The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

You're Not Doing Remus

"Potter with the quaffle - and he soars 'round Black - whoa near miss of a collision but Potter's broom handling is so brilliant he manages a deep dive nearly all the way to the carpet! What a brilliant move that was!! They'll be talking of that in Quidditch Through Even More Ages. That's the long-anticipated sequel to the original that's finally expected to come out now that we've got James Potter to talk about in it, you know! We've been just waiting for the right star to come along that shines so bright as him so we'd have more stuff to say about Quidditch!"

"But wait -- forget Potter, there's BLACK, who's -- by jove look at this, he's just TAKEN THE SNITCH."

"What!? Wait! We're playing with a snitch?"

"Yes, clearly, as I've just caught it and I've beaten you!"

"No way! I didn't know we had a snitch, I would've imagined catching it ages ago."

"Sorry, mate, that's tough luck.... Oh. Hey - Reeves, you wanna play with us? We're about to start a second round?" Sirius nudged the hip of the other boy with the toe of his trainer. "Oi. Reeves."

The boy looked up. His eyes were green and they met the grey of Sirius's eyes. 

"It's Remus, not Reeves... and... no, thank you, I'm not much into quidditch."

"Not much into quidditch!" James shouted, pausing jumping on the opposite seat bench, holding the balled wrapper from the pasties they'd consumed, which was what Sirius had insisted was the snitch he'd just caught moments before. "How can you be not much into quidditch? Didn't you know it's the most magical sport in the world?"

"Only magical sport in the world, unless you count gobstones and dragon racing," Sirius said.

"Gobstones barely counts as a game at all and dragon racing ought to be illegal," James said, sounding very a rather lot like he'd heard it repeated a thousand times by someone and was just parroting their opinion.

"We can show you how to play if  it's just you don't know how to play," Sirius offered the boy with the green eyes. He hadn't looked away from that stare for a single second, nor did he now that James resumed jumping, landing with a thump behind him on Remus's bench and a thump back on the opposite one... Sirius just stared into those eyes. "I don't mind showing you."

The boy shook his head. "I know how to play. I - I just don't want to right now, but thank you."

Those eyes. Those eyes were eyes that someone could live in and die for, they were deep... deep beyond the number of years the kid had in his life so far. How does a kid, just a kid, have eyes so deep as that?  

Lily gasped. Her hands let go of Sirius's. She looked at him.

"What? Are you okay?" Sirius asked.

Lily's hands shook. "Can you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

Sirius looked confused. 

They were sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Paris, the city glowing below, the table scattered with Lily's Magique Amor textbooks, the quill in one of her hands, Remus's rune chart beside leaning against the stack of books and scrolls, where they could both reference it, and her other hand was holding onto Sirius's. He had a blank parchment and a quill, too, and he'd started copying the forms of letters from the beginning of the first scroll, which Lily had already finished copying. His copying of the runes was a bit messy and the line was crooked across his parchment and there was an ink splotch where the quill had dripped.