The trouble began over a door.
That was what made it so infuriating.
Not a curse gone wrong. Not a duel in a corridor. Not some grand house rivalry fit to satisfy the older students who spoke as if Hogwarts had been invented primarily to give children better architecture for contempt. Only a door, a rule, and the particular kind of adult unhelpfulness that arrived when the problem belonged to children and therefore, in adult estimation, had not yet earned urgency.
It was a wet Thursday in October.
Rain had been striking the castle on and off since breakfast, not enough for drama, only enough to make stone hold cold more aggressively and hems stay damp from one lesson to the next. The corridors smelled of wet wool and old fire. Water marked the flagstones near every entrance, and the windows along the staircases showed only grey sky and the vague movement of weather over the grounds.
Severus had just come from Potions.
That meant he was in a good mood, though he would not have named it that. Only steadier. More exact inside himself. Slughorn had assigned them a reading on infusion versus solution and said something in passing about certain minds being naturally suited to sequence, and Severus had spent the whole walk up from the dungeon turning the sentence over in his head while refusing to let it become too important.
Then he turned the corner near the second-floor landing and found Lily sitting on the corridor floor outside a bathroom door.
She had her satchel beside her, hair escaping from its tie, one sock damp at the ankle where the rain had got at her between lessons. The bathroom door behind her was closed. Not merely closed. Locked, by the set of her mouth.
Severus stopped.
The corridor around them remained ordinarily alive. Distant steps. A portrait somewhere muttering at a draught. The smell of cabbage from some far staircase where Peeves had likely done damage earlier in the day. Yet the whole scene arranged itself in his mind at once as problem.
"What happened?"
Lily looked up.
The relief in her face was so quick and unguarded it irritated him immediately because it showed how long she had already been there without anyone proving useful.
"The door's stuck."
He looked at the handle. Brass. Old. The sort of school door handle that had likely survived wars, floods, and generations of children but could still fail properly when asked to do the one ordinary thing for which it existed.
"On you?"
"No, on Mary."
He blinked. "Who?"
"Mary Macdonald." Lily stood at once as if his arrival had converted waiting into action. "She's in there."
There was, as if to confirm this, a muffled voice from beyond the door.
"I'm still here!"
Severus stepped nearer.
"How long?"
Lily made a face. "Ages."
That meant anything between three minutes and half an hour with Lily. He looked at her expression and revised upward.
"What happened?"
"She went in before Charms, and then when the bell went I waited because she was taking forever, and then the handle wouldn't turn from her side or mine, and then I went for Prefect Wilkes, and he said he'd tell someone, and then no one came, and now it's after Charms and half of lunch and Mary says she's freezing."
From behind the door came Mary's voice again, clearer this time with indignation.
"And this window doesn't shut!"
Severus looked at the ceiling for one brief second.
There it was. The whole chain of adult failure. A boy prefect told to tell someone. Someone not told, or not caring. A girls' bathroom made inaccessible by the very rule designed to preserve its propriety. A child inside with a window stuck open in October weather.
House division and gender division and corridor hierarchy all conspiring to produce maximum stupidity from minimum cause.
"Why didn't you get a professor?"
Lily looked affronted. "I tried."
He waited.
"Professor Binns went through me."
He stared.
Lily's face changed. "Well, not through me, through the corridor. But he didn't stop."
That sounded correct.
"And then Filch said if girls would stop yanking doors off hinges this sort of thing wouldn't happen."
Mary banged once from inside. "I didn't yank anything!"
Lily raised her voice. "I know!"
Then to Severus, more quietly and with increasing fury, "And then he said he didn't have the right key because the girls' lavatories all have different locks and if I'd been a proper little lady I'd wait instead of making a scene."
The sentence landed like an insult in Severus's own chest.
Not because it had been said to him. Because of the whole smug weight of it. The rule. The condescension. The use of girls and proper to make a mechanical failure into moral commentary.
He looked at the bathroom door again.
A stupid obstacle now made stupid by ideology.
"Move," he said.
Lily moved at once.
He took the handle and turned.
It stuck exactly as promised. Not jammed solid, but half-caught in some internal wrongness. The latch did not fully retract. Old mechanism. Poor maintenance. Ordinary explanation.
Not enough.
From inside, Mary said, "Is that you?"
Lily answered, "Yes. And Severus."
A pause.
Then: "Can he come in?"
Severus closed his eyes briefly.
Lily glared at the door. "No, because it is a girls' bathroom and he is tragically not useful to that system."
Mary, despite being cold and trapped, laughed once.
Good. She was not near panic yet.
Severus crouched and looked at the gap beneath the door. Narrow. No room there. He stood again and examined the lock plate. Worn screws. Brass gone dark at the edges. He put one ear near the wood and turned the handle slowly.
Metal caught.
Something inside shifted but not enough.
Lily hovered beside him with all her usual inability to keep her body from participating in a problem even when there was no physical room for participation.
"Can you do anything?"
He did not answer.
Not because he meant mystery. Because the question had too many possible meanings now.
Can you force it mechanically?
Can you force it magically?
Can you do anything as a boy on the wrong side of a girls' bathroom rule in a castle that already divided enough of the day for no good reason?
From further down the corridor came a group of Ravenclaws slowing to stare and then moving on when Lily gave them the sort of look that dared comment and promised retaliation.
Severus said, "Did you try the window from outside?"
Lily blinked. "No."
"Why not?"
She looked offended. "Because I was here."
This, he thought, was both exactly the problem and exactly Lily.
He looked toward the corridor bend. Rain-grey light came through the nearest stair window. Somewhere below, lunch was beginning in the Hall, and the whole castle was content to go on feeding itself while one child remained shut in a bathroom because adults had preferred protocol to usefulness.
"I'll go round," he said.
Lily grabbed his sleeve.
"What?"
"Don't leave me."
The sentence came out before she could refine it and meant, he thought instantly, not fear of corridor solitude but fear of being the sole guardian of a locked door while the only currently useful person vanished into route-finding. Still. The way she had said it tightened something in him.
"I'm not leaving," he said. "I'm going to the window."
Lily let go at once. "Oh."
Then, because she was Lily and incapable of letting temporary ignorance pass without remark: "That's what I meant."
He nodded once, sparing them both.
"The girls' corridor wraps round the courtyard," she added, already helping. "There's a narrow stair by the statue of the hunchback witch."
He looked at her.
"How do you know that?"
Lily's chin lifted a fraction. "Because I'm not blind."
He almost smiled. Did not.
Mary called through the door, "What's happening?"
Lily went to the wood at once. "He's going round to the window."
From inside came a silence and then, in a voice that suggested Mary Macdonald was trying with mixed success to remain dignified about the whole thing:
"Tell him not to fall."
Severus went.
The route took him through two corridors, one draughty stair, and a narrow side passage that smelled of wet stone and soap. The castle at midday remained maddeningly itself all through this: students moving to lunch, ghosts passing with complete disregard for doors, portraits watching with bored intelligence, rain at the windows, ordinary hidden-world life proceeding in full while this absurd locked-off emergency lived at its edge unnoticed.
He found the hunchback witch.
Beyond her, a slit-windowed passage looked down into a small inner courtyard where ivy blackened under rain and the stone flags held thin pools of water. The girls' bathroom window stood two stories above the courtyard, narrow and half-open exactly as Mary had said.
Severus looked down.
Then up.
No route from the courtyard wall. Too smooth.
But the passage itself continued to a service stair leading one level higher, and from there another corridor angled behind the bathroom wall. He followed it. The castle, he thought while moving, was built partly for getting lost and partly for making determined children inventive.
At last he found the outer casement.
Old iron latch. Swollen wood. Rain in the frame.
He tested it.
It moved.
Not elegantly. Enough.
From inside the bathroom, muffled but clear, came Mary's voice. "What's that?"
"It's me," he said.
There was a startled silence.
Then Lily's laugh, distant through stone and wood. "I told you."
The window opened inward three more inches.
Severus saw Mary then, wrapped in her robe against the cold and standing on the far side of the tiled room with an expression halfway between embarrassment and righteous fury. The interior looked ordinary enough. Sinks. Mirrors. White tile. One stall door hanging open. Another shut. The main door still refusing usefulness.
"Can you get in?" Mary asked.
"No."
He could perhaps have managed if he were smaller or more willing to lose skin to stone. Neither condition applied sufficiently.
He looked at the inside latch mechanism from this angle.
There.
A bent arm of metal catching where it should have dropped free. Rust or warping or years of Filch refusing maintenance. Ordinary explanation again. Still not enough on its own.
"Lift the handle when I say," he called.
Mary came at once, glad for instruction.
He reached through the narrowest possible space, fingers straining toward the bent arm. Cold iron. Wet paint. The angle was wrong. His sleeve caught on the frame. He swore under his breath.
From the corridor side Lily banged once on the door. "What's happening?"
"Quiet," he called back.
The absurdity of the scene nearly overwhelmed him.
A girls' bathroom. One trapped Gryffindor. One impatient one outside. One Slytherin half through a window because the rule system of the castle had not accounted for practical intelligence before lunch.
He got hold of the bent metal.
"Now."
Mary lifted the handle.
He pulled.
Something inside scraped, then snapped down into place. The door latch released with a noise audible even through wall and rain and corridor.
The next second the door flew open below and Lily's voice came through in victorious alarm.
"It worked!"
Mary's, sharper and much closer to her own freedom: "Oh, thank heaven."
Severus let go of the iron and nearly lost his balance against the frame before catching the sill properly.
From the passage below came running feet.
Lily, of course.
She appeared in the corridor outside the bathroom window one floor down, looking up with hair half-escaped and expression incandescent with relief and triumph.
"You did it."
He looked down at her.
Rain streaked the courtyard between them. The window frame dug into his ribs. The whole castle suddenly seemed very ridiculous and very alive.
"Yes," he said.
Mary appeared behind Lily in the open doorway, pale and furious and trying not to show either too much. "That was stupid."
Lily turned. "You were inside it."
"I know."
Mary looked up at Severus. "Thank you."
The words, offered across rain and gender-segregated plumbing, sounded more ceremonial than the situation deserved.
He nodded.
Then the wrong person arrived.
Filch came puffing into the lower corridor with his lantern and his keys and his permanent expression of being personally wronged by children's existence. He took in the open bathroom door, Mary outside it, Lily in the hall, and Severus at the window above with the satisfaction of a man finding evidence before bothering to ask what sort.
"What," he demanded, "is going on here?"
Lily opened her mouth at once.
Mary too.
Severus spoke first from above, because vantage granted temporary authority and because if anyone was going to tell this story badly, he preferred it not be Filch.
"The latch was bent."
Filch looked up as if only now remembering the school had vertical dimensions.
"And what are you doing up there?"
"Opening the window."
Filch's whole face puckered around the insult of such ingenuity. "That window is not for pupils."
Mary said, before anyone else could, "Neither is being shut in a lavatory."
Lily looked delighted by this new version of Mary Macdonald.
Filch glared at them all as if hoping guilt would become more visible under scrutiny.
Then, because the practical fact of the released door undermined whatever reprimand he had hoped to build, he did the only thing left to him and made the problem administrative.
"You should have waited."
Lily's outrage went incandescent.
"We did wait."
Filch sniffed. "A proper little—"
"Don't," said Mary.
The single word stopped him better than argument might have.
Filch looked at her, at Lily, at the open bathroom, at the window, at Severus above, and seemed to realize that whatever version of adult superiority he had hoped to stage had already been spoiled by the children organizing themselves more effectively than he had.
He muttered something about hinges and damage and irresponsible behavior and stomped off to find a tool or a complaint or both.
Severus climbed back down the route by which he had come.
By the time he rejoined them in the corridor outside the bathroom, Mary had washed her face and reassembled enough dignity to look only moderately like a person recently imprisoned by plumbing. Lily stood with one hand on the now-propped door as if daring the castle itself to try again. The rain had put a damp streak on Severus's sleeve and left grit at one cuff.
Mary looked from him to Lily and then to the door.
"All this," she said, "because I wanted not to be late to Charms smelling of pumpkin porridge."
Lily laughed.
Severus, to his own surprise, did too. Only once, softly, but enough.
Mary noticed.
"You do make sounds."
Lily, instantly treacherous, said, "He does them when he thinks no one's earned them."
Mary smiled then, brief but real.
The corridor felt suddenly ordinary again. Not the earlier stupid ordinary of rules and delay. A better one: three children standing after a solvable disaster, house colors still visible but temporarily made irrelevant by competence.
That irrelevance, Severus thought, was the real point.
Not the bathroom. Not even Filch. The way the house divide had become actively stupid in the face of simple practical need. Had Lily been a Slytherin, he would have entered the corridor without hesitation and the problem might have been solved ten minutes sooner. Had he been a Gryffindor, the same. Instead the castle had arranged them into separate streams and then acted surprised when the streams failed to solve one another's locked doors elegantly.
Mary adjusted her robe sleeves.
"I should go."
Lily nodded. "Are you all right?"
Mary gave the bathroom one final look of withering contempt. "I'm cross," she said. "That's close enough."
Then she hesitated, looking at Severus.
"You're Slytherin."
Not accusation. Observation. A new variable.
"Yes."
Mary nodded once as if fitting him into an altered map.
"Well. Thank you anyway."
She went.
Lily watched her disappear around the corner and then turned back to Severus with all the force of the relieved energy still in her.
"That was stupid."
"Yes."
"No, I mean properly stupid."
"Yes."
"She was freezing."
"Yes."
Lily made a frustrated sound and paced once in the narrow span between wall and bathroom door.
"I hate it."
"What?"
She stopped.
"This."
He knew what she meant before she explained it, but she did anyway, because some truths required naming aloud before they could be believed.
"That you couldn't just come in because of a rule, and the prefect wouldn't help because it was the girls' corridor, and Filch made it sound as though all of us were the problem instead of the door, and if I'd been a boy people would only have said fetch a tool, not stand there and be proper about it."
Severus looked at her.
The old ordinary rules again. Girls, boys, corridors, propriety. Hogwarts had added house to the structure and called it tradition.
"Yes," he said.
Lily searched his face.
Then, more quietly, "It's getting harder."
The sentence opened a different silence.
Not because the words were obscure. Because they were exact.
House division was still not killing the friendship. It remained. Riverbank and library and corridor corners had not vanished. Yet the castle had begun testing it. Timetables. Tables in the Hall. Dormitories. Staircases. Rules about where boys and girls could go. House loyalties layered over all of it. The old daily ease of simply turning up in each other's worlds had been replaced by routes, permissions, chances.
Severus looked at the wet mark on his own cuff.
"Yes," he said.
Lily nodded once, as if hearing the answer aloud mattered even when she already knew it.
Then she smiled suddenly, with a trace of the old mischief returning through the irritation.
"But you still went round the window."
He looked at her.
"That's because the door was stupid."
Lily's smile widened. "Exactly."
There it was again. The impossible bright reframing of inconvenience into proof.
He should have resisted it more than he did.
Instead he said, "Next time get a professor who isn't useless."
Lily laughed, and the whole corridor seemed better for a second.
"Binns doesn't count," she said.
"No."
"Filch doesn't count either."
"No."
They stood there another moment in the second-floor gloom with the rain at the windows and the ridiculous bathroom door propped open like a warning to future systems.
Then footsteps sounded further off and the spell of the corridor broke.
Lily looked toward the noise. Back to him. "I should go."
He nodded.
House colors remained. Rules remained. The castle remained itself: full of divisions already old enough to call themselves natural.
Yet as Lily turned away toward Gryffindor territory and he toward the lower corridors, Severus felt more sharply than before that the friendship was not ending under the split.
It was being tested by architecture.
And architecture, he thought as he glanced once more at the stupid bathroom door, was sometimes only a more respectable form of stupidity.
End of Chapter 44