Solution Two: Give a "Gentle" Hint
Lily woke up, very slowly, and wondered lazily where she was. Mmm... she was leaning against something soft and warm.... She made a little kittenish motion that scrunched her up closer, feeling wonderful... and then she opened her eyes.
She was cuddled up next to James Potter, with her head on his chest. After she had had time to process this fact, and determine that this was not some awful nightmare, she let out a piercing yelp, but more with surprise then anything, and sat up very suddenly, scooting away.
"You!" she squeaked, leaping to her feet as he began to move closer. "What were you... I mean what was I...." Her mind was racing furiously as she tried to think up an explanation for this madness. She had been feeling a bit queer this morning.... "You... You... THERE WAS A LOVE POTION IN MY PUMPKIN JUICE, WASN'T THERE????" It was, after all the only explanation. She went hot then cold as she remembered of the past day. If it was true.... Lily blushed very deeply, her face going as flaming red as her hair. If it was true then James Potter was a... a... really, there was no word in the English language to describe just how horrible he was!
Meanwhile, the inhuman thing only smirked at her. "Well, you wouldn't pay attention to me any other way...."
Lily gasped in outrage. "HOW DARE YOU?" she trumpeted in a voice that probably reverberated throughout the whole castle.
Up in the boy's dorm, Sirius grinned as he stared up at his canopy. "Ah, well, there she goes. Moony, I'll bet you a case of Chocolate Frogs that he spends the night in the hospital wing."
"I'd say more like a week, given the sound of things," the werewolf replied, cocking his head slightly. "I've never heard her sound this mad, not even when James replaced her Boomslang skin with potato peels that one time when we were in the second year, remember?
Sirius grinned at the memory. Indeed he did. Lily was, and always had been, amazingly talented at potions. Without a shadow of a doubt, or even any real effort, she left the rest of her class in the dust, even Snape. Maybe this accounted for the reason that he had never liked her that much. In any case, she had always managed to do everything so amazingly well that every once in a while Slughorn, even as early on as their second year, had put her to more complicated projects, as he had the rest of his class work on the normal sort of things. And it had been James's idea to replace one of her ingredients one day, and then watch her go half insane trying to figure out what she had done wrong and why nothing was working. And it really had been beautiful, like a work of art, to watch her in potions that day.
Of course, when she had accidentally found out a few weeks later, her wrath had also been exquisite, and after James had finally recovered, he had to serve detentions with Slughorn for most of the rest of the year. Slughorn liked Lily Evans--she was one of his favorites, for all that he always claimed not to have any.
"Lily," they heard James laugh downstairs, and then there was the reverberating sound of a slap, followed by what sounded not so much like a spell, but rather an avalanche of spells shrieked at the top of her lungs, and then thundering steps up the staircase.
"Well, come on, we'd better get him to the hospital wing," Remus sighed. Sirius was actually all for leaving him out there for a while longer, and Peter rather shared that opinion, but Remus wouldn't allow it. ("Just think how you would feel!") and so the threesome trooped down into the common room. Once they got there, it took a little while just to completely confirm that the thing they were looking at actually was James. Sirius actually collapsed with a fit of the giggles before they were done, while Remus did most of the work (but then what else was new?) and Peter just stood to the side looking faintly queasy.
"Well, um, James, you can't say I didn't warn you," Remus said finally, and even he sounded like he couldn't decide whether to be mildly amused or bemused.
"I didn't know that she could do this!" James said mournfully in a voice that sounded nothing like his normal tones.
There was a pause of a few minutes awkward silence filled only by Sirius's last gasps of mirth (the thing that was James shot him a baleful look) before Remus finally sighed heavily. "Ok then, let's get you to the hospital wing.... Wormtail-me and Padfoot can get him there if you want to finish that essay."
"I guess."
So, as Peter went back up the stairs to collect his ink, quill and parchment, Sirius and Remus carefully gathered up James and set off for the hospital wing.
At the same time, upstairs in the girls' dorm, a throughly enraged Lily Evans was pacing back and forth, her face as red as her hair-though with fury this time, not embarrassment-and gesturing wildly as she ranted. "Arrogant, lousy, unsufferable prat! Detestable, vain, big-headed, chauvinistic male pig! HORRIBLE little inhuman thing! He's so full of it, his eye's should be brown! Cold, INFURIATING absolutely deplorable little-"Here she broke off into something that sounded remarkably like quite a lot of swearing in something that could have been Spanish, French, or Italian; no one was ever sure which.
Anyway, this sort of thing went of for about half an hour-Lily cursing the air around someone blue, and in more then one language. Finally, when she seemed to be content for the moment just to stand fuming, a rather shy girl named Emily Schidehs asked timidly, "Umm, Lil? Who are you talking about?"
"Who am I talking about? Who am I talking about? I'LL TELL YOU WHO I'M TALKING ABOUT! JAMES DAVID POTTER!" Lily Evans looked truly terrifying at that moment. Her hair felt to her almost like a giant birds' nest, and her emerald-green eyes put one in mind of lasers more then anything else.
A bold girl named Violet spoke next. "What do you mean, Lily? After all, you sure were acting like you liked him all today...." And, though she had started off confident, her voice dribbled off pathetically as Lily turned her fiery gaze to glare daggers at her instead.
"Yes, well, I suppose that I was acting that way today. But do you know why? Do you know what that miserable little worm DID? LOVE POTION, THAT'S WHAT HE DID!!!"
There was a moment of shocked silence while this little revelation seemed to sink in, and then everything exploded. It was a bit like watching a volcano erupting-not one of the nice, calm little eruptions that is little but lava spilling out, but one that actually blows the top off of a mountain. On a slightly smaller scale, you can get the same effect by shaking an unopened bottle of soda for roughly half an hour, and then throwing a small grenade at it.
Yea, boom.
The point is, the world momentarily became one great jumbled mess of every girl in the dorm gasping in a horrified manner, or shrieking in indignation and outrage, or muttering various oaths against James Potter, as well as any friends and close relations that they could get their hands on. Many of the girls were all for marching up to the boys' dorm and doing various things to James after dragging him down to the common room, the nicest of which was turning him into a mouse and then setting him loose in a house full of cats, knezles, and various cross-breeds.
However, to everyone's surprise, it was Lily who halted their plans. When everyone demanded in one voice why she wouldn't let them go and make him pay by teaching him a lesson that (even with a boy's capacity for short-term memory) he would not soon forget, Lily had only smiled in a self-satisfied and slightly evil way. And then she had told them that she had taken care of it.
Seeing her grin, slow smiles began to spread across all of the other girls' faces as well. Lily, after all, was a prefect. She was also the top of her class, a sure pick for Head Girl next year, and had one of the most impressive collection of curses, hexes, and jinxes in the school.
If she said so, then James had gotten it good.
He was going to have an interesting time of it for the next few days too-Lily usually put a barb in the tail end of all of her spells that made them exceptionally hard to break. Her professors loved her for it-it was one of those reasons that her getting the Head Girl spot next year was practically guaranteed-but they rather doubted that James would admire her prowess nearly so much.
James, meanwhile, certainly was having an interesting (if somewhat worrisome) time of it. Both Madam Pomfery (the young and certainly pretty new assistant nurse) and Madam Thidy (who was the much older Head Nurse, and not nearly so easy on the eyes) were standing over his hospital bed, looking down at him somewhat bemusedly.
"And this really is James Potter?" Pomfery finally asked, slightly disbelievingly.
"Yes, I am!" croaked what once had been James, and both nurses jumped.
"Ah, you can speak? That makes things... marginally easier. Now, do you know what you were hit with?"
James sat for a moment in contemplation, as he tried to recall it all. "Just about everything, I think," he finally said.
Thidy sighed.
"I don't know if I've ever seen this particular effect before...." puzzled Pomfery. "Is it new?"
"The spells seem to have mixed with some... interesting results. James, I'm sorry, but you're going to be here for a while. Who was it, anyway?"
"I didn't see."
"Not at all?"
"No, Madam Thidy. I'm sorry."
The head nurse merely gave him a somewhat scrutinizing look before sighing and turning back. "Right, well, as this will take some time, we might as well get started. Come on, we need to start unpicking this mess...." Both nurses acquired an intense look of concentration, and finally one said, "Isn't that the Jelly Legs Jinx?"
"I think so, let's try the countercharm...."
* * * * * *
And so ends Chapter Two! Did you like it as much as Chapter One? James (btw) is probably going to be able to begin atoning for his... folly with refusing to tell. Lily would have cheerfully served detention for what she did, and not getting into trouble (and finding out that him not telling was the reason) is going to intrigue her, methinks.
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