Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or anything you can recognise from any books or TV series or movies. I do however take liberties with the plots or mentions provided by JKR or other writers. The only profit I'm getting out of it is improving my English.
Title: Secrets & Keepers – Entropy
Rating/Warnings: R/M [AU; Manipulative Dumbledore (therefore not Dumbledore friendly); profanity; canon typical violence; frank discussion of past child abuse (Harry but not only) and of past child abuse of sexual nature (not Harry); not very detailed descriptions of torture (not Harry); Black family feels; identity crisis; pureblood politics; good Slytherins]
Characters and pairings: Harry Potter, Sirius Black, Regulus Black, Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Bathsheda Babbling. As well as Hermione Granger, Arcturus Black, Larry Lawrence (OC) and Josephine Turner (OC). The rest of characters will appear as the story progresses.
All adults are more or less paternal towards Harry or grandfatherly towards Hermione as well as generally friendly or at the very least civil towards each other once they sort out their differences.
References to past and present relationship of sexual nature between Snape and Babbling. Occasional mentions of one sided Sirius/James, not one sided Sirius/OFC (the woman of many names). Contains mentions of Remus/Tonks, eventual allusions to Larry/Josephine and background Arcturus/Melania. No Harry or Hermione pairings because they have a lot on their plates and won't have time for teenage nonsenses for a longer while (at the very least through PoA timeline).
Spoilers: All seven books with occasional, brief references to ground work for HP & CC main plot as well as Secrets & Keepers – Collision Course and Secrets & Keepers – Supernova.
Summary: Harry & Hermione learn that as weird as everything become in the aftermath of learning devastating news is that the life actually goes on. There's a Dark Lord to destroy, a manipulative Headmaster to overthrow, family bonds and new friendships to establish and old ones to maintain. Direct sequel to S&K - Collision Course and S&K - Supernova.
Chapter summary: Harry has a talk with Lupin about mental health and chronic diseases. He also gets his own room.
Word count: About 4100.
Author's note: What can I say? Harry is intelligent (especially when he's not preoccupied with usual teenage drama) kid and figures out something. It was also a nice opportunity to give him a one-on-one conversation with Lupin.
Next chapter will be posted on Tuesday 23rd February 2021.
Beta read by Regnbuen (Nitraz).
I hope that You will find this story enjoyable. I would be the most grateful for constructive criticism.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place.
~Emily Dickinson
Secrets & Keepers – Entropy
Chapter eight: Werewolf on SSRI.
Harry Potter, 10th August 1993, 12 Grimmauld Place, London
He had his books, notebooks and loose pieces of parchment spread out in front of him, all over the coffee table on the ground floors sitting room, and was technically supposed to work on his Potions summer essay, but so far his essay consisted only of a title.
He promised himself yesterday before going to sleep that the Potions essay would be the one he would work on tomorrow, because during dinner, after spending the better part of the day cooped up with Sirius and later on also Regulus, in the library, Snape admitted, with a look of someone who had all of their teeth pulled out without anaesthesia, that amongst his possessions he found Harry's mother's potions textbooks that she reportedly threw after him after a failed attempt at reconciliation of their friendship.
And while Harry didn't doubt the admission that they had been thrown after him, he did doubt Snape's willingness to part with a single one of them, let alone three. Especially after Tonks, who along with Lupin had returned to Grimmauld Place for dinner, both in a peculiar, tetchy mood, casually mentioned that Magical Drafts and Potions had five books in their set. That comment earned her a glare from Snape and a comment how her poisons and antidotes had been faring.
So instead of needling Snape about what became of the other two Harry emphatically decided to not broach the subject. Even if they were still in Snape's possession, his mother had once been his friend, and if that was the only thing that was left of her… Harry couldn't imagine the idea of losing either Ron or Hermione physically after a fall out of their friendship. In fact he couldn't imagine anything that could possibly cause that, but if something similar to what happened to Snape's friendship with Harry's mother happened to him and his friends, he would be guarding his stupid copy of Quidditch Through the Ages with Ron's notes, like a dragon guards a pile of gold.
Nevertheless, leafing through the copy of Mum's Magical Drafts and Potions grade 3 occupied him well into the night before Sirius marched him up to his new bedroom.
The bedroom itself was once Sirius's bedroom that in the span of a day had undergone a drastic change in the décor. And while Kreacher did interrupt his Ancient Runes lessons with Babbling during the afternoon with bringing a couple of wallpaper samples to ask which one Master Harry liked the best, Harry made nothing of it until Sirius showed him his new bedroom.
It was breathtakingly beautiful. The vibrant green interactive wallpaper with soft golden accents of a moving forest filled with animals that roamed it, was matched with less heavy looking cherry wood. The bed, instead of a four-poster one of the past, had a tall padded headboard that was just high enough for Harry to sit up and lean against without smashing his head against the edge of it. The footboard of it was much lower but still tall enough to have folded throws and blankets hanging over it.
A boggart-dementor infested heavy wardrobe was exchanged with two narrower wardrobes and a chest of drawers. Next to the door hung a tall, full-length mirror. The window was surrounded by bookcases, mostly empty with the exception of books that Kreacher had to take out of Harry's trunk. The padded window-seat looked exactly as it looked previously, with the only difference being the colour of the wood and the vibrant green cushions. Instead of the old, heavy desk, there was a delicately looking table with fresh notebooks, a box of quills and couple of inkpots.
He was so deeply touched and taken by surprise that it had taken him a couple of minutes to find his voice, just to mumble thank you into Sirius's chest as he hugged the older man tightly.
"You're welcome," said Sirius as he hugged him tightly. "I'm sorry that we didn't get to pick them together…"
"Doesn't matter," Harry interrupted him. "It's great. It's more than I ever got from…"
He didn't finish because the look that passed through Sirius' face was a menacing glower that promised Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia a lot of nasty things.
Technically he could be working on his essay up in his bedroom, but he came with his, well his mum's potions textbook to breakfast, and afterwards got himself manoeuvred into helping Lupin with carrying a stack of books and a tall pile of parchment, both of which Snape had dumped almost literally on him as soon as the table was cleared.
So while Harry was supposed to work on his essay, Lupin holed himself up in an armchair with his stacks of parchment and books, and they had been supposedly working like that for the last two hours. Until a couple of minutes ago, during a break from taking notes of his mum's second grade book, Harry was struck by a sudden thought.
Ever since he arrived at Grimmauld Place he had hardly been left alone for further and longer than it took him to use the bathroom, and while it was understandable as long as Grimmauld Place looked like an ominous house of horrors and doom and gloom, Kreacher, between preparing meals in the last two days, had cleaned it up considerably. He still had a lot of work to do, but between Sirius and Regulus he made a sufficient dent in removing potentially dangerous items out of Harry's vicinity.
And yet, there he was, for the lack of the better word, babysat like a three year old toddler instead of thirteen year old teenager. The day before yesterday, the time he didn't spend sleeping were spent mostly in Sirius's company. Yesterday it was Babbling and Regulus throughout the day, and Sirius through the evening until he had fallen asleep. Sirius was also there when he woke up, in his dog form, pretending to nap when Harry woke up.
And now there was Lupin. Not that his presence interrupted him in any way. Lupin didn't make any noise and appeared to be engrossed in his own work, but that didn't change the fact that he was still there.
Then his thoughts had flew back to the conversation he had with Sirius in the bathroom the day before yesterday. About not considering being a vessel of Voldemort's soul piece as a death sentence. Then Babbling's comments came to mind, about that vulnerable little girl who committed suicide under the influence of the current Divination professor. Then came another thought about Snape and his mother's potions textbooks.
Was he on a suicide watch?
"Am I on a suicide watch?" he asked out loud.
"Hmm," hummed Lupin from his armchair. "What?" he asked as he looked up from his book.
"Am I on a suicide watch?" Harry repeated the question as he looked straight at Lupin.
Lupin's face did something. He opened his mouth, most likely to protest but then he appeared to change his mind, closed it, opened again, grimaced and closed his book with a slight thud.
He put it down on the table by the armchair and stood up, crossing the room to sit down on the couch behind Harry. Harry who took it as an invitation to do the same hoisted himself from the floor and sat on the couch turning himself towards Lupin.
"He's worried," said Lupin slowly. "Understandably so. This kind of news would be a lot to take in even to an adult with a perfectly balanced psyche."
"Regulus called it an inconvenience," said Harry.
"It is," agreed Lupin pensively. "Although personally, rather than that, I would consider it as something more similar to a chronic disease."
Like lycanthropy, mused Harry.
"You didn't choose to become that and you most certainly didn't ask for it, but you're the one that has to live with it," said Lupin slowly.
"Like you have to live with your furry problem?" asked Harry.
"Yes," nodded Lupin and he chuckled softly. "Your dad dubbed it as such, little furry problem he called it," he added for clarification. "Made it sound as if I owned a badly behaving rabbit instead of changing into a bloodthirsty beast every time the full moon rolled around."
"What's it like?" asked Harry cautiously. "Living with it, I mean."
Lupin hummed, scratched his chin and turned a bit more towards Harry before he crossed his right leg over his left knee and finally answered, "I was very little when I was turned. About five years old, so I have very few memories from the period of time when I wasn't a werewolf. But the earliest memories I have from after…" he paused for a moment. "Is pain and fear. Constant and ever present. The transformation itself is a very painful process, one to which the human body isn't accustomed to, not even many years later. Perhaps the thing that makes it worse is the knowledge that it's forced and unwanted, I don't know. But the pain of the transformation into a werewolf is nowhere near as bad as the reverse, because at the very least when you're transforming into a werewolf, while you're physically weak, most of the time you aren't injured."
"And that isn't always the case with the reverse transformation," offered Harry softly.
"Post-transformation injuries are very common," explained Lupin slowly. "You've got to remember that a transformed werewolf is not an unlucky sod that has a misfortune of turning into a wolf about once a month that gets to spend the full moons sleeping in his own bed. No," he paused, "a transformed werewolf is a bloodthirsty apex predator that will tear apart everything and everyone in its way to find two things, food and a new vessel for the disease it's carrying. And when there's nothing or no one to attack it will take out its frustration on itself, and injuries incurred in that form remain on the body that's transforming back. I have no memory of ever wearing short sleeves or trousers as a child, and I've lost count of how many fingers that's been hanging by a thread and how many times my father had to reattach them," he added as he extended his left arm towards Harry wriggling his fingers.
Much like the fingers of the adults he knew, Lupin's fingers were long and calloused, but there was something funky about his left pinkie. It was slightly bent when the rest of Lupin's fingers were straightened out, and instead of moving properly when Lupin wriggled his fingers, it only jerked slightly for about a couple of millimetres.
"I've bitten it off nice and clean when I was ten," said Lupin. "Good thing that I didn't eat it," he added with a self-depreciating twitch of his lips. "My dad managed to reverse the necrosis and reattach it, but it hasn't been working properly since then. It's good that it's a nearly bloody useless one," he added with a grimace.
"It could have been worse," commented Harry. "You could have bitten off the right thumb."
"That would really suck," agreed Lupin and he chuckled softly. "Coming back to your question though," he added. "In the very beginning I was a mess. I remember looking at my parents, lovely, caring people that nursed me through my injuries, and wanting to tear them into pieces. I hated that, I hated myself for feeling like that. I was angry, an awful lot, mostly at myself for sneaking out on a full moon night out of the house. I can't even remember now what for. At the werewolf that bit me. At my parents for bringing me to Muggle doctors that fixed me up. At the doctors for doing so. Again at myself for surviving it," he paused for a moment.
"But you learned to live with it," said Harry gently.
"Eventually," agreed Lupin with a soft hum. "But not completely. Differentiating my own thoughts and emotions from that of the wolf has helped a lot. But it was a royal pain in the arse for the better part of my childhood. Blessedly my mother was a saint and my father, he always felt responsible for what happened to me. They let me get away with a lot of shit, maybe a little too much than they should have, but they hadn't stopped looking for ways to fix my monthly problem. They certainly sacrificed a lot for that. My Mum never returned to work so she could stay with me while I recovered from the bite, and even though she was a Muggle herself, she spent her days pouring over new books that Dad kept bringing around in search for a cure. We also moved an awful lot and I have no memory of ever staying long enough in one place to even begin making tentative friendly overtures towards other children," he paused for a moment and scratched his chin with his right hand. "Hogwarts helped a lot, being allowed to attend it had been a huge relief and…" he paused again. "That twinkling crook certainly held that over my head for a very long time."
"And at Hogwarts?" Harry gently prompted him.
"On the Hogwarts Express I…" said Lupin and paused briefly. "Can't exactly call it making friends, but at the time it seemed like such, I befriended that traitorous rat, Pettigrew. Like me he was a reserved child, smaller and scrawnier though. I hit a grow spurt the summer before Hogwarts and I towered over him considerably, not that I ever managed to outgrow Sirius until we were adults, and even then it was a matter of a millimetre or two at the most. Pettigrew and I got sorted into Gryffindor along with Sirius and your father. We didn't befriend each other right away but we managed to coexist in one dormitory without too many fights. James and Sirius had their own thing with causing lots of mischief almost from the very beginning."
"And you?" asked Harry curiously.
"And I was there to learn, as much as I could, and possibly as fast as I could, because in the back of my mind I had this sometimes overwhelming fear that my secret would be found out and that I would be removed from Hogwarts. It certainly put a damper on the idea of making friends, especially once Pettigrew started hanging around James and Sirius more than he did with me," answered Lupin. "I tried to not let it bother me much, but I didn't realise how much I craved company until one day I just found myself gradually being pulled into discussions and arguments over pranks. I think that James started it, with some idea for a prank, a time sensitive one and that for some reason he couldn't find Sirius. So he started talking to me, at me at first, and before I knew what happened I was drawing out plans for that insane scheme. Sirius himself, after he returned from wherever he had gone, shot it down as unoriginal, took a good look at it, made some notes and told us that we will do this that way. Then it happened again and again, and before I realised it, I was no longer the outsider."
"What sort of friends were they?" asked Harry curiously.
"Early on?" mused Lupin. "Loud, obnoxious, very exuberant, although to be fair, James far more than Sirius. Trouble-makers and trouble-finders. Not that there weren't things which they didn't treat seriously. When we discovered that Pettigrew had been struggling with his studies so badly that McGonagall threatened him with holding him back for another first year if his grades won't improve, they sat down with me to prepare a revision plan, and they stuck to it with a clockwork precision. It didn't matter if a minute to an hour we were in the midst of planning another prank, the moment the clock struck a whole hour, it was gentlemen get your books out."
"Did it help?" asked Harry sceptically.
"In a way," said Lupin with a grimace. "Individual levels of magic and control over it varies from person to person. Then there's magical maturity which happens later in life. To some people it's a gradual process while to some it's a huge boost of power. The three of us had the luck of belonging to the first group and it looked that Pettigrew belonged to the latter. Can't tell for certain and to be frank I don't exactly care."
"Neither do I," agreed Harry. "I just wanted to know if it worked."
"He kept passing from year to year, sometimes with bigger or lesser effort," admitted Lupin.
"What about you?" prompted Harry. "Did your condition affect you as a student?"
"More than I would have liked," said Lupin with a grimace and he gestured at Harry's books. "I sure missed an awful lot of classes, but between Sirius and James' notes, and sometimes your mother's, I managed to not fall behind too much. Except Potions, that had always been a horror, and not because I just couldn't learn it. My theoretical knowledge of OWL level Potions is pretty fine, it's the brewing that's always been the problem…"
"Due to your oversensitive nose?" asked Harry.
"You've been told?" asked Lupin curiously.
"It came out during the discussion about whatever or not you would be able to track Reg here," admitted Harry. "Sirius also said that thanks to that they were the cleanest teenage boys in their entire year."
"For about half of an hour after the shower maybe," replied Lupin with a grimace. "Teenagers, hormones, two Quidditch players in the dormitory, lots of sweat and don't even get me started on aftershave. James kept sleeping in the common room for two weeks in our fourth year after he started to shave. Not that he had a lot to shave, just this single, tiny hair on the edge of his chin," he added as he pointed at his own chin. "It was so tiny that when he exclaimed that he was growing a beard we had to break out the magnifying lens to see it."
Harry snorted at that.
"But he decided to shave it, so the next morning he gathered all of us in the bathroom to observe the process. It was a miracle that with Sirius' running commentary he didn't nick himself. It would have been all fine if he didn't decide to use the aftershave. I don't know what it was, but I started sneezing immediately as soon as he opened the bottle, and he used so much of it that even Sirius and Pettigrew started sneezing too. We put him by the window to air him out but it didn't really help," added Lupin. "It even got worse during the day, at first we suspected that it was due to its ingredients, but later we discovered that the fucker had been using it during the day because he thought that it would make him smell even manlier."
"So he got the riot act," chuckled Harry.
"And he never failed to remind us about it when we all started shaving about a year later, and by that time we actually had something to shave. Well, more than James had when he started, especially Sirius, Pettigrew and I had lighter hair so stubble on us wasn't as visible as it was on him. Then there was this giant ban on facial hair, McGonagall's doing, she abhorred this trend that had been going around school, this ruggedly handsome, I lost my razor, Professor look. Which was okay as long as you actually didn't lose your razor or hadn't fallen a victim to a prank involving a hair growing potion. James loved doing that to Sirius, supposedly for using his shaving cream," said Lupin with a small smile.
"And Sirius just let it go?" asked Harry curiously.
"Sirius?" snorted Lupin. "Sirius had always been one determined fucker. He doesn't give up, not once he fixates himself on something," the atmosphere in the room shifted slightly. "He's physically incapable of giving up, not on someone he cares for and not without one hell of a fight. He will find a way to get this," Lupin pointed at Harry's scar, "out of you with you alive and unharmed. You've got to believe that Harry."
"I'm trying," mumbled Harry. "Or someone has been dosing me with calming draughts for the past couple of days."
"Don't knock off artificial help just yet," sighed Lupin. "People came up with them for a reason. They help, sometimes more, sometimes less. They got me through a real dark period of my life, after…" he hung his voice. "After your parents," he started again, "and Pettigrew died… I was in a very bad place. To a werewolf people they're close to are pack, and the loss of it…" he paused again. "The loss of all of you. I couldn't even get to see you because Dumbledore claimed that it wasn't safe, and while I hated every minute of it I couldn't argue, not about your safety, not when you were the only one left," whispered Lupin softly. "I was a physical and mental mess, I stopped caring and for some period of time also about whatever I live or die. I probably would have died if my father didn't get to me in time. He did his best to sort me out, not that he had it easy, with my condition, putting me in a psychiatric hospital for more intensive treatment wasn't an option. So I eventually ended up on a mixture of potions and anti-depressants that I've been taking for a very long time."
"Did they help?" asked Harry softly.
"Eventually," sighed Lupin. "Therapy helped more. Luckily my father found a squib psychiatrist who I didn't have to hide who and what I am, from. He helped me come with terms with the fact that for the wolf, no matter if I considered him a murderer and a traitor, Sirius was still pack, and that in order to keep the wolf less restless I needed the proximity of Azkaban."
"And then you learned that you've been wrong all along," sighed Harry.
"Yeah, that sucks but that's between me and Sirius. Of course the judgemental looks I'm getting for despoiling his baby cousin aren't helping. But once he gets it into his head that she's no longer the kid he used to play with, but an adult woman, he will come around. Not that he's completely blameless," admitted Lupin with a grimace. "But that's the lack of communication between the two of us, effect of lack of the mutual support and putting other things and people ahead of our friendship. I shouldn't have done it, he shouldn't have done it, and we both paid the price for doing so. Please, learn from our mistakes," he added softly.
"I wish I could," mumbled Harry. "But I can't exactly write to Ron or Hermione about this," he jabbed his scar, "or Pettigrew, especially to Ron because that would spook him."
He wasn't told how the adults planned to handle Pettigrew, but the only thing he did get on that subject was that the capture of Pettigrew was supposed to happen once the Weasleys returned to England.
"But you can write about other things," Lupin pointed out.
"Technically I'm spending the summer with Snape," replied Harry.
"Well, I'm sure that you can come up with a way to include that," said Lupin as he pointed at Harry's, technically Harry's Mum's potions textbooks. "Or the horror of learning that Snape and Lily were pals at school. Or how you got there in the first place."
"The last thing is a lie," muttered Harry referring to the cover story the adults came up with.
"Why you left the Dursleys isn't," Lupin made the argument. "Venting your spleen helps, sometimes more, sometimes less. And you get to call Dumbledore an idiot fair a square, you certainly have a good enough excuse," he added with small twitch of his lips.
"I bet that you wouldn't be able to come with the most outrageous name imaginable for him," said Harry cheekily.
"Oh Harry, you sweet summer child," sighed Lupin. "Didn't Sirius teach you yet that you shouldn't bet against a Marauder?" he asked pointedly. "Especially one that lives in a fishermen village in Yorkshire. I know so many curses and expletives that can put Messrs Working Class Wizard and Upper-class Wizarding Twats into shame. Now take your pencil and your notebook and start writing down…"
TBC
Next: Hermione meets Arcturus's old friend.
