The Play's The Thing

The Play's The Thing

By Minnow

Professor Dogberry, who taught Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, had spent very little time among real Muggles, and was consequently a purist of the first water. When he decided that the NEWTs class would not only read Shakespeare but perform a scene from one of the plays for the Professor Dumbledore's 137th birthday celebration, he decreed that only boys could be in it.

'In Shakespeare's day, there were no actresses,' he proclaimed, as Lily Evans and Zoë Smith giggled in the front row, Sirius Black gazed out of the window, and Remus Lupin scribbled notes assiduously, as he always did, which meant that he never actually took in what the professor had said until he read his work back later.

There were several boys doing Muggle Study NEWT, but as it was the softest of soft options, only three of them could be considered bright enough to learn and retain Shakespeare's lines. This meant that that Professor Dogberry's hands were rather tied with his choice of play. Lupin, who was fair, and quite a pretty boy, if the truth were known, would obviously have to play the girl. Black, who was handsome and dashing and beloved by all girls in all houses would have to be the boy. That left Robert Zello, Hufflepuff and Muggle-born, who at seventeen still retained most of his baby fat, and then some.

The Professor had put some thought into this while preparing the lesson, and eventually decided that they would act a scene from Romeo and Juliet, playing, respectively, Juliet, Romeo, and the Nurse. He announced these decisions to the class. The boys in the back row jeered and whistled, and the two girls in front, Lily Evans and Zoë Smith, looked round at Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, and simply convulsed with laughter.

Remus glanced up from his note-taking. 'What?'

'He didn't even hear!' Lily hiccupped, her eyes streaming. 'Lupin, you're going to be a girl in the play.'

'What play?' Remus gave her his sweet, uncertain smile, and Zoë kicked Lily under the table so she'd stop laughing, because the poor lamb really didn't have a clue what was going on under his nose half the time. 'Read your notes, Lupin!' Lily chuckled, ignoring Zoë completely.

He turned to Sirius for enlightenment. Sirius gave him a kindly look, and seemed about to pat his friend on the head. 'Moony, we're doing purist Shakespeare. You're going to be the girl.'

'I am not!' said Remus indignantly. He put up his hand. 'Professor! Professor Dogberry! They're joking, aren't they?'

Professor Dogberry liked Remus, who worked hard and did well in tests. 'I'm sure you will enjoy acting in a Shakespeare play, Mr Lupin. And as there are only three of you, perhaps we'd better make it a short scene. I don't see the rest of the school sitting through reams of Shakespeare anyway. Let alone Professor Dumbledore.'

The bell rang, and Remus and Sirius rushed off to break. 'Why are we suddenly doing a play?' Remus asked as they went out of the door, which started Lily and Zoë off again.

'I think he'll make a beautiful girl,' Zoë said staunchly, though. She fancied Remus Lupin, and still cherished hopes that he'd go out with her some day.

'Oh, yes,' agreed Lily. 'And we all know Black fancies himself as a gorgeous guy!'

*

Disaster struck just before the next Muggle Studies lesson, when Robert Zello accidentally sat on one of the Slytherins' pet toads, and was promptly jinxed by the Slytherin and six of his friends. He ended up completely paralysed in the Hospital Wing, and Madam Pomfrey didn't think he'd be fully himself for at least another ten days.

The toad didn't recover: Robert, as mentioned, was a plump boy.

Professor Dogberry, who had been preparing the perfect scene from Romeo and Juliet, was desolated. So desolated that he brought twelve copies of Hamlet to the lesson, and handed them round the class.

'A tragedy,' he announced, with a sombre face. It wasn't quite clear whether he was referring to the play or to Robert's dereliction.

'Turn to Act 3, Scene 1,' he said. 'Mr Black, you will read Hamlet. Mr Lupin, you will read Ophelia.'

Sirius nudged Remus, who was waiting expectantly to write down the next instructions. He then groaned and waved his hand in the air. 'But Professor Dogberry! Do I really have to learn this long bit?'

'This long bit,' said Dogberry, annoyed, 'is a very famous soliloquy, Mr Black. 'To be or not to be...do any of the Muggle-borns know it?'

Lily and Zoë put up their hands.

'It's all about suicide,' Lily explained. 'Hamlet's deciding whether to kill himself or not.'

'I'm not going to read that,' Sirius scoffed.

Professor Dogberry, who knew when he was beaten, sighed. 'Never mind. It's not vital to the scene anyway. We'll start with Ophelia's first words, on the next page. Good, my lord... '

'Don't forget, you're Ophelia,' Sirius hissed to Remus, who was doing his best to see if he could make himself disappear without the help of a cloak or a wand.

Remus said a very rude word under his breath. The girls giggled again. Professor Dogberry, who hadn't heard the expletive, snapped, 'That'll do, Miss Evans, Miss Smith. Any more noise and I'm taking ten points from Gryffindor. I do not want to take points from a Prefect, Miss Evans, so you will now be quiet and let Mr Black and Mr Lupin read the scene.'

Sirius pointed out the place to Remus, who promptly dropped his book on the floor and ducked under the desk to look for it. Lily stuffed her hankie in her mouth.

'Come on, Mr Lupin,' Dogberry said encouragingly, when Remus finally emerged. 'Do you want me to read it first?'

'Yes, please, Professor,' said Remus, looking desperately round the room. A piece of parchment floated gracefully down on to his open book: 'If you don't do it, he'll fail you!' Remus directed a savage glance at Sirius, a glance that said, 'You wait till the full moon, when I shall bite you, and then you'll be sorry.'

Dogberry, who loved Shakespeare, and had forgotten what it was like to be an adolescent boy, was soon launched enthusiastically into the scene. When he had finished, he said, 'Can anyone tell me what that was all about?'

Lily put up her hand. 'Well, Ophelia's giving back the presents Hamlet gave her, because he doesn't love her any more. And Hamlet's pretending to be mad, isn't he? He's trying to get rid of her.'

'Twenty points to Gryffindor.' For a moment, it seemed that Professor Dogberry was going to ask Lily and Zoë to read instead, but then he rallied himself. 'Can anyone tell me what is unusual about the scene?'

'Ophelia's lines are in blank verse and Hamlet's are in prose,' said Lily. She was beginning to look a bit smug, and the Prefect badge on her robes gleamed with reflected pride.

'Poor Moony, you have to do the hard bit,' smirked Sirius. Remus was about to jinx him when the bell rang.

*

At dinner, Remus and Sirius poured out their woes to the other two, who had had the sense to keep up Care of Magical Creatures instead. James snorted and swallowed his mashed potato the wrong way, then caught Lily's eye across the table, blushed, and excused himself to go and pester her for as long as she'd put up with him. Peter said blankly, 'Shakespeare?' and attacked his baked beans with his dessertspoon.

Sirius and Remus looked at each other and shrugged. 'It's just you and me, Moony,' Sirius said.

'I could kill Zello,' remarked Remus.

'Well, would you rather be doing Romeo and Juliet?' Sirius put on a falsetto voice. 'Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? '

'It's more familiar,' Remus said.

'You mean you've read it?'

'I meant to anyone who'd do Muggle studies,' Remus prevaricated. 'Except you.'

As Sirius was the first pureblood in 400 years to take the subject at NEWT level, he simply nodded. 'I bet you've read Hamlet. I bet you know that bloody scene already.'

'Well...yes. My Dad makes me read all that stuff, because he says I need to have a breadth of knowledge that the non-werewolf doesn't have.'

He sounded defensive, but Sirius didn't laugh. 'We'd better get on.'

It was unfortunate that their fellow-Marauders were doing more enticing things. James was in the Quidditch Team, and so his contribution to the birthday celebrations would be the exhibition match against Slytherin; and Peter's group was grooming a unicorn to present to Dumbledore as a pet. There were to be other productions - one of the Charms classes was presenting a full-scale magic act - but nobody else would have the indignity of spurning a former lover on stage, in front of the assembled staff and pupils of Hogwarts.

Remus and Sirius spent an evening struggling with the scene, and finally gave up around ten, when Lily and Zoë started giving them odd looks from the other side of the common room.

'They're breaking up,' Remus said, exasperated, on the eighth go-round. 'You're not meant to smile at me, Pads. You're meant to glower. He doesn't like Ophelia. He wants her to go to a nunnery and get out of his life.'

'It's just you'll make such a cute girl,' Sirius smirked.

Remus threw his ruler at Sirius, and narrowly missed decapitating him.

'Having trouble, boys?' Lily sneered, but relented when she saw the look of sheer misery on Remus's face. 'If you really can't do it, why not go to Professor Dogberry and suggest another scene? You don't have to be girls. Or a girl, that is,' she said hastily, when Sirius reached for his wand. 'I think there are two scenes at the beginning with Hamlet and his best friend, Horatio. Those'll be a lot better.'

Remus leafed through, perked up at first and then slumped back on to the sofa. 'There's other people in them, though.'

'Tiny parts. I'm sure a couple of the guys could manage,' Lily said.

*

It turned out that both the scenes with Horatio involved the ghost of Hamlet's father. Professor Dogberry detested ghosts in the classroom; ghosts had no place in Muggle studies, except the OWLs module on Fears and Superstition. He didn't want Nearly Headless Nick to be part of the Muggle Studies presentation.

However, with time running out before the Headmaster's birthday, Professor Dogberry was quite amenable to Remus and Sirius doing the first scene with Horatio and Hamlet, as long as they stopped before any ghost appeared, and coached poor Tim Tobias carefully in the two smaller parts.

'Act 1, Scene 2...ah, yes, I know it well,' he said, lost in a moment of nostalgia for his own days at Hogwarts. 'It will be easier for the costumes, too,' he conceded. 'I think one of the goats ate our princess wig, anyway. And we can't have an Ophelia with short hair, can we? Besides, you can just wear your dress robes - '

Sirius groaned. Dogberry looked daggers at him. 'Any more problems, Mr Black?'

'No, Professor.'

'Good. And, Mr Lupin' - he beamed at Remus, who was staring out of the window at a large exotic bird that had escaped from the Transfiguration classroom - 'if you and Mr Black do this scene as best you can, and I accept that we can't all be actors, I shall add a second star to the starred Os you are both receiving in your spring term reports.'

The words 'starred O' were among the few that had a galvanising effect on Remus. He was so excited, he actually grabbed Sirius's hand and dragged him back to the common room and their copies of Hamlet.

*

Tim Tobias, newly cast in the play, was a Gryffindor, and though he was immensely brave he wasn't very clever. He was actually in his seventh year at Hogwarts, having stayed down to redo Sixth Year after failing his end-of-year exams quite spectacularly, but all the same he was happy to be playing with two of the most popular boys in the school.

Sirius and Remus sat him down and explained what the scene was all about. 'Hamlet's best friends have come to tell him they saw the ghost of his father,' Sirius said.

They ran into problems almost at once. It was a long scene; Tim came in at slightly nebulous points, and had to play both Marcellus and Bernardo; and though they always spoke together, it was confusing for the poor boy. Remus and Sirius ran through it a few times with him after dinner, then read it again when he'd given up and gone to bed with a headache.

'The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever...They don't sound like friends, do they?' Remus asked.

'All this servant stuff,' Sirius smirked. 'I suppose that's because Hamlet's the prince and Horatio's a commoner. So Horatio feels inferior to him.'

'Yeah,' Remus rolled his eyes. 'I sometimes feel that way with you and Prongs.'

'What?'

'You know. Like you two are the leaders and I'm the follower.'

Sirius was appalled. He gaped at Remus, his mouth open. 'But...how can you think that?'

'Obvious. You two initiate all the pranks and you did the Animagus work together.' His voice was a bit wistful.

'But...we did the Animagus work for you, Moony! And Peter did it as well. With a lot of help. We'd never have started the Map without you, either.'

'I s'pose.'

Sirius thought that Remus looked a bit lost and sad, the way he sometimes did in Charms when they had to move a living creature around with a swish of their wands. On one occasion, Remus caught a flying mouse in midair, and was hexed by the Ravenclaw who had finally managed to levitate the creature.

'Anyway, Hamlet says, Sir, my good friend; I'll change that name with you, doesn't he?' Sirius said. 'So he's saying Horatio's his equal. And he calls him good friend. We're good friends, aren't we?'

It wasn't like Sirius to sound so uncertain, and Remus felt a bit guilty. 'Of course we are, Padfoot.'

Sirius stumbled again on 'The King, my Father!'

'Pads, you sound like you're seeing a ghost there!' Remus choked. He noticed that Lily and Zoë were lurking in the common room again, so he tried not to laugh and set them off. They rarely laughed at Sirius, only at him, and he didn't want them to start. For some reason, he felt a bit protective of Sirius at times.

'I am seeing a ghost!'

'But it's someone you, uh, liked.'

Sirius put his copy down with a sigh. 'Listen, Moony, I'm no actor.' He perked up. 'Why don't we do Romeo and Juliet after all? With Tim as the Nurse, or whatever? Who needs Zello, anyway?'

'But I'd have to be a girl. And there's no wig.'

'You don't need a wig. Your hair's long enough, really.' Sirius scrutinised his friend with his head on one side. 'Let's look it up, anyway.'

*

They went to the library and found several copies of Romeo and Juliet in the Muggle Studies section. Remus looked at his Muggle Studies notes and found the scene Professor Dogberry had suggested originally.

'Act 2, scene 2... It's very long,' he said. 'We'd never learn all that in time.'

'Yes, we would. We could cut it. Look, if we start where Juliet says Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon. Oh, right, are you okay with that?'

'More than you are with liking your father,' Remus grimaced. 'What about Tim?'

'We leave in the bit with the Nurse. It's only a couple of words, and you can tell him where to come in, can't you? And then I'll end with Love goes toward love as school-boys from their books. I like that bit. We're really going to deserve all those stars if we get through this, Moony. And just think how educated we'll be. Your Dad'll be pleased.'

They sat at one of the tables to read it through. Occasionally, Remus felt his face going a bit pink. 'D'you think we could really say all those things? About love and everything?'

'I don't see why not,' Sirius replied. 'Especially if I pretend you're a girl. I wasn't really joking when I said you looked cute. I actually think you'd be a really pretty girl.' For some reason, that didn't come out quite as casually as he'd meant it to. He smiled at Remus, not one of his usual careless grins, but a slightly shy smile.

Remus would normally have punched him in the nose for that, but Sirius looked a bit vulnerable, so he smiled back instead. 'If you're okay with it, I suppose I am.'

By mutual consent, they decided to read the lines and rehearse in the library rather than the common room. As long as the Librarian didn't hear them, they'd be okay. Sirius put a Privacy Charm round their table, so nobody would guess what they were up to. Of course, it was studying, and for the Headmaster's rapidly-approaching birthday, but they were glad of the spell all the same, as they worked their way through the lines until they were saying them without hesitation or embarrassment.

'If you'd ever told me I'd be able to spout Shakespeare with a straight face I'd have jinxed you,' Sirius said, after the sixth run-through when they had stopped a few times just to glance at each other and check how they were reacting.

'Good practice for your next girlfriend,' Remus said.

'Or yours,' Sirius retaliated.

Remus giggled. 'Not really. I'm Juliet. My boyfriend, maybe.'

Sirius didn't smile. 'Well. You know. Some guys have boyfriends.'

'I meant that as a joke, Padfoot!'

'I didn't.' He reached over and put his hand on top of Remus's. Remus looked back at him questioningly.

'Well, Moony...you know. I really like you, and saying this stuff...I thought it would make me cringe, but it doesn't. So maybe...'

Remus felt confused. 'But you like girls.'

'I never thought about it. I like you. Right now. Maybe I'll like girls another time. You like girls too, don't you?'

'Some. I never thought about it either. My parents are always telling me there'll be plenty of time for girls after NEWTs, when I'm qualified and all.'

'Plenty of time. Plenty of girls. But only one Sirius Black.'

Remus laughed at that. 'Just as well! No, really, though, if I were Juliet, I'd be madly in love with you, Pads.' That didn't come out quite as lightly as he'd intended either.

They stayed in the library a bit longer, pretending to be learning their lines. Sirius draped his arm over Remus's shoulder, and Remus didn't shake it off, and for a while they didn't even look at their texts at all.

*

When Lily and Zoë reported that Remus and Sirius seemed to have given up on Hamlet, the Muggle Studies back-row boys joined ranks with the front-row girls to take bets on what play and scene they would finally choose. Lily and Zoë had the advantage of knowing more titles of Shakespeare plays, but even they hadn't factored in that the boys might end up going for Romeo and Juliet after all. When Sirius started explaining to Professor Dogberry what they were going to do, quite a few Galleons changed hands discreetly among the other students, except Tim, who had been in on the act all along, but hadn't realised that his insider knowledge could win him some money.

What was astounding, as Lily hissed to Zoë, was that the two of them seemed so much more...comfortable with this scene. It was almost uncanny. Even if Remus was pretending to be a girl, he just seemed, well, like himself. And Sirius was succeeding in sounding almost sincere. When he said 'This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,/May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet' the two girls looked at each other with raised eyebrows and didn't even think of giggling.

Lily passed Zoë a note that read, 'It almost sounds like they're in love with each other!' and Zoë passed one back that said, 'Maybe they are! Ha, ha.'

Professor Dogberry was ecstatic. 'Bravo, boys! Now, if you can perform like that in front of the Headmaster, I think we'll see a few commendations, eh?' He then set the rest of the class an essay analysing the passage in detail. 'My one complaint is that you're not doing the whole scene,' he said. 'But as that rehearsal went so well, I don't really want to mess it up. And Mr Tobias, you were excellent, too.'

He arranged for the three boys to come to his office for a brief run-through the following evening. 'And we have to decide what you're going to wear. Dress rehearsal next lesson, because the performance is on Thursday. '

*

Sirius and Remus discussed costumes in the library, and agreed that they'd refuse to wear dress robes, or tights, or spangly little caps or shoes with turned-up toes. Not for one excerpt from a single scene. They would wear their school robes and they would speak their lines as best they could, and that would have to be good enough even for Dogberry.

Once that was out of the way, they ran through their speeches yet again. They also decided to try out a few extra actions, with a view to using them in the performance.

'That's what real actors do,' Remus said, and Sirius was quite happy to go along with him.

They started off holding hands, and that soon felt quite natural. They practised a brief kiss, too - 'because we don't actually get to the part where Romeo and Juliet say goodbye,' as Remus pointed out - which felt natural as well.

They held a full rehearsal up in the dorm, while James was at a meeting for the Quidditch team to decide the appropriate salutation for Professor Dumbledore on his birthday. Fortuitously, Peter was also out, as he happened to be next on the rota to feed milk through an eye-dropper to the baby unicorn.

They sat on Remus's bed to take turns practising their lines without the book, then flopped down on their backs, exhausted. 'This would be a good time to try our actions again,' Remus said. 'We could think up some new ones as well.'

'Right. One thing we haven't done yet. I imagine that Romeo'd put his arms round Juliet.' Sirius put his arms round Remus and shifted a bit on the bed so they were lying face-to-face. 'Hey, Juliet, you're meant to put your arms round me too.'

Remus obliged, a bit shyly. Once again, he felt his ears going pink. 'Then what?'

'C'mon, Moony, you tell me.'

'I'm Juliet, and I'm the girl,' Remus said, a bit stubbornly. 'You tell me. Or just do it.'

'Okay.' Sirius rolled Remus over so he was lying on top of him, and pressed his mouth to his. They'd already rehearsed that in the library, but not in such detail.

'That's good,' Remus said a while later. 'D'you think they actually slept together too?'

'Of course they did. Would you like to? Sleep with me?'

'Yeah.' Remus avoided Sirius's eyes. 'But not at this second. I mean, I would, but James and Peter are going to be back in a minute.'

Another while later, he said, 'I wonder what's keeping them.'

'Easy. I locked them out.' Sirius took his wand from the bedside table and flicked it at the door.

There was the sound of Peter's slightly plaintive voice and James's deeper, always slightly amused one outside the room. Remus and Sirius sprang apart, and scrambled for their books. When their friends tumbled into the dorm, they were sitting quietly learning their speeches by heart yet again.

'What the hell happened to that door?' James asked. 'We've been pushing it for about ten minutes.'

'Needs oiling,' Remus said, not looking up from his text.

'We ought to have Tim along for a quick practice,' Sirius remarked inconsequentially.

Remus burst out laughing, and a minute later Sirius did too. James glared at them, then said 'Shove over,' and sat on Remus's bed and told them all about the song they were going to sing for the Headmaster, and Peter showed them, with great indignation, the spot where the unicorn had bitten him, and the evening ended fairly raucously.

*

As they'd feared, Professor Dogberry was totally unsympathetic toward the idea of two of his actors not being in costume: Tim pronounced himself more than happy to wear his dress robes with a Muggle nurse's cap, complete with red cross. Professor Dogberry privately thought that Juliet's Nurse wouldn't have worn anything like it, but he kept his counsel, because at least Tim was getting into the spirit of the thing.

In the end, they compromised: Sirius was to wear Muggle jeans and a shirt, and Remus was to wear his dress robes. That way, Professor Dogberry reasoned, the two female protagonists would at least be wearing some sort of skirts. Remus clenched his fists at the words 'dress robes', and his chin jutted out belligerently, until Sirius nudged him and muttered something - probably to the effect that he could borrow his, which had been hung up in a cupboard and not scrunched away in a trunk for years.

Once they had sorted out their clothes, the dress rehearsal went badly, as dress rehearsals do. For a start, Lily and Zoë were late, having been kept behind at a Chairs Monitors' meeting, with regard to the seating for Professor Dumbledore's entertainment. They burst into the classroom just as Remus and Sirius were starting the scene, and this put Remus off; especially as the girls couldn't help gawking at Sirius in jeans and the tight teeshirt he'd borrowed from Remus in exchange for the loan of the robes.

When they'd sat down, Zoë promptly scribbled a note saying, 'SB is hot!' to which Lily replied, 'Yes, for RL. Look at them.' Zoë stared openly: while they were waiting to start the scene again, Sirius had laid his hand casually on Remus's shoulder, and Remus was gazing at Sirius as if he'd never seen him before. Zoë shrugged and wrote on a fresh piece of parchment, 'What a waste', and Lily replied, 'Of whom?' Then, Professor Dogberry hushed the class and the dress rehearsal was resumed.

The second time they were interrupted by a dungbomb ignited by one of the back-row boys, who was bored with Shakespeare and wanted to read Muggle porn magazines instead. He was sent to his Head of House to discuss his detention, and when the recitation resumed, Remus forgot his lines, and Sirius stumbled over 'the inconstant moon', with an apologetic look at his friend. Tim then omitted to pipe up 'Madam!' in the background, and the attempt finally had to be abandoned.

'Never mind, I'm sure you'll do it well tomorrow,' Professor Dogberry reassured them. 'Just keep practising after school, won't you?'

*

They did practise after school, up in the dorm. Sirius told James and Peter that they needed a lot of peace to rehearse, because they'd blown the scene in class and the other two didn't want any Marauders to make fools of themselves in front of Dumbledore, did they? James and Peter acquiesced quite happily, though James asked why Tim wasn't included in the rehearsal, and Sirius had to shut him up with one of his flinty Black looks.

Once their friends were safely out of the way, Remus and Sirius continued their practical rehearsals of what Romeo and Juliet might have done to each other, both onstage and behind the scenes, if they'd been boys. 'Of course, they were boys,' Remus pointed out. 'The actors, that is.'

'I know, Moony,' Sirius said. 'That was Dogberry's point, originally. Mind out, your elbow's bloody sharp.'

They started off by going through the actions they'd rehearsed so far. Then, they kissed for a while longer, then took off their robes and fooled around a bit more, then took off the rest of their clothes, and generally had an extremely enlightening and pleasurable rehearsal.

'The undress rehearsal,' Remus said afterwards, lying on the very rumpled and messy bed. 'Does this count as sleeping together, Pads?'

'Sort of,' Sirius said. 'I think Romeo and Juliet would have gone a bit further.'

'But they were married,' Remus pointed out.

Sirius snorted. 'You're funny.'

They had another practice, because it was a lot more entertaining than checking whether or not they were word-perfect. Eventually, Remus remembered, in some distant corner of his mind, the double starred Os he and Sirius would receive if they did their scene reasonably competently, and insisted on another run-through of the text. This was interrupted many times, until the bell for dinner rang and they reluctantly got their clothes on again to go down to the Great Hall.

They were late, and Tim was waiting for them at the Gryffindor table, nearly in tears, because he couldn't remember his cue. So the three of them spent the evening declaiming in the Gryffindor common room, until even Lily and Zoë got tired of hearing them, and starting throwing parchment airplanes. Tim was excellent at deflecting missiles, so the run-through degenerated into a big parchment fight, which the boys won.

*

Dumbledore's birthday was officially a holiday for everyone involved in his entertainments. The house-elves were busy polishing the stage that had been set up in the grounds, with magical shields ready to kick in if it decided to rain.

Fortunately, it was a lovely day: the ageing wizard always did have the best of luck. The various participants, free of lessons for a whole day, wandered round the grounds proclaiming lines, producing rabbits out of hats and setting off magical fireworks.

Remus and Sirius went down to sit by the lake for a final rehearsal. They'd decided not to include the actions they'd been practising, but they went on perfecting them all the same. Hidden from view of the rest of their schoolmates, they kissed a bit and sniggered at the feverish activity going on around the school, until Tim suddenly popped up next to them. He was beaming with delight at having found his new friends, and they were forced to discuss with him once again what exactly the Nurse was doing.

'Calling Juliet to come in,' Remus explained. 'Because she's been out on the balcony talking to Romeo. And she's not allowed to talk to him, because their families are enemies.'

'Like the Blacks and the Lupins,' Sirius elaborated.

Tim looked confused. Remus ruffled his hair and said it was time to go and get something to eat, and then they could put on their costumes and finally get the whole thing over with.

The main entertainments took place after the presentation of the baby unicorn and before the Quidditch match. The Sixth Year Muggle Studies performance was on just after a wonderful Ravenclaw exhibition of Transfiguration, not the easiest act to follow.

Remus and Sirius had never set foot on a stage before in their lives. But they recited their lines so beautifully that even the Muggle Study boys were a bit impressed, and Lily nudged Zoë and mouthed 'I told you so!' They smiled at each other throughout, and spoke with feeling and sincerity.

Professor McGonagall whispered to the Headmaster, 'What wonderful actors! You'd really think they meant every word.'

Tim shone too, piping up his two words excitedly, and getting his own round of applause at the end.

Afterwards, Remus and Sirius sat and watched the rest of the entertainments, sitting very close together on the ground in front of the stage, occasionally leaning even closer to whisper to each other.

Professor Dogberry congratulated them warmly as Dumbledore's cake was cut and drinks were poured for the toast to the Headmaster. 'You've both earned your extra stars. Good boys!' He turned to Tim. 'Mr Tobias, I am raising your mark to an E, because your performance certainly exceeded all my expectations.'

Shame about the wig, really, he thought to himself, because apart from his short hair, Lupin looked quite convincing as a girl, just as he'd known he would. In fact, all in all, he felt that Black and Lupin had been perfectly cast as the star-crossed lovers.

End