A/N:

I know I've now updated three times in as many weeks, but I wanted to give you some chapters while I had them written and the confidence to post them.

So without any further ado, please enjoy!

To absolutely nobody's surprise, the Potion of Dreamless Sleep was no dream to brew. It was, in fact, a complete monster to brew. Rose saw green sparks erupting from cauldrons, clouds of smoke in every colour imaginable (except purple), students crying from frustration, even the odd misbehaving untensil or ingredient getting chucked unceremoniously across the room. Sirius, the smug bastard that he often was, hummed the entirety of Queen's A Day At The Races, apparently unruffled by the difficulty of the potion or the tense atmosphere that always accompanied end of year exams.

James was similarly relaxed, not quite to the point of humming, but he didn't have the same tension in his shoulders that Remus had. He was happily stirring his potion (a slightly lighter shade of purple than required, but purple nonetheless) and glancing at the clock to make sure that he was on track. Remus was hurriedly chopping and stirring beside Rose, his hair a mess from the humidity of his cauldron. He was muttering under his breath, threatening his cauldron with a thorough pranking if it didn't start behaving itself (it should be noted that Remus' cauldron wasn't in fact terribly temperamental, but nobody had yet mustered enough courage to tell Remus that - Rose didn't see that happening any time soon either).

Rose herself had all but given up on achieving the perfect potion - she simply wasn't the Evans with the potioneering talent. Nevertheless, she rolled up her sleeves and got on with brewing the best potion she could. She followed the instructions to the letter (except where she remembered Lily telling her that the secret was adding in a dash more of powdered unicorns horn and stirring a counterclockwise turn every seven clockwise) and she was feeling quite proud of her efforts. Her potion wasn't quite as vibrant a purple as Sirius' (who had said earlier in the year that the right shade to aim for was her eyes, the flatterer) but it was much closer to the right shade than James's, so Rose hoped she had brewed the potion well enough to pass to their usual standards. Rose had no idea how Peter was going (he was hidden from her view by Sirius and James) but since she couldn't hear him having any kind of panic at the very little time remaining, Rose hoped he was holding up better than poor Remus. Remus' potion was perfectly acceptable, the poor man had just worked himself into such a state that he would never believe them when they told him he had done well enough to pass. Rose resigned herself to being supportive about it until the summer when the results were released. Then she would be quite right in saying she told him so.

Just as Rose had predicted (as if such a thing wasn't readily apparent to anyone who knew him), Remus was in a fine mood when they left the dungeons. His hair was a mess, his eyes flashed, and even Sirius knew better than to mention anything. "Well, that was a disaster" Remus announced, his angry footsteps stomping towards the Great Hall for lunch.

"Your potion was a darker purple than James's" Rose offered, sending an apologetic shrug at James. It was true, but there was only about a shade of lilac in difference. "And James is definitely going to pass."

"James didn't add too much powdered root of Asphodel" Remus retorted stubbornly.

Sirius rolled his eyes, already sick of the conversation. Much as she loved him, sometimes Sirius did have remarkably little tolerance for putting up with Moony in this intransigent mood. "A bit much root won't have that bad an effect, you corrected it with the dash of peppermint oil. Now, for the love of Merlin, can we stop going over our exams now?" He shook his hair back into place. "I thought we gave that up after fifth year."

"It's be different if you thought you'd made a mistake" Remus muttered, but he let James steer the conversation to the quidditch final, which would be held on the weekend after the exams finished. As if they didn't have enough to do this week as it was. Gryffindor versus Slytherin, winner took the house cup. Revenge house cup style, Rose couldn't wait. It was just what they needed to release all the pent up frustration with the war going on outside the Castle, the Slytherins being shifty inside the Castle, and everything else that meant they needed to blow off a little steam. And, Rose couldn't help but think that it would be very good for Sirius as well - and potentially less destructive for them all.

After lunch, the Marauders went their separate ways. Remus and Peter went off to sit their Arithmancy exam, Remus looking much more relaxed than he had that morning, while Peter seemed to turn greener with every step he took up the staircase. Sirius and James, on the other hand, were bound for their Care of Magical Creatures exam, which would see them out and enjoying the sunshine. Lucky bastards. Rose herself, meanwhile, would be sitting one of the exams she was looking forward to the most - History of Magic.

It was a dull subject (taught by a professor who was about as lively as a three day old ham sandwich), but Rose loved it and she hoped she wasn't being immodest when she thought that she was darn good at it too. So, she waved James and Sirius only slightly jealousy out into the sunshine, joining Remus and Peter on their lonely trudge up the stairs to their next exams. They parted ways on the Shifting Staircase, Remus and Peter going right while Rose strode left, hoping that their exams were going to focus as heavily on the Goblin Rebellions as Binns had in his lectures. Edgar, Caradoc and Emmeline hurried along beside her, some relaxed others not so. Emmeline looked just a little frazzled, muttering something under her breath about how smart it was to take an entire course just for the naptime it gave her, and then having to sit the exams anyway. Caradoc and Edgar remained silent, both having faraway looks she knew too well. It was the look of someone internally reviewing information, and hoping that they wouldn't have the dreaded mind blank when they came to actually have to write things down. Rose sympathised, of course she did, but there was a not insignificant part of her that enjoyed their misery.

The very few of them that took History of Magic filed into the classroom one by one. Their usual tables had been removed, single desks with provided parchment, ink and quills were in their places. Rose shrugged and took a desk at the very back of the room (Marauder instincts were hard to ignore), keeping a watchful eye out to make sure that Snape, Kentich and the rest of the students weren't up to anything shifty. Not that she actually thought that they would be - they still cared enough about their schooling (or at least their place at school) to attend the end of year exams without anything funny happening. At the front of the room, by Binns' all but useless desk, a giant hourglass waited to count down their time for the exam. Around them, the turn of the hour last note pealed away into stillness, sand beginning to trickle through the hourglass.

Parchment rasped, turned over by students ready to see the essay questions they would have to answer. Rose let out a small sigh of relief. Giants, Goblins, Grindelwald - the three G's of the sixth year curriculum. In her experience, thinking about what she was going to write just made her overthink things. It was far better for her to just get things down on the parchment. Binns preferred the information to be there and accurate rather than just rubbish presented in nice, flowery paragraphs. So, she nodded to herself, reached for the cheat-prevented quill, and got down to business. Her quill practically flew across the parchment, sending specks of ink (regulation Hogwarts black rather than the purple ink she preferred) flying on to her robes, hair and even across her cheeks. Aside from pranking and the lessons she shared with the Marauders, this was the one thing she was good at - the one thing she enjoyed? It wasn't particularly flashy or noteworthy, or even important, but it was something she did just for herself. She thought - while writing a particularly vicious remark about Grindelwald - that her love of history might have come from her Dad and the odd road trips across England and Wales that he would take them on during the summers before she and Lily came to Hogwarts. It also, loathe as she was to admit it - had something to do with proving that she - a Muggle-born - knew as much about wizarding history as she did muggle; that she wasn't some kind of fraud attending this school, being a part of the world without knowing or appreciating any of the events which had gone on to shape it.

She had told Remus once about her fears, back in second year. He had shared his biggest secret and Rose had wanted to show some degree of the same kind of trust in him that he had shown in her. She still remembered what he had done. Remus had smiled, losing some of the wariness he had been regarding them with back then. He had told her that he too felt that kind of need to prove he belonged in ordinary wizarding society - that probably they all did, in their ways. And, as such, they all had their own ways of trying to prove to themselves (and others) that they did, in fact belong. For Remus, it was being the best and most responsible student he could be, but also he proved he belonged by thriving in his friendship with them. For James and Sirius, they had speculated that they proved their belonging by being larger than life and ten times as mischievous. Peter proved it by tagging along after them, hiding his intelligence and playing up to the bumbling, nervous student everyone saw him to be. And, Rose herself, Remus had told her, used her love of history to understand the world she hadn't known of before the age of ten and through the knowledge prove to herself that she could be a part of it. Even at twelve, Remus saw right through them all. Subsequently, when Rose told Sirius, he had told her that she didn't have to prove she belonged. She just did, because she was with them. And once a Marauder, you never needed to belong to anyone or anywhere else. There was no need to prove anything to him. It was one of the many reasons she loved him. She hadn't quite realised it then, but the easy acceptance and understanding Remus always had with whatever she felt or thought had been one of the main reasons why she had felt closest to him out of all the other Marauders. She loved Sirius with all of her heart, but Remus was undeniably her best friend. He was the James Potter to her Sirius Black. And she wouldn't have it any other way.

Tuesday dawned just as brilliantly as the day before. Outside the Castle, the sun was shining, birds were chirping, and all the other things that usually characterised a lovely morning were there too. Inside, however, was another story entirely. Alarms were blaring inside the dormitories all across the castle. Fortunately, Lily's caterwauling alarm was just reserved for the first mornings of the exam week, every other day Marlene's infernal banshee alarm was more then sufficient to drag them out of their golden slumbers. Rose rolled out of bed with a grumble, automatically dressing while listening to her dormmates hurry about getting ready for the day. According to Remus' unnecessarily cheerful reminder to them all (by message patronus at four o'clock that morning - undoubtedly revenge for some slight done to him by the morons formerly known as James Potter and Sirius Black), their exams for the day were Charms and Muggle Studies/Magical Theory/Ancient Studies as was applicable to them. All in all, Rose foresaw a fairly light day for them all - dealing with Remus' exam neuroses notwithstanding.

Breakfast was again a subdued affair, not because of any bad news in the morning's Prophet (which had dealt with nothing more interesting than an interview with some Ministry department undersecretary and was only really good for lining the bins), but because of the looking spectre of their next exams. Up and down the tables, the fifth and seventh years looked collectively ready to spontaneously combust from nerves. Rose conceded that James and Sirius really weren't helping.

In loud voices, they commented on how hard the OWLs were, and how much more nastily exhausting the NEWTs must be than that. Remus and Rose did do their best to kick their shins under the table, but James and Sirius evaded them - and what hits they didn't evade, they bore with equanimity. If, however, a few minor jinxes happened to be thrown their way, well that was just in the nature of the Marauders and a perfectly natural thing that was too.

Charms class was the subject taken by the most sixth year students. Flitwick kept his class so fun and so educational that almost nobody had ever decided to drop the subject - nor had their grades been too low to keep them from the class. Which was why the corridor outside the Charms class was more than a little packed. James whistled around the corner to the Charms Corridor, fashionably late as ever.

"Hello all" he greeted brightly, taking up a position at the furthest end of the corridor from the rest of the students.

Peter hurried along in his wake, breathlessly waving while grumbling unpleasantness about James under his breath. It was entirely possible that the Marauder had in fact tripped poor Peter over before declaring a race to the Charms Corridor - which James of course had won. James grinned at him, clapping his back in both a friendly greeting and half-hearted apology for his tactics.

Remus shuffled along next, nose buried in an unmarked book (undoubtedly a textbook, possibly about Charms), not watching where he was going. Remarkably - or possibly as a testament to the sheer number of times he had wandered the corridors doing the exact same thing - Remus did not trip nor did he walk into any walls. He stopped, with unerring accuracy, next to James, where he leaned against the wall and carried on as before, lips moving soundlessly as he read.

Sirius, being the showoff that he was, loped down the corridor, singing some tune half under his breath. In another world, Rose was almost convinced that he would have put out an album, stardom would have suited him just as well as fighting puritanical, muggle-hating bastards. "Morning" he drawled, stopping in the middle of the corridor with his most charming smile on his face.

Marlene raised an eyebrow, unimpressed to say the least. "You're almost late" she snapped, mirroring the glare Lily was shooting at - surprise, surprise - James. "What in Merlin's name kept you?"

Sirius inclined his head, his smile morphing into a Marauder's smirk. "This and that, my dear Miss McKinnon. This and that."

"Or possibly nothing at all" Rose added, appearing apparently out of nowhere at Remus' side. "Maybe you'll simply never know."

Mary put her head in her hands and groaned. "It's an exam day, I can't be dealing with the Marauders today."

Rose wrinkled her nose, playfully offended. "We're the Marauders" she stated, askance. "You all can never deal with us. That's the whole point."

Emmeline mirrored Mary's groan, leaning into her side. "Oh, Godric help us. Now they're giving us Marauder logic too."

Remus didn't even glance up from his book as he replied "Our logic is undeniable."

For some reason, all the other students seemed relieved when Flitwick opened the door and let them all in. James and Sirius nodded to each other, seeming to take note of the alarming lack of faith the rest of their year had in them.

Remus, however, had his eyes more firmly set on the immediate, non-pranking future.

"Just our Charms theory and practicals to sit, and then we can have some lunch" he was saying, practically, to Peter. The rat animagus nodded mutely, but didn't look any less terrified at the prospect in front of them. Sixth year Charms were all non-verbal at the practical, and Peter didn't perform non-verbal spells well when he felt pressured. And when non-verbal spells didn't work, you tended to look like more than a bit of a pillock.

"And then we're splitting up again after lunch" Rose deadpanned, knowing it wouldn't help the situation at all but unable to resist. Especially when that frown appeared on Remus' face. The one that drew his brows together with a tiny crinkle at the middle, paired with the severe glint of disapproval within his eyes.

James broke away from whatever gripping mental prank planning conversation he was having with Sirius long enough to smirk wickedly. "Ah, that joyful occasion."

"Would that it could be now" Lily hissed over her shoulder, tossing her hair.

James heaved a wistful sigh. "My love, she is cruel."

Sirius mimed gagging behind James's back. "No, mate. Your love, she is uninterested."

"Mark my words, Padfoot" James announced, tone suggesting a dramatic silence ought to have just fallen. As it hadn't, he just crossed his arms over his robes and continued "Our children will be smart and beautiful. And they will be real."

"And Flobberworms will fly" Remus muttered in a rather carrying whisper. James snapped his head to face the werewolf, but was only met with a serenely smiling Remus, his face the perfect image angelic innocence. "Did I say something, Prongs?"

James harrumphed and threw himself into his chair, beginning what would definitely have been a good sulk had Flitwick not chosen that moment to send the exam papers flying towards them all.

Thank you for reading, as ever.

Reviews are always appreciated, if you have the time to leave one.