Sirius had spent his first year basking in the midst of the chaos inherent to magical education, dashing off homework at breakfast, irritating professors and Slytherins with vengeful glee, and generally dedicating himself to masterminding havoc.
"Do you ever wonder," he would muse, after check-mating Peter one too many times, "how they keep track of house points?"
Peter opened his mouth.
"Nuh-uh, Pettigrew, don't you dare say 'a spell," Sirius interrupted. "It might be an enchantment, but what kind? Not just anyone that can say, '10 points from Gryffindor, and stop being such a daft prick, Mr Black.' Only prefects, Head Girl and Boy, and professors…"
He paused contemplatively, and James rolled his eyes. "And those jewels – where do they come from? How do they count 'em? What happens if they run out?" He ran out of steam, and looked round for Remus, tucked in an alcove and half-covered in parchment rolls.
"Remus," he yelled across the Common Room. "Can you please stop reading and get over here. We need your mental faculties sharp an' unsullied by book learning."
Remus untangled himself from scholarly ephemera and took a seat by the fire to hear Sirius recap his subject of ill-intended inquiry, looking, as ever, quietly bemused.
"…and it's not like anyone ever checks the hourglass things. So, whaddya think we're dealing with here?"
"I haven't the foggiest, Black," Remus replied, running a hand across his face.
"C'mon, Remus, I know you've got an inkling. Think of the possibilities! The insight! The infamy! We could – we could… Potter, help me out!"
James tapped his fingers, scrunched up his face, and tugged at his hair.
"Win the cup?" Peter offered, hopefully.
"No!" Sirius cried despairingly, "I need you to think bigger!"
"Mess with the spell, so every time that bastard Nott docks us points for extending his tie it gets taken from Slytherin. Or, maybe, awards us what he's trying to take off?" suggested James.
"Better," Sirius encouraged.
"Or we could just nick all the emeralds and get rich," said James.
"I like the sound of that."
"I think you need more information," said Remus, leaning back into the sofa. "You're going to have to experiment."
"I like the sound of that even better," Sirius waggled his eyebrows.
Remus sighed and tucked his hands into his armpits. "What I mean is, you've got to get in more trouble, lots of it, with prefects who will take points instead of reporting you or putting you in detention. Probably until there's nothing left to dock."
"Are you mental?" James shouted. "Don't encourage him – he's bad enough already."
"They'll hate us," Peter wailed, looking despairingly around the Common Room.
Sirius grinned and patted Peter on the back until he started breathing normally again.
"I think you mean, we, Remus. We have got to get in lots of trouble."
Truthfully, Sirius could never get enough of Remus Lupin. He'd watched the boy, snatching glances under his heavy brows, as he loped from the Sorting Hat to the far end of the Gryffindor table, curled in the Common Room windows, skulked his limber way between class, all grey and evasive. He'd known that Remus didn't eat with anyone, didn't shower in the evenings, didn't sleep well, and didn't talk if he could avoid it.
Sirius liked, with a peculiar and particular ferocity, the way that Remus exercised such meticulous control over his facial expressions: the way he could smooth his forehead and keep his mouth calm, his eyes giving only the faintest hint of the movements of his mind. Sirius had never seen embarrassment or contempt or servility or uncertainty or anger or fear play across his features.
Sirius was the opposite: high energy, spring-coiled, exposed wiring. His mother had proved incapable of curbing or containing him, despite her best efforts, so he had chosen to stoke the furnace of himself. Sobriety and sincerity he flung away with self-discipline, and instead he lived in sheer, unbridled, joyful spite. He had thrown himself headlong into the matters of mischief-making, let his expression and gestures run amok, and admired Remus in his rare moments of stillness.
James he loved as his perfect foil, all secure attachment and self-conviction. He was the ideal accomplice: canny, brave, stalwart, quick to laughter, gloriously hot-headed when the mood struck. And Sirius was free, for the first time in his life, to wax lyrical and provoke and act out and command attention and then escape it, unscathed. He felt that nothing could ever silence him, cow him, grind him under heel, because he was safe in the amber warmth of the Gryffindor tower, strong in his powers, and far from all things grim and mildewed and petrified. Apart from some stray socks under his bed, perhaps.
Still, Sirius kept finding that his defiance and his desires made difficult bed-fellows. He wanted not to want, not so much. He wanted some of Remus' passionless self-restraint. He wanted Remus to show him how to do it, to let him in on his secrets, to take Sirius' hot hands and place them on his cool face and say, Here and here, you can hide, can you feel it? Or maybe he wanted Remus, holding his mildest expression, to run his long fingers across Sirius' brow and mouth and wiry shoulders, until he caught Sirius' fire. Not that Remus, elusive, taciturn, inflammable Remus, would ever choose to touch him. He was a stranger to desire.
In enacting various acts of insurrection and sabotage, Sirius came slowly to the conclusion: this was how he made peace with his desires. He was all desire. And what he wanted, more than anything, was to see Remus riled. He wanted Remus flustered, maybe sweaty and a little dirty – to peel away the parchment and the self-composure and the regulation uniform and get at his bones.
Remus tried to spell some dust off the windowsill, and quickly gave it up for lost. When he was fairly certain Madame Pomfrey had made it out the tunnel, he tugged off his musty sweater, folded it, and placed it on the sill next to his wand. He kicked his shoes into a corner, and added his shirt, trousers, socks, and underwear to the pile. Pinched in his too-small frame, grey-hued, he waited for the moon to rise.
This close to transformation, he felt neither cold nor fear. He was ready to explode, trembling with the anticipation of it. Prickling waves skittered across his skin, in time with the flickering candle that had been left for him on the mantelpiece. He paced into the centre of the room, and turned his face up to the cobwebbed rafters.
"Jesus, Moony, your arse is even paler than I'd imagined," said a voice behind him, bitter-edged and warm with laughter, more familiar to Remus than his own self that night.
Remus could've sworn his entire body stopped for a second. His heart turned to lead in his chest. His follicles were already starting to itch, his bones to ache and squeal, his body losing its certainty in its current shape and crying out what it could be.
He swung around to see Sirius leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, face full of glee and mischief. He watched James and Peter climb out of the passage into the shack, and adopt more appropriate expressions of bewilderment at seeing their friend starkers in the middle of a dusty room.
"N-n-no, no, no, no – you c-c-can't be here," Remus stammered. "C-c-close that door and fucking run, you idiots."
"After that insane tree almost took out one of my eyes? Not a chance," chuckled Sirius, pulling himself upright from against the door, and moving closer to Remus, who was beginning to shake uncontrollably. "You know it's below zero tonight, Moony? What on earth brings you out here, with the gentle-witch Pomfrey no less, in the nude?"
"You – don't – understand," hissed Remus, feeling increasingly hysterical as his awareness of the moon's proximity to the horizon heightened. He was beginning to unknit. "You have to get out of here. Now, Sirius. NOW!"
Sirius laughed, and tutted, pacing around Moony. "Don't get moody, Moony. My, do you have quite a collection of scars. Is this a ritual thing? No? God-forbid, a sex thing?"
"Sirius…," James cautioned, eyes fixed on Remus' expression as he struggled to keep it together. "Don't provoke him. He, uh, doesn't look so good."
The moon brushed the skyline with her exquisite curve, and Remus' knees gave out. Peter shrieked. He fell to the floor, his bones cracking and grating into new alignment, and watched Sirius' expression fall into uncertainty and then horror. The last shred of Remus' self-control tore, and he plummeted into the blackness of his every fear realised.
As he wrenched and burst under his own skin, he kept his eyes fixed on Sirius'.
"I'm a werewolf, Black. The moon is rising. If you want – to survive – the night, bolt that door – now – and run as fast as you can."
And then his jaws peeled apart and whatever made him him, Remus Lupin, was swallowed up by the maw of the beast he'd become.
He woke in a dusty corner, curled tight in a ball. The shack was pitch black in the quiet before true dawn. His hands were tight with caked dirt and blood, and his arms and flanks raw. It seemed he'd done his level best to claw off one of his own ears, and the blood had matted in his hair. His body protested its smallness, its fragility, and he winced as he unfolded himself and tried to stand.
It was only as he began the automatic motions of re-dressing that he remembered the last moments of the night prior: most vividly, he recalled Sirius' eyes draining of humour as his pupils pinned. As Remus had choked out the truth, far too fucking late. He scrabbled for his wand and barely saved himself from tripping over his remaining trouser-leg.
"Lumos," he whispered, with hushed fervour, and began the horrible task of searching the shack for the remnants of his friends. The wandlight revealed his hands to be dark-crusted, flaking crimson. He saw it, but tried not to notice it. Tried not to ask the questions they begged: Whose blood?
By the time Madame Pomfrey draw back the bolts and opened the door, Remus was dressed and sitting by the blackened hearth, the wound behind his ear reopened and dripping onto his collar. Madame Pomfrey tsked, had it sealed up with one imperious wave of her wand, and ushered him down the passage.
"You look done in, you poor thing. Let's get you back to the dorms for a good hot shower and a bit of sleep before breakfast. Anything else need patching up?" she bustled warmly behind him.
Remus mutely demurred her offers of further healing, as he always did, and they emerged onto the grounds, blue and hushed in the chill of the early morning. The wind blew gently pass his face, bringing the smell of pine, peat, hearth fire, sausages, ice, open skies – it was too much. He had no substance. The heavens could just whisk him away. The breeze had made its way into the interstices of his being, and was weaving its way through the emptiness between his skin and his skeleton.
Madame Pomfrey wished him well when they reached the entrance hall, and he made his solitary way through the lightening castle, ducking into the safety of his shortcuts whenever he could. As he neared the Gryffindor Common Room, his brain teemed and skittered. He wished he could hide in the walls and never emerge.
He reached the Fat Lady, and muttered the password. She raised an eyebrow and swung open soundlessly.
They were waiting for him by the fire – or, James and Sirius were, eye-sockets smudged dark with sleeplessness, and Peter was snoring quietly in an armchair, mouth agawp. Their eyes widened, drinking in his matted hair, the dark stain on his collar, and his blood-encrusted hands. James nudged Peter, and he woke with a faint cry and balked immediately at Remus, stood frozen in the doorway.
He opened his mouth, and closed it again. There was nothing he could think to say.
Sirius stood abruptly and came towards him. James and Peter leapt up, fear writ plain on their faces. And Sirius reached out, and placed his hands ever-so-gently on Remus' elbows.
"Rough night?" he murmured.
Remus winced, his mouth twisting.
"Hey," Sirius continued, his voice soft, "look, we're alright. You didn't hurt us."
James came up behind them. "And if you had, Remus, it would have been our own damn fault for being bloody fools."
Sirius pulled him into a hug, folding his wired, knackered frame into his warm arms.
"Don't worry," he muttered in Remus' shoulder, "you can trust us with your, uh, furry little secret.
"But, Gods, Moony," he said, stepping back, "we need to get you in a shower. You smell rancid, mate."
