When we got on the train in our first year, I noticed her. She tripped over my trunk as I was hauling it off to meet Sirius. I never talked to her much after that, though. I got lost with my friends, worried about which prank was best, or if Snivellus’ nose really had an implant like Sirius said it did. It didn’t, we dared Peter to ask him. She seemed kind enough, I glanced over her in my classes, saw her laughing with her friend Anna in the common room, but I never got to know her. That is, until our fifth year. It wasn’t a definite moment, really, but something within me just snapped.
Ever since that indefinite moment of realization, I have been rather infatuated with her. Not to the point to which Sirius exaggerates it, but this crush I had developed quite a bit. I know Sirius is right when he tells me to lie off, and it’s rather embarrassing when Peter laughs his arse off at me when I get rejected, but I can’t seem to stop. There is some driving force inside of me that pushes me onward, almost as if there are thousands of tiny hands shoving at my back and into Lily. I can’t stop. I simply can’t.
I’ve told myself to let her go, let all my attempts go to waste, but I just can’t. Kind of pathetic, right? Remus thinks it not pathetic. He says it’s romantic. Sirius and Peter think otherwise, and they remind me of it constantly.
I guess you could call it love, but I don’t let Sirius know that. He’d give me hell until the day I die.
He already does, actually, so in the greater scheme of things, it’s irrelevant to hide it from him.
Perhaps.
I’ll think on it.
--
She pushed him roughly into the dark closet on the fifth floor. Buckets clattering, and mops falling, Lily quickly shut the door before muttering a charm.
“What in the name of Merlin, Evans?” James rubbed the side of his head where it had collided with the wall on entry. “After all this time, this is how””
“I’m not in here to snog you James, unfortunately for you,” she paused considering her options. Looking around, she grabbed a bucket and turned it over to sit on. Plopping down on it, she grabbed James’ elbow and pulled him roughly to the floor.
“Evans, you could be a bit gentler, you know,” he said, ignoring her last statement and grabbing a bucket of his own. As he perched himself upon the plastic seat, his head bent to accommodate his height compared to the low, slanted ceiling. He could feel Lily’s eyes on him, which was a weird sensation, really. He felt like all she ever did was avert her gaze from him, and now she seemed unable to take her eyes off him.
“Right, well why are we here then?” James said, keeping in mind everything Remus had ever taught him about being a gentleman. He cleared his throat, his fist poised in front of his tightly closed mouth. He glanced up to meet Lily’s eyes and saw they were dark with worry; a sight he had not expected to see.
“Potter”er, James, there’s something I’ve realized”found out, actually,” she began; her voice tumbled off her tongue in a jittery fashion, as if her tongue was too big for her mouth.
“All right, let’s hear it,” James responded, crossing his arms across his chest.
“James, I”I don’t know if I should be saying this, or if it’s even my business, really,” Lily said, a noticeable shake having taken residence in her small voice. She paused, looking to him for reassurance.
James felt slightly short of breath, to say the least. Never once had Lily given him the time of day, and here she was asking for his. Her eyes were almost begging him for something”turned down on the outside corners, and wrinkled simply around the edges.
“You obviously are going to say something anyway, so just get on with it,” James retorted, his voice soft. He couldn’t help but let his guard down when he was around this girl, and apparently she had something important to say. He wanted her to feel comfortable, not like he was an arrogant berk, as she had said so many times. He edged his hand forward off his lap so it dangled dauntingly in the air, but recoiled once he realized that that was definitely not something Remus would see fitting to do in this situation.
She said quickly, after taking a deep breath, “James, I think Remus is a werewolf.”
James clasped his hands tight together as a reflex. He could feel his eyes growing wide at her revelation and a small shiver ran down his spine. She couldn’t possibly have caught on…
Could she?
He could feel his short fingernails digging in the tanned flesh on the back of his hand, but he didn’t let up on the pressure. It seemed to overshadow everything that had just been said, if only for a moment.
“I s-see.” James attempted to keep his voice flat, but failed as worry overtook his control. He relaxed his body, allowing some of the tension to flow from him, but his mind was still sharp. He couldn’t give anything away simply by his posture. But he couldn’t lie to her either. She looked at him expectantly, with her eyebrows cinched in a strange combination of suspicion and worry.
“How do you know that?” he asked quietly. At his minute confirmation, Lily visibly paled. After a few moments, she raised a shaky hand to her mouth and let out an audible gasp.
“Oh, James, how long?” She ignored his question. All of the air seemed to come out of her, giving her a look of a deflated balloon.
“For quite a while,” he replied.
“Well, does he know you know?” she asked, her voice gaining some strength. James looked upon her with weary eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to lie to her, but he also couldn’t bring himself to betray Remus. His head began to ache with worry as the two ultimatums weighed themselves heavily in his mind. Remus or Lily?
He stood up suddenly, casting Lily a glance of regret and said, “I’m sorry,” before he dashed out of the cupboard, letting the door bounce carelessly behind him as he sped away. How could he even have weighed the two? Remus was the obvious answer.
As he made his way up the many flights of stairs to the Gryffindor tower, thoughts raced through his head. Lily knew. Remus could be in trouble. How did Lily know? All that mattered was that she knew. She wouldn’t tell anyone. He trusted her.
He stopped walking. Smacking himself hard on the head, James tried to knock some sense into himself. He let out an angry string of curse words before finally calming down. Letting out a breath on which rode his nerves, he grinned. Lily wouldn’t tell anyone, save for Anna Boothe, but that wouldn’t matter anyway. The only people either of them ever spoke to were each other. As he began to think clearly again, he realized he needed to set things straight with Lily. He had left her hanging on assumptions and short answers, and he couldn’t have that. For Remus’ sake, he needed to talk to Lily again.
“Oi, Prongs! Didn’t know you took up talking to yourself. Scratch that, yes I did because you’ve always been slightly loony.” James turned to see a cross-eyed Sirius who was twirling his fingers around his ears in a mocking fashion.
“Snap out of it, Sirius,” James said, curtly.
Sirius moved his hands to face James in a surrendering pose. “Whoa, Prongsy, I was just messing””
“This is not the time to mess around,” James said, absently waving his hand at his friend.
“What’s got your knickers in a wad?” Sirius asked, his joking air having completely vanished and replaced by shock.
James looked carefully up and down the long corridor and saw nobody in sight. He moved a bit closer to Sirius so he could speak in a low voice, and said, “Evans knows about Remus.”
Silence was Sirius’ response. The look upon his face was strikingly familiar to the look on Lily’s face when she was telling James her findings--both pale and reminiscent of a fish out of water.
“Well, what? What do we do?” Sirius asked vaguely.
“I was just off to set things right when you started twirling your fingers at me,” James retorted harshly. Sirius had no response; he remained silent, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Taking his lack of feedback as unnatural apathy, James turned on his heal and began his brisk walk towards the broom cupboard he and Lily had been hiding in. He angrily shook his head as his feet picked up speed; sometimes Sirius was a right berk, and it always seemed to happen when James needed him the most. He might be rash, but he usually helped instead of hurt the situation. Usually.
“Prongs, wait up! I have an idea.” There it was”the faithfully brilliant, however slightly slow, Sirius Black.
“Move it along, then, no need to keep the lady waiting,” James replied, his pace steady. He heard the quick patter of Sirius’ feet running behind him before he appeared rather close to his right side.
“You should probably tone down the arm swinging, James. Might knock an innocent bystander out,” Sirius said, his good humour having apparently overtaken his state of shock as if it had never existed. James quit swaying his arms as he shot Sirius an angry look, his eyes lighting up at the simple prod.
“Ah, so when I mention the lady you join me?” James asked, sizing Sirius up out the corner of his eye.
“Figured I would contribute my extraordinary brawn and brass to our little predicament,” Sirius replied as he puffed his chest up with air.
“Oh, come off it, Padfoot,” James mumbled, hardly taking in the words his friend was saying. His goal now was to find Lily and set the record straight.
“You don’t think I have brawn and brass?” Sirius whimpered pathetically.
“I said shove off.” James said, the reprimand feeling strange to his ears, but necessary in his head. He felt Sirius shrink beside him, but he continued down the corridor. They walked in silence, Sirius a step behind James. As they neared the small cupboard, James trained his ears for any sounds within it.
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
Holding his finger up to his lips for silence, James walked quietly up to the door. He paused, lifted his fist, and wrapped the back of his knuckles loosely against the old wood of the door. The scratching immediately stopped.
“Who’s there?” came the timid voice of Lily, accompanied by shuffling of parchment and feet.
“It’s James. I’ve brought the world’s greatest prat with me,” James replied. Sirius shot him a look. “All right, I’ve brought Sirius with me.”
She opened the door, the gust of wind blowing her hair back from her face. “I knew who you were talking about before you named him,” she quipped, her voice betraying her lacklustre eyes. She smiled softly before forming her lips into a firm line once again.
“Er, can we come in or something?” Sirius asked as he bounced from his toes to his heels, seemingly oblivious to the situation.
“You want to come into the broom closet?” Lily asked, the proposition apparently strange to her; in fact, it was. Both boys immediately nodded eagerly. James led the way into the cramped room and took a seat on his previous bucket. He reflexively ruffled his hair before snatching his hand down to his side; Remus said Lily probably didn’t enjoy James’ infatuation with his hair. When the scrapes and clatters of the other two joining his level ceased, James looked hopefully at Sirius. Maybe he would be able to contribute something sufficient to this meeting.
James blanked. What was he going to say to satiate her? Yes, Evans, you’ve been walking in the midst of a werewolf for seven years. No worries, he hasn’t bit any children lately.
Shaking the thoughts from his head, he began, “Look, Evans, we just wanted to say””
“It’s really not your burden to carry,” Sirius interrupted, surprising both Lily and James. “James, Peter, and I have got it covered, so if you could possibly keep this little discovery to yourself, that would be beautiful.”
Lily nodded, a pensive frown pulling at the corners of her lips. “Does Dumbledore know?”
“Are you planning on telling him?” Sirius narrowed his eyes.
Her eyes bounced back and forth between the two, but her lips stayed firmly shut, still in a firm, straight line. A look of realization overtook her features and she replied, “Of course not! Why would I do such a thing as that, although I presume Remus has already touched on the matter with””
“Obviously Dumbledore knows,” Sirius announced, once again as an interruption. “But that’s between the werewolf and the headmaster, so is this little discussion over?”
He sounded annoyed, as if he had better things to do this late in the afternoon. James glared at him, his face set, before his raised his hand and gave Sirius a precise slap in the back of his head.
“What was that for?” Sirius cried, raising his hand to brush over the recently assaulted spot.
“Let others finish their sentences before you go barging in with your opinion,” James replied, as if his reason for smacking Sirius was obvious.
“All right, all right, boys. Calm down,” Lily said, her voice of reason taking control. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t want anyone getting funny ideas about the three of us…”
Sirius let out a bark of laughter as he stood, crouching from the low ceiling. Flushing red, James stood too, and as he did so, he noticed the corner of a parchment sticking out of Lily’s bag. On the small corner was written,
Remu”
Were”
Answe”
All previous blood in his face instantly drained away. “Evans, what’s written on that parchment there?”
He pointed to the flap of her bag where the parchment was. Following his finger’s trajectory, she bent down to retrieve the incriminating page. He watched as her eyes bounced over words and then back up to his face.
“These are notes Anna gave me about monthly illnesses and diseases””
“Remus is not ill.”
“Sirius, what did I say about interrupting?” James said, irritated. “Let the lady speak.”
Lily’s eyes seemed almost puzzled at his last remark, as if it were too civil to be escaping James Potter’s lips, which is probably what she believed. She folded the parchment in half before pulling her wand out.
“Incendio,” she stated, and flames erupted, slowly burning away the parchment. As the fire crackled its way up the dangling paper, she let out a small gasp when it climbed too high. She dropped it, instantly sending a jet of water onto the smouldering mass.
“Is that all right? It wasn’t anything important, really,” she continued airily as if her fingers hadn’t just been threatened by fire.
“You were writing before were came in here, though,” Sirius said suddenly. “You quit to open the door for us.”
“I just wrote a few more notes so I wouldn’t forget, but they’re gone now,” she said. “Now, can we get a move on?”
As they filed out of the small door one by one, James leading the trio, he allowed his eyes to dart up and down the long hall. At the very end where the corridor met a staircase stood a familiar figure. The figure was hidden in pale shadows, but James could still make out his tattered robes and broad-shouldered, narrow frame. James watched in hidden horror as Remus moved from the shadows, a confused look intertwining itself among the white scars of his face.
James froze for a moment as he thought of his next move. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Remus advancing slowly towards them. He looked back to Sirius and Lily for support, but he only shrugged and she looked so worried that James felt bad for putting any emotional weight on her. He turned back to look down the hall and found Remus standing immediately in front of him.
“All right, James? You look a bit… frazzled,” Remus said, raising his eyebrows.
“Fine, Remus,” James paused, searching for words to deviate from the current situation. “I always look frazzled, right? My hair is a bit messy if you haven’t noticed.”
Remus replied, a strange grin upon his face that didn’t completely meet his light eyes, “How silly of me to forget.” He looked over James’ shoulder to Sirius and Lily. “Nice rendezvous in the broom cupboard?”
A thick silence blanketed over the trio. James’ mind was racing with excuses. Or should he tell the truth? ”that they had a secret meeting to discuss his condition? He hardly thought Remus would enjoy that statement in the slightest. He felt the rushed movement of Lily walking in front of him so she was the person in Remus’ immediate line of vision. James felt his insides twist with inexplicable anticipation as her mouth hesitantly opened.
“Remus,” she said quietly as if she was telling him a secret, and continued simply, “I know.”