Long Live (Marauder!fic)
Remus Lupin is a nancified, conniving git who deserves to spend the rest of his life in the company of Moaning Myrtle.
The aforementioned nancified, conniving git stood back from the wall of the Gryffindor common room and began to chuckle. Where there had once been a portrait of Wendelin the Weird, there was now a copius amount of graffiti glowing blue in the low light. It was scrawled very precisely, as if someone with very messy, very familiar handwriting had tried painstakingly to make himself legible. This was, Remus supposed, their reward for Vanishing Sirius' clothes after Quidditch practice, leaving him to walk up to the castle in his boxers and meeting no less than three professors, including Professor McGonagall, on his way.
Personally, Remus' sympathy was not for Sirius, but for Professor McGonagall.
The insults didn't bother Remus, really. If Sirius wanted to be cruel--and he could indeed be very, very cruel, if Severus Snape was any indication--then he would let fly more deadly insults than that. Over the years Remus found it essential to be well-versed in Sirius-speak, and this...he looked at the display and grinned.
It was, at the very least, heavily veiled praise of his friends' marauding talents. At most, it was a fervent delcaration of Sirius' brotherly affection.
Remus suspected the latter. Things had been rough at Grimmauld Place, lately.
James Potter is a Quidditch-obsessed Mummy's boy who deserved to be shaved, coated in honey, and hung from the Astronomy tower in lady's knickers. In his Mum's knickers.
The Quidditch-obsessed Mummy's boy slung his arm around Remus' shoulders.
"Brings a tear to a man's eye, doesn't it?" James nodded towards Sirius' work of art. "Too bad his dream will never be realized. Mum's knickers don't fit me."
Remus raised an eyebrow and shrugged James' arm off of his shoulder. "I really don't want to know how you know that."
James waggled his eyebrows. "Spend a summer with Sirius and see how many disgusting things you find out that you didn't know before," He pretended to swoon. "I will never be the same. And neither will that poor house elf."
"James! Remus!" There was a rumble of stairs and a familiar pointed, smiling face came bounding down the staircase. He stopped when he saw them purusing the wall. "Whachya looking at?"
Peter Pettigrew has a face like the wrong end of a hippogriff. This is punishment enough.
Peter looked annoyed for a moment, but then rolled his eyes and started to chuckle.
"He's had a bad go of it at home again, hasn't he?"
"Regulus was being a git," said James. "But what Sirius doesn't understand is that Regulus is always a git."
"He's got real brothers," said Remus quietly.
"Yeah," said Peter. "What'll we do to cheer him up?"
There were several mentions of Slytherins in conjunction with toilets, Regulus' underpants flying on the breeze at the top of Gryffindor tower, and No-Heat, Wet-Start Fireworks in the Great Hall at breakfast next morning. As both random Slytherins and Regulus' underpants would be difficult to acquire owing to the nasty business of a password-guarded portraithole in the dungeon, they decided on a different course of action. In the end, Remus and Peter wrote a long, amorous love-letter to Professor McGonagall, James signed it with Sirius' name, and sent it off with the morning post. When she got it, (right after the fireworks died down...that one was too classic to resist, and they'd run it anyway) she glared at Sirius all through breakfast and gave him a detention during Transfiguration, but he came back from it laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes, and gave each of them a huge bear hug in turn.
"Long live the Marauders," said Remus, grinning as Sirius recounted the way he'd propositioned McGonagall during his detention.
"Indeed," said Sirius, raising his bottle of butterbeer. "Long live."