Lily Evans was many things: a talented witch, a loyal friend, the type of girl who stopped to stroke stray cats on the street regardless of the flea risk.
One thing she wasn't? A morning person.
Seven years in, her three roommates had set up a rotating system of waking Lily up. Every ten minutes, one of them would try normal tactics to wake her up – shaking her, saying her name loudly, pouring a few drops of water on her head, and once even blowing a trumpet directly into her ear. Whoever was the unlucky third (decided every morning by a game of rock, paper, scissors) would have to take a deep breath and Levicorpus the redhead until she was hanging beneath the fabric of her four-poster.
She was usually awake fairly swiftly after that.
The most crucial part of the final step used to be ensuring that Lily's wand was out of reach, after she'd been on a particularly bad period one February morning in fourth year and set Marlene's eyebrows on fire. Now that they were all fluent in nonverbal spells, it was a blood sport of a whole different kind.
"It's alright" Marlene smiled encouragingly at Alice, who was eyeing the clock nervously "you can do it. If she wakes up and tries the Cruciatus curse on you, I can knock her out with this" she twirled the base of her Beater's bat between her fingers.
Dorcas laughed from the other side of the room, where she sat in front of the vanity that the four girls shared. They'd bought it the summer before fifth year at a car boot sale in Bermondsey and begged for Marlene's mother to transfigure it down to something they could transport to and from school every year. She'd obliged, and it was now their most treasured possession.
Marlene had stepped away from her hairdresser duties for the moment, having taken her plaits out first thing that morning, leaving her with blonde waves for their first day back at school. Dorcas sat meticulously combing through her afro with her favourite red pick, waiting for her best friend to help her with the back of her head. She could always do it alone, but having your hair done by someone else was another kind of magic altogether.
Alice had already showered, which should have left her feeling, cool, calm and collected, but she still felt a familiar, anxious itch behind her right ear as she prepared to wake Lily up for the first time that academic year.
"It'll get easier with practice" Dorcas reminded her "now wake the Head Girl up with the dignity she deserves."
The four of them had been up until the early hours of the morning, half of the time spent gossiping and trying to lighten the mood, and the other half failing to make Lily feel better about her first encounter of the year with Severus Snape.
"You did really well" Alice had reassured her, the four of them haphazardly sprawled across Lily's bed, passing around a bag of Fizzing Whizzbees. "You were strong and clear and you told him you still didn't want to be friends with him."
"I just don't understand why he won't leave me alone" Lily said, patting at her non-stop tears with the palm of her hand. Her eyes were starting to ache, and she willed herself to get a fucking grip and just go to bed.
"Because he's a creep" Dorcas pointed out, popping a sweet into her mouth. "He thinks he's entitled to your time and attention just because his feelings are hurt, even though he was the one who hurt you."
"You don't owe him anything, Lil" Marlene added "and, I know you can handle yourself, but it's a good job that James was there to take you out of the situation, otherwise he might've tried to follow you back into the Common Room or something."
Lily agreed on that much, at least. They all remembered immediately after Lily's and Snape's fight in fifth year, when he'd spent weeks tracking her across the castle, waiting on the other side of the Fat Lady for her to go to breakfast, or to do her Prefect rounds. She'd even taken up jogging at the crack of dawn that year, so that she could go with Marlene on her weekend runs, rather than head out into the grounds alone, never quite feeling at ease.
It wasn't that she thought Severus would hurt her, not really. But he was desperate for her and, as her mum had always told her, desperate men were a dangerous breed.
Lily had talked herself in circles and finally succumbed to sleep somewhere after one AM, and the other girls had worked mechanically, tucking her in bed, drawing her curtains, laying out her uniform and unpacking her modest make up collection for the morning.
They'd been through these motions for each other before – Lily first when she'd failed to transfigure a teacup into a toadstool in second year and spent her whole evening crying in the toilet (they managed to joke about this one now, but it was touch and go for the two years following); Dorcas when she'd been outed by a particularly spiteful Slytherin in third year after she'd spotted her kissing a Hufflepuff girl in the corridor (she fucked said Slytherin's girlfriend after a party in fifth year and didn't regret a second of it); Alice when her long-term boyfriend Frank Longbottom had asked for a break just before Christmas last year (thankfully, it hadn't lasted); Marlene after her previous editor at the Hogwarts Herald had told her that she wouldn't make it as a journalist if she didn't sacrifice playing Quidditch (she hadn't listened, and had unanimously been made editor at the beginning of their sixth year).
Everything they did for each other, no matter how misguided it could be sometimes, was done out of love and respect.
Which is exactly why Alice smiled as she silently cast Levicorpus.
The squeal that followed was a welcome sound to the already-awake Gryffindor girls. "Doesn't it feel like we're home now?" Dorcas beamed, as Lily hung upside by her ankles, her nightdress hanging over her face.
"Nice tits, Lil" Marlene grinned, throwing her bat back on the bed and joining Dorcas at the vanity. "You're lucky Doe and I don't date redheads."
Lily fell to her mattress with a thump as Alice apologised repeatedly.
"Rise and shine, Head Girl!" Dorcas hollered "it's your last first day at Hogwarts!"
Lily shook out her bedhead, her glorious red hair tangled in knots. Her green eyes were poisonous, as they all expected, and she made an audible hissing sound as she grabbed her dressing gown and marched into the adjoining bathroom.
"Good to be home" Alice beamed, slipping into her robes. "Good to be home."
"This is diabolical" James exclaimed at Gryffindor's table in the Great Hall, shovelling scrambled eggs into his mouth at lightning speed. "Have you seen this?" he asked Sirius, waving the piece of parchment in front of him.
Remus had excused breakfast, never his favourite meal of the day, to go to the Hospital Wing and say hello to Poppy Pomfrey. The Marauders, due to the secretive nature of their many visits to the wing, had established a good relationship with the twenty-something nurse and refused to call her Madam, despite the fact that she repeatedly told Sirius that she was married and that dating a student was frowned upon at best.
Peter, as per the first day of every year, was so sick with nerves that Padfoot and Prongs had abandoned him in their bathroom and opted for a hearty breakfast before their first day of mayhem began.
"Timetables?" Sirius guessed correctly. He scanned his own with interest, his eyes getting wider by the second. "Fucking hell" he said finally "when are we going to have time for parties?"
"Or Quidditch!" James yelped, spraying bits of egg over the space between them as a result.
"Or the paper" Marlene sighed heavily, taking a seat beside James. "Lily said she spoke to Professor Flitwick this morning and he was already warning her about homework and revision. We haven't even started yet!"
"Don't forget Head Boy duties, Potter" Lily reminded the spluttering boy, slipping into the seat beside Marlene "patrolling and weekly meetings on Wednesday nights."
James raised his goblet of orange juice and wondered, fleetingly, if he could successfully drown himself in it.
"I knew taking six NEWTs was a mistake, mate" Sirius sighed, popping a grape into his mouth.
"You're telling me" James muttered. He pulled a quill and inkwell hurriedly out of his satchel and began extending the timetable, adding in his Head Boy responsibilities and potential slots for Quidditch practice and upcoming tryouts. Seventh year was starting to look claustrophobic at best, and the bell for their first lesson hadn't even sounded yet.
"I didn't know you boffs were taking six" said Marlene.
"We figured that it gives us a better chance" Sirius explained, pretending that he hadn't seen Lily's eyebrows raise in interest at the boys' previous comments. "At least then, if we bomb one, we'll still be good for Auror applications in July. How many are you taking, Evans?"
Lily flushed, knowing that Black had caught her out. "Only seven" she muttered. "McGonagall wouldn't let me take any more. I'm guessing she had an inkling that Head Girl would be coming my way, so…"
"Burnout doesn't look good on anyone, Evans, even when they're as gorgeous as you" James piped up, blowing on his timetable evenly to dry the ink.
"Glad to see you two are playing nicely again after last night" Sirius remarked, waggling his eyebrows at the Head Girl. "James was heartbroken after your tiff over Snivellus last night. The slimeball just isn't worth it, Evans."
Lily rolled her eyes and ignored the comment. "Does anyone else have Charms first?"
"Don't worry, Evans, we'll be there with bells on" Sirius assured her. "Maybe Flitwick will even keep our pairings from last year."
Lily had to admit that watching Sirius Black work was a lot of things: sometimes entertaining, mostly infuriating, but never an experience she was dying to repeat.
The bell sounded and the two girls rose from their seats. They didn't bother to ask the troublesome twosome if they wanted to follow them, everyone knew that they'd be fashionably late to every class that week, like they were just too cool for school.
Marlene must have been reading Lily's mind "not too cool to take six NEWTs, though" she grinned, linking arms with her friend. "But definitely not cool enough to take seven. There's only one witch cool enough to do that."
Lily rested her head on Marlene's shoulder. "Did I say thank you for last night already, or…?"
"Shut up, you prat" Marlene scolded "anytime."
"Do you think it looked like Potter was actually concentrating at breakfast?" Lily asked "like he was actually trying to fit everything in?"
Marlene shrugged "he might surprise you. I mean, it would be a surprise to all of us, but I still wouldn't put it past him to do it. He's a good leader, you know. Intense, but good."
Professor Flitwick greeted the two witches at the door "ladies!" he squeaked, as if he hadn't greeted them during breakfast that morning "welcome back. Are you ready to turn vinegar into wine?"
"My kind of charm" Lily muttered as the pair brushed past him and took their seats to begin their first lesson of the year.
"I didn't know it was possible to hurt this much" James groaned, throwing his gangly body onto the Common Room sofa that evening, having showered some of the stress away and eaten his body weight in roast beef at dinner. "Why does my brain actually hurt?"
"Probably because you haven't ever used it before" Peter joked, even though he was feeling deeply unfunny and, like the rest of the seventh years, in a state of shellshock about the day's events.
For a change, Sirius was mute, his brow furrowed as he flicked through his copy of The Standard Book of Spells and scrawled notes into the margins.
Remus was sat at one of the tables with the girls as they discussed the finer points of the day's lessons surrounded by towers of textbooks. Lily, for one, looked about ready to cry.
Of course everyone had told them that seventh year would be hard, but they hadn't been prepared for it to be like this straight out of the gate.
In Charms that morning, Professor Flitwick had explained that they should be able to charm their vinegar into each of the three shades of wine – red, white and rosé - by the end of the week and that, by Friday, they should also have written three feet of parchment explaining the similarities in the composites of wine and vinegar.
Then it had been a whistle-stop tour of their Defence Against the Dark Arts syllabus for the year, and they would need to read fifty pages about the Patronus charm by Thursday. Their wands had, disappointingly, remained on their desks for the whole hour.
James, Peter and Sirius had then spent a mind-numbingly boring lesson tending to Flobberworms for the first years taking Care of Magical Creatures. They'd been promised that, during their next lesson, Kettleburn would show them the tanks full of Lobalugs he was currently having shipped in from a muggle who ran an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. Merlin knows, the boys could use a bit of light relief in their timetables.
Lily had nearly burst into tears in their afternoon Transfiguration class when, after spending her whole summer reading up on the theory of full human Transfiguration, she'd failed to make it as far as changing a fingernail into a claw after a whole hour of trying. To add insult to her injured pride, McGonagall had set them a five-foot long essay on the dangers of human Transfiguration, due by Wednesday.
Sirius had finished the day spectacularly in greenhouse seven, when he'd accidentally set a Mimbulus Mimbletonia on fire, catapulting Stinksap over every other student in the greenhouse and a very unimpressed Professor Sprout, who had promptly given him his first detention of the year. As a result of Sirius' misstep, the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff NEWT students were to read a chapter on the many properties of Stinksap for their lesson on Friday, and had had to walk through the castle reeking of horse manure.
Remus, who hadn't elected the NEWT class, had observed Lily, Alice, Marlene, Sirius and James amusedly when they'd entered the Common Room just after four that afternoon. "Clearly, free periods are the safest option" he'd said dryly, continuing his head-start on the dreaded Charms essay.
"Right" Sirius sighed "time to go and clean up the Stinksap. Shall we all have a drink when I get back, just the eight of us? Down here?"
"Sounds good" James agreed, taking Sirius' textbook from him to begin his own essay. "Take Sprout some Firewhisky and see if it gets you out of there faster. Girls and Moony" he called across the room, ignoring the stares of the other students, who had an earlier curfew than they did "nightcap? Ten-ish?"
"Only if we can practice for Charms" Lily said sternly, causing everyone to stare at her in open-mouthed horror.
"I was thinking something a bit stronger than that, Evans, but whatever makes you feel like you're not breaking the rules" Sirius chided, ruffling her hair as he made his way out of the Common Room.
Later, by the embers of the fire, the eight of them raised a glass to another successful year at Hogwarts and prayed they'd all make it through without death by homework.
For once, Lily mused, taking a sip of her slightly vinegary wine, hanging out with the Marauders didn't infuriate her or make her skin crawl.
Maybe they were all maturing after all.