“He wants a party, obviously.” James said, walking between lessons one afternoon.
“In our dorm?” Remus asked, struggling with his ridiculously heavy book bag.
“Common room, I think. He wants everyone involved.”
“Of course,” Remus smiled fondly. He shifted his bag again.
“Want me to levitate that for you? I levitated Pete all the way up to divination, yesterday.”
“Is that how he got that bruise?” Remus raised an eyebrow.
“Not my fault Sirius shut the trap door too soon. Anyway, this birthday party - I think he wants it to be like yours last year.”
“Oh no,” Remus shook his head, “I’m not carrying him all the way back from Hogsmeade in that state again.”
“No, still in the common room. I just mean he wants alcohol. It is his sixteenth…”
“Well I’m not holding his hair back when he starts puking, either.” Remus said firmly.
James ruffled his hair as a group of girls walked past, all staring at him. Sometimes Remus was glad he had no interest in the opposite sex, because otherwise walking around with the quidditch captain might be unbearable. No wonder Peter liked to flaunt Desdemona so much.
The Sirius and Mary saga was currently at tolerable levels. Nothing had happened during the Hogsmeade visit, as far as Remus knew - and Mary would have almost certainly told him if it had. Apparently she wanted him to ‘prove’ that he could be a gentleman before she consented to be his girlfriend.
“A gentleman!” Sirius scoffed, when the marauders were alone, “I speak five languages! I have a family motto! I can ballroom-bloody-dance! I have twelve sets of dress robes! What more does she want??”
“Now you know my pain.” James sighed in response.
“She wants you to respect her,” Peter tried to explain.
“I do respect her!” Sirius said, piously, “She’s got the best tits in the year. That’s very respectable.”
Remus buried his head in his hands to hide the fact that he was smiling - because surely Sirius was never going to get a girlfriend with that attitude.
“So,” James said, now that the girls had passed and they were almost at the Great Hall, “Good idea? Big party, lots of noise, lots of booze, lots of girls?”
“Oh, yeah, sounds great!” Remus replied, half-heartedly.
“Aww, I know you’re shy, Moony, but I swear, loads of girls like you. You just need to know how to talk to them.”
Remus thought that was a bit rich, coming from James ‘oi, Evans!’ Potter, but he said nothing. “Anyway,” James went on, grinning as they entered the hall. “You can be the JD, you know all the music.”
“The DJ ,” Remus corrected.
“Whatever. All right, Wormtail?” James elbowed Peter, who was sitting with his girlfriend at the Ravenclaw table. She frowned at James,
“Why have you started calling him that?? It’s a terrible nickname!”
“Nah,” Remus smirked, “Suits him down the the ground.”
Peter flicked two fingers at both of them and returned to his lunch. They’d all been playing about with nicknames, partly because they wanted to finish the map by Christmas and needed the aliases, partly because James and Sirius just liked the idea of having codenames. They’d made a game of never calling each other by the name name twice, but after ‘squeaker’, ‘whiskers’, ‘scabbers’ and ‘cheese-muncher’ had been tested, ‘Wormtail’ had ended up sticking for Peter.
