academic curiosity

"Hey... Is Dumbledore your father Lily?" Alia suddenly caught up to Lily in the corridor on her way to Charms. Both girl were leaden with heavy books, scrawled on rolls of parchment hanging out of their bags and pockets.

Lily tossed her hair over her shoulder impatiently. "No. What gave you that moronic idea?"

"Oh, nothing. So do you think he´s James Potter´s father?"

"Absolutely," Lily said, "not."

"Hmm..." Alia walked alongside Lily, rubbing her chin with her free hand and looking perplexed, a thing she often did in the heights of her gathering of information. Alia was the living encyclopedia of the school. It seemed to be a hobby of hers to know everything about everyone.

"People seem awfully concerned about status these days!" Lily snapped. "I hardly think it would matter if someone were related to someone else, even if it was someone as... As amazing as the Headmaster is! It´s what we do that´s important," Lily trilled on, causing Alia to give her a testy sideways look.

"I was just asking, gee whiz Lily!" the other girl replied lazily.

"My parents say `Gee whiz!´," Lily sniped but as soon as she said it she cracked a grin and saw that Alia was holding her belly and laughing silently.

"You seriously need to consider taking a cup of coffee every morning. You uncaffeinated is scary..." Alia joked as they entered Flitwick´s class room. It was one of Lily´s favourite places in the castle. Especially at the holidays when they worked by the light of Christmas fairies.

"Longbottom," Lily intoned loudly as she came up from behind him and took a seat near the front center. "I hardly think that hat is acceptable as part of the uniform."

She stood and gazed at him pointedly as he looked a bit shocked.

"So what, now that your prefect you care about every stupid little school rule?" Frank asked with much grief as he yanked off his knit cap.

"No! But I do make it my personal goal to stamp out gloating!"

At this several people snickered. Frank stared at his Goblins hat whimsically at this answer. "Sore loser!" he mumbled good naturedly at her. The Grodzisk Goblins had beat Lily´s team, Puddlemere United at the Quidditch World Cup two months ago.

"Yes," Lily agreed.

Lily knew that Dale had hated people like Longbottom, because they were so uninterested in the goings on of important things like the war. But Lily could understand the appeal of being like those people. If you didn´t care for a cause, you wouldn´t be disappointed when it suffered losses.

The kinds of people Lily could not stand, however, were the ones who hated the people who cared. Petunia, her sister was just that kind...

"Miss Evans?"

Lily looked up with a start and saw that the Professor was standing on a chair looking at her with a smile of polite appeal.

"Would you mind terribly demonstrating the very unusual charm you created?"

Lily realized then that he had been addressing the class for some time and she had not been paying attention. She gave a half glance around the room and said, "Uh..."

The fact of the matter was, Lily had patented over twenty charms since she started Hogwarts. Five of them were actually fairly decent even. She frantically tried to guess which of these Flitwick would be referring to... They were at the end of the unit on Silencing Charms (which she had learned on her own in first year)... But she couldn´t think of anything...

"I understand if you´d rather not, I should have asked your permission before class, but I couldn´t catch you up in the corridor," he said fretfully, straightening his hat. He gestured to a box on the table beside himself. "Mr. Potter, would you mind demonstrating a bubble charm for the class, before it starts to smell?"

Before Potter got up from his chair and pointed his wand at the box, it dawned on Lily quite suddenly what charm Flitwick had wanted to see performed.

"OH!" she let out. `Wait... I can do that! I mean- I´ll do it, I apologize, Professor. I hadn´t properly heard... Er.. The question."

"Oh, very good then! I´ll let you come up and perform it!" Flitwick in his hurry to get off the chair and move out of the way, knocked his hat off his head. He was too excited to pick it up though.

Like everyone else in the class he leaned forward as as Lily approached the box and looked inside.

She removed her wand and prodded it. She hadn´t done this in a while... She couldn´t even think of where to begin until suddenly, seemingly without provocation the silver mist began to appear from her wand tip in her hand. It was aimed at the floor, at nothing in particular.

The mist permeated the air around the Lily, rather than the box, but the lifeless hinkypunk inside lifted it´s head anyway. She smiled at it. It stood on it´s two legs and stared back. Lily handed it her wand.

The thing cleared it´s throat, took a end of the wand in each hand and commenced singing, as it kicked a leg to the side theatrically.

"Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaal.... Send me a kiss by wire! Darlin, my hearts on fire!" It had a very fine voice, if a bit dry.

The response was immediate hysteria. The class flew off their seats and hunched over the scene playing out on the table, the hinkypunk not much caring about the extra attention.

Flitwick was clapping his hands, his eyes glossy with happiness.

The dead hinkypunk finished the routine and at the behest of the class, performed two encores before it simply refused to get up off its behind again. It stared stonily at the class, shaking it´s head. Lily smiled proudly at it´s stout disobedience.

"Make it do another number!" Jerrale Coleman called out.

"Not until you start paying!" Lily retorted. The class thought she was completely joking and laughed.

"It´s just a spell, it can´t really feel tired, can it?"Alia asked.

Lily shrugged. To her surprise the hinkypunk answered the question by resolutely showing a finger to Alia and then climbing back into it´s box to have a rest.

"Nice!" Alia snapped at Lily.

"Hey, show business is unionized,"Lily explained jokingly, but in the back of her head she wondered if the other things she reanimated to life had been so... Well, lifelike!

"Fabulous!" Flitwick was still clapping.

James Potter leaned over to watch the hinkypunk. A low, loud warbling noise was coming from the box, where it had fallen asleep

"Do you snore like that too, Evans?"

The class laughed as they wandered back to their seats. Flitwick began to help Davey Gudgeon remove a galleon from his ear.

Lily fidgeted. "Well, I don´t know. If I did I´d be sleeping at the time, see," Lily replied a little self-consciously. The fact of the matter was, she knew that the everyone had assumed that the hinkypunk had just taken on her own personality traits. That it was like a puppet and she had the strings. But that was the thing. She didn´t feel like she had much control over what the creature was doing at all.

She stood next to Potter and peered over the hinkypunk.

"This is a little different then when you made Mac Fusty´s frog do a jig back in second year..." Potter muttered softly so only she could hear him.

"Yeah," Lily agreed. She didn´t want to go into the long story with him of how the frog had just been given a sleeping drought by a Slytherin named Snape.

"So how do you make it dead again?" Potter asked with curiosity.

This was another thing that bugged Lily. "I don´t think I can do that... Actually..." she admitted under her breath reluctantly.

"Well, I guess that would explain that Skeleton Troupe taking their third world tour then..." He smiled at her.

She smiled back and for some reason his face went red. He scratched his shoulder and looked into the box again.

"I think this might become a problem," Lily said. "If I keep reanimating dead things... Well, there´ll will be an alarming number of tap dancing squirrels on our hands! We are on a island, after all..."

"I wouldn´t worry about that. We have vicious predators that can feed on the population of the undead. Acromantulas... Wild dogs.... Torys..." he muttered.

Lily cracked up. Tonks had taught them about the Muggle Ministry and the political parties a week prior in Muggle Studies.

"Lily?! Are you still messing with that thing? Come over here! Gonzalo was just telling me the most amazing story about the Donkey Plank maneuver!"

"Wronksi Feint!" Lily could hear a boy´s voice saying plaintively immediately afterward.

Lily caught Potter looking at Alia and the boy with a peevish facial expression as the two of them sat on a desk and whispered in each others ear.

"If she spent half the amount of time she does in flirting she´d be a help and not a hinder to my team..." he muttered flagrantly.

Lily begged to differ. "From my perspective in the stands she´s seems one of the finest fliers out on the pitch." She was going to also advise him that as Alia was flirting for quidditch information, he should hardly complain but he interrupted.

"Yeah? Well, it´s a good thing you aren´t the captain then!" he said with a surprising amount of surliness and stalked off to join his own group of friends, which was significantly bigger than Lily´s own.

She felt a little like a kid who was being sent to face the corner, but she could hardly understand why. "Boys are so high-mantainance!" she reported to a bewildered Gonzo and Bashir.

*    *    *

"What´s with that face?" Alia asked at dinner.

"Think I just miss Dale Percy,"Lily replied.

"Oh, I thought it had something to do with Stebbins´ obscene eating habits... Can´t you make him stop that with his stoavie?! You are a prefect!"

Lily didn´t think the comment warranted a response.

"Hey!" a round-faced boy in their year plopped down next to Lily.

"Hey, Bernie," Lily said.

"There´s been talk in my house... About the Slytherins."

"Okay, that´s to be expected,"Lily said, watching Kelly Nuin smash a first year´s face into the bowl of pudding at the Slytherin table. Once he yanked his head out, several people scooped up servings. Bernie snickered.

"No, this is important... About you, sort of. But if you don´t want to hear it, I under-"

"No!" Alia grabbed Bernie´s arm impatiently.

"Were Lily Evans´ legal representation," Marva butted in with a thick smile. "Naturally, you´ll need to tell us everything you know."

Lily put her fork down slowly and turned turned to show he had her undivided attention. The other two girls and Joe Leary showed this by hanging over their side of the table, gaping eagerly.

Bernie helped himself to some potatoes. "Would you like the good news-" he swallowed, "or the bad news first?"

Lily tapped a finger on the table nervously. "I hate multiple choice!" she sighed.

"The good news is it ain´t personal..."

"Wait- What do you mean?" Marva asked nosily. "Do you mean that mess when that one bloke tried to blow Lily´s head off-" (this was a slight exaggeration, forgiven by all present) "-and some of `em being nasty in the corridors an´ all? That it isn't just Lily they're-"

"That," Alia informed, "is precisely what he means." She turned and examined Bernie. "And I could have told her that, as I´ve been getting special attention from the Slytherin beaters in the matches this year... And this is different! I haven´t even gone out with their boyfriends yet!"

"Longbottom got an urn right in the kisser yesterday!"Joe volunteered. "But... That might have been Peeves..."

"Like I said!" Bernie muttered, "Any road... Now the bad news."

"Wait!" Lily interrupted, "What was the good news again? Did I miss that part?"

"They´re are some serious yobbos here... Nose deep in the dark arts! And not just a few either. And not just in Slytherin. They lay low y´know, stay out of the way, keep out of Filch´s office. They're just waiting to be recruited for the war... And not by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, neither!"

"Laying low? Could have fooled us!" Alia replied sardonically. "What do you call that great troll of a Slytherin openly attacking us smack in the middle of the Entrance Hall?!"

"Who told you all this stuff?" Lily asked Bernie with narrowed eyes.

"Girls," Bernie muttered, very impatiently getting up to leave. "Listen. Some of `em can´t hold tempers well, what can I say, huh? As for my sources... That´s my business ain´t it? Thought you´d deserved to know what was going on, Evans. You ain´t the only non-pure blood at Hogwarts are ya? But you´re a prefect. You´re jobs to keep any more tempers from getting lost. As for myself-" he straightened his robes, "I haven´t forgotten what that lot were saying after Nico Quietus died. And seeing how she was a friend of mine, you can count on me doing my part to keep a close eye on them... And etcetera."

*    *    *

Later that evening, sitting by a mounting stack of Transfiguration notes and a messy pile of Potions worksheets (some past due), Lily found herself staring for extensive amounts of time into the fire.

"What time do you have, Symes?" she asked a boy sitting behind her so suddenly he nearly leapt from his chair.

A few minutes later she was patrolling the corridors. This was the job of the older prefects, as their curfews were later. But she didn´t think the Head Girl would mind.

The night was uneventful for the most part.

She accidentally stumbled on Bandy Mendoza and Lydia Westwood smooching behind a suit of armor. She had to duck and flee when she found Peeves dismantling toilets, Mrs. Norris hissing and running off to tell Filch. She saw Rubeus Hagrid leave the Headmaster´s office. When she encountered the Bloody Baron haunting the fifth floor corridor, she decided that things were well in hand and she wandered back to the common room.

*    *    *

"I saw you last night!!" The tall Ravenclaw boy with the foot fetish called. He had been talking for a while, making conversation about the weather, why organized athletics were bad, the Spanish Minister for Magic... Lily nodded and filled the gaps he left for her politely, as she walked to class.

"Did you, hmm..." Lily replied a bit uneasy about this.

"Yes, you´re hair shone in the moon light!"

"Was there a moon last night? I don´t think there was!" Lily said a little frantically.

"No. There was a moon! Wasn´t there? Of course, that light could have just been Peeves reflecting off the the toilets..."

"Romantic, Dash," Sirius Black intoned. Both `Dash´ and Lily turned.

"Yeah, I´ll have to try that one some time," Potter added.

Lily was gratified that the mischief twins had decided to show up. She had been caught between civility and the heebie-jeebies.

Dash, however, was taken aback.

The events that went down next can best be described as follows:

A boy standing nearby named Gus Hobart, a lover of amphibians large and small lost control of his toad, Melinda. Melinda for some odd reason found that it wanted to be on the lapel of Dash, who was no great lover of anything that could live both in and out of the water.

Dash screeched hoarsely and flung Melinda to the floor in absolute disgust. Potter caught the toad with impossible reflexes, and clenched in one of his hands, both the toad and Potter stared at Dash in disbelief. Sirius was delighted with the display and began roaring laughter.

Meanwhile, mortified at the treatment of his toad, Gus began to hurl towards Dash´s chest yelling Scottish curses that Lily tried to understand but quickly lost track of as they turned into a long stream of blurred profanity.

Some Ravenclaws in Dash´s year of course chose that exact moment in time to enter the scene and and rushed to the side of the fight offering bitter, but clever insults at Hobart´s back.

Lily rolled up her sleeves and tried to step between the two boys but in confusion Gus took a swipe at her instead of Dash and then Potter and Black jumped in.

Peter Pettigrew at some point joined though he mainly directed punches and offered sound effects like: "POW!" followed by wild laughter. No one used discretion in whom they fought, excepting Sirius and Potter who always opted out of biffing each other on the head when they´re were other people readily available.

Gus ended up being rolled out of the fray, into the shouting Ravenclaws and knocked them down like so many ten pins. Some Hufflepuffs were also taken out. Ian Stokes´ robe fell over his face and he became entangled with a sculpture of a armed troll, screaming and thrashing wildly as if under attack as he couldn´t see what he was attached to.

A flying Ravenclaw accidentally sent Lily tumbling to the floor and smack into a stone wall. She briefly saw stars. Then Dash crawled through the melee, ripped off her left shoe with a triumphant guffaw and then clutching the shoe ecstatically, bellowed as he ran off, "I looooove yooooouuuu!"

"AGGGGH!" Lily replied, pointing at his retreating back.