All in the Family

Chapter 123: Snape's Worst Memory

To Stitches: That's alright, thanks for reviewing whenever you can! Acknowledging the problem is half the battle, and Peter's at least finally acknowledged that, but it may take some time to develop into a solution considering everything else that's fixing to go on...

You do not understand how much I've been looking forward to this chapter!

HPHPHPHPHP

It finally happened, as it was bound to do. One of them took these continuous bad falls just a bit to hard.

Lily yelped in surprise to find herself on a branch, couldn't latch onto the trunk let alone another one for stability, and went crashing down so fast she couldn't guess at what was below. Her face was dunked into water, while her arm crashed into something much more solid, sending a white-hot shot of pain in all directions from her elbow.

She came up spluttering and gasping in pain, her hair plastered to her eyes leaving her blind, her wand arm throbbing so bad she couldn't have done anything even if her mind wasn't frozen in shock.

Only when she began whimpering at the movement but forced herself to use her other arm to push her hair aside did she suddenly realize she'd also lost her wand during the fall and she'd have no way to fix herself up, but then her eyes adjusted to see Potter was already leaning over her.

Even if she would have had the presence of mind to tell him to piss off she wouldn't have, her arm just hurt too bad and she'd be grateful for anyone to fix it. His wand tapped her arm so fast and lightly she didn't even feel it, and just like that the pain was reduced to a dull throb in seconds, and then a cool tingling replaced that, before she was flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulder like nothing had happened.

"I'm sure Madam Pomfrey would have you in the hospital wing overnight just to make sure it went perfectly," he told her with pure sincerity, "but it's not at that crooked angle anymore, so I think you'll live."

He just smiled at her. Not a grin, not a smirk, just a friendly smile as he offered both hands to help her up in a gentlemanly fashion.

She took a deep breath, and he was already lowering his hands in surrender, before she surprised them both by grabbing hold and hauling herself to her feet. Since he'd already started to pull back she barely had a good grip on his fingers as she did so, but she got back upright and released him all the same. His hands hovered for only a moment around her shoulders to make sure she was going to stay upright before he dropped them and took a step back, now with that familiar smug look firmly set in place.

For some reason it wasn't as grating as she remembered it should be.

She looked just as quickly away, and felt a swarm of feelings for recognizing every inch of this place. The little pond she'd landed in was ringed with four smooth stone pebbles that had broken her elbow, each had a different-sized handprint on them in a different color, the koi were all at the other end still. The rainbow awning gave shade to half the backyard, the sandbox on the opposite side of the tree nobody had looked at in years, and the kites left out, though long weather-damaged, gave a friendly enough sense of life. She was all too familiar with the tree she'd just fallen out of, because Petunia had once done the very same thing when she was seven and her collarbone had broken in three places. Lily had run over to help, placing her hands on her sobbing sister and easing her crying for only a moment, and her older sister had actually smiled at her in thanks, one of the very few times she'd seemed in awe of her magic rather than hating it.

She'd spotted that cat weather-vane from the roof of Snape's home. They were at her house. That tree had a direct view right up to her window, and while the branches didn't extend far enough for him to crawl over, he'd scaled it countless times with pebbles in hand to get her attention, and she'd ease open the window and bounce dangerously on the awning before bunching up the material and sliding the rest of the way down, landing just so over the table and the two ran free of the yard.