Archive of Our Own

Remus was almost impressed. Aurors books devoted entire chapters to the difficulties of cornering wizards who could escape through a number of magical means, and yet the four of them had managed to accidentally trap themselves in the one place they had absolutely no chance of apparating out of. "Maybe we should tell Dumbledore about this, and the Aurors can start trying to herd dark wizards in here instead of all that bothersome dueling and chasing," Remus suggested. Thank Merlin none of them were claustrophobic, the hall the staircases had sandwiched them into wasn't especially spacious.

"I bet it's like herding cats. Maybe we could make them chase Wormtail. We'll tie a dark artifact around his tail as extra bait. It'd be like a carrot on a stick for evil prats," James answered from the dimness just ahead of Remus.

Remus couldn't see Peter, but felt fairly certain he was glaring at James. Sirius ignored the exchange in favor of saying, for roughly the tenth time, "This is your fault, Prongs. You and your sodding, poncy redhead fascination." He at least had the grace to change the tune slightly by adding a plaintive question. "Do you know what I could be doing now, instead of spending my last Christmas at Hogwarts trapped by stairs with you prats?"

"Vance?" Wormtail asked. He poked his toes along the stone in search of a hole large enough for a rat to squirm through, despite his lack of enthusiasm when Sirius had proposed the idea. "If she's still speaking to you, after that bit with the wind charms and her skirt."

Remus would really rather not remember the animated discussion about Vance's legs after that incident. He briefly pondered finding a way to accidentally tread on Peter's toes for bringing it to mind. It wasn't as if he were jealous. It was just that he didn't need to hear about it, was all. He also refrained from pointing out that James' obsessing over a female redhead was the opposite of poncy. Logic had no place in those sorts of conversations.

"Puffapod Pie," Sirius continued, as if Vance's name hadn't come up. It was entirely possible he had forgotten it. Sirius had a very limited attention span when he wasn't fixated on a prank, or Slytherin thumping, or sodding legs. "I could be eating the PIE your mum sent me."

James frowned, wincing as the momentary pause let Remus tread on his toes, instead, for no other reason than it was his fault. "She sent you a pie? I got a bloody peppermint stick. How come you get a pie?"

"Can we maybe focus less on the pie no one can eat, and more on getting out of here?" Remus asked. He couldn't help but marvel, again, at the sheer magnitude of their rotten luck this Christmas. Even Remus had been certain that this year would likely be free of mishaps, largely because of the map.

The map was a thing of beauty. Every passage was outlined, every pair of wandering prefect feet right there for them to see and avoid. Or not avoid, in the case of the Slytherin prefect, whom Sirius had insisted was extra whingy, when the goblin ears were only going to last a sodding hour anyway, the whiny prat. They'd been brilliant for thinking of it, and even more brilliant for creating it. Now that they had it, they were astoundingly brilliant, and nearly foolproof.

Excepting the stairs.

Early on, Peter had tried to work out the timing of the stairs, and how they intersected with this brief section of the mirrored passage. The problem was that they didn't have any timing. They moved on their own whims, and with no agenda that the four of them could suss out. Sirius had spent a term during his fourth year absolutely convinced that they were Hufflepuff-sympathizing stairs perpetuating an anti-Gryffindor agenda, after he made one of the Puffs cry. (The boy hadn't known to stay out of Sirius' way after a run-in with one of his cousins, a life-lesson most of Gryffindor had long since learned. Remus had considered some sort of charmed warning system, after that incident.) The theory had been discarded when the same rotund Puff was stranded on a landing for half an hour and ended up needing Sprout to levitate him down for supper. Peter, much as he fell behind in some things, was a bit handy with numbers. He was the only one of them with a solid knack for them. James could manage sums and the like easy enough, and Remus wasn't horrible, but none of them had an eye for ordering the way that Peter did.

It had been Peter who tried to sort out a formula for the stairs, but it was impossible to use logic in a castle that seemed to defy it on a regular basis. Sirius had badgered Wormtail over it, but even he had to give it up for a bad job eventually. (Especially as he'd tried to help, but only managed to muddle things hopelessly. Prongs had commented, not without reason, that any numbers higher than ten meant Sirius had to take off his shoes to work them through. The brief but furious attempt to whomp James after the comment was made had, at least, distracted Sirius from any further badgering.)

So they'd had to work around it. Most of the time, it wasn't a problem. They'd just wait out the stairs and then run up or down them, as needed. And if their mad dash away from someone took them toward the stairs, they just went a different way. (Thanks to the map, this tactic no longer ended with them lost in some obscure section of the castle while Prongs led them by the nose insisting that he was SURE it was a right, no matter that they were going in circles.) But there was one passage that ran under a section of the eastern castle, and it was sandwiched in by two sets of staircases. They were mostly never there at the same time, and it was one of the lesser used passages anyway, so it was just bad luck and lousy timing that had them dashing into the passage at that moment. Remus thought that their luck in general with such things probably boded ill for their futures.

"If you hadn't HAD to go to the bloody owlery, so you could send Evans another daft fluffy stuffed animal THING, we wouldn't be here and-"

"We were going to The Three Broomsticks for whiskey ANYWAY, it wasn't like it was out of the way!"

"Except for THE STAIRS being on this side."

Remus sighed as he listened to the bickering. He decided to pretend that they weren't there, and that he was actually listening to the ghosts of the mates he'd left to die in the snow while he went for tea. "Peter, maybe if you transformed, there's a space you can squeeze through?"

"Yeah, I'm looking. But what am I supposed to do? Run and tell McGonagall to come get you out? They'd know about the passage!" Peter answered. "Plus there's not anything in the walls that could fit a bloody COCKROACH, let alone a rat."

"Keep looking." James abandoned the argument in favor of doing something useful at least. His attempt to begin searching managed to bounce him off a wall and into Sirius, who then careened into Remus. As Sirius backside collided with his thigh, Remus was deeply glad no one could see the heat he felt flush through his cheeks. He stepped away quickly, shoulder smacking into the wall, and decided he preferred the endless bickering after all.

Fifteen minutes later they'd concluded that, based on the dim light provided by four wands and the uncooperative state of the stairs, they were all probably going to die. They'd be found years later as moldering skeletons dressed in matching Santa hats. (Excepting James, whose hat had been sacrificed to a barn owl with a temper earlier that evening.) They'd almost resorted to Prongs transforming and trying to charge the stairs when, finally, they gave up.

"Mum is going to KILL me," James concluded glumly. He slumped down next to Peter, reaching for the bag of clinking bottles he'd set down earlier and nearly crashed into a dozen times. The bottles had survived, though. Remus thought it was probably also telling that they were all more careful not to break the smuggled booze than they were to make sure not and get stuck in a Hallway on Christmas eve.

Sirius mimicked James in the instinctive way the two of them sometimes echoed each other. Remus found it alternately endearing and creepy. His shoulder pressed up against Remus' when he sat, and there was a distinctly forlorn note in his voice. "There's a pie upstairs, Moony. An unprotected Puffapod Pie. There's probably some greedy third year with his face in my pie right now."

Beneath the whining, Sirius sounded genuinely miserable, and his whole body sagged. Remus could barely see him, but he could feel it, and he thought he understood. They'd all stayed at Hogwarts for the holidays; their last year together, it'd seemed the thing to do. James' mum had insisted they at least floo home for Christmas dinner, and Sirius was still new to mum-fussing. He rarely talked about his life at home, before he'd run away last summer to stay with Prongs, but Remus was sure that a happy family holiday had never been part of the Black tradition.

Remus sighed inwardly. He knew it was futile, but he heard himself suggesting. "Well. . . we're here, aren't we? We might as well make the best of it. We could. . . I don't know, transfigure a bloody tree and get Prongs sloshed so he sings carols."

Peter groaned. "Can we get him sloshed enough that he DOESN'T sing? Please?"

"I don't SING," James said. This was a blatant and foul lie; two drinks in and James inevitably started warbling something. Remus sometimes used this to repel the drunken girls who always found their way to where Sirius was sitting. James was not meant to sing. Peter's opinion, however, was likely shaped by the night Sirius made him go rat so Prongs could use him as a substitute microphone.

Not that Remus cared if Sirius took interest in drunken girls whose names he didn't even know. Remus was just looking out for him.

Sirius' drooping did stop though, and he leaned into Remus more. Remus abruptly lost track of what it was he'd been saying. He cursed his inability to think properly once Sirius was touching him. He hadn't been this stupid last year, though he'd spent months not speaking to Sirius last year. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Luckily, James had already latched on to the idea of a transfigured, homemade Christmas, which saved Remus having to say anything else about it. "We can make do. We have the booze. WE CAN REBUILD HIM!"

"We have the technology!" Peter finished, laughing.

"I am never letting any of you watch telly ever again," Remus said dimly. He was more focused on the fact that Sirius' hand had, somehow, fallen to Remus' knee. It was maddening how often Padfoot groped him without knowing how it turned made Remus' stomach flip over every bloody time.

He was a sad-sack of a werewolf. "Someone transfigure a pie so Padfoot stops whinging about it," he added.

"What are we supposed to transfigure? We're in an empty hallway and the only thing we have with us is liquor. Which we want to drink," Peter pointed out reasonably.

That stymied them for a miraculous twenty seconds. "Take off your shoe," James ordered. Remus was reasonably sure that he was speaking to Peter, but it really didn't matter. Feet were feet, and there was no way to make that concept any more appealing.

"Oh Happy Christmas. Nothing says holiday cheer like pie that tastes like feet." Sirius considered. "Take off your jumper." Remus wasn't sure how much of an improvement that would be, since he distinctly remembered James brushing his jumper off with great agitation after they'd been through the Owlrey.

"We'll need decorations. It's not Christmas without blinky things," James added. Remus had seen James' Christmas tree on past holidays, both before and after he'd discovered muggle lights. While there had been decorations charmed to sparkle beforehand, he had to admit that the riot of light strings afterward (and the generator he'd gotten to run them) had a certain kind of fire-hazard charm. "Give me your hats."

Remus saw where this was headed. This plan was a train careening wildly along the tracks, and he was the plonker standing in the way. He made requisite protests about the cold, and everyone's levels of sanity, but he was brushed off with warming charms and orders to strip off various articles of clothing.

And that was how, half an hour later, Remus somehow ended up in his shirtsleeves and underpants, admiring an argyle tree festooned with leathery tinsel, and holding a shoe-pie that he was never, ever going to eat. (As it turned out, the jumpers were needed elsewhere.)

"Someone give me trousers, we need a a bit to shove at the top of the tree," Sirius ordered.

"Use your own!" James was intent on his hat-lights, which weren't actually lighting unless he shone his wand on them. Remus thought that was cheating. He also thought it was inevitable that by tomorrow, they would be found by McGonagall, half naked and surrounded by badly transfigured decorations. (Which was an improvement over skeletal remains years later, but not by much.) He wasn't sure if it was the nakedness, or the horrible transfigurations he'd be more embarrassed by.

By the time they were all down to underpants and one sock, Remus had confiscated one of the bottles of firewhiskey, and was doing his utmost to forget this evening. It was a losing endeavor, since he could never manage to get himself past tipsy thanks to one of the rare perks of a werewolf constitution, but he tried anyway. James had finally gotten his hat-lights working, and they cast an irritating, ever-changing blink of lights onto the four of them. The red-gold glow was almost eerie. Or it should have been. Sirius, damn him, somehow managed to look attractive, and was half naked. This wasn't helping Remus' sense of equilibrium or inner serenity.

When they'd run out of clothes and bits of pocket-lint to transfigure, they found out that while a full grown stag could not ram through the stone stairs, he could jam his head against the wall so that little crumbles of stone flaked off into small, transfigurable bits. (James, who was about a half a shot away from warbling by that point, had tried to transfigure the stairs themselves. He'd only managed to knock himself on his arse while Peter tried in vain to catch him.) So the tree was slowly acquiring ornaments, which began as appropriately holiday-spirited but had degenerated into filthily positioned stick figures. (And one extraordinarily detailed, yet horrifically proportioned, depiction of Santa making merry with his elves in ways Remus could happily have gone his entire life without imagining.)

Remus stared moodily down into his bottle, ignoring the nearly-finished rebuttal piece featuring Mrs. Claus and what Remus assumed was a reindeer, and tried again to imagine he was somewhere else. His brooding was interrupted when Sirius shoved a cup of something in his face. (Remus was willfully trying not to think about what the cup might once have been.)

"Try this," Sirius ordered. "I call it Rocknog."

"Is there any remote possibility that the name is not descriptive of how it was made?"

"No." Sirius grinned, and Remus' mouth twitched upward into an involuntary smile.

Peter cleared his throat, sidestepping James' attempt to fling tinsel on his head. (This was more dangerous than normal tinsel, given theirs had come out inappropriately dense) "So how did you nog a rock?"

"I transfigured a rock into an egg, and then added firewhiskey." Sirius looked disgustingly proud of his innovation. "Can't have a proper Christmas without nog. Even if no one actually knows what it is anyway."

"Oh brilliant. You found a way to skip right to the sicking up part of a hangover." Remus ignored Sirius' wheedling tone when he waved the drink at him with a drawn out Mooooooony. "No. There is no way I'm trying that."

"It's this or shoe-pie. You have to try one."

"Who says? It might kill me. And then how would you feel?" Remus answered.

Sirius pouted, and Remus felt an impossibly annoying urge to bite his protruding lip. He turned, but Peter, wise man that he was, was already backing up as far as the narrow hall would let him. "It's Prongs' fault we're here. Make him try it!"

"TRAITOR!" James accused, pointing an accusing finger at Wormtail. (Or rather, at a spot two paces to the left of him.) The good thing about James, though, was that his willingness to take the first hit when it came to something astonishingly stupid. Thus, he didn't fight too hard when Sirius shoved the cup at him. He declared that it tasted like firewhiskey. With rocks in it.

As it turned out, when they ran out of un-Rocknogged whiskey, Rocknog was good enough for them.

Remus had no idea how long they'd been there, or how much longer they WOULD be there. It all started to blur together at some point. James' warbling had turned to a lengthy discourse on Lily's mouth: how it was fantastic when it got all purse-y while she was yelling, and claiming, yet again, that he'd snogged her before the break. Peter started popping in and out of rat form and scurrying around. Looking for holes, again, Remus presumed. Peter DID have a habit of being the only sober one left, though Remus was always the only one who noticed, given the other two's usually fuzzy-brained memory of their drunken outings. Remus usually chalked it up to a greater sense of self-preservation than either Prongs or Padfoot ever displayed.

Sirius had used James' thigh for a pillow at first, but eventually James shoved him away after Sirius had tried to stuff his remaining un-transfigured sock into his mouth. So while James wound down and Peter did . . . something, Sirius lay with his head in Remus' lap. Remus wasn't drunk, but the Rocknog seemed to do what whiskey alone could not. It left his head just muddled enough that his fingers kept drifting into the soft fall of Sirius' shaggy hair across his thigh. His eyes rested on the full sweep of Sirius' lips; the strange orange color the lights turned them was not enough to keep them from being tempting.

Remus wrenched his gaze away again and let his head fall back with a solid thunk against the stone wall behind him. The stairs to their left shuddered and sent a small fall of dust down on their heads. "This whole place is going to collapse," Remus said.

"You always say that."

"Yes, but I'm not usually stuck here waiting for it to fall on my head," said Remus. He looked up, and then froze, blinking. The dim light made it hard to see at first, but as he stared up at the low ceiling, he spotted a distinct, if badly shaped, bunch of mistletoe. It had had probably once been someone's sock. He had not transfigured mistletoe. He wouldn't have. He'd have tried to pour the whiskey into a puddle on the floor and drown himself in it first. Someone else had made the mistletoe.

It was probably for a lark – Padfoot or Prongs setting up a prank they'd gotten too drunk to remember. Remus looked from the almost-mistletoe to Sirius, who looked back at him from beneath his lashes. "Moony?"

Remus realized his fingers were back in Sirius' hair, and that he was staring down at Sirius. He started to let go, but then looked up again. Someone had transfigured mistletoe. Someone, not him, had transfigured mistletoe above his bloody head.

He'd never be this drunk again, probably, and he'd never be in his underpants with sock-mistletoe above their heads. Remus licked his lips and then leaned down, his mouth finding Sirius' for a hard kiss. He felt Sirius stiffen, felt the surprise in him. Then the lips beneath his parted, and Sirius was kissing back.

Remus' spine curved uncomfortably as he bent over him., Sirius' tongue, when it tangled with his, tasted of Rocknog and something that was possibly shoe-pie, but Remus wasn't sure, and didn't want to know, and the stone behind him was freezing, despite the warming charms.

Despite that, it was quite possibly the single greatest moment of his life. Or it would be until tomorrow, when he remembered that, traitorous hormones aside, Sirius was maddening. For now, though, Sirius was warm and his mouth was sliding against Remus', only breaking away for Sirius to sit up, crowd in close and tangle a hand in Remus' hair to kiss him again and again until they were both panting.

"Bloody hell!" James voice made Remus tear his mouth away from Sirius'. He felt his cheeks heating in a scalding blush as James stared blearily at them. "NOW? You two start to snog NOW, when we're all locked in here in our skivies? Worst bloody timing ever."

"Shut it. I'm eating your pie too, when we get out of here," Sirius told him. Remus could hear the throaty, rough note in Sirius' voice that he always got when he was drunk, or after he'd come back from some dark corner and some nameless girl with his hair mussed and his mouth swollen. Only now it was for Remus which tipped it over from annoying to brilliant.

"I KNEW she sent me a pie too. You bent bastard," James grumbled and rolled over, muttering about going to sleep and waking him up when they were out of here, or dead, whichever came first.

Sirius' chest started to shake as he rumbled his deep bark of a laugh. "He's just brassed he's too drunk to watch."

"We're all drunk. And he could have drunk a lake full of whiskey and not wanted to watch." Remus' fingers were still in Sirius' hair, and he slid them through slowly, biting his lip again and then asking, despite his own suspicion that it was wiser not to ask. "Just how drunk are you?"

Sirius' lips slid warm and soft against Remus' jaw. "Not that drunk, Moony."

Remus doubted that, and tomorrow he'd probably have many, many reasons why this was daft. For now, he bent his head and found Sirius' mouth again, sinking back against the unforgiving, cold floor and pulling Sirius with him, keeping a tight hold, as if Sirius might slip away.

He woke up some undefined amount of time later to the grinding sound of stone on stone and dim light filtering down the passageway. He squinted his eyes open to see Peter standing over him, stretched on sockless tip-toes, reaching for the mistletoe.

Peter's eyes, more alert than Remus' – proof positive that Peter was smarter than all of them and had avoided the Rocknog – met Remus', and he smiled, nervous and crooked. Beside Remus, Sirius grunted and nuzzled in closer, hand slipping low enough that it was almost cupping his bum. Remus wondered if it was possible to be inexplicably happy, a little turned on, and want to die of embarrassment, all at the same time.

Peter's bare feet, and just what his missing sock might have been used for finally registered, and Remus blinked. "You. . ."

Peter made a quick, shushing sound as Sirius moved again, and then answered, quick and quiet. "I was a rat half the night. They can see in the dark. You spent the whole bloody night staring at each other when the other one wasn't looking. I thought. . ." Peter shrugged bashfully. "I figured you could just blame it on the whiskey, later."

Sirius' hand was actually gripping Remus' rear in his sleep. Across the hall, James was snorting fitfully awake. Remus had no idea how this would play out now, but he couldn't help the smile that was plastered across his face. "Happy Christmas, Peter."

"Happy Christmas, Moony."

~~