A contented silence ensued James and Sirius’ raucous return, only interrupted occasionally by a loud belch from one of the two candy crazed boys. These disruptions always earned a reproving glance from Lily, but, for the most part, the hyperactive boys seemed quite oblivious to her glares. The only proof that either of them ever saw her disapproval was a slight smirk on James’ face after a particularly impressive burp.
A few minutes passed in peace with Lily staring unseeingly out the window, Remus reading, Peter dozing, and the dark haired boys continuing their unhealthy antics, until a slight click of the latched compartment door being tried returned Lily to the present. Looking around, it seemed to Lily that none of the boys had noticed the attempted intrusion. However, this was quickly changed as several loud thumps shook the door. Peter started and gracefully fell off the seat.
“Open up in there,” a muffled voice shouted through the door.
Lily and Remus looked curiously at the door, until they noticed James and Sirius. The two gluttonous boys had frozen in their frenzy and turned their heads slowly to look at the door. They both looked like two deer caught in the headlights: wide-eyed and terrified.
James set down the Chocolate Frog he had been about to eat, and Sirius audibly gulped down the candy in his mouth. “That voice sounds familiar,” he said, his voice shaking slightly.
James got up, crept to the door, and peeked through the curtains. He suddenly sprang back and whispered furiously to Sirius, “It’s them! It’s your cousins!”
Sirius looked stricken. “Quick! Hide!” He and James immediately began scrambling around trying to somehow hide themselves from view. James only paused for a nanosecond to look at Peter, Remus, and Lily and whisper urgently to them, “One of you will have to cover for us!” The three looked at one another.
Peter gallantly reacted first. “One-two-three-not-it!” he cried shrilly, and dove into a corner, apparently trying to get as far from the door as humanly possible. More thumps shook the door.
Remus and Lily stared at each other for a moment before Remus said weakly, “Erm, not it?” Lily merely frowned at him and he amended apologetically, “I’m sorry Lily, but I’m a really bad liar. I’m great at telling when people are lying, but not at actually lying. I don’t think I could pull it off, and I don’t think it would be a good idea, given Sirius and James current relationship with these, er, cousins, for said cousins to find them.”
Lily threw up her hands in exasperation and huffed angrily. “That’s not fair! I mean, I don’t have any reason to defend those two maniacs.” She paused as the cousins banged on the door again and said maniacs’ search became increasingly frantic. She folded her arms and said incredulously, “Fine, if the need arises, I’ll cover for them! But this is completely ridiculous. I mean, we’re in a compartment. Where could they possibly hide?”
Six figures stood outside the compartment at the end of the train. One was restless, one almost serenely at ease, one bored, one alert but calm, and one stiffly silent.
“Bella,” whined a frail, sour looking little blond girl, “why are we waiting so long? We know they’re in there! We’ve looked in every other compartment.”
Bellatrix Black tossed her long black hair over her shoulder and smiled sardonically at her younger sister. Though there was only two years difference between them, Bella’s darkened eyes made it seem to be much more. “Cissy,” she crooned, though it was cold and was almost a hiss, “you must have patience. We want to make them squirm, make them surrender and open the door themselves because they can’t stand waiting for their fate any longer, before we pulverize them.”
“She has got a point though, Bellatrix,” said a bored looking boy with platinum blond hair that was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “This is getting to be quite tedious. I understand your reasons for waiting, but my patience is waning.”
“Just a little longer, Lucius, and then”” She was interrupted by the sound of the latch being lifted.
“Finally,” grunted Geoffrey Goyle as his ever present companion Victor Crabbe wrenched open the door. Bellatrix smiled smugly at the group, but it quickly disappeared when she saw who stood in the doorway.
A young girl with thick auburn hair and dark green eyes regarded them coolly. “May I help you?”
A boy with stringy black hair, pallid skin, and a rather large nose recovered first. “We’re looking for two boys that ran in here a few minutes ago. Have you seen them?”
The girl frowned slightly. “There are two boys in here, but neither has left the compartment since the train left the station.”
The boy regarded her suspiciously. “You’re sure of that?”
She looked affronted. “Well, if you don’t believe me, you can come in and look if you’d like.”
Bellatrix stepped forward and, giving the girl a slight push, stood in the doorway of the compartment. She surveyed the room through narrow eyes, but the girl seemed to be telling the truth. A boy sitting next to the window with an open book in his lap was looking at her with a puzzled expression on his face, while another plumper boy sat rigidly as close to the wall as he could across from him and appeared to be having a rather intense staring contest with the floor. She noted with a smirk of satisfaction a bead of sweat trickle down the side of his face. However, it quickly disappeared when she realized that her younger cousin and his obnoxious friend still eluded her. She rounded on the girl and quickly interrogated her.
“Why was the door locked?”
“We were hoping for some privacy.”
“And the curtains closed?”
“I find people walking past the window quite distracting.”
“Why are there five trunks for only three passengers?” Bellatrix looked triumphant, but this bold little girl didn’t miss a beat.
“There were two other girls in here. They left a while ago because Peter kept farting.” Peter’s eyes widened and he turned crimson.
“And why didn’t you leave?”
“I was the only girl smart enough to realize he was making fake fart noises.”
Bellatrix’s eyes flicked to the seat. “And what about all this candy?”
“Peter’s mum didn’t want him to go hungry before the trolley came round.”
Bellatrix swept the compartment with her eyes once more, glared at the girl, then lead the way back down the train. The others followed, except for the pale faced boy. He stood in the doorway for another moment, staring at the girl. She stubbornly held his gaze for a few seconds before he narrowed his eyes and spat in a low voice, “Liar.” Then he, too, was gone.
No one moved in the compartment for a full minute. Finally, Remus got up, made his way around the still standing Lily, and poked his head out the door. He shut it, latched it, and made sure the curtains were firmly shut before turning, looking around the compartment, and saying in a low voice, “They’re gone.”
Lily immediately collapsed on the seat looking dazed and muttering something that distinctly sounded like, “Boys. How did I end up in a compartment by myself with four other boys?”, Peter gave an audible sigh of relief, and, after a bit of rustling, clanging, and noises of discomfort coming from the direction of the ceiling, the two dark haired boys tumbled down from the luggage rack into a heap in the middle of the compartment. They remained tangled for a moment before sitting up on the floor with their backs leaning against the seats. James spoke first.
“Merlin, it’s lucky we’re so skinny, mate, or we wouldn’t have fit behind the trunks and we’d be dragon food right now.”
“Yeah,” echoed Sirius hollowly, “dragon food.” He suddenly snapped to attention as if awakened from a reverie. “James?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think we should leave the compartment any more before we get to Hogwarts.”
“Good plan, Sirius, good plan.”
They both jumped when Lily cleared her throat loudly. She looked at them meaningfully. James only frowned in confusion.
“What’s gone and crawled up your bum then, Evans?”
Lily couldn’t take it any longer. “Well I think I deserve just a little bit of thanks for saving both your stupid arses from being completely obliterated!” she exploded in anger.
James only grinned ignorantly. “Blimey, Evans, you’ve been cursing like a sailor this whole trip! Bloody this and arse that.” He put on a concerned visage. “You should really try to control your language a bit more.”
Lily looked as if she was about to burst when Sirius stood up, kneeled in front of her, laid his hands calmingly over her clenched fists, and said in a solemn tone, “On behalf of both myself and my esteemed colleague here, I do thank thee, fair Lady Lily, for aiding us in our time of peril.”
Lily’s frown lessened just a bit as she took in Sirius’ mock gallantry. “Fine. But you guys owe me. Big time.”
“Of course! Your wish is our command! You need only ask and””
Lily’s eyes snapped to James, who hadn’t been paying any attention to Sirius’ thanks and had returned to eating candy, and she interrupted coolly with narrowed eyes, “Especially you, Potter.”
James looked at her with a frown. “What are you on about now Evans? Sirius and I were both in the same amount of trouble””
“”and yet he was the only one with the decency and/or intelligence to thank me for helping you two loonies when I had absolutely no reason to! And thus I deem it fair that when I call upon you to fulfill the favors you owe me, you must complete the bigger favor. Fair? Yes, I think so.” She turned to Sirius to signify that the conversation between herself and James was officially over.
“Whatever,” James muttered. His disposition seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. He stopped eating candy, which was a miracle in itself, and took up Lily’s previous position of staring out the window silently, yet another wonder.
Lily interrupted the sudden silence. “Sirius, exactly how many cousins do you have at Hogwarts? I mean, if you have many more than what we saw just now, it seems like you’re going to have a bit of trouble keeping yourself from bodily harm,” she reasoned.
“Well,” he amended, “I guess it’s not entirely true that they’re all my cousins. Officially, at the moment, of that group, only Narcissa and Bellatrix were really my cousins. I’ve kind of lost count of how many I actually have, but it really doesn’t matter how many are legally related to me. First off, any that aren’t my cousins now will probably end up being related to me sooner or later, and secondly, all my family’s in Slytherin, so I usually just group them all together.” He grinned. “It’s easier to just consider them all related to me than to actually figure out which ones really are.” Suddenly his face fell and he went quiet.
“What?” asked Lily concernedly. “What’s wrong?”
Sirius hesitated, then said haltingly, “Well, it’s just, you know, it’s like I said. All my family’s been in Slytherin. But, I guess maybe you’ve noticed,” he gave a small feeble smile, “I don’t exactly get on well with my family. But there’s never been a Black at Hogwarts that wasn’t put in Slytherin.”
“Oh, I remember reading about Slytherin! That’s one of the four Hogwarts houses, right?” Lily asked eagerly.
“Yeah. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin.” He sighed dejectedly. “I don’t think it’d be any fun being in Slytherin, but blimey, my family would go ape if I was put anywhere else. Especially Gryffindor. I dunno if you’ve heard, but Slytherins and Gryffindors don’t exactly think of each other very fondly.”
Lily thought for a moment, then spoke. “You know Sirius, I don’t think you should worry about it too much,” she advised. “I mean, judging by what I’ve read of how we get sorted, you’ll end up where you belong. Maybe it’ll be Slytherin, maybe one of the others. But you know what? When I compare you to all those lovely Slytherins that I just had the pleasure of chatting with, you don’t seem anything like them. So maybe your family might become a bit, er, distraught. But I can tell you now, if you’re happy wherever you end up, then that’s what’s important, not what your family thinks.”
Sirius had listened quietly throughout, and now a smile slowly lit up his face. “Thanks Lily,” he said. “That really means a lot to me.”
She smiled warmly, then gasped and looked down at the seat between them. Sirius had crept his hand over until it was grasping her own. She looked at him in surprise, only to find him meeting her gaze with a grin. Lily blushed and smiled shyly, fitting her slightly smaller hand into his.
The other occupants of the compartment, for the most part, seemed oblivious to this little exchange. The only evidence that any of them had noticed it was a slight smile on Remus’ face as he read and a distinctly sour look on James’. Peter, however, slept on.
The Art of Lion Taming by The Queen Marauder
Chapter Notes: Huzzah! Another chapter completed! I know it's a bit shorter, but it suited my purposes. I promise a nice long juicy one next time! Check out my fully updated site, and enjoy!