Chapter Text
“So, Moony.” Sirius’s voice came from somewhere above him, over the music from the muggle record player. “Do you come here often?”
Remus didn’t bat an eye, finishing the passage he was reading and turning to the next page. “Where? Our Common Room? Or the school in general?”
“I’m just sure that I would’ve noticed a pretty face like yours before now.”
“If this is the first time you’re ever seeing my face, I think you ought to go to Madam Pomfrey.”
“Maybe I should,” said Sirius, “with how fast you’ve got my heart beating.”
Now Remus looked up, not impressed, to see Sirius leaning against the fireplace. His elbow was bent with his head resting in his hand, black hair spilling over his decorated fingers, and his long legs were lazily crossed at the ankle. He grinned.
Remus let his book close, his thumb still holding his place. “Why are you over here bothering me when there are so many other people here?”
Sirius gasped dramatically, his smile unfaltering. “Do you know how many girls would pay to be in your place right now?”
“I’d pay you to be in a different place right now.”
He tipped his head back, then looked forward again, down at Remus sitting on the sofa, and shook his hair from his eyes. It was longer than it usually was at the beginning of term. He revealed his other hand, which had been inconspicuously tucked behind his back the whole time, and presented Remus with a piece of cake on a little plate, a fork stabbed through the top.
“Saved you a piece,” he said. “It’s chocolate— you’d think those first years have never had any before. They’re ravenous.”
“They’re excited,” said Remus, setting his book on the small table next to the sofa and accepting the plate.
“Yeah,” Sirius said, plopping next to him on the cushion, “and now they’ve all had a ton of sugar.”
“Lily will be thrilled.” Remus grabbed the fork and took a bite— it was the same rich chocolate the elves usually made for Remus’s birthday, maybe a little sweeter. He frowned as he chewed, watching people laugh and dance in front of him, listening to the disco beat vibrating through the room. “Who's playing the music?”
Sirius produced his own fork out of nowhere, swiping a part of the cake before Remus could stop him. “We’ve been letting the first years pick,” he said, then ate the cake and dragged the clean fork from his mouth. “Some of them brought their own records, even. They all have pretty terrible taste.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Remus said, and he smiled when he met Marlene’s eye at the table with the record player, giving her a little nod as she rolled her eyes playfully.
“I know. I’m pretty much the most generous bloke in all of Hogwarts.”
Remus nodded. “The most humble, too.”
“Exactly,” said Sirius, stealing another bite of cake.
“Hey, you said you brought this for me,” scolded Remus, holding the plate away from Sirius.
Sirius poked his fork towards Remus, talking with his mouth full, “And you told me I was bothering you and it hurt my feelings so this is how you’re making it up to me.”
“Fine,” he said, bringing it back in Sirius’s reach and resigning to sharing it. He hadn’t really cared, nor had Sirius actually been bothering him. Remus wouldn’t be fed up with the fake flirting until the third or fourth party of the year.
There were plenty of girls looking in their direction, some blatantly staring, swaying with the music, and others hiding behind their cups of butterbeer or pumpkin juice before quickly turning back to giggle with their friends. They were checking Sirius out, hoping he’d give them the time of day, and Remus understood why. Sirius had already been popular before—especially among the girls—but he was stepping into sixth year with a whole new look, completely rebranding himself.
He was wearing a shiny black leather jacket—the same one he had been wearing since the train two days ago. He had had one before, but it was worn and oversized, loose over his frame, and it had been a hand-me-down from Head Boy Kingsley Shacklebolt in their fourth year. The one Sirius was wearing now fit perfectly, and James hadn’t had to unpack it upon their arrival to give it to him.
He also had black jeans on, black combat boots, two chains around his neck, and half a dozen rings on his fingers. The jewellery was all silver, but only in colour, and his hair was longer, curling slightly over his eyes and ears. He usually came back to Hogwarts with shorter, carefully styled hair, but it’d been free to grow out for nearly a month at this point, almost shaggy and purposely unkempt, which matched the rest of his outfit. If Remus were being honest, he was a little jealous of how bloody cool Sirius looked.
But Remus would never tell him that. Godric, he’d never hear the end of it.
It was Friday, and the full moon was Wednesday, making itself known by the simmering Remus could feel in his bones. It made his temper short and his mind restless, and he wasn’t sure how much of that was the wolf lurking beneath his skin or the anticipation of its appearance. Sirius had once told him his eyes got lighter as the moon waxed, going from deep brown to a pale, almost yellow colour, and that it made him look more dangerous, at least, ‘as dangerous as a bloke that wears knitted jumpers can look.’
Remus was sure the moon was playing a part in how annoyed he felt right now, but he didn’t want to bring attention to himself, or to the supposedly dangerous look in his eye if he were to glare at the girls that weren’t minding their own business.
“Sirius,” came Mary’s sing-song voice as she glided in front of their sofa— which was really more of a two-person cushioned chair. She had on a violet dress and black stockings, her shoes surely long-abandoned by now. “I brought you a drink.” She swirled a cup in front of Sirius’s face.
“Oh,” he said, setting his fork down on the now-bare plate in Remus’s hand so that he could take the cup. “Thank you…” He looked at the contents before raising his head again. “Why are you bringing me a drink?”
“Drink it. You’ll like it,” she said simply, one hand on her hip and the other holding her own cup. She gave Remus an apologetic look, darkly painted lips pouting a little. “Sorry, Remus, I would’ve brought you one if I’d known you were with Sirius.”
Remus waved her off. He was capable of getting his own drink if he wanted one.
Sirius took a large swig, then immediately started coughing, leaning forward and patting his chest. “Wow,” he said hoarsely, giving Mary a half-pained smile, “there’s alcohol in this.”
Mary nodded, smirking and raising her own cup to her lips.
Now Remus leaned forward, too. “Where’d you get alcohol?”
No alcohol was one of Lily’s requirements when they hosted this specific party, an annual event as of two years ago, with the strict rules set in place when Lily became a Prefect last year.
“Marlene had a flask,” Mary explained. “She must’ve charmed it so it doesn’t smell like anything.”
“Ah, good girl,” said Sirius, lowering the cup after a second drink and exhaling, leaning back again.
Mary smiled with a scrunch of her nose, shaking her head a little so her spiral curls bounced. “Why are you sitting all the way over here? Don’t tell me Remus is turning you into a bore.”
“Hey!” said Remus, his hand hovering over the novel he’d been about to pick back up, his thoughts paused on how soon he could go to bed without coming off as rude. He loved Peter, and letting the first years know they were accepted here was a great idea on James’s part, and he was a Prefect so he should be here, but the overlapping noise and general busyness of a party was suffocating in the week leading up to the moon.
“Don’t worry Remus, we all love your boringness. It’s very nice in every setting other than this one.”
“I love Moony’s boringness all the time,” supplied Sirius, reaching an arm around Remus’s shoulders and jostling him a little. It was well-intended, but Remus’s skeleton was already hurting, and Sirius must’ve seen his subtle flinch, because he pulled his arm back right away. Then he offered Remus his cup. “Here, you have this. I’m gonna go find Prongs.”
“He was with Peter,” Mary said, twisting and standing on her toes to look over people. “They were playing a game with a couple of the first years, like a tabletop miniature quidditch thing.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” said Sirius, standing up. He turned to point at Remus. “I’ll be back.”
“With more lines to try out on me?”
“If you’re lucky.”
Remus reached for his book a second time as Sirius walked away, the crowd parting to let him through like he was a god, Mary looping her arm in his to force him to share the spotlight. Remus flipped to find the page he had been on, and then a pair of hands came down on either of his shoulders.
“Moony!”
“Christ, Prongs,” he said, lifting the drink he almost just dumped over himself and shifting to look at James’s beaming face, inches from his.
“Sorry,” James winced, squeezing Remus’s shoulders instead, “wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s fine.” He tried to shrug James’s hands off, definitely not in the mood for a massage. “Alright,” he said, “that’s enough. Get off me.”
James grabbed the back of the sofa, jumping from behind it and landing in the open spot Sirius left behind. He was wearing two party hats, sticking out from his wild black hair like colourful horns.
“Padfoot just went to find you,” Remus said.
“Really?” asked James, crossing one leg over the other, his arm stretched across the chair behind Remus’s head. He craned his neck. “Seems he found a suitable distraction.”
Remus followed his gaze to the other side of the Common Room where Sirius was talking to a girl in their year, from Ravenclaw maybe, and making her laugh. She was pretty.
“Seems so,” he agreed, looking away. He finished the rest of whatever had been in the cup Sirius gave him.
“How’re you?” said James, also looking away, poking Remus in the leg as he recovered from the very strong alcohol that Marlene had snuck into the school.
“Good,” he managed, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
James hummed. “Enjoying the Welcome and Welcome Back and Happy Late Birthday Wormtail party?”
Remus laughed, and he felt much more comfortable already, whether it was James or the drink. “You guys have got to come up with a shorter name for it.”
“You’re the brainy one, you do it,” said James. “I’ve tried, but I don’t want to leave anything out.”
“What do you mean?”
James gestured with a hand as he talked. “Well, if we just call it a Happy Late Birthday Wormtail party, then that leaves out the welcome-back-to-school part of it, but if we call it the Welcome and Welcome Back party, then that leaves out that it’s also to celebrate Wormy’s birthday.”
“I see… Well, what about Welcome Back and Happy Late Birthday Wormtail?”
“But then that leaves out the first years,” James said exasperatedly, “who aren’t being welcomed back to Hogwarts. And if it’s just Welcome then that seems like it's specifically for the first years.”
Remus nodded slowly. “That’s quite the predicament.”
“Yeah, so it’s best to just leave the name as it is.”
“Fits nicely on the sign, too,” Remus said, looking up at the red banner that covered the length of the Common Room with Welcome and Welcome Back and Happy Late Birthday Wormtail written in large, loopy gold letters in Sirius’s handwriting— which was very neat when he wanted it to be.
“How’s your book?” James took it from Remus’s hand, observing the cover and flipping it over to look at the back. “Is it, by chance, about a house of stairs?”
“It is, actually.”
“Love when books are straightforward like that,” said James, handing the House of Stairs back to Remus.
“You can read it when I’m done.”
“Cool,” he said, and they both knew the chances of that happening. Remus always offered, though. “I was thinking I should— Hey! Sirius!”
James jumped to his feet, and Remus straightened on instinct, looking through the crowd of moving bodies for Sirius.
“Sirius!” he repeated, striding away from the sofa and politely excusing himself as he walked through people’s conversations and dancing. “They’re not supposed to be doing magic!”
“They’re not!” said Sirius, and Remus could pick him out easily, as he was next to the only eleven year old in the room that was hanging upside down, an invisible force suspending him in the air by his ankle. “I am!”
“Put him down!”
“He likes it!”
Sirius didn’t seem to be lying. The eleven year old was laughing, his face slowly turning red as all the blood rushed to his head. His arms were dangling, and he seemed to be trying to touch the floor, his fingers just barely brushing.
“Lift me higher!” he demanded from Sirius.
“Me next!” shouted another first year.
“No!” said James, pulling his wand from his hoodie pocket. “Evans is gonna—”
“Potter!” said Lily, and she stomped towards them, red hair flying, automatically yelling at James.
He whirled around to face her. “This wasn’t even—” He threw his arms out. “I was telling him to stop!”
“Likely story,” she snapped at him. “If that child’s feet are not both on the floor in two seconds—”
“Okay, okay,” said Sirius, and he twirled his wand to drop the spell. And the boy. James’s hand shot out to grab the kid’s scrawny leg, keeping him suspended and making sure he didn’t go crashing head first to the floor.
“Sirius!”
“Oops. Wasn’t really thinking.”
James bent to grip the kid’s arm, then gracefully spun him rightside up, letting him stumble to his feet. He was clearly disoriented, but still smiling.
“From now on,” scolded Lily as she stepped in front of them, her freckled cheeks pink with frustration, “if I ever see you use that spell again on someone other than yourselves, I will ensure that you serve detention with Filch!”
James and Sirius both wrinkled their noses at the thought, likely also remembering the spell’s involvement in the incident with Snape at the end of last year.
“We won’t, we promise,” James told her.
“We do?” asked Sirius.
James elbowed him hard.
“We do,” Sirius confirmed with a nod.
Lily scoffed disbelievingly, pointedly turning from them to check on the dizzy eleven year old and come up with a different activity for him and his friends to do, far away from James and Sirius.
Remus pushed himself up from the chair with all the dexterity of an eighty year old, sighing as he did so, and stretching in a way that made his spine pop. He had been sitting still for too long, and he usually didn’t fall into that habit until they actually had classes to sit and study for. It ached less when he moved around more, but he was a pretty stationary bloke in general. He had always felt very separate from his own body, as if it were just a vessel that existed outside of his control, belonging more to the waiting wolf. Remus was only the weary cage trying to contain it.
Remus stifled a yawn—though he really wasn’t that tired—then he spotted Peter telling a story to some younger students, waving his arms elaborately, and Mary was there too, chiming in every few seconds and excitedly nodding along. Remus wandered over, ducking through people’s conversations even though he was usually much taller than anyone else. He was skinny enough to successfully skirt around the ones that were dancing, only catching one stray elbow to the ribs and quickly flinching away from a party hat that threatened to take his eye.
It was crowded, most of the furniture pushed aside, the room full of heads bobbing with music and laughter, and, though it had started as a Gryffindor-specific party, some of the older students from other houses were here mingling, including the blonde girl from Ravenclaw that Sirius had been talking to. It was a good party, very friendly and mild and enjoyable if it were a different week. Even five days out shouldn’t be as aggravating as it felt right now, but the first full moon back at Hogwarts was always a little anxiety-inducing.
Remus didn’t really know why, but he supposed that was the fun of anxiety: the not-knowing.
“–and we’re the first class of the day, so we go in expecting to see the ice sculpture,” Peter was saying, and Remus knew exactly which day he was recounting (surprisingly or not, he only had two ice-sculpture-related memories), “but it wasn’t there!”
Mary was grinning, and Peter’s pale cheeks were flushed, his party hat almost completely sideways, an empty cup in his hand. It seemed Marlene’s flask might be a bit bottomless.
“Where was it?” asked a first year, eyes bright, chocolate caked around his mouth. The others were paying rapt attention to Peter, too, giddy excitement clear on every round face. Remus remembered starting Hogwarts, and his heart warmed, his wolfish irritation retreating a step. They were about to start the best years of their lives, and meet the best people.
“Well,” continued Peter, “at first we were all super disappointed, thinking McGonagall had come in early and gotten rid of it, but then we saw the giant puddle of water on the floor… right where we left the sculpture…”
“Oh no!” shrieked a young girl happily.
Another girl giggled. “It melted?”
“Yep,” Peter confirmed, nodding. “It turned out that we didn’t know how to cast a Cooling Charm that lasted longer than a few minutes.”
“Sirius was devastated,” said Mary. “I think I remember tears in his eyes.”
“There were no tears,” Remus said, and half a dozen pairs of eyes went to him. He wrapped his arms around himself a little self-consciously. He knew they saw his scars first, particularly the one from fourth year that staggered diagonally across his nose like a thin streak of lightning. He cleared his throat, forcing a small smile to contradict any accidental threatening impression. “Just a lot of whining.”
“Very loud whining,” Mary said to the crowd.
“Anyway,” said Peter, “the ice sculpture of Sirius for his birthday was a total failure, but we learned from our mistakes, so it went much better for James’s birthday. And we’re practically experts at Cooling Charms now.”
“McGonagall had to spend the whole day with a statue of James Potter carved out of ice,” Mary said, painting an invisible picture with her hand.
Remus nodded, remembering. Sirius had done the Sticking Charm to keep it there— he was the best at them. Though Remus was sure McGonagall could have figured out a way to dismantle the sculpture in seconds if she had truly hated it.
Mary leaned with a bent arm on Peter’s shoulder, still facing the kids. “I think she was trying not to laugh,” she said. “She’s not as scary as she looks, you know. I think she’s secretly a big softie, and you could probably get away w—”
“But,” interrupted Remus, cutting off Mary’s alcohol-influenced, very terrible advice, “I wouldn’t test her limits. James and Sirius spend a lot of their free time in detention, so it’s probably best to watch their antics from afar and, you know, don’t do what they do. Ever.”
Mary let her head fall forward slightly, turning it to look at Remus. “Says you.”
“I…” He pressed his lips together with an amused expression. He had nothing to say to that.
“Moony!” Peter said suddenly, spinning to face Remus and nearly sending Mary face-first to the floor. “Are you going up to the dorm soon?”
“No,” he said quickly, wincing a little because he was lying and was actually mere moments away from sneaking upstairs and reading in the quiet of his four-poster. “No… Well, I was maybe going to… I was thinking I might—”
“Great!” Peter said, looking happy enough that it almost hurt Remus’s feelings. He turned and manoeuvred around Mary, who had regained her balance, now showing off her painted nails to a few of the little girls and offering to paint theirs sometime this week. He bent over to scoop up an armful of little packages from a nearby table that Remus recognised as unopened chocolate frogs, then faced Remus with a smile. “Will you take these upstairs with you? People keep givin’ me them as presents and I don’t want anyone to steal any.”
“Oh,” said Remus, already holding out his hands to take them. “Yeah, okay, sure.”
“Don’t let anyone take one!” Peter emphasised, too loudly.
“I heard you, I got ‘em.”
“I mean it, Moony!” he continued shouting. “There could be rare cards in there. You know I don’t have Cornelius Agrippa!”
“I know,” Remus said, raising his voice a little even though it made his head hurt. “I’ll protect them with my life, Pete. Promise. They’ll go straight to your bed.”
Peter let the packaged frogs spill from his arms to Remus’s, smiling and smelling like sweat. His eyes were bright from the alcohol. “You’re a dream, Moony. A lovely dream. So good to me.”
Remus snorted, gathering them to his chest and trying not to drop any. “You sound like Sirius,” he mumbled, focusing.
Peter was too busy securing the frogs to listen. Once he was sure Remus could be trusted to transport his treasure, he gave him a friendly pat on the arm. “Night, Rem.”
Remus smiled softly. “Night, Pete. Happy late birthday.”
“Happy late birthday," he repeated nonsensically, then started giggling, his cheeks flushed to match the shiny red of his birthday hat. A second later, Marlene shouted his name from across the room, taking his attention away from Remus for good.
Remus had just begun weaving around other chatting students, clutching Peter’s precious chocolate frogs, when Lily’s voice rang out through the Common Room.
“Alright!” she announced in her clear, stern Prefect voice. Everyone paused, and someone even stopped the music. Remus couldn’t imagine having that sort of authority… even though he had the exact same title. “It’s nearly midnight,” she continued, “which means first years ought to head to bed now!”
Her words were immediately followed by a chorus of groans and whining. There were a few minutes of rounding up the youngest party guests, herding them towards their dorms, and Remus even had to give an encouraging nod towards the eleven year olds hiding in the folds of the thick curtain hanging by the window. He wasn’t sure how seriously he was taken, with his arms full of chocolate frogs, but the kids looked at him with wide eyes and scurried away. He didn’t have Lily’s power, but apparently he was intimidating enough to pull some sort of Prefect command. (For a bloke that wore knitted jumpers, at least.)
“Remus!” someone called, as Remus had one foot on the first step that led to his calm, quiet dorm with a currently unoccupied window sill. The music restarted at a lower volume. “Hey, Remus, wait!”
He turned with a small frown, looking down at Lily bounding in front of him. She stopped, tucking her straightened red hair behind her ears, and smiled up at him.
“What’s up?” he asked, shifting the frogs and facing her the rest of the way, taking his foot off the step.
She tilted her head, still smiling. “Are you tired?”
“I… Uh, not really,” he confessed. He shrugged, almost toppling a couple frogs before steadying them. “Just wanted to go upstairs. Got a bit of a headache.”
Lily put her hands behind her back, swinging her shoulders back and forth, and reached out a foot to lightly tap it against his.
He looked down, then back up, raising an eyebrow. “What?”
She bit her lip, which was shiny with gloss. “Wanna take a walk with me? We could get away from the stuffy room, you know, get some fresh air…”
Now a smile played on Remus's lips. “Fresh air?”
Lily nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”
He shook his head fondly. “Alright, alright. Let me take these–” He lifted his arms so the packaged frogs rustled– “upstairs for Pete. I’ll meet you outside the portrait hole.”
“Cool,” she chirped, a full grin splitting her face now. “I’ll bring the fresh air.”
Approximately three minutes later, after throwing the chocolate frogs on Peter’s bed and dodging James and Sirius and Marlene and Mary on the way out of the Common Room, Remus was waiting with his arms crossed next to the portrait of the Fat Lady, wishing he had brought his own fresh air.
The painting swung open, slightly squeaky, and the soft music and chatter of the party filtered out into the corridor as Lily hopped to the floor in front of him, a thin jacket pulled over her dress. She wasted no time in looping her arm in his and leading him in the direction of their designated fresh air spot. They sent three Hufflepuffs back to their Common Room, the suspicious smell of marijuana lingering after them, and they interrupted two fifth years with dishevelled clothes and hair. Whoever was on patrol tonight was not doing a very thorough job…
“Whoever’s on patrol tonight is not doing a very thorough job,” vocalised Lily, grumbling as she supervised the couple turning the corner. They were giggling and definitely not headed back to their Common Room.
Remus only hummed in agreement, subtly urging Lily along. They reached the Astronomy Tower a minute later, hesitantly creeping up the steps, nervous to walk in on something they didn’t want to see. Luckily, the floor was empty. Empty and open, the night sky visible to witness their hypocrisy.
“Here,” said Lily, revealing a box of muggle cigarettes from her jacket pocket as they reached the railing to look over the grounds. She pulled one out and handed it to him, flicking her wand a second later to light it and then placing one between her teeth and doing the same.
Remus took a deep breath in, relishing in the heat that curled comfortably in his chest, already dulling the pounding of his head, and then exhaled the smoke slowly. “Ah, fresh air,” he sighed, holding the cigarette next to his mouth.
Lily snorted, blowing her own smoke and smiling at him. “Confiscated three packs on the train ride,” she said.
“Lucky,” he said. He had only caught one group of third years with a nearly-empty pack. And he didn’t have any left over from the summer— he had had to cut back severely anyway, with how his mum watched him like a hawk.
“Are you…” Lily started, and Remus turned his head to find her watching him, squinting a little. She held her cigarette in one hand and reached the other to pluck at Remus’s jumper sleeve. “Is this wool?”
He frowned around his cigarette, looking down at his outfit, and mumbled, “I think so?”
“So,” said Lily, a small smirk on her face, “at this moment, you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“Oh my god.” Remus coughed, holding his cigarette out and patting his chest as Lily laughed at her own cleverness. “Peter made that joke in third year,” he said hoarsely, his eyes watering.
“It’s a good joke.”
“You guys learn one secret of mine and forget how to behave. It’s like I’m the first werewolf you’ve ever met.”
“You’re the most sarcastic one for sure.”
“I hate you.”
“You love me.”
Remus smiled despite himself, then sucked on the cigarette so the tip glowed. He was glad Lily had figured it out before they left for the summer. Everyone he wanted to know about his ‘furry little problem’ (James’s words, not his) knew about it now.
“So… Sirius seems alright,” Lily said after a minute, not looking at him and picking at her bracelet. Like Sirius’s jewellery, it was only silver in colour.
Remus breathed out smoke, watching the grey dissipate in the cool air before answering. “Yeah, I… I can tell something’s different, but he seems good.”
“Your letter was vague… Everyone’s talking about it, though, but it doesn’t seem that anyone knows what actually happened.” Lily gestured with her hand as she talked, smoke trailing after her cigarette. “You should’ve been at the meeting on the train. Regulus threatened to hex Severus’s tongue from his mouth at one point and Frank shut it all down.”
“I heard about that,” said Remus, the words sounding almost disgusted, an itchy feeling of protectiveness—and the wolf’s defensiveness—spreading over his skin. He took another puff of his cigarette.
“He really got disowned then?”
Remus flinched, his shoulders tensing, then forced himself to relax. This was just Lily, one of his best friends, and she wasn’t asking for information out of malice or for gossip. She genuinely cared. He nodded a little. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “He, uh— James said he showed up at his house at like midnight at the start of August. I know his parents are awful, he’s said it enough times, but I… I don’t know, it must’ve been worse than he let on.”
Lily gave a soft hum, doubtful. “Maybe he was just looking for an opportunity to leave, to run away and live with Potter.”
Remus clenched and unclenched his jaw. “It’s not like that. I just…” He swallowed, put the cigarette back to his lips for a second. “It was something bigger than that. I know it was.” He thought of how worried James sounded in his letters, reassuring Remus that Sirius was going to be okay and that he wasn’t going to go back home. He thought of how Sirius hadn’t written one word to Remus about it, and he hadn’t said anything either, and how James had pulled Remus and Peter aside on September first and instructed them not to bring it up unless Sirius did first.
“I think you’re right,” Lily said. “Whatever happened was clearly significant, now that I’m factoring in the way he’s been dressed.”
Now Remus was thinking of Sirius’s new leather jacket and longer hair. He looked cool, he looked more himself. His necklaces and his rings and his boots—
A whoosh sounded behind them, similar to when James or Sirius whipped off the Invisibility Cloak, and Remus jumped, flinging his cigarette off the top of Hogwarts’s tallest tower and spinning around.
“Christ, Remus,” scolded Lily, who had startled because of his reaction. Once they were sure they were staring at absolutely nothing, she smacked him lightly. “It was just an owl, you drama queen.”
Remus shook his head, turning back around to lean his forearms on the railing again. “You don’t know what I’ll have to put up with if James finds out about our secret little trysts.”
Lily raised her eyebrows at him. “Trysts?”
“You know what I mean.”
She turned around too. “Because of the smoking or because you’re sneaking around with me?”
Remus groaned, letting his head fall forward. “I was only thinking about the smoking, I didn’t even consider the other part.”
Lily stuck her nose in the air, lips curled slightly. “Well, you and I are allowed to have all the trysts we want, Potter doesn’t get to have a say in what I do.”
“‘Course not, but he has a say in what I do.”
“No, he doesn’t!”
Remus nodded insistently. “If he knew I was alone with you, in the Astronomy Tower, after curfew and off patrol, smoking—”
Lily scoffed. “What is he, your mother?!”
“No,” he said. “He’s worse.”
She crossed her arms, the stub of her cigarette held out between her fingers. “That’s ridiculous.”
Remus shrugged. So what if he didn’t want to disappoint James the same way he didn’t want to disappoint his mother? James did a lot for him, for all of them, and the least Remus could do was keep his slightly self-destructive bad habit a secret from him. It was called being a good friend— James didn’t need to be more concerned about Remus than he already was. And the cigarettes smothered most of the guilt Remus felt for smoking them.
“This is why he acts like he’s the best thing since sliced bread,” Lily said, her face pinched, “because you guys treat him like he is.”
“Well if anyone was gonna be, it’d be James.”
She rolled her eyes. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”
“You judge him too harshly.”
“Well someone ought to. I’m not in the business of inflating his head bigger than it already is.”
Irritation began to crawl across Remus’s skin again. “You’re biassed,” he said, “just ‘cause of the back and forth with Snape. James and Sirius aren’t the horrible people you think they are, and you should know now that Snape isn’t an easily redeemable bloke either.”
Lily was quiet as she dropped what was left of her cigarette over the edge of the tower and they both watched it fall until they lost track of it. “I don’t think they’re horrible people,” she said eventually. “And Severus isn’t horrible either. They’re just horrible to each other. They all need to grow up.”
Remus didn’t respond to that. He didn’t want to point out that Snape had been horrible to her, too, because Lily knew that, she had experienced it, and it would just start another argument. And she was probably right about them needing to grow up a bit, but Remus would still sooner defend his friends than agree with her.
“We should go back,” he said, after a few minutes of breathing actual fresh air and letting it cool him off a bit.
“Yeah.” Lily nodded. “Yeah, we’ve gotta make sure the party gets cleaned up soon.”
“Mhm, sure… ‘We.’”
She gave him a flat look, but her lips twitched when he offered her a placating smile. “I’m beginning to think you were only given that badge through the process of elimination.”
“Oh, definitely.” He pushed off the railing, standing straight. “What other options were there?”
“Peter might’ve been alright.”
“I love Peter,” said Remus, “but he would do literally anything James and Sirius told him to. You’d have basically just handed them each their own badge.” He held his hands up before Lily could retort with any anti-James agenda. “I know, I know, that’s not good and we’re working on it.”
Lily seemed to hold herself back from pushing further, and she turned to lead them from the tower. “Hmm. I suppose you are the least of four evils.”
“Evil seems dramatic,” he said, following her.
She looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes shadowed by her long bangs. “Well, they’re dramatic.”
“Yeah, but saying they’re evil almost gives them too much power. Most of the time they’re just minor inconveniences.”
“Don’t say ‘they’ as if you’re not included, Moony.”
Remus smirked as she walked ahead of him, his sensitive eyes able to perfectly see her in the dark corridor, and he was pleased to hear her use his nickname, despite the fact that she was mocking him for it. He could almost still feel the light shove she gave him when she put together its origin. Of course, a light shove from Lily meant he almost fell in the lake. He bet she’d give Sirius a run for his money, trained beater or not.
Remus was pulled from his mental ranking of all his friends’ arm strength when Lily gasped. He tensed, drawing his wand right away, but the noise turned into more of an angry huff.
“What do you think you’re doing?!” she said, bravely striding towards three boys that had definitely not been at the party in Gryffindor. They all turned to face them with varying expressions, lit up by the moonlight from the window, none of them shocked; Barty Crouch’s face twisted into a sneer, Evan Rosier’s pinched in something akin to disgust, and Regulus Black’s was perfectly blank, as if he were made of marble. As if the expression were a result of years of practice.
“And dare I ask what you two were up to?” asked Crouch, grinning like he was a jackal clamped down on helpless prey. “Astronomy Tower is that way, isn’t it, Rosier?”
“It’s after curfew, Mr. Crouch,” Lily said, ignoring the comment far easier than Remus was able to. He bit back to urge to defend himself, staring daggers instead, trying not to show his surprise when he accidentally met Regulus’s equally sharp gaze.
“You can’t tell us what to do,” drawled Crouch, and his eyes were probably pale enough to compare to Remus’s own. He nodded towards Regulus. “We’ve got our own prefect now. We’re allowed to be out.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Lily, undeterred, and Remus swore he could hear the silent ‘asshole’ at the end of her sentence.
Crouch gestured with the plastic cup in his hand. “Why don’t you tell me how it works then, darling?”
“Crouch,” was all Remus said, his voice clipped with the warning.
“Give me your drinks and head back to your Common Room. If you’re not a Prefect, you’re not permitted to be in the halls after curfew,” Lily said, walking the last few steps towards them with Remus following closely. “Mr. Black, I suggest you stop abusing your Prefect position or I’ll have to report it.”
Crouch opened his big mouth again, clearly offended, and Remus would blame the lack of filter on the obvious alcohol consumption, but this wasn’t his first run-in with Crouch. The boy was just as obnoxious when he was completely sober. Usually Rosier was his echo, but he looked a little too sick at the moment for his sidekick duties.
Regulus held up a hand, shutting his friend up without having to say a word, and his stony eyes were still trained on Remus. He forced them to Lily. “Fine,” he said sharply, and he grabbed the two cups that Crouch had in each hand, the third one from Rosier, and flicked his wand to let them hover in the air in front of Remus and Lily.
“Too good to hand them to us?” said Remus, a casual eyebrow raised.
Regulus’s eyes snapped back to Remus, but he didn’t rise to the bait, he only grabbed Crouch’s arm to jerk him from where he had been grumbling something foul and reaching for his cup again.
“Don’t, Remus,” said Lily.
“Yeah, down boy,” said Crouch, still fucking grinning. It looked wrong that all of his teeth didn’t come to a point.
“Shut up,” said both Lily and Regulus, Lily finally getting annoyed and Regulus sounding bored.
Crouch oohed, and Regulus didn’t say a word more, pushing his friend down the hall and tugging Rosier’s robe sleeve to drag him along. Regulus looked over his shoulder briefly, smug and haughty, like he had somehow won that interaction, and then they turned the corner.
“Ugh,” said Lily, shaking her head and her shoulders to rid herself of the last few minutes. “I can’t fucking stand Crouch and his bloody— Don’t drink that! You don’t know what they put in it!”
“I wasn’t!” insisted Remus, lowering one of the cups from where he had only been smelling it. Crouch and Rosier had definitely been drunk—Remus could smell it on their breath from here—but there wasn’t alcohol in their cups. He frowned down at them. Two were mostly empty, just a bit of water, and the third had— “Oh, what the hell.”
“What?” asked Lily, shuffling closer and standing on her toes to look down into the cup. “I can’t see.” She lit her wand, pointing to tip so the light brightened the inside of the cup and reflected off the water. She gasped softly, looking back up at Remus with wide eyes. “Is that a fish?”
“I believe so.” Remus shook the cup a little, watching the fish dart into the rounded walls, much too big for the tiny container.
“Don’t! You’ll hurt it!”
Remus lifted the empty cups in his other hand. “Lils, I think there might’ve been two other fish…”
“No!” she said in disbelief, her jaw dropped. “They were drinking them?!”
“Well, one of them didn’t.”
Regulus, probably. No wonder Rosier had looked ill.
Lily casted a spell at the fish, making it swim in panicked circles. “It’s a real fish,” she whispered. “Where did they even get it?”
“No idea.” He tipped the cup towards her. “I guess you don’t wanna have a try?”
“Very funny.”
“What do I do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said, stepping back from the responsibility, literally and figuratively, and shrugging. “You want a fish?”