~Sky's POV~
The next few months seemed to blur together. Everything seemed to center around sleep or pain. Whenever I wasn't asleep or tired, I was in pain. As my body became used to my new sleeping schedule, I was tired slightly less and in pain more. My last stubborn cut took such a long time to heal, and the entire time it was doing so, it hurt.
It didn't help that Moody wasn't going easy on any of us during our training sessions. Because he was now on a time limit, we were forced to learn one very complicated spell a night and then have the one night "off" to master it. We would then have to show mastery the next time we had training. We would often practice the less dangerous spells on each other, but those times were few and far between. Most of the spells we learned had to be practiced on dummies and mastering those spells outside of training was difficult. All of the spells we learned had real-world applications. We learned some healing spells, some defensive spells, and many offensive spells.
The work was almost mindless though, because there seemed to be no real threat to make us try. Moody figured out that we were becoming apathetic to the training relatively quickly and took it upon himself to spice things up. He started giving "pop quizzes" which basically involved a group of his Auror friends ambushing us when we entered the Great Hall. He liked to think that he surprised us, but that really only happened once. That one time was the first time, because we didn't use the map to get down to the Great Hall.
From that point on, we always used the map to make sure we were ready for these "pop quizzes". Lily had suggested once or twice that we stop relying on the map so heavily, because there wasn't going to be one for the whole world after we left school. We agreed with her, but she never said anything when we used it and had the upper hand before the "quizzes".
But on top of the randomness of the "quizzes", they were extra difficult because if we didn't use the spells we learned in lessons, then we failed. Lily nearly had a panic attack the first time we failed a pop quiz. She had never failed anything in her life, and it was devastating for her to fail.
What made everything ten times worse was that Cloud insisted on my training with him on Saturday mornings at sunrise. This meant that I either had to go almost straight from trainings on Friday nights to physical training on Saturday mornings or I would have both trainings on the same day.
It was a close race for which wore me out more. In the first scenario, I would have to go to school all day and then exhaust myself mentally at one training and then exhaust myself physically at the other a few hours later. With this scenario, I could sleep for the rest of the day Saturday and not have to worry about getting up again until really Monday afternoon. But in the other, I would have to exhaust myself physically in the morning, sleep for the majority of the day, and then exhaust myself mentally.
When it came down to it though, I preferred Cloud's trainings to Moody's. Cloud would at least give me breaks when I couldn't take anymore. With Moody, he doubled the pressure and pushed me harder. He claimed that I only performed my best when I was pissed, but what he didn't understand was that I was pissed from the moment I walked into his trainings.
Another reason I liked Cloud's training better was the presence of Sirius. He had known that I trained with Cloud since I started in my third year, but he never really knew the exact details of it. Sirius was now learning how to fight hand-to-hand and he was getting rather good at it. He refused to fight me for semi-obvious reasons (one of which was that I was so much more experienced than him). So, when he was practicing and learning with Cloud, I was practicing weapons with a faceless opponent that Cloud created.
This was mildly frustrating because the thing never stopped or gave in, and it never got tired. This was a problem whenever Cloud wasn't watching it. I would get pushed beyond my limit and it would eventually pin me with a sharp weapon to a vital body part of mine. It would never kill me, but the positions were often painful. I would only be let out of these holds when Cloud called off his creation, and sometimes that took a little while. But, on the whole, these training were much more enjoyable than the other one.
Lessons become almost a secondary concern to my friends and me. We breezed through Charms and Transfiguration because the work was a cake walk compared to Order training. As a group we dropped all of our extra classes, and we were even allowed to drop History of Magic. I figured that Dumbledore knew that listening to Binns for an hour or more after dinner was a form of cruel and unusual punishment and, since we were already getting that with Moody, he must have seen it as fair to let us drop History of Magic.
I was especially thankful for this because this was the only lesson besides Potions that we shared with the Slytherins. I could only take so much of Snape and Regulas glaring at me in a week. With our new schedules, the only times I had to endure that was during dinner and during double Potions on Friday afternoons.
It was tough to say which time caused me more distress. I knew that during dinner, they couldn't do anything without risking getting caught. They could try to poison me again, but my friends and I now knew spells that could detect poisoning in food. But during dinner, I had my back to them, and I always felt vulnerable like this, but never said anything. But during dinner at least I knew exactly where those vermin were.
During Potions, on the other hand, when the potions were being brewed, the room tended to fill up with multi-colored smoke. And, because Slughorn insisted on keeping the windows closed, the room became hazy and it became hard for me to see. My heart always raced during these times because the haze in the room reminded me of the haze Regulas put over my eyes when he abducted me.
I also got particularly nervous when we started to brew the particularly dangerous poisons. I didn't know if they were stealing vials of it or if they were trying to sabotage my potion, so to cause a catastrophic failure. My hands constantly shook and my breathing, despite my attempts to keep it calm and even, often became panicked and shallow.
I could never tell if Sirius picked up on these incidents because we were not partners anymore. He was partnered up with Peter and was across the room from me. I knew for a fact, though, that Remus, my new partner, noticed my panic attacks. He did his best to calm me down, so not to attract unwanted attention from the Slytherins. He reminded me that the last thing they needed was the knowledge that their mere presence could reduce me to a nervous wreck. These reminders helped, but I couldn't stop my heart from pounding.
I spent most of my free time in the tower during these months. Sirius tried to get me to go on walks on Sundays that we had off, but I didn't want to run the risk of meeting a Slytherin. I never told him this reason; I usually made up a lie for each time. I could tell that he didn't believe any of these lies, but he never pushed the matter. Usually he left me alone and went for walks by himself. I didn't like this but I didn't want to go with him, so I had no right to say anything.
But on top of all this tension, there was also the tension between Lily and James. Neither one of them talked to each other except for very superficial conversations, like "yes", "no", or "pass the salt". It was immensely frustrating for us because whenever they were in the same room together, the air between them was filled with awkwardness, and it made for a very uncomfortable for the rest of us.
I personally wanted to lock them in a room, preferably a small one, and refuse to let them out until they resolved whatever was going on between them. But none of the other boys would let me do that because they said that the last thing they needed on top of them not talking to each other was them not talking to the rest of us.
When I got this line of horse crap, I had to severely bite my longue. If Lily talked to me any less, I could have sworn she was mute. She had somehow figured out that I had tried to get her and James to talk the night after I found her on the couch with James, and now was talking to me like she was talking to James.
And trying to talk to James about it was like talking to a brick wall. When I even hinted at a question of what was going on between him and Lily, he would either ignore me completely or just shake his head and walk away. None of us could figure out exactly what had happened between them, but we figured that I had to be something major in order for them to be acting this way.
But this tension wasn't just a problem because it was making life in our group close to unbearable. It was a problem because it was affecting the dynamic of our group during our Order training. Lily and James refused to work together and that more often than not resulted in some significant mistake. The consequences for their mistakes were taken out on all of us, adding to the overall frustration within the group.
All of these factors combined led to me losing track of time. So it came as a huge shock to me when snow started to fall and December rolled around.
