I.
It starts like this:
There's a dead girl in the Great Hall.
II.
Some days Lily wonders how they ever got so far without something like this happening. Bad things happen when kids have weapons, and what is a wand if not a sword, a bow, a gun? Muggle kids get shot all the time. Wandless magic proves it all. You get angry, you see red; you look at someone the wrong way, fists clenched and stomach in knots and heart slamming against your ribs like a wild animal in a cage... kids get angry. Kids get scared.
Some days she thinks, it really is a miracle that we lasted so long without this happening sooner.
And some days she wonders how nobody saw this coming.
III.
What they don't tell you about being Head Girl (or Boy, Lily supposes, although James certainly doesn't suffer) is that it's 90% pacification of the student body—which sounds fancy, but really just involves pretending to care when two sobbing first years tell you that they're in love with the same fifth year. Or putting a decent levitation spell to good use whilst separating a seventh year and his brother when they try to garrote one another.
She tries to remain patient and firm at all times, feeling like a martyr. I am Joan of Arc, she thinks, when Roman Gillespie calls her 'as much fun as Merlin's scrotal hair'; I am Mother Teresa.
They come to her, after the first death, and they ask her opinion on the danger of a magic-friendly environment for youths who aren't fully trained to use it. She wants to laugh, wants to point out that Hogwarts is training them to use magic. But she's the Head Girl. She's seen what angry teenagers can do with a wand.
They know that, she realises. That's why they ask.
IV.
Marloes was pretty.
Lily always thought it was such an irrelevant—and borderline insulting—point to focus on. The Daily Prophet, of course, what more could one expect other than a huge photograph of Marloes' face, smiling like royalty, under a headline so brutally eye-catching that it was little wonder the edition sold out in half a day. Beautiful Teen Slaughtered at Hogwarts. Honestly.
Lily had four classes with her: Marloes was clever. She was an Arithmancy wonder-child, faster than a Goblin, destined to run the Ministry finance department—and beyond her mathematical gifts she had a delicate knack for Transfiguration and Potions. But with strawberry-blonde hair and eyes like the ocean, none of that mattered.
They found her first thing on Sunday morning, when the student body surged lazily toward the Great Hall for a hangover brunch. James had a tendency, since his Head appointment, to stroll amongst the masses like a prophet, making first-years carry his bag and threatening detention for trivial rule breaking—Lily wants nothing to do with it, disinterested in playing the bad cop to James' good cop, and walks so far behind that she can't hear his morally ambiguous abuse of power.
(She remembers him citing a second-year girl for overuse of the word 'like'.)
Blood dries brown. It's there, all over the marble, spread like a Rorschach card or one of those butterfly pictures little kids make by folding paper in half. And there in the centre of it, a grey fairy bent at hideous angles, is Marloes. Pretty Marloes. Clever Marloes. Neck snapped and eyes wide.
Someone screams. Head Boy James Potter freezes, speechless for the first time in his life, and Lily doesn't even hear herself firmly order all students back to their rooms because there's a ringing in her ears and she thinks she might vomit.
Marloes was the first, and it doesn't take long for the shock of a dead body to fade into obscurity.
What's one dead flower in a burning meadow?
