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April


It was James that was waiting up in the common room when Lily and Remus returned. Remus’s cheeks flushed bright red when he saw James, lounging across the chair closest to the fire, a book balanced on one knee. James shut the cover the moment they stepped inside and sat up, tossing it onto the coffee table. “Hey, there you are,” he said, getting up. “Are you alright?”

Remus nodded, “Is… is Sirius still awake?” he asked, looking at the stairwell that led up to the dorms.

James shook his head, “Him and Peter both fell asleep ages ago.”

“Good.” Remus turned to Lily, “Thanks again…” he murmured and he hastened away, up the stairs to the dorm.

Lily and James both watched him go, silence save for the cracking of the fire behind them fell over the pair of them, then. James turned to look back at her. She seemed to glow like gold in the fire’s reflection. He cleared his throat and she looked up at him. “Is he really alright?” he asked her.

“I s’pose he will be,” she answered. “How’s Sirius?”

“A bit on the traumatized side, really,” James replied.

“They’ll be okay, though, won’t they?” LIly questioned.

James nodded, “Yeah, I think so.”

“Does… does Sirius feel the same way as Remus?” she asked.

James shrugged, “It’s complicated for Sirius.”

Lily sighed, “I know it’s not very conventional, but… honestly, I sort of like the idea of the pair of them.”

“You do?” James asked.

“Yeah,” Lily nodded, “They’re just such opposites of each other. I think… they sort of balance each other out, don’t they? I dunno, I just think they’d make a cute couple.”

“With the small exception of the issue that Sirius is straight?” James asked.

Lily shrugged, “Yeah, that small exception.”

James looked at his feet and dragged his toe across the carpet. “I’m just really impressed with how… how bloody brave Remus was… just… kissing him.” He let his eyes slowly move up to connect with Lily’s. “Don’t you think that’s quite brave?”

Lily smirked, “Don’t you dare, Potter.”

James’s mouth curled into that stupid grin - the one with the one tooth that caught his lip, the one she hated - “Evans, don’t go getting your hopes up, I wasn’t planning to.”

“The only hope I had was that you’d try it so I’d have a good excuse to slug you in that big stupid face of yours,” she replied haughtily.

James’s eyes twinkled, “See, you say that, but I hear James, I want to touch your face.”

Lily rolled her eyes, “Why would I ever want to touch your face for, Potter?”

“To see how soft and smooth my skin is,” he replied. “The same reason you really want to run your fingers through my hair.” He bent, turning his head so the great mop of messy hair hung toward her, “Go on, live it up, Evans. Touch it.”

“Bugger off, I don’t want to touch it! You twisted prat.”

James laughed.

Lily rolled her eyes, “Can’t hold a conversation with you - it’s impossible! You’re impossible.” She turned and started toward the girls dormitory stairs.

“Evans, love,” James called and she paused, exasperated, and looked back at him. James smiled, “Thanks for taking care of Rey.”

Lily nodded, “Of course.”

“Good night, Evans.”

“Good night, Potter.”




Remus glanced at Sirius’s bed as he rushed past. He was asleep, curled up and hugging his knees. Remus quickly turned back to his own side of the room and changed into his pyjamas quickly, crawling into his bed and pulling the blankets close to his chin. He lay there in the dark, feeling helpless and so damn afraid of the morning light, cursing himself for having that moment of weakness, thinking that he’d ruined everything.

Remus closed his eyes so that when James came back upstairs a few moments later he assumed all three of the others were asleep, and he got into bed himself and with a sigh he, too, drifted off.

But in reality, only two of the boys in the room were asleep… Remus sniffled and hugged his pillow, his eyes squeezing shut tight, tears escaping them.

Suddenly the mattress shifted behind him and he felt weight press against his back… then a furry snout came over his shoulders and Snuffles licked the tears off his face, then curled back up against him, resting his chin on Remus’s shoulder in the dark.




March moved on. James’s birthday came and went without a kiss from Lily (which he reminded her of every time he saw her that day, but she refused him every time). Sirius and Remus, though a bit more awkward than they’d been before, were still just mates the same as they’d always been and the four of them went to great lengths to avoid mentioning The Kiss or anything that related to it.

For April Fool’s Day, James and Sirius decided to use the spell they’d found the day Remus drank the love potion and they set it on the entire school so that everyone spent the greater part of the morning speaking in opposites and getting quite frustrated by it. “You all deserve a reward for being such good boys!” McGonagall shouted at them and they snickered. Even though they got a hefty detention, they were quite pleased with the results of the prank.

The April full moon was a largely uneventful night. Despite how nervous about it Remus had felt in the days leading up to it - Would Sirius come? Would it be awkward? - Sirius came out to the shack with enough nervous energy coursing through him to keep them preoccupied with jokes until the change had happened and they could distract themselves by running through the woods, exploring the trees. It was good to be out there, away from the castle, away from the expectations and pressures.

As the end of term was nearing, the teachers were getting harder with their lessons, the exams coming up. Kingsley Shacklebolt even was getting sterner, teaching them with logic puzzles and questions like he’d done that first ever class and James declared Kingsley may be his favorite teacher ever, aside from McGonagall, of course, who they all loved most of all. Even if she was apparently the worst for the exams. She kept reminding them in her sharp Scottish accent with beady eyes, “You best be studying - especially you, Mr. Black, your grades are positively abysmal!”

A notice went up on the boards in the common room mid-way through April, announcing an end-of-term party in the Great Hall for all the houses. Like the Yule Ball and Valentines, a flurry of dates were made and Sirius made a production of asking Marlene McKinnon that Remus couldn’t help but feel was directed toward him. “Sorry mate,” Peter said quietly to Remus when Sirius was sitting at the lunch table reporting back everything that Marlene had said in response to his request. Remus had excused himself then to wash his face in the nearest boys toilet he could find.

Lily had gone to find him when she was stopped by Severus in the entrance hall. He caught her wrist, “Lily,” he said, and they stood on the stairs headed to the second floor, where Lily was fairly certain that she’d seen Remus go. “I haven’t seen you all month,” Severus complained. He knew why, of course, her fascination with him was over now that Slughorn had made him stop giving her the potion. He stared up at her, begging her with his eyes to still feel something for him as she’d done when he’d started with the potion. But the mere fact that she’d gone nearly a month without speaking a word to him didn’t bode well.

“I’m sorry, Sev,” Lily said, “It’s just that it’s been a very busy month, you see, with the exams coming up, I’ve been studying an awful lot.”

“But we’re still… we’re still together, aren’t we? You’re still my girlfriend?” he pressed.

Lily hesitated, “Sev, I…”

“You’ll come to the end of term party with me, won’t you? Please Lily?” he asked, not wanting her to say the words, to officially end it between them.

Lily sighed. It was too hard a conversation to have standing on the stairs of the castle anyway, she decided. “Yeah, I’ll go with you,” she said.

Severus smiled, “I’m so excited,” he said, and he leaned in to kiss her, but she moved her head so that he ended up putting his lips on her cheek instead of her mouth and he felt the pit in his stomach grow.

“I’ve got to go and find Remus,” she said, and she drew away, leaving Severus there in the hall with nothing but the somewhat tarnished hope of a date.

She knocked on the boy’s toilet door, “Remus?” she called.

“Go away,” he called back.

But Lily sat and waited outside the door for him and eventually he did come out and she gave him a hug, and he was glad. She was kind enough not to say a word about Sirius and Marlene, she was simply there for him. It seemed like nobody else was.

“Thanks, Lily, for being there for me,” Remus said.

“Always,” Lily answered.




The late April afternoons were getting warm - especially in the stuffy Divination tower. Frank Longbottom sat on his cushion, listening to Tobias go on and on about numerology from the textbook, and nearly falling asleep. Frank was watching a bird outside the window - circling over the trees of the Forbidden Forest and wishing he were outside on his broom, flying like the bird, instead of stuck up in the classroom like he was.

There was suddenly a commotion from the front of the room and he blinked and looked down across the class, over the heads of all the other students.

Professor Vablatsky had fallen from her chair, her limp hand all that could be seen around her desk, the teacup she’d been drinking from shattered on the floor.

“She just fell over suddenly and she was… she was dead. That was all there was to it,” Frank Longbottom said later at the dinner table, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. “It was awful.”

“But there had to have been something that caused it,” said Annalee, wide eyed, “People don’t just drop dead. There had to have been foul play!”

“She’s been poisoned once, it could’ve happened again,” Andy Woodhouse injected. “Sirius Black shoved the bezoar down her throat last time, remember? None of us had a bezoar in the classroom. And she was dead before we could’ve got it in her mouth even if we had.”

Annalee shivered. “Do you reckon her ghost will haunt the divination tower?”

“That tower’s creepy enough without it’s very own ghost,” Meg Johnson said.

“I still don’t understand who would want to kill off a professor,” Frank said, shaking his head, “It has to be an inside job, too, I mean, with all the owls and floos being monitored so closely it’s not as though an enemy can just come in and off her…”

“I’ll bet it’s the Slytherins,” Sirius said, suddenly pushing himself into the conversation. He and the other Marauders had just arrived a couple moments before.

Frank said, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Maybe it’s Snape,” suggested James, thinking that he wouldn’t put it past Snape to have poisoned Professor Vablatsky’s tea, given what he’d done to Lily Evans.

“I just can’t believe she’s dead,” said Remus, shaking his head.

“At least the exam for Divination’s cancelled,” Sirius pointed out. “Thank Merlin, too, I’ve been making rubbish up for the dreams for the whole term, I doubt I could really interpret anything even if I wanted to. Though she didn’t ever seem to notice. I have alright grades in that class.” He started eating his sandwich.

“I think everyone has alright grades in Divination,” Frank said. “It’s such an objective class. There’s no real way to be right or wrong - or at least for her to know it if you are.”

“Yeah, being a seer, she really should’ve seen this whole thing coming and avoided tea,” snickered James. “I would’ve done.”

“I guess we’ll have a new Divination professor next term,” said Sirius with a sigh.

“So long as we keep the Defense teacher, I’m fine with that!” answered James.

“We’ve already lost one Defense teacher this year,” Remus reminded them, “Professor Veigler.”

“Yeah, but I meant Kingsley,” James said, “He’s ruddy brilliant.”

Remus frowned, “Veigler was brilliant, too.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” said James, and he gave Remus a funny look, unsure where Remus’s argumentative mood was suddenly coming from. But then he looked over and saw Sirius was waving at Marlene McKinnon and he understood.