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More Than A Feeling


Tuesday morning, James carried Remus piggy back over the grounds, back to the castle, as Sirius ran ahead to be sure they wouldn't be caught on the way inside. Remus hugged onto James's shoulders weakly, asleep against him. "All clear," Sirius said into the shard of mirror on his end, standing in the entrance hall, and James nodded into his bit and hurried across the grounds to the stairs of the castle, climbing up and ducking through the door Sirius held open.

It was early - not yet even breakfast - but the boys had wanted to get Remus safely back to the dormitory before Professor Gaunt would be up and about the castle. They'd left the Shack mere minutes after Remus had turned back from his wolf form. They hurried on the moving staircases and into the passageway, snaking their way through the dark all the way up to the sixth floor, and up two more flights to the portrait of the Fat Lady.

"Wombats!" Sirius declared.

But the Fat Lady was snoring and the empty bottle of wine in the next painting over told James he had a feeling he knew why.

"Oi, wake up, woman!" Sirius implored her. "We haven't got all day!"

The Fat Lady groaned. "What are you even doing out of bed at this unholy hour?" she demanded, "What sort of student choses to leave their beds before the sun is properly up?!"

"The sort that never went to bed in the first place. Now let us in! Wombats!"

She scowled, “You haven’t got to say it so loudly! Shouting at the top of your voice like that…” and she started to swing forward.

Sirius grabbed hold of her frame, “YOU CALL THAT SHOUTING?!”

“Sirius, for Godric’s sake,” muttered James and he climbed through the portrait hole, carefully ducking low so he wouldn’t hit Remus in the frame, and disappeared into the common room.

Sirius climbed through behind them, tugging the portrait shut in his wake.

The common room was dark and they hurried up to the dorms without running into anybody. Peter was asleep on his bed, his face smushed onto the parchment of the Marauder’s Map, clutching his wand in one hand and a half-eaten bar of chocolate in the other. “Bloody hell,” Sirius muttered and he grabbed the Map, tugging it out from Peter’s face roughly just before a bit of drool fell upon the parchment, and he dusted it off as Peter spluttered awake by the sudden movement.

“What? What?” Peter asked, looking around, “Oh, it’s you lot. You’re back early.”

“Wanted to get Moony situated before going to class,” James said as he lay Remus down on his bed and Remus whimpered quietly from the pain of the mattress cupping his back as it did. Despite it being a good night, there were still a couple oozing cuts on Remus’s forearms and one on his hip, just above the band of his trousers, where Snuffles had nipped him to keep him from turning towards Hogsmeade in the forest.

Peter pointed at the cut on his hip, “That looks right nasty.”

“My teeth are stronger than they look,” Sirius muttered, and he pulled open a drawer in the night stand for a jar of healing balm and started to smear it over the cut.

James walked over to his bed and sighed, falling onto the mattress. “Ohh gods.” He closed his eyes.

“Hey don’t be doing that, you’ll fall asleep and we’ll miss Potions,” Sirius said, throwing the lid of the balm at James. It hit his knee and James groaned.

James ran his hands over his face, “Fuck Potions.” Then, forcing himself to sit up, he asked, “Oi, Pete, what was Gaunt up to all night?”

“Dunno,” Peter said, “I couldn’t find him on the Map!”

Sirius looked up from the balm he was smudging into Remus’s skin. “What?”

“He wasn’t on the Map.”

James was cleaning his glasses, but his eyebrows had folded with concern. “He must’ve left the castle.”

“I dunno,” Peter said. “But I watched his office for hours before I fell asleep.”

Sirius scowled. “Where would he go? Hogsmeade, you reckon?”

Peter shrugged.

James put his freshly cleaned lenses back on and his eyes flickered to Remus’s sleeping face and then back to the other two. “Suppose… suppose he does know about Remus somehow and he’s after… I dunno, he’s a half-blood hater, maybe he also hates, erm - half-, half-breeds…?” He felt terrible calling Remus a half-breed.

Sirius finished with the balm and waved his wand for bandages. “One more reason to hate the fish-bellied toad stool sample, I suppose.”

James said, “I mean, what if he knew we were all out there and went to investigate or something?”

Sirius said, “Then I s’pose it’s a good thing we went out into the forest last night.”

James rubbed his chin, “It would explain why he’s been seeming to pick on Rey, too, wouldn’t it?”

“Actually,” Peter said, clearing his throat, “I know you lot don’t like the, uh, the Divination topic, but… but I was doing my crystals last night while I was waiting for Gaunt to show up on the Map and I think I have an idea of what Gaunt’s problem is.”

Sirius sighed, “Pete, your stupid rocks can’t tell the future, alright? That Clearwater woman is mad!”

“No listen, guys,” Peter pleaded, “I cast the gemstones and they kept telling me that Gaun’t a liar, and he’s posing, he’s an actor or a pretender, and he’s using Remus to get further information about you, James.”

James looked up from where he’d been switching out his textbooks. “Further information about me? How do you mean?” He chuckled, his eyes crinkling.

“I dunno. Just, that’s what the crystals say is all.”

James smirked and looked at Sirius.




Lily was chewing on the end of her braid absently in Potions that morning… staring at James… whose hair was especially messy, whose oxford sleeves were rolled up in that annoying way, whose hair hung over his forehead…

That hair, though.

Lily stared at it…

Imagine, she thought, the sound of Horace Slughorn’s voice getting further and further away, her chin balanced upon her palm… Imagine James Potter… walking in slow motion down the stairs of the Gryffindor common room, shaking his head, his hair flying out in every direction… She could almost hear More than a Feeling playing on Sirius’s radio as a sound track to it as he moved, his hips rolling as he took the stairs… those blasted maroon joggers he wore sometimes, that hung kind of low on his waist, so the shape of his abdomen and hips showed clearly and no shirt, because - really, who wears a shirt in these sorts of visions? Especially when you had muscles as incredibly defined as James Potter’s chest and arms had become from years of Quidditch and there he comes in her mind walking down the steps towards her, his hair falling all over from the shaking, his muscles twitching…

“Miss. Evans, do you care to, uh, perhaps join us here today?” Slughorn cleared his throat.

Lily looked up, confused a second and found that half the room was giggling at her and Sirius was smirking from the next table over James’s shoulder, his eyes twinkling with amusement, as James stayed bent over the textbook, reading the next ingredients. She blinked as the room came back into focus. She flushed bright red as James looked up and over at her, one eyebrow raised.

Lily quickly turned forward. “Sorry Professor,” she stammered.

Sirius grinned and lolled out his tongue like a drooling dog at her and Lily rolled her eyes and James glanced over his shoulder to see Sirius Black acting totally normal, and he turned back to give Lily a funny look. As soon as he’d turned ‘round again, Sirius did the tongue again and Lily thought her next day dream may just be of herself giving Sirius Black a black eye!

“Alright, begin on your potions… Remember, no sampling today! We don’t need to be reliving last Valentine’s Tea!” he chuckled and meandered ‘round the tables.

Lily hadn’t been paying attention, she’d been too busy working on ignoring Sirius and -- oh alright -- admiring James Potter’s pecs, that she’d missed what it was they were to be working on and she reached over and tugged the book away from James, looking down at it.

Love Potion

She sighed and shook her head, then glanced at James - certain she’d be rewarded with some stupid arsed remark (“you heard him Evans, don’t go drinking the love potion and falling madly in love with me,” he said in her mind) but he didn’t say a word, he just set to work at counting lacewing flies from a little jar. He’d apparently already gotten out the ingredients. Lily reached for some and started cutting and slicing and crushing along side him as the directions said… and slowly the potion turned from the water base to a pale pink to a vibrant lavender to a sheer gold with pink smoke rising up from the surface…

“It oughtn’t have that slight purple shine that’s happening,” Lily said, “I don’t think it’s quite right.” She looked at the textbook. James used the ladle to inspect the potion closer, “I think it’s fine,” he said.

Lily shoved the book back at him, “Look there at the pictures. The sample photos look different than ours does.”

James said, “You’re mental, it’s just right.”

“It’s not right, don’t act like it’s right just because you don’t want to start over again.”

“Well I don’t want to start over again! We’ll be here all bloody day if we gotta go through that ridiculous amount of stirring you did all over again!”

Lily leaned in, “It doesn’t even smell right.”

“It smells fine.”

“How do you know? You haven’t even smelled it yet. Even I can only barely smell it over your cologne and I’m not even in the epicenter of all of that… aftershave… cologne…. Apocalypse you have going on over there…”

“Me! You should talk, your blasted hair’s smell is overpowering everything else!”

“Not nearly as much as you are!” Lily snapped, “I mean, gods, Potter!”

“It’s oh gods Evans, Evans,” Sirius intoned without looking over.

Lily scowled at him, “Mind your own cauldron!” she said, pointing as it started bubbling.

“Fuck!” Sirius exclaimed, turning back to his cauldron in a rush.

Behind them, Marlene McKinnon raised her eyebrow at Harry Warbeck as they shared exasperation over the constant bickering from the table ahead of them.

Sirius threw his arm about James’s shoulders on the stairs after Potions as they went up to the dormitory to switch out their textbook s and check on Remus Lupin. “You and Evans seemed to be talking an a lot over there this morning,” Sirius said suggestively, nudging James in the forearm with his elbow, “Huuuh? Huh? Huh?”

James shrugged Sirius off, “We were fighting, Sirius.”

“Like an old married couple,” Sirius supplied.

James sighed.

Sirius grinned and hugged him again.

James shrugged him off again. “She spent like half the class complaining about my cologne! And the way she’s said it, she’s all so snappy and stupid about it… Like her not cutting up the boomslang properly wasn’t the reason we had the problem in the first place!”

Sirius raised an eyebrow, “She complained about your cologne?” he asked, smirking.

“Yes!” Jame said with a sigh, “As though the amount of cologne I had on makes a difference what it bloody smells like!”

Sirius smirked. “But you aren’t even wearing any cologne!” he said knowingly, “It’s morning after a full moon… unless you were trying to asphyxiate Moony last night.” He smirked.

James blinked, “Wait. What?” he grabbed the hem of his jumper and yanked it up, taking a good deep breath of it. Sirius was right. No cologne.

Sirius waited, one eyebrow raised, for James to put two and two together… but it didn’t come. Instead, James simply said, “Bloody hell - she’s mental. Really mental. That girl is batty!”