A/N: This chapter is in Leah's POV. It is also dedicated to my lovely friend, Amanda, who is my inspiration for Leah, and is eagerly following this story. Hope you like it, twinner!

-C

My sister was up to something.

I knew it, and I didn't ask questions, because I had the distinct sense that it had nothing to do with me. I also got the sense that Mattia and Alyson were all over whatever it was, but when weren't they?

Instead, I was nursing my wounds from the latest Quidditch practice, in which James basically told me that it was me against the Bludger, much to my dismay. Lily was helping, but the bruises were multiplying, I swear.

"Can't you make that sting any less?" I snapped at Lily, counting all the ways I wanted to make James miserable for his mandate.

"Maybe if you'd stop moving it wouldn't hurt so badly," Lily retorted. "Look, you've had worse than this. You're just sour because Sirius is worried about you, and you know it."

Of course I knew it. That didn't mean I was going to admit it out loud just because she said it so bluntly. So instead, I just grumbled something unintelligible and flicked at the loose string on my pillow.

"I'm afraid I don't speak caveman, dear," Lily teased. "Look, if you would just hold still-"

"Then I'll be holding still and still in pain and it will take just as long, Lily Evans," I growled. "Don't you dare lie to me. You're not a dentist."

She laughed out loud at that, my throwing back at her the same thing she said to me all the time since she'd explained to me what a dentist was and why it was a funny sentence.

"Maybe I'll be a dentist someday," she said playfully. "You know, you're going to have to work things out with him, though. I don't get you being friends, but I'll accept it if I have to. You two have been friends for ages. It seems a silly thing to throw away, even if Constantin is the greatest thing that's ever happened to you, which I doubt he is."

I wanted to throw something at her, but she was right. I'd had a lot of great friends who I would rank above Constantin in the list of great things that had happened to me, Lily included.

So I didn't answer, just tried not to move as my skin stung while she rubbed the salve on me. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of being right. Lily Evans was right too much of the time and it wouldn't hurt her to not be told once in a while. She'd get a big fat gingered head if we told her so every time she was right about something.

Gritting my teeth was just as much for not saying such things at her in bitterness as for biting back my discomfort and not growling about how my skin felt.

"Do you happen to know what my darling sister is doing these days when she's being cryptic?" I managed to ask through my pain and annoyance. "I haven't been able to figure it out yet and I don't really want to ask."

"I don't," Lily admitted. "There, you're done. No, I think that whatever Suzy's up to is her business really, isn't it?"

"Not if it keeps her and Remus apart," I said nervously.

Susanna was starting to pay less attention to Remus, I had noticed. She seemed confused about something, but because I had enough of my own issues to think about I didn't make a big deal about whatever it was.

"I'm sure that they'll figure it out," Lily said dismissively, helping me get up. "Anyway, I've got something that will sort this out if you apply it for the next few days, and your legs will be like new. Want it?"

"I don't want to use it all up," I muttered, embarrassed that she was constantly wasting things on me.

"Don't be silly, I can always brew some more," Lily said with a wave of her hand.

Ah, so she'd made it herself. Well, I couldn't find a reason to really argue with that, so I took it and she wrote up some instructions for me on applying it.

"Now, do this properly," she warned. "Follow it all to the letter, all right?"

"Of course, Mum," I teased. "C'mon, we're meeting Alyson and Mattia for dinner."

We went down to the Great Hall, me still walking tenderly, and we sat down at the Ravenclaw table with Mattia and Alyson, who were whispering excitedly about something when we arrived.

"What's up?" I asked, helping myself to some potatoes.

"Nothing," they chorused coyly, not fooling either of us, but leaving a very clear impression that we weren't getting anything out of them.

"So," I finally said. "Suzy tells me she's got the runic piece close to publishable quality."

"Oh, really?" squeaked Mattia excitedly. "How long, do you think?"

"Well, it's got to pass inspection with Dumbledore first," I explained. "That should go through next week if he doesn't suggest any changes. And then she sends it off to the Committee of Runic Scholars for inspection and editing. Once it gets past their stringent requirements, they publish it. And she'll probably win an award or something and then my house will be truly insufferable."

Lily snorted.

"Oh, don't start that," she said teasingly. "You know perfectly well that you're immensely proud of her! Don't pretend like you're not. Really we're all very proud of her. I've even thought about talking to Professor Slughorn about doing a similar project in Potions."

"Not Charms?" Mattia asked. "We could do something together, you know. We're pretty good at Charms."

"But Lily's top of the year in Potions," Alyson said evenly. "She's got to do what she's phenomenal at, not just pretty good. I think you should do it, Lily."

I just looked down at my sausages considering.

It wasn't that I wasn't proud of Susanna, or that I thought that Lily shouldn't pursue something like that, something that would be good for her. It was just that I had gone to the Runes professor and McGonagall asking to do projects like the ones my sister was becoming so renowned for and was shot down with two very different excuses.

"Miss Papp, you know that you're spreading yourself awfully thin already. You do such good work, and I would hate to see that slip by adding a project you don't need. And after all, Potter says we're counting on you to win the Quidditch Cup again. You don't want to let down Gryffindor, do you?"

"Leah, dear, you're very good at Runes, but especially with your sister's work... There really isn't any sort of project right now that I could put you on that would get anyone to even look at your work compared with this theory she came up with. I mean this text, it just..."

And then I was sufficiently bombarded with lavish praise of Susanna's brilliant work. And I got enough of that at home, certainly.

And Lily would certainly get what she wanted because Slughorn thought she was the greatest thing since crystalized pineapple.

"Go for it, Lily," I said casually, glancing over at the Gryffindor table where the Marauders were sitting down with my sister and the girls in her year. "Uh-oh, here comes trouble."

They all glanced over.

"Oh, I hope Betsy's careful," Lily said, worried. "Sirius is... well... She's a bit innocent to be pinning her hopes and dreams on a boy like him, isn't she?"

She wasn't asking for an answer, of course. That was a good thing and we exchanged amused looks.

Betsy wasn't exactly innocent, although she'd probably been more or less innocent in the ways of carnal interactions before Sirius took her off for a night in Hogsmeade, but she wasn't innocent otherwise. After all, she was friends with Susanna, she lived on her own in Muggle London. Things like that hardened a person.

"Looks like they're having some interesting conversation," Alyson said softly. "I wonder what idiot is making the other idiots angry this time. It looks like the tension is coming off that group in waves."

"I think it's centered around Sirius," I said softly. "Look at the way Suzy's looking at him. I've never seen her so furious with him ever. Have you?"

"Nope," Mattia and Alyson chorused. Lily shook her head.

"Well, I guess we could always go find out?" Mattia asked.

But none of us was really curious enough to go over and find out what the fight was about. We'd probably hear about it later, but there was no reason to spoil a perfectly good meal with the drama of someone else's life.

At least, that was my life philosophy.

"So," I said with a smile, "who wants to study Transfiguration after we finish here?"

/-/

A/N: Sirius's POV

"All I'm saying is it wasn't intentional," I argued, trying to save myself at the very least. "I never intended-"

"Of course you didn't," Susanna seethed.

I'd forgotten how sexy she was when she seethed, but somehow I still didn't want her as much as I wanted Betsy. Maybe it was because somewhere in the back of my mind I was truly afraid for my life.

"Look, she just showed up in my bed, all right?" I insisted. "I don't even know her name!"

"Nor do I, come to think of it," Remus said thoughtfully, looking around the Great Hall for the skank in question. "C'mon, Susanna, you can't believe that Sirius would actually go for a girl like that."

"I don't know what to think of him anymore," she hissed. I looked over at Remus and gave him an appreciative smile for standing up for me, but I could tell that he wasn't going to thank me for putting him on the opposite side from Susanna on any argument at all, especially not with his big day coming up when he was going to reveal himself to her. He must have been horribly nervous and I was, as usual, not helping.

"Suzy, please," I sighed. "Do you remember when that Hufflepuff boy was following you around all the time?"

She glared at me.

Of course she remembered. That was what had started our flirtation and pseudo-relationship in the first place. She had acquired the stalker much to her surprise and absolutely to no one else's and she spent about a month trying to politely and even rudely get rid of him, to no avail before she asked me to help her. That led to public flirting, which then led to kissing that continued even in private, even after the stalker had given up, realizing he never had a prayer.

"Yes," she said bitterly.

I couldn't help but smile a little to myself, thinking of the way she'd begged me to help her get rid of him. She was almost as sexy begging as she was seething.

"Remember his name?" I asked triumphantly.

She didn't know it because she'd never known it. She'd never taken the time to learn it because he was inconsequential in her life. Of course, she didn't remember that she'd never known it, and thanks to my careful way of approaching the matter she seemed to think she ought to know.

"What's your point?" she finally snapped.

"The fact is, if he'd found a way to get into your bed in the middle of the night, none of us would have thought you'd put him there," I said, raising my eyebrows. "I don't know why you automatically jump to the conclusion that if a girl's in my bed it's my fault. After all, our beds are a lot easier to get into than yours, aren't they?"

She colored a bit, and I briefly wondered what that was all about, but she glared at me so fiercely I knew I had won.

"Fine," she almost spat at me. "But if I find out you've hurt her, I'll kill you."

I nodded, and briefly assessed her ability to kill me. After all, Leah was the fit one in their family. Susanna was shorter, less muscular... And then I started thinking about wandwork and could barely recall a time when I hadn't seen a Runes book of some sort in her hand.

But then I recalled how coolly she had taken out her opponent in Dueling Club the week before, even considering the fact that her reaction times were pitiful. When she stuck her nose in books, apparently she was learning more than translations.

No, I decided that while I probably could deflect her head on, if she tried to murder me in my sleep she would almost assuredly succeed.

Not that I was going to purposefully hurt Betsy anyway, but it was always good to assess risk, especially where the Papp sisters were concerned. Somehow they always found out exactly what you didn't want them to know. Come to think of it, that was probably Mattia's doing, that sneaky girl. How did she know everything?

The meal was finished without any further chaos, and when the girls had left, James leaned over the table, grinning at Remus.

"When are you meeting up with her, then?" he asked eagerly.

"Soon enough," Remus sighed, looking out the Great Hall after where the girls had just left. "And yet not at all soon enough."

Somehow, in realizing that he was going to have to flat out tell her he was in love with her, Remus had gone from being too embarrassed to talk about her without prodding to being almost unappetizingly sappy.

I hoped that wasn't what I sounded like while talking about Betsy.

"Did you see the way she was looking at you?" James continued excitedly. "I wonder what that was all about."

I'd noticed that too, the way Susanna was seizing Remus up as if she'd never looked at him properly before, but I wished James hadn't pointed it out to Remus, because he would read in all sorts of things that surely weren't there. It probably was just her trying to decide what to do if she found out who the letter writer was and liked him. She would need to know where her affections lay.

But as Remus was the letter writer, it wouldn't be a problem. Probably.

"What do you mean?" Remus said anxiously, snapping his head back to look at James with wide, amber eyes glowing with apprehension. "What happened? How was she looking at me?"

How Remus could manage to stare at a girl for an hour and not realize how she was looking at him was beyond me, but then, he was besotted, sort of like the fact that James could stare at Evans for days and not notice that she despised him.

Stupid, really.

"Nothing," I said firmly. "Ignore the idiot. She wasn't looking at you in any strange way. Now, remember what I said last night?"

"Yes," Remus said solemnly, nodding his head slightly. "When I meet with her, I'm to tell her that I'm the one writing the letters, explain my condition fully before she has a chance to react, and come right out and tell her that I'm desperately in love with her."

I nodded approvingly and said, "And then?"

Remus gulped nervously and looked down at his virtually empty plate.

"Then I'm supposed to snog her until she forgets there was ever a thought that there might be someone other than me standing there, waiting for her and then we'll be together forever."

Once more, I nodded sharply and said, "There we go, absolutely fool-proof."

"What's fool-proof?" Leah asked as she and Mattia slid into seats with us. My eyes narrowed slightly at them, wondering how much of my brilliant plan they'd actually heard. "Hopefully nothing Sirius came up with. Even he can botch fool-proof."

"One time," I growled. "I break your leg one time and you never let me forget it."

She grinned.

"So what was all the chaos over here earlier?" she asked. "Something to do with your fool-proof plans?"

"No," I said with a bark of laughter, realizing that our heated argument must have caused a slight scene. "No, one of my admirers found her way into my bed last night and I got quite a shock in the morning when I woke up to find a stranger cuddling me. And your darling sister seemed to think I'd put the bint there. Don't worry, I set her straight."

"Did you?" Mattia asked slowly.

"Did I what?"

"Did you, as you so charmingly put it, 'put the bint there,' or did she end up there some other way?"

"I resent that you even asked that," I spat. "No, I didn't put her there. I don't even know who she is. Besides, I l-"

I froze.

I realized that I'd nearly said out loud that I loved Betsy, which might have even been true, but I certainly wasn't prepared to go saying it out loud, especially when I hadn't even told Betsy yet.

But Mattia arched an eyebrow at me, grinning slightly, and I knew she knew what I was about to say. I also knew that she would keep it a secret, allow me to mull it over and deal with it my own way, but at least she would let it go for now.

"Well, I thought Suzy might be ripping your face off any second, the way things were looking," Leah continued, obviously not noticing that I'd been about to say anything of importance. "I'm sure you're glad she didn't."

"I'm sure half of Hogwarts is glad she didn't," Remus said, uncharacteristically cheerful and outgoing. We all turned and looked at him, but he didn't seem to notice. He was stirring his tea and humming to himself, obviously lost in thoughts of Susanna.

I began silently praying that I didn't turn out like him and James, no matter what I decided about the love issue.