Ridiculous

Ridiculous

"Riddikulus!" Remus said, and the boggart flew back into the cabinet. The doors slammed shut.

"Five points to each of you who faced the boggart," he told the Ravenclaw third years. "Class dismissed."

The Ravenclaws had been the last of the Houses to face this boggart, and the shapes it had taken on for each House had varied little. It had been a mummy three times, a zombie twice, a banshee three, and a spider an astonishing eight. The entire female population of Hufflepuff, plus Susan Bones and Ron Weasley, apparently suffered from arachnophobia. The repetitiveness had begun to get dull; even the boggart had put out a lackluster performance on the eighth giant spider: barely three feet high, rather than the looming ten foot behemoth it had managed for Ron Weasley.

There was a very good reason behind the name of the charm to banish a boggart; so many of the students' fears were frankly ridiculous. When, exactly, Parvati Patil, Blaise Zabini, and Terry Boot thought a mummy was going to come after them, Remus didn't know.

That was rather the point of the exercise: nearly all fears were ridiculous, really, except for the ones that weren't.

Remus had never had so much to fear from the outside world as from himself. He feared what he could become, and did, each month. But it was hard for a boggart to transform itself into the wolf. It became, instead, the thing that awoke the wolf.

Full moons hadn't been so scary at Hogwarts, not after Sirius, James, and Peter had become Animagi. Even on the nights when they were late or they couldn't all come, Remus had never spent a full moon alone after fifth year. Even after they left Hogwarts, some or all of the Marauders had made sure he was never alone those nights.

But then there was Halloween, and he'd been alone again, and it was so much worse than before, now that he knew it didn't have to be like this. But James was dead, and Peter was dead, and Sirius...

Black. Call him Black. Sirius had always been a Black, now matter how much he tried to forget it.

The problem with being alone was that Remus could get confused, even with the Wolfsbane Potion that kept the wolf at bay. For a moment the true wolf could take over, lusting after the moon, growling low, and for a moment Remus would know what the wolf knew, that being a wolf was good and right and exactly the way things should be. For that moment he would feel what the wolf felt, and that scared him in the pit of his stomach, with the kind of cold, sick fear he'd been too young and foolish to feel when Voldemort was rising. Even through the Wolfsbane, Remus could feel the true wolf clawing at his skin, yearning to overcome the potion and run and hunt and bite, and that was what scared him, that one day the wolf would succeed. Mad-Eye Moody's "constant vigilance" wasn't good enough to prevent the wolf. It would catch him off guard and push his mind away, and Remus was terrified of the consequences.

Sometimes, in his more forgiving moods, Remus wondered if it had felt like this for Sirius: that his identity as a Black, and everything that went with it, had been lurking just beneath the surface, biding its time, and one day it had risen up and Sirius hadn't been strong enough to fight back. Maybe he hadn't wanted to. Fighting back was hard, when your basest instincts were whispering for you to let go, this is what you are, what you are meant to be.

Remus liked to hope that Sirius had fought and lost, because anything was better than simply giving in. Remus liked to hope that he was stronger than Sirius, that he would keep the wolf at bay, no matter how many times it tore at him and growled at him and whined low in his throat. He couldn't help fearing the moon, old enemy, deceptive friend. It offered him freedom monthly, the chance to be what he was meant to be, and it grew harder to resist that call each time the moon rose. He would have to resist it, though, and resist it alone, because alone was his only option. Wishing it were different was ridiculous.