Lions Inside¹ | James Potter

five

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(Cough Syrup//Young the Giant)

Sunday evening, after dinner, the Gryffindor common room was packed full. Sirius and James tried to swipe a sofa for their friends but were quickly shooed away by the fifth-year Prefects and their own friends. James grumbled to himself, heading back to Andrea and Remus who were standing by the wall.

"I can't wait till we're older and we can chase off the younger students whenever we want," he pouted. Andrea pouted back at him and mockingly consoled him.

"I know it's not the Common Room, but you guys have a dorm where we can hang out, you know. Also, there's my dorm," she suggested.

Peter and Sirius shared a look. No one had tidied up the mess they had made yesterday or the mess they had added on this morning yet. "How about your dorm? More space," Sirius said casually with a grin.

Remus shook his head and walked up the spiral staircase to the girls' dorms behind Sirius. "If we're going to hang out in our rooms this year, we need to be better at keeping our dorm tidy," he whispered to his friend.

Sirius looked over his shoulder with a cheeky smile directed at Remus. "Now where's the fun in that?" he grinned.

The five of them reached the landing and Andrea opened the door to her dorm, leaving it open for the boys to follow inside.

Her room was a lot tidier than the boys', but not spotless. There were four four-poster beds around the circular room forming a semi-circle, flanked by windows on either side, the windows by the centre bed with their curtains drawn back, one window letting in the September, evening air.

Just like the boys' room, the beds were covered with red canopy curtains, giving anyone the option to untie them and get some privacy in their bed space. By the attempted bed-making of the middle one, all the boys could tell that was the bed Andrea had picked to sleep in.

It looked like Andrea had unpacked every single one of her belongings too. The chair next to her bed had her uniform for tomorrow tossed over it and the desk in the corner had all her schoolbooks stacked in two dangerously unstable piles, standing ready for her. One of the drawers on the dresser was open and Sirius glanced into it to see it was filled with quills, ink bottles and parchment.

"You know, dressers are traditionally for clothes," he teased her. Andrea rolled her eyes and closed the drawer, then opened the drawer beneath it, showing half-folded jumpers and hoodies.

"I know, but I didn't need more drawers for clothes, so I took advantage of the extra space." Shrugging, Sirius threw himself down onto the bed on the right of Andrea's, dropping to the mattress with a thud and narrowly missing Remus' eye with his elbow.

But Remus wasn't paying attention to his rowdy friend. He and Peter were both studying Andrea's picture wall.

They could see a younger Andrea standing between a tall black woman with smooth, glossy hair and a slightly shorter man with a bald head and a goatee. He had more of an olive skin tone and was probably the Italian dad they had heard about, making the woman on her other side her mother. As Remus looked from one to the other, the younger Andrea elbowed her father in the side and then went running off.

Underneath that, there was another picture. Showing James and Andrea that looked quite recent. This one didn't move like many of the others, instead standing still as Muggle pictures did.

It was a picture a muggle had taken for them in front of the Statue of Liberty when they had sneaked off without their parents during their summer in New York.