Previously in the Darklyverse: Emmeline and Peter got together, while Sirius and Remus broke up. Alice tried to get closer to Mary, who's been left out of the Gryffindors' circle ever since quitting the Order. Alice fought against her purist upbringing. James felt guilty for being distant with his parents before they died of spattergroit.

xx

November 2nd, 1978: James Potter

"Wait, back up," Mary is saying. "You're telling me that Em and Pett started having sex when they weren't already before, and Sirius and Remus broke up because they weren't having enough sex?"

"I know," says James. He got off work for the day about an hour ago and is now sitting in Mary's kitchen with her while Cattermole bustles around cooking dinner for the three of them.

"I'm going to kill Alice. If she wanted to be my friend, she should have looped me in on this stuff!"

"Well, I'm telling you now," says James, trying to feel amused rather than guilty.

"I can't believe this! Sirius and Remus—because of Marlene, I wasn't really ever allowed to support them, but I had no idea that things were going in that direction. And it kind of surprises me that Em wasn't already sleeping with Pett. I don't know, I lost track of what was going on between the two of them a long time ago. Good for them, though. It's always nice when people get to be with their people."

James says, "You say that like you're not engaged."

"Hello," calls Cattermole with a weird mix of sarcasm and humor. James snorts.

"What?" Mary protests. "It's still true whether or not I'm in a relationship. Love you, honey," she then calls out.

"Love you too," Cattermole claps back.

It's been more than a week since Remus and Sirius broke up, and almost three since Peter and Emmeline got together, and James can't decide whether or not he's surprised that this is the first Mary is hearing about either one. On the one hand, word of both couples spread like wildfire right when both of them happened, and you'd think that Mary, the keenest gossip of them all, would have been a part of that. Like Mary said, Alice, at least, should have looped her in, as Alice seemed to have been making more of an effort with Mary in recent weeks. Then again, Mary's been on the outs with basically all of the Gryffindors for a pretty long time now—should James really have expected people not to leave her out?

For her part, if Mary feels particularly hurt by being the last one to know everything that's happened, she's covering herself well. Her eyes are alight, and her mouth is curled into a lipped grin. "Do you really think Em and Pett are going to stay together? And for that matter, do you think Rem and Sirius aren't going to get back together?"

"Emmeline and Peter—I don't know. I hope it works out for them, or at least that they stay this close as friends if it doesn't, because I think Em really relies on him to get through her depression. She seems lonely, you know?"

Instantly, James regrets saying this, because something flashes behind Mary's eyes reminding him that she, too, gets lonely. But the moment passes, and she just says, "Yeah, I think Pete is good for her. Even if they break up, I think he could still be good for her. I wish she and I were closer so that I could be good for her, too, but… I mean, where do you even start? There's a lot of history there."

"You could always start with an owl—you know, like how you and Alice have been writing back and forth the last few months. The two of you have gotten pretty close, right?"

"If by 'close' you mean that she didn't tell me my best friends were getting together and breaking up, then yeah," says Mary, rolling her eyes.

"She's probably just been busy," James reasons. "Auror training is no picnic, and the Order is—"

He catches himself, casting a quick glance over to Cattermole, but Cattermole doesn't seem to have noticed anything amiss. "Anyway, I'm sort of hoping that Remus and Sirius end up getting back together. If they don't, and they never go back to being friends… I don't want our whole dynamic with Peter to get thrown off."

"Isn't it already a little thrown off, though?" Mary points out. "Alice says that you and the two of them and Lily have been doing a lot of stuff together recently. Where did Pett fit into that?"

If James tells himself the truth, the answer is that Peter didn't fit into the dynamic the four of them achieved after graduation, but he doesn't necessarily want to admit that to Mary when he can hardly even admit it to himself. "Peter knows how we feel about him," he says, and he hopes to god that that's true, too.

After he leaves Mary's, James heads to Dervish and Banges to pick up his gift for Mary and Cattermole, something he can't put off any longer now that it's coming up. He'd noticed Cattermole cooking entirely with Muggle pots and pans and spoons, so he shells out for a nice enchanted set that's both self-cleaning and capable of cooking your food for you when left unattended. Satisfied, he Vanishes his purchases, Apparates back home, and then conjures them back up to stuff in the closet until the day of the wedding shower.

Remus is holed up in his and James's bedroom, but Alice is sitting in the living room surrounded by metal bits and what looks like the wooden paneling of a grandfather clock. "I don't know why I took it upon myself to make one of these," she grouses, wiping her brow.

"Engagement gift?"

"For Mary, yeah. I was going to do another one for you and Lily, but we'll see how I get on with just one. Think it'll be easier the second time around?"

"If you buy ours in a shop, I'm sure Lily will forgive you," says James, laughing.

"I think I'm all tapped out for the rest of the night," says Alice. "I've been at this for two hours already, and I still feel like I've made no progress."

"Don't hurt yourself, yeah."

Alice sits back and Vanishes the mess, shaking her head. "Did you have a good time at Mary's?"

"Oh, just fine. She says she's going to kill you for not telling her about Sirius and Remus or about Peter and Em."

He says it playfully, but Alice just sighs. "I haven't seen her—or written to her, for that matter—in a few weeks. I was trying, I was, but it's just… it's hard to keep on with somebody who doesn't seem to ever be the one to reach out to you, you know?"

"That surprises me. Without Marlene, I'd have thought Mary would be reaching out as much as she could to other people."

"Maybe she just doesn't trust me," says Alice. "If I were Muggle-born, I might not trust myself, either."

This comes as a surprise to James: Alice usually does her damndest to avoid talking about having grown up with pureblood privilege and having learned some hard truths about the way the world works in her last couple years at Hogwarts. "I think you've fought incredibly hard to become a better person and learn to do better where you realized you were wrong. If Mary doesn't trust you, I don't think it's about that. It might just be…"

"Too late?" she finishes for him. "After all, we were always friends, but maybe it was just incidental. Maybe she didn't really feel close to me—maybe I didn't feel close to her, either. Now we're out of school, and she's not in the Order, and our common ground is gone."

"I'm sorry. I'm not really the person to tell you whether a relationship can stay alive on love alone, in spite of any baggage or differences—I don't know. I hope it can. I don't like the thought of Mary being all alone with nobody but Cattermole or Smethley." It's more than that, though. If love alone were enough, Sirius and Remus would still be together. If love alone were enough, Mary would still be Marlene's best friend. If love alone were enough, Lily and Snape…

He quashes that thought before he can run with it. "I'm going to go check on Remus," he says and hastily makes his exit.

He raps a few times on the door before going in. Remus is lying on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling, running his wand over and over again through his fingers. "Hey," he says, but he doesn't tear his eyes away to put them on James.

"Hey," says James. He closes the door behind him, hovers awkwardly on his feet for a few seconds, and then sits down on the edge of his own bed. "How're you holding up?"

"We were fine," says Remus hollowly. "We were fine, and now suddenly we're not even dating anymore. I don't understand what happened."

"If it helps, I don't think Sirius feels any better about it, either."

"If I'm unhappy with how it went down, and he's unhappy with how it went down, then why the hell did it go down this way at all?"

James doesn't try to answer that. The last thing he wants to do is get into a fight with one of his best friends because he isn't on his side through a breakup. "I can't tell you that," he says instead, "but I can tell you that Wormtail and I are here for you, whatever you need. Lily, too, I bet."

"Can you give me back my boyfriend?"

"I—"

"Then I don't need anything that you could possibly give me."

James is starting to recognize that Remus needs Time To Sulk and won't necessarily be any better off for having James's company. "I'm just going to go check on Alice," he says and then immediately registers déjà vu. "Holler if you want me, okay?"

But once he's back out in the living room, he doesn't necessarily want to talk to Alice much, either. He steps out for a walk, hoping that Remus won't decide he needs him before James gets back.

Their flat is on the third and highest story of a brick building in Cambridge (he's pretty sure that most of the rest of their building is inhabited by university students). His feet automatically take him to the campus, and he allows his thoughts to drift as he pounds the pavement and shoulders against the wind.

Not for the first time, he wishes his parents were still here to help him navigate everything that's happening—his friends all being at odds with each other and, of course, the constant pressure of trying to stay afloat in this war with Voldemort and the Death Eaters. But a small voice in his head tells him that it's not really fair for him to claim he's lost without them: as much as he loved his parents, and as many happy memories he has of them, he didn't really rely on them much or even loop them into what was going on with him until they were dying. Learning to become an Animagus, saving Snape from getting himself killed by Remus and subsequently fighting with Sirius, starting the Order, being partly responsible for the murders at the end of his sixth year: he can't remember telling any of it to his parents besides acknowledging that he knew both of the girls who died out there at the ambush.

Very soon after he started at Hogwarts, he felt tightly bonded to his dormmates, so much so that he felt the need to protect their privacy and deal internally with any serious situations that arose. Then, when they started the educational pranks that developed into actual war efforts, he concealed that from his parents too because he knew they wouldn't approve and because he thought he knew better than they did. Would they have cautioned him against it, maybe tried to even stop it, and would he have listened? Has James been living in an echo chamber for all these years where he's so ingratiated in it that no voice of reason could pull him out?

Sometimes, these days, all he wants is somebody to pull him out, even if just for a moment—even if he jumps right back deep into it when the conversation is over. He just wants to feel like a kid again, back when the name "You-Know-Who" wasn't plastered on every newspaper and there weren't any lives in James's hands.

Did he dive in too soon? Is he too young to be here? Should he make like Mary did and get out while he still can?

But he knows he can't spare himself—too much has happened, and he couldn't bear to know that his loved ones were all in danger without doing something to try to protect them. That must be the difference between Mary and him: she holds herself accountable to the people they've killed, whereas James holds himself accountable to the people they can still save.

He wonders, at the end of the day, which approach is better.