Sotto Voce

Chapter 5 - Solacium Fridgidus

I shall go the way of the open sea,
To the lands I knew before you came,
And the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me
The memory of your name.
- - - - Laurence Hope

"Lily! Lily, wait for a moment!"

She turned to witness James running across the courtyard, the milky, frost-covered grass crunching to ice under his leather loafers. He reached her in a few long strides, his breath coming out in cloudy white puffs. A whiff of his cologne cut through the thin, sharp air, but before the scent could linger, it was gone.

Her cheeks and lips, already pink from the cold, reddened fractionally as she lifted her eyes to his. Wrapping her school robe around her more tightly, she hoped - prayed - that last night was nothing but a fuzzy memory in his mind. Though, she thought with some sourness, it certainly wasn´t unclear in hers.

"Let me walk you to Divination. I´m in there too. That´s the class you have now, isn´t it?" James asked breathlessly.

Lily looked at him doubtfully. She didn´t believe for a moment that he was making idle small talk, not to her.

"I do have Divination now, you are correct. What do you really want to discuss?" she asked coolly.

"Well, I just wanted to thank you for helping me last night." James gave her a slightly embarrassed smile. "It can´t have been pleasant."

She fought down the tide of uneasiness that swept through her, discomfort twisting her stomach even as her skin tingled from the echo of his flesh. She dragged her eyes from his lips and gleaming teeth with some effort. Thoughts of that sort were dangerous, and she really needed to concentrate on the situation at hand. Perhaps if she waited for him to continue, he would reveal just how much he had retained of the memory.

A faint pink crept onto his cheeks. "I mean, I got rather ill and you were unfortunate enough to intercept me - well, you know..." he trailed off sheepishly. Her jaw clenched tightly, Lily waited for him to continue in pointed silence.

He coughed somewhat uncomfortably. "And then you made me drink something thoroughly unpleasant and I fell asleep."

Lily let out a breath she hadn´t known she was holding. It seemed the potion´s sedative had taken proper affect, which meant that he wouldn´t recall anything afterwards. But to her dismay, James continued talking, his attitude suddenly - suspiciously - blasé.

"And when I woke this morning," he drawled, "my clothes were off, and I was lying in bed." A side of his mouth twisted up in a half-smirk. "Might you have any idea how that came to be?"

Lily nearly choked. She scrupulously avoided his gaze, racking her brain desperately for an idea, for anything that would seem a plausible excuse to explain his state of dishabille. Her nails dug into her palms in an effort to keep her voice steady and quell the rising heat in her cheeks.

"I requested the house elves tend to you," she said coolly. "And evidently they felt the need to extricate you from your clothing." Lily paused, trying to find a way to steer the conversation into safer waters. "Do you know who poisoned you, by any chance?" She gave herself a silent cheer after his expression turned to one of shock. She may not have been a natural conversationalist, but at least the clumsy distraction had been effective.

James looked at her with disbelief. "Poison? You can´t be serious!" His grey eyes were wide with shock. "Who´d want to poison me?" he asked in a surprise-laden voice, which for all its sincerity, verged uncomfortably on arrogance.

Lily looked fiercely at him. She was unaccustomed to having her opinions refuted, especially one that seemed so obvious. "Do you have a better explanation for why you were vomiting right after dinner?" she asked sharply.

James sputtered. "But poison? That could have bloody well killed me!"

"It wouldn´t have killed you," said Lily, resuming her walk across the morning-chilled courtyard. This sort of straightforward conversation was relatively easy for her - it fed the questions into her and responses were neat and tidy. "It was picrotoxin, which is a Muggle product. Only magical poisons can kill wizards."

"So what you´re saying is that whoever put this in my drink didn´t intend to kill me?" James´ brow furrowed in concentration. "Then why," he said slowly, "would they have put poison in there to begin with?" A heavy sigh escaped his lips, and the Herculean glow that seemed to surround him had dissolved, leaving a mystified, brooding young man just as human as she.

Unexpectedly, Lily felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for him. He was obviously at a loss, visibly upset by the idea of someone wishing harm towards him - not at all the confident young wizard she was accustomed to. In a way, she liked him better like this; she was on more equal ground with him, compensating for his insecurity by becoming more secure herself. It was almost an unconscious transition, but one that she found she selfishly liked.

Still, it was disconcerting to see him in this vulnerable state, like a king without his crown. Physical vulnerability was one thing, but being suddenly exposed to emotional weakness put her in a distinctly unfamiliar situation.

Lily bit her lip. "Do you know who would have access to Muggle things?" she ventured, finding the questions for once flowing easily to her lips. She slipped past a doorway and began to ascend the stairs to the Divination tower. "You may not be able to ascertain their motives yet, but you could narrow down the list of suspects."

"Normally I´d blame it on Snape and be done with it," said James, "but he wasn´t anywhere near the Gryffindor table, let alone my goblet." He paused, eyes fixed on some indeterminate point. "Unless..." He trailed off and shook his head, dark hair brushing the tips of his silver-rimmed spectacles. "No, it would never have been a Gryffindor."

Lily was about to reply when the staircase shifted abruptly, stone grating against stone as it moved jaggedly from the wall. It stopped again suddenly just by another stair, and Lily took a few deep breaths. Her bag had been tossed away from her and she bent over to retrieve it when the stairs scraped violently against each other, pitching harshly to the side.

Her stomach gave a sickening lurch as her footing became unsteady and she stumbled over the precipice, falling in what seemed to be slow motion into the empty air. With a vague sense of detachment, she saw her book bag tumble over the edge, feeling her body begin to fall with it into the air that seemed to curve around her and pull her down. She suddenly felt a strong pair of arms wrap around her waist, hauling her upwards. Lily found herself being pulled closely against James´ chest, her knees weak and body shaking.

Distantly, she heard her books crack against the stone many floors below, and taking a deep, shuddering breath, she clutched the thick fabric of James´ cloak. That could have been her down there, laying in a heap of broken bones and books, a gruesome and unfamiliar spectacle for her classmates to discover. That morbid thought, the brush with death, unsettled her deeply, leaving her to hold desperately, unthinkingly, to the figure in front of her.

James said nothing, merely held her tightly and stroked her hair soothingly while she took in gulps of breath, inhaling like much-needed oxygen the somehow distinctly masculine scent of mint and musk and spice. The artless movement, the security, in the embrace left her feeling almost drowsy, drunk on the delicious feeling of warmth that was spreading from her solar plexus and into her fingertips; fingertips that felt suddenly the impulse to wrap around his neck and run through his hair.

The warmth was delicious, steadying - she could hear his heartbeat through the thick folds of his clothes, the tensing and relaxing of muscles as he shifted his arms to hold her more closely. Those affectionate, gentle hugs with her relatives were nothing like this. She didn´t want to let go, wanted to remain forever like this, with her skin warmed from his body heat, her body encased protectively in his arms.

Lily pulled away from James sharply; she was altogether swiftly, painfully cognizant of the close contact, and her own perpetuation of it. She felt a wave of disgust of herself, aghast at her clinginess and even more sickened by her enjoyment of it. Was she really so starved for human contact that she would fling herself at someone who hadn´t even requested any sort of touch, and probably didn´t want it?

She would have flushed a deep red color if not so consumed by the self-rebuke of her impulsive embrace, and instead settled for collecting herself with a firm clench of the jaw. She breathed in harshly. "Thank you for pulling me back. I´m sorry about - " her voice tightened, "throwing myself at you. Forgive my outburst."

James gave her a curious look. "Lily, you really don´t need to apologize." He paused, his eyes weighted with concern. "Are you sure you´re all right?"

She nodded awkwardly, eyes fastened to a portrait of a woman weeping over a tombstone in a garden thick with roses. Concentrate on being firm, she admonished herself.

"I´ll get your books up here. Can you make it to class on your own?" James put a hand on her shoulder, deep grey eyes looking at her searchingly, and filled almost painfully with concern - brotherly concern, she noted with a sick taste in her mouth.

Lily stiffened and pulled back from him, suddenly suffocated by the close proximity, physical and emotional. Her voice was strained. "Nonsense. I can get the books on my own and I can make it to class by myself," she said, straightening her robes. "Now, if you´ll excuse me - "

James stepped in her way and shook his head. "You go up. I´m sure our new professor won´t mind if such a dashing student such as myself is late." He grinned at her to reveal bright white teeth. "You can tell her your knight in shining armor went to rescue your wayward textbooks."

She looked at him with vague apprehension, filled with a sense of déjà vu. Hadn´t she just been thinking about knights in shining armor the other evening?

"I think I´ll pass on the latter," said Lily delicately. She could tell he was making an effort to lighten the mood and indulged the change of subject with relief. "But thank you for your offer of getting my books." Normally she wouldn´t have considered taking him up on the offer, but she didn´t want to hike all the way up and down the staircases a second time, especially considering she had nearly killed herself on one of them recently. She was feeling rather dizzy from the rush of hormones that pumped through her veins, but ill from the considerable lack on his part.

James flashed a last, dazzling grin at her before bounding down the stairs and disappearing down a dark corridor that she had always thought to be a dead end. His eyes, though, were filled with worry and weighted down by his own predicament. Lily sighed - she was getting caught in the most awkward circumstances with her unrequited crush. But to be honest with herself, she didn´t entirely hate the situation.

***

James had panted into Divination just a moment before the professor arrived, and slid into the seat next Lily. She, for one, was still trying to stomach the new décor of the room - it was, needless to say, atrocious. Thick plum-colored drapes were hung from the ceiling and wall, and the murky windows had been plastered with a peculiar, moving-patterned lace the colour of khaki. Even their desks were wrapped in dark, faded fabric, and frayed Persian rugs were piled one atop another on the floor. The candles that floated in crystal-ball-shaped sconces kept glittering in different colours as the wax melted, and the flame burned in rainbow. All in all, it looked like some repulsive, quasi-gothic boudoir.

Mist started to emit from the front of the room, and a figure stepped out from the shadow of it. Lily would have started laughing if she wasn´t gaping open-mouthed at the woman. She was dressed in a puff of dusty-rose-coloured satin, and her hair was covered by a veil of diaphanous material embedded with crystals. Her spectacles were so heavily and hideously jeweled that her round eyes stood out like bizarre headlights on a Muggle car.

She began to speak, her eyes slightly glazed and unfocused. "I am Sybil Trelawney, world-famous Seer and now your professor." Her voice was misty. "I will assist you with discovering your Inner Eye. Some of you will find that you are powerful Diviners. Others," she paused, her eyes coming to rest on Lily, "will have considerably more difficulty."

Next to her, James muffled a snicker. "If only Sirius could be here to see this," he murmured. "He could wrap her Inner Eye in a box and sell it to her as a Christmas present."

Lily smiled uncertainly and turned her attention to Trelawney, who was now floating about the room and giving instructions to specific pairs. She drifted slowly over the two of them, and gave them each a scrutinizing look. James had the most angelic look she´d ever seen on the face of a seventeen-year-old boy, and Lily nearly burst out laughing.

Trelawney, however, just about melted at his cherubic smile. "I sense much psychic power from you, my dear. Yes, yes..." She closed her eyes, speaking in a distant voice. "You had best stay far from those lacking the same talent. They will bring only ruin and downfall to you."

Her eyes snapped open to look at Lily. "I am sorry, my dear. You have very little aura," she continued, gasping suddenly and putting her hand to her forehead. "Oh, I knew it! You will die late in your life from a domestic accident. Terribly sorry," said the professor somberly. "The future lies within the crystal, my apprentices. Unpeel the onion of the future to reveal your destiny." With that strange metaphor, Trelawney glided away with her curtain-like robes shrouded around her, murmuring about the heavy burden of those with the Inner Eye.

Lily stared after her, lips parted in surprise, not sure whether to be enraged at her presumptuousness or amused by her prophecies. While she didn´t make a habit of being disrespectful to teachers, it appeared Trelawney was more of a charlatan than a teacher. She sat back in the faded mauve chair and looked morosely down at the desk. It appeared that Trelawney had chosen her as a victim for prophecies of doom, thought Lily glumly, blowing away the sunlit dust that sparkled in front of her nose.

"Cheer up," said James, glancing over at her. "As a prodigy in the field," he remarked with mock portentousness, "I can at least advise you as to how to live your remaining years in utmost bliss." He rubbed his hands over the crystal ball, which swirled with a silky cloud of azure at his touch.

"Oh yes, much conflict in the future...a lover´s spat? Oh, and he´s tall, dark, oh, and handsome, too - definitely not Snape then, eh? Well, this is quite entertaining - you know, your eyes are just as bright in a crystal ball?"

Lily lowered her eyes immediately, pale lids shielding her irises from view. The stifling air was drenched with musty perfume oil and was hazy with thick curls of tangerine incense. The stuffy, oppressive air made her clothes stick to her clammy skin, cold as snow to the touch. James took her hand and she flinched, automatically moving to pull it away from his strong and warm one, no matter how much her nerve endings told her to linger.

His eyes flickered from the candlelight in the room. Everyone was whispering in hushed voices, hunched over their velvet-draped desks or rearranging wet tea leaves on glass plates. James leaned forward. "Are you all right? Your hands are freezing, and I know you were given quite a scare earlier - "

"I´m fine," she replied shortly, smoothing the aubergine velvet on her desk with a pale hand. "Thank you for inquiring." She tentatively touched the crystal orb, which flushed to an amethyst colour at her fingertips. The mist swirled and thinned, leaving vague shapes inside. They fell suddenly into sharp relief, and Lily squinted closer to see.

It was her in there, standing on the balcony of an Italian villa and looking out into a vivid sunset, fading from cherry to gold to indigo and into the shadowed hills. A figure came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, leaning forward to nuzzle her neck. Her image in the crystal ball closed her eyes dreamily and twisted around to face the man that was obviously her lover, and she peered closer in order to identify him.

Lily gasped and removed her hands from the orb as if she had been scalded, the image burning behind her eyes in full colour and exquisiteness. The feeling of nausea swept over her again, and she closed her eyes in order to stop the world from swimming into a whirlpool of colour and unpleasant sensation. She curled her arms around herself, attempting to stop the waves of shock and hope and anger that were crashing at the edge of her consciousness. Why, why, did she have to feel so absurdly, irrationally strongly about this?

She faintly heard James asking her what was wrong, what she had seen in there to make her react so violently. If he didn´t know, she wasn´t eager to enlighten him.

***

Lily had managed to carefully avoid James for the entire week, withdrawing more into her private room and sitting at the back of class, hidden from view. She took obscure corridors to class, shrouded in shadows and without so much as one word to another one of her classmates. She had spoken perhaps a few sentences throughout the entire week, falling once again into the familiar state of utter solitude. It was cold comfort.

She could not, however, avoid the Prefect Meetings. Her absence would be more conspicuous than her attendance, and she didn´t want to disappoint those who had elected her to the post of Head Girl - she did have duties to fulfill, after all. So when she filed into the classroom that was used for such purposes, she found that she blended in easily with the students who milled noisily about the room, laughing and sharing jokes.

James tapped her on the shoulder and gave her an warm smile before calling everyone to order. She noted with slight amazement how they immediately obeyed his command; even Snape sat without hesitation.

James cleared his throat. "Our first order of business is the Halloween Feast. We need to assign people to charm the decorations, others to prevent the food from being tampered with - "

"You speak from personal experience, mate?" a Gryffindor prefect interrupted. The room erupted in laughter, obviously remembering last year´s Feast, in which James and company had doused the food in modified Cheering Charms, so that anyone who consumed it became not only very bubbly, but very flirtatious as well. Lily hadn´t been at the Feast, but it had been buzzing all over school the next day.

James grinned in response. "I wasn´t in charge of the Feast last year. I´m going to pass around a piece of parchment and you all can sign your names on it."

A dark-skinned Hufflepuff witch raised her hand. "Are we going to work with partners again this year?" Murmurs of excitement broke out among the prefects, and James glanced at them with an amused smile.

"I guess that means yes."

Lily watched the whole affair in wonderment. He assumed leadership so naturally, so easily, that she felt at ease simply sitting back and letting him take over to leave her working behind the scenes. That was, after all, what she had done for the past two years. The rest of the meeting passed quickly, it being early in the year and with no major issues to report. As people began to file out, she gathered the parchment that had been passed around and put it in her bag. She tidied up the room until she was the last one out the door, and she stepped out into the considerably cooler and darker hallway.

Two figures were speaking in hushed voices at the end of the hallway, and she strained to see them. Lily recognized James´ profile in the candlelight, his strong jaw and straight nose as distinct as that of a Greek statue´s. The pretty Hufflepuff who had asked about partners was gazing up at him, twirling her hair and laughing. Lily slipped further into the shadows in order to hear what they were saying.

"We should go together, James," the girl blushed. "I´ve been wanting to ask you for the longest time, you know," she laughed lightly. "I´ve fancied you since fifth year," she said, tracing the line of his jaw with her finger.

It was James´ turn to flush a bit. "You should have just asked before, Julia." He grinned, embarrassment gone, and put his hand on hers. "I would have accepted."

The girl - Julia - smiled coyly. "So does that mean you´ll accompany me to the Halloween Feast?"

His lips curled up in a devious smile. "And to Hogsmeade, too, if you like," he said playfully, fingering a lock of thick, black hair cut in a neat bob.

"Saturday, after breakfast in the Great Hall." Her dark eyes glinted as she leaned forward to kiss him sweetly, slowly on the lips. "See you then," she grinned impishly, before trotting down the corridor, her yellow and black Hufflepuff scarf streaming out behind her.

James touched his fingers to his lips, a smile lingering on his face. He had a faraway look on his face, pale eyes dreamy and distant. When he started down the corridor a bit later, Lily finally slipped out of the shadows and into the dim torchlight.

She felt sick. Jealousy gnawed at the pit of her stomach, disappointment resting on her shoulders like a leaden weight. What had she expected - that he ask her? She shook her head scornfully at herself. He wouldn´t look twice her way, not when there were girls like Julia around. She seemed to be everything Lily wasn´t - vivacious, affectionate, pretty in a dark, exotic way.

An irrational bubble of green-tinged anger flushed through her veins at this Julia, who had so sweetly and cruelly and entirely unintentionally sliced through any delusions Lily may have held about a romance with James. It wasn´t going to happen - she knew that now deep within her heart.

An inkbottle that she had been gripping finally crushed within her fist, the dark liquid seeping into the blood that was flowing from the cuts. She swore softly to herself and stooped down to collect the broken pieces that lay scattered on the floor. The shards cut shallowly but painfully into her skin, and she could feel them embedding deeper into her skin as she closed her fist around the ruined inkbottle. With her wand hand injured, there was nothing she could do about the spill, and she felt a bit guilty for leaving the pool of ink for the house elves to clean up. Lily headed back towards her room - there was no need to go to Madame Pomfrey over broken glass.