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Magical, Talking Stags


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.

He was grinning at her. “Yeah? What were you doing then?”

“Chasing after it through the woods,” she answered. “Can’t you bloody read? It plainly says that.”

James shrugged, “Chasing - snogging - same difference really, isn’t it?”

Lily glared at him.

James sighed, “Okay, c’mon, let me have it back, I won’t make fun anymore. Promise.” Lily reluctantly handed the parchment back to him, her jaw set and her mouth puckered with distrust. “Easy, Evans,” James said with that floppy, stupid grin of his that so made her blood boil.

Lily turned back to the messy handwriting on the sheets before her. “At least one of us was being honest about what they dreamed this week,” she said pointedly.

James smirked, “Was it that obvious?”

Lily glared at him.

James looked down at the parchment before him. She’d so obviously been honest about her dreams that he felt sort of bad for not being honest with his. So he scooted his cushion in closer. “Hey, so you want a real one to analyze, then?” he asked.

“That would be nice,” she said, her voice hard.

He licked his lips. “Okay, well… The other day, I dreamed I was walking ‘round in the woods and I was a stag --”

Lily’s face got very hot. “Stop making fun of me. It isn’t funny.”

Of course that time he hadn’t been, he’d been telling the truth, but her voice and her outraged little face was just too much to keep him from grinning and she made a very frustrated sound and threw down her quill. “Why are you such a beast?” she demanded, “Please - just… Tell. Me. A. Real. Dream.”

“Alriiiight,” James drawled, deciding he’d just leave out some of the details and try again. “I was in the woods -- for real Evans, that’s how it starts! -- and it was outback my family’s place and there was smoke all about, and I heard my dad calling and Moldy Voldey’s laughter, like from first year, remember?”

Lily nodded slow, very suddenly stunned into silence and staring at him in surprise that he really was being serious. “I still hear it sometimes in my sleep.”

James nodded back, “it’s haunting, isn’t it? ...And anyway, I woke up in a panic trying to find my dad, but the smoke was too thick and I couldn’t help him.” James shrugged. “I freaked out so much I fell out of bed and broke my glasses and everything. Remus had to mend them for me.”

Lily was quiet, “Well, its not very hard to analyze that one. You’re afraid for your dad.”

James nodded. “Yeah. Isn’t everybody about now?”

“Yeah,” Lily replied, “I suppose so.”

They were quiet a few moments, Lily contemplating what it meant that James was carrying around the weight of worrying about his parents as much as he was, and James feeling odd that he was being so transparent with Evans. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore - it just felt too strange, the way she wasn’t being mean to him - it just wasn’t like her - so he said, “Anyways, about these dreams where you’re snogging the stag…”

Lily’s brows dipped into a frown. “I’m not snogging the stag... we have… long talks.”

“So it’s a magical, talking stag?” James asked, raising one brow and pretending to take notes, “Uh huh, right. And how many bottles of butterbeer have you typically consumed prior to having these conversations with the magical, talking stag?”

“It’s a dream, you git,” she said, “Anything can talk in a dream.”

“Hang on, do odd things frequently talk to you in your dreams?” James asked, “Do you talk to lamps? Couches? Birds? What about potatoes?”

Lily stared at him. “I didn’t make fun of your dream,” she pointed out.

James said, “I’m not making fun of your dream, just of the talking stag.”

“Who came from my dream.”

“So what does this magical, talking stag say to you?” James asked, looking down at the parchment. There wasn’t any dialogue in her description of the dream. He looked back up.

Lily shrugged.

“What’s he say, Evans?”

“It’s private what he says, alright?” Lily said.

James grinned, “That’s ‘cos all he says is Lily kiss me, kiss me Lily!” He puckered up his lips and make kissy sounds at her.

Lily shoved him away, “Ugh,” she groaned, “Stop that, you’re repulsive.”

“You’re blushing, Evans,” James said, that one smirk inching its way onto his face, the little corner of his lip catching on the tooth on the left side of his mouth… hitching it up… Lily swallowed back the little nervous twinge that one smirk gave her. She hated that smirk.

“I’m not blushing,” she said, though she could feel it on her neck that she was.

“I’ll snog with you Evans if you like,” he said lowly.

“I’d sooner snog with the stag,” Lily said.

James’s eyes twinkled. “C’mon, Evans. Give me a try. One date, Love, that’s all it’ll take.”

“Never.”

James laughed, “Alright, Evans.” He leaned back and looked at the parchment again, biting his quill. “So to analyze your dream, I think you talking to a stag in the woods means you don’t have anyone else to talk to about whatever it is you talk to the beast about.”

Lily looked up at him, surprised by the sudden serious tone once again. “Possibly,” she admitted.

“What do you think the stag means?” he asked, genuinely interested in what her opinions on the creatures represented.

Lily thought for a moment, running her palms over the pages of her textbook. “I suppose stags are strong, but not in an obvious way. Like they aren’t weak in the muscles department but it’s not particularly what they’re known for, you know? They’re brave, though, and their strength is more in how they protect others. A stag will fight to the death to save its kin from harm if it needs to… but they’re generally gentle. They’re sort of… dunno, they’re majestic. They’re beautiful, you know? It’s like Bambi… he was the Prince of the Forest.”

“Come again?” James looked confused.

“Bambi? The film?” Lily asked, but James’s face was still confused. “It’s a movie from Disney?” James shook his head. “How have you never heard of Disney?” Lily asked. “You wizards, you think you know everything, but blimey! Disney, James. Bambi!”

“Saying it again won’t make me know it, Evans,” he pointed out. “What’s it about? I assume a deer who was, apparently, a prince.”

“Yeah, he was born a prince of the forest and his dad’s a stag…” Lily shrugged, “I dunno. You should see it sometime. You’d like Disney films if you saw some of them, I reckon.”

James nodded, “I’ll have to see one sometime. Maybe you could go with me.”

“I’m not dating you, Potter,” Lily said.

James laughed, “You can’t blame me for trying.”




Sirius checked the clock. It was nearly five o’clock in the evening and Remus was still not back from the Shrieking Shack. He tossed A Joker’s Spellbook aside and sat up in his bed, looking ‘round at Peter and James, “Remus is always back by now,” he said. “Do you reckon something’s wrong?”

James looked up at the clock, too. “Blimey, he is late,” he agreed, his brow furrowing with concern.

Sirius got up, “I didn’t like the way he looked before he left yesterday. He was peakier than usual. Did you notice? Those dark rings under his eyes?”

“He said it was a bad moon,” Peter pointed out.

“Yeah, but -- dunno, I got a funny feeling. We should go check on him.”

Peter’s eyes widened, “I’m not going out to the Shrieking Shack to face an angry werewolf! He might not be changed back yet! He’ll come back when he’s finished.”

Sirius said, “Unless he can’t for some reason.”

“Dumbledore knows where he is,” Peter pointed out, “Let him deal with it.”

James was getting up, too, “Dumbledore’s busy, Peter, he might not notice that Remus is gone at all. But Sirius, I think Peter’s a little right, too. We should tell Dumbledore and let him check on Remus. Just incase.”

Sirius didn’t really want to add the extra time of finding Dumbledore before going to check on Remus out there in the Shack, but he relented and Peter got up from the floor and the three of them headed out of the dormitories and through the portrait hole. They made their way through the castle until they’d gotten to the fifth floor corridor where Dumbledore’s office door stood, staring up at the giant gargoyles that blocked the entrance. None of them knew the password, though, and they stood there, shouting different kinds of candy at it, desperate to make it budge, but the gargoyle simply stood sentinel, staring with stone eyes straight ahead.

James was kicking the gargoyle when McGonagall came ‘round the corner of the hallway. “What in the name of Merlin do you think you are doing, Mr. Potter?” she trilled, “That gargoyle is several centuries old!” She caught his shoulder and stopped him kicking, then looked between the three of them.

“We need to see Dumbledore,” Sirius said, “But this bloke won’t take any of the passwords…”

“Dumbledore isn’t here at the present, he has stepped away from the school to take care of some business that needed attending to,” she said, looking them each in turn as they looked at one another with highly concerned faces. “What do you need Professor Dumbledore for?”

James looked up at McGonagall. “We’re… we’re worried about Remus…” he said slowly, biting his lower lip.

Something glinted in McGonagall’s eyes and the moment it did - James knew she knew. He looked at Sirius and Peter, and he could tell by the expressions on their faces that they both had seen it, too. James lowered his voice, “Professor, he hasn’t come back from the Shrieking Shack yet.”

McGonagall looked a bit shocked that they knew, and she nodded. “Alright. Go to your common room. I will see to Remus. Go on.”

“Yes, Professor,” James nodded and the three of them hurried away, back to Gryffindor Tower.