Thanks SO much to everyone who has reviewed! Here's another installment for you guys. I climb and hope the message on this one isn't lost on those who don't. Please let me know what you think! And happy reading!

By the way, for those of you following "Gash or Gold" – don't worry, I'm still working on it! This is just a side project that has taken my fancy.

Random Acts

"Year Twelve"

"Our way is not soft grass, it's a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards, forward, toward the sun."

Ruth Westheimer

One more step. This foot. That foot. Left. Right. Every. Thing. On. My. Body. Hurts. Merlin…..

Sirius lost his temper first.

"James, PLEASE explain to me one more time WHY we are doing this without magic! We could have flown up here on the brooms!"

"Because it's there, Sirius! Because it's there!" James yelled over his shoulder, giddy from the altitude.

"You can stuff your old Muggle quotes, Potter!" Sirius wailed back.

Remus looked up at the mountain summit, some 200 meters or so away. They were pretty close! But as they gained altitude, the snow got harder, the wind got colder, and the terrain seemed more alien, more detached from the green grass and stone walls of civilization. The world seemed less hospitable here as the sky grew closer – darker, meaner – more animalistic even, untamed and feral.

They'd only hiked a few scant hours and had almost reached the summit. It wasn't that big of a mountain, really. But the change in their surroundings with every step higher was startling. Remus searched his mind for an inner instinct that could love this pastime but found only hunger, frozen toes, and a very vivid image of his warm four-poster with the sheets pulled back, waiting for him.

"James, I hate to sound twelve, but….are we there yet?"

"Remus, you are twelve and NO we are not there yet!"

"You're going too fast, James. You'll kill us both!"

Sirius melodramatically threw himself into the snow and Remus collapsed beside him and shared a grin. James turned with a sigh and glissaded down to his fallen comrades, dug his heels into the snow to stop besides them.

"Water break, then?"

"Definitely," Sirius nodded and dug through his pack for a canteen then pulled it out like he had just discovered a dead rat.

"Cor, mine is frozen solid!"

Remus pulled his from inside his jacket and shook the water inside. "Body heat," he explained.

"Good idea, Remus! You're thinking like a mountain climber!" Potter gave him a genuine smile as he pulled out a large brick of Honeyduke's Finest and divided it among them.

Remus almost shattered a tooth on the frozen chocolate and pushed it to the back of his mouth, willing it to find a warm enough place to melt, and passed his water to Sirius who took it gratefully.

Remus had known the two boys since he arrived at Hogwarts, of course, but only recently had a camaraderie blossomed. Not that he had initiated it – or any of his friendships, for that matter. Eventually, lycanthropy ruined everything. That was a stone-set reality in his life.

When "the truth" emerged, friends went through their own transformations. Their faces and demeanors changed, until he no longer recognized them as the people he used to know. He saw everything in their morphing features - from delicate fear to total revulsion - before they faded from his life for good. But they did fade. All of them.

"I'm still the same. Why do they hate me now when they didn't hate me yesterday?" he had asked his mother once.

"Because some people won't make an effort to understand things," she had said gently. "You need special friends, Remus. Strong friends."

Over time, Lupin learned that these departures hurt less if he had no hand in their arrivals. If friends came and went while he remained the passive object, watching people come and go from his life. And so it began with these two boys. Coming to him. Seeking him out.

Then Remus, much to his own dismay, began dodging through crowded hallways to catch up, craning his neck to find Potter's crazy hair in the great hall, hedging through student clusters to sit next to Sirius in potions. All on his own accord.

It felt dangerous to like their company as much as he did. But they intrigued him, especially Sirius Black, who didn't let Remus' polite reserve, pedantic propensities, and furtive disappearances pass without note or jab. Black was much smarter than he acted. Brilliant, really, without being obvious about it. And Remus knew it was only a matter of time until he "knew."

So when Potter and Black corralled him in the library and Remus looked up to find them both gauging him with observant eyes, part of him froze in terror.

"Remus J. Lupin, how you feeling today?" James whispered.

Remus looked around the library with a bit of alarm.

"Why?"

"You up for a little trip out this weekend?"

"I can't get permission."

"Remus, Remus, Remus," Sirius smiled and rolled his eyes.

It was a carpe diem moment. The weather looked promising, the weekend homework less grueling than usual. They locked their doors and conjured sleeping doubles. Two floo networks, one portkey, and seven miles by broom-flight later, they reached the base of a mountain that James had already climbed several times.

"Alright, mates! Let's go. Not much further."

Potter repacked the chocolate and slung on his pack with a grunt.

"So…." Remus said, getting up with some difficulty and repacking his bag. "Why do you do this, James?"

"Dunno," he shrugged. "My grandfather climbs, started when he was about our age. I'm climbing all the ones he climbed as a kid. Onward and upward?" he said hopefully, looking at his two freezing friends.

Remus nodded then laughed at Sirius' maudlin expression and received a playful smack on the back of his head in exchange. And on they headed towards the summit.

Time moved slowly, passing in sounds and errant thoughts.

He heard determination in their crunching steps, exhaustion in their labored breathing. Not much farther…

White wisps of snow trailed outward, carried by miniature jetstreams threading steadily off the mountaintop, and Remus watched the tendrils play about the air before they trickled down and showered him with a taste of ice.

And suddenly, they stood on top. Sirius and Remus gaped at the staggering view on the other side, and James basked in their expressions as he planted a small Gryffindor flag on the summit and took pictures with Sirius' camera.

Remus hadn't expected the vibrant trees and rivers that resembled tiny specks and swirling lines of greens and blues; and the peppered snow of the slopes petering out as it faded amidst the deeper colors of the valley floor.

They hunkered down into their coats and drank in the view like warm butterbeer. The tints, the smells - the living painting before them pulsed with a strange peace that made everything perfect, if only for that moment in time. Few people would see the world exactly as they saw it, from that small mountain on an early spring day.

Remus' quiet voice knocked them out of their revelry.

"It makes sense to me now, James….. why you climb."

"Why?"

"Well," he said, scanning the view, a feeling of pure serenity running through his veins despite the howling gusts that pushed him back a bit now and then, the icy ground cold beneath his hands, chilling him to the bone.

"Because some things are worth earning, ya know? Worth fighting for, even if the fight has to come from within. Even if it takes something out of you. Makes you pay, I guess. It means more this way."

"Remus, you sound like a professor!" Sirius joked

But Potter's eyes were bright and intense as he gazed at Remus.

"Yeah," he said quietly.

And as they finally stood up and made to head down, Remus said something he'd wanted to say all day long.

"Thank you for bringing me."

James looked embarrassed.

"Well, it was Sirius' idea, really. I didn't think you could make it up here." he admitted. "And I knew Peter couldn't!"

Sirius glanced at Remus quickly, almost shyly, then looked back at the view with a silly grin.

"Why?" Remus laughed. "Why'd you ask me?"

"Don't know." Sirius said, continuing to look away. "You've been sick lately, on and off. And you seem sorta lonely sometimes. I thought you could use a break from everything. And I knew you could do it. You're…I think you're stronger than you look."

Potter just shrugged and patted Remus on the back as he headed down, but Remus looked at Sirius with an unnerving intensity. Did he know?

"Ta, Black." Remus said earnestly and took in a lungful of the clean, cold air. "There's no place I'd rather be at this very moment…. than with you prats." Sirius grabbed him in a headlock as they started back, and their laughter made James turn around and smile.

Up until that point in his life, Remus had lived a regimented life of heeding rules and desperately obeying them. It was all part of his attempt to create structure for himself when his world had so little by its very nature. But the weekend he conjured a double, snuck out of Hogwarts and went mountain climbing with his two new mates , he became a marauder. And the best years of his life began.

And although many other acts would mean more in the grand scheme of things, he often came back to the simple invite of a furtive weekend trip and the strength it gave him to believe in himself and to understand, through hard-earned epiphany, that few good things come to us without a struggle, but to the very end – bitter or sweet - they are very much worth the effort.

Not long after, his friends did discover his deep, dark secret, filling Remus with a dread that cut to the very heart of him. He had invested himself too deeply this time to hide the scars made by their departure, which he knew would come soon, leaving him alone in the world once again.

"I won't apologize," he said softly. "I can't help what I am. But I understand if you don't want to be my friend anymore. It's alright."

"No, it's not," Sirius said coldly.

"Okay, then it's not. So what do you want me to do, Black? Leave? Drop out of school?"

"Of course not."

Remus looked stunned.

"Why would we want that?" James added carefully.

Remus looked into their faces. Peter looked a little scared, but James and Sirius - they looked the same, acted the same. He waited for them to change, to become something other than his familiar mates. And nothing happened.

"Then why are you here?" Remus muttered.

"Maybe because we're your friends, Remus? Merlin…" James said and shook his head.

"I'm a werewolf."

Sirius was starting to get mad.

"So, what's your point? What do we have to do? Are you going to make this hard? Because if you are, that's fine. We can take it." Sirius narrowed his eyes with a devious grin. "A mate of mine once said that some things are worth fighting for, even if the fight has to come from within. So are we going to put this behind us? Hmm? Can you accept that we're not werewolves?"

And in spite of his misery, Remus laughed as tears welled up in the corners of his eyes.. And he realized that some things truly were sweeter for the effort. He had worked to gain their friendship and, in return, was rewarded with something finer than he had ever imagined gaining. Strong friends.

Only later would he learn how bitter or how sweet those friendships ran as he considered them whilst on the long climbs that the world thrust upon them. When the trails of life were steep and the way weary and hard. When the summits of those mountains called War and Loss were so very very far away….

tbc