MULTIPLE FURSONALITY

PART 7

It wasn't just conversations with potential for an emotional turn that triggered the appearance of Bruce.

One morning the kitchen was out of lemon. This simply became too much for Remus, who always took lemon in his tea. It just didn't work with just honey, or just lemon. The day was officially ruined. It had to be lemon and honey.

Hello, Bruce.

"Well he's not wrong," said Bruce. "Tea is pointless without lemon and honey."
And since Bruce didn't consider himself to be their friend, he went to seek company elsewhere.

Fletcher, however, oftened seemed to consider himself just that- a friend of the chaps. Especially at Herbology.

"Good morning!" he said, coming over and bringing some obscure plant with him. Because he was such a genious herbologist, he rarely grew what the others were growing. He was very show-offy about this. So show-offy in fact, the chaps sometimes quietly wondered, if he didn't have just a little bit of The Gryff somewhere in the line after all.

But of course there was just no way they'd ever tell him this.

"I bet you wonder what I got here!" he said, putting down his exotic plant.

"No," Sirius replied.

"It's a magical cactus!"
Spike.

The cactus stood in a pot of desert sand, waving its branches around. The chaps noticed it was missing all the spikes.

"I have to de-spike it from time to time. Seems brutal, but they get allover the place if I don't. It shoots spikes, you see."
"Don't see what's so impressive about a cactus," said Sirius. "They require little to no care at all."
"That is a common misconception. But you couldn't be more wrong. I had my pen pal Yun Yun, who lives near the Mekong river, send me water from the Mekong river. This cactus requires a very special kind of water, the kind you find in parts of the Mekong river, where the ghosts swim."

"Is the objective to possess the cactus?" James asked.

"It just likes water with an undertone of ghost, I guess. It's very powerful. Anyway. So, does Rem seem weird to you or what?"

"I don't know what you're talking about..."

"Maybe it's just me, then. I asked if I could have my bottle back. He said, in this voice: Hold your horses, plum cheeks. I'm not done with it yet. Maybe I'm overly paranoid. I've just never heard him say 'hold your horses' before."

"I have loads of empty bottles you can have, if you want to take them to a shop or something."

Fletcher lit up.

"Wow thanks a lot!" He lit down again. "But I still need this bottle back. Not just for the bus money, mind! It's a very special bottle for containing Death Water. You see, sometimes when you fill a bottle from a Death Water source, an actual ghost winds up in it." Fletcher scared himself pale. "This bottle has a very special filter to prevent that from happening. It looks like this."
He showed the chaps what looked like a kind of capsule with special symbols.

"Hm. This is supposed to be on that bottle. Ohhh now I remember..."

Perhaps his lineage wasn't bursting with The Gryff, but it was bursting with forgetful scatterbrains.

"I took it off when I rinsed it and then I forgot to put it back on..."

"So, to be clear," said James. "You gave Rem some of that water?"
"He thought it would be good for some tree." Shrug.

Fletcher took his cactus and went back to his spot, when James and Sirius had promised to return the bottle to him.

"So it is in fact not a repressed trauma we're dealing with," said Sirius. "But a ghost. And you thought Moony was clinically mental!"

"Hey, it's all ghosts, innit?" James argued.

Again the question was: What to do now?

And: How had the ghost even wound up inside him? Surely he hadn't drunk the stuff!

Clearly the chaps needed to have it confirmed that they really had worked things out this time.

But they needed to be delicate.