BACKFIRED !

By Bellegeste

A/N: Couldn't resist the title of this chapter! OK, so we have a few clichés here - contrived scenario leading to a confrontation, etc etc. but, it's not so much the jokes, it's the way you tell 'em…

Incidentally, if you were wondering why this is classified as part parody, it was more that there wasn't a tick-box for 'ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek'…

Chapter 2:THE LADY VANISHES

Lily felt as though she had been dismantled and then put back together again, very badly, by a careless, clumsy child. Everything ached; nothing worked. Her brain was issuing incomprehensible instructions in demotic Russian or ancient Mandarin or some tribal dialect with clicks and whirrs and glottal stops, but none of it made any sense. Her baffled nerves were directing the messages straight back, 'return to sender'.

Spread-eagled, she thought, when eventually she could think at all. I am lying here - somewhere – spread-eagled. She liked the feel of the word in her head; it felt solid and dependable and a lot more comfortable than the position itself. Spread-eagled. Spread-eagled. She said it to herself several times until the syllables ceased to have any meaning…

After a while it occurred to her that her skirt - the cream, layered cheesecloth wrap-over that James liked so much – was bunched up under her waist and that her legs were bare and exposed to view. But it didn't occur to her to move. James? That name sounded familiar. She had once known someone called James, sometime… I am lying somewhere, spread-eagled, with my skirt hoiked up and I once knew someone called James? It struck her as faintly ludicrous and she smiled vacantly into the grass…

Spread-eagled bare legs… that is most unladylike… unbecoming… unflattering… unacceptable… uncovered… uncensored… unwise… The list of unconnected 'un-' words undulated uncontrollably in her mind… uncomfortable… unconscious…

When she woke again the heat was going out of the sun and the breeze felt chill against her bare legs. Bare legs? Lily pushed herself to her knees, her body still heavy and unresponsive, brushing away dust and leaves from her blouse, modestly pulling the skirt to cover her ankles. Feeling a tickle in her hair she reached up and extricated a struggling Sedge Beetle, its busy legs kicking frantically against the dense net of curls. She threw it away from her with a yelp of disgust. Her cheek - she felt it tentatively - her arms, her thighs were mottled with the purple impress of crushed heather. Her head reeled; her stomach lurched. She knew she was only seconds away from being sick. Very sick.

It cleared her head a little, and she scrambled away a few yards and sat back on the heather, hugging her knees as she watched the flaming disc sinking to the horizon, leaving its trail of burnished fire reflected in the distant, darkening lake. A lake. Was that Hogwarts' lake? There was no way of telling. She looked about her, trying to get a fix on her surroundings, her emotions curiously disengaged. This wasn't right - where was the panic, the fear? All she felt was a profound sense of her unimportance in the universe, dwarfed by the vast expanse of nature, a single white spec on a huge, sombre, empty landscape. Hugging, silently rocking, she sat through a stage of torpor, adjusting to the sheer scale of her isolation.

Move. Was she going to sit here forever? She began lacing up her loosened, unravelled thoughts, pulling them into line, into shape, into coherence, and fastening them with a tight and - at last – angry knot. Where the heck was she? And why?

Judging from the sunset she was on a southern facing slope. Lower down, the hill appeared thickly wooded, with sessile oak growing right up to the lake shores. Higher up the oak thinned out, to be replaced by patches of native pine and birch; higher up still, beyond the tree line, the scrub and heathers gradually ceded place to grasses, moss and lichen and above that, rock. Lily guessed she was about half way up.

She had been lying, she now realised, near some kind of a path or track. And behind her - how could she not have noticed it before - was a hut. Not much more than a bus-shelter affair, but at least it was shelter of some sort. Perhaps there would be someone there. Someone to help her. Shakily she got to her feet, straightened her clothing, smoothed her hair, brushed herself down once more, and began to trudge up the hill.

The patch of ground in front of the hut was compacted hard, several black-grey circles of ash denoting past fires - camp fires. Against one wall a barrel formed a brimming water butt. Brimming with what? Lily was too thirsty to care. Bypassing the crude, wooden ladle hooked over the edge of the barrel and ignoring the dirty enamel pitcher that lay discarded on the ground, Lily plunged her arms straight in, scooping up a dripping handful. She drank deeply, splashing the cold water onto her face, sluicing away the numbing remnants of the spell.

Then she went inside.

XxXxX

"Mother of Merlin! Damn and blast and buggeration!" cried James, aghast.

"You might say that," agreed Sirius, equally perplexed, though with less at stake personally.

"What happened?" whispered Peter. "Where'd they go?"

"Where do you think, Worm-brain?" Sirius asked, amusement breaking through the surprise. He tapped Peter lightly on the forehead with the two wands he was holding.

"What were you saying before, Prongs? Lovely day for a walk? Lily like walking, does she?"

"She'll kill me. I'm dead meat." James' face was tragic. "I'm done for! I'll never live this down. What a cock-up! We'll have to go and get them. We'll have to…" He was thinking out loud, planning as he went along. "…we'll have to leg it back to Hogwarts, get our brooms, get their brooms… fly out to Cairnmhor and try to find them… Oh hell - what if the spell didn't work? What if they're not there? What if - ?"

What if they're splinched somewhere? No one dared say it.

"Drink!" proclaimed Sirius. "What we need is a drink. Come on - but not back to that foul flea-pit. Let's hit The Three Broomsticks."

"Sirius! There isn't time!" wailed James.

"Exactly. That's my point entirely. We do not have time for any of that. Have you both forgotten about Remus?"

In the shock of the moment, they had.

"We can't let him down." For all his cavalier attitude, Sirius was staunchly loyal to the werewolf. "James, old man, whatever you do about Lily - rescue her or leave in the clutches of the Slytherin sex-machine…"

"You're not helping," mumbled Peter.

"…you are well and truly in the poo. Dragon dung up to your neck, I'd say. You can't escape. What this calls for is a bit of lateral thinking. You're not telling me the combined creative genius of the Marauders can't work out a damage limitation strategy? Come along."

"This is all a big joke to you," moaned James, enraged that Sirius could take the crisis so calmly. Hands thrust fiercely into his pockets he stomped down the High Street after him. Sirius clapped his arm round his shoulder.

"Chin up, James. 'Faint heart never won fair maiden'. Right. First things first. Does that book of yours say anything about spell reversal? Un-Vanishing Spells?"

Glumly James shook his head.

"Pity. OK, so where does that get us?"

"Up shit creek! Look, Sirius, I wish you'd stop waving that sneak's wand about - he's probably got an Anti-Theft Hex on it or something. It'll have your hand off any second. You know what those wretched Slyths are like."

"I do. I most certainly do. Eureka! I do, you do, even Peter here does, and - wait for it – so does Lily. And that, my friend, is the solution to our problem. Don't you see? You're off the hook, James!"

Too gloom-laden to be cheered by his friend's flippancy, James did not see.

"Has Lily seen this here book of yours? No? Has she even heard of a Directed Vanishing Spell? No. There you go! What is there to connect you in Lily's mind with anything at all? One minute she's staking out a romantic rendezvous, the next minute she's accosted by the slimy Snake-Charmer, and then Wham! She's whisked off to Merlin knows where. What's she going to think?"

"That Snape…?" James hazarded.

"Precisely! That the evil Slytherin has kidnapped her. It's perfect. It's almost, if I may say so, better than the original plan."

"He'll deny it," said Peter.

"Course he will," said Sirius airily. "But will she believe him? Methinks he will protest too much. And she's not going to be impressed. No Siree!"

Even James had to admit that this scenario had possibilities.

"She's got one hell of a temper. She'll be scary. Fearsome."

"I don't fancy being in Snape's shoes!"

"But they're still together. What if…?" James could not entirely dismiss his suspicions.

"Not a chance, old bean. Can you think of anything more likely to put you off a bird than being ranted at solidly for hours on end while you're climbing down a mountainside? You're hot, you're tired, you're thirsty, you've got stones in your socks, and all the while you're getting it in the neck from some screaming red-haired Harpie - sorry, Prongs! But you said it yourself, she's not going to take this lying down…"

"Still not helping…" murmured Peter.

"Romantic potential: nil, zero, zilch, nada. You've just got to keep stumm and make a big thing about how frantically worried you've been about her. That'll get you back in her good books. Give her that present. In fact, if we cover for her so that she doesn't get a detention from Filch for getting back late, you'll be her hero for life."

"And Snape will cop the Detention!"

Suddenly it was sounding better and better.

End of chapter.

Next chapter: A SPINELESS CREEP. 'Kick Ass' Lily is not impressed!