And so life continued at Hogwarts, a fact which struck Remus as rather odd each morning when he woke. Life trickled by in classes and homework, pranks and moons, just as it always had. Surrounded by three snoring boys, each of whom was aware of his secret, Remus felt himself to be in a constant state of bemusement. Vaguely happy, dazed, absolutely bemused.
Apart from a steady stream of muffled werewolf jokes and an extra three long faces in the castle on the day of a full moon, things seemed remarkably normal. Like the fact that Remus had been keeping his lycanthropy a secret for three years didn't even merit a change in the lives of the four Gryffindor boys.
No, that wasn't quite true. Remus often stopped himself before he could begin feeling too satisfied with his life, werewolf or not. Whatever his friends' assurances to the contrary, there had been a material shift in their attitudes ever since Halloween. Specifically, a dynamic had changed in the friendship between the four boys. This dynamic was, as always, of Sirius' creation.
Most days, Remus found Sirius to be warm and protective, hand around the shoulder, cheeks pulled in chortling laughter, focussing his enormous, bounding energy on Remus. Other days, all effervescence vanished, leaving Remus alone to his pooling qualms. Remus knew that James had noticed this new Jekyll and Hyde attitude in Sirius, but neither had brought it up. He quietly suspected that James was torn between his protective role and his absolute loyalty to Sirius.
And then, between Sirius' warm smiles and cold shoulder, were those times where Remus was left on his own. About once a week, his three friends buggered off to who knows where without a word, with nary a guilty glance or apologetic mumble. Hating himself for the thought, yet thinking it all the more heatedly, Remus told himself that the others just needed their werewolf-free time.
Really, there was no cause to be bitter, was there? After all, if James allowed Sirius to continuously swing through temperaments, sooner or later several windows would be broken, and McGonagall would finally snap. Detentions were not exactly lacking amongst the four boys. So these excursions without Remus were all for the best, weren't they?
On this particular pale and chilly Saturday morning, Remus stretched languidly, rubbed his face into his downy pillow until breathing became necessary, and smiled faintly in a familiar bemusement. His secret was out. He had clawed his way out of the closet. Nothing, not the meaningful glances between his friends that Remus was not privy to, not the lonely hours of reading in the library, not even Sirius' odd behaviour, could besmirch his vaguely happy bemusement at this hour.
His eyes cracked open reluctantly and were assaulted by glaring light. House elves, Remus thought blearily to himself, should be forbidden to open the dormitory curtains on weekends. It was cruelty, that's what it was. Not even his four-poster bed drapes could block the filtered light.
The light was tinged with orange, a reddish glow, a colour like the autumn leaves in September, like Lily's hair…
Remus panicked for a moment as his rambling thoughts paused on the image of Lily, and he scrambled around his bedside table for his watch. He'd promised Lily that he would give her his notes for Defence Against the Dark Arts before she left for Hogsmeade, and he had no idea how long he'd slept in.
Ever since Remus had begun to notice that his friends seemed to be excluding him from unknown activities, and had hence been alone a lot more often than usual, he found himself spending more and more time talking to Lily. For some reason, the green-eyed Gryffindor had apparently made it her purpose to distract Remus from his glum thoughts, and he had been rather surprised to find that he shared quite a number of interests with her.
She'd tried to convince him to come to Hogsmeade with her today. Remus had even been tempted, despite knowing that he had to decline. The four Gryffindor boys always went to Hogsmeade together. This dictum had been established on the first and previous visit.
Yawning, Remus rolled out of bed, dragged on his clothes, stumbled past the snoring lumps that, when conscious, were known as his friends, and reached the common room with his eyes still mostly closed.
"Remus?" an amused voice inquired, and the boy in question peered up groggily, shoving a sheaf of parchment before him. "Are you even awake yet?" Lily asked with a smile.
Remus returned her grin, and straightened from his slouch sheepishly.
"I thought that Dumbledore didn't encourage zombies to roam the dormitories," Lily chided, shaking her head in mock exasperation.
"Hey, at least this zombie brought the notes, as promised," Remus said indignantly, thrusting the parchment forward again.
Lily accepted the proffered sheets, shaking her head wearily as she did. "Ugh. I mean, thanks, but you know. I do not feel like spending the weekend studying Defence."
"Well, you're going to Hogsmeade today, aren't you?" Remus said cheerily. "Won't be much time for study there, eh?"
"Are you kidding me? I'm going with a group of Ravenclaws. I won't be able to get away from work all day." She sighed, and then raised an eyebrow pointedly at Remus. "You know, you could always come to Hogsmeade with me-"
Before Remus was forced to shape yet another awkward refusal, Lily was interrupted the entrance of Sirius Black, yawning, dishevelled, shirtless and barefoot. Remus rolled his eyes at the predictable nature of his friend's arrival. He felt almost refined in comparison. At least Remus had stuck his head under the tap before yawning his way downstairs.
"Moony, go to Hogsmeade with a girl? Please," Sirius said dryly, sweeping a lazy hand through his bed hair and somehow converting shaggy into silken. Remus followed his gaze to Lily and shrugged his shoulders resignedly, attempting to excuse himself from whatever insults spouted next from Sirius' mouth. The sudden glint in Sirius' eyes could never imply delicacy this early on a Saturday morning.
"Though if he did," he drawled, winking at Remus, "I suppose it would be fitting that he went with Little Red Riding Hood."
"Unappreciated," Remus muttered, embarrassed, staring at his feet as he felt Lily's bewildered gaze. His ears reddened slightly as Sirius barked a mocking laugh, but lifted his eyes as he heard Lily's retort.
"What a small brain you have, Black," she droned, arching an eyebrow at the grinning Sirius. "All the better to think up stupid nicknames?"
"You bet, Red," Sirius nodded unabashedly, then spun on his heel with the grace only he possessed this soon after waking, and stalked back up the stairs to the boys' dormitory, presumably to put on a shirt before some First Year girls became overly excited. Remus shook his head slowly, removing his eyes from the undulating muscles in Sirius' bare back.
"Why couldn't he just defy his family by being put in Ravenclaw or something?" Lily muttered darkly, shaking her head at an apologetic Remus.
"I guess he thought that he should break tradition properly, go all out."
"Yeah – I suppose he wouldn't have fit in, anyway. Intelligence is a requirement for a Ravenclaw," Lily mused.
Remus smiled despite his loyalty for Sirius. Lily clapped him on the back encouragingly.
"Let's go down and visit Hagrid before we go – yeah, I know, separately – to Hogsmeade. We haven't seen him in a while, and we may as well go now."
As Lily beckoned, Remus followed, and they climbed through the portrait hole together, Lily gesturing before her with her sheaf of notes as she continued to insult Sirius, Remus keeping his mouth firmly shut (though twisted in a slight smirk). Reaching Hagrid's cabin with damp feet, the frosty lawn beginning to melt in the wan morning sunlight, they knocked on the door, but were greeted with a surprising lack of response.
"He must be carrying out groundkeeper duties or something," Lily shrugged, pivoting on her heel and beginning to trudge back up to the castle. Remus followed, slightly behind, peering reluctantly over his shoulder at the cabin. Quietly, he'd been hoping for another opportunity to apologise for Fang's eternal banishment from the Hogwarts castle. The memory of Halloween had not faded quickly from Hagrid's mind.
When they finally climbed back through the portrait hole and into the common room, Remus waved to Lily and began mounting the stairs two at a time, pulling himself along with the banister, eager to see whether Sirius had successfully woken the others, or perhaps collapsed back into bed. Either way, they would all soon be on an outing to Hogsmeade, each buoyed by a prankster's sense of joy at the prospect of visiting Zonko's.
It felt like forever since the four of them had really done something together.
"Hello?" he called brightly into the dormitory, but his greeting was unanswered, and when Remus pulled the door open to peer inside, he was surprised to find four empty beds. He stuck his head around the doorframe, noting the absence of his friends' shoes flung 'artistically' across the floor. They must have gone to breakfast already.
Remus returned to the common room and caught the eye of Frank Longbottom, a gangly fourth-year, who had just climbed in through the portrait hole.
"Oi, Frank, have you seen James or Sirius?"
Frank nodded, gesturing behind him as he answered. "Yeah, I saw them leaving for Hogsmeade, mate. I was wondering where you were."
Remus stared blankly as Frank shrugged and turned away. They'd left already? Without him? But he'd talked to Sirius just this morning – and hadn't they promised each other that Hogsmeade was a group mission to procure sweets and prank-making materials?
He started as someone tugged at his arm. He looked down to see Lily's pale, freckled hand clamped around his forearm.
"Hey, Remus," she said quietly, giving him a small smile. "Come to Hogsmeade with me, okay?"
"Okay," he muttered, trying not to look disappointed, or miserable, or betrayed, keeping his eyes trained on her small white fingers.
"Feel like some magical lollies, Remus?" Lily asked lightly, pulling him eagerly towards the bright window front of Honeydukes. "Maybe there's something there that will tempt Hagrid to forgive you – stoat sandwiches, perhaps, or honeyed hippogriff. Werewolf waffles?"
Remus glanced sharply at Lily, who was grinning at her own clever alliteration, and then twisted his face to reflect her expression of disgust as she obviously contemplated Hagrid's bizarre cooking. "Why stoat?" she muttered softly, shaking her head, but then they were immersed in the crowd of sweet-grabbing students, and Remus could hear Lily no more.
It had been a long day. Lily had dragged Remus to virtually every corner of the small village of Hogsmeade in an attempt to distract him from his melancholy, skipping quickly away from a certain group of Ravenclaws, dashing across a frosty field to peek over at the Shrieking Shack, examining owls at the Post Office.
Remus had to admit that there had been moments of successful distraction. Butterbeer was still as deliciously satisfying as the first time he had tried it, and there was a certain charm about the young Madam Rosmerta. However, as the light had eventually dulled through the afternoon, clouds solidifying across the sky, Remus had felt increasingly miserable.
Some friends he had. He hadn't even caught a glimpse of them all day, not even in Zonkos. Remus imagined that they must have spent the entire afternoon in Madam Puddifoots Teashop – one of the few places that Lily had neglected to drag him into.
As students bustled around him, knocking his shoulders into sweet stands as they grabbed last-minute provisions before their imminent return to Hogwarts, Remus stared blankly at a jar of Cockroach Cluster, feeling about as lifeless as the curled-up sweets. Lily had merged into the crowd as soon as they'd entered the door. Suddenly, a familiar voice drifted through the general murmur, and Remus' head shot up.
"Are you going to buy those Ice Mice or just stare at them, Pete?" James asked in an exasperated tone, clearly rolling his eyes and ignoring Sirius' snickers beside him.
"I was just-" Peter began, sounding vaguely hurt. Remus peered over the flock of students, trying to see over to the place where he thought he remembered seeing Ice Mice the last time he visited Honeydukes. He thought he might have caught a glimpse of a familiar shock of black hair, and narrowed his eyes.
"Just what?" Sirius drawled, "Enjoying the squeaking?"
"Mice are not the same as ra-" Peter began heatedly, but was interrupted by an insistent shushing from James. Remus frowned. More secrets? Ice Mice? What, was this avoidance thing some kind of confectionary scandal?
He knew he was being unreasonably paranoid, and yet somehow he could not bring himself to care. Fists clenching in anger, Remus jostled his way through the throng of students, forging a path more or less directly towards his friends' voices. The patch of black hair had disappeared somewhere, but he was determined to find the three boys. Screw secrecy. He wanted a confrontation.
"Oi, where have you guys go-" Remus heard Sirius' annoyed voice call out in irritation, but as he finally thrust his way into the gap in front of his black-haired friend, Sirius fell silent. A crooked grin eventually found its way to Sirius' face, and he smiled nervously at Remus. This was not a normal expression for the smug, arrogant Sirius, a fact that Remus did not even bother to take note of.
"Um, hi," Sirius began, clearing his throat and gesturing awkwardly with his arms full of a wide selection of Honeydukes sweets. "Come here often?"
Remus ignored this throw-away line and cut to the chase. He was angry. He advanced.
Sirius' cheerful façade seemed to fall away as he suddenly seemed to feel the heat of Remus' sense of betrayal. His face dropped into an apologetic expression, and he opened his mouth, undoubtedly to make some conciliatory excuse, but all that escaped him for a moment was a startled "Oof!" as Remus shoved him backwards with unusual force.
"So you thought you'd all go and hang out at Hogsmeade without me, right?" Remus yelled, silencing the chatter of the students on either side. "You thought you'd have some fun without the w- without the freak, like you do at school?"
He pushed Sirius again, both hands in the chest, prompting a spray of sweets to spill from his friend's arms and scatter across the floor. "Have a good time?" Remus raged, ignoring the startled, almost incredulous look on Sirius' face. "Not that you'd tell me, would you?"
As Sirius stumbled backwards, caught off guard by yet another shove, his face changed, shifting into a momentary mask of anger. "Yeah, you've never had any secrets, have you, Moony?" He reached out, grabbing Remus' hands as they were about to land squarely on his chest again, causing Remus to overbalance and crash heavily forward.
Remus caught a glimpse of Sirius' wide, wincing eyes as they tumbled together past a line of staring students, over several inconveniently-placed feet, and, unexpectedly, through a small door behind the counter at the back of the shop.
"Aaaargh!" they both cried as momentum carried them across a small landing to the top of a steep, dark staircase. Remus barely had time to desperately grasp a handful of Sirius' robes before the two boys crashed down the stairs, landing, bruised and battered and groaning, beside sealed crates of Honeydukes goods.
Remus gasped silently as he struggled to breath, having winded himself. He lay sprawled over what appeared to be Sirius' body, his elbows appreciating the softness of the heaving form below him. Slowly, he summoned the willpower to open his eyes, his anger having disappeared somewhere on the landing above them, and gazed through the shadowy darkness, finding Sirius' face unexpectedly near.
As Remus stared down at Sirius, only inches away, he noticed that his friend still wore the same startled expression as he had in the shop. For some reason, this fact seemed incredibly hilarious, and he began to choke out a shallow laugh. Sirius' expression abruptly changed.
"What'd you push me down here for, anyway?" he asked quietly, peering up at Remus' face. "We didn't mean to hurt your feelings or anything, Moony, we just couldn't find you before we left." He was silent for a moment, as if waiting. Then – "Ouch."
Remus averted his eyes, laughter silenced, a shade crossing over his face. "That's bollocks, Sirius, and you know it."
Now it was Sirius' turn to glance away, abashed. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, wincing, and stared into the darkness behind Remus as he spoke. "You know we're not avoiding you, or anything, Remus. And there's no way we'd ever want to hurt you. I mean, I didn't even realise that you felt… hurt or anything."
Remus was silent. It had been months since he had started feeling a bit left out, months since his friends had begun disappearing off together without him. He realised now that, while they had never spoken of it to him, he had never mentioned it either. He realised that his explosion of anger in the shop above had perhaps been as unexpected as Sirius made it seem.
He knew that Sirius, James and Peter still had a lot to account for. He lay motionless for a minute as his mind calmed, and examined all of this in a different perspective.
"You still shouldn't left without me, you know," he said finally, trying not to sound too pathetic.
"Get off me, you sod," Sirius muttered, groaning as he tried to push Remus off of his torso, sitting up gingerly when Remus obliged. "Ouch. I haven't fallen down a flight of stairs in ages."
"Rubbish," Remus sighed, stifling his laughter, and testing his muscles, wincing lightly. His aches and pains were nothing. He had had so much worse.
"Where are we?" Sirius asked lightly, no doubt hoping to avoid reigniting the rage which had led the two boys down to wherever they were now.
"Honeydukes cellar, presumably," Remus said quietly, staring around at the darkness, gradually beginning to see the outlines of cartons and the staircase, and of a dusty old trapdoor at the end of his feet.
"Shall we?" Sirius said with a groan, climbing painfully to his feet, and offering his hand to Remus, who still sat on the floor.
"Yeah," Remus responded, grabbing the hand, and using the firm grip to lever himself to his feet. They made their way carefully to the staircase and climbed it slowly, wary of tumbling back down in the darkness. Sirius reached the door at the top first. It had swung itself shut presumably after their entrance, and he reached forward with a tight smile at Remus. His smile faded as the handle refused to turn. He pulled out his wand from his robes and tapped fiercely at the door. "Alohomora! Alohomora!"
The door remained shut.
"Locked," Sirius said in disbelief, and tugged more insistently on the doorknob. Before Sirius could begin to hammer at the door and holler like was inevitable, Remus grabbed his shoulders.
"Sirius, we're not supposed to be down here," he said, attempting to sound calm. Inwardly, he cursed and raged at his constant bad luck. Undoubtedly, Honeydukes had finally dispersed its crowd of students and closed for the day.
"Where's here, Moony? I'm not going to spend my life locked in this cellar to keep you from getting in trouble!"
"Hysterics don't become you, Sirius," Remus sighed, and withdrew his hands from Sirius' shoulders. "Do you want to be banned from visiting Honeydukes for the rest of your existence?" Remus did not. In times like these, his chocolate fix was more important than he could possibly reveal.
"Of course not!" Sirius snapped, flexing his fingers impatiently at his sides. "But I don't want to live here forever!"
"Look," Remus said, raising his voice slightly, allowing a touch of his previous anger to spread into his tone as he talked to Sirius. "I saw a trapdoor down there, behind some crates. Maybe it'll lead to the shop next door or something, somewhere with an open door we can sneak out of."
"Alright," Sirius said reluctantly, allowing himself to be redirected back down the dull flight of stairs. "It probably leads to a giant vat of Cockroach Cluster, you know. Live cockroaches. When we become cockroach food, you know I'll blame you for it."
"As long as Snape chokes on a cockroach engorged on our flesh, you know it'll be worth it," Remus retorted lightly, getting down onto his bruised knees and hauling at the dull metal ring inset into the trapdoor.
"Let me," Sirius said dryly, rolling up his sleeves with a flourish and flexing his muscles. Remus rolled his eyes, fumbled in his pocket, shoved Sirius back out of the way and tried the unlocking spell on the reluctant, dust-coated trapdoor.
"Voila," he said smugly, peering down into the blackness beneath the trapdoor. He thought he could make out some stairs. "I don't think it leads to a giant vat of cockroaches, either."
"But why's it going down so far?" Sirius whined, glaring down at the black square in the floor of the cellar. "Shouldn't it just wind across to the shop next door?"
Before Remus could think of a logical answer to Sirius' question, the two boys froze as a key scraped into a heavy lock above them. "Quickly!" Remus hissed, diving headlong into the trapdoor entrance.
For the second time in twenty minutes, the two boys tumbled down a flight of hard, stone stairs, Sirius flinging out an arm to grab shut the trapdoor behind him, and, upon reaching the bottom, made their way cautiously along the lengthy passage beyond.
It was with some bemusement that they finally reached the end of the tunnel, searched around in the darkness for a ladder or another trapdoor or some form of exit, accidentally happened upon a small lever inset in stone, and stumbled, blinking, into a candle-lit hall of their very familiar school.
"Awesome," Sirius breathed, gazing back into the dark tunnel from which they had just arrived. "Do you know what this means?"
Remus closed his eyes wearily as his stomach growled fiercely with hunger. "Yes. It means that your cockroach hypothesis was terribly flawed."
Sirius ignored this. "It means that we have found a secret passage that leads out of Hogwarts, my friend. It means that we have uncovered a way to travel into a sweet shop in the dead of night and line our stomachs with sugar. In short, it means that we have discovered freedom."
Remus cracked open an eyelid in disbelief, squinting quizzically at Sirius.
"Come, we must inform the others!" the black-haired, bruised, and enlightened boy cried, limping excitedly into the hallway. Fatigued, famished, and emotionally exhausted, Remus slowly summoned the strength to follow his friend, comforted by the knowledge that some secrets, no matter how trivial, would always be shared between all four Gryffindors.
A/N: Ouch. This chapter was really hard to write, heaven knows why. Hope you enjoyed it, and that you couldn't tell there was a certain strain involved at times! Don't worry, I will work on resolving Remus' little outburst here in the next few chapters.
Now, You must ask yourselves that essential question: did she write this chapter purely with the ambition of including not only a topless Sirius, but a Remus collapsed on top of said Sirius?
Sigh. Sometimes I want to skip through the formative years of Hogwarts and get straight to the "good stuff".
Stick with me, brilliant readers, and please send a review to let me know how you're finding the story. Thanks for reading it!
xx Froody