Is It Over Now?

Chapter One

"Oh, you poor thing," Madam Pomfrey said with hints of pity that the werewolf would only ever accept from the older witch. She'd been caring for him since he was eleven, and she'd held him in her arms as he had asked her to let him die, and had kissed him on the forehead with the tenderness of a mother that the boy had never known before then. "It's been a bad night all around, hasn't it?"

"What do you mean 'all around'?" The boy asked, trying to sound more curious of the complications of spells gone wrong than anxious of the sort of damage that could never be undone.

But the medi witch only brushed Remus off and continued to heal the boy before taking him to the hospital wing. There, under the school nurse's watchful eyes, Remus drank down all of the sleeping draught that he had been given. He didn't fight her on it like he normally might have, the Gryffindor wasn't feeling as brave in that moment as the house might suggest.

When Remus woke again sometime later, he wasn't alone this time. Later he would find himself wishing that he was.

"Prongs?!" The boy croaked quietly at the disembodied head of his friend, only to be immediately shushed by the boy in question.

"Are you okay?" The other boy asked earnestly, but there was a look in James's eyes that the werewolf recognized too much from his own every time that he looked in the mirror. Everytime that he thought of Sirius in a certain way, or came back from a twig to the library with a certain group of fourth years that the other Marauders didn't know a thing about.

Shame.

Guilt.

"I'm really sorry, Moony," James said before Remus could even answer the boy's question or properly think of his own. He could hear the pain there in the other boy's voice and desperately wanted to know just what had placed it there.

"What happened?" Remus asked for the second time that day, his voice hardening from the softness that it had taken on that year.

"Look, don't be angry with him," James began to stammer hurriedly. "He's an idiot, but I don't think that he realized. I did. Think that he meant to..."

But Remus wasn't listening to the other boy's excuses, not when he knew that there was only one person that he would give them for with such desperation.

"What did Sirius do?" Thenboy asked, his voice growing harder still as the panic grew in James's.

Remus felt an all too famIliar anger rise up within him as the other boy spoke, as James dulled and bent the truth as much as he could so that it wouldn't just yet break. So that Suriusi came out looking less tarnished than he should have. Only it didn't work at all because unlike James two had grown up around unconditional love and truth, Rmeus had grown up around liars and could hear them as easily as breathing. Even white lies.

"He fuckign told Snape," Remus summarized bluntly, his voice coming out in much more of a growl then either of the boys wanted to hear, but - for the first time - Remus didn't bite it back.

"Not... not exactly," James said carefully, still trying to play the peacemaker. "He told him how the willow worked, and Snape..." Remus almost found it amusing how difficult it was for the boy before him to say just what the other two boys had done. Almost. "No one was hurt," James hurriedly continued, "but Snape he..."

"He saw me," Remus said, not needing the other boy's confirmation to know that it was true. Not wanting it either. "James, please leave."

"Remus-"

But the scarred boy wasn't having it, not when he knew that once the shock and betrayal of all of this had properly worn off that James would be right back at Sirius's side as if none of it had happened at all.