What's this? An update after only three days? Merlin's beard! Don't get your hopes up; it's quite short.
(I own nothing)
The first day of April brought mixed feelings to the students and teachers of Hogwarts. While the students were always excited to see what a certain group of trouble-makers did, they were also on edge lest they fall victim to a prank. The teachers, however, were all in agreement – April Fool's Day was quite possibly the most worrying day of the year.
Breakfast, the most sacred of celebrations (according to Marlene at least), was sabotaged. The boys must have found their way into the kitchen or paid off the house-elves or something, for there was no other explanation for the usual spread of eggs, bacon, toast and porridge to be replaced solely by sweets, cakes and chocolate. Not that Lily was complaining.
'Wow, Remus,' Black said, loud enough for even the Slytherins to hear. 'You're really wolfing that chocolate down, aren't you?'
Lily laughed loudly, and the four boys turned to look at her. She was, as far as three of them knew, in the dark about Remus's condition.
'What's so funny?' Hestia asked.
'Um … nothing,' Lily said. 'Just thought of something is all.'
Remus winked at her and she couldn't stop smiling as she winked back. Peter, Potter and Black all looked confused. Dorcas eyed her boyfriend suspiciously until they parted ways for class.
Care of Magical Creatures, strangely, involved a huge black dog bounding up to them halfway through class and refusing to leave, even when Professor Kettleburn tried to herd it away. It ran around the students, jumping up on a desk every now and then, and repeatedly licking an amused yet visibly uncomfortable Remus.
'Professor, this is Care of Magical Creatures,' Peter reasoned, scratching behind the dog's ears. 'Surely we should keep him.'
'It is a dog, Mr Pettigrew, it is not magical!' Professor Kettleburn wheezed, still chasing the very exited dog around. Remus loudly disagreed and said that they shouldn't presume to know this dog's life, and Professor Kettleburn eventually gave up trying to catch it.
The dog stayed, and eventually settled down on the ground beside Peter and Remus and occasionally licking Remus's hand. Lily wasn't sure how they managed to train a dog to do this but honestly, nothing would really surprise her.
With mental images of the four boys spending the last few weeks training a stray they adopted in order to pull this off, Lily made her way to Charms, avoiding the water balloons Peeves was liberally dropping on students.
As soon as Professor Flitwick clambered onto a desk so they could see him, Potter quietly muttered something with an inconspicuous wave of his wand under the desk. He and Remus exchanged smirks, and Lily waited for something to happen.
It wasn't until Professor Flitwick had finished his little speech about how the OWLS were only a month away that something actually happened. They began revising reparo and Peter made a show of not being able to manage it.
'Mr Pettigrew, and you're usually so good at charms!' Professor Flitwick smiled as he walked over to Peter. 'Not to matter; we all have our off-days. You've got the motion just a tad off, you see it's like this – what in the name of Merlin?!'
A large duck sprouted from Professor Flitwick's wand and began waddling around the room in confusion, quacking at students.
Lily thought Professor Flitwick might have gone into cardiac arrest with the shock. It took him over a minute to recover, the entire class in stitches watching the duck, before he raised his wand again. 'Evanesco!'
Yet another duck sprang forth, and soon the classroom was full of them as he tried his best, going red in the face with the effort, to remove them. He eventually resorted to herding them out of the classroom, his students helping him, and leading them to the lake, where they happily took to water and paddled around.
Surprisingly, Professor Flitwick wasn't even angry. He said something about extraordinary magic, and merely asked the four boys to remove the charm. Potter did so, with a wink, and Professor Flitwick was in such a good mood that they finished their lesson by the lake, revising the tickling charm instead.
No one was stupid enough to try anything in Transfiguration. Professor McGonagall stared sternly at the four the moment the walked in, and Lily suspected from Black's face that whatever they had planned was immediately cancelled.
Lunch consisted of regular foods. Marlene, who had refused to eat sweets for breakfast out of principle alone, ate so quickly that she didn't actually talk to her friends the whole meal. The boys were nowhere to be seen.
Halfway through lunch, the dog made a reappearance, bounding straight up to the teachers' table and jumping up onto it. It paused straight in front of Professor McGonagall, who looked both exasperated and amused, and gave it a quick pat on the head. The dog took off, running up and down between tables, sometimes under them. It actually leapt up onto the Slytherin table, running the whole length of it and getting its paws in their food.
The dog successfully dodged every half-hearted attempt at a banishing spell by Professor Flitwick, and yet again evaded Professor Kettleburn – who was now thoroughly enraged by its mere existence. It finally ran back out of the doors, and Lily wondered how on earth the boys had trained it to do that.
With lunch now over, students and teachers alike began filing out of the Great Hall, only to stop at the sight of the staircases. Every single set of stairs had been charmed so that, similar the stairs to the girls' dorms, anyone who tried to use them slipped right back down again. Students headed to the dungeon, as Lily was, had no problem and actually anticipated the equivalent of a tower slide to get to class.
What no one counted on was the fact that once one landed in the dungeons, one had to wade knee-deep through bubbles.
Having finally arrived at her desk in the Potions classroom, Lily noticed that there was something off about the room. It took her a few moments to realise that the desks had been moved closer together – not by much, only an inch or so – and that Professor Slughorn's chair had been lowered while his desk had been raised.
As such, most of the lesson was spent giggling while Slughorn bumped into things and cursed under his breath, just loud enough for them all to hear.
The teachers had managed to fix the staircases by the end of Potions, and so Lily made her way to History of Magic, still wading through bubbles.
Every single desk had been turned right around, all facing the door and each desk and chair levitating an inch off the ground. Professor Binns didn't seem to notice a thing out of the ordinary.
The rest of the day's classes were suspiciously quiet. The only unusual thing to happen was that Sirius Black actually took notes in Defence Against the Dark Arts. Lily and her friends, and everyone else she was sure, waited in a mix of eagerness and growing apprehension for the next stunt, but none came.
Classes finished and people went about their own business, some heading off towards the library, some up to the common room (where it was "safer"). Lily and her friends instead chose to sit in the Herbology corridor, keeping a wary eye out for Peeves and his instant darkness powder.
Dinner time came and went and still nothing out of the ordinary had happened. At this stage, even Professor McGonagall was looking around expectantly every now and then, throwing curious looks in the direction of the Gryffindor table. The four boys acted as though this was any other Thursday, and had no idea why everyone was sending them puzzled looks.
By nine o'clock, sat before the fire in the common room, Lily and her friends were starting to wonder if the boys had decided to downsize this year (after last year's giant-squid-doing-ballet fiasco), and if they were done for the day.
Clambering into bed later that night, Lily had accepted that April Fool's Day had come to a close. But, oh, how wrong she was.
At precisely three thirty a.m., there was a ridiculously loud screeching from outside that awoke every single person inside the castle. In their room, Marlene was the only one dash to the window, while the other three stirred in their beds, rubbing their eyes in confusion.
'Merlin's balls,' Marlene laughed, gazing out the window with a hand to her mouth. 'You have to see this.'
Lily swung out of bed and sleepily shuffled over to her friend's side. Over the Owlery there seemed to be some sort of murmuration. Every owl on the Hogwarts grounds was circling in the air above the Owlery, giving the impression of a large tornado about to hit.
Marlene left the window, crossed over to her bed and began shoving on shoes and a cardigan over her pyjamas. Lily, Hestia and a rather groggy Dorcas did the same, and descended into the common room.
They were not the only ones – every Gryffindor student was gathered there, all chattering excitedly ("I told you they wouldn't be done, Frank!" "Alice, you're forgetting that I agreed with you."), except for a certain four noticeably absent boys.
Lily found Benjy, who was gazing out the window with a huge grin on his face, and they decided that, as prefects, they should find out what was happening.
So Lily, Benjy, Emmeline Vance, Gregory Hayle and Victoria Dervish left the common room in search of a teacher, and found themselves converging with Ravenclaw prefects, who had joined forces with Hufflepuffs (some of them not even prefects), who practically demanded the Slytherins join them all when they bumped into them in the entrance to the Great Hall.
The Slytherins said the teachers were most likely outside, trying to calm the owls, and the rest of the party agreed. They exited the huge front doors, the cold wind biting fiercely at them. As suspected, many of the teachers had wands raised, pointing them in frustration at the birds (Professor Slughorn using more swear words than spells), and the Head Boy and Head Girl were practically shoved towards a bemused Professor Dumbledore to find out what on earth was happening.
Professor Dumbledore told them that he had never seen owls act in this way, and that maybe they should go and ask Professor Kettleburn. Professor Kettleburn looked mortally offended that the owls weren't doing as he commanded, and so the students thought it best not to approach him.
Suddenly, the owls all flew into the Owlery again, leaving the teachers and prefects (and stray Hufflepuffs) very puzzled. That was until, right over the lake, a bright white spark appeared, which grew and grew until it exploded, sending rainbow-coloured firecrackers, Catherine wheels and comets in all directions.
Professor McGonagall looked both proud and exasperated. Lily heard her say something along the lines of, "at least it's not Dance of the Sugarplum Squid this year," as she lowered her wand. Professor Dumbledore nodded in agreement and watched the fireworks, the colours reflecting in his half-moon glasses.
The display went on for quite some time and Lily forgot how bitingly cold it was. That may have had something to do with the Slytherins starting as small floating fire around which the Hufflepuffs gathered, sharing out marshmallows and hot chocolate (retrieved from Merlin knows where) with everyone – including teachers who feigned disapproval – while Ravenclaws used some sort of charm to ensure that neither the hot chocolate nor marshmallows ran out.
Once the last firecracker had fizzled out, the teachers remembered themselves and herded all the students back inside, ordering them to return to their common rooms and make sure that everyone (they all looked very pointedly at the Gryffindor prefects) was in bed.
The Gryffindor prefects, their exhaustion catching them, drudged all the way upstairs and returned back to the common room. With the fireworks over, most students had returned to the warmth of their beds. There were a few stragglers who had to be given Victoria Dervish's famous don't-test-me look, but apart from that, the prefects all returned to their own rooms.
The four boys didn't reappear until at least five that morning, all still laughing (Peter and Black smelling fiercely of firewhisky), and fell into bed.
Having been disrupted in the middle of the night, almost no teacher was in the mood to teach an actual lesson the next day. Only Professor McGonagall (who gave a speech about not forsaking their educations and, by extension, their futures because of a lack of sleep), Professor Binns (who as usual, had noticed nothing. Several students took naps in that particular class), and Professor Sprout (who went about business as usual).
Thank you very much for reading! Reviews are much appreciated.
There will not be an update until (at the earliest!) late August. Like I said previously, I'm going away and can't lug my computer around with me.
Also, having been reading over my story, I have realised with HORROR that I have spelled Professor McGonagall's name WRONG in every chapter until now. I apologise for any frustration/hopelessness for humanity I may have caused with my error. No one is more annoyed by it than I.
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