The Last Peverell

Chapter 14

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Chapter 14

About a month had passed and Jasmine's hunt for allies brought her to the library where she was doing the majority of her reading and scoping out for new political interests and allies. She had been having trouble concentrating back at the Tower. Her room was full of a crying Marlene, who had been cursed by a fellow house mate for being a dark witch for the third time this week. She took the insult hard and Lily had been trying to straighten her out all afternoon to no avail. The red head had been ice cold to Jasmine and wanted her nowhere near her crying friend. It wasn't like Jasmine was the one who had cursed her, but that didn't seem to matter to Lily Evans. She enjoyed making snide comments about her being around the Marauders all the time. Marlene had sworn to Merlin and back that the mischievous boys hadn't been behind the attack either, but Lily doubted her friend, making some side remark about an old crush on Sirius clouding her judgment.

To a certain extent, Jasmine was sure Lily was jealous. She might like to act like she hated James with a passion only her temper could surpass, but in the end, she was attracted to him, and his new slightly more "serious" persona.

Though, serious wasn't really the word Jasmine would use...since he still acted like an immature prat most of the time, playing small pranks, making jokes about wanking and just being a general school boy. The only difference in his demeanor was that he was taking his studies a little more seriously and wasn't targeting Severus nearly as much for their pranks. James was making an honest effort to stop bullying and it made a large impact on Lily's image of him and she wasn't taking it well.

Even Sirius was more focused on his school work this past month than he had been during the summer. Jasmine had caught both, James and Sirius, in the library. At first, she thought that they were going to play a prank, but when nothing happened she was sure they were attempting to hide something from Remus. When that didn't happen, she realized that they were working on revising some of their homework. It could be because they actually needed good grades this year. Or, the two of them had always just worked hard when no one was looking, which was also a very viable possibility.

This led to one of Jasmine's main dilemmas. She needed space away from her fellow Gryffindors. She enjoyed the chaos and the general noise, but sometimes she could understand why the hat had put her in Slytherin a few times. Their common room was rather subdued, comparatively to the tower. It wasn't full of studying students like Ravenclaw, but one could get their work done without worrying about it catching on fire or public fits of crying.

No matter the time period, the Gryffindor Common room was too loud to get anything done in. If it wasn't Fred and George, it was the Marauders causing mayhem. They had set a large number of fireworks off, triggered by the amount of times the name Potter was shouted by Evans.

Lily had caught them setting them up, so a lot of fireworks were going off as Marlene cried her eyes out in their room. One of them had nearly set her parchment on fire and that had only made things worse. The Marauders knew how to distract a room, that was for sure.

And, while Jasmine usually appreciated their antics, today was not one of them. Brightbark wanted a rather long essay and Jasmine had handed in flawless work all semester, it was driving the man mad. So, she wanted to keep him frustrated. He wanted to take points off of her work, and if she didn't write this paper perfectly, she knew he would.

Brightbark was sadly one of the best defense teachers she had ever seen enter Hogwarts halls. It was a shame that he was such a bigoted arse, otherwise she would have found his teaching style refreshing. The fifth-year class was really budding under his tutelage for the most part. He only taught light based spells, but defense tended to be light based regardless of bigotry. Brightbark just tended to take more points off students of darker magical decent if they couldn't get the spell work right the first time, which was infuriating and made her want to hex the pants off of him. Though, his need to see perfection from all of his students has created multiple study groups, so there was that. Lily was in charge of one of them, along with Marlene, Alice, a small Ravenclaw named Monica and a tall Hufflepuff chaser named Heather.