"Bye Mum! Bye Dad!"
As James stepped down from the window, the compartment door slid open and Sirius's head poked in.
"Mind if I join you?" he asked.
"Not at all," replied James, who'd been wondering whether he'd be spending the journey to Hogwarts alone or not. "Want a hand?" he added, watching Sirius almost throw his trunk into the compartment.
"Nah… I've got it… damn thing… been hauling it all over the place today." He dragged it over to a corner, then came over and sat himself opposite James, and swung his legs over the side of his seat. "I'm Sirius Black, by the way," he said carelessly.
"James Potter," said James. "You a first year?"
"Yep. Are you?"
"Course…"
"So you don't play Quidditch at all, do you?"
James looked shocked. "Hell yeah, I do!" he exclaimed, his eyes going bright.
"Awesome!" said Sirius, straightening up. "What position?"
And they whiled away an hour or so, talking animatedly of Quidditch, all about the different teams and makes of brooms and positions of the players, until they heard something outside.
There
was clattering outside their compartment and the sound of loud, crude laughter.
Sirius and James looked up towards the compartment door window and caught a
glimpse of a couple of boys - one with white-blonde hair, the other with dark -
followed by a girl with thick, shining, black hair, whose eyes were heavily
lidded. Her eyes swung into their compartment, and back out...then back in
again.
Without warning, the compartment door was
torn open, and the heavy-lidded girl was framed in the doorway, her companions
gathered round outside in the corridor behind her.
Her face was pulled into an expression of
great amusement, but in a horrible, sour sort of way. She strode inside,
staring fixedly at Sirius, who'd noticed her, but was staring just as fixedly
out his window.
"Aaaaahhh, dearest cousin
Sirius!" She exclaimed in a sick, overly dramatic babyish voice. She
stopped a few feet from him, bent down, hands on her knees as though addressing
a four-year-old, and grabbed his cheek with her thumb and forefinger, in what
looked like a painful pinch. "So wittle Sirius is finally starting out at
the big Magic School?" She cooed at him, still in her disgusting childlike
voice.
"I'm here, aren't I?"
Sirius spat, jerking his head away from her, still determined not to look at
her.
"Oooooh, Boy, you should know better
than to talk to me like that; I just might tell your mummy," she said. Her
friends behind her were cackling. Sirius, abandoning all attempts to avoid
seeing her, stood up, glaring at her.
Stepping forward, he turned her round to
face the door from which she'd come, and, pressing a hand into her back, pushed
her through it, growling, "Well, it's been hell chatting with you again,
Bella, and hopefully, I won't be seeing you around."
But the girl called Bella wasn't about to
be shoved through a doorway without having the last word.
"Yeah?" She crowed. "Well, you just wait! When your mother finds out about the scum you're hanging around with - " But Sirius had slammed the door shut on her before she could finish her rant.
Sirius looked livid. He was still scowling as he turned back to sit down again, uttering a very insulting swearword. James had the impression he'd meant it for the girl who was just here.
"Cousin?" James asked, frowning slightly.
Sirius nodded, and James decided to elaborate with a bracing, "Ah, don't let it get t'you, then. You can't help family."
Sirius took a great breath and said, "Yeah… yeah, I s'pose you're right…"
James thought well to change the subject. During the awkward silence in which James struggled to come up with something to say, they heard several squeals of laughter from next-door's compartment. Sirius and James exchanged looks of utter bewilderment.
"What the - " James muttered, but Sirius's trademark grin had flitted across his face.
"Girls," he said. He ran over to his trunk, kicked it open, grabbed a spellbook, and flicked to the index.
"Know any good eavesdropping charms?" he asked excitedly.
"Mate, I don't know any charms, period," laughed James, but he'd understood Sirius's intentions. He got out his own book of basic spells.
"How about this?" Sirius said, pointing to a paragraph in his book. "What if we shot this to thin out the wall? Worst it'd do is make a hole…" He looked up at James, still grinning.
"You do the honors?" James said, half laughing at what a compartment full of girls might do if a hole issued out of nowhere in the wall.
Sirius obliged, and the result was a hole. A good-sized, smoking hole, large enough to fit an arm through.
"Oh damn," Sirius muttered as a few girls screamed in fright.
"Reckon we should run for it?" asked James in a hushed voice, but they hardly needed telling, and shot towards the door, out into the corridor outside.
Out in the corridor, however, the girls seemed to've been able to surmise that two boys had been intending to eavesdrop on them, and they swarmed outside to attempt an ambush upon whoever was responsible.
Sirius and James ran straight into them, but amazingly got through, and continued racing down the corridor of the train, with the mob of angry chickas behind.
Though in the end, the two boys were to be seen pinned spectacularly to the ground by a couple of the girls. One of which was Raven, who was demanding an explanation of the pair of them, but the boys were shaking with too much partially suppressed laughter at the reaction to answer.
A hand closed over Raven's forearm, and pulled her off James. She looked behind her and saw a brown-haired boy step round her to help James to his feet.
To Raven's left, the girl who'd pinned Sirius, Medea, was getting to her feet standing back, and brushing off her robes. Only when Raven got a good look at Sirius did she realize that was the same boy she'd met on the platform.
"Sirius!" she exclaimed, laughing.
"The one and only," said Sirius cheerfully. James was laughing.
"So you're behind this as well?" Raven remarked. The crowd of students was quickly dispersing, now that the show was over. This left Sirius, James, Raven, Lily, and the light-haired boy who'd pulled Raven off James.
"Yep. And this - " continued Sirius, indicating James (who was straightening up, still laughing.)
" - Is James," finished James. "And thanks, mate, for getting this one off me," he added to the boy beside Raven. Raven chose to ignore James's rather rude reference to her, as she more interested in the boy next to her, whom she'd noticed was glancing at her every now and then.
Raven thought him quite good-looking, in a kind, natural sort of way, with light brown hair that curled near the end of each lock and fell onto his face and into gentle, brownish-orange eyes. He smiled slightly at James.
"No problem." But he added swiftly, "you were a bit rough," to Raven, who giggled.
"All right, all right, my apologies, James," she said, defeated. She turned back to the brown-haired boy. "I'm Raven Sinistra," she said, pressing the tips of her fingers to her breastbone. "And this is Lily Evans," she turned to Lily, who was glaring at James and Sirius.
The boy's smiled widened.
"Remus Lupin," he said.