Once Upon a Miserable Girl's Plight...

Hey! First up, reviews and critiques!

Remmy ish Mine- Thanks for your review! Nice and long, just how I like to give and get reviews! I just want to clarify what you said about Lily "blaming all males." If it came off that way, it wasn't my intention. Lily doesn't blame males for what happened to her mother, but rather she is a bit afraid to get too close to a boy (like her mother, who was good friends with her attacker) and does not want to give someone trust that could easily be broken. She feels this way about everyone (males and females alike) but it is true that Lily is being quite ignorant in her mistrust in boys. I personally don't feel that way about boys or anything, but because of the plot I have in mind, it is almost necessary that Lily not trust boys. Although all the stuff in Chapter 3 about boys being shallow and most other cynical views on boys (like the quote "They caused problems and heartache and never batted an eyelash at what they had done.") are part of Lily's character that would have been there in this story whether her mother had died or not. I hope this helps you understand what I meant for Lily's thoughts and feelings to seem like. Sometimes I make things more dramatic than they really are.

Whew, that was long winded... Well, onwards with Chapter 5 and thanks to everyone else who has reviewed this along the way. Please keep reviewing and letting me know what you think of this story.

-Kait

Disclaimer Read this and weep, for I am not J.K. Rowling and thus have no secrets to give you about anything concerning Harry Potter. The plot is mere speculation on my part and the characters most definitely do not belong to me.

Chapter Five: Fireworks

December & January, Fifth Year

If I come across one more Fillibuster firework while I'm patrolling the corridor as Prefect duties, I am going to pull a Potter and hex someone.

Oh, it's all well and dandy for Remus Lupin, who always seems to have been missed by fireworks when I pass him in the hall. But as Frank Longbottom pointed out to me earlier this evening, it is probably his friends setting the stupid things off, so it makes sense that the fireworks go no where near him while he's patrolling.

I suppose one of the boys got a few cases of them for Christmas. I wonder if the prat who sent them the fireworks realized that in doing so, they would be disrupting every student's life at Hogwarts.

Luckily, I was going to be relieved from Prefect duties in a couple minutes. I could see Davy Gudgeon walking towards me, wand out, incase of any more spare fireworks.

"You can go back to your dormitory for the night," he said, looking at me as I heaved a sigh of relief.

"You know, you just saved the whole Gryffindor common room from being hexed," I told him, smiling slightly.

"That's nice," he replied vaguely. I suppose he saw something zooming down the hallway, but I decided it would be better to just head straight for the common room than to look back.

"See you," I called as I hurried off, out of the politeness that my mother had instilled upon my brain while I was young.

Once in the common room, I looked around. I wasn't truly in the mood to talk to anyone (especially not Marlene, as her new obsession was James Potter) but rather I felt the need to be alone. People commented that I had been doing that a lot lately but I didn't particularly care. What was I to do when I still got the occasional sympathetic look from someone when I least expected it? Most people knew that my mother had died but I suppose that people were just catching on now that that was the reason I had become so quiet. I suppose that wasn't completely true though. I had spent so much more time this year on schoolwork and studying that I barely had time to think about her or the rest of my family. I just... threw myself into schoolwork.

But I had been dwelling on a thought all day. I missed my family and my house and...everything. It was quite an odd feeling...but it did seem to happen nearly every year. That's why my mother always made me the photo albums, I suppose. She wanted to make sure I had something to remember them all by.

Father didn't seem to be feeling any better lately than he had felt before. I wished I could help him. I wrote him letters weekly; the letters I would have normally addressed to my mother. I told him about life at Hogwarts and how the common room was the worst place to study because with a certain few Gryffindors there, you are never guaranteed a quiet setting. It just sort of... depressed me that I couldn't be there for him the way Petunia could be, since she was at home.

So I dragged myself up to my dormitory and past all of my giggling roommates to collect my picture albums. They were stuffed under some old socks and an extra school robe in my trunk. It was horror to have to walk past all those perky, smiling girls who were gossiping incessantly about some Hufflepuff boy and how Bertha Jorkins had been hexed by Sirius Black for spreading around an ugly rumor about him and his brother.

It was insane how cut off Hogwarts was from the rest of the world. There were so many problems going on outside of Hogwarts in the Wizarding world and even the Muggle world but yet all these girls seemed to notice was how nice looking some boy was. Couldn't they see what was happening in the world? Hadn't they seen the report in the paper about some Death Eaters' attack on the Prewetts? We were so confined, so safe and content in our little haven from the rest of the world and I couldn't understand it. But I really didn't want to spend more time thinking about it. There were so many horrors happening around us and maybe that was why Hogwarts was so appealing as a haven from the rest of the world. But I suppose in the end, we were all going to die anyway...

With that heavy thought on my mind, I grabbed the albums and rushed downstairs before I could be sucked into the conversation I had witnessed my dormitory.

Settling into my favorite comfy armchair by the fire, I started paging through the photographs and smiled when a particular photo I liked came up. It was almost soothing to flip through the pages methodically. I just sat there, freeing myself of emotion while I smiled and frown slightly with each page until I saw someone's shadow creep over the photographs.

"Still studying, Evans?" the voice came softly from above.

"No," I replied hotly as James Potter sat down in the chair next to mine, his eyes glittering, "I'm looking through some pictures."

"You dropped one," he said with a grin as he pointed to it just next to my ankle and then made to pick it up, "Here, I've got it."

He stared at the photograph in his hand for a moment. It was a wizarding picture and it definitely wasn't mine. For one thing, it was the picture I had found of him and Sirius in Diagon Alley a few months ago. It must have been with the books and must have fallen out when I picked up the first book. He looked up from it to give me a quizzical glance. It was a glance that felt as though he was trying to read my mind and gauge my thoughts on the photograph. I felt myself start to blush slightly. He didn't think I stole it or something, did he?

"Where did you get this?" he asked with an even wider grin (if possible) on his face than before.

"I found it in Diagon Alley," I answered simply. There was no point in lying, really. "I meant to give it back to one of you, but I forgot I even had it."

"I'm sure you did, Evans," he said as though he didn't believe me at all and raised his hand to his head to start messing up his hair.

Like I needed this. The last thing I wanted him to think was that I fancied him.

"Well, you've got it now, haven't you, Potter?"

I stated it bluntly, in hopes that he would take a hint and get away from me. Closing the album softly and gathering them together I readied myself to get out of there quickly but there was a group of girls taking their sweet time coming down the dormitory steps.

"Yes, I do," he started as he leaned a little closer to me; his smile was practically illuminating the whole room. But it was something in his eyes that startled me and I had to look away. "But I haven't gotten you to go to--"

I didn't quite hear the end of what he said because the group of girls had finally learned the meaning of 'walk' and I bolted up out of my chair and up the dormitory steps.

My breath caught in my throat as I lay in my bed, the hangings closed, a few minutes later.

James Potter, talking to me, making me blush (which I try to avoid doing, at all costs... although if you really think about it, it was the photograph that made me turn red), and then seemingly starting to ask me out? But was he serious?

And why did I care? No, I didn't, I reasoned, I was just merely curious.

That must have been it. Because James Potter was a prat who went around hexing people in the corridors and driving Prefects such as myself mad with his stupid antics. I didn't like him at all. He was the kind of boy that could easily break a girl's heart; I had seen it before.

I rolled over in my bed and closed my eyes, unwilling to let those thoughts to dwell in my mind anymore.