Lord Of The Guys: The Sixth Installment

"Dumbledore is the world's biggest cock," Snape complained loudly. He did a rather good job of summing up what everyone else was feeling.

"Shut up," James mumbled. His face, usually a nice, healthy pink, was flushing darker and darker, going from rosy to scarlet to magenta with astonishing speed. "Shut up, shut up, and shut up."

Remus looked down at his sandy toes, which were scrunched up tightly in mortification, and sighed. Looking at his feet was really much safer than, say, looking up and actually meeting someone's eye. That would mean he'd have to leave the realm of Unblinking Denial and actually acknowledge what had happened.

Remus wished briefly that he was an ostrich, and could bury his head in the sand, which would make avoiding any potential eye-contact a lot simpler. There was an odd snuffling noise to the right, and Remus glanced sideways at Peter, who was sitting on the ground. Since he possessed all the maturity of a particularly backward toddler, Peter found situations like these hilarious, rather than humiliating or horrifying. His attempts to hide his mirth were failing disastrously; it looked as if an invisible person was throttling him, shaking his head and shoulders in a fury.

"I mean," Snape sneered, picking up the small package with the tip of his thumb and forefinger, "what exactly are we supposed to do with these?" He dropped them back on top of the package, looking disgusted. Remus chanced a careful glance at Lily, who was very deliberately not looking at James, who, in turn, was very deliberately not looking at her not looking at him. Peter rocked backwards and forwards in his silent, hysterical laughter. Remus thought he might actually be having some kind of island-induced fit.

"Madame Pomfrey insisted that I include these," Snape read, in an irritated drawl. "We all do have your best interests at heart." He looked up at his audience scornfully. "For fuck's sake."

Peter, who had turned blue in the face from the Herculanean effort of not laughing, burst into peals of giggles. No-one spoke. Remus changed his mind abruptly. He wanted to bury Peter's head in the sand.

"What's in the silver tin?" Remus asked eventually, and Snape shrugged in unconcern.

"Probably more contraceptives," he spat venomously. "The old tosser, writing us cheery notes in purple ink and giving us condoms when what we really need is-"

"Anti-grease shampoo?" Sirius suggested caustically. Perhaps because he had seen the inside of his office more times than any other student in the school, Sirius rather liked Dumbledore. The unnerving frequency with which the Headmaster doled out his detentions did not seem to deter this relationship. Snape glared in response.

"Just because Black's morally bankrupt and a complete slag doesn't mean that Pomfrey has to mail us some-"

"Shut up," Lily muttered, echoing James. She knelt down and tried to prise open the lid of the container. When she succeeded, Remus stooped to pick up the scrap of parchment that fluttered onto the sand. "It's just little round yellow things."

"In times of great stress," Remus read aloud, "I always find it incredibly soothing to suck on these. The citrus flavour calms one, I believe, and they are certainly cheaper than narcotics."

"Sherbet Lemons," James said dismissively, with the blasé tone of one who has dedicated many an afternoon to sampling Honeydukes' new stock. "It's meant to be funny. It's just one of his little jokes."

"Who's laughing on this side of the Atlantic?" Snape enquired. Everyone turned to look at Peter, who agitatedly stuffed his knuckles into his mouth, but continued to chortle. Remus threw a sherbet lemon at the gasping boy, who caught it gratefully, and began to suck it, pausing every so often to look at the condoms and splutter. James nudged Remus in the ribs.

"Hey, should you really give him that? What if he chokes?"

"Er," Remus mumbled back, searching for something to say kinder than 'That was the plan'. After a brief respite, Peter seemed to remember what he'd found funny in the first place, and began to bray like a constipated donkey. "I thought it might calm him down?"

"Snape's right, though," Lily cut in, running a disappointed hand through her matted red hair. "Dumbledore's package is absolutely useless – apart from the soap and stuff, there's nothing remotely-" She opened a third cardboard box. Several small pots, a yellowed sponge and two brushes tumbled out of it, all bearing the legend 'Ferdie Frankfurter's Fabulous Flavoured Face-Paints! Non-toxic. Do not give to children below the age of three, or anyone who doesn't know how to have FUN!'.

"He's mad," Snape re-iterated. "Face-paint. Sweets. Condoms. It's ridiculous. We could be starving to death, we could be injured, Lupin could be ripping our throats out. We're all in fear of our-" Snape clapped an alarmed hand over his mouth just as the noise of Peter's chuckles trailed off into a stunned silence. Remus's heart first stopped beating, then performed a death-defying leap into his mouth. Peter swallowed his sherbet lemon whole, James looked aghast, and Sirius's expression was simply furious. Lily looked up in bewilderment, like the only person at the table who hasn't spotted the cockroach swimming in the fondue and is wondering why everyone has stopped eating.

"You," Sirius growled, his voice low. Lily's eyes darted from his angry face to Snape's defiant one in utter confusion. "You… you can't… you utter twat."

"Everyone calm down now," James said hopefully, putting a hand on Sirius's back. "Mate, you just-"

"I'm the one you should be fucking scared of," Sirius continued, taking a menacing step towards Snape, and shaking his head for emphasis. Remus, feeling desperate, moved to block his way, although a seven-foot bodybuilder would have had a hard time blocking Sirius in that state. Remus expected to be pushed past, or asked to move aside, but Sirius just looked hard at him, almost in him, his slate-grey eyes wide and angry. Remus felt his stomach perform several exceedingly complex acrobatic moves, then, all at once, Sirius raised his head and spoke to Snape over Remus's shoulder.

"If there was one part of the letter you should have listened to, it was the one about keeping fucking secrets, and right away you go and-"

"It's all right, I know!" Lily interrupted, standing up. Her eyes were shining brightly, and she looked close to tears. The boys turned as one to gawp at her.

"Evans knows?" Snape asked incredulously.

"No, she doesn't!" James protested. "And if you hadn't broken the promise you made before fishing and let it slip…"

"Know what?" Sirius asked quietly.

"Look, I don't know why you're all acting so odd, but if this… this thing is about those two-" she broke off and motioned vaguely at where Remus and Sirius were standing, "-then I know all about it. And I don't care, I'm not prejudiced about things like that at all."

James looked utterly taken aback. A reasonable 'I'm not prejudiced' was not the reaction one generally expected when it was revealed that someone a person been living in extremely close proximity to had lycanthropy. It wasn't really something one just accepted. Both he and Sirius had been equally shocked upon learning about Remus's other side, and although no-one ever mentioned it, Peter had been uneasy around Remus for weeks afterwards, secretly scared that he would maul him during Potions, or creep out of bed in the middle of the night to tear him to shreds. James stared quizzically at Lily, trying to fathom the reason behind her apparently all-embracing response to the news.

Remus said nothing, but for a wholly different reason. That morning, Lily had turned up on the beach just after Sirius had kissed him. She'd seen them kissing. She'd seen them. She saw us, Remus thought in frozen horror. And now she thinks that we're – that I'm… oh, God.

"What does Black have to do with anything?" Snape asked, looking impatient. "And who wouldn't be bloody prejudiced if a guy you thought was normal turned out to be a monster?"

"I don't think it makes him a monster," Lily protested, looking slightly affronted. It was official now; Lily had got the wrong end up the stick, and the tree she was supposed to be barking up was at the opposite end of the orchard. She carried on blithely. "And I don't think it had to be kept such a huge secret. It's not that awful."

"Not that bad?" Snape shrieked in a high-pitched falsetto, dodging Sirius's enraged lunge at him. "Something like that's not that bad?"

"It's because of small-minded people like you-"

"I'm a werewolf," Remus said, grabbing Lily's arm and whispering harshly in her ear. "All right? I'm a werewolf and that's the secret and we didn't tell you because it worked out so well the first time someone, namely Snape, found out about it. That's all."

"That's all." Lily repeated faintly. Then she shook herself. "You're an actual werewolf? A Dark Creature? As in you forget who you are completely and change into a bloodthirsty animal once every month?"

"Er, yes."

Lily looked from Remus's imploring hazel eyes to Snape's glittering black ones, then to Sirius's stormy grey stare and James's concerned brown gaze. She looked down at Peter, who had a sherbet lemon in one hand and an open pot of paint in the other, and was giving both considering licks. Peter rattled the tin of sherbet lemons noisily, and offered it to her, shrugging.

"I think this counts as a time of great stress," Lily mumbled, taking a handful of the sweets and cramming them into her mouth.

Peter, despite consuming half the pot of kiwi-flavoured paint, did not 'crawl off and die' (as Snape instructed him to do when he was offered a lick), but managed to calm Lily down quite efficiently by sitting her down in the shade and alternately plying her with sherbet lemons – 'I know they've gone melted and sticky in the heat, but they still taste all right' – and telling her comforting things like 'Remus wouldn't bite you if he knew it was you, 'cause he likes you. He wouldn't bite people he didn't like, even. He's really, really nice - only when he's the wolf he'd still bite you because then he wouldn't know it was you. But that's not going to happen, because it's ages 'til full moon and he won't be the wolf for ages. Okay?'

Snape, magnanimously, had cleaned all the fish they'd caught with the single pocket knife that Dumbledore had provided. Remus had been rather wary of giving Snape anything sharp, especially as his unconditional hatred for them all seemed to have increased tenfold, but he'd refrained from stabbing and been, as James had been grudgingly moved to remark, 'actually rather good at it'. It came from all the chopping and peeling that NEWT level Potions entailed, Remus decided. You always had to slice or peel or simmer something; it wouldn't be surprising if all alchemists were culinary geniuses.

Immediately after the fish had been cleaned, Snape grabbed a bar of soap and announced to the empty air in front of him that he was 'off for a bath'. No-one objected to this, as having him around was never exactly pleasant, and it was even less so after him having spent a good portion the past hour with dead fish. James and Sirius had managed to start a fire with the help of Remus's lighter (which had been under the mistaken impression that it would be funny if it didn't ignite the first thirteen times they tried it), and had between them developed a system of roasting the fish on a makeshift spit, where they sat on either side of the blaze, twirling the sticks and trying not to scorch their forearms. Remus had gladly relinquished the lighter, having exactly no cigarettes left in his trouser pocket. After the confrontation earlier, he'd decided that chain-smoking would be significantly more soothing than sticking to his ration, and promptly finished off the few he'd had in the pack.

Remus was also given the task of writing the letter to send back to Dumbledore. It took rather longer than it should have, due to the fact that he kept getting ash on the parchment and then panicking about it and ripping the parchment in an attempt to wipe it away with his sleeve. The huge owl that brought the letter was becoming increasingly irritated, not being accustomed to the searing heat, and had nipped savagely at his knuckles more than once, usually causing him to blot his words. Then there was the added hardship of not particularly wanting to write to Dumbledore, due to his apparent nonchalance and amusement at their predicament. They were trapped on an island, with no clues as to how they arrived there, and he'd sent them face-paint. Flavoured face-paint.

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

Snape wants to kill everyone and Peter does weird things to crabs and James is being generally stupid because he wants to show off to Lily and Lily knows I'm a werewolf and Sirius isn't wearing a shirt and he kissed me and it would be really helpful if you could just bring us home right now. Could you? Because I think my neck is sunburnt. And we don't have any proper food or anything. Oh, and everyone knows I'm a WEREWOLF. And Lily thinks I'm a GAY WEREWOLF. Because Sirius KISSED ME.

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

Why on earth did you send us face-paint, sherbet lemons and condoms? I hope they weren't intended to be used in any weird combination, because –

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

Don't worry, this paper only smells smoky because James and Sirius are nearby and they're using my lighter to start a cooking fire. (I keep a lighter in case of emergencies.)

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

Your owl just took several chunks out of my hand. And leg. And I'm not sending this anyway. Oh bugger.

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

Thanks ever so much for your letter, and for enclosing a quill, so we could write back. All of us were all really worried about getting back home, as none of us really have any idea why we're here. It just seems to be a hazy blur in our memories. We discussed it earlier, but perhaps something's just made us forget?

The cleaning stuff was really handy; Snape's already gone off to bathe - and I hope the others go soon too, because apart from Lily, they all smell slightly disgusting. It must be a female thing. Peter likes the sweets - and maybe we'll eat the face-paints if we get hungry enough, as James and Sirius seem to think setting food on fire is part of the cooking process - but somehow I don't think we'll be using the other thing. Especially as Lily and James seem to have begun completely ignoring each other – and not just one-sided blanking, James is doing it too – ever since we unwrapped them. Thanks anyway.

I hope you manage to get us out of here as soon as possible, and that the Ministry agree to let you bring us back. We're all really grateful for everything you've done for us.

Yours sincerely,
Remus J. Lupin

P.S. Somehow it got out that I'm a werewolf. I think that Lily's taking it a bit better than Snape did, but I kind of ran away haven't spoken to her much since she found out.

P.P.S. Maybe in your subsequent letter, you could send something useful that would help us adapt to life here a bit better? Maybe some clothes? It's just that Peter's in his pyjamas, and two of us are in uniform, and James and Sirius are in various stages of undress, which is distracting possibly a health hazard.

P.P.P.S. I just burn, and so does Peter, but I expect that the others will get brown soon. Snape seems to be turning orange.

"Finished?"

Remus looked up from fastening his roll of parchment to the owl's leg. It was Sirius, his dark head blocking out the sunlight. Remus peered up at him, squinting a little.

"Er, yeah." Remus knotted the string a little too tightly. The owl gave an agitated hoot, flapping its wings, and took flight, trailing a length of string over the sand. "Did you want to read it?"

"Not really," Sirius answered carelessly, sitting down next to him. Remus tried to edge away imperceptibly, just so that Sirius wasn't so disturbingly close, but Sirius shot a piercing look at him over his shoulder, and Remus froze. "You told Lily about it, then?"

"Um, yes. Er," Remus said, wishing he could still conduct a sentence in Sirius's prescence without interjecting random 'um's and 'er's all over the place. "She sort of thought Snape was acting funny because of the whole, er, kissing thing. I think, um, she might've seen that."

Sirius didn't say anything. He picked up a handful of sand and let the grains trickle gently through his palm.

"I don't think that she'll – er – tell anyone, though," Remus continued, fiddling anxiously with the cuffs of his shirt. "I don't think you need to worry-"

"I'm not worried," Sirius interrupted sharply, staring hard at the turquoise expanse of the sea.

"Oh," Remus said, startled. "Good?"

"You didn't have to tell her about the werewolf thing though, mate," Sirius went on, in a surprisingly amiable tone. It sounded forced. "You could have just let her say that she thought we were gay. And Snape would have shut up about you being a monster, and played along. He's not utterly thick, even if he is a slime-covered Flobberworm masquerading as a human being."

"I'm not sure what you're driving at-"

"What I'm driving at," Sirius burst out angrily, turning to face Remus, "is that when you were faced with the possibility of Lily discovering you're a werewolf, or the others finding out that we kissed, once, you decide that admitting to lycanthropy is the lesser of two evils."

"No, but I-"

"I'm not angry," Sirius said, slipping back into his normal voice and turning back to the sea. "I just wanted to know what, you know, you felt. And I guess you felt it was disgusting and horrible and that's what I thought before too, so it's fine. Forget it."

"But it wasn't like that," Remus protested, utterly taken aback. "It's not that I felt-"

"It's fiiiine," Sirius sing-songed, smiling wryly and standing up. "We'll just go back to normal. We won't even talk about it anymore. Like it never even happened." He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted over to Peter and Lily. "Are you two ready to eat yet?"
"Sirius," Remus whispered. Sirius ignored him. "Don't you want to talk about it?"

"YOU LOT!" James bellowed from the cooking fire on the beach. He was carrying the charred fish aloft on a large flat rock. "I. AM. THE. BARBEQUE... KING!" Peter and Lily looked up from the shade beside the shelter.

"The barbeque king's boxers are on fire," Lily called back, pointing at James's left leg, which was smouldering. Disbelieving, James rolled his eyes and glanced down at his leg just as the cotton ignited. His shrieks revebated around the island. Sirius raced down the beach heroically to bat out the flames, whilst James yelled at him and danced about madly. Remus watched, feeling useless.

"BUGGER bugger bugger, mate mind the FISH – no, you've got to put out the bit down there – OUCH! OUCH! PADFOOT!"

"Lupin?"

Remus looked up for the second time. It was Lily, brushing sand off her pleated skirt and looking extremely uncomfortable. And since when did she call him Lupin in that clipped, formal I-don't-know-you way? In the background, James sprinted into the sea, swearing foully, as Sirius and Peter crashed through the waves behind him, splashing him with salt water. Remus felt oddly detached from it all. As if he was in his own little bubble and could just float away, over the sapphire-blue horizon and-

"Lupin?"

"Sorry, what?"

"I've been thinking," Lily began, looking slightly incredulous that he hadn't been paying attention. "This thing about you being a werewolf sounds like some half-baked practical joke of Potter's and I wouldn't believe it for a second if it weren't for the fact that even you Neathanderals can see that a joke like that would be in very poor taste."

"Mmm," Remus said.

"And another thing-" Lily said, tucking her hair behind her ear officiously in a way that forcibly reminded Remus of when she was being a Prefect back at Hogwarts, "I saw you and Black this morning. I'm not judging you, and I don't know how long it's been going on for, but I'm not going to tell anyone that you're together, not if you don't want me to."

"We're not together, it's not-" Remus cut himself short, unable to explain. Lily glanced briefly over at Sirius, who, now satisfied his best friend wasn't going to burn to a crisp, was currently preoccupied with ducking James's head under the water.

"Whatever. I just think we should – act like it's normal. We won't talk about the werewolf thing, or the kiss, or anything. When we get back to Hogwarts, we'll just forget all about it, right?"

Remus felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He licked his dry lips nervously.

"So – it'll be like it never even happened?"

"Exactly, Lupin," Lily nodded, not meeting his eye. "I think that's best, don't you?"

Remus nodded dumbly, and Lily turned and ran gratefully back to join the others. Remus rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand tiredly. Sure, Unblinking Denial might be a safer place to stay, if everyone simply buried their heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge anything, but he wasn't sure he wanted to remain there anymore, not if Lily called him Lupin and Sirius still made him so confused.

Then again, Remus had visited The Cold Hard Truth Comes Out once before, and it hadn't exactly been a pleasant trip.

b>(Poll Closed, and deleted because it was buggering up everything. Sorry! And sorry everyone who read this installment with the crazy italics.) /b>