The Other War // James Potter & Lily Evans

laughter;

James woke the the sound of his blaring alarm which began to spit out red sparks that died on contact with his wooden night stand. It was a bright Wednesday morning. The sun shone through his window, and warmed up the room. The bathroom that James shared with Lily was between their two rooms was empty which meant that either Lily had left or that Lily wasn't awake. He climbed into his robes, deliberately leaving his cloak draped across his four poster bed and headed down to where the fire was still burning on the same log.

The first thing James noticed when he reached the base of the stairs was a ball of red hair cascading over one of the arms of the sofas like a waterfall of fire. Parchment and quills and empty ink bottles lay scattered upon the small centre table; it had appeared that Lily had fallen asleep before the warmth of the fire in the middle of doing her homework. Revision, perhaps? James thought. Classes hadn't even started for the year.

He felt a little bit guilty that he didn't bring her down a blanket or take her up to her dorm room (which she probably wouldn't have liked, anyway). He decided against waking her up given that it was still early so he wandered through the portrait hole down to the hall for breakfast.

When he got there, the hall was fairly empty. The only people sitting at the Gryffindor table were Sirius, Peter and Remus and a couple of younger students who stared at James wide-eyed as he walked by.

He took a seat next to Remus and pulled out a handful of conus from his pocket, handing them one by one over to Sirius who grinned widely. "Evans. Evans is head girl and we have our own dorm." James said.

Sirius chuckled. "I told you so,"

"What do I do?"

"What is there to do," Peter chuckled. "Don't piss 'er off, that's what." James didn't reply.

Slowly, the population of the hall began to increase and thus the volume of the chatter started to get louder. Sirius lazily picked at a pancake.

"So," Sirius began over a piece of pancake. "When are Quidditch trials, Captain Potter?" James twirled his fork in his fingers idly. It was only now that Sirius brought up the topic to a question he didn't even know the answer to did he find himself feeling frustrated. He sighed and raked a hand through his hair.

"I don't know," he said slowly.

Sirius, noticing his exasperation said, "Mate, relax. I was just wondering if I would have to actually trial or if you'd just let me onto the team..." He trailed off with a grin. James chucked and opposite him, Peter grinned and giggled.

"Saturday. I'll ask McGonagall to put a notice up or something." Sirius nodded. And then all do the sudden, out of the blue, Remus stared to laugh and snort uncontrollably. His neck and face turned red and his eyes bulged but he didn't stop laughing. He clutched his stomach.

"Mooney, what gotten into you?" Peter asked cautiously. Remus was still laughing he was almost blue from the lack of air. He tried to wheeze out a word or two in between his hiccups of laughter but when he quickly realised that that was impossible, he pointed to his pumpkin juice. James reached over and inspected it while Sirius furiously tried to stifle Remus's uncontrollable giggles. The pumpkin juice smelt like pumpkin juice and looked like pumpkin juice, but as soon as James dipped the tip of his tongue into the familiar orange liquid, Remus stopped laughing and James suddenly had to suppress the irresistible urge to start giggling.

Remus, who was not impressed to have been thoroughly pranked struggled to calm his breathing and regain his composure. He eyed the pumpkin juice wearily.

"Laughing potion." Frankly, James had never heard of said potion but he trusted Remus's judgement. It wasn't Remus's near suffocation experience that worried him the most, though, it was the knowledge that there was another prankster at Hogwarts, they were targeting the Marauders, threatening to steal their throne and James was not going to allow it.