After they had collectively talked James out of going on the hunt for Slytherins right then and there, they were all more willing to hear Lily's plan. It was at this point that she realised that The Plan, significant as it was, consisted of very little more than hiding outside the Slytherin common room and waiting for someone to slip up and have a frank, hour long discussion about the intricate details of the Slytherins plan and possibly list all those with Death Eater sympathies. It was not foolproof.

"Alright, so there's some work to be done… that is why I'm enlisting my best and brightest."

"Oh good, I was worried for a minute, who's that?" Jac said.

"You."

"That's… disheartening."

By the time they were ready to go to bed that night, they had a vague idea of who could follow who and when they could do it. The boys seemed to be taking on a great deal of the duties. Lily only had to sit outside the Gryffindor common room.

"Well, you are so good at it!" Sirius reasoned with a laugh when she protested that it was her plan and that she ought to have a little more involvement than essentially sitting in the one place nothing was ever going to happen.

"Look, do you want to defeat Voldemort or not?" he added, an unusually serious look on his face, though there was still a slight laugh in his voice that made her wonder if this was all a joke to them.

"I think you're getting ahead of yourself, we're very unlikely to actually be facing Voldemort on the fourth floor stairwell!"

"Yeah!" Peter added. "I think he prefers to hang around the second floor!"

Lily smiled at him; it really was hard to take all the Death Eater, blood purity nonsense seriously with this lot around. She had never known a group of people so utterly impervious to fear or worry.

Suddenly, she remembered something slightly less likely to have a major impact on the course of the Wizarding world, but very important if she ever wanted to eat a meal alone again.

"Oh, James?" she called, and he looked up from the conversation he was having with Sirius. "D'you have a girlfriend?"

It was amazing how that simply question caused more shock than Lily's recently telling them that there were very likely members of an extremist organisation in their school, bent on wiping out huge swathes of the population.

Every face in their group looked with shock from James to Lily. Sirius, she noticed, leant across to Remus, and whispered something excitedly. Remus' smile was hard to ignore.

"Not for me… I'm not asking for me… It's… for a friend." She finished lamely, wondering why she agreed to do these horrible things.

"No, Lily, I don't have a girlfriend." James answered, tired-sounding and robotic, as if he were reading from a script.

"Right… Do you fancy going on a date? Again, it's not with me!" she added that last bit quickly, and she could have sworn that she saw Jac look at Karen with a vague disappointment on her face.

"Well…" James looked sceptical. "Who's it with? Is it Sirius? Mate, just ask me yourself!"

"It's Iris. Iris Jacobs." She laughed as she answered. "I think she likes you, and you like her, don't you? So there's really no reason for you not to go, is there? She's very pretty. I think you'd be a good couple."

This was awful. She was cursing herself for agreeing to do this with every word. Who on earth agreed to ask out the boy they fancied for someone else? What kind of idiot did you have to be to get yourself into that sort of situation?

James shrugged, and nodded and Lily tried to pretend that she didn't feel like she had just stubbed her toe and gotten a paper-cut at the same time. You know, like an emotional paper-cut, a paper-cut of the soul, obviously.

Then, whilst musing on how ridiculous it was that she was feeling this bad, one of the worst things that can happen to a person trying to maintain their dignity happened. It was the damned Universe, sensing weakness and going in for the kill. Her eyes, that had been so rebellious in Potions, mutinied again, and she felt a sinking in her stomach when she realised that she was close to tears.

Feeling utterly pathetic, she made a quick excuse and fled up the stairs, saying that she would be back in a minute. She couldn't figure out why she was feeling like this. She had fancied people who didn't like her back before. She had been forced to deal with people and see them do things she didn't want them to do. She ran up the stairs, and the second she closed the door, she threw herself on the bed, and took a deep breath, expecting tears. But none came.

Now that she was in a safe enough place, unlikely to be humiliated, the tears had decided not to come after all. So she simply lay there, wondering what sort of idiot she had to be to not even be able to control her own tears.

It was only then, after she had taken several gasps of air and admitted that the tears were dried up, that she noticed that both Beth and Lynn were in the room, sitting on Beth's bed, reading magazines.

They had clearly been watching what must have looked like some kind of break down as Lily rushed in, threw herself down and started attempting to cry.

They waited a moment.

"You alright, Lily?"

There was really no way to salvage this, so it was almost understandable that her eyes rebelled and instead of nodding and excusing herself to go to the bathroom, she took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and started to cry. It came properly this time, with tears and everything.

Lynn and Beth looked startled and immediately climbed over to her and clucked around her, asking what was wrong. She couldn't speak, she couldn't even really say why she was crying, it wasn't as if she had declared her love for James and he had laughed in her face. She had simply done her friend, Iris, a favour and it had involved a little stomping on her own, personal feelings. They weren't even really feelings, they weren't that strong, they were just 'tendencies', 'leanings' or 'vague notions'.

She was just sad from… tiredness. It was very strange being so sad and not having a legitimate reason why. She didn't want to think about anything, she just wanted to not feel like crying, and not feel embarrassed when she thought about speaking to her own friends.

Deciding that she had been through quite enough for one Monday, she quickly feigned tiredness and changed into her pyjamas. She pulled the curtains closed and forced herself towards sleep, hoping that something might happen that would mean that she got to spend the rest of her life without having to talk to anyone in this entire, horrible school.

She was fortunate enough that the Universe gave her the night and it wasn't until the next morning when it descended upon her with its full powers of life-ruining torment.

She woke up early and headed down into the Great Hall for breakfast. She had briefly considered using some kind of disguise, but she had never loved the part of transfiguration that involved changing features and she didn't want to, in her distracted state, end up with half a nose.

She walked down to the Great Hall, smiling at the very few people who were obviously suffering through the same horror of being singled out as a victim by the Universe. Only people who have no joy left in their life would be up this early, and would therefore be down in the Great Hall.

There was something about being surrounded by people who were so utterly downtrodden that they were eating breakfast at half six that made her feel at home. She was with her people.

She decided on having porridge. This wasn't a day for a good breakfast; it wasn't a scrambled-eggs-and-bacon kind of day. It was a Tuesday, nowhere near as aggressively horrible as Monday, but it was still a generally bad one. The dullness of Tuesdays didn't deserve scrambled egg, it was a porridge day. A dull, sensible breakfast for a day that she was hoping would match.

She would have loved for it to be a dull, uneventful, boring day. She was hoping that the Universe would follow the time-honoured tradition of Tuesdays being boring and uneventful and she was heightening her chances of that happening by not forcing anything interesting to happen. Today, Lily would be going with the flow, the unremarkable, somewhat grey flow of events.

As it happened, the Universe was really more focussed on a sort of tidal wave, rather than the gradual flow that she really ought to have been dealing with. It started with James Potter, as an ever-increasing number of her problems did these days.

Half way through her porridge, she decided that she was simply tormenting herself for no reason and that perhaps it really was a scrambled-egg-and-bacon sort of day. The Universe had excellent, or perhaps terrible, timing, and it was just as she had pushed her porridge to one side and helped herself to some eggs that James sat down.

"Alright Evans?"

"Mm-hmm!" she nodded, rushing to start her breakfast, hoping that the fact she was eating would deter any conversation. She had tried this before, and it never seemed to work, but she kept trying.

"Missed you last night, thought you were coming back after you left?"

"I was tired… So, did I miss anything important?"

"Umm…" He looked a little uncomfortable as he thought back; she could only imagine that they had been talking about her.

"So… exactly how long did they spend laughing at me?"

"What? No… No one was laughing at you!" James' voice had jumped up to quite a high pitch and he was staring fixedly at the ceiling. Eventually, he glanced back at a sceptical-looking Lily. "Fine, they laughed a bit, but it wasn't… I mean, no one said anything bad."

"Yeah, I'm sure… Listen, I've got to go… just, do me a favour, and talk to Iris?"

She finished the remains of her breakfast and stood up, getting out of the Great Hall as quick as she could. She ran into Iris on her way out, who was looking at her expectantly.

"Lily! Hi... You look lovely this morning!"

She very much didn't. She hadn't even brushed her hair, just gathered it up in a haphazard way, while brushing her teeth and trying to dress herself in silence. She didn't think that Iris was the sort of person who would tell her she looked terrible though, even when she did.

"Thanks, Iris… Oh, I spoke to James, about you… he seemed keen."

That may have been a slight lie, she hadn't actually been able to gauge James' potential interest in Iris through her deep personal embarrassment, but surely he would be excited about it.

She was pretty, and nice and possibly a lot of other very positive things that Lily didn't know her well enough to comment on, and James was, y'know, all of those things too.

Well, not pretty… but the male equivalent of pretty. Sort of.

Anyway!

"Oh! Right!" Iris flushed a little and looked past Lily to where James was sitting by himself.

"You should go speak to him."

She fluttered around for a bit, touching her hair and face nervously. Despite, or perhaps because of, the depths of Lily's despair, she found herself feeling sort of hopeful for Iris. No matter what Lily might have secretly felt, Iris was a nice girl who happened to like the same boy Lily did. She wasn't evil, she wasn't being cruel, and she was just hoping that the handsome Captain of the Quidditch team might like her.

"Go on, he's by himself, and he'll be ten times easier to talk to than if he's with Sirius."

She watched as Iris made her way up to James, who looked up confusedly as she sat herself down in the seat Lily had occupied only moments before. She was caught in the strange position of wanting to see if it went well, and wanting to avoid having to look at the conversation. As she was dithering over this dilemma, James looked down towards her and met her eye. There was a second, a strangely long second, when she thought about running up and saying something, she thought about causing some kind of massive conversation-halting distraction, she thought about very little other than the fact that James was looking at her like… something. It wasn't a familiar look from him. She had seen James look angry, she had seen him look happy, she hadn't seen this. Whatever it was, it was strong. He looked sort of like he might be experiencing an emotional paper-cut of his own, but that couldn't be right, he ought to be happy, shouldn't he?

Maybe he didn't like Iris?

She conjured up as big a smile as she could muster under the circumstances and gave him a big thumbs-up.

Whether Iris had said something at that exact moment, or something else, James seemed to change. His expression dropped, and he turned to Iris. There was a beat of pause, and then he changed again, and she could tell even from across the room that he had switched into full-on James Potter charm mode. That was another thing that reminded her that he hadn't changed that much. Back when she had hated him, she had been most irritated by two things: his bullying, and his charming. He had always been able to drive her crazy by the whole 'everyone-loves-me' routine, complete with hair-ruffling and that stupid smirk.

She didn't want to see any of that now, so she turned her back and headed out of the Great Hall, trying to put it out of her mind. She had done the right thing, she knew that. She couldn't keep two people apart who might really get along just because she had some… 'vague notions' about one of them. James, not Iris.

She had made the right choice, and the horrible, twisting feeling in her stomach was just… pride? Relief? Happiness?

She decided that the library was probably the best place to hide out until she had to go to her first class and so she made her way up through the castle, intentionally avoiding the parts of the school that tended to be busier, not wanting to run into anyone else.

She was walking down a corridor on the third floor when she saw a worrying sight. Dumbledore was standing at the corner, talking in hushed tones with Professor Darroch.

When Lily reached them, hoping to simply slip by without comment, they looked around.

"Ahh, Miss Evans. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to take another corridor." Professor Darroch addressed her, but it was the headmaster that her attention was drawn to. Though his face was peaceful and nearly expressionless, except for a polite yet vague interest he was displaying.

"Why? Is something wrong?" she blurted out before she quite had a chance to think and remind herself that they were far more powerful than she was and could close half the corridors in the castle without any sort of reason and she wouldn't exactly be top of the list of people who ought to be informed.

Rather than the reaction she expected, which was a blunt and serious refusal to say anything, Professor Dumbledore spoke.

"There has been another attack on a pupil, Miss Evans, similar to the one that-"

"Like mine? Like what happened to me?" She could feel the panic rising. The feeling that hadn't been quite making it's way to the surface had returned. She remembered this feeling, it was the same pressure rising around her that she had felt when confronted with the Slytherins after her attack, when she had passed out with the fear and the tension.

If this was another attack, like hers, she had probably sat by while the perpetrators headed off to do it. She had been so caught up in listening in on stupid personal stuff, that she hadn't even wondered where they were going. She had assumed that because it was her first time watching them, they wouldn't be doing anything worth seeing. She had let this happen.

"Who?"

"I couldn't possibly say, Miss Evans."

"Mary?" The name came in a whisper, a terrified thought that she could hardly bear to think. Could Mary have left the dormitory after she had gone upstairs? Could it be her, again?

Just then, a worried Madame Pomfrey rushed around the corner, not seeing Lily, she launched into a speech.

"Professor Dumbledore, I think I've got her ready to move. I've left her with the Healer for the moment, but I thought I should come and tell you. It's going to be a long process, but she'll live. I'll accompany her to St Mungos, and speak with her parents."

"No Poppy, I think I ought to speak with them." Dumbledore answered, and they set off down the corridor Lily had just passed through. She had to say something.

"Professor! Professor Dumbledore, I think I-"

Madame Pomfrey turned around and snapped at her.

"Not now, Miss Evans! The headmaster has important matters to deal with, you can speak with him later."

"But I think I know who did it!"

Both of the adults turned and looked at her, Madame Pomfrey with the expected attention, but Dumbledore was merely observing her with a kind of calm, mild interest that belied the severity of the situation.

"Miss Evans, there will be time enough for discussing that after-"

"But, Professor," Madame Pomfrey cut across him, "If Miss Evans knows something about the attack on Miss Jones, she ought to be-"

"Miss Jones?" She was wracking her brains, trying to remember any Joneses that she knew. There was Ruby, a prefect from Hufflepuff, but she was half-blood and unlikely to be the first target for a group of Slytherins out to further their Death Eater ideals. Still, she could have been a target of opportunity, she didn't think that wandering the castle could have been the most precise method of gaining targets.

Then she remembered something that made her heart sink. A face came into her mind, a face that she had last seen disappearing around a corridor that looked a lot like the one she now stood near.

Guilt washed over her as she remembered someone that she had been introduced to only the night before. Jenny Jones.