The Next Great Adventure (A Marauders Fan Fic)

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

James obviously didn’t manage to convey Lily’s sentiments to Sirius as clearly as she had explained them to him; either that or Sirius had decided to ignore what James had related to him because, when Cassie agreed to go out with Rob, his face became set into a permanent, and furious, glower. Whenever he saw the Ravenclaw boy Sirius would shoot him the dirtiest looks that anyone had ever seen and, while some of the majority of the students were more preoccupied with their adoration of the couple and yet more with the approaching holidays, the ever-present whispers in the hallway of the minority who noticed this were correct when they speculated that Sirius liked her.

Living in the same house as Sirius made it hard not to notice how much he changed and Lily was surprised by the listlessness which overcame him when normally the run up to Christmas was the busiest time for him and the Marauders – traditionally it entailed a ridiculously large number of practical jokes which always came coupled with a lot of rule breaking and detention; they had no exams approaching and so always seized the opportunity to let loose and wreak as much havoc as was humanly possible. The Christmas period was second only to the end of the year in terms of manic Marauder mayhem and yet somehow, even when they spent all of their free time in detention, the craziness kept on coming. The previous year they had flooded all of the corridors, filling them completely with water and forcing both students and teachers alike to resort to swimming through the school – Slughorn had provided Gillyweed to all of his favourites, most of whom were the only ones who knew to ask for it, but even so the Potions supply had run out after just two days, and others had found other ways of dealing with it. Flitwick had cast a water repelling spell on his door as well as somehow creating an enormous air bubble inside his classroom which kept it perfectly normal whilst Professor Sprout had set free a whole bunch of Acquias plants which had spread their tentacles through the corridors and singlehandedly dried out about twenty classrooms. Professor McGonagall, of course, had not been happy with them.

This year, however, Sirius seemed to spend a lot of his time lingering in one corner of the Gryffindor common room or, as Frank had mentioned to Alice who had then told Mary and Lily, lying on his bed staring into space with deadened eyes. Cassie, despite the time that she was spending with Rob now, continued to try and talk to Sirius; whenever she did so, however, he would refuse to talk to her.

This carried on until the end of term and Lily spent much of her time listening to Cassie’s thoughts spin in endless circles as she tried to work out what was wrong with Sirius. She wasn’t the only one who was having conversations like that though: almost every time she saw James and Sirius together, James would roll his eyes and her and shoot her a long-suffering grin; although the events which they were struggling through had pushed their two best friends apart it seemed to have brought them closer, purely by forcing them to experience similar things and, since neither could find anyone else who truly understood the situation, when Lily was working by herself she would often find James coming to sit beside her.

This happened on the last night of term as Lily sat writing one of the essays that she had been set to do over the holidays. The ancient sofa sagged as James slumped into it and spread his arms out across its back, the lingering chill which hung about him and his windswept hair betraying his recent return from Quidditch practice.

“James,” Lily said, acknowledging him without lifting her eyes from the parchment on her lap.

“Still working I see.” He sounded impressed and Lily quirked one corner of her mouth. “McGonagall’s Transfiguration essay I see,” he said as he peered over her shoulder at her work. Her handwriting was just as neat as ever, just as neat as he had expected it to be when he had met her on their first day of school; it looped across the page, managing to be both smooth and sharp at the same time, just like the two sides of the girl it belonged to. He read her essay quickly and with interest, his eyes scanning the words even as she added more.