Chapter Text
As the next months pass, the pattern continues. Remus is sick once a month for a handful of days and always at the same time as Lily is suffering, and her conviction only grows. She stocks up on chocolate for both of them and carries the peppermint oil in her school bag even when the nausea hasn’t hit her. There becomes an unacknowledged sort of camaraderie between the two of them.
It’s just past the winter holidays with the determination of the start of a new calendar year hanging in the air and she’s wandering the grounds with the boys, they’ve ridiculously proclaimed themselves “the marauders” after McGonnagal had attempted to chastise them with the term. They had gone to the lake but it was too frozen over to be any fun to watch the creatures there and thus they’ve taken to wandering aimlessly about the grounds until the chill drives them to walk back toward the common room hearth.
Lily is hardly paying attention to whatever conversation James, Peter, and Remus have taken up, too intrigued by Sirius’s recounting of a strange holiday tradition of seance that he’d been forced to attend over the break.
Remus shoves James lightheartedly at something, undoubtedly stupid, that he’s said and he knocks against Lily’s shoulder. She turns to glare halfheartedly at him, but it quickly turns to a much more authentic glare at his next words.
“Hah, you shove like a girl, Rem,” he laughs before throwing his shoulder into Remus’s, knocking him off balance and into the snow.
Lily rounds on him instantly, “stop being an ass!” she shouts. It’s too loud, too defensive to be innocuous, but she’s annoyed on Remus’s behalf and unconcerned about being polite.
“Are you alright, Remus?” she asks, offering a gloved hand and hauling him to his feet.
He brushes snow from his trousers and cloak and chuckles shyly, “ah, it’s no big deal, Lily. We’re just roughhousing a little.”
She huffs anyway. She feels justified in being offended by James’s remark enough on her own. The fact that it was directed at Remus just makes it more so offensive. She gives Remus a stern look, one that she hopes conveys some sort of message of ‘you don’t have to take shit from him just because he’s one of your best friends’ and ‘don’t listen to him, you’re not a girl and I’m sure you don’t shove like one’ and also ‘girls can shove just as hard as boys and I’d know; Petunia’s a menace when she’s mad’. She’s not sure how much of it gets through but Remus gives her a gentle smile and she decides to drop it for now.
“Be nice. He’s your fucking friend,” she says curtly to a very confused-looking James before determinedly urging Sirius to continue his tale of the holiday seance to distract from the commotion she’d caused.