Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The train is serpentine, blood-and-maw red, sleek-sided and puff-mouthed, packed end to end with pockets of people in muggle clothes that wave out the windows with their trunks sitting at their feet or else swaying in compartments over their heads where they knock into the glass panes with dull thuds. The scenery whips by at a blur, first greyish cityscape and then miles of undulating greenery: grasses waving and trees hunched forward and fields full of late-summer wildflowers. The sky is a crystal sort of grey, both light and dark at once. Everything is enormous. Loud. Happening in shared moments, superimposed.

Severus Snape watches it all with wide eyes, Lily seated across from him, a handful of boys on the benches around him. They’re rowdy, eager. So nervous that they’re all trembling. So desperate that they can’t shut their mouths, words clumsy, too fast. As if they’re all mudbloods like Lily—all new to this world.

They’re not—Severus can tell. So they’re just ridiculous.

There’s the one Severus knows—the pureblood, the distant cousin he’s met only twice and who seems not to recognize him, the Black with neat hair and pressed clothes and the smile of a madman, the one whose gaze starts to look trampled the moment conversation fizzles out.

There’s a blond one—the roundest, shortest, most nervous of the group, with dimpled cheeks and a look like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, with a hungry desperation in his eyes when he looks at each of the rest of them, like see me, see me, sEE ME, I’M SCREAMING.

The honey-colored one—gaping brown eyes, narrow chin, a scar across his cheekbone, a book in his long-fingered hands, curls of a Welsh distinction at the very ends of his words, and something about him is strange, something about him is quiet but just as eager as the others, smothered but just as sharp, as strong. Something about him seems, at first glance, hungry.

The red-jumpered one with gold-rimmed glasses—that one, Severus hates on principle, for he sits like a prince and smiles like a poster-boy and speaks in just about the poshest accent Severus has ever been unfortunate enough to hear, but beneath all of that he chews his lip and breathes with a stutter like he isn’t quite sure how he got here and isn’t quite sure he should be allowed.

Lily doesn’t look at a one of them.

She isn’t looking at Severus either, but that’s nothing new. Lily is hot and cold with him—always has been. He’s clumsy with her. He doesn’t know how to handle her moods, and he especially doesn’t know how to handle her muggle family, thus they fall out and come back together three times a week. He always manages it in the end. If he turns the right look towards Lily, with his eyes so wide and his mouth pouting at that one angle that makes his lips tremble, he can get her to forgive him for just about anything. “You’d better be in Slytherin,” Severus tries, aiming to cheer her up.

“Slytherin?” interrupts the one with the glasses, leaning forward. He prods the shin of the Black boy seated across from him, as if in need of someone to agree with him. “Who wants to be in Slytherin? I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?”

Severus swallows a sour taste in his mouth. He’s not only a smarmy, fake prat then, but prejudiced as well. And of all people to unwittingly deliver that line to—a Black!—who tilts his head, eyes narrowing. “My whole family has been in Slytherin.”

The specky one is baffled by this development. “Blimey—and I thought you seemed alright!”

At that, Black beams, and his whole face changes. He’s no longer cowed, but emboldened, sitting taller, as if he thrives on a good word. “Maybe I’ll break tradition. Where are you heading, if you’ve got the choice?”

Specky raises an arm as if wielding an invisible sword, a knightly little thing. “‘Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!’ Like my dad.”

Severus makes an unintentional noise.

Specky turns, frowning. “Got a problem with that?”

“No,” says Severus, “if you’d rather be brawny than brainy—”

“Where’re you hoping to go, seeing as you’re neither?” Black interrupts, head tilted, falsely pleasant.

Severus rolls his eyes as Specky snorts a laugh, the blond snickering along in kind. Lily, however, stands up, pink in the cheeks, an avenging angel, and says, “Come on, Severus, let’s find another compartment.”

“Ooh,” Black says mockingly, the other laughing behind his hand. “Off you go then, darling, watch your step.”

“See ya, Snivellus!” calls the blond one as Lily tugs Severus’s hand, leading him out of the compartment.

“Snivellus,” Severus hears one of the others wheeze as the door shuts behind them. “You genius.”

Lily huffs, still flushed. The color makes her eyes gleam like shorn jade, like the stone in the good necklace Severus’s mother refuses to sell—the inheritance necklace from her mother, and her mother before. Lily catches him staring and he turns away, pretending to scan the length of the train for an empty compartment. “That one with the glasses is a toerag,” Lily says.

Severus feels a laugh burst free from his chest. “That’s one way to put it.”

“How rude of him, really,” she continues, grabbing the handle of her trunk and marching fiercely down the car, peeking into every doorway. “He doesn’t know anything. What a narrow-minded way to think of another house! I’m sure they all have their merits.” Lily stops dead in place, turning to administer quite the withering glare upon Severus. “That applies to you as well, you know. Don’t you go thinking poorly about others just because they’re made differently to you.”

“I don’t,” Severus sputters, hands coming up defensively. “I just—well, it’s different for me. I’ve already been told about all this stuff, houses and blood and families. I already know what’s good and bad in the wizarding world. I have that advantage,” he leans closer to Lily, “so I can teach you how to think the right way too.”

Lily’s face goes hard. “I can figure out the right way for myself, Sev.” She starts off again, away from him.

“Oh, come on, Lil,” he calls, following again. “You know how I meant it.”

“I do,” she says gravely, fingers closing around the handle to a compartment with three girls inside. They all look to be the same age as Severus and Lily are. “That’s exactly the problem.” Then she slides the doors open, painting a smile on her lips, and says, “Hello! Are those seats open?” leaving Severus to wonder what on Earth she could’ve meant by that.

It takes far more than serendipity and shared animosity to cement a friendship. Sirius Black is sure of it.

It takes, for example, your new acquaintance noting the look on your face as you bump bodily into your cousin’s promised bastard fiancé on the way to the candy trolley, and your cousin’s promised bastard fiancé shoving you into the wall, and your new acquaintance punching your cousin’s promised bastard fiancé square on the nose in retaliation like he’d been preparing for the moment all his life.

Sirius curses loudly, laughs wildly, and grabs James Potter by the sleeve. They scramble down the length of the train with Lucius and the Mulciber brat and bloody-nosed Rodolphus on their heels, and James yells, “Was that an error of judgement?” and Sirius, punchdrunk and perhaps experiencing some variety of love at first sight, shouts, “That was brilliant!”

They duck into the loo, lock themselves in a stall, and giggle until they’re red in the face, James’s knuckles bruised and Sirius’s heart soaring because, for the first time in his life, there is someone willing to defend him, to get in the way of hell raining down, and he would have to be royally nutter to let that pass him by without grabbing it by the heartstrings and carving his name into the holy meat before it escapes his grasp.

James sits at the tip of his rowboat, the other boys from his train compartment packed behind him. He’s leaning over the point, arms wrapped around it, watching the water ripple and the lily pads bob and the trees shudder around them. Weeping willows hiss; dandelions and early reddish leaves spot the shoreline, dancing loose like confetti, a celebration in topical colors, celebratory colors. Clouds and stars reflect back upon the surface of the water and James takes in every bit of it as they pass, rapt.

Below, unbreachable depths. Before, turrets cutting through the sky, so bold and brilliant and tall. This world spreads far further than east and west: here, James is promised something greater. Soar or sink, it seems to say. Wings or gills. Choose. Choose.

That’s easy. James has always wanted to fly.

He turns, mouth open, to face the others. Sirius, the one who smells inexplicably like black pepper and flowery womens’ perfume, the one for whom James bears bruised knuckles, quite specifically looks stricken, eyes glazed and lips parted.

“You’ll catch bugs,” James tells him.

“I simply can’t help it,” Sirius says.

“Yeah,” James says, fervent. “It’s thrilling.”

“It’s enormous,” Remus says, clambering to the front of the boat beside James, and the two of them kneel, arms round the pole, elbows digging into each other’s sides. He has a scar on his jaw, Remus, these four lines like claw-marks, and they’re silver under the moon, almost glimmering, which is bloody cool, if you ask James, and he has decided he wants to be Remus’s friend, because cool people really have to stick together during trying times such as these.

James nudges Remus’s narrow shoulder, shaking his head in honest wonder. He’s seen a heaping share of fancy places in his life, what with his father’s showcases and the other society events he’s been carted along to, but Hogwarts seems somehow other, somehow more, somehow brilliant and fantastical and, perhaps, singing. “This is marvellous. Where do you think we’ll all be living? In that round bit there? Or lower, perhaps. Near the water. Or near the kitchens!”

“Gryffindor lives in a tower,” Sirius says. “Slytherin is in a dungeon, all the way under the lake, where they charm the windows to make it look as though sunlight can come streaming in.”

“Slytherin sounds worse and worse with everything you say,” Peter says from where he’s bundled at the back of the boat, fiddling with a loose string from his jumper.

“It’s brilliant,” Remus says, breathless. “I’d be right grateful to be anywhere at all. Even the dungeons. Even the rubbish bins.”

The half-giant Hagrid, at his frontmost boat, waves his hands in the air. “We’re almost there, you lot!” he calls. “Get ready to climb out!”

James turns to Remus and grins blazingly. “This is it.”

“Sure is,” Remus says, though he’s started to look queasy.

“Hey,” James says. “We’ll be alright. I mean, my father will most likely disown me if I’m not Gryffindor, but we’ll be okay. All of us. What’s the worst that could happen, really?”

“I fall in the lake,” Peter says immediately.

“Mother sends me a Howler tomorrow morning when she hears the news,” Sirius says.

“I don’t end up sorted anywhere at all,” Remus says. “They realize it was a mistake to even bring me here. I’m not wizard enough.”

James’s brows wrinkle. “Are you muggleborn, then?”

“No,” Remus says. “No, that’s—not quite what I meant.”

“Well,” says James, giving him a once over, “I’m sure you’re plenty wizard. Dumbledore—that’s the headmaster, my dad says—he’s supposed to be a genius. There’s no way he could’ve made a mistake. If you’re here, you’re meant to be.”

Remus looks at James, eyes wide, little scars on his cheeks shining silvery pink. “You really think so?”

“I know it,” James says, nodding, though he doesn’t. Not at all.

But it’s quite easy to pretend, James is learning, if that’s what it takes to make friends.

“Let’s all promise to be mates,” Peter says, fast, as if he read James’s mind. The rest of them turn towards him. His eyes are bright in the dark. “No matter what house we end up in, let’s be mates, alright?”

“I’m in,” says Remus.

James shrugs. “I think you’re all alright, Gryffindor or not.” Then his lips quirk. “But most especially if you’re Gryffindor.”

“My parents would murder me if I were to fraternize with anyone even a little bit un-Slytherin,” Sirius says, tilting his head. He visibly weighs this, then, all at once, like a grease fire, he lights up behind the eyes. “I’m in, seeing as you all are the least Slytherin people I’ve ever met.”

“Thrilling,” James says, looking at them all. Three friends already—that’s more than he’s ever had, including cousins, since there’s only two of them and they’re way older than James is. He has to look down to hide the smile that threatens to tear his face right in half.

They’re climbing out of the boats and onto the slippery, mossy dock when James sees them again—Lily, titled like a flower but of countenance more like an ember, and that weird boy with the weird name. Severus, it was, and Peter had called him Snivellus, for the admittedly snivelly way he was acting around Lily. Embarrassing, that. To think, to really think that he had the unbaked audacity to sneer down upon James’s family while presenting himself the way he does. As if he knows anything about James’s life. About his father and mother, who work so hard and wear the judgments of the Sacred Twenty-Eight on their foreheads like halos. About the people they descended from: Potters and Dearborns and immigrants with resolve like gnarled tree roots in the dirt of a land that had never known them. It knows them now. They made it so.

James watches Lily climb out her boat, robes swishing around her ankles and wand tucked behind her ear, and thinks she looks like the sort of girl who becomes a princess. She’s got the curly hair for it, and some graceful set to her shoulders—like in the fairy tales. She floats.

“Hello, Lily,” James calls when she’s within hearing distance. Be polite, his mum would say while straightening his robes, forcing a comb through his hair, an hour or so before one of his father’s showcases. When greeting a stranger, you ask how they are, how their travels went, if they’re enjoying themselves. If there’s anything you can do for them. “You get on okay?”

She looks towards him, scowling, arms crossed. “What, you think I’m too stupid to get into a boat properly?”

And she marches away.

Watching her, James’s stomach turns upside down, because—well.

Even after seeing her for less than an hour, he knows some important truths about her, he thinks.

He knows Lily is the type of girl who has eyelashes like comb teeth and a laugh like a goose and the particular brand of righteous anger in her heart that could burn down the whole of the formidable castle with just one spark. He knows she defends her friend Severus to her last breath, with the sort of care James has never before seen in his life. He knows she sits with her shoulders hunched and her legs crossed, and that she blinks in sets of two, and that her fingernails are squared at the tips.

This, amongst other things, amongst all things, amongst and betwixt and beneath and around all things—this, yes, endears her to James, as does everything else about her, for Lily is the stuff of fireplace soot and hair ribbons and golden sparks and, thus, like magic and fate and a prophecy unfurled, like a promise and a misstep and a knife to the heart, James loves her from moment one. How could he not?

They must be made of each other. For each other. With the other in mind. They’re corresponding pieces. They both wore red on the train, for Merlin’s sake. To James, that means everything.

Maybe they get off on the wrong foot, but there’s time. Oodles of it. Ages and ages.

She already looks less furious and tear-streaked by the time they’re at the dining table, beneath enormous burgundy and golden banners with a green-cheeked Sirius and two other firsties wedged between them, James thinks. By the end of their second week, he bets, she’ll smile begrudgingly at him in the Common Room. It’ll be late and dark and still and James’s heart will go so bloody wonky he’ll think he’s going to faint from it. He won’t even care if he does. Her smile is sculpted with the cherubs in mind.

He thinks that it’s lucky lightning trails so closely behind thunder. He thinks she could split the sky with one stomp. He thinks she’s a tempest all wrapped up into the shortest girl of eleven he’s ever seen.

He thinks she’s brilliant, most of all.

Severus knows Lucius Malfoy.

He’s known him for years. The Prince side of his family is almost as pure as any Malfoy or Black, and he’s attended his fair share of holiday banquets and debutante balls as a result, clinging to his mother’s robes and wishing his father were allowed to come too, gaping at the lavish decorations and getting sick to his stomach from the richness of the food.

Lucius is sixteen and tall, regal-nosed and straight-shouldered, with a prefect badge on his chest and Narcissa Black—who won’t do any more than glance fleetingly across the hall to that sea of burgundy and gold to meet her little cousin’s terrified eyes—tucked carefully under his arm like a prize.

He points Severus and the rest of his new housemates—mostly purebloods, but none of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, which Severus finds strangely comforting—to the best food, and the best professors, and tells them that if they lose points for Slytherin, he’ll use an Unforgivable on them. He doesn’t say which. They all believe him. They still laugh.

Severus is the only one left unamused.

It’s because his stomach is turning, because his hands shake—not only has Lily been claimed by a house so terribly wrong for her, but too because he has made a rather damning realization: that specky little prat from the train is the heir to an Ancient and Most Noble family. That means Severus, in mocking his intelligence, challenged not only him, the twit, but the family line before him. The Potter family line, which is said to sire from Peverells and Godric Gryffindor himself, foreign as they may be. Other as they may be. Wrong as they may be, they are still undoubtedly powerful, and universally liked, if not respected.

The thought makes Severus’s bones sit uneasy. He wonders, embarrassed, about the implications of what he’s done. If it had been his mother who said something like that to the head of a Noble and Most Ancient house, she would have been bound by precedent, pride, and human nature to duel.

He’ll have to check the library. It must be in an etiquette book, somewhere.

Severus gives a surreptitious glance to the Gryffindor table and sees James Potter staring wide-eyed at Sirius Black, a spoon dangling from his mouth, as Black, plugging his nose with his fingers, chugs a glass of pumpkin juice. He looks so incredibly stupid that Severus scoffs to himself and decides then that he must be fine, after all. Only a real idiot would claim his action on the train as grounds for a duel, and only a real priss would report such a misdeed to his parents for subsequent action.

Severus decides, instead, to look at Lucius out of the corner of his eye while he shovels peas into his mouth. He thinks that he wants to be just like Lucius when he’s older: strong, awe-inspiring, and proudly holding the object of his affections to his side.

Lily feels a world away.

The dormitory is everything James had pictured based upon hearing his father’s stories: round, four mattresses arranged in a circle around a central radiator system. Every bed has a window behind it, a trunk at its foot, and a system of drawers below it. The desks are broad and made of dark wood. Every handle is brass, and every accent a rich burgundy that makes James’s blood pound against his wrists, at his throat.

It’s wonderful. It’s theirs.

James takes a bed between Sirius and Peter, Remus directly across from him. The four of them chatter as they pack away their clothes and towels and toothbrushes, stack their books on their desks and organize their quills and inkwells.

“I didn’t think it would really happen!” Peter blabbers, continuing the rant that had started the moment he’d sat upon Gryffindor’s benches and continued all through the meat and potatoes and into pudding. All the tarts had managed to muffle him for a moment, but he’d dove right back in the moment they’d started up the winding stairways to their dormitory. “I mean, I knew I’d end up somewhere, and I really wanted to be with you lot, but I never thought, really! Gryffindor! Wow!”

“Yeah,” Remus agrees, staring at it all, running his fingers along the bed hangings reverently. He’s plopped a viney little plant on their windowsill already. It leans towards the moonlight, deep green and thick-leaved and livid. James wonders momentarily if he ought to get a plant too, to make this place look like his own, but he’s never had a plant before, so he really doesn’t think it would help much. If anything, he could fill it up with candles like the ones his mum burns, or quidditch posters like the ones his dad helped him hang around his bedroom back home.

Something to make it his. Now that he can be—march around these floors like he means it, no more ducking between knees and Be a good little boy, James, and Is that what we taught you?—he’s going to be with absolute fervor. Brave for his friends, restless for himself, ready to take to this place like a beast to the forest, like teeth to a jugular.

“I’m going to be disowned,” Sirius notes, flat on his bed, staring despondently at the ceiling, his voice dragging James out of his head. “Narcissa wouldn’t even look at me. Like I’m not her cousin anymore—like suddenly I’m some sort of filth-ridden mudblood or something.”

“Oi!” James says. He lobs a sock at Sirius. It hits him on the cheek. “Don’t use that word.”

Sirius goes red, tossing the sock back at James. “It’s what she would’ve said.”

“That doesn’t mean you should say it. Not even to imitate her. It’s a terrible, nasty word. There’s nothing wrong with muggles and muggleborns,” James says, looking hard at Sirius, repeating everything he’s ever heard his dad rant about over the paper or seen his mum write in tall letters upon a picketing sign. “There’s nothing dirty about them. Unless they haven’t showered, of course, in which case they are literally dirty.”

“That’s not what my parents would say,” Sirius answers, curling on his side, knees to his chest. “They’d call them m—”

“The the other word,” James supplies.

“The other word,” Sirius repeats. “They’d call them that and they’d say even worse, too. They don’t think people of lower birth should be at Hogwarts at all. Almost sent me to Durmstrang because of it.”

“I didn’t think people could be that bad in real life,” James says, assuaged enough by the fact that it isn’t Sirius’s word to start shoving his arms through a thick jumper. He always runs chilly, and with all the windows open, he could use a bit of padding. The wool, he quickly finds, smells like his house: woodsmoke and ginger and that lofty dust that speckles the library. For the first moment since the hurry and excitement of arriving, he finds he misses home desperately. “Especially parents.”

“They’re not bad,” Sirius snaps, swallowing in that too-big-tongue way of someone distinctly nauseous. “They just have a beliefs-system old as time itself. Tradition and all that. Toujours Pur.”

“That sounds stupid,” Remus says. “What do they do when the world changes, if they’re so intent on staying the same?”

“They stay the same anyway,” Sirius says. “Why bother changing what’s worked for so long?”

“Because nothing works forever,” says Remus, brows knit.

“Ha,” says Sirius. “I don’t disagree with you—I assume that’s why I’m here instead of in the dungeons, after all—but I’d like to see someone tell that to them. Anyway, there’s no changing their minds, and they’re not bad parents.” He says this forcefully. “They give us everything we could ever want. They’re not bad parents.”

“They’re just bad people,” Peter says lightly from across the room.

Sirius scowls at him. Even his scowl is aristocratic. “I’m not saying that.”

“You don’t have to,” Remus says. “We have thoughts, you know. We can reason things out for ourselves.”

Sirius pulls his sheets up, so only his eyes and hair stick out the top. “They’re not bad people,” he says stubbornly. “They just have… a specific subset of interests which is infuriating in a myriad of ways, and so I do my best to infuriate them right back.”

“Does that work?” James asks. He tosses himself down on his mattress and turns onto his side to face Sirius, hands pillowed under his cheek.

Sirius nods, lips mashed together.

“I thought that was exaggerated,” James says, “all the talk about House Black being interested in blood purity and Dark Magic.”

“It’s not. It’s true, I mean. They’re obsessed,” says Sirius. “I, however, don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a mudblood.”

“Oi!”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way! I’m not saying it like them!”

“Don’t say it at all,” Remus says from across the room, voice quiet and grave.

“Is there—” Sirius says, then frowns. “Is there another word? Or do you just say the other word and call it a day?”

“Muggleborn,” James says, frowning right back. It’s not Sirius’s fault if he doesn’t know, he supposes, but he didn’t know people could not know. “That’s the word to use.”

“Muggleborn,” Sirius echoes. “That makes sense, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Remus says. “The other word is a slur.”

“Oh,” Sirius says, cheeks paling. He somehow manages to look sicker, even as he sits up, clearing his throat to say quite formally, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I’ll behave better in the future.”

“We can’t fault you for what you didn’t know,” James says, frowning. Sirius is weird. A little bit delightful, but weird. “We’re not mad,” he adds.

Sirius exhales in a long stream and then nods, just a little bob of his head. He looks down at his lap. “I… could tell my parents used it like a bad word, I suppose, but I never thought that the word itself was bad.”

“You just need to retrain your brain,” James says firmly. “You’ll figure it out. We’ll teach you, even.”

“I’m just so used to hearing the other one, I suppose. I’ve never even been around a mu—muggleborn until today, as far as I know.”

“Never?” Peter asks, eyes wide. “How is that possible?”

Sirius shrugs, expression haughty, shoulders climbing towards his ears. “I’ve mostly only been to family functions or society events of a… certain caliber.” He sits straighter, lengthens his spine, raises his chin. He looks like a little prince. “We’re Sacred Twenty-Eight, so I mostly know Yaxleys and Bulstrodes and Greengrasses.”

“I’ll get a little spray bottle and give you a spritz every time you say something rude, how about that?” James suggests.

“I’ll be very damp but undeniably acceptable within the Hogwartsian social sphere within a week,” Sirius says, “if my parents don’t sneak onto the grounds somehow, chop all my digits off, and make a bouquet out of them first, with which they will adorn my corpse at my imminent funeral.”

Peter laughs at the joke. Even Remus smiles a little bit. It’s a moment before Sirius manages a grin as well, just a flick of the lips.

“We’ll protect you,” James says in what he hopes is a strong, comforting voice. Like a knight of some sort. “No finger bouquets or untimely funerals while we’re around.”

“I don’t need protection,” Sirius says.

“I’ll do it anyway,” James says, throwing his arm out across the gap between his bed and Sirius’s. He raises his littlest finger.

Sirius considers it for a moment, then smiles that same wolfish smile from the boat. He tosses his arm to meet James’s. They link pinkies and shake.

“That was a binding oath,” James says, warm and heavy with potatoes and braised ribs. He pats his stomach and lets his eyes close. “We’re meant to be mates forever, now.”

“I figured your punch on the train was oath enough, but I won’t complain about doubling down on it,” Sirius says. “Just to make sure.”

“Oi, what about the rest of us? Shake my pinky too!” says Peter.

“Oh, knock off, ninny,” Remus says.

Laughter pools from all four beds.

James falls asleep without much further ado, glasses still on his nose and slacks still on his legs.

When he wakes, it’s to a cracking noise.

He jumps, sitting straight up, unsure of where he is for a moment.

Red curtains, red sheets, red jumper, a pinch in his shoulder where he slept on it funny.

“Thrilling,” he says feelingly.

There’s another crack. “Sorry, sorry,” follows this one. “Sorry, I’m a right mess.”

James looks, and it’s Peter, by the window, hands shaking and water glass broken by his feet.

“It’s alright,” James says. “It’s just a cup.”

“Just wanted a drink,” Peter says. “I’m really nervous.”

The sound of the shower starts up. James looks around, taking in Remus, hair mussed and pillow clutched against his chest, and Sirius’s bed, empty save for the blocks of stunning sunshine painted across his rumpled sheets.

“It didn’t bother any of us,” James assures Peter. “Do you need some help cleaning up?”

“No,” Peter says, already stooped to pick up the glass chunks, “I’ve got it. Thanks though.”

“Is there a glass-cleaning spell, d’you think?” Remus mumbles, eyes still closed.

“Probably,” says Peter, “but seeing as I surely don’t know it, this will have to do.”

“Maybe I can ask someone in the Common Room?” says James. Peter brightens hopefully. “Yeah. I’ll do that,” James promises, clambering out of bed, knuckling his eyes beneath the lenses of his glasses.

He pounds down the stairs and stops near the entrance to the sitting area, taking it in: all smattered with lounges and tables and poufs, couches and recliners and pillows. Everything is lovely, ornate, in shades of burgundy, gold, and brown. Some students are already milling around, toast between their teeth or the Daily Prophet open in their hands. The fire still roars, as if it is eternal, Hestia’s hearth.

James feels suddenly pricklingly nervous, from the pit of his stomach to the tips of his fingers. His house. This is supposed to be his family. As his mum would say, first impressions are absolutely everything, so his ought to be—well, Mum would say it ought to be polite, but he would much rather it be memorable. Like something out of a storybook. A hero’s entrance, chin high, sword raised, bleeding goodness out of his smile.

He picks out what seems to be the coolest group of boys—they can’t be much older than James himself, and they’re all talking animatedly amongst themselves—and shoves his shoulders back. He ambles his way over and says, “Sorry to interrupt, lads, but I was wondering if anyone could help us out with a bit of broken glass?”

They look up, easy smiles spreading on their lips. “Something break in your dorm?” one asks.

“Yeah,” James says, nodding. He shoves his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. “One of the other first years—seems a bit of a duffer, really—he knocked over a water glass and it shattered. We’d rather not start our first day bleeding all over the castle, so—”

Another one nods. “I’ve got you, mate. I can show you the spell, too, so you can take care of it yourself next time.”

“Thrilling,” James blurts, with far too much feeling. His cheeks go immediately hot. “I mean—um. That’s fab, thanks a lot.”

The boy—rather tall, rather dark, and rather handsome—claps James on the shoulder. “Not at all. Lead the way.”

James does, trying to walk like a regular person, but he can’t seem to remember exactly how it is that regular people walk. He thinks his arms are swinging far too much, and he keeps kicking himself in the ankle accidentally.

“My name’s James, by the way,” he blurts. He decidedly does not make eye contact with the boy, for the sake of his own preservation. “James Potter.” A shot of courage. “You’ll want to remember that one.”

“I will, will I?” says the boy, amused. “Alright then, James Potter. I’m Frank Longbottom. You’ll want to keep that one in mind as well.”

James nods, and finds he actually recognizes Frank in a vague, distant-memory, sepia sort of way. The name, he knows, at least: Longbottoms are Sacred Twenty-Eight. James must have seen him at parties and such, growing up. “I will. Definitely.”

He opens the door to the dorm, revealing Remus, still half-asleep in his bed, and Peter, stuck in his jumper, arm through the head hole and tilted akimbo to try and force himself through.

“It’s that one, I presume,” Frank says out of the side of his mouth.

“How ever could you tell?” James says.

Frank snorts a laugh and starts forward towards the puddle of icy water and glass shards by the window. James has always considered himself to be good at making people laugh, having trained himself into it by delivering sarcastic one-liners to his tutors until they dropped their careful elderly chortles in favor of surprised snorts and shouts of mirth. James can be funny. He can lift funny like a great medieval shield and make it his armor.

Before Frank makes it to the spill, the bathroom door pops open to reveal Sirius, seemingly back to his nervous nausea, naked save for the deep green towel wrapped around his hair and the midnight blue one at his waist.

Sirius and Frank make eye contact.

“Hullo there,” says Frank.

Sirius promptly takes a step backwards and closes the door between them.

“This is Frank,” James announces, late.

“Ah,” says Remus, who is rubbing his eyes as if he thought Frank was a friendly apparition—which wouldn’t be so outlandish of a thing, seeing as there seems to be quite the array of ghosts and poltergeists roaming the castle. “Alrigh?”

“I’m just fixing your glass,” Frank says, squatting beside the mess. “C’mere, Potter, I’ll show you.”

James goes as if pulled, socks scuffing along the stones.

“To mend something that’s been broken,” Frank says, prodding at the glass pieces with the tip of his slightly-hooked wand, “the spell is Reparo.”

The pieces jump back together, seamless.

“Thrilling,” James says wholeheartedly.

Frank drops the glass onto the stones, shattering it again. “Now you,” he says.

James feels his pockets for his wand, checks behind his ear, then mutters, “Bugger.” He retreats to his nightstand, finds it lying under a stack of books he’d unloaded last night, then kneels beside Frank.

“Move your wand like this,” Frank says, demonstrating a sort of swirl motion, “and picture in your mind what the glass would look like whole.”

James focuses quite hard. The glass was tall and narrow, the sides thinner than the bottom. With bumblebees raging about his stomach, he says, “Reparo,” and watches the whole thing combine again. Perhaps it’s a bit clumsier than when Frank had done it, the pieces galumphing together rather than flitting into place, but it works.

James picks up a whole drinking glass, and his mouth drops open.

“That was perfect,” Frank says, grinning widely. He squeezes James’s shoulder. “Excellent, mate. Nicely done.”

“You’re an absolute chap,” James says. “I mean—I suppose I knew I could do it—but that was easy as anything.”

“Right. Easy,” echoes Frank, bemused. “Alrighty then. I’m gonna kip back down to the Common Room. Holler if something else goes wrong.”

“Will do,” says James, hoping his blush isn’t as obvious as it feels. He lifts his chin proudly, like Dad says to. “Cheers. Thanks, mate.”

He watches Frank retreat and, when the door closes behind him, he turns to Peter and Remus, mouth dangling wide open.

Peter, now out of his sweater prison, and Remus, now buttoned into a shirt, are both already staring.

“Magic,” James says, wiggling his fingers.

The bathroom door cracks open. “Is he gone?” Sirius hisses, toweled head poking out. “I don’t bloody well want to be buck-arse-naked in front of a stranger.”

“Why, do you plan on being buck-arse-naked in front of us?” Remus asks, half-watching James as he pulls on a cardigan.

“It might happen,” Sirius says. “Some day, the moon might come out a bit early.”

“We don’t want to see your moon just yet, mate,” James says.

“Too soon?” says Sirius.

“Too soon. Next week, perhaps.”

“Shall I pencil it into my planner?”

James smiles, shaking his head, still riding the absolute high of having done actual controlled magic all by himself. “I think you’ll remember just fine, but if it tickles your peach, go right ahead.”

Frank Longbottom, it turns out, is a third year, which essentially means he’s an expert as to how everything works.

Remus, holding the straps of his bookbag tight in his hands, bouncing anxiously on his toes, thanks every star in the sky that Frank Longbottom exists and has taken a shine to the lot of them, because without him standing upon the benches at the side of the hallway and waving along the lot of first years like an orchestral conductor, Remus and his new housemates would’ve been lost eight times over just trying to find the Great Hall.

Remus doesn’t want to be lost. Remus wants to be everywhere just on time, quietly and politely and without pain or toil, because he has been given an enormous gift in being allowed to attend school at all and he’s acutely aware of that fact.

It’s all he can think, really. Don’t fall into the vanishing step, Remus, so you won’t get booted. Don’t trip a sixth year on accident, Remus, so you won’t get booted. Try to be as posh and proper like James and Sirius, Remus, so you won’t get booted. Listen to your prefects, Remus, so you won’t get booted.

His heart is racing. It’s all a bit much.

“Come on, then!” Frank calls, waving them on. “Straight down this corridor and you’ll end up at the Great Hall. Don’t listen to any of the portraits or statues; they’re all bastards and they’ve been here for so long that they’ll do anything at all to create some excitement. Merlin knows they’ll send you straight to the boiler rooms. Hurry along, then.”

Thirteen, to Remus, sounds enormous. Thirteen is knowing the locations of passages and classrooms and navigating these wild spinning staircases like a professional. Thirteen is elective classes and sweater vests and about a foot taller than most of the first years are.

Eleven feels little. Remus, especially, feels little.

The tables in the Great Hall are so long that Remus needs to stand to see the end of his own—forget making out the occupants of the others, all of which are but blurs of seaweed and butterscotch and aegean blue. Loud blurs, raucous blurs, but blurs nonetheless. Remus has never been around so many people, not ever in his life. Hay-On-Wye is the closest town to his family’s little cottage, and it’s so small and quiet, it’s bookish as if it was built with Russian plays as the foundation, and Remus supposes their cottage in specific is Chekovian. A tragedy. Not many people come near, though it’s a nice place, a happy place for the sad Lupins, like a birdhouse hiding omen crows. There’s so much sun. There’s always some sort of intellectual discussion to be had over Mam’s pancakes and hash, something about Da’s job or else Mam’s research or the newest artifact she’s dusted off and handed to the University for study. It was a place of “What does this word mean?” and “Where’d I leave my readers?” but not a place of friends. Not a place of parties or playdates. Not a place of crowds. This feels… horrifically new. And Remus needs to fit right into it, neat, like snapping a building block into place.

Remus keeps his elbows tucked to his sides as he pours spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his tea. It’s only as he looks up to return the pot to its place that he makes eye contact with that Lily Evans bird, her hair in a bulging braid round the crown of her head and her eyes bright with a smile. A smile for Remus.

She hasn’t smiled very much at all since yesterday evening. Remus had been watching for it, since he recognized her from the train—from before Sirius and James went and disappeared for half an hour looking for sweets only to return empty-handed and bruised-knuckled. Remus had thought Lily rather crass, upon meeting her. High-and-mighty.

But here she is: softened. Like he is worthy of softness.

“Heyup, Remus,” she says quietly, like a secret.

“Hi,” Remus answers, heart pounding. Every word. He has to monitor his every word.

“Are you excited?” she asks, while dumping concerning amounts of cinnamon onto her oats.

“I’m pretty nervous,” he says, leaning a bit closer. He wraps his fingers around his mug for the warmth and lifts it to his nose, hoping the familiar smell will bring him some calm. “That’s an understatement, actually. My heart is about to beat right out of my chest.”

Lily relaxes immensely at the admission. “Mine too,” she says. “I thought I was the only one.”

“No,” Remus says, and he sips his tea. Too sweet, which is just the way he likes it. Just the way his Mam always made it. “I think it’s the lot of us. It’s certainly me, at the very least.”

“When do you think we’ll get our schedules?” Lily asks, scooping up an enormous spoon of oats.

“Soon, hopefully,” Remus says. “I had quite wanted a chance to scout out the classroom before everyone else pours into the corridors.”

“Let’s do it together, then,” Lily says. “The moment we get our hands on them, we’ll go.”

“Cracking,” Remus says, relief saturating his voice. “Thanks, Lily.”

“No need t’thank me,” Lily says around a mouthful. “‘M bloody well close to pishing myself in fear as it is.”

The language startles a sharp laugh out of Remus. It catches the attention of his dorm-mates, the lot of whom turn towards him and Lily in various stages of full-mouthed glory with interest in their eyes.

“Nothing,” Remus says before they can ask.

“A’ ooo go’n t’ee ss’thnn?” James asks him round a mouthful of toast.

“I truly haven’t a clue what you’ve said,” Remus says.

James swallows painfully. “Aren’t you going to eat something?” he repeats.

Remus looks down at his empty plate and half-drained mug, then back up at James. “No,” he says.

James frowns. “You ought to put something in your stomach, so you don’t get sick. Eat. You’ll feel better.”

Remus flicks his brows.

“That’s what my mum says, anyway,” James says, looking down. He peers at Remus through his lashes. “That a little food can fix anything.”

Remus tilts his head, thoughtful. “You think so?”

James nods. “Always helps me, anyway.”

Remus looks at the toast platter, then at his plate. “One can’t hurt, then.”

“Good man,” says James, and follows it up with a hearty clap to Remus’s back.

Lily snorts.

James looks up. “What is it?” he says.

“You speak like a wrinkly old codge,” Lily tells him.

Sirius chokes on his juice, a fair bit of it spritzing out of his nose like a graceful garden fountain.

James hammers on Sirius’s spine as he says, “At least my tongue is refined. You sound like you were shat straight out the rump of Derby.”

“So what if I am?” she says, straightening, looking down her nose at James.

“Well, all I’m saying is, you’ve got no right to comment on my accent when you—”

“Mind what you say next, Potter—”

“—speak like that!”

“And what’s wrong with speaking the way I do?”

“Nothing, but I’m just saying—”

“Alright,” Remus says, throwing his hands up. “That’s enough. Return to your toast, James.”

“Fine.”

“Buzzkill,” Lily mutters, but she looks back at her oats and gives them a good stir.

“We can save duels for dinner time,” Sirius suggests.

“Let’s not fight at all,” Peter says from Sirius’s far side. “We’re all in this together, aren’t we? All first years in the same house? We ought to have each other’s backs.”

“I’d have the back of a wild boar before that of you, James Potter,” Lily says sweetly.

“You’re just a summer peach, aren’t you?”

“Peter’s right,” Remus interjects. “Let’s all get along, at least until we know what on Earth we’re doing here.”

“Fine,” James says, looking at Lily strangely.

She glares back at him. “Only because it’s Remus who asked.”

“Unbelievable,” James mutters.

Thankfully, it’s then that Professor McGonagall stands at the end of the table, hands full of crisp white timetables. Though severe at face value, with her slicked-back bun and her glasses perched low on her nose, the green of her robes brings out color in her cheeks. It makes her seem almost matronly, if you squint at her as she patters about, handing around papers and squeezing familiar shoulders in greeting, and for that small grace Remus is grateful, because he truly is about to faint from nerves.

“Good morning to you all,” she calls, “and welcome to your first term as Hogwarts students. As a reminder, I am Professor McGonagall, the head of Gryffindor house, to which you are all, of course, the newest recruits.”

“She makes it sound like a sports team,” Remus mutters.

“Basically is,” says a startlingly ginger older boy from a few seats down. “Once quidditch season comes round, at least.”

“I am now going to hand out your schedules for this term,” McGonagall continues, waving the cards in her hand, “starting with the first years, then the sevenths, then seconds, and so on. Please remain in your seat until your card has been handed to you, as swarming me will do neither you nor me any good.”

“Why’s my heart pounding?” Peter mumbles. “It’s not a contest. We’ll all get the same lessons.”

“Everything’s a contest, if you want it to be,” James says, watching McGonagall hawkishly as she rounds the table towards them. She begins handing out the time tables to a smattering of girls who are sat near Lily—Remus remembers Dorcas, with loads of curly hair and skin as dark as Frank’s, but the other two names are utterly gone from him—and then to Peter, James, Sirius, and Remus themselves.

Remus reads it with an urgency wholly inappropriate to the situation. “Transfiguration first, today,” he notes.

“That’ll be with me,” McGonagall says with a hint of pride, “so I’ll lead you from the Great Hall to the classroom as soon as I’ve finished handing the rest of the timetables around.”

“Thrilling,” James whispers.

“We’ve a free period before lunch,” Peter says. “That’s excellent, we’ll be able to eat for ages.”

“And History of Magic this afternoon,” Sirius adds. “If that doesn’t sound a bore, nothing does.”

“It’s taught by a ghost,” says a girl near them.

They all turn to her.

“Come again?” says James politely.

The girl grins, brushing spirally curls from her eyes to get a good look at them. “Professor Binns,” she says. “He’s the prof for that class. He’s a ghost. Literally.”

“Wicked,” Sirius says, grinning. “Haven’t met a ghost yet. I’ve always wanted to.”

“Ghosts are really real, then?” Lily says, eyes enormously wide.

The girl laughs. “Yeah, they’re really real. Though the only thing wicked about History of Magic is the headache you get while trying to pay attention the whole period through.”

“I hope it isn’t really that bad,” Remus says. “There must be so much to learn, after all.”

“The first troll rebellion or two is exciting,” the girl says, “you know—blood and guts and battlefields. Fun, right? But then you hit the seventy-second civil war, and everyone is named Wendrick the Wonderful and Warren the Well-Endowed, and it becomes really trying to keep track of who’s who.”

“Scaring the ickle firsties already, Alice?” Frank calls down the table, wearing a dimpled grin. “How deplorable of you.”

“I’m a menace,” Alice says with a shrug. “You can’t stop me from spreading chaos and fear wherever I may go. It’s my calling.”

Remus thinks that’s big talk for someone wearing pink lip gloss and heart-shaped hair barrettes.

“I’ll certainly try,” says Frank, a strange smirk curling his lips to the side.

Remus exchanges a significant look with Lily, who mouths, “Wow.”

So Frank and Alice are in love, or something.

In love sounds very grown-up—very thirteen.

McGonagall’s voice floats over the clatter of forks against plates and teacups against saucers. “First year Gryffindors—please rise and follow me!”

“Bloody Nora,” Remus says.

“Good luck, you lot!” Alice tells them.

“Don’t fall asleep in Minerva’s class,” Frank advises. “I’m not convinced she’s above taking a ruler to your knuckles.”

“Minerva?” Sirius says.

“McGonagall’s first name,” says Frank, lips quirked.

“Are we supposed to call them by their first names?” Peter asks, leaning over the table in earnest.

“Oh, most definitely not,” says Frank. “It’s sort of an epidemic, really. I’d love to stop, but I haven’t the willpower.”

“It’s all fun and games until you’ve called Dumbledore Alby to his face and felt the wrath of God descend upon you,” Alice says, cutting into a pancake. “I mean, he laughed, but really, I thought that was my final moment in this life.”

“Minerva,” Sirius says. “What an excellent name.”

“Regal,” James agrees. “She’s friends with my mum and dad, you know.”

They look at each other and slow smiles spread across their lips, like they already have an inside joke, like they have something planned. Like they’ve read each other’s minds.

“Don’t you two start,” Remus warns. “We haven’t even been to class yet. Don’t get us in trouble on the first day.”

Sirius shoots an exasperated sort of look at Remus. “What’s life without a bit of risk?”

“Long,” Remus replies.

“The rest of us, unlike Sirius, haven’t been condemned to death for treason to our family units quite yet,” Peter mumbles as they all file into a line behind McGonagall. “‘Scuse us for wanting to live to see another breakfast like this one.”

“Seriously,” Remus says, “you can do whatever you want, but if you get the rest of us in trouble, I’ll bloody shank you in your sleep.”

“I’ll sit with you, Remus,” Lily says beatifically, linking her arm through his. “That way neither of us will get in trouble.”

“Thanks,” he says, looking unapologetically at the lads.

James immediately links his arm through Sirius’s. “Solidarity,” he says.

Peter, meanwhile, looks around in a panic.

“Did you lose something?” Remus asks kindly, looking over his shoulder at the table to check for him.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “My partner.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find someone,” Lily assures him as McGonagall calls, “Come on, now! Follow me!”

Peter makes a small, sad sound, but turns to follow McGonagall’s instructions, effectively shutting down that conversation.

Remus feels guiltily grateful for that. It’s his fault Peter doesn’t have a partner, anyway, but he’s already managed to talk more to Lily than he did to Peter all night, so, really, he must have the right to partner with her instead. Doesn't he?

Remus puzzles upon it throughout the long and winding walk to the Transfiguration classroom. Perhaps it’s what inspired that song by The Beatles. The road was leading to McGonagall’s door all along. Remus has to muffle a somewhat hysterical laugh at the thought.

Lily drags him by the crook of the arm right to the middle desk of the front row.

“Oh, do we really have to?” Remus whispers, trailing to a stop.

Lily elbows him in the ribs. “Come on, it's fine. It’ll make us look responsible.”

Remus looks from Peter, seated alone at a twofer table, over to James and Sirius, who seem to be wrestling over who gets to sit at the window side of their desk.

“I’m left-handed!” James whines. He takes an elbow to the neck from Sirius and slumps over the tabletop, playing dead.

“Ah, yes, because we need to put in the extra effort to look like the responsible ones,” Remus says to Lily.

She snorts a laugh as McGonagall raises her hands at the front of the room, attracting their attention.

The room falls silent without her saying a word.

That, Remus thinks, is true magic.

“Good morning,” McGonagall says, “and welcome to your first lesson in Transfiguration. Before we foray into this great and wonderful new chapter of your lives, I’m wondering if any of you have an idea of what, exactly, Transfiguration is.”

Lily’s hand shoots up, nearly scaring Remus out of his pants. “The practice of Transfiguration depends upon the formulation of all things out of atoms and molecules, and the dynamic nature of these atoms and molecules. To put it simply, Transfiguration rearranges existing molecules into a new order, thus turning the object of the caster’s spell into a wholly new object without creating anything from thin air, as it were.”

“Precisely, Miss—?”

“Evans,” Lily says. “Lily Evans.”

McGonagall studies Lily closely for a moment. “You couldn’t be related to Sir Stephen Evans, of curse-breaking fame?”

“Er,” Lily says. “No, Professor, I suppose not, seeing as I’m muggleborn.”

McGonagall’s head tilts to the side, her bun bobbing. “Your understanding is impressive, Miss Evans,” she says, “considering you’ve never before been exposed to the concept. Take five points for Gryffindor.”

Lily goes positively crimson with blush.

“Now,” McGonagall says. “Did anyone else understand a single word of what has been graciously explained to you?”

Not a soul raises a hand.

“Right then,” McGonagall says. “A demonstration, perhaps, will aid your comprehension…” She promptly turns her desk into a rotund piglet and then back.

The class erupts into impressed muttering. Remus distinctly hears James’s aside of, “Thrilling!”

“Now that Miss Evans has so helpfully established for us the basics of Transfiguration theory, and I have given you a rather blatant example of it in practice,” McGonagall says briskly, addressing the rest of the class, “you might open your textbooks to page number two, where you will find the description of the theory behind the first spell we will be attempting: turning a simple matchstick into a sewing needle.”

“That was bloody brilliant,” James says impassionedly as they walk out of the Transfiguration classroom, trying to retrace their steps to the Great Hall for lunch. He carries his matchstick in hand proudly. Though it’s still rounded at the tip, it’s gone entirely silver. Remus didn’t get his matchstick to turn so silver. “Everything can be anything at all—it is utterly fascinating. That suit of armor could be a pancake. I could be a tree, then, or a load of galleons. You think I’m worth a good thousand or so?”

“That’s rich,” Lily mutters from behind them.

James frowns, shooting her a look over his shoulder. “I thought we weren’t fighting anymore.”

“My bad,” Lily says. “I was just so overwhelmed by how pigheaded you are that I forgot myself.” She pushes between them and marches down the hall towards the nearest winding stairwell, bookbag bouncing against her spine all the way.

James’s expression goes wounded and, funnily enough, Remus doesn’t think he’s feigning the hurt. It’s like a flechette striking through the heart of a bullseye: a puncture wound, pinprick in width but cutting deep into whatever softness it finds.

As it is, the look disappears almost as soon as it had appeared, shuttered away behind a clenched jaw and determined gaze aimed toward Lily’s back.

Remus reaches out silently and touches James’s elbow.

James’s gaze flits to him. He deflates.

“Let’s eat,” Remus suggests. “You’ll feel better.”

James gives him a half-smile. “Let’s hope History of Magic is as good as that lesson was,” he says. “That’ll make me feel better for sure.”

“That was bloody horrendous,” James says impassionedly, miserably, as they walk out of the History of Magic classroom late that afternoon, when the sun has gone slanted over the grounds and the torches on the walls have begun to spark to life. “I don’t feel better at all.”

Sirius, wedged between James and Remus, throws his arms around each of their shoulders as they pass a great crowd of Slytherins and Ravenclaws awaiting their turn for History of Incredible Boredom. Sirius has to strain to reach his arms around them properly. Remus turns his face to hide a smirk.

“And the old bat had the gall to assign us a foot of parchment on the first day,” Sirius marvels. “I don’t think I heard a single word he said the whole lesson through, and now I’ve got to write about it. What a load of waffle.”

Peter peers around James’s far side, from under his lanky arm. “I must’ve nodded off three separate times.”

“We played dots and boxes for the full hour,” says one of the girls who had sat near them at breakfast that morning—a curtain of black hair, angled eyes, and Remus had heard during attendance that she’s called Mary—pointing to another girl, who walks next to her—this one blond, a Loiner, and very tall, named Marlene.

“Oh, good on you,” James says. “I wish we’d thought of that.”

“Or you could’ve just paid attention,” Remus suggests. “Really, was it only Lily and I of the whole class taking notes?”

“Yes,” everyone answers together.

“Ah,” Remus says. “Lovely.”

“I think we deserve another meal after all that,” Sirius says, looking up at Remus, “don't you?”

“We’ll end up round as nifflers before the end of the month if we eat every time we have a difficult lesson,” Remus says.

Sirius sighs long-sufferingly. “I’m rather used to eating a handful of small meals all throughout the day, you know. I need to adjust to this utterly barbarian three-a-day system. Until I do, I am famished. I won’t make it much longer than this.”

“Boo hoo,” Remus responds.

“In all my years, I’ve never been so starved. I could faint, right here and now, at the blink of someone’s eye. Somebody blink, I’ll prove it to you.”

“Cross your fingers that the reason you’re so hungry is because you’re growing a bit,” James says, straightening enough that Sirius can no longer reach to wrap his arm over James’s shoulders.

“You’re rude,” Sirius says. He jabs James’s side, which makes James double over; Sirius, now able to reach, wraps his arm around James again. “For that, you personally are going to take me to eat. No arguing allowed.”

“I’ll bring you, Sirius,” Mary suggests, cheeks pink. Marlene elbows her in the ribs. Dorcas, opposite her, rolls her eyes.

Sirius’s gaze, however, stays locked on James’s face.

“Alright, I’ll take you,” James sighs, as if it’s some great trouble to him. The smile nearly splitting his face in two, of course, hints to otherwise.

Sirius, it turns out, had been right about the bate his mother would fly into upon hearing of his house placement.

It comes upon their third day of term, red and waxen and straining its way open.

“Oh, hell,” Sirius says when a school owl drops it onto his porridge.

“Run,” James advises.

“What on Earth is that?” says Lily, leaning forward with interest in her eyes.

Sirius, however, is cemented to his seat. Pure dread weighs his veins like ice. It’s horrible, that the letter is sort of beautiful. Creamy paper, scarlet ink like sliced skin, like a blood oath. Silken ribbon. He can imagine his mother flicking through his father’s desk drawers in search of the box of blank ones, can imagine her in the Green Room with the curtains drawn and the lamps on, draped across her chaise with Kreacher fanning her, tears in her eyes, heartbreak in every line of her bony body.

“A Howler,” Peter whispers, as if making noise will make the thing explode faster.

“Come on,” James says, grabbing Sirius around the elbow and yanking him to his feet. James all but drags him down the length of the Great Hall along the wall, the letter clutched in Sirius’s white-knuckled grip.

They break into the foyer at a run, in just enough time for the doors to shut behind them before the letter bursts in a fantastic display of ripped parchment and bits of dry wax.

“SIRIUS ORION BLACK,” it wails.

“Did she just call you Onion?” James says pleasantly.

“MY SON, MY BOY,” sobs Sirius’s mother. “BELIEVE MY SURPRISE UPON HEARING YOUR INSOLENCE RUNS THIS DEEP. A PHASE, I THOUGHT, OR PERHAPS A STREAK OF YOUTHFUL REBELLION—BUT NO! YOU HAVE CHANGED THE COURSE OF YOUR LIFE—GENERATIONS OF US AT YOUR BACK, YOUR GRANDFATHER IS SICK, THIS COULD VERY WELL KILL HIM, AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO! MY DARLING, MY LIGHT, MY STAR… MY SIRIUS…”

Sirius does not shut his eyes. He’s never flinched away from a blow.

“YOUR FATHER IS HEARTBROKEN. YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TAUGHT YOU, WHAT WE NEEDED FROM YOU, AND YET THIS IS THE EXAMPLE YOU’VE SET FOR YOUR CHILD BROTHER. THIS IS WHAT YOU’VE GIVEN HIM TO LOOK UP TO. I DID NOT RAISE YOU TO TURN YOUR BACK UPON YOUR FAMILY, YOUR BLOOD, YOUR BIRTHRIGHT!” A sniff, then her voice changes. No longer thick with grief, but chilled, deathly calm. Persephone manning the gate. “YOU MUST WATCH YOURSELF, NOW, SIRIUS. YOU CAN INGRAIN IT INTO THAT MUDBLOOD-LOVING MIND OF YOURS THAT, IF YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON YOUR FAMILY, WE WILL TURN ON YOU WITHOUT FLINCHING, MY DEAR, MY SON, MY SIRIUS.”

The bit of ribbon that had secured the parchment shut proceeds to stick straight out like a tongue and blow a raspberry at Sirius. The letter tears itself up and falls to the stones like a smattering of wretched confetti.

The small crowd of milling students that had compiled to watch the festivities begins to dissipate, some yelling out condolences or else laughing heartily. Sirius ignores both sentiments equally because, oh, he knows what this was. He saw this coming, and here it is.

A branding. A bruise he can’t heal with a stolen bottle of dittany. A mark across his forehead: different. Gryffindors cannot trust him; Slytherins cannot want him. He is neither, he is none, he is, more than anything, Black.

But, too, it is a threat; a reminder; a coded message begging him to change his mind. To change his heart. To be like them in the only way that truly matters: color.

Black, he is. Bone and blood and brain. He knows them, and they know him.

A glimmering frontal attack draws attention away from the flank, where the devastating blow will land.

“That was charming,” James says.

Sirius, ears still ringing from the shouting, looks over at James. As his stomach settles, a familiar, eternal dread taking up residence in its proper place, a slow grin spreads across his lips, as if James is some great cooling salve upon the raw flesh of this particular wound. Ha. His dittany. It’s perfect: James, clearly, did not see that for its truth. Sirius loves Gryffindors. “She is rather charming herself, you know.”

“I could almost feel her spit flying onto my face as she spoke,” James says.

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius says, “she’s a spitter.”

James nods a bit, mindless, giving the event no weight. “Do you want some more toast?”

“Yeah,” Sirius says.

They go back into the Great Hall and, really, that’s that.

Until the traditional letters start coming, anyway.

And—well. Those, Sirius can keep to himself.

Two weeks into their first term at Hogwarts, Lily Evans does not begrudgingly smile at James Potter across the Common Room, nor the dining table, nor the Herbology greenhouse, nor anywhere else at all.

It goes like this instead:

James makes a poor Wiggenweld potion, hides Mister Filch’s bastard cat in a passage behind a tapestry with Sirius and discovers a deep pool of untapped mischievous potential within himself, decently charms his teapot to spit colored steam—it’s bluish, really, if you squint—and transfigures an earthworm into a butter knife on his second try.

He’s showing the latter to Lily Evans proudly—maybe this will impress her, after all, maybe this will be the thing to make her look, to make her smile back—but she meets his eyes, stares at him with arid disinterest, and looks away.

It’s as good as her ignoring him.

This is when he realizes that, perhaps, he isn’t meant to love her, because mean people are impossible to love, or because she ought to have been in Slytherin with Snivellus Snape after all—or maybe she just sees through him in the way his parents were always afraid of people doing, and she finds that there’s nothing good within him at all, not even in those tender spots below his skin, bruise spots, don’t choose that mango, dear, look, it’s too soft.

It’s strange, thinking about it. Putting himself out there for the first time in his life to find out that what he is? Is worse than Snape.

And here’s the real truth in that: the trouble with Snape isn’t really that he’s an oily git, nor that the first thing he did was deliver an insult to James’s father and family.

It’s more than that—far more. Even with the too-big head and too-knobby knees of childhood, he radiates terrible, dark energy. James has never seen him do anything but scowl. The world goes lackluster and grey around him; he swallows light and bends it, an anti-prism, a dementor grinning, a succubus or a wraith, a nightmare.

So he scares James, though he’d never admit it aloud.

You can’t blame him for being scared. It’s just—well.

James shouldn’t be scared, should he? James is a Gryffindor, and a right strong one at that. Much stronger than the sniveling boy on the train. Much stronger than most first years, even other pureblooded ones, because he’s James Fleamont Potter, and his blood is that of lordships and ladies and solid gold dining sets. James ought to know that he’s got power, he’s got prestige, he’s got a lot over Snape. He ought to think it and, more than that, he ought to believe it. He really, really ought to.

It’s just. Sometimes Snape looks at Lily like he owns her, like she’s a canary and he’s got the cage hidden beneath his robes, and that scares James down to his bones. Not because it’s her, but because no one should look at anyone else like that, no matter who.

James thinks the worst thing a person could want to be is frightening, but that pursuit alone seems to be Snape’s dearest desire.

Lily Evans thinks James is less preferable in comparison to that. And the knowledge of it feels quite hard to swallow.

Lily Evans has every single last one of her mental faculties about her, thank you very much, and it’s something she quite prides herself upon.

These especially astute mental faculties, of course, are the greatest source of her myriad of Hogwartsian problems in that she seems to be the only soul with enough verve and fortitude to note such things as the impracticality of using bloody gas lamps for light when electric bulbs are so accessible nowadays. Why oh why would she want to use a quill when her ballpoint pen writes with even, smooth ink and needn’t be refilled every two lines? There isn’t an explanation for the backwardness of a place that should be so forward.

This, she learns, is the case with Hogwarts and nearly all its attendees: they are, as a whole, sickeningly and mind-numbingly backwards.

While her new dormmate Dorcas Meadowes with her broad halo of spiral curls doesn’t get a second look the way she might have in muggle London, Lily and her textbooks and her magic wand and the Bic perched behind her ear do. Lily with blood that runs, according to these wizards, rather more brown than average blood—and, truly, what is the problem with a bit of darkness? Lily finds it comforting: a thick afghan pulled over her shoulders, the elbow patches on her father’s favorite tweed, a mug of tea before swirling in the milk, mossy earth gone mushy with the rain squelching under her toes.

Besides, it rings rather like the Inquisition, this concept of dirty blood. That alone is enough to assure her she isn’t a fan of the way things are organized here.

So let her be dirty and dark. She’ll add it to the yard-long list of unsavory things she’s been called in her modest eleven years. It’s not the worst of them. It’ll never be the worst of them.

She voices these thoughts to one Remus Lupin in the library on a blustery Saturday while the rest of his merry band are running about on the grass, scuffling and yelling and charming wild berries to pelt the others.

Remus Lupin, Lily finds, can be quite astute himself. He performs well in Charms, and his History of Magic essays almost rival Severus’s practiced ones, or Lily’s own. He knows almost every answer in class, but never says them out loud. She’s taken to peeking at him over her shoulder just to watch him mouth along. He’s always correct. He always has a secret little grin for himself after.

Remus, Lily believes, is the easiest of those rowdy boys to get to know. He is not quite polite, just like her, and he takes his tea with just as many sugars as she does, which makes her feel less embarrassed about dumping spoonful after heaping spoonful into her cup. He doesn’t speak poshly, and his accent garbles the ends of his words, but his vocabulary is broad, the matching of which is something Lily takes as a personal challenge for herself. Truly, on paper, he comes off as quite mature. But Lily only a week ago heard him tell Sirius Black off for bewitching an impressively bigoted, incredibly posh Slytherin sixth year named Malfoy’s shoelaces to tie together when he could’ve cast a raining charm over their house table in the Great Hall and gotten the lot of snake bastards all at once. Lily doesn’t know what exactly they did to warrant the attack, but the genuine vitriol in Remus’s eyes as he glared at them was evidence enough that it must have been bad.

Revenge, Lily can respect. She thinks that bit of sharp, mischievous but harmless genius—that bit of quiet cunning, perhaps, within him—is what makes the idea of being Remus’s friend so intriguing.

Being mature is all well and good, after all—preferable, by far, to chaos—but Lily has no urge to be friends with boring people, nor one-dimensional ones, nor those with a distinctly wan personality. Remus is none of those things. He is multi-faceted: thoughtful, hardworking, and sharp—almost like he swallows back defensiveness with every bob of his throat. Like there’s some deep well of him to explore. Lily quite likes exploring the deep wells of people, especially when they promise to be as interesting as Remus Lupin.

“You do see what I’m saying, though, Remus?” she prods, carefully penning another line of their History of Magic essay. “Why are we using rolls of parchment—which allow the writing to wind up all crooked and uneven as we haven’t got lines to lead us—when loose-leaf is so perfectly accessible in the muggle world? It’s far too complicated, this parchment business, and I haven’t even got a reading disorder. Imagine what it’s like for students who can’t read or write as easily. Goodness, and how easy it is to cheat your assignments just by making your handwriting extra tall! I bet there are students who get away with writing half the amount we do, just by making their calligraphy big and crooked.”

“Yes,” he says vaguely. He unfolds the old Daily Prophet he’s skimming for a first-hand account of the wizarding uprisings in the early nineteen-forties and, when a cloud of dust comes up, sneezes.

“Bless you,” Lily says.

“Thanks.” He rubs his nose on his sleeve. “You’re right about the parchment, by the way. It’s unrealistic. And stupid. The wizarding world is entirely unwilling to progress when that progress was made by the minds of muggles. Historically, the superiority complex of the magical community in general is toxic at best and murderous at worst.”

“I can tell,” Lily says, scrawling a sentence about the involvement of Emma Goldman in the riots. “How incredibly narrow-minded.”

“Fight the power, Lily Evans,” Remus says, a little grin turning up the corner of his lips. It’s like his secret smile, but this one isn’t secret. It’s hers. She claims it with both hands.

“You, too,” she says, smiling back at him.

She likes Remus Lupin. She feels quite lucky that all her greatly practiced mental faculties support her in this social endeavor.

James has the utter honor of receiving his first detention at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry when taking the fall for a prank idea that started with baby powder, a vial of Draught of Peace, and a single quill feather and ended with twelve Hufflepuffs in the hospital wing, which was masterminded by Remus Lupin and performed by Sirius Black.

Sirius Black’s first detention at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is subsequent and thrilling, mostly for the reason that it is acquired while he is in the act of springing James Potter free from his first detention.

They spend their second detentions side by side at McGonagall’s Detention Desk, carving their initials into the wood with their wand tips and snickering to themselves, feeling eleven and alive and very, thrillingly naughty.

Dear Mum,

Peter Pettigrew does not fold his socks.

He doesn’t believe it’s worth the effort. They come apart in the drawer, and his mother never encouraged the pursuit. Nothing good comes from folding socks. This, he's sure of.

Or, he's sure of it until he meets James Potter, who folds his socks with just as much care as he hangs his crisp-edged oxford shirts in his wardrobe, or mutters an incantation in Transfiguration, or trails behind Sirius Black’s every footfall.

James Potter folds everything. He folds sweaters, pajamas, sweatshirts. He folds scraps of parchment, folds the rare but long letters he gets from his mum before storing them between the back pages of thick texts, folds up homework sheets before throwing them in the rubbish bin. He dog-ears book pages. He diagonally folds his marmalade-smeared toast and eats it like a half-sandwich to keep from getting sticky fingers. He folds over the ends of his slacks so they hover around his skinny ankles.

James Potter collects their clean laundry, dumps it out on his mattress, and folds it for the lot of them, depositing their freshened garments on their proper beds, ready to be put away.

They don’t ask him to. They hardly ever think to thank him for it. It’s just something he does, the same way he brushes his teeth or fluffs his hair or rolls his sleeves to just below the elbow.

Like an electric lightbulb clicking on, at age eleven, Peter Pettigrew starts to see the merits of folding.

Satisfied with herself for having finished her homework early (again, and maybe there’s something to be said for tradition because this is exactly how she spent her days returning from primary school: doing homework early, revising, and then reading until bedtime, freak, friendless save for Sev and he’s as far away from her now as he was back then and she’s lonely like freshly-harvested corn fields and lavender in August—but that’s off-topic, really), Lily pulls out her copy of Fantastic Mister Fox for the dozenth time since she’d received it for Christmas last year.

“Oh, not again,” Mary sighs, watching her rather than completing the star chart open across her knees, which she really ought to do. It’s due Wednesday, after all, and she’s hardly started.

“Mind your own business,” Lily says crossly. “It’s a lovely novel.”

“Lovely enough to read it eight times in a month and a half?” Marlene asks from where she’s perched atop the windowsill, brush in hand. She swears the moonlight makes her hair shine more. Lily will never pretend to understand this claim, but magic has already assured her of weirder truths than this, so she doesn’t badger Marlene for the specifics.

“Yeah,” Lily says, quite surely.

“No book can be that good,” Dorcas says, dropping the needle on side B of Blue Hawaii “I don’t care what it’s about.”

“Roald Dahl is clever, is all,” Lily says, hugging the book to her chest. The cover has started going wonky from being held open so much, for so long, but she tries to keep it in good form. “There are some pictures. They’re all funny, too.” For some reason, the thought that Sirius Black might like the style of the art strikes her. It’s quite a strange thought, as she’s never seen Sirius Black create art—unless doodles of dogs pooping and stars exploding and strange hybrid chicken-men in the margins of his notes pages count. Perhaps they do, now that she thinks on it. She’s not the dictator of what’s art and what isn’t. If she were, some of the tapestries she's seen here would certainly not be on the walls.

Dorcas settles on Lily’s bed beside her, bringing with her a distinct chamomile-and-greenhouse scent. She takes the book from Lily’s hands and flips it open.

“Boggis and Bunce and Bean / one fat, one short, one lean / these horrible crooks / so different in looks / were nonetheless equally mean,” Dorcas reads. She looks at Lily. “What the bloody hell did I just put my eyes on.”

Lily goes pink round the cheeks. “It’s a children’s book, sort of. It’s fun, even though it’s sort of silly. It’s about Mister Fox trying to feed his family by stealing food from the mean farmers. He’s sort of like Robin Hood.”

“What’s a robbing hood?” says Dorcas.

Lily sighs long-sufferingly for the state of wizarding fairy tales. “I forgot. It’s a muggle story. Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives what he stole to the poor.”

“How very Gryffindorian,” Marlene says, working her brush through a knot in her hair. “No wonder you ended up here, reading about characters like that.”

“Brave miss Lily,” Mary says loftily, climbing to her knees, “protecting those littler than her.”

“Funny, seeing as she’s the littlest one here,” Dorcas says, elbowing her in the ribs.

Lily elbows Dorcas right back, then flops onto her pillows. She afflicts a fancy sort of tone and quotes something her mum has on an embroidered pillow in their living room. “It’s as Shakespeare said: though she be but little, she is fierce.” Lily tucks her chin to look up at them. “Do tell me you know Shakespeare, at least.”

“That old duffer? I reckon everyone knows him,” Marlene says. “Wizards too, right Dorcas?”

“Ravenclaw, he was. Only a Ravenclaw could come up with such ridiculous situations and somehow make us all believe they could be realistic,” Dorcas says, flopping beside Lily, the two of them shoulder to shoulder. It’s surprisingly nice, the closeness. She hasn’t had anything like this since her sister—well. “Is anyone hungry? All this talk of books and reading has got me knackered.”

Lily laughs, turning her head on her pillow to look at Dorcas. “Aren’t you always hungry?”

“Forever,” she proclaims, “all day long, from sun-up to sun-down and back again. Please tell me that one of you has some nicked dinner rolls in her pillowcase or something.”

The others laugh too, now. “I’ve got a pack of Bertie Botts my mum sent me,” says Mary, leaning over the edge of her mattress to dig into her trunk. “Let’s have a bit of a game, shall we?”

James kicks a stone into the water. “What d’you think you want to be when you grow up?”

“Who, me?” Sirius says.

“No, the squid,” James says. “You, you, you numpty.”

Sirius hums. He’s got sun in his face, baking his skin, and he feels like sand, like deserts, like he’s been here forever and always will be. His hair is loose on his forehead and he wants to roll his sleeves, he badly wants to, to be like James, so comfortable in his skin, in his trousers, which are cuffed at the ankle to allow him to wade into the very edge of the lake, barefoot, skin dark with wetness. He’s visibly shuddering in the chill. It’s stupid, to let himself be cold. It makes no sense at all, but he looks so happy. He looks so happy, Sirius wants to dip into it, too. “I don’t want to do anything at all,” he says. “Mother and Father say I’ll have their Wizengamot seat once they’re old, and I don’t need to work before then. Not for a day.”

“You don’t want to work?” James says. He squints in the sunlight, looking back at Sirius. “There’s nothing you want to do with your life?”

Sirius pushes up on an elbow just enough to shrug at James, then he flops backwards onto the dirt once more. “What about you, then? What’s your dream?”

“I want to play for the national team,” James says fervently. There’s a plop as another rock hits the water. “Or the Cannons. Maybe the Cannons are my first choice, really.”

“The Cannons are pants.”

“The Cannons are—” James sputters. “Alright, yeah. Yeah, the Cannons are pants.” He wades out of the water, shivering, rubbing at his upper arms with his hands for friction. He kicks the ankles of his trousers down with his feet, leaving wet prints on the wool. “Brr, that’s brisk.” He sits beside Sirius, lays so they’re shoulder to shoulder, pressing closer even than that as if to steal warmth. Sirius feels, for a moment, frozen, but James is so clumsy with his touches, so everywhere and all-the-time, that Sirius finds himself already more used to it than he was when they started term and Sirius was ill with nerves and James was, too, just differently. James had, perhaps, forgiven him most easily, most quickly, most entirely, after explaining quite patiently to Sirius in the dark of their dormitory while the others were asleep exactly what the other word for muggleborn meant and why it was wrong to use it. Sirius supposes he should’ve known that his parents were a minority in their thoughts, even though they seemed so enormous; their dinner parties with Heronius Burke are never publicized affairs, especially when Father is looking to acquire new collectibles, and Sirius should’ve known, but at least he always knew the wishing people dead part was bad, and the judgement, and the torture, and now he knows more things are bad, too, so many things that are black are Black, or vice versa, perhaps. “The Cannons are pants, but I love them so much. Maybe if I just root for them hard enough, they’ll win. If teams could win just based on how badly their fans want it for them, the Cannons would be undefeated, I promise you that.”

“Mhm,” Sirius says, grinning at James, whose nose is close enough to nudge Sirius’s. James’s face is dark with cold, chapped lips and glasses slipping down his nose. “The Wasps will always be better.”

James moans like he’s been punched in the gut and doubles over, knees pulled to his chest. “You wound me. The Wasps. What are you, bandwagoning?”

“Yes, I’m bandwagoning!” Sirius says. “They’re winning now, and I want to win now, too. The Cannons are pants.”

“But at least they’re something to care for,” James says, rolling onto his stomach. He pillows his head on his folded arms. “You can’t love the Wasps, because you’re not really a fan of them, not properly. You don’t feel it in your blood and bones when they win. When the Cannons win, I’ve been wanting it so badly for so long that it feels like my whole body is on fire.”

“You are so full of waffle, mate.”

James laughs aloud, back bouncing as he snickers into his elbows. “Sure, Sirius. You go on and think that.” He reaches out and pats Sirius’s knee. “I’ll teach you. Alright? I’ll teach you how to love things properly.”

Sirius rolls his eyes, as if he isn’t grinning like a nancy. “Alright, Jamie,” he says. “Whatever you say.”

“Oi, there he comes,” Sirius hisses, hiding beside one of the suits of armor that line the corridors, cool metal pressing into his shoulder through the knit of his sweater. That chill of autumn has begun to cling to every surface it can, dastardly and impertinent, and it’s thrilling: no one could be upset with a sign as blatant as this that November is on its merry way.

“Evans is with him,” James says, looking faint. “Abort. Abort mission.”

“She's always with him. We’ll never do it if we’re waiting for him to pry off the barnacle.” Sirius digs an elbow into James’s ribs. “Don’t be a coward, mate.”

James elbows him right back, glaring. “I’m no coward. I’m far braver than any of you lot.”

“Put a lid on it,” Remus’s voice comes from the tapestry he and Peter are hidden behind, neither of them particularly thrilled for this specific endeavor. Heckling, Remus had called it. This isn’t a prank: it’s hazing. Besides, he’s just going to pretend it doesn’t bother him, same as when you vanished his shoes in the middle of Potions last week, and there’s no joy in it when he doesn’t react. Sirius had asserted that it isn’t heckling at all: it’s an offensive attack. He’s never had the ability to perform an offensive attack before. Now he does. Life is strange. “Continue measuring your penises later.”

“Penises is such an unwieldy word,” Sirius says, grabbing his wand from his waistband as Snape’s voice floats over, “Yes, but I’m only so good because I’ve been exposed to it for so long. I wouldn’t be an expert like I am without my mum’s help, or her enormous cabinet of ingredients in the kitchen. Some people have spice drawers; we have shelves and shelves of lacewing flies and pixie tears.”

Sirius meets James’s eyes, waiting for a signal of some sort.

James performs a complicated series of hand gestures and waves.

Sirius mimes snogging with himself, arms wrapped around his own trunk and hands desperately groping his own jumper.

James makes as if he’s going to swan dive over the banister.

Sirius peeks around the suit of armor again as Snape’s voice falls upon them. He takes prerogative, because that’s what he’s always done.

“Someone is looking especially unapproachable today,” Sirius calls over Snape’s droning, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed coolly over his chest.

“By Jove himself, what an impressive feat it is! Do you think we might be able to wrangle a smile out of the queen's guard?” James says from across the hall, eyes on Snape.

“By Jove,” Peter repeats at a wheeze behind the tapestry, which writhes as if Remus has nudged him and then squeaks as if the nudge was more of a punch.

“Really,” Lily says, huffy, her cheeks red as she looks between them all, gauging.

“I’m only asking,” James says with a shrug, an angelic smile painted onto his lips.

“Is that your Halloween costume?” Sirius asks Snape. “Have you gone as a bat, then?”

“Or a vampire, maybe,” says James.

“I think he’s just gone as a really large cloak,” says Sirius, head tilted, laughing the haughtiest laugh he can. For a moment, his stomach drops—Salazar’s sake, he sounds like his father—but then James snorts from across the hall and mutters “Good one, Sirius,” which serves its exact purpose: to make Sirius more comfortable here, like this, with a wicked tongue cutting jagged words out of silk lips. He knows exactly how to do this.

“Come on, Lil,” Snape says, grabbing her by the elbow and making to tug her away.

“Come on, Lil,” Sirius mocks as James, visibly startled, eyes locked on Snape’s hand, raises his wand and says, “Don’t grab her, what are you doing?”

They freeze, James’s wand at Snape’s chest, Snape’s hand nearly white-knuckled around Lily’s arm.

Snape’s free hand flies to his pocket for his wand so Sirius raises his to meet it. They hadn’t intended a fight, but now they’re in it and Sirius finds that he doesn’t mind it at all. It makes his heart start to pump like a drum roll behind his ribs. It’s the natural progression of events. And what better way to prove he isn’t like Snape—like purists, like the people that won’t trip over the word muggleborn like he does, because it’s new to his mouth, because they’ll never use it—than to fight back against a carrier of those ideas?

Lily, on the other hand, stands there, flint catching bright, and says, “Don’t you dare! What is wrong with you? Fighting in the corridors? How immature could you be?”

James throws his arms up in exasperation. “He’s grabbing you!”

“You’re teasing him!” Lily wrenches her arm out of Snape’s grip. His eyes go wide as if he’s shocked she’d done it. “You’re bullies!”

“Worse: you’re fat-headed prats with enough ego to sink you if you fell into the lake,” Snape snaps. “Did your daddies bother to tell you that your money doesn’t make you princes, or are they as narcissistic as you? Hard to swallow that truth, even off your silver spoon!”

“Stop, Sev!” Lily cries, turning towards him. “Don’t stoop to their level!”

“You don’t talk about my father or my family,” James snaps, cheeks flushed. “My father is a great man, and he earned his money through hard work.”

“Potter—”

“Hard work, right,” Snape simpers, his wand poking closer to James’s chest, head tilting to the side, something twisting in his lips. “As if being descended from a Noble and Most Ancient house makes you anything other than lucky, or developing a line of hair products is some great display of wit and cleverness.”

Sometimes Sirius thinks that Snape seems older than them. Not more mature, nor more posh. Perhaps angrier at the world.

But not in a righteous way. Not in a way that would drive him to improve the world he so dislikes. Rather in a way that says: I’ll burn this place down and rebuild it myself, making clay of ashes, and if you stand in my way I will grind you underfoot. You will be my cornerstone and it will be the most useful you have ever been.

Snape reminds Sirius of his mother: caring desperately about only those he sees as fit of the energy he expends to care; unwaveringly convinced as to what exactly is good and right in the world; so sure that he’s correct that his sureness alone could wear away a mountain grain by grain.

Perhaps it’s this particular reflection that turns Sirius’s stomach so sharply leftward—this familiarity that forces Sirius to move, a wave of utter terror breaking over his shoulders and foaming icy down his spine.

“Flipendo!” Sirius cries, repeating what he’s heard around the house—what’s knocked him into bookcases and thrown Kreacher down stairwells. What he has the twisted privilege of knowing.

It’s not a terribly strong spell, seeing as Sirius has never tried it before, but Snape stumbles backwards nevertheless, doubled over as if he’s been punched in the gut.

“Sirius Black, you put your wand away!” Lily yells, reaching over to grab Snape, to hold him up. “Sev, are you alright?”

“Orbis,” Snape hisses, waving his wand sharply, and Sirius’s feet cement to the stone, even as he strains, even as he shuts his eyes in acceptance of the flogging to come.

“Oh, crumbs,” James says, scrambling for his wand, but he’s too slow.

“Langlock!” Snape cries, then, “Melofors!” and rather suddenly Sirius is plunged into a soft sort of darkness—the type that makes the window’s light and candlestick’s glow orangish around him.

“Hey, what?” Sirius says—or, rather, tries to say, but his tongue is quite cemented to the roof of his mouth.

“Bloody hell,” James says, and then he says, “Locomotor Wiggly!”

There’s a loud thud and Lily shouts. Sirius gropes for his face to try and rub his eyes and finds he cannot touch his head. There’s something surrounding it, hard but strangely fleshy, and it’s starting to smell like soup. Like something wafting up from the kitchens, but far too close for it to be the feast.

Lily keeps shouting and now James is hollering and Snape is snapping and Sirius keeps knocking his knuckles on whatever the hell it is swallowing his head, because he doesn’t quite appreciate being stuck. Something about this is really rather claustrophobic.

“Help!” he yells silently. “I’m trapped!” No matter how hard he tries, pulling from the very pits of himself, no sound comes out. “Bollocks.”

“Sirius?” comes another voice. Remus’s, this time. It washes over Sirius like velvet.

Sirius waves, reaching out blindly, trying to find Remus’s—something. Just to hold onto him. So he doesn’t feel so weird and lost.

“Oof,” Remus says, as Sirius’s hand finds his face, hiking his lips crooked over his teeth. Sirius feels Remus’s warm breath against his thumb. “Get your fingers out of my nose, mate.”

Sirius does.

A moment passes, then Remus snorts a laugh. Then more. Louder, until he’s really thick with it, a bit wheezy and carefree. It’s a rare Remus Lupin laugh—the type Sirius would typically appreciate, were he not mute and unable to move and also rather blinded.

“Sirius,” Remus giggles over the sound of Snape, Lily, and James arguing loudly, “Sirius. You’re—Sirius. Hehehe. Oh Merlin.” Sirius hears Remus’s palms clap onto the outside of whatever it is Sirius is inside of, like he’s holding Sirius’s cheeks. “You’ve got a pumpkin around your head,” Remus says.

“Oh, how pleasant,” Sirius tries to say. “Do you think Peter will eat me out of here if I ask nicely?”

“I’m going to—here, maybe this will help. Finite Incantatem.”

Sirius regains access to his tongue and his feet. “Bloody hell,” he says, voice echoing inside the pumpkin globe. “Don’t cut it off. Give me eyeholes. I’m walking around like this all day. Happy Halloween, everyone.” Remus laughs harder. “Poke me some eyeholes, I’m serious. Eyeholes, Remus. Hey, where’s James?”

“Oh, hell,” Remus says. Then, “We could really make a nice roast dinner with you all. Someone fetch me a carving knife.”

“Please tell me what you see. Before I die of curiosity.”

“Well,” says Remus.

There’s a strange sound.

“Is that—?” Sirius says.

“Quack quack quack.”

“Yes,” says Remus.

“I’m livid with you both!” Lily is snapping. “Potter, you should have a dozen detentions for this! You started everything!”

“He should wash his head!” James yells, and Sirius is smacked in turn by both relief in the fact that James is not the duck and a thrill in the understanding that Snape is.

“Quack quack quack.”

“You’re an utter bully!” Lily cries. “What is wrong with you? You don’t say that to people!”

“We’re all thinking it,” James says. “He should know. Maybe then he’ll fix it, and then people won’t heckle him within an inch of his life anymore.”

“We’re doing him a favor, Evans,” Sirius says, raising his arms out and walking blindly towards the sound of their voices. Remus’s hand catches his. He’s led forward with a tug.

“Don’t you start, Sirius Black!” Lily audibly stomps towards them. “You’re just as bad as Potter and you deserve worse than you got!”

“I’m inside a pumpkin!”

“He is a duck!”

“Let’s all just calm down,” Remus says, not meaning it for a second.

“Don’t you start too, Remus Lupin! You let this happen! Laughing at it makes you just as bad as both of them!”

“Hey, none of us intended for everything to turn out like this.”

“The duck was not a part of the plan!! I panicked!! Sirius is a gourd!!”

“You have no right to—”

“He is a gourd—”

“—attack anyone else—”

“—he is a gourd he is a gourd—”

“—no matter what prompted it—”

“—he is a gourd he is a gourd he is a gourd—”

“—and you started this whole thing with your teasing, anyway!”

“The Headless Hunt is going to recruit him!”

“What on Earth is all this ruckus?” comes a new voice, accompanied by sharp, heeled-boot footfalls.

Sirius whips towards the sound. “May I introduce my newest alter ego: Sirius Ori-ange Black.”

A yellowish moment passes as Sirius puffs out his chest, strings of squash clinging to his eyelashes.

“You ought to workshop that one, Mister Black,” McGonagall says at last. “And how did this beast get into the castle?”

James laughs loudly.

“That’s Severus Snape!” Lily cries out. Sirius can hear the frustration in her voice. “Potter transfigured him into a duck!”

A moment passes. Sirius wishes desperately to see the look on Minnie’s face.

“Potter, Black, and Lupin, to my office.” Her voice raises chills along Sirius’s spine. “Mister Snape, I will contact your head of house to handle this as he sees fit. Miss Evans, to your dormitory, please. Mister Pettigrew, you may accompany her.”

“How did she even know I was here?” Peter's voice marvels and Sirius mutters, “Oh, no”, and the duck goes absolutely bonkers somewhere on the ground. Sirius considers trying to kick it but graciously restrains himself. “Professor Minnie. I’m in a pumpkin. He froze me in place and Langlocked me and put me in a pumpkin!”

“I can release you right now, though it would lead to the untimely demise of your alter ego,” McGonagall says.

Sirius taps over the place where his eyes are. “Just some eyeholes, please, if you would.”

She tilts his pumpkin head back and cuts two even triangular holes in the flesh. Sirius winces against the onslaught of afternoon light, then takes a look around and cackles.

Severus Duck is running around in a panic, tiny yellow feet pattering against the stones. He’s far nicer this way. They ought to just leave him.

Remus’s lips are mashed together and he’s flushed. Sirius knows it’s from panic at having been caught in the thick of things. Remus, understandably, loves being naughty but hates having responsibility for the naughtiness pinned upon him.

James is sporting a swollen, bloody nose and, perhaps most hilariously of all, a pair of thick-stalked leeks sprouting from his ears.

McGonagall’s nostrils are flared, her eye twitching.

Sirius grins at her. “Don’t lose your head, pumpkin.”

For a moment, Sirius cannot read her expression at all.

Then she waves her wand and it’s Severus Snape who sits honking upon the stone, eyes enormously wide and hands clamped around his throat in shock.

Lily cries out and falls to her knees beside him, grabbing for his shoulder. James, leek-eared, rolls his eyes. Remus scratches his chin awkwardly, turning away.

McGonagall looks at Sirius, who pushes his shoulders back, proud. He does not flinch. He takes responsibility.

Then, “My office. Now.”

For all of Sirius’s bravado in the hallway, he is impish perched upon the edge of one of McGonagall’s office chairs, legs dangling loosely and hands clasped in his lap and dimpled pumpkin still upon his head.

“I am unsure what you were thinking,” McGonagall says fiercely, hands waving, “dueling in broad daylight with a student from another house. As if you wouldn’t be caught and punished. Or, more importantly, as if no one would be hurt!”

“I was protecting Lily Evans and standing up for my family,” James says, sitting straight up. “Snape was grabbing her really tight and pulling her around and calling my dad stupid and—I didn’t even think about it! I just pulled my wand out!”

“James didn’t even cast the first spell,” Sirius says, voice muffled by the pumpkin. “I did.”

“But then Snape hit him with about fifteen jinxes all at once,” James adds. “Sirius only joined in to protect me from Snape, since Snape had his big nasty wand in my face and all.”

“And nothing provoked Mister Snape to handle Miss Evans in the way you’ve described?” McGonagall says, disbelieving.

“There’s no excuse at all!” James says. “No one should ever touch a lady that way, no matter what!” Then James winces. “I might’ve said something mean about his hair.”

“I might’ve said something about his clothes,” Sirius adds, looking at James.

They both look away, James swallowing a snort and Sirius swallowing in general. It’s not hard to be intimidated by McGonagall, but they’ve been in these chairs a fair few times already this term. James has learned that it’s far better to start in good spirits and be knocked down a peg than it is to start terrified and wind up trampled.

“Their teasing was never going to be physical,” Remus pipes from James’s other side, face almost green with nerves beneath those mysterious silvery scars of his, fingers knotted so tightly together that the tips are beetroot purple. Remus, unlike them, has yet to be caught mischiefing. James and Sirius make sure that’s the case. They’ve got the right constitution for detention. Remus—narrow and frail-boned and, when unamused, cuttingly mean as he is—decidedly doesn’t. “They—they shouldn’t have said what they did, maybe, but Severus is the one who threatened them first, and teased them back in the first place.”

McGonagall looks at Remus, then, an eyebrow raised. “And what exactly was your part in all of this, Mister Lupin?”

“Nothing,” James says, fast. “Remus didn’t do anything at all. He tried to stop us, really.”

“We should’ve listened to him,” says the Sirius Pumpkin. “Always has the best ideas, that Remus Lupin.”

James remembers in technicolor the moment Remus had suggested James put mashed potatoes on top of his wellington when he couldn’t choose between that and a slice of shepherd's pie. It had been a stroke of utter genius. James has never met a boy so intelligent, so well-thought, so clever as Remus Lupin.

“Best ideas,” James reiterates feelingly.

McGonagall hums. “In that case, you may leave, Mister Lupin.”

All the color returns to Remus’s cheeks in a wave. “You’re sure, Professor?”

McGonagall’s thick brows jump up her forehead. “You’re questioning the fact that I’m letting you off scott free?”

Remus flushes. “Surely not.” He slides to his feet off the chair, the scuffed soles of his loafers loud against the stone. “Have a good dinner,” Remus tells her. Then, to James and Sirius, “Godspeed, lads.”

Remus leaves.

James gulps and turns back to McGonagall. Sirius, in James’s periphery, kicks his feet anxiously.

“Three detentions each for misdemeanor,” McGonagall decides, opening a drawer in her desk to search for something.

James sighs. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What will you have us do?” Sirius says. “I heard from Frank that you nearly broke his elbow scrubbing trophies for starting a food fight last term.” A moment. “You aren’t going to flog us, are you?”

McGonagall’s lips twitch but she doesn’t look up. James thinks that’s the only reason she doesn’t notice how honest Sirius’s question is. “You will meet me in my office Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday next, where you will complete the weekend’s homework, to be handed in at the end of each session.”

“Well, that’s not bad!” James says, relieved.

Sirius’s head whips towards him. Almost without moving his lips, hardly more than a breath, he hisses, “Don’t say that or she’ll make it worse!”

James frowns. “She’s already decided. Why would she make it worse?”

James is distracted from further questioning when McGonagall foists a pair of shell-pink detention slips upon them. “Now go,” she says, “before Professor Slughorn finds you and assigns far worse punishment than a free period to complete your homework assignments.”

“Thanks, Minnie,” Sirius says, standing, the pumpkin spinning off-center with the movement. James rights it for him as he adds, “We are truly sorry about this whole event.”

“You’re not sorry,” McGonagall says. “It’s better to be honest, even when the truth is ugly.”

“We’re not a bit sorry,” James says. Sirius makes a strangled laugh in the back of his throat. “It was worth it, since Snape is a sourr jerk who calls my dad names and Evans didn’t get dragged around anymore.”

“But you’ve got a broken nose and detention to show for it,” McGonagall notes, eyebrows raised.

James shrugs, tucking the pink slip in his pocket. “Better me than her.”

McGonagall presses her lips together. “Then both your father and Miss Evans are lucky to have as fervent a protector as you, Mister Potter.”

James grins cheekily and gives her a final wave before turning towards the door, following Sirius out.

“Potter,” McGonagall calls, before the door shuts behind them.

He turns, wincing before he even meets her eyes, expecting that change of heart Sirius warned of.

She watches him, lips pursed, but there’s something absolutely glimmering in her gaze, polished brass and cut rubies. “That was an extremely advanced bit of magic you completed this afternoon,” she finally says. “Human transfiguration is not for anyone below year six to attempt.”

“How do you know it was me who’d done it?” James says. “Could’ve been Sirius.”

“Don’t make me laugh when I’m trying to be frank with you.”

“Well, it could’ve been Remus, at least.”

McGonagall studies him, steepling her fingers at her nose. “James,” she says. “I don’t believe anyone else involved in today’s altercation could have successfully completed that spell without irrevocably damaging the subject.”

James feels his cheeks go hot. “Really?”

She nods briskly. “Transfiguration is rooted in the imagination, in the art of making corporeal the things that one sees in their mind. You have always been gifted in that way.” Her lips quirk for a moment. “That having been said—you will not attempt human transfiguration again until your sixth year.”

“No, ma’am,” he says, shaking his head.

“You will not provoke another duel between students,” she says, “no matter who they may be or what they might say.”

“No, ma’am.” James crosses his fingers behind his back.

“You will go to the hospital wing now so that the matter of your face may be sorted out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mister Potter,” she says, jaw shifting like she’s chewing on her tongue. She sighs exhaustedly. “Two points will be given to Gryffindor for your display of magical prowess, impertinent as it was.” James smiles, something enormous expanding in his stomach, like he’s all spread with marmalade and honey and crisping caramel in the sun. “Off with you,” she says, shaking her head like she knows.

“Have a good holiday, Minnie,” he says, turning, and finally leaves.

He’s still standing on the other side of the door, a bit stunned by this particular series of events, when he hears her burst into loud laughter.

“A duck,” she wheezes, voice muffled through the wood.

James’s shoulders seem to push back of their own accord, pride boosting him as he goes to meet Sirius at the end of the hall and lead him towards the hospital wing.

A soft-cheeked, young-looking healer named Poppy Pomfrey runs the hospital and, in a similar but far less dangerous way to how Sirius refers to McGonagall as Minnie, James calls her Poppy.

She doesn’t seem to mind it, anyhow. She almost blushes, really, leaning over him and prodding at the twist of his already-long-enough nose bridge.

“Ouch,” James whines. “Ow, ow. Double ow.”

“You don’t get extra points for that,” Sirius says.

“Points?” Poppy says, holding the cartilage firmly between her fingers.

“Well, he earned points for turning Snape into a duck, you see,” Sirius says.

“Bloody hell,” Poppy murmurs.

“But,” Sirius sits near James’s knees on the mattress, feet swinging over the edge, a good half-yard between the bottoms of his shoes and the scuffled stones, “he also gets points for how badly he’s been hurt. For bravery and all that.”

“Strength of will,” James agrees. “Merlin, Poppy, you’re going to rip my whole bleeding nose off.”

“Watch your mouth,” she threatens.

“It is bleeding, though,” Sirius says.

“Yeah, I meant it literally!”

She pulls her wand from her apron and points it between James’s brows. “This may twinge a bit,” she says. “Episkey.”

With a crunchy sort of crack, James’s nose shifts itself back into place.

He strangles an exclamation of pain somewhere in the back of his throat.

“So strong,” Sirius gushes sarcastically, pretending to swoon.

“That’s me,” James says, choked, eyes filling with tears.

Poppy drops a palm flat on his head and meets his eyes. “Keep your glasses off for a bit, as you’ll have some lingering soreness. It should stop aching by tonight, but if it doesn’t, you run right back here for a potion, alright?”

“Yes ma'am,” James promises thickly.

She pinches his cheek and sends them on their way, James clinging to Sirius’s sleeve.

“You’re my seeing-eye dog,” James says as Sirius winds them carefully up the moving staircase.

“Woof,” says Sirius. “Watch this step, Jamesy.”

James jumps over it on two feet, trainers smacking on the stone, Sirius clinging to his elbow.

“Vanishing stair?” James asks.

“You bet. Alright, come on. You’re good the rest of the way up.”

They go up in earnest, bumping together with the sway of it, and Sirius drags him to the Fat Lady.

“Hello, dear,” James says, squinting at the olive-and-reddish mess that is her background. She seems to have melted into it.

“What’s wrong with him?” the lady asks.

Sirius says, “Dropped on his head too many times, I’m sure. Cornish pixie?”

“Charmed,” she says, swinging open.

“Long day,” Sirius says, half-dragging James through the portrait hole. “Time to rest, I think.”

“Why, that sounds just ducky to me,” James says amicably.

Sirius laughs aloud.

Remus shoulders his bag nervously, watching the door.

The boys have been gone at dinner for a long while now—perhaps too long. He doesn’t want them to catch him before he leaves. There had been enough questions when he’d packed his bags last month, swearing he’d be back the next day, off to visit his ill mam. What’s she sick with? Should I have my mum send her some soup? Do you need anything? Should we ask McGonagall if we can come with you?

Remus doesn’t particularly mind lying to them. It’s just that he’s utterly pants at thinking up excuses.

Cancer is what he’s decided on. It seems cancer is the sort of thing that renders a crowd speechless, whether born into the wizarding world or not.

Now he has a Get Well Soon! note sitting heavily in his pocket, signed by all four of them plus Lily Evans, who overheard them talking about it at breakfast and snagged the card right out of James’s hand to sign it.

He doesn’t know why he’s carrying it still. Or, really, he does. It’s embarrassing, but it’s nice to think that he’s got paraphernalia of good will with him, whether it’s actually meant for him or not. It makes him feel almost as if he isn’t marching out onto the grounds alone.

But he is. Alone, that is.

He trudges through the portrait hole, down the winding staircases, through the enormous double doors in the foyer, and onto the grass. It’s long and yellowed now, dying as the air goes cold. Remus tucks his fingers under his armpits, the rough wool of his sweater scratching at the creases of his palms, his breath fogging up in his eyes. The wind whispers through the treetops, sending leaves tumbling with every stammered breath, orange and brown like discarded fruit rinds on the wind.

Remus shudders. Death all around him.

Madame Pomfrey used to take this walk with him—those first two times, at least. September the fourth and October the third, he had a mate to make the distance seem shorter. The cold seem warmer. The weight of fear seem lighter.

Now it’s November the second and he’s alone.

He marches all the way to the hulking willow, the grounds empty save for a handful of lurking squirrels sifting through the undergrowth, chirping. He feels around for a stone, wincing as his back goes tight, a pain like a rubber band snap shooting to his neck and then down.

He sits for a moment, legs crossed, to stretch. The aches haven’t been terrible this month, but this evening they’re evil. Not even the fresh air offers relief: today Remus is snotty and overtired. Today he just wants to get the ruddy thing over with. So he picks up a stone, pushes himself painfully to his feet, and tosses the rock at that knot on the trunk—the one that makes the branches go still and steady.

He sighs, unsure if he’s supposed to feel bad for making the tree so average, even for a moment, but feeling bad nonetheless.

He crawls through the opening at the base of the tree, the gnarled roots of the thing digging into the heels of his hands and scuffing up the knees of his jeans. When the space broadens into the tunnel, he stands again, knees twinging this time.

“Ugh,” he says, voice echoing a bit around him. “Another month, another moon.”

With nothing much else to do, he sets off down the tunnel, knowing he has almost a half-mile of walking ahead of him before he makes it to the Shack, where he’ll spend a dozen or so dark hours biting at the walls and the couch and his legs.

He wishes he got to keep his brain as the wolf. That way, he could at least count the minutes until sunrise.

Remus sighs to himself. He tries to remind himself that changing here is good—better than it was at home, with the underground bunker and his mother’s stress pills and his own blood everywhere.

For all Remus hardly eats, the wolf is always hungry. It’ll eat anything in its way. The thing in its way, unfortunately, is typically Remus.

Remus is huffing and sweaty by the time he makes it to the trap door at the end of the tunnel, the Shack sitting directly above him.

He shoves the planks of the door upward. It hits the ground with a bang, a cloud of dust rising. He sneezes, then tosses his bookbag up and into the room. He follows it with a grunt, straining to reach and then to pull himself up.

Remus is rather small, is all. Reaching is one of the hardest things in the world for him.

But he does it, like he always does.

Panting, he drags his heavy limbs and his heavier bag to the couch and falls onto it, splaying flat.

“Ahhh,” he says. “I think—I deserve a wee treat for that one.” He flops his hand into the opening his zipper cuts into his bag and pulls out a bar of chocolate. He slides a finger through the fold and frees the bar, cracks off a piece, and pops it right into his mouth, letting it melt on his tongue. “Mmm,” he says, eyes falling shut, lips pulling into a tired smile. “That hits the spot.”

That’s where Remus stays, watching the sun carve across the sky. Eventually he pulls out his Defense text, skimming the next section so that he can stay ahead on his work. James had promised to take notes for once so that Remus could have something to study from after missing their lesson, but Remus likes to be especially prepared.

It never feels like work when it’s Defense, anyhow. It fascinates him, in a rather macabre and masochistic way.

He’s chewing idly on an aconite sprig—from his own plant, growing in their dormitory, and thank Merlin himself that James and Sirius are too distracted and Peter too stupid to notice it growing there between his ferns and succulents—and doodling a vampire in the margins, willing the relaxingly cool effect of the herb to seep into his muscles.

The thing about his condition that people tend not to think about is it’s so much more than just popping into wolf form once a month, running around howling and hungry, then waking up naked in the middle of the woods.

It makes him feel like rubbish all the time.

He’s got knees that ache in the rain and the cold, as if he’s seventy rather than eleven. He’s always hunching over for the pain of knots in his lower back. His fingers don’t like to straighten all the way, and his chest hurts sometimes, and his jaw is always cracking. He feels like he’s trapped, small and scared, inside the cage of a mystic, a zombie, and it’s bollocks. He’s tired. Eleven year olds shouldn’t be tired. They should be like James and Sirius: earnest, and bold, and a bit stupid.

He doesn’t have the luxury to be any of that.

So he keeps scribbling out notes, memorizing vocabulary terms, and chewing on his aconite stalks until the flavor is gone and the effects melt away, the moon too strong for much of anything to help.

It’s six-thirty when Remus puts his book away. His breathing has gone shallow again, the whole of him shivering but drenched in cold sweat. Frozen but feverish. He wants to pull on another jumper and crawl out of his skin.

When Remus’s back startles to crack and spread, his bones lengthening and muscles pulling and nose stretching and hair changing, he howls, mournful in navy night and entirely, desperately alone, feeling every inch the ghost they call him.

Severus is attempting to plait Lily’s hair.

She’s laughing. It’s a beautiful sound. Like bells.

“Stop moving!” he commands, giving her hair a gentle tug to make her sit still. “I’ll get it right if you stop—bloody—moving so much! You worm!”

“Me, a worm?” Lily demands, still grinning, still glowing. “I, Severus, am nothing of the sort. I am a lioness stalking out of her lair, teeth-bared and hungry, prey in her sights—”

“Frizzy,” he agrees, head bobbing as he nods, lips pressed together to hide his own smile.

Her mouth drops open. “I’m gonna get you for that one,” she says. “Prepare to die, duck boy.”

This is not the first time she has referenced the Altercation laughingly (she had greeted him with their familiar Ey up, mi duck and Severus had nearly decked her shit on the spot) but it’s the first time she’s said it and he hasn’t minded—mostly because that enormous smile on her face as she does.

She roars dramatically and tackles him backwards onto the cold, hard dirt, the chill of it pressing through his thin jacket and right into his spine. He shivers, smiling, trying to shove her off but only half-heartedly because the weight and warmth of her on him like this gives him butterflies.

“Oi, no necking on the grounds!” comes a voice.

“Oh, ignore them,” Lily says, cheeks flushed, as she digs her knuckles into Severus’s side. He squeals as she hits a ticklish spot and she laughs again.

“They’re really going at it,” Sirius Black says with a dry whistle. “Like nifflers with gold teeth, they are.”

James Potter’s loud, clear laugh echoes across the grounds and Severus feels himself blush, stomach souring. He gropes in his pocket for his wand and pulls it free.

Lily grabs at his elbow, trying to stop him. “Don’t, don’t,” she says. “They don’t deserve your anger, the ponces.”

Severus looks from her to the boys. Lily or retribution?

Retribution for having embarrassed him in front of Lily, he decides.

“Engorgio Skullus,” he says.

James Potter’s laugh cuts off sharply.

“Run,” Severus advises Lily.

They scramble to their feet and make a break for the entryway by the courtyard, Potter’s anguished shout fading into the distance.

“That was mean,” Lily gasps, clutching a stitch in her side.

“I learned it in a hex book.”

“It was awful!”

“Duck,” Severus reminds her. “I was a duck. I shat eggs for two days after.”

Lily claps a hand over her mouth, muffling a snort.

“Not funny,” Severus says.

“Could’ve made a fine omelet with them.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Or a souffle. Have you ever had souffle?”

“Cut it out.”

“I haven’t either, but I’ve heard they’re grand.”

“I’ll get you, one of these days.”

“Splendid, Miss Evans!” Flitwick chirps, clapping. “That’s quite the clean tapdance, yes… better than some things I’ve seen on the West End over the years…”

Lily’s pineapple clicks its shiny shoes together.

“Unbelievable,” Remus mutters from beside her, as Flitwick moves on to the next pair of desks, where James and Sirius’s pineapples are doing a partner swing-dance. Remus’s fruit, on the other hand, is wandering around their desk like a starving artist considering starting to busk for change to take the tube. “How did you do that?”

“I cast the spell,” she says promptly.

Remus rolls his eyes. “Come on. You know what I mean.”

Her cheeky grin softens into something more genuine. “I picture it in my head,” she says. “My magic, I mean.”

“You picture your magic,” Remus repeats.

“Mhm,” she says. “For me, it’s this pale blue glittery stuff, like in Cinderella. Have you seen it?”

“Sure,” Remus says, though he isn’t sure if it’s too girly for him to admit. “My mam loves that one.”

Lily smiles. “Me too. It’s so lovely and romantic. But that’s not the point.” She lifts her wand and gives it a tiny jab. A single sequin comes out the tip, star-shaped and pale blue and shiny.

“Wow,” Remus says. “What a lovely and useless talent.”

“Thank you,” she says primly. She drops it atop her pineapple, which is now doing the Charleston. “It’s what I imagine my magic looking like.”

“Like the Fairy Godmother’s magic,” Remus realizes. “When she casts spells, all that blue dust comes out of her wand.”

“Exactly,” Lily says. “Imagining blue magic dust swirling around and landing on the object every time I cast a charm sort of helps me visualize my magic going into the object properly.”

“Huh,” Remus says, dropping his cheek into his palm. He looks up at Lily, who glows with pride as her pineapple does a noisy time step. “That’s sort of genius, you know.”

“Oh, I dunno about that,” she says. Then, gushing, “Oh, but it is, isn’t it?”

Remus snorts a laugh, but feels a sort of weight in his stomach: this girl who comes from nothing, no experience, no prowess, shows them all up every day of their lives. Remus has never seen her so much as struggle with their homework. He wonders if she does—if she has to ask about vanishing cabinets and Floo powder the same way Sirius is mind-boggled by record players and washing machines. “You’re brilliant. No one can argue that.”

She grins, patting his cheek. “Cheers, Remus.”

He straightens, resolving to give Lily’s trick a try, if only to ease his pineapple’s emotional turmoil. He’s started to whistle a mournful tune. Poor blighter.

He lets his eyes close as he raises his wand. He imagines a bit of yellow thread coming from his wrist, into the end of the wand, through its unicorn hair core, and out the front of it. The thread snakes over to the fruit, wraps itself around its tufted leaves, and starts to glow as Remus’s magic courses through it.

Remus keeps his eyes closed, keeps the image in his mind, and recites the incantation: “Chorus Faciet Fructum.”

“Oh!” Lily cries. “Look, you’ve done it!”

Remus opens his eyes. The fruit is, indeed, doing a neat little two-step.

He smiles, accepting a firm squeeze from Lily. From their seats at the back of the room, James and Sirius start clapping and crying, “Jolly good show, sir! Well done indeed! You brilliant old bean!”

Remus holds up the side of his robes to hide his hand from Flitwick as he flips them the bird. Still, he smiles. He turns back to Lily. “Brilliant,” he repeats.

She flushes, but she’s clearly pleased.

Dearest James, our darling boy,

James folds the letter in half and, thankful he’d had the sense to wait until returning to the dormitory to open it, starts to cry.

Lily is returning her clothes to her dresser drawers when Marlene hustles through the door, hair in her eyes, digging under her mattress.

“What’d you forget?” Lily asks idly, folding a jumper neatly, running her fingertips along the folds.

“Bleeding hat,” Marlene says, yanking her nightstand drawer open. “Mum’s gonna kill me if she sees my head uncovered for even a moment in the snow.”

“That’s a shame,” Lily says.

Marlene does a double-take. “What on earth are you still here for, anyway? Thought you were going home.”

Lily sighs. “I was. I had a—erm, a change of plans,” she says, Petunia’s letter all but boring a hole through the wood of her desk.

“Oh,” Marlene sighs. “And Mary’s house is on the Floo network, now, so I’ve got to sit alone with Dorcas on the train.”

“You love Dorcas.”

“I fancy Mary and you more,” she mumbles, then claps a hand over her mouth as if she can force the words back inside, apple-core seedy. “Anyway, good holiday!”

Lily smiles exasperatedly at her over her shoulder and says, as feelingly as she can while putting her Christmas pajamas away, “Good holiday, Marley.”

Once alone in the dorm, she cracks.

She sits on the stone right where she’d been standing, legs folded before her, and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, shuddering under the weight of her sobs.

Christmas is her favorite time of year. It’s meant to be beautiful and romantic and sugar-dusted, but instead hers is a drafty stone bedroom for five with only one heart beating between the lofty, empty walls. There’s meant to be Christmas music playing, Elvis Presley and Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, but she hasn’t got a phonograph at school and radios don’t work on the grounds for some blooming reason. There should be stockings over the fire, and garlands that leave pine needles all along the stairs, and bundles of fake mistletoe dangling in every corridor. Her snow boots should be waiting by the door for her to slip them on and romp in the freshly fallen fluff, ice slipping down the neck of her shirt as her entire family takes part in a vicious snowball battle.

At Christmas, Lily is meant to watch holiday special telly programs, and bundle in her wooliest sweater, and cuddle next to Petunia on the couch. She’s meant to toss her torn wrapping paper at her dad and sip her mum’s peppermint hot cocoa and make sure none of the string lights on the tree go out. It’s the only time of year Mum smiles every day, it’s the only time of year Mum is around and happy the way Dad is all the time, and that means it has to be Lily’s favorite time of year.

This Christmas, Lily Evans will remember forever as being one of heartbreak, loneliness, and a sour stomach. It is, she decides, the worst thing that’s happened in her short life thus far.

There are three first years sitting in the Gryffindor Common Room on the evening of December the twenty-fourth, and none of them can quite meet the eyes of the other.

All three have heavy pockets, letters stuffed creased-edged inside, the ink starting to smudge from being handled. All three are stuffed into wooly sweaters and thick socks. All three are unwelcome in their homes, but none know that that’s the truth of the other.

James and Sirius are shoved shoulder to shoulder in their favorite enormous armchair, right before the fireplace. There’s plenty of room for them both, but they still lean into each other. They watch the flames flicker, reflecting ghostly upon the dark stone floors.

Eventually, Lily picks herself up off the couch and tromps over. She drops herself on the floor beside their chair, legs crossed and scowling.

Sirius looks at James in surprise.

The thing, James has come to understand, about being utterly and all-encompassingly in love with Lily Evans is that it’s hard, and exhausting. She’s easy to love in that it’s impossible not to love her, but she’s terribly hard to like. He doesn’t like her very much at all, when he thinks about it. She’s always picking fights with them and then blaming him for it, always defending Snape even when he’s just as wrong as James is, always kind to everyone who James isn’t.

When James looks at her, his stomach wrenches like he’s going to vomit pure glitter.

So James shrugs to Sirius in reply to his silent question.

They both look at her.

She looks up at them over her shoulder, then back at the fire.

They sit in shared silence. It feels a bit less lonely this way.

The morning next, Sirius awakens with a small pocket of dread sewn into the side of his heart and an enormous pocket of warmth tucked into his side.

He groggily knuckles at his eyes, groaning. He’s still in his armchair at the hearth, the fire fizzled out to all but nothing. James is strewn across Sirius’s legs, limblessly heavy with sleep, drooling a bit. His glasses have tumbled onto the carpet, but left a little notch in his skin where they’d clumsily pressed.

He pats James’s shoulder, something twisting in his stomach. If he looks at James from the right angle—from above and a little to the side—he could pretend it’s Regulus all akimbo across him. That shock of black hair. The fine material of his sweater. As long as he doesn’t see James’s dark hand dangling, he could pass for being Sirius’s brother by blood.

Regulus’s birthday is coming up—December the twenty-sixth. Notre miracle de Noël, his mother used to say, back when Regulus was clumsily toddling about on tiny stocking feet and everything made sense. Their Christmas miracle.

The miracle this year, perhaps, is that Sirius isn’t around for either holiday. It’s what his mother wants—the words You are not invited home for your term break, as penance for your actions are going to be emblazoned on the inside lids of his eyes forever—and, he can really only assume, it’s what Regulus wants as well.

Regulus may not have written him a handful of furious letters in splattered ink since his sorting, but he hasn’t written anything else, either. Sirius can read between the lines.

He leaves his hand molded to the curve of James’s shoulder and looks out the window, at the sun curling out across the powdery grounds, turning the snow golden and the sky crystal grey and the bare branches from the forest into cracks through fine china. As if Atlas’s shoulder had slipped and the whole thing had crashed to the dirt.

James makes a little noise and rolls right off the chair and onto the floor.

“Hmmnfngn,” he says.

“Morning, mate,” says Sirius.

“I’ve fallen,” James mumbles, baffled.

“You have,” Sirius says. He climbs off the chair and flops down next to James on the rug in solidarity. “Happy Christmas.”

James’s eyes pop open excitedly. “Presents,” he says. He reaches over, grabs Sirius’s arm, and shakes it. “Presents, presents.”

Sirius laughs aloud. “I’m not getting presents, Potter,” he says, shaking his head ruefully, “but I’ll come incinerate your wrapping paper for you.”

A wicked grin snakes across James’s lips. “You’ll have presents. I can promise you that right now.”

Sirius feels his stomach drop. “Did—did you get me a present?”

James shrugs, painting on this fake high-and-mighty expression to hide his mirth.

“You didn’t!” Sirius cries, tossing himself on top of James, all elbows and ribs knocking together, squeezing the living daylights out of him. “You didn’t! You absolute prat!”

“Well, you made us all miss your birthday,” James says pointedly, hugging Sirius back nonetheless. “It was only right.”

“I dunno how other people do birthdays,” Sirius sighs, clapping a palm onto the back of James’s neck. “I thought it was a family thing. I’ve never had friends.”

“No worries,” James says. “Next year, we’re throwing a party for you. Everyone in all of Gryffindor will come and we’ll all be celebrating how ruddy ancient you’ll be by then!”

The thought of it makes Sirius’s chest go so wonky that he flops flat on top of James, utterly unable to handle it.

James drums on Sirius’s back for a moment, all percussive palms, and then shakes him. “Presents,” he reminds Sirius. “Let’s open presents, it’ll be brilliant, happy Christmas.”

The gifts are in the dormitory, on the feet of their beds. James has a rather large and precarious pile, and Sirius—Sirius has a few carefully wrapped packages in prints to match James’s.

“Thrilling,” James breathes, hopping onto bed and tearing into the boxes.

Sirius follows him more slowly, crawling into his mattress, picking up the packages one at a time and giving them a shake.

He’d had presents growing up, of course. Tons of them. His parents adore him, adore his brother, and relish in nothing more than reminding them of how lucky they are by showering them with gifts, when they have been good and deserving. Even since the sorting—or, as Sirius has been calling it to himself, The Great Divide—he’s never been without. He has his uniforms, his books, and knows his broom is waiting when he goes home for the summer, right by his brother’s, by his flying gloves and his piano. He’s grateful for that.

Now, knowing the feeling of being sure he’ll never see another gift, of knowing he hasn’t deserved presents this year, but getting one anyway, he thinks he could weep. James is a treasure.

He removes the paper from the first box with the utmost care, even as he watches James tear into his own like a demon, tossing paper into the air, onto the stones, everywhere but the rubbish bin.

A knit sweater falls into his lap, chunky and charcoal grey. He lifts it by the shoulders and sees a maroon S stitched over the chest.

“A family jumper,” James says, giving Sirius a half-smile. “I might’ve told Mum about you.”

“What, that my family is currently revolted by me?” Sirius asks wryly.

“Nah,” James says, pulling out his own reddish version of the jumper, the J in grey, like they’re opposite halves. James tugs it over his head, grunting, getting it stuck on everything from his glasses to his ears to his nose. His head pops out, staticky. “Just that you’re my best mate and all.”

Sirius goes red. “You tosser.” He looks out the window, at the snow. “Say it again.”

“You’re my be~st mate,” James sings, obnoxious.

“Never mind, take it back. I don’t want it, I decided.”

James laughs and continues ripping into his gifts earnestly, his cheeks just as flushed as Sirius’s.

Sirius pulls free a tin of pistachio and cardamom fudge, a card tucked into it: Happy Christmas! Love, Mr. and Mrs. P.

“Those ones aren’t in Mum’s wrapping paper,” James says, mouth full of green fudge, pointing at the last few packages by Sirius’s knees.

Sirius’s stomach flips. He grabs them, pulling them to his chest. He takes a deep, preparatory breath before opening them.

From Remus he gets a hand-drawn map of the Sirius constellation—which he immediately tacks on the wall, astounded that Remus would think to give him something so thoughtful—and from Peter, a chocolate bar so hulking that he has to strain to lift it.

Sirius almost misses the loose envelope in the pile, what with all his neat wrapping paper scraps saved.

But Sirius sees it. So he takes it, slips it open.

Reads.

Dear Sirius,

There, the neat calligraphy breaks off into an illustration—far better than Regulus’s nine years would be capable of if he hadn’t had all these ages of art lessons—depicting Sirius and Regulus holding hands beside a Christmas tree, a blazing fireplace, a stack of presents.

The letter continues.

Sirius runs his fingertips across it, breathing slowly and deeply through his nose. Regulus doesn’t hate him. All my love. He hasn’t lost Regulus. That one thing he still loves more than anything else in the world—his worry stone, the cool side of his pillow, the sock he’s been missing—he still has it. Even knowing that it’s all a ploy, then—that they’re orchestrating this familial silence to make Sirius hurt badly enough to turn his back on what he believes—relief hits him like a whirlpool, swallowing him down towards calmer waters. He can handle the silence from them. He relishes in it, in fact. The less of them he sees, the more he realizes that his childhood took place in a building that was, for all intents and purposes, frozen in time—in more than just decor. In beliefs. In practices. For example. Mudbloods are just as smart as the rest of wizarding society. For example. Not everyone wears robes all day every day, and not wearing robes does not make one unfit to be presented to the public. For example. Dark objects are not, typically, a socially acceptable thing to collect, nor are they a socially acceptable means with which to punish one’s child for insolence.

It’s just—Regulus.

“Hey,” James says.

Sirius looks up at him.

James reaches under his bed, grabs a terribly-wrapped soft lump of something, and hucks it right at Sirius’s head.

Sirius bats it away from himself out of pure instinct and it bounces onto the mattress.

“I didn’t get you anything,” Sirius says, as if James hadn’t noticed by now.

“That’s alright,” James says with a smile. “Just means my birthday gift is going to have to be absolutely smashing to make up for it.”

“Promise,” Sirius says fervently, lifting the package carefully. He opens it slowly, James clambering onto Sirius’s mattress to watch properly.

“Blimey,” Sirius says, a swirl of excitement and dread in his stomach, “they’re brilliant!”

James grins enormously. “I thought you’d think so.”

Sirius unfolds the enormous Gryffindor wall-hangings, all in their brilliant oxblood red, and basks in the glory, and feels terror suck the warmth out of his face.

“I thought you could hand them up back at your house,” James says, “to make it feel more like home.”

Sirius looks at James. “You big cupcake.”

“Never tell,” James warns.

Sirius chucks him over the shoulder. “As if no one else has noticed, you thickhead.”

Sirius rises onto his feet and shakes out the hangings, folding them neatly, so they’re ready to stick right into his trunk. To hide at the bottom for when he’s feeling especially brave.

James has Regulus’s letter in his hands when Sirius sits back down.

“He writes his s backwards,” James notes, smiling.

Sirius carefully takes the letter back. “He’s nine. He’s a genius.”

“It’s cute,” James says. “I’d like to have a little brother, I think. To practice quidditch with. And play exploding snap against.”

Sirius huffs a laugh. “Brothers are fun until they’re not, and then they just make you sad.”

James seems to consider this. “Well, isn’t the fun part worth the sadness? If you really love them?”

Sirius’s throat goes tight. He looks away and doesn’t answer.

“Hey,” James says, reaching out and squeezing Sirius’s elbow. “Let’s go to the Common Room. We can play a round of chess or something.”

“You’re pants at chess,” Sirius says.

“But you’re not,” James says, “and whooping me always gives you a smile.”

Sirius goes intensely warm. “Alright then, mate.”

They’ve gone three rounds and James is just as charmingly awful as usual when a presence descends by them: the redheaded fifth year that always seems to hover somewhere in the boys’s periphery. A Weasley, he must be. Sirius’s parents used to talk loads about the Weasleys—about a house that wobbles on an axis precariously and scrapes the sky; about being Sacred Twenty-Eight but poorer than a country mouse; about turning their backs on everything known, everything honored, in favor of dedicating themselves to a weak sort of goodness.

This Weasley seems cool, though. He walks with a swagger and drinks whiskey in the library and never, ever gets caught. Sirius wishes he and James and Remus and Peter never got caught.

“Here for the holidays, lads?” the boy asks.

“Yeah,” James says. “Happy Christmas.”

“Thanks,” says the redheaded boy, smiling, taking in Sirius and James and their matching garb. “That’s a nice idea—family sweaters. I should tell my sister-in-law about that. She’s just had another son and he looks about identical to the first. This way she’ll be able to keep track when they’re older.”

“I get one every Christmas,” James says with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Got a closet full of burgundy sweaters with a big ol’ J on the chest.”

“A fashion mogul, you are,” the boy says, before cuffing them both round the heads and departing with a smile.

“‘The bloody hell is his name?” Sirius hisses.

“Oh, thank Merlin,” says James. “I thought it was only me who didn’t know!”

The afternoon passes slowly, the fire flickering, a handful of students milling about in armchairs and on sofas, hands on new drawing pads or books or decks of cards. It’s peaceful. Strangely familial. It feels like a memory Sirius hadn't realized he’d forgotten until he had it.

James has disappeared to the owlery to send off a thank-you letter to his folks when Lily Evans descends from her chambers, swollen-eyed and clinging to a novel.

She sits on the opposite end of the couch to him, as far away as she could manage while still being close.

A moment passes in shared silence.

“How’s your holiday been, Evans?” Sirius asks, for want of something to do, or maybe because he can’t quite find a reason to stamp manners and niceties out of his memory. Or maybe because it’s Lily, and, even now, he has to try to hate her more than he has to try to hate most other people.

“Oh, it’s been alright,” she says, “except for this stubborn headache that comes and goes.”

Sirius is about to ask if she’s tried going to the hospital wing for a potion when the portrait hole opens and James quite literally falls through, prompting Lily to say, “Ah. Here it comes again.”

“Ow,” says James from the floor.

“Nosedive,” Sirius comments.

“Eurgh, my aching brains,” Lily says, writhing as if ill.

James’s head pops up. “Alright, Evans?” he says, layering arrogance on like blinds over a beaming summer window.

Sirius is nearly overwhelmed with the fond. Big fond. Incredible waves of fond right from the toes to the tips of him.

“Oh, yes,” she says sarcastically, “I’m having a lovely Christmas here all by myself.”

“You could hang out with Sirius and I,” James offers, pushing himself to his feet.

“I wouldn’t want to spend time with you if you were the last person on this whole bloody earth,” Lily says, scowling at him. “You’re a bully and a jerk and I’d rather look at an oozing rash than at your smug face.”

James stops where he’s walking, expression shut down and stony. “You think I want to be here with you lot when I could be back home, in the mansion house that will be mine in six years, with my mum’s excellent cooking and my dad reading by the fireplace? You think I want to spend another day in this drafty old castle when I could be unwrapping presents from dawn until dusk and hiding in one of the dozens of rooms filled with books, chatting with the portraits of my relatives?” He scoffs. “Yeah, sure.”

Lily laughs snarkily. “You’re ridiculous. Do you even hear yourself? Because I do, and I wish I couldn’t.”

“Oi,” Sirius says, a spark of anger in his chest. “Watch the way you speak to him.”

“I’m so sorry to have upset your royal guard, your highness,” Lily says, oily, bowing sarcastically at them.

“Alright, you know what?” James says, chipped flint, hands on his hips. “We’re all upset and we’re taking it out on the others. Evans, you’d surely rather be home. Sirius, you—you surely wouldn’t rather be left here either. And me? Well, I wish my parents would stop busying themselves up on the one bloody week a year I get to see them, but—”

“Your personal life is none of my business,” Lily snaps, covering her ears. “The fact that I know anything about it at all is one of the great pains of my existence.”

“Sorry?” James says, like a question. Then, hard again, “Why don’t you ever drop it? Every time I try to stop us from fighting, you start it up again. That’s you, calling me things like toerag and whatever else, and I can’t be blamed for it.”

“You can be blamed for everything,” she seethes, eyes burning beneath the stripe of her curly bangs. “You, and—and everyone who made me like this!”

“Like what, exactly?” Sirius asks. “A rude, stuck-up bitch?”

Lily whirls on him, mouth falling open.

“Alright, that was a bit far,” James says.

“I hope you have a terrible, awful holiday,” Lily says, as if it’s the worst curse that could ever befall them. “And I hope your new year is worse than the last.” Then she turns on her heel and marches her way up the stairs to the girl’s dormitory as if she’d never come down at all.

“That was stupid,” James says. Then, turning to Sirius, “Hey, I told Mum thanks from you for the presents. She’ll be chuffed that you like them.”

Sirius shakes his head, reeling. “Let’s go eat. I have a gut feeling this will all make more sense after some bacon.”

“No,” Sirius says, jumping so enthusiastically upon the foot of James’s mattress that James, seated cross-legged at the head and chewing thoughtfully upon a quill, bounces about on his arse. “No, I think it’s better if it can be pinned back on us. They have to know we mean business.”

“Some people are dark wizard catchers,” James says, smirking up at Sirius. “We, on the other hand, are dark wizard hecklers.”

“Pranking supremos,” Sirius says, rolling his r. He steals another bit of James’s Christmas fudge—which, really, James doesn’t understand, since Sirius has got his own and all—and lands a jump on his bum, sitting down. The mattress shudders. The bed frame squeaks. “So we’ve already done pink robes, and tied-up shoelaces.”

“And ducks,” James adds, still proud of that one.

“You know,” Sirius says thoughtfully, “I don’t think we’ve done nearly enough sneaking out of bed in the night. There’s all this delightful castle spread out for the taking, and our personal levels of taking have been rather modest.”

James feels his heart skip. “We could get in trouble for that.”

“Most definitely. And every moment of it will be brilliant,” Sirius says. “Worth it.”

“Thrilling,” James proclaims, making a note on their list. “Midnight wanderings. Sounds dangerous and clever.”

“Very mature,” Sirius adds. He’s got his tie wrapped around his head and he looks absolutely ridiculous, sitting proudly like he is with silk dripping into his eyes. “Oh, mark down pastry cream as well. I’ll remember what that means.”

“Pastry… cream…”

“Feathers, of course.”

“Feathers… of course…” James looks up. “Any specific variety of feather?”

Sirius grins madly. “Peacock would be preferable.”

“Peacock… preferable….” James looks up. “I’ve had a bit of an idea: putting a layer of spellotape over every prefect toilet in the castle, so that they all get wee everywhere. But that might be too evil.”

“Definitely not too evil, are you kidding? That’s perfect, it’s tame, practically,” Sirius says, jabbing at the paper. “Write it, scribe. Merlin, it’s the perfect crime. Every house is targeted, so it’ll be impossible to pin.”

“Right?” James says, feeling strangely proud for having Sirius’s approval. “It’s an attack against authority, more than one against any faction of studentkind.”

“You sound like the bloody Prophet, you do.” Sirius stands and takes on a rather dramatic, echoing tenor as he says, “It is the unionizing of the students, the coming together not of bodies alone but of hearts and souls in the pursuance of a single mission, that creates a formidable enemy. Authority must tremble before it! The unwavering passion of the empowered masses!”

James laughs aloud, then darts forward to give Sirius’s ankle a sharp yank, sending him tumbling onto his arse. “You’re brilliant. That certainly roused my heart and soul or whatever.”

They grapple a bit between themselves, until they’re both laughing so hard that they’re wheezing, their eyes wet. They flop backwards onto James’s pillows, tired deeply, the day having been rather long. Sirius’s tie is gone—somewhere across the room, surely—and James is missing a sock. They’re rumpled, and messy, and one with the squalor of wrapping paper and ribbons around them.

It feels like they haven’t been quiet for a single moment all day. The silence arrives politely, knocking on the doorframe, wiping off its shoes. It settles in like a missing brother between them.

Though he hates himself for it, James’s mood starts to go sour. There’s just something about staring at this stony ceiling between the prongs of his four-poster that makes him maudlin—makes him miss his ceiling, the one above his bed at home with the glow-in-the-dark stars and the poster of Diana Ross being very Diana Ross-like.

“Do you really not see your parents much?” Sirius asks, as if reading James’s mind.

James, for a moment, finds himself unable to answer.

His parents are great, really. Extremely kind, generous, and funny too. They’re good, and they love him.

But the company—the one his dad inherited from his father—along with his dad’s job at the ministry and his mum’s ridiculously intense book club—it keeps them busy.

James remembers birthdays he spent being watched by his older cousins, blowing out nine candles and looking for his parents on instinct only to find them absent through the haze of smoke. He remembers the earliest days of cello lessons and quidditch training and ballroom dance where he’d wait on the front stoop of a marble building, listening to the tattoo of an instructor tapping their foot impatiently behind him, because his father had forgotten it was his day to pick James up.

In equal measure, he remembers his father scooping him off the hardwood of their kitchen and spinning him around, pressing proud kisses to the side of his head when he brought home another round of good marks. He remembers the little league quidditch games his father did make it to, a Go James! banner in hand and an enormous, shiny-eyed smile on his lips.

“I love them,” he says. “They’re around sometimes, but not other times. I know what they’re doing is really important for dad’s company and all, but—” James feels himself flush. He isn’t sure if he’s allowed to be so soppy and soft and stupid around Sirius.

Sirius’s elbow nudges James’s. An invitation.

“I miss them,” James blurts, growing infuriatingly teary. “I used to hate going to all those showcases, getting dragged around like a little doll or something, having to be perfect and polite and never embarrass Dad, but I’d rather go to those now than never see them anymore at all.”

“Well, of course you miss them, if they’re good,” Sirius says, turning on his side to face James, pillowing his head in the bend of his elbow. “That makes sense. Besides, it’s not your fault they’re not toting you around.”

“Alright,” James says, rubbing his nose on his sleeve.

“That can’t be why at all,” Sirius assures, frowning. “I know we have our fun and eat it too, but we can be good, if we want to. Especially you. You were raised with the pureblood pedigree. You’re right proper and all, even if you’re not Sacred Twenty-Eight.”

James sighs. “I dunno. I mean, I think I can be proper. I know how to act around their old-people friends, and I know every social rule backwards and forwards. Address your elders by title and last name unless they request otherwise. Extend the right hand when greeting someone new. Two cheek kisses for friends, three for family, and four for people you really hate. But maybe I just—I dunno. I dunno.” James looks up at the ceiling again, because that intense gleam in Sirius’s stormy eyes is enough to make him want to blubber something awful. “Even if I was a brat around the house, I tried to be well-behaved in public and all. I just figure… I mean, why else wouldn’t they want me around? You know?”

“That’s tough, mate,” Sirius says quietly. “You should write to them about it. Then they can just tell you what it is.”

James shakes his head shrewdly. “They’d lie. I know my mum would lie to protect me.”

Sirius barks a laugh. “Merlin. That’s one thing our mothers have in common, then.”

James turns back towards him, eyebrows raised in a silent question.

“My mother protects me desperately, all the time, with everything in her,” Sirius says after a moment, the risen moon casting silvery shadows along his cheeks, highlighting the straight line of his ski-slope nose, “but I haven’t got a clue what she thinks she’s protecting me from, or if I even want to be protected from it.”

“That’s pants,” James says. It all sounds very pureblooded. Very Abbott and Malfoy and Parkinson. It sort of makes James wonder.

But then Sirius says, “Pants with a poop-stain in the crotch,” and James cracks a smile. “I dunno. It’s—most of my childhood is a blur, you know, for… one reason or another, and—it’s strange to me, still, learning that not everyone thinks the way they do, or does the things they do.”

“You’re better than them,” James tells him. “You’re a better person. Maybe they’re all just jealous that they can’t be as good as you. Good and brave.”

“Doubt it,” Sirius says, then goes quiet. Serious. “And it’s so confusing, because—I dunno. I wish I had somewhere I really wanted to be at Christmas.”

James’s chest goes tight. He reaches a hand out and squeezes Sirius’s elbow. “Next Christmas, we’ll both go to my place,” he promises. “My mum and dad will want you around, and I want you around, which means three whole people want you for the holidays. That’s practically trading your weird, creepy parents for my nice ones. It’s like you’ll never have lost anything at all.”

“Thanks,” Sirius says, voice wavering, and James can see the bits of gleaming liquid clinging to his lashes. “It’s just that I sort of wish—” Sirius falls suddenly silent. His jaw works at nothing, as if he can’t find the words, as if he can’t make them come out.

“Hey,” James says.

“They’re supposed to want me,” Sirius says, barely more than a breath, as if whispering it will make it less real. “They’re supposed to want me, and support me, no matter what. They’re my family. All they say is that family is more important than anything, but I guess that doesn’t count when it comes to me. I crossed the line. I am the line.” Sirius looks at James head-on. “I don’t want to be the line. I want them to be proud of me, even though I’m a Gryffindor.”

James scoots closer to Sirius, so their shoulders are pressed. “I can’t even imagine how that feels, mate,” he says, his stomach wriggling at the thought of his parents not wanting him anymore.

“And it’s weird, you know, because I’m the bloody heir and all. They should—be teaching me more, showing me how to handle the estates. We’re old enough.”

“Of course,” James says, immediately understanding. It’s what the two of them—the oldest children—have been groomed for since birth: inheriting the role of patriarch and all that comes with it. The magic, the prestige, and, in Sirius’s case, the Wizengamot seat.

“I don’t know if I want to be the heir of a family like mine,” Sirius says. “One that believes the things it does. And they don’t want me to be the heir of their family.”

“So it works out in everyone’s favor.”

“Sure,” Sirius says.

James studies him. “Do you think they’ve started planning to replace you with your brother already?”

Sirius takes a deep breath. “I think Mother is drafting a never-ending list of all the things I’ve done that would warrant burning me off the tree so Regulus can rightfully inherit the title, the houses, the money, and the magic.”

“Huh,” says James. “That’s bollocks.”

“It is bollocks, isn’t it.”

They spend a moment in silence, that sentiment heavy between them.

“You can be sad about it, for now,” James tells Sirius. “All that family junk. I won’t laugh at you for it.”

“Nor I at you,” Sirius says, “this one time. Next time, all bets are off.”

“Obviously,” James agrees, grinning. “But—I’ll still be here when you’re done being sad about it tonight. Then we can go run around the hallways. We can levitate some suits of armor or something.”

Sirius laughs, but it sounds all thick and snotty. “Imagine how loud they’d be if they fell.”

“We’ll do it right outside the Slytherin Common Room, then.”

“Wakey wakey, eggs and snakey,” Sirius says, really laughing now.

James boosts up onto his elbow so he can really take it in. Even teary and pink-cheeked, there’s nothing that quite mends his hurts like watching Sirius Black laugh.