Chapter Twelve: Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue…
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Sunday, 14 February Four months, ten days"I don't think I like Valentine's Day very much," Sirius commented lightly, licking the whipped cream off the top of his chocolate-vanilla-raspberry swirl ice-cream cone.
It was a remarkably warm, sunny day for February, and Sirius, Remus, and Peter had decided to take advantage of it with a trip to Diagon Alley's Florean Fortescue's. They hadn't been in quite a long time, and Sirius was growing restless with a lack of the kind of sugar that could only be obtained from one of Fortescue's cones.
Peter glanced at him over his own cone, which was peach-marshmallow flavored. "Why?"
Sirius shrugged. "I don't know," he said thoughtfully. "It just seems like a sort of non-holiday, doesn't it? There are no presents exchanged, no parades, no anything. There's not even any purpose."
"Sure there is," Remus told him, stirring his white chocolate peppermint milkshake with his straw before taking a sip. "It's, like, a day that was set aside just so that guys could tell their girlfriends or potential girlfriends that they love them without feeling like total saps."
Peter frowned, scooping a mini-marshmallow out of his ice cream with his finger. "That's kinda stupid."
Sirius turned to his other friend. "Do share, Peter," he ordered pleasantly as he continued make his way through his ice cream.
"Well, think of it this way," Peter said, leaning forward in his chair to get a napkin from the bright orange dispenser in the middle of the table. "The whole holiday--"
"Or lack thereof," Sirius interrupted promptly.
"Or lack thereof," Peter agreed, "sorta makes you feel obligated to say you love her or whatever, doesn't it? It makes you feel like you have to buy candy and candles and all that other sappy stuff. I think Valentine's Day was invented to make men feel uncomfortable."
"Out of the mouths of lonely single men," Sirius smiled.
Peter huffed. "Being single is a choice," he insisted. "And besides, I just had a date the other day."
Remus widened his eyes in fake surprise. "Oh, is that why you missed James's birthday party? You had a date?"
"A meeting with his hos," Sirius said knowledgably, nodding to Remus.
Peter instantly looked uncomfortable. "I told you," he mumbled. "I had a prior obligation that I absolutely couldn't get out of."
"Right, whatever," Sirius responded, immediately disinterested in the topic. "Anyway, Moony, I was hoping that Hestia might have mentioned me at James's birthday party, when I was talking to Lily? I keep meaning to ask you, but I just forget."
Remus instantly grew uncomfortable. "We did discuss you," he said carefully,
Sirius watched his friend eagerly. "Yeah? And?"
Remus didn't know whether to tell him or not. Where Hestia was concerned, it was especially difficult to predict how Sirius would react to something. Moreover, now that he was all friendly with Lily again, he might tell her that Remus was making up his own soap opera starring them. And Lily might get Very Angry. She might start throwing things like she did when she and James had the Very Major Fight a couple years back.
But even thinking about that fight made everyone uncomfortable, so Remus quickly muttered to Sirius, "Nothing, really."
"Nothing, really?" Sirius mocked. "Come on, she must've said something. Is she slowly feeling the power of my sex aura?"
"What fresh hell?" Peter burst out, breaking out in what could only be described as giggles. "Your sex aura?"
Sirius tossed his head arrogantly. "You may not have noticed this, Wormtail, because you have known me since before I blossomed into a sexual beast"—Peter emitted a string of very strangled laughs that actually sounded as though he were choking on a particularly large marshmallow—"but I radiate a sort of energy that makes girls want to throw their knickers at me. It's kinda like Mick Jagger, you know?"
Remus promptly dropped his milkshake and Peter started having a sort of laughing fit, complete with spasms.
"Are you really comparing yourself to Mick Jagger?" Remus asked incredulously, attempting to salvage his drink but only ending up with sticky hands.
"The likeness is uncanny," Sirius told them, his face astoundingly straight. "I mean, Mick isn't getting any younger, but women keep throwing themselves at him. I imagine that, like, twenty years in the future he's going to have about twelve kids all by different models."
"And you're going to be the same way?"
"Oh, God, no," Sirius responded, wrinkling his nose. "Kids? Ew. I can't even take care of myself. And there's no way a model could. I mean, she'd have them only drinking Evian and eating like rabbits. The kid would be undernourished. It doesn't even exist and I feel sorry for it."
////
"I could cry," Mrs. Evans proclaimed, and as her daughter glanced away from the car window to look at her, she noticed that her mother's eyes did look a bit watery. "Taking my daughter shopping for her wedding dress…"
"Not shopping," Lily was only too quick to correct her. "We're looking. I just want to get an idea of what I want." She drew in a breath. "The wedding is getting ridiculously close and I don't want to be rifling through racks of pretty much identical dresses the day before the wedding and sobbing hysterically because I don't have a clue as to what I want."
Mrs. Evans looked away from the road for a second to look at her daughter, smiling. "Aren't you just a little excited, though?" she asked, turning her attention back to the red car in front of her.
"Oh, I'm having difficulty breathing," Lily confirmed.
"I just don't know why you're doing this on Valentine's Day. Shouldn't you be spending time with James, dear?"
"Valentine's Day is a day for weddings," Lily told her, shifting in her seat to look around the car in front of them to view the line of shops on this street. "People get married on Valentine's Day. They're not shopping for wedding dresses. And, since it's Valentine's Day, that horrible planner of ours has a wedding today, so she can't come along." She grinned at her mother. "That is why I picked today. And James has a little paperwork he has to catch up on."
Mrs. Evans suddenly gasped. "Today is your anniversary, isn't it?!"
Lily scrunched up her nose. "Sort of," she admitted. "Today is the fourth anniversary of our first date thing…but the day we actually got together was, like, two days after that. So our anniversary is whenever we have time to celebrate it. Which is looking to be, like, three years from now."
"So, you've both been busy?"
"Insanely busy," Lily agreed, sighing. "Work has been absolutely mad. I haven't been home any earlier than ten all week, and James didn't even come home yesterday until three in the morning."
Her mother laughed a little and looked out her window.
Lily blinked, confused at that sudden laugh. Her lack of sleep wasn't really funny to her, but maybe it was to other people. "Something funny?"
"Oh, you just…" Mrs. Evans looked away from the window and smiled at her daughter.
"What?"
"You sounded very grown-up, just then."
Lily grinned and glanced down at her hands. "It's weird, isn't it?"
////
Peter apprehensively approached the Hog's Head later that day wearing his darkest set of robes and a cloak with a hood. The owl had simply said to report to the pub at sunset and to bring no one with him. When he'd finished reading it, the letter tore itself into lots of tiny pieces, which were then sucked into his kitchen table, which was interesting to him. Peter had seen many hundreds of letters self-destruct in many hundreds of different ways (he had even invented a few with his friends when he was in school—invisibility spells on letters that were activated and deactivated by breathing on them, letters zipping around a house until they found the nearest fire to throw themselves in and so on), but that one was new to him.
The littlest things fascinated Peter.
Maybe following confidential instructions was one of them.
He certainly did feel a tiny bit like James Bond.
That was exciting.
Not so exciting was the fact that his insides felt like they could just, like, pop out through his mouth any second now. He had heard stories of what happened to people when they did what he was about to do, and none of them ended very well. At least, they didn't end in a way that Peter considered good.
Peter willed himself to open the door to the pub, but it took an entire minute and a half before he could actually do it.
He stepped into the pub, lowering his hood as he did so. Peter tried to keep his face blank, tried not to let the terror show in his eyes. He scanned the room, looking for someone who looked…Death Eater-y. What do Death Eaters look like when they're just out for a drink? Peter didn't know; he didn't drink much, and even when he did, he certainly didn't do it in the company of Voldemort's minions.
Seeing no one looking particularly Death Eater-ish and deciding that his new bosses or whatever he was supposed to call them were running a tad late, Peter sidled up to the bar. His mouth had gone dry, and a drink of any sort was sounding really good right now.
Peter hoisted himself onto one of the seven stools lining the bar and waited for the bartender to take his order. He drummed his fingers on the soft, felt-like surface of the bar and noted with distaste the unpolished appearance his nails had taken on. They had been chewed to the quick, and he had hangnails on every finger, some of them bleeding. And he couldn't even remember biting them.
Strange.
"You Pettigrew?"
Peter nearly fell out of his seat at the sound of the voice. He hadn't been expecting it, and he had been half-hoping that the voice would never come, that he had just been making up this whole meeting in his warped mind.
Because, you know, therapy could cure whatever insanity had taken residence in his head.
Therapy couldn't help being a minion.
Peter thought about this. It probably could, actually. It could be like one of those Alcoholics Anonymous things. Death Eaters Anonymous. You could go to meetings and those meetings could cure you of your brainwashed…ness. And then they could probably Memory Charm you into forgetting every terrible thing you'd ever done as a minion.
Minions Anonymous had a nicer ring to it, actually.
Okay, it would be called Minions Anonymous. MA.
The voice, whoever it was (Peter hadn't yet turned around to see), poked him roughly right in between his shoulder blades. "Are you Pettigrew?" the voice repeated impatiently.
Peter turned around and stared into a face mostly obscured by a hood, but Peter could still see those eyes.
He would be able to recognize those eyes from miles away.
Those were Sirius's eyes.
But of course, it wasn't Sirius under that hood.
So this was Regulus.
Peter gulped, his throat feeling both dry and scratchy now. "Yeah," he rasped. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, I'm Pettigrew."
////
"Do you ever even go home?" Gideon Prewett asked, leaning over the wall of Sirius's cubicle so that he was looking down into James's.
"Not lately, thanks for asking," James muttered gruffly, deep in concentration. He refilled his best eagle feather quill with black ink and scribbled his signature almost illegibly on the dotted line to finish the report. "Besides, I could ask you the same thing. You're here almost as often as I am."
"Ah, but I don't have a fiancé to cater to."
James looked up darkly from the new form he had to fill out. "Lily doesn't need 'catering to'," he told Prewett matter-of-factly, adjusting his glasses and returning to the paper.
"Valentine's Day, though," Prewett commented airily.
"What of it?" James grumbled, scrawling the date at the top of the form.
"'What of it?'" Prewett repeated, smirking. "Potter, this day is, like, the single most romantic day of the year. Don't you think she'll be a little miffed if you're not there to spend it with her?"
"Valentine's Day is a non-holiday," James said promptly. "And Lily's out shopping with her mother, so no worries there. Besides, I bought her lingerie yesterday, so we're already done with our romantic-holiday stuff." He paused, blushing, as realized what he had said. "I mean, I bought her chocolates. Chocolates. Loves her chocolates, Lily does."
While the whole Quidditch match experience had certainly lessened James's dislike for Gideon Prewett, he was still firmly of the belief that Prewett desperately wanted to play Naughty Stewardess-type games with Lily. And he didn't want to give Prewett any ideas for new fantasies.
Prewett kept that obnoxious smirk on his face. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Chocolates."
"Right," James said. "Chocolates. Lots and…lots of chocolates."
"Good chocolates?"
"Of course. Naturally. Only the, er, best for Lily."
"Like, the edible-underwear type of chocolates?" Prewett slipped in, smirking still.
Oh, well that was just perfect, James thought. Prewett was getting bolder; he actually had the audacity to discuss his fantasies about James's girlfriend with him. It was really quite disgusting.
"No," James protested. "I respect Lily more than to buy her underwear that she can't wear on warm days." He tossed his head pompously. "I bought her a black lace negligee."
////
After the ice cream, Remus had said his good-byes to his friends and ducked inside his favorite bookshop. It isn't Flourish and Blott's, because that has almost always been too brightly lit and crowded and commercial for him. No, Remus likes Tomes, which is quite a bit down the road from the most populated areas of Diagon Alley. The store is remarkably isolated for Diagon Alley, and there are almost never more than ten people inside, and that's why Remus likes it so much. The store has exactly four windows in its two stories, and if you stand in front of the light that streams in from them, you can very clearly see little particles of dust dancing around in it.
The first floor is the entrance, where most if not all of the newest books are located. There's the checkout counter and a few shelves of 'bestsellers'. You're kind of obligated to put the quotations around 'bestsellers' because it's well known (well, amongst the people who go there) that no one ever really buys the books. Tomes is a library of sorts, where people go to just read and wile the hours away on rainy days or days when you don't feel like doing anything but sitting and losing themselves and forgetting time and any ideas of life altogether.
On days like that, you may smile a quick hello to Maisey or Celia or Devon at the counter as you head directly for the small, spindly spiral staircase that leads up to the second floor. The steps are caked in dust and you leave footprints as you go up. Once safely upstairs, the scent of old books overwhelms, and it's nice.
Remus loves it up there.
He lingers at the Non-Fiction section for about fifteen minutes or so, but lately he's discovered that he's read absolutely everything that's of interest to him in that section. So he moves on to the Fiction section more readily than usual. The old (and new) Muggle literature fascinates him—Muggles may not be able to do magic, but they're much better at writing stories than most magical authors.
Today he had picked up 'Jane Eyre', and was about a hundred and fifty pages in when he decided he didn't like it very much. Jane was kind of whiny, and Mr. Rochester just seemed bored with the whole thing. In fact, his favorite character so far was the crazy wife in the attic.
"Oh, 'Jane Eyre'? It's horrible, don't bother with it."
Remus dropped the book in shock. "Hestia?" he stammered, looking up at her.
She stood, grinning, in front of his chair, her purple cloak in her arms. She seemed genuinely pleased and a little surprised to see him. "Hi," she said. "I didn't know you knew Tomes." Hestia pointed her wand at an empty chair some six feet away and levitated it towards him, setting it down neatly next to his own armchair. Hestia settled herself into the chair, which was large, green, and velvety.
"I've been coming here since I was twelve," Remus told her, and was surprised to hear that he was actually speaking coherent English. He was quite proud of himself. "How do you know it?"
"Oh," she responded, turning around in her chair to hang her cloak on the back of it, "a colleague of mine recommended it to me when I complained about how Flourish & Blott's only carried the in-demand stuff, not the really compelling, interesting things. However, they also didn't carry that drivel." She pointed absently to Remus's book. "Which I guess is a plus."
"So you really didn't like it," Remus smiled.
Hestia made a face. "My mother made me read that book when I was, oh, eleven or so. Bored. Me. To. Pieces." She rolled her eyes as if to further the point.
Remus set the book down. "I didn't really like it either," he admitted.
Hestia's face instantly brightened. "You didn't?!" she said, emphatically happy.
"No."
She laughed excitedly. "You probably think this reaction is so weird, but I've never met anyone who didn't like 'Jane Eyre' before! As soon as I'd mention how much I hated it, someone would say, 'Why?! 'Jane Eyre' is one of the first pieces of literature to portray women in a positive light blah, blah, blah.'" She rolled her eyes again. "The girl was annoyed about a haircut, okay? That's kind of shallow. If she were really feminist, she should've been, like, embracing the butchness of her haircut and be all, 'If a man can keep his hair like this, so can I!'" Hestia paused. "That did happen, right?" she clarified. "She did complain about her haircut, right?"
"Yes," Remus said, rather entertained by this spiel.
"Good," Hestia replied, satisfied. "My memory is just as good as I thought it was." She pushed a piece of hair behind her ear.
There was silence.
Naturally, she broke it.
"So, what's a bloke like you doing all alone in a bookshop on Valentine's Day?" Hestia asked, leaning on her arm that was resting on the armrest.
"Not alone," Remus responded plaintively. "You're around, aren't you?" He regretted saying it almost as soon as the words left his mouth. That was a little more…bold than he usually liked to be.
Hestia, however, didn't seem to mind in the slightest. She smiled softly. "Yes," she said lightly. "I am, aren't I?"
She continued to smile at him, and he really had no choice but to smile back.
Before he remembered Sirius.
"Sirius," he blurted out.
Hestia waited for him to finish what she surely thought was the beginning of a sentence. "Yes?" she pressed when he didn't. "Sirius what?"
"He, ah," Remus stalled, searching for something witty and cool that Sirius had said or done lately. "He, ah, hates Valentine's Day."
Hestia sighed. "Yes, he would be. I suppose he and Lily broke up on Valentine's Day," she said mournfully. "Didn't you say James and Lily's anniversary was today?"
"What?" Remus said, confused. "Sirius and Lily—" But then, of course, he remembered.
The Lie.
The big, scary Lie.
And he winced, because he'd just have to continue this lie for about a million years because he'd never be able to tell Hestia, 'Yeah, look, I just made up that thing about Sirius and Lily going out because he's, like, crazy about you and I couldn't tell you so because then you'd get a restraining order and that would be bad for him. And plus I tend to babble when you're around and I haven't a clue why, so that definitely factored into it. But, really, if you get to know me, I'm really a nice guy' because…well, he just couldn't.
"Oh, ah," he mumbled. "Their anniversary…yeah. Um, Sirius is actually at home right now. I think he mentioned something about either slitting his wrists or drinking a bottle of wine*."
"I hope he chose the wine," Hestia said.
"Oh, he always does," Remus assured her.
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A/N: Yes! I finally finished it! It's 11:00 at night, I've been writing on this for four hours, so I'm very excited about this.
*I stole this line from "The Heartbreak" episode of "The O.C.", which is my favorite television show ever. It seems stupid from the commercials, but if you watch it, it's awesome. Sorry. Not here for "O.C." plugging. I apologize.
Um, yeah, and I know I said Adeline was coming back this chappie. I lied. Sorry. =) I just couldn't think of a way to fit her in. Admittedly, I could have put her in the scene where Lily and her mother were shopping for her wedding dress (you see the actual wedding dress quite soon), but I'd imagine that Lily would try to find some way to avoid that lovely experience. So I left her out this time. My apologies. Again.
Oh, and if you actually liked Jane Eyre and are mad at the comments above….well, sorry. =) I read that book when I was eleven because this boy in my class who I was really competitive with was going to read it, and I said I would read it first and he said, nu-uh, I will, and it went on like that for about a month. I finished it first, but I hated it. So, yeah. I don't know what the point of that story was. It's (quasi) late. I'm tired. That's no excuse…
….
I can't think of anything else to write, prolly because I'm really tired, so I'm going to go to bed now. Review!