The Path of Indiscretion by ficexchange

Merry Christmas, Juli (Musetta)!

The Path of Indiscretion

The weather outside was decidedly un-Christmas-y.

Perhaps it came as a result of the fact that the big day had already come and gone. Hogwarts was in that limbo between Christmas and the New Year where the end of the holidays was growing on the horizon and people didn't quite know what to do with themselves.

A surprising number of seventh years had decided to stay at Hogwarts for the Christmas holidays, but James supposed that was always the way things went. After six years at the same school, students always stumbled upon a new appreciation for the castle, their classmates, and the kitchens in their final year.

The Marauders were currently making as much use of the kitchens as possible, since their access to them would be terminated next year. Among their numerous projects that were filing up the hours of freedom from lessons was the drawing up of plans for the retrieval of a confiscated map, the organisation of tournaments in the noble arts of gobstones, chess and exploding snap, and the completion of holiday homework (listed in order of importance).

They had a system whereby the loser of these tournaments or he who suggested making a start on this holiday homework was usually dispatched as punishment out of the fire's sphere of warmth into the drafty corridors of the castle towards the kitchens. The combination of idleness and the knowledge that they could be doing more useful things with their time made them strangely peckish.

So, as a result of losing spectacularly to Sirius at exploding snap, even after pleading two out of three, James was betrayed by his own rules and had no choice but to haul himself out of one of the best armchairs in the common room and begin his expedition.

'If you let anyone take this chair,' he had warned his friends, 'I will seek out all the presents you've just received and set them on fire.'

'Hurry back,' Remus told him pleasantly. 'I don't want my tea getting cold.'

As James made a fond farewell to the House Elves half an hour later, laden with canvas bags of pastries and flasks of juice and tea and chocolate, he was happy in the opinion that the kitchens were serving their worth very well. He had keenly tried a sample of their newest creation, a kind of golf ball sized puff made of white nougat and icing sugar. Obviously, it was only a minor issue that he seemed to have offended the elves by suggesting that a business opportunity might lie in offering their recipe to Honeydukes.

He almost dropped the lot when the painting of the bowl of fruit shut behind him and he found Lily Evans coming around the corner into the corridor. Strangely enough, she carried on walking as if there were nothing untoward about the Head Boy making an exit from the kitchens at four in the afternoon, doing something he clearly shouldn't be. In her arms were three or so hardback, dusty-looking books. Obviously, completing holiday homework was a bit higher up on her list of priorities than it was on his.

As she was about to pass him by, he decided to be mature about all this.

'Er, hello,' he said.

'I've reached a new level of peace with the things you do, Potter,' she told him, and didn't stop walking.

'What might that mean exactly?' he hurried to catch her up without spilling anything.

'It means... I don't care that I saw you stealing food from the kitchens. I'm going to go back to my dormitory, put my books away, and see what my friends feel like doing before dinner.'

'Would you say it technically counts as stealing if they were practically begging me to take it?'

'I don't even care enough to discuss the morality of it.'

Something about her mood threw him a little. It wasn't exactly playful, but it wasn't as cold as she usually acted towards him either. Perhaps it was something like rueful. In any case, she had never liked him very much and James was beginning to consider that maybe she never would. Still, the more they came into contact with one another, the stronger the tension in his heart became. It was getting harder and harder to push it into a place where he could ignore it.

'The reason it matters to me so much is that it would put a whole different consideration into my morals. If you count this as stealing, this would actually be the first case of theft that I've ever carried out.'

'Oh, I can't believe you've never stolen anything before.'

'Never. Borrowed without permission, yes, but always returned.'

He wished, in a sense, that he would at least make some shade of progress, even a little. Anything, however small and insignificant, would be better than this stagnant state of indifference she now held him in.

'I thought that was you breaking into Professor Slughorn's storeroom last week.'

'We were merely observers.'

'Why would anyone want to break in there?' Lily asked, but James recognised that she wasn't asking him so much as asking rhetorically. She had stopped walking for a moment and James had to think fast to prevent an accident involving hot tea.

'Well, You know what they say about Doxy eyes.'

'What do they say?'

'That if you ground them up and snort them...'

'...What?'

'Nothing. Forget I said anything.'

She was obliged to at that moment, because they were suddenly confronted with the sound feared by almost every student at Hogwarts, a dry kind of mewing from foot level. Sure enough, Mrs Norris had made her entrance, crying with cruel victory at he prospect of two students being deservedly punished for their wrongdoings.

Lily looked at the cat, then she looked at James and the 'stolen' food and James looked blankly back. Obviously she was in a predicament. Being seen with someone who was breaking the rules was not good press, especially for a Head Girl. Then again, the fact that she was carrying books and not pastries would work in her favour.

Three seconds ticked tensely past them.

'I'll say you had nothing to do with it,' James told her quickly. He barely had time to reflect that this might have been the most chivalric thing he had ever done, when Lily seemed to come to a hasty decision.

'Come on,' she ordered and hooked a wrist under his elbow to tug him away from the cat. James had to quickly introduce his sense of balance to his reflexes and, miraculously, nothing slopped onto the floor. As they began to run back down the way they had come, James saw Lily throw a glance over her shoulder and knew that they were still being followed.

'Where are we going?' he hissed through his hard breathing and the faint hue of excitement. He was, after all, running somewhere with someone he quite liked. Lily didn't answer, she only stumbled to a halt and turned her attention on a window in the wall beside them. It stood alone, between two monstrous tapestries, small panes of thick, warped glass between brittle veins of stone. Filch was still nowhere to be seen, but they could feel him approaching, like an occult presence, seeping out of the walls... or perhaps it was his doppelganger, five feet away, flicking her tail at them and hissing.

Lily wasted no time: she slung her books onto her hip and pulled her wand from her back pocket. James wasn't yet ready to believe what she was doing. She was aiming her wand squarely at the window and shouting 'Reducto! ', which was a distinctly un-Head Girl-ish thing to do, and James could not help but be thoroughly entertained when the glass smashed fantastically and the concrete crumbled and there, behind the window in the middle of nowhere, was a roughly carved out corridor.

The next moment, darkness was all around them and James twisted around, stunned, to watch the glass and concrete and rubble rearrange itself in to the window that they left shattered on the floor.

It wasn't that he was stunned that something like this could happen at Hogwarts. On the contrary, he and his friends had witnessed stranger things happen on an almost daily basis. The shocking thing was that he, James Potter, had been previously ignorant of the whereabouts of one of Hogwarts' secret passages. He had no idea whether to feel affronted or impressed. The good news was that he was completely at leisure to make this decision, seeing as he and Lily were now safely sealed off from any bad-tempered caretakers.

The light of the world outside was soaking in through the glass of the window for the five or so minutes that they stood there quietly, she with her books, and he with his ambiguously illicit sustenance.

'Where does this lead, then?' he asked, deciding at last to be both affronted and impressed. She glanced at him and then turned her eyes back to the front, as if the situation were all very weighty and dangerous.

'It comes out somewhere near the Owlery.'

'I can't believe I missed one,' James said to himself, and did not notice her smile.

'You know all of the ones that go out of the castle,' she told him, 'but you never looked anywhere more... domestic.' Even though she steadfastly kept her eyes averted from his, she enjoyed the feeling of his gaze on her in the secretive half-light.

Then he took everything in one hand, and touched her face, so she had to look at him when he kissed her, and made her drop her books.

It was a perfectly logical continuation of their conversation, at least in James's opinion.

She picked up her books and gave him an exasperated look, lighting her wand as she began to walk into the passage.

But she held it with the same arm as the one that was holding the books against her side, and put the other arm in his.

'Well, you're welcome,' she said.

By the time they got back, Remus's tea was cold, the pastries were squashed and the icing sugar had dusted off most of the fluffy snowballs of House Elf experimentation.

But there had been a shade of progress, a first step. James wouldn't have thought it would be down Lily's path of indiscretion, but it was a first step nonetheless.