A/N: Thank you for your reviews. They bring sunshine to my life, which the chlorophyll in my scaly green skin converts to the requisite nutritional elements.
A week or two or three or four later...
Filius Flitwick basked happily in the water. A gaggle of first year Gryffindors giggled as they threw him slices of bread, which he caught and devoured. He used his huge tentacles to splash the water, causing his mesmerized audience to giggle some more.
The Giant Squid didn't spend all his time under the lake. During lesson times, he taught Charms classes.
Filius was the most blatant and unsuspected Animagus in Hogwarts. He was registered - in Fiji (1), home of some distant ancestor of his that he had conveniently happened to remember while waiting in line at the Fijian Animagus Registration Office.
He had better eyesight than any other Giant Squid in existence, since he wasn't a Charms Master for nothing. Which was why he could see, in a small cove two unlikely girls talking to each other. His eyes - already a foot in diameter - widened.
Lily and Bella watched the Giant Squid playing with the littluns.
"I've always wondered," said the Mudblood, "how such a creature got here in the first place."
The Mudblood-hater looked at the Squid again, and considered this. She hadn't considered it before, and it was a good question.
"They're salt-water molluscs," said Lily, "and this is a freshwater pond. A large freshwater pond, admittedly, but it's not connected to the ocean or anything."
Bella bit her lip, which Lily had learnt meant she was thinking, before just saying, "Magic." With this explanation out of the way, Bella got down to what they were talking about earlier.
"So about this mechanical House Elf that your Muggles sent to Mars -"
Lily, wondering if everything unexplainable got explained away by magic, continued with her story. "It's a simulacrum. The American Muggles made it. They call it a robotic probe. They launched it last November, and it's supposed to get to Mars this June. It's going to see if there's any life there." (2)
"The Muggles can make simulacrums?" asked Bella, surprised. "Without magic? How?"
"I don't know the details, exactly," replied Lily, "I think I'd have to go to Muggle university for many years before I could understand. It's just what I read in the newspapers."
"Hmmm." Bella had read Muggle newspapers - Andy had sometimes showed them to her when their mother wasn't around. She found them very confusing. And there were loads of them, which was even more confusing. Even the comics - by far the best bits of the papers - were sometimes confusing. All in all, it was a very confusing glimpse into the lives of very confusing people. It was definitely a good thing they were an inferior species. Pity there were so many of them...
"Have you read Sur la Magie Sombre?" asked Lily suddenly, looking at her watch. They had only a couple of minutes of their hour left.
"Course I have. Every proper Pureblood kid reads it. I got a book about her life on my eighth birthday. Well, that was the kids version."
"There's a kids version?" asked Lily, aghast. Sama's life was pretty horrific - and showed Muggles at their worst. She could easily see how Pureblood kids reading about her would hate and fear Muggles.
"Of course there is. It comes with lots of explanatory footnotes. And it's less graphic. So instead of saying that Sama is gang raped by the Muggle priests who carve her nipples, it just says they beat her up a lot. It's also got pictures, truly exquisite ones, drawn by some Andorran Veela in Andorra la Vella. Cissa really liked them. And every page smelt different. I liked page 17. It smelt of sandalwood."
Lily blinked. She didn't know what to say, and displayed considerable wisdom in saying nothing.
Bella's watch puffed up and let out a small plume of orange smoke. "Morgana! Tempus Fugit! (3) I better be off." She paused. "Mudblood filth," she added fo form's sake and because she meant it.
Lily barely noticed the insult - she was inured to it by now. "Meet you tomorrow at the room on fifth, same time?"
Bella nodded, gave the Mudblood an OK gesture before vanishing. Lily remained oblivious to the fact that this was a Pureblood gesture meaning 'Go piddle on yourself'.
"You've been seen consorting with Mudbloods," hissed Clelli Rosier, one of the most rabid pro-Voldemort seventh years in the school. He was, fortunately, more on the Thug side than the Bright side.
Bella never felt Thugginess implied Moroniness. She could speak Thug quite well herself. She knew her cousin Sirius could speak Thug, no matter how much he might deny it. Andromeda - now, Andy was interesting. She spoke Seriously Evolved Thug fluently, which was why she was able to escape with her Mudblood to parts as yet unknown. Their parents had been unsuccessful in tracking her, and Morgana knew they had tried.
Bella could really use her older sister's advice now.
Enough reminiscing. There was a wannabe thug to discipline.
"Course I have," stated Bella imperiously. "I need virgin blood, freely given for a Potions ingredient. I'm in negotiations with the Evans whore."
"Evans is a whore?" asked Clelli, scratching his head. "How's she a virgin then? Does she do only oral?"
Bella slapped her forehead with her hand. "No. She's a fucking virgin." She groaned at the even more confused look on the Pureblood wizard's face. "She's a virgin. I was using the word whore as an insult."
"Oh," he said. "OH!" he said, finally understanding. "Damn. That's a pity. I was going to ask what her price was. She's a fine bird. Er, for a Mudblood."
"Wanker. You tell me I'm consorting with Mudbloods when you want to shag her? How is shagging not consorting?"
The common room was watching with interest. Initially Bella and Clelli had been the only seventh years there, but the Herbology posse had just entered. (Bella despised vegetation of all kinds, especially when it made her way to her plate.) Clelli's cousin (third, once removed, twice disowned, thrice reowned) Evan Rosier was among them. Unfortunately, Evan was in possession of a brain not previously possessed by a cabbage.
"Greetings, Black. And cousin mine." Evan's voice was mellifluous, and a couple of third years in the corner swooned. Bella made a mental note to transfigure their cutlery to worms at the next meal. "I wish to offer my support for Clelli's ineptly expressed remarks."
Clelli looked most reassured and pleased by this, presumably because he thought 'inept' meant 'ept'.
"Mere shagging cannot be considered consorting," continued Rosier. "Consorting impliest the conveying of respect. The act of intercourse can be performed without an iota of respect involved, particularly if payment is involved. Animals shag. People consort. It's quite simple really."
Bella fumed. Rosier had a point - one that she was well aware of. But just because she had been caught off-guard by the sudden change of opponent did not mean she had lost face. Yet. As her father had told her when she was an eight year old sitting on his knee, it wasn't what how much you knew about a debate that mattered, but how much you knew about the debater.
"Granted, you make an excellent point, Rosier," she said. Her body language conveyed supreme boredom with the conversation, her agreement akin to handing her favourite dog a bone since she didn't need to chew on it. "When someone shags you, that doesn't mean they respect you. In fact, I overheard Annika Culter complaining to her friends last week that you didn't last very long, which sounds terribly far from respectful behaviour to me."
"EVAN!" shrieked an anonymous bint who was presumably Rosier's current squeeze.
Bella smirked as the common room rapidly forgot his earlier victory.
The Gryffindor common room was a pleasant place. Every evening at five pm, tea and cookies magically appeared and were duly devoured. Every evening at six pm (or thereabouts - Gryffindors and Punctuality were not bosom buddies) there would be an argument and everyone would sit around and watch. Today's Argument featured a Mudblood and a Pureblood. (Not that Gryffindors thought in such archaic and prejudiced terms, of course.)
"You've been seen consorting with the enemy," hissed Sirius Black.
"I agree," replied Lily. "In fact, I'm doing it right now. So if you could just transfer your tepid tush to the other end of the room, I'd been most obliged. You're getting in the way of my light."
"Light!" spat Sirius, pushing her book aside. "What do you know of light? You're talking to Bellatrix! She's the Darkest bitch in my family!"
Over in the corner, James Potter watched. He was rapidly becoming resigned to the fact that he had lost Lily for now, possibly for good. His attempts to court her after Snivellus' death had fallen flat - she didn't even get irritated by him any more. She didn't even see him. He was irrelevant. He suspected it was a ruse - but that if she stopped spending energy ignoring him, she would spend it Hexing him to Hades. Her dorm mates even said that she'd been exchanging Owls with Beauxbatons about transferring to there.
"Magic - no matter what colour - doesn't murder people, Black. People do. People like you." Lily was still sitting down, though she was looking at him. "And put your face away. You smell like one of Hagrid's pets."
"I'm not a murderer!" yelled Sirius. "That bloody ward made me do it!"
"Oh? Really? Tell you what, you Marauder," spat Lily, "I will not speak to your cousin if you give me a memory of the entire event where you lot killed Severus."
In the audience, James stiffened. If Lily ever learnt what Snape's last words were, she really would be lost to him. And the sight of their killing her childhood friend would be unforgettable, Aggression Ward or not. He wished Remus was here - but he'd been holed up in the library ever since the incident.
"Deal!" said Sirius.
Lily grinned - after all, Sirius had never specified which cousin and she could well survive without ever speaking to Barbie Black a.k.a. Narcissa again - and dashed to her dorm to grab a vial.
When she arrived back to the common room after a couple of minutes, it was to the sight of James and Sirius furiously arguing in hushed whispers in a corner of the lounge.
"What's up with them?" she asked a nearby fourth year.
"Potter doesn't seem to want Black to give you the memories," replied the boy. "Baker over there is taking bets on the outcome."
"But I've only been gone a couple of minutes!"
"It's Baker," he replied with a shrug. "He's a fast worker. And he'd offer odds on anything. You can get fifty to one odds on Professor Dumbledore becoming pregnant."
Lily thought fifty was rather small, but then remembered that male pregnancy was possible in the magical world - though even more painful than the female version. Men's backs were never meant to carry loads in the front (4), after all.
Lily realized she was digressing. And she'd missed the bit where Sirius and James had evidently reached some agreement.
"Ah, Evans," said Sirius nervously. "About that deal - "
Lily grinned. So he wanted to renege on it, did he? "Yes?" she replied sweetly.
"You never specified which cousin you would stop talking to."
So he'd worked that out too, thought Lily. "I assumed you meant Bellatrix," she replied, her voice still on the nauseating side of saccharine. Besides, she still hadn't said that she was going to stop talking to Bella.
"Er - yes - well - um - I might not be able to supply the memory," said Sirius nervously. "Potter here reminded me that I have this genetic condition, see, that causes me debilitating headaches if I retrieve any memories from it."
Lily gave Sirius her best Your-Dandruff-Is-Smarter-Than-You look. "Really. Let me guess. This condition of yours, it wouldn't be called Keeping Incriminating Evidence Out Of The Public Eye, would it?"
Before Sirius could reply, she turned up her nose at him, gathered her books, and left him and Potter standing there.
The resulting gossip swirled... and in Hogwarts, the court of public opinion swung against the Marauders once again.
Thousands of miles away, in a dinky small-town Big City called Chicago (5,6) Severus Snape was toasting himself. He had found a Potions Mistress in Hyde Park - a neighbourhood on the South Side of the city with seven seminaries and a small college of diligent bibliophiles called The University of Chicago - to apprentice under. Her name was Susan Sto Helit (8) and she was of indeterminate age. He thought she might be some kind of vampire hybrid. But she definitely knew her stuff and appreciated the fact that he wasn't who he said he was and didn't ask intrusive questions about his past.
She had just pointed to a cauldron in her lab and told him to brew the notoriously difficult Silverstorm (9) variant of Polyjuice. He almost made it right. She asked him what he should have done. He told her what he thought. She told him he was wrong and that he should report back at seven in the morning to sign the contract for their Apprenticeship.
Life was good.
He wondered, idly, how long it would remain that way.
(1) All Animagi in the magical world have to be registered. There is nothing to say where they have to be registered. For instance, in an alternate universe twenty years later, a Mudblood student called Hermione registers her form in Israel and uses it to escape Azkaban, but that is another story (by the same author). In any case, since Britain is one of the few countries that have public Animagus registries, very few people register there.
(2) Lily's talking about NASA's Viking I mission, which would have received extensive media coverage at the time. She would have read Muggle newspapers over the holidays.
(3)Tempus Fugit - Latin saying meaning 'Time Flies' and not 'Time Fudges It', though the latter has its uses.
(4) This was worked out in the Magical world first. To see when the Muggle world found out, please see Whitcome, K. K., Shapiro, L. J. & Lieberman, D. E. Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins. Nature advance online publication, doi:10.1038/nature06342 (2007). An extract from the abstract: "...Here we show that human females have evolved a derived curvature and reinforcement of the lumbar vertebrae to compensate for this bipedal obstetric load..."
(5) Home to two baseball (7) teams, called the White Sox and The Other Lot.
(6) Hypnobarb has an excellent HGSS fic 'Looking For Magic' on this site where Hermione and Draco go to college in Chicago. It's over 750 000 words, and counting. She may need some prodding to keep counting, so please prod her.
(7) Cricket on steroids. (That should serve to insult both sets of fans.)
(8) A.k.a. Death's Granddaughter is nicked from the Discworld. She won't be doing more than cameos, though :( This fic is set centuries post-Hogfather - she is an Immortal like her scythe-wielding 'ancestor', after all.
(9) A tribute to the author of my favourite HGSS fic, When A Lioness Fights.