After the trip to the Forbidden Forest, James complained he was starving and dragged everyone down to the kitchens near the Hufflepuff common room.
House-elves swarmed them, terrified the noble young wizards might go hungry. Roast Potatoes, cream biscuits, steak, pudding, Pumpkin Juice, dish after dish landed on the table.
James ate plenty and drank more, and rolled back to the dormitory with a stomach like a drum, throwing himself onto his bed in bliss.
Then his bladder woke him in the middle of the night.
He burrowed out from under the blankets without opening his eyes, groped along the floor with one foot until he found his slippers, and set off for the washroom on muscle memory alone.
Almost three years he'd walked this route. Bed to door, left turn, end of the corridor, door on the right, toilet on the left.
Never once got it wrong.
Standing up in his slippers, he lifted his head. Someone was at the window, back turned, motionless.
James squinted. Without his glasses it was a blurred dark shape, but he knew those lines.
He felt along the nightstand, found the glasses, settled them on his nose, and looked up again...
A face was pressed right up against his.
Two inches away, its eyes bulged grotesquely, its mouth stretched sideways at an angle no mouth should ever reach. Its tongue lolled crookedly over its lower lip.
"Mmf!"
Half a syllable made it out before a hand clamped over his mouth.
Then his foot fired off on its own. No thought involved, pure startled reflex: his right leg snapped forward and caught the other boy square in the stomach.
A strangled grunt, and the figure went tumbling backward, rolled once on the floor clutching his gut, curled up like a prawn, and raised one finger at him, mouth opening and closing, too winded to speak.
Only then did James see him properly. Sirius.
Lying on his side, hands over his belly, that grotesque expression not entirely wiped off yet.
The corners of his mouth were still hauling upward while his eyebrows knotted together, pain and laughter tangled into something even worse than the face he'd been pulling.
His mouth hung open in silence, shoulders jerking. He wanted to laugh and couldn't, because that kick had genuinely hurt.
James wasn't in a position to appreciate any of it. He had a more urgent problem.
His bladder, in that instant, reached a decision independent of his brain.
A few drops escaped.
His face changed. Abandoning Sirius, who was still convulsing soundlessly on the floor, he grabbed his waistband and bolted for the door.
Halfway there he doubled back, snatched his wand off the nightstand, threw Sirius a murderous glare, and charged down to the washroom at the end of the corridor without looking back.
Sirius pushed himself up, rubbing his stomach. That kick had landed with everything James had in it.
He hissed air through his teeth. Then he registered the sight of James sprinting off holding his trousers up, and worked out what had happened.
His mouth split open and he cackled without a sound, shoulders shaking, laughing and stifling it at the same time, which only made the ache worse.
He climbed to his feet and drifted back to the window.
He stared at the water a long while, focused on nothing, not even the moon.
Noise carried from the washroom. Something low first, muffled by too many corners, but the syllables were familiar.
"Scourgify."
Then again, harder.
"Scourgify!"
A pause, and footsteps came down the corridor.
James arrived with his temper still showing, mouth turned down, the tips of his ears pink.
Sirius tilted his head. His gaze rested on James's face for a moment, then travelled down and settled at crotch level.
James went red, crossed the two steps between them and shoved him with a shoulder, voice pressed low. "What are you looking at!"
Sirius rocked sideways from the impact, still grinning, and stayed leaning at that angle for a while, amused. Then the grin faded.
He turned back to the window.
James stood beside him, chest still rising and falling, anger not spent. Something felt off.
He glanced at his friend.
Ever since the funeral the day before yesterday, Sirius hadn't been right. He'd dropped flat onto his bed without even taking off the black robes, and answered nothing.
Yesterday he'd seemed better. Seemed.
Cornering that pack of Slytherins outside the castle, James had assumed he was back to normal, leading them off to make trouble the way he always did.
They'd done it eighty times if they'd done it once. Good mood, bad mood, didn't matter. Routine as dinner in the Great Hall.
But yesterday hadn't sat right.
Of all people, Sirius had picked the ones who hung around the little snake, and his tone had been vicious, the insults uglier than usual.
Something had felt wrong even then, but the fight was already happening, so James hadn't dwelt on it.
Afterward Sirius had improved, at least he wasn't shut up inside himself the way he'd been that first night, though happy wasn't the word.
James wasn't stupid. He strung it all together.
Sirius came back from the funeral hollowed out. The next day he went looking for a fight with people who orbited his brother. The fight helped, but not enough.
The conclusion was obvious. It was the little snake.
James Potter, third-year Gryffindor, ringleader of the Marauders, Sirius's best mate. This was his problem to fix.
If his brother was miserable, that was on him. He had to find a way to sort it out.
That was what being in charge meant.
Keeping his voice down, James asked, "What's actually wrong with you?"
Sirius glanced at him, said nothing, and turned back.
"You've been like this since the day before yesterday." James shifted a step closer, low and fast. "You won't answer anything, and then yesterday you go after that lot... you wanted to hit someone, right? You're angry and you needed somewhere to put it."
A shrug. No admission, no denial.
"Fine by me." James knocked his shoulder against Sirius's arm. "It's done, so let's corner them again tomorrow and really teach that lot..."
"James."
He stopped, brows drawing together.
Sirius turned to face him. The moon made his grey eyes bright, but the usual fire wasn't in them.
There was something in his expression James had rarely seen there. Stillness, and confusion.
"What is power, do you think?" Sirius asked quietly.
"What?"
"Power." He said it again, half to James, half to himself. "What do you think it is?"
James studied him, checking for a joke.
The question was strange, and stranger coming from Sirius. They never talked about things like this.
Power meant fighting. Winning meant you were good. What was there to ask?
He thought about it, and the answer he reached was simple.
"Stronger spells, faster reflexes." He said it like it was self-evident. "Whoever lands their curse first wins, and whoever wins has the power."
Sirius looked at him, and the Christmas banquet came flooding back.
Spells colliding in the Lestrange ballroom. Metal spikes conjured by Transfiguration spinning at speed into a black barrier, the blast tearing an entire wall to pieces.
A whip of condensed fire carving an arc through the air, the crack of its tip loud enough that you felt it in your ribs from across the hall.
Attack and defense trading at speed, two figures flickering between rubble and broken stone.
Curses that looked lethal from clear across the room, silver ones, purple ones, ones with no name he knew, every one of them carrying the weight of an intent to kill.
And at the end, Bella on her knees among the wreckage, screaming. Magic that seemed to tear at the soul itself. Regulus standing over her with his wand levelled at her face.
He could still see it. He probably always would.
None of that was what James meant by stronger spells. Not remotely.
Sirius shook his head. "Some wizards, it doesn't matter if you hit them. It won't do anything."
"Then hit them harder!" James missed the point entirely and decided his friend was overthinking it. "We've got them at home. My dad's got several locked in his study, keeps saying I'm too young to touch them, but if you need them, I'll go steal them. The Potter Family vaults can't be that poor."
Sirius looked at him. He meant it.
His eyes had that I can fix this light in them, the same as every time he'd come up with a plan, every time he'd led them into trouble, every time he'd taken the whole thing onto his own shoulders.
He honestly believed nastier curses were the answer.
Something churned in Sirius's chest, and none of it would come out as words.
Getting no reply, James switched tacks. "If you're angry but you don't fancy another fight, I've got other ideas."
He leaned in, eyes glittering. "Ink all over their robes. Sneak in at night and freeze their sheets into blocks of ice. Failing that, there's a family hex of ours that makes a bloke's shoes bite his toes. Nobody sees it coming, they go down flat on their face, and nobody can trace it back to us."
Sirius's mouth twitched, and his face loosened. "Leave it."
"How can you leave it?" James was getting agitated. "What's actually..."
He cut himself off, took another look at Sirius, and swallowed the rest.
This was about the little snake, and he couldn't very well offer to go and sort out his friend's own brother.
You could insult the Black family. You could insult Slytherin. You could insult every mouldering Pure-blood relic in Britain. You couldn't bring up the little snake. He'd learned that long ago.
Different angle, then.
"I'm serious." He edged closer. "Just tell me whether you want to get it out of your system."
"I don't."
"Then what..."
"James." Sirius turned to look at him. "Some things don't get solved by getting it out of your system."
James stood there with his mouth open, wanting to say something, with nothing to say.
For the first time he felt something sitting between him and his best mate, and he couldn't name it.
This wasn't a Sirius he recognised. A Sirius who stood at a window in the middle of the night asking what power was, telling him some things couldn't be fixed by lashing out.
He couldn't make sense of it, and his chest felt tight with it. His friend was unhappy and he had no move to make, and that was unbearable.
"So what do you want me to do?"
His shoulders sagged, deflated. "This won't work, that won't work, so say something. Whatever you say, I'll do it. You're my brother. I can't just stand here and watch you like this."
Sirius dropped his eyes. "I know."
James kept asking because he wanted to help. He understood that much.
He also understood that every solution James had was a harsher curse or a crueller prank, because that used to be him too.
They'd cursed the Black family together, cursed Slytherin together, agreed together that a fast enough, nasty enough spell solved everything.
He knew better now, and he couldn't explain it to James, because it wasn't something you could say to him.
Once, he'd have told him everything. Nothing was off limits. Now he knew some things couldn't be said, and some things were pointless to say.
To him those were two separate categories. To James's ear, they'd sound the same.
And he hadn't even managed to win over the hangers-on around Regulus. What business did he have trying to pull Regulus out of anything?
Everything he'd been planning felt like a joke now.
"You know what we should do." James perked up. "Let's go find Snivellus."
The word cut clean through everything in Sirius's head. "Snape?"
"Snape!" James's eyes lit again. "We corner him, and then you'll feel better!"
Sirius started to shake his head, and a voice came from behind them.
"What are you two doing awake at this hour?"
Both of them jumped.
Lupin stood there in pyjamas, hair a disaster, eyes half-shut with sleep.
He'd probably been woken by the noise, or maybe he'd been up a while. There was no telling how long he'd been standing there.
He watched them steadily, one side of his face gone bluish in the moonlight.
"Nothing," Sirius said.
"Talking," James said, at the same instant.
They looked at each other, then both turned away.
Lupin studied Sirius, then James, and didn't press.
He dragged a chair over, sat down, leaned back, and yawned. "Well, I'm awake now. What are we talking about?"