Forever and a Day ~ James Potter

The Patronus Charm

Chapter Forty-Eight

Friday 10th September 1976 ~ 15:37 ~ waning gibbous moon

"You won't believe what the new Defence Professor has set us for homework this weekend!" Alice groaned as she stomped into the library, throwing down her bag onto the table where her friends had been sitting, calmly completing their own extra work in their study period and receiving a glare from the librarian.

It had been eight days since their first lesson of N.E.W.T level subjects at school and all of the sixth years had been looking forward to a well-earned break after their first proper week of learning. However, just as Lily and Mary had previously predicted, they could not have been more wrong about what they would spend their weekend doing.

Rosie snatched her Alchemy textbook out from underneath the heavy satchel just in time, placing it gently underneath her seat and finishing off her sentence so that she could speak to her friends. Alice plonked herself down next to Mary, huffing and resting her head on her fist, her elbow resting upright on the table.

"What?" Lily asked curiously, also placing her quill back into her inkpot. Alice was the only one who had continued to study Defence seeing as the others couldn't fit it into their timetables, after all she was the one who had the ambition of being an Auror and Rosie highly doubted she'd need to learn any extra defensive spells to use against a bad case of Dragon Pox.

"It is our first lesson and Professor Hone wants us to try and cast a Patronus!" she scoffed, looking around at her friends for a bit of support. "Grumpy old git."

"What's a Patronus?" Mary asked curiously, putting down the magazine she'd found in her bag while looking for an essay to complete. "Is it difficult?"

"Is it difficult!?" Alice exclaimed incredulously, leaning forwards towards the table and frowning deeply. "It's near bloody impossible! Not even some adult Wizards can do it!"

"It's sort of what Muggles would call a 'spirit animal'," Lily explained to her calmly, seeing as she clearly wasn't going to get one from Alice, "You cast the Patronus charm and your own personal Patronus will come out of the end of wand. It's usually used to fight off Dementors."

"Erm..." Mary grimaced slightly, clearly not knowing what those things were either – she'd always said the Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons made her feel slightly queasy at learning about all the monsters she once believed were fairy tales were actually real, so she never paid too much attention.

"Oh, Mary, they're awful!" Marlene said, grimacing slightly even at the thought of the thigs. "They guard the Wizarding prison, Azkaban, and they're main priority is to suck out people's souls."

"Eugh," Mary shuddered at the thought of them, a grimace playing on her features that she couldn't change. "They sound like a delight."

"And to make matters worse," Alice continued with her rampage, not sounding impressed at the brief detour from her friends, "he's asked us to practice with people who don't even study the subject at N.E.W.T level! Merlin knows why, but apparently it's 'Dumbledore's orders'," Alice shook her head, not bothering to try and figure out why Dumbledore would want to distract so many students from their own studies to help out a friend. "So, are any of you willing to give it a try? For me?"

Lily, Marlene and Rosie all looked at each other slightly sceptically, not eager at all to take on any extra work while they still needed to write a dozen essays in the next few weeks. However, Mary didn't seem to quite get the grasp of how much work it would be to successfully cast the charm, so nodded eagerly, "I'll give it a go, Al. It sounds fun and it's only one spell, it can't take all weekend to learn at our age."