He remembered making forts in the sitting room. Tapestries, quilts, down comforters all thrown haphazardly across couches and chairs. They could barely fit underneath, the three of them. Until, that is, his mum had waved her wand and gotten the chandelier involved. Their fort had become a circus tent.

Two weeks they had that ridiculous tent set up. Two weeks of sleeping on thinly cushioned carpet, giggling as his mum and dad shared stories of their adventures. Two weeks of knowing, with absolute certainty, that his parents were there.

Looking at the sitting room now, James couldn't imagine why his parents had put up with it for so long. They'd been old even back then, while he'd been only six. Surely sleeping on the floor hadn't been good for them.

But they were always like that, his mum and dad. He could never quite figure out why. If it hadn't been for the extraneous amounts of candles on their birthday cakes each year, he might have thought them to be much younger people. People who would surely live to see their only son graduate from Hogwarts.

James sighed at the chandelier. It had been their fort's downfall—literally. His mum's sticking charm wore off, but not before James tugged a little too hard on the quilt attached to it. They'd heard the creaking and snapping of wood, and his dad had grabbed him 'round the middle and dived right out of the fort and into a side table. The chandelier came crashing down not three seconds later.

He remembered laughing with them, the broken chandelier embedded in a layer of blankets. Later, sneaking down to the kitchen for a pre-dinner snack, he'd discovered them using healing charms on each other. It was, probably, the first time James had ever really noticed how old and breakable his parents were.

It wouldn't be the last.

Carpet turned to rich mahogany wood as James moved from the sitting room to the dining room.

Four chairs, four plates, four sets of cutlery still set out for a dinner that would never take place. He and Sirius would have sat with them and eaten some delectable, house elf's cooking, like so many times before. Sirius would have teased him for his antics around a certain ginger girl. His parents would have asked, not for the first time, when they would receive a wedding invitation. And James would have laughed and said, "Just as soon as I get her to realize she's in love with me."

He staggered into a chair and sat with a heavy thunk. With numb fingers, he undid the clasp on his black cloak and draped it over the back of the chair.

His parents would never see him marry. They would never meet their grandchildren. James pushed his glasses up to his forehead and scrubbed a hand over his face. It was silly, he knew, to be thinking about things like marriage and children and Lily, always Lily, while he sat at an empty table for four.

Merlin, he was depressing. If there was one thing James Potter didn't do, it was depressing.

He stood and left the cloak behind. The kitchen was the next stop and he paused for a minute to remember all the times he and his dad had sneaked down the stairs for an extra slice of pie, or another bite of treacle tart. His mum would have never approved, but every time she caught them at it, she would just roll her eyes and swat them on the head.

James was fairly sure he'd learned all there was to know about bargaining from his dad. Whenever their secret desserts were discovered, his dad was quick to offer up whatever he happened to be eating to his mum.

"You can't be too cross with me," his dad would say. "I gave you the last of my cake!"

He was smiling faintly as he left the kitchen and started up the stairs. A long hallway stretched out before him and he went first to his bedroom, the second door on the right. It was just as he'd left it at the end of summer, bed sloppily made, curtains flung open, old textbooks and essays and notes in a pile on the floor.

He remembered the owl that delivered his and Sirius' results. It had arrived at his window at five o'clock in the morning and tapped its beak against the glass so loudly and frequently that Sirius, from two rooms down the hall, came in, yanked the window open and swore at the bird in a most impressive display of unsavory vocabulary. The owl had just ruffled its feathers and offered up the two envelopes tied to its leg.

They'd sat on his bed together, reading over their results. Sirius had been the first to look up.

"Not too bad," he'd said. "Only failed History of Magic. You?"

James had read over the list again, not quite believing what he was seeing. "Pads…I passed everything."

Sirius had ripped the parchment out of his hand and, upon reading his OWL results, laughed so hard he almost rolled off the bed. "Evans is going to kill you when she finds out!"

She nearly had, too. Because he, of course, had written to her about ten minutes later, expounding on all the wonders of his own genius. Her reply had come two days later with a copy of her own results (all O's, except for an E in Transfiguration) and a note at the bottom reading, "Never write me again, Potter." She hadn't even signed it.

He'd sat in his room with the curtains drawn for the rest of the day.

Kneeling, James sorted through the rubbish he'd thrown out of his trunk. Most of it was for classes he knew he wouldn't be taking anymore. Star charts, brass telescope, a detailed drawing of a unicorn (with a note in Sirius' handwriting saying, "You picked the wrong animal, mate."), and notes on a Muggle thing called television. He moved most of it to the bin by his writing desk and returned to what was left.

For some reason, he'd tossed his collection of detention slips out of his trunk, which explained why he hadn't been able to find them earlier in the year. He and Sirius had been collecting since first year, determined to out-detention each other. It seemed awfully silly now, reading through his list of wrongdoings. Why had he vanished Slughorn's chair in fourth year? Sure, it had been funny at the time, but McGonagall had been livid. He'd almost missed the last Quidditch match of the year. If it hadn't been for her ardent desire to win the cup, he reckoned she would have kept him in detention throughout the match. As it was, he'd barely made it out of her office and down to the pitch in time for the game.

James tucked the detention slips into his trouser pocket and put the rest of the rubbish, mostly notes the Marauders passed around in class, into the bin. He went to the door and looked back. The bed was still sloppily made and the curtains were still open, letting in the mild, mid-April sunlight, but it looked more like the bedroom of a young man now, instead of a young boy.

At least they'd seen him turn seventeen.

The thought sobered him and he left his bedroom in favor of the room at the end of the hall. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the room, filling it with the scent of parchment and ink and that old book smell he'd always associated with his dad. His dad's desk was stationed in the center of the room, still covered in books and whatever research he'd been working on. James sat down in the creaky, plush armchair and ran his fingers over a page of the spiky lettering he'd inherited from his dad. He'd been researching some charm that reacted strangely when used on goats. James didn't understand much of it, so he set it aside and rifled through the rest of the papers. More research, a couple letters from former coworkers, and a letter James had written him a few weeks before his birthday.

Had he known then that he would be visiting them in St. Mungo's six weeks later, he might not have begged for the newest Silver Arrow racing broom. Instead, he might have begged to come home. He might have demanded to know why they'd kept their failing health from him for so long.

James shoved away from the desk and stood. He was being depressing again and that just wouldn't do.

Leaving the study, he paused in the hallway and debated. His mum's work room was the closest door to him, but his parents' bedroom wasn't much further, either. Hesitating, he took a step toward the work room, changed his mind, and went into their bedroom.

The curtains were tied back, flooding the room with sunlight. Their bed was impeccably made, all tucked corners and perfect creases, and adorned with decorative pillows that James never understood the use of. When he'd been little, he would crawl into bed with them and throw all the extra pillows on the floor. The only pillow he'd needed then was his mum's arm.

Frowning, James tossed all the pillows off the bed, muttered a quick apology to whichever house elf would have to pick them all up, and flopped face-first onto the mattress. It smelled like them. Like old books and his mum's apple- and honeysuckle-scented perfume. He wanted to bottle it and keep it with him at all times, just in case he needed to remember how they smelled. He'd heard that, over time, people forgot their loved ones—what they looked like, what they sounded like, what they smelled like. James never wanted to forget them and couldn't imagine how anyone would forget their own parents.

He rolled onto his side and dug his wand out of his dress robes. He didn't know how to bottle a scent, but he knew how to prolong one. With a wave of his wand and flick of his wrist, a pearly sheen settled over the bed. With any luck, and James considered himself quite lucky despite recent events, the stasis charm would hold until the end of the school year. He would return then, when he had more than just a few hours to work, and find a more permanent solution.

It was time, he decided as he shuffled out of his parents' bedroom and back into the hallway. His mum's work room, aside from Sirius' bedroom, was the only one left. Before he'd turned fourteen, her work room had been off limits to him. He'd spent years devising different ways to sneak in, but his mum had always foiled his plans in one way or another. One such time, he'd ended up hanging from the ceiling by his fingertips for an hour. His mum had left him there until he'd started yelling that he couldn't feel his arms anymore.

The next day, she'd come up to him and made him promise that if she let him into her workroom, he would do only as he was told and not touch anything without permission. She'd made him solemnly swear to it. And, like a good Marauder, he swore to it and kept his promise.

He opened the door to her work room and kept his promise in mind. It was for his own safety, he'd come to realize after a couple years of watching his mum work on her various experiments. If he'd touched the wrong thing at the wrong time, the entire manor might have gone up in smoke.

Sometimes, but not very often, she would ask him to help her. He would do little things, like keep the temperature of the cauldron steady, or stir in ingredients, while she waved her wand in complicated patterns, concentration etched into every line of her face. He never did much, but she always thanked him afterwards as if he'd done a great service for his country.

There were eight empty cauldrons in the work room, all shoved to the side. The tables his mum usually worked at were covered in parchment and diagrams. Much like his dad's study, James didn't understand a lot of what she'd been researching. He'd missed that particular quirk in the gene pool, apparently. The only research he legitimately enjoyed was Transfigurative Theory. And Quidditch plays, but that hardly counted as an academic endeavor.

He still sat down and read through his mum's notes, tracing the loops and curls of her handwriting with his fingertip. It was possible these notes would be taken into the Department of Mysteries, never to be seen again. He wanted as much time with them as he could possibly get. They were, after all, his mum's last great work. Discovering these, he thought, was like discovering an unfinished Da Vinci painting. Unlike a painting, though, these would never be put on display. The Department of Mysteries didn't like for their mysteries to be outside their walls.

James shuffled the parchment around until he found a fresh sheet. He summoned a quill and an inkpot and wrote a quick letter to the department head, informing him of the projects and notes available to him upon request. Finished, he folded the letter, added it to his trouser pocket, and left his mum's study, and all her life's work, behind.

"Prongs? You all right, mate?"

"Yeah," James called back, thumping down the stairs two at a time. Back through the kitchen, across the dining room, into the sitting room. "It's weird," he said the moment his friends came into view. They were all standing in the foyer, just outside the sitting room. "I know they won't, but I still feel like they'll be coming through that door any minute."

Sirius glanced back at the door, something like hope in his eyes. When he looked back at James, his gaze was shuttered. "You need some more time?"

"Not sure what good it'll do me," he muttered, raking a hand through his hair.

Stepping up beside Sirius, Remus said, "You might need more time to process, is what he's saying. We can stay, if you want."

James shook his head and stared down at his feet. "Just…just give me ten more minutes."

Without a word, the three of them filed out the door. James was left in his big, empty house again. Alone. In his house. Not his dad's house. His. He'd inherited it, just like his handwriting and his unruly hair and his love of Quidditch and the smell of old books and honeysuckle. He had everything now, all the gold in Gringott's, all the connections at the Ministry, all the house elves in their service, all the furniture and paintings and books and responsibility. He had everything now. Everything except his mum and dad.

He found a seat on the floor and laid back. It was just as uncomfortable as he remembered.

The chandelier, fixed with a simple reparo all those years ago, glinted in the sunlight. It would have to go. He'd always hated the thing. He tended to hate anything that threatened his life, but not in the way he hated that chandelier. It had fallen and his parents had gotten hurt and he'd come to a realization that no boy of six would want to come to. And then they'd gone back to work, holed away in their Department of Mysteries. They'd left him with a governess, who let him build another fort but wouldn't let him keep it up for more than a day.

James remembered crawling into his parents' empty bed, kicking off the pillows, snuggling under their blanket, and falling asleep with nothing but their mingled scents to soothe him. He remembered McGonagall's face when she told him she had bad news and that he should pack his things and ready himself for a visit to St. Mungo's. He remembered everything about the hospital, from the too-white walls to the smell of death that lingered around his parents' ward.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he'd asked, holding his mum's hand. She'd still felt strong, despite the slight tremor in her hands. "I could've been here sooner. I could have—"

"James," she'd said, patiently, smiling at him. She'd smoothed his hair back from his forehead. "It was no use worrying you, and we didn't want to distract you from your studies."

"Fuck my studies," he'd countered. "You're sick! You're dying!"

She'd lifted one eyebrow. "Your father and I are well past our prime, James. Did you think we'd live forever?"

"No one lives forever."

"Exactly," she'd whispered. "Now," she patted his hand and closed her eyes, "go get some tea. The green tea with the lavender infusion is scrumptious."

He'd left, because she'd told him to and he never broke his promises. She was gone by the time he'd gotten back. His dad went an hour later. His heart, the Healers said, had just stopped beating, like it had given up without a warning.

"It knew," James had said, staring at the bed his mum had been occupying. "It knew she was gone."

He'd half expected his own heart to just stop beating, to give up. But it didn't happen and he'd been ushered out of the hospital and into his friends' waiting arms. Peter had been crying and Remus looked a bit misty as well. Sirius had put on a brave front and handed him a flask of firewhiskey.

"How'd you lot get here?" he'd asked, staring at the flask in his hands. The Black family crest was inked into its surface, but Sirius had scratched out the pur in Toujours Pur and etched in the word "shit" underneath. Always shit. It had felt fitting at the time.

"Told Minnie that they were practically my parents, too," Sirius had said. "And then I told her, "If you don't send all of us, there's no telling what sort of grief-stricken rituals he may get into, and Merlin knows I won't be the one to stop him." After that, it was a quick floo trip and a stop off at the Leaky Cauldron for some liquid fortification."

They'd stayed with him that night, holed up in a room above the Leaky Cauldron, drinking until the numbness inside him matched the outside.

He didn't remember the funeral. Bits and pieces were lodged in his brain. Mostly, he remembered that his stupid cloak kept choking him when he sat down.

Nothing made sense to him at the funeral. His parents just couldn't be dead. He'd been there for it, but it couldn't be real. They were still those two people, so in love even after a lifetime with each other, that they stayed on the floor of their sitting room for two weeks just to appease their only son. They were the ones who would come home from work at all hours of the day or night, exhausted to the point of stumbling, and still take the time to find James, kiss his wild hair, straighten his glasses and say, "I love you."

James sat up, pulled his knees up to his chest and laid his head on them. His throat constricted and he gasped for air. His gasps became sobs and his parents were dead and he was alone in his big, empty house.

A hand came to rest on his shoulder. "It's okay, Prongs." A warm, heavy weight settled in beside him. "You'll be okay, mate."

Another body, this one slighter and smelling faintly of musk, squeezed him from the other side. Remus didn't say a single word, but he found James' hand and held onto it.

"You've still got us, Prongs," said Peter, kneeling in front of him. "You're not alone."

"Yeah, mate, there's no getting rid of us," Sirius added. "Whether you like it or not, we're never going to leave you alone, not until you die, and probably not even then."

James hiccupped a laugh and lifted his head. "You solemnly swear?"

"I solemnly swear," they chorused.

Sniffling, James lifted his glasses and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Sirius offered him a handkerchief before he could get to his nose.

"This house is going to be awfully quiet with just the two of us living here," he noted, looking at each friend in turn. He got to Remus last. "I fully expect at least one of you to move in over the summer."

Remus bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. "You sure you want a werewolf prowling 'round your manor?"

"I honestly don't know who wouldn't want that," James answered. "All our rodent problems will disappear in one night—no offense, Wormtail."

"None taken."

The werewolf in question, however, cocked his head to the side. "You serious? You want me to move in with you?"

"I'm Sirius, and I want you to move in with us," said Sirius. He clapped Peter on the back. "You, too, Wormtail, if your mum allows it."

"Probably not," said Peter, scowling. Brightening, he added, "But I'll be 'round every day, so it'll almost be like I live here."

"Right then." Sirius got to his feet and helped Remus in getting James to stand. "This summer, Potter Manor becomes Marauder Manor. And until then, we've got two more months of school to look forward to."

"Two more months of staring at the back of Lily's head in Potions," Remus chimed.

Peter joined in happily with a, "Two more months of Lily yelling at you until her face turns blue!"

"Not helping, mate," Sirius muttered.

But it was exactly what James needed. He burst out laughing and slung his arm around Peter's shoulders. "I really love it when she does that," he said, leading the way out of the sitting room. "The contrast in colors does wonders for her."

"Not sure I understand the aesthetic appeal, Prongs," Sirius commented as he opened the front door. "Or do you just have a thing for primary colors?"

James nudged him in the ribs. "You should see it when she's got her Gryffindor scarf on. Absolutely stunning, she is."

They stepped off the porch toward the waiting portkey and James faltered.

"Er, hold on," he said, turning back around. He could feel their eyes on him, concerned and worried, and he appreciated them being there. None of them could really understand what he was going through, but he could never really understand what each of them had gone through, either. But they tried and they were there for each other, no matter what.

"That's family, isn't it?" he asked out loud, smiling up at his big, empty house. "We're a family," he said, turning toward them. "We're brothers."

"Always," said Remus.

"Forever and ever, 'til death do us part, amen," Sirius said.

James turned his back on his big, empty house with its big, empty rooms and joined his friends around the portkey, already envisioning the mad sort of forts he and his brothers would build that summer.