This was her fault. This attack was her fault. She had let Jenny Jones, a first year, wander around the castle alone. The Ravenclaw prefect had probably just pointed Jenny in the direction of the Common Room and then went back to the alcove and book they had been reading. Whether Jenny had ever made it to the Common Room, or if the Slytherins had been lurking waiting for the Ravenclaw to walk away and leave poor Jenny without defence or protection, she didn't know.
What she did know was that Jenny shouldn't have been there, alone or otherwise, and if Lily hadn't been so wrapped up in her own stupid thoughts, she would have realised how selfish she was being to send a first year wandering the school. Especially when she had known that the very people she suspected most of attacking her were prowling the school, looking for someone weak enough to pick on.
She didn't know Jenny enough to speak as to whether she was a Muggleborn, but she imagined that it was highly likely that she was.
Professor Dumbledore had simply nodded and told her that he would send her a letter arranging for her to come and speak to him about what she knew. She could do nothing but simply watch as Dumbledore and Madame Pomfrey moved of down the hallway, as her guilt seeped over her like mist.
As she walked into the Charms class, everything else that had been worrying her up until that point seemed so completely pointless. She had spent this morning worrying about James, and whether she would be able to keep hiding something that she had admitted to his best friend. She had worried about whether she could hide something, her own secrets, when she really should have been putting all her energy into working out other peoples. Specifically Severus and the other Slytherins who seemed to be working towards some undetermined aim that could only be extremely harmful to her and people like her, despite all the time Severus had spent trying to convince her that he thought of her completely separately from those other damned Mudbloods.
She didn't know how to treat the world normally at this point. She didn't know how she was supposed to laugh and chat and take notes and learn spells when she was a fundamentally terrible person who deserved to be the one lying in a bed in the Hospital Wing, waiting to be transferred to St. Mungos.
It was as if she had changed into a completely different person in the space of a day, and all the things that used to be so important and the things that used to be so easy were now irrelevant or impossible to do.
She didn't know how to come back from that.
"Lily? You okay?"
It was just Karen, but even her slightest whisper caused Lily to just about jump out of her skin.
"Yeah, I'm fine… just tired, and a bit…"
"Shaken? Did you hear about the attack?"
"Yeah, I almost walked down the corridor where it happened."
"Lily… Do you think that it was- Do you think that it was Snape, and the others that were with him? Could they have done it?"
"Definitely." She said in a low voice, thinking about how she was doubly responsible for the attack. She had let the predators loose, and practically served them up a victim.
Karen looked surprised.
"Wow… I thought that you'd defend him."
She was past defending Severus. She had known for longer than she had been willing to admit that if there was something dark taking place in Hogwarts, Severus was likely involved.
"No, there's no point. We both know that there's no point, you wouldn't believe me, and honestly, I don't think I'd even believe myself."
"Lily… this isn't your fault. Don't you go blaming yourself."
She thought about nodding along, about pretending that her conscience was absolutely clear but she couldn't even work up the energy to worry about what she would think of her.
"It is my fault. I let them go, Karen. If I hadn't been so desperate to find out their plans, I would have stepped out, and it would have been me they attacked. Not Jenny."
"Jenny?" Karen asked.
"A first year, Hufflepuff. Karen, I could have taken it, I could have defended myself, and she didn't stand a chance… but it's more than that. I saw Jenny last night. She was out after curfew, and I felt bad for her so I found a prefect to take her where she needed to go, and then I let her go." She whispered the whole thing, feeling guiltier with every word.
"Lily! It's not your job to take everything the Slytherins dish out, the fact that someone is in the Hospital Wing is the fault of the people who did the attacking. Not you. Even if you saw Jenny, it's the prefects fault more than yours, for leaving her."
"But they didn't know that there was a group of Slytherins wandering the castle. I did."
Karen seemed to waver for a moment, but she pressed on.
"Lily, this isn't your fault! It's no one's fault, except the people who did it. You can bet they aren't beating themselves up about this, so don't you dare let them get to you. They've hurt you once, don't let them do it again."
"But I just want to see her! Just for a minute!"
"She's not here, Miss Evans, she's been taken to Saint Mungo's, as I've just said. Professor Dumbledore's accompanied her, but I expect he will have a meeting arranged for you to go speak to him."
"Is she going to be okay?"
"I couldn't possibly d-"
"Please?" she begged, feeling herself waver close to tears. Madame Pomfrey seemed to relent a little.
"It's serious, she's not going to be back at the school for a while… but I think she'll live."
"Thank you." She muttered, before making her way to her next class, which was Potions. There was a horrible, panicky moment when she passed through the corridor to the dungeons, and walked past the statue behind which she had hidden behind the night before. Forcing herself to keep walking, despite the fact that the air seemed to have turned to treacle and walking forward had become a monumental task.
The fact that she even managed to reach the Potions classroom was a miracle, given how distracted she found herself, so it was never particularly likely that she was going to be able to pay a lot of attention to the class itself, but she decided to go to it anyway. When she made it to the classroom, she realised that her detour to the Hospital Wing had led her to be fifteen minutes late.
She knew that Slughorn wasn't likely to say anything, but she wasn't looking forward to the attention that was always brought to the person coming in late.
Forcing her eyes to the floor, she pushed the door open and entered the class. The class was already in progress with occasional bangs cutting through the hissing and bubbling of cauldrons along with the hum of conversation as people colluded, asking one another what they were doing wrong.
She made a beeline for where Slughorn was trying to salvage a potion that was looking, and smelling like burnt liquorice.
"Professor, I'm sorry that I'm late." She didn't offer a reason. As it turned out, she didn't need to, the professor simply nodded and allowed her to begin the classes work.
Within ten minutes, she had overtaken both Jac's and Peter's progress with the potion and was closing in on the others, who were looking increasingly frustrated. She wasn't paying a great deal of attention, but Potions was the subject where she was most likely to still manage to succeed at whatever task had been set. She was counting as she stirred the potion, focussing all her limited attention on the contents of the cauldron.
She was doing this to get her mind off of the thoughts of Jenny, and, though they were less frequent, thoughts of James and Iris.
As was frequent to happen, she found the classroom around her dissolving. Thankfully, this was not a result of her potion going awry, but because of her fascination with the art of potion-making. There was something about the subtle changes in a potions colour, or scent, that you had to pay a great deal of attention to detect, and the way reacting to them could change your resulting concoction. It was the sort of attention that drew you away from everything around you, and it could make you forget that there was anything going on in the world that was not directly related to the potion. There was the cauldron, the ingredients, the potion itself and that was all.
Perhaps it was this level of focus that made it all the more jarring when someone or something else intruded on this solitude. That was the reason, as Lily told herself, that she was so skittish and startled when she heard her name being hissed across the table, by a person she wouldn't have chosen to talk to.
"Oi, Lily!"
Her eyes flew up, and she looked questioningly at James, who she knew without a doubt was the person who had been speaking to her. She didn't answer since she wasn't altogether sure that she could remember any words but she nodded falteringly.
"Can you help? What do you do to stop the potion spitting?" He waved her over, and despite the fact that she really didn't want to be closer to James than she needed to, she had to help him. He did look pretty desperate.
"Can't you just turn it down?"
"Wow, Evans, I didn't think of that!"
"Alright, no need for the sarcasm. I don't see anyone else helping you!" Now that she looked up, every one of their friends was bowing their heads and looking studiously at their ingredients. She thought that she could almost sense some scheme, especially when she noticed that Sirius was staring so intently at his half-chopped Gurdyroots that she wondered if it had just started speaking to him.
"No, fair enough, seriously though, fix this for me?"
"I'm not a miracle worker!" she answered as she pointed her wand at the flames flickering beneath the cauldron stand and the fire dimmed slightly.
"Okay… what was the last thing you did?"
"I… probably added that stuff… no, I stirred it, so step six?"
She set about salvaging James' cauldron, and hopefully the potion inside of it too. She spent the rest of the class running back and forward between the two sides of the table, managing her own potions progress and occasionally stopping James from adding something to the potion that would have caused an issue. It was hard work, but she didn't mind because she ended up being busy enough that it wasn't awkward and she didn't have to talk about Iris, or about her being annoyed with James about the Mulciber-explosion incident.
It was uncomfortable to be both annoyed with someone for being immature, and also be upset about setting them up with a girl because you liked them yourself, which was overwhelmingly immature. She had resolved this by speaking about nothing but Potions, which worked while they were in class, but she had decidedly less to say on the topic of hallways, or lunch. There was only so many times you could ask if someone wanted some more food passed to them before it got slightly weird.
Eventually, she had to choose one of the topics of issue between her and James and raise it; it was overwhelming to be so separated from someone that, despite the issues between them at the moment, had recently become one of her best friends.
"So, how's Iris?"
"Dunno." He answered through a mouthful of food. "I haven't spoken to her since this morning."
"Yeah, but how was she this morning?"
If he found her sudden Iris obsession strange, he breezed past it and finished his mouthful, turning to look at her.
"She was fine… why?"
"So?" She asked, raising her eyebrows excitedly. She might not have wanted them to date, but she wasn't going to let anyone see that.
"What?"
"So… are you going?"
"I thought I'd finish my lunch to be honest!"
"No, are you going to go on a date with Iris?"
James looked uncomfortably around, and Sirius struck up a loud conversation with Remus. Lily watched as James stared at Sirius, looking almost betrayed. Then, he became fixated with the ceiling. She could tell that there was something that she wasn't being told, and she knew that whatever it was, everyone around her, not just James, knew it too.
"James?" she waved her hand in front of his face, and spent a good five minutes getting his attention.
Finally, he was forced to acknowledge her when she grabbed his face and forcibly turned it towards her.
"Look at me, would you? What's going on?"
"Sorry? What?" He apparently thought that he had been subtle in his ignoring her, and was really acting as if she had been waving calmly at him from across a crowded room, easily overlooked rather than waving a hand in front of him.
She knew that there was something very worth finding out, but she wasn't going to force it out of him. She could see that he was uncomfortable and, as nice as it was to not be the one in the position of discomfort and the one who was obviously lying, she felt sorry enough that she decided to drop it.
"So… I think I'm going to go to the library for a bit, do some of the homework… I'll see you in Transfiguration?"
Before anyone could offer to come with her, she pulled her bag onto her shoulder, pushed her plate away slightly bad-temperedly, and left in quite a rush.
At the very least, being in the library removed the distractions of James and Iris. However, this left her free to put all her energy into worrying about Jenny and feeling guilty that she hadn't stopped the attack. Cloistered in the very back of the library, right outside the restricted section where the least of the limited foot traffic passed through, she tried to read her textbook.
The words on the page blurred, and swirled dangerously and she found herself almost incapable of thinking about anything other than the last she had seen of Jenny as she rounded the corner away from Lily and towards the waiting Slytherins. She couldn't even think about going to the dungeon entrance to continue her plan. It hadn't helped Jenny, so what was the point of any of that nonsense? She couldn't help feeling that her whole plan had been the response of a child to a very adult problem.
She didn't know what she ought to do, but she didn't think that it was going to involve hiding behind a statue for hours and then going for a rest in the Common Room.
It was just as she was wondering what the more mature response would be that she heard someone dump their bag on the table on the other side of the bookcase she was behind. She looked through the spaces in the books, and saw, with a swooping sort of fear, that it was Severus.
