August 30, Fortescue's
Act III: Autumn, 1980
Book V: September
why, yes, that does mean if you're starting here you're gonna be hella lost
there's, like, boatloads of fic and 'what you should know about this series'
If you want a one-shot by me, try the Cobra series! They're fun!
"And ask him to tell Severus hullo from me, too," urged Sirius from out of nowhere in an unaccustomedly earnest and diffident voice.
Lily almost gave herself whiplash.
Of course it wasn't Sirius. It didn't even really sound like him; the voice's plaintive note not only raised it a good half-octave from any voice she should have recognized as Sirius's, but sounded natural. Genuine, too, not playfully wheedling. It sounded like real and habitual humility.
In fact it was his little brother, looking very tall and pretty in three-or-four-hundred year old togs, just as he'd always used to on Hogsmeade weekends. Today, though, the clothes didn't look as if he'd pulled a pleasing combination out of three or four different ancient wardrobes: they matched.
Also, his hair wasn't doing that fetchingly stupid James-thing—the one where an extremely vain straight-haired boy enchanted his hair to always look artfully wind-blown. She was sure Regulus Black had usually used it, because she'd noticed in her fourth year that his fringe and all of Jamie's hair had the same tendency to stay rakishly disarranged until a new gust of wind raked it into a new sort of becoming disarrangement, and stayed attractive once he got indoors instead of going limp and wet and clumping or, in drier weather, messy and mad-scientist-ish, like Sev's did.
She'd been exceedingly scathing at Jamie—or, at the time, Potter—about it. After which the tosser hadn't stopped using the charm, but had started playing with his hair a lot so it wouldn't look the same all day. Because he thought everybody including her was a bit gullible.
It was one of the things she'd learned to roll one eye at and keep the other out for. Jamie couldn't be helped but be moved by his feelings. They were usually stronger and worthier ones than vanity, but he'd always been a bit susceptible to things that were quiet and small, in more ways than she thought he let himself realize.
Black's fringe wasn't charmingly ruffled today, but very smooth and even, and his queue didn't have a single glossy hair out of place. He looked awfully formal, for a teashop.
Not to mention awkward. And secretly terrified, in an if-I-don't-admit-it-to-myself-it-will-go-away sort of way she recognized from scowlier Sev-faces.
Which was a bit odd on him, because if you asked Lily, Regulus Black always looked edgy. Or, no, not edgy, Sev looked edgy. Black had a softer look, as if he was always asking do you like me? On principle, you might say; it didn't seem to be about anything in particular.
Sometimes Lily had thought his face was just made that way. Like Sev's smaller smiles always looked smirky when you didn't know him. Or the way her school roommate Mary's air-cooled teeth (as Tuney would have said) and tendency to a stuffy nose made her tilt her head back to breathe, so that she always looked like a right cow who was looking down her nose at you, even though she was really a warm and lovely girl (despite being dim enough to fall toes over teakettle for Sirius three times in five years).
But this time it looked as if Black had something particular to worry about; he didn't look like a puppy who'd messed so much as a horse on the highway, with white all around his grey eyes. Madam Fortescue, the one he was talking to, was giving him an odd I know what's going on here and you don't smile. It was amused and tolerant, with a little something extra.
Lily had seen that something extra on Evan Rosier's face a few times, mostly when he was telling her something new about the mad way purebloods saw things. She'd thought it meant you ought to know this already, but then she'd seen Remus make the same super-patient eyebrows-up face at Sirius. Who, of course, said something stupid and got his head bitten off in a that's what I thought you'd say, when will you be better than this sort of way. Lily had realized then that it meant let's see what you do with all this rope I'm giving you.
Black must have been the recipient of that expression more than often enough to recognize it, because he looked deeply alarmed. Or, rather, he didn't exactly look deeply alarmed, but if you'd spent enough time with Sev you could recognize it. It was the look of someone who knew he'd swallowed his own foot halfway to the knee and was internally running on a hamster-wheel of dread, caught between the short-term terrified imperative to de-foot-ify his mouth and dig himself out of trouble at speed and the stubborn bedrock determination not to flail embarrassingly in public.
He did his obvious flailing in a perfectly appropriate voice that was only just a little hasty but giving off that sense of oh god oh god oh god what did I say she's going to kill me and I don't know why about as strongly as a scared skunk. "Er, I mean, I'm not sure what his title is, exactly? If he gets one. But you should tell him to! It's, er, it's a Slytherin thing, it'll help."
"Flora's a Hufflepuff, Mr. Black," Madam Fortescue said in a reminding tone, still wearing the Patience With Rope look.
"I know Florean's Hufflepuff," he assured her, still too hastily. Lily blinked a little; it actually didn't sound anywhere near enough like Flora's in Hufflepuff to make her think she'd misheard.
More than that, Black had put a sort of light emphasis on it that, for all his anxiety, sounded to her a lot like a Remus who was very firmly making a point and was only doing it in a non-angry way out of friendship.
"But Severus is Slytherin," he went on, semi-secretly anxiously again, "and if Florean sends a signal he's friendly with me and then I confirm it, Severus won't automatically assume he's an idiotic and malicious waste of space!" He beamed anxiously at Madam Fortescue.
Then he faltered a little, possibly because her eyebrows were trying to crawl their way up onto the ceiling. Collapsing in on himself a bit, he allowed, "Um. Probably."
Lily's hand shot up to her mouth, forcibly holding the snicker in. It was too bad Siri's brother was a muggle-despising pureblood snob (although certainly not, no matter how despondent Sirius got when he got really drunk, a murderous Death Eater). He was awfully cute, and it was good that Sev had at least one friend who wasn't sadistic, sleazily manipulative, or bossy enough to scare Sev into submission.
Which was probably the category she most closely fit into, herself, she had to admit. Even if she didn't want to be in it and hadn't understood how she was scaring him back in when she was doing it.
(Part of her felt strongly that she shouldn't feel badly about maybe having bossed him around sometimes; he didn't seem to have a lot of time for people who couldn't. And they had, she realized now, been sort of trying to raise each other. His parents had been worse than hopeless, and hers hadn't known the world she and Sev were going to live in. But they were grownups now. She'd let go of trying to mum him and force his choices back at that awful end of fifth year, and could only be grateful they were back, if not on the same page again, at least in the same chapter.)
She wasn't going to put Evan Rosier into the second category, because even if she was half-convinced he was the most manipulative person she'd ever met, she did believe he was genuinely on Sev's side, and she couldn't honestly call him sleazy.
But he couldn't count as a healthy friend for Sev, either. He thought everything Sev did was marvelous, even if it was as unexceptional as making tea, or utterly arse-faced. Maybe especially when it was arse-faced.
Probably the latter; she herself went a bit squishy inside when Jamie yowled humiliating and poorly-written ballads at her and shouted idiotic names at her in public, although she'd never reward him for it since she did actually recognize it as behavior a grown-up should not engage in.
But she knew James knew how she felt. And Sev was far more sensitive about other people's feelings than James had ever needed to be. He didn't always react well, and he could be as dumb as any man in some ways, but he was usually clear on how people felt about him. Usually because he automatically felt the same way back, twice as hard, and thought of reasons for it later.
She didn't think Evan had ever felt Severus was ever doing anything he ought to be discouraged from.
Except that he might, rather, just have been the most manipulative person she'd ever met and being all goopy on purpose to make Sev relax. Either way, Regulus Black, for all the bedrock snobbery that meant he'd never said two words to her unless forced, seemed like a much safer person for Sev to have around.
"You could write Mr. Snape yourself," Madam Fortescue suggested, less as if she thought Black ought to than to see what he'd do.
What he did was blanch and look appalled. He and Sirius didn't look that much alike, not really—Black Minor had a softer, more oval face, which was a good-looking one and still nicely pointy in the right places but didn't have Sirius's really aggravatingly remarkable bones.
There was enough of a family resemblance, though, that seeing him look horrified (and, clearly, horrified over a point of etiquette, not a point of fear) was just unutterably charming and made Lily feel warm all over and wish Remus could have seen it. It certainly made her feel better about what Sirius had done to her bathroom that morning, and goodness knew Remus deserved to have his schadenfreude tickled.
"Oh, no," he blurted. Then, pulling himself together, he tried to look less as if someone he was trying to impress had experimentally slapped him in the face with a wet fish. It was a very, very limited success. "Er, that is, no, Madam Fortescue, Severus wouldn't be impressed by that at all."
"Why not?" the proprietress asked. "It's the same thing, isn't it?"
"Uh," Black said blankly, his sad, posh Slytherin upbringing leaving him completely unable to put his finger on the very simple concept of 'Sev is disgusted by people who won't do for themselves.'
She left him explaining, instead, that if Flora-or-Florean just mentioned to Sev that he (?) knew Regulus, and then Regulus said yes-I-do-what-a-nice-person, Sev would understand that Regulus knew Flora-or-Florean and approved of him (him?). Whereas Regulus speaking to Sev himself would imply all sorts of importunate things, mainly that Regulus had the right to bully Sev, and then Sev would resent Flora-or-Florean for it.
And, Lily assumed, yell at Black. She further assumed that Sev yelling at Black was the outcome he most wanted to avoid, more than how Sev might feel about this floral person.
She did leave him to it then, though, because a waitress in cheery, glossy, orange-embroidered chestnut colored robes with short, fluttery hems scooped her out of the waiting area and led her to a booth.
Lily would have preferred a table; she liked being in the middle of things, able to turn and talk to anyone she knew. Since she was here to meet with an inveterate gossip, though, she didn't argue.
"By yourself, luv?" the waitress asked, putting down a menu and pausing with the second.
Lily smiled at her. "No, leave it, please, I'm meeting a friend, I'm just a bit early."
"Do you want me to wait until you friend shows up?"
"Oh, thanks," Lily smiled, "but she's not the most patient. Let's have a pot on the table when she gets here. I don't know her taste, though. What's good in this weather?"
The waitress was happy to be consulted, but in the end Lily ended up with a fruity green tea with elderberries. She wanted to send some to the little Blakeney girl at Hogwarts if it was any good, as a present combining 'congratulations on your prefecture from a former Head Girl' and 'sorry being impressed with my lunatic best friend led you to skip something nice and drink radish juice instead.'
Should she send it with a card? She would if it was most people, but since Blakeney was a Slytherin, would she be insulted by having it spelled out? Sev might have been, but Sev wasn't just a Slytherin, he was mental.
Calling Rita a friend was a bit of a stretch. Frankly, calling Rita a friend was an affront. It was an affront to wonderful people like Marlene and Remus and Ravi and wonderful pains in the arse like Alice and Sirius. Even to people like Peter and Mary who Lily felt vaguely obliged to be nice to even if they hadn't always been the best friends to her personally (she continued to hold that Mary was a wonderful girl. Having a pash for Sirius could derange anyone, even without everything Mulciber had done. One couldn't quite forget, though). Possibly even to twelve-year-old Tuney, although after that year things had gotten less friendly and more love-hate-stressful between them.
It wasn't an affront to Sev, because Sev had a strange relationship with warm words. Also because Lily didn't want to expose any of her easier friends to Rita, but she did really, really want to put Rita in a room with Sev and sit back with a bowl of popcorn.
Not even to get back at him for the last four or five years, although that would make it better. Only, she was almost sure that when Sev let himself fight with anyone these days, he made himself stop the verbal whiplash at first blood.
Which was as far as she wanted to go herself, thankyouverymuch, when it was just fighting for fun, but the boys on and around Spinners Row hadn't been anything like as polite or touchy as Sev's housemates. Lily would bet no one had invited him to a game of shouting-to-be-settled-honorably-through-footie by telling him his mother wore army boots in years.
Rita would be good for him. As long as she didn't go away remembering to bear a grudge. That was the problem. And Sev would stop at nothing when he really felt desperate (which was kind of chilling, especially in hindsight, however comforting it could be at the time when everyone else was being fluttery and useless), but he didn't actually approve of obliviation and wasn't very likely to use it just to help himself.
Lily was reflecting on how happy she was to be able to wholeheartedly believe that about Sev and how much she wished she could make her husband understand it clearly enough to subside rather than just backing off, when a dramatic shadow posed over her teacup.
Looking up, she saw a trim woman only a little older than her, with really solid face-bones accentuated into a mystique of near-androgeny by an amazingly glossy Beatles-ish mushroom cut and bright, acid-green nails a little longer than Lily would have felt comfortable with. It might have been those nails, or the combination of chartreuse blouse and dark amber cape, but her hair looked… brassier than Lily remembered. Or maybe she meant bronzier.
She didn't think Rita was using soap like Sev's; it didn't look unwashed. There was just that ever-so-faintly laurel color about the highlights. If Lily hadn't known wizards' hair and eyes commonly looked a bit strange, she would have suspected the same kind of hair-dying accident Tuney had had once, trying for a 'stylish' pale blonde that would have screamed peroxide to anyone who knew anything, if it had worked.
Smiling, Lily gestured to the chair across from her, but got exclaimed at and her cheeks air-pecked before Rita would sit in it. Lily would have just dived in, given the choice, but first she had to get through a fair few minutes of how svelte Lily looked for a new mother, where Rita found tailors that did Chinese collars, Harry and whether James was behaving himself (she said yes), and what tea Rita wanted. This turned out to be a smoky Assam that looked carbonated to Lily, apparently as a result of Bouncing Bulb powder, accompanied by some rather alarming-looking tea sandwiches.
Eventually, though, those rather long nails still piercing a sandwich-triangle, Rita pivoted from her apparently-entranced inquiry into how hard it was to resist the darkly-seductive lure of sleeping charms on an infant who didn't understand the difference between AM and PM and was therefore confused as regards to which four o'clock was the appropriate one for a light meal.
"It all sounds so grueling, darling," she said with a sympathy that Lily thought had some basis in real emotion even if it was drawling with cabbage-crisp enunciation and Rita looked as if Lily had been describing arcane rituals of Tibetan fishermen in Greek. "Are you sure you don't want to wait a few months?"
"It is grueling," Lily admitted, "and I don't think I ought to go take an office job or anything, but I don't like sitting around doing nothing but obsessing over the baby and tinkering with toy charms and babysitting the babysitters."
"That dishy Black boy's still hanging about, then?" Rita asked—disapprovingly despite her choice of adjective. Lily wasn't surprised. All their prefects had gotten tired of Sirius well before Christmas of their first year, even the ones who'd given him the benefit of the doubt about coming from a notoriously, er, traditional family. The ones like Rita, who'd been doing their OWLs or NEWTs the year they'd first encountered him, had all seemed to take his terrifying mix of naturally ebullient personality and loud dammit-I-am-not-a-dark-wizard defiance very, very personally.
Rita, unlike most of their prefects, had had a brother in Hufflepuff, and two sisters in Slytherin. She'd taken Sirius especially personally, telling him to his face that he was only showing his ignorance when he said being Gryffindor proved he was a good person, because both her sisters fainted in Potions when it was time to dissect things, whereas she herself ate hobnails and noisy, smelly, stupid little firsties for breakfast.
"You don't choose your in-laws," Lily replied, going for diplomacy. She could have reminded Rita that Sirius had been less of a universal pest once he and Jamie had stopped being wary of each other. Since the boys had, at that point, stopped being irritants in the common room and graduated to exploring the castle and losing Gryffindor oodles of points a month, however, she thought it better not to. "Besides, he is good with the baby. Not that I'd leave them alone all day, but—"
"Well, of course he is, with a captive audience," Rita opined, with an odd little jerk of her head. It looked as if she was trying to toss her hair, and Lily concluded she'd cut a lot of it off quite recently. "But talking of audiences."
Lily blinked at her.
Rita sighed, and flashed her an irritated and quite toothy smile. Which was exactly why Lily wanted to corner her and Sev and put a camera on them. "You said you had something quite new for me to show my editor," she reminded Lily.
"Oh! Yes, only I didn't know if you'd want—I mean, the paper, if they'd want something pleasant or controversial," Lily temporized.
"A product can't be popular if it isn't noticed," Rita didn't exactly answer the question, her eyebrow arched a bit ironically, "and if it isn't popular, it won't sell."
Not entirely comfortable with that answer, Lily nevertheless shrugged and, pulling her notebook out, asked, "Do you want them both, then?"
"Just read me out a bit," Rita waved a hand.
Lily opened the book, but couldn't help frowning. "If they're in my voice, though, you won't be experiencing what a reader does, will you?"
"Oh, I never do," Rita waved again, airily. "We think someone cursed me as a child; letters jump about on the page."
Lily stared. "But you're a reporter!" she protested. "You write!"
Looking amused, Rita reached across the table to pat her hand. "That's what dictaquills and recitaro spells are for, darling," she said patronizingly. "And editors, of course."
"…I love magic," Lily sighed. Most of the reason her mum had been willing to tolerate Sev, despite Tuney's stridency, was because of Gran's failing eyesight.
Back before the stroke that had taken her, Gran had been left to look after the girls while Mum and Dad had a weekend away. Lily had taken Sev home from the playground because he didn't look as if he wanted to go home much, but he'd ended up stranded with someone else's grandmother for over an hour, the poor boy.
Tuney had demanded that Lily and Lily alone help her cook, because Gran looked so tired and Sev was dirty and obviously wouldn't be any help no matter how he was looking to show off because he was a boy.
Sev had tried to go home at that point, although Sev never wanted to go home really. It hadn't had anything to do with Gran; it was because Tuney was ignoring everything he'd tried to explain about how he helped his mum in the kitchen and often cooked by himself all the time. Lily didn't imagine for a moment he'd actually cared about 'getting his grubby hands on Mummy's expensive modern kitchen things.'
He had cared about having his expertise dismissed and his offer to help scoffed at. Lily couldn't have guessed which he'd hated more. It was the saddest thing, how he'd never understood that Tuney just acted that way because she was lonely, too.
Gran had somehow caught his reluctance, anyway, and wouldn't let him go. When Mum and Dad came back, dinner was long since over but he was still reading A Tale of Two Cities to her and Lily, without any sign of impatience or resentment except for the many pauses to snort indignantly at the dialogue.
Lily had watched her mum's eyes widen in suspicion and alarm when they first came back, and then incredulity. Then, as Sev and Gran and Dad got into a (respectively whingey and amused) argument about whether or not it was acceptably frivolous to turn a major character into a walking pun in the midst of a heavy-handed argument about social justice, they'd softened, and she'd made them all tea herself and toasted some muffins.
Lily hadn't really followed the argument. Which had been frustrating at the time, but she forgave herself in retrospect: she'd been nine.
Gran had remarked later that evening, after Dad had walked Sev home, that she'd been in the middle of the book years ago when she'd had to give in and admit reading glasses weren't enough anymore: she'd never thought she'd have a chance to finish it. Lily's grandfather had been gone so long Lily didn't remember him, and the girl who came to do for Gran didn't have the patience.
It was Mum herself who went to Ms. Ellie to ask to borrow the boy in the afternoons and evenings in exchange for supper for the rest of Gran's visit, and Lily had never seen her bake so often before or since. She hadn't objected when Lily kept bringing Sev back after Gran left, either, just made all three kids tell her about the homework they'd done that day over supper.
It might have been more difficult for Sev if Gran had been able to make magic read aloud to her, but Gran would have been less bored and restless and itchy in her last years.
"Naturally you do," Rita said indifferently. "Isn't that what you said you'd be writing about?"
"Er, more or less," Lily didn't-exactly-agree in her turn. "I can start with that one, anyway."
She turned back a page, and read, "You have passed the Wyrm, and the chill in the wind has ripped tears from your eyes without pain: crossed the fields, and the sun has watered them with your sweat before you noticed. You have come to a river—a great lake—and though you're too young to give it terrible memories, it draws away your interest in what you've left behind, and leaves you with a safe and cozy boat, well guarded. You can see the fountain before you, promising you everything if you only dive in: health, learning, friends, the chance for love.
"All around you, the friends you've met on this journey are in your boat, in their own boats. The sparkling night water dazzles your eyes and you're swamped with feeling, with joy and wonder at this fair fortune offered you through no virtue of your own, this chance at more than you could ever have dreamed you that's come to you without your trying.
"All around you, your new friends are complaining about how they'll have to get wet to get everything the world could possibly offer them. They've come to the fountain because it's what was expected of them. They're disgruntled about how long it will take them to be allowed to risk their lives hurting each other for sport. They're wondering how much trouble their homework will be.
"This is what it is to come to Hogwarts when the only world you've known is muggle.
"Soon, you will meet Merlin in the flesh, and hope his wisdom will make sense to you one day. Your friends will note that everyone knows he's a bit mad, and hope he'll shut up soon so they can eat their tea. Soon, you—"
"All right, I see where you're going," Rita waved her silent, and tapped a long, bright nail thoughtfully against pursed, dark red lips. "Was that the pleasant one or the controversial one?"
Lily laughed, abashed. "Well, I thought it was the pleasant one when I was writing it. Fairy-tale tone and all, and there's a bit about the humbugs they have at the feasts in a minute. I only this week found out what they're for."
"The tone's rather accusatory," Rita noted, still reflective. "Could be offputting. Let's take another angle."
She tapped her lips a few more times, and took the notebook away from Lily. Turning to a fresh page and setting a quill from her own bag to hovering over it, she squinted vivisectingly at Lily and began dictating. "Dear… Asphodel. My mum wants to visit me at school and I don't know how to tell her the school is enchanted to keep people like her out and she can't call the right bus. What can I tell her?"
She turned to a new page. "Dear Asphodel. My boyfriend wants me to meet his mum, but he's a half-blood, screamer."
"A half-blood screamer?" Lily blinked. She knew one of those, of course, but didn't think that was what Rita meant.
"A screamer is an exclamation point, Lily-girl," Rita laughed at her, lifting the feather away from the page. "You have to tell the quill." Putting it back, she went on, "Should I bring butterbeer? Flitterbush sprigs? Dandelions? Do I bow or shake hands? Help!"
A new page. "Dear Asphodel, I'm a first-year. I've been doing really well at school, but when Professor em-dash told me to drink a potion I panicked and ran away and now I have detention. Asphodel, it has underline newt-eyes end-underline in it, screamer! I don't want to leave school, but all my friends are calling me a stupid pansy and my Head of House says I can't drop Potions for underline five years, end-underline, screamer! What can I do?"
She turned one more page, and speared Lily with a shrewd, challenging look. "Dear Asphodel, my husband has a new job at the Ministry and I'm very proud of him. But I'm also worried. I'm a muggleborn, and everyone in his office is so cool to me. I think they're telling him to be ashamed of me, maybe even that I'm why he has a hard time getting promoted. I know he loves me, but he's been drinking more and I'm afraid he's starting to believe them. I'm afraid this could ruin our marriage and I'm feeling so hopeless, please help me!"
Rita closed the notebook and slid it back across the table. She drained her tea, pocketed the last sandwich, and stood up with a wink. "Thanks for the tea, Lily. Same time next week?"
"Absolutely," Lily said firmly, all gleeful, bright-eyed butterflies inside. While it wasn't anything she would have thought of herself—or dared to think she might be any use at—she couldn't wait to get home and talk the sample problems out with her family. Jamie and Sirius could pureblood-proof her ideas, and Remus could help her find some sense to start with, and even Peter could tell her when her advice would be too hard for a nervous person to follow.
Although she wouldn't ask him using those exact words.
And someday, Harry would be a half-blood in the wizarding world. He'd be a young man, trying to make his way in a world of girls with agendas and criteria, maybe a world of cutthroat workplace competition that spun tidily around a network of old families and older ideas. There was also approximately a 100% probability, teenagers being teenagers, of self-involved friends who might care about him but wouldn't, as Sev might say, know how to be supportive social animals instead of normal human monsters yet. He'd have to deal with prejudiced purebloods and teachers who were there to make him grow and learn, not make him comfortable.
If the young men Lily knew were any guide, if the boys she'd known had been, Harry wouldn't want to bring every problem he had home to his mum. If she did this, he could have her help anyway.