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If you were to ask any of Lily’s friends, they would likely agree that she was a nosy person with a habit of poking into other people’s business. If you were to ask Lily, she would tell you that she couldn’t help being perceptive and caring about her friends. Admittedly, it wasn’t always that she just stumbled upon certain information, but she can’t really be faulted just for paying attention, right?

The current thing that she happened to be paying close attention to takes the form of a teenage boy with a mess of light brown curls and a smattering of freckles and a quite startling scar across his pale face. Remus wasn’t normally this pale and if the dark circles under his eyes were any indication, he hadn’t been getting much rest. He was currently slouched over a piece of parchment spread over a low coffee table in the common room alternating between scrubbing his hands over his tired face and bracing them against his back every few minutes. He had been looking progressively more ill over the past week and Lily had noticed the way that his attention seemed to be slipping in classes and that he’d been retiring to bed at earlier and earlier hours despite looking as if he hadn’t slept a wink the next day.

All of this in and of itself wasn’t terribly puzzling. It was still early fall, but after the recent cold snap, Remus certainly wasn’t the only one in Gryffindor tower suffering from a cold, but Lily feels justified in her concern anyway. Peter had tried nagging their friend into going to Madam Pomfrey two days ago when he had begun to look particularly bad, but Remus had refused. Any offers of simple spells or medication to help had been turned down and he continued to attend classes despite clearly feeling worse by the day.

Lily only realizes that she has been staring directly at her friend when he waves a hand between them and raises a questioning eyebrow at her focused expression. She offers him a sheepish smile and returns to her work still eying him out of her periphery as he sighs and braces his hands against his back until it pops loudly. Lily subconsciously mimics the movement. Her own back has been aching all day and, she thinks bitterly, will continue to ache for the next four days until Aunt Flo fucks off.

She turns back to the textbook in front of her, rereading the same passage on magical archaeological discoveries of the last century for the third time. She’s fairly certain that she will remember none of it by tomorrow.

The next morning, Lily is somewhat relieved when Remus doesn’t show up until third-hour Magical History. He looks exhausted but has regained quite a bit of color as well as his appetite if the way he positively wolfs down his lunch is any indication.

“You’re looking better today, Rem,” James grins across the table at him.

Remus smiles shyly, “I told you I’ve been feeling fine. I feel the same as yesterday.”

They all know it’s a lie. Anyone could see how miserable Remus was the night before and now that she’s paying close attention, several more instances of Remus being ill and denying it the entire time and afterward as well flash through her mind.

Huh, he really never admits to being sick, does he?

Transfiguration after lunch marks the start of a new unit involving transforming organic material into inorganic material. McGonnigal assures them that it’s much more simple than the reverse, but it’s much more complicated than the inorganic to inorganic that they’ve been working with up to this point. It’s a sufficient distraction to get everyone’s mind off of Remus’s odd behavior though.

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It must be only about a month since Remus was sick the last time, but the bags under his eyes are becoming rather prominent again and Lily’s fairly certain that he had run out of the Great Hall at breakfast so quickly because he had been hurrying to be sick in the toilets. In Potions class, he rests his head on his fist the entire time in an obvious effort to avoid inhaling the intense herbal scent that never quite leaves the classroom even on days when they study theory rather than practical brewing.

After the second time his face goes concerningly pale when he is forced to move his sleeve from his nose for more than a few seconds, Lily rummages through her bag to procure the tiny bottle of peppermint oil that she dabs on her wrist when she’s feeling particularly nauseous. He’s lucky she has it with her, she doesn’t carry it around too often, but it’s that time of the month for her and her stomach was rolling all of yesterday. She leans back and reaches an arm behind Muller and Wilson who sit between them, taps Remus on the shoulder to get his attention, and then passes the bottle with a scrap of parchment with a scrawled ‘you sick?’ on it.

He takes the offering with a puzzled face which morphs to relief at the label on the peppermint oil. He presses his wrist to the bottle without hesitation and overturns it to leave a glossy circle of fragrance on his wrist. He dabs a finger to the circle and then smears it under one ear for good measure before turning over the note on his desk. Strangely he looks slightly panicked by the note before hunching over it to scrawl something underneath her writing. Instead of stretching to hand it back behind their neighbors, he whispers something to Wilson who slides it along the table back to Lily.

‘thanks- not sick just allergies’ he’s written back.

Lily nods, gives him a sympathetic smile even though the allergy excuse is a load of shit in her opinion, and tucks the scrap of parchment into her bag with the peppermint oil.

Remus looks even worse for wear the next day at breakfast, but Lily can hardly bring herself to focus on his odd behaviors when she’s being plagued by cramps that make her consider skipping a class just to see Madam Pomfrey for some of that bright blue tea that the older girls swear by. Lily’s never actually gone to the infirmary for anything for her period, always talking herself out of it in slight embarrassment. She had friends to lend various amateur pain relief spells and products when she found herself unprepared, but she’d really rather not have to ask the stern matron for help with these things.

She puts her head down on her arms as a sharp pain shoots through her abdomen. Madam Pomfrey is sounding more and more friendly by the second. The plate of toast and eggs in front of her is cooling quickly, but Lily can’t manage to do more than poke at it with a fork. Nothing sounds particularly good at the moment. Her tea is alright. She could go for some honeydukes, but the breakfast table is decidedly unappetizing.

Marlene takes a seat next to her, swinging one leg over the bench and grabbing a piece of buttered toast right off of Lily’s plate.

“What, you’re not gonna eat?” she asks with her mouth half full of the stolen bread.

“I feel like death,” Lily proclaims with her face still tucked into her arms except for one eye which she uses to glare at her friend.

“Ah yes. The painters are in, aren’t they,” Marlene says without a hint of embarrassment. She’s every bit as nosy (observant and caring) as Lily though she’ll never admit it.

Lily groans, “yes the painters are fucking in, go ahead and announce it to the Ravenclaw table as well why don’t you,” she hisses. Then she has to unfold her arms from the table to yank Marlene back down when she starts to stand up, presumably to march over to the Ravenclaw table and do just as Lily had suggested because the girl has no shame. She lets Lily pull her back down with a smirk, then gives her friend a more sympathetic pat on the back.

Lily doesn’t end up going to the matron before her first class and ends up sitting miserably in History of Magic with her stomach growling from having only tea for breakfast and feeling vaguely sticky from the heat of the room. Or she hopes it’s only sweating from the heat of the room rather than blood. It’s only then, letting Professor Binn’s words fade to background noise, that she realizes how terrible Remus looks. They’re sitting at the same table, but she’s hardly removed her head from the nest of her arms at all. Now she makes eye contact with him looking exactly as miserable as she must and they make commiserate eye contact before her stomach growls again.

It’s not terribly loud compared to the lull of whispered student conversations and Binn’s droning voice, but Remus must hear it anyway because he raises his eyebrows then digs a hand into his robes and fishes out half a bar of Honeydukes cherry chocolate. For a second, Lily can only blink. It feels like a dream. Possibly a miracle as she reaches out to accept the offering immediately replacing Sirius at the top of her list of favorites out of their little group. Remus offers her a small and all-too-understanding chuckle as she breaks off a piece and lets her eyes roll back while it melts on her tongue.

The problem with trying to figure out Remus’s problem, Lily decides later that evening after watching Remus beg off studying by claiming a migraine, is that he always seems to be sick when she herself is least inclined to investigate. In fact, the past three times that he’s been ill, it’s been right over her time of the month.

Oh.

Aches and pains and fatigue and nausea. Cravings for chocolate. Occurring once a month.

It seems obvious in retrospect that she and Remus were experiencing the same ‘illness’, but she hadn’t really considered it before because Reums is… well, Remus. Flat-chested, though he’s always wearing loose sweaters and she’s heard the other boys tease him about his modesty- always retreating to the bathrooms or behind the curtains of his bed to change deep-voiced, though not as low as Sirius or James’, and Jessica Lowry’s voice is awfully low too and if Remus was intentionally lowering his voice and although Lily’s never intentionally checked Remus out there, she has the vague impression in her mind that there must be more than empty fabric in the crotch of his pants. She’s not going to ponder that one any further.

It’s not something she knows the right words for, but Lily knows it happens that people don’t always connect with the gender they’re born with. She knows that it’s not considered the most acceptable, at least in the muggle world, but perhaps it’s considered more normal in the wizarding world. She tries to think if she’s ever heard of it in the wizarding world, but nothing comes to mind. She decides that no matter how acceptable it is in the wizarding world, it’s fine by her. Remus is her friend after all, and it’s hardly her business what was marked on his birth certificate beyond making sure she’s there for him no matter what.

The next day, feeling slightly less horrific than the day before, although still quite ill, Lily marches to the library with a newfound determination to understand her friend. She manages to find several volumes on the subject, many of them focused on transfiguration. Only one book, a biographical volume on Melvin Sylvester, addresses what it calls “transphobia” noting it as prevalent in the muggle community. It seems that there isn’t much social stigma surrounding it in the wizarding world then. Though Lily supposes that Remus is half-blood, one foot still in the muggle world just like her, and besides, it’s his private life, if he doesn’t want anyone to know this about him then she can respect that. Well. As much as she can after having already snooped her own way to knowing it.

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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.

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The next month, the day after Remus has stopped looking like he wants to throw up at every strong smell and has stopped popping his joints and twisting his back every few minutes, it’s Peter who makes a fuss. Well, he doesn’t make too much of a fuss, but it turns into a fuss and Lily feels defensive anyway.

Apparently, there had been blood on Remus’s sheets. Peter had been grossed out, having flopped onto Remus’s bed in the midst of struggling through astrology homework, then he had shouted and when James had heard what it was, he, of course, had been concerned and Remus had brushed it off as being nothing but a scratch and then Sirius had been even more concerned and their hushed argument had continued into the common room where Lily had been brought up to speed by Peter. Sirius was now demanding to know exactly how he had been scratched so badly when he had flooed home the night before to see his sick mother.

Remus was growing redder and redder and clearly more panicked by the second and Lily can’t just stand and watch. She shoves her way through their stupid huddle, pushing Sirius and James away, snatches the sheets straight out of Remus’s arms, and grabs him by the elbow.

“Stop fussing, you’re not helping anything,” she says to the other boys, then turns to Remus, “I’ll walk with you to the laundry.”

Remus nods, seeming both confused and grateful for her intervention. She marches them both out of the common room with a strong grip on his arm, brushing past the other boys with her nose slightly in the air and a few elbows angled a bit sharper than strictly necessary to carve out their path.

Their walk to the laundry starts as an awkward silence, but Lily is determined to see it through. Remus finally breaks it with a hesitant cough.

“Um, thanks I guess,” he says scratching sheepishly at the back of his neck.

He’s still clearly a little bit confused by her intervention and Lily’s not quite sure how to explain without risking making him uncomfortable. He hasn’t actually told her anything, after all, it’s only by her own nosiness that she’s figured out his secret, but he deserves to know that she knows, right? She worries her lip between teeth while working up the nerve to respond.

“You don’t owe them an explanation you know… a little thing once a month doesn’t make you any different from them. Not really.”

She tries to put all the reassurance and acceptance she can into her voice, still unwilling to say anything too direct that might come across wrong, but feeling that this will make it clear.

She meets Remus’s eyes again and sees him looking startled.

“Sorry,” she says, some of the certainty seeping out of her tone, “I know you didn’t mean for me to know, I just started realizing things and then it all seemed to fall into place and well, I won’t pry, but I’m here for you and I don’t think any differently of you and I hope I haven’t messed anything up by sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.”

Remus stares at her for a long, silent moment until tears are gathering in his eyes.

“Y-you don’t think any different of me? You d-don’t hate me?”

He sounds scared and hesitant. As if something like that could ever come between their friendship.

“Of course not Remus, I could never hate you. You’re my friend and this doesn’t change anything at all,” she says earnestly.

Remus sniffs and wipes at his eyes with his sweater sleeves as if Lily is doing something absolutely incredible rather than just accepting him just as he is.

“Thank you, Lily,” he finally whispers.

They make the rest of the trip to the laundry in companionable silence beside Remus’s occasional sniffling.

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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.

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The last few months of the term are a mad scramble to cram as much knowledge into the students as possible just in time for them to go home and forget it all over the break. Between final exams and packing and promising to visit friends over the summer, it’s all very different from first year.

Peter always hugs everyone goodbye because he’s just like that. Sirius rarely hugs his friends, flinches from physical affection most of the time, but on the last day of term, he hugs them all hard and strong and like he doesn’t want to let go at all. James seems embarrassed when he opens his arms for her this year and is blushing fiercely when Lily pulls away. Remus watches it all with a soft expression then envelopes Lily in a warm embrace and tucks a small note card into the pocket of her cloak with a smile.

“Mate!” James gasps, sounding slightly affronted.

Remus snorts a laugh in reply, “relax James, Lily is just a good friend.”

Lily smiles and nods, though she has a feeling she’s missing something. She says her final goodbyes to the boys before joining Dorcus, Marlene, and Alice to board the train with them. It’s only once they’re well into the ride back and their compartment has dissolved from conversation to quiet individual activity, Alice immersed in a book on plant classifications of the magical world, Dorcus picking carefully through a box of every flavor beans and sorting it into different flavors, and Marlene bent intently over Dorcus’s bowed head where she’s twisting and braiding sections into a complicated updo, that Lily finally fishes Remus’s note from her pocket. She tears past the sticking charm holding the note closed at its edges and angles her body away from her friends to read it.

Dear Lily,

Thank you for everything this year. Looking back I can see the instances of you looking out for me even before I knew that you knew of my condition. You are a dear friend to me and I will miss you over the summer. If you’d like to write I would be delighted to hear from you. Although it’s not much of a conversation topic, it is refreshing to be able to talk to someone who knows my secret.

Take care,
R.L.

Lily frowns slightly at the word “condition”. It makes it sound like there is something wrong with Remus and she hopes he doesn’t actually think that way. She shrugs it off. After all, who is she to tell Remus how to correctly talk about his own experiences? She resolves to write to him over the summer.

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When September rolls around again, Lily finds herself at platform 9 ¾ searching the heads of the crowd for Remus more than any of her other friends. She had met with Alice a few times over the summer and had visited Diagon Alley to get her supplies with Marlene and had even run into Sirius on that trip (though they had hardly acknowledged each other due to the presence of his mother and father), but Lily and Remus have been writing over the summer, just little things, telling each other about their days and speculating about obscure magical topics that escape the level of their current magical education. Their letters have hardly been anything particularly personal, but Lily is very excited to see him.

She’s beginning to think she must have missed him and he must already be on the train when he comes through the barrier accompanied by a tiny woman with greyish-brown hair and the same freckles as Remus has. Lily beams at him and rushes over before he’s even realized her. She throws her arms around him forcing him to drop the handle of his trunk.

“Remus!” she smiles brightly at him, unsure what to say, but happy to see him looking well.

“Lily,” he smiles back, then turns to the woman by his side, “mum, this is Lily, the friend I told you about.”

“Ah, the clever one, yes?”

Lily blushes and smooths her skirt, equal parts pleased and embarrassed.

“Oi! Since when is she the clever one? I’m the clever one!” There’s a sudden pale hand ruffling Remus’s hair and Sirius shoves his face over his friend’s shoulder to glare at Lily for daring to usurp him as the clever one.

“She’s not even a marauder!” Sirius whines over their chuckling, “it’s a boys-only club!”

Lily’s not sure if she should be indignant about that one or let it slide. It’s equally exclusionary to her and potentially validating to Remus. Remus’s smile doesn’t falter, so Lily rolls her eyes good-naturedly.

“The true measure of being a marauder,” Remus interjects wisely, “isn’t about gender- it’s about whether McGonigal has dubbed you ‘a marauder’ in a disciplinary lecture.”

Sirius howls with laugher and Peter, who has appeared alongside them as well, snickers. Remus’s mother wacks her son lightly with a disapproving look.

“Ah, come on mum, I keep my nose clean enough.”

They’re forced into hasty goodbyes and last-minute pleas to send things forgotten by owl when the train gives its warning whistle.

They hurry aboard and James offers his unnecessary help with lifting Lily’s trunk above the benches. Lily’s not altogether sure why he feels the need to offer but the rest of the marauders roll their eyes in such an identical and synchronized movement that she’s momentarily stunned into accepting.

Remus stays while James lifts the trunk and then a second longer so that it’s just the two of them.

“Do you think you could make me some more of that potion from last year?” he asks softly when James is out of earshot.
“Oh, of course!” Remus looks embarrassed and Lily remembers how uncomfortable she had been asking Madam Pomfrey for it the first time.

“Of course I can. It’s a pretty easy one, I can show you how to make it yourself too if you’d like.”

Remus looks far too impressed, “I don’t know Lily, you know I’m not as good at potions as you.”

“Oh, I promise it’s simple!”

“Well… Okay I suppose,” he relents, “that’s really impressive though, Lily.”

She smiles even though he’s wrong. It’s really a simple potion. She’s half surprised he’s never heard of it before, what with the way his nose is always burried in a book he always seems to know the most obscure things. She’s not above accepting a little flattery though.

Dorcus pokes her head around the corner and Remus makes his way further down the train towards the compartment all the way at the back that the boys had claimed as theirs after their fateful meeting there at the start of first year.

Dorcus, predictably, begins teasing her as soon as the door to their compartment is shut.

“Oooohhh! What were you two chatting about?” she asks, eyebrows wiggling madly in a way that forces a laugh out of Lily.

“Oh nothing. I was just offering to help him out with some potions work.”

“A study date! Oh how cute!”

“Remus is just a friend,” Lily scolds, unbothered.

Dorcus must recognize that her attempts to fluster her friend have no real foot to stand on and she pouts in disappointment for a second.

“Oh well,” she eventually declares, “that just means I have more of a chance with him,” she smirks.

Lily rolls her eyes for what feels like the hundredth time that day between Tuney’s whining and Severus’s pestering and the absurdity of the marauder’s antics. It’s good to be heading back to school.

Chapter Text

Third-year seems to mark some significant leap to more advanced magic. While both first and second had covered basics, they are finally getting into deeper topics and more advanced work. Lily almost forgets about agreeing to teach Remus the potion, but finally, at the beginning of November, Lily makes her excuses, and Remus his, and they both skip out on a Hogsmeade weekend to hole up in the same potions lab that Lily has used every time she’s made the potion.

She already has the ingredients ready, but with the added length of their conversation, brewing it takes longer than usual.

Remus is probably the quietest out of the marauder’s group. Peter might be, it’s a bit of a toss-up between them most days. Except when Sirius is brooding. There are times, especially when he’s just come back from being at home, where he’s practically silent. No stomping up the stairs, no shouting across the common room, or loud barking laughter, just uncanny quiet.

Usually, though, Remus is the quiet one. Reserved enough that the teachers rarely suspect him for his involvement in the rest of the Marauders’ antics (besides the current DADA Professor, Bennet, who has seemed to have some sort of grudge against Remus ever since reading his name on the roster the very first day). His grades are good and he’s studious to keep them that way. He’s attractive and polite and vaguely mysterious in a way that makes Dorcus in good company in her admiration.

In the quiet of the potions lab with only Lily for company, however, he seems to have a million things to say. He rambles about his favorite muggle literature and his mother’s odd opinions on things Lily knows nothing about. He talks about things they’re studying in classes. He’s taking runes this year. Lily isn’t, so he tells her about some of the more fascinating aspects of their history. He talks about the strange things that the boys have gotten up to that Lily has never heard of before.

“Ha, you better stop telling me all the adventures you have without me or I’ll start thinking you don’t want me around!” Lily says jokingly, but although her tone is light and she really means nothing by it, Remus’s smile tightens a bit.

She gives him a questioning look at his odd reaction.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” he replies.

It’s obvious to Lily though that it’s not ‘nothing’ and she’s not one to let this sort of thing go. She’s nosy and has no intention of changing. She raises an eyebrow and waits for him to fill the silence.

Remus huffs, “the others have just been a little distant lately I suppose,” he mutters. “I think they’ve been avoiding me.”

Lily looks at him in shock.

“I don’t know what I did,” Remus looks upset and genuinely hurt, “but they keep making excuses and going off together and I told them I couldn’t make it to Hogsmeade today and they didn’t even ask why. They actually looked really pleased about it.”

Lily doesn’t really know how to comfort him. She resolves to give the boys a stern talking to later, but right now, she can only pat Remus’s shoulder awkwardly and offer sympathies and apologies, and reassurances.

They gradually return to topics of school and reading, giving the topic of friends a narrow berth. By the time the bright blue concoction is done, Remus is smiling once again.

They throw out the batch they’ve made. It won’t keep long enough to be of any use to either of them, but Remus insists that it’s been good practice and that he’ll be able to brew it on his own next month. He copies the recipe down in neat penmanship on the muggle recipe cards that he insists on using for his potions and gives her an entirely too grateful smile.

They end up studying in the library until hours after all the students are back from Hogsmeade and James finally finds them hunched over an arithmancy textbook together.

Chapter Text

The Marauders know something. Lily is sure of it. The way they’ve been eyeing Remus lately, still friendly, but also suspicious and calculatingly, makes her uneasy. Anytime she finds them looking his way with the odd expressions on their face she’s taken to glaring at them until they stop. She knows she’s gotten her protective point across when one day Sirius looks at Remus in that distrustful way and then immediately flicks his gaze to her, checking if she had noticed, before lowering his eyes back to his parchment.

As nosy as Lily may be, she doesn’t like the way that the Marauders seem to be going about finding out Remus’s personal information.

It’s Peter who finally confirms it to her.

“You know about Remus, don’t you,” he asks, eyes narrowed.

Lily squares her shoulders, using her full height (six centimeters taller than Peter), to her advantage in hopes of intimidating him.

“What I do or don’t know about Remus is none of your business,” she hisses, “it doesn’t change who he is and it won’t ever change the fact that I’m his friend and you’ll have me to worry about if you ever hurt him.”

Vaguely, Lily realizes that she’s never threatened someone like this before, but from the way that Peter’s eyes widen and he quickly moves away, he must understand how completely serious she is. He furrows his brow at her before leaving. She’s not entirely sure from this interaction whether Peter and undoubtedly the rest of the Marauders, have figured out the truth or if they’re just at that first stage of suspicious and starting to be nosy.

The anxiety of knowing that Remus’s other friends know, or at least suspect, something and not knowing how they feel about it, gnaws at Lily. She’s uncertain of how to bring it up with Remus and even less certain of if she even wants to.

Peter stays away from her, sufficiently scared by her previous threats it seems, but Sirius is less concerned for his own well-being than he ought to be, and he approaches her in the common room a week later.

“So, Lily,” he greets her, trying to be casual.

“Sirius.”

“Peter mentioned, well and the rest of us all figured, that you might be aware of Remus’s--”

“Whatever you think you know about Remus, you’d do well to talk to him about it rather than trying to sneak behind his back and get it from his other friends.”

She slams her book closed on the table.

Sirius is looking at her with a strange sincere expression on his face.

“You really think he’d be okay with us knowing? I mean, we’ve talked about how to bring it up to him, but we don’t want to freak him out. He didn’t exactly tell us, we just kinda figured it out.”

Lily stares at him for a long moment, trying to gauge how much she trusts him. Admittedly, it’s quite a lot. She sighs, “he didn’t exactly tell me either. Just… well just make sure he knows that you guys are still there for him and that it doesn’t change things between you and all that. I know he’s scared of people knowing, but he also told me it was refreshing to have someone who the truth.”

Sirius nods eagerly, soaking up everything she’s saying like it’s the most important thing he’s ever heard.

She does trust them, really she does, and she knows Remus does too.

“Don’t you dare hurt him. Do this right, Sirius.”

Chapter Text

It’s a Saturday, toward the end of March when everything is finally confessed.

The boys and Lily are all sitting down at the banks of the Great Lake, feet stripped of stockings and shoes and dangling in the freezing cold water. Sirius, James, and Lily have been having a pissing contest for the past several minutes and all of their feet are pale and numb with trying to keep them in the water the longest.

Remus had stuck a hand in the water testing its temperature and then declared that he would sit this one out. Peter had stuck both feet in with a cocksure grin on his face, but had yanked them both out with a yelp when they brushed against some creature or plant.

It’s still cold enough out for winter cloaks despite the deceptive green reappearing on the Great Lawn and in the Highly-Discouraged Forest.

“O-O-Okay,” James speaks up through chattering teeth, “let’s call a truce. It’s been a quarter-hour.”

Lily sees the competitive sparkle in Sirius’s eyes and nods in agreement.

“Alright- on three, two, one!”

James yanks his feet out of the water. Sirius and Lily both yank their knees up halfway to give the impression that they’re going along with it before stopping, toes still in the lake.

They howl in laughter until Lily is laying on her back on the bank clutching her sides. She’s pretty sure there are tears on Sirius’s face from laughing too hard, but honestly, her own eyes are slightly blurry.

After 25 minutes, Lily finally pulls aching and slightly blue feet out of the pond to reluctantly allow Sirius the victory. He waits another couple of minutes in self-satisfied gloating before yanking his feet out. When he stands to put his socks back on, he nearly falls over into the lake when his feet are too numb to support him.

Peter and Remus present him with a flower crown made of weedy wildflowers that have begun to pop up around the grounds to declare him the winner.

He looks ridiculous, but it’s a good look on him. For half a second, while Remus is arranging the flower crown on Sirius’s perfectly messy curls, Lily thinks that Sirius might lean in and kiss him. There’s definitely some tension there that she hadn’t previously realized. She smirks and resolves to interrogate Remus about it later.

James clears his throat in a serious way that makes all of them look at him.

“So, Remus, mate,” he licks at his chapped lips, “we’ve got something to talk about.”

Remus looks pale, slightly sick all of a sudden. He looks downright terrified if they’re being honest.

Lily moves next to him ready to comfort him, protect him, rip James’s nose right off his face if he messes this up. Really, ready to do whatever is required of her.

Peter pipes up when James pauses unnaturally long, “it’s alright, we’re not going to be all bigotted about it or anything.”

James and Sirius nod in agreement, and Sirius speaks next, “you’re still the same person Remus, this doesn’t change anything really, it’s just a furry little problem.”

He looks pleased with his assessment. Lily has no idea what ‘furry little problem’ could mean here if not something quite rude and not entirely sensical.

“You really are all okay with this?” Remus asks, sounding just as disbelieving as the first time Lily had admitted to knowing his secret.

The Marauders murmur various assents and reassurances.

“Your friend turns into a blood-thirsty monster once a month and you’re all just fine with it?”

And okay, Lily might take slight issue with that assessment, but honestly, it’s starting to feel like this conversation is about something else entirely than what she knows it’s actually about.

“It doesn’t make a difference to us that you’re a werewolf, Remus. We’re all still your friends and we always will be.”

Lily’s brain seems to short circut. Werewolf?

Oh.

OH.

She’s stopped walking she realizes and the boys are all looking at her strangely.

Suddenly she’s fighting laughter. This has to be the most convoluted misunderstanding she’s ever had. It’s been over a year since she told Remus she knew his secret and apparently she didn’t.

“Remus we should talk later,” she manages through a minor coughing fit to cover her giggles.

Remus looks far too relieved and pleased to care too much about her strange behavior and readily agrees.

Chapter Text

“So, I suppose it’s not a huge deal, but I should probably be honest with you anyway I suppose,” Lily picks at her fingernails avoiding Remus’s eyes.

He’s clearly concerned, “Lily, what’s wrong?”

She sighs, “well, you see, I didn’t actually know you were a werewolf until today.”

She risks a quick glance up and sees Remus’s frozen smile, furrowed brows, uncertain eyes.

“But you… you were the first one that knew,” Remus insists, shaking his head.

And yeah, Lily gets it, in retrospect, it’s a little hilarious how long this miscommunication went on for and how thoroughly convinced they both were that they understood what was going on. It’s incredibly absurd how far off they both were.

“Well, I certainly knew something,” Lily still hasn’t quite figured out the right way to say it.

“Okay, but you would stock up on chocolate for the full moon for me and you always knew when I was feeling the effects the most. You even helped me that one time when there was blood on my sheets from coming back after the moon all scratched up,” Remus is getting redder in the face by the second and Lily can’t honestly say which of them must be more flushed.

“Hells, Lily! You invented a fucking potion for me, you can’t say you didn’t know!”

“Remus, it’s okay, I don’t mind, I just… well, I thought it was something else.”

“What on earth could you have gotten so mixed up with Lycanthropy?”

“I thought you were transgender!”

She can see the wheels turning in Remus’s head. Incident after incident making sense in this new context.

“Oh, so you thought…Oh. Yeah. That actually makes sense.”

The awkwardness of their conversation and silence slowly dissipates with laughter. Misunderstanding or not, their friendship is as assured as ever.

“What about the potion then?” Remus suddenly asks, fishing the worn recipe card from his bag.

“Yeah! I can’t actually believe that worked in retrospect,” Lily yanks a roll of parchment and a quill out of her own bag throwing it down onto the floor of Lily’s abandoned dorm room where she’d ushered Remus away to talk, to begin scribbling notes.

“It’s a tea that Madam Pomfrey makes for the girls dealing with- you know- worse cycles, but the idea of it is centered around a monthly calendar and maintaining states from one point of the month to another, so it kinda makes sense that it would work for your condition too!”

Remus, next to her has pulled out the notes that he’s already made in analyzing the potion and both of them quickly lose themselves to the work of studying and speculations on how to improve it now that Lily is a little more informed.

They retire to the library to continue research a few hours later and Lily reluctantly agrees to come with Remus to talk to Madam Pomfrey about her discovery. She halfheartedly disputes the term ‘discovery’, but agrees nonetheless. Anything for her friends.

It seems everyone has a good laugh at Lily’s wrong conclusions. The Marauders tease her relentlessly about it over her red-faced defense that it was a perfectly logical conclusion to come to. Their teasing is fond though and Sirius even takes the time to put a hand on her shoulder and say, uncharacteristically serious, that she’s a good friend and that it’s good to know that she’s supportive of more than just werewolf rights.

Madam Pomfrey scolds her for experimenting with unknown effects of a potion despite Lily’s insistence that she hadn’t actually intended to be experimenting with the effects of the potion on a werewolf, it had just happened out that way. But the matron also keeps taking little breaks in the lecture to clear her throat and cough slightly in a way that Lily is fairly sure is a valiant attempt at not laughing while telling off a student.

Remus, of course, sits back and enjoys the show. Clearly amused by her embarrassment and content in the relief of their little group all knowing the truth.