Chapter Text
Seventh year - 1977 October
Being Head Girl was hard! If you took it seriously, that is, which Lily Evans surely did. The same couldn’t be said for this year’s Head Boy though. No, James Potter was happy to offload most of the responsibilities on his redheaded partner in favour of just watching the beautiful girl as she mulled over next week’s prefect duty assignments at her desk with the end of her quill in her mouth, lightly nibbled by those full, pink lips. It really was a true sign of just how hard she was concentrating on the problem at hand. Had she been aware of what this scene was doing to James, she wouldn’t have been able to keep that concentration up much longer, out of sheer embarrassment.
Alright, that wasn’t the whole truth. Potter wasn’t slacking off all the time. It’s just that the administrative tasks weren’t exactly his strong suit. When it actually came to coordinating the prefects in live situations and making decisions regarding issues they brought forth on the spot, those were the times James shone. Skills he had plenty of time to learn as Quidditch Captain. Most people looked up to him for leadership, and he was good at giving them direction. Even if he was a big goof at times (less so now than a few years ago).
Lily was the one who handled the processes in the background that made it all possible, and the person the students came to if they had personal issues or concerns. People – well most of them, those who weren’t hopped on the whole pure-blood supremacy nonsense – listened to her too, but she wasn’t the motivational speech kind of girl, if you know what I mean, at least not in front of crowds. More like a mother figure or a personal counsellor, giving advice in one-on-one situations.
In all honesty, they made a pretty good team, their strengths and flaws complementing each other. That wasn’t to say Lily didn’t hate evenings like this when she was stuck figuring out patrol timetables that seemed like endless equations with like a hundred variables while Potter got to doss around. Hadn’t she been muggle-born, this task would have been even harder – nigh impossible to do without basic calculus education, which most of the Wizarding World didn’t have. What was he still doing here anyway? When he could just go off with the Marauders to do whatever they did?
It was distracting. He was distracting with that dark mop of unruly, seemingly untameable hair, sitting in that chair backwards with no care in the world. And his eyes. Those hazel-coloured, puppy-dog eyes that were trained on her even at this very second from behind the rim of his glasses? Or that smirk he always had on his face when he was so sure of himself?
Get a hold of yourself, Evans, she sighed inwardly, shaking off the image. Keeping her thoughts on track was hard enough on an average day ever since the beginning of this term, but her defences were lower now than ever, what with being under the weather and all. In any case, she had vowed not to give in to Potter years ago, no matter how hard he tried, why would she start now? Maybe that was the root of the problem actually. He wasn’t blatantly flaunting his affections for her anymore, hadn’t for about a year or so, which with them being so confined to each other’s company most of the day was more evident than ever. It was driving her nuts.
Lily set her quill down, rubbing her temples, trying to get rid of a sinus headache that had started to bloom about an hour earlier. She was almost certain that by the next day she would be in for a nasty cold. But before that, she had to finish this stupid patrol schedule because sure as bloody hell no one else would.
“You alright there, Evans?” Potter asked her with concern written all over his face.
Of course, he noticed. And moments like these kept the hope up in Lily’s heart that he still cared. Though why she hoped she didn’t know. It’s not like all their differences had suddenly disappeared. And she still had the resolution that she had made.
“Just a headache,” she assured him with a small smile. On some deep inner level, she didn’t really want to worry him, but maybe full honesty would have been better so the next day wouldn’t catch him unprepared. Even if she managed to finish this ruddy spreadsheet, Potter would have to conduct the prefect meeting all by himself. Something he had never done before.
James scowled at her, reluctant to accept that statement as the whole truth and watched the redhead for a couple more seconds before deciding that an intervention was needed.
“Why don’t you head back to the dorms to get some sleep while I finish that?” the Head Boy offered, taking Lily completely by surprise.
She knew that the thought was what ought to count. The gesture was sweet for sure, but the fact that she knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t actually get done sent her to the end of her already short rope.
“Do you even know what this is?” the redheaded witch challenged him with arms crossed, leaning back in her chair.
“Uhm… something for tomorrow’s prefect meeting, right? I’ll figure it out,” James shrugged nonchalantly. How hard could it be?
“So you can arrange the schedule of twenty-five people into seven two-hour hallway patrol shifts a day, seven times a week, by pairs of two in a way that doesn’t conflict with any of their class schedules or other responsibilities like Quidditch practice, while making sure that no one has more than five shifts a week, and balancing it out that if they took five shifts the previous week they only do four in this one, preferably with only one shift a day so that they always have enough time for homework?” Lily rattled off the parameters of her problem, getting a little out of breath by the end.
“I’ll… get Remus to help?” he allowed in a small voice, realising that indeed it was definitely beyond his capabilities by the sound of it. Lupin had been a prefect since year five, so at least he knew the drill, unlike James who was appointed as Head Boy without any forewarning. He had been just as surprised as everyone else. One month into the job he was still trying to learn the ropes.
“Just forget it,” she sighed in disappointment, turning back to the parchment where maybe about half of the timeslots had been filled with names. And then she hadn’t even mentioned contingency plans, having stand-by pairs for occasions when something unexpected happened, like illness or detention.
Speaking of which, she needed to let Eckles or Briggs know to step in for her tomorrow. Even with Pepper-up, she would be out of commission for at least 24 hours. And although common sense – and last year’s hard-learned lesson – would have dictated going down to Madam Pomfrey right this minute for her dose to prevent this from spiralling out of control, Lily still hadn’t gotten over her medicine aversion. The Infirmary could wait until the morning. After the prefect meeting.
“Or you could still finish it tomorrow? The meeting is not till 10 AM,” Potter tried to get Lily to rest again.
Lily made a face. She wanted to sleep in. Finishing this would take at least another two hours, and that would mean getting up at like 6 AM if she wanted to get breakfast in before the meeting too.
“Not an option,” she quipped a second later, without even looking up from her papers.
Where was she? Right, next Saturday’s roster. The weekends were easier in a sense, with only practices and extracurricular activities to account for. And harder because everyone would have preferred to have free time. Who could take the early afternoon shift? Potter and Bailey, the new fifth-year Gryffindor prefect, were out, due to Quidditch practice. Maybe Remus? He was only assigned to three earlier slots in the week. But he wanted to go down and watch, as he often did, and she tried to accommodate that as much as she could, even if that wasn’t strictly necessary…
As she was sifting through the list of available prefects, her train of thought was interrupted by an annoying itch that had made itself known in the back of her nose, making it twitch irritatedly.
“Bless you,” James said, and Lily looked up confusedly.
“Why bless hhi… me… hiiih…heh’ktshuuu …” she sneezed into the crook of her arm, completely taken aback. Where did that come from?
“That’s why,” he smirked at her triumphantly, setting his head down on his arms on the back of his chair. It seemed he knew her body better than she did. Lily glared at him in annoyance.
“If you can’t help, at least don’t distract me,” Lily huffed with a small sniffle.
“Who said I can’t help? Let’s do this together,” James hopped up, grabbing his chair to bring over and settle down by the redhead’s side.
He just now noticed what all those papers on her desk were made up of. Twenty-five parchments, each with a name and their schedule, marking the open slots when they were free for prefect duty. He noticed that there were different colour markings on them, some red, noting that they absolutely couldn’t take those, reserved for official obligations, then there were the yellows, which weren’t preferred by the particular prefect but would take them if all else failed. Potter remembered Lily asking him to give a similar timetable, and now he knew what it was used for.
“Hey… uhm… were personal preferences always taken into account?” Potter frowned at the papers, awed at the same time by the job Evans took on every week by trying to figure out something that worked for everyone.
“What?” Lily squinted at him perplexedly before catching his line of sight. “Oh, the yellows. No, I came up with that.”
“Aren’t you just making your job harder?” the Quidditch Captain raised a brow. His leadership on the sports field was more of an authoritarian approach, whereas Lily was trying to run a democracy here. Bordering on anarchy.
“Yeah, I didn’t really realise in the summer when I first thought of the idea how much it would complicate the process, and the prefects got so enthused that I don’t have the heart to tell them that I wouldn’t take this into account anymore. Naturally, at a lot of times, I can’t work around it, and they do have to take a shift in the yellow slots, but more often than not it has worked out. So far,” the redhead rubbed her tired eyes, which screamed for sleep. Next week’s timetable didn’t want to add up at all. Three prefects handed in modifications to their preferences and that had thrown the whole previous system out the window.
“Then don’t do it, just tell them to suck it up and do their job,” James advised her, getting more worried by the minute that Lily would fall off her chair if she tried to keep this bravado up much longer. Obviously, she was exhausted, overworking herself.
“I can’t back down now,” she firmly stated, getting back to the table, and trying to concentrate again.
“Lily…” he started, causing her to glance up because for once he had used her given name. “Yes, you can.”
“You really don’t understand, do you?” Evans muttered, in barely a whisper.
The things that people said behind her back, calling her mudblood, filthy, unworthy of wielding magic. It really didn’t bother her that much but it meant that she had to work that much harder to gain even the slightest bit of acceptance. Respect she didn’t even dream of from this particular crowd. She had a hard enough time reigning in the six Slytherin prefects as is, Potter having to back her up most of the time. If she went and took back the one change she made since becoming Head Girl that was welcomed with universal approval where would that leave her?
“What don’t I understand, Evans? That you are going to burn out in a matter of weeks if you keep this up?” he spat, a bit harsher than he initially intended.
Her last bit of patience evaporated as her frustration jumped to a whole new level. At the back of her mind, where her rational side resided, she knew he was just trying to look out for her, but at the forefront, all she could think about was indignant outrage as her fiery temper flared.
“Try being in my friggin’ shoes for one bloody day, and then you can lecture me about what is or isn’t necessary, Potter! Now get out so I can finish this pile of rubbish without getting interrupted every five seconds!” Lily yelled, pointing towards the door of their office.
James put his hands up as a sign of backing down, his mouth in a hard line of disapproval. He walked back briskly to his desk, grabbed his bag with an overly aggressive yank, and stalked out of the room without another word, thinking how wrong Evans was if she felt that he had it all easy.
All the fight had drained from her the moment the door slammed shut, and all she was left with was a hoarse throat and a full-blown headache. Not to mention a pang of heartbreak. Well done, Evans… you managed to drive away the one person who you wished would stay forever... isn't that just peachy?
With a small cough, she sat back down and aimed her attention at the half-done schedule in front of her.
By the time she finished, it was midnight, and she didn’t even have the strength to stand up, let alone walk back to the Gryffindor Tower. Telling herself that she was only going to lay her head down for five minutes to gather some energy, she set her throbbing forehead against her arms.
And of course, she fell asleep, right as the grandfather clock in the corner struck twelve.
Lily woke to the sound of an alarm clock the next morning. In bed. What? How did she get here? The next thing she noticed was that she was feeling absolutely fine. No headache, no stuffed-up nose, no nothing. Which was confusing because she was confident that she was starting to get a fever last night.
And then there was the smell. The room didn’t smell like the room she shared with Marlene, Betty and Carla. More… musky… with a hint of sweat and dirty laundry… And then the realisation hit her. Must be the boy’s dorm. She shot up in the bed with a new flare of annoyance.
“Son of a …” she cursed under her breath, expecting to see Potter by her side with a wicked grin, but she was all alone in bed, curtains closed, and her voice sounded off. Too deep to be her own.
“What was that, Prongs?” Sirius called out to… apparently her... from the bathroom.
Lily glanced down at her body and hands, only now realising how blurry everything was. Like she was in need of glasses. The usually redhead paled as the full extent of her predicament dawned on her. Somehow she ended up in Potter’s body.
But if she was here…
James was shivering like crazy. That was actually what brought him back from dreamland. Not that seemed to be a pleasant place to be anyway, he must have been having a nightmare or something. Then he noticed the hard surface under his face, the scratchy throat, the stuffed-up nose, the aching back – scratch that, the aching everything – and moaned pitifully.
Great… Evans managed to pass on her cold… he thought foggily. And they had Quidditch tryouts in the afternoon. Ugh.
Wait a minute… he paused as his mind caught up with the details. He distinctly remembered going to bed in the Gryffindor dorms. In his own bed. What was he doing bent over a table?
James opened his eyes, only to be met with a bunch of long red hair in his face, kind of tickling his sensitive skin. With an annoyed grunt, he tried to push Lily away gently from his personal space, only to meet no resistance, just air.
His head snapped up, causing him to almost fall out of the chair with a dizzy spell, the locks of red hair following the movement.
What the…? he looked down, finding protrusions on his chest under his clothing that could only be constituted as boobs, and further down he was definitely sporting a skirt.
For all intents and purposes, it seemed like he was in Lily’s body.
But if he was here…
“Prongs?” Sirius’s slightly worried voice came from the other side of the curtain when the presumed James didn’t respond for a while.
Lily couldn’t decide if she should tell Black about the body switch or keep it a secret, not knowing if Potter would want the Marauders to see – or just know about – him in a female body.
She contemplated too long, and the bed curtains were suddenly yanked open by Sirius, clad in just a towel, toothbrush sticking out from his mouth. Her initial reaction was to cover her eyes, but she couldn’t help but notice the slender, well-muscled physique of the teenage boy. Those abs… No wonder Marlene couldn’t shut up about them for weeks, even after their mutual split last year.
“For the love of Merlin, put some bloody clothes on, Black!” she shrieked in a very unmanly fashion, covering her eyes, and causing Padfoot’s eyebrows to disappear behind his dark bangs.
“What’s the matter with you Jamesie? It’s not like you haven’t seen my willy before,” he teased playfully, wiggling his hips side to side as if tempting fate for that towel to fall right off.
“Naked men are not my first choice so early in the morning,” Lily muttered, peeking out between her fingers, strictly at his face, knowing that the behaviour she was displaying was probably very out of character for James, but she just could not make herself care. Let that cocky bastard deal with the fallout.
“You’re onto something there, mate. A hoard of naked, willing women is much more preferable,” Sirius winked at her then strutted back into the bathroom to finish his business, much to Lily’s relief.
Taking advantage of the fact that the other two boys seemed to be out at the moment, she hopped out of bed to look for something to put on. Not the best move in the book. The body she had to navigate now was bigger than she was used to, with long gangly teenage boy limbs and she unceremoniously fell into a heap on the floor on her first try.
Lily pulled herself up by grabbing the top of James’s trunk, where she came eye to eye with a huge parchment, folded upon itself in multiple layers. On its front, the following message could be read among the depictions of the Hogwarts castle:
Messrs
MOONY, WORMTAIL,
PADFOOT & PRONGS
are proud to present
The
MARAUDER’S
MAP
Lily knew that the boys referred to themselves as the Marauders, and Sirius had just called her Prongs while she was in James’s body, so that was one name deciphered. She could guess that Moony had to be Remus, being a werewolf and all, but had no idea which one was Peter or Sirius between the other two nicknames. And a map? Of what? What had they made?
Curiosity winning over she started to open the parchment when the door to the dorm burst open, making her jump in fright as Lupin and Pettigrew filed in, probably returning from breakfast. Those two were always the early risers of the bunch.
“Let me guess. Lily?” Remus inquired with a slight disapproving shake of his head as he observed James hunched over the Marauder’s Map.
“Uhm… what?” Lily’s heart stammered in her chest frantically, thinking that she had already been found out. I mean Remus was a werewolf, maybe he had the ability to sniff out the difference in scent or something?
“Relax, I’m not judging. Though she would be furious if she knew that you spied on her with that map. Again, ” he tutted, knowing his fellow redheaded prefect all too well. “By the way, last night I think you left it open, you should know to be more careful than that even in the dorms.”
Lily just nodded mutely, utterly clueless as to how she was supposed to respond to information like that. Apparently, this piece of parchment somehow allowed James to “spy” on her, and – if the tin could be trusted – was made by these four themselves. On the one hand, she was impressed because that had to be one hell of a charm to pull off, on the other hand, she was horrified to her core. The ways this could be misused were endless. Especially in the times they were living. And what about leaving it open? It had been folded on itself.
With a shaky hand, she turned back to the map and opened up its folds. A two-dimensional version of the whole castle was unveiled before her. Several seconds passed by before she even noticed the tiny dots scurrying about with name tags attached to them. Holy moly! The map showed the position of everyone within the walls of Hogwarts. At least one of her previous questions was answered.
“So? Where is she?” Moony prompted, brows furrowed a bit. James usually couldn’t shut up for two seconds, especially if Lily was the subject. He was way too quiet for the werewolf’s liking.
Lily almost blurted out that she was right there, seeing that the dot in the seventh year’s boys’ dorm in the Gryffindor announced so. Interesting. The map was not fooled by the body switch. She might just have to hang onto this until she could get to James and learn his stance on how to handle the situation. And give him a piece of her mind along the way.
Instead, she quickly darted her eyes to the prefect’s office, where she knew she had fallen asleep, and sure enough, there was a name tag for one James Potter.
“Prefect’s office,” she muttered out loud for Lupin’s benefit, sitting back on her heels.
How the hell did this happen? True, she had said some heated words to him before he left last night, but magic like that doesn’t happen accidentally. Not at their age anyway. Maybe something in the office got triggered by those words? She had to get back there to investigate.
“Already? Or did she sleep there? No wonder you were so worried about her running herself to the ground,” Remus commented crossing the room to take a look at it himself. Lily quickly closed the map up, grabbing it firmly with one hand, while pushing herself up with the other.
“Yeah, I better go check on hi… her,” she corrected herself quickly as she proceeded to stand up, only to wobble to the side, catching herself on the bedpost, Lupin reaching after her to steady her as well.
“Are you sure you are alright?” he looked at James’s face scrutinizingly as he righted his fellow Marauder up by the elbow.
“I… uhm, yeah, just numb legs, been sitting on the floor too long,” Lily stammered. So James had noticed how unwell she was last night. And he was worried about her, enough so to mention it to his buddies. Although there was not much they didn’t share with each other.
“Make sure Evans goes down to the Hospital Wing before the prefect meeting,” Sirius chose right that moment to stroll out of the bathroom again, now fully dressed, seemingly having caught the last few snippets of that conversation, glancing at Moony. “The full moon is in two days. I’d rather not repeat last year’s incident this time around.”
“Right,” the Head Girl agreed, guilt plaguing her as she remembered her role in getting the werewolf sick just before turning. “I’ll take care of it.”
Lily proceeded to head for the door, forgetting everything that she was supposed to do before discovering the Marauder’s Map. Lupin and Black shared a look. Something fishy was going on. James was not acting himself, and they both knew it. Sirius might be inclined to go out of the tower in sleepwear or in nothing at all just for the shock factor of it, and might even con or bet James into doing it, but Prongs would never willingly go meet Lily in pyjamas and make an embarrassment of himself.
“Might want to put on some pants for that, mate,” Padfoot reminded James in a sort of amused bewilderment.