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･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.
JAMES'S CRYPTIC PROPOSAL and Lydia's own muddled tipsy mind skews the night before into nothing but a disorienting blur.
She remembers most of it, of course - just not the exact details. She does remember Sirius rejecting her, and she does remember talking to James but even now on the very next day, Lydia struggles to wrap her head around the idea of James Potter helping her. After all, he did not give her much to work with which was partly the fault of Mary MacDonald, another Gryffindor friend of Lily's, who had drunkenly stumbled upon them and shrieked happily when she saw Lydia was at the party. But before she had been interrupted, Lydia had at least gotten the gist of what James had to offer her.
He could help her get Sirius's attention, if she helped him in return with something - the certain something of which was the cryptic part that he had failed to mention the night before.
Understandably so, Lydia is a bit wary. That, with the added factor that James Potter was an absolute idiot most of the times made her think that this was all just one practical joke on her.
"This is so difficult," Phoebe sighs jadedly.
She's stood in front of Lydia, wand in hand, as the pair and the rest of their peers in the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom attempt to perform what Lydia has come to learn as being quite possibly one of the most advanced pieces of magic she has ever learned. The wild ginger-haired Professor Rakepick had taught her lesson briefly on the Patronus charm before sending the group off into partners to practice the incantation. What made it even worse was that they had to learn how to conjure the spell properly before they had to perform it in front of the class non-verbally. As if it wasn't hard enough. At least Phoebe didn't have warrant for feeling any less insecure with her wand work as the rest of the class was quite clearly wallowing in their own stumped misery. All around them, quiet utterings of the charm were spoken and yet all a handful of students could muster was a shapeless cloud of mist forming at the ends of their wands before fading into disappointing nothingness.
"You can't give up now, Phoebs," Lydia says. "Maybe you're not thinking of the right thing."
"What could be happier than the memory of your first birthday?" Phoebe asks.
She doesn't miss the way in which Phoebe scowls, jabbing her wand in Lydia's face as if to threaten casting a jinx on her that Lydia knows well enough she will not cast. Phoebe slumps against the desk nearest her instead, half sitting on the smooth surface and crossing her arms over her chest. As soon as she does, wondrous murmurs and gasps of awe sound from around the room and earn the attention of both Phoebe and Lydia. The moment they look up, their eyes land on the spectacle at once. It is hard to miss anyway, for there, prancing about the room mystically is a blinding, radiant, silver animal, leaving wispy trails of silvery starlight in its wake looking akin to a swirling constellation. As Lydia gawks at the creature, she squints her eyes to grab a better look, and makes it out to be a stag, great mighty antlers swinging gracefully in every which way. It leaps up into the air and through the space between Phoebe and Lydia, bouncing off a nearby desk and into the air where it fades magnificently into a blinding ball of light. Cheering applause shortly breaks out amongst the group, and Professor Rakepike delightedly walks over to the sole person who had cast it.
