“So where’s Peter, anyway?” James asked approximately twenty minutes later.
“Why, did you want to chase him off again?” Remus asked dourly.
The three of them were sitting in opposite corners of the dorm, as far away from each other as was possible. Sirius, thinking that they’d all be safer if he couldn’t speak, had actually transformed into the great black dog, but as they spoke, he lifted his lips in a low snarl.
“Eugh,” James said, making a face at him. “Your teeth are making me nervous.”
Sirius gave an annoyed little yip and rested his head on his massive paws.
“Anyway,” James continued, looking back over at Remus, “I did not chase him off.”
“He’s not here,” Remus pointed out. “And the whole point of this curse is to split us up. You think he’d be trying to find us, to get in on this.”
But James was shaking his head. “But that’s not really how Peter operates, is it?” he said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t fight like we do, he doesn’t have the fire. He just disappears when he’s mad, and it works, doesn’t it? It makes s sit around and wonder where he is and what we did wrong. Honestly, we could probably break this curse by getting Peter to show up and yell at us.”
Remus gave a harsh bark of laughter and James glanced up at him, his eyes narrowed. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Remus shrugged. “It just always surprises me when you’re perceptive.”
James bit back a retort. “This is awful,” he said after a minute. “I really don’t like wanting to hit you all the time.”
“I know what you mean,” Remus sighed. “Maybe staying all together is a dumb idea, maybe we should try to go to class and stuff…”
“But we’d be bound to run into each other in public, we’d have classes together! And then we’d actually be doing things, at least here all we’re doing is sitting, the worst we can do is bicker…who knows what would happen…and people would see it happening, which is probably just what Annabelle and those Ravenclaws want.”
Sirius growled at Annabelle’s name, and Remus sighed again.
“I wish we knew how to break it,” he said. “I know it’s not going to last too long or anything, but still, I have a life I want to get back to…”
“No you don’t,” James said, rolling his eyes.
“Just because I’m not the Quidditch Captain or Head Boy or Boyfriend-of-the-Year doesn’t mean”” Remus began hotly, his hands balling into his fists, but Sirius, raising his head, barked loudly at them, and he backed off.
“I’m not Boyfriend-of-the-Year,” James muttered, not looking at either of them. “Especially not now. I don’t even know””
He got a faraway look in his eyes.
“Whatever,” Remus said, flipping his wand around his hand. “I’ll be right here waiting if you ever decide to finish that sentence.”
“I just got a really stupid idea,” James said, bounding to his feet. “But who knows, it might actually work…I’ll be back!”
“Oi!” Remus called after his retreating back. “I thought we weren’t going to leave the room!”
---
Peter, as it turned out, was not far; he, like Sirius, had taken to his animal form. He was curled just beneath a pipe in the walls that ran alongside their dorm room, listening as they discussed him.
James was right”Peter always preferred to run from a fight. Curse or no curse, this was how he dealt with things, how he always would.
And then listening to them hurt too much, and he turned tail and skittered through the walls.
---
Lily didn’t know what was happening, but she had never been this unfocused in Potions class before. Remus wasn’t there, she had noticed straight off, with an unexpected surge of anger. Maybe James got to him, too, she thought savagely, dumping entirely too much powdered ginger into her cauldron, which bubbled poisonously. Lily fingered the stone in her pocket”a strange, carved object she had found beneath her pillow that morning”and scowled at it.
I don’t know what I was thinking, she thought, and began stirring her potion viciously, some of it sloshing over the edge. Why would I ever have agreed to go out with him? Severus was right all along about him…
At this thought, she looked up over her shoulder at Severus Snape, halfway across the classroom, who, she saw, was watching her cauldron with some trepidation. “What?” she snapped at him, not realizing that the drops of potion that had spilled were currently burning a hole through her table.
When she looked back, James was standing in front of her.
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked rudely.
James shrugged. “I knew you had Potions right now, and, ah…”
“Mr. Potter!” Professor Slughorn had suddenly bustled over. “Good as it is to see you in my classroom again, I must tell you, we’re in the middle of a very temperamental potion at the moment, and it won’t do to have you distracting my students…especially this one, though I rather expect she knows that…”
He looked pointedly at Lily, whose scowl deepened. “Don’t look at me, Professor, I didn’t ask him to come here. In fact, the sooner he leaves, the better.”
Severus, she noticed, was watching this conversation not without amusement, which only infuriated her more.
“I know, I know,” James was saying. “I’m on my way out. I just need to know one thing first”Lily, was there anything underneath your pillow this morning?”
Caught off guard, Lily pulled the stone out of her pocket. “What, like this?” she asked, and James visibly relaxed.
“Yeah,” he said. “That.”
“What is it?” Lily asked suspiciously.
“I’ll explain it all later,” James said quickly. “But I just needed to””
And before she had time to figure out what was going on, James had grabbed her by the elbow and planted a kiss on her lips, right in front of Slughorn and the entire Potions class.
After a moment, they broke apart, Lily shoving him away. “…the hell was that?” she asked, glowering at him. There were a few catcalls from behind them, and a loud whoop. Severus was no longer looking amused.
“I’m mad at you,” Lily said, “and you can’t just…actually, hey. How come I’m not mad at you anymore?”
James’s face relaxed into a grin. “I was only half sure that that was going to work,” he said.
“You can’t just kiss me every time I’m mad at you,” Lily said, but she was smiling herself now. “That really, really shouldn’t work, I don’t””
“Nah, it won’t,” James said, as Slughorn, recovering from his surprise, looked as though he were about to speak again. “This was a special circumstance, I’ll explain it in detail later, but basically we were all just cursed, and I think we just broke our part of it.”
“What?” Lily yelped. “Cursed?”
“Later,” James said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, and then darting backwards out of the classroom.
Utterly bemused, Lily turned back towards her potion, shaking her head. She eyed the grimly bubbling mixture, and then the clock, before waving her wand and Vanishing the entire thing. She had just enough time to try again.
---
“So what I want to know,” Sirius asked petulantly a few days later in the common room, “is, knowing that that worked, why didn’t you run immediately back to Gryffindor Tower so you could snog me and Moony?”
James gave him a pained look.
Sirius fluttered his eyelashes. “You know you want to,” he said. “I’ve been told that I’m highly smoochable.”
Remus snorted. “By who, Moaning Myrtle?”
“Hey,” Sirius said, sounding wounded. “Can’t we all be extra nice to each other for today? Too much teasing lately.”
Remus just looked at him, then stood up and left the table.
“He’s been like that ever since the curse wore off,” Sirius muttered.
“Are you sure it has?” Peter asked, piping up for the first time.
“It should have,” James said. “It’s been a couple of days, and the rest of us aren’t feeling it anymore, are we?”
It had faded, Sirius was sure”they had explained the curse to both Peter and Lily, when they turned up, although at that point, the antagonism between Lily and James, at least, was gone. But the tension between Remus and Sirius had lingered.
“Did something happen before?” Lily asked. “Before the curse, I mean.”
Sirius shrugged. “I dunno,” he said. “But I guess I better go talk to him.”
And sighing heavily, he followed Remus out of the common room.
Remus, to his surprise, was leaning against the wall just outside of the portrait hole, looking stormy.
“So…” Sirius said hesitantly, “do I want to ask?”
Remus blinked over at him, and then shrugged. “Just thinking about that curse,” he said.
“Yeah, about that,” Sirius said. “That’s over, right?”
“It’s not affecting me anymore, if that’s what you’re asking,” Remus said.
“Sure,” Sirius said. “Okay, then. So what’s going on?”
Remus had pursed his lips together so tightly that all color had drained from them, and when he finally spoke, that same sort of tightness was laced through his voice. “I’ve just been thinking about some of the things we said.”
“Like what?” Sirius asked, genuinely puzzled. “I mean, it was all pretty harmless. We made fun of James for his hair, what’s new about that?”
The look Remus threw him was almost disgusted. “There was more than that, and you know it,” he said. “And we weren’t making it up. Or at least I know I wasn’t making up what I was saying. I don’t know where half of it was coming from, but it was real.”
“Everyone has issues,” Sirius shrugged, starting to feel uncomfortable.
“Yeah, but you and I especially,” Remus said. “Or don’t you remember that first fight we had before James interrupted us?”
“I seem to remember you doing a lot of that yelling yourself,” Sirius pointed out.
“Because you were being obnoxious, which I guess shouldn’t be all that surprising any more…”
“Hey!” Sirius snapped, defensive now. “That’s not fair. All I did was ask you why you never seem to want to date.”
“For about the thirtieth time this week,” Remus said. “And I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over.”
“Come on,” Sirius said. “We just worry about you sometimes, you can’t seriously be mad at me for””
“I can take care of myself,” Remus said briskly. “I was doing it for a long time before you came along, and I don’t care how well-intentioned you are, there are just some things that you will not ever understand. And I’m sorry if I just don’t care about girls or dating that much. As hard as it may be for the rest of you to comprehend, I have bigger things on my mind.”
Sirius, completely bemused, just started at him for a moment. “Where is this coming from?” he asked finally.
But Remus turned wordlessly away from him, disappearing down a side corridor. Sirius just stood, feeling suddenly very small, watching the empty hall.
Some time later, he wandered listlessly into the dormitory, only to find Lily and James inside, embroiled in a rather tense game of Exploding Snap.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said to Lily, who shrugged.
“I do a lot of things I’m not supposed to do these days,” she said.
“True enough,” Remus said, not really wanting to engage. “What happened to Peter?”
“Went to the library,” James said, looking up from the game. “Said he needed to catch up on homework, but really, I think the tension was a little too much for him.”
“What tension?” muttered Sirius, flopping backwards onto his four-poster and staring at the ceiling.
Frowning slightly at his tone, Lily looked over at him. “Did…did you catch Remus?” she asked hesitantly.
“In a manner of speaking,” Sirius said bitterly, still not looking at them. “And, just for the record, better not mention anything about dating to him, because it seems to make him mad.”
James and Lily exchanged a long, quizzical look. “What”” James started to say, but as he leaned slightly forward to look at Sirius, the Exploding Snap cards exploded in his face.
He and Lily both fell backwards, coughing and waving away smoke. Several of the drawers in the dorm had rattled free, but Sirius had not moved. A minute later, however, he blinked as something golden fluttered past his face.
Sitting up in surprise, Sirius looked over at James and Lily, who were both upright once more and looking at the Snitch that was circling their heads.
“Is that”” Lily asked curiously, and James nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been in my drawer ever since we got back from Christmas holidays. I’d quite forgotten about it, actually.”
“I didn’t realize you’d kept it, much less here,” Lily said quietly.
“Course I did,” James side, his voice even lower.
Sirius felt vaguely as though he was missing something, and strongly as though he was interrupting a private moment. The thought quite reenergized him”seconds later, he had vaulted off of his four-poster and plopped himself down in between the two of them.
“So,” he said, looking closely back and forth into their two faces, “what’s going on?”
James laughed. “Oh, stow it, Padfoot,” he said as the Snitch whirred between them.
“Where’d you get the Snitch?” Sirius asked tenaciously.
“Found it,” James said smoothly.
“Just lying around,” Lily added, smothering a grin.
“Doesn’t happen to be the same Snitch that went disappearing from the Great Hall months ago, does it?” Sirius asked.
There was pointed silence from both Lily and James, until Sirius gave them such a hangdog look that they both laughed. James broke first.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “It kind of is. When all those balls got released into the Great Hall, we may have””
“”sort of caught it at the same time,” Lily continued. “Except, you know, we weren’t speaking at the time, so it was a little awkward””
“”but Lily held onto it and then gave it to me for Christmas, anonymously, but since no one else knew about it, it obviously meant that she loves me, so I kept it.”
“It did not mean that,” Lily insisted, going scarlet. “I was just trying to be friends again.”
Amusing as this had the potential to be, Sirius disliked being out of the loop. “And neither of you ever bothered to tell me any of this before?”
“We weren’t really speaking at the time either, Padfoot,” James pointed out. “And besides, it was just kind of””
“Private,” Lily finished.
“Ugh,” Sirius said, flopping over backwards. “Stop finishing each other’s sentences. I’m supposed to do that.”
James patted him sympathetically on the foot.
---
The next day found Lily in Potions class, frowning as she carefully measured chopped aconite into her cauldron. They were, of course, working on NEWT level potions, and despite her skill, Potions was quickly becoming one of her most difficult classes. So far today, only Severus had managed to make it even halfway through his, although Lily herself was not far behind. She was moving slower than normal out of caution, because, strangely, today, Professor Slughorn had not told them what it was they were brewing, only given step-by-step instructions.
Remus, back in class after his previous, curse-induced absence, was struggling. His potion, which was supposed to be a deep violet, had turned a poisonous-looking acid green, and he was swearing softly to himself. It was so unlike Remus to lose his composure like this that Lily turned instinctively to help him”her own potion was set to simmer for another twelve minutes.
“Did some of the aconite leaves get in there as well?” she asked, her brow furrowed. “It was only supposed to be the flowers, the leaves are quite poisonous.”
“I must have,” he said morosely. He looked especially haggard, and Lily tried to remember how soon the full moon was. “Not that it matters, I won’t be doing too many potions after Hogwarts.”
“What are you talking about?” Lily asked.
“It’s not easy for me, Lily, like it is for you,” Remus said, an edge in his voice. “Do you know how much I had to study for this OWL, and I barely got an Exceeds Expectations. James studied half as much as I did and he got the same score, he just didn’t want to take Potions again. Sirius didn’t study at all and got an Outstanding. I just took it because”oh, I don’t know, and shouldn’t you be looking after your own potion?”
Lily looked over her shoulder”her cauldron was still bubbling quietly. “Not for a few more minutes,” she said. “Let me help you.”
“You can’t,” Remus said miserably. “It’s not worth it.”
Lily felt as though they were no longer talking about Potions class. “Remus is this…” she began cautiously, “is this about whatever happened with you and Sirius?”
He looked up at her sharply just as Professor Slughorn called attention.
“Ho, well, as many of you by now have realized, this is, perhaps, one of the most difficult potions we’ve ever attempted in my class!” Slughorn announced happily. “I thought we’d try it out merely for fun, and I hardly expect any of you to get it right on this first attempt””Lily looked encouragingly at Remus”“although Mr. Snape and Ms. Evans are both heading successfully in the right direction.”
Slughorn stopped to beam at Lily, who smiled weakly back at him, feeling both Remus and Severus’s eyes on her.
“Now,” Slughorn continued, “since most of you have either reached a stage where your potion is to be left alone for a certain amount of time, or you’ve messed up so badly that you would need to restart the whole thing, I thought I’d take a moment to tell you what it is, in fact, that you are brewing. You may have noticed that the main ingredient in this particular potion is aconite, a rather toxic little plant that happens to go by another name. Can anyone tell me what that is?”
Lily’s hand flew into the air, and Slughorn called on her. “Monkshood,” she answered promptly.
“True, very true,” Slughorn said. “But there’s actually a third name, which is the one I’m looking for”Mr. Snape?”
“Wolfsbane,” Severus answered. His lip curled slightly as he cut his eyes towards Remus, who Lily noticed had suddenly gone very still.
“Correct!” Slughorn said. “This potion is very recent, only just announced last month, but quite useful for those wizards unfortunately bitten by a werewolf. It does not cure lycanthropy, but it does alleviate some of the symptoms; a werewolf will still transform into a wolf at the full moon, but with the potion, he may keep his mind during these transformations, no longer posing a danger to society.”
The bell rang then, and students hurriedly began cleaning up. “Thought it would be handy to keep you all abreast of current Potions news. We’ll try it again towards the end of term, if there’s time!” Slughorn called over the din.
Lily barely managed to catch Remus as he hurried down the corridor. “Wait,” she called, reaching out to grab his arm. When he turned to face her, she saw all the color had drained from his face. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I”free period, but I just””
“Come on,” Lily said firmly, hauling him into an empty classroom and sitting him down. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
“I…I didn’t know,” Remus said faintly. “I didn’t know anyone was even working on a Potion. I had no idea. And I can’t make it.”
“That was only the first time you tried it,” Lily said reasonably, but Remus was already shaking his head.
“No, even if I do eventually get it right, I’m not…I’m not a good enough Potions maker. I wouldn’t be able to make it reliably, consistently month after month. Not on my own. But now that there’s a chance…it almost makes it worse.”
“Makes what worse?” Lily asked quietly.
“This…disease,” Remus said quietly. “The fact that I’m a werewolf.”
It was the first time that she’d ever heard him say the word itself out loud, and she had a sudden urge to grip his hand, his shoulder, something, but he was already speaking again.
“And what Sirius and I were fighting about earlier, it was what Sirius and I always fight about. He’s always trying to get me to date, to ask girls out, to do something with my life, but he doesn’t understand that I can’t. Not everyone is like him, or James or Peter or you. Not everyone could accept my…condition. And I can’t date anyone, I can’t have any kind of relationship, I couldn’t love someone and keep that kind of thing secret. I never even thought I’d be able to have friends, and I’m lucky beyond all I ever imagined that I do. Anything else is too much to ask for. But I can’t explain that to Sirius, he wouldn’t understand.”
His eyes were bright as he spoke, but at the same time, it was as though something heavy were being lifted from him. And now Lily did move; she knelt before him, covering his hand with hers.
“First of all,” she said, “I think there are a lot of people in the world who would accept you, if you gave them a chance, although I understand that it may be hard to find them, and that there are a lot of things working against you.”
Remus shrugged, the ghost of a smile on his face for the first time. “Maybe,” he said. “Although it’s not really the kind of thing you’d bring up in casual conversation.”
Lily laughed quietly, then tightened her fingers around his. “And secondly,” she continued, “the potion? I’ll make it for you.”
His hand was suddenly a vice on hers. “You’d do that?” he asked hoarsely, and she nodded.
“I’ll talk to Slughorn, have him practice making it with me, but I’m sure I could get the hang of it by the end of the year. And after we leave Hogwarts…I’ll make it for you. Every month. I promise.”
Remus seemed to be at a loss for words. Briskly, Lily stood up, turning away, giving him a moment to compose himself. “And now I have a Transfiguration essay that I really should be writing,” she said, as he rose to his feet.
“Oh,” he sighed. “Right. And don’t forget the Charms practical.” Then he put a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to look up at him. “Lily,” he said, “thank you.”
Impulsively, she leaned in and hugged him, trying to put as much love and support and solidarity into the gesture as she could. He hugged her back, almost carefully, and she realized just how rarely he let himself depend on people like this, how independent he was, but also how lonely.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course.
Stars Apart by Willow Rosenberg
Chapter Notes: This is basically a continuation of last chapter. Enjoy!-------------------------