Chapter Text
She's stuck with this motherfucker every Tuesday night.
They're stuck together on other nights too, but on Tuesdays it's just the two of them, and that particularly stings.
As recently as a month ago, Tuesday was Lily's favourite night of the week. Though Aunty M never advertised it on a sandwich board or scrawled it in a book of ancient rules, it's common knowledge that Tuesday nights in The Gaff cater almost exclusively to the same small group of untroublesome regulars. Folks like Ken, Pat and Archie, the Matrons and their checkers board, or old Bathilda and her yellowed Take a Break magazines from the mid-nineties, have been visiting the bar for so many decades that visiting itself is as habitual as brushing their teeth before bed, and it is they who darken the door on the quietest evenings; not that newcomers aren't welcome, but small dive bars aren't exactly rocking on a typical Tuesday night.
It's not just quiet in The Gaff on Tuesdays, it's comatose, and the bar can easily be managed by a staff of two.
That was great, when Lily worked Tuesday nights with Dorcas, and could chat and gossip and take longer breaks, and keep her coursework behind the bar (she used to get quite a lot accomplished, believe it or not).
Then Dorcas moved back in with her parents in Bishop's Stortford.
Then Moira hired that—that fucking cadaver.
*
He's posh, he's pampered, he has no conceivable reason to need employment because he's already rolling in money and aside from making the actual drinks, he doesn't do any fucking work.
He doesn't tidy up, doesn't wipe down, barely engages with customers unless he's planning to sleep with them later, avoids using the till, doesn't keep an eye out for what stock needs replenishing, won't venture down into the cellar when a keg needs changing, and Lily has never seen him check for a single ID. A toddler could come waddling into the bar in search of a Bloody Mary and Sirius would dutifully fill their sippy cup with tomato juice and vodka, but he sure as hell wouldn't bid the poor tyke a good day.
Lily thinks that maybe—maybe—Aunty M only hired him because he stirred something within her, sexually, which seems to be a common affliction suffered by people who encounter him.
He's a decidedly slender person, and makes a point of keeping his arms bare from the elbows down, exposing a pair of white, tattooed, prominently blue-veined forearms, all skin and visible bone, with fingernails painted black. His eyes are usually smeared with kohl and encircled by a darkness of a more natural, sleepless kind; sickly, sunken hollows above a pair of crystalline cheekbones; but his skin is poreless and clear, his long black hair decidedly lustrous, and the tragedy of his overall appearance works for him somehow, in fact it might even be deliberate. He wouldn't look out of place in a heroin chic magazine spread from the 90s; wretched, but miraculously well-preserved.
In any case, Sirius's baseline assumption is that everyone he meets is either wet or hard for him, and he's frequently proved right, particularly by the thirsty hordes that descend upon the bar on weekends.
Personally, he leaves Lily arid.
It's like a desert plain down there.
*
She reminds him that she finds him about as sexually appealing as noxious gas on a busy, late December evening that sees two drunk young women come to actual physical blows over him by the jukebox, necessitating a hasty escort off the premises by Kingsley, Lily's upstairs neighbour who doesn't work in The Gaff but occasionally pops down when muscle is required, and Sirius (who hadn't been remotely interested in either of them, but played them against one another like he was carrying out a sadistic chess manoeuvre) is waxing lyrical about how his lot in life is to be cursed with such beauty that he's doomed to never be treated like a normal proletariat, ego spiralling wildly out of control, and she feels the need to remind him that he's not a god.
"Good joke," comes his unaffected response, "if James were here, he'd appreciate it."
And that's punishing, because the only thing worse than listening to Sirius blather on about how attractive he finds himself is listening to him talk about his brother—a man who by his own description is some kind of anointed saint, nature's only perfect creation, or alternatively, a prat—and this inevitably leads to further monologing on the subject.
"Guess what his girlfriend did the other day," he fronts, trailing along behind her like a dog, but a dog whose only intent is to fool her into believing he's not rabid before he inevitably bites, as she retreats behind the bar.
The brother's girlfriend—who has been a thorn in Sirius's side for two years and who sounds, incidentally, like the most inoffensive, blandly nice woman on the planet—is also a frequent topic.
Lily would happily pay good money to never hear about James or his girlfriend again.
"Don't care," she tells him. After a quick game of memory gymnastics, she turns a plastic smile upon one of several patrons who have propped themselves up against the long, walnut bar. "What can I get you?"
"Pint of San Miguel, please," the lucky chosen half-shouts above the noise.
"No worries."
"She turned up in the middle of game night when she hadn't even told him she was coming over," Sirius begins to complain, practically breathing down Lily's neck while she produces a pint glass and slots it beneath the tap. "Then she asked if she could play too, even though we'd already set up the board and started twenty minutes earlier."
Lily pulls down on the tap handle and determinedly watches the amber liquid fill the glass at an angle.
"And James is a soft touch," he continues, "so he convinced the others to start over and that was the whole night ruined because we had to keep explaining the fucking rules to her."
There are a lot of responses that Lily could offer to that, responses like "how nice of her to take an interest in his hobby instead of trying to take him away from it" or "try having a real problem for once" or even "you're obsessed with your brother, shut the fuck up," but she focuses instead on achieving a perfect head of creamy white foam on top of the pint of San Miguel and slides it across the bar. "£6.20, when you're ready."
The patron murmurs his thanks, his phone at the ready for a one-tap payment, and Lily slides over to the till to enter the amount. Sirius, standing in front of it, shuffles back to allow her access, paying no mind to the fact that Marlene and Davey, further down the bar, are equally as busy and in need of help. They're screening the footy today, Arsenal is playing Crystal Palace on Sky Sports and it's half-time, so the bar is heaving with jersey-clad supporters looking to get their fix before the next half begins and the Gunners (inevitably, it seems) widen their current 3-1 advantage. Things are always tense when two London teams clash, and while Lily came to work expecting a couple of scraps between punters, she hadn't expected the culprits to be two tiara-adorned women on a hen do.
"We didn't even get to finish because it took her so fucking long to take her turns that Pete started dozing off and we had to call it a night." Sirius is still going. "She kept saying it was too complicated, but if it's too complicated, why fucking play?"
"I don't know, to learn how?" Lily suggests, engaging despite herself, though that's always a fatal error. She shifts her gaze to the next customer, a well-dressed man who has been sequestered in a booth with his pretty date for the past hour. "What can I get you?"
"A Summer Garden Party for myself and a Lily's Love Elixir for the other half, thanks."
"No problem."
"You know she's Lily, don't you? It's her elixir," Sirius tells him, nudging Lily in the side, as he always does whenever someone orders that cocktail within earshot. The Gaff is independently run with no oversight from a brewery, so Moira left the creation of the cocktail menu to her staff, advising them to have fun with dreaming up drinks. Lily's Love Elixir—a mix of rose-infused gin, elderflower liqueur, sparkling wine and raspberry puree—was Bonnie's suggestion, Lily was tactically outvoted into submission, and it mortifies her every time Sirius tries to implicate that she named it after herself.
It's also her favourite drink on the menu. Not that she can ever admit that aloud.
The customer's expression slides towards discomfort. "Ah?"
"If you know so much about it, you bloody make it," Lily hisses at Sirius, taking a coupe glass from the overhead rack and pressing it into his hand.
"Alright." To his small credit, he takes it from her and immediately sets about doing just that while Lily, her cheeks burning with embarrassment, grabs a highball for the Garden Party (ironically, that's her least favourite drink, because cucumber is foul). "Anyway, I've told the lads that we're having the next game night round at Remus's so that way she can't let herself in whenever she fucking feels like it and take over the whole night."
"Then I hope Remus invites her."
"He won't." That's the thing about Sirius, even when he knows that Lily's being caustic on purpose, he responds to her comments like they're having a perfectly rational conversation. "He doesn't like her either, he's just too polite to say it."
Lily rolls her eyes and dunks a scoopful of ice into the highball.
"She tries to change him too much."
"Oh, I'm sure."
"She does. Do you see him here?" Sirius gestures around the bar with the liqueur bottle. "His team's up 3-1 but he's out with her at Winter fucking Wonderland."
"Slide that shaker over, would you?"
He completely ignores the question. "And what's the point of him putting in all this effort when they're not even going to last anyway? He's too good for her. He's punching down."
Lily reaches past his midsection and snatches at the cocktail shaker. "Yeah, no, he isn't punching down."
"He is. You'll see when you meet him."
"If I ever have to actually meet your brother, Black, I will surely kill your brother," she threatens, and in that moment, while Darius squeezes by them both with a tray of empties and Sirius turns his petulantly pretty pout upon her face, she truly and sincerely means it.
"You two aren't brother and sister?" their cocktail-ordering customer pipes up, genuine confusion creasing his stately features.
Then Sirius's pout becomes a gleaming, vampire grin.
He's never going to let her forget that.
Her fingers are going to stink of cucumber all night.
She'd slam her head down on the bar and be done with it right now, if it weren't so fucking sticky.
*
If Aunty M weren't her boss (or if she were her real aunt, not her mother's oldest friend), Lily would give her no end of shit for hiring the most useless living ornament known to man to work in her bar, but Aunty M is her boss.
She's also her landlord.
She doesn't need to be either, technically. Lily is closing in on the end of an online master's that she can study from anywhere, her flat is a bit of a shithole and the cost of living would be cheaper if she moved back in with her parents in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, but all of that is trumped by the fact that she doesn't have to pay rent, which makes her London living situation a bit of a lottery win. Moira is the fourth person in as many generations of her family to inherit the bar and the two flats above it. She doesn't have a mortgage and has no interest in living there herself, so the deal is that Lily studies part time, manages The Gaff five days a week and pays for her own utilities and repairs. The only time Lily sees the woman is when she pops in to do the top level managerial stuff from her tiny little office in the back, usually on Mondays and Thursdays, and the rest of the time she's left to her own devices, but while Moira happily took Lily and Bonnie's suggestions to introduce a new cocktail menu, an order-from-your-booth app, quiz nights, football screenings and live music sessions to bring in more custom throughout the week (except, of course, for on Tuesdays, her weekly oasis from the noise) she remains stubbornly controlling where hiring, firing and scheduling are concerned.
Hence, Sirius.
Who Moira fancies, despite being old enough to have birthed him.
He knows it too, not that he gives a shit. He certainly doesn't pretend to work any harder when she's around, just offers to play her at pool and uses the time to practice improving his game while Moira dotes and giggles and thinks it means something it doesn't. Then she flutters off home in a tizzy and Sirius deletes her from his brain until the next time she turns up in her tight jeans with some "I just happened to grab these out" pastries in tow.
"Play a game with me," he asks Lily on a Tuesday night in early January that sees her conducting a deep clean behind the bar.
She's been tetchy lately because she's smack-bang in the middle of a final push to get the first draft of her dissertation submitted, and struggling with writer's block, and Sirius knows this because she had the common decency to warn him of her mood. He also knows that she wouldn't say yes regardless. He has been working in The Gaff since October and Lily has never once accepted his offer of a game of pool, but it never stops him from asking anyway.
She's also on her knees behind the bar with a dishrag and a spray bottle of Moira's homemade vinegar solution at the minute, scrubbing at the stainless-steel shelves that are fitted in the under bar, surrounded by displaced bottles of their most popular brands. His timing literally could not be better designed to piss her off.
"No thank you," she breathes through her labour.
"Oh, come on." Sirius leans over the bar and peers down at her, his hair gleaming like a shampoo advert beneath the overhead neon lights. "Why not?"
"I'm busy. Ask one of the gents to play pool with you." Ken, Pat and Archie have been ensconced in a booth and ordering multiple pints of Carling since four p.m.
"If they try to stand their knobbly old knees will rupture, come on, play."
"Then ask your sainted brother to pop over and play."
Sirius huffs through his nose. "James won't even play me at home."
It's no surprise that a man so devoted to leisure that he treats his place of employment as an extension of his own home would have a pool table in his house. The Gaff's table is where he picks up half his sexual conquests; if Lily wasn't the one who locked up at night, she's certain that he would have fucked someone on it by now. "I wonder why."
"Because he can't beat me," he drawls. "Why are you so determined to pretend you aren't fun?"
"Because I'm not fun."
"Liar."
She stops scrubbing, pushes a wisp of dark red hair out of her face with her forearm and stands up. Forget the gents and their aged bones, her own knees are starting to ache from prolonged contact with the hardwood floor. "Because most people actually work during their working hours, yeah? We can't all afford to piss about playing pool."
"What about all that pissing about that you do on your laptop?"
"Lord, forgive me for occasionally doing some schoolwork when it's quiet. You think writing a dissertation is my idea of a good time?"
"Could be. What's it about?"
She drops her dishrag into the sink with a short, clipped sigh, and yanks the rubber glove off her left hand. "It's a case study on the impact of psychosocial programs on the lives of forcibly displaced children and youth in Great Britain."
"Shit." Sirius stands up straight, pushing his body away from the bar with his palms, and squints at her like she's a magic eye puzzle. "I thought you were studying poetry or something."
"Why poetry?"
"Because of all the cardigans."
She stares at him for a second while the implied insult settles in, and rankles, her bones. "Fuck you!"
"They don't suit you."
"Again, fuck you."
He's grinning like the most self-satisfied prick imaginable, as usual. His teeth look like a perfect row of pearls and it's galling, because while Lily doesn't fancy him at all, she can recognise his innate beauty. He deserves to be so much uglier. "You look like you've been pulled out of a fire and had a blanket wrapped around your shoulders for the shock."
"Sounds preferable to this conversation."
"I'm just saying, you're an attractive woman—"
"I have no interest in changing my personal style to better fit the mould of someone you'd like to fuck, mate."
"Yeah, I know that." He has the temerity to roll his eyes like she's the problem. "That's not the point I was making."
"Then what was your point?"
"That they don't suit you. You're too young for them. They're swallowing you whole. You're welcome."
He's not wrong; her cheap Primark cardigans are too big, too baggy, and conservative in a way that doesn't vibe with her personality, her appearance or her true personal style, but that's exactly why Lily wears them behind the bar. "Did you ever consider that I dress like this at work because I don't want to court attention from the aspiring sexual harassers who drink here?"
"If that's your only line of defence against those blokes you'll need a new tactic, because that's not going to stop them," Sirius surmises, and what's annoying is that once again, he's right, because it doesn't, and yet she tries. "Are you playing or not?"
"Not." She enunciates the word with the hardest "t" she can muster.
"Fine," he concedes, unbothered. "I'll play by myself."
"Or you could do your fucking job and take the Christmas decorations down?" she suggests to no avail, because he has already turned away and is strolling towards the pool table.
"Later," he calls over his shoulder.
"Wanker," Lily mutters under her breath.
*
A few weeks later, just a few days before her birthday, Lily receives an early present in the form of a text from a vacationing Moira, about 30 minutes before The Gaff is due to open.
Sirius sick & not in 2nite, Davey covering x
As a result, she is in high spirits when she starts her shift, greeting Davey with the sunny smile to end all sunny smiles, and remains in high spirits until Sirius waltzes into the bar anyway, late in the afternoon.
"Beluga on the rocks, ma petite sœur," he demands, rapping his knuckles on the bar top's walnut surface as he slides onto a stool.
"What are you doing here?" Lily replies, frozen in the act of polishing a wine glass, her voice carrying louder than intended across the bar.
"What d'you think?"
"I thought you were poorly?"
He stares blankly at her. His mouth is set in a hard, tense line, and the whites of his smoky grey eyes are curiously red, as if he's been rubbing at them repeatedly, or as if he downed three or four whiskeys before he left his house. "I am."
"So why are you here?"
"I'm taking a mental health day."
She lowers her rag and glass. "I'm pretty sure that the last thing anyone taking a mental health day ought to do is show up at the bar they work at and order a beluga."
"Thanks for the sage opinion, Mum," he retorts, rather more nastily than he usually would. "Now where the fuck is my vodka?"
And whatever energy she might have had to argue finds itself sapped, so Lily shuts up and serves him. She doesn't have time for this drama.
He proceeds to drink.
And drink.
And drink.
*
Unsurprisingly, he makes for a terrible customer.
For the first hour he is mostly silent, contemplating the depths of his glasses (he packs three away alarmingly quickly) between sips and occasionally holding them aloft, presumably so that he can study his vodka from different angles. Then comes the disconnected grunts, the shooting of spiteful glares at random, unfixed points in the room, the slouching over the bar and staring gloomily at nothing, as if he is dying for someone to ask him what on earth could have done him so wrong, but also as if he will punch the person who dares.
"Not very personable, are you?" he remarks a few hours later, when Lily happens to venture down to his end of the bar in search of a copper mug.
Lily pauses mid-action, the mug swinging from two fingers. "I beg your pardon?"
"Aren't bartenders meant to talk to their patrons?" he questions her, gesturing to her chest with one hand. "Shouldn't you be encouraging me to share my troubles, help me through my shit, that sort of bollox?"
"You never do that," Lily points out. "With any customers."
"Not talking 'bout me, am I? I'm talking about you."
"In that case, no, you're thinking of a therapist."
He snorts into his beluga. "Therapist, drink dispenser, I don't see a difference."
"The difference is that therapists are paid to listen to your shit."
"And?"
"And." She reaches for the tip jar by the nearest register and slides it towards his elbow. "This jar's not seen a penny from your pocket and you've spent a fortune on vodka in three hours, so we can talk when I've been better compensated."
Sirius's reply is not made in words, but in one of his wide, sarcastic, toothpaste advert grins, and Lily's not in the mood to entertain him any further, so she whisks herself away to finish making Bathilda's vodka and tonic. Because Davey is a saint, he asserts that he's more than happy to serve Sirius his next few drinks, and by the time Lily makes it back down that end of the bar, he is practically hanging onto his stool for dear life, well and truly fucked.
And so, here the night finds her, stuck on babysitting duty because Davey has an early class on Tuesdays and Lily sent him home half an hour ago.
She makes him a coffee, pushes it across the bar, and he squints at the mug as if she'd pulverised a rat and served it to him.
"What is that?" he asks.
"It's coffee."
"What?"
"Coffee."
He tries to fix her with a withering look, but he's too plastered to pull it off. "Din'ask for coffee."
"Part of you did."
"Which part?"
"The part that's turned your legs and feet all to mush." She pushes it a little closer to him. "So get it down your gob."
Sirius contemplates the wide-rimmed cup, squatting proudly in its mismatched saucer, before him. His eyes are unfocused and lazy, and he gazes through the spiralling wisps of steam that rise from the muddy surface of the beverage like he's pursuing a meditative state.
Several seconds of quiet, mostly drunken contemplation pass them by.
"Huh," he finally mutters. Elegant fingers close around the cup. "What'd I owe you?"
"Just drink it," she directs, her voice as firm as his is sloppy, "your sobriety will be more than payment enough."
It's shitty stuff, that coffee, scooped from a jar of supermarket-brand instant granules that might be close to their use-by date, or shockingly well past it—she forgot to check when she grabbed it—originally purchased by Bonnie to keep behind the bar when she was on shift because Bonnie is a weirdo who prefers the instant crap, long forgotten in the wake of her departure, and good enough to top off with a bit of hot water and pour down the throat of an anaemically pale aristocrat who can't handle his fucking vodka.
Lily's shutting up shop in fifteen minutes. She's not switching the espresso machine back on.
*
He drinks his coffee-flavoured swill with an obedience that seems—her scattered knowledge of this man and his disposition notwithstanding—quite uncharacteristic, spilling only a little on himself and declaring that it tastes like piss, which is fair, but he's still so hammered by closing that he can barely move, and Lily has to call upon her neighbour to help her get him up.
"Come on, pal," Kingsley grunts, hoisting him off the stool that he has been languishing on all night.
With an amused snort, Sirius goes limp and tries to drape himself over the bar, but the bloke is a soggy string bean compared to King's Herculean frame, and after a bit of a scuffle, he is manoeuvred out of his seat as easily as if he weighs nothing more than a bag of flour. King deposits him on his feet with an arm across his back and one hand tucked securely under his armpit, and, wobbling only a little, Lily's drunken colleague blinks up at the much taller man; mesmerised, perhaps, by the neon light that forms a pink halo around his waxed dome of a head.
"You're a big fucker, aren't you?" he decides aloud, adopting a conversational tone.
King blows a laugh out his nostrils. "Big enough."
"Big fucker, isn't he?" Sirius then tells Lily, gesturing with his thumb.
"He's a bit of a superhero, yeah," she agrees.
"You shagged him yet?"
Her droll chuckle is a mirror of King's, but it's the aforementioned big fucker who answers. "I shag men, mate."
"Do you?" Sirius looks King up and down again, this time with a hazily academic sort of interest. "Reckon I'd be adventurous and give you a go if I weren't pissed."
"Lucky me."
"Could do it anyway, t'be honest."
"Flattering, but I'm happily taken."
"Fair enough." His gaze swings around to Lily. "Wha'bout you, then? Fancy it?"
"Oh, I'm not taken," she confirms.
His eyebrows lift. "Jus'not interested?"
"Not remotely, and you're not interested either, so stop being a bloody troll," she finishes, dry as a bone. "Plus, I'm closing up for the night, so you're going to need to get going."
"Ah, fair enough," he concedes, lifting his hand in a sloppy mock salute, and sends a slack grin towards the floor. "I'll fuck off, then, message received."
He stumbles away from Kingsley's supportive arm and begins his unsteady journey to the exit, taking exaggerated pains to place one foot precisely in front of the other like a tipsy tightrope walker, but falls almost immediately, prompting Kingsley to dart forwards and grab him around the waist to prevent him from smashing head-first into a table.
"I don't think he's making it home by himself," her neighbour remarks, though he hardly needs to.
Sirius mutters something unintelligible, his head lolling to one side.
Lily could send him on his way regardless, as she has done with countless plastered patrons who came and went before him. That's the nature of this job; she can't monitor everyone who passes through these doors, but Sirius is someone she knows, and she can't quite shake the feeling that, despite his usual, lackadaisical attitude towards work, it's completely out of character for him to do something like this.
Something could be troubling him, and if that's true, she's not sure how she feels about packing him off by himself while he's in this state.
Fuck it all, but she cares about what happens to this prick.
"Yeah, you're right," she agrees, silently cursing herself. "Could you help me bring him upstairs?"
*
"Jesus," Lily breathes.
"What?"
"He only has seven contacts."
"Seven in total?"
"Yeah, listen. Dad, Employer, James, Mum, Pete, Remus and—" She snorts. She's unsurprised, but she snorts. "The Ruby Orchard Thai Spa."
Kingsley is perched in the armchair that abuts Lily's tiny sofa, across which a barely conscious Sirius is now draped, and his laugh is Julia Louis-Dreyfus-meme nervous. "What the fuck?"
"That's it." Lily lets her wrist go limp and Sirius's phone—which is an iPhone 16 Pro because of course he'd have the latest, fanciest model—swings down, coming to rest briefly upon her chest. Convincing him to hand it over, and stutter out "two-seven-oh-three-one-nine-nine-nine" had taken several minutes longer than it ought to have. Somehow the journey from downstairs to upstairs saw him shift into an even deeper state of drunkenness. Lily might have been right in assuming that he started drinking long before he decided to come to the bar. "I'm not joking."
"Six people and a spa?"
"No surnames either."
"Do you think he's a sociopath?"
"I think he's a dick, is what he is," she darkly intones, lifting the phone again. She opens the entry labelled James and hits the call button. "Hang on, I'm gonna ring his brother."
"How do you know which one his brother is?"
But the call has already begun, and Lily waves her hand briefly in the air. "It's ringing."
Seconds later, the call is answered by a man with a pleasantly low-toned voice that is—much as she hates to have such a thought about any relative of the sleeping monster on her sofa—disarmingly fucking sexy. "Hey, you on your way home yet?"
"Er, hey." Lily turns in the direction of her door, facing away from Kingsley. "Is this James?"
A pause. "Yeah?"
"Hi, sorry, my name's Lily, I work in the bar with your brother—"
"Is everything alright?"
"Well, I'm not… sure, actually?" she admits, and tosses a glance over her shoulder at Sirius. Upon being hefted inside her flat he insisted upon stripping to the waist like his clothes were burning him alive, after which he threw his jacket and shirt on the coffee table and fell upon the sofa with a groan, announcing to the room that he wished that bitch was dead before he buried his face in a cushion. Whoever that bitch is. "He called in sick to work today, but then he turned up a couple of hours after we opened and started ordering vodka, and now he's drank himself into such a state that I don't think it would be safe to send him home by himself."
The brother expels a sharp breath down the phone. "Shit."
"Well… yeah."
"Did he mention running into anyone earlier?"
"Er, no. Not to me, anyway, and the person who served him for most of the night went home a while ago." Likely not to Davey either. Of all their colleagues, Lily is the only person who Sirius seems to enjoy talking to—or talking at, for the most part. "Do you think you could come in and pick him up?"
"Yeah, of course, don't worry. I'll leave right now. Are you still at the bar?"
"Yes, well—I live in the flat right above it and my neighbour's helped me close up and bring him up here. He's asleep on the sofa at the minute. Do you know where you're going?"
She hears the rattle of keys on the other end of the phone. He really is leaving right now. "St. Michael's Alley, right?"
"Yeah, it's a bit of a maze around here, but if you're facing the bar from the very front entrance on the corner and head left towards Cornhill, you'll see a green door and that's how you get to mine. Ring the buzzer for flat 2 and I'll let you straight up."
"Flat 2. No worries. Gimme about 25 minutes and I'll be there."
"Alright," she agrees, feeling rather wrong-footed, though she doesn't know why. "Bye."
"So, he's coming?" Kingsley asks, once Lily has hung up.
"Yeah, he's on his way now. Did you hear that?" she adds loudly, and drops Sirius's phone into the crook of his arm, rather than violate his privacy by scrolling through his photos to see if she can instinctively pick his hot-voiced brother out of the six or so faces he is likely to have in there. "Your brother is on his way!"
Sirius puts on an Oscar winning impression of a dead body in response, and Lily sighs, tensing and releasing her shoulders, though it does nothing to offer her relief.
Suddenly she feels exhausted.
"Do you want me to stay until they've left?" ventures Kingsley. "In case…"
"In case I let an assailant into my flat?"
"Yeah."
"Yes, please." She sighs again. "Fancy a cuppa?"
Kingsley does, so Lily brews a pot of Twinings spiced apple and passionflower because it's late, the brother might take longer than twenty-five minutes, and she'll have to get up and do this shit all over again in the morning. They drink it out of her mismatched mugs by the light of the television while she sits on the floor, her head resting against her sleeping colleague's bony knee.
They haven't even finished an episode of Arrested Development when the buzzer sounds.
"Your assailant's punctual, at least," remarks Kingsley.
"At least," Lily agrees, scrambling up from the floor and pressing the door release button.
And she hears footsteps thundering up the stairs outside, and opens her front door to the idiot's oft-discussed brother, and he stares at her, and she stares at him, and neither of them blink or speak or move for a number of silent, scalding seconds, and the why of it will inevitably stick in her head like a thumbtack for months afterwards, but Lily is completely unaware of that.
For now.