A/N: So here's the next chapter! I didn't want to make it too long so I'm really sorry if it got weirdly cut off at the end (I don't so though). Anyway as before I'd really appreciate your reviews, bad and good!

I have great idea for a prank! Marauders meeting after dinner.
-Prongs

Oh shit, looks like you'll have to limit your eating habits for the night, Wormie.
-Padfoot

Sirius, please, I am really begging you, STOP CALLING ME WORMIE.
-WormTAIL

Will you stay focused on the class, I am really begging you lot. Some of us are trying to study.
-M.

Moony, you're bringing us all down with your compulsive studying disorder.
-Padfoot

If I did not know any better I would think that you've picked up a book and actually read something instead of throwing it around the room, trying to make it fly.
-M.

McGoggles is giving us the eye… lay low or we'll be in detention before we can say accio.
-Wormtail

You're paranoia is increasing, Wormie, you should really see Madam Pomfrey.
-Prongs

And since when exactly are you hold responsible for the thing we do? Even poor Moony gets in more trouble than you, and that is kind of sad if you think about it.
-Padfoot

But unfortunately for the quartet McGonagall was actually looking at them with a deathly stare. Which meant, Peter had been right. Peter gave Sirius his I-told-you-so look which Sirius had a great despise on, thank god he didn't have to see it that often.

"Mr. Potter, is there anything you want to share with the rest of the class?" She asked coolly. James set up his best poker face and a pair of oddly believable innocent eyes. Peter giggled beside James, out of pure stress. Sirius kicked Peter's right leg so the shorter boy gasped before shutting up.

"No, Professor, thank you for the concerns though, we'll let you know if we want to share anything with you," McGonagall was not pleased. Her mouth was a thin line and her emerald, sharp eyes looked skeptically at the four boys who sat together, as usual, at the back of the classroom.

"Mr. Potter, I am warning you. Watch your tongue or Filch will have some company feeding the Giant Squid tomorrow."

"But, Professor, tomorrow is Saturday,"

"Exactly." And then the witch stormed off, leaving all four of them with chills running down their back.

"That woman…" Sirius said, awed as they rushed out of Transfiguration. "…Has not gotten laid for a long time," he finished. Peter answered by pretending to puke.

"That's a disturbing thought, Padfoot, even for you," Remus sighed.

"Nonsense! I've come up with so much worse, you're exaggerating," Sirius said with a dramatic wave.

"Why do they even feed the Giant Squid?"

"Yeah, that's really the big question, Pete," James smiled at Peter who looked rather upset. James connected his fright of the Giant Squid to his phobia of water. When they became Animagi in order to accompany Remus in his transformations they got to know something about Peter that nobody had even thought of before as an option. Peter's biggest fear was that he would turn into something that would need to breath underwater. That really would be the most useless outcome that James could think of.

"You don't think that they'd actually let it die? Firstly, it can't live on its own anymore because a) it's so giant that it has almost exterminated all the deep-fish is the Black Lake and b) because it's remarkably old for a Squid," Remus said slowly, as if he were talking to a child. But as usual, his eyes flickered with nothing but kindness. His middle name should've been Nice, James observed to himself.

"Your love for animals is endless, Moony. It's only a Squid, and a giant one too for that matter," Sirius said jokingly to Remus.

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," Remus answered darkly and Sirius just laughed and punched him hard on the shoulder, but as usual Remus didn't seem to feel a thing. Imagine how useful it could be to have all this wolf specialties, he made a note to try to make more use of Remus in their future pranks. Who would've thought that it would be mid September and the furthest they'd gone was dyeing Snivellius' eyebrows to very light shade of pink, and that almost didn't even count as a prank, just their daily routine. But that was about to change, James thought with a wide grin on his face.

"No, simply no," to James' surprise it was Remus who spoke up first.

"I'll take Remus' side on this one, mate, it's an horrible idea,"

"Yeah… I kind of agree with the other two, I think…" James was stunned beyond words. Never in his five-years friendship with Sirius had he said his ideas were horrible. No matter how stupid, spontaneous or how unmanageable the task seemed to be, he could always count on Sirius to be jumping up and down like an overly excited puppy. And what concerned Peter, James couldn't recall that he'd ever even so much as disagreed with him.

"Can you imagine how furious she'll be? It will be murderous!" Sirius gasped, dramatically throwing his hands up in the air, breathing heavily like he didn't have enough oxygen to breath.

"But…" James began, not willing to give up so easily.

"James, I'm not accepting that we will transfigure Lily's hair into hay," Remus said calmly as his tawny hair fell so close to his eyes that James wondered how he could see. Sirius smirked at the thought of Lily's red hair all pointy and straw looking. "Nor the fourteen other ideas that require Lily Evans' presence." Remus finished. James sighed heavily and fixed his glasses on his nose. He would have to be far more creative than this, he thought. They wouldn't get fooled so easily into shoving her out of their lives. He knew a lost battle when he met one so he gave up, for now.

"Peter you eat too damn loudly," Sirius groaned, "I can't even hear the voices inside my head anymore! It's freaking me out." Remus looked up from his book, New Theory of Numerology, which he was reading for pleasure. Sirius moaned on his bed, his head hanging off the bed. "I am booooored! Can we please do something?"

"Am I the only one who's hungry?"

"Oh please, Pete, you have to cut your dinner short one time and you're almost dying from withdrawal symptoms already," Peter blushed so he looked like a red balloon with some mousy brown mop laying on top of it.

James didn't really hear much more of the conversation. He was somewhere between waking and sleeping, it felt really surreal. He felt like he couldn't move a leg or even just a toe. It was like he was forced to think. Think about all the things he'd been avoiding since he came back to Hogwarts; he was aware of the fact that he used the school as an excuse from not acknowledging what was going on inside his head. Like his own body was trapping him and holding him as a hostage. The worst part to James was not that he felt bad and that he felt guilty and that he felt he was failing on so many levels. It was that Sirius acted like nothing ever happened, and James just knew that it was just an act. An act so Sirius could cope with the world, cope with his best mate.

Yes, of course the Marauders were a combination of four, but everyone could see that James and Sirius shared a different bond with each other. They were like brothers, fuck it, Sirius was James' brother in every sense of the bloody word. He felt more connected with him than every single of his relatives (which were not actually that many, but that's not the point). It didn't matter that they were not related by blood, and it didn't matter that Sirius' family hated his guts.

James could not look at Sirius anymore without having his heart filled with deep sorrow. He couldn't look at Sirius' face without instantly focus on the scar, still very visible, over his left eyebrow. Sirius probably thought that his dark curls, which he let grow a bit longer and wilder than was consider suitable for a Black, fully obscure the wound. But the damn scar was too obvious to James to handle anymore. He didn't know how to handle this thing anymore. Firstly, he couldn't even talk about it. He couldn't get it off his chest or get other's opinions on how in the world he could settle with thing as they were. Sirius never actually told him: "Oh and by the way, don't tell the others." But James could sense it. If Sirius wouldn't talk about it, or even show that he remembered any of it, he obviously didn't want James to bring the subject up.

He couldn't feel his body anymore, it was like a detached object to his mind, just lying there, useless. But his conscious felt pain, and that was far more painful than any physical pain he'd ever felt before. Even worse than the time he broke his hand while playing Quidditch with his father when he was six, he could still remember how absurd his fright was. Still, it couldn't even be compared with how absurdly crossed he was now. He could suddenly feel how his brain began to bring him back to the Night.

"Mother, you don't understand! Sirius is coming and you haven't even made dinner yet!" James said with annoyed voice. He couldn't comprehend what his Mother did not understand about the matter. His best friend was coming for a visit for the first time, and though he would never admit it out loud, he wanted Sirius to enjoy the stay. See how cool his father could be (not that he would ever, ever, say that so James senior could hear) and how nice and motherly his mother was. He wanted to play Quidditch until they couldn't manage to control the brooms anymore and he wanted to sneak into his Father's library and try and learn forbidden hexes that would come in handy in the following school year. But mainly this summer bored him insanely, his parents did not take his jokes as well as his best mate did, and why would they. Most of them were highly inappropriate to be said to parents.

"James, you have to calm down or I'll let the Healers at St. Mungos do it for you," his Mr. Potter said with a kind smile. "Go clean your room and I will take care of the dinner, dear," his Mother said in a motherly voice but James knew better, it was an order. His mother was sly that way, as one against two boys she had to be clever in methods to get her ways around the house.

As he cleaned his bedroom carelessly he couldn't help but feeling very impatient about that his Father would not be home from work in time. James' mind worked that way, he got obsessed with things very easily. Almost as easily as he lost interest in them. After he moved on from a little tidying up he began to categorized his dirty socks by texture. As he did so, he couldn't stop looking at the hands of his alarm clock which seemed to move faster by the minute that passed. Where on earth was Sirius?

First he'd made that assumption that he was trying to be fashionably late, that seemed very like Sirius but as the time flew and he was close to two hours late James changed his mind. Sirius was obviously trying to be funny. He sworn by himself that he would get revenge, he found nothing funny about this situation. His mother didn't seem too upset, said he probably had to do some chorus before leaving home. Mr. Potter did obviously not know Sirius very well, she might have heard a thing or two about Sirius (and maybe a little more than that) but Sirius would never do chorus. He'd say something like:

"Jamesy boy, it's simply below my dignity and my masculine manhood to use vacuum cleaner with my bare hands." And James would laugh and remind him for the billionth time not to call him nicknames.

When he finally drifted into sleep that night, he'd decided that Sirius had cancelled on him without cancelling and found some new best friend who let him call himself something as embarrassing like Jamesy boy.

How wrong he had been.