A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviewed! It's my favorite notification to pop up on my phone, and really keeps me motivated to keep churning this out.
Chapter Six
"I was thinking," James said casually, "That I might not go home for Christmas."
Sirius and Peter halted their game of chess, a match that Peter—to his great pride—currently led, his queen on a trail of hot pursuit after Sirius' king. Sirius looked hardly concerned at the state of the game, but made sure to offer several loud objections every time Peter took a piece—more to cheer his friend on rather than to truly complain, James thought. In contrast to their curious, expectant faces, Remus didn't bother to look up from his book, although he did raise his eyebrows, clearly listening.
"Did exams melt your brain?" Sirius asked.
"It could be a Time Turner issue," Peter suggested. "Like we're back in time, what, two weeks ago, when we all signed up to go home?"
Sirius prodded his remaining rook forward in a valiant attempt to close in on Peter's queen. "Could be both, if you think about it. I mean, what reason is there to change plans now?" Peter's knight swooped down to take the rook, and Sirius swore so spectacularly that half the common room turned to look at them.
"I have a few reasons, actually," James said, frowning, no longer quite so casual.
"And I want to hear them, Prongs, I really do," Sirius assured him, with all of his customary cheer. "Just wait a bit so Wormtail can put me out of my misery, will you? He has…" He considered the board carefully. "Well, I think he'll take it in four moves."
"Three," Peter corrected, and he kept his word, his face a delighted shade of pink.
"Good show, good show," Sirius said as his king threw his small, ivory crown at the feet of Peter's queen. He stood, stretched, and levitated his armchair next to James', where it had sat before he'd rousingly challenged Peter to a game of chess. They played regularly, and Peter won nearly half the time—and genuinely, James thought, because Sirius wasn't the type to throw a game, even for a friend. Still, Sirius didn't seem to mind losing, maybe because Peter so clearly liked winning. He threw himself back into his chair and leaned forward, towards James. "Go ahead, then. Make your case. Wait—Moony, put your book down. Don't you want to hear this?"
"Sure, just give me a minute. Almost done with this chapter."
James tilted his head to read the worn gold lettering along the book's spine. "Hippocrates' Help: 1001 Healing Charms," he read aloud. "Don't you know a lot already?"
"Sure, but nothing musculature. My hip hurt for ages last month after…" Remus glanced around the packed common room, choosing his words carefully, "After my furry little problem. It would be nice to be a little more prepared this time."
"You can't lay off one night?" Peter asked. "I don't know how you can even look at words right now. McGonagall and Flitwick giving exams on the same day—"
Remus turned a page and lowered his book, but didn't close it. "I'm on the real easy stuff, still, because you're right." He rubbed his eyes. With the full moon still a few nights away, he didn't yet look as sickly as he inevitably would, but still appeared drawn and tired. "Flitwick's was brutal."
"Christmas," James repeated impatiently, and as Remus smiled, he suddenly looked less worn down, and transformed again into a lad of seventeen. He gave James an exaggerated, well will you get on with it? gesture, as if James had kept him waiting the whole time.
"Are you about to do a pitch?" Sirius asked.
"Yes. Listen." James drew himself up, and held out three fingers. "I've got three reasons why I want to stay—and why I think you all should stay too. First—" here he ticked off a finger, "We've never been at Hogwarts for Christmas before. Don't you wonder what it's like?"
"Wildly festive, I'm sure, since Hagrid's grown too many trees." Peter nodded towards the massive Christmas across the room from them, just past the fireplace, which had appeared one morning, decked out in twinkling fairy lights and Gryffindor scarlet and gold. Similar trees dotted almost every area of the castle, with several in the Great Hall, and more scattered across classrooms, courtyards, the foyer, the Hospital Wing, even crammed into several corridors. Flitwick had decorated each tree differently, conjuring glossy, golden bubbles; real icicles; and color-changing baubles to hang from the branches. The sheer volume of trees had left some students wondering if Hagrid had cleared an entire patch of the Forbidden Forest to complete the job.
"The feast is supposed to be good too," James continued. "And think about it—we've never been here when the castle isn't packed to its full capacity. Do you know how easy it will be to get around at night? We can double and triple check that we haven't missed any passages for the map."
Sirius began to look interested, which didn't surprise James at all. He loved to sneak out of the common room at night, just for the sake of it, for the thrill of rule-breaking, and they'd done it seldom so far that year.
"Reason number two." James ticked off a second finger. "We can go to Hogsmeade. I bet I could talk McGonagall into letting us go during the day—"
"Has anyone ever talked McGonagall into anything?" Remus asked skeptically.
"—and if she says no, we can just go at night. Or we can do both. We've never been at Hogsmeade for Christmas time either."
"I didn't know you were so sentimental about Christmas, Prongs," Remus said, his skepticism even clearer.
James shrugged. "Well, it's our last one here. Seems kind of important, doesn't it? Who knows where we'll be next year."
"Oh, we'll be together," Sirius said, almost severely, like a warning.
"But it won't be here," James insisted. "And that'll make everything different."
James had felt scared, truly, the first day of seventh year. There was a certain finality in knowing that it was his last first day of school, ever, in his whole life. For six years, he'd been able to rely on the fact that, no matter what happened, there would be more time at Hogwarts, more time with his friends, just more time. Now, as each day melted away, time felt more and more like a precious commodity, each day one he would never get back.
But there was more to it than that, of course. "Third." He lowered his finger and leaned back, resting his arms on the sides of his chair. "Moony, your furry little problem comes to visit in four days. You said it yourself earlier this year—the visit is harder when you're at home. So why go through it there? If we stay, we can handle it here, like we always do."
Remus finally shut his book, then, and placed it on the forgotten chessboard. His eyes looked strangely bright, and the nearby fireplace cast odd, flickering shadows across the long, thin scar that ran across his left cheek, the only flaw on his otherwise handsome face. "I don't need everyone to change their plans because of me," he said, and James recognized immediately that his pride piqued at the thought.
"There are two other reasons, too," Sirius pointed out, and James knew then that he had come fully around on the plan.
"I can't." Peter looked truly put out. He seemed to understand, even though Sirius and Remus hadn't explicitly agreed to stay, that they would eventually. "Mum'll be alone if I'm not there, and I already told her I was coming."
James sat, silent for a moment, wracking his brain for a way that Peter could somehow avoid going home. Yet he only had to imagine Peter's mum—short, pale, and rather frail-looking, with a nervous smile and kind blue eyes—to understand that Peter could not disappoint her, even if he desperately wanted to. "It won't be the same," he finally said, truthfully. "Or, it wouldn't be the same," he corrected quickly. "If we stay, that is."
Peter sighed, and reached out to pull his onyx king piece from the chessboard, which he turned over and over again in his hands. The joy he'd gotten from trouncing Sirius had clearly gone, and he looked, as the other three watched him, clearly miserable. "It's fine," he said finally, as if convincing himself, and looked up to give them his best attempt at a smile. "No, really," he insisted as Remus began to interject. "If you want to stay, don't go home on my account. I mean, we wouldn't be together even if we all went home anyway, beside you two." He nodded at Sirius and James. "So stay and help Moony, and tell me about it when I get back. You'll be able to get under the Willow okay without me?"
"Yes, we can do that no problem. That's not why we want you to stick around, Wormtail," Sirius insisted, so sincerely that Peter again looked gratified.
"You're taking this better than I would, if you lot were to stay together and I had to leave," James told him quietly, impressed.
Peter smiled, and didn't voice what he—and the others, even James—thought: that that would never happen. James was the heart of their group, their unofficial leader, and they never deviated from his path.
"Look," Remus broke in, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. "That's all well and good, and thanks, Prongs, for suggesting it, and Wormtail, thanks going along with it, even though you have to go home."
"I'm also here," Sirius pointed out, but Remus ignored him.
"But I don't want to be the reason we all change our Christmas plans. I can handle the problem at home this month. It's not a big deal. Besides, I'm going to have to soon, aren't I? How many months do we have until we graduate?"
James stared at him, confused. "So?" It hit him. "Mate, obviously we're still going to get together for this after we graduate. It'll be easier then, really. We can just Apparate into Hogsmeade."
It hadn't occurred to him that he might not be the only one who worried about how much things would change come June.
Sirius gave a bark of a laugh. "Moony, you think we worked this hard to join you to just give it up in a few months?"
Remus said nothing, and a silence fell, one that lengthened with a certain sort of awkwardness that hadn't happened between the four of them for as long as James could recall.
"Prongs," Sirius said suddenly. He nodded towards where Lily had just emerged from the portrait hole, her face pink with chill. "Is she staying?"
"Yes." The question came so out of left field that James didn't understand the point, not until Sirius widened his eyes at him, just a fraction of a difference, and tipped his head almost unnoticeably towards Remus, who had begun to grin.
"Wait, is that really why you want to stay?" Remus asked, and relief flooded his features. He picked his book back up, rifling through the pages. "Ah." Somehow, he managed to make the single syllable speak volumes.
"It's not!" James insisted, and it wasn't, but Sirius kept looking at him in a way James entirely understood, his head still tipped towards Remus, as if to say let him have this. "Well—if there were a fourth reason to stay, for me, she might tip the scales. But it's not about that."
Somehow the defensiveness in his voice only made the case against him, not for him.
Peter chortled. "Okay, I feel better. If this is actually a case of you all staying so Prongs can chase after Evans, I won't miss anything. I've seen that script play out. I know how it goes."
"You could have just said so at the beginning," Remus added, and he now looked mollified, his pride no longer at stake.
As he watched Remus' mood change so instantly, James thought, for the first time, that Lily might have something right in her insistence that one person's embarrassment could often wipe out another's.
"Here, let's make sure she's staying, you know, just double-check." Sirius cupped a hand over his mouth. "Oi, Evans! C'mere!"
James fought the urge to hide his face in his hands.
Lily turned to look at them, mid-way through conversing with Marlene and Hestia Jones. She gave a visible, long-suffering sigh, muttered something to her friends, and then crossed the common room to them. "Yes?" she asked warily, unfastening and removing her cloak, which she draped over one arm.
"How are you?" Sirius asked jauntily. "Pull up a chair, won't you?"
James watched her hesitate, clearly only too aware—as he was—that more than a few sets of eyes watched the interaction, probably hoping for some post-exam entertainment in the form of one of his and her famous rows. "I'm just peachy, Black, thanks." She didn't summon a chair, but perched on the arm of Remus'. She turned his book over in his hands so she could examine the cover, a move performed easily, with great familiarity. "Hippocrates' Help," she read aloud, and then looked to Remus. "I've read this one. So has Hestia. It's alright, really, but she thinks it's basically worthless."
"Really?" Remus asked, intrigued. "Why?"
"She has this whole thing about how books like this separate the many different forms of healing—you know, stressing the importance of healing charms over, say, healing plants, which is where her interest really lies. She thinks Healers don't look towards Herbology nearly enough."
Peter groaned. "No more school talk, Evans, please, not tonight."
"Yeah, can you focus?" Sirius asked, waving a hand to direct her attention back to him.
"I might, if I knew what I was meant to focus on."
"We were planning to go home for Christmas, but now we're planning to stay," Remus told her. Despite his growing embarrassment, James couldn't conceal a delighted grin at Remus' casual confirmation of his plan. "We wondered if you were staying too."
"Yes. Potter knows that." As she turned to look at him, bemused, James felt heat begin to flood his chest.
They hadn't spoken in the handful of days that had passed since Slughorn's Christmas party, not really. James wasn't sure what to blame it on—the chaos of exams or some sort of newfound awkwardness after their near kiss, something he wasn't sure if she felt, but he definitely did. They had had their final prefect meeting of the term two evenings prior, and she had acted perfectly polite towards him, although brisk in her overall manner. He'd only found out, then, that she wasn't going home for Christmas, as she polled the prefects to find out who planned to stay at Hogwarts and could help with some limited patrol duty over the holiday. Only she and two of the Hufflepuff prefects planned to stay, and James had to admit—but to himself, only to himself—that hearing that she planned to spend Christmas in the castle (and, in addition, that Morton planned to go home) cinched a lot of his growing desire to stay as well.
"Right, I told them I knew that," James added quickly. "But we wondered if you knew who else was staying as well." It seemed a plausible enough lie, and better than explaining that Sirius had called her over to take the mickey out of him.
"Hestia's staying, but I think that's it. We figured it would just be us."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Evans," Sirius said, although he sounded anything but.
"All you ever do is disappoint me, so it's hardly a disappointment anymore, strangely enough." She smiled as she said it, and Sirius laughed, clearly pleased and ready to banter back, but she turned again to James. "Will you patrol a bit, then? I think most everyone plans to go home, so Filch should be able to take care of most of it." She paused, her expression suddenly skeptical. "Or at least I figured he could, but now that I know you four are staying…"
"Three," Peter corrected. He no longer sounded as glum as he had before, but clearly the idea still rankled. "I've got to go home. See my mum."
Lily nodded, and bit the corner of her lip briefly. "You should sit with Marlene on the train," she offered. She sounded completely blasé, and didn't even bother to look at him, instead watched the progress of her hands, still red with chill, as she began to unwind her long plait. "She'll be with Rooney, and I expect he and Morton and the other Ravenclaws will talk your ear off about Quidditch, try to figure out what Gryffindor's strategies are, all that. I'll tell her you plan to. She'll be pleased, I expect—it'll mean they won't lob all their questions at her."
Gratitude twisted with distaste in James' mouth. He hadn't even considered who Peter would sit with on the train, because they'd always taken it together, and he felt a rush of appreciation towards her for thinking of that, furthering the heat in his chest. But at the same time, hearing Morton's name—especially from her lips—left him with its usual stab of irritation.
Had she talked to him again, since Slughorn's party? James had wanted to ask her—wanted to ask her still—but didn't know if he should, or how she'd react.
Unashamed appreciation read all over Peter's face, but he tried to match her nonchalant tone. "I suppose I could do that, maybe feed them some disinformation," he said, and James marveled, briefly, at how Lily had managed to so clearly help him without seemingly an ounce of pity that could wound his pride. A glance at Sirius confirmed that he appeared to have the same thought, and also that James could learn something from it given his so recent dealings with Remus—although on the latter, James wondered if he was projecting a bit of his own thoughts onto Sirius' expression.
"Great." She stood up, shook her hair out, and glanced back at James as she did so. He reached up to rub his forehead, worried his admiration showed all over his face. "Patrol was a mess tonight," she said, and if she noticed his expression, she didn't look it. "I swear, mating season just explodes after end-of-term exams. I don't know why everyone thinks the Astronomy Tower is the best place to snog, it's so bloody cold. I checked it three times, and found couples there twice."
"Okay, tell me everything. This sounds like the fun part of being a prefect." Sirius leaned forward, intrigued.
"It's really not," Remus said mildly. James wondered, not for the first time, how his friend felt to have lost his prefect position when James became Head Boy. They had never discussed it. "You see a lot more of people than you'd want to."
"And it's never anyone you'd want to see, you know?" Lily mused.
Based on his own experience, having seen her, James firmly disagreed there.
"Evans!" Sirius sounded delightfully scandalized.
"What?" she asked without shame. "I saw a Hufflepuff's arse tonight, and I'd never thought about his arse before, and now that's all I'll think about when he's around. I will never look at him again."
"Who was it?" Sirius asked as they all began to laugh.
"Oh, she won't tell you," Remus said, and James noticed something fond, in his voice and face, as he looked up at Lily. "There's an unspoken prefect code. You never reveal who you see if you catch people at it. It just seems wrong, you know? No point in shaming anyone, letting that get all around."
"Although we used to tell each other all the time," Lily reminded him.
"Well, we kept finding the same people. Do you remember—"
Watching them, a taunting little voice whispered repeated Lily's words in James' ear. "When you're around someone constantly," she had said, floating in the water of the prefect's bathtub, "Some things just…happen."
But he knew better, right?
Lily cut Remus off. "Not in front of this lot. Prefect code!" she reminded him, laughing. She continued to smile as she looked back to James, who made himself return the gesture, if woodenly. "Just keep an eye out when you're on duty tomorrow. Everyone has one more day before break to get it out of their systems."
He wondered, no matter how hard he tried to banish the thought, if that included her.
"I've never caught anyone," he said, and then felt heat creep up the back of his neck as she gave him a look, one eyebrow raised, that he doubted anyone (except maybe Sirius) could read. He recognized the accusation in her expression. Except me, it seemed to say. He rushed on. "How many points did you take tonight?"
"Do you take more if you see their arses?" Peter asked.
"I've never considered it, Pettigrew, but I probably should. I didn't take any points tonight, just bawled them out a bit and sent them back to their common rooms. What?" she asked at Sirius' disbelieving noise."
"Just very magnanimous of you, that's all," he assured her innocently.
She shrugged. "I blame them less after exams. It's like a near-death experience for some people—"
"Sure felt like it," Peter muttered.
"—which of course means so many people just need to feel alive again afterwards. I only wish they'd pick a different place than the Astronomy Tower. I don't know how anyone gets their pants down. I was only there for maybe five minutes and I just about froze my tits off."
"They still look great," James said, which sent Sirius and Peter into hysterics. Remus, too, began to laugh, although he covered his face with his hand, but not before he shot James a look torn somewhere between exasperation and amusement. Even as he laughed, Peter pushed his chair back, out of the line of fire between where Lily stood and James sat, clearly anticipating some sort of furious retort, either verbally or magically.
But none came. "Thanks, Potter, you're such a gent," she said sarcastically, but her smile didn't falter, and there was no real acid in her voice. "Anyway, just keep an eye out tomorrow." She tossed them a half-wave and left them there, to return to Marlene and Hestia.
As his friends' laughter died down, James felt, rather than saw, that they turned to him, as he kept his eyes trained on Lily's retreating form. "Don't ask," he finally said after a few moments of expectant silence. "Couldn't tell you. Don't even understand it myself."
He looked back in time to see Remus nod slowly. "I can see why we're staying," he said simply, and James didn't ask after what he meant.
xxx
McGonagall seemed largely suspicious when James, Sirius, and Remus approached her with a request to stay at the castle over Christmas.
"Really?" she asked crossly, and she didn't bother to look up from grading. Her quill darted particularly savagely across the exam in front of her, in a way that made James hope, very fervently, that it didn't belong to him. "You couldn't have decided this weeks ago, when everyone else did? You expect me to believe that the three of you came to this decision—just now, one day before the train leaves!—with no mischief or mayhem in mind?"
"Professor—" Sirius began with an indignant air, but Remus cut him off.
"I actually thought it might be better for me to stay behind, Professor, all things considered," he said quietly. With the full moon nearing, his complexion had started to turn rather gray. "I had wanted to go home and see my family, and I really planned to, but after thinking about it, I realized it's easier for me here than it is at home at this time of month. And Sirius and James…well, they wanted to stay and support me as much as they could."
McGonagall inhaled sharply and looked up. Her piercing eyes landed on the three of them in turn, and then settled on Remus, where they softened to gentler than James had ever seen. "Oh." She cleared her throat, and then returned to her grading, but with much less vigor. "Of course, Lupin. Of course, the three of you are welcome to stay. I trust you will owl your parents, and I will inform the headmaster."
"Moony, that was brilliant!" Sirius hissed once they'd escaped her office. "I've never been prouder."
James tried to smother his laugh, so relieved it almost sounded hysterical. "A bit of a gamble, though, wasn't it? Did she already know that we know?"
Remus ducked his head rather sheepishly, but he couldn't hide his grin as well, which brightened his face past the haggard look he'd given McGonagall. "No, at least I hadn't told her. But she probably assumed that I'd told you all by this point, it's been almost seven years now. Besides," he added, as much to himself as to them, "I didn't tell her anything that wasn't true. Just…not all of the truth."
xxx
They waved Peter off the next day, who, to his credit, affected admirably high spirits.
"Don't send Padfoot under the Willow first," he cautioned with a grin. "Remember last time he tried? Full branch to the gut."
Sirius touched his stomach reminiscently, almost fondly. "Still hurts when I think about it."
"Pettigrew!" They turned to see Rooney gesturing from across the frozen grounds, Morton by his side and Marlene under his arm, with a cluster of other Ravenclaws behind them. "C'mon!" He sounded as friendly and open as if the idea for Peter to ride with them had originated with him, and not Lily. James felt a warm sense of gratitude, undeniably toward Lily, but increasingly towards Rooney as well.
Peter obviously felt it too. "Well, I'm off to give them a ton of fake Quidditch plays," he said, and he sounded as if he truly didn't mind the situation. James reached out to clap him on the back, and Peter returned the gesture before he trotted away.
"Better man than us," Sirius noted affectionately as they watched him go. "I'd be throwing a right fit if I were forced to sit in a compartment with those gits all the way to London."
"Nice of them to include him, though," Remus said firmly, fairly. "Lily didn't have to suggest it, and they didn't have to agree."
But James knew why they had. He had seen Marlene's face when she'd looked up at Rooney as he'd called over, clearly all the more smitten by his kindness, and knew Rooney must have felt her look too, and reveled in it. And Morton… He looked past Peter, even as Marlene and Rooney watched him approach, scanning the grounds. His gaze landed on the three of them, and James didn't bother to look away. He felt certain that Morton searched for Lily, hoping she'd come to say goodbye, so she could see that they'd done as she asked and included Peter.
Yet James knew—knew because he'd already looked at the milling masses of students exchanging hugs and calling out farewells—that she hadn't bothered to come outside.
xxx
The castle felt altogether different when they went back inside, which Sirius noted in a quieter voice than usual, as the absence of hundreds of pairs of feet and hundreds of voices now seemed to magnify his. They were used to seeing the castle this empty, but only at nighttime. Somehow, James thought, the silence felt more eerie in the daylight than it did in the dark.
But once they returned to the common room, aside from missing Peter, it began to feel like an ordinary full moon day. Remus took to his bed, intent on resting before his transformation, which always took a lot out of him. Full moons had the opposite effect on Sirius and James, who, James knew guiltily, enjoyed the experience without any of the physical or emotional pain Remus felt. Although too keyed up to sit still, he and Sirius still pulled their favorite armchairs near the fire and tried several rounds of Exploding Snap, before Sirius finally threw the cards on the floor, where several exploded at once. "Let's go to the Quidditch pitch, fly a bit," he suggested.
It didn't escape James' notice that he hadn't seen Lily and Hestia all morning or afternoon. He worried, briefly, that perhaps Lily had changed her mind on the holiday just as—perhaps just because—he had changed his, and had gotten on the train to go home after all. But he told himself, more firmly than he felt, that it wouldn't matter if she had gone, because he would have a good time with his mates regardless.
And that night, when he, Remus, and Sirius raced their animal forms around the snowy acres outside Hogsmeade, he realized that he believed it.
xxx
Still, James felt no small amount of pleasure the next morning when he came down the stairs in Gryffindor tower to see Lily and Hestia occupying the same chairs he and Sirius had sat in the day before. He stood still for a moment, glad that Remus and Sirius hadn't yet stirred from their lie-in, because he couldn't hide the grin that broke over his face.
He watched Lily struggle with the knitting needles in her hands, her eyes trained on the identical pair in Hestia's that moved with ease. "I hate doing things that I'm bad at!" she exclaimed, and her voice rose enough in frustration that James could hear her from the stairs.
"Spoken like someone who is really never bad at anything," he heard Hestia reply as he walked towards them, her voice much quieter, calmer. "Besides, you're not bad at this—you've never done it. So it doesn't count as something you're bad at."
"But I have knitted. Well, tried. My grandmother tried to teach me, but it just didn't take. Petunia ended up with all the lessons, because I was just a total lost cause and wanted to play outside with Snape." She looked up just in time to see James flinch as he approached. He often forgot—or tried to forget—that she and Snape had grown up together, especially after they had apparently stopped talking following their final, infamous row in fifth year. "I assume you were out of bed last night, weren't you?" she asked him irritably, tossing her knitting needles on the ground.
"What makes you say that?" he asked, summoning himself an armchair and sitting down without an invitation. He watched Hestia pick up Lily's discarded needles and hand them back to her patiently. "You alright, Jones?" She smiled at him pleasantly enough, and he thought then, as he had in years past, that she had always seemed to loathe him a bit less than Lily and Marlene did—unless she just she hid it better.
"Good, thanks. And you?" Her forehead puckered with legitimate curiosity.
"I assume you were out, and Hestia asks that way, because you're sporting a really spectacular black eye." Lily transfigured one of her knitting needles into a mirror and handed it to him. He could feel her watching him closely as he pulled at his eyelid, admiring the swollen purple bruise. "Out of bed at night, not up until eleven, visible injuries—who's your woman, Potter, and what did you do to make her so mad?" she asked, her voice light and airy, and Hestia laughed. Yet he thought she sounded, still, more inquisitive than usual—unless that was his own wishful thinking.
"Well, her name is Sirius, and she obviously gets jealous easily, so be careful." He transfigured the knitting needle back to its original form and handed it back to her, grinning as she laughed. "We were just mucking about last night, dueling, and he got a little too into it. I got him just as good, though," he added, unable to resist padding his own ego a bit, but also sure Sirius would feel just as sore as he did when he woke up. To his recollection, his black eye had actually come at Remus' hands, in one of those moments where Remus-as-Moony simply underestimated his own strength and had lunged at him, taking him unawares. But he doubted either Lily or Hestia would believe that Remus—gentle, human Remus, the only Remus they both knew—had it in him to wound anyone, even in a duel.
"All this in your dorm?" Hestia asked. She looked at Lily, doubtful. "We were out late, but…"
"Wait, where were you?" He rounded on Lily. "You get after me for being out of bed, when you're not in yours either?"
"I was patrolling, Potter," she said, now all sarcasm and rolled eyes. She picked her knitting needles back up and, at Hestia's sweet, encouraging smile, accepted a ball of pale green yard. "Hestia came with me. And before you ask, no, that doesn't mean you can let Black or Remus tag along from now on. Filch saw us and tried to bring us in for rule-breaking, but we talked our way out of it. I imagined he'd throw the three of you in detention for months if he saw you out at night, patrolling or not."
He stared. "How did you talk Filch out of it? I've never been able to get anything by him."
She shrugged. "Reminded him I was Head Girl, so I had reason to be out at night. And then Hestia asked if he knew either of our names, and of course he didn't—he just knows me on sight from patrols, and I don't know if he's ever so much as noticed Hestia." She smiled at her friend, clearly proud. "So then Hestia pointed out—but so sweetly, it would have sounded so much worse coming from me, because I just didn't have it in me to pull that sort of tone—that if he didn't know our names, that must mean we weren't the sort of students who would be out of bed to break the rules."
"And that worked? How?" Sirius' incredulous voice made all three of them jump; no one had seen him or Remus approach. James noted, a little bitterly, that neither of them looked visibly worse for the wear, besides Remus' slightly pale complexion. His bitterness only increased when Sirius took one look at his face and burst out laughing. "Sorry, mate, sorry!"
"I already told them about our duel," James explained quickly, and, to his credit, Sirius didn't so much as blink.
"I knew I got you good with a couple spells, but I didn't think I'd given you such a shiner!" he exclaimed, and James relaxed enough to laugh as soon as he heard Sirius name himself the culprit. "Did you tell them that Remus here gave us worst of it all?" he asked, clapping Remus on the back, who winced a little, which didn't escape Hestia's sharp eye.
"Are you all hurt?" she asked reproachfully.
Lily sighed, a long-suffering sound. "Of course they are," she said with exaggerated patience. "C'mon, you've met them. This is what they do."
"I suppose." Hestia set down her knitting needles, and Lily instantly followed suit. "We could go down to the greenhouse and get some Dittany. It would help your eye, Potter."
"So would a healing charm," Lily countered, and although no animosity colored her tone, she spoke in the voice of one continuing a long argument, as if they had had this disagreement many times. "And then we wouldn't have to go out in the cold."
"I'm actually curious about the Dittany," Remus said, and he had a look on his face that James recognized well, that of pure, academic interest. "Could we go now? We could compare their efficacy, Dittany against healing charms."
Sirius groaned. "Really? Really? This is how you want to spend your holiday, Remus? This?"
But Hestia looked pleased, and Lily not disinterested. "But what will we compare it to?" Lily asked. "We can't half-cure Potter's eye. Although," she added thoughtfully, "We could blacken the other."
At that, Remus grinned. "I'm sure we're wounded enough for comparisons, between the three of us."
xxx
Even from the beginning, James would realize later, the five of them came together easily that Christmas break, as if they had spent the past six years not simply passing in corridors, but as real friends.
He'd overlooked Hestia entirely for years, as, he realized belatedly, most people probably did. She seemed to lack the spark of her two closest friends, so much less fiery and outgoing than Lily and Marlene, that she paled a bit in comparison. Yet when he watched her explain the proper manner of harvesting Dittany to Remus, he realized, looking at their faces, that their personalities seemed to line up almost exact—thoughtful, mild, perhaps a bit more serious than the people they hung around with, and a bit beyond their years, in a way that made people forget them entirely next to the bright lights of their friends that burned around them. She and Remus seemed suitably matched, he thought for a moment or two. Then he watched the way her eyes brightened and her always-pink cheeks flushed still darker at Sirius' triumphant laugh as he connected a snowball with the back of James' head. James had turned to Lily, wondering if she recognized the look of infatuation of her friend's face, but found her promptly returning Sirius' fire, the back of her fiery red hair also powdered with a fine spray of snow.
After breaking for lunch, they spent much of the afternoon in the common room, drying off, getting warm, and healing.
Remus watched the most closely, clearly intrigued, as Lily reached into the cauldron of Essence of Dittany she'd just pulled off the fire to dampen a square of cloth. She knelt by James' side and dabbed it along the thick scratch that wrapped around his ribcage, her other hand cool against his skin where he'd pulled up his jumper, needlessly helping him hold it in place. She glanced up at him, all sweetness, although he recognized the look as immediately insincere the moment she read his expression and she pressed her lips together, stifling a smile.
James felt heat flood his face, the same heat that seemed to radiate from the rest of his body, as she dropped her head and her hair fell in front of her face. Nearby, Sirius began to snigger, which he managed to hide passably well in a rough, hacking cough.
"Merlin!" he said once the fit seemed to have passed. "Could someone drink Dittany, for their lungs? I feel like I might need to."
"You can drink Essence of Dittany, but it wouldn't help your lungs unless they're internally wounded, like bruised or bleeding," Hestia answered seriously, apparently missing the jest in his voice. "Look!" she exclaimed to Remus, pointing needlessly to the greenish smoke that rose from James' side. "That's how you can tell it's working. And when the smoke clears…"
When the smoke cleared, James reached to touch his side, and he felt only smooth, reknitted skin.
"You can also pour, rather than dab, which can help conserve the Essence," Hestia continued, and she sounded like a mini-instructor. "We're lucky here, that Hogwarts lets us use as much as we want of almost anything in the greenhouses, because Sprout is talented enough that she can grow just about anything and in larger quantities than most growers. But Dittany is actually pretty expensive to buy in Diagon Alley. Still, even though pouring often works better, it makes sense that Lily would dab it on Potter's wound, because of the way it wrapped around his ribcage. Because of the curve, you might miss the wound as you pour, so dabbing works just as well."
"Healing charms work just as well too," Lily pointed out cheekily as she rose to her feet. "And all you need is your wand, which these three gits had last night, so I'm not sure how you've waited this long to heal yourself, it's mind-boggling. Remus, I know you know some healing charms. I've seen where you've used them on yourself."
James wondered, of course, where on his body she had seen them.
"You don't really think about these things when you're in a duel," Sirius told her, saving Remus from the pressures of formulating a response.
"Don't look so surprised," James told Lily. "You said earlier that this is just what we do."
"That doesn't make it smart," she snapped back, and, with the last of his wounds healed, she pulled the hem of his jumper down harder than necessary, clearly annoyed. "Did you ever stop to think about what would happen if one of ou seriously got injured fighting a duel like this?
Do you know where you'd go or what you'd do?"
"Honestly? No."
"Of course not." She sighed, and then turned to Remus. "I can show you some of the more complicaated healing charms on Black, if you'd like. What are your bets he'll scream?"
And Sirius did scream, eventually, just for the theatrics of it, but not because it hurt in the least.
xxx
They set up games after dinner, with Sirius challenging Lily to chess while Hestia sat down to teach Remus how to play Bavarian Exploding Snap. She offered to teach James too, but he begged off, using his upcoming patrol duty as an excuse. He felt strangely content to lounge in a chair near Sirius and Lily, his legs draped over the chair's arm and his head leaned against the wingback.
Lily insisted that she didn't care much for wizard's chess, but set up a remarkably good defense as Sirius began taking her pieces, and soon captured enough that nearly as many of his sat in crumbled heaps across the board.
"Were you having me on?" he asked accusingly as her knight claimed one of his rooks. "Never play my arse—I play Pete at least three times a week and sometimes even he doesn't put up this kind of fight sometimes."
"She really rarely plays, at least that I've seen," Hestia defended loyally, and her she took her eyes off the table between her and Remus just long enough her enough for two of the cards in front of her to explode. "Ouch!" She brought singed fingertips to her lips, and then looked over to Lily, smiling behind her hand. "And she hates doing things she's bad at."
"Why were you knitting earlier?" James asked, remembering.
"It's calming and a good creative outlet," Hestia answered before Lily could speak. Her voice carried a certain sort of crispness that imparted that she'd said these words before, and many times.
"Both of which Hestia thinks I need in my life," Lily continued, and she made a smacking gestured towards Sirius, although her hands didn't come anywhere near him, as he moved his rook forward, laughing, and encroached on her king. Her eyes flickered to James and she smiled, and he felt a familiar flutter in his chest at the sight. "I told her that I have plenty of creative outlets—like, I find new ways to make you miserable all the time. That's creative."
He wasn't sure if she meant for the words to bring him pleasure, but they absolutely did.
"And he loves it," Sirius said breezily, and James resisted the urge to glare at his friend, because even if it was true, he didn't have to make it so known. "And we love it, too. Cheers, Evans, truly. Keeps him a bit humble. Check."
"Humble? Potter? Never." But she didn't sound like she meant it, not really, not in the way she might have in the past.
And so the long battle began, of Sirius chasing Lily's king around the board, taking a few final pieces just for show. When he finally cornered her, midway between a rook and his queen, she gave up and knocked her king over before he could throw down his crown, although not in bad humor. She did, however, shoot a mild stinging hex Sirius' way when he wouldn't stop laughing at his victory, in a way he never did when he beat Peter. He only yelped as the spell landed on his chest, but otherwise didn't acknowledge what she'd done, although he kept his gloating to a simple grin after that.
A short while later nine thirty rolled around, and James rose to his feet. "I have to go patrol." He paused, debating, his heart in his mouth. "Evans, d'you want to walk with me?" he asked, and he wished Sirius had the same tact as Remus, enough to look away from the scene.
She didn't move from where she'd settled on the common room's squishiest sofa after the chess game, curled up under a conjured blanket with her head on Hestia's lap. But she did smile, slow and amused, and the way she looked up at him seemed careful, almost searching. "No," she said simply, and then waited, watched, to see how he'd react. "But ask me again later, some other time." He knew from the way that she giggled—yes, giggled, the sound foreign to his ears—that she, too, recalled that she'd spoken the same words at Slughorn's Christmas party. And then she stretched, seemingly carelessly, and reengaged Hestia in their previous conversation about a Teen Witch Weekly article Hestia read from the magazine held over Lily's head.
He couldn't help a glance back at his friends before he left, just in time to see Remus mouth something at Sirius, his brow furrowed, while a grin all but split Sirius' face. Sirius caught his eye and winked, and James hurried out the portrait hole before he laugh out loud from the sheer buoyancy of his mood.
Patrol went smoothly, smoother than it had ever gone before, because it felt like no other soul besides his own walked Hogwarts' floors that night. James spent a good portion of the time prodding behind every ornamental tapestry he could find, his mission to double- and triple-check the castle for any overlooked passageways still fresh on his mind. He also spoke at length to the portrait of Mirabella Plunkett, who guarded a secret passage on the first-floor landing. She seemed pleased at the conversation, despite the hour (unlike many of the other portraits, who called for him to put out his wand even before he could approach), and promised to visit some of her friends' frames to find out if they knew of any shortcut he might have missed. Shortly thereafter, he came upon Professor McGonagall as she left the Transfiguration classroom, still dressed in her day robes and with her hair pulled back as severely as ever. When she saw him patrolling, she greeted him briskly, although James thought he saw a flash of pride on her face before she swept away.
All in all, it seemed a very successful night.
By the time he returned to the common room, the fire burned low in the grate, throwing off about as much light as the glowing Christmas tree, which left the empty room otherwise dark. Yet the moment he took a step forward, out of the portrait hole, his feet silent on the plush carpet, he heard voices, and he froze by instinct.
"I'm not asking you to tell me anything that you don't want to tell me." He recognized Lily's voice, although her voice lacked the firmness with which she usually spoke, and had taken on more soft, meaningful emotion than he'd ever heard before. "I just want you to be aware what it looks like, and to be careful, so no one else asks questions."
"I appreciate your concern." And James recognized Remus' voice, even as he craned his neck and saw the pair of them standing, alone, at the bottom of the dormitory stairs. "But I don't know what you're talking about."
"Fucking hell." And now a certain hardness reached her tone, as she grabbed Remus' arm when he turned to leave, and with enough force that she managed to pull him back into place. "Do you want me to stay it? Because I don't want to put the words in your mouth, but I will. Christ, Remus, I've been taking notes for you once a month in Arithmancy for, what, over three years now? Do you think I've never glanced at a calendar and realized what those dates add up to? I've seen the way that you look before you disappear, and how you look after. And no spells make those kinds of wounds, the ones we saw today, even though I tried to act like I believed your bullshit explanations for Hestia's sake. I'm not stupid."
James' stomach dropped.
"I never said—"
She cut him off, not with words, but by thrusting whatever she held in her hands into his unwilling arms. "Just take it, okay? I know there's no way you lot aren't injured aside from what you showed us. And I can teach you the charms, the healing spells you don't know—I would have ages ago, if you would have let me."
Remus stood, silent, and turned an object over in his hands. A bit of twinkling fairy light from the Christmas tree reflected off the side, and James recognized it as a small potions vial. He would have bet his brand new Cleansweep Five that it contained the rest of the Essence of Dittany. James hesitated, heart pounding, wondering when—no, if—he should interrupt.
"Okay," Remus said finally.
"Okay?"
"You can teach me." And now Remus' voice took on a professional, academic quality. "I know the basic spells for healing surface wounds, obviously, but there are other things I can't quite crack, like if there's something muscular—oh." He broke off as Lily launched herself into his arms, pressing her face just below his collarbone, her arms wrapped securely around his back and hands raised up to grip each of his shoulders. Remus put his own arms around her, and even as James felt his adrenaline turn to jealous ashes in his mouth, he had the presence of mind to note, gratefully, that the way Remus patted her hair looked rather stilted, awkward, as if he wasn't used to touching her.
"I trust that you're being careful, because I trust you." Now Lily looked up at him, her arms still tight around his back, and James wished he could see her face better, to see if her eyes took on that quality he couldn't get out of his mind after she'd looked at him with such fire in the prefect's bathroom. "But I can't not say it."
"I know. Go ahead." For the first time, Remus had a smile in his voice, clearly anticipating her next words.
"Just—be careful. Be careful yourself, and make sure those idiots are careful too," she said, and James knew she meant him and Sirius and probably Peter, even though she hadn't healed his injuries that day. "I'm not going to ask what role they play in this—"
"Thank you, really."
"—but I know you know the risks, and definitely better than I do. And Remus, I would help you, whatever you need, no questions asked." She let him go, stepped back, and pulled a hand through her long, loose hair. "You could have told me," she said, without a hint of reproach, as if she fully understood his reasoning, but still needed to speak her piece. "I assumed a long time ago, but it wasn't my place to ask. And it never changed anything. I've never thought of you any different."
Now Remus pulled her back in for a second hug, and James wished he could see the expression on his friend's face instead, which loomed even further in the shadows than Lily's. "I know," he said meaningfully, and left it at that.
"I'm to bed," Lily told him after a beat, slipping away from him. She took a couple steps up the stairs to the girls' dormitory, then hesitated. "You'll share that with Potter? And Black? she asked, gesturing to the bottle in his hands with a wave of her fingers. "I can brew more if you need."
Again, James heard, rather than saw, Remus' smile. "I will." And he started up his own stairs, skipping steps at twos and threes, back to his normal strength after the night before. "'Night, Lily."
"'Night."
James waited until he heard the faint click of two doors closing before he moved. Then he reached for the closest chair, sat down, and stared at his watch for a long, silent five minutes before he joined his friends upstairs.
Sirius still laid awake, propped up on his bed with a muggle motorcycle magazine, and Remus had just pulled back his own bedsheets, his eyes pink with exhaustion. Sirius tossed James the Essence of Dittany bottle as he walked in, which he caught without much effort.
"Evans gave me the rest," Remus explained. "Padfoot and I already used some. I think I bit your leg last night, didn't I?" he asked, entirely apologetic.
James nodded, and pulled up the leg of his jeans to pour a few drops of dittany on the bite, which vanished almost immediately. "No worries, mate," he said, and he meant it. He paused, waiting for Remus to share the rest of his conversation with Lily, but he didn't. "Nice of her," James finally added.
"It was," Remus replied, and said no more.
After they turned the lights out, James lay awake for a long time, listening to his friends snore.
xxx
"Potter, your requests are getting fairly ridiculous," McGonagall said curtly at breakfast the next morning. Irritation seemed to put her entirely off her eggs, and she pushed them away. "I let you and your friends stay on for Christmas, even though you only gave me less than twenty-four hours' notice. And now you're asking for what, exactly?"
"It's really not much, Professor," he said earnestly, rocking back on his heels, and she snorted. He'd polished his Head Boy badge that morning for the first time in ages, and he hoped she noticed that he wore it, even subconsciously, in case it made her trust him more. "Compared to most Hogsmeade visits, this would be fairly simple. There are only, what—" He glanced around the Great Hall, and counted eleven heads breakfasting at the mid-morning hour. "There must not be more than fifteen of us here altogether, I'd wager, and even less that are third year and above. Filch would have an easier time checking us all in and out—"
"Did it occur to you, Potter, that Mr. Filch also plans to enjoy his holiday?"
"Well, then I'm sure we'd be happy to take over whatever his normal duties are during Hogsmeade visits," Lily spoke up brightly, gesturing between the two of them. "We're Head Boy and Girl, after all. I think we've been trusted with more this term than this, since so few students would go."
James grinned at her, and when she caught the look, she smiled back. She had come up with the idea, when he'd floated the proposition that they ask McGonagall for a Hogsmeade visit, that they talk to her together, as a united front. "Think about it," she had said, tossing a card down in Exploding Snap. "Who is McGonagall more likely to listen to—me and you, or you by yourself? Or, god forbid, you and Black?"
Even Sirius had instantly conceded the point.
"That's hardly the point," McGonagall snapped. "We plan Hogsmeade visits in advance for a reason, Evans. There are issues at play that you don't understand."
"What are they, Professor? We can handle them—I'm sure of it." McGonagall opened her mouth crossly, but Lily plunged on. Something about the way she spoke seemed to switch subtly, and, although she didn't look sick or sound defeated, as Remus had when he'd asked for the three of them to stay over Christmas, there was something about her—the quality of her voice, the look on her face, something—that reminded James of that moment very much. "I think it would be a good morale booster. So many of us are here not because we don't want to go home for the holidays, but because we can't. Remus fell ill. Hestia's mum died last spring, and this is her first Christmas without her. My sister despises me enough for my magic that it's not worth the trouble it would cause for me to go home. Black's family—well, they're just evil, aren't they? Potter, when was the last time he even saw them? And that's just our table. The holidays are hard, Professor. It would be nice to forget that for a bit."
Even though James recognized that she spoke, ultimately, to play on McGonagall's sympathies enough to secure their visit, he could also tell that she meant it, just as Remus had meant his own reasoning for staying behind at Hogwarts for Christmas. She used the truth as she needed to, just as he had.
McGonagall could tell she meant it as well. Some of the tight lines around her mouth lessened, just a little. "Be that as it may—"
"I think it's a fine idea." Dumbledore had appeared sometime in the midst of Lily's monologue. He took up his seat in the middle of the table, just at the edge of his conversation, and removed his pointed purple hat. Lily took a step back, away from him, and almost collided with James in the process, and he understood why. Dumbledore radiated a powerful energy that neither of them felt entirely comfortable with or were used to. They saw the headmaster frequently at mealtimes, certainly, but from a distance. James couldn't recall a time he'd spoken to Dumbledore personally, aside from the last two years when Gryffindor had won the Quidditch cup, and briefly at the start of the term as Head Boy. "Come, Minerva, it's Christmas," Dumbledore continued indulgently, and he summoned a stack of toast his way with a silent, wandless wave, as if the impressive act came as naturally as blowing his nose. "You can hardly fault Ms. Evans and Mr. Potter for wishing to stretch their legs. And I have no doubt that they could make a valiant effort to get their on their own if they wished." His mouth twitched under his long moustache. "Perhaps we should be glad they're asking for official permission."
"That is a change of pace," McGonagall admitted reluctantly. She favored James with a ghost of a smile. "It was nice to see you out patrolling last night, Potter, rather than after hours for some nefarious purpose."
He grinned. "Cheers, Professor. Can we?" He had felt Lily's curious eyes on him at Dumbledore's suggestion that they could get to Hogsmeade on his own, and knew that she would pepper him with dozens of questions later. He had considered the prospect himself more than once, of simply taking one of the seven passageways out of Hogwarts and bypassing McGonagall completely, as he and his friends had done countless times before, instead of asking to go. But he knew that if he took a passageway to Hogsmeade he couldn't bring Lily along—it was one thing, after all, to show her an internal passageway or two, but quite another to give away routes in and out of the castle, such major secrets that he and his friends had guarded so closely for years. And he hated that leaving her behind bothered him as much as it did.
McGonagall looked to Dumbledore, who gave her expansive motion with one wizened hand, as if to say, as you wish. "Fine," she agreed reluctantly, and Lily fairly clapped her hands together in excitement. "Tomorrow, then, but only for the afternoon, and I expect you two to take care of everything. The village will be busy on Christmas Eve—make sure don't overlook a single student when you check everyone in or out."
When they walked back to Gryffindor tables, faces shining, Lily reached and gave James' arm a friendly squeeze, and the sudden pressure of her touch almost made him jump. "That was brilliant!" she breathed, her voice hushed.
"You were brilliant," he said, and he swore he could feel the heat of her hand even after she pulled away. "Sirius will love that he's officially now a sob story—truly, he will get a kick out of this." His glanced to his friend, and his gaze landed on Hestia, who looked particularly flushed seated next to him. James wanted to ask about her mother, then, even though he wasn't sure what he would say.
"We were brilliant—just such a good team." She sounded so genuinely pleased by this—and James liked the sound of it so much—that his mind immediately shifted off of Hestia and back to her, once again buzzing with happiness. She stopped him before they reached the earshot of their friends (their friends, he thought, because it increasingly seemed possible that things would shift in that direction), again with a hand on his arm. "Will you show me sometime? What Dumbledore was talking about—the ways out of the castle?" she asked. He recognized the yearning in her voice, the same feeling he had felt the night before, scouring the corridors for even more secret rooms and passages—the need for adventure, to explore. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard it from her before.
"If I can," he said finally, and, to his surprise, she seemed mollified by that.
xxx
Later that afternoon, as he, Sirius, and Remus prowled the castle in the never-ending quest for secrets to add to the Marauders Map, Remus dropped the previous night's bombshell.
"So, Lily knows about my furry little problem," he said, and James knew he proffered the information casually on purpose, although he wasn't sure if it was meant to keep him and Sirius calm, or wind them up. Either was possible.
"What?" Sirius stopped short in his tracks, wand still pressed against where he tapped suspiciously behind a lone set of armor on the second floor. He rounded on Remus, his face a mask of panic. "How?"
"She told him last night," James supplied, and met Remus' surprised look. "I overheard the end when I got back from patrol." There seemed little point trying to hide it. To his relief, Remus didn't look apologetic in the last, which made the entire conversation seem entirely above board, no matter James' various stabs of jealousy throughout. And it had been innocent, James knew, looking at his friend's face in the light of day. He wasn't sure why he hadn't seen it then.
"You could have stepped in, helped me out," Remus said, and he only sounded the faintest bit judgmental.
"Seemed important to let her go. I didn't know what to do, honestly."
"What did she say?" Sirius demanded, and now he looked between them, irate, obviously aware of the disadvantage in his lack of knowledge.
"A lot of stuff. I mean, we never said the word…" Remus trailed off, and looked around the deserted corridor, before continuing, lowering his voice to speak the single word, "Werewolf. I think she wanted me to say it, if either of us. But she pointed out all the classes I've missed, especially because she takes notes for me in Arithmancy every month, even though I've never asked her to. And she knew we weren't wounded in a duel." He patted James' shoulder. "It was a good try though, mate."
James felt a twinge of guilt somewhere between his shoulders. "If I hadn't shown up with a black eye, she probably wouldn't have said anything."
Remus shrugged, and James realized, then, that his casual attitude was not for show—he genuinely felt comfortable with the idea that Lily knew about his lycanthropy. "Don't worry about it. She said—well, you heard her, you were there." He looked to Sirius instead, whose mouth still worked furiously, though silently. "She said that she'd known for a while, but it wasn't her place to ask. That's why she gave me the rest of the Dittany—she figured we probably still needed it, or we maybe that we would next month."
"I can't believe you're both so calm about this," Sirius said with angry disbelief. "How long have we tried to keep this under wraps? Did you tell her, then? About the other three of us?"
"Of course not." For the first time, Remus lost some of his cool. "This was my issue to tell, and yours is yours. I wouldn't do that, Padfoot."
Sirius scoffed, clearly uncomforted. "Your bird needs to wind her neck in, mate," he said to James. "There's no reason for her to get involved in any of this. If she tells anyone—"
"She won't," James interrupted, and Sirius scoffed again. It had begun to sound like a habit.
"I really don't think she will," Remus agreed, and now he sounded mild again, his usual self.
"Right. I expect this from Prongs, because he's always been lovesick, but really, Moony? You too? You don't think she'll tell McKinnon? Or Jones? You really think that?" Sirius looked between their faces, and recognized that, yes, they really did. He swore spectacularly, turned on his heel, and left.
Remus grabbed James' shirt to stop him from following. "Let him go. He'll come around."
James sighed and pushed his glasses up to rub his face. "He didn't have to act like such a tosser," he said, his voice muffled behind his hand.
"Nah, I think he did. C'mon, we might as well go up to the common room." James followed Remus as he led them towards the Grand Staircase. "He's worried, and just doesn't know how to express it. But has he ever?" He looked sideways at James. "It wasn't actually even about Lily, you know."
"I know. But I didn't like it, all the same."
"'Course. Wouldn't expect you to." They climbed the first flight of stairs in silence before Remus spoke again. "I meant what I said, you know. I really don't think she'll say anything."
"Yeah, I don't either. She's good at keeping secrets." James caught the way Remus' expression changed, and asked one of the questions that had been plaguing him for months. "Did you know? About her and Morton?"
"What about—oh. Oh." Remus had a way, James thought dully, of making a single syllable speak more volumes than most people's sentences. "I—well, I suspected, sometime late fifth year. But I didn't know, no."
"And you never—"
"Told you? No." He sighed as James looked at him accusingly. "What was I going to say, Prongs? That I thought something was going on, when I knew you'd go off your head like you did with Greg Gimble?" James flinched, but if Remus noticed, he ignored it. "And I had no proof. It was never anything overt, just—these little things, here and there. On top of that, they patrolled together so often, I knew there was no way it wasn't rigged somehow. But I didn't know they were—"
"Shagging?" James asked harshly, and now it was Remus' turn to flinch. He looked truly horrified, James noted with satisfaction, appreciating the company to his misery.
"They—no, Prongs, I didn't know that. Bloody hell, I thought they probably snuck off to snog, because lots of prefects did, but—"
"And you two never did?" The words flew out before James could stop them.
Remus stopped midway through the fourth-floor staircase, each foot on two separate steps. "What, me and Lily?" His disbelief transformed, slowly, to laughter, and he began to chuckle, seemingly against his wishes. "No. Never. C'mon, you know better."
James couldn't muster up the energy to feel so much as stupid or annoyed. "As she likes to point out, I don't really know her."
"Well, you know me."
There it came—the energy for emotion he thought he couldn't muster, and the feeling was feeling guilt. "Moony—" he began awkwardly, but Remus waved his hand, dismissing the moment, and began to climb again.
"Don't worry about it, mate. I get it. She does this to you."
"I just—she's so under my skin. I can never read her. I never know what she's thinking, and she does things that—"
Remus stopped on the fifth floor, and pulled James off the stairs and around the corner, into the relative privacy of the empty fifth-floor corridor, which felt much less exposed than the stairwell. "Do you want to know what I think? As someone who knows her better, and who has a lot more objectivity than you?" he asked, and James gave him a weary go ahead motion. "I think she likes you, Prongs, in a way that I didn't think possible coming into this year."
James stared. He opened and closed his mouth several times, not sure, each time, what he meant to say. "Oh," he finally settled on, but the word sounded empty, devoid of meaning, unlike Remus' from a moment ago.
"I didn't even see it before break, but it was there yesterday. She's nice to you now, and she laughs at your jokes, and, yeah, she nettles you, that's just her way, that's how she banters."
"She acts like that towards you too. And Padfoot."
Remus gave him a look that rang with pity. "You're really thick if you believe that. Really. But besides, Padfoot has seen it too. After you went on patrol last night, I asked him about it, and he said that it had been happening since last month at Slughorn's dinner party, and even more at his Christmas party."
James waited, tense, worried about what else Sirius might have said—because he knew so much, so much that James knew would make Remus look at him with the same sort of furious disappointment he'd aimed towards Sirius after he'd sent Snape under the Whomping Willow their fifth year. And there were things Sirius didn't know, still, despite everything that he did—that James had taken Lily to the kitchens, for example, or about their long talk in the prefect's bathroom after Slughorn's party, things James had kept close to his chest. He knew Remus wouldn't look on those later memories as favorably as he did, but would see them as fruit of the poisonous tree, as they had come about only because of James' unintentional—and then very intentional—spying on Lily with Morton.
But the look from Remus never came, and James smiled as much from relief as from a burgeoning sense of hope at Remus' words. "It has been different," he admitted, which was as truthful a representation as he could give of the very good, and very bad, interactions he'd had with her, and Remus beamed in response.
"Knew it. Congratulations, mate. I really didn't think it could be done." He led them back out to the staircase, and they resumed their climb. "Just don't drive her off now. You know how she is—if you try to stick it on her too strongly, she'll bolt."
"Yeah, she's warned me off that more than once. But also, there's…her and Morton."
"Wait, really? Still? They're still…" Remus trailed off, and his mouth twisted in distaste. "I didn't expect that."
"You don't know the half of it," James muttered, and Remus turned to look at him, his face suddenly sharp.
"Did she tell you?"
"Tell me what?"
"That they're dating?"
"Shagging," James corrected, and he felt a certain about of vindication at Remus' look of surprise, which had matched his own when he first heard the news. "Just shagging, she says. And…she kind of told me. It's complicated."
Remus looked as if he very much wanted to ask further questions, but finally just shrugged. "Huh. Well, I wouldn't worry about it."
"But they've been doing this, what, for over a year?"
"So?" They hung back, the Fat Lady now in their sights, but far enough away she couldn't overhear them, in case she wasn't asleep as she looked. "If she says that's all it is, that's probably all it is. I don't know why she'd lie, and, besides, she's dated other blokes, and she's never hidden it like she has this. Sometimes a shag is just a shag." He said this as if he knew, and James wondered, for a wild moment, if Remus had sneaked off patrol with a female prefect of his own once or twice. But Remus smiled, patted his shoulder, and started towards the Fat Lady. "C'mon, let's see if Padfoot is back."
He wasn't, not then, but when he reappeared to join them at dinner, his mood had entirely changed, and he had turned once again into his usual cheerful self.
After dinner, he challenged Lily to another round of chess, and when she demurred, suggested Exploding Snap. He battled her with such gusto that she threw her arms in triumph when she won their tournament, eking out three victories over his two, and seemed pleased when he acted altogether put out. James knew, when Sirius glanced at him and Remus, with a hint of a grin, that his performance was as much an apology to them as it had been to her, even though she had remained oblivious to their quarrel.