Chapter Text
The next month when Lily and Remus are both feeling sluggish and achy and she pulls a bar of honeydukes toffee chocolate from her bag and breaks it to hand half to Remus, she can see the realization in his eyes. That she does this because she knows that it’s that time of the month for him too. He gives her a soft, grateful smile as he pops a chunk of it in his mouth.
When her cramps finally get bad enough to go to Madam Pomfrey for some of the legendary blue tea, she knows immediately that she absolutely has to convince Remus to try it. She sits in the infirmary until well after she can feel the effects loosening the painful knots in her spine asking the matron questions about the tea with a dark flush on her face. She forces herself to push through her own embarrassment until Madam Pomfrey with a sigh and an eye roll scrawls a fairly simple potion recipe on the end of one of Lily’s rolls of parchment.
“If you’re so determined, I’m sure you can brew it on your own if Horace’s assessment of your skills is accurate. Make sure you use bluebonnets, not bluebells, you don’t want to mess up your herbology on this one.”
She tucks the parchment back into Lily’s bag before returning to her endless rushing work. Lily practically jumps off the cot she’d been perching on, hurrying back to class. In the last hours of the day, Lily hardly retains anything. She keeps sneaking looks at the recipe from Madam Pomfrey. The potion requires moon water from the phase furthest from the start of the cycle. According to her lunar charts, that means she’ll need moon water from the new moon for her and Remus. She’s pretty sure Professor Slughorn will have a couple of bottles of it. She’ll just have to ask him to borrow some and then she can start making her own supply before the next cycle.
Asking Slughorn for the new moon water feels like the most mortifying thing Lily has ever had to do and only that morning, she’d thought the same of asking Madam Pomfrey all those questions about how to make the tea. Moon water of various phases is a common ingredient in potions, but she’s absolutely convinced that Professor Slughorn will know exactly what she needs it for.
For Remus, she reminds herself.
After her next Potions class, Lily stays behind, tying her shoes then taking her time to pack her bag until everyone else has left. Then she grits her teeth, hard, and makes her way to Slughorn’s desk feeling her face turn as dark red as her hair.
“Excuse me, Professor, I wonder if I could borrow some moon water from the new moon from your store if you have any.”
She says it too fast, all one breath, and it sounds terribly suspicious. Luckily, Slughorn is less observant than James when he’s left his glasses behind.
“Sure thing Miss Evans. I should have a jug-” he rummages in the bottom drawer of the desk before pulling out a large bottle still adorned with a fire whiskey label that’s been inked over to read ‘moon water- new moon’.
“Here you are,” he grins, presenting the bottle to her, “if you could bring back the bottle afterward please.”
Then he turns back to a heavy book on his desk without another word. Lily sees herself out, her heart beating fast.
The next day is Saturday and Lily spends the morning gathering the remaining ingredients for the potion and then sneaking into the student potion lab where the older students are able to practice their brewing outside of class time. As a second year, she’s not technically allowed in there, but it’s a Hogsmeade weekend so the older students aren’t around for the most part and the lab itself is unsupervised. She makes three attempts at the potion, testing, bottling, and labeling each one. She tries each of them a teaspoon at a time so that their effects have worn off by the time she’s done with the next brewing.
She runs out of ingredients after the third attempt and determines the last iteration of it to be the most potent of them. It’s a pretty midnight blue and doesn’t taste horrible either. Lily is really pretty proud of her success. Once her cauldron has been washed, the workstation cleaned up, and everything put away, she tucks all three bottles into her bag and makes her way back to the common room. None of the boys are there, but Lily is fairly certain they won’t be in their room.
She’s found herself gathering up her wits before doing something she thought she never would quite a lot in the past couple of months. Now, she sets her shoulders and proceeds to sneak up the staircase to the boys’ dormitories. Luckily it’s not hard to figure out which door is their room. There’s an admittedly elegant black plaque on one of the doors with ‘The Marauders’ engraved in Sirius’s distinct posh calligraphy.
She pushes the door open, heart racing, to reveal a thankfully empty room. She takes stock of the mess and quickly identifies Remus’s bed. She tucks the bottle with the most potent version of her attempts against his pillow and scribbles a vague note on a scrap of parchment.
‘Should help loads -Lily’
Remus positively beams at her when she sees him the next day. His lips are tinged slightly blue and it’s apparent in the way he holds himself that the potion is in fact helping loads.