academic curiosity

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"Oh, no!" Lily moaned as she stumbled into the shocking cold, in step with Dale Percy.

"We are not having fun," Dale grumbled, head and arms pulled as far into his winter cloak as they would go until he was just a white forehead peeking out of a neck hole.

Sharon Wiggins, a Gryffindor sixth year, dashed past them with a desperately cheery face. "Never fear!!! It´ll get... Warmer... When we get into... The stands... With everyone else..." her teeth were chattering loudly. She had painted her face and worn a vibrant, flashing gold robe, determined to have team spirit.

Dale and Lily blinked back the bright glare of Sharon´s cloak.

"Can´t we just pay Joe Leary and Eddie to bat a badminton back and forth and tackle one another under tables of the common room for the next forty-five minutes instead?!" Dale begged Lily. He had never been a particular fan of Quidditch.

"No, they´re already up ahead of us any ways! Eat some of this," Lily removed a paper pouch and handed him a small sugary wafer.

"Wha?" Dale immediately shoved it into his mouth, assuming it was food. Which luckily enough, it happened to be.

`It´s candied ginger!" Lily exclaimed proudly. "I discovered on the trip back from Hogsmeade last weekend that it was rather good for keeping the heat..."

"Hey, Lily Evans!" Sonia Otto, a Slytherin who had been friends with Bellatrix, called from a few yards ahead. "Is that your face? Or did a flesh-eating slug crawl onto it and DIE?" she asked pointedly.

Dale and Lily exchanged horrified glances and began patting Lily´s face, Dale squishing her nose upward to see if anything was hiding up her right nostril.

"Do you SEE anything Dale?!?" Lily screamed in a theatrical level of panic.

"NOTHING YET..." he bellowed hopefully. "But if we do find anything we should most definitely use it for extra credit!"

Not two seconds later they were assaulted by more Slytherin slander.

"HEEEELLLO GRYFF-IN-DOOOORS!" Someone called on a magical voice amplifier, otherwise known in the muggle world as a megaphone.

It was Paolo Cortez, perched on top of two other boy´s shoulders. "ARRRRE YOOOOOUUU READY TO LOOOOOOOOOSE!? HAH HA HA!"

Lily and Dale shared glances. "This may be the best night of our lives," Dale said earnestly, as one of the bulky Slytherin boys carrying Cortez suddenly fell in a puddle, screaming: "Oh dear god MY EYES MY EYES," and waving his arms in the direction of Sharon´s obscenely bright flashing robe as his smaller cronies collapsed around him into the mud. They all got a round of applause.

Dale´s eyes twinkled with delight. "Ah, the Christmas spirit... Don´t mind me, I always get a little overemotional this time of year!"

The match started on time, Lily had wrestled a large mass of younger students for a front row seat alongside her house mates, while Dale lounged in the back row with a few of the other less-enthused.

Alia Bashir, her dorm mate, owned a fine set of binoculars and as she was a beater on the Gryffindor team, she hardly needed them for games so she let Lily borrow them.

She had them fixed them to her eye sockets as soon as possible, focusing in and out and gazing from left to right excitedly.

The match commenced much the way they always do, although there was a distinct impression that the players above were quite good. Balls shot around and were batted from one person to the next like in a pinball machine. It appeared that one couldn´t fly two feet without a bludger being slammed in their direction, but nearly everyone avoided getting hit. A quick dark-haired Gryffindor sailed the quaffle right into the center hoop.

"POTTER! GRYFFINDOR IN THE LEAD... NOW RAVENCLAW BETTER WATCH THEMSELVES TONIGHT. GRYFFINDOR HAS WON BOTH MATCHES THEY´VE PLAYED SO FAR THIS SEASON, THANKS TO A WELL-ROUNDED TEAM AND THE TALENTS OF EVERYBODY´S NORTH TOWER HERO, JAMES POTTER, THAT´S NUMBER SEVEN FOLKS, IF YOU DIDN´T KNOW IT. AH! HERE´S RAVENCLAW´S DRAVUS WITH THE SWITCH TO NATHANIEL CORNER AND-"

The crowd roared.

"OHHHH!! DEFLECTED BY CRUZ!!! DEEE-NIED. CORNER GOT HANDLED LIKE A REDHEADED STEP CHILD! IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL, BUT IT WOULDN´T BE QUIDDITCH ANY OTHER WAY..."

Lily watched in amazement as Potter caught a bludger right in the chest. He fell back and suddenly was hanging from his broom by the back of his knees, swinging around with a huge grin so that with the big red cape he looked not just a little like a trampeze artist for the traveling circus.

Another bludger was flung at him to knock him down completely but he swung out of it´s way and regained his position on his broom, flitting away quickly and going after the quaffle as Miriam Heed, one of the Ravenclaw´s chasers began taking it towards the Gryffindor hoops.

"POTTER, NUMERO SIETA, IS ON CABLE´S TAIL NOW... BETTER HURRY GLENDORA! OH! AND HERE COMES GRYFFINDOR´S IGNATIUS SIMMS, WELL DONE! QUAFFLE NOW IN GRYFFINDOR CONTROL, WATCH IT BASHIR, YOUR TRYING TO BLUDGEON THE REF THERE! HEH, HEH!

OH, NOW SIMMS IS TAKING IT ON HOME FOR THE- NO! ARTHUR DASH DEFENDED HIS HOOP- OH! HERE IT COMES BACK TO THE GRYFFINDOR SIDE AGAIN!"

Lily watched with mouth hanging open, nothing but intelligible screaming all around as Ravenclaw nearly scored two times, then finally did, tying the game. A melee of flying bats, balls and limbs surrounded the Gryffindor end of the pitch, El Palmer darting this way and that, frantically guarding their team´s hoops.

After twenty minutes...

"JONES BETTER CATCH THE SNITCH! I DON´T THINK I CAN HANDLE THIS FOR ANOTHER MINUTE!" Sharon was crying fretfully.

Lily turned from the match a moment to smile sympathetically at her. She saw what happened next, first then, through the eyes of her fellow spectators.

Suddenly the regimental line of decorated Gryffindors standing in the row behind her fell silent. Then there faces fell, mouths dropped wide open and eyes grew wide.

Lily looked forward again.

A lonely broom was hovering in the air, almost like it was searching for it´s wizard. Below it, thirty feet at least, crumpled on the ground was the Gryffindor seeker.

"Is he okay??" A first year screamed, tears welling up.

"What about the snitch?!" Frank Longbottom cried anxiously, shaking a second year in front of him like a rag doll.

Lily focused her binoculars on the maroon-clad figure bearing the number seven. He made a rough turnabout and appeared to be thinking.

She tried to find Kendra Mercer, Ravenclaw´s seeker, but she was no where to be seen.

That is until both she and Potter suddenly darted faster then light across Lily´s view and upward.

The crowd was on it´s feet and pointing as a flash of gold disappeared into a low cloud and both Potter and Convoy went after it.

"MERCER IS ON THE NEW XXXX, SAID TO BE THE FASTEST BROOM MADE... POTTER´S GOT SPEED BUT HIS TALENT LIES IN IS HIS COORDINATION, WILL HE BE ABLE TO SCRAMBLE FOR A WIN FOR GRYFFINDOR???"

`POOOOOOOOTTTTTTTER!" Students around Lily were flinging themselves on to the seats below them, stomping and shaking their hair maniacally. Lily focused in upon Professor McGonagall and she was tearing off her tartan hat and shaking her fist at the cloud.

The Ravenclaws were just as distressed, Lily saw that most of them threatened to fall en masse off the side of the stands, they were all hanging so far out to get a better view.

Someone shoved Lily forward and she found herself slammed over the side of the stand herself, people immediately pushing up behind to see. She got a sickening view of the floor of the pitch, twenty-five feet below. She felt very ill used and expressed this by jabbing her wand into a soft orifice behind her shoulder that turned out to be someone´s belly button.

"That tickles, damn it!" a boy shouted.

Lily squirmed around to get a secure footing and then aimed her binoculars at the sky in dread, leaning against the front of the stands backwards, head hanging back.

Potter came streaming out of the cloud, flying pele, his messy black hair dripping down his face from the humidity inside the little cloud. Kendra came out a little afterward, looking befuddled.

The snitch much to Lily´s glee and dismay was heading directly for the Gryffindor stand. Just as quickly as everyone had shoved forward, they all fell back as the tiny golden snitch came at them full force and Potter going what appeared to be 80 MPH after it.

The last thing Lily saw was a flash of red robe over her head and then Potter hurled himself into the crowd. He shot out of it less than a second later, hand outstretched. He snatched at the air gracefully and to Lily it looked like he had caught a humming bird.

There was a long moment of silence throughout the stadium and then a shock wave of noise that was deafening.

Ravenclaws were fluttering onto the pitch demanding a rematch before Madam Mulkey even waved her hand in the motion of a Gryffindor victory. "POTTER´S A CHASER! HE CAN´T CATCH THE BLEEDING SNITCH!" one girl was screaming until her face went purple.

The Gryffindor players, who had started to look like their birthday had been taken away last minute, now flew at Potter in ecstatic glee, cascading out of the stands and onto the pitch.

McGonagall was jumping up and down in the Staff section and fanning her red face with her hat, Dumbledore was smiling.

Lily returned the binoculars to her pocket, brushed the sweat off her brow and sighed.

*    *    *

The weeks leading to Christmas Holiday had come faster than usual for Lily and unlike the previous year, she went home for vacation.

Like every Christmas, her father had absent-mindedly waited until the holiday was upon them before he went out into the freezing icy weather to buy gifts for she, Petunia and their mum.

Lily offered to go with him and he looked quite relieved. "We´ll just go to the department store... Your mum saw a spanner she wanted there I think..." he murmured with a befuddled expression on his face.

The department store was packed to the brim with every sort of person you could imagine walking the earth in muggle form. It was so packed with last minute buyers that people were literally pressed against the windows. When they came through the front entrance Lily saw a old woman´s face smeared along the glass, her old crone hand pounding on the glass, her muffled screaming sounding something like, "LEEEAVE THIS PLACE. BEFORE IT´S TOO LATE. BEWAAAAARE....."

If Dale was here, Lily thought as she watched in a mixture of horror and glee as seven middle-aged house fraus beat each other to bits over a doll that `tinkled´ itself with a sheepish grin, he would have would have said: "Ah, capitalism."

But she didn´t have much time to reflect on everyone else´s barbarism as she had to find her father´s present for Petunia while he got hers, as Lily couldn´t very well pick out her own.

She joined a large group of people hovering over a frail, pale employee as he cut open a large cardboard box filled with stuffing. The people all leaned forwards expectantly, Lily watched over the shoulder of a man in a rather odd purple zoot suit as the store clerk jammed his hand desperately into the box, plucking out a small object that dangled frantically.

It was some kind of ornament for the tree, in the shape of a cat, wearing a muffler and a hat. It´s arms and legs wobbled violently as it was flung from the box. He thrust the cat at them all and screamed, "HERE! Take it and leave! We haven´t anything else!"

The pack of shoppers paid no heed to his pleading, instead they were digging through the box for their prizes.

"How much are these things?" Lily asked as she picked up a cat that rolled away under one of the purple suited man´s legs.

"Free aren´t they?!"" a elderly woman screeched, Lily wasn´t sure if it was question or answer.

"Free?"

"Yes," The man in purple turned and grinned horribly. "They quite ran out of Becky poo-trousers dolls, and we all rallied!"

"That´s absurd," Lily replied. She put a 5 pound note in the pocket of the overwhelmed clerk as she slid past and clutched her new cat happily.

"OH! Lily. There you are! Bloody been all over the store, it´s like World War Three, here. What´s THAT?" he pointed to her cat.

"I´ve got a cat!" she announced.

"Good, good. We´ll give that to Petunia! We´ll just grab some wrapping paper and go-"

"No, this is my cat. Can I trade with Petunia?" Lily also knew for a fact that Petunia would have no interest in the thing as a present.

"Whatever!" Her father was already half way at the other end of the store, where a melee of people were tackling, and pummeling. It looked like a zombie movie Lily had seen once. "Just hurry, that little old man thinks he´s going to have the last roll of santa paper. TACKLE HIM LILY!"

*    *    *

"What are those scratches?" Joe asked Lily as they took the horseless carriages back to Hogwarts.

"Claw marks," she explained.

"Owl? Cat?"

"This old guy..." Lily replied mistily. "Have you seen my cat yet?"

The wobbling limbs of the cat were reflected on his pupils. "Ooooh..."

"Watch it hoss! This is mine." Lily folded the cat up into her pocket as Joe´s sticky hands gravitated towards it. "I worked hard for it too. And my bloody sister was awfully pleased that her present was so much bigger and more expensive-looking than mine."

"Remind me never to go home for the holiday again," Alia moaned from Lily´s other side.

"Why´s that?" Lily asked.

Alia sat up and grimaced. "Politics! My parents are pro-Voldemort! I couldn´t through a single meal without my damn Aunt or Cousins and my parents arguing over the muggle problem..."

"Your parents are daft," Lily informed her cooly. "Maybe next year you should slip some Stifle-Trifle into their roast beef?"

Stifle-Trifle was a potion that worked a lot like a tranquilizer, except it had bad side effects if taken with meat, such as, a sprouted growth like a rutabaga on one´s forehead and perpetual, uncontrollable drooling for twenty-four hours.

"I´ll try something a little less circumspect," Alia replied determinedly. She apparently chose to ignore Lily´s rudeness about her parents being stupid. "Anyway, did you have another row with yours?"

"No, my family and I get on fine, it´s my sister and I with the problem."

"Oh?"

`She should be sent as a peace keeper for the UN," Lily joked dryly. "Not that she gives a flip about anyone but herself and snooping on other people, but she´s unbudgeable on some things..."

"Sounds beastly," Alia commented, staring up at the castle through the open window of the carriage. She was looking up at the hill ahead and suddenly she frowned and peered out the window.

"Are we there yet?" Joe asked.

"No, you know we bloody well aren´t. You can SEE where the castle is," Alia leaned over and informed him. She turned her head out again quickly and began to peer again.

"Dale had the right idea," Lily muttered as the carriage suddenly jerked up and down over a pot hole.

"´Bout what?" Joe asked, clutching to the side of the carriage for dear life.

"Staying at school-" Lily stopped mid-sentence.

Lily felt an icy cold hand snatch at her arm just a half second before their carriage came to a shuddering stand still. Alia clung to her with an amazing grip.

Lily felt it first. Every bad memory she could conjure came into her head all at once and her chest ached until it became painful.

Over the screams of students in carriages ahead of them, she heard Joe talking: "What´s that thing?!"