DISCLAIMER: I am not J.K. Rowling, nor do I own any of the characters, names, ideas, yadda yadda yadda herein and wherein and everywhere. If I did own the characters, I would make Lupin my love slave, because he is furry and lovable and full of cuddly goodness.

AWKWARD

In which our hero Remus finds himself in some "interesting" positions

while trying to keep an eye on his vagabond friends, James and Sirius.

episode one: being remus' unfortunate misadventure in the bedchambers of professor Dumbledore

Remus studied his reflection in the gold glint of the prefect badge. He didn't care if the small group of second years in the corner of the common room were sniggering at him from over the top of their homework; he wasn't going to let the splatters of pumpkin juice from dinner tarnish the front of the badge, and besides, polishing had become a bit of a stress relief exercise for Remus.

In the first week of school alone, he was already finding it extremely hard to keep up with his responsibilities as prefect. After the exploding parchment episodes had begun to worn off, especially after that one incident in the library resulting in a small fire by the ancient volumes section, an epidemic of hickeys had broken out. Remus would have considered this quite normal, if it hadn't been for the fact that the hickeys removed themselves from their victim's neck at will, and turned funny, often disgusting shades of green and yellow, only to result in pustules and/or hives below the chin.

The worst part of all this was that the makers of this fuss were Remus' own two best friends.

Keeping an eye on James and Sirius was probably the hardest task any school prefect had ever and would ever have to do. But Remus was determined to keep his word to Dumbledore and to keep those two under wraps before they burnt the whole school down.

"Moony!" He almost winced when he heard Sirius' voice echo across the common room, the dark haired sixteen-year-old's hair swinging into his face as he grinned up at his friend. James was not far behind, the back of his hair still mussed and messy, and a wide set smile on his face. He pushed his glasses to his nose and began to laugh when he saw the badge in Lupin's hand.

"You still polishin' that thing, Remus?" James asked, sitting down across from Lupin, still laughing. "I mean, there comes a time when it cannot possibly be any shinier, and you reached that point about two days ago."

"Speaking of reaching points, how's that potions report of mine coming along?" Sirius asked, pulling a pillow from the couch and setting it on the ground beside James' feet. He fell onto it in the same manner of a tired dog flopping onto its bed.

"Oh, it's fine…" Remus said, letting his voice quietly trail off. He knew it hadn't been right to say he'd do the written half of Sirius' big potions report for the term, but Sirius was his best friend, and it was always hard to turn him down…

"Why the long face, Remus?" James asked, pulling a parchment out of his pocket, than giving a yell when it exploded in his hands. He and Sirius immediately started to roar, but Remus remained silent, biting his lip and looking from one amused face to the other.

"Is that really safe?" Remus snapped, shaking his head in disapproval. "I mean, people can really get hurt with those. A Hufflepuff had to go to the hospital wing for burns on his hands, and now he can't even hold a quill."

"You're making that up." James said, grinning as he brushed the ashes off his sleeves and emptied the remainder of the parchment into a wastebasket. "Just because we play a few tricks, doesn't mean the whole school's going to end up blowing up or anything."

"Well, I'd rather there not be any more…incidents." Remus said slowly, biting his lip again. "And I mean the hickeys too."

"What makes you think we started the hickeys?" Sirius retorted, angrily throwing him a frown.

"Because I heard you talking about them the night before they started showing up in school." Remus said, rolling his eyes. "And I heard you two talking this morning, about some sort of 'sabotage' of Professor Dumbledore's office."

Sirius and James were silent for a moment, both chewing their lips and looking tense. Sirius finally broke the silence, shaking his head and roaring with laughter. James joined in, but the looks of tension in both of their eyes hadn't gone away.

"That's a good one!" James said, still laughing. "Sabotaging Dumbledore's office? That's really funny!"

"Yeah!" Sirius joined in. "You must've misheard us. We probably were saying, um…hajj in the bump… or… core!"

"Uh, yeah." James nodded, trying to give his friend a convincing smile. Remus rolled his eyes again.

"Hajj in the bump?" He asked, raising an eyebrow.

"New fad. Join the Islamic movement. Very popular." Sirius added quickly, biting his lip.

"Right." Remus said, getting up from the couch. "Just remember: I have my eye on you." He flashed his badge in their direction again, and Sirius crossed his fingers over his face, moaning in feigned terror. Remus threw a pillow at him before heading up the spiral staircase to the dormitories.

That night however, Remus found it very hard to sleep. Between listening to someone moaning suggestive language in their sleep somewhere behind him, and the constant shifting of Sirius in his bed, Remus remembered the plan his friends had discussed, and resolved after much deliberation and biting of nails, that he would follow them.

Whenever they left…or whatever.

For one thing, you couldn't apparate inside Hogwarts. (he being the only who would probably ever read Hogwarts: A History was practically the only one who knew that)

All the same, James and Sirius knew their way around this school better than anyone, and he knew it was going to be quite the task of attempting to secretly trail them on their mission.

While he was thinking all of these thoughts of deliberation and logic, he didn't notice James crawling out of bed beside him, pulling on his invisibility cloak, and promptly leaving the dormitories. By the time he did realize his absence, Sirius was already creeping down towards the common room, and Lupin had to spring out of bed a bit louder than he had hoped, almost waking up the student he landed on, to catch up.

In the common room, Sirius lazily tapped the carved head of a lion on the fireplace, and then stepped through the stairway that had suddenly appeared there. Lupin waited a few seconds before crawling after him, resisting the urge to begin humming a theme song.

Once he had begun to creep his way down the stairs, he gave into his temptations, and started to hum to himself, narrowing his eyes in the torchlit stairwell. Soon, a tiny trapdoor appeared at the bottom, and Lupin pushed it open, only to find himself emerging into the hall between the legs of a shapely statue of a female quidditch player. Shuddering with the thought of the grins James and Sirius must have had on their faces when discovering this certain passageway, he spotted Sirius' shadow, and hurried down the hall after him.

He immediately recognized his whereabouts once he had emerged into the more open corridor of rose marble and green-glowing torches. He was standing outside the entrance to Dumbledore's office, but instead of proceeding toward the main doors, he listened to the almost silent sound of footsteps going around the left-hand corner, and followed.

Sirius and James were nowhere in sight, but another doorway had appeared, one that would have been hidden to passerby's otherwise. It was a plain wooden door, impossible to see unless you had crawled behind the wings of the griffin statue, and taking a deep breath, Lupin pushed it open.

The room inside was poorly lit, and the only things he could see were what appeared to be the outlines of a bed, and a shuttered window beyond. There was the smell of incense floating on the air, and the soft sound of harp music playing somewhere in the room.

Lupin rubbed his watering eyes, affected by the strong incense burning beside him, and realized with a gasp that he was in Dumbledore's bedroom.

Not only that, but he was not alone.

"James?" He whispered at the soft noises coming from the general area of the bed. "Sirius?" He hissed into the darkness, slowly backing towards the wall. The last thing he wanted was a sleep-deprived Dumbledore waking up and yelling at him.

"What was that?" Came the soft Scottish brogue from the bed. Lupin covered his mouth in horror.

This was…not…good…

"If it's a house elf, see what they want." The familiar voice of Dumbledore said. A figure was getting up out of bed, reaching lazily for the wand on the bed stand. A whispered 'lumos' sounded, and the lights in the room flickered on.

Remus screamed like a girl.

Standing before him was a completely naked Professor McGonagall, with no clothes on her person except for a tartan thong in her left hand. Her mouth was hanging open, her eyes as wide as saucers. Dumbledore was in bed, blankets covering everything from the bare torso down, but his mouth too was hanging open.

Remus continued to scream.

"Holy fookin' shyte." McGonagall whispered, suddenly realizing she was naked and using the thong and her hands to cover her lower half. Her top half remained exposed, and Remus continued to stare and scream.

"Who the hell is it, and why are they screaming?" Dumbledore asked, blinking and reaching for the spectacles on the headboard. He had climbed from bed, and Lupin had just caught a glimpse of his bare behind.

Remus was still screaming.

"Bloody hell!" Dumbledore exclaimed, blinking into his spectacles and staring at Remus, who was now pinned to the wall and unable to move out of a mixture of shock and pure fear.

Remus continued to scream like a little girl whose thigh had just been pinched, a high pitched sort of warble that must have woken the whole school.

"Mr. Lupin, would you please stop screaming?" McGonagall asked, now attempting to cover herself with a curtain. Dumbledore was blinking from one person to another over his shoulder, and did not seem to notice he was fully mooning Remus while he did it.

Remus shut his mouth immediately.

"Now that we've all settled down, I'd appreciate it if you left the room, went back to your dormitory and did not speak of this to anyone ever again." McGonagall said in a slow, deliberate tone. Remus began to nod almost hysterically, his eyes now shut tightly.

"Will you please leave?" McGonagall asked, now sounding insistent. Remus continued to nod, beginning to step to what he thought was the door. Instead, his eyes being closed, he tripped over his own feet, and fell to the floor. He stood up quickly, only to realize he now had Dumbledore's briefs over his head and McGonagall's tartan bra around his neck.

Remus let out yet another high-pitched scream.

"That's quite enough, Mr. Lupin!" McGonagall barked. Dumbledore was still frozen in place, his bare behind shining like a lantern in the candlelight.

Remus shut his mouth, only to have his teeth clamp down on the front of Dumbledore's briefs.

Remus let out yet another scream, and ran headfirst into the door. He picked himself back up, pushed the door open, and ran for his life back to the dormitories, Dumbledore's briefs still over his head and the tartan bra still across his collarbone.

Remus screamed the entire way.

The next morning, Remus staggered down to breakfast, his eyes on the ground. The bra and briefs had been hastily stuffed under his bed before he'd collapsed onto it last night, and fearing he'd confess his experience to the first person he spoke to, he had spent the entire morning in silence.

At the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall, James and Sirius were also eating in silence. They had both woken up with socks in their mouths and threatening notes posted at the front of their beds, and neither was talking to Lupin.

Lupin had stopped looking up at the staff table, because when he'd accidentally glanced towards it earlier, both McGonagall and Dumbledore were staring at him pointedly: McGonagall looking like she wanted to burn a hole in his head, and Dumbledore's face a mixture of confusion and fear, exactly what he felt like at that moment.

For the rest of the day, he'd worked especially hard to take all the hallways and stairs McGonagall and Dumbledore rarely frequented, hoping not to run into them. He did see Dumbledore near the east wing of the fifth floor, but Dumbledore had knocked over a number of first years in his hurry to avoid Lupin, whereas Remus had run into a wall.

"You know, we didn't do anything." Remus heard a voice behind him as he got to his feet; Dumbledore was now gone, and the first years were huddled in the corner, looking dazed. James was holding out a hand, and Remus took it and allowed his friend to pull him up.

His head was pounding from where it had smashed against the portrait of twin brothers holding frogs, both of whom were now moaning and nursing their smashed-in faces, their frogs croaking and hopping across the frame. Remus lifted a hand to his own forehead, biting his lip when it came back bloody.

"Yeah," Sirius had appeared behind them, his hands on his hips. "We only went to Dumbledore's office to see if there really was a trapdoor there, like one of the Slytherins had said."

"But there wasn't." James said pointedly, eyeing Remus' bleeding head. "The bloody bugger lied."

"And we never intended for you to follow us, so whatever happened that caused you to stuff socks in our mouths and threaten our lives is really not our fault." Sirius said, narrowing his eyes in anger.

"Well, someone has to keep an eye on you two." Lupin said, attempting to stand up for himself. "If you had broken into the office and messed something up, or stolen something-"

"We're just having fun, Moony, not committing homicidal crimes!" Sirius cried, shaking his head in exasperation. "Honestly, the things you take seriously…" He started to walk away, only to fall flat on his face. They all turned to see Peter standing on the hem of Sirius' robes, turning a bright shade of violet.

"Sorry…" Peter said softly, biting his lip and shuffling off of Sirius' cloak. "I sorta…uh…I sorta didn't notice I was on your robe, Sirius."

"Well, I'm glad you have such acute senses, Peter." Sirius said gruffly, pushing himself to his feet and shaking his head like a shaggy dog. "Otherwise I'd never get my daily dosage of bruising."

"Well…I sorta…I sorta…" Peter stuttered, but Sirius held out a hand for silence.

"I don't care, really." He said, turning on his heel and storming off. When the rest of them stood there staring at him, he turned around again and yelled: "Well, aren't you coming?"

"Coming where?" James asked, folding his arms across his chest. "We're not done pouting at each other."

"It's time for transfiguration, idiots." Sirius said, eyeing the grandfather clock across the hall. "We're already three minutes late."

Lupin let out a gasp and hurried after Sirius. TRANSFIGURATION! Now what was he going to do? How was he supposed to spend an entire class only a few feet from the person he'd only just seen…

He couldn't think about it. Whenever he did, the urge to scream like a little girl started in his throat, and he wasn't sure he wanted all that with his friends around.

They practically ran down the hall and skipped half the stairs. Lupin knew McGonagall was going to be in a particularly surly mood as it was, and he really didn't need another excuse to have her fuming at him.

When they arrived at McGonagall's classroom, they were all relieved to see she was not present yet, and they hurried to their usual seats, barely receiving so much as a glance from the rest of the class, who were already used to the foursome showing up late for everything and making some kind of scene.

McGonagall finally emerged from her office a few minutes later, slamming the door behind her and stomping to the front of the class. She stared straight at the back of the room towards a spot on the far wall that Lupin could not quite identify. It was obvious she was refusing to make eye contact with any of them.

"Open your books." She barked, and they all jumped as they reached in their bags for Transfiguration Year Six. "Page 256 through 270 please. We will be having a quiz following your reading, which will count as a full test in your term report."

Everyone let out a simultaneous groan.

"I'd suggest you stop your complaining and read the damn book!" She yelled, her eyes flashing menacingly. The students were eyeing each other nervously; when was the last time they'd heard McGonagall swear in front of students? "You have ten minutes."

There was a fluttering of papers, and the talking ceased as everyone bent over their books, eyes now focused on the jumble of words before them. Lupin was finding it extremely hard to concentrate on the chapter when he felt McGonagall's eyes flicker from the wall to his head, but he bit his lip and bent even lower over the book, his nose nearly touching the page.

When the ten minutes were up, almost no one had finished the chapter. Even Remus had to take a few more seconds after the cutoff time to finish the last sentence. When McGonagall snapped for all books to close, Remus realized with a sinking heart that he had hardly even absorbed the last few pages.

McGonagall passed out three pages of questions to everyone, giving them the remainder of the class to finish. If the questions hadn't been as impossible as they were, Remus would have been relieved at all the time she'd given him, but he knew that even with years to complete the test, he wouldn't be able to answer half of these.

"What's a Snorlag?" Sirius hissed from beside him. Lupin felt McGonagall's eyes flashing onto the two of them, so he didn't respond, but Sirius continued to hiss. "Is it what you transform, or what you get after the spell?"

"Remus Lupin!" McGonagall snapped, and Lupin was forced to put his head up. He stared at a point past her right ear, a tiny speck on the chalkboard. She too was looking past him, not allowing herself to look directly into his eyes.

"Front of the class, Mr. Lupin." She barked, pointing to the floor beside her. He said nothing, but stood up from his desk, starting for the head of the class.

"Bring your paper with you." McGonagall ordered, and he reached back for his test, shuffling towards where she stood. He mounted the steps to the podium where she taught, and slowly handed her his test.

"Incarcio." She hissed, and the test burst into flames. Lupin jumped in place, as did most of the class. Sirius was looking shell-shocked, and his mouth kept opening and closing like a dying fish. Lupin sighed, because his friend had nothing to worry about; Lupin knew perfectly well why McGonagall had picked on him.

"Your test is a zero, Mr. Lupin. You've failed." McGonagall said, but she was speaking to the wall on the opposite side of the room. "Now, I need to report this to Professor Dumbledore, and possibly arrange a week of detention."

The class was staring at her in awe, their mouths hanging open. When students talked during tests, they normally received a verbal warning and a few points off their final score. But a week's detention, flunking, and a trip to the headmaster?

"Yes, ma'am." Remus whispered, talking to the floorboard nail next to his left toe.

"Do you understand what you have done?" McGonagall asked the corner of the table.

"I was…talking during a test." Lupin replied to his shoelace.

"You know this is not allowed." McGonagall said to her fingernail, which she was examining in earnest. "There are serious consequences that all of this class would do well from understanding. The rest of the class will remain here while I take Mr. Lupin to the headmaster's office. Miss Evans, you are in charge."

Lupin looked up to see the red-headed Lily Evans nod at McGonagall. Her bright green eyes fell on Remus, and she gave him a small smile. Her eyes were full of apology and pity, and it made his heart melt. As he walked out the door, he found himself picturing her face instead of McGonagall's.

There was silence as they marched to Dumbledore's office, and Lupin was glad of it. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with a conversation between himself and McGonagall right now, and he was already beginning to grow angry with her. If they started to talk, he was afraid it would lead to an argument, and students fighting with teachers led to dire consequences.

He stared at the dark hair flowing down her back as they walked up the spiral staircase to Dumbledore's office. Her tartan robes were hard not to step on, and he kept lifting his feet up to his knees in order to avoid tripping her up.

The door to Dumbledore's office had opened before him, and McGonagall literally pushed him inside. Lupin found himself standing before a mahogany desk, and Professor Dumbledore looked up, blinking a few times before turning bright red and staring back down at the scroll in his hands.

"Mr. Lupin was talking during a quiz, Headmaster." McGonagall said quickly, staring pointedly at the top of Dumbledore's dark brown head. He looked up momentarily, his eyes flashing from McGonagall's face to Lupin's, and then glanced back down at his scroll.

"And why is he here, Minerva?" Dumbledore asked quietly, and Lupin could almost feel the heat of McGonagall's temper rising beside him.

"That's cheating!" She hissed, forcing Lupin forward. "I believe a detention should be arranged, as well as a fail for that test-"

"Minerva…" Lupin could no longer look at Dumbledore, who was now staring up at McGonagall. All he could picture was a bare behind and a blinking pair of eyes.

"Albus." Minerva snapped back, her arms folding across her chest.

"Minerva." Dumbledore said back, raising his eyebrows.

"Albus." Minerva hissed.

"Minerva." Dumbledore said softly, and Lupin wondered how much longer they were gong to continue playing the name game.

"Albus, he is getting detention." McGonagall finally hissed.

"No, he's going back to class. Seeing your headmaster and transfiguration teacher completely naked and in bed together is not a reason to receive a detention."

McGonagall's jaw dropped. "Is that why you think I'm doing this?" She screamed, jabbing a finger at him. "I'll have you know that not only have I completely forgotten the incident, but I am following the appropriate measures for this kind of incident. Are we supposed to encourage cheating?"

"Was he actually cheating?"

"Well….I saw him…he was listening to…well…"She stuttered, her voice trailing off.

"That's what I thought." Dumbledore let out a long sigh. "You can go, Mr. Lupin. There's really no other reason for you to be here but to satisfy my partner's incorrect wishes. Professor McGonagall and I need to sort out a few things before she leaves, but I wouldn't have any problem with you heading back to class yourself."

"Thank you, Headmaster." Remus managed, and ducked out of the room, feeling McGonagall successfully burning a hole in the back of his neck.

He made it through the rest of Transfiguration, even after his test was returned to him and he still didn't know half the answers. As he was leaving however, he saw McGonagall get up from her desk, clearing her throat.

"Go ahead without me." He told Sirius, pushing him out and slowing his progress at packing up. When everyone had left and he and McGonagall were the only ones in the classroom, McGonagall cleared her throat once more, and strode down the aisle to where he stood shoving his book into his bag.

"I just wanted to say, Lupin," She began, taking a deep breath. "That I want my bra back."

episode two: being remus' accidental stumbling upon the passage to the girls' dormitories, and the misunderstandings, confusion, and betrayal that take place therein

Remus had never taken much interest in girls. Unlike his friends, he didn't go tromping off in front of large groups of them, yelling impressive cuss words and showing off coordination skills. When a girl approached him, instead of mussing his hair like James, or putting on a sly grin like Sirius, he simply flushed red and began to mutter in low tones of embarrassment and confusion.

There was one girl though that made him especially red. Lily Evans was in Gryffindor sixth year as well. She was confident, and kind, and beautiful. She was a million wonderful different adjectives that Remus found extremely easy to come up with in a few seconds. When he saw her, and when she smiled, everything got a whole lot better.

Unfortunately, she was James' current eye candy.

It was a very good thing Lily Evans had never been to the boys' dormitories. If so, then she would have seen that James had decorated his four-poster with about a dozen voluptuous centerfold beauties from Bewitching Vixens Weekly, all hexed in a clever way so that they possessed the smiling face of Lily Evans, blinking long eyelashes and smiling suggestively.

When Remus got angry at James, he always threatened to strip the bed of Lily's face, and James would shut up or stop teasing him immediately. But the truth was that Remus didn't need a reason to take Lily's shining face from the bodies of busty pin-up girls. Remus felt sick every time he glanced towards James' bed, and whenever he finally got the chance, he'd have those things off in a second, anger or not.

It was Remus hidden aspirations and James' hot-headed obsession for the same girl that would be their temporary undoing. It was Lily that almost tore the two apart.

But let's not get too sentimentally dramatic here.

Remus was sixteen, and everyone knows the number one thing on a teenage boy's minds. Hormones aside, Remus had never been close to girls, and being curious seems like a fairly typical notion for wanting to get close to an especially nice one. James could have had any girl he wanted, even if he came across as a fat-headed jock with messy hair. Sirius, even if his recent attempts to woo ladies had not gone well, still dealt better with the opposite sex than Remus ever would. And even Peter, who hardly showed any interest in girls, had been called 'cute' by the seventh year girls he'd accidentally stumbled into one day.

Remus had already had his close encounters of the frightening kind with intimacy, and I'm sure if you had seen two of your most admired teachers naked in one night, you'd probably avoid the whole area for a couple of years in which you recovered psychologically from the blow.

Remus was smart, though. He understood what had happened, and had dealt with it as emotionally well as he could. Whenever he thought about 'it', he screamed like a girl, thus releasing his encased emotions and confusion in one quick swipe. It was like killing two phoenixes with one stone.

Regardless that everyone now thought him to be on something, and that his friends were starting to wear earplugs for a few days, Remus felt he was recovering nicely. It had been three days of refusing to look either one of the teachers in the eye, nor warm up completely to his friends, whom he still thought were guilty of this episode, but it had also been three days of fully clothed individuals, and for that Remus was thankful.

Three days following the 'events', Remus found himself on extra prefect duties as assigned by McGonagall, who still was unnerved he'd seen her in such a condition. Ignoring Dumbledore's instructions to leave Remus alone, she'd given him extra hall duty, and made him watch the first years between classes, trailing them from room to room, under the pretext that he 'keep an eye out for hickeys.' Remus hated it, but he also didn't want to give McGonagall further reason to hate him, so he did what he was told.

That Thursday, he was sitting on a bench on the third floor, his prefect badge glowing green for 'hall duty.' Despite McGonagall's orders, he'd pulled out a book and was deep in the middle of The Werewolf's Romance, a steamy piece of fiction Sirius had given him as a joke, but which Remus was actually finding entertaining. Somewhere between Tawny the mountain princess' flight from the evil Duke Gargenolf and her reunion with her lover the werewolf Igor, he heard the sounds of scuffing feet and hushed voices down the corridor. Setting down the romance for a moment, he peered past the statue of an eagle devouring a snake, only to see two familiar rear ends slipping behind a marble swan. Remus let out an exasperated sigh and stood up, walking silently to where James and Sirius were staring at the wall.

"Fourth row, third brick from the left?" James mused, rubbing his chin. "Or maybe it's third row, fourth brick from the right."

"It's fifth row, ninth brick from the left, idiot." Sirius said, tapping a brick in front of him. Nothing happened.

"It's not that one." Remus said softly, causing both of his friends to jump in place, only to turn around slowly and give him looks of unmistakable guilt.

"Damn it Moony, if you're going to sneak up on someone, go do it to Pete." Sirius barked angrily, folding his arms across his chest.

"If you're going to get into trouble, do it where a prefect can't see you." Remus said sharply, raising an eyebrow.

"We're not doing anything." James said unconvincingly.

"Examining bricks?" Remus raised his eyebrow again.

"Does it matter?" Sirius asked angrily, grabbing James' sleeve and dragging him out from behind the swan. "Whatever we were going to do, we're not going to now, so you can leave us alone."

"Right." Remus said, rolling his eyes.

As Sirius started down the hall, Peter ran straight into him knocking him to the floor as was his daily practice.

"Sorry!" Peter squeaked, helping Sirius to his feet. "I was trying to find you-"

"Yeah, whatever." Sirius barked. He turned to Remus. "You gonna come down to lunch?"

"I will."

"And don't you even think about poking around that wall." James said, narrowing his eyes at Lupin.

"Fine." Remus said, eyeing them as they staggered off.

But nothing was just 'fine' to Remus. 'Fine' would not be 'fine' if James and Sirius were about to plan some elaborate trick or prank or overall misbehavior under Remus' nose, only to invoke the wrath of the McG. 'Fine' would be 'hellishly unlucky'.

So Remus did what any prefect would do. Remus went back to the wall and tapped every brick in sight.

And it just so happened that on his fifty sixth try, the swan unfolded into a staircase extending to the ceiling and beyond.

"Cool." Lupin said, smiling to himself. He remembered the brick, tapped it again, and the staircase disappeared.

He now had something to do tonight.

So after transfiguration (including much wiping of tears on his sleeve after his B- on the test he'd almost failed) dinner (in which James and Sirius carried on a loudly innocent conversation about studying hard tonight and not doing anything mischievous whatsoever) and extra credit for care of magical creatures (the damn fire-breathing bunnies nearly incarcerated his left buttocks, making the experience SO not worth three points on his term grade) he headed to bed. Or at least, he pretended to.