Disclaimer: This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.

Thanks to all my reviewers and sorry for the long delay.

The story so far:
Severus turned himself in to Dumbledore in seventh year, shortly before Xmas holidays, and was recruited to spy on the other Death Eaters. Dumbledore covered his absence for interrogation and intensive Occlumency training by faking a Dormis beetle attack that left his “body” unable to be examined closely enough for Pomfrey to detect the fraud. Upon “regaining consciousness”, he told his friends he’d been trying to collect squirrel-poo to spike Potter’s potion.

Lily Evans was waiting for him in the Potions classroom. She always was.

“Heard you got out today,” she said. “You all right?”

He shrugged and pushed his way past her. No doubt she’d be full of questions, but that didn’t mean he had to answer.

“Why were you in the Forest anyhow?” she persisted, as he dumped his bag next to hers under the desk. “Was it something to do with James?”

“Not everything has to do with flipping Potter, Evans.”

He flung himself into the chair and studied the wood-grain of the desk. It was part of a deal he’d scrupulously observed since their second day of Potions partnership that he wouldn’t swear at her in class and she’d overlook what he called her outside class. He glowered at the door as more students sauntered through it.

“Not everything,” she agreed. “Sometimes it’s about Sirius.”

He turned his glower on her and her green eyes and her red hair and her knowing smile.

“Was it another prank?” she murmured, opening her Potions book and pretending to be absorbed in it.

That was another part of the deal: she’d be discreet about talking to him and he wouldn’t ignore her when she spoke.

”Isn’t it always, where they’re concerned?” he said sourly.

“Not this year. James has changed since becoming Head Boy. He’s grown up.”

The Gryffindor gits came in then, followed closely by Slughorn, and the lesson started. They were preparing the base for Eckhart’s Elixir today. It needed to sit for three weeks before distillation, which would take them neatly into spring term.

“I asked James.” She glanced sidelong at him, as she ground the cockroaches into fine powder. “He said it had nothing to do with him that he knew of.”

He stirred five times clockwise, added the first pinch of lovage and stirred again.

“And you’re so confident he’s telling the truth, you need my confirmation?” he sniped.

I’m just trying to make out why you’d do something so stupid as go in the forest at night,” she said. “It’s not called Forbidden for nothing.”

Her eyes saw too much. He looked at her hands instead, small, blunt but amazingly capable hands, and swallowed hard. He dreamed of her hands sometimes.

“Yes, I imagine it’s full of werewolves,” he said in as bored a voice as he could manage. He was almost sure she knew about Lupin, but she’d never said and he’d sworn not to. “But it wasn’t full moon so I was perfectly safe.” Perfectly safe? He’d never be perfectly safe again.

“Safe? You idiot!” She banged the pestle a little too hard against the mortar and half a roach leg fluttered up and down again. She bit her lip and moderated her arm movements. “Bitten by a Dormis beetle isn’t safe. How long were you lying unconscious till you were found? Anything could have eaten you.”

“Not werewolves,” he said, throwing in another pinch of lovage and stirring. “Told you, it wasn’t full moon.”

“Idiot!” she said again. “There are Acromantulas, you know!”

He didn’t know, actually, but he didn’t doubt the accuracy of her information. Not when her boyfriend went roaming every month.

“Pity they don’t eat Potter then. He goes in more often than I do.” Maybe not more often, but definitely deeper.

“Look, can you stop rabbiting on about James?” Lily grumbled, putting down mortar and pestle with exaggerated care. She eyed the potion with suspicion. “Try a half-stir anti-clockwise on every fifth stir from now on. It’s too pink.”

“It’s purple enough,” he said, adding the last pinch. “You’re the one who keeps bringing him into the conversation. I don’t want to talk about him.”

“I just want to know what’s going on.”

He snorted. No, you don’t. You really don’t.

She narrowed her eyes at the potion. The colour had deepened to a rather virulent shade of magenta.

Adding the cockroach powder in a thin, steady stream, she said lightly, “It’s very suspicious, you know, this determined silence. You’re not normally backward about blaming James. If it wasn’t him playing a prank on you, was it you trying to play a prank on him?”

Evans was the one (kind-of-sort-of-almost-not-quite-a) friend that he wasn’t betraying by spying for Dumbledore. It would have been nice to still be able to talk to her sometimes. Not about what he was doing, of course, never that, but Charms and Potions and N.E.W.T.s and neutral topics like that. But it wouldn’t do. She wasn’t in any more danger from his spying than she had been from his Death Eating, but it wouldn’t do.

Anyway, she was Potter’s girlfriend. That wasn’t going to change. Not now.

“And if it was?” he said slowly. “If I was looking for red squirrel droppings to drop in his potion last week?”

The third part of their deal was that they wouldn’t prank each other. Turning Potter bald wouldn’t have been a prank on her, back when they’d brokered their deal and she’d hated the git. It still wasn’t, when the git became her boyfriend. But he supposed that turning the git bald just before she took him home to meet her family might fairly be called so.

He hadn’t done it, in the end, hadn’t wanted to. He wondered now whether that had been as much because it had become a deal-breaker as because depilating Potter had seemed altogether too flimsy a revenge on the gang that had tried to kill him. Funny the things he was learning about himself, wasn’t it?

She was staring at him now, the potion forgotten. He noticed mechanically that it needed to cool and he put out the flame.

“You didn’t! You wouldn’t!”

No, he didn’t. But she didn’t know that and, if he had his way, she never would.

Really, it was better this way.

A/N Eckhart’s Elixir is not canon. Lovage and cockroach parts are.

Although we don't see Harry's class working in partnerships in sixth year Potions, I've chosen to assume that there are some potions on the curriculum that require more than two hands and this is one of them.