Ooh purple 1 please!
“You know you’re my best friend, right?”
Lily looks up from her essay to blink back at Severus. He hasn’t even looked up from his own parchment, but his face is smooth and indifferent, like he’s just suggested they take a break instead of saying something sort of touching out of the blue.
She sets down her quill and waits for Severus to do the same, but he doesn’t. She watched his dark eyes carefully, noticing that they flicker upwards every few seconds, as if he’s looking to see if she’s still watching him.
He can be such a pill sometimes, honestly.
Lily Summons Severus’ parchment. His eyes finally meet hers, snapping to her face like a kitchen magnet thwacking onto a refrigerator.
“Really?” she rolls up his essay. “Tell me more about that.”
Severus scowls and shrugs, throwing his quill into his rucksack dismissively. “I’m just making sure you know.”
Lily frowns. He’s never done this sort of thing before — remind her. They’d had a row just yesterday but they’ve made up already, just in time to suffer through Herbology with Potter and Black, who somehow managed to sabotage both of their rue saplings while they’re back had been turned. Severus had gotten them back by dumping some new experiment into Potter’s and now they were in the library, working on the essay they’d been assigned in lieu of a detention.
Severus’ scowl turns into that worried, famished look, like he’s starving and she’s only just reminded him.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Lily asks, fanning herself with the parchment. “I’m not exactly forgetful.”
A blush creeps into his cheeks — Lily bites her tongue.
“After our argument the other day…” he shakes his head. “We’ve been fighting a lot lately, haven’t we?”
Lily drops the parchment. They have — she would be lying if she tried to play it off like they weren’t. They’d always bickered here and there, but lately, the digs back and forth had started to sting a little more, dissipate a little less. They clung around them like smoke when they walked from class or sat quietly by the lake.
“That’s what people who are close do,” Lily says instead. “They argue. They know how to press each others buttons.”
Severus looks away quickly to glare at the floor. Lily is confused before she realizes why — his parents. I think you’re house is haunted, your dad is always mad and that must be why —
“Yeah,” he said quietly, so quietly that Lily almost has to strain to hear it. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Or you could stop hanging out with those creeps.” Lily knows she shouldn’t, she can’t help herself. She can see herself losing him, see him pulling away, and sometimes, she’s not sure if she wants to stop him. “I don’t know what you see in then anyway.”
“Potter says the same thing about me to you.” Sev bites back in a bitter voice, like he can’t stand the taste of the words in his mouth.
Lily crosses her arms. “Potter is his own special kind of creep. We’re on the same page about that, at least.”
Sev manages to smirk, just a little bit.
“But we’re not talking about Potter — I’m talking about your other friends.” she gives him a pointed look.
Sev hangs his head low — he knows, on some level he does, and he knows that she knows that he knows. “They’re my Housemates. What do you want me to do?”
“You know that’s not what this is about.”
“I already told you, I can’t control what other people say or do!”
Lily slams up from the table, because she hasn’t told him — hasn’t told him what Mulciber hissed through the girl’s loo door the other day while she was in there. He didn’t hear what he’d followed her to the loo to say, to do out of earshot, away from Sev, who might not even believe her if she told him.
And Lily doesn’t. She shouldn’t have to — shouldn’t need to, because Severus is her best friend. That’s what he said, that’s what started this whole bloody aggravating conversation —
It’s what starts every bloody aggravating conversation.
As Lily storms off, she wonders how many are left, how many she can count on one hand, until he slips through her fingers.
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