Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

James awaits the arrival of Sirius—who had returned home for a night to fetch his school things and arrived at King’s Cross with the full Black entourage—in their usual compartment at the end of the train, hands folded in his lap and knee jackhammer bouncing.

It’s a blessing that he hasn't to wait long; Sirius arrives with a flourish, new spiffing undercut flopping in his eyes, all easy grace as he steps around the glass door. James takes three seconds to make sure he has all ten fingers, both ears, and no visible lesions, then is immediately upon him with a hug gone blazingly tight with relief, an obnoxious kiss on the cheek, and a sandwich.

“Peanut butter is my favorite,” Sirius tells him.

James straightens Sirius’s collar and says, “I know.”

Sirius grins around a mouthful, mushy bread poking out around his teeth.

“You’re bloody disgusting,” Remus’s voice says from the entrance of the compartment.

James roars with utter joy and leaps to his feet, scooping Remus up and hugging him with such enthusiasm that his feet leave the ground.

“Alright,” Remus says, his startled laugh filling the compartment. “I missed you too, you great lump.”

James sets him down, then takes his shoulders in his hands and just beams at him for a moment.

“Oh, you tosser,” Remus says. He pats James’s cheek and smiles tiredly.

“You look good, mate,” James says. “How was the end of your summer? Did you get to rest up a bit? Here, give me that, I’ve got it.”

“It was alright,” Remus says, watching James hike his trunk into the luggage holder. “Quiet, of course, but I suppose that’s to be expected.”

“I’d say so, yeah,” James says, eyes growing soft.

Remus slugs him on the shoulder and then shoves him aside, saying, “Get over here already, Black, Merlin alive.”

Sirius, who is practically vibrating with excitement at this point, drops the parchment paper with the crusts to his sandwich, hops up, and tosses his arms round Remus’s narrow waist. Remus’s chest, at the center, near the drum-crash beat of his heart, is always warmer than his fingers. They’re all but frostbitten where they brush at Sirius’s neck. He looks better. It makes Sirius’s heart pound.

“You’ve grown spectacular sideburns,” Sirius says, roughing up Remus’s mop top.

“To match James’s,” Remus says, hand fisting in Sirius’s jacket, the both of them swaying. “His sideburns are the foundation of my vague understanding of fashion.”

“That explains a lot,” Sirius says, pulling back enough to meet Remus’s eyes. “James wouldn’t know fashion if it grabbed him by the neck and snogged him.”

“Imagine that,” Remus says, eyes flicking, for all of a heartbeat, to Sirius’s lips.

Sirius nearly faints. Truly, he should be dangled from the ceiling by his thumbs for this. He’d almost forgotten in the weeks since they’d last seen each other, with the great harrowing distraction which is summer: he’s embarrassingly devoted.

The compartment door smacks open. They snap apart.

“Oi, can someone help me with this?” Peter whines, trunk in one hand, knapsack over his shoulder, and a canvas tote practically dragging across the floor.

James leaps forward, hands out. “Hey, Pete,” he says, grinning, taking Peter’s enormous trunk and heaving it into the overhead storage. “How was your holiday?”

“Boring,” Peter says, tossing his tote and knapsack down. “I’ve brought snacks, though, so that’ll be good, won’t it?”

“Brilliant,” Sirius says, lightheaded like a Victorian dandy. Like one of those birds out of Evans’s romance books.

Merlin, Sirius really is one of them. Emma Woodhouse, perhaps, with his undeniable intelligence and talent and spiffing good looks. With all his charm. With a bit of cruelty buried in his heart.

With, it could be said, his Mister Knightley—the one who tells him off when he’s gone too far; the only one who can’t be charmed by him but seems to like him fine enough anyway; the only one who’s cross with him because he wants Sirius to be better rather than to punish him.

“Come on, then, sit,” Sirius says, tugging Remus down by the elbow, the pair of them falling splay-kneed and loose-shouldered onto the bench across from James and Peter and all his snacks. “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”

“Blimey,” James whispers breathlessly in the Great Hall, dinner untouched on his plate before him. “They’re everywhere. Look at ‘em.”

Sirius glances up. “What am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?”

“The shape of them,” James says, head tilting to the side, focused on something Sirius can’t quite find. “They’re—wow. Bloody hell.”

“Wha’ are ‘oo on abou’?” Remus asks around a mouthful of buttered roll.

“Boobies,” James says, holding his hands over his chest to mime the general look of a pair. “Real live knockers, lads. Those certainly weren’t there last term. Now they’re everywhere. Blimey. I’m glad for it, honest, I am, but where did they come from? And so fast!”

Sirius snorts into his potatoes.

“No, look,” James says. “It’s amazing. That’s real magic right there. Boobs, from nothing. That’s organic creation, that is.”

“Eat your chicken,” Remus says.

“No, I—look at them, Remus, you can’t tell me you don’t like the look of ‘em. You like the birds, don’t you?”

“They’re fine,” Remus says dryly.

“They’re right nice, they are. Perky. Wow. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“What an auspicious beginning to the new term,” Sirius says, grinning, as he shovels a forkful of turkey into his mouth. “Remus, why don’t you grow a pair of knockers to share with us lot? You’re the only bird who’d let James feel her up anyhow. Dorcas! Yes, hi. Pass the peas, won’t you, darling?”

James runs in the mornings now.

This wouldn’t be a problem if he weren’t the loudest galumphing elephant boy to ever walk the face of the earth.

Remus had been glad—so glad—to escape away to Hogwarts this term. To leave the quiet walls of his quiet house and be tossed back into the thick of learning, to occupy his mind properly, but now? Oh, now he misses the eerie silence, if only because it meant James wasn’t going to stub his toe on his trunk at six bloody a.m. and then let loose a string of curses a sailor would blush at.

He pulls on a pair of shorts that show more thigh than Remus wants to see and a t-shirt that is considerably too big for him. He sticks his wand in his waistband, stretches a bit, and then goes down to the quidditch pitch, where he does laps for an hour. When he comes back upstairs, just as Remus has started nodding off in his absence, he (accidentally, purposely, it’s all the same) lets the door slam against the wall, strips his shirt in the entryway like a movie star, and then hogs the bathroom for the subsequent thirty minutes.

Maybe it’s that Remus might be actually, genuinely annoyed at James for the first time in his life, and that’s why he’s being melodramatic, but he’s not particularly chuffed about the fact that his year is commencing with James humming fucking The Boys Are Back In Town—which is, coincidentally, right in the sweet spot of James’s brand new vocal break—as he scrubs his sweaty arse at seven in the bloody morning.

But, that being said, Remus is, after all, angelic. A being of perfection, holiness, and deep goodness. He could handle his sweet, sweet sleep being interrupted by James’s obnoxiousness. Really, he could. He wouldn’t say a word in complaint.

It’s just that Sirius, much like James, has taken up a new hobby.

Sunrise fucking yoga.

“Evans recommended it,” he says with a shrug when asked for an explanation. “Apparently muggles are all over this shit. I’ve been going all summer. It’s good for strength training before quidditch.”

It is a crime to humanity that the Gryffindor tower—and, ha ha fucking ha, Remus’s bed in specific—overlooks the quidditch pitch. It is a crime to Remus Lupin that Sirius Black wears sweatpants like Jerry Hall wore that one lace jumpsuit that had half of the population of Hogwarts casting muffling charms on their bed hangings.

A weird, hot anger erupts in Remus’s stomach, washes over his cheeks, just thinking about it. Sirius shouldn’t—it shouldn’t be allowed, he’s being a slag, what is he playing at? There are—there must be—lines that don’t get crossed, and this must be one of them. It must be.

Remus spends five minutes sitting straight up on his mattress, gaping, under the guise of being actually physically petrified, and then scoots himself out of bed one millimeter at a time. He pads towards the dormitory door, realizes he has nothing to do in the Common Room, pads towards the bathroom instead, feels no urge to piss, and then comes to a stop on the fringe of the room, where he plants his hands on his hips and grunts like a fucking caveman because the alternative is bursting into utterly hysterical laughter.

“What’re you doing?” Peter asks, squinting at him from in bed.

“Considering the merits of developing a drinking problem,” Remus replies.

“And?”

Remus tilts his head to peer out the window. Sirius is bent in half at the waist, head hanging near his knees and arms dangling. His arse—bloody hell. It’s straight in the air.

Another wave of frustration hits Remus.

“Merits far outweigh the cons,” he says brusquely, crossing to his trunk and pulling out a plastic water bottle of coconut flavored alcoholic something he impulsively bought in the loo on the train off a Hufflepuff seventh year named Alzoneus Nim. Oi, Lupin, you’re fifteen now, right? he’d said, and Remus replied Sure, and now he has rum, and it is a very old, very brave feeling. He wonders how old Frank Longbottom was when he first slipped alcohol into the castle.

“You do know we have class, right?” says Peter.

Remus flicks the cap off the bottle and takes a swig. It tastes like fucking candy. Delightful. “It’s only Herbology. That doesn’t even count as a class. That’s a leisure activity.”

“Every class is a leisure activity for you,” Peter mumbles. He grabs his pillow from under his head and mashes it over his eyes. “Wake me when you’re going to breakfast.”

Remus hums his acknowledgement, then crosses to his plant window. He inches pots aside—maybe he needs to (gulp) sacrifice some of his plants, because there’s really no fucking room to sit here anymore, and it’s such a nice spot—and squirms wherever he can fit, planting one foot at a time and scooting low so his head doesn’t hit the hanging plants. He drinks some more, just enough to taste the awful bitter bite of alcohol somewhere in all that sugar, then puts the bottle down. He leans his head on the window glass and sighs.

Sunrise fucking yoga. Is Sirius trying to kill him?

The door slams open.

Regulus snorts awake.

“Get up!” sings Emerald, tossing their blinds open, allowing that enchanted fake sunrise light inside. Oh God. Oh no. Regulus’s eyes feel like they’ve been coated in carpet. “Good morning! Come join the rest of the world!”

“How did you get in here?” Regulus grunts, as Barty quite literally starts to cry.

“Door was open,” says Emerald, leaning over to meet Regulus’s glare with a cheerful smile.

“Was not,” says Regulus.

“Was too.”

“Was not.”

“What, do you think I’m lying?”

“Yes.”

“You’re right. I am.” She yanks Regulus’s covers off him. He gasps with the sudden cold, balling upon himself. “Your ward charms couldn’t keep out a fly. Do you need me to teach you?”

He raises a single wavering finger at her. “Go apologize to Barty.”

“Barty has no want or need for my apologies.”

“Boo hoo,” Barty says. “Apologize, wench.”

“You are,” she says, “the scum between my toes.”

“Cheers.”

“Who told you the Common Room passcode?” Regulus says suddenly. “Forget the door, you shouldn’t even be in this part of the dungeons.”

“Are you kidding?” Emerald says. “Your password is Salazar, which is, coincidentally, the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Who chose it, a Gryffindor?”

“It’s dangerous for you to be here,” Regulus says.

“Have you forgotten I’m a pureblood?” Emerald says, tearing through Regulus’s trunk, tossing clothes at him. A pair of bundled socks hits him right on the nose. “I’m not going to be targeted for my blood any more than you will be, Reg.”

“Yes, but you’re a Hufflepuff,” says Regulus.

“Yes, but I know the Conjunctivitis Curse, so I think I’ll be fine.”

Regulus blinks. When she puts it that way.

“Get out of bed,” she sings, twirling, arms out, glowing like the face of a pearl in moonlight. “It’s a brand new day, and we have loads of learning to do.”

Barty makes a miserable sound.

Regulus finds himself smiling.

“Why are you glistening in the morning light?” Emerald asks him, squinting. “I’ve never seen a face so shiny.”

“Narcissa told me to put vitamin E oil on overnight because it will keep me young and supple.” Regulus pats his cheeks. “Is it working?”

Emerald shakes her head. “You and your brother need to have a frank chat right bloody now. You need some male influences in your life.”

“Hey!”

“All I’m saying is it shouldn’t fall to poor Narcissa to teach you about shaving your bollocks.”

Regulus covers his ears. “That’s very saucy language.”

“What, because I’m a lady?” she challenges.

“No, because it’s seven in the morning!”

“Exactly!” She tosses her arms out. “Up and at ‘em, old bean! It’s time to live, is it not?”

Regulus glares stonily at her. “You’re my villain origin story.”

She winks at him, flicks Barty between the eyebrows, and swirls her way out of the room, robes dancing around her ankles, hair bouncing, rucksack swinging like a sack of bricks over her shoulder.

Regulus sighs, then sits. “She’ll be the end of us someday.”

“Just you, mate,” Barty mumbles into his pillow.

Regulus looks at the door. “Yeah,” he says. “I reckon you’re right.”

“No, I’ll take Pettigrew—”

“But what about me?!”

“We’re not allowed to sit together anyway.”

“It’s a new year. Maybe she changed her mind.”

Sirius laughs out loud, haughty but delighted. “That was funny, Potter. Have you ever thought about trading quidditch for comedy?”

James elbows Sirius in the ribs. “Let’s ask Peter, then. It’s him we’re fighting over in the first place.”

“Yes, Peter, darling, dear, apple of my eye,” says Sirius, turning towards Peter, who looks back with a very unimpressed deadpan.

“I don’t want to be with either of you,” he says.

“Oh, well, bugger you too, then,” Sirius says. He turns back towards James, steadying him by the elbow as they leap clumsily off the moving staircase James once punched Augustus Rookwood upon. James has never been good at these staircases; he doesn’t pay nearly enough attention, then he teeters, and Sirius shouts at him in public to be careful, and Remus smacks them both upside the head, and Peter rolls his eyes like it’s his job. “Anyway, I need to take Pettigrew because I hate everyone.”

“Cheers,” Peter says.

“No, listen,” Sirius insists as they start up the blessedly stationary stairs towards the North Tower. “James, you like people, don’t you?”

“Sure,” James says.

“Well, I don’t,” Sirius says, wrinkling his nose in disgust, “which is why you, rather than me, will be fine partnering up with whomever has the nerve and bollocks to sit next to you.”

James rolls his eyes and marches ahead, leaving Sirius and Peter, who are both rather less agile than him, in the dust. It’s what they deserve, for mutiny.

James stomps up the stairs to the tower and, when he’s there, he pops through the trapdoor like a little groundhog and suddenly feels much better, despite the fact that he hates this room and everything that has ever happened in here.

He takes a deep breath of sage-scented air, drapes his elbows over the hardwood floor, and sings, “Helllooo, Professor Vablatsky!” He is privy to a sudden smack on the arse. “Hey!” he cries, covering the accosted appendage with both palms. He peers back down the hole and sees Sirius’s hand raised, head tilted back to look consideringly up at James.

“Solid bounce,” Sirius says. “Very nice follow through.”

“Hurry already, Potter,” comes Mary’s voice from down the corridor. “You’re holding up the line.”

James rolls his eyes and vaults into the room, making himself at home in a pouf near the center of the front row: the position with maximum potential for administering large doses of annoyance.

Vablatsky isn’t even here, it turns out, which means his greeting was useless. He lounges back, trying to make himself comfortable. The poufs are like rocks this year. Maybe James is just getting old. What a miserable thought.

Sirius comes up, helping Peter get his footing. James watches them, thinking suddenly that it’s quite weird to be anywhere at all without Remus Lupin.

“Have fun,” Sirius sings, sticking his tongue out as he passes James on his journey to the back row. James tries to trip him. Sirius sidesteps it gracefully, like walking on air.

Peter gives James a wave, looking rather resigned to his fate.

“Godspeed, Petey,” James says solemnly.

“Thanks,” Peter says, marching heavily up the stairs. “I’ll need that.”

“Hello, Mary,” James says as she walks by next. She ruffles his hair. Marlene follows, and James gives her a “Marley! Hiya, darling.”

“Hallo, Jaz,” says Marlene, smiling, squeezing his shoulder.

“Has Dorcas dropped out, then?” James asks when he sees she isn’t following the pair. He frowns. “And Evans?”

“Dorcas, yes, but Lily, no,” Marlene says, far too smugly. “Dunno where she is, though. Probably not far.”

“Hellloooo, class,” sings a voice from the front of the room.

James hums. “Hopefully not far, as she’s already late.”

“Please find your seats,” says Professor Vablatsky, just as barefoot and muumuu-wearing as ever, but this time with the fun addition of a fashion scarf tied over her head. The rich purple material bulges with the sheer volume of hair it holds in place. It makes her look lopsided, mostly.

They do as she’s asked, and James’s partnering pouf is left empty. He gives the room a scan—certainly he isn’t the worst option here. Certainly there are people more boring than James Potter to be beside. Surely there are, and yet James is alone, and Sirius is flipping him the bird from the back row while Peter speaks earnestly with a smiley Marlene, and every other seat is taken.

“Fuck you,” James mouths at Sirius.

It’s as James turns back around that the most wonderful, glorious, convenient, spectacular, and in all ways fateful thing that has ever happened to him comes to pass. He forgives Sirius immediately, entirely, and makes a mental note to buy him a fat load of sugar quills when they sneak out to Honeydukes next.

Lily Evans pops into the room with a ripped-open rucksack and a look of fury screwing her face in knots and there is, of course, only one open seat.

James crosses himself three times and starts drafting an owl to his mother in his head: Mum, you’ll be thrilled to hear I’ve discovered God for myself, and I have not yet managed to turn Him so far against me that He won’t grant the occasional miracle in my favor.

“Good of you to join us, Miss Evans,” Vablatsky chimes. “I waited to start attendance until your arrival…”

“How nice of you,” Evans says tersely, looking over the filled seats with an expression of pure, unadulterated dread.

James grins, blissful, and kicks her pouf out from under the table for her.

“If you would please take a seat, Miss Evans,” Vablatsky says. “I do believe you’ve held up the class for quite long enough now.”

She stomps over, cheeks bright red, and tosses herself onto the seat, arms crossed over her chest, ripped rucksack dropped onto the carpet between them.

As Vablatsky begins calling role, James gives Lily a smaller, more genuine smile. “Alright, Evans?”

“Obviously not,” she huffs. “Have you tact?”

“Not much,” James admits. He leans over and gives her rucksack a neat Reparo. He’s always been good at that spell. The seam is imperceptible once he’s done.

Her glare softens a degree. “I could’ve done that myself,” she says halfheartedly.

“Mister Black?”

“Here, darling, and ready to serve.”

“I know,” James says, “but you hadn’t. So I did it. You’re welcome.”

She sticks her tongue out at him and sets about organizing the enormous load of textbooks that had come weeping through the rip. Arithmancy, Divination, Charms. Potions as well, and Astronomy.

“What have you got all those on you for?” James says, prodding them. “We haven’t got half those lessons until the end of the week.”

“Light reading,” she suggests, flattening a piece of parchment against the table and weighing it down at the corners with an inkwell, a rubber eraser, a greenish pebble, and her copy of their Divs text.

“Barmy,” James sings under his breath.

“Miss Evans?” Vablatsky calls.

“Present, as we have so established,” she drawls.

James hides a smile by turning around to give Sirius a cross-eyed, tongue-out look. Sirius just smirks, nodding at Evans. James shoots him a double thumbs-up.

“Mister Potter, please face forward.”

“Sorry, Prof, but Sirius is all the way back there, and my attention lives wherever he is,” James says, turning to face her anyhow.

“Three points from Gryffindor,” Vablatsky says, squinting at him.

“Off to a good start!” James says cheerily. His smile doesn’t even slip when Evans hits him on the shoulder with the textbook. This is too rich.

“This term,” Vablatsky says now, and James doesn’t even mind the sound of her voice, this must be Enlightenment, true fulfillment, “we will be focusing on Divination from both the body and the sky… the temporal and the primordial… combining the clues given to us by our physical forms with those from the celestial and astral planes from which we have all come to be…”

“Did you plan this?” Lily hisses at him, scowling.

“Plan what?”

“Filling every other seat in the classroom!”

“How on Earth could I have possibly planned this?!”

“Somehow, I’m sure! You’re James Potter, I put absolutely nothing past you!”

“You think far too highly of me, then, Evans.”

They let that sentiment ring for a moment before they both burst into snickered laughter at the ridiculousness of it. Lily turns sharply away, her back to him, a hand over her mouth. James covers his flushed face with both palms.

“What the hell is going on?” he mouths to himself through his grin.

“—and read until the end of the section,” Vablatsky finishes saying.

“Shit,” Evans says, turning back around, suddenly sober. “Oh, bollocks. What are we supposed to read?”

“No clue,” James says giddily. “This is the best day of my life.”

Evans flips through pages frantically. “Come on, help me.”

James turns around and squints at Sirius.

Sirius, without looking away from his text, holds up two fingers, then three, then six.

“Page two-hundred-and-thirty-six,” James tells Evans.

Evans skims. “There is no page two-hundred-and-thirty-six!”

“Bastard,” James says fondly. “Alright, let’s just pretend, then.”

“But we won’t know what to do when it’s time to actually participate!”

James flicks his eyebrows up. “It’s Divination, darling. We’ll make something up.”

Evans covers her face with her hands. “Brilliant. Excellent. This is the start of the end of my academic career.”

“Oh, cheer up, Evans,” James says, giving her a soft kick under the desk. “It’ll be fun. Just you and me and our future together.”

She kicks him back, hard.

“Ow!” He pulls his leg to his chest and rubs his twinging shin.

“Mister Potter,” Vablatsky sighs, pinching her nose.

“Hey, you knew this would happen,” he tells her. “Really, if anything, it’s your fault. Thank you so much.”

“You could have protected me from this,” Evans says.

“Oi, I’m not that bad,” James says, turning to her. She gives him a scathing look. “Touché,” he says.

“Please,” Vablatsky says. “Chapter one. Divination and the stars.”

The class breaks into a steady hum of noise as they begin reading the chapter aloud, flipping pages, opening new inkwells and comparing quill feathers. The candlelight flickers brighter with a wave of Vablatsky’s bleached-white wand. This only serves to make the room warmer, more stifling, and more cozy. James shoves his sleeves further up his arms and settles into his pouf for the long-haul. “We could’ve probably guessed that,” he mutters, letting Evans flip to the right page. “First day, first chapter, makes sense.”

“I’m going to hex you,” she informs him, “if you do not shut up and pay attention. Here’s the section—page three.”

“Why were you late, anyway?” he asks, leaning forward to see the text properly. “You’re never late.”

“I don’t believe it’s any of your business.”

“If we’re going to work together, you’ll have to be more open with me, or we’ll never be able to See anything within each other,” James says, looking at the stark constellation drawings rather than reading. Like ink-spills over dripped wax. “We’ll be the worst in the class. You don’t want that, I assume.”

Evans sighs deeply.

“Tell me, then,” James urges. “It’s clearly bothering you.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Tell me anyway. C’mon, Evans. I’m all ears,” he says, using his palms to push said ears out like that elephant bloke from the film Sirius talked about watching in Muggle Studies.

She sighs again, leaning forward to rest her cheek on the pages of the book. “Argued with Severus.”

James wrinkles his nose on instinct, but does very well at pretending to be otherwise unaffected. “What about?”

“Oh, you know,” she says, “he’s been spending more and more time with bloody Rookwood and that lot—”

“Rookwood,” James grumbles, running his tongue over his chipped tooth.

“—and I keep telling him they’re trouble, but he never bloody listens to me, and it’s infuriating!” She conspicuously flips a page in their book as Vablatsky walks down the aisles in that I’m-just-making-sure-you’re-working way professors have. “They’re going to make him do something awful, I just know it.”

“Does this mean you’re no longer cross with me for turning him into a sea urchin at the end of last term?” Evans glares severely. “Bad question. Never mind. What did Snape say when you told him all that?”

Evans picks up one of those muggle pens she uses and writes BLAH BLAH BLAH enthusiastically in the margins of her text, as if taking notes. “To stop being so dramatic.”

“I don’t think you were being dramatic,” James says.

“And to mind my own business.”

“Hypocritical of him, seeing as he’s always got something unseemly to shout in the corridor at anyone who breathes wrong.”

“He makes me so mad sometimes.”

“Then why are you friends?” James says.

She looks sharply at him. “Because we always have been.”

“That doesn’t mean you always have to be.”

“I have an obligation,” she says carefully, “to—to remind him that he used to be good, and that he still can be good. I see it in him, even now. He’s funny and sweet, when he doesn’t think about it.”

“You don’t owe him anything,” James says, frowning. “You’re both your own people, and people can grow apart.”

Evans frowns back, lips pouted, and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Oh, what do you know. You and Sirius never row. That’s what’s strange. I’ve never heard of two people who spend so much time together never rowing”

“We haven’t found much to row about yet,” James says with a shrug. “I don’t row with Remus or Peter, either. Nor Marlene, Mary, and Dorcas.”

“Well, I row with everyone.” There’s something hardened about the admission. “That’s why it’s no different with Sev. I’m just the rowing type, I suppose.”

“I don’t think you have to be,” James says. “I mean, if you like rowing, then sure. But if you just do it because you think you ought to….”

Evans shrugs a little. “Yeah. I dunno. Maybe so.” She gives him a strange look. “What just happened?”

“Dunno,” he says with an impish smile. “I think we might’ve had a normal conversation.”

Her expression goes far away. “Hm. I guess it can be done.”

“I love this class already.” With lips still quirked, James leans over the book. “Alright, come on. Let’s read about constellations. Maybe there’s something wacky in here we can tease Sirius about.”

Peter and James take the opportunity to head to the kitchens and greet the house elves while Remus and Sirius are in Muggle Studies that afternoon.

“Are they going to get all antsy if we interrupt them before dinner is served?” James asks, twirling his wand between his fingers.

“Nah,” Peter says, watching him over his shoulder. James often lets him lead the charge on their duo excursions, and Peter feels quite proud of that, especially now. The kitchens were his magnum opus of findings, after all. Returning there is like reliving his greatest achievement at Hogwarts to date. “They’ll be glad to see us, I bet. It’s been months. Oh, maybe they’ll even let us try some of the dinner dishes early.”

“That would be thrilling,” James says, shooting Peter a little smile as they leap onto the moving staircase a moment before it’s too late. James is like that: a skin-of-the-teeth sort of person who wants very much not to be so. “I hope they’ve made those little baby potatoes with all the rosemary. Those things make me believe in God, just a little bit.”

Peter snorts. “Then, God willing, potatoes will be in abundance this evening.”

“Mm. Potatoes in abundance. Not only my ideal afterlife, but also a brilliant name for a rock band.”

They jog and skip and sneak their way to the upper dungeons, James hitting Snape with a surreptitious Leg-Locker and Peter pulling them quickly into a tapestry passage before Snape can recover and retaliate. James shakes his head, dragging a finger along the walls.

“Sniveling prat,” he says. “Did you see the look on his face?”

Peter’s lips curl to the side. “Yes, James, I did. Everyone in the bloody corridor did.”

James tilts his head back to the raw ceiling, sighing as if he’s in his most perfect state. “I relish in it. It’s so nice to be back.”

The kitchen is indeed bustling as much as James had worried it would be, but the elves are so thrilled to have company that it’s almost frightening.

“Master Peter!” Blinky cries, tugging his hand, and he stumbles as he follows her all the way to the cauldrons, where she shoves a ladle into his palm and curls his fingers closed around it. “I’m so glad you’re here, Master Peter, because I can’t tell if this soup is adequately spiced!”

Peter tries a sip, then hums. “Perhaps a bit more pepper?”

Blinky nods, breathing a sigh of relief, and runs for the pepper grinder, her ears flapping as she goes. Peter had quickly learned that the elves are unsatisfied with a simple That’s perfect! Even if Peter really does think as much, it’s better to give them some sort of arbitrary thing to “fix,” for the sake of their own sanity.

On the other side of the tables, James sits cross-legged on the tiles, jabbering in rapidfire French with Jolie, the head pastry chef of the kitchen. His expression is one of incredible focus and he wields a profiterole in each hand. Jolie is twirling her apron string around her fingers as they talk, her eyes wide and cheeks pink, and Peter thinks it really is quite classic that an elf would fancy James Potter. Just about everyone seems to be nursing a crush on him these days, since he had the gall to shoot up in height this summer. He’s still not as tall as Remus—no one is as tall as Remus, after all, not even Marlene—but he’s left both Sirius and Peter in his dust. It’s rude of him.

A tiny hand grabs Peter’s. He looks down and finds Clang nervously shifting his weight.

Clang is a special case, as far as the elves go. He’s younger than the others, and none of them know exactly what sort of house he came from before Hogwarts hired him, but they’ve never heard Clang speak. Peter wonders sometimes if he has the ability to and chooses not to, but mostly he doesn’t mind the quiet. Clang is quite good at communicating his thoughts without words.

“Hi, Clang,” Peter says, squatting down before him. “Had a good summer?”

Clang nods, smiling just slightly.

“That’s good,” Peter says warmly. “Have you got something you want me to try?”

Clang nods again, then tugs Peter’s hand. Peter rises and lets himself be pulled, waving and calling out greetings and promising to try more things than he has room in his stomach for, surely. The whole room, from the floor to the vaulted ceilings, smells of carrots and cinnamon and butter, beef and broth and asparagus, yeast and vanilla and berries. Clang leads him to a table where the youngest elves usually work, arranging fruit on tarts or mixing up dressings—tasks that keep their tiny fingertips away from knife-edges.

“Hello, Peter!” says Rosy, smiling, mixing apple slices with cinnamon and sugar. The younger elves are the only ones who listen when told to drop the pleasantries—all that Master and Mister bullshit. It makes Peter uncomfortable to hear. He certainly isn’t their master.

“Hiya, Ro,” he answers. “Everything going well?”

“Yes, very much so!” she says. She has a tiny bow in her tuft of yellow hair. “We’re making desserts now.”

“Brilliant,” Peter says. “I always love the desserts you all make.”

Rosy blushes and giggles as she continues her stirring.

Clang prods Peter again.

“Yes, I’m here,” Peter says. “Goodness, I always forget how many of you there are. Do you need something, Clang?”

Clang grins outright, then, in a way that makes Peter feel quite warm for having inspired it. Clang pushes—of all things—a dish of seasoned potatoes at him.

Peter laughs aloud, then looks around for James. He finds him in the center of the kitchen, absolutely swarmed, with Jolie hanging over his shoulders, Jinx perched on his hip, and Odie sitting on his foot. He’s got a solid hold on all of them, and a smile for each in turn. People can say what they want about James being crass or the center of his own world, but for every ounce of ego in him, he’s got double the amount of heart.

“Oi, Potter,” he calls, smiling at the sight.

James looks over, adjusting his grip on Jinx, who is making a valiant attempt to use him as an anthropomorphic jungle gym.

Peter holds the potatoes aloft. “God heard you, mate.”

James smiles so hugely, so brilliantly, so effortlessly, that Peter momentarily loses his breath.

“It is,” James says, “so nice to be back.”

“Sirius, I swear to bloody Merlin,” James says, pausing in the middle of this week’s To Do, To Remember, To Forget list as the thought strikes him, “if you don’t try out for quidditch this year, I’ll cut off your knob.”

“Replace it with yours,” Sirius replies, lounging on the couch with an arm tossed behind his head. They’ve commandeered about half the seats in the Common Room for themselves this evening, close to the fire and all. It’s quite the set-up. “If I had that glorious beast hanging between my legs, I’d never have trouble wrangling myself a date.”

“You’re revolting,” Remus says.

“You’ve never seen my knob,” James says, frowning.

“It’s majestic, that thing,” says Sirius. “Like an autumn squash. Or a yam.”

“I quite like yams,” says Peter, only half-listening.

James snorts. “Not this type, mate.” He turns back to Sirius, then. “You will come out, won’t you?”

Sirius sighs deeply, and says, as if this explains everything wrong in the world and then some, “My brother is going for the Slytherin team.”

“So you’re giving yourself an excuse to see him more often if you play! What’s a bit of friendly competition between siblings?” James shoves Sirius’s socked feet off his lap and shuts his journal, resigned to the fact that Sirius is able to turn anything at all into A Task. “Come on. We need you. No one beats like you do.”

“You’re right—no one beats it like I do.”

“Cheers.”

“These are layups,” Sirius says, chortling. “You’re handing them right to me.”

“Make all the jokes you want,” James says with a shrug. “Just come out for the team. Don’t be a prat. You love being needed. Our whole house needs you. You’ll be an utter ledge.”

“I already am,” Sirius says.

“More of a ledge, then,” James says. He turns to Remus, who has a muggle highlighter between his teeth and a star chart in his lap. His eyes go wide when he notices James looking at him.

“Don’t bring me into this,” Remus says.

“Sirius on a broom,” James hedges. He isn't blind, after all. Just because Remus hasn’t talked about it doesn’t mean he hasn’t noticed the way Remus looks at Sirius—down through his lashes, eyes widened just slightly as if he’s a little bit shocked every time he sees him—or reacts when Sirius touches him—a startle, a twitch in his jaw—or speaks to Sirius—the words seem to pull themselves right out of the pit of his stomach, the words push daisies, they hammer on the hood of a casket neither of them have quite yet earned. He isn’t sure if it’s a passing attraction—for which James certainly couldn’t blame Remus, considering Sirius looks the way he does—or if Remus even realizes he feels that way, and he’s even less sure if Sirius realizes the way he carries himself can be so intoxicating, but James isn’t above using it—bloody hormones—to his advantage, for something as harmless and/or beneficial as this. “Sirius in our red and gold… Sirius in those tight quidditch pants… Sirius gloriously happy, after having clobbered every other team on the righteous path to the cup… Sirius deliriously proud, dancing like an idiot at the celebratory party…”

“I resent that,” Sirius says.

“I’ve suddenly had a change of heart,” Remus announces. “Sirius, you have to go out for the quidditch team. Gryffindor needs you.”

Sirius peers at Remus through one squinted eye. “You think I should do it?”

“Oh, so you listen to him and not me?” James demands.

“We promised Slughorn Remus is our official impulse control,” Sirius says mindlessly, pushing James’s face away with his palm. He repeats, “You think I should?”

“I think you ought to,” Remus says, pink around the cheeks, highlighter dangling between his teeth like a cigarette.

“Well, alright then,” Sirius says, staring at Remus a moment longer before returning to his flat, luxurious position.

“Thrilling,” James proclaims.

Sometimes, he’s quite good at getting what he wants.

The thing about Sirius, generally, is that he seems to be far more alive than anyone else.

He burns bright, the star he was named for, with a furious and brutal type of heat, but he, because of it, has a hard time understanding others, to a degree. He’s good at interacting with them because he’s good at pretending he’s only slightly above average, only marginally more. But he is a well of fury and ferocity in a way that is impossible to dream of being, in a way that is intimidating, in a way that means he’s surprised to learn other fourteen-year-olds don’t feel quite as much as he does. Because he cannot fathom being smaller, or lesser, or muted. He cannot fathom feeling smaller, or lesser, or muted. Because he forgets such things are possible. Are probable, even.

Because he is so wonderful. Because he is so untamperable, and he cannot imagine being little.

It’s almost astounding. The way he doesn’t even realize, until the moment he does, when he is so frustrated with everyone who isn’t him. The way he is a silk jacket, the way he is a vanity, the way he is an uncalloused palm and a heavy ring and a glass of champagne tossed to the floor and a mascara-tinged tear and the stain of ocean water on the topmost peak of a jetty.

This is all important to note for the reason that it is directly causing a not-rare instance of Sirius leaping from mattress to mattress, shaking them all out of sleep, a manic energy vibrating in his every shouted word. There are stomps on their ceiling, curses, the inhabitants of the dormitory above them naffed at the noise. Remus doesn’t blame them. He’d appreciate having a rock to throw at Sirius and his insanity presently.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Peter moans, eyes closed, burying himself beneath his pillow.

Sirius leaps from James’s bed to Peter’s and jumps excitedly, nearly stepping on Peter’s legs.

“Oh, leave him alone,” James mutters, sitting up, hair in his eyes like a fluffy little lion cub. Remus clings to the image, mentally, because otherwise he will choke Sirus to death, no hesitation. Choke him dead.

“A welcome back prank,” Sirius proposes.

“We already hung that Lockhart kid from a candelabra by his robes,” James says, knuckling his eyes. “Isn’t that enough?”

“We only got one detention each for that,” Sirius says. “That’s not nearly enough. In what world is that enough? Not this world.”

“Yes, well, any regular professor would’ve given us two weeks for it. We only got off easy be—” James breaks off to yawn enormously, jaw cracking, “—because Minnie thinks he’s an annoying twat and probably wanted to do it as badly as we did.”

“You have any ideas on the list, James?” Remus says, resigned. He’s awake, now.

“Mm. No. Too sleepy for lists.”

“Hard to imagine a world where you’re too anything for lists.”

“I have an idea,” Peter says.

James perks up, eyes still half-closed. “Hit us with it, Petey.”

“I found this spell,” he says, twisting his lips to hide a smile, grabbing a textbook from under his bed and opening it up, “that can confuse a doorway. You walk through expecting the logical course of events—coming into a new room—but you wind up somewhere other than the place on the other side. Like a portkey, or some sort of forced Apparition. A Vanishing Cabinet.”

A silent moment passes where the three others allow this notion to settle upon them, then they scramble forward to read the incantation in Peter’s book.

“Bloody brilliant,” James breathes. “Bloody brilliant, Peter!”

“We could pack every student in the whole school into Filch’s office,” Sirius says dreamily, falling onto Peter’s mattress beside him, lips spreading into a smile.

“Every doorway could go somewhere else,” Remus says. “To the far end of the castle, even.”

“Mayhem,” Sirius says, brilliant, mercurial, and Remus, in his exhaustion, thinks that he would like to place his thumb in that dimple on Sirius’s chin. “How’s the map? We can bring it along to make sure we hit every doorway.”

“Maybe not every doorway,” Remus says, but he pads to his desk and picks up the paper anyhow, running a reverent fingertip over the faded red pencil lines, the starker ink lines over top, the mad mutterings in the margins and the stupid fake Latin and the hours of time they’ve all bled onto this page. “And it might be smarter for us to split up, to cover more ground.”

“If not every doorway, which?” says Sirius. He rises and paces, caged energy.

“Not the ones that go outside, or into loos,” Peter suggests. “I don’t want piss puddles all over because we started sending everyone into the Divination Tower.”

“We’ll do alternating doorways,” Remus says. “In the classrooms that connect, we’ll bugger both entrances, because it’d be useless to only do one door, but otherwise we’ll do every other. There ought to be a pattern, but we can do the entire third floor to keep things interesting, for example.”

“We’ll bar everyone from the Great Hall so the profs are inspired to fix it fast,” James says, grinning his electric, madman grin.

Sirius dumps himself onto the edge of Remus’s desk beside him. He wraps one of Remus’s loose curls around his finger and tugs. “Genius,” he says simply, enunciating every letter in that aristocratic way of his.

Remus feels necrotic and visible in a way that makes him want to writhe.

Remus bats his hand away. “Kiss-arse.”

Sirius just smirks. “A little arse-kissing never killed anybody.”

“As far as you know, at least,” Peter mutters, rolling exhaustedly out of bed.

James claps Peter’s shoulder. “Cheer up, Petey. We’ve got work to do, haven’t we?”

So they pull on dark-colored shirts and trousers and do their best to tip-toe down the stairs. They slip under James’s cloak, bunched far too close together, and curse the whole way along the corridor to the moving staircases, toes being stepped on and hair being pulled and Remus hissing at them all to lift their elbows because the weight of the fabric is bending the map.

“Okay,” James whispers, but the rest of them are still trying to choke each other, so James says, “Okay! Okay! Shut your fucking mouths before I bang you all together like Newton balls.”

“Even your threats are bogus,” Peter says.

“Shh, shh, shut up, I’m speaking,” James says, and they’re all whipped, so they listen, which would probably be embarrassing if someone else saw. “I’ll take Remus and we’ll hit the lower hallways, near the basement, where it’s easier to hide without the cloak. Peter and Sirius, you two should go up towards the towers, but be careful, because Filch—”

“Is always looking for stragglers up there, we know,” Peter sighs, knuckling his eyes. “You taking the map?”

“Yeah, I thought so. You’ll be fine?”

“Sure,” Peter shrugs. “We know the towers pretty well by now.”

“Get Filch’s favorite broom closet, too,” Remus tells Sirius, earnest as the grim.

Sirius grins. “Perfect. Meet back here in two hours?”

“Maybe less,” James decides. “If it takes that long, you’re idiots. We’ll be back here at three, done or not.”

They stack their hands at the heart of their little circle. They push down, then toss their hands in the air, grinning, glimmering.

The cloak slips off Remus and James’s heads, making their hair stick up with static. The air feels crisper without it. James is still smiling like he belongs on the funny farm.

Remus snorts a laugh, socks James on the shoulder, then pulls him along, opening the map. “Come on, then, Theseus. You got a plan?”

“Well, I was hoping your map would give us some ideas, my lovely girlfriend Ariadne,” James replies, leaning over to skim the map as they walk. “Hm, hm, hm. Let’s start in the snake pits and work our way up, then?”

“Sounds good to me,” Remus says, a thrill in his stomach. He really does enjoy this bit, and he and James almost never get caught together anyway: Remus is attentive enough to hear the footsteps coming, and James is quick enough to get them out of the way before they’re found. At that, even when they do bump into Slughorn or McGonagall or Sprout on an evening walk, Remus has the excuse of moons coming or going necessitating a stint in the hospital wing for a potion or two, and since James puked in McGonagall’s office, he’s started pretending to be stricken by a wave of lightheaded nausea and stabbing stomach pain with charming results. Remus will never understand how he makes himself go so pale and clammy at a moment’s notice. He should drop quidditch and join an acting troupe.

Peter and Sirius, too, are a good pair, when they’re in amiable enough moods (meaning, mostly, when Sirius is forgiving and Peter is quiet). No one finds hiding spots or passageways like Peter, and Sirius has the innate ability to create distractions in eight different places at once. Neither of them are good at lying, since Sirius is too proud and Peter too smug when he’s done his part right, but it’s rare that one can find either of them at all when they don’t want to be found.

They’re a fairly successful crew overall, really, if you ask Remus.

James leads all the way down to the dungeons, hugging close to the stone walls, shushing portraits conspiratorially, devastatingly charming. Remus muffles their footsteps with a spell—well, he muffles his own footsteps, as James never wears shoes on these missions for the specific purpose of being quieter in the corridors—and keeps careful track of the turns they take, the ones they skip. He wishes he brought a pencil to mark on the map everywhere they’d been—or the places they plan to go, or—or where they are, so they can’t get lost.

“I’ve had an idea, and I think it might be brilliant,” Remus mutters, leaning close. James’s hair bounces as he jerks his chin to tell Remus he’s listening. “What if we were able to see on the map exactly where we are in the castle at all times?”

James turns around, brow furrowed. “Like a tracking charm.”

“But somehow transferred onto the parchment,” Remus says, and his heart kicks into gear. “What if we could see where everyone was? Filch, and McGonagall, and Dumbledore—everyone? Then we wouldn’t need to hurry and hide, because we’d know exactly where to go to avoid them.”

James stares at him. “I could kiss you. That’s genius, Remus. What would we use, like, a—what’s it—”

“A Hom—”

“—a Homonculus, right?”

“Yeah, exactly, right,” Remus says, pulling James to a stop. “Exactly that. We’d know where everyone was at all times.”

“I bet we’d see Sirius dangling off the Astronomy Tower right now,” James says, the lenses of his glasses gleaming milky in the light of their Lumos.

“Surely, doing something stupid, absolutely,” Remus agrees, a smile quirking his lips. “Poor Peter.”

“Too true.” James gives Remus a little shake. “Genius. I’ll grab a book from the library that covers it. I’m sure there’s one somewhere.”

“On what, cartography?” Remus snorts. “Excited over a map.”

“A genius map,” James says, never one to allow Remus’s barbs at himself. “This is going to change our lives. No more detention for us.”

“Imagine that,” Remus says. “No more bedpans or cauldron bottoms.”

“Or gum scraping, or feeding Kettleburn’s bloody armada of doxies. We’ll have so much free time, God only knows what we’ll do with it.”

Remus snickers all the way to the end of the hallway, imagining James feeding doxies in detention—screaming shrilly and then assuring the audience of no one that he wasn’t actually afraid at all. Absolute egghead that he is.

“This corridor looks good,” James says, scrutinizing it from echoing end to end. The floors are damp, the air stiff and stale with musk and mold—like a mermaid’s taint, Lily would say. The lights have a greenish tinge, and the portraits liberally and eloquently curse at them—the result of hundreds of years of teenaged influence. This is where the N.E.W.T. students take Advanced Potions, and a select group of upperclassmen study creatures. It’s a terrible place to be. Maybe they’re doing everyone in those courses a favor, not letting them inside for the day.

Remus goes to the closest door, allowing James to take the farthest, and starts charming the stone frames, whispering the incantation and waving his wand in a great arc—like sunset.

They finish floor by floor, efficient, snickering to themselves as they choose to spell Charms rooms to let out in the Divination Tower and Potions to pack into the Defense Against the Dark Arts office.

They’re tired by the time they get to the last floor, Remus’s knee twinging like a bitch and James yawning around every incantation, but they weren’t caught, which makes Remus say “Tidy,” approximately seven times in a row and James laugh like Remus has told the funniest joke in history. They do the final door together: sending Transfiguration to the tapestry corridor on the sixth floor. When Remus looks at James, he has both hands raised like a conductor, his sweatpants hiked on one ankle, his socks dangling past the ends of his toes. In the light from the candelabras, he’s a slip of russet silk, the sort of thing a symphony orchestra proudly tunes before, a miraculous, miraculous thing. He’s in that mode where joy leaks out of him in amounts great enough to supplant the passive contentment of anyone around; James isn’t always happy anymore, but when he is, he is in leaps and bounds and a firework explosion. He is, if you were to ask Remus, the very best of people.

They meet Sirius and Peter at the portrait, twenty minutes earlier than planned.

“Peter shit his pants in the dungeons,” Sirius announces, cracking his neck. He seems to be in a fine mood, which is good—they won’t have to mediate an apology to Peter before bedtime.

“I most certainly did not,” Peter huffs. “And anyway, if I did, could you have blamed me? No one has set foot down there since the Italian bloody Renaissance.”

“It is probably infested with boggarts and lice,” Sirius allows, clapping Peter’s shoulder.

“I’m sure you were very brave, Pete,” Remus says. “Now let’s please go to bed. Pretend to be civilized for once, et cetera.”

They laugh, all of them giddy. Remus and James explain the Homonculus as they pad up the spiral staircase to their dormitory, and they swear to start researching the next day, some great and inexplicable energy humming between them. They sleep like the dead for four hours, wake up in the worst mood of their young lives, and then get to watch chaos unfold.

Hufflepuffs keep turning up in Myrtle’s lavatory. The frog choir ends up in the Potions storage closet. Astronomy club is in the trophy room. It’s madness. By the time Finites have been cast and everything is back in order, the boys have a week of detention, Lily has kicked Remus in the shins, Severus Snape is sopping wet from being sent into the prefect’s bathtub, and Sirius is bouncing on his toes, grinning with all the intention of moonrise. Everything is exactly as it should be.

Now they’ve just got to wait for quidditch try-outs to be done, so they can be finished with Sirius’s mood. A week of detention is more than enough for Remus, especially when there’s no proof to be found it was them, Professor McGonagall, really, precedent can’t prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt! Where is justice? Where is trust?

(The wicked grin on Remus’s lips contradicts his every word. He’ll take those detentions proudly. It was brilliant. They were. They are.)

Sirius doesn’t think he’s a quidditch genius or anything. He knows he’s far from a perfect player. But he’s good at keeping the other beater in his sights, in guessing what they’re going to do based solely upon the way the muscles of their shoulder strain. He’s a graceful flier, unlike James, who flies with just as much earnest gumption as he does anything else. He’s got a good arm, good aim, and a brutal swing. He can listen to a captain, despite all evidence implying otherwise. He’s good. He’s not perfect, but he’s good.

He and James huddle together as they wait for the news, shoulders pressed.

“Carter, you’re back,” Frank tells their brick of a keeper, not looking up from his list.

Carter grunts. A goddamn peach, he is.

“James, Gwen, you’re back.”

“Cheers,” James says, grinning.

“You’d be lost without us, Frankie,” says Gwen, cheeks still pink with exertion. She elbowed a prospective seeker onto the ground from ten feet up not an hour ago. Sirius still hasn’t stopped gaping.

“Connor, you’re seeking for us again,” Frank says.

“That’s horrifying,” says Connor feelingly.

“Hurry up, Frank, Jesus,” calls someone from the back of the crowd. A seventh year who had gone out for beater. He was fine. Sirius was good.

“Mind how you speak to me,” Frank says, hoisting his pencil and paper higher. “I could change the list before I read it out, you know.”

It’s not often a coach announces the team directly after try-outs like this. It gives far too much opportunity for angry, disappointed blockhead muscle-stacks to beat the snot out of you. Frank is brave.

“Our new chaser is going to be Antonio Fernandez,” Frank accounces, giving a quick glance up from his paper to watch the third-year smile proudly as a friend thumps his back. James mutters something about passes righty but doesn’t complain. Antonio Fernandez was fine. Sirius was good.

“Is that everyone?” Frank asks innocently.

“I’ll kill him,” Sirius says. “I’ll kill you.”

“C’mon, Frank, tell us if we made it,” James mutters.

“...And,” Frank says, lips twitching, “my co-beater, mostly because he’d make a eunuch of me otherwise, will be the one and only… Mister Sirius Black.”

Sirius’s stomach drops into his arse. His knees nearly give out. It’s James’s arm round his shoulders that keeps him upright, and James’s whoop ringing in his ears that make him sure he heard correctly. Sirius tosses his head back and laughs, wondering what could have possessed him to make him think this could have gone any other way.

A package deal, he and James are. There’s no one without the other on the dirt, so why would it be any different in the sky?

“Does everyone have their texts opened? Yes?” Kettleburn says, clapping what’s left of his hands together, standing at the edge of the gleaming lake. Behind him, the squid waves its tentacles languidly—an attention whore. “Good. Open to the second chapter, please: Classifying Creatures. Yes, go on, hurry up.”

Remus sighs heavily, knocking the toes of his shoes together. The grass itches through his trousers, pollen heavy on every blade, every breath. Autumn hangs heavy in the air, heady, and lands on the apple of his throat like nausea. He’s hours from his next moon, and he’s feeling it in every angle of himself, but especially in his head—the pressure behind his eyes so entire, so corporeal, that he fears they may pop right out the front of his face.

“Are we ready?” calls Kettleburn, walking along the edge of the lake, too loud, too loud.

Lily leans into his side. She is so thoughtful with her affection that it sometimes catches Remus off guard that he receives it, and is so strangely attuned to Remus’s every motion that she always knows when to touch him, smother him with good intentions. More strangely by far, however, is that Sirius leans into his other side. Sirius never sits with him in Care of Magical Creatures, because Remus likes this class, and Sirius ruins most things that Remus likes by only occasional malevolence. Today, however, Sirius is here, and he’s even being quiet. As a result, James is here and quiet, and Peter is here and setting fire to a dandelion with his wand. Thus, all of them are here—all the girls, too, because they are rather sheeplike. Remus doesn’t blame them; all of year four’s Gryffindors are. Kettleburn keeps giving them suspicious looks. Remus doesn’t blame him: Remus, too, is suspicious of them, and he is them.

It’s sweet, though. All of them here while he swallows back rising chunks of his breakfast. It’s like having fans. An entourage.

“Page twenty-four,” Kettleburn goads again. “Come on, Ravenclaws, I see you doodling. That’s not a textbook. That’s Witch Weekly. My eyes still work, you know.”

“I, for one, did not know that,” Mary mutters.

Marlene snorts, twirling her hair around her wand. Dorcas sits beside her, watching the motion, cheek resting on her knuckles.

Remus drops his chin on Lily’s shoulder and lets his eyes drift closed.

“I’ll read to you,” Lily says, knocking her forehead against his. “Chapter Two: Classifying Creatures. In this chapter, we will explore how the danger a creature poses can be ranked upon a sliding scale and thus utilized to—”

“Lily, you’re an angel,” Remus says, “but I will punch you so hard if you keep talking.”

She pats his head and keeps her reading internal, then.

It’s after class, when Remus is grumpy from having been shaken from his sun-warm nap by Sirius, when Remus starts to wish he’d just muscled through and done the reading himself, because then he wouldn’t be reading the words Werewolves are ranked XXXXX on the Scamander Scale for Scariness in James’s chicken-scratch handwriting four hours before moonrise.

That line does have the phrase THAT IS SO COOL, REMUS, SO COOL, YOU ARE VERY COOL SCARY CHOMPER MAN GRR written after it, but it doesn’t assuage Remus as much as James must have hoped it would.

XXXXX. Remus can surround himself in wool and worn corduroy all he wants, can make enough cups of tea for himself that he runs out of flat surfaces upon which to leave them, can hug Lily when she wants to and grow himself a garden of good things and tell himself he is gentle, tell himself he is good, but he knows. He knows. He is a pair of sharpened teeth in the cage of someone very polite.

Five-fucking-X. He double-checks the locks on the doors that night, and howls until his voice cracks into nothing, and then he bleeds.

“Guess what I’ve acquired,” Sirius sings, posing in the dormitory doorway, one hand on the frame above him and one shoulder leaning into the side.

“A haircut?” says James.

“A shred of intelligence,” says Remus.

“A small hippopotamus,” says Peter.

“Seriously, what do you all think I do when you’re not around?” Sirius traipses into the room, shaking his head. “No, none of the above. Those were terrible guesses and if this had been an exam, you would’ve failed. I’ve got something far better, of course, than a hippopotamus or a haircut.” He makes a show of holding his waistcoat open with a flourish. With two fingers he removes something small from the inner pocket.

“Oh good God,” says Remus.

“Is that—?”

“A spliff from the tender hands of Hagrid himself, yes,” says Sirius. “For us to enjoy this fine evening.”

“Have any of you even smoked before?” Peter asks, sitting on his knees.

“No,” they chorus.

Peter nods. “Oh. Okay, perfect. Let’s do it then.”

“I mean, I have homework, but Merlin knows that means nothing to me,” says James, sweeping his books off his mattress and onto the floor. “Come hither, sweet creature of the night, and share your spoils.”

Sirius drops himself into the opening James has made, twirling the spliff between his fingers like a tiny baton. “Who wants the ceremonial first hit?”

“We’re not fighting you for it,” says James, ruffling Sirius’s hair. James has never quite managed to come to a functional understanding of personal space or why one might want it. It’s a good thing Sirius relishes in anything James gives him. “You just want us to praise you for being the one to acquire it. Yes, yes, glory glory hallelujah. Light her up, baby.”

Sirius squints at it, then raises his wand. “How?”

“Put it in your mouth and inhale?” James suggests.

“Are we all sharing spit?” Peter says, nose wrinkled.

“Do you care that much?” Sirius asks. “Don’t want to contract any of our diseases, huh?”

“What disease do you have?” Peter demands, eyes wide.

Sirius rolls his eyes and flops backwards on the mattress, head falling onto James’s pillow.

“No diseases, Pete,” James says. “He was just being a prick, as usual.”

“Come on, light ‘er up,” Remus says, rubbing his hands together. “I’m curious to see what it’s like. I’ve read it can help with—you know. Moon stuff.”

The concept warms something in Sirius’s belly—being able to help with Remus’s moon stuff in more ways than their secret studying hints them towards, in more ways than stealing Death’s-head Hawk Moths from the Potions storage closet, in more ways than tucking Remus into extra jumpers and slipping Dittany into his bag. He likes helping, when it’s Remus. He likes Remus.

He holds the spliff between his teeth, gives his wand a sharp jab, and lights the tip on the little flame he’s summoned. He inhales quickly, too hard, and the smoke staggers its way down his throat, into his chest, tightening his lungs and pouring out his nose in twin streams. He pushes up onto his elbow to cough properly, and James hammers on his back, and Remus and Peter scramble onto the end of the mattress, waiting, eyes wide.

“Was it horrible?” Remus asks.

Sirius clears his throat, tears in his eyes, and chokes out, “No, it was brilliant.”

“Are you stoned yet?” Peter says.

“No, I’m not stoned yet,” Sirius says, rolling his eyes. He clears his throat again, a blistering sharp sting at the base of it, then hands the joint to Remus. “Here, you next.”

Remus takes it gingerly, puts it in that place Sirius’s lips just touched, and inhales, cheeks hollowing. Sirius feels something stir in his stomach at the sight. Fancying Remus is such a bother. Remus coughs, wrinkles his nose, grunts, “Bloody hell.” He looks pink-cheeked, with dying sunlight reflecting off the maroon duvet.

Remus hands off to Peter, who takes one hit and then says, disgusted, “Oh, no. Absolutely not. Not for me.”

“You don’t like it?” James asks, taking the joint next. He relights it on the tip of his wand, then quickly inhales, sharp and with far too much confidence, if the way he coughs is any indicator. “Actually, I don’t mind the flavor.”

“Like too-strong tea,” Sirius says. “And sadness.” He plucks it from James’s hand and takes another hit, deeper. He opens his throat, closes his eyes, and doesn’t cough, exhaling the smoke in a long stream from between his lips. “Oh, check me out. I’m already a professional.”

“Professional what,” Remus says, taking it next, “professional prat?” Then he is sucking, coughing, wiping his nose on his sleeve. A smile bursts onto his lips. “Shit.”

Sirius finds himself smiling back, a laugh consolidating at the bottom of his neck, where his spine starts. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Remus says. He inhales once more, then offers the joint to Peter, who waves it off. James takes it, inhales, clears his throat. The lenses of his glasses fill with smoke as he breathes out.

“My nose is dripping,” James announces.

“You look so silly,” Sirius says. “My shoulders feel weird.”

Remus is blinking forcefully.

“I,” says James. He takes another hit. He looks stupid when he smokes, like he’s sipping through a straw. “I,” he says again.

Sirius takes the spliff from him and sucks. It’s short, now, the blackened tip close to his fingernails. It tastes, generally, like the bottom of a Floo, and burns the whole way down. He stares at Remus at the end of the mattress, and he feels James’s warmth like a being next to him, and he inhales, eyes locked on Remus’s pretty, pretty, pretty ones, so unabashedly, uninterestingly brown, Sirius would know them anywhere. Paler than James’s. Rounder, too. Blond-tipped lashes. A scar at the inner corner of the left one.

Sirius holds the joint out for Remus, perched between his long pointer finger and longer middle finger, the paper only a shade lighter than his skin, the tendons in his hands jutting out with the stretch.

Remus takes it the same way, between his fingers, perched right above his proud knuckles. There’s a scar across the back of Remus’s hand. Pale, stark, long and thin, from the bottom knuckle of his thumb all the way to the base of his littlest finger. Sirius is sure he’s seen it before, sure he’s noticed, but it startles him this time. It makes his stomach roll, a pair of dice, a pocketful of stones.

Remus inhales. Jostles a dozing Peter and urges him to retreat to his bed, if he’s going to knock out. Peter does, and starts to snore—a familiar rumble.

Sirius settles back on his pillows beside James. He closes his eyes and feels like he’s rocking side to side. He realizes, suddenly, sharply, that he can feel every centimeter of his skin, can feel every fold in the fabric of his clothes, can feel his blood trapped in his veins and his lashes batting dust and the loose strings of hair on his neck. He leans into James’s side.

James tosses his arm around him. “Good?” he says softly.

Sirius makes a sound of assent. He just needs to be touched, sometimes.

“Good, Remus?” James says.

“Mm,” Remus says, handing the spliff to James. He settles at the end of the bed, curling on his side with his knees to his chest, eyes closed. “Don’t wake me.”

“Did you tell Peter to fuck off because you wanted more space for yourself?” James says.

“F’that’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to Peter, I’m better than both of you.”

“Well,” says Sirius. “You’ve got a point. Carry on.”

Remus falling asleep is like a painting settling into stillness, from technicolor to sepia. His breaths come slow, his face goes slack, his hands go limp where they lay on the duvet.

Sirius blinks. His eyes feel pointy.

“You look like you’re melting,” says James, and Sirius believes him, because he trusts James more than he’d trust a mirror.

“That’s funny,” Sirius says, though it isn’t.

“You’re well and truly sauced,” James says with a snicker, hand on the back of Sirius’s head, fingers in his hair. It’s just the two of them, even though it isn’t. It always is, sometimes most especially when it isn’t.

“I’m,” Sirius splutters. “I’m not sauced. Do you really think I, of all people, would be so stupid as to allow myself to… become sauced?”

“You can’t even open your eyes properly.”

“Really?” says Sirius, prodding at them. He tries. Fails. Everything goes half-blurry, out of focus, because the lids are too heavy. Fucking eyelids. Can’t even—eyelid. Can’t. Can’t. Something plummets sharply south in Sirius’s stomach. “Well. Add it to the list.”

“List?”

“List of things I’m useless at,” Sirius says.

“Sirius,” James says.

“Right alongside siring an heir and—and being a good brother, following the family rules, an’ providing an example to follow as scion of a Noble and Most Ancient house.”

“I thought you didn’t want to do any of those things. I thought you didn’t want to be that person.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to be,” Sirius says. “It’s that I’m not. Can’t I just hate myself for being wrong in peace?”

“Sirius,” James says, soft, devastated.

“M’so… such a bad son,” Sirius says, still smiling, tears filling his aching eyes, dripping over his flushed cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” James says. “Please don’t cry.”

“You know how Icarus brained himself on the rock?” says Sirius. “You know?”

“I know,” says James.

“You know how he flew?” says Sirius.

“I know,” says James.

“I don’t think I’d mind,” says Sirius, and James doesn’t ask for a clarification.

“I love you,” James says instead. “Have I ever told you that? I love you.”

Sirius’s face crumples. He turns away.

“Hey,” James says, “stop. Stop. Look at me. Sirius.” He takes Sirius by the chin and holds him in place, bearing down into Sirius’s eyes with this awful earnestness, this painful sweetness, James is hot wax and Sirius is the press of a stamp. “Look at me,” James says again.

“I am,” Sirius croaks.

“I love you,” James says. “Alright? Alright, Sirius?”

“Alright,” Sirius says.

“I love you,” James says. Satisfied, this time.

“I can’t,” says Sirius, waving his hands, searching for the words. “I can’t, but—”

“It’s okay,” James says.

“It’s hard.”

“It’s okay, Sirius.”

“But I do. You know I do, right? In every way I can?”

“Sure, I know,” says James. He nods like he’s trying to speak in every possible manner, to make sure Sirius hears him. “I know, Sirius. Go to sleep, okay? Just go to sleep.”

“Okay,” says Sirius with a sniff. He moves to get off James’s bed, but James grabs his elbow and yanks him flat down.

“Don’t be a moron,” James mutters, closing his eyes.

Sirius reaches forward with an arm that won’t aim properly and clumsily removes James’s glasses for him. He places them on the nightstand. Grabs James’s hand and pets the back of it.

“Sleep good,” James says, squeezing Sirius’s fingers. “It’ll be easier in the morning.”

“Promise?” Sirius says.

“I swear,” says James, and, really, with that much conviction in his voice, it would be impossible for Sirius not to believe him.

Sirius is sore all over from quidditch.

He knew it would be work, he knew his body would be naffed about all the running and tossing and stretching and weight-lifting, but he did not expect his shoulders to weep with every vague movement. His muscles constantly feel as if they’re on the verge of tearing apart, tissue paper. His sides go sore. His back, his thighs, his jaw from clenching in preparation for the smack of the bat against the bludger. He’s a mess. He can hardly dress himself. He needs a hot shower.

“Where’s Potter?” Sirius says, harried, collecting his robes.

“In the loo,” says Remus. “He’s been in there twenty minutes.”

Sirius huffs, then crosses to the door and hammers on it with both fists. “Are you puking in there?”

“Shitting!” comes James’s reply. “It won’t stop!”

Sirius leans his forehead on the wood. “It’s always something with you.”

“I had a cup of yogurt for breakfast,” James says, voice muffled. He sounds in good spirits, the fucking weirdo. “I think that’s what’s done it. I’m allergic to yogurt.”

“You can’t be allergic to yogurt,” says Sirius. He looks at Remus over his shoulder. “Can he?”

Remus is unimpressed. “And how the fuck would I know.”

“You’re supposed to know everything,” Sirius says.

“It’s funny to me that everyone thinks that, since James and you have marks far better than mine could dream of being.”

“I’m not talking about marks,” Sirius says impatiently. “James and I have good marks, but we know nothing. You, on the other hand, know everything. So, yes, I assume you would know if one can be allergic to yogurt.”

“Don’t listen at the door!” James yells. “I don’t want you to hear this! Trauma!”

Sirius crosses his arms and strides to the far side of the room, huffing. He needed to get in there ten minutes ago if he wants time for his hair to dry before class, which he does, because it’ll go all wavy and frizzed otherwise, which he hates. “I have to shower. Hurry up.”

“Do you really think I control the speed at which my intestines deep-clean themselves? Oh my God.”

“This should be illegal,” Remus says hysterically. “This is a fever dream.”

“James,” Sirius yells. “I’m going to tell Frank you’re ill, and Frank is going to kick your arse.”

There’s a flush. The door flies open. James, thankfully clothed, starts washing his hands, sending Sirius a look of pure betrayal. “You wouldn’t.”

“No more milk,” Sirius tells him. “That’s it.”

“What will I eat?” James says, horrified.

“Milkless things!” Sirius shouts. He tosses his hands up, then winces spectacularly as his shoulders twinge.

“Get in the shower,” James says, disgusted, shaking his head. “If you come out of there before you’re in a better mood, I’ll kill you.”

“How can you be so sore and so chipper?” Sirius grinds, stretching, fingers linked, shoving his arms as far forward as he can.

“I love feeling sore,” James informs Sirius, before popping his toothbrush into his mouth. “It’s so refreshing.”

“Weirdo,” Sirius says like a swear, rolling his neck, marching into the bathroom. “Remus, is he nutty or what?”

“Nutty, yes,” Remus says, shouldering his rucksack. “Do take care not to drown yourself.”

Sirius pauses in the doorway and turns to face Remus, strangely touched. “Thanks, Remus.”

There’s a sharp pinch to his arse. He shrieks and whirls on James, tugging him into a headlock. Toothpaste drips everywhere. Both of them shout incomprehensibly. James’s toothbrush pokes Sirius’s armpit.

It’s a normal morning.

“Were you the only one who went out for the team?” Severus drawls.

“Eat my shorts,” says Regulus. “I’ll have you know I’m a fabulous flier and, in general, an extraordinarily gifted athlete.”

Severus rolls his eyes to the enchanted ceiling. “Merlin help us all, there are two of him.”

“I’m far better on a broom,” Regulus says. “You just wait until the match. Then you’ll be eating my smelliest, most threadbare shorts, you boot-licking son-of-a—”

“Reg?”

“We’ll finish this later,” he says to Snape, who rolls his eyes again and then leaves the table, rucksack in hand. Regulus turns over his shoulder, glad to be rid of him. “Hullo, Em.”

She stands there, white cat-eyed glasses on her nose, books clutched to her chest, dreadlocks tumbling over her shoulders. Unimpressed. “Did you forget we were going to study?”

“Erm,” he says. “No? Obviously not? I just wanted—uh—more bacon! That’s what I wanted. More bacon. Mmm, bacon.”

“Mm, bacon,” she echoes dryly.

“Oi, blood traitor, fuck off, won’t you?” Goyle grumbles from across the table, mouth full. “You’re spoiling my appetite.”

“Your existence spoils my existence in general, so it’s only fair,” Emerald tells him. She looks at Regulus. “To the lake?”

“Yep,” he says, grabbing his bookbag, careful to jar the table and send Goyle’s steaming teacup falling into his lap. “Whoopsies! My bad, Georgie.” He knocks the table again. A milk pitcher falls onto a tray of toast. Sausages go rolling. Bowls slide right over the lip and shatter on the floor, spilling their contents. “Oh, I’m so clumsy.” He tosses the core of his half-eaten apple right at Goyle. It hits him in the face. “Goodness me, how did that happen?”

“I’m going to fucking destroy you,” Goyle shouts, leaping to his feet.

Emerald grabs Regulus by the wrist and tugs him away, a squeal falling from her lips. They run all the way out the Great Hall, leaving Goyle and a handful of his year-mates patting him dry like he’s Jesus and they’re Mary Magdalene. Absolutely ludicrous, all of them.

Emerald is huffing as they march through the entryway, outside into the rare, stunning sunlight. “He’s going to kick your arse for that.”

“He’d have to catch me first,” says Regulus. “I’m very slippy, you know.”

“Slippy enough to avoid George Goyle?” Before Regulus can answer, she claps her hands over her lips. “Oh, Circe’s sake. You called him Georgie.”

“I did,” Regulus says. “I think it’s fitting.”

“That was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”

“I’ll pretend that you saying that doesn’t hurt my feelings.”

“Do not start.”

“I thought it was badass of me, is all.”

“You know what it was?” she says, slowing their walk, scuffing her shiny mary janes along the dusty pathway. The sun makes her periwinkle-painted fingernails go pearlescent. “Go on. Ask me what it was.”

“What was it, Emerald?” he says dutifully.

“Stupid!” she yells. The students milling by the lake turn over their shoulders. Regulus ducks his head and hides his face by holding his hand right up against his cheek. He doesn’t even exist. If he doesn’t exist, they can’t see him get shouted at.

“It was not stupid,” he says.

“It was,” she insists, cheeks dark, eyes wide. “And you know exactly what else it was, too. Who would have done that same thing. You know exactly, Regulus, what I’m going to say.”

“I do,” he acquiesces, “but does that make it bad?”

“Not bad,” Emerald says, tugging him by the elbow to that pretty willow tree she likes sitting beneath at the edge of the lake, where the light breeze that comes off the water rustles the dangling boughs. “Not bad, Reg. Just—stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Maybe I don’t care anymore,” he says.

She looks at him. Her looks cut to the bone.

“Yeah, okay, that was a lie. Figured it was worth a shot,” he says. They sit on the dirt, Emerald laying her skirt out carefully beneath her, Regulus dusting soil off his hands. That’s another thing so very similar about them: unlike their siblings, they prefer to be put-together, sleek, and shining at all times. They like being pretty. They’re proud of what they have; it isn’t their fault how their families got it all. “Maybe someday I’ll stop caring.”

“You mean you’ll stop being scared,” she says.

Regulus rolls his eyes and flops backward, resting his head on his rucksack. “If you would stop calling me a coward, I would appreciate it.”

“I’ll stop calling you a coward when you start acknowledging the fact that you’re being a coward,” she says, patting the dirt with her palms, harried. “It makes me think you—oh, it makes me think you agree with all those horrible things they say.”

Regulus stays quiet.

“When we hang out with Barty,” Emerald says carefully, “you’re not different, not really, but you go along with everything he believes. Or—you don’t go along, not really, because you hardly speak at all. And it makes me think that—that you’re just doing the same thing with me. You never speak. Your brother speaks so much, and you never speak, and if you wanted to be like him then maybe you would give me some sort of idea as to what you think about all of this!”

“I don’t think,” Regulus quips, looking up at her, at the way the sun hits her hair, at the line of her nose all illuminated by it. “That’s a lie, actually, but.” She looks back, lips pursed in that way that means she’s probably about to cry. Bloody Hufflepuff. He likes her so much. “To you,” he says, quiet, “I won’t lie. Okay? Not to you.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth now?” she says miserably.

He screws his lips to the side, thoughtful. “Hm,” he says. “Hm, hm, hm.” He holds up his pinky.

For a moment, she stares at him like she’s going to call him a thick idiot. Then she breaks into the widest, sweetest smile Regulus has ever seen. She loops her finger around his and squeezes.

“No lying,” he promises. “Not with us. It’s different with us. Can’t you feel it?”

She nods, still smiling at him. “Yes,” she says. “It’s always been different with us.”

“I, Regulus Arcturus Black, scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, promise to you, Emerald Marie Shacklebolt, scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Shacklebolt, that I will always speak the truth,” Regulus says, putting on his special occasions voice. “Do you swear the same?”

“I do,” Emerald says, eyes gleaming behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

Regulus reaches up and flicks the point of the frames, by her temple. She squeaks and bats his hand away.

“Better?” he asks, their swearing pinkies still linked.

“Mhm,” she says, looking at him, then at her folded knees. “Yeah. Thank you.”

“Of course,” he says. “Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Hm?”

“Well, you clearly didn’t want to study, or you might have opened a book,” Regulus says.

“Oh.” She wrinkles her nose, embarrassed. “Nothing, I suppose. We’ve just covered it, I think.”

“Mmm,” says Regulus, only a little bitter, “so it was an intervention.”

“Not an intervention! A moment where your concerned friend brought up her concerns to you! For your sake!”

Regulus pulls a dandelion out of the grass and lobs it at her. It gets caught on the breeze, drifting inland, past them both. They watch it go.

“Reg?” she says.

“Yes, Emerald?”

She visibly steels herself. “I hope the things you tell me are the real ones.”

He looks away. Clears his throat. Looks back at her. “I’ll try.”

Potter is bouncing his leg like an absolute menace today.

He usually is. Almost always is. But today is something else. Today, he could shake the foundation of Rome with just his heel, with just those torn-up Adidas trainers and that flash of white sport sock.

“I am begging you to stop,” Lily says. She has dirt all over her jumper and hair hanging loose in her face from her fallen scrunchie. She kills every plant she touches without even trying. She looks at a plant wrong and it gives up the ghost. And at the tiny round table behind hers and Marlene’s, Potter sits with Remus and prunes his Angel’s Trumpet and bounces his leg for England. With every twitch—Jesus Harold Christ—he drives her closer to insanity.

“Are you alright?” he asks her, brows knit.

“I should be asking you the same thing,” she says, poking her and Marlene’s poor, brown plant. It’s shriveling before her very eyes. Every blossom has dried up and fallen off, like she’s the poisonous one. “Sorry, Mar,” she says to Marlene, who pauses in filing her nails just long enough to smile reassuringly at her and say, “Oh, no prob, Lily. I was going to fail this class either way.”

Lily sighs and turns toward Potter and Remus, but mostly Remus. “How do I fix this plant?” she says.

“Not a clue,” says Remus, resting his chin on his palm.

“Ugh,” Lily whines. “I hate this bloody class.”

“I thought you liked plants,” says Remus, eyes closed. “You give me seeds every Christmas.”

“Because eventually Sprout will start to care that you filch them!” Lily hisses. Potter’s knee keeps jackknifing. “Would you quit it with the leg, Potter?”

“That, I cannot do. Not even for you, my dear Trumpeting Angel,” he says, leaning back in his seat to offer a pretty pink blossom off their plant to her. She smacks it right onto the greenhouse floor with her and Marlene’s dead leaves. “Rude,” Potter mutters.

“Sit with us, Lily,” Remus says, now resting his head on his folded arms, which is the kiss of death for him. He’ll be out in two minutes, max. “I can hear your plant crying from here for mercy. She wants you to give up on her. She’s so tired of this life, these struggles… she wants to pass peacefully on...”

“And let me fail this class? Funny,” Lily says, glaring at her plant. It drops a blossom pointedly. “Oh, bugger you, too, you little bastard.”

She looks at Potter and Remus. Sighs.

She drags her chair to their table and sits next to Remus, close enough to knock their knees together. “Do tell,” Lily says to James, feeling like Petunia, a bloodhound for gossip. He flicks his brows. “I complained to you in Divination,” she urges. “It’s only fair you complain to me back.”

“Oooh,” Remus says. “You’re talking now. You two.”

“We’ve talked plenty,” Lily says.

“Nah, we’ve argued,” James corrects with an icy sort of smile. “We don’t talk. Look at us now, even.”

“Hmm,” Lily says, narrowing her eyes. She slumps in her chair and lays her hands palms-up on the table. “There,” she says, looking right at James Potter, expectant. “No tricks. No malevolence. Talk to me, Potter. Like I’m one of the lads.”

James wrinkles his nose. “So you want to hear about how yogurt made me—”

“Do not, James,” Remus says.

James grins, then looks away, smile fading. Sprout’s silhouette is visible through the opaque glass walls, jovial even in this vague half-way, as she talks circles with Frank Longbottom, who interrupted their lesson in a fit of excitement twenty minutes ago, wielding a plant all covered with spikes and flowers and pustules—something Lily had never seen before—and has had Sprout’s attention since.

“Potter?” Lily says.

He sighs. Looks at her. Ruffles a hand through his hair. “My mum’s in a ministry holding cell,” he admits.

Lily blinks. “She’s what now.”

“She got soft-arrested,” James says. “Dad owled me this morning, and the writing was all wiggly so I know he was just about laughing his arse off, but Mum was at a protest yesterday afternoon for—increased elves’ wages, maybe? Or maybe it was the one against the poaching of unicorns, I dunno, she’s always somewhere—anyway, the protest was busted because they got rowdy and Mum decided to stand her ground rather than retreat when the DMLE broke it up. Dad had to take my mum, his wife, to a cell in the ministry last night.”

“Oh my God,” says Lily, gaping.

“It’s a bit hilarious,” James says with a funny sort of half-laugh, “but, I dunno, she’s pretty old, no matter how badass she is. I don’t think they’re going to punish her or anything, and of course she’s not going to prison, but—she’s got old hands, I dunno. I dunno.” He shakes his head, takes a breath, and plants a self-deprecating sort of grin on his lips. “I’m a bit of a Mummy’s Boy. Sue me for it, but I don’t like thinking of her in a cell.”

“No, of course,” Lily says. “She’s—this has happened before?”

“Oh, yeah, two or three times now,” James says. “It’s—like I said, it’s fine. I’m being stupid, really.”

Lily blinks three times. “It would be stupid if you weren’t worried.”

James slumps forward and prods his beautiful, healthy Angel’s Trumpet with the tip of his wand. “Eh. Whatever. She’ll be fine. Dad promised.”

“And that’s enough for you?” Lily says.

“Absolutely,” James says firmly, but, again, his leg starts to bounce.

Lily kicks her foot out and drops it atop the knee, weighing it down.

James looks at her shoes—a pair of patent leather mary janes with a strap over the top and blocky two-inch heels that Mary had transfigured for her, as Mary is fantastic at clothing Transfiguration and Lily is wholeheartedly mediocre at it, as she is with all Transfiguration—and then starts fiddling with them, unpermitted. He undoes the little snap button, then presses it closed again with a click. Open, closed. Open, closed.

“What do you need?” she asks at length.

James startles. “What do you mean?”

“To,” Lily gestures wildly, “make it better, I dunno. What do you need?”

The corners of James’s lips flick into a smile for the shortest moment before he schools his expression into one of grim seriousness. “A date. With you. In Hogsmeade.”

“You are insufferable,” Lily says, yanking her foot back and returning to her table, leaving James behind laughing and Remus starting to snore—just in time, as Sprout pops back into the room with a cheerful, “Where are we at, everyone? Good? Good!”

“You still fancy Lily, I see,” Remus says, bumping into James’s shoulder as they walk out of the greenhouse, the smell of dung clinging to their hands.

James carelessly slings his arm over Remus’s shoulders. “I have never felt like fancying is the right word, you know.”

“You hardly let us use any word at all,” Remus says. “You alternate between waxing poetic about her and shouting at us when we so much as say the words Lily and fancy in the same sentence.” James makes a non-committal sound. “What’s the right word, then?” Remus says. “If fancying isn’t it.”

James sighs. “Dunno.”

“Interesting.”

“I just… well, I suppose it’s not our time yet,” James says strongly. More strongly than Remus has ever heard James address the topic of Lily. “Hers and mine, I mean. I’ll wait. I’m patient. All we need is time.”

Remus, for the first time, considers that James could be entirely right about it all: that Lily will love him, one day. That James doesn’t just fancy her, and hasn’t ever just fancied her. That James keeps on with her because he knows it’ll be worth it in the end.

The thought both frustrates and amuses Remus. He doesn’t know why James won’t just give in and let himself be happy before then—why James is always betting his house on the impossible.

But, too, Remus recognizes it’s a pretty hypocritical thing for him to think.

He jostles James as they walk. “I bet, mate,” he says. “You just hang in there. She’d be stupid not to come around eventually.”

“This is a misery, it is,” Frank Longbottom says, head tilted back to watch the sky upend an utter monsoon upon the quidditch pitch.

“Then call practice off,” Sirius says. He jumps with a rumble of thunder.

“Why on Earth would I do that?” Frank says.

“This is not halal, mate,” James says. He, though, looks resigned to his fate.

“If we’d be forced to play in these conditions, we ought to practice in them too.” Frank visibly steels himself. “Alright, men. Sack up.” He marches into the deluge, ever their fearless leader.

Frank is a damn good coach. Sirius has known as much since try-outs, and has been feeling it since their first practice. Sometimes, like now, Sirius thinks Frank may be too good of a coach. So good that he should, maybe, just maybe, absolutely not be a coach.

“Does anyone have a good drying spell?” asks Antonio Fernandez, shaking out his shoulders, standing in the doorway with the rest of them, staring at the way the rain is fucking smattering off the puddle in the middle of the pitch.

“You’re on your own with that, Fez old boy,” says Gwendolyne, cheerily marching past them and onto the grass, tilting her head back to catch the rain on her skin.

“She’s insane. She’s insane,” Fez says fervently. He jogs out after her, shouting, “Oi! Wait up!”

Connor goes next, sighing. His ginger hair turns a muddy brown when it’s wet. It matches their uniforms better, this way. Carter follows Connor, his keeper’s helmet protecting his hair from going soggy, the lucky bastard. James stands patiently at Sirius’s right shoulder.

“What are we waiting for?” he asks.

“A sign from God,” says Sirius.

As if on command, stark white lightning cracks across the sky. They can hear Gwen’s laugh singing, can see Frank pressing a noogie into Carter’s skull for jumping. Everyone’s practice gear is absolutely sodden. They’re all fine and everything is lovely.

“There we go, then,” Sirius says, and marches into the rain.

The water is cold, colder than the air, and falling so fast that it hammers Sirius’s hair knot down the curve of his skull. James has his head tilted back, catching raindrops on his tongue, on the lenses of those prescription goggles that makes him look like an electrocuted demiguise.

“Alright,” Frank roars over the patter. “Come on, in the air.”

“Bloody hell,” Sirius mutters.

“We’ll just—we’ll do a catch,” Frank says, spitting a mouthful of rainwater, becoming annoyed. “This is so fucking stupid. We’ll do a catch, just to warm up, and then some laps. Then we’ll all practice shooting with this awful wind resistance. Con, sorry for you, mate. We’ll do some seeker-only practice later in the week, alright?”

Connor tosses a waterlogged thumbs-up.

“Alright,” Frank says, rubbing his palms over his cropped hair, shucking water off it. “Up and at ‘em.”

It goes well, for a while. Fez and Gwen get in some sort of strange showdown, tossing the quaffle back and forth with horrifying precision and force. James is shockingly adept at catching anything, even slicked up, and Sirius spends too much time admiring the way James traces every move of the ball, every flinch of the elbow before it's thrown, every dart of the eyes. He’s somehow better now than he was at try-outs in second year, which none of them had thought possible at the time, but James is fucking spectacular. He’ll always surprise them all, Sirius is sure.

Thunder roars. Sirius flinches.

He focuses on the rain running over his cheeks, on the hair plastered to his forehead, on Frank’s shoulders and Connor’s broom stance and the weight of the quaffle in his hands, not quite unfamiliar but not nearly as natural as his bat. He tosses underhand to Carter, who keeps trying to smack the thing away rather than catch it out of some deeply-ingrained keeper’s instinct.

The quaffle is tossed back to Sirius. Thunder rumbles. Sirius jumps, his grip goes wonky, and the quaffle unceremoniously smashes the two littlest fingers of his right hand against his palm with a crack like thick porcelain.

Sirius drops the quaffle, pain flaring white-hot up into his wrist.

“Oh, ow,” Fez calls sympathetically.

“Nice catch, arsehole,” grunts Carter.

“Fuck off,” Sirius shouts back.

“Alright, everyone quit a second,” Frank calls, arm raised.

James is upon Sirius already, hovering so close their ankles knock together.

“You’re an utterly unmitigated disaster of a boy,” James tells him, voice too-loud with nerves.

Sirius thinks it’s rather bold of James to say, tatterdemalion as he is.

“M’fine,” Sirius says, afraid to move, to make it worse.

“Shut up,” James snaps. “You look like you’re about to puke.” He turns on his broom, waves at Frank wordlessly.

Frank shouts over the thunder: “Fuck it. Literally just—just fuck it. Go inside, dry off, we’ll practice tomorrow at seven in the dungeons, before lessons.”

“Running,” Gwen whines, and Fez is complaining to Carter, and James is taking Sirius’s hand in his so tenderly that Sirius wants to sock him in the nose for it. James holds him still by the wrist and the rain pounds down and thunder—Sirius flinches.

“Why didn’t I know you’re scared of thunder, hm?” James mutters. “Can you straighten your fingers?”

Sirius tries, and the pain of it makes him gag. “Absolutely not. And I’m not scared of thunder.” He’s scared of the trapdoor to the attic hideaway slamming open. He’s scared of the library door shutting heavily behind him while his mother rolls her sleeves and tells him to listen better next time so this won’t have to happen again. He’s scared of a lot of things, but not thunder.

James scrutinizes him. “Alright,” he says quietly. “Come on, then. Hospital for you.”

“Battle wounds. I’ll wear them with pride.”

James knocks his elbow against Sirius’s, then gives Sirius’s broomstick a nudge so he’s facing the changing rooms. “Go on,” James says. “I’m right here with you.”

Their newest Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher—their fourth in as many years—is majorly fucked in the head.

James knows this. It’s bitterly obvious to him.

Unfortunately, it seems he’s the only one who has managed to notice.

Hardly taller than Sirius, that Professor Kriska is. He wears fancy robes and heavy rings on his fingers. He walks with his back too straight and speaks with a voice too sharp.

“He’s an arsehole, sure,” Remus says when James brings it up, “but so are most people. At least we’re learning.”

With Kriska comes a new way of teaching Defense: a lecture class once a week, held in a large, auditorium-style classroom, with every member of the year present across all four houses, and then a practical lesson later on where they apply those learnings.

On the first day of class, standing at the front of the lecture hall with his beady eyes and shiny bald head, he had instructed all the muggleborn students to stand, so he would know who they are.

“Why?” a Ravenclaw asked.

“So I know who you are,” Kriska said again.

A warning bell erupted in James’s stomach. Naturally, he stood first, obviously not a muggleborn from his heir ring to his pristine robes to his last name but certainly not giving a flobberworm fart, which made Remus and Sirius and Peter stand, until, one by one, the rest of the Gryffindors rose too. Then, the Hufflepuffs. A smattering of Ravenclaws. A Slytherin girl named Alessia Carrow with her chin held high.

James had glared at the professor. The professor had scowled at them all and taken five points from each house for cheek. All James felt was relief in knowing that the man didn’t have something over on anyone in the class except him. He could take it. He can take it.

“He’s awful,” James insists now, six weeks in, as he walks with the girls and Peter from class, Sirius off escorting a white-cheeked Remus to the dormitory for some aconite. “I think he’s a Death Eater, no shit.”

“Just because he’s an arsehole doesn’t mean he’s a fascist, James,” Dorcas says timidly.

“Yeah, you skipped a few middle steps there,” says Peter.

“I just get a vibe from him,” James insists. “A really bad vibe. It’s something about his eyes.”

“They’re not deep and beautiful and romantic enough for you?” says Mary.

“He looks like a snake,” James says stubbornly. “He looks like he would go casting awful spells on muggles just for kicks.”

“I think you need to take a deep breath,” Lily says, and he turns on her.

“Are you calling me dramatic?” James demands.

“If the boot fits,” Lily says, continuing to walk.

He sputters, then follows. “Say that to my face, you utter toadstool.”

She whirls on her heel, facing him, walking backwards, hair swishing in a big mess of frizz and curls around her shoulders, eyes glowing like she’s the universe’s favorite, and she says, “If. The boot. Fits.”

“We’re going to get in a real fistfight one of these days,” James mutters sourly, adjusting the rolls of his sleeves with sharp flicks of his fingers, the others chuckling behind him, “and you’re going to regret treating me like—”

“A cum sock?” Lily offers.

James, a boy of fourteen with the sense of humor to boot, chokes on air.

Lily disappears around the corner. James, a bit boggled, slows his strides to match up with Peter’s, shaking his head.

“I believe you, James,” Peter says quietly, seriously.

James tosses an arm around his shoulders. “Thanks, Petey. I hope I’m wrong, really, but I have a feeling.”

“I trust your gut feelings,” Peter says. “They’re usually pretty spot on.”

“I trust them, too. That’s why I’m worried.”

Everything is somewhat calm, somewhat unextraordinary, until the second week of October, when they’re meant to start learning about inferi and, instead, the chalkboard says UNFORGIVABLE CURSES.

“Erm,” says James.

“The executive decision to bring this part of the curriculum to younger students as well as sixth years was not made lightly,” Kriska says from the front of the room, head tilted, benign smile on his lips. “With the state of our social sphere being what it is, it’s best for you all to be exposed to the reality of the power that you could face at a young age. Do you understand?”

James has a very bad feeling.

But he lets Sirius tug him into the classroom by the elbow, and he lets Kriska give his little introductory speech about the effects of each curse and how they must not be treated like child’s playthings and how the most important ingredient in the internal soup of spell casting is intention, and that’s strange enough as it is, and James looks across the room, but he’s the only one bugging. Sirius is doodling cartoon fish with legs. Remus is half-asleep. Peter is braiding Mary’s hair from the desk behind her.

That’s when Kriska says he’s going to start demonstrating the curses before the class. And James thinks, oh, brilliant, where’s the lacewing fly you’re going to Imperio into tap-dancing?

But then Kriska says, “McKinnon, how about you?” and James says, “Excuse me?”

Every eye in the room whips onto him.

“You’re going to cast Unforgivables on us,” James says, a fury unlike any he’s felt roaring in his ears.

“The Imperius Curse is something you should all learn to throw off,” says Kriska easily.

James looks around. Nearly everyone is avoiding his eye. The only one who looks at him is Peter, and Peter shakes his head minutely.

“Whatever,” James mutters, tugging a hand through his hair, scowling. Unforgivables. It’s fucking wrong.

Marlene’s hand brushes James’s desk as she walks to the front. Without looking at him, almost without opening her mouth, she whispers a desperate, lilting, “Shut up!”

James turns to Sirius. Raises his eyebrows minutely.

Sirius gives a single nod. Of course. It’s par for the course with Noble and Most Ancient Houses—especially those holding onto their Wizengamot seats.

Remus next. They meet eyes. He shakes his head.

Peter. A wide-eyed no.

Fuck.

He meets the eye of Lily, of all people, and she, of everyone, looks as nauseated as him. He frowns at her. She shakes her head in confusion.

Mary. No. Dorcas. A nod. Thank Merlin.

That’s their house covered. The Slytherins in their year are mostly halfbloods, or purebloods from less prominent houses. To them, it’ll be down to their parents if they’ve been trained. Goyle will have been. Yaxley, perhaps. Dolohov won’t have been, nor will Avery, but Snape—he’s a toss-up. The Greengrass and Bulstrode girls will have been tried, but definitely not the Abbott one.

Marlene, muggleborn, tall and knock-kneed and wispy, stands in front of their class to the jeers of some and the gentle calls of admiration of the rest, and she glows lightly. Like there’s a bit of gold dust in her veins. James has never seen anyone like her—like she’s made of real good stuff. Aged mead and fine champagne bubbling. She’s sunshine.

“Imperio,” says Kriska, and her light goes abruptly dim.

James reaches over and squeezes Sirius’s elbow.

Marlene, glazed, slack-faced, stands before them and twirls, twice. Her arms go up, then down again. She does an arabesque with grace James has never seen her lanky limbs possess, then bends over to touch her toes, her short, plaid skirt flying up in a way that has shouts of outrage and appreciation rising in a horrible chorus.

It’s as she’s hunched that the door smacks open.

Kriska gives his wand a surreptitious wave and Marlene straightens, her brows knitted and her lips turned down at the corners. James leaps to his feet and runs to her without so much as looking at Professor McGonagall and her stiff lips and her raised wand in the doorway like an archangel ascended.

“Hey,” James says quietly, taking Marlene’s elbow to right her, and Mary is there smoothing down her skirt, and Lily, and Marlene is saying, “Bloody hell, it’s like being asleep but awake at the same time,” and James says, “Come on, sit down,” and Mary says, “That was terrifying,” and Lily says, audibly shaken, “You don’t have to do that again.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” Goyle hisses as they lead Marlene to her and Mary’s desk, and James’s stomach twists, but Mary tells him, “Don’t.”

“I’d like to see how you take the Cruciatus, mudblood,” says Yaxley, and no one needs to tell James Don’t, because Lily stomps on Yaxley’s foot as they pass. His yelp of pain is particularly enjoyable.

James’s ears are ringing. He can’t hear McGonagall yelling, can’t hear her say the castle is set with a hairpin trigger to announce the usage of unregistered Unforgivables, can’t hear her demand to know what the bloody hell he was thinking, casting the spell on an underage witch, and especially doing so without governmental approval, can’t hear her swear an Auror team will be summoned to question him, but Remus will recall it all for him later.

Now, all he feels is a sense of outrage under his skin like lightning and a strong desire to punch something.

He sits Marlene down. She’s pale and wide-eyed. He’s sweating.

“You’re okay,” he tells her.

“I know,” she says. “That was crazy.”

Mary squeezes James’s hand.

“Please return to your dormitories until your next class,” McGonagall says loudly, and the ringing in James’s ears fades to a background hum. “I expect you to handle this maturely. Do not spread rumors. Nothing is certain, now. There is nothing else to say. Good evening. Miss McKinnon, you come with me.”

“I’ll go too,” Mary says strongly, and James keeps the same words from rolling off his tongue only because Sirius, at the desk next to Marlene’s, looks particularly white in the face.

Not a single Gryffindor moves from their desks until Mary and Marlene have disappeared out the door with one of McGonagall’s hands on each of their shoulders. She gives a glance back at them before she goes, and, if James didn’t know better, he’d say she looks scared.

Only then do the Gryffindors start to stand, uneasy, whispering amongst themselves. Lily wrings her hands and Sirius has lost the liquidity of his movements and Dorcas looks sick. Remus’s lips are mashed together. Peter has his hands tucked under his armpits. James shakes. Just enough to complicate shouldering his backpack.

He loves Marlene, of course, the same way he loves the rest—but he hadn’t realized the lengths he’d go to in order to protect her until now. He’d jump in front of an Imperio for her, easily. For any of them. Dorcas, Mary, Lily. Peter, Remus, and Sirius, of course. It’s easy to consider them his family, spending every day with them, eating at their elbows, sleeping in adjacent towers, attending almost all the same classes. They’re family, and James doesn’t let family get hurt.

“Come on,” says a voice that isn’t right. Snape’s. At Lily’s shoulder, his lips turned down at the corners.

Even Dorcas looks ready to yell.

“Oh, don’t!” Lily says sharply, glaring at Snape. “Are you so tactless as to think I want to be with anyone else right now?”

Snape blinks.

“Leave me alone,” Lily growls, and she grabs Dorcas and Peter by the wrists, tugging them with her out of the room.

Remus grabs Sirius and James by the hands and they follow, leaving Snape there with a sort of furious light rising in his eyes.

“She’ll be in the hospital wing, won’t she?” says Lily, and she sounds as if she’s suddenly contracted a head cold. “I-if we want to see her, she’s probably there.”

“Yes,” says Remus.

“What the fuck,” James bursts. “What the fuck?”

“Dumbledore must’ve interviewed that man,” Lily breathes, blinking fast. “He had to approve his appointment. The Imperius. Is that—is it normal? For wizards?”

“Purebloods,” says Sirius, being dragged by Remus more than walking, “and only the most traditional at that.”

“That’s why I haven’t been under it before,” James says. “Nor Remus, nor Peter.”

“I was trained at age six,” Sirius says. “Over and over again, by different members of my family, one at a time, until I could reliably throw it off. It took years.”

“I had a cousin who was trained a bit,” Dorcas says. “She said it wasn’t awful because it doesn’t hurt, but she used to cry so much after that her parents gave up on teaching her. They just couldn’t handle it.”

“It’s like the person who casts it has scooped your brain out,” Sirius says, staring blankly ahead, “and let your head get all cold and dusty and empty, and then they whisper into your skull so their voice echoes against your bones, and you think to yourself that it might be your voice, because it’s in your head, after all, but it feels wrong. It just—it feels wrong, but it feels good, too. It’s almost relaxing, because you’re not in control for once. You get to let someone else drive.”

They’re so quiet. Sirius’s voice weaves with the clatter of their footsteps on the stone as Lily leads them down the halls, around corners and down stairs and—

“Let’s take this tapestry here,” James says, yanking them off course. “It’s faster.”

“Since when was this passage here?” Lily says, climbing through the opening as James holds it aside. It’s got dancing pixies on it, all in tutus, fairy floss pink and blue.

“Forever, I’d reckon,” says Peter, following her.

“Bloody hell,” Dorcas whispers, voice echoing in the chambers.

To Sirius, James gives an apologetic glance. He isn’t sure if he was supposed to share this.

Sirius shrugs it off, then climbs through. James needs to give him a hug or something right fucking now, before his bones melt and his lungs go flat.

Remus goes through last before James. The tapestry falls against the stone with a huff, and then they’re all there, in the dark, packed close.

“Do you want to lead, Pete?” James asks.

“Sure,” Peter says without enthusiasm. He lights his wand and heads off, Dorcas on his heels.

Lily turns to them. “There are more secret passages?”

“Going to rat us out?” James asks.

She scowls. “No. I’m jealous I didn’t think to look for them first.”

Then she turns and goes after Dorcas down the narrow tunnel at a jog, every footstep echoing.

James watches for a moment, says, “Huh,” then follows.

They have to argue with Poppy for five whole minutes before she lets them in. They have to hand her their wands, promise to be quiet, swear that they won’t excite Marlene. As it is, she already has a small crowd of friends around her: Marlene has always been so bright, and teenagers aren’t much more than moths. There’s Millie-Short-For-Mildred and Topher-Who-Mary-Calls-Gopher from Hufflepuff, and a fifth year Ravenclaw named Sadie. The only thing about her James knows is that people call her Sexy Sadie, like the song, and they’re not far off: she, like Millie-Short-For-Mildred, wears her skirt short and her shirt open lower than James reckons is standard regulation. Mary is there, sitting under the sheets beside Marlene, clinging to her hand with a white-knuckled grip. Dorcas and Lily climb onto the foot of the bed and Sirius drapes himself over the nearest cot and James shoves Remus and his bad knees into a visitor’s chair. They don’t really talk. They just look at each other.

It seems insane. It seems the story-book sort of fantastic. James didn’t think this happened in real life.

He knew, obviously he knew about the attacks, about pureblood culture, about the awful things that happen to muggleborns and muggles and whoever else, but this happened right in front of them. This happened at Hogwarts.

It’s the first time James starts to realize the sympathies of the Death Eaters are inside the castle just as much as outside.

It makes sense, James thinks, that they’re all suspicious of the new professor that is said to arrive on the following Sunday evening, but doesn’t come to dinner. No peeks. The halls are alight with gossip, of course, about everything and nothing but especially about poor Marlene, who really is an inter-house treasure. No one has seen the professor, though some Ravenclaws camped outside his office in hopes of catching a glimpse.

All of Monday is spent listening to whispers, bits of half-baked rumors starting with “He’s seven feet tall and battled a dragon” and ending with “No, you don’t get it, he’s literally Elvis Presley, I saw him.”

Tuesday has the year four Gryffindors nervously shifting their weight in the hallway outside the classroom, every last one of them early for the lesson out of curiosity more than anything else. Sirius is fiddling with the buttons of Remus’s non-uniform-standard grandpa cardigan. Lily is muttering with Peter, leaning against the wall. James tucks his hands into his armpits and looks at them all. Just looks, coolly.

The bell rings.

They file into the room utterly nervous, sit in their seats wearing brave faces, and wait.

It’s a long minute later that their new professor walks in. He goes right to the desk, drops his case, and then turns to them. The class holds its breath. They look.

Mary seems to be speaking for everyone when she mutters, horrified: “Oh my God. Sexy. Hot, oh, very hot.”

The man is tall, but has posture like a parenthesis. He’s young, but his dark hair is starting to go grey at the temples. He has the faded sort of freckles of someone who has roasted themselves in the sun every summer for lifetimes, and the deep-set, dark-lashed brown eyes of an angel. His leather boots are thick-soled and soft-sided with wear, and his woolly cardigan has elbow patches of a matching hide. His expression is carefully blank as he gives them a sweeping look.

“I,” says Marlene blankly. “Wow. Okay. Worth it. Absolutely worth everything.”

“Hello,” says the professor. His voice is deep, clear, and rather quiet. “This is Defense Against the Dark Arts, and you’re Gryffindor house?”

“Yes, sir,” they say, enraptured.

“Damn,” says the professor. “I hoped there would be a mix-up and I’d get stuck with Care of Magical Creatures. More exciting, that.”

There’s a nervous twitter from the class.

“That was a joke,” their professor says. “If joking is beyond what your mental capacity is capable of, I’ll keep things straightforward.”

“Good Lord, anything but that,” says Sirius dryly, leaning back in his chair. There’s a satisfied smile on his lips, like the cat with a mouthful of canary.

The professor gives them a sweeping, considering glance. He removes his wand from a holster on his thigh and gives it a wave to close the door. “Shall we set down some ground rules?” he says. “I hear your last professor did nothing of the sort, and that’s why he is, rather unfortunately, under charges from the Ministry for exposing ye youngins to Dark Magic.”

James is startled by the frankness with which the man speaks. Immediately, he’s excited. Honesty. They haven’t had a professor look at them and deem them worth honesty yet. No one talks about the uprisings and attacks and threats. This man will. James can tell. He feels it like sparklers in his palms.

“Rule one,” the professor says, “is that whatever problems we have outside this room disappear the moment we walk in. When we’re here, it’s to be here and learn. It’s to fill our minds with information that will save our lives someday. It’s to become better, brighter, and smarter students. The spells and theories you learn in this class will, undeniably, apply to every other aspect of your education.” He flicks his brows. “We’ll learn about dark creatures, which supplants your magical creature education. We’ll learn how to deflect magic, which will come in handy when your partner buggers up in Potions and explodes your cauldron. We’ll learn to duel,” the class breaks into whispers, “because that is the only way to protect yourself properly in a world that doesn’t care if you live or die.” The Professor straightens. “Do you care if you live or die?”

Yes, James thinks. I do.

The professor gives a satisfied nod. “Good. Moving on, then.” He clears his throat, looks down as his eye twitches into a wink. James thinks he’s hiding a smirk. He turns on his heel, takes languid steps along the length of the raised stage at the front of the room. “If you see me while you’re walking in the corridors? No you didn’t. If you see me carrying six to-go boxes filled with mashed potatoes out of the Great Hall? No you didn’t. If you see me laying face-down on the floor of Greenhouse four? No you didn’t. If you see me utilizing the prefect’s lavatory to take a bubble bath at four in the morning? No you didn’t. If you see me doing a crossword at my desk with my pet kneazle and figure you ought to come in to ask me for extra help on the homework assignment? No you especially didn’t.”

“He’s bloody perfect,” Sirius hisses, eyes locked on the man as he paces with his veiny hands clasped behind his back.

“If I give you a critique on an assignment and you respond to it unprofessionally, I will put you at that desk in the corner over there, facing the wall. That is the time-out corner. We will all, as a class, laugh at you for being in the time-out corner. Ha ha, look at that immature little man who can’t handle constructive criticism. You will be embarrassed. You will deserve this embarrassment because you are young and stupid. Everyone together: let’s practice. Imagine there’s someone in that corner desk. Now—” he lifts his hands like a maestro to his orchestra and they all laugh together, forced at first, but then a bit more real as they realize he genuinely means it with all of his heart. And it’s funny. It is. They’re fifteen, and this man is going to put them in time out, and they’re going to let him.

The man nods in satisfaction. “Very good. That imaginary child has now learned his lesson. And here is the lesson the rest of you will learn now, if you pay attention: I’m the expert. You’re the child. You’re going to listen to me because I’m going to make you smarter. This will be a mutually beneficial arrangement: you learn how to protect yourself and I make a bloody excellent salary with which I will buy many, many candles I will likely never burn.” He stands, tucks his hands into his pockets, and surveys them all. “Any questions?”

Marlene raises her hand slowly.

“You, blonde one,” the man says.

“I was just wondering what we should call you, sir,” she says, cheeks going pink.

The man’s lips crawl upward in a smirk. He says, voice easy and just a bit cocky, arms crossed over his broad chest, “I’m Auror Campbell. But you all—” he outright grins, eyes glimmering like the ministry badge boasting A on his breast, “you lucky things may call me August.”

“In the words of one Sirius Black, Spank me and call me baby, Big Daddy.”

“Marlene!” Lily cries, laughing, clutching her stomach. “You can’t say that! He’s got to be nearly thirty!”

Marlene shrugs, popping a square of chocolate in her mouth. “I can’t help it. Have you seen him? Like Adonis, that man. He’s carved of ivory and dipped in gold.”

“He’s a Renaissance statue with a lumberjack beard,” says Mary, whose nerves had given up the ghost upon the first sight of August that morning. She’s been dreamily sketching outlines of the man all afternoon. None of them are accurate—they all look rather like Disney princes, tall and proud where August was hunched and witty and sharp—but there’s something about the man… something about him that makes him princely nonetheless.

“I could steam at the mouth like a kettle when he walks into a room,” Dorcas says dreamily. “I want to hold his hand and give him flowers and pet his kneazle.”

“I want him to teach me a lesson,” Marlene says. “I want him to teach me every lesson he knows.”

“What do you think his kneazle is called?” Dorcas says, staring into space. “I think it must be something like Rusty, or White Lightning.”

“That is so hot,” says Marlene with a whine.

“Sirius told me he calls dibs,” Lily informs them, “so you’re all shit out of luck.”

“I wonder if those boys daydream about professors in their dorm as well,” Mary says, tying a bit of silk around her hair, elbows all akimbo as she strains. “Honestly, I can only imagine what happens up there.”

“Non-stop circle-jerk,” says Marlene.

Laughter erupts around the room.

(In fact, Sirius and James are perched on the highest balcony of the boy’s wing of Gryffindor tower, past all the dormitories, filling envelopes with poorly written jokes and a bit of eau de Cheering Solution, which Peter has so helpfully made gaseous for them. They transfigure the envelopes into paper butterflies, rain them onto the courtyard below, and watch everyone around catch them, unfurl them, and find a laugh inside. This does not make Marlene’s prediction any less humorous. The boys will smirk and snicker when Dorcas relays it to them over breakfast the next day. Sirius will mime doing something quite fallic to his boiled egg.)

“There’s no way Peter would be into that,” Dorcas is saying with a shudder. “He has an unflinchingly heterosexual air about him.”

“What, so you think Potter would be into it?” Lily says incredulously, slipping a bookmark into her Bronte and putting it aside.

“I think that Potter would be into anything at all, if you asked him nicely enough,” Marlene says wisely. “Sometimes I wonder about him and Sirius, really.”

“No,” Lily says, shaking her head but smiling, “not him and Potter. Sirius wouldn’t really stoop that low.”

“I believe they live in a constant state of Ew, that’s gross! I’d never do that with him… unless he asked me first,” Mary says, coming over to Lily’s bed and sitting, bringing with her a cloud of orange blossom perfume. “I don’t doubt any of them could fall in love with any other of the others at a whim.”

“That’s the best sort of friendship,” Lily says, leaning towards Mary and batting her eyelashes.

“They’re a harem,” Dorcas says as Mary leans backwards on the mattress, away from Lily.

“We could be a harem,” Lily says, winking exaggeratedly, “if you want.”

“Don't promise me anything you won’t go through with,” Marlene says, laying smoothly on her back, an arm tossed over her eyes. She’s all hard lines and long limbs and, really, Lily thinks, considering her, she wouldn’t say no without at least thinking about it first. “You’ll break my heart, you will.”

“I already have,” Lily says, rising to her knees and striking a lascivious pose. “You’ve seen me in my kecks, haven’t you? That’s a vision no one could come away from un-enamored.”

“I think I’m fairly enamoring, no?” says Mary, pouting, running her fingers through her long hair. “Really, someone should have fallen in love with me by now.”

“I think so, Mare,” Lily says. “You’re very beautiful and strong and everyone in the world is missing out for not being in love with you.”

“Seconded,” Marlene sings.

“Dorcas?” Mary prods, batting her lashes.

“Mm, I dunno. Your make-up makes you look like a tart,” Dorcas says at length, eyes glimmering.

“I’ll punch your pretty teeth in,” Mary says sweetly.

“Fight, fight, fight,” Marlene chants as Lily chants, “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”

Dorcas snags her pillow out from under her head and wallops Mary across the face.

Mary shrieks, then grabs her own pillow, descending on Dorcas with a war-cry.

Lily looks at Marlene. Marlene shrugs.

They grab up their pillows and join in, shouting, laughing, and Lily is grateful that here, at least, between the four walls of their dormitory, they are always safe.

“I’ll put down a whole galleon.”

“No you won’t.”

“I will, I’ll put down a galleon—”

“I know you, though. You won’t stand by it. The time will come to cash in and you’ll say you just spent your last one on—I dunno, hair product, or a fancy tarot deck.”

“A galleon. I swear. No hair mousse or tarot decks until the game is over. I’m putting down a galleon.”

“Is the galleon yours or Mary’s?”

“Does that really matter?”

“I suppose not, but—”

“Put me down. Put me down. Put me down—”

“Alright, Jesus, you’re a worse nag than Lily. For which category, then?”

“Bloody hell, there’s categories?”

Remus rolls his eyes. “Do you even know what you’re betting on? Or are you just doing it because everyone else is?”

“Mm,” says Marlene, cocking her head. “The second one.”

Remus pats the side of the cardboard box he’s transformed into a little coin collecting tin by separating it into three sections using strips of extra cardboard he cut down to size. It rattles, full of gold, silver, and bronze. “There’s three outcomes we’re betting on. The red section is bets on Sirius falling off his broom. The gold section is bets on Sirius knocking James out with his bat. The purple section is bets on Sirius knocking himself out with the bat.”

Marlene squints up at him, hair like molten gold in the firelight. “What did you put money on?”

“I surely can’t say.”

“And why not?”

“That would be cheating! I’m the—I’m the mastermind behind it, I know what everyone bet on, I have the notebook with everything tallied in it! And I have insider knowledge, considering the match is all James has talked about all week!”

“You put money on all three, didn’t you.”

“Yeah, I did.”

Marlene bursts into loud laughter.

Remus smiles too, covering his mouth with his hand. Sirius doesn’t know about the betting yet—he would’ve begged to be a part of it by now if he did—but that’s only because he and James have been on the pitch since the moment classes ended, working their arses off with Frank and co. It’s been strange, all of a sudden not having Sirius around the dormitory to spend time with in the absence of James, but Remus has been doing well for himself. He gets a fair bit of revising done when they aren’t around, mostly because the both of them feel no need to revise, as they both seem to have memories like bear traps. Remus’s memory is, on the other hand, swiss cheese, especially when it comes to things he doesn’t exactly give a fig about. Like History of Magic, for example. There simply isn’t the room in his head for all of those famous sword-wielding bastards.

Other things, he remembers. Other things, he has time to think about now. Other things, other things, it’s always something but when it’s other things, Remus ends up hurting his own feelings more often than he’d likely to admit, because other things almost always sting.

He’s been missing his mum like a lung.

So he spends loads of time with Lily, watching her knit clumsy scarves and kipping off to use Sirius’s record player to listen to his copy of Ziggy Stardust and Lily’s copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. He mostly avoids Peter, but only because he doesn’t know what to say to him in the absence of Sirius offending him or James acting as a conversational buffer. He sits with Marlene and Dorcas and Mary and works with them on their Care of Magical Creatures homework and listens to them whisper about the boys they quite suddenly find attractive. They didn’t talk about boys last year—not to Remus, anyway. But now it’s Oh, doesn’t Mark from Ravenclaw have the nicest arms you’ve ever seen? and D’you think it’s really inappropriate of me to say that Yaxley has nice cheekbones? Yes? Alright.

Anyway. He’s keeping his hands full and his mind busy, and that’s what matters. He gets a letter from Dad every week, and that matters too. Lily never questions it when Remus just wants to lay in bed and nap while the boys are at practice, and that matters perhaps most of all.

Remus zones back in just as Marlene is wiping her eyes, laughter abating. “I swear, Remus,” she says, “sometimes I’m not sure if you hate him or love him more than any of the rest of us do.” Remus hums, because she has just uncannily hit the nail on the head in a devastating way and he doesn’t know how to pretend otherwise. “Sirius does seem like the tough love type, doesn’t he?” Marlene continues, not noticing Remus’s discomfort. “Like he needs a little roughing up every now and then.”

“I don’t think love should rough anyone up,” Remus says, immediately defensive, because he’s still young and the best love he’s known was his mother’s and that love was like fucking summer sunshine. “I think love is—it’s supposed to do the opposite, isn’t it? It’s where you turn to when you’re done with being roughed up, when you—when you want to be smoothed out.” Marlene looks like she’s about to reply, but that just won’t do, so Remus plows on. “And anyway. Anyway, Sirius doesn’t need tough anything. He’s tough enough. He…” Remus catches himself about to say something about Sirius’s home life being toughening enough to encompass a lifetime of strife, but holds his tongue. Sirius doesn’t talk about home hardly ever, even with Remus. With James, Remus reckons he might, and a swirl of unexpected jealously licks through Remus’s stomach at the thought. He swallows to dull the heat of it. Marlene doesn’t need another piece of Sirius, Remus reckons. It’s okay to be selfish with Sirius, to horde every piece of him he has, Remus reckons. Remus’s claim is… bigger, Remus reckons. “Sirius doesn’t need tough love,” he decides to say. “He—have you ever looked at him? I mean, really looked at him. He’s a marble statue, he’s a museum exhibit. He needs to be admired. He needs to be… adored.”

Remus finally looks up at Marlene. She has the strangest expression on her face: these soft, knowing eyes, and this pursed, pitying mouth. “Oh, Remus,” she says gently.

“What?” he grunts. She covers her lips to hide a smile. “What?” he says with fervor. “What, Marley, what, please tell me what it is that has you making that face.”

“Nothing,” she says, dimples poking into her cheeks, smug bastard. “Nothing, Remus, dear, nothing at all.”

“Well, that ruined my day,” Remus grumbles, sliding down in his seat. There’s a great commotion from the far side of the room, then, as the Gryffindor quidditch team storms inside, lead by Frank and Gwendolyne, who are laughing loudly, and followed by the rest: a clump of maroon and broad smiles among which Sirius manages to stand out, sleek hair tucked behind his ears and a grin like quicksilver on his lips. His cheeks are pink with exertion in a way they very rarely get. He looks good. Proud.

Remus thinks red is Sirius’s color.

Marlene is laughing at him again. He whirls to glare at her just as James plops into the recliner squished against her and Sirius falls onto the couch near Remus, stretching out his full length and dropping his sock feet onto Remus’s lap, muddy trainers discarded on the floor near his head.

“You smell like armpit,” Remus says.

“I thought I was going to faint out there tonight,” James says, thrilled, tossing an arm around Marlene’s shoulders and pressing a noogie into her head that has her whining and smacking his hand away. “It was brilliant. I could sleep for seventy years.”

“And yet you’re this energetic?” Remus says.

“What’s this, Remus?” Sirius asks, prodding Remus’s ribs with his toe, nudging the money tin with his other foot.

“Box,” Remus says.

Sirius gives him an unimpressed look.

Remus bats his eyes innocently.

Sirius rolls his eyes towards the ceiling, clearly deeming it not worth the effort.

James asks Marlene, “Hey, have you done the homework for Divination?” and that makes Remus’s attention check out quite presently, so he looks down at Sirius’s stupid gross feet on his lap.

He sighs. He tucks the bottoms of Sirius’s practice pants into the tops of his socks.

Sirius nudges him again. He has a private sort of smile on his lips, brows wrinkled with incredulity. He glimmers.

Remus gives a little shrug. “Warmer that way,” he says.

Sirius’s lip quirks higher on the right side when he’s not thinking about it. Remus has noticed it before, but now he’ll never notice anything else.

Sirius lays back flat, arms folded beneath his head. He lets his foot sway, heel rocking against Remus’s thigh. James and Marlene continue to talk beside him. Across the room, Lily is teaching second years how to make a teapot somersault. Peter is in another corner with Dorcas, blushing.

Remus leans back against the cushions of the couch and feels warm.

“M’not going to lie to you,” Remus says, knuckling his eye, “but I did not… expect this.”

The Common Room is a zoo. It’s seven in the morning and the Common Room is a zoo. It’s seven in the morning and the Common Room is a zoo because people are drinking, people have spliffs held between their teeth as they doze on the couch, people are mixing Kahlua with their coffee, someone has an Elvis record playing and it is seven in the morning.

A pair of seventh years are standing on the study table, lording over it all. “It’s fine, it’s good, it’s fine,” one of them is saying, and the other, “Everything is perfect, it’s perfect.”

“Go, go Gryffindor,” someone cheers, then giggles.

“Oh, Jesus,” Lily says, hobbling closer to Remus’s side, jostling his little collection tin, which now has straps so he can hang it over his shoulders. “They scare me.”

“Well,” says Remus. “You know what they say.”

He starts walking into the fray.

“Wait!” Lily squawks. “Hey, wait, I don’t know what they say. What do they—? Remus!”

He reaches for a communal bottle of Firewhiskey on the table. It’s smoking lightly at the mouth. He can smell the sharp tang of cinnamon and alcohol clinging to the glass, stickying it up. He pours a cup, then turns to Lily, who has caught up and is now looking at the drink with enormous eyes.

“You want?” Remus asks.

“Have you had… before?” she says, blinking.

He shrugs. “I have a bottle of something in the dormitory but I’ve been too nervous to do much other than sip it to feel cool.”

She shifts her weight. “Are you going to?”

He examines it all. Thinks about it. (Feels old. Feels curious.) Nods.

She purses her lips. A look of deep determination takes her. “Alright,” she says. “Yup. Yes. Pour me a cup, Remus.”

“So demanding,” he comments, but he grabs a second plastic cup and pours a finger or two of liquor into it. He hands it over.

“Oh, goodness,” she says, taking him by the elbow and tugging him towards the fringe of the room, out of the amassing crowd. “This feels naughty. Is this what you all always feel like, stringing up socks and sneaking around in the dark and such?”

“Pretty much,” Remus says.

“Ah,” says Lily. “Well. Now it makes sense.”

Remus lifts his cup silently, holding it out. She clinks hers against it, sending him a glimmering, exhilarated smile.

They drink.

Remus makes a face. Cocks his head. Listens to Lily sputter and gasp like she’s in a shitty theater production. Remus smacks his tongue. Traces the burn from the back of his throat down to the pit of his stomach. Feels, immediately, an urge to smile.

He looks at Lily, with her wild curls sticking up in all directions and her neat mascara and her enormous maroon t-shirt tucked into her flared corduroy pants. Her freckly arms are on display and her cheeks and nose and chest are turning pink with flush and he is so, so fond of her and her wily, snappish incandescence he could choke on it.

He reaches forward and squishes her cheeks between his thumb and fingers. “Oh my God,” he says.

“Oh my God,” she says, garbled.

“Oh,” he says. He laughs. “Oh my God. Yep. That’ll do it. That’s—yes.”

Lily bursts into laughter, spitting a little because Remus is still squishing her cheeks. She hunches forward with the force of it and he follows, feeling the laugh twinge in his stomach with its force, hearing his lungs rattle and his spine crack and his nose crinkle.

There’s sudden clapping. Still laughing, Remus and Lily look up to see the Gryffindor quidditch team pouring into the Common Room. James and Sirius are trudging down the stairs, and—and—

Heroic. Dashing. Off the pages of a storybook. Absolutely breathtaking in red, that smooth skin, that crooked smirk, have his shoulders always been so broad?

Sirius meets his eyes and James is looking at Lily and it’s like they’re the only four people in the room, until they’re not, because Peter comes barreling over from where he was talking with Mary, and Marlene is prattling on a mile and minute, and Remus can’t hear any of it over the ringing in his ears. Tunnel vision.

“I’m,” he says, and he raises his cup a little. He shakes his head like a wet dog. “I’m.”

He goes to the table and pours himself another finger of Firewhiskey. He thinks he takes it like a champ.

“Hey,” comes Sirius’s voice, and Remus turns, and there’s the rest of Sirius, and Remus knew he’d be there, and yet he’s here, really here, and Remus makes a sound that isn’t much more than six or seven vowels shoved together.

Sirius’s lips quirk into a smile. “James is asking Lily for a good luck kiss.”

“She’s going to kill him,” Remus says, instead of Are you here to ask for the same? because fuck if he knows where that thought came from. He gives a wild laugh, harried, urgently grabs the bottle off the table, and takes a swig right from it. He clears his throat and offers it to a baffled Sirius. “Liquid courage?”

Sirius presses his lips together to hide a smile. “I’ll save that for you, I think.”

Merlin, do I ever need it, Remus thinks, furious with—himself, mostly.

“We’re going down to breakfast,” Sirius says, pointing at the portrait hole with his thumb. James is hurdling through it, rubbing his cheek as if he’s been smacked. Remus looks at Lily, who looks wildly confused as she stares into her cup, and then back to Sirius, gleaming in wait.

“I,” Remus says. “Lily.”

“Sure,” Sirius says, and he’s almost good enough at presenting a cool front that the way he sags is unnoticeable. “Yeah. I’ll see you in the Great Hall before we leave, though, right?”

Remus can tell, even now, that this is a request. He smiles, feeling soft and fond and familiar and like caramel. “Yeah,” he says quietly. He reaches out on impulse and gives Sirius’s wrist a squeeze. “I’ll be down in a minute, Sirius.”

Sirius relaxes into his usual smile. Proud, self-assured, pretty.

He’s gone like a sliver of light at dusk.

Remus says, “I’ve goofed it now, haven't I.”

Lily is there in a moment, taking the bottle from Remus, taking a gulp from the mouth.

“I think we ought to keep this,” she says.

“Like, steal it?” he says.

She nods, eyes wide.

He shrugs. “Alright. Here, shrink it, we’ll put it in the money tin.”

She smiles brightly, pats his shoulder in appreciation of the idea, then does.

“Shall we breakfast?” she says.

“We shall,” he says, holding his elbow out to her.

The walk to the Great Hall has never been so funny, nor so perilous. They cling to every banister like they’re on the Titanic, going down. They hang onto each other’s shoulders and stumble and have to stop to pretend to tie their trainers every time they pass a professor just so they won’t be seen tripping over nothing by someone who can bust them for it.

They fall onto benches at the breakfast table flushed and still laughing, patting their hair into place.

“You look like you just escaped a shared broom closet,” Frank says over the rim of his coffee, looking very captainly in his uniform jumper and keeper’s helmet.

“Have you put money down?” Remus asks instead of answering that.

“Money down?” Frank says.

Remus claps a hand over his lips.

Lily bursts into laughter.

Along the benches, people have started to notice Remus has arrived.

“Oi, Lupin,” someone calls, “did you get my galleon? Fez put it down for me.”

“I most certainly did not!” Fez says.

A pair of Ravenclaws come up behind him. “We’ve got money on him knocking himself out.”

Remus takes their sickles wordlessly and pulls out a tiny spiral ring notebook. He makes a note.

“What…?” says James.

“Lupin!” someone down the table yells. “I’m good for three knuts on him knocking himself and Potter.”

“Hey!” James says. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

Lily is wheezing.

Remus makes a note, writing as fast as he is able.

“Lupin!”

“Four sickles on a headbanger!”

“Six sickles on him falling!”

“Make a line,” Remus says desperately, waving his little notepad.

“What is happening?” says Peter. “What am I missing?”

Lily’s head is dropped between folded arms on the tabletop, inconsolable, hiccuping, back bouncing.

“I have ten knuts, can I put that on him hitting himself and then falling?”

“Did Mary give you my galleon?” Marlene asks.

Remus takes the shrunken, two-inch bottle out of his box, dumps it into his juice, and takes a miniscule sip.

Sirius is leaning across the table, face screwed up in an almost comical show of confusion.

“Bloody hell,” Remus mouths to himself.

Lily takes his cup and sips, screwing up her face as she realizes the shrunken size of the bottle means the concentration of alcohol now in the glass is… very alcohol.

There’s money clattering onto the table. There are people at his shoulders. Remus is drunk.

He raises a hand. The clatter settles.

“Bloody hell, that was like freaking McGonagall,” Lily sputters.

“What is—” Sirius starts.

Remus glares at him.

“Merlin, alright,” Sirius says, raising his hands in surrender.

“If you have money,” Remus says clumsily through numb lips, “get in line, and for Merlin’s sake, behave yourselves.”

“Muuuum,” sings Lily.

“What is up with you?” James asks her, nose wrinkled.

She sticks her tongue out at him.

Remus takes a galleon from a Hufflepuff sixth year. Sticks it in the box.

“Remus,” Sirius whines from across the table. Remus smiles to himself. Sirius hates not knowing things, not being in on the joke.

“Tell him, then, Lil,” Remus says. He takes a sickle from Slytherin Alessia. “Where is this going?”

“Double bonk,” she says.

“Good choice,” says Remus.

“Sirius…” Lily is saying. “Sirius… Sirius.”

“Circe’s tits, woman, spit it out.”

“We’re betting on how you’ll play,” Lily says, very fast, before hiding behind the jug of pumpkin juice.

“Eat toast,” Remus tells her as he slips the last three knuts in the ‘fall-off’ section of the tin. The crowd is gone. It’s just Gryffindors again, thank goodness. Remus is sweating. “You need something in your stomach.”

“Ooh, okay,” she says cheerily, immediately coming out from behind the juice to grab a piece of toast from the platter and eat it dry, like she’s James or something. Gross. “Sirius, we’re betting on how you’ll play.”

“So you said,” he says dryly, but his eyes are glimmering.

“Remus planned the whooole thing,” Lily says.

“Don’t throw me under the bus.”

“You did, though! And it’s hilarious!” she says, voice breaking into a series of snorting laughs.

Remus flicks a glance up at her, at James as he stares at her like she’s the best thing he’s ever seen, at Sirius where he’s—looking at Remus. Remus crosses his eyes at him. Sirius sticks his tongue out.

“And,” Lily gasps, pulling herself together, “and, and! Everyone is in on it. They’re making bets.”

“What did you bet on, then?” Sirius asks her.

“I think you’re going to hit Potter with your bat,” she says, taking a huge bite of toast. “Or maybe I just hope you will,” she adds, but she’s smiling a bit. Maybe the slap she gave James had an underlying layer of begrudging fondness beneath it.

“That’s an option?” James says, squinting. “Cripes. How many people voted for that?”

Remus peruses his notebook idly, squinting to make out the writing as his vision sways side to side. “Mmm, dozens.”

“Dozens?!”

“What are the other options?” Sirius asks.

“Hit yourself with the bat or fall off your broom,” Lily says, flapping her toast. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sirius, the entire situation is incredibly funny.”

“You’re not upset, are you?” Remus asks, though he knows Sirius isn’t—knew he would never be. It’s too smart.

“Of bloody course not, it’s genius,” Sirius says. Remus grins proudly. “What did you all put your money on? I could make it happen, so you win.”

“Oh, shite,” Remus says, realizing that they have sort of ruined the whole thing now. “Huh. Whoops.”

“I’ll pretend I don’t know, then,” Sirius says graciously.

“I know how to do a memory charm,” Peter pipes up.

They all look at him.

“What?” he says hotly. “James can turn people into sea urchins and Sirius can roll eyeballs backwards but I can’t wipe a memory or two?”

“Do you,” Remus says. Stumped. Then, again, “Huh.”

Lily bursts into laughter.

“Are you going to unravel my brain?” Sirius asks, squinting. If Remus weren’t so drunk, he’d think Sirius was hiding a wave of panic, cracking that forefinger knuckle again and again like it healed wrong ages ago and now could pop and snap forever.

“No,” Peter says, scowling. “I’m good at them, I swear.”

“Who’d you practice on? A ghost? The giant squid?”

“No!”

“Just because you forgot to wipe your arse doesn’t mean you wiped your memory, Pete,” Sirius says, and Peter flips him off.

“I say he should do it,” James says. “I trust him.”

“With my brain? No thanks,” Sirius scoffs. Crack. Crack.

“I trust you, Peter,” Lily says, grabbing his face between her hands.

“You have toast crumbs on your fingers,” Peter says.

“I trust you,” she tells him again.

“Bloody hell,” says Sirius. “I’m begging you to test it on anyone else at any other time.”

“Sirius Black, a nancy?” Remus says. “I’m mindboggled. Truly, I am.”

“Alright,” comes a call from further down the table—Frank. He’s standing. Remus doesn’t know when he stood. He didn’t even notice. His jaw is funny and numb. All he knows is he’s grateful for what Frank is in this moment: a distraction, an escape for Sirius, who apparently draws the line at Memory Charms of all things. “Gryffindor, let’s head down. Bring toast with you if you need sustenance.”

James slings an arm around Sirius’s shoulders and jostles him. “Here we go, mate.”

“Luck,” Remus says, smiling up at them, fond. “You’ll be brilliant. Both of you.”

Sirius lifts his chin proudly. “Damn right. See you out there.”

“Should we go out now as well?” Lily says, watching the team file out to jeers and clapping. “We can get good seats.”

Remus knows Lily. He knows Lily like his own palm, for her freneticies and her compulsions and her passions, which is why he knows she’s going to drag him to the front row of the stands and she’s going to scream her head off about how she bloody loves quidditch isn’t this is exciting Remus?? Remus??? except it’ll be worse this time because they’re going to tip over the front railing and fall to their grisly deaths on the pitch below.

“Yes,” he says, smiling wide enough that his face feels funny and bunched. “We’ve got cheering to do, I reckon.”

Sirius has always been rather good with other people’s emotions, but terrible with his own.

This predicament renders him quite obnoxious all through the team vigil and quite unable to catch a big enough breath all through breakfast, while Gryffindors sip surreptitiously out of flasks, getting drunk over juice and porridge. By the time the team marches down to the pitch, he feels like a ghost. He needs the bat in his hands. He keeps telling himself that. The weight of it, the shined wood, will make him feel real again.

Sirius sits heavily on the bench in the changing rooms. He ties his hair back, buckles his helmet on. Tightens his elbow pads. Knee pads. Chest plate. Does his boots up.

“Hey,” says Frank.

Sirius looks up. Frank isn’t the tallest bloke around, but standing in front of Sirius the way he is, he seems like a giant. Bold and brave. Strong. With a small smile on his lips.

“Hiya,” says Sirius.

Frank sits. “You look ill, mate.”

“Feel it, too.”

Frank jostles their shoulders together. “Shouldn’t be.”

“And why not?”

“Because you know you’re good.”

“I do know I’m good. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be nervous.”

“Yes, but I know you,” Frank says, lips quirking. “You love showing off. You must be excited to do that much, at least.”

“Sure.”

“Look, even Potter’s calm,” Frank says, waving across the tent at him. He’s doing pull-ups from a bar, knees bent, cheeks dark with exertion. He’s smiling as he talks to Gwen, who keeps tossing sweaty socks for him to dodge. He looks good. He looks confident. Sirius knows he hasn’t puked once, because he hasn’t separated himself from James’s side in the past twenty-four hours. Not even to piss. They went together like a pair of birds.

“Yes, well, I don’t want to be like James,” Sirius says gruffly. “He’s mental.”

Frank laughs. “Too true. Hey.”

Sirius looks at him.

Frank drops a palm atop Sirius’s head. “Don’t even think about it. Just play, alright?”

Sirius smacks Frank’s hand away. “Bloody hell, man, I’m fine.”

Frank rolls his eyes but leaves Sirius to himself.

The minutes tick by. Frank prods his enchanted record player and starts a rousing rendition of Elvis’s It’s Now or Never, swaying his hips and spinning everyone and singing along with his whole chest.

Morale, James mouths to Sirius across the room. Frank is very focused on things like morale, more than Eli ever was, if James is to be believed.

Sirius wags his brows.

James squints at him. He looks like such a boffin in those goggles, really.

James sticks his hands in his pockets and crosses the room to sit on the bench beside Sirius.

“Good?” he asks. “Ready to go?”

Sirius shrugs. “You?”

“Sure,” James says, and he sounds like he means it. “Yeah. It feels easier, you know?”

“You’ve proven yourself already,” Sirius says.

“And you’ve nothing to prove,” James says pointedly as Connor shakes his skinny arse in their faces.

“Sure,” Sirius says.

“And,” James says, not even looking at Sirius, “you can pretend your brother isn’t even there. Alright?”

“He will be there,” Sirius says sourly. Trust James to find the heart of the issue every time. “I don’t want to play against him. It’s sacrilege to beat him at anything.”

“If you purposely let him win, I’ll bloody eviscerate you.”

“I wouldn’t. I would eviscerate myself for that.” Sirius sighs. “Just wish it wasn’t so stupid.”

“I know, mate.”

“Alright,” Frank is saying, laughing, trying to round everyone up. “Blood is pumping, we’re ready to go! Alright, Gryffindor! Play to win, and you’ll do me proud!”

“He’s so nice,” James says.

“That scares you?”

“Nothing scares me. It does, however, make me think that we are going to be decimated.”

“I would rather choke than be decimated by Slytherin.”

“Yeah, fuck them.”

Gwen disappears down the hallway that leads onto the pitch, leaving them the only two in the tent. The air goes stiff with what they can’t make themselves say.

James claps a hand onto the back of Sirius’s neck, then tugs him close, giving him the gentlest headbutt of all time. That’s familiar, at least: loving each other so wordlessly, enormously, that the best way to communicate it is through small acts of violence. “You need a minute?”

Sirius hums, grateful but without words.

James squeezes his neck once more, then releases him. He grins with an easy confidence that momentarily floors Sirius, then makes him smile back. Infectious, it is.

Without a word, James grabs his broom and jogs out of the changing room, down towards that endless hallway towards certain doom.

Sirius stares at the place James had disappeared, then gives a sweeping glance along the tent. He takes a deep, settling breath. This is nothing. This is easy. This is what he’s good at: whether it’s a wand or a bat in his hands, he’s always protecting.

“Just a man alone in a canvas tent,” Sirius says, “with an empire at his feet, which he must lift onto his shoulders.”

He stares at the opening, the pitch sitting pretty on the other side. He nods.

He walks out.

He gets into the line of Gryffindor players just in time, hikes a leg over his broom, and shoots down the corridor onto the pitch just as his name echoes over everything everything everything: “SIRIUS… BLACK!!”

He pulls on his charmingest grin and waves as the stands erupt half into cheers and half into boos. He pumps his fist for Gryffindor, waving his bat, then turns to blow kisses at everyone in green.

He is immediately appalled to note that Narcissa and Bellatrix are in the stands, hair tied back in ribbons and wearing emerald satin shirts, the farthest thing from fitting in the jersey-wearing stadium seats.

“Fucking Christ,” he says.

James shoots by, wincing. “Noticed, did you? I was going to tell you not to look.”

“Don’t baby me,” Sirius snaps.

James just grins. “Sure. Did you see who’s in red, though?”

Sirius looks, a hand up to guard his vision from the sharp sunlight, and nearly drops his bat. “Oh my God!”

He hadn’t noticed her at first glance or second, in a shirt made of maroon corduroy with her long hair pulled into a plait, a smiling man in a yellow sweater vest and white button-shirt beside her.

He feels something rise in his stomach, ferocious. Thrilled. That’s his family. That’s his family.

He presses both hands to his mouth, bat and all, and throws Andromeda a kiss.

She smiles, really smiles, youthful and free in a way he has never once seen her look, like it’s her face but a whole new girl wearing it, and mimes catching the kiss, pressing it to her cheek.

Sirius is so happy. It’s like drinking sunshine and gilding all him, solid gold throat and a belly full of cut rubies. He is a temple and all the riches it hides.

He looks at James, who is beaming at him already.

“Let’s win this bloody match,” Sirius says.

James pumps his fist. “Right on, mate.”

The moment Connor Kelly catches the snitch is one that Sirius wholeheartedly believes will never leave his mind as long as he lives.

The sun is bright on the golden ball. Regulus is the width of a finger away from closing his hand around it. Kelly, a worse seeker, a luckier bastard, is there just first. Just barely.

The stands erupt. Thunder and chanting and cheering and boos, a tempest, an unimaginable end.

James is upon him. Sirius doesn’t know what to do with this feeling in his chest so he pours it into a kiss that smacks right onto James’s lips, chaste and short but enough that they’re both laughing out loud as they shove each other away, hands on shoulders and prodding stomachs, and James slaps the top of Sirius’s helmet, saying, “Brilliant, bloody brilliant! Thrilling, mate!”

The team is there, dog-piled. Frank is beaming. The spectators are pouring onto the pitch.

Sirius strains his neck and looks.

Regulus appears sick to his stomach for a quarter of a second before his face goes carefully blank.

Sirius keeps staring at him. Prays for Regulus to feel it, to meet his eyes.

He doesn’t. He returns to the grass in a dive as graceful as everything else he does, his form perfect, his robes billowing around him, snake snake snake.

Sirius looks back at James, unwilling to think about it.

James grins. “Mum and Dad are here, too.”

“They are,” Sirius agrees, but something is starting to sink in his stomach. No good feeling lasts, after all.

“Let’s go see them?” James suggests.

So they barrel down to the grass with the rest of the team, knees shaking as they reacquaint themselves with hard land. Lily is upon him so quickly, so powerfully, a little hurricane, squeaking shrilly about how clean your angles are, Sirius, I’ve never seen aim like that! So well done!

“Do you smell like Firewhiskey?” Sirius hisses in her ear, her hair poking up his nose.

“Yes!” she says, too loud. “Remus and I were naughty! It’s fun!”

Sirius looks up and meets Remus’s eyes where he stands with his money tin open and a swarm of students whining about the fact that Sirius hadn’t fallen after all, hadn’t brained himself or James, and by all accounts had had a successful first game.

No one can be too disappointed, however. Not with Slytherin down seventy points in the running for the Cup.

Remus presses his lip together against a smile, then jerks his shoulder. Sirius follows the movement and, God, she’s here, so he runs at her.

Andromeda scoops him into a hug. She smells like the same iris perfume Sirius steals from his mother and faintly like crisp windchill from being high in the stands. They didn’t hug much as children, as they chose other, slightly more aggressive means with which to show their affection, but this is good too. He ruffles her hair and she rubs her palm on his helmet like she’s doing the same.

“I,” he says. He laughs wildly and squeezes her tighter. “You!”

“Me,” says Andromeda. She pulls back enough to meet his eyes and gestures behind her. “Ted!”

“I’ll be damned,” Sirius says, straightening. “Hufflepuff Ted, in the flesh.”

“Charmed,” Ted says, holding out a hand for Sirius to shake.

Sirius does, enthusiastically. “I’ve been waiting to meet you for years, mate. Mostly to shape up if you’re good enough for Meda, but also to see what sort of stud you must’ve been to catch the ice queen’s eye.”

“She’s no ice queen,” Ted says, smiling demurely. “She's a bit of a tough nut, but she’s all peanut butter inside.”

Sirius truly tries not to laugh at that. He does, but it’s so bizarre, and he knows in a distinct and immediate sort of way exactly why Andromeda would like a bloke like Hufflepuff Ted. Real salt of the earth type. She needs that. Someone she can use as arm candy, or a front for a stint as a vigilante.

“Sirius!” says Missus P., dropping James like a sack of potatoes to patter her merry way over and scoop him up.

“Hey!” James says in offense as Missus P. plants a loud, wet kiss on Sirius’s forehead. Sirius beams up at her, hooking his arm around her waist.

“Missus P., this is my cousin, Andromeda, and her booooyfriend, Hufflepuff Ted,” Sirius says, heart singing against his ribs.

Andromeda gives the lightest of smiles to Missus P., closing off a layer, but is the pinnacle of politeness as they shake hands.

“Brilliant!” Mister P. says, taking Sirius by the shoulders and beaming at him. “Brilliant!”

Lily is clinging to Remus’s arm, smiling at everyone. James is listening intently to Peter as he talks a mile a minute about the match, a little grin on his lips. Marlene and Mary and Dorcas are surrounding Gwen, tugging her fringe and straightening her robes. Frank Longbottom is carrying Alice around on his back, both of them laughing like loons.

Across the pitch, Narcissa and Bellatrix are talking to Regulus, reserved, pinched, pale and pointy-chinned. Regulus isn’t smiling, but he doesn’t look as sickly as he did when Connor caught the snitch. Narcissa has a fond sort of gleam in her eyes. Bella is eyeing Evan Rosier, pinky finger at the corner of her lips, like a vulture.

Narcissa, as if she feels Sirius’s gaze, looks up.

Sirius gives her a tentative smile.

She softens. Nods.

He nods back.

He turns to Andromeda again and saves her from a stiflingly affectionate but well-meaning chat with Missus P. by taking her hands and pulling her to the side.

“Why are you here?” he asks bluntly, still grinning at her nonetheless.

She tucks a loose strand of Sirius’s hair behind his ear. “I figured your parents wouldn’t come. I thought someone ought to.”

“Thank you,” he says, “but I have Mister and Missus P. now, too.”

“Someone from your family,” she corrects. “Someone of your blood.” To remind you we’re not all against you, she doesn’t say.

Sirius squeezes her fingers. “Thank you,” he says, meaning it. “Thank you for bringing Ted, too. He’ll be good for you.”

“I’ll be good for him, more like,” she says, airy, and there’s something undeniably more relaxed to her—she’s every inch of herself still, but—oh, God, she’s happy.

Sirius tugs her by the wrists into another hug. He presses his face into her shoulder. “You can go see Reg, now. I know you want to.”

“Will you come?” she asks.

He thinks. “No,” he decides. “I want him to enjoy having family here for his sake. I don’t want to ruin that for him. Besides,” he pulls back, palms her cheek, and she leans into the touch, “I have family here, too.” Quiet, but firm.

“I’m happy for you,” she says.

“So am I,” he replies.

On the other side of the Common Room, through a thick fog of smoke and bodies, James Potter is gaping at Sexy Sadie, who somehow received a coveted invitation to the Gryffindor afterparty, who is three inches taller than James, who is wearing a shirt so low-cut that Lily struggles to call it a bloody shirt, who is asking James on a date if Sirius can read lips as well as he claims he can.

“It’s either date or late she’s saying,” Sirius insists, their shared spliff dancing between his lips. He’s squinting, head tilted, and it’s quite a trick, what with his cheekbones and this lighting. “Buggering shitting bollocks. It’s moments like this when I wish I had superhuman hearing.”

“That’s the—that’s the last thing you need.”

“You don’t know what I need. Why don’t you want me to thrive?”

“I do! I do! You just—superhuman hearing? Really? Tell me honestly you won’t use that for evil.”

“I will absolutely use it for evil, what the fuck kind of question—?”

“I rest my case.” Lily rolls her numb lips against her teeth. “This is so strange.”

“Were you still drunk when we started with this?”

“No, God, no, it would’ve killed me if I were.”

Sirius plucks the spliff from his mouth and sticks it between her teeth, closing her jaw for her to hold it in place. She takes a little puff.

“Better or worse?” Sirius asks.

“You’re, like, so much for me right now,” she tells him.

Sirius smirks, oozing arrogance, objectively the most beautiful person she’s ever seen, glowing in the low light like a bit of mystery.

“Hey. Today, at the end of the match, was that your first kiss?” Lily asks, leaning against Sirius’s shoulder.

“Merlin, no,” he says, not holding her back but not pushing her away. “No, I kissed both Gayle and George Goyle at a ball when I was nine.”

“How’d that go?”

Sirius shrugs. “Gayle punched me in the face. George didn’t. Mother had to issue a formal apology from House Black to House Goyle. It was more trouble than it was worth for two objectively shitty kisses.”

Lily is still hunched over her knees, in hysterics, when Remus walks over, tugging James by the wrist, both of them stumbling.

“I needed to get him out of there,” Remus says, rolling his eyes. “Nice bloke, you are, Potter, but big bloody idiot, too.”

“I’m,” Potter says, and he’s blinking every second, smoke from their spliff in his eyes. “I have no idea what just happened.”

“She asked him on a date,” Remus says, (“Ha!” says Sirius.) “and the fool just stood there and salivated for thirty seconds.” (“I did not,” says James.)

Sirius holds his arms out. James sits on his lap. Sirius wraps his arms tight around James’s waist and looks up at him, pot-softened. Sirius seems more human, high. Less like he would tear up dirt to smooth onto someone’s face or chew glass to spit in someone’s eyes.

James tucks a hair behind Sirius’s ear. Lily half-thinks they’re about to snog again. She almost wants to leave—to give them space to. Then Remus sits on her lap, so she wraps her arms around his thin waist as tightly as she can and presses her face into his shoulder and sniffs a deep sniff of his comfortable warm scent.

“Missed you,” Remus says.

Lily purses her lips. He leans into it, taking the kiss on his warm cheek.

“Remus,” James says, reaching over, as if seeing him for the first time—as if Remus hadn’t escorted him over. He catches Remus’s hand. “Hey.”

“Hiya,” says Remus, squinting at him. Bloody hell.

“How are you?” James asks Remus seriously. “Not feeling… not moony?”

“Bloody hell,” Lily whispers.

“Not moony?” Remus repeats. “I’m always moony.”

“Bloody hell,” Lily says again.

“Always moony. You are always moony,” James says. “Moony thing. Can I call you that?”

“What?”

“Can I call you Moony?”

“As my name?”

“Well, yeah.”

“That’s a bit tactless.”

“Bloody hell,” she says.

“Even so.”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, not at all. We’ll, erm, we’ll make something up!”

“We’re always making something up.”

“Bloody hell,” she says.

“It’s for a good cause.”

“Is it?”

“The Moony cause for Moony things,” James says.

Remus’s lips quirk. “Yeah, alright. It’s kind of sweet.”

James grins. “Cheers, mate.”

“Bloody hell,” Lily says.

James turns to her this time. “Are you stoned?”

“I,” she answers.

A smile bursts onto James’s face. “How the mighty do fall indeed,” he says.

“I feel like you’ve all forgotten I’m here, so I am taking this opportunity to assert my presence,” says Sirius.

“I haven’t forgotten you, not even for a minute,” says James.

“I need a drink,” Lily decides. “With desperation.”

“Me too,” James says, frowning.

“Why do you need a drink?” says Remus.

“To get my brain juices flowing,” says Lily, gesturing loosely with her hands.

“Never,” says Sirius, “and I mean never say that again.”

“Come on then, Potter,” Lily says briskly. “Off we pop.”

“Thrilling,” he says.

“Oh, this is. Fucked,” says Sirius.

Lily and James lilt to their feet and stumble their way to the table, collecting cups and half-full bottles.

“This is,” James says, and then he bursts into giggles.

“Oh Jesus,” says Lily. “Oh Jesus.”

James grabs his cup and sniffs it. He makes a noise like his bollocks have gone through a clothes wringer, then steels himself and drinks.

“Spit in the face of God,” says Lily.

James huffs a nose-laugh, swirling a bit of Firewhiskey in his mouth. He swallows it, then immediately makes a face as if he’s chewed a lemon wedge to the pith.

Lily laughs aloud, covering her mouth with two hands. “God got you for that one, then.”

“God can lick my bumhole,” James says, shuddering. “Not that I believe in Him, but I hope I don’t go to hell for saying that.”

Lily hums. “Of course you’re superstitious but you don’t believe in God. I’m not surprised in the slightest.”

“Why, you do believe in Him?” James asks.

“I’m not sure,” she answers, surprised with her own frankness. “I like the idea of Him, of everything being written out in the stars for us, but it sounds so complicated. Heaven and hell and all that rubbish.”

“Mhm,” says James. “I’d hate knowing that someone else decides everything I’ll ever do for me. Where’s that free will we’re all supposed to have? I’ll carve my own life out of brick and lay the stones to walk my way to my eventual end. In, like, a billion years. Because I’m gonna live forever.”

Lily can’t help but huff. James Potter, live forever. Of course he will. He’s like the sun.

James continues, voice going up in volume a bit and gestures growing larger, looser. “Besides, if there is a God, He’s an utter prat. Letting people like Voldemort run around rampant and such… it just isn’t right. I can’t imagine a God who would let that happen. Who would let so many people just die. Who would let anyone just die.”

“Some people would say the death of the few is for the benefit of the many. And that life is special because it ends.”

“Poppycock,” says James.

Lily looks at him in disbelief.

“I’m drunk,” he informs her.

She feels the corners of her lips twitch. “Are you? I wouldn’t have been able to tell.”

“In that case,” says James, and he pours another drink for himself, the Firewhiskey bottle glugging enormously as the reddish stuff pours from the narrow mouth. He looks at her over his shoulder, hair falling over his forehead, squinting a bit. “You want some more?”

Lily looks into her cup. “Alright. Just a spot, though.”

He pours her two shots.

“Well, damn,” she comments. “Now I’ve got to finish those.”

“If it’s too much, I’m sure Sirius will take the dregs,” James teases.

Lily stands taller. “I can handle it. I’m very, um. Experienced. I have a constitution of pure concrete.”

“That’s cute,” says James. “Shall we together, then?”

Lily looks at her drink, intimidated by the sheer amount of liquid she’ll have to get down her throat in one go.

“Yes?” she says.

James grins, eyes a bit wild, and they cheers.

They drink at once, Lily tilting her head back and James leaning forward, the cup nearly perpendicular to his face, a palm catching the liquid that doesn’t quite make it into his mouth.

Lily shudders as it settles in her stomach, hot all the way down. She blinks eyelids like feather dusters weighed down with years of muck. She clutches the cup tighter between fingers like wildflower stalks, the type that could snap in a solid enough breeze.

James Potter looks at her with eyes like coffee grounds and a smile like pure momentum and the number seven emblazoned on his chest like a prophecy, and Lily lets him look.

“James!” someone calls. “Potter!”

They both jump as if shocked.

It’s a fifth year from the team standing on a table, waving an arm. The rest of the team surrounds her, the lot of them drunk and grinning and red-cheeked. Some of them are dancing, some singing along with The Who, but most of them are gesturing for James to go over and pool their mutual stupidity into a public display of Arsery.

Like a glass wall shattering, Lily remembers herself.

Drunk. They’re drunk. And this is Potter, who may not be bad, but who makes her furious.

“I don’t mean to occupy Gryffindor’s quidditch star all evening,” Lily says, taking a step away from him. “You go have fun.”

“I’m having fun here, too,” he says. “Aren’t you?”

Lily looks at him. She looks long and hard. She looks, but—and this is important—she doesn’t quite see.

“Goodnight, Potter,” she says.

She turns and makes a break for the spiral staircase to her dormitory with such speed that she misses entirely the way his face falls.

Misery. Everything is misery and torture and pain.

Every scent? Nauseating. Remus’s stomach turns like an electric washing machine, all suds and cotton. He can’t even remember if he slept. He just. Nausea. A pounding in his temples, across his forehead. He’s going to vomit. That’s not a fear. That’s a threat. A promise.

“Death to sounds,” James croaks. “All sounds. Oh Merlin please just let me die.”

“I don’t think Merlin controls the die,” Peter mumbles.

“Hey,” Sirius says, squinting at the girls as they enter the Great Hall in a rumpled, red-eyed, messy-haired horde. “You all look like shit.”

“Charmer,” Mary says, planting a kiss on his cheek as she sits beside him.

“I don’t look like shit because I don’t feel like shit,” Marlene says. “In fact, I caught up on two weeks of dream journals this morning.”

“Did you really?” James says, staring up at her through sagging eyelids.

“No,” she says. “I threw up in the shower.”

James pats her back as she sits on one side of him. Dorcas descends tenderly, massaging her temples. Lily wedges herself in beside Sirius, on James’s other side.

James stares at her like she’s an apparition, and when he opens his mouth to speak, she holds a single finger to his lips.

“Shhh,” Lily says. “I have minimal ability to handle your fuckery today.”

He stares at her for a moment, then grunts like a caveman.

Lily gives him a ginger nod, then drops her hand.

James looks at Remus, then, as if Remus has answers for him. This is funny to Remus, as he has never had a single answer James hasn’t had, though James always pretends otherwise. Remus shrugs for James’s sake.

James looks down at his mug of tea and swallows compulsively.

“How’s everyone?” asks Mary at a whisper.

“No one managed a successful hangover spell,” Peter says gruffly.

“Not even the ever-talented Mister Potter?” says Lily, brows raised.

James has his eyes closed. He shakes his head, lips pursed in a distinctly near-vomiting way.

Lily huffs. Pale, almost green beneath her freckles, with bags beneath her eyes like bruises, she grabs the nearest ladle and drags James’s empty bowl close. She serves up three enormous scoops of oatmeal with cinnamon and blueberries sprinkled on top. She grabs a plate, piles eggs and potatoes and hunks of melon on it, then pushes it before him. Nudges his shoulder.

He opens his eyes to it. Looks. Looks at her. Looks back at the plate. At her.

Softens like butter.

“Eat,” she says.

He dutifully picks up his spoon and scoops oats into his mouth, still looking at her. “Did you sleep?” he croaks.

Her gaze darts away from his. “No. I—well, I had a sudden urge to practice some Transfiguration when I got back to the dormitory.”

“She was casting spells on that lamp all night,” Mary grunts, pinching her nose, blowing on her chamomile. “Badly. Drunk as a skunk. Lily, I love you, and you suck at Transfiguration.”

“What spell?” James asks.

“Lamp,” Mary manages again.

“Yes, lamp, but lamp to what?” says James.

“Lightning bug,” Marlene supplies around a bite of green apple.

James frowns at her. At his potatoes. At Lily. She’s loading herself a plate of toast, and currently buttering a piece of wholemeal bread with aggression. Her hair is starting to burst free of its slapdash knot from the motion, loose pieces hanging in her eyes, against the curve of her cheek.

James reaches out and moves a curl from her face. Tucks it carefully behind her ear. The way he might for Sirius or Marlene or his mum. Casual. Thoughtless.

She freezes mid-butter.

He retracts his hand immediately.

She looks intensely at her bread.

“I could,” James says. He clears his throat. “I could help with the spell.”

“I don’t need your help,” Lily says.

“Okay,” James says quietly, staring at the breakfast she put together for him.

A moment passes.

She slaps a serving spoon of berries onto his plate. She plasters him with potatoes, boiled eggs, sausages, and toast—only the ends of the bread, just as James has taken his toast since—well, since Remus has known him, at least.

James doesn’t eat much, generally. Certainly not that much. But he lets it happen. He nudges his plate closer to her, so she can properly reach.

Marlene has her hands over her mouth. Dorcas has hers over her ears. Mary covers her eyes. Sirius’s forehead is on the tabletop. Peter looks catatonic, a slice of toast dangling from between his teeth.

Remus shakes his head. They’re fucking insufferable. They need to be locked in a fucking broom cupboard and forced to sort out their issues, because clearly there’s something fucked going on here below the surface.

“You want seconds, Potter?” Lily asks.

“Hm,” James says. “Yes, but not in an I’m still hungry way. Just in an I have poor self-control way.”

“Isn’t that the way everyone eats seconds?” Lily plops the Alps of potato piles onto his plate anyhow.

They watch, all of them, as Lily and James clumsily, earnestly, defensively, properly take care of each other for the first time.

Remus reckons, with exasperation in the pit of his stomach, that they’ll figure it out eventually after all.

“Lose anything last night?” Severus asks when Lily falls into her seat beside him at the front of the Potions classroom.

His voice is sharp, and too loud.

“I’m sure I haven’t a clue what you’re implying,” she says, dropping her bag onto the floor. “And I don’t appreciate your attitude.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Severus snaps. “At the Gryffindor piss-up.”

“Sev,” she says.

“No, I understand,” Severus says, reaching under the desk to grab his ratty textbook from his rucksack. “I understand, Lily, that you have priorities now, and those priorities fall in the realm of drinking with Remus Lupin and slobbering all over the blood-traitor Black—”

“Don’t you dare,” Lily hisses, head pounding. “Don’t you dare say a word against either of them.”

For a moment, everything is quiet on the Western Front.

Then Severus says, “Why?”

She looks at him. “Why what?”

“Why do you spend time with them instead of me?” Severus says.

“We spend time together,” Lily says, but even she can hear how lame it sounds. They used to spend every waking minute side by side. Now they spend Potions class, and the afternoon after in the library completing their assignment.

Severus scowls at her.

“Don’t,” Lily warns him, but—something must be wrong with her. That’s what it is, because she has never once in her life been afraid of anyone, afraid of talking back or shouting or a quick Trip-Jinx, but she’s looking at Severus and her stomach is tight in a nervous knot. “Don’t, Severus.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to feel and not feel,” Severus hisses, button-eyed and scowling. It’s like cold is rolling off him. “Salazar’s sake, Lily, you brush me aside like I haven’t given you years of my life.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” she says.

“But you took them without complaint,” he replies. “And now you’re throwing that away.”

“Then make yourself worthy of my time,” she says. “We have this argument four times a week.”

“No we don’t,” he says, “because I don’t even see you four times a week anymore.”

“Stop playing some pained little victim, poor Severus, friendless save for lucky Lily Evans who gets to wile away time at his side—”

“Don’t you play the hero, then!”

What else could I possibly be? Lily almost says. If I’m not the hero, what am I? The town fucking fool?

“I am monumentally hungover and thus I am just grumpy enough to feel no obligation to be pleasant towards you,” Lily says instead. “In other words, fuck right off before I behead you and use your detached skull as a flowerpot.”

Severus looks at her, unimpressed. Scoffs. Shakes his head.

Pulls the gurdyroot close. “Come on,” he says. “We’re going to fall behind.”

Sirius is with Remus in Care of Magical Creatures again. He’s being quiet, really, and well-behaved—or, as well-behaved as drawing the cover of Abbey Road but with frogs upright in clothes can be. Remus wouldn’t mind it, not at all, if his joints weren’t itchy. His joints. His JOINTS.

It’s the moon, yes, it’s coming too quickly, but it’s also Sirius. Unintentionally, but nonetheless.

Every time Sirius grabs a pencil, they all shift. They were in a line, once, Remus thinks mournfully. A neat line. In color order. Now blue is next to red and yellow is after violet and Remus’s joints itch.

“Stop it,” he says, smacking Sirius’s hand away. “This is why I don’t sit with you.”

Sirius pouts childishly.

“You’re making a mess,” Remus says, straightening them compulsively. “Come on. Take out your own pencils, arsehole.”

“You are so moony. Few days before and you get all antsy and particular and mean.”

“I am not,” Remus snaps. He blinks. “Oh, good Godric, I am.”

Sirius smiles at him, too-white too-straight teeth and a healthy pinkness to his cheeks from the chill in the air.

Remus flops backward and stares at the sky. Anything, anything to keep from looking at that fucking smug face.

Now that James has had his first kiss—its inherent Siriusness aside—he feels as if he’s quite grown up and mature.

Thus, he asks Lily to Hogsmeade.

“No, you pig-head,” she hisses.

Granted, they’re in the middle of a Herbology exam at the time, and James thinks she would’ve said much more had they not been constrained by the allowances of educational decorum.

After Lily and her glare and her stomping (and that smudge of dirt on her cheekbone), James goes after a pretty Hufflepuff who always says hi in the corridors and tends to give him eyes across the Great Hall. Her name is Lucy Larkin, soft like a songbird, and James asks her like this:

“Did it hurt when you fell from the sky?” A beat. “Y’know. From when you were up there with the diamonds and such.”

James feels rather lucky she’s a halfblood with a record player and a penchant for boy band rock, because he gets paid well for his effort.

“How was it?” Remus is the one to ask, because Sirius is busy laughing so aggressively James worries in a distant, foggy sort of way that he’s going to vomit.

“Monumental,” James says breathlessly. His eyes are so wide it’s almost painful. His consciousness is floating on another plane. He is a figment. Pomegranate-seed-small.

“And you’re sure she didn’t drug you?” Peter says.

“Positive,” says James.

Sirius is on his back, knees tucked to his chest, hands fisted, laughing so hard it’s gone silent.

“I,” James says.

“And it was just a snog?” Peter says, gaping.

“Go have a letch round the Common Room and let us know if you get like this after just a snog,” Remus tells Peter, slapping his shoulder. “We’ll compare the results. A scientific study, go on, Pete.”

“You gauche bastard,” Sirius finally chokes out, meeting James’s eyes. “You absolute pinnacle of male inferiority.”

“Oi,” says James, not really offended, because he’s still thinking about Lucy’s pink cheeks and the way her waist felt under his hand and the hiccuping way she laughed at him the moment they split apart in the stairwell. He thinks—bloody hell, he might even fancy her. Is that all it takes to fancy someone? One good kiss? Is this what fancying feels like?

It’s familiar. It makes him think of Eli, of second year and the bathroom and Eli everywhere. (And anyway. Anyway, James doesn’t fancy Lily, not at all. He’s irrevocably in love with her. It’s entirely different.)

James is questioning everything he's ever known.

Sirius meanwhile has drifted to his feet and fallen onto James’s mattress beside him, slipping an arm around his shoulders. “I have a problem, you know.”

“What’s the problem?” James says, meeting his solemn gaze.

“I haven’t a clue who it is we’re talking about.”

Remus and Peter burst into laughter.

“She’s a Hufflepuff in our year,” says James over the sound of it, knowing better than to be frustrated with Sirius. It’s just the way he is.

“Not Jane,” Sirius confirms.

“No, not Jane the Hufflepuff.”

“I didn’t know there were other bird Hufflepuffs in our year,” Sirius says.

“There are five other bird Hufflepuffs,” Peter howls.

“Five?” Sirius says. He blinks. “That can’t be right. There’s Jane… and there’s—this one—”

“Lucy,” James says, “her name is Lucy.”

“That can’t be right,” Sirius says again.

“They’re in our History of Magic class,” Peter insists, and Remus is the one nearing hysterics now. “Every single one of them. All five.”

“They’ve been there the whole time?” Sirius says. “Three and a half years?”

“Yes, Sirius,” James sighs. “Lucy sits with Jane, though. If that clears anything up in that fucking Lethean swamp you call a brain.”

“You and Andromeda would get on like a house on fire,” Sirius says, squinting at James. He sits sharply up. “Oh! Is she the one without eyebrows?”

James socks him on the shoulder.

“Ow,” Sirius whines, hunching over, clutching the spot. Chokes out: “Already defending her honor. A good sign, I presume.”

“She’s got eyebrows,” James mutters, flushed. “They’re fine eyebrows. Great ones, even. They’re just… very blond.”

“Do you even know her?” Peter says, squinting at James. “Like, at all?”

“A bit,” James says with a shrug. “You know. In passing.”

“She must be well fit, then, to steal you away from Evans all of a sudden,” Sirius says.

James raises his fist threateningly again.

Sirius chuckles as he flinches away, tugging James’s pillow over his head, hiding.

James sighs, rubbing Sirius’s spine where he lays out of an innate need to be moving more than his typical innate need to be touching. “It’s different than it is with Evans,” James admits. “For one, Lucy actually fancies me. It’s not like Evans will mind me… sniffing the roses before I end up in her garden. And Lucy is well fit.”

“She looks sort of like a blond Olivia Hussey,” Remus says thoughtfully.

“I haven’t a clue who that is,” James says.

“Muggle actress,” Remus clarifies.

“Mm,” James says, and then he’s thinking about Lucy again, in a sort of vague but interested way. “Lucy could be a movie star.”

“Were you a good snog?” Sirius asks from beneath the pillow.

“I performed adequately, I’d say,” James says, a smile coming to his lips. The kiss had been long and—well, rather wet, in all honesty—but enjoyable overall. He surely won’t mind trying it again sometime. “I was—yeah, I was fine, I bet.”

Remus tosses a thumbs up across the room. Peter, who has been hanging onto every detail, rolls his eyes.

“When’s your date, then?” Peter asks, curled on his side.

“Hogsmeade on Guy Fawkes,” James says, knuckling his nose to hide the way his smile grows. “Fireworks and butterbeer, I reckon.”

“You romantic devil, you sly dog,” Sirius says, only a little sarcastic, batting blindly at James’s hip. “Feel ‘er up for us.”

“You’re depraved.”

“You wish you were with someone depraved rather than little miss angel Lacie.”

“It’s Lucy.”

“Bugger me sideways.”

“You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”

“I presume so.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Peter says, nose wrinkled. “Don't want to imagine James buggering anything, thanks much.”

They laugh, James far too pleased to complain about the dig. The light, spacey feeling carries all the way into the next morning, when he finds Lucy waiting nervously for him at the entrance to the Great Hall, shifting her weight between her vinyl boots. Her hair is pinned back today, neat and smooth, and her eyes are lined with makeup in a pretty blue color. She pulls herself up when she sees him coming, a tentative smile flitting to her lips. It stretches wide when James smiles back at her.

James waves the boys onward, not bothering to look as they jeer, giving grating shouts of laughter and slapping his shoulders as they go on into the Great Hall. He comes up to Lucy, instead.

“Morning,” he says, tucking his hands into his pockets.

“Hiya,” she says. “Sleep good?”

“Mhm,” James says with a nod. “You look really pretty.”

She wrinkles her nose when she smiles. “You look pretty, too.”

James offers her his elbow, and, when he thinks about it, he does have a funny swirling feeling in his stomach. He isn’t exactly sure what two people who are snogging are supposed to do with each other when they aren’t snogging, and he certainly doesn’t know what they’re supposed to say, but that seems like the foundation of it all: the butterflies. Her smile, her boots, his butterflies.

They walk into the Great Hall side by side, a new era commencing without any to-do at all.

“Hey.”

Lily shoots a scowl over her shoulder, but can’t maintain it. “Hey.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, I dunno. You just look a bit mopey.” Sirius sits on the low courtyard wall beside her, bringing with him a cloud of fancy cologne: something floral and vanilla. His neat duster jacket bumps the sleeve of her puffy purple parka. “You’ve got a plan to make it better, I presume.”

“You presume?”

“Well. You usually do, when it comes to things such as this.”

“Things such as what?”

“Things such as people being sad.” A moment. “Just because it’s you feeling the sadness this time round doesn’t mean you deserve a plan any less than if it were Remus or I or one of the girls, you know.”

“How very heartfelt of you.”

“I know. I could gag.”

“Mm. Same.”

A moment. “May I be of service in any way?”

“That depends. Have you got any dungbombs on you?”

“For you? I’d make dungbombs from scratch. Out of thin air. Like God.”

“Our father, who art in a constant state of debauchery,” Lily quips.

“Our father? Have you seen me? More like ‘Our daddy.’”

“I need you to stop using that term in front of me.”

“Makes you uncomfortable?”

“Petunia still calls our father that. It’s weird enough hearing it in her voice without thinking of your voice and your face every time the words leave her prissy little mouth.”

“I, on the other hand, believe the image of my face must be a welcome one at any hour.” Sirius pokes her elbow with his own. “Where do you want to throw these sanctimonious dungbombs of mine, anyhow?”

Lily looks at him, a little pout on her lips. “Hufflepuff hallway?”

Sirius smiles with his canines. “Darling, you truly do possess the key to my heart.”