All the Young Dudes ( Sirius' Perspective )

Fourth Year : June

Saturday 28th June 1975

The common room was chaos—exactly the way that Sirius liked it. As usual on the last day of term, everyone was frantically searching for misplaced objects, collecting abandoned books and trinkets that had been scattered about the room throughout the year, and calling out to each other so that clamouring voices rang out at every turn,

“Have you seen my—”

“Accio wristwatch!”

“Who took my—”

“My toad, has anyone seen my—”

Sirius and James were crouched behind one of the oversized armchairs, each picking objects for the other to levitate. Sirius was just about to dare James to levitate Harpreet’s lucky quill (he’d just discovered it stuck between two sofa cushions, and was cradling it gently in his hands) when the portrait door swung open, and they were rudely interrupted.

“You two!” Huffed a familiar, snippy voice. Sure enough, Evans was marching over, wand brandished and a very McGonagall-esque glare on her face.

Sirius laughed and darted behind James, using him as a shield,

“Come on, Evans, just a bit of last day high spirits!”

“Why can’t you just leave people be, Black?!”

“Why can’t you leave us be,” he shot back, sending green sparks flying up to singe the ceiling, “You’re not a prefect yet, y’know!”

“Oooh, just wait ‘til I am!” She stamped her foot, throwing at jinx at Sirius. Luckily, James was an excellent shield; he absorbed the spell quite nicely. Remus, who had walked in with Lily and was doing sod all to help (the traitor) began to giggle hysterically as turnips sprouted from their poor friend’s ears.

“Well that wasn’t very goody-goody,” Sirius admonished, taking the opportunity to transfigure a nearby lamp into a flock of birds that squawked and screeched and fluttered around the room.

Lily wasn’t finished, though. Before either of them could blink, she’d hit James with a jelly-legs jinx, causing him to collapse on the floor with his hands still clutching the turnips on his face. This left Sirius exposed to an attack, and before he could get his wand up Lily had fired off a binding spell, disabling him. She turned to Remus.

“Help me sort all this out, will you?”

“Aww…ok, fine,” Remus grinned, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. Sirius watched, betrayed, from the floor, as Remus and Lily de-transfigured the lamp, erased the singe marks on the ceiling, and generally demolished all the hard work he had done to get the common room into such a wild state of anarchy. Sirius struggled against his invisible bonds, frustrated, but it was no use. Lily didn’t even bother to lift her spells, only shot them an evil smirk before bidding goodbye to Remus and disappearing up the stairs to the girls’ dorm.

“Isn’t she marvellous,” James said wistfully, smiling as Remus helped him into a nearby chair. His legs were still unsteady, shaking and threatening to give out beneath him. For such a goody-two-shoes, Evans was certainly good at jinxes.

“Yeah, real charmer,” Sirius grumbled, offended that Remus had left him struggling on the ground. He wiggled again, trying to get free.