Dinner was wonderful, as usual. The Great Hall was filled with the usual Christmas decorations, and, emptier than usual, with only five Gryffindors, three Ravenclaws, six Hufflepuffs, and four Slytherins, and Filch, Dumbledore, and the Hogwarts ghosts. The house-elves hadn't made as much food as they usually did; all of the food was situated at one end of each table, where everyone sat.
Lily reached for a baked potato, then remembered what Remus had asked her in the prefect's bathroom. She turned to her neighbor.
"James."
"What?" He looked up quickly.
"Where did you get the idea that I hate you?"
He squirmed a bit. "Well—you always hate to be around me—you never seem to want to get along—what am I supposed to think?"
Lily sat back in her chair, slouching. He had a point. On the other hand, however much she might get ticked at him at certain times, she didn't hate him. She didn't hate anybody, come to that. Not Serena—she didn't feel that Serena was worthy of the time spent to hate her. And there really was no one else that came to mind that she couldn't stand. Severus and Lucius were her good friends, though they were slimy gits to the rest of Hogwarts, excluding the Slytherins. Professor Trelawney was a nutty grasshopper that drove her up the wall millions of times in an hour and a half, but when she got right down to it, she didn't hate her, she despised her. There was an oh-so-subtle difference that she couldn't pin down, but it was there.
"Oh—I don't know. I definitely don't hate you—hate is a stronger word than you know. You annoy me beyond words much of the time, but you're not the least of my problems."
He smiled. "Thanks. I was kinda worried—it's just that I don't know how it happens, but we're always fighting, no matter what."
"That's your own fault."
"Hey! It is not! I—"
To James' left, Sirius groaned loudly. "They're fighting again!"
Lily couldn't help it. She started to giggle loudly.
That night, Lily couldn't sleep. She was so used to giggles from the other beds going on far into the night, and it was hard for her to drop off. Sighing loudly, Lily picked up Very good, Jeeves!, and slipped downstairs after throwing on a long, dark dressing gown. Down in the common room, she placed herself on a largeish sofa with a rather high back, opened her book, and began to read.
Before long, however, she tensed, raised her head, and listened with all her might. Lily recognized those sounds.
Padding, stomping, and whispering seemed to follow the four boys around at night, along with an Invisibility Cloak. So, come to that, did Peter's clumsiness.
"I told you not to step on my feet!"
"I've said I'm sorry!"
"Yeah, well, how you can manage to step on my feet when you're in front of me is more than I can fathom. Will you keep your feet in one place?"
"I'm sorry!"
"Well, you'd better be."
"Sirius, shut up. We don't know if Lily's still up or not."
Hidden behind the sofa, Lily snickered to herself.
"You mean your girlfriend?"
"Sirius, shut up! She isn't, and you know that perfectly well!"
"Well, you two seem to be spending an awful lot of time together, that's all."
"Yeah—what was it, Remus?—tearing each other's jugular veins out through our toes."
"And you were the one that begged me to find out if she hated you or not."
"Is there something wrong with that?"
"Nope," Sirius' cheerful voice agreed. "I want to be godfather, okay?"
"What?" James' enraged whisper bordered on a scream.
"Don't panic, James! You really don't want her coming down here."
"I happen to know that! What the bloody intestine-covered antlers do you mean, you want to be the godfather!?"
"What I said! I want to be your son's godfather!"
"Sirius, shut up."
"You didn't—"
"I know I didn't deny it! I don't need to, all right?"
"Sure. Fine. Whatever." Sirius gave in. "Let's just get out of here, all right?"
"Suits us," the three other boys replied at the same time.
With that, they slid out of the common room and down the corridors, out of the entrance hall, and onto the grounds. Once outside, they discarded the Invisibility Cloak, leaving Sirius to hold it while they raced towards the Whomping Willow. Lily glanced up at the sky, and she noticed that the moon wasn't full yet, though it was more than pretty close. Tomorrow, she judged, or the day after, it would be complete.
Keeping close to the borders of the Forbidden Forest, she watched the four boys stop in front of the Whomping Willow. Peter stopped, nearly frozen in a sort of fear. They others were getting impatient.
"Peter, come on! It's not going to kill you!"
"We'll get you out of it if something wrong stays. You want to help Moony, don't you?"
Remus frowned. "Moony?"
"Yep. You're Moony now. I think I told you that before, though. Just go, Peter!"
Peter gulped one last time, then closed his eyes and, after a few moments, started to shrink. Lily narrowed her eyes as she saw a small rat dash across the lawn and push the knot on the Willow. It froze instantly, and the boys made a dash for the hole in the ground near the roots.
Lily wasted no time, but followed quickly. She slid into the underground corridor and followed the winding earth walls and the whispered whoops as they headed for the Shrieking Shack.
Three feet in front of the door to the Shack, Lily stopped, and inched her way towards a crack, peering through. Her eyebrows mounted her forehead as she saw an assortment of animals inside, standing in front of a mirror; the rat she'd seen before, a large, shaggy, black dog, and an almost silvery stag, whose fur glimmered in the moonlight that came through the cracks in the dilapidated old house. Remus, an expression of joy and excitedness all over his countenance, was sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning from ear to ear.
"You really did it! I don't know how you did, but—oh, you're wonderful!
Lily shook her head several times to clear the thickness that was clouding her brain. Animagi. Animagi. Her friends had managed to become Animagi. Unregistered Animagi. Illegal Animagi. This was a serious offense. An expellable offense. She hadn't thought that they'd actually manage it, Peter being Peter. But they obviously had. Lily pressed herself against the wall in a sort of numb state of shock. What if the school authorities find out?
The last thing she wanted was the boys thrown out of school, even if she and James did fight all the time. They were her friends—yes, even James—he hadn't spilled her secret about the Alendoren Cove to anyone, had he? All right then, she told herself, you've got no right telling anyone this. This is their secret. And for all Lily was concerned, it would stay their secret. Not hers, not Professor McGonagall's, and not Dumbledore's. Or anyone else's, for that matter.
Lily kept her word to herself and her friends. It wasn't terribly difficult to keep it a secret from school authorities; it seemed like you would have to be thicker than concrete mixed with raisins to not be able to keep anything hidden. True, Dumbledore was a different story, what with the feeling he gave one as if he could read minds, but if one just stayed out of his way, one was fine.
Two days after the boys' final transformation practice was complete, Remus did indeed vanish. But that night, Lily sat at her window, one foot tucked underneath her, watching a large black shaggy dog, a silvery, spindly stag, and a small beetling speck she knew to be a rat romping around with a large werewolf. She almost wished she could join in when she heard several growls that couldn't stand for anything but laughter.
Christmas Eve was spent downstairs in the common room. The boys knew, or thought they knew, that nights spent by herself in the girls' dormitory tower were terribly lonely, so they had pooled as many blankets, covers, and pillows together as they could and dragged them into the common room, creating five makeshift beds that were stacked at least two inches high. True, they'd had to strip almost every bed in the Gryffindor Tower, but, James added, with a wave of his hand, the house-elves would be delighted to clean their mess up.
So, at about ten o'clock at night, they were sitting around the fire, each in their respective stacks of comforters, with an almost full bottle of butterbeer next to each of them and an interesting sort of bread the house-elves had prepared for the next day; Stollen, it was called; Lily recognized it as a celebrated German winter holiday food. It was a sort of cake-like bread made with raisins and topped with quite a bit of powdered sugar; also quite undescribable.
Lily was leaning against a fender on the fireplace; Sirius and Peter were sprawled all over the floor and all five beds; Remus was lying on his stomach, resting his chin on a fist, and James was sitting tailor-style on his pillow. They had just finished laughing at a narrow escape Sirius had had while bringing the butterbeer back from Hogsmeade; he had run into Professor McGonagall and dropped the bottles. The story he had given her was that one of the house-elves was currently undergoing severe depression and supplying himself with butterbeer, and Sirius had been asked to confiscate it. Without giving Professor McGonagall a chance to open her mouth to take points away from Gryffindor, Sirius had given her a cheery "Merry Christmas!" and vanished around the corner. At the moment, he was entertaining his friends with an imitation of Professor McGonagall's face when he freely handed out the information about a drunk house-elf. And for some reason, the image of a reeling, swaying, hiccupping green bat with tennis-ball eyes kept popping up in front of Lily's eyes.
Peter dropped off at about ten-fifteen; Remus' head was sinking quickly, as this was his first day back after the Shrieking Shack; he was exhausted. And Sirius had accompanied him back to the Shrieking Shack while James had to take Peter back to the castle, so, quite soon, only James, and Lily were left awake.
Lily suppressed a yawn. "I don't want to think about what McGonagall might think if she came in here and saw us."
"Why? We're not doing anything disgusting or illegal."
Lily smirked at the word 'illegal'. "She'd find a way."
Falsely, James gasped and held a hand to his throat. "Lily Evans, talking rudely about a teacher? The world is coming to an end!"
Lily scowled. "Thanks to you, my world is going to come to an end quicker than I ever thought it would."
"Oh, really?" He stemmed his fists in his sides. "Pray explain."
Snorting, Lily pulled her necklace out of her robes. "What do you call this?"
"Hey now, that's not my fault!"
"It isn't? It's your fault that I got locked in that dungeon in first year and came out with this!"
"So?"
"And it's you that would have gotten both of us killed if I had left you alone with Tom for just a minute more."
"Oh." James dropped his head. "True. But unknowingly!"
"We'd still be dead, genius! Not that I'd mind, but I don't' think I'd like to go without the sensation of eating."
He pushed himself up to sit back on his heels. "Lily, I want to talk to you."
"You are."
"I'm laughing myself sick. No, really, this is serious."
"I'm not stopping you. In case, of course, you say something I don't want to hear, in which case I will stop you. But proceed."
"All right." He shifted his balance. "Lily, it's about—well, you, really. Remember when you got hit over the head last
summer and had to get stitches?"
"Yes."
"Well, the thing that hit you on the head—when I picked it up from the bottom
of the pool—it—"
"It what? Come out with it already! You have no idea how maddening this is!"
"All right." James got straight to the point.