Chapter Twenty: Once You Go Gryffindor…
redacted lyrics from Life Uncommon, Jewel
"Do you deny it?" Lupin asked, amused at Sirius' grumpy reaction. His friend knew that it was futile to try to keep secrets from him during the week of the full moon, and his reaction had been a common one over the course of their years at school. Sirius stood up and walked over to his own trunk, fiddling with the contents as though he hadn't heard Remus press him for an answer. Lupin continued to stare at him, and finally he cleared his throat to let the other boy know that he wasn't going to drop the matter.
"All right," Sirius conceded, shutting his trunk and turning to face Remus with crossed arms. "Are you happy now?" he asked, sounding slightly petulant.
"Ecstatic."
"I'm not going to 'stand aside' for you either, or any of that rubbish," Sirius told him bluntly. His statement wasn't as surprising as it would have been, as Remus could tell how he felt from many clues, not the least of which was the growing sense of possessiveness toward the girl. Nonetheless, that he felt strongly enough to declare something like that—for all intents and purposes staking his claim—Remus was impressed. Then again, Padfoot had always been the type to go out and get what he wanted—and he was as stubborn as a barrel of rocks.
"You're really serious about that," he observed lightly.
"Yes, I am."
Black held himself proudly erect, as though the very contrast from his usual easygoing posture would lend credit to his purpose. The sense that Lupin was getting from him would best be described as apologetic anger.
"You don't actually think—" he started incredulously, stopping when he realized exactly what his friend thought. "Sirius, the strongest emotion I feel toward Hermia James is that of friendship," he explained, knowing that to ridicule his friend at this point wouldn't do any good toward convincing him of his disinterest.
"You don't have to say that," Sirius protested, deflating slightly. "If you really—"
"Oh, will you please stop with that nonsense and come back over here," Remus said in exasperation. The warrior's stance Sirius was adopting in the corner of the room was as ridiculous as it was unnecessary. For a long moment Sirius looked as if he were going to get angry, but then he smiled sheepishly and walked back over to Remus' four-poster.
"Can you teach me how to insult with adoration, Moony?" he asked, deadpan.
"Of course, you dear overgrown mutt."
oOoOoOoOo
When Hermione got to the Quidditch Pitch, she saw with relief that the tryouts were still underway. The stands and the field were both colored in patches by gold and crimson from both players and onlookers, and it took a fair bit of time to locate Lily's location from the ground. As she climbed the tower to reach the bleachers, Hermione recognized a few of the students flying past. She saw James, of course—he'd conjured up a rather odd looking aura for himself, no doubt to make it easier to be recognized as he shouted orders to his potential teammates. Fiona McCready was unmistakable in Gryffindor robes and a scarf from the Irish National Quidditch Team, her thick curls flying about her face in a reddish gold nimbus.
After she'd reached the top, Hermione saw that the students on the field were a lot more organized than it appeared from the ground. A group of three or four were at the far goal with a Quaffle, taking turns shooting and passing, while the nearest goal appeared to be the host of Keeper tryouts. This particular tower was fairly empty, as most of the observers were clumped around the 'home' goal rings. She was able to walk right up to her friend and sit down, feeling slightly embarrassed as she did so—the other girl had conjured a comfortable pillow for her to sit on. Hermione wondered how long it had sat there unused.
"That must have been some dinner," Lily observed the moment she caught sight of her.
"I am so sorry," Hermione fretted. "The time got away from me and—"
"Just tell me who you were off snogging with and we'll call it even," her friend offered as a compromise. Hermione would have laughed if she weren't so sensitive from the jokes about herself and Remus earlier that day.
"I wasn't 'off snogging' anyone!" she protested hotly.
"That would be much easier to believe if you weren't busy trying to reinvent the word 'fuchsia,'" Lily's hand reached up as if to pinch Hermione's cheeks, which were indeed a rather bright shade of pink. The trouble was that she had felt a little flutter of excitement when Sirius had shown up during dinner, but there wasn't really any way to explain why it didn't mean anything to Lily. After all, saying 'I'm just anxious around him because I cared a great deal for him as an adult, and I am really upset about his death' would not go over well at all.
She wished she could tell Harry how well Sirius looked, how lively and full of hope and mischief he was. His grey eyes danced with merriment and his voice held none of the self-derision that had shown up so much in the last year of his life. His body wasn't gaunt and wasted, but muscular and lithe, his hands strong and yet very gentle as he'd touched her—wait. Hermione stopped herself. Why would Harry care about Sirius' hands! You've gone batty, Hermione.
"Tell me it wasn't a boy that made you space out like that," Lily interrupted her silent reflections with a snap of her fingers in front of Hermione's face. Then she made a face and apologized, saying, "I don't mean to be pushy, I'm just—" she blushed, tossing a look over her shoulder at the players on the field. "Happy. And I'd love to think that the people around me could be happy too…"
"I'm glad you're happy, Lily," Hermione said, a little of the blush fading as she focused on something other than putting her foot in her mouth. "I'd love to tell you it was something special I was thinking about, but I was just reminiscing about people I knew back home."
Hermione thought that little half-truth was quite brilliant, really.
"So, how are the tryouts going?" she deflected neatly.
"Very well—McCready and Johnson were the Beaters last year, and they're just as good today, James says," Lily spoke in an excited tone, waving at her boyfriend as he swooshed past. "Looks like they're just finishing up the Keeper tryouts now," she observed.
"I like Fiona," Hermione declared. "She came right out and told me she wouldn't hold it against me for being in Slytherin."
"That sounds like her," the redhead agreed. "Just keep her away from the Firewhiskey."
"What?" Hermione laughed. "Where would you even get any—" Lily just looked at her, eyes twinkling, and she realized exactly who had created the Marauders' Map—not that she could admit that she knew about it, of course.
Just as Hermione had decided to pretend ignorance and put Lily on the spot, the only other student on their observation tower stood up and muttered 'trouble,' leaning over the railing to look at the ground below. The girls both scurried to the edge to see what was going on.
Many of the hovering Gryffindors had landed and were forming a group in the middle of the field, facing a knot of roughly two dozen Slytherin students carrying broomsticks. One of them was Eunae Zabini. Hermione wasn't surprised to see she played Quidditch—she seemed exactly the type of personality that Slytherin usually fielded as a Beater.
When James saw what was happening below him, he cancelled the spell he'd cast on himself and started down to see what the matter was. It appeared to be a heated argument, but too far away for the voices to carry as far as the elevated bleachers. Hermione saw quite a few of the other spectators begin to hurry down the stairs, but though she knew her friend wanted to know exactly what their rival House was attempting to do, Lily stayed put.
"I told James I wouldn't ask him not to hate the Slytherins," she explained, turning her back on the unfolding drama on the field and leaning against the railing. "But I wouldn't let him act on it. Even so," she sighed, "I don't want him to think I'd start a row over something someone else did to him—he can take care of himself, he always does." Hermione impulsively reached out and gave her friend a hug; Lily looked miserable.
"You don't want to go down there and look like you're marching over to nag him for fighting," she interpreted sympathetically. "What we really could use here are some Extendable Ears," Hermione mused.
"What?" Lily asked in an amused tone, the strange statement seeming to cheer her up slightly.
"Never mind."
Hermione risked a look over her shoulder and saw with no small surprise that James was signaling the Gryffindors to head out, the Slytherin team already in the air and flying. "Looks like it's over," she said to her friend.
"Well, that's unexpected," the other girl said with impressive understatement. They hurried down to intercept James, who had a huge grin on his face.
"What is this, the Twilight Zone?" Hermione asked in bewilderment. Lily laughed, James did not.
"Hurry," he said, looking over his shoulder and nearly doubling over in laughter.
"James Potter," his girlfriend said severely, "what in Merlin's name did you do!"
"I'll tell you, I promise, just keep walking," James choked out, fairly dragging the two of them into the castle where he finally collapsed on the stone floor and practically shook the walls with the force of his mirth.
"I switched them," he finally managed, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. "The Quidditch balls…"
"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, completely at a loss.
"Their personalities," Potter said, holding his stomach as though it hurt.
"Oh, lord," Lily said, sitting down beside him and starting to chuckle.
"You don't mean, like 'Quaffle to Bludger' and—" Hermione had her answer when James laid his head on Lily's shoulder and started shaking again. "I wondered why you gave up so easily," she said, not quite finding it as amusing as he did, but appreciating the prank nonetheless.
"They're going to know it was you," his girlfriend pointed out.
"Let them," he shrugged. "They should have known better than to think I'd just leave when they asked me to."
oOoOoOoOo
The fallout from the Quidditch prank was felt the next day by fully half of the Gryffindors, who spent their Sunday mealtimes with bowls, plates, and cups that randomly rejected their contents. Most of them tolerated the bewitched dishes with equanimity when they saw the number of students in Slytherin with bruises and limps. The revenge actually backfired, as James and Fiona especially considered each incident as a baptism that proved their superiority.
Hermione and Lily chose to eat their meals outside that day.
Unfortunately, Lucius Malfoy seemed to have taken Hermione's friendship with the instigator of the previous day's plot as a personal insult, as though as a former Slytherin she should have prevented such an event. He glared at her during Charms so much that Professor Flitwick had come over to see what Hermione was doing at her table that should garner so much attention—and promptly awarded Gryffindor five House points for her masterful performance of an indexing charm she was using while searching for information on the subject they were studying that day.
Hermione sincerely hoped that the professor hadn't done this solely to vex the student he was forced to take into class, as she would be the one to feel the effects of it.
Transfiguration went splendidly—right up until the moment that Professor McGonagall caught Sirius and James snickering at the back of the classroom just after she'd demonstrated something about her own animagus transformation. Hermione know that the professor was quite sensitive about her gift, and so she wasn't surprised at all when the two boys earned themselves a detention for later that night. James assuaged their collective curiosity at lunch when Peter asked what they'd gotten in trouble for.
"It was classic," the black-haired boy boasted. "McGonagall had just finished morphing out of her cat form when Sirius whispered to me how amusing it would have been to have a dog bark at her to see her reaction." Everyone at the table roared with laughter, but Hermione had to restrain herself slightly, knowing that she wasn't supposed to be in on the bigger part of the joke—the fact that Sirius could very well have performed his own suggestion. Even though she was quite fond of their prim Head of House, she had to admit the thought was awfully funny.
"I wonder how many House points that would have lost us," Sirius said, his broad grin causing a few of the Ravenclaw girls across from him to giggle and wave. He winked at them, and Hermione found their tittering response to be terribly vapid. She turned back to her food to see Remus Lupin giving her an odd smile, which she hesitatingly returned.
The whole group of them left the Great Hall together, laughing and talking as they started down a long corridor—only to find Lucius Malfoy blocking their path with a couple of burly looking sidekicks in silver and green at his side.
"Was there something?" Lily said coolly, making as if she were simply going to push her way through them.
"Might want to call off your little wifey," Lucius said nastily to James. "Wouldn't want her to get hurt, after all."
"You wouldn't have the—" Sirius was interrupted by Remus, who stepped forward with purpose and laid a gentle hand on his friend's shoulder.
"Move along, Mr. Malfoy," he said, giving the other boy a sign of respect as incentive to listen. "I'm a Prefect, and I'd hate to have to bring a small matter like this up to our Heads of House." It was a very tactful message, but Malfoy would have none of it.
"He's a Prefect, too," the blonde boy sneered, jutting a thumb in the direction of the boy Hermione knew to be Francis Wilkes. "My issue isn't with you, anyway—it's with our little expatriate, there."
"You don't even know what that means," scoffed James. Even so, he and Sirius stepped a little closer to each other, with Hermione behind them. She didn't want anyone to fight her battles for her however, and she pushed her way past them to stand next to Remus. As she did so, she felt Sirius reach down and squeeze her hand quickly in support, something that sent a frisson of excitement through her entire body.
Right then, Hermione felt as if she could fight a lion with her bare hands.
"I'm sorry, you can't borrow my Charms notes, Malfoy," she said with a disdainful look. The icy anger of her opponent turned immediately to fury, just as she'd known it would. He was a fool, she decided—hot anger made for stupid mistakes.
"You think you've found a home among these imbecilic hotheads," he snapped. "Leaving Slytherin was a mistake you'll regret, I'm sure—but if you continue to try to sabotage my classes—"
"You are the only one doing that," she interrupted, beginning to get angry at his thickheaded behavior. "I know what you did—bewitching the Sorting Hat—and furthermore, so does Dumbledore." She saw the boy in front of her turn slightly pale and open his mouth as if to protest his innocence. She went on before he could come up with a fresh lie. "You're right, I should have stayed in Slytherin," she said, shocking her audience. "Just so I could be the first Muggle-born to defile you self-righteous lot of pureblood fanatics with my presence!" Almost everyone gasped, but Lucius' eyes bulged with shock and fury, his hands nearly white from the pressure of holding them in fists. She continued, goading him. "Didn't think of that, did you—come to think of it, what were you thinking?"
She didn't expect him to answer, but the question had been plaguing her ever since Peter had confirmed the fact that Malfoy had been behind the whole sorting debacle. To her surprise, he answered.
"I just…" he said, his voice raspy as though he'd forgotten how to use it in the face of her extraordinary declaration. As he cleared it, though, his eyes took on a very haughty look, and he backed away from her slightly. "I just thought it would stir things up, bring in some new blood—not a mudblood," his voice took on more and more confidence as he spoke, the tone becoming increasingly condescending until he finished his insult with triumph, as if she would be completely beaten down by the prudish sentiment.
"Say that again and I'll—" Sirius began from behind her, and she could actually feel the force of wind from James' attempt to hold him back. Potter managed to stop him just at her back, close enough that she could feel his breathing.
Hermione thought about the first time she'd heard the word 'mudblood'—from this man's own son. It had the power to hurt her then, but not now. Strange how the conversation she'd held with Snape turned out to be so relevant; how she'd stopped her future professor from speaking it but allowed her enemy to do so without so much as a whisper of dismay.
It had no power over her anymore.
"You're just stupid enough to think that's an insult, Malfoy," she said, reaching behind her to seek Sirius' hand in an echo of his earlier attempt to fortify her. The contact brought back the heady thrill she'd felt earlier, and she began to realize that their touch brought with it much more than the simple support and encouragement that she'd intended. The rushing heartbeat was from the confrontation, though, she was sure of that…
Lucius was still glaring at her, his two goons doing the same beside him as though waiting for the order to rush the group.
"Did you ever think that calling her that only insults you when she turns out to better at something than you are?" Lily called out from beside Remus and Peter.
"Just walk away, before you put your foot in it," suggested James.
"Once you go Gryffindor, you never go back," Hermione taunted in a sweet tone of voice, shivering delightedly as the breath from Sirius' laughter tickled the hairs at the back of her neck.