Chapter 4 - Rendezvous
The day couldn't pass fast enough for James Potter. A private, candlelight dinner with Lily! And she seemed to approve! Winning the house-cup and being appointed head boy and both on his birthday couldn't have pleased James any more than the outcome of that morning. When the hour finally came, he was excited and flushed, nevertheless he looked quite dashing in his ocean blue dress robes. Fortunately, Remus had been able to concoct a potion to change his hair back to their usual midnight black.
James finally left the dorm followed by cheers and 'good luck' wishes from his friends.
Only minutes after, Peter left the dorm to meet up with Melissa Trotter. After their being matched up in the charm she had sweetly asked him to come and study with her in the library, and though Peter had a sneaking suspicion that her reason for it was to press him for details on the nature of the relationship between James and Lily, he'd agreed to go over their history essays together.
Both of their friends gone, Sirius soon noticed the guarded looks Remus was shooting him every now and then. In all the excitement of the day he'd forgotten the suspicious glance at the breakfast table, but now he came to wonder what was buggering his friend.
At first, he decided to ignore it, but soon he found that Remus' repeated silence was making him quite nervous. When he could take it no longer, he turned to the other boy, matching their eyes levelly.
"Remus, what..."
He didn't even have to finish the sentence before Remus exploded. "Sirius, have you changed any of the other questionnaires?"
Sirius pondered this for a moment. Why would Remus ask him such a question? "Of course I haven't. Okay, so I've read a few, and I probably shouldn't have done that, but..."
"Did you read mine?"
Remus seemed so agitated, but Sirius couldn't quite figure out why that should be. "Of course not. You should know I wouldn't. I admit that I've read Lily's, but only so that I'd know whether James would need friendly comforting or friendly encouragement after the charm. I wouldn't read yours, or James' or Peter's. Wouldn't be right, kind of. Besides, we know almost everything about each other, I could simply ask you if I wanted to know what you'd written."
Remus was still staring at him, expression as unreadable as it had been that morning at the breakfast table.
"What, you don't believe me? Fine!"
Sirius jumped up from his bed with an impulse, and strode towards the door, face set. He wasn't used to his friends not believing what he said. Sure, there had been some disagreements within their little circle, the worst being roughly three months ago after the incident with Snape, but they'd never mistrusted each other.
"Sirius, wait! It's just..."
But Sirius didn't wait to hear what it was just. He stomped off through the common room, waving off questions about James and Lily. Remus didn't follow him.
***
Some minutes later, Sirius found himself somewhere about the Eastern wing of the castle. He knew he was near the Ravenclaw common room, though he didn't know where exactly it was.
Sirius Black had a very hot temper, a temper that had brought him into more trouble than he cared to remember, but just as quick as he was to explode was his calming afterwards, and he never held a grudge for more than half an hour. Thus, he was quite willing to go back to their dorm and sort things out with Remus - pity was, since the staircases had shifted behind him he couldn't really determine how to come back, as he hadn't followed his own steps due to his anger at being mistrusted, and by Remus of all people!
Looking for signs that would remind him of the way back, Sirius suddenly stopped in his tracks as he heard a very soft, very clear voice, singing a beautiful but mourning song. Entranced by the sound that seemed not quite human but more ethereal, he followed it until he faced a heavy oak door with many woodcarvings upon it.
The voice sounded even clearer now, and Sirius was shook with a remorse the reason for which he could not place. It was as if an age-old grief was flooding through him, a grief not his own, yet so very real it almost turned his stomach.
Unsure of how to proceed, Sirius finally gathered his wits and very softly gave a short knock to the door. He knew the person - whoever she was - inside would probably want to be left alone, but he simply had to know who was singing these wonderful and so tremendously sad tunes.
The door opened by itself, and at the same time, the voice inside stopped singing.
Taking the opening door as an invitation, Sirius stepped into the room. There, by the tower's window, sat a woman, skin white as porcelain and translucent, clad in a dress that had once been black, but was now a shimmering, transparent grey. She wore a grey veil, but beneath it Sirius could see her large, black eyes, darkened even further with sorrow.
Sirius knew the woman, though he had never seen her. She was the Grey Lady, the Ravenclaw Ghost. Ravenclaws guarded her like a secret, but every now and then one would overhear them talking about her in hushed voices, when telling the new first years about her, for example. She was clad in grey, they said, as she had died wearing mourning clothes, and a veil covered her face. And, the pupils from old wizarding families would add, though their grandfathers and -mothers and their parents before them had been to Hogwart's, no one had ever heard the Grey Lady speak.
As Sirius stepped into the room, he thought he saw the Lady's eyes light up for a moment, but a second after they were mournful again, and she turned her face away from him towards the window.
"I'm sorry," Sirius muttered, and turned to go, but her upraised hand urged him to come nearer.
Stepping closer to her slight form, he noticed a piece of very thick parchment laying in front of her, and next to it an old-fashioned quill and inkpot, a burnt-down candle, a piece of sealing wax and a signet ring which embedded a rose.
Unsure of what to do he looked at the lady, but she urged him towards the letter. Carefully observing her reaction, he picked it up, and when she showed no sign of disapproval, he read the faded ink on the old parchment. It was hard to decipher the old writing and archaic language, but he finally translated the first paragraph:
To Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, February Fourteenth 1493.
Dearest friend. I cannot wait any longer. I have been sitting here in this room every night since the Eve of All-Hallows, when we were supposed to meet, but you never showed. Should this letter ever reach you --
He did not read on, but instead turned to the lady.
"You... you know that Near... that Sir Nicholas died on October 31st that year you wanted to meet?" he asked, delicately. Nearly Headless Nick never failed to boast with the fact that he had died on the 'day of the dead'. The Lady nodded her head, slowly, then, her gaze never leaving his, outstretched her arms. The silvery marks on her forearms gave Sirius the answer he'd been looking for.
"You didn't know when you wrote the letter?"
The Lady shook her head.
"And you... you..." he indicated her wrists, as not to offend her by saying it out loud. Slowly, she nodded again.
"But, you do know that Sir Nicholas is here in the castle?"
Once more, she nodded, but now it seemed almost with an air of desperation that she did it, and again she indicated the letter.
Sirius thought about everything he knew about ghosts, then asked her: "You can't leave this part of the castle until that letter is delivered, right?"
Still with the air of a lady, but non-the-less seeming desperate she nodded her head.
"But why hasn't anyone found this letter before in such a long time?"
She indicated the door, then the date on the letter. Sirius nodded thoughtfully.
"I'll deliver the letter for you."
The expression she now showed was one of utter thankfulness, and a glimmer of hope appeared in her eyes beneath the veil.
"I'll... I'll come back to you when I've found him. I'll find him, don't worry, Milady. I'll be back."
Quickly, he left the room, the letter in hand. He passed a couple of portraits, but their inhabitants were obviously off somewhere else, so he couldn't ask for direction. Just when he was about to give up, a fifth year he knew from the Hogwart's Express entered the hallway from another passage. She pointed him to the right stairway willingly, and Sirius set off in a hurry. If what he'd presumed from the 'conversation' with the Grey Lady, he had only until midnight to find Sir Nick, or the door would be closed again, and he had no idea where he should find the Lady then.
Thinking the Marauder's Map would be helpful, he went back to the Gryffindor dorm, quite forgetting the disagreement he'd had with Remus. Besides, Remus was as incapable of being resentful towards his friends as he was himself.
In the dorm, he found Remus still sitting on the bed, a thoughtful expression on his face as he looked at the small, heart-shaped card he'd received at this morning's Love Match spell. Sirius filed the thought into his mind. He'd have to ask Remus about that later. For now, he related in short his meeting with the Ravenclaw ghost to his friend while he extracted their precious map from its hiding place.
Bare three minutes later, two boys could be seen scampering along the corridors of the Gryffindor wing, excitedly following the trail of the old noble ghost. Their path led them to the dungeons, a wide complex that spread beneath all of Hogwart's. The Marauders knew this part of the castle well, many an adventure had been to explore these corridors with their old, eerie silence, their ancient stone carvings, and their instruments of torture and death, still displayed as they were hundreds of years ago.
They finally found the ghost they were seeking in one of those chambers of torture, sitting on a tree stump, resentfully eying a large axe that lay beside it, glimmering with a silver light that came not from the torches in the dungeon but from the old blood turned ghost upon it. The same silvery substance could be seen all around the stump, luminescent in the candlelight.
Sir Nick was muttering to himself angrily. "Couldn't do a straight job of it, now could they. It can't be *that* hard to sharpen an axe, can it? Bloody rich enough to use a new one, anyway, but *no*. Use the old blunt one. Sir Nick won't mind being a *nearly* headless ghost. Ha!"
At this, he noticed the two boys standing in the room with him, averting their eyes from the axe and the blood delicately.
"Now, and what would *you* two want here at this time, he? Out of bed and everything."
"It's not bedtime yet!" Sirius argued promptly.
"We have a message for you, sir." Remus produced, much more helpful to the task at hand.
"Who from?" Sir Nick asked, bewildered. Ghosts could move so swiftly through the castle that messages seemed to most like a waste of time, and they hardly had any correspondence outside the castle, seeing that most people they'd known weren't only dead, but fallen to dust several hundred years ago.
"The Grey Lady, sir, the Ravenclaw ghost," Sirius said eagerly.
"Ha!" Nearly Headless Nick exclaimed once more. "She's bloody late with that. Went over there to speak with her plenty of times in the past hundreds of years. She won't answer me."
"I don't really think she can, sir," Sirius said carefully and respectfully. "I still think you'd be interested in this particular letter."
He produced the old parchment carefully, aware of its age. The ghost's eyes lighted up in wonder and awe as he saw the date.
"Blimey," he said. "No wonder she never answered me! Had her tongue cut out, poor thing, protecting me of all people!"
Sirius and Remus both remained delicately silent.
"But I don't understand. I've been to that room often a times, right after I came back as a ghost. Wouldn't open, nor let me pass through the door or the walls."
"I think," Sirius offered, "it's only open on Valentine's Day, for some reason."
"Blimey!" Sir Nick exclaimed, once more. "Of course! Oh, I've been a bloody imbecile to not think of that. Come, my friends, we'll go there right now!"
And with the air of a noble of the elder days, Sir Nick lead the way through the dungeons, careful not to sift through any walls or locked doors, yet so swiftly that the boys had a hard time following.
When they arrived at the room where Sirius had found the Ravenclaw ghost, they were both panting. Again, the door had opened on it's own, but this time the Lady sprang (or flew) up from her chair in delight as her eyes settled on Sir Nick and the old letter in his hand.
The two Gryffindor boys smiled at both of them, then decided to retreat as to leave the two ghosts to themselves, but stopped as the Grey Lady once more indicated Sirius to stay.
"I know not how to thank you two!" Sir Nick said, regarding the boys with a look of pure glee.
But it was the Grey Lady who did so. Suddenly, the air seemed to crackle with energy, as Sirius recognized the fair voice he'd heard sing earlier. The veil of the Lady never moved, so she couldn't have spoken them with her lips.
"Look in your right pocket, Sirius Black."
Then, the two ghosts turned to one another, and Sirius and Remus knew they were dismissed, so they quickly scrambled out and back to their own dorm.
The day couldn't pass fast enough for James Potter. A private, candlelight dinner with Lily! And she seemed to approve! Winning the house-cup and being appointed head boy and both on his birthday couldn't have pleased James any more than the outcome of that morning. When the hour finally came, he was excited and flushed, nevertheless he looked quite dashing in his ocean blue dress robes. Fortunately, Remus had been able to concoct a potion to change his hair back to their usual midnight black.
James finally left the dorm followed by cheers and 'good luck' wishes from his friends.
Only minutes after, Peter left the dorm to meet up with Melissa Trotter. After their being matched up in the charm she had sweetly asked him to come and study with her in the library, and though Peter had a sneaking suspicion that her reason for it was to press him for details on the nature of the relationship between James and Lily, he'd agreed to go over their history essays together.
Both of their friends gone, Sirius soon noticed the guarded looks Remus was shooting him every now and then. In all the excitement of the day he'd forgotten the suspicious glance at the breakfast table, but now he came to wonder what was buggering his friend.
At first, he decided to ignore it, but soon he found that Remus' repeated silence was making him quite nervous. When he could take it no longer, he turned to the other boy, matching their eyes levelly.
"Remus, what..."
He didn't even have to finish the sentence before Remus exploded. "Sirius, have you changed any of the other questionnaires?"
Sirius pondered this for a moment. Why would Remus ask him such a question? "Of course I haven't. Okay, so I've read a few, and I probably shouldn't have done that, but..."
"Did you read mine?"
Remus seemed so agitated, but Sirius couldn't quite figure out why that should be. "Of course not. You should know I wouldn't. I admit that I've read Lily's, but only so that I'd know whether James would need friendly comforting or friendly encouragement after the charm. I wouldn't read yours, or James' or Peter's. Wouldn't be right, kind of. Besides, we know almost everything about each other, I could simply ask you if I wanted to know what you'd written."
Remus was still staring at him, expression as unreadable as it had been that morning at the breakfast table.
"What, you don't believe me? Fine!"
Sirius jumped up from his bed with an impulse, and strode towards the door, face set. He wasn't used to his friends not believing what he said. Sure, there had been some disagreements within their little circle, the worst being roughly three months ago after the incident with Snape, but they'd never mistrusted each other.
"Sirius, wait! It's just..."
But Sirius didn't wait to hear what it was just. He stomped off through the common room, waving off questions about James and Lily. Remus didn't follow him.
***
Some minutes later, Sirius found himself somewhere about the Eastern wing of the castle. He knew he was near the Ravenclaw common room, though he didn't know where exactly it was.
Sirius Black had a very hot temper, a temper that had brought him into more trouble than he cared to remember, but just as quick as he was to explode was his calming afterwards, and he never held a grudge for more than half an hour. Thus, he was quite willing to go back to their dorm and sort things out with Remus - pity was, since the staircases had shifted behind him he couldn't really determine how to come back, as he hadn't followed his own steps due to his anger at being mistrusted, and by Remus of all people!
Looking for signs that would remind him of the way back, Sirius suddenly stopped in his tracks as he heard a very soft, very clear voice, singing a beautiful but mourning song. Entranced by the sound that seemed not quite human but more ethereal, he followed it until he faced a heavy oak door with many woodcarvings upon it.
The voice sounded even clearer now, and Sirius was shook with a remorse the reason for which he could not place. It was as if an age-old grief was flooding through him, a grief not his own, yet so very real it almost turned his stomach.
Unsure of how to proceed, Sirius finally gathered his wits and very softly gave a short knock to the door. He knew the person - whoever she was - inside would probably want to be left alone, but he simply had to know who was singing these wonderful and so tremendously sad tunes.
The door opened by itself, and at the same time, the voice inside stopped singing.
Taking the opening door as an invitation, Sirius stepped into the room. There, by the tower's window, sat a woman, skin white as porcelain and translucent, clad in a dress that had once been black, but was now a shimmering, transparent grey. She wore a grey veil, but beneath it Sirius could see her large, black eyes, darkened even further with sorrow.
Sirius knew the woman, though he had never seen her. She was the Grey Lady, the Ravenclaw Ghost. Ravenclaws guarded her like a secret, but every now and then one would overhear them talking about her in hushed voices, when telling the new first years about her, for example. She was clad in grey, they said, as she had died wearing mourning clothes, and a veil covered her face. And, the pupils from old wizarding families would add, though their grandfathers and -mothers and their parents before them had been to Hogwart's, no one had ever heard the Grey Lady speak.
As Sirius stepped into the room, he thought he saw the Lady's eyes light up for a moment, but a second after they were mournful again, and she turned her face away from him towards the window.
"I'm sorry," Sirius muttered, and turned to go, but her upraised hand urged him to come nearer.
Stepping closer to her slight form, he noticed a piece of very thick parchment laying in front of her, and next to it an old-fashioned quill and inkpot, a burnt-down candle, a piece of sealing wax and a signet ring which embedded a rose.
Unsure of what to do he looked at the lady, but she urged him towards the letter. Carefully observing her reaction, he picked it up, and when she showed no sign of disapproval, he read the faded ink on the old parchment. It was hard to decipher the old writing and archaic language, but he finally translated the first paragraph:
To Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, February Fourteenth 1493.
Dearest friend. I cannot wait any longer. I have been sitting here in this room every night since the Eve of All-Hallows, when we were supposed to meet, but you never showed. Should this letter ever reach you --
He did not read on, but instead turned to the lady.
"You... you know that Near... that Sir Nicholas died on October 31st that year you wanted to meet?" he asked, delicately. Nearly Headless Nick never failed to boast with the fact that he had died on the 'day of the dead'. The Lady nodded her head, slowly, then, her gaze never leaving his, outstretched her arms. The silvery marks on her forearms gave Sirius the answer he'd been looking for.
"You didn't know when you wrote the letter?"
The Lady shook her head.
"And you... you..." he indicated her wrists, as not to offend her by saying it out loud. Slowly, she nodded again.
"But, you do know that Sir Nicholas is here in the castle?"
Once more, she nodded, but now it seemed almost with an air of desperation that she did it, and again she indicated the letter.
Sirius thought about everything he knew about ghosts, then asked her: "You can't leave this part of the castle until that letter is delivered, right?"
Still with the air of a lady, but non-the-less seeming desperate she nodded her head.
"But why hasn't anyone found this letter before in such a long time?"
She indicated the door, then the date on the letter. Sirius nodded thoughtfully.
"I'll deliver the letter for you."
The expression she now showed was one of utter thankfulness, and a glimmer of hope appeared in her eyes beneath the veil.
"I'll... I'll come back to you when I've found him. I'll find him, don't worry, Milady. I'll be back."
Quickly, he left the room, the letter in hand. He passed a couple of portraits, but their inhabitants were obviously off somewhere else, so he couldn't ask for direction. Just when he was about to give up, a fifth year he knew from the Hogwart's Express entered the hallway from another passage. She pointed him to the right stairway willingly, and Sirius set off in a hurry. If what he'd presumed from the 'conversation' with the Grey Lady, he had only until midnight to find Sir Nick, or the door would be closed again, and he had no idea where he should find the Lady then.
Thinking the Marauder's Map would be helpful, he went back to the Gryffindor dorm, quite forgetting the disagreement he'd had with Remus. Besides, Remus was as incapable of being resentful towards his friends as he was himself.
In the dorm, he found Remus still sitting on the bed, a thoughtful expression on his face as he looked at the small, heart-shaped card he'd received at this morning's Love Match spell. Sirius filed the thought into his mind. He'd have to ask Remus about that later. For now, he related in short his meeting with the Ravenclaw ghost to his friend while he extracted their precious map from its hiding place.
Bare three minutes later, two boys could be seen scampering along the corridors of the Gryffindor wing, excitedly following the trail of the old noble ghost. Their path led them to the dungeons, a wide complex that spread beneath all of Hogwart's. The Marauders knew this part of the castle well, many an adventure had been to explore these corridors with their old, eerie silence, their ancient stone carvings, and their instruments of torture and death, still displayed as they were hundreds of years ago.
They finally found the ghost they were seeking in one of those chambers of torture, sitting on a tree stump, resentfully eying a large axe that lay beside it, glimmering with a silver light that came not from the torches in the dungeon but from the old blood turned ghost upon it. The same silvery substance could be seen all around the stump, luminescent in the candlelight.
Sir Nick was muttering to himself angrily. "Couldn't do a straight job of it, now could they. It can't be *that* hard to sharpen an axe, can it? Bloody rich enough to use a new one, anyway, but *no*. Use the old blunt one. Sir Nick won't mind being a *nearly* headless ghost. Ha!"
At this, he noticed the two boys standing in the room with him, averting their eyes from the axe and the blood delicately.
"Now, and what would *you* two want here at this time, he? Out of bed and everything."
"It's not bedtime yet!" Sirius argued promptly.
"We have a message for you, sir." Remus produced, much more helpful to the task at hand.
"Who from?" Sir Nick asked, bewildered. Ghosts could move so swiftly through the castle that messages seemed to most like a waste of time, and they hardly had any correspondence outside the castle, seeing that most people they'd known weren't only dead, but fallen to dust several hundred years ago.
"The Grey Lady, sir, the Ravenclaw ghost," Sirius said eagerly.
"Ha!" Nearly Headless Nick exclaimed once more. "She's bloody late with that. Went over there to speak with her plenty of times in the past hundreds of years. She won't answer me."
"I don't really think she can, sir," Sirius said carefully and respectfully. "I still think you'd be interested in this particular letter."
He produced the old parchment carefully, aware of its age. The ghost's eyes lighted up in wonder and awe as he saw the date.
"Blimey," he said. "No wonder she never answered me! Had her tongue cut out, poor thing, protecting me of all people!"
Sirius and Remus both remained delicately silent.
"But I don't understand. I've been to that room often a times, right after I came back as a ghost. Wouldn't open, nor let me pass through the door or the walls."
"I think," Sirius offered, "it's only open on Valentine's Day, for some reason."
"Blimey!" Sir Nick exclaimed, once more. "Of course! Oh, I've been a bloody imbecile to not think of that. Come, my friends, we'll go there right now!"
And with the air of a noble of the elder days, Sir Nick lead the way through the dungeons, careful not to sift through any walls or locked doors, yet so swiftly that the boys had a hard time following.
When they arrived at the room where Sirius had found the Ravenclaw ghost, they were both panting. Again, the door had opened on it's own, but this time the Lady sprang (or flew) up from her chair in delight as her eyes settled on Sir Nick and the old letter in his hand.
The two Gryffindor boys smiled at both of them, then decided to retreat as to leave the two ghosts to themselves, but stopped as the Grey Lady once more indicated Sirius to stay.
"I know not how to thank you two!" Sir Nick said, regarding the boys with a look of pure glee.
But it was the Grey Lady who did so. Suddenly, the air seemed to crackle with energy, as Sirius recognized the fair voice he'd heard sing earlier. The veil of the Lady never moved, so she couldn't have spoken them with her lips.
"Look in your right pocket, Sirius Black."
Then, the two ghosts turned to one another, and Sirius and Remus knew they were dismissed, so they quickly scrambled out and back to their own dorm.