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Snogging With My Mates


Remus tried very hard to stay out of everything and anything pertaining to the Valentine tea that was going on in Gryffindor common room on Valentine’s Day… which would have worked quite well until James and Sirius took over the dormitory, getting ready. He kept his nose firmly planted in a textbook as he sat on his bed, ignoring it as James and Sirius poked at one another. He especially hated it when Sirius stood before the mirror at the end of his bed taking an inexplicable amount of time poking and pulling at his hair, slicking it back and trying to get it all perfect. Every time his hands went through it, Remus felt like the air was being vacuum packed out of his lungs and he adjusted his book, raising it up on his knees, to keep from being able to see Sirius at all.

“Do I look alright, mate?” James asked, nudging Peter, who was sitting on his bed flicking through a book also, though not with anywhere near the immersion that Remus was doing (and not for the same reason, either).

Peter stared up at him, “Well your hair’s a bit messy,” he said, “I’m sure Sirius could give you some of the excess of Sleekeazy he’s got smeared about in his hair if you’re out.”

“Oi. I need every drop that’s in it,” Sirius announced. “Have you seen my hair? It’s unruly!”

It’s perfect, thought Remus.

“Besides that, mine is supposed to be messy,” James said. “Like I’ve just come off the Quidditch pitch. That’s what all the witches like.”

Peter shrugged, “Then… yeah, I s’pose you look good. I dunno.”

“You’re useless… Hey Rey,” James called. “Rey, what do you think? Do I look good?”

“Why are you asking me? How would I know?” Remus asked, a little bit of a panic to his voice.

Sirius turned around, “You have eyes don’t you, Rey?” he asked, laughing.

“I - I mean, I dunno anymore than Peter knows if - if a boy looks good.”

James rolled his eyes, “Well imagine what a witch might think if she looked at me!” he said.

Blimey is he a prat,” said Sirius in a high pitched voice, imitating Lily. James chucked a pillow from his bed at Sirius and the question was forgotten as Sirius bellowed out, “WATCH IT! I’ve just spent an hour making this mane look presentable, don’t you go messing it up with your bloody pillow!”

They spent a good deal more time preparing - Sirius changing from his Deep Purple t-shirt to his Rolling Stone shirt and back to Deep Purple, unable to decide which band Marlene might appreciate more.

“Does she like Deep Purple?” Peter asked.

“SHE BETTER!” Sirius shouted. “Everyone should like Deep Purple. Bloody hell.”

Finally, they were ready to go - Sirius had decided on his Creedence t-shirt after all the debate about Deep Purple - and they stood by the door. “How do we look, last chance to fix anything glaringly wrong with us,” Sirius said.

“Well that’s a loaded offer,” laughed Peter, “Can’t change out your faces, can we?”

James reached for the pillow to throw again but Sirius caught him and stopped him from diving. “Alright, calm yourself down,” Sirius said. He looked over at Remus and Peter.

Peter said, “You look like quite a pair.”

James grinned, “We are. We’re a very tight pair… you can’t hardly tell us apart any longer.” He looked at Sirius. At the moment, they literally could not have looked more different - James with his unruly, pseudo-windblown look and Sirius all slicked back and perfected. James with his nice button up shirt and tweed jacket; Sirius with his Creedence tee, ripped jeans and leather jacket… “We’re sort of hybrids of one another by now,” James said, looking them both over.

Sirius grinned, “Yes, you see, I’m Jirius and he’s Sirames.”

James grinned, “Brilliant! We ought to get that trademarked.”

“We’ll have t-shirts made,” Sirius agreed.

The dorm room was quite peaceful once the two of them had gone off and their voices faded down the stairs. Remus let out a streaming sigh, tossing the textbook down. He hadn’t comprehended even a single word of what he’d been reading for the past hour and he threw himself back into his pillow.

Peter looked over. “It must be nice.”

“What?” Remus asked, rubbing his eyes, trying to recall the spell for headache alleviation.

“To be popular enough to have a girl agree to go to something like this with you,” Peter said quietly.

Remus glanced over at him. “Did you ask somebody?”

Peter looked down at his book. “Well… sort of.”

“What did she say?”

“She said yes at first.”

Remus sat up. “And then?”

“Well… well then James asked her and she… changed her mind.”

“You asked Annalee McKinnon to be your Valentine?” Remus asked, sitting up, looking at Peter in shock. “Really?”

Peter nodded. “I figured I’d better before this bravery streak I’ve had lately runs out. I never thought she would say yes. And then she did… but then James asked her and she said yes to him, too…” Peter’s cheeks turned red, “She didn’t even tell me. I only found out because of James bragging about the common room last night that she’d said yes.”

Remus frowned, “Well that’s not very nice of her.” He shook his head. “Guess we’re just a couple of lonely bachelors, Pete.”

Peter nodded. “How about you? Did you ask anybody, Rey?”

Remus shook his head, “Nawh. I didn’t bother.”

“I reckon anybody in the school would say yes to you, though, you’re so nice,” Peter said. “Everybody knows you’re brilliant, too, and you’re not bad looking… even with the scar.”

“While I apreciate the lie, I beg to differ with you, mate,” Remus said, “Not anybody would’ve said yes if I asked and unfortunately I’ve a feeling the person I wanted to ask would’ve been one of the biggest nos there ever was.”

Peter shrugged, “You never know.” He paused. “Was it Lily Evans again that you wanted to ask?”

Remus shook his head. “Nawh.”

They fell silent, just sitting there thinking about their personal misfortunes. Finally, after quite a long while, Peter said, “Rey. I’m gonna run down to the kitchen and get us some butterbeers and lava cakes. I think we’ve deserved it, yeah?”

“That sounds good, Peter.”

Remus watched as Peter ducked out the dormitory door and he shook his head. Who knew that little Peter Pettigrew had been harboring an interest in Annalee McKinnon all this time? Rey certainly hadn’t noticed. Then again, he realized, there was quite a lot about Peter that they didn’t notice. Like, for instance, there was a photograph of his sister on his nightstand and the book on his bed was a copy of a Hardy Boys detective novel.

Remus made a mental note to be sure to pay more attention to Peter in the future.




Meanwhile, downstairs in the Great Hall, James and Sirius had found their dates and led them to a couple tables in the corner, which they quickly pushed together so it was one big square with four seats. Marlene and Annalee shared a look, but neither complained. The boys sat side by side facing their dates, and tea and little finger sandwiches appeared on the table the moment they’d settled.

“Blimey the service is fast,” said Sirius.

“Yeah, impressive,” said James, nodding. “If only it had provided something more appetizing than… what is this stuff?”

“Cucumber sandwiches,” said Marlene. “They’re dainty. Good for tea.”

“Tea makes me think of biscuits,” said James.

“Mmm, yeah, biscuits with a bit of blackberry jam, yeah?” Sirius said, grinning.

“I was thinking orange marmalade, but blackberry jam works, too,” James said, nodding.

Annalee looked at Marlene, then turned to look at James and Sirius and said, “So the next Quidditch game’s coming up soon. Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, isn’t it?”

“Yup!” James nodded, “Sure is. We’re going to kick some eagle butt.”

“Do eagles have butts?” Sirius asked.

“They have tails, so they must have butts,” replied James matter-of-factly. As he answered, he looked to the left of their table and there was Lily and Severus Snape, just arriving. Severus went ‘round and pulled the chair out for Lily and waited for her to sit before he went to his own seat and their tea and cucumber sandwiches appeared. For a moment, James couldn’t tear his eyes off them as Severus leaned over and poured Lily her first cup of tea.

Marlene cleared her throat, “So you must be practicing extra hard then, right?”

“Oh loads,” James said, nodding. “You lot were out on the pitch there for the last one. I saw you.”

“Yeah, we fancied to watch you lot play… You’re very good, everyone thinks so,” Annalee said and she looked all doe-eyed at James, who grinned heartily.

“Well,” he said, his voice a bit louder than it really needed to be, “They don’t just give trophies to nobodies, do they? And I have a trophy in the Trophy Hall for my part as Seeker in the tourney against Illvermorny last term...”

Sirius laughed, “You don’t say? You’ve never mentioned having a Trophy before. For Quidditch you, say? Blimey.” He looked at Annalee and Marlene, “I swear he’s never spoken of the trophy in all the time I’ve known him.” Sirius’s eyes glittered with sarcasm.

James was glancing at Lily Evans.

Sirius elbowed him to keep him focused.

James nodded and took a sip of his tea.

And it was as James was glancing over toward her that he spotted Severus Snape pull a vial of something from one of his pockets and, distracting Lily with a question about some girl, he reached over and poured the contents of the vial into Lily’s teacup. The cup sparked a little, hissed, and a strong scent of vanilla and strawberries poured forth from the table. He blinked, watching as Snape recorked the vial and tucked it back in his pocket before Lily had finished answering his question and turned back.

“Bloody hell --” James said, and without thinking, he stood up, interrupting a story Marlene was telling that he hadn’t even heard a word of. She looked startled when his chair scraped across the stone floor.

Sirius grabbed James’s tweed jacket by the wrist, “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“He’s poisoning her,” James said.

“What?” Marlene and Annalee looked across the hall the way James was looking at Lily.

“He’s just put something in her drink.”

Sirius looked concerned but Annalee waved it off, “Oh give it a reset, Potter, Lily’s fine. Sev’s her boyfriend and he’s always making up flavored elixirs for their drinks. He made her raspberry soda last week!”

James sat back down slowly, warily watching as Lily drank the cup, wanting to go and slap it out of her hands. “I dunno, he did it really fishy-like. He distracted her, then put it in.”

“Maybe it’s a surprise?” Marlene suggested, though she sounded just as doubtful as James felt.

James watched, on the edge of his seat, ready to scoop Lily up and run her clear across the castle to Madam Pomfrey’s if he had to. But she lowered the tea cup without any complications - in fact, she seemed quite pleased by whatever it was in the cup for she seemed to melt into it and stared up at Severus with wide eyes, blinking like some sort of newborn fawn or something. James finally turned away, unable to stand looking at her while she looked at Snape like that…

All in all the date went quite rocky. As it probably should be expected to if one of the two of them was paying more attention to the happenings at another table, and the other spent the rest of the time trying to overcompensate for his friend’s lack of active participation by becoming more and more hyper from nervous energy…

By the time the tea was over, Annalee said, “I’m going to walk Marlene back to Ravenclaw… You lot don’t need to wait.” She grabbed Marlene McKinnon and dragged her off down the hallway.

“Bye,” said Sirius weakly, waving as the pair of them walked swiftly away, heads together and whispering. He turned to James, smacking his hand against his forehead, “That was awful.”

“I think it’s Valentine’s day in general that’s awful,” James said, “All that misery we went through with the coin toss and that… For this? I want my knut back!”

“It was my knut actually,” Sirius said, “And you owe it back to me, seeing as you hucked it down the air vent.”

James laughed, “I’ll give you a galleon if you throw in never mentioning this horrible tea to me ever again.”

Sirius laughed, “Deal.”

They walked along through the castle in silence. Then, “It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could’ve got Lily to say yes.”

“Yeah…You know, I imagine it’s a lot more fun when you’re looking forward to snogging after,” Sirius said. “Maybe we should’ve made prearrangements for them to snog us. Everything’s better after a proper snogging.”

“Well that ship has sailed,” said James, waving his arm into the air in front of him to indicate a ship heading into the sunset, “Seeing as I’m not snogging with you and I’m willing to bet the other two lads aren’t either.”

Sirius laughed, “I have no plans of snogging with my mates, don’t you worry, Potter.”

They’d reached the Gryffindor common room and they stood before the portrait of the Fat Lady and Sirius was just about to give her the password when James looked over at him. “We’re telling Rey and Pete we snogged the girls, though, right? So they don’t think we’re pathetic?”

“Oh of course,” Sirius replied.

“Okay, good,” James nodded.