(no subject)
that could have been the beginning of the end if i wasn't already in the middle
by throughadoor
thanks to smartlikjustin, rageprufrock and circusgirl for beta action and to semielliptical for the impetus. html version here or you can read it --
JAMES
*
"Oy! That's my foot!"
"Sorry," James said, snickering, "I didn't see it."
James and Sirius were crouched underneath the invisibility cloak, the Map and a bag of Dungbombs between them. "Must be because it's invisible," Sirius retorted, "very funny. Watch where you step, you pisser."
As always, the options for the evening had been homework or mayhem, and Sirius had sworn he had it on good authority that the Slytherins were sneaking out after hours to sacrifice goats or eat Muggle babies or whatever it was Slytherins did for fun. So they'd found a spot with a view of the Slytherin portrait hole, hid themselves in the cover of darkness and the cloak and waited.
But that had been hours ago. James stifled a yawn. They'd had Quidditch practice from the end of lessons until it was too dark to see the Snitch, and he was so exhausted he could hardly stand upright, let alone avoid tripping over Sirius' feet. Sirius was standing behind James, both invisible and in the dark, but James could picture Sirius' mouth in a frown, and how his forehead would wrinkle if James suggested that they call the night a wash and go to bed.
Ever since Sirius had returned from Christmas hols with three trunks and a grim expression that suggested he'd had enough, he'd been obsessed with tormenting the Slytherins. Hexing Snivellus in the corridor was one thing, James thought, but Sirius' need to prove himself in opposition to everything he'd been raised into was bordering on obsession.
He was, quite possibly, off his bloody rocker.
"Hogsmeade weekend, eh?" James asked.
"Yeah," Sirius said, sounding distracted, "thought we could make a trip to Zonko's, freshen up our stash of Dungbombs after we put these to good use."
"Actually," James said, "I was thinking of asking Evans."
"Right," Sirius scoffed. "So after Zonko's, maybe we can get in on the goblin card game at the Hog's Head?"
"No, I'm serious," James said. "I'm going to ask Evans if she wants to go to Hogsmeade with me."
He tried to act as though he hadn't asked Lily Evans to be his date to Hogsmeade two dozen times since their fourth year, because James believed in staying upbeat. Besides, he was nearly positive that Lily had only been putting on when she'd told him she'd rather drop dead than borrow his extra quill in Herbology on Tuesday.
Sirius was having none of it. "Right," he said, "ask Evans to Hogsmeade. That's a fantastic idea, why didn't you think of it before?"
James dug his elbow into what he hoped was Sirius' invisible midsection and he was gratified with contact against what felt like the soft curve of Sirius' stomach.
Sirius made a started "oof" sound but kept laughing. "Ask Evans to Hogsmeade, he says," Sirius gasped, in a hammed-up sort of way. "You're brilliant, Potter, absolutely mad brilliant."
James waited for Sirius to wear himself out. He was comforted with the probability that Sirius' carrying on would scare away any Slytherins who might be lurking about and the night would be wasted.
When he was finished, Sirius said, "So, Zonko's, then?"
James concentrated on feeling lighter than air, as though the stone step they'd been sitting on for the last three or six thousand hours was actually a very fluffy cloud. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe if Evans already has other plans." Before Sirius could answer, James caught a slight movement at the Slytherin portrait hole out of the corner of his eye. "Hang on," he whispered. "I think I see something."
*
James stared at Sirius and Peter's white faces, imagining that his own looked similarly stricken. "There's nothing we can do now," Sirius said quickly. "If we try and stop him, we'll get caught."
"If we don't try and stop him," James said, feeling like his head was being held under water, the shock of it cold and suffocating, "he could die." He was running before he'd fully realized what he had to do.
He found Snape at the base of the Whomping Willow, wand drawn, inspecting the knots in the trunk under the cautiously swaying branches.
"Sni--" James started, but stopped himself. "Snape, wait!" he said, "wait, it's a trick. It's a trick, wait." He was doubled over, panting.
Snape turned and showed a clenched scowl. "Think you can keep me from finding out your secret? I know you, Potter, you're doing something out of bounds, and when I find out what it is, the whole lot of you will be expelled."
"Go on then, and by the way, it's the second knot to your left," James nearly said, but forced himself through gritted teeth to actually say, "Snape, you can't. He's a werewolf, Remus is a werewolf, he'll kill you."
At once, and just as he'd nearly regained his breath, the wind was knocked out of him. Snape had him pinned to the ground, wand nudging in the hollow of James' throat. "Are you barking mad?" Snape shouted, "I could have been killed!"
"'Swhat," James wheezed, fighting to push him off, "I was trying to tell you."
"So what's that make you, then?" Snape sneered, his eyes still blazing behind the greasy curtain of his hair. James reflected that perhaps those six years of torturing Snape for laughs had been remiss if this was the result. "Think I'll be indebted to you because you saved my life?"
Snape leaned in very close, and James could smell his breath, and nearly feel the slimy hair on his face. "I will never be indebted to you, James Potter," Snape said. "Do you hear me? Never." He stood up, wand still held defensively. "You might have saved yourself from Azkaban, but I'll still see you expelled."
As Snape tore away toward the castle, James uncrumpled himself and sat up. "I wasn't trying to save your life, you know," he said when Snape was well out of earshot, "I was trying to save Remus'."
**
"You've got to stop showing up like this, mate."
Sirius was swaying slightly, one arm dangling out of his cloak. James had propped himself in the door frame like he was a broom that might otherwise fall over. Which he suspected he would. Fall over, that is. Sirius was drunk and James was near-dead from exhaustion. From where James stood -- at the threshold, as though Sirius was a vampire he wasn't quite sure he wanted to invite inside -- they seemed about equally well off.
"You can't," James shook himself a little more awake, "it's almost midnight, and your godson has slept exactly seventeen minutes since last Tuesday."
"Don't they have --" Sirius swayed a little to the left and then forward to right himself as though he was a child's spinning top. "--spells for that sort of thing?"
James grimaced. "Looked it up," he said, "bloody books say that it's illegal to cast any type of spell that inhibits natural human responses."
Sirius' eyes got very wide, the same as how he'd looked when James had told him that Lily was pregnant. His mouth had formed a little 'o' and then he'd said, "I think I'm going to be sick," and run off for the washroom. But that had been more about the ten empty casks of fire whiskey between them and that they'd come straight from a skirmish with some Death Eaters, one of whom may have been Sirius' cousin, who had definitely tossed an Avera Kedavra at him as a greeting, because after Sirius came back from the wash room, he'd composed what he'd drunkenly claimed to be the beginnings of an epic poem devoted to all the things they were going to teach James' first born. The list included Quidditch, hating Slytherins, the best ways to cheat at Exploding Snap and also Quidditch.
James realized that Sirius was still boggling and swaying. "So," James said, "what can I do you for this fine evening?"
"Umrahel's Tavern," Sirius said.
"Come again?"
"Umrahel's Tavern," Sirius said. "Between Angus' Ancient Artifacts and The Evil Eye in Knockturn Alley, door opens if you smear powered kitten whiskers on the Newt's eye statue. And since I happen to have a whole bag of--" Sirius groped in the pocket of his robes. "Happen to have, had 'round here somewhere," he muttered.
James raised his eyebrows. "Kitten whisker powder?" he asked.
Sirius grinned. "Aww, c'mon," he said. "Totally humane supplier, I promise, I charmed the whiskers off the kittens myself. It's all for the greater good, eh? We'll have a few rounds of troll scotch, bash a few skulls."
"So it's a Dark bar, then?"
Sirius eyed him as though to ask if there was any other kind, which, point taken.
The routine shook out like this: Sirius would show up with a dodgy method for gaining entry to a bar that was rumored to cater to dark wizards. They'd go, get a little sloshed and generally exercise their talent for shooting their mouths off until some Snape-a-like type challenged them to a duel. Then all hell broke loose, right on schedule.
"But," James said, "the last time my ears didn't shrink back to normal for a week."
"And you had those lilac-scented boils, too, didn't you?" Sirius said. "I have to hand it to Rosier, he really didn't learn a damned thing in school."
"True," James said, "but I'm out tonight, I'm so bloody exhausted I'd end up giving myself lilac-scented boils."
"It's no fun without you!" Sirius said, flapping his arms and looking petulant.
"Sure it is," James said. "I always end up trying to drag you off just when the hexing's getting good, don't I?"
"Exactly! I need you to keep me out of trouble. Think what'll happen if I go out without out you."
"I can't."
"James."
"Sirius."
"Prongs."
"Padfoot."
"I just can't, alright? You know what Lily said last time, when she was shrinking down my ears? She said, 'You're somebody's father now, James Potter.' And she's, I mean, she's right, you know?"
"Wow," Sirius said. "You even sound like one."
"Get out of here," James said, waving him off. "The night's still young. Give my love to Rosier, tell him it's nothing a steadier wand hand won't fix."
*
Sirius stood with his back to James, and when he spoke, his words seemed far away. "I didn't not tell you," he said.
Which, to think about it, was ridiculous, and so James said, "Well, what's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that I wasn't sneaking around having some secret, some secret -- what did you want me to do, pass you a note during Charms?"
And that was absolutely rich, coming from Sirius, as though James was the one who couldn't seem to grow up, and James felt words fly out of his mouth thickly, and he didn't care how they sounded. "I need to know that the people I trust are completely honest with me."
Sirius turned around, his face blanched like a burnt egg. "Are you saying that you don't trust me?"
When James shagged Lily for the first time, she'd said, "Run off and tell your friends that you finally bagged Lily Evans and I'll tell the whole school that you're skinny as your wand where it counts." She'd been buttoning up her blouse with one hand and she'd pressed her other hand against his chest. "This is between you and me," she'd said, "not you and me and Moon-Eye and Paddies and Worm Tongue or whatever you call yourselves. Got it?"
"I'm saying that -- even Peter knew."
"Peter bloody lives there."
He'd told Sirius anyway, of course, all of it, including the part where she'd begged to have the backs of her knees tickled. Just after James and Lily were married, Sirius had come over for dinner, drank almost an entire bottle of cheap spiced wine and asked if he could see the backs of Lily's knees. She'd made James sleep on the sofa for nearly a week.
"I shouldn't have found out something this important from Peter."
"So, what, Peter's the only one you can trust now?"
"I didn't say that." Except that maybe he did.
Dumbledore had taken James and Lily aside after a regular meeting of the Order to tell them about the prophecy, and James had decided that Dumbledore had finally gone off his rocker. Lily hadn't even been pregnant and James had been bloody terrified of becoming a father and he'd been relieved that it had been presumed that they'd wait until after the war to even discuss it.
So when Dumbledore had sworn them to secrecy, it'd seemed easy, but then Lily read it in her tea leaves and James had needed to tell someone he knew he could trust with more than just his own life.
"Maybe Peter ought to be your secret keeper, then," Sirius said, and his voice was very low and his face was very hard. But all James could see was Sirius when he'd told him he knew, how Sirius had looked like a stranger, how Sirius had looked caught.
"Maybe," James said, "you're right."
**
REMUS
*
Remus climbed the steps to the boys' dormitory of Gryffindor Tower. His arms were laden with books, and there were several dozen feet of parchment balanced under his chin. "Oh, don't worry about it, Peter," he muttered to himself, "I don't need any help finishing my essay. Go along with everyone else to Hogsmeade and I'll catch up."
When he reached the dormitory, it was dark. Not wanting to drop his books on his own feet, he angled for his wand with one hand and balanced his load with the other. After a few minutes of this juggling act, he dropped everything anyway, startled by a voice from one of the dark corners, saying, "Lumos."
"Who's there?" Remus called out, eyes adjusting to the torch light.
"S'only me."
Remus leaned to gather the small mountain of books and the river of parchment at his feet, but he glanced toward the tightly drawn curtains of Sirius' bed. Sirius sounded -- strange. Not sleepy, just strange.
"Why're you sitting in the dark, Padfoot?" Remus asked. No answer.
He dumped the books on his bed. "Are you alright?" Still no answer.
"I'm going down for supper," Remus continued, now staring directly at the fortress of Sirius' bed. "Do you want to come?"
Once again, he was met with silence. Remus thought about pressing the issue but decided against it. Sirius was known for enjoying a good sulk from time to time and if something was really wrong, Sirius would let James fix it when he was ready to have it fixed.
Just as Remus was about to leave, Sirius said, "Wait!" and drew back the curtain. "I'm not hungry," he said, "but could you stop by the hospital wing and get me some Vesiculum? I don't want to go out like this."
Sirius was nearly covered in bright pink suffering skin blisters, which was why Remus imagined he wanted the Vesiculum, but he also had a pair of black eyes, a rusted splash of blood at the corner of his mouth and a large gash splitting his chin.
"You, er, are you sure you don't want some bind-all bandages, too?"
Sirius shrugged, causing some of his blisters to sizzle in a way that looked terribly painful.
"What--" Remus started to ask what happened, but he knew what had happened. He wanted to ask why Sirius always went looking for trouble in exactly the same place, but he could have also asked Sirius why the sky was blue and gotten about the same answer.
"Where was James?" Remus asked finally.
Sirius grinned, but then winced at the effort. "He went with Evans," he said.
*
The sheet was white, it felt like parchment, and it was pulled up to Remus' chin. His legs and arms ached, and there was the familiar pattern of scrapes and claw marks across his hands and face, but Remus wasn't sick. This meant that, opposed to the other way around, he was in the hospital wing to keep everyone else safe from him.
It wasn't like he wasn't used to it.
Madame Phelps hadn't even been in to apply bind-all bandages, and the pile of stones settled in Remus' stomach said that they were going to expel him because he was too dangerous and too much of a risk to the other students. Hagrid, the groundskeeper, had brought Remus back from the Shack at dawn. He'd told Remus more than he probably should have about what had happened. Remus' bed in the hospital wing was separated from the rest by a white curtain, and the last person to disappear behind it was Hagrid.
To his surprise, the next person Remus saw was Sirius.
Sirius' eyes were blood-shot saucers, and his hands were knotted together in a way that made the act of contrition he put on for McGonagall whenever he got caught out-of-bounds look like even more of a sham by comparison. "Erm, good morning Moony," he said. "Madame Phelps says that you can leave as soon as she fixes up your face. She said I could see you first because there's some Hufflepuff first year with funugulus feet." He chuckled at this, but Remus only stared at him.
"I don't suppose it ever occurred to you that Snape could have died," Remus said, and his voice in his throat was a hard, sharp thing. Sirius actually took a step back, that was how surprised he was and how angry Remus sounded and Remus was surprised at first, too, but then realized it was true.
Sirius tried to shrug off his shock. "He wouldn't have," he said.
"Yes," Remus said, "he would have. And you don't know -- you don't know what it's like to know that, do you?"
Sirius shook his head.
"Hagrid, Hagrid said it was your fault-- that you told him."
"It was my fault," Sirius said, and if there was one thing Remus knew about Sirius, it was that he never told the truth that quickly.
"Did you tell him?" Remus repeated, because it seemed easier to say than, "You're lying." But he also wanted to make it clear that he wouldn't accept technicality or omission, and also that he wasn't stupid.
Sirius became very absorbed in the floor, and Remus knew he wouldn't be able to get any more out of him, and also that Sirius believed that it was his responsibility, regardless of what might have actually happened. Sirius was like that, dodging punishment whenever he could, but also willing to take the blame for events leading all the way back to his own birth.
"So you got into it with them again," Remus said slowly, once again revising the truth to fill in Sirius' blank spaces, "and this time you told Snape to meet you at the Shack? Is that how it happened, then?" They're creating the lie together, even if Remus is still entirely in the dark.
Sirius looked up, and Remus saw a blank face, no fresh bruises, only the faint lines and shadows of faded scrapes and scabs. "Yeah," Sirius said. "That's about it."
"I suppose," Remus said, "that I bloody well hate you, then."
Remus hates knowing that he's not got much choice here. Sirius would shoot a spell at his own foot if he thought there was a chance it would ricochet and hit someone else in the eye, and if Remus called him out, Sirius would just bury himself in manufactured guilt up to his eyeballs to spite himself. He hates that Sirius is this fist-full of arrogance who somehow believed that everything would prove to be all his fault, always, if someone looked hard enough. But he couldn't hate Sirius for this.
At last, Sirius looked him in the eye, but still betrayed nothing. "Understandable," he said.
Remus grinned crookedly; there was a cut splitting the other side of his mouth apart. "I mean, really," he said, staring back. "Here I am in the hospital wing and you didn't even bring me a card?"
*
The first word Remus saw when he woke up was ojoporoj. Vengeance Magic in Thirteenth Century Catalana, Chapter 5, Magic on the Body: "The magic of ojoporoj is as old as time and extremely dangerous." And Remus' nose was planted right below the word ojoporoj. The last thing Remus heard before he woke up was a pounding like thunder against the front door of the flat. It was the first thing he heard when he woke up, too, so he guessed it probably wasn't just a bad dream.
Remus hoisted himself up from his desk, face feeling flattened and imprinted with the words he'd unsuccessfully been trying to imprint on his brain. "Coming, coming already," he shouted, not caring if he woke up Peter because he'd bloody well been sleeping and he had to get up and open the door for --
Sirius.
Sirius was standing at the door, ripped remnants of his cloak cradled in his arms and ripped robes hanging loose from his shoulders, revealing a deep gash exploding green puss on his arm. He was laughing, saying, "Moony! 'M so happy to see you! Fancy a game of Exploding Snap?"
He was also, apparently, very drunk.
"Get in," Remus said, grabbing onto a torn sleeve. "You'll wake the neighbors." He pulled a stumbling Sirius inside and the door shut behind him. "Who, I might add, are Muggles."
Sirius tried to spin out of Remus' grasp. "Muggles!" he said. "I love Muggles!" He began to snicker to himself as though he'd just betrayed a clever secret.
"Yes," Remus said, managing to drag Sirius out of the proximity of the door, "that's fantastic. But let's maybe get you cleaned up, hmm?"
Sirius muttered something under his breath that sounded like "filthy mudbloods" and Remus thought he had a fair idea where Sirius had been. Not that it mattered; he was far too exhausted to ask.
He sat Sirius down at the kitchen table. "I've got some salves and things in the cupboard," he said. "It's hardly St. Mungos, but, you know, occupational hazard." He didn't ask Sirius why he hadn't gone to St. Mungos, with a burn like that. The members of the Order all tried to avoid showing up at the Ministry-run hospital with unexplained injuries if they could help it.
Sirius didn't say anything; he was humming the Hogwarts school song under his breath and tracing the wood grain of the table with his finger. When Remus turned away from the cupboard, Peter was standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
"What's going on?" he said. "What's Sirius doing here?"
Remus smirked. "Why, Peter," he said, piling essence of aloe, soya jelly and vinegar seeds on the table. "You don't approve of Sirius' habit of stopping by for tea at three o'clock in the morning?"
"I -- er," Peter stammered. Peter was a pretty decent flatmate, and always remembered to put a Smell Fresh charm on his dirty laundry, but he'd always been a bit thick and caught jokes like they were a Bludger to a head. "Where'd you go, Sirius?" he asked finally. "You don't look so good."
"I went," Sirius started, waving his finger around in an emphatic way, "to a little place full of -- actually, it was full of absolute rubbish, but that was the point, you know, bag full of kitten whisker powder and it was called, er --"
"Umrahel's Tavern?" Peter supplied.
"Yes!" Sirius said, thumping a fist against the table. And then, "How did you know that?"
"You're really drunk," Peter said. "I'm going to go back to bed."
"Sweet dreams!" Remus called after him. "I'll try not to let Sirius dance on the tables or anything and keep you awake," he added darkly.
He sat down next to Sirius at the table and began mixing essence of aloe and vinegar seeds in the mortar and pestle.
"That smells awful," Sirius said.
Remus raised his eyebrows. "So do you."
He dotted the mixture on Sirius' arm, Sirius wincing at the sting. "You know," he said, "it's nice, you and Wormtail being flatmates. Bet it's just like being at school. Ouch! Bloody hell, Moony, you trying to burn my fucking arm off?"
"Hold still."
"Why didn't we all get a flat together after school like we talked about?"
Remus sighed. "Because," he said, "you already had a flat, and James married Lily."
"Oh, right," Sirius said, nodding.
With Sirius' burn adequately cleaned, Remus applied a bind-all bandage and attempted to reparo his ripped sleeve. "Sirius," he said, "you have to stop doing this."
"Showing up like this?" Sirius said strangely. "Waking up Wormtail?"
Yes. "No. I mean," Remus paused, and through the rips in Sirius' robes he could see other scars, realizing that he'd tended to more of these ghost wounds than the ones he hadn't. "You're not sixteen anymore," he said, "and neither are the blokes you're going up against. You're going to get yourself killed."
Sirius had buried his face in crossed arms on the table, so his answer was muffled.
"He started it."
"But you go looking for it. And I don't even understand why. What do you have to prove? Everyone knows you hate the Dark Arts. My 90 year old Muggle neighbor knows you hate the Dark Arts. You practically walk around wearing a sign that says not to judge you because of your family, there's no need to get yourself killed by a Dark wizard to prove a point. Is there?"
Sirius didn't answer.
The next thing Remus heard was Sirius' snore.
*
The wood floor was like a block of ice under Remus' feet, and he was taking care to close the bedroom door as silently as possible. It wasn't unusual for the nights leading up to the full moon to find him sleepless, skin itching, blood restless and jumpy in his veins. He didn't like to talk about it, it made the twenty-eight days a month that he was human seem less so.
Anyway, it was nothing a cup of tea didn't usually fix.
Remus stood in the kitchen as he waited for the kettle to boil, still shivering under his robe. The previous day's Daily Prophet was spread across the kitchen table like a dissected corpse -- the front page displayed a photo of Millicent Bagnold speaking to the International Convention of Warlocks. Sirius had drawn a cartoonish bubble from Bagnold's mouth and written, "I'm so scared of the 'Voldemort problem' that I'm shitting my pants right now."
On the inside page, there was a photo with the caption Prominent philanthropist Augstin Malfoy and his son Lucius, with new wife Narcissa and their son Draco, attend the ribbon cutting of the new Ward for Hopelessly Cursed Cases at St. Mungo's Hospital. In the photo, the Malfoys were unrecognizable -- their faces had been marked out with permanent ink.
Remus was watching the images of the Malfoys squirm with discomfort, so he was surprised to look up and see Peter letting himself in the front door. "You're out late," Remus said. "I thought you were already asleep when I got home." Remus tried to sound calm, but made a note not to assume that Peter was sleep in bed even if his door was closed.
Peter appeared as startled to see Remus as Remus had been to see him. "Remus," he said, "You -- you're up late."
Remus shrugged. "Couldn't sleep," he said. "Where were you, anyway?"
Peter smiled. "I thought you might like some privacy."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm not deaf," Peter said, "and, er, both of you could stand to brush up on your silencing charms."
Remus' cheeks grew hot, and he very carefully studied the table, watching as the Chudley Canons' seeker allowed the Snitch to slip out of his grasp over and over and over again on the front page of the sports section.
"Don't worry," Peter said, "your secret is safe with me. You could have just told me, though. I'm your friend, aren't I?"
"It's not a secret," Remus said. "It's just, there's so much going on, it complicates things."
"Don't worry," Peter said, patting Remus on the shoulder. "I won't tell anyone. My lips are sealed."
It had been a secret, well, not a secret exactly, but it had been something they weren't telling people. But Remus hadn't felt like it was something he should feel ashamed about until now. He looked up and saw Peter's twitchy little smile, his comforting pat, and Remus felt like he might be sick. Behind them, the tea kettle let off a low whistle. "Want me to get your tea for you?" Peter asked.
Remus shook his head. "No," he said. "I think I'm just going to go back to bed."
When Remus slipped back in the duvet, Sirius rolled over and muttered, "Moony, your feet are like ice."
"Sorry," Remus said, curling his legs up to his chest. "Go back to sleep."
**
SIRIUS
*
Sirius scuffed his toe in the dirt as he wandered further away from Hogsmeade. The end of the world was surely at hand and the state of things was grim.
The facts: Peter was nowhere to be found. Remus had skipped a Hogsmeade weekend to finish his vampire essay. This wasn't particularly earth-shattering, it was the kind of short-sheeted thing that Remus did all the time, but Sirius found it deeply objectionable all the same. And James -- in a turn of events that had Sirius glancing up to check for chunks of falling sky -- had a date with Lily Evans. On top of everything else, the age line at the Hog's Head was working properly for what had to be the first time ever.
After three different girls had asked him if he fancied a coffee at Madam Puddifoot's, Sirius decided he might as well head back to the castle. At least distracting Remus while he tried to finish his vampire essay would be entertaining.
"Well, look who it is."
Sirius looked up from his feet and ahead on the path leading back to the castle, but when he saw who was standing in front of him, he realized he should have been able to tell by the stench.
"Snivellus," Sirius sneered. "If you know what's good for you, you'll scurry on back to the castle. I’m in a bloody awful mood and I'd like nothing better than to take it all out on you."
Rather than quaking in appropriate fear, Snape made an awful sort of expression that was probably supposed to be smile. "Oh, really?" he said. "Well, let's see what my friends have to say."
Sirius felt it almost as he heard it -- a voice yelled "Expelliarmus!" from somewhere behind him, the spell hit him in the back and his wand flew out of his hands. He whirled around to see Evan Rosier, Antonin Dolohov, Wilbur Wilkes, Caleb Mulciber and, unsurprisingly, his dear brother Regulus.
"Is that the best you've got?" Sirius called to Dolohov, who was smugly holding his own wand in one hand and Sirius' in the other.
"Flagrinigium!" called out one of them, maybe Wilkes, but Sirius wasn't sure, because his skin was blossoming in a sizzle of bright pink blisters.
He doubled over, hands on his knees, but gritted his teeth against the pain and said, "What, nobody ever taught you how to do a decent Cruciatus curse? You're no better than Muggles, what're you going to do next, give me a black eye?"
When they had him pinned to the ground, tender bruised pockets covering pretty much every spot of his body, Sirius reflected that taunting them with the brute force angle probably hadn't been the brightest plan. He'd given as good as he'd gotten, and that elbow against Rosier's cheek was definitely going to leave a mark, but five against one made things a bit difficult.
As Snape loomed over him while Wilkes kept Sirius flat on his back with a foot on his neck, Sirius supposed that it had really been six against one, but he refused to count Snape, on account of the fact that all he'd done was stand around and look greasy and self-satisfied.
"So, Snivellus," Sirius said, "it only took you six years to find five people who hate me as much as you do. Well done, you must be very--"
"Shut your mouth, Mudblood-lover," Wilkes snapped, and twisted his heel.
"S'very convincing," Sirius wheezed. "I'm frightened to death."
"That's right," said Regulus, who still looked like the same fat-headed idiot who, when they were children, had stolen Sirius' pet snake and then howled like a baby when it bit him. "And you're not going to go running to Dumbledore, either? Because you know that we'll tell the whole school that you had to leave home because you're a filthy, scum-sucking blood traitor pervert."
Sirius didn't say anything, and fought to turn his head to the side.
*
Sirius watched, dumbfounded, as James raced toward the Whomping Willow to risk his own hide in order to save Snape's. Standing beside him, Peter was sniffling miserably, and not even trying to hide the hot tears running down his face.
"Wormtail, get a hold of yourself. It's okay -- Snape might still die!" Sirius said with forced lightness.
"It's not that," Peter howled. "I'm going to be, to be expelled!" He then dissolved into totally wracked sobs, face buried in his hands and Sirius scuffed his toes in the grass uncomfortably.
"You don't know that," Sirius said, shrugging, although he suspected that Peter would get expelled, because what he'd done had been really, really bloody stupid. "Why don't you tell me what happened?" Sirius added when Peter still hadn't looked up from his muffled sniffling.
"I was walking back from the library when," Peter paused for a wet, messy snort, "they had me surrounded, I didn't even see them coming!"
"Who," Sirius asked sharply, "who had you surrounded?"
"Dolohov and Wilkes and Snape and your brother," said Peter. "They surrounded me and they said that I had to tell them where Remus went every month--"
"Wait, how did they know about Moony?"
"I don't know, Sirius!" Peter said, waving his hands helplessly. His face was red and blotched and he'd never looked more like a rat with those runny pink eyes. "They told me I had to tell them or Regulus would tell the whole school why you left home." He looked at Sirius wide-eyed. Sirius felt Regulus' sucker punch in his stomach all over again, and he sunk down to sit in the wet grass. His robes were getting soaked, but he barely noticed.
"So you told them?" he asked.
"I didn't think I had any choice!" Peter said. He kneeled down next to Sirius in the grass. "You believe me, right?" he said. "And now I'm going to be expelled for sure!" He still looked as though he might start bawling again any minute.
Sirius sighed. More than terrified or frantic, he felt exhausted. He wanted to lie down, sleep for a week and wake up when this whole mess was sorted. "Did they tell you that they're going to tell the whole school that I'm a poofer or did you figure it out on your own?" Sirius asked.
Peter's eyes got very, very wide.
Sirius laughed, but it was more of a strangled cough. "Well, none of the above, then," he said. "Look, they're not going to toss you out," he added. "Because," he paused.
There was no because -- they probably were going to toss Peter out. Sirius knew quite a bit about a few things and one of those was the art of getting in trouble. If Peter had spent the last six years carefully building a resume of mayhem, the prank against Snape might have been taken in stride -- an offense worth a severe penalty for sure, but no less than what could be expected of him. But Peter had only ever been punished the few times all four Marauders had been caught in sticky hijinx; trying to get Snape killed was going to come out of nowhere and Peter was definitely going to get expelled, unless --
"Because we're going to tell Dumbledore that I did it," Sirius finished with a large gulp.
"What?"
The plan was so obvious and so simple that the words tumbled out of Sirius' mouth before the idea had even coalesced in his head. "I'll tell Dumbledore that I told Snape and them about Moony, and that they've been blackmailing me all semester. They won't quite cancel each other out, but maybe it's enough to keep me from getting tossed out."
Peter's face was still painted with confusion. "But won't Snape tell Dumbledore the truth?" he asked.
Sirius laughed again, another sharp bark. "Are you mad?" he said. "Give up a chance to get me in trouble? Don't worry, Snape won't say a word. That'll be the least of our troubles."
Peter finally stopped crying and also looking like he was going to cry. Sirius was so exhausted that he could barely stand up, although he needed to get up in a hurry so he could confess to Dumbledore before Snape did. The weight of the responsibility for what had happened had already settled heavily on his shoulders, and by the time he was standing before Dumbledore in the head's office, he would barely remember that it hadn't been all his fault in the first place.
**
"Well," said Sirius brightly, "that was fun, even, right?"
"I can't feel my feet."
"To be fair, you cast the numbing charm on yourself."
"Sirius, I cast the numbing charm so that I wouldn't be able to feel whether or not Rosier had burned off my toes."
Sirius looked at Remus' feet. His shoes did look -- ashy. "I poured my beer on them," he said. "I think that helped, didn't it?"
Remus scowled. "I owe you a round, then, I suppose?" he asked.
Sirius frowned, more of a pout, really. "I wasn't going to collect," he said.
It was near half-three and they were traipsing around Diagon Alley looking for an all-night Floo. Sirius had been the one to suggest that they Floo instead of Apparating because Remus seemed disoriented after being hit by both a Cruciatus and several nasty disarming spells, but Sirius had forgotten that the Leaky Cauldron locked up at three and every closed store front they walked past appeared to be causing Remus an exponential amount of pain, numbing spell aside.
It had started the night Sirius had passed out at Remus and Peter's flat and woke up wedged upon their sofa with Remus standing over him with a smirk, a cup of tea and the offer of a headache cure. Moony had always been one of his best mates, of course, but Sirius forgot sometimes that he was really quite fantastic company and didn't laugh nearly as much as James might have when Sirius had told him that he was relatively certain there was a nest of pixies in his stomach.
So when Sirius ran into Caradoc Dearborn, an Auror who'd played Quidditch for Gryffindor at the same time as James and Sirius, and Caradoc mentioned having made some arrests at The Six Fingers Tavern, Sirius decided to spare James the embarrassment of turning him down in favor of bedtime story hour and showed up at Remus' door.
Remus had said no, and then that Sirius was bonkers, and then no again, and then that Sirius was aiming to get himself killed, and then no again and then finally yes when Sirius had shrugged and said he'd just go alone, then, and Remus gave in because he was worried that Sirius would get killed, a plan that Sirius knew would work all along.
"What are you thinking?" Sirius asked after they'd come to another dead end. He knew of a dodgy but surefire all-night Floo in Knockturn Alley, but given the circumstances under which they'd taken leave from The Six Fingers, he thought it was probably wise to steer clear.
"I'm thinking we should have just Apparated," Remus growled.
"But you're--" Sirius didn't want to say that Remus wasn't up for Apparating because that would just make him more cross. But Remus was looking quite pale and not at all like he'd be able to find his way, let alone his feet.
Remus pressed his palm against a lamp post and leaned heavy into it. "I'll be fine," he said. "C'mere, just let me--"
Sirius moved toward him and Remus shifted, placing his hands on Sirius' shoulders for balance.
"My flat, then?" Remus said. "On the count of three?"
Sirius nodded, and as Remus started to count, he wondered what they must have looked like under the lamp light to anyone else out at that hour.
When he opened his eyes, they were in the kitchen of Remus and Peter's flat, and Remus was looking much worse for the wear, still leaning against Sirius but with a weight that suggested he might actually collapse and his breathing was in short heaves.
"Let's, you should sit down," Sirius said, fumbling Remus into one of the kitchen chairs. "Do you want some water?" he asked.
Remus nodded.
"Er, where are the glasses?"
Remus pointed to the cabinet above the sink. Sirius filled a glass with a tap of his wand and handed it to Remus, who accepted it gratefully and managed to drink a few shaky sips.
"Do you want me to take a look at your feet?" Sirius was awful with remedies and knew that Remus would probably have to guide him through every step, including whether to grind the vinegar seeds or the eucalyptus first, but it seemed awful to just leave him there to mend his own feet.
Remus shook his head. "No," he said, "I still can't feel them, I think I'd rather sleep now and look at them in the morning." He smiled at what Sirius imagined was his own rather ashen expression. "Don't worry," Remus added. "I'm pretty sure I haven't lost any toes."
"Okay, so, I'll stay," Sirius said, pointing to the dilapidated sofa. "Peter's still visiting his mum, right? You shouldn't be alone, at least."
Remus took another sip of water. "Sirius, I'm fine," he said. "Compared to the transformation, this is nothing."
His hand was trembling, though, as he set down the glass.
When it was over, Sirius would still believe that Remus had known that Sirius was going to kiss him. The truth was that a kiss was never a big noisy surprise like in books, the other person had to be paying attention and not looking away or coughing or wiping their mouth with the cuff of their robes or any other manner of easy outs and Remus had definitely been paying attention.
The way he froze up when their lips met and pulled away like he'd touched fire, though, it was a pretty good impression of someone who was surprised.
"What are you doing?"
"I just--"
"No, you do not just--"
Remus was hurt and it was Sirius' fault. Remus had been Sirius' friend since he was eleven and now he was twenty-one and he sort of wanted to be eleven again. Remus' hands had shook when he'd set down the glass.
"I, uh, I wanted to," Sirius said with hastily gathered conviction. "What's wrong with that?" You're hardly the giant squid." He tried a smile but Remus' face stayed cloudy.
"So you like blokes, I like blokes, why the hell not? Is that it? Because it sure as bloody hell wasn't when we were in school."
It was times like this when Sirius suspected that Remus would make an excellent professor, because Sirius felt not unlike he was being asked to recall all the ingredients for a particular potion. So he shrugged. He already knew he was going to give the wrong answer.
*
Sirius' flat was a bit of a shoebox in terms of size and he didn't have many visitors, so he'd dragged his mattress out to the sitting room and made his bedroom there. The window had a nice view of the river, and, anyway, he lived alone, so it hardly mattered if he slept in the sitting room or took his tea in the bath tub or anything else.
Sirius hated living alone.
He hated living alone and so he slept in the sitting room but it didn't much help. Also, when there was a cacophony of knocking on his front door in the middle of the night, there was no chance of sleeping through it.
"Alright, alright," Sirius called from where his face was buried in his pillow, "just a bloody minute." Half-awake, he grabbed his wand from the discarded pile of robes on the floor, because even though it was unlikely that Death Eaters come to kill him would bother to knock first, one could never be too careful.
It was Remus at the door, and he looked terrible.
"Uh, hello," Sirius said, refusing to be self-conscious about the fact that he was wearing under shorts and nothing else, because he wouldn't have been before. He crossed his arms, elbows resting in his palms.
"Can I come in?"
Not feeling up to composing a response that wouldn't sound either eager or terse, Sirius stepped away from the threshold and back into the flat. Remus followed him.
They hadn't seen each other for almost a month.
Sirius wasn't embarrassed, because being embarrassed would mean that he'd thought he was wrong -- and that certainly wasn't it. But he was loathe to put himself in situations that would require them to act distant and awkward, so he'd been avoiding Remus and also Order meetings, which meant that he'd been inadvertently avoiding everyone they'd ever known who hadn't gone evil or gotten killed.
"Look, I know that--" Remus said, but trailed off, apparently deciding that he didn't know at all. "Something's happened," he said. "I thought you should hear it from a friend first."
The thing was that Sirius was already half-expecting that someone had died. First of all, "everyone they'd ever known who hadn't gone evil or gotten killed," was a short list, and it was shrinking all the time. Second of all, Sirius had been avoiding Remus, but he imagined that Remus had been avoiding him as well.
"Who is it?"
"Regulus."
That part was unexpected.
Regulus, his stupid pig-headed younger brother who he hadn't seen or spoken to since he left Hogwarts, and it'd probably been twice as long since they'd said two words to each other that weren't in anger. He hated Regulus with the same obligatory grudged anger that he felt for his entire family, but he also hardly knew him, so learning he was dead shouldn't have felt like anything more than the death of some Slytherin seeker he'd once beaten at Quidditch.
"Are you alright?" Remus said, resting his hand on Sirius' shoulder. "Why don't you sit down?"
They both sat on the edge of the mattress because there wasn't a sofa, and some part of Sirius' brain seemed to register that it should have been awkward, but it didn't matter, because it might as well have been happening to someone else. Still, it was almost funny, or it would have been if Sirius hadn't been -- apparently -- crying.
"Bloody fucking hell," he said, swiping at his eyes with angry balled up fists. "We hated each other, why the fuck am I crying?"
Remus put his arm around Sirius but Sirius stayed stiff against it. "He was still your brother," Remus said.
Sirius was grateful that he seemed to have put a stop to any tears, but his eyes still felt bright and his hands were still balled up into fists in his lap. "It doesn't matter," Sirius insisted. "he was an awful person and probably a Death Eater and I shouldn't be so--" He trailed off, and Remus didn't reply, because he'd already made his point, and because he probably knew Sirius knew that he was right. Regulus was dead and he was Sirius' brother and he was dead.
They sat in silence for a while, and Sirius even let himself relax against Remus' arm a little bit. After Sirius started to go crazy from the silence, he said, "I think I need a drink."
Instead of answering, Remus kissed him.
To his credit, Sirius didn't make a big production of putting Remus off like a nervous virgin, but when the kiss had run its course, the first thing he did was say, "So, what, my brother dies, you feel sorry for me, why the hell not? Is that it?"
Remus bit his lip. "Yeah, and?" he tried, but he wasn't drunk and he wasn't Sirius, so he couldn’t really pull it off.
"I don't want your pity," Sirius said, moving to stand up, even though it was a lie, he sort of did want Remus' pity, quite a lot, really.
Remus grabbed his hand. "It's not pity," he said rather forcefully. "Look, can't we just -- let's just agree that this won't be the smartest thing either of us have ever done, but it won't be the worst, either. Okay?"
Sirius looked at where their fingers were laced together. If he stopped pulling against it, they'd be holding hands. "But is it something you want to do?"
"Yes."
**
PETER
*
It was lunchtime, but Remus was making up the Charms exam they'd had the day after the full moon and James and Sirius were trying to spread Stick All Sleaze Fixative on the rims of the Slytherin toilets again, so Peter was on his own.
The three of them, James, Sirius and Peter, had been walking back from Care of Magical Creatures together when Sirius had tugged on James' tie and James had said, "Pardon us, Wormtail--"
"--but three's a crowd where we're going," Sirius had finished.
So now Peter was stuck eating his lunch alone at their usual table and looking, he was certain, like a complete fool. He gathered up his books and banished his lunch tray. Six years at Hogwarts and Peter still hadn't quite gotten the hang of what he told himself over and over was a simple spell -- his apple and his crumpled cloth napkin remained on the table after the tray had vanished.
Peter sighed. Usually he could count on James or Sirius to make a big show of trying to banish all four trays at once. He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and decided to take the apple outside.
It was a bright sun, blue sky, explosion of light and color sort of day, but to Peter it hardly registered as he wandered further away from the castle and toward the edge of the school grounds, scuffling his toes in the grass. He was feeling out of sorts, in the way that if anyone had asked him what was wrong, he would have said, "Oh, nothing," at least a few times before telling. But since there was no one around to ask, he supposed that he was feeling put out about the Stick All Sleaze Fixative or whatever it was he hadn't been clever enough or fast enough or wearing the lucky purple and yellow spotted shorts so he couldn't come along.
Mostly, it just wasn't fair.
There was a rotted out tree stump right at the edge of the Forbidden Forest that had been transfigured by some students into a bit of a bench with a seat. Peter though he'd sit there and eat his apple, but when he circled the tree stump, he saw that the spot was already occupied.
Severus Snape was crouched over what looked like a small mound of mermaid fins, trying to do something to them, something that involved setting them on fire -- or maybe not. He was cursing at the smoking pile of fins in a way that suggested he wasn't very happy with the results.
"What are you doing?" Peter asked before he could stop himself. He wasn't sure why, exactly, because the Rules of Being a Marauder -- an seemingly ever-changing list that was revised and reiterated most often when James and Sirius had nicked too much fire whiskey -- enumerated Snape as the enemy in either first, second or third degree of importance, depending on whether or not it was Quidditch season.
Snape whirled around, face bright and twisted. "What are you doing here?" he snapped. "Where's Potter and Black? Lurking under that bloody cloak, thinking I'll fall for something if it's just you?"
Peter stuck his chin out. If anything, he was sick and tired of talking and thinking about James and Sirius. "I don't know where they are," he said. "I just -- I just wanted to eat my apple."
Snape stared at him with what looked like disbelief, but didn't move from the ground.
"Are they canned?" Peter asked finally.
"What?"
"Um, er," Peter stumbled. "Are they canned, I said. Because if they're canned, it might help if you added some salt." He thought he'd read that somewhere, maybe. Once.
Snape gave him a strange sort of look and then, as though it was causing him a sharp pain in his chest to do so, said, "That's a good idea."
Peter beamed, and took a bit of his apple. It was crisp and sweet and he felt the smooth skin give way to soft flesh under his teeth. "And be careful when you use the toilet tonight," he added. "Just trust me."
*
Peter was walking back from the library after dinner when he found himself pulled into a dark corridor with a wand pressed against the hollow of his throat.
"What are you doing?"
"I thought we could have a chat. I never got a chance to thank you for your helpful tip."
Growing up, Peter's mother always told him that his father had died in a spelling accident before he was born. There were a few pictures of him around the flat -- one of a man with light brown hair with his impossibly young looking mother sitting on his lap at some sort of party and one of his father smirking and holding a Beater, wearing a Slytherin Quidditch uniform -- and Peter looked at them sometimes, imagining that they had the same nose or chin, but he'd never had a father, so it was hard to know what he was missing.
"But I--"
"'If you really want to see something, you should check out the Whomping Willow on the night of the full moon,'" Snape mimicked. "You set me up! You and Potter and Black, one of them must have put you up to it -- thought it was funny, did you? Sending me to get attacked by a werewolf?"
The summer he got his Hogwarts letter, his mother told him a secret: it was true that his father had died before he was born, but also had father been Arturo Nigellus, from a very old and powerful wizarding family, but his mother and Arturo Nigellus hadn't been married when he had died, which was why Peter's last name was Pettigrew, like his mother and his grandparents, who they lived with until he was six.
"They didn't, I swear! You said you wanted to know where he went every month, I was just trying to help! I didn't think you'd get hurt, I promise."
"Not very trustworthy though, are you, Pettigrew? You tell me Lupin's secret, what did you tell your friends?"
His mother had told him about his father, and then she'd said, "No matter what anyone says, remember that you're a pureblood wizard." Not that it'd mattered, because somehow only having half a set of parents was the same as being half-blooded in everyone else's eyes, and Peter was just another nameless Gryffindor, if anyone ever saw him in the shadow of James of Sirius or Remus.
"Don't worry, they think you made me do it. No one will ever know, I promise! We can keep helping each other."
It wasn't his fault, Snape wasn't supposed to get hurt. Peter had just wanted to make something big happen, something that would prove that Snape could trust him with big things.
"Tell you what, Pettigrew -- next time you think you're helping me? Don't bother."
**
Peter didn't really care for babies, but it seemed impolite not to hold James' when he popped in for a visit, especially when James had seemed eager to hand him over the minute Peter walked in the door. The baby, Harry, was obstinately sleeping, but Peter still held him in his lap gingerly, like a potion in a glass cauldron that also might explode.
"Of course," James said, his back turned, as he rummaged through the kitchen cupboards. "Of course he sleeps when you're holding him. Can't get a minute's rest when I've got him. And Lily's gone to see her sister and she might not be back until tomorrow."
The baby was always heavier than he expected, but then, Peter supposed Harry was growing bigger all the time, the way babies did. Lily had been absolutely enormous when she'd been pregnant, enormous and prone to cursing anyone who joked about her resemblance to a beached whale with a nasty bloating spell. Still, it was horrifying to imagine the wrapped up bundle in his lap having come out of Lily's body.
"I thought Lily hated her sister," Peter said.
"I don't know if she hates her," James pondered, "I think she just makes her miserable. But she might not see her for a while, so--" James trailed off. "There!" he said. He set the sugar pot down on the table. "Knew it was around here somewhere." He waved his wand at the pot and it began scooping spoonfuls into the tea cups he'd set out on the table.
"Sorry," James added, running his hands through his hair, which was standing up as though he'd been shocked on one end and completely flattened on the side around his ear. "I'm a complete wreck, I haven't slept right in weeks."
Peter nodded, shifting the baby's weight in his lap. The baby smelled funny, like sour milk and the tauntonweed cleaning spells they used on the diapers. "Me neither, I feel like I haven't slept well in ages," he said, looking into his tea cup. "Remus and Sirius, you know, they're rather loud."
James' spoon stopped circling in mid-stroke and clattered loudly against the rim of his cup. "Loud doing what?" he said, eyes wide.
Peter shrugged uncomfortably. It wasn't like he sat around trying to picture it. "You know," he said. "I mean, I know we joked about how they both fancied blokes when we were in school, but I didn't think they'd actually ever do anything! I mean, they're like our brothers."
In his lap, the baby shifted, but didn't wake. When Peter picked up his tea cup, it nearly slipped out of his hand -- his palms were that clammy with sweat.
*
James shifted his wand from one hand to the other, and then clapped his hands together. "Well!" he said. "I guess this is it. Do you want to stay for dinner afterward?" He tried to strangle out a laugh.
Peter already felt like he might be sick. He'd been told that there would be no way for the spell to divine his intentions, but he still felt nervous and awful and small. If he could do this, though, he would be different. He shook his head. "Better that I get back, so no one suspects," he said.
James nodded. He offered his hand and Peter put out his own, matching their palms and lacing their fingers. Peter's hands were cold, but if James noticed, he didn't say anything.
With his hand crushed in James', it was easy to forget that James was weak and that James was going to die, no matter what. James would die and so would Peter, if he didn't do what he must, and this was the one thing that Peter could do that James never would. It was important to remember that he really had no choice.
Before Peter realized that it was going to happen, James began to speak. "Repeat after me," he said, carefully steady and deathly serious. "The location of James Richard Potter, Lily Evans Potter and Harry James Potter may be found at the Little Blue House on the Hill, Godric's Hollow."
"The location of James Richard Potter, Lily Evans Potter and, and Harry James Potter may be found at the Little Blue House on the Hill, Godric's Hollow," Peter repeated. James had been looking straight into Peter's eyes when he said the words, but since he hadn't said that was necessary to the incantation, Peter looked over his shoulder, and his eyes settled on Lily, with the baby in her lap, sitting at the table following along with a thick spell book.
The house was James' parents. Peter had been there many times during the holidays when they'd been at school. Peter had been very fond of James' mother. She'd made delicious jam tarts, and had never complained when they got too loud. The house had stood empty since James' parents had died, a year before Harry was born.
"Okay," James said, raising his wand. "Fidelusimiso!"
Peter saw green sparks and felt the secret fly inside.
by throughadoor
thanks to smartlikjustin, rageprufrock and circusgirl for beta action and to semielliptical for the impetus. html version here or you can read it --
JAMES
*
"Oy! That's my foot!"
"Sorry," James said, snickering, "I didn't see it."
James and Sirius were crouched underneath the invisibility cloak, the Map and a bag of Dungbombs between them. "Must be because it's invisible," Sirius retorted, "very funny. Watch where you step, you pisser."
As always, the options for the evening had been homework or mayhem, and Sirius had sworn he had it on good authority that the Slytherins were sneaking out after hours to sacrifice goats or eat Muggle babies or whatever it was Slytherins did for fun. So they'd found a spot with a view of the Slytherin portrait hole, hid themselves in the cover of darkness and the cloak and waited.
But that had been hours ago. James stifled a yawn. They'd had Quidditch practice from the end of lessons until it was too dark to see the Snitch, and he was so exhausted he could hardly stand upright, let alone avoid tripping over Sirius' feet. Sirius was standing behind James, both invisible and in the dark, but James could picture Sirius' mouth in a frown, and how his forehead would wrinkle if James suggested that they call the night a wash and go to bed.
Ever since Sirius had returned from Christmas hols with three trunks and a grim expression that suggested he'd had enough, he'd been obsessed with tormenting the Slytherins. Hexing Snivellus in the corridor was one thing, James thought, but Sirius' need to prove himself in opposition to everything he'd been raised into was bordering on obsession.
He was, quite possibly, off his bloody rocker.
"Hogsmeade weekend, eh?" James asked.
"Yeah," Sirius said, sounding distracted, "thought we could make a trip to Zonko's, freshen up our stash of Dungbombs after we put these to good use."
"Actually," James said, "I was thinking of asking Evans."
"Right," Sirius scoffed. "So after Zonko's, maybe we can get in on the goblin card game at the Hog's Head?"
"No, I'm serious," James said. "I'm going to ask Evans if she wants to go to Hogsmeade with me."
He tried to act as though he hadn't asked Lily Evans to be his date to Hogsmeade two dozen times since their fourth year, because James believed in staying upbeat. Besides, he was nearly positive that Lily had only been putting on when she'd told him she'd rather drop dead than borrow his extra quill in Herbology on Tuesday.
Sirius was having none of it. "Right," he said, "ask Evans to Hogsmeade. That's a fantastic idea, why didn't you think of it before?"
James dug his elbow into what he hoped was Sirius' invisible midsection and he was gratified with contact against what felt like the soft curve of Sirius' stomach.
Sirius made a started "oof" sound but kept laughing. "Ask Evans to Hogsmeade, he says," Sirius gasped, in a hammed-up sort of way. "You're brilliant, Potter, absolutely mad brilliant."
James waited for Sirius to wear himself out. He was comforted with the probability that Sirius' carrying on would scare away any Slytherins who might be lurking about and the night would be wasted.
When he was finished, Sirius said, "So, Zonko's, then?"
James concentrated on feeling lighter than air, as though the stone step they'd been sitting on for the last three or six thousand hours was actually a very fluffy cloud. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe if Evans already has other plans." Before Sirius could answer, James caught a slight movement at the Slytherin portrait hole out of the corner of his eye. "Hang on," he whispered. "I think I see something."
*
James stared at Sirius and Peter's white faces, imagining that his own looked similarly stricken. "There's nothing we can do now," Sirius said quickly. "If we try and stop him, we'll get caught."
"If we don't try and stop him," James said, feeling like his head was being held under water, the shock of it cold and suffocating, "he could die." He was running before he'd fully realized what he had to do.
He found Snape at the base of the Whomping Willow, wand drawn, inspecting the knots in the trunk under the cautiously swaying branches.
"Sni--" James started, but stopped himself. "Snape, wait!" he said, "wait, it's a trick. It's a trick, wait." He was doubled over, panting.
Snape turned and showed a clenched scowl. "Think you can keep me from finding out your secret? I know you, Potter, you're doing something out of bounds, and when I find out what it is, the whole lot of you will be expelled."
"Go on then, and by the way, it's the second knot to your left," James nearly said, but forced himself through gritted teeth to actually say, "Snape, you can't. He's a werewolf, Remus is a werewolf, he'll kill you."
At once, and just as he'd nearly regained his breath, the wind was knocked out of him. Snape had him pinned to the ground, wand nudging in the hollow of James' throat. "Are you barking mad?" Snape shouted, "I could have been killed!"
"'Swhat," James wheezed, fighting to push him off, "I was trying to tell you."
"So what's that make you, then?" Snape sneered, his eyes still blazing behind the greasy curtain of his hair. James reflected that perhaps those six years of torturing Snape for laughs had been remiss if this was the result. "Think I'll be indebted to you because you saved my life?"
Snape leaned in very close, and James could smell his breath, and nearly feel the slimy hair on his face. "I will never be indebted to you, James Potter," Snape said. "Do you hear me? Never." He stood up, wand still held defensively. "You might have saved yourself from Azkaban, but I'll still see you expelled."
As Snape tore away toward the castle, James uncrumpled himself and sat up. "I wasn't trying to save your life, you know," he said when Snape was well out of earshot, "I was trying to save Remus'."
**
"You've got to stop showing up like this, mate."
Sirius was swaying slightly, one arm dangling out of his cloak. James had propped himself in the door frame like he was a broom that might otherwise fall over. Which he suspected he would. Fall over, that is. Sirius was drunk and James was near-dead from exhaustion. From where James stood -- at the threshold, as though Sirius was a vampire he wasn't quite sure he wanted to invite inside -- they seemed about equally well off.
"You can't," James shook himself a little more awake, "it's almost midnight, and your godson has slept exactly seventeen minutes since last Tuesday."
"Don't they have --" Sirius swayed a little to the left and then forward to right himself as though he was a child's spinning top. "--spells for that sort of thing?"
James grimaced. "Looked it up," he said, "bloody books say that it's illegal to cast any type of spell that inhibits natural human responses."
Sirius' eyes got very wide, the same as how he'd looked when James had told him that Lily was pregnant. His mouth had formed a little 'o' and then he'd said, "I think I'm going to be sick," and run off for the washroom. But that had been more about the ten empty casks of fire whiskey between them and that they'd come straight from a skirmish with some Death Eaters, one of whom may have been Sirius' cousin, who had definitely tossed an Avera Kedavra at him as a greeting, because after Sirius came back from the wash room, he'd composed what he'd drunkenly claimed to be the beginnings of an epic poem devoted to all the things they were going to teach James' first born. The list included Quidditch, hating Slytherins, the best ways to cheat at Exploding Snap and also Quidditch.
James realized that Sirius was still boggling and swaying. "So," James said, "what can I do you for this fine evening?"
"Umrahel's Tavern," Sirius said.
"Come again?"
"Umrahel's Tavern," Sirius said. "Between Angus' Ancient Artifacts and The Evil Eye in Knockturn Alley, door opens if you smear powered kitten whiskers on the Newt's eye statue. And since I happen to have a whole bag of--" Sirius groped in the pocket of his robes. "Happen to have, had 'round here somewhere," he muttered.
James raised his eyebrows. "Kitten whisker powder?" he asked.
Sirius grinned. "Aww, c'mon," he said. "Totally humane supplier, I promise, I charmed the whiskers off the kittens myself. It's all for the greater good, eh? We'll have a few rounds of troll scotch, bash a few skulls."
"So it's a Dark bar, then?"
Sirius eyed him as though to ask if there was any other kind, which, point taken.
The routine shook out like this: Sirius would show up with a dodgy method for gaining entry to a bar that was rumored to cater to dark wizards. They'd go, get a little sloshed and generally exercise their talent for shooting their mouths off until some Snape-a-like type challenged them to a duel. Then all hell broke loose, right on schedule.
"But," James said, "the last time my ears didn't shrink back to normal for a week."
"And you had those lilac-scented boils, too, didn't you?" Sirius said. "I have to hand it to Rosier, he really didn't learn a damned thing in school."
"True," James said, "but I'm out tonight, I'm so bloody exhausted I'd end up giving myself lilac-scented boils."
"It's no fun without you!" Sirius said, flapping his arms and looking petulant.
"Sure it is," James said. "I always end up trying to drag you off just when the hexing's getting good, don't I?"
"Exactly! I need you to keep me out of trouble. Think what'll happen if I go out without out you."
"I can't."
"James."
"Sirius."
"Prongs."
"Padfoot."
"I just can't, alright? You know what Lily said last time, when she was shrinking down my ears? She said, 'You're somebody's father now, James Potter.' And she's, I mean, she's right, you know?"
"Wow," Sirius said. "You even sound like one."
"Get out of here," James said, waving him off. "The night's still young. Give my love to Rosier, tell him it's nothing a steadier wand hand won't fix."
*
Sirius stood with his back to James, and when he spoke, his words seemed far away. "I didn't not tell you," he said.
Which, to think about it, was ridiculous, and so James said, "Well, what's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that I wasn't sneaking around having some secret, some secret -- what did you want me to do, pass you a note during Charms?"
And that was absolutely rich, coming from Sirius, as though James was the one who couldn't seem to grow up, and James felt words fly out of his mouth thickly, and he didn't care how they sounded. "I need to know that the people I trust are completely honest with me."
Sirius turned around, his face blanched like a burnt egg. "Are you saying that you don't trust me?"
When James shagged Lily for the first time, she'd said, "Run off and tell your friends that you finally bagged Lily Evans and I'll tell the whole school that you're skinny as your wand where it counts." She'd been buttoning up her blouse with one hand and she'd pressed her other hand against his chest. "This is between you and me," she'd said, "not you and me and Moon-Eye and Paddies and Worm Tongue or whatever you call yourselves. Got it?"
"I'm saying that -- even Peter knew."
"Peter bloody lives there."
He'd told Sirius anyway, of course, all of it, including the part where she'd begged to have the backs of her knees tickled. Just after James and Lily were married, Sirius had come over for dinner, drank almost an entire bottle of cheap spiced wine and asked if he could see the backs of Lily's knees. She'd made James sleep on the sofa for nearly a week.
"I shouldn't have found out something this important from Peter."
"So, what, Peter's the only one you can trust now?"
"I didn't say that." Except that maybe he did.
Dumbledore had taken James and Lily aside after a regular meeting of the Order to tell them about the prophecy, and James had decided that Dumbledore had finally gone off his rocker. Lily hadn't even been pregnant and James had been bloody terrified of becoming a father and he'd been relieved that it had been presumed that they'd wait until after the war to even discuss it.
So when Dumbledore had sworn them to secrecy, it'd seemed easy, but then Lily read it in her tea leaves and James had needed to tell someone he knew he could trust with more than just his own life.
"Maybe Peter ought to be your secret keeper, then," Sirius said, and his voice was very low and his face was very hard. But all James could see was Sirius when he'd told him he knew, how Sirius had looked like a stranger, how Sirius had looked caught.
"Maybe," James said, "you're right."
**
REMUS
*
Remus climbed the steps to the boys' dormitory of Gryffindor Tower. His arms were laden with books, and there were several dozen feet of parchment balanced under his chin. "Oh, don't worry about it, Peter," he muttered to himself, "I don't need any help finishing my essay. Go along with everyone else to Hogsmeade and I'll catch up."
When he reached the dormitory, it was dark. Not wanting to drop his books on his own feet, he angled for his wand with one hand and balanced his load with the other. After a few minutes of this juggling act, he dropped everything anyway, startled by a voice from one of the dark corners, saying, "Lumos."
"Who's there?" Remus called out, eyes adjusting to the torch light.
"S'only me."
Remus leaned to gather the small mountain of books and the river of parchment at his feet, but he glanced toward the tightly drawn curtains of Sirius' bed. Sirius sounded -- strange. Not sleepy, just strange.
"Why're you sitting in the dark, Padfoot?" Remus asked. No answer.
He dumped the books on his bed. "Are you alright?" Still no answer.
"I'm going down for supper," Remus continued, now staring directly at the fortress of Sirius' bed. "Do you want to come?"
Once again, he was met with silence. Remus thought about pressing the issue but decided against it. Sirius was known for enjoying a good sulk from time to time and if something was really wrong, Sirius would let James fix it when he was ready to have it fixed.
Just as Remus was about to leave, Sirius said, "Wait!" and drew back the curtain. "I'm not hungry," he said, "but could you stop by the hospital wing and get me some Vesiculum? I don't want to go out like this."
Sirius was nearly covered in bright pink suffering skin blisters, which was why Remus imagined he wanted the Vesiculum, but he also had a pair of black eyes, a rusted splash of blood at the corner of his mouth and a large gash splitting his chin.
"You, er, are you sure you don't want some bind-all bandages, too?"
Sirius shrugged, causing some of his blisters to sizzle in a way that looked terribly painful.
"What--" Remus started to ask what happened, but he knew what had happened. He wanted to ask why Sirius always went looking for trouble in exactly the same place, but he could have also asked Sirius why the sky was blue and gotten about the same answer.
"Where was James?" Remus asked finally.
Sirius grinned, but then winced at the effort. "He went with Evans," he said.
*
The sheet was white, it felt like parchment, and it was pulled up to Remus' chin. His legs and arms ached, and there was the familiar pattern of scrapes and claw marks across his hands and face, but Remus wasn't sick. This meant that, opposed to the other way around, he was in the hospital wing to keep everyone else safe from him.
It wasn't like he wasn't used to it.
Madame Phelps hadn't even been in to apply bind-all bandages, and the pile of stones settled in Remus' stomach said that they were going to expel him because he was too dangerous and too much of a risk to the other students. Hagrid, the groundskeeper, had brought Remus back from the Shack at dawn. He'd told Remus more than he probably should have about what had happened. Remus' bed in the hospital wing was separated from the rest by a white curtain, and the last person to disappear behind it was Hagrid.
To his surprise, the next person Remus saw was Sirius.
Sirius' eyes were blood-shot saucers, and his hands were knotted together in a way that made the act of contrition he put on for McGonagall whenever he got caught out-of-bounds look like even more of a sham by comparison. "Erm, good morning Moony," he said. "Madame Phelps says that you can leave as soon as she fixes up your face. She said I could see you first because there's some Hufflepuff first year with funugulus feet." He chuckled at this, but Remus only stared at him.
"I don't suppose it ever occurred to you that Snape could have died," Remus said, and his voice in his throat was a hard, sharp thing. Sirius actually took a step back, that was how surprised he was and how angry Remus sounded and Remus was surprised at first, too, but then realized it was true.
Sirius tried to shrug off his shock. "He wouldn't have," he said.
"Yes," Remus said, "he would have. And you don't know -- you don't know what it's like to know that, do you?"
Sirius shook his head.
"Hagrid, Hagrid said it was your fault-- that you told him."
"It was my fault," Sirius said, and if there was one thing Remus knew about Sirius, it was that he never told the truth that quickly.
"Did you tell him?" Remus repeated, because it seemed easier to say than, "You're lying." But he also wanted to make it clear that he wouldn't accept technicality or omission, and also that he wasn't stupid.
Sirius became very absorbed in the floor, and Remus knew he wouldn't be able to get any more out of him, and also that Sirius believed that it was his responsibility, regardless of what might have actually happened. Sirius was like that, dodging punishment whenever he could, but also willing to take the blame for events leading all the way back to his own birth.
"So you got into it with them again," Remus said slowly, once again revising the truth to fill in Sirius' blank spaces, "and this time you told Snape to meet you at the Shack? Is that how it happened, then?" They're creating the lie together, even if Remus is still entirely in the dark.
Sirius looked up, and Remus saw a blank face, no fresh bruises, only the faint lines and shadows of faded scrapes and scabs. "Yeah," Sirius said. "That's about it."
"I suppose," Remus said, "that I bloody well hate you, then."
Remus hates knowing that he's not got much choice here. Sirius would shoot a spell at his own foot if he thought there was a chance it would ricochet and hit someone else in the eye, and if Remus called him out, Sirius would just bury himself in manufactured guilt up to his eyeballs to spite himself. He hates that Sirius is this fist-full of arrogance who somehow believed that everything would prove to be all his fault, always, if someone looked hard enough. But he couldn't hate Sirius for this.
At last, Sirius looked him in the eye, but still betrayed nothing. "Understandable," he said.
Remus grinned crookedly; there was a cut splitting the other side of his mouth apart. "I mean, really," he said, staring back. "Here I am in the hospital wing and you didn't even bring me a card?"
*
The first word Remus saw when he woke up was ojoporoj. Vengeance Magic in Thirteenth Century Catalana, Chapter 5, Magic on the Body: "The magic of ojoporoj is as old as time and extremely dangerous." And Remus' nose was planted right below the word ojoporoj. The last thing Remus heard before he woke up was a pounding like thunder against the front door of the flat. It was the first thing he heard when he woke up, too, so he guessed it probably wasn't just a bad dream.
Remus hoisted himself up from his desk, face feeling flattened and imprinted with the words he'd unsuccessfully been trying to imprint on his brain. "Coming, coming already," he shouted, not caring if he woke up Peter because he'd bloody well been sleeping and he had to get up and open the door for --
Sirius.
Sirius was standing at the door, ripped remnants of his cloak cradled in his arms and ripped robes hanging loose from his shoulders, revealing a deep gash exploding green puss on his arm. He was laughing, saying, "Moony! 'M so happy to see you! Fancy a game of Exploding Snap?"
He was also, apparently, very drunk.
"Get in," Remus said, grabbing onto a torn sleeve. "You'll wake the neighbors." He pulled a stumbling Sirius inside and the door shut behind him. "Who, I might add, are Muggles."
Sirius tried to spin out of Remus' grasp. "Muggles!" he said. "I love Muggles!" He began to snicker to himself as though he'd just betrayed a clever secret.
"Yes," Remus said, managing to drag Sirius out of the proximity of the door, "that's fantastic. But let's maybe get you cleaned up, hmm?"
Sirius muttered something under his breath that sounded like "filthy mudbloods" and Remus thought he had a fair idea where Sirius had been. Not that it mattered; he was far too exhausted to ask.
He sat Sirius down at the kitchen table. "I've got some salves and things in the cupboard," he said. "It's hardly St. Mungos, but, you know, occupational hazard." He didn't ask Sirius why he hadn't gone to St. Mungos, with a burn like that. The members of the Order all tried to avoid showing up at the Ministry-run hospital with unexplained injuries if they could help it.
Sirius didn't say anything; he was humming the Hogwarts school song under his breath and tracing the wood grain of the table with his finger. When Remus turned away from the cupboard, Peter was standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
"What's going on?" he said. "What's Sirius doing here?"
Remus smirked. "Why, Peter," he said, piling essence of aloe, soya jelly and vinegar seeds on the table. "You don't approve of Sirius' habit of stopping by for tea at three o'clock in the morning?"
"I -- er," Peter stammered. Peter was a pretty decent flatmate, and always remembered to put a Smell Fresh charm on his dirty laundry, but he'd always been a bit thick and caught jokes like they were a Bludger to a head. "Where'd you go, Sirius?" he asked finally. "You don't look so good."
"I went," Sirius started, waving his finger around in an emphatic way, "to a little place full of -- actually, it was full of absolute rubbish, but that was the point, you know, bag full of kitten whisker powder and it was called, er --"
"Umrahel's Tavern?" Peter supplied.
"Yes!" Sirius said, thumping a fist against the table. And then, "How did you know that?"
"You're really drunk," Peter said. "I'm going to go back to bed."
"Sweet dreams!" Remus called after him. "I'll try not to let Sirius dance on the tables or anything and keep you awake," he added darkly.
He sat down next to Sirius at the table and began mixing essence of aloe and vinegar seeds in the mortar and pestle.
"That smells awful," Sirius said.
Remus raised his eyebrows. "So do you."
He dotted the mixture on Sirius' arm, Sirius wincing at the sting. "You know," he said, "it's nice, you and Wormtail being flatmates. Bet it's just like being at school. Ouch! Bloody hell, Moony, you trying to burn my fucking arm off?"
"Hold still."
"Why didn't we all get a flat together after school like we talked about?"
Remus sighed. "Because," he said, "you already had a flat, and James married Lily."
"Oh, right," Sirius said, nodding.
With Sirius' burn adequately cleaned, Remus applied a bind-all bandage and attempted to reparo his ripped sleeve. "Sirius," he said, "you have to stop doing this."
"Showing up like this?" Sirius said strangely. "Waking up Wormtail?"
Yes. "No. I mean," Remus paused, and through the rips in Sirius' robes he could see other scars, realizing that he'd tended to more of these ghost wounds than the ones he hadn't. "You're not sixteen anymore," he said, "and neither are the blokes you're going up against. You're going to get yourself killed."
Sirius had buried his face in crossed arms on the table, so his answer was muffled.
"He started it."
"But you go looking for it. And I don't even understand why. What do you have to prove? Everyone knows you hate the Dark Arts. My 90 year old Muggle neighbor knows you hate the Dark Arts. You practically walk around wearing a sign that says not to judge you because of your family, there's no need to get yourself killed by a Dark wizard to prove a point. Is there?"
Sirius didn't answer.
The next thing Remus heard was Sirius' snore.
*
The wood floor was like a block of ice under Remus' feet, and he was taking care to close the bedroom door as silently as possible. It wasn't unusual for the nights leading up to the full moon to find him sleepless, skin itching, blood restless and jumpy in his veins. He didn't like to talk about it, it made the twenty-eight days a month that he was human seem less so.
Anyway, it was nothing a cup of tea didn't usually fix.
Remus stood in the kitchen as he waited for the kettle to boil, still shivering under his robe. The previous day's Daily Prophet was spread across the kitchen table like a dissected corpse -- the front page displayed a photo of Millicent Bagnold speaking to the International Convention of Warlocks. Sirius had drawn a cartoonish bubble from Bagnold's mouth and written, "I'm so scared of the 'Voldemort problem' that I'm shitting my pants right now."
On the inside page, there was a photo with the caption Prominent philanthropist Augstin Malfoy and his son Lucius, with new wife Narcissa and their son Draco, attend the ribbon cutting of the new Ward for Hopelessly Cursed Cases at St. Mungo's Hospital. In the photo, the Malfoys were unrecognizable -- their faces had been marked out with permanent ink.
Remus was watching the images of the Malfoys squirm with discomfort, so he was surprised to look up and see Peter letting himself in the front door. "You're out late," Remus said. "I thought you were already asleep when I got home." Remus tried to sound calm, but made a note not to assume that Peter was sleep in bed even if his door was closed.
Peter appeared as startled to see Remus as Remus had been to see him. "Remus," he said, "You -- you're up late."
Remus shrugged. "Couldn't sleep," he said. "Where were you, anyway?"
Peter smiled. "I thought you might like some privacy."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm not deaf," Peter said, "and, er, both of you could stand to brush up on your silencing charms."
Remus' cheeks grew hot, and he very carefully studied the table, watching as the Chudley Canons' seeker allowed the Snitch to slip out of his grasp over and over and over again on the front page of the sports section.
"Don't worry," Peter said, "your secret is safe with me. You could have just told me, though. I'm your friend, aren't I?"
"It's not a secret," Remus said. "It's just, there's so much going on, it complicates things."
"Don't worry," Peter said, patting Remus on the shoulder. "I won't tell anyone. My lips are sealed."
It had been a secret, well, not a secret exactly, but it had been something they weren't telling people. But Remus hadn't felt like it was something he should feel ashamed about until now. He looked up and saw Peter's twitchy little smile, his comforting pat, and Remus felt like he might be sick. Behind them, the tea kettle let off a low whistle. "Want me to get your tea for you?" Peter asked.
Remus shook his head. "No," he said. "I think I'm just going to go back to bed."
When Remus slipped back in the duvet, Sirius rolled over and muttered, "Moony, your feet are like ice."
"Sorry," Remus said, curling his legs up to his chest. "Go back to sleep."
**
SIRIUS
*
Sirius scuffed his toe in the dirt as he wandered further away from Hogsmeade. The end of the world was surely at hand and the state of things was grim.
The facts: Peter was nowhere to be found. Remus had skipped a Hogsmeade weekend to finish his vampire essay. This wasn't particularly earth-shattering, it was the kind of short-sheeted thing that Remus did all the time, but Sirius found it deeply objectionable all the same. And James -- in a turn of events that had Sirius glancing up to check for chunks of falling sky -- had a date with Lily Evans. On top of everything else, the age line at the Hog's Head was working properly for what had to be the first time ever.
After three different girls had asked him if he fancied a coffee at Madam Puddifoot's, Sirius decided he might as well head back to the castle. At least distracting Remus while he tried to finish his vampire essay would be entertaining.
"Well, look who it is."
Sirius looked up from his feet and ahead on the path leading back to the castle, but when he saw who was standing in front of him, he realized he should have been able to tell by the stench.
"Snivellus," Sirius sneered. "If you know what's good for you, you'll scurry on back to the castle. I’m in a bloody awful mood and I'd like nothing better than to take it all out on you."
Rather than quaking in appropriate fear, Snape made an awful sort of expression that was probably supposed to be smile. "Oh, really?" he said. "Well, let's see what my friends have to say."
Sirius felt it almost as he heard it -- a voice yelled "Expelliarmus!" from somewhere behind him, the spell hit him in the back and his wand flew out of his hands. He whirled around to see Evan Rosier, Antonin Dolohov, Wilbur Wilkes, Caleb Mulciber and, unsurprisingly, his dear brother Regulus.
"Is that the best you've got?" Sirius called to Dolohov, who was smugly holding his own wand in one hand and Sirius' in the other.
"Flagrinigium!" called out one of them, maybe Wilkes, but Sirius wasn't sure, because his skin was blossoming in a sizzle of bright pink blisters.
He doubled over, hands on his knees, but gritted his teeth against the pain and said, "What, nobody ever taught you how to do a decent Cruciatus curse? You're no better than Muggles, what're you going to do next, give me a black eye?"
When they had him pinned to the ground, tender bruised pockets covering pretty much every spot of his body, Sirius reflected that taunting them with the brute force angle probably hadn't been the brightest plan. He'd given as good as he'd gotten, and that elbow against Rosier's cheek was definitely going to leave a mark, but five against one made things a bit difficult.
As Snape loomed over him while Wilkes kept Sirius flat on his back with a foot on his neck, Sirius supposed that it had really been six against one, but he refused to count Snape, on account of the fact that all he'd done was stand around and look greasy and self-satisfied.
"So, Snivellus," Sirius said, "it only took you six years to find five people who hate me as much as you do. Well done, you must be very--"
"Shut your mouth, Mudblood-lover," Wilkes snapped, and twisted his heel.
"S'very convincing," Sirius wheezed. "I'm frightened to death."
"That's right," said Regulus, who still looked like the same fat-headed idiot who, when they were children, had stolen Sirius' pet snake and then howled like a baby when it bit him. "And you're not going to go running to Dumbledore, either? Because you know that we'll tell the whole school that you had to leave home because you're a filthy, scum-sucking blood traitor pervert."
Sirius didn't say anything, and fought to turn his head to the side.
*
Sirius watched, dumbfounded, as James raced toward the Whomping Willow to risk his own hide in order to save Snape's. Standing beside him, Peter was sniffling miserably, and not even trying to hide the hot tears running down his face.
"Wormtail, get a hold of yourself. It's okay -- Snape might still die!" Sirius said with forced lightness.
"It's not that," Peter howled. "I'm going to be, to be expelled!" He then dissolved into totally wracked sobs, face buried in his hands and Sirius scuffed his toes in the grass uncomfortably.
"You don't know that," Sirius said, shrugging, although he suspected that Peter would get expelled, because what he'd done had been really, really bloody stupid. "Why don't you tell me what happened?" Sirius added when Peter still hadn't looked up from his muffled sniffling.
"I was walking back from the library when," Peter paused for a wet, messy snort, "they had me surrounded, I didn't even see them coming!"
"Who," Sirius asked sharply, "who had you surrounded?"
"Dolohov and Wilkes and Snape and your brother," said Peter. "They surrounded me and they said that I had to tell them where Remus went every month--"
"Wait, how did they know about Moony?"
"I don't know, Sirius!" Peter said, waving his hands helplessly. His face was red and blotched and he'd never looked more like a rat with those runny pink eyes. "They told me I had to tell them or Regulus would tell the whole school why you left home." He looked at Sirius wide-eyed. Sirius felt Regulus' sucker punch in his stomach all over again, and he sunk down to sit in the wet grass. His robes were getting soaked, but he barely noticed.
"So you told them?" he asked.
"I didn't think I had any choice!" Peter said. He kneeled down next to Sirius in the grass. "You believe me, right?" he said. "And now I'm going to be expelled for sure!" He still looked as though he might start bawling again any minute.
Sirius sighed. More than terrified or frantic, he felt exhausted. He wanted to lie down, sleep for a week and wake up when this whole mess was sorted. "Did they tell you that they're going to tell the whole school that I'm a poofer or did you figure it out on your own?" Sirius asked.
Peter's eyes got very, very wide.
Sirius laughed, but it was more of a strangled cough. "Well, none of the above, then," he said. "Look, they're not going to toss you out," he added. "Because," he paused.
There was no because -- they probably were going to toss Peter out. Sirius knew quite a bit about a few things and one of those was the art of getting in trouble. If Peter had spent the last six years carefully building a resume of mayhem, the prank against Snape might have been taken in stride -- an offense worth a severe penalty for sure, but no less than what could be expected of him. But Peter had only ever been punished the few times all four Marauders had been caught in sticky hijinx; trying to get Snape killed was going to come out of nowhere and Peter was definitely going to get expelled, unless --
"Because we're going to tell Dumbledore that I did it," Sirius finished with a large gulp.
"What?"
The plan was so obvious and so simple that the words tumbled out of Sirius' mouth before the idea had even coalesced in his head. "I'll tell Dumbledore that I told Snape and them about Moony, and that they've been blackmailing me all semester. They won't quite cancel each other out, but maybe it's enough to keep me from getting tossed out."
Peter's face was still painted with confusion. "But won't Snape tell Dumbledore the truth?" he asked.
Sirius laughed again, another sharp bark. "Are you mad?" he said. "Give up a chance to get me in trouble? Don't worry, Snape won't say a word. That'll be the least of our troubles."
Peter finally stopped crying and also looking like he was going to cry. Sirius was so exhausted that he could barely stand up, although he needed to get up in a hurry so he could confess to Dumbledore before Snape did. The weight of the responsibility for what had happened had already settled heavily on his shoulders, and by the time he was standing before Dumbledore in the head's office, he would barely remember that it hadn't been all his fault in the first place.
**
"Well," said Sirius brightly, "that was fun, even, right?"
"I can't feel my feet."
"To be fair, you cast the numbing charm on yourself."
"Sirius, I cast the numbing charm so that I wouldn't be able to feel whether or not Rosier had burned off my toes."
Sirius looked at Remus' feet. His shoes did look -- ashy. "I poured my beer on them," he said. "I think that helped, didn't it?"
Remus scowled. "I owe you a round, then, I suppose?" he asked.
Sirius frowned, more of a pout, really. "I wasn't going to collect," he said.
It was near half-three and they were traipsing around Diagon Alley looking for an all-night Floo. Sirius had been the one to suggest that they Floo instead of Apparating because Remus seemed disoriented after being hit by both a Cruciatus and several nasty disarming spells, but Sirius had forgotten that the Leaky Cauldron locked up at three and every closed store front they walked past appeared to be causing Remus an exponential amount of pain, numbing spell aside.
It had started the night Sirius had passed out at Remus and Peter's flat and woke up wedged upon their sofa with Remus standing over him with a smirk, a cup of tea and the offer of a headache cure. Moony had always been one of his best mates, of course, but Sirius forgot sometimes that he was really quite fantastic company and didn't laugh nearly as much as James might have when Sirius had told him that he was relatively certain there was a nest of pixies in his stomach.
So when Sirius ran into Caradoc Dearborn, an Auror who'd played Quidditch for Gryffindor at the same time as James and Sirius, and Caradoc mentioned having made some arrests at The Six Fingers Tavern, Sirius decided to spare James the embarrassment of turning him down in favor of bedtime story hour and showed up at Remus' door.
Remus had said no, and then that Sirius was bonkers, and then no again, and then that Sirius was aiming to get himself killed, and then no again and then finally yes when Sirius had shrugged and said he'd just go alone, then, and Remus gave in because he was worried that Sirius would get killed, a plan that Sirius knew would work all along.
"What are you thinking?" Sirius asked after they'd come to another dead end. He knew of a dodgy but surefire all-night Floo in Knockturn Alley, but given the circumstances under which they'd taken leave from The Six Fingers, he thought it was probably wise to steer clear.
"I'm thinking we should have just Apparated," Remus growled.
"But you're--" Sirius didn't want to say that Remus wasn't up for Apparating because that would just make him more cross. But Remus was looking quite pale and not at all like he'd be able to find his way, let alone his feet.
Remus pressed his palm against a lamp post and leaned heavy into it. "I'll be fine," he said. "C'mere, just let me--"
Sirius moved toward him and Remus shifted, placing his hands on Sirius' shoulders for balance.
"My flat, then?" Remus said. "On the count of three?"
Sirius nodded, and as Remus started to count, he wondered what they must have looked like under the lamp light to anyone else out at that hour.
When he opened his eyes, they were in the kitchen of Remus and Peter's flat, and Remus was looking much worse for the wear, still leaning against Sirius but with a weight that suggested he might actually collapse and his breathing was in short heaves.
"Let's, you should sit down," Sirius said, fumbling Remus into one of the kitchen chairs. "Do you want some water?" he asked.
Remus nodded.
"Er, where are the glasses?"
Remus pointed to the cabinet above the sink. Sirius filled a glass with a tap of his wand and handed it to Remus, who accepted it gratefully and managed to drink a few shaky sips.
"Do you want me to take a look at your feet?" Sirius was awful with remedies and knew that Remus would probably have to guide him through every step, including whether to grind the vinegar seeds or the eucalyptus first, but it seemed awful to just leave him there to mend his own feet.
Remus shook his head. "No," he said, "I still can't feel them, I think I'd rather sleep now and look at them in the morning." He smiled at what Sirius imagined was his own rather ashen expression. "Don't worry," Remus added. "I'm pretty sure I haven't lost any toes."
"Okay, so, I'll stay," Sirius said, pointing to the dilapidated sofa. "Peter's still visiting his mum, right? You shouldn't be alone, at least."
Remus took another sip of water. "Sirius, I'm fine," he said. "Compared to the transformation, this is nothing."
His hand was trembling, though, as he set down the glass.
When it was over, Sirius would still believe that Remus had known that Sirius was going to kiss him. The truth was that a kiss was never a big noisy surprise like in books, the other person had to be paying attention and not looking away or coughing or wiping their mouth with the cuff of their robes or any other manner of easy outs and Remus had definitely been paying attention.
The way he froze up when their lips met and pulled away like he'd touched fire, though, it was a pretty good impression of someone who was surprised.
"What are you doing?"
"I just--"
"No, you do not just--"
Remus was hurt and it was Sirius' fault. Remus had been Sirius' friend since he was eleven and now he was twenty-one and he sort of wanted to be eleven again. Remus' hands had shook when he'd set down the glass.
"I, uh, I wanted to," Sirius said with hastily gathered conviction. "What's wrong with that?" You're hardly the giant squid." He tried a smile but Remus' face stayed cloudy.
"So you like blokes, I like blokes, why the hell not? Is that it? Because it sure as bloody hell wasn't when we were in school."
It was times like this when Sirius suspected that Remus would make an excellent professor, because Sirius felt not unlike he was being asked to recall all the ingredients for a particular potion. So he shrugged. He already knew he was going to give the wrong answer.
*
Sirius' flat was a bit of a shoebox in terms of size and he didn't have many visitors, so he'd dragged his mattress out to the sitting room and made his bedroom there. The window had a nice view of the river, and, anyway, he lived alone, so it hardly mattered if he slept in the sitting room or took his tea in the bath tub or anything else.
Sirius hated living alone.
He hated living alone and so he slept in the sitting room but it didn't much help. Also, when there was a cacophony of knocking on his front door in the middle of the night, there was no chance of sleeping through it.
"Alright, alright," Sirius called from where his face was buried in his pillow, "just a bloody minute." Half-awake, he grabbed his wand from the discarded pile of robes on the floor, because even though it was unlikely that Death Eaters come to kill him would bother to knock first, one could never be too careful.
It was Remus at the door, and he looked terrible.
"Uh, hello," Sirius said, refusing to be self-conscious about the fact that he was wearing under shorts and nothing else, because he wouldn't have been before. He crossed his arms, elbows resting in his palms.
"Can I come in?"
Not feeling up to composing a response that wouldn't sound either eager or terse, Sirius stepped away from the threshold and back into the flat. Remus followed him.
They hadn't seen each other for almost a month.
Sirius wasn't embarrassed, because being embarrassed would mean that he'd thought he was wrong -- and that certainly wasn't it. But he was loathe to put himself in situations that would require them to act distant and awkward, so he'd been avoiding Remus and also Order meetings, which meant that he'd been inadvertently avoiding everyone they'd ever known who hadn't gone evil or gotten killed.
"Look, I know that--" Remus said, but trailed off, apparently deciding that he didn't know at all. "Something's happened," he said. "I thought you should hear it from a friend first."
The thing was that Sirius was already half-expecting that someone had died. First of all, "everyone they'd ever known who hadn't gone evil or gotten killed," was a short list, and it was shrinking all the time. Second of all, Sirius had been avoiding Remus, but he imagined that Remus had been avoiding him as well.
"Who is it?"
"Regulus."
That part was unexpected.
Regulus, his stupid pig-headed younger brother who he hadn't seen or spoken to since he left Hogwarts, and it'd probably been twice as long since they'd said two words to each other that weren't in anger. He hated Regulus with the same obligatory grudged anger that he felt for his entire family, but he also hardly knew him, so learning he was dead shouldn't have felt like anything more than the death of some Slytherin seeker he'd once beaten at Quidditch.
"Are you alright?" Remus said, resting his hand on Sirius' shoulder. "Why don't you sit down?"
They both sat on the edge of the mattress because there wasn't a sofa, and some part of Sirius' brain seemed to register that it should have been awkward, but it didn't matter, because it might as well have been happening to someone else. Still, it was almost funny, or it would have been if Sirius hadn't been -- apparently -- crying.
"Bloody fucking hell," he said, swiping at his eyes with angry balled up fists. "We hated each other, why the fuck am I crying?"
Remus put his arm around Sirius but Sirius stayed stiff against it. "He was still your brother," Remus said.
Sirius was grateful that he seemed to have put a stop to any tears, but his eyes still felt bright and his hands were still balled up into fists in his lap. "It doesn't matter," Sirius insisted. "he was an awful person and probably a Death Eater and I shouldn't be so--" He trailed off, and Remus didn't reply, because he'd already made his point, and because he probably knew Sirius knew that he was right. Regulus was dead and he was Sirius' brother and he was dead.
They sat in silence for a while, and Sirius even let himself relax against Remus' arm a little bit. After Sirius started to go crazy from the silence, he said, "I think I need a drink."
Instead of answering, Remus kissed him.
To his credit, Sirius didn't make a big production of putting Remus off like a nervous virgin, but when the kiss had run its course, the first thing he did was say, "So, what, my brother dies, you feel sorry for me, why the hell not? Is that it?"
Remus bit his lip. "Yeah, and?" he tried, but he wasn't drunk and he wasn't Sirius, so he couldn’t really pull it off.
"I don't want your pity," Sirius said, moving to stand up, even though it was a lie, he sort of did want Remus' pity, quite a lot, really.
Remus grabbed his hand. "It's not pity," he said rather forcefully. "Look, can't we just -- let's just agree that this won't be the smartest thing either of us have ever done, but it won't be the worst, either. Okay?"
Sirius looked at where their fingers were laced together. If he stopped pulling against it, they'd be holding hands. "But is it something you want to do?"
"Yes."
**
PETER
*
It was lunchtime, but Remus was making up the Charms exam they'd had the day after the full moon and James and Sirius were trying to spread Stick All Sleaze Fixative on the rims of the Slytherin toilets again, so Peter was on his own.
The three of them, James, Sirius and Peter, had been walking back from Care of Magical Creatures together when Sirius had tugged on James' tie and James had said, "Pardon us, Wormtail--"
"--but three's a crowd where we're going," Sirius had finished.
So now Peter was stuck eating his lunch alone at their usual table and looking, he was certain, like a complete fool. He gathered up his books and banished his lunch tray. Six years at Hogwarts and Peter still hadn't quite gotten the hang of what he told himself over and over was a simple spell -- his apple and his crumpled cloth napkin remained on the table after the tray had vanished.
Peter sighed. Usually he could count on James or Sirius to make a big show of trying to banish all four trays at once. He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and decided to take the apple outside.
It was a bright sun, blue sky, explosion of light and color sort of day, but to Peter it hardly registered as he wandered further away from the castle and toward the edge of the school grounds, scuffling his toes in the grass. He was feeling out of sorts, in the way that if anyone had asked him what was wrong, he would have said, "Oh, nothing," at least a few times before telling. But since there was no one around to ask, he supposed that he was feeling put out about the Stick All Sleaze Fixative or whatever it was he hadn't been clever enough or fast enough or wearing the lucky purple and yellow spotted shorts so he couldn't come along.
Mostly, it just wasn't fair.
There was a rotted out tree stump right at the edge of the Forbidden Forest that had been transfigured by some students into a bit of a bench with a seat. Peter though he'd sit there and eat his apple, but when he circled the tree stump, he saw that the spot was already occupied.
Severus Snape was crouched over what looked like a small mound of mermaid fins, trying to do something to them, something that involved setting them on fire -- or maybe not. He was cursing at the smoking pile of fins in a way that suggested he wasn't very happy with the results.
"What are you doing?" Peter asked before he could stop himself. He wasn't sure why, exactly, because the Rules of Being a Marauder -- an seemingly ever-changing list that was revised and reiterated most often when James and Sirius had nicked too much fire whiskey -- enumerated Snape as the enemy in either first, second or third degree of importance, depending on whether or not it was Quidditch season.
Snape whirled around, face bright and twisted. "What are you doing here?" he snapped. "Where's Potter and Black? Lurking under that bloody cloak, thinking I'll fall for something if it's just you?"
Peter stuck his chin out. If anything, he was sick and tired of talking and thinking about James and Sirius. "I don't know where they are," he said. "I just -- I just wanted to eat my apple."
Snape stared at him with what looked like disbelief, but didn't move from the ground.
"Are they canned?" Peter asked finally.
"What?"
"Um, er," Peter stumbled. "Are they canned, I said. Because if they're canned, it might help if you added some salt." He thought he'd read that somewhere, maybe. Once.
Snape gave him a strange sort of look and then, as though it was causing him a sharp pain in his chest to do so, said, "That's a good idea."
Peter beamed, and took a bit of his apple. It was crisp and sweet and he felt the smooth skin give way to soft flesh under his teeth. "And be careful when you use the toilet tonight," he added. "Just trust me."
*
Peter was walking back from the library after dinner when he found himself pulled into a dark corridor with a wand pressed against the hollow of his throat.
"What are you doing?"
"I thought we could have a chat. I never got a chance to thank you for your helpful tip."
Growing up, Peter's mother always told him that his father had died in a spelling accident before he was born. There were a few pictures of him around the flat -- one of a man with light brown hair with his impossibly young looking mother sitting on his lap at some sort of party and one of his father smirking and holding a Beater, wearing a Slytherin Quidditch uniform -- and Peter looked at them sometimes, imagining that they had the same nose or chin, but he'd never had a father, so it was hard to know what he was missing.
"But I--"
"'If you really want to see something, you should check out the Whomping Willow on the night of the full moon,'" Snape mimicked. "You set me up! You and Potter and Black, one of them must have put you up to it -- thought it was funny, did you? Sending me to get attacked by a werewolf?"
The summer he got his Hogwarts letter, his mother told him a secret: it was true that his father had died before he was born, but also had father been Arturo Nigellus, from a very old and powerful wizarding family, but his mother and Arturo Nigellus hadn't been married when he had died, which was why Peter's last name was Pettigrew, like his mother and his grandparents, who they lived with until he was six.
"They didn't, I swear! You said you wanted to know where he went every month, I was just trying to help! I didn't think you'd get hurt, I promise."
"Not very trustworthy though, are you, Pettigrew? You tell me Lupin's secret, what did you tell your friends?"
His mother had told him about his father, and then she'd said, "No matter what anyone says, remember that you're a pureblood wizard." Not that it'd mattered, because somehow only having half a set of parents was the same as being half-blooded in everyone else's eyes, and Peter was just another nameless Gryffindor, if anyone ever saw him in the shadow of James of Sirius or Remus.
"Don't worry, they think you made me do it. No one will ever know, I promise! We can keep helping each other."
It wasn't his fault, Snape wasn't supposed to get hurt. Peter had just wanted to make something big happen, something that would prove that Snape could trust him with big things.
"Tell you what, Pettigrew -- next time you think you're helping me? Don't bother."
**
Peter didn't really care for babies, but it seemed impolite not to hold James' when he popped in for a visit, especially when James had seemed eager to hand him over the minute Peter walked in the door. The baby, Harry, was obstinately sleeping, but Peter still held him in his lap gingerly, like a potion in a glass cauldron that also might explode.
"Of course," James said, his back turned, as he rummaged through the kitchen cupboards. "Of course he sleeps when you're holding him. Can't get a minute's rest when I've got him. And Lily's gone to see her sister and she might not be back until tomorrow."
The baby was always heavier than he expected, but then, Peter supposed Harry was growing bigger all the time, the way babies did. Lily had been absolutely enormous when she'd been pregnant, enormous and prone to cursing anyone who joked about her resemblance to a beached whale with a nasty bloating spell. Still, it was horrifying to imagine the wrapped up bundle in his lap having come out of Lily's body.
"I thought Lily hated her sister," Peter said.
"I don't know if she hates her," James pondered, "I think she just makes her miserable. But she might not see her for a while, so--" James trailed off. "There!" he said. He set the sugar pot down on the table. "Knew it was around here somewhere." He waved his wand at the pot and it began scooping spoonfuls into the tea cups he'd set out on the table.
"Sorry," James added, running his hands through his hair, which was standing up as though he'd been shocked on one end and completely flattened on the side around his ear. "I'm a complete wreck, I haven't slept right in weeks."
Peter nodded, shifting the baby's weight in his lap. The baby smelled funny, like sour milk and the tauntonweed cleaning spells they used on the diapers. "Me neither, I feel like I haven't slept well in ages," he said, looking into his tea cup. "Remus and Sirius, you know, they're rather loud."
James' spoon stopped circling in mid-stroke and clattered loudly against the rim of his cup. "Loud doing what?" he said, eyes wide.
Peter shrugged uncomfortably. It wasn't like he sat around trying to picture it. "You know," he said. "I mean, I know we joked about how they both fancied blokes when we were in school, but I didn't think they'd actually ever do anything! I mean, they're like our brothers."
In his lap, the baby shifted, but didn't wake. When Peter picked up his tea cup, it nearly slipped out of his hand -- his palms were that clammy with sweat.
*
James shifted his wand from one hand to the other, and then clapped his hands together. "Well!" he said. "I guess this is it. Do you want to stay for dinner afterward?" He tried to strangle out a laugh.
Peter already felt like he might be sick. He'd been told that there would be no way for the spell to divine his intentions, but he still felt nervous and awful and small. If he could do this, though, he would be different. He shook his head. "Better that I get back, so no one suspects," he said.
James nodded. He offered his hand and Peter put out his own, matching their palms and lacing their fingers. Peter's hands were cold, but if James noticed, he didn't say anything.
With his hand crushed in James', it was easy to forget that James was weak and that James was going to die, no matter what. James would die and so would Peter, if he didn't do what he must, and this was the one thing that Peter could do that James never would. It was important to remember that he really had no choice.
Before Peter realized that it was going to happen, James began to speak. "Repeat after me," he said, carefully steady and deathly serious. "The location of James Richard Potter, Lily Evans Potter and Harry James Potter may be found at the Little Blue House on the Hill, Godric's Hollow."
"The location of James Richard Potter, Lily Evans Potter and, and Harry James Potter may be found at the Little Blue House on the Hill, Godric's Hollow," Peter repeated. James had been looking straight into Peter's eyes when he said the words, but since he hadn't said that was necessary to the incantation, Peter looked over his shoulder, and his eyes settled on Lily, with the baby in her lap, sitting at the table following along with a thick spell book.
The house was James' parents. Peter had been there many times during the holidays when they'd been at school. Peter had been very fond of James' mother. She'd made delicious jam tarts, and had never complained when they got too loud. The house had stood empty since James' parents had died, a year before Harry was born.
"Okay," James said, raising his wand. "Fidelusimiso!"
Peter saw green sparks and felt the secret fly inside.