Chapter 413 - Something Strange Going On

Chapter 413: Chapter 413 - Something Strange Going On

"Ah, ah, ah." James lit up at once.

He got there first, flicked his wand, and a Hover Charm settled over the fallen wand.

Lily’s wand rose, drifting higher and higher, past the reach of her fingers, and hung there turning lazily in the air.

"Can’t reach?" He doubled over laughing.

A glance sideways at Snape on the floor handed him a word already waiting on his tongue.

"Strut for it, Evans. Jump a bit higher, maybe you’ll get there."

She rushed forward, head tipped back, stretching for the wand above her, up on her toes with her hand out. Nothing.

He was delighted. He came two steps closer, teasing the wand along like a string in front of a cat, floating it left, then right.

His whole attention sat on that hovering wand and the sight of her failing to reach it.

Those two steps put him directly beneath the alcove.

Her heels came down. Her eyes left the ceiling and stopped following her wand at all.

Green eyes flashed. Her left hand snapped toward the alcove, fingers spread, then yanked down hard, the motion so fast it came with no warning at all.

No incantation. No light. No wand movement. Magic bled straight out of her fingertips, caught the armour’s centre of mass, and wrenched it off its base.

Nothing had anchored the thing, its weight sat high, and the helmet had been perched crooked from the start.

The helmet slid first. Breastplate and vambraces lost their support and pitched outward, the whole suit coming apart with a clatter and toppling in one thunderous mass, dragging air down with it, straight at James’s head.

His reflexes were unfair. The light above him dimmed and he didn’t so much as look up. His wand whipped skyward and the spell was already leaving his mouth.

"Impedimenta!"

It slammed up into the falling iron on pure instinct, knocking the armour aside.

Breastplate and arm pieces veered off, plates crashing against the wall and floor, the helmet rolling away down the corridor with a long ringing series of clangs, sparks spitting off the stone.

Wand, spell, attention, every reflex he had was locked on the scrap metal over his head.

The Hover Charm broke. Lily’s wand dropped out of the air and landed at the edge of the alcove.

She’d been waiting for exactly that. The instant the armour came down, she was already diving for it.

One long stride, low, hand sweeping it up, then up and around with the tip levelled at him.

"Expelliarmus!"

Red light caught James square in the chest. His wand tore free, tumbled end over end, and cracked down at the far end of the corridor.

Silence again.

Loose armour pieces hummed as they rocked to a stop. A torch jumped on the wall, throwing light and shadow across the scattered iron.

He stood frozen, one hand still half-raised in the position that had flung the armour clear, the smugness not yet wiped off his face.

Metal rolled around his feet. His empty hand came down, slowly.

He looked at his bare palm, then up at her, and his whole face began to redden.

Lily stood among the wreckage, wand on him, chest heaving, hair loose in places, cheeks flushed.

Green eyes bright, lips pressed together. Her knee still hurt and her scraped palms burned, but the wand didn’t waver.

She’d won.

She could hardly believe it herself.

The wand was in her hand and his was on the floor. That was real.

"You think you’ve won, don’t you?" Her voice came out over her breathing. "Corner someone, knock them down, and it makes you brilliant."

She stepped closer, tip still on his chest. "You can push around anyone weaker than you. Put you against someone who can actually fight and what have you got left?"

He held his neck stiff, face burning, and not a word came out.

Her eyes flicked to the wall. Sirius was the one she still had to watch.

If he came at her now she had nothing left. That fight had wrung her dry.

But the glance stopped her short.

Grey eyes were fixed on her, and the look in them was strange beyond reading. Not confusion exactly, and not anything else she could name. He seemed to be looking at her and through her at once, gone unnervingly still.

She had no idea what he was thinking, though his stance and the hand shoved in his pocket said he wasn’t planning to fight.

She let him be, but didn’t drop her guard. He liked ambushes and had never shown a scrap of decency about it.

His gaze stayed on her. That last move was still turning over in his head.

He knew what it was. Magical manipulation, decently done, but hardly remarkable.

It was the shape of the reversal. You thought I’d lost, and the moment you relaxed was the moment I was waiting for.

The resemblance sharpened.

She pulled her eyes back to James. "Potter. Your wand’s on the floor, pick it up or don’t. One thing from me..."

Half a step forward, wand lifting with it, an edge in her voice. "Leave Severus alone from now on. And don’t let me catch you cornering anyone in a corridor again."

His neck stayed rigid, colour shifting from red to white and back.

His mouth opened. Then he looked down at the wand on the flagstones, and across at the wrecked armour strewn everywhere, and everything jammed in his throat.

Taken out by a suit of armour. Disarmed by a girl in his own year.

If that got around, the thought alone made his chest ache.

Watching him choke on it, the anger Lily had swallowed for a year finally let go.

This was James Potter.

She didn’t let herself enjoy it long. Nobody knew better than she did how she’d won.

If Potter hadn’t taken the bait, hadn’t spent his attention teasing her, if that armour hadn’t split his focus and he’d blocked cleanly, none of it turns around.

She’d won by a thread. A very thin one. But she’d won.

Another look at Sirius, and a thought surfaced.

That stunt of his. Ambushing someone already backed into a wall, then standing around like an audience.

Compared to him, nowhere close.

Her mouth curved before she could stop it, and she pulled it back in.

She thought of the person who always had a way and never used it on anyone like this. If he’d been here, she wouldn’t have needed to lift a finger. Those two wouldn’t have had the nerve to corner anybody.

She folded the thought away, kept her face still, and let out a breath. The edge went out of her voice.

Her wand dropped and she waved a hand. "That’s enough. Go."

James stood there a while longer, wrestling with himself, then bent and picked up his wand.

He didn’t look at her, or at Snape. His face was black, his chest working, a whole gutful of fury with nowhere to go.

He didn’t swing again, though. Throwing himself at someone after being disarmed was beneath even him. Worse than losing.

He turned and stalked off down the corridor, steps fast and heavy, boots ringing off the stone.

Two paces on, he looked back and glared at Sirius.

Sirius was still rooted there, staring at Lily, that odd look nowhere near gone.

"What are you gaping at?" James snapped. "Come on!"

He surfaced, shrugged, and followed at a crawl.

On the way out he turned his head for one more look at her, brows still knit.

Their footsteps faded, rounded the far corner, and were gone.

Lily crouched beside Snape and lifted the petrification.

His body slackened all at once. He pushed himself up to sit, and the frost-crusted arm moved stiffly, barely answering him.

The sight of it brought her anger back up.

"Sev, are you all right?" She reached to help him, scooping up his wand from where it had rolled and holding it out. "Look at your arm. Those two have gone too far. I’m going to Professor McGonagall, this whole thing..."

He didn’t answer. He stared at the wand held toward him and made no move for it.

After a moment he pushed himself up unaided and stood, arm still locked, eyes never once reaching her face.

"Sev?" Her hand hung in the air.

"I don’t need your help!" The words came low and cold, and he snatched the wand from her.

He turned, went past her, black robes stirring the air, footsteps quick and muffled, heading down toward the dungeons.

Her hand stayed up, still offering, while that dark shape shrank down the corridor, rounded the bend, and was swallowed by stone.

Eventually she brought the empty hand back and wiped grit and blood off her palm against her robe, and breathed out.

She raised her wand, floated the scattered plates back onto the alcove base in a stack, and set off for Gryffindor Tower.

Gryffindor Tower, girls’ dormitory.

The fire hadn’t gone out, and the red and gold hangings glowed warm with it.

Marcia sat cross-legged on her bed with a bound volume of Transfiguration Today. Susan lay on her stomach across a pillow, writing home.

The door opened and both heads came up.

"Why are you so la..." Marcia stopped mid-word.

Lily’s robe was crumpled, one sleeve grey with dust, strands of hair loose, palms scraped, one trouser leg torn at the knee.

But she didn’t look like someone who’d been beaten up.

Susan set her quill down and came over. "What happened?"

Lily put her satchel on the bedside table, hung up her robe, sat on the edge of the bed and bent to her shoelaces.

The bend jarred her knee and she hissed, rolled up the trouser leg and looked. A bruise had come up dark.

Marcia already had the Essence of Dittany in hand. "What happened?"

"Ran into Potter and his lot cornering someone." She pulled the stopper and put two drops on the knee, then dabbed a little into her torn palm. "We had a fight."

Marcia yelped. "You fought Potter?"

"Mm."

"And?"

"And his wand went flying."

She set the Essence of Dittany back on the table, wiped the dust off her own wand, and laid it beside her pillow.

Marcia and Susan looked at each other wearing the same expression: disbelief, tangled with the certainty that Lily wouldn’t joke about this.

"Hold on." Marcia squeezed onto the bed and pressed right up against her. "You disarmed James Potter? With a spell? Which spell?"

Lily’s mouth tilted up. "Disarming Charm."

Susan sat down too and twisted around to face her. "I know it was the Disarming Charm, the question is how you ever landed one. He moves like a startled hare..."

"There was a suit of armour," Lily said, leaning back against the headboard and stretching her legs out, a little pleased with herself. "One of the old ones in an alcove. I pulled it over on top of him. He blocked, and then I got him."

Susan thought about that, eyebrows going up. "That’s fast casting. Two spells back to back?"

Lily laughed and shook her head. "I never said I pulled it with my wand."

Marcia’s mouth hung open for a long moment before she slapped the mattress. "Lily Evans! When did you learn wandless magic?"

"Magical manipulation." Lily waved a hand and winked. "Remember? I’ve been practising all year."

Marcia’s eyebrows climbed and she snorted, grinning. "Fine, fine. Black’s star pupil."

Susan giggled behind her hand.

Out the window, the moon hung above the Forbidden Forest, silver spilling across the canopy and picking out layer on layer of it.

Lily watched the light a while, and a thought went through her.

She’d see Regulus at the weekend. She’d tell him about tonight.

Her mouth curved on its own, and refused to come back down.

At the other end of Gryffindor Tower, third-year boys’ dormitory.

James came in, tore off his robe and flung it on the floor. One shoe sailed under the bed, the other hit the leg of Lupin’s desk and bounced back.

He threw himself down. The bedframe shrieked. Then he started punching the blankets.

"What the hell is going on lately?"

He shouted it at the hangings and yanked his glasses off, tossing them next to the pillow.

"First those second-year snakes, five on four and we still couldn’t get the better of them, and now Evans disarms me. Evans! Who takes Potions!"

The more he chewed on it the angrier he got. He grabbed the pillow and slammed it twice against the boards.

Those second-years were the hangers-on around Black. He’d expected sorting out a handful of second-years to be nothing, and instead the little brats had been uncanny about it and fought him to a draw. Nobody came out ahead.

And now Evans.

On the next bed, Sirius lay flat on his back, hands laced behind his head, eyes on the top of the hangings, silent for a long while.

"Yeah," he said at last, unhurried. "Strange, isn’t it."

"Right?" James shot upright. "You felt it too? I said so, there’s something off about all this, there’s a reason behind it, there has to be!"

"Mm." Sirius was still staring upward, gaze drifting. "Something off. There’s a reason."

Each of them was somewhere else entirely.

James was on how nothing had gone his way for weeks. The second-years, then Evans. Cursed, the lot of it.

Sirius was on the way Lily fought, that resemblance he couldn’t shake off, the sense of having seen it somewhere before.

One mind on the ground, one in the clouds, and they’d landed on the same sentence by accident.

"What’s the matter with you?" James rolled off his bed, padded barefoot over, and jabbed a finger into Sirius’s arm. "Why didn’t you step in? I was down to that and you’re propped against a wall enjoying the show?"

Sirius shifted away, irritated by the poking. "Tch."

"Tch nothing!" James grabbed his shoulder and shook it. "You watched a girl disarm me and did nothing. Some friend you..."

"You’re rubbish." Sirius shoved his hand off, still not focused on anything in the room. "My fault?"

"Rubbish, am I?" James glared. "Then you get up and try her!"

Sirius pulled the blanket up over his head. "Can’t be bothered."

"You..."

James launched himself across, and the two of them wrestled and rolled over the bed, boards creaking.

At the desk, Lupin sat with a lamp lit and a Transfiguration book open, having said nothing the entire time.

He looked up at the tangle on the bed, at James’s face full of wounded pride, at Sirius scuffling with someone while his eyes stayed somewhere far off.

Lupin sighed and turned a page.

"Both of you settle down. We’ve got Transfiguration first thing."