Title: Veni, Vedi, Veni
Pairings/Characters: Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, James Potter, various prostitutes.
Rating: T because there are prostitutes all up in hurr. Various acts of a thoroughly debauched nature may or may not have happened. The question is, of course, how dirty is your imagination?
Notes: Written for a dear friend for her birthday.

The spell whizzed by so close to Remus' face that he felt the angry heat of it. He dived wildly through the dark night air and landed with a bone-jarring thud behind a dumpster.

There, he found Sirius.

Of course he did.

"This?" Remus hissed. "This is your brilliant plan?"

"Busy here!" Sirus answered. He took aim between what seemed to be the legs of a ridiculously voluptuous mannequin and fired off a blast. A muffled cry floated through the night. "Either shut up and duck or help."

Remus hauled himself up to his knees and gripped his wand tightly. "Where're James and Peter?"

"I don't know!" Sirius said. "I thought they were with you!"

Remus felt his fingers twitch and had to forcibly remind himself that strangling Sirius now would strand him alone in the midst of a dozen or so Death Eaters in the bowels of London. He channeled that energy into more fruitful gains, like he'd been routinely doing for years. There was no remarkable difference between Stunning murderous foes in the back-alleys of London and writing truly poetic Potions essays, not when blind rage was what spurred him on. "What do we do now?"

Sirius mopped hair gone limp with sweat out of his eyes and grinned.

Remus felt his stomach drop: nothing good ever came after Sirius smiled like that. "Whatever you're thinking—"

Suddenly, Peter materialized behind Sirius, who yelped and slapped him.

"Sirius!" Remus hissed, hauled Peter upright, and fired off two curses in rapid order. "Cover us, you prat!"

"Sorry, mate," Sirius said. "Bloody scared me—Stupefy! Where's Prongs?"

"Down the next alley!" Peter gasped. "There's an entrance into a Muggle establishment. We can hide in there."

"There's a little problem with that plan of action," Sirius said as he flung himself under a brilliant shower of green jets. "We'd be presenting them with a beautiful silhouette and I don't much fancy dying."

"Wait for it—" Peter said.

James, of course, did not disappoint: no less than four brilliantly glowing stags burst into the alley and charged the ever-approaching crowd of Death Eaters. They were followed in rapid order with what looked like a massive deluge of slime that seemingly appeared out of thin air but Remus knew for a fact that it was a very complicated Conjuring Charm that they'd perfected just last year to flood the dungeons. Thank heavens for useless ingenuity, he supposed.

"Now!" Sirius snarled, and they barreled out of the alley behind Peter.

Remus Lupin, erstwhile human, current werewolf, and future convict—which, really was the only obvious destination if he were to keep with this group of maniacs—gaped at the rather large, brightly lit entrance. Emblazoned across it were the words, "The Lusty Woman," subtitled with, "Veni. Vidi. Veni."

He gulped and said, "A brothel? This is your brilliant plan?"

"Isn't it great?" James asked and slung an arm around Remus' shoulders, smiling broadly and glancing around in what he thought was a surreptitious manner but mostly made him look a bit deranged.

"Of course it is," Sirius said from Remus' other side. "Think about it, man! More titties than you can shake a stick at!"

"Heh," Peter giggled. "He said 'stick'."

"Are you sure we can't Apparate out?" Remus asked.

Sirius shook his head. "No. They've locked the area down. I've sent a message to the Order so we just have to hide out until they get here."

"Here?" Remus asked again.

"It is a place for wayward ladies of the night," James said, "but nobody will be trying to kill us, which I really think is the deciding factor."

"Not that kind of death, anyway," Sirius said, and he and James plunged through the doors.

"I hate you all," Remus growled, and ran after them.

"Oh, honey," said the rather anatomically improbable woman straddling his lap. "Oh, darling. You make me so…" she leaned in, but Remus leaned back. Her lips looked fairly lethal and he really couldn't afford distractions.

"You make me so hot," she said, her voice a breathy whisper.

"Uh," Remus said because his brain currently was having a happy seizure and all thoughts under labels like Kill Sirius and Find James and Get Out of Here Alive and Rescue Peter from the Females were dying happy deaths.

"Why don't you do something about it, then, handsome?" she whispered. "I'm burning for you."

"We—" Remus cleared his throat. "We could—we could turn on a fan."

"You are so cute," the woman purred and then she took off her bra, which was when Remus decided that he really didn't care about Death Eaters and his friends could damn well watch out for themselves.

"Padfoot!" Peter cried as he burst into a room. Well. Room was a mild term for it, really. Oh my, Peter thought. Were those chains? And was Sirius—?

"What?" Sirius said, popping up from a mound of pillows and three or four women writhing in considerable dishabille and with a sequined bra hanging off his ear. "What, Wormy? I'm a bit busy."

"Oh!" Peter said, scrambling for the door. "Oh. Carry on, then."

"And she thinks I'm a total prat! And I fancy her so much—ever since I saw her all I could think about was how wonderful she is!" James cried. "I admit I've done some mean things in my day, but I've gotten better! I swear!"

"There, there." The glittering blonde lit a cigarette. "What sort of things?"

"She had this friend," James said. "Slimy git, really nasty sort of prat. My friends and I just pushed him around a bit—"

"A bit?"

"All right, a lot, but—"

"It seems to me," the woman said, "like you've got a disconnect between what you think a woman wants and what she really wants in reality. For example, she wouldn't look very kindly onto a man who torments her friend. She would want you to leave him alone."

"It's a moot point anyway," James said. "They're not really friends anymore."

"Well then," the woman said.

A pearly white eagle burst through the window high above Sirius' head and said in Mr. Potter's voice, "You'll want to get out now, boys."

"Damn," Sirius swore, and disentangled himself the best he could, which was a damn shame. That readhead had a magical mouth.

"Where are you going?" she asked, but Sirius only smiled as he cast a minor spell—one that imitated a Bewitched Sleep but only for a minute or so. She dropped off to sleep a moment later. Sirius shook his head; Remus had thought that one a waste of time.

He pulled on his pants, gave up on his shirt, left a wad of Muggle money for his lovely ladies, and sprinted off in search of his wayward friends.

Sirius found Remus caught in a passionate embrace with a brunette with spectacular tracts of land and then some. "Enough of that," he called as he barged into the room. "Our ride is here." He hit the woman with the sleeping spell and instantly, she slumped, boneless, in Remus' arms.

Remus slowly came to himself. He gazed at his lapful of beauty, cursed a blue streak, and said, "Padfoot, if we get out of here alive, remind me to kill you."

Sirius threw Remus his shirt. "Don't tell me you weren't enjoying that."

Remus sent him a look that would put any number of angry wet alley cats to shame. "I was. That was the point. Your timing is terrible." He eyed Sirius suspiciously. "Do you know, I'm not entirely sure this whole adventure isn't a plot of yours just so you could visit a Muggle brothel without Mrs. Potter hitting you with a broom."

Sirius laughed. "I'm good," he said, "but not that good," and pulled his friend out of the room.

"So, what you're saying is that I should be more sensitive?" James asked. "Like, if she asked to me write poems to her freckles, I should do it?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," the woman said. "You should probably also put on a loose white shirt with puffy sleeves and adopt an attitude of wilting lovelorn dissipation."

"Women," James said. "Absolutely mental, the lot of you."

"Not now, Prongs," Sirius said as he and Remus burst in.

"That was rude," James said, getting up. "We could have been doing anything."

Sirius and Remus blinked at him.

"No, you wouldn't have been," Remus said.

"Because you're going to be panting after Evans until you die. We should go. Now." Siruis glanced into the hallway, and tried to peer through all the clouds of perfume and the feathers and the sequins. "I think I see Peter cowering behind a fichus."

"I foresee a problem," James said as they gathered in the very back of the club. "If the Death Eaters are coming here—"

"We need to get the women and their, er, clients out," Remus said.

"How are we going to do that?" Peter asked, somewhat more distraught than the situation required him to be. "Some of these people are—you wouldn't believe what I saw! Whips! Chains! Whip cream! They tied a man to the ceiling."

"There, there," James said.

"How are we going to evacuate the building?" Remus asked again.

"This is how," Sirius said, and smashed his elbow into a small red protrusion in the wall. Immediately, a high wailing note emanated from everywhere and there started a stampede of men and women trailing some rather questionable modes of dress and paraphernalia.

"What?" Sirius asked as they all stared at him. "I know things!"

The building was on fire.

"Just so you know," Sirius yelled as he doged a curse, "this is not my fault!"

Mr. Potter raised an eyebrow as he eyed his son and his wayward friends. They were all very singed and smoking and covered in soot and missing patches of hair. In all, there couldn't have been three eyebrows between them. "A brothel, James?"

James grimaced. "Sorry, Dad."

"It was a temporary measure, sir," Sirius said.

"We were waylaid by Death Eaters and took what shelter we could, sir," Remus added.

"We're terribly sorry," Peter said.

Mr. Potter shook his head. "Don't tell your mother about this," he said.

"Of course not," James said, and he and his friends looked for the entire world like angels made of piety and love and all things holy.

"Right," Mr. Potter said, wondering how they all hadn't been thrown out of Hogwarts yet. "Let's go grow those eyebrows back, eh?"