And The Beat Goes On
Disclaimer: You know it's Rowling's, I know it's Rowling's… why lower my self-esteem further by forcing me to declare it?
Summary: James get beat up, Albus and Minerva talk about the war between love and hate, Ally and Remus get back together… again…
Author's Note: Way too lazy.
* * *
When you were young and on your own
How did it feel to be alone?
I was always thinking
Of games that I was playin'
How to make the best of my time
But only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart
And if your world should fall apart…
I have a friend I've never seen
He hides his head inside a dream
Someone should call him
And see if he can come out
Try to make sure that he's fine
But only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart
And if your world should fall apart…
-Everlast, Only Love Can Break Your Heart
* * *
Dawn on the ninth of December brought with it the first snowfall of the year. In the sixth-year boys' dormitory, where James, Remus, Sirius, and Andy were awoken by the extreme cold and the six inches of snow that had blown in the window.
Andy was relatively safe- he was far from the window and he'd had the curtains round his bed pulled shut.
James, second to the window, had snow blown under his curtains and woke up with a very cold nose. Frost covered his glasses, which lay on the bedside table.
Sirius had been too knackered to close his curtains, and the pile of melting wet snow on his covers was not a pleasant thing to wake up to. "Ugh… gross."
Remus, who had the bed by the window, actually had frostbite. And a cold. A sneeze awoke the rest of the room's occupants. Suddenly a breeze ruffled the stack of papers sitting on his trunk, blowing them all over the room. Remus groaned- it was cold and he didn't feel like getting out of bed. With a half-hearted wave of his wand, the window slammed shut.
Sirius rubbed his eyes and gathered up a few of the drawings that had blown onto his bed, shuffling through them. The first was of a frustrated James and an absolutely livid Lily, yelling at each other across the common room. He passed that one over to James, who just scowled at him. Second was one that looked like a future James and Lily- close together near a warm fire, snuggling. As tempted as he was to keep that one, he kept looking through the rest. There were several other drawings- a stag, a wolf, a lion, a dog, and one of Mioré watching Sirius when Sirius was unaware of it (Sirius carefully folded that one and stuck it under his pillow). The last drawing in the stack that had buried Padfoot only moments earlier, however, easily took the cake (and Sirius' breath away).
It was a simple charcoal drawing, exquisitely detailed, the only color being a bit of gold and violet for accentuating important details. And she certainly didn't look like anyone Sirius knew- except Allya, but even then the only resemblance was the eyes: the drawing was a smidgen too tall and the golden hair was far too long and curly. Sirius just shook his head and handed the papers over to Remus, thinking, That boy had it bad… It didn't occur to him to check the date at the bottom of the drawing… if he had checked, he would have seen that it was marked as 'December 7th'.
"What happened?" Andy, who had just cleared the fog from his brain, asked.
"We had the window open," Remus apologized. "Sorry."
Sirius did his best to quell the shivers that were coursing through his body, but found that he could not and so he rose to shower. Fifteen minutes later, while dressing, he swore loudly.
"What now, Sirius?" James mumbled from outside the bathroom door.
"Might want to do a Warming Charm on your knickers before you dress, boys…"
The girls' dorm was just the opposite.
"Great wizards, it's hot in here!" Lily grumbled, opening one eye to the dormitory. No wonder- the fire was blazing and all the windows were closed to the snow. Snow? She yanked the nearest window open and stuck her head out- yes, it was snowing already. Lily turned her head in both directions, taking in the beautiful white-covered landscape. It's gorgeous.
Her thoughts were rather rudely interrupted by a wake-up call in the form of a big, fat, wet snowball sent in her direction by the boy who had once been the object of her every fantasy. Spitting out a great mouthful of snow, she cursed colorfully at James Potter, and added, "I don't know what I ever saw in you! You make me sick!"
James gave a cocky grin. "That's not what you said last night," he shouted back, and was promptly hit in the face by another wet snowball, this one dyed bright blue, formed from the snow on the windowsill.
"Sicko." Lily ducked her head back inside, slamming the window rather harder than was necessary. That boy made her so mad…
"Am I to take it that you've been antagonizing Mr. Potter again, and lost?" Allya asked, propping herself up on one arm and quirking an eyebrow at her redheaded friend.
Lily scowled. "He started it," she pouted.
Allya cackled until the window opened again and a large lump of snow landed on her face.
In the Great Hall that morning, there was a good row between a certain 6th-year boy and a certain 6th-year girl, both in Gryffindor. Eventually, this resulted in a black eye for James and detention for Lily, which was unusual as she was almost always impeccably behaved.
"Honestly," Sirius grouched to Remus, "you'd think we were in first year again."
"Oh," Allya couldn't help but overhear. "You mean, they've fought like this before?"
Remus and Sirius laughed at her question. "They couldn't stand each other until the end of fourth year," Remus replied when he could speak again. "They hated each other- at least, when we were around."
"Yeah," Sirius snickered. "But once we hid under James' Invisibility Cloak and spied on them, and they were actually civil to each other."
The ghost of Siren O'Maley interjected, "I remember when we used to tease them about that… that the two top students in their year couldn't even get along, even though they were in the same house and had all the same friends."
Sirius' grin widened, if that was at all possible. "If I recall correctly, that's part of what got them together in the first place." It was at this point that his features took on the 'I-have-a-brilliant-diabolical-plan-to-get-people-who-hate-each-other-back-together-again' look.
Allya stopped him before he could speak. "Don't intervene, Sirius," she said, more severely than she'd intended.
Sirius and Remus exchanged glances. "Diviner thing?" they asked together, grinning.
Ally let the smallest of her 'all-will-be-revealed' smiles cross her face. "Maybe."
Within a few weeks of the hair-cutting (Lily was still mourning over Allya's lost hair), it became apparent that something unusual was happening to it.
Ally awoke the Monday after a relatively easy transformation, looked in the mirror, and frowned at her reflection. She supposed that, before, the weight of incredibly long hair had straightened it beyond what was simply straight- it was long and heavy and cracked around her like a whip whenever she let it down. Now, however, being cut nearly to her chin, it was- and oh, how she hated to think it-
Curling. Her hair was curling! And oh, how she hated it. Allya let out a frustrated sigh and tamed it back into a bun- that way, no one could tell that her hair was no longer its gorgeously straight self.
"Morning, Goldilocks," Remus called from the breakfast table.
Ally gave him a look. Remus cringed. "Do. Not. Call. Me. Goldilocks!" she whispered, in a mock-deadly voice. "Nobody calls me Goldilocks."
This elicited a grin from her friend. His witty reply- which undoubtedly would have been witty, if I hadn't written it- was interrupted by the arrival of the mail.
Lily scowled down at the Muggle-letter in her porridge bowl, picked it up as if it were poisonous, and slit it open with her butter-knife. She seemed oddly afraid of its contents.
The scowl deepened to a disgusted frown as she read all the way through it- an invitation to her Muggle sister's terrible wedding to a revolting man, written on a botched invitation in imperfect calligraphy. Her reply was short and to the point-
Pet-
You know I'd never come to your horrible wedding.
-Lily
P.S.: Doesn't that awful Vernon bear an uncanny resemblance to a fat pig?
And, just to make her point, she sent it back with an owl, knowing her sister would be furious with her and relishing the very idea of it. Needless to say, Lily was in a very sour mood after her detention, which involved cleaning the boys' toilets on the third floor. She thought McGonagall was being a tad harsh on her for that, but the Head of the House's intentions were still not quite clear to the girl- Don't fight with Potter.
That night in Dumbledore's office…
"Come in, Minerva."
She did so, not quite hiding her annoyance that he always knew when she was there, and, with a great sigh, flopped down into one of his oversized chairs that badly needed replacing. "I don't see how it's going to work, Headmaster," she confessed after a long period of silence. "Potter and Evans… well…"
Dumbledore looked at her, expecting her to continue. "Yes?"
"Well, sir," she said, squirming under his intent gaze, "they appear to, um…" she faltered. "Well, to be frank with you, I think they hate each other."
Dumbledore laughed for the first time in what felt like ages. "But of course they do, my dear professor!" he exclaimed, wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes. "It's only to be expected, after all. But they'll get over it."
"They'll get over it?" Minerva echoed. And then, "What do you mean, 'it's only to be expected'?"
The Headmaster's expression grew somber. "My dear Minerva," he said gently (and perhaps a little bitterly), "They've broken each other's hearts. Who, in this world that is so quickly becoming deprived of love, would not hate someone after that?"
"This is getting confusing," Allya complained to Remus, Sirius, and Mioré.
"What is?" Sirius asked.
"I think I lost you after the third black eye incident."
"Ah," Sirius said. "Second year." He and Mioré snickered a little. "We weren't there," he explained. "We didn't see anything, but…" A fit of laughter swallowed the last few words.
Mioré had to continue. "We heard it. Jimbo made a comment about her hair, and the next thing we heard was the sound of flesh-on-flesh." She punched a fist into her hand to demonstrate.
Allya grimaced. "Ouch. I get the feeling that's going to happen more and more often around here…"
James chose that minute to enter the room behind the portrait of Sir Cadogan, nursing a(nother) black eye, holding his glasses in one hand, and cursing softly.
He didn't even want to know why Remus, Sirius, Mioré and Ally were laughing so hard.
Godshit, he thought, conjuring some ice for his swollen face. Never would have thought Kat Silvera would have done that…
He'd just been rather summarily dismissed by a seventh-year Ravenclaw he'd asked out- and, he reflected ruefully, perhaps the comment he'd made about being every non-Slytherin girl's fantasy had been a little up on himself. She always seemed so sweet, too, he thought dryly.
Allya said something he didn't quite catch.
"Sorry, what was that?" he asked.
"I inquired," she said in a semi-irritated voice, "whether you had another run-in with Mrs Po- um, Miss Evans."
James didn't even notice her slip. "Kat Silvera," he answered, "really doesn't like guys who are full of shit."
"Like you," Sirius said.
"Like me," James agreed ruefully, trying not to bleed too much.
Lily tried hard not to look up when the noisy troop that was her fellow sixth-years entered the Gryffindor Tower, but something just yanked her head up. What she saw actually brought her up off of her feet and over to her friends (and James). She squinted in the dim light, brought her face close to his, pulled back, and announced, "I didn't do that."
Sirius grinned. "Correct, if a little surprising."
Lily just shook her head at him. "And where have you five been all afternoon? I didn't see you at dinner…"
"Oh," Remus said vaguely, "around."
"Around?"
"Around," Allya confirmed, leading Remus out of the common room and into the girls' dormitory by the hand.
Sirius watched them go with an amused expression- "Here we go again," he muttered, unable to contain his utter lack of surprise. He, too, left the common room, headed for the boys' dormitory. However, he did happen to overhear Lily's next few words-
"You know, you've got to start taking better care of yourself. It wouldn't do for this to get infected…"
Sirius allowed his grin to spread unchecked across his handsome visage. Everything was as it should be… for the time being.
THE END
