FIC: Halloween Mayhem II [Harry Potter, Marauders]
Chapter Two; And Lose Them Again...
Peter wrung his hands nervously, squeaking: "Uhm, Sirius?"
"We’re on a mission, Wormtail, call me Padfoot. We didn’t go through the trouble of coming up with cool yet appropriate nicknames for nothing, did we?"
"Eh, alright... Are you sure this is a good idea, Padfoot?"
"I see no reason to answer you, as you have already done so yourself."
"Huh?"
"I am Padfoot. The infamous Sirius Black. Of course I’m sure!"
Peter groaned.
"Now, are you ready?"
Peter groaned more tragically.
"Great! On my cue, wait till I give you the all-clear sign."
Peter groaned some more as Sirius slipped from their alcove and disappeared into the crowd clotting the Great Hall. He waited, his eyes darting from side to side and his ears strained, until the telltale sign of an exploding dungbomb resounded, indicating that Sirius had found a suiting Slytherin victim: one with an open book bag. Peter lingered in the safety of the shadows briefly, pretending to occupy himself with the useless question of whether the victim had been naive enough to walk around with an open book bag, or that Sirius had had to use one of those nifty magical tricks the mastery of which kept evading Peter, to get the bomb in. But the screams that arose at the bottom of the grand staircase quickly reminded him that he still had work to do; phase two of the plan depended solely on him. He had to keep up the honour of the Marauders, and Marauders simply did not do half-assed decoys.
Sirius would skin him alive if he messed up.
So Peter stepped out of his safe alcove to do as he was told, for the greater good. For the glory of the Marauders. Meanwhile, Sirius ran like the wind.
"That won’t do, Mr Lupin. Try again."
"Like this?"
"Try to put more power into your thrust, and then let it slide out smoothly."
His ear pressed against the wood of the door and his wand against his free temple, Sirius shook with silent laughter. Using this particular eavesdropping spell (a specially modified, highly sensitive one James had learned from his father, and which Sirius had used to replace the standard spell with once the conversation had turned so suggestive), he could hear perfectly well that nothing more physical than wandwaving was going on inside the teachers’ lounge. But if only they realised how lewd their choice of words sounded...
"No, no, Mr Lupin, be careful! Control yourself, or you’ll poke an eye out with that thing."
Sirius straightened, steeling himself. As fun as his current activity was, and as much bribing material on McGonagall he could gather, he only had limited time until Wormtail would be caught. He felt his face to make sure his expression was really as serious as he needed it to be, heaved a deep breath, took a step back, and threw himself against the door.
"Professor, someone ignited a dungbomb in the Great Hall!" he exclaimed as he burst into the room.
Remus looked like he was caught with his hand in the cooky jar, but Sirius didn’t have eyes for his friend; McGonagall had welcomed him with the tip of her wand. Sirius only barely managed to get his hands into the air, instead of around his own wand.
Easy there, don’t get too paranoid now, I’m not a Death Eater, I swear, I’m just a cocky Gryffindor punk who doesn’t know what’s good for him, he told his teacher with his wide eyes, inching backwards bit by bit all the while. McGonagall quickly regained her composure.
"Oh, it’s you, Mr Black. You startled me. Please refrain from doing that again, I would not like to be held responsible for the possible consequences. Dungbomb?" she asked sharply. "Now why would you come running to a teacher to report a dungbomb explosion, Mr Black?"
"Because I wasn’t the one who set it off!" He stomped his foot in frustration and continued venomously: "Honestly professor, the whole situation looked highly unstable. Whoever did this was an amateur. I saw at least one Slytherin firsty go down, so there might be casualties."
"Oh, spare me." McGonagall said in a clipped tone. She waved her wand to clear the table she and Remus had been working at and stood up.
"But professor, what about -" Remus sounded almost desperate.
"We’ll continue this later, Mr Lupin. I’ll let you know when. Practice in the mean time." she said as she brushed past Sirius in the doorway. The black-haired boy looked after her and turned to his friend once she was out of sight, dropping his envious act in favour of a wide grin. The grin fell a little when he noticed the lost-bordering-on-finding-the-way-back-through-anger look on Remus’s face.
"Oh no, I was too late! You’ve already succumbed to the humorlessness and have become a goody two shoes of a teachers’ pet." He sunk to his knees and buried his hands in his hair, wailing tragically.
"What the Hell did you do that for, Padfoot?" Remus all but shouted.
His tone of voice startled Sirius. Remus yelling: bad. Remus cussing: bad. Remus looking like he was trying to look not livid: bad. Remus looking the exact opposite of grateful: bad. Remus calling him Padfoot: good. Conclusion: inconclusive.
"Saving your sorry arse, that’s what!"
"Who said my arse needed saving?"
Sirius stared at his friend in disbelief. "Do you mean you think it didn’t? Good grief, I really was too late."
Remus looked like he wanted to jam his wand into Sirius’s gut. Luckily, all he did was glare daggers at Sirius, who knew from experience that Remus was stronger than he looked. But Remus was too kind and controlled to take his anger out on another, a fact Sirius was also well aware of and gladly exploited (even though he did think his friend could use some loosening up, and that getting into a Muggle style duel would do the trick wonderfully). It was for his own good, after all.
"Alright, have it your way. No fooling around." Sirius said, getting to his feet. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked Remus in squarely in the eye, his impression deadly serious. "What the Hell were you doing and why was it so bloody important that you’d act like this?"
Remus mouth opened and closed a few times before he managed to actually speak. "That’s none of your business."
"I want to know why you didn’t want me to save you, so it is, Moony. Do you have any idea what’s going on downstairs? We did that to save you!"
"I never asked you to save me! You call this saving? I’ll never be able to pull this off again..." Remus looked like Sirius had stolen his life raft during a raging storm at open sea, his anger disintegrating slowly and gradually being replaced by panic.
By now, Sirius was fairly convinced that Remus hadn’t been with McGonagall for a detention. Being too much of a Gryffindor for his own good was something Remus didn’t have to ‘pull off’. It was more of an annoying habit, one Sirius, James and Peter couldn’t seem to break no matter how often they took him out ‘maraudering’. Not unlike Lily before him, Sirius went down a list of possible explanations and discarded them all. That left him with only one option...
"Remember the Code, Moony." he said in a steely, unyielding voice. "We are the Marauders. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs will as such keep no secrets from one another. They will tell their friends when something is bothering them and they will listen when they are told things by said friends." Sirius looked at Remus pointedly.
Remus gave him a tortured look before diverting his gaze in shame and running a hand through his hair. "I invoke the constitutional right to privacy."
"Denied on the ground that I deem you to be of unsound mind when it comes to your own best interests."
"It has nothing to do with the Marauders, Sirius..." From murderous to pleading in less than two minutes. See, that’s what Sirius liked so much about Remus. They filled up the lapses in each other’s common sense. Though he had to admit that Remus made up for more non-existent common sense in Sirius and James that they’d ever be able to return.
Unfortunately, Remus’s gaps were a bit more dangerous than their’s. Sirius deemed it time to play it dirty.
"Don’t run away, Remus. We’re your friends, we won’t hurt you. I just want to help." he said in a quiet voice.
Remus bowed his head, muttering: "Bastard..." Sirius grinned, confident Remus remembered that he usually took that word as a compliment. "Damnit Sirius... like this isn’t hard enough already without..."
"Trust me, it’ll be easier once you’ve ’fessed up."
"No it won’t," Remus muttered darkly. "Sure, you and James are my friends, but I know you guys..."
"You broke the rules, didn’t you?" Sirius deadpanned.
"To Hell with the rules, I’m a Marauder!"
Opportunism! Was there hope for him still? "Now now Moony, you know those rules were put in place for your own wellbeing. We didn’t punish you for taking Slughorn’s blame all by yourself because we thought you deserved any more detentions."
Remus looked at him oddly.
"What, did I say something wrong?"
"You’re not here for that, are you?"
Sirius raised an eyebrow, earning him a humourless chuckle.
"Padfoot, I’m really not stupid enough to make arrangements behind your backs with those restrictions still in effect. I told you, this has nothing to do with the Marauders." Remus said, and muttered bitterly, almost as an afterthought: "Except that they ruined it."
To say Sirius had not expected this would be an understatement. Something not related to the Marauders? It was unthinkable! What else did Remus (and, similarly, Sirius himself) have? Other friends? Hardly. Of course they were popular - Merlin knew Sirius and James might kill half the school if they announced breathing was uncool - but only the Marauders, the werewolf and the three unregistered Animagi, were real friends to them. Family? Remus felt like a burden to them, Sirius couldn’t stand the thought of his. Girlfriends? Like Sirius didn’t know what those were like. Good for some entertainment every once in a while, but compared to the Marauders, they weren’t worth a knut. It couldn’t be...
"Please don’t tell me you have a crush on McGonagall." Sirius said faintly, turning a little green.
"What... Ugh - ew! What gave you that idea?!"
"Wormtail." Sirius answered distractedly, his gaze drifting from Remus’s face to the table. "There was stuff on the table - chocolates and weird goo... chocolates, Remus!"
Remus’s complexion blanched from his usual sickly-pale to pale-as-death. "Those were for me, not for her! She’d conjured them because I couldn’t make it work."
Sirius let out a strangled sound and fled the room.
"H - hey!"
Remus grabbed his wand and went after him. Sirius was nowhere to be seen in the hallway, but Remus could hear what sounded like the pounding of canine feet some distance away and set off into the direction they coming from - or rather, were going in. When he rounded a corner a hand suddenly fell over his mouth, followed by another one on his shoulder that slid across his chest, drew the matching arm around him and roughly pulled him onto the shadows, against something soft-yet-firm. Panic flashed through Remus at the thought of what this could be - a Death Eater out for a hostage, a monstrous mutated bed of fungus, an equally murderous magical tapestry, a big scary humanoid thing, a big scary insectoid thing, a big scary amphibian thing, Peeves, a Slytherin gorilla, Sirius Black... He realised he was pressed to someone’s chest when he was dragged through a hole in the wall that seemed to have (and probably really had) appeared out of nowhere, and ended up in what he immediately recognized as a secret passageway.
"Mhm-hwuw!"
The hands disappeared suddenly and reappeared in the blink of an eye, now pinning Remus to the wall by the shoulders. Stars shot across Remus’s vision when his head collided with the bare stone.
"Agh! What was that for?! Gerrof -"
But when he tried to break free, Sirius slammed him into the wall again.
"Moony, listen to me. I want you to calm down, think hard and answer me carefully, okay?" Sirius said, wide-eyed and looking more than a little crazed. "Is it in any way possible that McGonagall might have a crush on you? Because that would be very bad, Remus. Think of all the wrinkles she could be hiding beneath those robes! You have to be careful! Stay away from her!"
"Padfoot... Sirius, for the love of God, pull yourself together! I asked her to conjure those chocolates - no wait, that came out all wrong -"
Sirius abruptly pulled his hands away from Remus. "So you are -"
"No! If you’d just let me finish my sentences for once, you’d -"
"Oh, so now you do want to talk?"
"If it’ll keep you from jumping to conclusions like this, then yes, I’ll tell you all you bloody want to hear! Do you still want me to say my secret hobby is dressing up like Celina Warbeck and reciting her oeuvre to the stars above in the middle of a moonless night? This is your chance."
No! Padfoot, get a grip, he’s trying to trick you! Such a good student... "Maybe another time, mate." Sirius said laboriously, inwardly groaning in disappointment. "You’re not trying to change the subject, are you? What do you have to hide, my dear Moony?"
"It’s not... I don’t ‘have something to hide’, it’s just..." Remus took a deep breath and opened his mouth to finally tell Sirius everything, when -
"She’s forcing you to stay silent? Oh Merlin, now what do we do? Dumbledore will surely be on her side, and who else that’s in any situation to offer protection would believe us?"
"You’re doing it on purpose! You’re twisting my words so you can drag a confession out of me!"
Sirius sighed. "Of course I am, Remus. I’m Padfoot, the infamous Sirius Black, remember? Now tell me, what were you and old McGrumpy doing?" he said with a menacing grin on his face, leaning in close to the already squirming Remus. He rested one hand against the wall next to Remus’s head and took out his wand with the other. "Don’t make me make you, Moony. I don’t know if I’d be able to... control myself."
Remus’ eyes widened. "You wouldn’t."
Sirius smirked. "Oh, I would."
"Using such spells is an unforgivable act, Padfoot."
"I can do it by hand if you like that better? After all, I’ve already gone this far in harassing you, going just a little further wouldn’t do much more harm. For me, at least."
At that moment, Remus did a very stupid thing: he ducked beneath Sirius’s outstretched arm and ran. Or rather, tried to run. Before he managed to take more than five steps, he was thrown to the ground. A weight settled on his back, preventing him from defending himself against the onslaught of tickling that followed. It was a good thing that they were in a secret hallway where no-one could hear him scream.
"Do you give up?" Sirius dug his hands into his friend’s sides mercilessly. "Or do you want more?"
"Stop, stop, stop! Aaaaggghaiihaha!"
Sirius stopped. "So you surrender?"
"Never." Remus panted, and made a brave but foolish attempt to escape. Sirius sighed, planted his weight more firmly on Remus’s back, and continued.
"Alright, alright, I give up!"
"Good boy." Sirius straightened and pulled Remus up by the scruff, holding on tight just in case. "Now, do tell."
Remus looked like he wanted to die and mumbled something.
"Come again? I didn’t quite hear you."
Remus mumbled again.
Sirius frowned. "Come again? I’m sure I didn’t just hear that."
Remus repeated his earlier words through gritted teeth. Sirius soundlessly formed the words for himself as if to taste their authenticity.
"Impossible." he concluded.
"And why is that?" Remus hissed venomously.
"You’re Remus! Remus doesn’t interact romantically with girls! Girls don’t interact romantically with Remus! Why would girls be romantically interested in Remus?"
Later, Sirius would realise this had been where he crossed the line. No, not later as in ‘when Remus looked like he’d been slapped across the face’ or ‘when Remus’s hurt expression was replaced by a very, very angry one’ or ‘when Remus punched Sirius in the eye, completely taking Sirius by surprise, because Sirius hadn’t thought Remus would ever use such force against him’ or ‘when Remus stormed off without another word, despite Sirius’s confused and frustrated shouts’ or even ‘when Sirius decided to go save Wormtail after wracking his brains for what felt like hours, trying to figure out what had made Remus so angry’. No, only much, much later.
Dinner, which was usually one of the moments Sirius treasured most about the days in Hogwarts, was less than pleasant. When he approached James at the Gryffindor table, the bespectacled boy narrowed his eyes and demonstratively concentrated on his stew.
"Prongs?"
Smack, chew, gulp.
"Oi, Prongs! I’m talking to you! Remember me, Sirius Black? Your best friend?"
James finally looked up. "Did someone die while I was out?" he drawled, in that distinctive Leave Me Alone If It’s Something Less Than All Out Murder tone of voice.
"Are you kidding? That’s not funny, you know, with all that Death Eater activity as of late... No, but I figured out what’s going on with Remus, and -"
"Not interested." James said loudly, and returned to his food. When Sirius persisted in trying to get him to respond, he unceremoniously interrupted two of his fellow Quidditch players and joined in on their conversation. Sirius felt like hitting him over the head with a troll’s club.
The feeling intensified when Remus, too, ignored his very existence and chose to focus on a rather girly sounding conversation of Lily Evans and Friends rather than Sirius.
Almost pulling his hair out in frustration, Sirius sat down to eat all by his pretty lonesome, feeling dejected. He wished Madam Pomphrey had let Peter out of the Hospital Wing. Then he would have at least had someone to rant at. When he finally couldn’t take it anymore (after three bites), he injected himself in between a group of third year girls to boast about how he’d planned the stunt in the Great Hall that afternoon, where one of their fellow Gryffindors had run around shoving paint-filled dungbombs into people’s faces as they ran away from the first explosion’s odour, and had subsequently gotten pummelled and jinxed into a quite disgusting looking pulp.
By the time the students headed for bed, James personally came up to Sirius: he’d heard about the paint-dungbombs.
"Did they work?" he whispered excitedly. As they were in their own dormitory, there was no need to whisper, but it seemed to fit the subject of conversation. "Who’d you manage that, mate?"
"They didn’t work. Wormtail said there was hardly any smell at all. But that wasn’t the intention; I was out for the mess." Sirius said with a grin, all grief forgotten. He proceeded to explain the whole scheme to James - much to their mutual amusement - and following from that, told him what he had discovered about Remus’s mysterious business.
James looked stunned. "Bloody Hell mate, why didn’t you tell me that before?"
"I tried to, but you wouldn’t listen." Sirius answered dryly.
James grimaced. "Yeah, sorry about that..."
"Don’t worry about it, lots of people have days like that. You must have been infected by Lily and Moony." Sirius raised his voice at those last words so Remus, who just entered the dorm, hair still damp from his shower, would certainly hear. The werewolf scowled at them and climbed into bed, pulling the curtains closed.
"Aw, Moony, come on. You know we don’t mean anything by it." James said soothingly, walking over to his friend’s bed. He peered inside through the crack in the curtains. "But you have to admit it’s bizarre. I mean, you, courting a girl!"
Before Sirius could utter a warning, Remus’ fist shot out for the second time that day. The curtains were yanked closed more thoroughly and then spelled shut, while James scrambled to keep his footing, clutching his cracked glasses.
Chapter One: Take Your Positions!
Chapter Two: And Lose Them Again...
Chapter Three: Regroup ASAP
Chapter Four: This Is Called A Collision
Chapter Five: I Did Warn You Guys - That Hurts
Chapter Six: We’ll Be Playing Blind Today
Chapter Seven: Bet You Didn’t See That Coming
Chapter Eight: Somebody Tell Me I’m Dreaming
Chapter Nine: Please Play Nicely
Chapter Ten; Surprise, Surprise
Peter wrung his hands nervously, squeaking: "Uhm, Sirius?"
"We’re on a mission, Wormtail, call me Padfoot. We didn’t go through the trouble of coming up with cool yet appropriate nicknames for nothing, did we?"
"Eh, alright... Are you sure this is a good idea, Padfoot?"
"I see no reason to answer you, as you have already done so yourself."
"Huh?"
"I am Padfoot. The infamous Sirius Black. Of course I’m sure!"
Peter groaned.
"Now, are you ready?"
Peter groaned more tragically.
"Great! On my cue, wait till I give you the all-clear sign."
Peter groaned some more as Sirius slipped from their alcove and disappeared into the crowd clotting the Great Hall. He waited, his eyes darting from side to side and his ears strained, until the telltale sign of an exploding dungbomb resounded, indicating that Sirius had found a suiting Slytherin victim: one with an open book bag. Peter lingered in the safety of the shadows briefly, pretending to occupy himself with the useless question of whether the victim had been naive enough to walk around with an open book bag, or that Sirius had had to use one of those nifty magical tricks the mastery of which kept evading Peter, to get the bomb in. But the screams that arose at the bottom of the grand staircase quickly reminded him that he still had work to do; phase two of the plan depended solely on him. He had to keep up the honour of the Marauders, and Marauders simply did not do half-assed decoys.
Sirius would skin him alive if he messed up.
So Peter stepped out of his safe alcove to do as he was told, for the greater good. For the glory of the Marauders. Meanwhile, Sirius ran like the wind.
"That won’t do, Mr Lupin. Try again."
"Like this?"
"Try to put more power into your thrust, and then let it slide out smoothly."
His ear pressed against the wood of the door and his wand against his free temple, Sirius shook with silent laughter. Using this particular eavesdropping spell (a specially modified, highly sensitive one James had learned from his father, and which Sirius had used to replace the standard spell with once the conversation had turned so suggestive), he could hear perfectly well that nothing more physical than wandwaving was going on inside the teachers’ lounge. But if only they realised how lewd their choice of words sounded...
"No, no, Mr Lupin, be careful! Control yourself, or you’ll poke an eye out with that thing."
Sirius straightened, steeling himself. As fun as his current activity was, and as much bribing material on McGonagall he could gather, he only had limited time until Wormtail would be caught. He felt his face to make sure his expression was really as serious as he needed it to be, heaved a deep breath, took a step back, and threw himself against the door.
"Professor, someone ignited a dungbomb in the Great Hall!" he exclaimed as he burst into the room.
Remus looked like he was caught with his hand in the cooky jar, but Sirius didn’t have eyes for his friend; McGonagall had welcomed him with the tip of her wand. Sirius only barely managed to get his hands into the air, instead of around his own wand.
Easy there, don’t get too paranoid now, I’m not a Death Eater, I swear, I’m just a cocky Gryffindor punk who doesn’t know what’s good for him, he told his teacher with his wide eyes, inching backwards bit by bit all the while. McGonagall quickly regained her composure.
"Oh, it’s you, Mr Black. You startled me. Please refrain from doing that again, I would not like to be held responsible for the possible consequences. Dungbomb?" she asked sharply. "Now why would you come running to a teacher to report a dungbomb explosion, Mr Black?"
"Because I wasn’t the one who set it off!" He stomped his foot in frustration and continued venomously: "Honestly professor, the whole situation looked highly unstable. Whoever did this was an amateur. I saw at least one Slytherin firsty go down, so there might be casualties."
"Oh, spare me." McGonagall said in a clipped tone. She waved her wand to clear the table she and Remus had been working at and stood up.
"But professor, what about -" Remus sounded almost desperate.
"We’ll continue this later, Mr Lupin. I’ll let you know when. Practice in the mean time." she said as she brushed past Sirius in the doorway. The black-haired boy looked after her and turned to his friend once she was out of sight, dropping his envious act in favour of a wide grin. The grin fell a little when he noticed the lost-bordering-on-finding-the-way-back-through-anger look on Remus’s face.
"Oh no, I was too late! You’ve already succumbed to the humorlessness and have become a goody two shoes of a teachers’ pet." He sunk to his knees and buried his hands in his hair, wailing tragically.
"What the Hell did you do that for, Padfoot?" Remus all but shouted.
His tone of voice startled Sirius. Remus yelling: bad. Remus cussing: bad. Remus looking like he was trying to look not livid: bad. Remus looking the exact opposite of grateful: bad. Remus calling him Padfoot: good. Conclusion: inconclusive.
"Saving your sorry arse, that’s what!"
"Who said my arse needed saving?"
Sirius stared at his friend in disbelief. "Do you mean you think it didn’t? Good grief, I really was too late."
Remus looked like he wanted to jam his wand into Sirius’s gut. Luckily, all he did was glare daggers at Sirius, who knew from experience that Remus was stronger than he looked. But Remus was too kind and controlled to take his anger out on another, a fact Sirius was also well aware of and gladly exploited (even though he did think his friend could use some loosening up, and that getting into a Muggle style duel would do the trick wonderfully). It was for his own good, after all.
"Alright, have it your way. No fooling around." Sirius said, getting to his feet. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked Remus in squarely in the eye, his impression deadly serious. "What the Hell were you doing and why was it so bloody important that you’d act like this?"
Remus mouth opened and closed a few times before he managed to actually speak. "That’s none of your business."
"I want to know why you didn’t want me to save you, so it is, Moony. Do you have any idea what’s going on downstairs? We did that to save you!"
"I never asked you to save me! You call this saving? I’ll never be able to pull this off again..." Remus looked like Sirius had stolen his life raft during a raging storm at open sea, his anger disintegrating slowly and gradually being replaced by panic.
By now, Sirius was fairly convinced that Remus hadn’t been with McGonagall for a detention. Being too much of a Gryffindor for his own good was something Remus didn’t have to ‘pull off’. It was more of an annoying habit, one Sirius, James and Peter couldn’t seem to break no matter how often they took him out ‘maraudering’. Not unlike Lily before him, Sirius went down a list of possible explanations and discarded them all. That left him with only one option...
"Remember the Code, Moony." he said in a steely, unyielding voice. "We are the Marauders. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs will as such keep no secrets from one another. They will tell their friends when something is bothering them and they will listen when they are told things by said friends." Sirius looked at Remus pointedly.
Remus gave him a tortured look before diverting his gaze in shame and running a hand through his hair. "I invoke the constitutional right to privacy."
"Denied on the ground that I deem you to be of unsound mind when it comes to your own best interests."
"It has nothing to do with the Marauders, Sirius..." From murderous to pleading in less than two minutes. See, that’s what Sirius liked so much about Remus. They filled up the lapses in each other’s common sense. Though he had to admit that Remus made up for more non-existent common sense in Sirius and James that they’d ever be able to return.
Unfortunately, Remus’s gaps were a bit more dangerous than their’s. Sirius deemed it time to play it dirty.
"Don’t run away, Remus. We’re your friends, we won’t hurt you. I just want to help." he said in a quiet voice.
Remus bowed his head, muttering: "Bastard..." Sirius grinned, confident Remus remembered that he usually took that word as a compliment. "Damnit Sirius... like this isn’t hard enough already without..."
"Trust me, it’ll be easier once you’ve ’fessed up."
"No it won’t," Remus muttered darkly. "Sure, you and James are my friends, but I know you guys..."
"You broke the rules, didn’t you?" Sirius deadpanned.
"To Hell with the rules, I’m a Marauder!"
Opportunism! Was there hope for him still? "Now now Moony, you know those rules were put in place for your own wellbeing. We didn’t punish you for taking Slughorn’s blame all by yourself because we thought you deserved any more detentions."
Remus looked at him oddly.
"What, did I say something wrong?"
"You’re not here for that, are you?"
Sirius raised an eyebrow, earning him a humourless chuckle.
"Padfoot, I’m really not stupid enough to make arrangements behind your backs with those restrictions still in effect. I told you, this has nothing to do with the Marauders." Remus said, and muttered bitterly, almost as an afterthought: "Except that they ruined it."
To say Sirius had not expected this would be an understatement. Something not related to the Marauders? It was unthinkable! What else did Remus (and, similarly, Sirius himself) have? Other friends? Hardly. Of course they were popular - Merlin knew Sirius and James might kill half the school if they announced breathing was uncool - but only the Marauders, the werewolf and the three unregistered Animagi, were real friends to them. Family? Remus felt like a burden to them, Sirius couldn’t stand the thought of his. Girlfriends? Like Sirius didn’t know what those were like. Good for some entertainment every once in a while, but compared to the Marauders, they weren’t worth a knut. It couldn’t be...
"Please don’t tell me you have a crush on McGonagall." Sirius said faintly, turning a little green.
"What... Ugh - ew! What gave you that idea?!"
"Wormtail." Sirius answered distractedly, his gaze drifting from Remus’s face to the table. "There was stuff on the table - chocolates and weird goo... chocolates, Remus!"
Remus’s complexion blanched from his usual sickly-pale to pale-as-death. "Those were for me, not for her! She’d conjured them because I couldn’t make it work."
Sirius let out a strangled sound and fled the room.
"H - hey!"
Remus grabbed his wand and went after him. Sirius was nowhere to be seen in the hallway, but Remus could hear what sounded like the pounding of canine feet some distance away and set off into the direction they coming from - or rather, were going in. When he rounded a corner a hand suddenly fell over his mouth, followed by another one on his shoulder that slid across his chest, drew the matching arm around him and roughly pulled him onto the shadows, against something soft-yet-firm. Panic flashed through Remus at the thought of what this could be - a Death Eater out for a hostage, a monstrous mutated bed of fungus, an equally murderous magical tapestry, a big scary humanoid thing, a big scary insectoid thing, a big scary amphibian thing, Peeves, a Slytherin gorilla, Sirius Black... He realised he was pressed to someone’s chest when he was dragged through a hole in the wall that seemed to have (and probably really had) appeared out of nowhere, and ended up in what he immediately recognized as a secret passageway.
"Mhm-hwuw!"
The hands disappeared suddenly and reappeared in the blink of an eye, now pinning Remus to the wall by the shoulders. Stars shot across Remus’s vision when his head collided with the bare stone.
"Agh! What was that for?! Gerrof -"
But when he tried to break free, Sirius slammed him into the wall again.
"Moony, listen to me. I want you to calm down, think hard and answer me carefully, okay?" Sirius said, wide-eyed and looking more than a little crazed. "Is it in any way possible that McGonagall might have a crush on you? Because that would be very bad, Remus. Think of all the wrinkles she could be hiding beneath those robes! You have to be careful! Stay away from her!"
"Padfoot... Sirius, for the love of God, pull yourself together! I asked her to conjure those chocolates - no wait, that came out all wrong -"
Sirius abruptly pulled his hands away from Remus. "So you are -"
"No! If you’d just let me finish my sentences for once, you’d -"
"Oh, so now you do want to talk?"
"If it’ll keep you from jumping to conclusions like this, then yes, I’ll tell you all you bloody want to hear! Do you still want me to say my secret hobby is dressing up like Celina Warbeck and reciting her oeuvre to the stars above in the middle of a moonless night? This is your chance."
No! Padfoot, get a grip, he’s trying to trick you! Such a good student... "Maybe another time, mate." Sirius said laboriously, inwardly groaning in disappointment. "You’re not trying to change the subject, are you? What do you have to hide, my dear Moony?"
"It’s not... I don’t ‘have something to hide’, it’s just..." Remus took a deep breath and opened his mouth to finally tell Sirius everything, when -
"She’s forcing you to stay silent? Oh Merlin, now what do we do? Dumbledore will surely be on her side, and who else that’s in any situation to offer protection would believe us?"
"You’re doing it on purpose! You’re twisting my words so you can drag a confession out of me!"
Sirius sighed. "Of course I am, Remus. I’m Padfoot, the infamous Sirius Black, remember? Now tell me, what were you and old McGrumpy doing?" he said with a menacing grin on his face, leaning in close to the already squirming Remus. He rested one hand against the wall next to Remus’s head and took out his wand with the other. "Don’t make me make you, Moony. I don’t know if I’d be able to... control myself."
Remus’ eyes widened. "You wouldn’t."
Sirius smirked. "Oh, I would."
"Using such spells is an unforgivable act, Padfoot."
"I can do it by hand if you like that better? After all, I’ve already gone this far in harassing you, going just a little further wouldn’t do much more harm. For me, at least."
At that moment, Remus did a very stupid thing: he ducked beneath Sirius’s outstretched arm and ran. Or rather, tried to run. Before he managed to take more than five steps, he was thrown to the ground. A weight settled on his back, preventing him from defending himself against the onslaught of tickling that followed. It was a good thing that they were in a secret hallway where no-one could hear him scream.
"Do you give up?" Sirius dug his hands into his friend’s sides mercilessly. "Or do you want more?"
"Stop, stop, stop! Aaaaggghaiihaha!"
Sirius stopped. "So you surrender?"
"Never." Remus panted, and made a brave but foolish attempt to escape. Sirius sighed, planted his weight more firmly on Remus’s back, and continued.
"Alright, alright, I give up!"
"Good boy." Sirius straightened and pulled Remus up by the scruff, holding on tight just in case. "Now, do tell."
Remus looked like he wanted to die and mumbled something.
"Come again? I didn’t quite hear you."
Remus mumbled again.
Sirius frowned. "Come again? I’m sure I didn’t just hear that."
Remus repeated his earlier words through gritted teeth. Sirius soundlessly formed the words for himself as if to taste their authenticity.
"Impossible." he concluded.
"And why is that?" Remus hissed venomously.
"You’re Remus! Remus doesn’t interact romantically with girls! Girls don’t interact romantically with Remus! Why would girls be romantically interested in Remus?"
Later, Sirius would realise this had been where he crossed the line. No, not later as in ‘when Remus looked like he’d been slapped across the face’ or ‘when Remus’s hurt expression was replaced by a very, very angry one’ or ‘when Remus punched Sirius in the eye, completely taking Sirius by surprise, because Sirius hadn’t thought Remus would ever use such force against him’ or ‘when Remus stormed off without another word, despite Sirius’s confused and frustrated shouts’ or even ‘when Sirius decided to go save Wormtail after wracking his brains for what felt like hours, trying to figure out what had made Remus so angry’. No, only much, much later.
Dinner, which was usually one of the moments Sirius treasured most about the days in Hogwarts, was less than pleasant. When he approached James at the Gryffindor table, the bespectacled boy narrowed his eyes and demonstratively concentrated on his stew.
"Prongs?"
Smack, chew, gulp.
"Oi, Prongs! I’m talking to you! Remember me, Sirius Black? Your best friend?"
James finally looked up. "Did someone die while I was out?" he drawled, in that distinctive Leave Me Alone If It’s Something Less Than All Out Murder tone of voice.
"Are you kidding? That’s not funny, you know, with all that Death Eater activity as of late... No, but I figured out what’s going on with Remus, and -"
"Not interested." James said loudly, and returned to his food. When Sirius persisted in trying to get him to respond, he unceremoniously interrupted two of his fellow Quidditch players and joined in on their conversation. Sirius felt like hitting him over the head with a troll’s club.
The feeling intensified when Remus, too, ignored his very existence and chose to focus on a rather girly sounding conversation of Lily Evans and Friends rather than Sirius.
Almost pulling his hair out in frustration, Sirius sat down to eat all by his pretty lonesome, feeling dejected. He wished Madam Pomphrey had let Peter out of the Hospital Wing. Then he would have at least had someone to rant at. When he finally couldn’t take it anymore (after three bites), he injected himself in between a group of third year girls to boast about how he’d planned the stunt in the Great Hall that afternoon, where one of their fellow Gryffindors had run around shoving paint-filled dungbombs into people’s faces as they ran away from the first explosion’s odour, and had subsequently gotten pummelled and jinxed into a quite disgusting looking pulp.
By the time the students headed for bed, James personally came up to Sirius: he’d heard about the paint-dungbombs.
"Did they work?" he whispered excitedly. As they were in their own dormitory, there was no need to whisper, but it seemed to fit the subject of conversation. "Who’d you manage that, mate?"
"They didn’t work. Wormtail said there was hardly any smell at all. But that wasn’t the intention; I was out for the mess." Sirius said with a grin, all grief forgotten. He proceeded to explain the whole scheme to James - much to their mutual amusement - and following from that, told him what he had discovered about Remus’s mysterious business.
James looked stunned. "Bloody Hell mate, why didn’t you tell me that before?"
"I tried to, but you wouldn’t listen." Sirius answered dryly.
James grimaced. "Yeah, sorry about that..."
"Don’t worry about it, lots of people have days like that. You must have been infected by Lily and Moony." Sirius raised his voice at those last words so Remus, who just entered the dorm, hair still damp from his shower, would certainly hear. The werewolf scowled at them and climbed into bed, pulling the curtains closed.
"Aw, Moony, come on. You know we don’t mean anything by it." James said soothingly, walking over to his friend’s bed. He peered inside through the crack in the curtains. "But you have to admit it’s bizarre. I mean, you, courting a girl!"
Before Sirius could utter a warning, Remus’ fist shot out for the second time that day. The curtains were yanked closed more thoroughly and then spelled shut, while James scrambled to keep his footing, clutching his cracked glasses.
Chapter One: Take Your Positions!
Chapter Two: And Lose Them Again...
Chapter Three: Regroup ASAP
Chapter Four: This Is Called A Collision
Chapter Five: I Did Warn You Guys - That Hurts
Chapter Six: We’ll Be Playing Blind Today
Chapter Seven: Bet You Didn’t See That Coming
Chapter Eight: Somebody Tell Me I’m Dreaming
Chapter Nine: Please Play Nicely
Chapter Ten; Surprise, Surprise