This is what happens when you read too much SBP in no particular order, and then you write the beginning and end of a story, and then you let it fester for a month and a half. I had an incredible amount of fun writing this and it's for once not a "misconstrued feelings lead to emotional fugue"-type plot.
And the title actually does make sense, in an odd sort of way; it's not just me being pretentious and old-timey, I swear.
I disclaim, once and for all, that I own neither the characters nor the setting, naught but the premise, as everything else belongs to either JK Rowling or (for about two sentences) Emily Dickinson. Please don't sue me, as I have no job nor incredibly rich parents neither.
Please review afterward, as I'd like to know how I did. Yes, even if hypothetical reader is perusing this many moons from now, I would still appreciate feedback. Now, onward!
Sirius approaches Lily in the Charms corridor.
She's just tossing her hair over her shoulder as he shouts, "Oi, Evans!" and the momentum of the gesture combined with the astonishment that Sirius is speaking to her is enough for her to lose her balance and almost stumble, though she rights herself with the kind of feminine dignity Sirius can't even begin to comprehend and doesn't particularly want to.
She adopts a tolerant expression in advance for whatever madness he's about to propose.
"I need your advice," he says, and whatever she was expecting it certainly wasn't that so she drops the tolerance rather and decides to just listen in the hope she'll still have all her limbs at the end of this.
"I'm trying to woo someone, you see," and the world has gone absolutely raving mad but who cares about that anyhow, certainly not Sirius as he keeps rambling on, "and I've absolutely no fucking idea whatsoever how to go about it, which is odd because I'm me, you know, devilishly handsome and all that, and anyway I thought I'd ask you."
She stares at him, jaw positively plummeting, and eventually manages a "Why?"
"You know them better than most people, and I don't think blokes'll be much help in this situation."
"I say again, why? Also, who?" and Lily feels a little better because she's managed two coherent almost-sentences.
"Aye, there's the rub, Evans," and she wonders if she should mention the Shakespeare quotation but decides against it as he leans closer and whispers in her ear "It's Lupin, you see."
Now, of course, the earth has absolutely, positively spun out of its orbit, and any second now they'll be plunging past Neptune and heading straight for the Oort cloud, and where will Sirius Black be then? The Oort cloud as well, she supposes, and that makes her feel a little better for in that case he'll be frozen in deep space and even he couldn't cause any more havoc there. But anyway, she'd best stop contemplating the outer reaches of the solar system and consider the fact that Sirius is apparently gay and/or bi and set on Remus, whom she is apparently supposed to know how to woo.
"W-what?"—and now she's stuttering, really masterful, Lily, well done—"I didn't, um, realize, er, that you—that you were—"
"That," he says with a grim little twist of his mouth.
"Yes," she replies, for a lack of anything better to say, "that."
"Well I'm not usually," he says, making what appears to be a masterful effort to add to the incoherency of the situation, "only with him, because he just—he's just so him, you know, so very Remus," and she realizes that, bizarrely, she knows exactly what he means, and understands why the Remus-ness of it all would be enough to make a person go stark raving mad and start asking Lily Evans for love advice, but she decides not to examine why she knows that and instead to take the situation in hand, and with aplomb if possible.
"Well, what did you have in mind by "woo"-ing him? I think you'll have to go about it a little differently from your usual method of sexually assaulting the object of your affections to see how they'll respond, since judging by the yelps from the back of Transfiguration every day you've already tried that on him many a time. No, for Remus you'll want 'vulnerable, honest, and distinctly non-sexual' in that at least you won't try to grope him while you confess undying love or whatever."
"I can't grope him even a little bit? And it's not so much undying love as my desperate need to have permission to snog him all the time, and also kill absolutely everyone who so much as flirts with him, oh yes."
"I…" Sirius Black, you are absolutely terrifying, and make no mistake about it. "Right then. I shall make note to never so much as make eye contact with Remus again lest you tear out my throat in jealous rage. In the meantime, in hopes of postponing any need for jealous throat-tearing, I shall help you confess your feelings."
"That's all?" Sirius's ingratitude is downright insulting, Lily decides, and she won't stand for such things. "You'll just help me confess? That's only half! You have to make him want me back, too!"
She rolls her eyes. "I can't control his emotions for you, Sirius. I can only help you find a way to minimize your chances of rejection. I'm good, but I'm not magic—well actually I suppose I am, but I'm not a miracle worker anyhow."
"Right. Well," and Sirius exhales sharply through his nose, and meanwhile Lily is pretty sure that he was supposed to hate her for taking up James's time and not even going out with him, and she's supposed to despise Sirius for being an arrogant, incoherent prat, but all that has gone out the window somewhere along the line.
"Right then. We'll start with chocolate…"
The rest of Sirius's day is as frantic as any he's ever had. He begins, per Lily's suggestion, with chocolate, deciding to cut class to visit Hogsmeade as he's never managed to transfigure anything with more than a 60% cocoa content. On his way through the one-eyed witch to Honeyduke's he meets a small colony of spiders, who swarm over his feet in a way that obviously says, We are but a few of many; join us and serve us, that we may lay our eggs in your ears and infect you with our children.
Sirius can only hope any girly shrieking the good people of Hogsmeade hear will be attributed to the further antics of the thing that lives in the Shack.
Sirius spends a horrified hour trying to charm a rather graphic anatomy textbook into becoming a book of Emily Dickinson poems, Remus's most recent obsession, for just a few days until he can get his hands on a real one; he spends a horrified ten minutes being chased by angry cross-sections of spleens, nasal cavities, and other… things… until he eventually realizes he mispronounced amorata as animorata and forces the carved-up body parts into submission.
He then has to break into the girls' lav on the third floor and practically strip to get Moaning Myrtle to agree to lock Remus in the prefects' bathroom and distract him enough to keep him from leaving until six o'clock, a process that involves negotiating the degree of lewdness she is allowed to employ; Sirius is able to add another to the list of "sentences I never thought I would say": Myrtle, I'll allow above-the-belt touching, but if you grab Remus's crotch I will end you.
So all in all, not the weirdest day he's ever had.
All of this Remus-distracting would, of course, go to waste if Sirius didn't actually set up the surprise-slash-confession, which he manages to start off entirely wrong by trying to get Lily's advice on which sort of roses were best by bringing her samples of each. This would not have been such a problem if she hadn't been in her dormitory at the time, the logistical issues of which manifest themselves in the form of a facefull of thorns and an assortment of bruises from a rather unceremonious fall down the stairs-turned-stone slide. This is followed, alas, by the revelation that Remus doesn't actually like roses, he likes irises, so now Sirius has to figure out how to conjure an iris that smells like chocolate, rather than tuna fish.
Somehow, despite everything, Sirius reaches a point at which the astronomy tower has been strewn with as many irises as can be permitted within anything approaching good taste, and the book that sometimes condones to contain things like That I always did love, I bring thee proof and What then? Why, nothing, only/ your inference therefrom! has been placed tastefully upon an endtable procured from nowhere in particular, and mood music and lighting has been conjured by Sirius and then vanished by Lily only to mysteriously turn up again until at last they compromise with a few candles hovering at ceiling level. Lily claps him on the shoulder in a way that is just a bit too unsettlingly Jamesy and leaves to coax, in her mysteriously feminine way, Remus up to the astronomy tower, perhaps using the fact that he has just been (presumably) traumatized beyond imagining through Myrtle's attempts at distraction. This, alas, leaves Sirius alone to tug at his hair and rearrange the irises and finally concede the point and remove the candles altogether until Remus arrives, quite suddenly, standing flabbergasted and possibly traumatized until he's shoved in and the door locked by something manifesting itself as swirly red hair.
"Hello," Sirius says, and, finding this inadequate, "how are you?"
Remus makes a few guh noises and manages to stutter out something incoherent about irises.
"Also chocolate," Sirius says proudly, "Oh yes, and Emily Dickinson, mustn't forget her." He attempts to brandish the book at Remus so he can appreciate the wonder that is Sirius's devotion, realizes the book is horrifyingly heavy, and simply sort of drops it, most ungraciously, back down.
"Why?" asks Remus, and Sirius, conceding that it is an excellent question, decides to reply with,
"Would you like to be my boyfriend?"
Remus is just staring at him, just staring, and Sirius keeps up the manic grin that serves him so well in life even though he can feel it losing its emotion the longer he stays there, his eyes glazing over and his smile shrinking just enough to say No, I don't know what's wrong with me either, and I'm not particularly happy about it even though I pretend to be, and now he knows the longer he waits the stranger he'll look, till eventually he'll freeze as a particularly muscled gargoyle, and the dust of ages will settle in his hair and Remus will still just be staring at him.
Remus opens his mouth after an eternity squeezed into ten seconds, and Sirius braces himself and waits for his world to end.