For anyone upset about anything in the overall plot of this fic: get over it. My story. I'm writing it how I envision it. Which isn't to say you can't fact-check me, but going out of your way to send me a long PM about ways that this could have been done better is pushing the point of ridiculousness. Give me ideas, I'm good. But don't tell me that I shouldn't have done something because your idea is so much better than mine. If you know exactly how to write the perfect Harry Potter story and feel the need to point out every reason why mine isn't it, do us all a favor and write the damn thing. (I'm always looking for a new story to read. ;p)

On that note, I do appreciate every single review I get and I read all of them. I'm willing to answer questions or points of clarification, be it personally or in the A/N before the next chapter.

In accordance with that - an answer to some people's questions: Harry isn't placidly accepting that he'll stay with Remus and Sirius just because I need him there. He fully intended on leaving as soon as he was left alone long enough, but he was afraid of being knocked out again if he tried to get away while they were all there. When he was alone, he knew there were other people outside the door that could get to him. He was just biding his time.

And then Hermione showed up. And suddenly he had a reason to stay – he wanted to help her, and stop her from being bullied at school again. The only way to do that is to go with Sirius and Remus to learn everything he needs to.

Hope you enjoy!

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Hermione hardly ate dinner at all that night - she wanted to hurry so that she could get to the library. She couldn't forget Silas' expression and widened eyes when he'd told her what he called Mr. Lupin - it was much more important than the other names, she could tell. And he'd known that she was going to look up what Slaine meant during dinner time, and taking the special effort to tell her Mr. Lupin's name gave the impression that it was serious. So the only logical conclusion was that he wanted her to know what "Shyam-Seff" meant as soon as she could.

Ignoring her housemates eating around her, she vaguely wondered why Silas had not renamed Mr. Black as well. Everyone he spoke of had been given a new name, but...perhaps Mr. Black's first name - Sirius - actually suited him? She had noticed that all the names made an 's' sound, so perhaps that was part of it? But she knew that Sirius was the name of a star in the Canis Major constellation - the brightest star in the sky, in fact - but she didn't think that Silas would know that. She didn't suppose that snakes knew much about astronomy, but then she'd been surprised before.

She hurried to the library as soon as she'd finished a chicken sandwich and a serving of baked carrots. She was also curious to find out what her own name - Zuri - meant. She wondered why Silas' name was the only somewhat normal name she'd heard so far. Sadi, Slaine, Sirius, Shyam-Seff...they were all names that someone might find in a baby name book of sorts - but one of those books that only had the translations of words and made those words a name - like an ancient language. After all, a regularly used language might not recognize someone's name as a name if it was a word they could find in their regular dictionary.

It took a while to find what she was looking for in the library, but Madam Pince had long since stopped looking at her suspiciously when she browsed the books for a long time. The librarian seemed to have gotten used to her coming in there at all hours, but she was quiet and respectful, so she seemed to have gained her trust as far as the books were concerned. Hermione wondered if the old woman had picked up on the fact that she actually didn't have any friends, so it was doubtful that she would ever be shouting in the library with them and disrupting the peaceful environment.

No, Hermione stopped her thoughts with a smile. She did have a friend now - Silas was her friend. He'd said so, and he'd tried so hard to speak enough to be understood, when even she could see how awkward English was to him. Even though she did most of the talking, he and his snake - who was really more of a sister than a pet, of course - had accepted her fully and completely.

That was part of the reason why she tried to only think of him as Silas. Even if it wasn't the name on his birth certificate, it was his name. He'd introduced himself as Silas because that was who he thought of himself as. She knew that Mr. Black and Mr. Lupin tried to call him Silas - she had picked up on that much - but really they still thought of him as Harry Potter, and that was what their minds instinctively went to when they spoke to him. Not that it was because of his fame as the Boy-Who-Lived, but because they had known him as a baby, and were best friends with his parents. They had thought of her friend as Harry probably since his mother had told them what she planned to name her son when she was pregnant. That would make it probably about eleven and a half years, so obviously a new name thrown at them so suddenly would be rather hard to swallow. She supposed that they would get used to calling him Silas with time, but she didn't think that her new friend would be able to open up to them until they did.

And honestly, she couldn't blame him. If they seemed unable to accept the name he went by, how could he know whether or not they would accept him for who he was outside of his name? She would bet that that was largely the reason he hadn't told anyone but her about his Animagus abilities - she had accepted him from the very beginning, although if she was honest with herself she would have made friends with the Giant Squid if he had talked with her. Not that it was anything particularly new, but she had been very lonely at school, and any sign of friendship would have been accepted, raised by snakes or no. And it was fairly clear that Silas needed an ally of sorts that was human – from his perspective, if he couldn't communicate with people normally, it gave them room to walk over him. Not intentionally of course, but if they misunderstood something or lost their patience when they couldn't understand him, there was really nothing Silas could do about it, and a mediator would help tremendously, especially if the mediator was his friend. She wasn't sure her thoughts were making a whole lot of sense, but she knew that she would always be firmly on Silas' side in the face of any trouble. She owed that to him at the very least.

Hermione suddenly felt enormously glad that she hadn't made friends with anyone at school - if she had, she might not have been in the Hospital Wing that day and never could have made friends with Silas. And, just like she'd thought before, it seemed that he needed human friends very much, because he couldn't trust the humans he'd come across thus far. And for good reason - all of them were trying to make him conform to what people did and dismissing what he'd gone through, rather than finding an in-between where he might still be happy with snakes but that they could see him and communicate with him, too. It seemed to Hermione that everyone was expecting Silas to just forget about how he'd been raised and simply go along with what was expected for people. But she knew that it wouldn't be that simple. She could already see how stubborn her new friend was, and she knew that his learning with his new guardians was not going to be easy for either side.

While she could see Silas' struggle however, she also tried to look at it from Mr. Black and Mr. Lupin's perspectives. Both of them had known Silas as a baby, and after the Potters had died, he was supposed to have gone to Mr. Black, Silas' godfather. But, there had been an awful lot of confusion that night and he'd been put on the doorstep of his aunt and uncle, where he'd then seemingly disappeared without a trace. She could definitely understand if they were angry with Dumbledore for leaving Silas there in the middle of the night - and in the cold of November. Honestly she was a bit indignant about that herself, and her firm belief in all authority figures had been shaken quite a bit. And then Mr. Black and Mr. Lupin - the only people left who had truly cared for Harry and not this Boy-Who-Lived nonsense - hadn't seen or heard a single trace of the boy they loved, for an entire ten years. And then for him to show up out of the blue with a snake on his arm and only able to speak a language no one could understand and was typically seen as the sign of a Dark wizard (though Hermione knew that to be utter nonsense) and then insisting he was Silas and not Harry and then openly distrusting them...well, she could understand how it could be hard for them. She had seen the pain but also firm love and acceptance in both men's eyes when they looked at Silas, and they both had the air of someone who was suddenly reminded that there was indeed a life worth living. Really they just needed to get used to the changes in Silas - they had already accepted them. Even if Silas himself couldn't see it yet, she could see how much they loved and adored him. She had seen the same looks on her aunt and uncle after her aunt had given birth to twins a couple of years before.

She opened the large book she'd pulled from the shelf called The Self-Updating Compendium of Names and Their Meanings, and first made her way to the 'z' section. She was enormously curious to find out what "Zuri" meant after Silas' attitude towards her compared to everyone else. She was sure that it was something nice, based on how he acted around her and toward her, but when she finally located its meaning, her jaw dropped and tears sprang to her eyes. She read the meaning over and over again, unable to believe what she was seeing.

Beautiful? She thought distantly, absolutely shell-shocked. Me?

She knew what her peers thought about her - she'd been made fun of enough not only for her smarts but also for her appearance. She knew her hair was very bushy and it was hard for her to maintain it in some semblance of order. Honestly she didn't really know what to do about it - her mother and father didn't have her hair; she got it from her grandmother, who had died before she could even remember her. Her mother didn't know what to do about it, so usually she braided it for her for school, but Hermione got frustrated every time she tried to do it for herself, so she had mostly given up here. It wasn't as though she could impress anyone, anyway.

But other people had bushy hair too, so that wasn't a point of teasing so much as the one thing she hated most about herself. Her teeth.

It was very ironic that the daughter of two dentists would have such very large two front teeth. She had been called a beaver enough times in grade school that she had once tearfully pleaded with her parents to just remove them and give her false teeth that were of a more normal size. Her mother had said that she was still growing, and her baby teeth weren't all lost yet, so she didn't want to do anything that might be detrimental to her entire mouth. However, her father had gone on to promise her that they would talk when she was fourteen or fifteen, and see about cosmetic changes then. She had agreed reluctantly - not that there was anything else that she could do - but she was still very self-conscious about her large teeth, and tried to smile as little as possible - and if she slipped, to smile with her mouth closed.

Surely, she thought, surely her large teeth combined with her bushy hair made her possibly the ugliest girl she knew, and Silas couldn't possibly have named her something that meant "beautiful".

But there it was, plain as day in the book, simple and short and completely unable to be misinterpreted or misconstrued.

Zuri is a name of African origins, specifically from the Swahili Coast, meaning "beautiful".

She sat there with tears streaming from her eyes as the implications of this hit her. For all that she hated about how she looked, Silas not only thought her beautiful, but thought her beautiful enough that that was the name that he gave her - as though the name "beautiful" encompassed her and described her completely. He hadn't named her something that meant "bushy hair" or "big teeth" or even something kinder like "smart" that she thought might have suited her better. He had seen past what everyone else in her life besides perhaps her parents thought about her and named her something that showed he thought of her in very high regard. Never before had she felt so accepted by anyone.

She sat there for several minutes grinning to herself and trying to pull herself back together and regain some measure of composure. Finally she turned back to the book and turned to the 's' section.

First she discovered that Sadi meant a lucky or fortunate one. She wondered what the story behind that name was, remembering how only names that had a meaning were given among snakes. She wondered what made the young boomslang so lucky to merit her name. She would have to remember to find out.

She didn't find out anything new about Sirius, although she was reminded that Sirius was also called the Dog Star, so she wondered if perhaps that had something to do with it. It did suggest in the footnotes that the name seemed to have a sense of fun about it, although the reason for it didn't actually have any historical meaning. But perhaps that was why Silas just kept it.

She found that she was right about Madam Pomfrey's name and that it was in fact because she was a nurse, although the exact meaning was "good health". She wondered why Silas had decided to name her that, however - she had been able to pick up that he didn't trust the nurse or the potions she fed him, so why he wouldn't name her something like "attacker" or "dangerous" was beyond her.

She found herself amused when she discovered that Silas meant "forest dweller". It really was perfect, as he had lived in the forest with the other snakes as long as he could remember. She wondered briefly if he had named himself or if someone else had when he had shown up.

Finally she went to find Shyam-Seff, but when she got to the proper page, she could only find Shyam. She supposed that Silas may have combined two names and looked to the meaning of Shyam first.

A name of Indian origin, Shyam means "dark", and was typically used as a pet's name rather than a person's, coming about in the late fourteenth century.

Okay... Hermione didn't know what to think about that as she flipped a few pages back to "Seff". Mr. Lupin wasn't dark-skinned or even dark-haired. He was probably one of the lightest people she had ever seen. He was rather pale, besides the scars that stood out vividly, but the contrast only further showed how pale he was. His hair was a dirty blond with streaks of grey in it, and even his eyes were an amber-gold color. She thought it would be more suited for Mr. Black to be called "dark" – he had black hair and while his skin was light, it wasn't nearly as sickly pale as Mr. Lupin's. Heck, even his last name suggested "dark" better than everything about Mr. Lupin.

Drawing her finger down the page was looking for, she stopped near the bottom and read the single-worded description of Seff: "wolf."

She didn't particularly care why there wasn't the origin or the usage in the description; she had already put the literal meaning together in her head and was now trying to figure out why Silas thought it so important.

"Dark Wolf"? What does that even mean? I might have understood it if it had been Mr. Black's name - what with the dark hair and all, and his laugh sounds kind of like a dog bark. But Mr. Lupin was really pale and honestly sick-looking, so he's like the opposite of dark. Although Silas doesn't seem to be naming based on appearances – well, except for me. But the explanation for that remains to be revealed. ...So why would someone's personality be labeled as "dark wolf"? Or perhaps his identity... Madam Pomfrey is named for her identity as a nurse, and Sadi for being lucky... So how would Mr. Lupin's identity be a "dark wolf"?

She turned these thoughts over in her head for several minutes, coming up with several ideas and then tossing them out in the next moment as ridiculous or implausible.

...He nodded to Remus. "That's Moony."...

Hermione frowned a bit to herself. Moony - what an odd thing to call someone. You only gave someone a nickname if it meant something, and Moony seemed to be a very well-established nickname for the tired-looking man.

The other man had a scar running diagonally across his entire face. It looked like it had been a rather bad slash at some point.

Hermione's eyes widened rather suddenly as her jaw dropped, the dots suddenly connecting in her head. The small clues that seemed insignificant on their own suddenly combined to paint a very clear picture for what Silas was trying to tell her.

Moony.

Vivid scar.

Dark Wolf.

What wolf is considered Dark?

Werewolf.

...

Hermione didn't go to sleep that night. She pretended to leave the library at closing time, but for the first time in her life she broke the rules and went back an hour later under cover of darkness. She knew that after her discovery, she would never be able to go to sleep, not knowing whether or not Silas was safe with Mr. Lupin. Already she was fiercely loyal to her new friend, and if she discovered that it was unsafe to be with Lupin, she would get Silas out of there at the earliest opportunity.

But, she didn't know much about werewolves, so she didn't want to go running in like an avenging angel if she was wrong. Thus the reason for her time spent researching in the library the entire night through.

She found several books on the subject – more than she had even expected. At first she was excited and very glad that there was so much information on the subject, but then she actually got to reading them and she was disgusted. All she read were accounts of werewolf attacks, or werewolf trials and deaths. One book she found was about killing a werewolf and how to prepare its pelt, like werewolf skin rugs were a high commodity. Honestly it all seemed very biased against werewolves, and after finding a book describing in excruciating detail how to hunt and kill a werewolf cub, she threw it away in loathing. She didn't think these people seemed to realize that these werewolf "cubs" were children. That was one thing that had been constant – they only changed at the full moon. The rest of the information was vague and mostly speculation – one book suggested that they were just regular people the rest of the month, but most books insisted that even in human form, werewolves were incredibly dangerous. They didn't cite the exact danger however, so Hermione was inclined to believe that the one book was right. And if that was the case, then hunting werewolf cubs meant they were hunting children, and that was just despicable.

She wasn't so sure about adult werewolves, however. Obviously they were dangerous during the full moon, because they completely lost their human mind and reasoning – but what about the other twenty-seven days of the month? Would Silas be safe alone with Mr. Lupin during his tutoring? One book out of the fifty-something she had found couldn't be used as an accurate guide as the opinion was in so little minority, no matter how much it made sense or how little proof of facts the majority of the books had.

She couldn't find anything to assuage her worries in these books, but she had a thought in the early hours of the morning that Remus Lupin was friends with Sirius Black and James Potter – he must have gone to school with them, or around the same time. He would probably be in the yearbooks. After doing some quick math in her head, she went and grabbed all of the Hogwarts yearbooks from 1967 through 1979. She didn't know the exact ages of Silas/Harry's parents, but she knew that he was born in July of 1980, so it couldn't have been too much beforehand that they had graduated – she knew that they had been young parents.

She found several pictures of four boys starting in 1971 – the captions read them as James Potter, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, and Remus Lupin. Forgetting werewolves for a moment, she had to stop and stare at several of these pictures – they all seemed so…innocent. Even knowing that Pettigrew would betray them, she couldn't see it in any of the photos. They truly were best friends. There was even a picture of Lily Evans and Severus Snape in their first year – she was surprised at that, that they could be best friends. She had only ever heard nice things about the redhead, and Professor Snape was as different from her as night and day.

She did notice a picture in their fourth year of the four boys playing a prank on Snape, but he seemed more angry than jovial at the prank. Seeing Snape's hate for the four, she wondered how he would react to Silas. After all, Silas was practically a carbon copy of his father, sans the glasses.

She pushed it from her mind however, when she finally got to the yearbook from 1978. There were several more pictures of people she recognized in this year, as this was the year that they graduated and the focus was on them this time. She smiled at their class pictures, but it was the "Most Likely" and "Superlatives" page that caught her eye most.

It seemed a bit redundant to put James Potter and Lily Evans under "Most Likely to Get Married" as well as "Best Couple", but she shrugged it off. She laughed a bit at Sirius Black's "Most Likely to Get Arrested For Something Stupid", and noticed that Lily Evans got "Best Hair" for the girls. All four of the boys were put under "Most Mischievous", and someone had written 'Marauders rule!' next to it in the margins. She found that Remus Lupin got "Most Studious" as well as "Most Likely to Succeed". It seemed that the school still didn't know that he was a werewolf, because she knew from her reading how shunned werewolves were and how difficult it was for them to find work. If they had known about his lycanthropy, they would have known that he was about the least likely to succeed. Sad, but true.

She sighed and closed the yearbooks. She couldn't pick up whether or not Mr. Lupin's three friends had known about him being a werewolf or not from the pictures. She thought that they might, because Mr. Lupin's teenage self had appeared very comfortable with them, and that could only come from complete and utter trust. But, she didn't know him or how she thought, so she couldn't be sure. And she didn't know how to go about finding out without revealing that she knew about him. She might have thought that it was safe because Dumbledore wouldn't have let a werewolf come to school without the proper precautions, but her confidence in the old man was rather shaky after having learned that he'd dumped a one-year-old on a Muggle's front porch in the middle of the cold night without even leaving someone to make sure that the boy was alright. She had to admit to herself that she didn't really know what he was capable of.

Sighing again and rubbing her eyes, she checked her watch and saw that it was almost six o' clock in the morning. She knew that she wouldn't be able to get any sleep before she had to get up anyway for breakfast and classes, so she decided to try getting a Restorative Draught from Madam Pomfrey. Putting the books away, she crept quietly back out of the library and vowed to return as soon as she could to find answers for Silas. They had to be there somewhere.

…

Thanks for reading!