The Snape Incident

Chapter 5

Remus returned to himself just inside the Hogsmeade end of the tunnel. His friends, still transformed, were looking at him anxiously as he heaved himself to all fours. He had no memory of the night’s events, but supposed that he would be filled in on every detail by his friends’ play-by-play. He was not troubled overmuch by his raw throat, shaky limbs, or cloudy head: none of this was unusual. He simply knelt and took deep, slow breaths with his eyes tightly shut as he waited for the pounding in his ears to subside. The others looked on in horror as the self-inflicted wounds began to bleed once more from the stress of the Change. As Remus caught his breath, however, his peculiar werewolf magic healed the wounds, leaving behind fresh pink scars, which would fade into the web of old scars. Kneeling before them now was a recovering, newly whole, entirely nude Remus.

Sirius transfigured back into a human and extended a hand to the werewolf. “Going to sit there all day starkers? I’d never have pegged you to be one of those counter-culture, nudist sort of people, Moony.”

Remus looked up wearily and unabashedly, then grasped Sirius’s hand. He overbalanced when the taller boy pulled him to his feet, and stumbled toward the tunnel wall. Sirius caught his shoulder, and Prongs quickly appeared for Remus to steady himself against, but the werewolf had already assessed his own abilities in those few steps. “I’m too shaky yet —” he rasped, sinking to the ground, and Sirius nodded in a businesslike manner.

“Of course you are. Jamie-boy doesn’t mind carrying you — do you, James?” The stag shook his head in response to Sirius’s query. Of course he didn’t mind — what were friends for? And Remus was, in truth, not very heavy (unless he happened to be sitting on one’s chest and choking off one’s air). Remus suddenly found himself being lifted onto Prongs’s back by Sirius, who didn’t seem to think the werewolf could do anything for himself. After a moment, Remus decided that Sirius was quite right.

Peter had returned to his human form as well. “Cor, Moony, what did you do last night that you’re so tired now?”

“I should be asking you that question,” replied Remus hoarsely.

Sirius would have liked to ask Remus a few questions himself, but decided that it ought to be when the others were otherwise occupied, as they were unaware of how difficult the wax had been.

Inside the shack, Remus retrieved his clothing and dressed. He was escorted to the Infirmary by his friends (read: half-carried, half-dragged by Sirius), where Madam Poppy Pomfrey, the matron, awaited him. He was given pyjamas and tucked into bed, where he promptly fell asleep while Madam Pomfrey checked him for abnormalities. She set a bar of chocolate and a sleeping draught laced with blood-replenishing potion on his bedside table for when he awoke, and busied herself elsewhere in the Hospital Wing.

The poor thing always seemed so sickly, even when he wasn’t recuperating in one of her hospital beds. Poppy always thought him lucky, to have three such friends as James Potter, Peter Pettigrew, and Sirius Black — she had known they would be inseparable when the three boys began visiting him in the Hospital Wing in their first year. She was the sole witness to the peculiar tenderness these three boys extended to the werewolf in their midst, and marveled unseen from the door of the apothecary. These four were entirely self-contained, and yet were some of the most friendly students she had ever met.

After breakfast, a refreshed-looking Peter Pettigrew knocked shyly on the doorframe. “Good morning, Madam Pomfrey.”

“What do you need, Pettigrew?” asked Poppy, whisking past the door on her way to a shelf.

“I — well, I suppose I’m just checking in on Remus. Is he all right?”

Poppy smiled to herself. “Young Lupin will be fine, just as long as you hooligans let him rest a bit. Now, off with you!” she said briskly, and Peter scurried away. Such friends, Poppy mused, were rare indeed.

***

During lunch, Madam Pomfrey was dismayed to find the whole of the Gryffindor sixth year in her infirmary. They had congregated around Remus Lupin, who looked very small and vulnerable indeed against the starched white linens of the hospital bed. The three girls found this quite endearing and hovered over him protectively, while the boys teased amicably.

“Who’d have thought that being frail and sickly would be so attractive?” asked Sirius, smirking at the foot of the bed. Remus smiled back weakly, while James took up the thread.

“I know! Sometimes I wonder if Lily would pay more attention to me if I were perpetually ill. Would you, Lily? Because I can contract pneumonia or something,” he offered. Lily took a moment to swat his arm, then returned to lavishing attention upon Remus.

“Nah, that wouldn’t work, Jim. It’s only so attractive because Remus has some kind of animal magnetism,” said Peter, with a completely straight face. “I’m in here all the time for potions and jinxes, and these lovely ladies never fawn over me.”

“Have you ever though that you just aren’t as appealing an invalid, Pete? Because I certainly wouldn’t fawn over someone who had compound eyes or was covered in boils. Re here just looks tired,” Sirius pointed out.

“Oh, yes, because the ‘I haven’t slept in months’ look is so in right now,” retorted Peter.

“Apparently, Pete, it is,” said James, nodding toward the three girls who were ignoring them very deliberately and making small talk with Remus.

Madam Pomfrey swept towards them like a thundercloud, looking somewhat remorseful. “I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to leave now. You’ve classes to go to, and Lupin needs to rest.” They all protested, but were shooed away; Remus gave a lethargic wave when Sirius looked back, trying not to choke on the chocolate and potions being forced upon him.

Under the combined influence of Madam Pomfrey’s sleeping draught and his own exhaustion, Remus slept through the afternoon and on into the evening. He awoke, ravenous, sometime after dinner. Sirius was sitting next to the bed, writing, and he pulled a dinner roll from his pocket.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. We thought you might be hungry.” At the look on Remus’s face, he chuckled. “Don’t worry, there’s more in the dormitory. Even the house-elves like you, Moony, we could barely carry everything they gave us.”

“Good. I’m famished.” said Remus in a voice hoarse from howling and disuse. He tore into the roll while Sirius watched him, amused.

“Awake then, are you?” observed Madam Pomfrey. She flitted to the bed and waved her wand over Remus once. It glowed briefly, and she nodded, satisfied. “Well, Lupin, a full recovery once again. You can go. Just don’t over-exert yourself.” She fixed Sirius with a stern look and whisked away again, leaving the two boys alone. Remus shooed Sirius away and pulled the curtains to change out of the infirmary pyjamas and into his own clothes, which had been cleaned and folded neatly.

Remus was still tired, and had to lean on Sirius as they returned to Gryffindor Tower. Sirius opened the portrait hole (“Dreamers often lie,” he quoted. “In bed asleep, while they do dream things true,” returned the Fat Lady) and they entered the common room. They happened to walk in on a scene that, though not entirely unusual, demanded everyone’s attention.

“Lily!” shrieked Arabella. Every head in the common room jerked toward her. She would have laughed at the synchronity of it, had she not been furious. “Get that animal OFF MY ESSAY!” Mrs. Figg kept cats — “hordes of them,” her daughter insisted — and Arabella had acquired an unreasonable hatred of all things feline.

“Arabella,” began Remus, starting towards her, but no one heard him because Lily had said, far too loudly, “Good Lord, Belle, calm down. He’s just a cat!”

The blue eyes cracked and snapped with barely-restrained violence. “And if you don’t remove your feline, I will disembowel it and stuff it down your throat.”

Lancelot, Lily’s black-and-white cat, took a swipe at Arabella for the affront. He disliked the girl as much as she disliked him, and seemed to provoke her intentionally. Lancelot, at Lily’s bidding, usually spent most of his time wandering the castle, and slept in the common room so the girls had fewer late-night disputes. As Remus approached the table, however, the cat fled; cats would not tolerate him.

“Remus! You’re up!” exclaimed Lily.

“You’re all right?” asked Arabella, the quarrel quite forgotten as the cat was gone.

Remus gave them a little half-smile. “Quite.”

“But he’s still exceedingly tired and is to go to bed,” interjected Sirius.

“Pomfrey’s orders?” Lily’s bright green eyes were twinkling with affection.

“Of course,” confirmed Sirius.

“Which means, of course, that they’ll keep poor Remus up half the night,” translated Arabella. “You’re supposed to be his friends, make sure he takes care of himself, would you?” She shook her head chastisingly and sat down at the table again to finish her essay. Remus observed closely the flicking of her quill and the exact way she crossed her legs, until his stomach complained loudly of the fact that it had had nothing all day but chocolate and a dinner roll, and Lily giggled.

“I hope you plan to feed that boy,” she told Sirius. “Oh! Remus, you’re so adorable when you’re mortified.”

Sirius stifled his own comments on the indeed very adorable blush spreading across the werewolf’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, we wouldn’t starve our ickle Remmiekins,” he teased, “we only make him earn his keep in sexual favors.”

“Oh, good,” said Lily, half-listening, with an indulgent smile. She waved them toward the stairs as she resumed her own seat and picked up a roll of parchment.

“Come along, Moony,” said Sirius, ushering the other boy up the stairs. He was privately disturbed at the way his friend looked like he wasn’t getting square meals. He knew for a fact that Remus ate as voraciously as he did, if a bit more politely.

“Evening, Black,” said seventh-year Darryl Collins, Sirius’s fellow Beater. Collins nodded to Remus, obviously quite unaware of his name.

“Evening,” replied Sirius as Remus stopped on the fifth landing. The door here was labeled “Sixth-Years” in gold lettering, and was one of the sturdiest doors Sirius had ever encountered. It had survived five years of abuse from the four of them, no small feat when one considered the prodigious strength of a werewolf, even one with superb control over the amount of force he used. Remus had only ever come close to harming the door in their third year, when he slammed it in a Snape-related fury and nearly tore the hinges from the doorframe. The door swung open just as Remus reached out to grasp the knob.

“Oh!” gasped Peter. “Remus! We were just about to go see if you’d woke yet, and keep Sirius company.”

“Well, Pete, get out of the doorway so they can come in,” said James from inside the room. “I expect Moony’s ravenous.” He hauled Peter from the doorway and grinned, waving his hand to indicate the generous spread of food awaiting Remus.

“I told you the house-elves like you, Moony,” muttered Sirius. “Tuck in, then.”

Remus set to determinedly, though far more tidily than the others would have done. “It’s ‘cos he’s so polite to them, you know, that’s why the elves like him,” James said pointedly to Sirius, who protested. It wasn’t as though Sirius was cruel, just a bit overbearing at times, and many of the house-elves were just a bit wary of him. But then, he was also the one who turned up in the kitchens in the dead of night, demanding spinach-flavoured crackers and salmon mousse, and other similarly odd things that simply baffled the poor house-elves.

Suddenly, Remus paused. The other boys looked at him expectantly. “Last night... did I... that is, did everything go well?”

James grinned. “Of course it did, Moony! It was a blast. Although you got sidetracked a lot, running after squirrels and things.”

“As it turns out, we never made it out of the forest. Lost track of time swimming and frolicking, so we didn’t quite get the bang we would’ve by doing a quick lap through Hogsmeade,” said Sirius, sounding a bit regretful.

“But there’s no way they could have missed you and Padfoot howling,” Peter informed Remus, snagging a bit to nibble on from the impressive platter of food.

“It’s not just howling, Wormtail, it’s bonding through song!” said Sirius, and James groaned.

“Please, Padfoot, no waxing eloquent about your odd canine things — you’re not even really a dog.” Sirius thoroughly enjoyed his Animagus form, but James and Peter bored quickly whenever Sirius started in on the intricacies of canine society. Remus found these insights fascinating, as he was only ever at odds with the wolf, and was for the most part unaware of what it really was like to be a wolf, and how it interacted with the others, although he was well aware that the wolf he became was most definitely an Alpha.

It appeared that Sirius had given in while Remus was concentrating on the food, and was pouting reproachfully at James and Peter, so Remus swallowed and asked, “Was I... hostile?” He selected the description carefully, trying to be diplomatic and hating his utter lack of control over the wolf.

A Look passed between his friends, and then James gave a slight nod. “Only a little, at the beginning. You just needed to get used to us again, I think.”

Remus wondered with some trepidation what his friends were neglecting to tell him. It could be awful, he thought. Perhaps I don’t want to know. But they shouldn’t withhold things about the full moon, especially not potentially harmful things. Anger was beginning to well up inside him, fed by all the horrors his imagination could produce. If I am a danger, they need to say something.

But you always have been a danger, a deceitful, Slytherin-esque portion of his mind whispered. You endanger them and everyone within running distance at every full moon. You’re a danger to them even now, binding them to your darkness...

No! he raged back, slamming the vault door on his treacherous thoughts — truthful though they might be.

“Did you bulk up over the holiday?” asked Sirius, interrupting James’s play-by-play recounting of the night just as Padfoot and Moony got into a bit of a tussle at the meadow.

“No, why?” asked Remus, bewildered.

“You were a good deal stronger than I remembered, Moony. I couldn’t even pin you down.”

“That’s because you’re a mangy mutt, Padfoot,” teased Remus, and Peter burst out laughing. The others stared at him strangely, and he blushed.

“That was uncalled for, Wormtail — Moony isn’t that funny,” frowned Sirius.

“I think I’m a bit tired, it’s making me giddy,” mumbled Peter.

“Well, I don’t see why you’re tired, Wormtail, you rode on my head all night,” James snorted.

“Stop whining, Bambi, I was the one what got my tail kicked by Moony here. Oh, Moony, I wish I could’ve seen the bruises, they must have been beautiful — stupid fur got in the way.”

“You’re really morbid, Pads, that’s what you are,” grimaced Peter.

“A thoroughly morbid mutt,” agreed Remus. An enormous, bear-like mutt, true, but a mutt nonetheless.

“Defend me, Bambi, from these heartless cads!” cried Sirius, waving his arms about helplessly and laying his head on James’s shoulder.

“Not if you keep calling me ‘Bambi,’ mutt.” James shoved Sirius off his shoulder. “Now, I believe we were telling Moony what he did last night.”

Sirius blinked. “Oh. Right.”

Peter began to nibble on a Cauldron Cake.

***

James and Peter were both asleep. Neither of them had ever been a night-owl, as both of their canine compatriots were. They had, however, stayed up far later than usual, regaling Remus with an account of the previous night’s adventure while he snacked. Now Remus stared at Sirius across the round rug and empty tray and asked, “What weren’t you telling me earlier?”

“Not telling you? What?” Sirius frowned. “When?”

“When I asked if I was, er, hostile. And you all kind of looked at each other before James answered. What was it?”

“Oh,” said Sirius, “oh, that.” He fell quiet, contemplating his phrasing. “They thought I should tell you this, later.”

“Tell me what? I didn’t hurt anyone, did I?” asked Remus apprehensively.

Sirius began slowly, his eyes carefully trained on the floor. “Not any of us. When we got there, though, you were kind of a mess, all torn up. There was blood everywhere. I guess the wolf wanted blood so badly, he didn’t care whose it was. That it was his own.” He looked directly at Remus and saw the incomprehension, the horror, and the revulsion pass across his face, and he saw when his friend’s features slammed shut, trapping all the turmoil inside of him — but not before Sirius glimpsed the utter self-loathing.

I am vile. Despicable. Disgusting. Nothing but a bloodthirsty beast. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t deserve any of this. I’m a threat to everyone. I don’t deserve to live.

“Remus, I know what you’re thinking, and don’t you go down that path! It’s not true!” growled Sirius, lunging forward to grab Remus’s shoulders. He gave his friend a quick shake. “You are a wonderful and entirely worthwhile human being, and a superb wizard. Stop that. You know you can’t do anything about the wolf.”

Remus looked at him mournfully. “Then why try? I’m a danger even to myself.”

Sirius’s jaw clenched angrily as he railed silently against whatever powers could be so cruel as to do this to his gentle friend. “Stop that,” he muttered, peering closely into the amber eyes. “You’re a very decent person, and you deserve as much of a chance as anyone. And if you keep being all angsty, I’ll — I’ll — bite you!”

Remus laughed softly at the absurdity of the threat. “Thanks, Padfoot,” he whispered, pulling Sirius into an embrace. “I needed that.”

Sirius smirked. “Thought you might,” he said lightly.

Remus released him. “And you swear there’s nothing I need to worry about for classes tomorrow?”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re going to study yourself into senility. Fine, fine, I swear!” he said hastily when Remus’s expression grew dangerous. “You know, a bit of a break would do you good.”

“I’ve had a bit of a break all day. I just need to go back to what’s normal for me.”

“Speaking of normal, Moony,” Sirius began, throwing a glance at James’s bed, “Ol’ Prongsie thinks it’s high time we thought of a project.”

“Does he, now?” asked Remus mildly, noting the transition back to the affectionate hypocorism.

“Tried to brainstorm on his own, but he ‘wanted to include all of us.’”

“Sweet of him,” said Remus. His tone was mocking, but it touched him. Although, he really shouldn’t have expected anything else; the only thing they had ever excluded him from was learning to be Animagi, and that was because it was to be a surprise. As it turned out, it was impossible for a Dark Creature to become an Animagus, which they hadn’t known.

“I don’t know, after the amount of work Prongsie’s last project called for, I might have to knock some sense into him. He somehow managed not to have the late nights, as well.” James had used the excuse of Prefect duties to get out of some of the less desirable mapmaking tasks the previous year. He did a share of sneaking about invisible, and quite a lot of the advanced enchantments on the parchment, but he seemed to get more sleep than the rest of them, and snared the investigative assignments that were least likely to get him caught and punished. Sirius in particular resented that, for he had had numerous close encounters (and detentions) with Brindle and the crotchety caretaker, Argus Filch, and he wondered how they could have let James get away with it.

“You know we’ll do whatever he asks of us anyway, whatever the project will be,” said Remus.

Sirius laughed. “Yeah, I know.”

Remus stood and crossed to the window, leaving the tray for the house-elves.

“Oh, Moony — Snape asked about you today.” Remus froze mid-step. “I don’t think he knows. I don’t even think he suspects anything unusual — but he noticed your absence. Tried to make something of it, be cutting. It was pathetic, really.”

A terrible cold feeling spread over Remus, and he stared at Sirius without seeing. Noticing was the first step on the way to knowing, and if Snape found out... The entire school would know the next day, and they would fear him, hate him, like the villagers where he was Turned had. And their parents would find out, and then the letters would come. How can this monster be allowed to endanger our children? The werewolf must be removed — controlled — killed!

Sirius was still talking, on a tirade about how abhorrent Snape was. How could Sirius still be talking? Did he not realize how serious this situation was? Could he not see how dangerous Snape had suddenly become? Sirius was standing next to him now, saying, “Remus, Remus, calm down! If he starts to get too close, we’ll tell Dumbledore. He wouldn’t let anything happen to one of his students. It’ll all be fine. He’s too much of a stupid git to figure it out, anyway.” Sirius kept talking, his blue gaze steady and calming, and Remus clung to his presence like it was his last lifeline. Everything would be all right, just like Sirius said it would, because Sirius was often right about these things: they worked themselves out. “And in the meantime, we can make that git’s life miserable!” he finished cheerfully.

“Arabella wouldn’t like that much, and I still don’t want her to despise me,” said Remus, almost automatically.

Sirius fixed him with a very peculiar look. “No, I suppose not,” he said, and sounded peculiar as well. He moved off toward the window, looking out, and Remus watched him closely.

He was taller than Remus, and athletically slim. His shoulders were broad and muscular: a Beater had to be strong, to combat the heavy metal Bludgers. His arms were folded across his chest as he studied the night. His dark hair fell in elegant waves. Sirius was exceedingly handsome, with roguish good looks; he didn’t knot his tie, tuck in his shirt, or button his cuffs or collar. And he was charming and charismatic to boot. It struck Remus, just then as Sirius stood luminous in the moonlight, exactly why the boy was so sought-after: he was a tall, dark, and handsome fantasy come to life. Remus felt vaguely jealous and — appreciative?

Sirius finished deliberating and turned abruptly to Remus. “My offer still stands, Re.”