A/N so yeah… filler chapter… sorry for the wait. And the disappointing lack of interesting content. Enjoy.
Chapter 11: Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum
Remus was not sent to school the next day on accounts of what was explained to fellow students as an extreme case of food poisoning. Lies were always most believable when they were as close to the truth as possible. Sirius, also having been admitted to the hospital wing, had made a point of curling up on the bed beside Remus as soon as Pomfrey had left the room. He made extra sure to look adorable so that, when she returned, she wouldn't have the heart to make him move. The plan succeeded and, about 10 hours later, Sirius was still curled up beside his crush waiting patiently for the boy to awaken naturally. It quickly became a tedious process once the initial half-hour enjoyment of watching Remus sleep wore off. Finally, he decided it would be beneficial to his own sanity to wake the boy as gently as possible.
Remus' objection to the nose prodding his cheek was instantaneous and came in the form of lazy grumbles and poorly aimed but very insistent swatting motions from the arm that hadn't wrapped around the dog in his sleep. Sirius persisted and, after about a minute of his arm's valiant protestation, Remus cracked open an eye and glared with distaste at the far-too-bright hospital wing.
"Sirius… I'm tired! I don't want to wake up! I… OH SHIT! WHAT TIME IS IT!" exclaimed the prefect, making a sudden effort to rise, forgetting that a dog was on his right arm, and falling, wrapped in crisp, white bed sheets upon the cold, stone floor. His stomach, weak from the night before and jostled by the sudden movement, gave an uncomfortable lurch and the color drained from his already sickly face. Sirius, landing uncomfortably upside down between the bed-side table and the bed, recovered and righted himself before pushing a conveniently placed bucket below his friend's spluttering mouth. Remus, wiping his mouth embarrassedly, recalled that the reason he was so tired is that he had woken up several times that night to have Sirius hastily provide a bucket for his sick. It seemed that the firewhiskey had opened the floodgates of his usually calm stomach.
As Remus stood up shakily and looked around for his shoes, Madame Pomfrey snuck up on him from the other side of the bed and unceremoniously forced him back upon it. "You're to rest up today and be all better for school tomorrow. All your teachers have been informed. Professor Sprout asked me to tell you to thank this mutt, too. Seems he dragged you half dead across campus. I, for one, think he should've run for help. Thanks to his nobility, I had to fix up his stitches again." The healer mixed things here and there, forcing remedies down Remus' throat as though it were just another bottle she was pouring it into, all the while rambling about the trouble Sirius caused and how he was just an ungrateful little mutt.
She looked at Remus expectantly, and he realized she had just asked him a question which he had tuned out. "Sorry?" he asked, throat still burning with whatever the last potion he had been force-fed was.
"I asked if you were planning on keeping the stray. You seem to have become fond of him—Merlin knows why," repeated the Pomfrey.
"Oh… I… No. No, I don't think so. I'm fond enough of him, I guess, but I get enough of wild animals every month at the moon. I guess I'm not really a dog person," answered Remus. His first instinct had been to say yes, but he'd then remembered that Sirius would be human again and that he could no longer keep the boy as a pet. He almost felt a twinge of disappointment in spite of himself. In this form, Sirius was all his.
"Well then, you won't be keeping him too much longer, I suppose. Three weeks since the bite should be quite good enough," said Madame Pomfrey before she left his bedside to tend to other patients.
"Nine days…" said Remus out loud, and Sirius' head tilted as he looked over towards Remus. They both had been doing the math. The four had agreed on 25 days, and, counting that Monday, they had nine days left. On the following Sunday, 'Midnight' would be sent back to Remus' uncle, and Sirius would get back on Tuesday after his 'friend's' tragic death on Friday and his burial on Monday. Sirius would be back. Remus smiled at Sirius and, without thinking, planted a small kiss on the top of the dog's head. The instant he did it, he felt his stomach do a weird flip-flop motion, worried once again that he had just scared Sirius away. Sirius' innards experienced a similar phenomenon, but for less terrified and more hopeful reasons. When the dog merely cuddled up closer to Remus, the sick boy was happy to pretend it had never happened.
It was just past noon when Remus saw company other than Madame Pomfrey or midnight. It was then that the absent Marauders barged in to the hospital wing, arms laden with treats they knew didn't come with hospital lunches, waking several disgruntled patients as they did so.
Ignoring the irritated looks coming from the disturbed sleepers, James marched proudly over to Remus' bed, Peter close in tow, and placed the bowl of pudding, upon which a plate of pie was precariously perched, down on Sirius' back. The dog stiffened under the pressure not to drop the treats and relaxed only when Remus quickly removed them from his back and replaced them on his bed-side table.
"Moonshine! How was your date!" You could tell that they were being listened to because all the irritable, still-groggy patients immediately stopped looking at them and busied themselves quietly with something invisible at their bed-sides, not making a noise and curiously angling their ears toward the source of fresh gossip.
Remus, unsettled by the contrast between James' voice and the sudden lack of volume in the room, answered in a hiss, "how do you think?" looking down embarrassedly at his bed-sheets before occupying himself with rather violent bites of chocolate pudding.
"Aw, that's alright. Better luck next time! They clearly just didn't realize what a catch you are!" James gave Remus' cheek a pinch, almost causing him to spit out a portion of his obscenely large bite of pudding. It took Remus a minute or so, in which he continued to look grumpy and put enormous effort into swallowing, but when he recognized James' shifting of pronouns, aware of the listeners, he looked up surprised and thankful.
"Yeah… yeah, I guess. Thanks, mate," he smiled weakly and paced himself a bit more on the remainder of his treats, listening all the while to his companions complaints about their day's classes, grateful not to be questioned further on the happenings of the previous afternoon.
Classes the next day were dull as could be. Remus, still tired from his sickness, hardly even noticed when his eyes went unfocused in History of Magic and his usually-impeccable notes faded into absent minded doodles of stags, rats, and dogs. James smirked to himself when he saw a drawing of a dog with a heart around it, but he managed to pass off the accompanying snicker as a rather gross-sounding cough.
Herbology proved to be the only slightly entertaining class of the day, as Sirius, no doubt bored out of his mind himself, took it upon himself to provide a welcome distraction. Under cover of the invisibility cloak and the entrance of a dozen or more students, Sirius snuck into the greenhouse at the beginning of class and proceeded to rearrange whatever part of the classroom the professor happened to have her back to at any given moment. As such, the students spent class suppressing rather obvious chuckles every now and again and an increasingly befuddled and irritated Professor Sprout spent it repeatedly spinning on the spot, determined to find the source of the laughter, only to just miss the disappearance of another plant and cause the students to laugh still harder. Even Remus had to admit that the harmless, if somewhat distracting joke was a welcome diversion from a day of thoroughly uneventful classes.
"Mr. Lupin!" exclaimed the teacher, and Remus' eyes shifted the tiniest bit away from where he and the rest of the class had been amusedly watching Sirius slowly rearrange the color-coordinated earmuff shelf and he was completely shocked to see the flustered, usually amiable teacher mere inches from his seat. "You are a prefect! I demand to know what the cause of this tom-foolery is!"
Remus, knowing that his friends were frozen, waiting to hear his response, put on his best innocent face, looked the graying woman straight in the goggled eyes and said, "Why would I know. It just seems to me that you or another class forgot to tidy up last time they were in here and…" he paused, in believable ponderousness, "perhaps a charms class was practicing giggling charms. Anyone?"
A hufflepuff girl instantly raised her hand, forcing herself to meet eyes with the professor rather than watch what appeared to be disembodied, leopard-print earmuffs doing a victory dance. "It was ours, right Tom?" He nodded. "And, well, you know. When some of us start giggling, all of us will," said the girl in her Welch accent, smiling obliviously at the unconvinced teacher.
"Very well," grumbled the defeated teacher. "I swear," she said, throwing a pointed glance at the three present Marauders, "things like this only ever happen in this class!"
At the end of the class, Sirius snuck out after a few congratulatory pats from his friends. He spent most of next few hours chasing rodents and bothering slytherins. The final class of the day proved almost as boring as the first few, and the three Marauders with the misfortune to be present, took no notes. Thankfully, that evening had more entertainment in store than the day had.
It was frequently wondered, by onlookers unfamiliar with the inner workings of the Marauder family, why Peter was granted a seat in such an exclusive club. Were it merely for being a groupie of James', a dozen more interesting applicants would be willing to take the rodent-like boy's place in an instant. Some—those with slightly more knowledge of the group's history—would assume it could be credited to James and Peter having known each other as boys, but what they often failed to realize was that even back then Peter was a surprising choice to be included in James' inner circle. No, the true reason for the boy's qualification was known perhaps only to the Marauders themselves, and the rat's parents.
What most people did not know about Peter—and what so easily assured him a secure spot in the bespectacled teen's hear—was that the boy had a rather extraordinary penchant for sea shanties. And if there was one thing that went well with James' Great Second Uncle Grisham's self-distilled rum—which James, a favored relative of the crazy old wizard, received by the case once every month of two—it was a good, old fashioned, muggle sea shanty.
That night, Sirius and Remus discovered as they returned from dinner several minutes after their friends, was apparently destined to be one such joyous occasion.
"…had been gripped by fingers ten; And there they lay, all good dead men," was the lyric that greeted the pair as they entered their dorm to hear Peter belt the shanty, "Like break o' day in boozing ken…"
James chimed in, "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!"
"Fifteen men of the whole ship's list!" continued Peter, grabbing another mug he had apparently set aside for Remus.
"Yrhrhrnd," sung James through a mouthful of the beverage, "and a bottle of rum!" he finished with a gulp and a grin, pushing forward a saucer of the alcohol towards Sirius on the ground with his foot.
Remus sighed, taking the rum he was presented with but not drinking it.
"Dead and be damned and the rest gone whist!"
"Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!" belted James, Sirius barking along and dancing around his feet. "Don't worry Rem," he said as Peter sung alone, "we put the potion in so it won't make you sick!"
"…And there they lay, and the soggy skies dripped down in up-staring eyes in murk sunset and foul sunrise…"
"Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!" sung all four, as Remus finally lifted the cup and took a sip. "Why does he even know these muggle songs…"
about an hour and a half and a good several pints of rum later, the shanties had yet to falter. They very fact that Peter was still singing was actually astounding, because, sprawled out on the floor with eyes closed as he was, the boy could've easily been mistaken for sleeping or dead were it not for the fact that his lips—the only moving part of his body—were clearly forming the words of the song that filled the room.
"Now shipmates listen unto me, I'll tell you with my song, of the things that happened to me, when I come home from Hong Kong."
"How… is he still going?" asked Remus, staring at the ceiling from where he was trapped beneath the passed out dog.
"It's his one honest talent. When he gets his hands on ruuum," explained James, his voice slow and his annunciation compromised, "he becomes possessed by muggle pirates…"
"Then away you Santy, my dear Annie, oh, you New York girls, can't you dance the polka!"
"American, muggle pirates," added Remus, his eyes closing.
"Yeah…. S'wicked…"
"Did you know…" started Remus, taking a long pause in which he himself almost forgot the fact, "… that… when pirates didstuff… like… badstuff, the captaincould maroon them… with rum and a cutlass…. All aloooooone…"Sirius, apparently still awake, but showing no signs of movement, howled to punctuate his friend's words.
"Rem…" muttered James as he searched for his glasses, "I don' even know whatuh cutlass is…"
"It's a knife thing!" supplied Peter, his lungs needing a break.
"Yeah… it's a knife thing…"
And as Peter resumed his songs, the three were lulled to sleep where they lay, Remus and Sirius piled at the foot of James' bed, and James over by Peter's trunk with an object sticking uncomfortably into his back which would be revealed to be his missing glasses come morning.
A/N SOOOOO in case you didn't notice, I had nothing planned for this chapter. It was a rather pathetic chapter. In which NOTHING of interest happened… so yeah….. Sea shanties….. PLEASE REVIEW! XOXOXO