Note: Here we are again! Thank you very much to all those people who were kind enough to review the last chapter, you make me smile =)! For any readers of Meet the Lupins, I can tell you that I have written half of the next chapter and will finish it off soon – I am sorry for the long delay!
This chapter is dedicated to my good friend Gelly Bean! Thank you so much for the illustration of Chapter 2 (which the rest of you can view on DeviantArt by searching for "Teddy Lupin fire" - go and take a peek, it's brilliant!) you made my day! =)
Again, there are spoilers for Without a Trace in this chapter.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor am I making any profit form this piece of writing.
3: Occupational Hazard
This hadn't been how Remus Lupin had envisaged his evening. It wasn't supposed to be like this.
This is what happens, he thought irritably as he came to a halt at the bottom of the staircase so that he could lean against the stone bannister, when you allow yourself to be so intent on being nice. When you try to please everybody.
Dora wasn't going to be pleased. Oh no, she wasn't going to be pleased at all...
Remus sighed heavily, before hastily reaching to stifle a cough with the sleeve of his robes. This was supposed to be a special evening, he recalled, because for the first time in Merlin knew how long, he and his wife had made plans for an evening out. Such an event was rare during term time, he was never home from Hogwarts early and Tonks was forever needing an early night for work the next morning. There simply wasn't time for a trip anywhere. But this evening, since Remus had not managed to make an appearance at Kingsley's party, Tonks had decided they should throw all sensibilities to the wind.
"Sod it, Remus," she'd declared cheerily that morning over breakfast. "Let's just go out! Let's stay up until the early hours and have a bit of fun! Then I can barricade myself in my office tomorrow and claim I have a lot of paperwork, and you can just set the kids a load of note taking; we'll catch up on sleep that way."
Remus had merely raised a disbelieving eyebrow at this plan, but apparently she hadn't taken any notice because the next thing he knew she'd been kissing him goodbye and announcing that she'd meet him at the Three Broomsticks later.
And he'd said: I'll see you then.
By lunchtime he had started to think that a little late night excursion wouldn't be the most foolish thing in the world, after all it was only a one off. Come late afternoon, he'd found himself looking forward to the evening, and by the time dinner had come around Remus had actually been rather excited. He'd made a long mental list of possible places they might go whilst eating his lamb casserole, and an even longer mental list of what they might do there whilst eating his rhubarb crumble dessert. He was just midway through narrowing down the lists to the things he thought Tonks would most likely agree upon, when Transfiguration professor Tobias Budden had dropped into the empty chair beside him and, with four small words, shattered the werewolf's hopes for the evening.
"Minerva's looking for you."
Remus had known it was going to be bad from the second he'd glanced up from his bowl to find Budden looking at him with a distinctly mocking expression upon his face.
"No...no, no, no..." He'd started to shake his head vigorously and was about to bolt from the hall when he heard the immortal words:
"Ah, there you are!"
The Headmistress had appeared at his elbow and announced that regrettably Professor Sprout was unable to take her turn patrolling the corridors that evening because...well Remus hadn't listened to the reason why because he was much too busy resisting the urge to let out a very loud sigh of resignation, and would it be at all possible for Remus to cover for her?
Remus had wanted to ask why she was asking him, why couldn't she ask somebody else? He'd just taken his own turn yesterday...
It's because you always say yes, he told himself moodily as he stood leaning against the bannister, tapping his fingers upon the cool stone. She knew you would say yes, you always say yes, you did say yes...
And so here he was. Wandering aimlessly up and down the dark school corridors, having sent a brief, rather vague owl to his wife and fully expecting to receive a howler at the breakfast table the next day in return.
To be fair to Minerva, Remus thought as he turned on his heel and began to wander back down the corridor, she did pay him to be here twenty four hours a day, and despite this she did let him go home almost every night he wanted to.
Just not tonight, when it actually mattered.
Dora's going to kill me...
And this is pointless, anyway. How often when patrolling the corridors did he actually catch anybody? Most of the time it was Teddy coming to talk to him, so by rights it was easier for the curfew to be enforced when he wasn't in the castle...
As he turned a corner and made his way down another corridor, the only sound to be heard was his footsteps upon the floor and he strained to hear any other sound. He was determined for this night not to be a complete waste of his time, he was going to discover hordes of students attempting to sneak down to the kitchens, and a dozen or so more hiding in broom closets. He was going to find all of that at the very least, otherwise he would have to accept that this was a wasted evening. And to admit to his wife that he had swapped their night of freedom for a pointless stroll around Hogwarts...no, he couldn't do it...
Remus mused that he was unlikely to hear anything beside his own footfalls and breathing all night, let alone a horde of students. It probably didn't matter anyway because unless he found a reincarnation of Voldemort skulking in a cubicle of the boys' third floor bathroom, Tonks probably wouldn't think the sacrifice worthwhile.
The silence continued to mock him, and Remus began to think of all of the reasoning he would attempt and instantly fail to use when Tonks got hold of him the next day. Since he could have simply told Minerva that he was unavailable, there would be no reasoning convincing enough.
Maybe he'd go and check out those cubicles next. If Voldemort did somehow manage to appear in one of them, Remus' life would no doubt be over and done with very swiftly indeed. Then he wouldn't have to face Tonks in the morning...
Indeed, at that moment in time Remus decided that he would pick an encounter with Voldemort over Tonks without any hesitation at all. At least coming face to face with Voldemort would be over nice a quickly.
For another five minutes, there was nothing but the professor's footsteps as he mounted a staircase and headed along yet another corridor. They all looked the same in this poor light. They all sounded the same, too...
"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!"
...most of them sounded the same...
Remus instantly turned on his heel towards the sound of the cry, and dashed back down the corridor.
Maybe this wasn't going to be pointless after all...
He rounded the corner just in time to find a dark figure sprinting towards him, still shrieking at the top of their lungs.
"HELP! SOMEBODY...PROFESSOR!"
Chester Burton came to a skidding halt in front of the Head of Gryffindor House, panting for breath as he pointed over his shoulder, eyes wide with panic.
"Gryffindor Tower!" the boy gasped, tears streaming down his flushed face. "It's on FIRE!"
Remus opened his mouth to say something, though as the full force of Chester's words mentally pummeled his brain he had no idea what, only for a voice further up the corridor to call:
"What's going on down there?"
Remus forced himself to draw a calming breath, blinking away his wide-eyed look of mortified panic.
"Run and rouse the rest of the staff, Rosemary!" he called to the professor of Muggle Studies. "Gryffindor Tower is on fire!"
"On fire? Did you say on FIRE, Remus?" came the startled response, but Remus did pause to reply.
"Go and wake up as many teachers as you can, Chester, then go to the Great Hall and stay there." he instructed the petrified child briskly, and with that he ran to Gryffindor Tower.
Ignoring the frantic exclamations of the Fat Lady, Remus stumbled into the smoke shrouded common room mere minutes later, only to discover flames burning furiously before him, blocking the entrance to the staircase that lead to the students' dormitories. Gryffindor courage appeared to have risen up as fiercely as the flames had, through the heavy, choking mass of grey smoke that rose from the roaring fire, Remus could just make out a solid crowd of figures upon the stairs, and between shouts of alarm and smoke induced coughing, he could hear a loud voice shouting:
"On three! One! Two! THREE!"
"AGUAMENTI!" the Gryffindors bellowed, and Remus watched as a dozen jets of water shot towards the flames, only to evaporate with a menacing hiss, the flames seemingly unaffected.
Remus immediately drew his wand.
"Everybody to the top of the tower!" he demanded, taking a few steps forward. "Everybody get upstairs, close the doors and open all of the windows!"
With a number of calls of: yes professor, the crowd immediately disappeared in a rumble of pounding footsteps upon the spiral staircases. Remus raised his wand, ready to reel off as many possibly helpful spells that he could come up with, when a voice from behind him made him hesitate.
"Dad!"
Remus spun round to find Teddy crouched down behind an armchair, eyes wide as he stared at the chaotic scene.
Before Teddy could say a word, he found himself being hoisted up and onto his feet, and Remus practically dragged him towards the portrait hole.
"Get out! Get out!"
"But...but Dad..."
"Go to the Great Hall and stay there..."
"But Dad, the fire..."
"Will either burn or choke you to death. Now GET OUT!"
As Teddy was pushed out through the door way, causing him to stumble and fall to his knees, he hastily scrambled back onto his feet and turned to face his father.
"It's not a normal fire, Dad!" he cried desperately, and just as Remus made to turn away, the boy hurriedly thrust his arm forward, the Marauders' Handbook in his hand.
Remus froze, eyes widening in alarm.
"Oh sweet Merlin..." he breathed, as Teddy stared up at him with guilt ridden eyes.
"I...I tried to...to find something to...to put it out! But...but you didn't write anything..." Teddy trailed off into silence as the book was hurriedly snatched from his hand.
"Great Hall, Ted. Now!"
Teddy fled without another word.
When Professor McGonnogal and a handful of other teachers arrived a few minutes later, they were dismayed to discover that the fire seemed intent on getting worse rather than better, for Remus had made little if no progress in stifling the blaze. Without so much as a word to the werewolf, the teachers set about attempting to control the inferno, yet no matter what spells they threw at it, nothing seemed to make a difference.
Frustrated, Remus hurriedly pulled the offending book from his pocket and began to flick through it, cursing and muttering under his breath.
"I don't think this is the time for reading, do you?" the Headmistress shouted from beside him, but the werewolf ignored her.
"I should know this..." he complained aloud, wincing as a loud crash signaled the fiery demise of a portrait, the figures within the frame screaming in alarm. "I just have to remember...what happened last time?"
Last time, he recalled, closing the book with a snap and barely resisting the urge to fling it at the roaring fire, you accidentally set fire to one of the desks in a Charms classroom, and you weren't there when Dumbledore arrived and miraculously saved the day because you'd been ushered out into the corridor with the rest of the students...
Then you'd sworn never to attempt to create such a hideously dangerous spell again as long as you lived, especially when you're not clever enough to figure out how to banish it.
Bugger...
But he wasn't an idiotic schoolboy anymore, was he? He'd grown up at least a little bit, he understood more about magic...
Maybe it didn't take a genius like Dumbledore to fix this...
And so Remus planted his feet firmly upon the floor, raised his wand, and set about bellowing as many incantations as he could muster.
Ten minutes later and the blaze had begun to creep it's way up the spiral staircase, flames climbing the walls, leaving a black trail of charred portraits and tapestries in it's wake.
"This is hopeless!" Professor Rosemary Nichols exclaimed as yet another barrage of spells failed to have any real effect. "What dark magic is this?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Rosemary!" McGonnogal snapped furiously, unaware of Remus' wincing at the Muggle Studies professor's words. "Dark magic? This is clearly a case of a prank gone wrong!"
"Whatever it is," Tobias Budden announced, shouting to be heard above the rumbling and spitting flames, "if something isn't done soon the students are going to find themselves choking on the smoke. We need to evacuate the tower."
Remus was about to inform the rest of the staff that he had sent the Gryffindors up to the top of the tower, only to catch sight of his latest attempt to stifle the fire striking the flames with a loud crack. A small section of the fire was smothered with a hiss. As fresh flames began to burst into life in the small gap that the spell had created, Remus drew in a deep, triumphant breath.
"That's it...!" he began, only to be cut off by a spluttering cough that left him doubled over, clutching at his chest.
"Oh Merlin!" Madam Pomfrey's voice cried from just behind him, and Remus grimaced to feel a hand upon his arm. "Really, Minerva, Remus cannot stay in here! Look at him, all this smoke after his stay in Mungo's! I really don't think..."
"I'm fine, really I am!" Remus insisted, stubbornly clenching his teeth in an attempt to stop coughing.
"You've not been out of the hospital for that long," Madam Pomfrey insisted, giving his arm a sharp tug. "Keep this up and you'll be headed straight back again..."
"That was weeks ago! I'm fine..."
"Nonsense! For goodness sake, Minerva! Talk some sense into him..."
At McGonnogal's apologetic glance at him, Remus was sure that this was not an argument that he was going to win.
"I know how to put it out!" he announced hurriedly, before he could be banished from the room. Aiming at the fire again he repeated the spell, and beside him a number of people were foolish to take deep breaths of relief at the sight of diminishing flames, a number of coughing fits ensued.
"You heard him!" McGonnogal instructed, wand held ready. "We'll need to act together to have any real effect! Wands ready, everybody...not you," she added, glancing sideways at Remus who had taken aim along with the rest. "You should leave."
Remus resisted the urge to shout: I'm fine, because it did not appear to be a phrase that anybody understood. Instead he said:
"Somebody should be with the students. Merlin knows what's going on upstairs."
"I'll go," one of the teachers volunteered from the back of the crowd. "I'll fetch a broom, fly up to the window..."
"I'll go." Remus insisted, ignoring Madam Pomfrey's tut of disapproval. "I'll not waste time finding a broom, I'll go straight up the stairs."
"You should be in the Hospital Wing!" the nurse snapped furiously. "And how do you intend to walk up there when the staircase is on fire?"
"No, Poppy, being their Head of House I should be with my students. And I intend to walk up there when the staircase is on fire because you will all stifle the flames just long enough for me to run through them."
A number of the teachers murmured their approval of such a plan, but Madam Pomfrey was utterly livid at the mere idea of it.
"Do you have a death wish?" she shrieked, gripping her wand until her knuckles whitened.
Remus waited for McGonnogal's inevitable denial of the suggestion, only for the Headmistress to announce:
"Very well then, Remus..."
"Minerva! Really!"
"Now Poppy, it is a well known fact of life that being the Head of Gryffindor House is in itself a health hazard! If they hadn't managed to set their common room on fire this evening, no doubt they would have been up to some other form of mischief! Remus forfeited the right to distance himself from their raucous doings and dire straits the moment he agreed to take the job! Now, take aim all of you!"
Remus took a few steps forward, squinting as the heat struck his face like a physical wall, drawing in a slow, careful breath.
"Are you ready?" McGonnogal asked him, and the werewolf gritted his teeth against nerves and gave a firm nod. And with the command of: go!, Remus took a running jump, straight into the midst of the fire.
