In Your Eyes

Chapter Two

The Reason I Trusted You

In your eyes, I am a brother.

David and Cindy Potter had only one son, but James Potter had never lacked for brothers and sisters. The extended Potter family was reasonably large, but James had never been limited to that.

It was amazing, really, the way that James Potter inspired the loyalty of those around him. Either hatred or devotion resulted from every first encounter with the boy. Whichever the result, there was very little variation in the degree. Feelings toward James Potter were always extreme.

The way that he made his friends and enemies was often bizarre. He made the best friend of his life by dumping him in the lake on their first night at Hogwarts. He made his greatest enemy by spilling him out of the same boat. The fourth person in the boat that night eventually became his wife.

It was clear from the moment that the foursome entered the Great Hall, soaking wet and half an hour late, that a partnership had been formed between the first two boys. They strutted in ahead of a blushing redhead and a glowering dark boy with considerable pride in the first class mayhem that they had caused.

James Potter and Sirius Black earned their popularity in much the same way over the next few years. Their fellow students (and often professors) couldn't help but laugh at the - mostly - good-natured pranks they pulled. Even Professor McGonagall seemed to enjoy some of the wild stunts that disrupted the school. They were also scarcely fazed by their trips to Headmaster Dumbledore's office. Even when James or Sirius attacked an innocent bystander - usually because the somewhat paranoid duo thought it was a recent prank victim about to retaliate - the students of Hogwarts did not turn on them. They were like big brothers - even when they pummeled you for no reason you adored them.

They did make some of their friends in a more normal way. When they found out that their little stunt on the first night had almost gotten Hagrid fired, they spent most of their afternoons down in his hut for a month. He, like nearly everyone else, seemed to hold no grudge against them. After it became clear that Dumbledore would not fire him, he found the whole incident funny. They would not have been them, however, if they did not also see the distinct advantage of being friends with the Groundskeeper. With his help, they knew their way through the Forbidden Forest better than any pair of first years before them or since.

One friend they made by virtue of being a dorm mate, but he proved himself an extremely useful person to have in a pinch rather than an annoying tagalong. Several times when they were about to be caught, Peter had a back-up plan. James and Sirius said it time and again at Hogwarts and Lily would remark on it in her reports to the Order years later: Peter Pettigrew could talk his way out of anything. It came from growing up with two lawyers for parents. Within the first two months, he had memorized all of the School Rules and Codes of Conduct for both students and professors. He combined unequaled knowledge of the rules with a natural talent for bending and manipulating them. He was, therefore, fabulous at talking his way out of trouble. Like most barristers who twist the law for their own purposes, this did not make him terribly popular with the powers that be or the other students at the Castle. However, to Hogwarts' two most reckless pranksters, he was an invaluable companion. And Peter? Peter worshipped James and Sirius.

There was one friend that they knew from the very first night that they would eventually, inevitably make. Just as soon as they had beaten her.

After regaling those around them with a harrowing tale of adventure on the high seas (lake), they bestowed upon themselves the immemorial title that they felt they had earned: The First Years Who Caused the Most Trouble On Their First Night in the Castle. Because, honestly! Arriving half an hour late for the Sorting had to put them automatically in the Hall of Fame for all time! They were terribly dismayed when the highly amused fifth year prefect who had listened attentively to their tale disagreed.

"Any other year, you'd have it, no contest," Nate Powers told them. "I'd even swear that it was a record sure never to be beaten. Unfortunately for you - and me - you've been outdone by one of your new fellow Gryffindors."

In response to their furious demands for an explanation, Alexis Knowles pointed down the table to where the other four new first years sat. "That blonde one, Marissa Fletcher, snuck her little brother onto the Hogwarts Express," she explained. Just then, the crowd at the table parted enough for the two boys to see a small, mousey-haired boy of six or seven sitting in between the blonde girl who had apparently beaten them and the redhead they had dumped in the lake. All four of the new first years sitting around him burst into laughter at the same moment, the little boy looking extremely proud of himself for this accomplishment. "It's going to be quite a year," Alexis Knowles said with a small sigh, shaking her head and sharing a glance with her prefect partner.

And, indeed, it was. In fact, for James and Sirius it was war. After Marissa Fletcher stole the thunder from James and Sirius's glorious grand entrance, it couldn't be anything else. The first few months resulted in an ever escalating prank war between the two trios of Gryffindors. For the last time until they left the Castle seven years later, the rest of the students and staff were spared most of the mayhem of the six Gryffindors. Altogether, they had been much more manageable when they were turning on each other than when they eventually teamed up to cause mayhem for the school at large. Marissa, Lily and Remus proved a match, or nearly, for James, Sirius and Peter when directly provoked. It was a hilarious comedy of errors as fledglings flexed their magical wings by attacking each other in highly creative ways.

Somewhere in the middle of a gigantic food fight in a small room where they had been lured, the team lines broke down. In the free for all that resulted, the Prank War ended. By the time that they all collapsed onto the floor, covered in chocolate and whipped cream, they were all laughing too hard to care about their contest.

The strangest part about this encounter was that neither side remembered engineering the original prank. They immediately suspected foul play, but nailing down the culprit was harder than they expected. Who in Hogwarts Castle would dare - much less want - to lock up the feuding Gryffindor pranksters in a room with tons of chocolate cake, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce? James and Sirius, of course, declared that it must have been Professor McGonagall fed up with their infighting embarrassing Gryffindor. Marissa and Lily thought that, if it had been a professor, as the endlessly renewing magical sweets seemed to suggest, the enigmatic Headmaster Dumbledore was more likely than the stern Transfiguration professor.

It wasn't until twenty-six years later, when a very different Potter was causing trouble for the so-called "Headmistress," that Remus and Sirius learned the truth about the "Chocolate Room" across from the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. They then realized that Hogwarts itself had known that what they needed to get along was a lot of sweets to shove in each other's faces and hair. The two Marauders left would wonder if Hogwarts had known how much they would, desperately, need each other in the years to come. Or how much the world would need them.

The most common comment made about their year after that incident was that the Gryffindor Six would probably die for each other - and if they didn't tone down their pranks soon, they might.

Even after second year, when the boys discovered Remus's secret and began to form a tighter group among themselves, the Gryffindor Six were still the closest group at Hogwarts. Until their fifth year, when the first of the breaks started occurring, they enjoyed the sweetest, simplest, and strongest friendship of their lives.

~*~*~

So it was the hardest thing that could have been asked of James Potter to admit to himself that someone in the Gryffindor Six was working for Voldemort. It was the hardest thing that he would ever have to do: look for a traitor among those he loved and trusted more than anyone else in the world, save only Harry.

For what felt like the thousandth time in the past year, James Potter started his mental list:

He knew that he was not a traitor.

Don't even make him laugh mentioning Lily. The girl who faced down Lucius Malfoy at the age of four-bloody-teen - the moment that James had long suspected had been the moment that he fell for her - join Voldemort? The only genuine article Muggleborn in their midst? Perhaps the fiercest and most determined warrioress for the Order of the Pheonix? Not to mention she was his wife and Harry's mother.

And Sirius? Please! The boy who ran away from this dark family at the age of sixteen - before he understood all the costs of such a choice - and had turned his back on all of that ever since then? The operative who put his life on the line so freely that he had been accused of being suicidal rather than sacrifice the smallest Order goal? Him a double agent? Harry's godfather who had been the one to warn them of approaching attackers when he and Lily had been too distracted by the arrival of their bundle of joy?

That left only three of the Gryffindor Six. So who would it be? Peter Pettigrew who had saved Lily's life countless times or the couple that had opted out of the War? That wasn't entirely fair as Marissa's health certainly wouldn't have permitted her to fight, but it was hard not to consider it.

"I don't know, Lils," James told his wife, staring morosely into the fire. He felt her sit down a moment later, and, from the gurgling noises, she had Harry with her. "How could it be any of them?"

"Don't you mean either of them?" Lily asked quietly. James's head dropped down and he grabbed his frazzled hair in frustration and pain. He needed this to go away. "I don't want to think it's them any more than you do," his wife whispered to him.

"Merlin, can't we at least say their names?" James cried, ripping his head up. He met his wife's pain-racked green eyes for a long moment. "I can't do it either. Not when we're talking about this."

"Riss was the one who kept us from splintering after the love triangle gone wrong," Lily said. "And Remus owes all of you boys more than anyone could ever repay, more than anyone could ever forget."

"Lily, how could she? How could he? How can we even consider..." James stopped and said in a different voice, "Do you remember your seventeenth birthday?"

"How could I forget?" Lily asked, almost laughing as she swatted him on the arm with her free hand. She gave him a stern look for the sake of appearances, "You were drunker than I've ever seen you before or since. You humiliated me in front of my entire family and threw up most of the night."

James only grinned more broadly. "Remember how you sent Riss in to wake me up the next morning?"

"It served you right!" Lily said staunchly. Then she laughed. "My uncles looked at her like she was from outer space when she gave me the list of objects she wanted me to conjure for her. Then my aunt asked me if I really wanted to send a pretty girl up to my boyfriend's bedroom. I figured I'd cut my losses and explain that she was your cousin without trying to explain her props list."

"In that case, thanks a lot for the cymbals," James replied sarcastically. "I think my ears are still ringing from that." Lily only laughed. Harry followed suit, absolutely delighting his parents. Then James turned solemn for a moment, "That's the only time before now that I've ever thought of Marissa as evil."

~*~*~

In fairness, anyone would have thought Marissa evil, sadistic and spiteful that morning. By the Staff of Merlin, she had burst into James's room, hopped on his bed and banged the cymbals together with a great crash right over his head. "Good morning!" she had shouted altogether too brightly for any early Sunday morning, much less one when he had been trashed the night before.

James Potter gave the grunt and groan of his life in rapid succession, but even so it was wildly insufficient to express his displeasure with this occurrence. "No pity!" Marissa caroled, bouncing off the bed. James repeated the performance with even more emotion and reached weakly for what he knew would be the meager protection of his pillow. His groping hand, which he could barely stand to lift, could not find one. After a long moment's reflection, James determined that there wasn't one under his head either.

Marissa, in the meantime, had not been idle. The sheets under him heaved and his never more fragile stomach nearly did too. After a number of unintelligible sounds and a few unprintable words, James groaned, "Lily sent you to torture me?"

Marissa let out the most unappreciated laugh of her life. "And I thought she was exaggerating," she said, sounding highly amused. "Just how drunk were you last night? You barely even moved when I banged the cymbals in your ears."

"Thank for that, by th'way," he slurred out at his most sarcastic. It was safe to say that he truly hated Marissa Fletcher at this moment.

"You're welcome," she practically sang altogether too loudly, altogether too happily and altogether too close. The next moment he was instantly wet and cold. Had he not noticed the sounds of water running or her footsteps? Or had he just ignored them in favor of savoring the last few minutes he had on the nice, soft though pillow-less bed before she deprived him of that too? Oh well, inattentive or understandably lazy, he was wet through now.

James Potter had no memory of the phrases that poured out of his mouth after the water hit him. He had a feeling that he had blocked them out in self-defense, not wanting to remember saying those things to a friend. His memory picked up when he finally bellowed, "Even if you don't care about me, don't you at least care that you'll wake the whole house? And ruin the mattress!"

"Everyone in the Evans family is at church," Marissa replied. "That means we have a little over an hour in which to get you presentable. And don't worry, Lily charmed the water in these buckets before she left. Your concern for the mattress is touching, however."

"It's the only thing that's keeping me from killing myself," James replied, both because it was true at that moment and because he hoped beyond hope that it would influence her to leave him there for at least a little while longer.

"So the still-loving girlfriend and the four friends who would give their right elbow for you don't figure into the equation this morning?" Marissa asked, brightly curious and, again, far too close.

"Dear Merlin, she didn't get them in here too, did she?" James exclaimed in horror. Marissa alone was bad enough, but Marissa reinforced by the often drunk but still merciless Sirius?

"I'm the only one who loves you enough to get up to Surrey this early on a Sunday morning," was her reply. "And I might not even have done it except that I was already up when Lily called me, practically hysterical, at seven thirty. She almost missed us, we had just walked in from Mass."

"How bloody early in the morning is it?" James demanded loudly, then immediately regretted the volume he had used to express his anger.

"Almost eight," Marissa chirped. "At least I think that's what you were asking. You may want to lift your face from the mattress the next time you try to speak."

"Your voice is singularly annoying. I've never noticed before how shrill and strident it is," James said, burying his face deeper in the sweet, white expanse of mattress.

"Yet another reason to look up and let my pretty face off-set my unpleasant voice," Marissa replied cheerfully, utterly unfazed by his insults. Even so, James was thinking of stopping them. It was bad whenever he opened his mouth. Hell, it was bad just thinking.

Marissa gave him only a few seconds of peace in order to work this out. When his determinedly motionless position told her in no uncertain terms his opinion of her suggestion to lift his head - to move in any way - she said brightly, "So, do you want the hangover concoction I've got for you downstairs - it's Sirius's recipe: guaranteed to shrink your head to only twice its normal size - or do you want another bucket of water?"

"I'm cold," was all that James Potter managed in reply. He longed to add, "I want my blanket back," but everything hurt and he didn't think that it would be well-received in any event.

"I'm not surprised," Marissa told him and he could practically see her standing with her arms folded over her chest. "You've got icicles all over you - a little longer and you're sure to catch frostbite."

"Does Lily hate me?" James demanded, forcing himself to move a little as he started to shiver. He instantly regretted the effort and dropped back down onto the bed. "She had to know you'd be cruel and unusual punishment."

James wasn't entirely sure that the last part had been coherent, but Marissa replied, "Actually, I'm your protection." James made a garbled but loud noise of dissent that was probably the best he could manage. "Believe me, you don't want to deal with Lily right now," Marissa told him in answer to his grunt. "And if she doesn't believe that I've punished you properly, even a Lily straight from Church won't forgive you any time this century."

James felt something tickling on the bottoms of his feet - about the only part of him that didn't feel frozen. "Also," Marissa continued blithely, "I'm here to judge if you're coherent enough to survive the fight you and Lily are going to have soon without saying anything too stupid."

"It's her fault anyway," James mumbled.

"Like that," Marissa replied. The tickling started to increase in its annoyance.

"She's the one who drove me to the bottle," he defended himself, mostly because his severely hung over brain thought that passing the blame would stop the infernal tickling on the bottom of his feet. He also felt that it was true. She was the one who had made him positively frantic about last night.

"That's why you need me here," Marissa added with a supremely annoying laugh in her voice. "To make sure that you don't open with that."

Then the entire world did a belly flop. A very painful belly flop for the one person who had decided to stay stubbornly still all morning. The light alone nearly blinded him. The rolling and bucking was nearly the end of his practically nonexistent stomach control. "If you're not going to get up and drink your hangover juice like a person, I'll have to feed it to you the way I would a plant."

"What the hell does that-" James stopped talking and trying to block the light with his hands when something slimy entered his mouth and moved almost immediately to his throat. He bolted upright, clutching his throat and coughing violently. "You-you're trying to kill me!" he sputtered, hating his head for being upright and his voice for being loud. "What was that?" he demanded, trying to find a Marissa-shaped blur to attack.

"A raw egg," Marissa replied innocently from the opposite side of the room from the blob he had just decided to eviscerate. "I don't have the mixture up here so I'll have to feed you the ingredients separately. The next is a breast of chicken..."

"All right, fine, woman! I'll drink your foul potion!" James cried, fending off an imaginary attack from a chicken-wielding Marissa.

Despite his promise, he started to sink slowly back down onto the bed. However, her gentle but very much despised hands forced him back into a sitting position and swung him around so that his feet hit the cold wood floor. The tickling immediately stopped. It was the only good thing about the change.

A wash of scalding water hit him a moment later. "You said Lily wouldn't be back for an hour," James mumbled. He was rewarded for his effort and the stomach-churning task of sitting up with yet another blast of ice cold water. "Stop that!" he shouted, half-rising to his feet as he yelled at her. This nearly made him collapse back, but again Marissa's dainty but demon hands pushed him forward and forced him to his feet. "I need another hour of rest before I can face Lily."

This was a fairly good argument in his eyes. It was also not a terribly unreasonable request. Marissa, however, did not concur. "On the contrary, you need an hour of grooming to make you presentable," she replied, throwing his arm over her shoulders and starting to walk him somewhere. He didn't really care where. "And an hour of sobering up to make you articulate. Now, eyes open," she ordered as he felt cold metal settle on his nose.

A moment later, James Potter had never been more relieved to find himself wearing his glasses rather than some new torture device of the insane, evil, sadistic woman his girlfriend had sicced on him.

~*~*~

Lily just laughed at his pain, much as she and Marissa had back then. "Whatever her methods," she said once she had calmed down, "you have to give her the fact that you were neat, combed and pleasant by the time we got home. In fact, if it had been the first time they'd seen you, you might have made an excellent first impression on my family."

"Which backfired somewhat, as I recall," James laughed. "They thought that I was such a hardened drunk that I wasn't very hung over from my...display the previous night." Lily laughed harder, smiling even as she shook her head at her husband. "Almost the next time I saw them I wanted to ask your dad for your hand. You know he turned me down twice."

His wife seemed to collapse in on herself in her laughter, bending her head down and only staying upright enough to keep from crushing the one-year-old on her lap. Harry liked when his parents laughed and joined in. "If I recall, you didn't find it quite so funny at the time," James remarked, throwing his arm over her shoulders. "I literally had to save your life in front of them to get them to accept me, and even then I was still nervous because you did that idiotic 'dive in front of me' thing."

Although James tried not to let it show on his face, it bothered him, a lot, to feel the tension in her shoulders. He stayed alert himself for the sound of approaching footsteps even as his ears strained to catch every lovely note of his wife's and son's laughter. It bothered him more than anything else in his life that he couldn't protect his family better than that.

"I remember what you said after the second time they said no," James continued, clinging to this conversation and wishing it could fully dispel the shadow cast by the demons stalking them. "I hadn't even realized that you knew I was going to propose."

Lily snorted. "A blind man would have known that you were going to propose," she told him. "And what else could you have to say to my father in a room by yourselves except to ask permission to? You were much more subtle the first time, though."

"Well, when we walked out of the house, with me looking dejected enough to confirm all of your suspicions," James continued, "you turned to me and said, 'Don't worry about it too much, James. At least we know one of my families will give us their ringing endorsement.'" They both smiled, but this was a more bittersweet memory. "You didn't just mean Sirius and Peter when you said that. You meant Riss and Remus too."

"After Sirius, I mean Riss most of all," Lily said sadly. "After all, she and Sirius were the ones who tricked us and locked us both in that crazy chocolate room again in seventh year."

"You know what makes me want to believe in Remus more than anything else?" James said, once again morosely regarding the fire. "You remember all the craziness in sixth year?"

"You mean when Sirius or Remus or both could have ended up in Azkaban? And you or Snape or both could have died? Or when Dumbledore had to modify the memory of half the Great Hall when Snape started screaming out Remus's secret? And then all five of you were suspended for two weeks and even when you came back Marissa wouldn't speak to you?" Lily inquired dryly.

"Actually, I was talking about all the stunts we pulled afterwards trying to get Riss to forgive us," James replied. "But now that you mention it, it certainly was quite a year."

Lily shook her head and punched him in the arm. "Ow!" he cried more in protest than pain. "We did have to go to some very desperate measures!"

~*~*~

"Merrymen," Marissa told the Fat Lady. She and Lily had spent the better part of their first year trying to find out her real name only to learn that she had chosen her "nickname" herself. It turned out that she preferred a certain degree of anonymity with the students and knew that the younger students would probably call her "The Fat Lady" even if she didn't sanction it.

But although she preferred a degree of anonymity between herself and the students, she had no problem butting into their lives. When Marissa said the password, instead of swinging open, the Fat Lady put her hands on her hips. "And I suppose you are the one that display in there is intended for?" she said huffily. "Those four boys of yours had me hanging wide open for an hour while they lugged everything in. They were originally going to assemble it out here where I'd have to stare at it, but I told them to take their eye sore inside!"

"They're not my boys," Marissa replied, starting to walk in the opposite direction.

"Oh no you don't," Lily said with a sigh, grabbing her friend's arm and pulling her back.

"The mad marauders strike again, and suddenly you want to see it, Lils?" Marissa demanded as Lily guided her through the Portrait Hole. Lily noticed that Marissa had referred to the boys exclusively as "the marauders" ever since their return from suspension, and she usually added an insulting modifier to it. Lily had no idea why, but then neither the boys nor Marissa would just ruddy talk about whatever had happened that night. It was obvious that the boys were sorry and that Marissa was stubbornly not forgiving them. Not much else was clear.

Lily really didn't care. She knew that it probably made her a hypocrite, but she was so tired of this fighting. "Let's get it over with, whatever it is," Lily counseled instead of screaming at her friend that she should just have it out with the boys once and for all instead of ignoring them. Lily didn't because she knew that it would only make Marissa call her a hypocrite and stop listening to her at all. It was exactly what Marissa had been saying to her for a solid year about Potter, and Lily was finally beginning to appreciate how annoyed her friend must have been over the past year. Lily had barely made it the past two months. "We don't want them tracking us down like last time," Lily added as they emerged into the Common Room, bracing themselves.

They were ready for just about anything but what they saw - the Marauder's specialty.

"They'd find it a little hard to chase us around with that in tow," was all that Marissa managed to say, her voice reduced to a kind of shocked and (Lily hoped and prayed) touched whisper. Lily, for her part, could only stare mutely.

On the far wall of the Common Room lay a very odd stack of dark blue books. They were piled as high as Marissa was tall, packed tightly together. The thick, tall piles were arranged so that they spelled out the words, "WE'RE SORRY." The apostrophe dangled in midair and several of the letters obviously needed magical help to balance.

What was more amazing about it was that this display did what serenading her outside Gryffindor Tower a month ago had not done. It did what flowers, candy and ten thousand actually sincere-sounding apologies, and a hundred conversations with Remus had not accomplished. Marissa Fletcher walked over to the gigantic stacks of books and just stared at them from a few inches away.

"Pick one up, Riss," Remus told her, coming out from the shadows on the far side of the room. Marissa reached up without glancing at him and lifted a book off the top of the gigantic W. The moment that it touched her hands, the dark blue evaporated and a leather-bound book with gold-trimmed edges was revealed. "That only works in your hands," Remus told her. "We know that you have a problem holding onto your books. You lend them out and people don't return them. These books, however, are all for you."

"You rounded up - and defaced - all of my mother's books?" Marissa asked, looking up from the small book in her hands to meet Remus's eyes.

"And James pulled a bunch from his house with her name in them," Remus told her. "The ones that belonged to her also work for Dung. Those books make up 'WE.' The apostrophes is the complete works of William Shakespeare. The rest of the first word is made up of your favorite books - some of which we had quite a time finding, by the way." As Remus explained, Marissa walked up and down the large display, running her hands over the books and briefly changing their color. "The 'S' is the books that Sirius thinks are wonderful - unfortunately mostly comic books there. The 'O' is the books that James thinks you'll like. Peter and I each took an 'R,' and the 'Y' is Lily's."

"You helped, Lils?" Marissa asked, clutching the copy of Purgatorio in her hands. She opened it and ran her fingers over where her mother's name was written on the inside front cover.

"Well, I thought that I should make sure they didn't give you lousy books," Lily shrugged. "They didn't tell me they were going to create this monstrosity with my suggestions."

"There is one more thing," Remus told her. "You can shrink it down as small as you like, and if any of them go missing, they'll appear back here the next time that you want them."

Marissa smiled, staring at the gift in wonder. "This is...excessive, a tad," she finally managed to say.

"So, should I tell the boys it's all right to come down?" Remus asked hopefully, glancing at her sideways as if afraid to look at her directly.

"Tell them this is very sweet," Marissa replied after a long moment. She glanced down at the book in her hand, looking down as if she too didn't dare meet his eyes, "And also tell them that this time they obviously thought about what I would want instead of giving me something generic or that Sirius would love. They really do still know me." She sighed and closed her eyes, "Tell them any other offense and this would more than make up for it but...they traded my friendship too cheaply to buy it back, even for such an exorbitant price. They have to earn it a different way."

"And what way is that?" Remus asked, sounding very tired and more than a little annoyed. It was a tone that few had ever heard him use at all, especially with Marissa Fletcher. He had clearly thought that this would convince her, at long last, to forgive them. Even he had forgiven Sirius for the Willow incident. Why couldn't she let go?

"I don't know," Marissa admitted, and she was beginning to think the marauders incapable of figuring it out what it would take. "But they have to find some way of showing me that they value my friendship above some petty schoolboy grudge. They have no idea how much that hurt me, even now." Marissa didn't sound angry, as she had so often in the past two months. She sounded sad, hurt and very, very small. Then Remus realized, that was how they had made her feel. However James and Snape had handled the little that they told her about that night, they had somehow convinced her that James and Sirius had risked her friendship for something very small indeed.

James, Sirius and Peter, who had been hiding on the staircase leading to the Boys' Dormitory, turned around and marched back up to their room, frustrated with Marissa's stubbornness and their own stupidity.

~*~*~

"I couldn't believe she didn't forgive you after that," Lily Potter shook her head. "Then the next day, we found out she just wanted to torture you boys for one more night. I was so relieved."

"Actually, that's not why she forgave us the next day," James replied, surprised that he had never told Lily the true story. "Remus talked to her later that night."

~*~*~

"Riss," he called just as she started up the stairs. She turned around and faced him politely. "I want to talk to you about...what really happened that night."

"Remus," Marissa said, taking a few steps forward, "I told James and Severus that I didn't care about the details of what happened that night between them."

"Maybe you should," Remus replied, sounding uncertain and insanely nervous. But he was also grimly determined.

Marissa, for her part, was surprised and confused. About the only name that had been cleared in the garbled tales of that night was Remus's. Dumbledore had even told the prefects that Remus Lupin had only been suspended to spare him the initial fall-out. So what could he have to tell her to make him look guilty and nervous?

James and Sirius, who had been going down the stairs in search of Remus, found themselves frozen and crouched just out of sight on the stairs leading up to the Boys' Dormitory for the second time that day. "He's not seriously going to tell her!" Sirius hissed in shock, starting to move forward to stop him.

James threw out an arm to hold him back. "If he wasn't ready, he wouldn't be doing this," James told Sirius. Words could not express what he felt in that moment for Remus Lupin, knowing that he was about to tell a girl that he adored, was practically in love with, about his darkest secret. And why? So that she could forgive James Potter and Sirius Black for losing her her boyfriend. Maybe even help her find her way back into Snape's greasy arms.

"Come on, we'll light our badges and pretend we're patrolling," Remus said, ushering her out of the Portrait Hole.

The moment they heard the Portrait shut, Sirius said, "Cloak." They raced up the stairs and pried up the loose floorboard under which they hid the Invisibility Cloak. They were both under it and racing down the stairs (an odd sight as stray limbs inevitably peaked out from under it) and out of Gryffindor Tower in a few minutes time. "Where would they go?" Sirius hissed. "Not just any old empty classroom, right? Where would he consider safe?"

After several minutes of searching, James happened to look out the window and spotted two figures approaching the Whomping Willow. By the time that they caught up, hidden under the Cloak, Marissa and Remus were almost to the trap door.

"And this," Remus was telling her, "is about where James saved Snape's life." Marissa just stared at him mutely. "He came after him, at great personal risk, and pulled him back to safety."

"That's what made them decide they couldn't be at all connected with each other?" Marissa cried in consternation.

"Are you really surprised?" Remus asked, throwing up the trapdoor. He lifted himself up and extended his hand for hers.

She took it and let him pull her up into the unknown. She cast her lit wand once more around the dark tunnel even as she disappeared up. In darkness, the two boys scrambled to get up into the Shrieking Shack before the trapdoor closed.

"All right, Remus, you've shown me the secret knot on the Whomping Willow, which is apparently what Sirius told Severus about. You've told me that James saved his life and where, but you haven't told me where we're going or what Severus's life was in danger from down this tunnel. You haven't even assured me that we're not in danger from the same thing!"

"I promise, we're safe," Remus told her. James and Sirius noticed that Remus had not yet released Marissa's hand. Marissa seemed to notice it at the exact same moment. Seeing her glance, Remus dropped her hand instantly and looked away awkwardly.

Marissa looked around the room, taking in the beaten and broken furniture, the legless chairs and tables, the stuffing-less couches and pillows. "Why are we here, Remus?" she asked, turning back to face him.

Before he could answer, there was a tremendous crash from outside, and Marissa practically flew to where Remus was standing. "Relax," he told her calmly, obviously trying very hard not to hold her. He managed to give her a few pats on the back and then release her. "Nothing can get in to hurt us."

"How can you be so sure?" Marissa asked, looking thoroughly creeped out by her surroundings. She did not stray far from Remus.

"Because, Riss," Remus told her, leading her to the least dilapidated couch and sitting her down gently, "we're in the Shrieking Shack."

Although James and Sirius, to whom the Shack was practically a second home, applauded Remus's sense of drama, it was probably not the most comforting thing to say to Marissa at that moment. "Don't worry!" he cried an instant later when he realized his error. "It's not haunted, I swear!"

"How do you know?" Marissa demanded, trying to control her terrified reaction. It was all well and good to know that Nearly Headless Nick and other ghosts were friendly and almost comical at times. It was one thing to know that Peeves was mostly benign. It was another to shake off her Muggle upbringing and its ideas about ghosts.

"Because, I'm what makes the screams that the villagers hear once a month," Remus told her. There was a long pause after this statement. To his great but temporary relief, Remus saw only confusion in Marissa's eyes.

"I think you'd better start from the beginning, Remus," was all that she said.

So he did. As James and Sirius watched, unseen, Remus began a story that he had never fully told even them. "How much do you know about a man named Fenrir Grayback?"

"Voldemort's using him to threaten people's kids, right? Isn't that what Lizzie said was happening to her little sister? What is he, a molester or something?" Marissa's eyes went wide with horror the moment the words were out of her mouth. "He didn't-"

"Not anything like that," Remus assured her quickly. "Well, the thing about it is, Grayback isn't working for Voldemort as much as Voldemort's using him and providing him with ready prey. Grayback's been terrorizing for years."

"Remus, what-" Marissa started to interrupt.

"I'll get there, I promise," Remus cut her off, raising a hand to silence her protests. He took a deep breath before he began again, "My father was a born politician - I think I've told you that." Marissa nodded, looking confused but fixing her gaze on Remus. "Well, when he was rising through the ranks of the Ministry, he made a discovery about the high-ranking Auror in charge of finding and catching Fenrir Grayback. It turns out the man was helping him instead. He was apparently a believer in Grayback's cause. When my father exposed them, they swore revenge, and, well, it's always been Grayback's style to go after the children."

Remus had barely dared look at Marissa's face throughout this conversation. James and Sirius exchanged another look, wondering if it was too late to stop him after all. This was too much to ask. Marissa would forgive them eventually. "My parents, understandably, panicked," Remus started speaking again before they worked up the nerve to expose their location. "They were a little unwise about it, truthfully. I was too young to tell, of course, and much too young to stay tamely inside the house all the time. They should have just kept me homebound on the one night a month that Grayback was really dangerous, but they were afraid he'd kidnap me and keep me until then. So they played it safe. But...well, would your little brother have taken that well at the age of five?"

Remus, with obvious difficulty, forced himself to look up at her. "I snuck out of the house on precisely the wrong night. I was really old enough to know better than that, but the punishment inflicted on me was a little extreme for my fault. But in a way, I was lucky. If Grayback had sent one of his henchmen instead of coming to see me personally, I would probably be dead. But Grayback is a sort of specialist. He's possibly the only one who knows how to control himself enough not to kill his intended victim, just Bite him. You see, he sees it as his mission to make as many new werewolves as possible."

Remus lifted his shirt and revealed a large, hideous scar along his left side. Marissa reached out a tentative hand and touched it briefly. "Five years old," she whispered, shaking her head slightly. "Oh, Remus," she cried, suddenly grabbing his hand as she leaned forward, "please tell me you haven't been carrying this around by yourself this whole time! Please tell me you haven't been carrying this alone, trying to keep it to yourself all these years! It's too heavy for you to carry it by yourself!" She captured his gaze and held it, telling him fiercely, "Please tell me that those boys are helping you. Please tell me that you know you can tell them. Please tell me that they are..."

Remus was smiling. He seemed shocked at himself but unable to stop. "I didn't tell them," he said. Marissa immediately started to raise herself up in protest, but he grabbed the hand she was starting to wave in his face and added, "but they did figure it out on their own in second year."

"Well, good," Marissa declared decisively. Then she relaxed and settled back, leaning against the threadbare couch and Remus Lupin. "So how do they manage it?"

"Manage what?" Remus asked, giving her a brief look of awe and adoration before she returned her gaze to him. James and Sirius also regarded her in surprise and new respect. Even they hadn't handled their first interaction with Remus after figuring it out nearly that well, and they had thought that it would be cool to be a werewolf when they were twelve.

"Well, I know James and Sirius. They can never be satisfied until they've seen something," Marissa replied, not flinching even slightly as she sat against Remus. "And you'd never let them do it unsafely. Not with this. So how do they manage it? They must be keeping you company every month now. That would certainly explain many of your mysterious absences from Gryffindor Tower."

"They became Animagi," Remus told her without hesitating. Sirius looked very offended that he had given away their secret so freely, but James understood. At this moment, Remus Lupin would do anything for the girl who knew his secret and, a few seconds after finding out, had curled up against him. He would tell her anything if she would just keep talking to him as if nothing had changed.

"Really?" Marissa sounded impressed. "What animals?"

"Can't you guess?" Remus teased.

"James is a hippopotamus!" she shouted immediately, sitting up and thrusting her hand into the air as if answering a question in class. Remus burst out laughing, and Sirius nearly did too. James grimaced at her unseen.

"And Sirius is a poodle," she continued, smiling mischievously at her effect on Remus. Her unseen audience switched positions. Now James doubled up in silent laughter and Sirius bristled in anger. "And Peter's a bunny."

"All very good guesses," Remus told her between chortles.

"Actually, you probably should buy a rabbit, Remus," Marissa told him. "Most people think James is talking about a pet when he refers to your 'furry little problem.'"

"I'll consider that," Remus said, throwing caution to the wind and throwing his arm around her. Marissa seemed to automatically lean back against him, laying her head on his shoulder.

"Do," she said simply. They were quiet for a moment, just resting against each other. Then Marissa spoke again in a small voice, "Why did you tell me all of this tonight, Remus?"

James and Sirius, who had been plotting how they could escape out the trapdoor, perked up at this. Remus took a moment before answering, then explained, "You said that the reason you couldn't forgive them was that you thought James and Sirius had betrayed your friendship for nothing more than a petty schoolboy grudge. I thought that you needed to know that they were protecting something very big when they put that pressure on Snape. It wasn't even that they put my friendship ahead of yours. Another friend was in greater need than you at the time. That's the only choice that they made, not their friendship with you or their hatred for Snape."

Marissa absorbed this for a moment. Then she burst out with, "Merlin, they were stupid though!" She shook her head, looking disbelieving. "What was Sirius thinking? I really thought that this was some stupid prank that got out of control, but damn. What the bloody hell was Sirius thinking?"

James expected Sirius to make another dive forward, but he just hung his head. James patted him on the back. The kid had definitely messed up, but few had ever been more penitent - with regards to the trouble he could have caused Remus. "I mean, really," Marissa continued, "he was even stupider than James! I didn't think that was possible after how he and Snape acted that morning!" A similar pallor fell over James's features, especially when he thought how Marissa would think him more noble than he was. He could have kept Snape quiet without demanding that choice of Riss. In fact, he might have made the situation worse. Snape had, after all, tried to tell the whole school.

"Yes, they were," Remus agreed, "but James did it to protect a friend. Sirius too, really. I think he knew that Snape was close to figuring it out. He wanted him to find out in a way that would scare the pants off of him and keep him from using it to blackmail me. He was stupid, but he always has a method - however flawed - to his madness."

"They're basically good, I suppose," Marissa admitted grudgingly, but the smile on her face betrayed her.

"They're some of the best ones," Remus agreed. "But then I knew that from the moment that they told me that they knew. At twelve, I knew they would be something someday, when they had the courage to befriend a werewolf."

"It's not so hard when the werewolf is you," she said quietly, closing her eyes as her head slid to Remus's lap. James and Sirius sincerely hoped she wasn't going to go to sleep on top of him. They really wanted to get back to Gryffindor Tower tonight.

"So what are your real guesses?" Remus asked a moment later. "You don't really think that James's Animagus form is a hippopotamus, right?"

"What, you don't think that a hippo is a valid guess?" Marissa asked cheekily but sleepily, not opening her eyes. "All right," she conceded after a moment, "I actually think that Sirius might be a dog. Obviously not a poodle, but perhaps more like a Great Dane. Something big and noble. And inbred. I suppose he could be a lab. Something that will make all the girls want to pet him, which I don't doubt he has taken full advantage of throughout the years."

James had to hold his hand over Sirius's mouth to keep him from letting out a bark of laughter. "James would have to be something fast, but graceful, like the way he flies. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he were a bird. But maybe something more like a leopard or a tiger, but then again I don't really see him as a cat - even the great cats. Maybe a lion."

"The Gryffindor thing?" and from his voice, it was clear that Remus was beginning to nod off to sleep too.

"I was thinking the mane is more showy," Marissa murmured quietly, letting out a tremendous yawn. "He'd need something a little flashy, and then the messy hair could carry over." She shifted her position slightly, obviously getting comfortable for a long stay. Sirius and James tried not to groan. "Peter is something small, not immediately noticeable. He's the one you boys send ahead as a scout in difficult missions, so he'd be something good for gathering information. Something wily too, maybe a small breed of cat...or even a mouse."

"Much closer than your last guesses," Remus smiled, leaning his head back against the back of the couch. They talked a little more throughout the rest of the night, but the pauses got longer and longer until James and Sirius despaired of getting back to the Tower that night. It was clear that Remus and Marissa were going to fall asleep on the couch in the Shrieking Shack.

~*~*~

In the common room the next afternoon, Marissa walked up behind James and Sirius who were sitting by the fire playing chess. She simply stood behind them looking stern with her arms crossed over her chest for a long moment. Finally, she said with obvious difficulty, "I liked the books."

"I knew it!" Sirius crowed, immediately turning around to face her with a fierce grin on his face.

"I do have one question," she said when James also turned around to face her, smiling. "Why are they blue?"

"Because your bookishness is your Ravenclaw side coming out," Sirius replied immediately.

"Why you!" Marissa cried, smacking him in the arm with the book in her hand.

Sirius only grinned at James. "See? I told you that the cushioning charm on the books was a good idea in case she started throwing them at us." Then he removed his left arm from the sling that had cradled it ever since his return to the Castle. "Now I can take this stupid thing off!"

"You've been pretending to be injured so that I would feel sorry for you!" Marissa shouted at him, gaping at him in shock and anger.

"Took long enough to work!" Sirius hollered back. "And I'm also vastly amused that no one even questioned it all this time. I just grabbed it on the train ride back, and no one even wondered, barely even asked."

"Why you!" Marissa shouted, launching herself at Sirius who just picked her up and swung her around. He set her down and held her at arms length by her forehead. She swung at him ineffectually for a few minutes.

"Oh no you don't, Fletcher," he told her. "I just got done faking an injury. You're not going to give me a real one!"

~*~*~

"He never told me about it," Lily remarked, "even years later."

"He never told anyone," James corrected, "except her. Everyone else had to figure it out on their own." He sighed. "It was one of the most selfless, generous acts I've ever seen a friend do for anyone, much less for me," James told his wife seriously. He stared at the flames in the fire as if the key to clearing the Lupins' names lay within them.

Lily took his hand and squeezed it gently. This was as hard for her as it was for him. She was a member of the Gryffindor Six too, and she and Marissa had shared the smallest room in the tower for seven years. She knew Marissa better than she knew her own sister. But she also knew that this was a moment when she had to be strong for her husband, as he had so often been strong for her. She had to help him see that this was the only way that they could know that Harry was safe.

After a moment, she thought of the right memory. "You remember the day that Harry was born?" she asked with a fond smile down at her son. "Two weeks early and just in time to mark him from the very beginning?"

"And you insisted on going to a Muggle hospital so that we could wipe the records and move his birthday back a few weeks, or days, or even hours later when we told the Ministry," James added. "So you didn't have any relief from the labor pains. You took it all out on my right hand, instead. It still hurts sometimes."

"Oh, poor you," Lily rolled her eyes sarcastically. "I'll try to be more considerate the next time that I'm in labor with your children."

"All right, sorry," James said quickly. "You got revenge by hogging him during that whole time that we got with him before the nurses took him for cleaning."

"If they had waited any longer, you would have gotten him," Lily told him. "I wouldn't have had the strength left to hold him much longer after thirty-nine hours of labor."

~*~*~

At 11:59 on July 31^st, 1980, Lily Potter gave a yell loud enough to be heard in the Waiting Room by two anxious Marauders. Trying to dispel their worry, Sirius remarked that she was probably shouting right in James's ear to punish him for his part in her long, long suffering. Following suit, Peter wondered aloud if all of the windows in the hospital were a little nervous, certain that the next one would be shrill and loud enough to shatter glass.

They were half right. Lily had been taking a lot of her pain out on James in the past two days. But in a few more seconds, it would all be worth it.

Indeed, neither of his parents thought anything of their suffering when Harry James Potter was born, just as the seventh month died.

His mother flopped back onto the bed in exhaustion. Her hair was wet with sweat, the veins stood out in her forehead, her face was a sickly pale and her eyes were bloodshot. To James, she had never looked more beautiful. He knew that that was a terribly corny thing to think at that moment, but he couldn't help it. She was the strongest woman that he had ever met. He pushed a few strands of sweaty hair that had fallen into her face back behind her ears. She opened her weary eyes and smiled weakly at him. "How is he?" she whispered tiredly.

It was difficult to imagine her only having enough energy for such a soft voice when only a few seconds ago she had been filling the room (and several of those beyond it) with her screams. "The Healers-"

"Doctors," she corrected quietly.

"Are giving him a quick once over," James answered, not taking his eyes from her.

Lily smiled at him lovingly as she whispered, "How can you look at me? How can you look at me when Harry's right over there?"

"He's coming over," James answered, taking her hand in his and kissing it.

Lily smiled more widely. "We have a baby, James." She squeezed his hand weakly. "Thank you."

"You sure weren't thanking me a minute ago," James laughed. Then a nurse came up behind him and Lily looked up over his head to the small bundle in the woman's arms.

"I am now," she said in a voice full of wonder as the nurse lowered the tiny baby into his mother's arms. She looked as if she were going to cry. She breathed deeply and blinked rapidly, then opened her eyes and stared at her son. He was, actually, a little red and squished up, but he had a small mat of black hair on his head.

He was still crying loudly when the nurse placed him in Lily Potter's arms, but she held him close and watched in fascination. James Potter watched in awe as his wife calmed the tiny person that had just come out of her. "Hello, Harry," she whispered, giving him a gentle kiss on the top of his head. "You look just like your father. All scrunched and dirty."

James laughed and kissed his wife on the top of her head. She had just given birth to his firstborn son, and she could say whatever she wanted to about him. Harry's eyes, which had been closed as he was crying, opened. James smiled broadly and declared proudly, "But he'll have your eyes, Lils. Just look at them, they're beautiful."

"They're blue," Lily laughed.

"All babies start out blue. They're the same shape, so they'll be the same color," James said firmly.

"I'll let you two decide that in a minute," the nurse said, starting to reach for the baby. Lily looked most reluctant. The nurse obviously had a great deal of experience with this. "I'm sorry, but I've got to take him now. You'll be able to see him soon, I promise, but I suggest you get some rest or you won't be able to hold him."

"But James hasn't even been able to hold him yet," Lily complained on his behalf.

The nurse smiled slightly, "All right, if you don't need him to stay with you, your husband can carry him down part of the way." James stood and very seriously, an expression rarely seen on his face, took the small bundle from Lily's arms. He looked so scared as he held him; he was so careful in the way he balanced him, stiffening as if afraid to hurt him.

Lily actually laughed. "You're not going to break him, James." James could only stare down at his son in amazement. His son. The nurse led him out of the room.

James looked back at his wife at the door. "How did you do this, Lils?" he whispered reverently. It was the most perfect moment of his life, but nearly as fragile as the baby in his arms. Voldemort would be after this precious treasure and try to take it from him very soon. This was a very brief peace, but all the more precious because of it's brevity.

For now, the world was calm and beautiful. For now, that was enough. Lily was almost asleep already, dropping off in exhaustion. "I'm never speaking to you again, by the way," she said groggily to her husband.

James smiled even more broadly, "I've heard that before."

~*~*~

As if he knew that his parents were talking about him, Harry babbled a bit of baby talk and clapped his hands together. After marveling to each other that they had the most adorable baby ever, Lily continued her plan, "I think Sirius was more nervous than you were. Peter too. He arrived at the hospital five minutes after us. Sirius outdid him though, he was there five minutes before us. He had us checked in and gotten the wheelchair ready."

"Most of the nurses thought that he was the father," James laughed but automatically tightened his hold on Lily's shoulders.

"But Peter couldn't track down Riss and Remus," Lily added gently. "All thirty-nine hours I was in labor he was looking for them, but they weren't home or at work or anywhere else he could think of. Then, almost the moment Harry was born, Sirius spots them walking out of the hospital."

"They said Marissa had had a treatment there," James picked up the much more unpleasant narrative, "but it wasn't the hospital she had told us. They did switch a lot in those days, but the doctors didn't remember them. She and Remus had that little spat about him erasing doctors' memories again, but it didn't seem to make any sense."

"No more than ten minutes later, the Death Eaters arrived. If Sirius hadn't seen them use the Imperius Curse on the nurse at the front desk..." Lily shuddered involuntarily and James held her even more tightly.

"It still wasn't safe to move you, we had to hide you in the hospital until you had gotten some rest," James remembered, his voice tight. "Harry too, we needed the doctors to check him out and clean him up before we could all escape. Thank Merlin for Sirius. He single-handedly led them on a two hour wild goose chase."

"Thank Merlin for Sirius," Lily echoed.

"Thank Merlin for me!" Sirius agreed, bounding into the room, "especially since you two are obviously slipping. Normally, I'd already be dead if I tried a surprise entrance like that."

"We heard your footsteps," James told him truthfully.

"We recognized your bouncing little gait, too. No self-respecting Death Eater would skip into a house he was attacking," Lily added.

"You two think you're so clever," Sirius complained, throwing himself into an armchair facing them.

"Think?" they replied in unison.

Sirius gave them a look and threw his feet up on the ottoman. To Lily, he always looked a little uncomfortable when he tried to relax his posture. James knew he was uncomfortable and probably always would be when he was slouching. It was a coping mechanism for him, however, so neither of them ever commented on it. It was the same with his love life. He dated so deliberately wildly and unsteadily as if to thumb his nose at his upbringing.

"You're early, Padfoot," James remarked. "A dangerous move if you were worried about our finely toned instincts."

"Nah, I knew you'd never attack me," Sirius waved that away. "I came because I wanted to talk to you. You see, I've been doing some thinking, and I think we got it wrong."

"The last time you said that Lily wouldn't speak to me for almost two years," James told him.

"She spoke to you," Sirius replied, "very loudly, if I recall. She only gave you the cold shoulder until the Defense O.W.L., then she was yelling at you all the time."

"Well, I did fancy myself in love with Sirius," Lily remarked with a smile, setting down the squirming Harry, who crawled eagerly over to his Uncle Sirius.

"And she's apparently still punishing me for it!" James cried in mock dismay, pulling Lily closer as Sirius swung Harry up into his lap and started making faces at him. Lily gave her husband a quick kiss to reassure him before turning back to Sirius.

"Even if it caused some inconveniences, my judgment was proved right in the end, wasn't it?" Sirius replied, eyeing them suggestively. "You may have been mad at James for two years, but once you let the way I handled it go, you were happy I broke up with you, right?"

"That's true," Lily conceded, snuggling up against her husband. James leaned down and kissed her again.

"All right, that's enough demonstration," Sirius told them, sticking out his tongue for Harry's amusement.

"Since when are you queasy?" James asked, turning around to face his best friend. "For two years after the Love Triangle gone wrong you were telling me that I should just walk up to her and kiss her. Now, when that's not a horrible idea, you don't like it when I kiss my wife?"

Sirius just shook his head. "The point, which I am trying very hard to make, for once," he continued in a more serious voice as he crossed his eyes at Harry, "is that I happen to be right much more often than you two give me credit for and that, as this is a very delicate situation, I think you should hear me out." It was very difficult to take him seriously when he was making faces at Harry.

They tried anyway. "What do you think we're getting wrong in the plan, Sirius?" Lily asked. "Should we use Dumbledore instead of you? We have considered it, knowing that Voldemort would never be able to capture him, but he's so busy and we'd have to bother him for every little thing..."

"No, I think you've got it right steering clear of Dumbledore," Sirius told her, "and not just for the diplomatic reasons that you've stated." They all exchanged an awkward smile. "We don't need him convincing you to put the weight of the entire world on Harry's wee shoulders," Sirius continued. "If our esteemed Headmaster is one of the only people that you can talk to, he might pull it off."

"Even if it's true, I don't want my son growing up in the shadow of that prophecy," Lily said almost heatedly. "Alice feels the same way. I wish no one knew about it."

"We'd certainly have a lot less problems," James agreed. "But what do you think that we should change, Padfoot? Do you think that we're wrong not to trust Remus and Marissa?" The hope in James's eyes and in his heart was almost heartbreaking for his wife and his best friend to see. It was the same hope in their own hearts. It nearly killed them to crush it out of James, even more than to push it out of themselves.

"I wish that I did, Prongs," Sirius told him sadly and seriously. "You have no idea how much I wish that I did." Because Harry had started to pout when the silly faces were removed, Sirius rolled his eyes again and stuck out his tongue. "But I think," he said while making a fish-face at the baby, "that you should change your Secret Keeper. I've already talked to Peter."

"Sirius, we can't ask Peter," Lily said.

"You haven't, I did," Sirius returned. "Think about it, James. Voldemort is sure to come after me. He'll know that you would choose me. I'd never, ever betray you. He could torture me and I'd never say anything, but as we all know after the Galloway incident, I'm not impossible to trick." He put the squirming Harry down on the floor so that he could look at James and Lily seriously, "I'd never forgive myself if I let the three of you get hurt. Voldemort is human, but he's also the devil. There's nothing the devil is better at than tricking people with good intentions into doing something careless, stupid, and terrible."

"Is this still about the Willow incident, Padfoot?" James said after a moment. "Because you've grown up since then, matured monumentally. You'll never do anything like that to a friend again. We trust you with our lives."

"Then trust me," Sirius said. "Say Voldemort does all of what I just said...and even if he manages to trick me, the joke's on him. Because Peter's the Secret Keeper all along. He'd never expect it."

"Sirius..." James started to say. He looked up and met his friend's eyes for a long moment.

In your eyes, I wanted to see certainty. I wanted you to look me in the eyes and tell me that you knew beyond a doubt. That would be enough for me to decide. So I saw it, even when later I wasn't sure if it was really there.

"Please, Prongs, trust me on this," Sirius said. "Let me protect you not just with my life. Let me protect you from my own stupidity. We all know that I have my moments. We all know that I've been tricked. We all know that you two once ended up nearly getting killed by Voldemort because of it. Please, let me protect you from myself. I couldn't live with the fact that I hurt you because I had been stupid, because I had let myself be tricked."

Lily and James looked at each other for a moment. "Is Peter really all right with this?" Lily asked him.

"Yes," Sirius replied. "He can tell you himself when he gets here."

"Okay then," James told Sirius. "We'll put our lives in the hands of both of our best friends." A strange silence fell over their group after that statement. They had expected to feel relieved when the decision weighing on them had finally been made. Instead they only felt empty. They had finally, after months and years of looking at their friends sideways, turned their backs on them.

Lily picked up Harry from the floor and clutched him to her. James put his arm around both of them, holding onto them protectively. Sirius sat watching over the Potters, determined that nothing would ever happen to them again. Not on his watch. They said nothing else until Peter arrived.

When he did arrive, they still said very little. The Potters drew themselves close together and Peter stood in front of them. Sirius stayed to witness the enchantment, standing just to the side.

"Make sure that you tell me where this one is before he has too much fun tripping me when I can't see him," Sirius joked, jabbing an accusing finger at James. James Potter laughed and snagged his wife around the waist. "You know, it would be an unfair advantage to attack me when I can't find you."

"No promises," James laughed again.

"I'll keep him from getting out of hand," Lily promised, smiling now too, glad that some of the tension had been relieved.

"Marissa was the only one who ever had that power," Peter said, then practically clamped a hand over his mouth. "Once," he amended just a split second too late to do any good.

There was another awkward moment. James felt like his heart would break. Then he looked down at his beautiful wife and son who were depending on him to protect them, who trusted him and loved him as he had never thought he deserved to be trusted and loved. He looked over at Sirius and Peter, the two friends that had been his partners in crime since he was eleven years old. He smiled at all of them, knowing that he would never again feel as he felt in this moment. This was the perfect moment of his life, with the four people for whom he would die.

"Cast the charm, Lils," he said quietly but firmly.

As she did, James could only watch, one by one, the faces that he loved so much in awe.

In your eyes, I am worth dying for.

That night, James had a dream. As he lay down his head without the slightest worry for the first time since before Harry was born, he fell asleep without a second thought to check the house one more time for threats. He did not keep one eye open, sleeping fitfully.

Instead, he threw himself into the long neglected world of his dreams and found himself back in the Chocolate Room at Hogwarts. He was eleven again and dumping a bowl of chocolate sauce over the head of Marissa Fletcher, who responded by laughing and shoving a gooey piece of cake into his face. He looked across the room and saw Sirius and Peter sneaking up behind Lily and Remus, who were busy spraying whipped cream at each other. A moment later, the boys managed to pour a gigantic tub of batter on top of them.

He looked back at Marissa as he had all those years ago, but she had been replaced by a seventeen year old Lily Evans, standing there looking vaguely angry with her hands crossed over her chest. He looked down and saw the note that had appeared in his hands. He read aloud, "Here's hoping you can still work out your differences like when you were eleven. You have, after all, been acting like eleven-year-olds lately. Riss and Padfoot." He shook his head, crumbling up the note. "Well, isn't that just like them," he said in annoyance, "thinking that all of our issues could be worked out with a food fight. I mean really-"

He had stopped when Lily smashed a piece of chocolate cake into his face. She bounced away, laughing, but he was after her. Grabbing a bowl of chocolate sauce, he dumped it on top of her head. She retaliated by throwing a bowl filled with whipped cream back behind her at him. She squealed as he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off her feet. He spun her around then set her down again. They were both laughing wildly as she turned around to face him, probably to get a better aim for the gooey mess in her hand. However, when their eyes met, they suddenly realized how very close they were.

James couldn't breathe or move, and he certainly couldn't relax the grip that he still had on Lily's waist. "Merlin, I've missed you, James," she said, sounding out of breath. Then she kissed him. All James remembered thinking at the time was that Lily tasted even sweeter than the chocolate that they had been throwing at each other.

But that moment too pulled away and he was standing on the Grounds outside the Lake. He looked up at the Astronomy Tower and could just make out the six of them sitting on the roof eating breakfast on Marissa's eighteenth birthday. He looked to the right and saw Marissa disarming Snape when he had whirled on them after their Defense O.W.L. He looked to the left and saw the four of them emerging in their animal forms from the Whomping Willow. He looked forward and saw the six of them burst out of the Castle doors after their last N.E.W.T. and run toward the Lake, throwing off their heavy robes and hats as they went. They ran splashing into the water, Marissa throwing off the wig that she had worn all year to reveal an inch of natural blonde hair, and proceeded to celebrate their last exam at Hogwarts.

The James watching them splash each other and laugh wildly felt insanely jealous of the James who was dunking Remus's head under the water. He watched as Remus helped Marissa back up onto the shore just ahead of everyone else. He was almost overpowered with longing for the day when all of them had sat out, drying in the sun, and remembering what it had been like to spend seven years together in that Castle.

But already they were far away. Already he was squinting to catch a glimpse of the happy, whole group across the Lake. Then, somehow, he was outside of the Hogwarts gates, and they had slammed shut in his face with a tremendous clang. He looked around and saw Marissa and Remus standing on the far end of the road. He called to them, but they turned and walked away. He looked and saw Lily coming up the road from the opposite direction. She placed Harry in his arms and took his free hand.

James cast one last look back at the Castle, but he saw only an old ruin.