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Semele Perdita: The Once Lost

Chapter 28: A Death and A Discovery

LadyAkako

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[ James ]

I sat down glumly at the breakfast table the next day. The guys had been asleep by the time I had gotten back from patrol last night so I hadn't had the chance to share what had happened. I wasn't sure I even knew what happened.

Moony saw immediately that something was wrong, but the other two were slower to catch on. They were too preoccupied with their sausage and pumpkin juice.

“Are you going to glower all day or what?” Moony finally asked with a sigh as if he knew he was opening the flood gates. I pursed my lips and shook my head, fighting the urge to tell him everything.

“I'm not glowering,” I defended with a small sniff and adjusted myself on the bench. “I'm just preoccupied.”

“Preoffufied wif wha?” Peter asked through a mouthful of food. He swallowed hard and then looked expectantly at me. This sudden silence at the table caught Sirius's attention and he looked up from his plate of breakfast.

“What's going on?” he plowed into the interrogation eagerly. He pushed his plate slightly away and leaned across the table to encourage an answer. All three faces were intent on me and I looked down at the empty plate before me. Instead of answering, I began to pile food onto the white plate. Before I could take my first bite however, I was interrupted again. This time by Dumbledore himself.

“Attention, students, attention, allow me to distract you from your wonderful breakfast for a moment,” his strangely quiet voice floated over the Great Hall, immediately sending a wave of silence through it. “Unfortunately I have very grave news this morning. I must impart to the knowledge of the death of a very dear and important man in our bubble of existence. The Minister of Magic has been murdered and we find ourselves in the hands of his successor, Cornelius Fudge.”

An even stronger wave of immediate gossip crashed into the Great Hall and soon flooded any spare room in the place. Whispers were abandoned and instead, we were forced to yell to hear each other. The Minister of Magic dead?! The man seemed invincible. And who was this `successor'? He sounded like a pushover of mythic proportions.

Before the conversations could go much further however, Dumbledore held up his hands for silence and it swept the room again.

“During these dark times, it is easy to feel oppressed by the situations we find ourselves in, but I implore you, students, to rise above this tragedy,” Dumbledore continued in a gentle, yet forceful tone. “Much like a phoenix would rise from its own ashes, I ask you all to rise above the tragedies that are shaping your childhood and become what the future now requires you to be.”

A somber mood gripped the whole Hall and I felt as if a lead weight had dropped inside my stomach. A strange cocktail of emotions flooded my mind and flashbacks of my early childhood reached my conscience. I remember back in the day when my father had just been promoted to the head of his department, the Minister had come to our house for dinner. My mother had been ecstatic at such an important person gracing their threshold. I hadn't been allowed to be at the table and I remember being so upset that I had to eat with the house-elves. Remembering, it was only fair. I would have said some incredibly insulting thing to the portly Minister and shamed my family; after all I was only seven at the time of the promotion. Ten years later, I could still remember peering at the important man through the crack of the kitchen door and yearning to be at that table and hear every word my father and the man spoke to each other.

The thought occurred to me that my father was probably taking the news hard and I should write him. I wondered if he would even have time to read my note? The last time I was there we hardly spoke because of the pile of work that awaited him.

Everyone at the table remained silent for the remainder of breakfast and we headed to Transfiguration steeped in thought. McGonagall was unusually late to the class and when she arrived she seemed ruffled and disturbed.

“Page 102 until the end of the chapter,” she ordered tersely and sat down at her desk. I could have sworn her hair looked a little grayer this morning. She was dressed all in black and her skin was ashen with worry.

Sirius nudged me. He too seemed to have noticed the dramatic change in the strict woman's appearance. We both shuffled through our bags and brought out the relatively new books we had. Sirius's was already slightly scorched around the edge of the pages but mine was still almost shiny the way new books were. The rest of the class seemed to stir into action after a moment as well and I looked around the room wonderingly. There was not even the tiniest whisper to break the melancholy silence that had been imposed upon us so suddenly that morning.

My own reminiscing was broken by a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. Lily. I tilted my head as discreetly as possible to get a better look at her. She looked a bit dazed and was concentrated not on her book but on Marlene McKinnon who was sitting next to her and looked on the verge of tears. They weren't speaking but Lily was rubbing her friend's arm consolingly. Vaguely I remembered the McKinnons were somehow related to the Minister but the cobwebby corners of my mind that kept track of family connections couldn't recall exactly how. I wondered how much time Marlene had spent with the man.

Lily seemed to feel my eyes on her and turned to look at me questioningly. I shook my head and turned back to staring at the page in front of me. The words swam into curvy lines and the subject we were reading on managed to escape me for the rest of the class. The rest of the Marauders seemed to have completely forgotten my dark mood this morning and I was thankful for what I knew would only be a temporary reprieve from the questioning.

The day flew by in almost complete silence and the subject of my own brooding wasn't brought up until late that night when we were all gathered in the common room, pretending to study.

“So, what was the scowl you had on this morning about, Prongs?” Remus suddenly asked, breaking the uneasy silence that had settled over the four of us. He was desperate for conversation, I could tell, as we all were from today. “Not that it's out of place anymore.”

I didn't answer for a long moment and finally, sighed.

“Lily's mad at me,” I admitted, running a hand through me hair. I felt a headache coming on again. I had noticed today that whenever I began to think about what happened last night a horrible throbbing pain took up residency in my temples.

“What's new?” Peter asked doubtfully and I shot him a liberal glare.

“I didn't do anything wrong!” I defended myself vehemently. “One minute I'm trying to guess who she fancies, the next she's practically screaming at me for being thick. I have no idea what she's on about.”

“Girls will always be a mystery, mate,” Sirius commented knowingly. “Do yourself a favor now and stop trying to understand them. You never will.” He leaned back in the armchair and stretched his arms above his head subsequently drawing sidelong looks from several girls in the room.

“What exactly did she say to you when she was angry besides that you were thick?” Remus asked curiously. He had abandoned his Defense Against the Dark Arts book and was now staring at me intently.

“She said that I wasn't listening or something,” I answered after a moment. “Which I was, I listened to every word she said about the bloke she fancies. She….she just won't tell me enough about him to be sure who he is.”

“Well who did you think it was?” Peter asked helpfully. I had the undivided attention of all three of them. “Maybe she was just mad at your choice.”

“I don't know why she would, I went through almost the entire Hogwarts male population that has surpassed puberty before she got angry,” I said disbelievingly. “It was all in good humor until last night. Really, I've been guessing for days and she never got angry until last night near the end of the patrol.”

The Marauders seemed as stumped as I was and fell silent again. Peter cleared his throat and seemed to be searching for words. He shifted in his chair so he could look more closely at me.

“What has she told you about this mystery man?” he finally seemed to formulate a question. Sirius and Remus both nodded encouragingly as if that was exactly what they would have asked next. They all waited expectantly as I gathered up the well-chewed information in my head.

“Well she said…he's funny but not incredibly silly…he's adventurous…smart…and sweet,” I listed, absolutely bewildered with the girl as I said them out loud. “She's bonkers, I swear. She's turned down every single guy that I guessed. There's no one left!”

“Well...” Peter started, but drifted off in thought. He then brightened and his eyes sparkled as if he knew some important secret. “Prongs…did you ever ask if she fancied you?”

“Lily like him?” sputtered Sirius. “Last time I checked she still half-way loathed him.”

“Feelings change…” mused Remus reasonably. “I think Wormtail could be onto something. You fit all her criteria.”

I shook my head fiercely, not even able to find the words to dissent with them. Finally, I argued, “She tolerates me, she certainly doesn't fancy me. The only reason she even looks at me is because I'm Head Boy.”

“She agreed to help us with the map only when you asked her,” Peter inserted slyly and raised an eyebrow. Sirius seemed to snap to life with that comment and nodded, enlightened.

“…and she came to Hogsmeade with us, breaking at least a dozen school rules, after you asked her to,” Sirius added, his eyes had a conspiratorial glint in them. He jumped from his armchair and began to pace in the small alcove of the Common Room we were seated in. “In fact, everything she's ever done with us is because you asked her to. Maybe Wormtail really is on to something.”

“I think you have all gone absolutely loopy,” I groaned and buried my face into the couch's pillow. Lily was so far from liking me, it was preposterous to think differently. The boys were just reading that into what she had said because they hadn't been there when she was saying them. “And before you go any further with this craziness, I'm going to go to bed and hope this entire conversation is a bad dream.”

I rose, feigning sleep with an exaggerated yawn, and threw the pillow I had been grasping to the ground. Before they could protest, I rushed up the stairs to the dorm and threw myself on my bed, scattering a few unfinished papers on my way down.

They were wrong of course, but I couldn't help but feel a little stirring deep in my stomach when I relished the thought of Lily possibly, maybe liking me. After all, how many years had I pined after her? How many years had I secretly watched her in every class and memorized the maximum times I could pass her in the hallway in one day?

It was dizzying to think just when I had given up on the girl ever liking me that she might…just might return my own feelings.

I shook myself with the reminder that it was all speculation and she was still angry at me no matter if she actually liked me or not. However, I couldn't help but smile to myself going to sleep that night as I thought of the red-headed beauty that seemed to occupy my head a little more with each passing day.

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