The Marauders: Year Three | #Wattys2016

Magical, Talking Stag

Magical, Talking Stag

The next morning was Divination. James waited patiently on his cushion for Lily to stop dawdling by the door with Marlene McKinnon and Emmaline Vance - a ploy, he knew, to minimize the amount of time she'd have to spend alone with him at the table. He grinned at her from his seat, letting her know he was onto her, waiting for her to come over. She frowned and turned away. But when Professor Vablatsky called them all to their seats, there was no further putting it off and Lily reluctantly crossed the dark classroom to the table where James sat waiting for her.

"Morning, Love," he said, smiling.

Lily grit her teeth and opened her textbook, her hair falling over her shoulder to block him out of her view.

"Today, class, we begin analyzing dreams," Vablatsky said in a shivery voice. "We'll be dedicating a good portion of the term to dreams and their meanings before returning to the study of the tea leaves later in the year. I hope you've all had a good deal of dreams this week that you've recorded in your dream journals?" A good deal of the class murmured their assent. "Very good! You shall now trade journals and you'll each work on analyzing your partners' dreams and writing a detailed Dream Analysis based on your findings, which you'll hand in at the end of class!" Severus Snape had his hand in the air. "Yes, Severus?" Vablatsky called.

"My partner isn't here," he said.

Lily turned around and saw Severus's desk empty except for himself and she looked at James. "Is Remus feeling moony?" she hissed. James nodded. Lily frowned in concern.

"I have some sample dreams you can interpret for today," Professor Vablatsky replied, smiling, and she swept to her desk to withdraw the sample dreams.

James held out his parchment to Lily. "Here's my dreams, Evans," he said, a grin spreading across his face as she held out her own parchment. "Am I in these?" he asked.

"Not even once," Lily replied, taking his.

"You're in mine," he said thickly.

Lily said, "Just... get to work, Potter." She unfurled the parchment and stared down at the messy wreck that was James's horrid handwriting. "Were you being electrocuted while you wrote this, then?" she asked, looking up at him.

"What? No?" James asked, confused, "What?"

"Your handwriting is atrocious," Lily complained. "You need a proper penmanship class."

James ignored the comments and unrolled Lily's parchment across his lap. She had very neat handwriting, easy to read, with little circles instead of dots over her lower-case i's. James liked the little circles - they made him smile.

Lily struggled through the sentences James had scribbled down. She frowned as she waded through the swampy mish-mosh of dung that James had handed her. It was very clear that the dreams he'd written down were fakes - things he had manufactured rather than dreamed. Lily looked up at him, "You can't possibly truly be this full of yourself?" she demanded.

James looked up from the parchment. He had a sort of bewildered look on his face. "Huh?" he asked, confused.

"You didn't really dream about snogging me," she snapped.

"You didn't really dream about snogging a stag," James quipped.

Lily snapped her parchment out of his hands. "I wasn't snogging a stag," she said, her face heating up. She'd written down one of her dreams about chasing after a stag through the forest. She didn't know why - she'd done it against her better judgement, but it had been the only dream she'd had that night and she'd wanted to stay honest with her journal. She wished deeply that she'd been able to stay paired with Marlene or somebody else - anybody else but James Potter.