Remus didn't look up, but very strongly considered flipping James the bird. If James had his way, they'd none of them ever do homework, and instead of scraping past by sheer force of will and copies of one another's answers, they'd all be flunking out of school.

Not, as Remus sometimes thought, that James would particularly care.

"Fine," said James, when Remus didn't answer. "I guess it doesn't matter that it's the first nice night of the year, all clear, and nice…"

"You said that already," Remus said. He stared harder at his Divination book, which was adamantly proclaiming that his lifeline meant he would live long and prosper. He doubted that, seriously, but then he had many doubts about palmistry, and Divination more generally.

"Well," said James, "it is very nice."

"The snow is melting," said Peter.

"Yes," James agreed. "Yes it is. Which is part of what makes tonight so nice."

"That's great," said Remus. He wondered if he was perhaps misinterpreting the shape of his lower Mars. Then he wondered how he would be able to tell, his textbook being completely useless. "You do realise it's past midnight and you're not allowed outside anyway, right?"

James huffed. "Fine," he said again. "You know what, that's just fine. You can be a spoilsport all you want, Remus. You can just rain on my parade all you like. That's fine! But I'm not going to take it lying down."

Remus should have seen that one coming; James rarely, if ever, took anything lying down, except possibly Lily Evans's abuse.

"Good on you, James," he said.

It was then that Remus felt something cold, damp, and incredibly painful hit the back of his head. He thought: that's not right.

Stupidly, he kept staring at the pages of his textbook, until he registered Peter's high-pitched giggles coming from somewhere behind him.

Remus turned around. James and Peter were right where he'd left them, hanging over the back of the couch-- only now they were grinning madly. The empty common room behind them revealed nothing. Remus gave them a look, then brought his hand up to the back of his head, which felt much wetter and prickly than it had any rights to.

The rest of the melting snowball chose that moment to dislodge itself from his hair and slip down the back of his shirt, leaving a cold trail of water down his spine.

"Oh," said Remus. "You utter bastard."

Peter shrieked a giggle. "Remus swore!" he said, just as James lobbed another snowball in Remus' direction.

Remus ducked this time, and went spilling out of his chair onto the floor. "Where are you getting that!"

"Getting what?" said James innocently, and sent a snowball smashing into Remus' shoulder.

Remus wrinkled his nose and swept the snow onto the floor before it could seep into his shirt. "The snowballs! How are you doing it?"

James spread his hands, and fixed Remus with an expression of utmost dishonesty. "I know not of these 'snowballs' of which you speak," he said.

"Oh, come on--."

This time it was Peter who chucked the snowball at his head.

Remus got up, shaking the snow out of his hair. "This is getting to be a bit much, don't you think?" he said.

"Not at all," said James. "It's just getting fun-- oi! Sirius!"

Remus whipped his head around, only to receive another stinging snowball to the back for his troubles. He thought, that was just playing dirty, even if Sirius really had just climbed through the portrait hole. There must have been some kind of rule about unfair distractions.

On the other hand, Remus thought dizzily as Sirius mashed a snowball into his face by way of greeting, he might have been better off if it had just been a distraction and not a real, life-sized, mean bastard of a boyfriend.

"Hello to you too, Sirius," Remus said through clenched teeth. He flicked some snow off his cheek. "How was detention?"

"Oh," Sirius said, "it was just great. Brilliant, as it were. You know what skinning whatsits is like."

Remus looked nonplussed, and felt even more so when someone-- or two someones, more like-- launched a volley of snowballs at his back.

"All right," he said, backing up and turning around, to make sure he didn't have his back to any one of the three of them. "I could kill all three of you, you know that?"

Sirius snickered. "You wouldn't," he said, and reached into his pocket. He came up with a snowball.

"If you throw that at me," said Remus.

"Spoilsport," said James.

"I'm not kidding," said Remus.

"Neither was I," said James.

"I have a better idea," said Sirius, and threw his snowball with a not inconsiderable force at James's head.

"Ow!" James yelled. "My glasses!"

Remus laughed.

"Come on," said Sirius, and grabbed him, dragging him over to the sofa opposite James and Peter's.

"Sirius, I think you broke them!" James wailed.

"No he didn't," said Peter.

"He did! He did!" James took off his glasses and squinted at them, leaving him a prime target for Sirius' next snowball. "No fair! I call time out!"

"And I call you a tosser!" Sirius yelled, and tugged Remus down behind the sofa. "Here's the plan--"

"You teach me how to make them?" said Remus. He could still hear James and Peter squabbling over the state of James's glasses, which Remus hoped were in fact broken. Would serve him right, the tosser.

Sirius made a noise. "Yes," he said. "I guess that could be a good place to start. D'you have any parchment?"

"Right here? No."

Sirius let out a long-suffering sigh. "Fine." He rooted around in his pockets for a bit, then came up with a few scraps of lint, a broken quill tip, and some cellophane-wrapped sweets that had probably seen better, less melted days. "Okay," he said, dropping the lot on the floor. "We'll probably have to make some of these bigger, but--"

"Heads up!" Peter yelled.

"Bollocks," said Sirius a moment later, trying to shake off the mess of snow before it went down his shirt.

It having missed him completely, Remus had to snicker.

"You'll pay for that, Pettigrew!" said Sirius, popping his head up from behind the couch. "You and your little--"

He sat back down next to Remus as a snowball went whistling past his ear.

"No mercy," Sirius said, and picked apart the ball of lint extracted from his pocket. "So it's pretty simple. Just a little bit of nivalisium, and there you are." As he said it, the lint changed into a tiny, tightly packed snowball in the palm of his hand. Then he murmured, "engorgio," and Remus watched as the snowball swelled to a more standard size.

"Oh, cool," said Remus, and conjured his own snowball. He grinned. James and Peter, they were so dead.

"Hey!" said James, punctuating his yell with a snowball that landed far out of harm's way. "You chaps fall asleep over there?"

"Don't worry," Sirius said. "We didn't forget about you."

"Are you blind yet?" asked Remus.

"He's not blind," Peter said.

"I'm not blind!" James declared. "Besides, even that wouldn't stop me from beating you two losers. Me and Pete are snowball-throwing machines! You don't stand a chance."

"Damn," said Remus.

"He's all talk," Sirius said.

But Remus thought it was probably true; if the last snowball fight they'd gotten into was any indication, they'd soon all give up and go for the nearest target. That was how Peter had ended up facedown in the snow, with James stuffing snow down his trousers, declaring himself champion of all things snow-related.

That was also how Remus had ended up on his back, with Sirius sitting on his thighs, crushing snow into Remus' face, while Remus tried, unsuccessfully, to shove him off.

"Get *off*," Remus had said, grabbing at Sirius' hands. But then Sirius had suddenly stopped, and pressed his cold mouth down to Remus', like they hadn't been on the front lawn, out there for anyone to see.

James had yelled, "I don't see any fighting going on over there!", and Remus had finally managed to slip a fistful of snow down Sirius' coat and shove him away. Remus hadn't been sure what James could see, but he wasn't willing to find out.

"Ha!" Sirius crowed, presently, and Remus jerked his head up at him. "Come on, Remus, you're missing all the fun." He mashed a snowball into the top of Remus' head, making him yelp.

"Nah," Remus said, using Sirius' pant leg to pull himself up. "I was just thinking about last time."

"Yeah?" said Sirius, as he tossed another snowball at Peter. Peter made a shrill noise, and Sirius had to duck to avoid the retaliatory snowball that came hurtling past his head. "You remember that, do you?"

Remus grinned. His clothes were soaked, and he could feel ice water trickling down the hollow of his spine, and he was freezing. But James's glasses were potentially broken, and it was probably going to be the last time this year he'd have a chance to chuck snow at anyone. He said, "We bury the dead, first."

"Okay," said Sirius.

"But then," said Remus, as a final snowball caught him in the ribs, knocking the breath from his lungs-- James cackled. "But then," Remus said again, "I was thinking, maybe, we could pick up where we left off."

"Get out of these wet clothes," said Sirius, looking at him sideways. There was a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

"Something like that," Remus agreed, and if he suddenly felt his skin prickling, he thought it was hardly from the cold.