The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

Not - one?

"Bilius..."

"Ohhhh bloody hell. You could get in huge trouble for that. Both of you. You could go to jail, harboring they call that. And him - bloody hell."

"Yeah, well it won't happen if you keep your mouth shut," Sirius said. He was trying to sound strong and determined but he sounded timid and nervous instead and he hated the way he sounded. His hands shook too much to even grab onto his wand to draw it. He just stared at Bilius with pleading eyes. "Please."

Bilius criss-crossed his heart with his fingers, "Sirius, I swear, I'd never."

Sirius sat down on the grass beside Bilius and stared at him.

"That woman will though," Bilius said, shakily.

"Fuck."

"She'll tell Gomer what's happened, Gomer'll trace it back to you, and --"

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

"Fuck." Sirius doubled over so deeply that his face was nearly touching his boots and he stared down into the grass.

"I can tell Gomer you weren't there," Bil said quickly.

"What?"

"I'll tell Gomer you weren't there and the woman's mad. Or we'll - we'll intercept her message. Yeah, that's it. We'll tell her a false name for you and she can go on a wild goose hunt looking for some fake bloke."

Sirius's voice rose in a panic, desperate for a solution, "Or we'll just go back, right now, right now and just confund her! That's it. We'll go back and we'll confund her and make her forget the whole thing."

"What about her friends?" Bil asked.

"Confund them, too!"

"Madness," Bilius said.

"Better than having the Ministry go after Remus, isn't it?" Sirius choked the words out.

"Or we can tell Gideon and Fabian."

Sirius looked up.

"They can watch for the report. They can make it disappear on the Ministry end."

"They can?"

"I assume. They're top aurors and all."

"Yeah," Sirius murmured, "Yeah."

Bilius and Sirius sat there for a long time, silent, then Bilius looked at Sirius squarely. "So..." he paused and waited for Sirius's eyes to meet his. "Is it cool being married to a werewolf?"

Sirius replied, "Simply the best."

Lula was delightful, that was the only word Remus could think of to describe her. She was bubbly and friendly, she excitedly led him around the campus, showing him different classrooms and telling him stories about the teachers and various events they'd held there. She was a journalist major, she said, wanting to go into writing for a rock magazine and took photography on the side. Her boyfriend (Stewie, she called him) was an artist who took classes in the fine arts department but already had sold a lot of work on commission. "He does a lot of portraits and fabulous anti-realism, he calls it."

"Anti-realism?"

"Everything looks realistic but there's fantastic elements. Like the portrait you saw he did of me. The eyes being galaxies... he'll draw a perfectly normal scene of a garden, say, then he'll throw in an alien sitting on a park bench. Perfectly normal except it isn't. It's brilliant and I love it."

Remus laughed, "That sounds interesting."

"It really is. He explains it much better than I do. You'll have to meet him sometime. What're you taking this summer?"