Far from trying to hide, Sirius fully embraced his Aging Muggle persona when Elodie appeared outside with the camera. He posed with his bike and even flew past so she could take an action shot.

They ate lunch shortly afterwards, and then Elodie walked Sirius back into his room, excited to show him the present she'd managed to arrange. When she walked in, there was a new cardboard box over by the window seat, with a flat piece of parchment on it, but she didn't pay it much mind. Maybe it was a separate present from Remus, or it was some other kind of housekeeping-y thing that wasn't her business, Elodie decided.

Sirius had followed her without any innuendo, and when she turned to watch his expression when he walked in and saw the Pensieve, he wasn't surprised.

Frustrated, she walked over and shoved his shoulder in mock anger. "You peeked!"

"I had no idea there was anything to peek at!" he protested.

Remus poked his head in and Elodie immediately honed in on him. "Did you tell him to look in here?" she asked, glaring.

To her surprise, he looked chagrined. "I went past my room to snag the vial for the memory, and he followed me," Remus said. "I didn't mean to spoil your surprise."

He handed over the silver-ribboned vial from inside his vest pocket. It was warm from his body heat, and she held it close in the second after she took it from him, knowing that it had been a difficult choice.

"I thought the present was for me?" Sirius said. Elodie looked over to see him standing beside the Pensieve looking over at the vial she'd just taken from Remus with great curiosity.

"It is. I assume being from a Pureblood, ancient family, you know what a Pensieve is?" Elodie said.

"Funny way to say 'rich and spoiled,' but yes, I know," he teased.

"And you know how to extract yourself from it, when you're finished viewing the memory?" she asked. She didn't want to trap him in there, though Albus had taught her how to extricate someone when you weren't sharing the memory.

Thankfully, he didn't hesitate, and he didn't seem to be showing any of his 'I'm lying recklessly, don't challenge me or I'll get bitchy with you' mannerisms, either.

"Yes."

"Want to really watch the First Task?" Elodie dangled.

The hungry, excited look in his eyes made Elodie's heart leap.

"Here's Remus's memory and Albus's memory," she said, holding up each vial in turn after rescuing Albus's from the brass case. "Also mine, but Remus is taller, and I hid my face a few times, though I guess that won't matter for the memory. Pensieves have you standing inside the memory, don't they?" she said, mostly talking to herself.

"I thought Albus lent you this for your gift from him as well as to use for Sirius?" Remus said, sounding confused.

"Well, yes," Elodie allowed. "But I haven't actually used it yet, because it's the memory of Albus talking to my mother. In the hospital."

Remus crossed the room and gathered her up into a giant hug. Something broke in her, at this. He would never have acted this way a month ago, and she needed this. Her dear, careful friend had been inhibited by her, the vicious self-doubting voice in her head said. She ignored it and wrapped her own arms around him, allowing herself to revel ever so slightly in the smell of parchment and chocolate that she loved so much. For now, it was the wonderful, comforting warmth of him, body and spirit, that she took to herself, in those moments.

"Thank you," Elodie said, her voice trembling with the tears that were at the back of her throat. They were as much for her mother as they were for that sweet, unasked for, needed moment they'd just shared.

"I think Sirius is going to shake himself apart, into pieces, over there," Remus said against her hair. "Should we put him out of his misery?"

"Out of his misery with dragons, you mean," Elodie said, giving Remus one last squeeze and backing away from him. He didn't even look as uncomfortable as she would have expected.

Sirius was indeed bouncing on his heels when Elodie walked over to the him beside the Pensieve. She held up the three vials to choose from and he went straight for the grey one, correctly guessing to whom it belonged.

"I'll take Remus's, thank you! And feel free to do something other than watch me, because I think it's a long memory," he said, opening the screwed on lid and pouring the mist-like memory into the Pensieve as if he did this every day. "At least, I hope it is!"

Then, with no hesitation, Sirius pushed his face into the mist.

8888888888888888

Elodie and Remus had left the master bedroom smiling. When they reached the living room, she turned to him to ask a question.

"What else did Sirius give you for Christmas?" Sirius had mentioned another present off-hand, and Elodie suspected it was the gift he was initially going to give Remus if there were no better prospects.

"He warned me not to expect too much from it, but he signed over the fifty year lease for a storage space he had put things into shortly after Harry was born. There are items that belonged to all five of us in there, but he said he isn't up for sorting through it," Remus told her. "Said that ultimately, my memories might be less dismal, in regards to what I might find there."

"Wow. That's basically giving you everything he owns, just about," she said.

"It's an overwhelming prospect, honestly. I am very grateful, but also petrified," Remus admitted, cramming his hands into his pockets and looking up, up, beyond the ceiling, into some vast expanse invisible to her. He leaned back so far she thought sure he would topple, but Remus brought himself back down to Earth soon enough. "It's probably the most Sirius present he's ever managed to give to someone: it's touchingly sentimental, and a lot of work to sort out, all at once."

Elodie burst out laughing, and Remus joined her with a wry chuckle. "He sure is something else," she said.

"Not any easier to sort out as his girlfriend, then?" Remus said. His tone held no hint of an agenda, and as a result, she felt it hard to hold up any kind of pretense to him.

"I wouldn't know," she said, shrugging. Then she added, "Well. I wouldn't know yet, I should say."

Remus started to look uneasy, and she sighed.

"It's not about you," she said, hearing the irritation in her voice and dropping her mental resistance to any pang of guilt she felt in reverberation.

"I would be an arrogant man if I acted as though having prior feelings for me should preclude any issues you might have with Sirius Black, of all people," Remus said, his expression so piercing and direct that she almost called him a sphynx. She didn't have a chance to respond to his face, though, as Remus turned and walked into the kitchen right after he said this.

"Wait," she called out. "You haven't opened my present to you!" A few seconds passed, and Elodie groaned. She'd fucked up again, accidentally framing his unhappiness as though he were rejecting her, and doubling down on it by bringing up her present. "It's very boring, if it helps!" she called out after covering her face with her hands, filled with frustration at herself.

"Stop beating yourself up," Remus said. His voice was quite near, and she whipped her head up to look at him so fast it hurt. She knew he couldn't have heard Sirius say the same thing to her, those weeks ago, but it was still an odd experience to hear that duplicate phrase, with her eyes shut and her hands covering her face, both times.

"Oh, ignore me, I'm a mess," she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. "Merry Christmas?" She held up his wrapped present, which had been waiting beside her chair, forgotten, for half the day.

Remus picked it up and felt along the contours of it like a child tasked with guessing his present before opening it. She'd missed watching him open Sirius's second gift (if there had been anything to open), and the Weasleys' present hadn't been so unusual in shape, so this behavior was new and fascinating.

"Thank you, I've always wanted a…" he trailed off, holding the present up at eye level, flat, as if measuring its aerodynamics. "-cutting board with handles? Muggle hoverboard?"

"Someone saw Back to the Future II in the theater, I think," Elodie said in a sing-song chant. "Wrong, and wrong, for the record."

"Hmm," Remus said, walking over to his chair and shaking the present by his ear.

"Did you ever break one, doing this?" she couldn't help but ask.

He shook his head. "Once, my mother wrapped up five brass keys loosely in a box beside the actual present, in the same package. She told me I'd probably broken a mug someone bought me by fiddling with it too much," he said. "She probably hoped it would make me stop trying to suss them out."

"She was so very wrong, wasn't she?"

Remus grinned at her.

"Well open it up, Mr. Holmes, I have dinner to continue making at regular intervals, today," she encouraged.

"Very well," he said, but his smile didn't diminish a bit. It didn't dim at all once he was finished opening the present, either, which was also gratifying. The rich cherry color of the wood looked elegant with the prints she'd had made, as the Orion's Belt used newsprint that had a slight golden cast to it. There were two little insets, one for each of the spells; she'd had a professional framecrafter place a charmed glowing crystal that traced out the wand movement for each spell. Reserō Ōstium glowed blue, and his Reparo alternative was a crisp yellow.

"This isn't boring at all, this is beautiful! Thank you so much," Remus said. He traced his fingers across the glass that protected his two articles, and Elodie wondered if it had been over his own name in the byline. "I'm going to hang this up in my room so I can see it from my desk."

He was smiling when he walked past the couch toward the hallway, and Elodie started sorting through her Moody notes, feeling better about Remus's gift.

Despite being a well known Auror as well as someone of a high social standing due to his so-called exploits, Alastor Moody was not the sort of person who showed up in news articles and history books. The most she found about him was about the rounding up of Death Eaters in 1981, and even there, there wasn't much about what he was like to be around, just what he'd done.

The notes told Elodie she'd basically done all the prep work she could, and it was time to think about another of the conundrums that were coming up, eventually. There was no way in hell Elodie was going to let Dolores Fucking Umbridge use her skin-carving quill on Harry's arm. To prevent this, Elodie had an idea that she'd actually seen in a fanfiction, used in a completely different situation. The spell was cast on Person A, and the spell would inform a designated group of people if Person A was harmed. Elodie's goal was to find out if there was such a spell, and if there wasn't, she wanted to figure out how to create one.

8888888888888888

It was hours later when Sirius finally came out of his room practically glowing with pride.

"I am so proud of that young man I could explode!" he said, pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace.

Elodie came out from the kitchen instead of just watching him from the doorway. She'd just finished eating the dinner she'd made the three of them as a bit of a Christmas celebration. Remus wasn't quite done with his yet.

"Since I was there, I can vouch for it being good enough to miss Christmas dinner," she teased. "I would look at my watch and complain about the time specifically, but I care about you too much to even try to act like one of your parents."

Sirius stopped pacing and smiled slyly at her. "You're just terrified I'll have someone paint a portrait of you and stick you somewhere miserable, so you could turn into a monster version of yourself over twenty years," Sirius said. He walked toward the kitchen, but swung his left hand out to slide it along her hip as he passed her.

Elodie hardly noticed, still stunned by his assessment of his mother. It was probably true that Walburga Black hadn't always been the caricature of herself that was evidenced in the portrait that screeched and hurled insults. For him to recognize that was profoundly important to her.

Then she realized something-Sirius hadn't been to #12 Grimmauld Place since his mother's death. His knowledge of her portrait's toxic behavior was tempered by the two times she'd mentioned it, once being in the conversation when she'd revealed to him everything about who she was and how she knew what she knew. Harry was not someone Walburga cared for much, but she hated Hermione and the distilled version of herself in the portrait clearly had a great amount of loathing for her eldest son.

She had a vision of herself standing in front of that portrait, looking at a woman she never would have imagined she would find herself so intimately connected to via Sirius himself. What would she say? By the time she got the chance, Elodie imagined she would be more 'official' in her relationship with Sirius.

Her stomach did a flip flop.

She hugged her arms around herself and did a bit of a twirl. Her heart felt like it had simply expanded around the Sirius-growth that had planted itself there. She still loved Remus in quite a few ways, but her hopes about how he felt about her had changed drastically. Now, she wanted to protect him from the erroneous conclusion he may have already come to, that despite her protestations, she hadn't ever really loved him. Was Remus the kind of person to take that to heart, in a painful way? She really hoped not. Not just because he was wrong, and she could prove it (if she was a masochist) but because Remus so very much deserved that love.

Would having to watch him fall for Nymphadora Tonks be painful, by the time it would start to happen?

Elodie opened her eyes and banished the thought on the spot. That was above her pay grade, as her father would have said. To her surprise, Sirius was still in the doorway to the kitchen, or at least, he had come back to it while she'd had her eyes shut. The look in his eyes was warm, and he almost looked bemused, as if he could hear how hard she had been thinking about him and Remus, getting the barest hints of how strong her emotions were when it came to the two of them.

She shrugged and smiled, rolling her eyes to the ceiling as if to say, 'please excuse me, I'm just oddly whimsical, sometimes?'

Sirius lifted his hand to his lips and tapped there twice with his first two fingers, then turned and walked back into the kitchen. There, she heard his voice as he remarked on the food she'd prepared.

"Fuck, yes. Pudding!"

With Sirius occupied, Elodie decided she would go to his room and dither about watching the memory Albus had given her. She didn't think she would actually watch it today; she probably would pack up the Pensieve and move it back down to her room before she did that, but she was feeling impulsive tonight, so in service to that, she went into Sirius's room.

Sirius had left the memory he'd poured out inside the Pensieve, and Elodie decided she shouldn't mess with it. One thing she hadn't thought about until today was the chance she had to show Sirius a memory that could prove that this universe was a book universe. The trick was that she needed a memory specific enough that she could target it, not just a nebulous knowledge that was floating around as a non specific fact.

Elodie sat down on the end of Sirius's bed and closed her eyes, trying to remember any memories of seeing one of the books, or perhaps a strong recollection of watching one of the movies. How strange would it be for Sirius to watch a memory of the Shrieking Shack scene in the film version of Prisoner of Azkaban! It was amusing to Elodie to think that, while she knew she'd handled her copies of the books many, many times, she couldn't pinpoint any particular 'view' of them that stuck out. She thought over times she'd have seen the covers of the books, and then she remembered that when she'd first bought copies of the books, the Deathly Hallows book wasn't released yet.

She'd started reading the books at the end of 2006, when someone gave her the first book. Elodie loved it so much that she'd gone out and bought the other five books with gift cards she'd gotten as Christmas presents. The following summer, she'd avoided buying the next book initially, skittish because of the reports from friends who had read the book and didn't have good things to say about Lupin's portrayal in it. It wasn't until early 2008 that she forced herself to buy it, but over the next year and a few months she'd tried to read the last few chapters, always giving up in frustration when she didn't want to read past finding Remus and Tonks dead on the floor in the Great Hall.

Even getting herself to buy the book in the first place had been momentous, and she had a clear memory of herself standing in a bookstore in July of 2007, holding the book in her hand, surrounded by all of the Potter memorabilia from both the books and the movies. She'd traced the image of Harry standing in some sort of ancient amphitheater, his hand uplifted as though raising the words of the title for her consideration. Even though she hadn't bought the book that day, she was sure she could pinpoint that memory well enough to extract it.

Elodie opened her eyes and stood up right as Remus walked into the room. He looked guilty, and that was so incongruous that she rushed over to him, thinking there was something wrong.

"What happened?" she demanded, her eyes scanning over his face and the items in his hands for signs of further distress. He was carrying a large water bottle, and he set it down on the windowsill, seeming to be surprised by the fact that Sirius didn't have an end table.

"Nothing's wrong, I just…" he trailed off, looking guilty again. "I've made a decision. I think I may need to intervene," he said. He didn't sound very confident, and she wondered if he was either joking with her, or stalling, to keep her in the room for something Sirius might have had planned.

"Meddle? That's not like you," Elodie teased. She walked over to where she'd set the brass Pensieve case and picked it up, opening it and laying it on the bed. She wanted to see how many empty vials were left. Albus's vial with the memory of the First Task wasn't with the others, and neither was Remus's, so she assumed Sirius had set them down somewhere on the bed. Her green ribboned vial was there, and so were a few empty ones. She didn't grab one of them as she'd originally planned to, because Remus's odd behavior was making her suspicious.

Combined with his guilty attitude, Remus's statements made her feel ornery. It wasn't Remus's place to 'intervene,' as he'd put it, if he was referring to her relationship (or lack of an official one) with Sirius. She shot him a look as she walked back around Sirius's bed to hop up onto it to sit. Elodie had been planning to set on the edge, but Remus's frown deepened when she sat, so, goaded, she scooted so that she was sitting in the middle of the bed, her bright green Christmas Tree dress spread out beside her.

"So am I the one who needs the intervention, or is it Sirius? Or, ooh," she said with a look of feigned excitement. "Is it both of us?"

"Elodie," Remus said, coming over to the bed and sitting on the edge where she'd initially intended to sit. "I'm not Molly. I'm not going to moralize at you. My concern comes from something Sirius said last night."

"While he was drinking, right? Just to make it clear," Elodie said, hearing the angry edge in her own voice and hoping he heard it too.

"Yes, while he was drinking. He said you two are practically performing some sort of relationship dance for my benefit."

"No, you stop right there," Elodie said, turning on her side to draw herself up onto her knees, where she felt she was at least at height parity with Remus, while she spoke with him. She pointed at the open doorway, through which Sirius was probably sitting at the table eating dinner. "He was drunk, so his descriptions were fucked all to hell, first of all. Second of all, it wasn't just for your benefit. It's for my benefit too. Because he decided to go and screw up my chances with the person I wanted to be with by stepping in and showing that person he was staking a claim first. Our so-called 'relationship dance?'" Elodie changed her angry tone to a mocking one, the fury in the pit of her stomach boiling over into cruelty in tone and language. "-is about me being gracious enough to try to forgive him for that, given that I realized I care a lot about him in many different ways!"

"It wasn't just-"

"I'm not finished, Remus," Elodie said in a clipped voice. He looked like he wanted to continue to argue, but he stopped. "I am not saying I would have convinced you. But can you say that you didn't immediately think 'hands off' when you saw him kiss me?"

"I was relieved," Remus said, almost under his breath. It wasn't too quiet for her to hear it, though.

"God, that hurts. I want to think you didn't mean it to, but, wow," Elodie said, her hands clenched into fists at her sides and her head tipped back, eyes closed.

"I don't- I'm not-" Remus said, sounding panicked. She felt his weight shift on the bed, and assumed he stood up. "Will you-" he started to say, then stopped. His voice was less frantic, now. "Keep your eyes closed?" he said, plaintively.

She nodded, though she felt the pressure of tears against the closed lids.

When Remus spoke again, it was quietly, fervently. "I am not in- I don't want to be in love. With anyone. I like you a very great deal. You're in a position, as a friend, as a woman, that I've never…" He trailed off, and Elodie opened her eyes a fraction, just to let the tears fall, but no wider, then shut them again. "I see how this could-" Remus said, and she knew him so well, she understood what he was trying to say. For once she couldn't smooth this over, couldn't explain that she got it, because if she spoke as if she understood his meaning in that last statement, he would not be able to stay so frank and honest with her. He would retreat. She knew this instinctively. Elodie said something else to encourage him, instead.

"Please remember how well I know you," she said as softly as she could, given the fact that she was crying.

"You know me, and I am honored by that, Ellie, I am," Remus said softly. "I feel like you understood that I needed you to back off, and please know, I can't comprehend more than a fraction of what that was like, but I do recognize that it was hard," Remus told her in a compelling, emotional voice. "You've been so happy these past weeks, so relaxed, and I was so happy to see that in you, and then when Sirius told me about your agreement I was just-"

With a surge of adrenaline, Elodie opened her eyes. She needed to see the look on his face.

"Crushed," Remus said. He looked crushed. His eyebrows were furrowed, his face was blotchy, pale with red spreading up from his neck, high on his cheekbones, bright red at his ears. He looked like he wanted to run away from her and never return. Instead, because he was Remus, he walked up to the side of the bed and reached for her hand, which she was happy to offer. She felt his strong grip as a testament to their friendship.

"It wasn't fake. I am happy." It was important for her to say.

"I know. I can see that," Remus said. "However you felt those weeks ago, can you cling to how you've felt since then?" he asked her, and somehow it wasn't as ridiculous as it should have been, for him to be holding her hand and asking her to be happy with Sirius. Not as ridiculous as it had turned out to be when she had held Sirius's hand as she was on her way to convince Remus to let her love him.

"What are you asking me to do, Remus?" Elodie said. She wanted to elaborate, wanted to tell him that if she disappointed him by finding him lovable that was his problem, not hers, but she still loved him enough to know how unhelpful that would be to say out loud.

"Stop offering to love Sirius through a screen door," Remus said. He squeezed her hand and let go, stepping back to gesture as he spoke. "Did you have one of those, as a kid? We lived in a Muggle house, growing up. I didn't even know you could use magic for mundane things like keeping bugs out of your house until I spent long stretches of time at James's house." Remus had a faraway look in his eyes when he said James's name, but that faded at his next sentence. "We had a dog when I was very little, before I was bitten. We had to give him away, after." He shook off the sad look on his face, and Elodie could see him trying to refocus on his story. "Did you have a pet, growing up?"

"Fish," Elodie said, shaking her head.

Remus laughed a little, and she shrugged in amused apology, assuming her fish wouldn't be the kind of pet he was trying to illustrate his point with. "Well, in our household, Amal, our dog, he loved to try to reach me when we came home and he was inside. He'd throw himself at the screen door, pushing out the mesh of it as far as he could with his little doggie strength. I have this crystal clear memory of him licking me through it." Remus put a hand on his cheek as if he could still feel the sense memory. "He only did it once, I think it hurt him. But I was too little to reach the door handle, you see." Remus held up his hands straight up, palms facing her, like he was bracing himself against a wall. "He was right there, but he couldn't quite get to me, there was this tiny bit of not quite malleable something holding him back."

Elodie had been caught up in the memory, but now she sat back on her heels and ran her hand through her hair, her fingernails sliding through smoothly until the very last inch, where her hand caught on a tangle. She sighed, catching the symbolism there. She wanted to get up and walk away, but she was in the middle of Sirius's big bed, and the act of extricating herself would leave her vulnerable. Instead, she spoke.

"You think you're the something."

Remus shook his head sideways just slightly, as if he wished he could refute the suggestion, but he said, "Yes."

She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to lay out all the reasons and excuses and rationalizations that left his conclusion just that little tiny bit less credible than hers. She really, really wanted to.

Elodie was nothing if not a truth-teller.

"I don't want to listen to you," she said. She'd stopped crying long minutes ago, and honestly if she were to start crying again now it would be because of the picture of a four year old Remus Lupin losing his beloved dog because he was now a werewolf.

"You accused me of not wanting to eat and then you started having an argument in my room that I could hear from the kitchen!" Sirius said, walking into the room with his arms held wide in the standard 'are you kidding me?!' stance.

"That was all me," Remus said before Elodie could open her mouth to apologize. He walked over toward the Pensieve case to pick something up. Remus turned, and on the way back toward the door, he laid a friendly hand on Sirius's shoulder. "Don't be too angry, all right?"

Sirius immediately looked over at where Elodie was kneeling on the bed. She realized her hair was all in disarray, and she looked like she'd been crying. She shook her head against anything Sirius might have assumed, but was relieved to see him also shaking his head, as though he'd jumped to the kind of conclusion that could be refuted just by logic alone, and had rejected it as impossible. Elodie then looked over at where Remus stood with his hand on the doorknob. That seemed odd, and she started to feel a different kind of suspicion regarding what Remus had said to Sirius about not being angry.

"You two have some things to work out, and tonight is a good night to do it," Remus said. He sounded resigned and decisive.

"What are you planning, Moony?" Sirius asked, and that reminded Elodie of something.

"Wait," she said, finally making the clumsy movements that led to her getting out of the middle of Sirius's enormous bed. She marched up to Remus and put her hands on her hips. "Moony. Is that what this is really about?" she accused.

"In part," Remus said, holding his hands behind his back as he looked down at her disapprovingly. "It is, as you guessed, the full moon tonight. I don't feel like trying to defend myself from whatever discussion you want to have with my alter-ego. Not on Christmas."

Behind her, Elodie heard Sirius moving around and muttering something about his wand. Remus's words were inflammatory, though, and she felt like they were specifically designed to be. She wanted to accuse him of not trusting her, but given what Moony had said the last time they'd spoken, she probably would be treading on very uneven ground, there.

"You can't keep me from talking to Moony forever, Remus," she said, wanting to get at least somewhat under his skin after what he'd just said to her in the last twenty minutes.

Remus didn't look deterred, though. He reached out one hand to brace himself on the doorway he was standing in and leaned over to speak. "You may have thirty-six years of memories, Elodie, but all thirty-four years of my memories involve magic."

Then, holding up her wand in his hand for her to see it, Remus pulled the door shut, saying, "See you in twenty-four hours!"

Elodie was stunned. She reached out and tried to open the door, but not only was it locked, but there was an odd sort of feeling to the doorknob, as if there was a film of magic covering it that felt unpleasant to be near.

"Remus, you ASS! Unward the door!" Sirius yelled, walking over and slamming his hand flat against the wood of the door. The force seemed to reverberate back into him, and he was knocked back.

"He's got my wand, too. I think I left it at the table," Sirius said in a disgusted voice.

Elodie remembered setting hers down near the Pensieve case, and even though she had seen Remus holding it, she still walked over and looked for it where she'd left it. The idea that Remus Lupin of all people would lock the two of them in a room together was laughable to her. She felt something like mirth bubble up in her chest, but it got stuck like it had transfigured itself into a rougher emotion on the journey.

Sirius was still shouting, but Elodie took stock of the room, certain that someone as deliberate and careful as Remus would have planned this in advance. Her gaze traveled along the walls until she came to the cardboard box sitting under one of Sirius's windows. It had a piece of paper on it that she was now completely certain was a note.

"Sirius?" she said, pointing to the box. He walked over to it and picked up the note, his anger evident in the way it was slightly crumpled in his hand by the time he lifted it up to read it.

"'I left food in the box. The doors and windows are warded so that if you're in danger, they'll let you out. Please know this is for the benefit of the two of you most of all,'" Sirius read out loud from part of the letter. "He always was such a sanctimonious prick when he thought he was right," Sirius snarled. "What is he on about?"

"I might have some of a clue? He said he was crushed to find out about our kiss arrangement from you while you were drinking last night?" Elodie said, keeping her voice as light as she could under the circumstances.

"Shit. I'm sorry, I know we were keeping that just between us," he apologized, his face scrunched up like he'd stubbed his toe and it fell off.

"I don't want you to have to keep things from Remus, but this one seems to have set off a big old 'meddle-fest' on his part," Elodie said, sighing.

"You know, I never thought about that before," he said, throwing his head back to get his hair out of his eyes before he leaned over to pick up the box.

"What?"

"Before Azkaban, all my exploits were around people who were completely in on them. Getting drunk and telling secrets wasn't possible-everyone I drank with already knew," Sirius said, setting the box down on the bed.

Inside were magically charmed meals-cinnamon bread, sandwiches, etc. Elodie remembered seeing Remus coming into the room with a large water bottle, earlier. He'd been setting this up all day.

"See, to me, this feels totally out of character for Remus. He's Mr. Avoidance, don't you think? But he locked us in for twenty-four hours?!" Elodie said, grabbing the water bottle Remus had left on the windowsill and glaring at it. She was thirsty, but she wasn't sure she trusted him right now.

"No, this is him all over," Sirius said, moving the box off of his bed back to near the window. He gestured to the Pensieve box, and Elodie came over to fold it up. As soon as she was done, Sirius backed up and then took a flying leap to land on his bed, fully flat on his chest and stomach.

"Really?" Elodie asked, laughing.

"You should totally try it," Sirius said, rolling over. The smile on his face faded, and he looked back at the locked and warded door. "I'm telling you, Remus was every bit of the prankster that me and James were, at school. He just did it subtly. We were 'dungbomb in the ceiling' types. He was a 'goosegrass in the hallway' type."

"What does that mean?" Elodie asked, thinking of her Fidelity potion, which used Thrice Dried Goosegrass. It was possible that the 'thrice dried' part might be a hint, here, but she was mostly lost.

"Oh, goosegrass is very, very sticky," Sirius said, patting the bed for her to come sit. She shook her head, not wanting to be manipulated by Remus any more than she already had been. "If you have enough of it built up, it's like a very primitive glue. Remus would put it on the floor of the dungeons, a couple of coats a day, and at the end of the day you'd hear about one or two Slytherin students-even a seventh year, once-stuck to the floor. You're not supposed to use magic in the hallways, either."

"Oh, good Lord, that's a clever prank!" Elodie said. "I imagine he's ashamed of that, nowadays, though. He's said he doesn't like to judge people based on what house they were in."

"I bet you that's about Peter," Sirius said in a tone that belied the very weighty meaning behind his words.

Now Elodie went to sit down. She didn't want to discount Sirius's opinion on Remus, but the implication of Remus's seeming 'growth' in maturity from Hogwarts to the present when it came to house politics was really, really dark.

"So this is in line with the Remus you know, and knew then?" Elodie asked, trying to block out the negative thoughts about Peter and how his betrayal had hurt her friend's outlook.

"Not only is it in line, he's done it before," Sirius said, lying on his back, the picture of relaxation. She knew it was deceptive, because Sirius was upset at Remus. "He cast a very sneaky locking hex on the door to the Head Boy and Head Girl's suite, a month into school our seventh year."

"He locked in Lily and James?" Elodie asked, wide-eyed.

"Yes, he thought they needed to stop dancing around each other and- Oh."

"Yes. 'Oh,'" Elodie said, shaking her head at him. She sighed internally. Not wanting to let Remus manipulative them into getting his way might be difficult, this time.