Author's Note: Hell. Don't even read this; go read The Shoebox Project and forget I ever presumed to try to write a story about the effing Marauders.
Revel in my inferiority complex.
I'm going to stop bashing myself and attempt to get my priorities straight now. Don't mind me.
Today's excuse: You would not believe how stymied I was on this story. Like sriusly omg it was lyk the worst thing evr lol.
And then I just got extraordinarily lazy. I really, really, really apologize. Like, really.
Chapter beta'd (betaed?) by the lovely Eltea. +4 to grammar.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dark
Darkness stalked in the Forest, poised to pounce. Shadows skulked within its velvet folds, sliding just out of sight, flirting with the corners of the eyes. Thick, burgeoning white mist swathed the trees like so much cotton, injecting a damp, desolate humidity into the chill of the night.
It took almost all of Severus Snape's willpower not to shiver.
Douglas Reid was trudging placidly along before him—if a boy of that size and temperament could do anything placidly. The others were there, too, and that absurdly eager Regulus boy—the other Black brother; less outright outrageous but sufficiently marred by his own vast collection of annoying idiosyncrasies—was almost literally bouncing up and down with excitement. He didn't know anything. He thought this was all a game. Severus wasn't sure whether he wanted to beat the fool upside the head or break down and cry.
He settled with picking his way around a patch of particularly odious mud and reviewing the plan in his head, one last time.
They would find the clearing. They would set up. The interested members of the student body would arrive—that was, all the Slytherins, a smattering of high-minded Ravenclaws, and potentially a few Hufflepuffs who had been toying with the idea. (One girl had asked if they would invite any Gryffindors. She'd been laughed at until she almost burst a blood vessel blushing.) One of the Seventh Years would give a speech; a few graduate Death Eaters would make a dramatic entrance; they would demonstrate a few especially interesting and insidious spells. Severus had managed to come up with one of his own for the occasion, and he thought it would look pretty impressive. Then everyone would go home—that was, back to the castle. It was nothing more and nothing less than a recruitment exercise.
So why did it feel like he was marching purposefully towards the Apocalypse?
Something about it just unnerved him. Given, he would have opened his own jugular vein with his fingernails before admitting it, but… There was just something wrong here, in the jutting angles of the shadows and the hard determination in the others' eyes. He felt vulnerable. Stranded. Lost.
Meticulously he arranged his features into an expression of perfect impartiality. If he showed emotion here, in this place, in this company; if he let blood dribble out into the water and diffuse away; if he showed so much as a fragment of a hint of fear, he was dead. And if there was one thing in the world that Severus Snape did not want to be, "dead" was unequivocally it.
That wasn't entirely true, or not all the time. But if he was going to die… He didn't want it to be here. Not in this moist, ugly place, with its twisted trees and its strangling vines seeking his shoes. He wanted it to be at his behest. On his whim. In a time and place of his choosing; in a warm, snug room illuminated only by a modest, crackling fire, with the blade thin and shining and accessible in his skeletal fingers and the pulse under his skin strong and steady and destructible. Then there would be a grandeur and a nobility in the way in which it slowed… slowed… slowed… and stopped. Measured and collected; two things he had never quite managed to be in life.
But the Forest—the Forest was a world of untried, untested, unlimited imagination, of lurking horror and oppressive mystery. Suddenly, with dizzying force, he was struck by the desire to get out of here, to run as fast as his feet would consent to carry him. It was a mad wish, a flash of lunacy assaulting the cold logic to which he clung to survive in an endlessly disappointing world. He pushed it away. There would be no running. It was far too late for that now. It was too late to do anything but trail after Douglas Reid, knowing that they were teetering on the cusp of the moment when it all came together—when it all soared among the wispy clouds or slammed into the ground like a bird with broken wings.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Moon's waxing, isn't it?" Sirius remarked, magnanimously employing his forearm to shield his friends from the might of his subsequent yawn.
Remus looked up abruptly. "Yes," he said simply.
Sirius nodded to himself. "I don't need a calendar," he noted. "I can use Remus as an indicator of the lunar cycle. When the moon's new, he's normal; when it's waxing, he gets all jittery and fidgety; when it's full, we go stargazing; and when it's waning again, he sniffs the air a lot and itches behind his ears until he gets back to normal again."
The patch of skin behind Remus's right ear itched right on cue, and he fought the urge to jog his right knee up and down a little. He pointedly ignored both rebelling pieces of his anatomy and then focused on trying not to tap his quill bemusedly on his essay.
Sirius loosed another tremendous yawn, which stretched his jaw and probably aspired to shaking the foundations of the castle. "Gentlemen," he said, "it is Friday night, and none of us is out on a hot date. What is wrong with this picture?"
Remus smiled. "The fact that you're surprised," he answered.
"Silence, you. Your insolence is not appreciated."
"It's an affront to his vast and noble pride," James commented from where he was sprawled out on the couch, gangly limbs draping everywhere like limp spaghetti.
"You're damn right it is," Sirius confirmed. "And this frigging Charms essay is an even bigger affront. Such a big affront that I think I'm going to sneak into Flitwick's bedroom in the dark of the night, stuff him in a burlap bag, and go toss him into the coldest, dirtiest, most unpalatable freight car on the next train to Siberia."
"Siberia?" It was James's turn to yawn; he smacked his lips afterward. "Can't you think of anywhere more remote than that?"
"No. Can you? 'Cause I'd take that instead, if you could."
"I'll work on it. Why just Flitwick? Can you send McGonagall along, too? I'm getting tired of all this test preparation. Extremely tired. She knows we're all just going to wing it anyway. Well, all of us except Remus, who'll work like a dog studying and then blow everyone away with his scores."
Remus blushed happily.
"'Work like a dog'?" Sirius repeated airily. "And how exactly would he do that? Lie around with his tongue lolling out, asking himself to write his essay for him? Because that's how I work."
"Mangy cur," James noted unconcernedly.
"Eh. A little unkempt. I wouldn't say mangy, per se."
"Fair enough. Unkempt cur."
The contagious yawn that had been making its insidious way around the room reached Remus at last. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus them on the lines he was writing, but it didn't work very well. They crawled around on the page like a photographic negative, dark worms in white soil, squirming impatiently, and after a moment of squinting at them, he gave up and fought his way unsteadily to his feet.
"I'm going to go take a bath," he announced.
"Have fun," Sirius replied. There was a pause. "In the get-your-mind-out-of-the-gutter-James kind of way," he amended.
"Fishing it out as we speak," James replied.
"What would you bait James's mind with?" Peter mused.
Sirius snorted. "I'll give you a hint, Pete. It starts with 'L,' and it ends with 'ily Evans.'"
"Cheap shot," James declared, resignedly it seemed.
"C'mon, Jamesy. It was too easy. Give me a challenge next time, won't you?"
"Yeah, I'll challenge you to walk with the tree trunk I'm going to jam up your a—"
It was on that rejoinder that Remus closed the portrait, and it was on that rejoinder that he was still meditating bemusedly—and amusedly—when toweling at his hair twenty minutes later. Soon the carpet, lush and elaborate, whiled itself away beneath his carelessly bare feet, and he had already opened his mouth to speak the password when he paused.
Remus Lupin believed in second chances. He had received a thousand of them, a million, a number that defied counting, most of them unsolicited and all of them undeserved. And so it was that he went to the wide bank of windows one last time.
The condensation of his breath on the icy surface of the nearest windowpane could not conceal the inky blot of humanity slithering towards the edge of the Forest.
Remus had always cynically wondered what genius had thought that calling the place the "Forbidden Forest" would do anything but entice a school full of teenagers to head towards it with all possible speed.
What it was that compelled him—the Prefect's righteousness, the wolf's nose for the ominous, the human's insurmountable curiosity—Remus didn't know, but compelled he was. Compelled—if not dragged.
He was wearing drawstring pajama pants and an old gray T-shirt, his feet were still barer than birth, and he was running full-tilt across the dewy lawn, uneven breaths jerking out from his throat as ragged puffs of mist, his heart threatening to tear its way free of his chest, moving ever closer to the intricate chaos that was the Forest.
Just how many accounts of Creation spoke of a primordial pandemonium, touched and altered by a benevolent deity, giving rise to all life? And here he was—at the boundary of a patch of preserved wildness. At the fringe of an isolated reversion to the world of before. At the edge of one of the Old Places.
And in he plunged.
Broken twigs and jagged stones cut into the tender soles of his feet, but Remus ran softly, only the whisper of the fabric of his clothing, the gentle pattering of his steps, and the draw and release of each breath betraying that he was there at all. Those breaths grew gradually steadier. His strides became even. The wolf knew how to run. The only thing it did better than running was killing.
His quarry gave itself away with the profusion of milky white wandlight that filtered eerily through the trees. Panting lightly, Remus slowed his pace to a crawl and crept after them.
The tension was almost tangible. Remus thought he could taste it—sharp and acrid, digging its claws into the tongue. This was something important. That much was incontrovertible.
Severus trailed at the end of the group like a comet reluctantly jerked into a lopsided orbit.
Remus closed in.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sirius had found a bottle of bubble syrup. James did not know whence this object had come; he did not know how Sirius had produced it from nowhere; he did not know who had been stupid enough to sell such a thing to one Sirius Black. What he did know was that it was the single most annoying thing since, oh, EVER.
A bubble touched his forehead and popped. Distractedly he swiped at the faint filmy residue and frowned hard at his Transfiguration essay, willing words to come to him. Shortly, a thick current of bubbles whooshed directly at him to burst in machine gun succession all over his nose, cheeks, and glasses.
"Sirius!" he howled, scrubbing maniacally at his soapy skin and succeeding only in spreading a nice lather.
Calmly Sirius tossed his hair out of his face, pursed his lips, and blew delicately through the window of the bubble wand, begetting another cluster of shining, perfect, opalescent spheres. Lazily he ruptured a fat, lingering specimen with one long finger and rubbed absently at the resulting sudsy coating on his fingertip. "Where the hell's Remus?" he wanted to know.
"Hiding from you?" James hazarded, scouring at his glasses with a fistful of his sweater. "That's what I'd be doing."
Sirius chose to ignore that particular comment. "Hope he didn't drown," he remarked.
"I'm pretty sure he can swim," Peter noted.
"Unless he deliberately drowned himself," Sirius replied offhandedly.
There was a long and painful pause. No one wanted to laugh it off, and no one wanted to scoff and discount it, because it simply seemed too… possible. Likely? No. Realistic, even? Doubtful. But possible? Yes. Terribly, horribly, miserably possible. There was something of that to Remus Lupin, something fragile, something cautiously balanced, and gleaming in that nuanced existence like pyrite in a mountainside was that possibility. It sent through James a shiver that jittered every part of his body down to his littlest toe.
"To hell with this," Sirius decided, shifting in his seat. "I'm cheating." He drew out the Map, unfolded it, and began to tap it systematically with his wand. As he progressed downward from the seventh floor, the easy indifference fell from his face, piece by piece. First it was the appearance of the line between the dark slashes of his eyebrows. Then the slight narrowing of his eyes.
He was unabashedly biting his lip by the time he reached the first floor and, as James, standing at his shoulder, saw clearly, panned over the grounds. In the Forest, there was a mass of black dots so close together that their edges blurred and their names tangled. Just behind them were blazoned two separate circles.
One was labeled Remus Lupin, and the other Severus Snape.
"Well, shit," Sirius said. Then he jammed the Map into his pocket, shrugged his coat over his shoulders, and exploded out of the common room at a run.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Severus caught sight of Remus out of the corner of his eye. He whipped his wandering gaze towards Douglas Reid's cloak again, his mind whirling into action. Remus Lupin was not supposed to be here. And now that he was, he ran the very real risk of getting himself killed.
Severus's incorrigible mind had, of course, done the appropriate calculations. Though the math was rough at best, the odds were clearly not in Remus's favor. Remus, judging by his continued presence, did not seem to grasp the subtle concept of his own impending destruction.
Inwardly, Severus sighed. Then, carefully, he faded back from the group, letting them move gradually farther ahead until the light from their wands began to dim, disappearing among towering trees draped with moss like corrupted lace. To his confident expectation, his venomous vexation, and his intense relief, Remus, seeming bewildered, slowed with him.
Severus tightened his grip on his wand and turned to face the other boy. "You shouldn't have come, Lupin," he commented.
Remus found his own wand and clenched it in his hand. There was something foreign in his face—something hard and indomitable. "Well, I did," he replied.
Severus shrugged. "There's still time to change your mind."
Remus looked at him for a moment, almost sardonically. Then they both moved at once.
"Expell—"
The words that leapt out of Severus's mouth were the ones that he had labored over for weeks, the ones he had transcribed unthinkingly on his homework and had to scratch out, the ones he had whispered to himself over and over as he lay trying to sleep. They had been frothing in his throat all night, and now they snatched their chance for release.
"Depulsia coacto!" he shouted, his arm straighter than a meter-stick, the trembling of his hand just barely too faint to mar the spell.
There was a great and pervasive rumbling as the air bowed to Severus's whim. For a moment, pebbles danced on the ground, and leaves quivered where they clutched the arching branches that nurtured them. Then the fabric of the empty space compressed and collected, gathering itself into an invisible block that gave Remus Lupin one formidable shove.
It slammed him into a broad tree trunk; the body crumpled among the rolling roots and lay still. Mist curled in around it, wreathing the figure as if to protect it from further harm.
The others had heard the noise and were approaching fast.
"What the fuck did you do?"
"Is that a person?"
"Did you kill him, or what?"
"I took care of it," Severus stated, raising his single voice over the grating cacophony of their different ones.
"What do you mean, you—"
"I took care of it," he repeated, louder still. Then he swept through their ranks and pounded down the path towards the clearing. Over his shoulder he added vituperatively, "Are you coming? Or do you want Malfoy to think we can't make it to an appointment we've set?"
The gears in their primitive heads turned, and then they followed.