Disclaimer: Nope, sorry to disappoint. I'm just an American teenage girl.
A/N: First off, I would like to thank the following people who reviewed: hersheekiss13, daydreamin' angel, missscarlettbelle, pigs can fly, hermione-G-wanna-be, rohosluvsrolos, james-s2-lily, potterchik, and zhangie. Thank you all so much!! It means the world to me!
Sorry for the late update. I could have updated last week, but I re-read this chapter and it was, quite frankly, horrible. So, I had to go back and re-write this whole chapter; I hope it's okay. Well, at least I feel like it's better than the original one I had written. lol
I hope you all had a wonderful two weeks. I had exams all this week, and now they're finally over! Thank goodness!! Well, I suppose I'll stop rambling now (I'd be very surprised if anyone was still reading this author's note...I feel like I'm talking to myself...lol).
On with the story!
Chapter 3: Revolving Around Quidditch
She always felt like a spy when patrolling the dark halls of Hogwarts castle. Whether it was peeping around corners, sneaking into well known snogging spots, or breaking up dirty activities it was all rather exciting. Muggleborn Head Girl Lily Evans was out on the case of catching rule-breaking students. It was a dangerous job but one she had been happy to tackle. Of course, that was before she knew she'd have to collaborate with James Potter.
"Here we come," James called out loudly, stomping his feet louder than what was necessary. His footsteps reverberated off of the stone walls, only adding to the slightly frustrating noise. "We're rounding the corne—oof!"
Lily elbowed him hard in the chest, catching him off guard. "Will you shut up already? How many times do I have to tell you?" she hissed.
"Once more should do the trick."
"Twenty-ninth time the charm, Potter?" she asked scathingly, already completely fed up.
James grinned, eyes twinkling happily from behind his glasses. "I've always said twenty-nine is my lucky number—" Lily glared at him—"I don't see what the big deal is anyway. Just trying to lighten the mood."
Merlin, it was like trying to teach a two year old how to add and subtract. "You're practically giving them a warning!"
A look of innocence washed across the boy's face, but his act of ignorance didn't fool Lily. "Who?" he asked calmly, only adding to her rage.
"Look," Lily said, her voice tottering on the urge of impatience, "if there are…uh…couples up here—which there probably are, seeing as we're patrolling the—"
"—sex tower of all of Hogwarts?" James added in casually, apparently thinking Lily needed help in defining their current location.
"Well, I was going for the Astronomy Tower, but regardless, you can't go stomping around warning them off!" Lily argued, placing her hands on her hips. She seemed to be staring him down as if she were personally trying to melt him with her gaze.
"And why not? I'd rather not see…uh…that."
James blushed and Lily almost laughed out loud at his atypical discomfort, until she realized who she was with. After that, any humor seemed to disappear from the situation. "Oh, please," Lily stated, pushing past the black haired Head Boy and heading towards a small alcove where the curtain covering the spot was gently moving in a rather eerie, flowing, way. "You're so immature."
"Are you saying you want to see two people sucking each other's faces off?" James responded, the corners of his lips twitching slightly as they fought to turn up into a maniacal smirk.
Startled at his assumption, Lily spun around, momentarily forgetting the alcove and the mysterious vibrating decorative fabric. "I—No—you're crazy."
Suddenly at complete ease—though James usually tended to be cool in any given circumstance—Potter leaned casually against the wall of the Astronomy Tower, crossing his arms across his broad chest. She couldn't help but notice how much he had changed from the scrawny, skinny kid to the rather muscled seventeen year old he had become. "It's okay to have certain urges, Evans," James responded.
Right, so maybe he hadn't changed all that much. She threw her hands up into the air as if she were praying for God to strike James down with a lightening bolt. "Yeah, and you would know all about that, wouldn't you?" she retorted, tapping her foot distractedly and raising her eyebrows in such a way that hinted at her annoyance.
"Well, actually, no. That's Sirius."
Before she knew what had happened, Lily felt herself ease up and she emitted a short, terse laugh. Even James looked at her funnily. This strange phenomenon was absurd. She had laughed…at Potter…at a joke! Someone was poisoning her mind! Darn it; she knew she shouldn't have allowed Sirius to pour her that glass of pumpkin juice that morning. Trust the Marauders to spike a drink with some sort of potion that will take away any hope of rational thought from a person.
While she reprimanded herself for drinking that glass of unidentifiable liquid, stealthy footsteps clipped across the stone floor behind her. Straining her ears to make sure she wasn't hearing things, Lily saw James's eyes flicker from her face to a spot just over her left shoulder. Confused, Lily turned to look behind her in order to confirm what, or more accurately whom, was making the noise before—
"Oy! You two!"
Apparently James had seen something that she hadn't. Following her partner's gaze, Lily's eyes landed on two disheveled looking people behind her that were trying to shrink against a wall, attempting not to be seen. A boy and a girl; a boy whose shirt was buttoned as if he'd been on steroids while trying to do them up, and a girl who'd looked like she'd attempted to put on her makeup in the dark. Typical.
Standing to her fullest height, Lily was just about to open her mouth to reprimand the two rule-breaking students before James beat her to the punch again. "Robbie, shouldn't you be resting up for practice later this week?" he asked, observing the sixth year boy.
Of course, that boy was a Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Ready to jump in and hand out the punishments, knowing that James would probably never do it, Lily stepped forward. And, yet again, Potter rudely interrupted her.
"I'm afraid, as your Captain and Head Boy, I'm going to have to take ten points away from Gryffindor, mate," James announced sympathetically, yet authoritative. He looked at his fellow teammate for a second before his hazel eyes swiveled to Robbie's assumed girlfriend. "Ten points from Ravenclaw as well, Lisa."
Astounded that James was actually doing an adequate job, Lily simply stared upon the scene with wide eyes, totally not comprehending what was going on. When she felt James's eyes upon her, Lily lamely nodded and cleared her throat. "Uh, yeah, back to your respected common rooms."
As the two sixth years shot off down the corridor, an emotion began rising inside of Lily that seemed completely out of place, yet not at the same time. She was angry. She was enraged at the fact that James had completely jumped ahead of her and had made her look like an idiot, similar to a fish gaping for air who had just been pulled out of the sea by a fishing line. She was mad that James Potter, prankster superstar, had taken control of the situation. But most of all, she was angry at the fact that James was living up to her expectations of what a Head Boy should be.
And she didn't know why.
"So, I say I handled that pretty well," James said, wiping his hands off as if they had dirt on them. He had meant it as a joke, she knew, but right now Lily needed a justifiable reason to be angry at him.
"Can't you ever try to be humble, just for a second?" she asked, turning her back on him and intending to walk away with her thoughts.
She knew she was overreacting, and apparently so did he. "Evans, it was a joke."
Why could she feel her blood boiling? Why did her skin crawl at the sound of his voice? More than anything else in the world right now, she really just wanted to push him off of the Astronomy Tower, or hex him at least. For some reason, he was winding her up like he always knew how. This feeling made her feel foolish. However, Lily wasn't really thinking straight and therefore didn't realize how ridiculously this whole conversation was setting her emotions off.
If James knew what was good for him, he really should have kept his mouth shut. "You really need to learn how to loosen up."
There was a short moment's of silence as Lily let these words sink it; she allowed the words to build her temper even further. Who was he to tell her to loosen up when he had just taken points away from his own school house?
A good Head Boy, that's who.
Oh, shut up!
"You are bloody unbelievable," she exclaimed, her voice, surprisingly, smooth even though the voices inside of her head were battling it out. "Bloody unbelievable."
"What did I do, now?" He sighed and she scowled.
Lily hesitated, not really knowing how to answer this. Every answer she came up with sounded dumb even inside of her own head. Her thoughts were so jumbled by now that the only thing she could have accomplished if she had even tried to speak would have been a incoherent mumble. Emotions were flaring through her—anger, annoyance, anger again—and nothing seemed to make sense. That alone probably explained why Lily—a frozen look of pure frustration plastered across her normally pretty features—whisked off down the corridor without another word.
Hoping that Potter had gotten it through his thick skull that she didn't want to be around him, Lily strolled down the hall. Relief at being away from James swept through her, but she knew the feeling was too good to last.
"Hey, Evans!"
She could hear the screeching of breaks, the chilling sound of nails being dragged across a chalk board, a hallelujah chorus getting cut off suddenly, all of the most horrible sounds that she could think of entered her mind as her brain registered the voice. Shutting her eyes and hoping that she'd imagined the voice, Lily kept on walking down the stairs.
"Evans!"
Ignore him; he's not real.
"Oy! Woman!"
That about set her off like a sporadic firework again. How dare he call her something as degrading as 'woman'! She wasn't some low-life housemaid that was there to serve his every need! No good Head Boy would call their partner something that low.
"It's rude to ignore people, you know."
Her thin line of self-restraint snapped as easily as a twig, though she realized it had probably been snapped a long time ago—most likely the first time she had met him. "What is it, Potter?" she cracked, turning quickly.
The next thing happened so rapidly, Lily didn't even have time to feel foolish. As she had turned to hex Potter into the next decade, Lily's foot had caught itself on the step in front of her and she had stumbled. Instead of falling forwards, like she had expected, Lily began falling backwards and was helpless to the projectile motion. With a strange plummeting feeling, Lily's right foot fell straight through the infamous trick step that everyone at Hogwarts knew to avoid.
"Argh!!" Lily screamed, attempting to wrench her foot from the step that was now eating her leg, but her efforts weren't appreciated. Unfortunately, she failed to realize that she couldn't place her hand on the trick step to heave herself out without that getting sucked into the stair as well. So, now she only had one hand, one leg, and a very useless hormonal teenage boy to help her. Blasted trick step. Who made up this kind of stuff, anyway? Sickly amused people, that's who.
James kneeled down on the step above her. "Well, if you hadn't ignored me, Evans, I would have warned you that you were about to walk into the trick stair." He offered her a small grin and took hold of her one free hand, having the intention to help her out.
Unsurprisingly, Lily didn't find this act of helpfulness to be at all heroic. Of all people, she didn't need—didn't want—his help. "Get your hand off of me, Potter!" she exclaimed, glaring at him, convinced that this predicament was entirely his fault. Maybe if he hadn't handed out those punishments and shattered Lily's firm foundation of her view of him, then Lily wouldn't have been caught up in her angry thoughts and would have jumped over the step. Yep, this was his entire fault; most things were.
"Right, then," he stated, withdrawing his hand and straightening his back at once.
She could feel his eyes on her as she placed her only free hand on the stair in front of her and her free leg on a, hopefully, stable step. Lily proceeded to push and pull, pull and push, until her leg stuck in the stair seeped a few inches lower into the empty unknown space. "Bloody stair…" Lily muttered angrily, wishing she had a hand to shove the strands of wild red hair that had fallen from her ponytail out of her face so she could further survey her very sticky predicament. If she could somehow just reach her wand that was in her pocket without falling even more into the staircase…
"Are you sure you don't need some help?"
Lily scoffed, looking up at her so-called 'partner'. Ha, partner her very sore buttocks. "I'd rather eat a pixie."
For a moment, he simply stared down at her, his nose wrinkled up as if he'd just smelled something very offending. "You know," he began, crossing his arms, "pixies can be poisonous."
Gravity seemed to be taking its toll on her as she felt her leg sink an inch or two lower; it was really starting to throb now and her hand was going numb. In other words, her patience wasn't at its highest level. "Do you just like to hear yourself talk?"
"Look, if you don't want my help, all you had to do was tell me," James said.
"I have been!"
Shrugging as if he didn't care either way, James simply grinned and turned his back on her very slowly. It was almost like he was taunting her, daring her to change her mind. "Have it your way then."
Determined not to give in, Lily tried to shove herself out one last time—somehow getting her wand with the only free hand she possessed seemed improbable. However, when she tried to heave herself out, her hand slipped and she fell waist deep into the step. "Well, isn't this just great," she muttered to herself, really liking the idea of kicking something very, very hard.
Annoyed at how her night was turning out, Lily scowled to herself, muttering some very high obscenities under her breath that would have caused McGonagall to cringe. Potter was only a few feet away from her, and there was no way in Merlin's magical world that she could get herself out of this predicament by herself.
Breathing deeply, Lily clamped her eyes shut tightly. She could not believe she was stooping so low. "Potter, wait!"
It was like he had simply been waiting to hear those words as he turned back around to face her, a grin apparent across his face. "Need my help, then?" In response to his question she simply narrowed her green eyes and glared. Taking that as an unspoken plea for aid, James hopped down the remaining steps and stopped right above her. "On one condition…" he began, holding up a finger.
Could her night possibly get any worse? "Typical," she grumbled, completely fed up with everything; fed up with stupid trick steps, fed up with morons who came up with all of these pranks, fed up with James Potter for being so un-James Potter-ish and completely James Potter-ish at the same time.
James tapped his foot impatiently. "Actually, I usually don't find myself in this type of situation often." What she wouldn't give to swipe that smirk right off of his face.
Right at the moment, though, her thigh gave a mighty throb, like the blood circulation from her hip to her foot was being cut off. It was highly uncomfortable. Groaning, Lily sighed. "What's the condition?"
"Now normally I wouldn't take advantage of you like this—" Lily snorted, but James proceeded—"but I know you wouldn't listen to my request if you weren't stuck here…"
"What's the bloody condition, Potter?"
"I need to reschedule this Thursday's patrol."
Lily stared, completely gob-smacked for a split second. That was his condition? She had been expecting something…well, more. Possibly a request for a snog during breakfast tomorrow, an unnatural manipulation for her to be his date for a week, or a demand for her to profess her love for him in the middle of Transfiguration. But no, he just had to go and ask for the one thing Lily hadn't expected. What was wrong with him?
She searched her brain for some default to this request as well. "Why?" she asked impatiently.
"Quidditch practice. I tried to schedule it for another day, but Dorcas has some Charms meeting tomorrow, and Jake has tutoring Friday afternoons…"
Quidditch! Why did it always seem that everything revolved around bloody Quidditch? Because James-bloody-Potter's life revolved around Quidditch, that's why. "So, you're just going to ditch your responsibilities?"
He rubbed a hand through his hair. "No, I said I would like to reschedule."
"No, out of the question. I refuse to be the one to do all the work, and give out the late notices, and rearrange Prefects' schedules…"
"Evans," James said, interrupting her tirade. "I've already talked to Remus and that Hufflepuff fifth year Prefect and they said they'd take over Thursday."
Here he went again, acting all responsible. Lily couldn't help but wonder what was in it for him. Her anger returned, but it was intensified by the now searing pain in her trapped leg. "If I find out that you haven't taken care of it all…" she threatened.
Taking that as an agreement, James grabbed her waist in one swift motion and had pulled her up and out of the step as easy as if he'd been lifting a quill. Lily stumbled slightly, her right foot failing to support her sudden body weight. Brushing off her robes in a dignified manner, Lily stomped her sleeping foot on the ground to get the blood flowing again. She refused to meet James's glance; she refused to thank him. Yeah, she knew she was being childish, but she frankly didn't care.
"Well, then, I suppose I'll see you in lessons tomorrow."
Finally, Lily looked up at him. "What? Not going to ditch Potions?" she asked, her voice cold.
He stared at her, his eyes shining. "And miss watching you the whole period? Nah, I'll be there."
Just like that he had switched from possibly responsible back to his old immature self. "I hate you, Potter."
OOO
"I'm telling you," Lily exclaimed, pacing up and down in front of her four-poster bed back in her dormitory, "he's luring me into a false sense of security with his little 'act of maturity'."
The moment she had returned from her patrolling duties, Lily had felt the need to rant and rave about Potter to her friends. Marlene and Dorcas sat patiently on their separate beds, nodding and occasionally agreeing with her as Lily proceeded with her antics. Alice, and their two other roommates, had long ago fallen asleep, each one blissfully dreaming away. Honestly, that's what Marlene and Dorcas wished they were doing, but losing a few hours of sleep was sometimes inevitable.
"He's not that bad—" Dorcas trailed off at the look Lily was shooting her way—"er…anymore," she rectified her mistake hastily. Lily knew Dorcas was sometimes stuck in the middle. After all, James was her Quidditch captain; there was bound to be some type of loyalty thing there.
"Not that bad?" Lily questioned incredulously, waving her hands about, but really trying to remain as quiet as possible so her other dorm mates wouldn't wake. "Puh-lease! Underneath that mop of messy black hair are little devil horns!"
Marlene sighed, pushing her long dark hair out of her face and over her shoulder. "Here we go with the drama," she claimed, leaning against the headboard of her bed, observing her fingernails lazily.
Lily crossed her arms over her chest defiantly. Was she being dramatic? Of course she was! But was it justifiable? Duh, she was talking about James Potter, for Godric's sake! "Here," Marlene continued, throwing a chocolate frog at Lily, "eat this."
"Hey! Pass one over here," Dorcas stated, holding her large hands out to catch the small, wrapped desert.
Slowly unwrapping her piece of chocolate, Lily fell backwards onto her bed, the springs of her mattress creaking. There was a compatible silence as the three friends dug into their chocolate at nearly one in the morning. There was nothing better than chocolate; it was the best soothing food ever invented.
"You know," Marlene began, "have you ever thought of giving James a chance?"
A look similar to an expression of someone who had just been hit in the face with a Beater's bat crossed Lily's face. "Ew. I think I just lost my appetite," she responded seriously, shoving her half-eaten chocolate frog to the edge of her bed.
Dorcas grinned, snatching Lily's abandoned candy off of her bed. "You were the one who kissed him three years ago."
"Yeah, because you two dared me to!" Lily defended, her voice rising. Her friends were being totally unfair! Best friends were supposed to take your side, not someone's that you just so happened to hate with every fiber of your being. James Potter and Lily Evans just seemed to clash; they were two different people. He was mister outgoing, popular, cocky Potter. She was miss rule-abiding, intelligent, quick-tempered Evans.
Bed springs from somewhere across the dorm squeaked as its occupant shifted their position in bed. "You talk about James Potter way too much, Lily," Alice's tired voice spoke up from the other side of the room.
As Dorcas and Marlene giggled, Lily groaned and pulled her duvet over her face.
Annnnd, readers dismissed! Thank you for reading! And, please feel free to review:) I'll try to have the next chapter up by next week.
Have a wonderful day! Talk to you all later! (Wow, I think I've gone a bit overboard on all of the exclamation marks...lol)
--HeyLookTheSnitch