LINER NOTES:

I'm feeling quite inspired today, so there will be two chapters put out today- and I said this-or-that would happen at this-or-that time if I didn't get another mega-chapter? Well, this was turning into a mega-chapter - so the reveal will be in the other chapter coming out today (I won't make you wait any longer than it takes me to type it up, I promise), not this one. I WILL make it worth your wait, though, I really will. It's only that a friend of mine asked why Remus and Harry never discussed Sirius, and I realized "you know what? She's right, they should," so the first part of this chapter spawned from that.

DISCLAIMER: Someone actually emailed me after my"I am JKR"disclaimer to ask if I really was J.K. Rowling. I'm serious. The disclaimer was SARCASM, people! I'll be glad to sign your book, but it's not going to up the value any.

ARCHIVING: See Chapter 1, please.

RATING: This is rated PG-13/T for direct homosexuality (mild kissing, mention of male/male relationship), a guy wearing makeup (see the REFERENCE NOTES at the bottom before backing up because you think it's squickable, it's probably notwhat you're thinking),vague discussion of naked people (or rather posters thereof),and general maturity of the content matter. (In other words, amigos, it's not all balloons and rainbows.)

REVIEWS:

Yulara: On the contrary, Severus would remember the Marauders'awful pranks and taunts without realizing on a conscious level that Remus wasn't a part of it, so yes, he would probably think of Remus as being vicious, though not necessarily in a blood-and-gore sense. Harry did exactly what I would do in that situation - there are times when letting someone down gently just isn't the right approach. If Harry had said "Maybe you should . . ." then Remus never would have and the chapter would cease to exist. Sometimes you just have to hit someone over the head with a two-by-four to make them listen to sense. And as to LOTR: I've tried four times to read The Hobbit, and every time I try I fall asleep at the same part (when the hobbits are camping in the giants' camp). It took me three hours to get to that point. To give you an idea why this is significant, I read Order of the Phoenix - all 800-some pages of it - in less than six hours. So I have very good reason to not like LOTR - it's a sedative!

UPDATE: I finally finished The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and am now about 20 pages into the first book ofThe Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit wasn't horrible, once I re-read it (and Gollum RULES), but it's never going to trump good ol' Remus.

Enjoy!

Remus and Harry spent eight days in a nervous state – Remus more so than Harry, as he had more riding on Nate's answer than he was willing to admit. So now he was sitting in the large living room window, staring out at the starry night sky (1) and brooding. He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting there, but he suddenly felt himself enveloped in a slightly childish and awkward hug and leaned backward instinctively, still half-engaged in the memories he'd been sorting through. Harry almost fell over from the added weight, so he sat down on the window ledge. "I was worried about you. You've been sitting here so long I wasn't even entirely sure you were still alive."

Remus shook himself out of his trance. "Sorry. How long have I been here?"

"Three and a half hours."

The werewolf sighed. "I was only thinking – it's almost exactly like the night Sirius and your father found out about – well, I suppose I really found out too . . ."

"About you being a werewolf?"

Remus shook his head. "Gay. Or 'Resident Queer,' which Sirius insisted on teasing me with for the next month. He seemed to find it the height of hilarity to pin a poster of a naked man next to my bed. It took me almost four hours to get the stupid thing off, it kept reattaching itself. Apparently jokes like that never quite go out of style. In seventh year your father woke me up at three o'clock in the morning to beg me to switch beds with him for the night because apparently Sirius found an audio poster of some pinup girl, and she kept laughing because James was sleeping in his underwear. I didn't have it too much better, but I was always the best at Charms, so it wasn't too hard to shut her up."

"Oh." Harry laughed softly at the sudden digression in the path of Remus' thoughts, andscooted further into the window – his legs were falling asleep – and suddenly a wide yet wistful grin broke over his face. Remus hadn't talked about Sirius even once, except that single mention atKing's Cross,since – since the bad night (Harry pushed the thought away from himself) and Remus' brooding only went to show him how little he really knew about his godfather. Maybe he could get some answers while Remus was in this odd, dreamy mood. "Care to share?"

Remus grinned a little and shook his head. "Terribly persistent, aren't you?" he teased, then leaned his head against Harry's shoulder while he tried to sort out the beginning of memory – there was so much entangled with everything else, the way that life does,that he couldn't be entirely certain what Harry would or wouldn't know. Finally he chose a thread. "Well, first, you have to understand that although it's not very often done, people fromall Houses are allowed in the common room of any other House. It used to be much less rare – a lot's changed since I was in school, I imagine the war had something to do with that– and when we were in fifth year we all – all the boys in the Tower, I mean, there were seven of us– got conned into a game of Truth or Dare with the girls and a bunch of kids from Ravenclaw. I think there were a few Hufflepuffs in there, too, and I know Lucius Malfoy's youngersiblings were there - there were two of them, fraternal twins, boy and girl -but that's beside the point. The point really is that I'd only ever kissed your mother on the cheek before, and never anybody else - well, except family, but that's different - in any way, and that's where the whole thing started . . ."

"Truth or Dare, Moony?"

"Er . . ." Remus looked nervously around the loose grouping of friends sitting on chairs, rugs, the sofa, and the floor, before answering. "Truth, I guess."

"Okay . . ."

"And you're not allowed to ask anything overly personal, Lil's, remember that. I don't need people asking if I have bunny rabbits on my underwear or something like that. The sheep question (2)was bad enough."

"Oh, I'll remember." Lily Evans grinned at him mischievously from the floor, and Remus made a mental note to make her kiss James – or at least to dare James to kiss her hand – before the game was over.

"Who do you have a crush on?"

"Erm . . ." Remus thought about that one. "Well . . . nobody . . . actually . . . right now . . ."

"Ah, that's a boring answer! Make him do a dare, Evans!" James all but howled indignantly from his bean bag by the fire.

Unfortunately, Remus' idea wasn't as original a dare as he had thought.

"Kiss Sirius? Are you out of your mind, Lily?"

"On the mouth."

James hooted as Sirius and Remus both adopted panic-stricken looks.

"I'm not kissing him! I don't know where his mouth's been!"

"Nowhere particularly dirty since I brushed my teeth this morning, Moony," Sirius replied, sounding quite put out. Suddenly the reality of his friend's predicament hit him full force and he almost doubled over in laughter.

"What's so funny?" Remus demanded.

"Only – only – you've never kissed anybody before, have you, Moony?"

Remus turned a rather becoming shade of red. "There's nothing wrong with that," he answered defensively.

"Oh, no, there's nothing wrong with it – only that you haven't been visited by the Spark Monster."

"The what?" Remus didn't care too much for conversation about monsters.

"If you see sparks when you get your first kiss, it means you're going to lose your virginity within a year."

Remus sputtered indignantly. "You honestly . . . I . . . no! I'm not kissing my best friend, Lily, and I already answered a question –"

"Which was vetoed as too boring an answer," James injected. "You're stuck, Moony."

"And I suppose you honestly believe in this Spark Demon thing."

"Spark Monster. And yes, I do –" Sirius' face broke into a downright evil grin – "It works."

Remus blushed even more heavily.

Finally, feeling extraordinarily trapped, Remus swung himself forward on his arms and kissed the corner of Sirius' mouth. His eyes grew wide for several silent seconds. Then he scrambled to his feet, stared around the circle, and ran out of the room.

"And I ran off like a scared rabbit. That answer your question?"

Harry just about died laughing. "And . . . and did you see sparks?"

"What do you suppose I took off for? I was appalled."

"Bit homophobic?"

"Not really . . . just never really thought I could be one, you know?"

"Yeah . . . I guess. So, so this Spark Monster thing –"

"I never figured out if it was true or not."

"Why not?"

"Well, because I fell just outside the one-year time limit . . . "

Harry groaned. Trust Remus to not be an amusing and typical victim of a secondary-school maybe-myth. It was like the God of Lake Hogsmeade story. Nobody'd ever actually been pulled into the lake by an angry mer-god, but the legend persisted.

Remus grinned mischievously at Harry. "More than you cared to know?"

"I was just thinking it was a bloody shame you didn't fall under the so-called curse."

Remus laughed. "Sirius and your dad both said that."

Suddenly Harry, who had slouched into a lounging position, sat bolt upright. "You never . . . went out with Sirius, did you?"

"As in, in a romantic way, or at all?"

Harry nodded.

Remus laughed at that. "Well, we went to the Graduation Ball together, but that was only because I couldn't find a date – my choices were pretty limited to begin with – and Sirius absolutely refused to let me stay in the tower or to go alone. But we went as friends, nothing more than that. I think at one point he might have been - somewhat interested - but it would have been too much like - oh, I don't know, sleeping with my own brother or something. Probably something close to how you'd feel if somebody tried to set you up with Ron or Hermione."

"Oh."

"Would it bother you if we had dated in a romantic way?"

Harry considered. "I guess not. But it'd be an awful lot to swallow all at one time, you know?"

"Oh, believe me, Harry, I know." He grinned suddenly. "You know, I would've loved to see the look on his face when he came into the kitchen and saw your O.W.L. scores."

Harry smiled a bit automatically, but Remus put a quick stop to that.

"The ones we love never really leave us, Harry. And I know he was here that night, even if we couldn't see him . . . even if he normally exists on another plane now."

"How do you know?"

"I put your O.W.L.s back in the envelope and we went to bed, remember?" Harry nodded. "When I came out in the morning to start breakfast, they were sitting in a row on the table and the envelope was missing. And I can assure you there was nobody else in the flat that night. The door was locked."

"You're putting me on," Harry protested.

"I would do no such thing, Harry Potter, and you ought to know better by now. I rather fancy it would have been Sirius' idea of a right joke, leaving me to go crazy over a disappearing envelope. He enjoyed doing things like that. I wanted to keep it so you'd have it - I still have mine because I didn't want to lose the score summary - but it was gone, summary sheet and all. The only thing left was the part he would have wanted you to keep - the certificates. I'm sure of that. I still have the book with Sirius' certificates in it, somewhere. He refused flat out to keep the rest. He wanted you to remember the important things. That was one of the last things he ever said to me that made any kind of real sense to the general populace instead of meaning something to only Sirius himself."

Somewhere inside, Harry began to heal.

It was just when Remus had finally resigned himself to the fact that he would probably not be hearing from Nate again that he awoke to the tap of claws against the bedroom window, and when he peered out into the half-lit dawn sky he saw black and a flash of white. Looking back, Remus would say that he had never moved so fast to open the window and get the answers he'd been craving for more than a week.

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Dear Rémy,

You aren't the only one having writing troubles. I did as you suggested and seriously thought about this answer before giving it, or even setting a quill to paper, but it was extremely difficult to do so.

The only answer I find myself able to come up with is that, to be truly honest, I don't know what to say. I have always had one picture of werewolves based off those that I have met and what I've read in books and the newspapers. You certainly do not fit that image, but I'm not sure whether or not I would still want to pursue this. You've shown me that perhaps I'm not always in the absolute right – but I'm really not sure what to think. To be perfectly honest, I feel I'd rather make a more informed decision. Would you care to meet sometime? Name a place if you'd like to meet – we both live in London and I can get almost anywhere in the city provided I don't have to guard myself against overeager courtesans.

Always,

Nate

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Remus stared in shock.

Remus tipped his head back and forced his eyeball down so he could still see into the mirror as he lined the bottom of his eye with kohl and eye pencil. "One of these days I'm going to go get major cosmetic surgery and I won't have to do this anymore, won't that be wonderful, Harry?"

Harry just shook his head from where he was sitting. "But your face still wouldn't show up on stage if you didn't put on makeup (3), so you'd be defeating the purpose."

Remus gave a sort of half-nod to the side. "I suppose you've got a point," he conceded as he covered his eyelids in some kind of lighter-than-flesh-tone liquid that seemed to double the size of his eyes. "One nice thing, all this gel and liquid makeup is a lot easier to use than what I was stuck with when I first started doing things like this. Back then powder makeup and stick makeup were the only kinds that existed – other than pancake and greasepaint, but those have been around for a few hundred years (4), and I wasn't aiming to look like a clown."

Harry heard the unvoiced and subtle question. "You look fine, Remus."

Remus played nervously with his earring (another acquisition he'd added himself when he was fifteen or so). "Do you think so, really?"

"Absolutely. You'll tell me about him when you get home, right?"

"Of course." Remus paused, and then burst out with another question. "You don't think it was a bad idea, do you, Harry? To ask him to meet me between sets?"

Harry grinned approvingly. "Absolutely not. It's the best thing you could do. Assuming he's actuallysome crazy bloodthirsty maniac – I don't believe that, but pretend for a minute that maybe it's true – then you're in a public place, surrounded by people, and there are people you have to account to. If you don't show up, they'll come looking for you. You're meeting him casually instead of some formal thing right off, so it won't be as awkward, and if he's been around for any of the show you'll have something to start off a conversation with. It's a great idea."

Remus grinned too, but his grin was anxious and quickly faltered. "I hope you're right."

"I know I'm right. You need to get going. You only have an hour to be there and you always say you like to be there as early as you can."

Remus nodded, not quite sure what to say, and stood up.

"Don't wait up, Harry."

"I won't."

"And you know the rules when I'm not–"

"No open flames, no using the phone for long distance or superlong calls, you'll call at ten, there's money on the kitchen table if I want to go down around the corner to eat, don't be out after eight, and if anybody comes around make sure I know who's at the door for absolute certain before opening it."

"Right. Wish me luck."

"All the luck in the world." Harry hugged his guardian briefly but tightly and handed him the car keys. "When are you going to be home?"

"I don't know. I'll be here in the morning."

"Okay."

Remus shut the door.

REFERENCE NOTES:

(1) I inserted this to make my 10th grade English teacher, Mr. Jenkins, happy even though I'm not in his class anymore (he was my favorite English teacher and actually encouraged us to study Harry Potter for literary value, which is how I started writing Harry Potter fanfiction). Stars in literature are a symbol of hope and a positive outlook (or that things are "looking up"). Winter stars can mean death, but summer stars – like these – are often a sign of good things to come. Just thought y'all might like to know the origin of this phrase, which did not exist in the notebook-form draft of this chapter.

(2) This is a pun-joke shared by Alicia and I. Alicia is the proud owner of a bedroom set with sheep on it, and a matching pair of pajamas. I was teasing her little brother (nicely - considering he's a little squirt we get along pretty well) about wearing one of Alicia's old shirts, or something like that, when the idea of Remus in Alicia's pajamas popped into my head for no real reason, along with an amusing pun onan old cliche - "A wolf in sheep clothing." The 'sheep question' would probably be arather embarrassing question as to where he got them, etc. (I envision them as hand-me-downs from his sister Catherine.)

(3) This is true. Heavy makeup is a must when performing onstage, even if you're male, because stage lights tend to "wash out" your complexion and make you look sickly and blurred (think old Polaroid photo here). Remus is not secretly a drag queen – he just knows the true professional tricks of the trade.

(4) Someone in my math class tried to argue this with me, but it is very definitely true – greasepaint has been around for a long, long time. "Blackface," the form of makeup used by 19th century (and earlier) performers to play Othello and other black characters onstage, is a form of greasepaint.