III. Question

"Halloween always feels a little strange for me now, you know." Lily Evans was in conversation with her friend Mary MacDonald somewhere down the Gryffindor table. "Can you even imagine? I've been celebrating a wizard holiday my whole life and didn't even know it..."

"I think it's cute," Mary assured her. "Running around pretending about things they don't believe in—wizards haven't got nearly as much imagination as Muggles do, I've always thought."

"You don't necessarily have to believe in something to have fun imagining, right? I think a lot of people still fancy the idea of there being a Father Christmas even once they've grown up, for example."

"Father Christmas at least brings people presents," Mary pointed out. "Things like werewolves and vampires, though—they don't exactly fill anybody with warm thoughts, do they?"

Lily began to laugh. "I suppose that's true."

"Don't listen to her, Remus."

Peter was staring at Remus with a soulful look that quite unnerved him.

"Beg pardon?"

"Don't get so distracted," James clarified. "Kind of challenging to have a conversation with somebody who isn't paying attention, you know."

"Er—sorry. We were having a conversation?"

"We were trying to, anyway." Sirius elbowed him. "You feeling alright, mate?"

He really wasn't. The full moon was days away but Remus was already showing the strongest symptoms he'd had in months—the onset of puberty, perhaps, Madam Pomfrey had suggested, which hadn't put him at ease at all.

"Sorry," Remus said again. "I'd better go have an early night, I think."

"What? C'mon, it's Halloween! You can't just go to bed early on Halloween!"

"And yet I think I will." Remus took a Cauldron Cake from the table before retreating. "Enjoy the feast for me. Really."

Irritability and irrationality: these were the most common behavioral symptoms a werewolf exhibited before a full moon, according to experts. It was at times like these—times when he lay hoping for sleep to come erase the hours—that Remus wanted to find one of these experts and ask why it hadn't rationally occurred to them that experiencing long bouts of fever and fatigue, not to mention aches and pains, would make anyone irritable.

Bugger it all. Insomnia had taken claim of Remus and he could not manage to sleep things off after all. His next plan was to compromise by curling up with a book (a horror novel, as was most appropriate), but this only managed to distract Remus well enough that he hadn't noticed the other Marauders creeping back into the dormitory until it was too late.

"Er," said Remus.

James was now at the foot of the bed with his hand wrapped tightly around one of Remus' bedposts. Peter was on Remus' right, kneeling, looking ready to pounce if needed, and Sirius was standing off to the left so that he formed a solid barrier of twelve year old between Remus and the door. It was all rather odd.

"Couldn't sleep?"

Remus raised an eyebrow at this most softly asked question.

"Still conscious, unfortunately. What's this about?

"I think we need to have a chat," said James, after consulting the others with a look. "If you're willing to stay up a bit longer, that is."

"A chat," said Remus.

"We should go talk about this somewhere private, actually. Don't want anyone walking in, you know—"

"Is one of you in trouble?"

"No," said Sirius. "But we should really discuss this somewhere else."

Remus marked his page with a carefully placed bookmark and sighed as he set the book down on his bedside cabinet.

"I'll warn you right now, I'm not really in the mood for pranks."

"It isn't a prank," Peter said.

"Well has someone died then? Or—"

"It's nothing you've suggested so far," James said, with heightened tension in his voice. "Just… you're not bad enough for infirmary, obviously, so will you just come with us already? We'll use the invisibility cloak and go somewhere where we can... get this out of the way."

Get this out of the way?

"I'll come then," said Remus, frowning deeply. "But this better not be anything stupid. You're sure no one's died?"

Perhaps not, but it certainly still felt like death as James went to fetch his cloak. They marched down from the dormitories together, carefully dodging stragglers who weren't yet finished with their Halloween merry-making. Remus noticed that Peter seemed awfully jittery at the moment, but then again jitteriness was practically Peter's default state of being—more surprising was that Sirius was acting jittery too, and here Remus had long assumed that Blacks were simply too well-bred to jitter.

Was this about to be a prank after all? This became Remus' best guess, especially after James started whispering, "it's fine, don't worry," over and over.

They encountered a new problem once they'd slipped out through the front doors of the castle: a crisp wind kept threatening to blow the invisibility cloak off them, or at the very least reveal four pairs of disembodied feet. James nodded towards a shadowy little area where there were neither windows nor breezes, where it should be safe to talk at last.

"Christ that thing is hot," Sirius complained loudly, throwing off his portion of the cloak. This confused Remus even further, as the cloak was actually very cool to the touch.

"Keep your voice down," Peter reminded him.

"Alright then," said Remus, as he settled against the architecture of the castle's outer wall. He kept his tone as businesslike as possible. "Tell me what happened."

The other boys looked at one another. Peter still had the cloak hanging from one of his shoulders; he looked like he'd been cut in half.

"One of you lost your favorite pair of socks," Remus suggested.

"No."

"The house-elves are refusing to hand over anymore food."

"No. Remus—"

"Hold on, I've got a real one now. Does this have something to do with Severus? Or Lily? Both of them maybe?"

"Shut up already," said Sirius, pale in the face. "Maybe we could say what it is if you'd just shut up."

Remus balked and went quiet.

"Alright," said James. "Well?"

"Well what?" Peter said.

"Who's going to say it?"

"You know bloody well who's gonna say it," hissed Sirius.

"Well—maybe I changed my mind!"

"You were the one that decided we needed to do this! And you were the one that came up with the plan, so it's only right if you have to ask!"

James clenched his fists. He swayed on the spot. Then he shook his head and tried once more.

"Well," James began, stopping to think after every word, "we've come to a—conclusion."

"A conclusion," said Remus.

"Yes. And, I mean, we have come to this… this conclusion… and by we I mean all three of us… and, well, this conclusion is based on… based on things."

"Observations," Sirius supplied.

"Facts, even," said Peter.

"Right, we've come to a conclusion based on observations and facts. And, well… we've all decided that you should tell us for sure, and, if it turns out that this is all wrong… and wow, we're going to look like the biggest arseholes ever if we are…"

Irritability and irrationality: these were the most common behavioral symptoms a werewolf exhibited before a full moon, according to experts. Remus would like to add 'so braindead from exhaustion that he won't recognize his own worst nightmare about to come true' to this list.

"So—the thing is—" James forced himself to look him in the eye. "I mean—a werewolf, Remus? A-are you?"

Remus felt suddenly detached from himself, as though a stranger had come to take his place: a stranger who believed James' question was only terrifying for its lack of grammatical sense. A stranger who didn't have to hope against hope that his ridiculous friends had confused Halloween with April Fools'. A stranger who hadn't just been discovered by a group of boys who normally didn't even have enough sense to keep themselves out of detention.

"Why are you asking?"

Oddly enough, this stranger seemed to share Remus' voice.

"Oh," said James, blinking. He'd clearly never considered that he might need to explain himself. "Well, I mean, Christ, you're gone once a month, for one thing…"

"I checked the lunar charts when we were doing that one bit of homework," Peter said, all very quickly. "And—well, I thought it was odd you weren't just leaving on the weekends, and you weren't gone exactly once a month either. The only pattern was that you've always been gone when the moon is full."

"Right. And I mean, if it happens once or twice it's not any big deal, but after five times it's not a coincidence anymore, and you've been out on the full moon at least seven times that we know of—"

"I still wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, though," said Sirius. He looked flustered. "Any explanation would do..."

"But then that didn't explain that you always looked a little scratched up when you came back, of course."

"Or how you'd always look a little ill beforehand."

"The next thing we did was—er—well, we asked Lily if she knew any details about your mum. Sorry about that," James said hastily, "but we didn't want to pry into your personal life directly—"

"And here was the strange thing: Lily told us she was pretty sure your mum was doing just fine, since you mentioned she does some sort of—I don't know, some Muggle job—"

"But we insisted you told us she was sick, so Lily told us it must be something really recent then. Well it can't have been recent, right? You first told us about it sometime in March last year. That didn't sit right with me—you told us but you didn't tell Lily? She's been your mate since the day you got here—"

"I thought maybe you were just a pathological liar at that point," said Sirius.

"My theory was that you just liked skipping class," said James. "You know, on top of being a pathological liar."

"I didn't think either of those things," confessed Peter. "I realized what the evidence meant almost from the start."

"Yeah, Sirius and me were—Sirius especially—we were in denial for a bit. So the next thing that happened was that Peter convinced us to go look up werewolves in the library and see if anything else fit."

"Right. Except you're the only one who's any good at research, Remus, so we thought it might be quicker if we just went and asked Madam Pince—"

"But she knew we were all friends, I guess, from the number of times we've been in there—"

"As soon as we said we were looking for books on werewolves—"

"The look on her face—"

"I was completely convinced at that point."

"Me too."

"Me three."

"We all were," said James, and then he was able to look back at Remus more bravely. "So—just tell us the truth, alright? And if we're wrong, we won't say another word about it, but I mean, if we're right..."

"So are you or aren't you?" implored Sirius. "Please just tell us."

Remus felt himself slide clumsily back into his own body before he spoke. Or maybe that feeling had simply been the world in general, come falling down around him.

"Well there you have it."

Everyone blinked at him.

"What?"

"You win," said Remus. His voice is trembled.

"Er," said Peter.

"I said you win! You did it, you really did it—really marvelous! Marvelous work! Jolly good!"

"There's no need to be hysterical," begged Peter.

"Well excuse me!" There was clearly no better time on earth for hysterics, thank you. "Excuse me if I'm not taking this all that well! I suppose you want to hear me say congratulations? Because you've really earned it?"

There was stunned silence all around.

"Fuck," said Sirius, taking a horrified step backward. "He is."

James' eyebrows went up so high on his forehead they could have broken off from the strain.

"W-wait," Peter stammered. "He hasn't even said for certain—"

Remus' eyes swam with tears. He closed them and buried his face in his hands; this seemed as good a confirmation as any.

"Oh my god," whispered James. "You're serious? Y-you're honestly—honestly a—?"

"I can't believe it—I don't think I've ever even seen a—"

"But how are you here? And how the hell is nobody dead yet, if you're a—?"

Werewolf.

Werewolf.

Werewolf.

Remus was terrified. He couldn't bare the thought of losing everything he had wanted so badly: magic, Hogwarts, friends. All of those things, one by one, would be stripped away again, and it was all his fault, all his fault, for letting letting his secret slip. He would have to leave here, and go back to that world where those things could not exist again, he would go back to be shunned and sick, locked up on the nights when the moon was full and left to suffer—

Because he, Remus J. Lupin, was undeniably, irrefutably a werewolf.