Work Text:
What Lily likes about Sev, when they first meet, is this. Here is a boy who knows what it means to be an outsider, what it means to be looked down on. Here is a boy who might treat her as an equal in the gutter they’ve both been relegated to. Sev is the first person to call her special and mean it, to tell her that she is not the only one. Lily grows up watching her father struggle for work, watching her mother struggle to make ends meet, watching her sister try to conform. Lily grows up knowing she is different; Sev is the first person who makes her feel like different doesn’t have to be bad.
What Sev doesn’t tell Lily, when they first meet, is this. Here is a boy desperate for friends, half in love with the first pretty girl like him that he sees. Here is a boy who has always wanted what he can’t have, who is drawn to brilliance because of how deeply he craves it for himself. Sev looks at Lily and sees beauty and wit, a charming girl who will grow into a powerful witch despite and not because of what she was born with. Sev tells Lily tales of magic and leaves out the prejudice. Sev tells Lily Hogwarts will be different because he needs it to be, and tells her she is special because to him she is the exception and not the rule.
Their first year, this is how it goes: Lily and Sev board the Hogwarts Express together, roaming up and down the corridors for a compartment. They settle in with a bespectacled, dark-haired boy and his arrogant looking friend. What Lily doesn’t know, at the tender age of eleven, is this: two of those boys will fight beside her. Two of those boys will become her brothers-in-arms, will risk their lives and their livelihoods back to back with her, and neither of them will be Sev. What Lily does know, at the tender age of eleven, is this: bullies aren’t worth her time. She and Sev retreat to find better seating after only a few minutes, Lily incandescent with rage that fades quickly back into nervous excitement.
After the sorting, after Lily and her fellow Gryffindor first years are led through winding corridors with staircases that move to the tower that will be her home until the day she graduates, after she and her dorm mates have chattered and laughed and tucked themselves under the covers of their richly canopied beds, Lily lets herself think of Sev. Sev; her first friend, the boy who understood her in ways that none of the girls she went to primary with ever really could. Sev, alone in Slytherin amongst children with the cold haughty look Lily is used to seeing on her disapproving neighbours.
The next morning at breakfast, Lily sits with Mary and Marlene and Arabella. The next morning at breakfast, Lily beams across the hall at Sev and waves a cheery hullo. The next morning at breakfast, Sev barely tilts his head in acknowledgement.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Arabella whispers as they hurry to Transfiguration later. “It must have been hard getting sorted away from each other.”
“What’s there to be sorry for?” says Lily, laughing, eleven and innocent. “It’s not like we can’t still get on after classes.”
Arabella, halfblood and aware of the whispers, Arabella whose parents debated between Ilvermony and Hogwarts for the entire summer, Arabella who begged to come here for the chance to be sorted Gryffindor like the much older sister she idolises, just shakes her head. Lily, savouring her first day of her first term of her first year knowing she’s a witch, tucks her arm through her new friend’s as they dart into the classroom. Lily, savouring her first day of her first term of her first year knowing she’s a witch, is one of two students who manages to make her match pointy by the end of the lesson. The other is that Potter bloke from the train; Lily, not one to be outdone, shows him up later in charms when she’s the first to make her feather float.
It goes like this: Lily falls in with her dorm mates easy as breathing, with her year mates less so. She and Potter bicker and snipe, she and Black give each other frosty glares across common room, classroom, and Great Hall alike, she and Remus are chums on the rare occasion they’re partnered in lessons. She and Sev study together when they can, breakfast on the lawn over the weekends, snatch time when they’re able. It goes like this: Lily falls in love with magic, with Hogwarts, with this world she was born to be a part of. When she lights candles in the dormitory on the odd Friday night, then for eight days straight in early December, nobody says anything about it. When she goes home for the winter hols and comes back without Christmas gifts, none of her growing group of friends care a whit.
Lily spends her summer hols roaming the woods with Sev, trading notes on their summer reading with Sev, debating potion theory with Sev. They live half in each other's pockets the way they had before Hogwarts and house loyalties started to divide them. Sev is quieter, almost grimmer, moodier than she remembers him being. Lily notices but doesn’t care, missing the ease of the magical world herself, feeling at odds slipping back into a skin she had shed when she left Cokeworth behind for the first time.
Their second year, this is how it goes: Lily and Sev board the Hogwarts Express together. Their second year, this is how it goes: Sev calls Mary a mudblood, and Lily might not know that slur but she knows that tone, the same one that adults use when they whisper ‘yid’ or ‘christ-killer’ behind their hands, like they think that covering their mouths will cover their prejudice.
Lily cuts him dead with her glare and Sev apologises until he’s blue in the face. She doesn’t want to hear it, can’t listen to him fumble through platitudes when he knows what insults like that mean to her, so she turns into the first train compartment she can find to make it stop. Potter and Black are huddled by the window, whispering together thick as thieves, heads snapping up as she blows in. Remus waves from the seats across, and Peter squeaks.
“Alright, Evans?” Potter drawls. “Did you get lost on your way to the loo?”
“Need a place to sit?” Remus asks. “I think Marlene and the others are just up the way.”
“Thanks, Remus,” Lily says, finally managing to draw up a smile.
She can tell by the looks the boys exchange that it’s shaky, weak, not convincing when she most wants it to be. Lily doesn’t want questions, doesn’t want the girls when they’ll be busy coddling Mary, is just about to get up and find some other compartment to hide in the corner of when the door bangs open.
“Lily,” Sev pants, pale face lighting up in relief. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Just let me explain, alright? It was a misunderstanding, you know I would never call you that.”
“That’s not the point, Sev,” Lily snaps, crossing her arms over her chest, uncomfortably aware of their audience. “The point is that you said it to anyone at all.”
“What did he say?” Potter asks, looking half ready to leap out of his seat. Black crosses his legs at the ankles, raises an eyebrow.
“It doesn’t mean what you think it does,” Sev wheedles, ignoring Potter, ignoring Black. “Please, let’s talk about this.”
“Fine,” Lily agrees, watching Sev sag in relief. She doesn’t move, waits for him to take a tentative step farther into the compartment, door sliding shut behind him. “So what does ‘mudblood’ mean then?”
She can tell from the way Black’s easy posture tenses, the sharp way Potter inhales, the way Remus shifts uncomfortably in his seat and Peter leans away from Sev that it’s not anything good. She can tell from the way Sev has gone shifty about the eyes that he’s trying to be shirty with her. Lily wants a straight answer, and then she’s pretty sure she never wants to see him again.
“It means someone with Muggle parents,” Sev finally answers. “Someone like you, or Mary, who doesn’t come from a magical family.”
“It’s a slur,” Potter adds when it’s clear that Severus isn’t going to elaborate. “It means someone with dirty blood, like having Muggles in your line taints the magic.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard about my family by now,” Black chips in, eyeing Lily carefully, like he’s not quite sure he wants to say this, like he’s not quite sure why he’s giving her his trust. “Slytherin, the herd of them, and convinced that the purity of our blood makes them better than the riff raff.”
Lily closes her eyes for a second longer than a standard blink, remembering the blue numbers tattooed on her grandmother’s forearm, the fathomless stare her grandfather adopts when he thinks no one is looking. Lily closes her eyes, remembering a war that had started with words like these, thinking of the history her father has told her never to forget and the atrocities her mother tries to.
“Right, thank you lot,” Lily tells James and Sirius. “And you, Snivellus, better get out of here before I start this year’s coursework for Defense a day early.”
Severus looks at her for a long moment like he’s waiting for a punchline, for a reprieve. Lily glares back, expression set, face carved from stone. Lily glares back through the sting of tears, until her sadness has dissolved into anger, until a sense of surety settles along her bones. Severus is no idiot, has known Lily long enough to recognise that she won’t be changing her mind. Severus is no idiot; he knows better than to try and call her bluff.
The compartment is silent as he flees, the robes he’d been sure to change into first thing flapping around him like the wings of a bat. The compartment is silent as Lily and Sirius eye each other, as James fidgets with the buttons on his shirt, as Remus pretends to read the book still open across his lap.
“Cauldron cake?” Peter offers, finally, holding out a slightly squashed packet, the first to break the tension.
“Got any chocolate?” Lily asks.
Peter doesn’t, but Remus does. Lily takes the bar he tosses her gratefully, letting the candy dissolve on her tongue. Lily takes the bar he tosses her gratefully, and takes the tentative acceptance the four of them offer her too. Lily could go back to her friends, to Marly and Bell, could let them comfort her the way she’s sure they’ve comforted Mary. Lily could go back to her friends, and pretend this never happened. Lily could go back to her friends, but she stays with these boys who could be new ones, poking holes in Potter and Black’s plans for a welcoming feast prank until they let her help with the plot, discussing her favourite science fiction with Remus, laughing with Pete over a game of Exploding Snap.
Lily spends her second year competing with Potter, bickering with Black, studying with Remus and Bell. Lily spends her second year planning elaborate hijinks in front of the common room fire, learning what the castle looks like after curfew, laughing until her sides ache with mates who love her because of and not despite everything she is.
“Whatever happened to the Snape boy?” her father asks her, over winter hols, when Lily comes stumbling into the kitchen for cocoa, her second night home. “You never mention him anymore.”
Severus is outside right now tossing rocks at her window, Lily doesn’t say. Severus cornered her in the halls last week to apologise yet again for the wrong thing. Severus has been begging for her attention but only where his new Slytherin friends can’t see since he opened his mouth on the train and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for the first time since she’s known him.
Lily looks at her father for a long moment in the moonlight streaming through the window over the sink, trying to decide what to tell him. Lily looks at her father for a long moment in the moonlight, trying to decide if it’s better to let him believe she’s finally found a place to belong or tell him there’s a familiar kind of war brewing.
“He called a friend of mine a slur,” Lily finally answers. “Because she doesn’t come from a magical family. And when I asked him what it meant, he lied to me. When I asked him what it meant, he told me that he would never call me that.”
David Evans looks at his daughter, twelve years old and already so fierce. David Evans looks at his daughter, and wishes with all his heart that she be spared from the kind of hate their people have always known in spades. David Evans looks at his daughter, so proud of the woman she is growing up to be.
Severus grabs Lily in the corridor their second week of spring term, trying to apologise yet again, trying to convince her that he’s worth her time. The stinging hex she casts is so strong it gets Severus an overnight stay in the hospital wing, fifty points lost from Gryffindor, and a letter sent home to her parents. Her father owls back a box of her favourite chocolates.
Lily’s third year starts like this: Sev glares at her across the train platform, the venom in his expression not quite reaching his eyes. Lily’s third year starts like this: Mary and Marly laughing over summer adventures while Bell sits looking grim.
“You need to watch your back this year,” Bell tells Lily as the Hogwarts Express pulls away from the station. “Snape’s more enemy than friend to you, and Araminta’s been whispering behind closed doors all summer about the kind of shite people like his mates are getting up to.”
Lily knows that Bell had to fight to come to Hogwarts, that Bell’s Muggle father is the easiest kind of target for people like Snape is showing himself to be, that Bell’s much older sister Araminta is an Auror in the Hate Crimes division of the DMLE and the things she would whisper about are the kinds of things that keep Lily up at night.
“We’ll watch each other’s backs,” Lily vows, while Marly and Mary laugh over summer adventures, while a grinning Potter joins them with his lot following just behind. “We’ll keep an eye out for anyone who needs it, yeah?”
“Yes,” Arabella swears, gaze drifting to their mates. Yes, Arabella swears, knowing what it means. Yes, Arabella swears, with the same conviction that Araminta wore on her face when she took her Auror’s oath with their whole mismatched family watching on from the crowd.
Lily’s third year starts like this: Potter comes to her in the common room after the welcome feast, looking humble in a way that’s fleetingly rare, for him. Potter comes to her in the common room, and asks her for help.
The thing about James Potter is this. Lily had pegged him for a posh tosser the first moment she met him, the cut of his clothes and ease of his bearing speaking to the kind of life she (and Snape) had never had the privilege of living. The first time James Potter opened his mouth in front of her, he’d proven her right, slagging off Slytherin in the tone of voice that people had used all her short span of years to imply that people like Lily (like Snape) were somehow less.
The thing about James Potter is this. He’ll do anything for a laugh, has a bad habit of cursing the younger students in other houses out of misplaced Gryffindor pride, because Black eggs him on, because his mummy spoiled him as a baby and he’s still learning the world doesn’t belong just to him. The thing about James Potter is this. He’ll do anything for those he cares about, and Lily has come to admire that in him, because Lily is the same.
“Remus is a werewolf,” Potter says, on their first night of their third year in the common room they’ve both come to consider a home. “And I want to do something about it.”
They spend all of their free time in the library, after that, James and Sirius and Lily, Peter sitting timidly resolute beside them. They spend all of their time in the library, slogging through outdated, unkind texts on lycanthropy. There is no cure and no treatment, seemingly no hope, until James stumbles across a passage that mentions animagi in a musty old guide to dark creatures.
“Of course,” Lily breathes, mind dancing over the possibilities, eyes alight with the magic that would be behind it all. “The transformation only affects humans. That’s bloody brilliant, that is.”
“Oi Evans, you do know that animagus forms are highly regulated? We’d be breaking the law if we tried what I think you’re suggesting.”
“As if rules have ever stopped you,” Lily shoots back.
James and Sirius grin, twins of each other, smirks like knife blades cutting across their faces. Peter’s gaze flits back and forth between the three of them, something scared and hungry in his eyes. Lily watches them, these boys of hers, friends in the last place she would have thought to look not so long ago. Lily watches them, something settling warm behind her breastbone at their willingness to take this risk for somebody most would call a creature.
Lily spends her third year digging through magical texts so dense they make her head hurt, whispering with Sirius and James in the common room and across the breakfast table, trading notes back and forth. Lily spends her third year cheering along Marly and James during quidditch matches, practising Defence spells with Bell, holding Mary while she cries over the names the Slytherin boys whisper at her in the corridors.
Lily spends her third year learning how to take care of the people she loves, learning how to let them take care of her. She goes to Potter for help in Transfiguration, lends him her notes for Charms. When he and Black hex younger students for laughs, she curses them back. Lily spends her third year growing up, slowly but surely, attuned to the rising tension in the corridors, listening to the grim letters Bell passes on from her sister, starting to figure out what part in this she wants to play.
In January, Lily Evans turns thirteen, adult in ways she shouldn’t have to be and still naive in others. Snape sends her a card with one of the school owls, the morning after her birthday. Lily reads the generic wishes for happiness, the scrawled ‘I am sorry, Lily, please forgive me’ at the bottom. Lily looks across the Great Hall at Snape, snickering with Avery and Goyle, and sets the parchment on her empty plate. Lily waits until Snape glances at her, glances down at what’s in front of her, to set the note aflame.
Lily spends the summer before her fourth year trading owls between James and Sirius, Peter and Remus, planning pranks and discussing readings, working towards transformation of a very specific sort. She meets Mary in the city, giggles over school girl crushes and gossips over grades, their mothers chatting distant in the background. Bell comes to stay for several glorious days at the end of July, Petunia glaring as they whisper over the Daily Prophet, over the rumours from Araminta that Bell brings with her, held closely to her chest.
Their fourth year starts like this: with Mary in the hospital wing, courtesy of Mulciber. Lily sits at her friend’s bedside, their second week of classes, talking Mary through the Potions she misses and coaching her through Charms, burying her fury because it’s not what Mary needs. Lily sits at her friend’s bedside, both afternoons for the two days Madame Pomfrey insists on keeping her, soothing Mary’s worries with one hand, burying her nails in the palm of the other.
Their fourth year starts like this: Lily signs up for duelling club, with Bell and her boys beside her. Mary who has never quite learned to stand up for herself, Mary who makes an easy target because of it, who will have nightmares through the rest of their time at Hogwarts although she doesn’t know it yet, declines the invitation.
“You don’t know it was Mulciber,” Mary whispers in the common room their third week of classes, buried in the corner of her favourite couch. “You don’t even know it was about blood. James and Sirius used to hex the younger years for fun on the regular. This could have just been a prank gone wrong.”
For all that Mary is not wrong about her friend’s tendencies towards violent mischief, her words make Lily’s blood curdle. What Lily struggles to remember about Mary is this: before Hogwarts, before her letter came, before she discovered the magic in her veins and the legacy that could leave her with, Mary never had any reason to be hated. Lily who grew up Jewish, Bell who grew up with a Black father and skin that marked her as different before her blood could even be called into question, can recognise the patterns.
What Mary doesn’t understand is this: James and Sirius are arrogant schoolboys still learning what it means to be self-assured instead of superior. James and Sirius grew up being told that the world was theirs for the taking. James and Sirius apologised for the right thing when she told them to be better, and Lily may be quick to anger but she is also forgiving. Lily could tell that they understood what they were saying sorry for.
Lily goes to bed most nights their fourth year exhausted, from ever more difficult coursework, from the ever more complex steps to the animagus process. She spends the entire month of November with a mandrake leaf pressed against the inside of her right cheek, all of January brewing for the final step to the transformation. Lily goes to bed most nights their fourth year exhausted, because the Slytherin students are growing bolder, because sometimes James and often Sirius can’t help but retaliate.
Lily emerges as one of the best duelists in her year, maintains her position as first in the class. She convinces James to teach her Quidditch over a series of long cold nights in December, flies with him and Marly on the weekends when she can. Bell comes back to school after winter hols stone-faced and quiet, holding onto a secret that Lily won’t discover until the end of the year.
“There was nothing I could do,” Bell whispers to Lily’s shoulder on the train back to King’s Cross for the summer, in an otherwise empty compartment, forehead pressed against Lily’s clavicle. “I begged them to let me stay, but Araminta says that the writing’s on the wall. There was nothing I could do.”
“It’s alright,” Lily whispers back, thinking of her father’s quiet resignation the night she told him about Snape. “It’ll be okay. We’ll write, you’ll come back once you’re of age. I love you, Bell, don’t you forget.”
Lily rides the rest of the way to the station, in the car back to Cokeworth, with her heart beating outside of her chest. Bell’s parents are pulling her from Hogwarts; Bell’s parents are taking her to France.
Their fifth year starts like this: Lily’s father hugs her goodbye on the platform, her mother presses a dry kiss to her cheek. Lily boards the train looking back at them, wishing she could be brave enough to tell them the truth. Lily boards the train looking back at them, wishing running was an option that could ever make sense.
Lily pins the Prefect badge that came with her letter to her chest as the view outside the windows transitions to empty fields, smiles with something approaching real delight when she finds out that her counterpart is Remus. Lily pins the Prefect badge to her chest and sits through the prefect’s meeting and tries not to think about what it means, to be made enforcer of a school tearing itself apart at the seams.
Lily leads the Gryffindor first years to the tower that night with a kind expression painted in place. They all look so small, she thinks, staring over their heads to Remus leading the rear. Lily feels fifteen going on fifty, suddenly, too big for her skin and too small all at once. All these children, hers to protect. All these children, and how many will make it through the brewing war alive?
Fifth year starts like this: Lily and James, back to back in a sixth floor corridor, caught on their way in from their first full moon. Fifth year starts like this: Lily and James, back to back in a sixth floor corridor, wands at the ready, bodies tense and arms steady. The Slytherin seventh years who corner them do not cast, wary eyes on the sticks of wood in their hands. Lily grins, something feral, something sharp. James settles back on the balls of his feet, crosses his arms over his chest, cocks an eyebrow at Avery out in front.
“The mudblood and the blood traitor,” Rosier drawls, as he strolls out of the shadow of a tapestry to join his fellow scum. “And where are the rest of your miserable Marauders?”
“Shagging your mothers,” Lily taunts. James barks out a laugh, sounding like Sirius, doesn’t take his eyes off the two pricks in front of him.
“How delightfully immature. You can lower your wands, you know. We’re not here to hurt you.”
“Oh?” James asks, nonchalant. “Then what do you want?”
“To give you a warning. There’s a right way of things and a wrong. If you value your lives, you’ll realise which is which without having to be told. Or, let me put it this way: don’t make Him mad.”
Lily doesn’t know who He is, but she’s heard the whispers. Lily doesn’t know who He is, but she finds herself desperate to earn his ire. She can feel James’s heart beating against her back, beside her own, can feel his breathing catch then steady. Lily remembers her grandparents, her father, every piece of gut wrenching family history she’s ever learned, every thing she ever thought might have been done to stop it. James bumps his elbow against hers once, twice; a question. Lily bumps back; an answer.
“You can take your warning and stuff it up your arse, Rosier,” she tells the older boy, calm, still grinning. “I’ll do as I please, and I dare you to stop me.”
“And you?” Rosier calls to James. “Or does the mudblood speak for you?”
“Like Evans said,” James calls back. “Stuff it up your arse. Although I’m not sure how much you can fit besides that massive pole.”
James and Lily flee, laughing breathless children, unaware and unafraid of what their decisions will yet entail. James and Lily flee, back to the safety of Gryffindor tower, back to Sirius and Peter waiting in the boys dormitory, back to Marlene and Mary all that’s left in the girls.
Lily writes to Bell the next morning, some of the humour faded in the stark light of day. Lily writes to Bell and tells her that Hogwarts has only gotten worse, that her parents were right to take her, all the things her friend needs to hear and nothing that she would want to. That night, on patrol, she takes the half-finished map with her, tucks the cloak into her book bag with James’s blessing. The worst she encounters is Snape, just before curfew near the kitchens. He looks at her with something approaching concern in the dark pools of his eyes, takes a half-aborted step towards her before fleeing back to his dungeon roost.
Lily takes a hex she thinks was meant for a third year Hufflepuff in the third floor corridor outside Charms two weeks before winter hols. James is standing beside her, still high off the effects of the cheering charms they’d been practising. Lily curses the sixth year Slytherin who casts it halfway down the corridor before James can even draw his wand, lets James drag her to the hospital wing without protest and grasps his hand back just as tightly as he grips hers.
Sirius tricks Snape into following Remus to the Shrieking Shack the second week in January, James snatching Severus back at the last minute. Lily, running late to meet the others from a Slug Club gathering she hadn’t been able to lie her way out of, misses the whole thing. They spend a tense two months at odds, Remus betrayed and James furious with Sirius in a way none of the Marauders have seen him before, Sirius remorseful and too arrogant to show it.
“I don’t understand what Prongs is so bloody mad about,” Sirius mumbles to Lily in front of the common room fire the night before their first full moon since. “He hates Snivellus just as much as I do, I thought he’d have a good laugh.”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe he’s mad about the attempted murder?” Lily snaps before she can stop herself, glancing over her shoulder towards the boy’s staircase, politely ignoring the guilt that flickers across Sirius’s too handsome face at the reminder. “Or maybe it’s about the fact that you almost turned Moony into a murder weapon?”
Sirius crosses his arms over his chest, mulish and remorseful all at once, clearly uncomfortable with the reckoning she’s forcing on him.
“Look, Padfoot,” she finally softens to say, because for all the nonchalance Sirius wears as a shield she knows how hard he’s worked to shed his upbringing . “For all that you hate about your family, their name means that the Wizarding World will always accept you. You’ve never doubted your place here. Remus grew up being told that he was less than a human being because of something that happened to him. Every day he gets to spend at Hogwarts, with us, is a day he never thought he’d get.”
Sirius stares at her for a long moment when she finishes, the firelight playing across his high cheekbones, casting his eyes in shadow. Sirius stares at her for a long moment, and Lily stares at him right back.
The patter of footsteps eventually breaks their stalemate, Lily standing to meet James and Peter at the arm of the sofa. Sirius is not the kind of person who admits easily to being in the wrong. It takes him another month of James’s best silent treatment, Lily and Peter’s pointed avoidance, Remus’s clenched jaw, to get over himself.
Lily, James, and Remus are in the boys dorm, two of them half-heartedly studying for O.W.L. ‘s and one of them pointedly not, when Peter comes through the doorway, Sirius trailing miserably behind. For the first time since Lily has met him, there’s a hint of humility in the line of his shoulders, something that looks like remorse in the set of his jaw.
“I’m sorry that I put you in a position to hurt someone, Moony,” Sirius says as the door shuts behind him, only his fellow Marauders left to judge him. “I never should have exposed your secret to someone who would use it against you. You’re one of my best friends, and I’m sorry that I overlooked your well-being to pull a prank.”
It’s Remus he looks to as he finishes. Lily and James, sat on either side of Moony, exchange glances behind his back. Sirius stays stock still before him, still in a way that belies the tension in his frame, expression belying the belief that they’ll turn him away for good this time.
Remus watches him, silent. James and Lily let the silence play out, Peter shuffling awkwardly at the foot of the bed they’re all perched on, never comfortable with conflict. Finally, Remus nods. Finally, the tension breaks
“Merlin, Padfoot,” James says, as Lily’s shoulders slump and Remus lets a half smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “And here I was thinking you had the emotional range of a teaspoon.”
“Fuck off, Prongs,” Sirius retorts, melting into his usual languid pose, smirk blooming across his face to match the look James is wearing. “It’s a tablespoon, at least.”
There’s an uneasiness that lingers about the Marauders for the rest of the year, despite the apology. There’s an uneasiness that lingers about Hogwarts, as the fifth years sit for their exams, as reports of disappearances start to litter the pages of the Prophet. Lily finds herself watching around corners, down corridors, keeps her wand up her sleeve and does not think about why. Lily finds herself counting heads in the common room at night, catches James doing the same.
She writes to Bell her worries over O.W.L. ‘s, the latest stupid thing her boys have done, who Marly and Mary are pining over. She writes about the sense of dread that wakes her up in the middle of the night sometimes, the weight of her worries making her breath come short. Bell writes about how desperately she misses Hogwarts, about her concern for Arabella, about the comments on her appearance she receives in place of comments about her blood. Bell writes about how much she wishes her parents would have let her stay to fight.
The last schoolboy prank James Potter ever plays ends like this: Snape hanging in the air by one skinny ankle, calling Lily the word he had promised he would never use for her. The last schoolboy prank James Potter ever plays ends like this: with Lily pointing a wand at him in the same corridor they’d started the year back to back in.
“It’s not funny anymore, Prongs!” Lily shouts. “Do you understand that? Snape did nothing to you, but you strung him up anyway! That makes you no better than the rest of them.”
“Evans,” James says, level, hands out palms up so calm it makes her want to scream. “You of all people know that Snape has absolutely done things to deserve my anger.”
And Lily does, really; remembers dabbing dittany on a cut across his cheek just last week, where Snape had ‘nicked’ him with a slicing charm cutting samples in Herbology. Lily has heard the whispers about what Snape brews up outside of potions, can point to half a dozen times in their shared childhood where the glint in his eye would be just this side of too cruel, where his fantasies of revenge were just this side of too gruesome.
“Evans,” James pleads. “You know who I am.”
And Lily does, really; James is the boy who has always stood beside her, beside Remus, who has broken the law countless times to save their friends’ skins. James is learning to leave his hotheaded, casually arrogant ways behind, learning to care deeply for those who most need someone in their corner. James has proven time and time again that he will throw himself into any kind of danger to stand up for what he believes in.
“You’re right,” she says, finally, lowering her wand.
Her anger is not for Snivellus, with his cold sneer and his sad eyes and his need to put down others to feel superior about himself. Her anger is not for Snape, with his too big robes and his greasy hair and the slightly hooked nose he tends to stick in the air. It’s for Sev, the boy who introduced Lily to magic, who told her she could be anything, who held her hand every time one of their neighbours threw an insult her way. It’s for Sev, who traded his morality for belonging without hardly blinking, when he’d once promised to always be in her corner.
“I do know,” she whispers to the front of his robes as he edges closer, as he carefully folds her into his arms. “I’m just upset because I’ve truly lost my oldest friend.”
“You have new ones, now,” James reminds her. “And I, for one, don’t plan on letting you go anytime soon.”
He keeps an arm around her shoulders even as they start their trek back towards Gryffindor tower, picks up their well worn disagreement on ballpoint pens versus quills just to get her smiling.
“Quills have more gravitas,” he says, straight-faced, as they round the corner two corridors over from the Fat Lady. Lily bursts into laughter despite herself.
Sev might be gone, but she has Potter and their merry band of misfits to take his place. Sev might be gone, but she has Marly and Mary and Bell who love her for exactly what she is and nothing less. Sev might be gone, but he made his choices. Lily can’t find it in herself to regret any of her own.
There’s a note delivered to her at breakfast the next morning, from one of the school owls. It’s written in a scratchy, familiar hand, and Lily almost burns it without bothering to read any farther than her name. The words ‘I’m sorry’ greet her when she unfolds the parchment, followed by ‘I never meant to hurt you’ and the rest of Snape’s usual song and dance. Three years on, and Snape still hasn’t grasped the crux of the matter. Three years on, and Snape still hasn’t realised that it was never about what he would and wouldn’t be willing to call her.
She doesn’t burn his apologies, this time. Instead she tucks the scrap of parchment inside the cover of her Potions textbook, as a reminder. James catches her eye as she does, cocking his head at her in a silent question. Lily grins back at him, lopsided, steady on the path that she set for herself in that train compartment second year.
That summer, Lily visits Mary again in Muggle London, has Marly over several afternoons to listen to records, finally visits the Potter’s mansion. They play two a side quidditch in his massive yard, Lily and Marly against Sirius and James, Lily and Sirius against Marly and James, Peter and Remus cheering them all on by turns from the sidelines. Lily spends that summer sun-drenched, happy, laughing. Lily spends that summer blissfully unaware that the other shoe has yet to drop.
Sixth year starts like this: Bell writes to tell Lily that Araminta is dead. There’s an article in the prophet about it, about the raid that claimed half a dozen Auror’s lives, about the suspicion that it was a trap. The article does not list names. Lily reads it at breakfast the second day of term, Bell’s sister a passing thought quickly dismissed. The letter comes that night.
Sixth year starts like this: James finds Lily in the common room, piece of parchment hanging between fingers gone suddenly slack, green eyes fixed on nothing. He takes the parchment from her, skims it quickly, perches on the edge of her armchair to wrap his arms around her, says nothing as she turns to bury her face in his side.
Lily asks McGonagall for permission to attend the funeral, expecting to be denied. Instead, McGonagall looks at her for a long moment with her trademark piercing gaze before agreeing. Instead, McGonagall arranges a portkey to the Figg family plot in South London. Instead, McGonagall accompanies Lily and May and Marly to offer her condolences.
Bell is a shell of herself, at the service, eyes rimmed in red and hair lank about her shoulders. Bell is a shell of herself, and for the first time Lily does not know what to say to her friend, so she does not say anything. Lily stands at Bell’s side as Araminta’s casket is lowered into the ground. Lily tosses a handful of dirt down into the grave instead of the flowers that the others offer, whispering the Mourner’s Kaddish under her breath for a brave soul lost to the kind of prejudice Lily has never lived without.
Sixth year continues like this: James, Lily, and Sirius standing tall in the middle of Hogsmeade’s main street, wands raised to ward off the figures clad in dark robes advancing on them. Sixth year continues like this: with a taste of what it really means to be at war. Lily ducks a curse, throws a shield up in front of Sirius on instinct, sweeps several second years out of harm's way with a well aimed spell as James wings stunners into the crowd of bone white faces.
Sirius covers Lily’s flank with a shouted counter-curse as she charms the snow piled up against the shops into ice daggers to fling at their attackers, pulls James back by his scruff just in time to avoid a jet of ominous green light. The shopfront just to their right explodes outward with a bang that has the three of them reaching for each other; Lily glimpses a group of terrified fourth years through the clearing smoke and plunges back into the fray with the boys at her back, anger burning bright in her chest.
Lily boards the train for winter hols two weeks later with shiny new scars across her shoulder blades, James hobbling on crutches beside her. Lily gives her mother a hollow smile when they reach King’s Cross, catches James’s eyes across the crowded platform as she hugs her father and finds her own melancholy reflected back at her.
Home should feel the same as it always does; Petunia greets her with a sneer, her father tries to keep the peace, her mother doesn’t bother. Home should feel the same as it always does, but the skin across her back is still tender, but the lack of letters from Bell feels like a chain around her neck. Lily tries to be happy, to be lively, but she no longer has pretence to cling to. Lily tries to be happy, but everytime she closes her eyes masked faces are waiting to greet her.
It’s her father who finally corners her, in the kitchen the night before she goes back to Hogwarts. Lily hasn’t slept a full night since she left the castle, finds herself filling a glass at the tap just for something to do with her hands.
“I wanted things to be different for you, there,” David Evans tells his youngest daughter, watching the way her shoulders hunch around her ears, familiar with what soldiers look like coming back from a fight. “I wanted so badly for you to find a place you could be accepted for who you are.”
“I wanted that too,” Lily whispers, squeezing her eyes shut, tears pricking hot against the inside of her eyelids. “I still want that, Dad, and I think I’m willing to fight for it.”
“I think you should,” David Evans says, knowing better than most what fighting might (will likely) mean, prouder of his daughter’s strength of principle than he knows how to express. “If you feel you need to.”
Lily goes back to school with that conviction burning behind her breastbone, sure now of what her place is, sure now that the world she wants to live in is one she’s going to have to carve out with her own sweat and blood. Lily spends the rest of sixth year ignoring the target she knows is painted on her back, too busy watching over her classmates and yearmates not yet aware of the targets painted on theirs.
Mary is attacked again in a seventh floor corridor the week before the end of term. James takes Lily to the Forbidden Forest that night. James takes Lily to the Forbidden Forest that night and stands with her, a silent sentinel at her side as she rages. Lily is back in the hospital wing the next morning, in the chair beside her friend’s bed, shirt neatly buttoned, tie perfectly in place, red hair plaited neatly back. Lily sits vigil for the second time in the past three years, jaw set, ready for whatever might come next.
What Lily is not prepared for (what Lily is not even sure, in all honesty, that she wants) is this: the Head Girl’s badge that comes tumbling out of her letter that summer, a shiny sign of the authority she thinks she would rather wield in the shadows, a concrete reminder of the decision she has made to fight. But there is this, too: Lily would rather it be her than anyone else. If Dumbledore wants to make a mudblood the leader of a student body tearing itself apart over purity, she would rather it be someone prepared.
Seventh year starts like this: Lily and Marly and Mary and James and Sirius and Remus and Peter, laughing over stories from summer hols in a compartment on the Hogwarts Express. Seventh year starts like this: with a grim undertone that everyone notices but none of them will acknowledge. Seventh year starts like this: with warmth pooling low in Lily’s stomach every time she catches James’s eyes.
He’s different this year, seems more settled in his body, still patently ridiculous but no longer ignorant to how the world works. Lily likes it, likes him, can admit to herself that the feelings aren’t exactly new.
Seventh year starts like this: James and Lily alone in the Head’s office, a pleasant but not unwelcome surprise. By rights, the badge should have gone to Remus. By nature, James is a better choice. Lily loves Remus, his ability to empathise, his quiet steadiness, the care that he pours into his work. Lily loves Remus, but James makes her better, makes her want to be better, and she likes to think she does the same for him.
“Are you disappointed?” James asks her. “That it’s me?”
“No,” Lily murmurs, shifting closer to him on the sofa, leaning her head against his shoulder. “You have this annoying habit of turning everything you touch into gold.”
He laughs, lets his head come to rest on top of hers, twines their fingers together and rests them on his thigh. The Slytherin prefects had refused to come to tonight’s meeting, Jerry Colchester from Ravenclaw had called her a word Lily would rather not repeat when she denied his request to swap patrol shifts with Heidi Beck from Hufflepuff, but with James on her side she’s confident they’ll come out on top.
Lily won’t kiss him for the first time until two days before winter holidays, in the corridor outside the kitchens after he gives over the flask of hot chocolate they’ve just nicked to a sniffling homesick Hufflepuff firstie, but the seeds have been sowed. Lily won’t kiss him for the first time until two days before winter holidays, but by then it’s too late to stop herself falling anyway.
Dumbledore comes to them in the spring, with his offer to join the Order. Dumbledore comes to them in the spring, while James is writing applications to Healer training programs, while Lily is writing her own to the Auror Academy at the ministry. Dumbledore comes to them in the spring, and asks them to risk lives already overshadowed by the threat Voldemort and his masked scourge represent.
“The two of you are some of the brightest, most selfless students I’ve ever had the chance to teach,” Dumbledore says. “But I need you to understand that what I'm asking comes with a heavy price. Please, do not answer lightly.”
Lily looks at James, and James looks at Lily, and the two of them turn back to their headmaster with the same answer ready on both their lips. Lily does not need to think. She knows that this is not a light matter, that it’s not about dressing up to play the hero. Lily is not so selfless as her headmaster would like to believe, not when being able to live her own life is first and foremost on her mind.
For James, the answer is no less automatic but the driving force is different. For James who has always loved his friends more than he cares for his own safety, for James who is pure of blood and pure of heart and so Gryffindor he aches with it, this fight is about choice. James is no more selfless than Lily. James wants to love the flame-hearted fire-haired girl sitting beside him without having to fear for either of their lives.
“Can we ask our friends?” James asks before they leave the headmaster’s office, something mulish about his face, like Dumbledore’s answer may not matter.
“They’ll want to fight,” Lily adds, crossing her arms over her chest, letter to Bell half-composed already.
“I’m sure they will,” Dumbledore says. “But I’d ask that you let me approach them in my own time.”
Sirius and Marlene are tapped over the Easter holidays, Remus the week after, Peter just before graduation. Bell sends a picture of a phoenix burning via owl towards the end of term. Mary isn’t asked, and Lily isn’t sure whether to be relieved or indignant, thinks that Mary is at least owed the choice when she bears the scars of more direct antagonism than any of them.
For Sirius, his answer is automatic as James’s was, as Lily’s. For Sirius who was born into the blood politics at the centre of this mess, for Sirius who measures his morality by the brother and the sister he found for himself in Hogwarts hallowed halls, this fight is a family matter. Sirius wants to clean house, to distance himself from the parents who never quite learned how to love.
Marlene joins the fight for her friends, for the cause, because she believes in freedom and free will and protecting civil liberties. Remus joins the fight because he owes his life to the friends also throwing themselves into the fray, because he is a creature with precious few other options, because the Death Eaters would use him as a tool and he’d rather live in prejudice than give in to the part of himself he hates the most. Bell joins the fight with the memory of Araminta clutched tight to her chest, as desperate as Lily to make a place for herself. Peter joins the fight because he is too cowardly to say no, because Sirius and James are indomitable, because he wants to be on the winning side.
Lily walks across the stage at the end of May to whoops from her friends in the crowd. She dances with James at the Leavers Ball that night, with Sirius, with Remus, with a blushing Peter. They trade sips from smuggled flasks of Firewhiskey, laugh until their sides ache, watch with their classmates on the dance floor as the banners turn into birds at midnight, one last Marauder’s prank to see them all off into their adulthood.
Lily wakes up in James’s four poster bed the next morning, traipses down to breakfast in his Quidditch jumper and applies herself to bangers and eggs with alacrity. Later that afternoon she boards the train for the last time, tucking herself into James’s side as they watch the scenery pass by, quiet in these last few moments of their school career.
Is it really so surprising, then, how their story ends? Lily and James, Head Boy and Girl of Hogwarts at its very worst, who grew up with wands at the ready to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves. Sirius Black, doomed from the moment he left his blood behind for the friends he considers family. Marlene McKinnon, who has never been very good at looking before she leaps to protect her mates. Remus Lupin, chewed up and spit out before the age of eleven, making the best of a series of bad circumstances.
This is how the rest of their life begins: Lily steps off the Hogwarts Express for the last time, James’s hand clasped in hers, Sirius just ahead of the pair of them, Remus trailing behind. This is how the rest of their life begins: the Marauders and their friends shout goodbye-for-nows and see-you-soons across the platform as they disperse.
Somewhere in the sea of students, Severus Snape stands waiting for the pureblood mother who gave her son his desperate need to prove himself and precious little else. Somewhere in the sea of students, Severus Snape watches Lily Evans walk into her ever after with the Gryffindor boys he never should have let her love.
What Lily learns, early on, what she never quite forgets, what she hopes desperately her son will remember as she faces the business end of the Dark Lord’s wand, is this: life is about choices. Lily does not regret the ones she’s made, even when they’ve led her here. Lily hopes Harry will not regret them for her, when he’s old enough to understand what his mother and father gave up for him. Lily whispers the sh’ma into Harry’s dark curls as green light washes over her, as she chooses to meet her end with the strength of spirit she has always, somehow, managed to keep burning.