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Chapter Text

Lily didn’t know what she was expecting on a Monday morning, but being woken by her flatmate trying to sing every part of “One Day More” definitely wasn’t it.

“We’ll be ready for these schoolboys- and yet with you, my world has started~!”

“Tomorrow we’ll be far away~”

Lily groaned, the sun was showing through her window, and her alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. It was no use, there was no way she’d be able to go back to sleep now.

When she finally managed to haul herself out of bed Mary was a song forward, she could hear clicks across the floor as Mary walked around in those high heels she always wore.
She got up and walked to her mirror, she was wearing the shirt her parents had gotten her, “ I just want some’bud’y to love,” the text on the shirt said with flowers patterned across it. It was a Christmas gift, she and Petunia had gotten matching ones. She could remember Pet’s exact scowl as she opened her box to a shirt with bright yellow flowers that read “ Girls just wanted to have sunflowers”. Lily was sure she saw a peak of bright yellow in the trash later that night.

“If I could close your wounds with words of love~”

She went forward in her routine, taking a shower, cleaning her face, doing her hair, getting dressed, and watering her plants. A small little aloe plant, some green hydrangeas Marlene got her when they moved in, “They look like your eyes!” Marlene had said, and a big pot of sunflowers Sev had gotten her as a housewarming gift. Even though she had a small amount it was crammed onto her windowsill, she would have to convince Mary to let her put some in the kitchen.

She packed her bag and walked out of her room to the kitchen where Mary was swaying from side to side with the music.

“Morning!” She said.

The record was still blasting from where Mary had it sitting on the counter, Lily stopped the needle and walked over the to bookcase to put the record away.

“ Hey! What the hell-?”

Lily sighed as she slipped the record in with the rest. “It's 7 in the morning, Mary, I don’t even know how you listen to this stuff so early without bursting a blood cell.”

Mary put her hands on her hips and shook her head disapprovingly.

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you went with me to see it on West End last year. “

Mary Macdonald, Lily’s flatmate since the start of college. They had been friends since secondary school, and she had barely changed since then. She had starred in every school production their school had put on, their drama teacher used to say she had the voice of an angel. She had everyone in that school under her spell by the time she left, but despite her determination to end up on the West End by 18, her parents convinced her to a more “honest living”, so here she was, sharing a flat with an almost lawyer and a women's studies major. In Lily’s mind she always associated Mary with the music blaring as she tried to study in peace and quiet.

Mary turned back to the pancakes that she was cooking on the stove. “ Why are you up so early?! You have an early class?” She said.

“ No, but I have dance at 9 and I’m meeting Sev for coffee at 1.”

Mary made a gagging sound and Lily punched her in the arm before sitting down at their lame excuse of a dining room table. She began searching through her bag for the book she had packed a couple of minutes before. She had around 20 minutes before she had to leave, so that would mean she could read at least 50 pages.

“ No fucking way are you making pancakes?”

Marlene walked in scratching her head wearing a worn and oversized Sex Pistols shirt that went past her knees. She sat in the chair across from Lily at the table and had a comically terrified expression on her face. Lily chuckled a bit into her book.

“She's gonna burn the house down!” Marlene yelled.

Mary fumed. “ What are you talking about?”

“ The last time you tried to cook something you almost burnt all my hair off !”

Marlene Mckinnon was the last of their trio. She had found the flat herself by spending hours scanning through magazines instead of studying for exams. When they first moved in there was a faint smell of urine and what Lily at the time, was pretty sure was a human toe in the corner of her room. But it's been almost a year now and they’d been able to make the place their own. Marlene used to yell “You can’t get anywhere unless you work hard!” every time Lily or Mary complained, but it paid off in the end when they all got to live away from their parents. She remembered that first night, she was still trying to deep clean her room when Marlene had come in with a bottle of champagne. Lily had sat there gaping.

“ Where the hell did you get that?”

Marlene grinned as she held the bottle in the doorway of Lily’s room.

“ Leftover from some party at the diner.” She gestured for her to follow her to their living room.

Well, it was almost a living room, there was no furniture yet so they all just settled for sitting on the floor that Lily had mopped for hours making sure there was no trace of bile left. Mary came skipping towards them and sat beside Lily, hugging her shoulders before letting go suddenly and screaming. Lily covered her ears.

“ What??!” Lily said.

“ I almost forgot!” Mary jumped up from where she was sitting and was suddenly running across the room, when she returned she was holding something behind her back. Marlene took a swig from the champagne bottle. Lily looked up at where Mary was standing.

“ What is that?”

Mary pulled the mysterious item from behind her back. It was a record player, a brand new record player. Marlene screamed and Lily groaned.

“Holy shit! Where the fuck did you get the money for that?!” Marlene asked.

Mary sat down and put the record player in the middle of where they were located on the floor.

“ I had some savings lying around.”

Lily groaned again and Mary beamed.

“ How am I supposed to get any work done here if that thing is here?!”

Marlene crossed her legs and tutted.

“ Oh, am I sorry Miss Future Lawyer, are your perfect little ears too delicate for anything that isn't some swot on a piano?”

“ Hey! Studies have said that classical music makes you smarter! From what I’ve seen it looks like you could greatly benefit from that!”

Marlene kicked her from where she was at the floor. Mary sighed.

“ I think it would be good to have! Lighten this dreary place up a bit.” Mary said while carefully prying open the record player’s box.

“ Why don’t we give it a bit of a test drive then!” Marlene quickly jumped up from where she was sitting to run to her room. Lily groaned for the third time this evening. A few moments later Marlene came in with a record and pulled the record player out of the box. And than Marlene turned the volume notch all the way up.

I saw you standing on the corner, you looked so big and fine.

Marlene had grabbed a wooden spoon from a box in the kitchen and was pointing to both her and Mary as she danced to the beat of the music. The immense volume of Blondie vibrated everything in the room, Lily swear she heard one of the plant pots from her room fall and shatter. Mary smiled up at Marlene and then started laughing as she saw Lily start messaging her forehead.

You just had to laugh!~

Even just thinking about that memory was giving Lily a migraine.

“ It wasn’t that bad! Besides, you looked good with shorter hair! You should be thanking me! “ Mary said bringing Lily back to current day.

Mary was now pointing her spatula at where Marlene was sticking her tongue at her from the table. At first glance, Marlene and Mary were complete opposites. Mary had her hair curly down her back, she was wearing a shirt cut high on her waist that had long sleeves that flared at the bottoms. Along with that came a long patterned skirt and her dark purple heels she never was seen out of. Marlene the other hand looked like she came straight from the concert where her shirt was bought. Her blond hair was cut choppy down to a little above her shoulders and her face and ears were littered with piercings.

A little after secondary school ended and Marlene had chosen her major, her parents stopped keeping in contact all that much. All the organizations she had applied to for volunteer work had gone against her mother’s idea of a “ good Christian lifestyle” so by this point Marlene had cut ties completely, other than the letter now and again to her brother.

Mary was yelling now.

“ The pancakes are going to be fine! Stop overreacting!”

“ Then eat them all yourself! Me and Lily have a shift later, we can’t be vommiting for the next 9 hours!”

Marlene got up from her seat and walked up to the bookcase where she plucked a Velvet Underground record and put it on the record player.

“Sunday Morning brings the dawn in~”

Lily sighed again and leaned her head back in her chair. Marlene stood from where the record player was playing soft tunes and pointed at her.

“Don't be moody! I thought you needed money!”

Lily pouted. “ I d0. I just didn't think a diner is where I’d end up Marley”.

Just one month earlier she had been interning at one of the biggest law firms in London, and now here she was. Begging her friends for job opportunities, it was humiliating.

Marlene poured a cup of coffee from where she was at the counter.

“ Hey! It's honest work, trust me. You’ll be back on your feet in not time.”

She walked up to where Lily was sitting and quickly patted her on the head before walking back to her room. Mary laughed as she set a plate of black pancakes on the table.

“ Uhhh Mary I think you might've overcooked these-”

“ Shove it, Evans.”

***

20 minutes later Lily hopped the tube to north London for her ballet class. The locker rooms smelled sterile, one of her favorite smells. As she packed up her bag afterward she smoothed her fingers over the sides of her on-point ballet shoes. They were starting to wear away, she would have to get new ones. She shut her eyes a moment, listening to the quiet of the locker room before the door opened and she heard footsteps come near.

“Lily!”

The woman stood next to where Lily was sitting on the bench, she stuffed her shoes in her bag before she could see and stood up. The women standing in front of her was older than her, she had cut short ginger hair and her dress had children’s finger paintings all over it, Lily contemplated for a moment if the dress came like that or not. Molly Weasley worked with kids down the hall, people in Lily’s classes often complained about how you could hear screaming as they tried to concentrate. She once heard her teacher call her classes “glorified babysitting”.

Despite all the scrutiny Lily always had respect for Molly, takes a lot of willpower to work with loud and gross children all day long. Molly grinned at her. Lily gave her a small smile

“ Hi Molly. Is there something I can do for you?”

Lily had first met Molly when she came for her first class almost late, Molly had been kind enough to give her directions while Lily’s mascara was smearing from her stressed induced tears.

Molly widened her smile.

Yep. She was gonna ask her for a favor, Lily braced herself.

“ Just, lately I was thinking of bringing in some dancers from the adult classes to give a different perspective on things…” Molly inquired.

Lily tilted her head a bit.

“ Different perspective? What do you mean by that?”

“ Just with the kids, we usually let them go to their own rhythm, let them learn what they want to learn. But some of them have become interested in the classes you all are doing in the hall. I’ve been going around asking some of the dancers if they want to come in and just guide a short lesson maybe once a week.”

Lily groaned inwardly.

No. Way.

“ I don’t know Molly, I’m starting a new job today and-”

Molly sprang up and put her hands out.

“ You don’t have to give me an answer right now! Think about it and get back to me.” Molly panicked.

Lily closed her eyes for a second and sighed as Molly started walking out of the locker room.

The locker room door slammed as Molly waved her goodbye. Lily mentally kicked herself.

***

“You should ask her to pay you.”

Lily pulled a book from the shelf and squinted at the crease on the bind before putting it neatly back on the shelf. She looked at Severous who was standing right next to her, holding a book titled “ A Molecule Away from Madness”.

“ I can't do that, Molly’s already technically volunteering. Asking her to pay me would mean it would come out of her pocket.” Lily pulled another book from the shelf and blew off the dust. Sev waved his hands and coughed so loudly that other customers in the used bookstore stared.

“And that would just be cruel.”

Severus took the book from her hand and inspected it, flipping it around to read the back.

“ Well it's not like you're the only dancer there, someone else will do it.” He handed the book back to her and she put it back on the shelf.

“ Yeah.. but she just seemed so nervous. I don’t know…. all the other teachers always look down on her… “

Sev huffed and put his hands in his pockets as he walked over to another shelf.

“ Well, it's not your problem. You are just a student after all. “

Lily stood at the shelf and shuffled her feet a bit before walking over to where Sev was bending down to take another book from a different shelf.

Sev had been her best friend since she was five, she guessed he had her best interest in mind, but
still, Molly’s watery smile just kept coming back to her.

“ This is it. “ He tapped the front of a book he was holding and Lily squinted at it. It was huge
with a hard covering and little molecule cartoons over it. Lily snorted.

“ Nerd ” He huffed and Lily watched as he walked over to the front to pay for it.

Severus was majoring in Chemistry which meant this had been his go-to spot for textbooks since his professors decided to make them buy some high-end one every other week. Ever since he and Lily were kids they never had much money. Lily’s parents owned a flower shop while Sev’s single dad made a modest living off of being a writer. They had been neighbors and been inseparable ever since.

He had been the reason she went to college for her major in law, without him pulling her into the library every day she didn't think she would get through her last year as easily as she did.

“ Just do it on the side Lils, you never did really take it seriously did you?”

“ Yeah but law? I’m not sure if I’m smart enough for that, I didn't go to some posh boarding school like you."

During their second year of primary school, Sev’s dad was able to secure him a spot at some rich kid boarding school and he had been going ever since, so Lily only saw him at summers. Every time she greeted him from the train she swore he changed a bit more, like that glint in his eyes faded away.

They were sitting at their favorite spot when she had decided where to go college, the lake had been reflecting the sun so vividly in her memory.

“You're smart enough Lily, you just tend to underestimate yourself.” He knocked her shoulder playfully.

They had sat there for about another hour before Petunia came out to yell at them to come back inside.

“ If I go to Phoenix you won’t be able to run away.” She bumped his hip as they walked back.

“You’re stuck with me.”

He only laughed as he bumped her back.

“ I’m counting on it”.

They made their way over to the coffee shop Lily had been frequenting almost every day since the start of college. They walked in as a soft piano played from the overheard speaker, there was barely anyone there except for a few people studying at the tables off to the side. It was perfect.

“ Could I get a Jasmine Tea?” Lily said as she reached the front counter.

“ Sure! Milk and sugar ok?”

Lily smiled as Sev got a table over by the window.

“ Yep.“

Lily sat across from him at the table and brought out her book. He squinted at her.

“ You ok? You seem tired.”

“ Oh no, well I had to wake up a bit early cause Mary was being a bit loud but I mostly think it’s all the stress from the whole internship debacle hitting me. “

Sev gave her a judgemental look as she rubbed her forehead.

“ If your flatmates ever give you too much trouble you could always just live with me.”

Lily sighed, he never really did like Mary and Marlene, she guessed they were just a bit too “carefree” for him.

“ They don’t give me trouble, Sev.”

He opened up his book on the table and began reading.
“ If you say so.”

They sat in silence for a bit after that, the warm coffee shop air calming Lily’s nerves, she was able to get about 10 pages in when the door to the coffee shop door swung open and a loud cackle interrupted their peace. It was two guys that seemed like they were around Lily’s age pushing each other around like two school kids. She dismissed them at first but decided to look when she heard another loud sound come from them, disturbing her peace.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Lily thought as she set her eyes on them.

One of the guys had just finished ordering and turned to his friend, making it so Lily could see his whole face. He was a South Asian guy with dark curly hair that looked like he’d been through a storm and just decided not to comb it down after. Aside from that he was wearing a red varsity jacket with yellow accents and a yellow G on the side.

Sitting on top of his face was a pair of familiar round horned-rimmed glasses.

Lily seethed and then she sunk a bit in her chair hoping that he wouldn’t see her.

This can’t be happening.

Sev scoffed from where he was sitting, back facing the door.

“ Would’ve thought people here at this pompous uni would at least have manners.”

He turned around in his seat to look at the two guys and immediately swung back around forcefully and slouched in his chair, matching Lily.

She leaned to the side to get a better look at the two guys who just ordered and were waiting by the counter for their drinks.

She never recalled seeing the second one ever around campus, he looked like he walked straight out of one of the albums Marlene had. He was wearing a leather jacket with a patch on the side that said “ God Save the Queen”, which Lily recognized, no thanks to Marlene.

Her eyes began to hover back to the guy with glasses, and just before it seemed like he was going to make eye contact with her, her heart beating rapidly, Sev pulled her to the side.

“ Don’t look!”
The look on Sev’s face was one she’d never seen before, he looked almost terrified. Lily took his arm off from where he grabbed her shoulder.

“What's wrong with you?!” She said.

Sev kept his voice in a low whisper as Lily could still hear the guys talk loudly in the back. He took a deep breath and started speaking.

“ I know them from school.”

Lily gaped.

“ No way!” Lily glanced at the guys behind them and how the black-haired one was now trying to see how many sugar packets he could balance on the glasses' head.

“ I thought you said all the guys who went to your school were rich assholes!”

“ They are! Trust me Lily those two are bad news.” Sev took another glance behind him.

“ Thought the campus would be big enough that I wouldn't run into them.”

Lily couldn't believe it, this was one of the first times Lily ever heard about Severous’s school. Usually, it was a tidbit here and there about some friend or science thing, but nothing like this.

“ Jasmine tea for Lily!”

Cutting her from her thoughts, Lily got up from where she was slouching in her chair and patted Sev on the arm before walking over to the counter.

“ Be right back”.

She walked over to the counter, keeping her head down. The glasses guy had picked up a coffee that was ready right next to her tea and immediately started making Lily nervous when he started waving it around like a crazy person.

“ All great love stories are over the course of years Pads! Just because it's taken you forever doesn't mean there isn't hope left!”

His friend scoffed as he put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.

“ Alright Romeo, give me an example then.”

The Glasses guy stood for a bit hand on his chin before snapping his fingers and pointing at his friend.

“ Gone With the Wind”

His friend held his stomach as he burst out laughing.

“ No fucking way!”

The Glasses guy stepped towards his friend and took his arm and his friend struggled to shove him off.

“You would understand if you didn’t sleep through the whole- SHIT.”

In one quick moment as Lily was stepping up to grab her tea the guy fell backward and spilled his coffee all over Lily’s newly cleaned white shirt. They sat for a second, the face of the glasses guy looked like he was scared out of his mind as he refused to look her in the eye. His eyes were glued to Lily’s coffee-stained shirt.

The glasses guy grabbed napkins off the table beside him and began to try to wipe Lily’s shirt down, it looked like his hands were shaking. His friend sat beside him, hands covering his mouth like he was trying his best not to laugh. Lily couldn’t do anything but stand there baffled, about how this man crumbled so easily just by one measly spill.

“ Oh god, I’m so so sorry. Here let me just-”

At that point, he finally looked up and they made eye contact, and the bastard’s eyes only began to grow wider, his face getting paler. He stopped moving, clutching a wet napkin to her shirt.

“ Oh. Hey.” He said in almost a whisper.

Lily stood there, getting increasingly uncomfortable by the reunion.

“What-” She started.

“ Hey! Get off of her!”

Suddenly Sev materialized behind her, pushing the man back towards the counter. He stepped in front of her, glaring at the two of them, the expression he wore went beyond any type of anger Lily had seen from him before. It wasn’t just anger, it was loathing.

The glasses guy’s friend instantly started, stepping forward, voice raising to a high volume.

“ Oi! What’s your problem-? “

When he and Sev made eye contact, there was a moment of silence, of tension.

Then all of a sudden the guy started laughing.

Sev’s grimace just got darker as the man across from him laughed and started shaking the glasses guy's shoulder and pointing, still laughing maniacally.

“ Jamie look! Look who it is!”

Lily looked down at Sev’s hands, and they were slowly tightening into fists. The glasses guy stood there stagnant, as his friend seemed to be the complete opposite, still filling the whole cafe with noise as he laughed.

“ Look Black, we don’t want any trouble-” Sev said, holding out his hands.

“ Trouble? We're not causing trouble.” The friend pointed his fingerless-gloved hand at Sev who looked like he was going to explode from the stress of this encounter.

“ You looked like you wanted trouble when you pushed my mate up against the counter.” He said.

He grinned, directly contrasting his friend who was now seemingly unfrozen and was just peering back down at the stain on Lily’s shirt.

“ You’ve always been a little creep you know that Sniv? Just didn’t expect you to follow us all the way to London.”

At that, something inside Severus turned, as his face turned into a sneer Lily had never seen before.

“ I didn’t expect you to be in London, seeing how much your family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with you.”

Suddenly the man with the leather jacket started forward. Lily jumped, the only thing that seemed to be keeping him from tearing Sev apart at that moment was his friend holding him back.

The Glasses guy with the other arm that wasn’t being used to hold back his friend, took the another drink that was now done from the counter. He hovered it in front of his friend’s face.

“ Padfoot. Coffee. Cmon.” At this mention of the coffee in front of him, the man seemed to calm down a bit. The Glasses man turned back to where Lily and Sev were standing. He began rifling through his pockets for his wallet, which he opened and looked back at Lily.

“ Your shirt, let me pay you for your shirt.” The man said with pleading eyes.

At that moment Lily looked at the man, and then at Sev who was looking off distantly, an unreadable expression on his face, and then at his friend who was still glaring with the anger of a thousand men at her best friend.

She put her hand up and glared at the man offering a 50 pound to her.

“ I don’t need it.” She said.

They made eye contact for another moment, and geers seemed to slowly turn in his brain. His expression grew cold.

“ Fine. “ And just like that, he pulled his friend by the arm out of the cafe, and just before leaving he stopped by the door turning back towards her and Severus.

“ Nice catching up with you Snivellous!” He gave a scout salute as he left and Lily could hear his friend explode with laughter as they walked down the street.

***

After that, Sev got quiet for the rest of their afternoon.

“ I don’t want to talk about it. It’s boring.” He said while retreating into his book.

Lily was getting continuously perplexed by her friend’s life. Since the first time her came off that train, she knew that there were things he wasn’t telling her. But she never thought it went this deep.

“ He’s just maturing Lily. Boys just do that later than girls. He’ll grow out of it eventually” Her mother would say whenever Lily expressed concern about how withdrawn her friend had gotten during their summers together.

And for a long time thats what she told herself, and when they got to college everything seemed fine. There was the judgy comment here and there, he always had something to say about her dancing, or her flat, or her friends. That was just Sev, he had always been like that.

Lily got off at her stop, and as she ran up the station stairs she couldn’t get that distanced look he had out of her mind.

And then she thought about Glasses guy and she felt her heart rate increase from rage.

She could still hear Umbridge’s screams clearly in her mind from a month ago. She shivered.

She arrived at her destination, an old-timey diner a few blocks down from their flat, which which judging on the amount of notices they got from their landlords about house robberies, didn't say anything good about the diner. Half of the lights on the sign were out, and as Lily opened the door she swore she saw a family of rats run out from one of the many holes in the outside wall.

“Marley?” Lily called into the crowded diner.

Lily looked around to find her friend, and she was nowhere to be seen amongst the crowd of hungover college students, and large families. There was a large jukebox next to her, and next to that was a gumball machine. According to Marlene, the Three Broomsticks Diner was older than their parent’s parents and had been through so many health code violations that the competition called it “the Rasputin of diners”. Frankie Valli played from the overhead speakers and she could hear the cooks in the back yelling to each other about orders rapidly.

Sherry Baby~!
Sherry~
Can you come out tonight?

She made her way timidly to where there was a window into the kitchen, since there seemed to be none at the front counter.

“ Excuse me?”

A man with an eyepatch quickly turned toward her and the sight of his face almost made Lily scream.

“ Whad’you standn’ there for?” He said more aggressively than Lily would've preferred.

“ Uh, I Uh, I’m looking for Marlene. I’m the new server, I’m supposed to start today.”

The man looked at her and chuckled.

“ New hire huh?” The rest of the cooks around him also seemed to chuckle as they carried out their work and Lily got increasingly more nervous by the second.

“ What are you doing standing there?”

And like an angel coming from above, Marlene herself came bustling from the door beside the kitchen. She was wearing her short choppy hair in a tiny ponytail, and a server uniform which seemed to be a white dress shirt with black pants and an apron. There was sweat sprawled across her forehead and she had her shirt sleeves pulled up above her elbows, making it so you could see her tattoo dedicated to her brother, it was a small black and white football that sat right on the back side of her arm.

She walked up to Lily and took a pen from her shirt pocket to put behind her ear, grinning.

“ God you look like a scared Chihuahua. C'mon” Marlene took her arm and guided her through the kitchens where the cooks continued to smirk at her, she could feel her stomach actively churn.

She guided her to the back of the diner where there was a tiny changing room.

“ Don’t mind them, they think everything is funny ever since our last server quit.. After the
accident.”

“ … What accident?”

Marlene opened a door beside an overflowing and nuclear-looking trashcan and ran inside.

“ We only have one changing room, which isn't usually a huge problem since there's only really three of us working at a time. We just take turns. “

Lily stood in the doorway of the room, as Marlene bounded to one of the lockers across the walls.

Marlene opened the locker and began to pull out a shirt, pants, and apron that matched hers. She handed it to Lily, who looked around at the tiny room in distaste. There were cobwebs littered all over the ceiling and it smelled like mildew.

Marlene smacked her on the shoulder.

“Marley!”

“ Cheer up!” She put her hands on both sides of Lily’s shoulders and shook her.

“Even big top lawyers start from the bottom!”

“ Fine! I get it! Stop shaking me!” Lily pulled Marlene off of her and she smiled.

“ Get changed, I have to introduce you to the server who's training you.”

“You're not training me?!”

“ Nope!” And with that Marlene slammed the door behind her, leaving Lily in the tiny creepy dressing room with a barely working lightbulb.

She got changed, and she had to tuck the dress shirt into her pants because it was too big. She gave herself a mental note to bring a belt next time because the pants also didn't fit her. She hung her ballet bag in her locker and took in her environment again.

“ How do you expect to get anywhere in this world when you can’t even get that fat head of yours out of the dirt dear?” Umbridge said in her mind.

She sighed and rummaged through her bag until she found the cigarettes that she had stashed there before leaving the flat. She looked around for a moment before seeing another door towards the far back of the room.

Upon opening, she came upon an alley, where there was more nuclear trash but this time in the form of dumpsters. And at least this time they were farther away so she couldn’t smell them.

Charming place. She thought.

She walked down a couple of the steps before checking the third one for anything living, or otherwise, and sat down.

She breathed in her cigarette after she lit it with the lighter she had also kept in her ballet bag, and as she blew out she could hear Umbridge’s frog-faced voice grow quieter and quieter.

Just as Lily had focused on listening to the sounds of the cars zooming past across the street, another sound brought her out of her cigarette-induced trance.

BANG

She looked down towards the alley where the noise was coming from and saw a tall figure slumped over, a phone pressed up against their ear. They grumbled into their phone before pinching their nose in aspiration.

“ No, I know, I just thought- No! That's not what I’m saying, I just think you should take it easy, you only have a few more months till- No, you're not listening to me!” The figure’s voice raised as they spoke and after a few moments of arguing, they hung up the phone, stuffing it in their pocket.

They then kicked the dumpster again making Lily jump out of her skin.

BANG

They continued to grumble and took a small cigarette box out of their pocket and shoved one in their mouth. The figure then walked slowly towards Lily who was growing even more afraid from when she was in the kitchen.

This is it. This is how I’m going to die, killed by a deviant in a gross alley with a half-earned law degree. Lily thinks.

The figure came to stand in front of her, and she slowly looked up taking in the man in front of her.

He was wearing the server uniform from the diner, with his sleeves rolled up the same way Marlene’s were, but instead of a tattoo showing, silver scars were going all the way up both of his arms. This was also reflected upon his face, as he wore a plain expression upon making eye contact with Lily. His eyes shifted and he peered back down towards the alley and then back to Lily before moving a hand to sift through his curly unkempt hair.

“ You got a light?” He said in a slight accent that Lily couldn’t place.

They sat there for a second, Lily just taking in what was just said to her while frozen in place. The man in front of her broke eye contact again and his eyebrows grew upturned almost as if he was getting embarrassed.

“ uh-” He said.

“Lily! There you are!”

Marlene who always seemed to show up at the right moment, busted through the door, voice barrelling through the alley.

“ I was looking for you! I told you your shift started in 15! What are you doing out here?” She stepped outside to the highest step of the stairs and peered down at where Lily was frozen sitting farther down, cig in hand.

“ Oh… I see…” She then looked up and smirked at the man standing in front of her, who was now throwing the cig that was once in his mouth behind him onto the alley floor. He shoved his hands in his pockets and squinted at Marlene who just continued to smile.

“ Seems like you have a new smoking buddy now!” She said while giggling.

The man just huffed.

“ Shut It.”

Marlene waved her hand to Lily and then to the man.

“ I’m glad that you two got to meet, Lily, Remus, Remus, Lily.”

Lily started up at the man who had now decided to refuse to look Lily in the eye.

“ He’ll be training you. “ Marlene said with a grin that Lily could only describe as evil.

Yep. Lily would definitely die here.

***

Lily was the first person in her ballet class to be able to go on pointe. She mostly credited it to the fact that she made Sev watch her feet while she practiced for hours upon hours, making him yell whenever they faltered toward the ground. She practiced before, and after she was supposed to be in bed, when she was in the lunch line, when she was walking to school, and when she was in school. Finally when she was able to keep her heels up for minutes straight and her teacher praised her in front of the whole class she just about cried. Afterward, her dad took her and Pet out for ice cream, and that's where she finally cried. Petunia just scoffed and called her a baby while her dad comforted her.

So you would think after all that pain her feet would at least be able to survive a four-hour workday.

Turns out 4 pm to 8 pm was Three Broomsticks busiest hours because when Remus told Lily that he wouldn’t exactly be able to train her the whole time, he meant it. A lot of her shift was spent just following behind him while he quickly took orders from table to table.

He had taken the orders of an old couple that seemed hell-bent on giving Lily an aneurysm with how many alterations to the food they were requesting. Despite how stressed this was making Lily, the taller man just stood next to her nodding at every word, quickly writing down everything they were saying in his notepad, at least that's what it looked like, his handwriting looked more like a combination of various squiggles than any words.

When he finished writing his last squiggle, Remus just shoved the notepad into his apron pocket before giving the difficult pair a small smile, crinkling the space below his eyes.

“ I’ll have that right up for you.” He said in a friendly tone.

Lily couldn't believe this was the same man she had seen viciously attack a dumpster in the alley earlier.

Throughout Remus’s so-called “training”, he pointed out the attributes of almost every sort of person he took the order of. This always happened right after he smiled at them and shuffled off to relay their order to the cooks, Lily trailing behind him.

“ They come in every other Friday, the kid, you see there-?

He told Lily after taking the order of a family of three, the parents were trying to teach their son how to read the kid's menu, ultimately failing when the kid seemed more interested in eating his crayons.

“-he has a peanut allergy so make sure you remember to write a note for the cooks before you pass off the older, sometimes the parents forget to let you know until you put their food down.”

A few orders later there was another note from Remus.

“That's Edgar Bones, he runs the real estate firm a few blocks down. “

Lily looked at the man with dark slick back hair and a clean-pressed suit, he was a bit on the older side, even more emphasized by the women sitting across from him, who seemed to be around Lily and Remus’s age.

Remus let out a low laugh before gesturing for Lily to lean in closer, like the noise from the diner wouldn't be enough to drown out their voices anyway.

“ The first time he came in he was with this one posh older woman, his wife.” Remus looked at Lily and grinned.

“ Ever since then, he’s brought in a different bird every time he's come in.”

“ No!” Lily yelled.

“Are you gonna tell her?” Lily said, leaning in, whispering.

Remus only laughed at her reaction, causing the scar that ran across his face to warp.

“ Marlene’s trying to see if we can manage to get the wife’s phone number, but it's a bit of a struggle since it seems like that bastard keeps his personal life pretty private.”

He ripped out the paper from his pad and hooked it at the counter, before turning back to Lily and handing her an identical notepad, and then handed her a pen. He adjusted his apron, smiling.

“ I think that's enough, you should be able to go on for the rest of the night.”

Lily just stood there holding her pen and notepad.

“ What?!”

Remus looked her up and down before putting a hand down on her shoulder.

“ I’ll be here if you need anything, your pre-law, you can handle it.”

He gestured to a table over by the corner of the diner, right by the jukebox.

“ Start over there, go slow, I can cover you if you fuck up, and so can Marlene.”

He then pushed her with surprising strength over towards the table, making her almost eat shit on the dirty diner floor.

“ Breathe Lily!” He called while she slowly walked over the table.

And now here Lily was, four hours later, after closing, dead on her feet, recalling every decision in her life that had possibly led her to this moment.

She was sitting on one of the stools up against the counter, her forehead was bathed from sweat, and in an effort to keep her temperature down she was resting her head against the cold counter surface.

At that point, she was too tired to even care that a four-month-old a few hours before had thrown up just a few inches away from where her face was resting on the counter.

Remus was standing across from her on the other side of the counter, he leaned his head down to try to get in contact with Lily’s corpse.

“ You ok there Newbie?”

“ I don’t know how you're able to do this every day.” She grumbled. Smiling at every customer that annoyed her was harder than she expected, especially since at least at her internship she didn’t even have to interact with anybody. Too busy filing papers, and running back to Starbucks after Umbridge had decided that her coffee wasn’t the exact temperature she liked.

“ I can think of a few ways.” He said.

At this moment it was time for Marlene to make another grand entrance, as she burst through the kitchen doors holding an opened bottle of champagne.

“ Look what Moody saved for us! Bones’s table ordered it but it turned out that his date wasn’t drinking age.”

This got Lily up. She lifted her head from the counter and looked towards Marlene who was sauntering over to their table now with three shot glasses.

“You're joking!”

Marlene put the bottle and glasses down on the counter with a clang and grinned.

“ I’m not. “

Remus just snorted again as he took the glass that Marlene poured for him, downing it in one go, making Marlene almost choke on her drink in surprise.

They had sat there for a bit drinking out of their chipped shot glasses, making pleasant small talk. She learned that surprisingly Remus went to the same college as her and Sev, studying for a bachelors in education.

“ My mum was a teacher, she had to quit when my family hit some trouble that made her stay home, but she still homeschooled me till primary school.” He said when questioned about it. This increased Lily’s amount of respect for him, her mother use to say that “people who help people were always the most wise.” This greatly contradicted Sev’s “Focus on yourself” attitude, he usually scoffed when Lily echoed this, because it always seemed to get her in situations that always ended badly. She thought of Molly’s proposition back in the lockeroom again.

The diner was empty as the cooks had all left, and Lily listened to the distant sounds of people from the London streets. At some point Remus had looked back to her, raising his eyebrows, shot glass in hand.

“ Marlene tells me you're a ballet dancer.”

Lily took another drink from her glass, a bit embarrassed. It wasn’t like she thought her dancing was shameful or anything. But every time someone asked her about it, she always got this sinking feeling in her stomach. As much effort as she’d been putting into her dancing while in college, the child side of her who learned pointe too early yelled at her, calling her a faker.

“ Oh yeah, I take classes from a company off campus.”

She laughed a bit and rubbed the back of her neck.

“It's stupid, I’ve been doing it since I was a kid and my Mum loved it so-”

Remus flashed her a kind smile, a genuine smile, one of understanding that made that sinking feeling in her stomach calm down a bit.

“ I think it's admirable. Takes a lot of work to put art aside like that.”

Lily jolted, the alcohol seemed to make her more jumpy, it was taking all her control at that moment not to jump out of her seat.

“ I mean I guess I am, but-”

Before Lily could give her retort Marlene started to grab Remus’s shoulders justling him back and forth.

“ You could talk Mr. Writer!”

“ Argh get off of me.” He said while struggling and failing to free himself from Marlene’s grasp.

Lily straightened up again.

“You're a writer?” She said

Remus started waving his hands maniacally, he looked almost nervous, which would be a first.

“ No not really, I-!”

Before he could finish Marlene let out another loud gasp.

“ Oh my god Remus tell her about your thing!”

“ What thing? Are you already drunk?” At this, Remus checked the champagne bottle again before Marlene gave him a sharp smack on the arm.

“ The thing! The thing with your flatmates!”

At this Remus’s face flushed, he then proceeded to smack Marlene back on the arm but this only pushed her to keep going.

“ Lily! Lily! You have to hear this! He and his flatmates- they like rented out this old ass theater to rehearse and everything!”

“ Marlene shut it!!”

Lily’s curiosity was only just growing as Remus seemed to get more embarrassed and Marlene more giggly.

“ What thing? What are you talking about?” Lily asked.

Remus stopped his accost of Marlene and turned back to her, a shy grin on his face.

“It's nothing- It's just something me and my friends wanted to do before graduating.”

“ What is it?” Lily said.

“It's a musical!” Marlene yelled and then fell into another fit of giggles.

Lily only gaped, as Remus’s head fell to his hands.

“ A musical?!” Lily echoed.

Remus just lifted his head from his hands and looked slowly over to the side windows, where Marlene was holding her chest as she continued to giggle.

Lily smacked her hand on the counter, feeling the alcohol truly reach her brain at this point.

“ Remus, explain.”

The man only sighed, shifting in his seat, bringing his eyes back to face Lily.

“ Me and my friends when we were growing up, we always put on these plays for our parents. And as we got older we kind of just… kept doing it, it only really stopped once we reached Uni and all moved out. And since we're all graduating soon we wanted to see if we could just..” He waved his hand around as he struggled to say his next words.

“ Make an actual one. One of my friends came upon some money recently so we thought, "why not, y’know?”

Lily sat there, absolutely perplexed by this character of a man.

“That's insane, you do know how insane that is right?” Lily said, a bit more louder than she would prefer.

Remus just smiled and took another sip of his shot glass.

“ I know.”

Marlene, who had calmed herself down a bit was sitting back down next to Lily at the counter, opposite to where Remus had pulled up a chair on the other side.

“ He’s making it sound small Lily! They have a whole ensemble planned, with set design and music and dancing-” Marlene let out another big gasp and she lunged across the counter towards the Remus.

“ Remus! Don’t you need a choreographer?”

Remus blinked.

“ Yeah I guess but-”

Marlene let out an evil grin as she turned back towards Lily.

Oh no, please no, Lily thought.

“ Lily should be your choreographer! She used to make all these dances for our dance team in secondary school! she would be perfect!”

Lily could handle working in a diner, killing her feet every day, but working on a musical set made her want to hurl even thinking about it.

Before Lily could even speak, Remus interjected.

“ I don’t know, were kind of particular with-”

“ This is so perfect! Lily, didn’t you say that you wanted to look for another way to get money for a bit?” Marlene interjected.

She turned back towards Lily, an evil grin plastered on her face. And at that moment Lily realized.

“ Remus will be training you!” She said at the start of her shift.

Marlene had planned this from the start.

That bitch.

Lily hadn’t noticed at that moment but she had started tuning out Remus and Marlene’s chattering. Remus’s speech began to stutter as Marlene persisted.

“ She lives nearby didn’t you say it was down in Hogsmeade?”

“ Yeah, but it's a bit of a demanding job I don’t think she would have time-”

Would Lily have the time? She had dancing, school, and whatever was happening with Severus.

Sev’s words called back in her memory,

“-you never did really take it seriously did you?”

And then Remus’s statement from earlier in the night.

“Takes a lot of work to put art aside like that.”

And then her mum's face as she gave her a huge bouquet after her first recital. She had to take up the whole back of the car just with that bouquet, the smells entering her sinuses, she had never been so happy.

“I can do it.”

Lily spoke and she saw Remus freeze as she did.

“ Are you sure?” He looked at her like he was expecting her to say she was joking. The scar that ran from his eyebrow to across the bridge of his nose stayed stagnant on his face.

She took a deep breath and took a shot of champagne from her glass.
“Yeah, sure. Why not?”

***

She had woken up with a migraine the next morning, after a nauseating ride home on the tube. She had a shift later in the day again, and she didn't have a class scheduled until Wednesday so she was free to sleep in for another few hours before Marlene inevitably threw a pillow at her face.

“ What the hell Marley?!”

Marlene was standing at the foot of her bed, wearing a tattered sweater with holes and close pins, she was wearing her sneakers on Lily’s carpet which made her cringe a bit.

“ I thought we were gonna stop by Remus’s thing? He said they had the stage till 2 remember?”

Marlene threw another pillow at her which Lily dodged by leaping off her bed this time. She yelled as she trotted out the door.

“ He sent me the address, so hurry your butt up!”

Lily had almost forgotten about the mess that she had gotten into. After the initial decision Lily made, Remus who looked scared out of his mind, said that she didn't have to jump into anything.

“ Just come by tomorrow, my flatmates should at least be there so I can run it by them first.”

Which she appreciated considering that she didn’t know what compelled her to do it in the first place, other than the fact that she would be financially compensated.

“ I can’t believe you roped me into this.” Lily groaned while leaning against the tube door.

“ I can’t believe you let me rope you into this.” Marlene said, leaning against the opposite side of the door across from Lily.

Lily groaned again. Marlene giggled and glanced out the tube window, and than back at Lily with a smile.

“ You just seem so lost lately. '' As she talked she absentmindedly picked at one of the frays coming undone from her sweater.

“ Sometimes you just need to do something a bit stupid to make you appreciate life a bit more, y'know.”

Lily grew uncomfortable and shifted her eyes away from Marlene’s gaze.

“After you lost your internship, me and Mary thought you were never going to come out of your room until you started going to your dance classes again.”

“Oh”. Lily looked down at her worn-out loafers, the buckles were getting more orange by the day.

“ Well, I’m fine.” She smiled back at Marlene.

She knows that Marlene’s right, after she lost her internship she couldn't even will herself out of her bed. She lost the biggest opportunity she was given to her and she had never been more down trodden. She was only able to get up and go to her classes after breaking down on phone call to her Dad.

They came to a stop, and the people around her started moving toward the door as she and Marlene jumped off onto the pavement floor.

“ And hey! Who knows? Maybe this could be your big break! Imagine how jealous Mary would be if you got on the West End before her!” Marlene had jumped in front of her, waving her arms and grinning.

Lily shoved passed her and she giggled as she ran to catch up to her.

They had landed at the address that Remus had given them, they stood in front of an abandoned joke shop. The sign-up above read “Zonko’s Joke Shop” in obnoxious orange letters that had faded and had stains all over from who knows what. There was a padlock on the door and nothing to be seen from the inside, as Lily peered through the front windows.

“Huh.” Lily said.

Marlene stood there for a bit, she seemed to be thinking, as she shuffled her sneakers against the ground for a second before leaning her head to look at the alley that lay beside the joke shop.

“ Did he give us the wrong address?” Lily said, and as she turned to look at Marlene, the other girl was approaching the alley looking down it inquisitively.

Marlene looked back at Lily.

“ …Do you think?”

Lily shrugged and sighed.

“ It doesn’t hurt.”

They walked down the alley a bit, as it very much reminded Lily of the alley by Three Broomsticks, except with a stronger smell of piss. There was nothing except for dumpsters and rats as they walked, until they came upon a metal door that was opened just a crack. Lily heard distant voices coming from the inside.

Lily and Marlene looked at each other for a while, before Lily took a deep breath and pushed the door with her shoulder, no way in hell was she touching the door handle with her bare hands.

What they came upon was a small theater. It smelled faintly of gas and Lily could hear the pipes clatter as she and Marlene slowly wandered in. There seemed to be no heater because the air barely shifted as they entered from the outside, their footsteps making hardly any sound. The whole theater was lined with red carpet, on the floor and seats, up until the small wooden stage that sat all the way towards the back.

In front of the stage came the owners of the distant voices that Lily heard before. One of them belonged to Remus who was wearing a coat on top of a sweater, she guessed because of the lack of heater. The man the other voice was coming from was chubby and he was on the shorter side, his height making it so that he was up to Remus’s shoulder. He looked like he had just come from the office, with a plaid shirt, a tie, and brown slacks.

Remus stood with his hands tucked into both of his armpits, clearly freezing, and continued to fight with his friend while Lily and Marlene walked down the theater aisle.

“ Listen, I didn't even want it in the show, but he had a mad fit when I said to scrap it.”

The man in slacks was holding a small folded-over booklet, squinting at one of the pages.

“ I the moon and you the stars? It sounds like some corny thing that you would write in that journal of yours during 4th year.”

Remus went silent. And the other man slowly raised his face from the booklet, eyes wide.

“ Moony please don’t tell me-”

“ It wasn’t my idea!” Remus threw up his hands as the other man burst out laughing, shaking the whole theater.

The other man cackled, and Remus with an aspirated look glanced to the theater aisle where Lily and Marlene were making their way over. He raised his arm and waved them over. As they approached Remus smiled as his and Lily’s eyes met.

“ Lily! I’m glad you made it!”

He gestured over to the man standing near him and then to Lily and Marlene.

“ Marlene you know Peter, Peter, this is Lily Evans, she’s a new waitress at the diner.”

Peter, who seemed to be an everyman incarnate, stuck out his hand to and shook Lily’s hand firmly while grinning, showing braces sitting on his adult teeth.

Marlene huffed.

“ What’s with the entrance?” She said while gesturing towards the door in the back of the theater.

“ Ah. Sorry about that, forgot to tell you.” Remus looked over to where Marlene was pointing and sighed.

“ Well, I told you that we were able to afford all this through that trust fund that Sirius got. As much money we have, we still have to plan ahead. Were just not trying to spend it all in one go.”

Peter scoffed.

“ We wanted a cooler theater but Remus wouldn’t let us.”

Remus scoffed back and shoved his hands into his bulky jacket.

“ They were expensive! I just want to make sure that we stay safe, Especially since we're really only using this place for rehearsals for now.”

Peter looked to the side, looking like he was resisting the urge of scoffing again. Remus punched his shoulder.

“ The bloke who owned this place used to be a regular at the diner, and used to talk about how he was struggling to get someone to rent it out since it was such a weird place. He said that it used to be a school where they would teach kids acting, with the shop at the front connecting to the back. We only noticed that the joke shop had been closed down recently, so we had to scour the diner’s records for his number.”

It seemed like Peter had been at every step of this search, as he shivered when Remus mentioned it.

“ Anyways, the heating hasn’t been working in decades, the wallpaper’s peeling off the ceiling and we haven’t even tried to see if those fucked up spotlights work, but it's what we got.” At this, Remus grinned proudly.

“ Wow,” Lily said. She couldn’t help but be amused by how animated this dingy space made Remus feel.

Peter just made a clicking sound with his mouth and shook his head. He then faced Lily.

“ So choreographer huh?”

Lily gulped, suddenly she wanted to run as far as she could.

She took a glance at Marlene who returned the sentiment with a reassuring nod.

“ Uh- yeah, I mean maybe, I don’t know at the moment if I have the-” Lily stammered, as Peter and Remus stared at her.

“ Well we would pay you a lot, don’t you go to Phoenix, for law?” Peter said as he looked her over.

“ Money doesn’t matter Pete if she doesn’t want to do it-” Remus started.

“ Are you any good? I mean we’re not exactly rolling in options so I guess it wouldn’t matter, but we at least need someone competent.”

“ Jesus fuck Pete.” Remus sighed.

“ What?”

As Peter responded to Remus, Marlene piped up on Lily’s behalf.

“ She’s been dancing since she was like 5! I don’t think I know anyone more competent.”

Remus raised her eyebrows and looked at Peter. See. I told you. Remus’s expression seem to read. Peter hung his head and then sighed. He handed the booklet that he was reading back to Remus.

“You're gonna have to run it by Padfoot first.”

Remus’s expression carried something that seemed to Lily like a mix of the contradicting emotions of pessimism and amusement.

“ I know, we’ll ask him when he gets here.”

Remus tucked his arms underneath each other as he turned to Lily smiling again.

“ We can wait until our other flatmates get here and then we can make a decision.”

At this, Lily nodded and Marlene let out a breath.

“ Competence is key at the moment since our seemingly competent people seem to be running short as of lately.” Peter said after cackling and looking at Remus who’s eyes grew wide.

“ Ok! It was not that bad.” Remus said, voice raised.

Peter just shrugged, which only seemed to make Remus angrier as he opened the booklet to a specific page, making a flick sound every time he turned a page.

“ Read this,” Remus said as he shoved the booklet into Lily’s hands, Marlene appeared at the page over her shoulder.

“Okay…” Lily said as she glanced back down at the page.

Lily read the monologue that was written out on the page, Marlene chuckled a bit, seeming to finish reading it around the same time Lily did. Marlene looked back at Remus with that evil grin she always sported.

“ You, Remus Lupin, wrote this?”

“ You guys are blowing this out of proportion, it's a bit flowery but-”

“ A bit? “ Peter interjected, which just earned another punch in the arm from Remus.

Lily laughed a bit too, and reread the monologue. It was melodramatic, but it was kind of cute in a way. It reminded her of all those sappy romance movies she would watch with her mum while waiting for their leftovers from the previous night to heat up.

Pulling out of Lily’s thoughts, Remus said defensively.

“I was 13!”

Marlene only laughed.

“ And what a 13-year-old you were…” This comment from Marlene's earning is another cackle from Peter’s brace-filled mouth.

Remus snatched the booklet that had now found itself into Marlene’s hands.

“ I know it's embarrassing but it's only a work in progress. I’m sure it would sound better acted, not read.” Remus rambled.

“ Can I try?” Lily said.

She had been mostly mute for this whole interaction. Everyone turned their heads to look at her. Lily started to sweat.

“ Try acting it..?” Remus said.

“Yeah, If you don’t mind” Well this was embarrassing, Lily thought.

Before Lily could take back her words Remus was giving the booklet back to Lily and guiding her up to the stage stairs. He, Peter, and Marlene sat on the carpeted seats, peering up at her from where she was standing on the stage. Marlene cheered and clapped her hands.

Lily closed her eyes, she imagined what the words would sound like in her brain. She imagined the men in waistcoats reciting poetry from the movies her mum loved. She imagined the glint in her mother’s eye as she recited every word.

I was lost before I met you, a single ship amidst space and time.
Every time I thought it was over, the sheer force of my loneliness pulled me back into the vast emptiness of the endless sea.

I did not know that I was capable of being saved before you pulled me out.
You saved me. You saved me from my own fears, my own past.

You are my purpose, you shine brighter than any light.
I’ the moon, you the stars.

She looked up from where she was reading the lines on the page. Her hands were shaking.
Peter and Marlene were clapping, Marlene with a big smile sprawled across her face. Remus didn’t clap, he sat in his seat, hand resting on the side of his chin. He studied her, which only made Lily want to sweat more.

She did an awkward bow and then walked off the stage to where Marlene shook her gently, still smiling.

Peter and Remus stood by, Peter stealing glances towards Remus who still had that thoughtful look on his face.

“Lily,” Remus said.

“ Yes?” Lily responded.

“ Have you ever thought about acting?”

Her eyebrows raised at this, and Lily was suddenly stuck to the floor, unable to move.

“ Uh- No.” She said, voice trembling.

Remus turned toward Peter.

“ James was having a hard time finding an actress for the second lead.”

Peter thought a moment before realization came to his face, he slapped his forehead.

“ Holy shit I forgot about that!”

He then turned towards Lily, who was still very much frozen, taking his hand in hers.

“ You should be the second lead! It would be perfect!” Peter exclaimed while shaking Lily’s hand back and forth. Marlene stood next to Lily, too stunned to speak.

“ I-” Lily started, but just as she did the back theater's doors slammed open, a loud voice coming from them.

“What's up wolf pack?!” The voice yelled from the back, and as Lily turned to where the noise was coming from her blood ran cold.

“ God, don’t say shit like that!” Remus groaned.

The man only chuckled and as he walked down the aisle his appearance became more clear.

He wasn’t taller than Remus, but was taller than Peter. He had hair that looked like it had been attacked by a wild bird and was wearing a red varsity jacket with a yellow G on the side.

Sitting on top of his face was a pair of round horned-rimmed glasses.

Chapter Text

It was around 2 am on a Monday and Remus was sitting on his flat’s couch while his flatmates played Greased Lightning for the fifth time in a row.

We’ll get some overhead lifters and four-barrel quads oh yeah!
Keep talking whoa keep talking!

He tried to focus on the ceiling as everything seemed to be spinning. He squinted his eyes and spotted a sticky hand sitting, rotting, near the corner of the ceiling. As he stared at the sticky hand wondering how he’d allow it to be there long enough where it only had about 2 fingers left to show for itself, he heard a loud sound.

A loud banging sound, and then following the first sound there came loud crashes right after the other, like someone had been standing on the counter, probably singing along to the song, having to hold onto the pots and pan cupboard door to keep balance, since they were 5 pints in and extremely drunk.

And had fallen off the counter onto their kitchen floor, with the pots and pans from the cupboard accompanying them shortly after.

The loud talking that was coming from the kitchen began to waver a bit as he heard someone panic loudly. Remus, without taking his eyes off the ceiling, felt around next to him for the Marlboros he should've put there earlier in the night. The person panicking continued to yell while John Travolta continued to sing.

“ How many fingers am I holding up?”

You are supreme, the chick’ll cream for Greased Lightnin’!

Remus took a deep breath as the people around him shuffled towards the kitchen to see what all the noise was about. He tried to remember if he still had that first aid kit in his room.

“ Make way people! Make way!” The voice yelled.

“ Could you be any louder?!” Another distant voice said.

He heard two sets of footsteps walking slowly up to where he was sitting on the couch. At this point, everyone had cleared the flat leaving John Travolta sad and alone, still singing about cars. Remus’s neck was getting sore as he shut his eyes and tried to block out any incoming noise.

“Moony.“ One voice said.

“ I think he’s sleeping,” The other one said.

Remus slowly raised his head from the couch and looked at his two flatmates standing in front of him. James was trembling as he was struggling to hold Sirius up by his right arm. Sirius was slumped down holding his head in his hands.

“ I’m awake.“ He said while pinching the bridge of his nose and adjusting his eyes. Quick after Remus responded, Sirius shrugged James off and flopped down on the couch like a ragdoll.

“ I think I’m gonna hurl” He mumbled into the couch cushion.

“ Fuck no. No no no no no, not again.” Remus pushed himself off the couch and pulled Sirius’s shoulders off of the couch, causing a groan to come from Sirius who had seemingly lost all control of his body, making it even harder for Remus to grab hold of him.

Last time they had a party in the flat, Sirius had fallen off the kitchen counter singing along to, embarrassingly enough, a Rent song and had thrown up all over their couch, leaving Remus to spend two hours the next day cleaning to get rid of the stain his puke left.

This time, Remus finally was able to pry Sirius off of the couch and had to tightly grip his shoulders to keep him from swaying. He took one hand off of one of Sirius’s shoulders to hold his head up by his chin.

“ Keep your head up, breathe.” A moment later, Sirius took his eyes off the floor to make eye contact with him. His hair had begun to fall into his face, framing his face, and his eyes glimmered a bit as Remus’s began to blink rapidly. Sirius’s cheeks filled up with air.

“ No! Don’t stop breathing dumbass!”

Remus’s yells were overlapped by Sirius’s laughs as he struggled to push himself off of Remus to sit back on the couch. Remus tried his best to not strangle the man who was in danger of puking all over the faded stain on the couch, that Remus had covered with a pillow after failing to clean it for hours.

James was standing opposite them with his hands on his hips giggling. Another moment passed and a door slamming sounded from the other side of their seemingly empty flat, making James jump. James stood there for a second, his eyes squinting, if Remus listened carefully he would be able to hear the gears churning in his drunk brain. Another moment, James snapped his fingers and proceeded to point at Remus who had now resulted in hooking his arm around Sirius’s shoulders, placing him in a headlock.

“ I should check on Pete.” He started walking toward the door slamming sound before stopping and turning back toward where Remus and Sirius were standing.

“ You gonna be ok? You still have that first aid kit in your room?”

Sirius’s eyes shifted toward the ceiling as he stomped on Remus’s foot, making Remus yell again and tighten the headlock.

“ Is that a sticky hand on the ceiling?” Sirius mumbled.

Remus turned to his side to respond to James but he was already gone. Sirius, the drunkard, was humming Grease Lighting and was progressively getting louder.

“Ok Danny Zuko” He started slowly moving Sirius in front of him, hand on shoulders once again.

“ One foot in front of the other. 1, 2, 1, 2 “ Once in front of Remus’s room Sirius stopped suddenly at the doorway gasping loudly and dramatically.

“ Don’t you still have that yearbook from 2nd year?!” Sirius with a sudden burst of energy ran to the bookshelf standing near Remus’s bed.

“ … maybe?” Remus made his way toward the desk by his bed and grabbed a plastic water bottle that he had left there the night before. Sirius was rapidly flipping through the books on his shelf, suddenly jumping when he saw a certain cover.

“ LOOK HERE IT IS!” He said while jumping up and down like a child and then proceeding to run and jump on Remus’s bed, surely damaging his bed frame.

“ Le Voila!” He patted the bed next to him and shoved the book in Remus’s face as soon as he sat down.

“ Fuck! Calm down!” Remus wrestled the book out of his hands and swapped it for the opened water bottle. He put the booklet on his lap, the cover was bright red with a gold lion roaring on the front and a distant picture of the school behind it. Sirius took a swig of the bottle as Remus flipped through the pages, their legs pressed up against each other on the bed, their backs up against the wall.

“ Look, look!” Sirius said while pointing to a certain page in the paper. Remus had almost forgotten that he was drinking that night too, if it wasn’t for the splitting headache that happened as a result of Sirius screaming in his ear.

He was pointing to a picture of a 12-year-old boy in the corner, straight-faced with unkempt hair and a scar going through his left eyebrow. Underneath the picture cursive writing spelled Remus John Lupin. Sirius started maniacally laughing as Remus groaned covering the picture with his palm. Sirius started moving his hand from the picture.

“ Bollocks, you were so scary!” Sirius finally was able to wrestle his hand away from the picture and stared down at it, laughing. Remus leaned his head against the wall behind him and smiled at how much joy Sirius’s drunk mind was seemingly getting from this.

“ Well, I guess that's what rooming with you lot for a year will do.” Remus snorted and Sirius punched him hard in the shoulder.

“ You were scary before us! Prongs thought you were in a gang.” At this Remus burst out laughing, not even noticing how close Sirius was getting by the minute as he continued to turn through the pages.

“ I thought you were cool though.” It was a mumble, Remus barely heard it from his position, head leaning against the wall.

“ No way you did. “

“ Yuh huh, I did. I went home that summer and researched London gangs in my family’s library, to I don’t know…” He began waving his hands around.

“ Have something to talk to you about.” Sirius’s eyes moved away from Remus’s in embarrassment as Remus just laughed more.

“You're drunk!”

“ Not it’s true I swear! You can ask James!.” He began yelling again making Remus’s head hurt.

“ Ok ok, I believe you! Just stop yelling!” At this, a small smile formed on his face as Sirius relocated his head from the wall to Remus’s shoulder. Which would sent Remus out the window if it wasn’t for the fact that the alcohol was wearing off and his eyes were drooping. Sirius mumbled into his shoulder and stopped flipping through the yearbook in front of him.

“ m’ sorry” He had stopped on a page of a picture of their whole 2nd year class, posing in front of the main building entrance. There in the front stood four boys, One with round glasses and hair that looked like he had spent the day rolling around in the grass, one with shaggy black hair that went down a bit above his shoulders and smeared eyeliner on his eyes, one taller then the rest with a tired expression and a scars running through the sides of his face, and one short and more on the chubby side, smiling widely so you could see his braces.

It felt like ages ago, Remus smoothed his fingers over the photo as Sirius began to stir at his side, water bottle still in hand. He felt Sirius’s head move from his shoulder, and he slowly lifted his gaze to match Sirius’s, his eyes were lined with red. Remus closed the yearbook and set it to the side, almost jumping out of his skin when Sirius lifted a hand to trace the scar that ran over the bridge of his nose.

“ What are you doing?” Remus struggled to control his breathing. Sirius seemed to ponder this question while squinting, finger lying over the side of his jaw. After a moment where Remus had thought he was going to lose the ability to breathe, he set down his hand and smiled.

“ Yep, not scary.”

They sat there, looking into each other's eyes, Remus couldn’t even feel the bed underneath him anymore. His room seemed to melt away, the only thing that he could look at was Sirius’s face and his dopey smile. There was a piece of his fringe that was sticking to his cheek, he wanted to push it out of the way. Their faces were centimeters apart and just when Remus could feel his hand lifting to move that piece of hair out of the way, Sirius curled over onto Remus’s legs.

He threw up.

Remus hadn’t noticed at the time but nobody had turned off the Grease record that James had put on during the party. As Sirius proceeded to drunkenly apologize repeatedly and Remus’s soul was leaving his body, the record was still echoing throughout the flat.

Beatings of my broken heart
Will rise the first place on the charts
Oh, my heart arranges
Oh, those magic changes~

***

It was the next morning.

The light was streaming through the window that sat in the middle of his room right by the bookcase. His eyelids sat heavy on his face, he lay there a bit until a sudden noise woke him fully up. A low snore from a body seemingly sleeping next to him.

After puking all over Remus’s only good pair of pants, Sirius had passed out on his bed, and not wanting to have to haul him back to his room, Remus just took off his shoes and scooted him to the side, a tired routine at this point. Every time they host a party Sirius always ends up drunk and dozing in Remus’s bed at the end of the night.

Remus sat up and looked at him. His faded Stones’ t-shirt now had a big wet stain from where the puke had been and there was a trail of drool coming from his mouth going down to the edge of his chin. Even then, Remus caught himself sitting next to him and watching him snore for at least another minute. He could count every little blemish on his skin and his eyes drifting back to his long eyelashes. Remus turned to face the table beside his bed and saw that his alarm clock mysteriously disappeared.

He sat there for a bit, before deciding that Sirius had gotten to sleep enough.

He took a deep breath before yelling out into the hallway where he heard the distant sounds of
Billy Joel playing from their record player in the kitchen.

You oughta know by now-
You oughta know by now~

“JAMES.” A moment passed before the noises in the kitchen paused and Sirius waking up, suddenly sat upright and groaned.

“ YEA?” Yelled James back.

“ WHAT TIME IS IT?” Remus sat there as James thought. Sirius rubbed his eyes and then slumped back into bed this time taking pillows to cover his ears.

“ uh… 7:30?”

“7:30?!” Remus got up from his bed and almost tripped over the step that went up to his bed.

“ Yea!” James yelled unknowing of Remus’s sudden panic.

“ Shit shit shit shit”. Remus mumbled as he went over to his closet to rut around for his work clothes. As he was rapidly pulling his pajama shirt off, he heard Sirius sit up again on his bed.

“ Was’ happening? Where are you going?” Remus began pulling on his pants and reaching to find his belt in the back of his closet.

“ I’m supposed to be at the diner at 7:00! Marlene gave me the keys...SHIT!” As a result of trying to pull his shoes on, he banged his shoe on the bottom of the dresser.

As he turned around for the door his eyes settled on the table beside his bed where his alarm had disappeared.

“ Padfoot.” Remus said while standing in the middle of his room with a terrible bedhead that he wasn’t planning on fixing.

“ Can I help you? “ Sirius was now leaning back against the wall his bed was up against, his shirt was riding up to show a bit of his stomach, and you could still see the trail the drool left behind on his face.

“ Where’s my alarm.” Sirius sat there for a second, like he was searching his mind for a memory.

“ I think I…. turned it off, It started ringing so I kinda just...” He made a pushing motion with his hand while grinning.

“ I dunno, it’s all hazy.” He continue to chuckle like he always did when he expected to get off scot-free with some stupid ass mistake. But not with Remus. Remus scoffed and began to walk toward the door while picking his backpack off the floor.

“ Do you take pride in making my life harder?” He said as Sirius followed him into the kitchen, plopping down at the table, littered with beer bottles from the previous night. I’ll clean that up later. Remus thinks.

“ Aw, Moony don’t be like that.” He picked up one of the beer bottles on the table and before peering down into it to check if there was beer still in it, he took a swig. James snorted from where he was washing a plate at the sink, a record player sitting on the counter beside him. The music had gotten louder as they entered the kitchen.

Need to know that you will always be~
Same old someone I knew~

“I loosen you up, admit it, what’ll be showing up a few minutes late gonna do to you? How many times did you get sent to the office back in secondary? “ He took another swig of the beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“ This whole teaching thing has shoved the stick right up your ass again.”

Remus turned back to Sirius from where he was spraying whipped cream on two slices of bread and huffed.

“ Change your shirt you smell like puke.” At this James made a disgusted face as Sirius sniffed his shirt and gagged.

“ Why did you let me sleep in this?!”

Remus turned back around and put the top onto his diabetes-inducing sandwich.

“It's not my job to clean you up every time James decides to put on the Grease record. I just let you sleep in my bed because it's a pain to haul your dumbarse back to your room.” Remus took the knife he was using and pointed it at Sirius who was only now smiling even harder, as a result of making Remus even more late than he already was.

“ Sleeping there is a privilege, don’t be a dick just because you take one sip of alcohol and all of a sudden you regress ten years in age.” He turned back away as Sirius just continued to grin and take another swig of his lukewarm beer.

“ Flaws are what make us human, humanity makes good art, what can I say?” Sirius chuckled at this and then froze for a second before slamming his beer on the table. Remus laughed in surprise and James jumped.

“ Pads be careful with that! I’m pretty sure that table is an heirloom!” Sirius ignoring James's protests slammed his hand on the table before making straight eye contact with Remus across the room. He snapped his fingers.

“ That would be a good song lyric.” Remus not being able to ever stay truly angry at him for too long, laughed again at the stupid grin that painted Sirius’s face, a grin whenever he thought he came upon something great.

Sucker, Remus thought as he felt the sides of his mouth upturn.

Remus shook his head and began moving to rifle through the cabinet above his head for something that would stifle his hangover-induced headache.

“ You think everything would be a good song lyric,” Remus said as he took pain relievers from the cabinet.

Sirius just kept going though, now he was drumming his fingers rapidly on the table.

“ Y’know that song that you wrote for the 2nd act, the one after the climax with all the nerdy references!” He was waving his arms around now.

“ Nerdy references….? Remus sifted through his thoughts, he didn’t think he had pitched any songs to Sirius like that, there was that one about Lupa he started ages ago but it wasn’t finished and he only brainstormed it in his-”

“Shit Sirius! Did you read my journal again?!”

Sirius just sat there grinning that Sirius Black grin.

“ Well, duh.”

“ Fuck! You really need to learn what privacy is!” James just chuckled as he set another clean plate to the side.

“ Were Marauders, privacy doesn’t exist”

Sirius raised his day-old bear.

“ Cheers to that.”

Remus just shook his head and looked at the ceiling while pinching his nose.

“ I guess It might work…? I don't know, I don't even have a melody worked out yet, it was just an idea.”

Sirius shifted in his seat, and his smile turned into something more genuine.

“ I have something in mind, I can run it by you later, we should try workshopping it a bit, I like what you come up with Moony.”

At that Remus’s face heated up and he turned back to the kitchen counter as he popped two pills into his mouth before grabbing his whipped cream spread sandwich, causing James to scoff next to him.

“Could you please eat something of substance before you leave?”

“ Can’t, no time.” Remus shoved the sandwich in his mouth and rushed out the door, hearing James’s distant yelling.

“ But you have time to talk about song lyrics- ok he’s gone.” Remus could hear Sirius’s barked laughter as he ran down the stairs from their flat.

***

Remus was able to get to Three Broomsticks at 8:30, about an hour and half later than he was supposed to. He realized by checking his watch as he walked off the tube, he took a deep breath and just made himself to remember to blame it on Sirius later. Marlene usually lets his lateness slide on account of Remus letting her blast her music in the locker room. But as Remus walked up to the diner it wasn’t Marlene standing near the door.

Shit. Remus thought.

Standing by the door, reading Pride and Predjuduce by Jane Austen was Lily Evans herself. She was leaning up against the wall wearing a button up with loafers, despite the fact that her hair was up in a tight ponytail there were still bits of her curly red hair sticking out from several places. She took one look up at him from her book, scoffed and looked back down.

Gonna be a long day.

Remus muttered a low “ ‘Morning “ as he passed Lily to the door and unlocked it. It opened with a creak and she followed him inside, putting her bag on the front counter. Remus went to the breaker to turn on all the lights. Despite how scared he was of her he still had a paycheck on the line at the end of the day. The diner lit up with a buzz and he turned back to Lily.

“ I’m gonna start putting the specials on display, you can go to the locker room first. And than maybe we can see if we can take inventory before Moody and the other cooks get here.” He smiled after saying this, in order to give the idea that he wasn’t looking for a fight, but Lily just glared at him and nodded her head.

He walked over to the barley working Jukebox he and Marlene were able to convince their manager and owner of the diner, Gideon, to get. Marlene had come up with the idea after James had subjected her to one of his annual Grease rewatches. Afterward James came in and qued You’re the One that I Want about 10 times before Gideon almost punched him.

He put three quarters in and put on a Beatles song before banging his head softly against the jukebox.

Don’t let me down
Nobody ever loved me like she does~

Well at least shes not yelling at me. Remus thought and than shivered as he reminded himself of what occurred yesterday at the theater.

Their first consultation with Lily had been put simply, a disaster.

“ Whats up Wolf Pack!” James yelled from the entrance. Notably, without Sirius, who was very much supposed to be there by now. Remus groaned inwardly.

“ God, don’t say shit like that!” Remus than groaned outwardly. James and Sirius had adopted that name for their group since primary, when at a visit to his house, his mum had explained the origin behind their family name. Remus suspected they only kept it up to annoy him whenever they decided to howl in public spaces.

James,despite Remus’s protests, just chuckled and came standing next to Remus where he patted him on the shoulder.

“ You didn’t already start already did you?” James said, ruffling his own hair.

“ Me and Remus got here an hour ago. “ Peter said despite still smiling. Remus just sighed.

“ Where's Sirius.” He said.

James shrugged.

“ ‘Don’t know. Said he was working on something.”

“ Working on what?!” Remus said, jaw clenching. Sirius not showing up was most notably a problem since he was the one who worried Remus the most when it came to convincing to consider Lily. He always was the most stuck up when it came to their choices, it usually came down to money, Remus being the most frugal of the group always ended in some argument about the amount of money they should be spending. The only reason that Remus was able to get his friends to choose the dingy theater instead of anything else was the promise that they would move to something better once they got farther in the process. It didn't come as a surprise to Remus that the rich kids he decided to make a musical with would care more about how cool something looked instead of if the spending decision was gonna get them kicked out of their flat and living on the street.

“ I don’t know, Moony, thats all he-” He stopped in his tracks as he looked to the side of Remus where Lily was standing. Lily was also pale, her green eyes wide. As James stopped talking and seemed to notice that Lily had been standing there the whole time, Lily’s gaze hardened, her eyes squinting with her brows furrowing.

“What is she-” James said, clearly scared out of his mind. Which is rare considering that Remus once saw him streak across their school’s football field on a dare.

Remus looked just back and forth between the pair, and gestured towards Lily.

“ This is Lily Evans, she’s the choreographer we were considering.” He explained slowly and calmly, like he was soothing a wild animal.

He looked to Lily and gestured over to James.

“ Lily this is James Potter, he’s going to play the lead role in the show.” The air grew even more tense. Peter looked like he was watching a ticking time bomb, ringing his hands back and forth on his tie, and Marlene just looked perplexed, her gaze focused on Lily.

“ You two know each other?” Remus said, as this seemed to be the only explanation that explained how they were acting.

James nervously glanced back to Remus.

“ Vaguely. “ He said in a small voice. Lily’s glare only darkened. Remus started to get a bit uneasy. Until now Remus had never seen Lily get so angry, not even when that man at the diner asked her if the curtain matched the drapes.

“Well-” He said, but he was cut off.

“ I wasn’t aware you would be friends with people like him.” Lily said coldly, she crossed her arms and at that moment Remus thought she resembled a certain teacher at Hogwarts, about to reprimand him. He shivered.

“ People like him-? Lily what are you talking about?” Remus asked, James just stood there frozen in place, before softening a bit.

“ Ah hey don’t be like that we-” James said, which was a bad move since it sounded more condescending than well meaning. This only made Lily more angry.

“ Don’t tell me what to do you arrogant son of a-!” Lily said, voice rising, walking forward closer to James’s face. Marlene stood there stunned, and as Lily moved forward Peter squeaked in surprise.

“ Woah! Lily! ” Remus put a hand on Lily’s shoulder as she seemed to be raring up to throttle his friend. At this Lily sharply turned to glare at him and shoved his hand away before storming out of the run down theater.

Marlene stood there, she looked at the exit where Lily had stomped out and back at Remus. She started rapidly sifting through her pockets and shoved the keys to the diner into his hands.

“ I have practice early in the morning so I won’t be able to open the doors as early. Do me a favor and open for me at 7:00?.” She said so fast that Remus’s mind had a hard time keeping up.

Before even getting a response Marlene rushed out the door yelling and waving.

“ Okay thanks bye!”

The door slammed, and Remus, James, and Peter sat there in silence for a minute before Remus punched James in the arm.

“ OW. What the hell?!”

“ What did you do to make her hate you so much?!” Remus said. Peter’s eyes just flicked back and forth between them like he was watching a tennis match.

“ Why do you always assume it was me who did something?”

“ James. What did you do. “ Remus just repeated. Lily didn’t seem like the person to start fights on the regular so all clues pointed to James at the moment.

James sighed dramatically and grinned sheepishly, a trait him and Sirius seemed to share whenever they got caught.

“ Lets go back to the flat, its freezing in here.” James said while turning on his heel back to the exit.

Turns out, yesterday morning before work when Remus had been nursing a bad migraine, James and Sirius had gone on a quick run to a nearby cafe for caffeine to nurse his sickness. In the process James had spilled coffee all over Lily’s shirt, and than Lily wouldn’t let him pay her back for the shirt he ruined.

“ Did you apologize?” Remus asked as they sat on their flats fire escape. Where he had sat James down on the windowsill, with Pete sitting beside him and Remus standing in front smoking.

“ Of course I apologized! I swear I took out my wallet and everything, she wasn’t having it.”

Thats all James was willing to tell them.

“ I’m going to try to see if I can convince her to come back tomorrow during my shift. Your going to apologize. Again. On your knees if you have to” Remus scolded, realizing that he sounded way too much like his mother.

“ Whatever you say Moony.” James said back.

He was definitely leaving some parts out but while James was explaining his tale his hair was growing more and more distressed by the minute, so Remus decided to interrogate him on a later date.

The story certainly didn’t explained how Lily was acting, it had to go deeper because just a coffee ruined shirt didn’t seem to explain why Lily glowered at Remus whenever he even got a few feet away from her

Mabye the shirt was really expensive. He thought while tying his apron on.

He looked back toward the door and the cooks still haven’t arrived, which wasn’t a surprise, they usually trickled in around 9:15ish. Despite this being a diner they were never able to open till around 10. This never got back to Gideon, it was a well kept secret between all the staff at this point.

Remus sighed and made his way back to the kitchen, past where Lily was setting menus on the tables.

He looked into the food pantry and saw a bag near the corner, he took a look inside and saw a bunch of uncut onions, that were definitely not there last time he checked.

Shit. Remus thought for the second time today. This wasn’t new, the cooks always tended to get new supply near the end of the night when the servers are busy, and then they leave early and come in late and always leave Remus, Marlene, and whatever server is temporarily working with them at the moment to prepare them during opening.

But Marlene had football practice, and had left Remus alone with a woman that seemingly hated his guts for a reason he was unaware of.

Remus sighed and just bit the bullet. He walked out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway to see that Lily had aligned each crayon perfectly to match up to where she placed each place matt.

“Lily”

Lily looked up, her expression shifting from concentrated to cold.

Remus just nodded his head back toward the kitchen behind him.

“ You mind helping me with something?”

Surprisingly, despite the glares and scoffs, she got up from where she was bending over at the tables and followed Remus to the pantry. Remus lifted the bag over to a nearby counter in the kitchen and Lily just squinted at the onions as he poured them out onto the counter he had just wiped down last night.

“ Seems like these were delivered last night, since the cooks usually don’t get here till a bit later, we’ll have to prepare them so they can use them when they get here.” Remus sighed and put his hands in his hips.

“ Ok.” Lily just said bluntly.

“ I’ll soak them there, and than I’ll pass them over to you to cut. That ok?”

“ Thats fine.” Lily responded, adjusting her hair so that there were no strands in her face.

They worked in silence for a few minutes until Remus took a look over to where Lily was dicing her onions. He had finishing soaking all of them with ease and Lily, was still carefully slicing her 3rd onion into identical pieces.

“ You don’t have to be the that precise. It’s an American diner, no ones expecting much.” He laughed a bit as he said this, trying not to sound condescending.

Lily just ignored him.

Remus looked over at the clock that sat over the kitchen entrance, its was around 9:15, the cooks should be here soon. If they didn’t get this done Remus didn’t want to deal with Moody snapping at them everytime they give them an order. He looked back over to Lily’s careful slicing and felt a migraine grow.

What Remus really wanted to do was go outside and have a smoke, but instead he was stuck in a kitchen chopping onions with a stubborn redhead.

“ Here. If you pinch you knife more towards the end-” Remus steped toward Lily, who just increased her cutting speed and took another step to the side.

“ I’m fine. I don’t need your help.” Her hand that was holding down the slice of onion she was dicing was progressively getting more close to her knife as she seemed to increase the pace of cutting.

“ Lily- I’m not trying to mansplain or anything but-”

“ I know what I’m doing. I’ve cut onions before.” Lily snapped.

“ Not saying that you haven’t. It’s just your hand- if you let me just-”

“ I don’t need your help!” At this her hand holding the knife shifted.

“ Lily!”

“ What-?!” She looked away from her cuttingboard, and chopped seemingly not looking where her knife was headed, right down on the side of her hand. She jumped back and held her hand as red came spilling out.

“ Shit!”

Remus sighed.

“ Come with me, we have a first aid kit under the front counter.”

Lily solemnly followed Remus to the front, where she sat down on a stool while Remus sat opposite of her on another stool, soaking her cut in disinfected. Lily muttered something as he put the cotton ball he was using down on the counter. He reached for the bandages and started wrapping her hand slowly.

“ What?”

“ I’m sorry.” She said, eyes to the floor.

“ It’s alright, happened to me a million of times.” Remus said. He finished wrapping her hand and cut off the access. With a sigh he put the bandages back in the kit and closed it. Lily kept her gaze fixed on the floor.

“ I’m sorry about yesterday too. I didn’t mean to make a scene. It’s just- “ She drifted off and started to play with where the bandaged was cut at the end of her hand.

“ It’s kind of personal. I don’t want to get into it, especially if your friends with him.” She said quietly. Her green eyes seem to dim a bit, growing tired.

That basically confirmed it for him, James was definitely not telling them the whole story. Remus sighed and stood up from where he was sitting on the stool at the counter.

“ Listen. I don’t exactly know the extent of what James did, but he’s not a bad guy.”

At this Lily broke eye contact, shifting her gaze to the side where the tables sat.

“ He can be a bit of a prick sometimes but he has a good heart, I can say, I’ve known him since we were in primary school.”

Lily’s gaze didn’t move.

“ Lily.” Remus pleaded. She looked away from the tables and than at her bandaged hand, and than at Remus.

“ Give us another go? You don’t have to decide on anything right away.”

Lily looked at Remus for a second, and than back at her bandaged hand.

“ Ok.”

***

Marlene ended up showing up the same time as the cooks did. Moody patted Remus on the back once he saw that all the onions had been cut, Remus had to cut the rest himself after Lily put herself out of commission. Later when Remus was done and patting his hands on his apron, he saw Lily emerge from the back door smelling like smoke.

Due to the fact that it was Tuesday, they werent as busy. Remus found that during his time working at the Three Broomsticks diner they tended to get the most business from business men hiding affairs and hung over college students. Remus had never been to America so he couldn’t exactly gauge if that was true to an actual American diner but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

Lily who seemed to be talking to him again, was manning his tables while he worked the front counter. And as she went back and forth from the kitchen to the front, the pep in her step got slower. After she hooked her current order to the kitchen Remus tapped her on the shoulder and gestured to the front.

“ Man the front counter for me?”

Lily’s eyes seemed to soften and she walked over to take Remus’s place. Remus took another look at the clock and saw that it was nearing 12. At this, he made his way to where Moody’s station was in the kitchen.

“ Do you have any-?” Remus started. Moody grunted and gestured to the side where he had extra scraps of bacon in a to-go box. Remus grinned and took the box.

“ Thanks.” Remus said. Moody just let out an amused chuckle.

“ Always willing to help out the needy.” He gruffly said before turning back to where he was putting a sandwich together on his pan.

Just as Remus opened the to-go box to check the contents he heard a familiar voice coming from the front. Right on time.

In response to the voice Lily scoffed and responded coldy.

“ What are you doing here?” Lily asked.

“ Unfortunately, I’m not here for you carrot top.” The voice than laughed. Remus could feel Lily’s glare from the kitchen.

“ OI! LOOPY!”

Remus sighed, and Moody let out another chuckle as Remus walked out of the kitchen with the to-go box.

He put the box on the front counter in front of where Sirius was grinning, he was wearing his signature leather jacket and had his guitar in a case strapped to his back. Lily stood there with her arms crossed over her chest.

“ Don’t call me that.” Remus said as he pushed the to-go box towards Sirius who took it gratefully.

“ Thanks Moony.” After taking the to go box Sirius pushed in return a to go coffee cup. Lily looked at the cup and her eyes widened.

“ Sorry about your alarm clock.” Sirius grinned sheepishly, as Remus took the top off to inspect the contents of the cup. From smell alone Remus could tell that there was at least 3 sugar packets poured in there. Remus looked up from the cup to meet Sirius’s grin with a smile. A sort of silent forgiveness.

“ Its from that place near campus that Prongs goes to all the time. “ Sirius said.

Sirius tilted his head a bit, grin turning into a more genuine smile, one that showed his dimples more clearly, Remus tried to ignore how this made his heart jump.

He than leaned his head on his hand and side-eyed Lily before looking back at Remus, this took Remus out of silently reprimanding himself for how his dumb heart acted whenever his friend smiled.

“ Oh right. “ Remus said, he gestured to Lily and than to Sirius, a tired routine at this point.

“ Lily, this is Sirius, he’s another one of my flatmates, he’s in charge of the music for the show.”

He than gestured over to Lily, who seemed to be thinking through some complicated thoughts in her mind through the way her brows were furrowing and how she was tapping her pen on the counter.

“ Sirius. This is Lily, she was the choreographer we were telling you about.” At this Sirius’s eyes widened and his smile grew devious.

“ Ah.” He looked back at Lily and stood up from where he was leaning on the counter.

“ Coffee girl. “ He said, his pitch getting higher which usually signaled that he knew something that they didn’t. Lily’s glare only darkened, and Remus fearing a repeat of yesterday, quickly changed the subject.

“ Padfoot, don’t you have a shift at the garage you should be getting to.” Remus asked, sweating. Sirius quickly turned to look at Remus, like he forgot that he was standing there.

“ Oh yeah! But just gimme a sec. I wanted to run something by you about that song.” Sirius’s pace of speaking began to quicken, which seemed to happen whenever he got excited, and he set his guitar case on a stool at the counter before opening it and taking out a crumbled piece of sheet music. Remus took it from where he held it out over the counter and smoothed it out with the palm of his hand.

“ The one from this morning?” Remus asked.

“ Yep! I was thinking we could start more slowly and-” He learned over the counter and pointed to the lines in the sheet music he was talking about. Remus tried to keep his sight focused on the sheet music and not how close Sirius was getting to his face.

“ Crescendo near the end?” Remus cut Sirius off. By the way that Sirius grinned at Remus’s response he guessed that was probably what he was going to say. He looked at Remus a moment, and kept grinning, Remus’s heart rate quickened.

“ Exactly!” He said before jumping off from where he was hovering over the counter, and slinging his guitar case over his shoulder. Remus glanced at the sheet and saw that below each line there was words, at least thats what Remus assumed they were, he had a hard time reading Sirius’s pompous cursive handwriting. During primary they use to tease Sirius for that, so they found that later on he tried to make it seem less elegant. But he had to focus to do that, this seemed like he did it in a rush.

Sirius opened the to go box and shoved a piece of bacon in his mouth before taking it and running out the door, stopping at the entrance to wave.

“ Look it over and tell me what you think at practice! Adieu!” He yelled before Remus could ask what any of these words even meant.

Lily than glanced over to Remus with an amused expression on her face.

“ You two do that often?” She said.

“ Do what?” Remus asked, suddenly nervous.

“ Finish eachother’s sentences?”

“ I mean maybe-”

Sirius at this moment came running back up to the door, making Lily jump.

“ Oh! Also!” He yelled, almost out of breath from running back.

He looked over to where Lily was standing and his grin widened.

“ I’ll give James your regards, coffee girl!” He said before waving and running out the door again. Lily’s face went bright red at this.

Remus just sighed.

***

“ She’s that bird that Jamie always goes to the cafe to ogle at.” Sirius said before running his hands across the piano, filling the theater with the sounds of the keys clanging.

“ I went to that cafe before I noticed she went! Also I don’t ogle!” James yelled back from where he was standing on the stage, a work in progress of the script Remus and Sirius were working on in his hand. Remus was sitting beside Sirius on the piano bench making notes on the sheet music that was sitting on the piano, he was mostly just rewriting notes in his own handwriting. Peter laughed from where he was sitting in one of the seats in front of the stage.

“Ohhhh so shes Coffee Girl.” Peter said laughing.

“ Yep. And he spilled coffee all over her nice cleanly pressed shirt.” Sirius said leaning toward Remus to peer up at where James was glaring at him from the stage.

“ It was an accident! I didn’t even know she was there until I bumped into her!” James yelled defensively, waving his script around as he floundered. Remus turned the page of the sheet music and Sirius tried to draw something on the side of the paper, Remus smacked his hand away.

“ Ok but she absolutely hates you. You must've done something else.” Remus said.

Sirius than made eye contact with James and they seemingly had a silent conversation just through stares. Peter shivered as he looked at them.

“ I hate it when they do that.”

Sirius glanced wearily back at Remus who raised his eyebrows as a response.

“ She’s friends with Snape.” Sirius said, looking away from Remus’s gaze. Peter gasped like he was watching a soap opera.

“ No fucking way.” Peter whispered.

James sighed and he jumped off the stage onto the carpet floor.

“ Yep.” James said, Sirius snorted and began playing a slow tune on the keys in front of him.

“ I wasn’t aware the slimy git was able to talk to girls.” Sirius said, pace still steady even though he wasn’t looking at the keys. Peter got up from his chair, smiling despite the circumstances.

“ Isn’t this hysterical? The chick you fancy is cozy with your mortal enemy!” Pete said, James's face just got darker, but at this point he looked more scared than angry.

“ Oh god.” James muttered.

Sirius played a dramatic dun dun duuuuuun, on the piano.

Remus than banged his head against the keys, resulting in a large clang that stopped Sirius from playing suddenly.

“ This show is doomed. “ Remus muttered, Sirius just laughed. Peter wasn’t lying when he said they didn’t have many options, if anything he was sugarcoating it. They didn’t really have any options, turns out a choreographer who would work with a group of college kids was harder to find in London than they thought, and don’t even get him started on their co-lead. They had told James to start looking a while ago but despite it being a few months apparently he’d gotten nowhere.

The back door opened, rather loudly, since it was basically a slab of metal with a handle. And two women walked down the theater isle.

“ Hey Mckinnon!” James waved as Marlene ran up to the group, hopping on top of James and almost tipping the man over onto the floor. Marlene grinned as she ruffled James’s hair.

“ Hey yourself. Are you still coming to the game next Friday?” She said. James just shoved her back.

“ Like I would miss it. I’m trying to see if I can get the whole team to go too.” James said, at this Marlene’s grin widened, which dampened a bit when Lily finally sauntered over, glaring with the fire of a thousand suns at James. Marlene cleared her throat awkwardly.

“ I didn’t tell you before but James is on the guys' football team at Phoenix. They helped us be able to use the main field for practice, remember?” Marlene said to Lily. Lily just nodded, not taking her gaze from James, who was now standing awkwardly hands shoved in his jacket’s pockets.

Remus glanced at Sirius who Remus wasn’t surprised to see an amused smile forming on his face. They both clambered off the bench and walked toward the group. Remus patted on James’s shoulder to signal that he should move a bit away, and Remus tried to give Lily his warmest smile.

“ Lily, I'm glad you're here.” He said. Lily looked away from James and returned the smile.

“ Glad to be here.” She said. It seemed like she had significantly warmed up to him from this morning, which gave him a little more hope that today would go smoothly. To his side he heard a laugh and Sirius had mumbled something quietly into James’s ear. James's eyes started to sparkle a bit and he turned towards Lily, a determined expression on his face.

James then went on his hands and knees on the floor in front of Lily.

His hope was quickly squandard.

Lily looked like she was about to run out of the theater that very moment, eyes wide, she took a step back from where James was kneeling at her feet in surprise. Sirius, the bastard, had one hand on Remus’s shoulder, hiding his face behind him as he seemed to struggle with not bursting out with laughter. Similarly, Marlene and Peter were holding their hands to their mouths, and Marlene’s eyes were watering.

Remus was just thinking of who he would dedicate his record collection to when stress inevitably killed him.

“ I’m truly sorry if I’ve done anything to offend you in any way!” James, the clown, yelled from where his hands were placed on the floor. Lily didn’t move, she seemed to contemplate for a second before stuttering out her next words.

“ What- I- that’s ok- I guess.” She said. At this James looked up at her and smiled, which seemed to catch the poor woman more off guard because the color of her face went a shade that was almost close to the color of her hair. Lily then sighed, and her expression grew aspirated.

“ You are terrible James Potter.” She said.

Remus did a silent prayer to a god he did not believe in, as James got off the floor grinning. He then cleared his throat.

“ So Evans, I heard you can act?” James said wearing a goofy smile on his face. Lily scoffed and glanced at Marlene who was still struggling to keep her laugh inside.

“ We had her read something before you got here on Monday, she’s pretty good.” Remus said and Peter nodded. Lily looked at him and raised her eyebrows, which showed that she didn’t really believe him.

James tilted his head a bit and smiled. “ Is this true?”

“Maybe..?” Lily said with uncertainty.

“ Well, she certainly has the confidence for it.” Sirius snorted and Lily glared at him. Sirius ran back over to where they had left some extra copies of the work-in-progress scripts on the piano and handed one to Lily.

“ Well, let's see what you got.” He said with a cocky grin. He exchanged a glance with James for a moment before James hauled himself back on the stage, he never seemed to use the stairs.

Lily shifted her position to be closer to Marlene and started to nervously stammer.

“ Well I don’t exactly know I want to do both yet-” She said. This didn’t seem to sway Sirius who promptly said-

“ We’d double your pay.”

At this Remus turned, making eye contact with Sirius before looking back toward Lily, whose eyes widened as a result of Sirius’s response.

“ We can always discuss pay later-” Remus said before getting cut off by Sirius.

“ With this theater, we have a lot of money left in the budget, we can pay you double if you do both jobs.” He stated and Remus pinched the bridge of his nose trying to avoid another migraine. Lily who had seemed to be caught off guard multiple times this evening promptly said-

“ Well ok.”

“ Leaving me hanging Ms. Fawcett?” James yelled from where he was standing alone on the stage.

Lily looked at where she was being addressed by James then back to Remus and Sirius, and then back to James. She then quietly climbed the stairs and stood beside James, who promptly guided her to which scene they would be doing. Peter sat down on one of the seats in the audience, and everyone else followed.

They started reciting the lines that he and Sirius had written, surprisingly Lily was able to keep up. In secondary they had a short-lived drama club that James had started and later had to end when he was made captain of the football team. The club consisted of the four of them and a few other students who usually didn’t stay in the club long. One of the reasons being that despite being talented, none of them could deny that, James always seemed to overwhelm his scene partners. Remus, Peter, and Sirius would never join in, just sit off to the side and watch as James’s scene partners slowly got more and more intimidated by how passionate James got, his voice raising and his hands gesturing.

But Lily seemed to be doing ok, it almost seemed like the two were communicating through the lines they were saying to each other. Lily’s attitude was more matter-of-fact, so whenever James tried to joke around she would instantly shut him down, instead of encouraging him, like a certain leather-clad individual Remus wasn’t going to name.

“ Mind telling me what you're hiding?” Lily said, squinting her eyes, keeping her voice leveled as she looked James up and down.

“ I don’t know what you're referring to,” James said with a grin, stepping forward. Lily promptly stepped back.

“ You always seem to be gone once a month… Always at the same time… whenever there's a full moon.”

At saying the line Lily stopped, lowering her script from eye level to raise an eyebrow at where Remus was sitting.

“ What is this show about exactly?” She asked. Sirius snorted from where he was sitting next to Remus. He leaned his cheek onto the side of his hand and then glanced over to Remus and smiled coyly.

Well, he was going to have to tell her eventually. He sighed before speaking up.

“ A wizard falling in love with a werewolf”

“You're joking,” Lily said, as James grinned next to her and Peter cackled.

He was not.

***

He might be writing a musical about being in love with his best friend.

Remus according to his mother was quite a handful when he was a child. Both in terms of behavior and just overall experience. He had been in and out of the hospital because of a weak heart for as long as he could remember, it was especially bad when he was younger. Whenever they could, his father would have them move to some other far-off town that seemingly had the cure to all of Remus’s problems that made his heart give out if he just about sneezed.

Nothing ever seemed to work though. And every time his dad came back from buying some new oil that supposedly “made your heart stronger”, Remus just went along with it, mostly cause they never seemed to work but also because his mother told him to.

Later when Remus’s condition steadied they settled in his mum’s home town in Wales, where Lyall was able to achieve his dream of opening up a knick-knack shop. It was mostly different wolf and Roman paraphernalia, but it put food on the table, and it let his mum stay home to take care of him until they shipped him off to boarding school on some sort of “academic scholarship”.

On his first break back from school he had stayed home considering that before this his hobbies consisted of reading and getting in fights with the boys that lived in the town. This is what motivated Hope to give him the journal.

It had been a small leather back notebook, his mum had given it to him with a soft smile.

“ Here cariad. It doesn’t have to be anything, just write whatever you're thinking.” She said

Fast forward to about 10 years later where Remus is writing in his 20th journal about some random thought on his flat’s balcony while music played distantly from the party he was sitting out of. Suddenly the music got a bit louder and then quieter as someone opened and closed the window that went out to the balcony.

Everybody here is out of sight
They don't bark and they don't bite

They keep things loose, they keep things light~

“ How are you not freezing your arse off out here?” Sirius said.

Remus turned around and shrugged.

“ Wearing a jacket definitely helps.” He said as he looked at Sirius who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

He then shut the notebook to prevent his friend from seeing the poem he was currently writing about his eyes. Sirius walked up and sat next to him on the edge of the building, legs hanging off the side. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.

“ Don’t need one. I run hot.” He grinned and Remus scoffed pulling his jacket off his shoulders and putting it around Sirius’s. Sirius stopped for a second and stared, Remus had to keep himself from turning completely red at the fact. Sirius then broke eye contact and muttered a quiet-
“ Thanks…” Before pulling the jacket on both arms.

“ You get tired of the party?” Remus asked, eyes shifting back to the London skyline out of embarrassment.

“ Easy to when you're not there,” Sirius responded earning a shove from Remus making the other man chuckle.

“ I’ll go back in if James puts on the Grease record.” He said shrugging. Remus snorted at this, the Grease record had become a staple of their flat parties by now.

They sat in silence for a bit after that, listening to London sounds in comfortable tranquility. Sirius seemed to be the only person that Remus could do that with, just sit without needing to talk. But also at the same time, the two had been able to talk entire 5 hour train rides to and from their boarding school.

“ Y’know if you're feeling tired you could always tell me and I could send everyone home so you could get some sleep,” Sirius stated like it was obvious.

“ You don’t have to do that.”

“ I would though, if you wanted me to.” He said back. Remus’s heart skipped a beat, and he had to look away before Sirius saw the smile that was forming on his face.

Sirius then saw that Remus was holding his journal in his left hand and pounced, snatching it out of his hands and flipping it open to a random page.

“ Yoink!”

“ Oi!” He said trying to wrestle it out of Sirius’s grasp.

“ Ooooh what's this.” He said while holding the book out to read in front of him. Remus froze, the page he was reading was a particularly old one, probably written when they were still in secondary school.

It was a poem about you guessed it, Sirius.

But not specifically, Remus never said specific names, just vague ideas, so as long Sirius stayed oblivious he was safe.

This didn’t stop Remus from being frozen in fear, watching Sirius’s eyes scan the page in front of him. He then slowly turned his head away from the page and met Remus’s gaze.

“Moony.” He said softly. Remus’s heart stopped for a second before Sirius started talking again.

“ This would make great song lyrics.” He said, and Remus groaned.

“ You always say that!”

“ No, I’m serious!” At this, he snorted which just made Remus shove him again.

“ I could totally put a baseline in the back of this and call it a song, It’s great its like all romantic like one of those paintings-!” He said, his pace quickening as he rambled. Remus just sat there and smiled.

“ I don’t know Padfoot…”

“ No! No! I can imagine it now.” He said and then closed his eyes, holding his hand out to rest on Remus’s shoulder. He couldn’t help but laugh, Sirius only really got like this when he was high, or on the verge of coming up with something crazy that usually got them a month’s worth of detention.

“You're in a forest, its night time, there's stars in the sky.” He waved his free hand to show that there were stars, he then opened one of his eyes to look at Remus.

“You're not imagining!”

“ Ok! Ok!” Remus closed his eyes.

“ The stars get closer as your rooted to the ground, there's some sort of magic keeping you to the ground, like in what you wrote.”

Remus kept his eyes shut listening, until he slowly opened them, meeting Sirius’s gaze as he did too.

“ Can you see it?” He smiled and he just looked so happy Remus couldn’t help beaming back, despite the fact his face was probably bright red at this point.

“ Yeah, Padfoot. I can see it.” He said.

A week later, Sirius had finally decided to drop out of college a semester in after certain family developments.

They decided to get drunk in celebration on that very balcony. Sirius was probably the drunkest out of all of them the way he brought the record player outside, setting it on the window sill and letting it blast Bowie from where it teetered on falling.

Rebel rebel, you've torn your dress
Rebel rebel, your face is a mess
Rebel rebel, how could they know?~
Hot tramp, I love you so!

Remus was sitting in the same spot he was sitting when Sirius had first come up with the song they later that night named “Moonlight”, he was smoking a cigarette and listening to his friends talk.

“ I’m not going to just sit in a room with a bunch of swots who probably never had to work a day in their life, to get a degree I don’t even care about! Safe my arse, my family is built of a bunch of men that rather sit back and let the government do all the work for them.” Sirius rambled on from where he was standing in front of James who was sitting on a beach chair that he had managed to fit through the window onto the balcony. James just hummed agreeably.

“ Orion can suck my knob.” Sirius then said, before dropping the cigarette he was waving around and flattening it with his boot.

“ I wanna do something that matters. Make something that matters. Like Moony with his writing!” He said gesturing over where Remus was sitting on the balcony edge.

“ Don’t think Moony’s diary entries count as great literature Padfoot,” Peter said from where he was leaning on the back wall, he took a swig of his beer and James cackled.

“ At least it's something! Better than majoring in business for a semester because it's what your bloody rotten family wants you to do!” Sirius yelled back taking another pint from the box and popping off the top, before taking a long swig.

James laughed again, and he pointed with his pointer finger while still holding onto his pint with the same hand.

“ Hey, those weren't just diary entries! Those made my life in primary! How would we have done Snow White in my parent’s basement?” James said and Peter and Remus snorted. Snow white had been chosen after a dumb joke about Sirius’s pale skin, and later they had crafted the whole thing except each dwarf had been named a different type of curse word that got James a rough smack in the back of his head from his mum.

“ Well don’t expect any more of that out of me,” Remus said.

“ Imagine if we did though.” James joked back.

“ What if we did.”

They all turned to look at Sirius.

“ What do you mean,” James said.

“ What if we made an actual one, like the ones in your basement but scaled up.”

James and Peter laughed nervously.

“ Like an actual musical? “ James said, looking at Remus and Peter with nervous eyes.

“ Yeah like an actual musical,” Sirius said, with no trace of sarcasm.

“ We can use Moony’s music and everything, and the money from Alpharad’s trust fund, it can be a thing we do before we all graduate and become real adults!” He was grinning now and Remus shared another worried glance with James.

He then thought back to how Sirius’s eyes reflected stars as he came up with a tune to go with Remus’s poem a week ago.

“ What would it be about,” Remus said. James and Peter looked at him with disbelief. Sirius just stood there with his chin resting on his thumb.

“ Well it would have to be based on the song we made. So maybe…” He shifted his feet back in forth while thinking.

“ Something to do with magic, so like a wizard… and all good musicals have to have romance so… a wizard and a..” He then drifted off looking off to the London skyline, his eyes then drifted to Remus where they made eye contact.

Sirius stared and then jumped from where he was standing.

“ A WEREWOLF!” He yelled so all of London could hear him.

James and Peter promptly laughed hysterically for the next 15 minutes.

Remus was so screwed.

Chapter Text

Dolores Umbridge was known in the law field for her will of steel and pure stubbornness. She got on the map through a complicated copyright lawsuit between a small business that sold ugly sweaters and her client, a corporation unwilling to share any traits that any other character shared with their mascot, an orange with legs and big tennis shoes. Planted on any bottle of juice in any grocery store you come across, the mascot had such dedicated leaders that they issued a first-rate lawyer to sue the little people until they took down their whole line of sweaters, and she not only did that, Umbridge was able to shut down the whole business. She was given the case and she crushed the small business’s attorney down into the ground, all with an evil smirk on her froggish face.

Umbridge also most notably did not allow her employees to wear flat shoes, pants, or the color black.

Which is why Lily was sitting at a desk in a tight pencil skirt and a 5-inch heel on a Monday morning. She didn’t even own any heels before this internship, she had to borrow Mary’s for the first week before having to buy her own. She tapped her heel against the floor rapidly, since they had carpeted flooring it made no noise, but her desk slightly shook making her pen roll off her desk and to the floor. She had gotten to the firm 2 hours ago and her boss had still not arrived, which wasn’t unusual, Lily had only started 4 months ago which to Umbridge meant that she was still not experienced enough to take upon real jobs, those usually went to her other intern. Lily was usually just sent on errands, to get dresses tailored, to feed her 20 cats, to get a server fired for not putting enough whipped cream on her pancakes.

It was physically and mentally taxing, and it was humiliating but Lily had decided to hold out until Umbridge decided to finally let her accompany her to trials, and once she graduated she would be able to get a job at any law firm she wanted. She was already being paid, so how bad could it be?

It’ll be worth it, She would chant to herself. Lily did this while she struggled to bend down in her skirt to get the pen off the floor, leaning underneath her desk. She then promptly banged her head on the bottom of the desk when she heard the door open. Umbridge walked down the aisle to her office in the back, her heels clicked as she passed, and tucked in her right arm was a bright pink cat carrier, she held her head high and then slammed her door, making it so that the rest of Lily’s pens that she had been aligning all rolled off her desk.

Dorcas, the other intern, who was following behind her, snorted as she spotted Lily rubbing her head. She sat down at her desk that stood across from Lily’s and turned to her computer, smiling.

“ She’s not happy…” She said,

“ So I’m assuming the meeting went bad then,” Lily said flatly, Dorcas just glanced at her, she was no longer smiling. “Not happy” could mean anything if you thought about it, she could be content, she could be depressed. It didn’t necessarily mean that if Lily messed something up in the next 20 minutes she could get fired.

But most of the time it did.

It usually went like this. Umbridge would come back from some “meeting”, and everything would be fine until someone spilled a drink, or forgot to cancel an appointment. “Not happy” meant that someone was going, whether they did something or not. If you even coughed,“ We can’t have someone unfit to take care of themselves take care of others, now can we darling?” She would say.

Like she was summoned, Umbridge then opened the door making both Lily and Docas sit up. She turned to Lily and smiled, Lily’s blood ran cold.

“ Ms. Evans, it seems that I’m feeling quite under the weather, be a dear and pick something up for me?” She said, hand still on the door, she had seemed to leave the cat carrier in the office. This made sense considering that she had a litter box stationed in there that Lily had to clean almost twice a day.

“ Of course! Do you have a prescription from a doctor or-?” It was a mistake for Lily to ask anything else, Umbridge cut her off immediately with a shrill laugh.

“ Oh no, darling.” She said her voice was sweet but her eyes were sharp, like a predator stalking prey.

“Be back within the hour.” She then shut the door. She had not given Lily any information. Lily needed information. Throughout her internship, she constantly pitted against the women across from her, Umbridge seemed to take joy out of the fact that she and Dorcas routinely raced to see who could open the door for her first. Of course, Lily always lost, because she wasn’t as merciless as she should be. She didn’t always look upon poor people with disdain and tended to carry more empathy. She never directly said it, but she thinks Umbridge could probably just sense it.

It hurt her more than anything to have to ask for help, but she couldn’t afford to lose this internship, so she stood up and waddled over to the desk across from her.

“ Cassie.”

“ Don’t call me that. Also no. ” Dorcas said from where she was typing something on her computer.

“ Please. I just need information, I can’t get fired, I’ll have to quit my dance classes and I really don’t want to have to tell my Dad-” Lily said, her hands clasped together, Dorcas just glared at her, she paused typing.

“ Evans. I can’t help you.” She said coldly.

“ If you do this for me, I’ll….” Lily trailed off, she had nothing to offer her, she had no money, she was re-wearing the same green heels from yesterday, and she had bought only 3 pairs secondhand.

“ I’ll…I’ll… get you a date! I know loads of lesbians who like strong women in law.” Which was a lie, she only knew one, and Marlene hated lawyers so much that she had tried to represent herself when she tried to take some guy who rear-ended her parent's car to court, she was 17 at the time.

Dorcas just looked at her with an expression of disgust and pity, and she rolled back her chair to make more distance between them.

“ God no.” She scoffed. Lily just persisted as she saw the minutes pass on the clock, she held her head down and planted her elbows on the glass desk.

“ Please.” She waited a moment and then heard Dorcas’s chair roll back, closer to the desk. Lily looked up from where she was staring at the floor and saw that Dorcas was frowning.

“ I’m guessing that she wants some kind of aspirin,” Dorcas said, and she frowned more as she saw Lily’s face light up.

“ Not just normal aspirin though, she gets this specific one with an input of caffeine, can’t exactly think of the name but it has a purple label.”

“ Do… stores even hold aspirin-like that?” Lily asked, Dorcas just huffed and shrugged her shoulders, and turned back to her computer. Lily stood up and took a moment to consider where she'd get special caffeine-infused aspirin from, no way they held that kind of stuff in just normal grocery stores, but she didn’t have time to catch a taxi anywhere. Dorcas glanced back at where Lily was frozen standing in front of her desk.

“ GO!” She yelled, and Lily grabbed her wallet and sprinted out the door. From what she remembered there should be a Tesco in the neighborhood, so when Lily got out of the building she took a deep breath and booked it down the street. She was almost halfway there when she almost tripped on a crack in the road. She was able to stabilize herself on a nearby street lamp, breathing. She checked the time frantically and saw that she had about 30 minutes to get there, buy the drug, and get back. She couldn’t get fired, just couldn't. Lily had held the highest grade point average in her whole secondary class, she wasn’t going to be thwarted by a woman with an affinity for pink frills and crushing dreams. Lily checked the time again and took another deep breath before taking her heels off.

She was able to get to the Tesco in the next 10 minutes, her pits surely smelled and no amount of lavender-smelling lady deodorant was going to fix that at this point. She ran to the drug aisle, leaving her heels out by the entrance, and scanned the shelves for a purple labeled aspirin, when she saw it. There was only one left on the shelf. Lily reached out, grabbed it, and at the same time, her hand collided with another. She repelled her hand quickly and looked to her side where she saw a man staring wide-eyed at her. She laughed awkwardly, and the man next to her did the same.

She reached back for the bottle and their hands collided again, she smiled at the man and her pulse started to quicken.

“ Heh. Sorry about that I-” He said. Lily’s pulse was beating so fast that she could hear it in her ear now. She took one quick up-and-down glance at the man next to her, grabbed the bottle, and ran out of the aisle.

The man yelled from where she left him in the dust, but it was too late. She was already at the front desk. She slammed the bottle on the counter, startling the employee, and began already opening her wallet.

“ This please.” She said The cashier gave her a weary look before scanning it.

“ That would be 24.99- oh mam I’m sorry but we aren’t taking cash at this time.” The cashier glanced down at the cash she was offering and Lily checked her wallet again, but her card wasn’t in there. She had given it to Mary this morning for groceries.

“ What do you mean you don’t take cash? You're a grocery store!”

Next to Lily, a debit card was slammed onto the counter.

The man that Lily had previously left in the drug aisle was now right next to her, breathing hard as he had also run from across the store to the counter.

“ If she can’t pay I can.” He said in between breaths. Lily looked at him in horror.

“ Excuse me?!” She said, The cashier just stood there, looking back and forth in between them, and the man just grinned at her and adjusted the glasses with round lenses he was wearing. Lily suddenly felt the urge to throw the first punch she would've ever thrown in her life. She then turned back toward the register.

“ Can I put it on hold? I can go and get my card now and come back later.” Her hands were gripping the sides of the counter.

“ I can pay for it now. And you’ll get a generous tip.” The man next to her said, waving his card haughty in the air.

“ Listen I work for Dolores Umbridge, the lawyer with the firm down the street, if you give me this now I’m sure she can reimburse you.” She pleaded. The man next to her just laughed, and she glared at him.

“ What is possibly so funny?”

“ Nothing. “ He said, still grinning, Lily looked him over. Messy hair, glasses, varsity jacket, expensive shoes. Lily clocked him quick, fucking bastard.

“ What’s going to happen to you if you can’t get this?” Lily said. The man looked at her, studying her for a second. Lily just kept going, she was angry and she could feel the Tesco tiled flooring on her bare feet.

“ Daddy going to take away your car privileges?” She said, the man’s eyes widened on impact and Lily turned back to the cashier.

“ I will pay triple the cost. Tomorrow.”

“ Mam-”

The glasses man, who seemed to be reinvigorated, sharply turned to the cashier.

“ I need this aspirin. Scan the card.” He stated, his gaze turned focused as the cashier trembled and hesitantly scanned the card. He then grabbed the bottle and walked out of the Tesco doors, Lily watching him. Lily weighed if it was worth starting a fight with someone who could probably beat her ass in front of a Tesco and then ran out the doors after him.

“ Hey!”

The man sighed and turned on his heel as Lily ran up.

“ Listen-” He started.

“ No, you listen arsehole!” She said cutting him off. The man just laughed in surprise as he adjusted his stupid glasses again.

“ I need that aspirin- you don’t understand my boss- she’ll have my head.” This seemingly didn’t do anything in her favor as he just sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“ I think you’ll be fine sweetheart.”

This is the moment, this is the moment where Lily is finally going to throw her first punch. She balled her fists, she was now aware she was arguing with a man in front of a very busy street in London, barefoot, this was not one of her best moments.

“ What do you even need a special type of aspirin for that you can’t just get tomorrow?!” She was now yelling. The man just pursed his lips and looked away from Lily, he was getting nervous. Aha, she thought.

“ My mate, he has this sorta heart condition.”

“ Bullshit!” She yelled, of course, he would pull the friend card.

“ No really!” His hands quickly shifted from his pockets to his hair, making it more erratic than it already was.

“What is it called then?” He just stared at her, she crossed her hands over her chest.

“ …What?”

“ Your mate’s so-called heart condition? What is the name?”

Caught red-handed, he stood there, silent, lips pursed, thinking.

“ I-It doesn’t matter!” He sputtered, he waved the bottle around in his hands. Lily just continued to glare at him.

“ Listen lady! You couldn’t pay for it so you don’t get it! Sorry, but that's not my problem!” He got more up close to her as he said this, before turning back and walking down the street.

“ ARSEHOLE!” Lily screamed from where she was standing, he just shot her the bird as he continued to walk down the sidewalk.

Safe to say Lily got fired shortly after she came back to the office empty-handed. It could've also been the way she was barefoot since she had forgotten her heels back in Tesco.

The moment haunts her, Umbridge's smile as she ripped into her, Dorcas’s look of pity as she packed her things, and most vividly, those stupid round horned-rimmed glasses.

***

Now flash forward to about a month later and she was sitting on the hardened wooden floor of the dubbed “Zunko’s theater” by Marlene, cradling a script and a water bottle. Ever since that first rehearsal she had been later given a full script by Remus and had read over the whole thing. Despite the ridiculous premise, it was honestly not that bad, werewolf nonsense aside it seemed earnest enough, and as much as she wanted to pride herself on how intellectual she could be, she did love a good romance. It followed a basic storyline, it was a forbidden romance with more of a leaning on poetry and imagery than plot. She found herself inhaling through her nose a lot while reading it but she had slowly grown to like it over time.

“ It’s really about what love can bring out in us. How it can make us violent, make us do things we would've never thought of doing.” Remus had said to her during a smoke break they had taken during a later shift at the diner. While he talked he waved his cig holding hand, making the smoke make pretty wisps in the air. Lily really didn't know what he was talking about, but she nodded anyway.

“It's like a physical manifestation of that, yeah it might seem silly but werewolves in nature are like this complicated mess of two different sides of the same coin that not even the person themselves can figure out.” Lily just nodded again as he rambled, leaning her head back on the back alley wall of the steps they were sitting on.

With the notes from Remus, she was encouraged to start brainstorming on what she wanted to do for the choreography, and she was supposed to schedule a session with Sirius so he could teach her the music, which she wasn’t looking forward to.

All this combined with the fact that she constantly had to grit her teeth as James egged her on during rehearsal. She had gotten through another 3 whole rehearsals where she basically just had to act alongside the arsehole and it was already proving a challenge. He seemed to make it one mission to make Lily angry, making edits to his lines or blocking that made it so he would either move her around the stage or one particular incident, trip her, which just resulted in Lily stumbling a bit and then almost kicking him in the balls as retaliation. At the end of the day, though it wasn’t anything too harmful making it so nobody could punish him for it, the most anyone did was Remus telling James to shape up over Sirius’s cackles. James himself certainly didn’t listen to Lily whenever he told her to knock it off. She realized more and more that her role as the co-lead meant that she had to actively work together to get the lines across, and it certainly didn’t help when it seemed like the man didn’t possess one serious bone in his body. Lily had never considered herself a violent person but, every line changed, every time he looked at her with that stupid grin, Lily had to hold herself back from breaking his nose.

Today’s practice had been after an especially difficult shift at Broomsticks’ where she had to not only unclog a toilet that a 4-year-old had demolished, but she had served a table of 20 whole people, as well as do everything with less help than usual since Remus had been out for a “medical emergency”. Lily asked what exactly that had meant and Marlene had just shrugged. Afterward, Mary met them outside Zonko’s as she wanted to see the musical for herself and had spent the whole time catcalling Lily from the audience, which would have been funny if it wasn’t for the fact that she already had to deal with James trying to start some sort of impromptu dance with her every time she even so moved.

They had just finished about an hour of practice before they called for a break which left Lily where she was sitting backstage. She didn’t want to face whatever joke Mary was gonna make and she was still tired from her shift, so she just sat on the floor nursing a water bottle while squinting her eyes as hard as she could to prevent a migraine from forming.

“ Who are you hiding out from Ms. Oh Grand Powerful Warlock?”

Lily groaned as James plopped down next to her.

“ Who do you think?” She spat out, and he only chuckled.

“ Playing hard to get now? I don’t remember seeing that in the script.” He said and then snatched the script Lily was holding. Lily jumped to grab it back and he only just held it higher, grinning.

“ Since when did you care about being faithful to the script?” She said as she grabbed the script back from his hands.

“ Sirius said I could improvise as I saw fit.” He shrugged.

“ Well improvise as you might, I still think it's disrespectful to Remus’s writing, and it makes it harder for everyone else when you change everything up all the time.”

“ You calling me selfish Evans?”

“ In a way.”

“ Well, I think you could use a little improv, loosen you up a bit.” He only smiled as he said this and Lily felt that the migraine she was trying to prevent came up again. She only huffed and looked back to the other side of the stage, where Peter was explaining how the switch box worked to Marlene.

She looked back down at her shoes, which were still rusting at the buckles, she hadn’t been able to justify buying new ones. James leaned over more and his and Lily’s shoulders touched and she had to physically prevent herself from jumping away. He flicked the script page she had opened.

“See look here, like the wizard, there would be no love story if she hadn’t broken the rules somewhat and gone out past curfew.” Lily watched his face slowly morph into a genuine smile.

“ I guess so- but it really causes her more pain than anything, she gets expelled from the academy in the end and her love abandons her.” Lily flips through the pages as she says this and she watches James's smile fade, he turns back around and huffs.

“ I’ve been trying to get Remus to change that ending.” He pouts, and it's almost so comical that Lily laughs outright.

“ Why? It’s realistic. What were they going to do? Run away together?” At this James only gets more angry and he jumps up.

“ Yes! If they really loved each other!”

Lily only shook her head.

“You're so childish. I like it, I think it's beautifully tragic.” The way Remus’s eye sparkled in the alley came back to her. The story is just the same kind of stuff that would make her mum cry, it reminded her of home. Lily loved heightened romantic comedies but it was always the tragic ones that got her to feel the most.

“ It’s bloody depressing, it's what it is.” He huffs and then leans over and points at Lily.

“You're bloody depressing, you and Remus, big weepies the both of you.”

“ What are you talking about?”

“ A real love story should inspire you! Should fill you with joy, not make you suicidal.”

“ I think you have a really shallow view of love mate.” Lily says, James just shakes his head, and then looks at Lily, and stares at her, which causes her smile to fade.

“ …What?”

“ Are you coming to Remus's party tomorrow?” He responds, he slightly squints his eyes, looking at her.

“ Wasn’t aware it’s “Remus’s party” and not just an excuse for you and Sirius to get drunk on a Thursday night.”

“ Ok so maybe it isn’t his party, but we're throwing it in his honor… anyway, are you going?” James smiled after saying this.

Lily shook her head. “ Can’t, I’m busy.” James’s smile faded quickly.

“ Busy doing what?”

“ Studying.” She said, with this whole other adventure on the side she had barely been able to study for her classes. She had expressed this to Sev over the phone and he had just stated that she needed to get more dedicated and not let her recent internship loss affect her. She couldn’t help but agree since after her slump after she was first fired, she felt that she couldn’t really keep up with classes the same. She hadn’t mentioned the musical to him yet, she hadn’t been able to figure out what his history with the guys had been yet, but judging from their encounter in the cafe it wasn’t good.

“ Study another night.”

“ People usually find it beneficial to study multiple nights before a test. At least smart people do.” She said, flickering her glance quickly to him and then quickly away. James kept looking at her, frowning. His eyes then started scanning her, like she was some puzzle he was having a hard time-solving. He paused and then suddenly stood up from the stage and walked to the end, he then yelled.

“Mary!” He yelled as he walked to the end of the stage. Lily quickly put the pieces together as she watched James walk, and she got up to walk after him.

“ Hey! James!” She said, but he had already caught Mary’s attention.

“ Mary! Evans says she has to study, so she can’t go to Remus’s party tomorrow!” He said while cuffing his hands over his face like a megaphone. Mary had been standing off in front of the stage with Marlene and Peter who had finished the switch box tutorial. Sirius seemed to be off to the side on a phone call, he seemed stressed out by the way he was waving his arms and pacing.

At this news, Mary tutted and put her hands on her hips.

“ Whaaaaaat?! Lillllllyyyy!” She whined. James only grinned as Lily’s brow’s furrowed, she glared at him. Bringing Mary into this would only result in disaster, as she was always dragging Lily to things, ever since they had been in secondary school. It started when Mary asked her to go to the bathroom with her in year 6 and it never stopped. As thick as he seemed, James seemed to know this as he just grinned and looked between the both of them.

“ I have to study! Don’t you have that exam on Monday, Mary?”

“ Yeah, but that's on Monday!” She only said, and Lily sighed. At this moment, her saving grace was surprisingly Sirius who seemed to get off his phone call. His mouth was into a firm line and his eyes seemed more glassy than normal. Lily saw Peter mumble something to him, and Sirius mumbled something back, and the only thing she could discern from his response was Remus’s name. Peter then called for James as they walked out of the theater. He jumped off the stage and pulled on his jacket from where he had left it on one of the chairs in the audience. It was that bright red varsity jacket that made Lily’s head hurt just by looking at it. He grinned and waved as he walked out after his friends.

“ Good job today Evans! Cya tomorrow night! Mary has the address!” He then blew a kiss and Lily had never wanted to throttle a man more.

***

On the way back Mary, Marlene, and Lily had taken the tube and Mary had spent the whole time trying to convince her to go to the party tomorrow. Marlene, was off the hook, as she always was, ever since she had declared parties as “not her thing”, Mary didn’t usually push her to do things, but she did try as she might to push Lily.

“ We hardly know them, Mary! They could be psychopaths!”

“ Marlene knows them! Marlene, are they psychopaths?” She said turning to Marlene who was leaning against the door of the tube, she was watching their conversation with an amused smile on her face.

“ Not that I know of, no”

“ Honestly if you think they're psychopaths and you’ve been working with them every day for hours then that's more concerning.”

“ You can never be too careful. Besides I wasn’t lying, I do need to study.”

“ What you need is to chill out a little bit. Please for me? You are making a whole musical with these guys. You might as well try to get to know them a bit.” She pouted, sticking her bottom lip out. Lily sighed and banged the back of her head on the back of the tube wall.

“ I don’t know Mary. Sev knew them back at school, and I already told you about the whole tea incident.” At this Mary’s brows only furrowed, and she put her hand on Lily’s shoulder.

“ We’ll show up, get a feel, investigate a bit, and if you feel unsafe we’ll leave.” She said earnestly, making full eye contact with Lily, it didn’t even look like she was blinking. Since that first cafe encounter and few more meetings with Sev she hadn’t been able to collect any information regarding what their relationship was. She knew it was hostile to a degree, if Sirius was ready to start a rumble in her favorite cafe had anything to say for it. She has known Severus for around 10 years now, it felt weird that he was keeping things from her. Once James had gotten up from the floor after kneeling for that apology Lily had decided that she was going to find out, Severus telling her or not. Mary was right, Lily did want to investigate, and since Remus wasn’t at work and he was the only one of them she could stand talking to, a party was probably her best bet if she wanted to get any information out of him.

“ …Fine.” She said, and at this very moment, the doors to their stop had opened and Mary cheered, throwing her hands up as she pulled Lily out of the tube doors.

***

“Oh no…. Mary!” Lily groaned upon stepping out onto the street in front of their building. Mary was standing in front of a damaged and mangled Ford Escort that had been affectionately dubbed “shit-mobile” by Marlene and “Darling” by Mary, who had it gifted to her by her parents who had been pressured into getting her car for her sweet sixteen. They had seemed to get it off her late Great Uncle and it had definitely seen better days, the blue paint was chipped, Mary practically had to wrestle with the key to turn it on and with the amount of noise the engine made, you could hear it coming from a mile away. Mary usually kept it in her family’s garage, only using it for “special occasions”.

“ What?! I thought this would make you happy! Now we don’t have to take the tube!”

“ I would rather take the tube, Mary!” She had whined.

In the end, like every time Mary had won and they had driven to the guys’ building in the shit-mobile. Once arrived they were forced to walk a mile from their parking spot to a large brick building. Upon entrance, it was way more modest than Lily expected, there was no car check, no doorman, and they didn’t even need to check in with anyone before they walked in. What they did have to do was buzz in which had Mary surveying the keypad next to the door before pressing the button marked “BLACK”. They then took an elevator, knocked on the door, and arrived at an almost drunk James Potter opening the door to them.

He had abandoned his varsity jacket for a blue collared shirt and his glasses were pushed up to his forehead. He grinned when he spotted Lily and sat there, leaning on the door frame while music blasted in the flat behind him, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. It only made Lily more angry.

There's a room where the light won’t find you~
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down~

He sat there, and stared at Lily for a bit, not saying anything. His eyes seemed to wander downwards before jumping suddenly back to her face.

“ You came!” He said.

Lily shared a glance with Mary who was only smiling while looking at her and James. Somehow suddenly she felt like they had been playing a game, and as soon as Lily showed up at the door, she lost. “ So I did. ” Lily said, glowering.

“ Come in! Lemme get you a drink!” He moved aside from the doorway, where they walked through, Lily heard Mary giggling from where she walked in behind her. He guided them through the crowd of people who filled the flat, while surveying Lily saw Sirius over by where they had stationed the record player on the kitchen counter, looking uncharacteristically moody as he sat within a group of people sipping from a solo cup, and Peter was on the couch in the living room, where he was talking up some girl in a black dress, Lily almost swore she saw their manager from the diner somewhere in the crowd. Remus, Lily couldn’t seem to find, despite the fact this seemed to be “his party”. They followed James over to a table in the kitchen where there were multiple bottles of alcohol, he handed both her and Mary a solo cup of whatever concoction was made on the table. Lily mentally decided to pour it down the drain later. After giving them drinks James set down the bottle he was holding and turned back sharply to Lily. He seemed more fidgety than normal, even with his round glasses sitting in his hair he still tried to ruffle it, even though it was always in the same disarray he always seemed to leave it in. James cleared his throat roughly.

“ You look good!”

Lily looked at him skeptically. “ …Thanks.” She muttered, Mary then elbowed her in the back. She glared at her before looking back to James.

“ Yeah- the dress, it was my mum's.” She said looking down at the emerald green dress she was wearing. It had really been rotting at the back of her closet, but Mary had found it in preparation for the party, and since Lily hadn’t really needed to buy any dresses since starting Uni it was really the only thing she had. It still felt weird to wear it though.

“ Well, it’s stellar. I bet she misses it!”

“ Well, she’s dead so not really.” She mumbled, and she felt another elbow from Mary before she looked up to see James’s pale face.

“ Evans- I’m sorry I didn’t mean-”

“ It’s alright. Where’s your bathroom?” To this, James silently with a frown on his face pointed down toward a hallway in the flat. Lily muttered a thank you before walking to where James was pointing before Mary could elbow her again. As she walked down the flat hallway and heard the music growing quieter, she began to smell smoke coming from a window in the hall. She lifted the window sill to reveal a fire escape with a tall lanky man smoking a cigarette out on one of the fire escape’s stairs. He smiled as she climbed through the window, making the scar that ran across his cheek stretch.

“ Not enjoying your party?” She said Remus just silently laughed and handed her the cigarette he was holding.

“ It's more of an excuse for Sirius and James to get drunk on a Thursday rather than a “ celebration of my accomplishments”. He shrugged.

“ What exactly are those accomplishments?” She said, smirking and tilting her head.

“ I was able to land a student teaching gig at a school in Scotland.”

“That’s great Remus!”

“ Yeah... The commute’s gonna be hell though, especially since Sirius wants to ramp up the number of practices we're doing.” His eyes seemed to dim a bit as he said this, despite this his content smile didn’t fade.

“ He’s really working you like a dog huh?” Lily thought back to seeing the two of them arguing over lines at the piano. No matter how intense the argument, they both would come out of it smiling in the end.

“ Yeah, but I don't mind it. I didn’t tell him about the location though, I didn't want to make him feel like the show is some kind of burden on me.” At this, Lily just hummed affirmatively. Remus sat up from where he was leaving over on the step and turned his body to look at Lily, before laughing a bit.

“ You clean up nice Evans.” Remus said as he passed her his cigarette. She scoffed.

“ Your friend certainly thought so, couldn’t stop staring at me.” At this, he just laughed.

“ You just make him nervous.”

“ If I make him so nervous then how come he won't stop trying to trip me up during rehearsal.” She blew out the smoke and then handed the cig back to Remus, who despite the fall weather was wearing a heavy brown coat with flannel lining.

“ You’ll get used to it. We all do eventually.” At this, Lily just scoffed again. She then shoved him a bit to the side, below she could hear a cab honk in nearby traffic.

“ How come you left me and Marlene alone yesterday?” Remus took a long drag and then stared off into the distance.

“ Got sick. I tend to often, get sick I mean.” He shrugged and passed the cig back to Lily without looking at her. “ The only reason I was able to keep that job is because James’s dad knows the owner.”

“Huh” Lily took a long hit and looked at Remus’s far-out gaze, he started picking at the calluses on his hands. She didn’t want to push it more than she already had, she had heard from Marlene before that Remus had been known to be a bit “flighty” with his shifts.

They had sat there on the fire escape for about an hour, just quietly exchanging small talk. It was easy to talk to someone who didn’t try to fix her all the time like most of the people in her life seemed to want to do constantly. She then remembered Mary’s promise of “investigating” from earlier and decided to focus on it.

“ I still can’t believe all four of you were able to land one flat together.” She said then laughed, which then followed by a cough. Remus took the now, 3rd cigarette they were sharing and shook his head.

“ James’s parents have a lot of connections and Sirius had the money to spend so I had no reason to refuse.” He shrugged, and then took another hit and breathed out, but it sounded more like a sigh if anything. Depending on what Lily has seen of Remus’s frugalness she shivered what the process of convincing him to move in would've been like.

“ We already lived together at school, so it seemed like a natural development.”

“ You went to school together?”

“ Yep.” He then chuckled and shook his head, as he spoke a wistful smile kept on his face. “A boarding school”.

Bingo. Lily thought, and she decided to press further.

“ Boarding school? Would've never thought, you don’t seem like the type.” She tilted her head, smiling, Remus looked at her inquisitively, almost like he knew something she didn’t. From what she knew, Remus didn’t know about her friendship with Severus but she guessed that Sirius and James would mention it by now. Even if they had, it didn’t seem to spark the same reaction from him as it did from the other two. Lily thought for a moment that he was going to ask her something but then he stopped and looked away from the fire escape.

“ I wasn’t, my parents sent me to the school on an “Elite Youth Scholarship”, I reckon they just wanted to get me out of the house.” He laughed again, but more awkwardly. Lily was treading the line at this point she knew, but the scholarship Remus said and the one that Severus had said he went to the school on connected in her brain, and if she could push him a bit more-

“Moooooonyyyy!”

An irritating whine sounded from down the hall, and Remus sighed, getting off the fire escape and stubbing out the cigarette with the ball of his foot.

“ Duty calls.” He said before smiling at Lily, she gave a smile back even though she had technically failed at gathering the information she needed, and the taller man climbed awkwardly back through the window going out of the fire escape. Left alone on the escape, Lily sighed, she had basically acquired nothing, maybe if Potter was drunk enough she could get something out of him. She emerged back into the hallway, struggling to climb out of the window in heels, to hear strange music playing from the main room of the flat.

Now I know you can rent it
A new lease you are my love~

Either Mary had somehow infected the music taste of whoever was surveying the music or they were playing Rent at this college flat party.

Lily had to get out of there as soon as possible.

Before she could leave though, James came stumbling up to the entrance of the hallway, his glasses were still up to his forehead, and his face hadn’t gotten any redder since the last time Lily had seen him. No way he was going this whole party sober.

“ Evans! I’ve been looking for you!” He smiled, and it almost looked cute if Lily wasn’t so focused on the showtunes blasting from behind him. Something inside her was telling her that the person who was responsible was standing in front of her, with a goofy grin on his face. She stood in the hallway and spread out her arms.

“ Well, you found me.” She said stoically. Instead of repelling Potter, which was what she was aiming to do, with her tone and demeanor, he only stepped closer, his voice going down an octave.

“ I’m sorry about what I said earlier, about your mum.” Lily’s eyebrows raised, well she certainly didn’t expect that.

“ I said it was ok. No need to feel bad about it.”

“ I know it’s just if I knew, I wouldn’t have said that,” James mumbled, he started to self-consciously shuffle his feet back and forth. Lily was starting to get annoyed, she wanted to find Mary and get out of there but instead, she was stuck talking to some stuck-up theater kid.

“Oh yeah, like you're so respectful.” She snorted, and James frowned.

“ I am. I’m not like some pratt incapable of empathy Evans.” His voice got softer, and it just made her remember him in the cafe a week earlier, offering her 50 pounds to pay for her shirt, she then also remembered Sev’s scowl, the way he balled his hands into tight fists as Sirius teased him.

“ Really Potter because I’ve heard otherwise.” At this James’s eyes widened and he stopped shuffling his feet, which were planted onto the floor.

“ Don’t tell me Snape told you that!”

“Severus didn’t tell me anything! He didn’t need to!” Lily seethed, at this point her feet were aching again from the mile hike she had to take from their parking spot and she wished she smuggled in more cigarettes. “ You and Sirius just think you're part of your own little world, don’t you? It’s so typical!” Lily stomped her foot as she yelled, James just stood there frozen. As he stood there the aspirin incident flashed back in her mind, and with that Umbridge’s smirk as she walked out of her office barefoot. She had to walk back to Tesco to find her heels, the fronts had been scuffed from where she threw to the ground. After holding the heels in her hands, thumb running over where the damages were, she broke down on the London sidewalk.

“ You take what you want and change the rules only for your benefit. You come from your mansions and your posh boarding schools and think you know everything about everything! Well quirky little musical or not, you're still all a bunch of whiny little gits!” Lily yelled. She sat there a bit, breathing out slowly as she continued making eye contact with James whose eyes got darker. He looked toward the floor.

“ Well, Snape doesn’t know a single thing about me. He thinks he does but he doesn't.”

“I think I know enough to form my own judgment, Potter.” She spat out and then stomped out of the hallway. She marched into the kitchen where people were crowding all around, pouring drinks into cups by the mess of the dining table James had brought them to at the beginning of the night. That's where she saw Mary, laughing at something Peter had said while he handed her another drink. As Mary laughed Lily listened to the Rent record that was echoing throughout the room, she made a split-second decision and then walked up to her friend, tapping her on the shoulder.

Revolution, justice, screaming for solutions-
Forcing changes, risk, and danger-
Making noise and making pleas!

Mary looked at her with a big smile, Peter gave Lily a small wave, she waved back.

“ Lily? Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since you went to the bathroom.”

“ I’m feeling a bit sick- I think I’m going to go wait in the car.”

“ What? Do you want me to take you home?” Mary’s face immediately grew concerned, her eyeliner at this point had gotten a bit smeared, her hand was resting on Peter’s forearm.

“No! It’s fine! I’ll be fine! Just meet me there when you're ready to go.” She tried to give her best “I’m fine” smile, Mary looked at her and then sighed.

“ Ok… Just call me if you want to leave.” She took her hand off of Peter and rested it on Lily’s arm. She then grabbed her shawl that she had left on a chair by the table and draped it around Lily’s shoulders, she also handed Lily the car keys. Lily nodded and then squeezed through the crowd to the door. She sat in the elevator and took a deep breath, maybe she would apologize to James later, maybe not, maybe she should just quit the musical altogether. It didn’t seem all that worth it anymore, she couldn't see how she was expected to work with someone so unpredictable, she already had a hard time handling his attitude during rehearsals. She walked toward the entrance and as she walked she heard a door open and someone running behind her.

“ Evans!”

Oh fuck no. She thought, before picking up her pace, speed walking now down the street. She had been wearing the brown heels she was wearing when she first had gotten hired for her internship, so she had trouble actually moving fast enough to pass him, so, the football player he was, he caught up to her easily

James, glasses back on his face, face red with exhaustion came running in front of her, stopping her in her tracks.

“ Evans! Lily! Hey! Let me walk you.” He said within breaths, Lily realized that he probably had to go down the stairs instead of the elevator in order to catch up with her.

“ I’m a grown woman, I think I can walk to my car without a chaperone.” She said as she walked past James as he seemed to deflate a bit.

“ Ok I get it! I’m an arsehole!” He said while coming up to walk beside her, she refused to look at him.

“ But Mary seemed worried, and you don’t know this area, it’s not safe.” Lily relaxed a bit at the mention of Mary, and she slowed her pace making it so James stopped ahead of her.

“ Ok. But we are not going to talk. You're going to walk me to my car, that's it.” She stated, pointing a finger to his chest. At her statement, James smiled and nodded his head. Thus began the journey to the shit-mobile in silence.

It was a bit of a walk. Mary had struggled with parking since everywhere they had tried to park cost them an arm and a leg to stay there for more than an hour. So Lily was stuck with James the whole way, her feet were progressively getting worse and as they walked more James began to whistle a toon she guessed was located somewhere on the Rent soundtrack.

“ You can walk in those?” He then said, waking Lily from her fatigue-induced trance. He was looking at her heels.

“ What does it look like I’m doing?” She spat back.

“ No it's just- they don’t exactly look comfortable.”

“ Well I’m fine.”

“ Do you wanna switch?” Lily stopped in her tracks. It seemed that they had approached the crest of a hill, there was a gate surrounding the edge with a clear view of the London skyline glimmering in the night.

“ James.” She said, trying to remind him of her previously stated rule of no talking.

“ We can switch shoes if you want.” He said, smiling coyly, Lily just rolled her eyes, turning away from him toward the peer.

“ Why would we do that?”

“ It would make it easier for you to walk the rest of the way to your car. I might seem clunky but I’m brilliant on my feet.” He then proceeded to tap his feet in a dance that could only be described as dorky, as Lily stood by watching in horror.

“ You're not getting my shoes potter.” She refused to lose at any more games this man seemed to want to play with her.

“ Whatever you say. I’ll let you know though I almost played Sandy in my school’s version of Grease.” He said, holding his head high, any redness that was on his face seemed to fade.

Lily let out an ugly laugh out of surprise. “ Yeah right!”

“ No really! I was the understudy! Would've had the actual role but Kathy Anderson insisted on going on even though she had a cold, bloody disappointing it was.”

Lily covered her hand over her mouth to avoid showing him her smile. “ Oh my god!”

“ I know! She sounded terrible too! No way could she hit those notes on a sore throat!”

“James!”

“ I know. I know. No talking.” They went silent again, a smile settling on James’s face. He approached the crest of the hill and looked out for a second before turning back to Lily. His smile shifted a bit.

The moon was sitting in the night sky half full, as she saw it she couldn’t help but think of the musical.“ It’s pretty.” She said and realized that she broke basically the only rule she set, but it didn’t hurt to state the obvious.

“ Yeah. I always forget, I spent most of my teen years out of London.”

“ Right. At the boarding school.” She said flatly.

“ At the boarding school. Honestly, it was not as bad as you would think. It’s where I met the guys.” He shrugged, his voice turning more wistful.

“ I used to have this big dream of moving to America and starting my career as some big shot actor, starring in all these Broadway productions.” Lily hummed agreeably, she remembered the first time her mum took her to go see a performance of Swan Lake. That night before bed Lily had burned every move Odette did, and tried to recreate them until Petunia invariably snitched on her to their dad. Lily couldn’t help but stop the small smile that formed.

“ Yeah, Remus told me about the living room performances.” Lily smirked and James' eyes widened before he burst out laughing.

“ The first one we did was West Side Story, even though I doubt we even understood it.”

“ Lemme guess, you were Tony and Sirius was Riff.”

“ No! But that would've been perfect. I’m surprised Evans, I thought you hated musicals.” James said, apparently impressed by her bare minimum knowledge, Lily just shrugged. James continued.

“No but-I was Riff, Tony was Pete, Sirius was Bernardo, and Remus was Maria.” Lily suddenly couldn’t control the laughter that was coming out of her.

“ Holy- Why?!” She sputtered out. James grinned.

“ He was the only one mature enough to settle for the role.” Lily just laughed again, walking back down the crest of the hill and shaking her head.

They walked a bit longer and after about another 10 minutes they had finally reached Mary’s car. On arrival Lily unlocked the car and opened the door to the passenger's seat, they stood in silence as Lily didn’t climb in yet. Lily thought, weighing her options of what to say next, but before she could James cleared his throat.

“ I’m glad you came.” He said, smirking.

“ Didn’t really give me a choice.” She said, shrugging. James just grinned, and Lily’s jaw clenched.

“ You didn’t have to but thank you for walking me back.” She said bluntly, refusing to make eye contact.

“ It’s no problem.” He said, and then shuffled his feet a bit before turning to walk back to the building.

Lily stared at his back, she tried to imagine little versions of the guys playing out West Side Story in a living room, it honestly seemed too ridiculous to seem true.

“ And since we're all graduating soon we wanted to see if we could just... make an actual one. One of my friends came upon some money recently so we thought, "why not, y’know?” Remus’s statement came back to her.

“ Potter!” Lily yelled and James sharply turned around, almost stumbling. Lily laughed again against her better judgment.

“ I think you would have made an amazing Sandy.” She yelled, before climbing into the passenger seat and slamming the door.

***

When James had made it back to the flat the party had already ended, he credited this to the fact that Sirius had disappeared most likely to go look wherever Remus decided to skulk off to. He was usually the one keeping the party going, until he got too tired or hurt, usually falling off the kitchen counter. He opened the flat door to Mary who seemed to be leaving. James assured her that he had escorted Lily safely to their car, and Mary hugged him before saying goodbye and waltzing down the hallway in those purple heels. She seemed to have at least more control than Lily did, which made him feel better about letting her walk to her car at this time.

“ Are you sure you're going to be alright?” He yelled to her down the hall.

“ Already had enough of you for one night Potter! Good night!” She yelled back.

James had no idea what that meant, but he waved anyway making his way into their now quiet flat. Someone had turned the record off, but before that it seemed like someone had replaced the Rent record he put on for an ABBA one that he didn’t even know they had. He heard a snort come from the living room, and he turned his head to see Peter absolutely conked out on the couch. He quietly put a blanket over the sleeping beauty before checking on the other set of his roommates, the record still softly playing from the kitchen.

Do I really see what’s in her mind?
Each time I think I’m close to knowing-
She keeps on growing~
Slipping through my fingers all the time~

Remus’s door was closed, which usually meant that him and Sirius were in there sleeping, but James realized with a glance to his side that Sirius’s door was open, with sounds of a guitar echoing from the inside.

“ No way you're sober.” He said as he entered the room, Sirius being that he had paid the most for the flat, got the biggest room. He was sitting on the bay window across from his bed, strumming his acoustic guitar that was a gift from Andromeda in their 3rd year of school. There were drawings and stickers all over the thing, Peter had drawn a sketch in pen of Hogwarts on the bottom part of the body, there was sticker of Marc Bolan from electric warrior that Remus had given him, and up towards the neck was were each of the guys’ nicknames scratched in by James. Sirius just snorted as James came sitting across from him.

“ Just a little bit.” He said quietly, which was also unusual.

“ Did something happen between you and…?” He didn’t say the name but he shifted his glance noticeably from Sirius’s and the room next door.

“ No, not really.”

“ Ok, no need to be so specific.” Sirius just snorted again, he went back to strumming on the strings of his guitar, James recognized this as one of Sirius’s dreamy moods. James would walk in on him during school drawing hearts with cupid arrows on the side of his bed frame, or looking at the guitar and sheet music in front of him, writing music. These moods were usually caused by a certain someone sleeping in the aforementioned room next door. James picked up the sheet music that was sitting in front of him. He couldn't really understand any of it, he usually did better expressing his feelings through action, Sirius was more art focused so it made it hard for him to figure out what he was thinking most of the time, he usually was able to just force it out of him with a game of football.

“ It’s for that love ballad.” Sirius said not looking up from his guitar.

“ Near the end right?” James had remembered Sirius and Remus struggling coming up with ideas for this song, since it was so important.

“ Yep.” Sirius chimed back, plucking another string on his guitar.

So this was one of his dreamy moods.

“ I’ll have to get Moony to help me with lyrics later.” Sirius said, he stopped playing and leaned over the body of the guitar, crossing his arms over. He then lifted his hands to his head, sifting them through his hair, “ It’s just my mind gets so jumbled, I get focused too much on the wrong things and I can’t come up with anything substantial.”

“ Why don’t you just use some metaphor for the moon again?”

“ Oh yeah, you love those.” Sirius smiled and then lifted his eyebrows, a sort of silent indication of a secret he only let James in on years ago.

James does, despite being probably the loudest person he knew Sirius kinda had a problem expressing his emotions most of the time. Encouraging the metaphors was James’s best method to get him to be a bit more open.

“ They're romantic, they come so naturally to you,” James said then shrugged. That's what James always thought of love as being, natural, instinctual. You see the person you love and everything makes sense, the world comes into focus.

He thinks back to the London skyline at the crest of the hill, and then to Lily, covering her mouth as he embarrassed himself, her hair slightly blowing in the wind. Her green eyes, her green dress.

“ It’s pretty.” She had said, looking out toward the moon.

James looked back out of the window and felt himself get almost dreamy.

Chapter Text

They had been sitting on the back porch of his parent’s cottage they had bought when they had decided to move back to Solva. It was around 10 pm so the lights that accompanied the garden gnomes his mum had scattered throughout the garden showed like fireflies. It was completely quiet except for the distant sound of a record his mum had put on from the kitchen.

So will you please say hello
To the folks I know?
Tell them I won't be long~

Remus was tucked into his mum's arms as she rocked the porch swing they were sitting on slowly back and forth, at the same time she held a piece of cedar wood and a carving knife, she discarded the pieces she cut off to her armrest. He didn’t bother to look at what she was carving, he kept his eyes focused on the trees belonging to the forest not too far from their house. She eventually broke the silence though.

“ Why are you upset?” She said softly, not looking up from what she was carving. He didn’t respond. His mom spoke again sternly, but still low enough that it didn’t approach louder than a whisper.

“ Remus.” She stopped carving. He looked at her and then focused on his side where he could see the fence that marked their cottage's entrance. All the decorating had been done by his mother, she tended to get a bit overboard, hence the gnomes, but they never stopped her.

“ I hate it here.” He grumbled, Hope just shifted her sight back to where she was sculpting her wood.

“You’ve said.” She said,

“ I don’t know why we just can’t go back to London.” Before this they had stationed themselves in a tiny flat in London, his father had wanted to talk to a friendly acquaintance about possible cures for Remus. They had only been there for 2 months.

“ Your father thinks it’s more safe here than in London”

“ More boring you mean.”

“ Remus.” His mother’s tone was stern.

“ It’s boring here! And it's going to be more boring when I’m cooped up in some loony shop every day!”

“ You said you wanted to be let out of the house, so that's what we're letting you do.” She kept her tone soft, but her eyes got more sharp as she talked. Remus just grumbled a response and slumped into the swing, his mum’s arm still around his shoulders.

“He’s still scared to let you out by yourself so this is a compromise, you should be happy.”

Remus just grumbled again. He had been home-schooled ever since he could remember and working at some store that was more likely to have a mythos-accurate depiction of Mercury than a bathroom was not his perfect idea of “getting out of the house”. In London there were at least fun things to go see, with a parent chaperone, of course, his mother had taken him to as many music shops as she could. In Solva, there was the lake, and trees, and that was pretty much it.

“ Hey.” His mother’s voice brought him out of his sulking.

Remus looked up at her from where his gaze had shifted to the trees again. She had paused carving again and had left the knife on the armrest so she could rest that hand on his cheek.

“ Your father might not show it but he worries about you cariad. He wants to make sure you can live a long happy life. “ She moves her thumb up and down on his cheek.

“ You listen to him and when you get older and healthy, you can move to London or wherever is far away from here. You can take all the adventures you want, okay?” Because that's what she called their constant relocating, “Adventures”. He gives her a small nod before looking off again.

“ Just humor him, love. He only wants the best for you.” At this, she turned her body to take the figure she sculpted and put it on the porch fence in front of them. It was a wooden wolf.

“ Cause that's what wolves do. They protect.”

***

The next day his dad had him suited up and manning the front counter at “Lupin’s Keepsake Creations.” He had been patted on the back by his father before he was told specifically “ not to move from the counter”, which wouldn't be hard considering that Remus hadn’t ever seen more than 3 people in here at a time. The store had jam-packed shelves front to back, either with things that Lyall was able to collect from their trips , or things they had made over the years. His parents’ favorite activity was to fashion little knick-knacks from random materials around the house, Remus commonly had socks missing and later found in knitting used to make a hat that was gifted to him for Christmas.

They had only been Solva for a few months but he was pretty sure everyone thought they were weirdos. Most of their money came from the few unfortunate tourists who just happened upon the shop on a whim. Because of their cottage being stationed on the far end of town and their strange habit of not really interacting with anyone, they didn’t ever get visitors. Which worked more in his father’s favor really, since he seemed to want to keep Remus as sheltered as possible.

Remus had been sitting at the counter since the morning, and it was now mid-afternoon. He was about to finish the copy of Lord of the Flies his mother had given him, his patience running thin ,when a kid entered the shop, setting off the bells at the doors. Remus muttered a half-hearted “Welcome in”, before returning to his book.

After a bit he took a curious glance back up to the kid, he had a dark hoodie pulled up over his head, and he was slumped over a shelf with one hand in his pocket, the other clutched onto the strap of the backpack he was wearing. Remus noted the suspicious behavior and then directed his attention back to his book.

Then there was a loud noise, like glass clanging together, Remus looked up and the kid was running out of the store, backpack rattling back and forth as he did.

Remus felt his heart rate rise, as he focused on the shelf that was now stripped. His mum’s wolf carving had been put there.

Without thinking Remus hopped the counter and was out the door.

He could never run fast, he was never even allowed to run. But at this moment his feet moved on his own. Ignoring how his breath was catching in his throat he followed the thief down the path into town, almost nearly avoiding a trash can the thief knocked over to slow him down. He followed the him through an alley and back out again, he could barely follow and surely got stares as he ran and screamed but didn’t have the energy to care.

He was running, the only thing he could hear was his rapid breathing, his vision even blurring, to the point that the only thing he could see was the dark spot he was following behind.

His breath was getting more shallow by the moment, and in a single moment, he couldn’t breathe, and without looking his foot got caught-

And he fell.

***
It turned out that the thief had been some bored school kid, they had caught him shortly after Remus fell, making him return everything he stole. The bag of returned items sat on their kitchen table, the wolf carving sitting upright, staring at him.

To play the hero, Remus had tripped while going downstairs to the town’s docks, making him take a nasty fall that showed clearly on the scar that now spread across his face.

“ I told you not to leave the counter, there's a phone for a reason, why didn’t you call someone?” His father was standing across from him at the table, hands on his hips, he had put his glasses down on the table in a fit of rage. His mum sat next to him at the table, redoing one of the bandages on Remus’s arm.

“ This is what happens when you don’t think Remus!”

“ Lyall.” His mother said as she slammed the medical scissors on the table.

“ I’m sorry.” Remus murmured in response. His father just kept going, he was now pacing.

“ What did you think was going to happen? Your not like other kids Remus, you can’t just run off whenever you feel like it!”

“ I know.” Remus just said quietly, if this had been any other day, if this had been just the other night even, he would've fought back, but he couldn't help himself from thinking of seeing his face after he woke up from his fall. The scar ran across his face starting from his left eyebrow to his right cheek, it taunted him, it was now an everyday reminder of his incompetence. Remus hated it.

At Remus’s response, his father rubbed his forehead in frustration, his eyes squinting. The few gray hairs he had acquired in the last few years were more visible than ever. “ I need to know that you can care for yourself and make smart choices. Your mother and I aren’t going to be around forever.” He said. Remus just gave a quiet nod.

His mother sat still at Remus’s side, she was cradling his hand in hers, rubbing circles with her thumb.

“ I think we should tell him, Hope.” He started and then took his glasses from the table, putting them on. His mother’s eyes grew glassy and she let go of Remus’s hand.

“ Tell me what?”

His mother continued to not look at him.

“ Mum? Tell me what?” He pleaded, she looked back at him, her eyes were always, to Remus, comparable to the sea but at this moment they looked more gray.

“ In London, Robert Clarke, you remember? He told me about this private school in Scotland, they started giving out these sorts of- academic scholarships.” His father began to move his hands around while talking, a nervous tick.

“ You submit an essay your kid did and if the school thinks it's good enough, they get full tuition until they graduate as long as they keep their grades up.” His father stopped and looked at him, smiling a bit.

Remus could feel the ground fall from beneath him. It was happening, his parents were finally getting sick of him.

“...What?” Was the only thing he was able to get out. His mum had begun holding his hand again, she was clutching it tightly with both hands this time. When she spoke it was slow and quiet, like she was comforting him. It wasn’t exactly working.

“ Y’know that essay you wrote about Lupa and Rome?”

“ What- But I don’t understand. We don't live in Scotland.” He looked in between his parents, his heart rate started again, and he could feel tears starting in his throat. When his father spoke, his smile dropped, and his voice grew cold.

“ It’s a boarding school, Remus.”

“What?” Was all he could say, his voice cracked as he spoke.

“ It’ll be good Remus. The teachers there are said to be top of the line, if we can’t smack some sense into you then they surely can.” His dad chuckled like this was funny to him. Them sending Remus to some faraway place with none was funny to him. His mum was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear her.

“ Remus. Remus look at me.” She pleaded.

He did and she moved her hands from his to his shoulders.

“ Think of this as another adventure, Scotland is not that far from London right?” Her voice was shaking slightly, as she dragged her hands up and down his shoulders.

Remus didn’t want an adventure, he hated Solva he did, but nothing seemed like hell more than being sent out to the middle of nowhere without his parents. He couldn’t even catch some kid stealing from their store. How was he supposed to survive miles alone with no support? He had never been to Scotland before, on their first day in London he had gotten so overwhelmed by a crowded sidewalk that they had to take him to the emergency room.

His parents were trying to get rid of him.

That thought among several other negative ones raged in his head in the next few weeks as they prepared him for school. His mom had packed his bags with almost every book he owned, and his father did the same but with medical supplies. One of the conditions Lyall had been able to negotiate with the principal before his enrollment was that Remus was to be given constant attention from the school’s medical team while attending. Since this was one of the first years the school was doing the scholarship they were desperate for participants, making negotiations easy. Of course, all that would be out of the window if Remus couldn’t keep his grades up which his father made sure to remind him constantly.

Since Hogwarts was in Scotland they had to travel to London and catch a train to the school. His parents stood with him on the platform, they had gotten there later than expected so mostly everyone was on the train already. His mom was kneeling on the platform ground, to be on his level, her eyes got all glassy and dull again, and her hands were on his shoulders.

“ It’s only for a few months and then you can come home for Christmas.”

Remus only nodded. Up to his departure; he hadn't spoken much. His mother cuffed his cheek with her hand before letting go and rummaging through the purse she had at her side.

“ I have something for you.” At this she took out the wooden wolf carving, Remus’s eyes widened. She placed it in his hands, covering it with hers.

“ Let it protect you.” Her eyes remained glassy as she smiled. She let go and went to stand next to his father, who didn’t smile. What he did was pat Remus on the shoulder and nod before gesturing to his mother that it was time to leave.

Remus climbed into the train where children were shouting from all angles. After a bit of struggle in maneuvering around hyper children flinging their bodies everywhere, he made it to the back where he found an empty cart. He sat down near the window where he placed the wolf carving, feeling his eyes droop as he leaned his head on the window sill. He watched the wolf as the train pulled out of the station, falling into a dreamless sleep.

***

He was able to find his alarm from where Sirius had previously smacked it off his bedside table, which, unlike the previous night, was blaring obnoxiously from where it sat beside his bed. This did not work in his favor. His head felt heavy and he had to work to keep his eyes open, which wasn’t a good thing to wake up with. James had convinced him to keep his pain meds in the kitchen, so they could make sure he didn’t overdose, but there was no way he was able to get as far as their flat’s kitchen without collapsing.

Even worse, he had a morning shift at the diner.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. He chanted in his head, in a voice that was half his and half his father’s.

The door to his room opened to Peter who was again fitted up in his office working attire. He hadn’t even had to buy new clothing for his internship, he just dressed like that. He stood at the doorway, a toothbrush sitting in his mouth. Remus’s alarm clock was still blaring, Peter walked up to his bed and pressed a bunch of random buttons until it turned off. Remus would tell him which one to push but he was too focused on getting himself to sit up without throwing up. Peter squinted at him as he sat up.

“ You ok there Moony?”

“ I’m fine. What do you need?” He said sternly, rubbing his forehead with his thumbs.

“ Really because you look-”

“ I’m fine.”

Peter sat there, eyes squinting, he then pointed to Remus’s messy desk at the other side of the room. Everything in his room was perfectly neat, organized, and tucked neatly into drawers and shelves, his desk was the only spot that wasn’t. Notebooks piled upon notebooks and papers and sticky notes stuck all over the nearby wall.

“ Do you have a scientific calculator?” Peter asked, pointing to his desk.

“ Yeah, it should be in the drawer by the window.” Peter grinned and went to rummage through Remus’s desk drawers. To make it seem like he was fine Remus kept talking.

“You are a business major, why don’t you have a calculator?”

“ Well I did, but I lent it to James for that course he was taking about exercise physiology, I think he lost it.” Peter snorted.

“ Ah, yeah I remember,” Remus said as he rested his head on the back wall, he closed his eyes to make his vision stop spinning.

“ Here it is,” Peter said before turning around to show Remus, who slowly pried his head from the wall.

“ You can keep it as long as you want, I haven’t used it since first year.” Remus struggled to say, his breath catching slightly, he smiled.

“Your the best Moony.” Peter grinned and then squinted again as he approached Remus’s bed.

“ Are you sure you're ok?” He said, and Remus took an exhale out of his nose.

“ I’m fine.”

“ Padfoot said you only get that sweaty when you're not fine.” He raised his eyebrows at this, and Remus looked at his hand which he hadn’t noticed was way more moist than it had been when he first woken up. Again, not a good sign.

“ Well Padfoot’s not here,” Remus said, trying to smile again. Peter seemed to get increasingly more nervous the longer he looked at him, and usually when this happened he went to get either James or Sirius, which would probably lead to Remus not going to work, and he needed to go to work.

Much to Remus’s dismay at this very moment, the front door opened and closed, followed by a loud voice.

“ Oi! I got bagels!” Sirius yelled from where he was in the kitchen. Peter’s eyes rapidly looked from Remus and back to where Sirius’s voice was coming from.

“ Peter. Don’t.” Remus said he was sweating more now. Peter just seemed to get paler. Sirius was still yelling from the kitchen.

“ You can thank me later!”

“I’m sorry”. Peter squeaked and then shuffled quickly out the door.

“ Traitor!” Remus yelled after him. Shortly after Peter left he could hear murmurs coming from the kitchen, and then stomping toward Remus’s room. Remus leaned his head against the wall again and swore to spit in Peter’s coffee later. Unsurprisingly the stomping belonged to Sirius who had not taken off his docs yet. He walked up to Remus’s bed wearing his leather jacket over an open flannel and his hair was windswept from being outside, he was holding a small rectangular box that he set on Remus’s bedside table as he walked in.

“ You look like shit.” He said, his gaze solid, his blue eyes turning stoney.

“ Thanks,” Remus said, glaring at Peter who was watching from Remus’s doorway. Sirius continued.

“You're sweating like a pig.”

“ It’s just hot in here.” He went to get up, legs creaking as he did. “ Really, I’m fine.” He stood up from his bed to indicate that he was perfectly fine, but Sirius’s gaze didn’t waver, he just pushed Remus back down onto his bed by his shoulder.

“ I have a shift at 10, a bit of sweat isn’t that bad.” He said with Sirius's hand still placed on his shoulder. Sirius lifted his hand and then reached for the box he placed at Remus’s bedside, he opened the top and pulled out a small thermometer. He smiled a smile that made Remus’s blood go cold despite heating it up by the minute.

“Then let's see.” He waved the small thermometer in his hand as he smirked.

“ I’m fine you don’t need to-”

“ If your really fine then the thermometer will tell us you are.”

He glared and Sirius kept eye contact, squinting and smiling devilishly back. Peter had moved more into the room looking more scared by the minute. Remus snatched the stick from Sirius’s hand and put it into his mouth, not breaking eye contact. Afterward, he looked at the red liquid climb high. Before Sirius could take it out of his hands he stammered.

“ I’ll just sleep it off. I’ve already missed enough work, I told Marlene I would be there today.” He said.

“ Like hell, you will.” Sirius just scoffed, looking at the thermometer. He then turned back to Peter who jumped at the action.

“ Get Mckinnon on the phone.” He said, and Peter nodded, running out the door. Remus’s blood started to boil, more than it already was.

“ I’m not a child! I can take care of myself!” He spat out, Sirius just stood there holding the thermometer. He didn’t say anything, his eyes still stone-cold gray. He wordlessly walked out, slamming the door, and followed after was a slight “click”.

What the fuck, Remus thought, there was no way that he-

Remus clambered out of his bed, almost falling when his legs clicked, and struggled to stand. He made it over to his door where he jiggled the handle to reveal that Sirius did in fact lock him inside his room.

Defeated Remus slumped against the door, before banging on it from the inside.

“ WANKER!” He yelled and then pathetically got up from the floor and resolved to go back to sleep.

***

When Remus woke up it was to a candle on his bedside and his blinds drawn so that the room was basked in a dim light. The record player had been moved from the kitchen onto Remus’s desk, where there was a pile of books on the ground in order to make room. It was softly playing a Led Zeppelin record that Remus recognized as one of Sirius’s. He always tended to play it whenever Remus got sick.

Made up my mind to make a new start-
Going to California with an aching in my heart

Sirius himself seemed to have pulled one of the chairs from the kitchen into his bedroom, sitting so that his knees hit the side of Remus’s bed frame. No longer wearing the leather jacket, he was quietly sitting there slumped over, hand resting against his cheek, he had a soft smile on his face and he was reading a leather-bound journal, Remus’s leather-bound journal.

Remus took a moment to process his surroundings, taking a breath in to quiet the white noise playing in his brain and to inhale the candle that seemed to be some sort of strange combination of tobacco and leather…? Sirius sat up as he realized that Remus had woken up. Remus snatched the journal from his hands, making Sirius cackle.

“Gimme that.” He spat out as he inspected the page that Sirius had been reading. He had marked the page all over with a blue gel pen, next to a recount Remus wrote about an especially annoying customer at the diner and their affinity for putting mayo on hash browns. Sirius drew a little doodle of James’s family dog taking a shit on the corner of the page. Despite the immaturity, Remus had to suppress a smile.

“ I like reading it, you write so…. Eloquently.” He shifted his pitch to sound more pompous but it really just sounded like how Remus thought he sounded when they first met back in primary.

“ Shut up. It’s not meant for outside eyes, it’s private.” At this, Sirius groaned.

“ Oh c’mon, since when was anything private between us?”

“ Since always weirdo.” Sirius just snorted, his eyes shifting to where Remus was looking at the journal page. “ If someone ever talked to me that way I’d smack them upside the head.”

“ Well, you can’t exactly do that when your working on a minimum wage paycheck.” Remus laughed a bit.

“ Then I’ll do it for you.”

“ Like a guard dog?”

“ Yeah.” Sirius grinned as Remus laughed-the record singing from his desk.

Oh, the sea was red and the sky was gray
I wonder how tomorrow could ever follow today~

“ My mum loved this record,” Remus said softly, remembering how she would pull him up from his studies to dance with her in the kitchen.

“ I know. She was the one that gave it to me.” Remus whipped his head over to Sirius in surprise, which was a mistake since his head was still dizzy.

“ My mum gave you this record?” At Remus’s astonishment, Sirius let out a giggle that made Remus’s insides flutter.

“ Yep. A bit before uni.”

“ I can’t believe it,” Remus muttered and Sirius just laughed again.

“ She gave me sheet music too. I've been too scared to try to learn it though.”

“ I think you could do it. You’ve learned harder songs.” Remus said, he smiled and got one back from Sirius. He felt the air heat up and quickly shifted the conversation, the events from earlier in the day replayed in his mind. “What are you still doing here? Don’t you have a job?”

“ Ted let me take the day off. ‘Told me to tell you that he hopes you get better.” Sirius grinned.

“ You shouldn’t be bunking off work to stay home and baby me,” Remus said, placing his journal beside the candle on the bedside table, the wick was almost gone, it must've been burning for a while.

At the sudden movement, his eyes grew loopy, and he leaned his head against the wall. Sirius shuffled his legs upon the chair he was sitting on and then moved the chair even closer to Remus’s bed.

“ If babying you is what’s gonna make you stop acting like a stubborn git, then babying it is.” He said and then tilted his head, steadying it on his knee. Remus closed his eyes, he didn’t want to look over at his captor, he had to remind himself to keep an extra key in his room.

“ What time is it?”

“ Uh… around 2”

“ Fuck “ Remus picked up his hand to rub his forehead. His head was relaxing a bit now, so if he took some meds then he should be able to still go to work, go in around 4 hours late, but it was better than nothing. He didn’t want to explain to Gideon why he hadn’t been working as many hours as last month, the hole in his stomach sunk deeper as Remus shut his eyes to dispel any nausea. He slowly started rising from his bed and following was Sirius who suddenly pushed him back down.

“ I’m going to work Sirius” They made eye contact, and despite his condition Remus told himself not to blink. Somehow that felt like a victory to him.

“ I already called Mckinnon and told her you wouldn’t go in today.”

“ Then I’ll just call her back and tell her I am.” He began to get up again, and in response, Sirius pushed him back down by his shoulders.

“ Don’t make me lock the door again.” Sirius’s eyes started getting glassy, he hated it when that happened, it reminded him too much of his mother. Remus slumped back down on his bed and groaned, digging the palms of his hands into his eyes.

“ Don’t be upset,” Sirius stated, voice small.

“ I’m not upset, Padfoot.” He released his hands from his eyes and turned his head to look towards the wall.

“ Sounds like you are.”

“ Well I’m not, just… frustrated,” Remus grumbled. They sat there for a bit, Led Zeppelin continued to play from the record player, and Remus didn’t dare to turn over.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan~
It’s got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home

Remus listened while Sirius sighed deeply, sitting back in his chair.

“ Your mum said that if you ever went back to the emergency room she would make you move home.” He sputtered, like he was scared to get the words out.

“ I’m not going to the emergency room Sirius.” At this response, Remus was met with silence. He decided to turn back around, seeing exactly what he dreaded. Sirius was sitting on the chair, legs crossed, rubbing his neck and looking at the ground, his eyes resembled a weepy dog’s.

God. Remus thought before pulling himself up again.

“ I need to be able to take care of myself, I’m not going to have you lot around forever.”

Sirius looked up from where he was sitting, hands falling from his neck to his lap, his thumb tracing over the calluses over his palms. Remus resisted the urge to take his hands in his to stop him from fidgeting. “ It’s not like you're moving out anytime soon,” Sirius said, thankfully there was still humor to his words.

At this, Remus was reminded of Hogwarts, and he shifted his eyes to the wall. Sirius’s voice grew panicked.

“ Don’t tell me-”

“ I’m not going anywhere.” He said bluntly, making the muscles that tensed in Sirius’s face relax, Remus's heart rate slowed a bit more. He hadn’t told Sirius where he had been able to get a student teaching opportunity at. He could never predict Sirius’s actions but he could tell that his reaction to this wouldn’t be good. Worst case scenario he would cancel the show altogether which would probably break Remus’s heart, embarrassingly enough.

He had told James though. “ You should tell him. Let him know that it isn’t going to change anything.” James said as they sat on the fire escape, Remus had told them about a day ago, conveniently leaving out the specific school and the location that came with it. He shortly confessed the truth to James in a struggle to contain his guilt that collected when Sirius insisted on throwing a party and buying a cake that spelled Remus’s name like “Lopen”.

“ I will.” He promised that day. But he decided to delay inwardly as he looked at Sirius’s eyes softening.

“ But we're not going to be kids forever, what happens when you get married and have kids?” Remus said, ignoring the tug in his gut that occurred when he said that. Sirius just snorted, Remus continued. “ You can’t be heading over to the hospice every day to make sure I’m taking the correct vitamins.”

Sirius’s brows furrowed in confusion.

“ Hospice? What are you talking about?” Sirius snorted again and then looked at Remus who just raised his eyebrows.

“ Remus, what do you mean Hospice?” Sirius’s eyes began to grow wide again.

“ It’s just a plan for the future.” He echoed the exact words his dad had said to him, Hospice, it was something his father had been trying to suggest to him since he entered uni.

“ What about your degree? Your writing?” Sirius raised from his chair, his volume getting louder, making Remus’s head thrum.

“ Sirius calm down, it was just something me and my dad were talking about-”

The record had stopped playing.

“ I thought you liked writing!” Sirius stood up from his chair quickly, knocking it to the ground with a clatter as it hit the floor.

“ What I like is staying alive!” Remus spat out and instantly regretted it. Contrasting how big Sirius’s eyes had previously gotten, they softened suddenly, looking like they were about to drip out of his eye sockets.

“ Sirius-” Remus started, and was quickly cut off.

“ I’ll let Marlene know that you're coming in later.” He mumbled, his voice going down an octave, his words mushing together. He picked up the chair and walked out of the room.

Remus didn’t end up going to work that day.

***

A day passed and Sirius wasn’t talking to him. But also he wasn’t completely avoiding him, at least Remus hoped so, he had been caught up with a morning and afternoon class and hadn’t been able to be back at the flat.

He and Sirius got into fights all the time, but they usually were resolved quickly, it had been this way since the primary. Remus would call him out for being brat and Sirius would yell at him for not letting him copy his history homework, it was never too long-lasting. Something shifted after they started uni though, Remus didn’t know if it was what his mum had told his flatmates before he had decided to move in with them, or just Sirius’s in-laws, or the musical, but they had been more delicate lately. Not just delicate in the easily offendable way, but in the way where Remus found himself being in close quarters with Sirius more often, which was a surprise because after secondary school Remus had thought it would be the opposite.

Remus had told his father that he would only make good decisions, and he had. He was in control… most of the time. He usually lost it when Sirius decided to do something stupid that messed up his whole schedule.

He hated it, he couldn’t even get his head straight when the even sight of his friend’s face gave his weak heart palpitations. His father’s voice never left his mind whenever he ended up spending a course brainstorming ideas for the musical instead of paying attention. That didn’t mean he ever could stop himself, he had spent more time thinking about this musical than he would like to admit. And the more Sirius got involved the more the songs got more specific to Remus’s feelings. He always expected Sirius to get grossed out by how sappy his lyrics were but his favorites always seemed to be the ones he picked right out from Remus’s journal.

He had caved earlier in the day by letting James and Sirius have that party, so he was stuck daydreaming on the fire escape, followed by Lily who carried red within her eyes and a glare as sharp as daggers. He tried to vie in James’s favor but there was only so much a man could do.

The night was getting later, getting Remus wondering if he had to do the usual party routine when-

“Moooooonyyyy!”

Something in Remus exhaled with relief. He followed the sound to Sirius’s room, putting his cigarette box back in his pocket. Upon entrance, he saw Sirius sitting on the side of his bay window looking out at the sky. He looked at Remus once he entered, a frown on his face, he looked not particularly drunk, which was unusual. His eyes grew wistful as Remus sat down across from him.

“ You came.” He said softly, his tone surprised Remus, he usually got louder when drunk, not quieter.

“ You call and I answer,” Remus responded, Sirius gave him a smile that could melt butter and Remus looked away to the window to prevent his face from heating up. He could still hear people talking from the main room, despite the silence there was still noise, which Remus was thankful for since he could practically feel the unresolved tension dripping from the ceiling.

He resolved to look around Sirius’s room which was noticeably bigger than his. The candle that Sirius had used the other day had been left in Remus’s room, but Sirius had a whole shelf full of them, his cousin, Andy, had a thing for gifting people novelty candles. His room was a mess, with clothes thrown about, open drawers, and posters covering the walls. They used to joke about Sirius having a hoarding problem, the man was way more sentimental than he let on, he kept everything from pictures of them from their school days, to concert tickets. Remus was pretty sure that he had kept every gift he had given him since primary. On top of that Sirius tended not to know how to clean up after himself, Remus always found himself throwing something away or folding something whenever he found himself in here.

“ I’m sorry for yelling earlier.” He said.

“ I just don’t know why you're like that all the time,” Sirius grumbled back.

“ Like what?” In response Sirius waved around his hands and widened his eyes, which probably indicated what he was talking about to James but Remus just got more confused. Sirius seemed to notice this and he huffed and rested his head on his knees.

“ You act like you're totally fine one second, and going to drop dead on the drop of the hat the other.” Sirius said, avoiding eye contact.

“ The hospice is just in case and it was mostly my dads idea.” Remus said back, trying to keep his voice from wavering.

This didn’t seem to help at all, Sirius just continued looking down at where his feet were placed at cushions that accompanied the bay window. Remus' eyes drifted as he contemplated what to say next and he landed on a picture that was pinned right above Sirius’s bed. It looked like it had been taken around 5th year, they all had such big smiles on their faces, something inside Remus shifted a bit.

“ I’ll be fine, you're still going to be stuck with me, I’m not going anywhere.” He repeated from yesterday, as he spoke he kicked Sirius slightly trying to get him to look at him again. His eyes grew less sad, but they didn’t look any happier.

“ Whatever you say, Moony.” He said, voice still stagnant. He stretched out his legs, so that they sat over where Remus’s were. The voices from the party outside got more quiet as people seemed to be leaving, Remus turned his attention to where Sirius seemed to be studying him, his heart rate started up again.

“ What-”

“ I think we should change the ending.”

“ What?”

“ The ending of the musical. We should change it.”

“ Huh- why?” Remus sputtered, caught off guard.

“ It’s bloody depressing.”

“ That's not what you said before!” When Remus first came up with the ending they had been getting high on the floor of this very bedroom floor, music sheets strewn about. Despite it being a warm day Sirius was wearing one of his sweaters and giggling at just about everything he suggested.

“ That's so stupid!”

“ Of course it's stupid! The play is about a bloody werewolf for christ sake!” Remus waved his hands maniacally from where he was sitting up, one leg tucked in, Sirius just continued to giggle.

“ I wouldn’t say that it's only about a werewolf…”

“ Ok then what is it about Sondheim?” At this reference Sirius just continued to laugh before catching his breath, putting the blunt they were sharing to the side on one of the sheets of music.

“ I don’t know… Love?” He said so earnestly that Remus would have swooned if he wasn’t already frustrated enough. So he just huffed and layed back on the floor beside Sirius who just laughed at his reaction.

“ I don’t even know how a werewolf would be able to love.” Remus spat out, his mind getting more foggy, he stared at the ceiling. Peter a bit after moving in had painted stars across the ceiling for Sirius’s birthday. Sirius continued to smile as he shoved Remus’s arm.

“ Maybe he doesn’t know either.”

And that was it. To contrast the silly subject matter they had come up with an ending where the Werewolf, unable to handle the implications of entering a relationship with the wizard, disappears leaving her behind. James might hate it, but it did make the man cry during his first read through of the script, so there wasthat.

“ Well I changed my mind!” Sirius said, bringing Remus out of his thoughts, he crossed his legs. Somehow Remus felt the urge to run out of the room, but his position seemed to make that impossible. Remus looked at Sirius’s icey eyes and then his gaze drifted again back to the picture of them pinned on the wall, and then another thing caught his eye. Sitting on a desk near the corner of his room sat a wooden wolf statue.

The one Remus’s mum had carved.

Remus looked at the statue for a second before drawing his attention back to Sirius, who was looking at him expectedly.

“ I’ll think about it.”

Chapter Text

Lily had just about fallen for the 5th time that day. The routine her instructor had given her for the upcoming recital contained about 2 different pirouettes, and she couldn’t get through a full run-through without messing up. She looked up at the window at the side of the empty ballet classroom, the sun had moved to a different spot in the sky. She had been working for about 4 hours now, it being a Saturday she had an easy time getting a small room to practice. Normally she would've brought Sev with her, but with it being winter he was off at Hogwarts.

Lily could feel the tears well up in her throat and the tight bun she put in her hair was causing a migraine, the cool sprung floor being even colder because of the cold outside. Lily stuck out her leg and surveyed her damaged feet. The pointe shoes her mum had gotten her were almost completely worn away by now, making her feet more easily bruisable, and bruised they were.
Lily probably had about another day before her dad started wondering where all the bandages in the house were going. Lily took a deep breath and leaned forward, resting her forehead on her thigh.

She would get it eventually. If her instructor thought she could do it, then she could.

After another breath, she heard a sharp knock on the door before it opened to a small girl, grinning with cheeks and nose red, clearly coming straight from outside. She waved energetically as Lily raised her head. Lily tucked her feet quickly underneath her legs so that she couldn’t see.

“ The receptionist said you might be back here!” Marlene said, still smiling, reaching her eyes.

“ Hi,” Lily said softly before getting up, ignoring the pains in her feet. “ Let me change real quick and then we can go,” she said, and Marlene nodded.

Later Lily and Marlene left Lily’s dance school to a bakery in between both of their houses, besides her parent’s shop. As they passed Marlene tilted her head.

“ Do you know when your Dad's going to open up again? My mum said that she needs something new to put on our dining table.” She asked, Lily just shrugged. Her dad hadn’t been working for a while now, she had decided not to worry too much about it.

As she headed into the bakery she glanced back at the shop. The wall was painted green with flowers lining the bottom that her parents had her and Pet paint when they were little. Currently, the inside was basically empty with the lights off, making it look dark and dreary, the closed sign hanging from the door being even more prominent. It made Lily’s eyes water a bit looking at it, she tried not to think about the last memory she had in there as she left the door open for Marlene to the bakery.

As they stood in the small line to the cashier, admiring the sweets on display, Lily inhaled the warm air, trying to calm her thoughts. Her feet still ached so she shifted back and forth on them to relieve pressure. Marlene took her eyes off the pastries to notice Lily fidgeting, her eyes grew worried.

“ You ok?”

“Yeah, just a bit tired, I was there all day,” Lily responded, trying to stand on both feet. Marlene gave her a doubting look

“ You know if you're always so worried all the time, those lines in between your eyebrows become permanent.” She stated, making a face that was supposed to mimic Lily's but she kinda just looked constipated. Lily pushed her side as she laughed, and was promptly scolded by the lady waiting for her order, as they had made it to the front of the line.

After the bakery, they walked down the snowy road of their neighborhood while sipping hot chocolate. Children nearby were building a snowman, but other than that it was empty except for the sounds of her and her friend's footsteps. Marlene was regaling her with a tale about a fight with her mother about dying her hair.

“ She said that they’d kick me out of school! Can you believe that?” Marlene yelled, shaking the hand that wasn’t holding the hot chocolate around. Lily could believe it, unlike Lily, Marlene went to a catholic school with strict uniform policies, and this frustrated Marlene since she had been hoping to bleach her hair since she’d happened upon one of Lily’s Teen Vogue magazines. Lily just snorted at Marlene’s remark.

“ Actually I can,” Lily said, and Marlene just huffed, she then began to mutter, “Just four more years,” under her breath.

“ Oh, speaking of school,” Lily said, and Marlene perked up as Lily stopped walking to give Marlene her hot chocolate and open her backpack. She took out a neatly stapled-together essay and handed it over to Marlene.

“ You did it!” She exclaimed.

“ Of course I did, you asked me too.” Lily was walking a bit ahead so as she spoke she did a spin, slightly on point, making her wince.

“ I was partly joking.”

Lily just laughed and continued walking.

“ So what's your price?” Marlene asked, catching up.

“It's free. Consider it a friend discount.” Lily said and when she saw Marlene’s mischievous grin she added: “ You can only cash it in once though”, She held up her pointer finger and Marlene’s smile fell into a comical frown.

“ Aw…” She whined.

She had been writing essays for her classmates for a while now, and until she could get an actual job it was a good way to save up for new pointe shoes, and since Marlene was her friend and she hadn’t exactly asked her to do it she felt bad charging her, as much as she needed the money.

The conversation topic shifted, Marlene tried to get Lily to teach her how to do a proper ballet spin, even though the path was icy and they were both wearing boots. Marlene tried and almost fell on her arse, making Lily burst out laughing. Her laughing was cut off though by Marlene abruptly stopping, making Lily turn back around to see that they had arrived at Lily’s house.

Petunia was standing at the entrance of the door fighting with her dad who was distressed and looking like he’d just woken up from a nap although it was late afternoon. He was wearing a flower-patterned robe with slippers, the robe was a gift from Lily’s aunt, and they all had matching ones. Petunia in contrast was wearing a short pleated skirt, heels, and a full face of makeup. This surprised Lily because their mother had never let them wear that sort of stuff outside the house before.

They argued as Lily stood in shock nearby, her father's quiet tone contrasting Petunia's yelling. This had been happening more and more lately, their dad had always been a pushover, it was no secret, but recently he’d wanted to change that, and with Petunia’s new resolution to do every dangerous thing under the sun they clashed constantly, making very painful family dinners where Lily had to sit in-between them while they fought, pushing her food around on her plate.

Finally, after a minute, the argument got to a head where Pet started storming away, their father calling her name. Despite wearing heels her sister walked down the icy stairs without falling, Lily rushed past Marlene so she could meet her at the gate.

“ What happened?” But just as Lily could get the words out Petunia shoved passed her without a word. “Petunia!”, she called out but the other girl just kept walking, down the snowy street without a jacket. Marlene came running behind her.

“ What was that?” She asked.

“ I don’t know…” Lily murmured before looking up to where her dad sat, defeated, hands at his sides, Lily could see dark circles beneath his eyes as they made eye contact.

“ Lily! What are you doing standing out there? It's freezing out!” He yelled from the door, as her dad yelled she turned back to Marlene standing puzzled beside her.

“ I’ll see you tomorrow?” She said, Marlene just nodded, brows still furrowed as Lily ran up the steps up to her father. As she approached the door her father seemed to notice Marlene standing by the gate.

“ Marlene! You want to come in for some tea?” As he yelled from the door Marlene jumped.

“ No, that's alright! My mum wants me home before 5!” She called back.

“ Well tell your mum I say hi!” He then put his hand on Lily’s shoulder urging her inside before timidly closing the door.

“ Tunie’s not going to be with us for dinner so I thought we could order from that Indian place you like.” He smiled warmly.

“ Ok…” She said while walking towards her room. Her dad stopped her before she fully left the main room though.

“ Oh, Lily.” He said and Lily turned back into the kitchen where he was about to pick up the home phone. “ You have a letter from Severus, I put it in your room.”

“ Ok.” She repeated, walking back into her room and silently closing the door. She left the lights off to keep the room in a dim light, the only light coming from the bright snow outside her window. She lumbered over to her bed to where she cautiously took off her socks to inspect the damage her ballet shoes had done, afterwards she flopped back down onto the quilt that covered her bed. She took a few deep breaths, looking at the ceiling before she turned over to her window sill beside her bed, where she had a couple of white roses in a vase. Her parents had started a tradition of getting her and her sister a new flower to put in their rooms every month or so, once her father had closed the shop though Lily had the same roses in her vase for a while now. They had been as white as snow a month ago, but now they were dull and wilted, next to them lay the letter. She picked it up and surveyed the tan envelope with the shiny intricate stamp on top, very much in character for a fancy boarding school. She looked at it for a bit, wondering what they did at Hogwarts, no doubt Sev wasn’t having to sell essays for new pointe shoes.

Lily stood up from her bed and tossed the letter to the side, she would write him back later. She could hear her dad ordering food from the kitchen and in that moment Lily felt the stuffiness of her room as the walls seemed to close around her. With another glance at Sev’s letter that now lay beside her pillow she got up, grabbing her ballet shoes and tip-toeing past the kitchen where her dad was still ordering. She walked down the stairs to a small garden in the back, it had been partly a gift from her grandparents, along with the house they had decided to adorn the garden fitted for the florist's children, with flower bushes and fountain. Both were out of commission due to the cold. Lily walked over to a stone bench that sat in the corner of the garden beneath a very dead tree. Despite this, it was covered by the house next door, so the ground in front remained dry.

Lily sat down and tied on her shoes before trying to practice her routine, ignoring how much it hurt to go on pointe with her injuries on top of stone flooring. She got about halfway through without falling when her father came clambering down the back stairs.

“ Lily!” He was holding a rectangular box, wrapped with last year’s birthday wrapping paper. She looked at it confused, he continued down the stairs and sat on the small stone bench, still wearing the slippers he had to jump around to avoid the snow.

“ They didn’t have the curry you usually get so I got you the green one instead, I hope that's ok.”

“ That's fine.” She said, even though it wasn’t, she hated green curry, but despite this, she decided not to mention it. She’d suffered the consequences of her father’s weak memory enough by now to be used to having to shovel gross food in her mouth because he had forgotten what she liked and didn’t

“ What’s that?” She gestured to the box as she sat down next to him. He put the box on her lap and smiled.

“ I wanted to give you an early Christmas present.” He smiled. The wrapping paper on top was childish, to say the least, with animals scattered across adorned with colorful birthday hats. Her father was still wearing the bathrobe from before, so he shivered slightly as he talked. Lily shared the sentiment as she was wearing only a sweater, she hadn’t grabbed her jacket before leaving her room.

She ripped the wrapping paper off to reveal a new set of pointe shoes.

“ I had to ask the lady at the shop what type to get.” As her father talked his smile faded a bit. “ Your mum used to be the one who took care of all this stuff.” He chuckled slightly. Lily looked at them, turning over the box to inspect the back. They were a size 4, Lily was a size 6.

“ Thank you…” She said softly, her father smiled and stood back up.

“ Head back inside soon huh? ‘Bloody freezing out here.” He then walked back through the garden back into the house, clutching his sides as he shivered. She kept her eyes on the shoes, and just as she heard the door shut, she watched as the box beneath her began to be stained with her own tears.

Her mother had died about a year before.

***

“ We’ll call you if any are available.” The receptionist at her dance school said dully before turning back to her phone. Lily sighed and said her thank yous, before heading out the door, nearly avoiding Molly, she still hadn’t decided if she wanted to help her out with the kids yet.

Lily was supposed to be meeting the ensemble next week, and Sirius had shown her the space she was supposed to use to meet with them. It had been almost indistinguishable from a closet in the back of the theater. Needless to say when shown the space Lily promptly yelled at Sirius for his incompetence and resolved to find a space herself. Which resulted in her asking if she could rent a room from her company for a couple of days a week. She had still been struggling to put choreography together, which also resulted in Mary forcing her way in to help her, which then led to a chain effect down to Mary being cast in the ensemble to the girl’s excitement.

She wanted to at least give the performers a decent space while she worked through her incompetence. She hadn’t choreographed anything since high school, other than some dances she would make out of boredom with Mary, so she wasn’t the most confident with her skill set. But she was being paid a fair wage, so she might as well try.

It had been around a month since she joined the musical, and the air was growing cooler, winter growing closer. She walked to a nearby field on campus where she said she would meet Marlene after her practice, and as she approached the bleachers debating if she should sit down or not she heard a familiar voice.

“ Evans!” Remus called as he was sitting nearby on the bleachers with a book and a backpack at his side. She waved back and began to make her way to him when her attention went back to the field. James Potter was standing stagnant in the middle of the field, he seemed to have forgotten that he was engaged in a very active game of football because in favor of kicking the ball that was between his legs, he decided to stare intently at Lily, with a goofy smile on his face. He was then promptly brought back by Marlene, who stole the ball.

Lily sat beside Remus who put what seemed to be a grocery store coupon in between his pages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream before closing the book, resting it on his lap.

“ Have you ever seen the ballet for that?” Lily said, gesturing to the book, Remus looked down and snorted.

“ Nope.” He promptly said, gaze drifting back to the field where cheers occurred because James made a goal. He then turned back to Lily, “ Is it good?”

“ Eh.” Lily shrugged. “ Was never the biggest Shakespeare fan, I liked the ballet though, I had my mum take me a couple of times.”

“ I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare is enjoyable without any dialogue.” He said.

Lily laughed quietly, “Maybe, but I always thought there was something beautiful about being able to portray an emotion without saying anything.” As she spoke she slowly swept her arm up and then down, like she was doing a plié.

“ Said like a true dancer.” Remus chuckled, bumping her softly with his shoulder, Lily snorted and bumped him back.

“ It’s a good show though, I recommend it, take your mates with you.” She said partly joking, but far off in the back of her mind she thought that it would probably be something James would like, him being the romantic.

“ I’ll take your word for it,” Remus said, his eyes then giving a more far-off appearance, his mind drifting. “ I only really read Shakespeare for school, Sirius hated it though.”

“ Take him anyway. Magic, people turning into animals, ‘seems like it would be right up his alley.” Lily said snarkily, Remus laughed before looking back at the book and setting it in his bag.

“ What are you doing here anyway?” Lily asked.

“ James dragged me away from studying, apparently if I spent any more time inside-'' For this Remus pitched his voice high, no doubt trying to mimic James -” I’d lose all oxygen from my brain.” Lily laughed, before looking back at the man in question on the field who seemed to be playing a game of keep away with Marlene that ended with them both on the ground. She could hear his loud laugh from the bleachers; it didn’t seem to annoy her as much as it did before.

“ I’m supposed to wait here until Sirius finishes his shift so we can go home and work on lyrics, you?” He tilted his head a bit. He was wearing the same heavy jacket and sweater combo as he always did, Lily had discovered that the man was just fickle to the cold, even still she didn’t know how he could wear that much without breaking out in a sweat.

“ Marlene wanted me to walk her home after practice,” Lily said, resting her head on her knees.

“ Were you able to get a better room?” He asked, apparently Lily’s argument with Sirius had gotten back to him. Lily gave a sharp breath out of her nose as the receptionist's dull tone came back to her. She shrugged, “ I asked my dance school if they had any rooms for rent, and they said they would call me if any opened up.”

Remus glanced at the tired expression on her face and his brows furrowed. “ Do you want me to ask around? If the worst comes to worst I bet we could clear some space at Broomsticks’.” He said, which was very sweet, but it kind of tugged at her stomach. She waved him off.

“ It’s fine, I’ve got it handled,” Lily said.

“Whatever you say Ms. Grand Ol’ Warlock.” He responded snarkily, Lily promptly punched him in the arm as he laughed.

She talked to Remus for a bit longer, until she noticed that the rest of either football team were missing, only leaving their friends playing on the field. Whatever the two were doing didn’t seem to comply with the rules of football that Lily was aware of, she was growing vaguely concerned before Remus just laughed, seemingly noticing the same time Lily did.

“ How long do you think it's going to take for them to notice that everyone else left.” He said, smiling.

“ I’d give it another 10 minutes,” Lily responded, who in contrast was straight-faced. Their bet was unfortunately ended by the surprise appearance of Sirius who set the guitar case strapped on his back to the ground beside the bleachers and was now tackling a frazzled James to the ground. Marlene stood by laughing before turning to the bleachers, noticing Lily and Remus, and waving them over. When they had gotten to the others' level on the field floor, Remus walked over to where the boys were tangled to the floor, stopping to grab Sirius’s discarded guitar case. Sirius upon seeing him, suddenly stopped his wrestling with James to stand up straight up like a soldier ready for duty. Lily watched as he startled Remus slightly with his display, and laughed inwardly.

She attempted to ignore Potter’s eyes on her as she offered Marlene her chapstick.

“ Oi Evans! What are you doing after this?” Sirius said, fairly loudly for their short distance. James shoved him as he talked, and Lily could feel herself getting tired. Thankfully Marlene answered for her.

“ We're headed back to the flat, why?” She said, handing Lily back her chapstick. At this point, Sirius had put James into a headlock and was struggling to keep him in it as Remus watched with an amused expression.

“ You still haven't been briefed on the music yet.” He said, finally letting his friend go, and taking the guitar case from Remus, slinging it around his shoulder.

Ah, right she hadn’t. Before Lily could protest, Sirius piped back up. “ We can order food.” He grinned. Lily looked at the boys and then back to Marlene who was mouthing silently the words “ free food” to her. Lily sighed.

“ Sure, I guess.”

***

The “free food” offering culminated in them sitting in the girl’s living room on a phone call with Peter as he struggled to decide what toppings to tell the pizza employee to put on the pizza. They had ended with 3 different pizzas each with an abundance of toppings that went from pepperoni to Hawaiian, much to Lily’s disgust. Peter was off work shortly after they had arrived at the girls’ flat so they had decided to let him pick something up and come join them after. As well as Peter, they were also joined by Mary who gleefully put on a Bee gees’ album on their record player that made both Remus and Sirius groan. It sat right next to the discarded pizza boxes they had gotten on their living room floor next to the couch, Mary guarding it.

Nobody gets too much
Heaven no more
It’s much harder to come by
I’m waiting in line~

Along with Mary, they had all ended up sitting on the floor since the purple couch Mary had gotten from a charity shop was only big enough for two people. After a while of eating and listening to James recount a story that somehow both included a bungee jump and ice skating, Remus took out a small booklet with sheet music out of his bag and handed it to Lily.

Lily flipped through it and stopped on a song entitled “Moonlight”, the song was accompanied by notes on either side, she recognized Remus’s messy handwriting. Sirius sat down across the circle next to James, he took the guitar out of the case he was carrying, with greasy hands still from the pizza, which made Lily mentally wince.

Sirius clapped his hands to get the group’s attention, even though it sounded more like a clang due to the amount of rings on his hands. He then smirked at Lily.

“ Lemme guess, you can’t read sheet music,” Sirius said, Lily glared.

“ No.” She grumbled.

“ We’ll just have to teach you then.” Sirius smiled, very much amused by the fact that he knew something that Lily didn’t. Lily felt the irritation bubble up in her stomach. Lily didn’t know when this competitiveness with Sirius had started, but it had been a main staple of their practices with the crew for the past couple of weeks. Lily usually lost, being that she had never made a musical before, and of course she didn’t know what a bloody fermata was Sirius.

In response to Lily’s frown, Remus patted her shoulder and took the booklet back from her.

“ We have recordings of most of the songs, so it shouldn't be too hard, this idiot,” He nodded over to where Sirius was fiddling with his guitar strings,” just brought out the guitar in case we need to tweak anything to make it more suitable for you.” Remus gestured over to where Sirius and James were sitting with said guitar, like every other time Remus had insulted him, Sirius’s grin only grew wider. Remus then took out his phone and surveyed different mixes, and then looked back at the page that Lily had been looking at.

“ Moonlight should be easy enough, It’s a duet so James can help you through it,” He handed the booklet back to Lily and pointed at one of the lines highlighted in green. “ You start there.”

“ Just sing with the tune of the backtrack, we can help you as you go along.” As he talked he flipped to later pages, Lily’s lines being woven with lines highlighted in red, seemingly James’s. Remus gave her a comforting smile as he moved to play the backtrack, Marlene cheered quietly from where she was sitting on the other side of Lily.

Lily tried to focus on the words in front of her instead of the 6 other sets of eyes on her. Remus started the backtrack, pretty piano sounds came from the phone. She followed the page in front of her, singing along when it was her turn, strangely James hadn’t sung along like Remus said, but she just assumed that it was his way of annoying her again. Another strange thing is that Remus didn’t stop her anytime to give her any tips, so she got through the whole song, before the music stopped, and the 7 of them sat in silence. Lily looked up to see a weird expression on Remus’s face, he looked almost scared. Lily looked around the circle, Marlene was smiling with her eyebrows raised, and Sirius was covering his mouth but by looking at his eyes you could see that he was struggling to keep in a laugh, Peter and Mary almost had matching expressions of horror, they seemed to be frozen in the process of switching paper plates, and James stared at her just as intently as before, this time his eyes were wide, his mouth apart.

“ …What?” She was able to shakily say. This seemed to snap everyone else back to reality real quick with Remus placing his phone on the floor in front of him, Sirius cackling, and James closing his mouth. Marlene just patted her on the shoulder like she was comforting her before shoving another piece of pizza in her mouth. Sirius continued to laugh and Remus shifted his expression to something more assuring, but his eyes gave off the impression that he was more worried than relieved.

“ It's fine, It’s fine. We didn’t exactly ask you if you had any singing experience prior to this, it's okay, we can work with this.” His repeating of these phrases sounded more like he was trying to reassure himself than Lily, he maniacally flipped through the pages of the booklet he took from Lily, and began writing notes with a nearby pen, which didn’t make Lily feel any better.

“ I don’t understand what's happening. Was it bad?” Lily said, a bit petrified that she had embarrassed herself in front of everyone. She had never really sung in front of people before, she hardly ever sang at all other than song choruses that got stuck in her head while she was studying. She knew she wasn’t exactly experienced, but she never thought she would be bad. At this moment Lily felt an urge to either puke into the nearest trash can or climb into a hole in the ground and never come out.

Remus looked back to answer her but unfortunately for him, Sirius got there first.

“ Have you ever heard crows shag?” Sirius said.

“ Padfoot,” Remus yelled, and threw a plastic fork at him from across the circle, just making him laugh even more as he dodged to the side.

“ Oh my god.” Lily just mumbled before putting her head in her hands, gaining a hand on her back from Marlene and a small “ It wasn’t that bad Lily” from Mary. Lily heard an unexpected voice pipe up from across the circle, making her look up.

“ I think you have the potential to be good…” James said, adjusting his glasses and pushing them up his face. At this Sirius who was still laughing stopped for a second, smiling and staring intently at James, who just glanced at him. After a moment of what seemed like some silent signal being exchanged, Sirius crossed his hands over his guitar, leaning forward and looking like some pompous supervillain.

“ You know what! James should tutor you!” He yelled, Mary gave a slight gasp and put her hand over her mouth.

“ Oh no I don’t think-” Lily responded, her heart pounding to the beat of her mind that was currently chanting no no no no no-

“ Football season is almost over anyway so I’d have the time,” James said. The bastard smiled at Lily like he was doing her a favor and not single-handedly ruining her life. Before Lily could even defend herself, the men sharing one mind had already decided for her.

“ With James teaching Lily, me and Moony can work more on finishing the music.” He said, his grin widening. At this, Remus just exhaled from his nose and mumbled.

“ We don’t have that much to finish, really we should be finished by now-” Sirius just cut him off by strumming down on his guitar.

“ Then it’s settled.” He then jumped up and asked Mary if they had any beer, before patting an amused James on the shoulder. Lily settled to lean her head back against the couch, once again trying to ignore James’s eyes.

***

Lily had been observing James Potter since the start of the production. She was put into a situation in which she was supposed to work with another person nearly impossible to work with so after one rehearsal she decided to try to figure out how to use that to her advantage. If the man changes lines, then Lily would just make it impossible to do so, if he referenced any sort of musical theater production Lily would feign cluelessness, she wanted him to hate her, she preferred for him to hate her.

You didn’t necessarily need cooperation to make something work, Lily had learned that the hard way. She was being paid for her competence so she just wished Potter would let her be competent. But no, she was never able to gain the reins on anything. The man was always one step ahead, from observation she had discovered that the man was some sort of mind reader, at least with most people. He seemed to know what to do to get Marlene to laugh, to get Remus to take a break, to get Sirius to go through the next step of whatever they were planning. Most frustratingly he knew how to make Lily angry. Marlene had giggled after she walked off the stage after a particular practice where she had to teach James some choreography she had been workshopping. Although it had been a solo number in which only James was supposed to dance, he had to manage to dip Lily several times.

“ I’ve never seen you that red before.” She had said, smiling. Lily had snapped back that it was from anger rather than any type of embarrassment.

Oh and if the man wasn’t so proud. Not only was he proud of himself by pissing Lily off at every turn but he was too proud to take any offense to his character. Lily had seen this first hand with her argument with him at the party but she had also seen it later in the way he took notes, arguing with Remus like him not iterating on things correctly was some “new interpretation” of the work, god it made Lily’s blood boil. He was also proud of his ideas, of love specifically. His proclamations of what love should be made Lily fume, it reminded her of her mother and her weakness for melodrama, Lily shivered when she realized that her mother and Potter would probably get along.

His main goal seemed to be to get Remus to change the ending of the musical, most recently joined by Sirius. This just resulted in Remus rattling off his usual responses of “ Maybe”, or “I’ll think about it”, which he seemed to do to avoid saying no, which he couldn't seem to do with his friends.

And now Lily was stuck totally out of her expertise, turns out she was rather shit at singing. She wallowed in the fact that she had to again hand her fate over to the moron but there was nothing else she could do. Mary was too busy and not familiar with the music to help her and despite Remus assuring her that he’d try to pop by when he didn’t have class it seemed like she would have to bend to Potter’s will. The thought sent a shiver up her spine.

She was set later that week to see Sev again for a rerun of “The Sixth Sense” in their local theater; she hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. They’d shared phone calls but Lily seemed to be run thin by her work with the show and school. Sev had seemed to consciously ignore how Lily was seemingly ramping up her amount of ballet classes, which was her usual excuse when she had practice over at the theater. It was kinda of like dancing, she was dancing at some of the practices, so an omniscient lie, which made Lily feel better since it seemed like that's what Sev was doing every time she tried to bring up Hogwarts.

Her investigation hadn’t ended, just a bit halted by the fact that she had been focused on other things. Based on her observations she had figured out that James, Sirius, and Peter all came from wealthy families, Remus being able to go to Hogwarts on the same academic scholarship Sev landed with the help of his father. Nothing new, unfortunately, what was new was the information she got from Potter at one rather late rehearsal.

“ Why do you keep calling him that?” Lily had asked, they left the theater, and James shut the big metal door as they walked into the alley. Remus and Sirius were far ahead of them, even so, Lily kept her voice quiet.

“ Call him what?”

“ You call Black your brother.”

“ How do you know he’s not my brother?” James said grinning cheekily. Lily raised an eyebrow, partly in question. I guess she didn’t necessarily know that they weren't related, she had just assumed they weren't because of their appearances. At Lily’s face, James laughed and kicked a pebble in the alley.

“ Nah, we're not related, I just call him that 'cause he’s been living with my family since we were 16. His mum’s Korean and his dad’s French, Pads always said his dad was some kind of prince but I always said that was bollocks-” And there he went, during the past few days James did this, rambling about himself. Lily couldn’t tell if it was something he did to fill the quiet or just his way of indulging in himself, but either way Lily just listened until he got distracted by something else.

With James’s response, Lily remembered back to their meeting in the cafe. The way Sirius bristled when Sev mentioned his family. Sirius’s behavior and general attitude made more sense through this lens, it was exactly like a kid acting out for his parent’s attention. What James said made it sound like he was kicked out, which concerned her a bit, she would have to see if she could get some answers from Remus later.

Also thinking back on the cafe meeting, Lily knew that Sirius and James were generally ready to fight with anyone insulting their intelligence, but Lily hadn’t ever known Sev to act like that. He always seemed to be afraid of confrontation, one time Lily had seen the man eat out a whole meal that was messed up instead of asking the waiter to take it back. Back in the cafe, it was like he had morphed into a different person.

Lily had never reveled in instigating but as she was at the end of her boat being months in with no progress, she told Sev to meet her after her shift at the diner the same time she was working with Remus. She hoped that he would at least be smarter than his friends and not try to start a fight but she packed pepper spray in her bag just in case.
At 7:00 pm when Lily was finishing up carrying bags from a storage truck to the pantry successfully all by herself. She was spacing out looking at the clock while listening to Moody ramble on about a run-in with a burglar trying to break into his house when Lily heard the bells ring from the front door. Sev is always right on time, Remus being at the front counter was immediately greeted with a scoff. Lily excused herself from the bizarre conversation with Moody and pressed her ear up against the kitchen doors, which earned a snort from the cook behind her.

“ Oh. Severus.” Lily heard Remus’s soft tone pipe up from the kitchen.

“ Lupin,” Severus said venomously.

“ What can I do for you?”

Didn’t seem like it was going too bad, Lily thought, but Remus tended to be polite with everyone no matter how evil, that is except when it came to his friends. But polite didn’t give Lily information, so she continued to listen.

“ Are you meeting Lily? I think she should be off by now.” Remus said, Sev grunted in response.

There was an awkward silence. Someone coughed.

“ So how’ve you been?”

Okay, that was Lily’s cue to intervene, she already changed out of her work clothes, so she walked out to the front to where the two men were standing awkwardly. Sev looked rapidly between them and the exit, he was bluntly answering Remus’s question, voice low an octave, like he was trying to act intimidating.

“ Fine.” He said before turning his attention toward Lily as she stood beside him. She looked between the two men, trying to morph her eyes into something of ignorance.

“ Do you two know each other?” Lily asked and Sev just grunted in response.

“ We went to the same school,” Remus asked, a strange look in his eyes as he continued to smile. By now this should been something both of them knew, if the cafe incident got back to Remus by now, he would of course already know that Lily was friends with Sev. He seemed to be on a similar page as Lily, as he feigned ignorance.

“ Oh, how fun!” Lily piped up, she hoped to get a telling response from either Remus or Sev from this but Sev just grunted again, Remus crinkled his eyes some more and tilted his head.

“ We should get going,” Severus said, pulling Lily out of the diner, and with that they were gone, leaving out the diner doors.

***

“ If you had to talk to any dead person who would it be,” Severus said as they walked out of the theater that evening.

“ My mum,” Lily said immediately.

“ Lily. You could talk to anyone.” He raised her eyebrows at her, Lily laughed a bit.

“ I don't know, I’d want to let her know how I’m doing, how Pet is doing, how my dad is.” Her friend just shook his head.

“ So sentimental.” He scoffed.

Lily noticed that her friend’s body language had gotten more closed off, his responses to her conversation being more stilted. Lily ignored it, waiting for him to bring it up. From experience, Lily hadn’t been able to ask Sev about school without him just closing up again, so she decided the best course of action would just be to allow him to talk about it when he felt like it. She had been in the middle of complaining about something her ballet instructor said when he had decided to finally open up.

“ How long has Lupin worked there?” He asked, throwing away his ticket in a nearby garbage can. They were walking on the empty London streets. It seemed to have rained while they were in the theater, Lily had to dodge a puddle before answering his question.

“ Well, before me, and before Marlene, so I’m guessing for a while.” She said.

“ You haven’t mentioned him before.” He squinted a bit at Lily, studying her face. She sweated a bit.

“ Well, there's nothing much to mention” Lily shrugged, Sev’s demeanor didn’t seem to change.

“ Are you close?”

“ Oh, um- not really…?” Weird question, Lily thought. She thought about the amount of time she had spent with Remus in the past weeks, it was a lot but they didn’t really get that close, at least not as close as she was with Sev or Marlene and Mary. They got along well but Lily still had her guard up, mostly because she didn’t know where she stood with him, considering the situation and history with Severus.

“ You seem close.” Sev sniffed, the air was cold, and Lily shuddered.

“ He’s a nice guy, there's only really him and Marlene so I see him a lot,” Lily said, she watched Sev’s face for a reaction, as he continued to walk on the street beside her. She decided to take a risk. “ He’s nice, but he’s friends with Potter and them so…” Lily stopped in the road, looking at her friend.

“ That’s why it was so weird earlier right?” She then put her hand on her friend's shoulder, trying to support him a bit because he seemed to struggle more with walking as they talked.

“ We went to Hogwarts on the same scholarship, me and him.”

“ Yeah, he mentioned,” Lily spoke softly, she treaded carefully. Her friend's eyes started to dart around the road in front of them, he only really got this way whenever he talked about his father so Lily assumed that it was about to tread on some bad territory. “ Sev, did something happen back at school? You can tell me.” At this, he looked at her, and then he was back at his feet, as continued to walk. Lily was mostly stunned at first so she ran to catch up to him, splashing in a small puddle, and getting her socks a bit wet.

“ Potter and them, their pratts, all of them. Complete imbeciles.” He spat out, he was walking making a stomping noise every time he put his foot down.

“ Sev-”

“ I know you like to take in these sort of-” He gestured around Lily with his hands. “- delinquents” He spat out, the word filled with venom. “ But you have to trust me, don’t associate with them, Black almost got expelled our 6th year.” When he said this, his eyes grew darker. At this point they had made it to the tube underground, standing on the platform. Lily just stared at him.

“ Alright.” She said, her voice quiet.

***

The next day was Lily’s first tutoring session with James, after some initial discussion, they decided that James would come over to their flat after Lily’s morning class. She had caught the man standing in front of their door, fist hovering in front of the door… but not knocking.

“ Potter.” He jumped when Lily spoke, looking at her like a deer in the headlights.

“ Evans! Hi! I was just-”

Before he could finish Lily cut him off, opening the door and leaving it open behind her. “Uh-huh.” She mumbled.

She walked into the kitchen where Mary was leaning up against their counter reading a cookbook that Lily had gotten her for Christmas last year, beside her sat a carton of eggs.

“ What are you making?” Lily said, opening the fridge beside her to grab a ginger ale. Mary grinned.

“ French Toast.” She then noticed James who had just now walked into the kitchen and her grin widened. “ Jamie!”

“ Macdonald.” He said, matching Mary’s expression, he leaned against their kitchen table, one hand planted on the surface. Lily rolled her eyes before closing the fridge door with a slam.

“ We’ll be in my room. Try not to burn the flat down.” She said, heading toward her room, taking her ginger ale and Potter behind her. “ Ha ha.” She heard Mary say from the kitchen, and James snorted.

“ I like your flat. It’s homey.” He said before walking into Lily’s room after her.

“ If you mean small, then yeah it is,” Lily stated, sitting down on her bed. He stood there awkwardly and looked around before seeing the annoyed expression on Lily’s face.

“ You can sit.” She said, making the man’s eyebrows rise, he then sat opposite her on her bed. He continued to look around and smile, while Lily sat her ginger ale on the bedside table next to them.

“ You sure have a thing for flowers.” He said, Lily looked at the goofy expression on his face and turned to take out the sheet music Remus had given her from her table drawer.

“ Well, my dad’s a florist.” Not only a florist but also a fanatic for any sort of flower memorabilia, along with a different type of postcard from her hometown, her father loved to send her and her sister anything flower-related that wasn’t already a flower itself. Some examples around her room were the quilt that she had brought from home that had tulips across the front, candles, a lamp sitting on her bedside table, and most egregiously, printed floral wallpaper he had brought when he helped her move in. This not even including the flowers in pots and vases that Lily had collected by her windowsill, combined with Lily’s ballet stuff scattered everywhere her room looked like a little girl’s dream. Marlene used to say that walking into Lily’s room made her eyes strain.

James just hummed and smiled in response, still looking wistfully around the room.

“ What is it,” Lily said, in response to James’s strange expression.

“ It’s just not what I expected.” He said.

“ What?”

“ Your room. It’s so girly, and you're so… prickly.”

“ Flowers can be prickly.” She said defensively.

“ Of course.” He grinned and Lily became self-conscious for a second and moved to change the subject, flipping through her book.

“So I thought we could just spend this session learning the basics.” She said, snapping James’s attention back to her.

“ Oh yeah.”

“ I’ll teach you how to sight read some, so you're not totally lost.” He snorted as he flipped through the book he took out of the backpack he was wearing.

They went on for the next 20 minutes like that, James going through what certain notes meant, when to breathe, etc, a lot of it not involving actually singing, which was a relief to Lily who wasn’t in a rush to embarrass herself again. At some point, James turned to the duet she had sung earlier in the week and grinned.

“ Have you choreographed any of this one yet?” James said, Lily leaned over to look at it.

“ I have a few ideas, Sirius hasn’t passed along the track yet so I haven’t been able to come up with anything concrete yet,” Lily said and grew nervous as James’s grin widened, he waved his phone in his hand.

“ I have the track. How about we practice?”

“ Oh, I don’t know, we don’t really have a lot of room.”

“Then we’ll move to the living room.” He clasped his hands together. “ I keep tripping up at practice, I could really use the help.” This tripping up is more of just ignoring Lily’s instructions in favor of doing something idiotic. Lily looked at him and sighed. They moved to the living room, pushing back some furniture for more room. Mary peered at them through the kitchen and then put her attention back on her french toast frying in her pan after grinning wickedly. They stood together in the middle of the room, James played the track from his phone.

It was one of the first songs in the show, a duet in the woods a bit after the first meeting, the werewolf finally caves to the wizard’s advances and that's when the romance really starts. Lily thought back to the scenes after and before she and James had practiced, and the lyrics that Remus had gone over with her briefly. The song was mostly from the werewolf’s point of view, Remus has said that it focused on the idea of letting love in, Lily had suggested a partnered dance break near the end, but she hadn’t really had time to actually practice it, with her partner being insufferable and all.

“ So the key here is your support.” She took James’s hand in hers and his eyebrows shot up. She laughed inwardly, as his face got more red as she guided his hand to lay on her back.

“ This is where they begin to trust each other, so I’m going to move and you need to just make sure I don’t fall.”

“ Whatever you say, Evans.” He smiled his hand tensing on her back.

“ Just follow me.” She said and he nodded.

She kept his hand on her back as she turned around the room, he kept her eyes on hers, and Lily kept her eyes on his, mostly to signal if he was doing something wrong. She lifted her eyebrows before dipping low, James jumped moving his other hand to her back, almost dropping her. They stood there for a moment, James cradling her in the air.

“ James.”

“ Oh right.” He lifted her again, she cherished the scared look on his face and continued. She tried to turn again and was rewarded with a hard stomp from James on her left foot.

“ James!”

“ Sorry!”

“ Just pay attention to where my feet are going,” Lily said, trying not to yell. James muttered an affirmative and shifted his sight from Lily to their feet. As they continued James would shift his eyesight from her feet to Lily and then nervously back down again. She had to repeatedly take the man’s hand to guide him. Lily had expected to have to guide him through it but she didn’t expect to have to teach him so much.

In a move to move out, hands intertwined, Lily moved to step back and instead of mirroring her James moved to spin her out, making Lily trip over his foot, bringing them both to the ground, a pile of limbs.

“ James I swear to god!” Despite her yell, her dance partner just chuckled while lying over her.

“ Sorry.” He said, his hands placed on either side of her. Lily tried to not focus on the weight on her and pushed James up by his shoulder, they sat across from each other on the carpeted ground.

“ This isn’t acting, you can’t just decide to change something whenever you feel like it.” Her voice and blood rising.

“ Whatever you say.” He said, getting back on his feet.

“ You need to take this seriously.” The man only smiled and nodded. Lily had to keep herself from bursting into flames. For the sake of the show, she decided that she would sit through one more practice, and then kick this guy out.

Lily started up the music again, a beautiful mix of piano and what sounded like a violin making her feet want to move. She used the hand on her back to guide him throughout the room, some being what Lily choreographed earlier, some just being made up on the spot. James didn’t take his eyes off her once, faltering a bit whenever Lily tried to push him into uneasy territory.

She cradled her arms around his shoulders for a moment, and maybe because she felt like messing with him or some other unthinkable reason, looking into his eyes she lifted herself in the air.

Surprisingly she didn’t fall, arms wrapped around her waist, James spun her mid-air before letting her feet hit the ground.

The music had stopped, and they stood in the small living room, Lily could hear her breathing.

“ I had to learn how to waltz when I was younger.” He said, in response to whatever embarrassing expression Lily was holding on her face. She cleared her throat awkwardly.

“ Important life skill to teach your kids.” She said sarcastically, a little out of breath, James gave out a small laugh.

“ My parents thought so.”

“ Your parents sound wonderful.” She said trying to get her thoughts in order.

“ They are.” He smiled adjusting his glasses that were made more wonky due to the dancing, and Lily melted a bit, she averted her eyes. She quickly moved back over to flip through her booklet that she left on their couch, leaving James standing alone in the middle of the living room.

“Maybe I’ll take you one day.”

“ Where?” She looked back to where James was standing, grinning, hands on hips.

“ Ballroom dancing.” He said, Lily let out a laugh of disbelief.

“ Yeah sure, and then later we can go salsa dancing.”

“ If you want to.” Despite herself Lily laughed again, just making James smile bigger.

“ Well, thank you for this,” She said after catching her breath.

“ Yeah, of course, it was the least I could do, y’know as your co-lead.” He said, smiling a smile that made Lily’s insides lurch. “ We can tackle your breath control more next time,” James said, swinging his hands back and forth, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“ It’s alright, I should be able to get a handle on the rest by the next rehearsal.” Lily closed her booklet.

“ But you don’t know the rest, I’m supposed to teach you.” He stopped moving, and his brows furrowed.

“ You really don’t have to. I’ll just ask Mary if I need any help.”

“ Mary doesn’t know the music.” He walked closer to Lily from the couch.

“ Mary has been singing since primary school.” She waved her book for emphasis. “ I took notes, I'll be fine.”

“ So have I, and I know the music so it would be better-”

“ It would be better if I just learned the rest by myself.”

“ Lily, you can’t learn anything if you don’t let me teach it to you-”

“ I don't need your help, Potter.” Venom accompanied her voice. At this James deflated, sitting completely still, his eyes widened.

“ Alright.” He said in a small voice.

At that moment Mary poked her head back around the corner, Lily had almost forgotten that she was there.

“ Fancy a French toast break?” She grinned awkwardly. James moved to sling his bag around his shoulder.

“ I should really get going.” As he said this he glanced at Lily quickly.

“Then I’ll just put some in a Tupperware for you.”

“ Well.” James smiled and they both moved towards the kitchen, leaving Lily in the living room with her sheet music. Lily smoothed her fingers over the notes on the sheet music, rereading the notes she marked with a green pen, hearing Mary giggle from the kitchen.

“ I’m gonna have to give you all the rejects if you don’t mind.” She heard Mary say.

“That's fine, Sirius will basically eat anything,” James said, and then after another moment, their front door closed. With James gone Lily moved to grab another ginger ale from the fridge, she had finished her other one. As she closed the fridge door she was met with Mary standing with a frustrated expression on her face.

“ I don’t want to hear it,” Lily said.

“ Lily.”

“ He’s infuriating Mary! I can’t be relying on him for everything, I’ll go insane.” In response, Mary just shook her head and turned back to where she was plating the rest of the French toast.

“ Seems like you're already going insane,” Mary said.

“ Probably,” Lily said back.

Chapter Text

Hogwarts was a civilized but loud place. Founded in the early 1900s, Hogwarts was meant to give the children of the acclaimed and wealthy a place to prosper. Through the years it continued to take in many children around the United Kingdom. It even opened its doors to the less fortunate of families, which is why Remus Lupin was standing in the school’s hallway at 10 pm trying to pick a lock to their headmaster’s office.

“It’s not opening,” Remus said before giving up, he could hear all his friends groan behind him. Sirius took the bobby pin and pushed past him. “Lemme try.” He said before jiggling it aggressively in the keyhole. Remus got up and stood beside James and Peter, Peter was shaking and repeatedly looking over his shoulder, while James’s brows were furrowing. Sirius was crouched down and the noises that were coming from his aggressive assault of the lock just got louder as he continued.

“ We should just give up before Filch catches us.” Peter whimpered, this caused Sirius to grunt loudly and then pop up from where he was crouching like a whack-a-mole.

“We're not giving up, because if we give up then we lose.” He said, holding his right hand flat and banging into it with his fist.

“ Most importantly, we lose to them,” James said, hand on Peter’s shoulder, shaking him slightly.

“ A fate worse than death,” Remus said unemotionally.

“ Don’t be snarky Moons, we're doing this for you,” Sirius said, waving him off.

“ I never asked you to.”

“ And yet you're still here,” Sirius said, grinning, which made his heart flip. The hallways were dark due to the time, since Sirius and James had spent an hour after getting their items confiscated convincing Remus and Peter to break into Dumbledore’s office.

“ So what do we do?” Sirius said, looking at Remus pointedly.

“ I don’t know, you got us into this mess, you figure it out.”

“ What!” He yelled, realizing he was standing in a dark hallway, and shifted to whispering, “ No it's not.”

“ Kinda is Pads,” James said, smirking, and pushing his glasses up his nose. Since it was late at night they were all wearing pajamas, so James was wearing checkered patterned pajama pants with Rudolph on them.

“ If you never pissed off Malfoy and Snape then we wouldn’t be here trying to get the stuff back.” He jerked his head over to the door, and Sirius just huffed in defeat. He then looked around, making an adorable expression that conveyed that he was unfortunately thinking. He then snapped his fingers.

“ We go through the window.” His eyes twinkled and Remus kicked himself for finding it endearing.

They made their way outside, the crescent moon twinkling in the air, the summer air giving a slight wind. Remus could feel the muddy ground move beneath his feat as they walked across the school’s courtyard.

“ We’ll slip in, get the fireworks and get out.” Sirius was walking with James in front of Remus and Peter, he turned around and walked backward as he talked. He made corresponding hand movements as he blathered on, acting like a spy introducing a plan to assassinate the prime minister, even though he was whispering Remus bet that the birds sleeping up in the trees could still hear him.

“ And stick them down Snivellus’s pants,” James said, looking back over his shoulder before stopping and jabbing Sirius in the shoulder.

“ It’s a foolproof plan if I do say so myself.” He said, attention towards Remus who was just standing with his arms crossed.

“ Pads.” He started shaking Sirius's shoulder now, and the shaking got more aggressive, basically throwing Sirius around, Remus and Peter stood by perplexed.

“ What?!” He exclaimed back, James wordlessly pointed up making the rest of the boys look up.

What they saw was Dumbledore’s office window, which seemed to be about 3 stories up from where they were standing on the ground. Peter squeaked in fear.

“ Well, bollocks,” Sirius stated, resting his hands on his hips.

“ We're doomed!” Peter yelled out, which earned a “ Breathe Wormtail”, from James. Sirius tapped James as he tried to comfort Peter and pointed to the school wall.

“ Put me on your shoulders.” He said, and with the two boys sharing the same brain, James grinned before nodding excitedly. Remus stood nearby watching them wondering how he could prevent himself from falling asleep in history the next morning. Picking on a string coming undone from his sweater, he looked around. Being a rich boarding school Hogwarts had dumped pounds of money into foliage and landscaping, but because of their headmaster’s habit of acquiring weird decorations around the school, he had invested in a gigantic willow tree that sat just beside his office window. Remus looked at the tree and plotted a course in his head.

“ Somebody should climb the willow.” He said, looking up at the branches above them.

“ Huh?” James said as he was trying to hoist Sirius up on his shoulders and failing. Peter nearby copied Remus by looking up, a confused look on his face.

“ The branches reach right beside the window, get in that way.”

“ Like by climbing…?”

“ Yeah, I used to do it all the time back home.” Remus looked down and saw his friend’s perplexed faces. “Don’t tell me you’ve never climbed a tree before.” They then looked at each other and then back at Remus.

“ Wasn’t ever allowed to,” Sirius said, James and Peter, both shook their heads. Remus frowned, when he suggested it he wasn’t really expecting to be the one climbing. He hadn’t really climbed any trees since he was little, and his parents didn’t really let him do that kind of stuff after the 5th visit to the emergency room, because of that he was hardly athletic, not even mentioning the time of night catching up to him, making his eyes and limbs tired. Despite this James grinned cheekily, making Remus frown more since he could expect what was coming.

“ Then Moony can climb up, open the window, and let us in from the inside!” He said. Peter looked rapidly between the two of them and Sirius cackled. Before Remus could protest James was off, dragging along Peter who seemed to be even more scared than before. Remus looked at the tree and plotted his course of action, before lifting one foot to a divot in the tree, he then heard a laugh come from his side.

“ What are you looking at?” He said to Sirius who was standing by the willow and looking at Remus with an expression that Remus couldn’t read.. He was wearing one of Remus’s sweaters over his pajamas and had seemed to tie his hair up earlier to prepare himself from getting on his friend's shoulder. Since he was staring at Remus like that and Remus was in a slightly embarrassing position, he couldn’t help it when his face started to redden, he hoped that Sirius couldn’t see in the dark.

“ Nothing~” The boy slightly sang, highlighting his annoyingly great singing voice that made Remus’s knees weak. Which was to his disadvantage due to the fact that he needed to be able to rely on the strength of his knees, so he fell a bit down on the tree making Sirius laugh again before trotting away.

He continued up the tree, almost falling a couple of times because of his too long limbs. Once up near the window he climbed the longer branch to the window sill, shuffling along, his legs dangling. If he was caught now Remus didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to get down, as he got closer to the window he struggled not to look down. Thankfully he was able to haul the window open, and slide awkwardly into the headmaster’s office. He tiptoed quietly to the door and opened it to the three stooges standing behind, grinning.

“Moony the monkey!” Sirius yelled, he was then shushed by the rest of them as they stepped into the office.

“ If I was an old fart like Dumbledore where would I keep all the fun stuff?” James mumbled as he opened and closed cabinets on the wall, gingerly closing each one in order to not make any noise. They continued to look around the room, Remus making his way to close the window he had opened.

“ Was it scary?” Suddenly Sirius appeared at his side. Remus just punched him in the arm, “ No.” he grumbled back. The window was right behind the headmaster’s large cedar desk that stood in the back of the room, elevated. Remus went to open the drawers in them as Sirius snickered behind him. Closing the drawers slowly and quietly he opened a large drawer on the left side of the desk closest to the floor, he tried and failed, the drawer did not open, there was a small lock on the front.

“ Huh. Over here.” Remus stood by looking around for a key while his friends gathered around him at the desk. They looked down at the drawer and then all simultaneously joined Remus in peering around the room.

In a book that Remus had finished during one of James’s football practices, a detective was able to unearth a secret room with a key discovered in a fake book, one of those books that were hollow in the middle, but what type of book would Dumbledore hide a key in? The man was definitely obsessed with fantasy, with his bizarre outfits and also his love for nerdy memorabilia. The only thing stopping him from making the school look like an average comic convention was their vice principal and the parent board. How he was able to become the headmaster of such a prestigious boarding school they will never know.

So Remus walked up to the large bookshelf covering more than half of the room, it winded all around the room, going as high as the ceiling. His friends watched curiously as he went through and looked for L in the alphabetical order their headmaster had seemed to put the books in. Eventually, he happened upon Fellowship of the Ring, and on a whim he opened it, and surprisingly he was right. The book was hollow and in the middle sat a drawer key, he picked it up, set the book back, and walked back to the desks where his friends sat, gobsmacked.

“ Moony, you're a genius!” James called out, before being shushed by Sirius and Peter.

“ I just guessed.” He shrugged and put the key into the large drawer, and upon opening they were faced with a barrage of different items piled on top of each other. James went excitedly down on his knees and began to go through the pile.

“ Look.” James grinned, he was holding up a small plastic baggy holding a small amount of pot in it. Sirius chuckled, and Remus could see Peter grow more paranoid. “ Get the fireworks and let's go!” He whispered.

James turned back to the drawer and mumbled, “ Alright Alright,” before happening upon the fireworks and pulling them out with a flourish. Peter clapped silently and they headed back towards the door. Remus kneeled down to the drawer, seeing something familiar that he had confiscated unfairly when Malfoy was searching through their room, the prefect seemed to want to confiscate anything to make the Marauders mad, and so Remus lost one of his prized possessions, and the others the fireworks. He snatched it and was able to awkwardly fit it in the front pocket of his sweatpants. Sirius was still standing behind him and eyed him warily before they both walked behind the others. Remus put the key back and they carefully closed the office door. They walked quietly back down the hallway, Sirius prancing in front of them waving around the fireworks.

“ How ‘bout we set them off tonight, maybe we can have Moony set them off near the Slytherin dorms! Out by that tree by the lake.” He said way too loud.

“Keep it down.” Remus shushed him. “You’d have to kill me before making me do that again.” This earned an “aww”, from James and Sirius. Sirius did the equivalent of what Remus would only imagine what someone trying to mimic puppy dog eyes would look like, Remus just squinted his eyes back in return.

“ But you were so good at it,” Sirius said.

“ Anyone can climb a tree, Pads,” Remus responded.

“ I can’t.”

“ Your posh arse is the exception.”

“ I’m not posh.”

“ You are.”

“ Am not.”

“ Sirius, on the first day of school you asked where the salad fork was.”

“ I don’t see how that's posh.”

“ Normal people don’t usually use specific forks for different foods.”

“ Well, that's just nasty.”

“ See!” At this, Remus gestured to James and Peter who were just watching with tired expressions.

“ Well, at least I have manners.”

“ I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“ Really?”

“ Really.”

“ Well-” Sirius started but was cut off when Remus shushed him loudly, hearing something come from the opposite end of the sprawling hallway.

“ His wolf senses are tingling,” Sirius smirked before Remus shushed him again.

“ Shut up!” He whisper yelled, before the sound got louder, someone slowly came into view. They all scattered, Remus because of his bickering with Sirius was stuck with them trying to hide in a shadow beneath a nearby staircase. Across the hall, James and Peter were stuck hiding behind the corner of the hallway wall. The source of the sound was revealed to belong to Filch and his heavy boots, being followed behind by Mrs. Norris. Right before he passed Remus heard a shuffle and a curse, it seemed that Peter had almost knocked over a potted plant on the side of the wall. Filch stopped, he sharply turned around, looking around the hallway. Mrs. Norris, being behind him, turned her little cat's head toward where Remus and Sirius were taking cover below. She slowly sauntered up, sniffing the air as she stopped before where Remus and Sirius were crouched down. Remus could hear Sirius’s breathing begin to become more shallow as the cat continued to get closer. And just when Remus was saying his prayers Filch let out a shriek from the other side of the hall.

“ POTTER!”

“ Shit!” James yelled and both he and Peter ran off with Filch behind them, Mrs. Norris quickly followed. Sirius let out an exhale before sitting down on the ground.

“ We should head back around, and see if we can save them before they pass the dorms,” Remus said, remaining standing.

“ Alright.” Sirius said back, letting out a low laugh that made his heart flutter embarrassingly.

“This whole thing has become such a mess.” Remus sighed.

“ Anything for our Moony,” Sirius said, smirking, his eyes twinkled a bit. Remus groaned, they began to walk down the other side of the hall, seeing if they could take one of their discovered shortcuts through the school to get to James and Peter before Filch could.

“ Do me a favor and don’t get carried away with this whole thing.”

“ Carried away?” Sirius said, like he didn’t know what the words meant.

“ Yeah, don’t get yourself expelled or anything.”

“ You mean don’t get caught.”

“ I mean I guess, but I just-” Remus stopped walking. “ Don’t get in too much trouble for my sake.” Sirius stopped walking, he turned back, they now approached the hall with the windows, the outside moonlight highlighted his pitch-dark hair, lying just below his shoulders.

“ Moony.” He said quietly, he wasn’t smiling anymore and it made him nervous.

“ Just promise me ok?”

“ But-”

“ Promise me.” He said adamantly. Sirius stopped, looking at him.

“ Whatever you say, Moony.”

They walked in silence for a few more minutes before Sirius spoke up.

“ Hey, Moony.”

“ Yeah?”

“What did you put in your pocket earlier?”

“ Oh.” He took out the small carving from his pocket, it had grown smaller as he grew bigger. Just sitting a bit larger on his palm was the wolf carving his mother had given him before leaving for Hogwarts. As he held it out, Sirius peered at it curiously.

“ My mum made it.” He smiled and looked up to see Sirius studying him.

“ What?” Sirius jumped, supposedly taken out of his trance by this question.

“ Nothing! Your mum seems nice.” He mumbled.

“ Yeah, she is.” Remus peered at Sirius’s expression, he was smiling but he could tell that it was more out of melancholy. Remus looked at the carving in his hand and thought of his mom's smile, the way her eyes lit up whenever he walked off the train at the end of the year. Sirius was now wringing his hands as Remus sat there in silence. He peered at the way Sirus’s nails were almost blunt down to the skin, a habit he seemed to have picked up on, sometimes they would get so dull that he would have to wrap bandages around them. The boy said that he picked at them because it was better for guitar playing, but Remus always noticed that the habit got the worst whenever he was awaiting a letter from home. Along with the nails and the calluses that lined his palms from said guitar, Sirius’s hands were quite the sight for sore eyes. Despite that, Remus always felt his eyes drift to them during lessons unconsciously. Today Sirius had both a bandaid on his pointer and thumb and he picked at them as Remus looked, the moonlight from the outside and the small lights in the hall being the only thing illuminating the two of them.

Slowly and quietly Remus took the wolf carving and slowly placed it in Sirius's hands and closed his fingers around it. They looked at each other, Sirius’s eyebrows tilting upward.

“ Keep it.” He said timidly.

“ I can’t-” Sirius protested, opening his fingers back up and looking at it before looking back at Remus.

“ I want you to have it.” He said, breaking eye contact since his heart seemed to rapidly beating.

“ Thank you..” Sirius mumbled so quietly that if it wasn’t for the quietness of the hallway, Remus wouldn’t have heard it.

“ No problem Pads.”

***

When he was younger, he alongside his friends were known among Hogwarts staff to be nefarious troublemakers, and even when Remus made prefect his 5th year and James head boy their 7th, they were given detention regularly and gave each teacher a headache whenever they came into class.

Now here Remus was as a full-grown adult, commuting to and from the school to live out his dream of becoming what his friends once despised.

Not saying that when he told his friends about his life plan they were necessarily upset, neither was it much of a surprise. Remus had made it his part-time job at school to tutor other students, and teachers often told him how helpful he was in helping others understand the material. He had always enjoyed being the one being relied on. When he wasn’t helping his friends with homework, or in the medical bay, he was studying, so with recommendations from teachers he had a clear path to Phoenix for a degree in education, and later a teaching position at Hogwarts. Cause thats how things were when you had acclimated yourself into the posh society of the upper class like Remus seemingly had.

Despite doing the student teaching gig he still wasn’t sold on the idea of teaching at his old school, McGonagall and Pomfrey had been no less than thrilled to see him there, but the idea of being so far away from London got him depressed. He couldn’t imagine not waking up in his room in his friend’s flat every day.

He enjoyed the job, it made his dad happy to say the least, and a secure job meant that he would get good health care and be able to live longer, which was really the only thing Lyall cared about. That or he would be shipped away to a hospice.

So here he was, running himself thin in between a student teaching at a place around 2 hours away and constant musical rehearsal.

He leaned his head on the window sill of the train window next to him, his head ached and his eyes drooped, and all he wanted to do was go home and do the work his job had assigned to him, but due to his insistence to still not to tell Sirius about his situation he was stuck doing this until the show opened.

So he toughed it out. And every time Sirius scheduled a rehearsal for after “ Remus’s swot days,” he just smiled and nodded as he ignored James' concerned glances. Thankfully he didn’t have student teaching every day, and they gave him a pretty flexible schedule so he was able to make most rehearsals, if not late, his excuse of “ traffic” had worked well so far. He had given the impression to Sirius that the place was just an hour away by car, and that he had been borrowing Mary’s in order to get there every Tuesday and Thursday, as old and barely working as the car was. Every rehearsal he walked in, run ragged from a tired school day and long train ride, but despite that he kept going and the sight of Sirius’s smile that spread whenever Remus walked in didn’t make it any better.

God, he was weak, not only physically but also mentally. He’d been suffering the consequences of this crush since primary and this was when he was really feeling the weight of it. He would break under the pressure eventually, soon his friend would discover the inspiration behind his writing and feel disgusted, promptly ending their friendship. So sue him if he just wanted to enjoy this a little while longer.

He stepped off the train and took the tube to a bookstore nearby campus where he said he would meet Lily. It was small, off to the corner, and easily missable, they had decided to meet there when Lily had mentioned it in passing and they had realized that they both frequented it a lot, due to the fact that its supply was filled with used items, making them significantly cheaper.

He walked into the store, bookshelves stood high, practically falling over, using his height to his advantage he surveyed the store easily, and made his way to where he saw bright red hair. She was over in the law section, reading a book with another tucked in her armpit, her hair was in a tight ponytail like always, and she was wearing a loose collared shirt like always, with a long skirt almost down to her heels. She lifted her head from where she was reading and looked him over like he was a criminal she was about to defend.

“ You made it.”

“ I did.” He said. Her eyes studied his face before shutting the book she was reading and placing it on the shelf.

“ You look terrible.”

“ Teaching will do that to you.” He shrugged. She seemed to not want to pry, which was one of the things he liked about Lily, she was always straight to the point, preferring logical answers to emotional ones.

“ Come with me, I want to show you something.” She said before walking towards the back of the store. As they squeezed through shelves, Lily looked back over her shoulder and they reached a bookcase that was all the way in the back, the cramped corner of the bookshop was illuminated only by a single light bulb placed above them on the ceiling. She smirked at him as she stopped before the bookshelf “Have you been over here?” She said,

“ No. I usually only come here for textbooks.” He responded, taking a small thin booklet from the shelf.

“ Me too, but I decided to explore the dance section a couple of days ago and stumbled upon it.” She gestured to the bookshelf, her arm swishing gracefully up and down, even her mannerisms carried the gratefulness of a dancer. Remus looked at the booklet he had taken from the shelf. It was faded yellow from age and on the cover was a picture of a man and a woman from a famous painting, their legs more realistic like they were cut out from a magazine. Remus could recognize that picture anywhere, he opened the booklet to reveal sheet music from every song from Sunday in the Park with George in all its beauty. He let out an amazed and quiet, “Wow”, before looking back at the shelf. There seemed to be tons of other sheet music there, along with memoirs and movie scripts. Lily, who seemed to be searching the same section as him, held up a booklet with a bright red cover and big black lettering. She grinned cheekily, and at that moment Remus thought maybe she was spending too much time with James and he had rubbed off on her.

“ Remus look.” Recognizing the cover, Remus suddenly had flashbacks of a white dress and pitching his voice high while his friends laughed at him, he shivered.

“ Please don’t tell me that James told you.”

“ You bet he did, Maria my dear.”

Lily laughed and Remus groaned before taking the booklet and flipping through it, Lily peering over his shoulder. He settled on looking at the music for Somewhere, he smoothed his fingers over the music as he read the lyrics beneath. He hadn’t meant to, but somehow he found himself singing softly out loud.

“ Peace and quiet and open air.”

“Wait for us, somewhere~” Lily had begun singing the next line beside him. Remus looked at her and smiled.

“ You're getting better.” He said, Lily just rolled her eyes.

“ Thanks.” She said, crossing her arms over her chest. According to James, the first tutoring session didn’t exactly go the way he intended. “ No no this is a good idea! They spend more time together, they bond, and before we know it they're basically shagging on stage!” Sirius had said, like some kind of evil genius. Remus thought that it was a good idea in theory, it would be beneficial for their two leads to be at least,friendly, then being at each other's throats constantly. But the first session apparently went nowhere, and when asked, James just said that they clashed creatively, whatever that meant. He had asked Sirius, who James usually confided in, but was just given a shake of his head and a shrug. Remus planned to push the two to have another session when he had the energy to. He and Sirius couldn’t spend any more time editing songs to be more suitable for their lead who apparently couldn’t sing.

They made their way out of the bookstore, buying the West Side Story booklet for 7 pounds, and started walking to the theater for rehearsal. Remus was feeling more chilly than usual since he had to wear a tie for his job, and it was also partly constricting his breath intake, irritating him. Lily noticed him fiddling with it and smiled.

“ You clean up nice.”

“ Very funny.” He said, Lily snorted. In order to gather information but also just to get her back, he asked about the tutor sessions.

“ One is enough, I don’t think I can stand anymore.” She said, kicking dead leaves that scattered the ground.

“ Aw c’mon. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“ It was, he’s just so insistent that he knows everything,” Lily said. Remus didn’t say that technically he did know everything in her situation, since the girl very evidently didn’t know anything about music, but he kept his mouth shut. Lily then sharply pointed at him.

“ Don’t tell him I said this.”

“ Don’t worry, this is nothing he hasn’t already heard before.” At this, Lily laughed and looked at his dark circles again.

“ Have you finished the last ballad yet?”

“ Ugh, don’t remind me,” Remus grumbled, he felt a headache come on.

“ What?”

“ It should be finished, it's just that Sirius suddenly decided that he wanted to be the one to write the lyrics, and he hasn’t made any progress.”

“Huh.” Lily tilted her head when they stopped at the corner to wait for the street light to tell them to cross. “ He’s been way more involved lately hasn’t he.”

“ Well, he’s been going to rehearsal so that's new,” Remus said spitefully, but Lily was right, on top of Remus having to go back and forth for work, Sirius had been more insistent on being involved in everything. When they first started up the musical they decided to split responsibilities between the four of them, Remus the writing, Sirius the music, James the acting, and Pete the stage. But with Remus doing the writing and Sirius the music, they had ended up working together more than he had expected, but even then he hadn’t Sirius showing up at the diner with different lyrics he had come up with, that was usually Remus’s job. And showing up at the diner was one thing, the most Sirius ever did was get his morning leftovers and then run out the door. Now Sirius would sit himself down at a table, order a black coffee, and go back and forth between his table and Remus, asking him for notes.

They made their way to the theater, walking through the alley along the old joke shop and opening the large heavy door. Inside there was a vast increase of people than their usual rehearsals, Peter had to bring more people on for the stage crew and James had brought more actors alongside the whole ensemble. And to Remus’s relief, they had decided to keep the same theater for the final show, but even then Sirius still had multiple people come in from Ted’s garage to fix up places around the theater that seemed ugly or broken. They were almost done, it made Remus’s heart ache.

Before he could get too depressed Emmeline and Mary ran up to Lily, and pulled her away to get her fitted for her costume

“ Wish me luck!” She groaned, and waved as she was pulled away to behind the stage.

“ Oi Moony!” James waved to him from the stage and jumped off, he was wearing a white shirt tied at the collar and brown billowy pants, he was also still wearing the red tennis shoes he always had on. He held out his arms as he sauntered up.

“ How do I look?”

“ Like a pirate.” Remus snorted, and James’s smile comically fell. Sirius ran up to the two, grinning wickedly and holding something behind his back.

“ Oh, but you're missing the most important part.” He said and then placed a set of wolf ears on James’s head, making the man frown even more.

“ Oh my god.” Remus covered his mouth to not show how much he was smiling.

“ Isn’t it great? I had Mary make them.” Sirius seemed to be unable to stop grinning, James in contrast was not, but his frown soon turned into astonishment as his gaze shifted from Sirius and Remus to Lily who was coming from the dressing room. She was wearing a long dark blue dress with a corset, adorned with a witch’s hat. She wore a similar frown to James as she and Mary walked up to them.

“ How’d I do?” Mary said, wearing a similar grin to as Sirius, she was notably looking at James’s face when she said this.

“ You look great,” James said Lily just looked at him for a bit before laughing, eyes pinned to the top of his head.

“ Are those supposed to be wolf ears?” She said, and for one of the first times in Remus’s life, he saw James Potter grow self-conscious, his face reddening. Sirius looked at him with that wicked grin and then back to Remus who despite himself was also smiling. They walked up to the stage to rehearse a scene, Mary going back to discuss with Emmeline, and Sirius stood next to Remus, hands in his leather jacket. He seemed to have come from a shift at the garage, because under his jacket he was wearing his gray mechanic’s uniform, name tag, and all, there was also a bit of what looked like to be an oil stain on his right cheek. Remus had to tell himself not to try to wipe it away with his thumb. Remus drew his gaze away to Lily and James awkwardly interacting on stage, James seemed more withdrawn than usual.

“ Do you think they're going to be ok?” Remus asked, Sirius’s grin went down to something more comfortable.

“ Yeah. Jamie never gives up that easily.” Remus ignored how cryptic that comment was, and told himself to press him later.

After a while of practicing with just the two leads, Remus realized something about James’s performance. James was always the most boisterous of the group, he and Sirius certainly never had any problems with getting their feelings known. But Sirius was more calculating, he tended to be able to read people more so, in contrast, James got his heart broken more, and he was more trusting. If the number of times the Marauders had to comfort him with ice cream and a movie whenever some girl broke his heart said anything. The improv and jokes were more fun at the start, but as they were getting closer to the opening of the show, Remus was getting worried that James didn’t connect with the character that he was playing. The werewolf was supposed to be closed off, less willing to let people into his life, which was pretty much the opposite of James. James was a good actor, but Remus has started to think that his crush on Lily may have made him blindsided to how the character themself would act.

“ James. Come here.” He gestured to James off the stage and tried to put on his serious director face despite the sight of James’s wolf ears making him want to laugh. Sirius was off helping the stage crew so Remus had been stuck with instructing the actors himself. Before he could open his mouth though James spoke first.

“ Are you doing ok?” He said eyebrows upturned.

“ I’m fine.”

“ You look exhausted.” He said.

Remus groaned and held his head back to the ceiling, he could feel a lecture coming.

“ You should just tell him, it’s not good for you or your health to be going back and forth like this.”

“ I know. I’ll tell him eventually- it’s just.” He looked over to where Pete and Sirius stood joking loudly, pushing each other around. James followed his eyes and only grew more concerned when Remus didn’t finish.

“ Moony. If you don’t tell him then he’ll just work it out himself.”

“I know.”

“Remus, I'm serious.” James lifted his eyebrows.

“ I’m aware.”

“ Really? Because you're nodding your head but it doesn’t seem like you're listening to me.” James pestered.

“ I’ll tell him, James,” Remus said, James just kept staring at him, a look of disbelief on his face.

“ I will.” He said.

“ Ok. But y’know-” James continued anyway, Remus groaned loudly. “ I’m only hassling you so much because I’m your friend, and so is Padfoot.” He put his hand on Remus’s shoulder, raising his eyebrows high.

“ I know Prongs.” He said, he then changed the subject before James could grill him again.
“ Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about your acting.” This seemed to catch James off guard, he took his hand off his shoulder to put it in one of the pockets of his costume’s pants.

“ What about my acting?” He said. Remus could sense the defense in his voice and decided to tread carefully.

“ I think you need to remember what type of character that you're playing.”

“ Remember…?”

“ You need to leave less of you out of your performance.” God this is hard, James was a brilliant actor but every theater director he’s had will tell you that he has a hard time taking notes.

“ So you're essentially just telling me to act better.”

“ I mean in a way-” At this James’s eyes grew a bit cold and Remus decided to backtrack a bit, “but also not really, it just seems like you're letting too much of your personal feelings prevent you from playing the character faithfully.”

Remus glanced quickly at where Lily was going through dance numbers with the ensemble on stage, James followed his gaze and began to shuffle his feet on the floor. He then curtly nodded. “ Ok.” He said and then patted Remus on the shoulder before going to bother Lily on the stage. He seemed to be asking about the choreography, as Remus watched Lily kneel down to take his ankles and guide his feet, the action seemed to take him off guard, his face going bright red. Remus took a deep exhale and then made it his way over to Peter and Sirius. Peter’s face seemed to go blue as Remus walked up.

“ Pete, why are you looking at me like that?”

“ Nothing!” He said, hiding his phone behind his back. Remus turned to Sirius who was just smirking, making eye contact with Remus, and then drifting his sight to the stage.

“ Did something happen with the stage?”

“ I’m handling it.” Peter continued. Something clearly was wrong. Peter was put in charge of anything involving stage management, so he was in charge of the crew and also the set, which he was happy to do. But Remus was sometimes worried that putting him in a leadership position wasn’t their smartest decision, he tended to crack under pressure a lot. Which Remus had experienced firsthand whenever he was partnered up with him for a school project. Despite this, Peter was determined to do a good job, which was admirable but it was a bit hard to get him to admit that something was going wrong under his command.

“Peter.” Remus said sternly, trying to put his newly adopted teacher's voice to use. It proved effective on a 13-year-old who tried to continually throw paper airplanes at him when he wasn’t looking. It didn’t seem to work though, Peter just looked away. Remus sighed and turned his attention to the stage where James was trying to see if he could do a cartwheel alongside one of the members of the ensemble, Mary was standing nearby now wearing a gown similar to Lily's and cheering.

“ James! Come back down here.” As Remus yelled, Sirius let out a quiet, “ oooooooo”, like someone was getting him called to the principal’s office. Despite having to come down to the floor a couple of minutes ago, he seemed to be just as happy to hop off the stage again to where the three of them were standing.

“ Peter, why do you look like that?” He promptly said, echoing Remus’s previous sentiment on the man’s nervous face.

“ Something happened with the stage, but he won’t tell us.”

“ Peter, this is supposed to be a group effort, we're not going to crucify you if something goes wrong,” James said in a calm tone.

“ Better to tell us now, so it doesn’t get worse,” Sirius said knowingly. It had seemed that Peter had told him the problem before the other two more responsible members of their group had come over. Peter glared at him and then sighed, his face going back a bit to its regular color.

“We're off schedule.”

“ Well, that's not too bad,” James said, mostly to Remus who grew concerned. The “schedule” in question was one that Remus had made for everyone to make sure they were done on time for the opening.

“ No. It is bad, we were supposed to be done with the set by the end of this week, but the painters were too busy to come in today.”

“ When did you find this out?” Remus said.

“ Just now,” Peter said in a small voice. Remus groaned and pinched his nose, which just made Sirius snort next to him, he always found Remus’s distress hilarious. Remus thought while his friends talked, their voices getting muffled as he focused on his thoughts. He had feeling the real weight of working his body since 6 am now, his knees were clicking, and his head was heavy, he did have a bottle of pills in his bag though, and he didn’t really need to grade those papers McGonagall had given him till Thursday, so he could always do it tomorrow during his break at the diner.

“ Do you have the paint?” Remus said, silencing his friends who were arguing over who they would convince to stay late and start on the set. Peter just scrunched his face in bewilderment.

“ Yeah, it's backstage.”

“ Ok.” Remus sighed, “ I don't have a later shift today, so I can stay.”

At this, James brought his mouth into a tight line. “ Moony, you can’t, you need to go home and rest.” He said.

“ I won’t stay for too long, and I have some Tylenol in my bag,” He gestured over to his tattered old backpack that was sitting on one of the audience chairs.

“Moony-” James started, Remus braced himself but Sirius cut in.

“ I’ll stay too.” He stated, grinning at Remus. Remus’s heart started beating faster.

“ Sirius, we were supposed to meet with those project managers from the marketing agency tonight,” James said, pronouncing Sirius’s name like a mom chastising her child for breaking a vase.

“ Just do it without me, I’d probably just muck up the whole thing anyway.” He shrugged and then stared intently at James who was just squinting his own eyes in confusion. James then looked quickly between Remus and Sirius and sighed.

“ Just be home before 10,” James said.

“ Yes. Mum.” Sirius said, earning a laugh from Peter, who threw Remus an apologetic glance before bounding back over to the stage crew.

After a few more hours of rehearsal, all the actors changed out of their costumes and Sirius trotted backstage to carry the buckets of paint over. They weren't supposed to be doing anything too difficult, just put down base colors so that the painters could add detail later. As Remus was pulling a tarp across the stage floor, Lily walked over to him. Even though she had changed out of her costuming, she still had glimmery eye shadow on her eyelids, complimenting her green eyes. He guessed that Mary was feeling experimental in the dressing room.

“ You going home?” She said,

“ Nope. Some painters got busy so we're staying back to start for them.”

“It's almost like you enjoy working yourself to death,” She snorted.

“ I do, thank you.” He said, laying a wooden panel slowly on top of the tarp. Sirius came back on the stage hauling a paint bucket with one arm and plopping it down loudly next to them.

“ Evans.” He said matter of factly.

“ Black,” Lily said, her gaze hardening, before crossing the bag strap she was wearing across her torso. She turned back to Remus, her gaze softening, “ Get some rest ok? Who am I going to steal cigarettes from when you're not there?” She smiled turned around and walked towards the stage stairs.

“ I’ll be there.” He said, laughing a bit, and waved to her as she walked out with Mary towards the back door. Sirius snorted behind him, the whole theater was now empty, leaving them completely alone.

“What's so funny?”

“ Nothing. I guess you two are really friends then?”

“ Yeah, I guess.” He shrugged and then kneeled down to open one of the paint buckets, Sirius sat cross-legged next to him. “ I’m a bit worried about her and Prongs. I think he might be too intimidated by her.” He said. At this Sirius just laughed, taking the top that Remus had plied off from the paint bucket from his hand.

“ You’ve got to be joking.”

“ You saw them during rehearsal.”

“ He wasn’t acting any different though.”

“ Yeah, but I’m worried that if they don’t get along it’ll affect their performances. They need to be able to trust each other, he looked almost scared of her today.” Remus said, putting down his paintbrush.

“ You're saying he’s wavering in the face of a challenge.”

Remus huffed, everything was always so competitive with him. “ What I’m saying is that Lily’s not acting the way he expects, so he’s panicking a bit.”

“ You wanna know what I think?” Sirius leaned in a bit more to get in Remus’s face, raising his eyebrows.

“ What do you think Padfoot,” Remus says back bluntly.

“ I think he fancies her and is worried that he’s putting her off.” He shrugs.

“ Did he tell you that?”

“ Maybe,” Sirius says.

Remus threw his head back, pinched his nose and groaned loudly, just to really emphasize his aspiration for his audience of one. “ God, what is this primary school?” Sirius just laughed.

“ I tried to talk to him during rehearsal, but I don’t know if he really understood.” Remus squeezed his eyes closed a bit. “ I trust him, I do. I just never thought that him being so emotional would ever hinder his acting instead of enhancing it.”

“ He always seemed to have more of a handle on his emotions than we did.”

“ Exactly.” Remus sighed once again, Sirius had moved while they were talking, across from him to the other side of the wooden panel, but since it seemed that he had finished he moved back beside Remus, their knees touching. Remus took one look at the smile that spread across his face and inwardly punched himself as he could tell what he was going to say.

“ So about the ending-”

“ Sirius.”

“ I just want you to hear me out.” He turned his body over, their knees brushing against each other. Remus did not turn around, he continued to paint, trying to ignore how Sirius’s eyes glimmered.

“ We make it seem like the werewolf leaves her, but instead he just goes into hiding, so she has to go find him shacking up in a cave or something. And then he realizes the error of his ways and finally realizes the importance of love and-” At this Sirius clumped his hands together before exploding them out. “ Boom.” He says. Remus just glances up from where he’s painting and then down again.

“ We’d probably have to add another scene or song-”

“ We can just work it into the last ballad,”

“ Sirius”

“ Moony.” Remus just glares and looks back down to his painting.

“ Why are you so against happily ever afters?” Sirius leaned over, almost dipping his elbows in paint before realizing it last minute and moving back.

“ Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“ How could it ever not make sense?”

“ Happily ever afters don't happen in real life. Life still sucks even after you find true love, nothing changes.” Remus puts his paintbrush into the bucket and then gestures with his hands to make his point. “ A werewolf is still a werewolf.”

“ So?”

“ So! Just because society doesn’t care, and his love doesn’t care, he does! It doesn’t change the fact that he’s forever burdened with the fact that he’s a monster, and is going to be one forever.” Remus states, turning around to pull another set piece toward him.

“ You ever hear about “ Love conquers all ” ?”

“ Love isn’t some magical force, it can’t make the impossible possible.”

“ Do you like to revel in being a bummer all the time?” Sirius groaned loudly.

“ Flaws are what make us human, humanity makes good art,” He echoed his friend’s statement that he had scribbled on the sides of Remus’s notes in his journal, and he got a playful shove from Sirius as he began painting the new set piece in front with brown paint.

“ Anyways, you never had any problems with the ending before, why do you want to change it now?” Remus gives him a sideways glance, as Sirius’s face grows thoughtful, his eyes getting sharper just like every time Remus asks him something.

“ Maybe I just gained a new outlook on life.” He smiled at Remus, a smile that caused a shiver to go through his body.

“ Will that outlook make it so that you’re not a pompous arse all the time?” Remus snorted, causing Sirius to kick him in the arm with his foot, which was only sock-cladded since they had taken off their shoes to sit on the stage that had just been cleaned.

“ So violent, you’ll put me in stitches before the show even opens,” Remus says.

“ Good, then I can take over and make the cast reenact Grease instead.”

“ You wouldn’t”

“ I would.” He grinned. Remus caught his breath from laughing as Sirius pulled the piece he was painting towards the middle of them.

“ Called your mom the other day.”

“ It’s weird how close you too are.”

“ I can’t help it if I’m her favorite.” At this, Remus just laughed again. His mum likes all his friends, but she always tended to dote on Sirius the most, he was the only one of Remus’s friends who received an invite frequently to come stay for Christmas, to Remus’s embarrassment.

“ Anyways, she asked how the student teaching was going and I wasn’t able to tell her anything,” Sirius pointed with the back of a new smaller paintbrush at Remus’s chest,” because you haven’t told me anything.”

“ It’s nothing exciting,” Remus said, leaning forward to paint farther down on the set piece.

“ You're around snotty teenagers all day, there has to be something,” Sirius said, raising his eyebrows and poking him with the paintbrush again. Remus thought for a second.

“ Today I broke up a gambling ring operating inside the girl’s bathroom.”

“ In the girl’s bathroom?”

“ Yeah, I couldn’t go by myself so I had to go and get one of the female teachers to do it for me.”

“ What were they even gambling on?”

“ What couples would break up before the school dance.”

“ Oh of course.”

“ Yep, it’s apparently a pretty common occurrence.”

“ And you're telling me that you didn’t participate?”

“ Of course not. I’m an adult.”

“ Yeah. Right.” Sirius snorted.

“ Yeah, and besides I already have 50 pounds riding in the same ring the teachers already set up.” Sirius snorted, pausing painting the set piece to laugh.

“ So you're not stressed out at all?” He said before starting up again.

“ What? No.” Remus snapped back, he was a bit sick of the amount of times people had tried to coddle him today.

“ Don’t get defensive,” Sirius said, almost reading his mind.

“ I’m not. Does it look like I’m stressed?”

“ You just look tired.”

Remus groaned, and Sirius just smiled at him. “ I’m guessing that you’ve heard that already?”

“ Yep.” He continued painting, shifting his eyesight away from Sirius’s; he decided to change the subject before he got a repeat of the lecture he got earlier from James.

“ Is she doing ok?” As he studied Sirius’s face for any emotion, he felt the hole in his stomach grow a bit larger.

“Yeah, she said she was able to walk over to the store the other day.” His eyes then grew bigger with concern. “ She said that it had been a while since she’s last heard from you.”

Remus sighed, thinking back to the conversation he had with her a couple of months ago on the phone.

“ I’m not doing treatment, Remus.”

“ What?” He had been in the alley of Broomsticks’, it had been a couple of months after her diagnosis, and Remus’s ears had almost begun ringing as soon as she called.

“ I’ve decided that I’m not doing chemo, Remus.”

“ But-

“ Your father has accepted my decision.”

“ No, I know, I just thought- “

“ I talked to everyone to make the correct preparations, it’s done, Remus.” Her tone was cold, despite it being a phone call Remus could picture her face, her hair always done up the way she did it every day, probably sitting in their kitchen, drinking the black tea she always drank at dinner time.

He realized that he hadn't responded to Sirius.

“ We got into a big fight the other day.”

“ Oh,” Sirius said quietly, looking more concerned, his eyes were growing glassier by the minute, Remus just nodded, he didn’t want to prolong this conversation any longer.

“ I’m fine, we're fine, I’ll call her eventually, I’ve just been busy with teaching and everything.” Remus took a deep breath and continued to focus on painting, trying not to show the emotion in his face. Sirius just stood there, frowning at him, Remus tried to ignore how it made his heart rate go faster, instead, he lightly shoved Sirius with his elbow.

“ Get painting, you’ve barely done anything.”

“ Oh sorry, Sir.” Following Remus’s comment, Sirius turned to him and laid his palm on his brush before pulling the bristles back and letting go, splattering paint everywhere, including on Remus. Thankfully he wasn’t wearing his outfit from before, he had changed into a spare shirt that they kept in the dressing rooms just in case. In response Remus froze, glaring at his friend beside him who was grinning evilly. He was clearly trying to get a rise out of him, so like the mature adult Remus was and will always be he took his paintbrush and swung it across Sirius’s face, causing him to yell and swing his own brush back in retaliation.

What then occurred was a battle of endurance of who of the grown men could get the most paint on the other. They were wasting time and materials, which would have made Remus seethe at any other moment, but the sound of Sirius’s laughs combined with his own made his heart fly so much that they went on like that for another 10 minutes. The tarp had begun to get covered and thankfully they had finished most of the work before so they didn’t have to worry about either. Remus was mostly worried about Sirius since his black hair was splattered all over with the green paint Remus was using, he guessed that he hadn’t looked any better but he wasn’t the one who spent every day styling his hair to make it look as close as Mick Jagger’s as possible. Any feelings of worry were quickly squandered though when Sirius shoved his fist into the bucket of paint and smeared it across his head.

Like every time Remus found himself stuck with Sirius, he found himself being pulled out of the mindset that his father had implanted since age 10. As he threw paint back at his friend with his bare hands, feeling the heat rise in his face, he imagined what his dad would say. What a waste of time, he would probably say, wiping his glasses and shaking his head. Those thoughts were quickly squashed though, because the now-empty theater was filled with his and Sirius’s cackles as they fell on top of each other.

Remus had never felt the same kind of happiness he once felt with his friends at Hogwarts when he was student teaching, but he did in moments like these. He could probably do this forever, he wanted to do this forever. Making art with Sirius till the end of time, until he was old and weak, too old to even pick up a pencil. He could manage it though if Sirius was with him.

“ Got a bit carried away boys?” When they got home James was standing in the kitchen drinking a pint in a suit, supposedly for the meeting with the project managers he had. Peter was then called in to join in, laughing at the two, and Remus assured them that they had got as much work done as they could before the paint fight had begun.

All this culminated in Remus sitting in their tiny bathroom trying to wash blue paint out from his scalp.

There was a knock on the door, and Sirius slowly sauntered in, smirking at the disarray Remus had made at the sink, blue paint smeared everywhere. He had changed out of his uniform, wearing an old football jersey that somehow still fit him from when he was on their old school’s football team.

“ You want me to help you with that?” He said, and Remus sat down on the stool they kept by the sink. He noticed that his assaulte was completely paintless.

“ How did you get it out so quickly?” Sirius grinned and held out a glass bottle in his hand, it was olive oil, Remus groaned.

He sat there on the stool while Sirius sifted his hands through Remus’s tattered hair, he pulled here and there just to annoy him, but other than that they sat in comfortable silence. Remus tried to ignore how the feeling of his hands on his scalp made him feel.

“ Where did you even learn about this?” Remus asked to avoid focusing on his thoughts.

“ Sometimes Andy has me help her with her galleries.”

The silence continued, from outside Remus could hear the record play behind James and Peter’s conversation in the kitchen.

Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom
Well, who am I to keep you down?
It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it~

Remus felt the nimble fingers sliding through his hair slowly slide down to lay on his neck. He looked up at Sirius standing in front of him, his fingers toying with the strands of hair lying on the base of his neck, his eyes were stone-cold gray, his mouth unsure, before looking up and making eye contact with him. Remus felt his heart stop for a moment before Sirius started talking.

“We’ll finish the show Moony, and your mum she’ll- she’ll be well enough to come see it.” His voice broke a bit while he spoke, making Remus want to jump up from the spot, unable to get any words out he just nodded.

“ You deserve it,” Sirius murmured, still looking at Remus. The record still playing from the kitchen, Remus stared into his eyes, finding that they looked more like the ocean than the color gray.

Say, women, they will come and they will go~
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
You’ll know~

Chapter Text

Friday, December, 6 | 30 days till opening

It was almost noon when Lily was sitting on the floor of her room, her closet doors were flung open, Mary rummaging inside like a pirate searching for buried treasure. Marlene was sitting next to Lily on the floor at the foot of her bed, on top of the bed was their record player, which Marlene had won control of via a violent game of rock paper scissors with Mary.

“Your getting old”, that's what they’ll say-
But don’t give a damn I’m listening anyway
Stop!
Don’t you stop!

Marlene groaned from where she was lying, back on the floor, legs propped up on the bed. “ What was so terrible about the original dress again?”

Mary stomped out of Lily’s closet, her face tight in frustration. “ Lily said it was too tight.”

Marlene sat up and gave Lily a look.

“ What?! It's a serious concern! I need to be able to dance without being scared of tearing the thing open!” She gestured over to Mary standing above her, hands on her hips. “Anyway, I’m not the one overreacting here, I don’t see why we need a whole new dress and not just alter the old one.”

Mary gave a long sigh that sounded more like a whine. “ Black mentioned making you look distinct, so you don't get confused with the ensemble.”

“ Can’t we just get her a belt or something?”

“ We can’t really afford to spend any more money on costuming.” Lily groaned and gave Mary a pointed look. Mary had a bit of a problem with spending, she was a notorious shopaholic, which Lily realized should have been something to inform Remus about before he put her in charge of costuming alongside Emmeline.

“ I’m sure there's some kind of cheap craft store nearby,” Marlene said before sitting up and crossing her legs. Mary groaned at the idea of a “craft store”, but in the end she caved, and they walked 30 minutes over to a small craft, etc store with a kind old lady at the front who waved them off as they entered. It smelled like mildew and detergent, and Mary kept sneezing every second. They were going through an aisle filled with charms, when Marlene held out a small bell and shook it, causing it to make a small ring.

“ Hear me out. You put these all around the bottom of her dress so she makes noise whenever she walks.” She says. Lily snorted, while Mary fumed from Marlene's inability to take this situation seriously. Mary had led them to the fabric section and began inspecting different rolls of fabric, leaving Marlene and Lily to just wander around the section aimlessly. Marlene held up a neon green fabric grinning, “ It matches your eyes~!” She sang.

“ They do not look like that.”

“ In the dark they do.”

“ How many times do I have to tell you, my eyes don’t glow in the dark.” In response to Lily’s quip, the girl in front of her froze, holding up the ugly fabric.

“ Marley?” She shook her a bit, before turning to see what Marlene was staring at over her shoulder.

Lily’s heart stopped. At the opposite end of the aisle stood Dorcas Meadows, her previous internship colleague. “ Oh my god.” She said quietly, memories came rushing back, Lily running down the street barefoot, Umbridge firing her in front of the whole office, and James’s stupid grin while he walked out of the Tesco. Her breathing was getting shallow, the only thing bringing her out of it was Marlene speaking up, her voice getting the most dreamy Lily has ever heard.

“ She’s gorgeous.” She gasped.

“ Marlene!”

“ What?!” The two girls were silently now yelling at each other in whispers.

“That's the girl who used to work at Umbridge’s with me!” Lily punched her in the shoulder.

“ What?!”

“ What’s going on?” Mary had emerged from her creative zone on the other end of the aisle, she was holding a strip of dark blue fabric with small constellations patterned on it. As she walked up, Lily took her shoulder to hold her down to where she and Marlene were bending over in a huddle.

“ That girl used to work at Umbridge's with me.” She pointed.

“ The snotty one that sat across from you?” Mary asked, Lily nodded.

“ Ooooh. She’s gorgeous.” Mary stood up to get a better look and was promptly shoved back down again by Lily.

“ Mary!”

“ Sorry! Sorry!” She looked at Marlene who looked like she was one step away from smoke coming out of her ears, “ Marlene your face is bright red.”

“ What?!” Marlene, the parrot, said again. Mary turned back to Lily who was currently plotting a course to the exit.

“ Are you gonna talk to her?”

“What?! No!” Lily yelled, quietly though. Mary gave her a look before directing her gaze back to Dorcas standing at the end of the aisle.

“Talk to her. Let her know how much better you're doing now.”

“ Mary. I work at a diner and am a lead in a musical.” Mary gave her another look, the disapproving one, where her bottom lip sticks out and she glares at you like a therapist at the edge of a breakthrough. They engaged in a quick 30-second staring contest, Marlene still staring at the end of the aisle, when Lily sighed and got up from the huddle. It didn’t hurt, it's not like she would ever see her again. She walked over to the girl where she was inspecting yarn, wearing a cleanly pressed suit, and Lily shivered, almost the same heels she had once worn when Lily had her internship.

“ Hey!” Dorcas didn’t move so she repeated herself. “ Hello?” Lily said louder, this time she did she was heard as the girl next to her turned sharply.

“ Oh. Evans. Hi.”

“ How are you? I haven't seen you since…” Lily drifted off, at the slight mention of Lily’s trauma a small smile formed on Dorcas’s face.

“ You got sacked.” She said,

“ Yes.” Lily sighed. Dorcas turned her body still carrying the yarn, now seemingly enthralled in the conversation now that she could humiliate Lily some more.

“ What are you doing now?”

“ Oh y’know… working part time.”

“ Where?” Dorcas tilted her head.

“Someplace near my flat. Are you still at Umbridge's?” At Lily’s dismissal, Dorcas shifted her eyes a bit.

“ I am, I actually started as an associate today.”

“ I thought Umbridge didn’t do associates with less than a year of experience?”

“ Well she made an expectation.”

“ She did? Because I remember her mentioning that she hadn’t made any interns associates in around 20 years?”

“ I would be the first one.” Dorcas smiled; her makeup perfectly smooth on her face. Lily had just basically gotten out of bed when Mary had burst into her room worrying about her costume. Lily wished she was still wearing heels, she was feeling incredibly small. Trying to focus on anything other than Dorcas’s condescending smile, Lily spotted the yarn in her perfected pedicured nails.

“ Do you knit?” Lily noticed that her voice had been getting higher and higher through the course of this conversation, she now sounded like a chipmunk.

“ As a hobby.” She shrugged, her voice deep and monotone.

“ Oh fun!” Lily piped up, trying her best to smile even though she was more close to crying. She felt a hand on her shoulder and all of the sudden Mary was behind her grinning, dragging along Marlene who had managed to close her mouth, but she still looked like a scared puppy.

“ Lily! We have to go, we’ll be late to rehearsal!” Mary beamed, looking between her and Dorcas, whose eyebrows raised at the mention of rehearsal. Lily braced herself for impact.

“ Rehearsal?” Dorcas asked, Lily could practically hear the upcoming snobbery from a mile away, but Mary, the ever-proud, cut Lily off before she could save herself.

“ Wh-”

“ We have rehearsal with a small ensemble for a musical we're going to be in.” Mary said cheerfully. Lily felt herself sinking into the floor as Dorcas’s smirk grew.

“ You're in a musical?”

“ Yep. Lily’s one of our leads. You should come!” Mary said, handing out a pamphlet Peter had made, apparently the girl just carried them around with her. Lily pressed her mouth in a tight straight line, trying to prevent a scream when Dorcas responded.

“ Never begged you as a thespian Evans.” Dorcas said, flipping the pamphlet over to inspect the back.

“ Heh.” Was all Lily was able to get out, her face was probably bright red by now.

“ It fits you, you were always the more…emotional type.” Dorcas snarked. In a flash Lily was back in the office, Umbridge making Lily clean her cat’s litter box when she had suggested her volunteering for a nonprofit.

“ Well I have to go, I have to attend a trial at 3 for some homicide case we’ve been working on.” Dorcas smiled and Lily thought she was going to die right there. “ It was nice seeing you, Evans.” She turned to walk out of the aisle but stopped when she noticed Marlene in the way. “Excuse me.” She bowed her head and Marlene squeaked, face reddening as she moved to the side to let her through. The blonde then continued to watch her as she walked out of the store, the clicks of her heels on the hard ground as she walked.

“ “You were always the more emotional type?” What does that even mean?” Mary tutted.

“ Lawyers can’t have emotions.” Marlene responded, eyes still glued to the door that Dorcas had left through. Lily groaned.

“ Did you have to mention the musical?”

“ Why not?!” Mary gasped, so loudly that Dorcas could probably hear it outside the store. Marlene had seemed to finally be able to take her eyes off the door to smirk at Lily.

“ She’s embarrassed.”

“ She’s not embarrassed!” She frowned at Marlene and then turned back to Lily to see how blue her face was, at this she just frowned more. “ Lily, are you embarrassed?”

“ Maybe a little bit.”

“ Lily!”

“ Whatever! I don’t want to talk about this!” Lily yelled back. After that Mary put her hands on her hips before sharing a concerned glance with Marlene. Lily sighed and lowered her tone. “ Can we leave please?”

“ Let me just pay for this first.” Mary held up the roll of fabric she had picked up. She rambled as she walked down towards the register. “ I’m thinking of maybe overlaying this on the skirt-” Marlene gave appropriate “ooos” and “ahs”, and Lily just followed behind quietly trying not to think back to the Tesco parking lot.

“ So sentimental.” Sev had said while they were walking out of the movie theater. Lily felt dizzy. As they reached the register and Mary began small talk with the old lady at the counter, Marlene pulled Lily to the side to examine a display of cute erasers near the counter. Lily’s phone started rumbling, she picked up and examined the ID.

It was her sister. Marlene looked over her shoulder and must've seen her gloomy expression because she spoke to her in a hushed tone. “ Call her later.” Lily gave a small shake of her head before walking out of the store to pick up the phone outside. She took a deep breath, breathing in the cold December air, and picked up.

“ Hey Pet, what can I do for you?” She said. She couldn’t help feeling like she was back at the diner taking orders.

“ Why do you always think I only call whenever I need a favor? Do you really think that low of me?” Her sister’s shrill voice picked up from the opposite end of her phone.

“ I don’t think low of you, Pet.” Lily said she didn’t really have the energy to fight currently. “ How are you?”

“ I’m doing fine.”

“ How’s school?” Petunia was a year behind at a medical school in Cambridge, their dad had almost cried when she told him. “ Both of my girls, geniuses!” He had said.

“ Oof. Dad didn’t tell you?” She said, of course she would assume that their dad tells her everything. Petunia hardly ever calls and when she does it was because their dad wouldn't let her do something and she needed Lily to convince him.

“ Didn’t tell me what?”

“ I’m not in school anymore.”

“ You dropped out?!”

“ Yeah Lily.” She said like it was no big deal.

“ Why?! What about Mum?!”

“ What does Mum have to do with any of this?” Days after their mum had been hospitalized Lily and Petunia sat on the swings of their school’s playground. It had been around 8:00 pm, and she had gotten into a nasty fight with their Dad after he said that they wouldn't be able to visit her tomorrow because he had to keep the shop open all day. It was summer, and despite that Pet was sniffling wiping the snot from her nose. “ When I get older.” Her voice was all wobbly from crying. “ I’m going to make sure nobody ever gets sick.”

“ Nothing- I just thought you were dedicated, Dad said-”

“ This isn’t Dad’s decision. It’s mine and I made it for the right reason.”

“ Being-?” Lily could feel her blood boiling.

“ I’m getting married!” She said cheerfully.

“ What?! Married?! Pet, you're barely 21!”

“ Yeah but-”

“ Are you pregnant?!”

“ Lily!” She screamed. It wasn’t a no, Lily felt her brain go into overdrive.

“ Pet you don't have to get married, I know a clinic, Dad will understand-”

“ Lily.” Her voice got high and sharp, Lily could imagine the way her eyes glared over the phone like they did whenever Lily tried to help her out without her asking directly. “ I’m getting married next April, I’m just telling you since Dad didn't seem to.”

“ But Pet-”

“ I don’t want to hear it, Lily.” She said, If Lily hadn’t been completely blue while talking to Dorcas before in the store, she was most definitely now.

“ But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about, well not exactly.”

“ …Huh?” Lily felt her brain melt.

“ It’s just…” She sighed. “ Dad is all insistent that we host the wedding back in Kent, in that dinky little garden he and Mum had done it in, but it’s just Vernon’s family live up in Birmingham and they said they would be able to rent this just stunning church-” Lily cut her off, she wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible.

“ What do you want?” She said bluntly, Pet must’ve heard her dreary tone since she paused for a bit before answering.

“ Just talk to Dad for me? Tell him to step back a bit?” Her tone had grown more kind, as it usually did whenever she was asking for something.

“ Alright.” Lily said quietly.

“ Great, I’ll update you again soon.” She then hung up, and right as Lily put her phone back in her pocket, Marlene and Mary came shuffling out of the doors. Mary with a bright yellow plastic bag, came to rest a comforting hand on her back. Marlene furrowed her brows in concern.

“ What happened?” She said,

Lily looked up from where she was staring at the ground and at her friends who were standing by her, looking more worried every second she didn’t answer.

“ Petunia’s getting married.” Both Mary and Marlene gasped.

“ Is she pregnant?!” Marlene said immediately, Mary punched her in the arm.

“ She got mad when I asked her.” Lily shrugged hopelessly, at Marlene’s tone she felt herself grow a bit lighter.

“ So she is.” She said and Mary punched her in the arm again.

“ What?! Nobody our age gets married unless they're pregnant, drunk, or in some sort of uber-religious cult!” She exclaimed, and at that moment the absurdness of Lily’s situation all came crashing down on her and she couldn’t help herself from losing herself laughing, Mary and Marlene shortly followed after.

***

The day after Lily had an afternoon practice with the ensemble and then a late noon tutor session with James. Remus had been able to convince her into one more after she struggled with singing a ballad during an earlier rehearsal, so she told herself she would give James one more shot. Her strong will wavered though when the man in question bounded up to her after rehearsal telling her to dress “ warm and comfy” for their session on Saturday.

“ Are you sure you don’t want any leaps for this number?” A tall man with short dark hair said to her. Benjy Fenwick, he was added to the ensemble, via Mary. He had approached her after they started practice for the last number, it was more on the dark and depressing side, so Lily decided to keep it more grounded, which Remus had agreed with her on when they discussed it.

“ I’m sure.” Lily smiled, Fenwick had proven to be especially sassy throughout rehearsals, apparently according to Mary he had auditioned for Juilliard and had been waitlisted.

“ Really? It’s just the number seems a bit…dull.” He said. Since they were finishing up, everyone had nothing better to do than to watch their conversation. Mary stood up ready to intervene.

Lily contemplated, it was a bit of a boring routine, in terms of choreography, but the dance shouldn't be the focus during the number. But she guessed that it didn't exactly hurt to energize it a bit, after all, Peter said that all the lights would be her on James, so it's not like anyone would be able to focus too much on the dancers anyway.

“ I don’t know about leaps… maybe we can work something else in?” Lily shuffled her feet in between positions while she thought. “ Maybe some partner work?” She asked, Fenwick froze, seemingly not expecting to be actually compromised with.

“ Uh… Maybe?”

“ I’ll run it by the guys and we’ll see if we can work some in the next practice.” She smiled and Fenwick just nodded curtly before walking away. She started packing up when Mary pounced on her from behind.

“ Look at you~! Ms. Choreographer!” She said, shaking her shoulders slightly.

“ He just asked a question and I answered.” She said, As she zipped her bag up, two ensemble members walked by greeting her kindly, which usually didn’t happen. The dancers were never exactly mean, but they definitely sensed that she didn’t really know what she was doing.

“ Good job today!” One of the ensemble members, Alice, said as she walked out, beaming at Lily, which usually didn’t happen.

“ Uh- Yeah you too.” Lily stuttered out, Mary just grinned louder.

“ They're warming you up to you!”

“ I guess so.” Lily said, slinging her bag around her shoulder.

“ You're not going to change?” Mary looked her up and down, she was wearing sweats and a hoodie underneath her winter jacket.

“ No. I have a session later with James and he said to dress and I quote “ Warm and comfortable”.”

Mary just gave her an amused smile. “ I thought you were done with all that?”

Lily sighed. “ No. I guess not.” On cue, there was a knock on the door, well, on the door frame since it was open. James was standing in the frame, grinning. He stood remaining by the entrance like he was waiting for Lily to grant him access to come in.

“ What are you doing here?” Lily asked. She thought that she was just going to meet him at his flat again.

“ Thought I would pick you up, I borrowed a friend’s car.”

Lily gaped, and Mary snorted before slinking out the door, passing James who remained smiling.

“ I’ll leave you to it. Don’t get carried away kids~” She sang as she walked off, James watched her go before turning back to Lily, still standing in the doorway. Lily sighed and walked out of the room.

“ Alright.” She said, They walked down the hallway in silence. It had been kind of awkward between the two of them since the last tutoring session. It had seemed that James had put up some invisible wall, which Lily didn’t exactly mind but it was kind of annoying whenever she was required to get up and personal during rehearsal. She often found him jumping whenever she had to guide him like she was some ghost.

“ The room was nice.”

“ The practice studio? Oh yeah, it's nice. Well, anything is nicer than that closet Sirius tried to put us in.” James snorted at her comment.

“ I bet you could have made space in the diner.”

“ That's what Remus said too” Lily exhaled.

“ What’s wrong with it?”

“ I just don’t love the idea of my dancers practicing in the same place I had a kid pee on one of the booths.”

“ What do you mean? It gives atmosphere.”

Lily snorted again before she caught a flash of orange hair and in a panic pulled James into a hallway stemming from the one they were in.

“ What-?!” Lily backed James up across a wall and put her hand over his mouth.

“ Shhhh!” She said, and watched as Molly walked by, holding a coloring book to her chest. It had been ages since she had propositioned Lily back in September, and by this point, she really had no excuse, since her original excuse of “no time” was unusable since she had been balancing the musical on top of classes and work. At the end of the day, it was about money and she just didn’t think she could face Molly with that as her only explanation. As the older women passed Lily let out a breath of relief before letting go of James. His glasses had gotten messed up on his face so Lily straightened them out before walking out into the hallway. The man stood there bewildered for a second before running to catch up to her.

“ What the hell was that about?!”

“ Don’t worry about it.”

“ Do you know that woman?!”

“ Potter.”

“ You can’t just do that to a guy and not explain!” He stopped in the hallway, Lily stopped too and took another frustrated exhale. She looked around, she didn’t really want to discuss this in the open. Rumors spread fast at the academy.

“ I’ll tell you in the car.” James gave her an incredulous look and they continued walking. When they made it out to the car, Lily was surprised to find a sleek black Buick. She gave him a look as he started up the engine.

“ Who’s car is this?”

“ Sirius’s boss is related to him so he let me borrow it.”

“ Huh.”

“ Hey, it was either this or the motorcycle.”

“ I’m just surprised you have your license no less drive.”

“ I can drive! What makes you think I can’t drive?!”

“ You just never seemed like the type to be good at following instructions.”

James snorted as he stopped at a red light.

“ I’ll let you know I was the first to get my license. It took Remus and Sirius loads of tries and Pete doesn't even have one.”

“ Ok, I believe you.” She pointed in front of her. “ Stop sign.”

“ I saw that, thank you very much.”

“Uh-huh.” They moved along the road carefully, James surprisingly following more road laws than Lily would expect. It was the beginning of December and they hadn’t gotten any snow yet, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t cold. James turned on the heat before giving her a sideways glance warily.

“ You gonna tell me what happened back there?”

“ Oh.” She looked out the window, there were kids in uniforms, presumedly walking back from school. One slipped on the icy ground, the others around helped them up and kept walking. “ She asked me for a favor months ago, I haven’t gotten back to her.”

“ What was the favor?”

Lily looked down at her boots that were flicking off coloring at the edges, they probably needed to be replaced, Lily thought.

“ She wanted to have some adult dancers come in and teach the little ones, I told her I didn’t really have the time but she kept asking and…”

“ Ah,” James said, eyes focused on the road. She was surprised she wasn’t getting some kind of lecture about the “right thing.” She peered over to him, he was gripping the steering wheel tightly.

“ Well if you don’t have the time, you don’t have the time.” He shrugged and then glanced to where Lily was looking at him, something shifted a bit in his eyes when he looked back. “ I mean, if you want to do it after the show, I could always help.”

“ What?”

“ Yeah! I’m great with kids, my mum always makes me play football with my little cousins at Christmas, I bet you could ask Remus too if he’s done with student teaching by then.” He said, smiling and glancing back at Lily a couple of times as he talked.

“ I’ll think about it.” She said, James looked at her once he stopped at another red light, smiling. Something in her stomach squirmed.

“ Eyes on the road Potter,” She said, he chuckled and followed her order. As she looked back at the sidewalk, Lily realized that this wasn’t either of the streets she or the guys’ flats were on.

“ Potter.”

“ Yeah?”

“ Where are we going?”

“It's a surprise.” He looked away from the road again to grin at her.

Lily sent a quick text to Remus telling him that his friend was trying to murder her and it would be all his fault.

They drove along, slowly driving more and more out of London until they arrived at a small clearing in the forest. James had cheerfully parked alongside in a small parking lot while Lily was maniacally arguing with Remus about whether she was going to die or not.

“ Surprise!” James was standing in front of a small man-made staircase, supposedly carved out of the stone at the mountain’s base. There was a small sign next to it with a drawing of a wolf and the words WATCH OUT underneath it. The man was absolutely beaming with joy as Lily got out of the car and set her gaze up the mountain.

“ Where the fuck are we.” She said, still standing close to the car.

“ Godric's Hollow hiking trail,” He grinned as he turned around to gesture to the mountain behind him. “ My parents used to take me here all the time when I was a kid, and I take the guys here at least once a year.” Despite Lily’s horrified expression he kept talking. “ If we head out now we might be able to see the sunset from the top, the view is just-”

“ You picked me up from practice to go hiking?!”

“ Yep!”

If Lily’s soul hadn’t left her body the minute James had walked into the theater the first day then it had here.

“ James. I thought you were going to teach me how to sing.”

“ I know! I come here before every show, improves my performance tenfold.” He said. She couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t get her feet to move from her position in the car.

“ James, I am not doing this.”

“ Aw c’mon Evans don’t tell me you're scared of a little exercise.” His grin grew from passionate to something more taunting. Lily felt herself get more feeling in her legs as he smirked at her.

“ No! I just don’t see how this-!” She gestured to the trail in front of her, “-isn’t a complete waste of time!”

“ It helps.” He said, tilting his head forward. “ You have to trust me.”

She sighed, anything was at least better than having to sing in front of him again, and after all this she had at least had a convincing story to tell Remus when she inevitably gave up on the tutoring sessions again.

“ Alright.” The grown man in front of her fist pumped the air, “ But, I’m not staying after dark, so this better be quick.” She stepped forward approaching James at the staircase and pointed to the sign mentioning wolves.

“We're not going to get attacked or anything right?”

“ Oh no. I’ve been coming here for ages, never seen any.” He then slung the backpack to his chest and patted it making a large clattering sound. “ But if we do, I’m prepared.” He said smiling, Lily snorted.

“ Right.”

***

They climbed the mountain, and thankfully once they made it up the small staircase spiraling into the trail there was a map. Lily made sure to put the trail in her memory while James moaned in the background that she didn’t need to because he already knew it. It was a pretty journey, all things to say, it was basically all woodland but there was nothing wrong with that. Lily’s parents had taken her on a couple of hikes back in her hometown, but those were less of hikes than they were just an excuse for her parents to stop every minute to examine some sort of flora on the ground. She wished she brought the flora encyclopedia that her mum had given her when she was little, at least she would have something concrete to look at as she struggled to define the different types of leaves. She settled on just trying to define everything based on the information she had already in her mind. After about an hour of Lily trying to rack her brain for plant knowledge and bickering with James about the “real meaning of Sweeny Todd”, and what food would be their respective characters' favorite food, which just caused them just to bicker more.

“ I just don’t know why a werewolf, who lives in the forest, and is an animal half of its life, would like to eat wings.” Lily scoffed.

“ You just don’t understand him like I do Evans.”

“ Really? Because it seems like you're just projecting”

“ We're more alike than you would think.”

They made it to a small clearing, marking their halfway point. The clearing almost looked like a fairy circle with grass cleared in a circle with trees and rocks surrounding it. There were also little flowers aligning the circle, peeking out from behind the rocks. Since it was winter Lily hadn’t seen many flowers so she had mostly been defining the different types of trees and weeds. James stood in the middle of the circle, hands on his hips.

“ There sure are a lot of these flowers everywhere.” He frowned at the small white flowers that had spread everywhere. Lily bent down to examine one of the stems.

“ Well, Lillies are basically weeds with how invasive they are.” She said, and then looked back at James who was gaping at her, he then lifted a shallow pointer finger at the flowers.

“ These are…?”

“ Yep.” She turned back to prevent her face from heating up but much to her dismay James walked over and kneeled next to her peering curiously at the flowers before reaching out. Lily smacked his hand away.

“ Don’t touch. They're poisonous.” James just chuckled and smiled at her in a way that made her feel like her feet were no longer on the floor.

“ Makes sense.” He said.

“ Har har.” She snapped back and then moved to get up, the clearing seemed to be more on the end of the mountain making it so they could see the sky clearer than when they were just in pure woodland. The sun was now seeming to set, the sky turning into an orange-pink hue, James had gotten up after her and noticed where she was frowning, he cursed under his breath.

“ Shit.” He then looked around and cleared some bramble away to reveal another trail, and gestured for Lily to follow him.

“ What are you doing?”

“ Shortcut.” He gave her that grin that he gave her when they were at the foot of the mountain, the challenging one that made her insides bubble and her mind race. She followed after him, making sure she didn’t step on any Lilies, invasive or not her mum would turn in her grave if she knew she was stepping on flowers. They walked along a little trail that looked like it was mostly made from human footsteps, being that it was narrow enough that Lily and James had to walk in a tight line to follow it. They walked for about 10 minutes before they hit a dead end, a wall of rocks piled on top of each other. Lily sharply exhaled.

“ Welp, I’m not surprised.” She looked back at where they came from before glancing back to see James lifting a foot on one of the divots of the wall.

“James. What the actual fuck are you doing.” He looked back at her, completely serious, and laughed a bit before gesturing back to the wall.

“ Climbing.”

“ I’m not doing that.”

“ C’mon it's perfectly safe, me and Sirius used to do this all the time when we were kids.” She just continued to look astonished at him till she huffed and put his hands on his hips. “What's the purpose of legs like that if you don’t use them?” He took a glance down.

“ Uh, I don’t know. Dance?! Not fucking rock climbing!”

“ C’mon Lily, it’s not even that high.”

“ James I swear to god-”

“ I’ll climb up first and then help you every step of the way,” He looked at her, and in the light coming from the sunset his brown eyes seemed to get the smallest bit lighter, “ I thought we needed to trust each other.”

Lily looked back at the trail, then to the wall, and then at James’s eyes underneath his idiotic glasses. Then she thought of that first performance of Swan Lake, Odette being lifted into the air by her partner, and how it made her heart swell. She thought back to her and James lying on top of each other in their living room, the way his smile made his nose scrunch. She shut her eyes hard and then opened them back up to see James still standing in front of her, a bit closer than before.

“ Fine.” She sighed, he grinned before climbing up the wall, giving notes and instructions of what to do, and then lifting his arms into the air at the top. “ See!” He said, “ Not that hard.”

Lily sighed, once again, and made sure her shoelaces were tied before putting her foot on the first rock, James giving her words of encouragement from above. She was almost all the way up when her foot settled on a rock that was more icy than she anticipated making her foot slip, she saw her life flash before her eyes before James grabbed her arm and hauled her up to solid ground.

“ You ok?” He asked. They were sitting on hard ground and it seemed that James had fallen too as a result of pulling her up. She looked at him for a second before nodding silently, he then shook her shoulders rapidly, breathing heavily. “ You did it! You’re a rock climber!”

“ Yeah, whatever.” She stood up, trying her best not to smile, and wiped her pants off, James shortly following after. From there the path was pretty streamlined, Lily followed behind James as he led her through the clearings, the woodland starting up again, 15 minutes into the path, the sun had begun to set more, making the sky darker.

“ James?” She said from where she was behind, the man in front of her promptly shushed her, grabbing her arm to bring her quickly behind a stack of rocks. “ What’s wrong with you?” She yelled, which she was shushed again and James pointed to something in front of them in front of the rocks they were hiding behind, his pointer finger planted to his lips.

In the clearing in front of them were three wolves, an older one presumably the mum, and two cubs. They were sniffing some lilies crowding around a nearby tree, the babies following behind. She and James watched, eyes wide as the small pack began walking back into the forest away from the trail.

Lily was able to manage a silent little, “ Holy shit.” before she and James broke out into almost identical screams shaking each other and jumping up and down.

“ It has to be fate, it's like the universe knows why we're here!”

“ I don’t why the universe would care about our little college musical.” She responded as they continued to walk the path afterward, with the sun leaving the sky, James in front of her carried a large flashlight enlightening the path. With how the trees were clearing ahead Lily guessed that this was most likely the end of the trail. James gave a delighted yell as he ran ahead of her to the top.

“ We made it!” As Lily emerged from the forest to the clearing he turned and pointed to her, still holding the flashlight she might add, which almost blinded her. “You made it!” He yelled.

“I made it.” She held up a weak fist and then took a swig of a water bottle James had given her from his backpack. When she looked up she was met with a view of London at night, there was a crescent moon in the sky, along with tons of little lights from houses below, James shut off his flashlight to walk towards the edge. Lily walked up next to him making sure not to go too close even though there was gating around the edge.

“ Is this the part where you kill me?” She asked, James just cackled, he then slung his backpack around again taking out their music booklet from the show.

“ No. This is where the lesson begins.”

“ James. We’ve been out here for hours.”

“ I know, a bit off schedule, but this still works.” He grinned and flipped to Lily’s ballad at the end of the first act that she had been struggling with. He pushed his glasses up on his face.

“ Now as a warm up-”

“ Excuse me?” Lily murmured, James just kept going.

“ We're going to do a short warm-up.” He flattened his hand against the booklet and looked at Lily, “ Trust me, I know you're tired. This isn’t gonna take long.”

“ Ok…”

“ I want to take a large exhale of air-”, he acted this out, puffing out his cheeks like a chipmunk, “ and then scream it all back out.” He said, letting out a yell that probably shook the whole mountain. Lily just stared at him and put her water bottle down to her side in disbelief.

“ … You can’t be serious.”

“ I am.”

“ James! If anyone hears me screaming they're going to think that someone's being murdered.”

“ No they won't! I used to do this all the time!”

“ Well that doesn't exactly make me feel safe.”

“ Lily.” James’s face had lost all humor, she found that he looked way different like that, she found herself getting a weird sort of comfort out of it, but it still didn’t make her feel much better.

“ Fine…” She glared at James who was still trying to stare her down and then turned back to the London skyline. She took a deep breath inhaling the cold December air and then yelled with all her might back out to the sky. When she looked back James was smiling with his brows tilting upward, a bit concerned.

“ Seems like you have a lot of pent-up rage Evans.”

“ Shut up. Was that it?” James stared at her a bit, seemingly entranced by Lily’s nose before snapping out of it and clearing his throat.

“ Uh yeah, now…-” He held up this sheet music close to her face. “ I want you to do the same thing but sing.” He was now grinning.

“ Was this the exceptional method that somehow improved your performance before every show?” She looked at him with disbelief.

“ Yep you can ask-'' He gestured around before realizing that none else was with them, “ well, anyone.” He smiled shamelessly and Lily took the booklet from him. She had practiced this song loads of times, and even when Sirius and Remus had adjusted it for her level it was still hard to get all the way through it without her having to cough or take a drink of water.

“ Doubting my teaching methods Evans?”

“ A bit.” She took another breath of the frigid air. “ I think I’m a bit of a lost cause to be honest.” She had looked away and when she looked back at James had the same stern look on his face, but this time there was something more gentle about it, like he was going to offer her a warm glass of milk and a bedtime story, it made her feel a bit warmer despite the weather.

“ Lily. You wanna know the reason why I brought you up here?”

“ To play a practical joke?”

“ Ha. no.” His eyes were now locked on hers, “ Because I think you're good, but the problem is-” he waggled his pointer finger, “ You don’t think your good.”

“ Well-”

“ I’m not done. I think you're good, but you just need some sort of push.” He looked back out to the stunning view in front of them, hand setting on the bar of the gate holding them. “ I came here a bunch as a kid because you don’t have to worry about anyone else here, you can yell and nobody can hear you.”

“ Again, a bit unnerving.”

“ You know what I mean!” He looked back at her. “ Just try it? Just once, and then I’ll take you back to the bottom.”

“ I know the way, I don’t need you to guide me.”

“ I bet you do.” He said, and surprisingly there was no mocking tone in his voice this time. His smile was reassuring as Lily looked back down to see where her lines were highlighted in green. “ Want me to cover my ears?” He cheekily said. Lily snorted and shook her head.

She sang, she tried to keep her eyesight on the houses lining the London streets, she followed each car as it drove down the streets, looking back down to the booklet if she needed to, she basically had it memorized by now. Once she finished, her voice was a bit dry but she felt elevated, that was the first time she was able to get through the whole thing without stopping. When she looked over to James, smiling, he was holding the script with a sparkle in his eyes. Instead of giving her notes he just kept going, reading the script to the next scene, and Lily went along, banking on the high that she got from singing the previous song. Every time they had an extra character in the scene James would pitch his voice higher or lower depending on the character, and Lily would have to hold back giggles as she responded back. Soon they went through the whole second act, including every song, which Lily was surprisingly able to do with fewer problems. Once they finished, Lily held her sheet music booklet to her chest, heaving from exhaustion, James was grinning, a pink tint accenting both of his cheeks. They stood like for around 30 seconds, and the only sound in the surrounding area was their short breaths. They stared for a minute and then James’s phone rang.

“ Ello?” He said, turning away quickly, his other hand quickly shoved in his pocket as he walked away from the edge. Lily looked back down at the view trying to get her nerves back since the walls she had built up were all seemingly toppled in the past 30 minutes by a man with ugly glasses. She was brought out of her thoughts when she heard said man yell from the other end of the hill.

“ Fire?! What do you mean by fire?!” He cried. Lily stared as he continued to talk into his phone.

“ I mean I guess we could… Lemme ask her. See you in a bit.” He put his phone back in his pocket and turned to Lily, a slightly embarrassed smile on his face as she walked down the hill towards him.

“ So… You hungry?” He asked.

***

A few hours later Lily was sitting in the Three Broomsticks diner after closing in between Remus and Mary in a booth eating half-burnt pancakes that Remus and her had whipped up with whatever ingredients they could find in the pantry. The old jukebox playing overhead behind their loud shouts.

‘Cause you started something, can’t you see
That ever since we met you’ve had a hold on me
No matter what you do, I only want to be with you~

“ How was I supposed to know that bacon is highly flammable?” Sirius was sitting across from Remus at their table, talking while shoving chocolate chip pancakes in his mouth rapidly.

“ You put vodka on it, Padfoot.” Remus said, passing a plate holding a stack of pancakes towards Peter who was sitting at the end of the table on a chair he had to pull up.

“ Well duh, how else was I supposed to enhance the flavor?”

“ Why were you even making Bacon at 9 pm anyway?” Marlene snorted from where James was holding her in a headlock.

“ Moony loves bacon.” He said taking a big gulp, like it somewhat explained his bizarre actions. James gave him a look while Remus just chuckled next to Lily.

“ I think this serves as a valuable lesson in why you shouldn't keep candles around while you cook.”

“ Ok Professor Lupin~.” Mary said from where she was eating the food off of Peter’s plate.

The number of pancakes that they had plated at the middle of the table began to dwindle as the night went on, at some point, Sirius and James brought out alcohol from the pantry and after some convincing, they popped it open. She and Remus were left at the table alone, as James and Sirius had gotten up to teach the Waltz to Mary and Marlene, Peter watching and clapping along. The impromptu lesson proved to be difficult since they were all practically wasted and were trying to gracefully dance alongside the slow T.rex song that Remus had put on the jukebox.

Is it strange to dance so late
I, I, I danced myself into the tomb
I danced myself into the tomb

Remus nudged her in the shoulder, taking her gaze off of where she was staring at James and his hand guiding Marlene along, it had been a waltz at some point but it had quickly turned into some sort of bizarre wrestling match that then evolved into some sort of rugby game when James threw a salt shaker across the room, Marlene sprinting across the diner to catch it. When he laughed his eyes squinted Lily noticed, she didn’t realize how long she was staring until Remus smirked at her.

“ So… You're alive.” He said.

“ Barley.” She stated, Remus laughed. He smiled and rested his cheek on his knuckles.

“ I'm surprised that he was able to get you all the way to the top.”

“ What do you mean?” Lily asked, the man next to her shrugged, according to Sirius he had been studying all day for an exam, which showed in his slow movements and bags under his eyes.

“ We usually just hike until we get to the halfway point, only Sirius has been all the way to the top.” He shrugged.

“ Huh.” Lily said she thought back to James's face when he looked at the view.

“ I came here a bunch as a kid because you don’t have to worry about anyone else here, you can yell and nobody can hear you.” He had said.

“ At least you're done. You don’t have to do any more sessions if you don’t want to.” Remus said, bringing her out of her thoughts.

“ I wouldn't mind doing a couple more honestly.” She shrugged and Remus blinked.

“ Really?”

“ Yeah, I mean, my singing is terrible, I need it.” She looked away to the empty plate in front of her.

“ Well. Okay then.”

The night went on, they drank more, so much in fact that they had to leave when Sirius and James had somehow broken one of their pancake plates in a drunken game of frisbee. Remus fumed and rushed them all out before they could break anything else.

“ You guys ok to get home?” James said outside the door, he was addressing her and her friends, but despite that, he was really only making eye contact with her. Behind him, Remus was hauling a wasted Sirius alongside Peter who was trying to keep the bile in his mouth and not the sidewalk.

“ We’ll be fine, it's a short walk.”

“ Are you sure? You're not too tired at all?”

“ I’ll be fine. After all, I have the universe on my side.” She smiled and got one back from James, and she in fact kept smiling as they walked down the block back to their flat.

Chapter Text

Friday, December, 13 | 23 days till opening

“Hello? What's going on?”

“ Hi, cariad.”

“ Mum? What’s going on?”

“ Nothing love, just checking how you're doing.”

It had been a couple of months since Remus had last called her. He didn’t really want to have to hear the decline of energy in his mother’s voice as she got sicker and sicker. It made him angry like he wanted to kick something. But even still, he was out in the same spot, sitting on the stairs leading to the alley at the diner, cigarette in hand. It was almost out, burning down to his fingertips like a match. If he focused, he could feel the heat on his fingers.

“ I’m doing fine. How are you doing? I heard that you went to the store all by yourself the other day.” He said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. Hope chuckled on the other side of the line.

“ I did. It was quite fulfilling. It was a bit hard reaching the high shelves without your dad though.” She said softly. Remus dropped his cig on the floor and squashed it with his foot. It was fully winter now, Remus had to brush off snow before sitting down on the step. He has a slight urge to spark up his lighter just to heat himself some more.

“ Well, In a few weeks, I can go with you, and reach all the high shelves for you.” He said, Hope paused. He felt his heart beat slowly against his chest.

“ Actually.” Her voice got a bit dimmer. “ I wanted to talk to you about that.”

“...What?” He smooths his hands over the lighter Sirius had given him as a graduation present. It was gold with a moon carved onto it, he always held it in his coat pocket.

“ It’s just… the train ride is so long and your dad is worried about your health with you making the trip back here-”

“ My health?"

“ - And I’m going to be in the hospital the whole break anyway.”

“ Hospital?! I thought you were doing better?!”

“ I am, but the doctor said it doesn't hurt to take residency as soon as possible-”

“ But-”

“ And I know that the train ticket back is always so expensive, and we just don’t want anything to hinder your studies.” She said “we” but he was sure it was his dad who said this, there was a reason he probably had her pass this message along and not him.

“ But Mum-!”

“ Remus, listen to me.” She said sternly, Remus felt like he was back in Solva, his mom chastising him after he broke her sewing machine while trying to sew a hole shut in his ripped sweater.

“ You’ll be able to come home, just not right now.”

His eyesight zeroed on the cigarette he had smashed on the floor, the snow slowly covering it, his mum was still talking despite his silence.

“ We already asked Effie and Monty if they minded taking you for Christmas…” She paused for an answer and after not getting one her voice grew a bit softer, “Remus are you listening to me?”

“ I’m listening.”

“ We're proud of you, we want you to keep doing your best, so just do this one thing for us ok?” Her voice broke a bit. His hands had gotten numb, he had forgotten his gloves at home.

“ Ok.”

“ Rwy'n dy garu di Remus.”

“ I love you too.”

“ I’ll see you soon. Stay strong love.” She hung up. The line rang as Remus sat still on the steps, the snow falling around him.

***

Once he had gotten home, he immediately grabbed a beer from the fridge and took a huge swig. A chuckle came behind him as Peter was eating a peanut butter jelly sandwich from the table in the kitchen. James goes through these phases where to prevent worrying he keeps his hands moving by making as many sandwiches as he can in a frenzy. Their fridge ends up filled to the brim with cucumber, peanut butter, and jelly, or jam sandwiches. He never eats any of them though, usually, that's their job. As Remus turned his back to the counter the front door opened and closed with loud voices coming through.

Sirius took the pint from Remus’s hands and ran to the other side of the kitchen to take a sip, Remus following behind trying and failing to snatch it back. James laughed, smelling freshly of cologne and sweat, wearing his football jersey; he took a cup from the cabinets overhead, pouring water from the sink, and drinking all of it in one go. He then smacked it down loudly on the counter, grinning loudly. That grin seemed to be a more common occurrence since that hiking session with Lily.

“ Mum called me today, ‘said Moony was going to be ours for Christmas.” He said.

“ Holy shit!” Sirius yelled from the other side of their small kitchen, he was left unguarded for a minute leaving Remus to finally snatch back the pint he was holding. This left Sirius unaffected. “ I can finally show you that motorbike I was telling you about!” He yelled out, causing James to snort.

“ The old one he found in a trash dump,” James said.

“ I did not get it from a trash dump!” He paused, frowning. “ I got off the side of the road.” James cackled, earning a punch on the arm from Sirius. Peter looked up from his half-eaten sandwich.

“ Shouldn’t you be going home? With your mum being sick and everything?”

“ Pete.” James scolded, and Sirius’s smile instantly fell.

“ It’s fine.” He said to prevent James from lecturing. Remus looked down into his pint, the glass reflecting the color of his fingertips.

“ They thought it would be pointless since she’s just going to be cooped up in the hospital the whole time.” He swung the bottle back and forth in his hand, watching the liquid follow the movement. “ And because the train ride makes me sick, and the ticket is expensive, along with a million other stupid reasons.” As he talked, James’s eyes didn’t shift at all, Remus guessed that he already was told this.

“ Mum said that she would set you up on our home phone that can call long distance. You’ll be able to call them every day.” James walked over and patted him on the shoulder, Remus nodded.

“ I’m sure you’ll be able to go home for Easter,” Peter said, he was resting his sandwich down on the table, away from his mouth.

“ It’s fine, with everything going on, I didn’t want to have to take the train ride anyway.” He mumbled, Sirius hadn’t said anything. Instead, he walked over to the fridge and took out a beer, cracking it open.

“ Why don’t we move movie night to tonight? We can even watch that sucky version of West Side Story.”

Remus smiled at the sight of Sirius’s decision to solve his problem with a musical showing, like he usually did when one of them was upset. After all, it usually worked for him, they had sat down and watched every iteration they could find of Phantom of the Opera when Sirius had left home.

“ The un-sucky version being what? The version we did in primary?” Remus said, James furrowed his brows in frustration at Sirius’s sudden change of subject.

“ Of course,” Sirius said confidently, Remus snorted.

“ I can’t anyway. I’m seeing a show with Lily in like…” He checked his watch, “ half an hour.”

At this James’s face got redder. “ With Evans?” He said, his pitch getting higher. Sirius laughed at the look on his face.

“ Yeah, we won tickets to Anna Karenina through a raffle.” He grinned. They had mostly entered as a joke, Gideon had set the thing up with all the diner’s staff, as a sort of early Christmas gift, and he and Lily had done a joint sign-up, almost spending 30 dollars on the amount of tickets they put in, there were only 3 other people who entered so really all their effort was for naught.

“ The one at the diner right?” Peter said through his sandwich.

“ Why the hell are you taking Evans and not us?” Sirius whined.

“ We entered the raffle together.” Remus shrugged, trying not to focus on how obviously Sirius was pouting. The man quickly snapped out of it though when he saw James’s face, shoving his shoulder into his side and smirking.

“ Well, you could at least get a good word in for Prongs.”

“ What?!” James squawked.

“ You’ve been really quiet since last week. Did something happen?” Remus said. James’s eyes widened.

“ Nothing happened! We hiked, it was…”

“ Was what Potter?” Sirius laughed louder.

“ Fun, it was fun.” James said and smiled down at his shoes, his cheeks red. Sirius glanced at Remus who met him with a shrug. Lily and James had been ramping up the amount of tutor sessions they were doing, which Remus would say is because of Lily’s determination for perfection but he suspected that something else lurked underneath the surface in the way Lily’s eyes would look whenever she mentioned him.

Like she was summoned, the buzzer on the wall rang loudly, making James jump. Sirius pressed the button, grinning still, keeping his sight on the terrified look James was giving him.

“ Who is it?~” Sirius sang.

“ It’s Lily!” She called from the speaker.

Sirius continued to smile as he pressed the button to open the door. “Come on up!” He chimed into the speaker. James tried to shove him but missed as Sirius sprinted out of the room, James following behind him. Remus and Peter exchanged a frustrated glance as they listened to the men yell at each other from the other room.

***

Lily was wearing a long heavy gray suede jacket with boots that went up to just below her knees, her hair was up like always with earmuffs on her ears to compensate for the cold. As Remus walked out into the cramped hallway, she was making room for an older man trying to haul two big grocery bags into his flat across the hall. She looked over and smiled at him as she held the door open for the man, and nodded as she was given a quiet, “ thank you” from the old man.

“ Mr. Director.” She said, her cheeks a bit pink from the outside.

“ Not a director.” He responded before nudging her to walk down the hallway.

“The boys didn’t say anything about me coming up?” She said as they walked down the cold street to the Tube entrance.

“ No. Why do you ask?” He said innocently.

“ Remus. I could practically hear Black’s smile from the other side of the buzzer.” She frowned comically as Remus laughed.

“ How’s the ballad going?” Lily said as Remus sat next to her, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“ You're always asking about that!” Remus groaned and bumped Lily in the side, and then had to pick her up again by the arm when she almost slipped on the icy road. She laughs as she sturdied herself.

“ I love seeing you talk about it. You always seem so professional.”

“ I could say the same thing for you.”

“ You think so?” She asked, the sides of her mouth quivering up.

“ Yep.” Lily's full smile showed through, it warmed his weak heart a bit. Their train then came, making them hop on quickly and getting two seats near the entrance.

“ Y’know, I couldn’t have done it without you.” Lily says, smiling.

“ Yeah. Yeah.”

“ I’m serious!” Maybe it was because of the way Remus’s mind often drifted to the same thing but at this usage of the word he snorted rather loudly, causing a few stares around them in the train car. He leaned his head up against the tube seat he was sitting in, but due to his height it kind of just resulted in him looking at the dirty ceiling above him.

“ Anyways about the ballad, Sirius says that it’s almost done. It’s up to him and James now.” He throws up his hands in a fruitless gesture. “ It’s out of my hands, whether I like it or not.”

“ I’m sure it’ll be fine, Potter’s competent enough.” She looked out into the aisle, putting her feet underneath her seat as someone walked by. Remus stared at her.

“ Wow.” Remus let out a small gasp at the “compliment”.

“ What?”

“ Competent?”

“ Shut up.” She looked to the other side of the car, face reddening even more. He laughed and a few minutes later they were out on the streets again, Remus’s breath coming out as smoke as they walked. As they approached the theater-middling downtown London, the amount of people surrounding them increased, specifically older, richer, people. They entered the line to check in their tickets, Lily bobbing up and down from where she stood ahead in line and Remus looking around warily. He kept his eyes on Lily as she continued to move around below the outside lights the theater put on.

“ You sure are excited.” He said. Since the line wasn’t moving she turned out to face him, grinning.

“ I haven’t been to a real ballet in so long.” She said, “ How are you not excited?” Remus shrugged, Lily grabbed his shoulders and looked into his eyes, he could almost see his reflection in her pale green eyes.

“ When you get in there, and the lights go off, and the orchestra starts playing,” Her smile got wider, her eyes brighter, “ and the dancers take their first steps, it's almost like… magic!” Her voice rose, and like she got self-conscious about how excited she was getting, she shyly took her hands off his shoulders and stepped back.

“ It reminds me of home. My mum used to take me to shows all the time as a kid.” She shrugged.

“ I know the feeling.” He smiled, and she smiled back. Up until a while ago, he didn’t know anything about Lily’s relationship with her mother until she had mentioned it in passing during one of their shifts.

“ My dad used to say that my mum used to come home from each school day carrying the biggest smile, even though she had stickers all over her clothes.” They were wiping a table during closing, and Marlene was napping in the locker room. They promised to wake her once they had finished, she had been especially tired from a football game a few hours before.

Remus had somehow brought the conversation to his mother, since he had that moment with Sirius in the bathroom, he saw his thoughts drift back to her more often. He felt like he was in primary again feeling homesick, just wanting anything more than to be back in Wales again.

“ Ah, and nothing is worse than stickers in compromising positions.” She nodded to Remus and his paint-stained pants, the paint staining his nether region. He had acquired the stain through an encounter with a rather cheeky 13-year-old and a science project about paint chemicals. Remus snorted at Lily’s remark.

“ You said she doesn’t teach anymore right?” Lily asked.

“ Yep.”

“ Does she want to? Sounds like she loved it.” She stopped wiping the table, it being thoroughly cleaned by now, Remus stood by at the head of the table as she shuffled off the booth seat.

“ I mean even if she wanted to, she’s too sick to even be able to.”

“ Ah. So they’re living vicariously through you.” Lily said, intending it to be with humor but it only made Remus’s face grimace.

“ I guess.” He said, trying to hide any negative feelings this was bringing up. She looked at him, her smile falling, and her next words were soft.

“ I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-” She looked down to her shoes, planted to the ground.

“I lost my mum to breast cancer, I was pretty young. Sometimes I forget that people aren’t as numb to sickness as I am.” She moved the rag she was holding to the other hand and rested it on his forearm. “ It gets better.” She smiled, looking up from her shoes at him.

Remus appreciated Lily, she reminded him of the good things that came with the burden of responsibility.

He looked up at where the sign in front displayed the title of the show, “ANNA KARENINA”, it said. Lily smiled back and followed where Remus was looking. “ Would she like this one?” He said.

“ I don’t know, I haven't seen it.” Lily shrugged.

“ She like melodrama?” Lily nodded. “ Then yeah, she’d probably love this one.”

“ I thought you hadn't been to any ballets?”

“ I haven’t. I read the book.”

“ Of course you've read the book.”

“ You calling me a swot?”

“ No.” She smirked at him. “ I’m calling you a nerd.”

“ Says you.” Remus nudged her with his arm, causing her to laugh and stagger back a bit which unfortunately was into the space of a snide older woman in front of them.

“ Oh! I’m so sorry!” Lily jumped back, she earned a scoff and a glare from the older lady who just turned back around. Lily turned back to Remus and made a face.

“ That was polite.” She said, Remus snorted. Lily took a quick look around, noticing the crowd around them was missing a lot of broke college students. “ Is it just me or do we not fit in here?”

“ You just noticed?”

They were able to make it inside with no more insult to injury, and they shuffled down the aisle to their seats. Despite this being a rather posh place, Gideon's tickets got them stuck up on the balcony, the huge stage looking tiny from their view, Lily’s excitement didn’t seem to dwindle though. As they found their seats Remus popped off to get refreshments, which was a Mars bar for him and a ginger ale for Lily. She took the ginger ale gratefully as he sat back down. Shortly after the lights went off, the curtains opened, and Lily practically vibrated in her seat.

As they watched, Lily’s smile didn’t dim. Around halfway through, the main male dancer in white, ran across the stage twirling and leaping with an immense strength Remus would never have expected based on his distance from the stage. Lily leaned into Remus to whisper into his ear.

“ Do you think I could get James to do that?” She said,

“Honestly, he’d do anything you ask him to do.” This earned a sharp smack to the side of his arm, and a snatch of his Mars bar as he laughed, apparently too loudly, because two old ladies in front of them turned sharply over to shush them. Lily, clearly embarrassed, sunk back into her seat, passing Remus his Mars bar back as he continued to laugh, this time more quietly.

The show ended in a swift hour and a half that didn’t feel like it. He let Lily guide him out of the theater beaming about the intricacies of the dancing that Remus would never understand even if he tried. As they left the theater the cold air suddenly hit Remus in the face, and the crowd that once filled the theater sprawled across the street.

“ Sorry, I’m rambling, we should get home.” She said, looking around for an opening in the crowd.

“ Don’t apologize, are you hungry?” He smiled, and she quickly nodded. They shoved through the crowd to a nearby cafe. Their table was around a small window at the side, the chairs cushioned and a small cat was sitting at the counter. Despite Remus’s offer the two just ended up getting a coffee each. Lily still rambled, waving her arms around, her purple-colored fingernails making matching purple shapes in the air.

“ It was just so beautiful! God, I've missed it.”

“ You’ve basically been doing ballet every day though.” He said, taking a short sip of his coffee, almost burning his tongue. Lily sighed.

“ Yeah. But it’s not the same…” She said drearily, Remus made an affirmative humm as he tried to take another sip of his coffee.

“ Would you ever want to do this for a living?” He heard Lily say across from him at the table. She was looking out the window, it had begun snowing, and her eyes got a bit dimmer.

“ Do what?”

“ Y’know…? Art?” She looked back at him, Remus put his mug back on the plate, making a soft clang.

“ When I was a kid, yeah, but even back then it always seemed like some crazy pipe dream.” He shrugged, if Sirius was here he’d probably smack him on the head. He tried to not revel in the thought too much. “ I mean, I’m basically doing it now.” He said.

“ Is writing and teaching others to write the same?” Lily tilted her head curiously.

“ In some ways.” He looked out to the snow. “ Anyways, as much as I wanted to, my Dad would never let me. Art doesn’t exactly pay the hospital bills for a kid with a prune for a heart.” He tried to carry humor in his voice to get the image of Sirius sitting next to his bed not reappearing in his head, like it had been commonly doing since it had happened.

Lily leaned forward, resting her cheek on her hand. There was one gold ring on her hand, on top was an emerald pendant. “ There’s nothing wrong with dreaming though.” She said, her voice morphing into something wistful he hadn’t heard before.

“ Lily.” He said, grounding her back to reality, blinking rapidly.

“ Huh?”

“ What is happening?”

“ What?”

“ Why are you acting like that?”

“ Acting like what?” She said, her eyes suddenly getting wider. Remus slapped his palm to his forehead.

“ Oh my god, it's James, he’s infected you!”

“ What?! No he hasn't!” She yelled, the cat that was sitting on the counter startled and ran off.

“ You're talking exactly like him and Sirius.”

“ I would never.” She said, hands clenching her mug.

“ I don’t know Lily, it seems like he’s really gotten to you. You’ve been acting different.”

“ I could say the same thing about you!” She leaned forward, glaring.

“ I don’t know what you're talking about.” He looked back to his cup, then to his fingers clenching the handle, he was letting his nails get too long.

“ Really Remus? You're just going to let me believe that the extra writing sessions with Black are all for,” She raised her hands in bunny ears. “ The Sake of the Show.”

“ Again, I don't know what you’re trying to imply.”

“ Remus. The set painting, the long periods Potter’s telling me you two spend in his room, the piano mysteriously being broken and you have to stay back to help him fix it?” She widened her eyes. She was mostly right, he and Sirius had been spending a lot more time together, some of it under weird circumstances. With the broken piano, Sirius justified Remus staying back with him for the reason of giving him “ moral support “, Remus had stayed back instead of going home and taking a nap, even though he really should've. But he wasn’t going to admit that.

“ First of all, none of that has been my idea.”

“ Yeah, but you seriously haven’t noticed?”

“ Noticed what?”

“ Remus c’mon! How clingy he’s been!” As she talked the coffee she had rejected to drink sat in front of her, the liquid shaking in the mug. Remus felt his legs slowly go to jelly, he didn’t expect to be interrogated about this in a 24-hour cafe on a Friday night.

“ That’s just how he acts. He’s always been like that.”

“ Yeah, but you have to recognize how much it has increased lately, right? You know what this kind of behavior usually means.” Her eyes shifted a bit, and Remus’s heart began to beat rapidly.

“ Don’t say it.”

“ Remus.”

“ I’ve known Sirius half of my life. That would be insane.” His logical mind made him say, his heart in contrast was beating even more rapidly at the mention.

“ Doesn’t mean it’s not a possibility.” She said, her worried face getting a bit softer. “I just think all of this wears you out. Don’t think I haven't noticed the eye bags either.” She flicked her gaze upwards to Remus’s eyes. In an effort to not dig any deeper Remus decided to cave a bit.

“ Fine. You win.” He held up his hands in surrender. “ Maybe I have noticed the change a little bit.” Lily’s eyebrows raised in disbelief as he said this.

“ Are you going to talk to him about it?”

“ I’ll talk to him after the opening.” A tired waiter walked over to the table, taking both of their mugs, which were emptied during the interrogation. Remus pulled out his wallet to slap a quick ten on the table alongside Lily.

“ Everything always comes “ after the opening “ with you doesn’t it.” She said, holding the glass door of the cafe open for him. The street was empty.

“ I’m just trying to make it through one day at a time.” He sighed and Lily surrendered a small smile. She kicked a small pile of snow, sending it into the road next to them.

“ I’m sorry if I’m overstepping, I’ve been told that I can get a bit…” She stopped walking and her smile grew shy, “ …protective of my friends.” At the word “friends” Remus smiled back, shoving his hands in his pockets. He felt like he had finally melted all the ice surrounding Lily’s previous prickly personality. The thing that made her cut herself in the kitchen all those months ago.

“ It’s fine. Someone was going to have to grill me eventually. Better you than James.” At this, Lily let out a disgusted groan.

“ God I hate to know that I have something in common with him.” She frowned, but Remus had a feeling she was playing it up due to their previous conversation.

“ You two are really more alike than you think.”

“ Ugh! Stop it!” She made a move to swipe at him that he dodged, almost gracefully if he didn’t nearly slip on the ice as he did it.

They headed back onto the tube and as they sat down on an almost empty train cart he fully realized how late it was.

“ You want to come over to our flat so I can drive you the rest of the way home?” At this Lily’s face grew surprised so Remus quickly backtracked, “ I mean not like that- it’s just it’s pretty late and-” She cut him off with a smile.

“ That would be nice, thanks.”

They approached Remus and his friends’ flat, he briefly considered sending some sort of messenger pigeon to not give poor James a heart attack but the man was never up past 11 pm anyway. They made it up to the front door and he left Lily at the entrance as he headed to get the keys to Ted’s car that James had borrowed for the aforementioned hike the two had taken a week ago. He didn’t really know where the keys were, but he figured that if he just searched the kitchen enough he would find them. As he looked in an empty cookie jar that Peter had picked up at a flea market but had never put any cookies in, a voice piped up from around the corner.

“ Looking for something?”

Remus nearly jumped out of his skin, slamming the top of the jar down, almost breaking the poor thing. Lily, who was standing at the entrance snorted. Despite being by the entrance she was still a short distance away from him, since the entrance to their small flat went straight to the kitchen anyway. He turned to where the voice came from and standing near the area between their living room, was Sirius, wearing a faded stones’ shirt, the same one he had once thrown up on, with sweatpants. His hair was up loosely by his neck and despite the time, it didn’t look like he had been woken up. Remus tried to force his eyes not to stare any longer, Lily’s words coming into his mind from earlier, and he forced his attention back to looking for the keys.

“ Ted’s car keys,” He glanced to where Sirius was walking up to him at the counter, he tried to feign aspiration as he talked, “What are you doing up?”

“ Working on that ballad.” He grinned and leaned back to meet Remus’s eye. He hated that grin, it was like he was trying to let Remus in on something that Remus had no idea about. He felt his face heat up, and thankfully at the same time, Sirius shifted his attention to Lily standing with her arms crossed at the doorway.

“ Evans.”

“ Black.” She said, her feet planted, her eyes sharp. As she glared at him she threw a knowing look Remus’s way, a look he tried to ignore.

“ How was the show?” Sirius turned back to Remus, voice quiet like he was trying to share some sort of secret. Remus tried to keep his mind occupied on finding those damn car keys and not how he could see Sirius’s collarbone as the shirt dipped when he moved. He moved to open another cupboard muttering in frustration when he failed again in finding the keys.

“ It was fine, where are those damn keys?” As he grumbled he heard another door open from down the hall. What emerged was a frazzled and drowsy James Potter, his hair was a mess, like always and he squinted at Remus and Sirius at the counter, since he was without his glasses.

“ What are you doing?” He said and then yawned loudly. Remus groaned.

“ How did you even wake up? Your room is the farthest from the kitchen.”

“ He has ears like a gazelle.” Sirius chuckled, his remark earned a smack from the sleepy figure who froze as he noticed Lily still standing by the door.

“ Evans.”

She smiled at James’s sleepy posture. “ Potter.”

“ Wha-What are you doing here?”

“ James! Where did you put Ted’s car keys?!” Remus yelled out. James promptly shushed him.

“ You’ll wake Peter!” He whispered, he then scratched his head, drawing his attention back to Remus from where Lily was suppressing a laugh at the entrance. “ It’s not in here?”

“No,” Remus groaned again.

“ I’m sure they're here somewhere.” He moved to search the kitchen cabinet closest to him, he squinted his eyes even more as he attempted to survey the cabinet. Remus pinched the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes again to hear a small clink like someone had opened the cookie jar again. Sirius, smirking, opened the jar and gingerly reached a hand in and pulled out the keys, waggling them in the air as he held them. Remus glowered at him.

“ You're some sort of wizard I swear.” He said snatching the keys from Sirius's hands as he cackled. James snorted from where he was closing the cabinet back up.

“ Watch out Evans, sounds like Padfoot’s coming for your role.” He said, Lily laughed finally, earning a soppy smile from James. Sirius rolled his eyes before looking at the keys in Remus’s hands.

“ Don’t tell me you're planning on driving? In this weather?” He asked.

“ I’m perfectly capable of driving in the snow.” He said, trying not to let up eye contact when Sirius smirked at him again. He turned to Lily standing on the other side of the kitchen, at the mention of Remus’s driving ability her eyebrows rose on her face.

“ I think we should at least let Evans know what she’s signing up for.”

“ Oh fuck off.” He wallowed.

“ Remus, can you not drive?” Lily said, arms still crossed.

“ I can, I passed the test just like everyone else.”

“ Barely,” James mumbled, Remus sent him a glare before realizing something. He made sure to shoot Lily a grin before turning back to James.

“ Y’know what Sirius is right, I really shouldn’t be driving home in this weather.” He cocked his arm back, “ James, you drive Lily home.” He threw the keys to James who caught them easily, his face seeming to lose all drowsiness.

“...What?” He said, his brain barely catching up, shown through how his eyes slowly got lighter.
“ But… I just woke up.” Was the only defense his poor sleepy brain could muster.

“ The cold should wake you up enough. Driving in the snow, I don’t think my poor heart could take it!” He said dramatically. Sirius sniggered as James looked to Lily for any sort of defense.

Lily shrugged, looking at Remus with a smile. It didn’t have the intended effect that Remus was going for but at least he was able to rag James some more. “ I don’t mind. As long as someone gets me home.” She said. This seemed to be all that James needed because he instantly straightened up.

“ Well… Ok. Lemme just get my glasses. “ He mumbled, face getting redder, as he shuffled away to his room. James held the door open for Lily as they left, and Remus had to keep himself from laughing at the glare Lily finally gave him as they left.

Sirius was still leaning on the counter way too close to Remus. He leaned a bit closer, their shoulders touching. Despite the heating in their flat not being up to full temperature Remus felt himself sweat.

“ You're evil.” Sirius smiled, strands falling from his ponytail.

“ Shut it Gandalf.”

***

On Sirius’s insistence, they ended up watching West Side Story around the same time the next day. James and Remus were in the kitchen making popcorn, James shaking the kernels around in the pot while Remus made sure he didn’t get distracted by anything and burnt them.

“ You never told me how the ballet was,” James said, switching the handle of the pot to his other hand to adjust his glasses.

“ It was good. A bit boring to be honest, Lily had a good time though.” He looked at James, who had directed his attention towards the kernels popping quietly in the pot.

“ Are you gonna ask me?” At this James turned sharply as a kernel sounded a loud POP.

“ Ask what?” He blinked, a dear in the headlights.

“ Don’t be dumb, about Lily.” Remus raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“ Am I really that obvious?”

“ Prongs. Everyone knows”

“ Even Lily?”

“ In her own stubborn, livid way.” He tilted his head and messaged his side where she had shoved him earlier in the theater. James let out a groan and frowned.

“ What am I supposed to do?”

“ Ask her out probably.”

“ She hates me,” James said, frowning even more.

“ No she doesn’t,” Remus said, James turned excitedly, almost burning himself but jumping at the last minute.

“ She doesn’t love you,” James deflated a bit, “ But I wouldn’t necessarily say she hates you.”

“ Just ask her out, and if she says no then what’s done is done.” He shrugged. James sighed.

“ I don’t know… what if Snape like puts a hit out on me or something.”

“ James. “

“ I mean- doesn’t it bother you? She’s friends with Snivellus.” He pitched his voice when he said it like it was some sort of curse.

“ No, it doesn’t bother me. Secondary was ages ago.”

“ It bothers Sirius.”

“ Of course it does,” Remus said, that certainly explained why Sirius hated Lily so much. On cue, Sirius’s loud cackle sounded from the living room where he and Peter were supposed to be putting on the movie. Remus looked out to the living room to see the back of Sirius’s head, when he looked back James was smiling evilly.

“ James-”

“ How ‘bout I ask out Lily and you tell Sirius about Hogwarts.”

“ I don’t see how either one of those things is in any way related.” At this James continued to smile, he then shrugged. The popcorn ceased popping, James took the top off and began to scoop it into two large bowls, they had dogs patterned all over them, they had been another item that Peter had happened upon at a flea market. The man loves buying strange things for cheap.

Remus sighed, he was probably going to have to tell Sirius anyway, and maybe if he agreed to this James and Lily’s relationship would be less hostile by the time the show opened. James was holding out his hand now, his other hand holding one of the ugly popcorn bowls.

“ Fine.” Remus shook his hand.

“ Glad to do business with you,” James said.

“ Weirdo.” He moved to pick up the other bowl and walked to the living room, where Sirius and Peter were sitting in the middle of the couch. James ran ahead of him to jump beside Peter next on the couch, as Remus sat on the other side with Sirius. He sighed loudly as Sirius grabbed the popcorn bowl from his hands.

“ What? You don’t want to sit next to me?” Sirius asked, making James snort from the other side of the couch.

“You're a popcorn hog,” Remus whined.

“ I’m about sick and tired of all these false accusations, Moony.”

Peter held up the remote and pressed play on the movie, a red screen lighting the dark room.
“ Not false.” He said.

“ Lies and slander,” Sirius said, trying to wrestle the bowl back from Remus who had taken it.

The movie started, displaying the Jets and Sharks prancing around New York streets. Later on, Maria’s pretty face was framed by their TV screen making his friend laugh. “ It’s Moony!” Sirius pointed to the screen. He tried to ignore how bright his eyes were even in the darkness of their flat.

They got through the movie, Sirius almost falling off the couch multiple times, James pushed him whenever he got too loud. By the time they ended, Peter was asleep, tired from a shift at the office, James waking him up so he could haul him back to his room. When James walked back in he stretched his arm above his head, yawning loudly.

“ Well, I’m going to head to bed. I told Mckinnon I would do some drills with her in the morning.”

“ In the snow?!” Remus exclaimed, James just grinned sheepishly.

“ Football stops for no one.” Sirius chuckled, glancing back quickly at Remus. “ You have the day off tomorrow right?” The look in his eyes unnerved him a bit, somehow Remus thought that he probably wouldn't be able to lie to him even if he wanted to.

“ Yeah.”

“ I found an old DVD of Singing in the Rain in the sale bin the other day, wanna watch it?” He tilted his head in question, lips quirked like he was a dog. Singing in the Rain was one of their favorites, he remembers specifically having his friends over for a sleepover during Summer break in 4th year, he and Sirius had stayed up to watch it when James and Peter fell asleep.

“You know what this kind of behavior usually means.” Lily’s statement from yesterday came back to him.

Remus glanced at James who was standing in front of the couch, at the scene in front of him his smile turned more into a smirk.

“ You don’t have to be at the garage tomorrow?”

“ I have a later shift at 3,” Sirius said. Remus resisted another glance at James, he took a deep breath.

“ Yeah. Sure.” At this Sirius’s smile grew and James let out a soft chuckle.

“ Well, I’ll see you tossers tomorrow.” He walked down the hall scratching the back of his head.

“ ‘Night James!” Remus turned over the couch and when he turned back Sirius was still smiling at him, a foggy look in his eyes.

“ Sirius?” He said, making Sirius jump up from where he was sitting on the couch.

“ Lemme go get the DVD.” He said and then ran down the hall. As he left Remus weighed his options.

He could hypothetically take this opportunity to tell Sirius about Hogwarts, but also he still had to go home with them for Christmas, and telling him about Hogwarts meant that he would have to open the floodgates about everything… yeah, Remus wasn’t gonna do it.

He’ll do it after the opening, Lily’s mocking voice comes back in his head. As he shook his head to try to dispel it, Sirius walked up to the couch still smiling brightly. He put the DVD into the DVD player and popped back on the couch, sitting on the opposite side, propping his legs on Remus’s who was sitting on the coffee table in front of them.

As the movie continued, Sirius inched closer and closer to Remus, they were about 20 minutes in and their shoulders were nearly touching.

-Or you study Shakespeare and be quite elite
And you could charm the critics and have to eat

Sirius snorted at the screen. “ You know that I had this all memorized at some point?”

“ Choreography too?” Remus said, eyes still on the screen. Sirius laughed quietly, Remus’s heart did a little backflip in his chest.

“ Yep. It was James’s idea, he said it would make you feel better after you were stuck in the infirmary with pneumonia. Remember? “

“ Ah, yeah I remember that.” Of course Remus remembers it. There had been a slight cold going through the 5th years, any normal kid would have to go to class with a stuffy nose but Remus, whose body seemed to just give up at the slightest sight of struggle, was out of class for about two weeks.

Remus snorted as he imagined Sirius watching a TV, teaching himself complicated footwork at the age of 16. “ You never did it though, how come? “ Sirius just snorted and shrugged.

“ James was going through that whole Broadway phase, didn’t want to steal his thunder. “

“ Bullshit! You were embarrassed weren’t you?” Remus said this just to rile the man up, because he hadn’t ever seen Sirius embarrassed in his entire life he’d known him.

“ Me?! Never! “ Sirius took up a pillow and smacked him quickly with it earning a kick with Remus's foot to his shin, causing him to howl in pain, flinging himself back on the couch.

“ My foot! Moony you broke my foot! “ He yelled loudly even though James and Pete were supposedly sleeping down the hall.

“ You're being dramatic. “

“ No really! Feel it! “ He brought his leg up sharply, almost kicking Remus in the face.

“ I don’t want to touch your foot you git!” He laughed, as he wrestled Sirius’s leg out of his lap.

He looked at Sirius, a superstar smile, face chiseled like an ancient Roman statue that Remus would be forced to look at everyday because of his dad’s store back home.

“ Y’know I will never understand why you never auditioned for any of the school musicals with James.” Sirius shrugged at Remus’s statement. Remus knew what was coming, he had heard it a million times before.

“ Stage fright,” Sirius stated. Sirius’s stage fright had been a long-time excuse and secret between the Marauders ever since Sirius quit choir in 5th year. It was truly tragic that Remus would never be able to hear him sing in front of an audience again. The man was a magician with a microphone, it was no accident that 5th year had been a hard year for him and his relationship with his family, they had classical music built into their bones and were the ones who had him doing choir in the first place. Remus truly mourned the man’s talent whenever he hears Sirius humming a song under his breath, he wouldn’t ever forgive his family for ruining it for him.

Remus scoffed at Sirius’s statement and Sirius looked back at him.

“ No really Moony, I can sing while hammered at parties but as soon I have lights on me…” His gaze grew hardened. “ I’m not on the stage anymore.” He murmured, Remus’s heart sank. He didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to get what his friend was trying to imply.

Something in his brain changed a bit at that moment, he had been watching performances upon performances these last few months, and he never really realized how much his actions were like one big one. He took one big gulp before talking, his voice just a bit above a whisper.

“ What if I asked you to do it just for me? Only me.” He asked. “ Would you do it?”

They sat in silence, Sirius looked at him like he was some sort of painting in a museum. He wasn’t frowning but he wasn’t smiling either, he looked rather… torn. Remus could feel himself shaking, it was something about the environment, the darkness making him more confident. Gene Kelly was singing from the TV in front of him.

If I ever dared
To think you cared
This is what I’d say to you~
You were meant for me~

“ I would.” He said, so quietly that Remus thought he maybe would've thought he had imagined it if he hadn’t watched Sirius’s mouth move. “ You know I would.” He said this a bit louder, but no less softer.

“ You’d just have to ask. “ Sirius said, he leaned forward and Remus for a second lost the ability to breathe, he had to tell himself to continue to blink as Sirius rested his forehead against his. He could feel a hand inch towards his own on the couch.

You were all the sweet things rolled up in one ~
Your like a plaintive melody ~
That never lets me free~

If Gene Kelly wasn’t serenading in the background Remus was pretty sure he would’ve thought he and Sirius were trapped in some kind of bubble. There was always a moment where Remus found himself blindsided by his surroundings whenever he and Sirius were alone, that party when Sirius soiled his pants came to mind. The way that Sirius was looking at him was the same look the man had when he was drunkenly caressing his face. He tried not to get hung up on what that could mean at this right moment.

It was like every moment in his life was flashing before his eyes, except every memory had a shorter boy with shaggy hair in it. It’s like he had infected all his memories, and the weird thing is that it didn’t make Remus feel any different, that’s always how his mind operated. He was always used to overanalyzing what his friend was doing at any given moment, it’s like it was programmed into his body the minute he had met him in that train cart on the way to Hogwarts.

He almost felt like he was inside one of his poems. Stuck in the coolness of the night air as the stars beckoned him upward. The dreams that Remus would put down into his journal on the nights he was awake, riddled with insomnia were always just words on the paper. Remus saw the images, but they were always just images within his mind and then words upon a paper. When Remus got out of bed or lifted his head from his journal during class, Sirius would smile at him, and he knew that whatever he wrote down in his journal was just that, dreams. Imaginary, not real.

As he looked into Sirius’s morphed figure in front of him, he felt the border between his imagination and reality fuse. He was sweaty despite the layers he was wearing and he couldn’t stop himself from shaking. That never happened in his dreams.

You know what this kind of behavior usually means.

Stupid stupid stupid. A dark voice chanted in his mind, and he didn’t know if this was his voice or someone else’s.

He then coughed, or snorted, honestly Remus was so hopped up on whatever the air in the room had turned into that he couldn't tell the difference. All he knew was that he needed to pull himself back from reality real quick before his father somehow kicked down his door.

Remus tried to smile nonchalantly as he shifted his view back to the Tv, he tried not to look at the face that Sirius was giving him. He tried to move his hand, but Sirius was holding his hand steadily and Remus didn’t want to let go, but he knew that Sirius could feel him shaking.

“ I’ve always wanted you to.”

“ Want to-?”

“ Ask me to sing. You've never asked me to sing any of the stuff you write.”

Remus considered this. “ I didn’t know you wanted to.” He said quietly. Sirius just continued to look at the side of Remus’s face as he shrugged. Remus couldn't imagine what could be so interesting on his profile, other than the nasty gash that was left after Remus lost breath and fell from a tree as a kid.

“ If you wrote something for me I would sing it for you.” He said earnestly, Remus felt his hand tighten on his own.

I’ve been writing for you since I was 11 ,Remus thought. He didn’t dare say it though, feeling Sirius rub small circles with his pointer finger on Remus’s hand; he didn't want to push himself over the edge as much as he already was. So he laughed, because that's what you do with dreams, you have them, and then laugh at them in the morning. You don’t make a whole musical about them and then somehow end up in whatever situation Remus was in now.

“ Even if it was a whole musical with you as the lead?” He grinned, and Sirius just gave him a small smile that Remus saw by glancing back quickly in order not to make his mind melt.

“ If you asked me to,” Sirius said, bringing their laced fingers to his knee and resting his head on Remus’s shoulder. Remus focused on steadying his breathing and Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds belting on the front screen. He didn’t take any action to move out of the position though.

They sat in comfortable silence for a little while longer, at least as comfortable as Remus could get without combusting as Sirius kept an iron grip on his hand.

“ That's what we should do after Moonlight,” Sirius said near the end. Debbie Reynolds was singing in front of the crowd at the theater, and Gene Kelly helped her.

You are my lucky star~
I saw you from afar~

“ Do what?” Remus kept his voice quiet, he didn’t think his heart could make him go any louder.

“ We should make another musical, just you and me.”

It’s like he could feel himself getting sleepy, his feet sticking to the floor, the stars calling his name.

“ What?” Remus laughed, although a bit awkwardly.

“ Yeah! I can be the lead, you can write the whole thing and we can do the music together again! We have all the experience now.”

“ Sirius, you have to be joking.” Remus steadied his voice, Sirius stopped instantly, his grip on Remus’s hand lessened a bit.

“ What?”

“ We can’t just make another musical after this one.”

“ Why not?” They were now fully looking at each other, Sirius’s eyebrows moved to make him look like Remus had told him to put a toy in a store back on a shelf or like a dog being told that they were leaving the park.

“Because we have responsibilities. I’ll probably be teaching full time by next year if not-” Remus knew that he shouldn’t continue onto what he was going to say, but Sirius was gripping his hand again, and if he didn’t somehow get his mind in order he worried he would wake up next morning with his dad telling him to come home.

“ -I’ll be y’know-,” Remus shrugged, he tried to play it off, trying to not upset the man beside him.
“ Incapacitated.”

Sirius’s grip on his hand tightened.

“ Remus don’t say that.”

“ I know you get uncomfortable when I bring it up-”

“ This isn't about me!” He yelled, startling Remus a bit, it also seemed to startle Sirius. His eyes were wide and he looked back down to where their hands were together at his knee.

“ You shouldn’t feel as if you have to hold yourself back.” He said quietly. Remus didn’t know if he intended for it to have a double meaning but it felt like it.

“ I’m not holding myself back from anything,” Remus responded. The movie had ended, the credits soaring down the screen. Sirius didn’t say anything, just kept holding his hand.

“ Remus.”

“ What's wrong?” He said calmly, he didn’t want to rile him up again.

“ You remember when in 5th year when I was suspended for…” Sirius didn’t say it but they both knew what he was talking about. “ I was suspended and staying at Jamie’s and I snuck out to your house once summer came.”

“ Yeah.” Remus snorted remembering the boy by his bedroom window. “ You took the train from London, scared the shit out of my mum.”

He remembered that night so vividly, that his insomnia had increased since the incident. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Sirius’s face as he stood in their school’s dining hall, grinning with malice. All he wanted to do then was punch the person who was supposed to be his best friend. He had never been filled with so much anger, he was angry at himself, at Sirius, at his stupid sickness for ruining every good thing in his life.

“ Do you remember what I said to get you to come down,” Sirius said while resuming rubbing circles on Remus’s hand. The TV screen had gone blank now, the only noises Remus heard were the streets of London outside and the soft breathing coming from Sirius beside him.

“ Yeah, I remember,” Remus said.

“ Tell me.” Sirius was looking at him, and despite Remus’s brain telling him not to look. He did.

“ You said…” Remus sighed. “ You said that I…was like the moon.”

Sirius laughed silently as Remus groaned.

“ Yeah but that's not all I said, I said that you were like the moon, phases and all. “ Sirius' hand had released Remus’s now and was moving up slowly, he rested it on his cheek, thumb tracing the scar that ran along the bridge of his nose, just like that night months ago. “ Because despite what phase the moon is in, it's still the brightest thing in the sky.”

“ You were never that good at metaphors,” Remus says. Remus couldn’t help himself from laughing, it was more out of nervousness than anything.

“ Well as cheesy as it was, it worked.” Sirius grinned, his hand still on Remus’s cheek.

“ Of course, it worked. How could you say that and not expect me to come down to beat some sense into you.”

Sirius laughed the laugh he did whenever Remus said a joke, it was probably his favorite sound ever.

That night Remus had come down due to his anger and also out of worry that if he shut out Sirius again he would continue to throw rocks and break the glass in his window as well as wake up his parents.

“ Are you mental?!” He remembered yelling in the garden beside his room.

“ What else am I supposed to do?! You won’t talk to me! I had to get your attention somehow!”

They yelled at each other for another 20 minutes, breathless and on the floor at the end of it as Remus got so mad that he ended up hitting Sirius physically. It was an action due to a built-up of weeks of anger, Remus had been ignoring Sirius the whole time, settling on making him suffer that way. His journal entries were almost unlegible, his handwriting becoming even worse as he struggled to control how to handle the betrayal and desire to just go back to the things that were before.

Remus since then sometimes goes back and reads those entries if he ends up at his parents house. He finds that he can always see where his tears left traces on the paper.

“ Just give me time? Let me show you how much you mean to me. I can uh…”

They were lying on the cool grass, Remus could feel his eyes grow glassy and damp, it was a hard balance of catching his breath from exhaustion while trying not to cry at the same time.

“ I’ll shave my head! I will shave my head Moony-” He turned his head towards him where Remus was keeping a hand over his face, “-just give me the word and I’ll do it.” His eyes were so filled with emotion, glassy and bright like something out of Remus’s fantasies that he knew he wouldn't be able to hold up any longer.

“ You don’t have to do that.” Remus had said, his voice cracking, the tears were definitely falling now.

That night was probably the night he realized that he was truly fucked. After all that, after all the betrayal, after all the anger, Remus couldn’t keep himself from constantly thinking of black hair and gray eyes.

“ Well, when I said that, I meant it, and I wanted you to believe it.” His eyes twinkled the same way they did when they were lying outside Remus’s bedroom window.

“ Believe that I’m the moon?” Remus said incredulously, smiling and lifting an eyebrow.

“ Yea. Tell me that you believe it, even if you don’t mean it, tell me anyway.” Sirius said. He seemed to be very determined to get Remus to play call and response with him. Remus took another breath, keeping his hand calm and laced with Sirius’s.

“ I believe it.” He said and a part of him meant it

Chapter Text

Thursday, December 19 | 16 days till opening

Here cariad. It doesn’t have to be anything, just write whatever you're thinking

This is what happens when you don’t think Remus!

I’m only hassling you so much because I’m your friend, and so is Padfoot

You know what this kind of behavior usually means.

Tell me that you believe it, even if you don’t mean it, tell me anyway.

It was like Remus had some kind of Greek chorus in his head, telling his story through an outside perspective. Specifically outside his head, Remus could never be part of the chorus, because he was stuck in his own life, dealing with his own shit.

It was Thursday and about 6 days from whatever the fuck happened between him and Sirius on that stupid couch.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it, he couldn’t stop thinking about everything, it was like his mind was a rapid hurricane, constantly throwing things to the forefront without even giving him time to process why he was thinking about them in the first place.

Sirius acting the way he did on the couch only happened in Remus’s dreams and not in real life. In real life Remus would get up, and out of bed to the kitchen where Sirius would be trying to combine 3 completely unrelated ingredients on a frying pan, and then after 10 minutes of joking around and wrestling over a hot stove, James would eventually kick them out of the kitchen. And that's how things were supposed to be, Remus never took well to change, he liked where he was, he could handle the misery that came with being in love with your best friend, he had been doing it for it felt like a decade now, no god, it had been a decade by now.

His whole worldview had been turned upside down, every time he ever thought of home, or the sterile smell of the hospital Sirius’s stupid gray eyes and toothy smile would just pop into his mind. And he would hold his hand, and rest his head on his shoulder and say “ I would sing for you Remus. If you asked. “

Because of course, Remus wouldn’t ask, he would never even consider in a million years that his best friend who he was pining after his whole life would want him to ask.

“ God it's like I can smell the sweat through the phone,” Lily said through Hogwarts’s ancient payphone. The sound was so old and bad that it sounded like she was talking to him 10 feet down in a cave.

He had decided to call Lily on his break since he needed some sort of scapegoat and that statement of hers had been banging around his head since that night.

And also she was really the only one of his friends he could talk to.

James was most definitely too blindsided by his whimsical desires and how he acted in the kitchen on Saturday led Remus to believe that he knew too much about what was going on. He would call Peter, but the man didn’t exactly handle stress well and Remus was basically full of it. So he went to the person who could give him the most outside, unbiased perspective.

“ I’ve had to put on several different layers of cologne and deodorant, every time I think, I sweat, and every time I sweat I-”

“ Ok stop. Calm down. If I hear anything gross I’m hanging up, I just saw a grown man hurl into his pancakes, I don’t think I can take anymore.” Sternly, again with the lawyer voice that Lily puts on whenever she seems to be wanted to be taken seriously.

“ Right. Sorry.” He takes a deep breath, some 13-year-old texting on his phone gives him a judgemental stare as she walks by.

Lily sighs. “ I’ve never seen you this panicked before, even when that group of 20 came in an hour before closing.”

“ I mean I’ve been this panicked before, I just-” That was in 5th year, after the suspension incident. Shit.

“ Are you doing ok?”

“ Physically or mentally?”

“ Physically, you already told me all about your mental state dum dum,” Lily said. Now that she had mentioned it Remus noticed that his body had been going through a bit more than usual.

“ Well my breaths are shaky and I feel like hell so I would say about a 4 on the pain scale.”

“ Jesus Remus, do I need to get someone to pick you up?”

“ It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

He hears another sigh through the phone. “ If you say so but if I get a call from a terrified primary teacher I’m suing.”

“ You have my word,” Remus says, leaning his head against the back wall of the phone booth, really everything about Hogwarts feels so historical. From the desks to the phones.

“ So what exactly are you freaking out about?”

“ I feel like the rug is being pulled out from under me,” Remus said, he traced a finger across his knuckles like Sirius had done that night.

“ And what is the rug here? Is it Sirius or is it you?”

“ You're not very good at metaphors either.” Remus scrunched his nose in disapproval.

“ Sorry, I’m not as eloquent as you Mr. Poet.” She said, Remus could imagine the way her eyes were squinting through the phone.

“ I guess… the rug is my security…? I mean that's what friendship is right? Security.”

“ I would say so,” Lily said calmly and softly, he felt like he was in a therapy appointment.

“ I guess I feel like I’m falling into a territory that I don’t think I’ll be able to handle,” Remus said. He rested the phone in between his ear and shoulder and then made movements with his hands as he talked, even though Lily couldn’t see it.

“ I had this whole plan for my life: go to school, go to college, maybe try to keep a job, and then eventually end up in some kind of hospice. Everything always seemed so manageable, there was always an ending.”

“ And not having one is scary right?”

“ Right.”

“ My friends always screwed me off the path, but it wasn’t ever anything I couldn’t handle.” Remus closed his eyes, waiting for the impact of the words he was about to say. “ Love was never in the cards, love I can’t handle, I think that will break me.”
There was silence, Lily hummed and then sat with him a bit, he could hear her thinking.

“ You're scared that having to confront your feelings outright will have demonstrative consequences on your life?”

Remus snorted at Lily’s astute phrasing. “ Pretty much yeah.”

Lily took a second to think again before speaking up. “ Y’know I didn’t say all those things that night to necessarily scare you.”

“ I know.”

“ I mean who knows Rem, maybe we're just too paranoid, too hyper-aware of affection. It could be nothing.” She cheerily said, Remus chuckled quietly but it didn’t make the hole in his stomach get any lighter. “ He's probably just like that, like you said.”

“ Yeah, but….”

“ What? Is this about the running away from home thing?”

“ You know about that?”

“ Potter mentioned it, and I didn't want to pry.”

“ Makes sense. I mean we’ve been tip-toeing a line ever since secondary, something happened and ever since then, something changed. He acted differently around me, and I could never place why, nobody ever noticed anything when I asked.” He heard Lily give him a small “ uh huh,” Urging him to go on.

“ It was a pretty big fight, I was mad at him for a while, and some part of me thinks this new behavior is him trying to make it up to me, even though we started the musical for him, he never seemed to be all that interested in the whole thing.”

“ Like when he didn’t come to practice.” Lily snorted.

“ He’s been showing up now though,” Remus said back.

“ True.” Lily said softly like cogs were turning in her brain.

“ So lemme throw another metaphor your way if you don’t mind.”

“ Go for it.”

“ So let's say… that you're a werewolf.”

“ Oh my god! Lily!”

“ No wait, I'm not finished!”

“ I don’t even want to hear it- I’m hanging up.” He said even though he didn’t make any moves to hang up.

“ But I'm not wrong, right? That's where the whole plot comes from?”

“ Lily. “

“ C’mon Remus, you can’t put me through this whole soap opera and not expect me to not put the pieces together.” She was shouting a bit loudly now, Remus could tell that she was grinning. “ You said that most of the songs were from your journal, and I can’t be the only one that notices that you go to write every time you feel any strong emotion.”

Remus groaned, he hadn’t intended to let anyone into this secret, but he relented, there was no use to keep anything from her now. She knew his whole soul by now.

“ No. You're right.”

“ Haha, I knew it,” Lily said smugly.

“ It wasn’t like I meant for it to happen! Sirius came up with the initial idea and he just kept taking everything from my journal, there was really nothing I could do to stop it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“ Lily.”

“ Sorry. I’ll stop teasing.” Lily said. “ Anyway, hang in there. I don’t think you're in as much trouble as you think you are. And who knows, a different ending might be a better one, no need to freak out about it.”

“ You're right. Thanks for this. Sorry I’m essentially using you as a therapist.”

“ Nah it’s alright. I’ve been doing the same my whole life, I can return the favor.”

He hung up, his lunch break ending in a few minutes, his breath becoming more steady as he made his way back to McGonagall’s classroom.

As soon as he stepped through the doors he was hit with a gaggle of 11-year-olds, screaming his name at different volumes.

A little girl named Ilya shoved a book in his face, as quickly as he was able to fend the teens off. “ I finished it!” She grinned, holding up the first Lord of the Rings book to his face.

“ I’m surprised! It's only been about 2 weeks.”

“ I read fast.”

“ She was reading it during lunch!” A boy from a nearby desk yelled, he cackled along with some other kids and Ilya’s face went red. Remus kneeled and gave his best “ adult smile”.

“ I can get you the next one tomorrow.” Ilya grinned and quickly ran away, still holding the library book to her chest.

“ You really shouldn’t be recommending children books they aren’t fit to read.” McGonagall sat at her desk in the corner of the room, she was going through papers with a red dip pin that looked almost like a tallon, and her graying hair was up in a tight bun behind her head.

“ She can handle it, she read the whole thing! In 2 weeks!” He grinned as he pulled up a chair beside her desk. It was faster than he could read as a kid, a part of him was jealous.

“ I heard.” The older woman continued to mark papers sharply, only glancing as he sat down. “ Lord of the Rings is a strange series to recommend a 3rd year as well, I would say.”

“ Why? Nothing wrong with a bit of fantasy.” He laughed it off, but she threw a look that made it look like she was reading his mind and he felt the sweat coming back.

“ We have more important matters to discuss.” She moved to a lower drawer on her desk to pull out a form and handed it over to Remus.

“ What’s this?” He asked.

“ Employment.” She said,

“ I’m sorry?”

She stopped grading papers, folding her hands on the desk and looking at him sternly.

“ I talked to Albus, and he and I agreed that you would be a valuable asset after graduation.” She said, Remus looked down at the paper, there was a place to sign at the bottom and Remus couldn’t stop staring at where fancy scrawl spelled out your signature.

“ The paperwork is just a precaution but after that, we can set you up with a class to assist and your hours. You’d start part-time of course.”

“ Thank you..” He held the paper in his hands, all his hard work and fatigue into one paper.

“ That's great Remus!”

He found himself later on another phone call, unfortunately not as calming as the one he had previously with Lily.

“ Look at you!” His dad yelled through the phone, sometimes when he talked to Remus he found that it sounded like he was trying to sell him something. Even then he never went above a monotone tone of voice. Remus hasn’t heard him yell since he was a kid and he fell down those stairs and fucked up his face for the rest of his life. He was trying to get some energy back from Remus, but he mostly felt empty.

“ Yeah.” He said unemotionally.

“What's wrong with you?” Lyall says. When he first picked up the phone his dad had told him that he was reading on their porch, he could imagine the exact movement as his dad got confused and put his book down in concern.

“ There’s nothing wrong with me.” Remus tried not to sound too tired when he said this.

“ You should be happy. This is a payoff of all our hard work.”

Remus took a deep breath, one that went through and out slowly through his nose.

“ I know.” He says.

He hadn’t told either of his parents about the musical yet, he hadn’t been able to soldier up and admit that a good third of his paycheck had gone to helping Mary hem and make a bunch of wizard costumes.

Because that would be a waste of time.

He realizes that he’s been probably keeping too many secrets from too many people lately.

“ I’m happy dad, I just…” He rubs a hand down his face and a little kid runs by him on the train aisle, their mother following quickly behind. “ It just seems to be coming a bit all too fast.”

“ Nothing is too fast Remus. You especially should know that.” His dad said not faltering once. Remus took another deep breath as he could guess what his dad was about to say next. “ My grandfather died from a heart attack at 32, that’s only about 10 years older than you are now.”

The train stopped at a station, the kid who had run by Remus earlier got off and he watched as their mom led them off the platform.

“ I know. “

“ Me and your mum didn’t lose our minds with worry every year while you were off at some rich boarding school for you to give up.”

“ I’m not giving up. I’m just a bit overwhelmed I guess.”

His dad exhaled and Remus could see the way he probably put his book down on the table next to him. “You know I’m not trying to scare you.”

Remus hummed affirmatively.

“ I think you should just be more proud of yourself, you’ve gotten this far.”

“ I know,” Remus says, despite his dad being mostly calm he can still feel his heart beat faster.

“ I have to go. We're about to move your mum to the hospital soon.”

Remus almost jumped out of his seat. “ How is she doing?“

“ As good as she can be. She told you about Christmas?”

Remus struggled to swallow. “ Yeah. “

“ Great, we’ll send your gift through the mail, your mum's almost finished, won’t stop working on it even as we speak, she’s stubborn that one.” As his dad says this he hears a yell from his mother from some distance, his dad laughs.

“ We’ll see you soon, stay strong.”

“Yeah, see you.”

His dad hung up, and Remus still had another 30 minutes till his stop.

***

Today was the day of their last rehearsal, they had to work out some edges, make sure that costumes fit perfectly, check the set for any cracks, and then they were done.

It all felt kind of surreal, Remus hadn’t noticed how much he’d been just drifting through the process, for once he wasn’t thinking of the ending but if anything that just made it harder. The one time he didn’t want an ending it was coming too fast. There were a couple of implications that came with the ending of the musical, it marked the end of their college lives in a way, and that in itself made Remus want to fall to the floor with exhaustion.

There was some sort of dissociation about the way that Remus was walking from his train to the theater. It was freezing, he was still wearing a tie for some reason, and when he got there, the object of all his worries was standing coolly outside the heavy metal door, smoking a cigarette.

“ You told me that you ran out this morning,” Remus said, avoiding eye contact, opening the door with his shoulder.

“ I did.” Sirius grinned and waved Remus’s Marlboro box in his face, “ Got these from that stash that you keep in the kitchen.”

Remus snatched the box out of his hand and grumbled as they entered the theater. “ I don’t even know how you know about that.” He said.

“ I know everything about you, Moony.” Sirius smiled, Singing in the Rain and Gene Kelly came back to Remus’s mind and he struggled to push down the wave of guilt that came up in his chest.

When they walked in the lights were already off, Sirius put his finger up to his lip to tell him to be quiet and they made their way to where Peter was sitting with the other crew members in the upper rows. Lily was already up onstage with the ensemble, wearing the long dress and hat from before, she was singing the first song in the track list, and surprisingly not sputtering at all. She had more emotion in her voice than before, she seemed almost delighted to be acting, which was new.

” Look who decided to show up.” Peter smirked from his seat. Remus shushed him and spoke in a whisper as Sirius chuckled beside him, Remus kept his eyes from looking to his side.

“ Train was running late,” Remus said as he watched Lily’s feet move across the stage. A dance break ensued and after the ensemble was able to lift her off the ground in an impressive feat, the rest of the crew erupted in applause. Remus searched Lily’s face for any sign of struggle but she only continued to smile as she paused at the end of the song. Her eyes drifted for a second to the side of the stage, and she gave a small laugh at whatever was standing there. The smile that was caused by the laugh stayed as she ran off stage for a scene change.

“ I think she’s finally got it,” Remus said, slightly breathless. James had come up a little bit after and sent a glare their way after Sirius whooped loudly at his appearance in his ears and tail that accompanied his costume.

“ If you mean she’s hitting the bare minimum notes then yeah, she is,” Sirius whispered. Remus elbowed him and kept his vision glued to the stage as Sirius laughed beside him.

They got through act one with only one wardrobe malfunction where Lily had to go on without her witch's hat for the rest of the show. Mary would complain later that it was Emmeline’s fault that the stitching hadn’t held and that Lily hadn’t been paying enough attention to how she was whipping her head around, but she ended up grumbling while backstage stitching up the hat anyway. It was an overall success; other than that, they continued to act 2, Remus giving Lily a thumbs up from the audience, making her smile wider as they started.

Remus couldn’t tell if James was doing better or not, Remus’s biggest problems came in the later act with some of the more depressing scenes. Ever since the first rehearsal where Remus had given James the first round of notes about his performance he had been forced to do exercises with the man that involved him shouting out random depressing situations and forcing him to act them out improv style. These were never Remus’s idea and were usually spurred on Remus while he was trying to study, and later joined in by Sirius and Peter who would only make it harder by jeering and throwing popcorn at the poor man.

“ Your adoptive father who has raised you all your life is dying of old age right after your wedding.”

“ Ok, uh, a bit specific.”

“ You just found out that the girl you got pregnant died without you knowing from a botched abortion.”

“ Jesus Moony!” James yells, and Remus shrugs.

“ Oh! Oh! I got one! You're a woman working hard at her waitress job and your abusive husband knocks you up and steals all your money!” Sirius exclaims and throws a crisp bag at him from where he's sitting at their dinner table.

“ Stop throwing things at me!”

Remus laughs over his textbook, and Sirius’s grin widens as Remus snorts and just continues to laugh harder like the idiot he is.

They had stopped doing those exercises shortly after that. Despite that, Remus can kinda see how James’s acting has gotten a bit better, he seems to be more comfortable with Lily at least. The bantering and arguing haven’t stopped but the dances that Lily worked hard to choreograph look more like they are dancing together and not like they're purposely trying to avoid each other at all times, like an uncomfortable version of tag. They had finished the tutoring sessions a while ago and ever since the two had gone “hiking” they seemed to constantly bicker in a weird way where it seemed both parties enjoyed arguing with each other to find out who could be more right.

“ I’m not saying that you're not entitled to your own opinion, I’m just saying that it's wrong.” Remus heard James saying one day during practice. Usually, when James would get all haughty like this he’d hear Lily yell but instead, he heard a small exhale of laughter.

“ You can’t say, Falling Slowly is everyone’s favorite.” Lily laughs.

“You have to duck down here because someone’s going to jump over you.” She says, showing the movement to James who follows her with wide eyes.

” Jesus Evans really?” He says.

“ You can do it, once you hear the music you’ll be good, the moment you duck is when the violin stops so you’ll know.” She says, standing in sweatpants and a tank top, her hair up, she’s breathing a bit heavily, Remus had only just gotten to the theater but they had been practicing for a few hours before he arrived.

“ If you say so,” James says a bit doubtfully, Lily just shakes her head with a smile that Remus hadn’t seen before. It seems like one of Lily’s greatest joys in life is being able to make James go all nervous by pushing him out of his comfort zone.

“ Anyway, It’s everyone’s favorite for a reason, the reprise always has me tearing up,” James says.

” What doesn’t make you tear up Potter?”

“ Hey, don't make fun of me just because you're as empathetic as a brick of coal.” They had been dancing comfortably, and at this comment Lily scrunched her face and stuck her foot out, making James trip and fall on the mat. James moves to trip her as revenge but she dodges with a laugh that echoes through the entire theater.

Every time it happens Remus just finds himself sideways glancing at Mary who just grins knowingly, so basically, everyone knew what was going on except the two in question. It kind of unnerved Remus that James got closer to spurring Remus’s action in the agreement they made, he’s trying not to think about it though.

As they approach the end of the musical, Remus tries to pay attention to the actors instead of how Sirius is attempting to play some kind of weird game of footsie with him while sitting on the other side of him. James was doing better than before, but the man was also holding something back.

“I’ve forgotten to tell you, I…I have preparation for my graduation tomorrow, so I won’t be able to slip away.” Lily, in her long dark dress, got up from lying on the stage ground on James’s lap. James’s expression didn't shift but his eyes continued to follow her as she got up off the floor.

“ Preparation..?” He asks.

Lily pursues her lips, her expression slightly pained, “ We have to do one final test at the end of our years at the academy, to show that we can handle what we’ve learned.” She shrugs.

“ What have you learned?”

“ You know, magic.” She says and James’s eyebrows furrow.

“ Right.” He says bluntly, Lily looks down at her feet, she’s leaving out the fact that they have to kill a beast as part of the test.

“ I’ll be back the next day I promise.” She runs to the floor again, clutching James’s face in her hands.

” Right.” He says, there’s a slight strain in his voice.

The lights go dim as the scene changes.

They get through the rest of Act 2 and at the end the crew erupts in loud cheers, James jumps off the stage to tackle Sirius to the ground, which looks like it hurts but they are promptly back on their feet in the next 3 minutes. Remus decides that he doesn’t want to dampen the man’s mood so he holds in his feedback to tell him later. Lily came up to hug him as everyone packs up.

” You doing ok?” She says as she pulls away, still wearing her stage makeup.

“ As ok as I can be,” Remus says and then he notices that Lily’s shaking. “ Are you ok?” She looks at Remus for a moment and then sighs.

“ I guess the excitement is getting to me a bit.” She gives him a more relaxed smile before a loud whistle comes from the back of the theater. Sirius is standing near the door with James, wearing almost identical grins on their faces.

“ After party at Broomsticks’!” He yells and everyone erupts into cheering but all Remus can hear is Lily huffing beside him.

“ Are they allowed to do that? They don’t even work there.” She says and Remus lets out a small laugh as they both walk out of the loud theater.

Turns out that James and Sirius are allowed to host an impromptu party at the diner because they arrive at their manager and the owner of the diner handing over the keys.

“ What’s mine is yours.” He says as the rest of the crew bustles in way after closing time.

“ You can just tell them no Gideon,” Lily says and Gideon just lets out a hardy chuckle before bidding them goodbye and walking to his car. Lily gives Remus a look as James runs to the kitchen no doubt to rummage through the pantries for food and alcohol.

“ I’m not staying after to clean this up, just thought I would let you know.” She says and Remus shoves her with her elbow.

***

Lily tries not to get too concerned as more and more people turn up to the party in Broomsticks’. She sat herself down in one of the booths with Marlene so that she could tell her about football, like usual. She can barely hear her over the loud talking and music, Talking Heads blasting from the old jukebox.

But they’ll make a fool of you and it’s alright, baby it's alright~!
We’re on the road to nowhere! Hey!
We’re on the road to nowhere~

Marlene waved her hands around and Lily craned her neck a bit to keep her eye on what she was trying to look at before Marlene sat beside her. James was trying to do some type of group dance with Sirius and Peter that involved them interlocking their arms and jumping in a circle. They looked incredibly stupid, but Lily couldn’t help from watching as James squinted his eyes behind his glasses as he laughed. Her lip twitched and she sighed causing a look from Marlene.

“ Lily?” Marlene said.

“ What?” Lily started up, looking at Marlene suddenly, taking her elbow off the table. Marlene just snorted and before Lily could defend herself James waltzed up and slammed his hand loudly on the table in front of them.

“ Alright Evans, it's time.” He says. Lily quickly glances at Marlene for help but she just shakes her head and gets up from the booth, grinning at James as she slides past him.

“ Time for what, Potter?” She said in aspiration.

“ You know what. I said I would take you dancing, didn't I?” He holds out his hand and cocks his head to the dance floor, well “dance floor” is putting it lightly, it's the open space between the bar and the tables and the only place where there's enough room to move around without bumping into something.

“ You want to ballroom dance? To this?” She gestures to the lively rock playing overhead. James considers this and then runs over the jukebox and slides two quarters in.

Ah… now I don’t hardly know her
But I think I could love her~

James walks back up to the table as Lily scoffs in disbelief. “ This better?” He says holding out his hand again.

“ You are terrible James Potter.” She takes his hand and tries to stop her heart from doing jumping jacks as he leads her to the dance floor.

***

Crimson and Clover~
Over and over~

Sirius watches while James tries to dip Lily, going lower and lower as the girl smacks him on the arm to let her go. It’s frankly disgusting and he makes that very fact known as he gags and Mary hands over his drink. She laughs in his face.

“ You're so childish.” She says with humor.

“ I am not.” He says. Mary just laughs at him again.

Another glance at Lily and James and he’s reminded of his original objective.

“ Where’s Moony?” He looks to Peter chatting up and finishing Mary’s drink for her as she chants telling him to chug, chug, chug. Peter takes a big gulp as Mary politely claps and he then shrugs.

“ You know how he gets, he probably slipped away somewhere,” Peter says, which is not a sufficient enough answer. Usually, if this was at their flat, Sirius would find the man on their fire escape or balcony, or if he was really hammered, he would just yell his name, which to his credit, usually worked.

“ I bet he’s out in the alley smoking.” Marlene appeared beside Mary. “ It’s through the break room.” She gestures to a door in the back, Sirius nods and makes his way to the door. The break room is gross and dusty, but honestly, it's not any better than some of the older parts of Ted’s garage so Sirius doesn’t dwell too much on it. He sees a door off to the side that’s slightly ajar, bringing in cold air from the outside. Sirius gets a look at Remus’s back and smirks at the fact that he left his jacket back on one of the booths.

He tiptoes out the door to see an alley entirely covered with snow and Remus sitting on one of the lower steps that lead out to the ground, smoking a cigarette, just like Marlene said. He makes his way as quietly as he can down the steps, being that his Docs are making stopping sounds as they crinkle the snow below them. Surprisingly Remus doesn’t notice though, so Sirius can bend down behind him and jump on his shoulders, earning a jump from Remus.

“ Fuck! Sirius! Don’t do that! Are you trying to kill me?!” He makes a move to elbow Sirius in the stomach but he easily dodges it.

“ Like I could.” Sirius snorts at the look on Moony’s face, all aspirated in a way that makes the scar that runs across his nose crease, it’s lovely.

Remus wipes some snow off the space on the step beside him and gestures for Sirius to sit down. As he does he smiles and Remus looks at him and then quickly looks away, Sirius just smiles more. He then shivers because fuck it’s cold. Remus looks at him for a second before taking his coat off.

” Here.” He hands it over to Sirius, just like that night on the balcony, and scoffs as Sirius puts it on.

“ Thanks,” Sirius says. “What are you doing out here? Think you're too good for us or something?”

“ Yeah, looking after 11-year-olds all day has made me realize that I’m a bit above drinking on a Thursday night.” He says sarcastically. Sirius laughs.

“ You doing ok?” He leans in and brings his voice to a lower level. Remus looks at him with eyes wide like some sort of cute owl.

“ Yeah? Why?”

“ You haven’t been sleeping,” Sirius says, it's a stress response that Moony’s had since Primary, Sirius would wake up from some nightmare to see Moony reading by their bedside window, it's one of the reasons they started calling him Moony in the first place. That and because of Keith Moon.

Remus blinks and then breaks eye contact, something that Sirius has found that he’s been doing a lot. It doesn’t make him too hopeful for his future chances.

“ How do you know I haven’t been sleeping?” He mumbles, Sirius moves a bit closer, touching their shoulders together. Normally he would hold himself back some more but instead, he leans more into Remus and says what comes to his mind.

“ You move slower when you're tired, also these,” He swipes his thumbs across the eyebags below Remus’s eyes and smiles as he watches Remus’s face slowly redden and he looks quickly away.

“ I guess I’m just a bit worried about my mum.”

“ I thought so,” Sirius says and Remus looks at him with a smile that makes Sirius’s bones figuratively melt. He bumps Remus softly with his shoulder.

“ Doesn’t look like she’s going to be able to make it to London for the show,” Remus says, still smiling, he laughs at himself.

“ Then we’ll just film it, send it through the post,” Sirius says, Remus just snorts.

“ I haven’t even told them about the show.”

Sirius stops.

“ What? Why not?” He says. Remus is looking back down at where his trainers are getting damper in the snow. A car races by on the London street beside them.

Remus shrugs, “ They’d think it's just a laugh.”

“ They liked the ones we did when we were kids.”

“ They thought those were a laugh too Sirius. We were kids.” Remus says this with so much conviction that it sounds like he believes it. Sirius tries to keep the astonishment he has by that fact hidden as he keeps talking.

“ I think your mum would like it, she’s the one who gave you that girly journal in the first place.” Remus just laughs, that low chuckle he lets out when he’s comfortable, Sirius is unashamed of the fact that he has every laugh Remus does categorized in his brain.

“ How long are you going to call poetry girly? You're a songwriter for god’s sake.”

“ Hmmm, not the same.”

“ It basically is.”

“ There’s nothing wrong with having a more feminine side, Moony.” Remus just continues to laugh and fireworks go off in Sirius’s brain.

” You sure that’s all it is?”

“ Huh?”

“ There’s nothing else stressing you out?” Remus looks away from his gaze for a second, he lets his cigarette fall to the floor and stomps it out with his foot.

“ There's nothing else Padfoot.”

“ If something is bothering you, you can tell me Moony. No secrets remember?” He says, calling back to the summer before their 6th year of school.

They had been lying on the grass of Remus’s family’s garden beside his bed window, heavy breathing, Remus had his arm over his eyes, but Sirius could pretty easily tell that he was crying.

“ You don’t have to forgive me, but I would really like to be your friend again.” It was nighttime, unlike London, where Sirius had grown up, you could see every star in the sky, though he didn’t keep his eyes from Remus lying next to him. Remus let his arm fall to the floor next to him and when he looked at Sirius his eyes were glassy on top of the brownish hazel of his pupils, he couldn’t help himself from comparing them to stained glass.

“ I won’t forgive you.” He says, he sniffs and his voice is all watery and it makes Sirius feel like he should go jump into some sort of body of water to punish himself for making him sad enough to sound like that. “ But I’ll be friends again.” He says and his voice cracks as he moves to get up into a sitting position.

Sirius peels his back from the ground quickly and throws himself at the other boy, almost throwing them to the ground again with the amount of force he uses.

“ But!” Remus says, pulling away and looking at him earnestly, his face is tear-streaked and Sirius didn’t want anything else but to wipe them away.

“ No more secrets! If you feel like fucking something up,” He pushes Sirius back playfully by his shoulder, finally smiling again, “ Tell me for fucks sake.”

Here on the steps in the diner alley, Sirius recalls that memory, Remus gets the same glassy look in his eyes as he did that day all those years ago.

“ There’s nothing else bothering me, Padfoot. I promise.“ He says.

***

They leave that following Saturday for the Potter’s for Christmas break. They bid Peter goodbye at the door of the flat as they take a cab down to the Potter manor in South London. It’s a humongous building that always makes Remus’s stomach turn whenever he sees it, and James always laughs whenever he scoffs upon arrival.

“ Don’t be so frugal, Moony,” James says as Euphemia bounds out of the front entrance tackling Sirius in a hug as he runs up, notably leaving his luggage behind. Monty follows behind her and ruffles Sirius’s hair, James grins at the scene.

“ I just don’t see how anyone could need this much space,” Remus says with a frown on his face. James snorts and moves to take Sirius’s luggage and move up the long path to meet where the rest of them are at the entrance.

“ You could use the extra space Moony, I swear your height is getting you closer to the sky more every day.”

” Shut it- Hi! How are you?!” Remus switches up promptly as Effie makes a beeline to him to hug him, James laughs at this and Remus shoots him a glare over Effie’s shoulder.

“ I’m sorry about your mum dear.” She later says as they haul their luggage inside. Sirius is currently trying and failing to take a rolling suitcase up the grand staircase, James taunting him from the top.

“ It’s alright.”

“ Jamie told you about the home phone?”

“ He did.”

” Lovely, I’ll see if we can get a call down there after dinner.”

“ Thank you, Effie.” He smiles, which Effie returns before patting him softly on the cheek. She then turns around to the racket on the stairs and cuffs her hands to her mouth so that the noise reaches the upper floor.

“ You boys make sure that Remus doesn’t feel too homesick ok?” She yelled. Sirius and James grin.

“ Yes, mum~.” They say in unison. Effie shakes her head in aspiration and heads to the kitchen where her husband is reading the paper.

Surprisingly, Remus makes it through the next few days. The kind of dissociation effect that carried his life after the couch incident seems to wear away a bit. That is until Sirius brushes his hands on his own during dinner, or looks at him in a way that makes it seem like he wants to eat him. It only happens a couple of times but when it does he has to excuse himself from the table. But things are pretty much normal, Remus eventually warms up to the way Sirius is treating him, and his heart is at least getting used to it, slowing its beating drastically whenever Sirius smiles at him.

He makes food with Effie, does the crossword with Monty, and watches movies at midnight with Sirius and James. Everything is fine, Remus is handling it. He doesn’t exactly know if he’s handling it well but he’s handling it. He just has to ignore the guilt in his stomach every time Sirius directs any attention his way.

“ I still can’t believe I wasn’t able to get you to change the ending,” Sirius said that Monday before Christmas. They were sitting on the roof, Sirius’s room had a window that led out there, the air was cold, and somehow Remus had ended up giving him his jacket again. The man really needed to get appropriate winter clothes.

“ I’m more strong-willed than you think,” Remus says, taking a drink of the pint they brought up.

“You're a stubborn git is what you are,” Sirius says taking a swig of his own drink, Remus shoves the bottom of the bottle upward making Sirius choke and spill it over the black striped sweater he's wearing.

” Christ Moony!” He whines, Remus can’t hear him, he's too busy laughing.

“ I honestly don’t know what your problem with the ending is, it’s not that depressing. Loads of musicals end that way.” He says. Sirius looks out to the London cityscape, a far-out look in his eyes, he then looks over to Remus thoughtfully.

“ I don’t know. I think it just makes me feel better if we end it happily.” He shrugs, looking down into his pint bottle.

“ Just because we have a sad ending doesn’t mean that we'll be sad when it ends dumb arse.” He bumps Sirius with his shoulder and he gives out a tired laugh.

” Hey, uh Moony.” Sirius is now looking back at him, close enough that Remus can see the smoke spill from his mouth as he talks, it almost hits Remus’s face.

“ Yeah?” Remus says, almost in a whisper. There alone on the roof, Sirius brings his eyes up to Remus’s and his heart starts beating again.

“ Can I ask you something?” He says, Remus gulps.

” What is it?” Remus says, his voice cracks unattractively and he cringes at himself slightly. Sirius just laughs and then smiles that toothy smile that he adores so much. He can feel his face heat up as Sirius just gets closer to his.

“ What-“

“ LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” James yells, hauling himself through the window carrying boxes of fireworks under his arm. Remus jumps away like he's been stung, Sirius slowly turns around, his lip quivering slightly.

” Could you be any louder?!” Sirius says and Remus tries to ignore the amount of annoyance in his voice.

” Oooooh I’m sorry Mr. Black, I’ll be quieter, do you want me to rub your feet while I’m here?” James says haughtily in a high-pitched voice that he designed specifically to piss Sirius off.

“ I’ll rub your feet!” Sirius said, getting to his feet, taking a firework box, and whacking James with it.

“Ow!” James yelped. Sirius surveyed the firework packages he took and a devilish grin spreads across his face.

“ Where the hell did you get these?” He said.

“ The attic. ‘Seems like we didn’t use all of the ones we got off of Xeno during secondary.” He looked at Sirius, matching his grin.

” You have a match?” Sirius asked and James went to search his pockets.

“ Hey! Don’t set them off here, you're gonna wake your parents,” Remus said as James brought out a matchbox from his pants.

They both sighed. “ Ok, Moony~,” They said once again in unison, Remus was starting to get tired of it.

They went down below to the Potter’s garden to set off the fireworks and Remus thankfully was able to prevent a couple of firework-induced fires while watching Sirius and James play around like kids in the cold winter air.

At the end of it they walked back to their rooms. Remus’s being closest to the stairway, he stood by his door deciding whether or not he wanted to open it. He turned to Sirius a bit farther down the hall, stifling a yawn as James ran to his room to avoid an oncoming punch from Sirius.

” Hey Padfoot?” He said and Sirius turned sharply, his eyes bright in the darkness of the hallway.

“ Yeah, Moony?”

“ What were you going to ask me earlier?”

“ Oh.” Sirius stopped, shoving his hands in his jeans pockets and searching Remus’s face for something, Remus wouldn't know. He then breathed out a sharp breath that turned into a small chuckle. “ Just something about the show,” he waved his hand, “ don’t worry about it.” He moved to walk toward his room in the hallway, in a somewhat dismissive way. “ ‘Night Moony!”

Remus had to keep himself from reaching out, but instead, he just opened up his bedroom door.

“ ‘Night Padfoot.”

***

Tuesday, December 24 | 11 days till opening

The next day James and Remus go to a nearby market to buy last-minute Christmas presents. Sirius stays home to bake with Effie and every 20 minutes James checks his phone.

“ They're going to burn down the house I swear,” James says. They go throughout the market, James familiarly pointing out different booths to them as they walk around. He keeps having to wipe off his glasses as they fog up.

“ Do you do this every year? Buy your parents gifts on Christmas Eve?” Remus asks while inspecting a mug at one of the booths.

“ Yep. Mum loves whatever weird thing I can get her, the weirder the better, last year I got them matching aprons.”

“ Oh, I bet they loved those.”

“ They did.” James smiles, he then turns his attention to the mug that Remus is now putting down. “You're not gonna buy that?”

“ Nah, I already bought your parents gifts.”

“ What?! How?!”

“I always buy your parents gifts.” Remus snorts.

“ Huh?!”

They continued through the market, leaving when they happened upon a small record store off to the side. James bounds up to him grinning and holding something behind his back while Remus is looking at Elliot Smith's records. “Look,” James says, holding out a black shirt with text in the middle spelling out the princess in cursive writing. James waves the shirt around, “ Should I get it for Padfoot?” He says.

“ Where did you even get that?”

“ They had a bargain box at the front.” James says, “ Well?”

“ Get it,” Remus says back, James smirks and tucks the shirt into his arm. He leans his back against the record cart next to him and crosses his arms.

“ What did you get him?”

” A hat.”

“ A hat?”

Remus shrugs. “ I would’ve gotten him a jacket but I know he wouldn’t wear it, so…” Remus pushes all the records he flipped forward back in one swift movement, “ A hat.”

“ Romantic.” James snorts and Remus exhales sharply.

“ Shut up.” He says.

James smirks as he directs his attention to the street they can see from the record store’s windows, “ Sooooo, how’s it going?”

Remus glances at him as he moves away from the record cart he finished looking at, he moves to another one across the aisle and starts flipping through, James following him. “ How’s what going?”

” You know Remus.”

Remus continues to busy his fingers, holding up a record to inspect the back. “ I haven’t told him.”

” So are you gonna tell him before or after you give him the hat?”

“ James,” Remus warns.

“ When are you gonna tell him?” James asks, looking at Remus with a sort of concern that he tends to save for the more serious moments where he has to break up arguments.

“ After the show,” Remus says, pushing the records in the cart back. James hums and looks back to the interior of the store.

” You could tell him earlier.” He slightly sings this, like he’s trying to indirectly influence him. Remus turns sharply, raising an eyebrow. “ Stop trying to rush me.” He searches James’s face, and he raises his eyebrows.

” If you want to ask Lily out now just do it.” He says and James’s face turns into a tomato.

” That’s not what this is about!”

“Uh-huh.” Remus hums in disbelief.

“ You're the worst Lupin.” Remus snorts and moves to the record cart next to him.

“ Anyways, I think you should really tell him.”

“ Why are you being so pushy about this?”

“ I just feel like you guys got so close after all that shit in 5th year. Like the way you guys act around each other now, it’s like you're on the edge… and if you just told him-“ James moves his hands around as he talks, and the person at the front counter scans the shirt and takes James’s card as they say the price.

“ On the edge of what?” Remus squints.

“ You know.” James looks at him, eyes wide, eyebrows raised.

” …What? “ James continues to look at him, eyes huge behind his glasses like some kind of frog. He holds up both of his hands and slowly brings them together, interlocking his fingers. He realizes as soon as James’s eyebrows start to wiggle.

“ Ew James!” He shoves him as they walk out of the store.

“ What?! You can’t tell me that I’m wrong!”

“ I’m done talking to you,” Remus says, stomping down the street towards the Potter’s. James runs behind them.

“ Hey! Moony!”

***

To Jame’s surprise Sirius and Effie don’t burn down the house and they sit down that evening to eat Christmas Eve dinner, said dinner being slightly burnt.

They sit around the big dinner table, and Remus can’t help laughing a bit at the contrast their kitchen is to their flat’s.

“ We’re excited for next Friday! We tried to give a ticket to Eunice next door but she said that she hates musicals.” Effie says, Monty nods along to her statement.

Sirius snorts into his food. “ Her loss then,” Sirius smirks at James quickly and then looks back to Effie and Monty. “ Have you seen James’s costume?” James’s face goes red once again as he tries to wrestle the phone out of Sirius’s hand. He ended up losing and his face only got redder as Effie and Monty cooed over his wolf ears.

“ How’s football going honey?” Effie says.

” Well the seasons over mum.” James said through a mouthful of food, “ I should be able to get back to practicing more regularly when showings end.”

“ No Broadway then?”

James groans. “ Muuuuum.” Effie just laughs and looks at Remus who sits back in his chair beside Sirius after refilling his glass with more water. He smiles, and Sirius's foot kicks him underneath the table, Remus kicks him back and Sirius responds by hooking his foot around his ankle.

“ Your mum phoned this morning Remus.” She says, bringing Remus out of the state the ankle touching is putting him in.

“ How’s she doing? I should’ve rung her yesterday but I basically passed out once we got home.” Sirius snorts because this is a very obvious lie. Remus tries to kick him under the table again but fails since their feet are still interlocked.

“ Better, they’ve moved her fully to Hospice now.” Remus tried not to frown.

“ That’s good.”

“ Oh! I almost forgot, I need to congratulate you.” Effie smiles sweetly and claps her hands together.

“ Congratulate me on what?” Remus tilts his head slightly to the side as he takes another sip of his water. Effie pats him bashfully on his arm.

“ Don’t be smart with me, your mum told me all about the job offer.”

Remus chokes on his water.

“ What job offer?” He heard James say as Remus punched his chest to clear his throat. When he looked up he saw James look rapidly between him and Sirius sitting next to him, he didn’t dare look at the face Sirius must have been giving him.

“ He didn’t tell you? Hope told me that he’d been offered a position at Hogwarts once he finished school!” Effie said cheerfully, blind to Remus’s inner panic.

Remus started to sweat now, his breath rapid. Sirius’s foot was no longer interlocked with his.

Beside him, he heard a small voice. “ Why would Hogwarts be giving you job offers?” Sirius said.

“ I- “ Remus started but Effie kept talking.

“ Well, I thought he’d been a student teaching there for a while now.”

“ No. He told us that he’d been a student teaching at some school in Soho.” Sirius turned to James across the table. “ Right?” James just looked at him, brows tilting upward, mouth in a straight line.

Finally, Sirius turned back to Remus, his eyes a bit glassy, and his voice shaking a bit. “ Remus. “ He said so desperately that it made Remus want to gouge his eyes out..

“ I’m sorry, I was gonna tell you-“ He stuttered out, but before he could finish Sirius stood up suddenly, making his chair skitter loudly against the ground. He walked out of the room to the house’s garden.

They all sat there in silence. Effie follows Sirius with her eyes filled with worry.

“ Should I have not said that?”

“ It’s alright mum, he’s just having a bit of a fit,” James said, then looked at Remus. “ Remus.”

“ Right.” Remus unfroze himself from his seat and got up to follow Sirius to the garden.

The Potter’s garden was almost as extravagant as their house, almost spanning a mile long of land. It would be beautiful alive but being that it was the day before Christmas everything was covered in sheets of snow. It was night now, the only thing lighting up the dark air being the lights illuminating the stone path Remus runs down to a small clearing with a bench at the side and a fountain a few steps down.

He couldn’t help thinking of his own parents’ garden the night Sirius showed up beneath his window.

Sirius is standing a bit in front of the fountain, arms crossed, feet planted, like he was waiting for Remus to follow him. He kept his back turned as Remus walked up.

“ Sirius,” Remus says almost desperately.

“ Am I the only one who didn’t know?” Sirius said, his voice dark and emotionless. It made Remus’s heart tug but he kept his ground.

“ I was going to tell you, but with the show and everything-“

“ You told everyone but me! “

” I know, it's just…” Remus looked down to his feet, crickets played their songs nearby. ” I didn’t want to upset you before we finished.”

“ Upset me?! Why the hell do you think it would upset me?!” Sirius wasn’t yelling yet, but it certainly felt like it. Remus avoided eye contact.

” Moony.” Sirius said with conviction, his voice shaking a bit. “ Don’t lie to me.”

“ Sirius,” Remus said. “ After you dropped out of school…you were so sensitive.” Sirius scoffed sarcastically at this.

“ We thought you’d never be the same again, James said that the musical might've been the thing that got you out of your slump.”

“ Oh fuck you.” Sirius spat out.

“ James thought-“ Remus struggled to keep up, he didn’t want to end up throwing up all his words like some sort of word vomit.

“ I don’t want to hear about what James bloody thought!” He was yelling now. “ Why the fuck did you not tell me that you were student teaching at Hogwarts?!”

“ I just thought it would be better for you if you didn’t know-“

“ I’m not a child Remus! You don’t have to constantly take care of me!”

“ You think I don’t know that!” Remus snapped, Sirius’s mouth promptly shut, his brows furrowed. “ God, all I’ve been doing for the last 10 years has been taking care of you! If you're drunk, if you're gone and gotten yourself suspended, if you need someone to write music for some dumb idea you’ve had. Don’t act like it’s anything different whenever you pass out into my bed at night.” His voice faltered slightly and something shifted in Sirius’s eyes.

“ Moony I-“

Remus kept talking, all he could hear was his rapid heartbeat and all he could see was Sirius standing in front of him, “ I know how much the musical means to you, you can deny it but we all know it does.” Remus balls his fist up, nails digging into the scars on his hands.

“ It doesn’t mean anything to you?” Sirius says in a voice small that Remus can barely hear.

” …What?”

“ The show. It doesn’t mean anything to you?”

” Sirius.”

“ Everything that we’ve made together? You think it was just all some big laugh don’t you? Your were just humoring me this whole time until you can fuck off to Scotland?!”

“ Sirius, I'm not like you.” He says.

“ What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!”

Remus takes a deep breath, looks up, and takes a hand down his face in aspiration. “ I don’t have some trust fund backing me up, I can’t just drop out of school, I-“

“ I can’t afford to act like you do, I don’t have the time.”

Sirius laughs in disbelief. “ Don’t act like I’m some idiot just because I don’t constantly act like I’m going to drop dead every minute.”

“ Sirius-“

“ And stop acting like you're gonna die any time soon! Stop using it as an excuse!”

“ Excuse?! Excuse for what?!”

“ For-“ Sirius brings his hands up and searches them for his next words, “ letting you feel, for letting yourself emote.”

“ What are you talking about? I can’t just stop being sick you know, this is my life!”

“ You're more than that Remus!” Sirius yells and Remus thinks that it's no doubt loud enough that the Potters can probably hear it from inside the house.

Remus takes a deep breath. “ Listen.” He says, trying to talk calmly. ” I didn’t tell you because I thought you would shut me out, tell me to take it and never come back-”

” You're wrong.” Sirius cuts him off.

“ What-?”

“ You're wrong. I don’t want you to take it.”

Remus stops talking, his heart is rapidly beating in his chest.

“ Don’t take the job. Stay here.” He takes a deep breath. “Stay here with me.” Sirius looks at him, his eyes bright and glassy in the night illuminated barely with light.

“ I love you.”

Chapter Text

Thursday, December 19 | 16 days till opening

“ What do you mean you're not going home?”

Lily chuckled a bit at how taken back Remus was. “ There's not really any point for me to.”

It was getting later into the night at the party at Broomsticks’, Lily had been able to get James to take a break from swinging her around the dancefloor for a second, really just to give herself time to recover about how dizzy his smile was making her. At the same time she sat down, she was accompanied by Remus, coming from the back door with Sirius behind him, smelling vaguely of ash. Lily, slightly tipsy, chastised him for not telling her that he was taking a smoke break and not bringing her along.

“ No point? What about your Dad?” Remus said, his eyes drifting back to where Sirius was trying to see how long he could spin Mary before she relented.

“ Eh.” Lily shrugged. “ He has a new girlfriend, Nancy, I think her name was.” He had told her when she called him to talk about the wedding. He sounded so happy it made Lily’s stomach violently clench, she was a bit sick and tired of calling her loved ones and being bombarded with new and sudden romantic pursuits.

“ She’s helping me reopen the shop! She’s way better at all the numbers than your old man is.” He said

She hadn’t been able to talk to her dad about the wedding, she kind of just sat there and listened to him talk, burying herself under the covers of her bed like he was telling her a scary bedtime story.

She didn’t want to go home for Christmas, her family had surprised her too much lately with how they were able to move on with their lives. And Lily was sitting in a theater almost every day, practicing to be a lead in a musical.

“ Besides, I told Sev I would stay back with him for Christmas.” She says next, watching for any sign of resentment on Remus’s face. Like always though, there was none, he just smiled softly. He sort of reminded Lily of a teddy bear sometimes.

Early on this year, she and Sev decided to stay home together for Christmas, ever since he and his dad had a big fight. Lily needed some excuse to not go home and she wasn't just going to leave her best friend to spend Christmas alone.

“ That's nice.” He says and Lily just nods, she looks back to their dancefloor to see James running from the bathroom as Mary manages to get ABBA playing on the jukebox.

Gonna do my very best and it ain’t no lie
If you put me to the test, if you let me try
Take a chance on me~

James runs and jumps up and down like some kid at a candy shop and Lily can’t seem to decide if she wants to scowl or swoon. She groans instead and catches James dancing and pointing at her from where she and Remus are sitting in their usual spot in the booth.

” Does he ever run out of energy?”

Remus chuckles silently, “ Nope. Once he gets even the slightest drop of alcohol into his veins nothing is stopping him. Impervious to hangovers too.”

” You got to be fucking kidding me.”

“ Nope.”

“ Oh my god.” Lily groans again.

Ever since the hike Lily’s relationship with James has been uncertain at best. A part of Lily is still suspicious of him, her friendship with Sev being her biggest priority, she would never be able to trust the man when Sev gets so infuriated at even the mention of the name. She hasn’t learned anything more about what happened between them at school, but at this point, Lily wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a classic case of childish rivalry. Sev tended to do that sometimes, someone would get to the swings at the playground before him and he would cast a curse on their entire bloodline.

So she decided to tolerate James at the least. She told herself that she didn’t truly trust him because as much as he might catch her from falling off cliffs, and give her helpful criticism during their tutor sessions she couldn't stop herself from imagining the smarmy smile he gave her walking out of that Tesco.

It just happened that she had to spend so much time around him, they were co-leads. And if they started to banter about something meaningless, then that wasn’t certainly Lily’s fault, what was she supposed to do? Not correct him when he was so blatantly wrong all the time?

Really, if she was honest, as much as she wanted to ignore it, she loathed the way he made her feel. It was like a deep burning feeling in her heart, one that never let up, it spread everywhere, to her feet during rehearsal, to her face, to her mind whenever she was just trying to get some shut-eye between classes. Usually, this was some manifestation of anger but the burning itself wasn't anger, she was angry because she was burning.

It all felt so cheesy, like something she would make a dance for, or something that Remus would write about.

She hid behind Remus in the booth while James continued to yell her name, Remus eventually spared her by giving the man a thumbs down, which made James just comically frown and go back to find some other poor soul to swing around.

“ Thanks.” Lily exhales and leans back against the booth.

” Are you gonna do anything about that?” She hears Remus say as she shuts her eyes tight. She had been practicing all day, all month really, and she was just so tired. Tired, but she was also jittery, it was a weird existence that Lily only really got when she was little before recitals. Lily didn’t know how to feel about that feeling working its way back to her after all these years.

“ About what?”

“ About…?” Remus glances at James who is now trying to do some sort of breakdance and almost tripping Sirius with his foot.

“ I’m not doing anything about it, we're working well enough together aren't we?” She raises her glass and takes a sip, Remus looks at her incredulously.

“ You know that he really likes you right?”

” No he doesn't.” She says. “ He just acts like that because he knows that it’ll piss me off.”

“ Lily, he took you to the top of the trail.”

” Remus, I don’t want to talk about this.” She says and Remus almost pouts, he’d been drinking a bit more since he came from the back.

“ We always talk about my love life.”

“ That's because it's a mess, Rem.” Lily snorts at this and Remus exhales a breath from his nose and takes a swing of his drink.

“ Look I’m not trying to wing man or anything when I say this-“

“ Uh-huh,” Lily says with disbelief.

“ -But I think you're letting this superficial hate you have for him blindside you a bit.”

“ Superficial? What about it is superficial?” She says.

“ Lily.” Remus turns his body to Lily in the booth, and his words start to slur a bit, even then he sounds like Lily’s middle school teacher telling her to speak up during group reading. “ Give me one real reason why you supposedly hate him so much.”

“ Wha-“ Lily stuttered out, she didn’t like what he was trying to imply. She looks out to the dance floor, but James is nowhere to be seen. She cranes her neck and sees him over by the doorway, hugging Emeline, and laughing at something she says before waving them off. As he senses it, his eyesight shifts to look at Lily, and right before he can fully see her creepily staring she turns away to where Remus is looking at her, eyebrows raised, expecting an answer.

“ He’s… unpredictable,” is what she ends up saying.

“ Unpredictable?”

“ Yeah,” Lily says. “ How the fuck am I supposed to work with someone I can’t predict? Of course, he flusters me all the time, he scares the hell out of me!” Her voice ended up rising, and she could feel the burning spreading to her face again.

“ I just thought I was braver than this.” She says all wobbly, this time the burning just makes her exhausted. She feels like a flower that’s wilting.

Flowers wilt when they aren’t loved enough, don’t just ignore them. She heard her mum say. Lily didn’t know if she was the one who was wilting or if it was her state of mind.

Remus looks at her sympathetically and puts his arm over her shoulder, pulling her into a side hug in the booth.

“ You smell like fucking cigarettes,” Lily says, sniffling a bit, she’s not crying, she’s not.

“ Shut up,” Remus says back.

***

Later that Saturday Lily had been stationed at their dinner table, drinking tea and trying to get herself to focus on reviewing terms for her next exam, and not Potter’s stupid dimples, when Mary threw a suitcase in front of her.

“ That's my suitcase. What are you doing with my suitcase?” She says looking up at Mary who was wearing comfortable train attire. Marlene comes into the room with Lily’s backpack that she uses for school and plops it on the table, almost knocking her tea over.

” You're coming with us to Kent! “ Marlene grinned.

“ What?!” Lily planted her foot on the floor from where they had been scrunched up on her chair. “ No, I’m not.”

“ You are,” Mary says, her will never wavering. “ I called Severus, he said it would be ok, if not passively aggressively.” She muttered offhandly and side glances at Marlene who just snorts. ” I also bought your train ticket, and you'll be back before Christmas, so you have no excuse.”

Lily stood there stunned. She had really allowed herself to be pushed around so much lately. This was getting a bit out of hand.

“ But I-“ She starts and Mary just cuts her off.

“ Lily c’mon, you need a break, you need to go home,” Mary says, softening a bit, “ You need to see your dad.”

At that moment, she almost cried, the exhaustion hitting her.

“ He doesn’t want me there.”

“ Lily, you know that's not true,” Marlene says, her hair stuck out like straw out of her winter hat.

“ You're not just gonna let your dad open up the shop again without you being able to nag him through it?” Mary asks, Lily forgot that she had told them that. Lily laughs a watery laugh and her friends walk over to hug her in her chair.

A few hours later she’s sending Sev several apology texts, and he’s sending back blunt “It's ok”’s and “ See you in a few days.” She tries not to feel guilty about it, she would be back to see him at Christmas anyway.

She’s sitting in the waiting area for the train, with Mary and Marlene in the bathroom, when her phone rings.

“ Are you at the Potter’s?”

“ Yep,” Remus says from the other end.

” Mary and Marlene are kidnapping me so I’m waiting for the train to go back to Kent.” She says.

“ Good.” He laughs, on the other end she hears a familiar voice say Remus’s name. “ I got to go, take it easy ok? Relax, that's what breaks are for, I know you're unfamiliar with the concept.”

“ I could say the same to you.” She says smiling, “ Maybe take it easy on the drama until you get back?”

“ Yeah yeah.”

She hangs up as Mary and Marlene come back from the bathroom and minutes later she's on the train home against her better judgment.

***

Her old town is the same, the snow covers the streets and snowmen line the sidewalks. As they make it back from the train station Mary and Marlene point and jeer at any street front that's changed, because that's what you're supposed to do when you go back to your hometown, not frown at everything dead like Lily.

“ The shop is the closest to the station, wanna stop there first?” Mary says, peering out a street sign as they drive through the snowy roads.

“ You guys don’t have to come with me,” Lily says, sitting in the middle of Marlene and Mary, looking down at her shoes.

“ I wanna go!” Marlene looked back from where she was looking out the window. “ I haven’t seen Joey in ages!” She says.

“ Don’t call my dad Joey.” Lily groans.

“ He told me to call him that.” Marlene pouts.

“ He told you to call him Joe, not Joey.” She glances at Mary who's just smiling, and Marlene just shrugs.

They arrive at the shop, it's been repainted, so the little flowers Lily and Pet painted were covered up by a new layer of bright green paint. Lily tries not to get too upset about it.

“ Do you think he’s here?”

“ He should, it's only the afternoon,” Marlene says, looking at the watch on her wrist. Mary pushes the door open before Lily can prepare herself, making a soft ding as they walk in.

There's a plastic wrap over the floors as it seems like they hadn’t finished painting, and it's very much open other than the desk near the back. The openness was different, before it seemed like her parents wanted to make customers almost feel claustrophobic by the amount of things they were able to shove in the small space. She remembered running back and forth through the shelves, their mum telling them to slow down so that they didn’t tip anything over.

At one of the side walls sits a ginger man, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, he always seemed to dress younger than he actually was, their mum used to say that he fit in more with her and Pet than people his own age. He was kneeling on the floor, painting a corner a darker shade of green. As the bell rang and they walked in, carrying their luggage with them he stood up slowly, a hand on his back. He looked at them with confusion and then his eyes lit up as he spotted Lily and bounded over dropping his paintbrush to hug her.

“ Lily!”

“ Hi, Dad.” She says small into his shoulder.

“ What are you doing here? I thought you were spending Christmas with Sev back in London?” He puts his hands on his hips, his pants are stained all over with paint.

“ I'm back for just a few days, I’m heading back Tuesday.” She forces her mouth into a smile, her dad grins back.

“ Great! Me and Nance will be happy to have you.” He says, and Lily struggles to keep her smile up.

“ Joey!” Marlene yells before Lily can scowl.

They exchange usual pleasantries, Lily’s dad regarding the girls saying that “ he almost didn’t recognize them, “ and that they almost look like “ real grown-ups.” Lily feels so small again like she's back on the playground she and Pet used to go to. Thankfully, Mary doesn’t mention the musical when he asks what they’ve been doing

“ What don’t you guys come over? Marl’s you can invite your brother. Is he still working that insurance job?” Her dad says and at that moment an older woman comes through the back door by the desk. She has dark brown hair chopped up above her shoulders in a bob, she’s wearing a pair of overalls with identical paint stains as her dad on them. She’s holding a bucket of paint that she plops on the floor before her dad beckons her over to where their standing by the door.

“ Nancy! This is my daughter Lily.” She walks over and he puts an arm around his waist, Lily puts on her second fake smile of the evening.

“ It’s nice to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you!” Nancy says sweetly, Lily tries to keep the anger bubbling up in her chest.

“ Good things I hope,” Lily says, and Marlene snorts beside her to release some of the tension.

“ We’ll talk over dinner,” Her dad turns to Mary and Marlene, “ You two need a ride to your parent’s place?”

“ That would be great Mr. Evans,” Mary says, her dad just laughs and goes to take off the gloves he was wearing.

“ Call me Joey Mary.”

Marlene laughs and Mary smirks Lily’s way, making her groan.

Nancy, Lily learns is a psychiatrist who works part-time with a contracting company, Lily’s dad met her while she was helping him fix a window some kids threw a baseball through. She’s kind, smart, and funny and she talks to Lily about some complicated legal case she read in the paper. Lily likes her, so she tries not to get depressed when Lily’s dad mentions off handley that she’s been using her mum’s old baking mitts.

“ Are you planning on helping renovate Lily, I understand if you just want to relax,” Nancy says over dinner.

“ No it's ok, I’d be glad to help.” She says, Nancy beams and her dad spares her a small smile.

“ You should repaint the flowers at the front of the store.” Nancy says, she then shoves her dad softly with her shoulder, “ This one covered them up.”

“ That paint had been there for ages! It was basically peeling off!” Her dad says.

Nancy tutts and shakes her head. “ They were so cute though.”

“ I can repaint them, can’t promise they're gonna be any better than when me and Pet did them when we were kids.”

“ I’m sure they’ll be perfect,” Nancy says, and Lily is surprised by how genuine it is, and not like she’s just saying it to get Lily to like her.

The next day Lily accompanies Nancy and her dad down to the shop to help renovate. She kneels for about an hour to paint little dandelions and sunflowers at the bottom of the storefront while Nancy and her dad paint inside.

She has to paint all the flowers that Pet would have been doing if she was here, but she decided to stay with Vernon’s family for Christmas, Lily didn’t even know if her sister was aware of Nancy. She didn’t know if Petunia would be angry about it or not, Lily thought back to the levity in her voice as she told her that she dropped out of med school.

Lily got up, wiped down her pants, shook off some snow from her boots, and started to go inside when she heard Nancy and her dad talk quietly inside.

“ We should probably re-tile the floor too.” Lily hears her dad say.

“ Let’s keep it, it's homely,” Nancy says.

” Why are you being so sentimental about this?” Her dad chuckles softly.

“ Why aren’t you being sentimental?” Nancy responds, “ This place is precious, Violet had a real eye for design.” There's a pause, she thinks she can hear her dad taking a breath.

“ She did.” He says.

The mention of Lily’s mum’s name makes her stomach curve. It’s not like Lily expected Nancy to not know anything about her mother. Her mother’s death haunts their household like a big sheet. They have pictures of her everywhere, her beautiful smile and bright hair brightening up every picture. When Lily came home the first day she was surprised by the picture frame of her that she left on her dresser. It was after her first recital, in the picture her mum was hugging her, both of their faces scrunched in laughter. Lily’s hair was up in a tight bun and her outfit had way too many feathers, but Lily looked at it and cried. She curled up by her bed and flowerless windowsill and murmured “I’m sorry,” as she held the frame to her chest.

She stepped in, Nancy and her dad turning to face her as she walked in.

“ You done out there?” Her dad says, who lifted his gaze from where he was frowning on the floor.

“ Yep,” Lily said, and Nancy went outside to see. She smiled brightly and squeezed Lily’s shoulder and said they were beautiful. Lily tried not to let the tears fall out of her eyes.

***

Monday, December 23 | 12 days till opening

“ France?! Why the hell would you want to move to bloody France?!” Marlene yelled.

They were walking down a dead and cold beach near Mary’s house. The water next to them was frozen and they had the whole beach to themselves. They did this whenever something happened during secondary. Marlene would pull them down here whenever her parents got too mouthy or strict, she would plant her feet in the sand and scream as loud as she could into the ocean. Right now Marlene came back to Kent to stay with her brother, who works at a small car insurance firm in town. Lily had shown up to Marlene’s brother’s house to them playing football in the front yard, he had noogied Lily so hard that she swore her hair was still fuzzy from it.

They had picked up Mary from her parent’s house and then like always headed back down here, where Mary decided to break the news that she was thinking of moving to France after graduation.

“ It was just something my professor suggested. You can’t fully learn a language until you live in the country of origin.” Mary says, smiling sadly.

“ But you can’t go! Who's supposed to help make fun of Lily whenever she buys another one of those scented hand sanitizers!” Marlene exclaimed.

“ Hey!” Lily shoves Marlene.

“ Oh, I like those. I still buy the cake-scented one.” Mary says. Lily gives Marlene a look and she just huffs.

“ Both of you, weirdos.”

Lily and Mary laugh as they continue to walk down the beach.

“ I’m proud of you Mary. It’s a big step.” Lily says.

“ Thanks, Lils.” Mary smiles and then looks out to the distance of the beach. “ I never really thought I would love French so much when my parents forced me to change my major. But here I am.” She lifts her arm, making the jewelry she’s wearing jangle.

Lily remembers the day she had to comfort Mary when she changed her major from theater to French. Mary had bursted into her house and collapsed on her bed, crying into the quilt on top, her makeup smearing everywhere. Lily made tea and sat beside her to rub circles on her shoulder as the girl sobbed.

“ I mean, I knew it was gonna be hard to convince them-,” She sniffed loudly, “ But I just thought I could hold out a little while longer, maybe deep down I didn’t like theater as much as I thought I did.”

“ That's not true Mary.”

“ How can I call myself the next Bernadette Peters if I can’t even stand up to my parents about something I love.” She continued to sob again.

“ This doesn’t mean that you have to stop acting Mare’, you could just do local theater on the side.” Lily handed a tissue to her and Mary loudly blew into it.

“ You think so?”

“ Yeah, we can research some places near the flat together, I still need to look into nearby companies.”

“ You're still going to dance?”

Lily smiled. “ Of course I am.”

Mary finally smiled after an hour of crying, it was like sunshine on a cloudy day. “ Music is basically a language, right?”

“ To be honest, I never really thought I could open my heart to it as much as I have,” Mary says back in the present day.

“ It doesn’t mean the dream stops though.” She looks at Lily and nods. “ If it's not West End by 18, it's by 25.” She runs a bit ahead, twirling around gracefully to face Lily and Marlene. “ You can come with Lily.”

Lily snorts. “ To the West End or France?”

“ To the West End!”

Lily laughs. “ No way Mary!”

“ Oh c’mon.” She stops walking and puts her hands on her hips. “ You're really good, and I can tell that you enjoy it.”

“ Doesn’t mean I’m going to audition for actual professional shows.” She laughs and Mary gives her a look.

“ What?” Lily asks under Mary’s gaze.

“ Have you told Joey about the show yet?”

“ Don’t call him that-“

“ Well? Have you?” Mary looks at her, and so does Marlene. Lily squirms a bit.

“ …No.”

“ Lily!” Mary yells, making Lily jump. “ What are you embarrassed about?”

“ Nothing!”

Mary and Marlene continued to look at her.

“ I just…” Lily says. “ If I tell him that means this whole thing is real.”

” And you don’t want it to be real?”

“ Well, it feels a bit insane to me,” Lily says. “ I get fired from my law internship and immediately turn to an amateur musical production. I was so adamant about going into Law, I don’t want my dad to laugh in my face.”

“ You're not as much of a failure as you think you are Lily,” Mary says, she’s now resting a hand against her arm. “ You've worked hard for this. Be proud.”

Lily nods and Mary nods back, and they continue their walk down the beach.

Lily comes home to all the house lights off except for a candle her father had lit on the kitchen table. He had his knuckles interlaced and over his head, elbows against the table.

“ Is everything ok?” She says after shutting the door behind her. He looks up suddenly like he didn’t hear her come in.

“ Oh, Lily.” He says, “ Yeah, I’m fine, it's just…” He sighs.

“ I guess it would be insensitive to do it without Petunia.”

“ Do what?”

“ Visiting your mum’s grave.”

“ Ah,” Lily says. It's something they do every holiday, but they always do it together. Lily looked over to the counter to where Nancy left her mother’s oven mitts. They were pale pink adorned all over with little Lillies.

” I’m sure Petunia won’t mind, let's go now before the sun sets.”

They walked the path to their local graveyard holding some flowers in a bouquet that they got from their garden. Her father wiped away some snow from the gravestone and put the bouquet gently atop the snow covering the whole graveyard.

“ She loved Christmas,” Lily said after a while of silence, her father laughed silently beside her.

“ Remember when she bought those scary elf decorations for the house?”

“ Yeah.” Lily laughed. “ Pet hated those.” She heard a sniffle from her dad next to her.

“ I can’t believe she’s getting married.”

“ Me neither.” Lily shook her head.

“ I’m guessing you tried to talk her out of it?”

“ Yep. I even offered to take her to the clinic.”

“ No!”

“ Yes!” Lily laughed despite herself. “ She got so mad at me.” Lily looked at her dad, his eyes were a bit fogged over. “ She actually wanted me to talk to you about that.”

“ Hm?” Her dad kept his eyes glued to her mother’s grave.

“ She thinks you're being a tad bit overbearing.”

“ Ah, of course.” Her dad snorts a short spit of laughter. “ She never liked it when I tried to parent her too much.”

” I don’t think it's that.” Lily says. “ I think she just wants to build something new, I mean…” Lily thinks about the playground, her and Pet on the swings, Lily comforting her while she cries. “ I think she thinks she’s lived too long making decisions for mum and not for herself.”

Her dad hums affirmatively, Lily stares at the snow around her feet.

” Just leave her be, and when the time comes,” Lily shoves her dad softly, “you can plan my wedding. And when I say plan I mean the whole thing. I want it to be flower-themed and everything.”

Her dad chuckles and Lily finds herself letting a real smile spill out. Her dad looks up at her.

“ I think Violet would have been proud of who you've turned out to be, Lily.”

The tears start pouring out of Lily’s face before she can ever catch herself. Her dad holds her in his arms as she cries. He smells like cinnamon and wood and Lily feels her blood warm despite the snow that surrounds them. When she pulls away she digs into her jacket packet.

” I have something for you.” She pulls out the musical pamphlet that Mary gave her earlier before she left her house. She hands it over to her dad. He looks over it inquisitively and his eyes widen as he reads the inside.

“ You're in this?”

“ Yeah.” Lily sniffs and wipes her nose with her sleeve, which she would gag at normally but right now she doesn't seem to care. “ I worked on the choreography too. Marys in it, you should come.”

Her dad looks down at the pamphlet and then back at Lily, still vaguely astonished.

” Yeah. Yeah. Of course.” He says in a sort of stunned voice that makes Lily vaguely nervous.

“ Do you think it's stupid?” She says and her dad snaps to attention, his eyes only getting wider.

“ No! No, this is great. This is amazing Lily, after the whole internship thing I thought you’d stop dancing for sure.” He says and Lily has to keep herself from letting out more tears. She shrugs and lets out a watery laugh instead.

“ Well she would've wanted me to keep going, so.” She looks back at her mum’s grave and so does her dad, he then looks back at Lily and smiles.

“ She would.”

Her dad keeps looking through the pamphlet and they sit for a few more seconds of silence before Lily speaks up again.

” Dad.”

“ Yeah?”

” I really like Nancy.” She says. Her dad looks back up, his smile growing.

“ I do too love, I do too.”

***

Lily sees her dad and Nancy off at the train platform the next morning.

“ It was so nice to finally meet you,” Nancy says as she pulls away from a hug. “ I’m excited to see your show!” She adds and her dad nods enthusiastically.

“ Don’t get your hopes too high.” Lily snarks.

Nancy makes a pshhh noise with her mouth and her dad just laughs.

“ If you're in it I’m sure it's great.” He says, and Lily hugs him and waves at the two of them as the train departs.

Sev is supposed to pick her up with his car at the train station so she arrives to him standing up against a wall scrolling through his phone.

“ How was Joey?” Sev says once their inside his car, Lily scoffs at the mention of the nickname.

“ Ugh, not you too.”

They drive from the train station through London and she ends up missing the calm streets of Kent a bit. Also back in London, her thoughts start to wander again, being in the car with Sev makes her think of the car ride James gave her to trail. The way he glanced at her, Lily shivered, she didn’t want to be thinking of that right now. She just wanted to relax and enjoy her Christmas.

” Lab work has been surprisingly fulfilling.”

“ Really? Don’t they make you stay all night if you don’t finish?”

“ Yeah, but at that point it's kind of a part of the experience.”

Lily snorts. “ Sounds fun.”

“ It's more fun than damaging your feet for hours.” He snarks, Lily pushes him, making the car slightly waver.

“ Lily! I’m driving!” He yells, but Lily just laughs at him.

“ Anyway, Macdonald told me the weirdest thing the other day when she called me to tell me that you were going back to Kent.”

“Hm,” Lily hummed. She was barely paying attention, she had to wake up early to make the train on time and she didn’t manage to sleep on the train ride back.

“ She said that you needed to be back for a “show” anyway.” Lily’s heart stopped and looked up from where she was leaning against the window.

” Are you doing some kind of recital again?” He looked at her curiously. Lily was tired so she just decided to rip the bandaid off.

“ No, it's a musical.”

Sev laughed in disbelief. “ A what?”

“ A musical, I got the lead part and I’m the choreographer too.”

“ What..? Lily, you can’t be serious!” He said with the type of humor in his voice that just made Lily more nervous but she didn’t back down.

“ I’m serious.” She leans forward to get a pamphlet from her bag, she puts it on the dashboard in front of them and once they hit a red light he picks it up and reads through it.

“ Lily… This says Potter’s in it.”

“ Yeah, so?”

“ Lily, I specifically remember telling you to stay away from him.” Sev’s voice was rising now, his driving was getting a bit erratic despite the snow and icy roads.

“ I didn’t choose to be in it with him, it just happened, it's not like we're friends or anything.” At this Lily’s stomach lurched, but she decided to ignore it. ” Remus said that they would pay me for both positions and Marys also in it, it's not like I’m doing this because of him.”

“ Oh if Mary’s doing it then I’m sure it's fine.”

“ Why are you so upset about this?!”

“ Because this is idiotic Lily!” Her heart stops, and for some reason, she feels like she can feel it break.

“ This isn’t like you! You're traipsing around with these… these…Idiots!” He slaps the pamphlet back on the dashboard and starts driving again. “What about school Lily? What about your future?!”

“ Just because I’m doing this doesn’t mean I’m putting my whole life on hold! I thought you knew me better than that!”

“ I thought I did too! I thought you were smarter than this!” Sev’s voice at this moment shifts into something Lily recognizes, it sounds like it did months ago in the cafe.

“ Why are you doing this?!” Sev says.

“ Because I enjoy it!” Lily yells before thinking, he looks back from the road with a face that looks at her like she just confessed to murder. He then sighs deeply.

“ I guess I haven’t been fully honest about why I hate Potter so much.” He says. Lily just stares at him.

Lily took a deep breath, she had been working for this information for months, but at this point she didn’t want to hear it anymore.

“ I told you that I was sent to school on a scholarship, well that scholarship had special conditions, you needed to be able to keep your grades up high enough to stay enrolled. Because of this… It got kind of competitive. Hogwarts kept a ranking of every student after exam season, I was always around in the top 5 places. James and his goons always took up the top spots. They never studied, I don’t think I’d ever seen Black even touch a textbook but there they were, taking up the first two spots every exam season. It was infuriating and it got even worse once Lupin got involved because every prank was justified by keeping their buddy enrolled. One day before exam season they flooded my entire dorm’s bathroom, and only really got off with it with a slap of the wrist. It was ridiculous.”

Sev’s hands clenched the wheel as he kept talking. “ One exam season in 5th year, I was threatening Lupin’s spot at 3rd place in the ranking so before Lunch they slipped Mirtazapine in my drink, do you know what that is?” He turned to Lily and she just shook her head curtly.

“ It’s a drug that helps depressed people sleep, but the amount they spiked me with made me pass out during the exam and even worse, there was some chemical in it that I was allergic to.” He looked back to Lily, his eyes turning into something filled with resentment and hate.

” They almost killed me, Lily.” He said. Lily could hear her heartbeat in her chest.

“ The only reason I survived is because Potter fessed up to the type of drug they gave me. Black stole the thing when he went to visit Lupin in the infirmary, the kid had heart problems so I guess he made the mistake of showing Black where it was. He should've been expelled but he was only suspended for a couple weeks at the end of the term, and I had to take the exam all over again.”

“ I can’t believe it,” Lily said quietly, she moved her eyesight back down to her feet.

James had said that Severus knew nothing about him, but she guessed that she didn’t either. She found her breath stuttering a bit, her mind drifting to James’s dimpled smile. She wanted to sink into the ground.

“ Don’t want to believe that your new boyfriend is a psycho?” Severus says with a bite to his voice that Lily didn’t know he was capable of.

” Sev, what-“ She stared at him and it must be a look full of surprise because Sev just gets more aspirated.

“ What Lily.”

“ Why are you acting this way?”

“ Huh? Why are you asking me that after what I just told you?!”

“ No Sev, you are acting different.”

“ I could say the same thing about you. Seems like Macdonald and McKinnon have infected you with their foolishness, no doubt Potter increased the spread.” Sev spat out. Lily stared at him. Her friend was gone, she had no idea who she was in the car with.

“ Sev. Stop the car.”

“ What?!”

“ Stop the car!” She yelled and he abruptly stopped and pulled to the side of the road. Lily got out and pulled her luggage from the back seat.

“ Lily! What the hell is wrong with you?!” Sev yelled from his car window.

“ What is wrong with you?!” She stood on the street. “ It’s like every time Potter comes into conversation you morph into this different person!” She’s standing on the street and yelling. Words are spilling out and at this point, Lily isn’t stopping them from flowing.

“ And Potter or not I care about this show! I worked hard on it! I’m sick of you looking down on me like me caring about my passions makes me some kind of idiot!”

Sev just furrowed his eyebrows, frowning. “ Lily c’mon. Don’t be childish!”

At this point, Lily’s eyes were getting watery and all she wanted was to be back home in her flat amongst her flowers.

“ Have a good Christmas.” Is all she says. She walks back to her flat, Sev yelling her name behind her, her luggage rolling behind her on the icy street.

***

Friday, December 27 | 8 days till opening

“ You know Lily, I never liked him,” Marlene said. They were lying on their living room floor, her and Mary getting back from Kent just a few hours before.

Lily had spent her Christmas watching Love Island and crying on her couch. She hadn’t even been interested in watching Love Island before this, but she had watched all of it, with a bowl of crisps in her lap. She felt so empty, she felt like her whole life was a lie. How long had her best friend been like that and she didn’t even know. She felt so worthless and so so so stupid.

She covered her face with her hands to prevent her tear gates from opening again. “ I just feel so stupid.” She said all wobbly.

“ Hey…You're not stupid Lily.” Mary said softly.

“ No! I am!” She says, hands still to her face. “Because you know why?! ‘Cause he did that shit all the time! I knew he never cared about my dancing but I always thought,” She took a deep snotty breath, tears were falling now. Her hair was down and splayed over their carpet that Lily had rejected to clean, so it was probably filled with crisp crumbs, Lily couldn’t bring herself to care. “ I always thought oh good ol’ Sev, that's just how he is.”

“ I should've known! He was my best friend and I knew he was keeping secrets from me and I didn’t care!”

“ You didn’t care, Lily, because he was your friend,” Marlene said, taking a serious tone. “ The Hogwarts thing he was probably keeping from you because it was traumatizing, he probably didn’t want to be that vulnerable with you.”

“ Why not?! Why wouldn't he want to be vulnerable with me?! I was his best friend! I’m not some baby that needs to be coddled!”

At this, Marlene shared a look with Mary and Lily just cried harder.

“ This stupid musical! It's ruining my whole life! I can’t stop thinking about James’s stupid face, even though he tried to murder someone. I keep getting weirdly shaky, and fucking Remus isn’t picking up my fucking calls!” It’s about 10 pm on a Monday so she really shouldn’t be yelling but she can’t help herself when every time she gets reminded of her situation she gets a burn in her gut so sharp it makes her want to scream.

After her outburst Mary and Marlene look at her kindly, waiting for her heavy breathing to subside.

” Ok. I’m ok.” She says more calmly now that she has let out her frustrations a bit. She still feels like shit though.

“ Remus isn’t picking up your calls?” Marlene asks.

Lily sniffs and wipes her nose. “ No.”

“ Huh. That's weird.” Marlene says.

“ He has pretty bad heart issues, right? Maybe he had a flare-up or something.” Mary adds.

Marlene makes a worried sound in her throat. “ Well, that certainly wouldn't be good.”

“It was a pretty big fight, I was mad at him for a while,-“ Remus had said over the phone.

Black stole the thing when he went to visit Lupin in the infirmary, the kid had heart problems so I guess he made the mistake of showing Black where it was.

Lily just groans because now she’s just extra worried.

“ Sorry Lils,” Mary says, she then props herself on her arm, making her side face Lily and Marlene. “ Anyway, it's insane that James and Sirius tried to drug Severus, I knew they were knobs during school but I never knew it was that bad.”

“ Crazy shit goes down at boarding schools. Wouldn’t be surprised if they were in some kind of cult too.” Marlene says and Lily despite her grief, laughs.

Mary tutts from her spot on the floor. “ What's with you and cults?”

“ What?! They're interesting!”

Lily laughs. “ You're so weird.”

“ Anyway.” Marlene scrunches her nose in annoyance. “ Are you gonna talk to him?”

“ Talk to who?” Lily asks, looking back up at the ceiling.

“ James!”

” What?!” She turns sharply to where Marlene is sitting. “ Why would I talk to James?!”

” You could ask him for the whole story. There might be something Sev left out.” Mary shrugs when Lily turns to look at her. “ Or you could get confirmation he’s a wanker and kick him in the bollocks during the show.” Mary grins, and Lily’s stomach only stirs.

She thinks back to James at the top of the trail. The kindness in his eyes as she sang Moonlight. His laugh whenever he messed up steps during rehearsal, it made Lily ache and she didn’t exactly know with what but she knew whatever it was just going to make her more depressed.

So Lily decided to call him.

***

The next day she meets James at Madam Puddifoots, the cafe they met each other at after the run-in at Tesco. Lily decided to order her tea as soon as she got there, to avoid any spillage when the he arrived. She basically had to throw out that old t-shirt, she had been too emotionally distraught to spend time getting rid of the stain.

She sat there at a table near a window, looking at the same page of her book, not reading, and tapping her finger against her tea mug.

She was about 20 minutes early, she knew that, so she didn’t expect him to show up right away.

He walked over, passing the front counter, straight to her with a smile, Lily held herself back from returning it.

“ Hey.” He said, pulling back the chair across from her at the small coffee table. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, he almost looked like a completely different person. He had a bit of a tired look to him too, his hair being tousled like normal but his smile didn’t seem genuine.

“ How was your Christmas?” James asked.

“ Good.” She says, she purposely looks down to the table to avoid seeing his face.

“ You look tired.” She said, he looked up suddenly like he was surprised she noticed and then laughed quietly into his hands.

“ Ah, right,” James says, he keeps smiling although it’s a bit fake around the edges.

“ Well, there was a bit of a thing during Christmas.”

“ Remus isn’t picking up my calls.”

“ That would be it then.” He leans back in his chair, he stares out the window next to them. She tries to imagine him as someone who would poison his classmate and then laugh about it later. She decided to take it one step at a time though.

“ Is he ok?”

“ What?” James said absentmindedly. “ Oh yeah, he’s fine. He just went back to Wales to see his parents for a bit.”

“ Oh,” Lily said, it definitely wasn’t a good sign that her friend had run away to another place without her knowing and that James had called whatever happened to him a thing. ” That's it? He just left?”

“He and Sirius had a pretty big fight,” James said, the tiredness seemed to make more sense now, “ It’s happened before, they’ll get over it by the time the show starts.” He says vaguely dismissively.

It’s happened before.

Given the opening, Lily decides to take it.

“ Sev told me about what happened with you guys, during school.” She keeps her voice steady, James looks back quickly and then back to the window. He then laughs without any humor to it.

“You’re gonna have to be more specific Evans-“

” The drugging?! The suspension?!”

He’s still not looking at her.

“ Ah. Right. Well.” He shrugs. “ It was a long time ago.”

“ That's all you have to say for yourself?”

“ What do you want me to say?!”

“ I want an explanation!” She’s yelling, she sees the girl at the front counter give her a wary look. “ I want an explanation for your behavior, you owe me at least that!”

James looks at her, his gaze without his glasses is even worse than usual. He runs a hand through his hair and then sighs.

“ It all got a little out of hand.” He says. “ It was stupid rivalry, Snape and his friends-” She watched his eyes get murky and he clenched his hand on the table.

“ They had some stupid notion that if they picked on Moony enough they would get him to drop out. It was pretty bad until me and Padfoot stepped in near the end of 2nd year. All the pranks were pretty much harmless, if not pretty childish, at first, until something…” James said.

“ Something changed in 5th year and I had to calm Sirius down after he slipped Snape something he got from the infirmary. It was really lucky that Sirius had a breakdown and told me because, if I wasn’t able to tell our nurse what type of medication it was, it could've been pretty bad.”

“ Sirius fessed up and he got suspended. He and Remus got into a pretty big fight after that, they didn’t talk to each other for about 3 months, which was a record.” He chuckled and Lily just sat there in silence.

“ So.” He raised his hand and then rested it back on the table. “ That's it, there's your explanation.”

“ Marlene said that you were a knob during school.” Lily finds herself saying.

James smiles sadly. “ I don’t deny it.” He said. “ I was a stupid kid and I thought I was doing the right thing for the sake of a friend. I’ve changed,” He looks away from Lily, “ Doesn’t make me hate Snape any less though.”

Lily was a bit miffed, she hadn’t expected him to be so mature about the whole situation. She thought she would get some sort of reaction, this was the same man who would trip his friends as a joke and flirt with Lily just to see her face get red.

The way he sat there, almost still, as he watched her tap her mug, made her stomach twist and turn like some sort of tornado.

“ Listen, Lily,” James says, pulling her out of her daze.

” For full transparency before we perform on Friday-” He says.

“ I’m sorry about the aspirin.”

Lily stopps fidgeting with her mug.

“ Mckinon told me that you were fired because of it, and although there's nothing I can do to go back and fix it, I’m sorry.” He’s fully looking at her now, eyes dark and meaningful. “I’m sorry for the way I behaved, I tend not to be in my right mind when stressed.”

“ We haven’t known each other for long, but your opinion matters to me.”

stop

“ I think you're great Lily.”

stop, stop, stop

They sat there in silence, James’s big brown eyes awaiting an answer and Lily just sitting there, her hands clenched in her lap.

Her will was wilting by the moment, and she felt like she had heartburn to the biggest magnitude.

“ You're so selfish.” She mumbled. The look that James gave her almost brought her to pieces.

She got up and walked out of the coffee shop.

***

Tuesday, December 31 | 4 days till opening

Lily’s head was swarming, swarming with thoughts but they were all just James.

James during rehearsal when she had him laughing against the mat.

James grinning at her as she sang to London at the top of the trail

James glancing back at her as she dozed off in his car.

James holding the door open for her after the party.

Stupid James walking out of the Tesco aspirin in hand.

She ended up boarding herself up in her room, Mary and Marlene occasionally coming to give her food or moral support.

She felt like she finally understood Remus’s fear of change.

It was around 7 pm when Lily felt her throat stuff up like she couldn’t breathe. She had about a million missed calls from Sev on her phone, no texts or calls from James, and she was sure Mary and Marlene were hushly talking about her in the next room.

“ Lily? Where are you going?” Mary said as she and Marlene watched her silently walk up to the door of their flat. They were sitting at the kitchen table, they looked to be trying to eat some kind of leftover that Mary had made.

“ I’m just going to clear my head a bit.”

” …Okay.” Mary says, sparing a concerned glance at Marlene. As she walked out and closed the door she heard Mary yell, “ Be careful! Keep your phone on you!”

Her feet were walking without any purpose. Somehow she ended up on the Tube and later walked down a gross alley, and opened a metal door to a small theater.

The theater was so different from when she first stepped into it.

They had fixed the heating, so Lily didn’t shiver whenever she came in, all the paint on the walls was fixed, and there were no more cracks in the ceiling.

Everything felt so much lighter.

She found herself walking up the steps to the stage and sifting her phone for a song. She ended up playing Moonlight and scrolling to the dance break near the end. Except this time she didn’t have a partner.

She followed the steps anyway, her feet in trainers so any hard twirl she attempted ultimately failed. She tried to imagine James there with her but ultimately she was dancing with air so after a while of holding her hands to an invisible person and attempting to hold herself up she gave up.

She restarted the music and tried again, leaving James behind her.

Overall it was just like dancing in the kitchen with Mary, or during a lone warm-up in an empty classroom.

When Lily was little her mother had walked in on her struggling to do a plie to a recording of Claire De Lune on her busted-up radio. She had cried out of embarrassment and frustration and her mom had held her and soothed her while Lily calmed to the smell of her lavender perfume. The next day her mum signed her up for ballet classes and that was the beginning of the end for her.

The track ended, fading into the next song on the track list. Lily stood on the stage for a bit before kneeling to turn off the music sounding from her phone, when she heard someone clapping from inside the theater. She jumped and moved quickly to pack her bag when a familiar stuck-up voice sounded throughout the theater.

“ Don’t mind me. Just passing through.” The voice said.

Sirius Black stood in between the middle rows of the audience, his hair was up and his light eyes had a sort of a sad tilt to them. She glared at him from her higher position on the stage.

“ What are you doing here?”

” No need to get defensive.” He grinned like a child and Lily wanted to punch him.

” I was just gonna use the piano.” He tilted his head to the grand piano that sat at the side of the stage. “ Helps me think. I’m guessing you're here for a similar reason?”

Lily kept her gaze firm. “ I’m not interested in talking to you Black.”

“ Alright.” He turned to leave.

“-we’ve been tip-toeing a line ever since secondary, something happened and ever since then, something changed. He acted differently around me, and I could never place why, nobody ever noticed anything when I asked.”

“ Hey, wait,” Lily said.

“ I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“ Shut up.” She exhaled from her nose. “ I just have one question.”

“ Shoot,” Sirius said. He was less hostile, Lily thought. Seemed like everybody was acting weird lately.

“ Why did you spike Sev, back at school.”

“ Oh.” He said promptly, he then pursed his lips like he was solving some kind of math problem. Lily scowled at how much this didn’t seem to bother him, in contrast, Lily’s stomach was in a constant stream of drought and hurt.

“ I was…kind of…” He made weird, meaningless hand movements “- Flailing in a way.”

“ Flailing.”

“ Yeah.” He said matter of factly. “ I was kind of out of control, I felt worthless and like a waste of space. I had just gotten out of a situation that I had put up with for years all because I had thought that I didn’t deserve better. And I think a part of me still believed it.”

He chuckled “ I mean hell I still believe it now.”

“ The thing is Evans-“ He starts.

“ I’ve never truly separated myself from my parents. They were wicked people, the only reason I was able to get out was because they didn’t see worth in putting up with me anymore. Tired indifference to their oldest son running away from home I would say.” He grins and Lily thinks she hasn’t met a more unusual person.

I might not be in that house anymore but hell does it still feel like.”

“ It’s like every decision I make has to prove in some way that I’m not the way they tried to raise me.”

His next words were soft and sad, and Lily’s heart partly sank.

“ The only thing that ever came easy to me was love and hell if I’ve fucked that up.”

“ So yeah.” He shrugged. “ Did that answer your question?”

“ I mean I could’ve gone without the sob story but I guess you kind of answered it.” Lily says and Sirius snorts, but it kind of sounds more deprecating if anything.

I don’t remember him always being this pathetic. Lily thinks while looking at the little man over again.

She then is reminded of Remus’s shaky voice through the phone as he tries to disassemble his relationship with the man standing in front of her.

” I think you're a terrible person.” Lily says, Sirius just lets out a short breath of laughter.

“ That's fine.” He says.

” I mean, that’s what every day is for right?” He twirls around on his heel to walk out of the theater.

“ That's it?” Lily calls after him.

“ What?”

“ You're not going to tell me to forgive James? You're just gonna leave?”

“ I don’t need to tell you anything. It’s your decision, forgive him or not you're still gonna act on Friday, so I’m happy.”

“ How do you know that? I could just not show up.”

He smiles, a cold shivering sort of thing. “ I just do.” He says.

He left Lily in the theater then, standing in a pool of her own emotions on that stage.

At the end of the first act after Moonlight, the two characters share a kiss. It's a moment of great triumph, they both create a space in the middle of time where they can both be themselves and love.

In rehearsals James would make a face before the kiss, Lily laughing in his face before he could even lean in.

When they did have to take the scene seriously after a lecture from Remus, James kept a grip on her back, interlacing his fingers to dip her slightly. When they pulled away Lily had to keep herself from smiling, she had never felt more warm than with James’s arms wrapped around her waist.

“ I think you're great Lily.” He said back in the cafe.

Lily was so fucked.

: End of Act One:

Chapter Text

The room was cramped, sterile, and smelled like some old hag’s ashes. There was Black everywhere, both figuratively and literally.

The Black’s Christmas charity ball was an annual tradition in which every stuffy white person was invited to sit in one room and drink champagne and pretend to be cordial to each other. It's put on as some sort of fundraiser for something, whether it be dying puppies or starving children, he doubted the money was going there and not into the organizer’s pockets. To put simply, it absolutely blows. Sirius couldn’t think of a lamer thing than watching his mum suck up to some old guy with wooden dentures as he had to stand up straight and avoid her glare all night.

And the room really did smell bad, like a cold sort of smell, like you were in a fridge without the temperature. The tie his mum had put him in was making it hard to breathe, he wanted this whole thing to be over and he couldn’t find his brother. Sirius had lost sight of his little brother about an hour ago when it started raining hard, the thunder banging against the window, rattling the glasses lined up on every table.

He was starting to get worried, if he didn’t find him soon, then his parents would start to catch on and that wouldn’t be good.

“ Who are you looking for bud?” A pleasant voice came from beside him.

His cousin Andromeda was standing next to him, lips pursed like they did every time she talked to him. Her long hair was wavy and falling around her shoulders, her dress was a dark purple and surprisingly she was wearing a lot more eyeliner than he would think her mum would let her out of the house in. Sirius liked Andy, she would help him sneak out of gatherings like this to teach him the guitar. But not this time because this time he had a more important task to solve.

“ I can’t find Regulus anywhere.” He said. Andy kneeled, wobbling a bit since she was wearing heels.

“ I’m sure he’s somewhere.” She tilted her head a bit to the side. “ He’s not with your parents?”

Sirius shook his head.

“ Huh. Well, I’m sure he’s fine.” She patted him on the shoulder. “ You want me to teach you those super hard cords?” She gestured to the door that led to the hallway, and she whispered so nobody would hear her. She really was cool.

“ I can’t.” He said, although sadly. He must've been pouting because Andromeda smiled at him with sympathy.

“ Hey it's ok buddy, I can just teach them to you later.”

“ But I’m going to school next week.” Sirius pouts, his voice a bit watery now. “ I don’t want to have to stop playing.”

“ Just because you're at school doesn't mean you have to stop playing,” Andy says.

“ But who’s gonna teach me?” He sniffed.

“ I can send you some books through the post and hey,” She used her hand to direct Sirius’s face back towards her, her smile was so warm, which Sirius found weird since her mum was probably the meanest woman he knew, of course right after his own.

“- when you get old enough I can lend you my guitar.” She says grinning.

“ Really?!”

Andy laughs. “ Really.”

Someone yells across the room and Andromeda shoots up quickly, her posture quickly changing, she turns to leave and then smiles at Sirius, patting him once again on the shoulder.

“ Music stops for none Sirius, remember that.”

Sirius nods and salutes her like a soldier, making the girl laugh again. She waves and runs off to where her sister is calling for her across the hall.

He was alone again and he still hadn’t found his brother. He goes around looking under each tablecloth, the noise of the thunder looming behind him. After a while something more overpowering than the thunder stops him in his tracks.

“ Regulus Black!” His mother was standing firmly, wine glass in hand. As she yelled she put the now empty glass on the table and grabbed another one.

Oh no. Sirius thinks and then he dives under the closest table. All the light is dimmed and it takes his eyes a bit to adjust. He can hear his mum talking frantically to his dad and stomping around, sometimes when Sirius is really scared, her footsteps make her sound like she’s some kind of giant. He sat on the floor for a bit, catching his breath because surprisingly diving under a table like that took stamina, when he heard short stunted sniffles from a distance.

Sirius looked over to where the sound was coming from and saw a little boy, a bit younger than him, wearing similar dress and crying into his knees tucked into his stomach. Sirius shuffled over on his hands and feet, no doubt getting his clothes dirty, and reached out to him, making the boy wave his hands around almost smacking Sirius in the face.

“ Reg! Reg it's me!” Sirius covered his face. “ Stop!”

“ Oh.” Regulus calmed down, sniffing slightly, his eyes were big and glassy. He looks at Sirius and then promptly digs his head to his knees, sobbing silently. Sirius puts his arm around the boy’s shoulder, gently cradling him while humming words of reassurance. Which seemed to be working until another crackle of thunder would boom outside making Regulus cry again. Sirius kept humming, wondering when the stupid party would be over so he could find some way to sneak out. Which they would have to do since their father was probably off with his secretary and their mum was too drunk to function.

“ I hate thunder,” Regulus said smally, Sirius just hummed affirmatively.

“ I know Reg.”

Sirius was used to his role of big brother by now, it, of course, took a while to get comfortable with, lord knows he wasn’t good at it at the beginning. But he never really got time to practice, he just had to find a closet and hide with his brother until his parents stopped yelling, they were both incapacitated, or gone.

So it wasn't that hard.

There was another yell that came from their mother in the other dimension that was outside the tablecloths, Regulus flinched and Sirius pulled him closer. At some point, the yelling continued to include Sirius’s name as well, and his mum was just getting louder, which Sirius guessed was because the party was ending. Their mother would never act this way in front of loads of people. Sirius was glad that the party was almost over, his arm was kind of getting tired and he kind of just wanted to put his brother to bed and go and read in his room. But that also depended on if the storm stopped soon, Reg would never be able to sleep with that much thunder outside.

“ Don’t go tell Mum that I’m here,” Reg murmured in response to their mother rapidly yelling Sirius’s name.

“ I’m not going anywhere,” Sirius said quietly and Regulus just sniffed again. His eyes were getting a bit droopy now, it was past their bedtime but usually at parties their parents had an au pair come put them to bed, but Sirius guessed that she couldn’t find them either. Sirius was fully prepared for having to haul Reg over his shoulder to get him to his room.

“ You're leaving though,” Regulus said quietly.

“ Just for school,” Sirius bumped softly with his shoulder, “and then I’ll be back.”

Despite this assurance, Regulus just frowned.

“ I have to come back anyway. Andy said she would give me her guitar.” Sirius said. “ Maybe when I get good enough I can teach you and then we can start a band!” He whispered shouted, bumping Reg continuously with his shoulder.

“ I don’t want to be in a band,” Regulus said, still as a statue, still crying.

“Then you're lame.”

Regulus pushed him.

“ Hey!” Sirius yelled.

“ You're a bad brother,” Reg said, more dry this time. Sirius pushed him back then wrapped an arm around his shoulders, noogying his hair aggressively. They stayed underneath the table for about another hour, their mother’s screams subsiding and Regulus falling asleep on his shoulder as the thunder continued outside the manor.

***

If his little brother was the lamest person alive then Sirius’s roommate was probably lame but in a whole new way that Sirius couldn’t even comprehend.

“ Why doesn’t he fight back? This is getting embarrassing.” Sirius said in front of his breakfast. They were at the mess hall at school, Sirius sitting across from James, (his new best friend that he just met a couple of months ago), trying to eat as Slytherin kids made obnoxious noises from across the hall. The noises and teasing were directed towards Sirius’s other roommate, who sat a way down at the table, eating only an apple for breakfast and reading a book, ignoring any noise coming his way. The Slytherin kids, including the kid with greasy black hair, that he and James had decided to hate just due to the principal that he was gross looking, had now started coughing obnoxiously into their hands, all of them looking pointedly at Sirius’s roommate. He was not perturbed, just continued reading his nerdy book with words on the front that Sirius didn’t understand.

James, who didn’t seem to be paying attention to the same things Sirius was, lifted his head from his porridge to across the hall at the commotion. “ Maybe he’s waiting for a teacher?”

“ There is no teacher,” Sirius said, James just shrugged and went back to his porridge.

When Sirius had started school he was excited to get out of his house and away from his weepy brother and unstable parents. He was made optimistic when he met James who was possibly the coolest person he had ever met, and then late into the school day, Remus Lupin stumbled into their room all gangly and weird.

First of all, the kid didn’t talk. James had attempted to make friendly conversation upon his entrance but all the kid did was shake his head and mumble. He had easily gotten along with both Potter and Pettigrew fine, but Lupin just left before anyone could talk to him. He certainly looked cool, Sirius thought. He’s huge in stature and has a big scar on his face that makes him look like some kind of main character from an action movie. Due to his insistence to ignore all confrontation though, Sirius was quickly disappointed.

He was always reading, always looking at his feet, and never talking. It was weird that none of the teachers seemed to call on him, and they always looked at him with the type of look that you would give a weeping puppy.

And he was always bloody disappearing .

God knows why, James and Peter had given up wondering where he went, but Sirius kept thinking about it whenever he saw Lupin’s bed empty at the end of the day.

“ Why do they keep doing that?” Sirius wondered, he hadn’t touched his food in a while. James looked up again to look at the kids continually fake coughing into their fists and cackling.

“ Maybe he’s sick or something,” James says. At this time Lupin promptly closed his book with a SLAM and got up from where he was sitting at the table. Sirius watched him as he walked past their table, ignoring the kids making fun of him to throwing his apple core in the trash.

“ Sick huh,” Sirius murmured as he watched Lupin walk out of the hall, book still in hand.

Peter had made it to the mess hall sometime later, being that he slept in and no amount of inference from James and Sirius had him up. They both snickered as the boy scarfed down his food and they headed for their first class of the day.

Slughorn was rambling about something Sirius deemed unimportant, and then after a while of dragging white chalk across a blackboard, he rolled a small TV on a cart into the classroom. Shutting off the lights and instructing the class to be quiet and focus their attention on the screen.

Sirius had been sketching guitars on notebook paper, James drawing little footballs on the side until it dissolved into an intricate game of James drawing something and then Sirius racing to scribble it out as fast as he could. It was fun, and Slughorn wracked both of their heads with a newspaper for being too loud, so it ceased from that point. Also, it seemed like James had preferred snoozing on the desk than playing any more games with him, which was disappointing, to say the least.

Sirius looked down at his paper and frowned while the science video played around them. He had written to Andy last week asking for the guitar books but he hadn’t gotten a response yet, he was bored with the Piano, which was the only instrument he knew how to play. His mum had made him take lessons when he was home, so while he was at school he didn’t really want to play piano and having to think of his mum, even if there was a piano located in the music room, which he checked yesterday. Even if he went to avoid piano he couldn’t for much longer, his mum had mentioned making him join the choir at some point so most likely he would end up there, singing on a stage, Sirius groaned inwardly at the thought.

He directed his attention beside him across the aisle to another row of desks when he heard familiar Slytherin snickering. Two of the kids that Sirius had seen in the lunchroom were laughing while sticking together a ball of paper with spit and notebook paper. Sirius noted with frustration that one of the kids was the greasy one that he and James hated. And then with even more frustration Sirius looked to where the kids were peering while preparing for their prank and saw Lupin sitting in front of them at another desk, watching the video on the screen earnestly and taking notes. Peter was next to him, watching the video but somehow his mouth was tilted slightly open, like he was sleeping with his eyes closed.

The snickers from the children behind were fairly loud, but Slughorn was at his desk across his classroom so he clearly couldn't hear them. Lupin certainly could hear him but Sirius guessed that he was resolving to his tried and true method of just sitting back like some kind of pussy.

Sirius watched as the boys finished their wad loaded it into a straw and pointed it toward the back of Lupin’s head.

Somehow, Sirius found himself on his feet, and before the boy could shoot the bullet at Lupin’s head he snatched the straw from the boy’s hand.

” Quit it!” Sirius yelled, way too loud for the quiet classroom before this. Everyone shifted at the same time in their seats, looking to the back of the classroom where Sirius stood.

“ What’s your problem?!” The boy with the straw asked back, spitting in Sirius’s face.

“ You're my problem!” Sirius yelled from where he stood in the aisle. “ Why don’t you pick on someone who at least has the nerve to fight back!”

“ Mr. Black that's enough!” Slughorn had made it back across the room, putting himself between Sirius and the boy, who had now stood up in his chair. The greasy kid just sat there glaring at Sirius through his ugly eyes and ugly face.

“ Detention for both of you!”

“ But sir! He started it!” The kid was now saying.

“ That's not true! He was gonna spit that thing at Lupin’s head! I saw it!” James was back at Sirius’s side, seemingly woken from his nap a while ago.

“ It doesn’t matter who started it! You both interrupted class so you are both punished!” Slughorn said, and the boy at the desk glared at Sirius now.

He murmured something under his breath, but just loud enough for Sirius to hear. “ Ninny.” He grumbled and like it was some sort of challenge, Sirius felt his blood boiling and his arm was swinging before he could even stop it.

Minutes later Sirius was in their headmaster’s office.

“ I’ll let you know that we take acts of aggression like this very seriously at Hogwarts Sirius.” Dumbledore sat at his big desk in front of a big window, next to a winding bookcase. Sirius just hummed in response, and Dumbledore sighed.

“ Being that it’s your first year here we will let this slide, and let your parents handle your punishment.” He said. “ Don’t make me see you in here again Sirius.” He said softly, but Sirius had stopped listening when the old bat mentioned his parents.

Sirius’s mum was going to kill him.

Sirius’s mum was going to kill him and it was all because he decided to get up and defend some sick kid. Sirius felt his stomach lurch, he felt like he was going to throw up as he walked out of the headmaster’s office. He perked up a bit though when he saw James waiting outside, he grinned and propped those stupid glasses of his up on his nose as he saw Sirius walk out.

“ That was so awesome! You should've seen Mulciber’s face as all that blood came out of his nose!” He bumped Sirius with his elbow as they walked down the hallway, “ It was so gross!” He laughed and Sirius felt himself get a little bit lighter, at least James thought he was cool.

Sirius was laughing as James was acting out the blood coming from Mulciber’s nose, he took two hands and splayed them from his nose, making a loud sound as he did it. Sirius laughed as James played in front of him, and then stopped laughing as James suddenly stopped and made Sirius bump into him. James was looking at something in front of them and Sirius tilted his head to get a clue to what he was so surprised by.

In front of them, standing with both fists clenched at his sides and his brow furrowed like he was angry was Remus Lupin.

Expecting a thank you from the boy that he was sent to the headmaster’s office for saving, Sirius grinned.

“ Hey-“

“ I didn’t ask you to stand up for me,” Lupin said, his face slightly red and Sirius realized that this was the first time he had heard the kid talk. His voice sounded weird, smooth, and not…british.

“ Well…” Sirius was at a loss for words at the nerve of this guy, he held his arms out and shrugged, “ I did.”

This only seemed to make Lupin more angry as his face just got darker. “ What you did was stupid.” He said, pronouncing his every word perfectly like he was some kind of grownup.

Sirius froze, astonished that he was being lectured again instead of giving gratitude, he looked to James who seemed to share the same sentiment as he stood next to Sirius wide-eyed.

“ What you did was stupid and you should be ashamed of yourself.” Lupin then said, which slapped Sirius out of his frozen state, because there was no way he was being talked to by someone who wasn’t a teacher.

“ What is wrong with you?!” He yelled and Lupin’s face stayed firm with anger. “ You should be thanking me!”

“ Well, I’m not! Because like I said, I didn’t ask you!”

“ Well, maybe you should have!” Sirius spat back.

“ What?!”

“ Those kids, they bully you all day long, and what do you do? Nothing!” Sirius was now waving his arms around, Lupin was inches taller than him, so he had to get an advantage somehow, so he raised his voice too. “ What is that going to do!?”

” I can handle my own problems!” Lupin yelled back, he raised a hand and pointed it toward Sirius’s chest, “And I certainly don’t need help from stupid tossers like you!”

He then turned around and stomped back down the hallway leaving Sirius stunned and red-faced.

The next day Sirius was determined to get his revenge on Lupin for yelling at him. There was a period when their dorm was empty, James outside watching the football practice and Peter with him, Lupin usually being gone for mysterious reasons. Sirius planned to look through his things, to find something truly embarrassing to make him sorry. He didn’t exactly know what, but he figured that the problem would solve itself once he got looking.

He arrived at the dorm around the time he planned and was glad to see that he was right and the room was empty. He started by opening Lupin’s trunk, bending over and sifting through, and being mostly disappointed as it just contained a bunch of sweaters and books. As he rummaged and was about to give up he spotted a peculiar item, he had just assumed it was another book at first but upon further investigation, there was no title on the front. He opened it up and was delighted to see that it was some kind of journal, as there was line paper inside instead of pages with words. Sirius grinned at his find and sat on Lupin’s bed to snoop through the pages.

He expected some kind of girly “Dear Diary” stuff but instead, he was hit with weird blocks of text. Some were just descriptions of objects that Sirius had seen around the castle, and some were lines of text formed in interesting ways that Sirius didn’t recognize. He flipped to another one on a page and started reading, even though it was hard since the boy’s handwriting looked like he was writing with his less dominant hand.

Tomorrow a wolf comes to take me away
She comes in the middle of the night
When your eyes rest
and the sun sleeps

I see her in my dreams
Talking to the moon like a close friend

Tomorrow a wolf comes to take me away
It will be day tomorrow

Well, that was creepy, Sirius thinks and then a shiver goes up his spine. He keeps looking through the pages, reading everything. He finds himself getting lost in the words, his fingers coming to smooth over the words on each page. He imagines his roommate writing, with the scar that runs across his face and his sandy hair. Sirius thinks back to something Andy told him during one of their lessons.

“ Oh, those are the lyrics.” She had said. She points to the words that Sirius was gesturing to on the sheet music. “ You probably can’t read yet can you?” She smirks.

“ I can too!” Sirius protests, just making Andy laugh harder as she tunes her acoustic guitar.

” What do they say then?” She asks. Sirius glares at her and then turns his attention toward the book squinting at the words on the page.

“ Something about…stars?” He says.

Andy snorts. “ Of course, that's the word you recognize.” Andy rests her guitar in her lap, leaning over and reading the book in front of her. “ Bowie was a real genius.” She says wistfully.

Later on, when Sirius was able to read better Andy taught him more about the ins and outs of lyrics, and Sirius loved every minute of it. He looked down at the journal on his lap, that's what the words reminded him of, lyrics.

Maybe Lupin was cooler than he thought.

“ What are you doing?!”

Sirius froze from where he was sitting on the bed across the room, Lupin standing at the entrance of the room. He then swiftly walked over to where Sirius was still sitting unable to move and snatched the journal from his hands.

“ Hey!” Sirius found himself saying.

“ Don’t touch that! It’s private!” Lupin said, his face slightly red with embarrassment. He stood by the bed, waiting for Sirius’s response, eyebrows raised.

“ How did you get so good at writing lyrics?” Sirius looked at the journal in Lupin’s hands, Lupin scrunched his face in confusion.

“They're not lyrics, they're poems.” He said, Sirius frowned.

“ It would be cooler if they were,” Sirius said,

“ Well, they're not.”

“ You could make them into lyrics pretty easily.”

“ What? “

“ Here lemme show you.” He grabbed the journal back, making Lupin flinch in the process. He then flipped open the journal to the poem he was reading earlier and cocked his head to the space next to him on the bed. Wordlessly, Lupin sat next to him and gave him a strange look.

” My cousin is teaching me guitar.” He says as Lupin continues to look at him like some exhibit at a zoo. “ She says that if you write lyrics visual enough, the music comes to you naturally.”

“ Like…? In your mind?”

“ Yeah. Here, close your eyes.” Sirius closed his eyes. He waited for a second, leaving a hand on Lupin’s shoulder. “ Can you hear it?”

“ No.”

Sirius huffed and opened his eyes to Lupin staring at him.

“ If you're going to write all this girly stuff you might as well use it for something,” Sirius said, waving the journal around.

“ It's not girly.”

” It is.”

“ ‘Cause you're the one who can decide what's girly and not.”

“ Of course. I don’t see you punching anyone.”

Lupin snorted, it surprised Sirius, making his heart jump in his chest. “ That was pretty cool.” He said quietly.

“ It was, wasn't it?!” Sirius grinned and Lupin awarded him with a small smile. It stretched the scar across his face a bit, and upon looking more closely Sirius noticed that he had a scatter of freckles across his face.

His face was not too bad to look at, he could sit here looking at it for ages.

” I think you're a terrible person Black.” Lupin said, still giving Sirius that lovely smile.

“ That's fine.” Sirius shrugged, Lupin laughed again and Sirius felt like he was almost floating.

That's probably when he started falling, falling into the inevitable hole that was Remus Lupin.

***

“ So? What’s the plan?”

They were sitting on the floor of James’s house’s living room watching Say Anything. It was way past their bedtime and Sirius could almost see the fireflies fly by the window leading to the Potters’ garden.

It has been approximately 2 months and 3 days since he had fucked everything up.

The movie was stupid, Sirius felt stupid, everything was stupid and Sirius hated everything.

“ What are you blabbering about? “ Sirius said, taking in a handful of popcorn as he said it.

“ You know,” James nudged him, grinning like he did whenever he came up with something that ended with them putting some sort of food in Snape’s greasy hair, “ Your plan for winning back Moony.”

Sirius jumped so fast that he knocked the popcorn to the ground, the kernels spreading all over the ground. Sirius had to tell himself not to wince and cry once he looked at the mess in front of him.

“ You arse! Look at what you made me do!”

“ Well? “

“ Well, what? “ Sirius spat back.

“ What’s the plan?”

“ There is no plan!” He yelled in a whisper, he didn’t want to wake Effie and Monty up. “ I bollocked everything up, Moony hates me and I’ll die alone with my 10 dogs and piles of money at 25 from a horrific motorcycle accident.”

“ Sirius, you didn’t even try.”

“ I did! I told him I was sorry every day!” Sirius tried to keep tears in as he moved to pick up the spilled kernels back into the bowl. “ Everyone’s right about me. I’m a Black all the way down to my core.” His pubescent voice cracked but he didn’t care much, he just focused on not looking at the sympathy that was spreading across his best friend’s face.

“ Sirius. “ James says silently.

“ I've accepted that my life’s ruined a long time ago, what’s the point of anything if I can’t even have Moony feed the dogs while I go play shows.”

“ Remus wouldn’t be going to your shows?”

“ Loud noises give him migraines.” Sirius just mumbled into where his knees were tucked into his chest. “ I’d just do it over again once I get home.”

“ Like a private concert?”

“Yeah. “

“ Aren’t you a generous lover.”

Sirius let out a sob into his knees, James comforted him by patting him on the back.

“ I’m never gonna be able to be a lover!” He cried.

“ Listen Pads,” James said, Sirius raised his face slightly, “What I meant by you didn’t try is that, you always said your apologies but did you show it?”

“ Show it? “ He said and James grinned. There was a stain on Sirius’s pants where the black kohl on his eyes had been smudged.

“ A grand gesture maybe.” James nudged his head to the TV where John Cusack was holding a boombox on top of a car.

Sirius came out to James around the start of the 4th and then told him that he was in love with Remus around the start of the 5th. Which he would never regret in hindsight, but that didn’t mean that there were times when he didn’t regret it. James was his best friend, and best friends watch each other backs, which meant that James had been determined to wingman him in every embarrassing way possible. This could’ve been fixable if Remus was some random boy from some other house and not their best friend who they spent all their time with.

Safe to say that Sirius had to hold James back a lot from concocting sappy and rom-comy scenes to get the two together.

But Sirius had severely fucked up, so he could probably use any advice he could get.

When Sirius had his first choir concert he had very non-attractively thought he was going to hurl in one of their public and very nasty school toilets. Sirius actually thought he was going to die because if he wasn’t going to throw up then, then he was going to do it on stage and he was pretty sure that a Black throwing up on his mum in the front row was something that did not go down well in family history.

He sat there, in the public toilet stall, basically making his will in his head when Remus had walked in wearing a wool sweater and collared shirt like always, but he was also wearing a tie, much to Sirius’s surprise.

“ Are you here to watch me die?” He had grumbled, head resting on the toilet seat, Remus scrunched his nose at this. Sirius smiled at his expression while the boy lifted him carefully from the seat and used both hands to steady him on the opposite wall of the stall. He sat down on the floor on the other side and handed Sirius a water bottle.

“ You're not gonna die, you haven’t gotten that motorcycle yet.”

Sirius grinned “ Ah right, then you get a bigger check when I grow older and die rich. “

“ You putting me on your will Pads?”

“ Of course I am, why wouldn’t I?”

“ I dunno.” Remus shrugged and Sirius wanted to smooth out the space between his eyebrows that was furrowing.

“ Thought it would be reserved for family.”

“ Well, I don’t wanna give them anything. My money deserves to go to my gold-digging friends.” He promptly said, earning a snort from Remus which made his cheeks and heart warm.

They sat in comfortable silence, their legs weaved together on the stall floor. Remus let his head lay back on the stall wall and Sirius couldn’t keep his eyes off of the gash he had on the side of his cheek, right by his chin. It looked so pretty, all silvery contrasting the warmness of the boy’s skin.

“Are you ready to go back out?” Remus said after a bit.

“ Nuh uh, not going.” Sirius shook his head and then had to stop when he felt a gag rising in his chest.

“ What? Sirius. “

“ I can’t do it.”

“ Oh come on, you sing in front of people all the time. “

“ Yeah, but that’s not in front of them. “ He said, interlocking eyes with Remus.

“ Then don’t look at them,” Remus said and the earnestness of his voice made Sirius’s heart beat fast in his chest. “ I'll sit in the back row and you can just look at me the whole time,” He said, and then smiled a smile that would probably melt butter if he wanted it to.

“ Ok. “ Sirius had said before Remus hauled him off the bathroom floor to the stage.

Remus told Sirius to look at him, and he did. But honestly, Sirius didn’t need to be told to look, he would’ve done it anyway. Remus sat with Pete and James in a far corner, smiling a smile that reached his eyes. Whenever he made eye contact with Sirius he swore that he could see the kid’s smile grow but that might’ve been wishful thinking.

That smile got him through that night, Sirius missed it.

Sirius never got that secret smile anymore, all he got was a cold look of disappointment, disdain, and sadness; making Sirius want to rip his hair out and give it to Moony on a silver platter. Which he wouldn’t even like, Remus would just get mad at him for hurting himself.

Sirius watched as the music blared from Cusack’s boombox and he looked back to James with a small smile.

“ You have a boombox? “

***

Sirius had a plan.

It started when Sirius sat there after that party, on the window sill of his bedroom, looking into Moony’s eyes.

“ I’ll be fine, you're still going to be stuck with me, I’m not going anywhere.” He had said. Some of the happiest moments of Sirius’s life had been while he was in love with Remus. Being in love with Remus was like a warm blanket. Despite the heartache of never being able to tell the man, it often brought him joy. The freckles on his nose and the sweetness of his smile made Sirius all warm, like he was back in the common room of Hogwarts, lying out in front of the fire.

They were about to graduate and Sirius realized at that moment sitting across from someone he loved, who believed that he was going to die soon, that he couldn’t continue in life lying to himself and telling himself that he was content with how their relationship was.

“ You're not gonna be young and hot forever!” James had said one day when Sirius had been on the floor, wallowing in self-pity after Peter had set Remus up with some girl from his job. “ Love waits for no one, Padfoot!”

Later on that night, Remus had come home, hanging his corduroy jacket by the door silently, his face contemplative.

“ How’d it go?” Sirius had sat himself on the couch after that talk with James. He told himself that he would deem how the date went from Remus’s face, sometimes when Remus got more thoughtful his eyes would fog up and get darker, Sirius tried to look at his eyes from where he was sitting on the couch but he couldn’t see due to his proximity.

Remus mumbled something as a response.

“ What?” Sirius said with a grin, Remus’s face was reddening. “ You're going to have to speak up Moonbeam. I'm partly deaf in one ear, you see.”

Remus just got redder, Sirius smiled, it was really hard not to find him endearing.

“ Peter hadn’t told me that it was supposed to be a date.”

Sirius had burst out laughing then and there.

Moony wouldn’t be going anywhere if Sirius had anything to say about it.

So Sirius concocted a plan, he would just make Remus realize his worth through a sort of subliminal messaging. He told himself that if he ever told Remus straight up that he loved him the man would probably freak out and probably go bury himself underground or something. So Sirius would just ease him in it, which seemed easy enough. He somehow ended up in a situation where he was expressing his feelings constantly indirectly through the language of the musical, so he told himself that if he just took it slow then he would have Remus basically falling into his arms by the end.

But Sirius had always been arse at taking things slow.

“ Don’t take the job. Stay here. Stay here with me.”

“ I love you.”

His plan had failed.

“ I mean I love you too Pads, I love you and James and-“

“ You know that's not what I meant,” Sirius said.

They sat in another ‘bout of silence.

Remus stood there, frozen, eyes wide and beautiful. Sirius had just wanted to scream at him to speak. There were crickets nearby, making the only noise throughout the yard.

“ Remus say something.”

“ I- I don’t know what to say.”

“ Well, what are you thinking?” Sirius says he digs his boot into some nearby snow. Remus presses his mouth into a firm line, his eyes are stormy, cheeks red because of the cold, or maybe because of something else, Sirius didn’t want to get his hopes up.

“ I’m thinking…” Remus says in the next moment, he’s purposely not looking at Sirius at this point. “ I’m thinking that you don’t exactly know what you're saying.”

“ …What?”

Remus had always been smarter than him, Sirius knew that, and Sirius liked that about him. But something Remus tended to do was tell him how he felt, like Sirius was uncertain about the words he said. But he never was, he was aware of the decisions he made.

“ I’m not speaking out of my arse Moony, I really do love-“

” Sirius. “ His voice was stern now, he was trying to give Sirius an out.

“ Remus, I want you to stay.” Sirius stood his ground. “ I want you to stay with me because I love you, and know that I mean it when I say it.”

Remus stood there, tall, wearing that stupid old corduroy jacket, wearing an expression that Sirius hadn’t ever seen before in the decade of knowing him.

“ Sirius, I-“ He looked at him and at that moment Sirius was sure that his heart had died.

” I can’t do this.”

And then he left.

Remus left for Wales that next morning, apparently because of some “family problem”, according to Effie. Which of course was bullshit.

James of course knew what was up, but they decided to cover up anything till after they got home. Which was hard when Sirius opened up a gift from Remus on Christmas day and saw the ugliest hat he’d ever seen.

Sirius hated that man so much.

Once they got back Sirius locked himself in his room, fully willing to drown his sorrows in loud music and cigarettes.

It’s over, It’s over!
This haunting, it’s over!
They cut my wrists, and watch me bleed~!

It was like he was catapulted all the way to the start of his life at Hogwarts, sneering at the tall kid in his dorm.

The plan was never going to work, because if Remus didn’t even trust him with the information that he was going to leave London eventually then maybe he didn’t mean that much to him in the first place.

Sirius would have to admit eventually that he existed in a sort of plane of infinite Peter Pandum, but even he could recognize that he wouldn’t be able to make this musical forever. His initial idea was more something to delay the inevitable, something to give him time and a tool for his eventual confession.

Maybe he was just as stupid as everyone thought he was, maybe the whimsy of James’s thoughts back in school had infected him somehow. Because that stuff usually worked for James, he had big eyes and an infectious personality that even made the she-devil that was Lily Evans fall for him eventually. All Sirius had was great hair and tons of baggage, he wasn’t nearly as good-hearted as James, and he was stupid for even thinking that he could pull it off in the first place. Cause really what was the point of all Sirius’s dedication if Moony was just planning on packing his bags and leaving them all behind anyway?

and over, and over!
They cut my wrists and watch me bleed~!
They stop haunting me!

“ God open a window or something!” James yelled as he came in and took the needle off the blasting loud record. He then obnoxiously coughed and went to haul the window sill on Sirius’s window open.

Sirius had been using a cup of tea as an ashtray, he hadn’t even realized he had been smoking with the window closed. James stood over his bed, an apron tied to his front, hands on hips. “ Are you going to mope in here your whole life or tell me what happened?”

He grumbled, but eventually, James pulled him out of bed and out into the street. They sat in a park near their flat, a big fountain in the middle. Surprisingly there wasn’t much snow, but it was still pretty empty because of the cold. Sirius watched two kids run to a crowd of birds, scaring them all at once, flying into the air. It made him think of Regulus, which was weird since his brother hadn’t even bothered to call him in probably years now.

“So?” James had walked back with two coffees in his hands. He handed one to Sirius and looked at him expectantly, a red scarf sitting around his neck.

“ I had this whole plan…that if I…” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “ That if I showed him how great this whole, “ He waved around his hand, James looked at him with one eyebrow raised, “ this whole thing was, then he would keep doing it… with me.” He stumbled and looked at the ground slightly embarrassed.

It felt stupid now that Sirius was saying it out loud.

“ You wanted to recruit Moony to the penniless life of being an artist,” James said bluntly, a slight smirk on his face.

“ Yeah! But also it's not like I was trying to do it selfishly.” Sirius said back, James nodded.

” Of course not.” James said, looking in front of the fountain in front of them. “ So what happened?”

” In the garden… I lost it a little bit.” He said, James snorted.

“ My mind was running a million thoughts per minute, so I kind of just told him the truth.”

” Being…?”

Sirius gave James a look and then groaned loudly. He and James at this point were masters at reading each other's facial expressions, so it didn’t take him too long to catch on to what Sirius was trying not to say. His eyes opened wide suddenly as he realized.

“ Don’t tell me you-?”

” Yep.”

“ And what? You told him not to take the job?”

“ I told him not to take the job.” He said every word heavily and groaned again as James let out a breathless laugh.

” And he left immediately after.” James said.

“ Yeah,” Sirius responded.

” Did he say anything after you said it?”

“ He said that he couldn’t do this, whatever this is,” Sirius said and James just stared out in front of him.

“ To be honest I’m not surprised.” He said.

“ You're not surprised that I got rejected?” Sirius said defensively.

” You don’t know that yet.” James said back.

“ Pretty sure I do! Don’t know what else “ I can’t do this” could mean!” Sirius was yelling now, but really he couldn’t imagine how you would be able to get any positive interpretation of his situation. The way Remus’s mouth tilted, it was like he was looking at a burning building.

“ It could mean a lot of different things actually.”

Sirius groaned again.

” I mean, it wasn’t a bad plan…” James continued.

“ It doesn’t matter, it would have failed anyway because no matter what he still wasn’t telling me about bloody Hogwarts.”

” And what does that mean exactly..?” James always did this, instead of asking him direct questions he kind of just goaded him through until he just admitted what he was thinking. He thought that Sirius hadn’t seen through it by now, but he had. It didn’t mean that James ever failed at getting him to spill his guts out though.

” It means-!” Sirius stood up from the bench they were sitting on, “ That he was always going to leave! Leave us! Leave me!”

“ I just don’t understand how you all knew that and were ok with it!”

Jame just shrugged. “ Because I thought it was what he wanted.”

” Don’t you think?” James said.

“ I thought he was dedicated to his writing.”

“ You thought he was dedicated to you,” James said back snarkily, Sirius just huffed in response.

“ You can’t really convince a bloke to leave his whole life behind for you. He has to make that decision himself.”

” So what am I supposed to do? Just wait around? What if he never comes back?”

“ He’ll come back.” James snorts like this is funny and not ruining Sirius’s life. ” You just need to know what to say when he does.”

“ Funny.” Sirius began walking back to the flat, James following behind him. He got in front and splayed his arms out, preventing Sirius from walking any further.

” You like to convince yourself that your some emotionless bad arse Padfoot,” James says, Sirius tries to dodge around him but James just blocks his way again, “ But you're really just a romantic deep down like me, you just don’t want to admit it.”

“ Because if you were really as much of a heartless git as you said you were. Then you would've never hung on as long as you have.” James grinned, the grin that he did whenever he knew he was right.

“ I believe in you Padfoot, and I believe in your everlasting love,” James said passionately.

Sirius gagged comically and they went their way back to their flat.

“ I think I have an idea that might help.” James went to wrestle the keys out of his jacket pocket and unlocked the door with a click.

“ What are you on about now?” Sirius says.

As they enter the flat, Sirius plops down on the couch, placing his coffee on the coffee table without a coaster. Remus would probably lecture him if he were here.

This thought doesn’t make him any less upset.

James is standing in front of Sirius on the couch now. “ Ever since primary, you’ve never really been able to talk to him.” He says.

“ What?! That’s not-“

” Don’t deny it. It’s true.” James held up a finger. “ So maybe all you need is some practice,” James said, and then ran out of the room, he came back holding a sweater and putting it over his head. Sirius recognized with horror that it was one of Remus’s, James smiled deviously.

“ Let's act it out.” He said.

“ Fuck no.” Sirius got off the couch.

“ Oh c’mon! We used to do this all the time!”

“ Yeah, when we were kids!”

When James first got into musical theater as a kid, everything was through the lens of acting with him. Whenever he or Sirius would get involved in any little problem James would put on some kind of silly voice and they would laugh and pretend their woes away.

Sirius had always struggled with saying the right thing, it wasn’t instinctual for him to do so. It was just easier to prank than do anyone favors. The only exceptions were his friends, more specifically Remus who he had on more than one occasion had gotten into hot water for defending him when the man specifically asked him not to. Protecting Remus was like breathing for him, he didn’t know how not to do it. He kept that wolf statue that he gave him on his bed stand, they protected each other, it was Marauder code at this point.

“ Just say what’s on your mind.”

“ James, this is weird.”

“ No, it’s not.”

“ James, it is.”

“ Sirius.” James’s grin dropped. “ You can’t just sit back while everything you've worked towards turns to shit.”

“ I just don’t see the point in this. He hates me.”

James sighed. ” He doesn’t hate you, Padfoot, I don’t think he has a singular bone in his body that is capable of hating you.”

“ Then why did he leave?”

“ I don’t know, that's for you to find out.” James looked at him expectantly, he then reached for a cigarette pack that was sitting on their kitchen counter and tucked a cigarette behind his ear. He grinned and Sirius started to reevaluate his choices.

James looked at him for another second until Sirius felt himself backed into a corner with no other choice but to participate.

“ Moony.”

“ Padfoot,” James said in an exaggerated Welsh accent.

“ He does not sound like that.”

“ Don’t break character!”

Sirius looked back down at the floor, then back at James who was surprisingly nailing Remus’s stern teacher face.

“ I-“ He looked into James’s eyes, finding himself sweating a bit.

Sirius thought back to the first time he ever felt this clog in his throat. Like he was unable to open his mouth because he was scared of ruining everything all over again.

It had all started when he had been staying in the infirmary with Remus after a particular flare-up and was able to convince Pomfrey to let him stay another period. He had stationed himself next to Remus on his bed, head against the headboard, and he read a history textbook all the while Remus’s eyes began to droop.

” Why’d you stop reading?”

“ You're falling asleep.” Sirius had said through giggles, he found Remus’s studiousness in the face of sickness rather funny sometimes.

“ I’m not.” Remus struggled to sit up straighter on the bed and rubbed his eyes, it didn’t seem to help though because he just yawned immediately after. “ I’m not going to sleep yet.”

He looked tired, but not specifically sleep-tired, more emotionally. It made Sirius’s heart clench. Every time this happened they would always walk into the infirmary with Remus on a call with his parents, trying to reassure them that he was okay. It always seemed like they were more worried for his health than he ever was.

” Can you read me the sheet music that you were working on?”

“ How do you know about that?”

“ I saw you hide it in English.”

“ Stalker.” Sirius softly pushed him, earning a tired laugh from Remus making Sirius smile himself.

“ Well?”

“ I think you should really go to sleep, Moony,” Sirius said and closed the history book on his lap, Remus frowned and looked away from Sirius’s eyes.

“ ‘Can’t, hurts too much.” He said and then upon looking at Sirius’s worried expression his frown turned straight and he started picking at his nail beds. “ Sorry.”

“ I can go over a little bit, and then you need to sleep,” Sirius said, he hopped off the bed to get the sheet music he had been tinkering with during class. He got it from his bag and sat back next to Remus on the bed. He held it and tilted it for Remus to see.

“ Andy gave you the paper?”

“ Yep.”

Remus hummed and then squinted, pointing at a note on the paper in front of them. “ What note is that?”

“ Oh well that's just two-quarter notes, but this here,” He traced over the line on the paper, “ means that they're tied together, meaning that they’re played as one note since they have the same pitch.”

They went on for a few more minutes, a part of him wishing that he brought his guitar, even though Pomfrey would never let him bring a guitar into the infirmary. He tapped out each note on his thigh, Remus following every word and asking questions throughout, showing that he was interested which made his heart fly.

“ I wish I could do this. You're so good at it.”

Sirius shrugged. “ It’s not too hard. Just a lot of memorization.”

Remus hummed something again, looking down at the sheet music in their laps. “ I think you're amazing.” He said.

Sirius felt his face heat up but the kid sounded partly delirious so he tried not to let it get to his head.

He let out a short laugh, real smooth. “ You should sleep.”

Remus, with his eyes about half closed, just nodded.

“ Could you do me a favor?”

“ Anything for you Moons.”

Remus smiled, “ Stupid.” He said quietly. He then pointed to a cabinet on the other side of the infirmary. “ There's a medication that helps me sleep, top cabinet.”

Sirius nodded enthusiastically and got off the bed, walking to where he had to embarrassingly stand on his tippy toes to reach the top medicine cabinet, and with further instruction on what the bottle looked like he was back and dropping it into the other boy’s hands.

“ Don’t tell anyone that I told you where this was,” He held up the pill bottle, “ I don’t think I’m supposed to be telling people where potentially dangerous drugs are.”

“ Oh?”

Remus snorted, “ I trust you though.” He gave him a sleepy smile and Sirius smiled back.

“ My lips are sealed.” he made a gesture that showed he was sealing his mouth and throwing away the key.

Remus took a pill from the bottle and popped it in his mouth giving it back to Sirius to return to the medicine cabinet. Sirius then went to sit back on the bed again, Remus sideways glancing at him skeptically.

“ You don’t have to stay, I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“ I’ll just stay till you fall asleep.”

Remus murmured something that Sirius couldn’t hear and after a bit of Sirius sitting next to the boy in the bed, staring off into space, he felt a weight fall to his shoulder. Remus had fallen asleep on his shoulder, snoozing soundly, eyelashes resting against his cheek.

It startled Sirius a bit, one of the things that led Sirius to believe that he was in some kind of gang when they first met was the way the other boy avoided vulnerability like the plague. It took them all till 2nd year to confront him about why he was disappearing to the infirmary all the time. It seemed like the boy was always prepared for the rugg to be pulled from under him, which pulled at Sirius’s heart a little more than he would like to admit.

Sirius had stayed there for about another hour until Pomfrey came in to kick him out.

And about a week later Sirius had a confrontation with Snape in a lone hallway, which led to Sirius sneaking into the infirmary one night to slip a sleeping drug into his tea the next day.

As teachers rushed around the exam hall and Sirius stood in the crowd around a supposed passed-out student, Sirius caught Remus’s eye across the huddle.

There was something in his eyes that said he had some kind of hidden knowledge before anyone had known the cause of fainting. Remus’s eyebrows tilted, it seemed like something in Sirius’s face had shown him that he had broken their promise of not getting too carried away. It had snapped Sirius out of his dazed state immediately, he would’ve run to Remus’s feet if James wasn’t rapidly trying to gain his attention next to him in the crowd.

“ Sirius? Sirius, what happened? What did you do?!”

“ Sirius! “

James was standing still in the kitchen, wearing Remus’s sweater, a cigarette behind his ear. He had dropped his silly demeanor and was now looking at him with increasing concern. Sirius hadn’t realized that he was gripping the counter behind him so hard.

“ I’m fine, I just need to lie down for a bit.” Sirius was able to get out before walking back to his room. James followed behind him, slamming the door open as Sirius attempted to close it. He then goes and sifts through Sirius’s record collection and puts on one, skipping ahead, putting the volume lower than Sirius had it before. He flops down next to Sirius on his bed. Sirius sits up to light a cigarette and continues to listen to the record, staring at the ceiling mindlessly.

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling~!
That’s how it’s been all around me.

At least his thoughts start mindless, soon enough they’re dominated again by a strange boy with brown hair and scars.

I think you're amazing.

“ James. “ Sirius said into the air that was getting more smoke heavy by the minute.

“ Yeah? “

“ I think I’m a terrible person.”

James sniffed. “ That’s fine.”

Chapter Text

For James’s 10th birthday, he wished for brothers. He had always been an only child, and even though he had a plentiful number of cousins and inlaws around his age, it was never enough. He craved the sort of rapport that he saw his cousins have with their siblings. He was close with his parents, sure, but his dad would just scold him if he found him pranking the mean old lady who lived down the corner, and that wouldn’t be fun.

James wished for brothers, so when he came of age to go to the same boarding school his father attended he made his goal was to get just that. He would be active in his mission sure, but also if the birthday gods heard his wish then surely it must come naturally.

Hogwarts was an unusual little school. It was unusual but also renowned around the upper class for its ability to churn out kids bound for success. One of their many claims to fame is their sorting system. Each child before enrolling was to take a test, a test that sorted them into a house based on their traits. James had filled his test out with an earnestness that made him jump up and down in his seat, and ask his father numerous questions that eventually led the man to a migraine. If he wasn’t going to be in the same house as his father, then he might as well die.

“ Well, it’s time.” His mum smoothed his hair again and looked nervously towards the train behind him. She then kissed him on the cheek and made space for his father to kneel next to him.

“ Be brave son.” He said, giving James the small smile he always gave. And just like that, James was off.

James wasn’t aware of how loud a train could get until he stepped onto the Hogwarts Express. Other than family affairs he had never seen so many children his age in the same place. He walked down the train aisle looking around enthusiastically at the people around him. He was watching a girl break up with her sodden boyfriend loudly in a nearby cart when he found himself headfirst into another kid’s chest.

He was a few years older than James, with light hair and a snide and mean face. He squinted at him with disgust as he paused in front of where he was trying to open the cart on the other side’s door.

“ Watch where you’re going!” He said pompously, he then scanned James’s face, a realization appearing to hit his face. He then smirked coldly and turned to the other people in the cart beside them. Two girls and a younger boy whose back was to them, seemingly staring out the window, head resting on his hand like he was bored.

“ What’s your name kid?” The boy asked.

“ James Potter.” He said.

“ Bella, get a look at this! It’s a Potter!” The boy said, gesturing to one of the girls with dark wild hair. The other one, a girl almost identical to the other one except her hair was straightened, scrunched her face in scorn at the mention of James’s surname.

“ A Potter huh?” The wild girl said as she got up and joined her friend by the doorway of the cart. Her eyes were dark and her face was pale, she looked like one of those ghosts from the story books his mum would read to him. It didn’t scare him though, he continued to stare.

“ So what if I am?” He said.

“ Cocky are you?” She said, tilting her head and grinning ghoulishly.

“ Maybe.”

The girl brought herself closer to his face, glaring in a way that was surely meant to scare him but it made James just uncomfortable, as he could feel her breaths against his face.

“ You better watch yourself, Potter. ‘Wouldn’t want to end up like your Daddy and Mummy. Associating with beggars and low-lives for a living.” She said humorlessly. James scrunched his face in confusion.

His parents were both criminal defense lawyers with a reputation for picking up cases with low success rates, before that though, his grandfather was the head of a successful brewery company, which was why his parents sought so much wealth so early. They always chose to help the ones who needed it, more for the good of the world and less for money. His grandfather had died before his father had decided to not take over the company, so the old man stayed ignorant and content, but the rest of the upper class hadn’t. James hadn’t known at the time that his family had basically been exiled from any sort of rich respect, but the Blacks did.

Despite James’s young ignorance, he assumed what the girl had said was supposed to be an insult, so he got angry anyway.

“ It’s at least better than associating with you lot.” He states head held high. The girl and boy looming over him both move toward him rapidly in response, but before they can a sharp laugh comes from the cart.

The boy by the window is now turned towards them, showing a big grin that has spread across his face. His eyes twinkle as he makes eye contact with James.

“ And what are you laughing about?” The snide boy said.

“ Nothing “ The boy sings, popping off his seat and waltzing up haughtily up to James at the entrance to the cart.

“ Sirius.” The girl warns. Like James, the boy doesn’t waver an inch, he just turns to James and smiles, James smiles back.

“ You shouldn’t frown so much Bella. It’ll give you wrinkles.” The boy then says, James gobsmacked behind him. The boy just continues to laugh as Bella’s face gets redder.

“ And lord knows you have enough already!”

“ SIRIUS!” The girl screeches, and the snide boy beside her looks upon the scene with fear as she moves to grab the boy in front of her. She misses though, the boy dodges and grabs James’s hand, running back down the aisle, screeching following behind them.

As they run, James’s hand clutched in his, the boy grins.

“ My name’s Sirius. Yours?”

“ It’s James.”

James smiles as they run directionless, hand in hand.

***

Once James had gotten off the train, he learned that his new best friend’s name was Sirius Black, he loves guitar, and music, and hates his family to a concerning degree. Despite this though he had never laughed his hardest than on that train ride to Hogwarts.

“ No way they let first-years try out for the football team.” Sirius scoffed as they entered the great hall, kids clambering and chirping all around them.

“ Well, maybe I’ll just be so good they’ll have to let me in.” He said.

“ Yeah right! I bet you slip and fall on your arse as soon as you're out there!”

James laughed, shoving his friend playfully. “ I’ll take that bet!” As James says this there is a sharp sound made throughout the room. Upon further inspection it had come from their teacher at the head of the room, Ms. Mcgonnagall, beside her sat their headmaster, wearing some kind of long robe, it looked more like that dress to James though. The headmaster smiled kindly, as he addressed all the first years waiting before the great hall.

“ Before we head in, we are to have you sorted into your houses via your test results.” The man says, James feels himself shaking with excitement. He gets less energy from Sirius, the boy just crosses his arms and yawns.

The old man then goes to take a list from the women next to him, he holds the list in grandeur and lists off names.

“Let’s start with the new members of Gryffindor house.”

James felt his body fill with emotion, he was almost jumping up and down in his spot.

“ What are you so excited about?” He heard Sirius whisper beside him.

“ My dad was in Gryffindor,” James whispers back, eyes glued to the man standing above them.

“ What’s so good about it?”

James was startled at the question, he couldn’t believe that somebody could be so clueless about the greatness of the house. “ It means that your brave and-”

“ James Potter!”

“ YES!” James yelled out suddenly. The whole room went silent around him, James’s face slowly going red as snickers sounded behind him. Sirius just peered at him with a concerned face.

Despite the embarrassment, James felt elated, now he was right on track to be right along with his dad. The day was going alright so far, James thought as he grinned and Sirius leaned back into his ear to whisper something again.

“ My whole family has been in Slytherin.”

“ What?!” James whisper yells in disbelief. Sirius just nods.

“ So are you gonna be in Slytherin?” James says, his heart dropping. Sirius just looks at him and shrugs.

They get through the list, Gideon and Fabian Prewett, Emelliene Vance, Benjy Fenwick, as each name was called out James peered at his friend nervously beside him, and like the world heard his prayers, they got to the end of the list and just as Sirius seemed to let out a breath of air-

“ Sirius Black!”

The bored expression quickly fell from his face, as his eyes began to grow wider. He then quickly glanced to the other side of the room, to where the girls and boys from the cart earlier were looking upon the Headmaster with astonishment.

James didn’t notice though, he was too busy grinning and shaking his friend’s shoulder in excitement. As the headmaster’s calls quieted down and the hall fell into a nulled silence as he reached for the next list of students, a scoff and a laugh could be heard across the hall. James didn’t notice, but at that moment his friend seemed to violently flinch next to him.

“ We should’ve figured the little git would be brainless enough to end up in Gryffindor.” The voice said, upon further inspection on James’s part he noticed it was from the same snide blonde boy from the train. Sirius looked at his shoes, his eyes shut tight on his face like he was trying to teleport out of the grand hall. As tight as his face was though, James could see his hands trembling.

“Hey!”

The group of older kids surrounding the blonde boy from the train all turned around to face James and his bespectacled face and wild hair.

“ You again.” The snide boy said, scoffing at where James was fuming in front of him.

“Yeah, me!” James said, yelling as the older kids loomed over him. “ So what if he’s in Gryffindor? What it’s to you?!”

“ You don’t know kid? Blacks have always been in Slytherin house, this one-” He points at where Sirius is standing behind James, eyes watery.

“ -Is a deviant “ He hisses.

James looks to where his friend is standing, hands balled at his sides. Sirius looked away to the side, his hands still trembling and James couldn’t think of something more distressing than seeing his friend so upset.

“ So what?! Gryffindors are brave at heart! I’d say that’s better than whatever you lot are!”

A small snicker sounded from the group, a smaller boy with greasy hair and dull eyes, James turned on him. His ears were ringing at this point, the whole hall had eyes on him, the headmaster watching the group at the side, eyes painted with some sort of emotion that seemed too adult for James to comprehend.

“ Got a problem with that?!” James says to the boy.

The greasy boy, shook a bit, seemingly surprised to be addressed directly.

“ No. “ The boy mumbles, “ If you’d rather be brawny than brainy-”

“ -And where’re you hoping to go, seeing as you’re neither?” A voice behind James cut the boy off suddenly. Sirius put a hand on James’s shoulder, he seemed to gain some color back to his pale face. The greasy boy though in contrast, began to redden up like a tomato. Sirius then, with a steady hand on James’s shoulder, guides him away from the crowd, a smile on his face again, James’s mirrors the same one, although a bit more unsure.

“ Now that it seems that our little show has ceased,” The headmaster pipes back up, “Let’s move on to the new students of the Hufflepuff house.”

“ Way to stick it to them, Potter.” Sirius laughed then remarked.

“ You're not mad you’re not in Slytherin?”

“ No.” Sirius shook his head and smiled warmly, “ There was bound to be someone to break tradition, ‘don’t mind that it had to be me.”

“ After all, I think it’s pretty cool that we’re all brave at heart,” He says, pitching his voice to mock James, James just laughs though and stands at his side throughout the rest of the days’ sorting.

Later on, they were lucky enough to be roomed together in the dorms and clicked quickly with Peter Pettigrew as he brought in a big box of chocolate from his suitcase.

“ Mum said that it would help me make friends.” The boy said timidly, wringing his hands together.

“ Your mum was right!” Sirius said, grinning and grabbing a chocolate bar from the box. James slung his arm around Peter’s shoulders and shook him, making the boy slightly dizzy.

Later on, after an awkward meeting with their rather late to the party, 4th roommate, and some thrown punches on Sirius’s part, James was found with a study hall period all alone.

They were supposed to read 5 chapters of a book for their English class, and James was always pants at reading. He always seemed to space out while concentrating on the words, making it so that he basically had to start the whole page over again, and throughout the whole thing, he never really retained all the information he was supposed to. It frustrated him, and he always just ended up giving up with watery eyes out of anger.

He looked around the hall for a seat, book tucked into his shoulder, it was rather busy for a Wednesday, with every chair at every table full, except for one. The one empty chair James was able to spot with his near-sighted eyes was seated next to a gangly boy with sandy hair that he immediately recognized as his 4th roommate. He wasn’t too thrilled to have to sit next to him, especially after Sirius seemed to have decided to plot some evil plan to get back at him for yelling at him like some adult. That was only yesterday and before this period James caught Sirius stewing, eyes dark, scarily in their science class.

Technically though, the boy had done nothing to offend James himself, so he repeated his mother’s mantra to be kind and went to settle into the chair beside the boy. He was granted a quick and wary side glance before the scarred boy before he went back to reading. From what James has seen of Lupin, he seemed to really like reading, he even saw it now, a book in hand and more stacked up beside him on the desk. A pang of jealousy rang in James’s chest as he opened the reading he had to do for his class and began to stare at a page.

Minutes later, a hand resting against his cheek, James’s eyes began to droop, a sudden CLAP waking him up. The clap was Lupin closing the book he had been reading, he looked at James as he corrected his posture and went back to staring at his page. He scans the lines on the page, struggling to read certain words that are too hard for him to sound out. At this point James can feel the rage emerging again, he was just about done with Huckleberry Finn and whatever antics he was supposed to care about. A voice brings James out of his stupor.

“ Do you need help?”

James looks at him surprised as Lupin looks back at him pointedly, James just stares, not answering. Lupin sighs.

“ With the book? Do you need help?” He says.

“ What?! No!” James scrambles.

“ Really? Because you’ve been glaring at the same page for a while now.”

Struck by the realization that apparently, he had been so obvious about his struggle and also that Lupin had noticed, James’s face gets redder.

“ Well- I,” He tries not to lash out like Sirius, his mum would well whack him for it, so instead he takes a deep breath and points to a word he was struggling to read on the page.

“ What does this say?” He asks, Lupin smiles, and leans in to read the word.

The rest of the study hall continues, with Lupin reading through the chapter with James, guiding him through it kindly.

About a year later he finds himself shouting amongst his three best friends in their dorm room.

“ No, but think about how brilliant it would be!” Sirius says as he’s wearing his tie around his head, standing in the room hands on his hips like some kind of commander.

“ Snape wakes up, and then boom!” Sirius yells, he turns towards Remus who is looking at him unimpressed, book in his lap. “ Snakes in his pants!” He yells, his eyes twinkling. Below him Peter is lying on his back, he giggles a giggle that would only happen due to a sugar-induced high.

“ Where would you even get snakes?” Remus responds, his voice is monotone but James can see the sides of his frown tilt upward.

“ I bet you could pull some up from Sprout’s garden,” James says from where he’s sitting on his bed, Remus glares at him. He just shrugs and takes a swig of the butterbeer he’s holding.

Sirius turns around dramatically and points to him.“ Exactly! We’ll get snakes from Sprout’s garden and put them in his bed when he’s sleeping!”

“ There’s no way,” Remus says to Sirius’s rambling. Sirius deflates because of this, his face becoming comically sad in a way he seemed to master over the past year to look like some kind of sad puppy.

“ Please Moony, you can’t just let these knobs bully you forever!” Sirius says, raising his hands above his head.

“ It’s better than getting detention for life.” Remus promptly says, he closes his book and takes a deep breath through his nose.

“ You’d be better off just stuffing toy snakes in his bed.” He says sarcastically, then laughs slightly at his own comment. Sirius’s face then lights up unexpectedly.

“That’s it!” He yells, he moves towards the bed, and grabs Remus’s shoulders, getting up and close to his face. James wouldn’t have noticed it back then but he swore that he saw a red tinge appear on Remus’s face.

“ We put toy snakes in his bed, and he wakes up scared thinking they're real!” He yells, James laughs at his excitement.

“ Moony, you're a genius!”

“ What- But-” Remus stammers, eyes wide as saucers.

Sirius then begins to laugh up and jump up and down, before moving to play a record on their record player Sirius’s cousin had gotten him.

remember when rock was young
Me and Susie had so much fun~!
Holding hands and skimming stones
Hand an old gold Chevy, and a place of my own~!

Sirius pulled Remus up from where he was sitting on his bed to dance, which kind of just resulted in Sirius grabbing his hands and whirling him around the dorm since the kid seemed to have the same amount of coordination as a baby giraffe. Peter continues to giggle, and James’s cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

They had gone forth on the prank the next couple of days, instigating the prank war for the ages. Also, the prank war that started their string of detentions that occurred every year neither rain nor shine.

“ Come on Potter! Don’t just sit there!” Sirius yelled from where he had also managed to get Petter off the floor. James laughed as Sirius pulled him up from his bed, and then continued to cringe as James sang harpishly along with the music.

And the Crocodile rocking was out of sight~
Laa, la-la-la-la-laa~!

“ Argh! My ears!” He yelled as Remus laughed beside him, and later that night a prefect came to their door saying that they got several noise complaints.

James had always wished for brothers, though never in a million years would he think it would take so much bloody work.

***

“Jamie? Why aren’t you dressed?”

James looked down at his t-shirt and jeans with a confused expression.

“ I am.” He said, flipping a page in the football magazine he was reading.

His mum looked at him, standing at the door. He realized that the dress and pearls she was wearing were a great contrast to his casual wear. He was a bit confused, and maybe a bit slightly scared as his mum squinted her own eyes in frustration.

“ You're not going to be wearing jeans to the theater beta.”

James looked at his mum with more confusion. “ The theater…?”

“ Yes love, the theater.”

They had been in New York for a couple of days now, and it had been a total bore. James wasn’t able to write any letters back home to his friends, so he was mostly being dragged around by his parents to different tourist traps. Even though they had been in the city for no more than 72 hours, if he was forced to go to Times Square one more time he thinks his head would explode.

“ It’s just a play? How fancy can it be?” He groaned, as his mother left the entrance of the room.

She then promptly walked back and gave him a stern glare that told him to stop asking questions.

About an hour later he was in a stuffy theater sitting between both of his parents wearing a sweater and tie in the sweltering heat. He was not going to write to Sirius about this later. He was sure it would take at least a month for the kid to stop teasing him about it. He was fidgeting with the playbill they had given him before they had entered the theater, and he had just completely twisted it into something unrecognizable when the lights shut off and James’s head stopped buzzing. The audience went completely silent, and an overture began, starting so silent that James could barely hear it until it flooded every single one of his senses all at once. Which he would have expected to be a bad sensation but instead his heart started rapidly beating.

Sirius would often describe the experience of listening to good music as if the song wormed itself into your brain and showed you visions. And James always thought it was weird rambling, as much as Remus nodded and agreed with him.

He never really got music. His friends loved it, who knows the many times James sat in their dorm room as his best friend rambled on about some rock singer and how the man was like a, “wizard but for the ears”.

But at this moment that all changed.

He felt like he had entered some different reality, he wasn’t able to take his eyes off the stage. The actors danced about and every time the music got louder James felt like his heart and eyes were popping out of his body.

Say it loud and there’s music playing
Say it soft and it’s almost like praying
Maria~
I’ll never stop saying
“Maria”~

It was a completely different feeling than when he was playing football. While he was on the field he was aware of everything and how every part of his body was moving in a rhythm that moved him toward a goal. With this the buzzing in his head that allowed his body to twitch stopped, he felt foggy, it would be almost scary if he couldn’t feel his emotions turn and change with the story.

All he could think while Tony belted the end of Maria on the stage below him was-,

I can do that

And he did, at least a few weeks later.

“ James! This is stupid!”

They were in his basement at around 4 in the afternoon. James had just come back from New York completely Broadway obsessed. After West Side Story James forced his parents to take him to about 5 more shows, including West Side Story again. He decided while sitting in that chair that he would get himself on that stage one day. But he had to start small, and as much as intriguing a one-man play would be, he wouldn’t be able to reenact West Side Story without a Maria.

They were standing in his basement, he was pushing a couch back to the wall to make more space for practice. Remus was incidentally sitting on said couch, reading a book, he closed it as James pushed the couch back.

“ What exactly is happening?” Remus said, setting down his book in his lap.

James cleared his throat loudly.

“ What we are going to do my fine gentlemen, is an experience like none other. I am giving you the opportunity to recreate one of the most beautiful productions in musical theater.” He said, he was standing in the middle of the room now, trying to project his voice to the loudest octave. Peter and Sirius were standing at his side, looking at him like he was crazy.

Remus sat still on the couch, book in his lap, a finger keeping his place. He pointed gingerly at James and looked to Sirius and Peter beside him.

“ Why is he talking like that?”

“ Hell if I know!” Sirius yelled and threw up his arms.

“ Hey, language!” James said, his parents were right upstairs, he didn’t want to get in trouble.

“ Were recreating what? The movie?” Peter scrunched his face in confusion.

“ Well, it was a stage play first,” James commented.

“ What?”

“ We're doing the movie, but a play,” James explained.

“ Why? “

“ Because it’s cool Pete!” James said. He was getting a bit frustrated now. The reason he had invited them over in the first place was so he could sit them down and force them to watch the movie, so they’d have enough information for the play. He didn’t get why they couldn’t understand it.

“ This is lame,” Sirius said, pouting.

“ You think everything is lame Sirius.” Remus piped in from the couch.

“ No!” Sirius said, he stuck out fingers and counted them, “ Marc Bolan, Bowie, Iggy Pop, guitar-”

Remus snorted loudly, cutting Sirius off, and instead of lashing out the boy’s face just went bright red.
“ Shut up!” Sirius said, his pubescent voice cracking.

Thankfully by now, James knew his best friend enough that there was a pretty easy way to convince him to do something. He usually followed two simple steps.

James scoffed, making Sirius turn sharply to him, face still tomato red.

“ Well don’t join if you don’t want to, I didn’t think you’d be able to handle it anyway.”

“ What?!” Sirius shot back, hands clenching, face getting redder.

“ Your voice only really goes to a mouse’s pitch anyways,” James said, he then did an impression of a song that their choir did earlier this year. It was in Latin so it mostly involved James yelling gibberish in a high voice, but either way, it did the job as his friend was getting more visually frustrated. Remus and Peter laughed loudly, just making the boy angrier.

“ That’s not what I sound like!”

“ I don’t know….” James whistled and diverted his eyes. With the first step completed, James moved to the next step.

“ It’s okay, Padfoot,” James said. “ We only need 3 people to do it anyway, we can just switch around a bunch of parts.” He looked pointedly towards Remus who was watching the scene unfold from the couch still. “ What do you say Moony?”

Remus shrugs. “ Sure.”

Remus was only the other one who needed convincing, Peter usually did anything that he told him to and James was seeing the stubbornness drip away from Sirius’s face.

Ever since that day that Sirius had punched Mulciber in the face it seemed like the key to make Sirius do anything was to guarantee that it was going to impress Moony in some way. James had caught on to it real quick and had used the knowledge more for evil than he would admit.

Sirius looked toward Remus on the couch, the boy raising his eyebrows in a kind of challenge. The stubborn boy then sighed loudly.

“ Fine….” Sirius wallowed.

And just like that James took up the boys’ next 5 hours racking their child minds trying to figure out how to reenact West Side Story with only four people. They settled on switching roles, the main ones being settled through a lot of yelling and eventually a resentful surrender by Remus on the role of Maria. They had later moved up to the living room to be able to make more use of their surroundings and build some kind of set out of pillows and a coffee table.

“ Sit right there.” James sat his parents down on a couch that they pushed back in the living room for space. His mother looked at him with an amused smile, his father just continued to read the paper.

“ What is this?” His mum says.

James grins and steps back to where the rest of his friends are standing still in their assigned places. Peter runs to the side to turn off the lights and Remus holds a flashlight up to James’s face.

“ Marauder productions present!” James projects out to the room.

“ West Side Story!”

After approximately 45 minutes of watching 4, 12-year-olds run around a room attempting to act, Peter using a ketchup bottle to recreate the blood spilling from his chest, Sirius using his fingers as a fake gun, and James screaming the lyrics of Cool at the top of his lungs, probably waking up their neighbors, they had finished their performance.

His mum was clapping excitedly and his dad surprisingly was as well, newspaper now discarded to his side.

“ Bravo!” His mum exclaimed, a big smile adorning her face.

They took a proper theater bow, hands held, brought up, and then down. James’s heart hadn’t stopped rapidly beating the whole performance, his face was aching from smiling and somehow he felt like he could run a mile.

“ You were amazing Jamie!” His mum came up to pat him on the shoulder. “ A proper actor this one is!” She turned toward his dad and he smiled warmly and nodded.

“ But you all were lovely as well!” She was now talking to his friends. Sirius’s face was going red by the compliment.

Later that night they all lay in sleeping bags around his room, heads reaching the middle making a circle. James looked at his ceiling as he played back the performance that night.

I can do that, he thought.

I can do it!

“Prongs!” A shout brought him out of his thoughts, and seconds later before he could react so did a pillow, whacking him right in his face. He couldn’t see well without his glasses but he could pretty easily tell who his attacker was.

“ Are you listening to me?!” Sirius said, standing on his knees in his sleeping bag. Peter, was sitting up criss crossed on his. Remus, like usual, was reading a book quietly on the other side of Sirius.

“ What did you say?” James responded, Sirius took one look at his face and snorted.

“ Look at him! He hasn’t stopped smiling since we did that stupid play!” He said.

“ It wasn’t stupid!”

“ A proper actor this one is!” Sirius said in a mocking tone.

James threw his pillow back at Sirius’s face and they tousled while Peter spoke over them.

“ I thought it was fun.” He says. James had just finished whacking Sirius sharp in the face before he heard Peter’s comment and his attention was directed elsewhere.

“ Really?!” He turned to Sirius who was rubbing his head and sitting up. “ We should do another one then!” He looked to Sirius who was at first adamant about declaring the performances as “lame” but to James’s surprise, the boy just shrugged.

“ Only if I get to sing again.” He says. James blinks slowly, Sirius grins and his heart has never felt so full.

That was the start of a very long journey for him. Since then he absorbed any sort of theater media, even crying when his parents said that they wouldn’t be going to New York again the next summer. James always had a pushy personality, so it didn’t take but a year to get his friends up to date with his excitement. They kept going on, doing their “ Living Room Plays”, sometimes they would sing, sometimes they wouldn’t, one such attempt included an original song Remus and Sirius had written.

James found himself head-deep in a different act of performance. He used his words, instead of his body, and other than football, he couldn’t imagine himself liking anything more.

“ That was lovely James! Didn’t know you were so talented!”

Right before they had done another Living Room Play of Little Shop of Horrors, which made use of too much paper mache and ketchup blood, Remus’s mum had dropped by to pick him up, resulting in her being convinced to sit down and watch the show. They now stood by the door as Remus put on his shoes.

“ Thanks, Mrs. Lupin.” He blushed and rubbed his neck. Remus saw from where he was getting up and smirked.

“ James is auditioning for the school play next year.” He told his mum.

“ Well with how you were doing before, I’m sure you’ll get it.” She says back, smiling in a way that looks too much like Remus that it’s a bit creepy.

“ He’ll be on the West End in no time.” His father said, smiling genuinely, sitting on the couch, crossed-legged. His mum nodded as she sat next to him.

“ I’d say so!” Mrs. Lupin said.

James loved the thrill of acting, he liked to let himself go and feel himself change to a different person.

But most importantly…he was good at it.

***

4 years later, sitting on the floor of their dorm nursing a lukewarm beer, tears falling from his eyes, James vowed to quit theater for good.

“ Oh come on Prongs! She was a tramp, you’re better off without her!”

This comment didn’t help, and James just continued to sob more.

Their 6th year of school brought their theater’s club performance of West Side Story for all the school to see. It was their first big play since James hadn’t been able to keep more than 3 people in the club for more than a month, but this year James had dedicated all his willpower to getting people to join and they had enough to cast a whole show. James chose West Side Story, for their first, being that it was his favorite and also since he and his now girlfriend, Amelia Bones, were set to play Maria and Tony respectfully. That is until James caught her snogging Bearnardo two seconds before their first show time.

Thus the sobbing.

“ I mean she was basically snogging her own brother. Don’t you find that kind of weird?” Sirius continued.

“ It’s just a role, Sirius, they’re not actual siblings,” Remus said sternly, hand on James’s shoulder to where he was lying on the floor.

“ I still say it’s weird,” Sirius says, Remus just rolls his eyes.

James sniffs snottily, “ They had dated before this, he was her Spanish tutor.”

At this Sirius hissed sympathetically, gaining another glare from where Remus was attempting to comfort him.

“ They’ll be other girls, James,” Remus says softly, James just sniffs again and takes a swig of his beer. They were supposed to be hosting the best after-party Hogwarts had ever seen, but instead, James had been so distraught after the show had ended that he had yelled at Amelia for breaking his heart and locking himself in their dorm to wallow in his own misery.

“ She was a terrible Maria, to be honest.” Sirius scoffed and Peter laughed at his comment, obviously drunk now. “ I mean her vibrato was just terrible.”

“Sirius,” Remus warned.

“ No really! She sounded like a dying fish!” What then occurred was Sirius doing an impression of what Amelia’s singing sounded like, surprisingly making James laugh a bit, his head becoming less foggy. Peter laughed so hard he fell over onto his back, and Remus smirked despite his angry remarks earlier.

“ What Sirius is trying to say,” Remus interjects the laughing coming from the boys in front of him, “ Is that you’ll have better co-leads.”

This statement just made James even more depressed though, as he began to continue to sob violently just as he seemed to pick up himself again.

“What’s wrong?!” Remus panicked and James mumbled out a response, making Remus have to ask for clarification.

“ You're what?”

“ I’m not doing theater club again next year,” James says.

“What?!” The boys all yelled in unison.

“ Why the hell not?!” Sirius said, his hands hard against the dorm floor.

“ Prewett said that he would make me captain next year, I won’t be able to juggle both at the same time.” He says drearily.

“ But Prongs you can’t just quit! Theater stops for none!”

“ I thought you always said music stops for none.” James squinted at Sirius, and the boy just shrugged.

“ Eh, tomato tomahto.” He said, he then looked pointedly at Remus in front of him. He wasn’t as blown away as Sirius but his eyes showed a layer of concern.

“ You can’t possibly go along with this?” Sirius asks Remus. Remus just shakes his head, making eye contact with James.

“ If you think you should prioritize football, then.” Remus shrugs. Sirius’s mouth drops open in surprise.

“ Why all of a sudden are you so against quitting? You’re the one who quit choir.” Remus then says.

“ Yeah but-” Sirius softened, “ -that’s different.”

“ Is it?” Remus challenged. Sirius stopped talking, mouth dead set in a firm line on his face.

It hadn’t been the end of theater as a whole for James, he still listened to Grease religiously and made his friends watch every new Broadway recording he could get his hands on, and they continued to recite play scripts drunk in James’s room during break. But James could never take it seriously the same way he did when he was a kid. It made him think of heartbreak, there was no more spark that allowed him to keep going.

Until the end of his junior year of college when his friends came to him with a proposition.

“ I want you to play the lead,” Sirius said on a cool day in June, they were sitting on a bench in a park near their flat.

“ Sirius, you know that I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore.” He had said.

“You're the only one I trust to do it right.” Sirius said, his eyes glassy, “ Please.”

The day Sirius had run away from his family he had turned up at James’s house with a black eye, with no further explanation on how it happened. Sirius was the loudest person James knew, but that day as his parents nursed him back to full health he didn’t say a word. James was terrified, and he continued to be terrified for his best friend as he hugged him later that evening as he cried into James’s shoulder.

At this moment his best friend had that look in his eye, the same one that accompanied the dark purple bruise that was on his face that day.

So James had agreed, he had agreed for Sirius’s sake, and for Remus’s sake. And even he made a pact to himself that no matter how deep of a hole of shit he found himself in, he would keep going.

And he was in deep shit.

***

James always prided himself on how he was able to handle himself in tense situations. It was a skill he would tell people developed from football but it was more of a result of how accident-prone his friends tended to be. Somebody had to be level-headed when his friends’ first reaction to any failure was to panic or if your name is Sirius Black, cry and lock yourself in your room, blasting music so loud that their neighbors give noise complaints.

He prided himself on how he was able to keep it together while his friends came apart, but despite this, he never really trusted the decisions he made in the heat of the moment. Without his friends there to level himself out he usually did things that resulted in a foul in football or a reprimand from his mom in Hindi.

Or if you were Lily Evans, a long-standing grudge.

It was a morning in September and the leaves had been dying and falling to the ground. Making cracking sounds as Sirius stepped on them with his docs.

“ I mean it just seemed impossible, the bloke was a freak! If I was Scarlett, spinster or not, I wouldn't marry him. “ Sirius said, his guitar strapped to his back. Despite this he could still move without much struggle, he did a slight skip and laughed as James gasped dramatically at his statement.

“ That is probably the most false thing I’ve ever heard.”

It was later on in their third year of Uni, that Sirius had been able to comfortably settle into a job at a motorcycle garage after a year of soul searching, and they were walking back to the flat after James’s football practice. Peter had his internship at an office that sold ceiling fans and Remus had a shift at the diner.

They walked down the street to their flat and as they walked James glanced at the window of Madam Puddifoot’s, a cafe that James had found himself frequently in lately. The reason for this fact was sitting right by the window, sipping tea, reading a book.

Her bright red hair was down today, pulled back with a headband. She was wearing a white dress shirt with purple flowers adorning the top and was possibly the most beautiful woman James had ever seen. He didn’t usually consider himself a shallow person but after the first time he saw her, when he was getting the guy's coffee before practice, he found himself stopping by constantly to just get a glimpse. Her nails were painted a sage green color, to match her eyes, and she took another sip of her tea glancing to the side, he quickly started walking from where he stopped on the sidewalk.

James quickened his pace out of panic that he’d been spotted and he heard laughter come from his side.

“You're pathetic,” Sirius stated, chuckling while keeping James’s pace. James scoffed and swatted Sirius’s arm, he dodged despite the weight on his back and James walked quicker leaving Sirius behind before he caught up again.

“ If I’m pathetic then you're hopeless,” James said grinning, his friend wore a matching one and he glanced to where the street spanded in front of them.

“ Race you to the flat.” He quickly said before booking it down the street.

“OI!” James protested before running after him, laughing.

In football, James found that there was always a sort of quiet that occurred before he made a goal. His vision blurred, only making the ball in front of him in focus, his hearing gave out too. Everything slowed until all his senses came back tenfold right when the ball hit the goal. He explained this anomaly to the smartest person he knew at the time, hoping for some kind of explanation, but Remus just smiled warmly and said that it was probably just nerves. “Calm before the storm”, he called it. Sirius, who was supposed to be his best friend, just called him an idiot, and Peter cackled.

They had made it back to the flat, although later in the afternoon, Sirius was panting from the exhaustion that came from running a block back to the flat. James had won by a landslide, Sirius had blamed it on the cargo that he had in his possession but James knew he hadn’t exercised since being on the football team in secondary with him.

James walked into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and looked out the window next to the sink. There was a tree between the space the window showed, and in that space was a nest with baby birds. When first discovered, Peter wanted to scare them off so they could open the window, but Sirius and Remus convinced him not to, they then proceeded to name each baby bird after some rock musician they liked.

All James could hear was the distant noises of Sirius leaving his guitar case down in his room and the quiet tweeting of the baby birds. It then suddenly stopped when their home phone started ringing. Sirius ran into the kitchen to get it, picking up the phone with an “ Ello’?”

The birds then stopped, and James could only hear a soft bang of something falling down the hall towards the bathroom. Sirius was still talking on the phone.

“What's up, Mckinnon? No, we haven’t seen’em, I thought he had a shift, with you?” Sirius slowly started to panic, James could tell by the way he was rapidly tapping his finger on the counter. He heard another sound come from the bathroom down near Remus’s room and he swore he heard a trace of a voice cursing. He started to walk down the hall, leaving Sirius in the kitchen still on the phone.

As he came upon the bathroom door he leaned his ear on the smooth wood of the door and then softly knocked.

“ Moony? You in there?”

There was no response.

“Moony?” He repeated, he heard another faint noise come from inside the bathroom, and then to his relief, a voice with a slight Welsh accent.

“ I’m here.”

“ Remus, what’s going on? Are you ok?” He tried jostling the door handle, but it was locked.

“ Yeah, everything's fine- It’s nothing, just feeling a bit nauseous.” He said, his voice breaking a bit.

“ So you had to leave work?” James asked, this time he got no response. It was quiet again, Remus seemingly not moving from where he was stationed in the bathroom. He then heard loud stomping coming towards him and Sirius moved him away from where he still had his ear on the door’s surface.

Sirius promptly stuck a bobby pin into the keyhole of the doorknob, picking the lock with a click before opening the door and walking straight into the bathroom.

“Holy fuck Remus!” Sirius said as he walked in. James was frozen in place, his vision slightly blurring, Sirius’s back was covering where Remus was sitting on the floor of the bathroom so he couldn’t see anything. Sirius only used real names when distressed.

“ Don’t just come barging in here-! Did you fucking pick the lock?!”

“ Of course I did! Marlene said she made you go home, I wasn’t just gonna let you die in here!”

“ I’m not dying Sirius!”

“ Bloody looks like it!” He yelled back. The two continued to argue back and forth, James was still rooted to the spot in front of the bathroom door. He felt his hearing give out for a second and before he spiraled he took a deep breath, blocking out the frantic shouting.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in-

He was taken out of his ritual by Sirius calling his name.

“ JAMES.”

James turned to him and his eyes were darting all over the place, his hands were placed on Remus’s shoulders as the man, still in his work clothes, was kneeling over the toilet seat. Sirius’s hands only seemed to tighten where he held Remus as he looked at James. This was typical, every time Remus had an episode he and Peter always had to drag Sirius away kicking and crying, so there was no way James was going to be able to get him to move now. He took one last deep breath.

“ I’m gonna run to the Tesco down the street to see if I can get some of that weird aspirin. Sirius you stay here, I’ll call Pete on my way there to see when he can get off.” He said trying to keep his speech as steady as possible. Sirius just nodded and went back to speaking low so Remus could hear him.“ It’s ok moons, hang in there, breathe.” Remus seemed to use all his energy yelling at Sirius earlier, so he just sat on the bathroom floor, head in his hands.

James put one foot in front of the other and ran out of their flat. His actions that took place after that he wasn’t the most proud of. He was of course stunned, he imagined his first actual meeting with the cafe girl would have been more romantic, with maybe a Madonna song playing in the background, not a vicious fight to the death for an aspirin bottle. But after the shock first wore off and he had been scoffed at plenty of times in his efforts to get the bottle, his thoughts had been blindsided by thinking of the first time something like this happened back when they were in primary school. Remus had started hyperventilating in their English class and they had to wait there with him while he struggled to breathe for the next 15 minutes, waiting for the nurse to make it across campus from the infirmary.

But there was no nurse, or English teacher to tell them what to do this time, so James might've done some stupid things that resulted in his new co-lead to hate the ground he walked on.

He wouldn’t ever try to use Remus as a way to excuse his actions, he certainly didn’t regret the outcome, even if Remus ended up being fine in the end. After a good hour of sitting on a call with Remus’s mom, Sirius's hands shook insisting that they needed to go to the hospital, and every time he did Remus quickly shut him down. They had ended up sitting all around Remus’s room while the man slept soundly head against the wall, Sirius was right beside him snoozing on his shoulder. A little while later he and Remus talked while Peter and Sirius were still sleeping, Peter on the floor since James was sitting on the desk chair and Sirius on the bed.

“ How are you feeling?” James asked from where he was stationed at the desk, swaying in the chair back and forth.

“ Good. It wasn’t all that bad.” Remus stated, which was a lie considering the state of the bathroom before James left.

“ Whatever you say Moony,” James said as Remus let out a low chuckle, he then moved carefully to not wake Sirius up from where he was resting on his shoulder and popped another aspirin into his mouth. Afterward, he held the bottle and looked at the label on the back.

“ Where did you say you got this from?”

“ Tesco.”

“ Didn’t know they held this type of aspirin.”

“ I was surprised too, it was the last one.”

“ Huh,” Remus said, he then tilted his head to look at where James was sitting away from the bed. He smiled, and James smiled back.

“ Had to kill a small child to get it.” James joked, Remus let out another quiet laugh.

“You're truly something else, Potter.”

***

“You come from your mansions and your posh boarding schools and think you know everything about everything! Well quirky little musical or not, you're still all a bunch of whiny little gits!”

The day after Lily Evans had unleashed hell upon him, and then that same night allowed him to walk her back to her car, moon lighting up the sky, James had to wake up to an early morning practice with an aggressive blonde he was sure wanted his head.

“ I had never seen her so angry!” Marlene chimed after shoving James to the ground. James wiped off his knees, stealing the ball from her feet and juggling it with his own.

“ I swear your name is like a trigger in our flat, one mention and she goes ballistic! All I did was ask how you were and all of a sudden she’s stomping and slamming doors!” She cackled and James frowned as he settled the football in between his feet.

“ I think I get it, Marlene.” He says, Marlene just snorts at the expression on his face and continues to harass him like usual.

So Lily hated him, no big deal. Hate he could work with, hate can very much translate to love on stage. After his girlfriend cheated on him before they opened West Side Story in secondary, they continued, his hate fueling his performance, his friends had said it was some of the best acting they had ever seen, so sure, James could work with hate. He tried to not let it bother him, besides, he found the face Lily made whenever he teased her kind of endearing, and Remus made it seem like no matter how much she hated him, it was not like she would quit, which was good. James certainly couldn’t handle having to audition any more actors, his standards seemed to be way too high and no other actors other than Lily ever were able to keep up with him.

So later that evening he continued to walk into the shabby old theater, a smile on his face, a song in his head.

He expected the theater to be empty, it was rare the others showed up this early to rehearsal, being that Remus and Peter had work, and Sirius seemed to be unable to keep track of time effectively ever since they were kids.

Instead, he was faced with the woman of his dreams herself, upon the stage, a graceful violin tune enveloping the whole theater.

After James had met Lily officially for the first time in that Tesco he began to have the same dream over and over.

He was in his childhood room, the football posters on the wall, the dents and scratches in his bed frame from roughhousing with his friends throughout the room. But he wasn’t there as an adult, it didn’t even seem like he was there as a kid, his vision brought him closer to the carpet on the floor than it did his actual height. Like he was some sort of figurine he used to keep on his very own shelf, James found himself a miniature version of himself, standing amongst his room, looming over him. He always found himself looking around, looking at his hands, looking at the ceiling, eventually though, a tune would play out from above on the desk near his bed. The song was never something that fully formed in his brain, he wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was violin, or bass guitar. All he knew was that it was beautiful, almost hypnotizing as he found himself drawn to the source of the sound. He climbed up the sides of his desk to discover a music box, one that his mum always kept in her room. She would play it to lull James back to sleep after a rather bad nightmare. It was a soft pink, with a silver undertone on the inside, and in the middle, spinning alongside the music was a small porcelain ballerina. But instead of the usual ballerina’s blonde hair upon her porcelain head, it was replaced with bright red hair, and as James approached the music box she suddenly turned her head sharply, rage in her eyes.

That’s when James wakes up.

Those eyes, those green eyes, are always the last thing he sees before James finds himself waking up in a cold sweat.

Remus used to describe his dreams to James, usually in a moment of vulnerability, late nights in the hospital, or the last seconds of an all-nighter.

“ I feel like I’m floating, everything is fuzzy but…. I’m happy, I’m never confused, everything is always as they’re supposed to be.” Remus would say. He would never say specifics, but he would describe in romantic, poetic ways that would make James smile.

James never had dreams before the Tesco incident, and now he does, and they’re never floaty or wonderfully fuzzy. Instead, they’re sharp, and scary as James seems to jump out of his pants whenever he sees flashes of green. The flash of green always seems to follow dreamy movements and music, somehow James always thought in a way that’s how Lily made him feel. He always found himself sweating, or being taken off guard at the last second.

Despite how vivid Lily’s eyes were in James’s memory, as he watched her dance on stage, her eyes were closed.

James had observed that Lily always seemed to move like she was ready to run a mile at any moment, like she was always on alert, always working. But on the stage, she moved so swiftly alongside the music that James would say it looked like the girl was some kind of possessed. And if Lily wasn’t possessed, James definitely felt like he was. He somehow found himself frozen where he was standing in the aisle. He felt like an idiot, just standing there, but he couldn’t take her eyes off her. She moved around the stage, her feet making no noise despite the fact she was still wearing loafers. It was like the music was guiding her, them working in perfect tandem, every new note causing a new movement in Lily’s routine that would take James’s breath away just when he thought he just caught it.

It was almost like magic, like a dream.

Before James could walk, or even he didn’t know, clap. Just like his dream the song ended and Lily’s green eyes shot open. She turned slowly to where James was standing like a statue in the theater aisle. Contempt spreads through her face and she opens her mouth to speak.

“ Potter.“

***

For the next few months, James tried to see Lily dance whenever he could, even if that meant making a fool of himself in the process.

She was certainly the most independent person he knew, and as much as James saw her as a strong person, the independence seemed to be rooted in weakness more than anything. Because as much as James found himself in a trance by the girl’s dancing, god could she not sing.

He decided after being basically kicked out of his first tutor session with her that he would have to shift their approach if he would ever get her to let him actually teach. He thought of how her eyes would shift whenever James would attempt to help her, it was like there were actual bars going up in real-time. He thought of Amelia and her eyes going gray after he caught her cheating 5 minutes before the curtains. Emotional vulnerability was something James would have to bring out in people, and he had done it before. The trick is that you start physically and then go mentally. It might sound a bit psycho at first, Sirius had told him so when James had first brought him to trail after he ran away from home, but it worked for him, and Lily was possibly the only other person James had seen to be so hesitant to let James help.

The trail worked, James had mountains of evidence. Every time he took one of his friends up to that trail one of them would spill their guts, but usually it was a last resort, Sirius being the only one he took up all the way.

He respected Lily incredibly, he didn’t want it to seem like he was manipulating her for his own gain, but the musical in the way seemed to be eating away at her. With the amount of shows he did for theater class and the one show he did for theater club back in secondary, he knows that the trail helps.

“ So what time?”

They were sitting on the edge of the stage, everyone was packing up and Sirius was waiting for him at the door, squinting suspiciously as Lily addressed him.

“ What..?”

“ For the next tutoring session? What time?” Lily reiterates.

Later on in the flat Remus had said he looked like a goldfish gulping for air, but it had really felt like he had to grasp at any air at that moment.

“ You want to do another one?”

“Yeah, if you’re up for it?” She said, and then she smiled, showing all her teeth and her eyes wrinkled and James felt like he was flying off the ground before she had even walked away.

They had scheduled another one for a later Wednesday after James’s classes, specifically this time for his place. Which meant that he had to clean his room in a panic, shoving most of the trash that he left lying around underneath his bed.

“ Potter! Your client’s here!”

Lily Evans was standing in his flat’s kitchen, arms crossed, not exactly scowling, but wearing a slight frown. A win, if you were to ask James. Opposite to Lily in the kitchen was Remus, wearing teacher chic and grinning like he won a ball game. Suddenly James wanted to leave said kitchen, and take a run around the block.

They stood in silence, James standing at the entrance of the kitchen when Remus widened his eyes aggressively and cocked his head in the direction of James's room.

“ My uh- We can practice in my room.” James stuttered and pointed vaguely and awkwardly down the hall. Lily raised her eyebrows in a silent challenge and James realized the implications of his situation.

“ Uh- If you're ok with that.” Is all James was able to say.

“ That’s fine,” Lily says with no emotion.

They walked down to his room, and as he moved to sit on his desk chair, he watched Lily scan the items around his room. Honestly, James could have been more considerate when he got his room. Other than the odd poster, and clothes strewn about he never really put any effort into decorating his room. By Lily’s pinched-up face, he guessed the little messes seemed to bother her quite a bit.

“ It’s a mess in here.” She says.

“ You think so?” He says while taking a clueless look around his room.

“ Do you ever clean?” She walks over to his drawer and picks up a shirt with small fingers, she then drops it back down in disgust. James just shakes his head, causing his hair to hit him partly in the eye.

“ No in-house maids?.” She says sarcastically, lifting an eyebrow. James smiled, which was not her intended reaction.

“ Nope! Just an enforced cleaning day every couple of months.” He says cheerily.

Lily snorts softly from her nose, “ I can tell.” She says. She sits down on James’s bed and his heart starts banging against his chest, as she continues to eye certain spots in James’s room that he forgot to clean; he somehow grows self-conscious. Which was a new feeling.

“ Sorry, it’s not as- uh- lively in here.” He says. Lily looks at him inquisitively, which he can’t decide whether to dislike or not, he doesn’t particularly like to be examined like that, but on the other hand, being examined by her…

“ Could use a plant or two.” She responds coolly. James snorts.

“ What? Like in your room?”

“ Well, maybe not exactly like my room, but putting one on the window sill wouldn’t hurt.” She gestures to the window, the groggy London weather, causing a few raindrops to fall against the glass.

“ If you gave me one-” He shrugs, “ Maybe.”

She looks at him, and then glances back to the sill behind her.

“ I can ask my dad to send one sometime.” She squints at the sill. James looks at her with slight confusion; she seems to recognize all too quickly.

“ My dad, he’s a florist.”

“ Oh.”

“ Yeah, he and my mum, they opened a flower shop a little after I was born.”

James snorts way too loudly.“ Ah, well that explains it.”

“ Explain what?” She cocks her head a bit to the side, and James can’t help himself from laughing a tiny bit.

“ So?” She says, looking at him underneath her brilliant eyelashes, James is so entranced he forgets what the purpose of their meeting is. He jumps up.

“ Right uh-” He flips through his sheet book and they move to work.

They work in perfect harmony for the hour, cracking a few jokes here and there, bickering a bit but not so intense that it has Lily storming out of their apartment. In a more calm moment, Lily comes back from their bathroom to bite her thumb, studying the booklet sitting on her lap. James stares a bit, and then realizing this is probably when people are supposed to talk, takes the opening in stride.

“ So florists?”

“ Huh?”

“ Your parents.” He says with a smile.

“ Oh right, yeah.” She looks back to her booklet. “ They’re florists.”

“ And…You're not gonna be a florist.” He says. Lily snorts.

“ Nope.”

“ Explain that.” He says, Lily snorts again adorably and then closes the booklet sharply.

“ Well, I thought I could go bigger.”

“ Bigger?”

“ Yep.”

“ And that's what law is? Bigger than being a florist?”

“ I think so.” She says, tilting her nose slightly up. “ What about you?” She turns back to him.

“ Huh?”

“ Why aren’t you an actor?”

“ My parents aren’t actors Evans.”

“ Whatever. Answer the question.”

He furrowed his eyebrows, it was a weird question, and the way that Lily was looking at him made him want to rapidly kick his foot to the ground. He never wanted to be an actor, well never wanted to be an actor since he was 12, and that was a long time ago. He didn’t like this, he always seemed to reminisce when she was around, something about her made him lean back into his shell.

“ Well, my parents wanted me to be secure.”

Lily tsked, “ Bullshit. Give me a real reason.”

“ That is the real reason, Evans.” He says, he tries not to lose his cool.

“ So you're not doing it because your parents don't want you to?”

“ Pretty much.”

They fall into silence, Lily opens his booklet again, she drags her fingers along the music notes, her nails are a dull blue today.

“ My mum wanted me to be a dancer.” She says, making James almost jump out of his seat.

“ And why aren’t you?” James responds.

“ I guess…” She says, her fingers twirling around the page gracefully, James can’t stop himself from watching. “... I’m too scared.”

Her fingers stop, and her eyes fade a bit, and before James can get up the nerve to speak again she closes her booklet again causing a large CLAP sound to fill the room.

“ Well, thanks for this.” She says, and then moves to get up.

That was the end of it. James was too nervous to ask for any follow-up, at risk of scaring her out of the apartment, and at the end of it she said goodbye to him with a smile at the foot of their front door, a green scarf wrapped around her neck. James struggled not to frown as she closed the door.

He had gotten nothing out of her, and all he had gotten was a snicker and a punch in the arm from his roommates watching their whole goodbye exchange from the kitchen.

“ Well done casanova!” Sirius yelled, causing Peter to cackle loudly and Remus to choke on his coffee.

“ Shut up.” James stomped back to his room.

***

It was a dreary and cold winter day. It was around 8 days till opening, Remus was basically impossible to contact, Sirius was a mess, and Peter kept asking him whether either of them was getting better. And honestly, James had no idea. And at this point, everything was fucked to a point that nothing James seemed to do seemed to help, so he decided to let them figure their shit out themselves. They always seemed to anyway, whether James had to give them a little push or not.

Either way, James was tired. Whether it is because of emotional turmoil on behalf of his friends or just exhaustion due to the amount he’s been rehearsing alone in his room.

He has around 5 unread messages to Lily sitting on his phone.

He’s tired, and he’s still tired as he walks to Madam Puddifoot’s to get his best friend coffee to nurse his broken heart, and almost eats shit while walking on the ice-covered sidewalk.

He recovers though, grabbing onto a nearby pole, a shrill laugh coming from in front of him.

In all scenarios James could have thought of to get him angry on his day of rest, this would possibly be the one that would make him the most furious.

In front of him, standing in all his greasy glory is the little man James has hated since primary.

“ What are you doing here?” He spits out, standing up straighter.

“ Wasn’t aware you owned all of London.” Snape snaps back.

“ Well, it would benefit from the lack of your greasy presence.” James moves to walk past the git and just as he does, an arm grabs onto his.

By instinct, and also disgust, James snatches his arm away, and just for good measure, pushes Snape back by the shoulder.

“ What the fuck are you doing?”

“ Have you talked to Lily recently?” Snape says, freezing James immediately to where he was wiping off his jacket sleeve from where Snape grabbed him.

“ What? No.” He says.

“ Really?”

“ I don’t see how it’s your business if I’ve talked to Lily or not.”

“ Well you're doing that daft play with her are you not?”

“ Yeah? I don’t see how that has to do with anything.” This was weird, and James just wanted to get away at this point. Even sitting in Sirius’s smoke-filled bedroom would be better than this.

Snape seems to consider what James has said, he stares down at his shoes, his hands clenched.

“Everything is always just so easy for you.” He says pompously. He then walks away, leaving James completely horrified on the street.

And just like she was summoned, James’s phone rings, a text from Lily, reading:

Are you free to talk tomorrow?

Chapter Text

It was late August and as soon as he got back from Wales he held himself over the toilet seat of their flat’s bathroom.

Nothing was coming out, but even then his head was spinning. When he had decided to miss around two days of classes for a trip back home he didn’t expect to be ambushed as soon as he got there.

Their cottage on the edge of Solva was clean, there were things taken off the walls, some of his mother’s projects, even though they were raggedy and unfinished, were no longer hanging on the walls. That should've been the first sign that something was off, but the way that his father spoke, like all the emotion had left at the door and that it was just his body-carrying conversation made Remus feel unsure even in his own childhood home.

Something was wrong, Remus was at least smart enough to know that. A parent doesn't exactly call in the middle of their son’s shift on a Tuesday asking for him to come home if everything was dandelions and rainbows. As he packed his bag manically in his room, James and Peter had tea in the kitchen, Sirius stood in the doorway, arms crossed, he was never that good at giving him space.

His mother was sitting on their living room couch as he walked in, reading and nursing a cup of tea. She looks up and her eyes brighten, a slow and gentle smile spreading across her face as Remus sits down on a chair opposite of her.

“ Mum? What's going on?” He asks, he carefully glances at his dad, his mouth is clamped shut on his face, he straightens his glasses, and avoids eye contact. He takes his mother’s hand and holds it tightly. Remus can feel his stomach flooding with dread.

“ Remus.” His mother says, still smiling.

A day and a half later, he’s back in his flat, huddled over the toilet.

As much as he wants to, nothing comes out. Nothing is coming out, but it feels like all his feelings are dripping out of every orifice of his body. He shuts his eyes and listens to the distant ringing in his ears and he tries to imagine…. To imagine…

“ Moony.”

Sirius is standing at the door again, arms crossed. His brow is furrowing, he looks tired, and judging from the stains on stains on his uniform it looks like someone had a tough day at the garage.

“ I told you to call me once you got back.” He says. Tone not wavering, this was a normal sight for him. It was mostly Remus’s fault, he left the door to the bathroom open.

Remus turns back towards the toilet bowl, grossly enough, “ I forgot.” He says gruffly. Sirius snorts and moves to close the door, he does, and then he sits beside him on the bathroom floor, shoes still on.

“ Prongs and Wormy are still in class, so you have about an hour before you have to quit wallowing and tell us what happened,” Sirius says matter-of-factly. He stares off to space, more specifically to the bathroom door. Remus just hums something in response, this seems to get Sirius’s attention.

“ Leave without warning, no explanation…” He says tiredly, his voice is strained but even still there's a melody in the way he speaks. Remus tries not to let this make him cave in.

“ Get’s back, still no explanation…” He continues, he turns his head slowly to look at Remus. Remus looks back, eyes half-lidded now.

“ When I left I didn’t know why either.” Is all he says.

“ …And now?”

They sit still, it's quiet. Somehow Remus’s life had felt like a bunch of pit stops, like every time he’s finally on a train to satisfaction, something blocks the road. This time’s pitstop feels like a cruel joke. God was definitely laughing at him. Give the sick kid a sick mom, bet that got the whole audience roaring. He’s trying to think if his feelings for his friend were a pit stop or not, because if anything, him loving Sirius never stopped him. He always seemed to keep going. Peculiar that.

Like every time in Remus’s life, Sirius’s voice brings him out of his thoughts.

“ Isn’t this familiar?”

“ What?”

“ This? The toilet, the bathroom.” He says, gesturing to their surroundings. It clicks in Remus’s head. The choir concert, the bathroom before the choir concert.

“ Oh. Yeah. That.” Remus gives a silent chuckle, he tries not to notice how Sirius smiles at him.

“ You saved me that day.”

Remus laughs again at that.

“ Yeah, laugh it up. Everything I say is always so funny to you isn’t it?” Sirius says, there's a bite in his voice that surprises Remus as he gets up from the toilet seat.

“ I’m just a big joke to you aren’t I?” He continues and Remus feels his emotions drip and drop into puddles onto the floor.

“ That's not true.”

“ You know it's fine. I know I'm overbearing, James tells me as much.”

Remus just continues to stare.

“ My parents tell me as much-” He laughs dryly,” God don’t I know it.”

“ My mum has cancer.”

Remus says, he's sitting fully up now, his elbow resting on the seat, somehow his hand has almost intertwined with Remus’ on the floor.

“ Oh-” Sirius spits out, his face is almost blue now. “ Moony, I’m sorry-”

“ It’s alright.”

There’s silence again.

“ You didn’t have to tell me. I’m sorry if I guilt-tripped you-”

“ No, you're right, I shouldn't keep it from you.”

He intertwines their fingers.

“ No secrets, remember?”

Sirius scooches over along the bathroom wall, and Remus sits beside him, back to the wall. They don’t look at each other, just sit there, hands still, sterile white walls staring back at them.

“ You're too good to me.”

“ Sirius.”

“ I don’t deserve it.”

“ Eh.” Remus shrugs good-humoredly, “ We help each other.”

Sirius smiles, a small one, one that Remus barely sees, it makes him feel like a light has started within him.

“ Bad day at work?” Remus asks, Sirius predictably snorts at the ill-toned question.

“ Some lady’s BMW refused to start and she let me have it.”

“ I’m guessing you didn’t take that very well.”

“ Nope. I completely lost it. Ted told me to take the rest of the day off. Hence-” He gestures to the bathroom.

“ I’m sure she deserved it.”

“ She did! And her idiot kid was screaming the whole time, god it was a nightmare.”

“ Welcome to the 9 to 5 life,” Remus says.

“ Hey. If it means I don’t have to go back to school then I'm good.

“ You hated it that much?”

He sighs silently out of his nose and leans his head back against the bathroom wall.

“ Just don’t think school was for me.”

“ ‘Nothing wrong with that.”

“ I might have to go back if it means keeping up with your smart arse though.” He says, he elbows Remus softly in the arm. Remus laughs for real this time.

“ You won’t need to.” He says genuinely, something Remus can’t decipher flashes in his eyes. He looks down to his heavy boots sitting across the room to the door.

“ When Uncle Alpharad died I told myself that I was going to do something with meaning. That I would do what I want, and what I want is to make people happy.” He taps his finger in Remus’s palm, and Remus watches him as he slowly turns his gaze from his shoes to Remus’s face.

“ Are you happy Moony?” He asks.

He thinks about the question, looking away from Sirius’s glassy eyes. He thinks of his Mother, sitting on the burgundy couch, clasping his father’s hand like a lifeline, while she told him that she was basically ending her own life. He thinks of pit stops, and late nights in the Hogwarts dormitories, laying in a mess of blankets and pillows that he and friends threw to the ground to be closer. He thinks of plays, fake blood, and writing in his journal. He thinks of smiles.

“ I don’t know.” He says, squinting on the floor tiles, they multiply by the second.

“ Huh.” Sirius just responds, a minute later Remus finds himself sniffling, keeping wetness from flowing out of his eyes.

“ I’m sorry about your Mum Remus.”

About an hour later Remus relays the story of his visit to James and Peter who give him sympathies and pat his back while they find an old VHS tape of Sweeny Todd on their flat’s busy shelf. But at that moment, Remus cries, he lets any feeling he was keeping inside fall out of his eyes, onto Sirius’s shoulder as he holds him, in their small flat’s bathroom in London.

***

Friday, January 2 | 1 day till opening

“ Get up.” His father says while throwing Remus’s jacket on top of his childhood bed where he was seconds ago in a fitful sleep.

“ Wha-huh?” Is all he manages out, all his Dad does is turn on the lights and slam the door back open as he leaves.

“Where are we going?” Remus says as he’s lacing his snow boots. His father just sighs out of his nose and opens the door and waits for Remus to walk out of it.

“ The market.” His father says.

“ This early?!”

“ Want to get there while everything is fresh,” He throws a hat to Remus and he catches it as it sharply hits his chest, “now c’mon.” He shoves Remus out the door when he’s nothing more than a ghost and as they walk his father barely says anything to him. It's a winter market, there will barely be any actual food there, so his dad’s excuse of getting any while it's “fresh” is probably just an excuse to pester Remus out of bed early. Because that's all his dad does, pester.

As they get to the market, the shop is barely setting up and Remus puts his head down as his dad attempts to barter in the cold winter air for some kind of meat that he's too depressed to even notice.

He tries not to think what Sirius would be doing right now. Probably setting up for the show, joking with James, and teasing Peter. No doubt they don’t need him to be there, despite the amount of times Remus imagined the opening. But there's no way he could go back now, he got what he wanted and he ran away, breaking the heart of probably the person he loved most. He lied and he cheated, and what he got from it was a musical and a confession he was too much a coward to respond to.

No life with him is easy. He already struggles with the guilt of having to live in that flat knowing that his flatmates have to pick up the pieces of him a few times a month. The musical was supposed to be a gift, something to make everyone feel better. He feels like he just made everyone’s life harder. He thinks of Lily, crying into his shoulder at the diner. The way Sirius looked when Remus left the garden, the sad smile Euphemia gave him as he left with his bags.

He really was a burden, wasn’t he.

“ What do you think?” His father says bringing him out of his wallowing.

“ Huh?”

“ What do you think?” His father repeats, this time in a more annoyed tone than the last time. He’s holding up two different-sized carrots and looking at Remus with his eyes wide, waiting for an answer.

“ Uh. I don’t know,” He points limply at one,” That one.” His father just gruffs, hands the one that Remus didn’t point to the cashier, and buys it all while mumbling.

“ You should be taking this more seriously.”

“ What?”

“ You should be taking this more seriously since you’ve decided to show up randomly without telling me or your mother.”

“ I’m sorry.”

His father just squints and turns away from the booth, taking the bag from the cashier and walking away, Remus following behind him.

“ We know you're sorry.” Is all his Father says, it makes him want to sink into the ground.

“ We know you're sorry, so today you will show it. We're going to bake something for your mother and then you're going to apologize to her at the hospice. God knows she’s been losing herself with worry ever since I called her and told her that you came home out of nowhere in the middle of the night.” He stops in the empty path of the market.

“ And we all know she doesn’t need that. You should know especially.”

“ I know Dad,” Remus says, like an order, like he’s always done since he was a child.

“ I truly don’t know how you’ve turned out like this.” He stops at another booth. Remus stands frozen behind him.

His dad deeply sighs and adjusts his glasses on his face. “ Such a mess. At least get your choices in order instead of just coming back and crying like a child.” He says this with some kind of knowing like he’s in on some secret that Remus didn’t know about. For a moment Remus’s heart starts and he thinks there's no way-

He buys something else from the booth, Remus is too unfocused to realize what he's buying, so he aggressively shoves the bag into Remus’s arms and continues to walk, Remus still standing in the same spot as he hears him grumble something to him under his breath.

“ You're not a child anymore Remus.”

***

They return from the market, and his father says a few words to him as he leaves Remus to bake in the kitchen with the ingredients he got from the market. After he’s done, they leave for the hospital. Remus sits in a fold-up chair next to his mom’s hospital bed, the tin of carrot cake beside them on the side deck of the bed. His father told him not to be a child, so he’s doing his best. He’s sitting there, keeping in tears and words unsaid as he keeps his sick mother company.

“ Don’t take the job. Stay here.”

“ I love you.”

He hears those words repeated in his nightmares now. It’s a cruel joke, it's all a cruel joke. Somewhere in Remus’s shoddy, frail mind child Remus is yelling, yelling about promises and secrets. And somehow Remus can’t get himself to listen, it’s too hard to.

“ Remus, love, I can practically hear you thinking.” His mum says, she’s cradling a cup of tea Remus brought her in her lap. She’s smiling, but in the hospital bed with the window next to her providing the only light in the room she looks weak. It makes Remus feel uneasy all over again.

“ I’m sorry.” He says. “ I know you and Dad didn’t want me here.” He says, he spills his guts out, as it seems everyone is now.

“ Remus stop, you know that isn’t true.” His mother says, her voice is frail

“ I can’t think of what else could be.”

“ Remus.” She sighs tiredly. It makes Remus feel only worse. He’s not supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be home with the Potters right now. Drinking hot chocolate and laughing at some stupid joke James made. He’s not supposed to be back in Wales.

“ We thought it would be best for you to be at the Potter’s for Christmas.” She says, stretching across the hospital bed to grab Remus’s hand. “ We didn’t want anything to affect your studies, you had already been doing so well.”

“ So you’ve said.”

“ You’ve always been so reliant on us for approval.”

“ What?” Remus looks up from his hands, his mum is no longer smiling, she looks at him steadily, holding her frail hand in his.

“ The truth is cariad…” She starts, “ I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

“ I didn’t want you to see that I could no longer care for you.” She says sadly.

Remus finds himself stopped in time. He can’t even bring himself to hold his mother’s hand, it sits there, his mum clasping his fingers.

“ I would never tell your dad this but-” She looks away for a second, “ I want to go with no regrets, I don’t want you torturing yourself because I’m this way, and if that means that you see me as callous then that’s fine.”

Hope Lupin was like cool fresh air on a summer’s day. She worked her whole life as a teacher and no matter how hard it got she kept going, and even as she had to give up the job to take care of her sick kid she never regretted any of her decisions. Remus always knew he would see it in her eyes, the way she would push more books onto his desk while he read, and the way she hugged him as he got off the train back from Hogwarts.

When Remus first acted upon the stupid decision that led him to hate his face forever, the decision that had him tumbling down the stone steps to the ground, he found himself huddled in the corner of his room, prevented from looking at any shiny surface. It was right after his parents had told him about Hogwarts and he felt like his life was ending.

“ Remus? Cariad? Unlock the door?” He heard his mother call from outside his door. In response, Remus said nothing, just buried his head in his knees.

And then he hears a click, and his door opens.

As he looks up, his mother enters, holding up a key and grinning shyly.

“ We have a key, sorry love.” She says, she sits in front of him on the floor. Her dress bunching at her knees. His carpeted floor must hurt her knees, is all he can think.

“ Remus, I know you're mad.”

Mad didn’t even seem to cover it, so Remus looked rudely away from his mother’s gaze.

“ I think you’ll like it there, there's only so much I can teach you before you pass me.”

“ Your special Cariad. You and that mind of yours.” As she says this she taps his forehead lightly.

“ We don’t deserve it.”

She grew up, took a risk, fell in love with some British man her family deemed strange and throughout it all took her life in stride. Remus loved her, and no matter the number of times his insecure brain would make him think his parents hated him, he would never think in a million years that “regret” would spill out of his mother’s mouth like it just did.

“ Something happened at the Potters. I assume that’s why you're here?” She says bluntly. She stares determinedly into Remus’s eyes as he struggles to answer.

“ Something happened at the Potters.”

“ And I can assume that it had something to do with Sirius.” She says so easily.

“ You can.”

“ We're not going to be awakened again in the middle of the night with the boy at your window are we?”

Remus laughs despite himself. “ No mum.” He says.

“ Good.” She looks down at her hands, away from Remus. “ While that would make things easier.”

“ He never really did make things easy for me.” He finds himself saying, he doesn’t know where it comes from.

“ He doesn’t?” She tilts her head in a questioning manner like this surprises her. “ You're certainly not making things easier for him. Being that you're here and not in London, and your show opens tomorrow.”

Remus stops.

“ …What?” He says.

“ Effie mentioned it over the phone.” She responds flatly. Her eyes show no shine and truly at this moment, Remus feels like he’s in a hole with no ladder to get up. Remus guesses that's all mums do these days, trade secrets to ruin their kids’ lives. Everything is raging through Remus’s mind at this moment so all he can say is a weak-

“ I’m sorry.”

“ It’s alright Remus.” She looks away. “ I guess it’s partly me and your father’s fault.”

Remus says nothing.

“ Remus?” She says lightly, in a way, Remus feels like a ghost, like he’s nonexistent. “ Are you happy?”

“ I don’t know.” He says, he squints at his fingers in his lap.

“ Well, are you trying to be?”

“ I- I don’t know mum.” He says, eyes watering unwillingly.

Somewhere his mind child Remus is yelling at him.

***

Friday, January 3 | 13 hours till opening

Early the next morning Remus sits in his childhood bed awake. He hadn’t been able to sleep that whole night, his parent’s words haunting him.

Is he happy?

He thinks of Sirius on that bathroom tile, the smell of oil and coffee as he cries into his friend’s shoulder. Had he been happy this whole time and just not known it? But how could that even be possible?

After all this time Sirius was never a pitstop, if anything Sirius kept him going, but it was all just fantasy to him. The fantasy of being with Sirius could never happen, because there was always a hospice or an evening spent in the bathroom that convinced him that the only place Remus deserved to be was in some place with nurses attending to him. He could never put that on someone, and as he sat there at his mother’s side, just like Sirius did with him with Led Zeppelin playing in the back of his room, the reality struck him.

His illness didn’t make him very satisfied, pushing his friends away because of his illness didn’t make him very satisfied. It certainly didn’t make Sirius happier, all the times he had to sit there as the man with icy eyes yelled at him for his unwillingness to let him help him.

A new ending never even seems like a possibility, how would one write a new ending for oneself? Despite this, he saw endings rebuilt constantly. Sirius had quit college in an instant when his uncle had died, he had started up a musical to make Remus happy. Making a new ending for himself, the concept seemed so foreign to Remus that it made him sweat up in hives, it made him run away from his friend’s home and cry to his parents about how shit his life had gotten.

He gets up without knowing how, somehow his legs are moving and he’s in his kitchen, making tea. His father is behind him, reading the paper, Remus doesn't see it but his tired eyes follow him carefully, like he's about to break in front of his eyes.

If he never wanted to be happy, why did he continue to sit with the Marauders at lunch? Why did he go on with this musical even though he knew that it would show too much of himself at the end?

How long had his feet been stuck to the ground, how long had he been reaching for the stars with no progress?

As the teapot boils and Remus pours hot water into his mug where the earl gray tea bag sits he looks up to a painting his mother made hanging in the kitchen.

It was a night sky, and right below, painted with about two strokes of gray paint was the shape of a wolf.

Something clicks in his mind and he’s turning back around to his father. His father takes a sip from his mug and raises his eyebrows at Remus over his paper.

“ I’m going back to London,” Remus says. He doesn’t feel like himself, he feels like a puppet, but despite this before his father can say anything he’s walking back to his room to pack a bag. He’ll have to buy a ticket at the station and if he leaves now he’ll be late, but most likely be able to get there around intermission. Remus is doing this. He’s doing this.

He's not moving that fast, but his breath is hitching. As he makes his way to the front door his father stops him with a loud clearing of his throat.

“ Make sure to tape it for me and your mum.” He says.

Remus just stares at him in surprise.

“ Send it in the post.” His father continues. All Remus can bring himself to do is nod curtly as he closes the door behind him.

As he makes his way down the cottage path and into Solva he somehow finds himself running. His vision blurring and his breath getting shallower by the minute. And somehow, he’s on a train back to London.

He’s sitting back on a train to London and as he is, he takes out his journal and starts writing. As he does, Sirius’s lovely melodic voice rings through his mind repeatedly.

“ Why are you so against happily ever afters?”

Chapter Text

“Lily.”

A soft voice was speaking into her ear, she felt her eyes slowly flutter open to see her mum smiling at her from where she was lying on their couch in front of the TV. The air was warm and smelled like pumpkin like a previously used kitchen. The credits on the TV were flickering past quickly on the BBC version of Sense and Sensibility they had been watching, somehow Lily had unconsciously fallen asleep.

“ Time to go to bed love.” Her mother says, her brown hair is held back in a bun behind her neck, and her eyes show fatigue but her smile doesn’t. Beside Lily, she hears a snort and looks over to see Petunia snoozing on the arm of the couch. Her mother sighs as she gets up to pick up her little sister in her arms. She turns a bit in her sleep but doesn’t wake as her mother hauls her from the couch, Pet’s head and arms drooping like a ragdoll. Lily rubs her eyes and makes her way back to her room.

As she settles into bed her mum peeks her head from her door, now Petunialess.

“ That girl can sleep through anything I swear.” Says her mum, she sits on Lily's bed, beside her legs.

“ You should’ve just left her,” Lily says bluntly, this just makes her mother smile wider.

“ Yeah but that would've been very kind wouldn’t it.”

“ So what,” Lily says sleepily, her eyes are heavy, and she lies her head on her pillow. Her mum rubs her feet and exhales from her nose.

“ So, your sister would have woken up aching from sleeping on the couch. I don’t mind having to carry her back to her room.”

“ But it's so much work.” Lily huffs.

“ It’s worth it in the end.” Her mum says, her eyes light. She pats Lily’s knee and gets up from her bed to turn Lily’s light off.

“Night Lily.” She says, flicking the switch on the wall.

It’s the last thing Lily sees before it all goes dark.

***

Friday, January 3 | 9 hours till opening

“How do you know that? I could just not show up.”

“ I just do.”

The man trotted out of the theater grinning, boots clicking as he walked. Lily had never hated someone more.

She would call Remus later.

That stupid conniving, sniveling grin, it's the grin some little boy would give before pulling a girl’s pigtails on the playground. James had it, and yet whenever Lily thought about that grin on his face, her heart would now sink into deeper pools of depression.

Maybe she was a terrible person, perhaps she didn’t have the gall to be able to put in the work for someone she loved. But hell if she commits to something she's going to finish it.

It was almost below 10 degrees, and the cold filled all of Lily’s senses as she had to run through the snow to their last dance practice before opening.

“ Last practice!” Mary chimes in as they clamber out of the tube. She then slips on some ice on the road and smiles as Lily grabs her arm to prevent her from falling. “ How ‘you feeling?” She says, a glint in her eyes as she whips her hair back from her face.

“ Fine,” Lily says, slightly out of breath from the tube stairs. In a way that is meant to convince herself she repeats her words, less shaky. “ Yeah, I’m fine.” She doesn’t catch Mary’s worrying look as a bright light catches her eye as they pass. Lily jerks to a stop, a sudden idea popping up in her head, and as she walks into the brightly lit store, Mary follows, yelling her name in confusion.

“ Lily?”

30 minutes later she arrives at the dance studio with two dozen donuts in hand, with a partly puzzled, partly proud Mary at her side.

Lily takes a deep breath, trying to keep her eyes from watering, and speaks.

“ Good morning!”

Previously in chattering discussion, all the dancers sharply turned to her at once, and the room went silent making Lily’s skin crawl. Lily almost loses her nerve if Mary doesn’t slightly shove her with her elbow.

“ I-uh- It’s been a hard few months and I just wanted to say that I’m so proud of everyone.” She says to the still room. Alice, the dancer who gave her well wishes earlier, smiles kindly while reaching for her foot in a leg stretch on the studio floor.

With a little more courage she continues, “ I bet a lot of you could tell but this is my first time choreographing any sort of um-” Her throat wells up, glasses and a familiar loud chuckle flash in her mind, an empty table, a cafe door slamming. As she struggles for breath a few of the dancer’s eyebrows upturn in sympathy.

“ -any sort of big production like this, but I just wanted to thank everyone for all the support and for being so patient with me.” She manages out, at this Mary pats her gently on the back and opens up the box of donuts she’s holding.

She doesn’t end up crying but she gets a few hugs, from Alice, Mary, and surprisingly from Benjy, and as she continues and finishes the rehearsal she feels a bit relieved. There's still a pretty big hole in her chest but it seems a bit more manageable, at least until she’s forced to face her problem head-on.

As she leaves she and Mary walk out into the hallway and she sees a bundle of red hair walk towards her in the hallway, by instinct Lily bows her head and smiles, Molly returns it and continues walking. Mary side-eyes her a bit and something inside Lily clicks and she turns around, spinning on the ball of her foot.

“ Um-! Molly!” She stops, and Mary stops with her.

“ Yes, dear?” Molly stops where she is too, clutching a coloring book to her chest.

“ Your favor? About teaching the kids, I have some free time opening up soon so I- I’d be willing to help out if you still need people.”

There's a moment when they stand a foot apart, Molly’s eyes are wide, and Mary looks at her bewildered for the second time today. Molly seems to not have expected this either as she slightly sputters out her next words. “ Oh- no, that would be wonderful!” She says.

Lily determinedly nods and Molly grins, her cheeks widening.

“ I can email you the details later this week!” She says, Lily grins back.

“ That would be great, thank you Molly.”

“ Of course love.” She says, and then turns back around.

Lily continues to walk, a surprised Mary stands still behind her, and she runs back up to Lily in the hall.

“ What is up with you?” Mary says.

***

They show up later for a cast meeting at the theater right before opening, She and Mary show up with red noses and cold breath. Marlene now accompanied them, being that at the last minute, she had spent so much time backstage, that Peter had elected her unofficial stage crew. Lily’s heart beat fast as they opened the loud theater door to a crowd gathering by the edge of the stage. Throughout the thing, she told herself she would at least have a buffer in Remus, but to her astonishment, the man still wasn’t there. There was excited discussion around them, people moving their hands freely and as they walked up the aisle something became known to Lily. The air was excited up to where James, Peter, and Sirius stood. They stood almost solemn, James carried on a conversation with Emmeline but his eyes looked the same as they did in the cafe, tired. Peter looked like he was about to nod out right there, and Sirius’s hair was up in a ponytail behind his head and strands stuck up so statically like he rubbed his head against a carpet. He had dark circles below his eyes and she swore she would smell cigarettes even a well distance away. They made eye contact as she walked up with Marlene and Mary, he smirked at her and it made her stomach churn.

James didn’t look at her. She told herself to call Remus later again.

He was wearing a dark sweater and jeans, looking the most dull she had ever seen him. He didn’t use any gestures as he chatted, just nodded providing small smiles. It’s like someone zapped all the energy out of him. Lily would’ve guessed the man would be mopping more, but as Lily wondered this, he looked to his side where Sirius was probably digging into his pocket for a cigarette, he then shoved him slightly in the arm and glanced pointedly to the rest of the group.

Lily stared at James, at his hands and how he shoved them back in his pockets, for a second she thought she saw him look at her, but just as she did a loud clap shook her out of her trance.

“ Ok!” Easily getting everyone's attention, Sirius stood at the edge of the stage, looking fed up but willing.

“ We were going to have our director give a speech before we got started but as he is missing-” Sirius says this pettily, like a dog, and James only frowns at him as he continues. “ I’m going to give one, and since I am woefully unprepared, I have nothing to say but-”

“ Don’t fuck this up.”

He says, one hand with a cigarette, and the energy in the room dips, James looks at him with frustration and Peter looks to be nursing a headache. Sirius looks upon the cast without regret claps his hands together again and then grins cartoonishly.

“ Happy opening!”

The speech was terrible, Mary looked horrified and before James could lecture him Sirius stalked off to the alley, cigarette still in hand. As James looks at his best friend walking out of the theater Lily somehow finds herself walking toward him.

“ Where’s Remus?” She finds herself saying, she’s looking at his face but nothing is registering.

“ Huh?” He says, his eyes quickly shooting from where he was watching the door to Lily’s face.

“ It’s opening day and he’s not here. Where is he?” She reiterates.

“ Well he never said when he was getting back so-” James stammers out, before he finishes Lily shoves past him and begins walking backstage. Anger Lily can work with, anger is easy. James might have been watching her as she left, she makes herself keep walking until she hits a small empty corner backstage. It’s colder than the rest of the theater and there’s dust collecting in the corner, Lily digs her phone out of her pocket and dials a number aggressively.

Unexpectedly she hears a voice pick up at the other end.

“ Hello?”

“ You fucking dickhead!” She yells, a stagehand passes by holding a box, he gives her a weird look but keeps walking.

“ Look I’m sorry-” Remus says from the other line.

“ Where are you right now?!”

“ On a train.” He says shortly.

“ Better be to London.”

“ It is.”

“ Good.”

There's a silence, Lily sits in the desolate corner backstage, and she listens to the dull noises of the train on the other line.

“ You know how hard it's been here without you?”

“ What?” Remus says. He hasn’t been here, he doesn’t know anything.

“ I’ve ruined everything.” She says dejectedly, she’s probably saying more than she should.

“ You’ve ruined- What? Lily, what's going on?”

She takes a deep breath, trying not to get her eyes wet again, and keeps talking.

“ Severus told me everything, about the spiking and the expulsion.”

“ Oh,” Remus says quietly.

“ And I don’t know- I was angry and confused and-” She hears nothing from the other line so she just keeps going. “ It’s just so much easier to be angry, but I’m hurting him, but I can’t get myself to just let go.” Her voice breaks. “ I’m terrible.”

“ You're not terrible Lily.”

“ Yes! Yes, I am!” She yells, “ I’ve put so much work into everything! And it’s so hard! And Petunia’s getting married and my Dad doesn’t need me anymore, and I-” She’s done it, she’s crying. Her whole wall has fallen, a few seconds ago her face was stone frozen, now she thinks if she has to show a whole crowd of people her heart, she’ll break down right then and there.

“ Lily, it’s ok.”

“ No, it's not ok! What am I supposed to do? I can’t act like this.” She’s yelling and sniffling and wiping tears, and it's all not very pretty. She thinks back to her heels on the ground of the London streets, minutes away from the Tesco, she feels very cold.

“ I think you can,” Remus says, not wavering, no tone of sympathy.

“...What?”

“ I think you can act. I think you can go up on that stage and act your heart out because you know what-” He takes a breath.

“What else can you do?”

“ ….What else can I do?” Lily repeats quietly.

“ Exactly,” Remus says.

“ Remus, I think you’ve lost it.”

“ Maybe.” He chuckles a bit, it's such a stark contrast to Lily’s state that it almost makes her angry. She’s standing there still like a statue, holding her phone to her face when Remus talks again.

“ I’ll be there around intermission.” He says.

“ Ok,” Lily responds, she can’t feel her hands.

“ I have a plan, don't worry.”

“ A plan? What are you talking about?”

“ See you in a few hours!” He yells, sounding almost… chipper. He then hangs up.

Deeper backstage Lily can hear Mary call for help from the changing rooms, Lily sits there and puts her phone back in her jeans pocket.

He’s absolutely lost it, and Lily was so fucked.

***

2 hours later Lily found herself behind curtains reciting mantras to herself. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and then breathes out, she then abruptly opens her eyes to a frazzled James Potter.

They stare at each other, Lily feels like she’s standing on hot coals, her dress sits comfortably on her but somehow it's hard to breathe.

“ What was that?” James said. It’s hard to be so scared of him when he’s standing there with animal ears but here Lily was. Anger is easy but Lily just keeps her eyebrows still on her head.

“ Just something I would do before recitals.” She says, James just blinks at her. “ Helps with nerves.” She says as James continues to stare at her.

“ Oh.” He says quietly. He stares at her, but also somehow behind her, as his eyes flicker back and forth between her and the wall. Lily hates it. She closes her eyes again but opens them when James speaks again.

“ Are you still mad at me?” He says. She looks at him, the face he makes is almost childish.

“ What if I am?”

“Then…” He starts, and like he loses his nerve, deflates.”...Nothing.” He huffs and looks to where the curtains sit motionless beside them. “ Just wanted to know where we stood.” An overture starts.

“ Like that's helpful.” She spits out. This seems to anger James enough that he looks sharply back towards her.

“ I don’t know what you want me to do Lily!”

“ I want you to get angry at me!”

“ I am!”

“ Good!” She yells, her chest heaving. James looks at her brows furrowed, confused but elated, and then the curtains open.

***

“ So then why do you keep coming back?” He says, the moon is only halfway through the cycle, his eyes glow in the dark anyway, making it hard to look away.

“ What?” She says, turning back to face as he sits below a tree.

“ You keep coming back, you must have a reason.” He looks at her pointedly, and she smiles.

“ I like your company.” She says, his eyes widen and then his brows furrow as he gets confused, she finds it almost cute.

“ I’m certain you’re capable of getting better company considering…” He looks at her and then glances at the moon. She snorts.

“ I don’t care about that.” She says, her cheeks getting warmer as she sits beside him at the foot of the tree in the parting of the woods. “ I like you better.”

She manages to guide him up from the foot of the tree and feels their feet grow lighter as he helps her off the ground, the stars guiding their way as they fill the split in the trees with music. He smiles as he lifts her into the air and as they run out of breath and find themselves on the floor the curtain closes and he frowns as roaring applause sounds behind them.

“ What's the use of being angry all the time?!” James stands up, he yells but it's still whispering as the crowd claps and moves to intermission. Stagehands move frantically behind them, Lily gets up from her place on the floor almost stunned by his sudden outburst and continuation of the argument before the curtains open.

“ Well, it certainly lets a person know where they stand” She mocks him, this only just makes him seemingly angrier.

“ God, you're unbelievable!”

“ I’m unbelievable?!”

“ YES!” He screams in a whisper. “ One minute we're fine and then the next you're spitting at my shoes!”

“ You poisoned my best friend!”

“ That was a long time ago! I already said sorry! I’m sorry that your best friend is a git but you don’t have to take it out on me!”

“ You're one to talk!”

“ Really?! Cause everythings just so easy for me?! You think this is all so easy for me? I don’t have feelings just because I have a little more handle on things than some people?!”

“ I never said you didn’t have feelings!”

“ Well, you certainly implied it!” He screams, in an attempt to probably look more serious he rips his ears off his head to ruffle his hair. “ You know how you act affects everyone right?! You're not the only one who’s having a hard time with all this!”

“ I know that!”

“ Do you Lily? Because I’m quite sick of seeing you sulk like this show is the worst thing that's possibly happened to you. Because frankly it isn’t, we all know it isn’t!”

“ I’m sorry if me being uncomfortable annoys you so much! But I’m not used to all this ok?!”

“ Lily, you're brilliant!” He yells out of the blue. Lily stands there unmoving, out of the corner of her eye she sees Sirius walk in, microphone at his ear, clipboard at his side, he stops as James makes his declaration.

“ You're so brilliant Lily, how many times do I have to say that to get that through that thick skull of yours?!” His fists are shaking, his hair sticking up from every end.

“ I like you a lot, all of you.” He says, quieter, not in a whisper. “ It angers me how you act like you don’t know it.”

Noone moves, Sirius stands at the door and Marlene and Peter are stuck still carrying a couch onto the other side of the stage. And then like a firecracker James picks up his ears from the floor and walks out stage left, passing a completely shocked Sirius. Sirius looks to Lily who is about still as he is and then looks to where James passed him and then runs after him.

***

Intermission is about 30 minutes long and as she sits in her dressing room, looking at her witch hat in front of her, there’s a polite knock on her door.

“ Lily- um, there's someone here to see you,” Marlene says, poking her head out the door. Her eyes carry a nervousness that makes Lily not want to hear her next words. “ It’s um-” Her voice lowers, “him”.

As Marlene gauges Lily’s reaction she bristles up, “ Tell me the word and I’ll send him away!”

“ No, it’s fine,” Lily says, almost in a murmur. Seconds later, her voice still feels weak as she stands out of her chair in front of Severus, as he examines the show’s playbill in his hands.

He fidgets with it and laughs cruelly, it makes Lily’s insides boil in betrayal. He raises his eyebrows and gestures with the playbill, rolled up in his hand, like an enemy on the edge of defeat. “This is- This is all,” He laughs again.

“ How long were you doing all this?”

“ About 6 months.” She says, one word after the other, no emotion. She can’t show weakness.

“ And you didn’t-”

Lily cuts him off, she’s more tired of him than anything, “ Didn’t think you’d react well.” She says shortly.

“ In the car, you told me anyway. Why?”

“ Something in me stopped caring what you thought.” She says plainly. His eyebrows tilt on his face showing sorrow, despite this Lily keeps her mouth still in a straight line.

“ You never cared what I thought.”

“ Maybe, but that never stopped you from voicing your senseless opinions.” She says more now with anger.

“ I warned you-!” He starts, “ I warned you about them- About Potter-!”

“ Don’t make this about him!” A flame restarts in her, she’s now yelling. “ Do you know how worried I was? When you’d get off that train and keep your mouth clamped up whenever I asked about school?!

“Lily-”

“ You thought you could keep being my friend, hiding this much from me. Why? Because you thought I would disapprove? Because I was too delicate?”

“ Lily it wasn’t-”

“ Tell me,” Her mouth is spilling out everything now, every thought she’s had in these desolate past few days, “ how much did you bully some poor sick kid before you were able to mail me telling me you came in third for exams?!”

“ I-”

Her voice breaks, “ I could’ve helped you.” Sev’s face falls, as Lily feels tears well up and she feels torn down to bits. “ I could’ve helped you study if you just told me.”

“ Lily, don’t you see.” He spreads his hands and waves the playbill in front of him. “ All this- it’s getting to your head.”

“ No. No, it isn’t.”

“ Lily, I’ve never seen you this distraught.”

“ I don’t think you’ve ever seen me.” She says, again without thinking. It almost surprises her how dark Sev’s face goes at this statement.

“ Lily,” He pleads.

“ Nothing's gonna stay the same forever Sev.” She says. They stare, his eyes look glassy, and for a moment Lily wants him to stay, to continue to fight but he doesn’t.

Her best friend leaves the room, the door slamming behind him, and just like that, it’s over.

***

Nothing really comes out once the door slams, no water from any part of her body, she gets a knock from the door and a calming, “ You ok?”. From Marlene who probably saw Sev leave.

Her voice breaks again, causing a screech as she struggles to yell back a response. “ Yeah! Just gimme a second!” She shuts her eyes on her face, forcing every thought to the back of her mind, she sits up in her chair, paces around her tiny dressing room, and then sits back down. She gets up again, squeezes her eyes hard, back facing the door, hands clenched on the table in front of her. And at that moment, in the darkness, she hears her door slam open. Rage heats in her stomach, she’s back in attack mode, and as she turns sharply back around she stops, looking at a person she didn’t expect to be there.

The person who is not who she expects is heavy panting, nose red like he just got in from the cold, ducking his head so it doesn’t hit the small dressing room door frame. Bumping his head anyway, he grins sheepishly at Lily’s surprised expression and walks in. His mousy brown hair is more unkempt than usual, and his accent seems thicker than usual when he speaks.

“ Hey,” Remus says, still grinning, he looks almost nervous now.

“ Remus?! What are you doing here?!”

“ I said I’d be back by intermission didn’t I?” He says, rubbing his head where he bumped it against the door frame. He starts up again but before he can get a solid word out Lily tackles him in a hug.

“ Marlene said- oh”

They sit there, Remus awkwardly patting her back, he smells like the woods and Lily has to stop herself from crying right then.

“ I’m guessing the first act went ok?” He says as she pulls away and wipes her eyes gingerly, so as not to smear her makeup.

“ It went ok,” She shrugs, making Remus laugh softly. “ James might as well hate me.” She then says, at this Remus frowns.

“ Just apologize.”

“ Don’t think that would work.” She laughs without humor and Remus just shakes his head.

“ Nah it would, I think he wants you to.” He says matters of factly, Lily stews in this, thinking about James’s eyes as he confessed to her behind the curtain. As she sits there, Remus brings something out of his bag. Its paper, not stapled together, looking like they were just shoved into a bag without thought, which she would guess at the state of Remus, is what happened. He hands them over, Lily takes them with shaky hands.

“ What’s this?” She scans the pages, it’s a script, a script from the show, but it’s not a scene they ever rehearsed.

“ A favor.” He says, causing Lily to look back up at his face, he’s smiling, but the sides of his mouth are quirking nervously. She looks at him a bit confused, and then puts her attention back to the paper, through reading it she realizes…

“ Remus this is-”

“ You think you can get it all down by curtain call?” He cuts her off nervously.

She looks at him and then back to the paper, she feels a tug in her gut. Somehow this feels like the most important thing in the world right now.

“ Yeah.” She says, “Yeah I think I can.”

Remus deflates with relief, “ Thanks, Lily. Your brilliant”

Her heart starts up again at the use of the word but she speaks anyway.“ No problem.” She responds. The air in the dressing room is quiet, with a sense of realization between the two that is hesitant to be said, before Lily can break it Remus speaks up.

“ I have a lot of work to do.” He says shortly. Lily just smiles and nods, understanding and encouraging.

“ Go get ‘em, tiger.” She says, lifting the mood a bit, and Remus smiles wider.

“ Knock their socks off, newbie.” He punches her softly on the shoulder and leaves the dressing room with the small smile he always carries with him, leaving Lily with a better feeling.

***

She’s running, her legs carrying her body across the lawn and into the forest behind the academy. Her lungs grow tighter by the minute, and as she finds herself tripping over a branch onto the ground, her shins scraping and becoming red, her body doesn’t emotionally catch up and she keeps running. Eventually, she hits a clearing, a lone figure in the middle, the moon, a single crescent showing brightly in the sky above. She feels a sense of dread as well as melancholy as she approaches the figure in the clearing. He doesn’t turn, he doesn’t look at her.

“ Hey.” She says, seemingly into nothing as her lover stays stagnant, feet planted at the ground. The tree they seldom talk at sits beside them, the leaves dropping to the ground as the air grows colder.
“ Hey, look at me.” She walks up and grabs his arm, not expecting the sharp flinch that occurs when she does. He steps away, expecting a look of disgust due to the flinch she steps back, but all she sees in his eyes is sorrow, deep, deep sorrow.

“ I’m sorry.” She says softly, tears almost flowing out of her eyes. “ I would’ve never expected that to happen-”

“ Wouldn’t you?” He interjects sharply, sounding different.

“ What?” She says, “ What are you talking about? That wasn’t my fault! I didn’t tell them-”

“ It doesn’t matter!” Interjecting again, his shouts cause her body to shake. She looks at him horrified. “ Whether you told them or not, it was bound to happen.”

“ What are you talking about? They choose a different dark-” He flinches at the word, she corrects herself with vigor, “ a different creature every graduation, it didn’t have to-”

“ So why was it? Why was it me? Tell me!”

There’s a silence as she finds herself speechless, the trees buzz around them, and the stars she finds, are no longer twinkling, they had even left behind in this moment.

“ This was a mistake.” He says quietly, as he’s trying to prevent her from hearing.

“ No.” She says quietly, if he hears her he doesn’t care.

“ This was all a mistake, I shouldn’t have let you in so far.” He continues, but louder.

“ No!” She finds herself wailing. He looks at her, no longer angry but not with any better emotion.

“ I’m leaving.”

“ What?”

“ I’m leaving, it was a bad idea to be this close to the academy, I have to leave or this will happen again.”

“ You don’t have to, I can protect you!”

“ You can’t.”

“ Yes, I can!”

“ Not forever!”

“ Yes forever!” She yells out. Days ago they had sat in this same clearing, the sun approaching, causing him to beg her to stay, and somehow she had found herself on the other side.

“ This target on my back.” He says, “ It never disappears, this-” He gestures in between them, “ It was never going to last.”

She finds herself speechless once again, like the past year was a big slap in the face, how long had he thought this?

“ I’m sorry.” He walks up and cradles her face softly before walking back to the deep ends of the woods.

Lily stands on the stage in her hat and dress, her feet feel stuck to the ground and she can feel the audience hold their breath as the silence carries on and James walks to stage left, ending the show. Instead of letting him walk, she changes her mind, throws her hand out in front of her, and yells-

“ Take me with you!”

James stops from where he was walking off stage with wide eyes, his eyes seem somehow brighter without his glasses. He’s frozen but frozen even more is Lily, she stands there, her arm out in front of her, and somehow her mind goes blank, everything she read from the script gone. She carries on anyway.

“ I don’t care about any of this-!” She says choppily, “ If you are not here.” She lowers her hand after gesturing about. James is still staring at her.

“ I can not continue through life without you.” She says, voice breaking, which she can’t tell is real or acting.

“ I’m sorry for everything, for me and my ignorant thick brain,” She says each word like a struggle, like her emotions are pouring out like they are for the most part.

“ For you, I would give up anything, the sky, the stars,” She gestures to the academy behind her, “ Let alone this.”

“ Please.” She pleads, having to take up space in the script since James seems determined to keep his mouth shut and just stare at her like some kind of goldfish.

There’s a silence, somehow the audience can tell that this is mostly improv on Lily’s part, and there is no music to go with Remus’s last-minute additions so all you can hear is Lily’s heavy breathing and a silent cough go off from the audience.

Finally, James’s face reacts, his eyebrows go up and he stands straight and to Lily’s shock, moves. He walks up to her and stands in front of her, she can’t help but notice how much taller he is than her, not by much, the ears definitely give the man some height though.

Almost making Lily’s heart stop, he takes both of her hands in his silently, looks down at them, runs a finger across Lily’s palm, and then looks up at her. Eyes curious, she meets him with a glance back, smiling hesitantly.

“That’s a tough bargain warlock.” He says with humor, smiling a smile that makes Lily’s face most likely get red like a tomato. She laughs though, clutching his hands in hers a bit tighter.

“ Well, I’ve handled worse.” She says and shrugs. “ So...”

“Do you trust me?” She asks hesitantly.

“ Trust you? God that’s an understatement.” She laughs again, either out of surprise or shock at James’s ill-toned improv. He looks at her though, straight in the eyes, keeps her hands in his and whether it was because of the scene or Lily’s newfound impulsiveness she leans forwards to catch his lips with hers. James complies, rather enthusiastically, looping his arms tight around her waist, she would laugh if applause didn’t start roaring from the audience at this very moment.

Even after the curtains slowly closed, James kept his arms still, shifting his nose more comfortably to her face, continuing to kiss her like the world was ending, or beginning, Lily didn’t seem to find herself caring.

Her fingers sifted through his hair and as they pulled apart she shook them, making his hair get messier and the ears on top lopsided. When she looks back he’s only grinning, but she finds herself happier than before.

“ Your brilliant Lily Evans.” He says through smiles and worn lips.

“ I know.” She responds and smiles back.

Chapter Text

I’m sorry. I’m a bit of a coward, and actually, I love you.

Remus repeats it like a mantra in his head, it would be the first thing he would say to Sirius once he sees him, he needs to get everything out in the open as soon as possible. He held the new ending in his lap, his hands slightly shaking. He doesn’t really consider what would happen if Sirius doesn’t forgive him, he’s taking a bit of a risk. His hands don’t stop shaking. The show is supposed to open around 7, his train arrives at London station at 8:15 and his taxi goes far too slow and before he knows it he’s running down the street to Zonko’s. When he finally makes it to the alley he has to set a hand against the wall to catch his breath, people crowding the alley, smoking or talking about whatnot. He gets a few stares his way, but he ignores it in favor of making his way into the theater. It’s a bustle of talking, people standing up in the aisles, he searches the crowd and finds James talking with his parents off on a corner stage. As Remus makes his way over, James’s face lights up as he sees him.

“ Moony!” James yells and then enraptures him in a bear hug, almost making him lose all feeling in his arms. “ I knew you’d make it!” He grins.

“ Good to see you.” James’s dad pats him on the back, the same amount of strength as James’s hug, he tries to not let it wear him down too much.

“ Good to see you too-” He starts, Effie cuts him off.

“ Oh love, I’m so sorry about Christmas, if I knew you weren’t telling people I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“ It’s fine, it’s my fault really.” He shrugs, Effie just pouts her lip and then smiles, he turns to James who’s still wearing his wolf ears on top of his head. “ Where is-?”

“ He’s backstage,” James grins even more, immediately responding,” Right I believe, apparently there's been a mishap with the sound, last time I saw him he said he was going to yell at Pete about it.”

“ Lily, I need to see Lily.” Remus says, James’s eyebrows raise in surprise, “ Where is she?”

“ Her dressing room,” James responds.

“ Great thanks.” Remus nods and then walks backstage.

“ Wait-” James calls from behind him, “ Remus!”

As he walks he can hear the small conversations coming from Effe and Monty, “ Poor dear looks a bit frazzled doesn’t he?”

“ He always does Mum.” He hears James say back.

***

Lily, his savior, takes the new script in stride, and he feels his feet get a bit lighter. As he walks out of the dressing room he runs into Peter, and the boy gives him a hug and a little bit of tears as well but he can’t be sure because fog seems to be clouding his eyes out of stress.

“ I always believed in you mate.” Peter sniffs, he may be getting a tad bit emotional about this. Peter lets him go and he begins his search for Sirius, which ends up taking way longer than he expects. He gets wrapped up with every person he comes across, Marlene yelling at him for his stupidity, Mary hugging him, even Frank, one of the stage managers who he's never talked to, pats him on the back and makes him haul a set piece to another side of the stage. Tired and restless from being unsuccessful in his search for about the whole second half of the show, he walks up the stairs from stage left. He tiptoes up the stairs and moves to walk backstage when a creak in front of him catches his attention coming from the stairs on the other side of the stage.

He was breathing rather heavily now, he probably looked a mess, he hadn’t even checked how bad his hat hair was before leaving the taxi over here. Sirius was looking at him, wearing the crew uniform, microphone taped to his cheek, his hair up revealing his neck. His eyes widened as he looked at Remus. He looked so tired.

The show was at its climax, the academy revealing James as the final test of graduation, he escapes and Lily runs after him, the orchestra getting louder and louder as the danger increases. It’s so loud in fact that when Remus first speaks Sirius has to ask for clarification, being that he whispers on account that they’re backstage.

“ Hi.”

“ What?” Sirius mouths.

“ HI!” He yells, and as soon as he says it the orchestra suddenly stops, leaving them in silence.

“ Oh, hi,” Sirius says, there's about a foot in between them, Remus can’t see as much detail on Sirius’s face as he would want for this. “ You made it back.”

“ I did.”

“ Rather late don’t you think?”

“ Well I got back around intermission, the crew has kept me busy.” He laughs shortly and high-pitched, it's not attractive and he punches himself mentally.

“ Ah,” Sirius responds, arms crossed around his chest. They don’t make any movements since the crowd would hear with the lack of music going. “ I got your present."

“ Oh, did you?”

“ Yeah,” The sides of Sirius’s move tilt a bit, “ Very funny.”

“ It wasn’t meant to be funny, it was supposed to be practical.” Remus insists, Sirius just snorts at this.

“I-” Sirius starts but the adrenaline is running through Remus’s blood and suddenly he’s opening his mouth and says something that is way too loud for backstage.

“ I’m a coward!” He yells, and any music that is now playing stops, Sirius looks at him, almost scared and they both share a look towards the stage, seeing if Remus’s words interrupted the show. Thankfully it looks like they didn’t and Sirius’s brow furrows and he quickly makes his way over to where Remus is, grabs his wrist, and pulls him to stage right. They stand by more stairs that go down to the dressing room, the whole stage now visible from their location. Sirius holds onto Remus’s wrist, and his cheeks go slightly red as he drops it after too long.

“What the hell are you on about?.” Sirius says.

“ I just uh-” His eyes look around erratically, he had this whole thing rehearsed in his head, but right now the words all jumbled together, and as he looked at his best friend’s face all he wanted to do was cry. “ I’m sorry for not telling you about Hogwarts, I was scared.”

“ Scared? Of what? Of me?”

“ No!” Remus whisper shouts, he then curls a bit more into himself, “ Well yes, in a way.” Sirius just looks at him confused, Remus takes a deep breath.

“ I was never going to take the job at Hogwarts.”

“ What?!”

“ I know I’m a burden and I know I’m hard to be around,” He says, “ I’m pretty insecure.”

“ Well, I know that,” Sirius says, Remus laughs a bit. “ So what was all this for? Why make this whole fuss if you were never going to take the job in the first place?”

“ I guess, “ Remus looks up from where he was folding his hands together, “ I guess I was just waiting for you to tell me not to take it.”

At this Sirius’s eyes got more glassy, “ I mean I did, but I don’t how you were expecting me to when you didn’t tell me,” He says, “ Not even mentioning that you ran as soon I told you not to go.”

“ I know, and I shouldn’t have done that, I guess…,” He gestures around aimlessly with his hands, “ I have a bit of a fight or flight response.” He shrugs, “ And I was scared.”

“ Scared of me?”

“ I don’t…” He starts, “ I don’t want to weigh you down, you deserve more than that.” He gulps, “ You deserve more than me.”

They stand in silence, the sounds of the orchestra accompanying Lily and the company as she runs through the forest.

“ Well, fuck that!” Sirius suddenly yells, Remus would almost jump out of his skin if there wasn’t a show going on.

“ Sirius!” He whispers.

“ I don’t care about that!” Sirius keeps going, albeit quieter after Remus shushes him, “ I’m not going to let some invisible force tell me what I deserve or not!” He looks at him, “ Remus I want you. It’s all I've wanted since I was kid, and you can’t take that away from me, you and you’re-” He pushes him slightly, “ -cowardice, even though Remus, that is some bollocks, you are about the bravest person I know.”

Remus wants to cry, or scream, or maybe both. “ Sirius, I’m so sorry,” He manages out wobbly.

“ I said it was fine Remus.”

“ Really I had no right to act like that,” He’s rambling now, his words aren’t getting out right, “ After how I’ve been acting, what I’ve been doing, I shouldn’t have just up and left like that.”

“ Wait-“

“ I guess I was just so scared and I never even thought about how you would feel other than the fact you would find me disgusting.” He laughs without humor.

“ This was all a mistake, I shouldn’t have let you in so far.” James continues on the stage.

“ Wait, Remus,” Sirius stops him.

“ Huh?”

“ What you’ve been doing? What are you talking about?”

“ The show? The music?”

Sirius just stares at him.

“ Are you-?” He stops himself from saying it, “ You didn’t know?”

“ Know what Remus?” Sirius runs a hand through his hair but stops as he realizes it’s up. “God it feels like I’m having a stroke, why are you acting like I know everything?”

“ You don’t know everything?”

“ No! I never do, especially when it comes to you.” His arms are crossed and tucked around his chest, “ You're like a map in some made-up language Remus, I can never figure you out.”

“ I’m leaving, it was a bad idea to be this close to the academy, I have to leave or this will happen again.”

“ You don’t have to, I can protect you!”

“ You didn’t know?” Remus repeats.

“ Know what Remus?!”

Remus takes a breath, at this point he figures he might as well just come out and say it.

“ What did you think this whole thing was about Sirius?” Remus says, “ It’s been you, it’s always been you.” Remus looks at Sirius, his grey eyes staring back at him.

“ Everything has been about you Sirius, god everything I’ve written since I was 12 has been for you.”

“ Take me with you!” Lily yells out from the stage, hand held up high, Sirius looks suddenly out and then back to Remus, assuming an impromptu script change, Remus just keeps his eyes on him, refusing to move even as Lily continues to go off-script.

“ Did you-?”

“ I ran it to Lily during intermission.”

“ I don’t care about any of this-!” Lily yells choppily, “ If you are not here. I can not continue through life without you.”

“ I’m sorry for everything, for me and my ignorant thick brain,”

That wasn’t in the script, he was just happy that she got the gist of it anyway, he did run it by her 10 minutes before curtain call after all.

“ Do you forgive me?” Remus says nervously. He could almost feel a sweat droplet fall down his forehead, breathing was still hard for him since he’d run from that cab and this heart hurt, both literally and figuratively.

“ I already said I did you idiot,” He laughs and Remus’s heart flies, “ Your mental.” He rubs a hand across his face as Lily continues to blunder on stage.

“ For you, I would give up anything, the sky, the stars,” That line at least is from Remus’s script, “ Let alone this.” She says.

Sirius seems to register the words, as he looks back to Remus who has tried to inch more towards him while Lily improvises. His eyes are shiny, and as the words sit above them, Remus reaches out, sifting his fingers through Sirius’s.

“Do you trust me?”

“ Why did you do all this?” Sirius asks.

“Trust you? God that’s an understatement.” James’s voice echoes in front of them.

“ Why do you think?” Remus says, “ For you, idiot.”

Chapter Text

“ C’mon move along! This is backstage, not some amateur porno, break it up!” Marlene yells from where she moves up the stairs on stage left, she’s gesturing her clipboard to where Lily and James are embracing. They break up immediately, faces red, but James doesn’t stop smiling and Lily shoves him slightly, he chuckles and Marlene catches this, shaking her head. “ Really. Are you lot trying to give me a heart attack? I already had enough with whatever soap opera those two were acting out during the show.” She frowns and right as she does, Remus and Sirius approach behind her, smiling with more color back to their faces.

“ What soap opera?” James asks Marlene but it seems mostly directed towards Sirius who he glances at not subtle at all.

“ Don’t worry about it.” Sirius waves him off, answering the question. Marlene’s frown only grows. The crowd of people behind the curtains grows and as the space around them decreases James keeps his hand in hers, it makes her all warm inside, like she’s sitting by a fire.

“ Good job today! I’d say this was a successful run!” Sirius yells over all the clamoring, at the words everyone cheers, fists thrown in the air, “ Only 6 more to go!” He then continues, dullying the cheers completely, turning that “Yay’s!” to “ Awwww”. Sirius is undeterred anyway, as everyone moves to leave to get outside he gestures to Remus who’s standing steady next to him, he hadn’t taken his eyes off Sirius the whole time. He leans down and Sirius whispers something into his ear that makes the other man almost giggle, it seems so intimate, and Lily makes a note to ask about it later.

Mary runs to galumph her in a hug and almost knocks her over if she isn’t still focused on clutching James’s hand, “ We did it!” She yells, “ Now lemme see the stitches on your dress.” She grabs Lily’s waist to survey her work.

“ Mary!”

“ I have a bet with Em,” She just responds standing up straight again, looking thoroughly proud, “ And it seems like I’ve won, so if you excuse me.” Lily lifts an eyebrow suspiciously but Mary just smiles and struts to where Emmeline is having an energetic conversation with Benjy on the other side of the stage. They make their way out from backstage into the alley through a backdoor, Lily looking around for Marlene, but the girl seems to disappear, most likely doing last-minute checks with Peter, as she took one last look around James got her attention.

“ Are you proud of yourself?” He asks, eyes glimmering with something she wants to say is love but she doesn’t want to get too ahead of herself. “ You got through it.”

“ Yeah, I did.”

“ I find after the first performance all your shame just washes away,” James says, quietly. Still, Lily can hear it as he inches closer to her, “ And you get better as you keep going until you get to your last performance and you finally understand everything.”

“ I’d say I understand a good amount now.”

“ Yeah?”

“ Yeah.” She squeezes James’s hand in hers, “ But I wouldn’t mind having someone teach me the rest.” James grins and just as he seems about to say something else a loud voice calls to them.

“ Jamie! My baby!” The voice seems to belong to an older woman, with thick glasses and a warm smile that is already familiar to Lily a million times over. James’s mum hugs him, kissing him on the cheek firmly even though he complains about it. Behind her is a man Lily assumes to be James’s dad and Sirius, who she shares a knowing glance with.

The glance is heavy, and there seems to be a bit of a growing truce in it.

“ Mum!” James protests.

“ Oh he was just wonderful, don’t you think?” James’s mum persists, turning towards his dad who nods earnestly at the question.

“ And he was so nervous about it too, the night before I swear he almost pissed the bed.” Sirius grins.

“ That is not true!” James yells out, face reddening. “ You smoked so much last night I thought you were going to turn our whole flat into a coal mine!”

“ I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sirius says, eyes showing innocence, whether it is fake or not ( definitely fake ), “ I have never smoked in my life, I haven’t ever even looked at a cigarette before.”

“ You bloody liar!” James shouts, “ Mum he’s lying I swear!” He whines, and Lily just smiles, finding the childishness kinda funny instead of just plain annoying. Weird development that. They all just laugh, like this is a normal occurrence. Lily guessed from what she knew about the two it was.

“ Oh!” Taking her attention from her two sons, James’s mum turns towards her, “ I’m sorry dear, we haven’t been properly introduced yet.”

Lily smiles, “ Lily Evans mam.” She says. “ Nice to meet you, Mrs. Potter.”

“ Call me Effie hon.”

“ Alright.” Lily’s cheeks burn and she looks back to James who hadn’t taken his eyes off her the whole exchange.

“ While we’re in town, we should go to dinner. I want to hear all about the show, don’t you think Monty?” She turns towards said Monty and he smiles and nods agreeably. As Lily can feel her cheeks getting tired an alarm in her head starts ringing, she looks behind Monty’s shoulder and sees a dark and scrawny figure with slick back hair. James keeps talking.

“ There’s not much to talk about Mum really.”

Sev stares at her, and Lily’s smile drops, and like he can hear her thoughts he looks down to his shoes and walks down to the other side of the alley, where it ends and the London streets begin. Her heart feels sore and if it wasn’t the adrenaline of the whole day she probably would start crying. Without her knowing the conversation has been directed her way, James directs his undivided attention to her once again.

“ Right, Lily?” He asks, Lily snaps out of her stupor and blinks.

“ Huh?”

“ Are you alright love? You look pale.” Effie says, eyes showing concern, Lily looks at James and his eyes look the same.

“ Oh no, I’m fine,” She takes a breath, “ I guess all the exhaustion is just catching up to me,” She gives Effie a small smile and squeezes James’s hand reassuringly. “ If you’ll excuse me, I see someone I know, I’ll be right back.” She says, letting go of James’s hand slowly like she’s losing an anchor and she walks to where she saw Sev leave, crowds of people around her fill the air, with excited conversation. She takes a deep breath again, the icy air filling all her thoughts and she decides not to follow him. She then turns around and then is abruptly ambushed again.

Dorcas Meadow, wearing a dark green peacoat and black high-heeled boots, walks over to her, she’s holding a playbill and looks like an angel of death.

“ Evans.” She says. Despite her sudden appearance Lily doesn’t feel like she wants to crawl out of her skin, even though she’s still in full costume.

“ Hi, Cassie,” Lily responds, Dorcas frowns at the use of the nickname but does not chastise her, which is new. “ I’m surprised you came.”

“ Well,” Dorcas holds up the playbill, “ I wanted to see what you gave up law for.”

“ I never gave up law, I’m still in school.”

“ I wouldn’t blame you.” Dorcas says, a semblance of a smile hitting her face, “ This whole thing, it suits you.”

“ I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or an insult.”

“ It's a compliment.” She states.” But if I’m being honest it’s more for my benefit. You were always a better lawyer than me.” She says genuinely.

“ Thanks, Cassie,” Lily says back.

“ I’m leaving Umbridge’s firm next week,” She says, Lily’s eyebrows raise at this, “ My schedule will be free so if you want to maybe get lunch.” She shrugs, trying to be nonchalant but Lily can tell that she’s uncomfortable.

“ I’d love that.”

“ Great.” She smiles again, and Lily sees kindness in it.

“ LILY!” A scream startles both her and Dorcas, making them both jump on the icy stone floor below them. Marlene comes bolting towards her, grabbing onto Lily’s shoulders when she almost slips. She’s heaving and laughing high pitched, her breaths coming out in smoke, shivering slightly as she’s still wearing the short-sleeved stage crew shirt. “ YOU DID IT, I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!” She screams and hugs Lily tightly.

“ Are you drunk?” Lily says, as Marlene releases her.

“ Black might’ve snuck me some while we were all coming out.” She says and then huffs as Lily shoots her an aspirated look, “ Don’t be so mean, it’s the first show we should be celebrating!”

“ We’ll do plenty of celebrating, later,” Lily says, referring to the after-party they prepared at the boy’s flat once the show was done and everyone was greeted. Marlene just huffs again and then side glances to Dorcas who’s standing by Lily, the girl then freezes.

“ Oh right, Marlene you’ve met Dorcas, she worked at the firm with me,” Lily says, Marlene says nothing, eyes wide.

“ In the craft store, correct?” Dorcas asks, and she seems to find amusement in Marlene’s stricken reaction as a smile plays on her lips.

“ Yes.” Marlene squeaks.

“ Marlene’s part of the stage crew,” Lily says, “ But she’s an undergrad like me, she plays football as well with our college team.” For some reason, she has set herself as wingman, “ They almost won the London championship this year.”

“ An impressive feat.” Dorcas raises her eyebrows, fully smiling now. Lily takes that as her cue to leave, that is of course after a bit more meddling.

“ Oh, I think I see someone, Marly, why don’t you tell her about it.” Lily pats her on the shoulder, and Marlene breaks her frozen stance to stare wide-eyed at Lily before she breaks free of her grasp and walks away, hearing Marlene stutter through a sentence.

“ Well um- uh- It wasn’t the first time we got that far- there was this new goalie from Cambridge-” Lily hears Marlene stumble as she walks away. Catching a familiar face with mousy curls she suddenly finds herself running against the icy ground to jump Remus in a pulverizing hug.

“ Jeez Evans!” He says, gripping her shoulders, “ Never knew you to be so sentimental.”

“ Shut up you giant.” She says, punching him slightly and pulling away. “ So Mr. Director, how’d I do?”

“ Amazing,” He says grinning, “ I mean good for a girl who only just learned to sing a few months ago.”

“ I had a great teacher.” Lily spares a glance towards where James stands, still in the same place, talking with his parents. Remus catches it almost immediately.

“ I bet.” He says cheekily.

“ Sooooo,” Lily drawls, “ What happened backstage?”

“ Ah, the so-called “ soap opera,” Remus responds, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets.

“ Yep,” Lily confirms.

“ Marlene makes it sound way more dramatic than it actually was.” Despite the statement, Remus’s cheeks get redder.

“ And it wasn’t?”

“ No.”

“ What happened?”

“ We talked.” Remus’s cheek gets even warmer. He looks so unbearably happy and it's infectious, spreading to Lily, making her smile wider. “ About everything.”

“ Everything?”

“ Yes well, I realized that I was kind of going about the whole thing rather foolishly.” He shrugs. “ I had to be upfront about everything, and then it just solved itself from there.”

“ I can’t decide if you’re being vague about everything on purpose or if you're being vague because you don’t know what happened yourself.”

“ Well kinda,” He chuckles, “ Let’s just say it’s in the early stages.”

“ Is that supposed to be an innuendo?” Lily asks, laughing at how wide Remus’s eyes go.

“ What?! No!”

“ What’s an innuendo?” Sirius appears at Remus’s side, making the man jump.

“ Nothing!” Remus squeaks, his face getting bright red, he curls over trying to hide his face, but apparently, this answer isn’t enough for Sirius who just continues to pester him.

“ C’mon Moony! Tell me! What’s an innuendo?”

Lily, grinning at the scene, feels a hand sift into hers, and then she finds James beside her again.

“ Sorry, I left so suddenly.” She says as James leans on her.

“ Don’t say sorry, they don’t care.” James says, “ As long as you join us for brunch on Sunday.”

“ Brunch with your parents?” Lily says, “ Moving a bit fast, are we Potter?” At this James’s face gets bright red.

“ Well-!” He starts, but Lily just cuts him off with a laugh.

“ I’m joking, I’d love to.” She says, James lets out a breath of relief.

“ As long as there’s no ballroom dancing evolved.”

“ Don’t say that! You’re basically a pro by now!”

“ One dance in a diner does not make a pro.”

“ Well 2 months of singing lessons doesn’t make a talented musical theater actress, but here we are,” James states, smiling that smile that Lily loves and she looks right into his eyes, feeling the most calm she’s ever felt. That is until a loud posh voice interrupts them.

“ Don’t mean to interrupt this absolutely disgusting romantic moment you two are having, but it’s about negative degrees outside and I’m about to freeze my arse off!” Sirius screams from where he’s shivering dramatically in only a stage crew shirt and leather jacket. The alley had almost been completely empty by now, only leaving a few stragglers in Peter, Mary, Marlene, and most surprisingly Dorcas. James glares at Sirius and then takes a quick look down at his watch.

“ Actually yeah we should go, someone has to pick up the cake.” At this the others gather in a circle, Dorcas looking rather awkward as Marlene, now full of confidence, drags her over.

“ Cake? What cake?” Remus says confused.

“ We ordered a cake,” Sirius states.

“ What why?!”

“ For the after party, “ Sirius says, sticking his hand in Remus’s coat pocket, “ It’s chocolate on chocolate, so you’re welcome.” He says and Remus’s pupils get bigger, almost like he’s looking at the sun.

“ Don’t forget about the pizza! Somebody has to pick that up too!” Mary chimes in.

“ Well, I have Ted’s car parked down the street, I can take a few people and we can go down and pick up the cake since it’s under Sirius’s name.”

“ I have Darling parked up the block,” Mary says.

“ Ok so me, Mary, Marlene, Remus, and Dorcas will go pick up the pizzas, and you guys get the cake.” Lily decides, at this everyone nods except for Remus who blinks in puzzlement.

“ Wait-” Remus starts, but before he can get anything out, Mary grabs his arm with a wicked smile, seemingly excited to interrogate him about his absence this past week, and drags him away from where he was next to Sirius. Sirius tries to hide his disappointment at this, a comical frown toying at his lips. Marlene and Dorcas take off next, engaging in cordial and comfortable conversation, Lily turns to James.

“ No studying tonight?” James asks.

“ No studying.” Lily laughs a bit, and lets go of James’s hand as Sirius starts miming gagging behind him.

Chapter Text

James feels like he’s on cloud 9, he can’t stop moving, and he’s practically skipping the way to Ted’s car.

“ Can you stop jumping! You know how inconvenient it’s gonna be when I have to clean your brain off the floor once you crack your head open?” Sirius complains behind him. James just ignores him.

“ I’ve haven’t seen him this happy since they brought Phantom back on Broadway,” Peter says.

“ Well, at least he’ll stop wallowing,” Sirius says.

“ Says you!” James twirls around with the grace of a dancer to point at his friend.

“ I do not wallow!” Sirius yells, but they all know he’s wrong if the past week is any evidence. James doesn’t say this though, all he does is run to Ted’s car as he sees it parked on the corner.

“ Hey!” He hears Sirius yell before running after him. “ I do not wallow!”

“ Children.” Peter groans. “ All of you.”

They make it to the car and then drive over to the bakery to pick up the cake. The nice old lady at the front gives them a look as he hands the box over, opening the top so they can look at the work. On top, James almost lets out a gasp, is an almost impressive painted wolf with frosting, howling at the moon. They can’t stop laughing and as the lady scowls and closes the box to ring Sirius up, James’s phone buzzes in his pocket. As he looks at the contact ID his heart hammers in his chest, and Peter seemingly senses it since he rolls his eyes.

“ ‘Ello.” James chimes melodically as he picks up the phone.

“ Hey.” Lily’s voice says back, it’s so wonderful, her voice, he noticed it before but he feels less shame about admiring it now. “ We got the pizzas, we’re heading back now.” In the back almost like some comedy act, he hears a familiar Welsh voice yell, “ Only a psychopath would put olives on a pizza Mckinnon!”, James struggles to hold back a laugh.

“ Everything ok over there?”

“ Psssh oh yeah, it’s just rowdy, you know how it is.” And then again, another yell seemingly from Mary this time, “ Why did they even order vegetable? I don’t know any vegetarians do you?”

“ Just because you don’t know any doesn’t mean they don’t exist, some people just don’t like dead animal on their pizza.” A strict voice that James doesn’t recognize says.

“ Meadows, don't tell me you're vegetarian? “ Mary says back, sounding almost horrified. Then comes more yelling and a “ Settle down kids! “ from Remus, and then “ Is that James? Gimme the phone.”

The voice gets more clear now as Lily supposedly passes the phone.

“ James?”

“ Hey Moony what’s up?”

“ How far are you?”

“We’re still paying so we should be there in 20.”

“ Ah,” Remus says. “ We’ll get back before you then. I can wait outside if you need help lugging it up the stairs.”

“ Really?”

“ Yeah.”

“ Because you want to help or because you want to see the cake?” James asks. Sirius walks up to James’s and Peter’s side then, holding the cake in both hands, grinning.

“ No comment,” Remus says, and then in a sound of movement behind the phone, Lily’s voice picks up on the other side.

“ I’ll see you back at the flat?” Lily sighs and then says.

“ I’ll see you back at the flat.”

“ Oh and Potter.”

“ Yeah?”

“ I forgot to say it back at the alley but good job today.” She says. And like that James’s heart is exploding, he feels like he could jump up and fly by now, and he has never been more blessed. He’s almost such a sap that he almost cries.

“ Thanks, Evans.” He says, and he can almost see the exact smile Lily is probably sporting on her face right now. She hangs up then, but before that James hears a loud, “ oooooooooooooo,” and Lily yells “ Shut up!”

***

It’s been you, it’s always been you.

Sirius keeps playing those words over and over again in his head, call him narcissistic but he couldn’t imagine a better outcome. It’s like a weight had been lifted off his chest, what was he even worried about the whole time? He doesn’t know.

He sits in Ted’s car, the driver’s seat next to James who’s at the wheel, and Peter in the back with the cake. Sirius gave the cake instructions mainly because he was angry and buried in cigarettes in his room before the show, but he highly doubts he would do anything differently if he wasn’t even mad at Moony in the first place.

He leans his head back on the seat, and his hands all sparky, he longs for touch again, he misses Remus, even though it’s been only about an hour. He should’ve put up more of a fight back at the alley.

“ Moony is gonna hate this,” Peter says from the backseat, glancing towards the cake. Remus notoriously hates whenever they make fun of his name, but since this was a celebration for the musical Sirius felt he could get away with it this time.

“ He’ll get over it.” Sirius snorts.

“ Speaking of Moony.” James says, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel as they stop at a red light. “ I heard you talked?” James says, referring to the Marlene “ Soap Opera” incident shortly after the show ended.

“ We did,” Sirius responds shortly.

“ And you guys are good?”

“ We're good.”

“ Did you talk about, y’know?”

“ We did.”

“ And does he?”

“ He does.”

“ So are you guys shagging now?” Peter pokes his head from the back seat. At this Sirius’s face goes bright red and he looks at the window trying not to let the other two guys see.

“ Jeez Pete! Have some decorum.” James yells out, “ But I second that question.”

“ We did not shag!”

“ No but you know what I mean,” James says, he raises his eyebrows, “ Is this whole thing over? Are you going steady?”

“ Well…” Sirius starts, “ We didn’t exactly talk about it.” This seems to take James completely by surprise as he stops the car suddenly, almost sending Peter flying from the back seat and almost making Sirius slam his head on the front of the car. “ Fuck Prongs!”

“ What do you mean you didn’t talk about it?! You just said you did!”

“ I mean we talked, we just didn’t talk about that.”

“ What the fuck did you talk about then?!” James asks shamelessly, Sirius’s face probably just gets redder.

“ You can’t rush these things! We’ll talk about it when we're ready!”

“ Oh I think I can rush you when we've been dealing with this shit for what-?”

“ 12 years.” Pete chimes in.

“ 12 years Sirius!”

“ Yeah ok.” Sirius scoffs, he moves to get out of the car, opening the door, and getting up to stand on the curb. In front of the entrance to their apartment stands Remus, his head almost hitting the top of the doorway, he feels his heart get a bit lighter as he watches as Remus doesn’t notice them yet, seemingly texting on his phone. Sirius then notices that he’s alone on the curb, James and Peter still in the car.

“ What are you doing?” He asks, turning back to the car.

“ Talk to him,” James states, his forearm still resting on the wheel.

“ What?!”

“ Talk to him now.”

“ What,” He goes for the car door, but it's locked, “ Prongs you can’t be serious!”

“ Oh were Sirius,” Peter says, this is possibly one of the only moments where this isn’t funny. Sirius scowls.

“ This is so immature!”

“ Maybe but I’m not sitting through any more of this,” James says, “ You're going to talk to him, we’ll circle around the block and then come back, you’ll be alone.” Sirius just groans. “ Love waits for none Padfoot.”

“ It’s, music doesn’t stop for anyone, dibshit.”

“ Potato Potahto, now-” He makes a swishing movement with his hand, “ -go.” He drives away, and then like a child Sirius whines and makes his way to where Remus is standing. As he walks Remus raises his head from his phone and smiles, it’s a different smile, his cheeks redder and his eyes brighter, he’ll have to add it to his catalogue. Somehow the new smile makes Sirius giddy but even more nervous.

“ Hey Padfoot.”

“ Hey.”

“ Where's everyone else?”

“ Oh they got stuck back with something, they wanted me to run ahead to say they were gonna be a bit late.”

“ Oh.” Remus says, eyes kind and gentle like a kiss.

“ Hey so, while we're here.” Sirius looks down to his shoes, “ Do you mind if we talk about something?”

“ Whatever you want.” Remus says immediately, it makes Sirius’s heart do a flip in his chest.

“ I know I told you that I um, “ He doesn’t really want to bring that memory up, “ That I love you.” He says anyway, persisting. “ And you didn’t say that you did too but you kinda did in a way.”

“ I didn’t?”

“ I mean not directly.”

“ Oh.” Remus says, frowning a bit, “ Well I do.” He states matter of factly, Sirius’s heart is now doing cartwheels, probably a whole gymnastics routine by now.

“ Heh! Great!”

Kill him, kill him immediately.

“ Sirius… If you want to take it back.”

“ NO!” Sirius finds himself yelling on the lonely street. Remus just looks at him, eyebrows raised. “ No, I don’t want to take it back.” He takes a deep breath. “ I just wanted to ask you, since we both like each other,” He says, “ I was wondering if you wanted to see each other, and only each other.”

“ Like as a couple?”

“ Yes.”

“ Well I don’t know…” Sirius’s heart stops in his chest, this is how he’s going to die.

“ I’ve only been dreaming of it since I was 12, so sure.”

Sirius punches him in the shoulder.

“ Hey Padfoot!”

“ You are the fucking worst! Why I like you, I have no idea!”

“ I should be saying that, you're the one who pantsed me during common hour in 4th year.” Remus says, laughing and hooking both of his fingers in the loops of Sirius’s pants pulling him closer.

“ I told you,” Sirius rests his hands on either side of Remus’s waist, there's a fire in the touch, they never did this, he had always been conscious of how much he was touching Remus, he had been so paranoid. Now it felt like a whole new level had opened up. “ it was an accident, not my fault you were standing there.”

“ God, do you hear yourself?” Remus smiles even wider, he rests his forehead against Sirius’s, he thinks if they got any closer they probably could fuse, honestly he wouldn’t mind it.

“ Well it worked didn’t it? Look at you now.” Sirius says, his hands make their way up from Remus’s waist to rest on his cheeks, they're warm, he never wants to move. Remus laughs again, it is quiet but also so loud, it makes Sirius grinn and his heart start dancing in his chest again.

“ Sirius Black, I am so in love with you.” He says, and then closes the gap in between them. Remus moves his hands from Sirius’s belt loops to be fully around his waist, pulling him in as he moves his face to be more comfortable with his hands against Remus’s cheeks. They stay like that for god knows how long, just shifting a bit to take in more of each other, at some point Remus lets out a dreamy sigh as they come up for air that makes Sirius think he’s in heaven. Remus’s back settling on the back of the entrance of the apartment building, they make themselves suitable in the corner, laughing against each other's lips, that is until a loud honking brings them suddenly out of it.

“ Wow, is it getting hotter out here? James yells from his car, window down.” Wormy, do you feel that?”

“ How ‘bout you save some for the rest of us?!” Peter shouts, ignoring James’s question.

“ Shut up!” Sirius screams back, probably as red as a tomato, still with Remus’s arms around his waist. Remus just smiles and looks upon the scene with amusement in his eyes.

“ Woah Moony, seems like your man is out of control, reel him in!”

“ James I swear to god-!”

“ Reel him in? How do you suggest he do that Prongs?” Peter asks.

“ Probably a leash.” James answers.

“JAMES!”

And like clock work a song blasts from the car’s stereo carrying all through their neighborhood.

Show me show me show me how you do that trick-!
The one that makes me scream she said!
The one that makes me laugh she said~

James the bastard just keeps grinning.

Threw her arms around my neck,
Show me how you do it, and I promise you-
I promise you that I’ll run away with you-
I’ll run away with you~

***

“ It’s terrible!” Remus yells once Sirius opens the cake box with a flourish. Lily is eating a piece of pizza beside him and almost chokes on it as the cake is revealed, James tends to her immediately, Lily assuring him that she’s fine through giggles. Upon the cake being revealed the whole party breaks out in laughter, Remus would be mortified if Sirius wasn’t grinning at him, his cheeks red and eyes bright.

“Will you ever stop tormenting me,” Remus groans while Sirius sets the cake down on the table and hands a knife over to James, who begins to hand out slices to the rest of the cast. Sirius saddles up next to him, as close as someone can be, he can almost feel his hair touch his cheek.

“ Never,” Sirius says, and then takes a quick look around before slapping a sloppy kiss on his cheek.
“You’re disgusting,” Remus says as he wipes his cheek and Sirius puts his fingers through his. The party continues, people eating up said terrible cake, and progressively getting more drunk. Remus keeps sober though, wanting to enjoy everything to its every detail, Sirius seemingly shares the same sentiment, brandishing water the whole night. At a certain point the party hits a bit of a tired lull, with couples slow dancing and the cast getting too drunk to properly function, at this time Sirius grabs his hand, pushing him onto their couch suddenly.

“ What-”

“ Give a speech!”

“ What? Why?” Remus says, grabbing onto Sirius’s shoulders as he tries to push him onto their old couch.

“ You should’ve given one before opening but you weren’t there so,” Sirius shrugs and then starts a chant that everyone joins in on.

“ Speech! Speech! Speech!”

Remus makes eye contact with Lily, she’s standing in the living room, James’s arm around her waist, as their eyes land on each other she tips her drink and at that point Remus stops struggling and gives up, addressing the room.

“ So,” He clears his throat awkwardly, “ I’m sure a lot of you noticed that I wasn’t present for half of the show.” He glances downwards to where he shares a glance with Sirius, his eyes encouraging. “ I had a bit of a mishap, but I’m fine now and I’ve made things right.” He says, there are a few whoops from the crowd, giving him more confidence to continue. “ Even though I wasn’t there for the first half, what I did see was absolutely amazing, partly credited to our amazing leads,” He gestures to where Lily and James are standing, cuddled up to each other and already looking like some kind of married couple. At Remus’s statement, the crowd cheers and James grins as Lily gives a small wave. “ But also all of you made this show possible, and I can’t thank you enough. I know it’s a big risk trusting us,” he gestures to him, Sirius, James, and Peter, “ with a show like this so just, thank you.” Another round of cheering occurs. “ I could never imagine I would be here, and I’ve learned so much, so,” He sneaks another glance towards Sirius and when he sees his smile he struggles not to get choked up, “ good luck for the rest of the shows and just know I think the whole moon and stars of each one of you.” He says and a last round of cheering goes up, louder than the rest. As he makes his way off the couch, with Sirius’s hand clutched in his as he wobbles off, James and Peter find themselves by their sides.

“ Now that’s a speech,” James says, looking pointedly at Sirius, Remus shares the glance.

“ Oh?” He says.

“ I had to give one when you weren’t here and apparently it wasn’t such a crowd-pleaser.”

“That’s an understatement.” James snarks.

“ What did you say?”

“ I told them not to fuck it up.” Sirius shrugs and sips his water, Peter laughs drunkenly loudly.

“ I like that.” Remus says, “ Straight to the point.” Sirius grins wickedly at this, hand still in his as he leans over into Remus’s space.

“ Of course you do.” He says quietly.

“ Ugh, this is nauseating,” James remarks, earning a sharp glare from Sirius, that then melts as a certain song plays from the speakers connected to their record player.

I spend my days~
Just mooning~
Just sad and blue~

“ No fucking way!” Sirius shouts in disbelief. “ How is that possible you’ve been here the whole time!” He says, referring to James and the elusive Grease record that James puts on every party.

Just sad and blue~

“ Somebody else must’ve put it on, ” James says, absolutely giddy, he looks behind his shoulder quickly, “ Do you think I can get Lily to dance with me to this?”

“ I don’t know Prongs.” Remus says, “ She hates musicals.”

“ Even after all this?!” James says, Remus just shrugs and James, face full of determination, walks away to find the lady in question. Peter rolls his drunken eyes and follows behind him back into the midst of the crowded living room.

“You’re not going with them?” Remus asks Sirius, still holding his warm hand in his, “ Is this not your siren call?”

“ Nah, I’d rather stay with you.” Sirius squeezes his hand then.

Why must I go
On mooning
So all alone?

“ Hey, come with me I want to give you something,” Remus says then, dragging Sirius with him down the hall to his room. As they enter, Remus gets a sudden flash back to months ago, him dragging Sirius over and the boy then soiling his sheets, luckily now they’re both sober as Sirius presses a kiss to his neck before he goes to look in his drawer for the gift he had thrown in here before he went down to help the guys with the cake. He pulls it out, it being in a small paper bag, and hands it over to Sirius as he sits next to him on his bed.

“ Oh, so you actually got me a gift?” Sirius raises an eyebrow, eyeing the bag Remus gave him, “ You didn’t just say that to get me into your room?”

“ I actually got you a gift.” Remus shoves him softly with his shoulder, Sirius laughs and Remus feels light as a feather. “ But actually…” Remus trails off a bit and looks towards the doorway, “Let’s open it on the balcony.” He says, Sirius nodding, still surveying the bag. They get out to the balcony, sitting in the spot they always do whenever they discuss music, the sounds of the party drowned out by the sounds of London’s streets below them.

“ Go on, open it.” Remus insists as they sit, their legs dangling off the edge. Sirius does, reaching in and pulling out a small hard-bounded journal, he opens it and flips through the pages in awe.

“ For your thoughts,” Remus says, admiring the way Sirius’s hand turns each page. “ It might not be the best quality, I got it at the train gift shop,” he laughs at himself before Sirius cuts him off, putting his hand on the back of Remus’s neck and pulling him in for a kiss. As they pull away Sirius’s eyes look like stars.

“ It’s perfect.” He says wistfully. “ Perfect like you.”

“ You haven’t had even a lick of alcohol but despite that, you still act drunk.”

“ Yeah, drunk on you.”

“You were never that good at metaphors.”

“ No c’mon! That one was good!” Sirius yells despite the quiet, “ Professor!”

“ If I read that ever in a student’s paper I’d give them an F.”

“ Not if it was me.”

“ No, I guess not, if it were you.”

They lean onto each other, relying on each other’s body heat, as the snow covers the ground. They don’t talk about the musical’s rushed ending, or Remus’s mum not making it, or Remus’s illness, they just sit there, enjoying each other, enjoying the stars.

Remus would never wish for anything different.

***

Upon Lily’s better judgment, James Potter has once again gotten her on the dancefloor. This time it’s not in a diner, and she has a fair amount of alcohol in her system. It also helps that the man she is dancing with has a smile that could melt glass, but also chose to ask her to slow dance to a song from a musical, that Lily makes no haste to complain about.

“ You can’t be such an adamant musical hater when you know everything about them and also are actively in one.”

“ I can too.”

“ Has anyone told you how stubborn you are?”

“ I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She grins unconsciously, and James goes to dip them and they both cackle simultaneously as James almost drunkenly drops her. They dance for a long time, James swaying her side to side and putting on another musical record she doesn’t recognize as soon as the Grease one ends.

“ I was thinking of trying out for a local theatre once this one ends.” James says.

“ Really?” She asks and James shrugs.

“ Yeah, might as well give it a try,” James says, “ Doing all this again makes me realize how much I miss it.”

“ That's great James.” Lily smiles genuinely.

“ Are you gonna let me pay for that shirt now?” James whispers in her ear.

“ No.” Lily says, “ But I accept other forms of payment that aren't money.”

“ Like what?” James stares blankly, the music starts up from the speakers.

Deep in my eyes, what do you see?
Deep in my sighs, listen to me~

“ Dinner.” Lily states, “ Alone.”

“ Are you asking me out, Evans?” James grins.

“ Is that a yes?”

“ Yes.” James says, and then tries to twirl her out shamelessly, almost making her bump into two other dancers and causing him to almost fall face first on the floor. Lily doesn’t stop laughing as the music sounds all around her, filling her thoughts of only love.

Come to your senses~
Baby come back alive~

: END :