“I’m just saying, he’s never exactly himself during the full moon! He might eat me.”
“Calm down,” James said tolerantly. “He’s not going to eat you.”
“Yeah, but…” Sirius said helplessly, and a little insistently. “But he might.”
“You make each other mad all the time and he’s never eaten you before,” Peter pointed out, his eyes darting around the deserted corridor. “And could you two keep your voices down?”
It was a full moon, and they were headed, as usual, to the Shrieking Shack. They hadn’t bothered with the cloak”James had it stuffed in his back pocket in case of emergencies, but they couldn’t all fit under it any more, and it had been a long time since they encountered anyone in the corridors after hours. But Peter was still nervous about being out in the open. And Sirius was nervous about seeing Remus, convinced that, even as a werewolf, he was going to remember their argument. All of it was making James nervous, and he didn’t like that.
“Look,” he said to Sirius. “Lily told us what that was all about, he’s not really mad at you. It’s more of a general…thing.”
“Yeah, well, he may have told Lily that, but he didn’t tell me,” Sirius grumbled. “So I’m still going to go with my he’s-going-to-eat-me theory.”
“Whatever you say,” James said, rolling his eyes as they pushed out the doors and walked onto the grounds. Peter snickered.
Sirius eyed them huffily, then looked up at the moon. So many feet away, the ends of the Whomping Willow were waving ever so slightly in the breeze.
“Hey, it’s actually not freezing out!” James said, stretching his arms over his head.
“It is March,” Peter said. James grinned happily.
Sirius looked at him. “You’re thinking about Quidditch, aren’t you?” he asked.
James laughed. “How’d you know?” he asked.
“Because you’re always thinking about Quidditch,” Sirius said, and this time he was the one who rolled his eyes. “When you’re not thinking about Lily, anyway.”
James didn’t say anything, just smiled contentedly. Then he said, “You want to go get Moony? Wormtail and I will wait here.”
“What?” Sirius yelped. “Why me? Why aren’t we all going?”
James shrugged. “I dunno, I thought it would be better to stick to the forest tonight, instead of Hogsmeade, and I figured that you two canines needed some alone time.” He fluttered his eyelids suggestively, and Sirius socked him on the arm. “Besides,” James said, “my antlers always get caught in roots and stuff down there.”
“Well, why can’t Peter come with me?” Sirius protested?
Peter snorted. “As if,” he said. “I don’t want to get eaten.”
Scowling, Sirius opened his mouth again, but James pushed him towards the Whomping Willow. Peter seemed to disappear from sight; a moment later, James’s eyes trained on the dark shape moving through the grass, coming to rest on the knot at the base of the tree. The branches, which had just begun to sway a little more ominously, stilled suddenly.
Sirius threw James a dirty look as he slipped into the passage beneath the tree. James blew him a kiss before transforming himself into the great stag.
He cantered around the grounds for a few minutes, letting off steam. Spring was in the air, and boy or stag, that always got his spirits up. He threw his antlered head into the air, reared onto his hind legs for good measure, and then began looking for Peter.
A moment later, movement by the base of the tree caught his eye, and he glanced over to see two lithe, dark shapes slip out onto the grounds. From this distance, it was hard to tell the dog and the wolf apart”they were roughly the same size, shaggy and fierce.
They don’t appear to have eaten each other, James thought, a little dryly, but a little relieved, too. He felt a tickle by his hoof, and peered down to see Peter, in his rat from. Ducking his head, he let the rat clamber up into his antlers, and together, they gazed over at the wolf and the dog, now touching noses.
With a loud bark, Sirius tumbled backwards, crouching down, his front paws out and his tail in the air, wagging enthusiastically. The wolf adopted the same position for a moment, then raced forward, bowling the dog over. They both leapt to their feet, tumbling each other around in the grass, nipping playfully, their tails waving.
If deer could smile, James would have been smiling then.
---
Days later, after Remus had returned to classes, the full moon having run its course, Lily had to admit that both he and Sirius seemed to be in markedly better moods. “What happened during that full moon?” she asked James in an undertone one night, while they were sprawled on their stomachs on the common room floor, pretending to do Charms homework.
“Honestly?” James laughed, sneaking a glance at where Sirius and Remus were sitting in armchairs with Peter. “No idea. I think it was a dog-to-wolf thing. But they seem to have worked it out.”
They were never sure how much Remus remembered of the time he spent as a wolf”the topic always made him a little moody, so they didn’t like to bring it up. But he had come back to the castle after their night on the grounds and grinned a little at Sirius. The two of them had high-fived each other, Remus had ruffled Sirius’s hair, and that had been that.
“I think that if everyone could turn themselves into a dog and then run around for awhile,” James continued to Lily, “there would be fewer problems in the world. It seems like a good problem solver.”
“Just dogs?” she grinned. “Not, oh say, deer?”
“Well, you know,” James said loftily, “it takes a very certain type of person to handle a stag…you know, the grace, the strength, the elegance””
“The modesty,” Lily finished, but she was laughing.
James looked at her for a moment, then darted his hand out and began tickling her in the ribs.
“Hey!” she shrieked, laughing harder. “Stop that!”
A few feet away, tucked into their armchairs, Sirius, Remus and Peter watched with mild interest.
“Making quite a spectacle out of themselves, aren’t they?” Sirius said, mock-serious.
“Ah, yes,” said Remus, imitating his tone. “Most undignified.”
“I think it’s cute,” Peter protested, and Sirius whacked him on the back of the head.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s cute,” he said. “It’s bloody adorable. We’re just teasing, Wormtail.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “I always have trouble with that.”
Sirius and Remus both looked at him fondly, and then slouched back in their chairs, watching in contented silence.
“You know,” Sirius said a moment later, watching Lily and James as they settled down, “I could be in love.”
Remus and Peter both looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?” Remus said.
“Well I don’t mean like right now,” Sirius said hurriedly. “I just mean, you know. Someday. I think I’d like to be in love. It looks nice.”
Remus gave him a measured glance before saying, “Yeah. Me, too.”
Sirius looked round at him in surprise. “Really?” he asked.
Remus shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, and grinned. “Looks nice.”
“Ten years or so, maybe,” Sirius said, folding his arms back behind his head.
“Whatever will we do in the meantime?” Remus asked, a tad dryly.
“Oh, well that’s obvious,” Sirius said. “We’re going to finish up at Hogwarts. Go out into the real world. James and Lily are going to decide that there’s no point fighting it and get married early and be disgustingly happy for about the next fifty years. And they’re going to have about twelve also disgustingly adorable children, and we’re going to be their favorite uncles and spoil them rotten. And in the meantime, you and I are going to be living in a bachelor pad in London, each of us bringing home a different girl every week.”
“What happened to falling in love?” Remus laughed, but Sirius waved him away.
“I told you, that comes eventually. We have to have some fun before we settle down, unlike our boring married friends over there.”
“Hey!” Peter interjected suddenly. “What about me?”
“Oh, you’ll come visit all the time, obviously,” Sirius said. “But you’ll be living with your mom.”
Peter considered this for a moment. “Probably true,” he conceded.
“All in all,” Remus said, “not a bad future.”
“Not at all,” Sirius said smugly. “I, for one, can hardly wait.”
---
The seventh-years could no longer deny that NEWTS were, in fact, approaching. They were midway through March, with spring rapidly descending, but the fifth- and seventh-years could barely spare enough time from their studies to catch a glimpse of the outside world. Even Sirius had been caught a few times with his nose in a book, to the surprise of many (“You know how to read?” James had asked, wide-eyed, before Sirius threw the book at him).
For his part, James was kept busier than he had been before, and homework was the least of it. Quidditch practice had started up again, and he was pushing his team harder then ever, with practices almost every day. And while this meant a decent amount of time spent with both Leda and Annabelle, it also meant more time spent in the air, which he could never turn down. And despite everything, his team was flying well; as strange and suspicious as Annabelle could be on the ground, James had to admit that she was a good Chaser, and she helped him get the job done. And on top of Quidditch practice, he had Head Boy duties as well”although more often than not, this translated as an excuse to spend more time with Lily. And somehow, despite all of the work and the time commitments, James had never been happier.
For Lily, it was much the same. They had less than three months left at Hogwarts, and it seemed to her that the days were picking up speed. And she, too, was the happiest she had ever been at Hogwarts”even the early days, when she and Severus had still been friends and she had finally found a place where she belonged, paled in comparison. She wanted to cry out, hold on, do something to make these days that were flying by last forever, but it was no use. Eventually, she had to surrender.
One evening, she was sitting at dinner with Remus, carefully going over a Potions essay. A few feet down the table, Mary and Peter were similarly bent over their Ancient Runes homework, while Sirius watched them all in dismay, looking bored. James was still at Quidditch practice. And so, with his best friend absent and everyone else buried in their own homework, Sirius was left to his own devices.
Lily had mostly managed to tune him out, but when he leapt to his feet so enthusiastically that he upended her goblet of pumpkin juice, she looked up in annoyance. To her surprise, she saw Sirius jubilantly flicking the neck of a Slytherin fourth-year.
“Hiya, Reg!” Sirius said, leaning back against the table with his arms folded.
“Sirius,” the boy said formally, nodding at him.
Nonplussed, Lily looked between the two of them. She had never met Sirius’s brother before, but she assumed that this must be him”they looked too much alike to not be related, although the fourth-year was slighter, and lacked Sirius’s exuberance, and, it seemed, some of his confidence.
“How’s Mum?” Sirius asked cheekily, and his brother shot him a dirty look.
“How she always is,” he replied.
Sirius winced. “Sorry to hear that, mate,”” he said. “Anything I can do?”
“You could come home.”
Sirius laughed mirthlessly. “Not a chance, Regulus,” he said. “You know that.”
“Yeah,” Regulus said with a smile that managed to make his face seem a little less dour. “But I’ve been instructed to tell you to renounce your blood-traitor friends and pro-Muggle leanings and come home every time I see you.”
“Charming,” Sirius said, hitting him on the shoulder, and Regulus took a step backwards, crossing his arms as well.
“What do you want, anyway?” Regulus asked clearly not wanting to get into anything, and the two eyed each other somewhat warily.
Lily, who had been paying more attention to the brothers than to her essay, hissed in an undertone to Remus, “I can’t figure out if they’re going to end this conversation by hugging or by punching each other in the face.”
“That’s usually how it goes,” Remus muttered back. “Their relationship is…odd.”
Across the table, Sirius snapped his fingers. “Oh, right,” he said. “I had a question for you. There are these two Ravenclaws your year””
Regulus snorted. “Please, like I hang out with Ravenclaws.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, get over your Slytherin-worship for a second,” Sirius said, “and just tell me if you’ve heard anything about them. Michael Kingsbury and Nathaniel Rafferty.”
Regulus, Lily noticed, looked suddenly tense. “What do you want to know about Michael?” he asked.
“Ha,” Sirius said. “You do know him.”
“Maybe I’ve heard something,” Regulus said guardedly.
Sirius waited for a second. Then, “Well are you going to tell me?”
“There’s not much to tell,” Regulus said, eyeing him. “They’re not very fond of you, though.”
“I know that,” Sirius said. “Anything else?”
Regulus looked at him, his gaze unreadable, for a long while, before finally saying, “Michael’s girlfriend, that Gryffindor Chaser, she’s in my Transfiguration class, and I heard her saying something about how some curse would have more of an effect on you and your friends. You pissed her off. She’s kind of””
“Scary?” Sirius finished, grinning. “And I knew Annabelle was dating him.”
“Well, whatever,” Regulus said. “That’s all I know. Anything else?”
“Nah,” Sirius said. “That’s all I needed. Knew I could count on you, you’re such a little sneak.”
“Whatever,” Regulus said again. “Oh, by the way, Uncle Alphard died.”
“What?” Sirius yelped. “Way to bury the lead!”
“Yeah,” Regulus said. “I wasn’t really supposed to tell you that.”
“I actually liked him,” Sirius muttered.
“I know,” Regulus said. “He liked you, too. That’s why I’m not supposed to tell you. I mean, you’ll find out eventually, but I guess Mum didn’t want you to know until absolutely necessary…He left you a decent amount of gold in his will.”
“He what?” Sirius said, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah, well, don’t get too excited, Mum’s trying to find some way to make sure you never get it.”
“Of course she is, the old bat.”
“Stop,” Regulus said without any real spite, looking heavenwards.
“Right then,” Sirius said abruptly, sitting back down. “See you around then, Reg.”
“Sure,” said Regulus vaguely, and he wandered off towards the Slytherin table.
Looking pensive, Sirius glanced over at Lily and Remus, who were both staring at him. “What?” he asked.
Lily shook her head, turning her quill around in her fingers. “Nothing really,” she said. “I just thought I had a strange relationship with my sibling.”
“It’s not that weird,” Sirius protested. “We grew up together! He’s a little creep who buys into all my parents’ pure-blood ideals, but he is my brother.”
“You’re a little peculiar,” Remus said.
“I am not, I’m””
“Were you just talking to Regulus?”
James had finally arrived, fresh from the Quidditch pitch and dripping with mud.
“Yup,” Sirius said to him.
“Huh,” James said, sitting down next to Lily. “How is he?”
“As he ever is,” said Sirius.
“You’re getting mud everywhere,” Lily informed James, who grinned at her.
“Aw, come on, Evans,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a little mud.” And he leaned over to kiss her sloppily on the cheek.
“Gross!” she yelped, laughing as she pushed him in the chest. “Get off of me.”
“So there’s a Hogsmeade trip next weekend,” Remus said suddenly. “Last one before the Easter holidays.”
“Is there really?” Sirius said. “Kind of snuck up on us, didn’t it?”
“What isn’t, these days,” Lily mused.
“I don’t know if I really want to go,” James said thoughtfully, and they all looked at him.
“Are you serious?” Sirius asked.
James shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, it lost all the excitement back in like, the fifth year, especially since we go there all the time anyway. I don’t know, I just don’t see the point.”
“The point is that this is our last year!” Sirius said. “This may be the last Hogsmeade visit we get as students. Sure, it may not be all that exciting, but it’s the principle of the thing, you know? Help me out here.”
This last bit was directed at Lily, who shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m with James on this one, actually.”
Sirius narrowed his eyes at them. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I see how it is. You two just want to take advantage of the empty common room so you can snog in front of the fireplace.”
James smirked and winked at Lily, who shrugged at him, smiling as if to say, Not a bad idea.
And so it was that, when the next weekend came, it was just Sirius, Remus, and Peter who found themselves weaving down to Hogsmeade.
“I wonder how much Uncle Alphard left me,” Sirius was saying, a question he liked to bring up ever since he’d spoken to Regulus.
“I wonder if you’ll ever see it,” Remus countered.
“I don’t see why I wouldn’t, though,” Sirius said. “I mean, I’m seventeen, legally there’s nothing my mother can do.”
“Legally,” Remus said. “You do realize we’re talking about your mother, right? She’s not going to be stopped by a silly little thing like the law.”
“What would you spend it on if you did get the money?” Peter asked.
Sirius grinned wickedly. “Depends on how much it is,” he said. “But I’m thinking…a motorbike.”
Remus looked at him disparagingly. “Be serious,” he said.
“I always am,” Sirius said, winking. “Besides, come on. Can’t you see me on a motorcycle? One that flies?”
Remus groaned. “Yes, I can, actually,” he said. “And I can also see you breaking about a hundred Wizarding laws with it and getting thrown into Azkaban.”
“Moony, Moony,” Sirius sighed, clapping him on the shoulder. “Live a little.”
A moment later, he had hopped to the side as a boy and a girl brushed past him. Another boy hurried behind them, knocking into Peter as he tried to keep up, and Sirius narrowed his eyes at the trio, grumbling under his breathe.
“Don’t”” Remus started to say, but, as usual, Sirius ignored him.
“Hey, Annabelle,” he called out.
The blonde fourth-year turned at the sound of her name. “Oh,” she said, her voice dripping with scorn. “What do you want?”
“Who’s your friend?” Sirius asked, looking at the handsome, golden-haired boy who was hoding Annabelle’s hand.
Behind him, Remus gave a long-suffering sigh. “As if he doesn’t know perfectly well who that is,” he muttered to Peter.
“He’s only been stalking him all year,” Peter agreed.
“Michael Kingsbury,” the Ravenclaw said, holding out his hand.
Sirius eyed it for a moment before, somewhat reluctantly, reaching out his own. They locked gazes, neither smiling; Michael’s eyes were such a dark blue that they were almost black, and so bottomless that Sirius, uncomfortable, wanted to look away.
But Michael broke first, stepping back to put his arm around Annabelle. “So I hear you’ve been giving my girl here a bit of trouble,” he said.
“What?” yelped Sirius. “If anything, it’s the other way arou””
But his protests, to his surprise, were drowned out by Annabelle.
“It’s not trouble, Michael, God, I can handle myself,” she said angrily, pushing away from him, but he only laughed at her. A few feet away, the third boy, Nathaniel, was hovering, seemingly unsure if he should approach.
“Quite a firecracker you’ve got there,” Sirius said, folding his arms. Even though Michael was only a fourth-year, he and Sirius were of a height, and Sirius was unnerved. He found himself suddenly recalling the previous year, when he and James had been given detention with Michael and Nathaniel. Biting toilets, he remembered, that’s what Michael had been in there for. It wasn’t high on creativity, as far as pranks went, but there was a certain brutality to it that made Sirius even more ill-at-ease.
Annabelle, however, seemed oblivious to the tension. “Come on, Michael,” she said, “let’s go. I told Leda I’d meet her in the Three Broomsticks, and Nathaniel’s going to have a coronary if you make him wait any longer.”
“Nate’s fine,” Michael said, looking dispassionately over his shoulder at his friend.
“Whatever,” said Annabelle. “I’m going.”
And she turned and strode down the path towards Hogsmeade, Nathaniel quick on her heels. Michael lingered long enough to Sirius one last look, and then followed leisurely after them.
Sirius hung back, waiting for Remus and Peter to catch up.
“All right,” he said, his voice lowered, “I think they win the Creepiest Couple of the Year award.”
Peter nodded fervently.
“Are we going to walk this slowly the whole way there?” Remus asked.
“Yes,” Sirius said. “If we walk any faster, we’ll catch up to them, and then we’ll have to repeat that whole scenario.”
Remus thought about pointing out that Sirius had caused the encounter in the first place, and then decided against it. “Good point,” he said.
Thankfully, they didn’t have to walk slow for long; Annabelle and the two boys ducked into the Three Broomsticks at once. “Well, we’re not going in there yet,” Sirius said, and they kept walking.
They wandered around the village, crisscrossing through the familiar streets, delighting in the fact that it was warm enough, these days, to be outside for long periods of time. For a while, Sirius entertained the other two with drawn-out and increasingly far-fetched theories about what James and Lily were up to (“Taking a broomstick ride to Paris! Teaching each other how to paint self-portraits…without magic!”). But eventually, that ran its course, and as they walked slowly past the Shrieking Shack, Peter asked, “So, now what do we do?”
Sirius shrugged. “We could always go to Zonko’s,” he said. “I still want to do a big end-of-the-year, last-hurrah prank, and I could use some inspir””
He was cut off suddenly by a long, drawn-out scream coming from the Shrieking Shack.
A couple was walking past them at the same moment, and the wizard jumped so violently his hat fell off. “Most haunted place in Britain,” the woman said, smiling, and retrieving it for him.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Remus, blanching, turned to his friends. “What,” he asked, his voice low, “was that?”
“I”I don’t know,” Sirius said, at a loss for words.
“It sure as hell wasn’t me!” Remus said, on edge.
“Maybe…maybe it’s…” Sirius was fishing, coming up with nothing, and Peter looked anxiously between the two of them. And then there was another shriek, high-pitched and full of terror, cut off sharply at the end.
And then, for the second time that day, Annabelle Fletcher came barreling into Sirius.
“…the hell?” Sirius said. “Where did you come from?”
Annabelle was wide-eyed, and completely falling apart, the first time Sirius had ever seen her anything less than composed. “That’s Leda!” she screamed at Sirius, her hair falling in front of her eyes. “That’s Leda in there!”
“Whoah,” said Sirius, grabbing her elbow. “What are you talking about?”
“I was supposed to meet her in the Three Broomsticks,” Annabelle said, panic-stricken. “And she never showed, and it’s not like her, so I came looking, and””
There was another scream, and Annabelle wrenched her arm away from Sirius so hard that for a moment he was convinced she’d broken his fingers. “And that’s her! That’s her, I know it, and I don’t know what’s going on but I have to do something!”
Sirius grabbed her arm again. “There’s no way you’re going in there,” he said. “You don’t even know it’s her.”
Annabelle looked at him, and to his shock, he saw her eyes were filled with tears. “It is. I can tell. And I have to,” she said desperately. “What would you do? If it was your friend in there?”
Over her head, Sirius met Remus’s eyes. Then he reached for his wand.
---
James and Lily were, true to Sirius’s initial suspicion, taking advantage of the empty common room when the first wave of Gryffindors entered.
They were sharing an armchair, Lily’s legs across James’s lap, their fingers curled together, both of them talking and laughing quietly even though there was no one else in the room. Suddenly, the portrait burst open and a wave of students flooded in, some talking nervously, others silent, faces furrowed in concentration. Lily slid off the chair onto her feet, James standing right behind her, and they exchanged a quick look.
“What’s going on?” James said in an undertone. “It’s way too early for them to come back from Hogsmeade…”
“Look!” Lily threw out a hand, catching him in the chest. “Peter’s here.”
“Wormtail!” James called, and Peter looked up, and made a beeline for them.
“What’s going on?” Lily asked, eyeing the swarm of Gryffindor students. More were entering as they spoke.
“I don’t really know,” Peter said. “But there’s…something going on in the Shrieking Shack.”
“What?” James asked. “It’s not full moon!”
“Well it’s not Remus either,” Peter said, and he quickly related both Hogsmeade encounters with Annabelle.
“What happened?” James asked, his brow knitting.
“Padfoot sent me and Moony back to the village, to round everyone up,” Peter said. “We got most of them, I think, out of the Three Broomsticks…Moony’s got the Prefect badge, you know, so they believed him.”
“And Sirius?” James asked.
“He”well, he went in.” Peter said nervously.
“He what?” James bellowed.
“He told Annabelle to stay outside and he went in. Moony went after him when I was coming back, I think he was going to check for stragglers, and I…I don’t know what’s going on.”
James and Lily looked at each other again, both of them feeling the weight of the Head Boy and Girl badges on their chests, and then, wordlessly, they both turned and ran for the portrait hole.
They were moving against the flow; Remus and Peter’s warning had sent students from all Houses back to the school in droves, but by the time they had gotten out onto the grounds, the crowd had thinned.
“What do you think is happening?” James panted as they moved towards the village.
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “This is a mess, it’s chaos, I don’t understand, but I just have a bad feeling about this.”
James stopped in his tracks, looking at her. “I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”
Lily reached for his hand. “I know,” she said, and then she looked up. “Look!” she gasped, pointing down the road to the village, where Remus was walking towards them, supporting an exhausted-looking Annabelle. And just behind them was Sirius, a long gash at his temple dripping blood into his eyes, and the limp body of Leda Wood in his arms.
Stars Apart by Willow Rosenberg
Chapter Notes: Note on the werewolf: So the movies aren't canon, and especially, in my opinion, where the Marauders are concerned (Gary Oldman = great actor, but he's not MY Sirius! etc.) So, basically, the way I see the werewolf thing is not how it is in the movies. I mean, to paraphrase JKR in book 3, "the werewolf differs from the true wolf in several small ways" and it's like, a different snout shape and a tufted tail. Not, a wolf is a wolf and a werewolf is a giant, hairless, bipedal rat. So Remus as a werewolf, in this story anyway, looks pretty much like...a wolf. He's a little bigger than a true wolf maybe, and a little shaggier, but if you don't know what you're looking at, he could easily be mistaken.Have at it!
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