Remus' parents came home directly on time, and they both seemed to have been panicking—which was odd, because they couldn't have possibly predicted the dangerous activities which Remus was doing while they were gone.

"Remus!" cried Remus' mother, her hair disheveled. "You're okay!"

"Of course I'm okay," said Remus. "Did you think I was doing something dangerous or something?"

"He wasn't, by the way," said Sirius, who was sitting on the couch with his feet propped up on the armrest.

"Nothing dangerous at all," added James, who was sitting on Sirius' legs.

"Just quiet sitting," said Peter, who was huddling in the corner and trembling, evidently still shaken up from the day's adventures.

A pause.

"The words you are saying are comforting," said Remus' father, "but the way in which you are saying them is not. Did something happen?"

"No," said all four Marauders in unison.

"All right, then…. you really just sat here all day?"

"We went up into the attic," said Remus. "Found a bunch of my old things."

"It's like a wolf museum up there," said Sirius, stretching his legs.

Remus' parents exchanged bemused looks. "We… I mean, Remus…"

"Anyway," said Remus loudly, not wanting to get into any details of his childhood, "we found this record. Peter and the Wolf, it's called. What's it from? I don't remember it."

"Oh," said Remus' mother. "I remember that!"

"Me, too," said Remus' father. "There's a long tradition of wolf-related names in our family, due to a couple of Name Seers… now we know why, of course... but before, we just thought that it was a funny coincidence. That's why we got so many wolf-themed items for Remus as a baby. Hope found this record in the store and brought it home. Remus used to love it."

"I did?" asked Remus. "I don't remember that."

"Okay, well, you didn't love it," said Remus' mum. "You didn't have the patience for it. But we'd put it on sometimes when you were a baby. See, the interesting thing about Peter and the Wolf is that it has a story. I think I still remember it. Each instrument has a different theme, and each theme represents a different character. Go on, turn it on. I'll see what I remember."

They let the record run, and Remus' mother told the story of a cat, a duck, a bird, and a small boy named Peter. The musical themes lined up perfectly with her words, and she ended up riffing a bit and adding some parts that Remus was pretty sure weren't in the original.

"And then," she said dramatically as the bassoon played a melody in the distance, "Peter's grandfather called him back into the house, saying annoying things like, 'Peter, don't go outside without my permission!' and 'Peter, don't go beyond the fence!' and 'Peter, watch out for wolves!' and 'Peter, your brown coat makes you look like a squirrel!'"

"Your brown coat does make you look like a squirrel," said Remus' father, affronted. He'd been telling Remus' mother that for years. Remus rather liked her brown coat, but he could kind of see it—and Remus' mother was still bitter about the squirrel comment and continued to wear her brown coat nearly every day out of spite.

Remus' mother got a little bit hesitant whenever the wolf appeared (depicted by a French horn melody), but she managed to continue the story without censoring it too much (at least, Remus didn't think she was censoring it. Then again, he didn't know the original, so he couldn't exactly be sure).

"Woah," said Sirius once she'd finished. "So this… this Prokofiev bloke wasn't writing a symphony so much as he was writing a story for kids."

"Precisely."

"That explains a lot," said Sirius. "I was wondering why the melodies changed so abruptly. I think I like it. Do you have a piano?"

"Of course," said Remus' mother. "It should be in the drawer to your left. We've shrunk it. None of us play piano, so we didn't feel the need to grow it to normal size yet."

"Is there room?" asked Lyall, frowning. "It's a rather large piano."

"We could put it in the middle room," said Sirius. "The one between yours and Remus'?"

"No, I'm working on converting that to an office."

"The cellar?" asked Peter. "Just for now, I mean."

"Absolutely not," said Remus. "But… we could do the shed."

Remus' father paused, considering. "I suppose we could," he finally said. "The cellar is all fixed up now, so… yeah. We don't really need the shed for anything, do we?" With that, Remus' father stuck his hand into the drawer and pulled out a tiny piano. "I'm going there now," he said. "Anyone want to come?"

Everyone did.

Remus spent the next three hours or so watching Sirius come up with a highly impressive piano arrangement of Peter and the Wolf. It was very cold outside, so Remus' father ended up putting a Warming Charm on all four of them ("Your parents would kill me if I let you catch hypothermia," he said, to which Sirius responded, "Actually, they'd probably thank you"). And so Remus watched, astounded, as Sirius played each theme by ear and added countermelodies and harmonies as he went.

Suddenly, he stopped. "I need help," he said.

"What do you need?" asked Remus.

"I need someone to play this chord for me," he said. "Just over and over again. It's not that hard. You have a good sense of rhythm, right, Remus? I mean, you used to memorize poetry for fun and all."

"I… I guess," said Remus, absolutely flummoxed. "Just… how many times?"

Sirius stood up and dragged Remus to the piano, placing his fingers on the four keys that he wanted him to press. "We're gonna play the wolf theme," he said. "That's appropriate for you, right?"

Remus made a face. "I'm not a wolf right now."

"Good thing, too, because you need fingers for this. You know what? Actually, you're going to double up on the chords with me, except in a different octave. I want it to be super big, and I don't have enough hands. So you're going to hit this chord first—it's a Bb6 chord—"

"Those words mean nothing to me."

"It's easy. Just hit the black key, then this white key, then this white key, all at the same time."

Remus pressed the notes. "Sounds like a piano, all right," he said.

"Yep. Then you hit this one—er, wait, let me…." Sirius hummed a note. "Yeah. A, F#, E."

"I don't know what those letters mean."

"Merlin's beard, Remus, this is common knowledge. Can't you sort of play the piano?"

"I learned a heavily simplified version of Moonlight Sonata as a child because I thought it would be funny. I still know the notes, but they're muscle memory. I can't identify their names."

"But you sort of read sheet music, right?"

"I read Moonlight Sonata," said Remus. "That's it. I just know that the third white space sounds like this—" Remus pressed a note on the piano— "and the second line sounds like this." He pressed another note. "And so on. I just don't know their names."

Sirius shook his head. "I don't understand that," he said. "Fine, I'll show you the chord… the notes are here, here, and here. Then you're going to alternate between the chords like this." Sirius demonstrated on the higher octave. "See? Da-da-da-da-da, da…."

Remus tried, but his fingers got all tangled up. "How do you…? My fingers keep getting mixed up!"

"It's only a few notes. It's not that hard."

"I know which notes to press! I just can't get my fingers there that quickly!"

Sirius patiently waited until Remus got the hang of it, and James and Peter laughed in the back corner all the while. "Shut up," Remus grumbled. "It's not my fault I can't play piano. I've only played one thing on it."

"Really?" said James. "You never messed around on John Questus' piano? He was learning piano, wasn't he? And you two spent a lot of time together."

"Er, yeah, but… we mostly talked. There was a lot to catch up on."

"Oh," said Sirius. "If it were me, I'd've never stopped playing the piano. I love being able to play whatever I want instead of those stupid wizard composers. And 'just talking' is boring."

"And therein lies the reason that I got on with Professor Questus better than you did," Remus said primly.

Sirius rolled his eyes. "Anyway, now you have to play the same chord as the first one, except the D has to be an octave higher. Like that." Sirius showed him. "And then C#, A, E… and then the Bb chord again… and then bring the D down an octave for the next chord… and then C, F, C."

"What?!" exclaimed Remus. "That's so many letters! What do I do? I don't understand!"

"You just do it."

"But I don't remember! I don't know what any of those letters mean!"

"I could probably remember," James offered. "Me and my photographic memory and all."

"Yeah, but you have a terrible sense of rhythm," said Sirius. "Remember when you played the electric guitar? No, I don't want to play the piano with you. I want to play the piano with Moony. He has to help me play the theme, since he's part-wolf himself."

"I'm not part-wolf," Remus said. "I'm a werewolf. There's a difference."

"Fine, fine. I only meant that you're better than Prongs. You know Moonlight Sonata, at least. By the way I don't think I've ever heard you play that—I just heard you mention it to Questus. You should play it for me."

"No," said Remus. "I'm embarrassed. You're too much better than me. You'll laugh."

"Come on," wheedled Sirius. "I want to laugh at you."

Remus groaned. "Fine," he said. "I'll do it for you. But you owe me, and you'd better not laugh."

"Oh, I'm going to laugh."

Fortunately for Remus, Sirius managed to get through most of the piece before he couldn't hold back his laughter anymore. "You're just playing notes!" he guffawed, much to Remus' dismay. "I don't even know Moonlight Sonata and I already know that's a simplified arrangement! There's literally no chords; just roots! That's so bad, Moony!"

Remus stood up and crossed his arms. "You play it, then," he said, and then Sirius broke into an impromptu arrangement of Moonlight Sonata that was a thousand times better than Remus'.

Remus' friends left at the end of the day, and Remus and his parents had a lovely supper. He did not tell them about the secret passage, and he most certainly did not tell them about the Founders. They'd never let him stay home alone again.

But he did ask them something else that was mildly dangerous—something that had been on his mind ever since he and his friends had searched the attic. "Hey, Mum?" he asked, and he was extremely glad that his parents did not have his werewolf senses and could not hear his heart beating wildly inside his chest.

"Yes, love?"

"Could you tell me about… how it was?"

"How what was?"

"You know. When I was bitten. I was just thinking about it, looking at all that stuff in the attic. I suppose I don't understand some things. Why did you get rid of it all? Was it really so painful that you couldn't bear to look at anything wolf-related? I really just…" He took a deep breath and evoked the name of Professor Questus, even though he knew it was likely to make his mother cry. "Professor Questus and I talked about what it was like for me, and talking about it helped a great deal. When I know more about it, it seems less scary and mysterious. But there are a few pieces missing, because I have no idea what it was like for you and Dad. I wasn't emotionally mature enough to understand how you were feeling, and I was sleeping most of the time, anyway. I just want to hear stories... I want it to feel more real rather than a distant nightmare."

He'd been staring a hole in his plate, but now he dared to steal a glance at his mother. Sure enough, he spotted a tear leaking out of her eye, and he immediately felt horrendously guilty. "Mum, you don't have to. I know you've been feeling a little off recently." Oh, he was so stupid. His mother had been sensitive to the supernatural lately, so Remus shouldn't have mentioned any of that. He knew it was hard for her. Why had he pushed the subject?

"It's fine, sweetheart," she said. "I know we don't talk about it as much as we should."

Remus remembered the night he'd come into his father's room—not too long after Questus had died—feeling ill with grief and oddly empty. Remus' father had claimed that Remus could talk to him about anything... and then he'd done a hilariously accurate impression of Professor Questus, which had made Remus laugh. "Dad can tell me if you don't want to," he said. "I mean, if he wants. Later."

"No, I'll help," said Remus' mother. "We'll both tell you. I'll be honest with you, Remus: I don't like talking things out very much, but I know I need to. It's been a long time coming. I know it'll make me feel better, and I'm perfectly willing to do this with you and your father."

"I agree," said Remus' father. "We haven't talked candidly about it before, and you deserve as much as we can tell you. It's your story as much as it is ours, and we all have different sides. It's about time we pieced them together and got our heads round the whole thing."

Remus breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you," he said. "That means a lot."

"Why don't we do it after supper?" Remus' mum suggested. She was holding back tears admirably. "For right now, we'll just keep talking about your year at school. Tell us more about Francine the Bowtruckle, Remus."

Remus did. He told them everything he could think of—except Professor Craff, the secret passage, Giles Rosenblum, Remus' constant and uncharacteristic anger, and a few other assorted events of concern.

Talking about things was good, but there was definitely a such thing as oversharing.

Remus sat on Professor Questus' old armchair with a mug of hot cocoa and the pink blanket. He was hoping that sitting Questus' armchair with Questus' old blanket would make him a little braver—goodness knew Questus was never frightened of talking about things, and Remus had rarely been afraid to talk in his presence, either.

Remus' mother was on the couch, wrapped in her own blanket and frowning. Remus' father sat on the other armchair with a mug of tea beside him—he was flipping a photo album, looking for something.

"Do you want us to tell a particular story?" asked Remus' mother.

"No," said Remus. "Just anything. It doesn't need to be chronological. I just want to talk about it, because we always avoid it, and... well, I wasn't quite lucid enough at the time to remember all the details."

"Anything?"

"Yeah. Right before or after I was bitten. I was young, so it's hazy."

"There's too much," she said.

"Fine… erm, tell me about St. Mungo's, then."

"Hm," she said, and her were fingers shaking slightly as they gripped the blanket. "Well… okay. I'm sure you remember the beginning, when we took you there."

"I remember that."

"And then Susi came in a while later with a bite of her own and took the next bed over. You mostly slept for the first couple of days, and your father and I..."

"We mostly stared at the wall and felt sorry for you," said Remus' father, "and ourselves, of course."

"You'd been there for a couple of days when Susi offered to watch you for a while. She wanted us to be able to go home—shower—clean up—take a nap. We hadn't left your side in days, and you couldn't be alone."

"I remember that. She told me a story. I don't remember what it was about, though; I think I fell asleep."

"You were sleeping on and off a lot, so I'm not surprised," said Remus' mother with a faraway look in her eyes. "Your father and I Apparated home. We tried to clean up a bit. We told the nosy neighbor lady that you'd fallen out of the window."

"Did she believe you?"

"Of course. I'm a decent liar. But… we couldn't stay away for long, of course. We came back as soon as we'd both taken showers. But we had to clean up your room, too."

"Oh," said Remus. "I… hadn't thought about that." Indeed, his room had been perfectly clean when he'd returned from St. Mungo's. No blood. No pieces of glass. An intact window. Remus hadn't thought about it, because the whole thing had seemed like a hazy dream in the first place. Why would the remnants of such a terrifying night remain when so many other things had gone away?

"Your father did it all with that wand of his," said Remus' mother. "It only took a few seconds. But… my goodness, it was hard."

"I can imagine."

"Here's a loosely related anecdote," said Remus' father. "When you got back to the house, we had to get rid of practically everything that made noise."

"Oh, come now," said Remus. He remembered being sensitive to noise upon returning home, but he was also usually self-sacrificing and thoughtful enough to endure it. Wasn't he? "I wasn't that bad."

"Yes, you were. You made us whisper all the time. You made us get rid of the doorbell. You cried for ages when your mother accidentally dropped a plate on the floor. We got rid of the telephone because you would freeze up and complain whenever it rang…."

"What?! Mum told me we got rid of the telephone because you didn't understand Muggle technology and were afraid it was listening in to your conversations!"

Remus' father laughed and shook his head. "I'm not surprised she told you that. We didn't want you to feel guilty."

"Of course I feel guilty! That was the last thing that connected Mum to the outside world! I could have dealt with it! I'd've gladly traded some comfort for Mum's entire social life!"

"And that is precisely why we didn't tell you." Remus' mother smiled. "I didn't mind, Remus. I didn't have many people to talk to, anyway. At that point, we were prepared to make any sacrifices necessary for you."

"Key word being necessary," grumbled Remus.

"You were uncomfortable and we wanted to fix it. That's what any parent would do, especially ones in our situation. You must remember how much you were going through, and we couldn't do anything about it. We wanted to alleviate your struggles as much as was possible, and getting rid of the telephone was the only thing we felt we could do. It gave us some control—made us feel like we were helping. You needn't feel guilty about anything we've done for you, because we've done them just as much for ourselves."

Before Remus could argue, Remus' father had found whatever he'd been looking for in the photo album. "Ah-ha!" he said triumphantly. "Revelio." Then he sucked in a sharp breath. "Oh, it's worse than I remember."

"What?"

"I took a lot of photographs of the three of us that first month you were home from St. Mungo's," said Remus' father. "We didn't think you'd last the month, so it felt… important. But you look terrible in every one."

"That's not very nice," said Remus. He wasn't sure he wanted to see, but he bounded off the armchair and looked over his father's shoulder anyway. "Oh," he whispered.

Yeah, he did look terrible.

The first one was of a young Remus on a hospital bed. He was lying on his back, looking absolutely miserable and half-asleep, as his mother smiled next to him (but it wasn't quite reaching her eyes). He was about as pale as Nearly-Headless Nick on a bad day. His hair was wet—probably a mixture of sweat and tears—and a strand of it was sticking to his cheek. His eyebrows were furrowing and unfurrowing in pain. He was wrapped in bandages. Worst of all, there was still blood soaking through the sleeve of his pajamas and near his torso: the mark of what had caused his other maladies.

"We'd hoped the camera would make you happy," Remus' father was saying. "You used to love getting your picture taken. But you didn't even seem to recognize it. You were tired and uncomfortable. Look, here's another one."

This one was of Remus sitting up in the same hospital bed, and Susi was sitting next to him with a bright grin and waving a thumbs-up at the camera. Remus was looking a tiny bit better (at least he was sitting up), but he still wasn't smiling.

"Susi and I had plaited your hair," said Remus' mother. "Look, see it? Your hair was longer back then."

"Yeah."

"We thought it'd be fun… and you were waking up in the middle of the night and vomiting from the pain, so we wanted to keep it out of the way."

"I remember that," said Remus dully. This wasn't making him nearly as happy as he'd thought it would.

"There's one of you on your first day back," said Remus' mother. "I was reading you a story."

The young Remus did not look like he was listening to a story. It was a wizarding photograph, but the young Remus was not moving an inch. He was staring off into space, his eyes almost comically wide, as his mother tried to exude enough enthusiasm for the both of them.

"And here's you strapped up in the car," said Remus' father.

"We were going to look for a cure, weren't we?"

"…Yes."

They flipped through some more photos, each as depressing as the last. After what seemed like an eternity, Remus' father closed the album. "You can see why we hid them from you," he said. "They aren't very cheerful."

"I didn't even know you had them. I'd thought you just didn't take any photos when I was five. I'd wondered why you kept buying new albums when you'd had a perfectly good empty one right here. I figured it was sentimental or something."

"We didn't want you seeing them."

You tried way too hard to protect me, thought Remus, but he wasn't about to say it. His parents had truly tried their best in an impossible situation, and even though Remus wasn't happy with how they'd merely avoided the topic for years, coddling him to the point of causing insurmountable anxiety whenever he had to talk about his condition... they had done their best, and for that, Remus would always be thankful.

"But!" said Remus' mother, grabbing the album and flipping to the back. "We added this one the other day. See?"

Remus looked at the photograph. It was the picture he'd sent his parents of him and his friends at the first Quidditch game of Remus' first year. They were laughing—Remus was smiling for real—Sirius was stealing Remus' scarf—Remus' cheeks were tinged pink from both laughter and the cold—everyone was grinning, and it did reach their eyes. "See?" said Remus' mother again, her face flushed with joy (and remnants of tears). "It got better."

"It did, didn't it?"

"Do you remember how excited we were about your health when we saw you for the first time in January of your first year?" asked Remus' father.

"Of course. You were smothering."

"It wasn't just your health, you know. You were smiling. You were laughing. You were talking our ears off. I don't think you understand just how much had changed, Remus, but from our perspective, it was massive. You are so much different from how you were a couple of years ago, and it's amazing. We'd all learned to cope with the lycanthropy, and we'd all figured out how to be genuinely happy at home, just the three of us. But... that was a different kind of joy. This kind of joy is accompanied by hope, and it's quite a different sort. We owe Dumbledore everything."

"Yeah, we do," said Remus quietly.

There was a long moment of silence. Remus and his parents had never had a real conversation about that month, and Remus could see that his mother was already feeling better after her affirmation that things did indeed get better. It had been good for them to think of hope, especially as the increasing Dark activity in the world brought a different kind of hopelessness to their lives.

Questus had told Remus many, many times that talking was good for him, but Remus was still astounded every time it actually worked. It was sort of like crying. It was never pleasant at first, but one usually felt a little better after doing it.

"You know, Mum," he said, "I have loads of better photographs than that. Do you want to see them?"

Remus' mother nodded happily, and Remus dashed to his room to get the Marauder photo album. For the next hour, the Lupins sat and looked at photographs of the genuinely-happy Remus that they hadn't thought possible before Hogwarts, and Remus had trouble falling asleep that night due to joy instead of nightmares.

AN: Next week's chapter will include a young child, Madam Pomfrey's sister, and a happy dinosaur.