Chapter Text
“If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” -Tim O’Brien, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
“I live in fear of the Western descent into fascism. But I digress. The club is bumping, the ladies look good, the alcohol is flowing. There is so much pain in this world, but not in this room.” - Dimitri Finds Out
SUMMER, 1975.
Lily started at the three sharp raps against her window and her left hand shook, dragging eyeliner beneath her eye. Fucking hell. Nine months out of the year she used magic to apply makeup and she’d forgotten how steady a hand her black eye pencil required. Swearing again, she held the pencil in one hand as she deftly undid the lock on her ground-floor window with her other, catching Nic and Jet mid-knock.
“New look, eh?” Jet laughed as Nic tried — and failed — not to. Lily shushed him.
“What did I tell ya?” she said in hushed tones. For Christ’s sake, she’d told them five times that afternoon alone that Pet would be in the next room and they both knew the walls of the Evans' family flat were like cardboard.
Jasper Thumberton and Nicola Chang-Weiss, who smelled of hairspray and fags, oooo-ed at normal volume. Rolling her eyes, Lily shut the window as quietly as she could, fixing them with the deadliest stare she could manage through the glass. As if it mattered. When Jet and Nic were together there was no stopping them, especially when they’d already had a few. Lily crossed the room, taking the tumbler off her desk she kept there for this express purpose, and pressed the mouth of the glass to the thin wall she shared with her sister Petunia. It was strangely quiet on the other side. Fuck. Pet’d been on the phone with Vernon, her insufferable new boyfriend, just a few minutes before.
Lily had better get a move on. It was just gone 11 p.m. and, anticipating a quick getaway, she was already dressed for the gig. She didn’t bother with checking the mirror fixed to her closet door because Jet surely had one on him, the vain prick, and she patted her pockets to make sure she had cash. Shoving her eyeliner into her other pocket – her jeans were black so it hardly mattered if the pencil bled – Lily opened the window again, gingerly, as if it were a shaken soda can.
Behind her, the bedroom door clicked.
“Knew it,” said Petunia, who stood in her doorway dressed in a pink dressing gown, head adorned in rollers. She looked like a relic from another time. Lily hoisted herself easily onto the windowsill, swinging one leg into the garden so she was straddling it. Her friends, thankfully, had had the good sense to duck. For all the big game they talked — Jet had been to borstal, even — they were all piss and wind when it came to Petunia. Jet and Nic were terrified of Lily’s prim, perpetually pink elder sister. She’d babysat all three of them when they were kids, and though Petunia was barely two years older than Lily, she’d wielded her seniority like a knife. “Where’re you off to with your face looking like that?”
Though physical insults were part of Pet’s general repertoire, for once, Lily couldn’t blame her.
“It’s the fashion, haven’t you read the latest Jackie? ” she said breezily, flashing a toothy smile. Petunia was, predictably, unmoved. Really, Pet was stone-cold; her typing course was wasted on her. She might be a barrister for the county instead, in another life. Lily dropped the act, changing tack for her appeal. “Pet, c’mon. It’s first week of summer. Do you really care where your petulant, badly dressed little sister is off to?” She parroted a couple of Pet’s choice insults back at her, hoping — but not caring, particularly — that it might curry some strange favor with her sister.
Petunia crossed her arms. “You look like your eye was blacked. God forbid someone sees you like that, they’ll think you’re being abused.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Pet, please, I’ve just got off school and I’m dying for a night out. I’ll be back before morning. Nobody needs to know I’ve gone. I’ll even cover for you with our dear Vernon.” But this was quite the wrong thing to say. Petunia bristled.
“Our Vernon? Please.” She scoffed. Turning her head, she yelled down the hallway, “MUMMY!”
“SHHHHH!” said Lily, eyes wide. “C’mon, Petunia, you can really give it to me later, I swear I’m good for it. I’ll owe you one. Anything.”
There was a rustling down the hall, as their mother, presumably, made her way out of the bedroom.
“Pet, please. ” Lily was dangerously close to begging. Pet stood in her doorway, tapping her foot, as Lily met her eyes. Something unsaid passed between the two sisters. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon….
“Pet, what’s the matter?” their mother called down the hallway. Pet sighed audibly.
“Nevermind, Mummy, it was just a pest,” she said, looking pointedly at Lily. “I’ve got it. Go back to bed.”
Lily exhaled, hardly believing her luck. The sisters stayed silent for a beat, listening as their mother padded back down the hallway. Far away, a door clicked shut. Yes.
“You don’t owe me one ,” said Pet, “you owe me for a week. Whatever I say goes until next Saturday. And I mean whatever. Got it?”
“Got it,” Lily breathed, meaning it. “You’re the best Pet.” Petunia didn’t give any indication she’d heard Lily, merely huffing and turning rather dramatically on her slipper-clad heel. Without giving a second thought as to what she’d agreed to — that was a problem for tomorrow — Lily swung her other leg over the windowsill, narrowly avoiding Jet’s head in the process.
“I thought it was the UK’s position not to negotiate with terrorists?” said Nic lightly, attempting to dust grass stains off her knees as Lily inched her window down, lodging a small rock between the sill and the frame so she could pry it open later. Now standing, Jet lit three fags with his Zippo at the same time, passing one to Lily and one to Nic. Lily dragged gratefully, the cool night air a relief from that afternoon’s mugginess.
Summer. Finally.
It always took Lily a couple of days to readjust to Muggle life after leaving Hogwarts; she and Mary called it magical hangover. Going off magic cold-turkey was getting tougher by the year. She missed the faint magical hum in the air at every turn; she couldn’t really hear it, of course, it was more like something she felt in her bones and only really noticed when it was ripped away. At home, exhausted after exams, she’d slept for days, not even caring that she was facing a summer without Dorcas, Mary, and Sam, who were all travelling with their families, or even a subscription to The Daily Prophet.
No, for the first time since Lily had arrived at Hogwarts, she felt relieved to be home. After her first, second, and third years, her chest had ached with want as July and August crawled by. Lily wasn’t one to complain, and she’d never say it aloud, but she was tired. There had always been anti-Muggle-born sentiments at Hogwarts and Lord knows Lily had borne the brunt of it for years…but things had reached a fever pitch during fourth year. She was no stranger to casual cruelty, but blood supremacist ideology was becoming alarmingly common as Voldemort gained power. She never acknowledged it, of course — she took it on the chin, with her head held high, handling it the same way her father had told her the first time someone at grammar school called her a bad name. They’ve shown you who they are, Da would say. Now show ‘em back.
At Hogwarts, she never put a toe out of line, not one detention in four years. She was top of her class, and not for lack of trying. She’d lay naked on the Quidditch pitch before she admitted that any of those pure-blood brats had a leg-up on her, but they’d been learning magical history since they could walk, and she knew the ones from the wealthier families — Potter, Black, even Sam, her own friend — had had at least ten years of tutoring in magical theory before the Sorting Hat so much as touched their heads. So she spent long nights in the library, studying through gritted teeth, charming her quills so they didn’t snap under the intensity of her grip, reading ahead in every subject so she’d never suffer the embarrassment of incompetence. Sometimes, her own intelligence was exhilarating, but fuck. The pressure to be not just good, not just great, but the best, instead of the Muggle-born trash with no breeding and no manners and no poise and certainly no power, was suffocating her.
At first Hogwarts had felt like an escape. But lately, she’d felt boxed in from every direction.
Just then, though, Lily wasn’t thinking of the injustices of her breeding. She was determinedly enjoying the commingling of the nicotine and residual adrenaline leftover from the unexpected run-in with Pet. It felt, almost, like magic. The night was clear and for the moment, she was so free, so alive.
“Please, she’s hardly a terrorist,” said Lily casually, putting on her poshest accent — a rather cruel imitation of Black and Potter, not that Nic or Jet had met them. “Merely a minor threat to national security.”
Nic and Jet dissolved into laughter and Lily slung her arms around her best friends, the neck of her black The Doors t-shirt slipping down her left shoulder as they walked.
“You really did bung up your makeup though,” said Nic fairly, assessing the damage. “I’ll fix it for you on the bus.”
It was Lily who jammed the coins into the slot on the bus this time; they rotated paying for nights out based on who was hard-up at the time. And at the moment, Lily was flush.
“I dunno how you manage to have any brass by July,” Jet was saying in his thick Brummie accent. He knew that she, unlike him, only worked in the summers. Lily’d told her friends that her scholarship to her fancy Scottish private school covered everything, which was true enough, wasn’t it? Hogwarts was tuition-free and Lily really was on scholarship for books and school supplies. And aside from weekends in Hogsmeade, she hardly had time to spend anything at all, and the cash she’d saved last summer had lasted her all of fourth year with a bit left over. “What with the price of everything these days…”
Lily and Nic slid into two seats at the back of the bus and Nic propped the soles of her worn-out Doc knockoffs against the seat in front of her. Even though the bus was relatively empty, Jet hung over them, grabbing the stabilizer bar. Privately, Lily wondered if this was down to the fact that he’d grown by half a head since last summer and now towered over the girls. He was now as tall as he was broad, dark-skinned and bleached hair buzzed to his skull and several new piercings in his ears. Nic’s work, Lily guessed, having had her own ears pierced by her in Nic’s bathroom at thirteen with a pin sterilised by a lighter. (Lily, in turn, had done the honors to all the Gryffindor girls in third year, and was deeply proud of herself until Marlene McKinnon, two years ahead of her, remarked that there was a spell for that.)
Nic, who was nodding along, reached into the pocket of her worn black denim jacket for a swig of vodka so cheap it smelled of petrol. Lily necked a mouthful anyway, grateful for any buzz. Jet’s dad worked at the same manufacturing plant as Lily’s — they produced drills and auto parts, which were then sold to a variety of companies, including, rather annoyingly, Grunnings, the company where Pet’s prick boyfriend Vernon was an “account manager”, whatever that was supposed to mean. Anyway, Jet’s dad was sacked six months ago. Nic had told her so in a letter, which Lily’s mum dutifully forwarded to Hogwarts. Lily knew Jet wouldn’t prefer to speak about it — they were both professional compartmentalizers — but according to Nic, Jet’s dad, now without prospects, had turned to the bottle for comfort.
“It’s ‘bout to get worse, ain’t it, with that Thatcher bitch winning the conservative party vote, eh?” said Nic lowly, wisely turning the conversation to politics, out of emotional territory. Lily nodded, somberly, though she was grateful to Nic for bridging the gap for her; when it was just Lily and Jet on their own, without someone to run interference, their conversations were often awkward and halting.
Anyway, Da had written Lily in February with the news about Thatcher, his fury evident in his unusually tight handwriting. Lily made a point of keeping up on the Muggle news when she was at Hogwarts not just because she hated how her peers viewed the Muggle world as somehow less worthy or legitimate than the Wizarding world, but also because she found that the politics of the Muggle and Wizarding worlds mirrored each other. The distinct shift toward conservatism in both her worlds disheartened her, and she longed to discuss it all with Nic and Jet, so much so that she’d considered breaking the Statute of Secrecy more than once. But, of course, she couldn’t. It was bad enough to be Muggle-born. It would be worse to be a loudmouth. Untrustworthy. Unworthy. And it would be worst of all to be brought in front of the Wizengamot, which was made up, of course, of the pure-blood relatives of some of her nastiest classmates.
“What was it like?” Lily asked, turning to Nic. “The protest. The one you wrote me about last month.” It’d been at Oxford, apparently, where Thatcher went to school, and Nic had taken several buses and the train in order to make it. Nic licked her thumb and dragged it along the underside of Lily’s eye, ostensibly wiping away her smudged eyeliner. Wordlessly, Lily lifted her hips and eased the eyeliner pencil from her pocket, handing it to Nic and turning her eyes upwards so Nic could sort her out.
“Intense,” said Nic, her tongue between her teeth as she tightlined Lily’s waterline. “Blink.” Lily did as she was told, her eyes watering slightly. This was what Nic wanted, and she smudged the eyeliner expertly as Jet handed Lily his compact to check the results. Lily did, though she trusted Nic with her life, let alone her makeup. Her eyes, which were striking without enhancement as it was, green and almond-shaped, now looked positively feline. Lily wore no base makeup, thanks to the anti-acne spells she, along with the rest of her year, had learned from Marlene, who’d taken pity on them after the Ear Piercing Fiasco of 1973. Her hair, thick and vibrant and red, hung about her face in waves on the best of days, but the summer humidity had made it go flat. Lily ran her hands through it, adjusting her part so it was right down the middle of her skull. She often coveted Nic’s lustrous, pin-straight hair, which, though naturally jet-black, she bleached and dyed religiously; presently, it was a vibrant shade of green.
“C’mon, our stop’s next,” said Jet, reaching over Nic and Lily to pull at the rigging to trigger a stop. Out of the corner of her eye, Lily saw Nic blush, ever so slightly. Oh, yes, tonight really was going to be fun.
“You haven’t even told me who we’re seeing tonight!” said Lily as they stumbled off the bus. As soon as she’d stood up she realized the liquor had gone to her head, and felt pleasantly buzzed as they traipsed through Birmingham to Barbarella’s Discotheque. The full moon hung low in the sky, lighting the way.
“Lily, you’re gonna lose it, they’re so good,” Nic was saying as they turned onto Cumberland, the street buzzing with activity. “They’re called the Swankers, they’re from London — they’ve got this one song, my cousin put me onto them when they were called the Strand, you’re not gonna believe it when they play…”
Lily listened happily as Nic went on about the Swankers, extolling the virtues of their frontman, Steve Jones, until they stepped into the club and it swallowed them whole. Music piped through the speakers overhead, something gritty and loud that Lily didn’t recognize but gave her a little thrill. The club was packed; whoever the Swankers were, their reputation clearly preceded them.
Lily made a motion toward the bar and left Nic and Jet in the middle of the room, elbowing her way to the counter and ordering three pints from the barman. She took her time finding her friends again, wanting to give Nic and Jet an opening for the desire that was unfolding between them. She’d sensed something brewing for over a year, and last summer Nic had clumsily, drunkenly asked Lily whether she reckoned Jet would be any good in bed. Nic had barreled on without giving Lily so much as a moment to consider, weighing Jet’s pros (large hands, thoughtful nature, sympathetic to the feminist movement) against his cons (too short, and she’d known him too long, and her boobs were two different sizes and what if the left one never quite caught up to the right?).
As it happened, when Lily came upon her friends again they were standing rather close together, and Jet was bent toward Nic like a tree in the wind as she spoke in his ear. He looked so rapt that Lily regretted interrupting as she passed them their beers. She caught Nic’s eye and raised her eyebrows. Wordlessly, Nic raised her eyebrows back, as if to say, I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.
The Swankers came on late, full of grungy swagger. From their first chord, kinetic energy pulsed through the club, and Lily was so swept up in the noise that she didn’t mind it when the bloke behind her spilled half his drink all over her back.
I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy passersby
By the chorus the whole club was off their faces. Lily downed her beer and closed her eyes, shaking her head from side to side in time to the song’s thudding pulse. Right then, she couldn’t have cared less about the sweat in her eyes or the way her dark red hair was sticking to her forehead. Hands in the air, she jumped up and down with abandon, feeling Nic do the same beside her. Her shoulders knocked into a stranger’s on one side and Nic’s on the other and she screamed along with the crowd. Something shifted inside of Lily and she felt the knot of anger in her chest, which had lodged itself there when she was twelve and never left, loosen slightly. It was like she and everyone else at Barbarella’s were having some kind of exorcism, rage leaving their bodies via sweat and noise and pure, raw music. It was at once animal and electric, guttural and feral yet undeniably something else, something new. For a moment, nobody seemed weighed down by the past, the present, the future — not the Troubles, not the layoffs at the manufacturing plant, not their friends and neighbors losing their livelihoods. As the Swankers tore into an ear-shredding guitar solo there was a feeling, a palpable one, that something big was happening here. Something real.
Yes, Lily missed the hum of magic that emanated off Hogwarts, but that night, she was bowled over by the raw electricity inside Barbarella’s. Her eyes were still closed, and she didn’t know if Nic and Jet were snogging, but she hoped they were, hoped they would. As anger poured out of her, so did love, and she had so much of it that it was difficult to bear and she had no choice but to just move through it. She danced, surrounded by people who had no idea what it was like to reach for something just beyond, to grasp the intangible, to harness an incomprehensible power. It was just them and their hot blood. Tonight, it was more than enough.
James’s father said he was going off on Ministry business, but James was pretty sure that if that was the case, he’d’ve been gone two hours ago, and he wouldn’t be wearing his casual robes. Instead, Fleamont Potter was reorganizing his briefcase and reminding James, Sirius, and Peter of the house rules.
“...And look, don’t think I don’t remember what it was like to be fifteen, alright?” he was saying. “But we must exercise an abundance of caution. So no house parties. I’ll not have a repeat of last year, and best believe I’ll know if you’ve tried anything of the sort –”
“Dad, relax,” said James, his mouth full of toast. He chewed loudly, purely to distract Sirius, who was uncharacteristically focused. He and James were competing to see who could lob the most grapes into Pete’s open mouth, several feet away. Sirius was largely a formidable opponent on all fronts, and James knew it was cheap to use his best friend’s weaknesses against him. But, James reasoned, as Sirius had so few weaknesses to exploit, James could hardly knock a gift horse in the mouth, could he, and if there was one thing Sirius absolutely hated, it was seeing food in other people’s mouths. Sure enough, Sirius’s next grape bounced off Peter’s nose, ending his streak. James reached across the table and triumphantly helped himself to the potatoes on Sirius’s plate. “We’re not gonna throw a party.” This time, he mouthed at Sirius, who laughed good-naturedly.
Sometimes, James felt like everything could disappear in a moment.
The war loomed large over everyone, and, look: James knew he was lucky. More than lucky! He was, perhaps, the luckiest man who’d ever lived. He was wealthy, Pureblood, well-educated, top of his class, good-looking, and an ace Chaser. He didn’t mean to be full of himself, but these were the facts, weren’t they? And, for Merlin’s sake, he did speak five languages – Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and, obviously, English – and he just so happened to have the best friends anyone could ask for. But he was also the only person he knew whose parents were both members of the Order of the Phoenix, and therefore, over the past couple of months, had been adjusting, badly, to the ever-present anxiety of losing everyone he loved at the swish of a wand.
“I don’t want to know what Sirius is finding very funny,” said Mr. Potter, and James shook his head to clear it, bringing himself back down to Earth. His dad had just clicked his briefcase shut and now stood in the kitchen doorway. “Instead I’ll be trusting in your good breeding…and, of course, in Fern, who is honor-bound to let me know of your whereabouts at all times.” Fern, the family house elf, squeaked in agreement.
“Dad, I’m frankly affronted at the insinuation,” said James, his voice mockingly haughty. “Since when have you ever known me to –”
“I’ll have Moody looking in,” said Mr. Potter, gripping James roughly on the shoulder. James shook him off, but he was only pretending to be annoyed at his father’s touch. The truth was, he was gonna miss him when he was gone. “If you don’t fear me, you’d better fear him.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Potter,” said Sirius, grinning widely, “I’ll be here, keeping these two in line.” He leaned back in his chair, his long fingers laced together behind his neck. Grinning broadly, he didn’t have a chance to recover when the slant of the kitchen chair got the better of him and he fell flat on his back with a loud thud. James and Pete lost it then, doubled over with laughter as Sirius tried to extricate himself from his abruptly horizontal position.
Even Mr. Potter struggled to maintain a straight face. “As long as my boy is in good hands,” he said, striding alongside the stable and extending a hand to Sirius, who grasped it gratefully and leapt up, shaking his long black hair out of his face. Sirius didn’t let go of Mr. Potter’s hand and instead shook it in an exaggerated manner, as though they’d just closed some exciting business deal. Sirius grinned and Mr. Potter gamely went on with the scene before pulling Sirius into a tight hug, clapping him on the back. Peter was next, and finally, James stood, wrapping his arms around his father’s broad shoulders. He was as tall as his father now, and if he kept growing at the same rate he was going, he’d have an inch or two on him by summer’s end. Mr. Potter clasped James’s neck, pulling him close. “My boy,” he said softly in James’s ear, so Sirius and Peter couldn’t hear him. “I love you. Be good.”
“Love you too, Dad,” said James quietly. “Be safe.”
“I’ll see you at the weekend,” Mr. Potter called from the hallway. “Goodbye, Fern, and please do keep an eye on these boys, as we’ve discussed —”
“Boys?!” said James and Sirius at once, indignantly.
“I don’t see any boys here,” said James, looking around in all directions. Sirius made a show of looking under the table and opening the cupboards.
“Me either,” said Sirius. “Only men. Strong, confident, handsome, dashing, responsible men.”
“Modest, too,” Peter added.
“Goodbye, men!” said Mr. Potter. “Please conduct yourself as such!” And then he was off, the door shutting behind him. Sirius and Peter were still at it, lobbing quips back and forth like a quaffle, over the the familiar whirring of the security charms on the Potter’s front door clicking into place. They all pretended not to notice that it took a couple moments longer than usual. Peter and Sirius looked to James, their faces en media res – ready to go in any direction, wherever James took them. James, after a beat, pushed away his plate and cracked a smile.
“Alright, Fern,” he said to the house elf, “You heard Dad. Let’s get those invitations going, shall we? Tonight’s gonna be a rager.” Peter’s and Sirius’s laughter drowned out Fern’s indignant response.
***
They did not, in fact, have a rager. James loved to push limits, but lately, he’d been wanting more than just a reaction. He wanted not just attention from his father, but approval. What was that his dad was going on about earlier, calling them boys? They were fifteen, for Merlin’s sake! James was shaving nearly every day now, after all. This year, he and his friends would take their O.W.L.s and choose their careers. They’d turn sixteen, which was basically of-age. Hell, James was practically an animagus! He, Sirius, and Pete had hoped to have their first transformation at the end of their fourth year, but there’d been some unforeseen complications with the last, trickiest bit of magic. Pete had implored James and Sirius to ask Remus for help – he was better than any of them at this sort of deep theory research, he just had the patience for it – but James and Sirius had held the line. It was going to be a surprise, and besides, Remus would surely try to put a stop to the whole thing, and it would all be very tiresome. Remus hated attention, the great prat, and they were so close anyway. Sometimes it was best to just do things first and tell him about it later.
Not that his father knew anything about that, but come on.
His father loved him, this James knew, but he had no clue what James was capable of. None at all.
So, resigned to a long, hot day without Remus, who was still sleeping off the aftermath of the full moon, James and Sirius hopped on their brooms to play a pick-up game of quidditch on the Potter’s pitch.
Their game was familiar, by now: James and Sirius would start honest, but would add their own rules as their game went on, leaving Peter, who did commentary for every Hogwarts quidditch game, to improvise, playing catch-up. Though he wasn’t always as quick on the uptake off the pitch, Peter had a real eye for the sport, and, if nothing else, he knew James and Sirius so well that he could very nearly read their minds.
“...and there's Potter with the quaffle, scoring yet another point against Black, and that’s – yes! – an extra three points for the loop-de-loop, and that’s after the upside-down bonus, bringing him a full ten points into the lead –”
“FOUL!” Sirius was shouting, zooming after James, arms raised in the air as he greeted a crowd only he could see. “Foul! He went out of bounds during the loop-de-loop and we said left-hand scoring only!” He lunged forward and grabbed the tail of James’s broom, who yelped as he was pulled unexpectedly backwards, forced to grasp the handle of his Nimbus with both hands.
“FOUL!” James shouted back. “ THAT’S a foul, you right git, c’moff it, you’re cheating –”
“Not according to the seventh addendum of 1974 which states that hands are permitted on the tail of the opponents broom, but not the handle, providing a beater is not on the pitch–”
“Fuck the addendum!”
“And that IS a foul for Potter, under the No Bad Language Statute –” Peter announced as James groaned loudly.
“Bugger off Pete, it’s a free for all now!” He was still trying to shake Sirius off, but only halfheartedly. Really, James knew, Sirius would never let him go.
***
The following day, Remus joined them, arriving in the Potter’s fireplace via Floo. As he coughed and brushed ash off his faded clothes – Remus was forever wearing the same old things, no matter how often James made sure his clothes found their way into Remus’s trunk up in Gryffindor Tower – Sirius crossed the room, wand drawn, bulging his eyes as far as they’d go in a perverse imitation of Moody, the gruff Auror, a friend of James’s parents’. Lowering the pitch of his voice, but increasing the volume, Sirius pushed Moony up against the wall and said, “What breed of stuffed animal did Peter sleep with until he was thirteen?”
Peter squealed in protest, but Remus was already laughing. “A rabbit,” he said, “named Dearie.”
“Leave Dearie out of it!” said Peter, pink in the face. Sirius dropped his wand and let go of Remus’s threadbare shirt, and James was slightly alarmed at how much it hung off his friend’s lanky frame. Remus always looked a little gaunter after the full moon, but all the same, James made a note to ask Fern to prepare the fattiest dinner she could muster that evening.
“Alright?” said Remus by way of greeting, and he yawned, drawing himself up to his full height and stretching his long arms above his head.
“Glad to have you back, mate,” said James gratefully.
The boys – ahem, men – spent the rest of the afternoon outside, on the grounds. Sirius and James made Peter referee another quidditch match while Remus took a long nap beneath a nearby tree, his forearm flung over his eyes, his Ancient Runes textbook unopened to his left. Sirius and James crash-landed, rolling off their brooms directly into an impromptu wrestling match, which Peter also commentated, for nobody. The commotion woke Remus, who blinked against the bright sun and leaned back on his forearms, propping up his long upper body to watch his friends, a smirk playing on his face.
Finally, James and Sirius tired of their game and flopped down beside Remus, breathing hard. It took them all a moment to catch their breath. They fell into a comfortable silence, and for a while, nobody spoke.
James, naturally, was first to break it.
“So,” he said, working to look unbothered, “where d’you think Dad’s off to this time?” He hoped he’d successfully curbed the anxiety from his voice.
“It’s gotta be business for the Order, doesn’t it, James?” said Pete eagerly. Sirius knocked Pete upside the head, rolling his eyes.
“Obviously it’s business for the Order, you twat,” said Sirius impatiently. “But of what nature?”
“Men, please, make peace,” said James sagely, noticing the pink creeping up Peter’s cheeks. He looked pointedly at Sirius, who held up his hands, palms up, as if in surrender.
“Alright, alright, I’m only trying to speed things along…”
James absently ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Something’s coming, I know it,” he said, almost to himself. “Dad made it sound like this was a regular patrol, but Gideon said before that regular patrols don’t go overnight.”
“There hasn’t been anything in the news, has there?” said Pete. “Not since that Muggle-born family went missing in Elephant & Castle?”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” said James. The hand that was in his hair a few moments before was now shielding his eyes from the midday sun. “Voldemort’s —” Pete winced “— been too quiet. He’s luring us into a false sense of security, trying to get us to let our guard down.”
“Nobody’s guard is down,” said Sirius, “least of all Moody’s. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” He yelled the last two words and the other three boys started. Sirius, who found Moody’s mannerisms endlessly mimicable, did that about eight times a day, but it freaked James out every time.
At least Sirius’s outburst had broken the mood a bit. James heard tapping, and, blinking, saw that Sirius had picked up a pair of sticks and was knocking them rhythmically on the spine of Remus’s copy of Magical Hieroglyphs & Logograms as if it were a drum set. Remus sighed, as if considering whether it was worth asking him to stop, and deciding it wasn’t.
“I heard Molly Weasley’s up the duff again,” said Pete. “Maybe Moody just sent your dad out to get her a gift.”
James, Sirius, and Remus laughed heartily at the prospect of the two men discussing a registry while Peter tried not to look too pleased with himself. James pictured his father comparing – what do babies even play with? Rattles? – in Braithwaite’s Baby Bazaar at Diagon Alley, Moody suspiciously peering into bassinets with that creepy magical eye of his.
“Is that true, Pete?” said Sirius, giving a low whistle and sounding impressed. “Remind me to shake Arthur’s hand next time we see him. Who knew the gangly bloke had it in him.”
Remus, who’d grown at least four inches in as many months, looked mildly affronted. “What’s wrong with gangly blokes?”
James closed his eyes again as Remus and Sirius bantered. After four years with them in Gryffindor Tower, their bickering was like white noise. He and Pete frequently took bets on who they reckoned might win each minor argument, which often went on for days.
A small smile tugged at his lips. Yes, James thought, he stood to lose so much. More than most in his position. But if he knew one thing for sure, it was that he’d always have this.