Disclaimer: Characters and situations all belong to JK Rowlings, not me. Caius the raven belongs to Dragonelle, who has kindly allowed me to borrow him (Vesta McGonagall is hers too). She also owns the Remus-in-the-closet incident, Caligula Snape, and young Sirius's boggart. In addition, I got the name Polaris Black for Sirius's sister from someone else's fanfic, but I can't remember whose (her character, however, belongs entirely to me and Dragonelle).
Posted by: Elspeth (also known as L Squared)
Ships: Professor Sinistra and an adorable black dog, hopefully hints at a future Snape/McGonagall
Chapter Two: In Which Lupin Teaches the Fourth-years about Boggarts and Snape and McGonagall have a Civil Conversation.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the student body was delighted by the reappearance of "Professor Lupin." Those students in their third year and up remembered him fondly as one of the only DaDA teachers in recent years who hadn't been either totally ineffectual or secretly working for Voldemort (or, in Quirell's case, both), and the new first and second years seemed to find his lycanthropy to be more cool and exciting than frightening (once Professor McGonagall had put a stop to the rumor, most likely originating with the Weasley twins, that he ate any student who failed an exam—the new, updated version that had replaced it was that he fed them to Snuffles).
"Snuffles" himself was fast on his way to becoming the unofficial Hogwarts mascot. The Gryffindors (those who didn't know his true identity) had adopted him as a sort of house-wide pet, and had ceased to wonder exactly how he kept getting into their common room (and the kitchen, and Lupin's DaDA classroom, and just about everywhere else in the castle except Snape's dungeon). The other professors had grown used to Padfoot's presence in the teacher's lounge, where he curled up in front of the fire and silently listened in on their conversations—and engaged in shameless sucking up to Claire Sinistra, who turned out to have an unsuspected weakness for dogs.
" 'Ows my widdle Snuffle-wuffles, is Remus taking good care of you?" she was cooing one evening when Remus entered the room. "Remus, his fur is all matted and his toe nails need clipping." She returned to rubbing Padfoot's belly and playing with his ears. "Oh, do you like that, baby? Yes, you're such a good doggie."
"You're disgusting," Remus informed his friend as he settled into the next chair with a stack of lesson plans. If it were possible for dogs to smirk, Padfoot was doing so.
Remus couldn't help smiling as he listened to the regular whump-whump-whump of Padfoot's tail on the flagstones. It was good to see his friend happy for a change. He had seen the scars on Sirius's wrists, gruesome remnants of his time in Azkaban, heard the moans and cries in the middle of the night from the nightmares that he later denied having, noticed the difference between the old hyperactive and over-confident Sirius and the new quiet, brooding one, and he couldn't help but worry.
In a way, it was a relief to see Padfoot up to his old tricks again, though he wished his old friend would employ his "I'm-pathetic-and-neglected-and-starving-and-no-one-ever-feeds-me-so-please-give-me-that-bowl-of-ice-cream/slice-of-roastbeef/mug-of-butterbeer-or-I'll-shrivel-up-and-die" look in the Great Hall at mealtimes a bit more often. If nothing else, it would make Sinistra stop berating him for not feeding his "pwecious Snuffle-wuffles" properly.
"If I hear her cooing over that wretched animal one more time, I am going to become ill." Severus Snape muttered to himself, as he exited his chair near the fire to switch to one in the far corner of the room, as far away from "Snuffles" and Sinistra as was humanly possible.
"For once, I can sympathize with you," Minerva McGonagall muttered back. Much as she hated to agree with Snape about anything, she never had been able to bring herself to like dogs. "I suppose that monstrosity of Lupin's does have his good points, though. At least he keeps Sibyl away."
"Thank God for that," Snape agreed. "I just know she's dying to tell me that my future is full of agony and misfortune and that my aura is sinister and dark. I'm tempted to add a little something to her tealeaves. I wonder if her "inner eye" would be able to detect that."
"Find something unpleasant and untraceable but nonfatal, and I'd be tempted to help you. My fourth years always come in traumatized after her lessons. I believe last class she predicted that Ginny Weasley would "have a nasty fall" during the first quiddich match. The poor child will probably be so apprehensive, she'll fall off her own broom and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"Ah, yes, that would be a terrible shame." Snape's tone was suspiciously dry.
"Why Severus, you sound almost cheerful at the prospect. Are you implying that your house can't win unless the Gryffindor keeper is out of action?"'
"Hardly," Snape looked affronted. Quidditch was a continuing sore point between the two of them, due largely to the fact that Slytherin hadn't won a game against Gryffindor since Harry Potter had arrived at Hogwarts. Though Snape, unlike Minerva, had never been a player himself (she didn't think he'd so much as touched a broom since the day he'd gotten his apparition license) he threw himself into directing the Slytherin quidditch team with the same enthusiastic partisanship he displayed in all aspects of inter-house competition. "We smashed Hufflepuff last week two-hundred and ten to thirty."
"Hufflepuff has a new captain and an inexperienced seeker. And their two best chasers graduated last year." She let the statement speak for itself.
Snape snarled—though, admittedly, in a rather half-hearted manner—and changed the subject to the upcoming Halloween ball, which he had again been pressed into chaperoning. His traditional annual attempt to convince Dumbledore to cancel the affair, or at least excuse him from attending, had predictably met with failure.
By the time he somewhat abruptly excused himself to prepare for the next morning's seventh-year potions class, they had been conversing, with only a handful of mild insults exchanged, for nearly ten minutes. It had to be some sort of record.
^_~
When the Gryffindor fourth-years entered the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom the next afternoon, they found Professor Lupin standing beside his desk, one hand resting on top of a large wooden trunk, which was rocking back and forth slightly in a disturbing manner.
"What's in there?" Latoya Jordan asked somewhat nervously. With an older brother who was a close friend of the Weasley twins, she had learned to be wary of unidentified things in moving boxes.
Lupin smiled. "Don't worry, Latoya, it's doesn't bite. It's only a boggart."
Most of the students were not exactly reassured by this news, though Colin Creevy looked positively ecstatic with anticipation. His ever-present camera was already out and waiting on his desk, ready to record his classmates' (and his own) greatest fears for posterity. Someday, that child would make a fortune as a photographer for The Daily Prophet.
"Normally, boggarts are part of the third year curriculum, but I understand that you didn't cover them last year, so when Madame Pinch found this one lurking behind a set of shelves in the back of the restricted section, I thought I'd bring him in for you to have a go at.
"Now, before we start, can anyone here tell me a little about boggarts?"
Ginny Weasley's hand immediately went up.
"Yes, Ginny"
"Boggarts are shape changers," Ginny announced. "They live in dark places like closets and the spaces underneath beds, and they turn into whatever they think will scare you the most."
"Exactly right. Thank you, Ginny." Remus smiled approvingly at Ginny. The youngest Weasley was one of his best students (her detailed and enthusiastically researched essay on how to kill werewolves had actually given him nightmares). "Boggarts assume the shape of their victim's greatest fear, and thus they appear to each person in a different form. This places them at a disadvantage when dealing with a group of people. Can anyone tell me why? Colin?"
"Because we're all going to be scared of different things, and it won't know which one to pick?"
"Precisely. A boggart confronted with several wizards at once becomes confused. Should he be a mummy or a manticore? A blast-ended skrewt or Professor Snape?" There was a brief flurry of giggles as everyone recalled the infamous tale of Neville's Snape-in-drag boggart from two years ago. "He becomes frantic and begins to panic—and occasionally turns into some quite amusing things by mistake.
"And amusement, of course, is the secret to defeating a boggart. Boggarts, like their cousins the dementors, thrive on terror, and laughter is the antithesis of fear. When faced with a boggart, the best strategy is to use the riddikulatum charm, which forces it from a frightening shape into a humorous one.
"To invoke the spell, you point your wand at the boggart and say—repeat after me please—riddikulus."
"Riddikulus," everyone echoed.
"Good," Lupin said. "Remember to stress the second syllable. However, saying the charm is the easy part. As you say it, you have to picture in your mind the form you want the boggart to assume. Remember that however frightening it may appear, it is not actually a snake or a mummy or whatever it appears to be, only an imitation. If you react to it as you would to a real mummy, it feeds off your fear and will only grow larger and stronger. Yes, Colin?" The boy had his hand up and was practically twitching with excitement.
"Can I go first?"
"Ah, a volunteer. Wonderful. Yes, of course you may. Come up to the front of the classroom please, Colin. Get your wand ready. Now, before I open the trunk, what is it that you find the most frightening?"
"Clowns," Colin answered promptly.
"Clowns?" Ginny asked incredulously. "How can you be scared of clowns? They're supposed to be funny."
"They're not funny, they're demonic and creepy, with their horrid painted on smiles… Haven't you ever seen Stephen King's IT?"
"That's a muggle movie, isn't it?"
"Actually, a lot of students with muggle parents have boggarts inspired by muggle horror films," Lupin said. "There was a student in my year at Hogwarts whose boggart turned into a brain eating pod-person from outer space. Anyway, to get back on topic, how would you go about making a clown look less threatening?"
"I would wash its make-up off," Colin answered instantly. "It's the fake, white faces that make them scary."
"Alright then, when I open this trunk, the boggart will emerge and assume the form of a clown. I want you to cast the riddikulatum charm at it and visualize the clown drenched with a bucket of water, with all of its face paint washed off."
Remus lifted the trunk's lid, and out jumped a fully costumed circus clown, fully wigged and painted. Colin recoiled back from it, then brandished his wand at it, stammering "Riddikulus."
A red bucket full of water appear out of thin air, upending itself over the clown's head and drenching it completely, leaving the make-up running in colored streaks down its face. As the students began to laugh, Remus called John Spinnet forward to take Collin's place. With a pop, the bedraggled clown became a tall, white skeleton, which began to walk towards John menacingly, before—"Riddikulus"—falling to pieces with a loud clatter.
The students had just humiliated both Ginny Weasley's basilisk and Latoya Jordan's giant tarantula (which she tangled up in its own web), when the classroom door creaked open and Snuffles poked his head in, exactly as he had done dozens of times before. The tied up spider, rolling across the room to escape the students' shrieks of laughter, came to halt in front of the black dog and changed into the tall, hooded figure of a dementor.
Every hair on end, Snuffles flattened himself to the floor in a posture of abject terror. Waves of coldness seemed to roll of the cloaked form as it advanced on the whimpering canine, who was frozen with fear.
Remus stepped forward, blocking the dementor's path. It flickered indecisively for a moment, then changed shape again to become a full moon, hovering in the air on level with his face. As Snuffles fled to safety beneath his desk, Remus, wand at the ready, forced the boggart back into the trunk and slammed the lid.
"Right. I think that's enough boggart for now," he said, flipping the latch closed. "You can come out now, Snuffles, it's gone." He turned to face the class, who had gone pale from the chilling effect of the dementor—even an imitation dementor could be emotionally draining, as his sessions with Harry two years ago had shown him only too well. "Well," he began, "that was unexpected. Class will be ending a little early today. I want you all to go down to the kitchen and get the house elves to give you some chocolate; you'll probably need it after that little scene."
Most of the students began to drift out of the room, too shaken to be as pleased as they would normally have been about getting out of class early. Ginny, however, stayed behind, walking over to where Remus was crouched down beside his desk.
"Is Snuffles okay?" she asked, as he attempted, without success, to get the trembling dog to emerge from beneath his desk.
"He's just scared," Remus reassured her. "He'll be fine. You ought to go to the kitchens with the others now and get that chocolate." Ginny had been sitting up in the front row of desks, as she always did, and had been closer to the boggart/dementor than anyone else except him and Padfoot. She looked remarkably calm, considering, but her face was unusually pale, freckles standing out starkly.
"I will, I just wanted to ask something about the boggart first. Who's was it? It wasn't mine, 'cause mine's a basilisk," she shuddered slightly as she said the word, "and it wasn't yours, 'cause yours is a moon. So whose was it? Was it Snuffles'? I didn't know boggarts could work on animals."
"They can if the animal is sufficiently intelligent, like a kneezle or a Great Raven." Or an animagus, but he couldn't tell her that. Ginny was more than capable of putting two and two together, and while she would never intentionally blow Sirius's cover (once the situation had been explained to her), the knowledge would only put her at risk, from the ministry's Hit Wizards if nothing else.
"Or a really smart dog too, I guess," Ginny said, bending down to pat Padfoot on the head. He shivered and didn't respond, staying curled up under the desk in a defensive ball. "Poor baby, the nasty boggart really scared you, didn't he. Too bad dogs can't do the riddikulatum charm."
Once the door closed behind her, Remus returned to the task of extricating Padfoot from his hiding place.
"Come on, Padfoot, snap out of it. It's okay." No response.
"Sirius, if you don't come out from under that desk right now, I'll tell Severus that you're scared of boggarts."
The sharpness seemed to work where coaxing hadn't. Padfoot's head emerged cautiously from beneath the big piece of furniture, followed by the rest of his body. There was a shimmer, and then Sirius was sitting on the floor by the desk, his back against the wood and his knees drawn up to his chest.
"Sorry I buggered up your lesson, Moony. I didn't mean to… I didn't know…" He broke off, then made a bitter, half laughing sound. "I guess I kinda freaked out there, didn't I?"
"No more than I did the first time I saw a boggart. At least you didn't lock yourself in the closet."
One corner of Sirius's mouth actually twitched into something close to a smile. "It took forever to get you to come out of there. We were afraid we'd have to get Filch to come break the door in." The twisted sort-of-smile flickered momentarily into a reasonable facsimile of his old grin. "'Least your boggart wasn't as humiliating as Snape's."
Remus felt his lips twitching at the memory, though from an adult perspective it wasn't quite so much amusing as it was disquieting—that third-year Dark Arts class had been his only exposure to Caligula Snape, but even as a thirteen year old, he'd been very, very glad his parents weren't anything like that, and didn't have any trouble imagining why anyone who'd been raised by Snape senior would fear him.
"His wasn't nearly so interesting as yours was," Remus reminded his friend, trying to dispel the lingering bits of that haunted look in his eyes. "I don't think Professor Bale knew quite what to make of it. His background in science fiction B movies was a little lacking."
"I guess I've grown up a little since then." Again that weary half smile. "You know you're getting old when you can't laugh your fears away anymore."
"If you're old, what does that make me?"
"Seeing as you're three months older, bloody ancient."
"Bastard." Remus reached down and hauled his friend to his feet. It as easier than it should have been, even considering his lycanthropy-enhanced strength. "Come on, change back before someone sees you, so I can drag you up to my room by the collar and shove chocolate down your throat."
^_~
Next up, Chapter Three: In Which There is Pondering on Scars and Nightmares, and Remus Borrows a Potion
Y'all get serious angst, severe emotional trauma (bad, bad puns, shoot me now) and an introduction to Snape's familiar (sorry, "Pawn to Queen" fans, it's not a snake—but it can talk).