There was no need for more than just a simple smile or a friendly word to make my day. Our friendship made us happy and the things we gave each other made us who we were.
After all I have been through, I realized: There are people you get to know, there are people you make friends with, but there are also people which change you completely and which will remain in your heart forevermore. And this kind of people were my friends.
The day he proposed to her, made her as happy as I had never seen her before. I will never forget her shining eyes, when she told me. However she was, like all of us, only nineteen when it happened and I still ask myself, if she will regret someday having agreed on it so easily. She and James had been in a relationship for two years, then. A long time for people our age, but too short for marriage. And it was war. In this state of emergency they were made a whole lot of unusual bondings. Additionally we were part of the closest circle around Dumbledore, what kind of conditioned a soon death for all of us. That was the reason only very few people wondered, when both of them announced their wedding. One of those few which still imagined a future to come, was I. There is no way to call me an optimist, but I was always sure of the existance of more than one possibility.
Though even I had to admit that this future lay far away, regarding the latest excesses of Lord Voldemort's power and the ministry's reaction to those.
My litlle sister, actually being my coeval stepsister but loving to be called that way, never had been anybody's fool. She always knew what she wanted and was exceptionally good at accomplishing that. Stubborn and proud, she was the sterotype of a strong woman. However she had to undergo herself, how the strongest of women are weakened, when falling for the wrong men. Lara's pride literally forced her to always be the number one for her current partner, so it was obvious that she felt absolutely dishonoured by being cheated on in any way by noone less than Sirius Black.
I had never been fond of this relationship, but also had told her more than one time, that it had been her decision to be used by Sirius Black.
However from time to time interfiering in those matters seemed uneluctable.
The best example for this is the time, when she finally had managed to end it. Trying to keep neutral, I was caught in the crossfire. Like usual, Lily sttod by her best friend, after all she was a woman. And Prongs did the same by standing by Padfoot. So the seperation of one of my best friends from my sister additionally led to a quarrel between Lily and James, the most harmonic couple I knew.
It was a highly displeasing time for all of us, but finally, like not different to expect, Sirius and Lara got back together and all of the trouble had been in vain.
Wormtail's behaviour has been really akward in the past months. He comes to visit us less frequently and is shier and quieter than ever. However nobody besides me seemed to notice; James was too busy arranging the preperations for his wedding, the quidditch practice with his team the „Banging Bats" which played in second league and all the other problems that came up besides and still finding time for Lily or his friends. Sirius had to handle his relationship with Lara (who was more time-consuming than her tiny exterior revealed), his various buisnesses with which he tried hard to earn money and his friends all at once. And there still was the work for the order, which honestly did not cause few trouble and asked for all our effort and concentration. It nearly seemed as if the current situation had destoyed a part of our once so indestructable friendship.
Though I still loved them like I had as a little naive boy of eleven years, nevermind times and world had changed. We now were grown, knew the horrors of war, we knew love and hate and magic. We knew more than many other members of the magical community, more than we ever had dared to imagine. Many things had changed. Too many.
And by tomorrow Prongs would be married.