Oddballs

by Kat Maximoff

Summary: The two boys were both odd - their lives were nothing short of strange, fun, exciting, and different. However, they found each other, and that was enough. A short coming of age story as two boys find each other and more in their enchanting magical lives.

Disclaimer: Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.

Remus Lupin knew he was stranger than most fourteen year old boys. He had been born strange, really, but it wasn't until he was eight that he was set apart from all but a select few on the entire planet. Remus Lupin was born a wizard, a half-blood to be exact, and, at the age of precicely nine years old, seven months, one week and five days, he became a werewolf. Remus didn't remember much about the bite - only a lot of pain, then blackness. He had awoken in St. Mungo's Hospital the next day, and had been bustled out by his mother, Fiona Lupin. She had developed something odd about her since the attack - it wasn't a disorder, at least not one known by most doctors, but it was an obsessive control over her small boy. She wouldn't let him do anything after that; he wasn't allowed to ride a bike or play football, and the Muggle was dead set against her son learning all sorts of "dangerous magic." She had known for quite some time that her husband, Charles, was a wizard, but she had refused to allow him to practice his magic around their son. The summer that Remus turned fifteen, he recieved a letter in the mail that confirmed his mother's worst fears and thoroughly excited his father. He was accepted into the finest wizarding school in the country. Charles, a strong willed but quiet wizard, put his foot down, and Fiona gave in.

Remus had been elated to be able to do something normally - he could never go to summer camp or on school trips, in case something happened with his lycanthropy. Yet the Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore - the greatest wizard Remus had ever met - decided that the young Mr. Lupin was going to have a normal wizarding education. When Remus arrived at Hogwarts, he found that several new regulations had been placed, and a special tree had been erected to provide a hiding spot for the young werewolf during the full moon. Remus was going to have as normal of a life as possible, if it was up to Albus Dumbledore.

Still, there was nothing the man could do to change the boy's personality. He just didn't fit in. Years of being kept from doing normal childhood activities had rendered the boy socially incapable, and he immersed himself in books and classes to keep his mind off his lack of friends. Remus didn't want to get to know anyone - he knew that as soon as he was close to them, they would start to wonder where he got to every month. Questions would lead to accusations, which would lead to fights, and the fights would subsequently lead to disaster - a loss of the friendship, the entire school finding out about his problem, other things even more horrible than that flooded Remus's mind daily. He recalled Anna, the lovely young girl who he had played with when he was at school in his younger years. She was a sweet little thing, with a passion for calligraphy and a sweet temprament - she freed the littlest moth that had its wing caught on a rock, and she never swatted flies, even when the buzzed about her head and annoyed her during lessons. She had accepted Remus for who he was, but his mother - his horrid, overprotective mother - had made sure that she never came back to see him after he had broken a finger playing with her one day. Remus had been transfered to another school, and he had never heard from Anna again.

His first real friend was Lily Evans. She was quiet as well, but she was kind and therefore made friends easily. She frequented the library, sometimes alone, sometimes with a chattering girlfriend. Remus had avoided her. He avoided everyone, actually, in the library, and prefered to keep to himself and study. He was always studying, and people had stopped trying to get him to talk to them much. He'd say a few words, but it wasn't really in his nature to be so sociable all the time. Until Lily came in. She didn't just give up on him like most of the people who tried to make him speak. She sat next to him and chattered to him about her life, confessing everything to him . There was no risk, really - he didn't tell anyone anything. He wouldn't have anyway - he wasn't the kind of person who gossipped. Eventually, however, the studious boy began to tell Lily about himself. He came out of his shell.

It was a slow process, the emergence of Remus's other side, but Lily made it easy for him. He found himself forgetting about his mother. For the first month or so, it was as if she was going to jump out and end any friendship that he had. But he came to grips with the fact that she wasn't going to end every relationship that Remus had. It was then that he introduced himself to James Potter and Remus Lupin, two of the other boys in his year in Gryffindor..

Sirius and James had been fast friends. The two boys were so alike, it was hard for them not to be. Athletic, attractive, brilliant, and utterly unconcerned with rules, the two of them practically ruled the year. Remus didn't know why they were the two he approached. It seemed to him a logical choice at the time. It was Sirius that really drove him to get to know them. Sirius was an open, albeit rather obnoxious, boy, who seemed to find amusement in everything. Remus didn't know why he - a self-proclaimed social outcast - was accepted into their small group, but he had an idea that his involved Lily and James' undying crush on the girl. Remus had soon found the best friends of his life.

James and Sirius were both great, as was little Peter who they all hung out with for pity's sake, but Sirius was Remus's favorite. He was the only other "Marauder" (As the boys had dubbed themselves) who's past was less than satisfying. Sirius had grown up a pureblood in an evil household. The name of Black never sat well with most wizards - it was an evil house. Sirius hated his family, and could hardly stand living there. He would, he confided in his friends, move out someday and live on his own. Remus and Sirius grew close quickly. Sirius was close to James as well, but he couldn't really talk to the boy about his past. James simply couldn't relate. He had grown up in a mansion outside Whiltshire, and had everything his heart desired from the day he was born.

So it was - the four Marauders. Remus grew close to these boys, closer than he had ever been to Anna or Lily, his father or any other person in his life. It grew so that they spent every hour together - all those except for the ones spent in the Shrieking Shack by Remus. Exactly what Remus had feared began to happen. The others began to question why he was sick around the same time every month, and why he began to look peaky and pale in the days approaching his "sick day," as they dubbed it. It was Sirius who had finally figured it out. He had approached Remus one day while the werewolf and James were studying in the common room. "I figured out why you're sick every month." He stated, grinning and holding up a rather worn looking book. "You're sick around the full moon. You're a werewolf." Sirius said triumphantly, looking nothing short of dead proud.

"Shuttup!" Remus hissed, pulling Sirius down to his knees. "Don't be so loud."

"So it's true then?" James asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

"Yes, it's true." Remus said, looking rather angry.

"Don't be mad, mate, we're here to help." Sirius put in.

"Yeah, we don't think any less of you," James added.

Remus glared. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yes." Sirius stated firmly, leaving no room for dispute. Remus sighed and gave in, his tense face relaxing. "And we're going to help you." The boy added, smiling. "I know it must get boring. But I've read ahead in our Transie book and I think we might be able to become Animagi."

James nearly spat out his tea when Sirius boldly stated this option. "Yeah, right, mate. There's no way. It's dead impossible, that. We'd never do it."

"Courage, lads, that's what they say." Sirius said, pretending to point a sword at the celing. "We'll do it, and young Remus here will no longer be alone and unafraid on those cold, full-mooned nights."

"But why do we have to be Animagi to do that?" Peter piped up? He had been sitting on his own, playing chess against an invisible opponant who seemed to be beating him.

"Are you daft? Remus would kill us. They can't help it. It's instinct. He can't control himself." James told Peter, shaking his head at the smaller boy.

"You guys, you don't have to do this." Remus stated in his refined British accent.

"Yes, we do." Sirius said firmly, and smiled. "Where do you go? They can't have you roaming about the grounds, can they?"

"No. I go to the Shrieking Shack - at least that's what I think they call it." Remus paused. "I get in through the Whomping Willow."

"I wondered why they planted that great beast." James interjected. "I heard some fifth-years talking about possible reasons why they did it."

Remus offered a smile, his otherwise serious face lighting up. "Yep, it's all me." He said, trying to poke even a bit of fun at his horrid ailment. "All me." He repeated.

"OK, young masters. We best be getting to bed, we'll need all the energy we can to make this little experiment happen." Sirius said, impersonating a pirate. He stood and led the procession of boys up the dormitory stairs, earning small looks from the people placed about the common room.

"Night." Sirius said, as they lay in their four poster beds.

"Night, you daft fool. See you in the morning." Remus replied, rolling over to sleep. It was great to have friends - and his mother couldn't take them away from him. Even his lycanthropy couldn't. That was the mark of a true friend. Finally.

When they reached the age of fourteen, and came back to school for their fourth year, the boys still hadn't been able to transform into animals. They were top in their class in Transfiguration - even little Peter, who was normally in the bottom third of the year. This earned them more than a few strange looks from McGonnagal - she hadn't expected the boys who goofed off so much during her lessons to all four get top exam marks. Still, there were no suspicions that four fourth year boys were going to become Animagi right under Dumbledore's long and crooked nose, and their plans continued.

Sirius was starting to get more and more concerned about his family's life as the Dark Lord Voldemort continued his uprising. Everyone knew about Voldemort - every once and a while, there would be something in the Prophet about him. Remus wasn't scared, however. Most of the Hogwarts students weren't. Everyone knew that Lord Voldemort had gone to school at Hogwarts - however, they didn't know his real name, and his personna remained confidential. Sirius, however, had different things to worry about. He had gotten news the other day that his cousin, Bellatrix, had joined up with Voldemort. She and her fiancée both had worked their way into his innermost rings of power. Narcissa, too, Sirius' other cousin, was married to a Malfoy - dispicable creatures even without a master, but the whole lot of them had joined Voldemort - and was almost as evil as Bellatrix. The one that struck Sirius hardest, however, was his brother Regulus, to whom Sirius owed the loss of a happy childhood. Regulus and Sirius's mother had taken that away from him. Sirius was afraid, however, that something would happen. They wanted revenge, certainly - Bellatrix most of all. She had hated him, not because he was such a kind person, although that played into it, but because she had once trusted him. Sirius knew her very deepest desires and hopes, and he knew that she didn't want anyone around who knew that. Sirius found himself confiding more and more in Remus - his feelings of the lost friendship with his cousins, his horrible past, and his family were too much to just keep inside. The pair of them grew closer and closer - the self-proclaimed oddball, and the boy with the horrible past, all hidden away from everyone save for his closest friends.

Remus was starting to feel different than he ever had. The impending Halloween Ball was sending more than a few shivers down his spine, and it seemed like a thousand cornish pixies were rummaging around through his stomach everytime one of his friends brought the dance up. Still, he was trying his best to ignore the feelings. He didn't want to ask a girl, that was just how he felt. He didn't join in with the desire to have every girl in the school lusting after him, unlike his three best friends. Sirius didn't have to worry about that much - as screwed up as his family life was, he was attractive and funny, and any girl in the school would have been with him in a moment. James was Gryffindor's star Chaser, and the girls would just as soon line up to dance with him than they would with Sirius. It wasn't that Remus was bad looking, or that his personality was awful. He just didn't want to go to the dance with a girl, and that was that.

The days seemed to grow longer as the dance approached, and Remus found himself avoiding any people who might ask him which girl he was taking - these people included his best friends James and Peter, as well as, horribly for Remus, Sirius. Sirius had an odd way of dating - he never stayed with one girl for more than a week, two if she was really fun or attractive. It was as if he dated for show or for his own amusement, rather then because he liked the girls he was with. It puzzled Remus, and he didn't like it too much. He supposed that it was just another of Sirius's ways of coping. He had plenty, and was a very happy person most of the time. It was just that pasts are so hard to forget, and Sirius often dreamed about his. He wasn't an angsty, boring person who didn't do anything except for think about his past. No, he did everything he could to forget it, save for studying. It was his way to alleviate his memories. Everyone has bad memories - Sirius's ways of coping with them hid this from the rest of the world.

Remus found himself spending more and more time in the library, pondering himself. He didn't know why he felt this way - he certainly didn't need anything else to be strange about him. A wizard werewolf was odd enough - but one who wasn't even capable of having a crush on a girl? That was unheard of. It was during one of his midnight thinking sessions under James' invisibility cloak that Sirius found him.

"Budge over." Sirius's voice came loudly and clearly to Remus, who reluctantly made room.

"How'd you find me here?" He asked, perplexed.

"I guessed you were in the library, and then the book floating in midair clued me in the rest of the way." Sirius smiled, rather sadly, as he looked at his friend.

"Why?" Remus asked, his eyebrows knitting together.

"Because I thought you needed a friend. And I am your friend. Always have been, Remus. We don't care if you're different. We already know about your disease and your past. You don't need to hide here. What have you been doing, anyway?" Sirius asked.

"Thinking."

"About what?" The boy persisted.

"About... you." Remus replied.

"Why?"

"Because..." Remus trailed off, staring down at his palms. Sirius was close to him, too close in the darkness of the cloak. "Because I don't want to ask a girl to the dance."

"I don't understand." Sirius replied. However, Remus's cryptic answer, that didn't really seem to pertain to the question, clued him into something else that might be going on inside the boy.

"I think I like you... a lot. More than boys are supposed to like other boys." Remus hid his face in shame from the other boy, stammering as he forced the words out.

"Don't be silly, Remu. There's no supposed to in this world. Do you think you love me?" His voice was soft and smooth, and Remus was surprised to find himself nodding. He hadn't meant to tell anyone, particuarily Sirius, what he thought he was feeling.

"God damn it." He swore softly, his eyes pooling tears. It was true, though. He and Sirius had spent so much time together, Remus couldn't help but fall in love with him. He had never liked girls, more than as just friends, and had found his attraction to Sirius stronger than any he had ever felt. He was in love with the boy. He was fucking in love with his best friend.

"Remu..." Sirius trailed off. "I..." He bit his nail hard, nearly drawing blood. "I think that I love you too." It wasn't exactly the truth - Sirius wasn't sure if it was really love, yet, but he was sure that he really like the boy. More than just a friendship. Sirius had never been comfortable with the girls he had dated, and had never found himself feeling like they were more than friends to him.

"Don't say that just to be nice." Remus warned, his eyes dark.

"I'm not." Sirius replied, smiling slightly. "I promise you."

"Good." Remus said, and that was that.