James was not anxious for company; in the days that followed his fight with Sirius, he found himself ducking crowded corridors and busy meal times more than he remembered ever doing before. The bruise on his jaw, which had turned a mottled purple and swollen spectacularly, was a topic of discussion both in and out of the Gryffindor common room for several days, although James tended to be vague when asked what had happened. Most people assumed it was a Quidditch accident, and he let them, preferring that story to the truth. The validity of this claim was thrown into question when Sirius appeared the next morning with a similar-looking bruise around his eye, but accompanying it was so dark a scowl that, instead of prying, everyone chose to believe the Quidditch story.
Gryffindor Tower had, it seemed, become far too full of people for James’s taste. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Lily these days, of course, but now neither Sirius nor Peter was talking to him either. There were sides now, James supposed, with Lily and Sirius firmly on one side of a line in the sand and himself on the other. Peter was standing with Sirius, he knew, because of Leda; because James, by dating her, had violated one of the cardinal rules of friendship.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t have my reasons, James thought, trying vaguely to remember what they were as he scratched irritably at a Transfiguration essay, as though frustration could somehow alleviate his guilt.
He had taken to hiding out in the library over the past few days, primarily because Sirius never went there. Lily did, he knew, but he figured that she was avoiding him just as hard as he was avoiding her, so he wasn’t worried.
But Remus, however, frequented the library. Not only that, but he was the only one of James’s friends who had not made it clear where he stood, and it was this fact that James was considering as Remus walked towards the table he had settled himself into several hours ago. James considered pretending not to see him, just to make things easier, but he couldn’t bear to; despite all of his recent conflicts with his friends, he missed them desperately.
“So you’re going to have to fill me in on the rules here,” Remus said as he arrived at James’s table. “Do I have to ask your permission to sit down these days?”
James cracked a tentative smile at him. “Of course not,” he said, shifting some of his books out of the way.
“How’s it going?” Remus asked, slipping into an empty seat. His voice was mild, but his eyes were cold”twin pieces of flint that James found it hard to look at for too long.
“All right,” he said uncomfortably. “How’re you?”
“Been better,” Remus said briskly. “What’s going on, James? We barely see you anymore…Sirius said that you and Leda stayed out all night after the masquerade ball, and then the two of you had a fight…I know he already talked to you about this whole you-dating-Leda stuff, and obviously that didn’t go well, and I don’t want to harp on it or anything, but I don’t like what it’s doing to you. You’re in the common room so little that I’m starting to think you sneak in under the invisibility cloak whenever you need something.”
James looked at the floor”that was exactly what he had been doing. But even coming from Remus, these were fighting words, and his blood was stirring. “Did you just come down here so you could lecture me?” he asked acidly. “Because I know you don’t like to get involved in this thing. I know you like to watch from a safe distance without picking sides. But you may have to make some choices here.”
He looked challengingly at Remus, who merely stared calmly back. Remus wasn’t Sirius”it took more than this to ruffle him. James, in fact, started to feel rather ashamed as Remus looked unblinkingly at him, as through he were a petulant child.
“I heard someone found Severus Snape in a Full Body-Bind hex in the Potions classroom the day before the Halloween dance,” Remus said finally, and James winced, startled; it wasn’t what he had been expecting.
“Would you believe me if I told you that that was provoked?” he asked, realizing immediately that he could not pretend, at least to Remus, that he had nothing to do with that.
Remus sighed heavily. “You know,” he said, “if you had said that to me a month ago, I would have believed it. But a month ago, I would never have believed that you could do what you’re doing to Peter now.”
“Come on,” James protested. “No one’s letting me explain that. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal! Peter’s got to be over her by now, and it’s just…it’s good for me! It’s nice! It’s not like Lily, where I have to push and convince her and everything, it’s nice to just have a girl who…”
He trailed off, falling silent at the look on Remus’s face; somehow his “it’s easier” rationale didn’t sound so good when he said it out loud.
Remus shook his head, and there was blatant disgust in his eyes. “You know he’s not over her,” he said. “You know that, James. Should he be? Maybe. But he’s not, and that means that what you’re doing isn’t fair. And it isn’t fair to Leda, either. You’re using that girl to get over Lily. And the James Potter I know doesn’t use people like that, or treat his friends like that. The James Potter I know doesn’t do something just because it’s easy.”
It wasn’t fair, James thought. It wasn’t nearly as bad as all that…in fact, he was barely spending time with Leda. There was Quidditch practice, of course, and she usually wheedled him into staying late with her afterwards. And he ate meals with her”the ones he went to, anyway”but ever since the Masquerade Ball, when he had seen Sirius and Lily dancing, he’d felt as though he had been punched in the stomach. He’d known he was being ridiculous the next day, known there was nothing between them, and it wasn’t really that that had bothered him. It was seeing the two of them together, laughing and talking and looking completely at ease without him that had done it. He’d left the ball not long after. And Sirius had gotten it all wrong”he hadn’t left with Leda, he’d gone by himself onto the grounds and spent the night, of all places, in the Shrieking Shack, trying not to think about how well his friends were getting along without him and wondering if, really, he had been negligible all along.
But he couldn’t tell Remus this. Not now, not with the way Remus was looking at him”a mixture of disappointment and scorn that James had never seen on his face before. And Remus was right, he knew…James wasn’t behaving like himself”or, for that matter, a halfway decent person.
Without another word, Remus got to his feet and turned his back, leaving the library. James squeezed his eyes shut, unwilling to watch him walk away.
---
When Lily came down for dinner a few hours later, she found Remus sitting alone at the Gryffindor table, staring into a goblet of pumpkin juice as though he were contemplating drowning himself in it.
“Back away from the ledge!” Lily joked. “You have too much to live for!”
“What?” Remus said, looking up at her perplexedly. Lily raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Well. I talked to James earlier.”
Lily sucked in her breath. “How’d that go?” she asked.
Remus shrugged. “He’s probably not too happy with me now,” he said. “Although I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true…I don’t know. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“Maybe he’s just not ready to hear it,” Lily said sympathetically, sitting down beside him. It was a little awkward, she found, to be talking like this”she wasn’t used to being the one who did the consoling when it came to James.
“Well, hopefully he’ll come around,” Remus said. “I’m just…maybe this is a little selfish, but part of me just wants to know what will happen this weekend.”
“This weekend?” Lily asked, puzzled.
He sighed, looking guiltily. “It’s full moon,” he said. “And they usually come out to see me, you know. But James won’t go if he thinks Sirius will be there”and he especially won’t go now, after what just happened”and Sirius won’t go if he thinks James is coming. And Peter won’t come by himself, which I understand, because a rat is much less safe around a werewolf than a rat with an undersized moose and an overgrown puppy.”
Lily laughed a little at the image, unable to control herself. But she sobered quickly. “And you can’t just tell Sirius that James probably won’t come?” she suggested.
“I’m holding out hope that maybe he will,” Remus said sadly. “It’ll mean that he’s realized that he isn’t acting…you know, right. Plus, Sirius has been in such a terrible mood lately that I’m not even sure I want him showing up.”
“Yeah,” Lily said thoughtfully. “I have noticed that, I’ve been meaning to ask””
“I have news!”
Sirius himself had suddenly appeared on the other side of the table, beaming exuberantly at them. Lily and Remus exchanged startled glances. “Terrible mood, eh?” Lily muttered.
“What’s your news?” Remus asked Sirius warily, and Sirius plunked into a seat across from them and leaned forward conspiratorially.
“I think I know who’s been doing it,” he whispered excitedly.
“Doing…what, exactly?” Lily asked, and Sirius frowned at her.
“All these ridiculous pranks around here, of course!” he said, and Lily rolled her eyes.
“Are you still going on about that?” she asked. “There haven’t been many lately, have there?”
Sirius lifted a finger. “That’s what you think,” he said. “But I just heard that someone released a bunch of bowtruckles into the Ravenclaw dorms. Apparently they tore half the common room apart before they were rounded out. And it got me thinking…see those two?”
He rotated slightly to the left, gesturing at the Ravenclaw table. Lily and Remus both leaned around him, looking over. Two boys were sitting at one end. They were fourth-years, Lily guessed. One was exceptionally handsome, with gold hair, regally carved features, and blue eyes so striking that Lily could see them even from the Gryffindor table. The other was small and weedier, with a mop of limp, dark hair and a pointed face. Something about his pinched appearance reminded Lily of Severus, back in their early days at Hogwarts, and she looked away.
“What about them?” she asked Sirius.
“It’s totally them,” he said confidently.
“How on earth did you come to that conclusion?” Remus asked skeptically.
“Because they started last year,” Sirius said. “That tall one, that’s Michael Kingsbury. The other one is Nathaniel Rafferty. I’ve seen them sneaking around a lot lately. They’ve been prone to jinxing people in the halls since their second year. Just the other day some first year sprouted a cat’s tail, and they were there, laughing their bloody heads off. No finesse at all, that’s what struck me about them.”
“That proves nothing,” Lily said dismissively.
“Yeah, but they’ve been trying to do bigger things lately,” Sirius said earnestly. “The end of last year, they hexed all the boys toilets on the second floor. I only know this because they were given detention with me and Ja”” He swallowed the end of his sentence suddenly, as Lily tried to pretend she didn’t know what he had been going to say. He blinked owlishly for a moment and then continued, “Well, anyway, they’d basically charmed all these toilets so that anytime anyone, you know, went to use one, it bit them. Bit gross, really. Not to mention there were actually a few serious injuries”people getting stuck in the loo and all that…some pretty bad bite marks, to be honest…”
“That,” Remus commented, “is disgusting.”
“It’s also…I don’t know, it’s also pretty nasty,” Lily said, furrowing her brow. “I mean, pranking for harmless fun is one thing, as is going after people like Isaac Smith who really just had it coming, but that level? On random strangers? It just doesn’t seem sportsmanlike, somehow.”
“I know,” Sirius said. “It’s the same sort of thing this year, albeit a little better planned out. I think they’re trying to step up their game.”
But Lily was frowning again. “Sirius, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Sure for the stuff that happened in the Ravenclaw common room it fits, but what about all the pranks that have been pulled on Gryffindors, and in Gryffindor Tower? How would they have gotten in there? And what about everything that’s happened to us, specifically? What would Michael Kingsbury and Nathaniel Rafferty have against us? I mean, I’ve never even met them.”
“Authority figures? Like you were saying before?” Sirius said weakly, with the air of one grasping at straws. “Or, I dunno…maybe they have an accomplice in Gryffindor, or something.”
“Like who?” Lily asked, then said thoughtfully. “You don’t think…I mean, the pranks on Gryffindors seemed to have stopped since Leda started dating James…you don’t think it’s her, do you?”
“Absolutely not,” Sirius said promptly. “There’s no way she’d be able to think up anything like that. Besides, if she was pulling pranks, I’d be obligated to like her at least a little, and I just can’t bring myself to do that. Besides, she doesn’t even know those two Ravenclaws.”
“You still haven’t convinced me that those two have anything to do with this,” Remus said. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Sirius said, disheartened. Then he perked up. “Help me!” he said to Lily.
“Help you what?” Lily asked cautiously.
“Help me prove it’s them! We can tail them, see if they do anything suspicious. It’ll be fun!”
Lily did not look tempted. “What’s the point of that?” she asked.
Sirius shrugged. “It’s exciting. It’s more interesting than homework. Not knowing who’s been doing this stuff is really bothering me. Take your pick.”
Lily hesitated. It wasn’t, really, her idea of quality entertainment, but she knew it was the kind of thing that Sirius would normally have done with James, and she was reluctant to disappoint him. “Um,” she said, looking at his eager, hopeful face, “well…”
“It’ll keep you busy. Maybe you’ll finally be able to stop pining.”
He winked roguishly, and Lily threw her napkin at him. “I have not been pining,” she laughed.
Sirius made a face at her. “Little bit,” he said. “But come on, what do you say?”
“All right, fine,” Lily groaned. “Remus? You in?”
“No way,” Remus said calmly. “That’s a surefire way to get detention.”
“That’s half the fun,” Sirius assured Lily, who looked alarmed. “But anyway, this shouldn’t be too difficult, just a basic tracking exercise…”
“You sound like you’re losing your edge,” came an unfamiliar voice a few feet down the table. Surprised, all three of them looked around to see who had spoken.
It took Lily a minute to recognize the girl. Her dark blonde hair was cut short, just barely brushing the tops of her shoulders, and she had a delicate, almost birdlike bone structure. Her grey eyes were large and wide, but there was a certain shrewdness to them as she blinked calculatingly at Lily.
“It’s Annabelle, right?” Lily asked, finally placing her as the girl who had been talking to Leda in the Gryffindor common room. “You know Leda?”
“Her brother married my sister,” Annabelle said by way of confirmation.
“Do you make a habit out of butting in on people’s private conversations?” Sirius asked suddenly, scowling at her. “And what do you mean I’m losing my edge?”
The fourth-year shrugged, yawning. “You are,” she said. “You used to be famous around here for pulling all these elaborate pranks. You were practically a legend. And this year, you’ve gone soft. And now someone else is doing it and you can’t even figure out who it is. Sounds like you’re losing something to me.”
Sirius’s jaw dropped. “Well as I don’t recall asking your opinion,” he said caustically, “I hope you don’t mind if I ignore you.”
Annabelle looked bored. When she spoke again, it was to Lily, as though Sirius could no longer hold her attention. “I usually eat breakfast with Leda,” she said, and Lily wondered inwardly why the small girl was telling her this. A moment later, however, Annabelle said, “She’s in the hospital wing, though”somehow, a bunch of Wartcap powder got mixed into her clothes, and she had a bad reaction to it. She’s positively covered in these crusty scales. She looks like a walnut. But being one of her dorm-mates, you probably know something about that already.”
“Ah,” Lily said after a minute. “No, I haven’t seen Leda around recently. That explains where she’s got to, thought.”
“Right,” Annabelle said vaguely, standing up. “Hopefully she’ll be better for this week’s Quidditch match.” And she walked away.
The three of them stared after her. “Is it just me,” Remus asked, “or was that entire conversation just…odd?”
“I don’t like her,” Sirius said decisively. “Something about her gives me the creeps. But never mind that…didn’t I give you a bag of Wartcap powder earlier in the year, Lily?”
Lily blushed. “I forget,” she said guiltily.
Sirius crowed with laughter. “I knew it!” he guffawed. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Evans!”
Lily bit at her thumbnail. “Well, I liked it while I was doing it,” she confessed. “But I feel kind of bad now. I didn’t know she had that bad a reaction to it…I just thought it would be a little rash, maybe. I shouldn’t have been so vindictive.”
“No,” Sirius said forcefully. “Don’t feel bad. She messed up everything, she deserves what she gets.”
“Maybe,” Lily countered. “But that doesn’t mean I get to be the one to dish it out.
“It wasn’t all her fault, Padfoot,” Remus added softly.
Sirius’s face darkened, all his earlier exuberance draining away. “Whatever,” he muttered, getting to his feet. “I am going to go now. I have a surveillance scheme to plot out. And I have to drag Peter out of the dorm, since no one else is going to do it…once he hears that Leda’s out of commission, he should be okay.” And just as swiftly as Annabelle had, Sirius disappeared from the Great Hall.
“I should get going too,” Remus said, shuffling up his papers. His elbow knocked a book, which fell to the ground with a thump.
“I’ll get it,” Lily said, but as she bent down to pick it up, a piece of parchment fluttered out. “Oh, sorry,” she said, scooping it up. It looked like a letter. Not wanting to pry, Lily handed it to him, but her gaze fell accidentally upon the salutation”it was addressed to Marlene McKinnon.
“Oh,” Lily said delightedly, “you’re writing to Marlene?”
To her surprise, Remus reddened ever so slightly. “Every once in a while,” he said. “She’s out working for Dumbledore, you know, like she told us last year. She keeps me posted on what’s going on out there, more or less. And it’s just nice, you know, to have someone to talk to, what with everything going to pieces in here.”
“You’re not wrong,” Lily murmured. “Well, tell her from me that we all miss her.”
“I will,” Remus smiled at her before he, too, vanished, leaving Lily at the Gryffindor table alone.
---
Leda was released from the hospital wing just in time for the Gryffindor-versus-Slytherin Quidditch match. The Quidditch Captain side of James was relieved about this. Leda was, after all, his Keeper, and she was good at it; he knew that Gryffindor’s chances of winning the match would be greatly reduced without her.
On a personal level, however, James wished absently that she had needed to stay in the hospital wing for a few more days. Although the rash from the Wartcap Powder had disappeared, Leda was still furious, and was hell-bent on discovering who was responsible for the prank.
“I think it was Sirius,” she said to James as they walked down to breakfast together the morning of the match, carrying their broomsticks.
“What on earth makes you think that?” James asked wearily.
Leda shrugged. “He doesn’t like me much,” she said. “I can tell. And he’s jealous that you’ve been spending so much time with me, isn’t he? I mean, you haven’t said anything, but I have noticed that you aren’t speaking too much these days.”
James looked at her sideways, a little surprised that she had noticed that. “That’s about a lot of things,” he said, unwilling to say more. “But how could he have done that, anyway? It’s not like he can get into the girls’ dormitory.”
Leda’s face darkened. “Oh, please,” she scoffed. “Sirius Black? He could manage it just fine, I’m sure. If anyone can find away around that spell, he can. Or maybe he just had a girl do it for him, who knows.”
“I didn’t know you had such a high opinion of Sirius,” James said wryly as they reached the Gryffindor table and sat down.
“High opinion?” Leda asked. “Not at all. I think he should have been expelled a hundred times over for all the stunts he’s pulled.”
Tactfully, James refrained from pointing out that he and Sirius had pulled most of those stunts together. “Right,” he said instead, and hoped that she’d change the subject soon.
Farther down the table, Lily sat fiddling with her fork, trying to pretend that she had forgotten about the upcoming Quidditch match. This tactic, however, was doomed to failure; after a few minutes, Sirius arrived, jostling her as he threw himself next to her, and asked promptly, “So, going to the Quidditch match?”
Remus and Peter arrived a few moments behind him. “It should be pretty good,” Remus said. “Exciting, anyway. The teams are evenly matched.”
Peter snorted and reached for the toast. “Who exactly are we rooting for again?” he asked, sarcastically. “The team with James, Leda, and that Annabelle girl, or the team with Sirius’s scary younger brother?”
Surprised by the bitterness in his tone, Lily darted a look at Sirius, who rolled his eyes exasperatedly. She opened her mouth to question Peter, but Sirius shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Lily changed topics abruptly. “Your brother plays Quidditch?” she asked.
“Yep,” said Sirius, cutting up a piece of sausage. “Seeker. By the way, I’m not going to the game.”
He began eating. After a moment, however, he seemed to notice that no one was speaking, and looked up to find the other three gaping at him.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re not going?” said Peter in disbelief.
“Merlin, Padfoot,” said Remus. “Have you ever missed a match before?”
“No,” said Sirius absently. “But we have less than a year left, you know. I thought I’d give Evans here the opportunity to show me what it is people who don’t go to Quidditch games do when the castle empties out.”
Lily looked up at him, and as their eyes met, she understood that he was offering her a way out, and that, in many ways, watching James today would be just as painful for Sirius as it would be for her. “Sounds like a plan,” she said lightly, “since I wasn’t planning on going either.”
“Are you two serious?” Peter asked, eyes wide. Remus, however, looked carefully back and forth between the two of them, and something clicked in his gaze.
Lily shrugged apologetically at Peter as Sirius leaned forward to say something. Lily’s gaze drifted across the Great Hall”although she determinately avoided looking at James and Leda”and, more because of Sirius’s fascination with them than anything, she noticed Michael Kingsbury and Nathaniel Rafferty enter the Great Hall together. She didn’t pay them much mind at first, and, indeed, would probably have forgotten about them had not all hell broken loose a moment later.
From the far end of the Great Hall came the unmistakable sound of breaking glass, followed by the splintering of wood; alarmed, Lily looked over as shrieks erupted from the Hufflepuff table. All throughout the room people leapt to their feet, bewildered and frightened, as more dishes shattered.
Lily, reflexively, leapt onto her seat, straining to see what was going on. A moment later something whooshed by her head and she ducked, her eyes wide.
“What the hell?” she heard Sirius yelp from somewhere by her elbow. Swiveling around, Lily squinted up at the ceiling, looking for the object that had nearly decapitated her.
Her eyes trained on the ball before she really realized what she was seeing. But a moment later it registered, and she called, “Bludger! Someone released the Bludgers!”
Sirius swore loudly as all around them students dove under the tables, trying to avoid the balls. In the ensuing chaos, Lily realized two things”first, that she had vastly underestimated the skill it took Quidditch players to avoid these deadly balls, and secondly, that while Bludgers on a Quidditch field were one thing, Bludgers confined to an enclosed space, even one as large as the Great Hall, were far more dangerous. They ricocheted off the walls, slamming into tables with such force that, in some places, they crashed clean through. Peter, Lily saw, had rolled under the bench and was curled into a ball, his hands over his head.
Something moved in the corner of her eye, and Lily turned, ready to duck, but then blinked in surprise as a scarlet-clad blur swooped by her, followed a second later by an emerald one. It was the Quidditch players, Lily realized. James and Leda had both leapt onto their brooms and leapt into the air, and Gryffindor and Slytherin players alike were attempting to chase down the Bludgers. Distracted as she was, Lily barely had time to acknowledge the one stray fact”that this was the first, and probably the last, time that she would see the two houses working in tandem like this.
But it was a dangerous game; Lily, from her vantage point, could see more than one bloody nose in the vicinity, and several people appeared to be unconscious. Part of her wanted to join Peter under the table, but, rationally, she could see that, sturdy as they were, the tables offered little protection. It was better to stay where she was, with a good view of what was going on, and a healthy sense of when to duck.
After a few minutes of this, she was aware that Sirius had clambered onto the bench beside her. “How did this happen?” she shouted over the melee.
“I have my suspicions,” he called back, but then his face tensed; a moment later, he had dropped from the bench and was rolling across the floor as a Bludger slammed into the wall just inches from his head.
Lily was about to jump down to see if he was all right when something else fluttered by her nose. But this time it was gold; almost unconsciously, she turned her head to follow the movements and stretched out her arm, realizing, suddenly, that the Bludgers weren’t the only balls that had been released. Her bare hand closed around the small Snitch, its wings trembling violently against her, and then, almost in the same moment, James skidded to a halt on top of the Gryffindor table and his hand descended over hers.
For a moment, they were the only real feelings in the world”the cool curve of the Snitch against her palm, the heat of James’s hand on the back of hers, and their eyes locked for the first time in what felt like years. Then, suddenly, he pulled his hand away, returning it to the handle of his broom, and dropped his gaze to the small golden ball she was clutching.
It was the most contact they had had in weeks, the most she had looked at him since first seeing him in that empty classroom with Leda, and despite the pandemonium in the hall around him and the Quidditch players still wrestling the Bludgers from the sky, Lily couldn’t think of anything else.
James bent his knees, preparing to return to the air, and Lily opened her mouth, suddenly desperate not to let him go again, but before she could say anything, he looked directly into her eyes once more and said, simply, “Nice catch.” And then he was gone.
Lily watched him go, noting distantly that there wasn’t much left for him to do”one Bludger had already been captured, and the other was being cornered by a group of students now. Peter emerged from under the table as Remus and Sirius, both panting, picked themselves up, looking around cautiously.
“Well that was exciting,” Sirius said dryly.
“It’s all your fault,” Remus said to him. “You decided you weren’t going to the Quidditch match, so they brought the Quidditch match to you.”
“And who is they, exactly?” Sirius wondered aloud, quirking an eyebrow.
Lily looked down at the bench she had been standing on. Gingerly, she scooted away from a Bludger-shaped hole in the center, and sat down. “You may have a point about those two Ravenclaws, you know,” she said to Sirius. “They came in just before the Bludgers did.”
“Ha!” Sirius said triumphantly.
“They can’t be doing it alone though,” Remus said stubbornly. As the two leaned forward to debate, Lily tightened her fingers around the Snitch, still struggling in her hand, and thought back to those brief moments when she had James had both grabbed for it.
Something had passed between them then, something deeper than hurt feelings and hesitation. The way he had looked at her, as swift as it had been, had convinced her that, Leda or no Leda, things weren’t over between them. She knew it as surely as she had ever known anything, and that thought was realer, better, than any petty prank she could pull on Leda, and Lily wasn’t ready to let go.
And so instead she slid her hand, still curled around the Snitch, into the pocket of her robes, and held on.