Chapter Text
On September 1st, 1976, sixteen-year-old Lily Evans approached the brick barrier between platform nine and platform ten by herself for the first time. The usual constants—her anxious mother, her awkward best friend—were both absent. Her sister, whose presence was less reliable (and less pleasant) but still a typical component of a September 1st scene, was also missing from the picture.
Petunia’s endless wedding preparations were not unlike a gas, in that both had the tendency to expand and fill whatever space they were provided. An invitation emergency (a typo celebrating the union of one Petunia Evans to a Vermin Dursley—not actually Lily’s fault, although she wished it had been) had made it “simply impossible” for Petunia to accompany Lily to the station as usual. Lily, attempting to head off an argument by anticipating her sister’s next move, had suggested that their mother stay home as well, to help Petunia make whatever wedding decisions she considered that day’s priority. When her mother had protested, Lily and Petunia pointed out that, at sixteen, Lily was certainly capable of taking the bus into London and making her way to Kings Cross Station on her own. Faced with the rarely unified front of both of her daughters, Rosie Evans had supposed it would be best for everyone concerned if she stayed home with Petunia.
“Anyway,” her mother had said, “don’t you usually go with Severus? Come to think of it, we haven’t seen him around as much this summer… did he get a job to keep him so busy?”
All summer Lily had fended off inquiries into Snape’s life with the vaguest possible responses. Her mother, unfortunately, was not the type to leave things lie, and Lily was forced to change the topic back to the wedding, which had been promoted to only the second worst topic of conversation in the Evans’ household. Traveling with Snape was unthinkable. Equally unthinkable was explaining why she couldn’t speak to him anymore, so she’d avoided telling her mother of their… falling out. This strategy resulted in a guilty Lily leaving the house that morning with two breakfast sandwiches, one for her and one for Severus to eat on the bus into London. She’d eaten both defiantly, bouncing around on the cracked vinyl seats of the pokey old bus. Immediately after disembarking, she’d spotted a homeless man panhandling, and the guilty feeling returned in full force. Although, she’d comforted herself, egg sandwiches don’t hold up very well for hours on a hot bus.
Now, Lily stood alone, her hands wrapped firmly around the trolley’s bar, squaring off against the solid barrier. For a moment she was the only still spot in the bustling station, but almost immediately someone bumped into her back, breaking the illusion.
“So sorry dearie, hope I didn’t hurt you! But you don’t want to be standing there, it’s rather in the way…”
“Of course,” Lily responded automatically, “so sorry.” But the woman, already moving on down the platform, paid her no mind. Feeling suddenly very out of place, Lily began to walk briskly toward the barrier, passing through it without any more hesitation.
Now, she found herself alone on a very different platform. It retained the same frantic energy as the muggle platforms had—with children running past, parents shouting after them, trolley wheels rattling, and trunks thudding to the ground—but that was where the similarities stopped. The bustle of platform nine and three-quarters also included the screeches of owls, explosions originating from ill-fated card games, and sparks shot back and forth between children playing tag in the crowd. Rising up in front of Lily was a spectacularly scarlet steam engine emitting billows of white, sweetly-scented smoke. Luggage, ranging from trunks to cauldrons to loose quills, was being levitated in and out of the train’s windows, while parents in long, flowing robes embraced their children. Pieces of conversations floated by her: Don’t forget to send us an owl once a week, I am expecting those arithmancy grades to improve this year, do you hear me? Did you see—Benjy went to China and trained with dragons over the summer! In front of her, a student’s trunk bounced open, sending textbooks, broomstick, robes, and an entire packet of fresh slugs cascading across the platform. And underneath it all was the familiar hum, the pulsing reminder, of magic. As the sensations washed over her, Lily let herself sink into them, reassured by how welcoming they still felt. Magic is real—magic is real and it belongs to me.
An odd shiver passed through her and her eyes snapped open in response. She couldn’t see what had startled her. The platform was as sunny and busy as it ever was, but Lily felt cold, the magic of the moment before slipping out of reach.
“Lily?” She turned at the sound of the voice and saw Alice Okafor approaching her along the platform. “Lily, darling, I knew that was you!” Alice’s sweet smile dropped slightly as she got a good look at Lily’s face. “Is something wrong? You look a little funny...”
“Nothing, nothing,” Lily replied, shaking it off. “Someone just walked over my grave is all.” She dismissed the image of a dark-haired boy, shoulders hunched, hurrying through the crowd away from her.
“That’s awfully morbid for such a nice day… Are you sure—” But Alice was cut off by a high pitched squeal, the only warning before both girls were dragged into a tight embrace.
“Oof—Mary—I can’t breathe!”
“Babessss!” shouted Mary at full volume, “I missed youuuu! Alice, you look gorg—”
“No thanks to you, darling—you’ve absolutely crushed my ‘fro.”
“—Lily, you look like you ate something funny on the way here—”
“Cheers very much, Mary—”
“Did your mother and sister leave already? Thank Merlin—your sister’s a real pill! You know, last year she told Alice her hair looked untidy?”
“And she didn’t even have the excuse of you jumping all over it first,” sighed Alice.
“Gosh, sorry, Alice,” said Lily, looking at her with sympathy. “She really says the stupidest things…”
“Well,” said Alice, “in fairness to her, maybe it was untidy?” The other two girls shouted her down as they maneuvered themselves and their luggage up the steps and into one of the cars.
Once Lily and Mary had situated themselves in a free compartment, Alice said goodbye. “I’m off to find Frank. He’s Head Boy this year, you know, so he’ll be busy most of the trip.”
“It should have been you as Head Girl,” said Lily loyally.
“Oh no, not me—I was never good at the discipline side of being a prefect. Besides, with six N.E.W.T. classes, I just don’t have the time! I won’t envy Frank his schedule, that’s for sure.”
“Who’s Head Girl, then?” asked Mary.
“Some Slytherin.”
“Angelica Nott,” Lily clarified.
“I think Dumbledore’s hoping it might build some stronger interhouse ties,” said Alice, gathering up her things.
“He’s been on a real unity kick lately—who does he think he’s kidding?” said Mary, rolling her eyes.
“I know,” said Alice, sadly, “I hate to say it but honestly, it really seems like it’s too late for that. Well, sorry to be a downer, girls—I’ll clear out!” She left the compartment accompanied by waves and (in Mary’s case) loud kissing noises.
“Ugh!” exclaimed Mary, slumping back against the seat and lifting her long, honey-colored hair off of her neck. “I’m still all sweaty! How come neither of us ever think to put a featherweight charm on those things until they’re halfway up into the overhead rack?”
Lily was spared answering this impossible question by the loud and dramatic arrival of the other two Gryffindor girls. Marlene and Dorcas pushed through the compartment door, elbowing each other and shouting in a cheerful sort of way.
“Merlin, Marlene, I keep getting caught in your—whatever the hell this is,” snapped Dorcas, yanking what appeared to be a gauzy shawl off of her head and thrusting it at Marlene. Marlene, hands already full of pumpkin pasties, gestured vaguely to indicate Dorcas should put it on for her. Not one to be told what to do, Dorcas draped it over Marlene’s head in as inconvenient a way as possible before sitting down with a huff. Marlene tossed her head until the shawl settled around her shoulders, then threw herself down next to Dorcas.
“Hiya!” she said, “Pasty?”
“Hi Marly,” replied Lily fondly, “Hi Dorcas—I see you haven’t snapped and killed her yet.”
“And they thought it couldn’t be done,” said Dorcas, grimacing. “And yet here she is, three weeks later, entirely unscathed. A modern miracle.”
“Where did you even—hi Dorcas—where did you even get pumpkin pasties? We haven’t so much as left the station yet!” Mary asked, pushing Marlene’s knees off of her side of the bench.
“The trolley witch loooves me,” said Marlene with satisfaction, “and so does Dorcas!”
“Whatever,” grumbled Dorcas, but her tone wasn’t particularly convincing, especially when she followed it up by taking a bite out of the pasty in Marlene’s hand. “Well, we all know my summer was hell—how about everyone else? Mary? Didn’t you go to Paris or something?”
“Oh, Paris was wonderful—” Mary launched into what looked to be a long and rapturous story. Lily let herself relax into it, watching the scenery slip by outside the window, Mary’s voice rising and falling over how beautiful Paris was, about French boys she’d met who’d told her she was beautiful, about croissants she’d eaten and drinks she’d had by the Seine, records she’d listened to at her aunt’s bohemian parties… “Lily? Lily, are you listening to me?”
With an effort, Lily refocused. “I’m sorry, Mary—I must be tired. What did you say?”
“I said, I brought my record player this term so you can get to work charming it to play at Hogwarts!”
“Well,” said Lily cautiously, over Marlene and Dorcas’ cheers, “I’ll do my best of course, and Merlin knows I’d do anything to get some music into that castle, but I don’t want to risk screwing up your kit. Remus said that Potter tried it on his last year and it all went a bit tits up somehow—turned every record they tried to play into ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’… He said it devastated their record collection and Sirius wouldn’t speak to Potter for two days.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t have you, did they?” Mary dismissed these concerns with a wave of her hand. “I can always get another player if it takes you more than one try, but if anyone can figure it out it’s you, babe. Everyone knows James is absolute pants at charms; I can’t figure out why when he’s so good at everything else.”
The door banged open, throwing Lily back into high alert. “Aha!” shouted Sirius Black, barging into the compartment. “You were talking about us—don’t you know gossip is hurtful?”
“All I said,” sniffed Mary, “was that James is pants at charms. And it’s not gossip if everyone’s known it since first year.”
“She has a point, Sirius,” said Remus mildly, leaning in through the open door with Peter Pettigrew to speak over Sirius’ shoulder. From her corner of the compartment Lily could only see the three of them, but the fourth couldn’t be far away. “Hello, girls—Lily, Dorcas, Marlene—good summer?”
Sirius cut him off. “Yes, obviously, Prongs is pants at charms, but he likes to pretend no one has noticed—what prompted this observation, if I may ask? What? Moony, I said ‘if I may ask!’ What else could you possibly want from me? Hello, I guess. Smashing to see you all. Now if we could get back to the point, which was mocking Prongs, that would be even more smashing.”
Dorcas waved Peter and Remus in to sit, kicking Marlene’s legs off of the bench to make the offer more inviting.
Marlene, unphased, picked her feet back up and placed them on Dorcas’ lap. “Bet you a galleon we can charm Mary’s record player so that it turns out better than yours did.”
Sirius groaned theatrically, swooning against Peter, who was trying to push by him to sit with Dorcas. “Don’t even speak of it! Petey-boy—hold me—don’t let ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ hurt me anymore!”
Remus peeled Sirius off of Peter and ducked his grasping arms with agility born of experience. “Now you’ve gone and done it—that was quite possibly the worst week of our lives that you’re speaking of so lightly right now.”
“He means it,” said Peter, sitting down at last on Lily’s left. “For a while there I really thought our friendship would end in a multiple homicide.”
Sirius, abandoned next to the door, wailed loudly to remind everyone of his presence. Remus, sitting on Lily’s other side, yanked Sirius down into the space vacated by Marlene’s feet.
“The worst part of it,” Remus laughed, “was that James really thought he could fix it—he must have gone through a dozen records before he admitted defeat!” Despite the anxiety still lurking in her gut, Lily found herself caught up the story, laughing into Remus’ shoulder.
“You wouldn’t be laughing, Moony, if it had been your records he used,” said Sirius sulkily. That backstabbing berk destroyed my copy of Ziggy Stardust AND The White Album! The man has no shame!”
“Ziggy Stardust belonged to me, you bastard—” with that, James burst in from where he had been hanging back in the corridor. At the sound of his voice, Lily’s laugh shriveled up inside her. Despite herself, her head turned slowly toward him, eyes moving upwards as if pulled by some perverse force.
She had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye. He’d gotten darker over the summer, or else it was just his white shirt that made his tan more obvious. She had the strange sensation of double vision; looking at him in standing in the doorway in a t-shirt and jeans, but remembering him as he had been the first few train rides, when his parents still bought his clothes and all he’d had was robes. Seeing him in muggle clothing now left her feeling unsettled.
“I knew he’d come in if we took enough shots at him—he’s too vain to stand around and listen to us list his flaws…”
The compartment door, still unlatched, banged against its frame, the sound oddly echoing. James hadn’t moved, but he hadn’t spoken to her either. She looked away, striking up a conversation with Peter about his summer holidays in Brighton. It didn’t matter—she could feel his eyes on her even with her back turned. The cold feeling from the platform was back full force.
“It’s a crime to make me watch this…” Sirius muttered, before saying loudly, “Sit down already, Prongs, you sad wanker…” James allowed himself to be pushed down into the seat across from Sirius. On Lily’s left, Peter was telling her and Mary about the terrible sunburn he’d gotten his last few days at the beach. On her right, James started to jiggle his knee hard enough she could feel it through Remus.
“Is it still really obvious?” Peter asked anxiously. “I’ve been so worried it will peel right when we start classes up again…”
Looking at his cartoonishly pink face, Lily started to laugh. The knee jiggling paused, and then started up again twice as fast, shaking the whole bench. Ignoring it, she continued, “Peter, love, I’ve only ever seen a worse burn on myself!” His face fell. “Don’t worry, though—after the last summer of torture I made sure I looked up a charm for it as soon as I got back to the castle. I’ll fix you up now.”
Marlene burst in, unable to contain herself, “Lily sent us a picture from that summer—and guess where it is right now!” She shook her bag gleefully.
Horrified, Lily almost dropped her wand. “Marly, NO! Why would you even have that with you!” She started to get into the spirit of it, the words and exaggerated expressions coming more easily. “Do you carry it around? Waiting to humiliate me?” God bless Marlene, honestly.
Dorcas shook her head, a wicked smile spreading across her face. “No, but I happen to know she had to put her photo album in her bookbag because she doesn’t know how to pack.”
“It’s a conspiracy, I see—you’re both in on it!”
Marlene, who had immediately started digging in her enormous white bag, lifted her hand triumphantly. “Here she is: our little tomato!”
With a shriek, Lily abandoned her attempt at fixing Peter’s face in favor of lunging across the compartment and swiping at the polaroid, but Dorcas was faster, passing it from Marlene over to Sirius, who looked absolutely delighted.
“In fairness, Lily,” said Mary unhelpfully, “if you didn’t want people to see it you shouldn’t have sent us all photos. And you definitely shouldn’t have worn your red dress for the pictures… it really makes the whole thing so much worse.”
Lily, having calculated the odds of her coming out the winner of a scuffle with Sirius Black, known biter and all around dirty cheat, opted to preserve her moral high ground. She turned back to Peter’s face, saying in what she hoped was a dignified and unbothered manner, “Well, I deeply regret ever trying to keep you all in the loop about important events in my life. Catch me sharing anything with my best friends ever again!”
“Good look on you Evans—like a salamander with hair,” said Sirius, cackling as he passed the photo over to James and Remus. There was an uncomfortably long, silent pause before—
“Jesus wept,” said Remus, his head thunking back against the seat in resignation.
“Moony, if you’re going to be a bitch, please do it in a way I can comprehend and contribute to,” said Sirius. “But yes, I believe that is the general sentiment.”
“No—” said James, defensively, “it’s that… Well, how come it isn’t moving?”
Lily was focusing very hard on Peter’s forehead. The charm was tricky, and it required her full attention. “You’re pinching me,” said Peter, squirming. Automatically, she loosened her left hand, where it had been gripping the back of Peter’s neck.
“It’s a muggle photo.” The humor had drained out of Mary’s voice. “Obviously. Honestly, James, you and your mates are all Neanderthals…”
“Hey!”
“What’s a Neander…?”
“Never mind!” said Marlene forcefully, snatching the photo back and putting it carefully away in her bag. In her blunt way, Dorcas began an unprompted and very loud summary of a playoff quidditch match she and Marlene had attended the week before.
Lily finished the last spell, returning Peter’s skin to its natural state of English pastiness.
“Oh wow, Lily, that feels so much better! Does it look ok?”
“Brand-spanking new,” said Sirius, “like a baby’s bottom.”
Scowling, Peter flipped him off. As Sirius and Peter began an exchange of insults that promised to be lengthy, Lily lowered her wand hand into her lap, knuckles white. Deliberately, she began unpeeling her fingers from around its handle, where they had begun to cramp.
Abruptly, she stood. “I think I had better head to the prefects’ carriage now. I’ll see all of you later!”
Remus frowned. “Surely it’s not time yet?”
“No,” replied Lily, inventing rapidly, “but I wanted to speak to Frank before the meeting starts. So. I’d best be off.”
“But Lily,” said Mary, “we’ve barely seen you! All we’ve talked about was my trip, and quidditch… You hardly wrote all summer—I was hoping that meant you’d been up to something really juicy…”
Lily paused long enough to give Mary a genuine smile. “Don’t worry babes—I’ll see you all at the feast and I’ll tell you then. Promise. You won’t be able to shut me up.” Before anyone else could protest, she crossed the compartment and stepped through the door, deliberately keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead.
As the compartment door closed behind her, she forced herself a few steps down the corridor before leaning back against the wall, lightheaded with relief. She’d have to follow through and go find Frank now, but anything would be better than staying in that airless compartment. Frank would be easy. Sweet and cheerful, but perceptive enough not to ask her any questions. And most importantly, able to carry a conversation without her help long enough to get her to the prefects’ meeting. Then, all she would have to do would be make it through the meeting, and then through the ride up to the castle… It would be too rude to Alice to try to ride with her and Frank for that… She’d have to figure something else out for the carriages… And then just make it through the sorting and the feast… and then she’d be back safe in her room! So really, only a few hours more before she could relax.
Lily began sifting through her summer memories for ones that could be polished up into funny enough anecdotes to keep her friends satisfied at the feast. She was fairly certain that the wedding preparations, at least, would be hilarious from the outside. Having come up with a plan, Lily set off in search of Frank.
~
Lily sat in the window of Gryffindor tower, gazing out on the silent grounds. The moonlight was very bright tonight, leading the other girls to pull the curtains closed around their four-posters, but Lily couldn’t sleep. In the chaos and noise of the welcoming feast, surrounded by faces she wasn’t sure she wanted to see, she’d wanted nothing more than to be alone. Now that she was by herself in the silence of the dormitories, absent the chatter of her friends to remind her she existed, she felt disturbingly empty.
Snap out of it, she told herself sternly. You just need some sleep—there’s no excuse to get all maudlin. But she still made no move to get in bed. The grounds looked so magical at night. She remembered when the whole castle had felt like that, all the time: beautiful and enchanted, calling her to explore every inch of it. When she’d first arrived, all she could think was that it was like something out of E. Nesbit, or the Wizard of Oz, or Narnia—that she’d found a gateway to another world, one more fascinating and lovely than the ordinary world she’d left behind. Impulsively, Lily stood up and stepped into her shoes, picking her way silently across the room and down the spiral staircase.
As she drifted through it in the moonlight, Hogwarts felt alien and unreal. It was completely silent: no students in the halls, the portraits all fast asleep—not even the ghosts were out. She had the funny thought that maybe she was the ghost, haunting a version of the castle that no longer existed.
At first she was only walking aimlessly, but eventually she directed her feet toward the great hall; perhaps she could lie on one of the tables and watch clouds move across the starry ceiling until she got tired. It was as she approached the staircase into the entryway that she heard voices for the first time that night.
The sounds were indistinct but clearly male, and she hung back, unwilling to break the spell of the nighttime castle by having a conversation with a handful of her idiot classmates. Feeling her way in the darkness, she slipped on the stairs—just a little, but enough to disturb one of the sleeping portraits on the wall.
“Careful there, wench—tis dangerous to roam these lands alone at night!”
Beneath her, she heard a muttered curse, and the sound of people gathering their things and hurrying off into the night. Luckily, none of them came up the stairs in her direction; they must have been heading the opposite way, toward the dungeons. She waited until she was sure she’d heard them disappear before she began moving again. Moments later, Lily rounded the corner and saw what they’d left behind.
“GET OUT, MUDBLOODS” read six-foot tall letters all along one wall. In the flickering light of the torches that were kept burning all night in the entrance hall, she could see that whatever they were written in was red, red as blood.
Lily felt very cold. A lump of ice seemed to have formed at her core, and was seeping into the rest of her body. Through her paralysis, one thought forced its way to the front of her mind: she couldn’t let anyone else see this.
She drew her wand—her hands didn’t feel like hers—and attempted a vanishing spell. Of course, nothing happened. Nothing happened the second, or the third time she tried it as well. She stared blankly at the wall, unable to think of anything else to try. Moving jerkily and automatically, she stumped over to one of Filch’s many broom closets and hauled out a bucket, soap, and brushes. She filled the bucket with a stream of soapy water, and set to work scrubbing at the letters.
Almost an hour could have passed by the time she admitted that this wasn’t working. The harsh soap Filch used might have been burning her hands and cracking the skin on her knuckles so that they bled into the water, but it had made no discernable difference to the writing on the wall.
Lily sat back on her heels, tears blurring her vision. She had to fix it—she couldn’t leave this thing hanging over the entrance. A while ago, it had occurred to her to go and wake a teacher, but the thought of even one more person seeing this—seeing how many people resented her presence in this castle, seeing how far they were willing to go to make sure she knew it, seeing how weak she was in front of it—made her sick to her stomach. She just had to think.
Think, Lily—think like a fucking witch!
She squinted at the wall through her wet eyes. Whatever it was, it wasn’t spelled to the wall—that much she could see. It was painted on. Which meant that whatever they’d used for paint was what was holding the magic, which meant a potion. And potions, she could handle.
Lily rose to standing, facing the wall head on. “I am a fucking witch.” Then she got to work.
~
Rather than leave the wall for the time it would take to return to Gryffindor tower, Lily had resorted to summoning supplies from the potions classroom. On the unlikely chance that Slughorn noticed they were missing, all she’d have to do would be to say she’d needed to borrow them for an experiment of her own, and he would be delighted.
She was working on analyzing the paint on the wall—something had been added to give it it’s unnatural resistance both to vanishing, which was to be expected, but also to muggle cleaning methods, which was less common. Most wizards wouldn’t even think about counteracting those, meaning that most “permanent” inks sold by wizards were actually only impervious to magical erasure. This was most likely a custom mixture, and whoever had made it was very thorough.
One of the small cauldrons behind her rattled, alerting her that the breakdown of her sample was complete. She crouched by it and began siphoning the components into vials, frowning at them as she did so. Most seemed like standard additives, but then one caught her eye—cleavers root—she was sure of it! That would stand up to scrubbing and vanishing charms, as well as give the paint it’s shocking red color. Well, not for long! Now that she’d found the trick, constructing a counter-brew would be simple. She set to work with renewed confidence.
Thirty minutes later, Lily was painting her jerry-rigged potion—a unusual dark green—overtop of the writing on the wall. If everything worked correctly, the potions would begin to counteract each other, consuming each other’s components and leaving only water behind.
“G” was the first to go. As she watched the color leach away, and the paint lose its grip on the wall and splash to the floor, a surge of vindication swept the exhaustion from her body. Those bastards were going to come downstairs tomorrow and see that their efforts had been for nothing, she thought fiercely. No one would even know they had tried. It would be as if it never happened. She attacked the rest of the slogan with renewed intensity. But despite the success, something was nagging at her. Where had she seen cleavers root used before?
The memory came to her just as she was finishing up the “U,” and it knocked the legs out from under her. Two summers ago, just before her trip to Dover with her family. The two of them had been hanging out in the park, brainstorming local potion ingredients she could collect while she was away. They’d always loved to do that—saved money for one thing, but also just for the fun of it. Finding the magic even in mundane, sleepy Cokeworth.
She could hear him saying, “Gallium verum, or lady’s bedstraw, or cleavers, grows on costal cliffs—bet you could find that in Dover!” And she’d laughed, and asked what in the world they wanted with cleavers. And he’d said… And he’d said…
“Ink. Makes an beautiful permanent stain against any muggle cleaning, and supports any resistance a dye already has against wizard removal… only works with reds though, for some reason. Maybe if you find some, we can figure it out.”
She’d never found some. No, she had, but Petunia threw all her foraged supplies away during a dreadful row. Either way, she returned from Dover emptyhanded, and they’d never figured out why cleavers roots were only compatible with red dyes. They hadn’t, but possibly he had.
Lily sat there on the floor for a long time. The cold, which had seemed to retreat as she worked on her potions, was creeping back into her limbs, climbing up to her neck, paralyzing her. She stared at the word “BLOOD” on the wall, in its tell-tale scarlet. It remained, like a brand, even as the “MU” dissolved and dripped away.
Nothing happened to shake Lily out of her trance, no noise in the hall, no change in the light. She simply decided to stand back up. There was nothing else to do—she began to paint over the final four letters with her counter-brew. It didn’t feel like a victory anymore.
Pyrrhic, she thought to herself, when the losses are too great for celebration. But the only thing she’d lost tonight, she’d lost a long time ago. So why did she feel this way? She stepped back, and pressed her hands over her eyes. A thick blanket of shame was descending on her, bringing heat to her face and a pricking sensation behind her eyes—but the more she cried, the more ashamed she felt. Furious with herself, she rubbed her fists against her eyes until she saw stars, and then bent to begin clearing away her potions supplies. It was at this moment that James Potter and his mates burst, laughing, into view at the turn of the stairs.
James came to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the stairs, Sirius stumbling a few steps past him before seeing what he was looking at, and Peter and Remus running into their backs. They stared at each other. Lily, frozen in place, wondered what this could possibly look like to James. Him, out for a midnight snack with his best friends, sneaking giddily around the castle just for the hell of it. Her, in her pajamas and docs in the entrance hall, with her potions kit scattered on the floor around her.
“Evans? What the bloody—” began Sirius.
“Lily?” Remus stepped around James to stare at her. “Lily, what on earth are you doing?”
They collectively took a few more steps toward her, and then they saw it. All four of them froze, as the pieces began to fit together. Her, exhausted and tearstained, the cauldrons on the floor, and the stark, towering, red “BLOOD” still on the wall in front of her. She could see the ripple of realization move across their little group, as each of them looked first shocked, and then furious. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to scream. She wanted nothing more than for James Potter and his friends to have never, ever have come near the entrance hall tonight.
“Who did this,” he demanded. All she could do was look at him blankly. “Evans, who the fuck was it!”
“Why?” she said. Her voice felt as if it was coming from a great distance. “What does that matter?”
“What does it… Of course it matters! It matters because we’re not going to let them get away with this!”
“You? What are you going to do?”
“Fix it,” he said furiously. “Stop them.”
She laughed. It sounded strained and unnatural even to her. “Stop it? You can’t do anything. So it doesn’t matter who wrote it—all that matters is that no one ever sees it.” She turned back to look at the wall, where the words still lingered. “Useless,” she murmured.
Remus stepped forward. “Sirius, let’s you and me go get McGonagall—”
“No!” snapped Lily, wrapping her arms around herself to hold in the nausea roiling in her stomach. “It’s bad enough that all of you had to be here. I can’t let… no one else can see it!” She knew she sounded desperate, judging by the concern on all four of their faces.
“Come on, Evans,” said James. He spoke more quietly now, but desperation had crept into his voice as well. “Please. Just leave it… if you won’t get a teacher then at least let us—”
“Just leave it?” she asked, the ice in her veins coloring her voice. “Do you actually think that I could.”
“No—Evans! That’s not what I meant! I meant that we can finish what’s left and you can, you know, take a break or something. I don’t think…”
She looked at him flatly. “It’s already done.” Behind her, “BLOOD” began to drip, and run down the wall. As they watched, it turned clear, like water, and within seconds nothing was left but a puddle on the floor.
“Oh. Well, we could—"
“Just fuck off, Potter,” she said, exhaustion roughening her voice. “Please. Not tonight.” She turned her face back to the wall. After a tortured moment of indecision, she heard James and the rest of them leave.
Lily leaned her cheek against the cool stone of the corridor wall and closed her eyes. When she was a little girl, she and Petunia would lay spread-eagled on the grass outside and stare straight up at the sky to try to feel the turning of the earth. Lily was always so sure she felt it, and Petunia would laugh and tell her that it was impossible, that the earth was too big. She would lie there and listen, enthralled, as Petunia would explain again about the orbits of the planets, and the seasons, and the science she was learning in school. But the whole time Petunia talked, Lily could feel the earth swooping beneath her. The magic inside of Hogwarts felt like that.
She could feel the hum of it moving under the skin of the castle now—something that was always present, but which she could only feel when she sought it out. Maybe if she sat here long enough, she would start to hum too, she thought idly. It would be nice, to just dissolve into it. To sit here until she turned to stone.
Lily rose stiffly to her feet. The boys had vanished her bucket of soapy water, and neatly stacked her potions kit by her bag before they left. She stared at it blankly for a moment, before bending over and packing it back away, her hands clumsier than they had been before. She straightened up again, adjusting her bag, and began the slow walk back to Gryffindor tower, trailing one hand along the stone wall as she went.