Animagi

by Maenad1

An exercise in negotiating with werewolves, in both forms.

"I don't think this is a good idea."

It was perhaps the tenth time that day that that particular sentiment had been aired. The trouble with Remus' affliction was that he was always at his best immediately before he was about to be at his worst again, and Remus at his best had an irritating habit of exhibiting common sense, and of trying to impose it on his friends. All in all, it was a good thing that they had initially put the proposition to him when he was semiconscious.

"We'll be fine," James said carelessly. He was doing his homework; or rather, James' quill was doing his homework, James himself was sprawled on his stomach, doing his level best to curse a piece of paper for reasons best known to himself and Sirius, and best not enquired into by anybody who didn't want to be drawn into a plot guaranteed to earn him a week of detention. "Nobody's got stuck halfway between for months- hey, d'you remember the first time we tried it, and Peter's arm turned into a giant slug?"

"It wasn't a slug!" Peter said defensively. "It was a tail. Just in the wrong place."

"Yeah, I know that now, but we thought it was a slug, and we had to tell Madam Pomfrey he stuck his arm into a cauldron of botched swelling solution."

"What d'you mean we had to?-- No, what good is it if it signs our names on it? Then he'll know we sent it--" Sirius swiped at the paper with his wand with such vehemence that it sparked and one of the edges caught fire. "That was your idea, and Pomfrey didn't believe a word of it. She's never trusted me since."

"Yes, Sirius," James smirked, putting out the fire with the sleeve of his robe, singeing it in the process. "That's why she doesn't trust you."

"Hah! If you'd drawn the short straw to feed her that line, you wouldn't be a prefect now."

"As I was saying," Remus interrupted, clearing his throat significantly. "This isn't a good idea. What if you do turn into bits of slugs out there, or James just gets one antler between the eyes and another one--"

"Ahem."

"--Like he did last year, and I end up biting you?"

"Then I guess we'll be a pack," Sirius attempted what he appeared to think was a wolfish grin. "We'll terrorise the school."

"Are you saying we don't already?" James gave his friend an indignant look.

"But with teeth!"

"I like my antlers."

"You would. Herbivore."

"Mongrel."

"And proud of it!"

"Or what if," Remus tried again, "I don't particularly want three people watching me grow fur?"

"No fair. You've seen me grow fur."

"I've seen you," James squinted at the werewolf reflectively, "the Monday morning after our first Hogsmeade visit, when we had all that butterbeer. Lupin, you can't get scarier than that."

"Rubbish, I was perfectly civilised. You had your glasses on upside down. Butterbeer doesn't agree with your nerves, James."

They had him, for a moment, then. Once he started joking, it was only a matter of time before he acquiesced, and Remus' sense of humour was like that; it had started out as blatant sarcasm, which was what had attracted the rambunctious pair to him in the first place, had progressed to straight faced irony and showed signs of developing a subtle satirical edge. The more polite he sounded, the more likely it was that he was mocking you. He was shaping up to be a brilliant straight man, assisted not a little by the fact that half the time he looked like a forlorn invalid at death's door. No teacher could look into his haggard, serious face and blame him for anything, wherever the evidence pointed.

Then Peter inadvertently spoiled it.

"We won't go, if you say not to; there's no point."

Instantly, the worried look was back in Remus' eyes. "Well, I'm saying not to. How could I look Dumbledore in the face, if he found out?"

"Since when do you care what teachers think?"

"Not teachers," Remus shook his head, smiling faintly. "Headmasters. Must I explain the difference again, Sirius? Teachers are the irritating people who stand out the front of classrooms during lessons and interrupt our plotting time with homework. Headmasters-- oof!"

Sirius, never one to do things by halves, had just conjured a pillow and thrown it at his friend's head.

"You should get him back for that," James observed, sitting up to check on what his quill was writing and wincing at what he read. "I would. And you worry too much."

Remus responded by nonchalantly transforming Sirius' shoes into a pair of ballet slippers, adding a bow to his hair as an afterthought. "Somebody's got to, you don't worry at all."

"Peter does." Sirius got up to tackle the smaller boy and found himself pirouetting on pointed toe. "Hey! Ow." He fell over. "Actually, that was a good one, Remus. Where'd you find it?"

"In the book set for Transfiguration that you never bothered to read. Odd, where these things turn up…"

"But the dancing…?"

"Just a charm."

"Can you show me?"

"Of course."

"Cool. I know somebody who could use a little extra grace."

"Let me guess… Hm. Slytherin boy, perhaps? With hair that might fall out at the mention of shampoo?"

"Brilliant deduction! You should have taken Divination."

"I'm going to have to write this myself, aren't I?" James was distracted, looking at what his enchanted quill had put down on paper.

"Didn't I tell you it wouldn't work?" Sirius grinned triumphantly; he loved to be right. "You should have just copied Lily's."

"If I'm going to write it, I might as well write it."

"Besides," said Remus, deceptively bland, "she wouldn't let you."

"But you've got to let us come," James seemed to think it was time they were steered off the subject of Lily, possibly because his friends had Theories about why the mention of her caused him to develop a complexion roughly the shade of a tomato. "After all our hard work…"

"C'mon, please?" Sirius wheedled, and on impulse transformed and laid his shaggy head on Remus' knee; there were few better ways to do puppy dog eyes than as an actual puppy dog.

"Get off, will you. Oh, all right. But don't blame me if you have to spend the rest of your lives howling at the full moon," Remus shoved the dog away, watching it transform back into his grinning friend as it rolled over, and tried to catch Peter's eye. It was one of those moments of exasperation that they often shared, when James or Sirius or both were acting like magically precocious two year olds, but Peter was preoccupied with examining James' failed experiment in proxy essay writing. He had a feeling that even James inspired gibberish was better than his answer.

"Good decision, Mr Lupin, I promise you, you won't regret it." When he wanted to, James could do a startlingly good impression of a travelling salesman who'd just made a deal.

It wasn't confidence inspiring, but Remus just chuckled. "Your promises. Didn't you promise McGonagall you were going to have that essay written by tomorrow?"

"And have I let her down, yet? I'm working on it."

"No you're not," Sirius tugged at James' sleeve, pulling him over again. "You're helping me get this hex worked out, remember?"

"Oh. So I am. Sorry Professor," he declared to the absent McGonagall. "Priorities."

"What are you trying to do with it?" Remus asked, bowing to the inevitable.

"We're trying to fix it so that when Snape tries to write an essay on it, it insults him."

Remus glanced at the document Peter was perusing over the smaller boy's shoulder. "Why don't you just slip him James' psychotic quill?"

Two jaws dropped, and with their faces thus distorted, James and Sirius looked disconcertingly like twins.

"That's not a bad idea."

"Why didn't I think of it?"
"Do you really want me to answer that question?"

This time, Peter did catch Remus' look, and grinning, surrendered the essay. At the top James had penned: The Environmental Repercussions of Transfiguration. Beneath it, in a barely legible scrawl, the pen had elaborated:

Nincompoop! Think you know the answer do you? I wouldn't believe a word you wrote. It's twits like you that give essays like me a bad name. Idiot! Imbecile! Moron! Why anyone would waste an education on you, I can't imagine…

They couldn't get away until after dinner. Three hours ago, they'd bid goodbye to Remus, with every reassurance they could think of, and a parting shot from Sirius that had undone all their good work:

"Think of it this way. Worst case scenario: tonight you get to eat venison."

The plan had been to slip away the moment James finished Quidditch practice, but somebody-- or rather everybody-- had forgotten to bring the invisibility cloak along, and Flitwick had caught them sneaking back up to the dormitory to get it and hustled them off to the Great Hall, so the moon was high and swollen by the time they made their escape, hurrying down the corridor in a bumpy, invisible jumble of elbows and knees and wands, fumbling with unseen fingers at the trigger to the secret passage way Remus had surreptitiously pointed out to them and ducking inside before the inevitable occurred and Peter collided with James, creating a domino effect and causing three heads, six feet and an indeterminate number of arms to appear as the group hit the floor, followed by three torsoes as they laboriously extricated themselves from the cloak.

"Ouch."

"I'm beginning to think that word should be our motto. 'Ouch, Ow and my God, what happened to your head?'"

"Sirius?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up."

Getting up, they transformed, which proved to be a mistake, as James had had his arm around Sirius' shoulder to keep him from straying from under the mantle of invisibility, which, translated into animal limbs, resulted in the latter getting a hoof to the head, and a great deal of melodramatic whimpering. There followed a further delay while Peter scrambled up onto Sirius' shoulders and from there clambered up James' neck and settled himself between his antlers, tail wrapped around one of them to steady himself, monkey fashion. It would have been easier, all in all, for him to ride on Sirius, but the extra height would be useful in reaching the all important knot that would still the Whomping Willow before anybody ended with a broken neck, and besides, he didn't like the look of the black dog's teeth.

Cautiously, trying to match paces with strides that were no longer the same length, they made their way down the tunnel, stag and rat and dog. Having ransacked Lily's store of childhood books, James thought they must resemble a picture from one of those ridiculous anthropomorphic stories Muggles insisted on writing, where all the animals got along and had tea parties by the river. All they needed was a gruff old Badger to tell them off for their imprudence, which made him wonder if Dumbledore was an Animagus, and remind himself to look it up if he survived the night.

His train of thought was interrupted by being hit in the head by a tree root, and he reared, which he supposed as the closest you could come to jumping back in surprise when you had four legs. Peter was half hanging off his head, squeaking reproachfully and behind him Sirius' truncated barks seemed to correspond well enough to laughter. Kick Sirius. That was another thing he had to remember to do, if the tree didn't break his neck.

Once Peter had recovered enough to stop cowering behind his friend's left ear, James somehow managed to coax him up into the tree. After a bit of dimly perceived scurrying, the willow went still, and the rat emerged, looking as pleased with himself as it was possible for a rodent to look, and they proceeded through the tree.

Peter went first, scrabbling noisily, James followed immediately after, as a precaution. Being a stag was all very well in a field or forest, but his Animagus body just wasn't built for wriggling between gaps in a net of roots, and while it was more than a little humiliating, having your best friend shove you from behind with his very dirty paws, it was better than living there, at least until the tree woke up again and battered him to bits.

On the other side, the passage became even narrower. James had to run with his head between his knees, so Peter was forced to ride on Sirius, teeth and all.

Despite these impediments, they moved faster than they could have as humans. This was an aspect of transformation they'd never had a chance to test before, and an exhilarating one; this and the vital one: whether a werewolf would, after all, befriend Animagi.

Though he was trying to keep to James' pace, Sirius reached the entrance to the Shrieking Shack first, nearly causing another collision and certainly ending up with a hoof to the tail he wasn't altogether sure was unintentional. The shack had been abandoned a long time, and rumoured to be haunted, but its resemblance to a war zone hadn't been caused by a lack of inhabitants. On the contrary, it looked as if the place had been the abode of a horde of deranged juvenile delinquents.

Chairs were shattered, tables were splintered, a stove had been torn off the wall and several drawers were scattered about like the severed limbs of some giant. Everything had teeth marks, and most things claw marks as well.

And there was Remus.

At least, he thought it was Remus, though it was less like him than anything he'd ever seen. Sirius had got used to seeing his friends in animal form. They'd been doing this for years, give or take a few false starts. First one at a time, then altogether, with Remus playing lookout and ready to run for help if anything went seriously wrong. Being a dog was interesting. He felt both more and less at the same time. Life was less complex, less hectic. Some of the abstract emotions that humanity had forced upon itself disappeared completely. But he felt other things far more. Behind him, James and Peter were palpable forces, heard and smelled and felt, as well as seen out of the corner of his eye. A rat and a deer were fair game to a dog, but these were firmly classified by scent and emotion in his doggish heart as Not-Stag and Not-Rat, the way some dogs, brought up with kittens, are forced in the name of dignity to classify their feline companions as Not-Cat. Because he was not a dog, but Sirius looking like a dog, the distinction went further: this was James-Stag and Peter-Rat, who looked like themselves, despite the fur and claws and hooves.

Like James himself, James-Stag was lanky and bony, all long legs and antlers, with a tuft of fur that stuck up between his ears, which was more unkempt than usual, because Peter had been sitting on it; there were even dark circles around his eyes in default of glasses. Peter was, not to be too blunt about it, small and round and squeaky, as Peter ought to be, and he knew what he looked like: a scruffy mongrel with teeth for biting or grinning and a tail that gave his emotions away by batting or wagging while the rest of him was still.

So he'd had Remus-Wolf pictured in his head for a long time. Remus-Wolf was wiry and tidy, with salt-and-pepper fur that could blend into the shadows, and big ears that heard more than he gave away. He could stalk, almost unseen, beside you in the dark, and sniff out things with no scent at all, and his eyes had that sardonic look that dogs-- and therefore presumably wolves-- get when their masters or packmates are doing something incomprehensibly stupid.

But this-- well, to begin with the proportions were all wrong. The wolf dwarfed Remus, being all brawn and brute force where Lupin was brain and civility. Its fur was no colour in particular, a shock of brown and black and grey and that flew out in all directions as if claws were attached to every hair and its paws were roughly the size of a bear's. Its head was bent over, gnawing furiously at its own leg, obscuring its face, but Sirius was reasonably sure that whatever was in the eyes of a creature with its own blood on its teeth, it wasn't irony.

He looked over his shoulder at James. You don't become the pre-eminent pranksters at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry without developing first-rate nonverbal communication skills. These days, if he had to ask James what he was thinking, one of them needed to go to the hospital wing. From this angle, however, it was much harder. For the first time, his eyes weren't at the same level as James', and anyway he could only look into one of them properly, the other one being positioned out of his line of sight on the other side of James' antlered head.

Then the wolf looked up. Perhaps from an outside perspective it would have been pitiful: the demented creature with its bloodied foreleg and claw marks down its sides snarling suspiciously at the intruders as if they might do it more harm than it was doing itself, but none of them were outsiders and they were all included in that wild gaze.

So much for formulating plans. Not, James reflected, moving out of the tunnel beside the combined lumps of fur that were Sirius and Peter, that it mightn't have been a good idea to come up with one before they turned into animals without the capacity for speech. He stamped his foot; horses did that, maybe stags did as well.

Sirius, with Peter clinging to his ears and peering over his head, barked once and wagged his tail; his tongue lolled out of his mouth in an exuberant, doggy grin.

"That," James thought wryly, "is as close as we're going to come to: 'Hi, Remus. We made it.'"

The wolf growled and scrambled to its feet, favouring its injured leg.

"At least if we have to run for it, he won't be able to keep up." Cautious, fighting a primal instinct that was informing him sharply that he was in the presence of two carnivores, one of whom had skipped dinner, James moved forward and stretched out his nose to the werewolf. They'd taught them all sorts of things about defending themselves against werewolves in Defence Against the Dark Arts. What nobody had ever mentioned was how to tell one you wanted to be friends.

Apparently, nobody had explained the situation to the wolf, either. Caught by surprise, it sat down, inadvertently putting extra weight on its injured leg. Pain maddened it further, and it swiped at James' nose with one paw. He jerked his head away just in time, tossing his antlers. "Well, that didn't work. But he didn't bite."

Moving back out of the immediate range of the wolf's claws, James bent his knees, lowering himself to the ground. He settled with a disconcertingly loud thump, which elicited another growl from the wolf, but then he was down, a smaller, less threatening beast. Catching on, Sirius sank down beside him; Peter slid off the dog's back and huddled between them. Benign. Unprovocative.

Like a judge regarding accused men, the wolf considered.

"Remus?"

But one couldn't be sure. Where was the line between a friend mocking you, and a wild beast debating whether to tear your throat out?

The wolf lay down and laid its head on its paws. A gesture of consent.

Instantly, Sirius was on his feet again, barking ebulliently. There were stairs in the corner, rickety, dilapidated looking things, but Sirius braved them, pausing half way up to bark again, peering through the banister at his friends.

Left nose to nose with a werewolf, James froze in trepidation; Peter appeared to be trying to burrow into his side. But the wolf only made a harsh, yapping sound like a dog's laugh, and hobbled after Sirius on three legs, catching James a playful blow to his face with his tail.

Rat and deer exchanged a look, part relief, part amusement, part exasperation. James inclined his head towards the stairs, where the two canines were tussling in what one hoped was a playful manner. "After you."

Peter shot him a withering look. "You've got to be kidding."

He scrambled back onto the stag's back, and James hauled himself to his feet, desperately missing little things, like arms and opposable thumbs, and clattered up the stairs after his friends to add his antlers and Peter's tail to the fray.

Much of the night was spent dashing up and down those stairs, an exercise both exhausting and perversely entertaining, when avoiding each other's teeth and hooves became part of the ordeal. More furniture was broken and several people had acquired splinters by the time they collapsed, the four of them, in battered, four-legged heaps on the second floor.

And perhaps they were deluding themselves, but once or twice in the evening, they thought they caught an expression in the creature's eyes, good natured and amused, that belonged wholly to Remus, and not to the monster.

The trouble, Remus reflected, bringing one hand to rub at the back of his neck, with falling asleep as a wolf and waking up as a human, was that you got all the cricks in your spine associated with both species.

That and that you generally felt like hell. It wasn't so much that he had slept through the transformation back into his human form, which was every bit as painful as the change from boy to wolf, if not more so-- there was nothing quite like the feeling of several thousand coarse werewolf hairs retracting back into your body-- but that he had steadfastly ignored it, keeping his eyes shut and his body hunched in a reasonable approximation of the sleeping position the wolf considered comfortable until the throes passed. His right arm hurt worst of all.

Then he opened his eyes. And was confronted by one of the strangest sleeping companions a person ever had. Curled-- if curled was the right word for that precise folding of limbs-- on the floor beside him was a stag, a beautiful stag, if a bit scratched, with dark markings around his eyes.

James.

On a chair, or what was left of a chair, which was namely the seat and a ripped cushion, a plump rat was dozing.

Peter.

Sirius had taken the bed, a dusty four poster affair that just needed a few dog hairs to complete its appearance of utter disrepair, and was slumbering, legs and ears and tail all pointing in different directions, the picture of slightly ridiculous contentment.

And the moon, mercifully, had set in favour of the sun.

Sun meant morning. Morning meant classes. And classes meant people were going to notice that his friends were missing.

Remus hauled himself to his feet, wincing at aches and scratches and bruises. His arm was more of a mess than he wanted to contemplate right now, but he'd had worse. Far worse. This time around, it seemed he-- or rather they-- had done more damage to the premises than to themselves.

There was always a spare robe on the highest shelf up here; the wolf didn't generally bother to climb the stairs. Deprived of victims, it was miserable enough without exerting itself. The one he had worn the day before had been torn to shreds in the transformation; they always were. Of course, it would have made more sense to take the garment off before the process started, but it felt foolish, sitting naked in an abandoned shack, waiting to transform into a ravening wolf. With clothes on, you could pretend that you didn't know what was going to happen, that you were there for some other reason. Which was irrational and stupid, but he figured he was entitled to one irrational thought a month. All Remus' robes were worn and patched; they would have been anyway, all his clothes were second hand, but being sewn back together from scraps certainly didn't improve his wardrobe.

He pulled on his clothes, grimacing as the fabric caught on his injured arm, and debated which of his friends to awaken first. All in all, Peter seemed the safest bet, so he kneeled on the floor and poked dubiously at the sleeping rodent with one finger.

No response. Peter had always been a most diligent sleeper.

"Peter!" he hissed, then, wondering why he was whispering, repeated, louder: "Peter! Breakfast!"

A squeak issued from the furry bundle, and a whiskered nose emerged with beady eyes set above it, that blinked at him sleepily.

"Good morning," said Remus, dryly.

In answer, the rat jerked his head, indicating he should get out of the way, and a moment later there was a plump, concerned looking boy where a moment ago there had been a household pest. "Hi, Remus- God, look at your arm."

"It's fine," the werewolf said dismissively. It wasn't, but bravado was the prerogative of every fifteen year old. Two irrational thoughts a month. "You didn't get bitten?"
"Not by you," Peter pulled a face. "I think Sirius tried to take my leg off somewhere in there, but as far as I could tell, you kept your jaws to yourself. What d'you remember?"

"Bits and pieces. More than usual. Did James really knock Sirius down the stairs?"

"Twice. But you knocked him down. Then he knocked you down. Or something like that. It was hard to tell."

"Oh. D'you want to wake James, or Sirius?"

Those eyes, still rattish, if no longer quite so beady, flitted from one sleeping animal to another. "James," he said fervently.

"So you're going to let sleeping dogs lie?" Remus enquired, with a faint grin that looked out of place on his ashen, weary face. "Thanks a lot."

"Hey, you asked."

They approached the larger animals as carefully as Remus himself had been advanced on the night before, hands outstretched; James was on his feet before Peter even touched him with the skittishness of a wild deer; Sirius took rather more prodding, and it eventually took all three of them to get him awake and back into his human form.

"Remus, did you know your arm was bleeding?" he enquired drowsily, rubbing at his eyes and getting one of the dog hairs he had shed during the night caught in them. "Ow."

"No, Sirius, thanks for telling me."

"That looks pretty bad," said James, peering over his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Don't worry about me. Madam Pomfrey'll be along in a minute to pick me up. Which is why you have to get out of here and off to class."

"Class!" James moaned, dropping onto the bed beside Sirius. Both of them collapsed backwards in a dramatic gesture of despair. Twinnish again.

"Nobody told me, when I got into this, that I'd have to go to class the next day."

"Yeah, well, I'm telling you now," Remus asserted. "Move, or I'll have to drag you. Help me, Peter."

"Touch me," grumbled Sirius, "and I'll bite your hand off."

"Is that really something you want to say to a somebody who could have you for dinner next month?"

One eye flicked open. "I could take you. Couldn't I, James?"

"Oh, I dunno," his friend mused. "He would've finished you, last night, if I hadn't intervened."

"So that's how it is, is it?"

"That's how it is."

"Would you get out of here, before we all get expelled?"

"All right, all right." James sat up, pulling the protesting Sirius with him by the hair. "If you're that eager to get rid of us. And what happened to my glasses?"

"You had them when you transformed back. Where'd you put them?"

"If I knew that-- oh, here," he put them on and scrutinised Remus properly for the first time. "Hey, you look awful. Are you sure we should leave you?"

"Looking awful is my trademark. Don't worry about me. Just pick up my homework, okay?"

"Homework!" declaimed Sirius. "He's hopeless."

"All right," James said dubiously, motioning Peter to precede him, and pulling Sirius after him. He paused at the top of the stairs. "We'll bring it to you this afternoon, when we've got into enough trouble to explain away all these bruises."

"Okay," said Remus, and added in a rush of embarrassed earnestness: "And-- thanks."

"No problem. Though I don't know why you want homework," James winked, an indication of understanding.

"Yeah, we're going to have you committed, if you keep that up. St. Mungo's is the only place for that sort of thinking," Sirius chimed in, waving dismissively.

"It's all right," Peter agreed, and they clattered down the stairs and out of sight, making enough noise to alert anybody approaching from a mile away.

Remus shook his head, and settled down to compose his features into a plausible mask of suffering melancholy. Impulse to laugh or not, it wasn't that hard, when your arm felt like-- well, like a wolf had been chewing on it, and your backbone had several vehement complaints to voice. And anyway, when you cover for the best pranksters Hogwarts has seen in a century for five years, you learn a thing or two.