"Hi, I'm Remus Lupin, and, well, I'm a werewolf."
"Hello, Remus," intoned the thirty-odd werewolves sitting in a circle in
the far-too-small room.
It was a bright July day, perfect for the sunbathing, gardening, water-
skiing, and Quidditch, and Remus Lupin, Defense Against the Dark Arts
teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy, crucial member of the
Order of the Phoenix, and Marauder extraordinaire, was sitting in the
middle of a WereWolves Anonymous meeting.
I'm going to kill Sirius when I get back, he thought calmly to himself, a
mirthless smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. There's absolutely no
stopping me.
The window was open, the breeze wafted in, and despite this, the room
stayed suffocatingly hot and smelly. Deoderant was a fad that had never
caught on among a lot of werewolves.
Paying no attention to the werewolves around him "taking the first step by
admitting their problem," Lupin lazily dreamed up several quite descriptive
and quite painful ways for him to end Sirius's lease on life when he
returned later that day to Number 12, Grimmauld Place. .I wonder if sex-
change surgery without anesthetic hurts.Can people die from too many
papercuts?. Ooh, papercuts *during* the sex change.
He was happily concocting Murder Number Fourteen - involving toothpicks,
leg wax, and Severus "Snivellus" Snape, when he noticed everyone in the
room was silent and looking at him. He had been dwelling on the finer
points of, and had actually rather lost himself in, his latest homicidal
fantasy, having had to pause to consider whether Sirius had acted heinously
enough to deserve Snape as a part of his demise. One glance at the
massive, pink-and-yellow-clad werewolf named "Friedeline" sitting to his
right, and Lupin knew the answer to this was an unequivocal "YES."
So it was with a bit of a mild surprise that Lupin was shaken out of his
musings by the increasingly oppressive silence and impatient stares.
"Errr.hi?" he offered, wondering if maybe he had dreamed his earlier
introduction. Maybe he had fallen asleep, and dreamed he had said hi
already -
"We've *already* introduced ourselves," said a gaunt, middle-aged woman
with spectacles, managing somewhat amazingly, Lupin thought, to
simultaneously look down at him through her glasses and keep her nose so
spectacularly high in the air he was sure it would turn blue for lack of
oxygen in a moment.
"Oh."
The room sat silent, still staring.
"Er, I guess you want to know how I feel about being a werewolf, then."
One or two werewolves stirred. Remus took this as a sign to continue.
"It's, well, it's a periodic thing, I guess you already know that though.."
I wonder if I can successfully hide both a dungbomb and a scorpion in
Sirius's jockstrap. "It's fuzzy and I shed quite a lot - guess it's all
that tearing around.I always end up in a pool of my own fur when I come to
later on." .maybe an invisibility charm for the cup's occupants, then a
nice sticking charm for effect. "I don't know if this is a common thing
among you peop- us, I mean us. It, um, seems I'm allergic to my own fur!
Haha! Heh.ahem." .and I'll have to be sure to take lots of pictures.and
accidentally send them into the Quibbler. "And, yeah. That's about it."
He sat down, twiddled with a hole in his pants leg for a few moments, then
looked up to find his fellow werewolves giving him looks of mingled
disbelief, confusion, and disdain. Musta said the wrong thing, he thought.
Wonder if it was the shedding bit. Maybe they're touchy about stuff like
that.
"Mister.Lupin, correct?" said a raspy voice near the window. It was Margot
(pronounced 'mar-jott,' she had informed them earlier - she had altered the
pronunciation herself, to make it "less dumb and stupid-like"), their group
leader. The size of her body rivaled only by the power of her ugliness,
Lupin thought. Chuckling inwardly, he made a note to himself to write that
one down when he got out of this hellhole - he thought Sirius might like
it. This got him back to thinking about how Sirius had tricked him into
attending this meeting in the first place, telling him it was a surprise
prank on Snape, when it was in fact a prank on none other than little ol'
Remus J. Lupin. Soon-to-be-murderer of Sirius Black, he thought darkly.
Remus sighed, checked his pockets for anything with which he might kill
himself or Margot, contemplated the possibilities afforded by the pencil in
his pocket (yes, the pencil, you pervs), decided that it was much too short
to to reach any of Margot's vital organs through that heaving bosom and
besides he wasn't going to touch her for anything short of a reserved spot
on the Expressway to Heaven, First Class, and answered, "Yes, it is."
"Well, Mr. Lupin, while we were no doubt.tickled by your response to our
question," - something in Remus wanted to shrivel up and die at the way she
said "tickled" - "that was perhaps the least informative answer we could
have ever hoped for." She tittered a little at what God only knew what
(Remus sure didn't), and proceeded.
"You see," she continued, "We were simply wondering what career you are in,
as you seem familiar to all of us here. We thought you might be a
celebrity," she said, with the air of one who, by voicing her own thoughts,
establishes them as the irrevocable truth. Several of the werewolves
around the circle nodded excitedly at this, obviously delighted that the
amazing Margot had deigned to temporarily grace their lives with her
presence.
Lupin willed himself to keep his apathetic look plastered on his handsome,
if lined, features, and said perfectly evenly, "Nope, sorry. 'Fraid you've
got the wrong guy."
"Oh," faltered Margot. "Well, are you sure?"
No, I'm not sure. Please help me discover my true personality, it's been
missing for so long, I miss it and I want *you*, oh Mar-jott the Wise, to
help me find it. While we're at it, will you marry me and bear my fragile
little werewolf children? We'll name them Inkle, Fudgewop, Spinkie, and
Steve. "Yep, pretty sure."
"Oh" again. Remus was sure that this time, however, "oh" meant something
remarkably close to "damn it," and smiled in spite of himself. Making
Margot mad was fun. He finally understood just how much Harry must have
loved tormenting the Durselys. Maybe if she gets mad enough, she'll
explode, Lupin mused. On second thought, these are my nice shoes.I need to
save them to shove one down Sirius's throat and the other up his -
"Aspirations," declared Margot. "Every werewolf has got to have
aspirations. Without them, what are we but monthly monsters, creepy
creatures of the nocturnal night who prey on people in their innocuous
innocence." She had apparently moved on with the meeting while Remus once
again sat dreaming of a certain black-haired, olive-skinned man's death,
happily ignoring the nauseating literary devices Margot was using to
distract her fellow werewolves from the fact that she was, indeed, not
telling them anything at all.
Light brown hair falling in his eyes, Remus leaned back against the wall,
willing the meeting to be over so he could hurry up and kill his best
friend. He had only stayed in the room for perhaps a minute after first
sneaking in, thinking that these people were in on the huge joke with Snape
as its butt, the one that would outstrip even the Marauders' pranks in
their prime. Those sixty seconds he had lingered in the room had been
about fifty-eight too many for him to escape from the meeting afterwards,
however. First verbally, then physically they had restrained him from
leaving, thinking that it was just his nerves that were revolting against
his staying and not his whole metaphysical being that was on the verge of
puking itself inside out.
How pathetic can people - sorry, werewolves - get? he wondered, tuning back
in temporarily to study the people sitting around him. No wonder we can't
find work; one day a month we're contagious evil and for the other twenty-
nine.he looked to his right, where Friedeline was crying to Margot about
how her family locked her up every month and wouldn't come visit her while
she was a werewolf. On his left, a skinny, balding man was complaining to
a haggard-looking werewolf who seemed more ancient than the earth itself
about how he had been unfairly fired for mauling his boss's family at a
dinner party "purposely set on the full moon! The
set me up!!" For perhaps the twelth time that minute, Remus cursed life
for tossing him in with such a - what was the word? Ah yes. Such a
detestable crowd.
Then, without prelude, preamble, or any sort of warning, Heaven sent an
angel. The Angel of Death, to be specific: not there to give death, but to
receive it. The door to the stuffy little room was wrenched open, and
there stood -
"Die, Black!!"
Remus launched himself onto his best friend, propelling both of them out of
the doorway onto the cool stone floor of the hallway beyond. Just in reach
of the door, Sirius acidentally managed to kick it shut as Lupin proceeded
to punch every bit of the ex-convict that he could get to. So much for the
well-thought-out revenge.
Being the stronger, not to mention bigger, man, Sirius easily restrained
his friend's flying fists of "cartilege-breaking power!" as he often called
them, and gave Lupin a look that clearly said, "I win. Nyah nyah."
Lupin blinked, narrowed his eyes, then decided to be bold, and probably not
a little stupid. He leaned forward and kissed Sirius square on the lips.
Taken aback, Sirius left go of Lupin's hands, and tried to pull away.
Remus, however, thoroughly enjoying making Sirius this uncomfortable if not
exactly enjoying the fact that he was kissing his best friend, decided to
end the moment as decisively as he had begun it.
He kneed Sirius hard in the crotch.
That probably wasn't as satisfying as the scorpion in the jockstrap thing
would have been, but damn it's a pretty good substitute, Remus thought as
he stood up and watched his friend squirming in the floor.
It was at that moment that the door banged open, and Margot's massive
silhouette could be seen practically blocking all light from the room
beyond.
"NEVER - INTERRUPT - A - MEETING - OF - WEREWOLVES -ANONYMOUS - WHERE - I -
AM - THE - GROUP - LEADER!!" She bellowed, punctuating her words with
strategically aimed kicks at Sirius, who looked on the verge on tears
(whether from pain at Margot's kicks or laughter at Margot's shrub-themed
outfit, Remus couldn't tell). Remus decided that enough was enough, as
much as he wanted Sirius to pay for making him sit in that horrible
meeting, the thought of any more Margot in his life made him sick. He
dragged Sirius by his scraggly hair - Padfoot's getting a bath when this is
all over, he thought wryly, this rivals Snape for ickiness - and hauled him
away from the angry shrub-woman in the doorway, still yelling threats at
Sirius. As they reached the end of the hall, they heard Margot give a
final heartfelt "And you suck at life!" SLAM.
Both too stunned by this final outburst to speak, they were still for a
moment. Then Sirius, grinning madly, turned over and looked up at Remus,
who was just staring at the closed door.
"So Moony." he ventured, still grinning like a fool. "I hear you've taken
to attending WereWolves Anonymous meetings."
Remus composed himself, looked calmly down at his handsome friend, lying
happily on the floor like it was his own bed, and said, "Padfoot, I am
going to give you a ten-second headstart. Start running like hell, because
when - oh yes, when - I catch up to you, you're going to wish you'd never
been born."
A light flashed in Sirius's eyes that Remus was sure only he and James had
ever seen, and in the next instant, a large black dog was tearing down the
hall and out of sight around a corner.
"NO NO NO, you can't change, how can I chase you when you have four legs
and I've only got two.." he panted as he turned to race after the furry
streak that was Sirius Black. Still, he couldn't resist smiling as he
thought of the day's fiasco, and of the Marauders; this would have been
just the kind of thing they'd have reveled in. "Bloody animals." he
grinned to himself as he chased the big black dog out into the empty, sun-
filled street.
Fine.
Fine.