"Where the bloody hell are our bloody robes?!"
Lily, Bessie, Sylvie and Mary all looked up from their seats in the common room.
"Language, Black." Lily frowned at Sirius, who had spoken. "What makes you think we've got anything to do with where your robes might… or might not… be?"
She cast a sideways glance at Sylvie, who had hidden her mouth with her transfiguration textbook and Mary and Bessie, who were looking down at their homework with determinedly straight faces.
"We're not stupid, Evans." Potter said, which Lily thought was a rather debatable subject. "We know it was you lot."
"We're giving you until six o clock to give them back." Black said.
"Or we're telling Professor McGonagall." Pettigrew chimed in.
"No we're not." Black said, rolling his eyes. And then he narrowed them. "Or we're getting revenge ourselves."
"Oh well we're terrified now." Lily said, rolling her own eyes.
"You should be." Black warned. And he and the others, wearing an assortment of muggle jeans, shirts and trousers, went back to their own section of the common room.
Once they'd gone, Sylvie burst out laughing. Mary and Bessie joined in and soon they were all rolling around in hysterics.
It really was brilliant. And what's more, there was nothing they could do about it! They'd already tried to get up to the girls' dormitory, presumably to launch their own investigation, and there had been a loud noise like a klaxon and the stone stairs had turned into a slide, sending them back down into the common room which had also been very amusing for everyone involved (except the boys).
She couldn't wait to tell Sev all about it.
"Oh." He said, listening with far less enthusiasm than Lily had expected as she told him what she and the others had done out by the lake that afternoon.
Lily and Sev spent most of their weekends together, either sitting by the lake, walking around the grounds or else working together in the library.
She and the girls tended to play games during their free time, but Severus didn't care about any of that. He seemed to just enjoy being in Lily's company and she loved him for it. No one had ever made her feel as valued and appreciated for who she was as Sev did.
"Well I suppose that's funny." He said in a voice that didn't indicate he thought it was particularly funny at all. "What would have been funnier would be if you'd hexed them too though."
Lily frowned at him. "That's not very nice, Sev. They were sleeping!"
Sev shrugged. "So they'd have been easy targets."
Lily could quite understand Sev's dislike of the Gryffindor boys. They did seem to go out of their way to pick on him and it was usually four on one. She supposed she couldn't really blame him for his anger towards them.
"Let's talk about something else." She said. "How are you getting on with your potions essay? Did you have a look at the periodicals Slughorn mentioned last lesson?"
She watched her friend talk about his favourite subject and couldn't think badly of him anymore. He was so clever and passionate. She only wished everyone else could see the same Severus she could. No one would ever pick on him then.
"We missed you Lily." Sylvie said as she returned to the common room before dinner. "We've been wondering what to do with the boys' robes. Mary suggested we might do some sort of treasure hunt with them. I mean we don't want to keep them, do we?
"Why make it fun for them?" Lily said. The afternoon with Sev had led her to feel significantly less charitable towards the boys than she had done earlier. "Why not make them suffer?"
"We don't want Gryffindor to lose any points." Bessie said. "McGonagall won't be happy if they're not in uniform on Monday."
"And she'll want to know why not." Sylvie said. "What if she finds out it was us who took them?"
"I really don't want to get in trouble." Mary said worriedly.
"Why don't we throw them in the lake?" Lily suggested. That would be nice and inconvenient for them.
"The boys or the robes?"
"Ideally both. But I'll settle for their robes for now. The boys will get wet by default."
And so that's exactly what they did. When the Gryffindor boys had gone down to dinner, they crept back up to their dorm and posted a note under their door: "I've taken your robes. They didn't fit. I've left them at my front door. Love, the giant squid x'
They chucked the robes at the edge of the lake, secured by some water weeds so they didn't float away or sink (they weren't criminals after all) and then entered the great hall for dinner, gigging and congratulating one another on their brilliance.
They were still laughing about the joke that night in the dormitory. They thought it was best to avoid the common room (in case the boys decided to retaliate), and knew they were safe where the boys couldn't get to them in the girls' dorm.
Unfortunately, Professor McGonagall faced no such restrictions.
The girls frowned at one another as they heard a sharp knock at the door. "Who could that be?"
Sylvie got to her slipper-clad feet and went over to answer it. She flushed scarlet when she saw who it was. "P-Professor McGonagall."
"Good evening, Miss Smethwyck." Professor McGonagall said, looking over her head to the other girls on the dorm floor too. "Lily Evans, Bessie Bagshot and Mary Macdonald, I want you all to come with me now. And you, Miss Smethwyck."
Lily gulped and got to her feet. Black had said they wouldn't tell on them for what they'd done (or they suspected they had done). But obviously he, or one of the boys, had.
They followed their head of house to her office, looking nervously at one another all the while.
"Right, ladies." McGonagall said, surveying them over her glasses as they stood in front of her office desk, Sylvie still wearing her bedroom slippers. "Would one of you care to tell me what exactly it is you find so amusing about sending silly letters to Mr Filch?"
"What do you mean?!" Lily said, taken aback by the question. "We haven't done anything to Mr Filch!"
Professor McGonagall's lips thinned. She pulled a scrap of parchment from the pocket of her robes.
"Dear Mr Filch,"
She read aloud.
"We know it's not Valentine's Day yet, but we simply couldn't wait to confess our love. We've been watching you sweeping your way around the castle and we think you're utterly gorgeous.
Your smile, the way you walk, the way you handle yourself with a broom. You can 'take care' of us any day…
Buckets of love,
Lily Evans, Bessie Bagshot, Sylvie Smethwyck and Mary Macdonald"
Lily's jaw fell open. "We didn't write that!" She protested, quite horrified by what she'd just heard.
"No, it was Potter, Black, Pettigrew and Lupin!" Bessie cried.
"They're trying to get us back because we…" but Sylvie let her sentence die in mid air.
Professor McGonagall's nostril's flared. "Wait here." She snapped and marched out of the office.
"Those beasts!" Sylvie cried once she'd gone. "How dare they try and get us in trouble like that?!"
"To be fair to them, we did do it first..." Bessie said.
"Where do you think she's gone?" Mary said nervously.
Lily had been wondering that. She wondered if they were all about to get detention, or would McGonagall do something worse? Maybe she'd gone to get Professor Dumbledore? Was what they'd done bad enough to suspend them for?!
She wasn't sure if she was any more pleased to see who Professor McGonagall did bring back into the office with her five minutes later however.
She glared at Black and Potter as they entered the study with Lupin and Pettigrew. She was angry with them for getting Lupin in trouble now too. She was sure none of this had been his idea. It was very unfair that he should be called in too.
"For what it's worth, Professor, none of this is Lupin's fault." Sirius said as their head of house glared at them all, now crowded around her desk like unfortunate defendants before a judge. "He was quite happy to let the whole thing slide. I'm afraid we weren't." He glared at the girls.
"What whole thing, Black?" McGonagall said, turning to him.
"Will you tell her or shall I?" Black said, looking at Lily.
Lily sighed. "We might have played a trick on the boys, Professor." She admitted, doing her best to keep eye contact with her furious looking head of house. "We… er, I mean I, took their robes as a joke."
"We all helped." Bessie said loyally.
"Go on." Potter said encouragingly. "What did you do after that?"
Lily blushed. "We threw them in the lake."
Professor McGonagall's lips became even thinner still. Lily thought she could feel Mary trembling beside her.
"I see." She said coldly. "And then, gentlemen, instead of doing what anyone sensible would have done and report the incident to a member of staff, you write a highly immature and insulting letter to the castle caretaker, who, let me tell you, was very upset by the whole thing."
Potter snorted. McGonagall rounded on him. "I'm glad you find it funny, Potter." She snapped. "Mr Filch took a lot to calm down. He's made me promise to send the guilty parties to himself for detention, that was when it was established that it was indeed just a cruel joke, and so that's where you'll all be spending tomorrow night."
"You can't give us all detention, Professor." Black argued. "Like I said, Lupin had nothing to do with it."
"I did." Lupin said, looking miserably at the floor. "I went with you to post the note to Filch."
"All eight of you will have detention with Mr Filch." McGonagall clarified. "And you girls will have detention with me too. I will not tolerate theft or vandalism in this castle."
The girls all looked at their feet. "Yes, ma'am." "Sorry, Professor."
McGonagall dismissed them and they walked up to the common room, the girls marching ahead so they didn't have to talk to or look at the boys.
"I can't believe they did that!" Sylvie said crossly once they were back up in their dorm. "That was so unkind, and so embarrassing! I'm never going to be able to look at Filch in the eye again!"
"Well, we're all going to have to tomorrow night…" Lily said miserably.
She felt rotten for having been given detention, not just one but two! Professor McGonagall was going to hate her now, and she'd been doing so well with all her schoolwork so far.
"I hate them." She said, scowling out of the window as she thought of those idiots Potter and Black again. They'd caused her nothing but trouble since the first day of term. "We should have thrown them in the lake Sylvie. That way they might have drowned and we wouldn't have to deal with them."
She ignored the boys all throughout the next day and as best as she could in their detention with Filch, during which he made them clean all the toilets on the second floor with a toothbrush.
Potter and Black made a game where they tried to stuff their toothbrush down the back of Pettigrew's robes, to frantic squeaks from the shorter boy, but Lily, glowering throughout, got on with the job at hand, trying not to wince as she encountered more than a few 'unpleasantries' during the task.
The next night, McGonagall had them all writing lines, which she knew was a common muggle punishment and wasn't really too bad.
"We are young ladies, not degenerative vandals." Sylvie mocked, rolling her eyes as they made their way back to the Gryffindor common room afterwards. "Though I suppose we ought to be glad it was nothing worse. My parents said things would be more relaxed with Dumbledore in charge than they were in their day."
"Even so, my hand is still cramping." Bessie said, massaging her fingers.
"Essence of murtlap." Sirius Black, who'd been sitting in an armchair by the fire, grinned at them as they came through the portrait hole. "You'll have to dilute it a bit first but it will sort that right out for you."
"Had some experience writing lines, have you, Black?" Bessie said teasingly.
"McGonagall's pushed Potter and mine up to five hundred now." He said, grimacing slightly. "I reckon she'd give us more if she could but you have to draw the line somewhere I suppose…"
Lily wasn't surprised. Black and Potter were in detention about once a week. If she was McGonagall she'd have probably murdered the pair of them by now. The woman clearly had more patience than Lily did.
"Anyway, it's a good one to try." Black smiled. "Slughorn keeps a phial in his store cupboard, and he doesn't lock the door so it's fair game really."
Lily was quite sure it wasn't a good idea to repeat the same crime they'd been given detention for in the first place quite so soon, and the others didn't seem keen to break any more rules either so they decided to just put up with their aching hands instead.
"That's so unfair!" Sev said, jumping to her defence at once as Lily told him what had happened. "Why did she give you detention with Filch when it was those idiots who wrote that letter to him?! And two hundred lines is loads! I can't believe McGonagall did that to you."
Lily smiled. She loved that Sev was defending her like this. She knew how much he cared for her.
As term wore on, Lily settled into life in the castle. Her friendship group was firmly established, but she also felt closer to Sev than ever too.
He just needed her so much and what's more, he was asking for her help and really being honest with her in a way he never had done before.
"I don't want to go home." He told Lily one day in late November as the pair sat out in the stone courtyard with a little fire Lily had conjured to keep them warm. "I feel like Hogwarts is home for me now."
Lily felt very sad to hear this, as she rarely saw Sev in the company of the other boys in his year. Was being alone in the castle really better than being in Cokeworth with his family?
"It might not be so bad." She said quietly. "Maybe now a few months have passed things will be better."
Sev looked like he didn't believe this as a possibility for one minute, but he smiled as his eyes met hers. "Yeah, maybe." He said. "And you'll be there. And that's all that matters to me."