Sirius writes a book review, after a fashion.

If it's Remus and Sirius, then somehow it's okay.

How it happened, from beginning to end, from the man who started it all.

He tells himself he’s healing because it sounds healthy and well-adjusted and like him, and James has stopped showing up to contradict him.

In a house in Godric's Hollow, three boys toss their magic around and a little girl dies…unless.

"Come on," John said, "You can't tell me no one's ever thought to try that."

“Get up, John,” Sherlock says, in a tone that has John jerking upright in bed, immediately, and grappling for his gun in his bedside drawer, even as he says, “Sherlock, what is it?”

Incomprehensibly, Sherlock simply says, “Voldemort.”

NEED-

-e.l. icicles
-explo. snowb. globes (legal???)
-tenenbaum treacle
-HONEYDUKES, raid at
-Carol Card f/Mum
-tree? appro. trimmings? garland???
-green
-lights (candles, pixies, fire, etc.)
-exploding things in gen.

and also

-hairclips (sparkly kind, green, f/LE)

In which Sirius Black knows more than he ever wanted to.

Repeat after me, Mr. Black: I do believe in commas. I do, I do.

Infallible? Me? Come on. He had to be kidding. Only someone clearly off their rocker would put the likes of me up on a pedestal.

James tried to find the words, but nothing came. How in the hell are you supposed to explain to a drunk girl that garden gnomes aren't pets?

It's always the same two words that start it. "Nicked it," James says, a lazy smile tugging at his lips.

"The bad news is that I think I might have fallen ridiculously, head-over-heels, Prongs-for-Lily, nauseatingly in love with you. The worse news is that it took Marlene McKinnon's lips to tell me that."

In which Sirius is possibly naked, and Remus' mind is not the safest place to be.

He raised the Elder Wand up to touch his temple. Carefully, with a sobriety usually reserved for death and its cousins, he drew out a long string of silvery, wispy memories and deposited them just as carefully into the stone basin. Phineas Nigellus narrowed his eyes, trying to see what now swirled in the ancient basin. It was no use; all he could make out was a flash of golden curls and a wide, confident smile.

Have the guilt and horror caught up with you? I daresay that Malfoy might be slightly displeased to know where his little Cissy-darling was last night and who she was with.

It is twenty-five years since I first saw you. Your ill health, Albus Dumbledore.

Remus was really astoundingly drunk. Impressively, astonishingly drunk, with a side of bastard to go with the mix. He'd gotten himself tossed out of the bar approximately half an hour prior and he'd set himself at walking toward his flat immediately thereafter.

James wasn't stupid, and he was mostly quick. Four weeks, he'd counted. It'd taken him four weeks total to realize what exactly had happened and manage not to yell, "You bloody tart!" at Sirius.

Sirius kept forgetting to charge his meter. And so, with London melting through the windowpanes of his modest flat, he and Remus were resigned to drinking the beer before it went warm, and feeling summer seep in through the walls.

It wasn't always like that. Because when Dumbledore had paused before the cluster of four boys--and they were still boys, Sirius knew now--on their last day at Hogwarts, and told them that they were bound for extraordinary things, he'd been right.

Remus meets Sirius on the Hogwarts Express when Sirius' piano falls on his foot.

Her first kiss occurs when she is fourteen with Lucius Malfoy, outside the broom cupboard near the dungeons, after Potions. He had been escorting her to Defense for no significant reason except that it was a good and beneficial decorum for a Malfoy and a Black to be seen together. "The Malfoys are a respectable people, Andromeda," said Mother once, clean and polished fingers holding a wine glass to her mouth. 'The Blacks are a respectable people, too. Do you understand?'

He doesn’t think of her in clichés.

"I had a chance for a proper Christmas. I wasn't slapped or called names, and no one insulted my friends." He pulled a another cigarette from this pocket and lit it with the first. "I wasn't sent to bed without supper because I'm not of a mind to kill Muggles."

Regulus comes to terms with his brother, his family, his Lord, and himself.

Her lips press against his cheek, warm and smooth and all the things that lips are supposed to be, and in that moment, Remus knows that he’s fucked.

It had started as a game between James, Sirius, Peter, and Remus – their own secret dueling club – and they met whenever they could. But they had been discovered by the Slytherin Prefect, Nicolas Gradenko, a not-entirely-unreasonable bloke who admitted that he knew of a small group of Slytherins who met for the same purpose. But instead of the Slytherin reporting the friends, a series of negotiations between the two Prefects, Remus and Nicolas, had begun – against the advice of James and certainly the approval of Sirius. In spite of their suspicion, before long there was a small group of students from all four houses meeting at the top of the Astronomy Tower.

Remus Lupin wrote an essay about Quidditch and sex in his seventh year. Are you brave enough to read it? You'll never see the Snitch the same way again.

It is defined as "possessing lemur-like qualities." Like Moony. He possesses lemur-like qualities; thus, he is lemury.

He still isn’t sure how they got here, sticky and feverish, Lily pressed against the trunk of an old oak tree, his big hands tangled in her hair. It’s two days before end of term and the hottest day of the year.

However, Lily's circumstances this particular morning were not that of a normal day. No, for as a direct result of the rather grueling Quidditch match that had taken place the day before, Lily Evans had suddenly acquired herself a nice case of self-inflicted laryngitis.

"Potter," Lily blurted out desperately, catching sight of him in the corner with his friends. "It was Potter, and it was before we went out."

"Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting."

James Potter était assis à son bureau et corrigeait des copies. Lorsqu’il arriva à « Lily Evans », il sourit de toutes ses dents, sourire de séducteur qui lui avait permis de tomber tant de filles jusque là et, ne prenant même pas la peine de lire la copie, il y plaça un gros « D » à l’encre rouge (il ne s’en servait que pour les Serpentard). Cette rouquine l’énervait au plus haut point. Voilà un mois qu’elle jouait la Miss je sais tout dans son cours. Si elle croyait se le mettre dans la poche de cette manière là, elle se fourrait le doigt dans l’œil madame la préfète.

You truly notice him for the first time that day, and you aren't ready for it.

There's no one else to blame, but it's easier to take out your frustration on Death Eaters, garden gnomes and Alice Longbottom. It's simply more comfortable.

Lily, too caught up in her musings of James' room, had not noticed James at all. When Lily finally did look his way she was stunned with how heavily the attraction hit her. She began to wonder what it would be like to kiss him again. That was when the mantra started running through her head: "He's your professor..."

Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.

James was pink from head to toe, and from what Remus could see, it was the same exact color all over--not like a sunburn with varying shades, but a solid stomach-medicine hue, vaguely nauseating in and of itself. It had to be Charmwork. Advanced Charmwork from the looks of it--magic that no regular first year ought to have known. Which narrowed the field to James--who was predisposed to magic; Sirius--who was predisposed to mischief; Remus--who was predisposed to reading; or Snape.

"Oh MERLIN. STOP WRIGGLING OR I'LL HEX YOU! This is a rule. There is a KNICKERS RULE!"

It is a full moon on the night of October thirty-first, nineteen eighty-one, and therefore Remus has the best Halloween costume in most of England.

"Sometimes I think a curse should rest on me—because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can't help it—I enjoy every second of it."

"As if you had no choice? There's a moment, there's always a moment, 'I can do this, I can give into this, or I can resist it', and I don't know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one."

(She may or may not blame the eggnog later on, of course. He cannot foresee whether she will, and cannot bring himself to care just yet.)

"Look. You're a brilliant person. But if you don't stop babbling about this blasted present, I swear on my great-grandfather's most unholy and thrice-damned name that I will Silence you for the rest of your life."

"It's Valentine's Day. The girl expects it. I have to take her there."

Six hours stuck in a closet with someone you love -- it's the best kind of hell imaginable.

One day, Sirius notices how attractive Remus’ girlfriend is.

James Potter's luck was bound to run out. Who knew he'd take Remus Lupin's along with it?

There was visibility, and then there was invisibility. James Potter understood the difference between the two. When he decided to become invisible, no one was more surprised than he.

Algernon sicked up under my bed. Moony and I discussed what we could do with it during breakfast, but by the time I’d run up to preserve it after lunch, the house-elves had already got to it. Another wasted opportunity.

Maybe he’s just used to it now, and whatever he does to himself, it’s nothing new (he’s been broken, bruised, grazed, scratched, blinded, bleeding, twisted, dislocated and split more times than he can remember), or maybe it’s just the way Sirius sits on the end of his bed, complimenting his scars and suggesting what they can do next full moon before this one’s even waned yet, enthusiasm in his eyes and his hands only shaking slightly as he turns to go.

Remus' arms twist behind his head, curved slightly at the elbows and crossed at the wrists. Black velvet secures him to the bed, thin strips that bite delicately just above the bone, whispering softly over his skin as he tries to move.

"I won't stay just because you think you'll be lonely."

"You spiked the tea again." Remus is grumbling the minute they get outside, peering into the depths of their flask with an expression of fast-impending doom that tea doesn't often warrant.

When he'd snatched the book—Madam Marthe's Marvelous Dance Manuel—out of the library, he hadn't much been thinking about the torture it might bring with it. Truth be told, the only thing that had really been concerning James at the time was how to get out of the library without anyone seeing that he was taking the damned thing with him. Now in comparison, his former task seemed easy, trivial. There was no way he could have anticipated the horrors Madam Marthe had had waiting in store.

A lovesick Sirius is a desperate thing, and Remus Lupin insists on being oblivious.

Remus doesn't own his body, after all -- so why should he care who else does?

Agreeing to go home for Christmas with James and Sirius, Remus decided, had been one of the worst decisions he’d ever made. It wasn’t, really, how many things had exploded on the train (seventeen), or how many people had been waiting for them at King’s Cross (zero), or the number of thieves who attempted to lift his trunk in the trip between King’s Cross, where James’s parents had been supposed to meet them, and The Leaky Cauldron, where they were meeting them (three).

Beneath his bed were the socks that time had forgotten, a pair of briefs which he deemed fitting victim for his rage, and were quickly reduced to scraps of unrecognizable fabric, and a few stray dust bunnies that had eluded the house elves. He stayed there for some time, amusing himself by creating scenarios in which when he finally emerged, the world outside had ceased to exist, everyone had had their minds erased, or Sirius Black and James Potter had grown immense bunny ears on their arses and everyone forgot about the underwear's damming songs in their amusement.

How Sirius saved Christmas and why Remus is actually illiterate.

Raven sipped also, and wiped his mouth with a finger. The boy turned the cup over, pouring the rest onto the ground; it spun through the air back to Moon Queen, who laid it again on the table. Herne glanced at Hare, who was almost trembling with excitement. It barely took a shove from the green-masked boy to send him running for the trees, and Herne started after him, but a few quick notes on the reed flute drew him back.

I mean, when the love of your best friend's life comes to you and says, oi, Sirius, your godson's got to get signed up for Hogwarts, of course you say yes, Lily, indeed he does.

"It's a chickenpox because of all the poxes in all the world, it's the weakest. Chicken-hearted blighter."

It's the day before Remus' nineteenth birthday, and Sirius is at an utter gift-giving loss.

Sirius comes back from the loo to find James snogging Remus. He sways drunkenly for a moment and considers the three things that are wrong with this scenario. One, that this is James’ stag night, which means that he is getting married next week. Two, that James is kissing Remus, who is a boy, as is James. Three, that James is kissing Remus, which is a thing Sirius has dreamed about many many times, but has never dared to put into action. All three of these things are troubling.

Sirius won't remember why he does it, or five gin and tonics, or the curve of her mouth when she laughs, just like he won't remember the dull, low ache theme:alcohol lends to the conversation, until Lily can't stop laughing and he can't stop things spilling from his mouth, like pearls and diamonds in one of those wretched fairy tales.

You don't know it yet, but this is the last time you will ever touch him like this.

This is maotai. They import it specially. It comes from the Guizhou province -- I think it's made from wheat. And it is highly theme:alcoholic.

Remus wasn't comfortable alone with Sirius. Or James. Even in sixth year, with the summer to smooth things over, the near-death of Severus Snape was a sore spot. Peter spent a lot of time as chaperone. He didn't seem to mind. It wasn't that he didn't like Sirius or James, they were his mates, he'd have died for them and they for him. It was just that...it was all well and good to die for someone but holding a conversation with them was an entirely different matter.

"There is only one truly effective and permanent love potion, Miss Black. You won't find it in books, because it is difficult, deeply personal, and useless."

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

From the moment he saw her, Arthur knew there was something special about Molly Prewett.

Remus' hand was on Sirius' shoulder, and had been for too long. James stared at that, at the tight curve of long fingers against leather, and was torn between gratitude, that it saved him from looking at anyone's faces, and resentment of what it implied. Sirius had been dodging his questions, lately, and Remus had a way of looking at him, bland and watchful, which meant the questions stuck in his throat. They were his friends, and he didn't care if he was right: he didn't care what they did to or with each other. But they were his friends, and they shouldn't lie to him.

But then, realisation struck her like a bolt of lightning, made her head ache and her stomach roll and her heart lurch inside her chest. She grabbed his wrist and yanked up his sleeve, ignoring his gasp of pain. The infamous Mark, the snake and skull that she’d caught her sister admiring on her own arm glared at her, black and charred on his white skin. It radiated heat, in spite of how cold he was. The raindrops that fell to touch it sizzled and evaporated as greenish smoke.

Kicked out of the house by a best mate who's about to propose, Sirius heads to the Leaky fully intending to drown his frustration in a of pint of beer, but the blonde woman across the bar seems like a much better outlet for it.

You know what, my little man? Mum’s going to step out for awhile, and dad is just going to have to watch you.

If James wanted to debase himself in order to win a single date with Lily Evans, well, that wasn't much of a change at all.