REMUS

 James is the only person I know who had the temerity and just plain idiocy to do such a thing. When he woke up it was the first thing he spoke of.  

 "D'you guys think Evans would go out with me if she saw me with another girl?" he asked. I really didn't care about James' lovey-dovey problems at that moment, so I groaned and told him to go back to sleep.

 "I dunno," said Sirius. "It seems like a pretty stupid thing to do."

 "But would it work?" James wondered.

 "Maybe," said Sirius.

 "Yes, but would it?" James asked. 

  "Yeah! Yeah, it would!" I said, pulling the blankets over my head. If I had to listen to James one more time...

 "Thanks, Moony," said James, his voice sounding a little distant. I pulled the blankets off so I could shoot him a good glare, but he had already disappeared into the bathroom. 

 "It's not gonna work," said Sirius.

 I suppressed a snort. "You think?"

 But, more than surprisingly, when James returned from the Hufflepuff table he had a huge grin on his face.

 "It didn't work, did it?" asked Sirius.

 James sat down, the smile never leaving his face. "Oh, it worked."

 "Who'd you ask?" Peter asked. 

 James turned around to face the Hufflepuff table then turned back to us, as though he was afraid of being caught doing something wrong. 

 "Flynn," he said proudly.

 "No," said Sirius in disbelief. "You can't have."

 "I did, dear Padfoot, and she said yes," said James. 

 "What did you ask her for?" I asked. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" 

 "Relax, Moony," said James. "Like I said, she's not my real girlfriend."

 "Well, that just makes it worse!" I exclaimed. 

"You were the one who told me it was a good idea, this morning." said James. Sirius started snickering as I covered my face with my hands.

"Besides," continued James, "I had to leave Leah for you."

"What?"

"Yeah," said James. "Wouldn't be fair for me to take her 'cause you two already have a thing going."

"We don't have a thing going," I said, struggling to keep my voice even. James gave me this knowing look from over the top of his glasses, and I was just about ready to deal him a telling off or something.

"I thought you said she was pretty," said Sirius.

"I didn't say it directly," I protested.

"I'm not three years old, Moony. That's basically the same thing." said Sirius.

"Why are you doing this to me?" I groaned.

"We're your best friends," said James. "What else are we supposed to do?"

Yes, I made a very wide decision when befriending these people.

"Go bother Sirius about his love life," I said. It only took me a second to realize what I had just said. Damn it, Remus, you really are good at messing things up. I wondered how Sirius was going to get out of this one.

"Who needs a love life when you've already got shitty life problems to deal with?" Sirius asked in an almost noncommittal manner. Real smooth.

"Makes sense," said James. My chest easened but when Sirius caught my eye it tightened again.

Holy shit.

* * *

James insisted that we walk out together with Mollie, as well as Zach and Leah, to give him 'moral support', whatever he meant by that. Mollie hardly spoke to James, and James only stole occasional glances at Mollie. I tried not to stare too much at Leah, and thank heavens she didn't pay any attention to me. How were we going to survive?

Luckily, we had to split up as we had Potions and Mollie muttered something along the lines of Charms. The only thing that could have made the morning more abnormal and probably more unbearable would have been Potions with Slytherin. Of course, we did in fact have Potions with Slytherin that morning.

James constantly shot Snape nasty looks, as though he desperately wanted Snape to turn into an earthworm so he could squash him like a bug.

Professor Slughorn didn't really mind who sat with who, just as long as we did the work. At first I was paired with Sirius, but it wasn't like we were doing anything constructive. Slughorn was deeply absorbed in counting something with an abacus then hastily scribbling down large figures. Later though, Alice – one of Lily's friends – slipped between us and told Sirius to go work with Lily. Sirius tried to protest, but he couldn't do very well because if he made too much of a fuss Professor Slughorn would notice.

Alice glanced at the thickening sludge that simmered in our cauldron. She scrutinized it, her face harbouring that expression one gets when struggling incredibly hard to find the right word to describe something  indescribable.

"Don't bother," I said.

"I don't think I will," she replied. She turned and faced me. I wondered what she could possibly want from me.

"So who's Potter torturing now?" she asked.

"What?"

"Who's the girl being dragged around by Potter?"

"Oh." Looked like the 'news' had spread. Or maybe Lily just was paying attention to James and had seen Mollie. "You mean Mollie?"

"Is that her name? It's pretty."

"Did Lily ask you to find out about Mollie?" I asked.

Alice gave me the most composed look I've ever seen, like she would eventually implode due to the amount of levelheadedness she had.

"Have you already forgotten?" she asked. "Last year?"

"Course not."

"Then that clears everything up."

"Yeah. It does." I still couldn't help thinking that Lily had asked Alice to ask about Mollie.

"It really was a rather stupid thing to do," said Alice pointedly.

"To put it lightly," I replied Alice nodded in agreement. She didn't say anything else. Neither did I. I watched as Lily gave Sirius the exact same poisonous look James was giving Snape.

* * *

We were about to go to bed when James stumbled upon the subject as casually as he would mention his hair had caught fire – something that happened quite often.

"Any word from Regulus?" he asked. None of us had to ask who the question had been directed to. Peter stopped delving around in his trunk trying to find a wider pair of night trousers; I stopped clearing the books off my bed; James put his pillow back on his bed.

Sirius looked conflicted as he faced the three of us. I tried my best not to catch his eye. We rarely talked about Regulus and stuff to do with Sirius' family. It always seemed more of a delicate, sensitive and private subject. It was suddenly so quiet I could hear the wind sweeping over the castle, sounding like an off tune symphony of groans and creaks.

Sirius cleared his throat. "Uh... no, not that." He sat on his bed – plonking onto it as though mentioning Regulus had made him feel faint and lightheaded.

"I mean, I tried to talk to him once...  a few weeks ago," continued Sirius. "But it didn't go so well."

"But... he did talk to you at least, didn't he?" asked James softly.

"If you count bitchy comments and insults as talking then yeah he did talk to me." said Sirius.

"I bet the insults weren't about you," said Peter.

Sirius shook his head. "Just the usual stuff about Muggle-borns, some casual house rivalry nonsense."

"That's good," said Peter. "He wasn't insulting you."

"I think Pete's right," said James. "It can only get better from here, right?"

"I guess so," said Sirius. He wouldn't meet their eyes, and I knew perfectly well why. Silence filled the room.

"It's late," I said, voicing my thoughts for the first time in this conversation. "We should probably get to bed."

The others agreed. Once everybody was tucked in, I blew out the candles, but didn't enter my bed. Instead I climbed onto Sirius' bed and wrapped my arms around him from behind, resting my chin on his shoulder.

"Thought you might need a human blanket," I whispered. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind howling, the chill biting at any exposed part of me.

"Thanks," whispered Sirius back.

"I'm not leaving, by the way," I said after a while.

"Why not?"

"It's too cold and this bed is too warm."

* * *

In my opinion, there's nothing good about winter until the first snow. When it did snow, it snowed hard. It was as though someone had dumped buckets upon buckets of snow everywhere.

The Black Lake spread out in front of us like a gigantic black mirror. All the bare branches of the trees were now covered in glistening snow. Usually, Leah's beauty struck me as a very individual, wolfblood unique sort of thing. But today it fell upon everything around her; maybe it could even make the fresh scars on my arms and face beautiful.

"How was your full moon?" asked Leah.

"Wasn't too bad," a smooth lie. "Yours?"

"Fine, thanks," she replied. I didn't know what else to say.

"How are James and Peter?" asked Leah.

"They're doing OK. Mollie and Zach all right?"

"Yeah. They're doing good."

That was all. Just exchanging simple pleasantries like strangers in a park. Or maybe long lost friends: you've known them since childhood, run into them five years after school, ask about their life then say goodbye, knowing it'll be another five years before you see them again.

"Is Sirius alright?" asked Leah.

"You could say he's doing better." I said. We were both silent for sometime. Then Leah said the one thing I least expected her to.

"You have special friends." Just like Mum had said.

"What makes you say that?" I asked.

"They don't judge you because of who you are."

She said 'who' and not 'what' as though werewolves were people and not just menacing things. I didn't know if she said that because she was thinking out loud, or if she was actually trying to convey something to me, or maybe dig something out.

"Yeah, they're really great." I said. Something tightened around my chest, and I knew the only way to loosen it was to talk.

"Well I suppose there is one specific reason... as to why they take it so well..." I said.

"And what's that?" asked Leah. She turned and looked at me, her green-hazel eyes boring into me.

"They sort of... Became Animagi." I said without really thinking it through. Leah, however, smiled.

"Animagi? Really?" It was obvious she didn't believe.

"I know it sounds crazy but it's true," I said.

"Of course it sounds crazy," said Leah, turning back to face the Lake. She sucked on her teeth. "What kind of a sixteen year old is so advanced in magic that they can actually turn into an animal at will?"

"Is the moon advanced magic?" I asked.

"Wolfbloods are different. Werewolves too." said Leah in that same hard tone she'd first spoken to me in.

"What forms do they take?" she asked.

"Peter's a rat, Sirius is a dog and James is a stag." It suddenly sounded so stupid. Leah didn't reply. Instead she smirked a little.

"What?" I asked.

"Might just decide to have a stag for supper one evening," she said. "Just grab the throat and it'd be dead in about two minutes."

"You wouldn't dare," I said, feeling slightly shaken at the thought that she could in fact do such a thing.

"How do you know?" she asked. She actually laughed slightly as my eyebrows furrowed.

"Relax, I'm not that evil." she said. "Your friends are true, and brave."

She raised a hand and ran it over one particularly nasty scar on my face. Electricity ran through my entire body, tingling every nerve inside of me.

I didn't know what was more satisfying: the fresh snow that was slowly descending or the feel of Leah's skin on mine.