Chapter 14-- Damsel in Distress
Someone was rapping at the portrait hole. At first Lily had thought it was the old building settling, and then that it was someone tapping their toes nervously while studying, but it picked up in volume and intensity, and she had realized it was the sound of a person knocking. She sighed, pushed back her chair and strolled over to answer since no one else made a move to do so, and wondered why this particular bunch of first-years was so gormless. They were always forgetting the password. Everyone else was ignoring it, but she was a prefect, and therefore keeping some clueless eleven-year-old from standing miserably in the hallway was her job.
She swung open the door and saw, to her surprise, the handsome, dissatisfied face of one Regulus Black. He ducked in and pushed past her without so much as a thank-you. “You’re welcome,” she said coldly, but even that didn’t goad him into politeness. Annoyed, she closed the door and returned to her chair.
Reg Black was not unknown as a visitor to the Gryffindor common room, but his visits were certainly infrequent and usually served a purpose. This one seemed to be no different, as he headed directly for his brother, who was sitting at a table with the rest of the Marauders, ostensibly doing homework. “My beloved younger brother!” Sirius announced loudly, seemingly in a good mood. Regulus didn’t return the greeting, but gave Sirius a sardonic look as he pulled up another chair and sat down. Lily had never understood the relationship between these two -- sometimes they seemed to hate each other; sometimes they seemed to get along. At least Petunia was predictably awful. And now Lily couldn’t study. Rudeness always did that to her -- in this case, she was torn between going off on a tear at Regulus for his obnoxious manner, or just doing the polite thing and ignoring it, and either way, she was utterly distracted and annoyed.
Regulus, however, seemed totally nonplussed, and was leaning in to talk to Sirius about something. “So,” he asked quietly, but not quietly enough, “it’s you lot who are behind stopping these attacks on the Mudbloods, right?”
“Muggleborns,” James corrected, quickly and angrily, and for once Lily felt a wave of liking for him, borne of the speed and vehemence of his answer. He was a pure-blood himself -- his response had nothing to do with self-interest.
“Who cares,” Regulus answered, brushing James aside and returning to addressing his brother, who was now glowering at him. Sirius gave no reply, so Regulus repeated himself: “I asked, is it you lot who are stopping these attacks on--” This time he just waved his hand expansively in the direction of Lily and Mary and finished, “you know.” It was a concession, but Lily was still getting angrier and angrier as she eavesdropped on him.
“Do you think I’d tell you if it were?” Sirius replied. His expression was now grim, his arms crossed.
“Well, play innocent if you want, but I don’t see who else it could be,” Regulus answered casually. “You lot have a vested interest, and James’s cloak. It’s all too bleeding obvious.”
James’s cloak?
“Why do you want to know?” James asked, still angry. Remus and Peter just looked curious.
“I don’t,” Reg answered. “Well, I do, but I’m actually here with a warning.”
“Tell your Death Eater friends that we don’t need their warnings,” Sirius answered.
“The warning is from me,” Regulus continued, obviously getting bored with the verbal parrying. “The bunch who have been orchestrating these things are setting a trap for you. Tomorrow. Don’t let on I told you.”
“Why do they think it’s us?” Remus asked, interested.
Regulus sighed. “They don’t think it’s you; they think it’s Snape. I think it’s you: they don’t know about James’s cloak, so they would never have any idea how you’d get away with this kind of thing without being seen.”
“And you’re not telling them about James’s cloak, right?” Sirius asked. Lily, meanwhile, had snapped to attention, and was trying to look casual again so that Regulus wouldn’t notice that she was now not just listening, but interested. Mary, sitting next to her on the sofa and no longer absorbed in her book, gave Lily a meaningful look as the two of them strained to hear.
Regulus didn’t even dignify Sirius with a response, but was then distracted by James, who exploded, “Snape? I don’t think he’s has done a single good deed in his life. How does Snivelly wind up getting credit for being the mysterious hero?”
“Perhaps because he works with the Mudblood there in Potions. Maybe he fancies her,” Regulus answered, as Sirius and James responded in unison, “Muggle-born!” Regulus smirked in reply.
Regulus ignored the correction. “Snape is clever enough to do any number of things, including brewing up some Polyjuice Potion. He’s been known to have it around in the past. So he has the means, but I for one don’t believe he has the motive. Deny it all you want, but I know it’s you lot.”
James wasn't ready to let go of the topic. “Isn’t Snape supposed to be one of their masterminds?” he asked, continuing, “They must be even thicker than I thought.”
Regulus brushed him aside, clearly bored, shaking his head and responding, “Not recently -- keeps to himself this year. What’s Potter’s obsession with Snape?” he asked, turning to Sirius and talking about James as if he weren’t even there. “Is there a girl? Or does he fancy the big-nosed git himself?” James swatted Regulus on the back of the head, and Regulus turned back to him with a knowing look. “There’s a girl, isn’t there?” he asked, smiling sinisterly. “Well, all I can say is, if you can’t win her from Snape, you’ve got problems, mate. Seems like even just taking a shower more than twice a week would give you a head-start on him.” By now James was glowering and looking to Sirius for assistance, but Sirius was too busy laughing -- this had turned into one of those times when the Brothers Black actually got along.
“I’d better be going,” Regulus drawled, standing up and pushing in his chair. “Time to go ask my housemate who his lady-friend is. Or not.”
After Regulus left, Peter and Remus, who had been mostly silent but intently listening during the conversation, turned on James and Sirius. “You’re not keeping anything from us, are you?”
“You think we’d have done all that and not told you?” Sirius asked.
“You have the cloak,” Peter said, directing the comment at James.
“I do, but I haven’t used it for that. I’ve had no more idea than the next person when these things were going to happen. I’ve always thought it was Sam.”
“Douglas?” Peter asked, sounding skeptical.
“He’s smart enough, he’s dating a Muggleborn, and he has some relative or other in Slytherin.”
“It could be him, then,” Peter agreed.
“I can’t see who else it would be,” James replied. “I can’t imagine anyone in Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff who could pull it off.”
“It’s definitely not Snivellus,” Sirius added, and the group seemed to concur on that point, and left the topic alone.
“It’s not them,” Lily said quietly, barely above a whisper. “They would have started bragging by now if it were.”
“No, it couldn’t be them,” Mary replied, her voice soft but certain.
Lily stood up suddenly with what she thought was a fairly convincing yawn and stretch. “I’m exhausted,” she announced. “See you all in the morning.”
“Hitting the hay early, Sleeping Beauty?” James asked.
“As always when we have exams,” Lily replied casually. “Good night.” And scooping her books and parchments up into her arms, she disappeared up the stairs, reflecting that it wasn’t his actual flirting that bothered her, but the fact that he became royally pissed off whenever anyone else had the nerve to try it. He was as possessive as Sev in his own way. There really had to be some better option out there.
Fifteen minutes later, she was in her pyjamas, reading in bed by the light of the oil lamp, and starting to wonder whether Mary would catch on and follow her after all, when the door to their room opened and Mary’s voice asked, “Are you decent?”
“Long since,” Lily replied. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Well, I couldn’t exactly follow you up here. They’d think we were up to something,” Mary answered, closing the door and pulling her pyjamas out from under her pillow. “Which we are. Do you think it’s Severus?”
“It could be,” Lily said thoughtfully. “It’s obviously not the Marauders. And not Sam. He likes to lie low -- I just don’t see him doing anything to try to stop them in general. I mean, he just keeps an eye on Siobhan, and that’s about it. And James is right -- I can’t think of anyone in Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw who could pull it off even if they wanted to. But Severus… I mean, I suppose, but then, it would be madness. He lives with them. They could make his life hell, and avoiding trouble with that lot was always one of his primary goals in life… It couldn’t be him,” she said decisively. Then, turning to Mary, she asked, “Could it?”
“Of course not,” Mary said sarcastically. “He lives with them, he probably hears about everything they’re doing, he doesn’t seem to like them very much anymore, and he wants you back. Couldn’t possibly be him.” She shook Lily by the shoulders. “Are you daft? Of course it is. Sam Douglas my arse.” And with that, she stuck her feet into her slippers.
“Where are you going?” Lily asked, alarmed. She hadn’t counted on Mary wanting to intervene.
“To warn him, of course. I’ll pretend I need Potions notes or something like that, but I have to warn him.”
“Don’t,” Lily heard herself saying.
“Why not? Do you want them to just catch him?”
“No, but I want to catch him… I want to be sure it’s him.”
Mary shook her head and replied, “You really are daft.” She pulled her dressing gown on over her pyjamas and started walking toward the door.
“No,” Lily said thoughtfully, and Mary stopped and turned around to listen. “No, I do have a reason. We were best friends for seven years, and I put up with all his bigoted nonsense the entire time, and then I snapped. I need to know. If he’s changed enough that he’s going around doing things to stop attacks on Muggleborns, then he’s changed enough that I can eat crow and say I’m sorry. But if he’s the same old Severus…”
“He’s decent to me,” Mary countered.
“You know my theory on that,” Lily replied.
“And I don’t believe it,” Mary snapped. “I think I’d know if he were just putting up with me to try to impress you. James Potter, for example, just puts up with me to try to impress you. Severus does not.”
Her theory, Lily suddenly realised, was both self-centred and arrogant. And yet, even if Severus really were friends with Mary, it wasn’t good enough, and Mary needed to know why.
“So then, what if he does think of you as a friend even though you’re a Muggleborn? What if you’re the exception, just like I was? That’s not good enough. If he only sets aside his prejudices for the occasional person who’s pretty enough and clever enough for his liking, then he’s no different than he ever was. I was the exception, Mary, and for all I know, now you are. Don’t warn him. I’m going to try to keep an eye on him tomorrow. Please.”
“What if it’s already over by then?” Mary asked, arms crossed, expression serious.
“Well, if he mysteriously disappears to the hospital wing, we’ll have a fairly good idea that it’s him, won’t we?” Lily answered archly.
“And you’re willing to risk that?” Mary looked more worried than Lily had expected.
“Yes,” Lily said decisively. “Yes, I am. I’m not going to start talking to him again only to find out that he’s the same old bigoted toerag he’s always been. I need to know. Are you with me?”
“I’m always with you,” Mary said wearily, sitting down on her own bed. “Except when I’m with Severus. And you’re both a pair of eejits who keep trying to get me into trouble. No wonder you used to be friends.”
Really, it should have been easier than this. Whoever had prevented the first attack that she knew of, the one in Transfiguration class, had done their work before the school day even started, so she had awakened at an ungodly hour and waited around the corner from the entrance to Slytherin, until Sev, true to form, had emerged, early and alone. And then she had followed him. It wasn’t hard -- it shouldn’t have been hard, anyway. Breakfast had yet to start, most people were still waking and dressing, and it was not like she had to follow him in a crowd. There were enough pillars and statues to hide behind. But then he had gone into a room in an upper corridor and had closed the door after him, and he had not emerged. Ten minutes later, when she had finally gone in, he was nowhere to be found. And now breakfast was being served, the castle was crowded, and she was dashing to the Great Hall to find Mary.
“I’ve lost him,” she hissed, sitting down in an unoccupied spot on the bench next to Mary.
“You lost him? How did you lose him? Does he have an invisibility cloak?”
“No -- at least, I don’t think so -- but he went into a room on the seventh floor, and I couldn’t exactly follow him without him seeing me.”
“Just a moment,” Mary demanded. “I’m lost. What room? Not ten minutes ago you were heading out the front door with a determined look on your face -- so you’re saying he didn’t go outside after all? I thought you were tailing him.”
“He never went outside,” Lily replied. “I never went outside. What are you talking about?” The two of them looked at each other with a sudden dawning recognition.
“Oh, he has some nerve,” Lily said softly. “He wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t he?” Mary asked. She looked both astonished and delighted.
“No. I can’t believe it.”
“I can,” Mary answered. “He fancies you, and he knows how to make Polyjuice Potion. He probably does it all the time, now that I think about it.”
Lily seethed inwardly. “That, that-- oh, he really has some nerve. He had better not have--” She could feel herself blushing to the roots of her hair, and then she somehow realised what she needed to do. “Well, turnabout is fair play, and there’s only one way to find out. Come on,” she ordered, grabbing Mary’s arm.
“You’re going to follow him outside?” Mary asked, getting up and following her as Lily trotted briskly out of the hall.
“Yes. But not as myself. If he’s been going around using Polyjuice to turn into me, I’ll have his guts for garters -- but I still don’t want that Avery to catch him. Plus, it will give Sev a bit of a shock when I come in to warn him dressed up as himself, and I think he richly deserves that.”
“How--?”
“I have my ways,” she answered grimly. “Probably the same ways he has, now that I think about it. Come on.”
There were very few locations out of doors that could actually become the site of an attack on Muggleborns. At the Care of Magical Creatures pens down by the shores of the lake, Lily finally hit pay dirt: in the distance, partly hidden by the trees, she could see Avery. She couldn’t see Severus, though, which was a bit worrisome. As she came closer, she realised why: an unconscious form was slumped on the ground, partly leaning against the trunk of one of the great trees. The most logical conclusion, although it might not have been the most correct one, would be that he’d been slammed backward into the tree and knocked unconscious. Or she, as it were -- with a start, Lily recognised her own figure lying on the ground. She had known it would be like this, in a theoretical sense, but the reality was still a bit of a shock. Avery turned toward her as she ran, close enough to hear her but too far, unfortunately, to Curse.
“Leave her alone,” she called, startling herself with her low voice as she sprinted across the grass while pulling out her wand. Avery aimed his wand at her, as expected, but Mulciber -- Mulciber was indeed there also, but he was acting very oddly, rolling on the ground, apparently in agony. Severus seemed to have hit him with a particularly horrid spell before getting knocked unconscious.
“Leave her alone,” she repeated, panting, now finally up close and able to see what was going on. She kept her wand trained on Avery, who had returned the favour as soon as he had laid eyes on her, but she was grateful to Severus for taking Mulciber out of the equation, since the two of them together would have been hard to take on by herself. On closer inspection, Mulciber was writhing on the ground and scratching the living daylights out of his groin. Especially given the tension of the situation, it was hard for Lily not to laugh.
But facing Avery was not a laughing matter, and so instead, she focused on her one remaining opponent. “What did you do to her?” she asked him, catching herself before she called their victim “him.”
“Who the hell are you?” Avery asked.
“You know perfectly well who I am,” Lily replied. “And I asked what you did to her.”
“Since you’re so interested, she was subject to a rather enthusiastic expulsion spell. She deserved worse, but she got Mulciber before he could get her. Back to my question: that’s supposed to be you over there, you traitorous git,” Avery responded. “If it isn’t you, who is it?”
“That’s Lily Evans,” she stated, scrambling to respond as Severus would under the circumstances. “Are you blind, or are you effing mental? Who did you think it was?”
“I thought it was you, using Polyjuice Potion. So that little Mudblood bitch has been the one all this time,” Avery stated with what was almost a snarl.
“The one doing what?” Lily asked with feigned innocence and genuine annoyance. She hadn’t gotten used to the voice yet.
“Ruining perfectly good plans. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about, you coward. Pretending you weren’t interested. We could have used your help this year.”
“And I told you I wasn’t interested,” Lily said, taking a guess that such a conversation had indeed occurred. “Besides, how do you know she had anything to do with anything other than today?” Trying to deflect the blame off herself as well as Severus seemed the thing to do -- in getting caught in this disguise, he had inadvertently shifted blame to her, and the last thing she needed was the Death Eater gang having a vendetta against her. They were bad enough already.
“I don’t,” Avery said. “But every time we’ve come up with a way to put the Mudbloods in their place, someone has ruined it, and naturally, we all thought it was you. No one else has the access. And you’ve turned into such a bloody Mudblood sympathiser. What, were you passing along the information to your Mudblood friends and then having them do the dirty work?”
“Paranoid, aren’t we?” Lily replied in the most mocking tone she could conjure up. “You don’t think she was just doing her prefect duties and happened to run into you?”
“I doubt it,” Avery said, sneeringly, jerking his head in Lily’s direction. “Even if she is a prefect, your Mudblood girlfriend would have no good reason to be out here unless she somehow knew what we were planning. And here you are, the inevitable Prince Charming, coming to rescue her. Diffindo!”
There was a loud crack, and a good-sized branch from the tree above Lily snapped off and tumbled through the air. She leapt back to avoid being hit, only to discover that in the few seconds it took her to dodge it, Avery had levitated the unconscious body of the false Lily and Hovered it over the waters of the lake. He now stood, triumphantly, with his wand pointed in that direction.
“Don’t do it,” Lily ordered, training her wand on him again.
“My quarrel is with this little bitch today, Snape,” Avery replied. “I’ll deal with you later for being a Mudblood-lover. Still fancy her, don’t you? Don’t think we don’t hear you when you’re sleeping -- ‘Lily… Lily…’ ” he mocked in a whiny falsetto.
That particular piece of news left Lily suddenly queasy for the first time in this early morning adventure, so she ignored it, brandished her wand threateningly and commanded again, “Don’t do it. Bring her back.” Since his childhood hadn’t exactly included enthusiastic family trips to the swimming baths, Severus, as she recalled well, didn’t know how to swim. If Avery actually dumped him in the lake, she would have to rescue him without letting on that she could do a decent breaststroke and freestyle if needed.
“Because you can’t swim, can you?” Avery asked, his tone full of mockery. Bugger, they knew as well. “You can’t win, Snape,” he sneered. “What are your options? You do nothing -- I drop your girlfriend in the lake. You attack me -- I lose control of the Hover spell, and your girlfriend drops in the lake. What will you give me for saving you an early morning swim, Snivelly? How about some assistance in future? You could certainly help me better than this idiot,” he concluded, toeing Mulciber, who had rolled over in his general direction, still frantically clutching at himself. There had to have been something that Avery could have done for his friend, but he seemed disinclined.
Lily felt a sudden, boiling rage unlike anything she’d ever felt before. She didn’t know what drove it: Avery’s cocky bigotry, or her concern for Severus, or caffeine, or the unfamiliar force of testosterone -- clearly she’d have to make a point of looking up the physiology of Polyjuice Potion some time. For now though, her temper raging, she decided that attacking would be better than nothing: doing nothing did not seem physically possible at this particular moment. “Petrificus Totalis!” she shouted, and as Avery fell to the ground with a thud, there was an echoing splash from the lake as the Hover charm lifted.
Blast.
She hadn’t really had much hope of attacking Avery and then rescuing Sev before he was dropped into the depths of the water. But she tended to be an optimistic person, and she had hoped.
“Levicorpus!” she cried, running to the edge of the lake. Damn, Severus’s ever-popular hex didn’t seem to work if you couldn’t actually visualize the corpus in need of Levitation. She would have to ask him to work out that particular kink if he ever spoke to her again, but for now -- “Mobilicorpus!” she shouted, with a similar lack of success. Throwing off her robe and pullover, she cursed a blue streak for effect and verisimilitude. They really were a right pair of effing bastards -- they undoubtedly knew that Severus couldn't swim to save his life, never mind someone else's. Bugger. He would be feet deep in the water by now, Lily realized -- unconscious, inhaling water, drowning. She pushed back her hair -- his hair -- reminded herself to dog-paddle in case anyone was looking, and dived in.
The water was so cold that for a second, it felt as though her heart had stopped. Recovering herself, she took a deep breath and plunged under the water. Fortunately, the Hogwarts standard-issue uniform skirt and robes seemed to slow down a sinking person, and even in the murky water, Lily was able to find him fairly quickly. The robes didn’t help when pulling him out of the water, though -- in general, they seemed to just be an impediment to any kind of movement. She couldn’t dog paddle, hold onto him, and unfasten the clasp holding the robes on all at the same time, so she just kicked hard and pulled for the surface, dragging him with her until they broke through to the air. The strangeness of carrying her own self this way wasn’t lost on her.
He was still unconscious, but breathing was a function that didn’t require consciousness, and he coughed convulsively and then retched water and strands of stringy mucus down the front of her shirt. She was surprised by how little this bothered her -- something about her overall sense of relief that he was still alive and the fact that she couldn’t have been any wetter anyway, she supposed. And at least whatever he had been up to that morning -- Transfiguring into a girl, foiling evil plots, unsuccessfully dueling two housemates at once -- it apparently hadn’t included breakfast. Hoisting her own unconscious form, she staggered up out of the water to the edge of the lake, no longer buoyed by the water and utterly surprised that, technically, Severus was strong enough to carry her. Staggering as far as she could away from Avery’s rigid form and Mulciber’s writhing one, she deposited her friend and then crawled away from him and flopped back on the shore, breathing hard.
The spring air was still very crisp and chilly, Lily discovered, especially when one had just taken a dip in the lake fully dressed. Her soaked trousers were sticking to her legs and her shirt to her chest, and Severus-as-Lily was a similar sartorial disaster, with the addition of blue lips, tangles of long, wet red hair and the fact that the skirt -- how on earth had he obtained a skirt? -- had hiked up to what was no longer exactly at a modest level. She reached over and yanked it down to cover the legs that temporarily weren’t her own -- her thighs weren’t for public display, especially with a creep like Mulciber nearby, however incapacitated. Having recovered somewhat, she stood up, pushed Severus’s dripping black hair out of her face, shivered as the rivulets of water ran down onto her ears and neck, and retrieving the cast-off robe, flung it over her own inert form. The pullover she kept for herself, but it didn’t help: it was almost immediately as wet and cold as everything else she was wearing.
Now she just had to get him, unconscious, back to the castle before the clock struck midnight, the Polyjuice Potion wore off and they both turned back into pumpkins -- or before the potion's hour of effect came to an end, which amounted to the same thing. Shoving herself up to standing, she cast a Hover spell and watched as her own unconscious form jerked awkwardly into the air. “Mobilicorpus,” she chanted, and the body moved along with her, floating eerily through the ether as she took her first steps back up the hill with her wand pointed behind her.
As soon as she had started, she stopped with a sudden realisation. Even the most benign things Severus did were inevitably interpreted as sinister, so the sight of what appeared to be him, looking like a drowned rat, leading the inert, hovering form of the similarly soaked Lily Evans would probably be a very bad thing. At best it would make him even more reviled, which for some reason she cared about right now, and at worst it would lead to any number of fights with fellow students which, in her present condition, she doubted she could win and didn’t have time for anyway. Besides, a Hover spell wouldn’t be the method of choice for the boy who had been half in love with her for longer than she cared to think. Severus, for all his many flaws, would have been man enough to make an attempt at carrying her up to the castle: Half-Blood Prince indeed. At least there was something classically heroic and definitely much more human about it, and he was less likely to be accused of having evil intent against Lily’s person if the presumed Severus actually gave a damn enough to carry her, like something a Muggle would do. The Slytherin crowd would never let him live it down, but the other three houses would be less likely to give her trouble this way, and that constituted a rather significant majority.
She had been glad of Severus’s long legs as she had run down to the lake, and now she wondered whether even his skinny form would provide her with enough of the characteristic male upper-body strength to bear the deadweight of an unconscious girl all the way back to the castle. In his own skin, he probably weighed less than she did, she reflected, even though he was now a few inches taller than she. But that was all academic. She lowered the body to the ground, caught the lifeless form under the shoulders and knees, hoisted the false Lily into Severus’s thin arms, and began the slow, staggering walk up the hill.
When she arrived at the castle after the longest walk from the lake she’d ever had, she found that her timing could not have been worse. Breakfast was letting out, and a flood of students crowded the halls. A gaggle of puzzled-looking first years were heading out the door, presumably to Herbology, as she walked in, so her initial entrance to the school was relatively unimpeded, but as she tried to make her way through the older students crowding out of the Great Hall, she began to encounter the expected challenges. Murmurs were making their way through the crowd -- she and Severus must have made an interesting sight first thing in the morning -- but she continued to push forward, muttering “’Excuse me -- pardon me” as she pushed past her classmates. Perhaps the oddest part about all this was hearing her own words coming out in his voice. But if she could just get through without encountering--
James Potter. And Sirius Black. At first they looked puzzled, but then their features darkened with outrage and they shoved their way through the crowd calling, “Hey Snivellus! Snivellus! SNAPE! We’re talking to you!” She turned away from them in so far as that was possible, since she was heading in their general direction, and continued to make her way through the rush of students. Her burden was getting very heavy, and time was running short.
“Snape!” Potter barked, blocking her way, his usually handsome face ugly with anger and hatred. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing -- I’m trying to help her. Get out of my way and let me take her to Madam Pomfrey,” Lily answered, probably far more civilly than Severus would have. She attempted to move around them, but Potter and Black stepped in front of her again, stopping her in her tracks. “He asked what you did to her, Snape,” Black repeated, wand pointed up under her chin. Not fair, Lily thought angrily: her arms were full of her unconscious classmate, and she certainly couldn’t manage a wand.
“I said nothing,” Lily snarled. “Get out of my way!” She shoved up against the two of them to try to push past them, but they wouldn’t move, and they wouldn’t let her keep going. What did they really think Severus was going to do to her, she wondered, especially given that he had carried her in through an enormous crowd of witnesses. Sneak her up to his dormitory in Slytherin and have his way with her? They seemed to be utterly blinded to good sense. In any case, time was short, and she had truly had it with their misguided heroics.
“She’s been injured, and I’m taking her to the infirmary -- get the hell out of my way!” she finally barked, impressed with the effect that this order had when said in Severus’s voice. She could hear a few voices around her saying things like, “Yeah, James, let him go,” and James and Sirius reluctantly bowed to peer pressure and stepped aside.
She hoisted the unconscious figure again and kept going. With the majority opinion obviously against him, Potter finally stopped, wand lowered, staring angrily after them, with Black standing behind him in a similar pose.
The fight with Potter and Black had given her a second wind, she found, or maybe just enough time to catch her breath, and she carried her burden more quickly with renewed vigour and heightened awareness of the time. There was also the added bonus that Potter had made her angry enough to do a convincing imitation of Severus rather than the stammeringly polite one that had first entered the building -- although Severus had seemed a lot less angry lately, from a distance anyway.
When she arrived, Madam Pomfrey had somehow already caught wind that something was going on and had flung open the doors, rushing over and commanding, “Here, set her here!” Lily gently placed the figure on an empty bed -- they were all empty, actually -- and sat on the next one, dripping, to catch her breath. Madam Pomfrey was already beginning her ministrations, but she looked up at Lily to ask, “Severus, what happened to her? Did you witness it, whatever it was?”
Lily took a quick glance at the clock on the wall of the ward and realized that there was very little time left for Severus’s Polyjuice Potion, and that this would need to be explained. “Er, Madam Pomfrey… I’m not Severus.” Madam Pomfrey looked up sharply as Lily continued, “Polyjuice Potion -- I’m Lily Evans, and that’s Severus on the bed.”
“What were you two doing experimenting with Polyjuice potion?” Madam Pomfrey asked, “Is that why sh- he’s unconscious? Did something go wrong with it?”
“No, it worked fine,” Lily answered, “He was attacked. I believe he was knocked unconscious and then I know he was tossed into the lake, because I did see that part. I think he has been… thwarting some attacks on Muggleborns this year. This time, the people doing it set one up as a trap to catch him. I heard about it, so I went down there to make sure he was all right, but I took Polyjuice Potion and went as Sev because if they saw me walking in like him--”
“…they wouldn’t suspect that Severus was the traitor they were looking for,” Madam Pomfrey finished for her.
Lily nodded and concluded, “He’s in Slytherin, after all, so he’s a much better mole than I am. Is he going to be all right?”
“He appears to have a concussion, but I think he’ll be fine,” Madam Pomfrey replied, still bustling around the bed and handing Lily a blanket to wrap around her dripping form. “But I’d prefer to get him into a hospital gown and out of these wet clothes before he turns back into a boy. Especially the skirt,” she finished dryly. “I’m going to have to ask you to step out, for obvious reasons.”
When Lily returned in a few minutes, her alter-ego was breathing harder as though in pain, and after an initial jolt of fear, she realised that it was only the Polyjuice Potion beginning to wear off. Before her eyes, the red hair grew backward into his scalp and turned black, his face thinned, the colour left his cheeks and his nose grew longer, and her old friend Severus lay there, still unconscious. Madam Pomfrey had been working on a potion in another part of the room, and when she turned around, she jumped slightly as though startled. “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said to Lily with a smile. “I think one Severus Snape is quite enough.” She spoke of him fondly, and Lily somehow found it heartening that she wasn’t the only one who had ever thought well of him. He had always gotten on well with adults, she reflected, and the faculty all seemed to like him well enough; the problem was that he was terrible with his peers.
“Mind if I stay for a bit?” she asked.
Madam Pomfrey responded, “Actually, I wanted to get you out of those wet clothes and into a hospital gown yourself, Lily. I should probably keep an eye on you for the next day or so after the soaking you got. Besides, it wouldn’t take much for your fellow students to figure out what happened if you came in here unconscious--” she waved her hand at Severus-- “and walked out of here just fine an hour later, with your rescuer still in the hospital wing. Especially since apparently they already suspected him, from what you’re telling me. If you wanted to keep his interventions a secret…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but Lily knew what she meant. “Thanks,” she said, smiling gratefully at the Healer. She hadn’t known that the woman could be so understanding.
“That said,” Madame Pomfrey continued briskly before Lily could become too grateful, “I do need to report this situation to your Head of House, as I do with any incident in which a student is injured, and Professor McGonagall may not look lightly upon unauthorised brewing and use of Polyjuice Potion -- or to students taking matters such as this one into their own hands. Even prefects.”
“I think she may be used to the latter by now,” Lily laughed. She was not thrilled, but neither was she overly worried. Professor McGonagall seemed to do a remarkable job of balancing the letter and the spirit of the law.
Madam Pomfrey insisted on tucking her patient into a bed to warm up, and as she was indeed shivering, Lily climbed into the one next door to Severus to keep an eye on how he was doing. He still hadn’t awakened, which worried her, although she knew that he was probably going to be fine. For a while, she lay under the covers, reading a copy of Advanced Potion-Making from Pomfrey’s personal library, occasionally looking over to check up on him, and wondered what she was going to say to him after nearly a year's silence.
She had no doubt that he would talk to her -- eventually, and probably much sooner than eventually. If she was right about what had led him on his mad quest, his weakness for her hadn't changed much. A few superficial things had, she reflected, given the leisure to observe him up close for the first time in many months. He had grown quite a bit taller, but apparently hadn't eaten enough to keep up with it, with the result being that he looked even thinner than he always had. His shoulders, which he still seemed to hold in a permanent defeated slouch, had broadened somewhat from the narrow boyish frame she remembered. The ugly duckling was not growing up into a swan this time, though: there were no signs of her friend developing some heretofore hidden masculine beauty. His nose was still too large for his face, and his hair… was classic Severus. That was all.
There was nothing objectively more attractive about him, she concluded, turning away. It must have just been absence making the heart grow fonder, or gratitude, or the full moon -- or her usual tendency to find all the people she loved to be attractive in their own way. And she still loved him, odd creature though he was. The problem was how to love a friend like him in a world that wasn't just the two of them in a hospital ward, or the two of them studying together in No Man’s Land, or the two of them against Petunia Evans and Tobias and Eileen Snape back home. As long as they never had to interact with anyone else, they were fine: they were the best of friends. But in the everyday world of Hogwarts, it had never been that simple for them, not from the moment they had sat down together on the Hogwarts Express. Hogwarts had posed threats to their friendship that Petunia could only have dreamed about.
Even now she could hear her own voice in that midnight corridor, telling him that her friends all wondered why she had anything to do with him. She cringed at the thought of it: the brave and independent Lily Evans, a pawn of something as mundane as peer pressure. Some Gryffindor, she thought, rolling back over to look again at Severus's profile as he lay in uneasy sleep in the next bed. She suspected his sincerity, and she suspected his motives, but if he had done even half of what she and Mary believed, he was almost recklessly brave. And that held far more weight with her than she could ever safely let him know.
Snivellus and the Head Girl by SeverusSempra
Chapter Notes: Lily finally figures out what Severus is up to.
Chapter Endnotes: Thank you so much to my helpful and encouraging beta, Fresca (Colores) and to everyone who keeps reading and reviewing this! :)