Sirius was happy during every moment he spent at the Potters in the last days off of school. His time with only James was always a little different than the time he spent with all of his friends. Living in the house together, they were like brothers, hardly having to talk to each other and simply understanding what was on each other's minds even as they relaxed in total silence. Whenever they were at Hogwarts with Remus, Peter, and Lily, this kind of closeness always ended up pacified in the midst of the unneeded chatter and noise required for communication between five different individuals. But during the time they were at James's house and were out all day playing practical jokes on strangers and up all night watching bad horror movies, Sirius's relationship with James was clearly defined as one of the only true family ties he had.
But in a very mean and seizing way, the time to go back to school eventually crept up on them. James was a little more happy to be going back than Sirius was, and Sirius knew exactly why but wasn't in high enough spirits to tease him about it.
Mr. and Mrs. Potter walked them up to the passageway into Platform Nine and Three Quarters, helping them carry their things. James kissed his mother and then said, "Dad, can I talk to you over there for a moment?" He took him aside just out of earshot of Sirius and his mother.
"Er...I was just wondering...Once the school year's over, is it okay if Sirius comes home with us?" he asked.
His dad shrugged. "Of course. But if he's going to stay with us right afterward, won't he-"
"No, I don't mean for a visit. I mean for good."
His expression became concerned. "Well, I don't know, James. Your mum and I have no legal right to take him in, if you're saying that he's run away or something like that."
"No, they kicked him out...And he ran away. It's kind of a combination of both, I don't know. But they'd never let him come back. They've probably forgotten about him already."
His dad looked over his shoulder at Sirius, who was conversing with a girl from school who had just come up beside him and James's mother. "Alright. It'll work out somehow. While you're still at school we'll have time to buy him some things we'll need if we're to have another son around for a while. He can't be sleeping on your floor all the time."
James nodded, and then his dad patted him on the shoulder. "You stay out of trouble, you hear?"
With that James bounded back over to his friend, and his dad followed behind him and said, "Hey, Sirius, I've got something for you."
Sirius looked up at him, caught off guard. "For me?"
"Yeah." He handed Sirius a grocery bag. "They're all your favorites, I believe."
Inside the bag was a pile of at least a dozen record albums. Sirius peered into it and the Beach Boys' faces were looking up at him on the top of the stack.
"You're not giving these to me?" he questioned in a state of shock.
"Why not? You use them more than I do," he said. "And James told me you have a record player now, but nothing to play on it yet."
"Yeah, but..."
"Oh, take it and get out of here before I think I'll miss them and change my mind."
That made Sirius agree to the idea much faster. "Mr. P...Thanks." And he turned and said to James, "Let's get out of here."
They ran through the wall with all of their things and in seconds were standing before the gleaming Hogwarts Express and surrounded by other students about to get on.
"Padfoot!" someone called immediately. "Prongs! Hey!"
Peter was hustling over to them, weighed down by the bulging bag over his shoulder. Remus and a girl from Hufflepuff had been standing with him, and the both of them quietly followed Peter at a more relaxed speed.
"Wormtail," Sirius said as he reached them. "I can see you had a generous Christmas."
"Why?"
"You've been getting into the sweets, obviously."
"I always look like this."
"...Oh," Sirius said, getting a disapproving shove from James who knew he was teasing him on purpose.
"Hello, everyone," Remus said tiredly. "Let's not talk about Christmas. I'm going into a post-holiday winter depression."
The girl standing with him laughed gently. She was a seventh year girl that Remus had started talking to often this year, whose name was Madelin, not Matilda as Sirius had unobservantly stated in his letter to James. She was more than a head shorter than Remus and had a thin figure that made her about as harmless-looking as him. She wasn't strikingly beautiful but had rich brown hair that went down to her waist and cute freckles under her eyes. Her hair was in one long braid down her back and her neck was completely hidden in a furry green scarf.
"Hey!" Sirius said, noticing her, and outstretched his hand for her to shake. She did unsurely, as if suspecting with good reason that he wasn't being sincere. "I don't think we've ever been introduced. I'm Sirius. But you can call me Snuffles."
Peter and James giggled quietly, trying to contain themselves. Madelin looked a little uncomfortable, as if feeling made fun of.
"Guys, cut it out," Remus said with the same tiredness still in his voice.
"Okay, sorry," Sirius said to her. "I know I can seem like a prat, but I'm really nice and...cuddly, really..."
James and Peter couldn't help but start laughing again, looking like they wanted to hit Sirius for causing them to. They didn't get the chance to before a musical voice behind them said, "Hi, guys."
Lily had a duffel bag over her shoulder and a small suitcase. As the group made room for her to stand in the circle with everyone, a head poked out of her unzipped bag. It belonged to a cat with long white fur and powdery blue eyes.
"Well, hello, Galadriel," James said, reaching out to pet her cat which he seldom encountered. "How are you?"
"She's miserable," Lily said. "She hates sitting in here...No, Gal, you can't get out yet," she said as the cat struggled to crawl out for what obviously wasn't the first time. "Just take a nap or something."
At that moment a Ravenclaw girl named Johanna Silversmith walked by and said with a flirtatious voice, "Hi, Sirius."
"Hey, Johanna," he said back with a wave to her and a wink, immediately sinking to the same level of shallow talk.
"Er...Padfoot?" Remus asked once she was gone. "I thought you were with Victoria Knightley last time I checked."
"Yeah, so?"
Remus, along with a couple others present, rolled his eyes.
"Oh, by the way, thanks for your Christmas present," Sirius said. "You've officially revealed the wrongs of my dating behavior to my cousin."
"I'm disappointed," he said. "I hoped it would reveal the wrongs of your dating behavior to you."
Almost everyone laughed, even though not all of them understood what they were talking about.
"Oh, Madelin. Hi," Lily said, noticing her for the first time and sounding pleasantly surprised to see her with them. "Are you going to sit with us on the train?"
"Uh, have you counted how many people are here?" Sirius interfered. "Maybe I'm just mistaken, but there's six of - Ow! Dammit!" he yelled as James stomped on his foot.
"Actually, a few of my friends are already saving me a seat," Madelin said politely. "In fact, I better go join them. See you later," she said, directing her last comment at Remus in particular.
"We better go, too," Remus said to everyone, picking up his suitcase.
"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "We've got to hurry before all the compartments are taken."
Sirius, Remus, and Peter had rushed away toward the train before James and Lily could pick up all of their things. Since they now knew the others would save seats for them, they didn't need to be in any hurry.
James picked up his suitcase and Lily held hers with the arm that her duffel bag was over so that she had one free hand. After they rose from bending over to pick up their things, their eyes met and stayed locked that way, as unmovable as doors facing each other at opposite ends of a room.
"Hi," she said finally. "...How was your Christmas?"
"It was good," he answered. For all of the dull details didn't matter now that he was looking at her again. "What about yours?"
She nodded. "Fine." There was a brief pause of silence, and then she said, "I missed you."
He smiled. In a slow and undetectable movement their hands met in the space between them and clasped. They walked off like this toward the train, in a very quiet and unseen way.
In the compartment that they claimed, Sirius took a window seat next to Lily and James, and Peter and Remus sat facing them on the other side. Sirius had hardly sat down before he was looking through the records Mr. Potter had given him as eagerly as a kid digging into his bag of Halloween candy after trick-or-treating. Lily, mildly interested since she recognized most of the bands, looked briefly at each one after Sirius did as a stack accumulated on the seat in between the two of them. After the train had been moving for twenty minutes, Sirius was impatient to get something to eat and stood up to go hunt down the candy cart. He was barely out the door when a Gryffindor girl with long, very straight blond hair and a curvy body shape was standing before him. It was Victoria Knightley.
"Sirius, you didn't say hi to me outside the train," she said.
Sirius made a smooth transition from being surprised to being his nice self he always was around pretty females. "Well Vic, if you were close by, I didn't see you," he said in a kind of glazed, fake voice that one uses when babying a pet or a child.
Lily crossed her arms and shook her head as everyone inside the compartment heard their conversation. The others laughed quietly.
"I was hoping you missed me a little over the holidays," Victoria said with a pout.
"Sure I missed you, babydoll," Sirius said off-handedly, obviously without even thinking about whether it was true. "Hey, what do you say I buy you a chocolate frog?"
"Aw, will you really?"
Continuing to talk in this way, they walked off down the train and out of earshot of everyone in the compartment.
"I give up," Remus said, who now had his face in a newspaper. "The day Sirius gets in a mature relationship, I think we're all doomed."
They laughed.
Peter and Remus got into a conversation about one of the articles in the paper. James wasted little time while Sirius was away before turning to Lily, who was currently looking at the songs on the back of a Simon and Garfunkel album. "Oh, I should tell you. You might not want to ask Sirius anything about how his holiday went."
Remus looked up. "What?"
"Things went really bad at the big family reunion. I can't explain it all now. But he actually got fed up and left them this time."
"You mean he ran away?" Lily asked with raising concern.
"Basically, yes. He stayed at my house the rest of the time. He's not in the brightest mood right now."
"No kidding," Peter said. "And I actually thought he was feeling pretty good today."
"Probably because he's trying too hard to hide it," Remus said.
When Sirius returned, he had a handful of goodies and looked as exhausted as someone might look after walking a dog that pulled them along at a run the whole time.
"Padfoot, don't you ever fear that your karma is going to get back around to you one of these days and bite you back when you least expect it?" James asked out of genuine curiosity as he helped himself to one of his Cauldron Cakes.
"What?" Sirius asked cluelessly. "I bought her chocolate, what else do you want me to do?"
Lily sighed. He stood with his arms open questioningly, obviously expecting an actual answer, but they all knew he was beyond help.
A while later, Sirius had just sat down when a few Slytherin students passed their compartment. Nobody looked up or acknowledged it in any uncasual way until someone at the back of the group stopped abruptly at the sight of them. Severus Snapes stick-figure shape and slumped posture gave him away at once; they all saw him out of the corners of their eyes and noticed. It was clear that he had not purposely walked by them and not even really meant to stop, but had just been alarmed. He and the group sitting in the compartment avoided each other with such determination that a chance encounter like this brought an unpleasant surprise.
The five stared up at him for a moment in silence, but interlaced in the silence was a simmering dislike, and even among some of them, a noiselessy boiling hatred. It was only Lily whose emotions seemed cool, and when she was the one to speak there was even a trace of regret and sadness in her voice.
"Hello, Severus."
It was very different than it used to be, like it would have been less than a year ago, even though the words were no different than what she would have said then. Lily's greeting seemed to wake up Snape in a way so that he realized at last that he was standing there, and almost immediately he looked forward again and kept walking.
Sirius was now the only one who wasn't looking at the empty space where Snape had stood seconds ago. Lily turned to him and there was suddenly a hole that had to be filled by saying something, but she hadn't said anything to fill it ever since the hole had been made last spring when he did the thing that nobody would talk about now.
Quietly and gently, Lily began, "Sirius..."
"Don't, Lily," he said. "I know what you're going to say anyway. I don't need you to scold me like-"
"No, Sirius, listen," she said, still quietly even though he had already broken any kind of calmness present. "Now, of course I think that was a horrible thing for you to do, and he didn't deserve it. But I could never bring myself to actually say that to you. I have no right to blame you like that when I haven't had to live with those kinds of people my entire life."
Sirius was looking down so that no one saw his expression clearly, but there was still somehow a perceptible change in him when she said that.
"I mean...have you thought about why you would do something like that?" Lily asked him.
James was looking forward and couldn't see Sirius, but from the kind of silence he was giving he knew that they should all stop staring at him now and leave him alone. He reached to the side and touched Lily's arm so that she turned away, and as soon as she looked at James she got the message. Then Peter and Remus did, too. It took a while for them to start talking normally again, and for a few minutes they just looked at the moving land outside the window, but eventually they forgot all about Snape standing there and it was as if it had never bothered them at all.