It’s been half a year since they’ve last spoken, the longest time since they met before Hogwarts that she hasn’t talked to Severus at all. She knows she made the right decision to end their friendship—what had once been an anchor, a safe, hidden space, had become overgrown with twisting, grasping vines. She wants to help him, but that’s not a healthy relationship, and that’s not a friendship.
And he wants to keep her.
It would be unfair to say that’s all it was—a calculated, mature decision—because she’d been seeing where this lead for some time, and she hadn’t let go until that day. So there is anger, she admits, and betrayal, and bitterness.
It takes a lot of thought, over the summer, to keep herself from going to their old haunts, to avoid the places where he might be, although she never sees him there. She spots him only once or twice, a dark-haired shadow in the overgrown woods near Spinner’s End. The old garden shed, cracked and unused for years, puts forth foul smells and strange-colored smoke, but nobody bothers him in there. All down the street, the neighbours hear the same screaming fights from inside those walls that they have for years.
Things haven’t changed.
And things have.
It’s three weeks into the summer when an owl comes to her window with a message from James Potter, of all people. She considers lighting it on fire, but the message is polite, almost awkward. Despite the forwardness of the act, it is perhaps the least forward he has ever been. He doesn’t ask her to go out with him. He doesn’t ask her about herself at all. He talks a bit about the news; she’s kept up as best she’s able, having the Wizarding news sent to her house despite her parents’ quiet awkwardness and Petunia’s hate-filled glares.
It’s the most alone she’s been in her own home for years. Her sister hardly speaks to her; exits the room whenever she comes in. It frightens Lily that she doesn’t remember when it had started, or that she had been so preoccupied she hadn’t cared.
Now, she wishes she could find the words to mend things, but they are so far apart she doesn’t think they can hear each other at all.
But when she opens the paper, sometimes it has already been unfolded, and there are creases down the edges of each page.
In that first letter, James tells her a little of what is going on in his life—just the basics. A few sentences at most. But it is enough for her to read an answering, bewildered loneliness.
Everyone is growing apart this summer, it seems.
She writes back.
When they meet each other in person the next year, there is a palpable awkwardness. If they had gotten to be fast friends over the post, in person it seems as though the last few months haven’t happened. And yet—he reaches up to ruffle his hair, lowers his hand in embarrassment, and can’t quite meet her eyes—he makes an effort.
The continual feud between the Marauders and Severus’s Slytherin gang just… fails to start up again, as though it was that easy to erase. Maybe it is, now.
There’s a distance between the four friends that there never has been before—Sirius and James are no longer inseparable. Remus is hardly there at all. Peter still tags along with each of the other three, and that only makes it more obvious how little they are actually in each others’ company.
The Slytherins are hardly in the school at all. It’s no secret how many of them already are Death Eaters; at least, it’s no secret to Lily, but she is more aware than ever of the unusualness of her position; she’s seen and heard too much of them over the years for it to be a surprise now.
And Severus—he’s one of them, she knows. It should feel like a betrayal, but it’s been long enough that it just makes her feel sick. (The real betrayal was that summer afternoon half a year and another lifetime ago, when he said what he had said.
No.
The betrayal was that she had lost him long before that, and she still couldn’t figure out why.)
They avoid each others’ paths assiduously, but when they stumble by each other in the halls or meet each others’ eyes across the potions’ classroom, his face flushes with anger and shame and a piercing, driving ambition. I won’t apologize again.
That’s fine. I wouldn’t accept your apology anyway.
She tries to pretend she doesn’t reach for his gaze just as much as he does hers.