All the young dudes

Chapter 5: For Your Pleasure

***

It's been around a month since Sirius said the bloody thing out loud. Now that he's said it, he reckons, he won't ever have to think about it again and he can just forget about it. Forget about it so thoroughly, Sirius figures, that it'll stop being a problem at all. And it'll go away forever. It makes quite a lot of sense in his head.

The problem is that it's not working out like that. Not even a little bit.

"Hello? Anybody in there?"

Sirius startles, looks forward. Across the table, James rolls his eyes at him. "Pay attention."

"Sorry. Tired."

Sirius tries his hardest not to think about it. But then it does a number on him by being the only thing he can think about, sort of like how the moment somebody tells you not to picture a bright pink hippogriff the only thing you can see in your mind's eye is a bright pink hippogriff. Or like how the moment he tells himself to stop surveying the boys sitting around the Great Hall for breakfast and mentally rating which ones are fittest, that's all his brain seems to be able to do.

It only makes it worse that today is bloody Valentine's Day.

"Wait till you lot see it," James says. "Priscilla's gonna be the luckiest lady in the school, you just wait."

"I thought you fancied Marianne?" Peter asks.

James is shocked and affronted. "Don't be stupid."

"Yeah, don't be stupid," Remus says to Peter, wry. "Marianne was last week."

"I've moved on, haven't I? I've grown since then."

"What's your plan?"

James sets down his fork with great ceremony, steeples his fingers. "The plan has already been set in motion. Now we watch and wait."

"You make me nervous."

"Gents," James says, "what do women love?"

Sirius, who is deeply unqualified to answer this question, looks at Remus and Peter. There's a long stretch of pause. Then they all speak at once.

"Nice conversation," says Peter.

"Being left alone," says Remus.

"Robert Plant," says Sirius.

James rolls his eyes so hard they'll get stuck like that.

"You're all hopeless. The ladies love spectacle."

Sirius groans, Peter drops his face straight onto the tabletop. Even Remus strains for politeness: "I don't know about that, mate."

"Sure they do! I mean, y'know, unless you've got somebody soulless and fun-hating, a real Lily Evans type, just, just awful and probably redheaded and, y'know, boring and nosy and terrible—"

"And?" Remus prompts. Sometimes James gets so caught up complaining about Lily that he forgets what he's talking about.

"Yeah, anyway, the ladies like big displays, it's right romantic, shows you're serious."

Sirius is about to suggest that James only thinks girls like big spectacles because James' own favourite pastime is staging them, but he's distracted by movement out of the corner of his eye. Three flutes soar out from under the table to hang gracefully in the air over Priscilla Vane's head.

"Watch and learn," James says.

One flute lets out a single earsplitting note like the squeal of a dying animal; another drops out of the air and lands with a splash in Vera Brocklehurst's cornflakes. The third flute sets to smacking Priscilla around the head and neck.