Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, or anyone else I may allude to in this story.
A/N: Thanks to my reviewers. Your comments mean a lot to me. If you have any comments about the Gothic elements especially, drop me a review.
"Cowardice grips your spirit – which can twist
A man away from the noblest enterprise
As a trick of vision startles a shying beast."
- The Inferno of Dante
Several weeks passed fairly uneventfully, well, as uneventfully as days can be at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Potions exploded, students attacked each other in the hallways, and people emerged from classes with weird attachments on their bodies. In the middle of October, Lily found herself partnered with Snape in Potions once more.
"I see Potter has yet to murder you in your sleep," Snape sneered, "unfortunately," he added under his breath. Luckily for him, Lily did not hear his last word.
She looked at Snape, saying exasperatedly, "Of course he hasn't. Why would he?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe because you are leading him on, and dating someone else at the same time. By the way, who is Percival?"
Lily looked at Snape questioningly, "I don't know. Am I supposed to know him?"
Snape looked at Lily unbelievingly. "So, you've meeting some guy in your room on weekends and been writing about him in your diary, yet you refuse to acknowledge that you know him. Tsk, tsk."
Lily glared at Snape, "What in the world are you talking about. I don't even have a diary. Explain yourself!"
Snape stared at Lily, "Don't be an idiot, Evans, you know very well what diary I am talking about: the diary you had at dinner that day. The one where you wrote 'I hope Percival doesn't find out about my relationship with –' and that's all I saw. But it doesn't take an idiot to figure out the rest. You've been leading on Potter and this 'Percival' character. It would be no wonder if you end up dead, just like Canton."
Lily gaped at Snape, "That's what you saw?" she asked, and blushed slightly at the idea of having a relationship with James.
Misinterpreting her surprise at finding out what the diary said for surprise that he knew her secret, Snape sneered at Lily. "I guess your secret's out. If I cared about the relationships of Gryffindors I may have told other people about your various little 'trysts', but I have more important things to do than mess with the love lives of pathetic Muggleborns and those obsessed with them." He spat out the word "Muggleborns" as if it were one of the worst ever spoken by man.
Lily opened her mouth to retort, but at that moment Slughorn called for the students' attention, and she was forced to turn her attention to the instructor. After class, before he left, Snape took a parting shot at Lily, telling her to sleep with one eye open, before running off to the Slytherin common room.
Lily related her latest Snape encounter to Samantha and the boys at dinner that night. They were all surprised to hear what Elizabeth Canton had written in her diary. "So, she was having some sort of side relationship with the Head Boy while she was dating Betancourt? Ooh, this gets better all the time," Samantha exclaimed.
"I just can't believe that anyone would think I would kill you, Lily," James added, more concerned that Samantha.
"Wait," Sirius interjected, "what if Snape is planning a way to make you kill Lily? Maybe he is going to put you under the Imperius Curse and force you to strangle her in her sleep!"
"Be realistic, Sirius. Snape may not be the nicest guy in the world, but what reason would he have for making James kill me? It's illogical."
"Maybe Snape is secretly in love with you, and can't stand that you are supposedly involved with James, and the other guy, of course, and he would rather you be dead than have to share you?" Lily rolled her eyes at this, but Sirius continued, "So he not only gets revenge on you for not loving him like he wants you to, but he also gets revenge on James by making him responsible for the death of the woman he loves?" James and Lily blushed slightly at this. "You had better be careful, James. Snape might just be desperate enough to try something like this."
No one else at the table took Sirius seriously, but James paled slightly at the idea and was quiet for most of the rest of the evening.
Lily was a little quieter than usual, lost in her thoughts. She had not told anyone else, but every weekend, she had been hearing the voices and the pounding over by the bookcase. She had taken to sleeping in the common room on weekends, saying that she enjoyed the company of the boys. Sirius, Remus, and Peter believed she just liked being near James, but James was a little scared for her. Lily Evans was known for being levelheaded, and if she was not sleeping in her dorm, there must be something wrong.
As Halloween approached, Professor Quesnel began preparing the class for a practical lesson on boggarts, and, finally, two days before Halloween came the day for The Boggart Lesson, as Sirius had dramatically dubbed it. Everyone arrived early for the class, eager to begin.
Many of the students had typical boggarts: spiders, vampires, and, oddly, a flock of birds rained down on one Muggleborn who had watched too many movies as a child. Samantha, who had been so anxious to find out her worst fear, found herself being attacked by several giant moths, flying in her face, prompting her to scream like the banshee someone earlier had brought into the room. The boggart form that really surprised everyone and caused Professor Quesnel to intervene, though, was James'. As he approached the boggart, slightly less self-assured than usual, but more so than most of the other students, the boggart took on a form neither he nor Lily would soon forget.
