Another Night, Like Any Other
The dust made Remus sneezed.
"Gesundheit," Peter said, just as he had the last dozen times Remus had sneezed.
"You don't have to come with us," Sirius offered carelessly. Remus knew he was still smarting from Remus being made prefect and the one minute of subsequent lunacy when he'd suggested that maybe, just maybe, they might consider toning it down this year. Just a smidgen. Only, they had OWLS to worry about and it wouldn't do to spend all their study time in detention. As they had the past two years.
"Shut up, Sirius," James said, not even looking up from the stack of books he was sorting through.
"We're all in this together," Peter piped in, somewhat unnecessarily since if Sirius hadn't taken James' criticism to heart it was very unlikely he would listen to anything Peter had to say on the matter at all, but Remus appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.
"Besides, we only have one Portkey back to Hogsmeade," James added, tossing yet another useless tome aside. "So all of us are here until we're finished."
Sirius got that old gleam in his eye, the one that Remus had long ago learned to dread. "What do you suppose would happen if a prefect went missing for the weekend?" Obviously he wasn't nearly as placated as Remus had originally hoped.
"I suppose there would be hell to pay," Remus said evenly.
"Come off it," James said impatiently. "Or is it your heart that's not into it? Maybe it's you who wants to go back to Hogwarts and give up altogether."
That got to Sirius, so much so he forgot to argue—rightly—that he was always the first in the fray and even if it wasn't originally his idea (though Remus couldn't be sure of that anymore; no one could remember who deserved that credit now) he'd been labouring as hard as anyone else for the past three years, forsaking schoolwork and risking permanent faulty transfiguration for this project. Instead, he stopped trying to bait the others and threw himself on the floor beside James, attacking the stack of books with an intensity that often surprised people who didn't know Sirius as anything more than a carefree troublemaker.
Remus, too, settled in, keeping to himself the thought that once upon a time, he would have faced so much derision for voluntarily studying such heavy material on a Saturday night. After lights out and everything.
They stayed like that for the better part of an hour, the only sound the constant flicking of dry pages—and, of course, Remus' repeated sneezes and Peter's automatic, if distracted, blessings. It wasn't their first free evening spent in this manner and Remus had just about reached the point where he was expecting to still be doing this in between revision sessions for their N.E.W.T.s.
But then, at last, something happened and his world was turned upside down.
"James, Remus, Sirius—I think I've found it," Peter announced excitedly. He held up his book for the others to see. There lay proudly a single word in the headline.
Animagus