It all seemed so dull now.
On his way back to his dorm, James tried to untangle the knot of emotion stuck inside his throat. Unsuccessfully.
He felt empty, out of love, out of life, out of everything. As if his own breath had been knocked out of him.
He rapped on the door of their room before opening it, but didn't bother waiting for an answer to enter.
"What happened to you?" Even the voice of his friends, laced with worry, felt distant.
"I don't know Moony," James heard himself answer. "What happens every year without fail?"
There was a pause in which James knew they were staring at him, at his red eyes and the ghosts of his tears still caught on his cheeks. They could see through him better than anyone else could and James let them.
"Evans rejected you again, huh?" There was Sirius and a tone he probably hoped nonchalant and was anything but.
"No, no, she wouldn't, she told me-" There was Remus and the soft words of denial he spoke under his breath. "I thought- I need to talk to her."
"Don't." And there was James, angry and cold. "It's useless, she's made her decision. It was stupid of me to believe that I could make her like me."
He felt his friends' gaze digging a hole on his back as he crawled on his bed and closed the curtains around him. It was early still but he wanted to sleep.
He didn't know if there was any other remedy to heartbreak. He didn't know if he had ever been so hurt before, or if he even had the right to feel this angry, because it was wrong to feel entitled to some type of love from Lily. She didn't owe him anything and the friendship they had cultivated was beautiful and unexpected.
But somehow it felt like it was over.
Something had broken between him and Lily, an invisible connection, an implicit agreement, something he didn't even realise was there. If he was honest with himself, he wasn't sure if he wanted to ever see her again, because however hard the times were right now, she was the one causing him the most pain.
So why couldn't he stop thinking about her? Why couldn't he just push forward and put all of this behind him, why did he have to fall in love with the one girl who seemed to love breaking his heart? It hurt. It hurt because he had to let her go.
Unable to find the motivation to move, he laid above the covers, with his clothes on and eyes wide open. Specks of dust were dancing in the last rays of sunlight that peered through a crack in his curtains. In a childish instinct, he raised his hand to catch them, but suspended his motion at the last second. He was not a child and his random impulses of destruction had to come to an end.
That was what had happened with Lily. The more he looked back on it, the more clearly he could see it. Chasing after her, confronting her, forcing her to say something he himself wasn't ready to hear. That was all him and he couldn't blame her. It was him and his stupid need for answers, his desperate attempt at clarification, and his idiotic, nonreciprocal love.
In the bedroom, his friends' precipitated whispering had stopped and he was drowning in silence. He would never be able to sleep.
He woke up hours later.
The sunlight had faded completely, and had been replaced by the quiet of the night. James blinked once, twice, trying to understand what had woken him up so suddenly from what had been a very pleasant dream. He readjusted his glasses on his face and his eyes took a moment to get used to the darkness, and when they finally did, it was for him to see, at the foot of the bed, the three faces of his friends staring straight at him.
"Wakey wakey."
"Merlin, you guys are creepy."
"That's rich, coming from the guy who just spent five minutes making out with his pillow in his sleep."
"Don't listen to them," James said to his pillow, wiping the drool from his face with a quick gesture. "They'll never understand what we have."
"He's more affected than we thought," said Sirius as if James wasn't there and couldn't hear every word. "I'm changing the status of Operation Distraction from necessary to extremely necessary."
James yawned loudly and propped himself up on one elbow. "What's Operation Distraction and can I put a stop to it?"
"It's one good ol'fashion game of Maraudering. And no." Remus' tone was decisive despite his slight smile, and James had a terrifying realisation: if Remus of all people was willing to stoop to the level of neologism, then it meant they were serious.
"It's our last night of freedom before end of the year exams start," added Peter. "Please come with us."
James leaned back and stuffed his pillow over his face to hide himself. "I'm not in the mood to play, I'm not twelve any more," he said grumpily.
"That's where you're wrong, bud," said Sirius. "You're eighteen, so technically you are twelve, you just have six more years added. You don't stop being twelve when you grow up because you don't transform into another being at each of your birthdays, you just get another year older."
"That's the stupidest reasoning I have ever heard."
"Well, deal with it, arsehole. We want to play."
"What if I told you that I'm eight years old added to ten right now and therefore I want to sleep."
"I'd tell you that you're not making any sense and I would kick your arse until you got up."
"I hate you."
"Likewise."
"Are you really gonna make me go?"
"Yes."
"Fine."
The middle of the night was not ideal. James was exhausted and he would have loved to get a few more hours of sleep. But he had to admit that deep down, he had missed this. It had been a while since the Marauders had gotten together for one of their games or secret mission, and Peter was here, smiling, for the first time in months.
James owed him a lot. He missed him a lot too. So he got up from his bed without further protestations.
"You guys are bullies."
Sirius gave a shrug before pointing at James' trunk at the foot of his bed. "We need the cloak too."
James made a point of sighing dramatically. "It's like you can't do anything without me." As he unceremoniously threw the cloak over his friends' heads, a crucial detail became apparent. "I can see your legs. We're much too tall now, we can't all fit under it."
"It's fine, Wormy can just go in your pocket." Sirius' disembodied voice sounded impatient but James wasn't in the mood to be accommodating.
"No, he's gonna miss everything." It was true but James had ulterior motives. Operation Distraction would be a perfect opportunity for him to catch up with Peter, who he had barely seen lately. Which was James' fault really. He hadn't been the best of friends after Mary's death, too engulfed in his own grief to help his friend go through his. None of it had been fair for Peter. "Moony can walk in front of us though," James added. "Out of all of us, he's the least likely to get in trouble."
"Prefect privilege," nodded Remus as he stepped out from under the cloak. "Makes sense."
James slipped under the cloak and they were on their way. Honouring their tradition, they blew loud kisses to the Fat Lady's portrait upon leaving the common room, to which she answered with a wink. It felt like old times, when the world was a little less broken and little more whole.
James tried not to think about Lily.
It was hard, harder than he cared to admit. But with Peter by his side, stepping on his foot at every turn, and with Sirius right behind them, humming muggle songs none of them knew, it all started to feel a little easier.
"How are you doing, Pete?" said James suddenly, and he cringed at his own awkwardness. Surely, there would have been better ways to start this conversation.
"I'm fine," said the small boy. "Well, you know. Holding on."
"D'you want to talk about it?"
"Not really."
Fair enough. Silence settled on the group as they climbed down a staircase, and that silence was nowhere near as comfortable as James would have hoped.
"So what are we gonna do about Ice Queen?" asked Sirius after a few minutes.
"Don't call her that."
"Whatever. Honestly, I'm just mad because she's the only one I can talk to about music and you've gone and ruined that for me."
"How?"
"Well, you're my best mate and she was mean to you! I can't let that slide, you know. She's Blacklisted as I like to call it."
In front of them, Remus raised a threatening finger. "If I hear one more pun, I swear I will turn this convoy around and cancel Operation Distraction."
"You can talk about music with us you know," said Peter tentatively, turning to Sirius.
"Nice try but no. I doubt any of you can appreciate the genius of the Sex Pistols."
"Those muggle band names are just getting weirder and weirder," mumbled James, and thankfully for him, Sirius didn't hear.
It wasn't long before they arrived to the fourth floor, which had been their favourite playground as kids. Most on the classroom on this floor were no longer in use, the library was closed at this time of the night and the only office nearby was Professor Binn's, who had never shown any interest in anything closely or loosely related to students, bless his poor immortal soul.
One quick look at the Map told them Peeves was down in the kitchens, wrecking havoc amongst the house-elves, and that no one was anywhere close to them, so James stuffed the Invisibility Cloak into one of his pockets. The floor was quiet and the possibilities endless.
"Hide and seek?" said Peter with a slight smile. Had the suggestion come from anyone else James would have turned it down immediately, but it was Peter, and James could never say no to him. Especially not now.
"Hide and seek," he nodded, before running away from the group at full speed. "And you're seeking," he added loudly above his shoulder. Laughter echoed in the small corridor behind him and he smiled as he turned a corner and pushed open the first door he saw.
The room he entered looked to be a disused classroom. Desks had been pushed against the walls, buried under neat piles of chairs and there was an upturned waste-paper basket collecting dust on the ground. Just in front of James, propped up against the wall, was something he had never seen in any of the other abandoned classrooms, something that looked newer and cleaner than anything else in the room.
It was a mirror, standing on two clawed feet, so tall it reached the ceiling. It had an ornate gold frame with a strange inscription carved at the top.
At first, nothing felt out of place. It was his reflection in the mirror, looking back at him. The same hazel eyes and handsome face, the same broad shoulders and opinionated jaw. But just as he was about to look away, something in the glass caught his attention and made him cross the room to look more attentively.
It was him, but a different version of him, one that was much older. There were wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, that he almost had missed. The frame of his glasses was different. His hair wasn't jet-black but lightly grey around the sides of his face, and the self-conscious hand he carried to his temple didn't raise in the reflection.
There was a wedding band on his ring finger.
"Are you done admiring yourself, Prongs?" Sirius' voice echoed on the stone walls as the door fell shut behind him.
"No," James said, and the stranger in the mirror shot him a kind smile. "That's not me."
Behind him, he felt his friend approaching, and in front of him, a man appeared behind his own reflection. It was Sirius yet it wasn't Sirius. He had the same haughty features and the same mischievous eyes, but there were lines on his forehead, carved out by time, and he had the beginning of a grey beard. He carried himself differently too, with less youthful energy, but with a cheerful smile and serene attitude that was worth a thousand years.
"Why do we look so old?" Sirius's voice was laced with concern and James turned to him to see him frowning at his reflection. "Do you think this shows the future?"
In the glass of the mirror, old-Sirius smiled and laid a feather-light hand on old-James' shoulder. They looked happy, the both of them. Carefree. Like they had lived a long beautiful life and knew no regrets. James' chest hurt a little from looking at the two men, because it was a vision he desperately wanted to come true.
He wished to live long enough to have those dignified grey hair, and those happy wrinkles at the corner of his eyes. He wished to live long enough to one day look like his father, whose hands sometimes trembled a little too much and whose memory wasn't what it used to be, but who was still kind and funny, and the smartest person James had ever known.
He wanted that wedding band around his finger. In the reflection it looked so naturally worn, like it had always been there, and his own hands felt naked now.
"I hope it shows the future," he said. "I want to be that hot when I'm old."
"Yeah, I thought that was what you'd say. What d'you think, Moony?"
A few steps behind them, Remus, who had entered silently, was reading the writing engraved in the frame of the mirror with a concentrated look on his face.
"Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi," he read slowly."That's not Latin, at least I don't think so."
"What is it, then?"
"I don't know," he admitted with a shrug. "But if that mirror is just left unattended in some abandoned classroom I doubt it's of any danger."
"We don't care if it's dangerous, we just want to know if we can take it back to the dorm."
"Absolutely not."
"You're no fun, Moony. Can you please just reflect on it for one more minute?"
"That's the second pun of the night, James. Operation Distraction is canceled and I hate all of you."
"You love us, really."
"I do."