"If there are no more questions, you may find a partner, turn to page 357, and begin. One of you should record your observations at each stage of the preparation," Slughorn says. He pauses (and they all know it's a pause, for dramatic effect, and more is coming.) "Oh, and twenty points to the team that produces the best Epione Potion."

Lily likes the days Slughorn has them work in pairs.

Because (and she knows this is petty and childish, but she can't quite help it) it means that the one person in their year who might be as good at Potions as she is (and her former best friend) is going to be stuck working with the dead weight that is one of his fellow Slytherins.

And Lily?

Well, Lily gets to work with James.

Lily's been to a lot of Professor Slughorn's "little supper parties" over the last couple years, but this has been one for the books.

James Potter is in attendance.

As far as she knows, he's been ducking these invitations for longer than she's been on the guest list, but the price for breaking Regulus Black's nose seems to be that he is going to have to put in the occasional appearance.

And Slughorn, who is either unaware or unconcerned that his guest would probably rather be serving detention or writing an essay or possibly even having major surgery, is just delighted to have him here, and keeps bringing the conversation back around to asking after Potter's parents, or reminiscing about people and events from their circle.

Potter's not out-and-out rude, of course, but his answers are short and not really designed to be followed up on, and he's quick to shove someone else into the spotlight of the conversation.

It's almost hard to keep a straight face.

(And it's not what she expected. She's seen this before -- there's almost always a "star" at these dinners -- and people are usually happy to have been so anointed. And while she knows Potter has been avoiding these gatherings for years, she also kind of expected he'd find the attention flattering, once he finally got to one, rather than looking for ways to get away from it.)

The evening runs long -- they so often do -- and Slughorn dismisses them just after they should all have been back to their dormitories to avoid being out of bounds after hours. Potter is out the door even before most of the guests have got out of their chairs.

Lily says a very quick good night to Professor Slughorn, and makes it to the hallway just as Potter's about to vanish around the corner.

"Hey, Potter, wait up."

It shouldn't, perhaps, be a surprise that Hogwarts feels largely the same way it always has. It's Hogwarts, after all.

There are differences, of course. It's sixth year, they're doing NEWT-level classes, and the rooms full of every student in a house or two are gone. And even after only two days of classes, Lily can already tell that the change from OWL material to NEWT is significant, and that, as they have all qualified to be in the room, the teachers expect them to be able to keep up.

But it's still unmistakably Hogwarts. And she expected, after last year, that things would feel ... well, she hardly even knows. But different, in some way. Or in all ways.

Then again, she hasn't been to Potions yet. If there's a place things are going to feel utterly changed, it's likely to be Professor Slughorn's classroom. It's one of the smaller classes now, which means less of crowd to hide in. And it's the place where Severus once assured her they'd always be friends, and the place where she finally admitted that no, they wouldn't.

Professor Slughorn, at least, does not appear to have changed. He's standing at the door, greeting students as they come in, and his face breaks into a wide smile when he sees Lily. "Ah, Miss Evans. Had a good summer?"

"Lovely, thank you, Professor Slughorn. Did you?"

"I did. There was a rather amusing incident with a crup and a cabbage and, well, I shall tell you all about it next week at my first little supper party for the year. I'm sure you'll be there."

"I wouldn't miss it, sir."

"Splendid. Well, just find a spot over there, around the cauldrons. Thought I'd show you a bit of a preview of what you can look forward to this year and next, before we get down to work."

She'd guess about half the students have already arrived. The Slytherins have stayed in a group at the near end of the display of cauldrons, Severus in the middle of them. Lily walks past without so much as letting her eyes dart sideways. There doesn't seem to be anyone else present from Gryffindor, and the group of Ravenclaws includes Jeremy Flourish, with whom she exchanges small, slightly awkward smiles but has no desire to join. Almost by default, then, that leaves her with a spot near Juliet Jakes and Geoffrey Lewis of Hufflepuff.

She keeps her eyes on the cauldrons in front of her, ignoring whatever has caused a murmur to go through the Slytherins.

It's the week before OWLs, and everyone is starting to look harried and rumpled and worried and on edge, even the professors. Even Potter, though Lily kind of suspects that has more to do with the Quidditch loss than their upcoming exams.

Well, everyone except Sirius Black. He looks as calm and unconcernedly smug as ever, like he's not expecting to be asked to do anything more difficult than show up. Lily kind of wants to slap him for it.

But, Black aside, they're all under just a bit of strain, so Lily really thinks nothing of it when Severus can't find his quill Monday, and then she finds it on his desk. Not even when he swears that it absolutely, positively had not been there a moment ago. Because that's the same day Glynis isn't able to find her bag ... while it's slung over her shoulder.

Nor does Lily think it is anything other than nerves on Tuesday, when Severus tries to answer a question in Transfiguration and lets out a massive belch when he tries to say "Professor McGonagall." Not even when it happens twice.

No, Lily's first sign that something is going on is just that. A sign. A literal sign. One that reads My name is Snivellus Snape and I smell, stuck to the back of Sev's robes when he arrives for lunch on Wednesday. Halfway up the Gryffindor table, Potter and Black are laughing self-satisfied sorts of laughs and not being even a little subtle about it and Pettigrew is beaming and cheering. Lily catches Remus Lupin's eye and he quickly drops his gaze to his lunch.

Still, it's not till Thurday that Lily puts it all together, can see that there's a pattern here, that the sign was neither the beginning nor the end. On Thursday, faintly glowing letters appear across the back of Sev's hair, reading Wash Me.

At the very least, Lily thinks, the 'Marauders' should be able to come up with some new insults, creative as they're supposed to be.

Lily is very nearly late to Potions on Friday, the last class of their fifth year, after she has to help get a hysterical Coco Burwell calmed down and off to Madam Pomfrey. Professor Slughorn waves her into the room with a smile and without comment. Lily makes her way to the desk she has shared with Severus for five years.

"Don't sit here," Severus says, quietly, not looking up, when she starts to set her things on the desk.

"What? Why not?" Lily asks. "I always sit here."

"There's a sticking charm on the damned bench," Sev says.

Lily looks over at the desk across the aisle and a little behind them, where Potter is doing a much better job of not looking interested than Black is, for once.

"Miss Evans, if you could take your seat, please," Professor Slughorn says.

Lily meets Black's eyes, raises her chin just a little, and sits down next to Severus.

Severus still doesn't look at her, but asks, very quietly, "Do you think you're proving something by sitting with me, Lily?"

"Do you think you were proving something by telling me not to, Sev?" Lily asks.

"Yes," he says.

"Guess we both are, then."

But then, they've always been proving something in this room, haven't they? To themselves, to each other, to the rest of their Houses. Even when they didn't know they were.

If Slughorn has noticed that his two star pupils are not paying any attention to the lesson, he doesn't comment.

"Do you think you can make anything better by sitting with me?" Severus asks.

"Did you want me to just walk away?"

Sev makes a sound not quite like a laugh, and finally looks at her. There's something mocking in his eyes, sardonic even. "You can't if you want to, can you? You're stuck with me."

He's talking about the bench. She knows he's talking about the bench, but can't help but see his statement in the larger context of their years of friendship. It's the thing she's not sure he can appreciate any more. That she isn't -- that she has never been -- 'stuck with him.' She's always made a conscious, deliberate, and at times very difficult decision to be his friend.

Lily looks at him, and thinks about all the questions she's afraid to ask him anymore, things that will never come up on OWLs, things that make up a much, much harder test. Did you cast that spell on Elinor Perks? Why did you cast that spell on Elinor Perks? Did you think you were proving something when you did that? What? And to whom? Me? Mulciber? Avery? Regulus Black? What were you and Regulus Black talking about that made Potter decide to break his nose? Did you agree with whatever Regulus Black was saying that made Potter break his nose? Am I wrong about you, Severus? Do you want to be one of them? What am I going to do if you do?

"The funny thing is," Lily says, "I'm really not."

Lily slides away from him, and stands.

The sticking charm was only ever on his side of the bench.

James Potter was, after all, never going to go along with a plan that got her stuck to a bench with Severus Snape.

"Miss Evans?" Professor Slughorn says, breaking off on the middle of the review he's giving on moonstone. "Are you quite all right?"

"Fine," she says. "Sorry, couldn't see the blackboard."

She sits down again, across the aisle, in what is usually Coco Burwell's seat. She knows that absolutely no one in the room, including Professor Slughorn, thinks that she has actually moved to see the board better. But Professor Slughorn just nods and goes back to his lesson.

Severus sits with his hands on top of the desk, staring straight ahead. He does not turn to look at her, at least not that she sees.

Lily sits and takes careful, detailed notes that she doesn't need on things she already knows, until class is over.

Sometimes, Lily wonders if she and Severus are the first two people to ever attempt to be friends across the Gryffindor-and-Slytherin divide. Some days, she decides that the law of averages alone means that they're surely not, that in Hogwarts' hundreds of years they can't be, that maybe it's easier when the Wizarding World at large is more settled than she has ever known it to be.

Most of the time, though, it feels like they are.

Maybe they wouldn't have even tried, if she had known just what Slytherin and Gryffindor meant to each other. Instead, at the age of eleven, with her hair in plaits down her back and her new red-and-gold tie knotted neatly at her throat, she'd sat down next to him in her very first Hogwarts class, which had been Potions. "We're still friends, Sev, right? It doesn't matter that we're not in the same House, does it?"

"Of course we're still friends," he'd said, a little fiercely. "We'll always be friends. Best friends."

And Lily had smiled, relieved, and that had been that.

It would take her years to realize he'd only answered her first question.

Sometimes she wonders, too, if that's what got first Professor Slughorn's attention, her decision to start her Hogwarts career sitting not with Mary or Cliona, but with as a Muggle-born Gryffindor sharing a desk with a half-blood Slytherin. Lily hadn't seen it that way, hadn't really known enough to know it could be seen that way, and certainly hadn't been doing anything brave. Quite the opposite, really, as she'd sat with the one person in the room she'd known more than twenty-four hours.

At any rate, the Potions classroom has always been the easiest place at Hogwarts to be friends with Severus Snape. Maybe because she was quickly established as one of Professor Slughorn's favorites, and he has never been the least bit reticent in showing favoritism, so everyone knows it, even though he's the Head of Slytherin House and she's a Gryffindor.

Maybe it's because they're both so very good at Potions, undisputed bests in their year, and it's easier to flaunt convention from the top, sometimes. (Sometimes Lily even wonders if that's why they both got so good at Potions.) She's gone right on sitting next to him for five years now, in that classroom if no where else. And maybe the fact that they were both risking so much just by sitting together was what made it ever so easy to start to experiment with the instructions in the book in third year. Which was when they went from being good at Potions to being great at Potions.

At any rate, their Draught of Peace today had been, in Professor Slughorn's words, "an absolute triumph" and just from inhaling its fumes while they worked, Lily is feeling more relaxed than she has since sometime last month.

"We did well today," she tells Severus, cheerfully, as they pack up their things at the end of the lesson. Most of their classmates have already gone, because they'd been delayed by Professor Slughorn's effusive congratulations.

"It's Potions," he says. "We always do well."

"Right, including today," she says, and he laughs.

It's been a while since she's actually heard him laugh.

She's missed it.

"Do you want to meet up after dinner?" he asks. "Work on the essay?"

"Can't," she says. "I'm meeting Jeremy. But what about tomorrow? We've got a free period in the morning, and then we can finish after dinner if we need to."

"Tomorrow's fine," he says. They're alone now, their classmates have gone and Professor Slughorn is back in the storeroom. Severus leans back against their work table. "So how is it going with Jeremy?"

"Fine," she says, and then realizing that sounds a bit weak, adds, "Great. Really great."

Sev smiles at her. "'Really great'?"

"Well, of course," Lily says. "I mean, he's great. He's sweet and he's smart and it's ... "

"Great?" Sev suggests.

"Yes," Lily says. "It's great."

"You're bored, aren't you?"

"I didn't say that," Lily says.

"You didn't have to," Sev tells her.

"But I didn't."

"Yeah, you very carefully neither confirmed nor denied the allegation," he says.

"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about, Sev," she says, in a put-on prim tone that gives ways to giggles. "And you've got powdered moonstone on your nose."

Sev scrubs one hand across his nose. "Did I get it?" he asks, and Lily shakes her head. He tries again with no more success.

"Here, let me," she says, and Sev lowers his hand.

Lily carefully rubs the smudge off his nose, then shows him the moonstone on her thumb. "Got it," she says.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Lily wipes her thumb on the edge of her jumper.

"Look, Lily, I -- " Sev says, and then breaks off as there's a voice from the door.

"Oi, Snape," says Evan Rosier, "we're waiting. Leave your little Mudblood and come on."

Severus waves a hand at him, and Rosier rolls his eyes and goes.

Lily stares at the floor by Sev's feet, her good mood evaporated like the cauldron fumes that helped cause it.

"Ignore him," Severus tells her, in the same fierce tone he'd once told her that of course they were still friends. "Ignore him, you're nothing like that."

"I know," she says.

And of course she'll ignore him. It's all you can really do with people like Evan Rosier.

Except that when Sev leaves this room, he'll go have lunch with him. And Mulciber and Avery and the rest of them.

"You're better than any of them," Severus tells her.

"I know that, too," she says, managing something like a smile. "But thank you."

He slings his bag over his shoulder. "So I'll see you tomorrow, then. Free period, right?"

"Yeah, free period."

Lily watches him go. She's still standing, staring at the door, when Professor Slughorn comes back in from the storeroom.

"Miss Evans, you're still here? Is something wrong?"

Everything is wrong.

Lily shakes her head. "No, Professor. I was just leaving."

"Excellent work today," he tells her, "as always."

"Thank you, Professor."

"I still say you should have been in Slytherin, Miss Evans," he tells her. It's an old joke by now.

Somehow, Lily manages to grin at him from the doorway. "Well, I have to have some faults, now, don't I?"

Professor Slughorn laughs as she leaves his classroom.

Lily straightens her red-and-gold tie and heads for lunch.