Gryffindor Black brothers

chapter 7

The evening after the full moon, Remus returned to the dormitory, responding to his friends' inquiries about his mother's health with short, non-specific answers and vague shrugs, as he always did. He caught Sirius looking at him through narrowed eyes again before he quickly turned away.

The following morning, when Remus sat down in Defense Against the Dark Arts and reached into his bag to get his books, he winced, his shoulder protesting. he'd dislocated it during the transformation, and though Madam Pomfrey had set it back into place and healed it, it still ached a bit. To his surprise, he saw another pair of hands reach into his book bag and grab his textbook, notebook, and quill, placing them on his desk for him. He looked up to see Sirius, who gave him a slight smile.

"What'd you do to your shoulder?" Sirius asked, his voice mild, but his gaze pierced Remus, just as they had when he'd asked him why he had to go home. Remus flushed involuntarily, cursing himself for this traitorous reflex as he hastened to find another excuse.

"Nothing much," he replied. "I think I just slept on it wrong last night."

Sirius gave him a look that made it clear that he didn't believe him, but didn't respond, only took out his own books and turned to the front of the class, to where Professor Fawley began his lecture on the Disarming Charm. Remus wasn't fully able to pay attention during the class due to his nagging worry about the suspicious looks Sirius kept giving him. He concluded that he'd just have to step up his lying game from then on.

This resolution proved hard to keep, however, as, throughout the following months, Sirius' prying questions and narrowed-eye glances became all the more frequent. Remus didn't know what had triggered his roommate's sudden interest in Remus' excuses surrounding the full moon, nor how to stop it, as nothing he said ever seemed to satisfy Sirius, only made him more suspicious. Not only did Sirius question him about his excuses for leaving at each full moon—Remus had resolved to say he was ill from then on, instead of visiting home, but this didn't seem to dampen Sirius' curiosity in the slightest—he commented on Remus' soreness, tiredness, and injuries, which Remus always had after each full moon. With each question Sirius asked, or piercing look the other boy gave him, Remus' anxiety increased. He worried, too, that it wasn't only Sirius who was suspicious about his excuses, and that James and Peter were just too polite to ask their own prying questions, as Sirius did.

Remus was panicking—he had no idea what to do. He didn't want to write home to his parents with his concerns, as he knew that his father would want to immediately remove him from Hogwarts, and Remus hated the thought. However, if the boys in his dormitory found out, he knew that he may not have a choice. They might tell the whole school, and Professor Dumbledore might then be forced by the Ministry to expel him. Remus couldn't let that happen.

He couldn't let that happen. He couldn't.

And so, he didn't.

Not quite a month before the April full moon, in the weeks between the third and fourth full moons of the school year, Remus made the decision to come out to his friends about being a werewolf. He'd known that it would have to happen eventually, if Sirius' constant questioning and prying continued, and he was surprised that he'd held it off this long.

Perhaps he'd been too afraid to do it, for fear that his friends would reject him and treat him just like everyone else he'd ever met once they found out the truth. Or perhaps he'd been worried that they would think he was dangerous, or think that he would one day hurt them, like most people did when they found out the truth. Or, maybe, he'd simply just not wanted to bring up the painful past, to talk about something that was sure to make him more upset than he already was. Remus didn't know why he'd held off telling his friends about his condition, but now that he had, he was going to get it over with.