Chapter 13
It was a gray, cold day. He knew the ceiling in the Great Hall was enchanted to reflect the weather outside, but he was beginning to think the weather itself was enchanted to reflect his own sour mood. October was nearly over, and it felt as if he’d be stuck in this dreary purgatory for months.
Remus had gone home, genuinely, for once. He was visiting his mother, spending a few days there recovering from the incident. It was probably for the best, but James missed him. The dorm felt strange, with just Peter and Alex, the latter seeming thoroughly baffled by recent developments.
To his credit, he didn’t try to get involved. Just kept his head down and let James stew in his own hostility.
Alex was gone, doing whatever it was he did during the day, so it was just Peter who was witnessing James’s sulk. He was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, listlessly throwing a quaffle into the air and catching it with a dull smack. At least he still had quidditch.
A sound at the door made him startle and he shot to his feet as an achingly familiar body filled the doorway.
“I’m just here to grab my things,” Sirius said, his hands in the air to show he was wandless.
James swallowed, watching him closely. Then, as if Sirius wasn’t even there, he turned away, staring out of the window with determined focus. A few moments passed before Sirius spoke again.
“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” Sirius’s voice held no emotion but bitterness.
“Not if I can help it,” James said, forcing himself to hold his ex-best friend’s gaze.
“James,” Peter said, placatingly, but James had had enough.
“Come on, Pete, even you knew this was wrong,” he shook his head, trying to clear his mind of the thick mud of anger that had covered every corner since that night. “I just spent so long thinking you had a fucking conscience, Black. So long thinking that you were a good fucking person. And I was wrong.”
“Since when were you Snape’s biggest fan, James?” Sirius snapped his leash on his anger having been held too long. “He was trying to expose Remus, he’s been cursing muggleborns, he’s… What changed? When did we stop trying to fight back against that shit?”
“Do you know what would have happened, if Moony’d killed Snape? Or worse, turned him? He would have been executed by the Ministry. And you?” James nearly spat the next words. “You’d probably have gotten an Order of Merlin for exposing him.”
“That’s not fair,” Sirius said, his voice trembling. “I wouldn’t have let that happen, I wouldn’t have let Remus take the fall for that.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it!” James shouted, not caring in the slightest who might hear him. “You think you’re this impossible genius with a solution to every problem, and you’re not, Sirius. And you know what, it’s my fault, too. I’ve stood up for you at every point. I’ve made excuses for you for years. And now, when you go too fucking far, it’s my fault, too. That’s why I stopped it. That’s why I’ll stop you if I have to.”
“Fine.” Sirius was barely audible. “Stop what you want. I’m done.”
He grabbed his trunk, not bothering to see what was even inside, and opened the door with a loud bang. It was a few moments before James could no longer hear the thumps of his trunk on the stairs or the blood roaring in his ears.
Instead, all he could hear was the deep sigh of Peter Pettigrew.
“What?” James asked, still seething.
“Don’t take this out on me,” Peter snapped, with uncharacteristic bite. “I’m on your side.”
James didn’t have a clue about sides anymore. He would have said he was on the side of his friends, the side of the Marauders. The side of good and fun, with perhaps a side of well-earned mischief. He wanted, earnestly, to be on the side of love and light that his parents had raised him on. He wanted to fight for peace and justice and equality.
He’d thought, for a long time, that Sirius would be his ally in that fight. Be the person standing right next to him, the person he couldn’t live without.
Remus had barely spoken at all since the incident. The prank. James didn’t blame him. He wanted to burn out his own insides with the knowledge of what had happened, and he didn’t have half the baggage that Remus had.
Remus had nearly killed Snape. Remus had nearly killed James. And it had happened because Sirius had made it happen. How were they supposed to get over that?
How could anyone?
***
“Herbology? Herbology is your favourite lesson?” Lily asked, unable to smother the incredulousness in her tone.
“Is that so hard to believe?” Sirius said, with something resembling a smile.
“I just, it’s so…dull. I mean, it’s about plants, Sirius.”
“Fuck, really? I must have missed that.” He made the motion of wiping sweat off his brow in relief. “You really saved me some embarrassment there, Evans.”
“How can it possibly be that interesting to you?” She asked. If he’d been of a mind to share, Sirius might have mentioned how much she reminded him of James in that moment. Both like a dog with a bone.
“Don’t you like potions?” He countered. “That’s just throwing things in a cauldron and waiting for something to happen.”
“And that’s why you’re shit at potions,” she said, virtuously.
They were sitting in an odd, seldom-used corridor that had curved enough to create a small window nook. It afforded them both enough space to sit comfortably, with Sirius practically lounging against the cold stone. If it wasn’t for the deep purple bags under his eyes, he almost looked normal.
“I don’t need you to chaperone me, you know,” he said, after a brief pause. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. Well, more stupid,” he amended.
“I’m not chaperoning you,” she said, shrugging.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“Good. I don’t have any for you.” She chewed the end of her quill without looking at him.
“I thought you were nice.”
Lily looked up and saw that his brows were furrowed as if he really couldn’t fathom a reason she’d want to sit with him.
“Sirius,” she started, gently. “The fact that I’m sitting with you while you happen to not have any other friends available doesn’t mean that I’m sitting with you because you don’t have any other friends available.”
“So you’d have sat with me a week ago?” He asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Nope,” she said, popping the ‘p’. “Because then I would have had to sit with James Potter.”
Sirius laughed, but it was hollow, his eyes darkening. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened between the Gryffindor boys, or what it had to do with Severus, but not one of them was talking. And, if that was how they wanted it, all she could do was work with the information in front of her. Which currently made it seem like Severus and Potter had entered into some kind of unholy alliance against Sirius, disturbing her enough to stay out of the whole situation.
She rolled up the essay she’d made hardly any headway on and took out the Daily Prophet from her bag. She hadn’t had a chance to read much that morning, having already been running too late to do much more than gulp some tea and eat a bite of muffin.
Lily was flipping through the pages, past the front page news of more Ministry raids on suspected Death Eater locations, and gasped as she read the headline on page eleven. Sirius’s head snapped up, immediately.
“What is it?” He asked, sounding as if he was bracing himself for even more bad news.
“The… The Muggleborn Fairness Act,” she said, feeling dizzy. The act that had been in talk since before school had started, that the Wizarding Education Committee had been so staunchly opposed. The one that would limit the amount of muggleborn students accepted into Hogwarts each year. The one that would limit the amount of people like her.
“It’s not…It hasn’t passed…” Sirius said, but it sounded more like a prayer than a statement.
Wordlessly, she passed the paper to Sirius. The MFA hadn’t passed. But, taking up a full page was a new, shining advertisement for the act, proudly paid for by the Wizarding Education Committee. The tagline danced across the top of the page with a cruel levity. Fair is Fair.
“How is this possible?” He said, after scanning the page for a few moments. “They…They must know how insane this is. Doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone with a brain know that’s now how this works?”
Lily just shook her head, looking at the front of the paper that Sirius held in his hands. The Ministry performs raids to find the locations of suspected Death Eaters. She might have laughed. It was becoming very obvious to her that she knew exactly where to find Death Eaters–in the Ministry. At the Prophet. At Hogwarts.
“This means it will actually go to court,” she said, softly. “I’d hoped it would die on the lobbying tables.”
“That’s another chance for it to fail,” Sirius responded, his eyes flashing. “Which it will.”
She wished she could have his unwavering confidence. Or any confidence. But she wasn’t certain she had a shred yet.
“Dumbledore won’t let this happen,” Sirius continued, closing the paper with a decisive snap. “None of the teachers would. You think Slug would let anything happen to you?”
Lily laughed, but it sounded choked. She might have been embarrassed, if it weren’t for the fact she was fairly certain Sirius was at the end of a week even worse than hers.
“You’re getting protective, Black,” she teased, weakly. “A walking Gryffindor stereotype, you are.”
Instead of laughing, Sirius looked down. “Dunno about that.”
“Is that… Modesty?” She asked. “I might actually be sick if that’s the case.”
“Fuck off, Evans,” Sirius said, nudging her with his boot. She snorted but waited for him to go on. “Sometimes I wonder if the sorting hat was right, putting me in Gryffindor, is all.”
Lily nodded slowly. “I can understand that.”
“Really?” He sounded skeptical. “You were the fastest to get sorted in our year. The hat barely even touched that titchy ginger head and it was yelling out Gryffindor.”
Lily laughed, remembering how terrified she’d been on that day. It certainly hadn’t felt as fast for her, but she’d been told the same. Mostly by Severus, who had been devastated.
“I wanted to be Slytherin, at first,” she admitted. She’d never admitted that to anyone.
“Merlin, why?” He asked, looking at her like she might be diseased.
“Sev said it was best,” she shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot of data pools to pick from. And I’d met you and Potter on the train talking about Gryffindor, and you both seemed like right pricks.”
“I remember that,” he said, and the memory didn’t seem painful like the other mention of James had been. “We may, at times, have not put our best foot forward when it came to first impressions.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “That’s putting it lightly.”
They were quiet for a few more long moments as Lily studied him. Eventually, he looked up, catching her eye and giving her a strange look.
“My eyes are up here, Evans,” he said, pointing the end of his quill to his face. Lily rolled her eyes again and shook her head.
“You would be a terrible Slytherin,” she said.
“Hey!” He sounded outraged, which was unearned, in her opinion.
“How is that offensive? You hate Slytherins.”
“I don’t like being bad at things either,” he responded, with all the petulance of a small child.
“Sirius. You’re brave to the point of recklessness so often I’m not sure you know another way to do it. I’ve never seen you back down from a fight, even when it would have been a thousand times more prudent to do so. You’re not ambitious or cunning–don’t look at me like that,” she said, pointing at him, “you know it’s true. Daring, maybe. Intelligent, definitely. But not cunning. You don’t have the stamina for Ravenclaw or the work ethic of Hufflepuff. And while I’m still waiting to see evidence of your chivalry, I would say you encapsulate the rest of the House traits incredibly effectively.”
Instead of putting him at ease, her words seemed to have had the opposite effect.
“Thanks, Evans, but you don’t know the half of it. If I were half as good as that, I would have done a lot of things differently.”
She sighed. “That’s the thing I’ve never understood about you lot. You think bravery equates with goodness. The two have no effect on each other, just like ambition doesn’t make you evil. Amelia Bones is well on her way to becoming Minister of Magic at only seventeen, and you can’t think she’s evil.” She shrugged. “I’m sure there are plenty of very brave people who were only ever acting for themselves.”
“I really can’t tell if you’re insulting me anymore,” Sirius complained, but some of the light had returned to his eyes.
“Part of my charm,” Lily shrugged, looking out at the dark clouds drifting ever closer. They were silent for another few heartbeats before Sirius started packing his bag, placing her copy of the Prophet on the windowsill behind him.
“I’m off,” he said, unnecessarily.
Lily smiled and waved at him, resolving to stay in the quiet of the window for a few moments longer.
“Thanks, Lily,” he said, giving her a small, honest smile. Then, he was gone down the hall, and Lily was alone.
***
Lily went to breakfast early on October 31st, having been unable to sleep past four anyway. It was barely six now, and a Saturday, at that, but she was far from the only student hunched in the great hall, wrapping their fingers around a hot cup of tea.
The nightmares were taking their toll. She could still remember the dazed, absent look on Eric Turner’s face as he slammed the knife into his own shoulder. How he’d hardly even reacted to the injury. Like it was happening to someone else.
She’d heard screams in the Gryffindor Tower every night since then. They were usually over soon when the poor soul’s dormmates woke them before they could do anything dangerous to themselves. It was the others she worried about. The people who had their night terrors so silently they would escape detection–just to be slowly tortured every time they closed their eyes.
Madame Pomfrey had, apparently, stopped giving out vials of Dreamless Sleep. It hadn’t worked. It just made people harder to wake.
She could brew it herself if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to spend a second longer in her bed than she had to these days.
Someone sat near her at the Gryffindor table, and she looked up, reflexively. She met James Potter’s eyes and both sets widened, despite the relative normalcy about seeing a fellow Gryffindor sit at the breakfast table next to them.
“Evans,” he said, curtly, seemingly too proud to relocate. He poured a cup of tea carefully, and she watched as he dropped a full spoon of sugar in it. She’d never noticed him take sugar in his tea before. Not that she’d been paying attention.
They hadn’t spoken since that stupid night with truth or dare. Nothing had ever felt so far away.
“You should watch out, with Black,” James said after a few long moments, as if he couldn’t help himself. “He’s dangerous.”
The words hurt Lily and they weren’t even directed at her. She took a few moments to compose herself, taking a long sip of her coffee in the meantime. Then, she shrugged.
“Who isn’t?”
James scoffed. “Look, you might have fallen out with your mates and your boyfriend, but you can do a lot better than Sirius Black. Just trying to give you some advice.”
There was something in the way he said the words that made her hackles rise.
“I’ve never once taken your advice, James Potter, and I don’t plan on starting now.”
He laughed, coldly. “I should have known. One homicidal freak wasn’t enough for you, you trying to collect a set?”
This was more than she could take at six in the morning. “Just…” She started, a hand raised. “Just stop, okay? I don’t know what happened with the three of you and I don’t care. Stop trying to use me to hurt the other.”
James’s mouth opened, then closed again. A muscle in his jaw tensed. She’d never noticed just how sharp his jaw was.
“Have a nice day,” she said, without an ounce of credibility, and she got up, taking her tea and plate with her, moving pointedly down the Gryffindor table until he could no longer speak to her. “Oh,” she called out, louder than she really wanted. “And Happy Halloween.”