Disclaimer: I own the dog pound. J.K. Rowling owns the dog and his long-suffering, semi-psychotic friend.
A/N: Look, another chapter! Sorry I lied about the title, but I truly had no idea that most of this chapter would even happen. I must admit that this is going much better than I thought it would. At the beginning I had no clue what I'd be doing in the second chapter, but now I've got ideas for a few chapters ahead. If you still like this story, tell me and I'll try to update more frequently. If you don't, tell me and I will update much more frequently. Bwa ha ha...
Memories
After ten minutes, Remus could feel a good-sized stitch in his side. He would rather be just about anywhere else he could think of at the moment. But what could he do? When a friend, even one you would like to kill slowly and painfully, has just been caught by the dog catchers, there's not much you can do other than try to get him back.
If he ever got back home alive, Remus vowed, he would indeed kill Sirius slowly and painfully, but for now he had to get him out of the clutches of the Little Whinging Animal Control people before he did something terminally stupid. What bothered Remus about this scheme was that Sirius, by definition, would definitely do something terminally stupid before the night was out, which put a bit of a time constraint on his plans for rescue. Also, his plan so far consisted of following the truck to the pound and then coming up with a way to get Sirius out.
Not exactly conducive to cheerfulness, especially when Remus remembered the events of the evening so far. Something about the combined horrors of rum cake gone wrong, his broomstick turning to matchsticks, McGonagall taking on Sirius and winning by a landslide, and now following a truck containing his friend the drunken dog definitely brought out his pessimistic side. It didn't help that Sirius was now starting to howl the same drinking song that Remus had already heard way too much of that night.
Panting, Remus realized he was almost out of sight of the truck. If they didn't stop soon, he might lose them entirely, which would be disastrous. Aside from the not entirely unpleasant thought that Sirius would then be up for adoption come morning, he might accidentally reveal his true identity in a fit of tipsy high spirits, a development that didn't bear thinking about.
[Where's your motorcycle when I need it, Sirius?] Remus thought accusingly as he puffed down the road after the truck, whose driver apparently had about the skill of Ernie on the Knight Bus. The main difference was that things didn't jump out of his way, meaning that after approximately twenty blocks he had amassed a sizable collection of spinning sunflowers, pink flamingos, and ornamental cabbage.
[Little Whinging Mailbox Control,] thought Remus wryly as the truck narrowly missed a minivan backing out of a driveway. The two enormous, greasy brats inside looked up from their enormous, greasy hamburgers long enough to gawp at him in amazed derision. [Yeah, well, you need the exercise more than I do,] he thought unkindly, trying to look like he went jogging after an Animal Control truck every night at ten o'clock.
Two minutes later, all Remus's prayers were answered when the truck stopped abruptly and began to pull into a parking lot. That sound of squealing tires was the sweetest he had ever heard in his life. However, Remus allowed himself only a moment for jubilation before he had to force himself to think quickly about his next move. The men had already unloaded Sirius and were huffing and puffing their way up the sidewalk to the pound.
Hurrying up behind them, Remus smiled rather weakly at the nearest man, who was muttering soothing nonsense words, threats, and obscenities to Sirius. "Um, excuse me?" To his utter mortification, his words came out like a cross between the Singing Chipmunks and an amateur piccolo player. Slowly, the enormous slab of beef turned around and fixed him with a pair of beady eyes.
"Whadda ya want, buster?" the giant demanded rather irritably. Obviously, it was not a bright idea to bother him after a long day on the job. But then, Remus had never been known for his bright ideas. He managed to dredge up another so-sorry-to-bother-you smile from his repertoire and pasted it firmly on his face before attempting another conversational gambit.
"Well, you see, it happened like this. A little while ago, me and my dog were—"
"SILENCE!" yelled the beefy guy, deafening Remus and nearly knocking him over. "WE ARE CLOSED FOR THE NIGHT! COME BACK TOMORROW!" His initial impression had apparently been correct—this was not the person to talk to about getting Sirius back. Silently grateful that he had retained his life and all his limbs, Remus backed away gingerly.
By this time, the strange group had reached the door of the building and it was opening to admit the two employees with their canine companion. Remus knew he had to act quickly and deliberately, and so he did. As the men dragged Sirius inside, Remus darted glances around him to make sure nobody was watching, then stealthily followed.
Apparently, not stealthily enough. "And exactly what do you think you're doing?" a voice demanded at his elbow. Spinning around, Remus found himself confronted by a security guard, obviously some close relation to Mr. Beefy. Wondering how long his collection of weak but amiable smiles was going to hold out, he tried to explain.
"Um, well, actually, I was just hoping to talk to someone about my dog. See, he was accidentally..." He trailed off under the formidable glare of Beefy II, who was already turning away and beginning to stride purposefully, dragging Remus along with him. Helplessly watching Sirius being carted off in the opposite direction, he felt a terrible despair sweep over him. His friend Sirius "Wacko" Black was drunk and in the pound. Who knew what could happen?
His miserable musings were interrupted by their arrival at wherever they had been going to. "Boss!" Beefy II bellowed, shaking Remus's arm until his fingers rattled. "Found a trespasser!"
"Now wait a minute," Remus protested feebly. "I was trying to—" Then he caught sight of Boss and his indignant explanation died in his throat.
Boss was Cassandra Philips.
He and Sirius had met Cassandra at a Muggle party the summer they turned nineteen. Cass and Sirius had hit it off right away—literally. The party had featured an altercation between them culminating in a fistfight. Later, as Sirius lay in his hospital bed, he had told Remus, "I just know she's the one. Any woman who can beat me without trying is the ideal of feminine beauty." Remus had snorted and said nothing.
After their small difference of opinion had been resolved, Sirius and Cass had dated for the rest of the summer and most of the fall. It looked like they were meant for each other. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Cass told Sirius in front of twenty-three witnesses, including Remus, to bug off and never come near her again. Poor Sirius had never fully understood her reasons for this sudden reversal of feelings, but Remus thought he did—or at least the main one.
Him.
To say that Remus and Cassandra didn't get along was an understatement. To say they were constantly at each other's throats was right on the money. For Cass, any conversation with Remus was an argument waiting to happen. If he so much as mentioned his mild liking for cats, Cass was suddenly an ardent ailurophobe. When he suggested they all go somewhere Italian for dinner, she was furious that he had forgotten about her acute allergy to pasta. To all appearances, she greatly enjoyed hating Remus with all her mind, heart, soul, and strength.
Until the day of the break-up. Remus still bore the scars of that day, in more ways than one. As he thought about it, his finger unconsciously traced the thin white line running from his left eyebrow to his ear. Yes, that day had been one that would live in infamy in the annals of history...the fateful day that Sirius had actually dared to agree with Remus. He still remembered it as if it had been yesterday.
They had been talking about interesting pets and owners they had known. "You know," he had said casually as they were leaving the steakhouse, "I've thought a lot about it lately, and I don't think I'll ever get a pet." Cassandra's flashing green eyes were instantly riveted on him.
"And why not?" she asked, voice deceptively soft. Remus had learned to fear that voice, but he had also learned that if he didn't answer she would bother him about it all the way home. The only thing for it was to make the best of a bad situation.
He hemmed and hawed a little before attempting a reply. "Well, um, I think I'm actually more of a people person than an animal person, if you know what I mean." At least as far as regular animals were concerned—Animagi, of course, were a different story.
Cass no doubt knew exactly what he meant and would have gone on to tell him just what she thought of animal haters like him, but Sirius intervened first. "Yeah, I know how you feel," he said seriously. "I like to have someone I can actually talk with, you know? And animals just aren't too good at conversations. Great as they are," he added hastily to placate Cass.
Apparently, Cass didn't feel like being placated at the moment. Swelling with anger, she advanced on the cowering Sirius and Remus. At that moment, Remus beheld the scariest thing he had ever seen in his life—an angry female in full battle mode and ready to rumble.
Unfortunately, he was closest to her and thus received the brunt of her fury in the form of torture by fingernails, not a pleasant sensation at the best of times. Cass, however, took the art form to a whole new level, creatively achieving a sort of connecting effect by clawing a long scratch from the outer edge of his eyebrow to the top of his ear as well as giving him various other small souvenirs of the occasion. He tried to fight back, of course, but he was no match for an insane Muggle, especially when her natural insanity was heightened by the imagined slights to her beloved little furry animal friends. In the immortal words of Rudyard Kipling, the female of the species was indeed more deadly than the male.
When it was all over and Remus lay prostrate on the sidewalk, groaning with unbearable pain and wondering if he would ever be able to move any muscles in his face again, Cass turned on Sirius, who would have made a run for it earlier if he had any sense. Instead, he had stood rooted to the spot watching the unfolding violence with horrified fascination and here and there making a spasmodic movement in her direction as if to stop her somehow, if such a thing were possible. Now he smiled weakly and began to back away, trying to find a clear escape route through the passersby that had stopped to gawk at the unusual scene.
Cass was having none of it. "Sirius Cerberus Black!" No vestiges of the cooing, flirtatious timbre her voice had had earlier that evening now remained; it had dropped to about the temperature of liquid nitrogen and, to all appearances, wasn't going to warm up anytime soon. "Get over here. Now." Somehow, the cold anger was more frightening than the wild rage she had unleashed on Remus.
Sirius got over there. Now. It was, Remus thought, probably only the third time in his life he had seen Sirius truly scared, the other two times being the time he "accidentally" turned Professor McGonagall into a pumpkin in fifth year and the time last year when he crashed his motorcycle into the Minister of Magic's prized begonias. Of course, neither of those could hold a candle to the terrifying enormity of this situation, a fact that poor Sirius was no doubt very much aware of. After all, he had already suffered once from Cass's iron fist and had a pretty good idea of exactly how hard she could hit.
"Now, really, Cass," Sirius stammered, teetering on the brink of incoherence. "See here, we didn't mean any harm by it, it was just casual conversation, you've got to learn not to take it seriously..." Yup. Sirius was officially petrified; he was talking without pausing for breath. As Cass advanced on him menacingly, he took on the characteristics of someone breathing helium. "No no, please, I've learned my lesson, I'll never say it again I promise, animals are really very nice, did I ever happen to mention that I have fourteen pets at home and I even remember all their names! Fido, Rover, um, Spot, Sparky, er, Fluffy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, uh, Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh, and Ginger."
Remus winced. Before, Sirius might have had a chance to escape unscathed, but that last bit had done it. Cass wasn't stupid and knowing her, this would be the last straw...
Alas, he knew her only too well. "Sirius, dear heart, that's fifteen," she seethed furiously, one graceful, long-nailed hand reaching out to snag his collar and hoist him clear off the ground. Sirius gaped at her in astonishment as he dangled helplessly a few inches off the sidewalk, but Cass was still far from done with him. Besides her own anger, she couldn't bear to disappoint the assembled onlookers, who were probably enjoying the best show they'd seen in years.
"This," she hissed venomously up at him, "Has. Gone. Far. Enough. I've put up with that—that friend of yours for a long time, and I'm not going to stand for this any longer!"
[Believe me, lady, the feeling is mutual,] Remus snarled silently from his position on the ground, not daring to utter a syllable aloud for fear of Cass's reprisal. His good sense, such as he had, warned him that he'd better keep his head down, as the situation was way past turning ugly and well on its way to getting nasty. And he had definitely already had more than his fair share of both ugly and nasty at the hands of his friend's psycho girlfriend.
Cass was really getting warmed up now, her natural instinct for melodrama getting the best of her. "And if you think I'm going to just get over this like every other time, you've got another think coming! The number of times I've been insulted..." She was rapidly assuming the air of a long-suffering martyr finally, reluctantly speaking out against her treatment. All she needed now was a soapbox and she'd be all set for about the next two weeks.
However, her preparations to launch into an injured speech on cruelty to animals and significant others was interrupted by other niggling considerations—such as the fact that Sirius's face was rapidly turning from red to purple. In the face of the necessity of avoiding homicide charges, Cass was forced to abbreviate her remarks, which she did nicely, boiling them down into exactly ten words: "You jerk! Don't you dare come near me ever again!"
Then, amid the shocked stares and scattered applause of the gathered crowd, she unceremoniously dropped Sirius on the concrete and stalked off, knocking over seven people on her way. For a few seconds, everybody simply stood, sat, or lay there stunned, still absorbing the events of the last two minutes. Eventually, slowly at first, the crowd dispersed, many casting concerned and frightened looks at Cass's two victims over their shoulders. Finally they were alone.
Sirius was still rubbing his neck ruefully, Remus nursing the wounds he'd received in battle. He groaned as he laboriously picked himself up and shuffled slowly over to his friend. "Well," he commented grimly, ignoring the pain caused by moving his facial muscles.
Heaving a sigh, Sirius looked up at him, eyes slightly glazed. "Remus, I have just been traumatized for life," he told him wearily, looking for all the world like pictures of haggard survivors of F-5 tornadoes Remus had seen once on the Muggle Discovery Channel. Remus had to concur with this statement, although in his own case the effect was compounded by the additional horror of having had his face used as an abstract art medium.
"Yeah," he agreed heavily, offering a hand to help Sirius up. "I know exactly how you feel." It was not every day, or even most, that one got to see one's friend literally dumped, Remus reflected as the two young men limped down the street toward home.
Remus abruptly realized he had fallen into a reverie, resurrecting memories he had tried very hard to obliterate entirely. So Cass managed the city pound. Not at all surprising, considering her marked affinity for animals, but very bad for him. If she recognized him...
Such a fate would be terrible beyond comprehension. Not only would he be prevented from reaching Sirius, he'd probably also acquire a new set of souvenirs. He could see it now—Study in Fingernails and Flesh, Part Two, by Cassandra Philips. Shuddering at the thought, Remus tried to reassure himself that she had forgotten all about him, and even if she hadn't, she would never be able to recognize him more than fifteen years later. Unfortunately, he wasn't at all sure of this, knowing how long Cass could hold a grudge from painful experience.
Resolving to simply act as unRemus-like as he could and hope for the best, he tried to summon yet another polite smile. "Oh, good evening, ma'am. Perhaps you could help me. I'm awfully sorry to intrude after closing time, but there's been some sort of mistake."
[Yes, first I was enough of an idiot to make the mistake of letting my best friend your former boyfriend into my house, and then I made the mistake of letting the doofus escape with my only broomstick, which was then chewed into pieces by one of those precious canines you love so much, and now I'm about to make a big mistake by trying to rescue the most ungrateful dog on the planet. Other than that...] Remus realized he was starting to wallow in self-pity and quickly turned his thoughts back to the problem at hand.
"You see, my dog was mistakenly picked up by your employees when—" His plan was to go on spinning nonsense like this long enough to simply annoy her into giving him Sirius, but he broke off at the look on her face. It looked almost as if she had just recognized someone she hadn't seen in years...someone she had hoped never to see again but would be perfectly happy to torment now that she had.
"Remus, shut up," she commanded abruptly. Already fearing the worst possible outcome of this encounter, he shut up promptly and swallowed hard, wondering what would become of him. After all, there could be no doubt now that she recognized him.
[An elephant never forgets,] he reflected wryly as he waited for his fate. He should have known that a person like Cass was probably so sensitive that she kept meticulous records of everyone that had ever insulted her. Meaning, of course, that Remus had a file cabinet all to himself.
His musings were abruptly interrupted by a shriek of indignation. At first he couldn't figure out why, but an idea struck and he suddenly realized what was going on. Alas and alack, Remus had unconsciously just reverted to one of his usual habits in time of danger—thinking aloud. This had gotten him in plenty of trouble under other circumstances in the past, but he had a feeling that what was coming next would be the mother of all temper tantrums.
Regrettably, most of his gut feelings lately seemed to be right on track. "REMUS LUPIN!" Cass shrieked in spluttering fury. He was alarmed, but not really surprised, to see small flecks of foam at the corners of her mouth as her fists clenched and unclenched, revealing sporadic glimpses of The Gilded Spikes of Doom—those gold-painted fingernails that still gave him nightmares sometimes. This, however, was worse than any nightmare he could have ever imagined...whatever happened, he was pretty sure he wouldn't wake up before he hit the ground.
"You haven't changed a bit! You're still just as rude and inconsiderate as you ever were! I...I simply CANNOT BELIEVE THIS! I have never been so insulted in my life." Remus blinked in astonishment, amazed at this reversal of the facts. He was rude and inconsiderate? That was a new one.
"Oh, I'm soooo sorry," he drawled, unable to control himself despite the prospect of impending doom. "I realize now how unjust and hasty I have been in the past and I shall certainly endeavor to be more understanding and friendly in the future."
Cass's eyebrows arched, her anger still mounting but dormant for the moment, rather like Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii's last minutes. "Do I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice, Remus?" she inquired in a dangerously soft voice, eyes boring through him.
[Actually, this qualifies as a full-fledged symphony,] Remus corrected grimly, hoping that choice comment wouldn't also force its way out through his traitorous lips and doom him to a fate worse than death. Though, at the moment, he really couldn't imagine what could be worse than Death By Cass.
Apparently, Cass didn't need any more sarcasm from him to push her over the edge—she seemed to be doing quite a good job of that by herself. "GUARDS!" she shrieked, pointing a frighteningly well-manicured finger at Remus. "SEIZE HIM!"
Unfortunately, the security guards were only too happy to obey her every whim, and Remus found himself hoisted by the armpits and carried down the hallway much more quickly than he had been dragged up it. He hardly noticed, though, being much too busy sinking into the bottomless pit of despair. With Cass the She-Demon running the place, how could he possibly break in and spring Sirius without getting killed?
His morose reflections were cut short as they reached the exit. Unceremoniously, the guards dumped him on the sidewalk outside the Little Whinging pound. Remus winced as he hit the concrete hard.
As the door slammed firmly behind him, he ruefully observed to himself that his posterior muscles sure were getting a workout today. Then, with an effort, he dragged himself to his feet and retreated a safe distance from the building to fall back and regroup.
A/N: Definitely the longest chapter so far in the story. Pretty good, considering I didn't see it coming. But something possessed my fingers to type the fateful sentence "Boss was Cassandra Philips", and from there everything just kind of flowed. Sorry I lied about the chapter name, but I couldn't give up this idea. *AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION NEEDED* I'm doing a Scout project that involves compiling a small dictionary of terms and abbreviations used on fanfiction.net that new users might not know or might be too lazy to figure out on their own. So review *cough cough* and include a couple! Coming Soon: Chapter Six (hopefully How Much is That Doggie in the Window? for real this time).