Bewilderment…so aptly named
Disclaimer: I own no part of anything of J.K. Rowling's, Warner Brothers, etc. No profit is being made from this story written just for fun.
"Shades of Darkness"
Fifteen minutes to go. Lily stared at the clock, impatient, and waited for class to be dismissed. The professor was going on and on about Whatsit charms—and Lily normally would have found this fascinating—and was about to dive into the science of wrist flicks. Please, Lily thought, watching the seconds tick by.
"Pssst," came a whisper from down the row. "Lily, psssst!" The voice was that Gabriella. When she'd finally gotten her attention, she said, "Lily, what's up? You love Charms and now you don't care."
"Well—" Lily began, but the professor glared at her. Lily picked up her quill and began to write her words out. Gabriella waited impatiently, fidgeting, and making a general fuss until she was almost knocked over by a nudge from a more conscientious student. Looking up, Gabriella's eyes searched for the note that was about to come her way. When it did, she almost tore the note open in haste, neglecting to see that Lily was now paying strict attention to the professor; or at least, she was looking as if she was.
Gabbie, the note began as Gabriella's pupils devoured the words. Gabbie, I know you don't know what's up with me, but these past few days have been really confusing. You know James Potter? He is such a worthless prat sometimes, but he is being really nice to me and I like it. I thought that I was in love with Sirius, but this is totally different. James doesn't respect women in general so much, but do you think I can change him?
Gabriella put the note down in shock. The words "oh my gosh" formed a chain and linked its way around her mind, an endless chanting of words that portrayed her alarm and indignation. She picked up the quill hurriedly, and wrote a response that was sloppy and nearly illegible to anyone but Lily's eyes.
Um, well, James Potter is okay, I guess, whispered her words as the ink tripped over itself. They say how you can't change a man, you know, the way that you can't change anything solid, like the rocks or time. He is good-looking, but don't fall for his looks, dear Lily. Tall, dark, and handsome are all very well in those Muggle romance novels you read, but they don't work in the real world. The brooding and sulky man is apt to screw you over.
Lily read this with a sinking heart. Of course Gabriella was right. Still she persisted, however. You always seemed to find that quite sexy.
Gabriella faltered for a response, flipping her hair nervously behind her ear. It was, before he became uncontrollable and wild. He's gone downhill; there's no down from here.
Grains of frustration gathered around Lily's movements. It was just yesterday you said he was hot.
Gabriella coughed. This was getting tricky. He's all very well to ogle, for he's got sex appeal and you know it, but really. He's ridiculously immature and I believe he's had trouble with the law.
Lily's mouth watered. Incorrigible, eh? Wicked. I guess you're right, she penned.
I'm glad you see sense, replied Gabriella.
The bell rang and Lily sprang from her seat as if she'd been lit on fire. "Wait, Lily!" cried Gabriella, but Lily was on a mission and couldn't be stopped.
When she came into Divination late, Gabriella didn't know what to expect. Lily always tried to be punctual; it was part of what made her who she was. The punctuality was built into her just like her naïveté.
Even the professor looked a little shocked to see Lily Evans late. But Lily sat down right away and took out her textbook. "What page?" she whispered to Gabriella, and Gabriella was too dumbfounded to do anything but respond.
"Ahem!" the professor—Velaquin—cleared her throat. "Any questions?" Her eyes stared down Gabriella's, who shut her mouth and gulped.
At the silence Velaquin said, "I thought not. Very well, Lily! Let us see what you see in my future." With a dramatic pause, Velaquin threw her palm towards Lily, who grasped it and gazed at the lines confusedly.
"I-I see that you were in love with…with a black-haired man," Lily stammered. "Um, um, you will be broken-hearted at the loss of what appears to be, um, a close one. Beware changes."
"No!" Velaquin boomed. "You are confusing me with yourself!"
"R-right." Lily said nervously, her hands shaking slightly. "Well, for you—you enjoy the freedom of flight and you have had a plague of nightmares that will be ending soon."
"Very well," declared Professor Velaquin. "I, too, have foreseen the end of these nightmares."
"Miss Gardiner! And when will the pain of over-excitement disappear—" she inhaled impressively "—from my nightmares?"
"You never had it in the first place." Though it sounded like a statement, Gabriella was really questioning; she had little Divination talents.
"Quite right. Now, we will start the impressive task of reading our own palms. While this may be shocking to you, it is an important trait for any seer-to-be."
Lily told me that her palm was a net of lines. "I'm a very emotional person," she'd stated, gazing into the depths of her right hand. But that Divination class was a tricky one for Lily, for Gabriella was taking over her mindset.
"You will fall in love with a bee-yoo-tiful stranger!" warbled Gabriella, mimicking Professor Velaquin as she studied Lily's palm. "But he will not have black hair."
And suddenly Gabriella was filling in something in her book, and Lily was left alone with her very confusing prophecies.
When Lily walked into the Great Hall, she was expecting to see what she usually saw: the odd food fight, but generally happy, eating people. But she opened the door and was greeted with silence. Utter and complete silence.
Lily walked quickly across the space to her side of the Gryffindor table, her heels clacking against the floor much too loudly. "Um, Gabriella?" she asked. "What is this about?"
"What about?" Gabriella looked up from her notebook; there was a Charms' quiz the next day, but Gabriella got the best studying done while she was eating.
"This," Lily whispered. The silence grew more and more oppressive.
"Oh. It must be something James is up to, you know."
Lily looked at some of the others. Some of them looked like they were trying to talk, but couldn't. Others had their eyes open wider than usual; Lily was puzzled.
Lily spooned some mashed potatoes onto her plate and started picking at them uneasily. Gabriella bent her head down again over her book, trying to impress the facts into her mind. But suddenly the silence was shattered and falling to the ground in pieces, crashing on the floor. The one sound that had cracked the silence was the laugh of a boy in the same year as Lily, from the Gryffindor table. The laugh was chilling, and goosebumps rippled Lily's arms as a chill raced up and down her spine. She shivered; it was eerie.
Looking over, she saw the small, pointy-nosed boy just laughing, as if he'd learned some secret that made everything crazy. "Peter," Lily whispered. "Peter Pettigrew."
The professors sat at the tables where they usually did, unconcernedly eating away. Dumbledore, Lily was frightened to note, was gone.
Next to her, Gabriella's shoulders were shaking, and at first Lily thought that the girl was feeling the same trepidation as she. One look at her face showed a silent giggle that racked the Gabriella's body. And the back of Lily's neck began to prickle.
"It was so weird," Lily told me. "As if…as if they were connected in some way!" She'd flopped backwards onto the couch. "I don't know what to do. I don't think anyone else was even able to speak."
In the Great Hall, Lily blinked and missed what happened. She missed the sight of a pillar tearing through the ceiling, sending glass shards and bits of clouds from the enchanted sky everywhere. Lightning flashed—"a combination of the two different magics touching, I think," Lily said—and someone shrieked. The floor twitched, and dishes of food crashed to the floor in one drawn-out motion where everything seemed to be moving slowly.
The whole school watched as one entranced, and tiles began to split beneath their feet. The doors crashed against the stone wall as the doors were flung open, and a blue-clad figure leaped into the room. "Solidarify!" yelled the man, Dumbledore, and the tiles stopped splitting and the pillar was stopped from moving down into the kitchens. It looked almost like it was holding up the ceiling.
Dumbledore could fix this; of course he could. Lily twiddled with a piece of her red hair. "Prefects!" he bellowed so that his voice echoed around the silent room. "Please lead your those in your house to your common room! Do not go into the dormitories; please stay in the common room!"
Lily stood up, and she saw her fellow Gryffindor prefect—Remus—stand up as well. "Okay?" Dumbledore's voice rang across the room.
Remus looked as if he was trying to speak but couldn't. The other prefects seemed in a similar condition.
"Professor!" said Lily. He didn't hear, so she had to raise her voice. "Professor!" Dumbledore's head turned sharply to face her. "None of them can speak!"
Dumbledore simply waved his wand-bearing arm. "Very well."
The room erupted in words that were flung back at the speakers in harshness and relief. "Go!" yelled Dumbledore one last time, with an accompanying hand-gesture.
Back up at the common room, Lily and Remus sat on a couch, breathing slightly hard with all the climbing and re-climbing they'd had to do to keep everyone in check. "This is safety, guys!" Lily had called down the corridor, making sure everyone heard. Remus brought up the back, looking official, and making sure no one else tried to escape suddenly. They both looked exhausted, which was probably the reason that James hopped onto the couch, jarring it so they both looked up wearily.
"Hey guys," he said, altogether too brightly for the moods Remus and Lily were in. "How goes the prefect business?"
Remus and Lily both glared at him, but he pushed on, dauntless. "I guess I'm glad I threw that refreshing stink bomb in McGonagall's office last year to remember me by."
"It wasn't refreshing," reminded Remus, smiling despite himself.
"Maybe not for you," said James. "But it sure refreshed McGonagall's memory. That's why I'm not a prefect."
"Well lucky you," groaned Remus.
"Hey Lily." James tweaked a strand of Lily's red-gold hair. "How are you?"
"Decent," replied Lily. She didn't really care, and it showed in her voice.
"Where's Gabriella? I thought you two were attached at the hip."
Lily sighed. "I guess not."
James twisted his head to look about the common room. "Oh she's in here somewhe—" He was cut off by the sound of Gabriella's voice saying "hi!"
Lily put her head in her hands. "Hi, Gabbie," she said.
"Hey James." Gabriella twitched her eyebrows. "What do you think that big…display was in the Great Hall?"
"I don't know," James said, his brow furrowing. "I thought that the protections on Hogwarts were pretty strong."
"They're about to become a lot stronger," Remus stated. "Something like this won't happen again when Dumbledore's on the job."
Silence laced the air around the group, and gradually Lily and Remus dozed off. James was preoccupied, watching Lily sleep, and Gabriella was snuggled in the couch, dozing. At midnight, McGonagall entered the room; her bold entrance and the slamming of the portrait as it shut woke many of the sleeping students.
"You may go back to your dorms now," she declared to the fuzzy-minded Gryffindors, who nodded and tried to stand up. "We will explain what happened at breakfast tomorrow. The danger has passed. Please sleep."
Gabriella's teeth were small, like her fingernails, and she wore rings when Lily thought she shouldn't; they called attention to her stubby fingers. She woke Lily up the next day with her bracelets jangling against her rings (her bracelets were bangles and too large for her wrists) as she shook Lily gently. "Wake up, Lily," she whispered.
Lily's big green eyes slowly started to open, but she shut them tightly as the sunlight hit her eyes. "What time is it?" she mumbled, scratching her head.
"Time for breakfast," Gabriella said.
Lily turned over. "No it's not."
"Come on," Gabriella urged. "You'll get to know what happened last night."
"Right!" Lily sat up, blinking unsteadily and looking about her, bleary-eyed.
Gabriella helped Lily out of bed, and Lily brushed her teeth and generally made herself ready for the day. After she had slipped on a pair of shoes, she nodded to Gabriella and the two strode down to the Great Hall.
On the way, Lily noticed something strange with the set of wooden steps they were walking down. It wasn't as if she was trying to descend horizontally down the stairs; no, it was as if each plank was lower than she expected it to be. With each step, Lily had to grasp the handrail in order to not fall down. Gabriella, however, was having no problem.
"Lily," she called over her shoulder; being able to walk freely, she was farther ahead. "Come on, will you?"
"Yeah," replied Lily as she took yet another careful step. "Aren't you having some trouble too?"
"Trouble with what, your mind? Now come on."
So Lily, unhappy at being so rudely dismissed, followed in silence—but slowly. Once they reached the Great Hall, however—the stairs being bizarrely aligned for the marble staircase as well—Lily knew it wasn't just her mind acting up. For the heavy wooden doors that were normally so secure banged oddly against the white marble floor. It was off-balance, somehow, but that didn't make sense.
When she walked in, James ran up to her. Later, Lily would say to me how odd it was that James made a point of coming to talk to her. Though then she didn't think of it. "Did you feel it?" he asked, looking into Lily's eyes.
"Feel what? Again with this nonsense?" Gabriella blew on her nails, looking bored.
"No, Lily, did you?" James's eyes were intense, and Lily thought she could melt inside of them, swirling and turning and flipping.
"Yes." It was sharp, precise, and there was a moment between the two that Gabriella did not like.
"What are you two talking about? There's nothing wrong with anything in this school!" Gabriella broke the moment abruptly, and James turned away, annoyed.
"Lily, can I talk you for a moment? Alone?"
Lily nodded, and that was the last time Gabriella saw her as the exact same Lily she had known forever. James led her out of the Great Hall by the hand and to the right anddown some stairs (slowly, carefully),where they entered a little room. Lily thought for a second that James would lean forward and kiss her at one point, but she remembered Gabriella's "advice" and drew back, distancing herself from James. Their hands still attached them, however, and there was some awkwardness. He shook his head just a bit, disillusioning himself, and they walked up to a painting. I would have known the painting instantly, but Lily gazed at it interestedly and waited for James to explain. Instead, he tickled a pear that was in the fruit bowl in the painting. It squirmed—Lily's eyes widened—it snorted, and it turned into a handle. James grasped this and turned, but just before he opened it, he said, "I don't think that this will explain anything, but…if you felt it, too…"
Lily was mute, so she just squeezed his hand twice. He opened the portrait, pulling with his free hand, and stepped into the kitchens.
She'd never entered the realm of the house elves before, and was slightly shocked at this giant, underground Hogwarts of which she'd never known. House elves bustled about; she'd seen one before, so she knew how to identify one. "The place was swarming with them," she would later whisper confidentially to me, nudging me when she mentioned it.
And indeed they were. Except when Lily was there, it was different from any other time I—or any of the other people who frequented the kitchens—had ever seen it. Towards the middle of the kitchen on the ceiling, the rafters and the wood paneling that covered the ceiling was splintered. It was in roughly a square shape, and it looked no bigger than a house elf.
The house elves were not merely doing their usual bustling: they were scurrying about madly, and there was many a shrill squeak of panic in the air. Pots that had hung from bars well on the floor, tripping many a kitchen-worker, and the metal pans were slowly slipping toward one end, where the hearths were. The flames in the fireplaces were huge, fed by the debris that had slid into them. The fear-driven elves were not doing anything to help the situation, save for one brave creature that was valiantly (and vainly) trying to douse the fires. His comrades were not helping him at all with their senseless dashing.
Cooking ingredients were spilled everywhere, and, on their way to help the one brave house elf, Lily and James stepped into flour. It rose in clouds, making it hard for them to see the eggs that littered their path. They filled and handed buckets of water to the firefighting elf until the blazes were distinguished.
"Listen," James said, and his voice was deep and serious. ("He was so capable!" Lily told me.) "You all need to get out of the castle. There's a—"
"Hideout in the big oak tree through the tunnel behind the fireplace? Yeah, that's where we go for meetings and stuff," squeaked the elf, finishing James' sentence.
"…Right," replied James, slightly taken aback. Regaining his composure, he added, "But you have to get out of the castle, okay? And soon."
"Why?" asked Lily. It surprised James a little bit that Lily was the one to ask this and not the house elf, but he shut himself up and tried to formulate a reply.
"The castle's sinking."
The house elf looked appalled, and tried to get order in the kitchens. Knowing that he'd never capture all their attention, James commanded, "Cover your ears," to the house elf and Lily, and raised his wand-wielding arm straight into the air. "Radifito!" he shouted, and a bang issued from his wand.
There was sudden silence in the kitchens, and James took advantage of it. "Follow Gonlith! If you don't, you could die!" In a quieter voice, he said, "That is your name, right?"
The house elf nodded, and commands began issuing out of the small elf's mouth. A stream of those that worked in the kitchen began a mad rush over to him. James and Lily fought the tide and got out of there.
Standing back in the small room, Lily put a hand over her heart; it was banging. The castle was sinking? How?
The two walked back to the Great Hall, each wrapped in thought. Right before James was about to open the door, they heard a scream. On running in, they found it was Gabriella, who was laughing. Lily had to summon all her self-control to keep from going hysterical. As it was, her flesh began to crawl.
It was crazy.
A/N: I am so sorry that this is so late. The story seemed to have taken a twist, but answers will be given in next chapter, which will be coming in hopefully a week. I can't stick to deadlines very well, but I am going to write my socks off, as they say. Please review on your way out! And I'd like a moment for those who reviewed Chapter one.
So, an extra thanks to: Nattatude, Prince and the Purple Rain, Tiger17Lily, Liisa, Queen of Serpents, and Belladonna. Thanks! Your support is awesome. And I'm afraid that this chapter is not up to the first chapter's level, but it will get much, much better. I have awesome plans for next chapter, in which there will be less action, more romance, and explanations.
Bewilderment…so aptly named