Chapter 5: Human Nature
"Marleeeene!" Lily moaned. "How could you do this to me? And more importantly, how could you do this without asking me first~"
"I don't know." Marlene admitted. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. If and when I won the bet, you wouldn't needed to have known at all."
The 'bet' in question was a friendly gamble between Gryffindor beaters Sirius Black and Marlene McKinnon on who would knock more Slytherin Players off of their brooms during the quidditch match. The forfeit was a double date with him and her, and Lily and James. Marlene was confident she would win, having consistently outperformed Sirius in beating during their training sessions over the summer.
She had forgotten, of course, that this was Sirius Black she was betting with here, and while he might not have been the most subtle of erumpents in the Gryffindor common room, he was raised by a notorious Slytherin family, and had some sneakiness to him.
In retrospect, the immunity from the pranks of the Marauders for her entire friend group seemed to be a tawdry prize.
"Listen, Lily, it's just a Hogsmeade date. It's not like we are going to die on it, or something." Marlene tried to placate her irate friend.
"I don't know. It's Potter and Black. We just might." Lily grumbled, fingering her wand.
"Grow up, you two." Mary called out, not looking up from her magazine. "Marlene lost a bet she shouldn't have. She bet something that wasn't hers to bet. Shame on her. Lils. You can suck it up and deal with it. Who knows? Maybe you'll let your vicious, Slytherin streak through and whip him into shape."
"I don't know." Lily muttered darkly, her vibrant hair falling in front of her face. "I might just whip him instead."
"Lily." Dorcas looked at the redhead. "You quite literally killed the man on the train ride home. The fact that you resuscitated him and whether or not doing so was a mistake notwithstanding, he still likes you. He's either mad about you, or just mad! Maybe, just maybe, give it a shot."
"Fine." Lily snapped at her friends. "I'll go on the double date with you, Marlene. But!" She hissed. "I can't promise to be held accountable for my actions if he starts acting up."
"That's fair. I don't think I can promise to be held accountable for my actions, either." Marlene giggled. Lily sighed and pulled out her Charms homework.
"You know, I'm surprised you agreed to this." Potter smirked that slightly naughty smirked that screamed how confident he was. He was sitting across from her at their booth in the three broomsticks, and he was sporting a foam mustache from his butterbeer that made it all the more ridiculous.
"So am I." Lily muttered into her drink.
"I knew this would happen, eventually." Sirius grinned at her. "I'm basically a seer. Someone should tell that bat Delphi Mystique to move over. The future has a new conduit!"
"Merlin, Black, you just inherited your family's penchant for hallucinations and insanity." Lily shot back.
Black spread his hands out land leaned forward, appearing to be contemplating what she said. Surprisingly, he leaned back, and nodded. "That's probably true. After all, I am crazy enough to go on a double date with McKinnon, Evans, and Potter."
Lily couldn't help but smirk good naturedly. Damn it, against her better judgement she was enjoying herself.
Marlene came back from the loo. She saw Lily smiling, if slightly, and sighed. "Ok, what happened while I was gone?"
Sirius spoke up before the rest of them. "Lily merely pointed out that it's far more likely that what is occurring right now is more of a symptom of my familial insanity, rather than something that is actually occurring." He paused, and then looked around. His voiced dropped in volume, and he stage whispered. "And between us, I think she might be right. Evans is smiling, and she's sitting next to Potter. I'm sorry, Marlene, but as you are just a figment of my imagination, I am going to have to end this date. I'd like to go ride some unicorns."
"You'd definitely be hallucinating in that case." Lily shot back mirthfully. "No way Sirius Black is pure enough to get within a hundred feet of a unicorn. In fact, I'm surprised that they didn't all run from the forbidden forest after he took up residence in Gryffindor tower."
"You wound me, Evans." Sirius clasped his hand to his chest as he let out an exaggerated breath of air. "Prongs, old pal, I think she might have just besmirched my reputation."
"Oh, don't worry, Sirius." Marlene joined in; a wide grin spread across her face. "You besmirch your own reputation enough; I don't think anything Lily might do is going to affect it."
"I think she's figured you out, Padfoot." James stage whispered back at his friend.
Sirius broke down into incredibly convincing faux tears. "I try so hard for you people, and this is the thanks I get?"
"No, you don't." Lily and Marlene responded simultaneously.
"Prongs." Sirius gasped for air and sank down into his bench. "At my funeral, tell the world I died taking on a rogue flobberworm. My deceased self will prefer the pathetic fiction to the harsh truth: That Sirius Black, sexiest man alive, died from the verbal whips of two of the most vicious creatures in Britain."
James patted his friend on the back. "It's ok now, Padfoot. Remember, you're just hallucinating this. It'll all be fine when whatever you thought would be a good idea to ingest wears off."
Sirius nodded weakly.
The normally stoic Marlene couldn't help herself and burst into laughter. Even Lily couldn't help but smile at their antics - antics that would usually drive her to insanity. What is going wrong with me? She thought.
Sirius suddenly bolted up, his back stiffened ramrod straight, and a wide grin crossed his face. "Ahh, laughter of a fair maiden. The best medicine." He flexed his muscles and admired them.
"Black." Lily snorted. "She's laughing at you."
"Even better!"
"And I wouldn't exactly call her a fair maiden, either." James added, for which he was rewarded with a mild lightning curse from Marlene.
"You people are ridiculous." Lily sighed. "I actually can't believe you, sometimes."
"Yes. Your point?" Sirius's stony grey eyes bared down on her. They held eye contact for a moment before Lily decided it was getting awkward and pushed into his mind with a weak legilimency probe. She gave him a mental slap, and then retreated. Despite the prod being entirely mental, Sirius recoiled.
"So." Marlene interjected, seeing her friend illegally invade the mind of her date and figuring they could use a change of subject. "What is the story behind you nicknames?"
Sirius and James looked at one another before a moment before they both clasped their hands and rested their elbows on the table. They leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered at the same time. "So."
The snapped back and looked at one another. "I thought I was going first." James huffed.
Black looked at his friend, and remarked: "This is Sirius business, Prongs. Thereby, it's my right to tell them first."
James frowned at his friend, then conceded.
"So, you see, James is a real stag occasionally." Sirius related. James nodded severely.
"And Sirius is quite an old dog, almost always, really." James followed up.
Lily stared at them blankly. Marlene blinked a few times. "That sounds about right." She nodded.
"Marlene." Lily buried her head in her hands, "You've gotten us on a date with two irredeemably naughty, dirty boys."
"James Potter." He held out a hand and shot Lily one of his signature roguish grins. "One irredeemably naughty, dirty, boy, at your service."
Lily kept her head buried in her hands to hide the fact that her faced had joined her burning crimson hair in hue.
They strolled around Hogsmeade as a group. The autumn air was crisp, and the leaves had begun to change. They slowly moved out into the forest, away from the town.
Lily felt what was happening before it did happen. She spun around as her willow wand flew into her hand. She pushed magic through it and a bright blue shield pulsed out, expanding to fill the space behind them with a translucent, shimmering haze. The spell Mulciber had launched at their backs fizzled out harmlessly at on the wall of magic.
Sirius and James immediately brandished their wands, and Marlene's was already at the ready. Several of Mulciber's friends had their wands at the ready as well.
"So, not only do you sully yourself with the manic-mudblood, you also need her to defend you? Interesting how far the Potter line has fallen." One of his ilk called out.
"At least I'm not blood purist scum like you, Wilkes." James sneered back at him. "And at least my parents didn't meet each other at a family reunion."
"And Black." Wilkes, apparently, called out "At least you have the common sense to choose a proper pureblood, but I can't believe someone with a background as auspicious as yours is doing, slumming it with the impure."
Sirius snarled, and raised his wand.
"Hey, I've heard that Potter and Black get off on shagging animals, like that mudblood whore of theirs!"
Black had had enough and fired off another spell with a bark. One of the Slytherins batted it into the ground.
"You guys know how to form a mage trio?" Marlene asked, deadly serious. James and Sirius both nodded. "Good. I've got offense. Sirius, you adapt, and James, focus on defense."
"What about Evans?" James asked, his eyes not wavering from the group of slytherins. He shifted to a defensive posture, and batted away a few of the minor spells that the group sent at them. Marlene just smiled cruelly.
"Lily has mage." James nodded at this. He had seen Lily's work firsthand.
Normally from the receiving end, but there was a first time for everything.
The Slytherins finally got over their indecision, and started slinging curses. James and Sirius stood beside one another and cast powerful, overlapping shield charm. Marlene opened up, unleashing a torrent of nonlethal spells. Lily considered her options, and then thought about a spell she had never used on humans, but really wanted to right now.
"We need to finish this, and then get out of here. We will never outlast them." She intimated to them. Marlene nodded, and James halfheartedly agreed as he transfigured a tree into a net that caught the volley of projectiles that came inbound. Sirius was about to protest when Marlene shut him down. Whipped, he nodded.
Lily felt deep into her very essence and brought forth a weaker form of the Light of a Thousand Suns with a complex incantation and the wave of her wand. The forest was illuminated in the searing light, and their enemies were all blinded temporarily. She stumbled under the pain of channeling that much magic, and then got back up.
"Nice work." James commented, voice tinged with awe. "What was that?"
Lily immediately followed with another complicated movement and incantation, and drove her wand into the ground. The earth underneath the Slytherins rumbled, and long, sweeping roots cracked up through the topsoil and ensnared the hapless students. Lily focused on channeling the rather difficult magic for a few moments, letting the roots get a proper hold on her enemies, before the pain became too much. She fell to her knees and took several ragged breaths.
"Shit, is she alright?" James turned to look at Lily.
"I think so." Marlene commented. James's lapse of attention allowed bludgeoning curse to slip through his defenses, and it impacted Lily, knocking her back into the ground. "Or not. FULMINATA!" Marlene held the lightning spell for a few moments. It blasted through the remaining shields and knocked a few out. The trio followed up with a flurry of stunning spells. Their enemies stunned, for at least the moment, James scooped Lily's unconscious body up off of the ground, and started walking towards Hogsmeade.
"Umm, James?" Sirius asked. "You know the spell Mobilicorpus, right? You don't need to actually carry her."
"Shut up, Padfoot." James hissed. "Just give me this."
"I understand, and I entirely apologize."
Marlene just shook her head.
Lily woke up in something warm. She was kind of bouncing around, and there was a rustling of leaves coming from somewhere nearby. She cracked open her eyes.
Carrying her was James Potter. Lily sighed, even as the strange feelings in her stomach churned. "You do know that the spell Mobilicorpus exists, right? There was no need to carry me."
"Nope." Sirius ginned. "Not at all."
Lily sighed.
"That was some pretty cool magic, Lily." James commented. His face was a short distance from hers, and his heavy breathing was easily felt through his thin cloak.
"Thank you." She responded. They reached the horseless carriages, and James set her down in a seat. He held the door for Sirius and Marlene, and then crawled in after them.
"So, that was fun." Sirius commented.
"Let's not do it again, if we can help it." Marlene shook her head. "The fight part, not the date part. I might be amenable to something like that in the future."
Sirius pumped his fist in triumph. "I don't know, what about you, Evans."
"I enjoyed it." She spoke slowly, her headache pounding at the inside of her skull. She leaned over and rested her head on James's shoulder. "If you comment anything about this, my actions will be entirely due to the concussion."
James nodded meekly.
"Whipped!" Sirius mocked his friend.
"Hey Sally." Lily smiled at the painting as she walked up the stairs.
"Great. It's you. Again." The painting grumbled.
"Who else would it be?" Lily asked playfully.
"I do not know, but with luck, not you." Salazar scrunched his nose up at her. Lily conjured a couple of plush snake toys, and scattered them around the study, adorning shelves, the desk, and even Salazar's frame.
"I didn't think it was possible." Salazar gasped, clutching a hand to his chest.
"Think what was possible?" Lily grinned at him.
"Think that you could get more annoying, and yet here we are."
"It's a talent." Lily nodded, and went back to her work, decorating the chamber with fluffy, stuffed serpents. "Say, the other day we handed a bunch of Slytherin's their collective arses."
"Really now. And who is we?" Salazar drawled.
"Me, James Potter, Marlene McKinnon, and Sirius Black." Lily informed him. She walked back into the library, and pulled an ancient tome on potion off of the shelf.
"Really now?"
"Really." Lily nodded. "I played the role of mage in our mage trio and used Light of a Thousand Suns and a nonlethal variation to The Thirsty Trees against them."
"I'm sure you did." Salazar nodded. "It's not like those are difficult High Magic spells, and you are a sixth year mudblood. Oh, that's right, they are, and you are." He retorted sardonically.
"I did." Lily nodded. "Here, let me show you." She pointed her wand at the painting, and waved it in the proper movements. A brilliant cone of light emanated from the end. She focused on her breathing, and ignoring the pain in her body. She held it for about a minute before finally stopping.
Salazar stared at her, and blinked a few times, clearing his eyes as if he had just looked into the sun. In fairness, that was a fairly close approximation to what happened. "Miss Evans, are you sure that you are a mudblood?"
"Definitely." Lily smirked. "I look quite like both my mother and father, and I'll thank you to stop insinuating that I'm secretly a pureblood or something that was adopted by muggles."
"It's a compliment, fiend." The painting retorted. Lily waved him off and set to her books. Evidently, the assault on her and her friends yesterday meant that things were escalating.
She needed to be ready for when they did. Magic was no longer fun and games for her. Magic was survival. Magic was enforcing her will on the universe, so that at the end of all of this, she and her friends might still be alive.
After satiating her thirst for the esoteric knowledge ensconced within the tomes. Lily went out into the Chamber proper and began practicing the curses that would get her through this coming whatever it was. The willow in her hands seemed to push back, like it didn't like the fact she was learning things designed with killing and maiming in mind.
Too bad, wand. She thought. All told, I'd like to be alive when this all is over. If that means I have to get my hands dirty, learn some dark curses, and maybe even kill some people, so be it. I will be better than all of the others.
She cleared her mind, and returned to painting a canvas of destruction against the targets she conjured on one of the walls of the chamber. She carried on for almost an hour, when she noticed something after firing a Demon Cutter into the wall that left a long, deep gouge. Whatever magics the Chamber was made of immediately began repairing it, as the chunks or rock she had blasted out melted into the floor.
Every time she fired off a really intense bit of combat magic, she felt a stab of the pain that came from whenever she tried one of those high magic spells. Perhaps the pain of those spells wasn't endemic to them, but to powerful magic in general?
Definitely something to consider. She returned to the study and was about to cast a search spell when she realized it almost certainly come up with what she wanted in to.
But she really wanted to learn what the whole deal with the pain was, and if their was a way to ameliorate it.
And there was one person on hand who might know.
Sure, he was a bigoted asshole, but it probably wouldn't hurt to ask?
"Hey, Salazar." Lily asked the painting. "Mind if I ask a question?"
"Yes, and you just did." The bald man huffed. The snake with him in the painting stared at Lily.
"Excellent!" Lily carried on. "What do you know of the pain that I feel whenever I channel really powerful magic?"
The painting stared at her. "I'm not answering your questions, mudblood." It dismissed her with a sneer.
That didn't work. Lily considered her options. Maybe I should internalize the fact that I was in the domain of the founder that exalted cunning as a trait to be admired. She thought.
So, how do I go about sneaking the information out of him. Certainly, there's bribery, but I don't want to resort to that just yet. I could stroke his gargantuan ego, but that might be hit or miss…
Then, a lumos went off in her head, and she smiled.
"So, Salazar." Lily started. "You said you taught Muggleborns, if reluctantly while you were alive."
"Indeed, I did. Your point, Evans?"
"What has changed since then and now? Why won't you deign to teach me anything?"
"Because now." The painting sneered. "I am not a member of the schools faculty, and none of the mudbloods were intruding on my chamber."
"Ok then, how about we cut a deal? If you answer my question, I'll stay out of the Chamber for a week." Lily offered.
The painting considered it. "Fine."
Lily squeal internally in victory.
"To answer your question." The painting started, it's green eyes meeting Lily's. "We must first consider how magic works. As far as we can tell, we draw it through our bodies from somewhere. We don't know where. Alchemists call it 'The Inbetween', Transfigurers call it nowhere, and magical theorists call it the Aether. The truth is, we don't know. Imagine your body has a hole in it that we draw magic in through. Now, imagine you are drawing a lot of magic through that hole. When you do so, you "stretch" the hole, and the metaphorical stretching of the metaphorical hole is part of the cause of the pain you feel, the other part being the fact that you are drawing large quantities of rather volatile energies through your body. An interesting aside is that channeling magic will increase the size of the hole ever so slightly. This is why exceptionally old wizards tend to be rather powerful."
"Does it cause long term harm?" Lily asked.
"No, it does not. It is entirely a temporary phenomenon. Now go! And leave me in peace, mudblood!"
Lily nodded, contemplating what he said, and departed the chamber.
A/N: I've just gotten rid of all of the people that don't like James/Lily, haven't I?
Have hope, my comrades. While I've decided most of who lives and who dies, I haven't made up my mind yet on James.
I know this is a bit late, but I was really busy these last two weeks. I've gotten back into my groove, which will mean more infrequent updates than before (If that is even possible), because if it's Friday night and I can either A. Do my Solid Mechanics Homework due on Wednesday, or B. Edit and get my fanfic ready to post on Saturday, I'm going to do my Solids Homework every time.
Sorry. (Not really, engineering is way cooler than magic)