Disclaimer: Have I mentioned yet that I don't own Harry Potter? Oh, well, just in case, that guy with the scar on his head isn't mine.
A/N: Thanks to all of you who reviewed!!! Sharnie, -Jeisa-, messyblackhair66, pigs can fly, Idrinklead, Isolde Eris, CaramelBoost, amieken, MarisAlexia, Mouse and Stupid Productions, RoseLizzi, zhangie, love-tear-perish, SparklingEyesWithACrazyMind, and darth spots and darth stripes. You guys are amazing, as usual. Reviews really do make me feel happy.
Man, I really need to get better at updating more quickly. I know, I know, it has been like a month since I last updated. I'm sure you're sick of my excuses by now, so I'll just say I'm sorry and I'll try to do better. :) So, on with the chapter I say. (Wow, that must be one of my shortest A/N yet.) I dunno if this is my best chapter, but it's as good as I could get it. Hopefully you like it...
Chapter 6: Phase One
Lily paced back and forth in front of the fireplace, much like a prowling cat. Every few seconds she'd stop and glance towards the portrait hole, a pensive look on her face, before she would begin her stalking again.
The dare had just been handed out, and already Lily was getting ready to put it into action. It was later that night and the four girls were in the common room, the flames in the grate casting a warm glow throughout the room. However, the crackling fire did nothing to soften Lily's nerves.
"Shouldn't we start off with something less…drastic?" she asked suddenly, swinging her head around to face the three girls who were watching her from the couch.
"Drastic? You think this is drastic? Merlin, one can only imagine how you're going to react once we get to phase eight of your dare," said Marlene, throwing her dark hair over her shoulder easily.
Observing her friend carefully, Lily gulped, already fearing the answer to her unasked question. "Phase eight?"
Just from the look in her friend's eyes, Lily knew she wasn't going to like phase eight very much. "Going on a date with him, of course," Marlene answered.
Something between a yelp and a cough flew from Lily's throat. Yep, she didn't like that at all. "Date?"
Dorcas, Marlene, and Alice shared an amused smile as Lily resumed her now frantic pacing again, muttering chosen obscenities under her breath.
"Maybe we should just stick with phase one for now, yeah?" Dorcas suggested. "No sense in her getting worked up already."
Lily scoffed as she crossed her arms over her chest protectively, although she totally agreed with Dorcas. Phase one was hard enough to get prepared for; she didn't need to get confused with the other phases as well. Her heart pounded fast just thinking about what she was about to do. Whether this reaction was out of dread or excitement, Lily wasn't quite sure. It was possibly a combination of both.
Stupid phase one. It's going to be impossible, Lily thought savagely, glaring at her friends who stared back at her, confused as to why she was staring at them as if she were wishing for them to die.
What exactly was phase one?
Control her temper when around the Quidditch prodigy himself.
Wow, just thinking about it made her want to laugh at the preposterous proposal. Never had she been able to hold her tongue when James Potter had strutted across her path. Whenever he had screwed up or done something to tick her off, she'd always been right there to slap him back into his place. She knew that they should have started off with something easier.
"Wouldn't it be better to have phase one be something along the lines of having to pass him the potatoes at dinner?" Lily asked rather pathetically.
She scowled as her friends snorted with laughter. "Oh, honestly, Lily," Marlene commented like she was Lily's mother.
"You know you're excited about this," Alice stated quite simply, placing the book she'd been reading on the small table beside her.
"Otherwise," Dorcas cut in, "you wouldn't have agreed to it."
Lily mumbled something incoherently, but she couldn't stop the corners of mouth from creeping upwards into the tiniest of grins. Alright, so she really was looking forward to finally avenging everything Potter had ever done to her. It was quite thrilling actually. For once, she had the upper-hand on the Maruaders; none of them would ever see it coming. Potter wouldn't guess that she'd learned about their insolent bet, and the knowledge that she knew something that he didn't gave her a very powerful feeling indeed.
The plan was sort of like luring a mouse into one of those Muggle wooden killing machine contraptions, except without all of the violence and blood. The cheese bait was Lily; the mouse was James Potter. Upon entering the scene from his late night scavenging, the mouse would hesitantly approach the cheese—the object of his affections—and then snapThe trap would go off, the cheese would be saved from any nibbling, and the poor mouse would be caught up in the plan to destroy him.
Currently, the only missing part of their plan was the mouse. They hadn't seen hide or hair of Potter since earlier that evening at the Quidditch pitch. Lily knew he was probably out wrecking havoc with his band of miscreants, after finding out that he'd lied to her about switching patrol duties. But, seeing as Hogwarts was a pretty large place and considering the fact that Lily didn't want to go out and find them, the girls' only option was to wait up in the common room.
"I'm tired," Dorcas whined childishly an hour later from her spot in front of the fire. Marlene was dozing on the arm of the couch lazily, Alice was curled up in an armchair, and Lily had her head in her arms as if she were going into the fetal position.
"Me—" Alice broke off, yawning—"too."
"They are way out of bounds now," Lily said darkly. "Out and about three hours past curfew…"
"Don't even think about it, Lils," Marlene said, her eyes closed.
"What?"
"You know what."
Lily groaned and rolled her eyes. This was going to be way harder than she thought. She knew that on first instinct she'd want to get straight to the punishing upon the Marauder's entrance, but under the given circumstances…
The dare will get him back.
Two hours later Lily's wristwatch began to beep at a high pitch, signaling that two o'clock had just passed and three o'clock in the morning had just begun. Lily curled her feet further up into a ball on the couch she was currently snoozing on. Dorcas mumbled something incoherently in her sleep, Marlene's foot twitched, and Alice shifted positions from her spot on the floor. They had all tried to resist their persuasive, drooping eyelids, but alas the sound of the cackling fire had rocked them off to sleep and the closest they were going to get to starting phase one would be in their dreams.
"Padfoot, stop pushing me, you great mutt!"
"S'not my fault! I tripped on rat-tail, here."
"Hey!"
There was a fair bit of shuffling as the portrait hole leading into the common room creaked open. Sounds of footsteps, heavy breathing, and more protests were heard as a group of boys attempted to scurry through the portrait hole all at the same time.
"It'd be a lot easier with the cloak off."
"Someone could be up."
"It's three in the flippin' morning, Prongs."
"Hey, look, it's Lily!"
The footsteps immediately stopped in their tracks and any noise that had previously been around ceased.
"Is she awake?"
"No, no, I think she's asleep." There was a silence. "Merlin, they're all down here! How come we weren't invited to the sleep over?"
Three voices gasped audibly, like they had all just seen something incredibly frightening, as the redhead on the chair moved her hand from her stomach to a spot underneath her head. No one moved. No one dared to breathe. A few seconds later, after it was apparent that she was still, in fact, asleep, three relieved exhales of breath echoed around the empty room.
The sound of rustling silk fabric broke the tense silence. "C'mon. We have the cloak; they wouldn't be able to see us even if they were awake."
Apparently the other boys consented to that fact, and the sound of their footsteps struck back up again as they maneuvered invisibly around the room and towards a set of stairs leading up to the boys' dormitory. All was quiet, until—
"Wormtail, watch out for that—!"
Bang
Too late.
Wormtail, not receiving the warning early enough, hadn't seen the forgotten school bag lying on the floor. There was a rather high pitched squeal—accompanied with the sound of a string of curse words—as a desk, complete with a chess board, toppled over onto the floor. The game pieces scattered noisily.
And then a secession of highly painful and unlucky proceedings—well, for the group of boys anyway—happened all at once.
"What the—?!"
The three once-sleeping girls jumped at the sudden clatter of Wormtail's klutziness; Alice jerked up from the floor, her head colliding with Dorcas's feet sharply. Lily jumped from her chair clumsily and landed on the ground with an uncomfortable plop while Marlene, wide eyed, leapt to her feet with her wand in her hand.
There was a befuddled moment while the girls untangled themselves from their awkward positions. Marlene, having been able to stay on her feet, was the first to find the culprit—or culprits—of their rude awakening. Her dark eyes swiveled around the room frantically, ready to berate the unlucky souls, and then she found them in a jumbled collection of limbs.
And, oddly enough, she smiled and lowered her wand.
"Black? Pettigrew?" Her smile grew larger. "Potter?"
"What in the world…?" Lily cried sleepily, stumbling over towards the commotion and igniting her wand tip as she did so.
Peter was currently massaging his toe, which he presumably broke when he had tripped over the obstruction that had been so rudely placed in his path. Sirius was swearing under his breath as he rubbed his head, apparently having been dragged down along with Peter in the fall. And there in the corner was James Potter, hurriedly stuffing something silvery out of sight. However, they all stopped their current activities when they realized that they now had an audience.
Sirius gazed at the four girls unsteadily. "Would it help matters if I started apologizing profusely?" he asked, applying a wide smile onto his lips.
Now thoroughly awake, the four girls all glanced at each other; Lily, however, looked on the verge of eruption. "No it bloody well wouldn't! Where have you three been? What has been—"
"Hem, hem."
Oh shoot. The dare. Phase one. It was all coming back to her now.
Unbeknownst to the three boys, Dorcas, Marlene, and Alice all shot Lily a look that clearly read, 'get your act together'. And, as Lily looked down at Potter, she did get her act together and her face muscles immediately relaxed. Potter was going down…
"What I'm sure Lily was trying to say was that—"
"—was that, we've been worried about you lot," Lily interrupted, a confident gleam in her emerald eyes. The three girls smiled knowingly. The plan was going into affect.
There was a thick silence. Sirius had gone wide eyed. "The fall must have addled my hearing abilities, because I thought I just heard Evans say she'd been worried—"
"—about us?"
"Are we dreaming, Padfoot?"
"Nope, don't think so, Prongs."
The three boys were staring at Lily hard, trying to decipher her unusual behavior. "Is she sleep walking?" Peter asked.
"Of course I'm not, you twit," Lily shot back, her hands on her hips. "But, after Potter didn't return from Quidditch Practice…" Lily had to stop to control herself from snickering at the fact that she actually knew that Potter hadn't been anywhere near a broom.
Man, whoever said revenge wasn't sweet must have been wasted. The pure looks of disbelief on the boys' faces were simply enough to prove this fact. Every single one of them looked like they'd been hit upside the head with a mallet. Lily was really beginning to love this; score one for Lily.
"Funny how I didn't get the memo, though," Dorcas brought up, talking about the fact that she hadn't been at the pretend practice.
"As your captain, I decided to give you a break," James retorted quickly.
He said it in such a believable tone that Lily would have believed him, if she hadn't of already known the truth…and if she hadn't of known he was an incessant liar slash prankster in training.
"Oh, well, in that case…" Lily began.
Standing there, watching the three Marauders sitting on their bums on the ground, oddly enough spurred Lily on. Under normal circumstances, she'd never allow Potter to come within six feet of her flesh, but if she wanted to win this little battle she'd have to throw that goal out the window.
And, with that thought, she offered her hand to James Potter.
"Uh…" James looked at her pink-painted fingernails confusedly as if he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it.
"You're supposed to take it, Potter," Marlene answered to his curious gaze, rolling her eyes.
"He knows what he's supposed to do, McKinnon; he's just gone into shock," Sirius confirmed.
Still unconvinced, James looked around him, as if thinking that no way could Lily Evans actually be offering to help him up from the floor and that she simply must be offering the pleasure to someone else. When he saw no one, he coughed lightly into his hand, clearing his throat.
"Right, thanks, Evans."
The first thought Lily had when James took her hand was that he was in serious need for some moisturizer. Her second thought was that she couldn't believe she was allowing him to touch her. Her final thought before they dropped hands was that she was going to need to soak her hand in some very acidic disinfectant.
She was very aware that Sirius and Peter were gaping at her. She was also very much aware that James was now staring at her, a very odd smile plastered across her face. A blush crept onto her cheeks.
"I suggest you four get off to bed," Lily suggested authoritatively, scratching her neck to try to distract the others from her reddening cheeks.
"Three."
"Huh?"
"You mean three, not four," Sirius corrected her, hoisting himself off of the ground and pulling Peter up with him. "Can't you count, Evans?" The Marauders were missing their fourth partner of crime.
"So," James began, "if you're going to tell on us, Remus had nothing to do with this."
Well, Lily supposed that was sort of sweet, in a very weird way. He probably only wanted to win her over though by pretending to care for others. Too bad; that kind of attitude was sort of attractive.
"Where is Remus?" Dorcas asked.
Sirius shrugged off the question with a wave of his hand, as if the subject of their friend's whereabouts was of no importance. "So, what are you going to do with us, Evans? The usual? Detention for a week? Deduct house points? Report us to McGonagall?—"
"—I'm not going to punish you," Lily said.
However, Sirius carried on. "Slap James? Yell at us? Wait—what?"
"You better shove off before I change my mind, Black," Lily warned, crossing her arms.
For a moment, it appeared that the boys could not believe their luck. It was slightly funny how none of them found the girls' behavior, especially Lily's, peculiar enough to question it. They most likely didn't want to push it.
"Well, you heard the good lady," James said, clapping his hands together. "No point in denying Evans from what she desires." He nodded off to her and, for reasons that she herself didn't understand, she winked.
"Ladies," Black greeted in farewell.
"See you, boys," chimed the girls.
Before they disappeared on the staircase leading up to their dorms, James turned around. "Thanks, Evans," he said appreciatively.
It shocked her how genuine it sounded. Too bad he was just being kind in order to win the bet. "Don't count on it again."
Smirking, James nodded. "Wouldn't dream of it. 'Night, Evans."
"Goodnight, Potter."
With a final smirk, he was gone. And then, the four girls high-fived each other victoriously. Lily had survived phase one.
OOO
"You should have been there, Moony," James said, a dreamy expression across his face. The reason for his dream-like state? None other than Lily Evans, of course.
"Yeah, you missed a once in a lifetime event," Sirius stated, chuckling. James punched his friend in the arm.
Remus shielded his eyes from the bright glow of the morning sun as he sat up in his bed. The four boys were currently in the hospital wing. It was tradition after each full moon for them to come down to see their 'furry little friend' the following morning. There really was no reason for Remus to have to stay in the hospital wing however; Madame Pomfrey could heal cuts and bones in a heartbeat, but she always insisted on him staying for a while. The Healer was funny like that.
"You didn't slip her that love potion, did you," Remus asked in a carefree manner.
"Har, har, you're so witty, Moony…for a werewolf anyways," James stated sarcastically.
"And besides," Peter began, "we're saving that particular stash for something else…"
Just then, Madame Pomfrey came bustling towards them with a tray, upon which balanced a variety of different colored potions. The Marauders ceased their discussion. "Out of the way, boys," she stated, shoving past Sirius in order to lean over Remus. She resembled a mother hen protecting her baby chicks. "Feeling alright, Lupin?"
"Yes, ma'am," he responded, before she shoved a spoonful of potion down his throat. He spluttered for a moment.
Satisfied, Madame Pomfrey straightened her back. "Ten more minutes, boys."
Sirius rolled his sleeves up casually. "Oh, come on, ma'am. We're not bothering him."
"Black, what have you done to your arm?" she said immediately, ushering towards him and examining a long scratch that was just beginning to form a scab; it was fresh.
Remus's eyes widened as Sirius quickly pulled his sleeves back down. "I fell," he said automatically. "Nothing to fret about."
She observed him strictly for a moment, before hustling away, muttering about careless, reckless boys and their tendency to get hurt.
"Merlin, she's nosy," Sirius stated.
"You're down to five minutes now," Madame Pomfrey called over her shoulder. Clearly, she had heard his comment.
The group rolled their eyes, familiar with the Hogwarts Healer's antics. "How long is she keeping you for?" Peter asked.
"I should be out by noon," Remus responded, grinning, "and if not, come and smuggle me away."
"Will do, Moony," James agreed, clapping his friends on the shoulder. "Well, I have to go post up some bulletins in the common room."
"Oh?" Remus asked inquisitively.
"I need a new beater on my team," James responded.
Sirius grinned. "Yeah, mean old captain had to suspend one of his best."
"Amelia Evans?"
"The one and only."
"That's rubbish."
James frowned. "Tell me about it. McGonagall made me. Just because Evans was failing three of her subjects doesn't mean my Quidditch team should suffer for it."
Amelia Evans, was in fact, Gryffindor's best Beater. Despite the fact that she was an abnormally big girl for her age—fifteen years old—she flew threw the air with ease. Not to mention her strength and aim was incredible. The only draw back was that she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, to put it nicely, and thus she was just scraping a D in Transfiguration, Potions, and Charms.
"See? Told you Prongs would lead his team to a loss this season," Sirius said proudly, though his eyes were shining jokingly.
Pushing his best friend roughly, James stood up. "You know, I'm lucky to have such a supportive friend like you."
"Thanks."
"I was being sarcastic."
"Huh?" Peter said, jumping into the conversation and out of his chair.
The three healthy boys continued bickering as they made their way throughout the Hospital Wing.
"It means he was joking, Wormtail."
"I know what it means!"
"Why the bloody did you ask then?"
Remus chuckled to himself as he leaned back in his uncomfortable cot. What would he do without those three? Probably live a much more boring life.
So, that was a pretty long chapter. I hope that makes up for the month wait.
Next chapter: Phase two...oh dear, what trouble will Lily get herself into now? Ten bucks if you can guess it...oh wait, I don't have ten bucks. Dang it.
Well, I'll see all of you lovely people later (Well, I guess I won't see you...maybe I'll read you? Wait, I'm confusing myself...oh well, hopefully you know what I mean.) With that confusing note, please leave a review! Thanks for reading!
--HeyLookTheSnitch