So you actually have succeeded in reading the first and second part of this story without abusing your keys as a pillow? Congratulations! I hope that the third part won't make you do it either. – By the way, I already know what'll happen in the fourth part, that's a completely new feeling for me! *g*
Nail a pudding on the wall!
part 3
"Pussycat! Come to Daddy! Just look what Daddy got his nice little darling in Hogsmeade. - Come on, Mrs Norris!"
"Sirius, stop it, it's enough to make you sick!" James pretended to vomit in the bag he held in his hand.
"The end justifies the means, Jamsie." quietly responded his friend, sitting on the floor and watching with a grin the cat of the caretaker that was looking at the little group with an expression of distrust in her eyes and approached the pie which stood on a chair and looked rather innocent.
"D'you think she'll eat it?" Sarah whispered and gazed at Ms Norris with bated breath. The cat was examining the pie carefully, sniffed - and ate it.
With hardly stifled howls of triumph, Jessie, Sarah, Sirius, James, Remus and Lily set off for the Gryffindor common room, made the plate of the pie explode on the way and ran the next few hundred foots, all with broad grins and delighted expressions on their faces.
"Half an hour! Half an hour, and Mrs Norris will roam the grounds as a poisonous-green furball!"
James was almost dancing, then tangled in his robe and rescued himself by common laughter when no one came rush to his aid, despite his theatrical cries for help.
*
"Fancy that! Potter and his fan club!"
Snape.
Lily turned round and narrowed her eyes.
"Oh, you've found your speech again?" She looked slightly dissapointed. "What a pity! I really was hoping that Flitwick would do us and himself a favour in forgetting the countercurse, at least for today."
"You know that I'll get you for this, Lily!" He spat out her name, and added, with a glance at the rest of the group, "you and the rest of you stupid friends."
Sirius sneered contemptuous. "And what are you dreaming at night, Snape?"
The greasy-haired boy looked at him with hate. "You'll be the first one, Black."
He turned round, beckoned his two appendages to follow him and marched off for the Grat Hall.
Lily looked at James, her eyes flashing with anger.
"How far have you gotten with your plan, James? Do you know how to expel him?"
The six Gryffindors started to move in direction of their common room, discussing different ways to get rid of their problem (by name: Severus Snape).
"We, or rather Lily, could send a letter to his father, something about wanting to visit her best friend Severus during the Christmas holidays, and mentioning something about her parents being muggles. I'm sure that his father would make him change schools on the spot."
James shook his head emphatically. "No, Padfoot, I don't think so. First, his father'd believe Snape if he told him that he hates Lily and vice-versa. And then, Lily might be in real trouble."
"And if we'd blame something on him, you know, something really bad? Not just some exploding cauldrons or a few nights out of bed?"
"Good idea, Remus, but what could we blame on him? And how?" Jessie asked, shrugging helplessly.
"Mud or paint all over the trophies?" James suggested.
"And then we leave a message on the wall ‚With my best wishes, Severus Snape'?" Lily giggled. "A bit too obvious, don't you think? Besides, I'm sure that we'd end up scrubbing them afterwards."
"Nah, Lil', it wouldn't be that obvious, everyone here knows that Snape's not the brightest." Sarah grinned wickedly. "But, another suggestion: What if we make him look like a fool, so that he can't even walk down a corridor with everyone laughing at him? After a week or two, he'd be willing to leave the school of his own accord."
Now it was Remus' turn to shake his head. "Snape's not the sort to give up so easily."
"Ugly Smuggler."
Everyone stared at Sarah in disbelief.
"It's the password!" she said unpatiently and climbed through the portrait in the common room.
***
Later that afternoon, the three girls laid outside in the grass. Now, that the sun had shone for several hours ad had warmed up everything, they tried to catch enough sunrises to last them for the rest of the year. Or at least, that was how Sarah had made Lily and Jessie come.
"Know what?" Lily asked sleepily, glancing at her two friends. Jessie had her head on Lily's stomach while Sarah used Jessie as a pillow. "Sometimes I think we need a fourth person. Then I'd have a pillow, too."
Sarah giggled. "Oh, well, Lily, that shouldn't be a problem for you. Just ask James, I'm sure he'd be glad to help."
"That was a great piece of advice, Sarah, thank you very much."
Lily glared at the other two girls that were laughing, but after a second or two, she couldn't but laugh along with them, although she didn't exactly know why.
"So, you'll go to the Ball with him, don't you?"
Jessie had calmed down a bit and looked up at Lily, curiosity in her eyes.
"Yep. Are you happy now, you two?"
"We knew it all the time. Of course you wouldn't turn down James."
"He's my friend, Jessie, not more, and you know that."
Seeing the slightly incredulous expressions on their faces, she sighed.
"Sa, Jess, I know him far too well to fall in love with him. Trying to make James love you is like, uh,... like trying to nail a pudding on the wall, for example."
(A/N: I hope you're happy now. I really do! :-) )
"Lil', if I didn't know it better, I'd almost believe you. Anyway" she quickly changed the topic for not giving Lily the opportunity to contradict, "do you have an idea how I could make Sirius ask me to the Ball? If he doesn't, I mustn't go."
"Why Sirius, Sa? Why don't... er, Remus, for example, or Peter.?"
"If I go with Remus, I'd never ever see the Great Hall decorated for the Ball, you'd kill me before, Jessie-girl. And Peter... I wouldn't go with him even if he begged me to."
Jessie blushed, but couldn't answer, because in this very moment, the three boys aproached, looking as if Snape had been expelled. (Peter was still in the Hospital Wing, a shame he couldn't just stay there for the rest of his miserable life)
"Get up, lazy bones!" Sirius shouted, grinning idiotically. "Bet you haven't seen Mrs Norris yet, have you?"
Jessie, Sarah and Lily got up at once.
"Where?" they asked all together.
"Oh, she's not very keen on being seen like this! She's hiding, but we know where we can find her..."
***
"Whoa! She's gorgeous, isn't she?" Sirius adored the result of their work, a poisonous-green Mrs Norris, that tried to escape his grasp, hissing, biting and scratching at the same time.
"What do you think? How long will this last?" Remus examined a hair the cat had lost in her battle against Sirius.
"She'll need a new skin for the winter, so I guess it's over in one or two months..."
Everyone looked a bit dissapointed after Jessie's answer, but not for a long time.
"Maybe we should repeat this, you know... With blue or something..." James watched the cat, a thoughtful expression in his eyes.
"She'll never eat something we give her again."
"Not if she knows that it's from us."
"True. So what if she thinks it's from Filch?"
The six Gryffindors began to grin broadly.
***
The rest of the day passed by without anything interesting, and before you can say Zonko's Joke Shop, it was Sunday and time for the girls to go to the library for their detention. Although the boys first wanted to help them getting some books from the restricted section, they had changed their minds, apologising that they needed to do something very important, and so Ms Baine chased the girls from one bookshelf to the next, not even allowing them to stop and recover for just one short second.
"What do you think the guys are doing?" Lily asked in an undertone, sorting three heavy books in a shelf near the one Sarah was doing the same thing.
"Uh, I don't know. Probably prowling the castle, trying to get another detention." Sarah answered, carefully avoiding to move her lips.
"What are you two up to?" the loud voice of the librarian interrupted, and that was the last time they could talk for the next few hours.
When they finally left the library, none of the three was ready to go somewhere else than to bed, but after at best two hours, Lily found herself sitting in hers, panting and wondering what the hell had woken her up. A nightmare, probably, but she couldn't remember more that a flash of green light, and she didn't know why some green light should have frightened her.
Frightening or not, Lily realized quickly that she wasn't able to fall asleep again, so she got up, slipped into her dressing gown and went down to the deserted common room and then on the balcony. Maybe the moon was the reason she couldn't sleep. It shone brightly, unless she was very much mistaken, today or tomorrow it was full. She looked at the stars, trying to remember everything she learned in Astronomy, but all she could think of at the moment was Cassiopeia, probably, she was too tired. She was about to leave the balcony, slightly shivering in the cold night, when something caught her eye. A creamy-white stag! That wasn't too unusual, the Forbidden Forest was the home of a countless number of animals. Unusual was that he was accompagnied by a dog and a wolf. Lily closed her eyes. They were far apart, maybe her eyes were just as tired as her head. As she opened them again, they were gone. Lily shook her head, decided that she was imagining things, went back to the girl's dormitory and was fast asleep the moment her head touched the pillow.
***
The next day, in the afternoon, Sirius and Remus sat in the Gryffindor common room and tried to remember the ingredients you need for a seven-days-sleeping potion, when James climbed through the hole and took the seat next to them.
"Let's do something else, I'm not willing to write anything for Potions at the moment. Why don't we go and ask Madam Hooch if we could assist her in her lesson?"
Remus looked suspicious. "Er, whom does she teach this afternoon, Prongs?"
"The Gryffindor and the Ravenclaw third years?" James tried his best to look as innocent as possible.
"Jamie-boy, I know that you can't stand the thought of being away from Lily for more than two seconds, but..."
Sirius was interrupted.
"How do you mean?"
"Well, she's the next one on your list, isn't she?"
Sirius was slightly puzzled to see the relief on James' face. Maybe, he thought, maybe there's more than I think, eh, Prongs? I'll keep my eyes on you, old pal! Aloud, he said:
"As I was about to say when someone interrupted me so rude, why do you think Hooch would let us come?"
"Oh, I thought we'd tell her something about trying to search new talents for our Quidditch team. I'm sure she'll understand that! So, are you coming?"
The two other boys rose.
"'Course we are."
***
Lily gaped in disbelief at some of the girls that stood near their brooms, smiling, giggling, doing their hair and gazing at James.
"Why are they doing that? I mean, that doesn't even look pretty, you could think that they just escaped from a madhouse." she adressed Sarah and Jessie.
"It's quite simple, dear." Sarah smirked. "They're in love."
Lily grumbled. "If I ever fall in love, would you please slap me if I should behave like that?!?"
"So you aren't in love at the moment?"
She turned round, and if James hadn't caught her, she would have fallen down for sure.
"Am I really that frightening?" he joked, but didn't wait for her answer. "Come on, mount your broom, Madam Hooch said you were rather good."
"How flattering." She freed herself from his hands that he had placed around her waist to protect her from falling, careful not to look in the eyes of any of the girls watching her (and James, of course) - she wasn't ready to die.
A few minutes later, when everyone had finally mounted his broom and Madam Hooch's whistle gave them all the signal to leave the ground, Lily flew up, raced around the pitch, then she noticed that James really was in trouble. Encircled by six, maybe seven girls on brooms, he couldn't do anything if he didn't want to hurt someone. Although she couldn't stifle a giggle, when she caught James' pleading eyes, she, Remus and Jessie approached the crowd, and helped him to escape.
"You should look for a bodyguard." Jessie adviced with a rather wicked grin.
James wiped his forehead and smiled wryly.
"As long as I have you three, I don't need any bodyguard. Thanks."
The rest of the lesson, James was teaching Lily tricks, the two of them took to their heels whenever anyone was approaching them.
"Honestly, I don't know why you came to this lesson, James! You should've known that something like that would happen!" Lily was still roaring with laughter every time she recalled the scene.
James didn't laugh, but since they were at a safe distance from the others, he recovered rapidly.
"Uh, yeah, maybe... But I just wanted to see if someone here's good enough for our Quidditch team. By the way: You could try it, if you want."
Lily shook her head emphatically. "No, thank you, but I prefer to watch the games, really."
"If you say so." James shrugged.
***
"What did she say to you?" Sirius asked, and, catching James searching glance, he explained, "The girls wanted to take a shower."
"Oh, okay."
"So?"
"So what?"
"What did she say?"
"Oh, nothing, really." James blushed, a thing that increased Sirius' determination to get an answer.
"Come on, Prongs, you can trust me, you know you can." Sirius ignored James' snort and went on. "I'm sure that Hooch didn't want you to stay just to talk about the weather, eh?"
His friend gave up.
"Okay, she said that the next time I'm after a girl I should try to sort it out when she doesn't teach this girl."
Sirius said nothing, but even if he wanted to, he couldn't: He was rolling on the floor and shrieked with laughter.
*****
There are no complaining persons this time: it's nearly 1 in the morning, and as my holidays are over, I have to get up at 6.30....
Disclaimer: Every person is mine, Hogwarts is mine, the muggle and the wizard world are mine, the universe is mine, you are mine, and if you honestly believe this stuff, then it's time for you to see your shrink.
Mille grazie, merci beaucoup, thank you very much and tausend Dank for reading this. But only to those who review!!!
Saraléa