A/N: Since I strongly dislike Peter he will have very few lines, if any at all. The ones I do grace him with will be brief and inane, but he will always be in the general vacancy of James and Sirius, savvy?
Chapter Three: The Yuletide Ball
Mina
As she walked out of the Marauder's Lair, she breathed a sigh of relief. She had yet to encounter James and Sirius face-to-face and considered herself lucky. After quickly surveying the grounds about her, she breathed in the cool, crisp air that tenderly caressed her lungs, and with a slight spring in her step and all unwanted thoughts of her mother's evidential misery pushed into the dark recesses of her mind, she headed straight for the castle. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and could put even the most bitter of people in a fantasic mood.
That morning broke on a beautifully white world. It had been a very mild December thus far and the remaining students of Hogwarts weren't looking forward to a green Christmas; but just enough snow fell softly in the night to transfigure the grand old castle and its surroundings. Mina had peeped out from her frosted window with delighted eyes. The firs in the Forbidden Forest were all feathery and wonderful; the birches and wild trees that were scattered about the grounds were outlined in pearl; the empty fields were stretches of mere snowy dimples; and there was a sort of crisp tang in the air that was simply glorious.
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, Mina all but skipped out onto the grounds, where the snow resumed its silent descent. Then, she remembered why she was out here, to think. The weather was only a wonderful and timely distraction, as was Remus...
The sound of crunching snow brought her back to reality. Fearing it to be James Potter or some other menace, she quitely slipped away and began her journey back up to the castle.
Remus
He sat there quietly, musing in the silence she had left behind. If only there were some way to show her his nonperishably, ineradicable affections for her. He sat there for quite some time, pondering as how to do this in a seemly generic and totally unobtrusive manner. His musings were ever so rudely interrupted by a thoroughly disgruntled James.
"How could they? This is utterly preposterous, what with more than three-fourths of the students gone! I simply cannot believe it! So..." James faltered in his tirade, and it was clear he was absolutely, breath- takingly livid. Remus decided to let his temper go unchecked, as he dearly valued his life.
"So," James repeated, marching past the various magical oddities and turning to face Remus as though he were about to pronounce him in violation of some Marauder code of ethics. "So..."
Remus would have loved dearly to have said, "So what?" but he didn't feel that James's temper should be tested this early in the morning, especially when it was already under severe strain from whatever seemed to be bothering him. He therefore settled for looking politely puzzled, while he bit his lip, confident he was drawing blood.
"The teacher's have just come up with this outrageous idea!" James spewed forth, as if that explained everything. Remus nodded his head slowly, while still biting his lip, trying to suppress his gale force laughter. He had known James to go utterly berserk over the most trival of issues, and probably attributed this recent outcry to the Hogwarts staff banning Butterbeer or something as equally as absurd.
"The teachers think that, DESPITE THE FACT THAT MORE THAN HALF THE HOWARTS POPULATION ISN'T HERE, that they should host a dance!" James yelled, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustation in the past few minutes. "Can you believe it?" he asked for the second time in as many minutes.
A broad smile spread across Remus's face. He quickly caught himself, and stifled the bubbling laughter that threatened to overflow at any second. "That's horrible!" he managed with a straight face, all the while thanking the divine being that had answered his prayer.
Mina
When she arrived in the entrance hall, she found herself unable to proceed owing to the peculiarly large crowd of students congregated there, all milling around a rather large sign that had been erected at the foot of the marble staircase.
"What on earth?" she muttered to herself, for it seemed that every student that was staying at Hogwarts over the break was crammed into this room, apparently of their own accord. "Excuse me, prefect coming through!" she warned the mass of people nearest her. After several minutes of pushing and proding through the buzzing crowd, she had finally reached the sign, and began reading to herself:
The First Annual Yuletide Ball
The first Hogwarts Christmas Eve Ball will begin at 6 o' clock
on Friday the 24th of December. Lessons will end early.
Dress robes or other formal attire required.
Mina herself was quite stunned by the news. Nothing like this had ever happened at Hogwarts before and Mina silently pondered to what the students owed this occasion. She was still thinking, when all of the sudden the Head Boy's shrill voice cut through the buzzing air, "All right, that's quite enough! There's nothing to see here, please proceed to the Great Hall for breakfast!" Mina, still puzzled by the appearance of the sign, wondered briefly whether or not the sign was indeed a joke. She shrugged it off and proceeded up the marble staircase to her own Ravenclaw dormitory to finish what was left of her massive amounts of homework.
When Mina returned to the Great Hall that afternoon for lunch, she stopped abruptly. The sign was still there, thus meaning that it was obviously not a hoax, as seeing that some ever vigilant teacher would've promptly removed it. She sighed to herself and opened the doors to the Great Hall, surprised to see almost all the Hogwarts students sitting down at their various tables, chatting in an animate manner.
"MINA!" a female voice called across the hall, and Mina quickly turned her head in the direction of the voice. She waved mirthfully at one of the Hufflepuff girls, with whom she was good friends with, and began to walk over to an offered seat. "Where have you been?" Nicki asked in her usually curious demeanor.
"Around..." Mina replied vaguely in answer to her friend's question. Mina quickly said her hellos to the fourteen surrounding girls and began to carefully select food items for her brunch. The appearance of the sign in the entrance hall had a marked effect upon the inhabitants of the castle. Rumors were flying from student to student like highly contagious germs: who was going with whom, what was to be at the dance ( some said Dumbledore had booked a very popular wizarding band ), and why they were having the dance in the first place, among other such superfluous questions that were to go unanswered.
Mina also noticed that the castle seemed to be undergoing an extra- thorough cleaning before the decorations were put up that day. All the grimy paintings had been scrubbed, and the suits of armor were suddenly gleaming and moving without squeaking, the latter being a miracle in itself. And as she and the rest of the Hogwarts students were naturally curious as the day went on as to why the castle was undergoing such a drastic transformation, not one person had the courage to ask a passing teacher. The reason, of course, being that the staff members looked oddly tired today and were obviously more prone to snap at students, so everyone decided it was best to keep quiet and accept this...gift, if it could be dubbed as such.
Fortunately, she had had only one run-in with the Marauder's during the course of the day, and it was during this time that she was surrounded by several of her Hufflepuff girlfriends. She gave Remus a curt, but polite nod as her friends tried desperately to spirit her away before anything should happen to them, or her, courtesy the Marauder's.
Remus
James was pacing around the common room, growing ever nervous with each increasing step. "How can they do this? Or, more importantly, why did Lily go home for the break?" he wailed disconsolately, dropping into a chair. Despite the fact that Lily and James were not yet dating, James wanted desperately to ask her to a formal gathering, as he missed his last chance during the time of the Halloween Ball. Remus too, was becoming more nervous as the hours went by and he still found himself dateless (no matter that he had only read the sign just hours ago).
"Well, well, well," said Sirius suddenly, patting Remus gently on the back as if trying to console a mourner, "looks like James might finally crack." Then, with a solemn tone in his voice that gave him the impression of a general that suggested that they were planning the storming of an impregnable fortress, Sirius said, "When we get back to the common room tonight, all of us will have dates,...agreed?"
Well, Remus thought bitterly, easy for you to say. Sirius could escort any number of girls to the ball without the slightest hint of a problem, but Remus, not wishing to put a further damper on the mood, shook his head affirmatively.
"Um...sure?" Remus mumbled, knowing it was more of a question than an answer.
