A/N: And here it is – my personal favourite of the evil cliffies. ;)
27: Too Close to Home
A wave of chatter turned to sudden whispers. Several hundred pairs of eyes turned.
Remus was painfully aware of why his abrupt appearance in the Great Hall in the middle of Friday dinner had earned such attention. Deathly white, hair mussed by two days against a pillow, robes pulled haphazardly on and gait an uneven stumble of motion, he was certainly not looking at his best. Determinedly ignoring the stares and the ripple of murmurs, he hurriedly made his way down the centre of the room towards the staff table.
His arrival had not gone unnoticed by his colleagues either. Minerva McGonagall was staring at him with a mixture of confusion, exasperation and concern. Albus Dumbledore had already risen from his seat, his eyes alert but flicking almost unconsciously towards the darkening sky and impending moonrise beyond the windows. Severus Snape, his eyes narrowed, was regarding him with startled suspicion.
Remus reeled rapidly across the last few steps and all but slumped against the centre of the staff table, fingers digging in to the tablecloth as he struggled against the whirl of dizziness, the shiver of his bones and the increasing throb of his limbs. The gnarled hand of Dumbledore reached out to steady his shoulder as he met the blue-eyed gaze.
“What is it?” the headmaster asked softly.
“There’s a Dark Mark over Hogsmeade.” The words tumbled out between shuddering breaths. “I saw it out my bedroom window.”
The silence in the Great Hall was deafening. It occurred to Remus a moment too late that perhaps he should have lowered his voice.
Dumbledore’s eyes grew wide. A moment later, moving with an agility one would not expect of a wizard more than a century in age, he swivelled and strode towards the window. Snape, the suspicious sneer abruptly wiped, was sharply on his heels.
A rush of muttering and a sudden scrape of chairs implied a window-wards exodus was looming, but Minerva, her mouth a stern line had already risen to stem the tide of motion.
“You will remain in your seats!” The order was firm. “Please wait where you are whilst we investigate this.” Her eye caught at once upon one figure that did not seem inclined to obey. “That means you too, Mr Potter!”
Following her glare, Remus too caught Harry’s eye. For a moment it seemed The-Boy-Who-Lived intended to disobey the command of his Head of House; but facing the disapproval of the last of his father’s true friends as well, the Gryffindor sank reluctantly back into his seat at the House table. He did not look at all pleased.
Abruptly Dumbledore was back. His expression was grave as he beckoned his staff closer.
“Remus is correct,” he stated without preamble. “There is a Dark Mark over the village, recently cast, and signs of continuing Death Eater activity on the streets. We must act swiftly. Hagrid.”
“Aye?” The giant man stepped forward, bearded face a cocktail of anxiety and determination.
“Go at once to seal the gates and check the grounds for any sign of incursion. When you are done, return here and help watch the students.”
The groundskeeper nodded fiercely. “Yer can count on me, headmaster!”
As Hagrid made hurriedly for the main doors, Snape turned abruptly on the older wizard.
“The gates are to be sealed?” he exclaimed incredulously. “Are we not going to the aid of the villagers, headmaster?”
Dumbledore met his stare coolly. “You will not be,” he informed the Head of Slytherin. “You cannot afford to be seen fighting against Death Eaters, Severus. You will remain here with Hagrid and guard the children.”
“Only two?” Minerva interrupted sharply. “You would leave only two to keep them safe?”
Dumbledore smiled slightly behind his beard. “There are many hundreds of wands in this room, Minerva,” he pointed out gently. “And a good number of them are quite proficient at defending themselves – more perhaps than they should be. The castle itself will protect its charges and the Hogwarts house-elves will certainly fight willingly if summoned. Not to mention that Severus and Hagrid will provide excellent protection both physical and magical – against whatever may come.”
His eyes flickered briefly to Remus. The younger man realised that he had not been alone in expecting that Kane might use the night of the full moon to strike.
Minerva was still frowning, but she nonetheless conceded on that matter. It did not however prevent her from raising another. “But Professor Snape’s point remains – how are we to leave when Hagrid has sealed the gates?”
This time Dumbledore did smile. “There are more ways to leave this castle than by its gates. And more surprising ways to enter Hogsmeade. Remus? Any suggestions?”
Carving through the fuzz in his head, Remus wished fervently for his copy of the Marauder’s Map. Unfortunately, he had nothing like the energy required to summon it all the way from his office, not to mention the fact that his wand was still sitting unhelpful and forgotten on his office desk. He had no choice but to attempt to think. Seven secret passages, four known to Filch, five of which led to Hogsmeade…
“There’s a route from under the greenhouses that comes out in the woods behind Madam Puddifoots, not far from the Shrieking Shack,” he managed hoarsely. “Plus there’s a passage from that broom cupboard near the staff room that emerges in the well in the yard of the Three Broomsticks. And if you twitch the elbow of the largest suit of armour near the kitchens, it opens a panel to show a tunnel into the alley near Dervish and Banges. Mr Filch knows them all, I think, and the entrances into the village are well hidden from view.”
A good half of the staff were staring at him in astonishment. Snape however, his eyes narrowed, did not seem at all surprised. Remus fought the urge to squirm slightly under their curious gazes.
Dumbledore nodded. “The broom cupboard and the suit of armour, I think. Minerva, if you would take a moment to contact the Aurors before joining us?”
Minerva nodded, aware of exactly which Aurors in particular she was supposed to contact. “Of course.”
“The rest of you go.” Albus commanded. “Argus Filch will show you the passages. I will speak with the children and follow by my own means.”
By which, Remus was pretty sure, the headmaster meant he would travel by phoenix. He watched for a moment as Dumbledore strode to the front of the staff table and raised his hands sharply as he addressed the children. But his words drifted unheard past the almost stricken werewolf. His wand was still upstairs. And in less than half an hour he would have no opposable thumb with which to wield it. But a werewolf form under the control of a human mind – if he could find the strength to reach Hogsmeade, he was certain he could do some good…
He started to turn.
“Going somewhere Lupin?”
Snape. He hovered a few yards away, sallow face pinched and black eyes intense. Remus struggled to find the energy to meet his gaze but the pain in his limbs and the swirl in his mind was intensifying alarmingly. His wolfsbane-saturated body knew that moonrise was imminent.
The Head of Slytherin regarded him down the length of his hooked nose and snorted. “Look at the state of you. I suggest you use what strength you can muster to make your way safely back upstairs before you scare the students. Or were you planning that practical demonstration after all?”
The room was spinning and waltzing, a mass of colour and light that reminded him oddly of his tribute at the start of the year. It all seemed a very long time ago.
“I was going…” he stuttered. “The village… help them…”
Snape rolled his eyes elegantly. “I think not. A half-conscious werewolf is no use to anybody. Yet again you find yourself conveniently useless, Lupin. Transforming into a raging beast becomes a fine excuse to stay safe.”
Remus would have gladly responded to the unfounded insinuation, driven, he suspected, by Snape’s own sidelining and his discomfort at a potentially imminent encounter with a werewolf that had once come alarmingly close to eating him; but in that moment, a particularly violent shiver raced through his body, all but twisting his head from his shoulders in a flood of wooziness. He barely managed to cling to the table to avoid another undignified collapse before his pupils. Sickness rolled in his stomach, his mind raced and his emotions surged from misery to frustration to anger. He was ill, on the verge of an agonising transformation and with worries and feelings spinning turbulently through his mind that most people could not even comprehend. And Snape would not shut up …
For the Potions Master had either failed to notice his distress or simply did not care. “Nothing to say?” he taunted with a cold smile. “That brings back memories.”
Remus grimaced and gritted his teeth, but his composure was eroding rapidly. “Not now, Severus.” he all but growled hoarsely. “I’m not in the mood.”
But Snape only chuckled, an infuriating sound that set off sparks against the volatile flood in his colleague’s mind. “Now, now, Lupin. It was merely an observation. No need to bite my head off.”
It was the chuckle that did it. Inside the werewolf, something ignited. Slowly, darkly, his jaw set and his eyes icy, Remus raised his head and stared Severus Snape full in the face.
“I didn’t.” His glare drilled unrelentingly into the Slytherin, emphasising every word he spoke more out of the necessity of grinding them out than for any particular effect.
“But give me twenty minutes and I’ll see what I can do.”
Snape’s jaw dropped. Something shocked and unpleasant flashed behind his dark eyes.
“Professor Snape.” Remus offered thanks to the Gods for Minerva’s timely intervention – he was tore between an uncharacteristic burst of temper or quietly falling unconscious, and Snape’s goading was not helping him to resist the former. “The headmaster needs a word with you.”
Snape was still gaping at Remus, his mind clearly drifting towards a darkened tunnel and growling flash of teeth in the blackness. But at the sound of Minerva’s voice, his mouth closed with a snap. He gathered himself sharply. “Of course,” he replied a little too brusquely. Casting a final, unpleasant glance in the direction of Remus, he turned and strode away.
Minerva McGonagall regarded his sternly over her spectacles, the soot on her hat suggesting the all important floo call had been made. “Much as I hate to admit it, Severus made a good point,” she told him. “You should be upstairs, Remus.”
Remus shook his head, ignoring the minor explosions of dizziness this action ignited. “I want to come. Once the transformation passes, I’ll be strong, fast, immune to magic, and after this bloody week of hell I’d better be in my own mind! I can help, Minerva!”
“No.” Taking his arm firmly in her grasp, the Transfiguration Mistress turned him sharply around and half escorted, half-carried him across the Great Hall in the wake of the vanished teachers. “You’re in no state. Go to your office and let it happen in private. If you later feel so inclined, patrol the corridors for intruders but do not show yourself to the children. Death Eaters or not, they’ll be an uproar if you do. Understand?”
Frowning and shivering almost uncontrollably, Remus just about managed to nod. There was no denying that he was getting worse. He could all but hear his blood racing through his veins as chilling fingers scraped his spine, shivering his body violently. His head swam and throbbed, his vision pulsing; meanwhile the ache in his limbs was joined by a steady pulse of pain across his ribcage. He felt on the verge of falling apart.
He glanced around. Nervous and anxious, the children were huddled at their house tables, pale faces and wide eyes sweeping towards the doorway and windows as though they expected a veritable hoard of Death Eaters to burst in at any moment. Dumbledore had vanished, presumably on his way to Hogsmeade courtesy of Fawkes as Severus Snape stalked before the staff table, snapping out orders at his students. A brush of cold air announced the return of Hagrid, stepping quietly inside as he pushed the main door firmly closed and decisively dropped the heavy bolts. The school was sealed shut.
Minerva was glancing anxiously. “I have to go. The internal passageways need sealing and then I have to help the fight.” She fixed her pale and wilting colleague with an uncertain stare. “Can you make it upstairs by yourself? I could get Hagrid to…”
“No.” Remus managed to cut her off. “I’ll go to my office. It’s closer. I don’t need help.”
Minerva looked uncertain but she did not argue. “Well, if you’re sure…Take care Remus.”
Remus nodded. “You too. Watch your back.”
His former Head of House flashed him a brief smile. A moment later she was gone.
Composing himself stubbornly, Remus cast one last uncertain glance back towards the Great Hall where hundreds of voices clammered shrill and afraid, Severus Snape stalking the dais of the staff table at one end, Rubeus Hagrid lurking, hulking and determined at the other, guarding the main entrance and the young lives within. How could they expect him to hide away? He wanted to help, do something useful after a week of uselessness. Just watching over the children would have been enough…
Watching over.
Minerva had told him not to show himself. But there were more ways to watch than by looking.
The Marauder’s Map.
Remus smiled to himself. When he’d made his copy from Harry’s original, stored in the drawer of his office desk, he’d believed it might be useful. This scenario had never occurred to him. But he had no intention of ignoring it.
Drawing himself up, Remus fought down the surges of ice and fire that rampaged the length of his body and moved as quickly as he was able up the stairs.
* * *
Five minutes …
Maybe.
More or less.
Predicting the moment of his transformation was not an exact science. It varied in a most irritating manner – an odd combination of the relative times and positions of sunset and moonrise that was infuriatingly complicated to calculate with any accuracy. Remus, unsurprisingly never the keenest of astronomers, had long ago given up trying to tie his transformations to the clock and instead relied upon his own creeping sense of imminent change to predict exactly when the wolf would rise. It was a system that had been known to fail – as he had discovered to his cost at the end of his last year of teaching, a strong surge of adrenalin was enough to drown the familiar signals out. But unlike the calculations by the clock, which could only predict a window of ten or fifteen minutes, Remus could usually tell to less than a minute when it was time to bid farewell to his humanity.
It wasn’t the pain that he judged by – indeed, in his current condition, he could not have established which aches were significant and which a side effect of his mild aconite poisoning in any case. It was more a feeling, impossible to accurately describe to anyone else but another werewolf, gathering in the last hours before moonrise; a stirring of the waiting wolf, a surge through his blood and a whisper like wind that breezed through his mind, growing in strength with each passing second and spreading slowly through his body in a rush of cold. With more than thirty years experience of reading its quirks and feeling its touch, Remus knew its patterns well.
Four minutes…
With a sign, he settled his pain-ridden body down on the rug beside his office fireplace, pulling the warm blanket he had donned a few minutes before more firmly around his body. His pyjamas and robes were gone, stripped off and folded neatly in a nearby drawer – there was no point to destroying perfectly good clothes in the process of transforming after all. The Marauder’s Map rested on the floor beside him, neatly laid out and pinned in place by four stone paperweights, its emerald writing gleaming by firelight. Aside from a buzzing swarm of dots clustered together in the Great Hall, and his own dot, alone, at rest in its office, the map was still.
Good.
The first few minutes spent in his office had passed in fruitlessly staring out of the window towards the glow of Hogsmeade in search of some sign of the fate of his colleagues and friends. But the pain of standing in his weakened condition combined with his own dodgy vision had yielding nothing but frustration and vague colours – in the end he had abandoned his attempts to read the battle and curled himself up with the map by his fire to monitor the Hogwarts grounds for intruders. Thus far, there had been none.
Three minutes…
Perfunctorily he cast his eye over his map once more, searching the lawns, the edge of the forest and the Quidditch pitch for signs of invasion from without. But nothing moved, no dots lurked or lingered on Hogwarts hallowed soil, no Lestranges, no Macnairs, no Pettigrews. Remus felt himself breathe a sigh of relief. The school was safe for now…
And then he saw it.
One rogue dot.
It was easy to tell how he had missed it before, half-hidden, pressed in almost impossibly between the delicate trace outline of the school greenhouses and the thick dark boundary of the school walls, motionless, unmoving, unnaturally still. For a moment Remus squinted, unable to understand how a person could come to be half inserted through the castle wall, half within yet half outside. But then with a shock of ice, he realised.
The secret passage. The dot was several yards inside its mouth.
Two minutes…
Cursing his swirling vision, Remus struggled to focus. What did it say? Bellatrix Lestrange, Peter Pettigrew, Abraham Kane, Lord Voldemort… the possibilities were mind numbing. The name, what was the name…
His vision solidified. And there was the name.
Rubeus Hagrid.
Remus almost laughed out loud. Hagrid. And there, he’d been panicking like a child…
Wait.
Hagrid. How could it be Hagrid? Hagrid was inside. He’d watched him seal the door himself, and he had certainly not returned outdoors in the time that Remus had been map watching. And even if he had stepped back out before the map was opened…why? To stand statue-like in the mouth of a secret passage when he was supposed to be guarding the children?
Hagrid was a twitcher. Hagrid liked to pace. To see him so unmoving was almost to believe him…
A cold feeling was welling up inside of Remus’ chest, a chill that had nothing to do with his imminent bout of lycanthropy. Perhaps the map was a bad copy after all. Perhaps he’d made a mistake.
Hagrid was in the Great Hall. He had to be.
Abruptly he shifted his gaze to the almost impenetrable mass of black dots that represented the students of Hogwarts. He scanned the hoard with increasing frustration, but if Hagrid were amongst the masses of pupils, it would be near impossible to find him. Unless…
Snatching his wand quickly from the desk top, he touched it against the crisp clean parchment and spoke as precisely as he could.
“I am Moony. Do you know me?”
There was a moment’s pause; with a flash of concern, Remus wondered if the hidden layers and personality spells had carried through the copying process in the way he had hoped. But then the emerald green script of the title faded as an achingly familiar handwriting, eternally unaffected by the tremor time and imprisonment would bring, scrawled its reply to his words.
Mr Padfoot greets his would-be comrade and humbly requests that he prove it.
It was Sirius who had insisted on the coding of the more intricate layers and abilities of their creation to guard against possible Slytherin theft – there were secrets to this map that Remus was sure even the Weasley twins had not uncovered. He remembered the quirks they had planted, the tricks and handy shortcuts they had inserted, four boys sat around a candle in their dormitory late at night, young, thoughtless and tragically unaware of what was to come. The sudden recollection of the password he had chosen made the moment all the more painfully nostalgic.
“Diana,” he said softly.
Padfoot’s handwriting rippled and faded – another streak of writing emerged in its place.
Mr Prongs welcomes the estimable Mr Moony and asks what it is that he needs.
Biting his lip firmly, Remus leaned closer to the map.
“Remove all persons below the age of nineteen,” he said softly. “Show only the adults present.”
Instantly the black swarm was gone. Two dots stood alone in the Great Hall.
Remus felt a rush of relief. There. It must be a mistake. Two dots.
Severus Snape and…
His vision focussed.
The world froze.
Severus Snape.
And Abel Isaacs.
Everything lurched back into horrible motion.
Abel Isaacs.
Abraham Kane.
Locked in a room full of children. Under a rising full moon.
Oh dear gods.
He was moving instantly, map abandoned, hell, blanket abandoned, for there was no time for modesty when so many lives were at stake. He scrambled desperately at the study bolts with which he had so carefully sealed his office door, all but yanking it off his hinges in his efforts to remove it from his path. With a frantic yell of frustration, he hauled back the door and started to dive into the corridor.
A moment later he knew he was too late.
Pain.
It wracked his body with a sudden agonising spasm that all but drove him to his knees; only the sharp scrape of his fingernails into the doorframe prevented an instant collapse. For a half instant, he tried to regain his footing, tried to rush on, to help them, to warn them, to do something; but the second wave of agony struck relentlessly and sent him tumbling to the floor, his body shaking as a flood of ice and fiery anguished torture seared his helpless form from crown to sole.
The change.
Time was up.
No! No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!
Not now. Not again. Please not again!
But there was nothing he could do. Nothing but endure the familiar burning ice, nothing but suffer as his body twisted and contorted and forced itself into a bestial form he despised at the worst of all possible moments.
Nothing but realise with cold horror that if he was changing, Kane must be as well.
Amongst the children.
No more kids.
It was the last coherent thought he managed before the torment of the change engulfed him and transformed him utterly.
A/N: Ah, my favourite cliffhanger….;) I’ve had this one in mind almost from the start and certainly it was one of the first ideas I developed for the present day part of this fic – hence the early introduction of Remus having a copy of the Marauder’s Map way back in chapter four. See, I had a reason. :) Perverse as it sounds, I’ve been looking forward to writing this cliffhanger and the other very early idea that is at the end of chapter twenty-nine since I started. It was worth it. :) On a different note - The Marauder’s Map. I always liked the idea that there was more to the map than even Fred and George would have uncovered and the idea that there were deeper layers that allowed you to be more selective in searching for someone was one I wanted to use. The fact that it was plot relevant was a bonus. :)