Harry is coming down from the seventh year rooms when James comes sprinting up the stairs and tries to stifle a smile.
"Harry, let's go to breakfast!" James cheers in that manic kind of way that lets Harry know James hasn't slept yet.
Harry is willingly led out of the common room – and the wrong way compared to how they generally get to the Great Hall. James slaps his left foot up against a portrait of footsteps, nearly overbalances, and a few large stones of the wall to the left of the portrait opens.
"Oops, wrong one," James laughs and switches feet to use his right.
The wall to the right opens up and the two end up jumping down a slide, climbing out of the pedestal of a bust that complains at them, and casually strolls to the Great Hall.
Remus and Sirius are eating happily but there's barely anyone here even though breakfast is almost over. Handfuls of groups who made it down are now whispering and flicking glances over as Harry and James join the other two.
"What did you do?" Harry asks, impressed at just how holistic this prank was – there aren't even teachers here, although maybe they're busy dealing with the fall out.
"We filled the stairs -all of them- with devil's snare," Sirius says with a smirk.
People generally know how to combat devil's snare but Harry is certain the Marauders found a way to restrict fire and light spells.
James snickers and leans in, whispering, "But that's not the real prank. That's just the distraction." He winks. "They're too busy dealing with the devil's snare to realise we've barricaded the Ravenclaw dorm shut."
Harry looks over his shoulder across the nearly empty Great Hall and realises there's not a single Ravenclaw.
James' smirk is positively wicked.
The prank almost entirely detracts attention from the front page of the newspaper declaring how Lord Voldemort slaughtered his way through a Dark Lady's forces and left her body hanging from a rope in front of the Czech Ministry, found with a polite but curtly worded letter requesting to meet a liaison at your earliest convenience.
Harry says he was a part of the prank just so he can go to detention with the others because he doesn't know this herbology professor and he's not risking the man torturing James. (Harry's only paranoid because they are out to get him.)
James winks at a pair of Slytherin girls walking past the herbology garden, standing heroically on a giant cabbage with a shovel braced over his shoulder.
They giggle and wave.
Remus rolls his eyes, on his knees digging out weeds like they're supposed to be doing. Harry is down by the other side of the garden, wondering how to make it a game because James is clearly bored. Is this what raising a dad is like?
"James," Sirius says and holds out a hand, one foot braced on the giant cabbage. When James helps him up, Sirius goes with the motion and ducks in for a kiss on the cheek. "Don't flirt in front of me, babe, I know you just want to get me jealous."
James immediately turns back to the girls. "I'm not gay."
One of the girls is cracking up. "Yeah, sure! You do you, right?"
"You know how Sirius is!" James tries, shoving Sirius off the cabbage. "You know how he's like, it's a prank! I'm not gay with him!"
"What about with Remus?" the other girl calls over her shoulder.
They burst into even louder giggles and quickly disappear over a hill.
"Don't spread this around!" James yells and yet has no expectation that they'll listen. He groans and turns on Sirius, swinging around his shovel in annoyance. "Every time?!"
"You're the one who started it!" Sirius laughs, grabbing the shovel and yanking.
James comes stumbling off the cabbage but refuses to let go so they both circle around yanking at the shovel until Sirius almost steps on Remus.
"Guys, stop," Remus tries and then just sticks out a leg to trip Sirius, who takes down James as well.
James pushes himself up with a huff and turns Bambi eyes on Harry. "Tell your uncle Padfoot he's so mean."
"You started it!" Sirius cries again. "Okay, Harry, so last year Peter was sitting with a girl in the library and he was not getting a girlfriend before James, so your dad goes up-"
"Don't tell him that!" James complains, grabbing an uprooted weed from Remus' pile and throwing it at Sirius.
Sirius catches it. "-sits on Peter's lap, and it just escalates. He did it to Remus too, still does it to me."
"I do it to you because you do it to me!" James argues. "Harry, every time we catch each other within the vague vicinity of a female, we sabotage each other. It's horrible."
Harry, with a unique perspective of someone who knows these people but also has an outsider's view, hums noncommittally.
Remus has no such compunction and scoffs, loudly.
James turns on Remus, except instead of saying anything he throws back his head and howls. Sirius follows suit without even missing a beat.
"Do not!" Remus snaps. "I swear to fucking-"
Harry watches, incredulous, as James and Sirius sync up in a harmonious, almost haunting howl and Remus gets triggered mid-sentence into calling back with what is definitely not human vocal chords.
James and Sirius fall over each other laughing and Remus shakes himself out of it to throw a handful of dirt at them. "You both suck. I hate it when you do that."
While they wait for everyone to gather for quidditch practice, Remus is sitting cross-legged on the grass of the pitch with a James flopped belly down over his lap, Remus' book propped up on his back.
Sirius and Harry are also lying on their stomachs, heads together with James as they play card games on this lovely sunny afternoon.
It took a lot of convincing for Harry to coax James into playing because Sirius always wins their card games and it sucks losing that hard.
They started with poker and then moved to go fish before trying cucumber and now Harry is trying to explain how to play a fancy future card game. They keep having to switch because Sirius is constantly winning and James gets huffy.
Sirius can actually see the cards in James and Harry's hand through the reflection off their glasses, and he's been doing this to James since first year. On Sirius' deathbed he'll tell James and it'll be hilarious.
Eventually enough people gather, still earlier than the usual meeting, and James rolls himself up to start try-outs.
"I'm James, your captain," he begins with a wink. "You know me. This is Sirius, the beater and Harry is our new seeker," James introduces.
"Just like that?" the previous third year seeker says, her eyebrows drawing together. "What, you're going to kick me out without even pretending to hold a try-out?"
James raises an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, are you the captain?"
Harry nudges James with an elbow. "I should do proper try-outs. I've never done it before and I want to see how it is."
James coos at Harry. "Aww, okay. We'll do seeker first then."
Harry catches eight out of nine snitches released and only misses the last one because James is doing a little cheer dance and Harry stops to grin brightly at him.
"Any further complaints?" James asks, arm around Harry's shoulders and looking smug enough that someone would think he's the one who just caught eight snitches in under twenty minutes.
There are no further complaints and try-outs continue with James running them into the ground doing drills to weed out the weak.