“Bloody Snivellus! How can he? How can that jumped up, greasy-haired, pathetic excuse for a human being tell my godson he won’t be teaching him anymore? Doesn’t he know how vital this is? Is he so bloody important that he won’t even listen to Dumbledore?”
“Padfoot, I’ll deal with it. Get back here! There’s no use you going after Snape in this state. You’ll end up making the situation worse and if Umbridge catches you...”
“Merlin, I hope she didn’t catch Harry in her office.”
“Get away from there. If she does poke her head in here, the last thing we need is for her to come face to face with you. That really will cause trouble.”
“You check then.”
“That’s what I am doing... It’s fine. The connection's closed off. I guess we’ll find out sooner or later if he’s in trouble. I hope he doesn’t end up in detention; I hate to think what Umbridge will put him through.”
“I doubt he’ll care. My godson seems to get more like his dad every day.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“What do you mean? Are you suggesting that it’s a bad thing for him to be like James?”
“Oh, come down off your high Hippogriff, Padfoot. I just meant that now is not the time to be encouraging Harry to be more reckless.”
“Typical cautious-bloody-Lupin approach to a problem. You think he should just sit back and do nothing?”
“That isn’t what I’m saying. I just don’t think we should be sending him down the typical reckless-bloody-Black approach either! Didn’t I go along with this whole Dumbledore’s Army plan? Didn’t I go out and buy him those books for Christmas? If I’d disapproved then I would have come back with Mrs Bloxham’s Toadstool Tales.”
“Not if you hadn’t wanted me to stick them where the sun doesn’t shine, Moony.”
“Like to see you try, Padfoot. I’d like to see you try.”
“Think you can take me on, wolf boy?”
“You wouldn’t dare... Oy! Get off me, you mangy mutt... and stop looking at that fire! Harry’s not going to come back now. Look, I’ll get a message to Snape and find out what’s happening. Don’t even think about heading up to Hogwarts, not even if the delightful Dolores has got Harry chained upside down by his ankles in detention.”
“B-but...”
“Don’t argue. You know I’m right. Umbridge will take great pleasure in bringing you in.”
“You think she’ll treat you any better?”
“She can’t send me to Azkaban. Well, not yet, but give her time and I’m sure she’ll find some reason. Just...calm...down. As you’ve already said, Harry is exceedingly like James and will no doubt have had an escape route planned. Plus, if he does get caught, you should have realised by now that he’s inherited Lily’s ability to talk himself out of trouble whilst looking as innocent as a Pygmy Puff.”
“I imagine he picked up a few pointers about thinking on his feet when you were his teacher, Moony. You were certainly adept enough when we were at school. Why you never served as many detentions as Prongs and me, I’ll never know.”
“Oh, come on. You two were the evil genius’ in our gang. It would have been unfair if I’d got detention every time “ especially as I wasn’t always involved.”
“Yeah, right. You enjoyed a prank as much as the rest of us. You just got a bit sniffy when --”
“--When you two went too far and someone got hurt...”
“Yeah... yeah, all right. There’s no need to rub it in... Harry was getting pretty steamed up about Prongs, wasn’t he? Although, I guess that incident did show us in a bad light. Shame he didn’t see the time Snivelly and his Slytherin pals hexed me behind Honeydukes. I don’t think my left ear was ever the same after that. The lobe never quite regained its shape.”
“Vanity, thy name is Black. Your earlobe is fine. I think he was more upset about Lily shouting. Can’t be nice seeing your parents argue before they’re even married. He’ll probably ask us if she was drugged with a love potion or something.”
“Merlin, they were a right pair, weren’t they? I’d always thought of lilies as being calm flowers but, boy, when she got mad...”
“Ah, Tiger-Lily, and Prongs didn’t exactly hold back, did he? However much he loved her, he’d never back down.”
“A marriage of two minds with but a single thought.”
“And that thought was fire.”
“I was going to say love.”
“Padfoot, you old romantic.”
“I have my moments.”
“Hmm, I remember. But that wasn’t exactly romance, was it?”
“Every dog has his day, Moony. I just had a few more than most.”
“It’s rather sad how your time cooped up here has given you the delusion that you were some kind of stud. I don’t remember you being that successful.”
“Oy, I had a damn sight more success than you!”
“I had chances. I was just choosy... Merlin, we were right jerks in those days, weren’t we?”
“Not you, so much, Moony. You were always far more responsible than the rest of us put together.”
“Hmmm, I had to be though, didn’t I?”
“What do you mean? Oh, the werewolf thing!”
“Yes, Padfoot, the ‘werewolf thing’ as you so casually put it. You never really understood, did you, what it did “ what it does “ to me. Sometimes you even seemed pleased at what I was.”
“I suppose you’re right. I lived for excitement in those days; your secret and the possible danger were exhilarating for someone like me.”
“Someone like you? Wasn’t defying your family excitement enough?”
“I could only defy them at Hogwarts. Once back here in this hellish place, I was hemmed in by their loathing of me. I used to spend all the time in my room just re-living our adventures. Like the time we ventured too close to Hogsmeade -- ”
“--and Wormtail fell into that beer barrel as a rat and didn’t transfigure back quick enough. Merlin, yes, that was funny. He got really drunk and we had to sober him up back in the school before he could transform back.”
“HA! Drip-feeding black coffee into a comatose rat... one of our better nights. One of the few things that still makes me smile. He never went near beer again, did he? I remember he used to shudder even when it was Butterbeer.”
“He stopped drinking alcohol completely, at one point. I never quite understood why, but now I think it was in case he slipped up when under the influence. He could never hold his tongue, could he?”
“Mmm.”
“Why so quiet, Padfoot?”
“How did we never see what he was?”
“Could we have foreseen it? He was one of us, a Marauder. We swore we’d protect each other.”
“We should have known. Merlin, I trusted him implicitly. I trusted him with their lives. How could I have got it so wrong? How could we have not seen what was happening to him?”
“Perhaps we didn’t want to? I sometimes wonder if we were too harsh on him at school. Maybe we teased him once too often.”
“By ‘we’ you mean me, I suppose. A bit of teasing gives him the right to kill his friends and set me up for the crime?”
“No, no, of course not. Padfoot... Sirius... sit down. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I don’t know what happened to the boy we grew up with. But I think little Peter Pettigrew died a long time ago.”
“Pfft!. If you say so.”
“Sirius... would you tell me something?”
“Blimey, first names. This must be serious. What are you after? More reasons for Wormtail to turn on his friends? Bloody Lupin logic “ always looking for answers!”
“No, actually, it’s not to do with Peter. It’s just... well, I still wonder, sometimes, why you chose him as the Secret-Keeper. I understand why you switched but... why him and not me?”
“Well, that’s the million Galleon question. To put it bluntly, I didn’t trust you, Moony. Dumbledore said there was a traitor. I knew it wasn’t me, so that left you and Peter. He hero-worshipped James, and I didn’t think he’d have the intelligence, quite frankly, to be a spy whereas you...”
“Whereas I am a werewolf.”
“I was going to say a ‘highly intelligent werewolf’, actually. HA! Your lips twitched! You’re not angry at all.”
“Keep digging, Padfoot. You’re not out of that hole yet.”
“Care to join me in this hole, Moony? You said in the Shrieking Shack that you didn’t trust me. Was that only after James and Lily died? Or had you suspected me before?”
“Before. I had the same choice as you, after all. Although I was never quite as convinced as you that Peter was rock solid, and I certainly didn’t doubt his intelligence, but I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that you might be under family pressure, plus...”
“Plus what?”
“Plus you played that trick on Snape in our fifth year, and occasionally I wondered if you’d wanted me to get kicked out of Hogwarts.”
“Why the hell would I want that?”
“It was hindsight, Padfoot. I had to consider every option. And although you seemed to almost relish in me being a werewolf, I knew what the rest of your family were like. I can’t begin to imagine the pressure you were under, being a Black and a Gryffindor, and I could not discount the possibility that you’d returned to them. So... when I sat down and deliberated over everything we’d gone through, it made sense that you were the traitor and perhaps you’d showed your true colours that night when you told Snape about the Whomping Willow.”
“Godric, Moony, is that really what you thought? That I wanted you expelled.”
“I couldn’t see a reason why you’d tell him. That was not a normal prank, Sirius. This wasn’t turning him upside down and laughing at him. He could have died. And your room mate, a fellow Gryffindor, and your friend would have been the murderer. I’d have been kicked out at best... Azkaban or execution at worst. Are you really surprised that during those dark days of the war, and for years after, I wondered about you?”
“Moony, I never dreamt that Snape would actually press that knot on the tree. He was a Slytherin, for crying out loud. He was a slimy, snivelling coward “ he still is! I taunted him about it, and the bastard proved me wrong. Merlin, when James told me that Snape had gone down there, it was one of the worst moments of my life. I didn’t care about Snivelly, I admit that, but I did care about you and what this could have done to you.”
“And Prongs. Don’t forget him, Padfoot. I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between them, you know. I would have killed them both.”
“Maybe... or maybe you would have turned them both into werewolves. Fortunately, one of the Marauders was brave enough to drag Snape out of there before you did your worst. Although...”
“What are you smirking about?”
“Can you imagine Prongs as a werewolf? We’d have had a hard time controlling him, wouldn’t we? Harry would have been a lovely little cub, though.”
“You think James would have married Lily if he’d been a werewolf!”
“You think Lily wouldn’t have understood. I don’t think anything could have kept those two apart.”
“It would have stopped them getting together. James would not have wanted to inflict lycanthropy on Lily.”
“But it wouldn’t have just been his decision. You’re forgetting that Lily Evans was a formidable force and a stubborn witch. She would not have deserted him.”
“Prongs would not have got involved in the first place if he’d been a werewolf.”
“Huh! Who exactly are we talking about here? James and Lily... or you and Tonks?”
Staring into the Fire by Equinox Chick
Chapter Endnotes: I love reviews, they make me feel all warm and fuzzy. My two favourite blokes love them too, and as this is a story about them ...