "Most students don't want to be scholars. They want to pass their OWLs and never look at a cauldron again."
"And you think that's acceptable? That children should learn just enough to scrape through exams and then forget everything?"
"I think it's realistic. Not everyone is going to fall in love with potion-making, Lily."
"But what about the students who could fall in love with it? The ones who might become great potioneers if someone just showed them the beauty of it? If we strip out the theory, we're abandoning them."
"The core text needs to be accessible to everyone, including the dunderheads."
"You really need to stop calling them that."
"When they stop being that, I'll stop calling them that."
They compromised, eventually.
The book would have two tracks: a main text designed for clarity and practical success, and supplementary sections marked with a symbol (they argued about the symbol being a mortar and pestle or a potion vial) for students who wanted deeper understanding. The main text would get anyone through their OWLs. The supplementary material would prepare advanced students for NEWTs and beyond.
"It's inefficient," Severus said, looking at the proposed structure with evident distaste.
"We have nothing but time."
She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. It felt like tempting fate.
"Yes," he said quietly. "We do."
The days stopped blurring together and began, instead, to differentiate themselves by what they accomplished. They worked in the mornings, while the light was best and their minds were fresh, spreading parchment across the kitchen table and arguing about everything from ingredient preparation to chapter ordering to the proper use of semicolons while the cat watched from the kitchen shelves up above.
The afternoons were for individual work. She drafted explanatory passages while he wrote out recipes, each of them taking over separate corners of the house with their stacks of reference material and cups of cold tea. Sometimes she could hear him muttering to himself in the basement, working through a problem out loud, and it was a comfort, knowing he was struggling as well.
The evenings were for comparison and combination, spreading their separate efforts across the table and trying to weave them into something coherent. This was where most of the arguments happened, late at night when they were both tired and neither willing to concede a point.
Lily wanted to include recipes for practical, everyday potions: remedies for menstrual cramps, treatments for acne, cures for common colds, hangover relief, contraceptive draughts. Things that teenagers actually needed, that would show them potion-making had immediate, personal relevance to their lives.
"No publisher will touch a book that includes that stuff," Severus said flatly.
"No publisher will touch a book written by two twenty year olds who haven't even started their apprenticeships," Lily countered. "And yet here we are, three chapters in. Your optimism is showing, Sev. Might as well extend it."
Lily was in the chair she always sat in, the one with the wobbly leg that she'd learned to compensate for by distributing her weight slightly to the left, a habit so ingrained now that she did it even when sitting in other chairs. The kitchen lamp cast its circle of yellow light across the table, catching the chaos of their manuscript, the pages pushed aside to make room for plates and now reclaiming their territory with the slow creep of paperwork left to its own devices.
They'd been working on the book for nearly a week now. The stack of completed pages had grown from a handful of notes to something substantial, bound loosely with string and organized into chapters that were beginning to feel like a real progression. They'd finished the section on fundamental cutting techniques just that morning, Severus writing the final paragraph while Lily read over his shoulder and tried not to point out that he'd used the word "obviously" three times, as though anything about potion-making were obvious to a beginner.
It wasn't done. They had years of work ahead of them, whole chapters still existing only as outlines and arguments waiting to happen.
Now, as she reached for their bowls to take them to the sink, he stopped her with a hand on her wrist.
"Wait," he said. "There's something else."
He produced a folded piece of parchment from somewhere and smoothed it flat on his thigh between them and pushed it toward her.
"The foreword," he said. "I've written it."
"Already? We haven't even finished the-"
"It's not negotiable."
She looked at him, at the set of his jaw and the challenge in his eyes, and understood that this was something he'd been working on privately. She picked up the parchment.
The handwriting was his best, even more careful than the title page he'd given her weeks ago.
She read.
It began sternly, a warning against the kind of foolishness he had no patience for, a declaration that potions was not the showy magic. But then the language shifted, grew almost lyrical, speaking of simmering cauldrons and shimmering fumes, of liquids that moved through the blood with delicate power. He wrote of minds and senses and her throat tightened unexpectedly.
Then came the promises, followed immediately by a sharp dismissal of anyone too foolish to deserve such teaching.
"It's beautiful," she said. "And dramatic. Very dramatic." She picked up the parchment again, scanning the lines. "'Bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses.' 'Bottle fame, brew glory.' You've got quite a bit of flair hidden away in there, haven't you?"
"I wrote what the subject demanded. Nothing more."
"You wanted eleven-year-olds to be slightly terrified and also deeply intrigued."
He didn't deny it.
"It might be a bit much," she said, unable to resist pushing further. "'Stopper death'? For children who've barely learned to hold a stirring rod?"
He folded his arms, unmoved.
She looked at the foreword again, at the words he'd chosen so carefully, at the passion he'd allowed himself to commit to paper. This was what she'd wanted the book to be.
"Read it to me," she said.
"What?"
"Read it out loud. I want to hear it in your voice."
"You've just read it."
"I want to hear it." She pushed the parchment back toward him and settled back, closing her eyes. "Please."
She heard him sigh, the particular sigh that meant he was going to do what she asked despite his better judgment. The parchment rustled as he picked it up. A pause, during which she imagined him gathering himself, finding the right register.
Then his voice, low and measured, filling the small kitchen with words that seemed to grow larger as he spoke them.
He read it straight through, without embellishment but without embarrassment either. His voice was steady, assured, the voice of someone who believed absolutely in what he was saying. She kept her eyes closed and let the words wash over her.
When he reached the end the kitchen was silent.
She opened her eyes.
He was looking at her with the parchment still held loosely in his hands.
"Perfect," she said softly.
She couldn't have said what drew her outside.
The evening had been ordinary, or what passed for ordinary now: dinner from their stores, an hour of work on the chapter about antidotes, a mild argument about whether counterclockwise stirring in the final stages of a Pepperup Potion was essential or merely traditional. Severus had retreated to the bedroom still irritated about the stirring question, and Lily had found herself restless.
She needed air.
She opened the door.
She stood on the threshold for a moment, breathing in the coldness, feeling it fill her lungs with something that wasn't the same air she'd been breathing since December.
The backyard was exactly as she remembered it, which was to say it was barely a backyard at all. A rectangle of cracked paving stones, enclosed by a brick wall that had failed in several places. Being the last house on the row meant more space than their neighbours enjoyed, though space without purpose was just emptiness with boundaries.
They'd had plans for it once. A proper garden, Severus had said, for growing potion ingredients, moonwort and dittany and all the things that were expensive to buy and easy to cultivate if you knew what you were doing. They'd even bought magical topsoil, bags of it stacked in the old outhouse, rich and dark and waiting. Then the Ministry had restricted the sale of seeds and cuttings, part of their campaign to cut off supply lines to the Death Eaters, and the topsoil sat useless and Severus had been furious for a week.
So there was no grass, no flower beds, no suggestion that anything living had ever been encouraged to grow here. Just cracked stone and rotting fence and the slow entropy of a space that had been given up on.
Except for the gooseberry bush.
It crouched in the far corner like something that had arrived uninvited and refused to leave, its branches gnarled and wild. No one had pruned it in years. No one had tended it or shaped it or done any of the things that gardening books said you should do with fruit bushes. It had been left entirely to its own devices, and it had responded by becoming something halfway between a plant and a small, aggressive tree.
Lily had discovered it the first summer they'd lived here, when she'd come outside to escape the heat of the house and found tiny green berries hidden among the thorny branches.
The bush was bare now, of course. February was too early for leaves, let alone fruit.
She stepped out onto the paved brick floor and let the door fall closed behind her.
The sky above was enormous, wider than she remembered, stretching in every direction without walls or ceilings to contain it. She tilted her head back and breathed, in and out, feeling the cold air sting her throat and not caring. This was outside. This was the world.
That was when she saw it.
At first she thought it was a cloud formation, some trick of the fading light that had shaped the grey masses into something recognizable.
The Dark Mark hung in the sky to the southeast, perhaps twenty miles away, perhaps more. Distance was hard to judge with something that size, that bright, that impossible to ignore. She'd talked her mother into moving to Surrey, and Surrey was far from here, far from wherever that Mark was burning. That was supposed to make her feel better, she'd pushed for the move, had argued and pleaded until she'd agreed, but all she could think was that she couldn't reach them and if something happened to any of them, she would be the last to know.
And she couldn't do anything about it.
That was the truth of it, the truth she tried not to think about most days because thinking about it led nowhere good.
The Dark Mark was beginning to fade now, the green light dimming as whatever spell had cast it expended its power.
The gooseberry bush creaked in the wind, its bare branches scraping against each other in a tuneless, papery rasp. It would bloom again in spring. It would put out leaves and flowers and eventually, if the summer was kind, fruit.
The back door opened behind her.
She didn't turn around and he crossed the concrete in silence and stood beside her.
"You saw it," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
They stood together, watching the last traces of green fade from the sky.
"Do you know where?" she asked.
"No. The wireless isn't reporting anything yet. It could be anywhere within fifty miles."
Fifty miles. Close enough to feel, far enough to be helpless about. The war was everywhere and nowhere, touching down at random like lightning, and all they could do was hope it didn't find them here.
She leaned into him, letting her head rest against his shoulder.
"We just have to make it through," she said. "That's all. Just make it to the other side."
"Yes."
"And not lose hope."
"That would be advisable."
"Are you hopeful?"
He didn't answer. She felt him shift, his arm coming up to wrap around her shoulders, pulling her closer against the cold.
"Come inside," he said. "It's cold."
She went inside and closed the door behind her, and the yard returned to its darkness, and the stars turned overhead, and the gooseberry bush went on growing in its concrete corner, thorn by thorn by thorn, reaching for a sun that would, eventually, come back.
P E R E N N I T A S (36,070 words with more coming, Snily) Click here to read
An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other. These serve as epilogues to Septennium and Novennial, but can work as standalone pieces.
First chapter - July 1978. Lily drags Severus to Petunia's wedding. It goes about as well as expected.
Second chapter - June 1978. Lily gets a Muggle job while Severus does nothing at all, and somehow the war they're both hiding from finds her anyway.
Pairing: Lily Evans/Severus Snape
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
Chapter 2: July 1978. June 1978. Lily gets a Muggle job while Severus does nothing at all, and somehow the war they're both hiding from finds her anyway.
Word count of chapter 2: 36,070 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
She had eleven pounds and thirty pence in her purse, which represented the sum total of her savings after three weeks of sweeping hair at her mother's salon for two pounds an hour and spending as little as possible on everything else. Severus had offered to contribute, but she'd refused because his pride was in worse shape than hers after the Flourish & Blotts rejection, and because he had less than she did and wouldn't admit it.
Eleven pounds thirty. She could perhaps afford a serving dish if she found one on sale, or a set of napkin rings if such a thing existed at a price that wouldn't make her physically ill. She wandered through the department, touching nothing, turning over price tags with the morbid curiosity of someone who already knew the news would be bad and looked anyway.
A gravy boat.
She stopped in front of a display case and stared at the object in question. It was simple, pretty, and according to the price tag, eight pounds fifty.
Petunia would tolerate it. A gravy boat was the kind of thing a proper household had, the kind of thing Vernon's mother probably owned in triplicate, the kind of thing that said we are people who do things correctly. And it was eight pounds fifty, which left her enough for a bag of chips if she was careful.
"Could I have this wrapped, please?" she asked the woman behind the counter, a grey-haired lady in a twin set who looked like she'd been selling china since before the war. "It's for a wedding present."
The finished package was neat and pretty, the pale pink paper smoothed to perfection, a bow that actually looked like a bow and not the sad tangles Lily produced whenever she attempted gift wrapping without magic.
The bag was heavier than she'd expected. Eight pounds fifty of china in a Rackhams carrier bag, swinging against her leg as she made her way back to the escalators. She descended through the floors watching the store change character as she went, from the hushed refinement of homewares to the bustle of fashion to the gleaming, scented ground floor where the perfume counters presided over everything like a particularly glamorous checkpoint.
Lily turned away and headed for the exit, pushing through the heavy glass doors onto Corporation Street.
She turned left and almost walked straight past them.
A cluster of young women stood near a side entrance she hadn't noticed before, a plain door set back from the main frontage with nothing to distinguish it from any other door except the small sign that read STAFF ONLY. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all roughly her age, all dressed in what was clearly their best clothes, neat blouses and pressed skirts and shoes that had been polished that morning. They stood in a loose group with the particular energy of people waiting for something they wanted, nervous hands smoothing already-smooth hair, quick glances at each other that were assessments disguised as friendly looks.
Lily walked past. Got three paces. Stopped.
She turned back, curiosity pulling at her the way it always did, the same impulse that had never served her well.
"What's all this then?" she asked the nearest girl, a blonde with a careful flick in her hair and fingernails painted the exact shade of coral that Petunia would have approved of.
The girl looked her up and down with a quick, practised sweep that took in Lily's jacket, her hair, her face, and apparently found the results acceptable enough to warrant a response. "Sales position. On the floor. They're interviewing today." She nodded toward the staff door.
"What sort of sales?"
"Perfume counter, I think. Maybe cosmetics." The girl's voice was careful, well-modulated, the accent sanded down to something neutral and pleasant. A Birmingham girl who'd worked on her vowels. "My friend Diane worked the Lauder counter at Lewis's and said Rackhams was hiring, so." She shrugged, as though she hadn't spent two hours on her appearance that morning.
She thought about the salon. About her mother's voice saying "Lily, you've missed a bit" and "Lily, that's not how you hold the broom" and "Lily, if you're going to daydream, do it on your own time." About two pounds an hour and the smell of perm solution and the slow suffocation of sweeping other people's hair off a floor, day in and day out.
She smoothed her hair and straightened her collar and held the Rackhams bag where it could be seen, because a girl with a Rackhams bag was a girl who belonged in Rackhams, and if she told herself that firmly enough the logic might hold.
Lily joined the cluster and tried to look like she'd been there all along.
The staff door opened at quarter past eleven. A woman in a dark skirt and white blouse appeared, clipboard in hand, reading glasses perched on her nose in a way that suggested she wanted everyone to know she wore reading glasses.
"Right. If you're here for the sales position, follow me. Single file. Quietly, please. You're in a place of business."
They filed through the staff door and Lily felt the shift immediately, the way the building changed character once you crossed that invisible line. The polished floors gave way to grey linoleum.
The corridor was narrow and functional, notice boards on both walls covered in rotas, union leaflets, and a poster about fire safety that looked like it had been there since the building opened. They passed a door marked STAFF CANTEEN from which came the sound of someone arguing about milk, and another marked FIRST AID that had a handwritten addition reading "and lost property" in biro.
The room they were led to was not quite a staff room and not quite an office, something in between, with mismatched chairs arranged in rows and a desk at the front where the woman with the clipboard installed herself with the authority of a headmistress at assembly.
They went alphabetically. Lily sat in the back row and watched each girl walk up, sit down, and be sorted by the same five questions , where she lived, where she'd gone to school, what her father did, whether she'd worked in a shop before, whether she was courting, each answer redrawing the interviewer's face by degrees.
The girl from Solihull got a nod. The girl whose father managed a branch of the Midland Bank got an actual smile. The alphabet marched on and ran out, and Lily's name had not been called, because of course it hadn't, because she'd never been on the list.
Lily stood up.
She crossed the room, pulled out the chair opposite the interviewer, and sat down. Her heart was hammering but she kept her face pleasant and her back straight.
The woman frowned. "I didn't call your name."
"Oh." Lily looked at the clipboard, which was resting on the desk between them, and felt the magic move through her fingers before she'd quite decided to use it. The ink rearranged itself on the page with the same quiet confidence that ink always had when she asked it nicely. "You nearly missed me. Look, there." She tapped the page where her name now sat, slotted alphabetically between Everett, Jane and Foster, Deborah, in handwriting that matched the rest of the list perfectly. "Evans, Lily."
The woman looked at the clipboard. Looked at Lily. Looked at the clipboard again. Her frown deepened, but it was the frown of someone who suspected she'd made an administrative error rather than someone who suspected magic, because people never suspected magic, that was the great advantage of living in a world that had decided magic didn't exist.
"Evans," she repeated, as though tasting the word. "Right. Well. Since you're here." She picked up her pen. "Where do you live, Miss Evans?"
"Cokeworth."
She watched the woman's face perform a small, involuntary journey. It started at polite neutrality, detoured through recognition, and arrived at something that wasn't quite dismay but lived in the same neighbourhood.
Lily knew exactly what the woman was thinking.
"I went to boarding school," she added quickly. "In Scotland. Black Lake College."
The woman's pen paused. "Scotland?"
"Yes." Lily sat up straighter. "Seven years. Just finished, actually."
Something shifted behind the reading glasses.
"Your accent's not so bad, actually," the woman said, and clearly meant it as a compliment. "What was the school, again?"
"Black Lake College." The name that Hogwarts used on its Muggle paperwork, bland and institutional enough to pass without scrutiny but vague enough that nobody ever tried to look it up. "It's quite small. Up near Inverness."
"I see." A note on the clipboard. "And your father? What does he do?"
"He's dead." The words came out flatter than she'd intended. "He worked at the steelworks. Before."
The face fell again.
Lily understood, suddenly and completely, why Severus had come home from his interviews looking like the bones had been taken out of him.
"And your mother?"
"She works at a hair salon. In Cokeworth." No point pretending otherwise.
The woman made another note. Her handwriting, Lily noticed, had gotten smaller and tighter as the interview progressed, as though the pen itself was losing enthusiasm.
"Are you courting, Miss Evans?"
"Yes. I do. I have a boyfriend. We live together, actually. We've been together since Easter, properly together I mean, though we've known each other since we were children. He's brilliant at… chemistry, he's going to be a researcher once he's finished his training, and he's actually very kind even though people don't always see it, because he's a bit reserved, you know, he doesn't show it the way other people do, but he shows it in other ways, like he'll-"
Lily felt her cheeks warm. She hadn't meant to say all of that. The question had been about whether she had a boyfriend, not about whether she wanted to deliver a monologue on all his virtues. But once she'd started, the words had just kept coming, because it was Severus, and she could talk about Severus forever, and hadn't she earned the right to be proud of him?
"Miss Evans."
"We're saving up for apprenticeships, both of us, and I know it sounds a bit mad, living together and we're only eighteen, but-"
"Miss Evans." The woman's voice was firm enough to cut through the stream. "Thank you. That's… quite comprehensive."
The pen made a note that Lily suspected was not flattering.
"Are you pregnant?" The question came out with the blunt pragmatism of someone who had asked it many times before.
"No!" Lily sat up so straight she nearly left the chair. "Absolutely not. No. We're very careful. I brew my own-" She caught herself. "I mean. No. Definitely not."
The woman looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that contained an entire argument she'd decided not to have, and made a final note on the clipboard. "Well," she said, in the tone of someone closing a book they hadn't enjoyed, "I think that's everything, Miss Evans. We'll be in touch if-"
The door to the interview room opened.
A man walked in with the particular energy of someone who owned whatever room he was currently standing in. French, she thought, or maybe just someone who wanted you to think he was French.
"These are the girls?" He didn't wait for an answer, already scanning the room with the quick, assessing gaze of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for. His accent was English after all, but expensive English, the kind that came with a decent car and summers abroad.
The interviewer started to rise. "Mr. Piron, I haven't finished the initial-"
He didn't scan the room. His finger found her immediately, as though he'd made the decision before he'd finished the sentence. "That one."
Lily blinked.
"The redhead," he clarified, though there was only one redhead in the room so the clarification was unnecessary.
"Mr. Ashworth." The interviewer's voice had gone tight in a way that meant she was annoyed and trying not to show it. "Miss Evans hasn't completed the full assessment. Her background is, frankly-"
"I don't need her background" He said this with the absolute certainty of someone who had never been told his priorities were wrong, or who had been told and simply hadn't listened.
"I'm not looking for the girl next door. I'm looking for-" He waved his hand in a gesture that seemed to encompass something too large for words. "Striking. Dramatic. She's got those eyes and cheekbones and that hair and she looks like she could walk into a room and make everyone in it forget what they were saying. That's exactly what we need."
The interviewer looked at Lily. Looked at her clipboard. Looked back at the man, who was already moving toward the door as though the matter were settled, because in his mind it clearly was.
"She lives in Cokeworth," the interviewer said, a last volley.
"I don't care if she lives on the moon." He was already in the corridor. "Start her Monday. I'll send the training materials."
The door swung shut behind him. The interview room sat in stunned silence for a moment.
Lily turned back to the interviewer, who was still staring at her clipboard.
"So," Lily said, and the grin was already spreading across her face, unstoppable, incandescent. "Monday, then? What time should I be here?"
She Apparated into the back garden of Spinner's End with a crack that startled the cat off the fence, the Rackhams bag banging against her hip, the gravy boat rattling inside its tissue paper, and a grin on her face.
"It's me," she called into the hallway, which was unnecessary because it was always her, who else would it be.
She kicked off her shoes in the narrow space by the door, one hitting the skirting board with a thud, the other skidding across the lino to land against Severus's boots, which were lined up with their usual neatness. The contrast between his neatly paired boots and her shoe lying on its side like a drunk was, she thought, a fairly accurate summary of their domestic arrangement so far.
The Rackhams bag went on the wooden chair with a wobbly leg that they'd pushed against the wall and silently promoted to the status of hall table through the absence of anything better.
They'd been doing their best with the house. Three weeks of intense focus on how to improve it and arguing about paint colours had transformed it from almost uninhabitable to merely grim, which felt like progress. The wallpaper in the hallway was still peeling in places where the damp had gotten to it, but she'd patched the worst spots with a combination of paste and sheer stubbornness. The floorboards no longer creaked in that ominous way that suggested they might give out entirely, and the kitchen window, which had been painted shut since approximately 1965, now opened if you hit it in the right spot with the heel of your hand. Small victories.
She found him in the sitting room, folded into the armchair with a book that had moved forward several chapters since morning. A good day, then.
The room looked better than it had any right to. They'd scrubbed the grime from the windows, and the late afternoon light was coming through at a low angle that made everything look almost golden, almost warm. The bookshelves were full again, his collection reinstated with the spines aligned, organised by some system she hadn't cracked yet. She'd added a few things of her own to the room: a cushion she'd brought from her mother's house, a jar of wildflowers on the windowsill that he pretended to be annoyed about, a knitted throw from the Oxfam shop on the high street that covered the worst of the sofa's sins.
"I'm back," she announced, entirely unnecessarily, and threw herself onto the sofa. The springs gave their familiar groan of protest. She bounced once, settled, and then leaned across the gap between sofa and armchair to grab a fistful of his shirt and pull him toward her.
He came eagerly without much resistance, the book closing on his thumb to keep his place, and she kissed him with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had been out in the world all day and was very glad to be back home. His mouth was warm and tasted faintly of the tea he'd been drinking, and his free hand came up to rest on the side of her neck, his thumb finding the spot below her ear that always made her forget what she'd been about to say.
She pulled back before she could lose the thread entirely. "Guess what happened."
He regarded her with the expression of someone who had learned, through long experience, that her guessing games could go on for some time. "You bought the wedding gift."
"Well, yes. That happened too." She waved a hand, dismissing eight pounds fifty of agonised decision-making. "But something else. Guess again."
He closed the book properly now, surrendering his page to whatever conversation she was dragging him into. His eyes moved over her face. "You got caught stealing."
"I have never been caught stealing." This was technically true. "Once, and you were the lookout, so you don't get to use that tone. And that's a terrible guess. Look at my face. Do I look like someone who's been caught stealing?"
"You look like someone who's done something inadvisable and is extremely pleased about it."
She hit him with the nearest cushion, which was the one she'd brought from home and was therefore slightly too flat to do any real damage. "I got a job."
He set the book aside. "Where?"
"Guess."
"Lily."
"Guess."
The corner of his mouth did the thing it did when he was amused and refusing to admit it. "The chippy."
"The chippy?"
"You like chips. It's not an unreasonable assumption," he said. "Or the Co-op. Behind the till. You'd be good at that, actually. You talk to everyone whether they want you to or not."
She stared at him with her mouth open in theatrical outrage. "Is that really what you think? A chippy or the Co-op? That's the ceiling of your ambition for me?"
"I'm being realistic." He said it gently, without malice, but the truth of their situation was in the words nonetheless. Two eighteen-year-olds from Cokeworth with basically no Muggle qualifications that meant anything, no connections, no money, and a shared set of skills that were spectacularly useless in the non-magical economy. "Realistic for our situation. For now."
"The perfume counter," she said, drawing herself up with the kind of dignity she usually reserved for telling off first-years. "At Rackhams."
Silence.
"Rackhams," he repeated. "In Birmingham."
"In Birmingham. On Corporation Street. The big one." She was grinning now, unable to contain it, the same incandescent grin that had gotten her through the bus ride home, that she'd worn walking up the street and through the front door and probably into her sleep tonight. "The perfume counter. They launched a new perfume last year and it's apparently very sophisticated and dramatic and they wanted someone who looked-" She waved her hands around her face. "Striking, he said. And different."
"Who said?"
"The brand representative. He just walked in and pointed at me. 'That one'." She was talking too fast again, the words tumbling out. "The interviewer didn't want me at all, Sev. It was properly terrible, I told the woman about you and about Cokeworth and about Dad and she looked at me like I'd crawled in off the street, which I suppose I had-""
She stopped. The grin faltered.
He was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read, something caught between pride and a complicated ache that she recognised because she felt it too. The interviews he'd endured. The polite rejections, the not-quite-disguised contempt, the way the world kept telling him he wasn't the right sort of person for things he could have done brilliantly.
"I know," she said. "I know what it's like now. The way they look at you."
He held her gaze for a moment, and something passed between them that didn't need words. Then his jaw tightened in that way it did when he was putting something away for later, filing it in whatever internal cabinet held the things he didn't discuss, and his expression shifted to something more practical.
"You know what I mean," she said trying to end the uncomfortable topic. "We should go, actually. Over the weekend. To Rackhams. Before I start on Monday."
"Why?"
"So I know where I'm going, for one. It's massive, takes up half the street. And I want you to see it. I want you to see where I'll be every day, so when I come home complaining you can picture exactly where the suffering is happening." She grabbed and queezed his hand. "And we could look at the upper floors. The homewares. They've got everything up there, dinner sets and crystal and furniture, all these displays set up like actual rooms."
She was already picturing it, the two of them wandering through those careful arrangements of other people's imagined lives. "Not to buy anything, obviously. Just to look. Window shopping."
"Window shopping," he repeated.
"It's something to do. Just going to nice shops and looking at things you can't afford and imagine what it would be like to have them. It's free. The looking is free." She pulled herself closer to him, leveraging their joined hands until she was half out of the sofa and half in his chair, an arrangement that couldn't have been comfortable for either of them but which she preferred to the alternative of being more than arm's length away. "We could look at plates. And curtains. And pretend we're the sort of people who own matching things."
He said nothing, which was his way of saying quite a lot.
"Curtains and plates. And maybe some of those little glasses for sherry. They had a whole display of them, Sev, all lined up with tiny crystal stems."
"We don't drink sherry."
"That's not the point." She was almost in his lap now, her knees on the arm of the chair, one hand still holding his. "The point is going somewhere together that isn't the chippy or the Co-op or this house. The point is doing something that feels like we're-" She searched for the word. "Like we're building something. Even if it's just looking."
He gave it a good minute of consideration.
"Saturday," he said finally. "But I'm not looking at curtains for more than ten minutes."
"Done." She kissed him again, quick and firm, sealing the deal. "And if you're good, I'll buy you a bag of chips on the way home."
"From the chippy where you could have worked."
"From the chippy where I could have worked but didn't, because I am going to be a perfume counter girl at Rackhams department store and I am going to be brilliant at it."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"You will," he said quietly.
She kissed his cheek before the moment could get any softer and either of them had to acknowledge it. "Now guess what I bought Petunia."
The alarm didn't wake her. Severus did.
"It's half six. You told me to wake you at half six. I'm waking you at half six. If turn around again I'm leaving you to it."
She had, apparently, already turned around twice. She opened one eye and found him sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a mug of tea.
"Time is it," she mumbled into the pillow.
"I just told you. Half six. You have an hour and a half before you need to leave, which by your standards means you're already running late." He set the tea on the bedside table, positioning it precisely on the ring left by every other mug that had sat there before. "Get up."
She'd asked him to do this. Last night, standing in the bathroom doorway with wet hair and a towel and the particular wide-eyed panic of someone who had just realised that tomorrow was real and it was coming whether she was ready or not, she'd grabbed his arm and made him promise. "Wake me up. Don't let me sleep through it. I don't care how, just make sure I'm up, because if I'm late on my first day I will never forgive myself and I will absolutely die, Sev, I will die on the spot and you'll have to explain to my mother how you let it happen."
The tea helped. The clock on the bedside table did not. Ninety minutes until she had to be standing behind a counter in Birmingham.
The makeup took forty-five of those minutes.
She'd been practising all weekend, hunched over the tiny mirror in the bathroom with a collection of cosmetics salvaged from her mother's drawer, Petunia's abandoned makeup bag she left behind when she moved out, and the testers at Boots that she'd sampled more liberally than was strictly permitted, plus a few items she'd bought at Boots with money she probably should have spent on food. The training materials from the brand had included a sheet on "counter presentation standards" that was really just a list of requirements disguised as suggestions: foundation matched to skin tone, eyes defined but not heavy, lips in a shade that complemented the brand palette, brows groomed, lashes curled and coated.
She'd spent Sunday evening doing trial runs while Severus was existing in the sitting room, emerging every twenty minutes to present her face for inspection.
"Too much?"
"I don't know what that means in this context."
"On my eyes. The shadow. Is it too much?"
He'd looked up, studied her face and said, "Your eyelids are blue."
"They're supposed to be blue. It's called Night Sky."
"Well, your eyelids are not normally blue."
She'd thrown a flannel at him and gone back to the bathroom and then painted her nails at the kitchen table, a deep red, almost burgundy. She'd had to do two coats to get the colour even, and then a clear top coat that the woman at Boots had promised would prevent chipping, sitting with her fingers splayed on the table for twenty minutes while they dried, unable to touch anything, which was its own special kind of torture.
Severus had glanced at her nails once and said, "If flakes of that end up in a potion, I'm holding you personally responsible for whatever it produces."
She'd wiggled her wet nails at him in response, because maturity was overrated.
"Well?" She presented herself in the kitchen doorway, arms slightly out, face done, hair charmed smooth, every strand and brushstroke exactly as the training sheet demanded, inviting assessment.
Severus looked up from the toast he was burning. His eyes moved over her face. He tilted his head, considering. "You look nice," he said finally, the words coming out with the reluctance of a concession he hadn't planned to make.
She beamed at him, which probably ruined the sophisticated effect she'd been going for but couldn't be helped.
The shoes were the real problem.
They sat by the front door where she'd placed them last night, black leather with a modest heel, the pair her mother had bought her a few years ago for her internship.
She put them on and immediately regretted being born with feet. The leather, barely broken in despite three years of intermittent suffering, gripped the sides of her toes and pressed on the back of her heels in a way that promised agony by lunchtime. She stood up, wobbled slightly, and caught herself on the doorframe.
"You could wear other shoes," Severus said from behind the Prophet, which an owl had dropped through the mail slot twenty minutes ago.
"These are my only smart shoes."
"You could transfigure them to be comfortable."
"And if the charm wears off halfway through the day I'll be standing behind the counter in trainers. No." She took a few experimental steps, wincing. "I'll manage. Women have been wearing awful shoes for centuries. It's practically a tradition."
She kissed him almost at the door, tasting toast and tea, and felt his hand press briefly against the small of her back.
She'd scouted the spot where she appeared on Saturday, identifying it as sufficiently hidden and sufficiently close, a narrow passage between a printer's and a wholesale fabric shop that nobody seemed to use for anything except dumping cardboard boxes.
Corporation Street was already busy, the morning crowds moving with purposeful energy between the bus stops and the shop fronts. The air smelled of diesel and damp pavement, the June warmth not yet strong enough to burn off the overnight rain.
The staff door was propped open with a fire extinguisher, and a stream of people flowed through it, women mostly, some in their own clothes, others already in the uniforms and tabards of their various departments.
A woman she didn't recognise was waiting at the bottom of the staff stairs with a clipboard, because apparently no one at Rackhams could function without a clipboard. "New starter?"
"Yes. Lily Evans."
"Right. Follow me. I'll show you where everything is before they need you downstairs."
The tour was brisk and functional. Staff lockers, a narrow metal cupboard with a key that stuck. The canteen, a low-ceilinged room with Formica tables and the lingering ghost of ten thousand institutional meals. The fire exits. The smoking area, a concrete yard between the main building and the loading bay where a man in a brown overall was already on his second cigarette of the morning.
"Break is thirty minutes for full-timers. You eat in the canteen or outside. Not on the shop floor, obviously." The woman ticked something on her clipboard. "No food or drink at your counter. No sitting down unless you're in the staff room. No personal phone calls except emergencies, and your supervisor decides what counts as an emergency."
They descended to the ground floor via a staff staircase that emerged, through an unmarked door, into the hush of the perfume department. Even before the store opened, even with no customers and the lights not yet at full strength, the space had a particular quality of anticipated glamour, glass surfaces waiting to gleam, products arranged carefully, the air already layered with competing fragrances that had seeped into the very fabric of the place.
Her counter occupied a spot toward the middle of the floor, positioned like a bold statement between paragraphs of established elegance. The display was dark and dramatic compared to its neighbours: black lacquer surfaces, gold lettering, the distinctive red and gold of the packaging arranged in careful pyramids. Even empty of people, it looked like it was daring you to approach it.
A girl was already there, arranging bottles with the practised care of someone who'd done this many times before. She was perhaps a year older than Lily, with dark brown hair cut in a neat bob and the kind of quiet, composed face that didn't demand attention but rewarded it if you looked. She wore the uniform, a fitted black dress with gold piping along the seams.
She looked up when Lily approached and offered a small, careful smile.
"You must be the new girl. Lily?"
"That's me." Lily extended her hand, then worried that might be too formal, then committed to it anyway because withdrawing it would be worse. "Nice to meet you."
"Helen." The handshake was brief and precise. "I do the makeup side. Colours, foundations, the skincare range. You'll be on fragrance." She gestured at the perfume display with a movement that managed to be both economical and slightly proprietary. "They'll have told you the setup?"
"Vaguely. I'm doing perfume, you're doing the rest, and between us we're apparently running the whole counter."
Helen nodded. "That's about the size of it. It's not as bad as it sounds. Fragrance is mostly the same conversation over and over, just with different people. Once you've got the script down, it gets easier." She paused, assessing Lily with a look that was measuring but not unkind. "Have you worked a counter before?"
"No." There was no point lying about it. "I've worked in a salon."
"You'll need to be." Helen said this without malice, just stating a fact. "Mrs. Bissell, she's the floor supervisor, she's got high standards. Especially for the new girls. Just copy what I do for the first few days and you'll be fine."
The uniform was waiting for her in the staff room, hung on a hanger with a plastic bag over it. The same black dress she'd seen on Helen, in a size that was close enough to right that she could manage it without alteration. She changed in the staff toilets, struggling with the zip at the back until a passing woman from the Clinique counter took pity and yanked it up for her.
The enamel pin went on her chest, just above her heart, the gold catching the bathroom's strip light. She touched it once, lightly, and thought of her Head Girl badge.
Back on the floor, the store was opening. The overhead lights had come to full strength, and the first customers were drifting in through the main doors with the tentative energy of early shoppers. Helen was already at the counter, straight-backed and composed, her hands folded neatly behind her.
The morning light was streaming through the plate-glass frontage now, making the perfume bottles glow, the dark glass of the bottles catching the light like captured fire.
"When someone approaches, you greet them. Not too eager, not too cold. You say good morning. You ask if they're looking for anything in particular, or if they'd like to try something. If they say no, you step back but stay available. If they say yes, you-"
"Good morning." Lily jumped slightly. A woman had materialised in front of the counter, she was perhaps sixty, well-dressed in that particular way that meant money held over several generations. She was looking at the display with an expression of cautious interest.
Helen gave Lily a tiny nod. Go on.
Lily took a breath. "Good morning! Welcome!" She was aiming for Helen's composed warmth but landed somewhere closer to the voice she'd once used to greet first-years in the Gryffindor common room: slightly too bright, slightly too loud. "Are you looking for anything in particular, or would you like to have a smell of something?"
She heard the words leave her mouth and wanted to reach out and grab them from the air and shove them back in. Have a smell. Like she was offering the woman a bin bag to sniff.
The woman looked at Lily with a mixture of amusement and concern. "A smell?"
"A- a try. Would you like to try something. One of our fragrances." She was scrambling now, her face going hot. "We've got some lovely- this perfume is really popular right now, it's got a really nice- it smells really good-"
The woman declined to try anything that smelled really good and moved on to another counter, where a girl with a perfect chignon and an expression of glacial composure would probably never in her life describe a fragrance as "a really nice smell."
Helen waited until the woman was out of earshot. "Scent," she said quietly. "Or fragrance. Never smell."
"Right. Yes. Fragrance. Got it."
"And it's 'experience the fragrance' or 'discover the scent.' Not 'have a smell.'"
"I know. I know that. It just came out wrong." Lily pressed her hands against her burning cheeks, then remembered she was wearing foundation and stopped. "What else shouldn't I say?"
"Don't say nice. Don't say lovely. Don't say really good." Helen ticked them off on her fingers with the gentle precision of someone who'd made the same mistakes once and remembered. "The words you want are things like 'warm,' 'rich,' 'sensual,' 'exotic,' 'intoxicating.' You're not describing your nan's perfume. You're selling a mood."
"A mood."
"It isn't just a fragrance. It's an experience." Helen said this with a hint of irony. "The notes are spicy and oriental. Warm amber, rich myrrh, exotic jasmine. When someone asks about it, you're not telling them what it smells like. You're telling them who they could be when they're wearing it."
The next customer was a younger woman, maybe thirty, browsing with the aimless energy of someone killing time before a lunch appointment. Lily approached her with a smile.
"Good morning. Would you like to experience something from our collection? This is one of our newest fragrances, it's quite-" She reached for Helen's vocabulary. "-intoxicating. Very warm and exotic. Shall I show you?"
The woman accepted a sample spray on her wrist, sniffed politely, and said she'd think about it, which Helen later explained was code for "no but I'm too polite to say so."
By eleven o'clock she'd approached fourteen customers, successfully demonstrated the fragrance eight times, and sold exactly nothing. Her feet had progressed from mild discomfort through active protest to what she was fairly certain was the early stages of a medical emergency.
She leaned against the counter. Just slightly. Just taking the weight off her left foot for a moment, shifting her hip against the lacquered edge, letting the glass and wood take the strain that her shoes refused to.
"Miss Evans."
The voice came from behind her, sharp enough to make her straighten instantly. It was Mrs. Bissell, the floor supervisor.
She was a tall, solid woman and she looked at Lily with an expression that combined disappointment with something older and more weary, the expression of someone who had been correcting young women's posture for decades and was tired of it but would never stop.
"We don't lean."
"Sorry. I was just-"
"We don't lean, Miss Evans. Not on the counter, not on the display, not on each other." Her eyes swept Lily from head to toe, cataloguing every detail with the efficiency of someone marking an exam she expected to fail. "This is the ground floor of Rackhams, not a bus shelter. You are representing the brand. When a customer approaches this counter, the first thing they see is you. If you are leaning like a lamppost, what does that tell them about the products you're selling?"
"That they're… relaxing?"
Mrs. Bissell did not find this amusing. "It tells them that you don't care. That this counter isn't worth standing up for. That the brand isn't worth the effort." She adjusted the collar of Lily's dress with two precise fingers, a gesture that was somehow both corrective and invasive.
"Stand straight. Shoulders back. Weight on both feet. Hands at your sides or behind your back, never in your pockets, never on the counter. If your feet hurt, that's a problem you solve on your break, not on my floor."
"Yes, Mrs. Bissell."
"And Miss Evans?" She paused, turning back with the timing of someone who had rehearsed her exits. "When you speak to customers, you might consider that you're selling French perfume, not vegetables at a market stall. Your language should reflect the product."
She swept away before Lily could respond, which was probably for the best because Lily's response would not have reflected the product.
Helen caught her eye from the other side of the counter and gave a small, sympathetic shrug that said: told you.
Lily stood straight. Squared her shoulders. Put her weight on both feet and felt her heels scream in protest. She smiled at the next customer who approached and said, in the most sophisticated voice she could manage, "Good morning. Would you like to discover our new fragrance? It's an intoxicating blend of warm spices and oriental notes."
The customer gave her an odd look but accepted the sample spray.
Progress.
The break came at half one and Lily almost wept with relief. She signed out at the staff entrance and burst through the door into the humid June air, the city noise and diesel smell hitting her face like a blessing after hours of cloying perfume.
She had thirty minutes. Not enough time to go anywhere, really, but enough to walk a few streets and clear her head. She set off without a particular direction in mind, letting her feet choose the route, which was a mistake because her feet currently hated her and chose the most punishing combination of cobbles and uneven paving stones available.
She bought a sandwich from a shop on the corner, egg and cress on white bread, and ate it walking. The bread was slightly stale and the cress was limp, but it was food and she didn't have to stand up straight while she ate it.
She turned a corner and stopped.
She hadn't meant to come this way. Hadn't been thinking about directions at all, just walking, just moving, just letting the ache in her feet dictate the pace while her mind processed the morning.
The house looked exactly as it had three years ago, which was to say it looked exactly as it had probably looked for decades. Time hadn't touched it. Nothing had, by the look of things.
There wasn't much to see. The shell of the building remained, brick walls blackened and hollow, the roof gone entirely, the windows empty sockets. Weeds had colonised every surface, buddleia growing from the walls at improbable angles, its purple flowers nodding in the breeze. Through the gap where the back wall had collapsed inward, she could sense the faint shimmer of old wards, dormant but not dead, the magical equivalent of a lock on a door that no longer existed.
"Hello," she said quietly, standing on the pavement with her egg sandwich and her aching feet and her black uniform. "I work just round the corner now. So I'll probably be seeing you from time to time."
The house didn't answer, obviously. But something shifted, just slightly, the way Spinner's End did when she thought the words that made it visible.
She finished her sandwich, brushed the crumbs from her uniform, and checked her watch. Twelve minutes left.
She turned back toward Corporation Street. The shoes still hurt. The afternoon stretched ahead of her like a long, flat road with no shade. But the sun was warm on her shoulders, and she had a job, a real job, one that paid actual money and required her to wear a uniform and know the difference between a base note and a top note, and if she couldn't stand properly in these shoes then she'd take them off and stand in her stockinged feet and dare Mrs. Bissell to say a word about it.
She wouldn't, of course. She wasn't insane.
She pushed through the staff door at twenty-eight minutes past, two minutes to spare, and went back to work.
Lily stood on the doorstep for a full ten seconds before she could make herself turn the handle, not because the house was unwelcoming but because her body had decided that movement of any kind was now optional. Her feet had passed through pain into a numb, distant throbbing that she suspected would become agony again the moment she removed the shoes. Her back ached from her shoulders to her tailbone, a deep, structural protest against eight hours of enforced verticality. Her face felt like it had been laminated.
She got the door open and stepped inside, toeing off the shoes in the hallway with the kind of relief usually reserved for removing medieval torture devices. The left shoe had a dark patch on the heel where blood had seeped through her tights and into the leather.
"I'm home," she called up the stairs, her voice coming out hoarse from smiling with her whole voice all day.
No answer.
"Sev?"
The sitting room was empty. His book was on the arm of the chair where he'd left it that morning, the spine cracked at the same page, which meant he hadn't read today. The kitchen was as she'd left it, the breakfast things washed and stacked on the drainer because she'd done them before she left, the kettle cold. No sign that anyone had used the room since morning. The cat was curled on the kitchen windowsill in a patch of fading sunlight, and it opened one eye at her entrance, assessed her, and closed it again.
She climbed the stairs already knowing what she'd find: the bedroom door was pulled to but not latched, the way he left it when he was inside. She pushed it open.
He was asleep.
The curtains were drawn, the room dim and close with the particular atmosphere of a space that had been slept in for too long, the air heavy and still, faintly warm. He lay on his front, sprawled diagonally across the bed in the way he only managed when she wasn't in it to negotiate territory, one arm shoved under the pillow, the other hanging off the edge of the mattress, his fingers almost touching the floor. The sheet had migrated to somewhere around mid-thigh, leaving the rest of him bare from the nape of his neck to the small of his back.
She found the fact that he slept naked endearing and slightly funny and occasionally very distracting, depending on her mood and the particular angle of whatever part of him was currently on display.
Lily set her jacket over the back of the chair, not bothering to hang it properly. She crossed to the bed still in her uniform, blouse and skirt and ruined tights, too tired to change and too hungry for the sight of him to wait. The springs announced her with their usual chorus of complaint, but he didn't stir. He could sleep through almost anything when he was properly under. She'd tested this theory multiple times, once deliberately dropping a book from chest height onto the floorboards, and he hadn't so much as twitched.
She raised her hand and brought it down on his bare backside with a crisp, flat smack that echoed off the bedroom walls.
He came awake like a man who'd been hit with a Stunning Spell. His head shot up from the pillow, hair in his face, eyes wild and unfocused, one hand already reaching for the wand on the bedside table before his brain caught up with his reflexes.
"It's me," she said, grinning, her palm still tingling. "Just me."
He stared at her. His face went through the stages of waking and finally a narrowed-eyed glare that would have been more effective if he didn't still have the crease of the pillowcase imprinted on his cheek.
"What time is it?" He asked.
"About seven."
He squinted at the curtained window as if trying to verify this through the fabric. "Morning or evening?"
"Evening, Sev. It's evening. I've been at work all day." She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at him. "Have you really went back to bed after I left?"
He shrugged. One shoulder, barely a movement at all.
"Did you eat anything?" she asked.
The shrug again.
"Did you clean up the basement? You said last night that you were going to sort out the laboratory today. The cauldrons and the-"
"I was tired."
She didn't push.
She'd been watching it for weeks now. Since graduation, since the last day of school when they'd walked off the train and into a world that had no particular use for either of them, something had been settling over him like a slow fog. It crept in around the edges, visible only if you knew where to look.
The first week had been all right. They'd been busy with the house, scrubbing and mending and arguing about where to put the bookshelf, and the sheer novelty of living together had provided enough momentum to keep them both moving.
But once the house was habitable and the unpacking done, he stopped getting up at a regular time. She'd leave for the salon at half eight and he'd still be in bed, not sleeping exactly but not awake either, existing in some grey twilight state that she couldn't reach. He almost stopped reading, or read the same pages over and over without turning them some days. He stopped working on the experimental potions and spells that had consumed him at school, the journals and notes gathering dust on the desk while he sat in the chair and stared at the wall.
Some days were better. But the good hours were islands in a larger sea of nothing, and the nothing was getting wider.
Lily pulled the duvet up over both of them.
It took some doing. He was lying on top of it and she had to tug it free from under his weight, yanking it inch by inch until she could throw it over them both, creating a tent of cotton and warmth that sealed them off from the rest of the room. The curtains, the furniture, the peeling wallpaper, all of it disappeared.
"I've been thinking," she said, her voice soft in the enclosed space. The duvet smelled of them, of sleep and warmth. "About jobs."
He was quiet.
"There's work out there, Sev. Muggle work. It's not glamorous and the pay isn't brilliant, but it's something. It gets you out of the house. It gives you something to do with your hands." She was choosing her words carefully, laying them down one by one like stepping stones across water she knew was deeper than it looked.
"I could ask at work. They might need people behind the scenes, stock rooms, maintenance, deliveries. You wouldn't have to talk to anyone if you didn't want to."
"No."
The word came immediately.
She waited. Tried again. "It doesn't have to be a shop. There are factories, warehouses, offices that need-"
"I'm not working in a Muggle factory." His voice was muffled by the pillow but perfectly clear in its meaning. "I'm not sweeping floors or stacking shelves or standing behind a counter pretending to be a muggle"
The words hit a place inside her that was already tender.
"Is that what you think I'm doing?" she asked quietly. "Pretending to be something I'm not?"
Silence.
"It's money. It's a step toward the apprenticeships we both need, and I can't-" Her voice caught. She pressed on. "I can't do that alone."
He turned his head on the pillow. She could just see the shape of him in the dim space under the duvet, the outline of his profile, the glint of one eye.
"It's different for me," he said. "This world is yours. You belong in it. You can pass."
"You mean because I'm a muggleborn."
"It's not- " He stopped. Started again. "You know it's not about that."
"Do I?"
"It shouldn't make a difference."
"Well." Lily looked at him for a long moment. Then, despite everything, a small, sad smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Isn't that a beautiful thought."
She reached for his hand under the covers, found it, threaded her fingers through his. His hand was warm and dry, the fingers long and calloused. He didn't respond, but his fingers tightened around hers.
She thought Of him as the boy he had been at nine, ten, eleven years old, sitting cross-legged in the long grass by the canal with his dark eyes blazing, painting a world for her in words so vivid she could nearly touch it.
Hogwarts. Magic. A place where she would finally belong, where the strange, inexplicable things that happened around her would be celebrated rather than feared. He had made it sound like a homecoming. He had told her that being Muggleborn didn't matter, not really, not where it counted. He had said it with such fierce, uncomplicated certainty that she had believed him the way children believe in anything, completely, and without knowing what it would cost her later to find out he had been wrong.
His promises hadn't come true. Perhaps they had never been his to make.
She stared at the underside of the duvet, at the faint pattern of light filtering through the weave, and thought about the magical world. About the job listings in the Prophet that she never circled and the owl-order applications she never sent.
Even the places that would have hired her couldn't afford to anymore. She'd heard about shops threatened, windows broken, stock cursed on the shelves. Employers who wanted to do the right thing weighed it against the cost of doing the right thing and found the arithmetic impossible.
She'd spared herself that, at least. Had turned instead to the world she came from, the Muggle world, where the barriers were different. Where a man from some French brand could point at her and say "that one" and give her a job because he liked her face, and nobody had to check her bloodline first.
"I don't try," she said into the warm dark. "In case you were wondering. I don't try for jobs in the magical world. I don't send owls or fill in applications or do any of it."
She hadn't meant to say it. But the dark made things possible that daylight wouldn't allow.
"Because I know what would happen. The same thing that happens to you, Sev, just for different reasons." She swallowed. "I can't sit through that. I can't watch someone's expression change when they realise what I am. So I don't give them the chance."
The silence under the duvet was thick and warm and full of things that had no words yet.
His hand moved in hers, his thumb tracing a slow line across her knuckles. Back and forth, back and forth, the repetitive motion of someone soothing himself as much as her.
"We're the same," she said. "That's the bit you keep missing. You think we're different because the world sees us differently, but we're the same, Sev. We're both the wrong sort. Just wrong in different directions."
He was quiet for so long that she thought he'd fallen asleep. Then his voice came, low and rough, from somewhere very close to her ear.
"I'll clean the laboratory tomorrow."
She tightened her grip on his hand, and they lay there under the covers while the last of the evening light faded from the curtains.
The job grew around her, or she grew into it. She was never sure which.
The selling didn't come naturally. But it came. The first week had been a disaster of wrong words and awkward silences and Mrs. Bissell's corrections landing on her like hailstones. The second week was better. She learned to read customers carefully, noting the details that actually mattered. A woman who touched the bottles was ready to try something. A woman who stood three feet back with her arms crossed needed to be approached gently, drawn in with a question rather than a demonstration.
A woman who mentioned a specific occasion, anniversary, birthday, holiday, wanted to be told a story about the fragrance, wanted to feel that she was choosing something meaningful rather than just buying a bottle of scented liquid. Which was all that perfume was at the end of the day.
Helen was patient with her in that quiet, contained way of hers, correcting without condescending, demonstrating techniques with the economical grace of someone who had learned the hard way and remembered what the learning felt like. She showed Lily how to spray the sample strips, a single press at arm's length, letting the mist settle rather than drenching the paper. How to offer a wrist spray without grabbing the customer's hand.
She lied to Mrs. Calloway about Lily being in the bathroom when Lily was late, and never once brought it up.
She was getting better. The wrong words still escaped sometimes, "nice" slipping out before she could catch it, a "really lovely" making Helen's mouth tighten almost imperceptibly, but the disasters were fewer and the recoveries quicker. She was learning the rhythm of the floor, the morning lull and the lunchtime rush and the late-afternoon drift of women killing time before the shops closed.
It was on a Thursday, midway through week two, that the girl walked in.
Lily was restocking the sample strips, a mindless task that let her stand behind the display case and take the weight off her left foot, which had developed a blister on top of the blister from the first day.
The girl was standing at the cosmetics display two counters over, examining a lipstick tester with the tentative, slightly overwhelmed expression of someone who wasn't sure she was allowed to touch things. She was perhaps eighteen, mousy brown hair to her shoulders, a round, soft face with the kind of ordinariness that didn't demand a second glance.
Lily's hands stilled on the sample strips.
She knew that face.
She knew it from a kitchen table in Cokeworth, from a cramped bedroom with a mattress on the floor, from watching this face sleep on a mattress in her bedroom, breathing with someone else's lungs. She knew the slope of the nose and the set of the jaw and the way the brown hair fell across the forehead, because she'd seen Severus wear all of it, had watched those features contort with his expressions, his fury and his humiliation filtering through a face that had never been designed to carry them.
The smile came before she could stop it. A reflexive, helpless thing that had nothing to do with customer service and everything to do with the absurd, private comedy of memory.
The smile died almost as quickly as it had arrived.
She'd taken something from this girl. Something intimate and irreplaceable and given without knowledge or consent. She'd knelt on the floor of a salon and scraped hair from the tiles like it was an ingredient, a component, a thing to be harvested and used and never thought about again. She'd built a disguise around this girl's body and put someone else inside it and the girl had never known. Would never know.
The girl put the lipstick down and moved toward the perfume displays, drifting with the aimless current of someone browsing without intent.
Lily should have looked away. Should have let the girl drift past like any other customer and disappear back into the city, back into her own life, back into the comfortable anonymity of being someone Lily would never have to think about.
Instead, she stepped forward.
"Morning." Her voice came out warmer than her standard counter greeting. "Would you like to try some of our samples? We've just had a few new things come in."
The girl looked surprised to be addressed, the way people did when they weren't sure they were the right kind of customer for a particular counter. "Oh, I wasn't really- I was just looking."
"Here." Lily was already reaching behind the display, pulling out samples she had no business giving away. A miniature of the new eau de toilette. Two sachets of the body lotion. One of the deluxe sample strips in its little envelope, the kind they were supposed to save for serious customers. "Take these. Try them at home."
She was being reckless and she knew it. But the girl was right there, solid and real and completely unaware of what had been done to her, and Lily felt the irrational, overwhelming need to give her something.
"Are you sure?" The girl looked at the samples in her palm, then at Lily, a small uncertain crease forming between her brows. "That's really kind of you."
"It's nothing. Just a few bits. The perfume is wonderful, really warm and… you'll love it." Lily was stuffing more things into a small paper bag, glancing over her shoulder toward where Mrs. Bissell usually stationed herself by the escalators. She added another sample, a tiny vial of something she probably shouldn't have been touching without a customer request. "There. That should keep you going, Susan"
The girl clutched the bag with both hands, looking pleased and confused in equal measure.
The girl's face creased. "Sorry?"
"I-" Heat flooded Lily's neck and face. "Sorry. I don't know why I- I must have mixed you up with someone. I'm so sorry."
"My name's not Susan." The girl said it with the easy bemusement of someone correcting a minor mistake, not offended, just confused by the wrong name and found it mildly funny. "It's Pam."
Pam. She had a name. Of course she had a name.
"Pam. Right. I'm so sorry, I don't know what- sorry." Lily was stammering now, her face so hot she was certain her foundation was melting. "I hope you enjoy the samples, Pam."
The girl, Pam, gave her another puzzled smile and drifted away toward the escalators, the paper bag of ill-gotten samples clutched to her chest.
Helen looked at her from across the counter. "Friend of yours?"
"No," Lily said. "Just someone I owed something to."
The following Tuesday was dead from opening. By eleven o'clock Lily had spoken to exactly four people, two of whom had been looking for the toilets and one of whom had asked her if she worked here with the suspicious tone of someone who thought she might be lying. What she could possibly gain from impersonating a perfume counter girl for fun was a question Lily chose not to explore.
She'd taken to rearranging the display bottles for the third time, adjusting angles that didn't need adjusting, polishing glass that was already spotless, performing the pantomime of busyness that was somehow more exhausting than actual work. Helen had been called to help with a stocktake upstairs, leaving Lily alone on the counter with four hours still to go.
She heard the voice before she saw the face.
"Oh my god. Is that? It is. It bloody well is."
Lily's spine went rigid. She knew that voice the way the whole of Gryffindor Tower had known it , involuntarily, inescapably, through every wall and closed door in the castle.
She turned away from the voice. She busied herself with the bottles on the back shelf, the ones that didn't need touching, hoping that not turning around would somehow make the next ten seconds not happen.
"Lily Evans, I can see your hair from the bloody escalator. Don't you dare pretend you can't hear me."
Lily closed her eyes. Breathed. Opened them. Turned around.
Marlene McKinnon was standing in front of her counter with a Rackhams shopping bag in one hand and an expression of delighted disbelief that made Lily want to Disapparate on the spot. She was wearing a leather jacket over what appeared to be a cotton housedress, the kind of outfit that only made sense if you'd got dressed from two different wardrobes in the dark.
"Marlene." Lily fixed a smile to her face. "What are you doing here?"
She heard the defensiveness in her own voice and hated it. What are you doing here, as though Marlene was trespassing, as though this was Lily's territory rather than a department store that anyone could walk into. What she meant was please don't see me like this. Please don't go back and tell everyone that Lily Evans, Head Girl, top of the class, is standing behind a perfume counter in Birmingham selling fragrance to Muggle women for two pounds an hour plus commission.
"Shopping." Marlene lifted the bag as evidence. "Just some regular shopping. Needed a few things. Muggle things. You know how it is." She waved a hand vaguely.
There was something off about her. Her eyes kept moving, quick flicks toward the shop floor and the escalators and the exit, the restless scanning of someone who was monitoring their surroundings more carefully than the situation seemed to warrant.
"I didn't know you were in Birmingham," Lily said. "Are you living here now?"
"Oh, Birmingham, yes!" The laugh that came out was too loud for the perfume hall, loud enough to make the Estée Lauder girl glance over with raised eyebrows. "Always have, actually. Born and bred. Can you believe it? All those years at school and we never realised we were practically neighbours."
Another laugh, higher, slightly breathless. "So we'll be seeing each other around, then! How funny is that?"
Lily stared at her.
In seven years of sharing a dormitory, of eating meals at the same table, of sitting through classes and common room evenings and the endless sprawl of adolescent conversation, Lily had never once heard Marlene McKinnon sound like she was from Birmingham. Not a trace of Brummie. Not even the faint ghost of it that sometimes surfaced in people who'd worked hard to lose it.
And now she was standing here claiming she'd always been from Birmingham. Born and bred. With an accent that placed her approximately two hundred miles from the nearest chip shop on the Hagley Road.
Lily opened her mouth to ask something, she wasn't sure what, some question about where exactly in Birmingham, or which school she'd gone to before Hogwarts, or any of the things that people from the same area naturally asked each other.
"Small world," Lily said, and left it at that.
"Miss Evans."
Mrs. Bissell had materialised from wherever it was she went when she wasn't supervising, which Lily suspected was a pocket dimension accessible only to floor managers and people who fed on the suffering of shop assistants.
"I've noticed quite a lot of conversation happening at this counter and not very much selling." Mrs. Bissell's gaze moved from Lily to Marlene and back again with the measured assessment of someone calculating exactly how much productivity was being wasted. "Perhaps your friend would like to make a purchase, or perhaps she'd like to continue her browsing elsewhere so that you can attend to other customers."
There were no other customers. The floor was practically empty.
"Yes, Mrs. Bissell. Sorry, Mrs. Bissell."
Lily watched her go and felt the familiar burn of being corrected, duller now than the first week but still there, still stinging. She'd been doing better. Almost a full week without a scolding, a streak she'd been privately proud of, and now this, because Marlene bloody McKinnon had turned up.
Lily straightened the bottles that Mrs. Bissell's presence had somehow made feel crooked, even though she hadn't touched them. "Look, I can't really talk now. But I've got my lunch break at one if you want to-"
"Yes." The answer came fast, almost eager. "One o'clock. I'll meet you outside?"
"Staff entrance. Round the side."
Marlene nodded, collected her shopping bag, and headed for the escalators with a backwards wave.
One o'clock arrived with the particular mercy of a deadline reached. Lily signed out, exchanged a nod with Helen who was already covering both sides of the counter , and pushed through the staff door into the June afternoon.
Marlene was leaning against the wall of the building, shopping bag at her feet, face tilted up toward the pale sun.
"There's a sandwich shop around the corner," Lily said. "It's nothing fancy, but it's fast and I've only got half an hour."
The shop was a narrow, steamy establishment wedged between a newsagent and a dry cleaner, the kind of place that had been making sandwiches since before the war and saw no reason to change anything about the process. The bread was sliced thick, the fillings were generous, and the health and safety credentials were best not examined too closely if you wanted to eat with any enjoyment. A hand-lettered board behind the counter listed the options in chalk that had been smudged and rewritten so many times the words were archaeological layers of lunch.
Lily ordered a cheese, pickle, and onion on white without hesitation, the combination she'd been eating since childhood.
"I'm fine, actually," Marlene said, stepping back from the counter. "I had a late breakfast."
They found a bench on the pavement outside, squeezed between a lamppost and a bin that was doing its best, and Lily ate her sandwich. The cheese was exactly as rubbery as expected. The pickle and the onion were perfect.
Marlene sat beside her with her hands in her lap, her posture too straight for a bench on Corporation Street, her eyes doing that restless scanning thing again. She looked, Lily thought, like someone who was waiting for something and wasn't sure whether to dread it or hope for it.
Marlene reached into her handbag and produced a cigarette case, slim and silver. She opened it and held it toward Lily.
"Want one?"
Lily took it, settled it between her lips, and clicked her fingers.
The flame appeared at her fingertip and touched it to the cigarette's end, drew in the first breath, and felt the nicotine hit her bloodstream with the warm, slightly shameful relief of a habit she kept meaning to break and never did. She was supposed to be quitting.
Marlene pulled a cigarette for herself and raised her wand, drawn from a sleeve, with a quick glance up and down the street that happened so fast Lily almost missed it, and tapped the end. The tip glowed, she brought it to her lips, and immediately doubled over in a coughing fit that turned her face scarlet and drew concerned looks from a passing pensioner.
"Merlin!" Marlene wheezed, eyes streaming. "How do you- why does anyone-"
Lily watched her hack and splutter with the mixture of sympathy and amusement that experienced smokers reserved for first-timers. "You don't inhale it straight to the bottom of your lungs. You draw it into your mouth first, then-"
"I know the theory," Marlene gasped, blinking hard. "The practice is… god, that's vile." Then, with the dogged determination Lily remembered from seven years of watching her tackle things she was bad at, she brought it back to her lips and tried again, more carefully this time. A shallow draw. A tentative inhale. A cough, smaller, manageable.
"Better," Lily said.
"Horrible," Marlene countered.
They sat for a moment, smoke rising between them, the city moving past in its usual current of buses and shoppers and pigeons. Lily finished her sandwich, balled up the wrapper, and aimed it at the bin. Missed. Retrieved it. Dropped it in properly.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the words came out heavier than she'd intended, weighted with more than the immediate topic could justify. "For not answering your letters. I've been… things have been busy, with the move and the job and everything."
It was a lie, and she suspected they both knew it. Marlene had written to her twice since graduation, short, cheerful notes about summer plans and the relief of being done with exams. Lily had read them both, folded them carefully, put them in the drawer of the desk at Spinner's End, and not replied. Not because she was busy. Not because she'd forgotten.
Marlene had been kind when Lily came back from Easter with Severus. That needed to be said, because kindness was the accurate word even if it wasn't quite enough. She hadn't been cruel. Hadn't said anything cutting or dismissive or deliberately hurtful. But Lily had felt it anyway, the shift in the dormitory's atmosphere, the way conversations paused fractionally when she entered, the careful looks exchanged between Marlene and Mary and Dorcas that were meant to be invisible and weren't. They thought she was making a mistake.
She hadn't blamed them. But the not-blaming hadn't made it hurt less.
"It's fine," Marlene said, flicking ash with more confidence than yesterday, though her aim still needed work. A grey flake settled on her knee and she brushed it away without looking. "Everyone's been busy. It's been a weird summer for everyone, I think."
The silence was hard to fill. They sat on the bench while the city moved around them, two girls who had shared a dormitory for seven years and were discovering that dormitory proximity and actual friendship were not quite the same thing.
"Have you thought about N.E.W.T.s results?" Lily asked. "They should be out soon. Couple of weeks, I think."
Marlene's posture shifted, something loosening in her shoulders. "I've been trying not to think about them. If I think about them I'll go mad. Transfiguration was fine, I think. Defence, probably. But Charms-" She grimaced. "That practical. Did you think the practical was fair?"
"I thought it was alright."
Marlene gave her a look of pure betrayal, the universal expression of someone who'd found the exam difficult discovering that someone else hadn't.
They fell into the easy, rolling rhythm of exam post-mortems, a conversation they'd been having in various forms since first year. Which questions were unfair. Which sections they'd definitely failed. Which professors had set papers that bore no resemblance to what they'd taught.
Marlene stubbed out the remains of her cigarette on the underside of the bench, a gesture she'd clearly seen someone else do and was trying to replicate. She missed, burning her finger, and swore quietly.
Lily checked her watch. Seven minutes left.
"I should get back," she said, standing and brushing crumbs from her uniform. "Mrs. Bissell will dock my pay if I'm late. She might actually dock my pay if I'm on time. She might dock my pay on principle."
Marlene stood too, collecting her shopping bag.
"It was nice seeing you," Marlene said, and the words sounded rehearsed even though they probably weren't. "Really. I'm glad you're… that you're doing well."
Lily wasn't sure she was doing well.
"You too," she said. "And if you're in town again…"
"I will be. I'm always around. Since I live here." Marlene's smile was bright and brief. "Apparently."
They parted ways on Corporation Street, Lily heading back toward the staff entrance and Marlene walking in the opposite direction, her blonde head visible above the crowd for a few paces before the city swallowed her. Lily pushed through the staff door, signed in with two minutes to spare, straightened her collar in the corridor mirror, and went back to work.
Her mother's house looked the same as it always did, which was both comforting and faintly heartbreaking. The hydrangeas were in full bloom, fat blue heads nodding over the garden wall, and someone, her mother, presumably, had swept the path since Lily's last visit.
She had the key in her hand before she reached the door, the same key she'd carried since she was eleven years old, worn smooth from years of pocket-tumbling. She held it for a moment, feeling its weight, then put it back in her pocket and pressed the doorbell instead.
The chime sounded tinny and familiar through the glass. She could hear her mother's footsteps approaching, the particular clip of her house shoes on the hallway lino.
"Lily." Her mother stood in the doorway, tea towel over one shoulder. "You've still got your key, you know."
"I know. I just thought I'd ring. Be polite."
Her mother looked at her with an expression she reserved for statements she found transparently ridiculous. "That would be a first."
But she stepped aside to let Lily in and she stepped into the hallway that still smelled like her entire childhood compressed into a single breath.
Her mother was looking at her.
"Look at you," her mother said quietly.
"What?"
"You look nice." The words came out with the slight surprise of someone recognising something they hadn't expected to see. "Very grown up. The uniform suits you."
Lily felt a flush of pleasure that she tried and failed to suppress. "It's just a work dress, Mum."
"It's more than that and you know it." Her mother reached out and adjusted the collar, the same automatic gesture she'd been making since Lily was five, straightening things that didn't need straightening because the straightening was really about touching. "You look like a proper young woman. Your father would've-" She stopped, pressing her lips together in the way that meant the sentence was too heavy to finish.
Lily let the silence hold for a moment, giving the unfinished thought the space it needed.
"Tea?" her mother asked, because tea was always the bridge between difficult moments, the thing you did with your hands while your heart rearranged itself.
"Can't stay long. I just came for the phoneand to give you this." She held up the Rackhams bag with the perfume bottle inside.
"Staff gift from the counter. I wore it once and Sev opened every window in the house."
Her mother took the bag, peered inside, and her expression softened. "Well. Call it repayment for all the perfume that went missing from my dresser over the years."
Her mother took it, uncapped the bottle, and sniffed with the appraising air of a woman who knew what things cost.
"The phone is in the cupboard under the stairs. I pulled it out this morning." Her mother moved toward the kitchen. "You'll have a cup while you're here. You look like you need one."
Lily didn't argue and her mother set the mug in front of her.
"How's Severus?"
Her mother's back was to her, busy with her own tea.
Lily wrapped both hands around the mug and considered the question. How was Severus. Lily searched for words that wouldn't sound too dramatic, too alarming. The dishonest answer was "fine," which was what she usually said, which was what everyone usually said, which was the word that covered everything from genuinely fine to not fine at all.
"I'm a bit worried about him, actually."
Her mother turned around. The kettle was still in her hand, but she'd stopped pouring, her attention fully redirected.
"He's not… he hasn't been doing much. Since we finished school." Lily stared into her tea, watching the surface settle. "He sleeps a lot. Doesn't go out unless I make him. He was supposed to be setting up a laboratory in the basement, he's got all the equipment down there, but he just doesn't. He says he'll do it tomorrow and then tomorrow comes and he says it again."
Her mother sat down across from her, setting the kettle on the trivet with the particular deliberation of a woman who was choosing her next words carefully.
"He could come and work at the salon."
Lily looked up. "Mum."
"I mean it. There's always things want doing. Sweeping, stocking, the books need doing, someone's got to sort the supply cupboard because Janet's system is no system at all, it's just chaos with labels-"
"He wouldn't want that." Lily said gently, because the offer was kind and she knew it. "You remember when he helped out that summer. He was honest with the customers. I'll give him that."
"All I'm saying is the offer's there. It's not good, Lily, a young man sat about doing nothing all day. It gets into them. Like damp in the walls. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to shift."
She thought of Spinner's End, of the patches of moisture that kept coming back no matter how many drying charms Severus cast, of the way the house itself seemed to resist being made habitable, as though neglect had become part of its structure and couldn't be separated from the bricks and mortar.
"I'll tell him," Lily said. "About the offer. But don't hold your breath."
"I've known that boy since he was nine years old. I have never held my breath." Her mother took a sip of her tea.
"I know, Mum," Lily said. "I know."
She finished her tea, washed the mug, and retrieved the telephone from the cupboard under the stairs.
It was an old rotary model, heavy as a small anchor, the kind with a fabric-covered cord and a dial that clicked and whirred when you turned it. It had occupied the same spot on the hall wall since before Lily was born, replaced last year by a newer model with push buttons that her mother had bought from the catalogue and was disproportionately proud of.
"The cord's a bit frayed at the back," her mother said, watching her tuck it under her arm. "And you'll need a socket in the wall. Does that house of his even have-"
"We'll figure it out."
"Lily." Her mother followed her to the front door. "You know where I am."
"I know."
"And tell him about the salon."
"I will."
"And eat something proper tonight."
"Goodbye, Mum."
She walked home through the long June evening, the telephone heavy under her arm.
She found him on the sofa. He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, the other resting on his chest, watching the small black-and-white set. The reception was terrible at Spinner's End, the signal struggling to reach a house that didn't fully exist on the same plane as the rest of the street, and the picture rolled and flickered with a persistence that would have driven anyone else to smash the thing. Severus watched it anyway, his dark eyes tracking the grey shapes on the screen with the blank, unfocused attention of someone who was looking at something without seeing it.
He was dressed, which was an improvement on some days. His hair was unwashed. The laboratory, visible through the open door to the basement stairs, looked untouched.
He hadn't moved when the door opened. Hadn't called out, hadn't turned his head. She could have been anyone or no one at all.
She picked up the box and dropped it into his lap.
The box landed harder than she'd intended, the dense weight of the Bakelite telephone connecting with his midsection with a solid thud that made him grunt and jack-knife upright.
"Christ." He grabbed the box reflexively, his face contorting. "What the-"
"Sorry, sorry." She winced. "That was meant to be more of a gentle placement. Less of a- yeah. Sorry."
He glared at her over the top of the box, one hand pressed to his stomach where the corner had caught him. "You could have just put it on the table."
"I know. I was going for dramatic presentation. It needs work." She dropped onto the sofa beside him, tucking her feet under her with the relief of someone who had been vertical for far too long. "Do you want me to kiss it better or something?"
He gave her the look. The one that was supposed to be withering and had probably withered plenty of people in its time but had long since lost its effectiveness on her through overuse.
"I want you to develop some awareness of basic cause and effect.."
"Just open it."
He lifted the flaps of the cardboard box with the wary precision of someone disarming a suspicious package, which, given their history, was not an entirely unreasonable approach. The telephone emerged from its nest of tangled cord, cream Bakelite slightly yellowed with age.
He held it up and looked at it, then at her, then back at it. "It's a telephone."
"It's like you took muggle studies. Full marks. Outstanding."
"What is this for?"
"I got it from Mum. She's got a new one, didn't need this anymore." Lily pulled the cushion into her arms, hugging it against her chest. "I thought you might be able to get it working. In the house. So I can ring you from work if I need to, or we can ring for a takeaway without having to walk to the phone box in the rain."
He looked at the telephone. Looked at the wall where a telephone socket emphatically did not exist. Looked back at the telephone.
"This house doesn't have a telephone line and there's no socket."
"Sev." She waited until he looked at her. "I'm not asking you to ring British Telecom. I'm asking if you, a person who can literally make objects fly through the air and transform one thing into another thing, could figure out how to make a telephone work in this house."
"So it's a challenge."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The telephone sat between them on the sofa like a gauntlet thrown.
"If you can't do it," she said, leaning back with studied casualness, "it'll look quite nice on the wall. Very decorative."
His jaw tightened in exactly the way she'd known it would. "I didn't say I couldn't do it."
"You didn't say you could. So you'll try?"
He set the telephone on the floor beside the sofa with the careful deliberation of someone making a decision. "I'll look into it."
The television quiz show babbled on in the background, the man with the wide tie now asking about capital cities.
"Mum says hello, by the way," Lily said.
"No she doesn't."
"All right, she didn't say hello specifically. She asked how you were."
A pause. "What did you tell her?"
"That you were fine." She didn't look at him when she said it. "She also said you could come work at the salon if you wanted."
The look he gave her
"I told her you'd say that." Lily pulled the cushion tighter against her chest, biting back the smile. "She said the offer stands. Something about it not being good for a young man to sit about doing nothing."
"I'm not doing nothing." He gestured at the television, which was now showing an advert for washing powder. The gesture did not support his case. "I'm resting."
"You've been resting since end of May."
The words came out sharper than she'd intended, edged with the worry she'd been carrying all day.
"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean-"
"You did." He said it quietly, without anger. "And you're not wrong."
They sat with that for a moment, the television filling the silence with its cheerful inanity. Then Severus reached down and picked up the telephone again, settling it on his lap with something that looked, if she squinted, like purpose.
"I'll need copper wire," he said. "And rubber sheeting. And possibly a set of rune-carving tools finer than anything I currently own."
"I can check if there's a hardware shop near Rackhams."
He grunted, which meant yes, which meant thank you, which meant he'd be awake until three in the morning with wire in his teeth and diagrams spread across the floor. She kissed the top of his head before he could object and went to bed.
She saw Marlene before Marlene saw her. She was leaning against the railing by the staff entrance, face tilted up toward the sun with her eyes closed, and for a moment before she heard the door she looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with standing. It was twenty past twelve. Lily's break started at half. Marlene had been waiting, which meant she'd come here deliberately, which meant yesterday's encounter hadn't been the chance meeting it had appeared to be.
"How long have you been standing here?" Lily asked, pushing through the staff door into the June sunshine.
Marlene straightened, uncrossing her arms, rearranging her expression into something that was trying very hard to look casual. "Not long. Twenty minutes. Maybe a bit more." She shrugged. "I didn't have anything else on."
A girl who claimed to live in Birmingham and apparently had nothing to do on a Wednesday afternoon but stand outside a department store waiting for someone else's lunch break.
Marlene's hand went to her bag, and she produced the silver cigarette case from yesterday, flipping it open and holding it toward Lily with the automatic gesture of an offering already decided upon.
Lily took one.
Marlene closed the case without taking one for herself.
"Walk?" Lily suggested, because standing by the staff entrance felt conspicuous, and because movement was easier than stillness when you didn't know what was coming.
They fell into step together, heading away from Corporation Street and its crowds, toward the quieter side streets where the shops gave way to offices and the offices gave way to the odd, forgotten pockets of the city that existed between the places people actually went. The sun was out properly for once, June finally remembering its obligations, and the warmth on Lily's bare arms felt like nice.
Birmingham looked almost pretty in the light, the red brick glowing, the window boxes on the upper floors of the older buildings spilling geraniums and alyssum. They passed a small square with a bench and a tree that was doing its best and a pigeon that looked at them as though they were trespassing on its square.
Marlene didn't speak for the first few minutes, which was unlike her. At school she'd been a talker, the kind of person who filled silence like it was a hole that needed patching, who could sustain a conversation about nothing for the length of a corridor and make it feel like something. Now she walked with her hands in her jacket pockets and her eyes on the pavement and the particular tension of someone building up to something they didn't know how to say.
"Do you ever think about-" Marlene started, stopped, started again. "About having a purpose? A real one, I mean. Something bigger than just- than the day-to-day." She was speaking to the pavement, not to Lily, her voice careful and measured in a way that sounded rehearsed. "Like, knowing that what you're doing actually matters. That you're part of something important. That your life is being used for something that-"
She caught herself. Glanced at Lily with an expression that suggested she knew she was making a mess of this but couldn't find a cleaner way through.
"A cause," she said. "Having a cause. Don't you think everyone should have something they believe in enough to-"
"To what?" Lily's voice came out flat. The cigarette burned between her fingers, forgotten.
The warmth of the afternoon had gone cold somehow, or maybe that was just the temperature inside Lily's chest dropping several degrees in the space of a sentence. She kept walking, her pace quickening without her permission, her shoes clicking against the pavement with a sharpness that matched the sudden tight feeling behind her ribs.
A cause. A purpose. Something bigger than the day-to-day. As if the day-to-day was small. As if standing behind a counter for eight hours and learning to sell perfume and earning money that would go toward rent and food and the future she was trying to build with her own hands was somehow insufficient. As if the life she was living, the real, ordinary, exhausting life of getting up every morning and putting on the uniform and smiling at strangers, wasn't purpose enough because it didn't come with a banner or a manifesto or the particular self-importance of people who believed their fight was the only one that mattered.
She'd heard this before. Different words, different mouths, but the same essential message. At school, from the pure-bloods who treated Muggle work like a quaint curiosity. From the professors who spoke about "making a difference in the wizarding world" as though the wizarding world was the only one that counted. From James Potter, who had the luxury of caring about causes because he'd never had to care about money. From everyone who had enough that they could afford to look down on people who were still trying to get some.
Her life was small. She knew that. It was small and ordinary and nobody would write songs about it or put it in the papers. But it was hers.
"I need to get back." She ground the cigarette out under her shoe, the ember dying in a small shower of sparks against the pavement. "Can't be late. Mrs. Bissell, she's-"
"Lily, wait-"
She was already walking, quick and purposeful. Corporation Street was ahead, she could see the buses and the crowds and the familiar bulk of Rackhams rising above the rooftops, and she aimed for it like a compass needle finding north.
"Lily, please, that's not what I- I've made a mess of this, I know, but it's not-" Marlene was hurrying after her, her longer legs eating up the distance Lily was trying to create. "It came out wrong. Everything I said, it came out completely wrong. I just don't know how to-"
"How to what?" Lily spun around, fast enough to make Marlene pull up short. "How to tell me that my life doesn't matter? That selling perfume is beneath me? That I should be doing something more important with my time?"
"I know what people think, Marlene. I know what all of you think. Poor Lily, Head Girl, top of her class, and now she's spraying perfume on Muggle women for two quid and twenty-five pence an hour. What a waste. What a shame. If only she'd done something proper with her life."
"That's not-"
"I don't need your pity. And I don't need your causes." She turned away again, the staff entrance in sight now, the plain door that was the boundary between her world and the one Marlene was trying to pull her into.
"I came because Dumbledore sent me."
Lily's feet stopped moving before her brain had finished processing the sentence.
"What does he want, then?" Lily's voice came out flat and careful, stripped of the anger that had been driving it a moment ago.
Marlene swallowed. The rehearsed quality was gone from her voice, replaced by something halting and genuine. "There's a group. People working against- against You-Know-Who. Against what's happening. Dumbledore leads it. He's been organising since before we left school, longer maybe." She paused, checking the street with that quick, scanning look Lily had noticed before. "He asked me to find you. Specifically you."
"If he wants potions, he can ask Slughorn." The response came automatically, a deflection she hadn't planned, born out of the instinct that the less she knew about this, the less it could pull her in. "Slughorn's the Potions master. I'm just-"
"Slughorn said no." Marlene cut her off. "Dumbledore asked him. Slughorn told him he won't choose a side. Won't get involved. Said he's planning to retire and doesn't want the trouble."
Of course he had.
"So he comes to me instead." The bitterness in her voice surprised her.
"It's not like that." Marlene stepped closer, lowering her voice. A woman with a pram was approaching on the pavement, and they both fell silent until she'd passed, the ordinary intrusion of civilian life forcing a pause in a conversation that didn't belong on Corporation Street. "He knows about you, Lily. He's always known. The potions you and Snape used to brew at school, the Polyjuice, the contraceptive draughts, the the hangover cures you flogged before Hogsmeade weekends, all of it. He knows about the ingredients you sourced on the cheap, how you found substitutions when you couldn't get the real thing, how you made three cauldrons' worth from supplies that should only have stretched to one."
Lily felt the blood leave her face. She'd thought they'd been careful. She'd thought nobody knew.
"He needs that," Marlene said. "Someone who can brew under constraints. Someone who can stretch supplies, improvise, come up with new recipes when the standard ingredients aren't available." She paused, and Lily saw her choose her next words with care.
"There are new regulations coming. On potions ingredients. The Ministry's restricting access to anything that could be used for- for combat applications. Healing draughts, strengthening solutions, antidotes. The kind of things that a group operating outside the Ministry would need and wouldn't be able to get through normal channels."
"You want me to brew for a resistance movement," Lily said. The words sounded absurd in her own ears, spoken aloud on a public street in broad daylight, but Marlene didn't look away.
"I want you to consider it. That's all I'm asking."
Lily stared at her.
She thought about Severus. About the conversation under the duvet, back to back on the stairs of Spinner's End, his voice saying I choose you. About the promise she'd extracted from him, the one that had cost him Mulciber and Avery and whatever dark future they'd been offering. Don't join them. Whatever they're offering, whatever they're saying about power and respect and making the world better for wizards. Don't.
And he hadn't. He'd kept that promise. Had turned away from the Dark Lord and everything the Dark Lord offered, had chosen her and Cokeworth and a house that barely existed over the only people who'd ever told him he was good enough. Had given up the one world that wanted him because she'd asked him to.
How could she now turn around and join the other side? How could she stand in the same house where she'd made him promise to stay out of the war and tell him that she'd signed up for it herself?
"I just want to live my life." The words came out small and tired, scrubbed of the anger that had fuelled them earlier. "That's all I want, Marlene. I want to go to work and come home and brew potions and save up for the apprenticeship and have a life with Severus. An ordinary life. The kind of life that doesn't involve picking sides in a war."
"Lily-"
"I kept him out of it." She didn't say Severus's name, but they both knew. "I begged him to stay out and he did. Do you understand that? I cannot ask someone to stay out of a war and then walk into it myself."
Marlene opened her mouth. Lily didn't wait to hear what came out.
The crack of Apparition split the air between one heartbeat and the next. One moment she was standing on Corporation Street in the afternoon sun, and the next she was in the alley behind Spinner's End, the displacement of air ruffling the weeds that grew between the paving stones. Her ears rang. Her stomach lurched with the nausea of a too-hasty departure, the kind you got when you Apparated before you'd finished forming the destination in your mind.
She leaned against the alley wall and breathed.
Marlene didn't come back.
Not Thursday. Not the rest of that week or the one after. The staff entrance remained free of blonde girls with silver cigarette cases and causes that needed fighting, and Lily told herself she was glad about it. .
She threw herself into work instead, with the single-minded focus of someone building a wall between herself and everything she didn't want to think about. She sold three bottles in one afternoon and Helen gave her that nod again, the small one that meant more than praise, and Mrs. Bissell walked past the counter without stopping, which was, in its own way, the highest compliment the woman could pay.
The blisters healed. New shoes, bought with her first week's pay from the sale rack at Freeman Hardy Willis, broke in faster than the old ones and hurt less in the process. Her feet still ached by closing time, but it was a manageable ache now, the kind you could walk home on without wanting to amputate.
In the evenings she came home to Spinner's End and found Severus in various states of occupation. The telephone project had consumed him for the better part of a week, the kitchen table disappearing under a sprawl of wire, tools, and the gutted carcass of the Bakelite handset while he worked out how to bridge the gap between Muggle telecommunications and magical architecture. He'd solved it, eventually, through a combination of Floo network enchantments and what he described, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had invented something genuinely new, as a "signal transposition charm" that converted the magical carrier wave into something the Muggle exchange could interpret. The telephone now lived in the hallway, cream and solid and slightly warm to the touch from the enchantments running through it, and it worked, more or less, though the connection crackled and the dial tone had an odd harmonic that Lily suspected was the sound of magic and electricity trying to get along.
But the telephone was finished now, and the void it had filled was opening up again. She could see it in the mornings, the way he was slower to get up, slower to dress, slower to find a reason for the day. The laboratory in the basement remained half-organised, the cauldrons clean but unused, the ingredients gathering dust on their shelves.
The attack came on a Friday.
It was quarter past three, the dead hour of the afternoon when the store was at its quietest and the floor staff drifted into the particular stupor of having nothing to do and not being allowed to sit down. Lily was restocking the sample strips for the fourth time that day, a task she'd become so efficient at that she could do it with her eyes closed, which was fortunate because her mind was approximately seven miles away.
She heard the noise before she understood it. A sound that didn't belong on Corporation Street, that didn't belong anywhere in the Muggle world: the sharp, percussive crack of spellfire, followed by a scream that cut through the plate glass of the shop front like a knife through paper.
The ground floor went still. Every head turned toward the windows. Through the glass, Lily could see the street outside transforming, people running, the ordinary afternoon traffic of shoppers and buses and pigeons dissolving into chaos. Another crack. A flash of light that was the wrong colour for anything natural, green-tinged and vicious, and then the screaming started properly, not one voice but many, the sound of a crowd realising that something terrible was happening and not knowing which way to run.
A figure in dark robes appeared in front of the window. Then another. Then a third. They moved through the street with the unhurried confidence of people who knew they were the most dangerous thing in any given space, their masks bone-white against the black of their hoods, their wands out and casting with the casualness of a job being done rather than a battle being fought. A red spell hit a parked car and the windscreen exploded inward. A woman fell on the pavement, whether hit or tripped Lily couldn't tell.
The store erupted. Customers screamed and surged away from the windows, colliding with displays, knocking over carefully arranged pyramids of product. A woman knocked a bottle off the counter and it shattered on the floor, the heavy scent blooming into the air like blood from a wound. Helen grabbed Lily's arm and pulled her backward, away from the glass, her face white and her eyes wide with a terror that had no name in her vocabulary.
"What's happening? What's-"
"Get away from the windows," Lily said, and her voice came out in the tone she hadn't used since school, the Head Girl voice, the one that carried across common rooms and corridors and expected to be obeyed. "Helen, get everyone away from the windows. Into the back. The staff corridors. Now."
Helen stared at her for one frozen second, then the training kicked in, not Rackhams training but something older and deeper, the human instinct to follow someone who sounded like they knew what they were doing. She turned and began herding the nearest customers toward the back of the store, her voice high but steady, "This way, please, quickly, don't run, just walk quickly-"
Lily's wand was in her hand before she'd made the conscious decision to draw it, pulled from the sleeve where she kept it every day, the wood warm and familiar against her palm. She moved toward the doors, against the tide of people fleeing inward, her body carrying her forward while her mind raced through the inventory of spells she knew, sorting them by application, by power, by the likelihood of causing permanent harm to people she might recognise under those masks.
Because she might. That was the thought that lodged in her throat like a bone. Under those masks and those hoods could be anyone. Could be Mulciber with his cruel laugh. Could be Avery with his pureblood sneer. Could be faces she'd seen across the Great Hall, faces she'd passed in corridors, faces that Severus had once called friends.
She pushed through the doors and the noise hit her like a physical force. Corporation Street had become a battlefield, smoke and debris and the particular acrid smell of dark magic that she recognised from Defence Against the Dark Arts but had never encountered in the open air. A bin was on fire. A shop window across the street had been blown in, glass glittering on the pavement like ice. The three robed figures were moving up the street, methodical, their spells striking storefronts and parked cars and anyone who didn't move fast enough.
People were still on the ground. A man near the newspaper stand, curled on his side, not moving. A woman crouched behind a post box with a child pressed against her chest, the child's mouth open in a scream that couldn't compete with the noise. An elderly couple frozen in the middle of the road, holding each other, too confused or too frightened to run.
Lily raised her wand.
The Shield Charm expanded outward from her like a wall of light, transparent and shimmering, stretching across the width of the pavement in front of Rackhams. A curse from the nearest Death Eater struck it and shattered into sparks, the impact vibrating up her arm and into her shoulder. She held. Gritted her teeth and held, because the alternative was letting whatever came next hit the people behind her, the customers still streaming out of the store, Helen with her white face and her Muggle ignorance, the woman with the child behind the post box.
The nearest Death Eater turned toward her. She couldn't see his face behind the mask, just the dark eyes through the slits, and for one terrible moment she was certain he was someone she knew, certain from the way he tilted his head, the way he held his wand, the particular set of his shoulders.
She cast before she could think about it. A Stunning Spell, aimed at centre mass, with the additional force of pure, consuming fury. It hit the figure in the chest and he went down, crumpling onto the pavement like a puppet with its strings cut.
The other two turned. She cast again, a Disarming Charm that missed the second figure by inches and shattered a street lamp instead, glass raining down. She ducked behind a concrete planter, breath coming in gasps, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. A curse scorched the brickwork above her head, showering her with dust. She rolled, came up casting, a rapid series of defensive spells that she layered over each other the way Severus had taught her, each one reinforcing the last, building a lattice of protection that bought her seconds.
She was outmatched and she knew it. But the street was full of people who couldn't protect themselves, and the Ministry's response was somewhere between delayed and nonexistent, and someone had to stand between the curses and the civilians and today that someone was a girl from Cokeworth in a nice uniform with perfume in her hair.
The second figure raised his wand and Lily saw the green light begin to form at its tip and her blood went cold.
A crack of Apparition, then another, then six more in rapid succession. Robed figures materialised on the street, but these robes were different, Ministry purple, the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad and what looked like Aurors, wands already drawn, already casting. The two remaining Death Eaters looked at the numbers, made a calculation, and disappeared with twin cracks that left the air tasting of ozone.
What followed was chaos of a different kind. Ministry officials swarming the street, Obliviators moving through the crowd with the calm of people who did this regularly. Lily watched from behind the planter as a team of wizards in grey robes began repairing the damage, storefronts mending themselves, glass flying back into window frames, the burning bin extinguishing itself with a hiss. The unconscious Death Eater was collected, bound, and Disapparated away before any Muggle could register what they'd seen.
An Obliviator approached Lily. "Ma'am, I need you to-"
"I'm a witch." She held up her wand.
"Right." He checked her wand, checked her face, made a note on his clipboard. "We'll need a statement from you. Can you come to the Ministry-"
"Not today." The words came out rough, barely a voice at all. "I need to go home."
He tried to argue. She walked past him. Down Corporation Street, past the mended shop fronts and the Obliviators doing their work and the Muggles standing around with the glazed, confused expressions of people whose memories were being gently rearranged.
The bus took forty minutes. She sat in the back, by the window, and pressed her forehead against the glass and let the tears come. Silent, steady, leaking down her face and dripping off her jaw onto the collar of her uniform.
Nobody noticed. The bus was half-empty, the other passengers absorbed in their own worlds, and a girl crying silently by the window was not unusual enough to warrant attention. People cried on buses all the time. It was practically what buses were for. Wasn't it?
She got off the bus in Cokeworth and walked the long way home, circling through the back streets until the red left her eyes and her breathing steadied.
She let herself into Spinner's End and found Severus in the kitchen, standing at the stove, stirring something in a saucepan.
He'd cooked dinner. On the counter, the torn box of a Vesta Chow Mein sat propped against the wall, its illustration of glossy noodles and exotic vegetables bearing no relationship whatsoever to the contents of the saucepan. The crispy noodles from the second sachet were already divided between two plates, little nests of fried nothing waiting for the main event. The kitchen table was set with two plates and two forks and the stub of a candle he'd found somewhere.
"You're late," he said without turning around.
"Bus was slow." The lie came out smoothly. "That smells good."
It didn't, particularly. But he'd boiled the kettle and opened the box and followed the instructions and set the table, and that was dinner.
He served it with the same precision he brought to everything, the noodles portioned evenly, the sauce distributed with a care that the dish did not remotely warrant. She sat down across from him, the candle unlit between them, and picked up her fork.
They ate at the table, the candle unlit between them.
After dinner, while he washed up, Lily sat at the table with a piece of parchment and a quill and wrote two words.
I'm in.
She folded the parchment. Addressed it to Marlene McKinnon and hoped that the letter would find her. She raised her wand and called for a post owl, the spell pulling one from whatever network of willing birds existed above the rooftops of the Midlands, and when it arrived at the kitchen window, ruffled and expectant, she tied the parchment to its leg and watched it disappear into the dark sky.
Then she went back inside and helped Severus dry the dishes, and they watched something on the television that neither of them really saw, and she fell asleep on the sofa with her head on his shoulder and dreamed of nothing at all.
The next morning, the store was immaculate. Every window whole, every display intact, every surface polished to its usual gleam. Corporation Street hummed with its ordinary traffic, buses and shoppers and the newspaper seller on the corner shouting about something that wasn't a magical attack, because magical attacks didn't appear in newspapers, didn't appear anywhere, were erased as thoroughly as if they'd never happened.
Lily walked through the doors at quarter to nine and took her place behind the counter, and the perfume bottles were where she'd left them and the sample strips were neatly stacked and the floor was clean and dry and showed no sign of the bottle that had shattered on it yesterday afternoon.
Helen was already there, rubbing her temples with the distracted, slightly irritable expression of someone nursing a headache whose origin she couldn't explain.
"Didn't sleep well," she said when Lily asked. "Woke up with this splitting pain behind my eyes and I can't shake it. Must be coming down with something."
"Probably the weather," Lily said. "There's something going around."
"Must be." Helen reached under the counter for the paracetamol she kept in her handbag, shook two into her palm, and swallowed them with a sip of water.
The system established itself with the ease of something that had been waiting to happen. Marlene appeared at the staff entrance on Thursday, not waiting this time but moving, arriving at exactly twelve-thirty with a carrier bag from Boots that did not contain anything from Boots. The handoff was brief and wordless: the bag passed from Marlene's hand to Lily's, their eyes meeting for just long enough to confirm that this was happening, that the letter had been received, that the two words on the parchment had set something in motion that couldn't be taken back.
"Usual spot, Saturday," Marlene said. "Bring a thermos."
Then she was gone, walking back up the street with her shopping bags, disappearing into the crowd.
The carrier bag went into Lily's locker, where it sat between her spare tights and her lunch and the novel she was trying to read on her breaks. By two o'clock the smell had started. Subtle at first, the kind of thing you might attribute to someone's lunch going off, but by three it had developed a character that was impossible to ignore: the sharp, vegetal reek of fresh fluxweed mingling with the sulphurous undertone of powdered graphorn horn and the unmistakable pungency of flobberworm mucus that had been stewed for slightly too long.
"What is that?" The woman from another brand's counter, a stout, no-nonsense presence named Brenda, stood in the staff room with her hand over her nose and her face arranged in an expression of deep personal affront. "It smells like something died in someone's locker and then something else died on top of it."
"Might be the drains," Lily offered from behind her sandwich.
"That is not the drains. I know what the drains smell like. The drains smell like the drains. This smells like-" Brenda sniffed, recoiled, and looked around the room with narrowed eyes. "the back of the Bullring on a hot day, and I worked there three summers so I would know.."
Brenda was already retreating, hand still over her nose, clearly deciding that the mystery wasn't worth the olfactory suffering. "Someone needs to speak to maintenance about ventilation in here. It's not fit for human occupation."
She waited until Severus was asleep, which came earlier now that the telephone project was finished and the days had returned to their flat, featureless rhythm. By ten most evenings he was in bed, not sleeping so much as retreating, the duvet pulled up and the lights off and the particular stillness that meant he was done with the day and wanted it to be over. Most nights his hand would move from her hip to somewhere more deliberate, and she'd turn into him, and for a while the day and its flat featureless hours didn't matter, and he was present in a way that the daylight couldn't seem to manage.
Afterwards, she'd lie beside him and wait. His breathing always changed in the same sequence: the quick, uneven catch of it first, then the long, deliberate steadying, then the gradual loosening as his body forgot to hold on. His hand would slacken where it still rested on her skin, his fingers uncurling one by one, and the tension would leave his shoulders like something being poured out. He slept better on those nights.
She'd give it twenty minutes to be sure, lying still in the warm hollow they'd made, her skin cooling where the air found it. Then she'd slip out of bed and find her clothes in the dark.
She worked by the light of a single lamp, her notes spread on the bench beside her, translating the list of what was needed Marlene had given her into practical reality.
Healing draughts. Blood-replenishing potions. Dittany essence, concentrated to twenty times the standard strength because the recipients might not have time for the standard dosage. Burn paste. Anti-venoms.
The ingredients Marlene brought were inconsistent. Some were good quality, clearly sourced from proper apothecaries through channels Lily didn't ask about. Others were substandard, dried herbs past their peak, mineral compounds that had been stored badly, things that would have made Severus curl his lip and consign them to the bin.
She brewed the way she and Severus had always brewed together: with the understanding that waste was not an option when every ingredient represented money someone couldn't spare. The blood-replenishing potion was the hardest, requiring a base of pomegranate juice that she had to extract fresh and a stabilisation process that took six hours and couldn't be rushed. She set it going at midnight and checked it every forty-five minutes, dozing between checks on a kitchen chair she'd dragged into the basement, waking each time with a start and the momentary confusion of someone who'd forgotten why they were sleeping next to a cauldron.
The finished potions went into thermos flasks. Three of them, bought from the Oxfam shop for twenty pence each, the kind with screw-top lids and vacuum seals that kept the contents at whatever temperature you poured them in. She labelled each one with a strip of masking tape: H for healing, B for blood-replenishing, D for dittany.
Saturday she met Marlene on the bench outside the sandwich shop, the same bench where they'd smoked and talked about N.E.W.T.s. The handoff was the reverse of Thursday's: thermos flasks from Lily's bag to Marlene's, transferred with the casualness of two friends sharing a packed lunch.
"These will last about three weeks if they're stored properly," Lily said, keeping her voice low. "Cool, dark, sealed. The blood-replenishing potion needs to be shaken before use. The dittany's concentrated, so tell whoever's using it that three drops is a full dose. More than that and you'll get scarring."
Marlene nodded, tucking the flasks into her bag with care. "The order says thank you."
The weeks after were simple. Work, brew, deliver. Work, brew, deliver. The thermos flasks circulated like currency, out full and back empty, each return accompanied by a list from Marlene that was slightly longer than the last.
Sometimes Lily offered Marlene half her sandwich. Marlene always declined, though she was getting better at smoking, holding the cigarette with something approaching naturalness now, no longer coughing on every inhale. They didn't talk about much beyond the potions. Didn't discuss the war, or Dumbledore, or what the potions were being used for, or who was using them. Lily didn't ask and Marlene didn't offer.
It was on a Tuesday evening, that Severus asked.
She was at the kitchen table because after nine hours on her feet at Rackhams the thought of standing at the basement workbench made her knees ache in protest, chopping fluxweed with the small silver knife he'd given her for her seventeenth birthday, when she heard him in the doorway. She hadn't heard him come down the stairs, which meant he'd been standing there for a while.
"Where did you get the fluxweed?"
He stood in the doorway in his shirt and trousers, his eyes sharp despite the shadows under them. He looked like someone who had been sleeping too much and thinking too little, or possibly the opposite.
Lily's knife stilled on the cutting board. She looked at the half-chopped fluxweed under her knife, its unmistakable silver veins catching the lamplight, at the other ingredients arranged on the table in their careful groups, at the cauldron simmering on the back burner with something that was clearly not dinner. The evidence was damning and comprehensive, and the story she'd been constructing, that she'd found a cheap supplier, that she was brewing for practice, that it was just revision, just keeping her hand in, collapsed under the weight of his gaze like wet cardboard.
She set the knife down.
"Marlene McKinnon came to see me at work," she said. "A few weeks ago. She came on behalf of Dumbledore."
He didn't move or react in any visible way.
"There's a group," she continued, her voice steady because she'd rehearsed this, had known it would come and had planned what she'd say. "Working against You-Know-Who. Dumbledore runs it. They need someone to brew for them. Healing potions, blood-replenishing draughts, dittany, the things that are getting harder to source now that the Ministry's restricting ingredients."
"I know what a resistance movement needs. Healing draughts and blood replenishers. The same things the other side needs. The same things every side has always needed." he said. His voice was very flat.
"It's just brewing. Nothing direct. I'm not fighting. I'm not-" She gestured at the ingredients and the cauldron. "I'm just making potions and putting them in thermos flasks. That's all."
The silence that followed lasted long enough for the cauldron to bubble twice and the clock in the hallway to tick through seventeen seconds.
"Is there anything I could say that would stop you?" he asked.
She met his eyes.
"No," she said. "There isn't."
He nodded.
"I won't help you with it."
The words were quiet and absolute and left no room for negotiation.
Lily swallowed.She'd imagined anger, shouting, the door slamming and the silence that would follow. She'd imagined him threatening to leave. She'd prepared for all of these outcomes and braced herself against them.
She hadn't prepared for the calm.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he said.
After a while, he crossed to the stove and looked into the cauldron. "Your heat's too high," he said. "The dittany will lose potency if you let it simmer above eighty degrees."
He then left the kitchen.
The clock read seventeen minutes to six. Closing was at six. Seventeen minutes between Lily and the door, between the counter and the street, between standing here in her uniform and standing in the basement at Spinner's End where a cauldron of Wiggenweld Potion sat under a stasis charm that would expire at, she checked the time again, approximately quarter past six, at which point the unstirred potion would begin to degrade, and if the honeywater wasn't added within ten minutes of the stasis breaking, the entire batch would become first useless, then unstable, then, if left long enough, vigorously explosive.
Helen had already begun her closing routine on the cosmetics side, wiping down surfaces with the efficiency that Lily had come to rely on. The floor was emptying, the last shoppers drifting toward the exits with the particular reluctance of people who weren't quite ready to leave the air-conditioned comfort of the store for the June evening outside. Fourteen minutes.
She was reaching for the cloth to begin wiping down her own section when she saw him approaching.
She recognised him before she placed him. He was perhaps forty, wearing a suit that was trying to be better than it was, the tie loosened and the top button undone in the way of men who had been wearing suits all day and were reaching the end of their tolerance for them. He carried a Rackhams bag in one hand and walked with the particular purpose of someone who had a complaint and had been working himself up to it for the duration of the bus ride.
Then it clicked. Three days ago. Wednesday afternoon. He'd stood at this counter for twenty minutes, ostensibly choosing a perfume for his wife's birthday, asking Lily to spray samples on strip after strip while his eyes tracked not the fragrance. She'd noticed because you always noticed, it was one of the things you learned in the first week, the difference between a man who was shopping and a man who was browsing you while pretending to shop. She'd steered him toward it, wrapped the bottle, taken his money, and sent him on his way with a smile that she'd dropped the instant his back was turned.
He set the Rackhams bag on the counter.
"I'd like to return this." He reached into the bag and produced the box, still sealed in its cellophane, the gold and red packaging catching the light from the overhead fixtures. "My wife doesn't want it."
Lily looked at the box. Looked at the clock. Twelve minutes.
"I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "Do you have the receipt?"
"No. I've lost it." He said this with the flat certainty of someone who had either genuinely lost it or had never intended to produce it. "But I bought it here. From you. Three days ago."
"I remember." She kept her voice pleasant. "Unfortunately, without a receipt, I'm not able to process a return. What I can offer is an exchange for a different-"
"My wife found the name offensive." He cut across her with the blunt force of a man who was used to being heard. "Opium. She thinks it's inappropriate. She said, and I'm quoting here, that she doesn't want to smell like a drug den."
Lily had heard variations of this complaint before. The name was controversial by design, that was half the point of it.
"I understand your wife's concern," Lily said. "The name is intended to evoke the exotic origins of the fragrance's-"
"I don't care what it's intended to evoke. She doesn't want it. I want my money back."
Ten minutes. The stasis charm was counting down like a bomb she'd set and walked away from, ticking steadily in a basement fifteen miles from here.
"Without a receipt, I'm afraid I can't issue a refund. Store policy. But I'd be happy to exchange it for another fragrance, or I could issue a credit note that you could use-"
"I was poorly advised." His voice had risen by half a register, enough to make Helen glance over from the cosmetics side. "You told me this was a popular choice. You said my wife would love it. Those were your exact words."
She had not said those words. She had said "Opium is one of our most sought-after fragrances" and "it's a wonderful gift for someone special," which were the scripts she'd been trained to use and which made no specific promises about any particular wife's reaction to any particular perfume. But correcting him would escalate things and escalation was a luxury she did not have.
Eight minutes. Maybe nine if the stasis held stronger than she'd estimated, but she couldn't count on that.
"I'd like to speak to the floor manager." He said this the way people said it when they'd decided that the person in front of them was an obstacle rather than a solution. "This is unacceptable service. I want to speak to someone in charge."
Mrs. Bissell was somewhere on the floor. Lily could feel her presence the way you felt a change in weather, a distant atmospheric pressure that would arrive at the worst possible moment. If she called Mrs. Bissell over, the situation would take at least ten minutes to resolve, possibly longer if Mrs. Bissell decided to use it as a teaching moment, which she would, because Mrs. Bissell had never encountered an opportunity to correct Lily that she hadn't seized with both hands.
The man was still talking. His mouth was moving and words were coming out, something about customer service standards and the principle of the thing and how he'd been shopping at Rackhams for fifteen years, and Lily watched his lips form shapes and heard nothing except the ticking of the clock inside her head.
She felt the magic before she'd made the conscious decision to use it.
The Confundus Charm was gentle. She made sure of that. Not the sledgehammer version you'd use in a duel, the kind that left people staggering and confused for hours, but a whisper, a feather-touch against the surface of his thoughts. Just enough to rearrange his immediate priorities, to make the complaint feel less urgent, the refund less important, the bottle in his hand perfectly acceptable after all. Like discovering you'd been upset about something and then forgetting why, the emotional equivalent of walking into a room and not remembering what you'd come in for.
The tension in his jaw softened. His grip on the counter relaxed. His eyes, which had been fixed on her with the hard, indignant focus of a man who intended to be heard, went slightly vague, then cleared, then settled into an expression of mild confusion that was almost comically different from the fury of ten seconds ago.
"Actually," he said, looking at the box in his hand as though seeing it for the first time, "maybe I'll give it another go. She might warm to it. The smell, the scent, it is quite nice, isn't it?"
"It's a beautiful fragrance," Lily said, and her voice came out steady and warm and not at all like the voice of someone who had just performed illegal magic on a Muggle in the middle of a department store. "I'm sure she'll love it once she's had time to wear it."
"Yes." He nodded, pocketing the box with the satisfied air of a man who had resolved a problem. "Yes, I think you're right. Thank you."
"You're welcome. Have a lovely evening."
He walked away. Lily watched him cross the perfume hall and disappear through the main doors into the June evening, the bag swinging at his side and the complaint forgotten.
Four minutes.
The cloth moved by itself, wiping surfaces while Lily's hands straightened bottles, her magic multitasking with the fluid efficiency of someone who had spent seven years pretending she wasn't using it while using it constantly. The display case locks clicked shut without being touched. The sample strips filed themselves into their holder. The cash drawer balanced itself, the coins rearranging into their proper compartments with tiny metallic sounds that she covered by humming.
Helen looked over as Lily grabbed her bag from under the counter. "You're in a rush."
"Appointment," Lily said, which was technically true if you counted a cauldron of degrading potion as something you could have an appointment with. "See you tomorrow."
She signed out at the staff entrance, the pen moving so fast across the register that her signature was an illegible scrawl, and she was through the door and into the alley before the pen had finished rolling to a stop. The alley behind the skip, her usual spot, the walls of the printer's shop and the fabric wholesaler closing, she turned on her heel and the world compressed.
The crack of her arrival echoed off the houses of Spinner's End. She hit the ground running, which was inadvisable after Apparition and resulted in a stagger that nearly sent her into the wall, but she caught herself and kept moving, key in the door, door open, hallway, basement stairs-
She nearly fell. Her foot caught on the top step and she pitched forward, grabbing the railing with both hands, her bag swinging wildly and cracking against the wall. The stairway to the basement was narrow and steep and entirely unforgiving, and she took it at a speed that would have constituted a hazard in any workplace, her shoes skidding on the stone steps, her heart hammering with the absolute certainty that she was too late.
The light was on.
The laboratory light, the single lamp that hung above the workbench, was on. It hadn't been on when she'd left that morning.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped.
Severus stood at the workbench with his back to her, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his wand resting on the bench beside him. The cauldron sat on its burner, the flame adjusted to the precise low heat that the Wiggenweld demanded, and the potion inside was, she could see from here, the correct shade of pale green and gently steaming.
As she watched, he lifted the stirring rod, tapped it once against the rim of the cauldron, and added the honewater in a single smooth motion, the powder hitting the surface and dissolving instantly into the green.
He didn't turn around.
"Your stasis work has gotten sloppy," he said to the cauldron. "You cast it too thin. It would have failed at ten past six, not quarter past."
Lily stood on the bottom step with her hand on the railing and her heart in her throat and watched him stir. His shoulders were tense, his jaw set in that particular way that meant he was doing something he hadn't quite decided to do, had been pulled into it by some force stronger than his resolve.
"The Flobberworm mucus is substandard," he continued, still not looking at her. "Whoever sourced it doesn't know the difference between fresh and thawed. You've been compensating with extra moondew, which works but reduces the shelf life by half-"
"Sev."
He stopped stirring. The potion continued its gentle rotation in the cauldron, carried by its own momentum.
"Thank you," she said.
She looked. He had, she noticed, reorganised the ingredient shelves. The jars were labelled in his handwriting, small and exact, the dates of acquisition and the potency grades noted in the margins. The cauldrons had been scoured. The burners had been serviced. The entire laboratory, which she'd been maintaining in a state of functional chaos, had been transformed into the kind of workspace she remembered from their school days: ordered, efficient, ready.
He'd been down here for hours.
"I said I wouldn't help," he said after a while.
"I know."
The Wiggenweld Potion was finished by eight. He ladled it into the thermos flasks himself, his hand steady, each flask filled to exactly the same level. He capped them, labelled them in his handwriting, and set them on the bench in a row.
They never discussed it. That was the trick of it, the unspoken contract that made the whole thing possible. She simply came home from work one evening to find the burn paste finished and labelled and stored in the cabinet. The next morning, before she left, she noticed the boomslang skin she'd prepared had been re-cut, the pieces now uniformly thin, laid out on the board with the care of a surgical demonstration. His hands had always been steadier than hers. That night, the second batch of blood-replenishing potion was at stage four, further along than she could have gotten it in the time available, the colour richer and more consistent than anything she'd produced on her own.
They'd always been better together than apart. That was true of most things, but it was truest at a cauldron.
Her notes migrated from the bench to a shared space. She'd come down in the morning to find his annotations in the margins, that cramped handwriting she knew better than her own: Temperature too high by 2 degrees. Stir count should be 7 not 6. This substitution works but degrades after 72 hours, use fresh or add stabiliser. She wrote back in her own hand, questions and observations and the occasional argument about methodology that played out in ink over several days, a conversation conducted in the margins of potion recipes because some things were easier to write than to say.
He brewed during the day, while she was at work. She'd come home to find him in the basement, sleeves rolled, hair tied back, the laboratory transformed from a dusty, underused space into something that looked the way he'd always meant it to.
She delivered the thermos flasks to Marlene on Saturdays and he never mentioned the Order. Never asked who the potions were for, or where they went, or what they were used for. She didn't tell him.
Y'all, I accidentally deleted a bunch of posts with the mass post editor :( That includes some of the fanfiction covers I did… The formatting on those posts, where I posted several together, takes ages, so I'm not going to repost them immediately.
If I deleted one that you'd like to have a copy of, send me a DM. I still have local copies.
Summary: An anthology of one-shots tracing what might have been between Lily Evans and Severus Snape, if they had chosen each other.
First chapter: July 1978. Lily drags Severus to Petunia's wedding. It goes about as well as expected.
Word count of chapter 1: 13,342 words
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
1978 - A wedding
July had forgotten itself. That was the only explanation. Somewhere between the solstice and today, the entire month had lost its nerve, retreating into a sulky grey drizzle that belonged to March and had no business squatting over Surrey in what was supposed to be high summer.
To her misfortune, Petunia had moved the wedding from May to July because May weather was "simply too unpredictable, Lily, you wouldn't understand, you've never had to plan anything important." The irony of this decision was obvious. Lily had checked the forecast that morning: rain until evening, temperatures barely scraping fifteen degrees, with a chance of "bright spells" at best.
Lily felt the familiar squeeze of Apparition release her ribs and stumbled slightly on landing, her heels sinking into soft earth. They'd materialized between two overgrown privet hedges at the edge of the property, hidden from the road by dense greenery that dripped steadily onto their shoulders.
"Bloody-" She spat out a mouthful of hedge. A twig had lodged itself in her hair, and something small and many-legged was making its way up her wrist.
"Elegant," Severus muttered, extracting his shoe from a particularly soggy patch.
"Would you have preferred the living room? Petunia would have had me arrested." Lily pushed a branch away from her face and peered through the gap in the hedge.
She'd been here once before, three weeks ago, when her mother had insisted on seeing Petunia's new house. The visit had lasted exactly forty-seven minutes, during which Petunia had given them the grand tour with the breathless pride of someone who'd escaped a burning building and built a palace on the ashes. Vernon had been at work, thankfully.
Now she was back, with Severus in tow, for what promised to be the longest day of her life. Her fingers twitched toward her pocket before she remembered it was empty because she was quitting smoking. They simply couldn't afford her habit.
"Remind me again why I agreed to this," he asked.
"Because I asked very nicely." She turned to face him and bit back a smile.
"You asked while I was half-asleep."
"You could have said no." She'd learned, over the past months, that there existed a window of approximately ten minutes after they'd worn each other out when Severus would agree to almost anything. It felt slightly underhanded to exploit it, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
"Could I?" The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile but close enough.
"You didn't." She reached up to straighten his collar, which didn't need straightening, just to have an excuse to touch him. "It's one day. A few hours, really. We'll eat some free food, watch my sister marry a man who sells drills for a living, and be home by dark."
"Fine," he said, in the tone of a man being led to the gallows.
Lily picked leaves from her hair and reached for her hat, which was no longer on her head. A glance back revealed it dangling from a branch, victim of the hedge.
The hat had been Petunia's choice. The dress too: brown grey, high-collared, buttoned to the throat, delivered with a note about Lily not being trusted to dress herself. She looked like someone's maiden aunt, the kind who collected commemorative plates and had strong opinions about Princess Margaret's divorce.
She rescued the hat and crammed it back on. It would photograph terribly. Good.
Then she stepped back to examine him properly and noticed the problem immediately. "Oh, for- hold still."
Black cat hair covered the left side of his jacket in a fine dusting, concentrated around the pocket where the beast liked to rub its face. She pulled her wand from the hidden pocket she'd added to the dress with magic and conjured a lint roller. The magic was simple, barely a flicker, but Severus's eyes darted toward the street anyway.
"Relax. No one's watching." She rolled the sticky paper over his lapel, his shoulder, down the arm of his suit, black as a funeral and slightly too large because he'd transfigured it from school robes and refused to adjust it further. "You'd think he did this on purpose.."
"I was sitting on the sofa. The beast climbed on me." He said this with the unconvincing indignation of someone who had been caught letting the cat sleep on his chest for an hour while pretending to read.
She finished with the lint roller, vanished it with a flick, and leaned up to press a quick kiss to his mouth. "There. Presentable."
He caught her elbow before she could pull away. "Lily."
"Mm?"
"If this goes badly-"
"It won't."
"If it does." His fingers tightened slightly. "I need you to know that I tried to warn you."
The thing was, she needed this. Needed to prove, to herself, to her family, to some invisible jury that lived in her chest and judged her constantly, that they could do this. That they could attend a wedding like any other couple, make small talk with distant relations, eat canapés and drink too-sweet wine and not cause a scene. That love hadn't made her strange, or stranger than she'd already been.
And if she was honest, she needed a day away from the wizarding world entirely, the fear, the headlines, the conversations she and Severus couldn't have without treading on old wounds. Even Petunia's wedding seemed preferable to another evening listening for bad news.
They emerged from the hedge in stages, first Lily, then Severus, both picking leaves off their clothes with the studied casualness of people pretending they hadn't just crawled through shrubbery. The front path was paved with the kind of pristine flagstones that suggested someone spent their weekends on hands and knees with a wire brush. Lily's heels clicked against them as she walked, the sound too loud in the quiet street.
Every house on Privet Drive looked exactly the same. They were surrounded by neat lawns, net curtains, cars in the driveways that probably got washed every Sunday. This was Petunia's dream made manifest: a place where nothing unexpected ever happened, where everyone was exactly like everyone else, where the word "magic" only appeared in cleaning product advertisements.
She pressed the doorbell. Quick footsteps approached from inside, and the door swung open before she could prepare herself.
Her mother stood in the doorway, resplendent in a dress Lily had never seen before, light blue, properly fitted, with a small corsage pinned to her shoulder. She looked beautiful, Lily thought with a pang, genuinely beautiful, her hair set in soft waves, a dusting of powder on her cheeks, the careful composure of a woman who had decided she would not cry until at least the speeches.
"Lily, you're-" Her mother's eyes moved past her and stopped. "Oh."
"Severus." Her mother's hand fluttered to her throat. "I didn't… Lily didn't mention…"
"Good morning, Mrs. Evans." The words came out starched, as though he'd rehearsed them.
Her mother stopped, shook her head, and visibly decided this was a problem for later. "Never mind. Come in, both of you. Wipe your feet properly, Petunia's just had the runner cleaned."
The hallway of her sister's home smelled of new carpet and artifical florals, lavender and roses, maybe, emitting from the air fresheners placed on the shoe cupboard. Family photographs lined the walls in matching frames: Petunia's school photo, a faded shot of their parents in front of a Christmas tree, Petunia's graduation, Petunia and Vernon at what looked like a work function, Vernon's family in front of a caravan. Lily spotted exactly one picture of herself, tucked away near the stairs, a childhood shot where she was missing her front teeth and her hair looked like she'd lost a fight with a bramble bush. Of course Petunia would choose that one.
Lily had barely made it to the sitting room, all cream upholstery and matching curtains and the sort of aggressive blandness that suggested strong opinions about what constituted taste, when she heard Petunia's sharp footsteps on the stairs.
Severus was just about to sit on the sofa, perched on the very edge of the cream cushions.
Before she could do something, Petunia already appeared in the doorway.
She was halfway into her wedding dress, the bodice half way done up but the back still gaping open, held together by her own arm twisted awkwardly behind her. Her hair had been sculpted into an elaborate construction of curls and pins that added three inches to her height, and she had the wild-eyed look of a woman who had reached the end of a very frayed rope.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then Petunia made a sound like a kettle reaching boil, a high thin whistle of barely suppressed hysteria, and Lily braced for explosion.
"Mum." Petunia's voice came out strangled. "Mum, why is he in my house?"
Their mother appeared behind Petunia, slightly out of breath. "Now, Petunia, let's not-"
"Why is he sitting on my sofa?" The pitch of her voice rose dangerously. "On my wedding day? In my sitting room?"
Severus wisely remained silent.
"The invitation said I could bring a guest," Lily said, and was surprised by how steady her voice came out. "I brought a guest."
Petunia's head swiveled toward Lily and her eyes narrowed. "A guest," she repeated. "You thought, on today of all days, you thought the appropriate choice was him??"
"You said plus one. He's my plus one."
"I said plus one because that's what wedding invitations say, Lily. I didn't think you'd actually-" Petunia cut herself off, pressing her free hand to her forehead as though checking for fever. "I can't do this. I cannot do this right now. The cars are coming in an hour and…."
Lily felt the familiar defensive anger rising in her chest, the same anger she'd been swallowing down since she was nine years old. She lifted her chin.
"We've brought a gift," she said, and turned to Severus. "Sev, give her the gift."
He looked at her with an expression that clearly communicated his feelings about being volunteered for this particular task. But he stood, crossed to where he'd left his coat, and withdrew the wrapped box from its pocket, still shrunken to the size of a matchbox. He restored it to its proper dimensions with a flick of his wand that made Lily wince. Not the moment for casual magic, but done was done.
Severus crossed the room and held out the box. The wrapping paper was pale pink, chosen specifically because Lily knew Petunia would like it.
Petunia stared at it like he was offering her a severed head.
"It's a gravy boat," Lily supplied, when the silence stretched too long. "You mentioned you didn't have one. For the roast dinners. Vernon likes roast dinners, you said."
Severus had called it the most pointless gift he'd ever heard of. A boat for gravy, he'd said flatly, when she'd shown him the object. Instead of just… pouring it from the pan like a normal person. This creates extra washing up for no reason for the muggles. She'd thrown a cushion at his head and told him he'd never be invited to a posh dinner party with that attitude, which had started a playful argument that carried them through the evening.
Petunia ,of course, didn't take the gift. She stared at Severus's outstretched hands, then at Lily, then at the box again.
"There's a gift table," she said, her voice gone high and tight. "At the reception. Where all the gifts go. That's what the gift table is for, Lily. What kind of wedding doesn't have a gift table?"
"We didn't know-"
"Everyone knows about gift tables! Everyone who's ever been to a wedding in their entire life knows about gift tables!"
Severus lowered the box slowly, uncertain, then passed it sideways to Lily without looking at her. Clearly this was not the moment.
From upstairs came the sound of a door opening, followed by concerned voices. One of the bridesmaids. Yvonne, Lily thought, the one with the aggressive perm, called down: "Petunia? Everything all right down there?"
Petunia's face contorted through several expressions before landing on a bright, brittle smile. "Fine!" she shouted back, her voice suddenly cheerful. "Just fine! Don't come down! Stay up there, I'll be right back!"
The door closed again. The smile dropped from Petunia's face quickly.
Their mother stepped forward, taking charge with the particular competence she reserved for crises. "Kitchen," she said firmly. "Both of you. Now."
She herded them through the hall with a hand on each daughter's elbow, the firm, practiced grip of a woman who had once separated two screaming children fighting over the last bottle of fizzy drink and had never quite stopped.
The kitchen was too bright after the sitting room, all those white surfaces reflecting the grey light from the window. Petunia stood with her back against the counter, arms crossed over her half-done dress, looking at Lily like she was the source of everything wrong with this morning.
"Did you curse it?" Petunia demanded.
"What?" Lily said, genuinely bewildered.
"The gravy boat. Did you curse it?" Her voice had dropped to a hiss. "Like you cursed that teapot? Is it going to start singing in the middle of Christmas dinner? Or will it just explode?"
Lily felt her patience fraying at the edges. "The teapot wasn't- I didn't curse the teapot, Petunia. It was enchanted."
"Oh, there's a difference, is there?"
"Yes, actually. A curse is-" She stopped herself. This was not the time for a lecture on magical theory.
"It's just a gravy boat. Look." She took the box and tore off the wrapping paper, the pale pink she'd asked the shop assistant to make especially neat, knowing her sister, and extracted the gravy boat itself, white china with a delicate blue pattern around the rim, perfectly ordinary, aggressively normal.
She flipped it over, shaking it for good measure. "See? Nothing. It's just a gravy boat. It pours gravy. That's all it does."
Petunia's eyes narrowed. "Are you mocking me?"
The Cokeworth was creeping back into Petunia's voice, the way it always did when she lost her temper. She'd always had to work harder at losing it than Lily, more years there, deeper roots, and Lily took a petty, private satisfaction in hearing it resurface now.
"What? No, I'm showing you-"
"Do you think I'm stupid?" The words came out sharp enough to cut. "You think I don't know a curse wouldn't just fall out if you tipped it over?"
"Petunia."
"He never apologized, you know." The words came from somewhere much older than this morning. "That awful boy in my sitting room. For the branch. He never once said he was sorry."
The branch. Lily remembered. It had been an accident, mostly, but Severus would sooner have drunk poison than apologise to Petunia, and Lily had never made him.
"That was almost ten years ago," Lily said. "We were nine. And it's not like a tree branch is going to hunt you down and fall on you in the middle of the church."
"It's not about the branch." Petunia's voice cracked on the last word.
"It was never about the darned branch, Lily. It's about-" She gestured wildly, encompassing the kitchen, the house, the world beyond. "It's about everything. It's about you and him and-"
Lily heard them anyway, the words Petunia wouldn't say: magic, witch, freak. They sounded ugly even unspoken.
"And since when are you two even-" Petunia waved her hand again, a sharp dismissive gesture. "Together? When did that happen? Did you just decide to spring this on me today, of all days?"
"We've been together since Easter."
"Easter." Petunia's laugh sounded like their mother's when she was truly furious. "Easter. And you didn't think to mention it? In all those phone calls where you pretended to care about my wedding?"
"I didn't pretend-" Okay, maybe she had pretended a bit, it was hard not to.
"Even you could do better than him, Lily. Even you." Lily flinched before she could stop herself. How dare she? "That greasy, skulking, strange boy from Spinner's End. The one who used to watch you from the bushes like some kind of-"
"We live together." The words came out before Lily could stop them, defensive and defiant. "We're very happy, actually."
Petunia looked at her as though she'd just announced she'd taken up ritual sacrifice. "You live together?"
"Yes."
"Unmarried?"
"Yes." Lily drew herself up, trying to channel every modern woman she'd ever read and heard about. "It's 1978, Petunia. People live together. It's not scandalous."
She thought about Severus sitting alone in the other room. About his ‘you could live here, if you wanted’, and how it had meant everything even though it came with no ring, no ceremony, no promise beyond the next day and the day after that. Which was all that she really needed, wasn’t it?
"Mum." Petunia turned to their mother, who had been busying herself straightening the tea towels, adjusting the position of the kettle, doing everything possible to avoid being drawn into the conversation. "Mum, did you know about this? Did you know she was living in sin with that-"
"Petunia, that's enough." Their mother's voice was tired.
Petunia sputtered. "She brings her miserable boyfriend to my wedding without asking, she's apparently been carrying on with him for months, and it's her own business?"
"Sit down." Their mother said as suddenly Petunia’s face was fading from red into grey. She was guiding her toward the kitchen table, one hand firm on her shoulder. "Sit down before you fall down. Your face has gone all red, if you sweat now, we'll have to start over with the hair, and there isn't time."
"I can't sit down, the dress will-"
"Perch, then. Carefully." Their mother pulled out a chair. "I mean it, Petunia. You already nearly fainted once. We can't have that again."
Petunia lowered herself onto the edge of the chair, still holding her dress together at the back. "It was Marge," Petunia muttered, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.
"She insisted on staying here the night before with those horrible bulldogs, because the hotel wouldn't accept dogs, as if that's my problem, and it got into the flowers, ate half the boutonnieres, and then she had the nerve to say they probably disagreed with his stomach and could I get him some bicarbonate of soda. As if I keep bicarbonate of soda for dogs." Petunia's voice had taken on a wobbling, dangerous quality.
"And then the bakery called to say the cake topper had arrived damaged, and I had to send Fiona out to get a different one last minute, and it's raining, it's July and it's raining, and now this."
Her breathing had gone strange, Lily noticed. Quick and shallow, her chest rising and falling too fast beneath the bodice of her dress.
"Petunia?" Their mother leaned down, concerned. "Petunia, breathe. Slowly. In through your nose-"
"I can't-" Petunia's hand flew to her chest. "I can't breathe, I can't- this corset is too tight, I told the seamstress it was too tight, but she said it was supposed to be-"
"Mum, she's-"
"I know, I can see." Their mother was rubbing Petunia's back, making soothing sounds. "Petunia, love, you need to calm down. Think about Vernon. Think about the honeymoon. Two weeks in Costa Brava, remember? You've been looking forward to it for months."
Lily looked around the kitchen, searching for something that might help. A paper bag, maybe, wasn't that what you were supposed to breathe into? But she didn't see one, just the-
There. On the counter by the window. A bottle of wine, already opened, probably from whatever pre-wedding celebration the bridesmaids had been having upstairs.
Lily grabbed it and thrust it toward her sister. "Here. Drink this."
Petunia's hand shot out and seized the bottle with the desperation of a drowning woman grabbing a rope. She brought it to her lips and drank, great gulping swallows that made her cough and sputter because she was still breathing too fast at the same time.
"Slowly," their mother urged. "Petunia, slowly-"
The bottle tilted too far, her shaking hands unable to control it. She gasped as red wine splashed down the front of her wedding dress in a dark crimson wave.
For one frozen moment, nobody moved.
Lily watched the stain spread across the white silk, blooming outward like blood from a wound. The dress, the dress that Petunia had spent months choosing, that she'd had fitted four separate times, that she'd shown Lily photographs of with pride, was ruined.
Lily's hand was moving before she'd consciously decided to act, reaching for her wand where it was hidden up her sleeve. A simple cleaning charm, that's all it would take. Three seconds, maybe less, and the dress would be pristine again.
Her fingers closed around the wood just as Petunia's scream split the air. She stared at the spreading stain like she couldn't understand what she was seeing, her mouth open, her fingers trembling an inch above the ruined silk.
Their mother stood frozen, one hand still on Petunia's back, staring at the ruined dress with an expression of dawning horror.
Footsteps thundered on the stairs.
"Petunia? Petunia?" Yvonne's voice, shrill with alarm. "What's happened? We heard-"
The kitchen door burst open and the bridesmaids poured in, Yvonne with her perm, and two others Lily vaguely recognized from the engagement party, their matching lavender dresses creating a pastel wall of concern.
"Oh my God," one of them breathed.
She raised her hand to her head instead of casting the spell, scratching at her scalp with the wand's tip like it was a pencil she'd forgotten she was holding. Just a piece of wood. Just an absent-minded gesture. Nothing to see here.
The bridesmaids rushed forward, exclaiming, reaching for Petunia. Their mother was saying something about cold water and salt. Petunia had started crying, great heaving sobs that shook her whole body.
"Upstairs." Their mother's voice had gone calm in that particular way that meant she was barely holding herself together. "Bathroom. Now. We need to get that dress off before the stain sets."
She hauled Petunia up from the chair, one arm around her waist, already steering her toward the door. Petunia moved like a sleepwalker, staring down at the crimson bloom spread across her bodice with the hollow expression of someone watching their house burn down.
"Lily, come with us. I'll need help with… the buttons."
Lily followed them through the sitting room, painfully aware of Severus still perched on the sofa, where she had left him, watching the procession with the wary stillness of someone who'd wandered into the wrong room and couldn't find the exit.
The bathroom was at the end of the upstairs hallway. Their mother guided Petunia inside and immediately started working on the buttons at the back of the dress, her fingers moving with the efficiency of someone who had dressed and undressed children for many years.
"What have you got for stains?" she asked, not looking up. "White vinegar? Bicarbonate of soda? Salt, at least?"
Petunia shook her head, a jerky motion that sent one of her carefully pinned curls tumbling loose. "I don't… we only just moved in, the boxes aren't even all unpacked yet, I don't know where anything-"
"Have I taught you nothing?"
"The cleaning supplies are still downstairs somewhere…" Petunia's voice cracked. "I don't know, Mum."
The bridesmaids clustered in the doorway, craning to see, too many bodies for the tiny space.
"Help me get this off her. Carefully, don't pull, you'll tear the fabric."Their mother said tersely, finally getting the last button undone.
They maneuvered the dress over Petunia's head in a complicated operation that required four pairs of hands and the kind of teamwork usually reserved for bomb disposal. Petunia emerged from the silk cocoon in just her slip with her elaborate hairdo now listing dangerously to one side.
"My dress," she whispered. "My dress."
The bathroom had never been meant for this many people. Lily pressed herself against the sink, out of the way, while the bridesmaids surrounded Petunia with tissues and murmured reassurances. Petunia sat on the toilet lid and wept, her sobs coming in small hiccups that shook her bare shoulders.
"We'll fix it." One of the other bridesmaids assured her. "It's not that bad. Maybe if we soak it in cold water-"
"You can't soak silk in cold water, it'll water-mark."
"What about club soda? My mum always uses club soda."
"Does anyone have club soda?"
"I don't think Petunia has anything, she just said-"
"Lemon juice? Vinegar? There must be something in the kitchen."
The blonde bridesmaid, was rubbing Petunia's back in slow circles. "It's going to be fine, darling. It's going to be absolutely fine. We'll sort it. Nobody will even notice."
"It's on the bodice," Petunia whispered. "The front. Everyone will-"
"The bouquet will cover it," another bridesmaid offered. "You'll be holding your bouquet and nobody will-"
"I'm not holding my bouquet for ten hours, Karen."
Guilt sat in her stomach heavy as a stone. She'd known this would happen. Not this exactly, but something. She'd known and she'd come anyway.
"Everyone out." The words left her mouth before she'd fully decided to say them. "I need… we need a moment. Family only."
Yvonne's head snapped up. "But we're trying to help-"
"I know. And we appreciate it. But we need to discuss something privately." Lily met her mother's eyes over Petunia's bowed head, trying to communicate please, just go along with this. "Family discussion."
"She's right," she said, straightening up with the dress draped over her arm. "Give us five minutes. Go check on the flowers or something."
The bridesmaids exchanged uncertain glances, but something in their mother's tone didn't invite argument. They filed out one by one, Yvonne shooting Lily a sharp look as she passed, and then the door clicked shut behind them and it was just the three of them.
Their mother hung the dress on the back of the door, where the stain was fully visible in the harsh bathroom light, an ugly dark splotch that covered most of the bodice, the red wine already oxidizing to a brownish purple at the edges. She turned to Lily.
"Fix it."
Lily blinked. "What?"
"The dress. Fix it." Their mother's voice was flat, matter-of-fact. "I know you can. I've seen you mend things before, that time you burned a hole in your jumper with a cigarette and it was perfect again by morning." She gestured at the ruined silk. "This is just a stain. You can fix a stain."
"No."
Petunia's voice cut through the bathroom like a blade. She'd stopped crying, Lily realized. Her face was blotchy and red, her mascara ruined, but her eyes had gone hard with something that looked almost like hatred.
"Absolutely not." Petunia stood up from the toilet, drawing herself up to her full height in her slip and ruined hairdo, somehow still managing to look formidable. "I won't have it. Not today. Not on my wedding day."
Lily had known she would say that. Had known it from the moment the wine hit the silk. But hearing it stung.
"Petunia-" their mother started.
"No, Mum. I mean it." Petunia's chin was trembling, but her voice stayed steady. "I have spent months planning this wedding. Months. Every detail, every flower, every napkin fold, I did it myself because I wanted it to be perfect."
She looked at Lily with an expression that was almost pleading beneath the anger. "Can't you understand that? Can't you give me just one day where everything is ordinary?"
"I wasn't trying to-"
"You brought him." The word dripped with contempt. "To my wedding. Without asking. And now…" She gestured at the dress, at the bathroom, at the whole catastrophic morning.
Her eyes found Lily's and held them. "After this, I never want anything to do with any of this freakishness again. Ever. You can live your life and I'll live mine, and we'll pretend the other doesn't exist."
The words hit Lily harder than she'd expected.
"Fine." Lily forced the word out past the tightness in her throat. "Suit yourself."
A knock at the door made them all jump. Yvonne's voice came through, muffled but urgent.
"Mrs. Evans? We've had an idea. Sandra knows there's a Waitrose about ten minutes away, and there's a Sainsbury's in the other direction. If we split up, we can check both, one of them's bound to have proper stain remover. The kind for silk, maybe, or at least-"
Their mother was already opening the door. "That's good thinking. Yes, do that."
The bridesmaids clattered downstairs, already sorting themselves into groups, debating cars and directions with the renewed energy of people who finally had something useful to do.
"What about Boots?" Their mother had switched into organizational mode. "Lily and I will try Boots. They might have something in the chemist section, fabric treatments, maybe, or, it's worth checking."
"And I'll stay here." Petunia's voice was small, defeated. "In case, in case Vernon calls, or the car arrives early, or-"
"You'll stay here and rest." Their mother said. "Put a cold flannel on your face to bring down the swelling."
Lily followed her mother in a daze, her mind still stuck on Petunia's words.
In the sitting room Severus had found a copy of Good Housekeeping from somewhere and was clearly not too impressed with the article about casserole dishes that the cover had advertised. He looked up, his expression questioning.
She opened her mouth to ask if he wanted to come, to rescue him from the cream damask purgatory of Petunia's sitting room, but her mother's hand closed around her elbow before she could get the words out.
"Come on," her mother said, already pulling her toward the front door. "We haven't got time to waste."
Lily looked back over her shoulder as she was towed outside.
The Boots on the high street was well-lit and smelled of soap and cheap perfume. Lily followed her mother down the aisles, past the cosmetics counter where a bored-looking girl was restocking lipsticks, past the pharmacy queue where an elderly man was arguing about his prescription, toward the cleaning supplies section at the back of the store.
"What about this one?" Lily picked up a bottle at random, something called Stain Devils, with an optimistic devil mascot on the label.
Her mother took it from her, examined the back, and set it down again with a sigh. "That's for cotton and polyester. Don't you know anything?"
"I thought stain remover was stain remover."
"And that's exactly the problem, isn't it?" Her mother moved down the aisle, scanning the shelves. "You've never had to learn any of this. Wave your wand and everything's fixed. Why bother knowing what works on silk versus wool versus-"
"Mum."
"I'm just saying." She picked up another bottle, squinted at the instructions, put it back. "There are consequences to not knowing how the normal world works. Today being a prime example."
Lily bit the inside of her cheek and said nothing.
Her mother stopped in front of a display of specialty fabric treatments, her back to Lily. "You shouldn't have brought him."
"Severus hasn't done anything wrong." The words came out more defensive than she'd intended. "He's been perfectly acceptable. He sat quietly on the sofa, he didn't say an unkind word to Petunia, he's been the most well-behaved person in that house, and that includes the bridesmaids, one of whom suggested putting lemon juice on satin-"
"That's not what I mean, and you know it."
"He's my boyfriend, Mum. He's practically family at this point."
Her mother turned to face her, and the expression on her face made her feel about six years old.
"It's your sister's wedding day," she said quietly. "Her big day. And you knew how she felt about him. About all of it. And you brought him anyway."
"The invitation said-"
"I don't care what the invitation said." Her mother's voice was still quiet, but there was steel underneath it now. "You could have come alone. And it's not kind, Lily, making Severus sit through all this just so you can make a statement."
Lily opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. Because her mother wasn't entirely wrong, was she?
Her mother selected two bottles from the shelf, one promising to work on "delicate fabrics," another specifically mentioning silk, and headed for the register without waiting to see if Lily followed.
The queue was short, just one woman ahead of them buying nappies and formula. Lily stared at the impulse-buy display next to the till, travel-sized shampoos, breath mints, novelty keyrings, and tried to think of something to say that would make this better.
"You know," her mother said, not looking at her, "you and Petunia might have been closer if your father were still here."
She hadn't expected her father to be brought into this, not today, not in the middle of Boots.
"It started well before Dad died," she said, and her voice came out too flat. "You know that. It started when I met Severus. When I was nine."
"It started before that." Her mother moved forward as the woman ahead of them finished paying. "But he wouldn't have let it get this far."
The cashier rang up the stain removers, and her mother paid with exact change from her purse, the coins clicking against the counter one by one. The ordinary sounds of the transaction felt very far away.
"Come on," her mother said, tucking the paper bag under her arm. "We haven't got time to stand about."
They pulled up to Number Four, Privet Drive to find the other cars already back, parked haphazardly along the kerb. Her mother wrestled the Austin into a space at the end of the row, her parking as uncertain as ever. Through the front window, Lily could see movement, figures in lavender clustered around something, their body language suggesting excitement rather than crisis.
"Looks like someone found something that worked," her mother said, but her voice remained cautious.
Inside, the atmosphere had transformed. The bridesmaids were gathered in the sitting room, clustered around the wedding dress which now hung from the picture rail, displayed like a trophy. They were making sounds that Lily associated with baby mammals and engagement rings, soft oohs and aahs and little gasps of amazement.
"-completely gone, can you believe it-"
"-like it never even happened-"
"-must have been the cold water, I told you cold water was the trick-"
Lily stopped in the doorway, staring. The dress was returned to immaculate. Not just clean, like it had never happend. The wine stain had vanished entirely, leaving the white silk pristine and unmarked, as though the last hour had been nothing but a bad dream.
Petunia stood to one side, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression sour despite the miracle. She was calmer now, but she wasn't happy. She was watching the bridesmaids fuss over her dress with the tight-lipped tolerance of someone accepting a gift she hadn't wanted.
Movement on the sofa caught Lily's eye. Severus sat exactly where she'd left him, his expression the perfect mask of someone who had done nothing whatsoever and would swear to it under Veritaserum.
He looked up and met her eyes.
She knew. Instantly, completely, without him having to say a word. She knew what he'd done.
She smiled at him, a real smile, the first one she'd managed all morning, and he smiled his little one back. It was a small smile, barely a twitch of his lips, but she saw it.
She turned to her mother, who was still staring at the dress with an expression of confused relief, and raised her eyebrows slightly. See? He's not the problem.
Before she could cross the room to sit with him, Petunia's voice cut through the bridesmaids' chatter.
"Lily. Upstairs. Now."
The bedroom had been transformed into a beauty salon. Every surface was covered with makeup bags, hot rollers, hairspray cans, and the scattered bobby pins and tissues and the emergency sewing kit someone had thought to bring. The air was thick with competing perfumes and the chemical smell of Elnett.
The atmosphere, Lily noticed immediately, was tense. They were walking on eggshells.
Petunia sat at the main vanity, watching in the mirror as Yvonne applied her lipstick carefully. Her instructions had been specific and repeated: nothing too dark, nothing too bright, nothing that might look "common" or, the word had been deployed like a weapon, "slutty".
"Natural," Petunia had said. "Elegant. Like Princess Anne. Do you understand?"
The bridesmaids understood. They'd been understanding all morning, their own makeup muted and tasteful, their hair arranged in styles that complemented rather than competed.
Lily hovered near the door, feeling out of place in her unflattering dress and the wide-brimmed hat, miraculously still pinned in place. One of the bridesmaids, noticed her and gestured toward an empty chair.
"Come sit. We'll do your face before we run out of time."
Lily lowered herself into the chair, settling the hat in her lap, watching in the mirror as Sandra assessed her. The makeup spread out on the table was extensive, foundations and powders and things Lily couldn't name, all in shades of pink and peach and subtle coral.
"You've got good bone structure," Sandra said, selecting a brush. "This won't take long. Close your eyes."
Lily closed her eyes and tried to relax as Sandra began applying foundation with quick, practiced strokes. The brush was soft against her skin, almost soothing. She could hear the other bridesmaids murmuring to each other and Petunia issuing quiet corrections about eyeshadow color.
"Wait a moment."
The voice came from across the room, one of the other bridesmaids, a girl with a round face and a slightly nasal voice that Lily didn't recognize. She was staring at Lily with an expression of dawning recognition, her mascara wand frozen halfway to her eye.
"I know you."
Lily's stomach dropped.
"I've been trying to work it out all morning," the girl continued, moving closer, her head tilted to one side.
"I kept thinking, where do I know her from? And then just now, when you took the hat off, it clicked." She turned to Petunia with a smile that was clearly meant to be friendly.
"She came to Grunnings! Back in, when was it? 1976ish? She came to the office looking for you, and you said-"
The room went quiet and still.
Lily remembered. Of course she remembered. The typing pool, the blue carpet, the way Petunia had looked at her colleagues and said, clear as day: I don't know her.
"You said you didn't know her." The girl's smile was faltering now, confused by the sudden tension. "But this is your sister, isn't it? Lily?"
"Shut up."
Petunia's voice cracked. She'd risen from the vanity, her half-finished makeup giving her an oddly asymmetrical appearance, one eye done and one bare. Her hands were clenched at her sides, and Lily could see the familiar signs of an approaching storm, the white knuckles, the rigid spine, the high spots of colour on her cheeks.
"Petunia, I wasn't trying to-" the girl started.
"How dare you." Petunia advanced on her, and the girl took an instinctive step backward, bumping into the dresser. "How dare you suggest there's something not normal about my family. How dare you imply-"
"I wasn't implying anything! I just thought it was funny that you said-"
"My family is perfectly normal." Petunia's voice had gone ice-cold.
"Perfectly ordinary in every way. And that includes my sister." She seemed to struggle for a moment, searching for the right words. "I was obviously joking that day at Grunnings. Obviously. Anyone with half a brain would have known it was a joke."
The girl, Lily still couldn't remember her name, looked desperately around the room for support, but the other bridesmaids had suddenly become very interested in their own reflections. No one was jumping in to save her.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice small. "I didn't mean-"
"No." Petunia cut her off with a sharp gesture. "No, you've made your feelings quite clear. You think there's something wrong with my family. You think we're strange."
"I don't! I really don't, I just-"
"Take off the dress."
The words fell into the room like stones into still water. The girl blinked, uncomprehending.
"What?"
"You heard me. Take off the dress." Petunia's chin was raised, her expression imperious. "You're no longer a bridesmaid. My sister will take your place."
Lily felt the blood drain from her face. "Petunia, that's not-"
"I didn't ask your opinion." Petunia didn't even look at her.
The room had gone absolutely silent. The girl, the former bridesmaid, stood frozen, her mouth opening and closing without sound.
"Better hurry. We haven't got all day."
What followed was the most uncomfortable five minutes of Lily's life. The girl retreated behind a changing screen, her quiet sniffles audible to everyone, and emerged in her slip clutching the lavender bridesmaid dress to her chest. She handed it to Lily without meeting her eyes, then put on the clothes she came in and gathered her things, handbag, coat, the small gift bag she'd brought, and left without another word.
The front door slammed. Through the window, Lily watched her hurry down the garden path, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Well?" Petunia had returned to her seat at the vanity, examining her reflection as though nothing had happened. "Put it on. We're running out of time."
Lily changed behind the same screen, her hands shaking slightly as she struggled with the zip. The dress was too big, the other girl had been taller, broader in the shoulders, and when she emerged, she could feel the excess fabric pooling at her waist, the high neckline gaping where it should have sat snug.
She looked ridiculous. She'd traded one disaster for another, really. At least this one hadn't been specifically chosen to make her look terrible.
A knock at the door made everyone freeze mid-motion: a bridesmaid with a pin between her teeth, another halfway through blending Lily's eyeshadow, Petunia examining her reflection yet again. Lily knew that knock. She'd heard it through through bedroom doors and bathroom doors and the door of every room she'd ever occupied while he waited on the other side.
"Cars are here." Severus's voice came through the wood, slightly muffled. "Your mother says it's time to go."
Lily moved before anyone else could react, slipping toward the door and opening it just wide enough to squeeze her upper body through, blocking the gap.
He stood in the narrow hallway, still in his dark suit, his expression the carefully neutral mask he wore in hostile territory. His eyes flickered over what he could see of her, the unfamiliar colour at her shoulder, the way she was hiding behind the door, and one eyebrow rose slightly.
"What happened to your dress?"
"Change of plans." She kept her voice low, conscious of the bridesmaids just feet away. "Petunia's made me a bridesmaid."
The eyebrow climbed higher. "She what?"
"Long story. One of the other girls said something, Petunia got upset, and now-" She gestured vaguely at herself. "Now I'm a bridesmaid. Apparently."
"She's punishing you."
"She's not-" Lily started, then stopped. Because maybe he was right. Maybe this was punishment, Petunia's way of putting her in her place, of making her ridiculous in front of everyone. Making her wear a dress that didn't fit, stand up in front of a church full of strangers, to play a role she'd never been honestly offered.
"She's my sister," Lily said quietly.
"You shouldn't have to-"
"I know." She reached out and touched his arm, just briefly, a stolen moment of contact. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."
"I always worry." The words came out almost grudging, like an admission he hadn't meant to make.
Something warm bloomed in her chest. "About me?"
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Of course about you. Who else would I worry about?"
Her heart did the thing. The stupid, fluttering, teenage thing that she'd assumed would fade with time and hadn't, that she suspected would still be happening when she was forty and going grey and he was still sighing at her like she was the most exhausting thing he'd ever encountered.
"We'll be down in a minute," she said instead. "Don't wait for me, go with Mum. I'll see you at the church."
He nodded, his hand brushing hers as he turned to go, and then she was slipping back through the door into the chaos of the bedroom.
"The cars are here," she announced. "We need to go."
What followed was a flurry of last-minute adjustments, a final spray of hairspray, a touch-up of lipstick, someone's heel strap that had come undone. Petunia stood at the center of it all, being fussed over by three bridesmaids at once, her expression distant and rigid with tension of someone who had been holding themselves together for too long.
Then they were moving, a parade of lavender and white down the narrow staircase, through the sitting room and out the front door into the grey mist.
The threatened drizzle had finally arrived, not proper rain but a fine mist that clung to hair and fabric, too light for umbrellas, too persistent to ignore.The bridesmaids clustered on the front step, arms wrapped around themselves, shivering in their thin satin dresses.
Petunia was shivering too, Lily noticed. The wedding dress, for all its elaborate construction, was clearly not designed for an English July masquerading as the bleakest parts of April. Goosebumps had risen on Petunia's bare arms, and her jaw was set tight against the urge to let her teeth chatter.
A line of cars waited at the kerb, gleaming black Daimlers with white ribbons on the bonnets, looking almost absurdly formal against the backdrop of identical suburban houses. Lily spotted her mother climbing into one of the rear vehicles, Severus following behind her.
"Lily. You're with me."
Petunia had already reached the lead car, where a driver in a peaked cap was holding the door open. She stood waiting, her train gathered over one arm to keep it from the wet pavement, looking like a queen who expected her subjects to hurry up.
Lily hurried. Brides had their own kind of magic, she supposed, the kind that made everyone else orbit around them, at least for a day.
The interior of the Daimler was cream leather and polished wood and she settled onto the seat beside her sister, arranging her borrowed dress as best she could, trying not to take up too much space. The driver closed the door, sealing them into a bubble of quiet, and then they were moving, pulling away from her sister's new home.
Petunia stared straight ahead, her hands folded in her lap, her bouquet, white roses and stephanotis, resting on the seat between them. She hadn't stopped shivering.
There had to be something she could do.
Lily reached for the pendant. Her fingers found it where it always was, resting in the hollow of her throat, warm from her skin. The chain was delicate, the oval small enough to sit in the centre of her palm, the relief of St. Hedwig more memory than image now under years of wear.
She unclasped it. Closed her eyes. Focused.
The warming charm was simple, something she had mastered before Hogwarts. She'd done it a thousand times with a wand, a hundred times without. The magic came easily, flowing through her fingertips and into the metal, heating it gently, steadily, the kind of warmth that would seep through fabric and into skin and settle into bones.
She reached over and fastened the chain around Petunia's neck.
Petunia startled, her hand flying up to touch the unfamiliar weight.
"What-"
"You're cold," Lily said, and gently tucked the pendant beneath the high collar where no one would see it. "It'll help."
Petunia's fingers traced the outline of the medallion through her dress, pressing it against her sternum. The shivering was already subsiding, the magic doing its work.
"I should have fought you for this." Petunia's voice was strange, instead of cold and angry it was just tired. "He was my father too."
"I know."
"You just, took it. Like everything else. Like it was yours by right."
Lily could have argued, but she didn't.
"You can keep it," she said instead. "Have your turn."
"How very kind of you." But she made no move to remove it, and her fingers remained curled around the shape of it.
Lily said nothing and just watched the rain streak down the window.
The Daimler pulled up to the lychgate, and Lily could see the other bridesmaids already clustered in the covered porch, their lavender dresses bright spots of colour against the ancient stone. They were huddled together like penguins, arms wrapped around themselves, their carefully styled hair already beginning to wilt in the damp.
No sign of her mother. No sign of Severus. They must have already gone inside.
The driver came around to open the door, umbrella at the ready, and Petunia emerged in a careful maneuver that involved gathering her train, protecting her veil, and somehow maintaining the serene expression of a woman who had never experienced physical discomfort in her life. Lily followed less gracefully, the too-big dress threatening to trip her with every step.
"Finally," Yvonne said as they approached, her teeth chattering slightly. "We've been standing here for ages. It's absolutely freezing-"
"It's not cold at all." Petunia's voice was calm, almost pitying. "I don't know what you're all complaining about. It's perfectly pleasant."
The bridesmaids exchanged glances, the kind that questioned someone's sanity without saying so directly. Sandra had gone slightly blue around the lips, and the remaining bridesmaid whose name Lily still couldn't remember was visibly shaking.
Lily bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning.
"Stop slouching," Petunia snapped at no one in particular. "We're about to walk into a church, not a chip shop. Shoulders back. Chins up. And for God's sake, stop shivering, it looks common."
From inside the church, the first notes of the processional began to drift through the heavy oak doors.
"Right," Petunia said. She drew herself up to her full height, adjusted her veil one final time, and turned to face the doors. For a moment, she looked almost like a stranger. Then she looked like their mother. Then, just for a heartbeat, she looked like their father.
The music swelled, and Petunia began her walk.
The church was smaller inside than Lily had expected, somehow, the kind of place that looked impressive from the outside but revealed itself as intimate once you were within its walls. Stone pillars marched down either side of the nave, and the light filtering through the stained glass windows cast patterns of red and blue and gold across the worn flagstones.
Every pew was full on the right side of the aisle, Vernon's side, Lily realized, taking in the sea of unfamiliar faces. Vernon's family, his colleagues, his friends from the rugby club or the golf course or wherever it was that people like Vernon spent their weekends.
The left side, the bride's side, was noticeably emptier. A scattering of faces Lily half-recognized: A scattering of faces Lily half-recognized from photographs and stilted visits: women from the Grunnings typing pool, perhaps a few from Petunia's secretarial course, others she couldn't place at all.
And there, in the very front, sitting very straight in a pew that was otherwise empty: Severus and her mother.
Severus looked deeply uncomfortable, which was to say he looked the way he always looked in social situations. His dark suit stood out among the lighter colours around him, and his expression suggested he was enduring rather than participating.
Lily was supposed to keep her eyes forward, she knew. Supposed to glide serenely down the aisle like the other bridesmaids. But she couldn't help it, as she passed their pew, she raised her hand and wiggled her fingers at Severus in a small wave.
His expression shifted into something incredulous, a look that clearly communicated: What are you doing? Have you lost your mind entirely?
She grinned at him.
Yvonne shifted closer, her bouquet somehow managing to whack Lily's arm. Pay attention, that glare said. This is a wedding, not a joke.
Lily faced forward again, still smiling.
The altar was decorated with white flowers, roses and baby's breath, arranged in elaborate sprays that must have cost a fortune. Candles flickered in their holders, and the vicar stood waiting with his prayer book, looking exactly like every Church of England vicar Lily had ever seen.
And there was Vernon.
He stood at the front of the church like a boulder that had somehow acquired a morning suit. The suit was clearly expensive, probably the most expensive thing he'd ever worn, but it didn't quite fit. The jacket strained across his shoulders and back, the buttons pulling slightly, the fabric stretched tight over his considerable bulk. His face was red, whether from nerves or the warmth of the church or something else entirely, and when he caught sight of Lily among the bridesmaids, his small eyes widened in obvious surprise.
The ceremony proceeded according to its ancient formula. The vicar spoke the familiar words, dearly beloved, gathered here, holy matrimony, and the congregation responded in the expected ways. Vernon's voice boomed when he made his vows, too loud for the intimate space. Petunia's was quieter, almost trembling, but steady when it needed to be.
Lily stood with the other bridesmaids, holding her little bouquet, watching her sister become someone's wife.
They caught her by surprise, a sudden tightness in her throat, a prickling behind her eyes, and then moisture spilling down her cheeks before she could stop it. She wasn't even sure what had triggered it. The words, maybe, those ancient phrases about love and honour and forsaking all others. Or the way Petunia's voice cracked, just slightly, when she said "I do." Or the expression on her sister's face when Vernon slid the ring onto her finger.
Two people standing before God and everyone they knew, promising to build a life together. Promising to choose each other, every day, for the rest of their days.
Till death do us part.
Her eyes found Severus without meaning to, as they always did.
The vicar was calling for the final hymn. The congregation rustled to its feet, prayer books opening, throats clearing in preparation for the one part of the service where participation was expected.
Jerusalem. Of course. What else would Petunia choose but the most traditional, most English, most aggressively normal hymn in the entire Anglican repertoire?
The voices rose around her, some confident, some mumbling, Vernon's baritone drowning out everyone in his immediate vicinity. Lily sang the words she'd known since primary school, letting the familiar melody carry her along.
She looked toward Severus again. He was standing with everyone else, holding a hymn book that her mother had clearly thrust into his hands, but his mouth was barely moving.
Her mother noticed. Of course her mother noticed, she noticed everything, especially when it came to social impropriety. Her elbow shot out, catching Severus in the ribs.
The Daimler had been decorated while they were inside for photographs, an awkward affair, the whole wedding party crammed into the nave because the rain made outdoor shots impossible, everyone jostling for position while the photographer grew increasingly flustered. Now white ribbons streamed from the mirrors, paper flowers stuck to the bonnet, and a string of tin cans tied to the rear bumper clattered and clanged against the wet road as the car pulled away from the church. The guests lined the church steps, cheering and waving, arms raised as they threw the last handfuls of confetti. Somewhere in the crowd, an elderly woman was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
"Bit silly, isn't it?" Severus said, watching the car disappear around the corner, tin cans bouncing in its wake. "The reception's just round the corner. They could have walked."
"It's romantic."
"It's a waste of petrol."
"It's tradition." Lily slipped her hand into his, twining their fingers together. "The grand departure. The start of their new life together. The tin cans are meant to ward off evil spirits, you know. Or maybe bring good luck. I can never remember which."
"Muggles," Severus said, but there was something almost fond in his voice. Or at least less contemptuous than usual.
They walked to the reception together, following the stream of guests down the high street toward the hotel. Around them, other guests huddled under inadequate umbrellas or hurried along with newspapers held over their heads. Lily and Severus strolled at a leisurely pace, the rain subtly parting around them in a way that was entirely coincidental and not at all magical. Her hand stayed in his the entire way.
Some of Vernon's relatives shot them curious looks as they passed. Whether it was the dryness, the hand-holding or the ill-fitting bridesmaid dress or Severus's general air of not belonging, Lily couldn't tell. She kept her chin up and her grip firm, and after a while she stopped noticing the stares at all.
The hotel was the nicest in the area, the sort of place Petunia had probably been dreaming about since she'd first started planning her escape from Cokeworth. All manicured hedges and uniformed doormen and the quiet hush of money being spent without being discussed.
The gift table stood just inside the entrance, already groaning under the weight of wrapped packages. Lily deposited the gravy boat among them, its pink paper the only spot of colour on the whole table.
"Do you think they'll actually use it?" Severus asked, eyeing the pile of gifts with the expression of someone calculating how many cauldrons could be purchased for the same amount.
"Probably not. But that's not the point."
"Then what is the point?"
"The point is-" Lily paused, trying to articulate something she'd never really thought about before. "The point is showing up. Being part of it. Even if what you bring isn't perfect, even if they don't really want it, you showed up. You tried."
Severus looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, just once, and didn't ask any more questions.
The receiving line stretched from the function room doors halfway back to the entrance, a queue of guests waiting to offer their congratulations to the happy couple. Lily took her place at the end, Severus beside her with his arm stiff under her hand, and tried to prepare herself for the gauntlet ahead.
"Not difficult to spot the Dursley side, is it?" Severus murmured.
"Shh."
"There's a certain… consistency of form."
Vernon’s family was impossible to miss, and she couldn't argue. They dominated the line like a herd of well dressed elephants, large and loud and taking up more than their fair share of space. The men had Vernon’s ruddy complexion and thick necks straining against their collars, while the women wore floral prints that strained across their ample bosoms and spoke in voices that carried across the entire lobby.
The line crept forward. As they drew closer to the front, Lily became aware of a sound that made her stomach clench, a wet, snuffling noise, punctuated by the occasional yap. There were dogs in the receiving line.
Marge Dursley stood just ahead of them, unmistakable in a tweed suit that spoke of shooting parties and prize-winning hounds. She had a bulldog tucked under each arm, their wrinkled faces peering out at the world with expressions of squashed contempt. A third dog sat at her feet, straining against its lead, drool pooling on the hotel carpet.
"Basher, sit," Marge commanded. The dog ignored her entirely, its beady eyes fixed on Lily with what she could only interpret as malevolent interest.
Lily pressed closer to Severus, her hand tightening on his arm.
Marge was moving forward now, depositing the dogs on the carpet,enveloping first Petunia (who endured the embrace with visible discomfort) and then Vernon (who seemed genuinely pleased to see his sister) in suffocating hugs. The dogs yapped and squirmed.
Then it was finally their turn.
Petunia and Vernon stood side by side at the head of the receiving line, positioned in front of an elaborate flower arrangement that probably cost more than everything Lily owned. Petunia had refreshed her makeup since the ceremony, the tear tracks were gone, her lipstick perfect, her expression carefully composed. Vernon beamed beside her, his face still flushed, sweat beginning to bead at his temples despite the air conditioning.
"Congratulations," Lily said, and was surprised to find she meant it. "Both of you. Really."
Petunia's eyes flickered to Severus, standing silent at Lily's shoulder, then back to her sister. "Thank you for coming."
It was the closest to warmth they'd managed all day.
"And you must be-" Vernon had turned his attention to Severus, his small eyes taking in the dark suit, the sallow complexion, the general air of someone who would rather be anywhere else. "I don't think we've been properly introduced."
He thrust out his hand. It was large, pink, and slightly damp-looking. Lily watched Severus calculate whether refusing to shake it would cause more trouble than it was worth.
Lily caught his eye and gave him a look. Please. Just this once. For me.
Something in his jaw tightened, but he reached out and took Vernon's hand. The handshake lasted about as long as politeness demanded and not a second longer.
"Vernon Dursley," Vernon announced, puffing up slightly. "Assistant Manager of Production at Grunnings. We make finest drills." He said this as though it were an achievement on par with curing disease or landing on the moon. "And you are?"
"Severus Snape."
A pause. Vernon waited, clearly expecting more, a title, a company name, some indication of status and respectability.
Petunia had been watching this exchange with an expression Lily didn't trust, a small, sharp smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The kind of smile that usually preceded something unpleasant.
"Vernon, darling," Petunia said sweetly, "I ought to say, Severus isn't one of those magical people. Despite appearances." She let the pause hang in the air, let the implication sink in. "He's perfectly ordinary. Aren't you, Severus?"
Lily saw Severus go rigid, saw the colour drain from his face and then rush back in an angry flood.
Before Lily could respond, before she could think of something to say that wouldn't start a scene, Vernon was clapping Severus on the shoulder forcefully.
"Good man!" Vernon's voice boomed across the receiving line. "It takes a certain kind of character, doesn't it? Looking past the… the strangeness." He nodded toward Lily, not bothering to lower his voice.
"Can't have been easy, taking her on. All that peculiar business. But you've looked beyond it, haven't you? Very decent of you. Very decent indeed." He leaned in conspiratorially, though his whisper was loud enough to carry. "I hope she's properly grateful, eh? Not every man would be so understanding."
Lily couldn't help it. The giggle escaped before she could stop it, a small, startled sound that she tried to disguise as a cough. Because this was absurd.
Severus's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Vernon nodded sagely, as though Severus had agreed with him. "I said the same thing to Petunia when we first started courting. I said, 'Pet, I don't care about your family's… peculiarities. I can see that you are perfectly ordinary underneath all that.' And look at us now!" He gestured at the flower arrangements, the white tablecloths, the entire elaborate production of normality surrounding them. "She's very grateful for it, aren't you, Pet?"
"Very," Petunia said, obviously very pleased with herself.
Vernon nodded approvingly. "Well, we shouldn't hold up the line. Enjoy the reception! Open bar until nine, and Petunia's insisted on a chocolate fountain for pudding. Very modern, apparently."
Severus's expression had gone through several phases, shock, outrage, confusion, and finally settled on something that might have been bewildered amusement. His black eyes met Lily's, and she could see the same realization dawning in them. Is this man serious? Does he actually believe…?
She grabbed Severus's hand and pulled him away before he could recover enough to say something that would ruin the rest of the afternoon.
Their table was positioned at the very back of the function room, tucked into a corner near the service doors where waiters appeared and disappeared with trays of glasses. Table fourteen, according to the little card with the calligraphed number, the last table, the furthest from the head table where Petunia and Vernon sat in state surrounded by immediate family and important guests.
Lily suspected this placement was not accidental.
A feedback squeal from the microphone at the head table made everyone wince. Vernon's father had risen to his feet, a sheaf of papers clutched in one meaty hand, his face already flushed from the pre-dinner drinks. He was an older, heavier version of Vernon, the same small eyes, the same thick neck, the same air of self-satisfaction that seemed to be a Dursley family trait.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he boomed, "if I could have your attention please…"
The speech was long. Interminably, excruciatingly long. Vernon's father spoke about the proud Dursley family history (solid, respectable, and blisteringly dull for at least a century), about Vernon's many accomplishments (Assistant Manager of Production at only twenty-six!), about Petunia's beauty and grace and what a fine addition she would be to their family. He made jokes that weren't funny and paused for laughter that came too late and too thin.
When he finally turned to acknowledge her mother, And of course we must thank Mrs. Evans for raising such a lovely daughter," he announced. Lily raised her glass with everyone else, watching her mother beam at the head table. Such a lovely daughter. Singular. She kept her smile fixed and drank.
Vernon's speech was mercifully brief, a few words of thanks, a declaration of undying love for his "Pet", a nickname that made Lily cringe even after hearing it hundreds of times, a toast to the bridesmaids that she was apparently now included in. He raised his glass, everyone drank, and then it was the best man's turn.
The best man was one of Vernon's colleagues from Grunnings, a nervous-looking man named Gerald who kept adjusting his tie and clearing his throat. His speech was an attempt at humour, gentle ribbing about Vernon's obsession with company targets, some innuendo about dipping pens in company ink, a joke about a mishap with a drill demonstration that fell flat, some wordplay about "boring" that made Severus actually groan aloud.
"And now," Gerald said, visibly relieved to be nearing the end, "I have some telegrams from those who couldn't be with us today."
He produced a stack of cards and began to read. Congratulations from Vernon's aunt in Devon. Best wishes from a school friend now living in Australia. Then a message from someone at Grunnings head office that was clearly a form letter with the names filled in.
"'Wishing you a lifetime of happiness and a partnership as solid and reliable as Grunnings' product line,'" Gerald read. "From the board of directors."
Vernon looked genuinely moved, and Severus raised one eyebrow approximately half an inch, which for him was equivalent to howling with laughter.
"Shh." She squeezed his arm in warning, but her heart wasn't in it.
The telegrams eventually concluded, the applause scattered, and finally the waiters began to emerge from the kitchen with plates of food.
The chicken was overcooked and the vegetables had been boiled into mushiness, but Lily didn't care. She was hungry enough to eat the tablecloth, and from the way Severus was attacking his plate, he felt the same. They ate in companionable silence while the conversation at other tables rose and fell around them.
Halfway through the main course, Lily noticed Severus doing something odd with his napkin. He'd carefully separated a portion of chicken from the rest of his plate and was wrapping it in his handkerchief with the furtive movements of someone committing a minor crime.
It was for the cat, she realized. Of course it was for the cat.
She wanted to kiss him. Right there, in the middle of her sister's wedding reception, surrounded by Dursleys and drills and overcooked chicken. She wanted to grab his face and kiss him senseless because he was stealing food for their cat and acting like it was the most normal thing in the world.
She ate her vegetables instead, but she was smiling.
The cake was a towering confection of white fondant and sugar flowers, impressive enough to draw murmurs of appreciation from the crowd as it was wheeled out on a trolley. Petunia and Vernon posed beside it with a ceremonial knife, hands clasped together, smiling for the photographer. The flash went off. Everyone applauded.
"Good thing we're sitting back here," Severus murmured, leaning close enough that his breath tickled her ear. "If that suit of his finally gives up the ghost, we'll be safely out of range of the buttons."
She elbowed him in the ribs, but she was laughing. A few heads turned in their direction, and she pressed her hand over her mouth, trying to contain it.
"You're one to talk. Yours is practically falling off you."
He didn't argue, which was as close as he ever came to admitting she was right.
The cake was being cut now, Petunia guiding the knife with white-knuckled grace while Vernon hovered beside her looking vaguely dangerous with a sharp implement in his hand. Slices were distributed to the waiting crowd, passed from hand to hand until everyone had a plate.
The cake itself was traditional fruit cake, dense, dark, studded with candied fruit and soaked in alcohol. Lily took one bite and felt her face contort involuntarily.
"Not a fan?" Severus asked, already halfway through his slice.
"It tastes like Christmas died and they preserved the body in Brandy."
Severus was now eyeing hers with transparent interest. "Are you going to eat that?"
"Merlin, no." She pushed her plate toward him. He accepted it with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose evening was improving, and proceeded to demolish both pieces while she watched half impressed, half nauseated.
The evening reception began as the daylight faded and the room filled with additional guests, people who hadn't merited invitations to the ceremony but were welcome for the drinking and dancing portion of the festivities. The atmosphere shifted, loosened, the stiff formality of the wedding breakfast giving way to something more relaxed as alcohol flowed and ties were loosened and uncomfortable shoes were kicked under tables.
Severus had gone to investigate the buffet, a sprawling arrangement of sausage rolls and vol-au-vents and other beige foods that appeared to be mandatory at English social functions.Lily watched him navigate the crowd, shoulders hunched, moving through the press of bodies like a man trying not to touch anything. A crow in a cage of canaries.
She was still watching when someone dropped into the empty chair beside her.
"Bit boring, isn't it? These things always drag on."
The voice belonged to a young man she vaguely recognised. One of the ushers, she thought, a friend of Vernon's with sandy hair and a smile that had clearly opened doors for him before. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar, the universal signal of a man settling in for a long night of drinking. He'd angled his chair toward her and was leaning in with the confidence of someone who'd already had enough drinks to think himself interesting.
"I'm Martin," he said, extending a hand. "I don't think we've been introduced. You're one of the bridesmaids, yeah? I noticed you during the ceremony."
"Lily." She shook his hand briefly and let go quickly and hoped he would take the hint. "I'm the bride's sister."
"So you're the sister, then?" His brow furrowed. "Petunia's sister? Are you sure?"
She gave him the look that question deserved. Of course, she was sure.
"Okay, that was a stupid question." He leaned closer, breath sweet with champagne. "She never mentioned she had a sister. Funny, that. You'd think it would come up."
"Would it?" It shouldn't have surprised her. It did anyway.
"Beautiful girl like you, I'd mention you all the time. If you were my sister, I mean. Not that I-" He laughed, running a hand through his hair. "That came out wrong. Very wrong. What I meant was-"
A plate appeared between them, deposited on the table with enough force to rattle the silverware. Martin looked up to find Severus looming over him, visibly calculating which curse wouldn't warrant Ministry attention.
"You're in my seat."
"Oh, I was just-"
"Leaving." Severus's voice was flat, final. "You were just leaving."
Martin looked at Lily, perhaps hoping for rescue. She offered none. After a moment that stretched just long enough to be uncomfortable, he mumbled something about needing another drink and retreated toward the bar.
Severus took the vacated seat and slid a plate toward her, a careful selection from the buffet, arranged so that nothing touched.
"Friend of yours?"
"Never met him before in my life."
"Mm." He stabbed a cocktail sausage with unnecessary force. "He seemed very interested in getting to know you."
"Jealous?"
"Somewhat." But the corner of his mouth twitched, just slightly. "Eat your food before it gets colder."
The first dance was announced with great ceremony, a calling for everyone to clear the floor, the lights dimming to something meant to be romantic, Petunia and Vernon taking their positions in the center of the room. The song was something slow and traditional, strings swelling through the speakers as they began to sway in what might generously be called a waltz.
Lily and Severus had retreated to chairs along the wall, most of the tables having been removed to create space for dancing. They sat side by side watching the spectacle with weariness and unease.
They watched as other couples joined Petunia and Vernon on the floor, parents, wedding party members, guests emboldened by alcohol and romance. Even Lily's mother was persuaded onto the floor by Vernon's father, who turned out to be surprisingly light on his feet for a man of his dimensions.
"We should probably-" Lily started.
"No."
"I was going to say we should probably stay exactly where we are."
"Then we're in agreement."
The dancing was mostly terrible, a lot of shuffling and stepping on feet and enthusiastic spinning that threatened nearby furniture.
"We'd be worse than that," Lily observed.
They sat in comfortable silence as the music changed, something more upbeat now, and the dance floor filled with bodies.
The bouquet toss was announced with a squeal from one of the bridesmaids, Yvonne, pink-cheeked from dancing, grabbing Petunia's arm and insisting it was tradition, she had to do it, all the single girls were waiting.
Petunia looked like she'd rather swallow glass, but the bridesmaids were persistent and the DJ was already calling for unmarried women to gather on the dance floor. A cluster began to form, giggling and jostling for position, hands raised in anticipation.
On the dance floor, Petunia had been maneuvered into position with her back to the crowd, the bouquet clutched in her hands like a weapon she wasn't sure how to deploy.
She stayed in her chair, pushed against the wall where the tables had been, her empty plate balanced on her knee. Around her, the room surged forward, a press of women in party dresses and heels jostling for position, hands raised, laughter sharp and competitive.
Because catching it would mean turning around, bouquet in hand, flushed and laughing, and looking for him. And he would be sitting exactly where he was now, and his face would do whatever his face did when confronted with the implication of marriage, and she wasn't sure she could survive what that expression might be.
Because she did want to get married.
Petunia threw the bouquet. A shriek went up, a brief scuffle, and then one of Vernon's cousins emerged victorious, clutching the flowers while her competitors tried not to look as disappointed as they clearly were.
Lily pressed a smile onto her face and clapped along, and then the music started again and the moment passed and she was still in her chair, still beside him.
"Would you want to get married?"
The question came from beside her, quiet enough that she almost missed it under the noise of the reception. She looked up to find Severus watching her, his dark eyes intent on her face.
Her heart stopped. Started again too fast.
The plate on her knee tilted and she caught it, the last crumbs scattering, but she barely noticed. This was it, she thought. This was the moment he told her that he couldn't imagine it, that marriage wasn't for him, that she needed to accept the limits of what they had or find someone else.
She could lie. Could say no, marriage doesn't matter, I don't need a ring or a ceremony or any of that. Could protect herself from the rejection she could feel coming.
But she couldn't really say no. Because no was a lie, and she had promised herself years ago that she would never lie to him about the things that mattered. She would lie about finishing his biscuits and about how much she'd spent on boomslang skin and about whether his hair looked all right, but not about this.
She sat there, caught between the two impossibilities, wanting and terrified in equal measure. The Fleetwood Mac song was building to its chorus.
"Yes," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. "I would. Want that."
She braced herself for the withdrawal. For the careful step backward, the change in him, the beginning of the end. She would lose him, not all at once but by degrees, the way she'd almost lost him before, the slow fade of someone walking away down a very long corridor.
Instead, he nodded slowly, as though she'd confirmed something he'd been calculating.
Severus looked down at his hands, folded in his lap, and said: "I can't give you a wedding like this."
Lily blinked. "What?"
"This." He gestured vaguely at the reception, the flowers, the cake, the hundreds of guests in their expensive clothes. "Any of this. Not now. Probably not… not for a long time. I can't afford it."
"Severus-"
"But after we've finished our apprenticeships." He still wasn't looking at her, his voice stiff and formal, like he was reciting something he'd rehearsed. "Once we're both established. After there's enough. If you wanted to plan something. I wouldn't… I could…"
He trailed off, apparently running out of prepared speech.
Lily stared at him. The noise of the reception seemed to fade, the music and laughter and clinking glasses all going distant and muffled. She was having trouble breathing.
"Are you-" She had to stop, swallow, try again. "Severus, are you asking me to marry you?"
A muscle twitched in his cheek, and he looked to her for an answer. "If you wanted to."
Lily stared at him.
She'd known him for nearly ten years. He still found ways to surprise her.
S E P T E N N I U M (125,602 words, completed, Snily) Click here to read
June 1969 was when the word found her - witch - delivered by a strange, disheveled and sharp-elbowed boy called Severus.
In the soot-stained heart of Cokeworth, far from enchanted castles and moving staircases, Lily Evans and Severus Snape stole seven summers from time's stubborn march. Between broken bones and mended grudges, between flowers blooming out of season and roots that refused to take, Lily learns that magic has its limits, but still her hands keep reaching, reaching, reaching.
The Friendship of Lily Evans and Severus Snape - From 1969 to 1975
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE (82,377 words and more coming, Pansy/Neville) Click here to read
A Canon divergent AU. Harry Potter died, while Neville Longbottom became the Boy Who Lived and little that followed stayed the same.
Pansy thought being sorted into Gryffindor was rock bottom, until a troll incident had her inexplicably befriending Neville Longbottom and Ron Weasley of all people. Now she's handling toads, stalking suspicious professors through corridors, and discovering that spite makes for terrible life decisions but surprisingly solid friendships.
From Year 1 to Year 7 - a canon rewrite
I've uploaded chapter 6 of "Fortune Favors the Brave"!
You can read it here on Ao3 (and below on Tumblr)
Pairing: Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson
Year 3 - (1/3) - ictus (17,356 words)
The Hogwarts Express pulled away from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and Pansy watched the crowd shrink through the window until the platform finally disappeared, at first slowly then very fast. She settled back against the seat.
She'd survived it. Barely.
Her trunk sat in the overhead rack, heavier than last year. Mrs. Weasley had made her finish every summer assignment before September, had sat with her at the kitchen table night after night, the same way she'd apparently sat with Bill and Charlie and Percy and the twins and Ron and Ginny, year after year, guiding them through Potions essays and Transfiguration diagrams with a patience that made Pansy want to scream. She'd done it anyway. Three rolls of parchment on the uses of moonstone. Two feet on the Goblin Rebellions. A full chart of Jupiter's magical influences that Professor Sinistra might use as an example for the rest of the class.
It felt strange, having finished things. Having done them properly.
The train picked up speed. Fields blurred past the window, green and gold under the September sun. Ron had commandeered the entire opposite bench and sprawled across it like he owned the thing. Pansy sat with her feet tucked beneath her, watching the countryside scroll by, and neither of them mentioned the third seat. The empty one by the door. The one they'd saved without discussing it.
They'd seen Neville on the platform. Seen him standing beside his grandmother in her vulture hat, trunk levitated behind them, Trevor's tank clutched against his chest.
Twenty minutes out from London, the compartment door slid open.
Neville stood in the corridor. He looked apologetic, because of course he would. Trevor pressed against the glass of his tank, throat pulsing.
"Neville," Pansy said.
He stepped inside. Closed the door behind him. Sat down in the empty seat like he'd been there all along.
Ron's voice came out flat. "Oh, so you're allowed to talk to us now, are you?"
"Ron-" Pansy started.
"No, I want to know." Ron sat up, all the lazy sprawl gone from his posture. "Platform's right there, we're ten feet away, and you walk past like we're strangers. Your gran snaps her fingers and suddenly we don't exist? That's how it works?"
Neville flinched. His hands tightened around Trevor's tank.
"She made me promise," he said. "On the platform. She was watching. If I'd-" He stopped. Swallowed. "She said I wasn't to speak to either of you until we were out of her sight. That the friendship was over. That you'd- that you'd both-"
"But I'm here now," Neville said. "I'm here, and I don't care what she said, because you're my best friends and she's wrong about both of you, and I'm not- I won't-"
His words ran out.
"Your grandmother," she said, "is a deeply unpleasant woman."
Neville let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah."
Ron hadn't moved. His jaw was tight, arms folded, and Pansy could see him working through it. Finally he exhaled and slumped back against the seat.
"If your gran ever pulls that again, I'm sending her a Howler."
"She'd probably send it back unopened too," Neville said.
Neville set Trevor's tank on the seat beside him, and the toad pressed his face against the glass and stared at them all with bulging, judgmental eyes.
Outside, the fields gave way to moorland. The sun slipped behind a bank of cloud.
Pansy became aware of the cold gradually. The compartment had been warm when they boarded, that close, stuffy warmth of a train in early September, but something had shifted in the air. A chill crept through the window seams. She shivered and tugged her sleeves down over her fingers.
"Cold in here," Ron said.
Pansy reached over and pulled the window shut. It didn't help. If anything, the temperature dropped further, a deep and settling chill that had nothing to do with drafts. She pulled her legs up onto the seat and wrapped her arms around them.
Her jumper wasn't enough. The purple wool that had seemed so warm at the Burrow did nothing against this.
"Here." Neville shrugged off his jacket, brown corduroy, too big for him, probably a hand-me-down from someone with broader shoulders, and held it out. "Take it."
"I don't need-"
"Pansy. Take the jacket."
She took the jacket. Drew it around her shoulders and held the lapels closed at her throat.
"Thanks," she muttered.
Neville nodded. He was shivering now too, but he didn't ask for it back.
Trevor had gone still in his tank. The toad's throat wasn't pulsing anymore. He crouched in the corner, motionless, and then all at once he threw himself against the glass with a wet thwack that made them all jump.
"Trevor!" Neville lunged for the tank. Trevor scrambled against the glass, trying to find purchase, desperate to escape something none of them could see. Neville fumbled with the lid, got it open, scooped the toad into his hands before he could leap for the door. "Trev, it's fine, it's-"
Then Neville's breath hitched. He made a sound Pansy had never heard before, a high, tight wheeze like his lungs had forgotten how to work. His face had gone grey.
"Neville?" Pansy reached for him. "Neville, what's-"
"Something's wrong." Ron had moved to the window, pressing his face against the glass to see down the length of the train. "We've stopped. Why have we stopped? We're not anywhere near-"
The lights went out.
Pansy heard herself make a noise, a small, startled sound that disappeared into the dark. The cold was inside her now, not just around her. She could feel it in her chest, heavy and spreading.
Neville was still wheezing. She could hear him across the compartment, fighting for each breath, and she couldn't see him. She couldn't see anything.
Then the door slid open.
A wand tip flared to life and behind the light stood a man in Auror robes, Ministry insignia on his shoulder. His face was forgettable. Grey eyes, thin mouth, the kind of bland features that belonged behind a desk.
Behind him, in the corridor, something else waited.
Pansy knew what it was before she saw it clearly. The shape in the doorway: tall, hooded, hovering rather than standing. The way the cold intensified as it drifted closer, as if the thing was the source of it, as if it radiated winter from beneath its ragged cloak.
Dementor.
"Compartment search," the Auror said. His voice was clipped, professional. "Ministry orders. We'll need to check your belongings."
"Could you-" Pansy heard the words leave her mouth and couldn't stop them. "Could you make it leave? The- that thing behind you. I don't…"
She'd seen them before. At the Ministry, when they'd brought her in for questioning. They'd lined the corridor outside the courtroom, dozens of them, and she'd walked between them with her wrists in chains and felt the cold reach inside her and find everything she'd tried to bury.
The Auror glanced over his shoulder like he'd forgotten the dementor was there. "It won't enter unless there's cause. Standard procedure. Won't take a moment."
It drifted closer. Pansy could see the edge of its hood now, the darkness where a face should be. The cold found her bones. Found the hollow spaces where Tom had lived.
She wasn't in the train anymore. She was in the Chamber, water around her ankles, the basilisk coiled in the shadows. She was watching her own hands cast spells she'd never learned, feeling her mouth shape words in a language she didn't speak.
The fang in her hand. The diary on the stones. The way her fingers wouldn't stop shaking as she raised the-
"-Pansy. Pansy."
Someone was gripping her arm. She blinked and the Chamber dissolved and she was back in the compartment, Ron's fingers digging into her wrist hard enough to bruise.
"Snap out of it," he said. His face was very close to hers.
She couldn't answer.
Ron's eyes cut sideways. "Neville, mate. You breathing?"
"Mostly." Neville's voice came out thin, reedy. "I'm okay. I think."
The Auror was saying something. Ron twisted to look at him, and Pansy heard the conversation distantly, as if through water.
"-what exactly are you searching for? Does this have something to do with what happened last year?"
"Can't discuss ongoing investigations."
"Right, but you can drag that thing through a train full of students-"
"The Ministry's authority extends to-"
"I know what the Ministry's authority extends to, my dad works there-"
The Auror had moved to their luggage. He pulled down Pansy's trunk and flipped the latches, began sorting through her things with efficient and impersonal hands.
His hand moved toward her toiletry bag.
Pansy lunged. She ripped the trunk out of his grip and clutched it against her chest, and some part of her knew she was being ridiculous, knew that Ron was grey-faced and sweating, that Neville had slumped sideways against the window and looked like he might actually lose consciousness, but the thought of this stranger pawing through her things, finding her sanitary towels, holding them up in front of the boys while that thing hovered in the doorway-
"I'll search it myself," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Tell me what you're looking for and I'll show you it's not there."
The Auror regarded her for a moment. Then he shrugged, already turning toward Ron's trunk.
"We are searching for a rat." He flipped open Ron's bag and began rifling through it. "You can check your own things if you prefer. Makes no difference to me."
Pansy clutched her trunk and didn't let go until he'd finished with Ron's, with Neville's, until he'd swept his wand through the compartment one final time and declared them clear.
"Stay in your seats until we're moving again," he said. "Shouldn't be long."
He stepped back into the corridor. The dementor followed him, drifting away down the train, and the cold began to recede like a tide pulling back from shore.
The door slid shut.
Pansy sat frozen with her trunk in her lap, Neville's jacket still around her shoulders, and listened to the sound of Neville's breathing slowly steady into something that didn't sound concerning.
The train didn't move again for another three hours.
They sat in the dark compartment while the Aurors worked their way through every carriage, every trunk, every corner where contraband might hide. Pansy kept Neville's jacket around her shoulders and her trunk in her lap and didn't speak. None of them did.
When the wheels finally began to turn, it was past eleven. The countryside outside had gone fully dark, no moon, just the black shapes of hills against a blacker sky. Neville had fallen asleep with his head against the window, Trevor's tank balanced on his knees. Ron stared at nothing with the fixed expression of someone replaying something unpleasant behind his eyes.
They'd finally arrived at the tail end of everything, the last stragglers from the train, stumbling through the entrance doors while the rest of the school sat already sorted and settled. The House tables stretched the length of the room, packed with students, candles floating overhead, the enchanted ceiling showing nothing but unbroken black.
The Gryffindor table was full.
Pansy scanned the benches, looking for three seats together, and found none. The few gaps that existed were scattered, one near the first years, one halfway down beside a cluster of fifth years, one at the very end where no one wanted to sit because the drafts from the entrance hall cut straight through.
"I'll take the end," Ron said. "Neville, you go by the first years, Pansy-"
"I see it."
The gap was two-thirds of the way down, between a group of fifth-year girls and a pair of fourth-year boys. Enough space for one person, if they didn't mind squeezing. Pansy straightened her shoulders and walked toward it.
She'd almost reached the bench when one of the fifth years looked up. The girl's eyes went wide. She grabbed her neighbour's arm and whispered something, and suddenly all four of them were shifting, not to make room for Pansy, but away from her, pressing together toward the other end of the bench as if proximity to her might be catching.
On the other side, the fourth-year boys had noticed her too. One of them gathered his plate and goblet and relocated three seats down without a word.
Pansy stood there. The gap had widened now, enough for two people, maybe three, and no one was moving to fill it.
She sat down. Pulled an empty plate toward her. Kept her spine straight and her face blank and didn't look at anyone.
The Sorting had already begun. McGonagall was reading names from her scroll, and a line of first years waited by the stool, fidgeting and terrified. One by one they tried on the Hat. One by one it shouted a House name and they scurried to their tables.
She wondered sometimes what would have happened if she'd let it sort her properly.
Probably they'd hate her too. Just for different reasons.
"Moore, Simon!"
"RAVENCLAW!"
The last first year scurried to his seat. McGonagall rolled up her scroll and carried the Sorting Hat away, and the Hall fell into expectant silence as Dumbledore rose from his chair.
"Welcome," he said, "to another year at Hogwarts. Before we begin our feast, I have several announcements that cannot wait."
The silence deepened and Pansy saw students exchanging glances down the length of the tables.
"As many of you will have noticed during your journey here, the school is under heightened security this year. Aurors from the Ministry have conducted searches of the Hogwarts Express, and similar measures will continue throughout the term." Dumbledore paused. Let the words settle. "This is not a decision I made lightly, nor one I made alone. The Ministry has deemed it necessary, and I have agreed to cooperate… to a point."
Someone coughed. The sound echoed in the vast space.
"The reason for these measures is simple, though not pleasant. Over the summer, the fugitive Peter Pettigrew was spotted on Hogwarts grounds."
The Hall erupted. Pansy heard gasps, whispers, someone at the Hufflepuff table saying who? in a voice loud enough to carry. She didn't know the name either, not immediately, but something about it snagged in her memory. Something she'd read, or overheard, or-
"Pettigrew was a supporter of Lord Voldemort," Dumbledore continued, and the whispers cut off like someone had cast a Silencing Charm. "He has been in hiding since he managed to escape from Azkaban. His presence at Hogwarts, if confirmed, represents a serious threat to the safety of this school."
"To address this threat, the Ministry has stationed Dementors at the school's entrance and around its boundaries. They are here to assist in the search for Pettigrew and to apprehend him if he is found." Dumbledore's voice had gone hard. "I want to be clear with all of you: the Dementors are not your friends. They do not distinguish between the fugitive they hunt and the students who cross their path. You will avoid them. You will not approach them. You will not, under any circumstances, attempt to leave the castle grounds without staff supervision."
The candles flickered.
"Now," Dumbledore said, and his tone shifted, still serious, but lighter, as if he was deliberately steering them toward safer waters. "On to happier news. I am pleased to announce two new additions to our staff this year."
He gestured toward the High Table. Pansy's eyes followed the motion and found Hagrid, seated at the far end, humongous and beaming so broadly she could see the gaps in his teeth from across the Hall.
"Our own Rubeus Hagrid has agreed to take on the position of Professor of Care of Magical Creatures, in addition to his duties as gamekeeper."
Applause broke out at the Gryffindor table, genuine, enthusiastic, the first warm sound of the evening. Pansy clapped along with the rest, watching Hagrid's face go red beneath his beard. He raised one enormous hand in acknowledgment and nearly knocked over his goblet.
"And finally," Dumbledore continued, "I would like to introduce our new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor."
He turned toward the centre of the High Table, and a woman rose from her chair.
Pansy recognised her immediately.
She'd seen her at Hogwarts the year before, one of the Aurors stationed in the castle after the Chamber was opened, patrolling the corridors in Ministry robes, wand always at the ready. Pansy had passed her a dozen times in the halls. Had noticed her without really seeing her, the way you noticed furniture or suits of armour. Another adult with a badge and a grim expression. This one just happened to have a pretty face.
But now she was standing in front of the entire school, and Pansy looked at her properly for the first time.
Red hair. Not Weasley red, darker, richer, the colour of autumn leaves before they fell. Soft features and sharp eyes. The kind of face that might have been warm once, before something had taught it not to be.
Evans-Potter, Pansy thought, and the name clicked into place.
She'd seen it in the gossip columns. In Rita Skeeter's society pages, usually accompanied by some photograph of this woman looking unhappy at a Ministry function. Lily Potter, widow of the late James Potter, mother of the Boy Who Almost Lived. The stories were always the same, tragedy, loss, the dead husband and the dead son and the woman who'd survived them both.
Pansy looked at the High Table, then at Neville, then back again. Neville had gone, if possible, even paler. He was staring at the new professor with an expression Pansy couldn't read.
"Lily Evans-Potter," Dumbledore said. "Senior Auror with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and, as of this year, your Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor."
Evans-Potter inclined her head slightly. Then Dumbledore motioned for her to speak, and she stepped forward, and her voice carried across the Hall without any apparent effort.
"Thank you, Headmaster." She didn't smile. "Most of you won't remember me from last year, but I was stationed here after the Chamber of Secrets was opened. I saw what happened to this school. I saw what happened to its students."
Her gaze swept the Hall. For one terrible moment, Pansy was certain the eyes had found her, had picked her out of the crowd and recognised her as the girl who'd done it.
Then the gaze moved on, and Pansy could breathe again.
"I'll be honest with you," Evans-Potter continued. "I thought anyone who agreed to teach here after that had to be out of their mind. The fact that I'm standing in front of you now should tell you something about my sanity."
A few nervous laughs.
"I'm not here just to teach you how to defend yourselves, though I will do that. I'm here because Peter Pettigrew needs to be found before he can hurt anyone else. I'll be leading the search alongside the Ministry's Auror contingent." Her voice hardened. "If any of you see anything suspicious, anything at all, you come to me. Not to the Dementors. Not to the other Aurors. Or other Professors. To me. Is that understood?"
Silence. Then murmurs of assent rippled through the Hall.
"Good." Evans-Potter sat back down. "Enjoy your feast."
Someone started clapping. A few others joined in, then stopped when they realised no one else was committed to it.
Pansy looked toward Neville.
She knew exactly what Neville was thinking. She could trace the path of it without effort, the guilt that lived in him like a second heartbeat, the conviction that he should have died instead, that Harry Potter deserved the survival that had been wasted on him. He would spend the whole year apologising for being alive. He would look at Lily Evans-Potter and see an accusation in every glance, whether it existed or not.
The feast began. Food appeared on the golden plates. Students reached and chattered and laughed.
The walk to Gryffindor Tower had never felt so long.
Pansy kept her eyes fixed on the back of the student in front of her, some fourth-year boy she didn't know, broad-shouldered and oblivious, and matched her pace to the crowd. The corridors were full of the usual first-night chaos: lost first-years calling for prefects, older students reuniting with friends they hadn't seen all summer, the general disorder of several hundred people trying to reach the same places at once.
Nobody walked beside her. Somewhere between the doors and the second floor, the crowd had swallowed them.
The Fat Lady's portrait loomed ahead. The crowd bottlenecked at the entrance, students jostling for position, and Pansy found herself pressed between Ron's shoulder and a stone wall while they waited for the password to be given.
"Fortuna Major," someone called from the front, and the portrait swung open.
The common room was warm and bright and full of people who stopped talking when Pansy climbed through the entrance. She felt the silence spread like ripples, conversation dying table by table, head after head turning to track her progress across the room.
She lifted her chin. Walked toward the stairs to the girls' dormitories without acknowledging any of them.
The third-year girls' dormitory was at the top of the second landing. Pansy pushed open the door and stepped inside, already reaching for the clasp of her travelling cloak.
Three beds. Three nightstands. Two trunks, arranged at the foot of each bed.
Two trunks.
Pansy stopped. Counted again. Lavender's trunk, plastered with magazine clippings and bows. Parvati's trunk, neat and organised with her initials in brass.
"Where's my trunk?"
Lavender and Parvati were already in the room and sat on Lavender's bed, heads bent together over something Pansy couldn't see. Neither of them looked up.
"I said, where's my trunk?"
"Don't know." Lavender's voice was light, unconcerned. "Haven't seen it."
"The house-elves bring them up before we arrive. It should be-"
"Maybe the house-elves made a mistake." Parvati still hadn't looked at her. "Maybe they put it somewhere else."
"They don't make mistakes."
"Then maybe someone moved it." Lavender shrugged, a theatrical little motion. "Could have been anyone. Hard to say."
Pansy stood in the doorway with her cloak half-unclasped and her fingers digging into the wool. She could see it in the way they weren't actually looking at her. The studied innocence that wasn't innocent at all.
"What did you do with it?"
"We didn't do anything." Parvati finally glanced up. Her face was perfectly composed. "Why would we touch your things? We don't want anything to do with your things."
"Then how-"
"Maybe you should go look for it." Lavender waved a hand toward the door. "Check the common room. Or the boys' dorms. Or the lake. I'm sure it'll turn up."
Pansy wanted to hex them. Wanted to grab Lavender by her ridiculous blonde curls and shake her until she was even dumber than before.
She turned and walked back down the stairs.
The common room had mostly emptied while she'd been upstairs. A few clusters of older students remained, talking quietly by the fire, but most of Gryffindor had retreated to their beds. Pansy scanned the room, checking corners and alcoves, looking for-
There.
Her trunk sat at the base of the stairs to the boys' dormitory, shoved against the wall like rubbish waiting to be collected. The latches had come undone. Some of her things had spilled out onto the flagstones, a spare quill, a bottle of ink, the corner of her Transfiguration textbook visible beneath a crumpled robe.
Someone had thrown it down the stairs. Probably from the landing, probably while she was still on her way. Just picked it up and tossed it, let it tumble down until it landed here, contents scattered, everything she owned on display for anyone who walked past.
The ink bottle had cracked. Black liquid seeped across the flagstones, staining the hem of her spare robe. She vanished it with a muttered spell, one of the few bits of practical magic she'd retained from her homework sessions with Mrs. Weasley, and kept packing.
Lavender and Parvati were still on Lavender's bed when she returned. Still bent over whatever they'd been looking at before.
Pansy shoved the trunk against the foot of her bed, the bed by the window, the one furthest from the door, the one she'd slept in for two years, and began unpacking.
Her hands found the Transfiguration textbook. She opened it to pages 114 and 115, checking.
The pressed pansy was still there. Flattened and faded, petals gone thin as tissue, but intact. She closed the book and set it with the others.
Parvati whispered something. Lavender giggled.
Pansy pulled her nightdress from the trunk and changed with her back to them, facing the window. The grounds stretched out below, dark and vast, and somewhere out there the thestrals stood in their paddock, visible to no one but her.
She climbed into bed. Drew the curtains. Pressed her face into the pillow and tried to make her mind go quiet.
The whispering continued.
She could hear them through the heavy fabric, not the words, just the sounds of it. Murmur, pause, murmur. A soft laugh. More murmuring. The occasional rustle of bedclothes or creak of mattress springs as one of them shifted position.
The whispering went on.
Pansy opened her eyes. She didn't know what time it was. Late. Very late. Late enough that reasonable people would be asleep.
She pushed the curtain aside.
Parvati's bed was directly across from hers. The curtains were drawn, but light leaked out from behind them, wandlight, probably, bright enough to read by. The whispering was coming from inside. Both of them, still awake, still talking.
Talking about her. Obviously talking about her. What else would they be discussing at, she glanced at the clock on the mantle, three in the morning? What else could possibly be so important that it couldn't wait until daylight?
Pansy's shoe was on the floor beside her bed. She'd kicked it off when she'd climbed under the covers, hadn't bothered to put it away properly.
She picked it up. Felt the weight of it in her hand.
Threw it.
The shoe hit Parvati's curtains with a satisfying thwack. Lavender shrieked, a high, startled sound that probably woke half the tower. The curtains flew open and Parvati was there, hair dishevelled, wand in hand, face twisted with outrage.
"What is wrong with you?"
"Shut up." Pansy's voice came out screechy. "Just shut up."
"You threw a shoe at us!"
"And I'll throw the other one if you don't stop your talking. Some of us are trying to sleep."
Lavender had scrambled off the bed and was standing beside Parvati now, arms crossed over her nightgown. "We can do whatever we want. It's our dormitory too."
"It's three in the morning."
"So?"
"So normal people are asleep at three in the morning. Normal people aren't sitting up giggling about-" Pansy stopped. "Whatever you're giggling about."
"That didn't seem to bother you last year." Parvati's voice had gone sharp and there was no end in sight. "When you were up at all hours and wandering around. We're just talking. You were-"
"You know what happened last year." Pansy sat up in bed. The covers pooled around her waist. "You know it wasn't my choice."
"Do we?" Parvati stepped closer. "Because from where I'm standing, last year looked exactly like the year before. And the year before that. You've been horrible to us since the day we met. The possession was just, more of the same, wasn't it?"
"That's not-"
"You called me a mutt half-blood to my face. First week of first year. Said my robes looked like they came from a jumble sale."
Pansy remembered. She'd been trying to impress Draco, who'd walked away without noticing.
"And Lavender." Parvati gestured at her friend. "You told everyone her breath smelled. She cried for three days."
"I didn't-"
"You did. You've always been like this. Cruel and petty and mean, and last year you finally had an excuse for it. Poor Pansy, possessed by a dark wizard. Poor Pansy, not responsible for her actions. But you were responsible, weren't you? Before. You chose to be horrible to us. You chose it every single day."
Pansy was on her feet. She didn't remember standing. Her hands were at her sides, fingers curled into fists, and Parvati was right there, close enough to touch.
"Get away from my bed."
"Make me."
She shoved Parvati. Both hands, flat against her shoulders, hard enough to make her stumble. Parvati caught herself on the bedpost and came back swinging, not with magic, with her hands, nails raking across Pansy's arm as they crashed into each other.
They hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and nightdresses. Pansy felt hair tear in her grip, felt the sharp sting of fingernails on her arm. She kicked and scratched and didn't think about anything except hurting and being hurt.
Lavender was screaming. Pulling at Parvati's arm, trying to separate them. Pansy lunged for her nightstand, her wand was there, she could reach it and-
"What is the meaning of this?"
The voice cut through the chaos like a slamming door. Pansy froze with her fingers inches from her wand. Parvati went still beneath her.
Professor McGonagall stood in the doorway. Her tartan dressing gown was tied tightly at the waist, her grey hair loose around her shoulders. She looked exactly as terrifying as she did during the day.
"The other dormitories have lodged complaints about the noise," she said. "I came to investigate and find… this."
Parvati scrambled backwards, putting distance between herself and Pansy. Pansy gave her one last kick, a good one, solid contact with her shin, before pushing herself upright and trying to straighten her nightdress. Her hair was wild around her face, several strands hanging loose from her ponytailwhere Parvati had pulled them out.
Parvati looked no better. Her cheek was reddened where Pansy had scratched her. Her nightgown was torn at the collar.
They stood on opposite sides of the room, breathing hard.
McGonagall's gaze moved between them. "I presume this relates to the request Miss Brown and Miss Patil submitted before the term began."
Pansy's head snapped toward Lavender and Parvati. "What request?"
Neither of them answered. Parvati was looking at the floor. Lavender had developed a sudden interest in the hem of her sleeve.
"They asked," McGonagall said, "that you be reassigned to a different dormitory."
Of course they had. Of course they'd gone behind her back, written letters, made arrangements. Tried to have her removed like an infestation.
She should have thought of it first. Should have been the one to ask. Should have taken control of the situation before it took control of her.
"And?" Pansy kept her voice flat. "Are you reassigning me?"
"The request was denied. There are no available beds in the other third-year dormitories." McGonagall looked at each of them in turn. "I had hoped the three of you might find a way to coexist regardless. It appears I was optimistic."
Parvati shifted her weight. Shrugged one shoulder.
"It is late," McGonagall continued. "It has been an exceptionally long day for everyone. I am going to take twenty points from each of you and recommend strongly that you all get some sleep."
"Twenty points?" Lavender's voice rose. "But she started-"
"Twenty points each. I am not interested in assigning blame at half past two in the morning." McGonagall turned toward the door, then paused. "I will not give detentions tonight, as it is the first day of term. But if I am called to this dormitory again, there will be consequences far more severe than lost points. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Professor," Parvati muttered.
"Yes, Professor," Lavender echoed.
Pansy said nothing. McGonagall looked at her for a long moment and then left.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Silence. Lavender and Parvati stood by Parvati's bed, not looking at Pansy. Pansy stood by her own bed, not looking at them.
Pansy grabbed her trunk.
She shoved things into it without care, robes and books, everything she'd just spent twenty minutes unpacking. The latches wouldn't close properly; she forced them, metal grinding against metal, and dragged the whole thing toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Lavender asked.
"Somewhere else." Pansy shouldered the door open.
She hauled the trunk down the stairs, letting it bang against every step. The common room was empty now, the fire burned down to embers. She shoved the trunk against the wall and dropped onto the nearest sofa, pulling a dusty throw blanket over herself.
The sofa was too short. Her feet hung off the end. The cushions smelled like old smoke and something vaguely fungal.
Sleep wouldn't come.
After an hour, maybe two, she'd lost track, Pansy got up. Her bladder was aching and her mouth tasted sour and she needed to move, needed to do something with the restless energy that wouldn't leave her alone.
The girls' toilets were at the end of the corridor, past the dormitory stairs. She crept through the dark common room, pushed open the door, and found herself alone in a row of stalls and sinks.
Her fingers found her wand in the pocket of her nightdress.
The nearest stall was empty. Pansy stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
The walls were stone, grey and smooth, interrupted here and there by carved graffiti, initials and dates, crude drawings, the usual detritus of generations of Hogwarts students. "M.P. + A.W. 1970."
"M.M. WAS HERE." A rather explicit sketch that someone had attempted to scrub away without success.
Pansy raised her wand.
Parvati Patil stuffs her bra with used tissues.
The words carved themselves into the stone, neat and permanent. She moved to the next bare patch of wall.
Lavender eats boogers.
Not her best work.
Lavender eats boogers and licks up her snot.
Better. She added another line below it.
The wall was filling up. She kept going, carving insult after insult into the ancient stone, until her wand arm ached and she'd run out of blank space.
Serves them right. Absolutely right.
Pansy walked back to the common room, climbed onto the sofa, and pulled the blanket over her head. Morning would come eventually. It always did.
The common room was still dark when Pansy opened her eyes. Grey light filtered through the windows, dawn, or something close to it. Her neck ached from the angle she'd slept at, and the throw blanket had slipped to the floor sometime during the night, leaving her curled on the sofa in nothing but her nightdress.
She sat up. The fire had died completely, leaving the grate cold and ash-filled. No one else was awake. The portrait hole was closed, the armchairs empty, the stairs to the dormitories silent.
Good.
Pansy gathered her things from her trunk, robes, tie, the sensible shoes Mrs. Weasley had insisted she buy in Diagon Alley, and crept toward the girls' toilets.
The stall where she'd carved her messages was three doors down. Pansy glanced at it as she left, caught a glimpse of her handwriting on the walls, and felt nothing in particular. It was done. No point thinking about it now.
A window gave onto the grounds, and she stopped. Figures moved below, Aurors, their wands casting pale light across the dew-soaked grass. Beyond them, at the boundary, the dementors glided their endless circuit. She walked faster.
She was halfway down the third-floor corridor when she saw the poster.
It hung on the wall between two windows, fresh parchment bright against the ancient stone. WANTED, the headline read, in letters three inches tall. PETER PETTIGREW. EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT APPROACH.
Below the text, two images.
The first showed a man, small, soft-featured, with watery eyes and a receding hairline. He smiled nervously at the camera, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in front of him. The moving photograph looped every few seconds: smile, fidget, glance sideways, smile again. He looked like someone's embarrassing uncle. He looked like someone you'd forget five minutes after meeting him and were glad about it.
The second image was a rat.
Pansy stepped closer. The rat was grey-brown, ordinary, the kind of thing you'd find in any barn or cellar or Hogwarts dungeon. It sat on its haunches with its front paws raised, whiskers twitching. A small notation beneath the photograph read: Animagus form. Unregistered.
An animagus. A wizard who could transform into an animal at will, wear a different shape as easily as changing robes. And Pettigrew's shape was this. A rat.
Pansy tried to imagine it. Discovering that your animagus form, the animal that supposedly reflected your inner self, was a rodent. Something that lived in walls and ate rubbish and died in traps. Something people screamed at and called exterminators to remove.
She would never transform. Not once. She would bury the knowledge so deep that no one would ever know, would go to her grave without ever wearing that shape.
But then-
She looked at the photograph again. The rat's eyes were bright, alert. It watched the camera with an intelligence that didn't belong in something so small.
If you were trying to hide, a rat would be perfect. Rats went everywhere. Rats lived in the spaces between walls, in the gaps under floorboards, in the thousand hidden places that humans never thought to look. The castle was vast, corridors and classrooms and abandoned wings that hadn't been used in centuries. The grounds stretched for miles. How would you even begin to search for one rat among the thousands that already lived here?
You wouldn't. You couldn't. Pettigrew could be anywhere. Could be watching her right now, tucked into a crack in the stonework, and she would never know.
Pansy shivered and walked faster.
The Great Hall was empty when she arrived. The house tables stretched the length of the room, bare and polished, waiting for the breakfast that hadn't yet appeared. The enchanted ceiling showed the same grey dawn she'd seen through the common room windows, low clouds, no sun, the promise of rain later.
She chose a seat at the Gryffindor table. Not the end, where she'd sat last night in her quarantine of empty space, but somewhere in the middle.
The ceiling shifted above her. She watched it while she waited, the slow movement of clouds, the occasional bird crossing the grey expanse. The magic was subtle, easy to miss if you weren't paying attention. The clouds drifted. The light changed.
She wondered if anyone had ever tried to touch it. Flown up and reached for the clouds. Whether your hand would pass through them or whether you'd hit the actual ceiling, stone and plaster hidden behind the illusion.
The food appeared at seven. The Hall began to fill. Students trickled in by ones and twos, then larger groups, the noise level rising as people found their tables and their friends. Pansy kept her eyes on her plate and pretended not to notice the way conversations paused when people walked past her. The way certain students chose seats further down the table rather than take the empty spaces nearby.
"Budge over."
Ron dropped onto the bench beside her, already reaching for the bacon. Neville slid in on her other side, quieter, Trevor tucked into one of his robe pockets.
"You weren't in the dormitory this morning," Neville said. "Lavender said you'd, that you slept in the common room."
"Lavender can mind her own business."
"Pansy-"
"I didn't feel like sharing a room with people who'd petitioned to have me removed. Strange, I know." She took another bite of toast. Still cardboard. "The sofa was fine. I've slept on worse."
Ron and Neville exchanged a look over her head. She pretended not to see it.
The doors opened again. Lavender and Parvati entered together, arms linked, heads bent close as they talked. Pansy watched them cross the Hall, watched them scan the Gryffindor table and register where she was sitting, watched them choose seats as far from her as physically possible.
Parvati's cheek still showed the mark where Pansy had scratched her. Good. She hoped they'd found her messages this morning and knew exactly what she thought of them.
Lavender whispered something to Parvati. Parvati glanced toward Pansy and quickly looked away.
Yes. They'd seen it.
"What's that about?" Ron asked through a mouthful of bacon.
"Nothing." Pansy reached for the pumpkin juice. "Just Lavender and Parvati being themselves."
McGonagall appeared at the head of the table before Ron could ask anything else. She moved down the length of the bench, handing out schedules to each student.
"Miss Parkinson." McGonagall paused beside her, held out a folded sheet. Her expression gave nothing away, no reference to last night, no lingering disapproval. "Your timetable for the year. I trust you'll find it satisfactory."
She moved on to Neville. Pansy unfolded her schedule and scanned the first column. Monday. Nine o'clock.
Divination - North Tower - Professor Trelawney
She glanced sideways at Neville's schedule. He was still unfolding it, fingers clumsy with the parchment, and she reached over and plucked it from his hands before he could protest.
"Hey-"
"I want to see what you picked." She scanned the columns. Monday. Nine o'clock. Arithmancy. Eleven o'clock. Ancient Runes.
Pansy stared at the parchment. Read it again, certain she'd misunderstood.
"What is this?"
"My schedule." Neville reached for it. She held it out of his reach. "Pansy, give it back-"
"Arithmancy? Ancient Runes?" She shook the parchment at him. "Really, Neville?"
"I didn't-"
"We bought the books, Neville. Ron and I stood in Flourish and Blotts for an hour trying to figure out what you'd choose, and we decided, Magical Creatures because you love animals, Divination because your grandmother would hate it. We were so pleased with ourselves. We thought we'd worked it out."
Neville's face had gone pink. He was looking at the table, at his hands, anywhere but at her.
"My grandmother," he said quietly. "She… when I got home from the station last year, she'd already written to the school. Told them which electives I was taking. Said Arithmancy and Ancient Runes were the only acceptable options for someone in my position."
Someone in his position. The Boy Who Lived. The hero of the wizarding world, who wasn't allowed to take a class about magical creatures because his grandmother thought it was beneath him.
"So you're stuck with-" Pansy looked at the schedule again. "Arthimancy and Ancient Runes. For the next two years."
"They're not so bad. Arithmancy is actually quite interesting, once you get past the-"
"Neville."
He stopped. Looked at her properly for the first time.
"Your grandmother," Pansy said, "is a deeply unpleasant woman."
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close. "You've said that before."
"It bears repeating." She handed him back his schedule. "Every day, probably. Until it sinks in."
"Arthimancy," Ron said, shaking his head. "Better you than me."
"Thanks for the sympathy," said Neville into his porridge.
The ceiling above them had lightened slightly, the clouds thinning, a pale wash of gold bleeding through from the east.
Pansy finished her toast that still tasked like plaster and tried not to think about any of it.
She climbed the spiral staircase behind a cluster of Gryffindors, each step taking her further from the sensible stone corridors of the lower castle and deeper into something that felt increasingly unhinged. The air grew warmer as they ascended. Thicker. By the time they reached the landing, the temperature had risen to something approaching tropical, and a cloying sweetness hung in the atmosphere: incense, probably, or whatever passed for incense in the mind of someone who thought teaching the future was a reasonable career choice.
A silver ladder descended from a circular trapdoor in the ceiling. Pansy watched Lavender climb it with unseemly enthusiasm, followed by Parvati, followed by a string of other students who apparently found the prospect of prophecy exciting rather than absurd.
She went last. The rungs were cold under her palms despite the warmth, and the trapdoor opened onto a room that looked like the inside of a fever dream.
Curtains everywhere. Draped from the ceiling, hung across the windows, pooled on the floor in swathes of deep red and purple and gold. Small circular tables dotted the space, each surrounded by poufs and armchairs upholstered in fabric that clashed violently with everything around it. The fire in the grate burned low and red, adding to the heat, and the shelves lining the walls held an assortment of crystal balls, candles, and objects Pansy couldn't identify and didn't want to.
She found a seat near the back, as far from the fire as possible, and waited.
Professor Trelawney emerged from behind a beaded curtain several minutes after the class had settled.
"Welcome," she said, and her voice was breathy, theatrical, the voice of someone who had practiced being mysterious in front of a mirror. "Welcome to Divination. I am Professor Trelawney, and I shall be your guide into the realm of the Inner Eye."
She paused. Looked around the room. Frowned.
"We cannot begin. Someone is missing."
Lavender's hand shot up. "Professor, everyone's here. We counted on the stairs."
"The registers may say so, but the Eye sees differently." Trelawney pressed her fingers to her temples, bangles jangling. "There is one more. One who has not yet arrived. We must wait."
The class exchanged glances. Pansy counted heads, all the third-years who'd signed up for Divination were present, slumped in their armchairs and already sweating in the oppressive heat. No empty seats. No gaps in the circle.
No one came. The silence stretched from mystical into awkward. Trelawney's eyes opened slowly, her brow creasing.
"The fates have… shifted," she announced. "We shall proceed. The absent one will arrive when destiny permits."
The first twenty minutes were a monologue about the history of Divination, the importance of the Inner Eye, and the tragic burden of being able to perceive what others could not. Pansy stopped listening after the third mention of "gift" and let her gaze wander around the room instead. Lavender and Parvati sat together near the front, hanging on every word. Ron was two tables away, slumped so low in his armchair that he was practically horizontal.
"-and now," Trelawney said, sweeping toward the centre of the room, "I shall share with each of you a glimpse of what the Eye reveals."
She began moving between tables, pausing at each one to deliver pronouncements. Some were vague, "you will face a choice between two paths", and some were oddly specific,"beware of turnpis on the third Thursday of October." The students received these with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Lavender looked like she might actually cry with joy when Trelawney told her she would find unexpected happiness in a familiar place.
Trelawney stopped at Pansy's table.
Her magnified eyes fixed on Pansy's face. The bangles stilled. For a long moment, she simply stared, and Pansy had the uncomfortable sensation of being in her opinion very rudely stared at.
"You," Trelawney said. "You are searching for something."
Pansy said nothing.
"The Eye sees…" Trelawney's voice dropped to a whisper. "A new pair of shoes. You will find what you seek in a new pair of shoes."
Well, shopping might be nice, actually. A change of pace. Too bad that she penniless and practically homeless.
She filed the prophecy away under "probably nonsense but worth remembering" and waited for Trelawney to move on.
The practical portion of the lesson began after Trelawney had dispensed wisdom to the entire class. They were to read tea leaves, tasseography, she called it, the word delivered with the gravity usually reserved for death sentences. Each student would partner with another, drink their tea, swirl the dregs, and attempt to divine meaning from whatever shapes remained.
"Ron." Pansy caught his arm as the class began rearranging itself into pairs. "Partners?"
"Can't." He nodded toward Dean Thomas, who was already pulling a chair over to Ron's table, his back pointedly turned toward Pansy. "Dean asked me on the stairs. Said he wanted someone who wouldn't take it too seriously."
"I don't take it seriously."
"Yeah, but he asked first, so…"
He moved off before she could argue. Pansy stood alone in the middle of the room while pairs formed around her, watching her options dwindle with each passing second.
Lavender and Parvati. Obviously not. The Hufflepuff boy she didn't recognoze had already paired with Seamus Finnigan. Two girls she vaguely recognised from Herbology had claimed each other. Which left-
Hermione Granger sat alone at a table near the window.
Pansy had never spoken to her. Knew her only by reputation: the cleverest witch in their year, possibly in the entire school. The girl who raised her hand in every class, whose essays ran three feet longer than required, who had somehow befriended Draco Malfoy. The swottiest swot who ever swotted.
She was frowning at her textbook, one finger tracing down a page of tea leaf interpretations, apparently unbothered by the fact that no one had claimed her as a partner.
Pansy sighed and walked over.
She dropped her bag on the table with more force than strictly necessary. Granger looked up, startled, and Pansy pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down.
"Seems we're partners," Pansy said. "Try not to be insufferable about it."
Granger's eyebrows rose, but she didn't take the bait. "I wasn't aware anyone else was still looking."
"Well. Now you're aware."
The teacups arrived, floating gently from a cabinet near the fire to settle in front of each pair. The tea inside was pale and bitter-smelling, nothing like the strong builder's brew Mrs. Weasley made. Pansy drank hers in one long swallow, grimacing at the taste, and upended the cup onto its saucer.
Granger watched with the intensity of someone memorising technique for later examination. "You're supposed to leave a small amount of liquid. To help the leaves adhere to the sides."
"Too late now."
"The book says-"
"I don't care what the book says. Just tell me what you see."
Granger took the cup and peered inside. Her brow furrowed. She tilted it one way, then another, holding it up to catch the light from the window.
"It's quite… abstract," she said finally.
"Abstract."
"The shapes aren't conforming to any of the standard interpretations." She pulled the textbook closer, flipping rapidly between pages. "There's something that could be a serpent, but the head proportions are wrong. And this bit here might be, no, that doesn't make sense either-"
A snake. If the leaves showed a snake, she was going to throw the whole thing against the wall. The cup, the saucer, possibly the table.
"Perhaps if I cross-reference with the chapter on ambiguous symbols-"
"It's tea, Granger. It's not going to reveal the secrets of the universe."
"But the methodology clearly states-"
A shadow fell over the table. Trelawney had materialised beside them, silent as smoke, her enormous appearing eyes fixed on the cup in Granger's hands.
"May I?"
She didn't wait for permission. Long fingers plucked the cup away, tilted it, rotated it slowly. The bangles on her wrist caught the light and scattered it across the table in fragments.
"Ah," she breathed. "Yes. I see it now."
Pansy waited. Granger had gone still, textbook forgotten.
"A broom." Trelawney set the cup down with exaggerated care. "The leaves show a broom. Quite clearly, once you know how to look."
"A broom," Pansy repeated.
"The symbol has many meanings. Travel. Change. The sweeping away of the old to make room for the new." Trelawney's magnified eyes found Pansy's face. "But yes. Often, simply, a broom."
Granger leaned forward. "Are you playing Quidditch this year?"
"No."
"Have you ever played?"
"No."
"Do you intend to-"
"No." Pansy pulled the cup back toward her, away from both of them. "I don't fly. I've never flown. I have absolutely no interest in-"
"The Eye sees what it sees. It will make sense later." And Trelawney was already drifting toward the next table.
She disappeared behind a curtain of incense smoke. Granger was still looking at Pansy with that analytical expression, like she was a problem to be solved.
"It might not be literal," Granger said. "Symbolic interpretation suggests-"
"Granger. Please stop talking."
Granger stopped talking. She returned to her textbook, flipping to a new chapter, and Pansy glanced at Granger's leaves, saw nothing recognisable, and set the cup down without comment.
She didn't need a new hobby. She didn't need anything new at all. The last time she'd taken up something new, something to fill the empty hours, something to pour herself into, it had been a diary.
A broom. Quidditch. Flying around on a stick while people threw balls at her head.
Absolutely not.
"Pansy." Ron appeared at her elbow, Dean trailing behind him. "Quick favour."
"No."
"You don't even know what it is yet."
"The answer is still no."
"Switch cups with me." He held out his own teacup, dregs sloshing against the sides. "Mine's got something that looks like a splatter of mud. Yours has a broom. I need the broom."
Pansy looked at him. "Why do you need a broom?"
"Seeker tryouts are next week." He shoved the cup closer to her. "If I've got a broom in my leaves, it's got to be good luck."
"That's not how Divination works."
"You just told Granger it was meaningless tea. Make up your mind."
But Ron was looking at her with that hopeful expression, the one that made it difficult to say no, the one that reminded her of all the times he'd shown up anyway despite everything she'd done to drive him away.
"Fine." She shoved her cup toward him and took his in exchange. "But when you fall off your broom at a game, I'm not visiting you in the hospital wing."
"Yes you are."
"I'm really not."
"You absolutely are. You'll bring flowers and everything. Maybe chocolates." He was already backing away, Dean rolling his eyes behind him. "Thanks, Pansy. You're the best."
"I'm the worst and you know it."
He grinned and disappeared back to his table.
Pansy looked down at her new cup. The dregs inside did look rather like a splatter of mud, brown and formless and completely devoid of meaning.
Perfect.
Care of Magical Creatures was hippogriffs.
Pansy watched from the back of the group as Hagrid introduced Buckbeak: enormous, steel-feathered, walking with the deliberate calm of something that knew exactly how dangerous it was. Dean Thomas volunteered first, bowed properly, and ended up clinging to the creature's neck as it soared over the lake. He came back grinning so wide it looked painful.
The lesson proceeded without disaster, though not for lack of trying. Draco pushed toward the fence halfway through, announcing that if Thomas could manage it, surely he could do better. Pansy watched Hermione Granger materialise at his elbow, fingers closing around his arm, pulling him back with whispered angry urgency. Draco let her.
Pansy had never understood their friendship. Granger was rules and propriety and the desperate need to prove herself; Draco had been raised to believe all people were beneath him. Yet here they were, and Granger's grip on his arm was tight enough to bunch the fabric of his robes, and Draco's face was red but he wasn't pulling away.
She filed it under things that weren't her business.
By the time the lesson ended, half the class had flown and the other half had decided they preferred the ground. Pansy counted herself among the latter.
Defence Against the Dark Arts was in the third-floor corridor, a classroom Pansy had passed a hundred times without ever entering. She and Ron collected Neville from the Arithmancy corridor, he looked slightly dazed, the way he always did after difficult lessons, and the three of them walked together through the castle.
"How was the number stuff?" Ron asked.
"Complicated." Neville shifted his bag higher on his shoulder. "We had to calculate our birth charts using a twelve-variable equation. Mine came out wrong three times. Professor Vector thinks I've got my birth date wrong. Said I should write to my parents and confirm. But they, well…"
"Sounds miserable," Pansy said quickly.
The Defence classroom door stood open. Voices spilled out into the corridor, laughter, exclamations, the kind of noise that suggested something more interesting than textbooks was happening inside. Pansy exchanged a glance with Ron and stepped through.
The classroom still bore Lockhart's stamp: portraits of himself on every wall, that ridiculous painting of him painting a portrait of himself above the fireplace. The new professor had done nothing to change it. Perhaps she found it amusing. Perhaps she simply had better things to do. The desks had been pushed back against the walls to create an open space in the centre of the room. A cluster of students had gathered in the far corner, crowded around something Pansy couldn't see. There was more laughter and then a bark.
She pushed through the group.
A dog sat in the middle of the circle. large, black-furred, with the kind of shaggy coat that suggested either noble breeding gone feral or no breeding at all. It had a knotted length of curtain cord clamped in its jaws, and Seamus Finnigan was tugging on the other end, feet braced against the flagstones, losing badly.
"Come on, you great beast- give it-"
The dog yanked its head sideways and Seamus went sprawling. More laughter. Dean reached for the rope and the dog danced backward, tail wagging, clearly delighted with the game.
Ron dropped his bag and waded into the fray. "Let me try- move over, Seamus-"
"Care of Magical Creatures finished an hour ago," Pansy said to Neville. "Why does this school must make me suffer?"
"Maybe it belongs to Professor Evans-Potter?"
"What kind of professor keeps a dog in her classroom?"
Pansy found a desk near the window and sat down. Neville took the seat beside her. The chaos continued in the corner, more students joining in, the dog apparently inexhaustible, the noise level rising with each passing minute.
No sign of Professor Evans-Potter.
The clock on the wall showed five past the hour. Then ten past. Then quarter past. Pansy pulled out her textbook and flipped through the first chapter, Grindylows, as expected, the same introduction to dark creatures that every Defence curriculum seemed to start with, and wondered if the professor had forgotten she had a class.
The door banged open.
Lily Evans-Potter strode in looking like she'd just lost a fight with the Forbidden Forest. Dirt streaked the hem of her robes. Leaves clung to her hair. Her wand was out, gripped in her right hand with the casual readiness of someone who'd spent years expecting attacks from unexpected directions.
"Padfoot," she said. "Sit."
The dog stopped mid-leap, all four paws hitting the ground at once. It turned to look at her with an expression that, on a human face, would have been an eye-roll. Then it sat, tail still wagging, tongue lolling.
"The rest of you. Desks. Now."
The students scrambled. Pansy watched them sort themselves into seats, watched Professor Evans-Potter wave her wand to send the displaced furniture sliding back into proper rows, watched the dog pad to the front of the room and settle beside the teacher's desk like it belonged there.
"Apologies for my lateness." Evans-Potter didn't sound particularly apologetic. "I was following up on a lead that turned out to be nothing."
"Today we're going to discuss Animagi." Evans-Potter flicked her wand and a stack of parchment rose from her desk. "Padfoot, if you would."
The dog stood, trotted over to the floating stack, and took the top sheet delicately in its jaws. It carried the parchment to the nearest desk, Lavender Brown, who received it with a nervous giggle, and returned for the next.
Pansy watched it approach her row. Watched it deposit a sheet in front of Neville, then move to her desk. The parchment landed on her textbook, slightly damp, marked with the clear impression of a canine mouth.
She picked it up by the corner and wiped the slobber off on her robe.
"Animagi," Evans-Potter said, once the distribution was complete, "are witches and wizards who can transform into animals at will. It's an incredibly difficult branch of Transfiguration, most people who attempt it fail, and many of those who fail end up permanently stuck between forms. But for those who succeed, the ability can be extraordinarily useful."
She began to pace at the front of the room. Padfoot's head followed her movement like a spectator at a tennis match.
"There's a registry at the Ministry, as you'll see on your handout. All Animagi are required by law to register their animal form. This is because-"
A hand shot up. Granger, two rows ahead, practically vibrating with the need to speak.
"Yes, Miss Granger?"
"Professor, I've reviewed the third-year curriculum, and Animagi aren't mentioned at all. According to the syllabus, we're meant to begin with Grindylows, followed by Red Caps, followed by-"
"I'm aware of what the syllabus says."
"It's just that we'll need to take our O.W.L.s in two years, and if we don't cover the required material-"
Evans-Potter stopped pacing. The easy authority she'd walked in with hardened into something more harsh.
"Miss Granger. I have spent thirteen years as an Auror. I have encountered dark wizards who used Animagus transformations to infiltrate secure locations, to spy on their enemies, to escape capture. One such wizard is currently loose somewhere in this castle or its grounds." She let that sit for a moment. "I think my field experience counts for rather more than a textbook."
Granger's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"But the examinations-"
"Ten points from Slytherin." Evans-Potter turned back to the class. "There will be no further discussion on curriculum matters. If anyone else has concerns about my teaching methods, you're welcome to take them up with Professor Dumbledore."
Silence. Granger stared at her desk, face flushed, hands clenched around her quill. Padfoot let out a small whine, almost sympathetic, and Evans-Potter shot the dog a look that Pansy couldn't interpret.
"Now. Where was I. Yes- the Animagus registry."
She resumed her lecture. Pansy tried to follow, transformation, meditation, risk of death, but the warmth of the room and the rhythm of Evans-Potter's voice kept pulling her under. The common room sofa had given her perhaps three hours of sleep, and her body was demanding payment.
Her head dipped. She jerked it back up. Dipped again.
Neville's elbow found her ribs. "You're falling asleep."
"M'not."
"You are. You were snoring."
"Don't snore," she mumbled, but her eyes were already sliding closed again.
She surfaced briefly to Ron asking a loud, obviously fabricated question about mandrake leaves. Surfaced again to Neville kicking her ankle. Surfaced a third time to silence, the particular silence of a room that had stopped to watch something.
Evans-Potter stood at the front of the classroom, arms folded, watching her.
"Miss Parkinson. How kind of you to rejoin us."
Pansy straightened so fast her neck cracked. "Professor, I-"
"And Mr. Weasley, Mr. Longbottom, thank you for your valiant efforts at concealment. The loud questions and the kicking were very subtle." Her voice could have frozen the lake. "The three of you will report to my office. Perhaps we can discuss why Miss Parkinson finds my teaching so soporific."
Ron's ears had gone crimson. Neville was staring at his desk like it held the secrets of the universe.
At the front of the room, Padfoot watched them all with an expression that looked remarkably like amusement.
Professor Evans-Potter's office looked like someone had detonated a filing cabinet.
Parchment covered every surface, stacked on the desk, pinned to the walls, spilling out of drawers that hadn't been closed properly. A map of the castle grounds hung behind the door, marked with dozens of coloured pins and annotations in handwriting too small to read from across the room. Books lay open on chairs, on the windowsill, on top of other books. A cold cup of tea sat on a stack of what appeared to be Auror reports, a film forming on its surface.
Pansy stepped over a pile of what looked like old case files and began a circuit of the room.
"Pansy." Ron's voice was strained. "Maybe don't."
"Don't what?"
"Touch things."
"I'm not touching anything." She paused at a corkboard covered in moving photographs. Faces she didn't recognise, some smiling, some caught mid-motion. A few had red X marks drawn through them.
"Please just come sit down," Neville said.
Pansy ignored him. The corkboard photographs were interesting, Auror work, clearly, suspects or witnesses or victims. One showed a group of young people outside what looked like a pub, arms around each other's shoulders. She leaned closer. She had seen those faces before, but where?
"Pansy." Ron had gone slightly pale. "Sit. Down."
"Fine." She turned away from the corkboard and crossed to the desk. "I'll sit."
She dropped into the professor's chair.
"Not there!" Ron made a sound like a strangled cat. "Not the- that's her chair, you can't just-"
"She's not here. She won't know." Pansy spun the chair in a lazy half-circle, taking in the view of the office from this angle. More papers. More books. A quill that had been left uncapped, ink dried on the nib. "Honestly, Weasley, you'd think I was committing a crime."
Neville had his face in his hands.
The desk was as cluttered as the rest of the office, but someone had carved out a small clear space near the centre, just enough room for a lamp and a cluster of picture frames. Pansy reached for the nearest one and picked it up.
The photograph showed a boy. A very large boy. The largest boy, in fact, that Pansy had ever seen, blond, round-faced and pink-cheeked, squeezed into a jumper that strained across his middle, scowling at the camera with the petulant expression of someone who'd been told to smile and was refusing on principle. He didn't move. A Muggle photograph, then. Frozen in his sulk forever.
"Who do you think this is?" Pansy turned the frame toward Ron and Neville. "Relative? Friend? Small whale in human clothing?"
Ron made a noise of pure despair. "Put it back."
"I'm just asking a question."
"Put it back before she comes in and sees you holding her personal-"
The door flew open.
Professor Evans-Potter stood in the doorway. Her eyes swept the room: Neville rigid in his chair, Ron half-risen from his, Pansy behind the desk with the photograph still in her hands.
Her face went red.
"Miss Parkinson." The words came out clipped, precise, each syllable a separate piece of ice. "Would you care to explain why you're sitting in my chair, holding my-"
"We want to help."
Everyone turned to look at Neville.
He'd stood up. His hands were shaking slightly at his sides, but his voice came out steady, almost loud. "With the search. For Pettigrew. We want to help find him."
Ron's foot moved. Pansy saw it connect with Neville's ankle, a sharp, deliberate kick, but Neville kept talking.
"We could search. Student areas, you know. The common rooms. The dormitories." His voice gained momentum as he went, the words tumbling out faster. "We could listen for rumours, keep our eyes open. We've done this before, investigated things, I mean. First year, we tracked Quirrell for months before he-"
"Neville." Ron's voice was a hiss. "Shut up."
"-and we know the castle really well, all the passages and shortcuts, and we have free periods we could use to-"
"Neville."
Pansy sat frozen in Professor Evans-Potter's chair, photograph of the baby whale sized child still clutched in her hands, watching her free time evaporate in real time. Crawling through dungeons. Checking behind tapestries. Searching the grounds on hands and knees for a rat that could be literally anywhere, that could squeeze through cracks in the stonework and hide in walls and probably bite if you cornered it.
She was going to kill Neville. As soon as they were out of this office, she was going to strangle him with his own tie.
Evans-Potter hadn't moved from the doorway.
"You want to help," she said slowly.
"Yes." Neville's voice had steadied. "We do."
"The three of you. Searching for one of the most dangerous dark wizards in Britain."
"He's a rat. How dangerous can he-"
"He killed thirteen people with a single curse, Mr. Longbottom. He can be quite dangerous indeed."
Silence. Pansy watched Neville's throat work as he swallowed.
"Fine."
The word hung in the air. Ron's head snapped toward Evans-Potter, disbelief written across his face.
"Fine," she repeated. "You can help. Within limits. You'll report to me twice weekly with anything you've observed. You won't go anywhere alone. You won't confront Pettigrew if you find him- you'll come to me immediately, or to another professor if I'm unavailable. Am I understood?"
"Yes," Neville said. "Yes, Professor."
"I wanted the students involved from the start." Evans-Potter stepped into the office and closed the door behind her. Some of the tension left her shoulders, though her expression remained guarded. "Dumbledore disagreed. He thought it would cause panic, or put you at unnecessary risk. I argued that you're already at risk simply by being here, and that extra eyes might make the difference between catching Pettigrew and letting him slip away again."
She crossed to the desk. Pansy scrambled out of the chair, nearly tripping over a stack of files, and retreated to stand beside Ron.
Evans-Potter didn't sit. She stood behind the desk, looking at the three of them with an expression Pansy couldn't quite read.
"Dumbledore forbade me from recruiting," she said. "He said nothing about accepting volunteers."
"So we're… not in trouble?" Ron asked. "For the talking in class?"
"You're in trouble for talking in class. You're also now assisting with an Auror investigation." Evans-Potter picked up the photograph Pansy had abandoned on the desk, looked at it for a moment, and set it back in its place among the others. "Consider the two things separate. Now get to your next lesson. I believe you have Potions."
Snape was in a mood.
Pansy knew it the moment she walked into the dungeon. The temperature felt ten degrees colder than usual. The torches burned low in their brackets, casting shadows that seemed deeper and darker than they should. Snape himself stood at the front of the room, perfectly still, watching the students file in with an expression that promised suffering.
"Sit," he said. Nothing else. No greeting, no instructions, no sneering commentary on their inevitable incompetence.
Just: sit.
The class sat.
"Today," Snape said, "you will brew a Shrinking Solution. The instructions are on the board. You have ninety minutes. Begin."
He turned and walked to his desk. Sat down. Pulled a stack of essays toward him and began marking them with vicious slashes of red ink.
Students exchanged glances, the Gryffindors with the Slytherins, enemies united in shared confusion. Snape never left them unsupervised. Snape never stopped prowling the aisles, peering into cauldrons, finding fault with every stir and slice.
Pansy had never been grateful to Seamus for anything before, but the smoke billowing from his station obscured half the room, including Neville's cauldron, which had begun making sounds no potion should make.
Snape looked up from his marking. Looked at the smoke. Looked at Seamus, who was frantically trying to wave the fumes away with his textbook.
"Pathetic," Snape said. "Ten points from Gryffindor. Gon on and clean it up, Finnegan."
He returned to his essays. The smoke continued to billow. Seamus shot a desperate look at Dean, who shrugged helplessly and edged his stool further away.
Thirty minutes in, a Slytherin, added his caterpillars too early. The potion turned a violent shade of orange and began to bubble ominously.
Snape's head came up again. "Abysmal. Ten points from Slytherin."
A ripple of shock went through the room. Snape didn't take points from Slytherin. Snape never took points from Slytherin. The Slytherin students stared at their Head of House with the expressions of children who'd just watched their father kick the family dog.
The lesson continued. Pansy kept her head down and her cauldron steady and tried very hard not to attract attention. Beside her, Neville was sweating, his movements jerky and uncertain, stirring in the wrong direction and not noticing.
Snape stalked the aisles now. Whatever had been keeping him at his desk had broken, and the familiar menace was back, the billowing robes, the cold eyes, the way he loomed over cauldrons like a vulture over carrion.
He passed her cauldron without stopping. Her potion was grey where it should have been green, her knife work was always uneven, the prolonged contact with flobberworm mucus too revolting to endure with the necessary attention, but Snape's gaze slid over her as though she weren't there. The Chamber had left them in a strange kind of debt neither could acknowledge.
"Longbottom." The name came out like a curse. "What colour is your potion supposed to be?"
Neville looked down at his cauldron. Looked at the board. Looked back at his cauldron.
"Green?" he tried.
"Green." Snape leaned closer. "And what colour is your potion?"
"…Brownish?"
"Brownish." Snape straightened. "Thirty points from Gryffindor, and count yourself fortunate that supervising your detention would require me to endure your presence longer than I'm willing to."
He swept on. Neville's ears had gone bright red, but he said nothing, didn't argue, didn't protest, just stared at his ruined potion and stirred it pointlessly.
The lesson ground on. More points lost. More cauldrons ruined. More cutting remarks delivered. By the time Snape dismissed them, Gryffindor was down fifty points and Slytherin, unthinkably, was down fifteen.
Pansy gathered her things and fled before Snape could find a reason to keep her too. Neville caught up with her in the corridor, both of them walking fast, putting distance between themselves and the dungeon.
"What was that about?" Neville asked. "I've never seen him so-"
"Don't know. Don't care." Pansy hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. "I'm just glad we got out before he decided to fail someone for breathing wrong."
Behind them, the dungeon door slammed shut and Pansy walked faster.
Dinner was shepherd's pie and boiled vegetables and Pansy refusing to look at Neville.
"She's still not talking to me," Neville said to Ron, loud enough that Pansy could hear perfectly well. "Do you think she's actually angry?"
"Hard to say." Ron shovelled another forkful of mashed potato into his mouth. "Could be real. Could be performance. With Pansy, you never know."
"I'm sitting right here," Pansy said to her plate.
"Oh, she speaks." Ron nudged Neville with his elbow.
"I'm not speaking to him." Pansy pointed her fork at Neville without looking up. "I'm speaking to the general vicinity. There's a difference."
"She's definitely still angry."
"I would be too, if someone had volunteered all my free time to hunt rats in the walls."
Pansy stabbed a piece of carrot with more force than necessary. The truth was that she wasn't actually angry, hadn't been angry since they'd left Evans-Potter's office, really. The offer was so thoroughly Neville that she couldn't hold it against him. Of course he'd volunteered. Of course he'd seen a professor about to explode and decided the best course of action was to throw himself into the blast radius with an offer of help. That was simply who he was. The boy who walked toward trouble because someone might need him there.
It was exhausting. It was also, in some way she didn't want to examine too closely, one of the reasons she'd kept him.
But he didn't need to know that. Not yet. Let him squirm through dinner first.
"I really am sorry," Neville said. "I panicked. She was so angry, and you were sitting at her desk, and I just-"
"Panicked," Pansy repeated. "Yes. You mentioned."
"It won't be that bad. We'll just look around a bit, report anything suspicious-"
"We'll crawl through kitchens and cellars searching for a single rat in a castle that probably has thousands of them. We'll get filthy. We'll find nothing. And we'll do it multiple times a week until either Pettigrew is caught or we graduate, whichever comes first."
Neville winced. "When you put it like that-"
"I'm putting it accurately."
Ron had finished his shepherd's pie and was eyeing the serving dish for seconds. "Look at it this way. At least we're doing something. Better than sitting around waiting for the Aurors to handle it."
Pansy had no response to that. She returned her attention to her carrots and let the silence stretch until Neville started fidgeting.
"Are you going to stay angry forever?" he asked finally.
"I haven't decided yet." She allowed herself a small glance in his direction. "Ask me again after we've been searching for several hours."
The kitchens were in the basement, past a painting of a fruit bowl that giggled when you tickled the pear. Pansy had learned this from the twins over the summer, one of many pieces of forbidden knowledge they'd shared between gnome-throwing sessions and experiments that Mrs. Weasley had explicitly banned.
They didn't go inside. Evans-Potter had given them a list of areas to check, and the kitchen itself wasn't on it. Instead they were meant to search the surrounding corridors, the storage rooms, the forgotten corners where empty barrels and crates accumulated dust.
Ron took the lead, wand lit, casting light into alcoves and behind stacked supplies. Neville followed with a piece of parchment and a quill, marking down anything that seemed worth noting. Pansy brought up the rear and pretended to still be angry.
"I wonder what he would have been like," Ron said, apropos of nothing.
"Who?" Neville's quill scratched against parchment. He was noting a gap in the stonework, a potential rat-sized entrance.
"Harry. Harry Potter." Ron's wand beam swept across a row of wine barrels, illuminating nothing but cobwebs and cork. "He would have been in our year, wouldn't he? If he'd- you know."
The corridor felt suddenly smaller. Pansy watched Neville's back stiffen, watched him keep writing with careful, deliberate strokes.
"Yeah," Neville said. "He would have been."
"I think about it sometimes. What house he'd have been in. Whether we'd have been friends." Ron moved to the next alcove, still scanning. "His dad was Gryffindor. So was his mum, obviously. Probably would have ended up with us."
"Probably."
"Do you think we'd have got on? He and I, I mean. Mum says the Potters were close with her family before- well. Before."
Pansy trailed her fingers along the wall as they walked. The stone was cold and slightly damp, rougher than the corridors upstairs. She wasn't part of this conversation, didn't want to be part of it, but she couldn't help listening.
"I don't know," Neville said. "I didn't- I never knew him. I was only a baby when-"
"Right. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to-"
"It's fine."
It wasn't fine. Pansy could hear that much in the two words.
They turned a corner. The corridor stretched ahead, darker than before, the torches here burned down to stubs that no one had bothered to replace. Pansy's fingers found a crack in the wall, wide enough for a rat, maybe, though impossible to tell how deep it went.
"Neville," she said. "Here."
He came back to mark it down. Their eyes met briefly over the parchment, and Pansy saw it, the thing he always carried, the weight that sat behind his expression whenever anyone mentioned Harry Potter. The guilt that didn't belong to him but that he wore anyway, heavy as chains.
She didn't say anything. Neither did he. He made his note and moved on, and Pansy kept walking with her hand against the wall.
The dungeons began where the basement ended, marked by a drop in temperature and a shift in the architecture, rougher stone, lower ceilings, the sense of being deep beneath the earth where sunlight couldn't reach. Snape's domain. Pansy had never ventured this far down except for Potions, and even then she'd kept to the main corridors.
Ron's wand light bobbed ahead. Neville's quill kept scratching. Pansy traced the wall and tried not to think about rats.
Something moved.
She stopped. The sensation was difficult to name, not sound, exactly, not sight. A disturbance in the air. Dust that shouldn't have been swirling, caught in the edge of Ron's wand light. A current against her skin, subtle but definite, like someone had just passed very close to her in the dark.
"Did you feel-" she started.
"Mr. Weasley. Mr. Longbottom. Miss Parkinson."
The voice came from behind them. Pansy spun.
Professor Snape stood at the junction of two corridors, half-hidden in shadow, his breathing slightly uneven, as though he'd arrived in a hurry and composed himself just before they turned the corner. She hadn't heard him approach. Hadn't heard anything, no footsteps, no rustle of robes, and yet there he was, materialised from nothing like the dungeons had simply produced him.
"Professor." Neville's voice cracked slightly. "We were just-"
"Wandering the dungeons after hours." Snape stepped forward. The torchlight found his face, carved it into angles and hollows. "Nowhere near Gryffindor Tower. In an area that students have no business being."
"We're not wandering," Ron said. "We're searching."
"Searching." The word dripped with contempt. "For what, exactly?"
"Peter Pettigrew." Neville had straightened up, the way he did when he was trying to be brave. "We're helping with the search. Professor Evans-Potter-"
"Professor Evans-Potter has no authority to send students into the dungeons."
"She didn't send us. We volunteered."
Snape's expression didn't change, but the air around him seemed to grow colder. "Volunteered. To hunt a dark wizard. The three of you."
"What, precisely, would you do if you found him?" Snape moved closer and loomed. "Pettigrew killed thirteen people with a single curse. He evaded Aurors for a decade. He escaped from Azkaban, something no one has ever done before. And you three thought you would do what? Corner him in a corridor and make a citizen's arrest?"
Neville's jaw tightened. "Professor Evans-Potter said we could help. She gave us a list of areas to check. She said-"
"I don't care what Professor Evans-Potter said." Snape's voice came out uncharistically hurried. "You are children. You are in my dungeons. And you are going back to Gryffindor Tower immediately."
"But-"
"Immediately, Mr. Longbottom."
Neville stood rigid, still clutching his parchment and quill, and for a moment she thought he might actually argue.
He didn't. The fight went out of him all at once, shoulders dropping, chin lowering.
"Yes, Professor."
"Good." Snape stepped aside, clearing the path back toward the upper floors. "I will be having a conversation with Professor Evans-Potter about her judgment in allowing students to endanger themselves. Until then, if I find any of you in the dungeons again outside of class hours, the consequences will be severe."
They filed past him: Ron first, then Neville, then Pansy. She kept her eyes forward, didn't look at Snape as she passed, but she could feel him watching. Tracking them until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
Nobody spoke until they reached the stairs.
"That went well," Ron said finally.
Pansy had perfected the art of not-speaking to Neville and Ron. She sat with them at meals but addressed her comments to the air between them. She walked with them to classes but kept three deliberate paces behind. She helped with the Pettigrew searches, Evans-Potter had overruled Snape, apparently, though the dungeons were now officially off-limits, but communicated only in pointed looks and exaggerated sighs.
It was, she had to admit, enormously entertaining.
"She's still doing it," Ron said to Neville at breakfast on Thursday. "It's been a week. How long can one person hold a grudge?"
"Indefinitely," Pansy told her porridge. "If properly motivated."
Neville had stopped trying to apologise somewhere around day four. Now he just watched her performance with something that might have been amusement, if she squinted.
The second Divination lesson arrived on Friday morning. Pansy climbed the spiral staircase alone, already dreading the heat and the incense and the hour of invented futures. She claimed her usual seat near the back and watched the room fill. Granger arrived with three books and an expression of determined scepticism. Please, Pansy thought, let someone else deal with that today. Her head hurt enough already.
Trelawney drifted among the tables, distributing teacups and cryptic observations in equal measure. The incense was thicker today, if such a thing were possible. Pansy's eyes watered.
"We shall continue our exploration of the tea leaves," Trelawney announced, bangles jangling as she gestured toward the cabinet of cups. "But first: we wait."
Lavender's hand went up. "Wait for what, Professor?"
"For the one who has not yet arrived." Trelawney pressed her fingers to her temples, eyes fluttering closed. "The one I foresaw in our first meeting. He comes now. I can feel his approach."
The class exchanged glances.
The trapdoor banged open.
Neville hauled himself through, flushed and breathing hard, bag slipping off his shoulder. His robes were buttoned wrong, one side higher than the other, and his hair stuck up at angles that suggested he'd dressed in a hurry and possibly in the dark.
"Sorry," he gasped. "Sorry, I was… that wasn't as easy as I thought-"
"You have arrived." Trelawney glided toward him, shawls trailing, that serene smile fixed on her face. "The one the Eye foretold. I knew you would come."
Neville's face went from flushed to scarlet. "I- what?"
"In our first lesson, I sensed an absence. A presence yet to manifest. And here you are." She gestured expansively toward the room. "The universe has delivered you to us, Mr…?"
"Longbottom." He was still clutching the trapdoor frame, apparently uncertain whether to fully commit to entering. "Neville Longbottom."
A ripple went through the class. Whispers, quickly stifled. Trelawney's magnified eyes widened behind her glasses.
"The Boy Who Lived," she breathed. "Oh, but of course. The Eye sees so much more clearly now. You carry a great destiny, Mr. Longbottom. A great and terrible destiny."
"Right." Neville's voice had gone flat. "Uhmm… Thanks?"
He extracted himself from Trelawney's orbit and made his way toward Pansy's table, stepping over poufs and bags and the outstretched legs of students who didn't bother to move. The whispers followed him.
He dropped into the seat beside her. "You can stop now."
"Stop what?"
"Pretending to be angry." He was already pulling out his textbook, not looking at her. "It's been a week. I know you're not actually upset. You're just entertaining yourself at my expense."
Pansy considered denying it.
"Fine," she said. "I'll stop."
He looked at her then. Surprised, maybe, that she'd given in so easily.
She smiled.
"You're still an idiot for volunteering us and letting the wrong electives be picked for you," she added. "But I suppose you're my idiot, so I'll have to tolerate it."
Trelawney had begun her lecture, something about the deeper meanings hidden in tea leaf formations, the way the subconscious mind guided the swirl of liquid and sediment. Pansy let the words wash over her without listening.
Neville was reaching for his teacup when she noticed it.
A chain. Thin and golden, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. Neville didn't wear jewellery, had never worn jewellery in the two years she'd known him. He didn't even wear a watch.
"What's that?"
"What's what?" He was measuring tea leaves into his cup, frowning at the instructions on the board.
Pansy reached over and hooked her finger under the chain, tugging it free of his collar. Something small and gold glinted at the end, a pendant of some kind, circular, with delicate markings she couldn't quite-
Neville's hand came down on hers. Hard. He shoved her fingers away and stuffed the chain back under his shirt in a single motion.
"Don't."
"Since when have you been wearing a necklaces, Longbottom? I was just looking-"
"Well, don't." His voice had an edge she'd never heard before. Not angry, exactly. Something closer to panic. "It's nothing. Leave it alone."
Pansy pulled her hand back. Neville's face had gone tight, closed off, and he wasn't meeting her eyes.
"Fine," she said sharply.
Pansy watched him measure and pour and stir, and wondered what kind of nothing required that much protection. Neville misplaced things constantly. Lost them, forgot them, left them behind in classrooms and corridors. He didn't guard his possessions. He barely remembered he had them. Which made this unusual.
The practical portion of the lesson proceeded much as it had the week before. Students bent over cups and consulted textbooks and made up interpretations that ranged from the vaguely plausible to the completely absurd. Lavender claimed to see a wedding veil in Parvati's cup. Dean told Ron his leaves showed a cat, which Ron insisted was actually a lion and therefore proof that Gryffindor would win the Quidditch Cup.
Pansy's cup showed nothing recognisable. A blob. A smear. The aftermath of an unfortunate accident involving tea and gravity.
"Your turn," she said, pushing Neville's cup toward him. "Tell me my fortune."
He picked it up carefully, tilting it toward the window light. His hands were still slightly unsteady.
"I see…" He squinted into the cup. "A sort of… lumpy thing?"
"Profound."
"It might be a cliff. Or a hat."
Pansy considered this. A cliff and a hat. Her life since sitting under the Sorting Hat had certainly felt like falling off something.
"Excellent fortune," she said. "Obviously."
They spent the rest of the lesson competing to invent the most ridiculous interpretations, every smudge a promise of wealth, every stain a guarantee of happiness. Ron joined them eventually, challenged Neville to a tea-drinking race with cold dregs from abandoned cups, and lost badly. Trelawney floated past and said something approving about their enthusiasm for the mystic arts.
The morning was grey and wet and far too early.
She was nearer the boundaries here than she'd been since arriving, and the cold reflected it. Not the clean chill of autumn but the dementors' shadow, seeping through her cloak no matter how tightly she pulled it. The Quidditch pitch stretched below, grass dark with dew, goalposts rising into mist that hadn't yet dissipated. September had turned unusually cold overnight, and the stands were empty except for her and Neville and a handful of other Gryffindors who'd dragged themselves out of bed to watch their friends fail at sport.
Ron stood at the edge of the pitch with the other hopefuls. Seven of them altogether, ranging from a tiny first-year who looked like a strong wind might carry her off to a burly sixth-year who seemed more suited to Beating than Seeking. Ron was somewhere in the middle, not the smallest, not the largest, not the most confident.
The first-year was a surprise, they weren't usually permitted to try out, or even own brooms. But Ron had mentioned something about Wood camping outside McGonagall's office until she agreed to suspend the age requirements. Six years without the Cup had made them both desperate.
He'd been talking about this for weeks and she was glad at least the anticipation for it would be over.
"He looks green," Neville said.
"He always looks green. I think it's the red hair. Pulls the green undertones forward. Complementary colours." Neville's face suggested she might as well have been speaking Mermish.
"It's colour theory… forget it. What do you mean, green?"
"I mean he looks like he's about to be sick."
Pansy looked at Ron more closely. Neville was right, he looked pale and clammy, some tension in the way he gripped his borrowed school broom. He kept glancing up at the stands, finding her and Neville, then looking away again.
"He'll be fine," she said. "He's been practicing."
Movement at the edge of the pitch caught her eye. Something dark, low to the ground, moving through the tall grass near the goalposts. She squinted through the mist.
Padfoot. Professor Evans-Potter's dog, nose down, quartering the ground like a hunting hound. Every few yards he stopped, lifted his head, scented the wind. Then down again, working a trail only he could perceive.
"Professor Evans-Potter should keep better track of that animal," Pansy said. "It's going to wander onto the pitch and get hit by a Bludger."
Neville followed her gaze. "Maybe she sent him. To help with the search."
"Can dogs find rats?"
"I've heard Terriers can. There's a croft near Gran's, sheep mostly. The farmer keeps terriers for the rats, says they'd overrun the feed stores otherwise."
"Padfoot's not a terrier."
"No." Neville watched the dog disappear into a thicker patch of mist. "I don't know what he is, actually."
A whistle cut through the morning air. Oliver Wood had arrived, tall, broad-shouldered, carrying himself with the slightly manic energy of someone who took Quidditch far more seriously than any sane person should. She'd heard about Wood from Percy during the summer, usually in the context of why he hadn't slept properly since 1987. He strode onto the pitch and began arranging the hopefuls into something resembling order.
"Right," his voice carried across the stands, "you're all here because you think you can play Seeker. Most of you are wrong. Let's see what you're made of."
He produced a wooden case from somewhere, Pansy hadn't seen him carrying it, and flipped the latches. Three golden balls rose into the air, wings buzzing, hovering for a moment before they scattered in different directions.
"Practice snitches," Neville said. "They're slower than the real ones."
"How do you know that?"
"Ron told me. Seventeen times."
The hopefuls mounted their brooms and kicked off. Pansy watched Ron rise unsteadily into the air, his balance not quite right, his turns slightly too wide.
One of the practice snitches darted past the stands, wings catching the pale morning light. Pansy couldn't help tracking it, there, by the left goalpost, hovering just above the grass. The players were all looking in the wrong direction, scanning the empty air near the right side of the pitch.
"Ron," she called, pointing. "Left post. Low."
He turned. Squinted. Didn't see it.
"Lower. Near the ground. It's right there."
The snitch moved. Ron's eyes finally found it and he dove, but the first-year girl was faster, she'd been watching Pansy point, had figured out the trajectory, and she snatched the golden ball out of the air six feet before Ron reached it.
He pulled up, face flushed, and shot Pansy a look she couldn't quite interpret.
"Sorry," she called. "I was trying to help."
Wood's whistle again. "Everyone down. Regroup."
The players descended. Wood spoke to them in a voice too low for Pansy to hear, gesturing with his hands, probably delivering some sort of motivational speech about perseverance and house pride. Ron stood at the back of the group, staring at the ground.
Wood's whistle shrieked across the pitch. The players kicked off in a ragged line, spreading out across the field, and Pansy saw him release something from a case at his hip, a flash of gold that disappeared into the mist before she could track its path.
Then Wood looked up. At the stands. At Pansy.
"You there," he called. "In the purple sweater."
Pansy looked behind her. No one else sat nearby.
"Yes, you. Come down here."
She exchanged a glance with Neville, who shrugged, and made her way down the stands to the edge of the pitch. Wood met her at the boundary line, arms crossed, studying her with the assessing gaze of a horse trader examining livestock.
"Name?"
"Pansy Parkinson." She lifted her chin. "Of the Sacred Twenty-Eight Parkinsons."
Wood just blinked at her until he seemed to catch himself.
"You saw the snitch," he said. "Before anyone else. You pointed it out to Weasley."
"I was trying to help him."
"You saw it from the stands. A hundred feet away, through the mist. The players were thirty feet from it and they couldn't find it."
Pansy didn't know what to say to that. She'd seen a flash of gold, tracked the movement, pointed. It hadn't seemed remarkable.
"Have you ever thought about trying out?" Wood asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I've never flown a broom. Because I don't care about Quidditch. Because I have better things to do with my time than chase a ball around a field."
"You should try out."
"I just told you-"
"I heard what you told me." Wood was already turning, walking back toward the group of hopefuls. "Mount up. Let's see what you can do."
"I don't have a broom."
He picked one of the school brooms up tossed one to her without looking. She barely caught it.
"I really don't-"
"Gryffindor hasn't won the Cup in five years. five years, Parkinson. McGonagall pretends she doesn't care, but I've seen her face when Slytherin wins the trophy. If you've got talent, I need to see it. Even if you don't want to use it, I need to know what we're working with." He fixed her with a look that suggested arguing would be pointless. "Humor me. Five minutes. If you hate it, you never have to touch a broom again."
Pansy looked at the broom in her hands. Looked at Ron, standing with the other hopefuls, watching her with an expression she couldn't read. Looked at Neville in the stands, who raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
"Fine," she said. "Five minutes. Then I'm going back to the stands."
Wood nodded and launched into what was clearly a well-rehearsed speech. "Grip the handle like this. Kick off with your dominant foot. Lean forward to accelerate, pull back to slow down. Turn with your hips, not your hands. Don't look down."
"Don't look down?" Pansy repeated. "That's your advice?"
"People panic when they look down. They see how high they are and they freeze up. Keep your eyes on the horizon, or on what you're chasing, and let your body handle the rest."
Pansy gripped the broom the way he'd shown her. The wood was cold through her gloves, slightly rough despite the wear.
"Whenever you're ready."
She kicked off.
The ground dropped away. Wind caught her cloak, her hair, pressed against her face as she rose. The broom wobbled beneath her, she was gripping too hard, she could feel it, and she forced her fingers to loosen, let the handle settle into a more natural position.
Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty. The mist swirled around her, damp and cold, and then she was above it and the whole world opened up.
The castle spread below, grey stone and dark windows and the vast sweep of grounds rolling toward the forest. The lake glittered in the distance, catching the first weak rays of sun. The Quidditch pitch looked different from up here, smaller, contained, the stands like a child's toy.
She could see everything.
The first-year girl was wobbling badly, barely able to hold her position. The burly sixth-year flew like he was someone who'd learned to fly by watching Bludgers. Ron circled near the goalposts, watching her. Should she wave?
And there, near the entrance to the stands, hovering just above the bannister, a flash of gold.
Pansy leaned forward.
The broom shot ahead faster than she expected. She overcorrected, wobbled, nearly spun completely around before she figured out how to straighten. Her technique was terrible, she could feel it, the graceless lurching of someone who'd never done this before, but the snitch was there, she could see it, and her body knew which direction to go even if it didn't know how to get there elegantly.
Motion beside her. Ron had seen her dive, had followed, was cutting across the pitch at an angle that would bring him to the snitch at the same moment she arrived. His form was better than hers, but he was looking at her, not at the goal.
The snitch darted left. Pansy adjusted, barely, her broom protesting the sudden shift in direction. Ron mirrored the movement but half a second late, still tracking her instead of the ball.
They converged. The golden wings fluttered ten feet ahead, then five, then two.
Pansy reached out.
Ron reached out.
Their brooms collided.
Pansy didn't think. She shoved sideways with her shoulder, hard, deliberate, the way she'd shoved Parvati across the dormitory floor, and Ron's broom spun away. He shouted something, but she was already closing her fingers around one of the cold metal wings.
The Snitch wrenched sideways. The movement nearly pulled her off the broom, her thighs clamped against the handle, her free hand scrabbling for grip as the tiny thing dragged her arm through the air. It was stronger than it looked. The wing beat against her palm, edge biting into the webbing between her fingers, and her whole body listed to the right as the Snitch tried to tear itself free.
She couldn't really catch it like this. Not like this, not one-handed, not while the broom bucked beneath her and the ground tilted at wrong angles. The wing sliced against her skin and her fingers were slipping, the metal sliding through her grip inch by inch.
She let go.
The Snitch shot upward. Pansy lunged, abandoning the broom handle entirely, both hands reaching for the blur of gold as it tried to escape. Her fingers closed around the body of it, the round centre, not the wings, and she squeezed until she felt the metal indent slightly under her grip. The wings beat uselessly against her wrists, going nowhere.
She had it.
Pansy descended toward the grass, her landing more controlled than her takeoff but still rather clumsy, she hit the ground harder than she meant to, stumbled, caught herself with one hand in the wet grass. The snitch buzzed against her fingers, trapped and furious.
She looked at it. Small and silly it really was, a ball with wings, a toy that grown adults devoted their lives to chasing.
She'd caught it.
Something opened in her chest. Something that had been closed for months, locked down tight since the Chamber, since Tom, since she'd woken in the hospital wing and started the long slow process of putting herself back together. It was the discovery that she could still want things, could still chase them, could still close her fingers around them and refuse to let go.
"PANSY!"
Neville was on his feet in the stands, waving both arms over his head, grinning so wide she could see it from here. She lifted the hand holding the snitch, look, look what I did, and he cheered again.
Wood was striding toward her across the pitch, his expression unreadable but his pace quick.
Pansy turned to find Ron.
He'd landed twenty feet away. His broom lay on the grass beside him, abandoned, and he stood with his arms at his sides, watching her. Not moving. Not speaking.
Not smiling.
Pansy's hand lowered. The snitch's wings beat uselessly against her palm.
Ron looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned, picked up his broom, and walked off the pitch without a word.
I've uploaded a new chapter of "Fortune Favors the Brave"!
You can read it here on Ao3 (and below on Tumblr)
Pairing: Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson
Summer '93 at the Burrow
The chains wrapped around her wrists the moment she sat down. Pansy had, of course, known they would. She'd been warned, in the careful language of the Ministry officials who didn't want to be blamed for anything later, that the questioning chair was enchanted to restrain its unlucky occupants until they were done and that they would tighten if she struggled. It was a standard procedure, nothing personal.
She sat still, spine straight, chin lifted, and told herself that it was fine. If she had managed to survive the previous school year, she could survive a room full of wizards in plum-coloured robes in a vast and circular chamber shaped like a pit, asking her questions she didn't want to answer.
It didn't help that there were people watching in the benches that rose in tiers around the central pit where she sat in the chair like a specimen on a pin. She recognised some of the faces in the gallery. Dumbledore sat in the front row, inclining his head slightly when her eyes found his, a small acknowledgement that somehow made everything worse. He had offered her the castle for the holidays. McGonagall was beside him, lips pressed into a thin line, an expression Pansy had learned to associate with herself. She had offered her own home in Hogsmeade.
And there, in the shadows of the upper gallery, pale hair catching the torchlight: Lucius Malfoy. He had offered Malfoy Manor as a place for her to stay. She had refused. He had smiled and said he understood completely, and she had not believed him for a second. His face betrayed nothing, but his presence made her stomach clench. Ron's father sat a few seats down, looking profoundly uncomfortable in robes that had clearly been borrowed for the occasion, too short in the sleeves, too tight across the shoulders, the kind of borrowed that fooled no one. She had taken the family up on the offer to stay at the Burrow.
"Miss Parkinson." The voice came from the central podium, where a witch with iron-grey hair and a face like a disappointed hatchet presided over the proceedings. "You have been brought before this body to give testimony regarding the events at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry during the academic year of 1992 and 1993. Do you understand the nature of these proceedings?"
"Yes."
"You have been informed that you will be administered Veritaserum to ensure the accuracy of your testimony. Do you consent to this administration?"
Consent. As if she had a choice. As if the chains around her wrists were merely decorative, as if the fifty-odd witches and wizards staring down at her would simply let her leave if she said no.
"Do I have an alternative?"
A murmur rippled through the gallery. The grey-haired witch's expression sharpened. "You may refuse. However, refusal will be noted in the official record and may influence the Wizengamot's assessment of your cooperation and credibility."
"So I can consent or I can be branded uncooperative. How very optional." Her jaw tigthened. "Fine. Yes. I consent."
The wizard who approached her with the vial was young, barely older than Percy Weasley, with the nervous energy of someone who'd been assigned an unpleasant task and wanted it over quickly.
"Open your mouth, please."
Three drops on her tongue. The Veritaserum was colourless, odourless, indistinguishable from water except for the effect, which was immediate and unpleasant: a sensation like her skull was being very gently pried open and the truth rose in her throat like nausea, pressing against her teeth, demanding release. She swallowed hard.
"State your full name for the record."
"Pansy Viola Parkinson."
"Your date of birth?"
"Thirteenth of November, 1979."
"Your current residence?"
"I don't have one." The admission stung, dragged out of her by the potion before she could soften it. "My mother's whereabouts are unknown. I've been staying in the hospital wing at Hogwarts."
"And your father."
Pansy's jaw tightened. "You know where my father is."
"For the record, Miss Parkinson."
"Azkaban." A murmur rippled through the gallery, as if this were news to anyone present. "My father is in Azkaban, where he has been since I was four years old. I assume you have that information in your files, along with his crime, his trial transcript, and whatever other documentation you've assembled for this proceeding."
Another murmur. The grey-haired witch made a note on the parchment in front of her. "Your father is Theron Marius Parkinson, formerly of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror Division. Is that correct?"
"And he was convicted of..."
"I know what he was convicted of." Pansy's hands curled into fists beneath the chains. "Conspiracy. Murder. Providing intelligence to the Dark Lord during the first war. Betraying the identities of Aurors and Order members to Death Eaters, resulting in multiple deaths."
She heard gasps at the name, felt the ripple of discomfort through the gallery, and didn't care. "I was four. I don't remember him. I don't know him. Whatever sins you're hoping to pin on me through association, you'll have to try harder than invoking a man I've never had a conversation with."
"Miss Parkinson." The witch's voice was sharp. "You will answer the questions asked of you without editorial commentary."
"You asked about my father. I answered. If you wanted a simple yes or no, you should have asked a simpler question."
The Veritaserum was working and right now the truth was that she was furious, and frightened, and deeply, viciously tired of being looked at like she was already guilty of something.
The questioning continued.
They asked about the diary. When she'd received it, how she'd received it, what she'd known about its origins. She told them: a gift from Ron Weasley, found in his cauldron, assumed to be a blank journal. She told them about the first time words appeared on the page, about Tom's elegant script, about the conversations that had started as casual and become consuming.
"You wrote to this entity regularly?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Months. From September until-" The memory rose unbidden: the diary on her pillow, on her nightstand, in her trunk, no matter how many times she threw it away. "Until Christmas."
"You stopped writing at Christmas. But the attacks continued after Christmas, did they not?"
"Yes."
"Were those attacks your doing?"
"I didn't choose them. The diary was controlling me."
"So you claim no responsibility for the petrifications?"
"I claim I had no will in the matter."
"Then you should welcome the opportunity to cooperate fully with this inquiry." The witch's voice was all steel and no silk. "If you were merely an instrument, you should have nothing to hide. Your memories, your communications, all of it should be freely offered to aid our investigation."
The logic was a noose, and Pansy could feel it tightening.
"Is that not correct, Miss Parkinson?"
The Veritaserum answered for her. "Yes."
"And yet you have refused to cooperate. You have withheld your memories. You have declined to provide any record of your communications with the entity known as Tom Riddle." A pause. "Why?"
Pansy stared at the witch. The Veritaserum churned in her stomach, demanding honesty, and she gave it, just not the kind they wanted.
"Because you're asking me to write down the most private thoughts I've ever had and hand them to a room full of strangers who will read them out loud and judge me for them." Her voice didn't waver.
"Because I was thirteen years old and lonely and I wrote things in that diary that I've never said to anyone, things about my mother and my father and my friends, and you want me to transcribe all of it so you can enter it into the public record. Because those conversations were mine, even if the thing I was having them with turned out to be a monster, and I am not going to let you have them just because you're curious."
"The Ministry's interest is not curiosity, Miss Parkinson. It is a matter of national security. The entity you communicated with has been identified as a fragment of the wizard known as Lord Voldemort."
More gasps. More discomfort. Pansy felt nothing. She'd already been told, already had the revelation delivered in Dumbledore's gentle voice while she lay in a hospital bed trying to process the fact that she'd spent months pouring her heart out to the same Dark Lord her father had gone to Azkaban for serving.
"I'm aware."
"And you understand the significance of this identification? The communications you had with this entity may contain information vital to understanding the Dark Lord's methods, his vulnerabilities, his plans-"
"His plans?" Pansy laughed, and the sound echoed harshly off the stone walls. "You want to know his plans? He wanted a body. He wanted to come back. That was his plans. I don't know anything about whatever you're hoping to find in my diary entries. That was all that it was."
The grey-haired witch's quill scratched across parchment. "You maintain that you will not provide written records of your communications?"
"I maintain that there are no written records. The diary consumed everything I wrote. The pages were always blank by morning." Pansy's throat ached. "I couldn't give you transcripts even if I wanted to. All I have are memories, and those are-" She stopped. Swallowed. "Incomplete. There are gaps. Times I can't account for. I don't know what I did during those gaps."
"You have been asked to provide testimony from memory, then. To recount as much of your communications as you can recall."
"And I have declined."
A figure rose from the front bench. Lucius Malfoy's voice cut through the chamber like silk over steel.
"If I may, Madam Bones."
The grey-haired witch, Bones, apparently, inclined her head slightly. "Mr. Malfoy."
"I find myself curious about the circumstances surrounding this diary's discovery." Lucius moved as he spoke, descending the steps toward the central pit with the easy grace of a man who'd never been chained to anything in his life. "The accused states that it was given to her by young Mr. Weasley. Found in his cauldron, she says. A remarkable coincidence, wouldn't you agree?"
Pansy watched him approach. His pale eyes found hers, and she saw nothing in them, no warmth, no recognition of the child who'd played in his gardens, the girl his son had once called a friend.
"I might suggest," Lucius continued, his voice carrying effortlessly to every corner of the chamber, "that there is another coincidence worth examining. The diary, we now know, was an artifact of extraordinary dark magic. It was designed to possess, to manipulate, to ultimately resurrect the Dark Lord himself. And of all the students at Hogwarts, of all the children this artifact might have found its way to, it ended up in the hands of Pansy Parkinson."
He paused, letting the name sit in the air. "Daughter of Theron Parkinson. Death Eater. Traitor. One of the Dark Lord's trusted agents during the first war."
"I had nothing to do with my father's crimes." The words came out flat, automatic.
"And yet." Lucius cut her off smoothly. "The diary found you. Not a Muggle-born student, who might have been destroyed by it before any real damage could be done. Not a half-blood, with divided loyalties. But a pure-blood witch from one of the oldest families in Britain. A family with documented ties to the Dark Lord."
He spread his hands, the picture of reasonable concern. "One might wonder if this was truly a coincidence at all. One might wonder if the diary was meant to find Miss Parkinson. If it was, perhaps, guided to her."
"That's absurd." But her voice shook slightly, and she hated herself for it. "Ron found it in his cauldron. In Diagon Alley. It was random chance-"
"Was it?" Lucius's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Can you say with certainty that no one placed that diary where young Mr. Weasley would find it? Can you say with certainty that you were not, in some way, chosen?"
She couldn't say that with certainty. She didn't know how the diary had ended up in Ron's cauldron. She didn't know if it had been random or deliberate. She didn't know anything except that she was very tired and very frightened and this man was trying to make her look guilty of something she hadn't done.
"I didn't know what the diary was." The words came out small, stripped of defiance. "I didn't know who Tom Riddle was. I didn't know what would happen when I wrote in it."
Lucius regarded her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then his lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Let us speak, then, of your associations at Hogwarts." His tone shifted, becoming almost conversational, which somehow made it worse. "You were sorted into Gryffindor, I understand. Despite your family's long history with Slytherin House."
"The Hat sorted me where it sorted me."
"Indeed. And in Gryffindor, you formed certain... friendships." He let the word hang in the air, giving it weight it didn't deserve. "With young Mr. Weasley. And with Neville Longbottom."
Something cold slithered down Pansy's spine.
"They're my friends. Yes."
"Neville Longbottom." Lucius repeated the name as if tasting it. "The Boy Who Lived. The child who defeated the Dark Lord as an infant. A curious choice of companion for the daughter of a Death Eater, wouldn't you say?"
The Veritaserum dragged the answer out of her before she could shape it into something dignified. "I didn't choose him because of any of that. He'd lost his toad. I thought he was going to cry about it, so I helped him look. Then a troll nearly killed us both and that was that. That's all. That's how it happened."
"How touching." Lucius's voice was dry. "And this paragon of virtue, the boy who lived, did he know about the diary?"
The question hit her like a physical blow.
No, she thought desperately. No, don't make me answer this, don't-
But the Veritaserum didn't care what she wanted.
"Yes." The word came out strangled, torn from her against her will. "He knew."
A murmur rippled through the gallery. Pansy saw Dumbledore lean forward slightly, saw Arthur Weasley's face go pale.
"He knew." Lucius's voice was silk and satisfaction. "The Boy Who Lived knew that you possessed a dark artifact, and he said nothing? Did nothing?"
"That's not- you're twisting it-" She was fighting the serum now, trying to find the spaces between truths, the ways to tell the story that wouldn't damn Neville along with her. "He tried to help. He and Ron both. They tried to take it away from me, to bring it to the professors-"
"And yet they failed." Lucius cut through her protests. "The diary remained in your possession. The attacks continued. Students were petrified. A child died." He paused, letting each word land like a stone. "One might wonder why Mr. Longbottom, having discovered that his friend possessed an artifact capable of such destruction, did not simply go to the authorities himself. One might wonder what stopped him."
"I stopped him." She was crying now, she realized distantly, tears streaming down her face, and she couldn't stop that either. "Neville wanted to help me. He's always wanted to help me. That's not his fault. None of this is his fault. If you want to blame someone, blame me."
Lucius's expression flickered, perhaps with annoyance that she'd managed to redirect the narrative even under Veritaserum.
"And yet the fact remains," he said smoothly, "that Neville Longbottom, the wizarding world's greatest hope against the Dark Lord's return, knew of a dark artifact in Hogwarts and failed to report it to the proper authorities and just let it carry on with the destruction. One might question his judgment. One might wonder if the Boy Who Lived is quite as reliable as the public has been led to believe."
"One might also question," came a new voice, quiet but carrying, "why Mr. Malfoy is so eager to cast doubt on the character of a thirteen-year-old boy who has done nothing wrong."
Arthur Weasley had risen to his feet.
Lucius turned, his expression cooling. "I am merely pursuing relevant lines of inquiry, Weasley. The Wizengamot has a right to understand the full context-"
"The full context," Mr. Weasley interrupted, his voice hardening in a way Pansy had never heard before, "is that two children tried to help their friend and were thwarted by an incompetent professor and a dark artifact of extraordinary power. The full context is that Neville Longbottom did exactly what any decent person would do, he tried to intervene, he was rebuffed, and he trusted an adult who should have known better."
He stepped forward, and despite his ill-fitting robes and his shabby appearance, there was something in his bearing that made Lucius take a half-step back. "The full context, Mr. Malfoy, is that you seem remarkably interested in discrediting everyone involved in this affair except the one person who might actually deserve scrutiny: whoever put that diary into circulation in the first place."
The chamber had gone very quiet.
Lucius's pale eyes narrowed. "I'm not sure I understand your implication, Weasley."
"I'm not implying anything. I'm simply noting that dark artifacts don't appear from nowhere. Someone owned that diary. Someone kept it hidden for nearly fifty years. Someone decided to release it this year, of all years, into a school full of children." Mr. Weasley's voice carried to every corner of the chamber. "If the Wizengamot is interested in investigating coincidences, I'd suggest starting there."
The tension in the chamber was thick enough to cut. Pansy watched Lucius and Mr. Weasley face each other across the pit where she sat chained, and understood, dimly, that she was witnessing old grudges being aired under the guise of procedure.
She was so tired.
Bones cleared her throat. "The matter of the diary's origins is being investigated separately. Mr. Malfoy, if you have no further questions directly relevant to Miss Parkinson's testimony, I suggest we proceed."
For a moment, Lucius looked as though he might object. Then he inclined his head, the picture of gracious compliance, and stepped back.
"Of course, Madam Bones. I believe I've heard everything I needed to hear."
He returned to his seat in the gallery, and Pansy felt his gaze on her like a cold draft.
"Miss Parkinson. You've testified that you cannot provide written records of your communications. You've testified that your memories are incomplete. Is there anything else you wish to add to your statement?"
Pansy thought about it. The Veritaserum made thinking difficult, made everything slippery and strange, but she tried.
"I killed it," she said finally. "When it mattered. When it was using my body to attack Professor Snape, when it was trying to finish what it had started, I fought my way back and I grabbed a basilisk fang and I stabbed it." Her voice cracked. "I know that doesn't fix anything. I know people got hurt because of me. I know I should have asked for help sooner, should have told someone what was happening, should have done everything differently. But when it came down to it, I chose to destroy him. Even though it meant dying. Even though I thought the venom would kill me. I made that choice. And I don't know if that means anything to any of you, but it means something to me."
More silence.
Then Bones made a note on her parchment. "Very well. The Wizengamot will take a brief recess to deliberate. Miss Parkinson, you will remain here until a decision is reached regarding your status."
The chains around her wrists loosened, though they didn't release entirely.
The deliberation took two hours.
She spent most of it staring at the floor, trying not to think about anything. The Veritaserum was wearing off, leaving her with a headache and a queasy stomach and the uncomfortable awareness of everything she'd said.
When Bones returned, her expression was unreadable.
"The Wizengamot has reached a decision." Her voice echoed in the empty chamber. "Miss Parkinson, you are found to have been an unwitting victim of dark magic rather than a willing participant in criminal activity. No charges will be filed against you. However-" She paused, and Pansy felt her stomach clench. "You will be required to submit to periodic monitoring by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for a period of no less than one year. You will be required to report any unusual magical occurrences or contact from unknown individuals. And you will be expected to cooperate fully with any ongoing investigations into the diary's origins and the events of this past year."
Pansy nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak.
"As for your living arrangements: custody is hereby granted to Arthur and Molly Weasley for the duration of the summer holidays, pending the resolution of matters relating to your mother's whereabouts." Bones's expression softened, just slightly. "You are dismissed, Miss Parkinson. The chains will release momentarily."
The iron fell away from her wrists. Pansy stood on shaking legs, rubbing the red marks where the metal had bitten into her skin.
Arthur Weasley was already descending the steps toward her, his borrowed robes flapping around his ankles, his face creased with concern.
"Are you all right?" he asked quietly. "That was… that was rather a lot."
"I'm fine," she said.
He nodded, accepting this. "Molly's waiting at home. She's been cooking all morning, I think she's worried you're not eating enough, which, if I'm honest, she worries that about everyone, but especially-" He stopped, seeming to realize he was rambling. "The point is, there's food."
He offered her his arm, old-fashioned and formal and somehow exactly right.
Pansy took it.
The Floo deposited her onto a hearthrug that had seen better decades.
Pansy stumbled, caught herself on a mantelpiece crowded with mismatched candlesticks and what appeared to be a clock with nine hands, and tried to brush the soot from her robes while her ears adjusted to the assault.
The Burrow was loud.
There were pots clanging somewhere nearby, voices overlapping from at least three different directions, something that might have been a wireless playing what sounded like a Celestina Warbeck song, and just a general sense of noisiness. After three weeks in the hospital wing, where the only sounds had been Madam Pomfrey's measured footsteps and the occasional distant chime of a clock tower, the noise was hair raising.
She pressed a hand to her temple and tried not to wince.
The room she'd landed in was... she wasn't sure what to call it. A sitting room, perhaps, though it bore no resemblance to any sitting room she'd ever seen. The furniture was mismatched and overstuffed, arranged in ways that suggested comfort rather than aesthetics. Books and magazines covered every available surface.
"Pansy, dear!"
Mrs. Weasley emerged from what must be the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron that bore the stains of recent cooking. Her face was flushed from heat, her hair escaping from its braid, and she was already moving toward Pansy with arms outstretched.
The hug happened before Pansy could prepare for it.
She went rigid, the way she had in the hospital wing, but Mrs. Weasley didn't seem to notice or didn't seem to care. Those soft arms wrapped around her, pulled her close, held her with a firmness that brooked no argument.
"We're so glad you're here," Mrs. Weasley murmured into her hair. "So glad."
Pansy stood frozen, arms hanging at her sides, and didn't know what to do.
She should say something. Should explain that she didn't need this, didn't want it, that whatever weakness had made her cling to Mrs. Weasley in the hospital wing was finished now. She was better. She was fine.
But Mrs. Weasley was already pulling back, hands moving to Pansy's shoulders, examining her with the critical eye of someone with many children.
"You're still too bony," she announced. "Much too thin. We'll fix that. Dinner's almost ready, I've made beef and ale stew with dumplings, and there's treacle tart for after, and I won't hear any arguments about portions."
"I don't-"
"No arguments," Mrs. Weasley said firmly, and steered her toward the kitchen.
The kitchen was worse. Or better, depending on perspective. Pots bubbled on a stove that looked like it predated the Hogwarts founders. A knife was chopping vegetables by itself on a scarred wooden counter. The table was enormous, clearly designed for a family much larger than two parents, and it was already half-set with plates that didn't match and cutlery that had seen decades of use.
There was a window over the sink that looked out onto a garden gone wild with summer growth, and beyond that, hills rolling toward a sky just beginning to turn gold with evening.
"Children!" Mrs. Weasley's voice carried through the house with a volume that made Pansy flinch. "Come down and say hello to our guest!"
The thunder of footsteps on stairs. Pansy braced herself.
Percy appeared first. He offered her a formal nod and a "Welcome to our home, Pansy" that sounded rehearsed, like he'd been practicing in front of a mirror.
"Thank you," she managed.
The twins came next, and Pansy tensed automatically. Fred and George Weasley had made her life intermittently miserable since first year, nothing cruel, nothing targeted, just the general chaos they inflicted on anyone within range. Dungbombs in her book bag. A hex that turned her hair temporarily green. That time they'd somehow convinced Peeves to follow her around singing rude limericks for an entire afternoon.
But now they stood in the kitchen doorway, uncharacteristically subdued, wearing identical expressions of careful politeness.
"Pansy," said one of them, Fred, she thought, though she'd never been able to tell them apart reliably.
"Good to have you," said the other.
No joke. No prank. No mischievous glance exchanged between them that suggested something horrible was about to happen to her shoes.
Of course the twins were being careful with her. Everyone was going to be careful with her now and forever. She hated it already.
Ginny appeared last, hovering at the edge of the kitchen like she wasn't sure of her welcome.
"Hello," Ginny said quietly.
"Hello."
"Right," Mrs. Weasley said, breaking the silence. "Ginny, help me with the table. Percy, fetch the butter from the cold cabinet. Fred, George-" She fixed them with a look that suggested long experience with their particular brand of helpfulness. "Just... sit down somewhere and don't touch anything."
"Mum," George said, wounded. "We would never-"
"Sit."
They sat.
Pansy stood awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen, uncertain what to do with herself.
"Ron's outside," Mrs. Weasley said, glancing at Pansy as she directed Ginny toward a drawer full of napkins. "Practicing Quidditch, if you can call it that. He's very determined to make the team this year. Would you mind fetching him for dinner, dear?"
"I don't-" Pansy hesitated. "I don't know where the Quidditch pitch is."
Mrs. Weasley laughed, a warm sound that seemed to fill the kitchen. "Quidditch pitch! Oh, that's lovely. No, dear, we haven't got a pitch. Just the paddock out back. Go through the garden, past the chicken coop and you'll see him. Can't miss it, really."
She was being ushered toward the back door before she could protest, Mrs. Weasley's hands gentle but firm on her shoulders.
"Go on, then. Fresh air will do you good. You're still too pale."
The door closed behind her, and Pansy found herself standing in a garden that was, frankly, chaos. Vegetables growing in wild tangles, flowers that had clearly self-seeded and spread wherever they pleased, fruit trees heavy with summer growth, and what appeared to be a small pond that was definitely not supposed to have that many frogs.
The chicken coop was easy to spot, mostly because of the chickens and frankly, the chicken coop smell. She didn't like chickens. Couldn't say exactly why, only that something about the sight of them, the flutter of wings, the vulnerable stretch of feathered throats, made her hands feel wrong. Made her remember the gaps in her memory and wonder what had filled them.
And beyond it all, in a paddock that was more dandelions than grass, a figure on a broomstick swooped and dove against the evening sky.
Pansy picked her way through the garden, trying to avoid the worst of the overgrown patches, and immediately discovered that country gardens came with country wildlife. Something bit her ankle. Then her arm. Then her neck.
"Weasley!" she shouted, swatting at her arm where another mosquito had landed. "Get down here!"
The figure on the broomstick didn't hear her, or pretended not to. He was running through some kind of drill, weaving between what looked like old fence posts that had been charmed to hover at irregular heights.
"WEASLEY!"
Ron glanced down, saw her, and began a descent that was slightly too fast and ended with a stumble that he tried to turn into a casual dismount. It didn't quite work. His ears went red.
"Pansy! You're here!" He jogged toward her, broom over his shoulder, grinning despite the botched landing. "How was the- I mean, are you- did everything go alright?"
"I'm not in Azkaban, so apparently it went well enough." She slapped her neck, where something else had bitten her. "Can we go inside? The mosquitoes are eating me alive."
"Yeah, come on," he said, falling into step beside her. "Mum's been mental all week, getting things ready. You'd think the Minister of Magic himself was coming to stay."
"I noticed the lack of dungbombs in my welcome," Pansy said dryly. "The twins were suspiciously well-behaved."
"Oh, that won't last. Mum threatened to confiscate their entire inventory if they so much as looked at you funny for the first week. After that, all bets are off." Ron grinned at her. "Fair warning: don't eat anything they give you. Don't sit in any chair they offer you. And definitely don't open any packages that arrive by owl."
"Wonderful. I've traded one form of danger for another."
"At least this kind won't try to kill you. Probably." He paused, reconsidering. "Well. The puking pastilles might make you wish you were dead, but that's not quite the same thing."
They walked back through the garden as the sun slipped lower, casting long shadows across the overgrown flower beds. Ron chatted about Quidditch, the new broom, his chances at making the team, Wood's training regime that apparently bordered on abuse, and Pansy listened without really hearing, too busy watching the Burrow grow larger as they approached.
It was crooked. She hadn't noticed from inside, but from here she could see how the house seemed to lean in several different directions at once, additional rooms clearly added over the years without much concern for structural integrity or architectural coherence.
"Pansy?"
She blinked. Ron was holding the back door open, looking at her with what looked like concern to her.
"Coming," she said, and followed him inside.
Ginny led her up the stairs.
And up. And up. Pansy counted four landings before they reached what was apparently their destination, and she was slightly out of breath by the time they got there.
"This is my room," Ginny said, pushing open a door painted a shade of orange that made Pansy's eyes hurt. "Well, our room, I suppose. For now. I'll be in with Ron while you're here, he's got the extra camp bed, and he snores but not too badly and it's not so bad really."
The room was small. Tiny, really, by any reasonable standard, Pansy's wardrobe at the manor had been larger. A single bed was pushed against one wall, covered in a patchwork quilt that had clearly been made by hand rather than purchased. A desk was crammed under the window, barely visible beneath stacks of parchment. The walls were covered in posters, Quidditch teams, mostly, though Pansy spotted what might have been a Weird Sisters album cover partially hidden behind a schedule of some kind.
"I know it's not much," Ginny continued, apparently incapable of stopping once she'd started, "and it's probably nothing like what you're used to, but Mum's put fresh sheets on and I've cleared out the desk drawers for you, and there's space in the wardrobe, well, half the wardrobe, I've moved my things to one side, and if you need anything at all you can just ask, really, anything, we want you to feel at home-"
"It's fine."
"-and the bathroom's down one floor, second door on the left, don't go in the first door because that's Percy's room and he gets very upset about privacy, not that you'd want to go in there anyway, and-"
"Ginny."
"-and breakfast is usually around eight but Mum says you can sleep as late as you want, you're meant to be resting, and I'll try to be quiet when I come to get my things in the morning though I'm not very good at being quiet, Ron says I'm like a baby hippogriff-"
"Ginny!"
The girl stopped, mouth still open around whatever word had been about to escape. Her cheeks flushed red, nearly matching her hair.
"Sorry," she said, small. "I talk too much when I'm nervous. Mum always says."
Pansy wanted to say something cutting. Something about how yes, she had noticed, and perhaps Ginny could practice being nervous somewhere else.
"It's fine," Pansy said again, and tried to make it sound less like a dismissal. "I'm just tired. The hearing was... it was a lot."
Ginny nodded quickly. "Right. Of course. I'll just- I'll let you rest. If you need anything-"
"I'll ask."
"Right. Good. Okay." Ginny backed toward the door, nearly tripping over a pair of shoes she'd apparently forgotten to move. "I'll just… right. Goodnight. Or- it's not night yet, is it? Good evening? Good... rest?"
She fled before Pansy could respond, the door clicking shut behind her with the careful quietness of someone trying very hard not to disturb.
Pansy stood in the middle of the tiny room and breathed.
Alone. Finally alone.
She sat on the edge of the bed and then let herself drop on it, still in her robes, and stared at the ceiling.
She should sleep. She knew she should sleep. The exhaustion was a physical weight, pressing her into the mattress, making her limbs feel like they'd been filled with sand. She hadn't slept properly in weeks, months, really, if she was being honest.
But every time she closed her eyes, she thought that she still felt it.
What if he was still there?
The thought came unbidden, the way it always did, slipping through her defenses in the quiet moments. They'd told her the diary was destroyed. They'd told her Tom was gone, that he had been obliterated when she'd driven the fang through its pages. Dumbledore himself had assured her, in his calm and certain voice, that she was free.
But how could anyone know for certain? How could anyone look inside her head and verify that every trace of Tom Riddle had been scrubbed away, that there wasn't some fragment still lurking in the corners of her mind, waiting for her to let her guard down, waiting for her to sleep?
She rolled onto her side, facing the wall, and didn't close her eyes.
The ceiling cracks blurred as the light faded, evening sliding into night, and Pansy lay still and counted the hours until she could pretend to wake up.
She came down late.
It was nearly eleven by the time she descended the creaking stairs, later than she'd meant to be, but the night had stretched endlessly and somewhere around dawn she'd finally slipped into something that wasn't quite sleep but wasn't quite waking either. A grey half-consciousness that offered no rest but at least made the hours pass.
The kitchen was bright with midmorning sunshine, and Mrs. Weasley was at the stove, stirring something that smelled aggressively wholesome.
"There you are, dear!" She turned with a smile that didn't quite hide the concern in her eyes. "We've been waiting for you. Everyone wanted to have breakfast together, but I told them to let you rest, you needed it, anyone could see that, but now you're here, so sit down, sit down, don't worry about helping with anything-"
Pansy bit back the reply that rose, I wasn't planning to help, and made herself nod instead.
"Thank you," she said."That's very kind."
Mrs. Weasley beamed as if Pansy had presented her with a gift. "Nonsense, it's nothing. Sit, sit. I'll call the others down."
She sat. A place had been left for her at what was clearly the guest spot, between where Ron usually sat and an empty chair that probably belonged to Mr. Weasley.
"CHILDREN! BREAKFAST!"
The thunder of footsteps announced the arrival of the Weasley offspring and Ron dropped into the seat beside her with a "Morning, Pansy" that was blessedly normal. The twins appeared from somewhere, looking slightly singed, Pansy decided not to ask, and even Percy emerged from his room, nose already in a book.
Mr. Weasley came in last, his face lighting up when he saw the assembled family.
"Ah, excellent! Everyone's here." He took his seat at the head of the table, rubbing his hands together with evident pleasure. "Molly, this looks wonderful."
It did, objectively. Bacon and eggs and toast and beans, a full English breakfast that would have made the Hogwarts house-elves envious. Pansy's stomach, which had been reliably uninterested in food for months, actually stirred with something that might have been hunger.
She was reaching for the toast when the owls arrived.
They swoopedmthrough the open window in a flurry of wings and displaced feathers, each bearing thick envelopes sealed with the Hogwarts crest. The owls landed on the table with varying degrees of grace, one knocked over the salt shaker, another nearly put its foot in the butter, and extended their legs imperiously.
"School letters!" Mr. Weasley said, as if this weren't obvious. "Bit early this year, aren't they?"
Mrs. Weasley was already distributing envelopes, plucking them from the owl talons. "Ginny, Ron, and, oh, there's one for you too, Pansy dear. They must have forwarded it from the manor."
The envelope was heavier than Pansy expected. She turned it over in her hands, examining the green ink of her name, and tried to feel something other than tired.
Ron leaned close, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Don't worry about the money, by the way."
Pansy blinked at him. "What?"
"For school things. Books and supplies and all that." His ears had gone slightly pink, the way they did when he was embarrassed about something. "Dad won a prize: Daily Prophet Grand Prize Galleon Draw. Seven hundred galleons. We were going to Egypt to visit Bill, but then you… so there's plenty left over for school shopping, so you won't have to-" He grinned, some of the embarrassment fading into familiar teasing. "You won't have to worry about buying secondhand."
She pinched him. Hard, on the soft part of his arm just above the elbow, the spot she'd discovered was particularly sensitive during a Transfiguration lesson first year.
"Ow!"
"You deserved that."
She opened her letter.
The usual contents spilled out, but underneath all of that was a separate sheet of parchment, smaller than the others, marked with the heading ELECTIVE SELECTION FORM.
Right. Electives.
The form that Pansy had never received, because she'd been unconscious in the hospital wing.
She scanned the list of options with growing despair.
Arithmancy. Numbers. She'd rather die.
Care of Magical Creatures. After the troll, the three-headed dog, and of course the basilisk, she'd developed a firm policy of avoiding anything with more heads, fangs, or murderous intent than strictly necessary.
Divination. The future was not something she wished to examine closely. The present was bad enough.
Muggle Studies. Pointless, unless she planned to run away and live among them, which, actually, was growing more appealing by the day.
Ancient Runes. This sounded marginally more acceptable than the others, but also deeply, profoundly dusty.
She had to choose two. Two of these terrible options, and she had to live with them for the next three years.
What was Neville choosing?
She should write to him. But how did you apologize for betraying someone under Veritaserum? How did you explain that you'd tried to protect him and failed, that your testimony might have consequences for him that neither of them could predict?
She should write to him.
She would write to him.
Soon.
"What electives are you taking?"
Ron's question pulled her back to the present.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I didn't get the form until now. I haven't had time to think about it."
This, apparently, was an invitation.
"Divination's supposed to be easy," Fred offered from across the table.
"If you don't mind making things up," George added. "Which we don't."
"Care of Magical Creatures is wonderful," Ginny said eagerly. "Charlie always said-"
"Charlie was interested in dragons," Percy interrupted, not looking up from his book. "Normal people might find the subject less appealing. Ancient Runes is an excellent foundation for many Ministry careers."
"Muggle Studies," Mr. Weasley said, his face lighting up with evangelical fervor. "Fascinating subject. Absolutely fascinating. It's how I ended up in my department, you know, took the class in my third year and never looked back. Just last week I was reading about something called a float valve, and I still can't quite work out-"
"Arthur, dear, she doesn't need to hear about float valves at breakfast."
"But Molly, they're remarkably-"
Pansy let the conversation just wash over her, she wasn't sure she found anything interesting, actually. That was part of the problem.
She reached for her supply list, needing something to do with her hands, and a smaller piece of parchment slipped free from the stack.
It fluttered to the floor, landing face-up near her feet.
HOGSMEADE PERMISSION FORM, the heading read.
Pansy's hand shot down, grabbing the form before anyone could see it. She straightened in her chair, sliding the parchment beneath her, sitting on it with what she hoped was casual nonchalance.
She had no one to sign her form.
"Kneading is good for arm strength, dear," Mrs. Weasley had said, pressing a ball of dough into Pansy's reluctant hands.
Pansy had lasted approximately four minutes before declaring that she could feel her soul leaving her body through her fingertips and that if this was how the Weasleys made bread, it was no wonder they were all so alarmingly muscular. Mrs. Weasley had given her a long look and then sent her outside to help Ron with the garden.
"Degnoming," Mrs. Weasley had called it. "Much more your speed, I think. Fresh air, light exercise, very straightforward."
This had turned out to be a lie.
Pansy sat in a rickety wooden chair she'd dragged from the shed, a glass of cold lemonade sweating in her hand, and watched Ron chase what appeared to be angry potatoes with legs through the vegetable patch. The sun was viciously hot. The chair was uncomfortable. The lemonade was the only thing preventing her from expiring on the spot, and she intended to drink it very slowly.
"You're supposed to be helping," Ron called, slightly out of breath, as he cornered a gnome near the cabbages.
"I am helping. I'm supervising."
"That's not-" He grabbed the gnome, which immediately sank its teeth into his thumb. "Ow! You little-" He spun in a circle, the gnome clinging to his hand like a furious, potato-shaped pendant, and released it over the hedge. It sailed through the air with a high-pitched shriek and disappeared from view.
"I'm giving moral support."
Ron wiped his bitten hand on his trousers and stomped toward her, his face flushed with heat and exasperation. "Right. Fine. You want to just sit there? At least learn something." He gestured expansively at the garden. "Degnoming. It's simple. You grab them, you spin them around to make them dizzy so they can't find their way back, and you throw them over the hedge. Even you can manage that."
"Gnomes are pests. So we throw them out. Regularly. It's a thing we do. A family activity." He was standing over her now, hands on his hips, looking too much like his mother. "Get up."
"No."
"Pansy."
"It's too hot. I'll die. You'll have to explain to your mother why the houseguest perished in the vegetable patch."
"You're being ridiculous."
"I'm being realistic about my physical limitations."
Ron stared at her for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression, something that should have warned her, but she was too busy taking a pointed sip of her lemonade to notice.
He bent down, grabbed a gnome that had been attempting to sneak past them toward the tomatoes, and before Pansy could process what was happening, threw it directly at her lap.
She screamed.
The gnome screamed back, arguably louder, and latched onto the front of her robes with its horrible little fingers. She shot out of the chair so fast she knocked it over, pumpkin juice flying, the glass shattering against a garden stone. The gnome was climbing her. It was climbing her like she was a tree, its leathery face inches from her own, its breath smelling inexplicably of onions.
"GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF—"
"Grab it and throw it!" Ron was laughing so hard he'd doubled over, the absolute traitor. "Just grab it and-"
Pansy did not grab it. Pansy fled, sprinting across the garden with the gnome still clinging to her shoulder, shrieking words that would have made her mother faint and Mrs. Weasley reach for the soap. She could hear Ron's laughter following her, could hear him calling something about spinning it first, and she made a mental note to murder him at the earliest opportunity.
The gnome finally released its grip when she ran through the spray of the garden sprinkler, dropping to the ground with an offended squawk and waddling away toward the hedge at speed. Pansy stood in the spray, soaked, chest heaving, hair plastered to her face, and turned to glare at Ron across the length of the garden.
He was still laughing. He'd actually fallen over, was sitting in the dirt between the cabbages, tears streaming down his face, completely useless.
"I hate you," she called, with as much dignity as a person dripping sprinkler water could muster. "I hate you and I hate this garden and I hate gnomes and I am never helping with anything ever again."
"Your face," Ron wheezed. "Your face when it started climbing-"
She threw a tomato at him. It hit him square in the forehead with a wet, satisfying splat, red pulp and seeds sliding down his nose, and he didn't even stop laughing.
It was deeply unsatisfying. But it was the principle of the thing.
The parchment sat on Ginny's desk, blank and accusatory. One might have thought that nearly dying would cure a person of such mundane afflictions as the inability to write a simple letter.
She dipped her quill again and forced herself to write.
Neville,
I hope your summer has been better than mine, though given your grandmother, I suppose that's not guaranteed. The Weasleys are exhausting in ways I lack the vocabulary to describe. There are so many of them, Neville. They just keep appearing, like red-haired locusts.
I need to know what electives you're taking. I haven't chosen mine yet because I am, apparently, incapable of making decisions without external input. Don't make me guess. If I guess wrong and end up in Care of Magical Creatures without you, I'll never forgive you.
Write back.
Pansy
She paused, quill hovering over the parchment. There was more she could say. More she probably should say.
The Wizengamot. The questioning. Lucius Malfoy's silken voice asking if Neville knew about the diary, and her own voice answering yes because the Veritaserum left no room for lies or evasions.
But did Neville even know about that? The hearing had been closed to the public, the gallery filled with Ministry officials and Wizengamot members and a handful of others with specific interest in the proceedings. Augusta Longbottom hadn't been there. Maybe no one outside that chamber would ever know what Malfoy had tried to do.
And if Neville didn't know, did she really want to be the one to tell him?
By the way, a Death Eater used my testimony to publicly question your judgment and imply you're unfit to be the Boy Who Lived. Thought you should know. Hope your grandmother doesn't see the transcript.
She could imagine his face. The way his shoulders would curl inward, the way he'd start doing that thing with his hands. He'd blame himself somehow, he always did, would find a way to make her failure his responsibility. And for what? To ease her own guilt? To warn him about something that might never become public?
No. Better to say nothing. Better to let him have whatever peace his summer was affording him, to not be the bearer of news that might not even matter. If it came out later, she'd deal with it then. She'd explain. He'd understand.
Or he wouldn't, and she'd deserve that too.
She folded it carefully, sealed it with a blob of wax dripped from the candle on Ginny's nightstand, and pressed her thumb into the soft surface before it cooled.
She went to find Ron's owl.
The owl was called Feathers, a name that suited it perfectly, given that it appeared to be held together primarily by optimism and a few remaining ones. It was a small tawny owl of indeterminate age, slightly lopsided, with a bald patch on its chest that the shop owner had promised would grow back eventually. Ron had acquired it just before Pansy arrived, apparently through a campaign of guilt and persistence that had finally worn down his parents' resistance.
"Never had my a pet," he'd explained when she'd asked about it. "And he was cheap. Mum said I could have him if I promised to look after him properly, which I will, even if he does look a bit rough."
The owl in question was currently bouncing around its cage like it had consumed its body weight in sugar, hooting with enthusiasm at everything and nothing. When Pansy approached with the letter, it practically vibrated with excitement.
"Hold still," she muttered, trying to attach the letter to a leg that wouldn't stop moving. "This is a simple delivery. Longbottoms. One letter. Try not to get distracted by anything shiny on the way."
The owl hooted in a way that did not inspire confidence.
She carried the cage to the window, opened it, and watched the tiny owl disappear into the darkness, a pale speck against the stars.
It was done. The letter was sent. Now she just had to wait.
She woke to tapping.
For a disorienting moment, she didn't know where she was, the room wrong, the ceiling too low, the sounds and smells unfamiliar. The tapping continued, insistent and slightly frantic.
Pansy sat up, heart pounding, and saw a small shape bouncing against the window glass. Feathers was back already, silhouetted against the pale pre-dawn light.
Too fast. That was too fast.
She crossed to the window and fumbled with the latch, fingers clumsy with sleep and sudden dread. The owl tumbled through the opening in a flurry of feathers, landing on the desk with approximately zero grace.
He was still carrying the letter.
Her letter. Still sealed. Unopened.
Pansy picked it up with numb fingers and turned it over. There, on the back, in script that was decidedly not Neville's, too sharp, too neat, too deliberately elegant, were two words:
Return to Sender.
Neville wouldn't have sent it back. Neville, who had said I really don't mind in that quiet voice that meant he minded very much but would never say so. If her letter had reached him, he would have read it.
Someone else had sent it back. Someone with sharp, precise handwriting and the authority to intercept Neville's mail.
Of course Neville's grandmother had heard about the Wizengamot. The woman monitored everything related to her grandson with the vigilance of a hawk. She would have known about the questioning before Pansy had even left the Ministry building. Would have read the transcript, noted every damaging admission, calculated the potential consequences for the Longbottom name.
And she would have decided that Pansy Parkinson was no longer an acceptable associate for the Boy Who Lived.
Pansy sat on the edge of the bed, letter still clutched in her hand. She could write again. Could try to explain, to apologize, to grovel. But Neville's grandmother controlled the wards, controlled the owls, controlled everything that entered Neville's house. Any letter she sent would meet the same fate as this one.
She could wait until September. Find Neville on the train, explain in person. But September was weeks away. Weeks of silence, weeks of Neville thinking she'd abandoned him again.
You don't have to write me. I really don't mind.
He'd been preparing for this, she realized. Had known, somehow, that she would fail him. He'd given her permission to disappear because he expected her to.
And now his grandmother had made sure of it.
She set the letter on the desk, smoothing out the creases where her fingers had gripped too hard. The wax seal was still intact. Neville had never even seen her words, never known she'd tried.
Feathers hooted softly, and for once had the decency to hold still.
She found Ron after breakfast, in the paddock behind the house where he'd been spending most of his daylight hours.
He was on the ground for once, not flying, sitting cross-legged in the grass with a broom maintenance kit spread out before him. The broom lay across his knees, and he was carefully trimming stray twigs from the tail with the focus of a surgeon performing a delicate operation.
"Weasley."
He looked up, squinting against the light. "Pansy. You're up early." A pause, a closer look. "Or late. Did you sleep at all?"
"Have you written to Neville? Since term ended?"
Ron's hands stilled on the broom. "Why?"
"Just answer the question."
"Yeah. A few times." He was watching her now, wariness creeping into his expression. "Why? What's happened?"
"Did he write back?"
Silence. Ron picked up his scissors again, turned them over in his hands, not meeting her eyes.
"Ron."
"No," he said finally. "He didn't."
"Did you get your letters returned?"
The scissors went still. That was answer enough.
"Return to sender," Pansy said flatly. "Same handwriting. Sharp. Neat. Definitely not Neville's."
"His gran." Ron's voice had gone tight. "Has to be. She's always been mental about who he talks to, but-"
"So it's not just me." She hated how relieved that made her feel. Hated even more that the relief lasted only a moment before curdling into something worse. "She's cut him off from both of us."
"Looks like."
Pansy pulled at a strand of grass, shredding it between her fingers. "The Wizengamot. Malfoy's questions. That's what did it."
"You don't know that."
"Don't I?" She laughed, the sound brittle. "He spent ten minutes implying that Neville was complicit in dark magic because he knew about the diary. And I just sat there and confirmed it, because the Veritaserum-" She stopped, throat closing around the words.
"You didn't have a choice."
"I know I didn't have a choice. That doesn't matter. Augusta Longbottom heard that her grandson's judgment was being questioned in front of the entire Wizengamot, and she decided the easiest solution was to remove the source of the problem." Pansy's fingers tore through another strand of grass. "Me."
"And me, apparently."
"You're collateral damage. I'm the actual threat."
Ron snorted. "Right. Because you're so terrifying."
"I'm serious."
"So am I. You're about as threatening as a wet cat." He held up a hand before she could respond.
"This isn't funny."
"No," Ron agreed, the humor draining from his voice. "It's not."
They sat in silence. The sun climbed higher, burning off the dew, and somewhere in the distance a rooster crowed with entirely too much enthusiasm for the hour.
"What do we do?" Pansy asked finally.
"Wait for September. Find him on the train." Ron shrugged, but the movement was jerky, frustrated. "Not like we can storm Neville's house and demand visiting rights."
"We could try."
"We'd get hexed before we made it past the front gate. Augusta's not exactly the welcoming type."
Pansy almost smiled. "Neither am I."
"Yeah, but she's had about sixty more years to practice." Ron picked up his scissors and jabbed them at a stray twig with more force than necessary.
The Floo deposited them into the Leaky Cauldron in a series of green flashes, one Weasley after another tumbling out of the fireplace like red-haired dominoes. Pansy came last, managing to keep her footing through sheer force of will, and spent a moment brushing soot from her robes while the chaos of the Weasley family organized itself around her.
"Right," Mrs. Weasley said, producing a list from somewhere in her handbag and consulting it with the intensity of a general planning a military campaign. "We'll start with Gringotts, then new robes for Ginny, then books and then potions supplies. Arthur, you're in charge of the twins."
"I'm always in charge of the twins," Mr Weasley said mildly, though he was already casting a wary eye toward Fred and George, who had developed expressions of suspicious innocence.
Mrs. Weasley was already moving toward the back of the pub, toward the archway that led to Diagon Alley proper. "Everyone stay together. I mean it. Anyone who wanders off is doing dishes for a month."
The threat was delivered with the casual certainty of someone who had made good on such promises before. The twins exchanged glances but said nothing. Even Percy, who was technically an adult and could presumably wander wherever he liked, fell into line without protest.
Pansy followed the procession through the archway, watching Mrs. Weasley tap the bricks in the familiar pattern, and felt the wall shiver apart to reveal the bustling Diagon Alley in late summer.
Pansy pressed closer to Ron as they navigated the crowd, using him as a shield against the press of bodies.
After the order of Gringotts the bookshop was even more chaotic than the street outside, stacks of volumes piled precariously on every surface, customers squeezing between shelves with the determination of people on a mission. A harried-looking clerk was trying to direct traffic, pointing toward different sections with increasingly desperate gestures.
The booklist was still in Pansy's pocket, slightly crumpled but legible. She handed it over and watched Mrs. Weasley's eyes move down the parchment, her lips moving slightly as she read.
"Standard Book of Spells, Grade Three... Intermediate Transfiguration... oh, you've got the elective books listed too." Mrs. Weasley looked up. "Which subjects did you choose, dear?"
Pansy's stomach dropped. "I haven't. Decided, I mean. I still don't know what to take."
"The form's due until-"
"I know. I just-" She couldn't explain the real problem. Couldn't say that she'd been planning to copy Neville's choices, that she'd wanted to be in the same classes as him.
Ron appeared from somewhere in the stacks, arms full of books, his expression shifting when he saw her face. "What's wrong?"
"She hasn't chosen her electives," Mrs. Weasley said. "And she needs to buy the books today if she wants to have them in time for term."
"So pick something, you dummy." Ron dumped his books on a nearby table, narrowly missing an elderly witch who gave him a scandalized look. "What's the problem?"
"The problem is that I don't know what Neville's taking." The words came out sharper than she intended. "I wanted to be in at least one class with him, but I can't exactly ask him now, can I?"
Understanding dawned on Ron's face, followed quickly by something softer. "Oh. Right."
Mrs. Weasley looked between them, clearly missing some context but picking up on the emotional undercurrent. "Is there a reason you can't contact Neville?"
"His grandmother," Ron said shortly. "She's not letting our letters through."
"Ah." Mrs. Weasley's expression shifted to something knowing and slightly sad. "Augusta. Yes, I'd heard she's become... protective since last year."
"Well. We'll just have to make our best guess, won't we?"
"Guess?"
"About what Neville might choose." Mrs Weasley was already moving toward the shelves. "Ron, you know him. What subjects would appeal to him?"
Ron scratched his head. "Something practical. He's rubbish at theory but good at actually doing things."
"Care of Magical Creatures," Pansy said. "He loves animals. He's obsessed with that stupid toad."
"Yeah, that sounds right. And not Arithmancy, too many numbers. Not Ancient Runes either, all that fiddly translation would do his head in."
"What about Divination?" Mrs Weasley suggested.
Pansy considered it. Neville, peering anxiously into a crystal ball. It wasn't a perfect fit. But Divination was supposed to be easy, wasn't it? Vague predictions, no real wrong answers. A subject where you couldn't technically fail might be exactly what Neville needed.
"His grandmother would despise it," she said slowly. "She'd call it woolly nonsense."
"So he'd probably love it," Ron said. "Bit of quiet rebellion."
They ended up selecting books for Care of Magical Creatures and Divination. Pansy held the textbooks in her arms: "The Monster Book of Monsters", mercifully asleep and strapped shut, and "Unfogging the Future", with its cover illustration of a woman gazing into mist with theatrical mysticism. She tried to feel confident about the choices.
The announcement came at dinner, delivered with the particular excitement that Weasleys seemed to generate about everything. Pansy had given up on actually eating and was instead rearranging her food into increasingly violent patterns. The heat was unbearable, the noise was worse, and if one more person reached across her plate for the salt she was going to start screaming and never stop.
"Bill's coming home!" Mrs. Weasley's face was radiant, the kind of joy that Pansy associated with major holidays and unexpected inheritances. "He's got two weeks' leave from Gringotts. And Charlie's trying to arrange time off as well, he thinks he can manage a few days at least."
The table erupted into chaos. Ron was asking about Egypt, Ginny was bouncing in her seat, the twins were already planning something that would probably result in property damage, and Percy was saying something about career advancement that no one was listening to. Mr. Weasley beamed at his wife across the table, reaching over to squeeze her hand.
Pansy set down her fork and tried to keep her expression neutral.
More people. More Weasleys, specifically, descending on this already overcrowded house like red-haired locusts. Bill, the eldest, who worked as a curse-breaker in Egypt and was apparently some sort of family legend. Charlie, the second eldest, who had chosen to live in Romania with dragons rather than anywhere sensible. Two more bodies in a house that already felt like it was bursting at the seams.
She wanted to jump out the window.
She wanted to tear her hair out, strand by strand, until her scalp was as empty as her patience.
She wanted to be anywhere else at this point.
"We'll need to sort out the rooms," Mrs. Weasley was saying, already shifting into logistical mode. "Bill can have his old room, of course, and Charlie can share with the twins when he arrives-"
"Why do we have to share with Charlie?" Fred protested.
"Because you have the most space."
"We have experiments in that space!"
"Then you'll have to move your experiments."
"Some of them are volatile-"
"Then they shouldn't be in a bedroom in the first place, should they?"
Pansy watched the argument unfold with the detached horror of someone observing a natural disaster from a safe distance. Except there was no safe distance here. She was in the disaster, had been living in it for weeks, and it was about to get worse.
"What about Pansy?" Ginny asked, and every head at the table turned toward her.
Pansy's stomach clenched.
"She's been in my room," Ginny continued, apparently oblivious to Pansy's rising panic. "I've been sleeping in with Ron. But if Bill's taking his old room, and Charlie's with the twins..."
"You'll have to share with Pansy," Mrs. Weasley said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. "Just until the boys leave. It's only for a week."
"That's fine," she heard herself say, because what else could she say? No, actually, I'd rather sleep in the garden than share breathing space with your daughter? "I don't mind."
She minded. She minded enormously. But the Weasleys were feeding her and housing her and treating her like family despite having no obligation to do so, and she couldn't exactly throw a tantrum about room arrangements without confirming every suspicion they probably had about spoiled pure-blood children.
"Wonderful!" Mrs. Weasley beamed at her. "I knew you'd understand. We'll move an extra bed in tomorrow, it'll be cozy, like a sleepover."
She excused herself from the table as soon as it was polite to do so and went upstairs to enjoy her last night of solitude.
Bill arrived three days later.
Pansy heard the commotion from the garden, where she'd retreated to escape the pre-arrival excitement. Mrs. Weasley had been cleaning since dawn, despite the house already being as clean as a structurally questionable building full of magical artifacts and teenage boys could reasonably be. The excited shouting that erupted from inside suggested the prodigal son had returned.
She stayed where she was, sitting on an overturned bucket near the chicken coop, watching the gnomes wage what appeared to be a territorial war among the cabbages. A Parkinson, perched on a bucket. Her mother would have wept.
They wouldn't miss her if she stayed outside for an hour or two, letting them have their moment without an awkward observer.
A hand touched her shoulder.
Pansy nearly fell off the bucket. She spun around, heart hammering, every nerve screaming threat before her eyes had even processed what she was seeing.
A man stood behind her, tall and lean, with long red hair pulled back in a ponytail and a single fang earring glinting in the sunlight. His face was tanned and sharp-featured, the kind of face that suggested interesting stories and probably a few scars to go with them. He was grinning at her with easy amusement, apparently unbothered by the fact that she'd nearly hexed him.
"Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "Didn't mean to startle you. You must be Pansy."
She stared at him, still catching her breath. "You must be Bill."
"Guilty as charged." He dropped onto the grass beside her bucket, folding his long legs beneath him with the casual grace of someone who was comfortable anywhere. "Mum said you were staying with us. Thought I'd introduce myself before she drags me inside for three hours of questions about Egypt."
"You should go in. Your family's waiting."
"They'll survive another five minutes." His eyes, brown, lighter than Ron's, studied her with open curiosity. "Ron's written about you. So has Ginny, actually. You made quite an impression."
"I'm sure he mentioned my charming personality," she said dryly.
Bill laughed, a warm sound that reminded her of Mr. Weasley's but without the slightly manic edge. "He mentioned you were prickly. I believe his exact words were 'she's mean to everyone but she doesn't actually mean it.'"
"I do mean it. Most of the time."
"Most of the time," Bill agreed, still smiling. "Ron also mentioned the diary."
The words hit her like a splash of cold water. She went rigid, every defense snapping into place, ready to deflect whatever was coming. Pity, probably. Or judgment. Or that particular careful distance people adopted when they didn't want to get too close to someone who'd been touched by dark magic.
"I'm not going to ask about it," Bill continued, apparently reading her expression with ease. "Mum gave us all strict instructions not to pester you. I just wanted to say-" He paused, choosing his words. "You shouldn't be ashamed."
"I'm not ashamed."
The lie came out automatically, sharp and defensive. Bill raised an eyebrow but didn't challenge it.
"I work with cursed objects," he said instead. "That's what curse-breakers do. We find them, identify them, neutralize them. And I can tell you, from years of professional experience, that getting caught by one doesn't make you stupid or weak or whatever you're telling yourself."
Pansy said nothing. Her hands had curled into fists in her lap without her permission.
"I've been caught myself," Bill continued. "More times than I'd like to admit. There was a scarab pendant in a tomb near Luxor, looked completely harmless, just a bit of old jewelry. Took me three days to realize it was slowly draining me. Would have killed me if my partner hadn't noticed something was wrong."
"That's different."
"Is it?" He met her eyes, and there was no pity there, no judgment, just the straightforward assessment of someone who'd seen too much to be impressed by darkness. "A cursed object that looks harmless, that draws you in, that takes and takes before you realize what's happening? Sounds pretty similar to me."
Pansy wanted to argue. Wanted to explain that a scarab pendant wasn't the same as a diary that wrote back, that understood her, that made her feel less alone. That she'd chosen to write in it, chosen to confide in it, chosen Tom in a way that Bill hadn't chosen his pendant.
But the words stuck in her throat, and Bill was already pushing himself to his feet.
"Come inside," he said, offering her a hand. "Mum's probably about to send a search party, and I've got presents to distribute."
They went back inside, where the rest of the family had assembled in the sitting room with the barely contained excitement of children at Christmas. Bill produced a canvas bag from somewhere and began pulling out objects wrapped in newspaper, each one greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
"Souvenirs," he announced, grinning. "Before anyone asks: yes, Mum, they're all replicas. I know the rules."
"I should hope so," Mrs Weasley said, though she was smiling. "I won't have cursed artefacts in my house, thank you very much. We had quite enough trouble with that clock your father brought back from-"
"That was one time, Molly—"
"One time was enough."
Bill laid out his offerings on the coffee table: a small sphinx that purred when you stroked it, a scarab beetle that scuttled in circles, a set of hieroglyphic stamps, a tiny golden sarcophagus that opened to reveal a wrapped figure inside. The twins immediately began fighting over the scarab. Ginny claimed the sphinx. Ron examined the sarcophagus with the particular intensity of someone trying to determine if it was worth anything.
"And this," Bill said, lifting a final object from the bag with more care than the others, "is my favourite."
He held it up: a small golden feather, delicate and gleaming, mounted on a black wooden stand.
"Feather of Ma'at," he said. "From the gift shop at Giza, so it's not the real thing, that one's about three thousand years old and heavily warded. But the symbolism's the same."
"What's Ma'at?" Ginny asked, looking up from her sphinx.
"Egyptian goddess. Truth, justice, cosmic order: all the big concepts." Bill set the feather on the table where it caught the lamplight. "The ancient Egyptians believed that when you died, your heart was weighed against her feather. If your heart was light, if you'd lived a good life, told the truth, treated people fairly, you passed into the afterlife. But if your heart was heavy with wrongdoing..."
"What happened?" Ron asked.
"Ammit ate it. She was a demon: part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus. Sat beside the scales waiting for hearts that failed the test." Bill mimed jaws snapping shut. "No afterlife for you. Just oblivion."
"Charming," Mrs Weasley muttered.
"The Egyptians took justice seriously."
Pansy watched the feather glinting on the table as the others moved on to examining the hieroglyphic stamps. Such a small thing to measure a life against. Such a simple test: truth and justice, right and wrong, the weight of everything you'd ever done balanced on a single golden plume.
She thought about her own heart. What it might weigh, if anyone bothered to put it on the scales.
Heavy, probably.
She thought about Neville. His heart would pass the test easily, wouldn't it? Light as a feather, probably lighter. He'd never been cruel, never been selfish, never done anything worse than lose his toad and forget his homework. Even when he had every reason to be angry, at the world, but he just kept being kind. It was infuriating. It was impossible. It was everything she'd never learned how to be.
"Pansy?" Ron's voice cut through her thoughts. "You all right? You've gone quiet."
"Just tired," she said, looking away from the feather. "It's been a long day."
She didn't look at it again. But she didn't stop thinking about it either, about scales and hearts and the weight of everything she'd done. About whether there was any amount of good that could balance out the bad, or whether some hearts were simply too heavy to ever be redeemed.
About whether hers was one of them.
Summer had turned vicious in the final weeks of August, the kind of heat that made breathing feel like work and sleeping feel impossible. Pansy's nightdress stuck to her back. Her hair clung to her neck. The sheets were damp with sweat she refused to acknowledge.
And Ginny snored.
It wasn't a delicate snore, the kind that could be politely ignored or attributed to a stuffy nose. It was a full-bodied, enthusiastic snore, the kind that rattled the window panes slightly with each exhale. Pansy lay in the narrow camp bed that had been wedged into the corner of the room and stared at the ceiling and contemplated murder.
Not actual murder. Probably. But something that would make the snoring stop, even temporarily, so she could have five minutes of silence to not-sleep in peace.
The room felt smaller than ever with both of them in it. Ginny's bed took up most of the space, and the camp bed occupied what little remained, leaving barely enough floor to walk between them. Every time Pansy shifted, the canvas creaked. Every time Ginny rolled over, which was often, the bedsprings groaned in protest. The air itself felt crowded, thick with the presence of another person, another set of lungs consuming air that Pansy wanted for herself.
She couldn't do this.
She needed to be alone. Just for a little while. Just long enough to remember what silence sounded like.
The window was old, the latch stiff from years of paint buildup, but it opened quietly enough when she applied pressure to the right spots.
The roof outside the window was sloped but not steeply, shingled in some material that was probably magical given how it seemed to grip her bare feet rather than letting her slide. She climbed out carefully, easing herself onto the tiles, and settled into a spot where the slope levelled slightly, her back pressed against chimney brick that still held the day's warmth.
Above her, the stars blazed.
She'd noticed them before, that first night at the Burrow, how much brighter they were here than at the manor. But she hadn't really looked, hadn't let herself stop and stare and lose herself in the vastness of it. Now she did. The Milky Way arched overhead, impossibly bright, impossibly vast. It made her feel small in a way that was, for once, almost a relief. There was comfort in insignificance. The stars didn't care what she'd done or what had been done to her.
The silence was perfect. Complete. Even the usual night sounds, owls hunting, chicken rustling in the coop, the distant lowing of cattle from a neighboring farm, seemed muted up here, softened by distance and darkness.
She didn't know how long she sat there. Long enough for the moon to move visibly across the sky, long enough for the air to shift from too warm to too cold.
The window creaked.
Pansy's head snapped around, her hand reaching automatically for a wand she wasn't carrying. But it was only Ginny, red hair wild from sleep, pajama-clad and blinking owlishly in the darkness.
"What are you doing?" Ginny's whisper carried clearly in the night air. "It's freezing out here."
"It's August."
"It's still cold." Ginny was already climbing through the window, apparently having decided that if Pansy was going to sit on the roof, she was going to sit on the roof too. "You'll catch your death. Mum will have kittens."
"I'm fine."
"You're not even wearing shoes."
"I'm fine."
Ginny settled onto the tiles beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and Pansy felt the peace she'd been cultivating begin to fracture. The silence wasn't silent anymore. Even without speaking, Ginny filled the space, her breathing, her warmth, her relentless presence.
"The stars are nice," Ginny offered after a moment.
Pansy said nothing, but the words kept coming, a steady stream of cheerful babble that seemed to require no response. Pansy let them wash over her, jaw tight, fingernails digging into her palms.
"We should probably go back inside," Ginny said eventually, apparently having exhausted her supply of one-sided conversation topics. "It really is cold. And Mum checks on us sometimes, and if she finds the beds empty she'll-"
"Then go inside."
"Not without you."
"I don't need a minder."
"I didn't say you did. I just-" Ginny hesitated. "I don't want to leave you out here alone."
"Fine," she said, and started moving toward the window before Ginny could say anything else.
The room felt even smaller when they returned to it.
Pansy climbed into her camp bed and turned to face the wall, pulling the thin blanket up to her chin. Behind her, she heard Ginny settling into her own bed, the familiar creak of springs, the rustle of sheets being arranged.
Silence, finally. Maybe Ginny had gotten the message. Maybe she would just go to sleep and leave Pansy alone with her thoughts and the darkness.
"Pansy?"
Or maybe not.
"What." She didn't open her eyes. Perhaps if she refused to look at Ginny, Ginny would take the hint and cease to exist.
"Can I ask you something?"
"No."
A pause. Then, quieter: "It's about the diary."
Pansy went rigid and could now hear her own heartbeat in her ears, could feel it pounding against her ribs.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"I just wanted to know-"
"I said no."
"But-"
"Are you trying to get information out of me?" The words came out sharp, jagged, torn from somewhere deep in her chest. Pansy sat up, turning to face Ginny's bed even though she couldn't see more than a vague shape in the darkness. "Is that what this is? The room sharing, the roof, the questions? You're supposed to be my friend and get me talking?"
Maybe the Weasleys had taken her in to get information.
The thought surfaced from somewhere dark and paranoid, and once it was there she couldn't shake it. Mr. Weasley worked for the Ministry. He'd been at the Wizengamot, had heard the questions about the diary, had seen Pansy refuse to provide her memories. What if this whole thing was just a long game? What if they were waiting for her to let her guard down, to start talking, to give them the details the Ministry wanted?
"What? No, I just-"
"Then why do you want to know?" Her voice was rising, climbing toward something she couldn't control. "Why does everyone want to know about the diary? What do you think I'm going to tell you that I haven't already told the Wizengamot? What secrets do you think I'm keeping?"
"I don't think-"
"They put me in chains and forced Veritaserum down my throat and made me say it all out loud while fifty people watched. What more do you want from me?"
She was shouting now, loud enough to wake the whole house probably, but she couldn't stop. The words kept coming, all the fear and anger and humiliation she'd been suppressing for weeks finally finding an outlet.
"Do you want to know what it felt like? Do you want to know what it's like to wake up with blood under your fingernails and no idea whose it is? Do you want to know about the dreams, Ginny? About lying in the dark every night terrified to close your eyes because what if he's still there, what if he's just waiting for you to let your guard down-"
A sound cut through her tirade. Small, hiccuping. Unmistakable.
Ginny was crying.
"I'm sorry," Ginny whispered, her voice thick with tears. "I didn't mean- I was just curious- I'm sorry-"
It didn't help. The tears, the trembling voice, the apology, none of it made the rage quiet down. If anything, it burned hotter, because now Pansy was the villain and Ginny was crying and she was supposed to comfort her, was supposed to say it's all right when nothing was all right, when she couldn't even breathe properly-
She was on her feet before she'd decided to move.
"Pansy-"
"Don't."
She left. Down the stairs, through the dark, away from the tears and the tiny room and the questions she couldn't answer. Behind her, Ginny called her name again, but Pansy didn't stop.
The Burrow's back door was unlocked, of course it was, because the Weasleys trusted the world in ways that Pansy had never been able to understand. She stumbled through the garden in shoes hastily thrown on, not caring about the gnomes that hissed at her ankles or the dew that soaked through the thin canvas.
She didn't know where she was going. Away. That was the only clear thought in her head.
This was pathetic. She was pathetic. Standing in a field in the middle of the night, shivering like a lost dog, because she couldn't manage to exist in a house full of people who were trying to help her. The Weasleys had taken her in when no one else would. They'd fed her and housed her and asked nothing in return except that she be civil, and she couldn't even manage that.
And the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that she didn't fit here. Would never fit here. Every day was an effort, a performance, trying to smile at the right moments and say thank you enough times and pretend she belonged at their crowded table, in their chaotic home, in their loud and loving family that operated on rules she'd never learned. She was exhausted from the pretending. Exhausted from the gratitude she was supposed to feel and mostly did feel, which somehow made it worse. She hated needing them. Hated that her mother had vanished and her father was rotting in Azkaban and a family of blood traitors were the only people in the world who wanted her.
Something bit her ankle.
Pansy yelped, looking down to find a gnome latched onto her leg, its horrible little teeth sunk into her skin through the thin fabric of her pyjamas. She kicked out instinctively, sending the creature tumbling, and it rolled to a stop a few feet away, already scrambling upright, already coming back for more.
Another one emerged from beneath a cabbage. Then another. They'd been watching her, apparently. Waiting.
Fine.
Fine.
She grabbed the nearest gnome by its leathery leg and swung.
It wasn't graceful. It wasn't proper. It was nothing like the careful technique Ron had tried to teach her, no spinning, no aiming for the hedge. She just grabbed and threw, grabbed and threw, hurling gnomes into the darkness with a fury that had nothing to do with pest control and everything to do with the scream building in her chest that she couldn't let out.
Stupid gnomes. Stupid garden. Stupid Burrow with its stupid warmth and its stupid family who actually loved each other, who had so much of something she'd never had that they could afford to give it away to strays like her.
A gnome bit her hand. She threw it harder.
Another one got her knee. She punted it over the fence.
She didn't know how long she kept going. Long enough that the shaking stopped. Long enough that sweat replaced the chill, that her arms ached and her hands were covered in small crescent-shaped bite marks. Long enough that the garden was, if not gnome-free, at least significantly depleted.
She stood in the ruined vegetable patch, breathing hard, surrounded by upturned cabbages and the distant cursing of gnomes who'd landed badly, and felt something loosen in her chest. Not better. Not fixed. But quieter, at least. The anger had burned down to embers, leaving her hollow and exhausted and strangely calm.
The sitting room was occupied.
Pansy stopped in the doorway, surprised. It was barely dawn, too early for anyone to be awake, and yet there was Mrs. Weasley in one of the armchairs, a ball of yarn in her lap and knitting needles clicking softly in the early morning light.
"There you are," Mrs. Weasley said, not looking up from her work. Her voice was calm, unsurprised, as if finding houseguests wandering in at dawn was perfectly normal. "Come sit with me."
Pansy's feet carried her into the room before her mind had agreed to it. She sank onto the sofa across from Mrs. Weasley, suddenly aware of how she must look, grass-stained pajamas, wild hair, shoes soaked through with dew.
"You've been outside all night," Mrs. Weasley observed. Still not looking up, still knitting. The needles moved with practiced efficiency, loops of yarn appearing and disappearing in patterns too complex to follow.
"I couldn't sleep."
"Ginny told me. About your conversation." The needles paused for just a moment, then resumed. "She was quite upset. She thinks she did something terribly wrong."
The guilt hit Pansy like a physical blow. "I just-"
"I know." Mrs. Weasley finally looked up, and her eyes were kind but tired, the eyes of a woman who had been awake for hours, waiting.
Pansy didn't know what to say to that. She sat on the sofa and looked at her hands and tried to find words that would explain what she didn't understand herself.
"I can't figure you out," she said finally.
"Can't you?"
"Why are you being so nice to me?" The question came out raw, almost accusatory. "Why don't you just-" She waved a hand vaguely. "Send me back. To Hogwarts, or to the Ministry, or wherever."
Mrs. Weasley set down her knitting, giving Pansy her full attention for the first time. "Where would you like me to send you?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I. Which is why you're staying here." She picked up her needles again, but didn't resume working, just held them loosely in her lap. "You've been through something terrible, Pansy."
"Here," Mrs. Weasley said, lifting the bundle from her lap. "I made this for you. I know it's summer but I couldn't help myself. Once I start knitting something, I have to finish it."
It was a partly finished sweater the body complete but the sleeves not yet begun, armholes gaping where sleeves would eventually grow. Purple, a deep, rich purple, with a large letter P knitted into the front in yellow yarn. It was the same style as the sweaters she'd seen the Weasley children wear in winter, the ones Mrs. Weasley made for each of them every Christmas.
"I don't-" Pansy's voice came out strangely. "You didn't have to-"
"I wanted to." Mrs. Weasley pressed the sweater into her hands, soft wool warm from being worked.
She opened her mouth to say something: thank you, probably, or some deflection that would make the moment less overwhelming, but before she could speak, the sitting room door burst open.
Mr. Weasley stood in the doorway, hair disheveled, glasses askew, wearing a dressing gown that had clearly been thrown on in haste. His face was flushed with exertion and creased with worry.
"There you are!" He sagged against the doorframe, relief evident in every line of his body. "I've been searching everywhere down the road."
"She's fine, Arthur," Mrs. Weasley said calmly. "She just needed some air."
"You nearly gave me a heart attack, young lady. When Ginny said you'd gone, I thought, well, I don't know what I thought, but none of it was good." Mr. Weasley ran a hand through his thinning hair, making it stand up in new and interesting directions.
"I'm sorry," Pansy said, and meant it.
"No, no, don't apologize. Just-" He crossed to the sofa, sat down heavily beside her, and did something unexpected: he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, brief but firm. "Just tell someone next time. Leave a note. Something. We worry about you."
Pansy looked down at the unfinished purple sweater in her hands, at the P in cheerful yellow against the purple wool. She didn't trust herself to speak.
I've uploaded new chapters of "Fortune Favors the Brave"!
You can read it here on Ao3 (and below on Tumblr)
Pairing: Neville Longbottom/Pansy Parkinson
Words: 50,057 till now
----
Pansy gathered her things slowly, watching through the window as families surged toward the train. Somewhere out there, her mother waited. Or didn't. One never knew with Mother.
"Ready?" Ron appeared at the compartment door, trunk floating behind him courtesy of a charm that was definitely beyond first-year curriculum. Percy had cast it, looking thoroughly put-upon about helping his youngest brother.
"Of course.”
They found Neville on the platform, already being fussed over by a severe-looking witch in a vulture-topped hat. His grandmother, presumably. She had the particular expression of someone who had been disappointed by the world for so long it had become her resting state.
"There you are." Neville broke away from her grip and hurried over. "I thought you'd already gone."
"Without saying goodbye?" Ron looked genuinely offended. "What kind of friends do you think we are?"
Friends. How strange.
"Right." Neville shifted his weight, doing that thing with his shoulders. "So. Summer."
"Summer," Ron agreed.
Ron's mother looked exactly how Pansy had imagined: red-haired, soft around the edges, dressed in robes that had seen better decades, and already wearing an expression of aggressive maternal concern.
"We should-“ Neville started.
"Write," Ron finished. "Yeah. Definitely."
"Every week," Neville said firmly. "Promise?"
"Promise," Ron said.
They both looked at Pansy.
"Fine," she managed. "If you insist."
Neville's face split into that ridiculous smile, the one that made him look about seven years old. "Brilliant. And we should- I mean, before we go, could we-“
He opened his arms.
Oh no. A hug. In public. On a train platform. With a Weasley and the most awkward celebrity in Britain.
"Longbottom, if you think I'm going to-“
But Ron had already stepped forward, pulling Neville into a rough hug that involved much backslapping. Then they both turned to her, arms still half-extended, expressions expectant.
"Absolutely not."
"Come on, Pansy." Ron's grin was insufferable. "Don't be difficult."
"I'm always difficult. It's my defining characteristic."
"Please?" Neville's voice was small. "It's going to be a long summer."
Something about the way he said it, the resignation, the quiet dread, made her think of her own summer stretching ahead.
"Fine." She stepped forward stiffly. "But if either of you tells anyone about this-“
The hug was brief and awkward. Ron's sleeve button caught in her hair because of course it did, and his attempts to free it only made it worse. Neville squeezed too hard. She didn't know what to do with her hands and ended up sort of patting both their backs like they were misbehaving dogs.
It was, objectively, terrible.
She didn't want it to end.
"Write me," Neville said as he pulled away. "Both of you. Promise you'll write."
"We already promised," Ron pointed out.
"Promise again."
"We promise," Pansy said, and meant it, which was perhaps the most alarming part.
Mrs. Weasley reached them in a flurry of maternal concern, already exclaiming over Ron's robes and the state of his hair. She gathered him up in the kind of embrace Pansy had only seen in paintings, the sort that looked uncomfortable and was, apparently, not to be pulled away from. Ron's ears went red, but he didn't pull away.
Neville looked back once, his grandmother’s hand on his shoulder steering him towards the barrier, mouthing "write me" with desperate emphasis.
The Weasleys moved as a away, a chaos of red hair and overlapping voices. Ron was saying something to his mother, gesturing back toward where Pansy stood. Mrs. Weasley glanced over, and for a moment their eyes met. The woman's expression softened into something that might have been an invitation: a lifted hand, a questioning tilt of the head, come join us.
Pansy looked away first.When she looked back, the Weasleys were disappearing through the barrier, Ron casting one final wave over his shoulder. Then they were gone, swallowed by brick, and the platform felt suddenly too large.
She stood alone, surrounded by strangers, waiting for someone who might not come.
——
Mother arrived forty-seven minutes late, trailing a wizard Pansy had never seen before. He was younger than Mother by at least a decade, with slicked-back dark hair and the kind of carefully maintained stubble that suggested he spent more time in front of mirrors than was respectable for a grown man. Something about him, the way he held his cigarette, the slight curl of his lip, gave off a vaguely continental air that Pansy supposed some women found charming and she found deeply smarmy. She wondered if her mother had given him some of her father's old robes to wear, or if she had used them up on the other lovers over the years.
"Darling!" Mother swept forward in a cloud of perfume, pressing air-kisses near both of Pansy's cheeks. "The traffic was simply impossible. This is Aldric. Aldric, my daughter."
Aldric nodded vaguely in Pansy's direction without actually looking at her. "Charmed."
He wasn't, obviously. But Pansy recognized the type: another of Mother's "companions," here for a season and gone by autumn. She'd stopped learning their names around age eight.
"How was term?" Mother was already walking toward the exit, clearly expecting Pansy to follow with her own trunk. Aldric certainly wasn't offering to help. "Did you make any useful connections?"
Useful. Mother's favorite word. Useful connections, useful skills, useful appearances. Nothing existed in her world unless it could be leveraged.
"Some," Pansy said carefully.
"Anyone I'd know?"
"Neville Longbottom."
Mother's step actually faltered. "The Longbottom boy? The one who-“
"Yes."
"Well." Mother recovered, smile brightening. "How wonderful. His mother and I were at school together, you know. Different houses, and we never spoke, of course, but still. The Longbottoms are very well-connected, even if Augusta can be rather... and well you know the business with the Dark Lord, which was unfortunate all around…" She waved a hand, encompassing decades of complicated history in the gesture. "You must invite him for tea sometime. The manor could use some livening up."
The manor. Pansy's stomach sank. "I thought we'd be at the summer house."
"Change of plans, darling. Aldric has the most marvelous yacht, and we're going to spend July in the Mediterranean. You'd simply be bored, all that sailing and sun. Much better for you to stay at the manor with Aunt Araminta."
Pansy stopped walking. "Aunt Araminta?"
"She's offered to keep an eye on things while I'm away. Isn't that kind of her?"
"You're leaving me with Aunt Araminta." The words came out flat. "For the entire summer."
"Not the entire summer. I'll be back before term starts. Probably." Mother finally turned, and for a moment something almost like guilt crossed her face. Almost. "Don't look at me like that, Pansy. You're twelve years old. You don't need me hovering."
"I don't need you hovering, but I do need you present occasionally."
"Don't be dramatic." Mother's voice cooled. "Aldric's waiting."
"Let him wait."
"Pansy-“
"You're abandoning me." The words burst out before she could stop them, loud enough that nearby families turned to stare. "I've been gone for months and you're abandoning me to spend the summer with some- some-“
"Choose your next words very carefully." Mother's eyes had gone hard.
Pansy chose them. They were not careful.
"Is he married?"
"That's not an appropriate question."
"It's a simple question. It’s a yes or no question. Is he or isn't he-“
“Pansy. You will spend the summer with your Great aunt Araminta. You will be polite. You will be grateful. You will not embarrass this family with childish tantrums. Is that understood?"
"What family?" The words had escaped before Pansy could stop them, bitter and sharp and stupid, so stupid. "Father's in Azkaban, you're running off with some-“
"We do not," her mother said quietly, "speak of your father."
The fight that followed was spectacular. Pansy said things about Mother's "companions" that she'd been storing up for years. Mother said things about disappointment and gratitude and how Pansy had never appreciated everything that had been done for her or that she was given. Aldric looked progressively more uncomfortable until he eventually wandered off to examine a fascinating brick wall.
By the end, they were both breathing hard. Mother's careful composure had cracked; Pansy could see the real anger underneath, the old anger, the kind that had nothing to do with this fight and everything to do with having her as her daughter..
"You will go to the manor," Mother said, voice trembling with the effort of control. "You will stay with Aunt Araminta. You will behave. And when I return, we will discuss this further."
"Fine."
"Fine."
Mother turned and walked away without another word. Without a hug or a kiss or even a backward glance. Aldric hurried after her, casting one bewildered look over his shoulder at Pansy standing alone with her trunk.
Fine.
——
Great-Aunt Araminta was approximately nine hundred years old, thin as a wraith and twice as pale, with white hair pinned into a style that had last been fashionable during the Goblin Rebellions. If this was what the Parkinson bloodline had to look forward to, Pansy intended to find a very flattering portrait artist and never leave the house after fifty. She also smelled aggressively of medicinal potions: chronic dragon pox remedies, Pansy learned on the first day, applied every four hours without giving the smell an opportunity to fade. She had opinions about everything: Pansy's posture (atrocious), her hair (too severe), her robes (too modern), her attitude (entirely unacceptable for a young lady of good breeding).
The manor felt different with Mother gone. Emptier, somehow, though it had always been too large for two people. Pansy's footsteps echoed on marble floors that had been designed for parties, for gatherings of dozens, not for one girl wandering alone past closed doors and shrouded furniture. Whole wings sat unused, their air thick with dust and preservation charms that made her nose itch.
Meals were the worst. The dining room could seat thirty; she and Araminta occupied opposite ends of a table designed for diplomatic negotiations. The house-elf, ancient and half-deaf, served food that arrived lukewarm after its journey from the distant kitchen. Conversation echoed off the high ceiling, making every word sound more formal than intended.
"In my day," Aunt Araminta would begin, and Pansy would feel her soul attempting to leave her body.
"In my day, young ladies did not slouch."
"In my day, young ladies maintained proper correspondence with their social connections. Letters written promptly, on good parchment, with correct form. None of this modern laziness."
"In my day, young ladies understood that relationships required cultivation. One cannot simply ignore one's acquaintances and expect them to remain available when convenient."
Pansy pushed food around her plate and said nothing.
The days blurred into one another, distinguished only by which room she chose to avoid Araminta in. The library, with its leather chairs that smelled of pipe smoke and old paper. The conservatory, where magical plants pressed against the glass like prisoners. The music room, where a grand piano sat untouched beneath a layer of dust, and where she sometimes played the flute Hagrid had given her, the notes echoing strangely in the empty space.
On the third day, she found herself in her father's study.
She hadn't meant to go there. The door had simply been ajar, and her feet had carried her through before her mind could object. The room was exactly as he'd left it, she supposed. She had no memories of him actually using it, but someone had preserved everything under stasis charms. Quills arranged precisely on the desk. Books shelved in alphabetical order. A half-written letter, frozen mid-sentence, the ink still wet after seven years.
She didn't read it. Didn't touch anything. Just stood in the doorway and breathed air that smelled like a stranger and tried to feel something other than empty.
"Your father spent hours in that room," Araminta said from behind her, making Pansy jump. The old woman had appeared silently, which should have been impossible given her tendency to shuffle. "Planning. Scheming. He was always very good at schemes."
"I don't remember him."
"No. You wouldn't. I remember him well.” Araminta's voice was unreadable. "You were young when he made his choices. Choices have consequences, girl. Remember that."
She shuffled away, leaving Pansy alone with dust motes dancing in the afternoon light and a half-finished letter she would never read.
——
The first letter arrived on the fourth day of July. Pansy heard the tap at her window during breakfast and nearly knocked over her elderflower juice in her haste to reach it.
"Pansy, really." Aunt Araminta sniffed. "Such unseemly enthusiasm. A lady waits for her correspondence to be brought to her."
But Pansy was already at the window, fingers fumbling with the latch. The owl that tumbled through was ancient, moulting, and appeared to be held together primarily by determination. It landed on the sill in a heap of shabby feathers and stuck out one leg with the air of a creature that had given everything it had just to arrive.
The letter was from Ron, his handwriting exactly as messy as she would have expected.
Pansy,
I promised to write, so here I am. The Burrow is mental as usual. I promised to write, so here I am. The Burrow is mental as usual. The twins nicked Percy's prefect badge yesterday, tried to flush it down the toilet first, and when that didn't work, stuck it in his sandwich. Thought he'd cracked a tooth. Mum went spare. Percy's still not speaking to anyone, which honestly is an improvement.
Ginny keeps asking about Hogwarts and honestly if she asks one more time about the troll, I'm going to lose it. She says hello, by the way, and wanted me to tell you she has a shy bladder too, so she understands. Alright, she didn't actually tell me to write that, but she did tell me.
How's your summer? Neville wrote and said his grandmother is making him do extra lessons. Poor bloke. At least I just have to degnome the garden.
Write back if you want. Or don't. Whatever.
Ron
P.S. - Mum wants to know if you liked the fudge from Christmas. She tells me to let you know that she can make more.
Pansy read it twice more, hearing Ron's voice in every misspelled word and rambling sentence. The fudge was good. She'd die before admitting it.
The second letter arrived that evening. Pansy was lying on her bed with her head hanging off the edge, staring at nothing, when the tap came at the window. The owl waiting outside was immaculate and faintly judgmental, and when she opened the window it brought with it a cloud of old lady perfume so aggressive it made her eyes water. Definitely Augusta Longbottom's bird. Neville's handwriting was neater than Ron's but somehow more anxious, letters pressed too close together like they were huddling for warmth.
Dear Pansy,
I hope this letter finds you well. Gran is keeping me very busy with lessons. She says I need to "live up to the Longbottom name" which mostly means practicing spells I'm rubbish at and listening to stories about tales about my parents.
Trevor misses you. I know you'll say toads can't miss people, but he does this particular croak whenever I mention your name. I've decided it's his "Pansy croak." Happy-sad, if that makes sense. Like he's glad to think about you but wishes you were here.
How is your summer? Is your mother nice? I hope you're having a good time.
Please write back.
Your friend,
Neville
P.S. - I put a pressed flower in the envelope. A pansy. You probably don't remember, but in the hospital wing you said you wished you could keep one forever. You were still a bit loopy from the concussion, so maybe you didn't mean it. But I pressed one anyway, just in case.
A small, pressed flower fell from the envelope. Purple with a yellow center, perfectly preserved. Pansy stared at it for a long moment.
Pansy read it three times and then tucked it away in her nightstand and then read it again before realizing she had to write back. Immediately.
——-
The first draft came easily, words flowing from her quill in her usual crisp handwriting.
Neville,
Trevor sounds disgusting, as usual. Toads don't have "Pansy croaks." That's not a real thing. You're projecting human emotions onto a toad again. And I'd rather not be associated with that creature, even in passing thought.
Your grandmother sounds exhausting. But then, practicing spells you're "rubbish at" is rather the point of practice, isn't it? Your grades are even worse than mine, which takes some doing. Perhaps less time with Trevor, more time with your wand.
My summer is fine. My mother is travelling.
Pansy
P.S. - The flower is acceptable.
She read it over. Nodded, satisfied. Onto Ron’s.
Ron,
"The Burrow." You named your house after a hole in the ground. That's very on-brand. At least Percy's suffering sounds entertaining.
I'm staying at the manor with my great-aunt Araminta. Mother is off on a yacht with her latest mistake. Don't ask.
Tell your mother I'm not a charity case. I don't require feeding. The fudge was too sticky anyway, nearly took a tooth with it. The manor has far superior confectionery, I assure you.
Pansy
She folded both letters, sealed them with the Parkinson crest, nicked from her mother's study when she was eight and never missed, and tied them to the legs of the waiting owl. The bird took off into the grey morning sky, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared.
Pansy watched them go, feeling pleased with herself.
Then, slowly, the feeling curdled.
Trevor sounds disgusting, as usual.
She'd meant it fondly. Probably.
"The Burrow." You named your house after a hole in the ground.
Tell your mother I'm not a charity case.
Your grades are even worse than mine, which takes some doing.
Oh no.
Pansy's hands went cold. She read the words again in her memory, hearing them as Neville would hear them. That wasn’t good at all.
"No," she said aloud, already moving towards the window. "No, no, no-“
"Come back," she whispered at the empty sky. "Come back, come back, come back."
The owl did not come back.
Pansy ran from the library, through the dusty halls, past a startled Araminta in the parlor, out into the garden where the flesh eating plants recoiled from her footsteps. She could still see the owl, a dark speck against the clouds, heading steadily north.
"COME BACK!"
The owl, perhaps startled by the screaming girl below, actually paused. It circled once, seemed to consider, then began descending towards a large oak at the garden's edge.
Pansy sprinted towards it, robes catching on thorny bushes, dignity abandoned entirely. The owl had landed on a low branch, letters still clutched in its talons, watching her approach with the particular disdain owls reserved for hysterical humans.
"Good owl," she panted, reaching up. "Lovely owl. Give me the letters."
The owl hooted and hopped to a higher branch.
"I'm not playing games. Give. Me. The. Letters."
Another hop. Higher still.
Pansy stared up at the bird, which now perched a good ten feet above her head. Of course. Of course Araminta's owl would be as contrary as everything else in this horrible summer.
"Fine." She grabbed the lowest branch and began to climb.
She hadn't climbed a tree since she was seven, when Draco had dared her to reach the top of the oak in the Malfoy gardens. She'd made it halfway before a branch broke and she'd fallen, scraping her palms bloody. Her mother had been furious about the ruined dress. Draco had laughed.
This oak was larger, older, with branches that groaned under her weight. Bark scraped her hands raw. Her robes kept tangling in twigs. The owl watched her approach with what she could only describe as amusement.
"I will cook you," she hissed, reaching for the next branch. "I will pluck your feathers and cook you and eat you myself.”
The owl ruffled its feathers, unconcerned.
She was close now. Close enough to see the cream-colored envelopes dangling from its talons. Close enough to reach out and-
The owl bit her.
"OW!" Pansy yanked her hand back, lost her balance, grabbed wildly for a branch. Her fingers caught bark, held. "You absolute-“
Below her, the ground seemed very far away.
The owl took off.
She lunged.
For one impossible moment, she was airborne: fingers closing around a feathered leg, body swinging free of the branch, the world tilting sideways. The owl shrieked. Pansy shrieked back.
One letter tore free, spiraling down through the leaves. The other remained clutched in the owl's remaining talon as it tried desperately to escape this madwoman who'd apparently decided mail fraud was worth dying for.
"Give it to me!" Pansy's fingers found the envelope, tugged. The owl tugged back. The envelope ripped, her letter to Neville falling in two pieces.
The owl, apparently deciding this delivery was more trouble than it was worth, released its grip entirely and fled towards the house. Pansy watched it go, panting, covered in scratches and feathers, clinging to a tree branch fifteen feet off the ground.
The letters lay scattered in the grass below.
She climbed down slowly, no longer caring about splinters or torn robes or the fact that she looked like she'd lost a fight with a particularly violent bird. Which, technically, she had.
The letter to Ron had survived mostly intact, just dirty from its fall. The letter to Neville was in pieces. She gathered them carefully, trying to reassemble the fragments on the grass even though she would never send them.
She sat in the grass among the scattered parchment pieces and told herself this was fine. She'd just rewrite them. Take more time. Choose her words more carefully.
——
Back in her room, she found fresh parchment and began again.
Dear Ron,
No, too formal. She never said "dear."
Ron,
Thank you for your letter. I appreciated hearing from you.
She sounded like her mother writing to acquaintances. She crumpled it.
Ron,
My great aunt is staying for the summer. How are you?
Boring. Flat. Nothing like herself. She threw it away.
Ron,
That story about Percy’s badge made me
Made her what? Laugh? She didn't tell people things made her laugh. And she hadn't laughed anyway, it was barely a chuckle. She didn't tell people things made her happy. That wasn't how she worked.
Crumple. Discard. Start again.
Neville,
I'm glad you're okay. The pressed flower was very nice and I
Could she actually write that? Could she actually send it? It felt like handing someone a knife and showing them exactly where to cut.
She crumpled it with the others.
Hours passed. The light through the windows shifted from afternoon gold to evening amber. Parchment accumulated in drifts around her chair, failed attempt after failed attempt. Some were too mean. Some were too nice. Some sounded nothing like her, and some sounded exactly like her, which was somehow worse.
The problem, she realized as the shadows lengthened, wasn't finding the right words. It was that she didn't know who she was supposed to be on paper. In person, it was different. Written down, there was nowhere to hide. Every word sat there, permanent and exposed, evidence of exactly who she was.
And who she was, apparently, was someone who couldn't write two simple letters without making them sound wrong in some way.
She gave up as the dinner bell rang, leaving the scattered failures where they lay.
Tomorrow, she told herself. She'd try again tomorrow.
——
Tomorrow came and went. So did the next day, and the next.
Each morning Pansy woke with fresh determination. Each afternoon she sat in the library with blank parchment. Each evening she went to bed having written nothing, having sent nothing, the task somehow growing larger and more impossible with each failed attempt.
The problem was that she'd left it too long now. A day's delay could be explained. Two days was odd but forgivable. A week of silence after receiving letters from people who called her their friend? That required explanation. That required apology. And Pansy didn't know how to apologize without it sounding either sarcastic or pathetically desperate.
A week after the first letters arrived, the first owl came back. Ron's handwriting again.
Pansy,
Haven't heard back. Everything alright? Maybe your great aunt's owl got lost, they do that sometimes. Errol once delivered a letter to Norway instead of Norfolk. Was gone three months. We'd given him up for dead when he wandered back like nothing had happened.
We're going to Diagon Alley on the 15th. Mum says you're welcome to come. Neville's coming too. His gran approved it, which apparently took about seventeen owls. Need to get books and things. Also a new cauldron, because Neville melted mine on the last day of term. Don't ask.
Write back.
Ron
Neville's owl arrived hours later, because of course they were still coordinating.
Dear Pansy,
Ron said he's writing again, so I am too. I hope the letters aren't bothering you. If you're busy or just don't want to write, that's okay. I know I'm not always the best at conversations. Maybe letters are the same?
I hope your summer is good.
Your friend,
Neville
Your friend. Still. Even after she'd ignored his first letter. Even after she'd given him nothing back.
The guilt was a physical weight now, pressing on her chest every time she looked at the letters. She should write back. She needed to write back. But now she'd have to explain the silence, and what could she possibly say? Sorry, I wrote you letters but then attacked an owl to get them back because I realized I'm incapable of being nice even when I'm trying?
The silence stretched. Two weeks. Three.
Another set of letters arrived. These were shorter.
Dear Pansy, I hope everything is alright. I miss you. -Neville
I miss you.
She held that letter for a long time, reading those three words over and over until they blurred. Then she put it in the drawer with the others and closed it firmly.
And slowly, inevitably, the letters grew shorter. Less frequent.
Did I do something wrong? Ron says I probably didn't but I'm not sure. If I did, I'm sorry.
She wrote a reply that started with No and ended with nothing at all. She stared at the blank space where the truth should go.
I don’t know how to be good at this. I don’t know how to let people keep me. Please don’t stop.
She couldn’t write any of it.
She couldn't write back now. It had been too long. Any response would require acknowledging the weeks of silence, would require being honest about why she hadn't written, would require admitting that she'd been sitting in a library for nearly a month trying without result.
Better to explain in person, she told herself.
By August, the owls stopped coming.
Pansy told herself it was fine. Expected, even. She'd ignored them for too long. Of course they'd given up. Anyone would give up on someone who couldn't manage a simple letter.
———
August 15th dawned clear and bright, the first sun in days.
Pansy woke early, before Margot's shuffling footsteps announced breakfast. She lay in bed watching the light strengthen through the curtains and thought about Diagon Alley.
They'd be there by now, probably. Ron with his enormous family, Neville with his stern grandmother. They'd visit Flourish and Blotts for school books, Slug and Jiggers for potion supplies, maybe Fortescue's for ice cream after. They'd asked her to come. Please, Neville had written. Please.
She could still go. The Floo network connected the manor to the Leaky Cauldron; she'd done it dozens of times with her mother. She could be there in minutes. She could find them in the crowds, explain everything, make it right.
She got out of bed.
Dressed carefully in her best robes: the green ones.
Did her hair the way Neville had once said looked nice, though she'd pretended not to hear.
Went downstairs to the parlour where the Floo pot sat on the mantle, full of powder, waiting.
Stood there.
Stood there for a long time.
She thought about them standing in Diagon Alley, maybe looking for her, maybe asking each other if she'd come.
She thought about having to explain out loud why she couldn't write a letter.
The Floo powder felt cool in her palm. Green fire waited to carry her to London, to her friends, to some version of herself that was brave enough to show up.
She put the powder back in the pot.
The grandfather clock in the corner chimed noon. Then one. Then two.
Pansy sat in the parlour and watched the shadows move across the floor and didn't go to Diagon Alley.
———
The sun rose earlier than she wanted and set later than she could bear.
Wake. Breakfast with Araminta. Lectures about posture, about propriety, about the declining standards of modern youth. Escape to the library. Stare at blank parchment. Fail to write. Lunch. More lectures. Wander the empty halls. Dinner in the echoing dining room. Read their letters again. Sleep. Repeat.
Then one day she woke before dawn on September first.
The trunk was already packed, had been packed for days. Her robes hung pressed and ready, the red and gold accents still felt like a costume. The pressed flower had fallen over in the night, lying flat against the nightstand, and she picked it up carefully, slipping it between the pages of her Transfiguration textbook where it would be safe.
Araminta was waiting in the entrance hall, looking as severe and disappointed as ever.
"Write to your mother," she said as Pansy gathered her things. "She'll want to know you arrived safely."
"Of course."
"And maintain your correspondence this year. A lady cannot afford to let connections lapse. It reflects poorly on the family."
"I'll try," she said, and meant it, and knew that trying had never been enough.
The Floo flared green. Araminta watched her go without a wave or a word of farewell.
Pansy navigated through the crowd with her head down, not looking for red hair or a round face, definitely not hoping to spot them before they spotted her.
She found an empty compartment at the back of the train and closed the door firmly. Drew the curtains. Sat in the corner with her back to the window, where no one passing by could see her.
The train began to move.
She was halfway to Hogwarts when the compartment door slid open.
-------
The compartment door slid open.
"There you are!"
Ron stood in the doorway, slightly out of breath, his robes askew and his hair doing that thing where it stuck up in seven different directions. Behind him, Neville's round face appeared, flushed with exertion.
"We've been looking everywhere," Neville said. "We checked the whole train twice. Ron thought maybe you'd missed it, but I said you wouldn't, you're always on time for things-“
"We started at the front and worked back," Ron added, dropping onto the seat across from her like he belonged there. Like nothing had changed. "Should've started at the back, obviously. Would've found you ages ago."
Neville hesitated in the doorway, something uncertain in his expression. Then he seemed to make a decision, stepping inside and sliding the door shut behind him. He sat next to Ron, not next to her, and Pansy noticed the distance even as she told herself she didn't care.
"Hi," Neville said quietly.
"Hi," Pansy managed.
The silence stretched. Outside the window, green countryside rolled past, fields and hedgerows and the occasional glimpse of Muggle roads.
Ron cleared his throat. "So. Good summer?"
"It was fine," she said.
"We didn't hear from you." Neville's voice was careful, like he was handling something fragile. "We wrote. A lot. Ron's owl nearly had a breakdown from all the trips."
"But we never heard back." Neville was watching her now, really watching, with those earnest eyes that saw too much. "We were worried. I was worried. I thought maybe something had happened, or maybe you were angry about something, or maybe-“
"I didn't get them."
The lie came out before she could stop it, smooth and certain, the words arranging themselves into a story she hadn't known she was going to tell.
"The letters. I didn't get them." She met Neville's eyes, made herself hold his gaze. "I wasn't at the manor. My mother… her fiancé has a ship. We were traveling all summer. The Mediterranean, mostly. The owls couldn't find me because we weren't staying in one place."
Ron's eyebrows rose. "A ship? Fancy."
"It was tedious, actually. Nothing but water and my mother's fiancé talking about himself and endless shopping trips on land.” The details came easily now, borrowed from her mother's actual trip, the one Pansy hadn't been invited on. "We stopped in Monaco for a week. Then Sardinia. Then somewhere in Greece, I forget the name. By the end I was desperate to get back to solid ground."
"That explains it, then." Ron's shoulders relaxed. He'd believed her. Of course he'd believed her, why would she lie about something like this? "We thought maybe you were ignoring us."
"Why would I ignore you?"
"Dunno. People do sometimes." Ron shrugged, but something flickered across his face. "Glad it was just the owl thing."
"I'm glad you had a nice summer," Neville said, and his whole face had softened into something like relief. “It sounds amazing. I've never been on a boat. Gran says they make her seasick, so we never go anywhere near water."
"It was... fine." Pansy searched for details she didn't have. "Lots of sun."
"I burn," Neville said mournfully. "Trevor too, actually. I didn't know toads could burn, but he got this sort of reddish patch on his back last July and Gran said I should have kept him in the shade."
Ron snorted. "Your toad got a sunburn?"
"It's not funny! He was very uncomfortable."
"It's a little funny."
Pansy watched them bicker, something tight in her chest. They'd accepted it. Just like that. No suspicion, no careful looks, no questions she couldn't answer. They trusted her completely, and she'd just lied to their faces.
"Anyway," Neville continued, turning back to her, "you missed all my letters, so you don't know about any of it. Gran was Gran. Trevor escaped approximately forty-seven times. I found some seeds in the greenhouse that I've been trying to germinate, Wobbling Woundwort, I think, but they're tricky."
"Sounds thrilling."
She'd meant it to come out dry, affectionately sarcastic, the way she used to talk to him. Instead it just sounded flat. But Neville didn't seem to notice, or if he did, he didn't take offense. He just launched into an explanation of germination requirements and soil acidity, his hands moving as he talked, the way they always did when he was excited about something.
Ron caught her eye and mimed falling asleep. Pansy pressed her lips together to stop the smile.
This was what she'd missed. This easy back-and-forth, this sense of belonging somewhere. She'd spent two months alone in a dusty manor, reading their letters until the creases wore thin, and now here they were, real and warm and completely oblivious to the lies.
“-and the books say it responds to music," Neville was saying. "Specific frequencies, but no one's figured out which ones. I thought of you, actually. Because of your flute."
"My flute?"
"From Hagrid. The one you used on Fluffy." He ducked his head, suddenly shy. "I thought maybe, when we get back, we could try it? See if any of the notes make it bloom?"
He was offering her something. A project. A reason to spend time together. A bridge across the summer she'd wasted.
"Maybe," she said. "If your plant isn't as boring as it sounds."
Neville grinned. "It's fascinating, actually. Did you know that some specimens have been recorded blooming for seventy-two hours straight when exposed to the right-“
"Neville," Ron interrupted, "she said maybe. Don't scare her off with plant facts before we even get to school."
"They're not scary, they're interesting."
"To you. To normal people, they're just boring.”
They devolved into familiar argument. Pansy leaned back against her seat and let their voices wash over her, not really listening, just... existing. Being here. Being with them.
The lie sat heavy in her stomach. She could still tell them the truth, right now, while they were relaxed and happy, before it had time to fester.
But they looked so relieved. So glad to have her back, to have an explanation that made sense, to believe that the summer's silence was just bad luck and foreign postal systems.
How could she take that from them?
So she said nothing. Watched the countryside roll past. Laughed when Ron said something stupid. Nodded when Neville explained more than she'd ever wanted to know about rare magical plants.
The trolley witch came and went. Ron bought a mountain of sweets; Neville abstained, muttering something about having eaten too much at breakfast; Pansy selected a single Pumpkin Pasty she didn't actually want, just to have something to do with her hands.
Conversation continued in fits and starts. Ron carried most of it, apparently inexhaustible when it came to Weasley family chaos.
Pansy said very little. Every time she opened her mouth, she could feel the lie sitting there, taking up space where real words should be. She'd committed to it now. The ship, the traveling, the unreliable Mediterranean owls. If she took it back, she'd have to explain why she'd lied in the first place, and that explanation would require honesty she wasn't sure she possessed.
"You're quiet," Ron observed, somewhere between his account of Percy's prefect obsession and a tangent about dragon breeds Charlie had mentioned in his latest letter.
"I'm listening."
"Yeah, but usually you're listening and also making comments about how everything we say is stupid."
"Everything you say is stupid."
Ron grinned. "There she is."
But Neville didn't smile. He was looking out the window, profile sharp against the passing hills, and Pansy couldn't tell if he was lost in thought or deliberately avoiding her gaze.
The afternoon wore on. The light shifted from gold to grey to the particular purple that meant they were getting close. Students began moving through the corridors, changing into robes, collecting scattered belongings.
"We should get ready," Neville said, standing. It was the first thing he'd said in nearly half an hour. "The prefects will be doing rounds soon."
Ron groaned but stood as well, stretching in a way that took up most of the compartment. "Right. See you at the feast, yeah?"
He was asking her, Pansy realized. Asking if she'd sit with them.
"Obviously," she said, and hoped it sounded more certain than it felt.
Ron nodded and slipped out into the corridor. Neville lingered in the doorway, one hand on the frame, looking back at her with an expression she couldn't read.
"I'm glad you're okay," he said quietly. "I really was worried. All summer. I kept thinking something had happened to you."
"Nothing happened to me."
"I know. You were traveling.” His voice was neutral, carefully so. "It's just... I sent you something. In one of the letters. A pressed flower. I wondered if you'd gotten it."
The flower. The pansy from the hospital wing, preserved between parchment sheets, currently sitting at the bottom of her trunk beneath her robes.
"I didn't," Pansy said. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine. It was silly anyway." Neville said.
<p> </p>
The Great Hall blazed with candlelight, thousands of flames floating above the four long tables in their neat, impossible rows. Pansy had forgotten how overwhelming it was after two months in the dim, quiet house. The noise alone felt like an assault: hundreds of students talking over each other, the clatter of plates and goblets, the occasional shriek of laughter that cut through everything else.
The Sorting had dragged on forever, small frightened children stumbling to the stool one after another. Pansy had clapped mechanically when new Gryffindors joined the table, not bothering to learn their names. First years were interchangeable. She'd been one just last year, and look how well that had turned out.
Now the feast had begun in earnest, and Pansy found herself actually hungry for the first time in weeks. The house-elves had been a competent but uninspired cooks, producing meals that were nutritionally adequate and completely joyless. Without Mother there to terrorise them, the manor's house-elves had let their standards slip. The Hogwarts roast beef, by contrast, practically melted on her tongue.
"Pass the potatoes?" Ron asked through a mouthful of something.
"Chew first. You look like a hamster."
Neville was telling them about his grandmother's attempts to improve his duelling stance over the summer. Pansy half-listened, more focused on the Yorkshire pudding she was constructing into a small fortress around her peas.
She didn't notice the movement behind her until it was too late.
Something cold and heavy hit the top of her head. For a confused moment, she thought the ceiling had started leaking, some malfunction in the enchantment that showed the night sky. Then the substance slid down her face, thick and sticky, and she smelled treacle.
Pudding. Someone had dumped an entire serving of treacle pudding directly onto her head.
The table around her went silent. Then someone laughed, a sharp bark of amusement quickly stifled. Then someone else. Within seconds, it seemed like half of Gryffindor was either laughing or trying very hard not to.
Pansy sat frozen, treacle dripping from her hair onto her shoulders, sliding down her forehead towards her eyes. She could feel it seeping through her robes, warm and cloying, ruining everything it touched.
"Who-“ Her voice came out strangled.
The Slytherin table erupted in laughter. A few Gryffindors joined in, the ones who'd never warmed to having a Parkinson in their house. Pansy could feel eyes on her from every direction, could feel herself becoming a story that would be told and retold: “Did you see what happened to that Parkinson girl? The one who's supposed to be in Slytherin?”
Treacle dripped into her eye. She blinked furiously, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
"Here, let me-“ Neville had his wand out, face flushed with secondhand embarrassment. "I know a cleaning charm, Professor Sprout taught me for getting soil out of-”
"Neville, wait-“ Ron started.
"Tergum Sordis!"
The spell hit Pansy's head with a sensation like cold water. But instead of cleaning the pudding away, something went wrong. The treacle shuddered, bubbled, and transformed into something worse: a viscous grey-green slime that smelled faintly of pond water and began spreading rather than retreating.
"Oh no," Neville whispered. "Oh no, oh no, that wasn't supposed to- I must have mispronounced-“
The slime oozed down Pansy's neck, under her collar, cold and revolting against her skin. She could feel it sliding down her back, pooling at her waistband. The laughter around her had redoubled, even people who'd initially looked sympathetic now struggling to contain themselves.
"I'm so sorry," Neville was saying, wand hand trembling. "I can fix it, I think if I just-“
"I... I didn't mean to..." Neville, pale as death, still holding his wand. "Pansy, I'm sorry, I'll try again, I-“
He raised his wand again.
Pansy moved before she could think.
Her hand shot forward, fingers closing around Neville's wrist with a strength she hadn't expected from herself. She ripped the wand from his hand and placed it onto the table.
She wasn't letting that wand anywhere near her again. It had never worked properly, she'd told him so a hundred times, told him it couldn't just be his fault, told him to get a new one, but Neville was sentimental about it for reasons she'd never understood. His father's wand. As if that mattered when it kept turning simple charms into catastrophes.
The sound of wood on wood rang through the hushed hall.
He wanted to help, whispered a voice in her head. He always wants to help. He just doesn't know how.
Pansy stood. Slime dripped from her robes onto the bench, onto the floor, leaving a trail of grey-green goop. She didn't look at Draco. Didn't look at anyone. She fixed her eyes on the doors at the far end of the hall and started walking.
"Pansy, wait-“ Ron called after her.
She didn't wait. She walked faster, then faster still, slime squelching in her shoes with every step. The doors seemed impossibly far away. She could feel every eye in the hall following her progress, could hear the whispers starting up in her wake.
She hit the doors at nearly a run, shoving them open with both hands, and didn't stop until she'd reached the stairs. Only then did she let herself pause, breathing hard, slime still oozing down her spine.
She would not cry. She would not give them that. She would not-
A glob of slime detached from her hair and landed on her shoe with a wet splat.
She ran for Gryffindor Tower.
The dormitory mirror showed her a disaster.
The slime had spread to cover most of her upper body, matting her hair into thick, ropy clumps that stuck out at angles. Her face was streaked with grey-green residue. Her robes were probably ruined, the fabric already starting to discolor where the substance had soaked through.
The cleaning charm she attempted did nothing. The slime just sat there, mocking her magical inadequacy. She tried a different charm, one her mother had taught her for removing wine stains from silk. The slime turned slightly more purple but otherwise remained unmoved.
"Fine," she muttered. "We'll do this the Muggle way."
The bathroom attached to the second-year girls' dormitory was small but functional. Pansy turned the shower as hot as it would go and stood under the spray, still fully clothed, scrubbing at her hair with desperate fingers.
The slime resisted. Of course it did. Whatever Neville had accidentally created, it had bonded with her hair like it belonged there. She scrubbed harder, fingernails raking her scalp, and managed to dislodge a few clumps that swirled down the drain like grey-green jellyfish.
By the time she'd gotten most of it out, her fingers were pruned, her robes were soaked, and the bathroom floor was flooded with slightly slimy water. She peeled off her ruined clothes, wrapped herself in a towel, and sat on the edge of the tub, staring at nothing.
Draco had done that. Deliberately, publicly, cruelly. A year ago, she thought he would have been her ally, her friend, the person she sat next to at feasts and complained about other students with.
A knock at the dormitory door made her flinch.
"Pansy?" Lavender's voice, tentative. "Are you okay? Only Neville Longbottom is downstairs and he's very upset and keeps asking if you're dead."
She wasn't dead. Though at the moment, it didn't feel like a significant distinction.
"Tell him I'm fine," she called back.
"He says he won't leave until he sees you. And Ron Weasley's with him."
Of course they were. Of course those two idiots had followed her, were making a scene, were probably making everything worse in their attempt to make it better.
"Tell them-“ She stopped. What was the point? They'd just keep waiting. That was what they did. "Tell them I'll be down in ten minutes."
She dressed in fresh robes, spelled her hair as dry as she could manage, and examined herself in the mirror again. Still a disaster, but a less slimy one. Her hair would need proper washing tomorrow, probably multiple times, but at least she no longer looked like a swamp creature.
The common room had mostly emptied, students either still at the feast or already headed to bed. Ron and Neville sat in the chairs by the fire, looking up with identical expressions of worry when she appeared on the stairs.
"I'm so sorry," Neville said immediately, rising to his feet. "I don't know what happened, I've done that spell before, it sometimes worked on soil and I thought-“
"Neville."
“-it would work the same way but clearly pudding isn't soil and I should have thought about that before-”
"Neville."
“-and now your hair is ruined and it's all my fault and I completely understand if you never want to speak to me again-”
"Neville."
He stopped, mouth still open mid-apology.
"It's fine," Pansy said. The words came out more tired than angry. "You were trying to help."
"But I made it worse."
"Yes. You did. That's what you do." She sank into the chair across from them. "It's practically your defining characteristic."
Neville's face crumpled.
"She doesn't mean it like that," Ron said quickly. "Do you, Pansy?"
Did she? She wasn't sure anymore. She was too tired to calibrate, too wrung out to find the right balance between honest and cruel.
"I mean that you try to help and it goes wrong," she said finally. "But you still try. That's…" She waved a hand vaguely. "That's something."
It wasn't an apology, but it wasn't an attack either. Neville seemed to accept it, sinking back into his chair with residual guilt still written across his features.
"Malfoy's a git," Ron said. "Everyone knows it was him.”
Silence fell. The fire crackled. Somewhere above them, a dormitory door slammed.
"Here." Ron reached into his trunk sitting beside him and pulled out something small and dark. "I was going to give this to you on the train, but then we got distracted and I forgot."
He held it out: a small black diary, leather-bound, with a name stamped in faded gold on the cover. T. M. Riddle.
Pansy took it automatically. "What is this?"
"Found it in my new cauldron when we went to Diagon Alley. Must have fallen in at the shop or something. Mum said I should throw it away, but I thought…" He shrugged. "I don't know. You might want it."
She turned the diary over in her hands. The leather was worn but smooth, the pages inside blank when she flipped through them. Old, clearly, but not mistreated.
"You're giving me someone else's diary?"
"It's empty. See? Whoever this Riddle person was, they never wrote in it."
"So it's a used empty diary that belonged to a stranger." She raised an eyebrow. "You really know how to make a girl feel special, Weasley."
"I thought you could use it to practice," he said, and there was something careful in his voice now, something that made her look up sharply. "Writing, I mean. Since you're so out of practice."
"I don't need to practice writing," she said. "My penmanship is excellent."
"Course it is."
"It is."
"I said course it is."
"I'm going to bed," she announced, standing. "Some of us need to sleep so that they can get up early to wash slime out of our hair three more times before it's actually clean."
"I really am sorry," Neville said again.
"I know." She paused at the foot of the stairs. "Thank you. Both of you. For…" She gestured vaguely at the common room, at them, at whatever this was. "For coming to check."
The dormitory was dark except for Pansy's wand light, a small globe of illumination hovering above her pillow. Around her, the other girls had long since settled into sleep, their breathing slow and even behind drawn curtains.
Pansy couldn't sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw treacle pudding falling towards her face, felt the cold splatter, heard the laughter spreading through the Great Hall like wildfire. And then the slime, Neville's botched spell making everything worse, the long walk to the doors with hundreds of eyes tracking her progress.
She'd washed her hair four times. It still felt sticky.
The diary sat on her nightstand where she'd left it, that faded gold name catching her wand light. T. M. Riddle. She'd meant to shove it in her trunk and forget about it. Instead, she found herself reaching for it, running her thumb across the worn leather cover.
You could use it to practice.
She opened the diary to the first page. Blank. Cream-colored and slightly yellowed at the edges, but blank.
Her mother had given her a diary once, years ago. Pink leather with a tiny gold lock, the key on a chain meant to be worn around the neck. Pansy had written in it exactly three times before abandoning it at the bottom of her wardrobe.
This diary had no lock. Just blank pages and a stranger's name who might be dead.
She picked up her quill, then realized she had no ink. A rummage through her nightstand produced a self-inking quill, a gift from her mother that she'd never used because the ink was a garish purple that clashed with proper parchment.
The purple would look terrible against the cream pages. Somehow that made it easier to start.
September 1st , she wrote, then stopped. What came next? "Dear Diary" seemed pathetic. She wasn't going to address a book like it was a person.
Today was awful.
She stared at the words. They looked childish. Insufficient. She kept writing anyway.
Draco dumped pudding on my head at the feast. In front of everyone. He pretended it was an accident but it wasn't. He's never forgiven me for not being sorted into Slytherin, which is ironic because I've never forgiven myself either.
The quill moved faster now, purple ink spreading across the page.
Neville tried to help and made it worse. He always makes things worse. He turned the pudding into slime with a botched cleaning charm and I had to walk out of the Great Hall looking like something that crawled out of a bog. Everyone laughed. Even some of the Gryffindors.
I don't know why I'm writing this. Ron gave me this diary. He said I could use it to practice writing. I don't know if that's kind or annoying. Probably both.
"Some of us are trying to sleep."
Parvati's voice, muffled by bed curtains, dripping with irritation.
"Then sleep," Pansy said.
"I can't with your light on. It's coming through the gap."
"Then close your eyes."
"That's not how it works."
"Shut up, Patil."
Pansy didn't respond. She hunched closer to the diary, angling her body to block the wand light, and kept writing.
"Pansy, seriously-“
"Shut up, Parvati."
A huff from behind the curtains. Pointed rustling of blankets. Then silence, aggrieved but complete.
The words were coming faster now, spilling out like something that had been dammed up too long. Pansy's hand cramped around the quill but she didn't stop.
She wrote about everything. Things she'd never said aloud. Things she'd barely admitted to herself. The anger came out jagged and run-on, the sadness in fragments that didn't quite connect. Some of it didn't even make sense, just feelings with rough edges that snagged on each other as they poured onto the page.
The quill slipped from her fingers. She was distantly aware of it rolling across the blankets, probably staining them purple, but she couldn't summon the energy to care. The diary lay open on the pillow beside her, purple words gleaming wetly in the fading wand light.
Sleep took her between one breath and the next.
Morning came with aggressive Scottish sunlight and Lavender's cheerful humming from somewhere near the bathroom. Pansy pulled her pillow over her head and tried to will herself back to sleep.
No use. She was awake now, aware of the day ahead: first classes of term, facing the Great Hall again, possibly running into Draco in corridors. Her stomach clenched at the thought.
She reached for the diary without really thinking about it. She'd left it in the drawer, but somehow it had migrated to her pillow in the night, lying open beside her head like she'd been reading it in her sleep.
Strange. She didn't remember taking it out again.
Stranger still: the pages were blank.
Pansy sat up, frowning. She flipped through the diary quickly, checking every page. Nothing. No date at the top of the first page, no cramped confession about pudding and slime and not knowing how to accept kindness. Every cream-colored page was as empty as the day Ron had given it to her.
She checked the quill and ink. Still in the drawer where she'd left them. The quill tip was stained dark, proof that she'd used it recently. The ink level was lower than before.
But the words were gone.
"What kind of rubbish diary…" she muttered, examining the first page more closely. She held it up to the light, looking for traces of ink, indentations where the quill had pressed. Nothing. The page was pristine, like it had never been touched.
The diary had eaten her words. Consumed them overnight, leaving no trace. All that pathetic, vulnerable honesty she'd poured out in the darkness, and the stupid thing had just… absorbed it.
She should be angry. She should march downstairs and tell Ron his gift was defective, demand to know where he'd really found it, throw the thing in the fire and be done with it.
Instead, she found herself almost relieved.
Gone. All of it, gone.
And if she wrote in it again tonight, those words would disappear too.
She could try again. Write something less pathetic, something she wouldn't be ashamed of in the morning. If the diary was just going to eat everything anyway, what did it matter? She could practice being honest without any permanent record, without any risk of someone finding her feelings bound in leather and waiting to betray her.
It was perfect, really. A diary that left no evidence. A place to put things that needed to go somewhere, without the danger of them staying.
"Pansy?" Lavender's voice, still slightly hysterical. "Can you do something about this spider? You're good at being mean to things."
Pansy closed the diary slowly. Whatever had happened, whatever strange magic had consumed her words, at least no one else could read them now. Her secrets had been swallowed by blank pages, disappeared like they'd never existed.
Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this diary, with its strange hungry pages, was exactly what she needed: somewhere to put the thoughts she couldn't say aloud, with the guarantee that they'd never come back to haunt her.
Or maybe she should throw it in the fire and never think about it again.
"PANSY. SPIDER."
"Coming," she muttered, tucking the diary under her pillow.
Classes could wait. So could Draco's smug face and whatever clever remarks he'd prepared overnight. She'd tell Neville to make excuses, and spend the day in bed.
The second night, she wrote about classes.
Professor Lockhart is an idiot. He released Cornish pixies into the classroom and then ran away when they started destroying everything. Neville ended up hanging from the chandelier. Ron and I had to stack chairs to get him down while Granger handled the pixies with a freezing charm she probably learned in the womb.
The man is paid to teach us. He is paid actual galleons.
Ron says Lockhart's books are all lies. I'm inclined to believe him. No one who actually fought a werewolf would spend that much time talking about their hair care routine.
She'd been rather pleased with that entry.
In the morning, the pages were blank.
The third night, she wrote about Draco.
We were friends once. Or I thought we were. Maybe I was just convenient: someone to agree with him, laugh at his jokes, make him feel important. Maybe that's all I ever was to anyone. m>
Ron and Neville aren't like that. I don't think. They seem to actually want me around, even when I'm horrible. Especially when I'm horrible, sometimes. I don't understand it.
That entry felt too raw, too close to the bone. She'd almost scratched it out before remembering there was no point. The diary would eat it anyway.
In the morning, the pages were blank.
The fourth night, she wrote about her mother.
No letter yet. Not that I expected one. She's probably still in France with Aldric, drinking wine and forgetting she has a daughter. That's fine. I don't need her to write. I don't need anything from her.
Maybe Father would have written. I think. I don't actually know what he would have done. I was four when they took him. I don't remember his voice or his face or anything real about him, just the stories Mother tells, and I don't think those are true either.
She'd cried a little while writing that one, which was humiliating even with no witnesses. The tears had smeared the ink slightly, leaving dark blooms on the page like bruises.
In the morning, the pages were blank. Even the tear stains were gone.
By the fifth night, Pansy was getting frustrated.
She'd written something good, she was sure of it. A whole passage about the way the sky looked at sunset, silver and gold and impossible, and how she'd stood at the window of the common room watching it while Ron and Neville argued about the best flavor of Bertie Bott's beans behind her. She'd described the feeling of being suspended between two worlds: the quiet beauty outside and the warm chaos inside, and how she hadn't known which one she belonged to.
It had taken her an hour to get the words right. She'd crossed things out, rewritten sentences, actually tried in a way she hadn't since her governess had stood over her with a ruler.
In the morning: blank.
"Stupid thing," she muttered, flipping through the empty pages. "What's the point of you?"
The diary, predictably, did not answer.
She considered stopping. What was the point of practicing if the practice just disappeared? She couldn't tell if she was getting better because there was nothing to compare, no record of progress, just the same blank pages every morning like she'd never written anything at all.
But that night, she found herself reaching for the diary anyway. It had become habit now, this nightly ritual of putting words somewhere outside her own head. Even if they vanished, even if no one ever read them, there was something relieving about the act itself. Like screaming into a void that swallowed the sound.
Fine , she wrote. You want to eat my words? Eat these.
Draco Malfoy once stepped in peacock droppings at the Manor and tracked them across three rooms before anyone told him. Mrs. Malfoy had to lie down for an hour.
Professor Snape's nose is so large owls have attempted to nest in it.
I think Trevor is actually the smartest creature in Gryffindor Tower. He escapes constantly, which shows excellent judgment about his living situation.
Ron chews with his mouth open and it's disgusting but also somehow endearing, like watching a baby animal that hasn't learned manners yet.
I am deeply, tragically in love with the Hogwarts trifle. If it were a person I would marry it.
She was grinning by the end, the kind of grin that would have horrified her mother. These weren't proper thoughts. They weren't elegant or refined or suitable for a Parkinson. They were stupid and silly and exactly the kind of thing she'd never say out loud.
In the morning, the pages were blank, and Pansy was satisfied.
History of Magic was, as always, unbearable.
Professor Binns droned on about some goblin rebellion or another. The fourteenth, maybe. Or the fifteenth. Pansy had stopped trying to keep track weeks ago, along with any pretense of taking notes. The ghost never noticed who was paying attention anyway. He probably wouldn't notice if the entire class walked out, or if the classroom caught fire, or if goblins themselves burst through the door demanding reparations.
Beside her, Neville had given up entirely. His head rested on his folded arms, his breathing slow and even, a small puddle of drool forming on his parchment. Trevor sat on the desk in front of him, apparently the only one taking the lecture seriously, his bulbous eyes fixed on Binns with what looked almost like attention.
Ron was less subtle about his boredom. He'd torn a corner off his parchment and was rolling it into tiny balls, flicking them at the back of Seamus Finnigan's head with surprisingly good aim. When Pansy glanced over, he caught her eye and grinned, giving her a thumbs up as if to say watch this before launching another projectile.
Despite herself, she almost smiled.
She tried resting her head on her arms the way Neville had, but sleep wouldn't come. Her fingers kept drifting to her bag, to the shape of the diary inside. Eventually she stopped fighting it.
She'd taken to carrying it everywhere now, tucked in her bag between her Transfiguration text and her spare quills. Not because she expected to write in it during the day. Just because leaving it in her dormitory felt wrong somehow, like leaving behind a part of herself.
The blank pages gleamed up at her. She uncapped her ink, dipped her quill, and began to doodle.
First, a small snitch with an angry face. Then a stick figure that might have been Lockhart, identified by the exaggerated hair. A series of stars along the margin. The word "BORING" in elaborate Gothic lettering.
She was halfway through drawing a rather unflattering portrait of Binns (difficult, since he was transparent and she only had black ink) when she noticed something strange.
The ink was moving.
Not her ink. Different ink, appearing on the page as if written by an invisible hand. Dark, elegant script forming words directly below her doodle of Binns:
I quite agree. He was tedious when I was a student as well.
Pansy's quill slipped. She caught her yelp before it fully escaped, turning it into a sort of strangled cough that made Neville glance over with concern.
"You alright?" he whispered.
"Fine," she managed. "Swallowed wrong."
He gave her an odd look but turned back to his own half-hearted notes.
Pansy stared at the diary. The words were still there, dark against the cream-colored page. They hadn't faded or vanished or done anything except sit there, looking perfectly ordinary, as if diaries wrote back to people all the time.
She looked around the classroom. Binns was still droning. Students were still glazed over with boredom. No one was watching her. No one had noticed that her diary had just written to her.
Her hand trembled slightly as she touched quill to page.
Who are you? she wrote.
The response came immediately, ink blooming across the page with fluid certainty.
My name is Tom Riddle. I was wondering when you would finally say hello.
Tom was mean.
That was the first thing Pansy noticed, the thing that made her sit up straighter and pay attention. When she wrote something cutting about Lockhart, Tom didn't offer empty sympathy or gentle redirection. He matched her.
The man is a fraud , his elegant script appeared beneath her rant about the pixie disaster. I've known his type. All performance, no substance. The hair alone should have warned everyone. No one that concerned with their appearance has room left for actual competence.
Pansy stared at the words, something unfamiliar flickering in her chest. She'd expected the diary to be like Ron and Neville: tolerant of her sharpness, perhaps, but always slightly flinching from it. Always waiting for her to be softer.
Tom didn't wait for anything.
Some people don’t even notice that he is a fraud. , she wrote back.
I notice everything. As do you, I suspect. It's rather exhausting, isn't it? Seeing people clearly when they'd prefer to remain unseen.
She tested him. Of course she did.
What kind of name is Tom Riddle anyway? she wrote one evening, deliberately careless. Sounds Muggle.
Names are what the unimaginative cling to when they can't perceive what actually matters.
Doesn't change that Riddle is a Muggle name. Common as dirt. I've never heard of any wizarding Riddles. It isn’t even in the registries.
Parkinson. The word appeared with what felt like deliberate slowness. I knew a Parkinson once. Samuel, I believe. Wasn't worth much, and I wasn't alone in that opinion. Terrible card player. Worse conversationalist. The family name carried him further than his abilities ever could.
Pansy's eyes narrowed. Don't deflect. You're a half-blood, aren't you? Or worse.
I assure you, whatever is in my blood is worth more than any registry could measure.
Maybe , she wrote, quill pressing harder than necessary.
The deflection was obvious.
She let it go. For now.
Now, tell me more about this Lockhart creature. I find myself morbidly curious about how Hogwarts' standards have fallen.
Pansy snorted. You think standards were better in your day?
Marginally. Though we had our share of fools. A pause, then: There was a Transfiguration professor named Dumbledore. Thought himself terribly clever. The sort who watched you over his spectacles and acted as though he could see straight through to your soul.
The ink seemed to press harder into the page.
Tiresome man. Everyone thought him brilliant, of course. He cultivated that reputation carefully. But there's a difference between intelligence and wisdom, and Dumbledore never learned it. Too busy being mysterious. Too certain of his own judgment.
Pansy raised an eyebrow. That was a lot of venom for a professor from fifty years ago. Sounds like you didn't get along, she wrote.
He didn't approve of me. The words appeared with studied casualness. Some teachers can't bear students who might outshine them. It's a common failing of the mediocre.
She almost laughed. Dumbledore, mediocre? The man was Headmaster now, famous throughout the wizarding world, considered one of the greatest wizards alive. Whatever Tom remembered, it didn't match reality.
But everyone had teachers they'd hated. It wasn't strange.
She thought of Snape, who sneered at her when her potion inevitably came out wrong. Of McGonagall, whose mouth thinned every time Pansy opened hers. Of Sprout, perpetually disappointed whenever Neville chose her as a partner. Of Flitwick, relentlessly cheerful in a way that made her want to break something.
She couldn't think of a single professor who actually liked her. Tolerated, perhaps. Endured. But liked? She'd stopped expecting that somewhere around her third week at Hogwarts, when it became clear that she had no talent to make up for her personality.
So yes, Tom hated Dumbledore. Tom thought he was overrated and smug and too pleased with his own cleverness. That didn't mean anything. That was just what it felt like to be seen as a problem rather than a person.
She understood that perfectly.
What if I told you I was horrible , she wrote one night. Properly horrible. The kind of person who says cruel things because she can't help it, who makes people flinch and then feels satisfied about it.
The response came without hesitation.
I'd say you were being honest, which is more than most people manage. Cruelty is only a problem when it's wielded stupidly.
You're not going to tell me I should be nicer?
Why would I want you to be less interesting?
She read that line four times. Less interesting. Not less kind, not less difficult, not less sharp. Less interesting. As if her edges were the point of her rather than the problem with her.
Everyone else wants me to be nicer , she wrote.
Everyone else is boring. I thought we'd established that.
The testing continued. She couldn't help it. When someone seemed too good to be true, Pansy's instinct was to prove they weren't, to find the crack that would eventually break everything apart. Better to know now than be surprised later.
She wrote cruel things about Tom himself. Told him he was probably boring when he was alive, that being trapped in a diary was likely an improvement on his previous personality. Told him his handwriting was pretentious and his observations were obvious.
He laughed. She could tell he was laughing even through text, something in the rhythm of his responses, the slight pause before his words appeared.
You're trying to make me leave , he wrote. It won't work. I've met your type before. All thorns and terror, convinced that if you're vicious enough first, you won't get hurt. It's rather transparent, actually.
Her face flushed hot. I'm not transparent.
You're not. That's what makes you interesting. But I've had fifty years with nothing to do but think. I've gotten rather good at reading between lines.
What do you see between mine?
A long pause. Then: Someone who's been taught that wanting things is dangerous. Someone who learned early that the people who were supposed to love her would leave anyway, so she'd better leave first. Someone clever enough to see through everyone else but not quite brave enough to look in a mirror.
Pansy's hand trembled over the page. She should write something cutting back, something that would prove he didn't know her at all, didn't understand anything.
Instead she wrote: That's not fair.
No , Tom agreed. It's not. But it's accurate, isn't it?
She didn't answer. She closed the diary and shoved it under her pillow and lay awake for an hour, staring at the canopy, feeling seen in a way that was either wonderful or terrible and she couldn't tell which.
The next night, she wrote to him again. And the one after that.
It turned out that Tom was useful.
Not just entertaining, though he was that too. He had stories about everyone from his year: the scandals, the secret romances, the duels that the professors never found out about. Pansy recognized most of the surnames. The Notts, the Lestranges, the Rosiers, all the old families, frozen in Tom's memory as teenagers with acne and poor judgment. She hoarded the details like stolen sweets, imagining Theodore Nott's face if he knew his grandfather had once been caught crying in the Astronomy Tower over a Hufflepuff girl. A Hufflepuff… even worse than a Gryffindor.
But beyond the gossip, Tom was genuinely brilliant.
He hadn't been lying about being the best student of his year. When she complained about a Transfiguration essay she couldn't untangle, he walked her through the theory step by step, his explanations clearer than anything McGonagall had ever managed. When she struggled with a Potions assignment, he caught an error in the textbook itself, an incorrect measurement that would have ruined the entire brew.
How do you know all this? she wrote once, half-suspicious, half-awed.
How do you not know?
She started copying his suggestions directly into her essays. The results were immediate. McGonagall's tight-lipped tolerance softened into something approaching approval. Snape, who had never given her more than a dismissive glance, paused at her desk to examine her work and said nothing, which from Snape was practically a standing ovation.
Outstanding , Flitwick wrote across her Charms essay. Much improved, Miss Parkinson!
She stared at the word for a long time. She'd never gotten an Outstanding in her life.
Thank you , she wrote to Tom that night.
Don't thank me. You did the work. I merely pointed you in the right direction. This school leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t surprise me that you are struggling.
That wasn't quite true, and they both knew it. But she let him say it anyway, because it felt better than admitting how much she needed him.
I wish I could see the lake , Tom wrote one evening. You describe it so beautifully. The way the light hits the water at sunset, the castle reflected in the surface. I can almost imagine it.
It's just a lake , Pansy wrote back. But she was pleased despite herself. She'd worked on that description, choosing words carefully, trying to capture something she usually ignored.
It's not just anything to someone who can't see it. You don't know what it's like, Pansy. Fifty years of darkness, of existing only when someone opens these pages. Fifty years of silence.
That sounds awful.
It is. A pause. But talking to you makes it bearable. More than bearable. You see things so clearly, describe them so precisely. When you write to me, I can almost feel like I'm there.
She should have felt flattered. Instead, something prickled at the edges of her attention. A familiar sensation, the one she got when someone's words didn't quite match their meaning.
What do you want, Tom?
The question appeared on the page before she'd fully decided to write it. She stared at it, heart suddenly beating faster.
A long pause. Longer than usual.
I want what anyone wants. , he wrote finally. To walk on my own two feet.
That's not really an answer.
Isn't it? His script seemed to curl at the edges, almost amused. What do you want me to say? That I want to escape this diary? Of course I do. That I wish I could exist in the world again? Obviously.
Pansy tapped her quill against the page, leaving small dots of ink like a trail of breadcrumbs. Something was bothering her.
It’s a bit cruel isn’t it? she wrote. Living in that diary?
Another pause. Cruel?
Tom Riddle put you into that diary. A piece of himself that became you. And then he closed the cover and put you away somewhere. Left you in the dark for fifty years. She paused, then added: He didn't care much for you, did he?
She knew she was being cruel herself. Could feel the sharp edge of the words as she wrote them, the particular satisfaction of finding someone else's wound and pressing.
The diary was silent for a long time.
When the words finally appeared, they came slowly, each letter deliberate.
I am his past, present, and future. I am him and he is me. I am not merely a piece that was discarded. I am him.
Pansy raised an eyebrow at the page. Whatever you say, Tom.
The response was immediate, almost curt. You don't believe me.
I believe you believe it. There's a difference.
The silence stretched again. Pansy felt the familiar prickle of having pushed too far, the one that preceded hours of him refusing to respond. She hated when he did that. Hated the hollow feeling of opening the diary to blank pages, of writing questions that went unanswered.
Maybe I could find out what became of you. The real you. The one who made this diary. My great-aunt Araminta has been around for centuries with open ears. There's little the old crone hasn't heard about. She knows all the old families, all the old scandals. If Tom Riddle became someone, she'd know. She was trying to throw him a bone. Sometimes she was too mean to him and he ended up not writing back for a few hours, which left her bored.
Another pause. Pansy watched the page, waiting.
That won't be necessary.
Why not? Aren't you curious?
I know exactly what became of him. The words appeared with ink splotches like he was pressing too hard.
The next words were more smooth. Tell me about your day instead. What happened in Potions?
Pansy frowned at the page. He'd never refused information before. Never turned down an offer to learn more about the world beyond his pages. And the way he'd said it: I know exactly what became of him. Not wondering, not hoping. Knowing.
The question surfaced and she let it sink again, watching it disappear into darker water.
Besides, what did it matter? Tom was a prisoner held in paper. A voice trapped between pages, dependent on her to open the cover, to pick up the quill, to give him any connection to the world at all. She could shut the diary right now and he'd have nothing. She could throw it away and he'd spend another fifty years in silence and darkness, waiting for someone who might never come. She could throw it in a fire. Watch the leather blacken and curl. And whatever lived inside would die without a sound, without a witness, without anyone to mark that it had ever been.
She had the power here. She was the one with a body, with choices, with the ability to walk away.
She told herself that, and it felt true.
It felt true right up until she realised she couldn't remember the last time she'd gone a full hour without reaching for the diary. Right up until she noticed her hand was already moving towards it again, hungry for his words, desperate to fill the silence he'd left.
She opened the cover anyway.
She had the power. She did.
Didn't she?
The morning started wrong.
Pansy woke to pale winter light and a disorientation so complete she didn't recognize her own bed for a moment. The canopy above her looked unfamiliar, the hangings a color she couldn't name. She lay still, waiting for recognition to arrive. It came slowly: the canopy, the hangings, the particular creak of her mattress. Her head pounded like she'd slept for days or not at all.
Her hands felt strange. She lifted them to her face, examining her fingers in the thin light filtering through the curtains.
Pansy groaned, rolled over, and immediately winced. Her hands hurt, an ache under the nails. She flexed her fingers and frowned. Her right hand felt tight, the way it did after writing too long. Her left…
She brought it up to her face.
There was dirt under her fingernails. Packed in deep crescents, brownish-black, crusted at the cuticles.
“For Merlin’s sake,” she muttered. Had she fallen asleep scratching at something? She didn’t remember.
She jammed a thumbnail from her other hand under one of the worst offenders, picking. The stuff flaked a little, smearing against her skin.
It smelled… odd. Metallic, under the earthiness. She grimaced and, without thinking, scraped some free and ran it along her bottom teeth to pry it out, the way she always did when she couldn’t be bothered to find a proper nail brush.
The taste was immediate.
Metallic. Sharp. Like biting the inside of her cheek.
She froze, tongue pressed to the back of her teeth.
“…Lovely,” she said out loud, because if she kept silent maybe her head would start inventing reasons.
She sat up, hair falling in her face, and checked her scalp with cautious fingers. No scabs, no dampness, no soreness beyond the usual. She did have a habit of scratching when she was stressed. It could have been that. Old marks reopening in her sleep. She had been tense lately.
She glanced at the sheets. No obvious stains. Her pajamas were clean.
Pansy shook her head, hard, as if she could knock the unease loose.
“Brilliant,” she muttered. “Now I’m sleep-itching. That’s a thing. Definitely a thing.”
She rubbed her face and then swung her legs out of bed with more force than necessary.
She did not look at the diary as she dressed.
It lay beside her pillow, black cover innocently closed, gold letters winking faintly in the morning light.
She skipped breakfast.
Not intentionally, or at least that's what she told herself. She simply wasn't hungry, hadn't been hungry in days, and the thought of sitting in the Great Hall surrounded by noise and people and the expectation of conversation made her stomach clench.
The diary sat in her bag, warm against her hip. She hadn't written in it yet this morning. Hadn't wanted to, which was strange. Usually she was reaching for it before her eyes fully opened, hungry for Tom's words in a way she was never hungry for food anymore.
Today the thought of opening it made her stomach clench.
She gathered her books for Transfiguration and headed down to the common room, expecting it to be empty. Instead, she found a crowd.
Students clustered in groups, voices high and excited, the particular energy that meant something had happened. Pansy pushed through towards the portrait hole, catching fragments of conversation as she passed.
“-written on the wall, they're saying-”
“-Filch's cat, just hanging there-”
“-the Chamber of Secrets, my brother told me about it once-”
Pansy stopped. "What's going on?"
A third-year she vaguely recognized turned, eyes bright with the thrill of being first with gossip. "Someone attacked Mrs. Norris last night. Left her petrified outside the second-floor bathroom. And there was a message on the wall."
"What kind of message?"
“The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir, beware.“The girl delivered the words with relish, like she was reciting a particularly gruesome bedtime story.
"Pansy?"
She flinched. Ron stood a few feet away, Neville hovering behind him. They both looked uncertain, the awkwardness of their last conversations hanging between them like fog.
"Weasley." Her voice came out flat. "Longbottom."
Ron's jaw tightened at the surnames, but he didn't comment. "Did you hear? About the Chamber?"
"I'm hearing about it now."
"Someone opened it." Neville stepped forward, worry creasing his round face. "The Chamber of Secrets. It's supposed to be a myth, but someone wrote on the wall, and Mrs. Norris-“
"Yes, I gathered." Pansy adjusted her bag, feeling the diary shift against her hip. "Cat petrified, ominous message, general hysteria. Quite the morning."
"It's not hysteria." Ron's voice had an edge to it. "This is serious. The Chamber was supposedly built by Salazar Slytherin himself. There's meant to be some kind of monster inside."
"A monster that petrifies cats? Terrifying."
"It might petrify people too. Maybe Muggle-borns, specifically." Ron crossed his arms. "The heir of Slytherin is supposed to be able to control it. Use it to purge the school of anyone who isn't pure-blood."
Something cold slithered down Pansy's spine. She thought of Justin Finch-Fletchley, who'd sat beside her in the common room last year, chattering about Eton. She thought of the Muggle-born girl in her Herbology class who'd lent her a spare pair of gloves without being asked.
"Well," she said, "good thing I'm pure-blood then."
The words came out wrong. Too sharp, too defensive. Ron's expression shifted from concern to something harder.
"Right. Good thing for you."
"I didn't mean-“ She stopped. What had she meant? She didn't actually want anyone petrified. She wasn't her mother, casually cruel about blood status over tea. She'd sat next to Justin. She'd… she'd…
"We should do something," Neville said quietly.
Pansy turned to him, grateful for the subject change. "Do something?"
"About the Chamber. About whoever opened it." He was doing that thing with his shoulders, the one that made him look smaller and more determined simultaneously. "I'm the Boy Who Lived. If there's a monster threatening students, I should… I don't know. Investigate. Help."
"You should what?" Pansy stared at him. "Investigate a mythical chamber created by one of the most powerful dark wizards in history?"
"Someone has to."
"No, someone really doesn't. The professors will handle it. That's literally their job."
"But what if they can't? What if-“
"Neville." She stepped closer, something hot and frightened rising in her chest. "You nearly died last year. We all nearly died last year. And that was just one possessed professor. This is an actual monster."
"I know." His voice was quiet but steady. "That's why I have to do something."
"That's insane logic."
"It's my responsibility."
"It's your hero complex."
The words hit harder than she'd intended. Neville's face flickered, hurt bleeding through before he smoothed it away.
She should apologize. Should take it back, or at least soften it. But her mouth kept moving, the familiar reflex of cruelty when she felt cornered.
"You know what, Longbottom? If you want to help so badly, why don't you ask Filch for a bucket? I'm sure he'd appreciate assistance scrubbing the blood off the walls. Very heroic. Right up your alley."
Silence.
Ron's face had gone red, that particular Weasley flush that meant explosion was imminent. "What is wrong with you lately?"
"Nothing's wrong with me."
"You've been horrible for weeks. Worse than usual. And now you're- what, making jokes about someone being attacked?"
"It was a cat."
"It was a warning." Ron stepped forward, close enough that she could see the freckles standing out against his flushed skin. "And you're standing here being snide about it like nothing matters. Like it's all just entertainment."
"I didn't say-“
"Neville's trying to help. That's what he does. That's what we're supposed to do, isn't it? Help each other? But you've been so wrapped up in that stupid diary that you can't even-“
"Don't." The word came out like a slap. "Don't talk about the diary."
Ron blinked. Something shifted in his expression, confusion replacing anger. "What?"
"Just don't." Her hand had moved to her bag without her permission, pressing against the leather cover through the fabric. "It's none of your business."
"I gave it to you."
"And now it's mine. So leave it alone."
They stared at each other. The common room chatter continued around them, oblivious to the tension, everyone too focused on the Chamber news to notice three second-years having a silent standoff.
Neville cleared his throat. "We should get to class."
"Fine." Pansy turned away, not meeting either of their eyes. "Fine. Go be heroes. Save the school. See if I care."
She pushed through the portrait hole before they could respond, walking fast, almost running by the time she reached the first staircase. Her heart was pounding. Her hands were shaking.
She found an empty alcove behind a tapestry and pulled out her diary.
They don't understand , she wrote, the words jagged and furious. They want me to care about some stupid Chamber when they can't even- when they don’t-
She stopped. What was she trying to say?
Tom's response appeared slowly, as if he were choosing each word with care.
They don't deserve your concern. They've done nothing to earn it.
It's not about deserving. A boy died.
Did you know him?
She hesitated. No. Not really.
Then why should you grieve? Grief is for those we've lost. Not for strangers we're told to mourn.
It shouldn't have made sense. It did anyway.
Time stopped working properly.
Pansy first noticed it on what she thought was Friday, when she walked into Potions and found the classroom empty. She stood in the doorway for a full minute, confused, before a passing Hufflepuff informed her it was Sunday.
"There's no class on Sunday," the girl said slowly, like Pansy was simple. "Are you alright?"
"Fine," Pansy said. "I knew that."
She hadn't known that. She'd woken up, gotten dressed, gathered her books, walked to the dungeons, all without noticing that the corridors were wrong, that the light was wrong, that everything about the day was wrong. Two days had simply vanished, consumed by something she couldn't name.
It kept happening.
She'd sit down for lunch and find dinner appearing on the plates. She'd go to bed on Tuesday and wake up on Thursday. Once, horribly, she found herself standing in a corridor she didn't recognize, wearing robes she didn't remember putting on, with no idea how she'd gotten there or how long she'd been standing.
"You missed Transfiguration again," Neville said one morning. Or afternoon. She couldn't tell anymore.
"Did I?"
"Professor McGonagall asked where you were. I didn't know what to say."
Pansy looked at him. He seemed far away, like she was viewing him through water. His mouth moved and sounds came out but the meaning took too long to arrive, lagging behind like an echo.
"Tell her I was ill," she said.
"You've been ill a lot lately."
"Then tell her something else. I don't care."
She walked away before he could respond. Walking away had become her primary mode of interaction. Someone would talk to her, and she'd leave. It was easier than trying to follow conversations that kept sliding sideways, easier than pretending she knew what day it was or what she'd done that morning.
Then her temper frayed to nothing.
She'd always been short with people, but this was different. This was snapping at first-years who walked too slowly in corridors. This was hurling her Transfiguration textbook across the dormitory because she couldn't find her quill. This was screaming at Lavender Brown for breathing too loudly, actually screaming, until Lavender burst into tears and Parvati threatened to get a prefect.
"What is wrong with you?" Parvati demanded.
Pansy couldn't answer. She didn't know. Everything felt too loud, too bright, too present, except when she was writing to Tom, and then everything felt like nothing at all.
The other girls started avoiding her. She'd enter the dormitory and conversations would stop. She'd sit in the common room and people would drift away, finding reasons to be elsewhere. Even the first-years, who should have been too naive to notice social dynamics, gave her a wide berth.
Good, she thought. Let them avoid her. Let everyone avoid her. She didn't need them. She had Tom.
But Tom was becoming harder to reach too. Some days the diary wouldn't respond at all, his words delayed by hours or missing entirely. She'd write frantically, filling pages with questions and pleas, and wake up to find everything blank and no memory of his answers.
Are you angry with me? she wrote one night. Or morning. The curtains were drawn and she couldn't tell.
Never , came the reply, finally, after what felt like forever.
"Miss Parkinson. Wake up."
The voice came from far away, cutting through layers of dark, heavy sleep. Pansy tried to burrow deeper into her pillow, away from the sound, away from whatever was demanding her attention.
"Miss Parkinson." Sharper now. "Wake up immediately."
Her eyes opened.
Professor McGonagall stood at the foot of her bed. Not just in the dormitory, but at her bed specifically, looking down at her with an expression Pansy had never seen before. Something beyond stern. Something that made her stomach clench before her brain caught up.
"Professor?" Her voice came out rough with sleep. "What time-“
"Get dressed. All of you." McGonagall's gaze swept the dormitory, taking in Lavender and Parvati stirring in their own beds, the other girls blinking awake in confusion. "I need everyone in the common room. Now."
She left without further explanation, her footsteps quick and heavy on the stairs.
Pansy sat up slowly, head swimming. She reached automatically for her bedside table, for the diary that always sat there waiting-
It wasn't there.
Her hand patted the wooden surface, finding nothing. She looked, certain her eyes were playing tricks in the darkness. Empty. Just her wand, her water glass, the small clock that showed half three in the morning.
The diary was gone.
"Pansy?" Lavender's voice, thick with sleep and worry. "Did you hear? McGonagall wants us downstairs."
"Where is it?" Pansy threw back her covers, dropped to her knees beside the bed, felt beneath it with frantic hands. Dust. A forgotten sock. Nothing else.
"Where's what?"
"My-“ She stopped. Couldn't say it. Couldn't explain. "Nothing. Go on without me."
"She said everyone." Parvati was already pulling on a dressing gown, her face pale in the wandlight. "It sounded serious, Pansy. Really serious."
"I said go on."
But they didn't go. They stood there watching as Pansy tore through her sheets, her pillows, ripped open her bedside drawer and dumped its contents on the floor. Quills, ink bottles, the letters from Ron and Neville she'd never thrown away and always kept close, all scattering across the carpet while she searched for the only thing that mattered.
Not there. Not anywhere.
"Pansy." Lavender's hand closed around her arm. "We have to go. McGonagall said-“
"I can't find it."
"Find what?"
"I can’t-“ Her breath was coming too fast. The room was spinning slightly, or maybe she was spinning, untethered from everything solid. "I need to find it. I can't go without it."
Parvati appeared on her other side. Together, they pulled her upright, guided her towards the door. Pansy's feet moved without her permission, carrying her away from the chaos of her emptied drawers, away from all the places the diary wasn't.
"It has to be somewhere," she muttered. "It has to be. The common room. Maybe I left it in the common room."
"You can look after," Parvati said, her voice carefully soothing, the tone people used with small children and mad people, which made Pansy want to prove her right.
The common room was full.
Every Gryffindor, from first years to seventh, packed into the space in various states of undress. Some had managed robes; most hadn't. Percy Weasley stood near the fireplace in striped pajamas, his prefect badge pinned crookedly to his chest like he'd attached it in the dark. The Weasley twins sat on the floor, uncharacteristically silent. Small clusters of students huddled together, whispering, crying, holding each other.
Pansy scanned the room frantically. The sofas, the armchairs, the tables where students spread their homework. Where had she been sitting last night? She couldn't remember. The last clear memory she had was afternoon, maybe early evening, writing to Tom about something, and then-
Nothing. A gap. Darkness until McGonagall's voice dragged her back.
"Over here." Ron's voice, subdued in a way she'd never heard. He sat on one of the sofas near the back, Neville pressed close beside him. They'd saved a space between them.
She sat because it was easier than standing, her eyes still moving restlessly around the room. The sofa cushions. Maybe the diary had slipped between them, fallen into that gap where things disappeared. She shifted, digging her fingers down the back of the sofa. Her hand brushed crumbs, a lost quill cap, something sticky that might have once been jelly. No leather.
"What's happening?" she whispered. "Why is everyone-“
"We don't know yet." Neville's voice was barely audible. "McGonagall just said to gather. She looked…" He swallowed. "She looked like something terrible happened."
Pansy's hand worked along the cushion crack, fingers searching. Nothing. Neville stiffened beside her. Ron’s hands clenched on his knees.
McGonagall moved to stand before the fireplace, the flames casting strange shadows across her face. Pansy withdrew her hand, forcing herself still. She looked old, Pansy realized. Not just elderly, but aged, like something had drained years from her in a single night.
"I have called you here," McGonagall began, her voice steady but thin, "because there has been an incident."
Pansy shifted to her knees, peering over the sofa arm at the floor behind it. Dark carpet, dust, some crumpled paper. No diary.
"The Chamber of Secrets, as many of you know, has been opened."
Where else could it be? She'd had it yesterday. She was certain she'd had it. She remembered the weight of it against her hip as she walked to dinner. Had she gone to dinner? She couldn't remember dinner. Couldn't remember anything after the common room, after settling into this very sofa with the diary open on her lap-
"Tonight, the heir of Slytherin claimed its first victim."
Pansy barely heard. She slid off the sofa entirely, crouching on the floor, pushing aside someone's feet to look beneath the furniture properly. The diary could have been kicked under there. Could have fallen and rolled.
"Excuse me," she muttered, shoving at a pair of legs blocking her view. "Move."
“Pansy-” Neville reached for her, but she was already on her knees, fingers diving under the furniture.
“Get your feet up,” she snapped at a second-year in stripy socks.
"Pansy, what are you-“ Neville's whisper cut off as McGonagall continued.
"A student was killed several hours ago. Despite the efforts of the staff, we were unable to…" McGonagall's voice wavered for the first time. "We were unable to reach them in time."
The legs weren't moving. Pansy pushed harder, craning her neck to see into the shadows beneath the sofa. "I said move, I need to-“
"Miss Parkinson."
The common room had gone silent. Pansy looked up to find every face turned towards her: first years with tear-streaked cheeks, older students with expressions of horror, Ron and Neville staring down at her like she'd grown a second head.
McGonagall's gaze was ice.
"What exactly are you doing?"
Pansy froze, suddenly aware of how she must look. On her hands and knees on the floor, hair tangled, dressing gown askew, crawling around like an animal while her Head of House delivered what was clearly devastating news.
"I was just-“ Her voice came out strange and distant. "I lost something."
"Lost something. A child has lost his life.” McGonagall's tone could have frozen the lake. "A student is dead, Miss Parkinson. One of your housemates. A child. And you are searching for lost property."
Dead.
The word should have meant something. Pansy knew it should have meant something. She could see it in the faces around her: Lavender sobbing into Parvati's shoulder, the Weasley twins bracketing Ginny between them, faces identical and grave, all trace of mischief stripped away, seventh years who'd probably never spoken to a first year looking shattered nonetheless.
But she couldn't make herself feel it. The only thing she felt was the absence, the missing weight, the desperate need to find what she'd lost.
"Sit down," McGonagall said quietly. "And if you cannot treat this with the gravity it deserves, at least have the decency to be silent."
Pansy climbed back onto the sofa. Her hands were shaking, but not from grief.
"The student was Colin Creevey." McGonagall's voice had steadied, though her eyes were too bright. "First year. Many of you knew him."
Colin Creevey. Pansy searched her memory and found almost nothing. A small boy with a camera? Someone who followed Neville around sometimes, asking for photographs? She'd never bothered learning first year names, couldn't see the point when most of them blurred together into interchangeable children.
Except Ginny. She knew Ginny, Ron's sister, who'd been sorted into Gryffindor at the start of term.
"He was found in the fourth corridor,” McGonagall continued. "The details are not… they are not something I will share with you. What I will say is that Colin was a kind and enthusiastic boy who did not deserve what happened to him. Who did not deserve any of this."
Someone let out a wrenching sob. Pansy didn't turn to see who.
Ron sat rigid beside her, staring straight ahead. When she glanced at him, she saw tears tracking silently down his freckled cheeks, dropping onto his pajama shirt.
Neville had gone pale as milk, his hands clenched in his lap. "It should have been me," he whispered, so quiet only Pansy could hear. "I should have done something. I should have-“
"The school will be providing support," McGonagall was saying. "Anyone who needs to speak with someone, anyone who is struggling, please know that help is available. We will get through this together."
McGonagall dismissed them eventually, though she encouraged everyone to stay together, to support one another. Small groups formed, people reaching out to touch and hold and grieve. Pansy stood apart, eyes still scanning the room.
"Pansy." Ron's voice was hoarse. "Did you hear anything she said?"
"A student died. Colin something. First year."
"Colin Creevey." Neville wiped his face with his sleeve. "He used to ask me for photos. He was so excited about magic, about everything. He thought Hogwarts was the most wonderful place in the world."
Pansy said nothing. She was looking at the sofa where she'd been sitting, wondering if she should check beneath it again.
"What were you looking for?" Ron asked. "On the floor. What was so important that you-“
"Nothing."
"It wasn't nothing. You were crawling around while McGonagall told us a kid died."
"I said it was nothing."
They stared at each other.
"What's happening to you?" he asked quietly.
Pansy didn't answer. She walked away, back to the girls' staircase, back to the dormitory where she could search properly without everyone watching.
The diary wasn't there either.
She looked until dawn broke through the windows, until the other girls came back up and collapsed into their beds, until the whole tower fell into exhausted, grieving silence.
The diary was under her bed.
She'd checked there. She'd checked there at least four times, gotten on her hands and knees and swept her arm through the dust and shadows. It hadn't been there. She was certain it hadn't been there.
But now it was.
Pansy pulled it out with trembling fingers, holding it firmly. The leather was warm, almost feverish, pulsing with something that might have been her own heartbeat or might have been something else entirely.
She didn't make it to her bed. She dropped to the floor, diary on her knees, quill already moving.
Where were you?
Tom's response came slowly, each word appearing with visible effort.
Resting. Waiting for you.
I looked everywhere. I thought someone had taken you.
No one took me. I was always here. You just couldn't see me.
The explanation made no sense. Pansy knew it made no sense. But she was too relieved to push, too grateful to have him back to ask the questions crowding her throat.
Pansy had stopped trying to track the days. They came and went regardless of her awareness, slipping past like water through fingers. She knew it was Saturday only because the dormitory was quiet, most girls gone to Hogsmeade or the common room or anywhere that wasn't near her.
She'd taken to sleeping during the day on the weekends. It was easier than being awake, than navigating the gaps in her memory, than pretending she was still a functioning person. Sleep was dark and empty and asked nothing of her.
The diary lay on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. She'd started sleeping with it there, needing the weight of it, the reassurance that it wouldn't vanish again.
She dreamt of corridors. Long, dark, winding corridors that went nowhere and everywhere, that smelled of damp stone and something else. She dreamed of walking without choosing to walk, of her hands swinging like a puppet's on invisible strings, of words coming out of her mouth that weren’t really word and that weren't really hers.
She woke to hands on her curtains, fabric rasping against the rod, morning light flooding in where it didn't belong.
Lavender Brown stood at the foot of her bed, face pale and determined. Her hands were hidden behind her back.
"What do you want?" Pansy's voice came out slurred, thick with sleep.
"I'm sorry," Lavender said. "But this is for your own good."
She brought her hands forward. The diary was in them, black leather gleaming in the afternoon light.
Pansy's brain processed this slowly, synapses firing through fog. Lavender. Diary. Hands. The diary was in Lavender's hands. The diary was not on her chest where it should be.
"Give that back."
"No." Lavender was already moving towards the door.
"GIVE IT BACK."
Pansy lunged out of bed. Her legs tangled in the sheets and she went down hard, knees cracking against the floor. By the time she'd scrambled up, Lavender was at the door.
"I'm sorry," Lavender said again, and ran.
Pansy flew down the stairs after her, three at a time, bare feet skidding on stone. Her ankle turned on one step; she caught the railing, righted herself, kept going.
Below, she could see Lavender emerging into the common room, could see her arm draw back and release, could see the diary arcing through the air towards-
Ron caught it. Of course Ron caught it. He was standing at the foot of the stairs with Neville beside him, both of them positioned like this was a Quidditch play they'd rehearsed.
"Go!" Lavender shouted. "Go, go, go!"
They ran.
Pansy hit the common room floor and kept moving, shoving past a startled third-year, knocking over someone's chess game. Ron and Neville had a head start but she was faster, had to be faster, couldn't let them take her diary away from her.
What if they saw what she'd written? What if they read all the things she'd told Tom and realised how pathetic she was?
"STOP!" Her voice cracked, raw and desperate. "GIVE IT BACK!"
They didn't stop. They burst through the portrait hole and into the corridor beyond, robes flying behind them. Pansy followed, bare feet slapping against cold stone, nightgown billowing around her legs.
She must look insane. The thought flickered through her mind and she dismissed it. Who cared how she looked? They had her diary. They had Tom. They were trying to take it away from her.
"Please!" The word tore out of her without permission. "Please, just give it back, I need it, I NEED it-“
Ron glanced over his shoulder, but he kept running.
She was gaining on them. Desperation gave her speed that her body shouldn't have had.
They rounded a corner. She rounded it after them and lunged, fingers catching Neville's sleeve. She yanked, hard, and he stumbled.
"Pansy, stop-“ He tried to shake her off. "We're trying to help you-”
"I don't need help!"
She clawed at his arm, trying to reach past him to Ron, who had the diary clutched against his chest. Her fingers scraped fabric, found purchase, pulled-
And then lost it, her grip too weak, her hands trembling too badly. Neville wrenched free and they were running again, and she was falling behind, lungs burning, legs shaking, body finally betraying her.
"Please." It came out as a sob. "Please, please, please-“
She kept following anyway. Down corridors and around corners, up a flight of stairs that made her vision swim, past one of the Aurors who'd flooded the castle since Colin's death, a red-haired woman who looked more startled than authoritative as three students nearly bowled her over. Ron and Neville were heading somewhere specific, she realised dimly. Not just running. Going.
McGonagall's office. They were going to McGonagall.
Fresh panic flooded her, giving her legs new strength.
She caught up with them just as they rounded the final corner.
And ran directly into Professor Lockhart.
"Goodness!" Lockhart staggered backward, robes swirling dramatically. "What's all this then? Students running in the corridors? Highly irregular!"
Ron and Neville skidded to a halt, breathing hard. Pansy caught up seconds later, one hand finding the wall, the other pressed to the stitch in her side. She could barely stand. She certainly couldn't fight.
"Professor." Ron's voice was urgent. "We need to see Professor McGonagall. It's important."
"McGonagall?" Lockhart's perfectly groomed eyebrows rose. "Whatever for? Surely whatever problem you're having, I can assist. I am, after all, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Defense is rather my specialty.“ He smiled, teeth gleaming. "Did I ever tell you about the time I defended an entire village from a vampire coven using nothing but a wooden spoon as a wand and my considerable wits?"
"Professor, please." Neville stepped forward, the diary still clutched in Ron's hands behind him. "We think this diary has some kind of dark spell on it. Our friend has been… she's not well. She's been getting worse for weeks, and it started when she got this diary."
Lockhart's expression shifted to one of theatrical concern. "A cursed object? Here at Hogwarts? Well, we can't have that. Let me see it."
Ron hesitated. "We really think McGonagall should-“
"Nonsense! I've dealt with cursed objects dozens of times. Hundreds, even. There was a particularly nasty haunted hairbrush in Budapest that I had to subdue with nothing but a firm hand and extensive knowledge of follicular enchantments." He held out his hand, wiggling his fingers impatiently. "Come now, let's have a look."
Ron and Neville exchanged a glance. Slowly, reluctantly, Ron handed over the diary.
Pansy watched from behind them, too wrung out to intervene. Part of her wanted to grab it and run. Part of her wanted them to find something, to prove that something was genuinely wrong. Part of her just wanted to lie down on the cold stone floor and sleep forever.
Lockhart flipped through the diary with the casual air of someone examining a restaurant menu. "Hmm. Blank pages. Bit of wear on the binding. Rather ordinary, really."
"But if you check for dark magic-“ Neville started.
"Right, right, of course." Lockhart pulled out his wand and gave the diary a perfunctory wave, like he was swatting at a fly. "Aparecium."
Nothing happened.
"There we are!" He beamed at them. "Clean as a whistle. No dark magic whatsoever. Just an ordinary diary, slightly used."
"That can't be right." Ron's voice rose. "She's been talking to it. Writing in it and losing her bloody mind-“
Lockhart tucked his wand away with a flourish. "I can assure you, there is nothing wrong with this diary. I would stake my considerable reputation on it."
"But Professor McGonagall-“
"I will inform Professor McGonagall that I have personally examined the object in question and found it entirely harmless." His voice took on a slightly harder edge beneath the smile. "I am the Defense professor, am I not? This is quite literally my area of expertise. Unless you're suggesting I don't know how to detect a simple curse?"
Ron's jaw tightened. Neville's shoulders slumped.
"No, Professor," Neville said quietly.
"Excellent! Then we'll consider the matter closed." Lockhart turned to Pansy with what he probably thought was a reassuring smile. "Here you are, Miss… ah…"
"Parkinson."
"Miss Parkinson! One perfectly ordinary diary, certified curse-free by yours truly. Though I might suggest a more cheerful journal in future. More colorful, perhaps. Something with flowers. Much better for a young lady's disposition." He pressed the diary into her hands. "Now, off you go. No more running in the corridors!"
He strode away, humming something that sounded suspiciously like one of the songs from his books.
The corridor fell silent.
Pansy clutched the diary against her chest, feeling the leather warm against her skin. Safe. Tom was safe. They hadn't taken him away.
But the relief couldn't quite drown out the other feelings surging through her: humiliation at being chased through the castle in her nightgown, rage at their intervention, and underneath it all, a terrible hurt that she couldn't name and didn't want to examine.
She turned to face Ron and Neville.
They looked exhausted. Ron's face was flushed from running, his hair sticking up in all directions. Neville had a scratch on his cheek from where her fingernails must have caught him. They both wore identical expressions of frustrated helplessness.
Good. She wanted them to feel helpless. She wanted them to know what it was like to try and fail, to reach for something and have it slip away.
"Pansy-“ Neville started.
"Don't." Her voice came out raw, scraped hollow. "Don't you dare say my name like that. Like you care. Like any of this was about helping me."
"It was about helping you." Ron stepped forward. "You're not well. Anyone can see that. You've stopped eating, stopped sleeping properly, stopped being… you. And it started with that diary."
“Of you think I’m not being myself you don’t know anything about me."
"We know you're not well and that it all started with the diary.” Neville's voice was quiet but steady. "And we couldn't just- we had to try."
The hurt in her chest swelled, pressing against her ribs. They sounded so sincere. They looked so worried. And for a moment, a single terrible moment, she wanted to believe them.
But believing them would mean admitting something was wrong.
She couldn't. She wouldn't.
So she did what she always did when cornered. She found the sharpest weapon within reach and used it.
"You want to know why I never answered your letters this summer?"
The question hung in the air. Ron blinked, thrown by the subject change.
"What?"
"Your letters. The ones you kept sending, week after week, like sad little stray kneazles that couldn't take a hint." She felt her lips curl into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I got every single one. All eight of them. And I never wrote back because they were stupid and embarrassing."
Neville's face went pale. "Pansy-“
"'Dear Pansy, we miss you, we miss you, we miss you.'" She made her voice high and mocking. "Pathetic. Both of you. Writing to someone who obviously didn't want to hear from you, begging for attention like kicked puppies."
"You said you-“ Ron started.
"I lied. Obviously. Because the truth was too humiliating. For you." She took a step backward, then another. "I read your letters and I laughed at them. I showed them to my great aunt and we laughed together. Poor Ronald Weasley and his hovel that he called a burrow. Poor Neville Longbottom and his stupid toad. So desperate for friendship they'd write to someone who couldn't even be bothered to respond."
Ron's face had gone red, then white.
"That's not true," he said.
"Isn't it?" She clutched the diary tighter. "You don't know me at all. You never did. You just wanted a project, someone broken to fix so you could feel good about yourselves. The Boy Who Lived and his faithful sidekick, saving poor pathetic Pansy from herself."
"That's not-“ Neville's voice cracked.
"I hate you." The words came out quiet, almost calm. More devastating for their lack of heat. "I've always hated you. You're boring and common and I only tolerated you because I had no other options. But I have options now. I have-“
She swallowed.
"Leave me alone," she finished. "Both of you. Forever."
She turned and walked away.
She didn't run. Instead, she walked, steady and measured, chin high, bare feet silent on the stone.
It wasn't until she'd rounded the corner, until she was certain she was out of sight, that she let herself breathe.
The diary was warm in her hands. Safe. Here. Hers.
She'd protected it. She'd driven them away. She'd won.
Written between other projects (writing epilogue(s) to Novennial and editing chapter 4 of Fortune Favors the Brave) to bring you some Christmas cheer. And by "cheer," I mean Severus Snape's childhood.
Mind the tags on Ao3
Summary: December 1969. Severus finally walks into Lily's house. He thought the cold was the worst thing he would have to survive.
Words: 18,391
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Winter was his least favourite season. He felt it everywhere: in his bones, which ached at night as though being slowly twisted from within; in his fingers, stiff and uncooperative each morning; in his teeth, which ached from clenching against the cold. In Cokeworth it was not the winter of Christmas cards, with fluffy snow and children sledding down hills. This was a different winter: damp, piercing, saturated with coal dust and the smell of the river carrying waste from the steelworks. This kind of winter did not wrap the world in a white blanket. It settled into the walls, the streets, the lungs of everyone who breathed it, and it did not release its grip until March.
On days like those, he left the house before dawn, when his father was snoring in the sitting room and his mother lay in oblivion, and wandered the streets until the cold became unbearable. Then he found shelter, the abandoned mill with its rusted machinery, the library where the librarian watched him with suspicion but did not throw him out, or simply some doorway sheltered from the wind. He read, if he had a book. Thought about Hogwarts, if he did not. Counted the days until the letter that was supposed to come, the only promise he still allowed himself to believe.
Today he had chosen the industrial zone beyond the canal, a labyrinth of half-ruined warehouses and rusted pipes where neither children nor well-intentioned adults ever wandered. It smelled of machine oil and something burnt, and the echo of his footsteps bounced off the brick walls, creating the illusion of some other being following him.
He thought about how it would be dark soon. About how he would have to go home. About how home would be cold, or not cold, but then his father would be there, and that was worse.
He thought about Lily, though he had forbidden himself to think about her.
"Severus!"
He flinched so hard he lost his balance. The crate beneath him lurched, his feet sought purchase on the frozen ground and found none. The world tilted. He managed to throw out his hands, but his knee struck the frozen earth first, a sharp, bright flash of pain that darkened his vision for a moment.
"Severus! Are you all right?"
She was already beside him, her boots crunching on the icy crust, her breath escaping in little clouds of steam. She was wearing that blue coat he remembered from autumn, with a scarf tied crookedly as though she had been in a hurry. Her cheeks were flushed from cold and from running, and in her eyes was something he did not immediately recognise.
She was angry. At him.
"Don't touch," he managed when she reached for him. His voice came out sharper than he intended. "I can manage."
He tried to stand and discovered that his knee refused to cooperate. The pain pulsed hot and insistent, and when he looked down, he saw that his trousers had torn, and beneath them, bloody scraped skin.
"You're not all right," said Lily. It was not a question. She stood over him, hands on her hips, looking down at him with an expression that reminded him of her mother. "And you've been lying to me."
"I haven't told you anything."
"Exactly!" She nearly shouted it, and the echo caught her voice, carried it between the warehouses. "You haven't said anything! I've been looking for you every day, Severus. Every. Single. Day. You weren't coming to the river. You weren't at the library. I even-" she faltered, and her face wavered, "I even went to Spinner's End. Twice. But I was afraid to ring the bell."
She was afraid. Because she knew who might answer.
"You didn't need to look for me," he said. The words sounded wrong, too harsh, but he did not know how to say it differently. "I had things to do."
"What things?" She crouched beside him, and now their eyes were level. Her gaze was piercing, too piercing. She saw too much. "Sitting here alone and freezing? Those are your things?"
He turned away. Looking at her was unbearable.
"You don't understand."
"Then explain it to me."
But how could he? The cold had made him something different, or perhaps had only exposed what he had always been. He snapped at her questions. Rolled his eyes when she laughed too loudly. Once, he had said something cruel, he no longer remembered the words exactly, some barb about Muggles or about her not taking magic serious, and watched her face change. Just for a moment. Less than a second. But he saw it.
She was hurt. By him. By his words.
The truth he could not speak was this: he was afraid. Not of her, never of her, but of what he became during this season. That prickly, snarling thing that crawled out of him when cold and hunger and fear clenched into a knot beneath his ribs.
"There's nothing to explain," he said instead. "I'm just… busy."
"You're lying."
It was said without anger, almost gently, and that made it worse.
She reached for his knee, and he jerked back.
"Don't touch."
"Severus, you're bleeding. You need a plaster." She frowned, examining the wound. "Mum has a first aid kit at home. We can-"
"No."
The word escaped too quickly, too sharply. He saw her flinch and hated himself for it.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to go to your house."
This was truth, at least partially. He did not want to enter her home, did not want to see everything that was there and was not at his own.
"You've never been to ours," Lily said quietly. "In five months since we've been friends…"
"I just don't want to."
"Why?"
Lily sighed. Then, before he could react, she grabbed his hand and pulled him up.
His body exploded in protest.
Every nerve screamed alarm. Her fingers closed around his wrist, warm even through the sleeve, alive and foreign. He hated being touched. Hated it with that deep, instinctive hatred that forms over years and years.
He forced himself not to pull away. Forced himself not to hiss and not to push her off. It cost him effort that made his clenched teeth ache.
"Come on," she said, and it was not a request. "You're frozen, you're hurt, and I'm not leaving you here."
"Lily…"
"No." She dragged him behind her, and he found himself walking, limping, his knee throbbing with every step. "You disappeared for almost two weeks. Two weeks, Severus. I thought…" her voice wavered, just slightly, "I thought maybe I'd done something wrong. Or said something. Or…"
"You didn't do anything."
"Then why?"
They emerged from the industrial zone onto the street and soon number twelve appeared too quickly.
The house looked the same as all the other houses on this street, red brick darkened by soot, a narrow porch scrubbed to whiteness. But something set it apart from its neighbours: perhaps the curtains in the windows, straight and clean; perhaps the door knocker, polished to a shine; perhaps simply the sense that behind this door there was something worth coming home to.
"Ready?" she asked, looking at him over her shoulder.
He was not ready. He would never be ready.
"It's just a plaster," he said instead of answering. "I'll come in and leave."
"Of course," she said, and turned the key.
The door opened, and warmth poured out like a wave.
It struck his face with almost physical force, not merely the absence of cold, but something alive, tangible, insistent. The warmth enveloped his cheeks, seeped through the fabric of his coat, found his fingers hidden in too-long sleeves. His body reacted before his mind could intervene: shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch, lungs expanding to take in air that did not burn upon inhaling. Treacherous, involuntary reactions, and he hated himself for every one of them.
"Come in, then," said Lily, already crossing the threshold. "Don't stand in the doorway, you'll let all the cold in."
He stepped inside.
The hallway was narrow, as in all terraced houses in Cokeworth, but somehow subtly different from what he knew. Perhaps it was the wallpaper, a floral pattern, faded but clean, without those dark patches of damp that crept along the walls of Spinner's End. Perhaps it was the coat rack by the door, where coats of various sizes hung neatly, almost arranged by height. Perhaps it was the mat beneath their feet, worn but whole, absorbing the dirt from their boots.
"Mum!" Lily shouted, and her voice carried through the house, bouncing off the walls, filling the space. "I'm home! I've brought a friend!"
A friend.
The word lodged somewhere in his chest, sharp and strange. She had called him a friend. Not "a boy from school," not "a neighbour," not "that Snape from Spinner's End", a friend. Publicly, loudly, so the whole house could hear. Something like pride stirred in him, unbidden and out of place, and he hurried to crush the feeling before it could take root.
Lily was already removing her coat, tossing it onto the rack with the carelessness of someone who knows that someone else will straighten it later. The scarf flew after it.
"Take off your coat," she said. "You're not planning to stand in the hallway all evening."
He did not move. His fingers, still hidden in his sleeves, had begun to burn, that piercing, prickling sensation that comes when frozen flesh begins to thaw. The pain was almost pleasant in its certainty: he could focus on it instead of thinking about where he was and what it meant.
"Severus?"
"I'm fine," he said automatically.
"Coat," she repeated, and this time it was an order.
He took off the coat.
Beneath it, his jumper looked even worse than usual: stretched out, washed to colourlessness, with a hole at the elbow that he tried to hide by pressing his arm to his side. Lily silently took the coat from his hands and hung it next to hers.
It looked foreign there. Too large, too dark, too obviously belonging to someone else.
"Let's go to the kitchen," said Lily. "That's where the first aid kit is. And it's warmer."
She moved down the corridor, and he followed, trying to step as quietly as possible. His knee protested with every step, but he forced himself not to limp, or to limp less than he wanted to. He did not want to show weakness. Not here.
The kitchen opened before him like a stage opening before an audience.
It was small, all kitchens in terraced houses were small, but light flooded it as though it were twice the size. The window above the sink caught the grey glimmers of the December day, and the lamp on the ceiling added a yellow, homely light that softened the corners and made everything warmer than it really was. The table was covered with oilcloth patterned with faded daisies, and on it stood a vase with some dried flowers, useless and beautiful.
At the stove stood a woman.
It was Lily's mother. He knew about her.
Everyone in Cokeworth knew about Hortense Evans, even those who had never spoken to her. The older boys, the ones who were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, talked about her when they thought no one could hear. They talked about how she went shopping on Saturdays, how she carried her bag in the crook of her elbow, how her skirt moved when she walked. Some of them loitered outside the salon, watching through the window as she swept hair from the floor. Had seen them trail her at a distance through the Saturday market, nudging each other, laughing at things he didn't want to understand.
Severus had never taken part in this. He found it disgusting, the crowd of sniffling teenagers hiding around corners, their sweaty palms and greasy stares.
But he knew. He heard. He saw how they looked.
And now, standing in her kitchen, under her gaze, he felt shame, as if he had been the one following her through the streets, just because he knew.
Her gaze swept over him and he saw her nostrils flare, just slightly. Saw her lips thin into a line that was not quite a frown but was distaste all the same.
Lily kept talking.
"-so can we use the kit? Mum? The first aid kit?"
Her voice filled the kitchen, bright and ringing, like a bell that doesn't know it's chiming at the wrong moment. She didn't see her mother's face. Didn't see what he saw.
Mrs. Evans turned to the cupboard above the sink.
She opened the door and began sorting through its contents, bottles, jars, something in cardboard boxes. Her back was straight, her shoulders tense.
"Plaster, plaster…" Mrs. Evans murmured without turning around. "It was somewhere here…"
Lily finally fell silent, and in the quiet you could hear the clock ticking above the door. A small cuckoo clock, cheap, probably from a catalogue, but reliably working. In Severus's house, the clock had stopped two years ago, and no one had bothered to wind it again.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Evans, still rummaging in the cupboard, and her voice was even, almost pleasant, but something about it made Severus tense, "your friend should wait outside? While I look."
The words were perfectly polite. The tone was perfectly pleasant. And beneath both, Severus heard exactly what she meant: Leave my house.
He should go. He knew he should go. She did not want him here and he had no right to stay where he was not wanted. The door was only a few steps behind him. He could be through it and gone before Lily even noticed, disappearing back into the grey afternoon where he belonged.
But the warmth had seeped into him now, past the throbbing of his knee and the prickling of his thawing fingers, settling somewhere deep in his chest. The kitchen was so bright. The smell of cooking food curled around him like an embrace.
He did not want to leave.
"No," said Lily.
Her voice was different. Not that ringing, chirping voice with which she had talked about wands, and houses and ghosts. This voice was harder, sharper, with that note of stubbornness he heard when she argued with Petunia or refused to go home until he explained one more magical thing to her.
Mrs Evans turned. Her eyes moved from Lily to Severus and back again.
"Lily-"
"He can't go yet," said Lily, emerging from the cupboard with a small tin box. Her voice was cheerful, oblivious to the tension that hung in the air like smoke. "I need to show him something upstairs. It's important."
"It'll only take a minute. Come on, Severus."
She grabbed his wrist again, the same grip as before and pulled him toward the door. He caught a glimpse of Mrs Evans's expression as they passed: lips pressed thin, brow furrowed, the look of a woman who had much to say and was choosing, with visible effort, not to say it.
Lily did not seem to notice. Or perhaps she noticed and simply did not care. She was already through the kitchen door, dragging him into the narrow hallway, the first aid tin clutched in her free hand.
"This way," she said, as if he might somehow get lost. "My room's at the top."
The stairs were steep and narrow, covered in a carpet that had worn thin in the centre of each step. Lily took them two at a time, her grip on his wrist never loosening, and Severus followed as best he could, his injured knee protesting with each step. The wallpaper here was different from downstairs, a pattern of pale stripes that might once have been blue, and the air grew cooler as they climbed, the warmth of the kitchen fading behind them.
"Here," said Lily, stopping before a door at the end of the landing. She released his wrist to grasp the handle, then turned to look at him with an expression of barely contained excitement. "Ready?"
Before he could answer, she threw the door open.
"Ta-da!"
The room was small. Smaller even than his own, which he had not thought possible. The ceiling sloped sharply on one side, following the line of the roof, and a single window let in the fading afternoon light, its glass fogged with condensation.
It was cold. Not as cold as outside, but cold enough that he could see his breath if he exhaled slowly.
And yet.
There was a bed. There was a desk beneath the window, small and scarred but sturdy, with a lamp and a stack of schoolbooks and a jar of pencils. There was a wardrobe in the corner, its door hanging slightly open to reveal a jumble of clothes in manycolours.
"Sit down," said Lily, gesturing to the bed. "You need to sort out that knee."
He sat. The mattress gave beneath him, soft in a way he was not accustomed to, and for a moment he simply stayed there, feeling the strange luxury of it. Lily perched beside him, opening the first aid tin, and he rolled up his trouser leg to examine the damage.
The wound was not as bad as it had felt. The skin had scraped raw across his kneecap, and blood had dried in dark streaks down his shin, but it was superficial. He had had worse. He took the plaster Lily offered and pressed it over the scrape, smoothing down the edges with fingers that still trembled slightly from cold.
"I'm going to paint the walls," Lily was saying. She had drawn her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and was surveying her small kingdom with a critical eye. "Yellow, I think. Or maybe green. Mum says I have to wait until I'm older, but I've already picked out the colour. There's a tin at the hardware shop, this lovely sort of sunshine yellow, and Mr Pemberton said he'd put it aside for me if I saved up enough."
She talked on, spinning plans for shelves and curtains and a proper rug, and Severus listened without really hearing.
"Oh! I almost forgot."
Lily scrambled off the bed and crossed to the desk, where she rummaged through a drawer with the urgency of someone searching for buried treasure. When she turned back, she was holding something in her cupped hands, her face alight with a glow he had come to recognise.
"You have to see this," she whispered, as though the walls themselves might be listening. "But you can't tell anyone. Promise?"
"I promise."
She opened her hands.
It was a snow globe. A cheap thing, the sort sold at Woolies, with a plastic base and a glass dome filled with water and artificial snow. Inside, a tiny reindeer stood on a mound of white, its painted eyes staring blankly ahead.
"Watch," said Lily.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the snow began to move.
Not the lazy drift that came from shaking the globe, this was different. The flakes swirled in deliberate patterns, spiralling upward and outward, dancing in currents that had no natural source. They caught the light from the window and glittered like real snow, like magic, and as Severus watched, the reindeer's nose began to glow.
Red. A warm, steady red, like an ember or a tiny heart. He should have found it charming. Part of him did, even, the part that loved magic for its own sake, that thrilled at every new impossibility. But there was another part, harder and colder, that watched her wave her wand at a snow globe and thought: I would give anything to control magic like this. Anything. And you use it for this.
"I did it last week," Lily breathed. Her eyes were fixed on the globe, her face soft with wonder. "I just… wanted it to be like Rudolph, you know? And then it was."
She looked up at him and her expression turned vulnerable, something that made his chest ache.
"You're the first person I've ever shown," she said. "The only person. Because of the magic. Because you'd understand."
He did understand. He understood what it meant to have a secret that you could not share, a part of yourself that had to stay hidden. He understood the loneliness of it, and the relief of finally, having someone who knew.
"It's good," he said. The words felt inadequate, but he did not know what else to say. "The magic."
Lily beamed. It was the right thing to have said.
She set the snow globe carefully back in the drawer, handling it with the reverence of a holy relic, and then turned to him with renewed energy.
"Right," she announced. "Now you have to see the telly."
Severus blinked. "The telly?"
"I know I've talked about it, but I think maybe you thought I was lying." She was already heading for the door, gesturing for him to follow. "Because who has their own color telly, right? But I do. Dad bought it for me a few years ago. It's not new or anything, but it works, and it's mine."
They descended the stairs, Lily's footsteps light and quick, Severus's slower, his knee still stiff. The warmth rose to meet them as they reached the ground floor, and Lily pushed open a door to the right of the hallway.
The sitting room was small, like everything else in this house, but it glowed with a warmth.
A fire burned in the grate, real coal, not the meagre scraps they sometimes had at Spinner's End, but proper chunks that crackled and spat and threw dancing shadows across the walls. The furniture was old but comfortable-looking: a sofa with worn cushions, an armchair with a knitted throw draped over its back, a low table cluttered with magazines and cups and a half-finished jigsaw puzzle.
And in the corner, on a wooden stand, sat the television and on top of it, because there was nowhere else, because the room was too small for anything more, stood the Christmas tree.
It was a real tree, not one of the artificial ones he had seen in catalogues, and it reached nearly to the ceiling. The top had bent where it pressed against the plaster, the star tilting at an angle that should have looked absurd but somehow did not. It stood undecorated, the branches bare and dark, filling the room with the sharp green smell of pine.
He did not realise he had stopped in the doorway until Lily tugged at his sleeve.
"Come on," she said. "Sit down. You're still half-frozen."
He let her lead him to the sofa. The cushions sank beneath him, soft and warm from the fire, and he felt something in him begin to unclench. The heat from the grate washed over him in waves, seeping through his clothes, his skin, his bones.
When had he last been warm? Properly warm, not just the brief respite of a library radiator or a shop doorway, but warm all the way through?
He could not remember.
Lily had settled beside him on the sofa, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and was fiddling with the television's dial, coaxing it to life.
He let his head fall back against the cushion. Let his eyes drift half-closed. Let himself, for just a moment, pretend that this was his life.
The front door banged open with a force that made him flinch.
Footsteps in the hallway, quick, sharp, the particular rhythm of someone who belonged and knew it. Then a voice, high and carrying, with the aggrieved tone of the perpetually inconvenienced:
"Mum! Whose coat is that on the rack? It smells like-"
Footsteps in the corridor. Heavy, stomping, with that particular manner children have when they want their presence to be noticed. Severus heard her taking off her coat, heard something fall, perhaps a scarf, heard her walk past the living room toward the kitchen.
And stop.
He couldn't see her face, he stood in the doorway behind him, but he felt her gaze.
"What," she said, each word bitten off like a thread, "is he doing here?"
The warmth that had been seeping into Severus's bones seemed to curdle. He sat very still on the sofa, aware suddenly of how he must look: the threadbare coat, the torn trousers, the lank hair that had not been washed in longer than he cared to count.
"He's visiting," Lily replied. She pulled her knees up to her chest, settling more comfortably on the sofa with the studied nonchalance of someone who had no intention of moving anywhere. "And he's watching television. With me."
"It's my television too! Dad said it's shared!"
"Dad said it's mine and you can watch if I let you."
"That's not true! And I don't want him watching my television!"
Severus sat very still. The urge to say something cutting was almost overwhelming, but he forced it down. He would not give her the satisfaction. He would not make Lily choose. How this terrible Muggle girl could be Lily's sister, he would never understand.
She had not moved from the doorway, as though crossing the threshold into the same room as Severus might contaminate her. "Mum! Did you know about this? Did you say he could-"
"Petunia." Mrs Evans's voice came from the kitchen, weary and sharp. "Come here, please."
Petunia shot one last venomous look at Severus, a look that promised this was not over. He returned it in kind. She disappeared down the hall. He could hear their voices, though not the words: Mrs Evans's low and measured, Petunia's rising in protest. The phrases that drifted back were fragments only: …staying for dinner… and …will leave after… and …not up for discussion.
Beside him, Lily had gone rigid. Her hands were balled into fists on her knees, and a flush had crept up her neck, staining her cheeks an angry red.
"She's such a cow," she muttered. "She's always like this when I bring friends round. Always. Like she can't stand me having anyone but her."
"It's fine," said Severus, though it was not fine, would never be fine. "I can go."
"No." Lily turned to look at him, and her eyes were fierce. "You're staying. She doesn't get to decide who my friends are."
The voices in the kitchen rose again, Petunia's shrill with indignation, and then Mrs Evans said something too quiet to hear, and there was silence. Footsteps on the stairs, heavy and deliberate. A door slammed somewhere above them, hard enough to rattle the Christmas tree.
Mrs Evans appeared in the doorway a moment later. She looked tired and she pressed two fingers to her temple as though trying to hold something in.
"Dinner will be ready in ten minutes," she said. Her eyes passed over Severus without quite seeing him. "Lily, come help me set the table."
Dinner was torture.
Not because the food was bad, the food was incredible, the best he had eaten in months, perhaps in a year. Some stewed meat with potatoes and carrots, thick gravy that smelled so good his jaw ached. Bread cut in thick slices, still warm, with butter, real butter, that melted the moment it touched the crumb.
Don't eat too fast. Don't shovel it in like you're starving. Don't let them see.
But he was starving. When had he last eaten a proper meal? Not the scraps he scavenged at home, not the stale biscuits he sometimes stole from the corner shop, but real food, hot food, food that someone had made with care?
He could not remember.
He tried as best as he could to copy thier table manners, but his body didn't want to obey. His hands wanted to grab. His jaws wanted to tear. Every instinct screamed: faster, more, before it's taken away, while there's still a chance.
He forced himself to cut small pieces. Forced himself to set his fork on the edge of the plate between bites. Forced himself to chew before swallowing.
Mrs. Evans sat at the head of the table, Mr. Evans wasn't there, he was working the evening shift, as Lily had explained. Petunia sat across from Severus, pointedly looking at her plate, refusing to raise her eyes. Lily beside him, so close that their elbows sometimes touched.
Conversation was sparse and strained. Mrs. Evans asked Petunia about the friend she had been visiting. Petunia answered in monosyllables. Lily tried to tell them something about school, but her words didn't seem to have the effect she wanted them to.
Something nudged his knee under the table.
He flinched, but it was just Lily. Her leg pressed against his, and when he glanced at her, she barely perceptibly tilted her head toward him.
"Tell Mum it's delicious," she whispered, hardly moving her lips.
He blinked.
"What?"
"The food. Say it's delicious. She likes it when people compliment her cooking."
Severus glanced at Mrs. Evans. She wasn't looking at him, wasn't looking at anyone, really. She was pushing a piece of potato around her plate, chin propped on her hand, her gaze somewhere else entirely.
He cleared his throat.
The words stuck in his throat, as if they didn't want to come out.
"This is…" his voice sounded strange, too quiet, too hoarse. He cleared his throat again. "Very delicious. Thank you."
The words came out clumsy, truncated, as if he had carved them from wood with a dull carving knife.
Mrs. Evans raised her eyes.
For a fraction of a second their gazes met. Her green eyes, the same as Lily's, looked at him without expression. He couldn't read what she was thinking. Couldn't tell whether she had accepted his clumsy compliment or found it pathetic, which it was.
"You're welcome," she said finally.
Lily nudged his knee under the table again, this time approvingly, as if he had just passed a difficult exam.
He continued eating. Petunia made a small noise of disgust, barely audible, and Lily kicked her under the table. Severus pretended not to notice. He focused on his plate, on the diminishing pile of food before him, on the effort of eating slowly, normally, like someone who was not desperately, achingly hungry.
When almost nothing was left on the plate, only smeared traces of sauce and crumbs, he suddenly saw it.
The crack.
It ran across the edge of the plate: a thin, barely visible line that cut through the pattern of faded roses. An old crack, its edges darkened with time where dirt and grease had worked into the ceramic. The plate was whole, if you could call whole a dish that had cracked and not broken, but it was damaged.
He looked at Lily's plate. White, clean, with the same rose pattern, but without a single flaw.
At Petunia's plate. The same.
At Mrs. Evans's plate. The same.
Only his plate was cracked.
He knew it wasn't a coincidence.
The appetite that had tormented him all evening suddenly vanished, as if someone had switched it off, like switching off a light. The food that a minute ago had seemed the best thing he had tasted in many months now sat in his stomach like a heavy lump.
"Thank you for dinner," he said. "I should go."
The warmth faded from his body in stages. First his fingers, then his ears, then his face. By the time he crossed the canal bridge, the cold had seeped back into his bones, and it was as though the fire in the Evans's grate had never existed at all.
Lily had wanted to walk him home. He had refused, more sharply than he intended, and seen the hurt flash across her face before she buried it. But he could not let her see. Could not let her walk beside him through the darkening streets and watch as the houses grew shabbier, the streetlamps sparser, the air thicker with the stench of the river. She had been there before. She knew where he came from, had stood on his front step. Somehow that made it worse, the thought of her seeing it again, the knowledge settling deeper each time.
Severus walked quickly, despite his knee, which had begun to hurt again. The plaster under his trouser leg had shifted, its edges curling up, letting go of the scraped skin.
The street looked as if the town itself had turned away from it and forgotten. The houses here stood closer together than in the rest of Cokeworth, and were older, and were worse. Many windows were boarded up. Many doors had panels kicked in, patched haphazardly with plywood. There were no streetlamps here at all, only light from the rare windows where people still lived who had nowhere else to go.
His house was at the very end of the street, where it dead-ended at an abandoned factory.
Severus slowed his pace.
He always slowed his pace approaching the house.
Light in the living room window. Father was home.
This could mean anything. Father could be already drunk, already indifferent to everything. Father could be in that dangerous state between sobriety and drunkenness, when everything irritated him, when any sound, any word could trigger an explosion. Father could be asleep. Father could be awake.
There was no way to know without going in.
Severus approached the door.
The paint on it had peeled so badly that the original color, green, once, he thought, could no longer be determined. The handle wobbled, held by a single screw.
He pushed the door.
It opened with that familiar creak he had heard thousands of times and that every time made his insides clench. Too loud. The door was always too loud, always announcing his presence before he had time to prepare.
The smell hit him first.
Damp. This was the smell of houses that are never warm enough, houses where moisture seeps through the walls and never fully dries. Mixed with it was something sour, the stale smell of alcohol spilled and not wiped up, soaked into carpets and upholstery.
Cold was second.
Not the cold outside. This was a different cold, still and heavy, cold that had accumulated in the rooms for months, years, that had soaked into stone and wood and radiated back when there was no fire against it. Cold that was not weather but a state.
The corridor was dark.
The light bulb had burned out a week ago, and no one had replaced it. Severus moved by touch, fingers brushing the wall, stepping around places where the floor sagged more than usual.
Severus froze by the door, listening.
Breathing. Even, deep. Snoring.
Father was asleep.
Something inside him relaxed slightly, only slightly, because relaxing completely was impossible, because a sleeping father could wake at any moment. But enough that he could pass the living room door, stepping as quietly as he knew how.
The stairs.
Every step was familiar to him, this one creaks, this one can be skipped, this one wobbles. He climbed like a tightrope walker, balancing between sound and silence, between presence and invisibility.
His mother's door was closed. He tried the handle, locked, more often than not, but tonight it turned.
She was asleep. She was always asleep, or lying in the dark, or staring at nothing.
He stood at the foot of her bed and watched her breathe.
A witch. His mother was a witch, with magic in her blood and a wand within arm's reach, and she lived like this. Let them all live like this. The cold, the damp, the bare cupboards, the yellow tape on the cracked window, all of it could be fixed with a wave of her hand, and she did nothing.
His father was a Muggle. His father had no choice.
She had a choice. She had always had a choice.
He left without waking her.
The room was as he had left it.
It had not gone anywhere, of course. It had simply bided its time while he sat in the Evans's sitting room, while he let himself forget what was waiting for him. Now it claimed him again the moment he stepped through their front door, wrapping around him like a shroud.
Sofa cushions dragged to the floor and nested into a makeshift bed, blanket bunched in a heap, pillow without a pillowcase, gray with grime. Window with a crack taped over with yellow tape, through which cold seeped. Walls covered with damp stains spreading from the corner like a disease.
Moonlight fell through the window, drawing a pale rectangle on the floor.
Severus stood in the middle of the room and looked.
He thought about Lily's room.
He thought about the living room downstairs in the Evanses' house.
He thought about dinner.
And he thought about where he had returned.
To this house. To this room. To this cold that waited for him like a faithful dog that never leaves.
It rose in his chest.
He tried to stop it, the way he always did, the way he had learned over the years. Clench jaw. Clench fists. Clench everything inside himself into a small, tight ball that could be hidden.
He sank onto the sofa cushions.
The springs dug into his hips through the thin fabric, familiar pain, almost welcoming. The blanket smelled of damp and something musty. He pulled it over his shoulders, and the cold that had accumulated in the fabric burned him like mockery.
His throat tightened.
He felt it, that treacherous burning behind his eyes, that weakness he hated more than anything in the world. Tears. A childish, pointless reaction to what could not be changed. He didn't cry. He didn't allow himself to cry, because it changed nothing, because tears were an admission of defeat, an admission that you could be broken.
He hated this house. Hated every wall, every floorboard, every breath of air he had to take inside it. Hated the smell and the cold and the silence that was worse than any noise, because in that silence you could hear everything, Father's footsteps downstairs, the snoring, the muttering that might become shouting at any moment. Hated that this place was called home, though it had never been home and never would be.
He hated that he had to return. Every time. Every day. Again and again, because there was nowhere else to lay his head, because the world consisted of Spinner's End and everything else, and everything else was not his home.
The hatred was enormous, too enormous, it filled his chest, pressed against his ribs from inside, sought an exit.
The tears never fell.
He didn't let them.
But they were there, right at the edge, waiting for the moment when his control would weaken. They would wait today, and tomorrow, and the day after. They were part of this house just like the cold and the damp and the smell, all that he carried within himself, that he couldn't shake off.
He told himself he would not go back.
He told himself this as he lay awake that night. He told himself this as he rose before dawn, as he crept down the stairs past his father's snoring form on the sofa, as he slipped out into the grey morning and walked the familiar route toward the river. He told himself this with every step, a litany of self-denial: You will not return.
By midday, he was standing on the Evans's doorstep.
The walk had been automatic, his feet carrying him through streets he knew by heart while his mind constructed elaborate justifications. He needed to return something, though he had taken nothing. He needed to tell Lily something important about magic, though nothing came to mind. He needed-
He needed.
That was the shameful truth of it.
He hated himself for it. Hated the weakness that made him lift his hand to the knocker. Hated the hope that flickered in his chest when he heard footsteps approaching from within.
The door swung open, and Lily stood there in a knitted jumper two sizes too large, her hair escaping its plait in wild red tendrils.
"Severus?"
Her surprise was evident, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, one hand still gripping the door as though she might need to close it quickly. He braced himself for the rejection, for the polite excuse, for the sorry, but today isn't a good day.
Instead, her face broke into a grin.
"You came back!" She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him inside before he could respond, before he could change his mind and flee. "I didn't think, I mean, after yesterday… I thought maybe, but you're here! This is brilliant!"
The warmth enveloped him again, and he felt the strain loosen in his chest despite himself.
"I was just watching telly," Lily continued, already dragging him toward the sitting room. "It's so boring on my own, and Mum's out at the shops, and Tuney's being Tuney, and I was thinking about going to find you but it's so cold out there and I hate it, I really do, I don't know how you stand being outside all the time-"
"You wanted to find me?" The words escaped before he could stop them.
Lily paused, turning to look at him with an expression he could not quite read.
"Of course I did. I always want to find you." She said it simply, as though it were obvious, as though wanting him was the most natural thing in the world. "And I've always wanted you to come here, you know. To visit properly, not just because you've hurt your knee. I've wanted it for ages, but you always said no, and I didn't want to push, but-"
She stopped herself, biting her lip.
"I'm glad you're here," she finished. "That's all."
He did not know what to say to that. So he said nothing, and let her lead him to the sofa, and pretended that the tightness in his throat was just the cold he had not quite shaken.
Soon the television murmured in the corner, some programme about farming that neither of them was watching. Lily had pulled her knees up to her chest, her toes tucked beneath a cushion, and was pelting him with questions about magic the way she always did, rapid-fire, relentless, bouncing from topic to topic before he had finished answering the last.
"But how do you know when it's going to happen? The accidental magic, I mean. Is there a feeling? Like a sneeze coming on?"
"Sometimes." He shifted on the sofa, still unused to its softness.
"And at Hogwarts they teach you to control it?"
"They teach you to channel it. Through a wand."
"A wand." Her eyes went distant, dreamy. "What do you think mine will be made of? Do you think-"
The sitting room door opened.
Petunia stood in the doorway, still wearing her coat, her pale hair dark with damp from the drizzle outside. Her eyes found Severus immediately, and her lip curled.
"Oh," she said. "You're here."
"He's visiting," said Lily, her voice sharp with warning. "And he's staying."
"Mum's not home."
"I know Mum's not home. I don't need Mum's permission to have a friend over."
Petunia's jaw tightened. For a moment, Severus thought she would turn and leave, storm up to her room the way she had last night, slamming doors in her wake. But something seemed to shift in her expression. A calculation, perhaps. A weighing of options.
"Fine," she said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but. She shed her coat with sharp, irritated movements and dropped into the armchair by the fire. "But I'm not sitting in my room all day just because he's here."
"No one asked you to." Lily's grin had returned, bright and slightly dangerous. "In fact, you can play cards with us."
"I don't want to play cards."
"Too bad. I'm getting the deck."
She was off the sofa before Petunia could protest further, disappearing into the kitchen and returning moments later with a battered pack of cards. The box was held together with tape, and when she shook the cards out onto the low table, Severus saw that several of them were bent at the corners, their faces worn soft with use.
"We're playing Rummy," Lily announced. "Severus, do you know how to play?"
He did not. Card games were not something that happened at Spinner's End, he was sure his father played sometimes, but Severus had never been taught. He shook his head, feeling the familiar flush of inadequacy creep up his neck.
"That's all right, I'll teach you. It's easy, really. You just have to make sets, at least three of a kind, or runs of the same suit, and the first person to get rid of all their cards wins. Here, I'll show you."
She dealt the cards with practised ease, explaining the rules as she went. Severus listened intently, filing away each piece of information, already analysing the strategy beneath the simple mechanics.
By the third hand, he had won twice.
"You're a quick learner," said Lily, sounding both impressed and slightly annoyed. "It took Tuney ages to get the hang of it."
"I am right here," said Petunia coldly.
"I know. I'm just saying."
The fourth hand began. Severus was arranging his cards, already spotting a potential run, when he noticed something odd. Lily had drawn from the pile, but her hand had moved strangely with a flicker and with hesitation, and when she laid down her cards, she had exactly what she needed.
He narrowed his eyes.
The fifth hand confirmed his suspicions. The seven of hearts had appeared twice in the spread before them. Lily's wins were mounting, her grin widening, and there was a gleam in her eye that Severus recognised all too well.
"You're cheating," he said flatly.
Lily's grin faltered. "What? No I'm not."
"You're using magic. I can tell."
"I am not-"
"I knew it!" Petunia threw down her cards with a violence that sent several skittering off the table. "I knew you were doing something! You always cheat, Lily, you always have to win, and it's not fair!"
"I'm not cheating, I'm just-"
"I saw the card change." Severus's voice was quiet but certain. "The seven of hearts. It changed when you touched it."
For a moment, she looked as though she might argue further. Then her shoulders slumped.
"Fine," she muttered. "Maybe I helped things along a little. But it's not like it matters, it's just a game-"
"It matters if you're cheating!" Petunia's voice had risen to a pitch that made Severus wince. "I'm not playing with you anymore. I'm not playing anything with you anymore. You ruin everything!"
She shoved back from the table and stormed toward the door, but Lily caught her arm.
"Wait. Tuney, wait. I'm sorry, all right? I'll stop. I promise."
"You always promise."
"I mean it this time. Look-" Lily glanced at Severus, and something passed across her face. "You and Severus can play. Just the two of you. I'll just watch."
Petunia stared at her. Severus stared at her. Neither of them moved.
"Go on," said Lily, giving her sister a gentle push back toward the table. "I'll deal for you. No magic, I swear."
"You'll give him the good cards." Petunia said the word him as though it tasted unpleasant. "Because you're friends."
"I won't. You're my sister."
"Don't remind me."
This was a terrible idea. Severus could see that clearly. Petunia hated him, had made that abundantly clear from the moment she first saw him, and he had no particular fondness for her either, with her pinched face and her disdainful looks and her voice that rose to a whine at the slightest provocation. Playing cards with her would be torture. Playing cards with her would be-
Petunia sat back down.
She did not look at him. Did not acknowledge him in any way. But she picked up her cards, and she arranged them in her hand, and when Lily dealt the first round, she played.
So Severus played too.
The game was different without Lily's interference. Fairer, somehow, though Petunia was not a particularly skilled player. She took too long to make decisions and played too cautiously, hoarding cards she should have discarded long ago. She made it easy for him, and by the third hand, he had won again.
"You're quite good at this," said Petunia. It was not a compliment, exactly, her tone was too grudging for that, but it was not an insult either. It was simply an observation, delivered with a neutrality that surprised him.
"I learn quickly," he said.
"Mm."
They played another hand. Severus won again, but only barely.
Lily watched from the sofa, her chin propped on her knees, and there was a smugness to her expression that Severus did not like. It took him until the fifth hand to understand why.
She had done this on purpose.
The cheating, the argument, the suggestion that he and Petunia play alone, all of it had been calculated, designed to force them into proximity. To make them, in some strange way, get along.
He caught her eye across the room, and she had the grace to look slightly abashed. But only slightly.
"See?" she said, when Petunia laid down a winning run and allowed herself a small, triumphant smile. "This is nice. We're all getting along."
Petunia's smile vanished. "We're not getting along. We're just playing cards."
"Same thing." Lily leaned forward, her expression turning serious. "Actually, since we're all being so civilised, I think this is a good time for apologies."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
"Apologies," Petunia repeated, her voice flat.
"Yes." Lily nodded, looking between them. "Severus, you should apologise to Tuney for dropping that branch on her last summer."
He remembered. A hot August afternoon, Petunia spying on them from behind a hedge, his anger rising until it snapped, literally. The branch had fallen close enough to make her scream, though it had not actually hit her.
"And Tuney," Lily continued, turning to her sister, "you should apologise to Severus for what you said about his clothes."
Petunia's face had gone red. "I'm not apologising to him. He tried to kill me!"
"It was a branch. And it missed. It was an accident." Severus said stiffly. It had been an accident. Mostly. The branch had fallen when Petunia was walking beneath the tree, and perhaps he had been angry at her, and perhaps his anger had found an outlet in ways he had not entirely controlled, but he had not meant for it to hit her. Probably.
"Only just!"
Severus felt his own anger stirring, that familiar heat in his chest. "I'm not apologising," he said coldly. "She was spying on us. She deserved worse than a branch."
"See?" Petunia shrieked, jabbing a finger at him. "See what he's like? He's horrible! He's always been horrible!"
"And you insulted his clothes,'" Lily shot back. "That's horrible too."
"And I suppose his clothes just happened to look like they came from a rubbish bin?"
"Tuney!" Lily's voice was sharp with warning.
"What? He started it!"
"I didn't start anything. You're the one who-"
"Both of you, stop!" Lily threw up her hands. "Honestly, I was trying to help, but if you're both going to be pigheaded about it-"
"I'm not apologising to a Muggle," said Severus.
"Neither am I apologizing to that freak," said Petunia.
They looked at each other, really looked, perhaps for the first time, and in that moment, there was something almost like understanding between them. A mutual recognition of stubbornness, of pride, of the absolute refusal to bend.
Lily groaned and flopped back against the sofa cushions.
"You're both impossible," she announced to the ceiling. "Completely and utterly impossible."
He hated himself for it.
Hated even more than yesterday, because yesterday he could at least pretend it was spontaneous, that his legs had carried him to number twelve on their own. Today there was nothing to pretend. Today he had woken at five in the morning, in the dark, in the cold, and his first thought had been: when can I leave?
He waited.
Waited for Father to leave for work, the close of the door, the heavy footsteps on the stairs, the cough that made the walls shudder. Waited for that particular silence to settle in the house that meant relative safety. Waited for the sky outside the cracked window to turn gray enough to call it morning.
At seven he left the house.
It was still dark, the December morning was in no hurry to brighten, clinging to night until the last moment. The streets of Cokeworth were empty, except for the occasional workers hurrying to the early shift, hunched figures in dark coats who didn't raise their eyes from the pavement. The streetlamps were still lit, but their light seemed yellow and sickly in the predawn gloom.
He walked slowly.
Not because he didn't want to arrive, he did, and that was the worst of it. Simply, if he came too early, it would be… too obvious. Too pathetic. Even for him.
He wandered.
Through streets he knew by heart. Past closed shops with dark windows. Past the pub where yesterday's vomit hadn't yet been washed from the pavement. Past the church whose bells were silent until Sunday.
By half past eight he could wait no longer. His nose burned as if it had been dipped in ice water. Every breath was a small torture, the air scratched his throat, burned his lungs.
He stood before the door of number twelve and understood he was making a mistake.
It was too early. Lily was surely still asleep, or awake, but not expecting him at such an hour.
The sound of knuckles on wood seemed deafening in the morning silence. He waited, heart pounding somewhere in his throat, ready to flee at the first sign that he wasn't wanted.
Footsteps behind the door.
Not Lily, too heavy, too measured. Footsteps of an adult.
The door opened.
Mrs. Evans stood on the threshold in an apron over a plain dress, her hair already gathered in that tight knot he had seen yesterday. In her hand she held a cloth, evidently he had pulled her away from some task.
"Severus," she said. Not a question. A statement of fact.
His voice came out hoarse, broken by the cold. "Lily…"
"Lily is at school."
At school. Of course. It was Monday, or Tuesday? He had lost track of days. But whatever day it was, it was a school day, and Lily was where she was supposed to be, and he was here, on her doorstep like a beggar instead of a visiting friend.
"I…" he began backing away. "I didn't think. I just…"
"Where should you be, Severus?"
"I…" he didn't know what to say. The truth? That he had dropped out of school because he saw no point in it when he was going to Hogwarts? That the teachers had long since stopped looking for him? That the truant officers were easy enough to avoid? That his parents didn't care whether he attended classes or not?
Mrs. Evans didn't wait for an answer.
Her gaze slid over him: top to bottom, quick, professional, the way people do who are used to assessing. He knew what she saw: coat that didn't fit, clothes that weren't really his, shoes with worn soles, lips blue from cold that he couldn't control. Dark circles under his eyes from nights spent in the cold, in half-sleep, in constant expectation of danger. Hair he hadn't washed for… he couldn't remember how many days. He would rather not think how long he had gone without a proper bath, subsisting on hurried scrubs with icy water and a threadbare flannel.
"Come in," she said finally.
He didn't move. Didn't believe it.
"You can wait for Lily in the living room. She'll be back by four."
By four. Until four was… he tried to count and lost track. Many hours. Many hours in her house, under her roof, at her mercy.
She stepped back from the door, clearing the passage, and he understood he had no choice. Or rather, he had a choice, leave into the cold, wander the streets for another seven hours, then return when Lily was home. Or come in now.
He came in.
And the warmth received him as it did every time, immediately, all-consumingly, almost painfully. He stood in the corridor, not daring to go further, while Mrs. Evans closed and locked the door behind him.
"You can hang your coat there," she indicated the coat rack.
She passed him, heading off into the kitchen.
Severus took off his coat.
Without it he felt even more vulnerable, the thin jumper didn't hide how his shoulder blades jutted out, how his collarbones protruded. He hung his coat next to the others, the girls' school jackets, a pink adult raincoat, something knitted and bright, and his coat again looked foreign, a dark stain among strangers' things.
Fire burned in the fireplace.
Severus froze in the doorway, looking at the flames. She had already lit the fire, at half past eight in the morning, when all her children were at school or at friends' houses, when she was alone in the house. Lit a fire to heat an empty room.
No. Not empty. A room where she worked, cleaned, lived. A room that was her home and that she kept warm because that was right, because a home should be warm.
He sat on the sofa.
Carefully, on the very edge, trying to take up as little space as possible. His hands lay on his knees, motionless, awkward, he didn't know where to put them. There was nowhere to look, the television was silent, the magazines on the coffee table clearly belonged to Mrs. Evans and were hardly meant for his eyes.
He sat.
Warmth enveloped him from all sides, from the fireplace, from the walls, from the very air of this house. His fingers began to thaw, and again came that pulsing pain of returning circulation. He clenched his hands into fists, waiting it out, staring at one spot on the carpet.
Mrs. Evans appeared in the doorway.
She carried a bucket and mop, those instruments of domestic warfare that he had seen the neighbors in Cokeworth use, but never in his own house. His mother had long since stopped… doing anything.
"If you need the toilet, through the door in the kitchen" she said, crossing the room toward the window. "There's water in the kitchen if you need a drink."
He nodded.
She didn't look at him anymore. She had already drawn back the curtain and was wiping the glass.
The hours dragged.
Severus sat on the sofa and watched Mrs. Evans work.
She didn't stop for a minute, that was the first thing he noticed. Having wiped the window in the living room, she moved to the corridor. From there came the sound of a vacuum cleaner, a rare luxury he had seen only in shop windows. Then the sound moved upstairs, and he heard her footsteps overhead, the muffled thud of furniture being moved, actions whose meaning he could only guess at.
She returned to the living room with a broom and dustpan. Swept by the fireplace, collecting the ash into a bucket. Added coal. Straightened a garland on the tree that had begun to slip.
All this time she didn't look at him.
Didn't talk to him. Didn't offer him anything, not food, not tea, not even that contemptuous "are you hungry?" that he could have rejected with dignity. She simply worked as if he didn't exist, as if he were a piece of furniture, a sofa cushion, perhaps, or another photograph on the mantelpiece.
Severus sat and didn't move.
The television sat in its corner, silent and dark. He looked at it for a long moment, remembering how Lily had turned the dial, how the screen had flickered to life with colour and sound and movement. It would be so easy. Just cross the room, turn the knob, fill the silence with something other than his own breathing.
But Lily wasn't here.
And without her everything changed. Without her he was not a guest but… he didn't know what. A homeless person let in to warm up? A hanger-on tolerated out of politeness? Something stuck between categories, for which there was no suitable word.
So he simply sat.
He catalogued the room to keep himself still. Fire. Tree. Paper garlands. Photographs: baby Lily already red-haired, Petunia with a prize, the family posed by a car in some place with trees. The clock on the mantelpiece measured out the silence, its minute hand barely moving.
Ten o'clock.
Eleven.
Twelve.
From the kitchen came the smell of baking. Something sweet, with cinnamon, perhaps. His stomach growled, loudly, humiliatingly loudly in the silence of the house, and he pressed his hand to his belly as if he could muffle the sound.
Mrs. Evans didn't appear. Didn't offer him what she was baking. He didn't know if she had heard, and that uncertainty was worse than if she had heard and ignored it.
One.
Two.
The warmth was doing its work.
It came to him layer by layer, as yesterday, as always in this house and his body began to surrender. His head he had held turned toward the fireplace grew heavy, too heavy for his neck.
He fought it.
Bit his lip so the pain would keep him conscious. Dug his nails into his palms. Counted the patterns on the carpet, one, two, three, four, forcing his brain to work, forcing himself to stay awake.
Not here. Not in someone else's house.
His eyes closed.
Just for a second. Just to let them rest. He wasn't sleeping, he was just… not opening his eyes. That was different.
The fire crackled.
The clock ticked.
Somewhere far away, in the kitchen, Mrs. Evans was doing something, the sounds came muffled, as if through cotton, through water, through…
Crash.
The door hit the wall with such that he was on his feet before he was fully awake, heart slamming against his ribs, hands raised in defence against a threat he could not see. The room swam around him and for one terrible moment he did not know where he was, did not know-
"I'm home!"
Just Lily, bursting into the house with the same energy with which she burst everywhere, not caring what noise she made.
Severus blinked, trying to orient himself. He was sitting on the sofa, no, lying, somehow he had ended up on his side, head on the armrest, legs drawn up. The light outside the window had changed, from gray midday to gray early evening, with that density that foretold coming dusk.
"Severus!"
Lily stood in the doorway of the sitting room, still in her coat, scarf askew, her cheeks flushed from the cold outside. Her satchel hung from one shoulder, already slipping, and her hair had escaped its plaits in wild red strands that framed her face like flames.
She was beaming.
"You're here!" She rushed to the sofa, and before he could sit up properly, she was beside him, her hands cold from outside grabbing his shoulder. "Mum said you came this morning!"
She spoke so fast the words merged into a single stream. He sat up, trying to smooth his hair, which was surely sticking out in all directions, trying to shake off the remnants of sleep.
"You waited for me," she said. "All day. You really waited for me all day."
He wanted to say it wasn't like that.
But she was looking at him with those eyes of hers, green like her mother's but warm, so warm, and the lie stuck in his throat.
"Yes," he said instead. "I waited."
Her smile grew wider.
"Then come on," she pulled him by the hand. "I have to tell you about today. Margret brought a hamster to school and it escaped during geography, and Mr. Hardy said if it wasn't found by the end of the lesson we'd all get detention, as if we'd hidden it on purpose…."
She was dragging him somewhere, to the kitchen, probably, or upstairs to her room, and he followed her, still not fully awake.
The front door opened at six in the evening.
This time, Severus was prepared, or thought he was. He had been listening for it, attuned to every sound from the hallway, every creak of the house settling. But when the door swung open, it was not the quiet click of Mrs Evans returning from an errand. It was the heavy thud of a man's boots on the threshold, the grunt of effort as a body pushed through, the particular exhaustion that came from a day of labour.
Lily's father was home.
"Fucking hell, Hortense!" A man's voice, loud and hoarse, rang through the house. "Are you trying to kill us all?"
Severus froze.
The voice was rough, irritated, with that particular intonation he knew too well. The intonation of a man who had come home tired and angry, looking for someone to take out the day's accumulation on. The intonation that in his house always preceeded…
"Windows are closed and you're messing about with bleach!" the voice continued from the corridor. "Can't breathe in here, woman!"
He heard Mrs. Evans's reply, something short, sharp and about mold, but couldn't make out the words. Blood roared in his ears, drowning out everything else. His eyes darted around the room, searching for an exit, a path of retreat, a place to hide.
"Daddy!"
Lily's voice, cut through his panic like a knife.
She jumped up from the sofa where they had been sitting together, looking through her school notebooks, and rushed into the corridor with the swiftness with which she did everything.
Severus heard the thump of her colliding with something solid, heard the man's surprised "Oof!" and then a laugh.
"Steady on, Lily flower! You'll have me over."
Severus stayed where he was. His heart was still pounding, his muscles still locked in that old familiar tension, but he made himself breathe. Made himself unclench his fists.
Lily's chattered, bright and rapid, punctuated by her father's deeper responses. And then they appeared in the sitting room doorway, and Severus saw him clearly for the first time.
Mr. Evans was a big man, broad across the shoulders, thick through the chest and belly, with hands that looked like they could crush stone. His face was weathered and lines prematurely, and his sandy hair was greying at the temples and almost gone at the top, slicked back with sweat from the day's labour. He wore the clothes of a steelworker: thick coat, heavy trousers, a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, braces that strained across his back.
Lily hung on his arm, still telling him something, and he listened to her as if her chatter about school and hamsters was the most important thing he had heard all day.
His hand came up to ruffle her hair.
Severus flinched.
It was involuntary, instinctive, the same response he had to any sudden movement, any raised hand. His body jerked backward against the sofa cushions, his shoulders hunching, his arms coming up to-
But there was no blow.
There was only Lily, laughing and swatting at her father's hand, complaining that he was messing up her plaits.
Severus did not know what to do with it.
He sat frozen on the sofa, watching them, and for one brief moment, Mr. Evans's eyes met his.
"Who's this we have here?" he asked, nodding toward the sofa.
"This is Severus!" Lily's voice rang with pride, as though she were introducing a prize she had won. "He's my friend, Dad. The one I told you about. The one who knows about-" she caught herself, glanced at Severus, "-about all sorts of things."
Severus felt heat creeping up his neck. Her friend.
"Give me your coat," Lily was already pulling off her father's work jacket, that heavy, oil-stained thing that looked like it weighed more than she did. "And take off your boots, Mum just washed the floors."
Mr. Evans was watching him again, but there was no hostility in his gaze, only a kind of weary curiosity. He lowered himself into the armchair by the fire with a groan, his joints popping audibly, and began unlacing his boots. "The clever one, yeah? Lily says you know more than all her teachers put together."
Lily was already there, kneeling at her father's feet, tugging at his bootlaces with familiar efficiency. "He does, Dad. He really does. About a lot of very interesting things. He's read loads of books, more than anyone I know, and he can explain things properly, not like Mr Lewinson who just drones on and on-"
"All right, all right." Lily's father chuckled, leaning back in his chair as Lily wrestled his boots off and set them neatly by the hearth. "I believe you, love. No need to write the lad a reference."
Severus's face was burning now. He stared at the carpet, at the pattern of flowers worn thin by years of footsteps, and wished desperately that he could disappear into it. He was not accustomed to being spoken of with praise. Was not accustomed to being spoken of at all, except in tones of disgust or disappointment.
"Severus, is it?" Mr. Evans's voice made him look up, despite himself. The man was watching him with an expression that was not quite a smile but was not unfriendly either. "That's a mouthful. You'd be Toby's lad, then? I'd know that nose anywhere."
He did not know how to answer, so he said nothing, just shook his head slightly, and hoped that would be enough.
It seemed to be. Mr. Evans accepted this with the unconcerned shrug of a man who didn't put much stock in small talk, and turned back to Lily. She had perched herself on the arm of his chair and was complaining about a teacher, something about homework, about being singled out unfairly.
From the kitchen came the clatter of pots, and Mrs. Evans's voice: "Joe, if you're not doing anything useful in there-"
Lily's father hauled himself out of the armchair with another groan, "better see what trouble she's getting into", and made his way to the kitchen. Severus heard the door swing open, heard Mrs Evans's voice melt from the clipped efficiency she had used all day to something soft and warm.
Then: a giggle.
Lily rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "They're sometimes like that," she said, as though it were perfectly ordinary.
"Oi, Lily!" Mr. Evans's voice boomed from the kitchen, making Severus jump. "Ask your friend if he's staying for dinner!"
Before Severus could open his mouth, before he could formulate the refusal that was already rising in his throat, Lily answered for him.
"He's staying!"
He turned to glare at her, but she only shrugged, unrepentant.
"What?" she said, the picture of innocence. "You are staying."
"I don't-"
"You're staying," she repeated, and there was something in her voice that brooked no argument. "Dad won't mind. He likes meeting my friends."
Before he could find the words to refuse, she had taken his arm and steered him toward the kitchen, and by then it was too late.
The kitchen was not built for five people.
This became apparent almost immediately, as the family attempted to arrange themselves around the small table. Four chairs, five bodies, and a space barely large enough to accommodate either. Petunia had descended from her room with the air of a condemned prisoner approaching the gallows, her face set in an expression of martyred suffering that intensified the moment she saw Severus still there.
"He's staying for dinner again?" she demanded, not bothering to lower her voice. "Mum, you can't be serious-"
"Enough, Tuney." Mrs Evans's voice was sharp, brooking no argument. "Set another place."
"But there aren't enough chairs!"
"Then we'll manage, won't we?"
The solution, in the end, was to drag the armchair from the sitting room. It was Mr. Evans who did it, wrestling the heavy thing through the narrow doorway with much cursing and manoeuvring, while Mrs Evans directed from the stove and Petunia sulked against the counter. The chair was too big for the space, too low for the table, and looked absurd wedged between the cupboard and the wall, but Mr. Evans settled into it with a satisfied grunt, as though he had conquered Everest rather than relocated a piece of furniture.
"Right then," he said, slapping his palms on the worn armrests. "That's me sorted. Everyone else find a spot."
They shuffled into place like pieces of a puzzle. Mrs Evans at the head of the table, nearest the stove so she could serve. Lily beside her, then Severus in the corner where the table met the wall, the same spot as before, hemmed in, trapped. Petunia opposite, as far from him as the small space allowed, her chair angled away so she would not have to look at him.
The food arrived in the same serving dishes as before. A different meal this time, some kind of stew, thick with vegetables and chunks of meat, but the same ritual. Mrs Evans spooning portions onto plates, passing them around the table, the scrape of ceramic against wood.
Around him, the family talked.
Lily's father dominated the conversation, his voice filling the small kitchen with stories from the factory, someone named Calkins who had dropped a wrench into the machinery, a foreman who had been sacked for drinking on the job, the rumour that overtime would be cut after Christmas. His hands moved as he spoke, gesturing broadly, and sometimes he would pause to take a bite of food or a swig from his cup, and Mrs Evans would interject with a question or a comment, and Lily would laugh at something, and even Petunia would occasionally offer a sullen contribution.
Severus ate his stew and said nothing.
He watched Lily lean into her father's arm when he made a joke, watched Mrs Evans's face soften when her husband caught her eye across the table.
Why did she have all of this?
The question rose unbidden, sharp and ugly, and he could not push it down. He looked at Lily and felt hurt.
What had she done to deserve it? What had he done to deserve nothing?
The questions had no answers. They never did. He had asked them before, in the dark of his bedroom at Spinner's End, staring at the ceiling and listening to his parents destroy each other in the rooms below. Had asked them until his throat closed and his eyes burned and his hands ached from being clenched so tight. But the universe did not answer. The universe did not care.
"Why?"
Lily's voice was quiet and soft.
They were sitting on the low wall by the canal, their legs dangling over the water. The afternoon was grey and bitter, the kind of cold that seeped through every layer of clothing and settled into the marrow. Severus had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind, and he did not look at her when he answered.
"I just don't want to," he said, looking at the water.
"But why?" She shifted closer, close enough that their arms almost touched. "Did something happen?"
Silence. He heard her breathing, quickly, unevenly, as if holding something back. Tears? Anger? He didn't know and was afraid to find out.
"Did my parents upset you?" she asked finally. "If Mum said something, she probably didn't mean it the way it sounded, but I can talk to her. And Tuney…" She exhaled. "You know what Tuney's like. She's vile to me too at least once a week, if that helps."
"No one said anything."
"Is it Dad?"
He said nothing. But his silence must have been answer enough, because she nodded slowly, as though confirming something she had already suspected.
"He's not-" She stopped. Started again. "He would never hurt anyone, Sev. He's loud, I know, and he can be a bit much sometimes, but he's not… he's not like…"
She trailed off. She did not say like your father. She did not have to.
"I know," said Severus. "I just… I can't, Lily. I can't be there. It's too…"
She waited for him to finish. When he didn't, her expression turning wounded before her chin lifted slightly.
"Is it because we're poor?" The words came out quiet but pointed. "Because the house is small and shabby and Mum and Dad have to scrape for everything? Is that what's too much for you?"
"No." The denial was immediate, almost fierce. "Lily, you know that's not-"
"Then why?"
He was silent.
How could he explain to her what he himself barely understood? How could he say: your family causes me pain just by existing? How could he admit: I'm afraid of your father, though he's never raised a hand to me, and this fear humiliates me more than anything else in my life?
Lily was quiet for a long time.
"Okay," she said at last. Her voice was small, and when he glanced at her, he saw that her eyes were bright with something that might have been tears. "If that's what you want."
"I'm sorry," he said. The words felt inadequate. Useless.
Lily shook her head. "Don't be sorry." She reached over and squeezed his arm through his coat, just briefly, just once. "I just… I liked having you there. That's all."
He did not know what to say to that. So he said nothing, and they sat together in the cold until the light began to fade, and then they went their separate ways.
He wanted to ask her, why do you bother with me? The question sat behind his teeth, unasked. He was afraid of the answer. More afraid that she didn't have one, that he was simply a novelty, a curiosity, something to be picked up and examined and eventually set aside when she found something more interesting.
The cold deepened as December wore on.
By mid-December the temperature had dropped so low that even the old people of Cokeworth shook their heads and muttered something about "don't remember cold like this since forty-seven." Pipes in houses burst from the frost. The canal was covered with ice thick enough to bear a child's weight, though no one risked testing it. The snow that had fallen at the beginning of the month didn't melt but only accumulated new layers on top, turning into a dirty gray crust that crunched underfoot.
The house on Spinner's End surrendered to the cold without a fight.
Frost painted the inside of the windows at Spinner's End, and the water in the basin froze solid overnight, and no amount of blankets could keep the chill from finding him.
Severus did everything he could. Stuffed the gaps in the window with rags he found around the house. Slept in his clothes, in all the clothes he had, layer upon layer.
It wasn't enough.
He had survived winters before. He reminded himself of this constantly, a litany against despair. He had survived the winter when he was six and the pipes burst and they had no water for a week. Had survived the winter when he was eight and his father drank away the coal money and they burned furniture to keep warm. Had survived every winter of his short, miserable life, and he would survive this one too.
But knowing this did not make his fingers stop hurting.
He noticed them first as an itch, a maddening, burning itch on his fingers and toes that no amount of scratching could relieve. Then came the swelling, the skin puffing up red and angry, tender to the touch. Then the cracks, splitting open along his knuckles, weeping clear fluid that stung when it met the air.
There was nothing to do for them except wait. Wait for the weather to turn, wait for spring, wait for the slow return of warmth that would heal what winter had broken.
In the meantime, he wrapped his hands in rags and tried not to use them more than necessary.
Heating existed only downstairs, and only when his father was home, which was not often, and never predictably.
Father lit the fire in the at night, when he came home, if he didn't stop at the pub first, if he didn't crawl home past midnight, too drunk to think about the cold. On those rare evenings when the fire burned, warmth rose up the stairs: faint, barely perceptible, but still warmth. Severus sat on the top step, back pressed against the wall, and absorbed these crumbs, these pitiful remnants of someone else's comfort.
But he couldn't go downstairs.
His father hit with his right hand, the left one anchoring whatever part of Severus he had managed to grab. His father smelled like the pub, like sweat, like something chemical from the slaughterhouse where he worked. His father was not worth thinking about. Severus thought about him constantly.
While his mother almost never came out of her room.
Sometimes he heard her, footsteps, coughing, the sound of a bottle being opened. Sometimes he saw her, a ghost drifting to the kitchen for another dose of whatever helped her forget. She didn't look at him. Didn't talk to him. Existed in some parallel dimension where he was not her son but simply an obstacle, simply another object in the house to be avoided.
He didn't blame her.
He had long since stopped blaming her for anything. Blame required expectations, and he no longer expected anything from her.
The days blurred into one endless gray mass.
He woke, if you could call it waking after a night spent in half-oblivion. Ate, if there was anything in the house to eat, if he could make himself go down to the kitchen when no one was there. Waited, always waited, counting the days until summer, until the letter, until Hogwarts, until the moment when all this would finally end.
I've survived every winter before this.
He repeated it to himself like a mantra, like a prayer, like the only thing keeping him from… from what? He didn't know. From despair, probably. From simply lying down and not getting up, letting the cold take him, dissolving into this gray emptiness that was his life.
He simply existed.
Curled into a ball under all his blankets and clothes, hid his hands under his arms where it was slightly warmer, and waited. Waited for night to pass. Waited for day to pass. Waited for winter to pass.
Christmas Eve found him walking.
He had not planned it. Had not planned anything, really, beyond escape. Christmas was for other people. Other families. Not his. His mother had been drinking since morning, slumped in the kitchen chair with a bottle of something cheap and amber, and his father had come home in a black mood that Severus knew better than to test. He knew that asking about a Christmas gift was ridiculous, was asking for the belt, really. So he had slipped out the back door while they argued, while their voices rose and fell in that familiar, terrible rhythm, and he had walked.
The streets were quiet. Most of Cokeworth was indoors, preparing for tomorrow, cooking meals, wrapping presents, gathering around fires and televisions and each other. The houses he passed glowed with warm light, their windows revealing glimpses of tinsel and trees and families. He kept his head down, his hands shoved deep in his pockets to protect his aching fingers, and tried not to look.
But his feet knew where they were going.
He realised it only when he turned onto her street, that he had been walking here all along, drawn by some gravity he could not name.
He should leave. Should turn around and walk away before anyone saw him, before he had to explain what he was doing here, lurking like a thief in the dusk. He had told Lily he did not want to come to her house anymore. Had meant it, or thought he had. And yet here he was, standing on the pavement opposite her door, unable to make himself move.
Just a glimpse. That was all he wanted.
He crossed the street.
The sitting room curtains were not fully drawn. A gap remained, perhaps six inches wide, and through it he could see the fire burning in the grate and the sofa where he had sat and felt, for a few brief hours, what it might be like to belong somewhere. And there, curled in the armchair with a book, was Lily.
He stood frozen on the pavement, watching her through the glass, and the longing that rose in him was so fierce it made his chest ache.
Then she looked up.
Their eyes met through the window.
For one endless second, neither of them moved. Severus saw her expression shift and then she was on her feet, the book tumbling forgotten to the floor, and he was backing away, stumbling, turning to flee-
The front door banged open.
"Severus Snape, you stop right there!"
Her voice rang down the street, sharp with command. He froze mid-step, caught between the desperate urge to run and the knowledge that she would chase him if he did. She would chase him through the streets of Cokeworth in her stockinged feet if she had to, and she would catch him, because Lily Evans did not give up on anything.
He turned slowly.
She stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the hall, her cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders.
"Come inside," she said. It was not a request.
"Lily-"
"Now."
"I don't want to."
The words came out sullen, childish, and he hated himself for them. But he could not go in there when it pained him.
Lily's expression shifted. The command faded, replaced by pleading.
"Well, I want you to," she said quietly. "Please, Sev. For me."
"Why?"
She opened her mouth to answer. Closed it again. Her brow furrowed, and he could see her searching for words, for reasons, for some explanation that would make sense to both of them.
"Because…" she started, then stopped. "Because it's Christmas Eve, and you're out here alone, and I…"
She trailed off. Her hands twisted in the fabric of her cardigan, and she looked suddenly uncertain, not the fierce, confident girl who had dragged him about, but someone smaller, someone who did not know how to say what she meant.
"I just want you to," she finished lamely. "Is that not enough?"
It should not have been enough. He should have been able to refuse, to harden himself against the plea in her voice and walk away to where he belonged. He had been doing so well, keeping his distance, protecting himself, building back the walls she had torn down.
But she was standing in her doorway in her bare feet, on Christmas Eve, asking him to come inside. And he was so tired. So cold. So utterly, completely alone.
He walked toward her and Lily closed the door behind him, shutting out the night, and for a moment they stood together in the narrow hallway, neither quite sure what came next.
"Mum and Dad are out," Lily said. Her voice had steadied now, regaining some of its usual brightness. "Getting last-minute things. You know how Dad is, he always forgets something, and then they have to back and…"
She was rambling. Filling the silence with words because the silence was too heavy.
"I need your help," she continued, leading him toward the sitting room. "With the tree. We didn't finish decorating it properly, and Mum wants it done before they get back, and Tuney's locked herself in her room again, she's been in a right strop all day, something about a boy at school, so it's just me, and I can't reach the top branches, and…"
"You don't need help."
The words slipped out before he could stop them. Lily paused in the doorway of the sitting room, turning to look at him.
"You can reach the top branches fine," he said. "I've seen you do it. You don't need me."
"Maybe I just want the company," She frowned at him. "Is that so terrible?"
It was not terrible. That was the problem. Her kindness, her stubborn, relentless goodness, it was not terrible at all. It was worse than terrible. It was unbearable.
She was too kind. Too good. Too determined to pull him into her warm, bright world when he had already accepted that he did not belong there. Every gesture of friendship, every offered hand, every "come inside" and "stay for dinner" and "you're always welcome", it scraped against something raw in him, exposed wounds he had spent years learning to ignore.
She annoyed him, sometimes, with her refusal to give up on him. Her goodness was too much, too bright, too insistent, too certain that he was worth saving when he knew, knew in his bones, that he was not.
And yet.
And yet she was here asking him to help decorate a tree. And he was here, in her hallway, letting himself be asked.
He followed her into the sitting room.
The tree stood where it had always stood, perched on the television in the corner, its crooked top bent against the ceiling. It looked different than he remembered, fuller, somehow, though perhaps that was just the additional decorations that now hung from its branches. Tinsel cascaded down in silver streams, and glass baubles caught the firelight, and paper chains wound through the greenery like trails of bright confetti.
A box sat open on the floor, half-empty, its remaining contents glinting with promise. More ornaments. More tinsel. A small carved angel and a golden star.
Lily crossed to the box and knelt beside it, her fingers sifting through the decorations with familiar ease.
"We've had most of these since before I was born," she said, lifting a faded bauble painted with holly leaves. "Mum found this one at a church jumble sale before I was born. She says she paid tuppence for it. And this one." she held up a small wooden rocking horse, its paint chipped with age, "Dad made this when he was a boy, at St. Bartholomew's. They taught woodworking there. First thing he ever carved."
She smiled at the rocking horse, her thumb tracing the worn curves of its mane, and her face went soft and distant. She was not seeing the ornament, Severus realised. She was seeing all the Christmases it represented, all the years of trees and fires and family, all the memories layered onto this small wooden thing like coats of varnish.
She was everything right.
The thought came unbidden, sharp and clear as a bell. He watched her cradle the ornament in her palms, watched the firelight dance across her face, and he knew it with a certainty that hurt.
She was everything right, and good, and deserving. She deserved this house with its warmth and its tree and its family heirlooms passed down through generations. She deserved parents who loved her, a sister who shared her blood, a life full of ordinary magic, the magic of belonging, of being wanted, of having a place in the world where she fit.
She deserved to be loved. And she was.
His gaze drifted to the tree. The baubles hung at different heights, catching the light at different angles, each one a small sphere of reflected fire. In one of them, a deep red globe near the centre of the tree, he saw his own face staring back.
The reflection was distorted, stretched and curved by the ornament's shape, but he recognised himself. The lank dark hair. The sallow skin. The hollows under his eyes, the sharpness of his cheekbones, the thin line of his mouth, that horrible nose. He looked wrong. Like something that had crawled out of the shadows and did not belong in all this light.
Of course.
Of course there was something wrong with him. He had always known it, somewhere beneath the defiance and the anger and the desperate, clinging pride. It was fundamental and unfixable. Some flaw written into his very being that marked him as undeserving, as unworthy, as wrong.
The ornament swayed slightly, and his reflection rippled, broke apart, reformed. For a moment it almost seemed to be laughing at him.
"Sev?"
He blinked. Lily was watching him, her head tilted, the wooden rocking horse still cradled in her hands.
"You went away again," she said softly. "Where do you go, when you do that?"
He could not answer. Could not tell her that he went to a place where he saw himself clearly, too clearly, and what he saw was a boy who had no right to be standing in her sitting room, looking at her tree, wanting things he could not have.
"Nowhere," he said. "I'm here."
The front door opened with a gust of cold air and a commotion of voices.
"-told you we should have left earlier, but no, you had to watch the end of that programme-"
"It was only five minutes, Horty, for Christ's sake-"
"Five minutes that turned into twenty, and now look, the shops were picked clean, I couldn't find a single decent-"
They came through the hallway in a tumble of shopping bags and frost-reddened cheeks. Mrs Evans spotted him first, her eyes narrowing slightly as she registered his presence, but she said nothing, merely pressed her lips together and moved past him into the sitting room.
Mr. Evans followed, laden with bags that clinked and rustled, his broad face breaking into a grin when he saw Severus.
"Oi oi, the decorating committee," he said, nodding toward the tree. "Let's see what you've done, then."
Mrs Evans was already inspecting their work. She circled the tree slowly, her gaze moving from branch to branch, from bauble to tinsel to the paper chains that Lily had insisted on draping just so. Severus watched her face for signs of displeasure, bracing himself for criticism, but her expression remained unreadable.
"Acceptable," she said at last. "The angel's crooked, but we can fix that tomorrow. Lily, help me with these bags."
Acceptable. From Mrs Evans, Severus suspected that was high praise indeed.
Mr. Evans had already disappeared toward the kitchen, his heavy footsteps receding down the hall. A moment later came the sound of bags being set down, of paper rustling, of something being knocked over and a muttered curse.
Lily caught Severus's eye and smiled.
"He's wrapping presents," she said, her voice low and conspiratorial. "He always insists on doing it himself. Says Mum wraps them too neat and it takes all the fun out of unwrapping."
From upstairs came a thump, followed by the muffled sound of Petunia's voice raised in protest.
Mrs Evans sighed and looked at the ceiling like she could look through it. "What now?" she muttered, already moving toward the stairs. "That girl and her dramatics, I swear to God…"
She climbed the stairs with the heavy tread of a woman who had done this a thousand times before and expected to do it a thousand times more. A door opened somewhere above, and then Mrs Evans's voice, sharp and questioning, and Petunia's rising to meet it in that particular pitch of adolescent grievance.
Lily rolled her eyes. "Probably still about that boy. Mike Sowkins. She's been mooning over him for weeks, and now apparently he's asked Jennifer Latts to the Christmas dance instead." She shook her head. "As if any of it matters."
Severus said nothing. He was already moving toward the hallway. He had stayed too long. The tree was decorated, the parents were home, and whatever fragile excuse he had for being here had evaporated.
"You're going?" Lily's voice was small.
"I should."
She did not argue. Perhaps she understood, or perhaps she was simply tired. Either way, she followed him to the hallway and watched as he pulled on his coat.
He was reaching for the door handle when the kitchen door creaked open.
"Oi. Severus."
Mr. Evans's head appeared in the gap, his hair mussed and still red from outside. He jerked his chin toward the kitchen.
"Come here a minute."
It was not a request.
Severus glanced at Lily, who shrugged, she seemed as surprised as he was, and then made his way down the hall to the kitchen door. Lily's father stepped back to let him in, and Severus stopped dead on the threshold.
The kitchen table had been transformed into a battlefield.
Wrapping paper covered every inch of it, sheets of red and green and gold, some smooth, some crumpled, some torn into ragged strips. Ribbons curled across the chaos like party streamers after a hurricane. Scissors lay abandoned amid the carnage, along with three different rolls of tape, a ball of twine, and what appeared to be a small mountain of gift tags. And scattered among it all, half-hidden by the paper, were the presents themselves: small boxes and lumpy packages, some neatly wrapped (Mrs Evans's work, no doubt, done earlier and now buried), others bearing the distinctive marks of Mr. Evans's technique, crooked seams, excessive tape, corners that bulged where they should have been crisp.
"Don't mind the mess," Lily's father said, though his tone suggested he rather enjoyed it. "Hortense will have my head when she sees it, but that's half the fun, isn't it?"
He moved past Severus to the stove, where a kettle sat cold and unused, and then to the door that led to the small back garden. He paused there, one hand on the handle, and seemed to be choosing his words.
"Right, so." He cleared his throat. "I've run a bath. Hot water. Was going to have one myself, but then I remembered I've got to sort something out back, the bins, you know, they've been knocked about again, probably foxes, anyway, it'll go cold if no one uses it, and it seems a waste, so." He shrugged, not quite meeting Severus's eyes. "If you wanted. No sense letting good hot water sit."
The words hung in the air between them.
Severus stood still, his hands clenched at his sides, a feeling hot and prickly rising in his chest. He knew what this was. Knew that there were no foxes in the bins, no urgent task in the back garden. Knew that Lily's father had drawn that bath deliberately, intentionally, for him, for the dirty, skinny, shivering boy who had turned up on his doorstep like a stray.
Charity. That was what this was. Charity dressed up in excuses, wrapped in a thin pretence of coincidence so that Severus could accept it without having to admit what he was accepting.
He should be grateful. He knew he should be grateful. At Spinner's End, there was only cold water, water that came from the tap in a trickle, water that turned his skin to gooseflesh and made his teeth chatter, water that he avoided as much as possible in winter because the shock of it was almost worse than staying dirty. A hot bath was a luxury beyond imagining. A hot bath was something he had not had in months, perhaps longer.
But the offer burned.
Felt like an acknowledgment of how far he had fallen, how low he had sunk, how obvious his need had become. He wanted to refuse. Wanted to draw himself up and say no thank you, I'm fine, I don't need your charity. Wanted to preserve some scrap of dignity, some illusion that he was not as desperate as he so clearly was.
But his fingers ached. His skin itched with weeks of grime. And the thought of hot water, of sinking into warmth, of letting it seep into his frozen bones, was almost too much to bear.
Mr. Evans was watching him. Not staring, not demanding, just watching, with that same steady gaze he had turned on Severus at the dinner table.
"There's another thing," Lily's father said, before Severus could find his voice. He crossed to a corner of the kitchen where a cardboard box sat half-hidden behind the bin. "Mate of mine at the works, Benny Storkton. Good bloke. Got about six kids, maybe seven, loses count sometimes because they're not all under the same roof, if you take my meaning." He paused, scratching his head. "But maybe don't mention that to Lily. She goes to school with some of his lot, and I'm not sure they all know about each other."
He seemed to realise he'd wandered off the point. "Anyway. Benny's always passing on castoffs, clothes and such. His older ones grow out of things, he hands them to us for the girls."
He nudged the box with his foot. "Thing is, he's got boys as well as girls, and sometimes things get mixed up. Found these in the last lot." He bent down, rummaged for a moment, and came up with a bundle of fabric. "Jumpers, mostly. Couple of shirts. A pair of trousers. Some other stuff. Nothing fancy, mind, but they're in decent nick. Thought maybe…" He shrugged again, that same awkward, deliberate casualness. "Well. No use to us, are they? Might as well go to someone who can wear them."
He held out the bundle.
Severus stared at it. Stared at the jumpers, wool, thick, in dark colours that would not show dirt, and the shirts beneath them, and felt his throat close up.
Castoffs. Hand-me-downs. Charity.
Lily's father did not push. Did not insist.
It was a kindness. A careful, deliberate kindness, wrapped in the same rough packaging as the presents on the table.
Severus did not know what to say. The words tangled somewhere between his chest and his throat, and before he could unknot them, Joe Evans had set the clothes on the kitchen chair and clapped him on the shoulder before he could move away.
"Take care, lad."
He could say thank you. It was only two words. People said them all the time, meaningless as breathing. But the words would not come, because they were not meaningless, because they would be an admission, because he would rather choke.
He took the bath.
He did not decide to take it, not consciously, not in any way he could have articulated. One moment he was standing in the kitchen with his fists clenched and his pride screaming at him to refuse, and the next he was going through the door, following Mr. Evans's muttered directions to the bathroom.
The room was small and cramped, the walls completley covered in tiles. A toilet stood in one corner, a sink in another, and between them, vast and impossible and steaming gently in the cool air, sat the bath.
It was full nearly to the brim. The water was clouded with something that might have been soap or might have been bath salts, and tendrils of steam rose from its surface, curling toward the ceiling like smoke. A towel had been laid out on a wooden stool beside the tub, rough and faded but clean, so clean, and next to it sat a bar of soap, worn down to an oval.
Severus stood in the doorway and stared.
He locked the door. Stripped off his clothes, peeling away the layers until he stood shivering in the chill air, his skin prickling with gooseflesh. He did not look at himself. Did not want to see the sharp jut of his ribs, the bruises fading to yellow on his arms, the angry red of of his fingers and toes. He knew what he looked like. Knowing was enough.
The water was almost too hot.
He gasped as he lowered himself in, his body jerking instinctively away from the heat, but he forced himself to continue, inch by inch. By the time he was fully submerged, his skin had turned pink and his breath was coming in short, sharp pants, and the heat was everywhere, surrounding him, holding him, seeping into places he had forgotten could feel warm.
He closed his eyes.
For a long moment, he simply lay there, letting the water do its work. It lapped against his chin, against his ears, muffling the sounds of the house, the distant murmur of voices, the creak of floorboards, the ordinary noises of a family preparing for Christmas. Here, in this small tiled room, there was only the water and the warmth and the slow unknotting of muscles that had been clenched for weeks.
Then he began to scrub.
He scrubbed until his skin was raw. Until it hurt. Until the pain felt like penance, like punishment, like something he deserved for being here at all, for accepting this charity, this kindness, this thing he had not earned and could not repay.
The water had gone tepid by the time he stopped.
He pulled himself out of the bath, his limbs heavy and strange, and reached for the towel. It was rougher than he had expected, the fibres coarse against his sensitised skin, but it was dry and it was warm and he pressed his face into it for just a moment, breathing in the smell of soap and clean cotton.
His clothes lay in a heap on the floor.
He stared at them, the threadbare trousers, the stained shirt, the pants and vest that had been washed so many times they were more hole than fabric, and felt it curdle in his stomach. They were filthy. He could see it now, with his skin scrubbed clean, could smell the weeks of wear that clung to the fabric like a second skin. Putting them back on would undo everything.
But they were his.
He dressed slowly, pulling on each item with the grim resignation of a soldier donning armour. The fabric felt worse than he remembered, scratchy, damp with the steam from the bath, clinging to his clean skin in ways that made him want to claw it off. But he bore it. Had borne worse. Would bear worse still.
The new clothes were waiting in the kitchen.
Lily's father had left them on the chair by the back door, the jumpers folded neatly, the shirts stacked beneath them, a pair of thick wool socks placed on top like an afterthought. They looked warm. They looked whole. They looked like something a normal boy might wear, a boy who had a family and a home and a right to exist in the world.
He walked past them.
His coat hung on the rack by the front door, and he pulled it on with hands that trembled, from cold, he told himself, only from cold. He did not say goodbye to Lily. Did not thank her father for the bath or Mrs Evans for tolerating his presence. Did not do any of the things a decent person would do, because he was not decent, had never been decent, and pretending otherwise was a cruelty to everyone involved.
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
The cold was worse than before, sharper, somehow, the temperature having dropped while he was inside. His wet hair clung to his forehead and the back of his neck, and within moments the water began to trickle down beneath his collar, icy rivulets tracing paths along his spine. He should have dried it properly. Should have stayed by the fire until it was no longer dripping. Should have done a hundred things differently, but it was too late now.
He walked.
The Muggles bustled past him, laden with shopping bags, blind to anything beyond their small material lives. In less than two years, he would be gone from all of this. He would learn things they could not imagine. He would become someone they could not touch. The thought was the only important thing to call his own.
And he was walking home.
The first snowflake landed on his cheek.
He stopped. Looked up. The sky had darkened to a deep blue, and from it fell snow, soft, silent, impossibly white against the grey of Cokeworth. It drifted down in lazy spirals, catching the light from the streetlamps, settling on the pavement and the rooftops and the hunched shoulders of his too-thin coat.
The first snow of the year.
It fell on his wet hair and melted, adding to the cold water already dripping down his neck. It caught in his eyelashes and blurred his vision. It covered the pavement in a thin treacherous layer that made his worn shoes slip with every step.
And still he walked and it came to him that he had never felt so miserable in his life.
The realisation stopped him in his tracks.
He stood on the pavement, snow settling on his shoulders, and tried to understand it. Tried to untangle the knot of feelings that had lodged itself beneath his ribs. He should be grateful. Should be happy, or at least less wretched than usual.
And yet.
The snow fell harder.
And something hardened in him then. Crystallised in the cold like ice forming on still water.
Never again. He would starve first. Freeze first. He would make his own way or he would make no way at all, but he would not be grateful anymore, not for scraps from other people's plenty.
He tilted his face toward the sky and let it land on his skin, his forehead, his cheeks, his closed eyelids. The flakes were cold and soft and utterly indifferent to his suffering.
People might think that Severus liked black cats, and Lily liked orange cats, but it's the other way around. Severus prefers orange cats, and Lily prefers black cats.
Lily likes black cats because (at least before Hogwarts) she thinks is a proper color of a witch's cat. She bought a black cat as a pet for Hogwarts, hoping to fit in like a proper witch. She found out it was a myth but she still likes them regardless.
Severus likes orange cats because there's something so warm and cozy about them. The color of Lily's hair aside, orange cats are known to be kind of stupid, and that's what gave them their charm. The cat is an exact opposite of him and that's why he likes them so much.
Later in life, whenever they'll see a black or orange cat, it reminds them of the other.