Lily Chapter 67: Of Teachers, Stairs, and Invitations, a harry potter fanfic

A/N: A new Divination teacher, a new month, and then, a surprise! In the words of the new teacher, "Whoopeee."

Lily

Chapter 67

"All right, everybody shut up!" Came the playful, reedy voice from the new Divination professor. "I'm Professor Trombley, but call me Newton."

"Your name's Newton?"

"No, it's Aaron. But call me Newton." He dropped his lanky frame into a rotating chair and propelled himself across the room with a blast from his wand. "Which one of you is Juno Frese?"

Juno raised her hand, and 'Newton' rolled over to her desk. "And you're my 'special assistant,' is that right?" He put finger-quotes around "special assistant."

"Yeah."

He looked at her with a benign kind of sarcasm. "So what'd you do?"

"Huh?"

"What'd you do that was so bad that they made you my 'special assistant,' whatever the heck that's supposed to mean?"

"Oh." Juno grinned. "They said I put a Shrinking Solution in the punch at dinner."

"Well, whoopee!" Once again, he rolled his chair backwards to the front of the room. "Tell you what. You tell me what delusional psychopath painted this room white and I'll tell Professor Dumbledore that you were the best 'special assistant' a teacher ever had, and we'll call it even."

"Professor Gadani," Juno said promptly.

'Newton' let out a short laugh. "I already told you, it's Trombley, and I also already told you to call me Newton."

"No, I mean, Professor Gadani was the one who painted the room white."

He paled slightly. "Gadani? As in Fiorenza?"

"Yes…"

"She isn't still around, is she?"

"No…"

"So, you're saying that she couldn't legally be violating a restraining order or anything – not that I put a restraining order on her for stalking me viciously after our two-week relationship!"

The class laughed, and Juno couldn't help but toy with him a little. "Well, last I checked, she might still be hanging around the castle and packing up her things…"

"All right, that's enough of that!" he said, springing to his feet. "So, besides how to dodge flying glass shards, what did Fiorenza teach you? You." He whirled on Vanessa, who was laughing so hard she couldn't catch her breath. "Stop laughing or I'll kill you." It was that strange, harmlessly sardonic tone again, which made Vanessa's laughter redouble. "Ok. Anyone else?"

A Ravenclaw boy raised his hand. "I think we never got past the crystal balls."

'Newton' stopped and leaned back against the white wall, looking severely out of place. "I don't know why I teach this subject. There are probably more opportunities for dirty jokes in this class than in any other. Anyway, would anyone want to help me paint the walls for the first couple of classes? I think a nice taupe would suffice…"

Lily rubbed at a spot of paint that hadn't come out of her hand yet. Taupe, Professor Trombley had said, but at the last minute, he'd decided on a garish sort of teal. She scribbled out an answer to question four on her History of Magic homework (which had been ballooning to ridiculous volumes lately) and was skimming the text for something that would finish it well when James sat down next to her on the couch and put an arm around her waist. "Hey," he said, and kissed her as an afterthought. She closed her eyes and savored the feeling of his lips closing over hers, which always took her a little by surprise, no matter how many times she tried to anticipate it. That was the one thing that struck her about kissing James like this – it was never disappointing. She could never help smiling when they pulled apart.

"Hey what?"

He moved a little closer and put both his arms around her, taking her hands in his. "Hey, are you in the mood for an adventure?"

She leaned her head back against his chest. "What kind of adventure?"

"Well…d'you remember how I said that we don't exactly have every bit of Hogwarts on the map?"

"No…"

"Well, we don't. So every so often, we've sort of got to…" he paused, looking down at her face as though he would rather keep doing that than finish his sentence. Lily felt the same way. For a split second, her breath caught in her chest and her heart seemed to pound like there was something more than 'like' at work here, but the spell broke after a moment. "Expand our horizons, I guess. Want to come explore?"

Under cover of the Invisibility Cloak, they made their quiet way to the last hallway on the Marauder's Map. They walked to the end of it, a stone wall covered with a large painting of a young blonde girl singing, and took off the cloak. The girl looked up with surprise. "Oh, hello there," she said, grinning broadly. "Where did you two come from?"

"Gryffindor Tower," Lily explained.

"Isn't that where the Fat Lady lives? Or at least, just outside it? Oh, I do envy her, and all those other portraits downstairs. I don't get many visitors, you see, except for that vile Sir Cadogan. He's always convinced that I'm being carried off by a dragon or something." She sat down in a ratty white chair and adjusted her low-brimmed hat that made her look something like she'd come out of the 1920's. "So what are your names? And what are you doing back here anyway? Oh, you aren't lost, are you? That would just ruin this, because I'd feel so bad if you were lost, I only ever meet people when they're lost – you are lost, aren't you?"

James smiled. "I'm James, and this is my girlfriend, Lily, and no, we're not lost, we're trying to make a map."

"A map! That's wonderful! Can you put me on it? I'd love to sing for people, if they came by more often. Would you like to hear me sing something? Everyone I sing for tells me I'm rather good, but I don't know. What do you think?"

"Well, we heard you singing as we walked up, and that sounded pretty…"

"Really? That's just…oh, gosh, that's just…gosh! You really think so?"

Quite overcome by this Anna/Professor Gadani combination, Lily and James nodded.

"Great. Splendiferous. Fantastic. Say, you don't think Headmaster Dippet would be willing to hang up some pictures of sheet music so that I could use it for myself, do you?"

"Dippet? Dumbledore's headmaster now," James said, now taking a few steps toward the picture and tapping the stones in the wall around it. "I don't mean to interrupt you or anything, but is this a secret passageway?"

The girl looked at him strangely. "That's kind of a funny question. Not that I know of, but then again, nobody does come down here, like I said." She turned to Lily. "So the new headmaster, he'd get some pictures of music for me, right?"

"Maybe if I asked him for you," Lily replied.

"Well, you know, my favorite is jazz. Like Ella Fitzgerald, d'you know who that is? She's-"

A sudden rumbling drowned out her words as the wall swung out slowly like a giant door. "Found it!" James said exuberantly, and grabbed Lily by the hand, pulling her up the wide staircase revealed in place of the wall.

They paused on the stairs to light their wands, since there were no torches or candles on the walls. There was a thick purple carpet running up the center of the stairs, a carpet that giggled whenever you stepped on it like the footsteps were ticklish. Needless to say, this got tiresome after about thirty seconds.

"I can't take this much longer," Lily declared, stopping dead in her tracks and grabbing James's arm.

"Come on, the top can't be all that higher anyway. Just keep going."

Hehehehehehehehe!!!!

Another minute later, it was James's turn to have had enough. "What psychopath built these stairs?"

"Whoever it was sure wanted to keep something out of reach." Lily stopped again and leaned on the polished wooden railing. She glanced back down to where they started from. "Why can I still see the wall? It looks like we've been climbing for about three seconds."

And indeed, it took almost no time at all to reach the bottom. A good deal of up-and-down revealed that no matter how far you felt like you went, you will still be the same height up from the bottom. And that carpet would never….NEVER…stop giggling.

James sat down on a step and indicated for Lily to do the same. "There is absolutely nothing here," he said weakly.

"I wouldn't say that…"

"Oh, really? Name me one thing that's here. One thing besides the ruddy carpet, that is." He pounded the rug with his fist, only letting out a burbling scream of giggles that made the situation all the more irritating.

Lily felt like she wanted to say that they were here, she and James were, and that was more than nothing, wasn't it? But it sounded too corny, so the most she got out was to put a hand on his shoulder and say, "We-"

He turned and looked at her. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing, I just…" As though reading her mind, he suddenly kissed her, and kept kissing her until they both ran out of air. Even then, they barely separated their faces at all, and Lily only had time to whisper, "Something like that," before there it went again, without any words that she could think of, and with his hands actually running up her arms to her face, like they were in some sort of movie. It took a while for her to gather her thoughts enough to realize that this was what was called 'making out,' and she felt a little embarrassed that she hadn't figured it out earlier, but decided to concentrate instead on kissing.

Lily didn't know how long they sat there kissing, but it eventually faded into conversation. "I absolutely can't believe this is actually happening," James admitted. "I've been trying to get up the nerve since I was in third year."

"Really? I've sort of been on and off since first year," Lily laughed. "Well, more off than on, at first."

"Why's that?"

"Well…" James would be the only person she'd actually voiced this to, but, she reminded herself, if anyone, it should be James. "It was right before Chrissy died that I started to like you, right? And after, Dumbledore told me that you-know-who wanted to hurt me inside before he hurt me outside, like by killing the people I loved." The words brought a chill to her that she hadn't felt for a long time. Why had Voldemort been so quiet lately, anyway? For the first time, it worried her. "And…and I started to try and make myself not get close to anyone. Then it happened again, with Chantel. And again, Eurydice. Everyone I get close to gets hurt, even you. Remember when we got lost with the Floo powder and he was using that curse on you? That's what I mean. That's…" she broke off, afraid that if she kept talking, she'd cry.

He was silent for a second, but then he put an arm around her and let her put her head on his shoulder. "That's pretty awful, is what it is. I can't even imagine – is that why you've always been sort of arm's-length with Juno?"

"Well, that and she can be sort of a controlling prat sometimes, but yes," Lily said, smiling a little, "That's the main reason. And I'm really afraid for you now that we're…you know…us."

"Ok, time to stop thinking about it!" James said jokingly. "Time to think about…polar bears!"

"What?"

"Polar bears! They're big, they're white, they like cold weather – any thoughts?"

"How do you get from there to polar bears?"

"It's the gift of random topic-changing in uncomfortable situations. Sirius taught me." He grinned. "It's either polar bears or I make the carpet start giggling again."

March went out like a lamb, but April brought its customary deluge of rain. Sirius had to wait until a brief period of sunshine to bring his motorcycle down to Hagrid's cabin for fear that it would rust. On the first of May, though, an owl delivered a square, cream-colored envelope for Lily.

You are cordially invited to the wedding of Miss Petunia Evans and Mr. Vernon Dursley

At six o' clock in the evening

On Thursday the sixteenth of May, 1969

"Petunia's getting married!" she exclaimed. "But…" suddenly, a look of hurt came over her.

"What's wrong?" said James, a bagel halfway to his mouth.

Lily's voice dripped irony. "Well, it's on my birthday, for one thing. And for another thing, she added a little p.s. in her own handwriting. 'Nobody at the wedding is going to know about your abnormality, and I don't expect that they will afterwards. Don't bring any friends. Dress like a normal person.' Why would she be inviting me to begin with? She hates me."

"'P.P.S.'," Remus read off of the back from across the table. "'I'm only inviting you because Vernon says that all my family members should be there. Two…'" he trailed off as though he had read the rest of the sentence and decided against it.

"Two what?" Peter tactlessly inquired.

Lily turned over the invitation, read the p.p.s., and stuffed it back into the envelope with tears in her eyes. "'Two less, thanks to you.'"