"Potter with the quaffle - and he soars 'round Black - whoa near miss of a collision but Potter's broom handling is so brilliant he manages a deep dive nearly all the way to the carpet! What a brilliant move that was!! They'll be talking of that in Quidditch Through Even More Ages. That's the long-anticipated sequel to the original that's finally expected to come out now that we've got James Potter to talk about in it, you know! We've been just waiting for the right star to come along that shines so bright as him so we'd have more stuff to say about Quidditch!"

"But wait -- forget Potter, there's BLACK, who's -- by jove look at this, he's just TAKEN THE SNITCH."

"What!? Wait! We're playing with a snitch?"

"Yes, clearly, as I've just caught it and I've beaten you!"

"No way! I didn't know we had a snitch, I would've imagined catching it ages ago."

"Sorry, mate, that's tough luck.... Oh. Hey - Reeves, you wanna play with us? We're about to start a second round?" Sirius nudged the hip of the other boy with the toe of his trainer. "Oi. Reeves."

The boy looked up. His eyes were green and they met the grey of Sirius's eyes. 

"It's Remus, not Reeves... and... no, thank you, I'm not much into quidditch."

"Not much into quidditch!" James shouted, pausing jumping on the opposite seat bench, holding the balled wrapper from the pasties they'd consumed, which was what Sirius had insisted was the snitch he'd just caught moments before. "How can you be not much into quidditch? Didn't you know it's the most magical sport in the world?"

"Only magical sport in the world, unless you count gobstones and dragon racing," Sirius said.

"Gobstones barely counts as a game at all and dragon racing ought to be illegal," James said, sounding very a rather lot like he'd heard it repeated a thousand times by someone and was just parroting their opinion.

"We can show you how to play if  it's just you don't know how to play," Sirius offered the boy with the green eyes. He hadn't looked away from that stare for a single second, nor did he now that James resumed jumping, landing with a thump behind him on Remus's bench and a thump back on the opposite one... Sirius just stared into those eyes. "I don't mind showing you."

The boy shook his head. "I know how to play. I - I just don't want to right now, but thank you."

Those eyes. Those eyes were eyes that someone could live in and die for, they were deep... deep beyond the number of years the kid had in his life so far. How does a kid, just a kid, have eyes so deep as that?  

Lily gasped. Her hands let go of Sirius's. She looked at him.

"What? Are you okay?" Sirius asked.

Lily's hands shook. "Can you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

Sirius looked confused. 

They were sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Paris, the city glowing below, the table scattered with Lily's Magique Amor textbooks, the quill in one of her hands, Remus's rune chart beside leaning against the stack of books and scrolls, where they could both reference it, and her other hand was holding onto Sirius's. He had a blank parchment and a quill, too, and he'd started copying the forms of letters from the beginning of the first scroll, which Lily had already finished copying. His copying of the runes was a bit messy and the line was crooked across his parchment and there was an ink splotch where the quill had dripped.

It was like the memory had come through his hand, like he was a conductor of electricity and she'd felt it come through him and into her and it had played in her mind like a little movie and she'd felt -- 

"You loved him the second you saw him, didn't you?"

Sirius stared at her in confusion. "What?"

"You and Remus? On the train?"

Sirius was still confused.

"Didn't you see it? You ickle beans on the train... in your compartment... and Remus not knowing about quidditch? You called him Reeves," she giggled.

Sirius laughed, "I forgot I called him Reeves. Poor Remus. What weird name though, blimey. What were his parents thinking?"

Lily looked down at her books. "You really didn't see all that? or feel it, rather, I guess?"

Sirius shook his head.

Lily looked back up at him. "I dunno why you didn't see it."

"Me neither. But you did, huh?"

"Yeah... but I rather think it was - was sort of vicarious through you somehow." She looked at his still outstretched arm, his hand precisely where she'd left it when she drew back. She looked up at him. "The way you looked at him, Sirius... you loved him the moment you met him."

Sirius had a funny look to his face.

"What?"

"I dunno if it was that I loved him," Sirius said, "Its just - well, I suppose I could tell he was nervous or lonely or something. I felt bad for him, I remember that. I remember thinking he seemed older, or like he'd been through a really hard turn. I don't know why I thought that. He didn't look any different than any other kid on the train."

Lily looked down at her runes, a half finished sentence on the page, sort of roughly translated since the grammar didn't make sense yet for a true translation, but what was there thus far said, "Just as the light of morning shines from the very dawn..."

She looked up at Sirius. 

"You really didn't feel the memory?"

"No. Not at all." He looked regretful.

Lily let out a frustrated sound, just a little "hmmph" of a thing.

Sirius frowned. "So it won't work?"

"I may have to ask Professor Laurie how to show you to do the Magique Amor," she murmured. "I - I suppose I'm probably forgetting something important."

Sirius started to draw back his hand, but she reached to catch it again. "Wait." She paused, holding his palm with hers, their lifelines touching. She looked into his eyes. "I - would you mind staying with me while I do this, though? I'll tell you outloud the memories. I just - this is the furthest I've been able to get with doing Remus. Usually there's just a lot of pain."

Sirius looked at their hands touching. "Yeah," he said, "If it helps, sure."

So Lily took her quill back up and she drew a deep breath.

"Lupin, Remus!"

The small, terribly thin boy walked slowly up the plinth. He was slow going up the steps taking the two steps one at a time. Then, she'd though it was nervousness, now she thought of Remus's bad knees. Even at eleven, they'd been through years of transformations, she realized. Even at eleven, Remus's poor body was aged.

Perhaps that's where the depths of his eyes came from; from having seen so much.

The hat slipped over his face.

"I was so scared the hat would tell everyone my secret," Remus said. 

It was third year and they'd been talking about the Sorting Hat - it was sometime after Remus's birthday that year, she knew that, but she wasn't sure precisely when it had been. She just remembered the idea of the conversation that particular night... They'd met so many times in the passageway alcove to talk...He was sitting on the floor in the trophy room passageway, looking up at Lily, laying on the couch behind him.

"I remember the brim went over practically my whole face it was so big and the hat asked what I was afraid of. Nothing, I'd said, and the hat had chuckled and said, nothing? Nothing at all? and I'd said, no nothing - I mean, I didn't know what the hat could and couldn't see and if it didn't know what I was afraid of, then I was glad for it not to know and I wasn't going to out myself if it didn't know so I just said I was afraid of nothing. I meant that I didn't want to talk about what I was afraid of - you know, like - nevermind, it's nothing -- but I reckon the hat took it as bravery? I dunno. Because the next thing the hat said was - brave boy - and it shouted out Gryffindor! And that was it. That was my entire encounter with the hat."

Lily stared at him. "Well, I don't blame it, figuring out you were brave. Of course you're brave."

Remus stared up at her. "Thank you, Lily."

"I mean, what else could anyone think you are, if not brave?"

And they had been in the trophy room passage another night, before, during second year, and Remus Lupin had unbuttoned his uniform shirt and shrugged the shoulder back, revealing a moon-shaped scar on his shoulder. The scar was silver lined, paler pink than the rest of Remus's skin, and horrible and jaggedy and just a little recessed, as though part of him was missing, had been bitten off... The idea made Lily's stomach turn, even now as she copied the runes as watched the memory. 

"Is that a... a bite?" she whispered. 

Remus nodded. He looked miserable and afraid, his eyes searching her face, waiting for the terrible reaction he thought she was about to have.

"But - but that would - that would make you a -" She was ashamed of the feeling of horror that she remembered having felt, how it had welled up inside of her from her toes to her fingertips to the very tip of her nose, how she'd felt overwhelmed and suddenly afraid. This was the part in the movies when the bad guy would leap across the room and devour the girl, turn her into a werewolf, too, and there would be that horror-movie scream, the canned sound that was used over and over and over in so many crummy b-rated flicks... she felt dizzy.

But it was Remus Lupin, not some drooling, plaid-shirt-wearing, ugly, bloody, terrible monster with fangs and spikey claws and murder on the mind... No this was Remus, the scrawny little scar-marked angel of a boy who was her friend... one of her very closest friends at Hogwarts.

"I don't believe you. You're just trying to scare me. Why would you do that?"

But trying to scare her was even more out of character for Remus Lupin than being a werewolf was. At least being a werewolf wasn't a choice. Trying to scare her would've been a choice... and Remus Lupin would never choose to hurt her on purpose. Her or anyone else for that matter.

"I'm just telling you the truth."

"Where's Remus?" Lily asked.

James Potter was staring at her with an expression of arrogance. "I dunno, the hospital wing, I think?"

"The hospital wing?" 

"Yeah, the hospital wing." His voice had come off clipped.

"Is he sick?"

"Yeah," James said - as though that were obviously implied by the fact that it was the hospital wing.

Sirius was grinning with amusement, too. As though it were funny Remus was in the hospital wing! honestly, those boys - they were awful... She felt a fleeting moment of indignation like she'd felt back then, but then something else slipped in.

He wasn't grinning at Remus's hospital wing visit. He was grinning at James. Why was he grinning at James? And Lily looked back at James in the memory, feeling like a third party spectator suddenly, and the scene sort of... shifted... like it had been rotated... like he was seeing it from Sirius's perspective...

"Where's Remus?" Lily asked again, and this time it was her who sounded a bit arrogant. She was surprised by the tone of her own voice.

"I - I don't know," James stammered. She hadn't noticed he'd stammered. She noticed now and she was... amused? Amused why? Oh look at his cheeks how red they're going. "The hospital wing, I think."

"The hospital wing?"

He was downright red. "Yeah. The hospital wing."

"Is he sick?"

"Yeah," James Potter's nerves had the best of him, and Sirius grinned -- at James being nervous talking at Lily. Lily felt her stomach twist. Not arrogant. Nervous. Nervous about her....

"What? Are you mad?" Her voice echoed in her ears, guilt welling up inside her. She was standing on the stairs in the entrance hall at Hogwarts and Sirius, Peter, and Remus were glowering at her fiercely. "I mean it's James Potter, somebody's got to deflate his ego now and then!"

"You have no fucking idea what he's really like, Evans. No idea what really goes through his head, what he bloody does for other people! You have no idea! And if you had even an inkling --" Sirius Black was snarling mad. She could feel the anger in him, charged to the heights, he was ready to rip her apart to pieces in the passion he felt over protecting James.

"ENLIGHTEN ME, THEN!" she screamed.

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe he talks big because he feels small?"

James's voice was small. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in the apartment in Paris, his back to her, silhouetted by moonlight and city lights through the wide windows and glass doors of the balcony. She stared at him, longing to be closer to him. He didn't look small, but the voice gave him away, a shake to the words, "I don't want you to think different of me, though."

"Think different of you?" Lily whispered. "I could never think differently of you."

"Hullo..."

Lily looked up and it was like two scenes had blended. The back of her husband James, still hunched over on the edge of the bed, and there, timid and small, eleven, stepping through the memory of the compartment door on the train was the little boy James, his eyes nervously looking at her. "Is um... this seat taken?"

"No," it was now-Lily answering, not the blubbering girl from the train.

Eleven year old James stared at her with concern. He had a nervous, tentative smile. He was staring at her without taking his eyes away. "I'm James, by the way. James Potter."

"Lily Evans," she whispered.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "Just - because you're crying." His eyes were kind.

The kindest eyes she'd ever seen. 

She'd seen those eyes before somewhere... they were just so gentle and so loving...

"I can't believe you're real," she whispered. She was stroking the stag in the woods. "You're a bit of a hero, you know, coming when you did. I had a broken heart and you've managed to pick up the pieces a bit."

The smell of chrysthanenums and bluebells filled her nose.

James stood on the door step of the Evans house, juggling a bouquet of the flowers from one arm to the other. Lily stared from the end of the hallway as her mum talked to him. "Are you magic, too?" her mum asked.

James smiled, held his palm up empty to show her, then moved his fingers so the thumb rubbed against the pads of them like fire and he whispered, "Fumi gloria," and a smokey silver butterfly flew out of his hand when he flattened his palm again. It was iridescent, the butterfly was, but her mother's face was incandescent, and she watched with enchantment as the butterfly flew, landing on the bouquet of flowers he'd just handed her, and popped like a little bubble. 

She was smiling, holding a bouquet of James's magic.

Lily was staring into James's eyes a moment later, those gentle brown eyes.

"You sounded so lonely and sad."

"I'm sorry I burdened you with it."

"I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner."

"You have no idea how glad I am that you are here, Potter."

"I'm here, Evans, as long as you want me, I'm here."

"You're just so busy being strong for everyone, aren't you? And who's being strong for you?"

"Nobody," he barely breathed the word.

"Lily."

She shook her head.

"Lily."

She opened her eyes. She could feel tears on her face.

Sirius was staring at her. "Lily."

"I - Sirius?"

Sirius leaned closer, his eyes meeting hers. "You're not thinking about Remus," he whispered.

Lily looked at Sirius's face. "What?"

"You're whispering his name." Sirius nodded to door, through which Lily could see James, asleep on the bed. "You aren't doing Remus."

"I was whispering his name?"

"Yeah."

She flushed.

"You're not doing Remus."

Lily looked up at Sirius. "Bloody hell, I wasn't doing Remus," she realized, catching herself.

Sirius's eyebrows were raised, unsure what to say.

Lily let go of his hand and dropped the quill onto her parchment. She didn't even have it in her to read the translation, she felt so - overwhelmed, so guilty, so -- 

She looked at James laying there, thought how far she'd gone, how close she'd been to violating the one thing he'd asked of her. But oh how much more she loved him, even from just the little bit she'd done before she'd realized what she was doing - how much more she understood him, how much longer she realized that he'd loved her, how much stronger he seemed, how much braver --

"Gods, Sirius, I've been an idiot."

Sirius leaned back in the chair. He plucked his rose from Freddie Mercury from the table and spun the stem in his fingers again, staring at the petals. His eyes travelled to her. 

"Reckon we both were idiots for a time," he said.

"What?"

"Me, loving Moony since the moment I saw him and waiting until fourth year to say 'fuck it' and you -" Sirius laughed, shaking his head, "Seven years, Lilith. Blimey."

Lily stared at James's form on the bed. 

"Blimey," she whispered back. Then she looked back at Sirius again. "You knew it all along."

"Bloody hell he wasn't exactly hiding it," Sirius chuckled.

Lily sighed, "No. But he hides a lot of pain now, though."

Sirius looked over at James, too, then back to her. "Yeah, he's always hidden that. He's not the dramatic cutting black soul that I am on the outside, at least, but there's a reason he understands me so well, isn't there?" Sirius smiled a sad smile, watching as the rose spun between his fingers.