Eight's Company

by darkbluedark

Summary:

The first two nights, Harry sleeps like the dead— or, well, maybe that's not the best comparison, given the number of inferi attacks reported lately.

He sleeps like a log. Like a dead log. An un-re-animated dead log. From an everyday, inanimate, non-whomping tree.

After that, Harry wakes up screaming more nights than not, and he even cries on the bad ones, which makes James cry too. In this regard, James reckons that his first week of parenting a full-grown teenage adult bears an awful lot of resemblance to parenting a newborn baby. He feels both blessed and terrifyingly out of his depth.

Chapter 1: The Celebration

“So,” says Sirius as they trickle out of the potions lab. “Drinks?”

James looks around at their little group: Harry, who is still covered in dirt and ash; Malfoy, who shall now and forevermore be known as Draco, whose fine robes are ruined by wrinkles that criss-cross his chest and sleeves in very conspicuous patterns; Lily, whose purple fuzzy pyjama pants are just visible beneath the hem of her overrobe; and Sirius, who still looks a little wan beneath the loud t-shirt and leather jacket he originally donned for pub night.

They’re noteworthy, which is not something anyone really wants to be in wartime; but then again, only if you really look. And it’s pushing midnight now, which means anyone out and about is probably in no fit state to really be looking. Especially if they’re going out for drinks.

“C’mon,” Sirius urges. “To celebrate your engagement? And spontaneous rise to parenthood?”

James looks at Lily.

“Let’s get sloshed,” she decides. Sirius cheers.

Moody yells at them for it, but a Marauder’s solemn decision to get sloshed is final and beyond reproach, and Lily’s officially a Marauder now by pre-marriage (it’s a thing). Sirius pops home to fetch Moony, and James shakes his head at Lily when she brings up Peter, and Harry politely pretends he didn’t hear her ask.

Does James feel strange to be celebrating the lifetime accomplishment of wooing Lily Evans without Wormy, who had to suffer through just as many painful years of secondhand rejection as Moony and Padfoot before Lily finally gave in came to her senses? Yeah, absolutely. Is he still struggling to comprehend the fact that Peter is at all capable of betraying James so catastrophically? You bet. Would he maybe under other circumstances be inclined to invite Peter anyway and try to suss out his loyalties another time? Probably. But James just watched Harry lose his shit over a house elf not one hour ago, and so he decides that in the case of Wormtail, he'd better not risk it.

Pettigrew-related worries aside, they arrive at the Hippogriff’s Head in more or less high spirits, and James fetches the first round of drinks while Lily scouts out a table. Waiting at the bar for their mulled mead, James amuses himself watching Harry and Draco stand stiffly in front of the doorway and look everywhere except at each other.

Moony and Padfoot tumble out of the floo just in time. They’re only slightly dishevelled, and it’s only been about ten minutes they were alone together, so in James’ opinion, they’re off to an unironically great start.

Of course, knowing Sirius, he will have given Moony absolutely no warning about their guests— either because he got distracted with other activities or because he thought it would be funny to leave Remus in the dark; honestly, James would give either reason even odds— and this pans out when they arrive at the booth Lily’s found and Remus stops dead at the sight of Harry.

His wand is out in a flash. “Who the hell are you?”

It draws the attention of a couple of the parties at nearby tables, which is why Lily steps in with a well-placed elbow to his ribs.

After a moment, Remus sighs and stows away his wand. “Would anyone care to explain what the hell is going on?” he says, in a much more reasonable tone of voice.

“Prongs popped the question without you!” Sirius announces, which succeeds in distracting Remus from the presence of Harry and Draco long enough to shove him into the booth while James passes out drinks. Draco somehow manages to finagle his way into a chair at the end of the table, while the others end up in a Padfoot-Harry-Moony sandwich, which Remus does not look at all pleased about. To be honest, James is not quite pleased either, seeing how comfortable Harry looks with Sirius, although he will acknowledge that Harry does, at least, take advantage of his front-row seat across the table from James and Lily to stare avidly and a bit disconcertingly at his parents.

Draco, on the other hand, is staring morosely down at the bottle of mead he’s been handed. Harry, apparently so fixated on James as to follow his every glance, looks over and takes note too.

“Drinks not fancy enough for you, Malfoy?” he taunts. “Maybe if you imperio another barkeep–”

“Shut up, Potter,” Draco says with a wince. “I just think, since we’re celebrating, it ought to be champagne—”

“It’s the mead, isn’t it? Should I have a bezoar on hand?”

James tries to imagine any way at all that such a comment might be intended that doesn't involve poison. He comes up concerningly blank.

“Oh, I’m sure you’d think of something else,” Malfoy sneers. “Always have to save the day, don’t you?”

Harry snorts. “You know, that’s what your father said—”

“Last night, in bed!” Sirius finishes for him. He sounds awfully proud of himself for that joke for one long awkward moment until, with an “eurgh,” he realises exactly what it is he’s just implied.

Harry and Draco shoot him their best looks of utter affront before their bickering resumes. James would pay more attention to it, probably, if he wasn’t already painfully familiar with the utter incomprehensible nonsense the two of them are able to spout at each other. For all he knows, Draco is fabricating tales taller than anything Wormy could have ever come up with. There’s no way that “because founders forbid the great Harry Potter leave one perfectly safe eight year old veela at the bottom of the lake” is a real thing that anyone would actually mean to say.

Frankly, James has more important things to ponder, like why Harry keeps staring at Sirius with that look on his face.

(His fixation with Sirius is absolutely fine. It’s harmless. James does not take it personally. It’s definitely not something he’s jealous of. It’s not like Harry is his son or anything.)

Bless Moony and his unrepentant possessiveness for putting paid to that, though, so that James doesn’t have to: after the bare minimum of oohing over Lily’s finger and admonishing James for being an impatient twat, he turns right around to glare at Harry, who might as well be clinging to Sirius like a lost toddler.

“And who the hell are you?” he demands again.

"Erm. I'm Harry."

"I can see that," says Remus, pointedly eyeing his unruly mop of hair. Then he gives the same exact look at James' head. "Distant Potter cousin of some sort?"

"Not a cousin, no—”

"Although if you were Blacks—" Sirius cuts in.

"And," James continues loudly, "not distant in the way you're thinking of."

He shares a quick glance with Sirius wherein they silently agree to leave it at that, partly because Moony has always enjoyed a good riddle, and also because he would be much more likely to assume it's a prank if either of them just came out and said anything about time travel.

Remus tilts his head and scoots over to assess Harry full-on. After a few minutes, during which James plays sappily with the ring on Lily's finger, Remus leans in and takes an enormous whiff of Harry's neck.

"Moony!" Sirius yelps, scandalised.

"Time travel!" Remus declares. "Grandson, maybe."

“Hey!” James cheers, just as Sirius boos with equal fervour. “What? He got the gist of it!”

“No half-credit,” says Lily, the traitor.

“Honourable mention, at least,” Malfoy suggests; judging by the imperious tilt of his chin, he considers this a very magnanimous offer.

Remus crosses his arms and huffs. "What’d I get wrong?"

"He's our son," Lily explains with a proud smile at Harry, whose cheeks have only just started to drain of the blood that pooled there after Remus blatantly sniffed him, and who now reddens again under her attention. Of course, that's not helped by the fact that Remus immediately proceeds to attach his nostrils to the skin of Harry's neck and inhale.

Again. With gusto.

"Merlin's arse, Moony, we’re in public," Sirius seethes.

“And to think we called you Snuffles,” Harry mutters.

"There's no way he's your son," Remus says stubbornly to James. "He smells like he's never consumed a single teaspoon of capsaicin in his life—”

“Didn’t you say once you don’t think you can smell back more than seven years?”

“—Shut up, Padfoot. And I know for a fact you burn your tongue off at least once a week at home."

"Ah." James can feel his smile wobble. Lily's fingers tighten around his and he remembers that she, while in on the existence and identity of Harry, is relatively in the dark as to the rest of their fates.

"You're right," Harry says quietly. "I don't even know what that is."

Fortunately, Remus doesn't need any more clues than the sad expressions around him to put the pieces together. "Oh," he breathes. He manages to convey an astounding amount of heartbreak in one lone syllable.

Then he frowns and proceeds to sniff Harry yet again.

Sirius reaches around and yanks Moony’s head back by the hair. He looks not a whit bashful about this; worse, Remus makes a little moan in response that James vividly wishes he was not familiar with. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Harry proceeds to turn even redder at that.

It occurs to James to wonder how frequently and fiercely a bloke’s got to blush before you have to start worrying about his circulatory health or something.

Aw, look at him, being a concerned parent and shite! Fatherhood sure comes at you fast.

"You do smell a bit more like Lily," Remus tells Harry, which elicits a smile that’s equally surprised as it is pleased. "But even if you're not a potions bloke yourself, I can usually tell if someone's been raised in a potioneering household; it's a really distinctive smell, and it lingers, so you should—" he finally stops himself. "God damn it," he sighs. "You too?"

Lily shrugs at him as she clasps tighter to James’ hand. “Apparently.”

Remus eyes Harry's neck speculatively, but Sirius' fingers are still threaded through his hair and he doesn't make a move to sniff him again. "I don't understand," he admits. "Who's the muggle who smells like Lily?"

That small but genuine smile turns brittle on Harry’s face, though James reckons he might be the only one to notice; Lily has just gasped and she sounds much more pleased than James is inclined to feel at the moment.

“My parents?” she guesses. “They survive the war?”

It’s a fair fact to celebrate; the Evanses wouldn’t be the first parents of muggleborns, especially muggleborns who have made themselves prominent in the Order, to be targeted. It’s been a couple years now, but he knows Lily still has nightmares about the Macdonald massacre.

“Ah,” says Harry, and then, too quickly, “I was raised by your family, yeah.”

James doesn’t say anything to ruin Lily’s giddy relief, but as he meets Sirius’ eyes across the table he knows he wasn’t the only one to clock that Harry’s smile is still fragile and over-wide.

“Did none of us survive the war to raise you in a wizarding household?” Remus asks hotly.

"Well, I mean, Sirius was my godfather, but of course he was in prison by then—"

"Wait, really?” Lily claps her hands. “Marlene owes me two galleons.”

Remus, meanwhile, is choking on a sip of mead. "Prison?! Was it the— because of Padfoot?”

“Actually, the opposite,” Harry says. “Padfoot’s how he escaped.”

James can’t bring himself look away from the dizzying twitches of Remus’ face as he tries to decide how he feels about that. He catches relief, probably that it wasn’t due to the underaged and unregistered animagery that Moony himself inspired. Worry, then an unwilling spark of curiosity; worry again; and a flash of the Prefect Lupin face that only ever used to come out when Sirius landed himself in trouble. Vain hope, slowly dying out, that it's all a joke.

The suspense and the creeping despair are almost palpable. It’s a relief when Sirius shoves himself to his feet and proclaims, "I think it's time for round two!"

"Make it strong," Remus says defeatedly.

"I'm offended that you had to ask."

**

Once they've all got fresh drinks in hand, Remus turns to Draco. "And who are you?" he asks, much more politely than he'd aimed the question at Harry.

"My distant cousin," Sirius says with a smirk.

Remus raises his eyebrows, tilts his head, and runs his eyes over Draco. As with Harry, they linger on his hair, which is still a shiny white-gold, even in the dim lighting of the pub.

Draco leans back apprehensively under the scrutiny. "Please don't sniff me.”

Sirius guffaws. James finds this rather rich of him considering how very personally he has taken all of Moony’s previous inclinations to smell Harry.

"A Black and a Malfoy?" Remus guesses. It's really not a hard one, what with the hair, which means nobody cheers this time, although Sirius and Draco both nod. "Narcissa’s?"

"My mother," Draco confirms.

Remus's eyebrows rise even higher on his forehead. "Wouldn't have pegged someone like you for mates with a Potter," he says dubiously. "Or vice versa."

The reaction to that is instant and vehement.

"Oh, no, you’ve got it wrong—"

"We are not mates—”

"He wishes we were mates—"

"I wouldn't be caught dead with a Potter—"

"That's not what you said on the train—"

"Forget I asked," Remus mutters, almost lost beneath the clamour of their protests.

“—what I get for magnanimously trying to save you from the likes of a Weasley—”

“—been to his house once, and I was literally dragged there against my will—”

“—only even here together because we got too vigorous trying to kill each other in the wrong setting—”

"Say," Remus attempts to cut in, with no success.

“Like, you don’t understand: tied up and at wandpoint—”

“I was honestly about to turn him in to the Dark Lord—”

“Say,” Remus tries again, and then has to repeat himself progressively loudly, three times, until Harry and Draco finally deign to pay attention to him. "Say, do you remember who won the 1982 quidditch world cup? We could make some good easy money with that kind of insider info."

Harry only shrugs and looks at Draco, who can't answer because his mouth is already occupied gaping like a fish. "You're a professor!" he finally manages to say, sounding dismayed. It's especially funny in his plummy accent.

“I’m a what?” Remus repeats dumbly.

The reminder sends Sirius into fresh paroxysms of joy. "Professor Lupin!" he yells with an undertone of what James would reluctantly have to identify as a purr. "Oh, I can see you now in the tweed, with the elbow-pads—"

"You’re supposed to be setting a good example! A law-abiding role model for—"

Sirius interrupts Draco with a loud scoff. "Moony here's a marauder and a werewolf and a valued member of an underground vigilante crime-fighting organisation,” he brags with equal pride allotted to each descriptor.

“Sirius!” Remus yelps.

“They already know; calm down." He turns back to Draco. "Moony doesn't care about the ministry's laws!"

Harry nods along sagely for a few moments, only to stop abruptly and arrange his face into a scowl. "You say that, and yet! He confiscated the Marauders’ Map from me! Me, the son of Prongs! Just because he thought Sirius was out to kill me!"

"OUT TO KILL YOU?" Remus yells.

There follows a notable pause in the merriment going on at the surrounding tables. Remus winces guiltily while Lily and Sirius blast sheepish and charming smiles, respectively, at the curious faces turned their way until the rest of the pub resume their normal activities.

Harry, once again flushed, tries to avoid Remus’ eyes, but the niffler’s out of the briefcase now. "Erm, remember how he was in prison after my parents died?" he says, which, given Harry's had even less to drink than the rest of them because he's been too busy flirting fighting with Draco, is unacceptably blunt of him.

Remus makes a little wheezing grunt-y sound in confirmation.

"I was framed," Sirius grumbles. "Didn't realise even you believed me guilty," he adds with a reproachful glare at his boyfriend.

“I didn’t!” Remus protests. “I mean, I don’t! I won’t?” He frowns. “I wouldn’t?”

Sirius, ignoring Remus’ temporal crisis, retorts: “Apparently, you did.”

“If it helps,” says Harry, “I don’t think you wanted him Kissed.”

The rest of the table stares bleakly at him for several moments after this statement. Draco has his entire face in his palm. Lily looks like she wants to cry and James is right there with her.

Remus rubs at his eyes. "I think it's time for a round of something stronger," he pleads.

"Didn't we already do that?" Lily sighs.

"Maybe if we drink some more, none of us will be able to remember."

**

Drink some more, they do. And then some more.

Honestly, Remus with his superhuman metabolism should have been the soberest of them, but that doesn’t keep him from getting increasingly disgruntled at Harry’s obvious affection for Sirius. By the fourth round, Remus reverts to his tried-and-true method for overcoming jealousy, which is to say, blatantly groping Sirius under the table. The fact that he has to reach over Harry in order to do so seems not to deter him in the slightest. The fact that Draco lapses into fits of scandal every time he notices this even seems to encourage him.

Remus only finally gets over his possessiveness when he’s distracted by the story of his own future. While Sirius takes unmitigated delight in exclaiming "Professor Lupin!" at every opportunity, Remus himself flat-out refuses to believe he could one day teach at Hogwarts; or at least, not until he learns about the Wolfsbane Potion. It’s Harry who brings it up, but Draco who has to explain the intricacies of it. And then Lily proceeds to interrogate Draco about potions things while Remus cries, and Harry hugs him, and then Sirius is the one tamping down on his jealousy.

Of course, whereas Remus works through his possessiveness by means of public displays of vigorous affection, Sirius likes to dig in and make it hurt worse for everyone. James tries not to psychoanalyse him too much, but the pattern is very much there, and frankly, it explains a lot.

Exhibit A: Sirius leans in close to Harry, which also brings him closer to Remus, and says, loudly enough for the entire table to hear: "So who was it, again, that our Moony here knocked up?"

“What!” Remus yelps, in what is beginning to resemble a pattern for him. “Nobody! What?”

“Oh no,” Harry says, and even though his voice is deep with inebriation, he is firm in this. “I am not answering that.”

“C’mon, Haz, don’t you think Moony here has a right to know?”

“Moony doesn’t want to know,” Harry replies darkly, in tandem with Remus.

Sirius huffs. “Then don’t you think I have a right to know?”

“You don’t want to know either,” Harry repeats.

After one last calculating once-over at his godson, Sirius gives up on him and leans over the table towards Draco. He rests his chin on one hand and bats his eyelashes. “Draco, dear. Oh cousin mine, compatriot of the House of Black.”

“Don’t fall for it,” Lily says.

Sirius ignores her. “You do know you are going to be living with me for the foreseeable future?”

Draco narrows his eyes at him. “Is your flat not Lupin’s as well? I see no benefit to my housing situation in taking your side over his.”

Undeterred, Sirius only sprawls further over the table and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Wouldn’t you like to have an ally here, Draco? Someone who will take your side over Harry’s? You know James and Lily won’t.”

“Oh, but you will?” Draco leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “He’s your godson.”

Sirius shrugs. “You’re my cousin. You’ve got a better shot with me than with Moony here, don’t you think?”

For a moment, Draco eyes Remus speculatively. James can tell he’s not quite sold but James also knows that for a Gryffindor, Sirius can hold his own shockingly well in these little Slytherin social negotiations.

“Go big,” Lily says. “You can do better than nebulous promises of allyship, Draco.”

Draco leans back in his chair, smirking. “Seems like I’ve got an ally already. What can you offer me that girl-Potter here won’t?”

James feels like he should be offended at the way Draco is talking about Lily, but instead he is unexpectedly dazzled to remember, all over again, why Lily— his fiancee! — can now be referred to as girl-Potter. By the time he comes back to his senses, the time for heroic defence of his betrothed against possible slights has come and gone.

“Don’t bother negotiating,” Harry is urging Sirius. “Malfoy’s a pushover without his daddy or his cronies around to back him up.”

“I want my own room,” Draco says. “No sharing with Potter.”

“Then I want details,” Sirius demands.

“You really don’t want details,” Harry interrupts. He is ignored by both sides.

Draco shrugs. “I don’t have that many, really. Opposite sides of the war, you know.” He turns slightly ashy-green at this, though James can only speculate as to why.

“You have a name,” Sirius pushes. Draco nods. “You know when they got together?”

“Sirius,” Remus says firmly. He is also ignored by both sides.

“You know, Draco,” Lily interjects again. “I reckon Remus actually has more to offer you than Sirius does.”

“Neither of you should offer him anything. He’s a tosser.”

“I’m a man of many talents and resources, Draco,” Sirius says. “I’ve a lot to offer, if you’ve a name to offer.”

“Draco,” Remus rumbles in a tone that’s just a few octaves deeper than normal but very much effective. “You don’t want me as your enemy either.”

And finally, Draco wavers. His mouth opens, closes. His eyes vacillate nervously between Remus and Sirius, and then to Harry. “How old would she be right now, anyway?” he asks.

Harry widens his eyes and shakes his head. It’s a set of nonverbal cues that are vastly insufficiently subtle to escape the notice of literally anyone at the table.

“Moony, you dog!” Sirius howls.

“That’s fresh coming from you,” Lily mutters.

“My own boyfriend, a cradle robber!”

“Hey, now. Who’s to say I’m not the one who got cradle robbed?”

“Look at our godson!” Sirius shoves a hand in Harry’s direction. “You must be pushing forty by the time he gets that big, and you’re trying to tell me you knocked up some witch who’s even older than you?” He’s really laying the distraught on a bit thick, in James’ opinion, but Draco appears suitably alarmed.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Remus sighs. “I can’t deal with this alone— where’s Wormtail when you need him, anyway? I can’t believe he’d miss out on Prongs’ engagement drinks.”

Sirius stops flailing around like a fainting Victorian maiden; Harry’s smile falls and his fists clench; Draco becomes extremely interested in a spot of grime on the tabletop.

“What now?” Remus asks despairingly.

Nobody answers.

“More drinks?” Harry suggests.

“More drinks,” James agrees.

**

Halfway through their sixth round, Draco slams his glass down and shouts, “Enough! What is with these infantile nicknames? Prongs? Moony?”

Harry snickers. “Says the extremely mature inventor of Potty and Scarhead.”

Draco flushes but wags an unsteady finger at him. “They were befitting my age at the time! Your parents are, what? Twenty? Why are grown adults calling each other Footpads?”

James and Remus crow “Footpads!” immediately, and only laugh harder at Sirius’ answering scowl.

“Your dad once called me Patronus Potter, and he was, like, fifty.”

“What, that time you cast one at that muggle?” Malfoy drawls. “He was… uh, hold on, I was fifteen… he was forty-three, you prick.”

“You what?” Lily asks. “How is that not a violation of the International Statute of Secrecy and the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Wizardry?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Harry cries. “It was only ‘cause of the dementors!”

“Hence, Patronus Potty.”

“That’s a stupid nickname,” says Sirius.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Harry sighs.

“Says the Boy Who Lived, The Chosen One, Gryffindor’s Golden Boy—”

“Don’t forget Undesirable Number One,” chirps Harry with a cheeriness that comes off as aggressively fake. “Oh, and the Heir of Slytherin! And–”

“Can we get back to the aforementioned expellable offences?”

“Gryffindor golden boy is sooo overdone,” James whines.

“You’re only mad we didn’t let anyone call you that,” Remus says with a mostly-fond roll of his eyes.

“Maybe the next generation is just shite at nicknames.”

“Says the inventor of Snivellus,” Harry retorts, rather scathingly.

“He deserved it,” James insists. “He’s a git.”

“He was eleven!”

“Well, so was I!”

“Hang on,” Remus interrupts. “Did you say you were fifteen when Harry became Patronus Potter?”

“Patronus Potty,” Draco corrects.

“Literally nobody called me Patronus Potter. His dad said it one whole time—”

“That you know of,” Draco sniffs.

“Oh, pardon me,” Harry says sarcastically. ”Do share the juvenile nicknames you were coming up with that summer at Death Eater central; I’m sure they were riveting paradog— paragrams—”

“Paragons,” Lily offers.

“Paragons! Of wit."

“You already had a Patronus at fifteen?” Remus asks. He sounds very reluctantly impressed.

“Yeah.”

“A fully corporeal Patronus?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, looking wistfully at James in such a way as to absolve all lingering traces of jealousy over Harry’s apparent attachment to Sirius. “A stag.”

James feels like his heart is about to burst. Lily’s hand slips back into his and her shoulder leans, warm and solid, against him.

“That’s impressive,” Remus says, in such a tone as to suggest that his lingering traces of jealousy over Harry’s apparent attachment to Sirius are not quite so absolved.

Fortunately, Harry’s too drunk to notice; he’s beaming at Remus. “You taught me when I was thirteen.”

"PROFESSOR LUPIN!" Sirius crows.

Just then, they are distracted by the serendipitous arrival of Frank and Alice. Distantly, James ponders the need for more wizarding pubs, for the sake of an anonymous night out. Still, “Longbottom!” he calls, waving Frank and Alice over. “Come save me from Sirius; he’s being a twat.”

“Longbottom?” Draco gapes. “But– but– he’s fit?”

James is really only about as gay as the next guy— although, when one spends so much of one’s time with Sirius and Remus, the odds are actually much higher than he means to intend— but anyway, James supposes Frank is attractive enough for a bloke: tall and muscled, with a shadowed but defined jawline and hair that behaves itself, et cetera. That said, he can’t quite understand the air of shock infused into Draco's exclamation.

“Of course he is,” Harry scoffs. “Have you seen Neville lately? Like, really looked at him?”

Draco produces no verbal response to this; he only continues to gape, though with a faraway look in his eye. Alas, Harry’s quiet amusement is interrupted by Frank’s confused echo of, “Neville? Like my great uncle? When have any of you seen him lately? Actually, who are you?”

All at once, the six of them remember the ruddy great secret they’re probably not supposed to be spreading around. James blinks repeatedly and looks to Harry to respond. Harry glances at Draco, who glares stubbornly back at Harry, who then turns to Sirius for help, which James knows is a mistake because Sirius has always relied too much on his charm and not enough on plausibility when concocting a lie. It’s usually Remus who would be spinning a cover-up, except only when he’s sober, and, alas, Remus is already several sheets to the wind.

James continues to blink. The silence drags on.

Maybe he should have risked inviting Wormy after all.

Lily jerks her hand up from her lap and right into the corner of the tabletop. “I’m eng— ARGH! FUCK! OW!” She shakes it tenderly, notices she has sufficiently diverted the entirety of their acquaintances’ attention, and announces, “I’m engaged!”

Alice shrieks and seizes the proffered, reddening hand; Frank reaches over to slap James heartily on the back; and the rest of their group does a commendable job of being inconspicuous enough that the excitement of Lily’s news continues to distract Frank from his original queries.

Once the Longbottom party has finally moved on to their own table, Harry and Draco fall into a competition over who can tell the funniest story from their school days. Harry makes a good effort with his account of how Padfoot and his Divination teacher inadvertently teamed up to convince Harry he was being haunted by the Grim. What really makes that story great, though, is his description and subsequent impersonation of the professor, which he achieves with the help of two empty mead bottles, Remus’ cardigan, and several disposable serviettes laid together across his shoulders in imitation of a shawl.

“Merlin’s pubes, Potter, you’re such a muggle,” Draco complains in the middle of this production. “You already wear ugly glasses; just engorgio them, you dolt.”

Harry glowers at Malfoy, reaches sloooowly into Sirius’ pocket to borrow his wand, and proceeds to transfigure his napkin-shawl into an atrocious but realistic-looking maroon paisley wrap with coppery beaded fringes. The bottle-bottom makeshift glasses, he leaves pointedly as they are.

Draco follows this up with a truly dramatic retelling, and flail-heavy reenactment, of Harry getting pursued and ultimately hit by a rogue bludger, only to lose all the bones in his right arm. It probably definitely would have been less funny and more concerning were James still sober, but that train has long since come and gone.

“Whoever did set that bludger on you, anyway?” Draco wonders once he’s gotten his guffaws back under control. “Flint took credit for it, but Flint’s a filthy rotten liar, so.”

For some reason, Harry finds this endlessly amusing, and can’t stop giggling long enough to formulate an answer.

Draco scowls without much heat. “Woooords, Potter,” he slurs. Then, “Oh but I hope it was Weasley.”

“Fred and George?” Harry asks, scrunching up his nose.

“No, you imbecile. The girl. You know, the one who got possessed or whatever?”

“You watch it, Malfoy, that was your father’s fault anyway!”

“Calm down, Potter, Mordred’s pants. I know she wouldn’t have done it on her own.”

Harry hiccups and his brow furrows. “She didn’t, though. It was Dobby.”

Draco jerks back with such fervent wide-eyed surprise that he would surely have tumbled to the floor had Lily not grabbed the back of his chair for him. “Dobby? My Dobby?”

“Not for much longer after that,” Harry says with glee, only to fall quiet and sad a few seconds later.

Draco does not seem to notice Harry’s morose turn. “But that means I could have taken credit for jinxing the bludger!” he whines.

“But you didn’t tell him to do anything; he was trying to help.”

“Help?” Remus comments doubtfully.

Harry shrugs. “He thought if he got me injured bad enough, I’d be sent back. So I wouldn’t have to—” he hiccups, then waves his hand around airily. “Y’know, Chamber of Secrets,” he finishes, as if that explains anything.

Amid the quiet bewilderment of the rest of the table, Draco leans back and crosses his arms petulantly. “He was still a Malfoy elf. I could’ve taken the credit.”

“But then you would’ve been the filthy rotten liar,” Harry says, which sends him laughing loudly enough to attract the attention of half the tavern.

Lily sighs as she reaches over to confiscate Harry’s drink. “I think it’s water from now on for you.”

Harry’s face melts into something so soppy even James can honestly claim he’s never looked at her that pathetically. “Yes, mum,” he says, and then bursts into tears.

Chapter 2: The Inquisition

James wakes with a roaring headache and a truly foul taste in his mouth reminiscent of the underside of Padfoot’s paw. He fumbles for his wand— a mere foot away on his nightstand, and yet, maddeningly unattainable for a painful, scrabbling minute— and finally succeeds in summoning a hangover potion. Only once his brain has started to function again does he get around to putting on his glasses, and so only then does he realise there’s a person in his bed.

A person in his bed who is not Lily. A fully-clothed person, at least, but still not Lily. And not Sirius, or Moony, or even Peter. (Why does the thought of Peter make him sad?) Unless one of them thought it would be funny to polyjuice into James, which he would absolutely not put it past them to do during a night of drunken hooliganism, if not for the fact that they would have had to restock sometime within the last hour—

Oh yeah.

Harry.

Peter.

Harry!!

James rubs his eyes, and then the rest of his face, and then takes his glasses back off and gives them a good rub on his nightshirt (okay, fine, it’s actually the same shirt he was wearing yesterday; sue him). But the same body with the same Potter hair and strange scar on the forehead is still in James’ bed when he puts his glasses back on, so he can only conclude that the events of last night were not all a vivid alcohol-induced dream.

He stumbles into the kitchen on force of habit alone, where Lily already has a pot of coffee set aside. She’s kept the light half-dim in their soft-yellow and dark-wood kitchen, and her hair gleams above the embroidered white apron she got from her mum, and she looks so lovely James could cry. She passes him a mug as he sinks into a chair at the table, whereupon James is so overcome by love and gratitude that he moans, “marry me.”

“I don’t reckon that was the production Sirius and Remus had in mind,” Lily says wryly.

James can’t quite make sense of that comment so he just sits there, sipping his coffee and listening to the soothing sounds of butter sizzling in the pan, until—

“Marry me!” James yells again, in realisation.

Lily snorts. “There he is.”

James leaps out of the chair and bounds over to the stove, rips the spatula out of Lily’s hand, and stares with an ever-widening smile at the ring already on her finger. “We really— I finally— last night?” he whispers in awe.

“Oh, Jam,” Lily sighs fondly. “Go finish your coffee and try again when you’re coherent.”

James beams at her. He steals a long, lingering snog, then acquiesces to sit back down until the caffeine has properly entered his brain.

The rational thought filters back in slowly, hindered as it is by the utterly improbable presence of James and Lily’s teenage son in the next room. Apparently Harry got so drunk last night that he forgot he was supposed to be sleeping at Sirius’ to avoid James and Lily’s engagement sex. Or James and Lily were so drunk they forgot they were supposed to be having engagement sex. Or Sirius got so drunk he decided it would be funny to convince Harry to sleep over anyway while James and Lily had engagement sex. Or maybe Draco managed to finagle his own room out of round two of negotiations with Sirius? James couldn't tell you which of those, if any, was the case, because the last couple hours of the night are nothing but a dark blur in his mind.

Eventually his quiet ruminations are interrupted by much thumping and swearing down the hall. Then Harry comes charging out into the kitchen, clothes rumpled, hair askew, eyes bleary but wide and widening still behind smudgy round spectacles.

“Oh my god,” Harry breathes. His head is bouncing like a bludger between Lily and James; his hands are winding themselves into his locks and tugging frantically; his chest is heaving at a pace much too quick for a bloke who’s only just woken up. ”Oh my god.”

“Erm,” says James. “Hi.”

“Yes, Harry, love,” Lily adds. “We’re real.”

“Oh my god,” Harry repeats, and then, in slightly higher pitch, “Oh, I’ve bolloxed it all up, haven’t I?” His face pales rapidly at that, and he makes a break for the far side of the kitchen, where he proceeds to spew in spectacular fashion all over their sink.

It takes several more minutes of Lily rubbing his back and James standing around awkwardly to get Harry to calm down enough to take a hangover potion and then a cup of tea and a seat at the table. While he doesn’t seem about to vomit anymore, it does nothing for the manic gleam in his eyes or the way his knee bounces a thousand times an hour. “Oh my god,” he continues to mutter at great frequency, interspersed with, “Oh, Merlin,” like a proper halfblood, as well as the occasional, “What have I done?”

By the time Harry starts muttering other things, like, “Hermione’s gonna kill me,” James figures it’s about time to step in. It’s either that, or risk adding a calming draught to the hangover potion already in Harry’s system, which Lily would definitely yell at him for.

“Better this Hermione than Voldemort, eh?” James suggests.

It’s meant to be supportive. Judging by the look Harry gives him in response, though, he’s not feeling much support.

After another beat, Harry jumps up and starts pacing through the living room. James tracks his dizzying ellipses until he’s distracted by a horrible misshapen monstrosity covered in the same paisley fabric as Lily’s favourite couch.

Damn. He really should have known better than to attempt drunken transfiguration last night, especially so soon after the Shag Rug Incident That Will Not Be Named. At least that explains what Harry was doing in his bed.

By the time he pulls his attention back to his son, Harry is alternately pulling at his hair and picking at his chapped lips, and muttering darkly.

“So close,” he laments at one point. “So fucking close, all we needed to find was the bloody diadem, and then the snake, and we could’ve done it,” and then a bit later James hears, “sodding Malfoy, fucking everything up, I’ve got a literal prophesied nemesis and yet somehow, he continues to be the bane of my entire blasted existence!”

The longer Harry paces, the more agitated he looks and the louder his frantic babbling rises in volume: “... And it’s all well and fine to talk shit, innit, when you’re really honestly sure you’re about to die, and what does it matter, like who really cares if we brewed illegal polyjuice potion in the girls’ loo when we were twelve when there’s a price on all our heads just for being who we are, like the rest of our schoolkid crimes don’t really matter, do they? Might as well die for any of it if I can get a rise out of Malfoy on my way out…”

James has his own theories about the nature of the rise Harry would like to get out of Malfoy, but he has enough sense to stay silent.

“... Going to do now? Twenty bloody years in the past, no idea how, no time-turner, no Ron or Hermione, no wand, no horcruxes destroyed, oh, I’ve already said so many things I shouldn’t have mentioned, no idea how to obliviate someone, oh, where’s Hermione when you need her?” And then, transitioning frighteningly quickly from despondent to optimistic, he continues, “but if Lockhart could do it, how hard could it be?” just to fall back down the reverse when he remembers, “Dumbledore, oh bollocks, I’d never get him, especially not when he’s got the wand…”

And it’s at this point that James decides maybe he needs to cut in. “Dumbledore!” he says cheerfully. “I reckon we should see what he has to say about this, eh?”

Harry flies around, hand leaping down to his hip for a wand that’s not there. He stares at James as if he’d forgotten where he was, and then a moment later his face falls from shock to grief and his eyes rove over James’ face with a hunger that makes him deeply uncomfortable, though he tries not to show it.

“Yeah,” Harry finally says, and James is relieved to hear his voice sounding halfway normal, almost soft. “I reckon we should see what Dumbledore says.”

So Lily sends off some Patronuses while James directs Harry to the shower down the hall. It’s not until Harry comes slouching out of the room, heralded by a billow of steam, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, that it occurs to James to offer his son some clean clothes.

All he means to do is estimate how much he will need to shrink his clothes. Instead, he turns a discerning eye to Harry’s body and gets darkly distracted by what he finds:

Harry is skinny. James knew this, intellectually, already, what with his eyesight more or less corrected by his glasses, not to mention Dorcas’ diagnosis of malnutrition and Harry’s subsequent comments to Draco about… something along the lines of starving in a tent for a year?

And maybe if it had just been the sight of Harry’s ribs jutting prominently against his skin, James could have handled it, but. He's also covered in scars.

The fact of the matter is, there are very few injuries that magic can’t cure, and very few scars that magic can’t heal. James knows exactly two wizards with more scars than Harry has: Remus, who is a werewolf, and Moody, who chases Dark Wizards for a living. From this angle alone, James can see not only the strangely-shaped cut on his forehead, but also a wide burn mark on his chest that has healed in uneven waves, a thin dark line that appears to run fully around the circumference of Harry’s neck, a jagged score along his left forearm, a wide pearly gash across the same shoulder, two little circles of light skin like puncture woulds inside one elbow and a strange pink ring that looks like he got gored through the opposite elbow, and, now that James is looking for scars, a flash of something silvery on the back of his right hand.

Worst of all, when James gasps and exclaims, “Harry, what happened?” Harry just blinks at him with a face of utter incomprehension. As if nobody has ever looked at his naked torso before and been upset at the evidence of a life hard-lived on a body so young.

His stomach churns as he remembers another snippet of argument from last night– you survive the number of murder attempts that I did– and James morosely wonders whether the anti-emetic properties of hangover potions can hold up to pure cold horror. He ought to ask Lily. Or maybe he ought to make sure Lily never learns about any of this.

“Erm,” James stutters out. “Never mind. Let’s get you some clothes, yeah?”

He does not flee. He just happens to be a fast walker, naturally, and he’s only trying to be considerate of his poor naked son who doesn’t need to be left to drip dry in the nude in the hallway for any longer than necessary, alright? It’s called hospitality.

He’s quick to dig up and alter some clothes for Harry, who slips into the bedroom to change while James trudges back into the kitchen, where Lily is finishing up breakfast.

“All good?” she asks.

James nods. He doesn’t think she buys it but he’s grateful that she doesn’t push.

He sits down and stares at the lovely dish of eggs and toast in front of him. He slathers the whole thing in sriracha and still he’s got no appetite. For some reason he’s fixating on the enormous circular indentation in Harry’s elbow and wondering what on earth could have caused it. There were several mentions of dragons last night, weren’t there?

A couple minutes of half-heartedly stabbing at eggs later, Harry re-enters the kitchen, fully-clothed. He looks a bit better now that he’s clean and dressed, as well as maybe a bit less crazed now that he’s had some time to think, or at least a nice relaxing steam.

“We’re meeting the others at Hogwarts in half an hour,” Lily informs him.

Harry nods and starts on the plate he’s served. It’s odd, watching him eat; he appears to enjoy everything, if the faces of bliss he makes are any indication, and yet, he barely eats half of it all before he pushes the rest away. James tries not to jump to conclusions, but alas, the conclusions are right there, within easy jumping reach.

Finally, they pack up and floo over to Hogsmeade, where Sirius, Remus, and Draco meet them in the 3Bs for the walk up to the castle. Draco looks… surprisingly un-grumpy for a Malfoy thrown out of his own time and landed with Sirius and a werewolf. He also looks surprisingly relieved to see Harry step out of the floo, but then again, he did wake up this morning thrown out of his own time and in a flat with Sirius and a werewolf. Maybe Harry is just comforting in his familiarity.

If he didn’t know any better, James would believe that Harry and Draco had never been to Hogwarts before, given all of the looking around and staring at things like wee firsties. Draco lets his head be turned by a vanishing cabinet on the second floor, while Harry stares wistfully at two different girls’ lavatories— or, well, at least one of those glances was wistful; the other look might have been better described as… considering. Either way, a tryst in a girl’s loo on one of the main corridors is quite a risky endeavour to have pulled off, so James decides to be impressed about it.

Alas, Draco, too, catches Harry eyeing Moaning Myrtle’s hideout, and needless to say, he is significantly less impressed about it.

“Gonna go say hi to your girlfriend, Potter?” he says.

Harry startles out of his reverie and scoffs. ”My girlfriend? I’m not the one who went crying to her for comfort because I had no real friends to turn to.”

“Well, I’m not the one who went all exhibitionist on her in the Prefects’ Bathroom!”

Sirius chokes on a laugh. Harry sputters. “She spied on me! I didn’t know she was there!”

“Sure. Isn’t that what they all say?”

“If anything, that was a violation, not a friendship! And,” he adds, looking mortified, “I can’t believe she told you that.”

“Ah,” says Draco, grinning like the niffler who got the ring. “So you admit you’re surprised that she spilled the beans about your little tryst?”

“It’s more than a little weird—”

“But you feel betrayed because you expected her to keep your secrets. Like a friend would.”

“Wait, no, that’s not—”

“Oh, did you threaten her to keep her mouth shut then?”

“What? No!” Harry insists, outraged. James could warn him he’s digging himself deeper into this hole, but he’s enjoying the show just a little bit too much to intervene.

“Bribe her into silence?”

“What would you even bribe a ghost with?”

Draco sighs. “You have no imagination, Potter.”

Harry stops in his tracks to turn and narrow his eyes at Draco. “What did you bribe her with, then?”

Draco laughs. “Wouldn’t you like to know. Anyway, if you didn’t work out some sort of agreement to keep her quiet, then you were just expecting her not to tell anyone about your phantasmic sexual exploits—”

“Eurgh, don’t call it that—”

“Which means you expected her to keep your secrets out of nothing but a spirit of friendship—”

Siris snorts. “Spirit.”

Remus shushes him. “Don’t disrupt them; it’s getting good.”

“You’ve seen nothing yet,” mutters James.

”We were not friends!” Harry insists.

“Oh?” says Draco drily. “Did she not help you prepare for, and even cheat in, the Triwizard Tournament?”

”Triwizard Tournament?” Lily and Remus exclaim in unison.

In a moment of deja vu, James watches Harry startle out of an argument with Draco to remember there are other people around him, and that he maybe doesn’t want said people around him learning more about his life.

“Erm, nevermind,” says Harry, and picks up the pace to Dumbledore’s office.

Lily lets him pull ahead and falls into step beside James; Remus is doing the same with Sirius up ahead.

“I get the feeling our son’s life was… eventful even before he tripped his way into the past,” she comments. “What did you learn last night?”

James sighs. “I’m hoping he’ll explain it all himself for Dumbledore today. Otherwise it’s just a mess of barmy accusations and insinuations in no identifiable order, and…”

“Alright, alright. Let’s wait and see what he tells Dumbledore.”

**

It’s a bit of a squeeze for the seven adults plus Fawkes’ two-metre wingspan— not to mention the prolific collection of knick-knacks and curios— in the space of one tower office, but at least it keeps the cushiness of Dumbledore’s conjured chairs to a minimum. Draco looks even more uncomfortable than he did at the bar last night, elbows tucked into himself and shoulders tense. Fortunately for him, nobody else seems to notice; the rest of their impromptu committee is focused on Harry and the headmaster and the intense staredown already brewing between them.

Dumbledore greets them all perfunctorily and then launches right in. “I trust you understand the ramifications of your arrival in the past,” he says. Harry looks down at his hands, but James sees a muscle clench in his jaw. “The knowledge you possess of the future could save many lives, my boy.”

Harry shakes his head. “I’m not sure I should be telling you anything, to be honest.”

James bites back a sigh and hears Sirius fail to do the same. It’s all frustratingly reminiscent of Harry’s tight-lipped approach to their attempts to interrogate him last night.

“Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time,” Harry insists.

“The way I hear it,” Sirius says, leaning forward to fix a challenging gaze on Harry. “That didn’t stop you from doing it to save my life and steal a hippogriff.”

Several responses cycle through Harry’s face in quick succession. A mouth opened as if to argue, a smug flick of the eyes towards Draco, and then a ghost of a scowl as he realises how Sirius must have overheard that fact. Ultimately, he sets his chin into something stubborn and yet also, somehow, uncertain.“You’ve probably already heard too much,” he says, and his voice borders on a waver.

“Why don’t I tell you what I’ve already heard,” Dumbledore offers, and his words and his tone are soft, yet James hears a challenge buried beneath them.

Harry eyes Lily and Remus before turning back to Dumbledore. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” he says.

Nevertheless: “You named the person who will turn traitor to the Order of the Phoenix. You recounted the causes of death of several members of the Order. You mentioned many instances in which you narrowly escaped death by dragon, dementor, and Dark Lord.”

“So you see,” answers Harry, betraying only a brief twitch around his eyes and hands that won’t stop fidgeting in his lap. “You already know too much. It’s—” he turns guiltily to look at James, then Lily, then Sirius. “It’s not like I want you to die, but… I don’t know what will happen to the future if I… I have friends who are waiting for me, and the war, it’s—” but he stops himself in time and shuts his mouth again.

“The war can be won,” Dumbledore finishes. “Don’t you think? With the experience you possess, the benefit of foreknowledge on our side?”

Harry’s eyes gleam, but he shakes his head again. “Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time,” he whispers.

“It’s clear you feel a great burden on your young shoulders,” Dumbledore murmurs, more gently than before. “And I can see your heart is in the right place. It sounds like you were quite dedicated to the Order of the Phoenix, Harry. In fact, you claimed to possess a shocking amount of pull over the Order’s decisions for a man as young as yourself. I can only hazard to guess that it has something to do with the fame the both of you mentioned repeatedly, and perhaps why Mr. Malfoy called you their precious saviour. The Boy Who Lived, The Chosen One. Wouldn’t you like to share that burden now, while nobody but the occupants of this room knows your name?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry denies. “I’m nobody special. Just Harry.”

James flicks his eyes to Draco, who has managed to keep quiet, although his face clearly betrays his scepticism.

“And yet, not everyone in your time held secret meetings with myself, did they? Obviously few others have learned about my first encounter with a young Tom Riddle, or else you would not have used it as the basis of your security question.”

“So we talked about Voldemort,” Harry says, and ignores Draco’s wince at the name. “That means nothing.”

“Ah, but how many others did Voldemort go to such great lengths to capture for the purpose of his resurrection? How many other infants have been personally marked for death by a Dark Lord— You flinch at that? Why else would he offer your mother a chance to step aside, if his real target was not you?”

Harry looks almost as ill as he did this morning, right before he vomited in the kitchen sink. Lily whispers, incredulously, “step aside?” but James can’t bring himself to react, transfixed as he is on their increasingly cornered-looking son.

After a long, harrowing moment, Harry says, “That’s still not the whole story.”

“Indeed. Does it have something to do with why Lucius Malfoy, at Voldemort’s behest, lured you and the Order to the Department of Mysteries?”

Harry scowls. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“You seemed to be under the impression that you would know when Voldemort had heard of your capture.”

“Conjecture,” Harry says placidly.

“You are a parselmouth and you were, at one point, believed to be the Heir of Slytherin.”

Harry lifts his chin and lets out a hiss that sends chills down James’ spine. Sirius actually yelps in response; Harry ignores him to glare harder at Dumbledore. “What of it?”

“Remarkable,” Dumbledore murmurs. “An unprecedented level of connection, it seems, between Voldemort and you: the Chosen One.”

“Speculation.”

“But not entirely incorrect, is it?”

Harry doesn’t answer.

Dumbledore leans forward over his folded hands. “You do not believe I know too much already?”

“Of course I do,” Harry admits with a hint of petulance. “But there are still things you don’t know, straws you’re only grasping at, and I won’t help you along if there’s any chance the future I came from can still be salvaged.”

A long, pensive silence follows. Dumbledore and Harry resume their stare-off. James wonders whether Dumbledore would dare attempt legilimency again, knowing now who Harry is and how many allies he has, already, in this room.

“My boy,” says Dumbledore. “Your past has been undeniably altered. It would serve you well to accept that and, as they say, move on.”

Harry swallows and looks down at his hands. Those are definitely tears in his eyes. “If Hermione was here…” he says to himself. It’s barely a whisper, and yet, James can still hear his voice crack.

“Don’t tell me you need Granger to make all your decisions for you, Potter,” Draco drawls. James fights back an urge to punch the boy for kicking Harry when he’s down, but, remarkably, Harry appears to recover some of his awareness at that.

“Don’t pretend you don’t think she’d be better equipped to make them than I am,” he retorts.

“Perhaps,” interjects Dumbledore, before they can start to build up steam, “it would put you at ease to understand the nature of the temporal displacement you’ve experienced.”

James’ shoulders relax somewhat at the offer as Harry’s eyes widen with hope. “You know what happened?” Harry asks eagerly. “I figured this would be unprecedented; Hermione never mentioned two decades—”

“I apologise,” Dumbledore interrupts. “I don’t have the answers you desire at this moment, but I do assure you I will seek to understand the means of your time travel to the best of my ability.”

For a long moment, Harry doesn’t respond; just looks helplessly at the headmaster. He even glances at Draco, as if seeking guidance, or at least a reaction at all; but Draco only shrugs uncomfortably.

“It was probably something in the Room of Hidden Things,” he offers, as if that explains literally anything. James peeks around to confirm nobody else knows what Harry’s talking about, and instead he catches a silent but highly suspicious exchange between Sirius and Remus.

“Might this room be a relatively new addition to the castle?” Dumbledore suggests.

“Definitely not,” Harry says, wryly, but with something dark in the furrow of his brows. He gets to his feet with a sigh, using both hands on the armrests of the chair to push himself up. “C’mon, then,” he grumbles. “Maybe you lot can figure out how to add it to the map.”

James beams at his fellow Marauders at that, full of pride that his son knows the castle better than he does. Until he catches Sirius glancing at Remus again, and James is certain this time that the look on his face is guilt, and equally certain that the look on Remus' face is be cool and don't fuck this up. James fixes them both with his most gimlet stare, which he spent seven years' worth of transfiguration lessons trying to perfect, and it's woefully ineffective.

Harry explains how the Room of Requirement works during the walk from Dumbledore’s office to the corridor containing the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy.

“Remarkable,” Dumbledore murmurs, standing expectantly across from the blank stretch of wall along which Harry is now pacing with determination. “You know, I think I may have stumbled upon this room once, years ago, late at night when I was—”

“Desperately in need of a chamberpot,” Harry finishes for him as he comes to a halt in front of a door that has just materialised out of the wall.

The headmaster appears momentarily stunned at the interruption. “I suppose I told you that?”

“Mentioned it in a weird game of… oh, I don’t know, geographical vagueness one-upsmanship or something with Igor Karkaroff,” Harry says disinterestedly. He opens the door and strides in.

Sirius flings his arms across James and Remus’ shoulders as they follow the kid inside. “You know, if any of this was done with any modicum of pre-planning, I would have considered it a truly excellent prank.”

“Never thought I’d live to see the day Dumbledore was flummoxed by chamber pots,” Remus agrees.

As James trails in, gape-mouthed and wide-eyed at the mountains of junk on all sides, he spares one mature thought for the fortune it is that he and his friends never discovered this room in their heyday, or else the castle truly might not have survived to the end of their seventh year. Vaguely he hears Harry and Draco up front, arguing again— something about a battle and a cabinet, and something about a crab? which may or may not be related— but he gets distracted almost immediately by what just might be an original model Comet racing broom from 1679.

Eventually, they come to a meandering stop along one section of the labyrinth of junk. Harry is looking decidedly shifty, but he nods along when Draco states that this is more or less the location of their altercation. After a strict lecture on safety from Dumbledore, they all split up to go mysterious artefact hunting.

It’s a chuffing good couple of hours they spend exploring the palatial treasure trove of junk. Sirius pockets at least two items that are almost definitely cursed, but that’s nobody else’s business, so James makes no comment on it.

"Crazy we never found this place, huh," he says.

Sirius sends another look at Remus, and only then does James realise that Moony seems remarkably and uncharacteristically disinterested in Harry's conversation a ways away with Dumbledore, which, consisting as it does of esoteric magical theory, Hogwarts founders trivia, and marauder-worthy discoveries, should be absolutely riveting to Remus, the great swot.

James drops the mutilated scorpion husk he's been examining to cross his arms and scowl at his two new ex-best mates. "You knew," he accuses.

"Knew what?" Remus says innocently, just as Sirius blurts out, "I can explain." He gets an exasperated eye roll for his admission, along with an expectant glare.

"I mean, there's not much to explain, really," Sirius continues. "Moony and I found it while looking for somewhere to be alone, and telling you and Wormy would rather ruin the point of a secret sex dungeon, so…"

“So you deliberately claimed this section of the castle to survey and consciously chose not to add it to the Map?” James finishes.

“Well, when you put it like that…”

"You know the price of placing your prick over the collective good of the sacred brotherhood," James says heatedly.

Sirius throws his hands up in a defeated gesture, which sets the pockets of his robes jingling. "How am I supposed to relinquish rights to the Map for a month when it's already been confiscated?" he huffs.

James is not at all appeased. "I'll just have to think of something else then."

"I can think of something else," Remus pipes up.

"Shut up, Moony. This punishment goes for you too."

Chapter 3: The Fallout

They finally call off the hunt once Harry and Draco have both agreed that the radius of their search has expanded well beyond the plausible limits of their altercation. And when James says well beyond the plausible limits, he means it, because he’s almost positive that the thing was prolonged for at least an hour longer than necessary by Harry and Draco’s mutual refusal to say anything that would put them in agreement on any subject at all.

The results of their search– well, the results of their official search, which does not include the intriguing items every Marauder, without fail, has been stuffing into their pockets all afternoon– consist of the following: a heavy brass pocketwatch, a slightly ticcy rotating model of the solar system, something only vaguely resembling an hourglass filled with shimmering black gas, and a melon-sized ball of melon-coloured quartz covered in runes that had Lily, Remus, and Draco all swotting out together for several minutes.

Dumbledore collects each of the items carefully and informs them that he will take them back to his office to study. “Are you sure I can’t persuade you to share some of your experiences in the meantime, Harry?” he asks.

Harry shoots him a look of such bitter scorn that James rather gets the impression that Harry is only barely refraining from telling the Supreme Mugwump, for the second time in twenty-four hours, to get fucked.

So they part ways outside the headmaster’s office and trudge back down seven flights of stairs. Lily and Remus lag behind, but not so far back that James can’t hear Lily’s murmur of, “you haven’t seemed surprised by most of these developments.”

“Oh, not you, too!” Remus groans. James twists around to make a rude hand gesture at him.

Lily meets his glare looking decidedly unimpressed. “I just mean, Sirius must have filled you in on whatever he and my useless fiance overheard last night.”

“Oh, yes. This morning. Well, most of it, I suppose; he must have forgotten about that Triwizard Tournament business. Prongs didn’t?”

Prongs was a bit preoccupied with their teenage son’s horribly scarred torso, thank you very much, but James is definitely not ready to broach that subject with Lily yet. Still, he’s not going to hang around to eavesdrop on the completely unmerited assassination of his character, so he steps down the next flight to catch up with Harry and Padfoot instead. Draco’s in the lead further down, although James has no idea where he could possibly have to be with any kind of urgency.

“Still feeling the hangover?” James murmurs to Harry, who is rubbing his head.

“If by hangover, you mean Dumbledore, then yeah,” Harry grouches.

“You were wicked plastered last night, mate,” Sirius comments.

Harry scowls. “I’m not used to hard liquor.”

“What,” says Sirius. “You’ve never had anything stronger than butterbeer?”

“Erm. I managed about half a goblet of mead at a Slug Club Christmas party?” And then, raising his voice to reach Draco at the bottom of the next landing, “Of course, that was before Slughorn’s bottles of mead started coming up poisoned!”

In a truly shocking turn of events, Draco lets himself be provoked. “It’s not my fault that great greedy walrus can’t keep his hands off of gifts he bought for other people!”

“Alright,” James soothes. “So we’ve all gotten drunk at a Slug Club Party, see?”

“Except for Malfoy; he had to gate-crash because his family was on the outs with the Ministry—”

“Potter’s little teacher’s chipmunk never would’ve let him get properly sloshed, anyway—”

“For your information, Malfoy, we were all three of us planning to get drunk at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, and instead, we had to flee for our lives when the Ministry fell!”

A very undignified squawk from Remus pulls Harry and Draco out of yet another argument. Apparently, he and Lily have been enticed from their grousefest by the promise of more information, as Lily suddenly pulls up beside James to ask, “Are they always like this?”

“Do they always start arguing about something innocuous and then it rapidly descends into attempted murder, actual murder, and tyranny?” James summarises. “Yes.”

“Nothing like running for your life half-shitfaced,” Sirius comments in a weak but admirable attempt at distraction. “Y’remember that one time in fifth year, Prongs, when we decided to moon the Giant Squid?”

“You mean that time you dared yourself to moon the Giant Squid?” James says. “After getting wasted on two glasses of firewhisky?”

“You know all too well it was Wormy who—” Sirius’ steps falter at the reminder.

James has only just averted one horrifying conversation and is very much not ready for the Wormtail one. “Hey Harry,” he blurts. “You ever had gillywater?”

After a quick glance behind himself at Sirius, Harry shakes his head.

“Excellent,” James says. “My dad,” and he closes his eyes for just a moment to breathe through the grief that wells up at the reminder. “My dad bought me my first glass of gillywater, and now I get to do the same for you.”

It’s supposed to be a sweet little bonding moment, but of course, Sirius is allergic to anything of the sort. “Never mind gillywater,” he scoffs. “Tell me you’ve had firewhisky?”

“Kind of? I mean, it was a toast to Mad-Eye the night he died; it’s not like we were—”

Sirius doesn’t bother to wait for Harry to defend himself. “Berry Ocky Rot?”

Harry shrugs. “Half a glass or so; I had to keep my wits in order to— erm, to, properly manipulate Slughorn…”

As Sirius decides whether or not he wants to find that impressive, Lily chimes in with a delighted laugh. “What were you trying to get out of him?”

“A memory about—” he jerks his head back, blinks twice, and scowls at Lily. “That’s confidential.”

James can see Harry clamming back up as he realises he’s overshared. Sirius does, too, as he hops over a vanishing stair, and then two more steps in quick succession, to walk next to Harry and throw an arm over his shoulder.

“C’mon, Haz,” he cajoles. “What about elf-made wine? I dunno what you had in the future, but these days Rosmerta makes some truly exquisite sangria, if you can sweet-talk her into selling to students.”

“My first goblet of wine was–” Harry baulks visibly. “Erm, it was. The night I became a godfather?” And though he doesn’t name any names or point any fingers, he is betrayed by the sudden hunch of his shoulders under Sirius’ arm.

James watches all traces of mirth fall from Padfoot’s face at the reminder of the mysterious wife and child Remus ended up with. His back stiffens and his arm falls heavily back to his side. James can sense the hateful comment coming in his bones, but he can’t for the life of him think of any more types of alcohol to bring up, and—

“What kind of a son of a Marauder are you, anyway, if you couldn’t even find the time to sneak out and get sloshed?”

A flash of genuine hurt ripples across Harry’s face and he laughs hollowly. “You really don’t change, do you?” he says. The bitterness is audible in his voice, tugging like an old wound that never quite healed over right.

“Harry—” James starts.

“No!” Harry yells. “I’ve never been enough like James for him, there’s no point in denying it.”

He whirls around and stomps down the stairs, two- and three- at a time, stumbling twice in the process. James makes to go after him; instead, Lily shoves him towards Padfoot and goes after him herself. After a brief moment of dithering, Draco follows her down without a word.

James stares longingly at his son’s rapidly retreating back for only a moment before he turns on Sirius. “Really, Padfoot?” he seethes. “The kid confessed to robbing Gringotts on dragon-back just yesterday, and you still go telling him he’s not fit for the Marauders?”

“What?!” Lily’s shock comes echoing up from one flight down.

“Nothing!” James calls back, more out of habit than anything.

“Oh, honestly,” she huffs, but continues after Harry.

James stares down Sirius, who has faltered on a third-floor landing, eyes lowered but fixed on the slow and reluctant steps Remus is taking from where he’d faltered a ways back at the mention of Harry’s godson.

“Who does he think he is, anyway?” Sirius mutters angrily. “Why does everything that comes out of his mouth have to be about how hard his life was?”

“I don’t think—”

“He didn’t die, did he?” Sirius continues in a progressively higher voice. “He wasn’t locked in Azkaban for twelve years, was he?”

“That’s really not—”

“What right does he have to go crying over spilled elf-wine, anyway, when I’m the one who—”

“That’s enough, Sirius.” Remus has finally deigned to join them, and he speaks calmly but firmly as he takes the final step down to the landing.

“And you,” Sirius easily turns his tirade on Moony, complete with a finger jutting into his chest. “How dare you pretend you have anything to add here, you— you—”

“You, Sirius, were locked away in Azkaban for twelve years, believed to be a traitor and a Death Eater.”

Padfoot’s face contorts something awful, and the hand not making a small dent in Remus’ breastbone is trembling slightly at his side. “How dare you,” he whispers.

“Twelve years in prison for the alleged murder of our best friend in an attempt to hand a literal baby over to a Dark Lord, and tell me, Sirius Black. Did I move on?”

If Remus means what James thinks he means, James feels like he ought to be offended. But Sirius has already stirred up enough drama for the both of them, so he wisely keeps his mouth shut.

The finger connecting Sirius to Remus’ body has started to tremble, too. “What?” he says, soft as a sigh.

“Seems an awful long time to be alone,” Remus murmurs. “And yet, it was only after you died, wasn’t it, that I remarried?”

Sirius scoffs. “Sounds like it didn’t take you very long to get over it.”

“Get over it? I’m quite sure I never did.”

“Tell that to the bird you went and knocked up, then!”

“You would really begrudge the poor witch whatever miserable shell was left of me after you died?”

Sirius’ chest heaves as Remus takes slow steps forward to box him against the wall. “You can’t leave me, Moony,” he insists.

“You left me,” Remus retorts, with unnatural serenity in his voice but embers burning in his eyes. “You went where I couldn’t follow.”

Sirius’ eyelids flicker as his shoulder blades hit the stone wall behind him. “Couldn’t you?”

Something rumbles, low and angry, from Remus’ chest. “Would you have had me live out the rest of my days as a hermit? A lone wolf, packless, alone with my grief and regret, to do nothing but ponder our second chances, equally squandered?”

“Yes!” Sirius insists. “As I would have done for you!”

Now only inches away from Sirius’ face, Remus presses closer still. “I’m yours,” he promises. “Until the day you die. Do you understand?”

“Apparently not, if you’re just going to—”

“Sirius Black,” Remus murmurs. His voice has gone deep and gravelly and he pushes forward until the finger still half-heartedly pointed at his chest crumples. “For as long as there is life in your body and breath in your lungs, there is nobody else I will ever—”

He never gets around to finishing, though, because they start snogging instead.

James sighs and gives them ten whole over-generous seconds to reconcile before his acid reflux starts acting up. “Oi! You know neither of you is allowed to propose within seven days of a fellow Marauder’s proposal, right?”

Sirius manages to unfurl two fingers from the tangled mess he’s already made of Moony’s robes in order to crook him a V behind Remus’ back. James rolls his eyes and leaves them to it.

**

He catches up to Harry, Lily, and Draco halfway down the grounds. Harry is pacing in angry circles along the lakeshore; a bit further on, Draco skips rocks with minimal enthusiasm. Lily stands with her back to the castle, and yet, somehow, her bewilderment is clear in her posture alone. Harry is going off again, and James watches him pace with a sense of preemptive dizziness.

“As if he has any leg to stand on!” Harry is ranting. “All summer it was don’t be rash, Harry, and keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble, Harry, and don’t mind the dementors, Harry, just stay in the house and let the big boys handle it, and then all of a sudden, it’s sneak out and meet me, Harry, and James would do it, Harry, never mind that not only all of Wizarding Britain was still after him, but the Death Eaters as well, and they knew he was Padfoot, to boot! And—”

“I wasn’t sure you weren’t too daft to pick up on that, Potter,” Draco drawls.

Harry startles at the interruption, but recovers quickly and whirls on his new target. “You have some nerve to stand there and throw childish insults at me as if your entire family didn’t conspire to kill off my godfather! You, strutting around dropping hints, while your mother plotted with Kreacher and your father lured us to his death—”

“And meanwhile, you and your stupid attention-seeking exploits got me and my family tortured three times over, but go on, pretend you’re the only one here with grievances to air!’

“Don't go blaming me for your parents’ bad taste in Dark Lords!”

Draco’s face turns an alarming shade of pink. “If I still had my wand, Potter, you’d pay for that,” he spits.

“Just goes to show how dumb you are, then,” Harry sneers. “Because I don’t need one.” And it is only by pure luck that he has abandoned his pacing close enough to his spectators for James to grab him mid-leap.

Unfortunately, the luck ends there, as Harry does not arrest his momentum in time to keep his fist from swinging fully around and catching James in the side of his head.

“Ow,” James complains. A second later, he feels most of the vibrating tension leak out of the body in his arms, which he relinquishes to grab tenderly at his throbbing jaw.

“Ah, shit,” says Harry. “Sorry dad– I mean, erm, James. I mean—”

James grunts and waves away his stuttering.

“Honestly,” Draco sniffs, smoothing down his robes. “And you say I’m dramatic.”

And just like that, Harry launches himself at Draco again, and this time, James is too busy nursing his wounds to catch him.

They go skidding back onto overlong pond weeds with a damp thud, limbs and accusations flying, exchanging curses of both the profane and spellcasting variety. It probably is a good thing that neither of them have wands. As it is, though, their fists and knees appear to be doing quite a bit of damage anyway.

”Petrificus totalus!” Lily casts, just when it’s getting good out of hand.

The brawling teens snap taut like planks, Harry teetering mostly on top of Draco, and James amuses himself with the image of a child (himself) pushing their faces together like toy dolls. Meanwhile, Lily scolds them for their behaviour like the feisty little Head Girl James fell in love with.

By the time Lily lets them free, Harry and Draco look suitably ashamed of themselves. They stand up, brushing off clothes and rubbing gingerly at faces. That is to say, Harry is brushing off his clothes, which are rather dishevelled and covered in muck, while Draco is rubbing gingerly at his face, which sports a split lip and visible bruising of the cheekbone. It seems that Harry was right yesterday when he said purebloods are shite at muggle brawling.

“Now,” Lily finishes. “I understand you’re in a very stressful situation and that your emotions are naturally running high, so you two are going to split up and cool off. You’ll go home with Sirius and Remus, Draco; and—”

“Probably not,” James interjects with a sigh. Lily turns towards him with a spark of that fiery chastisement still lingering around her eyebrows and it sends an entirely unintended kind of thrill down James’ spine. “I had to leave them to their own devices in the stairwell, if you know what I mean,” he explains. “They won’t be up for air again for several hours. Possibly days.”

Lily sighs with the exasperation of a true Marauder-by-pre-marriage. “Well, we can’t take them both back to the flat,” she says. “It’s only got the one bedroom, and we’re down a sofa besides.”

James winces at the reminder of his horrifying drunken transfiguration misdeed. He could certainly transfigure the coffee table into an acceptable cot, but he and Lily would know his shame, and maybe Harry as well, depending on how observant he managed to be during his minor and very understandable mental breakdown this morning. Not to mention the flat, consisting of one bedroom and a combined kitchen- living space, is a bit of a squeeze for two angry teenagers who hate each other.

Nobody goes loitering around public places in times of war, though, and so if they can’t go back to the flat, they are left with few other options.

He bites back a sigh and says, “I guess we’ll hang out at Potter Cottage, then.”

“Are you sure?” Lily checks. She knows how many newly-painful memories the house holds for him; he hasn’t been back there since the wake.

He’s not sure, no; but there’s nowhere else to go. “Harry deserves to… to see it,” he decides. His voice is a little rough, but nobody calls him on it. “You haven’t seen it, have you?”

Harry blinks. “Potter cottage? I assume it’s a house.”

“The ancestral home of the Potters,” James confirms. “Built by Jebediah Potter in 1041, abandoned in 1456 and thought lost for two centuries until it was rediscovered by Azuleah Potter in 1683…”

He remembers his own father telling James the same history, and it hurts, but it’s a good hurt. The details of the cottage’s legacy have been preserved in detailed records in the library and the magic of the portraits that line each hallway. James had been rather ambivalent about it as a child, but he has to fight back tears now at the thought of each generation leaving their mark and their own storytellers in the home.

They reach the Hogwarts gates and James falls quiet as they split into pairs to apparate. It only feels right that James be the one to bring Harry onto the grounds of their family home, but it also feels wrong that Harry should have to be shown around at all. He should have grown up there, and James doesn’t know whether it was his future self’s fault or the course of the war that kept Harry so estranged from his roots.

He dares not speak any of this aloud, though, and Harry flattens his bangs nervously the more that James frowns at him.

“Right.” He shakes off his rumination and grabs his son by the arm. “Ready?”

Harry nods. James turns on his heel.

They coalesce a ways down the gentle slope of the lawns. “Welcome to Potter Cottage,” he announces as grandly as he can.

Harry is silent for several moments, staring at the manor before and slightly above them, then the gardens, then the regulation-size quidditch pitch, and then at James. “You call this place a cottage?”

James shrugs. “It started off as a cottage, at any rate, to hear great-whatever-grandpa Jebediah tell it.”

“Oh, well if it started out as a cottage, why bother calling it as it is? A bloody mansion,” Harry grumbles.

“We wizards do like our word play, I suppose,” he says amiably.

Harry continues to gape like a hungry dementor as they make their way up the hill. Lily and Draco don’t appear, so James can only assume they’ve apparated directly into the foyer, like normal people. James would not be the last to admit that he has a bit of a flair for the dramatic, but he reckons it’s only natural that he’d want to show Harry the full view of his home, and, of course, the quidditch pitch.

Sure enough, he can hear voices coming from the parlour as soon as he opens the door. James doesn’t have time to distinguish any more than that, though, before three house elves pop into the foyer in front of him and start squealing.

“Master James!”

“Mistress Lily says Master James is bringing a guest?”

“Master Jimmy!”

“The young master returns!”

“The guest is being a Potter too!”

“Master James!”

James can’t decide whether he wants to laugh or cry. Harry looks about the same. It shouldn’t be possible to feel crowded in by three creatures who barely reach to his knee, but somehow, the Potter elves are exuding enough exuberance to produce a decent impression of agoraphobia.

“Hi, yes, thank you,” he manages to say in a semblance of a normal voice. “Right, so as Lily mentioned, I guess, I’ve brought— well, he’s not exactly a guest. He’s, well, he’s my son.”

There follows a moment of perfect bamboozled silence as six bulbous eyes blink with incomprehension. Then they begin sizing Harry up, and then a second later there is an outbreak of exclamations even more excitable and unintelligible than the last.

“This is Harry,” James says loudly over their babble. It works to shut them up, so he continues. “Harry, these are the Potter elves. Soppy, Groppy, and Hermy.” Each of them bows, ears wiggling, as their name is given.

”Groppy?” Harry echoes. It comes out sounding a little funny, more like graw-py, not to mention slightly hysterical. Harry lets out a high-pitched giggle, and repeats, “Groppy?”

“Groppy is at your service, Master Harry!” proclaims the elf in question. She’s the youngest of the three by a fair margin, and therefore doubly eager to prove herself.

”Groppy!” Harry repeats. “And she’s—” he has to pause to draw in a breath around another mouthful of guffaws. “She’s titchy!”

“Don’t take it personally, Grop,” James hurries to interject, which only serves to tip Harry over into full-blown laughter and set Groppy’s ears to trembling. “He’s— well, Harry’s been through a lot, that’s all, but he really didn’t mean it—”

“And Hermy!” Harry shouts, now doubled over with laughter. “Groppy and Hermy! Oh, if only Ron were here—” and just like that, he’s sobered right back up.

Three elves and a James look expectantly at Harry as he returns to cognizance.

“Erm,” he says. “Right. Sorry about that, Graw—” he bites back a snigger with some apparent force— “Groppy. That was very rude. I didn’t mean it.”

Groppy squeaks her acceptance, but she still looks on the verge of offence, and Harry still looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown for reasons that remain a mystery, so James decides it’s time to move along.

“Soppy,” he says, addressing the only one of the elves who hasn’t been singled out by Harry for hilarity. “I think he’s just hungry, really. We’re overdue for lunch. Can you bring up something light?”

“Soppy is bringing tea and sandwiches to the parlour room.”

“Thank you.”

A few minutes later, they’ve all been ushered into the parlour and plied with a quantity of food that suggests a serious misunderstanding of ‘something light.’ Harry’s clothes have also been magically removed of lake-side muck, though James doubts Harry even noticed. James is seated on the faded red wingback where his dad always used to sit, and it’s positioned at an angle from the fireplace, where James knows his parents’ portrait has been hung, but he can’t bear to look. He figures one Potter’s mental break is enough for any given day.

After stuffing his face with half of an egg and cress sandwich, Harry finally comes up for air. He looks around as he sips his tea. “So this is where you grew up?”

James grunts affirmatively around a mouthful of strawberry.

“Why don’t you live here anymore?”

There are a couple answers for that, most of which have to do with James’ lingering grief and the malaise of rattling around your parents’ enormous empty house by yourself. Instead, he says, “Lil thinks house elves are creepy.”

”James!”

“What? It’s true.”

“You can’t just tell our son that!”

“Well, if he’s our son then he would’ve grown up knowing it anyway, innit?”

He didn’t mean it like that, but it’s just a reminder of why Harry didn’t, in fact, grow up knowing his mum was creeped out by house elves. James looks at the pained grimace on his son’s face and knows that it’s James’ turn to make amends.

He braces himself with a heavy sigh. “Would you like to meet your grandparents?”

Harry’s head jerks up. “I have—”

“I mean, of course you know Lily’s, but I figure you never met mine, if you've never been to the cottage before?”

Harry snaps his mouth shut and blinks at James. “Your parents live here?” he guesses.

James sighs, rubs his sweaty plans on his trousers, and stands up. He ushers Harry over to the hearth, where his painted parents await them with knowing smiles on their faces. His father’s hair is streaked with grey but just as unruly as James'— and Harry's. His mother’s skin is bronze and wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“Da,” is all James manages to say before his voice cracks.

“Oh,” breathes Harry, and there might be even more heartbreak in his voice than in James'. “They're— they died already?”

“About a month ago,” James says, wiping his cheeks.

“They would have loved to meet you,” says the portrait of his father. His voice sounds just like James remembers. The tears stream harder down his face.

Harry sniffles as well. “It's not like— I don't want to change anything, anyway, so I wouldn't even—”

“I know.”

A scoff announces Draco’s presence behind them. “I didn't realise the ugly glasses were a genetic trait.”

James is forced to push down a sudden and fervid urge to punch Draco for that, but he restrains himself; and a moment later, Harry wipes his eyes and introduces himself to the portrait of his grandparents with markedly more coherency. It’s still painful, mind you, between the reminders of James’ departed parents and the way Harry stumbles over his life story as if there are pitfalls at every step. But mum and dad are as soft and gracious as always, and Harry looks so pitifully grateful to speak to them that James can’t bring himself to regret it.

When they return to their seats, this time with Harry’s chair angled to look back and engage with the portrait at will, Harry looks calmer than he has, well, ever, so far, in this timeline at least.

It’s a peace that doesn’t last.

When Soppy pops back in with more scones, Harry takes one look at her, blinks, and says, “what happened to the elves here when you died?”

Soppy does not take this revelation well at all, and her bursting into tears only fuels Harry’s concern for her— James has never in his life seen a grown human attempt to embrace a house-elf, and it only makes Soppy bawl harder— and even after Soppy pops away to recover her dignity in peace, Harry paces and mutters and frets about the lonely solitude of the Potter Cottage elves.

James finally manages to distract him with a tour of the cottage, under the feeble sequitur that “they won’t get bored so easily, there’s so much to do here,” and fortunately, Harry accepts.

They while away a good two hours trooping through the house and its grounds, Draco trailing along behind them with thinly-disguised interest. Lily stays behind in the library, where she promises to write to Remus to let him know where Draco is. James knows that Lily has been quietly but fiercely missing the library ever since James’ parents died; judging by the glint in her eyes, she’s planning a very fruitful reunion with its contents.

**

They all end up back in the kitchen by evening, having worked up quite an appetite over the course of the tour. James is reluctant to call on any of the elves after Harry’s mysterious hysteria over Groppy and Hermy and less-mysterious breakdown with Soppy. Luckily, he hasn’t forgotten any of the dishes mum taught him to make. He surveys the staples stocked in the main kitchen and lights on the jar of lentils. Remus did say that Harry had been dreadfully deprived of properly-spiced foods, didn’t he? Well, no time like the present.

The smell of tadka makes him ache for his mum something fierce, but it’s not a bad ache, this time. There’s something beautiful about passing down family recipes, about making the same food for his son that his mother had made for him, learned in her own mother’s kitchen in pre-partition Kashmir. There's comfort in the ebb and flow of Harry and Lily's conversation on the other side of the room, even the inevitable bickering when Draco joins in. For the first time since his parents died, this house almost feels like home again.

It’s not necessarily a happy thing that Harry has never had daal before, but from another perspective, James feels inordinately pleased that this, at least, is one fatherhood first that he hasn’t missed sometime in the preceding seventeen years of Harry’s life.

(Well, probably. James will be the first to admit that he knows little to nothing about raising an actual baby, and he’s not ready to give in and ask Lily how old a baby has to be before they can safely eat lentils. Harry seems content to consider it his first daal, and so James is too.)

In fact, Harry seems quite enthusiastic about eating it, to the point where James is forced to bring up the fact that maybe he should be pacing himself, if his body isn’t quite used to so much consumption?

“Oh, no, don’t worry, I know how—” his head jerks up to eye Lily across the table. “I, erm, know how much I really ate this last year, and I was just exaggerating, really, you know, anything to piss off Malfoy.”

“What were you exaggerating about?” Lily asks.

James and Harry wince in unison. James because he was really hoping to forget to recount that particular detail to her, and Harry because it obviously wasn’t an exaggeration, and James knows that because he still can’t get the sight of Harry’s ribs out of his head.

“Nothing,” they say together.

“Salazar’s sake,” Draco mutters. When James bothers to spare him a glance, he returns it, looking decidedly unimpressed.

Lily frowns. “It sounded like you were saying—”

James kicks her shin under the table. “Leave it,” he murmurs.

She does, but she gives him a look that clearly says he will be talking about this later.

Alas, later comes sooner than James would have preferred, seeing as Harry all but nods off right there at the table. All things considered, it’s been a long and emotionally stressful day for him, and the soporific properties of a full stomach were undoubtedly the last straw. James gently guides him from the table and to the best guest room, where Harry collapses, fully-clothed, onto the bed. James feels dizzily paternal as he tucks his son in.

He turns out the lights and closes Harry’s door quietly behind him, only to look up into a faceful of stubborn Lily.

“Study,” she demands. “Now.”

James knows his fiancee (his fiancee! They’re engaged!) and he knows when he’s met a lost cause, so he follows her into the office without complaint. Mercifully, it’s a guest study, not his father’s, which James discovered during the tour earlier still smells strongly of Fleamont Potter.

Lily sprawls herself across the leather desk chair, leaving James to fold himself into the much less luxurious cloth-covered chair across the way. She stares expectantly at him. James knows what she wants, and he knows he’s had all day to get his thoughts in order. And yet, he’s had so much on his mind that he’s spared almost nothing for getting his thoughts in order, and now, faced with his damningly uninformed fiancee, James finds himself foundering.

“Peter betrayed us,” is what comes out of his mouth. And damn, he’s been so stoic all day in this house haunted with the fresh ghosts of his parents, but now that he remembers all that Peter’s done— or will do, or whatever— he fears he might finally break.

No, nope. He doesn’t need to fixate on this. Not when there are plenty of other strange revelations to think about instead. “And Snape killed Dumbledore. Oh, but you were there for that. Erm, Barty Crouch broke his son out of Azkaban! And then he was Kissed! Junior, not Senior. But not before he turned Draco into a ferret pretending to be Moody!”

“You’re not making any sense,” Lily says flatly.

“I know!” James despairs. “None of it made any sense.”

Lily sighs, then pulls out a roll of parchment and a quill from the desk drawer. “Why don’t you start from the beginning.”

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Still Preoccupied... With 1979