Chapter Five: Just Between the Four of Us, Okay?
It's November by the time they realize that there's something wrong with Remus's story. He's out sick again, and while Peter is out fruitlessly practicing his Transfiguration by the lake, Sirius and James are combing the doors, portraits, statues, and tapestries adorning the basement, a large stack of biscuits in each of their hands. "We should probably be checking the walls, too," Sirius remarks. "Sometimes there are doors that are just pretending."
"There's probably a spell for that. We can look into it," agrees James. "Pity that Remus isn't here—he's the best at drawing. When we make the actual map, he'd better be the one to design it."
"You want to surprise him in the Hospital Wing? I mean, judging by what he's said, he's probably sleeping, but we can at least drop some of this food off for him with a note in case he wakes up in the middle of the night or something."
So they set off upstairs, James marking down the layout of the corridors as they go. It's only a quarter past eight in the evening, which means the Hospital Wing is still open to students. Madam Pomfrey must be busy in the office when they get there because she's not in sight—but neither, they find, is Remus: the wing is totally empty of students.
"What?" says James blankly.
They actually go back and inquire to Madam Pomfrey about Remus's whereabouts, loading their pockets up with the biscuits so that she doesn't try to strip them of them. But she hustles them out of there without giving a proper explanation, swearing over their protests that Remus will be back out in the castle, good as new, sometime the next day.
"What?" James repeats as they're walking out of the wing. "If he's not in the Hospital Wing—"
"But whatever's going on with him, Madam Pomfrey is clearly in on it. Where could he be going that the staff all know about and are trying to cover up?"
"It's obvious that he's telling the truth—nobody who's not sick gets as weak and pale and clammy as he is about half of every month. But if he's sick, then why isn't he—?"
They've reached the Entrance Hall, but instead of heading in the direction of the Gryffindor common room, Sirius swings off to the side and pushes open the doors leading down the front steps of the castle. James raises his eyebrows, but Sirius just says, "If there's something going on with Remus, we need to loop Peter in. Come on."
It takes them ten minutes of scouring the edge of the lake to find Peter buried in the grass with his eyebrows furrowed and a snuffbox in his lap that's sprouted a pair of feebly beating wings. "I'm never going to get this," he moans, tucking his wand away, when he spots the two of them. "I'm going to fail all my exams and get kicked out of Hogwarts at the end of the trimester."
"You're not going to flunk," Sirius assures him. "Listen, we have bigger problems."
"Like what? Did something happen? I thought you were going to be scoping out the castle for longer than this."
James shakes his head. "It's Remus. We stopped by the Hospital Wing to drop off biscuits for him, and—he's not in there."
"What do you mean, he's not in there? Where is he if he's not in the Hospital Wing?"
"We don't know. We don't think he's lying to the staff—Madam Pomfrey obviously knew where he was and just wouldn't tell us—but we don't know why they'd cover up his whereabouts, and we don't know where he's going if it's not the Hospital Wing because he's obviously sick, and—"
All the time that James is talking, Peter's shaking his head from side to side. Since he's lying on his stomach in the grass and James is still standing, Peter's got his neck craned up to look James in the eye—but then Peter's eyes widen. He scrambles to his feet, but instead of looking level at James, he keeps his eyes aimed at the sky—and then abruptly starts striding back toward the castle.
"Peter, what's going on?" says Sirius. He reaches down to pick up Peter's abandoned winged snuffbox before scurrying to catch up to Peter and James. "Pete?"
"Where are you going?" James demands.
But Peter entirely ignores the both of them all the way back to the Gryffindor common room and into their dormitory. As the door slams shut behind the three of them, Peter dashes to his schoolbag and searches around in it for a moment before whipping out a long scroll of parchment, an ink pot, and a quill.
"Peter, what the hell?"
Peter ignores this, too. He unrolls the parchment on top of his bed and hastily begins drawing an open grid—six vertical lines and eleven horizontal ones that separate seven columns and twelve rows in all. In the bottom row, he draws an X through the third square from the left and writes a small 2 in its corner. He glances up at the ceiling for a moment, then numbers the second square from the left with a 1, the far left square with a 31, the far right square of the second to last row with a 30—and that's when Sirius realizes that Peter is drawing a calendar.
He goes all the way back to September first before stopping, leaving the top two rows completely blank. "He's disappeared overnight three times, right?" he says—it's the first time Sirius has heard Peter speak since James was explaining the situation outside. "When was the first one? Was it our first weekend here?"
"The Saturday, I think," says Sirius. James shoots him an oblivious look, and Sirius just shrugs at him before looking back at Peter, who's drawing an X through the square for September fourth.
"And what about last month?"
"It was the week before the Slug Club party, which was… two weekends ago? Three weekends ago?"
"On what day of the week?"
"Monday," James supplies, appearing to have given up for now on trying to coax an explanation out of Peter. "Remember? It was right before he told us he's the one who's been sick—we thought it was weird he said that his mum had waited until the weekend had just ended to ask him to come home."
"If it was two weekends ago… no, that can't be it. But if it was three…"
Peter marks October fourth with an X and immediately begins to count squares. Under the X on October fourth, he writes the number 30; on today's square, he writes the number 29.
"The first gap should have been less than that—shouldn't it? But if it's a time of day thing—if it was technically full during the day before the first time, and then at the end of the night the second time, that would mean there were only twenty-nine and a half days in between—maybe even closer to twenty-nine—and that would make sense—wouldn't it?"
"Pete," says James with an air of forced calm, "I hate to break it to you, but nothing you're saying right now is making any sense. Why are you tracking the dates of Remus's disappearances? How does that give us any information about where he's going?"
"It gives us more than enough information," says Peter heavily.
"How? What—?"
"Because it's a full moon tonight."
"Okay, but why—"
"It's a full moon tonight, and it was a full moon both of the last times he left the dormitory. He's a werewolf. Remus is a werewolf."
Sirius freezes. The Remus who insists they all get some studying done every night before bed, the Remus who came to the Slug Club party on Sirius's arm and let Sirius teach him to jitterbug in the middle of Slughorn's office, the Remus who blushes every time Sirius puts an arm around him—a werewolf? Like, a real, live, actual werewolf? "There's no way," he says. "There's absolutely no way."
James adds, "You're Muggle-born. How do you even know about werewolves?"
"There's a section on them in our Defense textbook. I haven't read it yet, but I saw the chapter in the table of contents. And it fits. We know he's sick—you can see just from looking at him that he's sick—but they wouldn't leave him in the Hospital Wing during transformations: I would think werewolves are dangerous, aren't they? He could—"
"Hurt people," says Sirius softly. "Kill them. Bite them, to make them become like him."
"I don't know where they're taking him, but they wouldn't leave him here, that's for sure. The way he acted when he told us he was sick—the way he didn't want us asking questions or trying to visit him—"
"Pete," says James, looking like he can't quite wrap his head around any of this, "calling somebody a werewolf is a really serious accusation, and anyway, we can't ask him about it tonight—he's probably not anywhere in the castle. Let's just sleep on it, okay? If, in the morning, you still think—"
"He's a werewolf," Peter insists. "I mean, we'll talk to him about it—of course we need to talk to him about it—but he's a werewolf, James."
And all Sirius can think about is what his mum and dad call werewolves: part-humans, half-breeds, beasts. He shares a dormitory with the boy—Remus has access to Sirius and Peter and James when they're sleeping. If Remus is liable to maim and kill and turn people when he's transformed, what about during the rest of the month? If he bit Sirius while human, would Sirius become a werewolf, too? If he's got no qualms about murder on the full moon, does he have any reservations about it the rest of the time?
"How could he do this to us?" he breathes. "How could he share a bedroom with us and not tell us something this major?"
"He's probably just scared of how we'll react," says James. "I mean, werewolves don't have a very good reputation, do they?"
With good reason, Sirius thinks, but he doesn't voice it. Werewolf or not, Remus knows what kind of family Sirius comes from and still gave him a chance, and so did James and Peter. Maybe his priorities are all out of whack, but Sirius doesn't want to say or do anything to alienate some of the few real friends he's managed to make in his time at Hogwarts.
Peter gets out his Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook at that moment, but the chapter on werewolves doesn't have much to say about their behavior when they're human. It just confirms the basics that Sirius already knows—werewolf bites to Muggles are usually fatal, but they usually turn wizarding victims into werewolves themselves; the condition has no cure or treatment; and werewolves are considered by the public to be extremely dangerous. Most of the chapter just talks about what to do if you're confronted by a werewolf—how to distinguish them from ordinary wolves and spells that can deter them from attacking you.
James and Peter stay up late into the night talking about it, but Sirius bows out of the dormitory pretty quickly—he doesn't really trust himself right now to say anything to anybody who knows about Remus. Instead, he races down to the common room and goes to sit by the first familiar face he sees: Marlene's.
The boys' relationships with the girls are a weird thing. With the exception of Sirius and Emmeline's friendship, as well as the study thing that Remus and Alice have going on, Sirius wouldn't call any of them close—they just hang out tangentially when they all eat together at meals, walk to and from classes together, or sometimes sit as a group in the common room in the evenings. But all of the conversations Sirius has had that made him feel like he belonged here at Hogwarts have been with the other blokes or, sometimes, with Emmeline: Marlene and Mary and Alice are more just… around.
Marlene's sitting alone on the floor near the portrait hole, and Sirius plunks down next to her and folds his legs. "Where's your shadow?" he asks by way of greeting.
Only startled for a moment, Marlene looks up from her textbook and gives him a big smile. "I made her go hang out with Alice and Emmeline," she says. "They're in the library, I think. I'm not saying I'm sick of being around Mary—she's the best friend I've made here, and I love being near her—but I want to encourage her to branch out a little, you know? It wouldn't be good for her to spend every waking second with me and never talk to anybody else."
"You can send her our way sometimes, if you like," Sirius offers. "Come with her, if you want. I don't see enough of you two—or Abbott or Evans, for that matter."
"Yeah, well, I don't think you're going to get very far with Lily," says Marlene, wrinkling her nose, "but the rest of us should do more stuff together. We should have, like, a swap day."
"A swap day?"
"Yeah, like—there's four of us and four of you, right? We can see how far you get with Mary. I kind of want to find out why Alice likes Lupin so much. Potter can do something with Emmeline, and Alice can give Pettigrew a hand with—any class, really; Pett's not very good in any of them, is he?"
He tries to push down the nauseous bubble in his stomach that arises at the mention of Remus. "Pett? You mean Pete?"
"No, I mean Pett," Marlene says with a grin. "Short for Pettigrew."
"And what about me and James and Remus?"
"Uh… well, Lupin can be Lupe. Potter can't be Pott—that's too similar to Pett—and I'm not calling him Jim; I hate the name Jim. He can be Jay. I'm still figuring you out, though," she informs him, poking him in the chest. "The name 'Sirius Black' doesn't really lend itself to any good nicknames."
He opts not to tell him about Regulus's childhood nickname for him—"Sissi." He doesn't think he wants anybody but Em to know about that one. "A swap day sounds fun. Let's do it. This weekend, maybe? It's not like any of us is doing anything on Saturday."
"Sure. I'll let the girls know. Where are the blokes, anyway? Aren't you usually all holed up together in your dormitory doing whatever it is you do in there by this time of night?"
Whoops. When he came down here, Sirius hadn't thought far enough ahead to come up with a good excuse. "Thought I'd broaden my horizons a little tonight," he says vaguely, and Marlene seems to accept this. "Hey, d'you want to play wizard's chess or something? I'm sick of studying."
"Sure—let me just run upstairs and grab Alice's chess set." Sirius makes to follow her as she gets up, but she grins and says, "You stay right here. Boys can't get up the staircase to the girls' dormitories."
After the first three games (which Sirius loses spectacularly), they're joined by Alice, who crawls through the portrait hole and settles in next to them. "I'm surprised you're not still down there with them," Marlene remarks as she's setting up the board for a fourth game. "You're more gung-ho on studying than either Mary or Emmeline is."
"Yes, well, I finished my essay first, and I was worried you might be a bit lonely up here—but it looks like you've got that covered, Black. Where are the other boys, anyway?"
"What, I can't come down to the common room to hang out with my best girl?"
Blushing, Marlene says, "Please. It's a valid question. And anyway, isn't your best girl Emmeline?"
"Today it's you, tomorrow it's Em—on Saturday, it'll be Macdonald."
"Since when do you have plans with Mary?" asks Alice.
Marlene and Sirius look at each other and snicker.
By the time Sirius goes back into the dormitory at eleven o'clock, he feels a little more human (no pun intended). Marlene headed up to her dormitory at freakin' nine-thirty—she really wasn't kidding when she told Sirius that she's early to bed and early to rise—but Alice, and later Em and Mary, kept Sirius company for a while longer downstairs before he admitted to himself that he'd put off seeing James and Peter again for long enough.
They both flinch a little and break off their conversation when Sirius opens the door. He's already decided, though, that his best course of action is to pretend like everything's normal, so he just grins at them and says, "I hope you both feel pretty good about the girls because Marlene and I have a proposition for you."
He can push off his feelings about Remus while he's absorbed in conversation, but they come creeping back when they finally all retire to bed—around two in the morning, tonight, without Remus there looking sickly enough to guilt James into making everybody go to bed at a reasonable time. His reaction is visceral: his heart is thumping in his chest, and his hands are hot and sweaty, and he feels afraid—not even of the future, but of the past. What if Remus had bitten him in his sleep before Sirius knew to avoid him? What if Remus has been putting on a front this whole time when he's really as murderous as any werewolf?
The next morning, James and Peter are sitting and chatting, fully dressed, on Peter's bed by the time Sirius wakes up. "Morning," he grunts at them as he rips open the bed hangings and starts rummaging through his trunk for clean pairs of robes and underwear.
"So, um," says Peter, "James and I were thinking we would skip breakfast so we can stop by the Hospital Wing. If Remus—really is a werewolf, he should be changed back by now, and—we wanted to talk to him directly. Do you—d'you want to come?"
He really, really doesn't—he just wants to go back to class, avoid this whole mess, and never have to talk to Remus again—but that isn't an option, and it'll look bad if they go down there without him, so he says, "Sure. Let me just get dressed first. If we're going to skip breakfast, do we still have any biscuits left over from last night?"
Once Sirius is clothed and has crammed a couple of biscuits in his mouth, the three of them head downstairs with their wands and schoolbags in tow. James and Peter fill the air with idle small talk, which is more than fine by Sirius—it leaves him free to try to strategize what the hell he's going to tell Remus when he sees him—but by the time they reach the Hospital Wing, Sirius still hasn't got the first idea what he's supposed to say.
Remus is actually there this time, curled up asleep on one of the cots with a tiny bit more color in his cheeks than he had yesterday, and Sirius is hit with a rush of—something. He just—he doesn't look like a killer, lying there asleep and vulnerable: he just looks like a scared kid, Sirius's scared kid friend. The Blacks seem to be wrong so far about Muggle-borns—is it possible that they're wrong about werewolves, too?
Madam Pomfrey hurries over and starts telling them off, but James says, "Please. We know why he's here. We just—we just want to talk to him for a few minutes before we go to class."
Pomfrey narrows her eyes, but something in her seems to give way, and she backs off to let them into the wing. Peter marches right up to Remus's bedside, sits down about halfway along it, and gently and slowly shakes Remus's shoulder. Remus opens his eyes. "Hey, buddy," says Peter. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm—it's—what is this?"
Peter looks back helplessly at Sirius and James, who are both hovering on their feet near the foot of the bed. When they don't make any move to help him out, he looks back at Remus and says, "We, uh… James and Sirius tried to come visit you last night, but you weren't here. I saw the moon, Rem. We made a calendar. You're a—werewolf, aren't you?"
Remus stares blindly at Peter for a moment, then looks over to Sirius, who hasn't got the foggiest clue what to say to him. "I'll have to ask Madam Pomfrey to start shutting the hangings on an empty bed every full moon," he says in a dull monotone, "so that people who come looking don't get suspicious." And then tears promptly begin to leak out of his eyes.
"Hey," says Peter with so much softness that Sirius feels uncomfortable looking in on it. "Come here."
He leans down and presses his chest flat against Remus's so that he can pull him into a hug. After a few seconds of this, Remus reaches up to wrap his arms hesitantly around Peter's waist. It's nothing like the showy embraces they've been giving each other in public or even like the way James keeps leaning up against each of them in the dormitory—this is private and personal and tender.
James steps forward, too, and rests one of his hands on Remus's shoulder, rubbing it gently. "We're here for you, okay? We'll do whatever you need us to do."
Peter lets go of Remus now, and Sirius is relieved to find that Remus is no longer crying. "I just need help hiding it," Remus whispers. "I'm not… I didn't really think through any good excuses. I mean, if you lot found out within three months—?"
"We'll tell people you're sick," says James, "but we won't say with what. We can tell people you're up in the dormitory during your transformations so that they don't go looking for you down here."
Peter adds, "We'll keep you safe, Rem. We know you're not…"
"I've never hurt anybody. I swear I haven't. I can't remember anything from any of my transformations—all I know is that I black out and wake up covered in gashes; I think I scratch myself because there's nobody else around that I can go after—but my parents used to keep me chained up, and Madam Pomfrey takes me to this boarded-up shack in Hogsmeade. There's a passageway to get into it underneath the Whomping Willow."
"The Whomping Willow?" says James, surprised. "How do you get under that thing without getting beaten to a pulp?"
"There's a knot you can press with a stick or whatever to get it to stop moving," Remus explains. He's still talking quietly, but his voice is a little steadier now.
"I'm so sorry this happened to you," Peter says. "How long have you been—? I mean, when did you first—?"
"I was four," Remus mumbles. "I don't really remember getting bitten—I can only really ever remember being…" He swats at his eyes again, looking frustrated. "Anyway, I didn't think I'd be able to come to Hogwarts at all, but Dumbledore talked to my parents and had the Whomping Willow planted for me, so that I could—so that they'd have somewhere to put me during my transformations. I don't know what I'm going to do after school—most werewolves can't find jobs anywhere—but…"
He looks up at Sirius now with pleading eyes, and Sirius feels a wave of horror wash over himself. Four-year-old Remus certainly didn't ask for this. Remus never wanted any of this.
"Remus…"
"Sirius," says Remus, once again in a whisper.
Peter and James are looking at Sirius rather nervously, but Sirius only has eyes for Remus. "I'll protect you," he mutters. "I swear it. I've got you, Lupe."
He crosses to Remus's bedside. "Budge up," he tells Peter, who stands up awkwardly as Sirius lies down on top of the sheets and puts his arms around Remus's shoulders. He doesn't really have any more words: he just lies there curled up around Remus for a long time, pressing his forehead to Remus's temple, his heart beating double time. Eventually, he hears James and Peter starting to make small talk with each other somewhere in the background, but Sirius couldn't tell you a word they're saying.
He and Remus don't say anything to each other, there in the rickety cot in the Hospital Wing, but when Sirius finally pulls away ten minutes before class is slated to start, he feels like he's about twice as close to Remus emotionally as he was just twelve hours ago. "If you're not out of here by lunchtime, I'll come back," he promises. There's phlegm in his throat clouding his words, and he clears it, but he still feels like he's in a fog.
"You, uh—you sure?" says James behind him, but Sirius doesn't turn around, instead looking Remus straight in the eyes. "I mean, we skipped breakfast—you'll starve."
"I'll live. I'll see you soon, okay, Moony?"
"Moony?" repeats Remus with wide eyes.
He doesn't know where the nickname came from, but now that it's slipped out, it feels like it fits. "Yeah," he says. "Just between the four of us, okay?"
"Okay," Remus echoes, and when he smiles—even though it's timid—Sirius feels for the first time like everything's really going to be all right.