Characters not mine.
(originally written for a "chosen families" challenge at comment_fic. Prompt was "With friends like these, who needs enemies?")
Sirius Black told Severus Snape about the knot in the Whomping Willow and nearly got the kid eaten by someone who was, effectively, one of his best friends. If James hadn't shown more sense, the wolf would have ripped an arm off at the very least.
This, Remus was convinced, was because Sirius was an idiot.
He'd seen a threat. He'd seen someone snooping around and trying to ruin the life of a friend - and when that friend is a werewolf, it can get pretty damned ruined if someone goes parading the fact around. So he'd arranged to get rid of the threat by whatever means was available.
And when Sirius got angry and protective, he wasn't always thinking clearly enough to realize he was destroying a threat with the friend he was trying to protect.
Idiot.
But an idiot Remus always wanted at his back. He cared, and he fought for people, and he would stay up all night just to make sure you were okay.
James Potter was stubborn and proud and held things together mostly because he refused to watch anything fall apart if he gave so much as a damn about it.
He usually failed to give said damn about the rules.
Sirius exercised his insane and creative streak when someone had his protective ire up. James usually exercised his in the service of making people laugh. Well, at least those people he liked. It tended to make those people he didn't like angry, or embarrassed, or covered in a bright red substance they couldn't always identify. And since he was charismatic and well-liked and his victims usually pissed a horde of people off, he usually got away with it.
Remus's private identification for Sirius might be "idiot," but with James it was, frankly, "sneaky bastard."
But James did care about justice, and he wanted to make you feel better, even if he did tend to try to be the mad vigilante with a water balloon full of paint.
Peter Pettigrew was a tag-along. This was true no matter how nicely Remus tried to put it.
He was a born follower and sometimes he got underfoot, and he used Remus, James, and Sirius as shields whenever he got in over his head.
But he was likeable and easy to talk to, and sometimes a relief since he was much easier to read than James or Sirius. He knew when to distract you and when to leave you alone. Remus always knew where Peter stood.
Remus Lupin was a monster, three nights out of every twenty-eight. He couldn't control it, and he ripped furniture up, lied about it, and alienated people.
He was good at alienating people. He was bad at trust, and even when that trust went both ways, he hadn't the slightest clue to respond, because he certainly couldn't do anything close to the things his friends did for him. And sometimes he wanted to run away from everything and never look back.
He was also a mother hen who kept track of his friends' more egregious flaws so he could smack them upside the head when they were threatening to get out of hand.
Lily asked how they hung together from time to time, and Remus had to concede that none of them were particularly nice people.
But when someone came up against the Marauders, they found a group of boys whose flaws fit together more neatly than their strengths, and there was nothing left to pick at.
It was friends like these who made enemies like them not at all frightening.