The 'No Contest' Contest

The eagle was balding, hunched and white, just like Professor Caladrius had been. It even had the Professor's nervous movements. When it settled on a branch, it shifted its weight from claw to claw, as though it badly needed the toilet.  

James had been watching it for a few hours, barely moving, while dusk settled in around him. He was in a pine forest in County Kildare, in the east of Ireland, and he was all alone. That wasn't unexpected, but it was still depressing. Sirius had said he'd taken about as much of James's Lily-obsession as he was going to take; Moony was currently padding around the Shrieking Shack, tearing up the furniture; and Wormtail got sick on broomsticks.

He had been tracking the eagle all over the forest, following silently on his broomstick, skimming the treetops with his feet. And now it had finally come to rest – or as close as the hopping, nervous creature ever seemed to come to rest. It wouldn't be easy to capture, but James didn't want it to be easy. He had been chafing helplessly at this problem for weeks, with nothing to take his mind off the idea of Lily Evans and Severus Snape canoodling together. Finally, he had a chance to do something about it.

And it just happened to be the very thing he was best at. The eagle would fly – and, presumably, being an eagle, it had had a lot of practice – but even a creature born for the air couldn't match the famous James Potter on his best broomstick. This was just an over-large, sharp-beaked Golden Snitch, when you thought about it. And, unless Voldemort turned up, there wouldn't even be any Bludgers. It would be easy.

If only everything could be like this! Impressing Lily, dealing with the idea of her going out with – even touching – Severus Snape; if only it could all be a wild, broomstick-top dash, with the wind whistling through his hair!

Well, in a sense, it now was. If he could capture Professor Caladrius, he would tell her. They were meant to be together. There was no way – no way – the future could turn out like that Boggart in Lily's shape had described. He wouldn't let it happen. A Lily who smiled with all the bitterness and cynicism of a bloody Slytherin! A Lily who killed. It was James Potter's Boggart too, now. In fact, considering the things you could do with Lily's brains and magical talent, it ought to be the Boggart of the whole world.

Admittedly, she had been gorgeous – beautiful and clever and daring – in fact, everything he loved about Lily Evans, but with something substantial missing. And, in its place, a tangle of sarcasm and bitterness. Trust Snape to turn everyone he touched into a simmering cauldron of cynicism!

James urged his broomstick into life. It was one of the very best, and hardly made a sound as it slid forwards. He was almost touching the eagle's tail-feathers when the bird rounded on him, shrieked, and launched itself off the branch and over James's head. He steadied the broom, cursing, and wheeled round after it. If Professor Caladrius was still in there – somewhere – he obviously didn't want to return to his old life.

James flattened himself to the broom-handle and followed, diving under the canopy. Caladrius was weaving madly through the branches, but James was used to dodging obstacles, and these ones hardly slowed him down at all, because they weren't trying to pelt him with Bludgers. Pine needles scratched his face as he darted past, but he was on top of everything – even gaining on the creature – before the nearest branch knocked off his glasses.  

If it hadn't been his glasses, it would have been his eyes, so he supposed he should have been thankful. But, in the sudden silence – broken only by the tinkle of glass fifty feet below – he didn't feel inclined to thank anybody. The world went blurry. Caladrius was still in front of him, a darting white shape in the gloom, but the tree-trunks were harder to make out. Being darker than the bird, they just blurred into one another. James couldn't tell whether he was bearing down on an open space or a solid wall of trees.

But he was never going to get another chance like this, so he kept his eyes on the careering white bird and hoped for the best.

He couldn't slow down, so the first tree trunk hit him in the shoulder harder than he would have thought possible. The impact spun his broom around when he was only a foot away from Caladrius's tail-feathers, and – faced with a choice between death and failure – James chose the Gryffindor option. He leapt off his broom, flung his arms around the bird, and fell with it, in a tangle of flailing wings and cracking branches, for what seemed like an eternity.   

When he felt his descent slowing, he turned his face up to the sky and smiled. Something was keeping him from hitting the ground, and lowering him onto it with almost tender carefulness. And, as his rescuer loomed into view, and told him he was 'abso-freakin-lutely mental', he went on smiling, because it was hard to stop.

"I knew you'd be here," he said softly.

"Oh yeah? And what if I wasn't? What if I decided to let you deal with the consequences of your own stupidity for once?"

What if the sun doesn't rise tomorrow? thought James, but he refrained from saying it.

"Stupidest thing I've ever seen," Sirius growled. "Jumping off a broomstick in mid-flight when you're fifty feet in the air! What, did you think you'd sprout wings or something? Did you think you're too good on a broomstick for it to be all the broomstick's doing?"

James waited for him to calm down. He wasn't sure he could have moved anyway. There was at least another five minutes of furious muttering before Sirius flopped down on the ground beside his friend, having apparently run out of insults.

The bird was still clamped to James's side, making a lot of noise, so Sirius – who seemed to be at least as angry with Caladrius as he was with James – conjured a bird cage out of the air, and wrestled the eagle into it, sustaining a lot of scratches along the way.

Eventually, there was silence. James took a deep breath, still looking up at the sky, and said. "Let's face it, Padfoot, we've done dumber things than this."

Sirius gave him a grudging smile. "Yeah, but they all seemed like good ideas at the time."

"What about when we tried to set Moony up with Florence Higgs on the night of the full moon?"

Sirius grimaced. "OK, maybe not that one."

"Meg says she still wakes up screaming."

"Jesus!" Sirius exclaimed, as though he'd been stung. "I said I was sorry, didn't I?"

"And the time you told Snape he could get us expelled if he went into the Shrieking Shack when Moony was fully transformed?"

"That would have worked if you hadn't been so bloody soft," Sirius grumbled. "And now look what's happened. The greasy git's driving you to suicidal feats of idiocy while he sleeps with your girlfriend."

James tried not to wince but, even in the state of surreal joy that comes from risking your life, and finding out your best friend's still behind you in the reckless extremes of idiocy, that sentence hurt. Sirius seemed to sense that he'd gone too far, though, because his tone was conciliatory when he replied:

"I s'pose I owe you one, don't I?"  

"You owe me about twelve," said James reproachfully.

"Yeah, well." Sirius cast a surly eye over his friend's recumbent figure, and got to his feet. "We'll call it eleven now, shall we? Come on. Let's get the bird man to Dumbledore."


Severus waited until Lily was back in the Valance House, draped across a velvet chaise-longue like the heroine of a Gothic novel, before he revived her. Considering the unfocused eyes, the dirt in her tangled hair, and the thorn-pricks on her skin, she located the most important memories of the past few hours remarkably quickly.

"It was him, wasn't it?"

"Don't try to move," said Severus. "You can get post-stupefaction paralysis if you try to move your muscles too quickly."  

"I know that!" she hissed. "I'm the one who taught you that! What did he want? Why did you stun me? I could have helped you!"

Severus tried to prepare himself for the pain he was going to cause her, but it was no good. His next sentence still ploughed through both their chests like a meat-cleaver. "Your conscious mind would have given too much away. Look, he's the most powerful Legilimens in the world, OK? You couldn't have resisted him, even with magic."

Lily blushed ferociously. "Couldn't you have told him you're lying to me about working for Dumbledore? Like all my friends think you are? I mean, I don't know anything, not really know it. I've never been in your meetings with Dumbledore. It's all just faith and hope and extrapolation - ,"

"If he thinks I need to lie to you, then he knows I can't control you," said Snape, in what he hoped was a soothing tone. "The only reason he's agreed to spare your life this long is because he thinks you're a sort of… pet."

Lily's mouth twisted in disgust. "Do you tell him I'm a sort of pet?"

"Lily – ,"

"Fine," she said petulantly. "It's fine. I know you've got to pretend to be a creep. But why can't you teach me how to control my thoughts so that I can pretend too?"

"Because you can't even control the volume of your voice?" he suggested. Again, the words lodged themselves in his chest and thrilled with agony. He could only imagine what they were doing to Lily. But it had to be said, didn't it?

No, it probably didn't have to be said. She was crying now. Severus stared at the carpet miserably.

"So I'm a liability?" she croaked.

"I didn't say that."

"I want to help you!"

"You can do that by doing as I say."

"Like your pet?"

"Don't - ,"

He stopped, because he was hating himself more and more with every sentence, and tried to clear his head.  The stress was getting to him. He felt as though this series of terrifying ambushes was his whole life now. He was just dragging himself through one depressing, draining disaster after another. And for what? For more time to spend looking at her, telling her nothing, watching her spirits sink, and worrying about how to hold on to her for another agonizing day.

He wished he could just forget about the future – just lose himself in the warmth of her body, and the gingerbread scent of her hair, and the fires she lit along every inch of his tingling skin when she looked at him.

But, if he did that, if he stopped concentrating for five fucking seconds, and something happened to her, it would all be over. Every time he had ever lost himself in pleasure, there had been some catastrophe lying in wait for him around the corner. A few hours after he'd first had sex with her, she collapsed on the floor of the Hospital Wing and stopped breathing for three minutes!

Fate wouldn't let him have these moments without exacting a heavy price. It always made him pay. And yet bloody Potter was drowning in gold and girls every day of his life, and all fate did with him was try to heap his plate higher.

Hopefully, one day, the Aurors would find him dead under a heap of lovers with a gold Galleon lodged in his throat. But, even in death, the gerbil-faced git would probably still be grinning.

Nevertheless, it was therapeutic, thinking about Potter's death, and it soon brought him back to reality.

"I can't teach you how to empty your mind," he said gently. "Emotional emptiness is like darkness. You don't know how to appreciate it because you've always looked good in the light. Your whole life, everybody has understood you. You've had no reason to hide what you think, so it's not going to come naturally to you."  

"Oh, that's what you think, is it?" she snapped, folding her arms. "You think it's easy, holding your head up in front of snooty pure-blood idiots who think you're an abomination? You think Petunia understood about Hogwarts? You think Meg and Mary understood about you?"

Severus didn't answer, and she looked down at the table-top, blushing. He had been oversimplifying. That was what stress did to you; it made you elide crucial little details – the crucial little details he was usually so good at spotting.

She was ashamed of the way she felt, and the things she thought. She was ashamed of all that squealing, Hufflepuff-style exuberance; she was ashamed of wanting things and putting her wants above other people's. It was a start. It was something he could work with.

"Healers need to learn how to keep an emotional distance anyway," she said sullenly. "That's why you're a better Healer than I am. That's why it took me five years of study before I got the Light Mark, and you picked it up without even being particularly interested in Healing magic."

Severus followed her gaze to the white scar on the back of his hand. He supposed it was stupid to assume she wouldn't notice it. Maybe he had even wanted her to notice it. He didn't want to go into the horrendous technicalities of what it had been like acquiring it, but, somehow, he wanted to hint at them.

"Does that bother you?" he said.

Lily laughed through a face-full of tears. "I'm proud of you," she replied. "And it bothers me. Can you understand that?" She gave a businesslike sniff, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "Anyway, mostly I'm glad. If I've lost my magic for good, it's comforting to think that you can still look after people. It means Dumbledore will still have someone to run the Hospital Wing."

"Ha!" said Snape bitterly. "He'll have to raise the salary to two-hundred Galleons a week, plus an apology."

"An apology a week?"

"A day. At least."

She giggled, and gave him a smile which made him realize that struggling every day of your life for a few sweaty, anxious moments with this woman was a fair price to pay. A bargain, even. Then she reached out hesitantly for his hand. Severus gave it to her, hoping that physical contact could make up for his shortage of comforting words. She moved the back of his hand this way and that, so the scar caught the light.

"I don't think enough people have told you what a talented wizard you are," she said thoughtfully. "But since it hasn't made any difference to your talent, I can't feel too sorry for you."

"Good," he said, frowning, while his subconscious mind exulted.

You've got to lock this away, he told himself, and never forget it. He wanted to keep everything about this moment – he wanted to bottle her words, her scent, and the way the candlelight made her tear-streaked face glitter. He wanted to pour it all into a Pensieve and bathe in it until his skin got puckered and wrinkly.

Even if it costs you an agony of concentration every time you have to look Voldemort in the eyes, you've got to hold on to this moment.

She clambered onto the armchair, straddling his lap just as she had done that first time in the Hospital Wing.

Bruiser's going to walk in, thought Severus, and he was not – except in a painful, tearing, teeth-grinding way – disappointed.

"No canoodling in this bloody house, boys and girls," said the most evil muggle on earth, from the doorway. "I've got responsibilities."

As Lily jumped up, blushing and tidying her hair, Bruiser rubbed his hands together in a heartlessly businesslike way. "Supper's ready. Then it'll be straight to bed, I think. I'm putting you in separate wings of the house. Seems you can't be too careful, with teenagers."


Poppy often used The Shipwreck as a temporary surgery, when there were emergencies in the village. It was reasonably clean, and everyone in the pub was far too intent on their drinking to object to the smell of disinfectant. But today, as she tended to Mrs. Reynolds's injured hand, she got the distinct feeling that the villagers were intent on her.

They kept whispering behind their hands and casting surly glances at her. Pints of bitter were sitting, neglected, on the table-tops. Sally hadn't let her eyes leave Poppy's face for half an hour. And even the charming new widow in the fox furs was looking grave. She had been standing behind the bar, polishing the same glass, for twenty minutes.

Poppy tried to concentrate on Mrs. Reynolds's injured hand, but even that was strange.

"I was hanging a painting and hit my thumb with the hammer," said the old woman shortly, proffering her hand with extreme reluctance.  

Poppy gently twisted it this way and that. There were any number of things wrong with the woman's story, but the first one which sprang to mind was: "But you're right-handed, Mrs. Reynolds, and you've injured your right thumb."

"Well, I haven't had any practice, have I?" the old woman snapped. "My Ted used to hang the pictures, and now, thanks to Fritz, I have to manage by myself. Are you sure you know what you're doing with that?" she added, squirming under Poppy's ministering hands.

Poppy looked up. The villagers had always been suspicious of her, but they usually trusted her intuition when it came to medical matters.

"I'm just cleaning the cut with iodine," she said, showing Mrs. Reynolds the label on the bottle. "Is there anything… wrong, Mrs. Reynolds?"

"You mean apart from a hammer-blow to the thumb?"

"It's just…" Poppy lowered her voice. "Sally and Margot only stared at me when I wished them a good morning earlier on. Everyone I've met today has seemed so… distracted."

"Ay, well, I expect you would too, if you'd lost your husband on the Normandy beaches," said Mrs. Reynolds briskly.

Poppy didn't answer. She cut a length of cloth and started to tie it in a bandage over Mrs. Reynolds's swollen hand. The cut was bleeding more than she would have liked – and that was another problem with the woman's story: she had never seen a hammer make a cut like that – but, without magic, there was no more she could do. The villagers were watching her too closely for her to risk applying Dittany. Perhaps she could persuade Morry to cast a surreptitious Freezing Charm on Mrs. Reynolds's hand when she wasn't looking. All the widows batted their eyelids at Morry.

"When will that lad become your husband, by the way?" asked Mrs. Reynolds, as though reading her mind.

"I don't know what you mean," said Poppy calmly, tying the bandage with steady hands. Blood was soaking through the gauze in the shape of a bird. Poppy watched it, fascinated. The shape was far too detailed to be coincidental: it had outspread wings, a beak, and separated tail-feathers. It looked exactly like a Phoenix.

"What a funny shape it's making," she murmured, trying – one last time – to bond with her prickly patient.

"What are you talking about, girl?"

"The blood on your bandage looks like a bird."

Mrs. Reynolds squinted. "No, it doesn't."

Poppy decided not to argue. "Well, I've done the best I can, Mrs. Reynolds. There are no broken bones. But, take my advice, and rest it for a few days. Don't try hanging any more pictures."

The old lady gave her a grunt of thanks – at least, Poppy chose to believe the grunt conveyed thanks, because it was easier than nursing a hangover of resentment for the rest of the day. She slipped out of the pub with relief, and found Morry waiting for her on the sea-front. He acknowledged her with his usual nod. It contained a mixture of amusement and approval. They didn't exchange many words, because they had both been stunned and traumatized by an uncaring world, and they just wanted to sit quietly for the rest of their lives, in case the world wasn't finished with them.

She wanted to ask him whether he had ever seen blood soaking through a bandage in the shape of a phoenix, but feared it would finally prove she had lost her mind. So she kept silent. She liked their companionable silences.

"They're not happy," said Morry unnecessarily, as they walked along the sea-front.

"I can see that."

"Something's happened."

"Well, if it doesn't involve bandages or broken bones, it's none of my business."

"It's none of your business even if it does," Morry protested. "They don't pay you for taking care of them, Poppy."

Poppy ignored him. "Tell me about the woman in the fox furs - ," she searched her memory for a second, and then added: "Mrs. Snape? When you say she's a 'dreamer', do you just mean she's got her head in the clouds, or do you mean she's someone like you?"

Morry looked offended. "Not like me, Poppy." He paused, and then added. "Well, maybe like I was, but certainly not like I am. She's from the world outside the dream – the world that made poppies sprout up out of the ground overnight at the base of the elder tree. I wouldn't say her coming here is exactly a good sign, but it's a sign that the dream is growing thin, so we ought to be – cautiously – thankful."

"What do you mean? Are you saying she's dangerous?"

Morry smiled and spread his hands. "Maybe only to certain people. I told you, there's a legend that, if you can break this curse, you will awake to immortality. That kind of story attracts a lot of unscrupulous characters. And bear in mind the curse is millennia old – it's had a lot of time to collect unscrupulous characters. They're treasure-seekers, mostly; although you get the odd really nasty dark wizard, or people who've been diagnosed with a fatal illness and think this curse is their only chance to go on living. I've never seen anyone break out of their own nightmare before, though. I thought I was the only one who could do that."

"And is this woman a treasure-seeker, a dark witch, or a terminally-ill patient?" Poppy asked, with that tone of gentle disbelief she always used on Morry when he was telling her that her life was all a dream.

Morry shrugged cheerfully. "She looks like all three."  

"What makes you think she's a -," Poppy hesitated, embarrassed to be using his crazy terminology, "- a dreamer?"

"It's something to do with the eyes," said Morry. "This curse can't make a proper sky and it can't make proper human eyes."

"What's wrong with Sally's eyes? Or Mrs. Reynolds's eyes?"

Morry shrugged. "I don't know exactly. They don't look right at you? They don't reflect? They look more like decorative objects than tools of perception? It's hard to explain. But believe me when I say that I can spot them," he assured her grimly. "I've got god-knows-how-many years of experience."

"Were you ever interested in gaining immortality?" she asked thoughtfully.

"Good heavens, no. I've got it already. It's lonely and boring."

"Only in places like this," she said, suppressing her smile.  

"You'd be surprised how many places like this there are. No, I aspire to mortality."

"You mean you want to die?"

"Eventually," he said, with another cheerful shrug. "Although I'm not in a hurry, and there are a few things I'd like to achieve before I go."

"Like what?"

"I'd like to see a real sun, or some real stars, for once," he said, grimacing up at the overcast, porridge-thick sky.

"You should go to France," said Poppy, folding her arms across her stomach. "It was beautiful there, at one point."

"I'll take you there when we wake up."

"Are you sure we won't be hundreds of years old?" she asked slyly. "Or thousands?"

Morry shrugged. "No, not sure. Just optimistic."



The roof would be the best way of getting to her. Sod Dark Lords and nightmare-guides and thousand-year-old curses; if he had to deal patiently with riddles and idiots, he was going to have a night with Lily. Some things were more important than life and death.

Severus opened his bedroom window and clambered out onto the tiles, trying not to think about how long it had been since this roof was last repaired.

It was immense. The slates stretched away for what seemed like miles, broken by the odd turret, chimney or skylight, all of it steel-coloured in the light of the moon. Several of the tiles were loose, so he trod carefully, casting a charm of his own creation, which would show up the most obvious protective enchantments.

"Revelio Incantatum," he whispered, watching the pigeons lurch away at the rays of silvery light which were now spreading out from his wand. The light illuminated bands of what looked like particles of dust, stretched across the roof like tennis-nets, and barring his way to the east wing.

"Ha," he muttered, sweeping his hand through the first one, which was a fine, golden colour, and recognizing the lurching motion in his stomach. It was an Inversion Charm. It inverted ground and sky, so that you were hanging over an immensity of stars, and felt as though you were going to fall into infinity if you took another step.

It was a charm that rewarded both detailed knowledge and reckless stupidity. If you were widely-read, you knew that the way through this spell was to step confidently into the unknown: but a surly, arrogant bastard like Potter would have stepped confidently into the unknown in any case. He was going to have to talk to Bruiser about the inherent Gryffindor-bias in his protective enchantments. Potter could have strutted through this obstacle course in a blindfold.

With a bored sigh, he stepped into the golden mist, allowed himself to be pitched upside-down, until his greasy hair was dangling into the night sky, and then walked forward, hardly even staggering as the world once again righted itself.

He should have spotted the loose-tiles as he walked away. Bruiser wouldn't rely on magic, when good old-fashioned gravity could be just as devastating. He had barely taken two steps from the Inversion Charm when the slates collapsed beneath his feet.

He fell straight down, but managed to launch himself forwards as he went, so that he hit his chest painfully against the roof slates, and scrambled his elbows over the top of them, while his legs dangled through the hole in the roof. He looked down and noted, with a kind of dull, far-away terror, that he was hanging over the main hall, which meant he would fall four storeys onto a floor of antique marble if he let go.

"Levicorpus," he muttered, gritting his teeth, and felt his body lifted out of the hole and pitched onto the roof slates. He lay there for a little while, trying to get his heart to sink back into his chest, and picturing all the horrible curses he could cast on Bruiser over the breakfast-table, if he managed to survive. Even without the thought of Lily, it would have been incentive enough.

He got shakily to his feet, and stumbled forwards. He didn't recognize the final band of particles which was stretched across the roof. When he swiped his hand through them, it came out cold and wet, which, on the whole, could have been worse. Probably another endurance charm which a bloody Gryffindor would be able to dance through.

Well, there weren't many things he wouldn't endure for this.

He stepped forwards, and it was like stepping into a waterfall. Sheets of cold water cascaded onto his head, trickled down the neck of his T-shirt and even pooled uncomfortably in his shoes.

A literal cold-shower. Ha! If he thought that was going to work, he was significantly under-estimating the power of teenage lust.

That was the problem with muggles who read about magic but never performed it. They had a tendency to prioritize the wand-twirling, or the incantations, without realizing that sheer, raw, aching feelings were the power source behind every spell. Whoever Bruiser used to cast these protective enchantments, they didn't want to stop Severus as much as Severus wanted not to be stopped. You had to match desire for desire. You had to mean it.

It was very cold, though. And, as he soon discovered, slippery. The wind was strong up here, and it drove the cold into his flesh like hundreds of tiny screws. He had to take it slowly for the rest of the way, edging his numb feet over the slates, but he didn't have any trouble recognizing Lily's window. Quite apart from the fact that he'd memorized its location from the garden earlier, it was the only one which had been thrown widely, invitingly open.

As he climbed through it, he was waylaid by what seemed to be another protective enchantment, but since this one was warm, and smelled of gingerbread, it didn't immediately disconcert him.

"You were forever!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms around him. "I was starting to think you weren't coming!"

Severus groaned, staggering, because she had thrown all her weight onto him, and was hanging around his neck, planting kisses over his face with determined ferocity.

Finally, she took in his wet hair and sagging, shivering shoulders. Her green eyes widened and she pulled away. "What happened to you?"

Severus muttered a few swear-word-laden phrases, but his teeth were still chattering, so the words 'Bruiser's a bastard' were probably the only ones she could discern.

Lily gave him one of her strange, conspiratorial smiles. They had always seemed dirty, in any context whatsoever. They had set his heart – and mind – racing even when they were both sitting quietly in the library discussing Switching Spells. Now, it seemed, they had finally found their proper place in the world. Severus, despite the shivering and teeth-chattering, was beginning to feel the same.

"Let's get you out of those wet clothes, shall we?" Her smile faltered, and she peered at him anxiously. "That is – if you're not too tired."

Severus gave her a withering stare. He would never be able to explain to her the 'no-contest' inner contest which was going on inside his head. As it happened, he was very tired. As it happened, he did have a lot of things on his mind. As it happened, he was constantly afraid that, at any moment, Voldemort would start tearing the walls down and strategically stripping the flesh from his bones.

But it also happened that she was standing there, smiling hopefully, with a curtain of hair over her right eye. And there was no contest. He had a body he could drag through anything – and would drag through anything, for her. One day, there would be something he couldn't push himself through. One day, his legs would give out from under him. And, one day, presumably, she would stop smiling at him. But not yet – oh god, not yet.