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Paragons
of delight and uncertainty
by Raven
PG-13, het, Lily/James. James likes Lily. Maybe not as much as he likes Quidditch. She might like him, too - but unfortunately, Sirius, Remus and Peter have got it in their heads to be helpful. The Slytherins are less than amused by proceedings. Complications ensue. With grateful thanks to Pirate Perian for the thorough beta, to Hathor for the loan of her personality, and to Leigh, Tory and Meredith for the ideas.
The retelling of some events that did take place at Hogwarts’ School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the summer of the year nineteen seventy-six, Anno Domini.
Chapter Five - in which hell hath no fury like luminous paint
“Oh, the Slytherins are not going to like this. They’re not going to like this at all,” said James with great deliberation.
The little house-elf looked confused. “Is master happy, sir?” she asked shyly. “Tink is doing her best to please and bring him what he asked for.”
“Everything’s just fine, sweetheart.” Sirius smiled at her and she seemed to swell with delight. She liked Sirius. Most house-elves did. “Thank you very much.”
“Master is very welcome. It was Tink’s pleasure to serve master.”
“I’m glad. Off you go the kitchens now, Tinkerbell darling, and be sure to treat yourself to a butterbeer with your dinner tonight.”
The house-elf beamed. “Thanking you, master.” She scampered off.
James shook his head. “Sirius Black. Always the charmer.”
Sirius smiled. He knew how to deal with house-elves. Remus and Peter had no experience with them, and while James’s family had them, they were generally seen and not heard. But Sirius, in an attempt to escape his parents, often spend time in the kitchen, talking to the family house-elves. “They’re all terrified of my mother,” he’d said. “They practically explode with embarrassment when someone’s nice to them.”
It would appear that the same tactics worked with the Hogwarts house-elves. Because it might prove difficult to explain, James had been loath to remove anything from the dormitories, but there didn’t seem to be any other way to acquire what they needed. Enter Sirius and Tinkerbell, and suddenly the four boys found themselves in possession of three large white sheets.
Shortly thereafter, James sat heavily on a bench, his arms full of aforementioned sheets, and wondered whatever possessed him to listen to Sirius Black. “This is insane,” he hissed. “They’ll never fall for it.”
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity,” quoted Remus with a smile. “More to the point, never underestimate the power of Slytherin stupidity. They’ll fall for it all right.”
“If it happened to us, would we fall for it?” James asked.
“No!” exclaimed Sirius, as Remus and Peter chorused, “Yes.”
“You’re outnumbered, Sirius,” Remus told him, but James wasn’t sure whether or not that was a good thing.
“Hurry up, let’s go!” Sirius said sharply. “We don’t have much time.”
Peter looked at his watch. “Half an hour to go yet,” he said.
“Right.” Sirius rubbed his hands together. “Have we got everything we need? Sheets?”
“Check.”
“Brooms?”
“Check.”
“Paint? Paintbrushes?”
“Check. Check.”
“Wands?”
There was no reply. Sirius looked down to see two wands pointing at his chest. “What do you take us for?” Remus inquired.
“Just checking,” concluded Sirius, lamely “Let’s get going.”
It proved slightly complicated for the four boys to transport such a motley assortment of equipment out of the castle and onto the Quidditch pitch, but careful use of James’s invisibility cloak and some clever manoeuvring round corners helped ensure they arrived on the pitch just as night was falling. The Gryffindor changing-rooms were dark and deserted. “Lumos,” muttered James to his wand, and the soft yellow light made the others blink in surprise.
Remus was at the window, looking out over the dark pitch. “Can’t see anyone yet,” he whispered. “We’re all right, we’ve got time.”
“Good.” Sirius grinned; he was in his element. “Peter, you’re sure you don’t want to fly?”
Peter nodded fervently. “Yeah, I’m sure. No flying. No way.”
“Whatever floats your boat. Remus, James… ”
“We’ve got the sheets to do yet,” James replied. “Hey, Remus – paintbrush?”
From his perch by the dark window, Remus threw it over. James caught it deftly and took the tin off the pot of paint. In the dim light, the thick liquid glowed faintly yellow. James took an experimental sniff, then coughed. “What is this stuff?”
“Told you, it’s a Muggle thing,” Sirius said impatiently. “Peter can back me up, can’t you?”
Peter, whose father was a Muggle, nodded. “Yellow paint,” he said.
“Luminous yellow,” Sirius continued. “Anything you paint with it glows in the dark.”
“But it’s not magic.”
“No.” Sirius shook his head. “Which will be why the Slytherins will be throwing fits by the end of it. Remus, can I have a paintbrush?”
The next ten minutes were quiet, as they all concentrated. James had no artistic talent and was painfully aware of it, so he took the simple route, folding the sheet over and painting small circles to masquerade as eyes. By the window, Remus had done something similar: he had paint eyes, only with considerably more flair. Sirius was somewhat scathing about it. “Remus, you’ve put eyelashes on these eyes.”
“Yes, so?”
“Since when are long, fluttering eyelashes scary?”
Remus chewed his paintbrush and considered. “Moaning Myrtle,” he said after a while, and Sirius had to concede the point.
Sirius himself was more ambitious, attempting luminous-yellow skulls and crossbones. “Creepy,” said Peter appreciatively, and Sirius grinned. After a few minutes more he threw down his paintbrush, and James followed suit. A moment spent fine-tuning an eyelash, and Remus was finished too.
“Ready?” Sirius asked. They nodded, so he got out his wand and said clearly, “Desicco.”
The paint dried instantaneously. Sirius nodded, satisfied, then said, “Denigro.”
Slowly, the parts of the sheets that had been left unpainted began to change colour. It took a few seconds, but the white became a solid, even black, making the paint stand out even more.
After a moment, James risked picking up a sheet. Nothing untoward happened, so they all followed his lead, lifting the sheets up off the floor and laying them out on the benches. Sirius started poking holes in them with his wand. “Get the brooms,” he said.
James complied, pulling out the three brooms from where he’d stowed them beneath a bench. He and Sirius generally had similar tastes, and they had the same broom make and model – the Nimbus 1100. It was easy enough to tell the difference, however; Sirius’s was the one with the bent tail, acquired from being hit by one too many Bludgers. The third broom was less showy, a classic Silver Arrow with one unusual feature – the silver lettering on the handle had been covered with several coats of clear nail varnish. James felt it vibrate in his hand as he rolled it over to Remus.
“Come on,” Sirius called. “Remus, you go first.”
James watched as Remus mounted the broom and hung in the air, the tips of his toes just brushing the ground. Sirius glanced keenly at him, and in one fluid motion he threw the sheet over Remus’s head. It covered him completely so not even his feet or the broom twigs were visible. Sirius tugged and pushed and pulled and muttered a few spells, but there was no real need for magic; it was impossible to tell there was a boy on a broom underneath the sheet. It looked like a levitating black tent with glowing yellow designs on it.
“Argh,” came Remus’s muffled voice. “Aren’t there supposed to be eye-holes in this thing?”
“Sorry.” Sirius gave one last tug, muttered some words, and a pair of amber eyes appeared through the small perforations in the sheet. “You look perfect, Remus.”
“Glad to hear it.” His voice was still muffled. “I feel like a… blargh.”
“What?”
“Paint in my mouth.”
“No, you feel like what?” James asked.
“A Dementor,” Remus replied with some difficulty. “Azkaban guards, you know. They have black cloaks that look like this. Ever seen one?”
“Never,” said Sirius, shrugging. “I’ll take your word for it. James, you go next.”
James did so, and found himself agreeing with Remus when the thick, opaque material was placed over his head. He was glad Remus had originally reminded Sirius of the need for air and eye holes; otherwise, he might have suffocated. As it was, he knew he’d have to fly very well to pull this off.
Sirius had more trouble, enlisting Peter’s help to make the sheet stay on, and it was Peter who had to open the door and tell them where it was, as the eye-holes did leave something to be desired when it came to visibility.
Outside, all they had to do was wait. It didn’t take long before seven people clad in green trooped onto the Quidditch pitch, carrying broomsticks.
James had often looked appreciatively in the direction of the Slytherin Quidditch team captain, before inwardly berating himself for even thinking those kinds of thoughts about a Slytherin. Her name was Gemma Cailler, and she was amazingly good at her job.
“Black!” she yelled, and even hidden out of sight in the shadows, Sirius flinched. She wasn’t shouting at him, of course. She was shouting at one of her team, a Beater by the evidence of the wooden bat.
“Get up there,” she went on. “I want to see your formation flying. You, Montgomery, Rosier… go. Now.”
There was a blur of green as they followed her orders. The three players were good, James was displeased to note. In planning this little adventure, he’d been looking forward to killing two birds with one stone and getting some inside information on Slytherin tactics. That the Slytherins spied on Gryffindor team practices he had no doubt; it was just that until now, no one had thought to return the favour.
“How about now?” Remus whispered, and James jumped at the sound of his voice, caught up as he was in watching the Slytherin players swoop and soar through the dark.
“Not so fast,” Sirius hissed back. “Wait until they’re all up there.”
This took several minutes. Cailler was thorough, going over her plans in exhaustive detail before she allowed her team to take to the air and try out her strategies. At last, she turned her back on them and reached for her own broom, and James tensed.
“Now!” Sirius called.
With difficulty, the three Gryffindors left the ground. His movements hindered by the sheet, James found it hard to fly upwards with his accustomed grace, and from what he could make out through his eye-holes, the other two were having similar problems. Slowly, lumberingly, they rose higher and higher, eventually coming to rest about twenty metres above the ground. Soft black material lost all boundaries and delineation, becoming a part of the night. There was no wind, and scarcely a flutter of a sheet.
One of the Slytherin Chasers – Montgomery – turned around.
“Aaaaargh!”
“Montgomery!” Cailler yelled. “What the hell…”
Her voice was drowned out in more screaming. Most of it was mere panicked wordlessness, but faint snatches of speech carried across to the ears of the three pranksters.
“Eyes… big yellow eyes… Basilisks!”
“Ghosts!”
“Moving! Make them stop!”
James grinned evilly to himself. “Swoop!” he called, almost too low to be heard, and with a sudden rush, they did. The huge yellow apparitions apparently coming in to attack were too much for some of the Slytherins to bear; still yelling, they headed towards the ground.
“Get back here!” Cailler shouted. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, you idiots! Come back!”
No one was left to listen to her.
Well… not quite no one.
She hung motionless in the air, staring at her team running for the changing-rooms. “Potter, Black, Lupin,” she said through gritted teeth, “I don’t know how you did this, and I don’t know whether you’re here in front of me, or on the ground, or hiding in a tree somewhere, but I do know one thing. You will pay for this. You will pay.”