James Potter's Guide to Avoiding Social Faux Pas

x.x.x

"Look at them!" James cried. "Just look at them!"

Peter obediently, if a bit grudgingly, turned away from his special edition Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle to face the remaining two Marauders, who were currently sharing an armchair at the opposite end of the common room. Remus was busy reading—or attempting to read—or pretending to read—or at least holding a book in front of his face, while Sirius was busy making a show of distracting him through various verbal and non-verbal means.

James, meanwhile, fumed. "Just look at them," he murmured again. "Now Padfoot's whispering in Moony's ear, now Padfoot's tickling Moony, now Moony's swatting Padfoot's hands away oh-so-playfully with whatever drivel he's been reading, now—oh. Merlin. That wink. Did you, Peter, or did you not just observe our male best mate wink at our other male best mate in a repulsively lecherous and licentious manner?"

"Yep," Peter replied, "saw it," although, having long since returned to his comic, he had not actually witnessed the lecherous and licentious wink in question.

"Those utter bastards. They're shagging. I know they're shagging. Don't you think they're shagging, Wormtail?"

"I really don't know, Prongs."

"Shagging like poncy little rabbits behind our backs. Don't think I haven't noticed Remus Lupin's improbably immasculine conscientiousness toward schoolwork and respect for all members of the female sex. Don't think I haven't noticed the bloody twinkling fairy lights in Sirius Black's meticulously lined eyes whenever he's near a certain special lycanthrope."

"Hmm." Peter turned a page in Martin Miggs.

"You don't seem to comprehend the gravity of this situation, Wormy. It is of the utmost importance that I discover the true extent of the relationship in question."

"Come again?"

James sighed. "I need to know if they're shagging."

"Would you like me to ask them?" Peter offered. "And then perhaps we'll settle the whole matter and I can finish my comic in peace."

"Oh, for the love of all things red-haired and green-eyed, Pettigrew! You don't just walk up to your two male best friends and ask them if they're shagging. That sort of socially insensitive behavior has the potential to create an extremely uncomfortable situation for all parties involved. Thank Godric you've got someone with a bit of common sense around"—he waved a hand to indicate himself—"to steer you away from such disastrous social faux pas."

Peter raised an eyebrow, but otherwise proved disinclined to respond.

"Luckily, during the past two to five minutes during which I have been outwardly making clever conversation, my brilliant mind has devised an infinitely superior plan. All I require is a rat who might slip surreptitiously in and out of a Potions storeroom"—Peter sighed in resignation—"and, oh, accio one strand of Remus Lupin's and one strand of Sirius Black's hair!"

At the other end of the Gryffindor common room, Remus flinched almost imperceptibly and frowned in confusion. A fraction of a second later, Sirius leaped from the armchair and howled in agony, his cries of "What the fuck?" resounding loudly throughout the area.

Catching the two hairs in his open palm, James grinned to himself with no marked absence of sadism.

x.x.x

When Sirius left the dormitory for a morning shower, Remus had already headed downstairs for breakfast and James had been sitting on Peter's bed whispering conspiratorially to the blond boy and occasionally tossing a predatory glance in Sirius' direction.

All in all, nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

But when Sirius returned to the dorms showered and changed, James and Peter were nowhere to be seen and Remus lay positioned rather precariously across his bed.

"Oy, Moony? What are you doing on my bed? Can't get enough of me, eh?"

"You take rather long showers for a bloke, don't you?" Remus muttered irritably. "It's already 8:45."

He winked. "Just wanted to look pretty for you, Moony."

"Well," Remus responded in a strangely husky voice, "it worked. So why don't you sit down right here"—he patted a spot on the bed beside him—"and let me do something for you."

His full lips were slightly parted and his dark gold hair was just a little more disheveled than usual and—fuck. Oh. Fuck.

"Moony?" Sirius choked. "Are you—are you feeling all right?"

"Of course I'm feeling all right," Remus snapped. "This is what we do, isn't it? Shag?"

Silence.

"Fine," he said. "Sit down here."

Sirius complied.

"Come closer."

Sirius complied.

"Now," Remus whispered into his ear, running a hand lightly across his chest, "do we or do we not. Shag. All. The. Time?"

Faced with this, really, how could Sirius be expected to form coherent sentences? "I—Remus, I—you're acting very—"

"Fine," the other boy said. "Why don't you just"—the shadow of a grimace flickered across his face—"why don't you just kiss me? That's as much as I need."

Naturally, Sirius complied.

And then the door immediately flew open and a frantic Remus Lupin burst into the dorms. And then the body now pinned beneath Sirius' own began to writhe and contort.

Sirius, always the first to react, promptly fell off of the bed and hit the floor with a painful thud. He hurriedly stood up and looked first to a stunned Remus Lupin standing just inside the doorway, next to a previously Remus-shaped James Potter still reclining on Sirius' bed and looking rather uncomfortable.

"I was just—I forgot my tie," the real Remus murmured. "I'm just—I didn't realize—sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll just go."

"No!" Sirius exclaimed, darting to the doorway. "No, no, no, Moony, wait! That was—I don't know what it was—but it wasn't what it looked like! I'm not shagging James!"

But Remus—his tie forgotten for the second time—was already gone.

James snorted. "Whole common room probably heard that, you ill-tempered pansy," he muttered as he hopped quietly off the bed and slinked toward the door.

"Fuck no you don't," Sirius snarled, grabbing his fellow troublemaker by the collar and shoving him roughly into the wall. "The. Hell. Was. That?"

"That. Erm—yes—well—that was a slight miscalculation on my part. Took the Polyjuice a bit too early, never realized you spent so much bloody time in the shower." He paused and smiled charmingly. "You of all people can't blame a bloke for a bit of curiosity, eh?"

"Curiosity?" he cried. "You're telling me that you Polyjuiced yourself into Remus Lupin and tricked me into snogging you in order to satisfy some sort of homosexual curiosity? Have I got that right?"

"No, you bloody well haven't got that right, you big girl's blouse," James spat as he struggled to free himself from Sirius' clutches. "I was curious not about my own very decided heterosexuality, but about the nature—shall I say the platonicity, or obvious lack thereof—of the relationship between a certain Mr. Padfoot and a certain Mr. Moony. And"—he grinned once more—"thanks to you, my suspicions of clandestine shagging have been confirmed."

Feeling a migraine coming on, Sirius let go of James and, in a particularly Moony-esque gesture, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

"You prat," he said. "You complete arsehole. You have fucked everything. Couldn't you just have asked?"

"Couldn't you just have told me that you and Moony were shagging?"

Sirius frowned. "But—" And then smiled. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes, and usually when pranks were involved—he loved the innate cunning that came with being a Black. "How can you be so sure, Potter? When did I ever say that Moony and I were shagging?"

"You just snogged me thinking that I was Remus Lupin," the messy-haired boy replied with an eye roll. "What more evidence could I need?"

"But," Sirius continued, "you just seduced me in Remus Lupin's body. The absolute most you can conjecture from your sick little experiment is that I would not necessarily be averse to shagging Moony. Doesn't mean I've ever been seduced by the real Remus—or vice versa, for that matter. Doesn't mean we've ever engaged in any 'clandestine shagging.' "

James paled. "You mean—all of that and you and Moony aren't—aren't shagging?"

He smirked. "Well I'm not bloody telling you now, am I, Potter?"

And then, being rather a zealous believer in vigilante justice, Sirius proceeded to give his best mate a spectacular bloody nose.

x.x.x

Seated at his favorite corner table in the library and ostensibly immersed in his Charms textbook, Remus made a valiant attempt to ignore the pouting boy in front of him.

"Please, Moony, you can't be cross. I thought I was snogging you."

Remus dropped his book. "I'm sorry?"

"Then you didn't see him morphing?"

"Morphing? Padfoot, I opened the door, I saw you on top of someone—snogging—you jumped about a foot, hit the floor, and there was James lying on your bed. And—well, it was unexpected, to be certain, but really—"

"I—he was Polyjuiced!" Sirius cut in. "James Polyjuiced himself into you and cleverly deceived me into snogging him because, with his keen observational skills and lightning-fast analytical thinking, he had deduced that we were shagging like poncy little rabbits behind his back and, naturally, wanted to be sure. Because we do. Shag. A lot. Don't we?"

Remus narrowed his eyes. "Number one, that explanation made not even the least bit of sense, but, sadly, I don't doubt its veracity. Number two, I thought you'd been acting a bit off, but I have now, with own my keen observational skills and lightning-fast analytical thinking, deduced that you are most assuredly not Sirius Black."

"Of course I am!" he exclaimed hurriedly. "Who else would I be?"

"No, you're not. And from the story you just told me, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you're James, Polyjuiced to look like Sirius, and that Sirius is currently immobilized and shoved into some cupboard because you wanted to find me first in order to, by means of some underhanded ploy that obviously involved pretending to be Sirius, determine whether or not he and I are shagging before he could get to me, relay the disgusting details of your—I must assume—failed first attempt, and warn me against revealing anything to a right prat such as yourself."

"Damn, he's good," the boy who was clearly James Potter muttered. "How on Godric's green earth can you be so certain I'm not Sirius?"

"Please," Remus huffed. "Sirius doesn't sound so utterly gay."

"Pardon? My voice is mellifluous and masculine and I most certainly do not—"

"And number three," he growled, ignoring James' interjection, "what were you thinking using Polyjuice Potion to turn into me?"

"Really, Remus, I think we both know Padfoot's an egg who's a little easier to crack. You're a bloody Gringott's vault when it comes to secrets. I figured the most efficient course of action would be to try to make him talk first and only in the highly unlikely case that my cunning scheme failed on him would I bother giving it a go on—"

"No, James. Not what I meant. You know what I am, don't you?"

"Yeah, you're a right nancy, and you and Sirius—"

"Again, not what I meant. I'm a werewolf, James. Polyjuice Potion is designed for changing into humans only."

James rolled Sirius' eyes. "You're still—"

"Don't." Remus took a deep breath. "What if you hadn't changed back properly, Prongs? What if you had been stuck in the body of a werewolf? The full moon is next week. Did that occur to you? What if you transformed? Have you even a speck of common bloody sense?"

"Moony." James looked terrifically contrite, especially wearing Sirius' patented puppy-dog eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry."

He couldn't remember the last time James had apologized quite so sincerely, and it took no small dose of will power to remain firm. "You're lucky I don't condone violent behavior, because if I did, I'd say you deserved a sound beating."

"Sirius already punched me," he muttered. "Made my nose bleed."

"Ah. Well. Good. I'm off, then."

"Wait!" James called. "Moony!"

"Yes?"

"Are you and Sirius shagging, then?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, James! Goodbye."

x.x.x

"Sirius?"

"Remus?"

"Yeah. For real, this time."

"Oh, thank Merlin," Sirius said, grabbing the other boy and kissing him square on the lips.

"Mm."

"Mm. So much better than James."

x.x.x

"Peter?"

"Yeah?"

"I finally found out. Remus swore upside down on his mother's life and Sirius swore on my mum's."

"Swore what?"

"They weren't shagging."

"Hmm."

"Peter?"

"Yeah?"

"Now they're shagging."

"I know, Prongs. I can hear them."

"My life is total shit."

"Hmm."

"Hey, have we got any of that Polyjuice left over?"

"A bit. Why?"

James grinned and pulled a long red hair from his pocket. "Because, contrary to my former assertion, my life is not yet total shit."

x.x.x

a/n: Love to all. =]