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Traditionally, each of the four Houses built a bonfire at Years' End: Hufflepuff to the east, Ravenclaw to the west, Slytherin to the north, and Gryffindor to the south. The House quidditch teams were in charge of the rivalling fireworks displays (the theory, perhaps, being that a few more injuries would hardly be noticed). The bonfires were in the charge of the sixth and seventh year students, and this year there were explicit bans on the burning of teachers' undergarments. Fifth years were in charge of dancing (it was erroneously believed that this would ease strained gender relations, and thus the tendency to devolve into naked revels was puzzling to some). Technically uninvolved, the lower years were at everyone's beck and call from the moment lessons let out, tearing themselves in two to meet the conflicting demands made on their time and attention.
Sirius had been charged to move two crates of saltpetre from the History broom closet to the back of the quidditch shower room without getting caught, to make sure that sixteen freshly baked pumpkin custards redolent of nutmeg but secretly doctored with something heinous in the Potions lab made it unscathed to the refreshments table, and to return four pairs of the Divinations professor's silk stockings and suspenders. ("He won't catch you, mate, he never saw us coming," the burly Prefect had said, clapping Sirius so hard on the shoulder that he'd had no breath to protest as his hands were filled with contraband). All in the next twenty minutes, on pain of three separate deaths.
Sirius had a wicked brainstorm and ran to the dormitory to grab his broom with the intention of conducting an airlift; but it was gone.
"Peter borrowed your broom," Remus said. He had sat up when Sirius ran in and looked pathetically glad for the excitement. "He and James were carried away by the Beaters to do something on the roof. Have you got knickers in your pocket?"
"Have to give 'em back," Sirius said, shoving them down even further. "McGonagall's promised hell to anyone found with staff thingies."
"Which explains why they're in your pocket," Remus said, smiling.
"I've got to run," Sirius said, and he didn't miss the disappointment that flashed across Remus' face. "Want to come with me?" he asked. "It's madness, of course."
Remus swung his legs over the edge of the bed, then looked up, his head cocking to the left the way he did when he was embarrassed. "I'll slow you down."
"Just throw your robes over your jammies and come on," Sirius said impatiently. "I've pies to deliver, saltpetre to smuggle, and Professor Gimlet's stockings to sneak back before sundown. I need more brains, because my cleverness is nothing without a broomstick."
"Yes, that's what we always say," Remus murmured, and stuffed the legs of his pyjama trousers into his boots for a decidedly eccentric effect combined with his ridiculously short robes. He was horribly pale, the way he always was after the full moon, and he limped as if one boot was full up of gravel. "That Sirius Black, handling a broom's all he's good at."
He took out a quill and a large piece of parchment and wrote a short message in a passable imitation of McGonagall's painfully precise hand. "Give me the knickers--good god, what are those? No--I don't want to know." He wodged them up inside the parchment, tied it with twine, and gave it to Peter's owl, which swooped out the window.
"That's why I need you," Sirius said, as they made a mad dash through the common room. "Where are we going first?"
"Saltpetre," Remus said firmly. "It's essential, you know."
Sirius dragged him downstairs and up again and then down: they were vulnerable on the main stairs, any older student passing could give then yet another assignment and they would be helpless. In the corridor he breathed a sigh of relief.
"It's just in here, in the closet," he said, "or so I was told." He opened the door and wrinkled his nose. "Lovely. Eau de lav."
"All we have to do is make them look like something else," Remus said.
Sirius scrunched up his face. "Something we'd be likely to be carrying through the castle."
"Apples. There are always millions of those, for the fortune-telling and the apple-bobbing in the lake." He sounded slightly wistful, which Sirius thought was odd, considering that for the past two years the squid had given them all horrible sucker-bruises on Samhain. And that last year there had been much panic and terror when the squid had led them on a merry game of Peter-bobbing.
Sirius took out his wand and sucked the tip as he thought. "I can transfigure everything but the smell."
"Stop that," Remus said, "you'll burn another hole through your tongue. Chew your nails or something. I can make them smell like daffodils… or roses… or lavender, and you can shut up right now, you know, we're in the same Charms class, you ought to remember those potpourri spells."
"I would never," Sirius said, "dream of committing such things to memory," and he leant over to sniff noisily at Remus' robes for hints of suspicious girliness, unfortunately making himself vulnerable to Remus' elbow. "Ow! You're bony."
"I know," Remus said, rubbing his arm. "I think that hurt me more than it hurt you." He took out his wand and gave it a gentle swish-and-flick. Something like soap bubbles settled gently around Sirius' head, along with an unmistakable smell of violets. "That'll do."
"You are so, so dead, Remus Lupin. As soon as I have milked every last bit of usefulness out of your skinny body I am going to, to—"
"Feed me to the Acromantula in the Forest?" Remus suggested. "I thought you were in a hurry."
Sirius fixed the intent of apples in his mind, and felt the Transfiguration work slowly. The resultant apples were a bit too green and rather wormy, but Remus made them smell like carnations, or something. They each took up a crate and staggered off, glad for the assistance of gravity.
They made it to the quidditch pitch without incident, and were relieved of their charge by a herd of towering Ravenclaws in goggles the moment Sirius shoved through the locker room door. "Thanks, Violet," the witch with the leather apron said, and Sirius fled. The air in the locker room had been grey with of charcoal dust, and Remus sneezed the entire way down to the Potions dungeons.
The last rays of the sunset were already filtering down through bright orange clouds as Sirius and Remus carefully levitated a chain of puddings out the Potions window and across the courtyard to the refreshments table. ("Best for us not even to be seen with these," Remus had said pensively, looking at the surgically scrubbed laboratory. "Wrong conclusions might be drawn.")
The entire population of Hogsmeade seemed to have descended on the school. The first fireworks went up with a bang that knocked stones free of mortar; Sirius jumped nearly out of his socks, and Remus started laughing madly. Sirius dragged him through the deafening throng (cursing whoever had decided that the fireworks were best accompanied by the Hogsmeade Partial Sobriety Chorus and Bagpipe Ensemble).
There was one last unoccupied patch of grass on the lawn, and he dove for it, pulling off his robe and spreading it out to lie on. Remus shoved him over, and they lay side by side, watching the fireworks and getting showered in pieces of burning ash. A pocket turnout produced an edible ham sandwich, half a bar of cheap chocolate, and a large waxed-paper sack of Turnabout's Treacle Toffee. By the time the fireworks ended they could nearly open their mouths again.
"Shee sha ba'fa'a?" Sirius asked, sitting up.
"Can' mo," Remus protested. He did look rather done in, and Sirius frowned, wondering if it had been horribly insensitive to force his poor damaged werewolf friend to run all over the castle perpetuating mischief. But he hadn't survived fourteen years of being Sirius Black without attaining a certain degree of self-assuredness. So he pulled Remus up ruthlessly and shouldered into his robe, all grassy now but still smelling horribly of violets.
"It's just the bonfire," he said, "I won't make you go squid-dodging. Unless you want to go back to the dorm."
Remus shook his head, still tongue-tied by toffee, and started off for the Gryffindor firepit. James and Peter found them, wild with tales of rooftop madness, and dragged them into the circle of Gryffindors past and present, who all drew wands and at the signal drummed from the staff room balcony cast simultaneous incendios.
The flames roared up and a wall of heat pushed the circle back, faces turning to breathe air that did not scald the windpipe and lungs. There was a definite aura of drunkenness about the upper years, and robes and shirts were already being shed. The music had started up, and even McGonagall was joining in the dance.
James turned to grin at Sirius, who noted that both his eyebrows were gone and his face had a rather panda-like appearance. James gave Sirius a similar goggling stare and grinned from ear to ear.
"Nice look, mate," he bawled in Sirius' ear, as Remus began to edge away. "We'll get you a frilly skirt to go with the purple hair, shall we?"
Sirius took Remus at a flying tackle and they rolled away from the ring of dancers and fire-worshippers, Remus laughing and Sirius cursing but ending up laughing as well. "You could have said something," he said, finally pinning Remus to the ground.
Remus shook his head, trying to repress a smile badly. "No, you know, I really couldn't have. I've no idea what I did wrong. But you do smell nice. Like my gran."
"Bloody violets," Sirius said. He dropped to the ground next to Remus and stared up at the fire. "Wish we could do this everyday. It's like the best day of pranks ever. Very primal, you know? Like being cave people. Hunting and gathering and burning things, and those big elephants that they had, you know. And buffaloes, I'm sure there were buffaloes. Do you think there's such a thing as a werebuffalo?" Remus was silent on the point of cave people and buffaloes, were or otherwise. Sirius looked over, trying to decide whether to poke or tickle him; but Remus was sound asleep, smiling in the bonfire light.