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I've posted a new chapter of Perennitas today!

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."

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