CW: Remus has some PTSD over killing people in his second year. Also bullying and violence.
Sirius ended up doing the Quidditch trials, but once again he didn't make it in, and James seemed more devastated about it than he did.
"I just wanted to play Quidditch together," James said sadly, moping around the common room with self-pity.
"It's alright, James," laughed Sirius. "I like Quidditch, but I'm not as obsessed with it as you."
"You're all a disgrace to society!" James huffed. "How could your lives not revolve around Quidditch? I go to every single Quidditch World Cup! It's only every four years, so I haven't been to one since I was ten, but the next one is July next year and I'm so, so, so excited!"
"Good for you," said Peter, rolling his eyes.
James's moping continued into October, until even Sirius was sick of it.
"I don't even mind that much!" he snapped at James, as he performed a soppy poem about Quidditch one night in our dormitory. "Everyone got in fair and square. I just wasn't good enough."
James's response was interrupted by a sound of something dropping on the floor. It came from near Peter's bed. We all turned around to see a gobstopper rolling on the floor and Peter shaking and looking at the three of us with his watery blue eyes wide.
"PETER!" Sirius almost yelled. "DID YOUR GOBSTOPPER MANDRAKE LEAF JUST FALL OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!?"
"I-I'm sorry, I wanted to taste it and…" Peter trailed off, picking up the gobstopper and popping it back in his mouth.
"That's not going to help anything," said James, putting his face in his hands. "We were so close!"
"Sorry… I'm so sorry…" Peter had turned pink with shame and hid under his covers.
Sirius and James got rid of their own gobstoppers angrily, staring daggers at Peter.
When the October moon came, my pre-moon temper was worse than ever. My first few periods of that day were taken up by a Potions workshop with our entire year. We'd been put in groups of four, one person from each house. To my disgust, the Slytherin from my group was Snape. The Hufflepuff and the Ravenclaw were both girls, Hestia Jones from Ravenclaw and Amelia Bones from Hufflepuff.
Snape was top of the class in Potions, so we finished well before the end of the class, and our potion was perfect of course. Hestia then went on talking about her muggle parents who were almost finished constructing some massive building in London. It was quite boring listening to her talk, but I didn't say anything, keeping the pre-moon anger down. I didn't lose it until Snape snapped.
"No one cares, you mudblood!"
"You didn't call me that…" said Hestia, growing paler.
"Oh god, Snape." I drew my wand. Half of me was telling me to just tell him off, but the other half was just too pissed at Snivellus, the little slimeball."You think that's funny? Do you seriously think that's funny, Snivellus? And you wonder why no one likes you?"
"What're you going to do about it, scar face?" Snape said, sounding bored.
"Remus, what're you doing?" Sirius hissed from across the room.
"He called Hestia a mudblood," I snapped. Sirius's face immediately turned angry, glaring at Snape as well.
"No duelling in class, Mr Lupin!" Slughorn yelled. "Put your wand away!"
I rolled my eyes, and put my wand down, then without thinking, punched him in the jaw, and regretted it immediately. Why would I do that?
"Remus!" Hestia cried.
"Severus!" Lily ran towards Snape put an arm around his shoulder, then looked up at me angrily. "How could you, Remus?"
"He called Hestia—"
"It doesn't matter!" Hestia interrupted, shaking her head at me, looking embarrassed. "It's nothing, it doesn't matter, Remus, really… You didn't need to punch him…"
"Mr Lupin! A word." I'd never seen Slughorn so angry. I followed him out of the Potions room and into the dungeons corridor, footsteps echoing.
"Sir, I'm sorry… I…"
"I expected better of you, Mr Lupin," said Slughorn, shaking his head angrily. "Meet me in detention tonight to explain your violent actions."
"I can't do tonight," I basically cried, "can I do tomorrow… please?"
"No." said Slughorn. "You'll see me for detention tonight. 8 o' clock. And if you argue, it'll be double."
"Please sir, I can do tomorrow night… triple even," I said, desperately.
"Whatever plans you have can wait," he hissed. "See me tonight. 8 o' clock. Violence is not tolerated at Hogwarts. If you fail to come to your detention, the punishments will be severe. And you're banned from the Slug Club."
"I thought Slughorn was fair," I snapped during lunch, stabbing my fork into the pie in front of me.
"Fair?" Sirius snorted. "Fair? He has an entire club dedicated to his favourite students."
"I meant during class," I said.
"Talk to McGonagall," said Peter. "Get her to reason with Slughorn."
"I don't want to seem whiney, and I do deserve detention," I said. "Plus, he can't expel me or something, I looked it up, he can only expel people from his own house, he can try to get McGonagall to expel me, but I think she'll just tell him to give me a detention instead, and he'll probably listen to her… Anyway, I'm going to go to the library, bye…"
"Y-you don't mind if I don't touch you, do you?" Madam Pomfrey asked the next morning. She'd obviously been told to come down to the Shrieking Shack, and even more obviously didn't want to be there. "I don't want my hands contaminated."
"Don't touch me then," I mumbled.
"Good," she said. "Come up to the Hospital Wing then, come on…"
She took me to the Hospital Wing, and I crawled into one of the beds, wanting to just close my eyes and fall asleep.
"Clean the sheets before you leave," she said.
"Um, OK," I mumbled. She tapped my fresh wounds with her wand, causing the bleeding to go down slowly.
"You can leave in an hour, get some rest," said Madam Pomfrey, shuffling away from me to tend to other students.
"Your friend told me you were ill, yet you only just come to the Hospital Wing now?" sneered a voice. Snape stood up from a chair near the entrance of the room and walked over to me. "What sort of illness may that be? Anything to do with monsters?"
"None of your business," I said coolly.
"Just being concerned with your health," Snape said with a fake look of worry on his face.
"Go be concerned with your own health," I muttered.
"Oh no!" he said, opening his mouth and putting his hands on his face. "Are you going to bite me?"
"Piss off."
"What you going to do, punch me again?" he said, rubbing the bruise on his face and sneering.
"Shut up, Snape," I said. "Just go away, you shouldn't be in the Hospital Wing."
"Oh, Madam Pomfrey was just treating the wounds on my face," he said. "That a monster half-blood gave to me."
"Then get back to your bed," I hissed. "I don't care, just piss off."
Snape's smile just curled even wider. I would have gladly punched him again if I hadn't been feeling too dead to get up.
"What are you doing here, Snivellus?" came a voice. James, Sirius, and Peter came marching towards Snape, who just sneered.
"What now?" he hissed.
"All of you! Out!" Madam Pomfrey yelled. The four of them didn't argue, just scurried out of the Hospital Wing without looking back.
An hour later, I washed the sheets on the bed I'd been on, then walked out to the Great Lake, where I saw Snape floating around. It took me a second to realise that he was literally flying, in the air, no broomstick or anything.
"What the hell…" I muttered. I walked closer to see James and Sirius were pointing their wands at him. Peter stood next to them, watching Snape in awe and clapping. Lily Evans was there as well, her arms crossed.
"Put him down!" she shouted. "Put him down now!"
"He deserves it, Evans," Sirius said to her
"He called Hestia a mudblood yesterday," said James, "I thought you were a muggle-born yourself?"
"You don't need to do this!" she cried. "It… just stop! Put him down!"
"Fine," said James. He nodded to Sirius, and they both lowered their wands, and Snape fell to the ground from the good sixteen feet above with a thud.
"Severus!" Lily cried. She rushed to her friend, who was now wailing on the floor. "You broke his leg!"
Lily shot an angry and disgusted look at Sirius and James, then helped Snape off the grounds and into the castle. I walked over to my friends.
"You shouldn't have dropped him like that," I said, crossing my arms.
"You shouldn't have punched him, then," said Sirius, crossing his arms back at me.
"You broke his leg!"
"You broke his jaw!" Sirius snapped. "Do you know how many times I've heard my family call people that?"
"How do you think Lily feels?" I cried, "She's probably upset that Snape, her best friend, used that word, but then she doesn't know if she should feel bad about his leg being broken! And jaw, yes, I shouldn't have done that. How do you think Hestia feels? Snape calling her that!"
"I bet she's used to it!"
"Well, she shouldn't be. It shouldn't be something that people hear frequently," I said. Sirius opened his mouth, but I interrupted him, "as a slur against them, not hearing it against other people."
"I agree, he shouldn't be saying it, that's why I made him drop like that!" he shouted.
"But Lily! You've probably just made her feel worse about it now!" I shouted. Peter and James had been watching us argue like a tennis match.
"Why do you care how Lily feels?" Sirius said, eyeing me. "You know James fancies her."
"I'm right here," said James, but we both ignored him.
"Because I owe her…" I trailed off. I'd never told my friends about that night at the Astronomy tower, and I didn't like to think about it much. Because of it, I felt like I owed Lily a life debt. "Anyway, she's my friend. And I don't want her to feel bad about it, so you shouldn't have done that, she'll be… maybe you don't understand. You should all be ashamed of yourselves."
At that, I turned around swiftly and marched away from them.
I spent the rest of the day trying to sleep and was gifted flashbacks by the god of dreams. All I could see was dead, bloody bodies, all killed by me, and the sight of Monifa's caused me to wake up, sweating and shaking. Why was I still thinking about this? It seemed like I was in the moment again, over and over in an infinite loop.
It was around four that afternoon when I was woken up by another flashback of Monifa's death and saw Peter sitting on his bed reading his charms textbook.
"Gee, Remus, you slept restlessly," he said. "By the way, Sirius wants to apparently have a grown-up conversation with you. Honestly, he thinks he's thirty years old, Sirius does."
"Where is he?" I asked.
"Uh, the girls' bathroom on the second floor," said Peter.
"The girls' bathroom?" I repeated.
"I dunno," he said, shrugging. "That's where he said he'd wait for you."
I nodded slowly, then walked out into the halls of the castle. I half ran down the stairs to the second floor and approached the girls' bathroom, then awkwardly rushed in.
I hadn't been in a girls' bathroom since I was around six years old, when Mum hadn't allowed me to go in the bathroom without her, so dragged me into the girls' lavatory with her, and I'd been so embarrassed as all the ladies smiled down at me, the one little boy in there.
Surprisingly, there were no girls in here, and it was probably one of the nicer bathrooms in the school.
"Hey," came a voice. I turned around to see Sirius approaching me. "I just thought… we're not children, we shouldn't just not speak to each other… we need to address that we had a disagreement…"
"Uh, yeah," I said. "Sorry, I was contradicting myself, I was only thinking how bad Lily must've felt…"
"It's alright," he said. "I guess you must have been really angry after —"
"That's no excuse." We stood there awkwardly for a second. "Sorry, I was just being stupid, so were you. We're both idiots."
"You're right," he said, rubbing his hair. "So… um, are we good?"
"Let's move on. Like adults." I said, nodding. He turned slightly pink and shook my hand. "Um, by the way, why are we in a girls' lavatory?"
"No one goes here," he said. "A girl died in here years ago, and she haunts it. Marlene McKinnon told me she went in here during her first year and met the ghost… Moaning Myrtle."
"Oh… how did the girl die?" I asked.
"Not sure… it was around thirty years ago, I'm pretty sure."
"Oh… OK." Silence, until I asked, "Are you and Marlene best friends now?"
"Not really," said Sirius. "We just talked at Quidditch trials, that's all."
"Alright. Let's leave before the ghost comes," I said, and we walked back to the common room together.