Author's Note: Date error in the summary has been corrected. I'd bet most of my life savings that you don't care.
The Harry Potter Lexicon, whence all of my dates originate, says that Sirius convincing Snape to follow Lupin at the full moon happened in September of 1975. Prisoner of Azkaban, however, which it cites for the date, makes no mention of the month, and having it all happen so fast would be very difficult, so I'm going to ignore that particular detail. I'm sure you care very much about that, too.
In addition, this fic is now in line to synch with everything that occurred in Deathly Hallows. There won't be anything in the way of startling spoilers, but it would only be fair to let you know. It doesn't come into play in this chapter in any case.
CHAPTER THREE
Hateful
They were bent low over the parchment, hunched like gargoyles, looking for all the world like a quartet plotting the overthrow of a dictator. Remus wasn't sure he liked that particular comparison. The idea of a conspiracy unsettled him and made his stomach twist a little.
But this wasn't a conspiracy. It was instead the fruits of the combined efforts of a few of Hogwarts's brightest, most creative, and most mischievous.
Sirius sat back first, his eyes glowing, a triumphant grin spreading slowly across his face. "It's done," he said. Remus saw Peter shiver happily. "Here," Sirius went on, graveness battling glee in his expression. He handed the quill to James first. "Sign it."
Unsurprisingly, James took his time, spelling out Prongs in great, sweeping letters. Smiling faintly, Remus found that he didn't mind. If an overzealous signature was the only way James saw fit to glorify himself, that was excellent, as far as Remus was concerned. It was a marked improvement over past exertions of insufferable ego.
The tail of the S dwindled to a last flourish, and Sirius took the paper next. Padfoot, he wrote, flicking out the lines to cross the F and the T. He passed the quill to the boy at his right, who accepted it, his blooming reverence spreading its petals wide, and leaned over to scratch out his contribution ecstatically. Wormtail squirmed its way onto the page.
It came to Remus next. Aware of the silly sentimentality, he merely admired it for a moment. It was going blank, absorbing the words that the others had written like quicksand, but he knew that beneath there lay a treasure trove of information, a feat of Charms and wit and a testament to their comaraderie that would outlast their days here. Their marks were set. The Map was forever.
Moony, he wrote.
And then it was complete.
They were all grinning like fools now, possessed by the helpless, all-encompassing exaltation that seeped out from their latest accomplishment like a disease.
Sirius raised his bottle of butterbeer. "To the Map," he announced.
Three fists clenched around three bottles and lifted them with as much conviction as if they had been revolutionary banners. "To the Map," James, Remus, and Peter echoed.
The glass clinked hard, and then they drank deeply.
They were still looking at the single, ostensibly unremarkable piece of parchment minutes later, too pleased for words. It was not looking at it that was hard.
Madam Rosmerta zeroed in on Sirius's empty drink like a dive bomber.
"Can I get you another one of those?" she inquired sweetly, offering him the most winsome of all her smiles.
Sirius managed to focus a slightly glazed pair of eyes on her. "Hm? Oh, yes, that would be wonderful, thank you."
Rosmerta smiled again and bustled off joyously. The ridiculously conspicuous flirting that she did when Sirius was around didn't unduly surprise Remus, of course. Just about every girl within five years of his age fell in love with Sirius Black, and most of them were reduced to batting their eyelashes at him and sighing daintily. Remus had never really been very jealous of all the attention. It was probably kind of annoying.
Well, he was a little jealous sometimes. Only a little. And only sometimes.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It happened after breakfast, when just about everyone had returned to the Gryffindor common room to fetch books and bags and just generally hoard a few more minutes to themselves. Peter and Sirius had started a game of chess, which was something that they did frequently--frequently enough, at least, that Remus had come to recognize their vastly disparate styles of play. Sirius had the blunt, blind killing instinct of a genuine predator. He bulldozed his way across the board, sacrificing pieces indiscriminately to further his advances. Peter, however, was a shrewder player, a cunning strategist. Most of Peter's acquaintances would have found it hard to believe, but, then, Peter was a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for. Though he had leaned on James's and Sirius's genius with some consistency, when it came down to it, no one could do the Animagus spell for you. Peter Pettigrew had managed that, and he was brilliant in chess as well.
Peter had just repossessed Sirius's first knight, to the considerable darkening of his opponent's expression, when a Fourth Year burst in through the portrait hole, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
"Everybody!" he shouted. Subdued murmurs and raucous laughter alike died down as the fair-haired youth leapt up onto a table and repeated the entreaty even louder.
"What?" Sirius demanded, slightly petulantly.
The boy held up a Daily Prophet with ink smudged where his fingers had been gripping it. The front page was dominated by a picture of what might once have been a charming cottage. Now it was little more than rubble. Dust wafted upward lazily, and even as the dumbstruck Gryffindors stared, another fragment of wall crumbled and collapsed. Bold, urgent letters cried plaintively, Dark Lord Flattens Half-Blood Household, and there was another story beneath it, smaller but more terrifying: Merciless Muggle Massacre was the title, and the grainy picture shook slightly, as if the photographer hadn't had time to steady his hand. The subject was nonetheless clear enough: seven occupied body bags.
Silence reigned, tyranically thick and complete, for a full minute. Then Lily Evans stood, tall and straight-backed, her eyes unyielding. She would have looked completely resolved if not for the way her lip trembled.
"We should go to class," she said.
And because it was what the man behind the headlines would least have wanted, they did.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The teachers chose not to address the problem directly in class, though there was a marked uneasiness in the atmosphere. McGonagall, whose domain they inhabited first that morning, was unusually quiet, and when she released the class to practice a new spell privately, they followed suit. What smiles there were stretched thin and tight, and laughter seemed like a foreign concept.
Or it did until they were freed for lunch.
In the courtyards as they fled their classes and then shortly thereafter in the Great Hall, the Slytherins were boisterous, jovial; brighter and louder than Remus had ever seen them. They were happy. They were cheerful. They were...celebrating.
Sirius's face had contorted into a mask of unadulterated rage, of cowing fury, of deep, encompassing hatred. An artist on the brink of suicide, betrayed by his last friend in the world, sinking irreversibly into a fathomless pit of loathing for himself and all that lay around him, might have slashed the lines of Sirius's visage onto the nearest canvas, trying only to release some of the welling anger before it killed him, before he drowned in it. Sirius's knuckles were whiter than snow, clenched around his knife as if he might plunge it into the jugular vein of the Slytherin his dark eyes followed--one who smirked widely and nodded, whose eyes glinted maliciously with the best of them.
"Bunch of pale-faced, baby-killing bastards," Sirius spat.
James looked exhausted. "Let it go, Sir--"
Sirius slammed his knife down onto the tabletop, the noise like a gunshot in the silence of the other Houses' portion of the Hall. "I will not let it go, James Potter," he snapped, "because it is--" The next part he shouted at the Slytherin table at the top of his voice. "--sick and wrong, and I will not stand for it!" He was on his feet now, his eyes hard, his face set, every muscle in his body angled for confrontation.
A cluster of Slytherins directly across from him rose together like a waterspout, like a black mist gathering over sunlit hills, a dark presence spattered with silver and green. Remus saw Regulus Black among them--so like Sirius, cast so closely in his image, and yet somehow so distant.
"Then, by all means," Severus Snape replied, his voice ringing with derision, a smirk of colossal proportions pulling his lips, "sit down."
Remus expected smoke to pour from Sirius's ears. But by the time the teachers had gained their feet mere seconds later, Sirius was striding down the aisle toward the exit, robes swirling around his ankles, footsteps echoing in the silence. Tendons shifted visibly in his back as he gave the doors a monumental shove imbued with improbable strength, and they gave way at his bidding. Out Sirius went.
The hush was shattered by the protesting squeals of the bench as Remus, James, and Peter pushed it backwards and leapt off of it to scramble after Sirius at a run. A wave of uproarious laughter from the Slytherins ushered them from the Hall, and the doors swung shut with unfeeling finality after them.
At risk of losing his figurative language privileges indefinitely, Remus realized that he felt like his heart had been put through a cheese grater with painstaking completeness. It wasn't bad enough that the seven innocent Muggles had fallen to a force they couldn't even see, couldn't even believe in, to resist. It wasn't bad enough that four of those Muggles had been children--children, who might have had long, wonderful lives, who might have grown up to cure cancer or write a bestseller or just settle down with a spouse and two kids and a garden in the backyard that would grow nothing but zucchini, which the kids would hide in their napkins instead of eating. No, that wasn't bad enough. The Slytherins had to smirk, had to laugh, had to crow out their triumph, had to gloat over a tragedy as a victory. They had to light Sirius's short, short fuse.
Sirius Black was the flagship of their little fleet, and they all knew it. James might have been smarter than him, strictly speaking, and more gleefully mischievous. But Sirius had more strength, more blind, steely conviction, and endless supplies of passion. He was passionate about everything and about nothing, about the tiny things and the tremendous ones, and it was that passion that compelled him in all that he did. Likely that was why so many girls had faded in his eyes--when the short chase was over and they were his, they weren't quite amazing enough to sustain the reckless passion with which he had wanted them. Remus wondered if anything was--if anything in the world could balance that incredible weight. Maybe they could--and maybe they did. The three of them. Him, and James, and Peter. Sirius loved them, that much was evident and undeniable. Remus was of the tentative belief that Sirius loved them more than he'd ever loved anything. It was a little bit of a scary thought.
They followed the shadowy figure, stiff with the radiating force of his ire, to the third floor. There, on a long carpet, he stopped, possibly because he had exerted at least some of his animosity on the two sets of stairs up which he had just stormed. Sure enough, he was panting a little, though the will for destruction was still written in plain letters across his face.
"Sirius, listen a minute," James began.
"No, James," Sirius retorted. "You listen a minute. You saw the bastard. You saw the bastard. You saw all those bastards, sitting pretty over there, grinning like monkeys with vampire teeth. They laugh in the face of human suffering, James Potter. They encourage it. And when that's not enough, they go out and do it themselves. How many do you think are on the nameless one's side now? How many people we've made fun of in Potions or jinxed for the Hell of it are moonlighting as murderers? Give me a fucking estimate, why don't you?" But he didn't give James or anyone else a chance to speak before he took it up again, rancor dripping from every pore; Remus, his olfactory abilities better than most as a side effect of his monthly transformations, almost thought he could smell Sirius's hatred; he imagined he could see it coalescing into a thin, wispy stream and curling around its master like an obedient snake, like a whirlwind, like a tornado with Sirius Black at its eye. "Fucking Nazis," Sirius snarled, pacing furiously now, kicking vengefully at the rug when it thickness impeded his feet. "They're fucking Nazis. And Severus--he's the worst of them. The worst. The bastard--the absolute bastard." Severus was actively seething now, his breath hissing between his teeth. "Oh, he'll get his fucking comeuppance. He will. He'll get what's coming to him. Complacent little fucker. No, my dear friends, you can't talk like that to Sirius Black and get away unscathed. He'll get his."
He looked up then, and he seemed almost surprised that they were there.
"I'm hungry," Peter said.
"I'm not going back in there," Sirius warned, the rage rising in his voice again.
"You don't have to," Peter responded, a lackadaisical shrug lifting his shoulders. "I'll go and bring you something back if you like. I can bring everybody something back, if you guys want."
The acquiescence was muted but universal, and Peter smiled, clicked his heels together and saluted sharply, and then strolled back along the corridor, skipping down the stairs.
"Good kid," James remarked, wearily it seemed.
"Sirius," Remus said slowly, making himself look levelly into Sirius's dark eyes. They were brothers now. They had been since the day years ago when those three saints had declared that they would try at any cost, that they would endeavor until they succeeded, that they would become Animagi--that they would do the impossible, and they would do it for him. They were brothers, the four of them, brothers linked by irrevocable ties stronger than blood, but there were limits to it--limits to brotherhood. There were limits to everything. "Why do you hate Severus?" Remus asked. Sirius opened his mouth, incensed by the very question, but Remus cut him off. "I don't mean," he clarified distinctly, "why you think he's petty and cruel and whatever else he is that's largely unequivocal. I mean, Sirius, why do you hate him so personally?"
There was a long moment of silence. James looked bewilderedly between Remus and Sirius as they met each other's eyes. And then Sirius smiled, a thin, horrible smile of untold anguish.
"Because," Sirius answered calmly, "Severus Snape is everything my family ever wanted me to be." That smile cut like a knife, and Remus felt himself flinch. "And I'm not."