A/N: Sorry this is so late, everyone! The last term of uni has been pretty hectic, but updates should be fairly regular from now on. :) Hope you enjoy this chapter!
Chapter 8 – A Quiet Evening
Late evening was the busiest time in the Gryffindor common room, when everyone had returned from dinner but only the very youngest students had gone to bed. James, Remus, Sirius and Peter were lucky to have found a table near the fireplace, where the warmth, though pleasant, was making them all sleepy. The most productive thing any of them had done was when Peter managed to charm his quill to write what he dictated, but unfortunately it had only worked for half a sentence before it started trying to pick up what everyone in the common room was saying all at once and had scribbled gibberish. After that, they'd given up on trying to get any homework done.
At precisely 9pm, the watch Remus had charmed to remind him about prefect duty started beeping. He tapped it with his wand to get it to shut up, which as well as stopping the beeping resulted in the watch starting to steam.
"Finite incantatum," he muttered in exasperation. "I think tiredness has eclipsed my magical ability. If I leave school to be a muggle do you think I'd be allowed to sleep for a year?"
"That sounds good," Peter said, leaning on the table and resting his chin on his arms. "I think I might join you."
"You sure you're okay to patrol, Moony?" James asked as Remus stood up to leave, rolling up the parchment he hadn't actually written anything on. "I'm tired, so you must be exhausted."
"Yeah, last night was pretty rough," Sirius said. "Maybe you should let Evans patrol by herself. I bet McGonagall wouldn't mind if you skipped it just this once."
"Or I could take your place," James suggested, grinning.
"I don't think it would be fair to subject her to your company," Remus said, glancing across the common room to where Lily was putting away her books and saying goodbye to her friends. "Anyway, it's only two hours. I'll manage."
"If you're sure," James said in a distracted tone as he noticed Lily coming over. His smile automatically turned into what he mistakenly thought was a winning grin.
Sirius rolled his eyes.
"You ready?" Lily asked Remus. "If you can bear to part from your fellow delinquents for an evening, that is."
"I'm ready," Remus said firmly, edging towards the portrait hole before James could make a fool of himself.
They stepped out into the corridor together and Lily shivered at the cooler air. Maybe she'd have to start putting her cloak and gloves on to patrol, she thought briefly. The evenings outside the dormitory could get awfully cold in the winter, especially if they were down in the dungeons or by the entrance hall.
"We're down on the 2nd and 3rd floor, right?" Remus asked, already starting towards the stairs without waiting for an answer.
Lily nodded and followed, frowning briefly at a couple of 4th years who were still scurrying back towards the common room. "Hopefully we won't encounter anyone else trying to sneak into the armoury. What did they even think they were going to go with those swords?"
"Stab each other, probably," Remus replied.
Lily wasn't entirely sure whether or not he was joking. Last year, she and Remus tended towards walking in opposite directions in their patrols, checking classrooms and dark corners of the castle for any troublemakers separately. Recently though, Lily had found that the two hours passed much more pleasantly when she had someone to talk to, and Remus wasn't all that bad when he wasn't around his friends.
"How are you, by the way?" she asked as she swung around the banister at the bottom of a flight of stairs - she always liked to check the library last when they patrolled around here, so it was best to start with the defence office on the second floor then work their way back up. "I saw you splinch your arm in apparition class earlier. It looked painful."
He raised his eyebrows, surprised she had even noticed that amongst the general chaos of the apparition class, but she was looking inside a classroom that had been left unlocked and didn't notice his expression.
"It wasn't as bad as it looked," he said. "Not as painful as actually getting your arm chopped off, I'd imagine. It just made me look like a bit of a prat."
"Well splinching is better than not being able to apparate at all yet. I'm sure next time you'll manage it without losing any limbs."
"Hope so," he replied. "I guess I was just tired. Is the classroom all clear?"
"Thankfully, yes." Lily replied, "Last year I walked in on a couple of seventh years who were almost completely naked. Empty classrooms are my enemy - I'm emotionally scarred."
Remus laughed. "Did you say anything to them or did you just leave and suppress that memory forever?"
"I think I stammered something about that being an inappropriate use of the classroom." Lily grinned. "Then I ran away."
"Good choice," Remus said as he took out his wand and prodded the wall between two portraits, one of a man fishing and the other of two women in a wine cellar who pointed and giggled at him.
The wall swung outwards like a door to reveal a narrow corridor. "I've never seen this passageway before," Lily said, lighting her wand and peering down it. "How did you know it was here?"
Remus shrugged. "James and Sirius have a knack for finding them. It leads to a dead end but I always check it just in case."
"Just in case what?" Lily asked, "you find someone else in your secret hideout?" She walked ahead of him towards the end of the corridor, where there was another empty classroom and the office of their defence professor, which was firmly locked. "Honestly, boys."
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Peter whispered as they stopped for the dozenth time to readjust the invisibility cloak, which only covered the three of them completely if they stooped while they walked.
"All my ideas are good," James replied, directing them towards the stairs leading down to the second floor.
Sirius snorted and James elbowed him in the side. "Ow!"
"Shhh," Peter said. "Someone will hear you!"
"No one is around here," James argued as they headed towards the staircase. "You worry too much Wormy."
"Really?" Peter replied in an urgent whisper, "because from here 'no one' looks an awful lot like Moony and Evans."
James turned in the direction of Peter's gaze, and spotted a tired-looking Remus and Lily walking down the corridor on the floor below.
"Bet you'd love to be caught by Evans, wouldn't you Prongs?" Sirius muttered, grinning.
"Actually, I don't think this would get me in her good books," James sighed as Lily and Remus turned and began to walk up the stairs towards them.
"He's really not all that bad," Remus said, shaking his head as he unknowingly approached his friends, who had shrunk as far as possible against one side of the railings, still under the cloak.
"Are you kidding me?" Lily sighed. "Maybe he can organise a Quidditch team but you all looked like complete idiots on Halloween. Not that I didn't appreciate the comic effect of you and Sirius literally falling over each other."
"He dived at me." Remus insisted, glancing suspiciously to one side when he thought he felt the waft of something move beside him. Shrugging, he turned back to Lily. "James just wanted to have fun - he loves Halloween. You almost gave him a heart attack with what you said at the feast, I think."
"His face was priceless," Lily smirked.
James made an indignant noise and felt Sirius laugh silently next to him. He waited for Remus to defend him, but instead Remus grinned and said, "That was probably my favourite part of the day - way more entertaining than the costumes."
"Moony you disloyal-" James whispered before he felt Sirius' hand on his mouth, but Remus and Lily had evidently already heard him because they both stopped and looked around.
Lily's face was clouded with confusion as she looked at the apparently empty staircase, but Remus's expression rocketed straight from bewildered to exasperated as he stared at the spot where his friends stood.
"What was that?" Lily asked, looking back down to the floor below them, then in front of her towards the first few classrooms on the third floor. Everywhere seemed quiet and empty. "I swear I just heard someone talking."
It was too late to deny that he'd heard anything, so Remus shrugged slightly and tried to look innocent, a talent that he had never quite mastered. "Er, maybe one of the suits of armour has gone walkabout?" he suggested weakly.
"Okaayy," Lily replied hesitantly. "Have you ever actually seen that happen?"
"We'd better go check the armoury," Remus said, ignoring the question and instead guiding Lily up the last of the stairs.
"We should really get that map finished," Sirius whispered as he felt James and Peter relax slightly and move away from each other into a more comfortable standing position. "Then we could avoid these kind of situations altogether."
"I think Moony's mad at you," Peter added, as Remus glared back at the three of them before he rounded the corner.
"He insulted our costumes," James said. "And an affront to the spirit of Halloween is an affront to everything we stand for."
Sirius grinned. "I'm with you there mate, but Moony did just have to cover for us and that always annoys him. It's a dishonour to the prefect badge or something."
"Oh well." James started walking down the stairs again, and Sirius and Peter had to hurry after him so the cloak didn't fall off. "It'll cheer him up when we bring back food from the kitchens."
Once their patrol was over and they returned to the nearly-empty common room, Lily said goodnight and went straight up to her dorm, leaving Remus to join his friends at the same table they'd been sitting at before he left. He almost might have convinced himself he imagined James' voice earlier, if it wasn't for the huge pile of food in the centre of the table.
"You went to the kitchens?" he asked, sinking into a chair and surveying the mound of cauldron cakes, pumpkin pasties, doughnuts and treacle tarts. "I thought maybe you were going to have a nice quiet night and not do anything to endanger my job as a prefect."
"Can you be fired from being a prefect?" Peter mused aloud.
"Probably only if you blow up a classroom or something," James said around a mouthful of cake. "Which I promise I will not involve you in, if the need ever arises."
"So thoughtful of you," Remus said as he glared between the three of them before sighing deeply and picking up a couple of cauldron cakes.
"That's the spirit," Sirius grinned, hooking a foot behind Remus' leg and pulling him towards the sofa until he collapsed beside him. "You need to keep your strength up after all that prefecting."
"I should have let Lily catch you," Remus moaned. "Except James would only have made a fool of us all."
"He can't help it, it's a bad habit."
"Oh cheers, Pete."
Remus laughed at the indignant expression on James' face as he aimed half a cake at the back of Peter's head.
"You're all idiots," he decided.
Peter ducked under the table to recover the cake missile from the floor, which Sirius grabbed from his hand and aimed it back towards an unsuspecting James. It hit James in the stomach and Sirius ducked his head, angling his entire body away from James and almost falling into Remus' lap in the process.
"Save me, Moony!" he laughed as James launched a counter attack.
"Complete idiots," Remus smiled.