So she had written her father and sister and told them that she would be staying at Hogwarts over the winter holidays to do some extra studying. It was as good an excuse as any, she thought, though the three weeks at Hogwarts would be rather boring; Amanda was leaving, Eva and Vanessa were going; there wouldn’t even be Serena to antagonize. Her father was taking her along on an International Ministry of Magic council meeting in Martinique; an island in the Caribbean, and Serena had asked to come. Naturally, her wish had been granted, and, Lily though dryly, she’d probably have the time of her life among old, wrinkly ministers telling her how lovely she looked.
By herself just after the rest of Hogwarts had gone home, she was getting rather sick and tired of lying on her bed, reflecting. Eva had begged her parents to let her stay, but they had insisted that she come home and spend some time with her family, and Lily hadn’t told anyone else that she was staying. As a result, she was frightened out of her wits when she heard a loud bang downstairs in the common room.
Sitting up quickly on her four-poster, she slid into a pair of slippers and made her way quickly down to the common room, where she was met mid-way by a huge wall of smoke invading her lungs.
Coughing madly, she leaned on the banister, trying desperately not to hurl. The smoke, besides being blueish-gray and rather thick, had the smell of the incense she’d once burned in her room, which was supposed to smell like ‘Egyptian Must’ but ended up leaving her room reeking like cigarette smoke. She had been nine at the time, and her mother almost had her head.
Stepping blindly downstairs into the foggy grayish mass, Lily tripped over something and went flying. She only had time to hear the thing she’d tripped over mutter: “Ouch!” before she hit the ground. Pushing herself up on her hands and knees, Lily whirled, looking at whatever she’d stumbled on. It had a mass of unruly, dark hair, and was trying to stand up, holding his side. Rolling her eyes, but closing them immediately afterwards because of the wafts of smoke entering her eyes, Lily pointed her wand somewhere in the room.
“Reducto!”
She knew that this spell was supposed to be used for solid objects, but, well, if this grayish smoky cement-type material wasn’t solid, she didn’t know what was. It worked well; at least she was able to see and breath relatively well, though she noticed that all of the torches and the fire were out, which wasn’t such a good thing, as it was quite cold outside. Cold enough for a light blizzard, which, in fact, was what was happening outside.
Lily stalked over to James, who was the nearest crumpled heap she could reach. Squirting him with a few drops of water from the end of her wand, she swiveled to face him.
“And what, may I ask, do you think you’re doing?”
James kind of blushed. “Practicing.”
“Practicing what?”
“Um—ah—that is—oh, hi, Sirius!” James leaped over the back of the sofa and hit Sirius on the back several times. “Good, you’re up. Where’s Peter and Remus?”
Sirius shrugged, but then caught sight of the shocked redhead. “Oh, hi, Lily.”
She gave a curt nod. “What, may I ask, happened here?”
”Oh.” James twitched a bit. “Peter had an accident.”
“A what?”
“An accident. His wand’s been acting funny.”
“Umph.” Lily threw herself down onto a chair and pointed her wand at the window, which immediately swung open, letting the thick, hazy mess escape. She only closed it when Peter started yelping at the cold, and James wasted no time in relighting the torches and common room fire.
James withdrew his wand, slipping it back into his sleeve. “I didn’t know you were staying.”
“I didn’t know you were.”
“True,” he amended. “We didn’t tell anyone.”
“So I gathered.”
“Yeah. Oh, Rem, buddy, you awake?”
Remus umphed as he shook his dirty blond hair out of his eyes. “No; I was abducted by evil dementors and clubbed on the head several times and lost the feeling in my right foot.”
James snorted, as did Sirius. “Where did that come from?”
“An extremely clogged brain. Peter, that was brilliant!”
A mousy figure behind a sofa emerged. “Thanks!” Peter jumped over the back of the chair, managing to trip and fall face forward onto thin air, so he was half hanging onto the sofa with his feet, half staring at the floor. Lily let out a loud laugh.
“Absolute genious, my friend—what is that?”
She was pointing to Peter’s hind end, which had sprouted a long, ratlike tail, made painfully obvious by the rear end of the owner sticking up for every dust mote to land on that wished to do so. Lily instantly looked behind her at James and Sirius, catching their involuntary start.
“Ah-hah!”
They all whirled around to look at her. “What?”
“What are you four up to?”
“Us?” They spoke in unison.
“Yes, you! No, I meant the fluffy pink bunnies that attack feet. Who do you think I meant?”
No answer.
“That’s what I thought. Now—honestly, what were you trying to do? Either your Transfiguration experiment went really wrong or—“she flailed around for an explanation—“or you’re trying to become Animagi and it’s just gone terribly wrong.”
As soon as she’d said it, she knew it was the truth, simply by looking at their shocked and frightened faces. Lily shrugged.
“But, since, of course, you KNOW that that would get you expelled, I think you’d better keep Peter away from his wand. That smoke was a bit too much. Are you four all right?”
Quickly, they pulled themselves together and Peter out of sight. “Sure, we’re fine. Say—“ James smiled—“anyone up for a Hogsmeade visit?”
Lily frowned. “There isn’t one announced, is there?”
“We just did. Come on, Lil—treat you to a butterbeer. Up to breaking a few rules once in a while?”
Lily laughed, shaking away the rest of the boys’ fears. “I’m a prefect, and I shouldn’t allow this, but—oh, holy Merlin, it’s Christmas. I’ll be ready in a few seconds.”
Sirius started breathing again as soon as Lily left the room. “James, that was the best save you’ve ever done. Brilliant. Do you think she knows?”
James shrugged. “That’s what I’m about to find out.”
On the other hand, Lily wasn’t extremely stupid. She knew perfectly well that James had only invited her to Hogsmeade so as to get her mind off what happened in the common room, and that he was intending to see if she suspected anything about their illegally trying to become Animagi. And, for her part, she was going to have a little fun. Actually, knowing Lily, more than a little.
With a wicked flash in her eye, she slipped back downstairs, hearing the boys whisper frantically. Quietly, she popped back into the torchlight.
“I just wanted to know—do I have to wear school robes or not?”
All four of the boys jumped at least three inches high, and James could hardly force his voice to work normally. “Oh—don’t bother with those—then they’ll know you’re from Hogwarts, and, well, you’re technically not supposed to be there. Just wear something normal.”
Lily smiled. “Me? Normal? Since when do those two words come into the same sentence?”
Sirius lounged across two chairs and a table. “Hey, James, we’d better get the cloak and stuff together. It’s snowing, too, in case you didn’t notice.”
James shrugged. “I noticed. So?”
“So you’ll need to wear something warm.”
“Oh, right. Lil, you get a cloak or something; we’ll meet you down here in a few seconds.”
“All right.” Noiselessly, Lily vanished back up the stairs, and Sirius frowned.
“I don’t like the fact that she can move so quiet.”
“Do you think anyone does?”
”No.”
“Exactly. Come on, we’d better get some money together.”
“All right.” Groaning, the four boys, waving smoke out of their faces, trooped up the stairs to their dormitory.
Lily was rummaging through her things for the black cloak Severus had given her way back in their third year. But when she slung it around her shoulders, she found she had shot up at least four inches since then. Half annoyed, half proud, she pointed her wand at her cape.
“Productio!”
Immediately, the black crushed velvet lengthened to her ankles, and the black lace with the familiar drooping vines as trim grew so as to fit around the larger cloak. It was a great help to know this charm, Lily reflected.
However, she quickly unfastened the ebony buckle and searched through her trunk until she came up with a black turtleneck and long black pants. They were the warmest things she had, and they were also good for getting out of sight quickly in darker places; since the snow wasn’t letting much sunlight through, it was going to be easy to vanish. Lily had an odd feeling that she would be vanishing sometime soon; that her innocent ramble would break apart and that the boys would be using several Memory Charms. So this would be rather helpful.
She only ran the brush through her hair several times before letting it hang over her shoulders to cover her ears, which she knew would be freezing in no time flat. Letting the hood hang down, she picked up a small bag for any purchases she might make or receive, and dropped her money-bag and wand inside. Eyes a bit alight, she left her dormitory for the common room.
The boys and she arrived downstairs at exactly the same time, and by the looks of their attire, they also were expecting it to be more than just a little cold. Peter was resembling something in the Forbidden Forest that had rolled in a honeycomb and then in a pile of fur; Remus was wrapped tightly in a light brown cape and a red sweater. Sirius and James were almost identical; they both had plain black cloaks with hoods hanging down their backs, and their feet were in black boots that disappeared under pants cuffs. Except for the fact that Sirius was wearing a jacket underneath his cape and James a navy blue sweater, they could have been mistaken for one another, if one could forget the unavoidable messy hair of Mr. Potter, which one couldn’t. They grinned at each other as Lily came down the stairs. Pulling out the Invisibility Cloak, Sirius flung it to Lily.
“Oh, this nifty little thing again?”
James grinned. “It’s useful, all right. Come on, this goes over all of us.”
”It covers five people?”
”It covers four.”
“Barely.”
“Remus!”
As it turned out, the cloak did cover five people, though the sight of several bodiless feet gliding through the corridors was a bit suspicious. But Abigail, the caretaker’s cat, didn’t show up to sniff them out and vanish for Filch, the caretaker, so they reached a relatively deserted corridor unnoticed by anyone.
They stopped right in front of a statue of a hump-backed, one-eyed witch. She had had two eyes, but then again, Sirius and James attended this school, and her stone eye was currently in the sewer systems. They had ground it up and dumped it in the kitchen’s large flour bag a week ago, when they were bored, and had also laughed themselves sick to find several students choking on slivers of stone in their bread.
Lily frowned. “What on earth?”
James grinned at her as he pulled his wand out and tapped the witch with it. “Dissendium!”
Immediately, the hump on the witch’s back swung open to reveal a corridor. Lily’s eyes opened wide, and the boys grinned to see her astonishment.
“What—how—?”
“It’s one of six passages out of here. Look—straight to Hogsmeade. We discovered it four years ago, to be exact.”
Lily was confused. “How—when—?”
Sirius couldn’t suppress a self-satisfied, smug grin. “It was sort of an accident. I was looking up words in the Latin dictionary to use instead of ‘darn’ or other words like that, so I found ‘Dissendium’, so one day James here—“ he clapped James on the shoulder, hard—“decided to trip me, and I fell against Clara here.” Affectionately, he patted the stone witch.
“Clara?”
“Yep. Agatha was too Puritany, Agnes was—“
Rolling his eyes, James cut in. “Lil, don’t get him started. We’d better be going. Ready?”
Lily nodded. “Sure. I’m game.”
“Very good. Come on, that butterbeer’s waiting!”
Sirius, Remus, Peter, and Lily didn’t need another persuasion tactic used, so, after jumping into the tunnel and heading forward by the light of James’ and Lily’s wands, it barely took them forty-five minutes by Peter’s watch to get to a dead end in the tunnel.
Lily frowned. “A dead end. Wonderful, really. Look—there’s Honeydukes right to the left of that clump of dirt! And just a few centimeters to the right, ladies and gentlemen, we have the world-famous Three Broomsticks, located just beside the millimeter-long tree root—“
James shoved her not so lightly. “Lily, shut up.” Ignoring her crossed arms and slitty-eyed glare, he reached for something overhead, and, seconds later, had pulled down an iron ring of sorts. He couldn’t help but look especially smug at Lily’s astonished countenance, but he didn’t forget to throw the Invisibility Cloak over her when he boosted her up.
Lily’s head emerged in a sort of basement, surrounded with boxes and crates of somethings. She quickly had to duck out of sight, however, as a boy about her age, rather horizontally gifted, tramped down a staircase, and, grumbling, picked up a box about a foot square, mumbling: “I hate little kids! It isn’t my fault that that brat spilled all of the Bloodsucking Chocolates, so why should I pay for it?” Frowning and scowling, he made his way upstairs, from which a sound of chatter could be heard.
When he was quite gone, James, Sirius, and the rest emerged from the trapdoor. Lily made a move to hand the Invisibility Cloak back to James, but he thrust it back at her impatiently.
“Keep it. You’d better—we’re better at blending in than you are.”
Lily sniffed. “Oh, are you? We’ll just see about that, then!” Untangling her arms from the Invisibility Cloak, she threw it back at James, and, making sure the ebony buckle at her throat was fastened securely, she threw a snide glance over her shoulder at the boys, took a few steps forward, and vanished.
The four almost yelled with surprise; luckily, however, they sustained themselves, as they really weren’t supposed to be in this cellar at all.
On closer investigation, that is, stepping closer to the boxes she had vanished behind, she was gone, with no trace left behind her. Puzzled, the boys took a glance at each other, then dived behind the crates as well, in search of her.
Twenty minutes later, when they emerged into the bright sunlight glaring on a packed coat of snow, and after their eyes had stopped blinking continually, the first thing their eyes landed on was Lily, seated on a stone bench next to a goblin reading a newspaper, examining her wand closely. When they approached, she set the wand down, clucking a bit.
“Look at your robes! Where were you, the inside of a vacuum cleaner?”
James scowled. “Looking for you, Evans.”
Lily smirked. “I told you I could blend in well. Satisfied?”
James sniffed, but Sirius, eyes sort of ablaze, asked Lily if she could teach him how to do that before catching James’ murderous glance. But then Sirius jerked his head in Peter’s direction, and James immediately apologized to Lily. Peter hadn’t been able to get rid of the tail, and it was now hiding under his robes.
When the wind picked up, they were none too unhappy about retreating into the Three Broomsticks and sending Peter off to buy their drinks. Lily was a bit disgruntled at discovering that the pub didn’t serve any type of coffee, but free butterbeer wasn’t anything one could turn down lightly. So she didn’t.
Remus pulled Lily’s chair out for her, and, hiding a smirk, she slid into it lightly, shaking shifts of snowflakes out of her hair. Several Christmas trees were placed around the room at intervals, giving the place quite a festive, warm, welcoming look. It was packed beyond belief, and the single waitress at the counter was filling orders frantically.
Peter returned with some change, which he handed to James. “Madame Rosmerta said it’d be awhile.”
“Oh.” James stuffed his change inside a handy pocket. “Rosie?”
“Yeah, her,” Peter shrugged.
Lily would have asked who Rosmerta or Rosie or any other names she happened to have amassed was, but since a girl about nineteen with a rather full front and turquoise high heels had just walked up to the table next to them with a tray of drinks, she figured that part out for herself.
But then James’ stretching arm blocked her view.
“So, Lily, what do you want for Christmas?”
Lily shrugged, fiddling with a loose thread in the tablecloth. “I don’t know. I thought maybe drawing pencils or something would be nice—but then again, there’re always books and candles—but there’s always incense—“
She broke off as she caught Sirius’ amused stare. “What?”
He couldn’t help snorting a bit. “Do you know, Lily, that you’re the only one that doesn’t immediately hit on a diamond ring or something like that when James Potter asks you what you want for Christmas.”
“And that would be a bad thing?”
Shrugging, Sirius clapped her on the shoulder. “Nope. I rather think he likes people not taking advantage of his money.”
James hissed at Sirius to shut up just as Madame Rosmerta clicked over to their table, holding a tray.
“Four large butterbeers?”
Sirius took the tray. “Mine!”
Laughing, Remus pulled Sirius back into his seat. “Hey, only one!”
“No fair!”
“Yes fair! It’s not your money, is it?”
Sirius had nothing to say to that.
“Ha!”
Lily broke in. She hadn’t forgotten that she intended to make the boys squirm a bit.
“So, what were you four doing in the common room?”
Immediately, their eyes shifted. “Nothing important.”
”Well, Peter’s still got a tail—and you looked as if it were important.”
James had obviously lost all common sense, as he tried appealing to Lily to be merciful.
“Lil, please, don’t tell McGonagall or Dumbledore.”
Eyes wide with innocence, Lily turned her head to look him full in the face.
“Well, why shouldn’t I? It’d only be asking her to remove Peter’s—erm—addition—but, really, it’s not as if some sort of Animagi transformation went horribly wrong, is it?”
Those four couldn’t keep a secret if their lives depended on it, she thought dryly as they tried unsuccessfully to hide their discomfort by spilling their butterbeer at the same time and ducking under the table to retrieve the bottles, immediately knocking their heads against each others’ and now sitting on the ground, holding aching skulls. It was all Lily could do not to laugh, and even then, if they'd had the security of mind to look up, they'd have seen that she knew what she knew, which, all in all, was more than they knew, if they’d bothered to think about it.
Lily noticed afterwards that none of the boys even hinted towards a fight, not even James, and that when she goaded them horrifically, with bait James usually couldn’t resist. This was rather amusing for her, though to the boys it was terrifying. “I own you” was the phrase she first thought of when she tried to put a name to this situation.
They got back to Hogwarts around four in the afternoon; Lily was thankful for her cloak and for the underground tunnel, for the wind mixed with a few flakes had turned into a mediocre snowstorm by the time they set off for Hogwarts with two bottle of butterbeer under each arm. When they got into the warm common room, the first thing they did, after throwing off the stuffy Invisibility Cloak, was to proceed to the nearest bathroom and turn on the hot water. Very hot water.
Lily, knowing Remus was a prefect, took her bathing suit with her as a precaution when she stepped into the prefect’s bathroom; the fourth door to the left of Boris the Bewildered’s statue on the fifth floor. Slipping into the rather more than primitive suit and knotting a towel around her waist, she headed straight for the handle that spouted tiny bubbles the size of Eva’s favorite diamond stud earrings; and they sparkled just like stars did. She infinitely preferred this kind over the pink footballs, and, pulling a small lever in the wall that dropped the level of the pool to a good nine feet, she grinned as the sparkling bubbles quickly reached the edge of the basin. When the pool-sized tub was filled to the brim, the door opened abruptly and Remus walked in.
Almost instinctively, he turned around, flinging his hands up to his eyes, and Lily snorted.
“Remus, dear, this swimsuit is almost what they wore in the 1890s. You can turn around.”
He frowned, but nevertheless shut the door. “What did they wear back then?”
Lily laughed loudly. “Skirts that went down to their ankles and sleeves to their elbows. Black. All black.”
He grinned, throwing off his own robes and informing her that he’d also taken the precaution of a suit. “Yours is practically that. Only it doesn’t have a skirt.”
“But it’s black and has sleeves.”
“True.” Tying her hair behind her head in a long, auburn ponytail, Lily dove into the water from the smallish diving board at the deepest end. Quickly, she came up to the sound of applauding. Remus was standing on the shallow end, grinning.
“Nice! Where’d you learn to do that?”
“It’s just a dive.” Lily shrugged.
“There is that,” he agreed. “But still, it was good!”
She climbed out, dived in again, and came up on the other end of the pool, with Remus tapping her shoulder.
“What?”
“I’ve got to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“All right, then.”
He squinted at a few sparkles in the bubbles, then got down to what he wanted to say.
“Lily?”
“Yeah?”
“We’ve been wondering lately-erm-that is-“ He scratched his ear, then looked up abruptly. Lily had a feeling she knew what was coming.
“Do you absolutely hate James?”
Lily’s eyebrows mounted her forehead, vanishing into her wet hair and shooting straight through the ceiling. “Where’d that come from?” It was definitely not the question she’d expected.
“No-seriously. Do you hate him?”
“No…why’d you think that?”
“Oh, no reason. It’s just that you two can’t be around each other without tearing your respective jugular veins out through your toes.”
Lily snorted. “Remus, dear, the jugular veins are in the neck, I believe.”
He shrugged. “You’d find a way. Well, that’s good.”
“That I could find a way to tear his-“
“No!” He interrupted quickly. “That you don’t hate him.”
“Ah.” She narrowed her eyes. “Did he ask you to ask me that?”
While she retied the rubber band around her hair, and while she was treading water with the band in her teeth, the door to the bathroom opened again and the rest of the boys stepped inside. Lily ducked underwater, berating herself for it a minute afterwards. There was no reason to do that; it’s not as if you’ve never seen them before!
James, Peter, and Sirius tramped in loudly, shaking off shoes so that they flew in high bounds through the air, one of Sirius’ landing quite close to the edge of the pool. Remus raised a hand and waved.
“Thought you’d never get here. I was jus talking to-“ he waved a hand in Lily’s general direction, then stopped as he couldn’t see her. “Never mind.”
The other boys, after taking off their own robes and jumping into the water, came pretty close to landing on top of Lily, but she managed to dodge. It was only when James did a cannonball that was almost a bellyflop and landed right in front of Lily, and opened his eyes when he was six inches away from her, that both of them surfaced, sputtering.
“Hey! What’re you doing here?”
“I’m a prefect, too, in case you didn’t know?”
“Oops. Sorry!” Taking advantage of the fact that she had just folded her arms, he reached behind her, grabbed the top of her head, and jerked her underwater. Again, she came up snorting water through her nose.
“James Potter!”
“What?” His face assumed a completely innocent and I-had-nothin-whatsoever-to-do-with-the-fact-that-you’re-snorting-water-through-your-nose-and-hacking-up-various-sparkly-bubbles expression, which quickly vanished when Lily aimed a rather nasty kick at his solarplex.
“Hey!” Trying to grab her foot, he grasped at empty air, and the next second, she had shot over to the other end of the pool and was resting her arms on the side lazily.
“What?”
“Someone’s dead!”
The rest of the afternoon they spent in the pool, dunking each other and seeing who could swim the most laps without coming up for air. No one was surprised when Lily won.
Dinner was wonderful, as usual. The Great Hall was filled with the usual Christmas decorations, and, emptier than usual, with only five Gryffindors, three Ravenclaws, six Hufflepuffs, and four Slytherins, and Filch, Dumbledore, and the Hogwarts ghosts. The house-elves hadn’t made as much food as they usually did; all of the food was situated at one end of each table, where everyone sat.
Lily reached for a baked potato, then remembered what Remus had asked her in the prefect’s bathroom. She turned to her neighbor.
“James.”
“What?” He looked up quickly.
“Where did you get the idea that I hate you?”
He squirmed a bit. “Well-you always hate to be around me-you never seem to want to get along-what am I supposed to think?”
Lily sat back in her chair, slouching. He had a point. On the other hand, however much she might get ticked at him at certain times, she didn’t hate him. She didn’t hate anybody, come to that. Not Serena-she didn’t feel that Serena was worthy of the time spent to hate her. And there really was no one else that came to mind that she couldn’t stand. Severus and Lucius were her good friends, though they were slimy gits to the rest of Hogwarts, excluding the Slytherins. Professor Trelawney was a nutty grasshopper that drove her up the wall millions of times in an hour and a half, but when she got right down to it, she didn’t hate her, she despised her. There was an oh-so-subtle difference that she couldn’t pin down, but it was there.
“Oh-I don’t know. I definitely don’t hate you-hate is a stronger word than you know. You annoy me beyond words much of the time, but you’re not the least of my problems.”
He smiled. “Thanks. I was kinda worried-it’s just that I don’t know how it happens, but we’re always fighting, no matter what.”
“That’s your own fault.”
“Hey! It is not! I-“
To James’ left, Sirius groaned loudly. “They’re fighting again!”
Lily couldn’t help it. She started to giggle loudly.
