***
The first line is a harried scribble, the second quick and calligraphic:
To REMUS "SMART MOUTH" LUPIN, alias MISTER MOONY,
Via this owl we found on the campsite that will probably die before it reaches him
Remus smiles and rips open the envelope. There are two letters folded together, and the first is from James.
Remus,
WE'RE AT THE WORLD CUP. I realise, of course, that you know this, as I mentioned it once or twice before term's end
Sirius circled the words "once or twice" and drew an arrow to the margin, where he's added Read: Twelve Thousand Million Times.
but it's worth repeating, because WE'RE AT THE WORLD CUP!!!
We got here just in time for the Semi-Finals with England and Argentina, and I'm saddened to report that our countrymen got pummeled. Sirius says my comments were tiresome
Another note in Sirius' handwriting: He wouldn't shut up
but their strategical issues were so obvious a CHILD, or even SIRIUS BLACK, could've seen them, had he been PAYING ATTENTION and not FIDDLING WITH MY OMNIOCULARS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME. But anyway, Syria and the Netherlands played for third a few days ago and that was a right blast, close as anything. Syria's technique is good, but they just don't have the lineup the Netherlands have got.
There's quite a bit of Quidditch-speak after that: the histories of Syria's player lineup and the Netherlands', comparisons between them both. Remus can be forgiven for skimming a bit.
We're having LOADS of fun in Geneva. There's a lot of magical history stuff Mum's really into here, and Sirius has been helping us get around with his French like the PONCY POSH MONSTROSITY he is
Circled in the margin: Vous pouvez naviguer seul la prochaine fois, branleur
and it's been a great time. The campsite's right next to this really huge lake and it's pretty and everything but it hasn't got a Giant Squid or ANYTHING COOL at all, so really what's the point?
Mum and Dad say hi. We'll be back to England by the time you can answer us probably, but I recommend letting the owl rest up a bit first.
Yours Sincerely,
JAMES WARREN BHARGAVA POTTER
Below it is Sirius' letter. It's shorter and significantly more legible.
Moony,
Having a great time at the Cup. The whole world's packed in here, and the best part is seeing all the mad stuff people from abroad do— we saw the Russian witch next to us at the campsite catch a grindylow in the lake with her bare hands, but Mr and Mrs Potter don't believe us. There's also loads of cool things to see in Geneva if you go on the wizarding tours. People used to try to do necromancy here a couple centuries ago, so you can go to the caves around the lake and see some really gross, messed up stuff. It's the absolute best.
Carlos sends her regards, and is pining for you terribly. Or I imagine she is, it's hard to tell. She was on James' shoulder when somebody lit a bottle rocket right next to us and nearly burst our eardrums, but she didn't react at all. James reckons she's fearless, the perfect icon of Gryffindor House, but I think she might just be deaf.
Have you heard from Pete at all? We're going to write to him too, obviously, but we won't bother if he's been murdered by his cousins. Always a possibility this far into the holidays. I only see mine once a year and I can't stand them, I don't know how he deals with his whole family living right next bloody door.
Hope you're doing alright, and that the full wasn't too awful.
Sirius
He almost misses the postscript:
I don't know how much your decor will be improved by a photograph of a devilishly handsome young gentleman with a skinny speccy git, but Mrs P insisted we send you a copy.
Inside the envelope Remus finds one more piece of paper, a small square photograph that'd look like a Muggle Polaroid shot if its subjects weren't moving. Sirius and James stand with their arms flung around each other's shoulders, an enormous stadium far off behind them just visible through the crowd. They beam up at him, faces bright with excitement, and Remus finds himself smiling back. He tacks it up on the wall above his desk.
He feels a bit guilty for the part of himself that wishes Sirius weren't off having the time of his life with his honourary family, so he might instead be home in the city to come over and be bored with Remus. The holidays pass more quickly when there's somebody else in town to waste time with. And Remus has noticed that there's a quality to Sirius that makes him hard to capture in a letter. With James and Peter, writing back and forth is at least some substitute for actually speaking to them. But Sirius, for whatever reason, only works in person to him.
Maybe it's all the very specifically Sirius-y things he does that seem so essential to his personality. Reading 'Moony' (he's grown to accept that the nickname's not going away) in Sirius' handwriting and hearing him say it are two very different experiences. That posh accent of his— which Sirius himself hates and James finds hilarious, which has softened over the years but not by much— is part of it. The word becomes all prim, diphthongal drawl: vowels slid together from the bottom of his throat to the back of his teeth, like the glide up a piano keyboard. Mee-ooney. There's also how he knows that Remus hates the name and it colours the way he says it every time, almost imperceptibly, the tiniest trace of that familiar tilt to his lips. What're you going to do about it? it asks. What indeed, Remus thinks.
He shakes his head. Does it automatically, possessed by some desperate, stupid instinct like it'd achieve something, dislodge whatever's been sticking to the walls in there lately. Rattle it free, like a dog shaking off an insect.
***
Whenever it's been months since Sirius has seen Brianna, she always comments on how tall he's gotten. Somehow it surprises her every time.
"A sweet little eleven-year-old fell into my shop!" she exclaims. "This big reedy thing— how'd that happen? Since when am I shorter than you, eh?"
"Since like a year ago."
"Shut it." She grabs one of his hands, studies his black nail varnish, scrunches her nose. "All them arty little mod fucks used to wear this in the sixties."
He snatches his hand back. "I saw Freddie Mercury with it in Melody Maker, sod off."
They go about their usual business: Sirius digs through the crates of new releases while Brianna sits on the counter, smokes a cigarette, and asks after his friends.
"How's James?"
"Asked me the other day if Iggy's full name was 'Ignatius Pop', so, y'know, normal."
"Peter?"
"Still into Pink-bloody-Floyd. I did end up giving him that one with the cow on for Christmas like you said and I've regretted it ever since, thanks a lot."
"And the one with the funny name?"
"Remus has been weird. Isn't answering my letters."
She snorts, exhaling smoke. "Never heard nothing like it, you lot and your letters. Call him on the telephone, you numpty."
"Er—"
"You've got a bleeding telephone, haven't you?"
"Yeah, yeah of course I've got a telephone," Sirius sputters. "It's just that, er—" Wildly he casts around for an excuse. What goes wrong with telephones? "The cat ate it," he blurts.
She blinks. "'Scuse me?"
"The cat ate it. Took a big bite out of the, er. The bit you talk into."
"Your cat...ate the telephone receiver?"
"Er..."
Sirius gets frustrated with himself in moments like these. It was three years ago that Brianna took him under her wing; how is he still so bad at pretending to be 'normal' for her sake? He wonders how Malcolm got used to it.
He gave up the wizarding world, Sirius' brain answers. That's how.
Oh. Right.
Sirius wonders about that sometimes, why Malcolm did what he did, but he's never asked. He doesn't think there's any answer that would make sense to him. Sirius has never known anything but their world. He can't picture himself without it.
What would that even look like, a Black without magic? Would his family exist, would he have been born at all? His parents are second cousins, he knows it wasn't love that made them get married. And what about the family disease? Muggles get haemophilia too, but Sirius has never thought to wonder before what he'd do about it without magic: there's an easy spell that stops the nosebleeds he gets. He still remembers being eight and suddenly not being able to see, how the Healers worked out that his brain had started bleeding. They gave him a potion and he was fine. He doesn't know how Muggles would've fixed that.
It's not worth imagining. Sirius is a product of his world, and he couldn't exist without it. How weird it is to have a friend on the other side who's got no idea of the gulf between them; how weird it is that secrets this huge can be kept casually, day-to-day.
"Yeah," Sirius answers. "Bit it right in half."
Brianna puts her cigarette out on the counter, rolling her eyes. "Whatever, lad."
***
"I can't believe you got them!"
Sirius brandishes the tiny drawstring pouch with pride. "Said I would, didn't I?"
"But where did you find Doxy eggs?" James doesn't bother to lower his voice. The greenhouse is full of noise while the fourth years fight with their Fanged Geraniums, a lazy October rainfall pattering against the glass roof.
"Told Kettleburn I had a keen interest and asked if he had any samples." Sirius tsks fondly, a sound sharply at odds with the snarling hiss his Fanged Geranium just produced. "Such an innocent soul, never suspects a thing. I feel bad taking advantage of him, I do."
"Do you really?" Peter asks.
"Not at all."
"Worked out well for us," Peter says. The second ritual in the Animagus spell demands a second potion, as full of weird ingredients as the last one.
"Moony'll be back later today, yeah?" James asks.
"No idea," Peter says. "You been to see him?" he asks Sirius.
"Nah." He recoils sharply as his geranium snaps at his hand. "He's been funny with me lately. Dunno what I did."
"Wish we could just get the stupid thing done," James says. "Then he wouldn't have to be in the bloody hospital all the time."
"How d'you reckon that?"
"Because he wouldn't hurt himself so bad in the first place, since that's the whole point, Pete."
"I mean, I think he'd still be in—"
"It's got to be on the new moon, right?" Sirius says. "I checked the calendar, the next one's on the fifteenth, that's two weeks from now. Think we'll be ready by then?"
"Easy. We'll brew the potion and after that it'll be a piece of cake."
Peter isn't sure if he would describe attempting a major step in a complex and potentially lethal spell as a 'piece of cake', but he doesn't argue. "I double-checked McGonagall's book, but I still don't understand the bit about—"
"Oy!" James glares at something past Peter's shoulder. "Get out of here!"
Of course when Peter turns around it's Snape he sees, hovering nearby. He glowers at James as he picks up a watering can at random from a shelf. "Just getting this."
"And you've got it," Sirius says, drawing his wand. "Now split."
With one more dirty look at the two of them, Snape slinks away.
James vents his feelings on a weed in his geranium's pot, yanking it up with such force that soil sprays everyone in a metre radius. "Sneaking, creeping, slimy little—"
"Thinks we're up to something," Sirius growls. "Wouldn't that just be the best day of his pathetic life, catching us in the act? Let's hex him, it's been ages."
"You hexed him yesterday," Peter points out, but no one seems to hear him.
"Got an even better idea," James says. "We've still got those Dungbombs?"
***
Remus hurries out of the hospital wing to get to History of Magic. Anything's better than sitting in bed letting Madam Pomfrey fuss over him, even Professor Binns soliloquizing in monotone about giant wars.
He takes his seat at the end of the row and gets his things out. Just past his right elbow Sirius watches him, stifling laughter into his sleeve.
It's suspicious. "What's going on?"
Across the aisle on Sirius' other side James and Peter burst into muffled giggles and wow, Remus needs new friends.
"Would someone please—"
Sirius cuts him off, looking like the cat that got a whole bloody flock of canaries. "Got Snivellus really good today."
Remus turns around in his seat. A worried-looking Lily sits beside an empty chair. "What'd you do to him?" he asks.
"Oh, don't you worry your little moony head about it," Sirius says in the voice he uses when he's trying to be annoying, the one that makes him sound like a particularly smug Oscar Wilde character. He reaches over to ruffle Remus' hair and explains, "He's perfectly unharmed. Just— ah— inconvenienced."
James leans over the gap between his and Sirius' desk. "Remember how we ordered a whole load of Dungbombs for the— for last year?"
It's funny, this unspoken rule that they don't refer to the Slytherin common room prank, that they don't allude to it at all. "Yeah," Remus says.
Catching his bottom lip with his teeth even as it spreads into a grin, Sirius tilts his chair at a more precarious angle. "Made good use of them."
"Oh?"
"Was bloody spying on us again," Sirius says, drawing out the suspense. "Couldn't just go with the usual jinxes, could we?"
"Stuffed him into the first floor lav with the whole lot of them," James blurts.
Sighing, Remus drops his face to one hand. "Locked the door, I suppose?"
"Chill out, somebody will hear him sooner or later."
The timing is remarkable. No sooner has Remus started to reply than the classroom door opens and in stalks Snape, with him the most overpoweringly sulphuric stench Remus has ever smelled. Everyone in the room covers their noses as he makes for his seat, a few people let out strangled groans, and Sirius, James, and Peter lose it completely, dissolving into fits of stifled laughter. Professor Binns takes no notice and keeps talking.
Red-faced, Snape pauses at James' desk. In a furious undertone he hisses, "You're a dead man, Potter." He turns to Sirius. "You too, Black. You're dead men."
Sirius barks a laugh and says, at full volume, "Well, fuck— at least we don't smell like it, mate!"
Whether it's the room positively exploding with laughter or the profanity that finally gets Professor Binns to turn around, they'll never know.
"Mr Brown, that's quite enough!" he wheezes.
"Yeah, Mr Brown," James drawls, and Sirius about tips over his desk aiming a kick at him.
Snape reaches his desk in the row behind theirs, and there's a loud scraping of furniture as those nearest scoot their chairs away from the source of the smell. Collars pull up over mouths and noses, Marianne Summerby sprays the air with perfume from her bag, there's a mad scramble to open the windows, and Snape's face grows steadily redder. Lily's the only one in the room who doesn't react; she grabs him by the arm and says something quietly, takes out her wand.
"Evans, hey Evans!" James is twisted round in his seat, hand in his hair. "How d'you like him now?"
But she doesn't seem to be listening. Not acknowledging James' existence at all, she waves her wand around Snape, muttering quietly, a hand left comfortingly on his forearm.
"Evans! Hey, y—" When Peter nudges him with a shoulder, James' mouth snaps shut. He drops to his desk on his elbows. "Whatever." He settles into his arms to doze.
The ruckus dies away eventually, and the class falls back into its usual lethargic quiet, punctuated by the odd snore. Remus attempts to take notes (he's the only one of the four who does; it's down to him that they don't all fail the class) but can't wrestle any focus. Even with the combined force of Lily's spellwork and the open windows, the smell is still pretty overpowering.
Next to him Sirius has completely given up on paying attention, slumped flat onto his desk, cheek against the wood. The angle at which he landed has left a good deal of dark hair spilling over the right half of Remus' notebook. Remus goes to brush it away, but stops himself. Instead, he pokes lightly at Sirius' shoulder with the point of his quill.
Sirius mumbles, "Ow," and doesn't move.
"You've gotten your hair all over my notebook."
Muffled against the desk: "It's for decoration."
"Sirius."
"Alright, alright." Sirius raises his head and rearranges himself into a more controlled sprawl. This time he's got his right arm stuck out over the desk, hand dangling, head rested against the inside of his elbow. He looks at Remus, petulant. "Don't shout at me, I'm tired."
"You had the energy to haul someone bodily into a loo."
"Yeah, and now I'm tired."
Remus rolls his eyes. He forces himself to pay attention, but now Professor Binns is talking about some sort of banshee revolt and he's got no idea what's going on.
He gives up quickly. He pokes Sirius again.
"Ow."
"As a matter of interest, what exactly was he spying on?"
"Just talking about the potion, mostly. We've been assembling ingredients."
"And?"
"Doxy eggs were a breeze, and the other two did a really excellent job nicking knotgrass from Slughorn. Got detention just to help him 'organise' his stores."
"You usually wait until I'm back for that sort of scheme."
"Yeah, thought we'd spare you the especially stupid stuff." Sirius shrugs the shoulder he isn't lying against. "You've got enough on your plate catching up after you get back. No time for detention."
That surprises Remus. "That was very considerate."
"Pete's idea. I reckon in addition to being The Oldest One he's also The Considerate One."
"To be fair, The Oldest One was always a bit of a cop-out. The Considerate One's better."
Sirius scoffs. "If you're a little old lady."
"Better than being Fit and Useless."
Cheek against the desk, Sirius peers up at him from under dark eyelashes and says, "'Fit', am I?"
Immediately Remus feels his face get hot and his pulse pick up and damn him, really. "That's been your title forever, James said it."
"I believe the word James used was 'pretty'."
Remus ducks his head, stabs his quill into its ink pot, and copies down the first words he hears Professor Binns say. "Either way, you're useless."
As he scribbles down something about cauldron embargoes he hears Sirius laugh quietly. His notes become spectacularly blotted.
He shakes himself. Get it together, man.
It's become a pattern, this.
Remus doesn't think about it. People talk all the time about how you can't take back words once you've said them but they don't mention thoughts, how once you've allowed a thought to wriggle its way to the surface there's no stamping it back down again into the static underneath, the un-worded sub-subconscious buzz where it can't hurt you. Keep it out of the front of your mind because once you've had that thought you're guilty of it forever, your brain will always be different for the phantom pathways those neurons burned. Remus knows it's an awful way to see things, he's knows that it's unhealthy, but he's never been able to shake it. For as long as he can remember his own mind has seemed to him like a poisonous, guilty thing that'll never be as pure or as whole or as righteous as he wants it to be, and as such shouldn't be dipped into more deeply than necessary.
He doesn't break the surface. He doesn't think about it.
His quill ran out of ink a sentence or two ago; he's been scratching invisible words. He throws down his quill with a murmur of, "Oh, sod it."
"That's the spirit," Sirius says sleepily. His eyes are shut. Then a second later they snap open as he says, rather loudly, "Oh! I forgot to tell you—"
Remus shushes him and Sirius lowers his voice again. "We're going to do the thing in two weeks, Tuesday the fifteenth. We'll be good to go by then."
"We— really?" Remus drops his voice into the quietest whisper he can manage; being overheard would be disastrous. "Where?"
"Where else? The Forbidden Forest, of course. I was thinking that nice big clearing, where Kettleburn takes us sometimes."
"That happened...fast. Wow."
Sirius smiles drowsily. "You're welcome, Moony. Now that's sorted..."
He settles his face back into the crook of his elbow, and within minutes he's sound asleep.
Binns drones on; Remus stares into space. After a while of gazing listlessly at the back of Randy Parkinson's head, he sees Sirius stir out of the corner of his eye. He's tilted his head in his sleep, causing some hair to fall over his face. It moves a little every time he breathes, which is funny to watch. It's probably not comfortable, hair hanging over your face like that. It'd get hot, wouldn't it? Especially since Sirius has got such thick hair. Absently, Remus reaches over to move it out of the way. It's very wavy. Would it be curly, if it were shorter? It's brushed his shoulders for as long as Remus has known him. It's also quite soft.
It's at this point that Remus realises he's sitting in the middle of History of bloody Magic, combing his friend's hair with his fingers. He recoils. He drops his head to his desk and buries it in his arms.
Oh God. This is going to be a problem.
***
"Careful," James says, his wandlight bending eerily through the dark trees. "I hear there are werewolves in this forest."
Remus rams into him with his shoulder. James cackles.
The trees thin out into a grassy, classroom-sized clearing where they set up shop. Remus casts a look around. His eyes have only just adjusted to the moonless night, and even with the vivid spray of stars that arcs overhead— so unlike what he's used to at home in London— the darkness seems unnaturally thick. It lies dense and black over the towering wall of trees.
"I've never liked new moons," he says to no one in particular.
"Should think you'd like them a spot more than the full ones."
He shrugs, eyes on the sky. "Devil I know."
"Er, lads?" comes Peter's voice, and Remus looks earthward again. Peter is crouched over the cauldron, set on a convenient stump. "How do we start a fire without burning the forest down?"
He and Remus look at each other for a second.
"Were you a Boy Scout?" Remus asks.
"Mum didn't think I was suited for it."
"Erm. Hang on, think I know something." Remus points his wand into his cupped palm, muttering an incantation he only sort of remembers, and light blue flames flicker to life in his hand with the sensation of a soft breeze. He scoops his handful of flame into the rotted hollow in the center of the stump and sets the cauldron over it. The murky potion inside immediately starts to bubble.
"Wicked."
"Thanks."
"Alright lads," says James in his distinct Alright lads voice. "Shall we begin?"
When Remus was a child growing up in a Muggle suburb, with his only real knowledge of magic whatever spells Dad did around the house, he had a rather fantastical picture in his mind of what magic should look like. Part of that was Muggle films, but mostly it was his mother's classics doctorate. Studying magic in school has made it significantly less romantic in his mind, as learning a lot about a subject often does, and he's since let go of the mystical images in his head.
But what beautiful, dangerous images they were. The magic of his childhood was the magic of alchemists in their secret workshops, plunging their hands into the guts of the universe; the magic that flowed through Circe when she turned men into pigs, through Cassandra when she prophesied on the burning plains of Troy; the magic that made worshippers of Dionysus go mad and rip people to shreds. He's learned since then, of course, that magic is a lot more mundane than all that. Mostly it's copying down notes on wand movements and trying to remember the dates of goblin wars and cutting up your valerian root wrong and your potion blowing up all over your shoes. To Remus, magic hasn't been big and cosmic and frightening for a very long time.
But tonight...Tonight he catches himself thinking, This is what magic should be.
An eerie purplish light coming off the potion as James adds the last ingredients. He pours in a final vial of powdered lionfish spines, and with a sizzling whoosh the mixture exhales a column of steam that glistens like heat rising from pavement. The smell that fills the clearing is sweetly metallic, like spent gunpowder. Their three faces are ghoulish in the potion's glow as they lean in over the cauldron, close their eyes, and on James' nod begin to breathe in the steam.
Remus isn't sure how long the stillness lasts, only that his eyes burn in the acrid-smelling steam and that he wouldn't shut them for a thousand Galleons. He sits fully enraptured of the glimmer in the air and the glow that gets steadily brighter and brighter, and of the smell that fills him up and makes him feel queasy but also stronger than he ever has before, like he could do anything, anything at all— he wonders if this is what the maenads had, he doesn't feel especially inclined to dismember a king with his hands but he probably could if he wanted to--
Suddenly Sirius' eyes fly open, and he heaves a deep, rattling gasp. The others take no notice. Remus crawls forward with his heart in his throat: "Sirius! What's—"
Sirius staggers upright, sheet of parchment in his left hand, and in the shimmering light Remus sees him raise his wand. The hissing and crackling of the potion gets louder but Remus can still hear Sirius' voice as he reads out the long incantation he perfected for months, syllables spilling from him as if he's lost the need for oxygen, like he's beyond it, and there's another gasp and a choking sound: Remus sees James lurch to standing.
Their voices run together for minutes, probably, and then Peter joins them and the potion is growing brighter and sizzling louder until Remus is sure it's going to explode but that doesn't bother him because nothing can hurt any of them right now, nothing, they're more than teenage boys, they're more than mortal—
And then darkness. The dense cloud of glistening steam pulls away, sucked back into the potion; the mad crescendo of light and noise cuts off and Sirius, James, and Peter crumple to the ground, unconscious.
The moonless night slams down over Remus' eyes. He feels the cold night air again, and hears the rustling of the forest around him. He doesn't feel strong anymore. On the contrary, he's filled with blind panic.
"Oh shit," he says, swaying to his feet. "Oh God, no, oh shit." His knees feel like rubber; his heart hammers so hard he can hear it. "Oh shit, oh Jesus Christ— hey!"
He sprints to where James is collapsed some metres in front of him, nearly kicking over the cauldron in the process. He falls to his knees to shake him by the shoulders, but James' eyes stay closed. "Hey! Hey, wake up!" He shakes him again. Nothing. "No, no no, this wasn't supposed to happen, I told you it could but it wasn't supposed to happen—"
Behind him, a drowsy voice says, "Remus?" He spins around. Peter is lying on the ground a ways away, disoriented but definitely not dead.
A strangled shout falls out of Remus' mouth. He staggers over, hearing his own voice crack upward an octave when he yelps, "PETE!"
Peter only looks more confused when Remus pretty much falls on top of him. "Yeah, I...what's wrong with you?"
Remus gulps in deep breaths. "Thought I killed you lot for a second."
"Nah, they'll come round in a sec," Peter says hoarsely. He frowns at Remus. "Were you crying?"
He reaches up to swipe a hand under his eyes. Huh. "I dunno."
"That's fair, considering. Thought we were dead, and all."
There's a retching sound from the other side of the clearing. Sirius is propped on one elbow with his face turned over his shoulder, vomiting into the grass.
"Ah," says Peter. "So, just the one more, then."
"Merlin's balls!"
"Oh, there he is," says Peter.
James rights himself onto shaking elbows. "Lads! Lads, I'm a, I just saw...oh, bugger." He flips over onto his hands and retches.
"At least I didn't get sick," Peter says brightly.
Sirius resurfaces, gasping for breath. "Find some wood and knock on it, mate."
"Alright, wait, so...what happened?"
"I got hit by a bloody truck is what happened," Sirius pants, then turns over and is sick some more.
James comes up for air just long enough to contribute, "Yeah, same," and then is back at it.
"I feel...odd," says Peter as he climbs unsteadily to his feet. His face is pale and sweaty. "That was odd. I...oh." He sways and Remus stands up to catch him.
Later, when everyone looks more normal and stops being sick, they sit in a circle around the little blue fire in the stump, the cauldron set aside. Remus doesn't know what to say after the enormity of what they've just done. What comes out of his mouth is, "So?"
Behind his glasses, flashing in the flickering blue light, James' eyes widen. "That. That is a bitch of a spell."
"I warned you, didn't I? Since the beginning I've been saying—!"
"Oh shut up, would you?" James groans. "I haven't got the energy. Anyway, I definitely saw something, did either of you?"
"What do you mean, saw something?" asks Remus, but nobody answers.
"Yeah, but I couldn't tell what," Sirius says "It was big, though, with four legs."
"So was mine! But mine had the, eh, what d'you call 'ems." James holds up his hands on top of his head and sticks out his fingers, giving him the impression of a black-haired television arial. "The things."
"The what?"
"The, ah." He wiggles his fingers. "I forget the word. The prong-y things."
"Antlers?" Peter suggests.
"Yeah, them."
"'Prong-y things'." Sirius snorts. "Wow."
"I forgot the word!"
"Yeah, but 'prong-y things'?"
"How else would you call 'em if you forgot the word?"
"I don't know, but I'd—"
"You saw your animal forms?" Remus says. "Already? I thought that didn't happen for weeks after."
"I think it's sort of a cumulative thing," James replies. "I didn't see all of mine, just—"
"Just the prong-y things," says Sirius.
"Shut up!"
"Think you're a moose, mate."
"Shut up!"
"What about you?" Remus asks Peter. "See anything?"
In a small voice he says, "Not a thing."
"That's no trouble," James says. "It'll come later in the dreams and things, that's what all the books said."
"Yeah."
"At least you kept your dinner," Sirius says. "That was absolutely mad, I thought my insides were melting. This spell is..."
"A bitch?" Remus volunteers.
"Yeah, about sums it up."
"But man, for a second there..." James trails off, eyes unfocused. "For a bit, I felt like...I dunno."
"Powerful?" says Remus. When all three of them nod, he continues. "I got that too and it was only secondhand."
Peter smiles, small and to himself. "I felt like Superman."
Remus nudges him with his elbow. "Even Superman couldn't do this."
"Well, we done here, then?" says James and he gets to his feet. "Wouldn't mind a nice lie-down after that, I'll admit..."
The other two stand as well. Remus blurts out, "Hang on, I. Ah."
"What?"
"I just. Er." It'd seemed like a good idea before, but now Remus feels embarrassed. "Nothing, just a stupid idea I had, you lot should sleep—"
"Oy, none of that. We love stupid ideas. What is it?"
His face is heating up, and he thanks the new moon for the darkness. "Well, it's just that you three are doing all of this stuff for me and we knew that this particular ritual would be really unpleasant, and I thought— well, I figured that I ought to do something nice for you all, a gift or something, but I didn't know what that'd be and besides it's not like I have money or anything—"
"Spit it out, Moony."
"I...oh Christ, it's stupid. But it's all I could think of," he says desperately. "You see, my mum's started to feel bad that while I'm at school I get used to Madam Pomfrey's potions for the pain after fulls and then when I come home I haven't got them and pretty much have to wait it out, because you can't get Muggle painkillers without being given them by a doctor. So she got me other stuff, and she cooks it into things for me but..." He reaches over for his bag, digs through it, and pulls out a folded up envelope. He hands it to Peter who, it occurs to him, will be most likely to understand what it is.
Peter doesn't disappoint. He tears open the envelope and looks inside, and his eyes widen. "Holy hell."
"What?" say Sirius and James in unison.
Looking back up at Remus, Peter's expression is one of complete shock. "Your mum got you pot?"
"She's a weird mum, alright?"
"My aunt caught my cousin with some a couple years ago. She went totally mental, barely let him outside the whole summer."
"Well, it's a bit different!" Remus protests. "The pain's really awful without the potions and she knew this would help, which it does, but I thought—"
"Wait," says James. "Are you saying that you, Remus Sensible Lupin—"
"John," he mumbles.
"—got us drugs? By stealing from your mother?"
Remus flings his hands out to his sides. "Yes! Alright? That is exactly what I did! Do you want the pot or not?"
"Well of course we do, you magnificent bastard!" James crows. He throws himself to the ground next to Remus, grabbing the envelope from Peter as he goes. "Come on, let's get this show on the road."
"I don't get it," Sirius says.
"In time, Black," James says soothingly as he goes for his bag. "Now get down here."
"How do you even know what marijuana is?" asks Peter. "You're a pure-blood."
"I," says James, ripping a piece of parchment into careful pieces, "am a very particular sort of pure-blood."
"What sort's that?"
He takes out another sheet and empties the contents of the envelope onto it, says, "New money," and leaves it at that.
With their four combined brain powers, three tries, and one Sticking Charm, they eventually manage to create a successful joint. After Remus gestures for James to do the honours, he leans over the stump and lights it on the blue fire. The end ignites, sending the spicy smell of it curling up through the air.
"Hey, it smells like Brianna's shop," Sirius says. He thinks for a moment. "Oh, that explains some things."
"Cheers," says James. He takes a pull on the joint, then immediately begins coughing so hard that it drops from his hand, lands in the grass, and starts a small fire. Sirius puts it out with a jet of water from his wand.
"Oh dear," Remus says.
***
"You know what's really far out?" says James as he lies on his back in the grass. "Air conditioning."
"What?" Sirius says.
"Air conditioning. It's a thing Muggles have got in their houses to keep it from getting too hot or cold."
"What is it, though?"
"Are you lot really talking about air conditioning?" Remus asks, but everyone ignores him. The grass is very cold but nice and soft.
"I dunno. Sciencey thing." James lifts one arm up from the ground and arcs it over his body toward Peter. "Peeeeeettigrew," he sing-songs. "Explain."
Peter, who's sat up against the stump and lit from behind in shuddering blue, makes a face. "How should I know?"
"You're sciencey and you live around Muggles."
"But I dunno how air conditioning works," Peter says. Remus had forgotten how much Peter changes his accent around them, how they haven't heard his natural voice since the early weeks of first year, but it turns out that a stoned Peter is pure Lancashire. "You just put it in your house and it goes."
"Without magic?" says Sirius. "Woah. Wicked."
"Think that's wicked, you'd go spare over quantum mechanics."
"What're those?"
"Science of small stuff. So small you can't see it."
"The science of James Potter's brain," says Sirius, then laughs for a really long time while James turns over and flails his limbs at him. Then Sirius continues. "Small stuff? What's so special?"
"Like..." Peter stares into space for a good ten or fifteen seconds. Finally, he shakes his head. "Nah. I'm not smart enough."
"Come ooooooon," James calls from the ground. Sirius joins in.
"Fine fine fine....it's. Er. Atoms and stuff. But it means more stuff than that. Like..." Peter screws up his face, apparently trying to convince his drugged brain to work faster. "Like, light's particles and waves at once and it's really fast, faster than anything, and there's this stuff called space-time that we're all in all the time and it's space but also time at the same time because time's a dimension, see? And then because light's so fast and because of space-time...things, it's. Er." He flaps his hands. "It's why you can't go back in time, see, like they do in the films and I always wanted to like in the films so when I was in primary school I asked me teacher how, but he told me how you can't because you'd have to go at, at the speed of light, see, but energy is mass times the speed of light squared and all that so you can't do it, go at the speed of light, because then your mass would have to be so big it's infinite, which is against—"
"Hang on," says James. "You can go back in time, though. People do it with Time-Turners."
To Remus' surprise, Peter starts laughing. It's different than the perpetual giggles he's had since they passed around the joint, though. From anyone else Remus would call it 'sardonic'.
"Magic, though. Magic doesn't count." Peter sinks further back against the stump. "Magic.....you know? Magic's the worst."
"What're you on about?" Sirius says.
"I said that magic's the worst. It hasn't got any rules at all. It just...it just goes, doesn't care about anything else at all."
"It's got some rules," James says. "You've got G—"
"Bloody Gamp and his bloody Laws of bloody Transfiguration," Peter says, and Remus is shocked. He's never heard Peter interrupt James like that or, for that matter, talk this long without stammering. He doesn't know if it's the pot or the subject matter that's got Peter so at ease. "But they don't come down to anything. In science there's always a reason for something, you've got something then there's a reason, not in a 'theory of everything' kinda way because you haven't really got those, well I mean there's like general relativity and the, and the things, what's the other thing— I..." Peter blinks. "I've forgotten what I was saying." He looks down at Remus, lying close to his shoe. "What was I saying?"
Remus regrets his decision to take this moment to sit up. The world spins dizzyingly; the huge black sky stirs its cauldron of stars. Also, he's having trouble remembering what order the last thirty seconds happened in. "General relativity?"
"Oh..." Peter trails off again. "I'm just, y'know, I'm saying that physics is beautiful because it's got rules so that way it's got, it's got, it's got harmony, d'you see?"
James snorts his way into a fit of giggles. "'Physics is beautiful'? You're stoned, mate, you're. You're talking nonsense."
"Aaaaaaaaaggghaaaggghhh," Peter says eloquently. "That's the thing with wizards. Think they know everything. The universe has got rules. Think they know everything cause they can sidestep all the rules. There's got to be rules."
"You can't say 'that's the problem with wizards' when you are a wizard, you git," Sirius says, and Remus thinks he's got a point.
"But I'm an awful one so I don't matter, see?"
"You shut your mouth!" James says. "That's...that's rubbish! I'll hex you if you say that again!"
Sirius makes a growling sort of noise. "I'll help."
"Oh shut up, all of you," Peter says, and without further ado he rolls over against the stump and into the grass.
But Remus is curious. "How d'you know all this stuff?"
"Me teacher took a special interest," he answers, thick with Northern lilt. "Gave me books and things. Told Mum I could be a, an engineer or— or an astrophysicist even, anything I wanted if I had the right teaching, said I could go to university." He snorts. "Thought that was right hilarious, she did. Couldn't get a decent mark for the life of me, could I? Didn't pan out into nothing, much." Shrugging, he tips his face up toward the night sky. "We knew I was gonna get the letter anyway, both me parents are magic so that right well sealed the deal. No point fussing about with maths when your name's down for Hogwarts."
Remus can't stop staring at Peter. He has the impression— one his murky brain just presented to him, sans explanation, as fact— that he's seeing him clearly for the first time. He wants to know more, ask a million questions of this person who's like the Peter he's known all this time but so unabashed and confident. There really are some nice things about drugs, he thinks distantly.
"Is that what you would've done, if you hadn't gotten the letter? Gone to university?"
That elicits another watery giggle. "Nah. We don't do that where I'm from."
"What's university?" asks James.
"A place Muggles go to learn more after they're done with school," Remus answers.
"Did your mum go there, then?" says Sirius. "Being a teacher, and all."
"Yeah, she did about as much school as you can do. She was Dr Jenning for a while back when she was publishing, before I was born, but—"
Peter chokes on air. "Jesus Christ, she's got a PhD? My mum didn't finish secondary school, good Lord."
"What's that?" James asks.
"A PhD's a title they give to Muggles who are really smart in a particular subject."
"Well, shit, mate," Sirius says as he waves a languid hand at Peter, "you could get one of them." Even in the dark Remus sees Peter redden.
"She's got one in classics," Remus says. He doesn't get a lot of opportunities to brag about his mum and he takes all of them that he can. "For generations the men in her family had been getting them, studying ancient Greek and such, but hardly any women went to university back then and especially not at that level. But she got one anyway. It was a big deal for the fifties."
Sirius nods. "Right on."
"She was getting her doctorate when she and Dad met, actually, that's sort of how—"
"Wait." James rolls over onto his stomach toward him. "Wait wait wait wait. There's something."
"Huh?"
"There's..." He wriggles around on his stomach like an intoxicated snake, trying to look at him directly. "...something." He points a finger at Remus' face and says, matter-of-fact, "You never talk about your dad. Not once, you never have."
Remus uncrosses his legs and tucks them up in front of himself. The October chill isn't so bad, but he feels a great urge to curl up. "Haven't I?"
"Nah, you haven't," Sirius chimes in. "Never. Well...once, you did once."
"There's hardly anything to say. How often do you lot chat about your fathers?"
"Cause Mister Prong-y Things here is the only one's got a good one, we all know that," Sirius says. "Pete doesn't know where his's got to and mine's a right scary bastard who never talks but every couple of years chucks the sugar bowl at my head. Not much to say there."
"It's just that we don't know anything about yours," James says, "except that he doesn't live with you."
"They're divorced, right? Or did he, er, pass?" Peter asks, with an awkward sensitivity that's more than James or Sirius have ever tried for.
"No, he's not dead. And they're not divorced either, legally— she still uses the name, at school and things— but for intents and purposes, yes. We haven't heard from him since I was seven, or I haven't, anyway."
Ever steadfast in his character, James is the one who finally says, "Why?"
"You know, I too find air conditioning incredibly fascinating," Remus says. "And central heating, that's—"
"Why?" James says. But from the look dawning on his face, Remus suspects he already knows.
Directly across the circle from Remus, Sirius sits perfectly still. The blue firelight throws his thunderous expression into high relief, sharpening the tightness in his jaw, the twitch of his upper lip. "Think I'll guess."
James shoves himself upright and stares at Remus, waiting for a refutation. When he says nothing, James' face twists in disbelief. With a vitriol Remus has never heard from him, he spits, "Bastard."
"It's more complicated than that, alright? Dad's a pureblood, he grew up with, with certain influences that—"
"Still a bastard."
"You're making it too simple, it wasn't so black and white as that." Remus' mind feels less pleasantly soft now, and his thoughts come out of his mouth much sharper than he expects them to when he says, "I know you find it gratifying being angry on my behalf, James, but what you fail to understand is that writing my father off as a bastard doing what bastards do won't help me at all, it never has."
The moment hangs heavily. The fire crackles, leaves rustle, and somewhere an owl hoots.
"You're right," James says, quiet. "It won't help."
They fall into silence again. A chilly breeze brushes the Forbidden Forest, stirring the treetops and the ends of their hair, and without really meaning to, without the clear thought of it forming in his mind, Remus talks. He speaks softly and to no one in particular, but he can feel the others listening, feel their breathing fall into pattern with his. He lets the words come.
"I was five when I was bitten. It was a fluke thing. I went outside later than I was supposed to. We don't know who it was or why they were there, the one house on a Muggle street where wizards lived, but it doesn't matter. It happened, and whoever it was I don't blame them.
"I didn't fully understand it at the time, the implications of it, and I don't think Mum did either. She's a Muggle, so...I mean, she couldn't fully appreciate what werewolves were to the world her son was born into. Dad knew, though. His family isn't, you know, isn't the Blacks or whoever, but he grew up hearing awful things, and then he went and got the job at the Ministry. He worked in the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Isn't that funny? The irony of that?
"They tried everything. They've got all sorts of mad 'cures' out there, but after a few years...well. It was hard for him, I could tell. He never treated my scars and things, that was always Mum, and I didn't realise it at the time but it was because he didn't like touching me. When I came into rooms he would look the other way, like I wasn't there, like I was a figment of his imagination. I don't remember much because when you're that young you don't remember specific things, just feelings, and I remember the feeling the house had in those days. As though it were always dark at the end of the hallway, and you always had a stomach ache, and nobody spoke above a whisper. Not literally, y'know, but that's how it felt, that sort of tense. As if we lived in a haunted house.
"Because everything went to rot after I was bitten. Everything went wrong. The house we were living in burned down just that next week, which is the most extraordinary coincidence, and then Dad got fired. I never knew why. There was something about...all of that stuff, that even now makes me feel as though I don't know the whole story. Sometimes I think there are parts of it that Mum still keeps from me. I don't ask her because I don't want to know. I'm quite cowardly, you see.
"Bad things kept happening. A year or two after I was bitten my parents told me I was going to have a little brother or sister, and I understand that now— I suppose they wanted some good news, something to bring light into things again. And it worked, for a while. I remember Mum being pregnant really well, actually, because the house felt so much better; they were hopeful again and as a kid I could sense that. They found out it was a girl and they let me help pick her name and everything, but when she was born she was dead. There was a funeral.
"He moved out a little while after that. Mum still doesn't know this, but I heard their conversation that night. She thinks I was asleep but I wasn't. Dad said he and Mum were cursed. He used that word, I'll never forget it: 'cursed'. How could they not be? One of their kids was dead and the other ought to be, he said. Precisely those words.
"And I can't blame him for thinking that way, I really can't. I'd had the same thoughts myself. Not thoughts so much, but the way stuff comes to you when you're seven, like instinct. I had an instinct for guilt. I remember when they explained to me what happened with my sister, I remember being sure— not coming to the conclusion deliberately or anything, but just assuming— that it was my fault. I was convinced that because of what I was my sister was not allowed to live and my parents were not allowed any happiness. Dad didn't say anything to make me feel that way. I just did.
"I've felt guilty since I was five years old and that's not his fault, he had nothing to do with it, that was all me. So I can't blame him for it. I try not to blame him for much, because I don't know if I would've done any differently. Would I have stayed? Maybe not. All the cowardice I have, all the guilt, all the fear...I can't blame anybody."
The words run dry and the blue fire crackles softly in the silence. Remus has stared vacantly at the stump this whole time and he's afraid to look up at his friends. Cowardice, says a voice in his head.
He looks up. They're all staring at him. Sirius' gaze is fixed, his face stony but his eyes burning, and Peter has his arms wrapped tightly around himself. James' mouth hangs slightly open and (Remus could be wrong, it's dark) there's a slight watery brightness to his eyes. As they all sit there around the flickering fire, James nods to himself. He inhales to speak and, in the silence, a twig breaks.
It happens fast. James' eyes fix on something past Remus' shoulder and he leaps to his feet and vaults over the stump, blocking out the blue fire when his robes whip past and for a split second it's pitch black, and his roar of "HEY!" splits the moonless night.
Remus is on his feet, wand drawn and heartbeat in his ears and what the hell is going on? He spins and sees James' back vanish into the thick screen of black trees. Peter and Sirius fly past into the forest and he sprints after them.
His legs pump hard beneath him and his lungs go into overtime to compensate for his racing heart but he doesn't feel either of them, just sees the blackness close over him as he outstrips the weak firelight. He charges blindly after the sound of bodies crashing through the brush and James' inarticulate cries of rage, echoing— James, where did James go? Remus whirls around, terror twisting in his throat, trying to find his friends, any of them, and through a cluster of ancient trees he spots a figure on profile, obscured by darkness but unmistakably James as he throws his wand arm out in front of him like a sword and cries, "Accio!"
There's a crash and a rush and a shout, and Remus watches another figure fly through the air as though yanked roughly backwards by an invisible tether and wham back-to-chest into James, sending them both careening into a tangled pile on the ground. They wrestle, yelling and punching and kicking, until there's a flash of light from somebody's wand and they're on their feet again and Remus is about eighty percent sure that's James holding the other person by the throat and not the other way around, oh God, and he pants, "Lumos," as he runs.
The wildly bouncing pool of light spills into focus over an alarming tableau: James grips Snape by the collar and he thrashes in his hold, his sallow face full of fury. Sirius stands behind, seething with silent rage, while Peter hovers in his shadow.
"What did you hear?" James roars, gives him a sharp shake by the neck. "WHAT?"
"I didn't hear anything, I didn't have to!" Snape says. "I smelled it just fine. Wait till McGonagall hears about this: the big Quidditch hero and his cronies sneaking off into the Forbidden Forest to get high!"
But James just shakes him again. "You didn't hear anything? Nothing, you heard nothing?"
"I didn't need to hear anything, you stupid pillock, I smelled all the evidence I need to get all four of you on the train home tomorrow!"
"Is that right?" James shoots back, but Remus catches the way his face falls in relief, how his shoulders relax.
Snape didn't hear Remus talking about his bite. That secret, at least, is safe.
"I heard your plans to come out here tonight. You'll want to be quieter in History of Magic," he sneers at Sirius, whose lip curls threateningly. "I don't know what you're all playing at, arranging weeks in advance to go light up in a forest full of stuff that'll kill you, but then none of you have ever been especially bright." Now he turns to Peter. "I see why you hang round them, Pettigrew. You don't look quite so stupid in comparison, do you?"
Sirius lunges forward but James pushes him away. "What're you gonna do, tell on us? You're out after hours in the Forest just the same as we are."
"I'll get a detention, fine, and Potter, Black, and sidekicks Loopy and Piggy will be out of here for good. Fair trade, I think."
"Or maybe you'll be going along with us when we tell them what you and your mates are up to." Sirius stalks forward to crowd Snape. "I'd bet anything you're one of them— the lot in the newspapers. You are, aren't you? We know about all of it, we saw what you lot wrote on the walls."
His face goes slack with shock for just a moment, then he's glaring. "I had nothing to do with that stupid stunt!" he spits. "Messing around and running their mouths, writing on the bloody walls! They had hell to pay after that, would've been thrown out of the group if they didn't already know too much. I know better than that." He smiles, and it's a slimy, sneering thing. "I'll tell you this, Black: idiots who can't help showing off won't survive what's coming. You'd do well to remember that."
Sirius jabs his wand right between Snape's eyes. "Is that a threat?"
"Not exactly. Not to you, anyway."
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Snape says in a voice so smug it's syrupy, "that I wasn't there that night, but your dear baby brother was."
Remus can only see half of Sirius' face, but he watches it twist. "Shut up."
It's just the reaction Snape's looking for, apparently, because he grins. "Sweet little Reggie, their cuddly pet. Terribly spineless, that one, does whatever they tell him to do. Won't last long. How old's he now, twelve?" Snape tsks. "Such a sweet age. Shame he won't see thirteen."
Remus sees Sirius lurch forward but can do nothing to stop him; he watches him seize a white-knuckled fistful of Snape's stringy hair and pull, all his weight behind him. Snape gives a short scream as Sirius heaves him out of James' grip by the hair, hauls him around kicking and yelping, and hurls him to the dirt. Peter gasps, James shouts a laugh, and Sirius kicks out one foot to hold him down by the throat.
James is clutching his sides in laughter but Sirius' face is icy with rage. "Talk about him again," he growls down at Snape, who's gasping and clutching uselessly at Sirius' ankle. "I dare you, you oily waste of oxygen."
He manages a few strangled words: "Struck a nerve, have I?"
Teeth gritted like a wild animal, he throws his weight onto the foot on Snape's throat, digging his heel in. Snape chokes and sputters and claws desperately at his leg but James keeps laughing and Remus can't do this, the guilt is like an angry shoe crushing his windpipe, and he rushes forward.
"Sirius, stop!" he cries, grabs him by the arms and pulls. "He'll suffocate, stop!"
Something snaps on Sirius' face and the animal look disappears. He lifts his foot, allows himself to be pulled backward into Remus' grip. Snape scrambles to his feet, hand to his throat, eyes wide and manic.
"They're gonna expel you," Snape says hoarsely, eyes darting. "The four of you are up to something and I'm going to find out what, and they'll finally expel all of you. You can't threaten me! Even if I'd anything to do with that night, you couldn't shock any of them." He gives a short, humourless laugh. "They all know, Dumbledore and the others! They know the Dark Lord's got supporters at Hogwarts but they can't just give us detentions, can they? That'd be admitting that they knew! They're going to keep their heads in the sand, so there's nothing any of you can say to anybody that would have the slightest—"
"We'll tell Lily."
Remus isn't the only one who turns to Peter in shock: Snape, Sirius, and James also seem to have forgotten that he existed. But there he is, standing off to the side, wringing his hands.
"Or I would, anyway," he says. "She wouldn't believe it from Sirius or James, but she'd believe it from me." An odd look passes over Peter's face. "Everybody knows I can't lie."
For the first time that night Snape looks thrown off. In fact, he looks properly scared. "What's she got to do with anything?"
"She's Muggle-born," Peter explains. "So— s-so if she found out you were involved with— with the stuff happening in the papers, she....well, she, she wouldn't be at all pleased about that." He slips into the stammer, still clutching nervously at his hands, but his eyes stay steady on Snape's.
None of them move. The five boys stand locked in place by the circle of wandlight, and the deep blackness of the forest shudders around them.
James' voice is abrupt in the stillness: "Snivellus, we seem to have reached an impasse. How about we make a deal: you scurry off and forget this ever happened, and we'll forget to tell Evans what we know. What d'you say?"
Remus doesn't think it's possible to kill someone with your mind, but Snape appears to be trying as he glares at James.
"This isn't over, Potter. You'll get what you deserve," Snape says. He drops his voice. "Even if it isn't from me."
Remus feels him knock hard into his shoulder as he passes. The dull crunch of his footsteps fades further and further away into the forest, and he's gone.
The bravado James had displayed a moment ago drops off him like a heavy coat, and he collapses to the ground. "Fuck me sideways and call me a bowtruckle," he groans into his hands, muffled. "That was close. Too close, oh Merlin."
Heart still beating in his ears, Remus nods. "McGonagall wouldn't have been well pleased to find us with drugs, would she?"
"I thought he'd heard you talking about your bite, stupid!" James cries, voice high with disbelief. "He was this close to telling the whole bloody school you're a werewolf!"
"Ah. Right."
James gets to his feet and goes to Peter. "Pettigrew," he says solemnly, "that was excellent work."
He shrugs. "Was nothing."
Sirius stops pacing like an angry tiger to turn his awe on Peter. "Was genius, is what it was! I thought I was going to have to actually kill him this time, but—"
"Who'd've thought Evans would ever turn out to be useful for anything, eh?" James says. "I forgot she still hangs round him. Probably the only friend he's got. Amazing she puts up with him."
"One of life's great mysteries."
"He's an ugly git but, then, she's a complete nightmare, so I imagine they're perfectly matched."
"Can say that again."
"I want to get him," James announces. "Been a dirty great sneak for ages, and I've held back—"
"You have?" Remus says.
"But this is the final straw, you hear me?"
Sirius nods. "This means war."
Remus' stomach drops. "Again? Didn't we just get an armistice?"
"He's been trying to get us expelled!" James cries. "This isn't just a laugh anymore, this isn't pranking the Slytherin common room—"
"Yes, and you'll recall how much of a laugh that was," Remus says, short.
That shuts him up. For a second, unflappable James Potter looks uncomfortable.
But then Sirius speaks. "We've got to think of something good. Really good, not the same old. Something to teach him a lesson, take him down a few pegs." He growls, low in his throat. "Thinks he's so clever...Yeah, it's gotta be good. It isn't over, this."
"No," James says. "Not even close."
***
Exactly thirty days after they perform the spell in the forest, Remus is woken up at God-knows-what in the morning by a screaming James Potter leaping on top of him.
"MOONY! I'M A DEER!"
He shoves James away and rolls back over into his pillow. "Good for you, mate," he mumbles.
"Moony!" There's a click and a bright, painful light. "The dreams, the animal ones! We've all had them!"
Remus jolts upright. His head spins as his eyes adjust to the glaring lamplight. "You— what?"
"All three of us!" James shouts. "We all woke up about thirty seconds apart, it was mental! Pete nearly lost his dinner."
"Still not sure I won't," says a faint voice past the bed hangings. Remus yanks the curtains apart. Peter sits on the floor in front of him, pale and shaken, while Sirius leans against the bedpost.
Remus' voice sounds shockingly calm to his own ears: "So? What're you two, then?"
"I'm the universe's sense of humour, is what I am," Sirius says.
James frowns. "Huh?"
"Well, my name's Sirius."
Remus can't believe it. "You're a dog, aren't you?"
"A black one, too." He gives a pensive toss of his hair from his eyes. "I dig it, though. Really enormous— could scare the shit out of anybody, I reckon."
"Mine was wicked," James declares. "One of those big, strong-looking ones people have on their coats of arms and things, with the big antlers you could kill somebody with!" He bounds off of Remus' bed, alight with excitement. "Pettigrew! Don't keep us in suspense!"
"Er." Peter, on the other hand, looks distinctly unenthused. "I don't wanna say."
"Come off it! It can't be that bad!"
"You aren't a kitten, are you?" teases Sirius.
"A poodle?"
"A jellyfish?"
"A caterpillar?"
"Remus' evil bunny rabbit?"
Peter blurts, "I'm a mouse, okay?"
"Oh," says James.
"A big one," Peter continues, morose. "Like..." He holds his hands a ways apart. "Like that. And grey."
"Er," says Sirius.
"Er," says James.
Remus sighs. He really doesn't want to be the one to say this, but Sirius and James are staring at each other, lost for words.
"Peter," Remus says gently, "that's a rat."
"I'm..." Peter says in a small, weak voice, "...I'm a rat?"
"Hey, none of that!" James drops down onto the floor next to Peter, swinging an arm around him. "We're damn lucky you're a rat, this is just what we need, see? We need somebody small enough to sneak around, who can get to the knot on the Willow. How else would we get through, eh? It's not just useful that you're so small, it's essential to the operation."
Remus knows that James is aware of how Madam Pomfrey simply levitates a long stick to prod the knot on the trunk every month. But Remus also knows when to shut up, so he nods eagerly.
"Yeah!" says Sirius. "Besides, rats are cool. They're really smart, aren't they?"
"Really smart," Remus agrees. "Smarter than dogs."
"Oh, thank Merlin. If Black was the smartest animal of the lot we'd really be up shit creek, wouldn't we?"
James dodges a kick from Sirius, rolls Carlos the puffskein off the lid of his trunk, and retrieves his Animagus notes. He takes the topmost sheet of parchment and consults it. "Now that we know our forms, we've one more long-form incantation each to come up with and then one more potion ritual— we drink this one eventually, so it's got to mean business. It'll take a while," he explains, scanning the notes, "because the incantation's got to be repeated on-- Merlin-- five consecutive new moons before you drink the potion, so, yeah, still quite a while yet. And then we even aren't totally crystal about how to do that very last transformation since it's so damn vague in the books-- but! We know what we're about now, don't we?" He looks up from his parchment and beams around at the three of them. "Lads...this is the home stretch."
The room explodes. Peter cheers and James punches the air, as with a raucous whoop Sirius bounds onto James' bed and jumps up and down. James leaps after him to join, and the bed frame creaks ominously while Peter laughs at them from the sidelines. The two bounce into each other, someone grabs the other in a headlock, and they both go tumbling down onto the mattress, shouting.
The dormitory door swings open. Remus turns around to see Casey Jordan, bleary eyed, sticking his head into the room. "What're you playing at?" he says, voice hoarse with sleep. "It's four o'clock in the morning!"
The two grappling on the bed freeze in tableau. James, with a handful of Sirius' hair and his knee aimed at his stomach, says, "Sorry. We'll keep it down."
"Promise," Sirius adds, neck stuck at a funny angle under the crook of James' elbow.
Casey rolls his eyes and shuts the door.
Immediately James disentangles himself from Sirius' limbs to vault onto Remus' bed. He scoops up a pillow and wallops Remus over the head with it.
"You're being quiet! This is a joyous occasion!"
"It'll be joyous tomorrow," Remus says. "Let's try not to wake the whole of Gryffindor Tower, shall we?"
"Oh, fine," says James, with another pillow smack for emphasis. "Lights off, gentlemen. Phase Three begins tomorrow!"
Once the lamps are put out and everyone's back in bed, it isn't long before Remus hears Peter's snores and Sirius' mumbling (something about moths tonight, if he's hearing correctly). But Remus doubts he'll be getting much sleep tonight.
It's really happening, then.
He lies awake staring into the dark, too consumed by guilt to sleep. He feels guilty for betraying Dumbledore's trust, and his mother, and his teachers who have never treated him differently because of what he is. There's guilt for James, whose warm heart leads his brilliant brain to recklessness, and for Peter who clings to any chance to prove himself worthy of their friendship no matter how hard they try to make him see that he belongs, and for Sirius...
Oh Christ, he has a completely different sort of guilt surrounding Sirius.
Remus has long since broken the no secrets oath, he knows it: Sirius goes about his life every day with no idea. He has no clue just how aware Remus is of him, how when a door opens across the room he'll know it's Sirius without looking. Maybe it's by smell or the way the air moves or the way Remus always knows where his own legs are without having to look at them, but he notices him; he feels the space he takes up.
Remus imagines a world in which he keeps the promise he made on the Astronomy Tower, one where he doesn't have secrets. He imagines himself saying to Sirius...what? You're like a phantom limb to me or I watch you more than I should or I'm not sure what it is about your voice or even I'm really glad I don't talk in my sleep. None of those would get at the full truth of it.
It's almost light out by the time Remus falls asleep, and his dreams are uneasy.
***