There was quite a bit of protest about that last chapter, and you can find the mashed-potato recap below :) Aren't I getting so much better about the updating? Only two weeks! Hope you like!
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"Lily, please, I don't know what went wrong, but I promise, I swear, that I can explain myself to you," he said in quiet desperation, the sadness cracking at the back of his throat. Lily looked almost ready to consider the option, but she blinked tightly, sending a stream of salt down her cheeks, and shook her head. She gasped as a sob escaped her and stood up. Her nose was red, her eyes puffy, and the tears ran down her face in a constant stream. Her shoulders shook as though she was laughing, just as they had been laughing together this morning…
"Lily, don't do this! I don't know what went wrong, but I'll fix it, I swear!" he said in one last desperate attempt. His heart was breaking, a tear rolled unnoticed out of the corner of his eye.
Lily, through the tears, through the pain managed to utter a few last words. "James Potter," she said with vengeance, as if the words were poison, "I hate you." And with the finality of those statements, and with the perverseness that they entailed, for at this moment, this very moment, she knew she truly loved him, she picked up her heaping plate of mashed potatoes and flung it in his face.
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Chapter 24 ~ Things Unheard and Things UnTold
Sitting in the middle of the Great Hall with gravy dripping into his lap and mashed potatoes in his nose and mouth, wondering what on earth had just happened to him, James Potter—Quidditch star, Head Boy, superb student, an Adonis if there ever was one, and generally admired and respected young man—began to tear up. There were still some mashed potatoes on his face, of course, so no one noticed, but he cried all the same. It was an angry cry, the kind of cry that you resented. He didn't want to be crying, he wanted to be happy. But the world didn't matter, not the other students, not the Marauders, and not the sixth and seventh year Gryffindor girls who had let up a small cheer of happiness when he had been drenched in whipped vegetable glory.
He didn't know how many people saw or really even cared. He set his elbows on the table, hung his head, and then viciously wiped the mashed potatoes off his face with his napkin in one full swipe. He was silent, then, for a good solid minute. Even Remus, next to him, had ceased eating, wondering if James was going to do something drastic. Tears fell onto the plate in front of him, though only Remus was close enough to see. To everyone else who cared to look, it would only seem like James was trying to save face.
"Prongs, buddy," Remus offered helpfully, though there was nothing much else for him to say. It would be unfair to encourage him because it really did seem like there was no hope. Lily had walked out of the Great Hall with as much dignity as she could manage, and, from the look of it, had headed in the opposite direction than the Gryffindor dormitories. James went rigid as soon as Remus had spoken, and jerkily he sat up and stalked out of the Great Hall. His eyes reflected like headlights belonging to a lost car on an unfamiliar road, and as he walked past, as the other girls whispered, Cecil Aveneere wondered if she had made some sort of dreadful mistake.
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Back from the Kitchen earlier that afternoon, Cecil had walked determinedly up to the Gryffindor Tower and into her dorm, where Lily and Laura were lying down on their beds in the midst of a burst of giggles. Seeing the anger boiling in her face, they had both immediately straightened and worriedly enquired if anything was wrong. Their peckish questions were a little too much for Cecil to handle as she tried to settle her nerves.
"I almost committed a murder, does that count?" she had said rudely, fuming, not at them, but at James, who, as she had violently envisioned, was falling down a long, long, staircase that didn't really exist anywhere in the school. Laura and Lily shut up immediately, though their mouths were by no means closed. They exchanged a glance and Laura issued a tiny, weak, nervous laugh.
"Ha ha," she forced out. "Cecil, you're kidding, right?" Cecil sighed loudly.
"Of course I'm kidding. I just meant that I'm really, really, pissed off." Lily had instantly thought to do a Cheering Charm, but was then rather afraid that Cecil would do something extreme like break her wand in half. Lily was fond of her wand, a swishy 10 ¼ inch willow work of beauty, and so she decided to leave it in her dresser drawer and try a more primitive attempt at calming her friend.
"Cecil, whatever it is, I'm sure you'll feel better if you just take a couple seconds to calm down," she said with a reassuring smile, rubbing her friends back slowly as she joined Lily on her bed. Laura joined them both.
"Yes," she added, "It's best if you just wait it out." Cecil, then, waiting possibly a millisecond, blurted out loudly, "It's about James."
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James walked away, not to look for Lily, because he was positive that she didn't want to see him, but up to the Head Boy/Girl Bathroom Suite. He knew she wouldn't be up there, if she truly wanted to avoid him she would go somewhere where she was completely out of bounds to him. Nevertheless, he had rather hoped that he would find the small sign read "OCCUPIED" in large red letters on the bathroom door down the main passage, but he didn't. The word "FREE" blasted him in the eye like a dart, scorning him. Passing by, he instead headed to the study further down that passage that was provided for their use. They had each separately used the room once or twice since the term had started, but never at the same time. James had had quite a few fantasies and he, Lily, and this room before, but as horribly impossible as they had seemed before, the odds were now ten times worse.
His heart weighed him down as he walked. Ponderously he made his way across the room, walking for no purpose except for to walk. Every step he took to the large couch seemed to echo with another theory of what he had done wrong.
She found out about the medicine. Step.
She thinks that I was just using her. Step.
She hated me all along and was so disgusted with herself for kissing me that she just couldn't handle it. Stomp.
He didn't particularly like the sound of that one.
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Lily's eyes had widened. As she sat on the bed in the late afternoon her back went rigid, her neck muscles went tight, and her jaw opened and closed many times, as if she was an infant and was just learning how to speak.
"What about James?" she had said queasily, her voiced trembling. Instantly she had known it was bad. Cecil was so good-natured, so playful, and so jubilant that it was hard to make her so angry. But at that moment Cecil had been livid, positively livid, and Lily's heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach. With each passing heartbeat, each loud, painful beat, a new horrible thought had passed through her mind.
Maybe he doesn't really want to go out with me. Thump-bump.
Or maybe he thinks I was just having a bit of fun. Thump-bump.
Or worse, what if he doesn't really like me? Thump-bump.
"Oh, Lily!" Cecil had cried emphatically, "He doesn't really like you!"
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The painful details of what she had said wouldn't leave his mind. Every moment was replayed. Every instant when she paused and he was given a chance to intercede, to object, was recalled and stretched callously across his memory. Each second was elongated into a mile of time, a long, painful mile that he ran across painfully with rapidly shortening breath. Every word, every twitch of the eyebrow, every tear was remembered, analyzed, and remembered fruitlessly again. He was flooded, flooded with thoughts of Lily, and he was drowning miserably.
There were the words that made him cringe, and cry, and want to slap himself at their irony.
Did it slip your mind, perhaps, before you kissed me, to ask if I minded being used?
There were the ones that made him wonder what he had done to make him worse than the Devil, the ones that made him question the interpretation of every movement he had ever made in her presence, of every word he had ever uttered that could have possibly made it to her ear.
I should have stayed away from you after Evelyn, and definitely after Laura, but I didn't. I take part of the blame.
And then there were the ones he loathed, then ones he wished he could sweep away with a broom and dump into the trashcan in his mind, mingling with the forgotten mistakes of the past. Those were the ones that made him understand the pain that made someone want to take a razor to their wrist.
Now, though, I'm paying more attention to my friends and less to the scum like you.
There were the words that made his lungs swell with regret…
I can assure you that I certainly don't like you anymore.
… anymore—the word haunted him, unconsciously filling him up with hope, hope that he knew he didn't deserve to have, and yet treasured it all the same…
We, we had such good times together, and you were always so nice…
The words that made him feel that if he had only acted sooner, just one or two moments sooner, everything would have been alright, and filled him still with so much hope that he could float. But the guilt of it all weighed him down, the feeling that if he could just take everything back and start over the world would be perfectly blissful. And then he was punctured with the realization of what she thought now…
James Potter, I hate you.
She had sat there, all the while crying, as if she didn't really want to believe what she was saying, telling him the lies of his heart, that he had used her, lead her on, and disposed her. She had said that, Everything was lies, wasn't it? And yet none of it truly was, except how he had incessantly drilled into his mind that he thought of her as nothing more than a friend. That was his mistake, and now it was too late. And while she spoke of his horrid thoughts, his scandalous acts, he had sat there dumbly, so disbelieving that he couldn't manage to utter the one savior word.
No.
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Cecil had then recounted to Lily all she had heard in the empty classroom. Enraged by the offence, the places of silence when perhaps one or two more words had been uttered, and the blindness when her cover was in danger weren't mentioned. The entire two or three minutes of dialogue, too, that she had missed, was expurgated—whittled down to no more than a handful of seconds of complete silence. Cecil hadn't even realized what she had done, let alone its consequences.
Lily, impressionable in her self-doubt, didn't question it for a second. It had seemed so much more believable that James wouldn't like her than that he actually would. Why hadn't he asked her out? Why had he looked so surprised when she kissed him back? It all made more sense this way, and she had slowly convinced herself that it was true. She had lain on her bed and cried, imagining what she would do when she saw him at dinner. She saw him not being able to say anything, to beg for forgiveness for being so horrible to her, to gently try and let her down as he explained how much he liked Ada. All of these scenarios, and dozens and dozens more she had imagined. Some had ended with her becoming so enraged with him that she kissed him passionately to shut him up, while others ended in her running away in tears as he told her quite plainly that he really didn't like her a bit.
She hadn't planned what to do upon entering the Great Hall, but she had strode bravely over to James, attempting to look as happy as possible so that she would seem perfectly content while she told him how much she hated him. She couldn't handle the stress of telling so many great lies, and after only a few moments she had begun to cry. She had been so, so intent on making him feel positively horrible that she didn't realize she was doing the same thing to herself.
If you honestly… If you honestly… If you honestly didn't like me James, I don't see why you had to pretend, to lead me on like that.
Those words, they had hurt for her to say them, as if she was accepting that she had been strung along mercilessly and then broken to pieces. What killed her though, what made her want to scream, was how he had looked at her. He could find no words, or very few, anyway, but he had looked at her in a way that almost made her forget everything she was going to say. And she had broken a little bit; she had let him slip him.
We, we had such good times together, and you were always so nice…
And he had begged, saying the same thing again and again, pleading with her. I don't understand, I don't know what went wrong, please don't cry. How could he have been so convincing that he loved her when she knew he didn't? He was horrible—utterly, utterly horrible.
She knew she couldn't bear to see him. That's why instead of to Gryffindor, she headed to Ravenclaw, where soon after dinner she was comforted by Robyn's rational thoughts, given a bed to sleep in, and left peacefully alone. While she lay there James still laid on the couch in the study, convinced that he was utterly, utterly horrible as well.
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Late that night—much, much later than even Lily or James had gone to bed, even tormented by their thoughts of each other—two girls walked to the Headmaster's office. No teachers were met on the way there. Mrs. Norris and Mr. Filch were avoided as well, evading the nighttime student prowlers.
"Do we really have to do this?" the smaller girl asked, clasping her hands tight around a tiny, clear sphere.
The other girl, didn't answer, tears in her eyes. She merely nodded her head in assent.
The two girls headed to Dumbledore's office, not once doubting whether or not he would be in his office at such a late time as to almost be considered early. They knew the password, though it had just been changed the night previous, and walked in to find Dumbledore sitting quietly at his desk, just as they had known he would be.
"Hello, girls. I knew you would be coming tonight, in a much different way that you knew I was going to be here, though. And I do know what you came for, and you really can't have it," he said simply, picking up his quill to sign a letter. He sealed it and held it out to the older girl. When she did not take it he sat back down, regarded the letter again, and disposed of it.
"The blessed and cursed kin you are," he said wearily. "Aveneere," he said quietly. "Tellers of the future. One of the last, preserved by odd means, I daresay. Not quite Seers, and yet…" he wandered off dreamily. "And yet," he reaffirmed, as if he had never intended to finish the thought at all.
"You came for your Stone, Cecil, and you cannot have it. I am sorry. And Genna, I will have to take yours, too, just as I took your sister's in her first year," he said sternly. "I had not realized you would both be so imprudent." He gazed at them deeply through his spectacles.
"Dumbledore, I have made a horrible mistake," Cecil said. "I—"
"I know what has passed, Cecil," Dumbledore assured her. "There isn't much I know of that takes place within these walls, but your friends are of a different sort. You, as every Teller before you, must pass the Rite before assuming privilege of your Stone again." Cecil sunk in her chair.
"I just can't bear it! I can't bear knowing that I could have known, and that I might have avoided the mess altogether," Cecil said, tears stinging her eyes. "I'm ready for whatever test I have to pass. Give the Rite to me this instant and I will pass," she said desperately. Dumbledore shook his head sadly. Genna looked frightened and continued to watch meekly from her chair.
"The test every human must pass, Cecil, Genna, is the test which puts our instinct, our resolve, against every other force. You must learn to rely on yourself, and to trust yourself to do the right thing. There are many such tests in one's life, and you may not even realize it when they come along. Before the Rite, you must learn to conquer yourself. It is not an easy task," he replied wearily. "You have simply shown me tonight that you have a long way to go before you reach this point, Cecil." Cecil nodded her head gravely and stood up to leave and Genna soon stood up too.
"Goodnight Professor," Cecil said and put her hand on Genna's shoulder. "Come on, Genna, let's go." Cecil guided her sister to the door and had already opened the passageway when Dumbledore called.
"Cecil? Cecil, could you please bring back young Ms. Aveneere's Stone? Yes, that's it, right there is just fine," he said amicably, directing her where to set it down. Then in a sterner voice, he continued, "You are an influential young woman, Ms. Aveneere, with or without your Stone. You caused what happened tonight, and it is still in your ability to undo it. That is not a power of magic, or a gift, but simply the power of the human heart. We are complicated beings, and there are things within yourself that you must master before the Stone," he finished quietly. "Now, goodnight," he said, and watched Cecil leave with a considerably larger amount of sadness than before. Yes, she still had a long way left to go.
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Yes, that is a very, very short chapter. The shortest I've written in awhile, I think. Though, I think it's pretty good content-wise, even if it's lacking length. Only 2,900 words, yipes! Oh well, I hope you liked it anyway. I was wondering if ANYONE at all picked up on the Aveneere/Avenir thing I had going on. Yes? No? Well, in the next chapter you can be assured to see (dun dun dun!) revealed histories, mortal plans, and L/J dramadramadrama (that's a lot of drama, in case you didn't pick up on that =D)
Mwaz,
Naavi
THANK YOUS: Amelia Bedelia: Okay, I'm not one to turn down a dare: That was so sweet that you said I was sweet for you being sweet for me being sweet for you being sweet, and this is so sweet I feel like I just ate seventy-billion candy bars! *whew* don't know what happened at the end there, but as always, thanks for being SO Sweet ;) Ariana: Yeah, it sorta seemed like Sirius screwed it up before, but everything happens for a reason, and if I had the choice for a good story with L/J together the whole time I would be all for it… Sadly my writing mind works in odd ways, so they aren't together… *sigh* the drama… oh well, thanks for the review! Ayla Pascal: Hahaha, your review had me cracking up ::squeals fangirishly:: I loved it! Thanks for the review as always! Britz: I am waiting oh-so-patiently for your email. As in, there are practically claw marks in my desk, but that's okie-dokey by me! Take a vaca because you deserve one! I'm guessing there were some more problemos with the computer, but I hope they are resolved quickly! Miss ya! Mwaz bubblegum*girl: haha, no you really didn't sound like my mother… she might have been more like, aphrodisiac? You wrote the word aphrodisiac, you know what it means? I think she forgets I'm fifteen o_O' anyway, thanks SO much for reviewing! Calypzo: Love the sn, and sososo happy you reviewed. Everyone who was so mad in their review made me laugh so hard…. Not that I was laughing at *you* No, no definitely not… mwaz and thanks Confuzzler: Ahh, no don't come in after my characters! They are only used to me torturing them and might get… *gasp* CONFUZZLED!!! Haha, okay… well… it was funny inside my head. Anyway, thanks for the compliment and the review, love ya much Cquill13: Yay! I'm SO glad that you are back! I always loved your reviews, and I'm happy that I could finally return the favor by reviewing you. Thanks sososo much! I can't wait to hear from you again! Emotionless: Thanks for the review! Hermione Granger: Wow, what a compliment. JKR is a goddess, and even being mentioned in the same sentence with her is like a compliment (unless its like, wow you could never be like JKR you write like crap, but you get the pic) Thanks SO much! Kaeera: How can you say that your review doesn't count? It counts a lot! I hoped I semi- returned the favor by reviewing your fic. I'll be sure to be much better about it in the future! Mwaz Le Chat Qui Garde Le Lune: I've missed you! Thanks so much for coming back to check this out! It means a lot. And I can't believe how many good stories you have now…. So many! Not like I'm one to talk, but update them quickly, please! Liz: Thanks for reading LP! Haha, I didn't expect many ppl to say that they liked the whole "I hate you" thing, but you surprised me! Matrices: Sorry I didn't fulfill your request about l/j action, but hopefully the conflict is appearing more to you now. But that might be in chapter 25… hm, I don't remember and I am too lazy to check. Anyway, I promise that this is getting much much more interesting plot-wise. It's just taking awhile because I'm trying to be JKRish and have lots of little parts wind together in the end. Whew, long explanation. Thanks again! Min Hee Ha: Yeah! Min is back for good! Sound the horns, start the parade… lock naavi in a mental asylum… yes, yes, yes, its just all in a day's work. Thanks so much for the review, and for putting up with my insanity. mwaz Myri canari: Sorry about the long words and the confuzzling… I don't mean to! The words the door uses are part of his character, so they won't be changed, but you won't see him much for awhile now, if that helps. Thanksabunch! Oh and sorry this is later than you expected! Parselmouth Majere: Ah! Don't be pissed at me! Just think of it this way, when they finally get together it will be that much better (I get excited just thinking about the finale!) It'll be worth it! Stace: Wow! I can't believe this is the best fanfic you have ever read! I suggest MochaButterfly's d/g fic (it's on my faves) and even if you don't like d/g you'll probably like this one. Thanks for reading! PrincessLesse: Thanks for the reviews of this and of ANLL (though I won't be continuing that one for awhile. I do have a rough chapter plan written and the skeletons for the next few chappies, but I'm concentrating on LP) I'm glad you liked last chapter so much, and hope that this shortie wasn't too much of a disappointment ;) mwaz Tinyiel: Glad you came to check this fic out, and I'm happy that I could be of some use to you at your start of ff.net. Vanessa: Hope everything for the scarlet letter went well, I definitely know about procrastinating on homework. Take now, for instance, my Geography book is sitting right next to me. But it looks pretty good right where it is, I think ;) Thanks for reviewing!