Where Life Leads

Previously in Where Life Leads:

Sirius looked up at her through sweat-dampened hair, panting heavily as though he had run a great distance. His face had several long scratches on it and his clothing was covered with blood. "Lily!" his voice and eyes were desperate. "Lily, you have to come quick!"

Chapter Fifteen

"What's wrong? What's happened?" Lily fought to keep the panic out of her voice.

Sirius shook his head at her impatiently and grabbed her arm, dragging her out of the room.

"Sirius!" Lily was practically running to keep up with him. "Sirius! I can follow you without you pulling me along," she finally said, ripping her arm from his grip and digging her heels into the ground. "Tell me where we're going. What have you done to get your clothes all bloody?"

He ignored her request and, taking her arm again, continued to pull her down the corridor until they were in front of a tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. Sirius faced the empty wall across from it and pulled out his wand. He touched the wall and spoke under his breath before turning to her.

"Get out your wand," he told her.

"What? Why?" Lily asked startled. "Sirius, this is where the Room of Requirement is. What are we doing here?"

"Just get out your wand and say the password for the Map!" he demanded.

"Not until you tell me what's going on, Sirius," she repeated sternly.

He looked at her desperately and ran a hand through his hair. It was a movement that reminded Lily so much of James that her heart skipped a beat. And suddenly she knew.

"It's James, isn't it? Something's happened."

"I-we need your help, so just- please?"

Lily closed her eyes and touched her wand to the wall, whispering, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

There was a click as a door appeared and then opened. Sirius pushed her into the room, following close behind. Lily didn't even notice the door disappearing again as Sirius pushed it shut. She was too busy running over to James. "What happened to you?" she exclaimed frantically.

He was lying on a cot in the middle of the room, covered in dirt with his left leg obviously broken and bleeding profusely. There was also a patch of blood spreading on the lower sleeve of his shirt, which was slightly tattered.

"Oh, good. You came." His glasses lay askew on the bridge of his nose and he grinned at her cheekily even as he grimaced with pain. There were bandages and towels spread haphazardly on the floor around the cot and Peter was kneeling next to him, wiping the blood away and cleaning the wound as best he could.

"Ow!" James yelled and cursed when Peter pressed on his leg too hard.

"Sorry, Prongs," Peter said, giving Lily a relieved look. "Hi Lily, I'm really glad you're here. I only know how to heal cuts and stuff and Sirius here is absolutely useless."

"Hey! I went and got Lily, didn't I?"

Peter snorted. "Not until after I told-"

"Shut up!" Lily shouted.

"I was only-" Sirius tried to defend himself.

"Both of you!" Lily glared at him and then knelt down next to Peter, who glanced at her nervously. She removed James' glasses, setting them on the table that had suddenly appeared next to her. "Tell me how this happened," she demanded of them. "And why didn't you take him to Madam Pomfrey?"

"Because she- ow!" James broke off his explanation with a shout of pain. "Watch it, Peter, would you?"

"S-sorry. It's hard to see with all the blood."

"Here," she said to Peter as she used her wand to cut James' ruined trousers away from his broken leg. "You're doing fine. Now clean it while I look at his arm."

Peter nodded and went to work. Lily took James' right arm and tore the sleeve of his shirt so that she could see the wound on his forearm. "Sirius, hold a cloth to this to stop the bleeding, would you?"

Sirius knelt down beside her and pressed a cloth to the wound, ignoring James' wince of pain.

Lily turned her attention back to his leg that Peter had managed to clean up a bit.

She used another spell to get rid of the rest of the dirt and sanitize the wound. It was, luckily, a clean break and with a few flicks of her wand, Lily managed to knit the bones back together. James gave a sigh of relief as the pain dulled slightly.

Lily set Peter to wrapping his leg with some gauze to stabilize it and then checked on the wound Sirius was tending to. It was only a small flesh wound and had already begun to stop bleeding, but Lily froze as she looked at it more closely.

"James, these are teeth marks," she said slowly, raising her eyes to search his, but he wouldn't meet her gaze. "Teeth marks... It's a full moon tonight," she started rambling. "We had to gather the fluxweed for Potions, but it should have been safe for everyone or else Slughorn would have done it himself. And he can't have got past the Whomping Willow because of the branches, and I know that's where he goes because I saw Madam Pomfrey taking him down once. And if this is why you didn't go to her instead that's just stupid. Especially if he... if Remus..." she whispered his name as if saying aloud would make it true. "If he bit-"

"It wouldn't matter," James interrupted her harshly through clenched teeth.

"It- it wouldn't matter?"

"No, it wouldn't. Because, well... you see..." He looked at her pleadingly. "I wasn't exactly human at the time."

"Wh-what do you mean?" Lily stuttered, afraid that he was going to tell her that it didn't matter because he had been bitten before, and that he was a werewolf too. She dismissed the thought as soon as it had occurred to her, though and sealed the wounds on his arm with a sharp jab of her wand. "I think I would have noticed if you were a werewolf, Potter."

"I'm not a werewolf. I'm a-"

"Don't! James, don't," Sirius broke in angrily. "You can't say, we promised to never-"

"Lily's smart, Padfoot. She would've figured it out sooner or later anyway," Peter interrupted. "Not that it matters. You know James would have told her before the year was out anyway. So what if it's a bit sooner?"

Sirius turned his back to them, fisting his hands in his hair and arguing internally with himself. "Fine, fine, alright," he said turning back to face them. "Just say it, Prongs."

"I'm an Animagus."

Lily whipped her head around and stared at James, wide eyed. Of all the things she had expected him to say, this was at the bottom of the list. It was unheard of for someone to have accomplished such serious magic while still in school. "You're a- you're a what?"

"An Animagus, a, err, stag to be precise. Sirus, too, and Peter."

"And what- what are they?" Lily barely managed to get out.

"A rat," Peter answered more cheerfully than the situation warranted. "It took me ages to get it. Sirius, here, was the first. He managed to become a huge black dog with hardly any trouble."

Lily blinked, trying to sort through all the thoughts that were circling around in her head. "Right.... right..." She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. "Prongs... I guess that explains the nicknames."

"Er, yeah," James agreed.

Lily nodded resolutely and then turned her attention to James' leg. With Peter's help the blood had been cleaned away, allowing her to fix the break with just a few spells.

"You shouldn't walk around right away," she told James. "For one, it takes time for the bone to completely knit back together. And for another, Madame Pomfrey would kill me."

That got a small smile from James. "So," he said hesitantly, "you're not angry?"

"I'm reserving my right to be angry until after I've heard explanations for everything."

James sighed. "It's a long story."

"I think Slughorn will forgive us if we're late for class tomorrow morning."

"But the potion-"

Lily glared. "We can always make up the work during a free period," she said and James gave in.

He looked to Sirius and Peter. "Help me back to the Heads' Room, will you? We may as well be comfortable."

The journey to the Heads' Room was longer than usual, with James leaning on his friends for support, trying to keep the weight off of his leg. Not to mention there was an obvious tension between all of them. The fact that Lily would finally be getting all the answers and the resigned glances Sirius kept shooting at James didn't help matters.

Lily walked ahead once they neared the room in order to whisper the password out of Sirius' and Peter's hearing.

They led James inside and helped him over to the sofa, where he lay down and propped his newly healed leg up on a pillow. His friends left the room, for once not making a snarky comment about leaving the two of them alone. The serious look on James' face must have made them realize how delicate the situation was. The upcoming conversations could either make or break Lily and James' friendship.

The two sat in silence for several minutes; the only sound was the clock as it slowly ticked its way towards midnight.

"It was my idea," James spoke suddenly. "To become Animagi so that we could help Remus during the full moon."

His hands twisted together restlessly and Lily could tell that he wanted nothing more than to get up and pace. She stood up from her chair and sat down next to James, taking one of his hands in hers and playing gently with his fingers. "Go on," she told him calmly.

"It took us forever, you know." He let out an amused laugh. "To figure out how to make the transformation. We would sneak into the Library after hours under my cloak and read anything about becoming an Animagus we could find. Figuring out the theory was easy and it didn't take us too long to make the transformation. We knew we couldn't just wander around and not expect anyone to notice. So once we knew what animals we were, we researched their behavior in order to blend in more easily. But our library is seriously lacking on books about ordinary animals. We had to buy them from Muggle catalogues and have them delivered to Peter's house."

James paused and gave Lily a searching look. "You have to understand... we had devoted so much time into researching that we didn't know what to do with ourselves once we were finished. And... well, you remember how we acted in fifth year. It seemed like a brilliant idea – going out into the forest on full moons. No one was stupid enough to go in there, except for us, and in our animal forms we had the whole forest to ourselves. None of the other creatures would bother a werewolf and Sirius and I were large enough to control him if we had to. And I know it was a stupid thing to do, but sometimes we ventured as far as Hogsmeade or into the secret passages of the school."

Lily stared at him incredulously and stood up to face him. "You're telling me that you went outside on a full moon with a werewolf in tow? That you thought it would be a bit of a lark to run around Hogsmeade and in the castle when there were people sleeping in their beds not ten feet away? You took that risk that Re-"

"No, it wasn't lik-"

"That Remus might somehow get away from you!" she continued as though he hadn't said anything, getting louder with each sentence until she was shouting. "Never mind that he didn't. Never mind that you and Sirius were large enough to stop him if he tried. Never mind that he didn't even get close!"

Lily breathed heavily, fighting to hold back tears of anger. James stared at her for a moment, his mouth open with shock. He moved as though he were going to stand up, but stopped with a grimace at his leg.

Taking a deep breath, she turned and looked him straight in the eye. "I thought that the four of you had more common sense than that. That after all Professor Dumbledore had gone through in order for Remus to be allowed to attend this school that you go and jeopardize it. Did you ever stop to think what might have happened if someone had got hurt? If someone had found out what you, Peter and Sirius were doing?" she paused and a smile loaded with irony crossed her face.

"We haven't gone wandering since before Christmas last year," he told her fiercely. "We got a bit of a nasty shock and it put things in perspective for us. It stopped being a game to see how far we could go and we were reminded of our original purpose for becoming Animagi. To keep Remus company during the full moon so that he wouldn't be so alone. We grew up a bit and well, came to our senses."

"You know," Lily said now that most of her anger had dissipated, "I always wondered what it was that Sirius had done to earn himself so much detention and to get himself kicked off of the Quidditch team. Come to think of it, there was a good long while last year when none of you, Remus especially, were speaking to him at all. And why he and Snape seem to have a particular vendetta against one another."

"Last year Sirius did something..." James sighed and ran his hands though his hair. "I still can't believe he could have been so stupid!" He looked desperately at her. "Part of me will never forgive him for it, but he's my best friend. And I know he'll never do something like that again. Not for anything – he'd die first, rather than betray his friends."

"James, what did he do? I remember that all of you didn't speak to him for more than a month last year. And then suddenly everything went back to normal."

James met her gaze seriously. "He let Snape overhear him talking to Peter about how to get past the Whomping Willow." His lip curled up in disgust. "Snape's been trying to figure out about Remus for years and Sirius practically gave him the key to the vault."

Lily's mind was whirling. That Sirius had done that didn't surprise her all that much. He had it in for Snape and no one could be surprised that he wished him dead. But to risk getting Remus involved in it...

"Tell me Snape didn't," she whispered pleadingly.

"I can't, Lily. And if Peter hadn't told me what had happened I never would have got there in time to pull Snape back. It was too late to keep him from seeing Remus, but he didn't get bitten, at least."

"And that was Sirius' plan." Lily said, putting it all together. "He figured that if Snape was so curious about Remus, that he could join him."

"Exactly. But he didn't even think for a minute about what would have happened to Remus for biting someone – even someone as foul as Snape. It would have been expulsion from school and a one-way ticket to Azkaban."

"Sirius deserved his punishment. Frankly, I'm surprised it wasn't worse."

"That's Dumbledore's doing. Snape wanted him expelled, but since no one was hurt he was able to stay. But we didn't let him accompany us at the full moon for a long while. And we haven't left the Shack since. But tonight, it was so windy and Remus has been getting restless being cooped up. I don't know what caused it, and any other time we might have taken him into the forest, but we couldn't tonight – not with you out there."

"And you broke your leg when Remus tried to get past you."

"Yeah."

Lily let out a frustrated sigh. "You are all such idiots!"

"I know we were!" James said with feeling "But we haven't done anything that stupid for a long time! And tonight couldn't have been helped. It was just a cruel-"

"Accident," Lily finished for him.

James sighed. "Yeah."

"I want to be angry at you. Merlin knows I do. But tonight wasn't anyone's fault and what happened last year.... Well, we weren't then what we are now so it just wouldn't be fair."

"And what's that?" he asked her quietly. "What are we?"

"I don't know."

James moved over on the sofa to make room for Lily to lie down next to him. "Just something?"

"Yes." Lily smiled up at him and rested her head against his chest. "That sounds about right."

"So I can still come be a Muggle with you over the holiday?"

Lily laughed. "I've already agreed, haven't I? Besides, how could I possibly say no if there's school work involved."

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

They actually managed to make it to Potions the next morning, although they missed breakfast. James' leg had healed with no outwardly sign of what had happened. There was an unspoken agreement not to speak of the previous night, but a bond had formed between the four of them that would not be easily broken.

At lunchtime Professor McGonagall came around to take down the names of those who were spending the Christmas holiday at Hogwarts. None of them signed the parchment and when Lily's roommates joined them, talk quickly turned to making plans to meet up over the holiday.

After eating, they all went to the common room and spent the rest of the afternoon completing their homework. James and Janice went to Quidditch practice after dinner, with Sirius going along to watch and, most likely, shout insults from the stands.

Lily and the others opted not to join them. Instead they stayed in the common room in front of the warm fire playing Exploding Snap, chess and reading.

Remus returned from the Hospital Wing just after Quidditch practice had ended and James, Peter and Sirius took him aside to quickly fill him in on the events of the previous night. Lily watched as his face paled and he turned to James with a stricken look on his face. James laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder and shortly after, they rejoined the girls.

Just before ten, Lily packed up her school bag. "James, we have to patrol soon."

James looked up from the game of cards he was playing with Sirius. "Already?"

"Yes," Lily answered with a laugh.

He stood up reluctantly. "Alright, just let me take my bag upstairs."

Lily nodded and did the same with hers, pausing to grab her cloak from its hook. The corridors were always cold this time of night, especially in the winter.

They didn't see anyone during their rounds, save for Professor Flitwick who called them into his office for a moment so that he could give them each a small box of pepper imps. Lily and James happily spent the rest of their patrol competing to see who could breathe fire the longest.

They were heading back to Gryffindor Tower when Mrs. Norris crossed their path. The cat paused to hiss menacingly at them, her tail twitching back and forth.

"Scram you," James told it. "We're Head Boy and Girl. We're allowed to be here. Why does she always bother us?" James asked turning to Lily. "Come on, Filch won't be far behind."

He started walking again but turned when he realized Lily wasn't following him. "Lily?"

She was staring at Mrs. Norris with an indescribable look on her face. "Hmm?"

"Are you coming?"

Lily looked at him with wide eyes. "No, I don't think so. James..."

"Yeah?

"I kind of feel like breaking the rules."

James laughed. "Well, far be it from me to stop you."

"Oh, nothing terrible. It's just that Mrs. Norris reminded me of something. Remember that room you're missing on your map?"

"I'll have you know we've scored the fourth floor and couldn't find a thing. Remus overturned every book in the library and there was nothing!"

Lily grinned at him. "Yes, well, I'd have been a bit disturbed if you were able to. The door to the room is charmed similarly to how the staircases to the girls' dorms are. Guys can't access it."

"You tricked me!"

"Not at all," Lily responded laughing. "Besides, if I show you now it's still earlier than it would have been."

"Very well." James bowed to her and said formally, "Lead the way, madam."

They left Mrs. Norris behind and took the quickest route to the forth floor. The doors to the Library swung open quietly and they were relieved to see that no one was around. Not even Madame Pince, who oftentimes stayed there late sorting through books.

Lily led James to the farthest corner of the Library where there was a stone wall that was empty except for two wall sconces. She trailed her hand lightly across the wall and a door suddenly appeared before them.

"I've never seen that door before!" James exclaimed. "How'd you do it?"

"I told you it was like the girls' stairs. It won't appear for blokes." She grinned at him and opened the door. "Only us."

The room was small and surprisingly not dusty at all. There were several tall shelves filled with brightly colored books with spines featuring puckered lips, shiny hair and an assortment of other girly things that James didn't recognize. The stone walls were decorated with an assortment of pictures of what looked like students and one wall featured a large painting of a landscape.

"What are all these books?"

"Beauty charms, tips for soothing menstrual cramps, books about pregnancy – you know, girly stuff," Lily answered him with a faint blush on her cheeks.

James guffawed and when Lily shot him a look he held up his hands apologetically. "Why keep them hidden then if they're so useful?"

"It's not hidden exactly. I suppose someone just didn't want the younger boys to be able to get to them. I mean, some of them are kind of embarrassing. Besides, Madam Pince knows where this room is and if a girl asks about one of these books she shows her where they're at."

"So is this it? Or is there more?" he asked, pulling out the Marauder's Map.

"I was hoping you'd ask that," Lily answered. "And this I'm certain Madam Pince knows nothing about."

She walked over to the tallest shelf and stood on her tiptoes to reach for a book on the top shelf. She wiggled the book from side to side six times and the painting of the landscape swung open to reveal a short, dimly lit passage with a heavy wood door at the end. They walked into the passage and the painting shut behind them.

"The painting-"

"You push on it to leave," Lily answered his unfinished question. She opened the door at the end of the passage and ducked slightly to enter. Despite the low doorway the room itself was fairly large and airy. There were two windows overlooking the grounds that would let in bright light during the day. Now though, there were several lamps that turned on when they entered. The room was strewn with comfortable furniture and there were also several poufs on the floor in front of a low table. James took the map from Lily and opened it on the table after sitting on a pouf.

"What was that book called- the one that you wiggled? And you have to wiggle it, right? You can't just pull it off the shelf."

"No, you have to wiggle it, otherwise the wall won't open."

"What's it called?" James asked again.

"Do you have to know? Can't you just say the second book from the left on the top shelf?"

"Too complicated. Besides, if the book gets moved someone trying to get into this place will be awfully frustrated."

Lily sighed and mumbled something.

James cocked his head. "Sorry, didn't catch that."

"I said," Lily spoke through gritted teeth, "its titled Smart Witches know their Contraceptives."

James raised an eyebrow at her. "Should I even ask why you were looking at that book?"

"Linda was curious," she said defensively.

James chuckled and set about adding the hidden room to the map.