The Marauders: Year Five #Wattys2017

Serious Sirius is Seriously unSirius

Serious Sirius is Seriously unSirius

James and Sirius did not make up that day. Nor the next. Nor the next after that. Remus and Peter were at odds, trying to get them back together but they wouldn't even speak to one another, even in the dormitory at night. "I feel like we're children of a divorce," whispered Peter to Remus during Potions class. Behind them, James and Sirius were sitting at their desk - Slughorn had refused to let them switch partners - and facing away from one another, neither working on the assignment despite Slughorn's warning that they'd receive an incomplete mark if they didn't set to work.

Lily glanced over from her table, where she was working alongside Severus Snape. Since he'd lost his partner when Evan Rosier had been expelled, Slughorn had moved them together at one table. He never failed to marvel at the potions that came from their combined projects, either. "Always perfect!" Slughorn said at every class when he bottled samples of their potions for grading.

James glared across the room at them, hating that Severus Snape was so close to her after all the rubbish he'd done. The entire world seemed bitterly unfair to him and the fact that Severus Snape was laughing and putting his hand on Lily Evans's hand and making her smile was the proof of it.

One day after Potions, Lily had run off to meet up with Jasper Odair and James was dawdling in the hall, waiting for Peter to come out after asking Slughorn a question and Severus Snape smirked at him and asked, "Are we feeling envious, Potter? Didn't think Gryffindors were capable of being so green."

With a flick of his wrist, James cast, "Coridum viridi!"

"Protego," Snape answered before the spell could hit him. It doubled back and hit James quite squarely and his entire body went green, head to toe, including his robes. Severus smirked, "Well. Now your true colours are showing!" and he walked away, laughing with Mulciber and calling James a frog.

"What the bleeding hell happened to you?" Remus asked when James arrived, still green, to Transfiguration.

"Snape," James growled.

Luckily, it took Professor McGonagall only a second to revert the spell, which she did clucking her tongue. But James sat stewing, hating Severus Snape all the more.

In addition to the tension between Sirius and James and James and Snape and Peter's anxiousness feeling like divorced kids, Remus wasn't having any luck at all in finding anything on wizarding mental health in the library and it was positively driving him insane. He knew there had to be something somewhere, but it seemed such a taboo that none of the books in the library contained much information. He was getting frustrated and hated that his beloved library could possibly fail him - especially at something as important as this. He had to fix Sirius because, as much as he loved him, Sirius was starting to annoy even Remus at this point with his sour attitude and on-again-off-again snarkiness.

Nobody else in the castle could stand to be around Sirius more than a few minutes, which meant that Remus was getting cut off, too, and he hated that feeling because he'd spent the greater part of his life cut off - the first eleven years of it, to be exact - and he didn't want to be forced back into that. He missed their friends and he missed being able to go down to the common room at night and do homework with Lily and the first years and all without feeling like a horrible person for abandoning Sirius Black to be alone, worrying what he was doing up there in the dorm without any supervision.

Remus sat in the library one evening, Sirius asleep on the bench beside him, thinking Remus was working on a History of Magic assignment. It was a week after everything had conspired and the state of things had not improved at all - on any level. Remus was tired. He leaned his head on his hands and shook his head, trying not to let the circumstances get him down as well (last thing they needed was for Remus to be depressed too).