"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
Remus's grandfather, his mother's father, was fond of quoting Ernest Hemingway when he'd had too much to drink; now the quote wouldn't stop repeating itself in his mind, mocking him. Gerard and Hortense Shepard were brilliant botanists and crossbreeders when they were alive, and Remus wished they had crossbred a plant to cure the common hangover.
Breakfast was spent mostly in silence as the four friends nursed their headaches and queasy stomachs over toast and coffee. Peter alone seemed cheerful, as he had somehow had much less to drink than the others. James appeared in a foul mood as he rested in forehead on his hand and tore off pieces of dry toast with his teeth, chewing slowly. Sirius, though haggard-looking, was now regaling them all with the story of his brilliant maneuvering of James's unconscious body back to the school last night, which made Peter giggle and snort. James scowled and seemed to be trying to disappear into his coffee cup. His unruly black hair hung low over his eyes.
"Did you get Lily home last night, Moony?" James mumbled.
Remus felt adrenaline course through his body, giving him the sudden, sickly feeling of having missed the last step on a staircase.
"Yes," he answered quickly. "Yes, she got home fine." Remus felt ill, and it wasn't entirely the hangover's fault.
"Thanks," James said, glancing up at Remus. "Tell me the truth. I made an ass of myself, didn't I?" He smiled his lopsided smile and Remus's heart dropped about a foot inside his chest. How could I have let it happen? he demanded for the four hundredth time this morning. There are some things you can't undo. Or forget.
"No, of course not," Peter soothed. "I was the horse's arse!" He and Sirius began cackling, and Peter punched James's arm until he offered a smile at last, brushing Peter's hand away.
Remus saw Lily's friend Olivia with a napkin full of scones and a cup of coffee, and she glared at Sirius as she passed; clearly that little affair, such as it was, was over. She was probably on her way to deliver breakfast in bed to Lily. Remus would be surprised if Lily didn't know of a potion to lessen the sting of a hangover, but perhaps she was too ill to make it. He could only guess how Lily was feeling at the moment, but he doubted she could imagine the guilt he was now experiencing. He couldn't stop replaying those kisses in his mind, however much he tried. It was sweet torture, though, and he couldn't seem to stop himself. He forced himself to look at James, to remind himself of where his loyalty should lie. In all of Remus's darkest nightmares, he never imagined himself in this position, having to keep a secret from one of his best friends – especially a secret that, hours ago, had seemed so sweet, like an extraordinary dream that needed to be shared to verify whether it was true.
When the owl delivered the Daily Prophet to their table, Remus picked it up, hoping to distract himself from thoughts of self-flagellation. His eyes widened when he saw the front page headlines.
"Adelaide Honeyduke is dead," Remus announced.
"What?" all three boys blurted at once.
"It says here that she died in her sleep. She was a hundred and eighty years old. Honeyduke's Sweetshop is going to be managed now by her niece, Cecelia Honeyduke."
"Was it Voldemort – ?"
"I'll bet he knows that the Honeydukes – "
"Did you tell anyone else about – ?"
"Calm down, will you?" asked Remus irritably, his head pounding. "At Slughorn's she said she wasn't going to live forever; that's why she told me all about the Greybacks. She wanted someone outside the family to know what had happened, to know about Fenrir and Voldemort." Remus stared at the newspaper and considered. "Maybe she was ill."
It seemed that the world was falling apart, and here he sat, eating toast, hung over and useless and feeling sorry for himself. Students were being wooed by Death Eaters, werewolves were infecting victims right and left, people were dying– and Remus sat wallowing in heartache. He made himself sick.
"We've got to get into that house," Remus muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.
Lost again in his dark thoughts, Remus didn't see Nearly Headless Nick until he was floating right next to him. Nick cleared his throat, a gurgly sound that caused James to retch slightly. The ghost cast a scathing look at James, then turned toward Remus.
"Professor Binns says he has some information for you," he said importantly.
Remus jumped, which made his head throb painfully. "Really? Where is he?"
"In his office, of course," Nick replied. Seeing the quizzical look on Remus's face, he sighed. "Of course, when one of us becomes a ghost, it takes no time at all for people to forget where we lived, what we did for a living, who we loved, how we died …"
Remus cut the ghost's soliloquy short. "Where is his office, Sir Nick?"
"Why do you need to see him? It's Sunday morning, you know," Nick reminded him, cocking an eyebrow. Nick knew as well as anyone that there would be very little traffic through the office of a professor who happened to be a ghost, particularly on a weekend.
"Sir Nick, I wish I could tell you," Remus said in a low voice. The ghost wasn't exactly the paragon of discretion, and Remus knew it. Nick might have seen him transform at some point during his years at school; but until Remus knew that for certain, he wasn't about to volunteer the information. However, Nick looked so disappointed that Remus finally offered, "It has to do with the history of certain, er, living creatures. No offense."
Nick rolled his eyes and his head teetered perilously on its ruff. "No one tells me anything these days."
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"I have very interesting news, Mr. Lupin," Professor Binns whispered with almost a smile. It was the most excitement Remus had heard in the ghost's voice in six years. "I shall add this information to my curriculum next year."
Remus sneezed violently, and pain tattooed the inside of his skull. Binns's office, tucked away in a far-off corner of the castle, appeared not to have been entered or cleaned in at least thirty years. Remus had been forced to use an Alohomora Charm to open the door. A thick layer of dust lay on every piece of furniture; and although Remus sat down gingerly in the brocade chair facing Binns's desk, he still managed to release clouds of dust into the stale air. He tried to cough gently, but his cranium throbbed rhythmically nonetheless. The candle sconces were so wrapped in spider's webs that they looked like plump cones of spun sugar, but grey and unappetizing. As he looked about the tiny room, he saw cobwebs veiling the tall bookshelves and paintings on the walls. Remus could not read the titles on any of the books that sat pinched together floor to ceiling. Normally he would long to wipe their spines and peruse them, but at present he was receiving Morse codes of stabbing pain every time he turned his head, thanks to the sneezes and the hangover. Remus had never seen Professor Binns inside this office or anywhere else on the Marauder's Map, and he wondered where the ghost went when he wasn't teaching his classes. Did he have a home elsewhere? A family? Certainly his family was dead by now; perhaps the ghost was haunting someone else's home now during his off hours.
"What did you find, professor?" Remus asked quietly.
"Hysteria." Professor Binns appeared almost pleased, and he actually nearly waggled his misty eyebrows as he said it.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Well, Mister Lupin, unfortunately I was not able to uncover a single example of record-keeping on werewolves. That has been one function of the Ministry of Magic for quite some time, and the records are relatively sealed at the moment. Although, given the current climate, I do wonder how long that will last."
You're not the only one, Remus thought.
"I searched everywhere for unofficial records of attacks, records not under the lock and key of the Ministry. I spoke with old contacts of mine, men of the cloth, who work in various churches where they often kept good documentation of local goings on – births, deaths, marriages, illnesses, and so on. I reconnected with an expert on ancestral records. I visited a reknowned authority on magical creatures who specializes in werewolves. Not to brag, but I also happen to know several politicians and town leaders and councilors. I must say they all looked a bit haggard when I visited them … a bit … insubstantial …" Binns trailed off, his brow knitted.
Remus had long suspected that the ghost didn't actually realize he was dead, so he quickly pressed him to continue. "But this hysteria you mentioned?"
"Ah, yes. Hysteria of great magnitude. It happened from 1520 to 1630 all over Europe. We knew about the werewolf trials, in which innocent people were tried and put to death for imagined lycanthropy. But I never realized what the real werewolves were doing during that time." Binns paused, almost dramatically. Remus wondered vaguely why the professor couldn't manage to inject this amount of enthusiasm into his regular class lectures.
"What were the werewolves doing?" asked Remus.
"Killing other werewolves."
Remus felt his stomach flip over and the blood drain from his head. He was very glad he was sitting down or he might have passed out.
"Wh – why?" His mouth was suddenly dry.
"The true lycanthropes were convinced that if each killed his or her own attacker in a ritualistic way, or by using the correct potion or a certain series of spells, they would be freed of their affliction."
Did he dare to hope? Remus's heart began to pound and his breath became shallow. "And were they freed?"
"On the contrary. These otherwise law-abiding men and women were saddled with the knowledge that they were now cold-blooded murderers as well as werewolves. There are records of strings of suicides following each spate of murders. There was some speculation that the blood bond between the attacker and the victim grows stronger if the victim kills his attacker. I don't know if there is any truth to that. But what I do know is this …"
Remus swallowed and waited, hearing his own thudding heart inside his skull.
"Survival of the fittest applies to the werewolf community, just as it does to any other species."
"What do you mean?" Remus's voice was barely a whisper.
"Before the hundred-year murder spree, I can only but imagine that somehow the, er, scent of the lycanthrope must have been stronger than it is today. That, and the ability of the victim to locate his attacker must have been more honed then, perhaps a primal hunting instinct that has since weakened. Otherwise, how would the victims have been able to find their attackers when entire lynch mobs couldn't always locate a werewolf with any reliability?"
"Go on," Remus muttered, not liking where this line of reasoning was going. His lips felt numb.
"And there are old tales prior to this massacre, tales of some werewolves being cured by hearing someone say their given name three times, or by sustaining three blows on the forehead with a knife, among other things. Perhaps these were real magical cures at one time … but they are no longer effective."
"Really." His voice sounded hollow.
"So the natural werewolf population, if you will, dwindled low indeed during that span of one hundred years. Diminished, but not demolished. Of the survivors, who would be left?"
Even over the dim roar of blood in his ears, Remus knew the answer to this question. He answered it automatically, as if he were in class. "The strongest. The fittest. The ones who couldn't be tracked. The ones who left no trace. "
"Exactly! And the infection those werewolves would spread would be a more resistant strain of lycanthropy, as it were. This sheds a whole new light on the relative quality of today's werewolf population. It's delightful."
Delightful. Exactly.
Remus stumbled toward a dusty garbage bin sitting beside the ghost's desk and vomited.
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A/N: Leave a review and you get to hold Remus's hair back while he barfs (ah, every fangirl's dream …). Better yet, leave a review and I'll get him out of this queasy situation!