Warning: a metric shitton of spiders. Which is considerably less than a fuckton but far greater than a bag of dicks.

.

James is lying on his bed, legs flopped over Sirius', who's curled up against James' side with an arm over his waist. They're doing nothing in particular, having settled into cuddling while Remus and Harry are flipping through old divination notes.

"Why are you even taking divination?" Sirius murmurs into James' ear, half asleep even though it's 3pm and morning sunlight is streaming through the windows. To be fair, it's Friday so it's allowed.

Harry shrugs. "Dunno. Didn't want to break my brain doing arithmancy or something."

"Potters don't have seer heritage gifts though?" Sirius muses.

"He might have gotten it from Voldemort," James points out, patting Sirius' forearm stretched across his stomach. "Because of the wicked looking scar, remember?"

Harry scoffs. "Nah, he's rubbish at divination. That man with prophecies is just – ugh."

Remus looks up from his thick stack of notes to reply but pauses when he sees the permanent tempus charm stuck to the wall. "Jamie, didn't you have something on now?"

James winces.

"You were going to hang out with Lily," Sirius says, doesn't move anyway.

"I said…" James trails off. "Fuck, I said Remi was sick again and I had to take care of him."

Remus raises an eyebrow. "That's why you didn't let me go downstairs for lunch today? I thought you were being nice, bringing me food in bed."

"It was a bribe," James admits.

Harry purses his lips.

"I know!" James cries, twisting away so doesn't have to look at Harry's disappointed expression. "I know, I just – I don't how to…you know. I do like her, I like everything about her…just - I don't know how to explain!"

"You can't keep dragging it out," Harry says firmly.

James looks over his shoulder with a frown. "Don't talk to me like you have any dating experience."

"Dad."

James groans because that word has never not worked on him, and he rolls back into Sirius. "It's not that I don't – I want to be with her and she's so, so smart and pretty, and I don't want to stop dating but…"

"But you don't like hanging out with her, more than you like hanging out with us," Harry continues. "And that's a sign that you should stop. And that's okay."

James tilts his head and nearly takes out Sirius' eye with the corner of his glasses. "Okay! Okay, I'll…pick a good time-"

"Today," Harry says.

"Today," James sighs but agrees, disentangling himself from Sirius to sit up.

Remus glares from behind Harry's back because Sirius is smiling too obviously. James pauses and Remus quickly makes his expression blank.

"Remus," James says slowly and then abruptly lurches forward, wand snapping out of the holster spell up his sleeve.

Remus dives to the side and James' deep yellow spell splashes against the thumb-sized spider hanging down above where his head was, throwing the spider against the wall on the other side of Remus' bed.

"Gross," James mutters.

Remus pushes himself back up again and, halfway to sitting up, looks down at the floor Harry's feet are still hanging over - and it's a moving carpet of spiders.

"Harry-!" Remus grabs a fistful of the back of Harry's shirt and drags him back, further onto the bed.

Sirius jerks upright and James is up on his knees now. Harry still reacts the fastest, eyes flickering around until he sees the windows the spiders are streaming in from and throws up pest repellent charm that bounces off the few still trickling in.

"Acromantula?" Remus asks in confusion because they have the signs of it, not really distinct from normal spiders at this size though.

And then the wave of spiders starts skittering up the bed posts.

And then the screaming starts from the other rooms.

The boys are up and leaping from bed to bed like they're playing the floor is lava, throwing down stunners and pest killing spells until they can burst out of the room, Harry slamming and locking the door shut behind them, James transfiguring the edges to be airtight.

There are spiders already in the spiral staircase, running along the floors and the walls, dangling down from the ceiling on webs or strung across on invisible threads.

James ducks and tries to shove himself under Remus' chin, shoulders hunching instinctively, already feeling like something is crawling along his spine. Remus grabs a fistful of James' jumper with one hand and throws out a shockwave of pale pink that floods the stairs, disintegrating the webs as it's an overpowered household charm for clearing dust and cobwebs.

But it doesn't affect the spiders, which then start falling. Sirius has a fit and makes the conscious decision that in times of desperate need, desperate measures are allowed and a vortex starts to form on his wand. Harry elbows him sharply because he doesn't know what that spell does but Sirius has a look on his face like he's waiting for some chaos to happen.

The vortex splutters out as Sirius rolls his eyes and instead, he summons bubblehead charms to all of them and then an engorgio so the bubbles swell to cover the entire body, then they all sprint downstairs, occasionally joined by screaming students bursting out of their rooms covered in spiders.

"I have to admit, this is an ice-cold prank," Sirius admits. "Like kudos but also fuck all eighteen generations of their ancestors."

"I doubt it's a prank," Remus mutters and jumps the last few stairs down.

They all stumble out into the common room where people are standing on chairs, or rushing out through the open portrait to get away from the sudden wave of spiders coming down the stairs.

James sees Lily and acknowledges that it's half out of habit (James really can't shake years of Pavlovian response to red hair) but damn, she looks fantastic indiscriminately slaughtering spiders with her blazing hair whipping around and spells lighting up the scowl on her face as she casts.

Ugh, they just talked about being indecisive. But it's not like he doesn't love everything about her…

Dumb deer, stop it James!

James glances over all the gathered students with everyone screaming and panicking, more chaos heard upstairs, and Harry is here and so is Lily…but really, wouldn't it be so cool if James saved the day?

James, bursting with Gryffindor courage and a near-fatal amount of confidence that you can only get from being loved too much, aims his wand at the stairs. "Sirius, get my back. Accio spiders!"

Sirius whips around back to back with James and summons a giant bug-zapper charm as a shield for when the handful of spiders that made it into the common room already are launched at him.

James is focused on the stairs, on the speedy stream of tiny wriggling creatures flying at his face, and transfigures them.

First into individual marbles that clatter and clink against each other at his feet, then when a burst of spiders come flying through, into a long red (it's Lily hair colour, wow, subtle James) ribbon - which is faster casting but more complicated because he still needs to transfigure individual spiders into it and oh shit he can't keep up, he's fucked, this isn't going to work.

A split second after James falters, the last handful of spiders fly downstairs and he catches them all into the ribbon, the frayed end falling gracefully, quietly at his feet with the scattered marbles.

The entire common room gapes at him in the midst of a stunned silence.

"Fuck me dead, I did not think that was going to end well!" James cries. He turns and grabs Sirius, both of them shaking each other because that was sick.

Harry blinks but snaps back into emergency mode quickly. "James, collect them all and contain them! Remus, Sirius, run to the hospital wing and get vials of acromantula antidote in case anyone was bitten."

Harry turns to the rest of the students. "Anyone with basic healing spells raise your hand, gather up anyone injured and keep them here, we don't know if there are more spiders in the rest of the castle and we can't move this many injured at once. I need everyone with pest control spell knowledge to follow me, we're sealing the rooms and then moving everyone still upstairs down into the common room."

Harry leads the way upstairs with a small army trotting after him obediently and people gather themselves together neatly with injured students moving towards ones with raised hands.

Remus and Sirius take off, watching each other's backs as they sprint through secret passages. James scoops everything up into a conjured bucket and seals the lid on before he just flops onto the couch and kicks his feet up onto the bucket.

While acromantula this small can't take down a full-grown human, some people got bit a lot and normal healing spells won't work for much, plus these are children and not adults. Not many students know something advanced like blood purifying spells either, or ways to siphon off venom so basically it's numbing and anti-inflammatory spells and a good old fashioned 'there, there, it'll be fine'.

James knows healing spells from Moony nights but there are enough people helping that he'd just get in the way. So James stays sprawled on the couch, done with today, but sees Lily kneeling beside a first year girl in distress, trying to reassure her and keep her calm.

James is going to save the world with the power of horny one day because he gets off the couch and kneels back on his heels next to Lily. "Hey, firstie, it was before your time but I bet you've heard the story about the Ravenclaw password being sabotaged, right?"

"James," Lily hisses. "Now is not the time."

The little first year girl shakes her head hesitantly but at least she's not staring at the pockmarks in her arms in abject horror anymore.

"Well, you're in for quite the story!" James laughs, loud enough that some of the others look over too. "So one day, Remi says; hey, who makes the password riddles for the Ravenclaw dorms?"