Lily Potter and a Small Circle of Friends

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 4: James and Sirius Meet a Pretty Girl

Sirius Black Apparated into the Potters' kitchen, where James and Lily were breakfasting at the kitchen table. Sirius was grinning with his usual enthusiasm, looking fit as a daisy and disgustingly like a morning person. He was entirely uninvited, but apparently not entirely unexpected, as Lily merely rose to fetch another mug, fill it with black coffee from the enamelware pot on the stove, and hand it to him, saying: "As much as you had to drink last night, what are you doing awake at this hour?"

Sirius took the cup, grinning even wider and said: "Oh, I sweated it off. I had me quite a workout last night."

"That albino girl?" James glanced up from his paperwork to ask with mild curiosity. "Nice figure, but those red eyes would have put me right off."

"She had them closed most of the time" said Sirius. "She was way cool ... when she was awake, that is. When she fell asleep, she snored something awful, so I left early."

"Sirius!" Lily was both giggling and shocked. "You didn't just -- abandon -- her?"

"Well, Lily, you're always telling me to try sleeping in my own bed, so I did ... I left her a real nice note, all about being urgently summoned to fight the forces of evil, in case I want to see her again."

That might have been the cue for two owls to tap at the window. Sirius, being already standing, opened the window and one owl hopped on his shoulder, while the other flew to James. "It says - Sirius, you and James see me at my Ministry office at 10 AM. Instructions. New project. Signed Brathwaite."

"Mine says the same. We've got a couple of hours yet, and I've got to turn all these damned little notes into a proper expense report, so why don't you go do whatever you do when you're not chasing girls, and I'll meet you at the Ministry?"

* * *

James Apparated into the Ministry building's lobby at five minutes to ten -- he respected Brathwaite not for his position in the Ministry, but for his position in the League Against Voldemort -- and just a moment later, Sirius appeared beside him. After getting directions from a reception witch, they walked through hallways, stairs, and doors until they were in the foyer of Brathwaite's office. It was done up as a waiting room. "Better check in with his reception witch" said James, and they walked to her desk.

When the reception witch looked up from her abacus to greet them, they saw she was a stacked blond with golden hair, big blue eyes, and blatantly artificial eyelashes. Sirius's eyes widened at the sight, as James told her: "I'm James Potter and this is Sirius Black. Mr. Brathwaite asked us to see him at 10 AM."

The girl's own eyes widened as she appeared to recognize James: "James Potter the Chaser?! I've seen you play! You were the greatest! Why didn't you turn pro?"

James was sufficiently accustomed to this reaction to find it boring, but also sufficiently accustomed to have an automatic answer: "I'm afraid sport pays very badly, and I'm a married man; I have a family to support."

But Sirius wanted to distract the girl's attention from James: "Oh, don't listen to him, he's just being modest. He doesn't have time for Quidditch because we're too busy fighting You-Know-Who. That's why Brathwaite called us -- he wants to give us instructions too secret to write down."

She had politely turned her gaze to Sirius while he was speaking, but straight away turned back to James: "Is that true?"

"Well, yes, so could you please let Mr. Brathwaite know that we're here?" This reminder of her job duties finally got through to her, and she flipped pages in a big leather-bound appointment book on her desk. She tapped one entry with her wand, and some illegible writing appeared where she had tapped. "Mr. Brathwaite was expecting you," she told them, "but he's busy right now with a very important Apparition. Please have a seat and make yourselves comfortable."

James took a seat and pulled parchment, quill, and scrappy little receipts out of his pockets, to continue the struggle with the expense account. Sirius remained standing by the reception desk. "If you saw James Chasing, you must have been at Hogwarts when we were, so how come I don't remember such a stunningly beautiful girl?"

"I was in Hufflepuff, and fourth year when you were seventh, so we never had any classes together" she explained, casting a last glance at James before returning to her abacus.

Sirius looked at her perfect profile and rather desperately tried again: "What kind of numbers are you crunching there?"

She looked up at him with distinct annoyance: "Look, Mr. Black, I have to figure out this whole department's owl usage so far this year in order to check whether it tracks with the owl budget for the department, and the report is due to OMB by noon, so I unfortunately don't have time for social chat."

Abashed, Sirius took a seat beside James. He didn't stay abashed long, elbowing James to get his attention, then loudly whispering: "James, she was practically throwing herself at you!"

"And you were throwing yourself at her."

"If you'd just said one word, you could have had her. No need to make a dinner date, she'd probably find a janitor's closet for a quickie!"

"Ugh. I don't think the way janitor's closets smell is exactly arousing."

"Yeah, but those tits!"

"Very nice" said James appreciatively "she looks a lot like Goya's painting of the Maja. I hope one of her boyfriends is a painter. Beauty is so mortal, at least its image should be preserved."

"James! Life is too short for philosophy!"

"Well, then, how about security? It's not just telling everyone you meet that we're secret agents, big secret! But anyone who wanted to kill or bewitch you wouldn't even have to make an effort, just dangle a pretty girl in front of you and you'd walk right into a bedroom that was full of Dark Magic traps!"

"James, I can take care of myself. I'm a big boy now. I've fought my way out of traps before."

"Damn it, Sirius," James struggled to keep his voice down despite being seriously annoyed. "Nobody cares if you get yourself killed; I'd miss you sometimes but otherwise it would be no loss. What we care about is the innocents you take with you, because of information taken from you, or because you aren't there to guard them."

* * *

"James, Sirius, sorry I kept you waiting." Brodhart Brathwaite was standing in his office door, beckoning them to enter. He was a big man, petty well filling the doorway, so wide and thick that people only noticed how tall he was when he stood by something that gave a comparison, such as the top of the doorway. For all that he looked like a retired wrestler, his true career had been as headmaster of a Muggle middle school. From that to Director of the Research Department of the Ministry of Magic is not a normal career path, but the previous Director had been demoted back to her beloved lab bench as punishment for years of incomprehensible budgets, absent reports, and personal quarrels with most people who crossed her path. Albus Dumbledore had persuaded the Minister that the tradition of promoting from within had quite a history of not working well in the Research Department. Dumbledore had persuaded the Minister that the skills required for managing researchers obsessed with bizarre projects, egotistical about ridiculous things, and speaking only in arcane jargon, are much the same as the skills required for managing teenagers, while simultaneously persuading Brathwaite that the league against Voldemort really needed to have him placed in the Research Department.

Brathwaite had stepped back within his office, shaken hands with James and Sirius when they entered, closed the door, and waved them to the visitor chairs as he took his own. "I'm afraid you may have to take Francis Bones flying. I realise that will be unpleasant for you." Apparently a correct prediction, as Sirius was graphically pantomiming a gag reflex.

"With two of us, we ought to be able to keep him from falling off his broomstick," James said with less than total confidence. "But why does Francis have to fly at all?"

"There is a document which Malfoy's nasties have been trying to decrypt, as they believe that it reveals the means by which the powers of some long-gone Dark Lord can be assumed by a modern dark wizard. Francis has interpreted this document. He reports that it is a topographical map showing an exact location where the aspirant dark wizard must stand at sunrise on Summer Solstice. Summer Solstice is June 20th, which gives us a very tight time constraint. We do not know whether the Darksiders can interpret this document, can find this location, but we must find it before the Solstice sunrise so we can guard it at that time and prevent any Darksider from making use of it. You will commence by going to Hogwarts to pick up Francis."

"But what does flying have to do with it?" protested Sirius.

"Francis feels confident that he can recognize the locale depicted by his map if he views it from above. If you are confident that you can do so as well, then you can fly without him. If you can find this location in some more efficient manner than scouring the whole countryside at random, that would be a good thing. I can tell you that trying to find it by consulting Muggle topographical maps does not work."

Having received their instructions, James and Sirius took their leave, walked back to the lobby with Sirius giving the receptionist witch only one exaggeratedly prolonged backward glance, then Apparated to Hogsmeade and flew from there to Hogwarts to begin the assignment.

Chapter 5: Library Science

Francis showed James and Sirius his redrawn copy of the topographical map, while babbling excitedly something about he had found it hidden in peacock feathers. Paying more attention to the map than to Francis's explanation, James tapped the map with his wand and it morphed into a three-dimensional (although parchment-colored and unnaturally smooth) model of the contours depicted. Looking down upon this model, which seemed to be a very mountainous area, Sirius shook his head. "You're never going to recognize this place from the air unless you include the current vegetation in the model."

Sirius tapped the model with his wand several times in quick succession. At each tap it changed, first to be a little diorama of that mountainous area with bare dirt, bare rock, and a little short grass, then to a bushy kind of place whose low parts were obscured by tallish trees growing thickly in the dells. Then to an area which had been graded, terraced and covered with Muggle houses, at which both James and Francis scowled.

"See, we can't recognize the place from the map unless we know its vegetation, and we can't learn the vegetation from just the map, without any object that came from the place as a link," Sirius told Francis.

Francis tapped the model with his wand, sending it back to its original contour, with a surface of bare dirt and rock; then he sighted along his wand over the mountains at the edge of the model. The ray of light like a laser shot from the wand, over the mountain at the edge, toward the center, where it hit a pile of boulders. No, it went through the pile of boulders and put one bright spot on the dark, huge, jagged boulder beyond it.

"This is the sunrise of Summer Solstice," Francis explained. "This horizon line is notched, the way the peaks line up, so that the sun has to be a good bit higher to clear the horizon on other days, and when the sun is higher, the ray that goes through that little hole in the rock pile hits the ground instead of going high enough to hit the boulder. I think there is even a mark on the rock to tell whether the spot of light is on the right place. And if it were covered with trees or Muggle houses, they'd block the sun beam."

"So who cares if the sun beam is blocked?" asked Sirius.

"Oh, it's the spell. The spell to transfer the power of the ancient Dark Wizard Fernabrant to a living dark wizard. He has to be touched by that light ray where it hits the rocks while he says the incantation. If the ray is blocked, the power can't be transferred, and we wouldn't have to prevent You-Know-Who from having the power transferred to him." Francis tapped the map with his wand again, and it returned to being a flat parchment.

"That sounds like your Wellingborough Stone," Sirius said suspiciously. "A rock that marks the spot where a person has to be touched by a specific ray of sunlight while saying an incantation. How much of your translation came from the document and how much from your theories?"

"That's how they did spells to transfer power from a dead wizard to a living one in those days," Francis explained with an annoying air of patience. "It was always tied to a ray of light. I suppose they could have used a moonbeam instead of a sunbeam, although I don't know of any instances. In any case, a wizard as powerful as Fernabrant would have taken steps to ensure that his sun beam would always be available. So we have to find the place."

James said to Francis, "Let me see if I've got this straight. You want us to fly over the whole country, or possibly the whole world, looking for a location about which we know nothing except your idea of what it looked like fifteen hundred years ago. Is that right?"

Francis looked somewhat embarrassed. "Well, yes, except it isn't just my idea."

James said to the silently fuming Sirius, "I think it's time to confer." The two walked to the other side of the almost-deserted library, but rather than whispering to each other, they sat at opposite ends of one of the long tables.

Talking Seashell Time. James told Lily a short summary of the problem. "Messing around with time," said Lily thoughtfully. "I don't like that at all."

"Messing around with time?" asked James.

"I thought you were saying that you want to Apparate to someplace fifteen hundred years ago, in order to recover its latitude and longitude, or collect a handful of dirt, or something. I really don't like that idea. You know, removing some dirt or stepping on a butterfly or something could cause a major Ice Age or some other chaotic change in history."

"Going back in time fifteen hundred years," mused James. "I don't even know what was in this area five hundred years before Hogwarts was founded."

Lily got busy talking him out of the idea that she herself had put into his head. Sirius waved his Seashell at James while shouting, "Hey!" to get his attention. Madam Pince glared at him so he called down the table, "Remus knows the charm for it!"

"The Charm for time travel?" James called back.

"No, what does time travel have to do with anything? This is the charm for finding something in a reference book, and Remus says he can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work for a map and an atlas. It's called the Homing Paper Charm, and he said surely Francis must know it." Sirius raised his voice even louder, which caused Madam Pince to glare even more angrily, and called across the room: "Hey, Francis! Do you know the Homing Paper Charm?"

Francis was more intimidated by Madam Pince than the other two. Instead of shouting back, he gave them a vigorous thumbs-up.

Sirius half-jumped, half-climbed over the narrow direction of the table on his way back to Francis. James moved just as quickly though less acrobatically, but Sirius had not yet exhausted the pleasure of irritating Madam Pince without penalty.

"So what did you need us for if you already know the charm to find your map in an atlas?" Sirius demanded.

"I never thought of it in connection with maps," replied Francis. Now he was doing something he well knew how to do. From his bookbag, he took a piece of linen rag paper with a dove and olive twig watermark, laid it over his map, and tapped it with his wand. The image of the map appeared on the paper ("I hope this works as well as writing it by hand," Francis commented) and then Francis folded the paper into a shape vaguely resembling a paper airplane. He tapped the folded paper with his wand, saying "Hespapyrogo!", and the paper flew away. After circling one section of the stacks, it homed in on an elephant folio volume bound in leather whose color had been entirely worn away. The paper came to rest on top of the huge, worn book.

Francis fetched that book from the shelf to the table, pointed his wand at it, and said, "Hespagovair!" The book opened itself and turned its pages quickly, but one by one, until the folded paper jumped up and dived in at one particular page. The page was a map of a coastline. Then an inanimate folded paper was lying on a page of an inanimate open book. Francis sat down and pored over that page, scouring it with his eyes.

Sirius gave James a look that meant "Do we have to do all his thinking for him?" In their schooldays, that look had usually referred to Peter. Francis was viewing part of his page through a magnifying glass, and comparing his map to what he saw on the page.

"Here it is," said Francis. He was pointing at a spot on the atlas map. James and Sirius dashed over to look at it. (Out of respect for the fragile-looking condition of the book, they didn't try to grab it out of each other's hands, didn't even knock Francis out of his chair in their hurry.) It was an island off the west coast of Scotland. Sirius tried to read the island's name written in faded, spidery script; then tried to pronounce its long Gaelic name, while James went to look in a more modern atlas for more recent information.

James found that people had once lived on that island (whose modern name was Sealand), but they had left to move somewhere with gaslights, telegraph, and land that would occasionally yield a crop, leaving behind them old, abandoned farm cottages and seaweed-eating feral sheep. After that, the island had been hidden from Muggles for almost one hundred years, to protect the sheep, who had been found to be gradually reverting to their ancestors' form, with fanged mouths, clawed feet, and golden fleece.

Nixies were said to come ashore on Sealand -- underwater horses whose finned feet turned into clawed feet as they left the water. Nixies are documented to have lured Muggles to ride them, then rushed underwater to drown the unfortunate Muggle who found that he was stuck to the Nixie's back and unable to escape. (Some scholars believe that nixies are a breed of kelpie with clawed feet, but nixies have never been known to change into any un-horse-like form.) They are not documented to cross-breed with sheep, not even magic sheep, not even magic sheep who had developed clawed feet.

Chapter 6: The Island

Now that they could read the map and knew where the island (Sealand) was, they didn't have to take Francis flying, which was a great relief to both of them. If it was a disappointment to Francis, he concealed his disappointment well as he exchanged farewells with Sirius and James.

As they walked from the castle to the edge of the school's grounds, they agreed that the obvious next step was to fly over the island and check for blatantly obvious traps or bad guys. Sirius wanted to take his motorcycle, but James said brooms. "We're going to look-see if there are any ambushers, not to alert any ambushers that we're there. That means *quiet*, not the horrible great din that beast of yours makes."

"But if they do see us, the bike can get away faster."

"Fine," said James. "You do whatever you want. Me, I'm going in alone."

"You're WHAT?" shouted Sirius.

"I'm going to look-see that island. Alone, broomstick, invisibility cloak."

"And won't you feel like a stupid git, hiding like that, when it turns out that there's nothing there but sheep?"

"And won't *you* feel like a stupid git when your last words are 'I blew the mission, so the Dark Side scores this goal'?"

"Fine," said Sirius. "Have it your own way then. Broomsticks for both of us."

James smiled and slapped his friend's shoulder, in a rough but affectionate way. "We'll meet at my place and decide where on the mainland we can Apparate to, to fly to the island."

And being now outside the school grounds, he Disapparated.

* * *

Home to fetch the broomstick, the Invisibility Cloak, Omnioculars, a knife up his sleeve and a spare wand in his boot. James wished Sirius could tell the difference between being professional and being a coward. A professional's main concern is to get the job done, even if it would be more fun to rush off unprepared and maybe bungle the job. Who was the Arctic explorer who had scolded the reporter: "We did not have any adventures. We had planned very carefully and brought all necessary equipment, so we accomplished our research goals efficiently"? Sirius usually complained that planning was boring.

Check the Apparatlas to find a conveniently Muggle-hidden destination point and look up its coordinates and the visualization provided. Arrive there and mount brooms. James always was happy whenever he was on the Thunderbolt, but, he thought to himself, he might have chosen the motorcycle if the other choice were that *thing* Sirius was flying. It was a broom that he had built himself, before he started (re)building the motorcycle, but, unlike the motorcycle, the broom was the opposite of a thoroughbred. The first time Lily had seen it, she'd called it a "Heinz 57 broom," which left both James and Sirius looking puzzled. She'd laughed at them and finally told them that it was a Muggle term for a dog that was descended from 57 different breeds. Sirius had wanted to argue about that (he always thought he had some special expertise about dogs) but Lily had placated him by calling it a "hot rod."

* * *

Sirius seemed to have been right about the island. Apparently there were no people and no visible traps. With the Omnioculars, James could look inside the half-fallen, abandoned huts and under the thickets and bushes clustered in the cleft of the mountain that was the center of the island. Sirius used a charm that was supposed to make objects glow green if they'd recently been exposed to Dark magic but that charm was still in development and they both knew that sometimes objects glowed that shouldn't and, perhaps worse, objects didn't glow that should. Suddenly there appeared to be a green forest fire, an inferno, among those bushes.

"Finite Incantatem!" Sirius commanded, looking rather shocked at the success of his spell, and the green conflagration vanished.

James, having looked through the Omnioculars, indicated a nearby rock ledge as a suitable place to land. Sirius, having landed, dismounted and glanced around. He tied his broom to a cord so that it hung down his back, and then he scurried, spider-like, down and sideways on the rock face as if demonstrating that a wand is more useful to rock climbing than either knowledge or handholds. James sighed after him, then busied himself with sight lines and cardinal directions, beginning with the computation of the time of sunrise on the Solstice -- the local sunrise would be a later time than given in an almanac, as the sun would have to clear another mountain on the mainland.

Sirius appeared to go inside a big pile of rocks -- big rocks, compared to the usual gravel and pebbles of suburban life. "Altogether too spider-like," James muttered, then returned to his calculations.

"Merlin's balls!" Sirius shouted. "James, you have got to see this!"

No need to fly over when one can look through the Omnioculars. No need to shout when one can spare one's throat by using the Seashell. "Okay, I'm looking with the Omnioculars, where are -- Whoa! You're right where that green fire was."

"Well, of course," said Sirius's voice in the Seashell. "Look at this place!"

It was worth looking at. The rock pile occupied the outer half of a deep rock ledge. From Sirius' viewpoint it seemed to tower over the space between the rock pile and rock wall. A large overhang above cast the space into dimness while causing it to seem like a chamber or a cave. "The sun will rise over these rocks and shine on this wall, until it rises high enough to be blocked by the overhang. I'm going to check on the wall."

No need to spend time flying when you can Apparate. James joined Sirius in the not-a-cave where Sirius was looking closely at the wall by the light of his wand, and asked: "Have you found any signs of Dark Magic?"

"Only the faintest traces. They're coming from this wall, but they're not recent."

James flew up to similarly examine the wall from the overhang to just above where Sirius could comfortably reach. Sirius cooperatively crouched, squatted, knelt, and lay on his belly to continue his research down to the bottom of the wall.

"This was all your plan to get me to roll in the dirt, right?" Sirius said cheerfully, thus indicating that he had found no more on his half of the wall than James had found on the other half.

James took up his Omnioculars and resumed his calculation, now tailored to this particular location, where the sun must rise not only over the mainland mountain but over the rock pile -- the rocks in the pile, boulders really, might be small compared to that fifty-foot tall entity called Eagle Rock, but were large enough that plenty of gaps were visible between rocks. Sirius watched with interest from his floor as James pointed his wand at the rock pile, sighted along the wand, carefully moved the aim and, appearing to concentrate intensely, whispered, "Pyroculus!"

James stared at his wand and suddenly one ray of bright light shone through the dimness of the enclosed space, from a chink in the rock pile to a vertical line of lightedness painted on the back wall, near the top. Illuminated, that spot of wall seemed to be a kind of gray with purple specks mixed in. The streak of light slid down the wall, fast compared to the speed with which sunny spots usually move. Near the bottom, the streak vanished as the entire space brightened as if someone had turned on the light; the not-a-cave fell back into dimness as James's little fireball's light was blocked by the overhang. He whispered "Finite Incantatem." He took a deep breath, trying to control his voice so he could sound casual rather than awed when he spoke again.

"Remember what Francis said about power being transferred to a person who is touched by a particular ray of sunlight? Voldemort will stand against that wall and let that spot of light slide over him!"

"And we'll be waiting here for him," Sirius chimed in. "Do you think there's any spell that could kill him if we got the drop on him?" Sirius jumped up and went to look down the other side of the rock ledge, opposite the side he had entered from. "Look! There's a footpath here, and I bet no one can see it unless they're looking straight down at it." He started walking down the footpath. James, muttering something about fools rushing in, followed him.

The path turned this way and it turned that way and it may have used some magic geography, because the lads were surprised to find themselves standing on leaf-covered (but otherwise bare) dirt under a grove of trees. They were in one of the crevices of the mountain with a stream running in the lowest part of it, and several boulders scattered around the stream. Sirius sprawled comfortably on a boulder that resembled a chair, took a theatrically deep breath, and announced, "I like the way this place smells. None of that automobile exhaust the Muggles keep putting in the air. No smell of humans. The brook sounds are nice too."

James thought that telling Sirius yet again to stop goofing around would be altogether too priggish. But lying down under the trees would be boring, even if he secretly agreed with Sirius that there was no danger. "Okay. Sitting around here is too boring for me, but you can stay while I keep walking and find out where this path goes. Try to wake up if I yell, okay?"

James followed the path to the water's edge. It came out on a piece of shore on the western edge which sloped gradually into the sea and, as viewed through Omnioculars, continued the same gradual slope for some distance under water. He could swim better as a stag than as a human (and, besides, it would keep his clothes from getting wet), so he transformed, and then he walked out into the water on the excuse of finding out how far it sloped gently before having a steep drop off.

Sirius, not surprisingly, got bored sitting under the trees doing nothing, so he also came along the path. When he saw the stag wading, he felt quite annoyed to have been left out, and also transformed. The big black dog rushed into the sea, to splash as much as possible, bounce around, and try to knock the stag down so that Prongs would be as wet as Padfoot.

Playing in the water to the point of breathlessness, it actually was the stag who succeeded in pushing the big dog under water, then trotted up ashore and shook the water off. Padfoot rushed on shore, barking enthusiastically, and shook the water off much more violently than Prongs had; he managed to get Prongs wet all over again.

James having by then entirely exhausted his ability to be cautious, they started to circle the island's shoreline as animals. Which led them into a very exciting fight with some fanged, clawed, bad-tempered sheep, whom Padfoot had thought it would be fun to bark at and herd. When the vicious sheep finally ran away, Prongs had to block Padfoot from chasing them. But vicious sheep were the only threat they found, and they had dried off by the time they changed back to human.

"I want to bring Remus here at the full moon," said Sirius. "Maybe Peter could get a babysitter for his mother that night; we could be the four Marauders once again."

"Sirius, we only checked a couple of places on this island," expostulated James, "and in the daytime. We have no idea what else might be hidden here or come here at night! There could be a whole congregation of Death Eaters!"

"And they'd be more scared of the werewolf than we'd be of them," Sirius said. "Calm down, Prongs. It's a perfect place, an uninhabited island, no humans to endanger. Invisible to Muggles, so any human who did come here would be a wizard, able to Apparate or fly away.... I really *hate* locking Moony in the shed every month. It's not only insulting, but he suffers so much from the human smells all around."

James still thought it was a bad idea (he got an image in his mind of a wolf in mid-leap, a wand pointed at him, and Avada Kedavra), but he knew how much it had cost Sirius to admit that he cared about anyone's feelings, even his own, so James kept silent.

* * *

Sirius told Remus about "that island you found for us" -- the cave, the grove, the shore, the sheep, the clean smells, the absence of humans. When he added, "I think we should go there at full moon," he saw the look of longing in Moony's eyes before Moony pulled a curtain over his thoughts and murmured, "And James thinks that's a really stupid idea."

"I don't know what's got into him!" Sirius complained. "Nowadays he's always talking like some old fart. 'Be careful,' he says. 'Dangerous,' he says. "And Prongs used to never be scared of anything.... Do you think it's because of marriage?"

"Maybe." Remus smiled a little, contemplating telling Sirius that maybe James liked living with Lily so much that he wanted to keep doing so for a good many more years. "Or it might be exactly what he says it is: that he's more concerned with getting the job done than with having fun."

Sirius glared rebelliously. Remus carried on arguing against his own interest. "Remember he's the Quidditch Captain. He wouldn't mind if the Seeker broke her head open crash-landing as long as she had caught the Snitch already, but he'd be bloody furious if she took herself out of the game like that when he needed her to catch the Snitch."

Chapter VII: Full Moon

Sirius was thinking favorably of their school days, when it was possible to just rush off and have fun, without having to make plans, and arrange things. But James still refused to take part in a Full Moon outing to Sealand, even after Peter had found someone else to look after his mother just this once, and Sirius was still so set on the outing that he buckled down to removing all his other friends' objections, which turned out to be the same thing as planning.

Remus was concerned that the charm had indicated recent Dark Magic in the not-a-cave, so Sirius brought him to check it out for himself. They flew all the way on Sirius's motorcycle, Remus having become accustomed to riding pillion when he wanted to humor Sirius. Sirius wanted to know Remus's opinion on the not-a-cave and especially its back wall, which Remus examined with every sign of interest, but not saying anything except the occasional "H'mmm". When he straightened up and turned away from that wall, Sirius eagerly asked him: "Well? Was it interesting?"

"Yes," Remus replied, and considered stopping at that, just to be irritating. He relented: "There's Dark Magic somewhere inside the rock wall, but it seems to have been slumbering for centuries. I haven't yet found any persuasive reason for us to avoid this island. Let's look over the rest of it."

* * *

Now Remus was familiar enough with Sealand to Apparate there, but Sirius knew he would be in no condition to Apparate back home (or anywhere else) the day after the Full Moon. Besides, Peter couldn't Apparate straight to Sealand this time. "We'll fly up on my bike," he told them. "That way I can give Moony a ride home after."

"It will carry two but not three,' Peter pointed out.

"Remus riding pillion, you in my shirt pocket."

"Sirius, it's summer now. The moon will rise long before sunset." Remus had that annoyingly professorial expression on his face, and was speaking in that carefully gentle tone of voice.

"Yeah. So we'll leave here around noon. That will give us plenty of time."

"If we fly the bike in daylight," Remus's patient tone was even more so, "we will be seen by Muggles."

Sirius was quite exasperated by the time that he had arranged that he would fly the bike North the night before Full Moon and stash it near their mainland spot, then the three of them would Apparate to join the bike the next afternoon, and fly to the island. While confident of his ability to put enough charms on the bike to keep it safe, he didn't feel good about leaving it alone so far from home.

And then Peter spoke to him separately: "Urm, Padfoot, considering the condition Moony always gets in on the morning after, I think it would be really hard on him to fly a long way home, especially without even having had any coffee and breakfast...."

"You're right," Sirius growled. "Will you please look after that part? Pack a picnic basket or something."

* * *

He was in a better mood when the three Marauders reunited with the motorcycle on the appointed day. Because Sirius always would lecture anyone who would listen about it being ridiculous to wear robes on a motorcycle, they were in Muggle clothing. Sirius secretly loved the excuse to wear a black leather jacket with lots of shiny zippers, and snug jeans, and black motorcycle boots. The pretty witch he'd persuaded to ride pillion with him last night hadn't been at all secret about loving it, too. And he'd even been able to tactfully persuade her to go home again before his friends arrived.

Remus was being very quiet, but obviously as an attempt to appear calm and businesslike and conceal the happiness lighting his face; he wasn't going to say one word about how much it meant to him that his friends were making all this effort for his sake. Peter was just plain cheerful, excited about the outing, and proud of the picnic basket he'd packed. James wasn't there. Sirius felt he was in danger of getting depressed about that, so he told the others: "Maybe it's a good thing that Prongs isn't with us. We can hunt some of those sheep without him preaching at us. I told you about the fangs and claws, right? It should be a challenge. And then, we all like mutton, right? But he has some arbitrary objection to eating ungulates."

Sirius tapped the picnic basket with his wand, shrank it small enough, and put it in the front pocket of his jeans, while Wormtail, transformed, climbed up his boot, jeans leg, and leather jacket to reach the unzipped top of the front zipper, climb inside the jacket, and tuck himself into the breast pocket of the shirt. The human two mounted the motorcycle, and they were on their way.

Having reached Sealand and found a good place to park the bike, they left the picnic basket, now about half its normal size, and walked up the mountain. Sirius was eager to show his discovery, the not-a-cave, to Peter, or anyone else who had never seen it and would be impressed.

Remus was always very aware of the position of the Moon when it was near full, and he knew that he was affected by its rise over the true horizon, not the apparent horizon. As the three explored the island, all in human form in courtesy to Moony, he glanced toward the East, right through that mountain on the mainland. He glanced there more and more as the afternoon wore on.

* * *

When Animagi take animal form, their clothing and everything else they're wearing, their wands and quite a few other things they're carrying, just vanish away, and return when the Animagi return to human form. That is yet one more advantage that Animagi have over werewolves, who only have their clothing, eyeglasses, and marriage rings behave so co-operatively, while everything else they wear or carry just falls down when they turn into wolves.

Remus held out his wand to Sirius: "Padfoot, I suppose that the safest place to leave this would be with the bike?"

Sirius nodded and turned into dog form. He took Remus's wand in his mouth as Peter, in rat form, climbed up onto Padfoot's back to ride along. Padfoot trotted along the path, back to the motorcycle, to leave the wand in the picnic basket, sharing its protective charms. If this had been only a matter of taking the wand to the motorcycle, they could have Apparated there. But it did not need to be put into words between them that walking there on their own four feet like Muggles was an excuse to give Moony some privacy for his transformation, which was neither instantaneous nor painless.

* * *

Wolf again, surrounded again by myriads of smells and sounds, all carrying information of a much fuller, richer world. If the human in his wilderness ramblings perceived the world in three dimensions, then the wolf must be perceiving it in five or six dimensions. As always, the human part of his mind (the part that thinks of past and future and other) wondered why he had been fearing this rather than yearning for it, wondered how he could consider himself alive in the sterile pages of the other twenty-eight days. Moony drank in a noseful of air, to savor its luxuriance, then sat back on his haunches to howl with the joy of life. Animals hearing it recognized the sound of a wolf proclaiming its territory, but if there had been human listeners, they would have been reminded of an extended phrase from a jazz trumpet solo.

Wolf instincts didn't need human mind to remind him that he was supposed to be in contact with his pack. A shorter howl, with yips in it, was the natural greeting to distant packmates, and he trotted off to join them.

The three Marauders had explored the island as humans in daylight, then as animals in the remaining daylight, and now as animals in darkness. When they were motivated to cover ground, the rat rode on the big dog's back, clinging to the long hairs of the thick ruff protecting the dog's neck, but when they were playing together, the rat scurried on his own feet. Sometimes he was It in Hide and Seek, and other times he protectively folded his little front paws over his head and allowed himself to be used as a croquet ball for the two canines to push into motion with their noses. But whenever the wolf and the dog started in to wrestle, the rat jumped off the dog's neck and scurried to some safe hiding place to watch the fight.

* * *

The three beasts were trotting down the now-familiar path from the not-a-cave to the shady grove when the wolf perceived a trace of disturbing odor in the air. His throat was already growling a little, his fur standing up along his spine, as he drew in another breath to identify the smell. Even quicker than he recognized it as the smell of human, his instincts were responding to it, flooding his body and mind with overwhelming blood-lust, rage, and hunger. Padfoot, having noticed Moony's behavior, was still sniffing the air to find its cause when Moony set off toward the source of the human smell. Wolf instincts know how to hunt; it's better to walk silently and invisibly to within attack distance than to set off at a dead run and alert the prey.

But Padfoot, finally identifying that smell, knew that he must protect the human, must stop Moony, preferably by getting ahead of him and blocking his way. The black dog took off at an all-out sprint to catch the wolf. The wolf growled at this interference, but the prey must have been alerted by the racket that dog was making -- crashing and bashing and even barking -- so he was free to yield to his rage's eager need and let himself into a lung-stretching race toward the object of desire. Padfoot couldn't catch Moony now!

Padfoot had much better eyesight than a natural dog, and saw that Moony's target was a long-haired woman (he rather thought she was young, and pretty, and naked) who had been sitting on the same throne-like rock on which he had sprawled on his first visit, but now she was standing up to see what was causing all the commotion. She either recognized a werewolf but was unable to Apparate, or simply panicked., because she leapt from the rock into a run toward the shore. Sirius hoped she had a boat there. He ran harder, and Wormtail tucked in his head and let go of the dog's neck hairs and concentrated on landing without breaking anything; one advantage of being a rat rather than a larger animal is landing with much less momentum.

The dog's momentum let him land hard when he leapt on the wolf, caught the scruff of his neck in his teeth, tried to hold him down with his weight. The wolf objected, thrashing about to try to shake him off, bending his head around to bite him. As a dog, Padfoot could not catch lycanthropy from a werewolf bite, but he could be wounded or killed. He was at something of a disadvantage in this fight because he was taking care not to damage Moony, but Moony had no such objection to damaging him. Startled by a sudden hot pain running down his belly, he loosened his grip, and Moony escaped, racing off after the human. The claws hadn't torn Padfoot's belly too deeply; he raced after the wolf. They were ignoring the path now, running over open ground.

Wormtail transformed to his human self, stood up and jumped and waved his arms around. He attracted Moony's attention, and Moony slowed his run, suddenly torn between two irresistibly tempting targets. He wheeled around and ran toward the closer human. Peter's heart pounded as he watched a raging werewolf rush toward him.

Padfoot leapt on the wolf, momentarily pulling him down, and Peter transformed back to rat with great relief.

This stage of the fight looked almost like an embrace, each beast's clawed front paws clutching at the other's neck, trying to hold his head in place to be bitten without biting, and each beast's clawed back paws trying to tear open the other's belly. They were on land that sloped and, as they rolled over and over each other, they moved down the slope. Wormtail, with better eyesight than a natural rat, saw that they were coming to a sudden drop-off of the land; they were near the edge of a steep slope, almost a cliff, with a fine view of the shore below. Wormtail felt a craving to close his eyes to avoid seeing the disaster, but the two fighters somehow recognized their situation and jumped away from each other so that they were no longer rolling toward the cliff edge.

Moony growled and looked over the cliff, and he saw, or somehow knew, that the woman was down there, on the shore below the cliff. In a desperation of hatred and desire, he howled and leapt out and down. Padfoot looked after him, saw the woman, and knew his duty. With the human side of his mind uttering a string of obscene profanities like a prayer, he also leapt over the cliff.

Wormtail had been following them at a rat's top speed for covering distance, and arrived as Padfoot leapt, so he in turn looked over the cliff. He saw that both canines had landed safely and were fighting again.

As they tore at each other, neither of them saw the woman reach the sea's edge and bend to pick something up: a sealskin. She put it on like a cloak and transformed instantly into a seal, gently dived headfirst into the sea and swam away. Wormtail, watching from the cliff, saw this transformation and headed down the cliff. He didn't leap over the edge; he climbed down on little rat feet which need only little rat-feet-sized footholds.

The human having left, the human smell gradually diminished, so the wolf's mind gradually cleared. It eventually occurred to Moony that , even though he was very angry at the dog for fighting with him, still the dog was his packmate Padfoot, and Padfoot wasn't trying to harm him. So the wolf should also be pulling his punches.

Padfoot, who was very tired as well as scratched and bitten, felt very much relieved to notice that Moony was no longer trying to kill him. He was too tired to remember the wolf surrender signals, so he rolled into a doggy submission posture, rolling over on his back with his paws flopping in the air and his head tilted back to expose the vulnerable throat. His heart filled with thanks when Moony licked his face instead of tearing at his throat.

Two weary canines groomed each other while yawning. Padfoot, lying on his side, curled up with his legs tucked in and his tail wrapped around them. Moony, realising that he also was tired, lay down with his head pillowed on Padfoot's rump, his legs tucked in and his tail wrapped around them so carefully that it covered his nose as well. Padfoot yawned and moved position so that he was using Moony as a pillow. Wormtail joined them and wiggled into a cozy, warm spot between the dog's front legs, and all slept.

* * *

Remus awoke late in the morning. His head felt as if a thousand-pound giant with big feet had stepped on it, and his whole body ached. That was the way he usually felt on the morning after the Full Moon, but familiarity didn't make it any more pleasant. He wished he were still asleep. Maybe if he pretended to be still asleep, it would turn true.

Even through closed eyelids, his eyes told him that the day was bright and sunny. Little background noises indicated that people were up and moving around. A strong smell of hot coffee washed over him, awakening two sluggish thoughts in his mind. One was pleasure at the beautiful fragrance. The other was a sense of loss and mourning at the absence of a world even more textured in smell than in sight. He reminded himself that the latter feeling would go away over the course of the day, not to return for a month. Odors of breakfast cooking joined the coffee smells, and Remus opened his eyes.

"Nice to see you wake up, Moony," Sirius said. "I thought maybe you were planning to sleep all day." Sirius was sitting lazily, leaning his back against a rock, sipping his coffee, while Peter was fussing busily with two magic cookfires, skillets and spatulas and blue-enameled coffee pot. Having heard Sirius greet Remus, he brought a large mug of coffee to Remus without waiting to be asked, and with an economy of movement far more graceful than his usual.

"Thank you," Remus remembered to mutter before inhaling half the coffee. His memories of the night before were beginning to sort themselves out. The wolf's memories were always vague to the human, but there seemed to have been a great deal of fighting, and -- "Surely I didn't have this pillow and blanket when I went to sleep?"

"I brought them," Peter explained proudly. "When you changed back, so did Padfoot and I, and we fetched the bedding and tucked you in nicely." He returned to his cookfires, dishing up the first place of bacon and eggs, and bringing it to Sirius, who replied: "You're going to make some witch a great wife someday, Wormtail." Peter wasn't sure whether that had been a compliment or an insult, but he brought the second plate to Remus before getting his own.

Remus picked at his food. There seemed to be a lot of blood in his memory, as well as a lot of running. Had they hunted a vicious sheep, as Sirius had planned? Had it put up a chase, and a good fight with its fangs and claws? He partly remembered gorging on the raw flesh and life-warm blood, the wolf tearing at it and gulping it down in simple gluttonous hunger. He felt disgusted at himself at the recollection. Padfoot had been eating beside him, but Sirius (lucky dog!) felt no more guilty for being a sheep-killing dog than for being a philanderer. Wormtail had nibbled on scraps the canines dropped, but somehow that seemed less disgusting, more like eating sushi.

"You cut me up pretty good last night, Moony," Sirius commented in a deliberately off-hand tone of voice.

"You cut him up pretty good, too," Peter said to Sirius.

Remus looked over at Sirius and said: "You don't look very cut up.... I don't feel very cut up."

"Oh, Peter's developing a nice skill in Healing Charms, " Sirius sounded more patronizing than admiring. "I wish he'd had that when we were at school -- I can think of a few times it would have come in handy."

Remus sighed. "I gather you're not going to tell me what I did last night until I ask you outright. Because I don't remember it."