Fic: The Cure
The Cure
By minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius, peripheral James/Lily
Era: MWPP, Seventh Year.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: James tries to cure Remus and Sirius of being gay.
Dedication: This one has to be for such_heights.
Happy, fluffy MWPP. On my journal, and now crossposted to remusxsirius and the_kennel.
The Cure
James first realised something was wrong a couple of weeks into the autumn term, when he was gazing idly out of the common room window and saw Remus and Sirius wandering down to the lake. That wasn’t especially unusual, but it was a bit odd that they seemed to be holding hands.
As James watched, the distant figure of Sirius thumped the distant figure of Remus on the back, and Remus gave Sirius a friendly punch on the shoulder. The two distant figures then put their arms round each other, sank to their knees on the muddy bank and kissed: or that was what it looked like from where James was standing.
He turned away, rubbing his eyes. He definitely needed new glasses, because there was no way he’d just seen Remus and Sirius snogging. Or if he had, he was going to Obliviate himself.
When he dared look again, the two figures had disappeared. James shook off the uneasy feeling that they were just out of sight, under a bush perhaps, doing something so unspeakable that he didn’t even want to think about it.
Instead, he busied himself with his Arithmancy homework, working out equations feverishly; so feverishly that Professor Quinn took him aside after the next lesson and told him solicitously not to overwork so early in the year.
Unfortunately, there were no equations with their wonderful logic to rescue James’s sanity a few days later, when he realised he’d left his list of homework ingredients in the Potions dungeon.
‘Catch you up in a minute, Wormtail,’ he shouted, and dashed off to fetch it.
There was a strange, scratchy sound in the dungeon as he pushed back the door, a sound like little mice, or big mice, scrabbling out of a cauldron. He peered round the stack of cauldrons to investigate, fully expecting to find a nest of giant rodents. Instead, he saw two of his best friends lying on the floor, legs wrapped round each other, their lips glued together, their hands frenziedly stroking each other.
His first, dispassionate, reaction was that they seemed to be more or less the same height, which must make kissing a lot easier than it was, or would be, with Lily Evans. Having had that thought, James felt shock kicking in. He dropped his parchment and squawked, making a noise that sounded something like ‘Kwa!’ and Sirius and Remus dropped each other and scrambled to their feet, dusting off their robes.
‘I’m giving Moony extra coaching,’ Sirius said, not very convincingly, and Remus said, ‘We were just discussing Everlasting Elixirs.’
Obliviation, James soon realised, was not an option, unless he wanted to forget the whole of Seventh Year. It seemed that, wherever he went, he stumbled on Remus and Sirius (or rather, RemusandSirius) in some sort of compromising position.
The final straw came at three one morning, when James was woken by loud, passionate moans of ‘MOONY!’ and ‘PADFOOT!’ and ‘OH YES, YES, RIGHT THERE.’ He sat up, rubbed his eyes and fumbled for his wand, rather distracted when Peter crawled into his bed, tousled and confused.
‘Are you having a nightmare, Prongs?’
‘It’s not me, idiot,’ hissed James, closing the curtains with a swish of his wand. ‘They’ve cast a Sonorus instead of a silencing spell.’ He finally pulled himself together enough to cast the spell himself, cutting short a cry of ‘OH, MERLIN!’ from Sirius, though it could have been Remus.
‘Is Remus killing Sirius?’ gasped Peter, wide-eyed. ‘He’s not meant to transform at the quarter moon! Is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘I’d have thought everyone knew by now,’ James said grimly. ‘Bloody Sirius and Remus, at it all over the place.’
‘At what?’
‘Damn it, Peter, I don’t want to go into details. They’re, they’re...um. Bent.’
Peter looked more confused than ever.
‘They like each other. They fancy each other. Shit. Haven’t you had the talk yet?’
By the time James had finished explaining the facts of life - the inverted facts of life - to Peter, it was almost time to get up.
After breakfast, he bearded Remus and Sirius in the dorm.
‘I am,’ said James, in his most grandiloquent voice, ‘fucking sick of seeing and hearing you two at it all the time.’
‘It’s not all the time,’ Sirius protested. ‘I mean, Moony will insist on going to lessons occasionally, otherwise he gets sulky and won’t have sex.’
‘I’ve never noticed him not having sex,’ James said. ‘Or you, for that matter.’
Sirius glanced at Remus, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head slightly. Remus’s face was flushed and he was obviously trying to avoid looking at James, but he caught Sirius’s eye and sniggered.
‘Sirius. Stop it. I’m trying to talk to you,’ James said.
‘So? We’re tired of hearing about Lily Evans,’ Sirius said.
James wanted to point out that he and Lily didn’t have loud sex all over the place. Actually, he and Lily had never had loud sex, or sex at all, or even kissed, though he had held her hand two weeks ago in Hogsmeade, and the spot where her thumb had rested still tingled slightly, and was six shades darker than the rest of his skin as he’d taken care not to wash it.
‘There must be some way to cure you two,’ he said, exasperated.
‘Cure us of what?’ Sirius asked in his silkiest, most dangerous voice.
‘Of being, um, well, you know.’ James fiddled with the edge of his robes. ‘Unnatural.’
‘It’s not unnatural!’ Remus protested, shocked out of his embarrassment. ‘The Greeks did it all the time! If you read some of the ancient Greek wizards on homosexuality, you’ll find - ‘
‘Moony, nobody’s going to read about the sodding Greek wizards!’ Sirius protested. ‘Why should we? We can do it all right here, at Hogwarts.’
‘Not any more!’ snapped James. ‘You’re perverts.’
He felt momentarily a bit ashamed of using such strong language to his two best mates, but really there was no other way to put it. He slammed out of the dorm, uncomfortably aware that the second his back was turned, Remus and Sirius would probably be in each other’s arms again. Damn it. He was Head Boy, and he was going to put a stop to this, no matter what it took.
*
To an educated wizard, the word ‘cure’ automatically conjured up the word ‘potion’. Initially, James was quite tempted to serve his friends up a Shrinking Solution, to apply directly to, well, certain parts of their bodies. James blushed slightly at the thought: he was a man of the world and this close to shagging Lily Evans, but he wasn’t a great one for anatomical terms.
He didn’t often set foot in the library, but he decided that a wizard on an important mission should do appropriate research. At break, he went to the Potions section and collected together a promising selection of thick volumes, some of them equally thick in dust.
He was a bit annoyed to see, out of the corner of his eye, that Remus and Sirius obviously considered the library one of their private places, and were diagonally across the aisle, in the History of Magic section. They were poring over a book about the Elf Revolution, but certainly not reading it. James could hear them whispering and laughing together, and they were no doubt engaged in some unsavoury touching.
Spurred on, James searched through index after index for potions to induce revulsion. He found a promising Aversion Therapy potion, and a couple that promised to turn women into men. He wasn’t quite sure how applicable they were, but copied the instructions all the same.
He was rewarded for his efforts when the bell for Transfiguration went, and the Head Girl herself appeared beside him and said in a genuinely impressed voice, ‘Goodness, are you doing extra work for your NEWT?’
James glanced round at History of Magic, but mercifully Remus and Sirius were no longer there.
‘Private research,’ he said with an attempt at a modest smile, and Lily smiled back and tucked her arm into his as they went down the great staircase.
James’s good mood soon dissipated during the lesson. He couldn’t help noticing that Remus and Sirius were holding hands under the desk, and passing notes while McGonagall explained why dragon-hide should never be Transfigured into an animate object. Serve them right if they made beetles instead of bottles, and got eaten by a Hungarian Horntail! He even smirked when McGonagall pointedly asked Sirius if he was quite sure he’d manage the practical; though he was less than happy when Remus and Sirius produced perfectly balanced bottles and McGonagall gave Gryffindor five points on their behalf. His own bottle had a crack in it, which displeased him immensely.
However, he felt better when he checked his store of Potions ingredients and found that he had everything needed to make a Straightening Philtre. ‘Works on hair, wizards and witches,’ the instructions read, so James resolved to keep a bit back for his own private use.
*
Remus and Sirius were late down to breakfast the following morning, as always. You could almost see the little bluebirds twittering round their heads, James thought sourly, as they walked into the Great Hall hand in hand, ignoring the Slytherin wolf-whistles.
‘Hey, guys, I got you some pumpkin juice,’ James said, pushing over the doctored glasses. ‘Thought you’d need it after your rough night.’
Remus blushed again, and Sirius scowled. ‘Get off our case, Prongs.’
‘Aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?’ James asked.
He watched them carefully until they’d drunk every drop of their juice. The only downside was that, to alleviate suspicion, he had to be extra solicitous all through the meal, helping Remus to scrambled egg and singling out the crispest bacon for Sirius.
Afterwards, Remus went pale and said, ‘Bloody hell, I feel awful.’
‘Must be that Flobberworm flu that’s going round,’ Sirius said, then turned quite green and said, ‘So do I.’
James, slightly alarmed, trailed after them at a slight distance as they ran to the nearest loo, where they threw up copiously, or so James gathered from the sounds emerging from the cubicles. Professor McGonagall happened to be passing by and heard them too; she transported the two boys to the Hospital Wing on the spot, using a Mobilicorpus spell.
It was incredibly annoying that they’d caught that damn Flobberworm flu immediately after taking their potion. James hoped they hadn’t thrown it all up, and entertained a few fantasies of them being cured already, and falling in love with a couple of the pretty Hufflepuff girls who were currently in the overflowing infirmary.
James went up to see them at break, partly to find out if his fantasies were coming true. To his horror, Madame Pomfrey met him at the door with a tragic expression and said, ‘Your friends have been poisoned, Mr Potter.'
‘Poisoned? You don’t mean they’re, they’re...’ James couldn’t quite bring himself to say ‘dead’.
‘Fortunately,’ Madame Pomfrey said, ‘I found the antidote in the nick of time! Someone had given them an overdose of mandrake essence.’ She gave James the strangest look, almost as if she knew about that wretched potion, though of course she couldn’t.
‘So they don’t have the flu?’ James asked, trying to spot his friends in one of the many occupied beds.
‘No, and I’ve had to isolate them from the other patients. Don’t want to weaken their immune systems.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Just for five minutes.’
They were in a side room, and the curtains were drawn round their beds. James pulled one of the curtains back a fraction, peeping in with great trepidation, envisaging the two white, inert forms. He remembered how he and Sirius had hypnotised the Slytherins into thinking they were pixies. He remembered the first time he’d transformed into Prongs, and raced Remus through the Forbidden Forest. He remembered the times the four of them had plotted and planned and chatted late into the night... His glasses misted up.
When they demisted, he thought he must once more be seeing things, because one of the beds was empty, and the other was full of what looked, from his briefest of brief glances, like a serious commotion under the heavy covers. Unfortunately, they weren’t quite heavy enough to muffle a series of heavy breathing sounds, faint moans and squeaks, which sounded suspiciously like the sounds that had woken James the other night.
He dropped the curtain and fled, wishing desperately that he’d actually managed to kill the stupid gits after all. It would be worth going to Azkaban to have the memories of their constant and noisy couplings erased, just for a start.
‘You all right, dear?’ asked Madam Pomfrey, and James went scarlet and sputtered, ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’ He fervently hoped she wouldn’t go and check on the patients herself, though serve them right if she did.
*
He did wonder if the poisonous potion might have some delayed effect, but in the week that followed he was forced to admit that nothing had changed: well, not quite nothing.
Sirius and Remus were suddenly extra solicitous of each other, like a pair of fussy maiden aunts. ‘Let me taste your tea, Moony,’ Sirius insisted every morning at breakfast, and ‘Sirius, you look a bit pale,’ Remus said anxiously just before bed every evening. James frequently spotted them taking each other’s pulses in the common room while they were doing their Ancient Runes homework.
The bloody potion didn’t even work as a hair straightener, James found. It made his unruly hair stand up at such an alarming angle that he worried for a moment that he might have been poisoned too, and all his hair would all fall out and leave him bald.
He decided to forget about Remus and Sirius for a few days, because there was a Hogsmeade weekend coming up, and he was going with Lily. When she perched on the arm of a chair and launched into a long anecdote about a girl in her dorm, James was so caught up with daydreams about how he might dare broach her lips, that he didn’t at first hear a word she was saying. He did register that her hair was newly-washed, and her eyes were bright as she enthusiastically told her story, waving her hands, which were, James noted not for the first time, tiny and slim with almond-shaped nails.
However, when Lily suddenly said, ‘But of course, Black wouldn’t fancy her, would he?’ he did a double-take and said, ‘Fancy who?’
‘I’ve just been telling you,’ Lily said, rather crossly. ‘Why do boys never listen? Poor Phoebe. That Slytherin boy she was going out with, you know. Well, he dumped her because she isn’t a pureblood. So I’ll have to go round with her this weekend, because she’s so miserable.’
‘You’re cancelling our date?’ James asked.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Hang on. Didn’t you say something about Sirius?’
Within five minutes their date was salvaged, and James felt that Sirius at least was launched in the right direction for a complete cure.
He had to wait until supper to tell him the good news, because he and Remus had unaccountably disappeared after school. They came into the Great Hall when dinner was already underway, flushed and panting.
‘Have they been doing it again?’ hissed Peter, who had taken in some, if not quite all, of the inverted facts of life.
‘Shut up, Wormtail!’
James didn’t say anything about Phoebe until Remus and Sirius had helped themselves to shepherd’s pie, and even sat patiently through their enquiries about each other’s food. ‘Those potatoes have a bit of a twang, don’t they, Padfoot?’ Remus asked, poking Sirius’s dinner with his fork, and Sirius said, ‘Well, I’m certainly not letting you eat them, then.’
When they’d finally started on their meals, James nudged Sirius and said, ‘Hey, Padfoot, you know the blonde girl in Evans’s dorm? The one you say looks like she could be a model?’
‘I said she could be a model aeroplane,’ Sirius said. ‘Because she always walks with her elbows sticking out.’
‘What’s an aeroplane?’ James said, but before Remus could finish explaining, the pudding arrived. Remus was worried because Sirius’s peach crumble had a faint taste of almonds. ‘The stones contain cyanide,’ he explained, and Sirius said, ‘I’ll risk it just this once. But I won’t allow you to!’
‘I won’t want to go on living if you’re dead.’ Remus helped himself to crumble too, and drowned it in custard.
James was so exasperated by the constant interruptions to the story of the flying machines that he was sorely tempted to brew and serve another lot of the poisonous potion. But he managed to keep his temper. After all, it was his fault Remus and Sirius were so paranoid about food at the moment.
‘You have a date with her, Padfoot,’ he finally announced.
Sirius looked confused. ‘What are you talking about? Who?’
‘I’ve only been trying to tell you for the past half hour!’ James said, slamming his spoon down on the table. ‘Phoebe. Aeroplane girl. Right? You and Phoebe are coming to Hogsmeade with me and Evans. Phoebe really fancies you, and I’m sure she’ll cure you of your, um, phase.’
‘Remus must come too,’ Sirius said immediately, and James sighed. ‘No, Padfoot. This is a date. We can’t bring all our friends along.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Remus said, though James thought his lip was trembling just a little bit. ‘It’ll be good for you, Sirius. Perhaps Prongs is right. Perhaps you shouldn’t feel tied down.’
‘Oh! Do you and Padfoot tie each other up?’ Peter asked with immense curiosity.
By the time James had picked him off the floor and undone the variety of jinxes cast by the combined forces of Black and Lupin, it was just about bedtime.
*
On Saturday, Sirius defiantly kissed Remus goodbye in full sight of James and Peter. They clung to each other for at least fifteen minutes, by James’s reckoning.
‘I’ll think about you every second,’ Sirius promised, and Remus said, ‘You’ll have a wonderful time, Padfoot. She’s a lovely girl.’
‘You don’t really think so?’ Sirius asked, sounding so distressed that Remus had to hold his hand and reassure him for a further ten minutes, by which time they were late.
The date, however, went swimmingly, once the four of them were sitting in the Three Broomsticks with their hot Butterbeers. James settled in to give Lily a blow-by-blow account of the Quidditch match against Slytherin, which she listened to attentively, though she had actually been present and seen it for herself.
He glanced at Sirius from time to time and was both surprised and relieved to see that he had apparently undergone an almost instant and spontaneous cure. He was sitting very close indeed to Phoebe - fast worker, James thought enviously - and occasionally took her hand to emphasise some point, gazing into her eyes as he talked. What was more, she seemed enthralled by what he had to say, and even laughed from time to time. Lily rarely laughed at his jokes, James reflected.
After the third round of Butterbeers, Lily excused herself to go to the loo, and James finally got a chance to listen in. He thought contentedly that perhaps Sirius could give him a few pointers: Lily definitely hadn’t ever put her arm round him and ruffled his hair.
‘You know I told you Remus is good at Divination?’ Sirius was saying, his eyes alight with pride and pleasure. ‘Well, he’s foreseen that one day Muggles will consider us just another normal couple!’
‘But wizards won’t?’
‘Not as far as Remus can tell. Wizards aren’t very tolerant, actually. Potter keeps trying to cure us, but he doesn’t understand that we don’t want to be cured.’
‘Of course you don’t!’ Phoebe said. ‘You two boys are so adorable together! You know, you make me wonder if perhaps I’m not wasting my time. Maybe I should find a nice girl.’
‘Definitely,’ Sirius said. ‘It’s great to be going out with someone who understands exactly what you’re thinking or feeling. To me, girls are just, well, weird. And you probably think guys are weird too, right?’
‘Absolutely!’ said Phoebe.
Lily returned from the loo at that moment, and James got up unsteadily, clutching her arm. ‘I feel like I’m getting that damn Flobberworm flu,’ he said, and Lily, rather unsympathetically, remarked, ‘You’ve had too much Butterbeer, that’s all.’ She was very sweet to him for the rest of the day, though, especially when he bought her a big slab of the finest Honeydukes fudge. She occasionally asked how he was feeling, and expressed her pleasure that Sirius and Phoebe were still deep in conversation.
‘They really seem to like each other,’ she whispered to James at one point, and James didn’t have the heart to enlighten her.
*
James pointedly ignored Remus or Sirius for the rest of the weekend, though they probably didn’t notice. They were joyously reunited on Sirius’s return from Hogsmeade, but they did have the decency to disappear somewhere to consummate their joy, rather than carrying on in the dorm. James thought they probably went to the Shack; he really didn’t want to know.
He was still pondering how to cure them - because, damn it, there was no way they were incurable - on Monday morning, when a tawny owl dropped the latest edition of Quidditch Weekly beside his porridge at breakfast. He flicked through, keeping half an ear on the latest health bulletins from Remus and Sirius.
‘Moony, I must insist you don’t eat toast with white spots on it! Could be ergotamine,’ Sirius was saying, and Remus said, ‘But ergotamine poisoning is fun! We’d have lovely hallucinations and be able to dance.’
James started to read the main feature mainly to drown out their voices, but soon found himself genuinely absorbed. The article was titled The Sport of Men, and began, ‘Tired of playing a game that even witches can play? Why don’t you try Tridditch?’
James discovered that Tridditch seemed far more exciting than Quidditch. You played with tridents and nets, endeavouring to catch your opponents and spear them. It was a dangerous game, obviously, and the instructions included a long appendix devoted to healing charms.
He brightened up at once. Not only did Tridditch sound fun, and satisfyingly risky, but he was sure that once Remus and Sirius were introduced to a proper, manly pursuit they’d soon discover the joys of heterosexuality. After all, it wasn’t their fault they went to a school overrun with girls whittering on about blokes. You could hardly blame a guy for getting confused! No doubt the resolutely masculine world of the Tridditch player would soon work the desired cure.
Testosterone, that was the ticket. James went to Defence Against the Dark Arts whistling, his glasses slightly askew, though he straightened them when Lily Evans smiled at him in the corridor.
After school, James gathered his friends together on the Quidditch pitch.
‘This had better be important,’ Sirius grumbled. ‘It’s bloody freezing, and I’ve got Charms homework.’
‘Since when do you care about homework?’ James asked. ‘Yes, it is important. It’s a game. Tridditch.’
‘Oh,’ Remus said, with great interest. ‘Gladiators. Are we going to fight against lions? Or elephants?’
James’s heart sank a little bit. ‘Well, not that sort of gladiator, Moony. See, we each have a net and a trident, and we’ve got to try and spear each other. But if your opponent manages to throw his net over you, you can’t harm him.’
‘Shouldn’t we have a full team?’ Sirius asked. ‘I bet I can spear Wormtail without even waving my wand.’
‘You don’t use your wand,’ James said, alarmed. ‘Brute force, Padfoot. That’s how we do it. Look, Remus and I will show you. Try and catch me under your net, Moony. Yes, that’s right. Wave it around.’
Remus waved his net around. In the gathering October twilight, it looked for a moment like a giant, white moth fluttering down on to the Quidditch pitch, until the silver gleam of James’s trident bisected it, landing in Remus’s left knee.
‘Ow! Ow!’ Remus sank to the ground clutching his leg, tears of what he later claimed were cold flowing copiously down his cheeks. James had to admit, sadly, that he’d rarely seen a feebler example of testosterone: in his standard issue school robes, with his undeniably pretty face, Remus in the dim light could have passed for one of the Ravenclaw beauties. If James hadn’t known that he unfolded into a tall, skinny boy, he might almost have fancied Remus himself.
Sirius, kneeling at his side, his long dark hair streaming down his back, was as distressed as James had ever seen him. ‘Moony, speak to me! Has he killed you?’
‘I’m fine. Really.’ Remus tried to struggle to his feet and fell down again.
‘Hang on guys, I’ve got a full set of healing charms here,’ James intervened, flicking through Quidditch Weekly as fast as he could. ‘Yeah, here’s a good one. Trident in knee. Apparently, it often happens.’ He attempted a light laugh.
Sirius got up and loomed over him threateningly. ‘You dare go near Remus again, mate, and you’ll have me to answer to! You’ve done enough damage for one day.’
He took out his wand and passed it over Remus’s knee, uttering a series of arcane incantations. Between spells, he muttered indignantly, ‘As if he didn’t have enough fucking pain to bear every month!’
‘Okay, Sirius, I didn’t do it on purpose.’
‘I didn’t say you did. Now shut up, Prongs. I’m trying to clot his blood.’
Eventually, Remus said, in a rather faint voice, ‘I think I’m okay now, Padfoot. If you could take the binding charm off my ankle, I can get up.’
‘Oh, no, Moony, I’m sorry!’ cried Sirius. ‘Finite Incantatem!’ He helped Remus up, putting his arm around him, quite unnecessarily, James thought, for extra support. ‘I’ll take you back to the castle. Here, lean on me.’
‘That didn’t work very well,’ Peter said, unexpectedly, after they’d hobbled off into the night, so entwined that they could have been one person. James was quite surprised at his acumen, but tried not to show it.
‘I will cure them, one day,’ he said, gathering together nets, tridents, and his now rather tattered copy of Quidditch Weekly.
‘Oh. I meant the game. Sirius was right. We should get a proper team together.’
‘Yeah. I dunno. I’ve sort of lost my enthusiasm for it,’ James said, rather bitterly.
‘It would impress Lily,’ Peter remarked, but James just shrugged and led the way back to the castle, slightly stooped under the weight of all the Tridditch paraphernalia.
*
That night, James went to sleep early, and dreamed that he and Lily were dancing together at the Yule Ball. He had some strange idea that if Remus and Sirius were dancing with them, they could be cured. Then, the music became discordant, Lily started making strange, choking noises, and groaning and screaming, Remus and Sirius were clinging to other and refusing to be cured, and Lily was falling...
James woke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding, his hands shaking so much that it took him several goes to manage a decent Lumos.
It took him a moment to realise that the noise was all in his dreams: no doubt a horrible sense memory of the Sonorus night. He noted that the bed-curtains were all open, and Remus and Sirius were sleeping peacefully in their respective four-posters. A shaft of moonlight fell across their faces, making them look uncannily angelic.
James thought regretfully that if only he’d used a Sleeping Draught instead of the ill-fated Straightening Philtre, all his problems would be solved. But he wasn’t going to risk any more potions.
He tiptoed out to the loo and got himself a glass of water, then lay down and pulled the covers over his head. Closing his eyes, he tried to visualise Sirius with Phoebe, and Remus with one of the pretty Hufflepuffs.
But they resolutely refused to play. Sirius would keep saying, ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ and running off to find Remus, who was asking his pretty Hufflepuff if she knew Sirius Black, and wasn’t he wonderful? It hit James dimly that they actually loved each other, which filled him with such trepidation that he woke up again, and lay there for a long time, trying to think of a few more cures.
Perhaps he could pretend that he and Peter were together, show Remus and Sirius how odd they looked. No. He wasn’t going to kiss Peter, even as a joke. Or maybe he could transform one of them into a girl with Polyjuice. The fatal flaw there was that the transformee would have to look like an existing girl, and they didn’t fancy any of them. Or he could ask Lily to seduce Remus: she liked Remus, and surely no boy or man on earth could resist Lily. But he couldn’t bear the thought of Remus, or anyone else, touching his girl. Maybe he could lock both of them in the Playwitch studios, where the prettiest witches were photographed...
He finally fell asleep at five, a faint smile on his face, and dreamed that Sirius was beating off Slytherin girls with a Bludger. Images of Remus and Sirius walking hand in hand by the lake invaded his dream from time to time, but he steadfastly ignored them.
End
By minnow_53
Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius, peripheral James/Lily
Era: MWPP, Seventh Year.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: James tries to cure Remus and Sirius of being gay.
Dedication: This one has to be for such_heights.
Happy, fluffy MWPP. On my journal, and now crossposted to remusxsirius and the_kennel.
The Cure
James first realised something was wrong a couple of weeks into the autumn term, when he was gazing idly out of the common room window and saw Remus and Sirius wandering down to the lake. That wasn’t especially unusual, but it was a bit odd that they seemed to be holding hands.
As James watched, the distant figure of Sirius thumped the distant figure of Remus on the back, and Remus gave Sirius a friendly punch on the shoulder. The two distant figures then put their arms round each other, sank to their knees on the muddy bank and kissed: or that was what it looked like from where James was standing.
He turned away, rubbing his eyes. He definitely needed new glasses, because there was no way he’d just seen Remus and Sirius snogging. Or if he had, he was going to Obliviate himself.
When he dared look again, the two figures had disappeared. James shook off the uneasy feeling that they were just out of sight, under a bush perhaps, doing something so unspeakable that he didn’t even want to think about it.
Instead, he busied himself with his Arithmancy homework, working out equations feverishly; so feverishly that Professor Quinn took him aside after the next lesson and told him solicitously not to overwork so early in the year.
Unfortunately, there were no equations with their wonderful logic to rescue James’s sanity a few days later, when he realised he’d left his list of homework ingredients in the Potions dungeon.
‘Catch you up in a minute, Wormtail,’ he shouted, and dashed off to fetch it.
There was a strange, scratchy sound in the dungeon as he pushed back the door, a sound like little mice, or big mice, scrabbling out of a cauldron. He peered round the stack of cauldrons to investigate, fully expecting to find a nest of giant rodents. Instead, he saw two of his best friends lying on the floor, legs wrapped round each other, their lips glued together, their hands frenziedly stroking each other.
His first, dispassionate, reaction was that they seemed to be more or less the same height, which must make kissing a lot easier than it was, or would be, with Lily Evans. Having had that thought, James felt shock kicking in. He dropped his parchment and squawked, making a noise that sounded something like ‘Kwa!’ and Sirius and Remus dropped each other and scrambled to their feet, dusting off their robes.
‘I’m giving Moony extra coaching,’ Sirius said, not very convincingly, and Remus said, ‘We were just discussing Everlasting Elixirs.’
Obliviation, James soon realised, was not an option, unless he wanted to forget the whole of Seventh Year. It seemed that, wherever he went, he stumbled on Remus and Sirius (or rather, RemusandSirius) in some sort of compromising position.
The final straw came at three one morning, when James was woken by loud, passionate moans of ‘MOONY!’ and ‘PADFOOT!’ and ‘OH YES, YES, RIGHT THERE.’ He sat up, rubbed his eyes and fumbled for his wand, rather distracted when Peter crawled into his bed, tousled and confused.
‘Are you having a nightmare, Prongs?’
‘It’s not me, idiot,’ hissed James, closing the curtains with a swish of his wand. ‘They’ve cast a Sonorus instead of a silencing spell.’ He finally pulled himself together enough to cast the spell himself, cutting short a cry of ‘OH, MERLIN!’ from Sirius, though it could have been Remus.
‘Is Remus killing Sirius?’ gasped Peter, wide-eyed. ‘He’s not meant to transform at the quarter moon! Is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘I’d have thought everyone knew by now,’ James said grimly. ‘Bloody Sirius and Remus, at it all over the place.’
‘At what?’
‘Damn it, Peter, I don’t want to go into details. They’re, they’re...um. Bent.’
Peter looked more confused than ever.
‘They like each other. They fancy each other. Shit. Haven’t you had the talk yet?’
By the time James had finished explaining the facts of life - the inverted facts of life - to Peter, it was almost time to get up.
After breakfast, he bearded Remus and Sirius in the dorm.
‘I am,’ said James, in his most grandiloquent voice, ‘fucking sick of seeing and hearing you two at it all the time.’
‘It’s not all the time,’ Sirius protested. ‘I mean, Moony will insist on going to lessons occasionally, otherwise he gets sulky and won’t have sex.’
‘I’ve never noticed him not having sex,’ James said. ‘Or you, for that matter.’
Sirius glanced at Remus, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head slightly. Remus’s face was flushed and he was obviously trying to avoid looking at James, but he caught Sirius’s eye and sniggered.
‘Sirius. Stop it. I’m trying to talk to you,’ James said.
‘So? We’re tired of hearing about Lily Evans,’ Sirius said.
James wanted to point out that he and Lily didn’t have loud sex all over the place. Actually, he and Lily had never had loud sex, or sex at all, or even kissed, though he had held her hand two weeks ago in Hogsmeade, and the spot where her thumb had rested still tingled slightly, and was six shades darker than the rest of his skin as he’d taken care not to wash it.
‘There must be some way to cure you two,’ he said, exasperated.
‘Cure us of what?’ Sirius asked in his silkiest, most dangerous voice.
‘Of being, um, well, you know.’ James fiddled with the edge of his robes. ‘Unnatural.’
‘It’s not unnatural!’ Remus protested, shocked out of his embarrassment. ‘The Greeks did it all the time! If you read some of the ancient Greek wizards on homosexuality, you’ll find - ‘
‘Moony, nobody’s going to read about the sodding Greek wizards!’ Sirius protested. ‘Why should we? We can do it all right here, at Hogwarts.’
‘Not any more!’ snapped James. ‘You’re perverts.’
He felt momentarily a bit ashamed of using such strong language to his two best mates, but really there was no other way to put it. He slammed out of the dorm, uncomfortably aware that the second his back was turned, Remus and Sirius would probably be in each other’s arms again. Damn it. He was Head Boy, and he was going to put a stop to this, no matter what it took.
*
To an educated wizard, the word ‘cure’ automatically conjured up the word ‘potion’. Initially, James was quite tempted to serve his friends up a Shrinking Solution, to apply directly to, well, certain parts of their bodies. James blushed slightly at the thought: he was a man of the world and this close to shagging Lily Evans, but he wasn’t a great one for anatomical terms.
He didn’t often set foot in the library, but he decided that a wizard on an important mission should do appropriate research. At break, he went to the Potions section and collected together a promising selection of thick volumes, some of them equally thick in dust.
He was a bit annoyed to see, out of the corner of his eye, that Remus and Sirius obviously considered the library one of their private places, and were diagonally across the aisle, in the History of Magic section. They were poring over a book about the Elf Revolution, but certainly not reading it. James could hear them whispering and laughing together, and they were no doubt engaged in some unsavoury touching.
Spurred on, James searched through index after index for potions to induce revulsion. He found a promising Aversion Therapy potion, and a couple that promised to turn women into men. He wasn’t quite sure how applicable they were, but copied the instructions all the same.
He was rewarded for his efforts when the bell for Transfiguration went, and the Head Girl herself appeared beside him and said in a genuinely impressed voice, ‘Goodness, are you doing extra work for your NEWT?’
James glanced round at History of Magic, but mercifully Remus and Sirius were no longer there.
‘Private research,’ he said with an attempt at a modest smile, and Lily smiled back and tucked her arm into his as they went down the great staircase.
James’s good mood soon dissipated during the lesson. He couldn’t help noticing that Remus and Sirius were holding hands under the desk, and passing notes while McGonagall explained why dragon-hide should never be Transfigured into an animate object. Serve them right if they made beetles instead of bottles, and got eaten by a Hungarian Horntail! He even smirked when McGonagall pointedly asked Sirius if he was quite sure he’d manage the practical; though he was less than happy when Remus and Sirius produced perfectly balanced bottles and McGonagall gave Gryffindor five points on their behalf. His own bottle had a crack in it, which displeased him immensely.
However, he felt better when he checked his store of Potions ingredients and found that he had everything needed to make a Straightening Philtre. ‘Works on hair, wizards and witches,’ the instructions read, so James resolved to keep a bit back for his own private use.
*
Remus and Sirius were late down to breakfast the following morning, as always. You could almost see the little bluebirds twittering round their heads, James thought sourly, as they walked into the Great Hall hand in hand, ignoring the Slytherin wolf-whistles.
‘Hey, guys, I got you some pumpkin juice,’ James said, pushing over the doctored glasses. ‘Thought you’d need it after your rough night.’
Remus blushed again, and Sirius scowled. ‘Get off our case, Prongs.’
‘Aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?’ James asked.
He watched them carefully until they’d drunk every drop of their juice. The only downside was that, to alleviate suspicion, he had to be extra solicitous all through the meal, helping Remus to scrambled egg and singling out the crispest bacon for Sirius.
Afterwards, Remus went pale and said, ‘Bloody hell, I feel awful.’
‘Must be that Flobberworm flu that’s going round,’ Sirius said, then turned quite green and said, ‘So do I.’
James, slightly alarmed, trailed after them at a slight distance as they ran to the nearest loo, where they threw up copiously, or so James gathered from the sounds emerging from the cubicles. Professor McGonagall happened to be passing by and heard them too; she transported the two boys to the Hospital Wing on the spot, using a Mobilicorpus spell.
It was incredibly annoying that they’d caught that damn Flobberworm flu immediately after taking their potion. James hoped they hadn’t thrown it all up, and entertained a few fantasies of them being cured already, and falling in love with a couple of the pretty Hufflepuff girls who were currently in the overflowing infirmary.
James went up to see them at break, partly to find out if his fantasies were coming true. To his horror, Madame Pomfrey met him at the door with a tragic expression and said, ‘Your friends have been poisoned, Mr Potter.'
‘Poisoned? You don’t mean they’re, they’re...’ James couldn’t quite bring himself to say ‘dead’.
‘Fortunately,’ Madame Pomfrey said, ‘I found the antidote in the nick of time! Someone had given them an overdose of mandrake essence.’ She gave James the strangest look, almost as if she knew about that wretched potion, though of course she couldn’t.
‘So they don’t have the flu?’ James asked, trying to spot his friends in one of the many occupied beds.
‘No, and I’ve had to isolate them from the other patients. Don’t want to weaken their immune systems.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Just for five minutes.’
They were in a side room, and the curtains were drawn round their beds. James pulled one of the curtains back a fraction, peeping in with great trepidation, envisaging the two white, inert forms. He remembered how he and Sirius had hypnotised the Slytherins into thinking they were pixies. He remembered the first time he’d transformed into Prongs, and raced Remus through the Forbidden Forest. He remembered the times the four of them had plotted and planned and chatted late into the night... His glasses misted up.
When they demisted, he thought he must once more be seeing things, because one of the beds was empty, and the other was full of what looked, from his briefest of brief glances, like a serious commotion under the heavy covers. Unfortunately, they weren’t quite heavy enough to muffle a series of heavy breathing sounds, faint moans and squeaks, which sounded suspiciously like the sounds that had woken James the other night.
He dropped the curtain and fled, wishing desperately that he’d actually managed to kill the stupid gits after all. It would be worth going to Azkaban to have the memories of their constant and noisy couplings erased, just for a start.
‘You all right, dear?’ asked Madam Pomfrey, and James went scarlet and sputtered, ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’ He fervently hoped she wouldn’t go and check on the patients herself, though serve them right if she did.
*
He did wonder if the poisonous potion might have some delayed effect, but in the week that followed he was forced to admit that nothing had changed: well, not quite nothing.
Sirius and Remus were suddenly extra solicitous of each other, like a pair of fussy maiden aunts. ‘Let me taste your tea, Moony,’ Sirius insisted every morning at breakfast, and ‘Sirius, you look a bit pale,’ Remus said anxiously just before bed every evening. James frequently spotted them taking each other’s pulses in the common room while they were doing their Ancient Runes homework.
The bloody potion didn’t even work as a hair straightener, James found. It made his unruly hair stand up at such an alarming angle that he worried for a moment that he might have been poisoned too, and all his hair would all fall out and leave him bald.
He decided to forget about Remus and Sirius for a few days, because there was a Hogsmeade weekend coming up, and he was going with Lily. When she perched on the arm of a chair and launched into a long anecdote about a girl in her dorm, James was so caught up with daydreams about how he might dare broach her lips, that he didn’t at first hear a word she was saying. He did register that her hair was newly-washed, and her eyes were bright as she enthusiastically told her story, waving her hands, which were, James noted not for the first time, tiny and slim with almond-shaped nails.
However, when Lily suddenly said, ‘But of course, Black wouldn’t fancy her, would he?’ he did a double-take and said, ‘Fancy who?’
‘I’ve just been telling you,’ Lily said, rather crossly. ‘Why do boys never listen? Poor Phoebe. That Slytherin boy she was going out with, you know. Well, he dumped her because she isn’t a pureblood. So I’ll have to go round with her this weekend, because she’s so miserable.’
‘You’re cancelling our date?’ James asked.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Hang on. Didn’t you say something about Sirius?’
Within five minutes their date was salvaged, and James felt that Sirius at least was launched in the right direction for a complete cure.
He had to wait until supper to tell him the good news, because he and Remus had unaccountably disappeared after school. They came into the Great Hall when dinner was already underway, flushed and panting.
‘Have they been doing it again?’ hissed Peter, who had taken in some, if not quite all, of the inverted facts of life.
‘Shut up, Wormtail!’
James didn’t say anything about Phoebe until Remus and Sirius had helped themselves to shepherd’s pie, and even sat patiently through their enquiries about each other’s food. ‘Those potatoes have a bit of a twang, don’t they, Padfoot?’ Remus asked, poking Sirius’s dinner with his fork, and Sirius said, ‘Well, I’m certainly not letting you eat them, then.’
When they’d finally started on their meals, James nudged Sirius and said, ‘Hey, Padfoot, you know the blonde girl in Evans’s dorm? The one you say looks like she could be a model?’
‘I said she could be a model aeroplane,’ Sirius said. ‘Because she always walks with her elbows sticking out.’
‘What’s an aeroplane?’ James said, but before Remus could finish explaining, the pudding arrived. Remus was worried because Sirius’s peach crumble had a faint taste of almonds. ‘The stones contain cyanide,’ he explained, and Sirius said, ‘I’ll risk it just this once. But I won’t allow you to!’
‘I won’t want to go on living if you’re dead.’ Remus helped himself to crumble too, and drowned it in custard.
James was so exasperated by the constant interruptions to the story of the flying machines that he was sorely tempted to brew and serve another lot of the poisonous potion. But he managed to keep his temper. After all, it was his fault Remus and Sirius were so paranoid about food at the moment.
‘You have a date with her, Padfoot,’ he finally announced.
Sirius looked confused. ‘What are you talking about? Who?’
‘I’ve only been trying to tell you for the past half hour!’ James said, slamming his spoon down on the table. ‘Phoebe. Aeroplane girl. Right? You and Phoebe are coming to Hogsmeade with me and Evans. Phoebe really fancies you, and I’m sure she’ll cure you of your, um, phase.’
‘Remus must come too,’ Sirius said immediately, and James sighed. ‘No, Padfoot. This is a date. We can’t bring all our friends along.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Remus said, though James thought his lip was trembling just a little bit. ‘It’ll be good for you, Sirius. Perhaps Prongs is right. Perhaps you shouldn’t feel tied down.’
‘Oh! Do you and Padfoot tie each other up?’ Peter asked with immense curiosity.
By the time James had picked him off the floor and undone the variety of jinxes cast by the combined forces of Black and Lupin, it was just about bedtime.
*
On Saturday, Sirius defiantly kissed Remus goodbye in full sight of James and Peter. They clung to each other for at least fifteen minutes, by James’s reckoning.
‘I’ll think about you every second,’ Sirius promised, and Remus said, ‘You’ll have a wonderful time, Padfoot. She’s a lovely girl.’
‘You don’t really think so?’ Sirius asked, sounding so distressed that Remus had to hold his hand and reassure him for a further ten minutes, by which time they were late.
The date, however, went swimmingly, once the four of them were sitting in the Three Broomsticks with their hot Butterbeers. James settled in to give Lily a blow-by-blow account of the Quidditch match against Slytherin, which she listened to attentively, though she had actually been present and seen it for herself.
He glanced at Sirius from time to time and was both surprised and relieved to see that he had apparently undergone an almost instant and spontaneous cure. He was sitting very close indeed to Phoebe - fast worker, James thought enviously - and occasionally took her hand to emphasise some point, gazing into her eyes as he talked. What was more, she seemed enthralled by what he had to say, and even laughed from time to time. Lily rarely laughed at his jokes, James reflected.
After the third round of Butterbeers, Lily excused herself to go to the loo, and James finally got a chance to listen in. He thought contentedly that perhaps Sirius could give him a few pointers: Lily definitely hadn’t ever put her arm round him and ruffled his hair.
‘You know I told you Remus is good at Divination?’ Sirius was saying, his eyes alight with pride and pleasure. ‘Well, he’s foreseen that one day Muggles will consider us just another normal couple!’
‘But wizards won’t?’
‘Not as far as Remus can tell. Wizards aren’t very tolerant, actually. Potter keeps trying to cure us, but he doesn’t understand that we don’t want to be cured.’
‘Of course you don’t!’ Phoebe said. ‘You two boys are so adorable together! You know, you make me wonder if perhaps I’m not wasting my time. Maybe I should find a nice girl.’
‘Definitely,’ Sirius said. ‘It’s great to be going out with someone who understands exactly what you’re thinking or feeling. To me, girls are just, well, weird. And you probably think guys are weird too, right?’
‘Absolutely!’ said Phoebe.
Lily returned from the loo at that moment, and James got up unsteadily, clutching her arm. ‘I feel like I’m getting that damn Flobberworm flu,’ he said, and Lily, rather unsympathetically, remarked, ‘You’ve had too much Butterbeer, that’s all.’ She was very sweet to him for the rest of the day, though, especially when he bought her a big slab of the finest Honeydukes fudge. She occasionally asked how he was feeling, and expressed her pleasure that Sirius and Phoebe were still deep in conversation.
‘They really seem to like each other,’ she whispered to James at one point, and James didn’t have the heart to enlighten her.
*
James pointedly ignored Remus or Sirius for the rest of the weekend, though they probably didn’t notice. They were joyously reunited on Sirius’s return from Hogsmeade, but they did have the decency to disappear somewhere to consummate their joy, rather than carrying on in the dorm. James thought they probably went to the Shack; he really didn’t want to know.
He was still pondering how to cure them - because, damn it, there was no way they were incurable - on Monday morning, when a tawny owl dropped the latest edition of Quidditch Weekly beside his porridge at breakfast. He flicked through, keeping half an ear on the latest health bulletins from Remus and Sirius.
‘Moony, I must insist you don’t eat toast with white spots on it! Could be ergotamine,’ Sirius was saying, and Remus said, ‘But ergotamine poisoning is fun! We’d have lovely hallucinations and be able to dance.’
James started to read the main feature mainly to drown out their voices, but soon found himself genuinely absorbed. The article was titled The Sport of Men, and began, ‘Tired of playing a game that even witches can play? Why don’t you try Tridditch?’
James discovered that Tridditch seemed far more exciting than Quidditch. You played with tridents and nets, endeavouring to catch your opponents and spear them. It was a dangerous game, obviously, and the instructions included a long appendix devoted to healing charms.
He brightened up at once. Not only did Tridditch sound fun, and satisfyingly risky, but he was sure that once Remus and Sirius were introduced to a proper, manly pursuit they’d soon discover the joys of heterosexuality. After all, it wasn’t their fault they went to a school overrun with girls whittering on about blokes. You could hardly blame a guy for getting confused! No doubt the resolutely masculine world of the Tridditch player would soon work the desired cure.
Testosterone, that was the ticket. James went to Defence Against the Dark Arts whistling, his glasses slightly askew, though he straightened them when Lily Evans smiled at him in the corridor.
After school, James gathered his friends together on the Quidditch pitch.
‘This had better be important,’ Sirius grumbled. ‘It’s bloody freezing, and I’ve got Charms homework.’
‘Since when do you care about homework?’ James asked. ‘Yes, it is important. It’s a game. Tridditch.’
‘Oh,’ Remus said, with great interest. ‘Gladiators. Are we going to fight against lions? Or elephants?’
James’s heart sank a little bit. ‘Well, not that sort of gladiator, Moony. See, we each have a net and a trident, and we’ve got to try and spear each other. But if your opponent manages to throw his net over you, you can’t harm him.’
‘Shouldn’t we have a full team?’ Sirius asked. ‘I bet I can spear Wormtail without even waving my wand.’
‘You don’t use your wand,’ James said, alarmed. ‘Brute force, Padfoot. That’s how we do it. Look, Remus and I will show you. Try and catch me under your net, Moony. Yes, that’s right. Wave it around.’
Remus waved his net around. In the gathering October twilight, it looked for a moment like a giant, white moth fluttering down on to the Quidditch pitch, until the silver gleam of James’s trident bisected it, landing in Remus’s left knee.
‘Ow! Ow!’ Remus sank to the ground clutching his leg, tears of what he later claimed were cold flowing copiously down his cheeks. James had to admit, sadly, that he’d rarely seen a feebler example of testosterone: in his standard issue school robes, with his undeniably pretty face, Remus in the dim light could have passed for one of the Ravenclaw beauties. If James hadn’t known that he unfolded into a tall, skinny boy, he might almost have fancied Remus himself.
Sirius, kneeling at his side, his long dark hair streaming down his back, was as distressed as James had ever seen him. ‘Moony, speak to me! Has he killed you?’
‘I’m fine. Really.’ Remus tried to struggle to his feet and fell down again.
‘Hang on guys, I’ve got a full set of healing charms here,’ James intervened, flicking through Quidditch Weekly as fast as he could. ‘Yeah, here’s a good one. Trident in knee. Apparently, it often happens.’ He attempted a light laugh.
Sirius got up and loomed over him threateningly. ‘You dare go near Remus again, mate, and you’ll have me to answer to! You’ve done enough damage for one day.’
He took out his wand and passed it over Remus’s knee, uttering a series of arcane incantations. Between spells, he muttered indignantly, ‘As if he didn’t have enough fucking pain to bear every month!’
‘Okay, Sirius, I didn’t do it on purpose.’
‘I didn’t say you did. Now shut up, Prongs. I’m trying to clot his blood.’
Eventually, Remus said, in a rather faint voice, ‘I think I’m okay now, Padfoot. If you could take the binding charm off my ankle, I can get up.’
‘Oh, no, Moony, I’m sorry!’ cried Sirius. ‘Finite Incantatem!’ He helped Remus up, putting his arm around him, quite unnecessarily, James thought, for extra support. ‘I’ll take you back to the castle. Here, lean on me.’
‘That didn’t work very well,’ Peter said, unexpectedly, after they’d hobbled off into the night, so entwined that they could have been one person. James was quite surprised at his acumen, but tried not to show it.
‘I will cure them, one day,’ he said, gathering together nets, tridents, and his now rather tattered copy of Quidditch Weekly.
‘Oh. I meant the game. Sirius was right. We should get a proper team together.’
‘Yeah. I dunno. I’ve sort of lost my enthusiasm for it,’ James said, rather bitterly.
‘It would impress Lily,’ Peter remarked, but James just shrugged and led the way back to the castle, slightly stooped under the weight of all the Tridditch paraphernalia.
*
That night, James went to sleep early, and dreamed that he and Lily were dancing together at the Yule Ball. He had some strange idea that if Remus and Sirius were dancing with them, they could be cured. Then, the music became discordant, Lily started making strange, choking noises, and groaning and screaming, Remus and Sirius were clinging to other and refusing to be cured, and Lily was falling...
James woke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding, his hands shaking so much that it took him several goes to manage a decent Lumos.
It took him a moment to realise that the noise was all in his dreams: no doubt a horrible sense memory of the Sonorus night. He noted that the bed-curtains were all open, and Remus and Sirius were sleeping peacefully in their respective four-posters. A shaft of moonlight fell across their faces, making them look uncannily angelic.
James thought regretfully that if only he’d used a Sleeping Draught instead of the ill-fated Straightening Philtre, all his problems would be solved. But he wasn’t going to risk any more potions.
He tiptoed out to the loo and got himself a glass of water, then lay down and pulled the covers over his head. Closing his eyes, he tried to visualise Sirius with Phoebe, and Remus with one of the pretty Hufflepuffs.
But they resolutely refused to play. Sirius would keep saying, ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ and running off to find Remus, who was asking his pretty Hufflepuff if she knew Sirius Black, and wasn’t he wonderful? It hit James dimly that they actually loved each other, which filled him with such trepidation that he woke up again, and lay there for a long time, trying to think of a few more cures.
Perhaps he could pretend that he and Peter were together, show Remus and Sirius how odd they looked. No. He wasn’t going to kiss Peter, even as a joke. Or maybe he could transform one of them into a girl with Polyjuice. The fatal flaw there was that the transformee would have to look like an existing girl, and they didn’t fancy any of them. Or he could ask Lily to seduce Remus: she liked Remus, and surely no boy or man on earth could resist Lily. But he couldn’t bear the thought of Remus, or anyone else, touching his girl. Maybe he could lock both of them in the Playwitch studios, where the prettiest witches were photographed...
He finally fell asleep at five, a faint smile on his face, and dreamed that Sirius was beating off Slytherin girls with a Bludger. Images of Remus and Sirius walking hand in hand by the lake invaded his dream from time to time, but he steadfastly ignored them.
End