Yay! New chapter from Spazzeh's a Hufflepuff! Thanks!

OOOOO

There's a secret, there's a secret, there's a juicy, juicy secret, just waiting to come out! Oh, Peter did like this, he liked this a lot. See, he was the one who faded in; Remus was a bookworm, and in general a bit of an introvert, but he still got so much attention because he was perfect Remus, with the grades and the maturity and everything else he could think of. And Sirius, well, he was self explanatory – he ate the attention like Lily on Lasagna Day, chopping it up into little bite-sized pieces and giving his friends only a bit. And sure, James got the girls Sirius left behind, but he didn't really try anything extraordinary to get attention – if Sirius was the seeker, James was the found. It all just came to him.

Now, Peter held no ill-will towards his friends for this – he did, in his own way, get attention. (Usually it came in the form of swirlies in the fourth-floor lavatory or immature jabs at his height and overall unappealing physical attributes, but that is hardly the point).

But the reason Peter liked secrets? They had to listen to him! They had to pay attention to what he said, he had power over him in a way he hadn't often gotten the chance to experience. This was what Peter lived for (well, this and baklava), even if he hadn't this to live for all too often.

He skipped to the kitchen, and, to his surprise, he found his friends there already. But his seat was already filled. By Severus Snape. What was going on here? "Hello," he said, rather slowly, giving a passing house elf a meaningful look. It nodded hastily and scurried off, forgetting its earlier duties and putting the platter of cooked roast beef off to the side, for another house elf to pick up. Peter just pulled up a vacant stool and sat across from Remus, who nodded happily in acknowledgement. "So, what's going on?"

"We're conspiring," Sirius replied gleefully, his onyx eyes sparkling in excitement only a child gets from the rush of a new toy. "You know, the blubbering git? We're going to take him down." Peter frowned, obvious a tad confused, but he nodded after a moment all the same. "We couldn't find you earlier, so we decided you'd, you know, just kind of migrate down here. Snivellus is going to help us."

"I would appreciate it," droned the greasy-haired potions mastermind, "if you didn't call me that." He flipped a strand of said flammable substance out of his face and glowered at Sirius. "I don't have to help you, you know."

"Yes, you do." James leaned forward on the table, his face set in a hard grimace. Peter knew James was probably killing himself inside for asking for Snivellus's help. "You wouldn't be able to stand there and watch Fairfax hurt her anymore than I would, Snape." The two held eye contact for a while; some sort of silent communication passed between them, and after a while, Snape leaned back in his chair and sighed.

"Fine," he drawled, looking away from the Marauders and studying a faded old oil painting on the far wall.

"I saw him, on the way here," Peter piped up after a few minutes' strained brainstorming, fidgeting with his hands. "Well, heard him, more like. He was with some girl – Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, maybe? – and she was telling him she was fed up with Lily blabbing to everyone about their 'relationship' – and why couldn't she tell anyone about theirs? He was a bit, well, bent on assuring her she was special." Sirius and James stared at him as if he were absolutely mad for having withheld this valuable information for so much as a few minutes.

"Wormtail!" Sirius groaned, burying his face in his hands as Remus started laughing. "Why didn't you say something sooner?"

Peter was embarrassed, and felt degraded by Sirius's reaction to his delayed news. "I didn't know what to make of it," he said defensively. "I couldn't tell if he was being serious, or if he was just telling her that to make her shut it so Evans didn't hear about it!"

The group sat in a somewhat somber mood for a minute longer. "We must confront him," Remus said after a house elf brought a platter of raspberry and honey baklava.

Peter reached eagerly for the nearest one, taking the crispy, hairbreadth-thin pastry folds and internally groaning at the delicate crunch as they separated in his fingers. Baklava was heaven if ever there was one. He greedily shoved the piece into his mouth, realizing everyone was looking at him rather oddly. "What?" he asked, crumbs of pastry sticking to the sides of his mouth and his cheeks.

James and Sirius laughed at Peter and shook their heads collectively in that simultaneous, twin-like way they'd always had, that Peter had always been jealous of. Remus, however, was hardly as amused. "Peter, slow down. That cannot be healthy." He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, looking extremely disapproving. He was such a bloody ninny sometimes.

"Whatever," Peter mumbled, pouting petulantly as the conversation moved, momentarily, onto lighter subjects.

Sirius started tapping his hands on the old wooden table anxiously, and glanced at the enchanted clock on the wall a few feet away. "So, Sirius," James chuckled, obviously amused by something he'd just thought of. "How is, uh, Danielle Quinn?"

A death glare was shot at James; this merely led him to burst into a fit of hilarity, which caused Sirius to blush shamefully. "Shut up, mate," he groaned, kicking him; the kicked missed, however, because James got out of the way – after all, he wasn't a bloody amazing seeker for nothing.

OOOOOOO

Sirius whistled quietly to himself as he hid in shadows and crept around corners as he made his way to the astronomy tower. The little strip of parchment was crinkled and already slightly worn in his pocket, but what would one have expected? He'd been fingering it, rereading it, constantly bothering the thing all day, and it was nearly torn in two now, the ink smudged to illegibility. But Sirius didn't care – he absent-mindedly played with the frayed edges as his footsteps echoed on the staircase leading to the seventh-floor west wing.

Now all that was left was the Astronomy tower – which, by the way, was extremely hard to climb. You went around and around in tight circles to get to the top, but you were so dizzy by the end you barely knew when to stop. Sirius took a deep breath and started a quick ascension.

Stone mixed into stone as he made the spiral trek, and he was nearly out of breath at the top – it was a rather tall tower. And there sat the petite redhead who'd been driving him crazy all day. He blinked a few times, half to rid his mind of the staircase-induced dizzy spell wrecking havoc on his head, and half to get over an entirely different dizziness.

"Hey," he said quietly, his voice coming out in a hoarse whisper. Danielle smiled and didn't directly say anything, just stood and put the book she'd so obviously been using to pass the time as she waited for him on the cold stone floor beside the cold stone wall. Had she been waiting long? Did she think he wouldn't show? Why was he questioning all of this?

"Hi," she said finally after a while. There were open windows at intervals along the tower, of course, and moonlight streamed in through the exposed, uncensored squares. One such square fell directly on Danielle ideally, and Sirius watched, dry-mouthed, as she tucked a strand of her fire-colored hair behind her ear and moved closer, out of the moonlight. "I'm glad you came."

"Me, too," Sirius said, fighting for some of his largely-acclaimed blasé attitude, his trademark indifference, his appeal in the form of carelessness that people loved – but it seemed to have disappeared. He didn't usually sneak out at night for a girl – the girl would sneak out for him. He was giddy with excitement he was so unaccustomed to feeling – was this how James felt, he wondered, about Lily? But this was rather insane – mad, really. Sirius wasn't in love with Danielle Quinn (he barely knew the girl) like James was with Lily – but she was different, he could tell, and potential for something – he didn't particularly know what – spat at him like a venomous snake waiting to uncoil and strike when she was around. Unfamiliar, enticing, different, intriguing, and all-mentally-consuming were words that seemed to redundantly echo in his mind, bouncing off of walls as if falling on deaf ears, when she was around, or when her name was mentioned. (As if he didn't already know.)

This girl was making his crazy. Absolutely-barking-mad.

Sirius Black did not go mad over a girl.

"So, uh," Danielle started to say, but dropped off to laugh somewhat nervously. This tipped Sirius off-track a bit, because the mental image he'd had of this girl so far had been ideal fearlessness – something that would, in all circumstances and situations, beat him. But maybe she was as faltered as he right now? He'd give almost anything to know. What was happening to him? "I wanted to ask you-"

"Oh, stop it!" A hauntingly familiar voice hissed, and Sirius had to force back a groan. Oh, couldn't this have happened any other night? Couldn't they have interrupted any other night, when he wasn't alone, in the Astronomy tower, with Danielle-freaking-Quinn? Couldn't his brotherly loyalties to James wait until daybreak, when he didn't have a certain intriguing, eager redhead in front of him? Couldn't Lily go gallivanting about the castle with Fairfax in other areas, anywhere but there?

But Sirius knew that, for now, his thicker-than-thieves bond with James would just have to come before Danielle Quinn, however reluctant he was to bring that about. He silently shushed Danielle, who seemed entirely taken aback as he grabbed her hand and crouched down, going down a feet of stairs so as to hear better. "Seth, I'm not going up there! It's so creepy at night when there's not a teacher around!" Lily's light voice echoed through the stairwell of the tower, bouncing off of the walls and reverberating tauntingly in his ears.

"I'm a sub, isn't that close enough?" Seth purred to her; Sirius had to fight the impulse to gag. What was he, a bloody cat? Sirius chuckled darkly. He was, in a sense, a dog, after all – dogs did not like cats, oh no, no, no.

Lily giggled, causing Sirius to scowl again. "Sirius? What's wrong? It's just Evans and Fairfax," Danielle said quietly, coming up behind him and putting her hand on his shoulder. It tingled and Sirius was distracted from his mission of eavesdropping for a moment. He glanced behind her and shot a half-hearted grin.

"It's my duty as his best friend." Danielle nodded – he didn't have to tell her what he was referring to. Lily and James were widely known as the two volatile lovebirds who just didn't get it, you know? Sirius had been working his butt off to get the two together, but they were both too stubborn and too prideful to work through whatever little spats they'd accumulated and fermented over for their entire Hogwarts careers. "Mind joining me on a little mission?"

Danielle looked off, through the open-spaced window, and bit her lip. When she turned back to him, her green eyes were sparkling and she had a smile on her face. "Why not?"

OOOOO

Oh, Merlin. I don't feel like saying anything. I'm too annoyed. I mean, I had the TV on while editing this, and that stupid pillow pet commercial came on—the one that seems to go on forever. Bleh. So, you know the drill. No one's reserved chapter 12. Don't forget everything that's happened, yeah, yeah, yeah... It's a pillow! It's a pet!

Kill me.