Chapter Eight: Point of View
With Mr. McKinnon’s words of caution still echoing inside his head, James stepped through the door into the small meeting room and found Lily Evans already waiting for him at the table. The Aurors on either side of the door gave him grim looks as they withdrew, shutting him inside with a probable murderer.
Evans looked up at him, green eyes guarded. The circles underneath her eyes had grown more pronounced, dark shadows that contrasted with otherwise pale skin. Azkaban was clearly taking its toll on her, although she managed to keep her head held high as she met his accusatory gaze.
“You lied,” James said bluntly, yanking out the chair across from her and sitting down.
She flinched ever so slightly at the sound of the wood scraping across the floor, but she did not take her eyes from his face as she asked, “About what?”
“Lucius Malfoy,” James replied. “You told me that his hatred of you was not personal. You left out the part about your friendship with his wife, Narcissa.”
Her eyes darkened and she looked away briefly, as though gathering her thoughts. Then she said in a bitter tone, “Narcissa and I were not friends. We were study partners at Hogwarts, and that is all.”
“So you didn’t try to get her to leave Malfoy?” James pressed, leaning forward. “You didn’t try to get her to leave her family? To turn away from their beliefs?” Evans said nothing, just continued to look down at her hands folded tightly in her lap, and James added, “You didn’t mock Malfoy and the Lestranges at every opportunity?”
“I didn’t mock them,” she snapped. “I argued. I stood up for myself and my rights. I am sorry if they thought I was being disrespectful, but…” She stopped abruptly and gave a choked laugh. “No, I’m not sorry, actually,” she amended her previous statement. “But what they saw as mocking, I saw as refusing to simply accept their abuse. Trust me, Mr. Potter, there is nothing I said to them that is even remotely comparable to all the things they have said to me.”
James ran a hand through his hair. It was probably true, he reasoned. He knew the Blacks, and he had heard countless tales from Sirius about their attitudes regarding Muggleborns. Evans might not have liked them, but the animosity was certainly not just one-sided. They would have despised her based simply on who she was.
But it didn’t change the fact that she had lied to him. Again. How many times would she refuse to tell the truth? How was he supposed to help her escape Azkaban or the Dementor’s Kiss if she wouldn’t even be honest?
“Was Mrs. Malfoy friends with the others, too?” James asked. “With Lupin, I mean. And with the Longbottoms.”
Evans glanced at him. “You’ve spoken to Frank?” she asked in trepidation, her hands now resting on the edge of the table. There was something uneasy in her eyes, a sort of reluctance he couldn’t quite place. Was she afraid of something Frank Longbottom might say?
“I did,” James answered. “Longbottom told me a bit about his wife’s death and your arguments with Lupin.”
Evans ran her fingers over the table, tracing lines in the smooth wood. “Yes. When Alice died, it… I think it nearly killed him. In the year that followed that, he became this… this person so bent on revenge and easing his own guilt and I think… sometimes, I think he became a person I didn’t recognize anymore.”
“He said you weren’t very understanding,” James said flatly.
Her body stiffened, fingers frozen just above the table. Then she pushed her chair back and stood up, turning away from him. He stared at her back, at her unruly red hair, and waited.
“I suppose I wasn’t,” she agreed after a long moment. “But for him to think that I didn’t believe this was something worth fighting for…” She turned to face him, her features devoid of all expression. Again, he was caught by the lack of emotion in her eyes and the too-sallow whiteness of her skin. He had never been imprisoned in Azkaban, but he knew what it did to people.
Some part of him made a mental note of this. She had to look presentable at the trial “ no matter what she said, aesthetics did matter “ and it wouldn’t do for Azkaban to rob her of her looks.
“You did not support Lupin’s decisions, and Longbottom did,” James said at last, prompting her after he realized that she had trailed off and lapsed into silence.
“Frank thought I was turning my back on everything I should believe in. As though he had any right to judge.” She paused for a moment, then sighed and said, “But I am not sure you would understand either, Mr. Potter. You do not have any experience being a Mudblood in this society.”
James leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been called a blood traitor for years,” he said quietly.
She frowned, eyebrows furrowed as she gazed at him wordlessly. Then she laughed and shook her head, arms folded over her chest. Her eyes darted about for a moment, before settling on him once more, and he was struck by the oddest sensation of being weighed and measured.
He had a feeling he hadn’t passed her test.
Her laughter had stopped, cut off abruptly and she yanked her chair out and sat down again.
“You don’t think they look down on me, too?” James asked, a bit annoyed.
“Look down on you?” she asked in disbelief. “Do you really think that? Do you really think they look down on you?”
They were getting quite a ways off topic at this point, but James was too intrigued by her venom and her sharp words to make any attempts at steering the conversation back towards Lupin and Malfoy. She was looking at him with a combination of disgust and amusement in her eyes, and it was rather startling.
She drew a breath and sighed, exhaling rapidly and shaking her head.
The Lily Evans he had meant only a few days ago had been tightlipped and unemotional, her words guarded and measured. The woman sitting before him now had more energy to her, more anger and more passion. He wondered idly if she was starting to trust him more “ and if that was the case, why did she continually lie? “ or if it was merely the effects of Azkaban slowly scraping away her self-restraint.
Azkaban drove everyone insane eventually.
At length, Evans said, “You’re a pureblood, Mr. Potter. And not just any pureblood. You are a Potter. You are wealthy, you are prestigious, and your family can trace its line back for generations.”
“And they hate me for the things I’ve decided to do with my life,” James said firmly. “Lestrange and his wife, Mrs. Malfoy, do you think they’re willing to overlook my actions just because I am a pureblood?”
“But don’t you see the difference?” she murmured, green eyes catching his gaze with their sudden seriousness. “Can’t you understand that being hated is not the same as being looked down upon?” She tilted her chin up, her words defiant. “You are a wealthy pureblood. And they may hate you for what you’ve done, but they don’t think you are beneath them. You are the enemy, yes. But you aren’t trash. You aren’t filth. You are still a pureblood, and nothing will ever change that.”
“Marrying a Muggleborn might,” James argued, and then stopped, surprised at himself. He had absolutely no idea why that thought had come to mind given how little time or energy he spent thinking about his marital prospects. Besides Mrs. McKinnon’s insistence that he marry Marlene, of course…
He had no doubt he was an eligible bachelor, but like Sirius, he simply didn’t date seriously. He had yet to find a woman who he could tolerate dating more than once, let alone consider actually marrying.
And yet here he was using marriage to a Muggleborn as his argument.
“Have you considered that?” Evans asked pointedly. “Have you dated anyone who wasn’t at least a half-blood?”
He hadn’t, but it wasn’t because of prejudice.
“I don’t believe in blood purity nonsense,” he said defensively.
“Of course not,” Evans agreed. “But in a world built around that very notion, it is a bit difficult to escape it. The families that your parents socialized with when you were growing up… I presume most of them were also purebloods? Not through any prejudice, of course, but merely because purebloods tend to all know each other. It is a small magical world, after all.”
“Plenty of my friends at Hogwarts were…”
She cut him off coldly, “You might have no recollection of me from Hogwarts, Mr. Potter, but I remember you. Sirius Black and Marlene McKinnon. Both purebloods, aren’t they? And they were your best mates, right?”
James had nothing to say in response to that. It wasn’t as though he only sought out purebloods as friends, and it certainly wasn’t as though he looked down on Muggleborns as being less than him. But most of his parents’ friends had been purebloods, Sirius and Marlene were both purebloods, and every girl he had dated had been either a pureblood or a half-blood, mostly because it had been at his mother’s urging and they had been daughters or nieces of her friends.
But both his parents were gone now and those days of incredibly awkward dinners with equally embarrassed girls were long over.
“My point, Mr. Potter, is that we are not in the same position. You might be hated, but you are not viewed as less than human. And you can always change your opinions…” Here she held up a hand to forestall his immediate retort, “…regardless of the fact that you won’t change them, you do still have that option. You could no longer be a blood traitor if you so choose. There is nothing I can do to be anything other than a Mudblood in their eyes.”
James rubbed his eyes wearily. They were both silent for a few minutes, Evans apparently content with having made her point, and James not really sure what to say. There was no way to counter her argument, but he didn’t like the way she had twisted his life to make him sound like some sort of bigot. Like the Lestranges or the Malfoys. He wasn’t that sort of person, and if he had always taken his status as a pureblood for granted… well, it wasn’t because he actually believed in any of the ridiculous notions spouted by his opponents.
His mind wandered back to Lucius Malfoy then, and he grimaced. He had yet to address that issue, or anything he had learned from Longbottom. But Evans was still staring at him with that critical look in her eyes and he felt almost embarrassed.
Aloud, he said, “Back to what I learned from Narcissa Malfoy and Frank Longbottom. Miss Evans, we do need to go over this because it will be important for the trial.”
“What happened with Malfoy is over. I didn’t kill him and the Wizengamot agreed with me,” Evans snapped. “I’m tired of having to continually say this.”
“I’m tired of continually finding out things from other people because you insist on lying to me,” James shot back.
Lily glared at him, not looking even the slightest bit abashed.
“Mrs. Malfoy said you hated her husband. You constantly argued with him. She said you ruined your friendship with her because of your hatred of him.”
“Oh, is that what Narcissa told you?” Evans said with a roll of her eyes. “Well, I suppose it would depend entirely on your point of view.”
“And what is your point of view?” James prompted.
Evans averted her gaze for a moment, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. When she spoke, her words were slow and deliberate, as though she was choosing them carefully.
“Narcissa and I were never really friends, but I did like her. She was smart, and she could be kind… sometimes. Like when she defended her cousin,” Evans eyes darted up, “from your pranks.”
It took James only a moment to realize she was referring to all the times he and Sirius had pranked Regulus Black. He narrowed his eyes, thinking, and was able to pull up a few memories of a stunning blonde witch interceding and hexing Sirius mercilessly.
Evans didn’t seem to notice that he was lost in his own memories, though, and she continued, “I know her sister “ Bellatrix “ was angry when she found out that Narcissa and I would work on potions together. I kept hoping Narcissa would turn out more like Andromeda… and after Narcissa started dating Malfoy… I wanted to help her see that this wasn’t the right path, but… I don’t know. I think, Mr. Potter, that I had deluded myself into believing that we were actually friends, that she cared about something more than the fact that I could help her pass her NEWTS. But we weren’t friends, and when Malfoy started mocking me… threatening me… she did nothing. And I still tried to get through to her. But she just wouldn’t listen.”
“Did you try to get her not to marry Malfoy?”
“Yes,” Evans answered. “And when she was pregnant, I was worried. For her son, for the type of person he would be with Lucius Malfoy to raise him.”
“And then Malfoy died.”
“And I did not kill him,” she said firmly.
“And then you and Lupin started dating.”
She moved jerkily, pulling her arms into her chest. Chewing her bottom lip “ something James thought idly was actually kind of endearing “ she nodded once. “We did.” Her words were breathless, little more than a whisper, and tears glimmered in her eyes.
“Did you love him?” James asked.
“Does it matter?” she demanded.
He shrugged. It didn’t really matter, actually, and he had asked it more on a whim than anything else. But Longbottom had been unsure if Evans loved Lupin the way that Lupin had loved her, and some part of him couldn’t help but wonder if she had been using her friend.
It was an uncharitable thought. But it was also a valid question.
“And then Alice Longbottom…”
“We’re not talking about that,” Lily cut in, an edge in her voice. “She’s dead. I don’t want to… Just leave it, Mr. Potter. It has nothing to do with this.”
“But the resulting arguments between yourself and Longbottom and Lupin…?” he questioned.
She glowered, but said, “It wasn’t really about Alice. Frank felt guilty, and that was part of it. And Remus wanted revenge, that was another part of it. But they also… it was about more than that. For Remus, it was about being a werewolf. It was about being trapped in a society that despised him, a society where he was viewed as worthless. He felt helpless to do anything about it, and he wanted… he wanted to fight the Dark. He wanted revenge on them for all the ways they continually hurt him, all the things they would not let him do.”
“And Longbottom agreed with him about that?”
“After Alice? Yes.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Revenge doesn’t help anyone,” Lily said, a bitter smirk playing around the corners of her lips. “Although Cissy seems quite pleased about everything she’s done to me.” James kept silent, and after a moment she added, “I just wanted Remus and Frank to be safe. There were things worth fighting for, of course, and they did have to take some risks. But not these unnecessary ones. Somehow, though… they were so bent on revenge that they stopped caring about anything else. Frank felt his loss of Alice so much and yet… he just couldn’t comprehend the fact that if he died, it would do the same thing to us. And Remus was the same…”
James watched as she reached up and absently played with a strand of red hair. For a brief moment she looked so tired and so vulnerable that he almost felt guilty about the news he would have to tell her next.
“Miss Evans… the trial is going to start in three days. Lestrange sent an owl to my office this morning.”
She smiled again, a smile that did not reach her eyes. “Well, that’s good. We wouldn’t want to delay the inevitable witch hunt.”
“You can’t lie to me anymore,” James said. “I am trying to help you. I am your only chance at avoiding Azkaban. But I need you to start telling me the truth. All of it.”
She studied his face, looking for something. The room was silent, and he felt a tension in the air as he waited for her response and she continued to search his expression for answers to her own unspoken questions. He didn’t know what she was looking for, and he didn’t know if she found it.
Eventually, though, she said, “You might be trying to help me, Mr. Potter, but you still don’t understand what it is that I want.”
“What you want?” he repeated numbly.
“I don’t care about Azkaban. I don’t care about Lestrange. I want to know who killed Remus and why. I want to get justice for that. And you only care about freeing me and getting the best of Lestrange. You don’t care about Remus. You don’t care about the truth.”
He hesitated, formulating his response, before saying, “You can’t find out the truth if you’re in Azkaban. And if you end up there, who will look for the truth for you?”
Lily held his gaze for another beat, then nodded. “Fine.”
He let out a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding. It seemed like they were finally making progress towards her actually being trustworthy, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was still a lot more she wasn’t telling him.
He rose to his feet, preparing to leave. He needed to think some more and then talk to Marlene about all this. And maybe Sirius.
“When Lupin owled you the day he came back,” James asked, “did he say anything important? Anything at all that could be helpful.”
There was a pause, just the tiniest fraction of a second, and then Lily said, “He thought he was being followed.”
James looked at her sharply, startled.
“I don’t know anything else,” she said boldly. “He didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know where he was or what he was doing… I just know that when he got back, he thought he was being watched.”
“Okay,” James said. “Thank you. I’ll see what I can find out about that.” Although he really had no idea where he would even start looking.
He moved towards the door, leaving Lily still sitting at the table in the windowless room.
And as he left the room, he realized with a sudden jolt that at some point towards the end of that conversation, he had stopped thinking of her as Evans and started thinking of her as Lily.