Lily asked questions the way weather arrived.
Not all at once. Not violently. But with a certainty that made resistance feel less like refusal and more like standing under rain insisting one was dry.
By the third week after moving in, she had developed the habit of appearing wherever the day left the smallest opening. At the gate while Severus returned from the grocer's. Halfway down the row when he was sent for coal. On the opposite pavement if he so much as paused at the window too long. She did not hover in the way boys on Spinner's End hovered, with mockery prepared. She simply arrived and assumed the world could bear one more person in it.
Sometimes Petunia came too.
More often lately she did not.
This did not mean she approved. Only that disapproval had changed tactics. It lived now in the window, in the delayed answer when Lily called from downstairs, in the expression she wore when their mother told them to take air and she understood that "air" increasingly meant Lily crossing the road rather than walking with her.
Severus noticed all of this.
He noticed, too, that Lily noticed almost none of it.
That afternoon she found him by the low wall near the lane behind the chapel, where he had gone with a book because the house was too close and the front room too dark and the kitchen too full of waiting. The day had turned unexpectedly mild for the season. Not warm. Only less cold, with a weak pale sun caught behind thin cloud and a breeze that smelled more of damp leaves than of coal.
He heard her before he saw her.
Not because she was loud. Because she walked as though the world needn't be warned she was in it. Gravel disturbed. Shoe against loose stone. A little breath of running slowed into walking once she spotted him.
"There you are."
He looked up from the book.
Lily stopped on the path, hands behind her back, cheeks pink from moving quickly. Her hair had escaped whatever attempt had been made to keep it in order that morning. One ribbon hung loose at her shoulder. She looked as though she had arrived from a brighter place and brought a piece of it by accident.
"I wasn't hiding," he said.
"No," she replied. "But you weren't easy to find either."
That was not the same thing. She said it as though it were.
Severus lowered his eyes to the open page. It was one of the plant books from the library, not because he expected to read much in the lane but because carrying it made him feel less available to interruption. Lily stood looking at the cover.
"You always have a book."
"Not always."
"Nearly."
He said nothing.
The lane behind the chapel was narrow enough that two people standing in it altered its shape. Moss grew along the lower stones of the wall. The grass at the edge of the path had gone straw-coloured in places. Somewhere beyond the chapel yard a crow complained at something invisible.
Lily shifted her weight. "Tuney says you think you're better than everyone."
Severus looked up sharply.
Lily, seeing his face change, added at once, "I told her that wasn't true."
He stared at her.
Not because Petunia's opinion surprised him. Because Lily had repeated it so plainly, with neither malice nor pity, as if truth became more manageable by being set on the ground between people and looked at directly.
"What did you say?" he asked.
"That you don't."
"And what did she say?"
Lily considered. "Mostly huffed."
Despite himself, despite Petunia, despite the question and its answer, something in him almost loosened at that.
Almost.
Lily came closer and leaned one hip against the wall beside him. "What are you reading?"
He showed her the title because it was easier than saying it aloud.
She frowned at the cover. "You like books about roots."
He closed the book a little over his finger. "I like books that explain things."
"What things?"
He should have said plants. That would have ended it.
Instead he said, "How things work."
Lily nodded as though this were obvious and important. "Good."
The word stayed there.
The afternoon breathed around them. From the main road came a lorry shifting gears badly. Somewhere in the chapel yard a door opened and shut. The sky remained pale and undecided.
Then Lily said, "How does it work?"
He looked at her.
"What?"
"The thing you said. Before." Her voice lowered by a degree, not out of fear, but because certain subjects seemed to suggest smaller sounds naturally. "The strange things."
Severus went still.
He had known this was coming.
Not exactly now, not exactly here. But ever since Lily had looked at his window without looking away, since she had asked about the field and the crack in the pane and the shape of the world with no understanding of which questions ordinary people learned not to ask, he had known they were moving toward this.
He had said too much before.
Or rather, he had left too much visible.
Lily's own oddnesses had already begun to show themselves in little remarks she made without noticing: about wanting something and then finding it in her pocket, about a flower stem turning toward her hand rather than the sun, about the feeling of knowing where a dropped object was before she saw it. She told such things as if asking whether they happened to everyone.
Perhaps they did. He had no basis for comparison except himself and his mother, and his mother's secrets did not extend to explanations.
"How does what work?" he asked, though the answer sat plainly between them.
Lily gave him a look that was not fooled and not offended by the attempt. "You know."
He watched a dead leaf drag itself a little way along the path in the breeze. Then stop.
"No," he said.
Lily crossed her arms. "You do know."
He looked at the book. At the wall. At the lane. Anywhere but at her face, because her face had the dangerous habit of appearing to expect honesty as a matter of course.
After a long moment he said, "It just does."
"That isn't an answer."
"It is."
"It's a terrible one."
He almost said then ask someone else. But there was no one else. Not really. And he knew it. She knew it too. That was the whole problem.
Lily pushed away from the wall and stepped in front of him, making him look at her or at least at the space where she stood.
"I jump farther than I should sometimes," she said. "And things happen when I'm cross. Or when I want them to. And once I was on the swing and I think I stayed up too long because I didn't want to come down yet, and I know that sounds silly but it happened, and Tuney says I make things up and Mum says I'm fanciful and Dad says I've got strong legs but that doesn't explain the flowers."
Severus blinked.
"The flowers?"
"Yes."
"What flowers?"
Lily frowned at him as if he were being deliberately slow. "The ones by the church wall. They opened when I touched them."
He stared at her.
The crow called again, harsh and uninterested. A bicycle went by on the road beyond. The lane remained itself, but the afternoon inside it had changed.
Lily looked over her shoulder toward the chapel wall, where nothing unusual could be seen from here. Then back at him. "So how does it work?"
He had no proper words.
That was the central fact of it. Not that he wanted to refuse her. That he did not know how to answer without sounding foolish. His mother had never given him a structure for this. Only fragments. Observations. A hidden box. A carved piece of dark wood under the bed. The moving photograph. Her silence. The strange light in her face when he noticed too much.
He knew the thing itself existed. He did not know what language respectable people used for its existence.
So he began badly.
"It's... there."
Lily waited.
He hated the waiting. It made every sentence feel smaller than the last one.
"You can't always see it," he said. "But it's there. Sort of in things. And in people too. Some people."
Her whole attention was on him now. Not politeness. Not amusement. That dangerous full listening he had already come to associate only with her.
"In people?" she said.
"Yes."
"Like blood?"
He frowned. "No."
"Like bones?"
"No."
She thought. "Like... breath?"
He considered that seriously because the wrongness of breath was less than the wrongness of blood somehow. "Closer."
Lily nodded as if this made complete sense and not almost none at all. "So what does it do?"
He looked down at his own hands.
Cold fingers. Ink stain along one side of the middle finger from school. Nail cut too short at the thumb. They looked ordinary enough. That had always been part of the strangeness. The things happened through hands that still seemed merely hands.
"It listens," he said before he could stop himself.
Lily's face changed.
Not because she understood fully. Because the answer sounded to her the way it had sounded in him: not silly, not polished, but true in some crooked important way.
"What does it listen to?"
He wanted to say fear. He wanted not to say that.
So he said, "Wanting."
That, too, was true. Just not complete.
Lily thought about this. "Then why doesn't it do what I want all the time?"
Because wanting was not enough. Because it mattered what sort. Because his wanted things and feared things often felt so close together he could not always tell which one had moved first. Because hers seemed to come from somewhere lighter.
He said, "Maybe it has to be strong wanting."
"I wanted Mrs. Kirkby's cat to come down from the wall and it didn't."
"That's a cat."
Lily smiled. "So?"
He nearly smiled back and hated himself for noticing it.
"So cats don't listen."
She laughed, and the lane brightened around the sound in a way that made no objective sense.
Then she crouched suddenly in front of him, elbows on knees, bringing her face level with his where he sat on the low wall.
"All right," she said. "Show me."
His stomach dropped.
"No."
"Why not?"
He stared at the path beyond her shoulder. "Because you can't."
"You can't?"
"No. I mean yes. I mean—" He stopped. Her eyes were on him, green and impossible. "It doesn't work like that."
"How does it work then?"
He closed the book fully now because pretending to read around her had become absurd.
"I don't know."
Lily considered this with more fairness than he deserved for the answer. "You know some."
"Not enough."
"That's all right."
The sentence startled him more than anything else she had said.
All right.
As if not knowing enough about the strangest thing in his life were a condition that could be borne without shame.
He looked at her properly then.
Lily was still crouched there in the lane, cardigan sleeves shoved up carelessly, a green smear on one knee from somewhere in the field yesterday or a garden wall this morning, hair escaping in every direction it pleased. She did not look like someone to whom important truths ought to be entrusted. She looked like someone who wandered into them and then expected the truths to be friendly.
And yet.
He said, haltingly, "It's... not like in stories."
"What stories?"
"The ones where people wave things." He made a vague motion with one hand. "Or say words."
"Maybe they're wrong stories."
"Maybe."
Lily took this in at once and built on it. "So it's more like... when something already wants to happen and you help it?"
He stared.
That was not right.
It was also not entirely wrong.
"Sometimes," he said.
Her face lit with the satisfaction of a puzzle half-solved. "I knew it."
"You didn't."
"I did a bit."
He looked away because the half-smile pressing at his mouth felt dangerous and unmanageable.
Lily straightened and began pacing the narrow lane in short excited turns, talking as she thought, which Severus would soon learn was one of her defining habits.
"That's why it's easier when I'm not trying too hard," she said. "Because when I try too hard it all goes stiff. But when I just want it and don't think, it sort of happens. Not always. But sometimes. And flowers must want to open anyway."
He watched her.
She was not precise. She was not cautious. She was not, in the way he understood intelligence, methodical. But there was a liveliness to her reasoning that made his own thoughts begin moving faster in answer, not because hers were more correct but because she treated half-understood things as worth leaning toward rather than stepping around.
"That's not all of it," he said.
She stopped at once and turned. "What else?"
He hesitated.
This was the dangerous part. The part where his own truth diverged from hers. Where the same phenomenon seemed to come to them through different doors.
"It's easier when you're frightened," he said quietly.
Lily frowned.
"For me," he added.
She looked at him.
The lane had gone still around them. Even the road beyond seemed farther away for a moment.
"Why?" she asked.
He could not tell her.
Not really.
Because in his house fear arrived more reliably than joy. Because whatever this thing was in him had learned his body through flinching before it ever learned it through delight. Because he had tried, once, standing alone by the wall behind the yard, to make a leaf rise the way he imagined she might, by thinking only of wanting, and nothing had happened at all until Tobias shouted his name from inside and the leaf skittered six feet across the bricks as if kicked.
He said, "I don't know."
Lily's face changed again. Not pity. Something quieter. She sat down beside him on the wall this time instead of crouching below him.
They were close enough that their sleeves nearly touched.
"That's not fair," she said.
The statement was so immediate and so childishly absolute that for one second he did not know what she meant. Life? The thing itself? That one of them should get flowers and swings and one should get fear?
He said, "What isn't?"
"That yours works like that."
He looked straight ahead at the chapel stones.
A sparrow landed on the wall opposite them, watched the two children seriously for half a breath, then flew off again. The wind lifted a strand of Lily's hair and dropped it.
At last Severus said, "Maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'm doing it wrong."
Lily turned toward him at once. "No."
He blinked. "You don't know."
She sounded almost indignant now. "You can't do being yourself wrong."
The sentence entered him and seemed to find no proper place to land.
He had no answer.
Lily, apparently unconcerned by this, slid off the wall and picked up a twig from the path. "All right," she said. "Then if no one knows the proper words, we'll make our own."
He watched her draw lines in the dirt as she spoke.
"This one can be... wanting." She scratched a straight line. "And this one can be helping." Another line crossing it. "And this one can be when it gets all upset and does things by itself."
"That's not a word."
"I know. I haven't made it yet."
Against his will, Severus found himself leaning closer.
She continued. "And there must be another one for when it feels near. Before."
That one hit too closely.
He looked at the twig marks. "Like pressure."
Lily glanced up, pleased. "Yes."
"Not exactly pressure."
"What then?"
He searched for it. Not because she demanded it, but because for the first time there seemed some chance of being met halfway rather than left alone with inexactness.
"Like... when the air knows before you do."
Lily went very still.
Then she nodded once, hard. "Yes."
The agreement was immediate and total.
Something in him shifted.
Not trust exactly. Not yet. But the structure beneath trust, perhaps. The first beam laid across empty space.
They spent the next half hour inventing the worst vocabulary imaginable.
Lily named things too quickly and changed her mind after two minutes. Severus objected to every term and then, when pushed, produced one only slightly less ridiculous. They called one state "nearness" and another "slipping" and a third "wrong air," though Lily argued that "wrong air" sounded like bad cabbage and not mystery. He told her that was because she made mystery sound silly. She told him that was because he made everything sound as if it had come in from the rain and disapproved of the furniture.
He laughed then.
Only once. Briefly. More a sound of disbelief escaping than proper laughter.
But it happened.
Lily turned and stared at him as though a very rare animal had stepped out of the hedgerow.
"What?"
"You do that too."
"What?"
"That."
He wished at once he had not made the sound. "No, I don't."
"You just did."
"I didn't."
Lily grinned. "You did."
The grin stayed on her face long enough that he had to look away.
The lane had gone dimmer by then. Not evening yet, but the hour when colour began thinning from the edges of things. The chapel stone had lost its warmth entirely. The first true chill of late afternoon returned.
From the street came Petunia's voice.
"Lily!"
Sharp. Irritated. Already assuming disobedience and moving toward proof.
Lily groaned. "Oh, honestly."
She leaned backward to look toward the lane mouth. "We're here!"
Petunia appeared a moment later, coat buttoned up, expression thunderous with the labor of having had to search.
"Mum said tea in ten minutes. I've been calling."
"I know."
"No, you haven't. You were talking."
Lily looked at Severus. "Yes."
Petunia followed the look and saw at once that something had changed.
Not something visible perhaps. Not if one had not been watching from the beginning. But Petunia had. Of course she had. She took in the twig marks in the dirt, the book shut beside Severus instead of open, Lily's pink-cheeked animation, his own expression not closed quite tightly enough, and understood what Lily herself likely had not yet named: a threshold had been crossed.
Her face hardened.
"There you are," she said to Lily, but her eyes were on Severus.
Lily ignored the tone. "We were figuring something out."
Petunia gave a short laugh. "You? Figuring?"
Lily's irritation flashed and vanished. "Yes."
"What?"
Severus looked at the twig marks and wanted them gone suddenly. Not because they were important in themselves. Because they had become theirs in a small private way, and Petunia's presence made privacy feel exposed.
Lily, gloriously careless with boundaries, said, "How things work."
Petunia stared at her sister as if this confirmed a long-standing diagnosis.
Then she looked at Severus. "And does he know?"
The cruelty in it was not loud enough to draw adult correction. That was what made it competent.
Before he could answer, Lily did.
"More than you."
Petunia's face changed.
Just once. Just enough.
Severus saw it clearly because he had seen versions of it at his own table: the exact instant a hurt became resentment because pride found no safer shelter.
Lily did not see. Or saw too late.
Petunia said, very evenly, "Come home."
"Tuney—"
"Now."
The word cut across the lane with adult force borrowed for a child's mouth.
Lily stood. She looked from Petunia to Severus and back again, confused in the honest way of those who have wounded someone accidentally and do not yet understand how it was done.
"All right," she said at last.
She turned to Severus. "Tomorrow?"
The question, asked in front of Petunia, made things worse immediately. He knew that. Petunia knew that. Lily did not.
"I don't know," he said.
Lily nodded as if the uncertainty were entirely acceptable. "All right."
Petunia had already begun walking back toward the street. Lily followed after gathering herself in one quick springing motion. At the mouth of the lane she looked back.
The look said plainly: this is not finished.
Then she vanished after her sister.
Severus remained on the wall with the shut book beside him and the twig marks still visible in the dirt.
The lane seemed quieter now than before they had entered it. More like itself, less like an interruption in which other rules had briefly applied. He looked at the crude lines Lily had drawn and the one wordless pattern his own twig had added without him realizing: a series of short careful strokes where he had been thinking rather than speaking.
At last he scuffed the whole thing away with his shoe.
Then he took up the book and went home.
The kitchen was already yellow with evening by the time he came in. Eileen stood at the stove with steam clouding the new pane of glass above the sink. The room smelled of onion and tea and the dry heat of the oven doing something modest with little.
"You're late," she said.
"Petunia came."
That made her look up.
Only for a moment. Then she returned to the pot. "And?"
He set the book on the table. "Nothing."
His mother gave the smallest possible indication that she knew this was not true. "Mm."
He stood there.
The house felt ordinary again, and therefore slightly unreal. The board had gone. The pane was fixed. The kettle sang softly. A spoon lay harmlessly by the bread board. Yet the lane behind the chapel, with its bad words for impossible things and Lily's full listening, remained bright in him as if he had carried some bit of the afternoon home inside his coat.
At last Eileen said, "You may as well tell me if it mattered."
He looked at her.
She did not look back. That made it easier.
"We talked."
"So I gathered."
"About..." He stopped.
The word did not come easily. Not magic. He still did not trust it, did not know whether it belonged to stories, to his mother's silence, to whatever wrongness had lived in the house long before Lily moved opposite.
"Things," he said.
His mother's hand stilled on the spoon.
For a second the kettle was the only sound in the room.
Then she resumed stirring and said, "And?"
He could not explain the lane. The twig marks. The sentence the air knows before you do. The way Lily had accepted his lack of answers as though incompleteness were not shameful. The way his own laughter had escaped before he could stop it.
So he said the truest small thing.
"She listened."
Eileen's face altered by a degree so slight another person might not have seen it.
"Yes," she said after a moment. "That matters."
The answer settled in the kitchen with the steam and the yellow light and the smell of onions.
Severus looked at the table. At the knife. At the cup rings in the wood. At the room in which he had spent so many days learning the cost of words badly timed or poorly chosen.
Then he thought of the lane, of saying things wrongly and having them become less wrong through saying them together.
For the first time in his life, explaining something he did not fully understand had felt less like exposure and more like building.
End of Chapter 15