Lily feels oddly sick to her stomach when she wakes up the next morning.

She shouldn't be surprised - she felt the exact same way before she went to bed last night. She can pinpoint the moment it started, because it was the exact moment that the 'are you embarrassed to be seen with me, is that what it is?' message popped up on her phone.

When she first came up with her brilliant plan to win the bet without permanently losing James, she thought it'd be easy. She thought it'd only be a matter of her own self-control, and as long as she could stop making heart eyes at him for long enough to focus on the task at hand, it'd be fine.

What she hadn't expected at all was how fucking guilty she'd feel because of it. He's been nothing but completely accommodating of all her nitpicky requests that, yes, are founded in good reason but maybe take things just a step too far, but apparently they've been gnawing at him on the inside the entire time.

And for a guy whose ego is usually the size of the Empire State Building, the fact that she's apparently managed to crumble that foundation is… well, she can't stomach that one bit.

She doesn't want to hurt him like that. She'd never imagined that she could hurt the man who brushes off Dumbledore's pointed digs with ease, and weathers every event at the precinct with an almost envious optimistic attitude.

She can't do that. Winning isn't worth that.

It requires admitting that she's wrong, of course, even though she hates that. But then again, she was, wasn't she? Pretty much every single thing that has happened since making that bet with Mary has proven that, despite her expectations of James and everything she thought she knew about him, his feelings for her aren't just superficial.

They couldn't be. If they were superficial, he would've just gotten annoyed and dropped her, not sent her a series of increasingly vulnerable text messages trying to figure out where he went wrong. No, last night was probably the biggest and clearest sign that his feelings run deeper than that. They're not surface-level at all.

And neither are hers. She didn't expect that either, but it turns out she likes him so much that she's willing to take a hit on her pride and her constant need to be right for him.

By the time she's made it to the precinct, skipping breakfast entirely, she's come to a decision. She's going to come clean to James about all of it tonight, and she's going to admit defeat to Mary.

Cheese platter and all.

She's there before anyone else, which is nice, because there's a vague sense of calm that hardly ever exists there. The night shift is mostly gone, and none of her coworkers have arrived yet, and the emptiness allows her to clear her mind just a little bit, which is good, considering she's spent the whole morning thinking at an average rate of about a thousand miles a minute.

In fact, the only sound for her first five minutes there is the automatic air freshener going off.

She gets distracted wondering who's going to be responsible for refilling that once she leaves, or if the precinct is just going to go back to smelling like dirty laundry like it did before she started working here.

After making herself a cup of tea, she dives straight into her work, not paying all that much attention as the rest of her colleagues gradually trickle in. The only one she cares about is the last to arrive, and he falls into his seat with a half-hearted "G'morning."

"Morning," she greets, looking up at him with a smile. But he's not looking at her, so he doesn't see it.

She frowns at that. Clearly, his feelings last night haven't dissipated yet.

Not that she'd really expect them to. She's sure her behavior over the past few days has really put him through the ringer.

She can't help it that he made it so fucking hard for her to follow through with all of her original plans. It had seemed easy at first - set some ground rules that could almost definitely be seen as ridiculous to anyone other than her, and enforce them just a little too rigidly. What she hadn't been prepared for, however, was the fact that every time she decided to let her guard down a little bit, she found herself relaxing into new patterns and rule-breaking and just… so much James.

It's just… he makes it so easy to fall for him.

And so then she'd snap back into things and remember what she was supposed to be doing, and she'd put him at a healthy distance again. Which… yeah, from outside of her own head probably looks like pretty damn confusing and inexplicable behaviour.

Her inbox dings, drawing her attention back to work. And then, as soon as she sees the subject line of the email, her attention is brought back to James once again.

"Witness Protection got back to us with the witnesses' backstories," she tells him, and he snaps his head up to look at her when she does so.

"Oh?"

"Yeah," she nods. "Come over to my desk - we can read through the summaries together."

"Okay." He comes rolling over, but he's careful to leave at least a foot between the two of their chairs.

They both read the reports in silence, and Lily lets herself absorb all the information in front of them first before she lets herself start thinking deeply about it or analysing connections, so it's a pretty uneventful experience even though the report contains far more salacious information than Lily could've ever expected. The only interruption comes in the form of Peter rolling across the room in his chair and colliding with Kingsley's filing cabinet, and that particular occurrence is such a commonplace feature of the office that both of them hardly even pay mind to it after looking up once to determine the source of the thud.

When they get to the bottom of the last page, to the signatures of both of the witnesses affirming the truth in their testimony, James lets out a long, low whistle.

"Holy fuck," he says quietly. "No wonder Riddle wanted them dead."

That's one of the most notable revelations of the document - that the man who called himself 'Voldemort' in his work with Lestrange and Crouch is actually Tom Riddle, one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan and, from everything Lily's read about him before this, a total asshole.

And now, he's both a total asshole and a criminal.

"I mean… they've got so much dirt on him - and they were going to publish it," Lily replies, her voice barely above a whisper as well. "And I imagine Riddle knew that embezzling money from charities to fund his private prison isn't exactly the sort of thing that would go over well when it got out."

James pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Well, yeah, that sort of shit's going to get him in jail - and probably having to pay all that money back."

"Yeah," Lily nods. "This is honestly probably going to have to go above us - not to Major Crimes obviously, because fuck Snape, but evidence of fraud and embezzlement definitely needs to go to like, the District Attorney's office for investigation."

"Ha, yeah, there's no way in hell the Vulture's getting his hands on any of this case," James agrees, leaning back in his chair. His knee bumps into hers, bringing her awareness to how much closer they've moved in the process of reading and talking through the transcript. "Shame this isn't all that helpful for tracking down Lestrange."

"Lestrange?" A third voice joins the conversation, and Lily turns to discover that Sirius' ears have perked up at that surname.

"Er, yeah," James replies awkwardly, and Lily can immediately tell that they're treading perilously close to a conversation James has been dreading.

"That's not a super common surname," Sirius replies, kicking his feet up on his desk. "Honestly, the only person I've ever met with that last name is my shitty cousin's husband."

… Fuck.

James runs his hand through his hair, nervousness evident in his voice. "Bellatrix, yeah?"

"That's the one," Sirius replies. "Haven't talked to her in years - she was always a bit of a nightmare, so like, good riddance."

James clears his throat. "Padfoot, wanna go with me to get a donut from that place up the street?"

Sirius looks between James and Lily. "Are you not going to invite your girlfriend along?" he asks, a teasing tone in his voice.

James looks over to her briefly, the panic in his eyes almost but not completely masked. It's evident that this is a conversation James wants to have with Sirius alone, and she gets that. "She's got - "

"I need to start work on transferring some of this transcript into the right hands as soon as possible," she finishes for him, and there's an immediate look of relief and gratification on his features.

Sirius shrugs. "Fair enough."

The two of them are gone for a long time - almost an hour, which is way longer than it takes to go get donuts, even when the place is super crowded and busy.

She actually pulls out her phone to send him a text asking if everything's okay, but her heart drops again when she sees their message history, and she talks herself out of it. James can handle himself, anyways, and if it turns out that Sirius is taking this news really badly, James doesn't really need her pestering him as well.

It's all well and good anyways, because the two of them appear not even five minutes later, bearing two giant boxes of donuts and, for some strange reason, giant multicoloured wizard hats that look like the sort of thing random street vendors try to pawn off onto tourists.

"Do I want to ask about the hats?" Remus says, immediately grabbing a donut from the box the other two brought in.

Sirius shrugged. "Life felt too serious for a minute there - and obviously something had to be done about that."

Lily looks over at James, hoping for some sort of confirmation or explanation of what's going on, and to her surprise, he's already watching her. She mouths an 'is everything okay?' which is quickly answered with a 'everything is fine.'

Clearly, explaining to Sirius that his fucked-up cousin might also be a serial assassin didn't go over as poorly as it could've.

She eventually gets a crème brûlée donut from the selection they've brought back and gets back to work. James comes back to his own desk not long after, and they work in peaceful companionship for the rest of the morning.

Well, as peaceful of companionship as can be achieved at the perpetually chaotic 73rd Precinct. (Which is to say, a donut is thrown across the room at one point, and Mary very creatively and loudly swears at her computer no fewer than six times in two hours.)

The rest of the day's investigation work yields hardly any additional useful information, except for maybe a few more details about the link between the convicts whose tattoos resembled Crouch's briefcase lining. Apparently, they'd all been in the same community organization at one point in time a few years ago - an organization that has all but disappeared in the past few years.

But between that discovery and the information about Riddle that's been handed off to federal authorities for investigation, Lily feels like it's more or less been a largely successful day.

Well, successful minus the fact that James still won't talk to her about anything that's not strictly work-related, and that's started to bother her more than it should.

"Step away from the desks - it's karaoke time!" Marlene declares at 5 pm on the nose, looking across the precinct at everyone who's still working.

Lily would prefer to finish off the progress notes she's in the middle of writing, but she also knows Marlene, and she knows that if she doesn't actually heed her friend's directions, she will be forcibly dragged away from her desk, rolling chair and all.

And she doesn't particularly want to have to explain to Dumbledore why her office chair is sitting in the middle of the building lobby again.

So she locks her computer, grabs her bag, and heads over to the elevator.

"I'm still pissed that Dumblediddles isn't coming," Marlene says as they exit, and Lily has to hold back a laugh at what honestly has to be the worst nickname she's given their captain yet.

Not everyone else has that same level of restraint though. "Dumblediddles, seriously?" Peter asks, looking at her disbelievingly. "That's got to be the least fitting name for that man that I have ever heard."

"No, I think Dumbiedoo wins that title," Remus replies.

"Ah, that was a good one," Marlene says fondly, clearly not at all bothered by how much everyone else in the elevator is shitting on her nickname creations.

The karaoke bar is only a short ten-minute walk from the precinct, and as soon as they step inside they're immediately escorted to their own private room, complete with a performance stage and all. It's not what Lily had originally envisioned, but she's immeasurably thankful that she's only going to be stuck singing off-key in front of her coworkers rather than an entire bar of strangers.

Although granted, the coworkers are the ones most likely to record her for blackmail - logically, complete strangers would probably somehow be a safer audience.

Their private room has one giant booth meant to hold all of them; so they all pack into the rounded seating, and Lily ends up with James on one side of her and Marlene on the other. There are at least five binders full of the available song listings for them to choose from, and directions for how to add new songs and performers to the queue.

Lily grabs one of them immediately - unlike nearly everyone else, who all go straight for the drink menus instead. She sees her choice as the far more logical one, really: she gets the exact same drink everywhere she goes, but picking a song to perform for karaoke is a much rarer occasion. Therefore, she needs more time to deliberate on this one.

It's a massive selection, including everything from classic 60s rock to Shaggy's 'It Wasn't Me,' which strikes Lily as objectively one of the worst potential karaoke songs to ever exist.

Someone must order her drink for her, because there's a whiskey Diet Coke in front of her without her even needing to ask for it, and she starts sipping on it as she flips through the book some more.

She notices that James is reading over her shoulder, and instantly comes up with a brilliant idea.

"We should do a duet," Lily says to him, flipping to the T section of the alphabetised list. "I'm sure there's some good Taylor Swift selections in here that we could go off of."

"Uh, yeah, that sounds good," he says, but suddenly he's not paying much attention to the catalogue at all. "I'm good with whatever - take your pick."

She can't help but feel a bit dejected at his response - if anything, the prospect of Taylor Swift karaoke should've at least gotten some sort of excited reaction out of him. Maybe it'll change when they actually get up to do it though, so she tries to not let it get her down too much when she gets up and goes over to the sign-up booth.

She writes in their names, and scrolls down to 'Love Story' - it feels like just the sort of cheesy, happy song to lift his spirits and have a little fun with. They're fifth on the list, which is good - four other people will make fools of themselves before either her or James have to sing.

It's not like Lily's a bad singer or anything, but is anyone really a good singer when it comes to karaoke?

James might be; it really wouldn't surprise her, he seems to be full of all sorts of secret talents and she's yet to find something he's not good at.

The group collectively decides that they should all wait until they're all at least on their second drink at minimum before starting in on karaoke (and Lily has no intention of going further than that; Two-Drink Lily is probably the last level that should be trusted with a microphone), so the first half of the evening is spent just talking amongst themselves instead.

James is still somewhat distant; despite his physical proximity, it definitely feels like he's set up some sort of wall between the two of them, and he doesn't seem to be all that receptive to any of her attempts to tear it down.

She supposes she can't really blame him for that; most of the times that she's been like this over the past few days have been swiftly followed by her switching back into the character she'd been trying to hard to maintain, and he's made it pretty clear that he hasn't enjoyed that particular rollercoaster.

And so it seems, maybe his new solution is to just not get on at all.

Things will be better, she reminds herself, after they're able to be alone tonight and after she comes clean about everything. She's sure he'll be at least somewhat annoyed with her, but not any more than he already is - at least he'll know the truth, and he'll know that she's done playing hot-and-cold.

All their cards will be out on the table, and everything will be okay. She knows it will be.

Sometime between the first and second drink, Lily excuses herself from the room to go to the bathroom.

The bar is nearly a labyrinth, and she manages to get lost both on her way there and on her way back.

It's on that return trip, where she's almost definitely walked by their room and completely missed it somehow, that she hears two voices coming from a small alcove. At the sound of them, she freezes.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," a voice that's instantly recognisable as Sirius says. "They were doing so good this weekend - what the hell happened?"

"I think I underestimated Lily's stubbornness," another voice - Marlene - answers.

And while Lily normally isn't one for eavesdropping, the mention of her name piques her curiosity instantly. She's going to listen in on this for just a little bit longer.

"Clearly," Sirius replies, exasperated.

"I really thought she'd give up on the whole 'push him away for a little bit but get back together in a few weeks' scheme after a few days. She'd normally feel guilty for pushing someone around like that."

They're talking about her and James. First of all, she does feel guilty, thank you very much, which is why she's been planning on telling James about the bet all day. But second of all, why the fuck is Marlene talking about this with Sirius of all people, who's not involved in this whatsoever?

"I mean, James isn't exactly helping things either." There's a thud that sounds like Sirius falling against the wall. "He's gotten obsessed with making sure he doesn't do anything that could possibly be mistaken for disagreeing with her - he's convinced that if he tries to pick apart her behaviour, it'll stall out their relationship. So he's just rolling over and letting her do whatever, even though he knows full well that something's off."

"You said this plan was idiot-proof," she shoots back. "Tell me then, why is it backfiring so horribly?"

"Because, clearly, they're both beyond just idiots."

Lily takes offense to that.

She's no idiot - no, the cogs in her brain are spinning at a rapid-fire pace, connecting the dots of their conversations. Sirius knows all the background of the bet somehow. And… James does too? Is he somehow on Mary's team?

No, that wouldn't make sense. If that were the case, Sirius wouldn't sound so annoyed at James right now. This sounds like something else entirely.

"Over-competitive idiots, for sure," Marlene replies. "Honestly though, we should've predicted this. We gave the two most competitive people we know opposing wagers - ones that are literally worthless outside of bragging rights, but even so, still something you can win - and we somehow expected them to give up as soon as they realised they'd be totally happy just letting things progress like a normal relationship and forgetting the absurd standards of their bets altogether? That was foolishly wishful thinking on our part."

Bets. Plural.

Sirius laughs hollowly. "It worked for a while though. I mean, I told you everything that happened at the cabin. They were… stupidly happy together, and Prongs was really convinced that she'd finally started to actually like him."

"And then you had to rub it in his face all over again that he was supposed to make her fall in love with him if he was going to win."

Lily's heart drops into her stomach.

There was a second bet. James has been spending this whole time under a separate bet, trying to make her fall in love with him for… what? Bragging rights? The knowledge that he could bag Lily Evans in the two weeks before she switched precincts?

It had all been a set-up.

None of this has been real.

Suddenly, her vision is flooded with red. she's absolutely fucking furious that this man - this man she'd really started to like, and really started to believe might've been genuinely into her - has actually just been playing her all along, like she's some sort of prize to be won.

She storms away, suddenly single-minded in her pursuit of one person in particular. She finds him, back at the group table where she'd left him, and is not at all subtle when she walks right up to him with a very clipped, "We need to talk. Alone."

He looks up at her, and a million different emotions flash through his eyes in an instant, and then, oddly enough, he just looks resigned to it all. "Yeah, sure," he says, getting up from his seat and seemingly not even caring about the confused looks the two of them are getting from everyone else at the table.

She turns on her heel and walks out of the bar, only looking back once, to ensure that he's following her. Unlike the path to the bathroom, the one to the front of the building is a straight shot, and she doesn't get lost this time.

And as soon as they're outside and the door swings shut, she rounds on him.

"I can't believe I ever let myself think you were for real. That I wasn't just some sort of prize to you," she says, the words betraying more emotion than she wants them to.

James just blinks at her, baffled. "What?"

"You don't have to play dumb," she replies. "I overheard Sirius - I know all about the fact that you made a fucking bet that you could make me fall in love with you. That I was just some little thing you thought you could win and then drop as soon as you proved your point."

His eyes go wide. "It's not - that's not what it was like at all."

"Really?" She puts her hands on her hips, challenging him to elaborate. "Then what was it like?"

She's not sure there's any way he can spin this into a positive light, although she'd really love to see him try.

"It was - " he trails off, biting his lip nervously. "I was trying to win you over, yeah, but not just because Sirius made some stupid bet with me over it."

"Oh, so you could have the thrill of the conquest too?" There's a tiny voice in the back of her head that says maybe she's being dramatic, and maybe she's putting meanings behind his words that aren't actually there, but she's so hurt and angry right now that she stifles that sensible part of her brain immediately.

"No, god, can you stop putting words in my mouth?"

It's too late for that - Lily's words are coming out too fast for her to even think about them at all. "This is exactly why I told Mary it'd be so fucking easy to get you to get over me in ten days," she snaps. "Because you really only liked the idea of me, didn't you? The idea of winning over the woman you shared a desk with before she left for good, adding another notch to your fucking bedpost just in time - "

He interrupts her. "Hold on, you were trying to get me to get over you in ten days? What the actual fuck?"

Her blood runs cold as she realises what she's just said - she's laid far too much of her own hand. "I had a bet with Mary," she mutters, hoping like hell that maybe he won't hear her.

Her hopes go unanswered though, because he laughs disbelievingly, before replying, "So you're telling me… that you also made a bet about me - one that involved emotionally manipulating me into thinking I didn't actually like you anymore - and somehow you're mad at me?"

"Yes!" she replies emphatically, practically shouting. "Because you let me believe your feelings for me were actually genuine and real - god, I was so fucking stupid to think that - "

"My feelings for you are genuine and real."

"How am I supposed to believe that? How am I supposed to know you mean anything you say anymore, when I don't know if you're just saying it to win some stupid bet?"

That seems to stump him, and he frowns. "Because you know me. You can trust me."

She takes a deep breath, and suddenly her anger gives way to the feeling that she's liable to start crying at any moment instead. "I thought I did. But now… now I'm not so sure."

And if she could catalogue a list of the most heartbreaking things she's ever seen in her life, the broken look on James' face as her words sink in would find itself somewhere near the top.

But she's not wrong, and she's not going to take them back. Knowing that he did what he did - that he's spent the last eight days leading her on to win a bet, she doesn't know how she's meant to believe him now.

How much of this is built on a lie?

James coughs, and the injured expression on his face is replaced with something harder. "No, Evans, you don't get to just play the victim here - you put me through hell these last few days with your whole hot-and-cold nonsense. And you lied to me too - I mean really, did you even mean it when you asked me out or was that all just part of the plan to trick me into dating and dumping you to win some stupid bet?"

She freezes, caught off-guard by his sudden change in disposition. "I - I - "

He scoffs in disbelief. "The whole thing was fucking fake. Naturally."

"It wasn't fake," she shoots back, finding her voice again. "I mean, maybe it was when I asked you out initially, but by the time we actually went on a date, and when we went upstate for the weekend… that was real."

"You're going to tell me that was real, but then somehow you decided that despite those 'real' feelings weren't worth losing a bet for? You're either lying to me or you're fucking delusional, and I really don't know which one is worse."

"I was going to come clean about it tonight," she replies softly, and she suddenly feels oh-so-very small. "After last night, I was done messing you around - I was going to accept defeat because it wasn't worth it."

"It took you that long to realise 'oh hey, maybe I shouldn't be fucking around with other people's emotions like they're my own personal playthings'? Really?"

James is properly pissed off now - it's not a side of him Lily's used to seeing, and definitely not ever directed at her.

"Were you ever planning on telling me the truth?" she shoots back. "At least I decided to be honest - and what would you have done, just pretended to gradually lose interest in me after I change precincts and blame it on our differences? You can't fucking lecture me on messing you around when you were doing the exact same thing!"

"I wasn't ever lying!" He rakes his hand through his hair in frustration, knocking his glasses off-kilter and not bothering to right them. "That's the difference here, Evans - I actually liked you from the start, and I never did anything I wouldn't have done without Sirius' stupid bet there in the first place!"

"You're telling me that, without this bet, you would've been perfectly fine with my stupid rules, and not had a single counterargument?"

His jaw twitches. "Maybe I would've, maybe I wouldn't - I don't fucking know. I wasn't a fan of them, but I'm also not just going to steamroll over your boundaries - and for being a bunch of 'stupid rules,' you were pretty damn well convincing of them."

He makes a fair point, but it's not enough to temper the feelings of hurt and betrayal blooming in her chest. She's intimately familiar with this feeling; she's been here all too many times before with all too many people. It's the whole reason she'd been so hesitant to get involved with James in the first place.

How could she ever have fooled herself into thinking he was different?

"That's not what's important here," she replies, her voice measured and not at all indicative of the storm of emotion inside of her. "The important thing is that you've shown me I was right all along about you. And you're right, I never should've asked you out to begin with - right about now, I'm really wishing I never did it at all."

His lips part, but no words come out; he just stares at her, completely at a loss.

The door to the karaoke bar opens, and Remus appears, looking extremely awkward and uncomfortable. Clearly, at least part of their conversation has carried to the other side of the door.

"Er," he begins, looking at an unspecified object in the distance instead of at either of their faces, "we're about to start karaoke."

"Good," James says, his voice cold. "This conversation is over anyways."

And despite the heat of Lily's own anger, the ice of his voice and the sense of finality in it slices right through it all, hits her straight in the heart.

She brushes Remus' shoulder as she walks back into the bar, not looking back at James once, not trusting herself not to react - scream, cry, whatever - if she looks at him right now. Instead, she walks with an almost laser focus to the karaoke machine, hits a few buttons, and finds a new set on the complete opposite side of the table from where James had been sitting.

When he walks into the room with Remus just a few moments later, he doesn't pay any mind to Lily's new location, just sits back in his old spot and acts like nothing happened. Lily sees Marlene and Sirius exchange a look, one that suggests they both know by now that they were overheard, and she feels a different wave of frustration wash over her.

The fact that the two of them orchestrated all of this - set her and James up to get into this mess to begin with, not even thinking about how many ways it could backfire and actually hurt people - is just… she knows they're not entirely to blame, but she's unavoidably angry at them nonetheless. If they'd really wanted to meddle and attempt to get her and James together, there are so many better ways they could've gone about it that wouldn't have hinged on everything in their relationship being a lie - hell, locking them in the supply room until they made out would've been a better option than this was.

But other than that meaningful look between Marlene and Sirius, no one wants to acknowledge the elephant in the room that is her and James' new seating arrangement and newfound coldness towards one another, so karaoke kicks off with Marlene's dramatic performance of 'Alejandro' by Lady Gaga.

Watching her colleagues make fools of themselves and act incredibly goofy with one another serves to distract Lily and lift her spirits slightly, but reality comes back to her when the screen flashes with a 'Next Up: Lily and James.'

She gets up from her seat with an almost laser focus, going and grabbing both microphones off the stand. When she whirls around, James is standing right there behind her, hands shoved in his pockets and a clear reluctance to do this evident on his face.

She realises he probably thinks they're still doing a cutesy love song - he wasn't in the room when she edited it, after all.

"I've changed our song selection, by the way," she informs him, trying her hardest to keep her voice level.

His eyebrows shoot up. "To what?"

She hands him a microphone, careful not to let her skin touch his. "You'll see."

The all-too-familiar opening chords of 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' ring out through the karaoke bar, and Lily watches as recognition flits across James' features.

"That's rich, Evans," he says coldly, keeping the microphone far away from him so that it doesn't pick up his words.

She shrugs primly. "It felt fitting," she replies, before immediately starting in on the opening line.

For as out of sync as they may be in real life, they easily play off of each other in karaoke, tossing lines back and forth with ease as James declares that 'I'm really going to miss you picking fights' and Lily answers with 'and me falling for it screaming that I'm right.'

They both practically yell the choruses at each other, neither of them caring much about melodic accuracy and focusing more on communicating whatever leftover anger is still built up inside of the both of them from fighting.

As they sing the last line and the music fades away, Lily realises how hard she's breathing, frozen in place and looking into James' hardened hazel eyes with an equally cold look of her own.

Peter's low whistle is the first thing to break the silence. "Someone get those two a room."

"I think that's the exact opposite of what either of them want right now," Sirius replies, and Lily's immediately aware of how she and James look right now, facing off at each other and ready to burst.

And somehow, Lily doesn't even have that in her. She's normally known for flying off the handle when provoked, but every ounce of that fight feels completely drained from her right now.

So she puts her microphone back on the stand, walks over to the table, grabs her purse, and walks out of the restaurant.

The hot summer air is stifling, even though the sun's halfway down already; she feels like she can't breathe properly as she sets off down the pavement at a pace that's ridiculously fast even by New York standards. But if she slows down she'll have to think, have to let her mind settle on things that aren't putting one foot in front of the other as fast as humanly possible without breaking into an all-out run, and she can't have that right now.

The karaoke bar is in the opposite direction of her apartment from the precinct, so the walk home is even longer than usual. Red baby hairs are plastered to the side of her face with sweat by the time she gets home, and she's breathing heavily with exertion. If she looked at herself in a mirror right now, she'd probably very closely resemble a tomato, cheeks and neck brightly flushed from the heat and the effort and something else as well.

She immediately gets into the shower when she gets home, setting the water to cold and just standing underneath it numbly, letting it cool her down and drain out whatever leftover energy she has left.

Once she's hit the point where the cold water ceases being soothing and turns downright uncomfortable, she turns it off, stepping out of the shower and immediately going off in pursuit of whatever giant sweatshirt and sweatpants combo she can get her hands on first.

Then she grabs a tub of ice cream out of the fridge - it's a rare occasion that she'll eat ice cream as an actual meal, but it feels warranted right now - and sits down on the couch, curling her knees to her chest and finally letting the reality of the evening sink in.

The words weren't ever said explicitly, but the implication was there - she and James are over.

She got what she wanted. She won.

So why, then, does it feel like such a loss?

She feels the loss of James acutely, like something actively clawing at her chest. As betrayed as part of her may feel, there's absolutely no denying that another part of her misses him and wishes tonight had gone differently. She wishes he hadn't made that bet at all, that she'd been able to just follow through with her original plan and to come clean to him about everything tonight and get things between them back on track.

But then again, his bet wouldn't have existed without hers. And without that bet, Lily would've never asked him out in the first place, and maybe none of this would've even happened at all.

And despite what she said in the heat of the moment, she doesn't want that either.

She takes another massive bite of chocolate ice cream, and watches as her phone lights up with a text notification from Marlene.

fuck lil i am sooooo sorry

i never thought this plan would backfire so badly

Lily opts not to respond - she's still angry at Marlene, and she really doesn't need to go off the handle on someone else tonight. Besides, if she lets herself think about it logically instead of emotionally, Marlene's not really the one to blame here, after all.

No, maybe the real person Lily needs to be blaming for all of this is herself.