The Next Great Adventure (A Marauders Fan Fic)

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Lily shut herself up in the common room or retreated outside with a stack of textbooks and notes more and more often as the exams drew nearer and nearer. Truth be told, though she’d been revising for them for months and working towards them for years, Lily still couldn’t quite believe that they were actually taking their O.W.L.s; they had seemed so far away for so long that it was impossible to think the dreaded exams had succeeded in creeping up on them completely unnoticed; they just felt like another lot of summer exams and it was hard to believe that these ones would actually matter.

However, by the night before their first exam Lily was feeling the stress of the upcoming tests. She knew that she’d done more than enough work for her exams but the suspense and waiting was giving her a headache.

“Are you okay Lily?” Alice managed to ask through the thick tension on the Gryffindor table, almost everyone in the fifth and seventh year completely silent as they pored over notes at the last minute, eating slowly and distractedly while Potions ingredients and spells ran through their minds.

“I’m just a bit nervous,” Lily admitted. “I’m sure I’ll be fine once our first exam is over though.”

“Don’t be Lil, you’ll be absolutely fine,” Cassie added, glancing up from her timeline for History of Magic, their first exam tomorrow morning.

“It just doesn’t really seem real,” she replied. “I can’t believe that we’re actually taking our O.W.L.s.”

“They’re just exams Lily. You’ve aced every one of the exams we’ve done before,” Cassie comforted, eyes still scanning the dates. “Who initiated the first rebellion in the Goblin Revolution?”

“Bugref,” Lily answered receiving a smile from Cassie.

“Exactly!” she grinned.

The next morning dawned unfairly beautiful, the golden sunlight which set the trees outside on fire, creating greenish halos around each of them, streaming in through the large windows and alighting gently on each of the apprehensive fifth and seventh years, pitting the ancient stone in the hall with diamonds and giving each waiting person a head of fire while dust motes danced between them. The hall was both deathly silent and filled with a constant rumble of talk, swelling like waves before fading into worried whispers as people asked each other last minute questions on things they thought they had forgotten to revise. Suddenly the door to the Great Hall swung open, revealing rows and rows of desks behind Professor McGonagall as she ordered them to form a line and enter, calling them in by class as pupils filed in, some holding hands as if to encourage and strengthen the other, a final protection against the looming exams before even that was torn away.

Lily sat down at her desk, placing her quill and ink on the desk before her as she gazed surreptitiously around at the many tables which stretched out from one end of the hall to the other. In front of her was her question paper and as Professor McGonagall turned over the giant hourglass which was placed at the front of the hall, her voice ringing through the silent room as she said, “You may begin,” Lily turned it over. Reading the first question quickly she began writing as fast as she could, her pounding heart quickly giving way to the focus in her mind as she tried to remember every cause of the International Statute of Secrecy.

By the time the exam was nearing its end Lily’s hand ached and she had covered her question paper in her small neat writing. Skimming back through her answers quickly she searched her brain for anything she might have missed until McGonagall’s voice ran through the silent hall once more and told them to put their papers down.

As they left the exam hall Lily met up with Cassie, Alice and Mary and they headed back up to the Gryffindor common room, surrounded by relieved chatter as people compared answers, complained about the difficulty of the paper or worried that they had found it too easy and generally enjoyed knowing that one of their papers was out of the way.