AN: Am I capable of writing Sirius/Remus interaction without at least a slightly homoerotic vibe? Um not usually lol. You've been warned. That said, this isn't going to turn into a triad story or anything, so don't start hoping for that. But anyway, hope you like this chap! It's short, but I think that's gonna be the trend for a while, potentially. At least I'm updating?

Chapter 24: Marauders Rising

"She was going to break up with him via owl?" Lily asked incredulously, her faintly horrified expression clearly conveying her dismay over this newly revealed piece of news. "You didn't mention that bit last night, Hermione!"

Dorcas had a decidedly different reaction; the blonde nearly falling about laughing in scandalized delight. "That's too good," she gasped in between cackles, banging the breakfast table with her fist for emphasis and causing quite the spectacle. Luckily, it was far too early on a weekend morning for any of the Marauders to be present to overhear her, and Mary wasn't there either, a fact Hermione was quietly relived over

"Don't be mean," Lily chastised gently. "Imagine if it were you ."

Dorcas straightened up. "No one would ever break up with me by owl," she said confidently. "And since when do you have sympathy for the likes of Black anyway, Lils?"

"I'll have you know that I am capable of feeling empathy for even such a loathsome creature as a Marauder," Lily informed her. "I'm magnanimous like that."

"Yes, I imagine that's how you manage to still be friends with Snape," Dorcas retorted, prompting Lily to squawk out an indignant 'oi!' and smack the blonde on the shoulder. Dorcas barreled on, undeterred. "Besides, from what Hermione says it sounds like they got in one last shag, as well, before she ended it, so I hardly think Black could have been too upset. He certainly wasn't crying into his porridge the next morning that I noticed, I'll say that much."

"He did look moody, though," Lily pointed out.

Dorcas waved this off. "Black always looks like that at the beginning of the year," she said dismissively; a harsh but accurate truth.

"He didn't have a very good summer," Hermione interjected softly, causing Dorcas to nod in satisfaction as her point was bolstered and Lily's mouth to twist into a slight frown.

"I don't know that he and Rebecca actually did, er, shag," Hermione went on, the curly haired witch stumbling a bit over the crude language, not to mention the mental picture it inevitably conjured up. She coughed delicately and tried to will the growing pinkness away from her cheeks, to no avail, unfortunately. Why was her biology betraying her in such a ridiculous manner, she wondered.

Dorcas scoffed, drawing Hermione's attention once more. "Oh please. You said yourself the pair of them looked thoroughly debauched, Hermione. What else could they possibly have been doing? Comparing potions notes?"

"Even Black wouldn't be stupid enough to have sex in the middle of a corridor!" Lily challenged, the redhead now looking a little flushed herself. Dorcas, in fact, was the only one of the trio of friends who was managing to look entirely unabashed just then.

"Maybe he's an exhibitionist," she speculated, amusement positively dripping from her voice.

"Maybe I really don't need to be picturing that!" Lily retorted.

"Would you rather be picturing someone else, then?" Dorcas asked slyly. "Potter, maybe?"

"Don't be obscene!" Lily shrieked, her cheeks flaming more hotly than ever.

Dorcas raised her eyebrows, as though terribly shocked by this response on Lily's part, even though Hermione suspected it was along the lines of what the blonde had been hoping for. "Touchy subject, I guess," she muttered, examining her nails (currently painted a vivid candy apple red) and avoiding Lily's eyes for a moment.

Hermione saw fit to charitably refocus the subject. "It doesn't matter if, or where, Black and Rebecca Forrester may, or may not, have had sex," she said agitatedly, dragging a hand through her curls in frustration. "Frankly, I'm much more concerned about what Mary was doing there than I am about whether or not those two got off together one last time! Now can we please stop discussing the logistics of Black's sex life?"

In the wake of this outburst by Hermione, the trio of friends, by mutual wordless agreement, ceased their discussion and ostensibly returned their attention to the innocuous matter of breakfast; and if any of them happened to be picturing any various Marauders in less than innocent states, they kept it to themselves.

What Hermione, Lily and Dorcas may have been surprised to learn, was that despite the fact that Sirius Black had so recently been unceremoniously dumped, he was far less concerned with the logistics of his sex life than they seemed to be. He had other things to focus on at the moment.

Peter was a fucking rat.

Sirius had nearly laughed himself sick when the poor bugger had finally got up the nerve to tell them, and he hadn't even felt bad about it. Peter was a fucking rat! Once he and James had stopped laughing long enough to think about it, though, they'd realized that Peter's form actually had the potential to be incredibly useful. For one thing, he'd be able to slip between the thrashing limbs of the whomping willow, and get to the knot on the trunk which would temporarily still them, much more easily than James or Sirius would have been able to. With their larger animagus forms (noble stag and giant, grim looking dog respectively) both dark haired Marauder's would have been shit out of luck when it came to making it through to the secret entrance which the prodigiously violent tree protected. Peter had brightened considerably once James had pointed out this essential fact; he always did like to feel useful.

Pete had always been the smallest Marauder, a fact he typically bore with quiet resentment, and he could also be a sneaky little fucker when it suited him. It made sense that he'd ended up as a rat, really, Sirius thought. And in the end, despite the abjectly miserable look on Pete's face when he'd told them, and Sirius and James' initial mirthful reaction to his reveal, that wasn't such a bad thing. Aside from helping to enable future monthly escapades with Moony, Peter's rat form, small as it was, was also ripe to be exploited for potential prank opportunities. Sirius couldn't fucking wait.

Remus cried when they told him (or more accurately, Sirius reflected, when they'd shown him) what they'd done, a fact the remaining three Marauder's had mostly tried delicately to ignore at the time, though Peter did goggle at Moony a bit until Sirius discretely smacked him on the back of the head. Remus was always hyper emotional near full moons anyway, and Sirius figured that your three closest friends becoming illegal animagi at great personal risk to themselves in order to spend time with your werewolf self during the full moon, at possibly even greater risk to themselves, was reason enough to get emotional.

"How could you do this?" Remus whispered, nearly bowled over with shock and the emotional impact of what his friends had just revealed. "How could you do this for me?"

"We fucking love you, you idiot," Sirius snapped, his own emotions beginning to fray a bit.

Remus simply shook his head, as though he was unable to absorb this fact, which was ridiculous, because Sirius had it on good authority, or from Lily Evans anyway, that Remus was supposed to be highly more emotionally intelligent than he himself was .

"Sirius is right, Moony," James said firmly, staring plaintively at their friend. "We did it because we care about you, mate."

"Right!" Peter piped in, voice slightly shaky. "We all care about you, Moony," he said sincerely.

Despite their assurances, Remus was still shaking his head. "I can't believe you three did something so incredibly dangerous, not to mention completely illegal!"

"Right," Sirius said sarcastically. "Because that's extremely out of character for us."

"That doesn't change how stupid and reckless your actions were!" Remus argued. "Any of you could have died during the process! And for what?"

"For you, you stupid berk!" Sirius shouted back. "And that's damn as good a cause as any, so don't try to tell me its fucking not!"

"I didn't ask you to martyr yourself for me, Sirius, I would never ask that!"

"Well you don't bloody have to!"

"Godric, none of us are going to end up martyring ourselves!" James cut in exasperatedly, reaching out a hand to grip Sirius's shoulder, before turning to Remus. "You know how good Sirius and I both are at Transfiguration, Moony, we were never going to die. It wasn't that dangerous."

Remus leveled him with a flat stare. "It was James. And now you all want to run around with me on the full moon? For Merlin's sake, I could kill you."

Sirius scoffed. "Did you see me and James, Moony? We're fucking huge. I think between the two of us we can handle you," he said confidently. "And manage to stop you from eating Peter. Probably."

"Oi!," Peter protested. "I can handle myself!"

"Sure, Pete," Sirius said patronizingly.

"We didn't just jump into this, Moony, we did research," James told Remus seriously, ignoring Peter and Sirius' continued bickering. "Tons of research. A werewolf bite can't infect an animagus, I know you know that. And we're your friends, Remus, your best friends. From everything we've read it seems like the wolf should accept us fairly easily as companions in our animal forms; it'll know us. You'll know us."

Remus remained stubbornly silent in the face of this logic. "What if it doesn't?" he muttered finally. "I never remember much of my transformations, just flashes. And pain, mostly," he said though gritted teeth. "What if the wolf doesn't recognize you guys? What if I end up hurting you?"

"He will and you won't, Rem," Sirius said emphatically. "Well," he conceded, "I suspect he might rough us up a bit in the course of things, but I'm not opposed to a bit of playfighting myself," he winked at Remus, drawing a reluctant, watery laugh from the other boy, which Sirius counted as a victory, even if Moony's arms were still crossed in a defensive posture. Sirius waggled his eyebrows at him in a further attempt to help alleviate the tension. "C'mon, Moony, don't you wanna wrestle with me?"

Remus snorted, finally looking up at him. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, you ponce?"

"But you two already do that," Peter said, looking confusedly between Remus and Sirius. Everyone ignored him.

"This is just…overwhelming," Remus said eventually, letting out a deep heavy breath. He looked imploringly between his friends, his eyes begging them for understanding. "It's not that I'm not grateful for what you three have done," he spoke haltingly, voice stuttering a bit. "I am, believe me," he said with a gasp, the depth of his emotion seemingly overwhelming him a bit. He hung his head. "I just don't know if I deserve it. And I couldn't live with myself if any of you got hurt. Not for me."

"Godric, Remus, of course you deserve it," James said feelingly, reaching out for the werewolf. James had always been unable to fully grasp the depth of Remus' self-loathing. Sirius, being intimately familiar with his own particular brand of self-loathing, understood it more, even if it frustrated him to all hell.

"This is going to be good thing, Remus," James continued, flush with his typical confidence that everything would turn out grandly, a sentiment Sirius happened to agree with in this instance.

"We've come this far, Moony!" Peter said brightly. "It'll be great, you'll see!"

Sirius nodded. "Wormtail here is right," he said ("Wormtail?!" Peter sputtered). "This whole thing was basically entirely my idea, and everyone knows that I always have the best ideas."

Remus snorted. "I'm not even going to comment on the ridiculous invalidity of that statement, Sirius. It would take far too long to properly delve into to the mountain of contradictory evidence to it at my disposal."

Sirius smiled. "There's my Moony," he said fondly, slinging an arm around the werewolf and pulling him to his side. "Listen, mate," he whispered fiercely, somewhere into the vicinity of Remus' hair. "I don't care what your well-meaning, self-pitying, furry, stubborn werewolf arse says, you're not going to stop us from going out there with you next full moon. So you might as well save your energy for other shit."

"The Marauders are up to something," Lily said definitively, a little over a fortnight their fifth year term. She, Dorcas and Hermione were clustered around a corner table in the Gryffindor Common Room, ostensibly revising for Defense Against The Dark Arts. In actuality, Dorcas had abandoned her DADA notes for the allure of Witch Weekly some time ago, Hermione was struggling not to let her eyes glaze over, and Lily had become distracted by her favorite topic on which to rant; The Marauders.

While Lily had always complained about the Marauders a fairly healthy amount in the time Hermione had known her (and. Dorcas assured her, long before as well) the curly haired witch had noticed that the redhead's rants regarding them had intensified significantly since she'd been made a Prefect. Hermione figured this probably had something to do with their blatant disregard for her authority, which, understandably, rankled Lily quite a bit. Lately, she'd even begun to get annoyed with Remus, who was usually her unequivocal favorite. His apparent utter lack of inclination and/or ability to reign in his friends had begun frustrating Lily to no end this year. "He's a Prefect too, he should do something!" Hermione had heard her mutter under her breath more than once in the past week alone.

"The Marauders are always up to something," Dorcas pointed out factually. "They embody being up to something."

"True," Lily acknowledged. "But this feels different," she said slowly. "Bigger somehow. I can't put my finger on it. I didn't think it was possible for the four of them to be more wrapped up in each other than they already were, but this year they've seemed…even more intensely codependent than usual. And have you noticed the weird new nicknames they suddenly have for each other? What is that about?"

Hermione let out a thoughtful, "hmm," laying aside her quill, interest sufficiently captured. She had noticed the new nicknames, in fact, and they were, indeed, as Lily had said, quite strange.

Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. Something about the order and flow of them together tugged at some distant part of Hermione's memory; almost as if she'd heard those names before, and in the same configuration. Had the Marauder's taken inspiration from some obscure myth Hermione had previously read about and since mostly forgotten? Or was it something else; something she'd heard a whisper of in another life, in another time? She massaged her temple, straining to remember.

The Weasley twins, she recalled with sudden clarity after a moment of thought. That was where she'd heard those names before! Fred and George had been huddled over an old bit of parchment late one night in the Common Room, whispering reverently about something, and she'd caught a snippet of their conversation. Enough to make out an odd series of names; Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. She'd assumed that the twins had been scheming and talking nonsense at the time, as they usually were, but now she wondered what it could have possibly meant, and what, if anything, it had to do with the Marauders.

"Maybe they had an orgy," Dorcas suggested, breaking into Hermione's thoughts. "Or became like, blood brothers or something."

"What is your obsession with bodily fluids?" Lily asked exasperatedly.

"What is your obsession with psychoanalyzing the Marauders?" Dorcas parried.

"That would be quite serious, actually," Hermione said softly.

Lily frowned, turning to her. "What would?"

"If they'd become blood brothers," Hermione explained, pushing her hair back from her face as she considered the possibility. "It's not like when Muggles do it. It wouldn't be relatively harmless fun. Blood magic is really serious business, and it can have drastic, binding consequences. There's a reason it's usually illegal. Black and Potter might be reckless enough to want to try it, but I doubt Remus would ever let them, much less agree to participate in such idiocy himself. And whatever's going on with the Marauder's right now, all four of them are definitely involved."

There was a beat of silence as Lily and Dorcas digested this information.

"So we've not yet ruled out the orgy theory, then?" Dorcas asked after a moment.

"I have an absolutely amazing idea," Sirius said as he slammed his way into the 5th year boys' dorm, startling Remus, who had been sprawled on his bed amidst a pile of Transfiguration notes, his text propped up open on his pillow for easy consultation, deeply engrossed in his revision process. "Also, Granger, Evan's and Meadows think we might be shagging, so there's that."

Remus shut his upended Transfiguration text with sigh. Sirius, in general but especially in this particular type of mood, made himself virtually impossible to be ignored. "Well, I certainly hope the first part of what you just said isn't overly related to the last part," he quipped.

"Not overly, though it would involve the exchange of bodily fluids."

"What the fuck are you two on about now?" James wanted to know, entering the dorm marginally more sedately than Sirius just had, Peter trailing in along behind him. "Only it sounds potentially disgusting, so I'd like to be involved."

"Trust me, you really wouldn't," Remus said flatly.

"Oi," Sirius protested, "You haven't even heard my idea yet!"

Remus shot him a highly skeptical look. "I think I've heard enough."

"I want to know!" Peter cut in eagerly, handily contradicting Remus, much to Sirius' gratification. "What is it?"

Sirius straightened up, puffing his chest out slightly. "We become blood brothers," he announced grandly.

"Wicked!" Peter said immediately. James cocked his head, looking intrigued.

Remus, as Granger had predicted he would, sought to squelch this burgeoning enthusiasm amongst his friends immediately, scoffing loudly and folding his arms across his chest for good measure. "He says with all the manner of Da Vinci unveiling a grand masterpiece," the werewolf said scathingly. "Absolutely not, Sirius, out of the question."

"Rude," Sirius said. "And unnecessary. You didn't even consider it, Moony! And besides, you know I'm more of a Caravaggio than a Da Vinci."

Remus snorted despite himself. "I suppose you would be, wouldn't you, you scoundrel," he muttered. "Let's just hope you manage to escape a premature and infamous death, eh, Black?"

Sirius smirked. "Wouldn't be the worst way to go."

("What are they talking about?" Peter whispered confusedly to James. James shrugged, equally flummoxed as Peter. "Absolutely no idea, mate. We'll just have to wait it out.")

"Since when do you know anything about Muggle Renaissance art anyway?" Remus demanded. "You haven't been talking to Hermione, have you?"

"I read," Sirius said haughtily, ignoring the latter part of the question. In fact, Sirius hadn't been talking to Granger about much of anything since he'd warned her about Malfoy a few weeks ago, least of all Muggle Renaissance art, but that was really none of Remus' business.

"Stop trying to distract me!," Remus admonished him frustratedly, tugging a hand through his sandy hair in exasperation. Merlin, Sirius drove him batty. If anyone was going to die a premature death in this friend group, it was likely Remus, and it was likely to be Sirius' fault. "We're not becoming blood brothers! End of discussion! Where did you even get such an asinine idea?"

"Dorcas Meadows," Sirius said promptly, as though that made any sense whatsoever.

"Really," Remus said skeptically.

"Really," Sirius parroted. "She thought we'd either done that, or that we'd had an orgy."

"What?!" Peter squeaked, tuning back into the conversation abruptly now that words whose implications he could understand, and be horrified by, were being tossed about once more. "Meadows thinks we're all a bunch of poofs?!"

Sirius shrugged, unconcerned. "Don't get hysterical, Wormy. It's not our job to police Meadow's fantasies. Besides, don't act like you've never thought about her, Granger and Evan's together. Godric knows I have."

"That's different," Peter said staunchly. "They're girls."

"And you're hopeless," Sirius said impatiently.

Meanwhile, James' eyes had gone wide. Sirius would have compared him to Bambi if that wouldn't have been too ridiculously on the nose for him to stomach, what with James' animagus form. "I only ever think about Lily," he said faintly, as though the appeal of other girls, even in conjunction with Evans, had never even occurred to him.

"Aren't you just a right saint," Sirius muttered disbelieving, and then, louder, "You nauseate me, Potter, you know that?"

"And you, Black, disgust me," James returned, eyes narrowing as his Lily-fogged brain (it was a reoccurring, and Sirius feared ultimately untreatable, condition of James') fully caught up to what Sirius had just said. "Wait, you think about Lily? In-in that way?" he sputtered.

"Careful, Sirius," Remus muttered, dropping his head into his hands.

Sirius, as was typical, failed to heed to werewolf's warning. Instead, he shrugged. "What? She's fit."

This admission, it seemed, was too much for James to handle. He socked Sirius hard in the shoulder, causing the pair of them to fall to the floor in a roiling pile of semi-playful/semi-serious adolescent violence.

"This," Peter observed to Remus as he watched their two best mates roll around on the floor together, half-heartedly swatting at each other, "this is why they think we're all gay."

As Hermione had posited, the Marauder's did not become blood brothers. They did, however, come out on the other side of the first full moon of their fifth year term, the first one they were all able to share together, forever changed and irrevocably bonded to each other. Remus, as James, Sirius and Peter had desperately hoped he would, softened considerably towards the idea of his friends as animagi after that first full moon; the first time Padfoot and Prongs (with moral, if not physical, support from Wormtail) were able to keep him from bodily tearing himself apart.

Despite the illegality and the danger of what his friends had done, of what they were doing by going out with him each month, there was nothing that could counter the invaluable relief of their companionship to Remus, or to the wolf, during the full moon. The level of trust that existed between the four Marauder's their last years of Hogwarts, especially during their adventures under the full moon at Remus' 'time of the month', may have been reckless and naïve; driven by shared risk and experience, and a belief in what the boys thought, at the time, was an unbreakable brotherhood, which later turned out to be more fragile than any of them they ever could have fathomed. But in those years, in those moments, the seemingly unshakable bond between the four Marauders was also beautiful and pure. If, like adolescence itself, ultimately short lived.

But all that fracture and strife was still a while off yet, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs all happily oblivious to it. And in the meantime, the Marauders were hard at work, attempting to immortalize themselves forever as they were then, in the form of a map.

AN: Um so okay, went and made myself entirely too emotional with that last section. Tell me if the end is too cheesy! I indulge in a lot of future/foreshadowing stuff this chapter with the boys, which was fun, if also kinda depressing. Hope you liked it! Sorry for the lack of Hermione/Sirius interaction, but that should be back next chapter. Love you guys, please review!

Speaking of, huge shoutout and love/*hugs* to the guest reviewer who left long reviews like, yesterday. You seriously inspired me to finish this chap today, so thank you! It's true folks, reviews feed my soul and motivate the hell out of me!

PS: Do yourself a favor and look up Caravaggio. I, as the kids say, stan. His Wikipedia is a ride lol.

PPS: I proofread this like, 1.5 mixed drinks in, so please feel free to let me know if you spot mistakes.