fatal love

chapter 138

The next week passed quickly. After Remus' birthday, both he and Evans entered their full-on revision mode to prepare for NEWTs, and were spending at least an hour or two in the library every day after classes.

Sirius, James, and Marlene, on the other hand, were ramping up their Quidditch practice. Gryffindor had played Hufflepuff on Sunday and won, meaning the only thing standing between them and the Quidditch Cup was their match with Slytherin in May. So James had started holding more and more practices at the crack of dawn, dragging Sirius out of bed against his will, sometimes when it was still dark out, to go and run drills on the pitch.

Not that he didn't want to fuck Slytherin's shit up just as much as any other Gryffindor, and it wasn't like he was even that opposed to some early starts - but the lengths James was going to were, frankly, ridiculous. He pointed this out to James one morning, after a particularly unproductive practice because the sun had not yet risen, and none of the Gryffindor team could see any of the bloody balls, and ended up flying around aimlessly for an hour. But James just responded with a cheery attitude, saying "got to learn to play in all conditions!". Sirius was pretty sure he heard some of the team planning a mutiny after that.

Annoyingly, it wasn't James' newfound levels of happy-go-lucky dictatorship that was bugging Sirius so much as his continued inability to cast a Patronus. It was coming up on four months of trying now, and he hadn't got anywhere, and it was frustrating him more than he'd like to admit.

He just wasn't used to struggling with something in the classroom, especially not something that others had managed to do ages ago, and especially especially not something that he was actually putting some effort into. So it was starting to hit his ego.

It was James who noticed how much it was getting to Sirius, when he found him practicing in the dorm on his own the next Sunday evening.

"It's okay if you can't do it," said James sympathetically. "Most witches and wizards can't, you know."

"I'm not supposed to be most wizards, Potter," Sirius snapped.

James looked at him analytically, tilting his head, and Sirius glared at him.

"Fine," James said, "let me help you. Tell me what you're doing."

Sirius sighed. "I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be bloody doing. And I've tried a million different memories, and I keep racking my head and going as far back as eleven, and none of them fucking work!"

James hummed thoughtfully.

"How did you do it?" Sirius asked.

"I stopped overthinking," James said simply. "I spent so long trying to be happy, so I could cast the spell. But that's all manufactured happiness, and in the end, the thing that did it was seeing Lily's Patronus. And then, just by seeing that, and knowing what it meant, I was suddenly so happy that it wasn't even hard. And I knew I was going to cast my own one before I even said the words."

Sirius looked at James and felt some of his anger fade involuntarily, seeing the expression on his face. "You sap," he muttered affectionately.

James chuckled. "Yeah, maybe. But give it ago - don't try to be happy, don't stress yourself out, just let yourself feel. Not for the spell, or for any purpose at all, just be happy for the sake of being happy."

So Sirius stopped searching his mind, stopped hunting for his happiest memory. He closed his eyes, and instead of worrying, he tried to let himself just feel. Tried to just feel happy right there, and use whatever memory came to mind.

An image floated to the surface, one that he hadn't even been trying to find.

"Luck, happiness and love?"