Another Prisoner, Another Professor

The room was still for a few moments before Ron and Hermione came out from underneath the desk. "He's down on the ground floor in Filch's office now," said Ron, looking at the Marauder's Map. "That must be where he got the keys from."

"Harry, I'm so sorry!" Hermione wailed. "He's going to make things horrible for you, and if I hadn't sneezed - "

"Any one of us could have sneezed," Harry said. "Come on, we should get out of here."

During the time they had been in Black's office, clouds had formed and covered the full moon. "If Sir Cadogan isn't back yet, we can't get to our rooms," said Harry, taking his broom from where it was leaning next to the windowsill. "And if he is back, he'll make too much noise before he lets us in, if he lets us in. I think we should fly through one of the windows in Gryffindor Tower and bring the brooms back in the morning."

Somehow, the dark was less menacing than the full, bright light of the moon had been. "Snape'll really have it in for you now," Ron said as he slipped a pin between the common room window and its frame and lifted the latch. "More than he usually does, I mean. Harry, look, I think you ought to tell Black everything. He'll understand, and that way Snape can't tell him anything he doesn't already know."

"He can't tell him now anyway," said Harry. "Otherwise Black will want to know why Snape was in his office." The window swung open and they quickly flew inside. "I'm not going to tell Black, he's ill and he doesn't need anything else to worry about."

Hermione shut the window and sat down near the fireplace. "Black definitely wanted you, Harry," she said, taking the notebook from her pocket. "You do believe that now, don't you?"

"Yeah," said Harry, sitting down next to her as Ron sat on her other side. "I do."

"Maybe he hasn't been the best godfather, but I think he's trying to change that. If the book and letter were under one of his chairs, he must have been reading them recently. And he tried when you were a baby, he didn't just let you go to the Dursleys without trying to have the courts give him custody. I've seen Brutus Swift mentioned in the Daily Prophet before - he's one of the best wizarding lawyers, maybe the best wizarding lawyer. Black must have spent a lot of money trying to have you live with him."

"And even if he's sick," added Ron, "if he's still trying, he probably doesn't think he's going to die anytime soon. Here, let me see what that letter said." Hermione handed him the notebook; Ron opened it and read it again. "'No serious and/or easily transmittable diseases' - so if nobody else here is sick, it's something serious and something he couldn't hide from a healer. What's VD?"

"I was hoping you'd know," Hermione said. "I thought maybe it was some kind of wizarding sickness."

"I never heard of it."

"Well, then," said Hermione, "it's got to be - " She stopped and blushed.

"What?" Harry asked.

"I mean, I can't think of anything else it would be - "

"Sometime this century, Hermione," said Ron.

"It's got to be venereal disease," she finished. Harry and Ron exchanged puzzled looks. "Venereal disease - it's diseases you get from - from going to bed with someone."

"From going to bed with someone?" Ron repeated.

Hermione blushed even redder. "Ron, you do know how people make babies - "

"Yeah, I know how people make babies! I just didn't know there were diseases."

"Well, there are, and they're not the reason why Black didn't raise Harry," Hermione said hurriedly, her face now the shade of a particularly ripe tomato. "Whatever he's got, it's something that's letting him live normally, at least most of the time - "

"Come on," said Ron. "Don't tell me you haven't figured it out."

"Figured what out?"

"He's a werewolf," Ron said. "And don't say anything about 'enough evidence' until I'm done.

"Okay, Black's got something that's dangerous enough that a court wouldn't let him raise Harry if they knew about it, but it's not dangerous enough that he can't live in a school full of people and give it to anyone. I know all about magical illnesses - every one of them's happened to someone in my family. Dragon pox is contagious, and so are fwooper pox and Uric's Fever. Plus Black would be sick in bed if he had any of those. But whatever he's got has to be a least a bit contagious, or else the court would figure, 'well, Harry can't catch it' and they'd give Black custody. What kind of disease lets you do all the stuff Black does?

"He must've had about five billion chances to get bit by a werewolf, between Lupin and the kids in their school. Especially because nobody'd invented the Wolfsbane Potion yet. So Black's teaching, and somebody bites him. He doesn't want anybody to find out because everybody minus Flitwick hates werewolves. Then Harry's parents die, and Black knows the what's-it-called - he knows the lycanthropy will be in his blood and if the healers examine him they'll find it. If he lets them examine him, he won't have Harry and everybody will know he's a werewolf. If he doesn't, he just doesn't have Harry. So he hires this Brutus Swift bloke and tries to find a loophole someplace, but he can't do it.

"So he's got to leave Harry with the Dursleys. For some reason, he wants a job even though he's rich. Maybe the werewolf school reminds him too much of Lupin or something, so he quits there. With most other jobs, he'll have to take one day off work every month and people will catch on, so he's got to find something without regular hours. He goes to Africa, where he's out by himself. Then Dumbledore asks him to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and there's Black's loophole, he can be near Harry without being examined. Only it's still too dangerous for people to know he's a werewolf. Especially because Lupin's just escaped. If Black tells Harry that he's his godfather, he's got to explain why Harry's never met him before, and he can't do that. So he doesn't tell him, he just looks out for him and helps him fight dementors. That stuff in the bottle was the Wolfsbane Potion. Of course he wants us to think of Lupin as a person and not a werewolf, he's a werewolf."

It all made an amazing amount of sense to Harry; he thought it all through again and couldn't find anything that it left unexplained. Hermione, however, was less than convinced.

"You figured all this out in the fifteen minutes since we found the notebook?" she asked.

"Well, I thought a little about it before, you know, 'maybe Black's really a werewolf himself.' What, you don't like it?" Ron's voice sounded unusually guarded.

"If Black's a werewolf, why hasn't he missed any classes?"

"I don't know, maybe all the full moons were on weekends or when we didn't have class! Go look it up!"

"How do the headaches fit in?"

"He's under stress!" Ron rolled his eyes. "What else do you want? You talk about evidence, I gave you evidence. Name me one contagious wizarding disease that lets somebody fly a motorbike, Hermione. One."

"It could be a Muggle disease."

"Pureblood wizards don't usually get Muggle diseases. I've known at least one person that's had every single wizarding disease, and believe me, you can't fly a motorbike if you've got any of them. You're in bed scratching or sweating or being sick into a bowl."

"Well, we can find out soon if Black's a werewolf or not," said Harry quickly. "We just find out when the next full moon is and see if he shows up."

Ron and Hermione both looked at him. "Yeah," said Ron, his voice back to normal. "Whatever he's got, though, I don't think he's anywhere near dying. Look, I know you don't want to tell Black about Snape, but maybe you should tell him that you know he's your godfather and you've figured out that he's a werewolf. Saves him from having to decide if he's going to tell you."

"If he is a werewolf," said Hermione.

"If Black's gone during the next full moon, I'll tell him what I know," Harry said. "If he's not a werewolf, I don't know what I'm going to tell him."

With this decided, the three of them went up to bed. "Maybe you could live with Black after all," said Ron as he and Harry climbed the stairs to their dormitory. "He could just take you from the Dursleys and not bother to tell the courts. Hey, maybe me and Hermione could visit you over the summer! Where d'you suppose Black lives, anyway? Got to be a nice place, wherever it is."

"Yeah," said Harry. He thought of the imaginary boy, sitting in the Black's parlor reading Quidditch magazines, and smiled.